Hope everyone had a good week!
Noem news is good news
Trump fires homeland security secretary Kristi Noem
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/05/trump-kristi-noem-homeland-security
What you need to know about Sen. Markwayne Mullin, Trump’s new pick to lead DHS
https://www.npr.org/2026/03/05/nx-s1-5737554/markwayne-mullin-homeland-security-kristi-noem-trump
Trump wants to help pick Iran’s next leader as the war stretches into Day 6
https://www.npr.org/2026/03/05/nx-s1-5736566/u-s-israeli-strikes-continue-across-iran-iranian-drones-hit-azerbaijan
What else ya got Deadsplinterati?!?
…at some point between watching a guy on youtube cheerfully run through how the super-discounted wifi extender he ordered for $5 off temu (that looked to have shipped 100,000 or so others to reach best seller in the wifi device category or whatever) could be all-the-way hacked in what…while being broadly incomprehensible as a process…might also be described as close to elementary fashion…&…well…this one?
…might have already done the think of seven impossible things before breakfast dance & possibly squeezed in a small existential crisis before I finished my coffee…so…don’t want to get all carried away throwing around terms like “asymmetric” or anything this early in another day of “now what?”…but it sure is jarring how in sort of the rest of the world & the sane pockets somehow enduring this stateside serious people are all earnestly trying to fit what the hell everyone is feeling like they have to do next in context with this or that other strand of stuff that’s been going on for some value of forever & is of significance in addition to being of pith & moment…& the part where the determinitive input making it surreal is that this guy has a point about how this is equally tricky to refute
…so…uh…about that existential crisis thing…not trying to induce those…& personal mileage is notoriously variable so I similarly don’t know if the utility of the thing is likely to map any less variably…but this…if you’ll forgive a gaiman/sandman reference…kinda “did it for me” this morning?
…on account of there’s a bit in one of the sandman comics where what would be a passage if it were prose goes…if you make some substitutions
…anyway…it…ummm…was funny to me?
…on the one hand the oracle thing seems like another string to the dual purpose bow of funding the people who fund his grift as directly as possible from the (to them) renewable resource that is the public purse…which at this level is seemingly broadly analogous to running up a massive unauthorized overdraft on the taxpayers’ account…so the contract is maybe a way to push enough cash their way to offset the paramount/WB-discovery + tik tok thing in a “make you whole on the back-end” sort of SOP kinda way…but…like
…if all that shit meant anything I don’t see how you wind up certifying stuff that is bound up with grok the same way I don’t see how you consider starlink to be overall fit for purpose whatever its functionality in the field aspects might be a fit for…the QA on this stuff seems way nearer the temu product the guy who found out it was wildly insecure couldn’t identify an OEM to inform of the flaw in their product than it does the “lives depend on the accurate & secure handling of this dataset full of things that fall in protected classes of information”…& the narrow set of purposes to which they seem set on putting any of this stuff to are generally things held in ways designed not to let them precisely because they shouldn’t be…so…unless palantir has a patch for that…presumably a bunch of workarounds…&…based on their hiring practices…that recipe is kinda why I needed saving from the sudden onset of a minor existential crisis of the “when you think about it, is there anything they couldn’t break more or less cataclysmic-ly mostly by application of brute ignorance with a combo of misapplied game theory & unfounded confidence in their inherent superiority?”
…but then I remembered most of the really bad buttons connect to systems that might be too old to be on receive to stupid on its present bandwidth…like the username from before they were born…that’s…older code…& they won’t check out
…or at least that’s what I’m telling myself today so I don’t go looking at anything that might tell me I’d be fooling myself, anyway?
…hmm…well…it’s not just me…presumably…with some concerns this morning
…but…it’s…probably fine…I’m sure it’s fine…otherwise WaPo would have mentioned it…right?
I was told I’m an old because I don’t have a login name without a number.
I remember studying history at various points and being like why are these fucking kings so stupid? Example being basically ALL of the Crusades.
I guess some things never change.
i was today years old when i learnt our national lottery is 50 years older than the united states…
have a feeling someone on the interwebs will eventually give me a reason to throw that out…lol
Meg wins the Internet today. Everybody else go home.
…might have a contender for the runner-up
I’d thought that the whole “Markwayne” thing was just a clerical error because whoever filled out the birth certificate sheet didn’t leave enough space between the first and middle names, but it turns out to be even stupider than that:
“His first name is a tribute to two of his paternal uncles, Mark and Wayne; his mother put both names on his birth certificate, intending to later shorten his name to one of the two, but ultimately never did.”
Hillbilly shit. I know it well.
Disappointingly, he’s not even related to Bruce Wayne!
See this is where you missed out by not going to some college in the South. By the time you unironically hear head coach names like Dabo Sweeney, Jimbo Fischer, Houston Nutt, Tommy Tuberville, etc
Markwaybe Mullin fits right in.
…feels like he has something extra, though…& after @perdido filled in the blank I think I get it now…he’s…a walking meme?
…markwayne *is* why-not-both.gif on legs…that’s what his mama really called him, even?
It’s entirely likely that either Uncle Mark or Uncle Wayne is his biological father.
Yeah, I went there.
@bryanlsplinter, based on things that have happened in my extended family, I feel like we need to consider that she wasn’t sure if Uncle Mark or Uncle Wayne was the father and picked a name that would work in either case.
Exactly.