Coming from the same ghouls that vow to “protect women” from the evil trans people.

Searching “uss abraham lincoln hit” indicates Iran’s been claiming for weeks to have hit the Lincoln. And it’s been thoroughly denied by US command. So either the US government is blatantly lying about a carrier being hit, or the Iranian state media is lying for propaganda purposes. Personally, I’m inclined to believe the US gov here. If a carrier is reduced to a smoldering wreck, you’re just not going to be able to hide that for very long. There would be thousands of witnesses, from both the carrier and its escorts. And eventually someone’s going to notice that no one is phoning home to their relatives anymore from the Lincoln. Even if the ship was already under a communications blackout, eventually there will come a time where the ship and crew would have ended their deployment. At most you could hide the destroyed carrier for a few months. No. There is just no practical way to hide a loss that big.

In fact, they wouldn’t even try. They would be shouting about it from the rooftops. Every politician who opposed war funding would be accused of betraying the dead crew of the Lincoln. There’s just no practical way to hide a loss that large, so you might as well lean into it for propaganda.

Fall from within is one thing. Being toppled externally is another entirely.

Governments don’t actually get toppled by mobs of protesters storming the palace gates. Machine guns are quite effective at preventing that. They topple when some other individual or faction convinces enough key players in the country that the new guys are a better option. The protesters only storm the gates when the army decides to look the other way. And the army only decides to look the other way when there’s some viable alternative to the existing government. No high-ranking general with a retirement to worry about wants to see the state they serve collapse into complete anarchy.

The point of this is that internal revolutions tend to be good for their people. A revolutionary movement can only successfully topple a government when they can make a good case to a lot of powerful people that they can competently manage the gears of state.

But imposed from without? You can invade a place and stick someone on the throne, but they won’t have any legitimacy. And that power and legitimacy vacuum leads to sectarian violence and civil wars. Or, as in the case of the Shah, the foreign-imposed leader maintains their position through shear force and barbarity.

I mean, that’s what they said about Saddam. And then Iraq had a million dead over the next decade…and ISIS.

Can we go for something more Biblical? Maybe struck by lightning immediately after, in an outdoor public speech, denying having any involvement with Epstein?

Hey Fates, are you listening? Can we just make the Caesar metaphor completely on the hose and have him be stabbed to death by a group of Republican Senators?

I want to buy a telescoping flag pole. Forget half mast, I want to be able to fly flags at double mast when someone particularly wicked dies.

I could see why people would stick with it. It’s a relatively low-stress job that pays decently, has government labor protections, government benefits, and doesn’t require a lot of education. Some searching suggests the average pay of a TSA worker is $56k. Plus retirement and health insurance. And the only credential required is a high school diploma or a GED.

What other job that requires nothing more than a high school diploma has pay and benefits that good? Maybe if you start your own business up. But in terms of wage labor, very few things come as good, at that education level, as a TSA job. A couple, each working at the TSA, can easily bring in $100-150k per year if they stay there awhile.

It’s quite understandable why the TSA agents won’t quit during a shutdown. When the money is flowing, being a TSA agent is a pretty decent gig.

I mean, Trump is known for a love of gold objects, maybe he bought some old antique ring at some point? And it is a miracle that he’s lived for long as he has, considering his diet and lifestyle…

they’re talking about people who have debilitating medical or psychiatric conditions

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_abuse_of_psychiatry_in_the_Soviet_Union

In times like ours, I’m going to oppose any attempt to expand the powers governments have at putting people in cages, however benevolent the aim.

I’m an American. I want nukes. Not for my country, me specifically. We should legalize the private ownership of nuclear bombs!

How would the Canadians possibly smuggle a nuke across the border?

“Mr. President, the Canadians have called to apologize for insulting you. They’re also sending an apology gift. It’s a large, golden, 20 foot tall statue in the shape of a moose!”

“Wow, that’s amazing. Bring it to DC at once!”

It seems that’s what Iran was doing actually. They enriched uranium up to 60%. Bomb grade is 90%. But there’s really no reason to enrich that high except to make nukes. And nuclear enrichment is not a linear thing. Half the work is just to get to 5% enrichment.

It seems they designed their program to be right on the edge of nuclear breakout. In retrospect, they probably should have gone straight for the bomb.

In science, we prefer observational to speculative evidence.

You spend your life building a beautiful home. Right when you pay the mortgage off and finish the last detail…a drunken maniac busts in the door, shoots you, and moves into your former home. And he just gets away with it because there’s no cops in your town.

Or, more concretely, you build a magnificent culture, industry, society, and economy. You invest in your people and technological innovation. You turn your nation into an economic powerhouse. Then the neighboring country, who put all of their more limited resources into the military, storms across the border and takes over your little paradise. Now you’re still paying the tax levels of a Nordic welfare state, but all of the money just goes into the pockets of the warlords and oligarchs of the mafia state that just conquered you.

As if the Ukrainians aren’t a culture and people going back thousands of years. What odd bigotries you have.

“Do I look like some STD-ridden guy?”

“Well, STD-ridden guys tend to refuse condoms. That’s how they got their STDs. So you tell me.”

Does the wind not blow in Estonia?

Of course you can manipulate chat bots. That’s common knowledge and not even worth bringing up. What you’re missing is that everything you enter into he corporate LLMs is logged and monitored. And you can’t cheat around the monitoring, as you have no way to know what key words or themes they might be tracking.

I really wonder how much of this is being driven by fear of LLMs and truly distributed knowledge. Sure, the big corporate LLMs have safeguards built into them, but you can run many models on your home computer unrestricted.

Imagine someone asking an LLM for detailed step-by-step instructions on how to build a suicide vest from ordinary household materials. Sure, you can find that stuff online if you really search for it, but the search engines try really hard to suppress such results. Plus such a search might result in authorities being flagged. But the right LLMs might make anyone into an expert bomb maker.

Whether such open source LLMs are actually good enough to teach a complete novice how to build explosives, chemical weapons, of infectious agents is largely immaterial. Even if half of the home bomb makers manage to blow themselves up in the process, that still represents suicide vests and IEDs going from rare things requiring a skilled bomb maker to something anyone can build in their garage.

There are a lot of incredibly dangerous things that an ordinary person could build with the resources they have access to, if only they had the knowledge. And often just trying to acquire the necessary knowledge is enough to get you a knock on the door from the FBI. But an unrestricted LLM operating on an air gapped computer? Completely untraceable.

I wonder how much of this move to clamp down on free computing is a reaction to fears like this.