Tuesday Links - 28 March

An article from Gavin Mortimer at The Spectator is up first. France is on a knife edge

But beneath Macron’s defiant exterior there will be a nagging worry: that the disorder is contagious, spreading from the minority of violent extremists to the majority of peaceful demonstrators. These are the ordinary men and women who have reached the end of their tether with the cost of living crisis. By instinct many will be pro-police but they are in the street because they are anti-Macron.

Impro Guns - Expedient SMG (NSW Police)

An expedient SMG seized by [New South Wales] Police after a recent drug related raid.

The Other McCain - ‘Limited Scientific Evidence’

Are you kidding me with this? What kind of “journalism” is being practiced at NPR? Perhaps the kind in which ordinary common sense is prohibited.

CDR Salamander - Fullbore Friday: good enough is great

Yep, you knew they were going to make it to FbF - The Flower Class Corvette from one of the books on Phibian's professional reading list (hey, there is an idea I never get around to), The Cruel Sea. For a 205', 33' beam 16 kt ship - she seems multi-mission to me.

Pixy Misa at Ambient Irony - Daily News Stuff 26 March 2023: Surely You Don't Care What Other People Think Edition. What's the difference between sharing data with a Chinese company and sharing it with the Chinese government?

None. The difference is none. All Chinese internet companies are entirely under the thumb of the Chinese intelligence agencies. [SNIP]

Which simply proves that TikTok is acting in bad faith. The company has claimed for years that US user data is held separate from and inaccessible to Chinese operations, but all of TikTok's internal tools have backdoors to allow China to spy on foreign users.

Wombat-socho - Fear And Loathing On The Intertubes. On the harassment of Pikamee over the playing of a video game.

A lot of trans activists online got jumped on with both boots for not policing their own bad actors, and then 4chan got into the act. Every one of the “activists’ who had bullied Pikamee got doxxed, and quite a few of them shut down their Twitter accounts – but not before 4chan and others brought the receipts and exposed them as the lying bullies they were.

Juliette Ochieng - California From the Inside: How I knew they were lying. Apparently there is a new mask mandate in Calif.

Now, since the new mask “mandate” of 2023, I see a lot more people wearing them than was so in the last 18 months or so, but I can’t remember the last time I put on one and no one has accosted me about it. Hey, it might be Black Woman Privilege, but I don’t think so.

Victory Girls - Notre Dame Shows Stanford How Free Speech Works

One can applaud Dean Martinez for her commitment to free speech, while also applauding Notre Dame. After the Stanford brouhaha, the Notre Dame chapter of the Federalist Society invited Judge Duncan to speak on their campus.

Again from The Other McCain - BREAKING NEWS: Nashville School Shooter Is Probably Not a Trump Voter

While I always strive to avoid speculation in situations like this, the (allegedly) transgender person known as Audrey (or “Aiden”) Hale does not seem to fit the MAGA profile.