AI Browsers considered unsafe

OK, that post title is more than a bit inflammatory, but who on earth would want to use something like this?

Several new AI browsers, including OpenAI's Atlas, offer the ability to take actions on the user's behalf, such as opening web pages or even shopping. But these added capabilities create new attack vectors, particularly prompt injection.

Prompt injection occurs when something causes text that the user didn't write to become commands for an AI bot. Direct prompt injection happens when unwanted text gets entered at the point of prompt input, while indirect injection happens when content, such as a web page or PDF that the bot has been asked to summarize, contains hidden commands that AI then follows as if the user had entered them.

This is unbelievably bad.  How bad?  This bad: 

Last week, researchers at Brave browser published a report detailing indirect prompt injection vulns they found in the Comet and Fellou browsers. For Comet, the testers added instructions as unreadable text inside an image on a web page, and for Fellou they simply wrote the instructions into the text of a web page.

When the browsers were asked to summarize these pages – something a user might do – they followed the instructions by opening Gmail, grabbing the subject line of the user's most recent email message, and then appending that data as the query string of another URL to a website that the researchers controlled. If the website were run by crims, they'd be able to collect user data with it.

Surely they must be exaggerating, I hear you say.  Nope - the author of the post at El Reg recreated the exploit his very own self, simply by creating a web page with the commands hidden in it.  FYI, that's 1996 technology right there.

Now look, I may be an old crabby security geezer (no comments, Glen Filthie!) but the problem of sanitizing user input is a really old one.  So old that it was old when XKCD did it's classic "Bobby Tables" cartoon:

There have been over 3000 XKCD cartoons; that one was number 327.  Yeah, that long ago. 

My opinion about anything regarding AI is that the hype is so fierce that the people developing the applications don't really focus much on security, because security is hard and it would slow down the release cadence.  And so exploits that wouldn't have surprised anyone back in 2010 keep popping up.

Le sigh.  Once again, security isn't an afterthought, it wasn't thought of at all.  My recommendation is not to touch these turkeys with a 100' pole.

Can we just go back to Standard Time all the time?

People seem to dislike the time changes, and so this is maybe another issue where Trump can side with the People against inertia.

Mozart - Requiem in D

The older I get, the grumpier I get.  Sometimes I look on our society and feel like I am getting my Jeremiah on, which is never a good look.

Memorial Day is one of the times that this reliably happens.  Look, people, this holiday is not about barbecues and beach.

Remember them, that their memory not fade.

Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine.  Et lux perpetua luceat eis.  Amen.

Air Impact Wrench 1, Borepatch 0

Working on the Jeep, spinning wrenches.  Except the last guy who came near a couple of bolts torqued them down. I even got a cheat bar to get some extended leverage on the ratchet wrench.

Broke the danged wrench.  Those bolts don't want to spin.

I have them liberally soaked with penetrating oil, and will see how they are tomorrow morning.  I'd hate to have to take it to a garage to get bolts loosened.  Sheesh.

Since I have a compressor, maybe I'll just head out to Lowe's and get a danged pneumatic impact wrench.  Fight fire with fire.  But this is really annoying, turning a one hour job into an all day one, just because Cletus was in a hurry to clock out and drove the bolt down.

Why, oh why?

People like to (as The Queen Of The World likes to say) complicate a cornflake.  Case in point: dimmer switches.  I've been swapping dimmer switches for simple on/off ones for literally (mumble mumble) decades.  It's dead simple.

Except now it's not.  Most new light bulbs are LED type, because Congressional Lobbyists for General Electric wanted all of us to pay $5/bulb instead of 50 cents.  Thanks ever so much, Congress.  But the Twilight Lone experience doesn't end just at sticker shock.  Consider the failure points:

1. Your LED bulbs must be "Dimable".  They won't dim if they're not, and you'll pay a premium for this.
2. Your dimmer switch must be for LED bulbs.  It won't work with normal incandescent ones (assuming you can even get these anymore).  You will (wait for it) pay a premium for this.
   
3. The new dimmer switches are bigger than the old ones.  This isn't a problem if you have only one switch in the electrical box; this is a big, big problem (see what I did there?) if you have multiple switches in the same box, covered with a multi switch face plate.

That last one means that there are lights that I simply cannot dim, because I can't swap out an existing on/off switch for  one of the new, high-falutin' (and expensive) LED dimmer switches because it simply won't fit. 

Gee, thanks for jacking everything up, Congress.  Nobody's life, liberty, property, or sanity are safe when you're in session.  Jerks.

Richard Dawkins is a midwit

Aesop brings the Hammer Of Truth down on the good professor:

One cannot have "only a quarter of an eye, only a hundredth of an eye, or half an eye, is better than nothing " (3:50ff).

Basic physiology disagrees:

It doesn't work like that.

 

In the trade, there's a technical term for what you are when you have a half, a quarter, or a hundredth of an eye (and by this we mean not just the eyeball itself, but the entire cascade of processes enabling vision): BLIND.

There's a lot more in the post, and even more in the comments.  But what I find most interesting is the fact that Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist and so he knows this. Aesop has a simple answer to why Dawkins still tells this sort of lie  (he's a lying liar).  Well, sure.

But that's not particularly interesting.  Why does he lie?  Moldbug explained this 15 years ago:

Nonetheless, it’s my sad duty to inform the world that Professor Dawkins has been pwned. Perhaps you’re over 30 and you’re unfamiliar with this curious new word. As La Wik puts it:

The word “pwn” remains in use as Internet social-culture slang meaning: to take unauthorized control of someone else or something belonging to someone else by exploiting a vulnerability.

(At least here at Unqualified Reservations, pwned alliterates with posse and rhymes with loaned.) How could such a learned and wise mind exhibit such an exploitable vulnerability? And who—or what—has taken unauthorized control over Professor Dawkins? The aliens? The CIA? The Jews? The mind boggles.

Ah, those crazy kids and their barbaric slang like pwned.  Good Lord, do I really have over 400 posts with that tag?  Ahem.  

Continuing with Dawkins' failure to adequately explain the difference between Science and Religion:

My belief is that Professor Dawkins is not just a Christian atheist. He is a Protestant atheist. And he is not just a Protestant atheist. He is a Calvinist atheist. And he is not just a Calvinist atheist. He is an Anglo-Calvinist atheist. In other words, he can be also be described as a Puritan atheist, a Dissenter atheist, a Nonconformist atheist, an Evangelical atheist, etc., etc.

This cladistic taxonomy traces Professor Dawkins’ intellectual ancestry back about 400 years, to the era of the English Civil War. Except of course for the atheism theme, Professor Dawkins’ kernel is a remarkable match for the Ranter, Leveller, Digger, Quaker, Fifth Monarchist, or any of the more extreme English Dissenter traditions that flourished during the Cromwellian interregnum.

Frankly, these dudes were freaks. Maniacal fanatics. Any mainstream English thinker of the 17th, 18th or 19th century, informed that this tradition (or its modern descendant) is now the planet’s dominant Christian denomination, would regard this as a sign of imminent apocalypse. If you’re sure they’re wrong, you’re more sure than me.

Now I must warn you, Moldbug is pretty thick going.  Fosetti has a very accessible overview that will give you 95% of Moldbug's arguments.

One other interesting comment at Aesop's place concerned science as a process.  As I've pointed out repeatedly over the last few years, science as practiced today is very, very sick, and the reason is The Iron Law of Bureaucracy in action:

I can't seem to find and data about the number of scientists working today, vs. the number a century ago.  I can't even find decent proxy data for this - say the number of scientific articles published in 2010 vs. the number published in 1910.  But we can all agree that there has been a vast increase in the number of working scientists and the number of published articles (which may be up to 50 Million by now).

And yet we are not seeing any obvious acceleration in the pace of scientific discovery.  Nigel Calder again:

While the modern advances are all impressive, are they really more impressive than those from a century ago?  Especially when you adjust for the army of scientists at work today - perhaps a thousand times as many as at the dawn of the 20th Century - the question becomes why has science slowed down?

The post about how sick science as practiced today is gives the reason:

Nothing is moving in the foundations of physics. One experiment after theother is returning null results: No new particles, no new dimensions, no new symmetries. Sure, there are some anomalies in the data here and there, and maybe one of them will turn out to be real news. But experimentalists are just poking in the dark. They have no clue where new physics may be to find. And their colleagues in theory development are of no help.

...

This is a long and detailed discussion which is hard to excerpt.  This bit seems very important as to the institutional rot:

Developing new methodologies is harder than inventing new particles in the dozens, which is why they don’t like to hear my conclusions. Any change will reduce the paper output, and they don’t want this. It’s not institutional pressure that creates this resistance, it’s that scientists themselves don’t want to move their butts.

How long can they go on with this, you ask? How long can they keep on spinning theory-tales?

I am afraid there is nothing that can stop them. They review each other’s papers. They review each other’s grant proposals. And they constantly tell each other that what they are doing is good science. Why should they stop? For them, all is going well. They hold conferences, they publish papers, they discuss their great new ideas. From the inside, it looks like business as usual, just that nothing comes out of it.

This is not a problem that will go away by itself.

The people who run the institutions of Science don't see that there's a problem.  I mean, hey - there's a ton of grant funding coming in and nobody can be allowed to rock that boat, amirite?  And so it's all gatekeeping and name calling.

The result? Scientific Progress has essentially ground to a halt.

Note that this doesn't apply to Engineering, which we can call "science that works".  SpaceX is Exhibit 1 for the Prosecution here.  But Science as currently practiced is a game for fools and liars. And Richard Dawkins, but I repeat myself.

Retractionwatch is Exhibit 2 for the Prosecution.  A few minutes thought will produce another dozen Exhibits.

And yes, I was an Engineer not a Scientist by training back at State U.  Because of that, I haven't been (intellectually) pwned, like Dawkins has.  But good gravy, it's getting to where the term "scientist" is almost as pejorative as the term "intellectual".  The last word goes to Aesop, who explains why:

I doubt, with Dawkins being so invested, intellectually and morally, in the lifelong lie, he'd ever be intellectually honest enough to admit that he, just like Darwin, had a grudge against the idea of the divine or supernatural, and both had therefore sunk their spurs into the idea that there is no god, because it makes the rest of their pathetic existence tolerable and comfortable, not to mention lucrative.

He's entitled to go to hell in whatever way he sees fit to do so; that's free will in action.

But to make it his life's work to try and bamboozle others by deliberately ignoring the utter lack of any scientific underpinning for his delusions, and furthermore the evidence to the exact contrary, and outright lying about both in support of his line of twaddle, is quite inarguably and inexcusably monstrous and damnable.

Vince Gill - One More Last Chance

So some Covid Karen tells us we all need to forgive and forget about the damage, deaths, and pain inflicted by the Covid lockdowns.  Lots of folks are talking about this - I particularly like Aesop's. Better people than I have written eloquently about the death and destruction, and about how forgiveness requires repentance.  I really don't have anything more to add about that, either.

But one thing struck me about Karen's (actually Brown University Economist Emily Oster) article.  Specifically, this:

The people who got it right, for whatever reason, may want to gloat. Those who got it wrong, for whatever reason, may feel defensive and retrench into a position that doesn’t accord with the facts. All of this gloating and defensiveness continues to gobble up a lot of social energy and to drive the culture wars, especially on the internet. These discussions are heated, unpleasant and, ultimately, unproductive. In the face of so much uncertainty, getting something right had a hefty element of luck. And, similarly, getting something wrong wasn’t a moral failing. Treating pandemic choices as a scorecard on which some people racked up more points than others is preventing us from moving forward. [My emphasis - Borepatch]

Whoa, slow down Cowpoke.  There wasn't any luck involved at all.  Case in point, Borepatch, March 22, 2020 - a week after lockdowns were imposed:

There are three very interesting Coronavirus narratives emerging in just the last day or two:

1. The virus looks to be less bad - and perhaps much less bad - than we had feared.  As we learn more, we learn that the worst case scenario that had been put forward is much less likely.
2. Government actions have been a factor in making the outbreak or response worse or of using the outbreak to cover up their failures.
3. The government response is strangling the economy.  By their own admission (i.e. bills being discussed in Congress), there is at least a Trillion dollars of damage so far.

So look at this situation: things are not as bad as we feared, governments are to some extent demonstrably incompetent and untrustworthy, and the draconian crackdown/overreaction is destroying businesses, jobs, and people's lives.

Man, I sure was lucky in that analysis, wasn't I?  But I guess that I'm particularly lucky because a month later I wrote this:

Most importantly of all, we're not tracking (well, modeling) how many of the Kung Flu deaths are people who had severe health problems and would likely have died soon anyway.  Sure, there are stories about young healthy people keeling over from this; we know that this is a vanishingly small minority of the total deaths.

But we know that we are putting the population of the country under severe strain, and that this has very real consequences.  Aesop left a comment from the health care front lines that illustrates this:

And yes, in one night, three of the traumas we had were domestic violence.

Normally, we see one of those a month; at worst, one a week. Not three in one night.

But it hasn't been that way every night. Yet.

Man, that's two in a row for Borepatch!  How lucky can you get?  But wait - there's more!  Posted here September 3, 2020:

A groundbreaking new study commissioned by Revolver News concludes that COVID-19 lockdowns are ten times more deadly than the actual COVID-19 virus in terms of years of life lost by American citizens.

Up until this point there had been no simple, rigorous analysis that accurately and definitively conveys the true costs of the COVID-19 lockdowns. Accordingly, Revolver News set out to commission a study to do precisely that: to finally quantify the net damage of the lockdowns in terms of a metric known as “life-years.” Simply put, we have drawn upon existing economic studies on the health effects of unemployment to calculate an estimate of how many years of life will have been lost due to the lockdowns in the United States, and have weighed this against an estimate of how many years of life will have been saved by the lockdowns. The results are nothing short of staggering, and suggest that the lockdowns will end up costing Americans over 10 times as many years of life as they will save from the virus itself.

Bold in original.  That's some medical response, right there.

In all honesty, this really isn't controversial at all.  We've studied the health effects of unemployment for decades and decades.  We know what happened to employment, and how many people lost their jobs.  Applying known health impacts to those people allows us to quantify mortality due to the lockdown.  It's just math.

What is interesting here is the analysis of age at death.  For virtually all (90%) of Covid deaths, the patient was very old.  This means that there were few "life years" left for that patient.  However, for unemployment caused mortality the age at death was much younger, and so there were many more years for each of these people.

The process of higher mathematics gives the result that is in boldface in the quote.

It's hard to see a more counter productive government response.

Man, I must be the luckiest man on the face of the earth, stringing these analyses and predictions together like that.  I'd better buy a Powerball ticket for tonight!  [/snark]

So what is it that makes me so much smarter than a Brown University Professor?  I wrote about this in the April post linked above, specifically:

Once a government executes a particular power, they will want to do it again.  Most of the country in under house arrest; where does that lead in the future?  To SiG's point that people will answer this by saying that people will die and isn't it heartless to let them die over a hypothetical, let me reply by asking how many people?  Because we don't know the number because we're not measuring the factors that would tell us the answer: how many are very sick and would die within the next 6-12 months?  Sure their lives are valuable but do we wreck 50 million lives to give them and extra 6 months?  That sounds harsh, but that's exactly the tradeoff that we are making.

It's the Unseen.  And the costs are Unseen, too, because no Governor in the land wants to make it explicit to the voters just what are all the many miseries that have been unleashed on them by said Governor.  That it is Unseen is not by accident.

And so our policy makers see the situation poorly, looking through a glass darkly at only a portion of the situation.  Of course the resulting public policy is hideous.  Interestingly, the misery is concentrated on Trump voters (the hourly wage class), not the governing class (who work from home via videoconference).  You can't get to your factory job that way, but the salaried class are doing fine.  No doubt this is all a coincidence.

Even a private University like Brown cannot exist without the generous support of the Government.  Professor Oster has a financial incentive to follow the government with respect to this policy, and when a person's dinner depends upon their support for a particular policy they tend not to see any evidence that runs counter to that policy.

Oh, and no doubt Professor Oster did just fine during the lockdowns while working class people in Providence lost their businesses.  No doubt this was all a coincidence, too.

Moving on is crucial now, because the pandemic created many problems that we still need to solve.

Student test scores have shown historic declines, more so in math than in reading, and more so for students who were disadvantaged at the start. We need to collect data, experiment, and invest. Is high-dosage tutoring more or less cost-effective than extended school years? Why have some states recovered faster than others? We should focus on questions like these, because answering them is how we will help our children recover.

Many people have neglected their health care over the past several years. Notably, routine vaccination rates for children (for measles, pertussis, etc.) are way down. Rather than debating the role that messaging about COVID vaccines had in this decline, we need to put all our energy into bringing these rates back up. Pediatricians and public-health officials will need to work together on community outreach, and politicians will need to consider school mandates.

The standard saying is that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. But dwelling on the mistakes of history can lead to a repetitive doom loop as well. Let’s acknowledge that we made complicated choices in the face of deep uncertainty, and then try to work together to build back and move forward.

Point of order, Professor Oster: it wasn't the pandemic that caused all this damage.  Rather, it was the government imposed lockdowns (supported by "experts" such as yourself) that did.  Some of us called this very, very early: April 21, 2020 to be specific:

There is simply no rational, science-based justification to keep the lockdowns in place anymore.  We see this recognized by Governors (who are starting to end the lockdown) and by the population in general (who are starting to willfully violate the lockdown).  Everybody but the "experts" is starting to recognize this, and the "experts" may be refusing to recognize it so that they don't get blamed.

We knew this from the very beginning, but dim-bulb "Experts" like Professor Oster got this public policy wrong all the time.  They got it was catastrophically wrong. Yet somehow the "experts" keep wanting another chance to get things catastrophically wrong again.  And again.  And again.

Professor Oster wants us to give these same "experts" one more last chance.  There's a Country music song about that.

(Best country music cameo ever)

One More Last Chance (Songwriters: Vince Gill, Gary Nicholson)

She was standing at the front door
When I came home last night
A good book in her left hand
And a rollin' pin in the right
She said you've come home for the last time
With whiskey on your breath
If you don't listen to my preachin' boy
I'm goin' to have to beat you half to death

Give me just a one more last chance
Before you say we're through
I know I drive you crazy baby
It's the best that I can do
We're just some good ol' boys, a makin' noise
I ain't a runnin' 'round on you
Give me just a one more last chance
Before you say we're through

First she hid my glasses
'Cause she knows that I can't see
She said you ain't goin' nowhere boy
'Til you spend a little time with me
Then the boys called from the honky tonk
Said there's a party goin' on down here
Well she might've took my car keys
But she forgot about my old John Deere

So give me just a one more last chance
Before you say we're through
I know I drive you crazy baby
It's the best that I can do
We're just some good ol' boys, a makin' noise
I ain't a runnin' 'round on you
Give me just a one more last chance
Before you say we're through

Who benefits from the US in Ukraine?

One thing that I have not been able to figure out is who would benefit from the US sending 8,500 (or 50,000 - the number keeps changing) US troops to Stalingrad in winter.  We've seen this movie before and we all know how it comes out.  There are pretty much no good arguments to do this - nothing but huffing and puffing about "deterring aggression" and "stopping Putin's land grab" and "country borders are sacred".  Let's quickly dispense with these arguments and move on to who really wins.

Deterring Aggression.  It's not 1939, and the US Establishment isn't Neville Chamberland.  A quick review of the first two decades of this century will establish the wars we've fought: Afghanistan (2001-2021), Iraq (2003 - present), Libya (2011), Syria (2013).  The problem isn't an American meekness; on the contrary.  Vladimir Putin knows this, and doesn't have to read between the lines to understand what NATO expansion plans for Ukraine would mean to a Russia that shares a border with it.

Putin's "Land Grab".  So Russia has demanded guarantees from NATO that (a) Ukraine will not be admitted to the coalition (as this would compel NATO to defend Ukraine in the future, by treaty), and also guarantees that NATO offensive weapons will not be stationed in Ukraine.  The NATO General Secretary has explicitly rejected both demands, as has the US State Department (at least according to the Russian foreign ministry; while this is not proof, it does concur with the NATO General Secretary's public statements from two days ago).  So what options does Putin have?  More importantly, what options are we giving him?

"National Borders are sacrosanct".  Well, except for the US-Mexico border, I guess.  This doesn't pass the "red face" test - the fact that people can say this without shame only shows that our elites are, well, shameless.

So who wins in this showdown?  We know who is facing the risks - you know, that whole Stalingrad in winter thing, but Russia is facing substantial risks as well from sanctions, a military with some good units but many not so good ones, potential guerrilla war, etc.  NATO appears to be splintering before our eyes as Germany, France, and others refuse to do any heavy lifting (Germany's offer a a few thousand mil surplus helmets to Ukraine speaks volumes on how tight this "alliance" is).  

Oh yeah - Russia has a bunch of nuclear missiles aimed at us.  That would never go sideways, right?  So there are lots of potential losers here.  

Who wins?

China.  This is long, but clearly and plainly laid out.  I highly recommend you spend the time to watch it:

Other winners: The Military Industrial Complex (Defense suppliers and retired 4 stars who get cushy and well paid gigs on their boards of directors).  The Biden Administration which gets to keep the Hunter Biden Ukrainian payoffs swept under the carpet.  The Democratic Party which is desperately looking for something - anything - to change the electorate's focus from the disastrous Afghanistan bug out, or inflation, or the increasingly unpopular Covid lockdowns, or the Teacher's Unions destroying public education, or the weakening economy.

I guess that the Democrats aren't smart enough to figure out what adding that whole "Stalingrad in winter" thing to that list will do in the run up to the elections.

Tucker Carlson quite rightly asks: how does any of this make America stronger?  Clearly it doesn't - to the contrary.  But if you don't pound the jingoistic War Drum with the idiots in the media you're Putin's Stooge or Neville Chamberlin or unpatriotic.  Or something.

I'm so old that I remember Democrats shouting that they were tired of their patriotism being questioned.  Times sure have changed.

But remember: these people are all so much smarter (and nicer!) than you are.  You stooge, you.

UPDATE 27 January 2022 17:46:  Divemedic has a detailed post about another downside - our diminished military capability and top-heavy brass.  You should read the whole thing but this is the summation:

The US has cut its ability to project power so severely, that it can no longer afford to be, nor can it be, the world’s policeman.

Russia and China know that.

But hey - on to Stalingrad!

UPDATE 27 January 2022 18:40:  LOL:

The other things the BBC were moaning about were the winter famine wiping out the children of the Taliban and the poor pitiful Ukrainians who are ill-equipped to fight the Red Army. I see a confluence of benefits here. The Taliban have $89 billion dollars in high tech weaponry they manifestly don't need and the Ukraine produces most of Europes wheat. They could trade weaponry to the breadbasket of Europe for food. Win win!

Helpful. That's me.

Maybe $89 B of food would give them enough weapons to get to Stalingrad, amirite?  Who says that Atomic War can't be hilarious?

UPDATE 27 January 2022 19:01:  Yeah, yeah, I can stop anytime.  Kurt Schlicter (LTC USA, Ret) has an informative post about the difference between the Cold War NATO of his service days and today's NATO.  He echos and amplifies what Divemedic highlights, from an Army (vs. a Navy) perspective.  He is even more pessimistic (and sarcastically so) than Divemedic is.  But he gets deadly serious in his key point:

It seems like we might have trouble achieving our objectives. And one of the biggest reasons is that it’s not clear what our objectives would even be. Since none of the usual hawks can be bothered to articulate a vital American interest involved in defending Ukraine’s borders, that makes it hard to come up with objectives for the military. “Stop Putin” is not really a military objective; it’s sort of an amorphous goal.

So what does victory look like? Putin held off to the outskirts of Kiev? Putin tossed back over the Belarus and Russian borders? What’s our desired end state? Or are we not going to articulate that either? Maybe we can just sort of exist in a tense status quo over some sort of demilitarized zone for seven decades or so. Gee, sound familiar?

Now all these questions deserve answers, but don’t look for any since none of the answers are good. And bad answers would slow the rush to war, so we can’t have them come out. Instead, the establishment is going back to the classics. If you ask what America’s vital interest is, you love Putin. If you ask what our military objectives would be, much less how we can rev up the combat power way over there to attain them, you love Putin. Yeah, it’s always a delight to be a vet of the Cold War being who is told he digs the Russians by a bunch of DC saps whose experience with the Bear is trying a Moscow Mule once, deciding it was icky, and asking for a white wine spritzer instead.

The Ukrainians are getting a raw deal, and I hope they drown their invaders in a river of blood. But it’s not our fight. And, if we did fight, there’s a significant chance we would lose. Then every two-bit tyrant on Earth will be coming for a piece of the helpless giant. We’re weak right now, folks, and the worst thing we can do is get up in front of everyone and prove it.

This.  This exactly.  The Administration looks like it is trying to draw into an inside straight.  With the potential death, destruction, and risk to America's international position, I'd sure like answers - any answers - to the question what do we get out of any of this?

When people are taken out of their depth they lose their heads, no matter how charming a bluff they put up.

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

So what do you do when they stop reporting Covid deaths?

The Fed.Gov is going to stop asking hospitals to report deaths from Covid.  Since all that will be reported is case counts (and possibly hospitalizations, although that is far from clear), what do you do over the next few months?

Retired ER doctor Tim Wolter has an outstanding summary of the current - and likely last - set of actual data and what it means.  I recommend that you read the entire information-dense post and bookmark it.

In particular, the data he shows from Florida are extremely interesting: 7 day moving average of cases in January: 60,000.  7 day moving average of deaths in January: 9.  That's a case fatality rate of 0.015%.

And this is particularly telling:

Digging deeper into [Minnesota] stats you find that the average "case" is 36 years old, the average ICU hospitalized patient is 63 and the average age of those dying from Covid is 80. That stat caught my eye. To have an average age of 80 there must be some real oldsters in the sample set. Indeed, deaths were recorded in patients ranging from age 1 to age 109.

Remember, this data will no longer be reported so it will no longer be possible to use actual death data to show that Covid is a disease that is dangerous almost exclusively to the very old and very sick.  Remember to get your 2 year old quadruple vaxed and always masked up - never mind that she's not yet talking because she's developmentally stunted.  Got to protect those sick Boomers!

It's getting very hard indeed to avoid straying into the fever swamps when you look at the crude propaganda coming from our health care institutions.  Qui bono, indeed?

Note: it's been a while since I've tagged a post with my tag "evil".  But here's an excerpt from that last post which seems more and more to apply to the CDC and other "elite" institutions ostensibly tasked with keeping the population safe:

The ancient Romans were said to make a land into a desert, and then call it peace.  I mean, there were no more folks opposing their rule after they had killed most of the folks, amirite?

The Fed.Gov will make a desert and then call it "health".  This is the end game.  Don't let a crisis go to waste.

* It's not The Virus From Hell.  You want to see a disease from Hell?  Here you go.

Yeah, this is a bit ranty.

Monoclonal antibodies - a report from the field

So our doctor said to go get them.  Actually, she was kind of lukewarm on the subject - our Internet digging said that they may or may not handle the new variant, but the test doesn't tell you what you have and the doc said that it wouldn't do any harm.  So off we went.

Remember last fall when President Biden cut off monoclonal antibodies to Florida?  This looks like one of the many shoot-from-the-hip and then backtrack policies from this Keystone Kops administration.  You can get them, although we had to drive a bit.  There's actually a pretty nice web page to find the location nearest to you.

And so off we went.  It was the better part of an hour drive which wasn't too bad.  This was a pop-up clinic in a community center.  There were a bunch of folks there as walk-ins; we were glad that we made reservations.

The procedure can be given two ways - an infusion (The Queen Of The World got this) or a set of four injections (I got these thinking it would be quicker - it was, but they keep you for an hour after the procedure "just in case" so it really wan't).  Then we drove back.

A couple hours later I started feeling worse - not a ton worse, but I had felt like I was on the mend before and then I didn't.  Even today it feels like I took a step backwards, although this is pretty impressionistic.  TQOTW doesn't seem to be much different.

So, did it do any good?  Beats me.  What I think I learned from this is that all the panic porn has an effect - I'm kind of glad that I took TQOTW because she wasn't doing great - but this is an emotional side of me that has been manipulated for two years.  The logical side of me thinks that maybe it didn't do anything.

Your mileage may vary, void where prohibited, do not remove tag on penalty of law.  Oh, and the Biden Administration can suck it.  Thanks for nothing, guys, you vindictive pricks.

UPDATE 25 JANUARY 2022 13:10:  Aaaaand they're gone.  The FDA removed the Emergency Use Authorization for monoclonal antibodies in Florida.  Looks like it's the only State subject to this restriction.  I'm glad we got ours last week.  Man, the Democrats suck.

Let's go, Brandon!

Hey, Canadians are nicer than us Yanks, amirite?

Canadian town bans marriage between non-vacinated couples.

And a quick note for you hosers from the Great White North: before yammering on about how awful our (private) healthcare system is, please explain the following:

Charlie Gard

Alfie Evans

Oliver Cameron

Ashya King

Nota bene: these cases are from Britain, the Mother Country.  The Canadian health system (whatever it is called) is explicitly modeled on Britains National Health System (NHS) which has assumed almost cult-like status in Britain.

Britain.  You know: the land where Great Britain used to be.

So all you Canuk Hosers can just shut right up about how awesome your "Health Care" system is..  Yeah, ours may still be swirling the drain, but yours was flushed long ago.  After all, we are all still Citizens of the Republic (for now), but you are Subjects of the Crown.

Except for Glen Filthie.  He's reloading and sharpening bayonets.  Glen, come on down to Florida.  The air still smells of Freedom.

This post has the tag "Statist Pricks" because, well, you know.

On the Internet nobody can tell if you're a dog

Politeness is a sign of dignity, not of subservience.

- Theodore Roosevelt 

But everybody can tell if you're an asshole.

Divemedic posted his stance on the vaccine: get it if you think it's right for you, don't get it if you don't think it's right for you.  A more sensible position is hard to imagine.

And then The Internet appeared in his comments section, with SumD00d telling him he was wrong (well, I think that's what he said because the comment was fairly incomprehensible; hey, it's The Internet, amirite?).

And while the comment was moderately incoherent, the attitude of the commenter was anything but.  Commenter "Hedge" is an asshole.  He may (or may not) be a dog with a keyboard but he is unmistakably an asshole with one.

Sigh.

I am very grateful indeed that the commenters here are almost always respectful and intelligent - and the commenters on the Dad Jokes are funny as hell.  I almost never need to step in to tell folks to settle down and mind their manners - maybe only 2 or 3 times in the 13 years I've been here.

People think wrong when they think that the Internet gives them anonymity.  It doesn't.  It gives pseudonymity, which is not at all the same thing.  If you post under a pseudonym (like Hedge and I both do), you still develop a reputation.  Quite frankly, you can't comment anonymously here, so anything you say in the comments here will add to (or in rare cases detract from) your reputation.

Divemedic certainly doesn't need me to fight his fights, that's not the point of this post.  I love  comments and the two way (or multiple way) discussions we have here.  But I'm not going to tolerate Internet Assholes like Hedge here.  Cathedra mea, regula meae - my place, my rules..  If you don't like it, don't stop by.  This really isn't very hard.

It is a wise thing to be polite; consequently, it is a stupid thing to be rude. To make enemies by unnecessary and willful incivility, is just as insane a proceeding as to set your house on fire. For politeness is like a counter--an avowedly false coin, with which it is foolish to be stingy. 

- Arthur Schopenhauer, The Wisdom Of Life 

Why voting no longer matters

You look at the destructive policies that are being put in place and wonder what on earth the left is up to.  Places that have the most "progressive" governments are instituting profoundly anti-progressive policies, like eliminating advanced math courses in public schools, or eliminating charter schools.  Both of these benefit middle class or working class students - the elites, of course, send their kids to private schools.  You could as easily use the example of unions losing good paying jobs when pipelines and oil drilling permits are canceled.

So what gives?  I mean, it's obvious that these policies are destructive to income equality.  J.Kb has a very interesting angle on what is driving the insanity:

The elites love, above all else, having things and access to things that regular people don’t ...

The point of buying shit like that is the knowledge that people who didn’t go to the right finishing schools and then to Harvard and then do a brokerage firm on Wall Street can’t buy that stuff.

Moreover, what the elite hate more than anything else is that so much of what they had we can have too.

...

Cellphones and laptops used to be status symbols of the elite.  Think about Gordon Gekko in Wall Street talking on his cellphone in 1987.  By 1997, every middle-class businessman in Miami had a cellphone.  By 2007, cellphones were so ubiquitous that high school kids had cell phones, new homebuyers had given up landlines, and payphones were removed from public places.

Technology had democratized luxury and the elite couldn’t stand it.

Since then, the desire has been not just to own more but to make the rest of us own less ... 

That doesn’t apply to the elite, just to us.

Now add Kurt Schlicter's insight about anti-Trumpism:

The real reason the elite hated Donald Trump was not that he was an ideological conservative (he only sort of was) or that he tweeted mean things (they like mean tweets, just not ones directed at them). It was that Trump identified the failures of “the best and the brightest” and called them out. There is nothing these experts hate more than challenges to the authority they think they deserve.

He drew back the curtain so that everyone could see that the "elites" were anything but elite.  They cannot ever forgive him for that, and thus the rage.

Putting these together, we can see that the elites are furious at the idea that someone could challenge their authority, and determined that this will never happen again.  This is why these anti-progressive policies are being implemented everywhere: it's to tell the "non-elites" that they need to keep their place, or else.  Every Trump voter will be punished, to make sure a Trumpist rebellion never occurs again.  The punishments will be crude, and the cruder the better - to drive home the point of who's on top and who isn't (and won't ever be).

Back in November, I posted about the surprising crudeness of the election fraud:

What is striking about the fraud is the blatant clumsiness on display: the Democrats aren't even trying to hide the fact that they are manufacturing ballots in industrial quantities.  This is really, really interesting, and suggests that their motive is not simply to install their preferred candidate in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.  It suggests that the motivation is deeper, and darker.

Theodore Dalrymple studied Soviet era propaganda - the propaganda targeting not a western audience, but instead the populations of the Warsaw Pact.  He was struck by how crude it was:

In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control.

I think that this is what they're after - showing the country that they can steal an election and there's nothing that we can do about it.  It comes from the same source that causes cities to remove statues of George Washington.  It's showing who's up and who's down.

The crudeness of it all isn't a bug - it's the primary point to these people, who believe that they have a fundamental right to rule.

The elites are determined that their opponents will be humiliated and impoverished forever.  Never again will they be laughed at by the unwashed masses.  Never again will the masses aspire to the elite's station.  The elites don't mind the masses hating them so long as they fear them.

That's why there will never be a free and fair election in the country again, at least if the elites get their way.