The Other McCain brings us an analysis of why the Left keeps trying to replace things that work, with things that they believe sound good. The Worst People in the World (Part II)
You will never understand liberals until you read Thomas Sowell’s The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy. However often I’ve recommended that book over the years, I occasionally feel the need to repeat the recommendation for the simple reason that Sowell demystifies what would otherwise be incomprehensible, i.e., the persistent tendency of the Left to make their own good intentions an argument for supporting policies that are objectively harmful to the very people that liberals claim to be “helping.”
I would like to point out that when those policies fail, the cognitive dissonance causes a lot of problems, usually ending in violence.
After touching on the Minneapolis anti-ICE protests, and dip into the history of 2014, and the Kaitlyn Hunt case, we get an analysis of some of the TDS around the American Men's Hockey victory at the Olympics. Click thru, it is entertaining. Except for the bits about how the Left believe their good intentions are not paving the road to hell.
What really shocked Canadians is the realization that 49 of the 50 states are better off than Canada financially. They accept that America in whole has a better economy. What galls them is that those southern states are better off. The TDS crowd believes slavery is still alive in the SEC states.
It's said with justice that a nation's architecture reflects its soul. A soul which is beautiful, good and true will build accordingly, see the great gothic cathedrals. A soul which is ugly, bad and false will create monstrosities.
In a state where anti-gunners have been pushing increasingly restrictive gun control laws in recent years, the incident serves as a stark reminder that such laws do not prevent deadly crimes.
Speaking of Meta, an AI security research at that company running an experiment with OpenClaw - a local tool that connects to other AI systems and to your application - watched it happily delete all her emails, ignoring instructions to stop until she hit the reset button on her Mac. (Tech Crunch)
OpenClaw is also woefully insecure, so if you do set it up it's just as likely that someone will do that to you while you sleep.
The protest against Bryan Dawson was, in fact, an attempt to punish and silence 1819 News for publishing the truth about Bubba/“Brittini,” but the students also mentioned Dawson’s criminal record.
A man has been acquitted of murder for a confrontation that ended in a deadly shooting outside a Grand Rapids bar.
Now the defendant in the case is prohibited person, so he faces some weapons charges, which may explain why the DA thought he could win.
It started as bar fight between two groups. One group had been escorted to the exit by bar security. When the other group left the bar, the defendant had been punched in the head, leading to a self-defense shooting. There was video of the shooting.
Now it isn't self-defense because the shooter says it is. Perhaps the DA felt there were gray areas that a trial was justified, and perhaps the DA hates self-defense, thought he could "win" against a defendant with a prior conviction. DAs mostly don't like self-defense, though to be fair, I have no knowledge of Grand Rapids or what the DA is like.
Add privacy to the list of potential casualties caused by the proliferation of AI, because researchers have found that large language models (LLMs) can be used to deanonymize internet users – even those who use pseudonyms – more efficiently than human sleuths.
Click thru for the details.
The technique employed by the authors is not a universal privacy solvent – it's only successful some of the time. But it's successful often enough that those posting online under a pseudonymous account should not assume their identities will remain unknow
Probably enough that journalists or activists in questionable countries should be worried. And you can add United Kingdom to the list of countries that don't like freedom of speech.
Age verification schemes that being pushed in UK, Australia, and Europe are not about protecting children; they are about destroying privacy. The upcoming war on VPNs is about the same thing.
Now don't get me wrong, with the right inverter, and several acres of solar panels, properly positioned, you could recharge your EV battery, or any other battery. If you limit yourself to solar panels you can put on a car, you won't be able to do much.
But believing that you can power an EV with the amount of solar panels you can deploy in that much space, is apparently something that the average theater kid believes.
Take the Hyundai Ioniq 5, for example. It sips energy at 17 kWh per 100 km, yet roof panels would need roughly 28 hours of peak sun to add about 80 km (a best-case calculation often floated by accessory makers like Solarstic). In real life, you may net closer to 15 km on a bright day.
The reason is simple: power. These systems typically max out near 1.2 kW under perfect alignment and temperature. That’s minuscule next to home charging or public DC points—on the order of 40x weaker than a modest 50 kW roadside charger. A full battery purely from rooftop solar would take days, not hours.
Here is a bit of the fine print, that doesn't get advertised when you buy solar panels. The rating for wattage is measure when the panel temperature is about 60 degrees Fahrenheit. Not the air temperature, but the panel temperature. These panels are typically black or dark blue, behind a protective coating. For every degree above 60, the efficiency - the power output - of the panel decreases. In anything but winter weather the panel temperature will be elevated. Think of putting your hand on a black car on a sunny August afternoon.
Another problem is shade. Depending on the type of panel you have, a small amount of shade on the panel, even a few percent, can significantly degrade the power output of the panel. I'm sure they've gotten better at this, but there is a reason that you install solar panels where there are no trees, and you keep them clean.
I despair for the future of humanity if this is the level of scientific understanding that our education system is churning out.
I don't know if the EV car companies actually believed that they could achieve any level of charging by putting solar panels on a car, or if they just knew that most of the EV-car-buying public would be ignorant of the basic reality of the amount of solar panels required to get any noticeable charge.
This shooting took place in October of last year. It took until this week for a judge to dismiss the charges with prejudice. There was video of the incident.
Now, he was under "disability" meaning that he was not supposed to be in possession of a firearm.
He shot 2 people, who he claimed were about to shoot him. The DA charged him with felonious assault, and improper discharge of a firearm.
"The charges against my client were dismissed with prejudice because after reviewing the internal video from City Bird, it was crystal clear my client acted in self-defense," said Clyde Bennett, Ferguson's defense attorney. "This is what I said from the beginning that my client acted in self-defense."
Now any video reviewed by the judge in the case, was available to the District Attorney's office. But DAs, HATE self-defense, especially in Blue Cities like Cincinnati.
Fountain Square is in the heart of downtown Cincinnati.
The defendant faces other charges, so he is not out of the woods, but he won't face these charges.
And the Hamilton County DA not withstanding, self-defense is a human right, and might just be a legal right in Ohio.
A political firestorm has erupted in Britain after Member of Parliament Rupert Lowe, who also serves as the leader of the newly created Restore Britain party, released a statement detailing explosive testimony from an ongoing inquiry into organized child sexual exploitation.
The revelations, he warned, expose not only criminal migrant depravity but what he described as institutional failure on a breathtaking scale.
If you are unfamiliar with the Pakistani rape gangs that roamed the streets of England, I can recommend this post from 2020 from Daniel Greenfield (Sultan Knish): Call it a tale of two girls. And a tale of two Englands. It is a disturbing story of immigrants abusing British girls and the authorities covering it up (and aiding it) because to do otherwise would open said authorities up to accusations of racism and xenophobia. And while the Sultan Knish post talks of one victim, there were many. The image above is from this post, from 2022.
The statement further asserts that some members of law enforcement were not merely negligent but complicit in the heinous crimes against the innocent. The survivor alleges that certain police officers participated directly in the abuse and that money was exchanged openly.
What punishment is suitable for the rape gangs? What punishment is suitable for the cops?
I haven't written about ransomware in some time. Not really a conscious decision, it just hasn't been bubbling to the top of my news feed. And for the most part, corporate C-suites have been sufficiently hit over the head to take security at least a bit seriously. But you apparently still can't tell doctors how to do they jobs, not even the part that are information technology related.
Ransomware attacks against public schools and agencies have proliferated in recent years. They have shutdown 911 dispatch functions and exposed sensitive student data, among other harms.
Doctors and lawyers don't take too well to being told what to do, though to be fair, I've never worked with or for doctors. Public schools are typically spending money on things that don't matter, and there is little to no fallout for the people who run them. (Can you fire a public school administrator? Probably easier than firing a public school teacher, but not easy.)
And this kind of ransomware attack has real world impacts.
Richard Bell, 55, drove three hours from his home in Oxford the medical center’s main campus in Jackson on Friday only to learn that he wouldn’t be able to get his bloodwork or chemotherapy treatment.
“It was all shut down,” Bell said. “It gets pretty frustrating.”
The FBI is involved, and the medical system is restoring (trying?) to restore.
The one thing I've noticed is that the press, even the tech press, almost never reports on how the system in question was compromised. Was it a phishing attack that someone fell for, or a technical defect in their security that was penetrated? Inquiring minds...
RCW evaluates The Cost of Not Acting Against Iran. Capt. Ed at Hat Hair, 'Token' Nukes, Lobster Meals, 'Unbridgeable Impasse': Do Portents Point To An Iran Strike? Leslie Eastman at LI reports Trump is Forging the Mineral Alliance: U.S. to Form Trading Bloc to Counter China
This might disrupt our trip a bit…
Team Red’s version of the Washington Monument shutdowns. Stop pretending that there’s any difference between the Teams.
ITEM 1: Hillary admitted she went to Epstein’s Island but only to talk to his girlfriend, not to meet the children.
In the 1970s, she said she only bought Playboy to read the articles.
JPMorgan Chase acknowledged for the first time that it closed the bank accounts of President Donald Trump and several of his businesses in the political and legal aftermath of the Jan. 6, 2021 attacks on the U.S. Capitol, the latest development in a legal saga
And if you want your fourth Amendment rights, you need to give up your Second Amendment. I never grasped the degree to which gun control forces were not misguided lefties, but rather dictatorial tyrants.
Michael Boice broke into a home in New Castle, Pennsylvania.
Boice, who was shot in the leg during the break-in, is still hospitalized in Ohio. Police say he will be extradited to Pennsylvania once discharged.
New Castle is about a 55 mile drive north of Pittsburgh, and about a 100 mile drive southeast of Cleveland. It is about a 15 or 20 mile drive east of Youngstown, Ohio.
No charges are expected for the homeowner, because, at least away from the Blue Cities in Pennsylvania, it seems that self-defense is legal, and it even seems to be catching on the cities.
There has been much written about AI and Hollywood. The Writer's Guild is considering another strike this year about the use of AI. (Because their last strike worked out so well, the total work being done in Hollywood is contracting like crazy.)
Ben Affleck is convinced that actors are safe from AI, though some of the technical aspects of filmmaking, such as special effects, will be impacted.
The reason, per Mr. Affleck, is the creative and collaborative aspect of art.
James Woods is sure that actors are NOT immune to being cut.
Mr. Woods, however, is very well-versed in the history of Hollywood. Simply, when creativity and economy clash, profits win. When viewed in this light, whereby AI is merely a tool to increase profits, the economy of the technology’s use is inescapable—for every aspect of production regarding on-screen entertainment, including actors.
And since James Woods has been blacklisted in Hollywood for Wrongthink, I believe his perspective is a bit clearer.
Go read the whole thing, it isn't very long. I'm looking forward to parts 2 and 3.
Social media can be OK as long as you avoid the insanity. It can be hard to do, but I try to concentrate, a least a bit, on the music and movie side of things. That's how I found this song, by way of X, and a regular song game.
I had heard of Kool & the Gang, of course, though I never was a fan of much of their music that was on the radio. This song was from an album released before their commercial success, which came in 1973, as near as I can tell from some quick research. I like it. It is more jazz than the stuff that was commercially successful.
Amazon's cloud platform suffered a 13-hour disruption affecting one service after resident engineers allowed Kiro to make changes, according to four sources who spoke to the Financial Times.
The "Cloud People" as I call them, don't want us owning anything, just resting and leasing. "You will own nothing and be happy" was something that Mao said as did Lenin and Marx. Of course they WILL own stuff.
I am truly, non-sarcastically impressed that Ms Hinsliff and a few other left-wing commenters are now willing to admit that “there are likely to be consequences” to increasing the minimum wage. Hearing that word, “consequences”, enter left-wing discussions of workers’ pay is like a glimpse of a little mammalian form scurrying through the dust kicked up by a brontosaurus.
We had empowered girl boss characters on screen - and it didn’t work. The result wasn’t a brave new world in entertainment, but tedious Mary Sues, declining viewership and cultural fatigue.
This isn’t too surprising During their initial hearing in Allegany County District Court last year, Blank’s case for release was clearly the most sympathetic.
Car thefts for thee, but not for me. Exit quote: “It is remarkable how quickly the traditional law enforcement model becomes essential when crime crosses the threshold of City Hall.”
It is, dear reader, almost time to head south again. The Missus Herself is off to California to visit LUSH for a fortnight leaving me, Your Humble Scribe, to once again fend for himself. As the invitation to visit The Nuke is always open, I decided to go there for a week, or so, rather than entertain myself at Chez Sarge.
Well, that went better than I thought it would. We played the Daytraders last Sunday and took two games out of three; we lost the opener to Vida Blue but won game 2 in extra innings on an RBI single by Tom Grieve, and in game three we pounded Larry Gura for 12 runs while holding the Daytraders scoreless.
And dear punters, all three of you, have you cancelled your timeshares in Jalisco, walked back that all inclusive? Hope so, if not, shelter in place and hope the good guys catch up with you.
Topher Field is a Australian documentary film maker and libertarian political commentator. He also has a YouTube Channel.
John Lott is a researcher and author of the book More Guns, Less Crime.
These two had a conversation. This is an interesting, if brief (9 minute) excerpt of that meeting, about America's experience with armed self-defense. It is 9 minutes out of a conversation that lasted just over an hour. I have not listened to entire conversation, but I will try to get to that this week.
95% of the time that people use guns defensively, they don't fire the gun. It's simply brandishing a gun is enough to cause the criminal to go break off the attack.
Of course those stories don't end up in the news, unless something "odd" happens, like the defender holds the attacker at gunpoint until police arrive. But mostly, there is no news story.
One in 4 Jewish college students say they either felt or were excluded from a campus activity because of their Jewish identity, a new survey by the American Jewish Committee and Hillel International found.
The results add evidence to on-going concerns about rampant antisemitism on American college campuses.
Is anyone shocked that higher education is rampant with discrimination and hate? Read the whole thing.
Mercedes-Benz ordered a recall for 12,236 EQB electric SUVs, which could catch fire due to an issue within the high-voltage battery system. According to documents filed with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).
That will be expensive for each car, but I have no idea if that is a large number compared to the number sold, or if many more were sold, but only a subset were impacted.
The documents also state that any EQBs not included in the recall are already equipped with more robust batteries.
In the time before the replacement, owners are told to park outdoors, away from structures and other vehicles.
Of course the letters notifiying people which SUVs are affected won't go out until Friday the 27th, and the fix won't be available until April.
Ghost is an interesting band. They go out of their way to provoke people with their theatrics. Quite a bit of their music has been reminding me of 1980s music lately, and today we have a cover from '89.
It might not fit Metal for Mondays exactly, but since I make the rules...
This song is "It's A Sin" by Ghost. It was released as a single on January 16th. It was originally a song by Pet Shop Boys from 1989.
The deadly violence sparked by the military killing of an infamous cartel leader has now spread widely across Mexico, as American citizens near the border were warned to shelter in place.
At least 20 of Mexico’s 31 states have seen violent clashes in the wake of the death of the country’s most wanted man, Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, head of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG).
Who had "Mexico Collapses" on their 2026 bingo card? Or would this be redundant?
A group of people were playing inside the pool hall about 2 a.m. when another group walked in, Mancha said through a spokesman, citing preliminary information.
When the first group left about 10 minutes later, the second group followed them outside and “words were exchanged,” Mancha said.
Bridgeview, Illinois is a village in Cook County that is about 15 miles southwest of the Loop.
One guy attacked. One guy defended. Though it will be a while before the State's Attorney makes any decision on charges.
