“Expanding the Supreme Court rights the wrongs the Republicans have done to this great court. Expanding the Supreme Court is equal justice and will ensure equal justice is dispensed to all Americans.”

The reality: The United States Supreme Court is not broken. Rather, the balance on the Court is not currently to the liking of the left. And the “wrongs the Republicans have done” have been comprised solely of operating within constitutional boundaries agreed upon by both parties 232 years ago and a nine-justice limit in place for 152 years, Ed. //

We’ve seen it time and time and again. When Democrats don’t win by the rules, they try to change the rules — and/or cheat, of course. Hillary wins the popular vote in 2016, but loses the Electoral College? Eliminate the Electoral College.

Yet, if 2016 had been a mirror image? If Trump had won the popular vote but lost the Electoral vote? A: Republicans would not have called for the demise of the EC. B: Democrats would have defended the EC to their dying hypocritical breath.

And so? They set about changing as many state election laws across the country between 2016 and 2020 as they could get away with. Yet when Georgia Republicans enact true election reform — which benefits all voters? Cry “Racism!, “Jim Crow!,” and behave as the left is now behaving.

And when the literal law of the land — nine justices on the United States Supreme Court, a number which even liberal-stalwart justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was opposed to changing — doesn’t go your way? You attempt to pack the Court. All in the name of “democracy.”

Ted Cruz encapsulated it, this morning.

“Today’s Democrat Party doesn’t care about undermining the rule of law.

If Democrats pack the Court, our free speech rights go out the window, our religious liberty goes out the window, and the Second Amendment is effectively repealed from the Bill of Rights.”

'Dirty Jobs' and 'Six Degrees' host Mike Rowe is correct about the negative economic and social effects of the minimum wage.

Over the weekend, while promoting his new Discovery Channel show “Six Degrees,” Mike Rowe shared some thoughts on the push to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour. Appearing on Fox Business, the former “Dirty Jobs” star said he wants “everybody who works hard and plays fair to prosper.”

As the host, executive producer, and creator of “Six Degrees,” which focuses on the interconnectedness of the world throughout history, Rowe added:

I want everybody to be able to support themselves. But if you just pull the money out of midair you’re going to create other problems, like there is a ladder of success that people climb and some of those jobs that are out there for seven, eight, nine dollars an hour, in my view, they’re simply not intended to be careers. They’re not intended to be full-time jobs. They’re rungs on a ladder. //

Rowe’s 2013 “S.W.E.A.T. Pledge” (Skill & Work Ethic Aren’t Taboo) //

Reading now over Rowe’s S.W.E.A.T. pledge, I see I followed it. It wasn’t a pledge “to gratuitous abuse and disenfranchisement.” What Johnson, who mocked the pledge as “bourgeois propaganda” marketing “very basic human needs” misses, is that hard, honest work genuinely satisfies basic human needs. Indeed, that five-cent raise I earned at 14 still brings me more pride than most of my later white-collar job achievements.

My story is not an isolated one, but I also recognize it is not universal, which is why policy and policy debates should not focus on the anecdotal but the reality of economics and unintended consequences. Rowe raised those points, and he is correct.

Minimum-wage jobs are rungs, and if the government offers an “artificially high wage for unskilled jobs,” it takes away the incentives for “more people to learn a skill that’s actually in demand” and are careers that do support families. That reality is no less true just because Rowe once sang opera.

In January, we learned about a Chinese espionage campaign that exploited four zero-days in Microsoft Exchange. One of the characteristics of the campaign, in the later days when the Chinese probably realized that the vulnerabilities would soon be fixed, was to install a web shell in compromised networks that would give them subsequent remote access. Even if the vulnerabilities were patched, the shell would remain until the network operators removed it.

Now, months later, many of those shells are still in place. And they’re being used by criminal hackers as well.

On Tuesday, the FBI announced that it successfully received a court order to remove “hundreds” of these web shells from networks in the US.

This is nothing short of extraordinary, and I can think of no real-world parallel. //

xcv • April 14, 2021 12:32 PM

@ O.P.
xcv But every courthouse in the United States is running on Microsoft’s legal-industry-specific software products. Lexis-Nexis databases, title deed and recording software, court filing software, etc. So some guy is going to end up in the federal penitentiary, and all the court records will be deleted, altered, or hacked on Microsoft software, and after a few years, nobody can even look up any records as to why the guy’s in prison, but they’re never going to let him out, because he’s been classified as a violent felon in the federal prison population.

It makes me wonder what they classify as “violent crime” or not, because pulling the trigger of a handgun with your finger is no more violent than striking a key on a computer keyboard with the same finger — and consequences no longer matter in court — because modern courts no longer require the third of three elements necessary to convict a crime since the time of the ancient Romans, namely

1. mens rea;
2. actus reus; &
3. noxa rea.

The ancient Romans insisted that if (#1) it wasn’t something you intended to do, or (#2) it wasn’t something you really did, or (#3) you did not really harm anyone — then you didn’t commit a crime, and therefore you could not be convicted of a crime.

Modern courts on the other hand have repealed the classical third necessary element of conviction for crime, and omitted due process by either imposing punishment for harmless or victimless acts, or by falsely imputing harm (noxa) where none exists.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2021/04/the-fbi-is-now-securing-networks-without-their-owners-permission.html/#comment-372456

Squaretail
an hour ago
Geraldo's predominant character trait is his huge ego. That means he reacts badly and excessively when someone points out that he is wrong. If his base beliefs are wrong, his life, at least his all-important public life, is shown to be tawdry and meaningless. In his mind, he can't be wrong and important at the same time. His reaction to Bongino's facts was a desperate attempt to justify his life and professional existence. Sad and pathetic when you think about it.

National Review’s David Harsanyi dug up a quote from the Roosevelt era that pretty much sums up the whole thing.

FDR’s Court-packing scheme, wrote the Democrat-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee in 1937, “is a measure which should be so emphatically rejected that its parallel will never again be presented to the free representatives of the free people of America.” //

Today, modern progressives, intent on centralizing state power and nullifying constitutional protections for the minority, disagree. After spending four years delegitimizing the Supreme Court, they’ve convinced Joe Biden to create the “Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court,” which is another step in normalizing the idea of packing the Supreme Court.

As a general matter, Potter could be convicted of the charge each of the following was proven by evidence beyond a reasonable doubt:

1. Her conduct in withdrawing her service weapon was “culpably negligent”.
2. That negligence created an unreasonable risk, and
3. In doing so she CONSCIOUSLY took the chance of causing death or great bodily harm.
   Maybe because of my capitalization and emphasis you might detect a hint of where I think there might be a problem in the case against her. //

A Glock and a Taser do not feel the same in your hand — and in some respects, the design of the Taser is purposely so.

But I want to give a H/T here to my friend Jazz Shaw over at Hotair who was the first I saw to raise the issue of “slips and capture” and how it might play into the analysis of Potter’s mistake.

What is “slips and capture”? I’m guessing that is a very common question, and one we will hear more about in the weeks and months ahead. //

“Capture” is the term used for when the officer’s attention is “captured” by an outside distraction. In the same moment, a high level of discernment is necessary to engage in a specific and precise form of conduct — in this case, making an intentional move to grab the Taser rather than their handgun. But the distraction takes away from the ability to engage in the higher-ordered thinking at a specific moment in time when needed, and the actor — in this case Potter — “slips” in the processing of what she needs to do and instead follows a well-practiced course of activity without the brain making an appropriate “attention check” before an action takes place that cannot be recalled. The action which is unintentionally taken is normally that which is the most habitually reinforced by practice — i.e., drawing her handgun.

Given the present non-existence of any perfect agreement on where applications should store their cached information, I propose a very simple convention that will at least allow such information to be identified effectively. Regardless of where the application decides to (or is configured to) place its cache directory, it should place within this directory a file named:

CACHEDIR.TAG

This file must be an ordinary file, not for example a symbolic link. Additionally, the first 43 octets of this file must consist of the following ASCII header string:

Signature: 8a477f597d28d172789f06886806bc55

Case is important in the header signature, there can be no whitespace or other characters in the file before the 'S', and there is exactly one space character (ASCII code 32 decimal) after the colon. The header string does not have to be followed by an LF or CR/LF in the file in order for the file to be recognized as a valid cache directory tag. The hex value in the signature happens to be the MD5 hash of the string ".IsCacheDirectory". This signature header is required to avoid the chance of an unrelated file named CACHEDIR.TAG being mistakenly interpreted as a cache directory tag by data management utilities, and (for example) causing valuable data not to be backed up.

The content of the remainder of the tag file is currently unspecified, except that it should be a plain text file in UTF-8 encoding, and any line beginning with a hash character ('#') should be treated as a comment and ignored by any software that reads the file.

We will henceforth refer to a file named as specified above, and having the required signature at the beginning of its content, as a cache directory tag.

For the benefit of anyone who happens to find and look at a cache directory tag directly, it is recommended that applications include in the file a comment referring back to this specification. For example:

Signature: 8a477f597d28d172789f06886806bc55
# This file is a cache directory tag created by (application name).
# For information about cache directory tags, see:
#   http://www.brynosaurus.com/cachedir/

Remember that Russian bounties story with which the media absolutely flayed President Donald Trump?

The fake story claimed that, per U.S. intelligence agencies, supposedly, Russia had offered bounties for killing American forces in Afghanistan. Democrats went crazy, using the story to suggest that somehow Trump, who they painted as a Putin puppet, was not doing anything about this and endangering American troops.

Now that just got officially walked back by U.S. intel.

But on Thursday, the Biden administration announced that U.S. intelligence only had “low to moderate” confidence in the story after all. Translated from the jargon of spyworld, that means the intelligence agencies have found the story is, at best, unproven—and possibly untrue.

The discussion starts with Geraldo speaking as an expert on how police wear their weapons and suggesting the gun should be moved to the non-dominant hand’s side. As Bongino points out, that’s a ridiculously stupid idea. Anyone that has tried to cross-draw knows the problems with it, and that’s specifically true when you might be pinned down on the ground with someone on top of you.

The reason police wear their guns where they wear them is so they can access them and shoot them accurately in situations that may be completely out of control. If you’ve ever shot a gun single-handed with your non-dominant hand, you understand. It’s not that it’s not possible, but it’s not ideal, and “not ideal” can be the difference between life and death in policing. That includes possibly hitting a bystander due to decreased accuracy.

Geraldo also tried to claim that black people are killed at twice the rate of white people by police per capita, insinuating there’s some kind of racial animus driving those numbers. What that ignores is the increased number of police encounters due to higher crime rates among certain demographics. There is no evidence, for example, that the warrant being served on Daunte Wright was motivated by racism. The same is true for the attempted arrests of George Floyd and Jacob Blake, to name a few. That doesn’t give license for police to go outside of what is legal and proper, but it is valuable context when you consider the predominant narrative being pushed by groups like Black Lives Matter.

Bongino rightly points out that there is no data to back up the idea that there is a plague of police officers hunting down and murdering black men. Geraldo then launches into an obscenity-filled tirade about how Bongino is why protesters have the rage they do. Apparently, facts make them outraged?

Look, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Be skeptical of police power. To do so is actually a good thing because you should be skeptical of all government power institutions. But that does not mean a-factual narratives not backed by data get to form an excuse for rioting and stupidity, nor should they shape our public debate. Bongino was right on the facts here. That’s what should matter.