Category: Dumbass Bullshit

This Jenny Horne woman is embarrassing. She’s talking about removing the Confederate flag from the South Carolina’s state grounds. This is what happens when you have a full-time legislature – they have so much time on their hands that they think that every mundane vote is somehow “meaningful”. The folks who voted for this drama queen should reconsider whether she should be returned during the next election.

Even Jimmy Carter says that “very few” people think the flag is a racist symbol according to the Washington Times. But it looks like the flag will come down, if Governor Haley signs the bill that passed the House today.

According to the Washington Post, 22-year-old Devon Staples, after a little lubrication, put a fireworks mortar on his empty head and threatened to light the contents. His friends thought that they had talked him out of it, when suddenly it ignited and killed Staples instantly.

Staples’s brother, 25-year-old Cody Staples, called it an accident.

“I was the first one who got there,” he told the New York Daily News. “There was no rushing him to the hospital. There was no Devon left when I got there.

“It was a freak accident. … Devon was not the kind of person who would do something stupid. He was the kind of person who would pretend to do something stupid to make people laugh.”

Stupid, right? Well, according to the Associated Press, his mother seems to think that her son’s stupidity should be regulated;

Staples’ mother, Kathleen Staples, said she is going to reach out to lawmakers about the possibility of tighter controls over fireworks. The state should consider requiring safety training courses before allowing someone to use them, she said. She compared fireworks with other regulated items such as cars and guns.

“At least it’d be a little bit more than, ‘Here you go,’” Staples said. “That’s an explosive. They didn’t just hand me a license and put me in the car.”

There are also unlicensed drivers on the road. What part of the word “explosives” made Staples think that they wouldn’t blow his head off? Of course, this is Kathleen’s way of diverting blame for her son’s upbringing from herself. The problem with this country today is that there are too many regulations and rules – so many that most of us break laws everyday without knowing that we broke a law. Government can’t protect us from ourselves. If Staples’ friends couldn’t convince him that launching explosives from his head were a bad idea, why does mother think that any amount of training would do the job?

Chief Tango sends us a link to the story about Michael Warning, reportedly a veteran who stole a Humvee military vehicle from Fort Gordon, Georgia and led police on relatively high speed chase to South Carolina;

The Aiken County Sheriff’s Office says the suspect stole the military vehicle from Barton Field at Fort Gordon, where it was on display. Deputies say the suspect was ex-military. “It’s just a crazy time now, so we just didn’t know what was going on. We had no idea that they weren’t all together,” Hiers said.

The first call came to dispatch around Mile Marker 11. The chase finally ended about twenty minutes later after deputies say the car swerved on and off the road, left the interstate on Exit 18, and later, cut through the wood line. When the driver got back on the Interstate, deputies say they were able to stop him. Investigators say the twelve thousand pound Humvee nearly collided head on with a patrol car.

The article says that Warning was taken to the hospital for an unknown medical condition, of that I have no doubt. They also point out that he wasn’t injured during the chase on Friday evening.

Young buck sergeant Bryan Scott Wolfinger went to Cross Creek Mall in Fayetteville, North Carolina, a few miles from Fort Bragg, to have professional pictures taken. The problems came because Wolfinger was wearing a tactical vest with several magazines for his scary black gun, which he was also carrying. The public lost their collective shit as a result. Police arrived and arrested young Wolfinger on charges of “going armed to the terror of the public”. From CBS News;

An Army official tells CBS News correspondent David Martin that right now, Wolfinger is guilty of “very poor judgment,” but whether or not he broke military law remains to be seen.

Martin notes Wolfinger would not have been issued an AR-15 by the Army.

The Army has regulations about the storage of personal weapons and that’s one thing that will be investigated.

According to the reports, Wolfinger never made it into the mall. Yeah, very poor judgement, Sergeant. But, you know, the police should have used good judgement and released him with a warning once they found out what he was doing there. Unless, they were just playing to the media.

This morning, we find out from Fox News that the folks at the Office of Personnel Management knew about the extent of the breach of our personal information back in April, but when they finally announced the hack, for some stupid reason, they wouldn’t admit the extent of the damage to our privacy.

The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that the day after the White House admitted that hackers had breached personnel files, OPM publicly denied that the security clearance forms had been compromised despite receiving information to the contrary from the FBI. The administration did not say that security clearance forms had likely been accessed by the intruders until more than a week had passed.

A OPM spokeswoman denied the claims, telling the Journal the agency had been “completely consistent” in its reporting of the data breach.

Sounds a little like their attempts to cover up their failures to respond to the attack on the consulate in Benghazi, doesn’t it? It also sounds like the cover up of the extent of the damage to the Veterans’ health care system. This administration couldn’t tell the truth about the weather. Lucky for them that most of American is preoccupied with Bruce Jenner, Rachel Dolezal and the Confederate flag.

Fox News reports that the Office of Personnel Management has admitted that hackers have stolen the personally identifiable information (PII) of more than 18 million people. But, don’t worry, the OPM director, Katherine Archuleta, says that her agency is not to blame;

Grilled on whether anyone takes responsibility, Archuleta said only the perpetrators should be blamed — she said current failures result from decades of meager investment in security systems, but said changes are being made and in fact helped detect the latest breaches.

Yeah, it would be the bank robbers’ fault if they went in the bank and stolen money, but it’s the banker’s fault that the money is stolen if the banker starts storing the money on the sidewalk.

The Office of Personnel Management initially estimated about 4 million current and former government workers were affected by one of the hacks. But Fox News is told by multiple sources that lawmakers have been informed the number will grow to at least 18 million — and could, according to one source, soar to as high as 30 million.

I had to put the information of my family on the application for my security clearance, so I can see how the numbers would balloon. I guess no one in this administration is responsible for anything anymore.

Their contractor can go pound sand, too. I’m not putting my PII on another website for someone to lose. Lifelock tells me that they’ll do the same thing to monitor my information.

I got my promised email the other day notifying me that my PII was part of the data that the Office of Personnel Management lost to Chinese “hackers”. The solution was an email to the same address that the Chinese now has and it included a link that I was supposed to click and then enter my PII on another website, you know, so that someone else would have the opportunity to lose my information, you know someone that hasn’t had an opportunity to lose it yet, after the Department of Defense, the Veterans’ Affairs Department and now OPM had all lost control of it. This last time it might be worse, though – if they lost control of my application for my security clearance, they also got a hold of all my friends and family information, as well.

So, how did that happen? According to Business Insider, the Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary for Cybersecurity Dr. Andy Ozment told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that the systems administrator for the information “was in Argentina and his co-worker was physically located in the [People’s Republic of China].”

From Ars Technica;

But even if the systems had been encrypted, it likely wouldn’t have mattered. Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary for Cybersecurity Dr. Andy Ozment testified that encryption would “not have helped in this case” because the attackers had gained valid user credentials to the systems that they attacked—likely through social engineering. And because of the lack of multifactor authentication on these systems, the attackers would have been able to use those credentials at will to access systems from within and potentially even from outside the network.

Oh, by the way, the email that I got from OPM contained this disclaimer; “nothing in this letter should be construed as OPM or the U.S. Government accepting liability for any of the matters covered by this letter”.

That’s how I knew it was from the government and that they were there to help me.

Needless to say, I’ll just stick with my own subscription to Lifelock, I’ve had enough of the government’s solutions for my security. Did I mention that the breech happened months ago and lasted for months? That this latest breech is like closing the barn doors after the horses already ran all the way to China.

Thanks to Bobo for the link to BI.

Chief Tango sends us a link to the story of Donald Wileman Sr., 57 and Paul Lazzaro in Pennsylvania whose arguement over their military service led to Wileman stabbing Lazzaro in the neck;

In a videotaped statement at Kingston police headquarters, the witness described for police how he had been biking home when Wileman saw him and invited him into the apartment. Inside, the witness said he heard a discussion between Wileman and Lazzaro about their service days escalate into a shoving match. That’s when Wileman pulled a knife on Lazzaro, the witness told officers.

Wileman got 15-30 months in prison, two years of probation and $11,000 in restitution to Mr. Lazzaro. Wileman is 57 years old – if I look that bad at 57, I hope someone shoots me. I hope the judge knows that it’s going to take him a long time to come up with eleven grand.