Tag: Stupid people

Amateur Hour

Marxists, Morons & Idiots, Weapons

I suppose that we should be grateful that this latest Leon Czolgosz-wannabe wasn’t as well prepared as he should have been.  Clearly, he went straight to the “Suggested Assassin’s Weapons” tab at Amazon or something — that is to say, he got some things quite right, and a lot of other things very wrong.  Consider this series of pics of his “arsenal” which he hoped to use at the Hilton D.C.:

Okay, let’s look at this “arsenal”.

  • Pump shotgun:  Yes of course.  If you’re going for “maximum damage in a confined area”, there are few better choices.  One might argue that a semi-auto would be a better choice, but potato-potahto.
  • Colt 1911 model:  Also a solid choice for a handgun, although he may have been better off with one of those guns which carry a 500-round magazine, e.g. a Glock.  Still, the chances of him getting to actually use a handgun (any handgun) during a mass shooting are going to be minimal, unless the 1911 is backup for when you run out of 12ga ammo.  But:
  • Knives (4, assassin for the use of):  Four knives?  For a gunfight?  Okay, by all means carry a knife as part of your EDC accoutrements (I do), but let’s be honest about this:  in his proposed scenario, a knife — any knife, let alone four — will be about as useful as a golf club, maybe less so.  And:  two throwing knives?  Useless;  toss them for a couple spare magazines (which you are going to need if shooting a 1911;  ask me how I know this.)  Also, a Ka-Bar is too unwieldy;  that boot knife (which I carry when wearing cowboy boots) would be the only decent option here.

I still think that the Secret Service missed a trick by not shooting the asshole dead on the spot, but that’s just me.  Given how inept the SS have been with their handguns in the past, however, subduing the scrote might have been the better option;  at least there was no collateral damage.

Yeah, I Don’t Buy It

Bureaucracy, Politics

Here’s a piece about former-AG Blondie and the power hierarchy she inherited at the DoJ:

She inherited an agency riddled with holdovers, careerist prosecutors, and institutional muscle memory tuned to the prior regime’s priorities. Her mandate, executed with the cold ferocity of a Florida prosecutor who once stared down the Clintons and lived to tell it, was never to play the long public game of show trials. It was to do the lethal, invisible labor: purge disloyal elements, redirect investigative task forces, shutter the foreign-influence shops that had become political protection rackets, and…most critically…build the factual scaffolding of cases that could survive judicial scrutiny once the political headwinds shifted. That is precisely what she delivered.

And:

First-term chaos taught the lesson: the Senate-confirmed loyalist who survives confirmation must serve as the institutional wrecking ball. The public demands scalps; the law demands airtight cases. Bondi supplied the latter while the former were still being assembled. Those who call her tenure “incompetent” reveal either their ignorance of how the executive branch actually functions or their desire to keep the machine broken so it can never be turned against its former masters. She was never meant to be the permanent face of the Justice Department. She was the architect who laid the rebar and poured the concrete under fire. The structure now stands. The new tenants can furnish it with indictments. That is not failure. That is lethal, disciplined statecraft.

Yeah.  Unfortunately, while I may be ignorant of the big-league governmental powerplays and what have you, I’m not ignorant of the need to look after the interests of ordinary folk, i.e. the voters, who put this lot in power to do all the above, but also to address and right the wrongs perpetrated by the previous bunch of scumbags on ordinary people.

How difficult would it be for the AG to look at, say, the case of Patrick Adamiak — you know, the innocent man railroaded by the ATF (who fall under the DoJ, lest we forget) — and get him out of jail?  Or to withdraw the dozens upon dozens of criminal cases that are still being prosecuted by the DoJ despite the cases being prima facie contrary to both new policy and the law?

Doing both the above may be difficult, but when you are the CEO of an outfit, it’s easy to say to a small task force, “Find all the cases that are being prosecuted but shouldn’t be;  set out a legal (or Constitutional) rationale for nolle prosequi, and I’ll sign the authorizations.”  That’s called “delegation” and it’s what good managers do.

And Pam Bondi didn’t do that.

Let’s just hope that her successor does.

Because Of Course It’s The Guns

Anti-Gun Nannies, Marxists

Here we go again:

Forty-five years ago, John Hinckley Jr attempted to assassinate Ronald Reagan as he left the Hilton hotel in Washington, injuring the US president and three others. Obsessed with the actor Jodie Foster, and seeking to gain her attention, the shooter had initially pursued Reagan’s Democratic predecessor, Jimmy Carter.

On Saturday night, the hotel again rang to shots as it hosted the annual White House correspondents’ dinner. Tuxedo-clad politicians and journalists dived under tables as bangs were heard from the lobby, and Donald Trump was rushed from the stage. A secret service agent was shot, though saved by his ballistics vest. The echoes of the 1981 attack are a potent reminder that violence has long been a tragic strand of the American political tradition. Gun violence is grimly familiar. This does not diminish the seriousness of an incident that was widely and rightly condemned. Rather, it highlights its importance. …

The shooting also demonstrates once more the calamitous effect of gun culture. The US has 120 firearms for every 100 residents. While shooting homicides fell last year, on average they killed 40 people each day. A 2024 study by the violence research programme at the University of California, Davis suggested that many recent firearms purchasers were open to political violence.

Well, it’s The Guardian (no link because fukkem) so let me just address a few of the fallacies therein.

Let’s start with “the calamitous effect of gun culture.”   The really calamitous effects of an unarmed citizenry (the opposite of a gun culture) is when the government starts the wholesale massacre or imprisonment of its citizens.  To use but two such examples, we have the Soviet Union in the 1930s and the Cambodian killing fields of the 1980s.  Of course, the fucking Guardian isn’t ever going to talk about those because the massacres happened under the type of government — that would be “Marxist” — that they themselves support and wish were in power.

“While shooting homicides fell last year, on average they killed 40 people each day.”  Sounds horrible, dunnit?  Except that in 2024, the total number of deaths was 3,072,666, or 8,418 per day.  Ummmm carry the three… so gunshot deaths (assuming that 40/day is accurate hem hem) accounted for 0.48% of the total.  Let’s do a little comparison, shall we?

Gunshot deaths per day:  40.  Now the U.S. daily death rate (according to these guys) breaks down by category as follows:

  • Heart disease:  1,873 (22%)
  • Cancer:  1,698 (20%)
  • Accidents (all causes):  541 (6.4%)
  • Stroke:  457 (5.4%)
  • Chronic lower respiratory diseases:  399 (4.7%)
  • Alzheimer’s:  317 (3.8%)
  • Diabetes:  258 (3.1%)
  • Liver disease/cirrhosis:  143 (1.7%)

Oh, and I’m willing to bet that the Guardian‘s 40 gunshot deaths per day includes suicides, which each year account for about half of all gun deaths.

Okay, one last thing:  “…many recent firearms purchasers were open to political violence.”  Yeah, and considering the recent spate of would-be assassins, almost all those thus predisposed were lefties or nutcases.  In this country, they are akin to Guardian readers.

Fucking prats, the lot of them.

Old-Fashioned Security

Technology

One comment (on this article) got me thinking:

I’m speaking to my business’s IT people about getting a “cold storage” option, even just a hard drive sitting in a desk drawer we update once a week. I don’t know how much I trust our cloud based database now.

Back when I was running Grand Union’s customer management function, I was fearful to the extent of paranoia about protecting our customers’ data privacy.  So fearful was I that I made several changes (against massive resistance from IT) in our data storage process.

As with all such nascent programs of the time, when customers applied for a loyalty card, we collected their personal data (name and address) and applied a unique ID number embedded in the card’s magnetic strip (no chips back then).  Like everyone else, we delegated this task to our card provider, who included that service, plus a direct mail service in their product offering.  I wasn’t too comfortable about having our customers’ data in the hands of a third party, but you have to trust somebody sometimes, and I figured that they had more to lose in the mismanagement thereof, which would keep them honest.

Then I found out that our company’s IT department had ordered the provider to send them those customer files over to us, as a “backup” and “security” measure (of course).  I didn’t like having two sets of data out there, but being the new boy, I kept my trap shut.

Then I found out that Store Operations was in the process of setting up a little routine which would track our staff’s spending — all staff had cards issued to them (for the wrong reasons, by the way, but I’ll talk about that some other time).  So I blew up at the Ops VP — the first time I had exploded at a senior member of upper management, but by no means the last — and uttered the words that became quite legendary at Grand Union.

“Let me make one thing quite clear.  Just because we are housing the data, does not mean you can play with it.  You know who owns the data?  I DO.  And only I will dictate how the data is to be used from now on.”  (There were more words, calling them idiots for abusing our own staff when in fact we were getting free research from their behavior, but that too is a story for another time.)

The result of all this was that I took all the personal customer data off the mainframe, leaving only the unique IDs behind, and stored that data not on our department’s terminal — which of course was linked to IT — but on a stand-alone PC in my techie Kenny’s office, on which resided only the customer data (and IDs of course), and the necessary tools to manage it (I used Paradox as the database manager and query tool, and Quattro Pro as the spreadsheet program).  Incidentally, the only way I got funding for the PC was by threatening to just buy one with my own money if I got turned down.  The only way to get data off that PC was by diskette (remember them) and Jaz cassettes (once again, the best mass offline storage media at the time);  and I had the only other Jaz drive in the company (and also the only other Quattro Pro software, but that was by choice because MS Excel was and still is an inferior product).

And absolutely everything was password-protected — only Kenny and I had admin privileges.  It was unwieldy, and often frustrating, and time-consuming;  but our data was secure, which was all that mattered to me.  So when we were doing a direct-mail promotion to our customer-cardholders, Kenny and I would do the analysis, then send the promotional offer and list of customer IDs to our card provider to create the mail shot.  (The “sending” of the promo details involved handing a Jaz cassette to our account executive to take back to their IT department:  also unwieldy and time-consuming, but irrelevant to me.  And the head of their IT department was a great friend of mine, so I trusted him to safeguard the data.)

And all that was in the mid-1990s, when data snooping was rudimentary, crude and easily blocked.  Now?  Fuggedabahtit.

I do know that had anyone in my department even suggested to me that I back up our data on some Internet-based “cloud” (for the usual “convenience” reasons), I would probably have fired them, for forgetting that when it comes to data — most especially private data — security matters more than ease or convenience.  I eve refused to back up our customer data on the company’s own mainframe, so protective did I feel about the issue.

And I think that people need to feel more like that today, because in today’s world data security is more, not less fragile and indeed vulnerable.

Long Time… Gone

Corporate Fuckery, Entertainment, Management

I have been a fan of Formula One racing since my early teens, which makes me older than just about everyone involved in running F1 today.

Just recently, I had a problem with my AppleTV account and couldn’t change the payment method — no need for details, but it’s a fucking nightmare and would be easier if I just created a new account.  Why am I subscribing to AppleTV, you ask?  Well, late last year F1 told me that their own website (F1.com) would no longer be streaming races because they’d sold the broadcast rights to AppleTV.  Fair enough:  it’s their absolute right to do so, and the AppleTV sub was actually cheaper than the F1 sub;  so that, coupled with my desire to watch the Slow Horses TV series (read the books, loved them), I made the change even though once I’d watched all the episodes, I found that AppleTV doesn’t have much worth watching anyway.  But there was always the F1 racing, which (did I already mention? I’ve loved since my early teens) so what the hell.

Of course, the modern F1 is no longer the F1 I used to love.  Gone were the earsplitting roar and howls of V6- and V12 car engines, and in their place came hybrid engines, using pathetic little 1500cc turbo motors with laptop batteries to “boost” performance because Green Is Mighty and Internal Combustion Engines Are Evil, or some such nonsense.

Then this season saw new rules (a.k.a. the “formula” in the product description), which made the cars even MOAR BATTERY, except of course that batteries when used to propel cars at 300mph run out of spark within yards not miles, so we were greeted with the spectacle of the world’s finest drivers and the world’s most accomplished engineers becoming software managers.  Put in plain terms, cars would overtake other cars, and then immediately lose their position because their batteries were drained whilst their competitors had recharged theirs so could take back the position:  repeat ad nauseam.  Not only was the spectacle unsatisfying, it became outright dangerous, as was seen in the last race where a driver with a full battery was about to move to overtake, but the car in front suddenly lost 25mph because his battery had just gone flat.  At a closing speed of 275mph, no human reactions are quick enough to address that impending crash — but amazingly, young Ollie Bearman’s were almost that quick and he pulled off the track to avoid a massive collision.  Unfortunately, his car’s battery was still in flat-out mode, and Bearman hit the barrier head-on with a force of 50 Gs.  How he survived is a miracle;  how his electric motor didn’t catch fire and turn him extra-crispy is a credit to the engineers who built the car.  Nor did his car crumple like a newspaper and turn his skeleton into soup.

Of course, the F1 organization recognized all this for the disaster it is, and have hurriedly put through a massive rules change.  They were fortunate in that next two Grand Prix races in Saudi Arabian peninsula had been canceled because Trump’s merry war on Iran had resulted in the latter sending missiles raining on the Gulf states — and nobody wanted to see battery-powered race cars having to take action to avoid incoming SCUDs, let alone their competitors’ cars, and F1 audiences in the stands deciding that watching electric go-karts play swapalongs would not be sufficient spectacle to keep them from being turned into hamburger by the aforementioned missiles.  So F1 caught a break, and having three weeks before the next race (Miami GP), changed a whole bunch of rules, making the thing even more complex than before.  (Please watch this video — it’s less than ten minutes long — to see the absolute clusterfuck that F1 racing has become.)

Why am I telling you all this?  Because after sixty-odd years of F1 fandom, I’ve decided that enough is enough.  I’m not interested in watching what F1 has become, I don’t like what F1’s owners, the foul Liberty Media, have created — four races in the Saudi Peninsula?  WTF? — and even worse, losing various countries’ Grand Prix races because European organizers can’t match those of the oil-rich Arabs.  I mean, the entire Grand Prix concept began in France, and there’s no room on the calendar for a French GP?  WTFF?

So I’m walking away.  I would say that I’ll content myself by watching the “highlights” videos on EeewChoob, but honestly, I don’t think there will be any highlights worth watching, anymore.

Here’s a thought:  throw away the stupid hybrid engines and go back to racing with real engines, the aforementioned V6 and V8 monsters, let the drivers race these cars to the utmost limit of mechanical and human performance, and make F1 watchable again.  Like it was in, say, 1975.  (And yes I know, the cars were deathtraps.  I’m not suggesting throwing out the entire car, just the stupid engines.)

I know, I know:  “You can’t stop progress, Kim;  you can’t go back to the old ways.”

And don’t suggest I try to follow other motor racing types, either.  Once you’ve watched Formula 1, all other car types resemble tortoises and hippos racing.  Even Le Mans, which I watch every year, all 24 hours at a time if there’s no highlights video, doesn’t begin to compare.

I think I’ll start watching horse racing instead.  That is, until Liberty Media buys them out, makes the owners strap rockets to their horses’ asses “to improve the spectacle”, and gets fifty racing tracks built in Saudi Arabia to host the new F1 Horse Racing Circuit, doing away with Belmont, Saratoga, Aintree and Epson in the process.

And speaking of horses’ asses:  so long, F1/Liberty Media — and AppleTV.  Neither of you is worth the trouble of supporting anymore.

Wine Lakes, Butter Mountains

Bad News, Eco-Crap, Gummint

Thanks (once again) to The Divine Sarah at Insty’s, we have this brilliant analysis of how government can totally fuck up the market — any market — by ignoring the effects of pricing, deficits and surpluses.

Now, I know it’s about Britishland, and I know that just this is going to cause some of my Murkin Readers to roll their eyes, mutter something about “foreign entanglements”, and go off to wank over Megyn Kelly’s latest nutjob rant or whatever..

Don’t.

As I have said countless times before, I always look over The Pond to see what the Euros and Brits are doing, because they provide at worst an object lesson on what not to do, and at best a warning that we should never allow our own Gummint to repeat their mistakes Over Here.

And I also don’t want to hear bullshit like “Oh, this could never happen here” because not only can it happen, it’s already happening at the state level (cf. California, New York, Illinois and most recently, Virginia).  All it takes is one general election which sweeps the Socialists into power, controlling House, Senate and the White House, and everything bad that is happening in Yurp and Britishland will absolutely happen here, just on a national scale.

So follow the above link, read it, learn from it, and let’s make damn sure that such fecklessness and idiocy can never happen here.