Busted

Well, they caught the guy they think was the leaker of the Israeli attack plans. Turns out he was a CIA employee.

A C.I.A. official has been charged with disclosing classified documents that appeared to show Israel’s plans to retaliate against Iran for a missile attack earlier this year, according to court documents and people familiar with the matter.

The official, Asif W. Rahman, was indicted last week in federal court in Virginia with two counts of willful retention and transmission of national defense information. He was arrested by the F.B.I. on Tuesday in Cambodia and brought to federal court in Guam to face charges.

Meanwhile, the dweeby A1C who put all the classified docs on that gaming Discord server is going to the big house for fifteen years. He should have kept them in a spare bathroom or garage, then he could be going to the White House for four.

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Smoothbrains at Threads...

"Not a sports car any stretch of the definition"?

What kind of pig-ignorant mouth noise is that?

It is the definitional example. The MG-TC is the type specimen of sports cars. All other sports cars are shadows cast on the cave wall by the TC.

That's the sportsest sports car that ever sportsed!

To this day I remember the time I parked my Porsche 924S next to an original gangsta TC in the parking lot of the Blockbuster in Midtown ATL and just sat there and swooned over it until the owner came out.

Hand to God, he had stringback gloves. A flat cap, too. Dude had the Official MG-TC Uniform!

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It's not "yelling fire in a crowded theater", but...

What has this country come to when a simple man can’t make terroristic threats over an interstate telecommunications system anymore?

My favorite part of the whole story is his seeming bewilderment.

The FBI traced the account to Carillo's residence in Winchester. The FBI searched his home on Friday and Carillo told officers that if the search was “about the online stuff. I posted it,” according to the affidavit. He later stated incredulously, “This is all over a comment, huh?”

If I were his public defender, I'd try the angle that since he'd posted the content on GETTR, nobody actually saw it. If you mail a threatedning letter in the forest and nobody's around to read it, is anyone really threatened?

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What in the wide, wide world of sports?

So, a little after seven AM on Saturday morning, a dude here in Indianapolis wanders out to his truck with three kids in tow. He unlocks the truck, retrieves the pistol that he'd had in the cab, cranks a round off into the air, and then hands it to one of the kids, who proceeds to do likewise. The kids then pass it around, each of them popping a few rounds into the sky... at a 45 degree angle, you know, ensuring the bullet will travel as far as possible ...before handing the pistol back to its owner who then empties most of the rest of the mag into the clouds.

It's all on video.

The dude got arrested and, you know what? Good. Lock his ass up for a bit. And he better have to forfeit the blaster, too. Clip a corner off my lolbertarian card or whatever, but maybe gun ownership isn't for him.

Does this look like there's a safe direction in any direction?

Today in "People Are Dumb"...

From the Associated Press:

Federal auto safety regulators are warning people not to stick decals on their steering wheels because they can be hurled at drivers if the air bags inflate in a crash.

The warning from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration comes after another driver was severely hurt by a flying emblem during a crash. The air bag inflated and sent two pieces of metal from an aftermarket decal into the driver’s face and neck.

The agency said it couldn’t say where or when the injury occurred. But it said the injury was the second it is aware of involving an aftermarket decal. In the previous case the driver lost sight in one eye after being hit by a rhinestone-adorned decal that hit them in the face, NHTSA said in a statement Tuesday.

Apparently bling-encrusted vehicle logo stickers are a thing that people stick in the center of their steering wheel hub, right over the airbag cover. You know, the airbag that deploys via an explosive charge. Essentially this means you can buy fragmentation sleeves for your safety grenade from Amazon!

From Reddit, where someone hot-glued a homemade claymore.

Imagine if someone did this in a car that had un-replaced Takata airbags!

"Yo, dawg, I heard you like fragments so I put some fragments on your fragments..."

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Scam Spam

The latest form of scam emails to clog my spam folder are ones that purport to be from various services claiming that a payment was declined and my account will be suspended or deleted or terminated or some other ominous-sounding word.

This is most amusing when it's coming from someone claiming to be from Sirius XM or some other place where I don't actually have an account.

I can see a less net-savvy person falling for one of these, as some look very official. I avoid even looking at these on a touchscreen device.

One giveaway is the return email address...

Bad Info Drives Out Good

Greg Ellifritz put up an informative post on social media regarding the (in)efficacy of birdshot in a home defense role recently.

It was shared widely on the internet with predictable results, as the legions of shambling mouth-breathers tried to set Greg straight.

He's had about enough of that.

"I got my first shotgun instructor certification in 1999. I’ve been teaching shotgun skills longer than some of these commentators have been alive. I carried a shotgun every day in a 25-year police career and used those shotguns to convince some very bad men to submit to arrest. I’ve seen, treated, and investigated gunshot wounds from birdshot, buckshot, and slugs. I’ve killed lots of critters with shotguns in the hunting fields. I’ve attended countless shotgun ballistic gelatin shooting demonstrations and autopsies of victims killed with shotgun pellets. I’ve written 162 different articles on using the shotgun for self defense as well as producing the largest firearms stopping power research study in the last two decades.

I might know a thing or two about what shotgun pellets do to human bodies.

But when I try to share that knowledge with the general public, I get shit upon from the anonymous population of uneducated internet trolls who gain self esteem from insulting other people."

Bad info drives out good. I definitely know the feeling, as it's why I rarely discuss gun stuff in GenPop-accessible places myself these days.

Save the birdshot for birds.

The First Rule of Dunning-Kruger Club...

ZCQOTD: "This man has built an impregnable stone house with lovely west-facing balconies on the summit of Mount Stupid."

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Unreal

It's like the entire business model of the Fox News Cinematic Universe and the entire larger constellation of Right wing social media grifters is finding dumb stuff to get not-very-bright people extremely agitated about.

Today's is especially silly.

Clownshoes

In today's episode of "Real life or The Onion?"...

This is some fundamentally unserious nonsense.

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Half everyone's dumber than average.

Via the NYT, we hear of this Monmouth University poll:

"Just under 1 in 5 Americans believe the singer Taylor Swift is part of a covert effort to help President Joe Biden win the 2024 election.

[snip]

Just under half (46%) of the American public has heard something about Swift being part of a supposed covert government effort to help Biden win the 2024 presidential election. Just under 1 in 5 Americans (18%) believe such a conspiracy involving Swift exists."

"Wow," you say, "That's crazy!" Except it's not really that out of line with overall numbers in a land where better than one in ten agreed with the statement "The moon landings were faked" and less than six in ten agreed with "Humans evolved".

I mean, the New York Times is wringing its hands about one in five people believing in this moronic TaySway conspiracy only a few thin sheets of newsprint away from where it prints the frickin' horoscope!

We are a fundamentally unserious people, and one in five of your neighbors, at minimum, is a credulous moron.

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Well... bye.

Back in Atlanta, when I'd hear someone going on about how much better things were back in whatever city they'd moved there from... and Atlanta is a veritable city of transplants ...my standard response was that old airline advertising slogan: "Delta is ready when you are."

In that spirit...

You're not entitled to your own facts.

So, there was this guy claiming that "librarians gleefully threw Cat In The Hat [sic] on the bonfire".

When called on his falsehood, he got snippy.

I have no interest in visiting his blog to "argue further" because there's nothing to argue, as the thing he is claiming happened only happened in his imagination.

Let's help out Matt's short memory: 

What actually happened is that Dr. Seuss Enterprises, the company that manages Theodor Geisel's estate, asked Random House, the company that prints his books, to take six titles (And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, If I Ran the Zoo, McElligot's Pool, On Beyond Zebra!, Scrambled Eggs Super!, and The Cat's Quizzer) out of print, due to illustrations and/or words that they felt portrayed dated and negative ethnic stereotypes.

You will note the complete absence from the actual facts of the following three things: librarians, bonfires, and The Cat in the Hat.

Now, you can agree with this decision or not (I personally find it pretty questionable and feel that it smacks of overreaction) and you are certainly entitled to your own opinion.

But you aren't entitled to your own facts.

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QotD: Unforgiving Edition...

In a post about a Texas man injuring his grandson with a homemade .45 Colt blank, Claude Werner writes:

Firearms are relentlessly unforgiving of the slightest lapse in attention or competence. The shooter has probably been ‘shooting for years.’ Unfortunately, as is sometimes said of the law enforcement profession: “Some people have 20 years of experience and some people have one year of experience 20 times.”

Go and RTWT.
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Negative Outcomes

The incident in the previous post where the dude capped his tree-trimming neighbor for no adequately explainable reason reminds me of the (in)famous Duel at the Dumpster in Texas a few years back.

If you haven't read Claude Werner's excellent series of posts about that clown show, you really should.

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Looks like Florida Man is at it again.

Sounds like the shooter messed up by the numbers. Also, it sounds like his neighbor, the decedent, flunked an important test, too.

"One of the 911 calls came from the wife of the shooter, in which she stated her husband went outside to scare the neighbor with a gun and shot him," the affidavit said. "The caller further stated her husband did not mean to do this and he just meant to scare him."

Druzolowski told a Volusia deputy in a recorded interview, that he retrieved a 357 Magnum revolver and confronted Ford after his wife told him Ford was on his property and that a gate was open, the affidavit said.

Druzolowski told officials that when he told Ford to get off his property, Ford allegedly told him to mind his own business and cursed, the affidavit said.

Ford also asked Druzolowski if he was going to shoot him, the affidavit said. Druzolowski said that he warned Ford to stop walking toward him or he would shoot, the document states.

Druzolowski also told the deputy, the affidavit said, he feared for his life, but acknowledged Ford had not threatened him.

I don't know about you, but I'd sure hate for my last words to be "What are you gonna do? Shoot me?" Dying is bad enough, but feeling like an idiot while you bleed out would just add insult to injury.

If someone's demonstrated that they're unhinged enough to point a gun at you because you're trimming branches on their side of the fence, you should probably vacate the premises. Maybe call the po-po.

So we've got one guy dead, a kid without a dad, and a septuagenarian who's gonna spend the rest of his miserable life jammed up in the gears of the legal system because he mistook a revolver for a magic problem-solving wand.

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Darwin can be delayed, but he's rarely denied.

So, a dude plummeted seventy-odd stories to his death in Hong Kong a couple weeks ago. What was he doing on the outside of a building, seven hundred feet above the ground? Was he washing windows or changing light bulbs or servicing an antenna?

No, he was trying to get a selfie for an Instagram post.

Theo Kindynis, a sociologist who has studied rooftopping, said that to many urban explorers, young rooftoppers who engage in made-for-Instagram antics are known as “dangle kiddies.”

“Remi’s Instagram is full of the same tropes — legs dangling in front of a cityscape, selfie stick on top of a mast, silhouetted figure on a ledge — that were already becoming cliché in 2016,” said Mr. Kindynis, a professor at Goldsmiths, University of London, referring to Mr. Lucidi.

The kulturkampf is so dumb.

So apparently the usual Rage Farmers on the Right are getting their paypiggies all worked up and assmad about a movie about a little girl's toy doll.

I haven't seen anything so dumb since Tucker Carlson got all tore up about the green M&M getting sensible shoes that didn't give him a boner anymore.

Big Facts

Politics turn us into mood-affiliated dummies. Culture war politics turns us into utter idiots. https://t.co/GeXp0Oov2l

— Paul Matzko (@PMatzko) June 24, 2023

Top. Men.

So, imagine you got a job as an IT dude at WidgetCo, Inc.

Obviously, in order to keep WidgetCo's networks up and running, you have to be given administrator access to the network, right?

But what you're expected to be doing is keeping the network running, not farting around and sifting through sales records and the manager's emails and all the files in the HR department. If you were doing that, you could get in trouble.

On that note, hey, let's see what's shakin' in the Massachusetts Air National Guard!

The filing also shows that Teixeira was written up by colleagues for apparently not following rules for the use of classified systems. A Sept. 15 Air Force memorandum included in the newly released court materials notes that Teixeira “had been observed taking notes on classified intelligence information” inside a room specifically designed to handle sensitive classified material.

Teixeira, the Air Force memo says, was instructed “to no longer take notes in any form on classified intelligence information.” About a month later, a memo noted that Teixeira “was potentially ignoring the cease-and-desist order” given to him in September. He was instructed to stop “any deep dives into classified intelligence information and focus on his job,” that memo said.

So, basically this kid was caught multiple times and repeatedly told "Mr. Bunny Rabbit, those carrots aren't for you! Or the kids in your War Thunder Discord channel!"

"I pinkie-swear I won't write things down in the SCIF again!"

I swear to Vishnu, this is the by-gawd dumbest Clancy novel I've ever been stuck in.

If every man-jack in this dude's chain of command isn't finishing out what's left of their wrecked careers conducting polar bear censuses at Pituffik Space Base, heads need to roll.

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