Jean Meslier
Whoever has formed true ideas of the ignorance, credulity, negligence, and sottishness of common people, will always regard their religious opinions with the greater suspicion for their being generally established.
I’m a moral nihilist, which is not to say that I kick puppies and punch grandmothers – it’s just because I am unconvinced by the attempts to establish systems of ethics that I’ve encountered, so far. I’m a fan of “the golden rule”, i.e:
“That which you hate to be done to you, do not do to another.”
Apparently we’re going to have to have regular discussions about email security, until politicians get their heads out of the sand and realize that they are targets and regular victims of mid-skill-level attack, and they need to level up their game if they don’t want to periodically look stupid.
Email security is not hard. I’d say “it just takes a little attention to detail…” but it doesn’t even take that much. I can only conclude that politicians are just blockheads about information technology and politics and it just shows how eminently qualified they are to lead high-tech civilizations. [stderr]
The world of web-scraping ‘bots and click-farming results in weird stuff, sometimes. I got an email from a friend asking me what my involvement might have been in setting this up:
We all need one now and again. So here’s a young Carl Sagan, in his pre-turtleneck days, talking about aliens visiting us:
I reported last week that the Taliban and ISIS appear to be making gains in Afghanistan [stderr] and hypothesized that the Russians might provide subtle covert support to make the US experience there more unpleasant and costly.
Russia Times had a now-famous “meet and greet” conference like the Milken conference. [stderr] And there are some fun pictures of the attendees…
There was some discussion of needles over at Caine’s [affinity] about how needles are made. I’m sure you’ll enjoy this!
Ross, speaking at an economics conference in California on Monday, recounted the scene at the Florida estate when Trump interrupted dessert to inform Chinese President Xi Jinping that the US had attacked a Syrian airfield.