How stupid is it in the .gov?

...Nonetheless, we were forced to kidnap a seal, strap it to a board, put headphones on the seal, and play sonic boom sounds to it to see if it would be distressed. This is an actual thing that happened. This is actually real. I have pictures. It's a seal with headphones strapped to a board.

Now, the amazing part is how calm the seal was. Because if I was a seal, I'd be like, this is the end. They're definitely going to eat me. When the seal goes back to other seal friends, how's he going to explain that? Never going to believe him. That's why I'm like, well, it's like getting kidnapped by aliens and getting an anal probe. You come back and say, I swear to God, I got kidnapped by aliens, they stuck an anal probe in my butt. And people are like, no, that's ridiculous. His seal buddies are never going to believe him that he gets strapped to a board, and they put headphones on his ears and then let him go.

I don't think the public is quite aware of the madness that goes on."
Whole story here

It does come to war in the Pacific,

 as the man has pointed out before, we're in real trouble.  Because there were real problems with the ammo supplies long ago, and they didn't realistically deal with it.

'Qualified immunity' my ass, how does that give a county engineer protection

for pulling people over and detaining them?  No LE officer, no legal authority, asshat just did it.  And some idiot judges granted him said immunity, which is even more idiotic than what he did.

Ah, the 'Experts' we're supposed to trust...

...Yet Reuters has found new evidence that the CDC’s response to the pandemic also was marred by actions – or inaction – by the agency’s career scientists and frontline staff.

At a crucial moment in the pandemic when Americans were quarantined after possible exposure to the virus abroad, the agency declined or resisted potentially valuable opportunities to study whether the disease could be spread by those without symptoms, according to previously undisclosed internal emails, other documents and interviews with key players.

Soon after balking at testing the returnees from Wuhan, the agency delayed testing asymptomatic passengers among 318 evacuees from the Diamond Princess, a contaminated cruise ship in Japan. In addition, the agency failed at that time to make effective use of outside experts and appeared at times unprepared for the crisis on the ground, lacking adequate personal protective gear and ignoring established protocols, Reuters found.

... According to [Dr. Michael Callahan, a veteran infectious disease specialist from Massachusetts General Hospital], he had to turn back two CDC staffers seeking to board the Diamond Princess in Japan because they had no current experience in emergency medicine and infection control.

Callahan said the problem was not isolated to the CDC’s coronavirus response. In his regular interactions in the field with CDC staff in recent years, he said, he has seen “a progressive degradation of clinical expertise and incident management,” particularly during Ebola outbreaks in Africa.

The CDC needs “people that can actually do public health when bad stuff happens,” Callahan said. 

Short version: "You want us to have nothing but a tazer? With what these idiots are doing in Portland

and here?  So you can suck up to the politicians and admin?  Fuck that and fuck you, I'm gone!"“Since then, staff turnover and administrative delays, those things have held up this process of making sure my officers can safely and legally fulfill their duties without firearms, and keeping this campus secure in the midst of ongoing unrest in Portland,” he added.
I'd imagine the morons thought "So what if the officers don't like it, what are they going to do, quit?  What?  They QUIT?"
I'd imagine they're going to have fun finding people to replace them.  Especially with the campus communists already breaking the office windows and such.

Tab clearing

"The peasants are revolting, please make them stop!"


Control freaks and idiots.


The Mayor of Chicago helped this happen.  I wonder how she'll try to blame it on Trump?
Also, if you think attacking a Ronald McDonald House is 'protesting' you're an idiot.


But it's all justified because 'protesting', right?


Worst Hitler Ever.


Idiot politicians and bureaucrats.  If you're running into their paywall, the important part:

In an email to employees sent out on July 31, the head of Wisconsin’s Department of Natural Resources not only reminded employees of Gov. Tony Evers’ mask order going into effect on Aug. 1, he also said that every DNR employee must wear a mask … even while on a teleconference.

The reason behind the directive is even sillier than the directive — if that’s possible:

“By wearing a mask while video conferencing with the general public, we visually remind folks that masking is an important part of navigating the business of natural resources during this tumultuous time,” Sheridan said.

"Screw standards and the kids, Race Is Everything!"

The excuse for damn near everything: "You're a racist!"

That includes you daring to ask why a public office can't do its job.
Yesterday, roughly two weeks later, WGN came back to the story and found that the situation was still a mess. There is still a line of people showing up at the Daley Center for traffic court only to find out traffic court is online only at the moment. And one of the people they had interviewed for their earlier story finally received a notice about the online court date. The court date was July 7 but on the back of the postcard the date it was mailed was July 16. This particular man had driven three hours each way and waited 3 hours on a line to find out he’d missed his online appearance.

WGN finally got a chance to speak to Court Clerk Dorothy Brown about why all this was happening and her response was, shall we say, very interesting. Brown said the only reason she was being asked was because WGN “felt like this black woman’s office had to have done something wrong.”
"Why hasn't this been straightened out?"
"You're just asking me because I'm black!"  Jeez. 

Cops and Bureaucraps who need to be fired as well as sued.

Starting with Sheriff Joseph Konrath and Patrol Sergeant Cameron Klump from Marquette County Sheriff's Department, followed by the supposed adults running the high school.

Short version: kid got sick, doctors decided she had the Wuflu, she posted about it, and the uniformed thugs demanded
...remove Amyiah's Instagram posts. If they refused, Klump said the family faced charges for disorderly conduct and Klump told them he would "start taking people to jail," according to the suit.

What the hell, you may ask, was their supposed justification for this?
Konrath's justification was that there had been no confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the county. He found out about the Instagram post from Amyiah's high school. The Cohoon family had contacted the school to let them know about Amyiah's infection, but nobody ever contacted them back to get more information. It appears that instead the school contacted the police.
But wait!  There's MORE!
That evening the family would discover that a school administrator sent out an alert to families accusing Cohoon of making it up and assuring families that any information of infection was just a rumor. "Let me assure you there is NO truth to this," the message read. "This was a foolish means to get attention and the source of the rumor has been addressed. This rumor had caught the attention of our Public Health Department and she was involved in putting a stop to this nonsense."
Well then...

I hope every clown involved in this loses their ass.

First, flog and hang the rapists

Then flog and hang the effing idiots who turned them loose because "ICE bad".

These morons are insane.

FINALLY this is getting out to a wider audience

For months, Broward schools delayed or withheld records, refused to publicly assess the role of employees, spread misinformation and even sought to jail reporters who published the truth.

New information gathered by the South Florida Sun Sentinel proves that the school district knew far more than it’s saying about a disturbed former student obsessed with death and guns who mowed down staff and students with an assault rifle on Valentine’s Day.

After promising an honest assessment of what led to the shooting, the district instead hired a consultant whose primary goal, according to school records, was preparing a legal defense. Then the district kept most of those findings from the public.

The district also spent untold amounts on lawyers to fight the release of records and nearly $200,000 to pay public relations consultants who advised administrators to clam up, the Sun Sentinel found.
Some might ask "What could be so bad that they'd to all this to try to hide it?"
Glad you asked:
With a judge’s approval, the district obscured references to Cruz — nearly two-thirds of the text — to protect his privacy under law. Only when the Sun Sentinel obtained and published an uncensored copy did the truth come out: Cruz was deeply troubled; the district improperly withdrew support he needed; he asked for additional services; and the district bungled his request, leaving him spinning without help.
And on.  And on.

And this article doesn't touch on the failures by the Sheriff's Office, which tie directly into a lot of this.

Go read it.  Breakables warning in effect.

He didn't shoot him, club him, nothing like that:

He tackled him.  That's it.  And the response:
Officer Guzley remains on patrol but is awaiting potential discipline. One of Guzley’s own supervisors filed the complaint against him with Seattle’s Office of Police Accountability.

The investigation is for "failure to de-escalate." The case remains open, but the recommendation is for Guzley to receive a two-day suspension without pay.
Read the whole thing to find out just how fucking stupid this is.  And just how much that supervisor needs that badge shoved up his ass.

After reading this, I really hope even more that Trump does gut a bunch of these agencies

Thus, a planned "celebration" of OCR's accomplishments at the Department of Education headquarters Thursday morning was really more of a funeral. If an alien from a more sensible planet had dropped in on the event, he would have noted tearful sniffling and prayerful entreaties to stay strong and keep the faith—and assumed something more than federal money and power had been lost.

In nearly eight years under the Obama administration, celebrants recounted, the office has issued 34 "policy guidance documents." These are edicts reinterpreting existing laws—new executive entanglements, made mandatory by funding incentives, that also serve a moral imperative.
So, who else has a problem with a big federal agency having this mindset?  And they actually believe this crap:
But in the minds and hearts of those who've carried them out, OCR's goals guided the nation toward the light of righteousness and salvation. There is no higher aim than theirs: to show every child the federal government believes in his or her ability to succeed. The message of federally-ordained disciplinary reforms is, in Secretary King's words, "We love you and we want you to be successful."
Your effing PARENTS and FAMILY are supposed to do that; not Big Brother. 
"The work of OCR," King told the audience, many of whom work at the civil rights office, "is just critical to the mission of schools to save lives." What he seems to have meant, but cannot say in a secular age, is that before federal education reforms save lives, they save souls: "That kind of [unconditionally loving] culture in a school … has been the difference for some kids between whether or not they drop out, whether or not they have the opportunity to graduate, or whether or not they stay connected to school or become disconnected and end up getting involved in violence."
That these morons think that's the mission of a school is a good indicator of just how "Big Brother Must Save You" these asshats are.

Marian Wright Edelman, founder of the Children's Defense Fund, assured career bureaucrats they're doing "the Lord's work" and then issued a grandmotherly scold: "You're probably going to have some real bad days," she said—but, "You stay in place."
Gee, what happened to all that 'Separation of Church and State' these clowns always insist upon?  Or is that only important when it's someone else 'doing the Lord's work'?

There's more, all of it "We Are Here To Save The Childrens" crap.

Why various people in the FDA and Medicare should be deprived of oxygen,

because "If everyone can get it, the demand will be too much."
In 2011, the FDA approved a medical device to repair the heart using a catheter in the leg artery called the Sapien 3. The cost of the new valve is the same as cracking the chest, but has lower risks and is an easier procedure to perform. Medicare fears that more elderly patients will want their hearts repaired with this new technology, so strict coverage rules have been set in place.

For a patient to qualify for the new procedure, Medicare requires two cardiac surgeons to certify the patient cannot handle open-heart repair. A cardiothoracic surgeon and interventional cardiologist must also be present in the operating room during the procedure. This is very costly and limits procedures to large academic medical centers. The FDA has labeled the valves to require these restrictions.
Because better you have a more risky, more invasive procedure with more after-effects than get this one.  Because idiots are in charge.

Oh, that was a wonderful idea, wasn't it?

Those who attended the emergency meeting demanded to know who composed and sent out emails and a Facebook post this week after an out-of-school fight broke out Tuesday at a local park.

The post, which has since been deleted, called for a “Diversity Day.” Students were told to wear Gateway High shirts and “Black Lives Matter” shirts for the pre-planned event.

Parents said Friday that the post on an official district account added racial tension to what was originally a nonpolitical, juvenile dispute.
What makes this even more idiotic?
Gateway High board members asserted that the event was a personnel issue, and they were still investigating who sent out the emails and post.
Really?  Nobody knows who sent the e-mail?  You're dealing with Hillary Clinton and the State Department?

Yes, there's a larger pattern: DHS and its fusion centers are

full of shit.  And pretend to care when called on their crap.
3. Is there a larger pattern here? It would be comforting to think this was just one poorly drafted document. But fusion centers across the country have a history of producing work with similar problems, including an infamous "strategic report" in Missouri that identified the Gadsden flag as "the most common symbol displayed by militia members and organizations." More broadly, a 2012 congressional investigation concluded that the centers' output was "oftentimes shoddy, rarely timely, sometimes endangering citizens' civil liberties and Privacy Act protections, occasionally taken from already-published public sources, and more often than not unrelated to terrorism." According to the congressional investigators, nearly a third of these reports weren't even circulated after they were written—sometimes because they contained no useful information, sometimes because they "overstepped legal boundaries."

Four years later, is this Finicum bulletin typical of the Utah agency's work? Is it typical of fusion centers in general? Is any sort of review process underway?
In the Holder/Lynch/Obama Department of 'Justice'?  Are you kidding?

From the control freaks who consider a Gadsden flag or a

'I support the Constitution' bumper sticker reason enough to put you on a terrorist watch list:
Obama administration counter-terrorism officials have trained domestic Homeland Security law enforcement officers to focus on the behavior of people entering the United States, rather than their political, ideological or religious background.
Add this to the idiocy of "We can't look at the public social media posts of people wanting visas, that might violate privacy!".  From people who had no problem illegally going through the phone calls, and texts, and e-mails of citizens.  And then lying about it.


And the new Pussy-In Chief of Canada is right on the trail:
Justin Trudeau is under attack after he said he was uncomfortable with the Conservative description of so-called honour killings as "barbaric.
...
"He said 'he does not want them to be described in such a 'pejorative' way in Canada's citizenship guide'," according to the Tory missive. "Trudeau said that 'I think that's part of the tone that I'm uncomfortable with'."
...
"The subjective value loaded into that word makes it easy to dismiss as an insult, rather than a statement of basic, simple fact," he added.
Trudeau, you're an idiot.  It's a description, and wusses like you apparently feel that a blunt statement of fact is troubling.

Canada, you're in for a bad while.

And once again, the .gov proves that the "We must have more Government to protect us

against the evil people who make things!" line is stupid.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is now taking interest in craft breweries by proposing new regulations that could cost beer makers big bucks to keep their brews on-tap.

The new regulations will require breweries to list nutritional content if they want to keep serving their suds at chain restaurants and brew pubs.
...
Small breweries will have to spend hundreds of dollars per beer to analyze the nutritional value of each type sold.

“A good analysis [will cost] probably somewhere between the $500-$1,000 range of what I’ve seen. Then multiply it across the styles that you have,” said Lawinski.

And at a thousand dollars a pop, that could keep unique and seasonal brews from making it to your favorite watering hole.
Yeah.  Because this is Essential To Public Safety.  Which so often translates to "We want control of EVERYTHING."


Oh, Canada: you're going to pay for putting that idiot in charge.


Hey, just list it as a 4th-trimester abortion and a lot of the leftists won't care.  They're already in favor of crap like this, anyway.


Damn.  As Kevin put it, 'an American who happened to be born somewhere else.'


Things are being run by a bunch of fucking idiots more worried about bad PR than about letting terrorists in.
Fearing a civil liberties backlash and "bad public relations" for the Obama administration, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson refused in early 2014 to end a secret U.S. policy that prohibited immigration officials from reviewing the social media messages of all foreign citizens applying for U.S. visas, a former senior department official said.
Yes, really.
Cohen said the issue reached a head at a heated 2014 meeting chaired by Homeland Security Deputy Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, other top deputies and representatives of the DHS Office of Civil Liberties and the Office of Privacy.

"The primary concern was that it would be viewed negatively if it was disclosed publicly and there were concerns that it would be embarrassing," Cohen said in an interview broadcast on "Good Morning America" today.
'Embarrassing'.  Letting a terrorist in to kill people isn't, but this might be...
"They felt looking at public postings [of foreign U.S. visa applicants] was an invasion of their privacy," the official told ABC News. "The arguments being made were, and are still, in bad faith."
And stupid.  Moronic.  Insane.  Maybe a few other things. 

At least the elbow only made my arm hurt;

right now everything attached to that shoulder aches, or is stiff, or both.  Lifting anything heavier than a drink with the right hand is out, and it's going to be a while before I can shoot right-handed, or ride the bike, or anything else requiring arm movement and/or strength on that side.

Yes, day before surgery tanked up the bike, after adding Sta-Bil, and rode it enough to make sure the system is protected.  And the battery tender connection is there, so can just plug it in to cover that end.

When I can drive, it's going to be a 'one-hand only in a standard- tranny vehicle' thing.  Again.  Not much fun, but works.

I shall now end my bitching about it, and present "It's not only the Army that screws with pistol contracts":
Army:
Everybody hates this doorstop of a solicitation that’s the size and weight of a Russian novel, but doesn’t even specify what caliber the Army wants. “Surprise us!”

No $#!+, surprise us. Could they have thought up any way to signal more forcefully that they have no idea what they’re doing?
Former SecDef Bob Gates said, “This is absurd… it’s a handgun, for God’s sake.” But the Army requirements document is longer than the D-Day base op order… by about 50 times.
...
We disagree that the Army has a single preferred pistol in mind, but we think the lack of a caliber spec is a somewhat inept signal that the Army wants to be sold the 9mm again. (Or, God help us, a multicaliber-interchangeable-Man-From-UNCLE gun). But the way the MHS run-off is set up, you can get bounced from the competition if one of your documents has the wrong size margins, but not if your gun doesn’t work.
There’s something deeply pathological about that.

EffingBI:
The truth is revealed! The FBI RFP seems to be blatantly tailored to fit one particular firearm, the Sig Sauer P320. There is no doubt that government agencies often write tight standards when a RFP goes out, having specific requirements and needs for the product to be purchased. However, this RFP appears to be so specific that only the Sig Sauer P320 would fit all the FBI requirements. Let’s examine the RFP and show how many fine handguns are eliminated by the FBI requirements.

There's ICE/DHS crap in there too; I'd suggest reading it all, possibly after moving breakables out of reach.


Unfortunately, saying "I can't find media confirmation on this" doesn't mean shit; considering the way Sweden, for one, hammers anyone who talks about the rape numbers and dares to mention 'muslim', means official media is often suspect.  At best.
In a hospital near the Rhine, migrants attacked the staff with knives after they had handed over an 8-month-old on the brink of death, which they had dragged across half of Europe for three months. The child died in two days, despite having received top care at one of the best pediatric clinics in Germany. The physician had to undergo surgery and two nurses are laid up in the ICU. Nobody has been punished.

The local press is forbidden to write about it, so we know about it through email. What would have happened to a German if he had stabbed a doctor and nurses with a knife? Or if he had flung his own syphilis-infected urine into a nurse’s face and so threatened her with infection?

And now, if you'll excuse me, this 'prop the hand up so I can type' this has worn down.  See you later.

Y'know, if the EPA wasn't spending time and money on being all tactical,

The Environmental Protection Agency has spent millions of dollars over the last decade on military-style weapons to arm its 200 “special agents” to fight environmental crime.

Among the weapons purchased are guns, body armor, camouflage equipment, unmanned aircraft, amphibious assault ships, radar and night-vision gear and other military-style weaponry and surveillance activities, according to a new report by the watchdog group Open the Books.
then maybe they wouldn't be screwing up on this level in other ways:
An Environmental Protection Agency crew working at the Standard Mine above Crested Butte triggered a wastewater spill into a creek that flows into the town water supply — a small-scale repeat of the Gold King incident this year.

Only an estimated 2,000 gallons spilled Tuesday, amid efforts to open a collapsed portal.

EPA officials on Wednesday, responding to Denver Post queries about the mine, didn’t reveal the spill. On Thursday afternoon, the agency issued a prepared statement saying that, based on neutral acidity and creek flow levels, Crested Butte didn’t close its water intakes.

“Subsequent investigation found no visible plume or signs of significant impacts in downstream locations,” the EPA said.
Translation: "Don't worry, we investigated ourselves again and once again determined all is well."

So: the EPA is spending bleeploads of other peoples money so they can have their own Super-Tactical SWAT Team, like the Department of Education and others with equally zero damned need for such, while they screw with individuals and businesses, contaminate rivers and God knows what all else, and declare themselves innocent of any wrongdoing.

You wanted another reason to get rid of all these bastards, either one of these would do.

Tab clearing

Why Do Muslims Get to Ignore the Same Laws Used to Prosecute Christian Businesses?
Because double-standards, and muslims are a protected species.


Why a lot of leftists seem to have a soft spot for pedophiles.  And they do.


Well, if a lot of intelligence people weren't pissed, that would surprise me.  And I love the 'orange jumpsuit' line.


Using Twitter to hold up signs — it’s exasperating precisely because the one “Red Line” that actually seems to still exist is the one forbidding the media from holding the one guy who can do anything about these foreign policy meltdowns and humanitarian crises responsible. 

Our media collectively demands accountability for these conflicts from every single person…except the one person who has any real power to stop or mitigate it. This has always been the anecdote in Obama’s foreign policy: 1) show up 2) demand the world follow him 3) world leaders balk at his demands 4) he shrugs his shoulders and goes and plays with his selfie stick somewhere.


The leftists really want this country to have been based on slavery, don't they?


Piece on why people(including scientists) fall for bogus research.  Big part:
This "publication bias" means that journals are basically selecting for outliers. In other words, they are in the business of publishing papers that, for no failure of method but simply from sheer dumb luck, happened to get an unusual sample. They are going to select for those papers more than they should -- especially in fields that study humans, who are expensive and reluctant to sit still for your experiment, rather than something like bacteria, which can be studied in numbers ending in lots of zeroes.


Never forget the kind of crap Bill Clinton and Hillary thought was a good idea:
What he wanted was quite a bit more serious. Disturbing even. The administration supported frivolous lawsuits against gun makers and sellers in hopes of either bankrupting them or effectively nationalizing them to be run as the government saw fit. In 2000 Smith and Wesson, then under British ownership conceded to the Clintons and agreed to most of their demands. The resultant boycott reduced the value of the company to about 10% of its original value.

The stuff that S&W agreed to would only have been the beginning. Found at Arms and the Law, is a link to a pdf (6 pages) from the Clinton library detailing what Bill and Co. had in mind for the firearms industry. The first link is a summary and makes for easy reading. The pdf goes into detail with legal jargon. If you can get past the legalese, the details are horrendous. All this was to be put into effect as a result of lawsuits rather than legislation which Bill recognized he could never get passed.


Here's an idea: just get rid of DHS instead of trying to 'improve' it.