People have had enough and are starting to fight back with mockery. Here are a bunch of underground posters from England (of all places) that cut the heart out of the virus scare.
I like this one, too:
And this one gets to the very heart of people feeling virtuous about the lockdown:
There are a lot more, every bit as good. Bravo to the UK Underground.
What do you call a potato that makes Internet videos?
A Youtuber.
Update (because I can):
How do you tell the difference between an alligator and a crocodile?
You'll see one later and the other in a while.
You don't get much more baroque than "pupil of Pachelbel" baroque. Johann Heinrich Buttstett was one of the last of the great southern German baroque organists, born this day in 1666.
Longtime reader and FOTB (and in meatspace) libertyman sends in this Dad joke:
I just read the police arrested two fellows who had stolen a calendar. They each got six months.
And longtime reader and FOTB (and in meatspace) Longtime reader and FOTB (and in meatspace) Burt sends in this:
What's the name for an occupied airplane bathroom?
Hypotenuse.
The police arrested a dog that was giving birth on the side of the road. She was littering.
Microsoft this week released a preview version of Windows Subsystem for Linux GUI, or WSLg, which provides a way to run Linux applications with graphic interfaces on Windows devices.
...
"You can use this feature to run any GUI application that might only exist in Linux, or to run your own applications or testing in a Linux environment," explained Craig Loewen, program manager for the Windows Developer Platform at Microsoft, in a blog post.
Man, the tech world is getting weird. Eric Raymond had a pretty interesting take on this last year:
Azure makes Microsoft most of its money. The Windows monopoly has become a sideshow, with sales of conventional desktop PCs (the only market it dominates) declining. Accordingly, the return on investment of spending on Windows development is falling. As PC volume sales continue to fall off , it’s inevitably going to stop being a profit center and turn into a drag on the business.
Looked at from the point of view of cold-blooded profit maximization, this means continuing Windows development is a thing Microsoft would prefer not to be doing. Instead, they’d do better putting more capital investment into Azure – which is widely rumored to be running more Linux instances than Windows these days.
Interesting world we live in.
I really need to get back into doing these. So here you go.
RIP, FTP
Mozilla is removing support for downloading files from FTP links. All in all, this is a good thing - we've known that passing unencrypted usernames and passwords across the Intarwebs is A Very Bad Thing Indeed for oh, 30 years or so.
Google: Here's a cool new privacy feature. Everybody: Nah, we're good
Google has a new privacy "solution" that pretty much everybody thinks is designed to rip off users' privacy even more. The Vivaldi team released a statement that really sums up why none of the browsers (other than Chrome) are going to use Google's cunning scheme:
“We will not support the FLoC API and plan to disable it, no matter how it is implemented. It does not protect privacy and it certainly is not beneficial to users, to unwittingly give away their privacy for the financial gain of Google.”
Oft evil will shall evil mar, and all that. Hey Google, don't be evil. (P.S. Don't use Chrome)
SAP attacks under way in the wild
You don't get more buttoned down corporate in the software world than database maker SAP. And they're seeing attacks against their software, as hackers reverse engineer SAP security patches.
2 year old VPN server vulnerability being exploited in the wild
I can't imagine why someone wouldn't install a critical security patch on a critical security device, but it seems that a bunch of folks haven't. Oooooh kaaaaay, then.
SpaceX encrypts telemetry
Well, it looks like they've been encrypting Starship for a couple years, but they are now encrypting Falcon 9 telemetry.
It turns out that there was a Batman, and he lived in the 16th century. He was an author and a parson. What's even better is that he was parson of Newington Butts. This kicked over my giggle box.
Hat tip to I Want A New Left which a bunch of y'all would like.
Spelunking in the archives here, I ran across this excellent article from 2009. I have linked to snips of it before, but the entire article is well worth the 15 minutes to read and digest. Yes, it's a number of years old but what is fascinating is that the objections raised in the article have yet to be addressed. Here's an excerpt:
I have looked at the raw temperature record for the USA (USHCN data) and the Bureau of Meteorology data for Victoria, Australia. Both show fluctuations of temperature with time but zero underlying trend for the last century. By contrast, the official IPCC endorsed data shows a strong underlying upwards trend. When I investigate why the difference, I find that the raw data has been adjusted for several supposed factors and every one of these adjustments created a warming trend. This implies that the claimed warming trend is due to the adjustments, not the raw data. In any less controversial scientific issue, such a result would be viewed with the greatest possible skepticism and would be extremely unlikely to be accepted.
The whole article is pack full of this sort of stuff. Highly recommended.
I got hire as a security guard and my boss told me to watch the office. I'm on season eight and I can't figure out what this has to do with security.
Over at Miguel's place (I think it was J.Kb - hey guys, can you get a tag to show who posted what there?) we get a link to ravings at the UK Guardian about a Climate Change Final Solution:
The insane people at The Guardian published an article that sets up the historical precedent for that.
Why Genghis Khan was good for the planet
Laying waste to land scrubbed 700m tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphereHis empire lasted a century and a half and eventually covered nearly a quarter of the earth’s surface. His murderous Mongol armies were responsible for the massacre of as many as 40 million people. Even today, his name remains a byword for brutality and terror. But boy, was Genghis green.
Genghis Khan, in fact, may have been not just the greatest warrior but the greatest eco-warrior of all time, according to a study by the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Energy. It has concluded that the 13th-century Mongol leader’s bloody advance, laying waste to vast swaths of territory and wiping out entire civilisations en route, may have scrubbed 700m tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere – roughly the quantity of carbon dioxide generated in a year through global petrol consumption – by allowing previously populated and cultivated land to return to carbon-absorbing forest.
Killing 40 Million people for the planet.
This fiendishly clever plan of theres will indeed lead to a lower population because people like me will put .45 caliber holes in the foreheads of genocidal eco-fascists like the Guardian writers. Think of all the compost!
Sheesh, it's like these people don't ever listen to what they say. If they did, they might think something like "Hmm, am I sounding like a deranged, genocidal fascist? Maybe we should focus on something incremental, like bike paths." Instead, they'll talk themselves into my proposal, above.
And these morons probably think they're the smartest kids on the block.
And to show that this isn't a one-off, a "Black Swan", an oddball proposal - but rather a recurrent theme from the Genocidal Eco Left, here are some other genocidal Save The Planet sooper smaht plans that we've mocked here, dredged from the Borepatch archives:
Save The Planet - Starve The Children
Kill The Children For Mother Gaia
Friday Follies: KillThe Children For Mother Gaia Edition
Cut Health Care To Save Mother Gaia
Global Warming Causes Totalitarianism
Oh, and that last one is a hoot - the link there goes to an article published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. This sort of genocidal eco fascism is entirely mainstream in western medical establishments. It seems that there must be some sort of education plan in action, to make all this easy to get along with. Maybe something like this ...
UPDATE 18 April 2021 11:19: Very good reply posted over at The Silicon Graybeard.
So the news media lies to us on purpose. Here's a news flash: there have been country music songs about liars and cheaters basically since there's been country music. This was perhaps Hank's biggest hit, recorded in his last recording session before his death. It sings the song of crashing media TV ratings and reduced subscribership. See ya, suckas!
Your Cheatin' Heart (Songwriter: Hank Williams, Sr.)
Your cheatin' heart
Will make you weep
You'll cry and cry
And try to sleep
But sleep won't come
The whole night through
Your cheatin' heart will tell on you...
When tears come down
Like falling rain
You'll toss around
And call my name
You'll walk the floor
The way I do
Your cheatin' heart will tell on you...
Your cheatin' heart
Will pine some day
And crave the love
You threw away
The time will come
When you'll be blue
Your cheatin' heart will tell on you...
When tears come down
Like falling rain
You'll toss around
And call my name
You'll walk the floor
The way I do
Your cheatin' heart will tell on you...
... if you do read the newspaper you are misinformed.
Mark Twain's quote is justly famous but is in need of renovation after 130 years. Adam Piggott has a post explaining why:
From The Other McCain, a report that journalists at a press conference in Minnesota wildly objected to the police chief’s use of the word riot to describe the behaviour of certain groups of individuals who had taken to lobbing large chunks of concrete in the general direction of bystanders, police and numerous pieces of private property. The term riot is obviously appropriate and accurate based on the footage of the events. And when you consider that the business of journalism is to report on events using common vocabulary as a communication tool, then the outraged objections of these journalists to correct word usage is particularly illuminating.
The whole post makes the case that journalists are Public Enemy number 1. And so, back to Mr. Twain's comment which we can rewrite as follows:
If you don't follow the media, you are uninformed. If you do follow the media you are both uninformed and misinformed.
