Wednesday shorts

Yep, tomorrow is tryptophan day. Well, it’s thought of as such – but it turns out that is an urban legend and turkey doesn’t put you to sleep. I may, but not the turkey. The sleepy feeling is basically overeating causing your blood sugar to go a little nuts.

Leading into the holiday:

The Muslim support group Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) is rewarding some of our bad actors.

Anti-Israel agitators who spread disruption at US colleges and were punished by authorities were awarded checks for $1,000 by a Muslim nonprofit, The Post has learned.

The money was given to students who faced penalties for leading pro-Palestinian protests before and after the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7 2023, according to a bombshell report by the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) and the Intelligent Advocacy Network (IAN).

The cash was awarded from a “Champions of Justice Fund,” set up by the  Council on American-Islamic Relations’ (CAIR) as “institutional endorsement,” the report claims.NY Post

A story of a Harvard (how shocking) student who was arrested,  and subsequently lost his law firm internship, costing him thousands in income, follows….and it tells how Harvard gave him an additional $65,000 grant. Boo freakin’ hoo.

 

And some experts are warning that AI chatbots have a potentially dangerous exploitable flaw.

Current and former military officers are warning that adversaries are likely to exploit a natural flaw in artificial intelligence chatbots to inject instructions for stealing files, distorting public opinion or otherwise betraying trusted users.

The vulnerability to such “prompt injection attacks” exists because large language models, the backbone of chatbots that digest hordes of user text to generate responses, cannot distinguish between malicious and trusted user instructions. Defense News

In simple terms, the AI works from the data it is given but cannot distinguish between whether a logical end is right or wrong, as I read it, so by feeding the correct info in, the AI output can be distorted. Doesn’t even need a Democratic legislator o do it, either. H/t to JeffLPH for this one.

And in closing, let’s chat about gunz. The Trump administration included language in the shutdown bill to forbid VA from reporting veterans who have a financial fiduciary as mentally ill, as they were wont to do in the past.  (VA may be your buddy when they pay you, but they are NOT your ally on the subject of guns. Just an fyi.) For years, the VA has reported many vets as ill whose only issues were financial.  You think you should lose all your firearms because you’re bad with money? I suspect not.  A plus for Trump.

And… then there is Bondi. I know many here like her, but her past is checkered on guns – keep your eyes on her and the DOJ. As an example – the National Firearms Act of 1934, commonly called NFA, created a whole class of firearms which needed special registration and taxation. Matter of fact, it was challenged, and went all the way to the Supreme Court who allowed it to stand as a tax and since Congress has the power to create taxes, it was ruled Constitutional.  Taxed and registered various things, like full-automatic weapons, sawed off rifles and shotguns, suppressors… all the “gangster-type weapons” H0llywood and the media demonized back then. A stupid tax, true, but legal.

In the Big Beautiful Bill the $200 tax was reduced to $0. Why is that significant? The Supremes ruled that the NFA was a TAX bill – so with no tax, logically the other provisions in it are moot and that law should be off the books.  Nope, the situation is going to trial: Gun Owners of America are suing to get NFA gone – and the DOJ is fighting it.

A 48-page memorandum of law submitted by the DOJ moving for summary judgment on Thursday revealed that the government would in fact seek to defend the NFA by arguing it was still a “valid” tax.

But if it is $0, how? Then Bondi’s folks really stepped in it:

“Seeking to curtail armed crime, the NFA targeted particularly dangerous and easily concealable weapons that ‘could be used readily and efficiently by criminals,’” the memo read, citing multiple cases that addressed regulation of “concealable” weapons as “likely to be used for criminal purposes,” and “valued for their ability to be easily concealed and to unleash devastating damage at short range.” Mediaite

So Trump and Bondi’s DOJ is parroting arguments that could have come from Bloomberg, Giffords, or Everytown? They just made an argument for banning every pistol!

As I have said before…do NOT assume this administration is pro-gun. Pro-themselves, maybe – but neither Trump’s nor Bondi’s record is so solid as to be comfortable with anything they say or do about guns.