Tag: You Can’t Cure Stupid

Pointless Judicial Decrees

A bunch of states decided to sue Cody Wilson’s company Defense Distributed after the Justice Department gave up its futile fight against the company. As part of this ongoing lawsuit a federal judge has extended the ban against Defense Distributed distributing its 3D printer designs for firearms:

A federal judge in Seattle issued an injunction today that blocks Defense Distributed from publishing its 3D-printed gun designs online. The move extends a temporary ban issued last month and the injunction will remain in place until a lawsuit brought forth by a number of state attorneys general is resolved. Washington, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Oregon, Maryland and Washington, DC signed onto the suit last month in an effort to reverse a US Department of State settlement that allowed the 3D gun designs to be published online. Eleven additional states joined the lawsuit earlier this month.

Gun control advocates, who have never been the sharpest tools in the shed, are celebrating this ruling. In their fantasy land where laws have power they view this judge’s ruling as a strike against 3D printed firearms. The problem is that this ruling, just like the previous ruling it extends, is meaningless because you can find the designs all over the Internet.

What gun control advocates and the states that are bringing this lawsuit against Defense Distributed fail to understand is that the gun control debate is over. Once guns became data that could be uploaded to the Internet the ability to control them ceased to exist. It doesn’t matter what the outcome of this lawsuit is, the files released by Defense Distributed will remain available.

Soon Everything May Not Cause Cancer

WARNING: This product contains chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm.

That label seems to appear on everything. While it is meant to warn consumers about potential cancer-causing chemicals in their products, it’s really a testament of the foolishness of democracy. That label was the result of Proposition 65, which was a voter initiative that appeared on the California ballot and was voted into law by California voters.

Fortunately, some sanity may be returning to labeling. After a judge decided that coffee should include a Proposition 65 warning label, some people have finally decided that the warning label may be getting applied a bit too liberally:

After a judge ruled in March that coffee should be served with jolting labels that alert drinkers to a cancer risk, the state of California seems to have woken up to the concern that its pervasive health warnings may have gone too far.

“There’s a danger to overwarning—it’s important to warn about real health risks,” Sam Delson told The New York Times.

Delson is the deputy director for external and legislative affairs for California’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment. The office proposed a regulation shortly after a March ruling that would unequivocally declare that any cancer-linked components of roasted and brewed coffee “pose no significant risk of cancer.” Today, August 16, the proposed regulation is getting a public hearing in Sacramento.

If the regulation is adopted, it’s expected to nullify the warning on Californians’ sacred morning brews. It’s also expected to water-down the controversial law known as Proposition 65 that led to the warning—and scores of others.

Warning labels become pointless if they are applied to things to which the warning doesn’t apply. The Proposition 65 warning label has been misapplied so frequently that it has becoming the common butt of jokes. Nobody with an iota of common sense takes the warning label seriously.

Even if Proposition 65 is watered down, it should remain a testament to the stupidity of people in large numbers.

Stupid Shit Politicians Say

The Australian government is once again pushing to make effective cryptography illegal by demanding that companies that utilize cryptography compromise their security model by implementing some kind of government backdoor. If you have any familiarity with cryptography, you know that what the Australian government wants, a backdoor that ensures only law enforcers and authorized individuals can access the encrypted information, is impossible. Once you compromise a cryptographic protocol, anybody who discovers the compromise can bypass the encryption as well.

However, that fact is merely a mathematical law. As the Australian prime minister noted, the laws of mathematics don’t apply in his country:

“Well the laws of Australia prevail in Australia, I can assure you of that. The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia,” he said.

This realization will put Australia decades if not centuries ahead of other nations. Imagine how quickly Australia’s space program will advance when the politicians prohibit gravity and therefore eliminate the need for expensive rockets to reach space! Imagine how quickly the country’s electronics manufacturing market will advance when the politicians rule the laws of energy illegal and all of their electronics can run indefinitely without needing to be recharged! Now that Australia can simply render natural laws null and void with the stroke of a pen, there’s nothing the country can’t achieve!

You Can Just Say Any Old Shit These Days

One of the “wonders” of the modern United States is that you can just say any old shit and get away with it:

Bonafide patriot woman and “Fox & Friends” middle-seat host Ainsley Earhardt made an oopsie during a Thursday morning rallying cry for America when she made reference to the never-existent “communist Japan.”

[…]

“You know, we defeated communist Japan, radical Islamists. We ask our men and women to go overseas to fight for our country and sacrifice so much for our country so we can be the land of the free, the land of the brave,” the host said.

This is an example of a very prevalent phenomenon here in the United States, and from what I’ve seen the rest of the world, where people feel free to talk authoritatively about shit they know nothing about.

I’m currently reading a book on the history of Japan from the Meiji Restoration to modern times. I just got to the beginning of World War II. Although I was vaguely familiar with this aspect of Japanese history, after reading the chapters dealing with the 1920s through the 1930s I now understand just how anti-communist the Japanese government was at that time (and that attitude didn’t stop in the 1940s). This doesn’t surprise me since the Japanese government at the time was strongly focused on the emperor and communists hate emperors (the name specifically, they prefer the term chairman or premier).

Now that I’ve read that part of the book and have familiarity with the topic, I won’t shy away from talking about it. However, before that I would have shied away from talking about the Japanese government at that time because I wasn’t very familiar with it and I try to avoid talking authoritatively about things that I’m not familiar with. I also feel that I’m in the minority when it comes to that.

Don’t Believe Everything You Read on the Internet… or in a Book

The Internet is a platform for everybody, and I mean everybody. From scientists to conspiracy theorists. From medical professionals to witch doctors. From professional chefs to idiots who don’t know that the ingredients they’re recommending are toxic:

Holmgren’s idealized Little House lifestyle led to online fame and eventually helped her land a book deal. Which is fine. Holmgren’s Tales from a Forager’s Kitchen: The Ultimate Field Guide to Evoke Curiosity and Wonderment with More Than 80 Recipes and Foraging Tips hit shelves earlier this year. And amazingly, she had more to say than would fit in that subtitle—upon its release, Holmgren and her forest-find-decorated home were featured in publications like the Star Tribune.

Here’s the problem: Forager’s Kitchen also includes recipes that use raw morel mushrooms. There’s a smoothie in there made with raw elderberries.

Both of which are toxic if served uncooked.

The Internet gave Holmgren a platform and according to Shitty Pages she has risen through the ranks and is now an “Instagram influencer” (whatever the fuck that is). Thanks to fame that the Internet enabled her to accrue, she was able to publish a physical book. It just so happens that following the advice in her book could lead to some discomfort. So, yeah, thanks Internet!

I’m rather sad that this book is being recalled. I think a lot of people would benefit from direct experience in not believing every idiot thing that they read.

Incoherent Screeching

Shortly after Cody Wilson won his day in court the gun control crowd started screeching incoherently. Failing to understand the reality of the situation, which is their modus operandi, they started demanding that judges, politicians, and anybody else involved in the government stop the distribution of files for printing firearms on 3D prints. The latest futile attempt to stop Wilson was made by several attorneys and a federal judge in Seattle:

A federal judge in Seattle has issued a temporary restraining order to stop the release of blueprints to make untraceable and undetectable 3D-printed plastic guns.

Eight Democratic attorneys general filed a lawsuit Monday seeking to block the federal government’s settlement with the company that makes the plans available online. They also sought a restraining order, arguing the 3D guns would be a safety risk.

A judge issued a restraining order? Oh no, whatever shall we do? I guess those 3D printer files are lost to the world now. Game over.

I wonder if these gun control fanatics are actually stupid enough to believe that. While a judge may issue a restraining order that prevents Defense Distributed, Wilson’s company, from offering the files they are still available via the most censorship resilient website on the Internet, The Pirate Bay. If you know anything about the history of The Pirate Bay, you know that there is no way in hell that any judged in the United States will get those files removed from that site. Even if they could do that, those files are being hosted by a number of people so anybody with the magnet link can still get the files. The genie is out of the bottle.

The Question to Stop 3D Guns

You find some wonderful words of wisdom on Twitter:

If we don’t scream and yell, any person will be able to start printing 3D guns this Wednesday, August 1st.

As opposed to what we can print now, which are apparently only 2D guns!

Jeff sessions can stop this.

Oh, my sweet summer child.

Please Sir, Could You Spare Some Wi-Fi

If you’re caught burgling a house, claiming that you just wanted to use the Wi-Fi network is as good of an attempt to talk your way out of jail time as any:

A 60-something couple in Palo Alto got an unpleasant surprise on Sunday when they woke up in the middle of the night to find a masked intruder in their bedroom. He said he wanted to use the couple’s Wi-Fi network.

[…]

Remarkably, this wasn’t the suspect’s only legally dubious attempt to get Wi-Fi access that weekend. Just before midnight the previous night, police say, the same young man was found prowling around outside another Palo Alto home. When the house’s residents came out and confronted him, he “asked to use their Wi-Fi network because he was out of data.”

He should have said that he just wanted to use the bathroom.

Ineffective Screeching

Everytown for Gun Safety is not happy about Cody Wilson’s recent court victory and have started a campaign asking its members to write Secretary Pompeo to encourage him to “stop the release of downloadable files that will allow people, including convicted felons and terrorists, to make untraceable guns on their 3D printers.”

Image courtesy of the Anarchopirateball Facebook page.

It’s fun watching a gun control organization screech ineffectively. There is literally no way that any government official can stop the release of something that has already been released. Cody Wilson didn’t sit on the files he used to print the original Liberator, he released them to the Internet and a lot of people, myself included, downloaded a copy. Even if Pompeo could issue a decree to make downloading and sharing the files illegal, it wouldn’t stop the file’s proliferation. As we’ve seen with other illegal content, namely pirated music and movies, laws have no power to stop illegal downloading. The battle against the spread of 3D printer files for firearms is a battle that cannot be won.