gender – Bumbling Bees

Last Week in Weird

27 March 2017 by Darien Sumner

The God That Failed

Ever noticed what a complete fraud democracy is? Let’s go right on ahead and notwithstand that even on its own terms, it’s rubbish; rather, I’d prefer to focus on the utterly phony way "democracy" is leveraged as a scare tactic; it seems as though, whatever happens, it’s a "threat to democracy" or it will "undermine democracy" or perhaps it will even be "the end of democracy." By my count, all the democracy everywhere should have ended about eleven times over since election day, yet it apparently struggles onward, facing new existential threats every day.

The latest threat to democracy, of course, is the dreaded Fake News. As any fule kno, but as only the kind of fule who works for a government school will breathlessly explain to you, the entire reason for the evil Donald Hitler’s victory over St. Hillary of Clinton is that the internet was so infested with fake news that everybody forgot how great Hillary is. I am compelled to agree with this thesis, since your humble narrator seems to have forgotten that quite thoroughly.

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Last Week in Weird

3 October 2016 by Darien Sumner

Government in microcosm

On Wednesday, CNN did one of its hilariously phony "Town Hall" bits, in which a carefully-screened group of people asks prearranged questions, and president Obama uses them as an excuse to talk about how great he art. This week, the widow of a soldier who committed suicide asked the president what could be done to reduce to rate of veteran suicides from its current level of twenty-two per day, and the president, in between two different anecdotes about how many lives he personally has saved through the awesome power of bureaucracy, dispensed this pearl of wisdom:

We are hiring more mental health professionals. But the fact that there’s still 20 a day who are feeling hopeless means that we’ve got to do more. And, you know, anybody who’s watching right now, if you call the, you know, veterans help line, there’s going to be somebody there to answer.

So, really, all those suicidal soldiers need to do is call up the government’s suicide help line, where the highly-trained professionals from the government will be there to help. I guess this story would have a happy ending, then, if it weren’t for one niggling little detail: quite often, when people call the suicide help line, there actually isn’t anybody there to answer.

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Last Week in Weird

22 August 2016 by Darien Sumner

I’m Commander Shepard, and this is my favorite auction on the internet

Last year, Kapersky reported on the existence of a secret, highly sophisticated hacking group they dubbed the Equation Group. The Equation Group was all but confirmed to be a part of the NSA, due to its frequent use of encryption techniques otherwise only observed to be used by the NSA, and was discovered to be responsible for a series of highly advanced hacks that could do things no other known malware could do (such as rewrite hard drive firmware). Clearly, this was evidence that the United States government employed the most terrifying, invincible hackers anywhere in the world!

And then last week the Shadow Brokers announced that they’d stolen the whole suite of hacking tools, and offered to sell it to the highest bidder.

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