I’ve said this before: we cannot trust the government to keep secrets from the citizens. They very obviously are not trustworthy. Today’s stupid secret comes to us from Military.com, probably the best source online for inside news on the U.S.…
No Disintegrations: DHS Is Feeling A Tad Insecure
Many sources are reporting that DHS is looking to spend around $180 million on a bounty hunter program. Which is just so many kinds of wrong. Even the existence of bounty hunters in a modern State is an admission of…
A Just War II: Christmas Has Gone Too Far
I originally posted this mini-rant in 2022. Since then, things have not improved. Thanksgiving is Ukraine to Christmas’ Russia: I wouldn’t normally be particularly interested in it, though it seems fine (if a bit problematic), but its annoying neighbor just…
Do A New Thing: On Interpreting The Law
Paul Campos, at the Lawyers, Guns & Money blog, has an interesting post today about ways to approach interpreting the law called “Follow the rules or do the right thing?“. You should read it. Now, I Am Not A Lawyer…
Archive: ICANN Jump on the Terrorist Bandwagon
I am inordinately proud of the poem in this one. An old post of mine from Kuro5hin.Org, dated “Fri Nov 16th, 2001 at 09:47:52 AM EST”. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) have jumped on the “we…
Political Spelunking: Learning To Cave Like A Democrat
The Democrats really are the most useless opposition party. They didn’t do much when they were last in power either. Two things that happened over the weekend illustrate this: Trump, damn his name would not even have been a candidate…
ICE, ICE, Criminal: The FBI Misses The Actual Problem
So, the FBI wants ICE (and presumably other federal masked marauders as well) to identify themselves properly so we can tell them apart from the criminals. Yeah; that’s not gonna work. I mean, sure, part of the problem is that…
Archive: /dev/null/nethack Tournament 2001
These early tournaments had a simple structure; by the time I stopped hosting it, the scoreboard was absurdly complicated. An old post of mine from Kuro5hin.Org, dated “Wed Oct 31st, 2001 at 06:31:11 PM EST”. Tonight (Halloween) at midnight Pacific…
The Overton Window: It’s Not A “Both Sides” Problem
Yesterday, I proposed the concept of the “Asshole window” as a way of thinking about how society can collapse just from having too many assholes around. I was in a mood. But that idea is inspired by an actual concept…
The Asshole Window: A New Theory Of Societal Collapse
I tell my kids that the most amazing thing about the world we live in is that this ramshackle system works at all. Much less that it works well enough to support 8 billion people. It really shouldn’t. It probably…