And the Rest of It

All manner of things going on ...

Today in "governmental incompetence" news:

Management of a crack military Cyber War unit assigned to counter Chinese and Russian threats is so haphazard it “lacks direction” despite half a billion in spending, says a Department of National Defence audit. Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan had boasted his department was on the cutting edge of technology. Auditors instead found cyber analysts had to take cabs to access computer networks scattered across Ottawa: “This can result in up to $200 in taxi fares a week for one person.”

 

 

But the government isn't the only brainless lot:

The poll taken in early July found that more than half of Canadian households (53%) had someone working at home over the past year. In Ontario, which has suffered through two stay-at-home orders this year, it was three out of five households, the highest in Canada.

Among those, 29% said they would like to continue to do so permanently and 44% said they would be content with a so-called hybrid situation, a mix of working from home and in the office. Only 27% said they wanted to return to the office full-time.

The poll’s next question got a bit more interesting.

When the Canadians who want to continue working from home were asked what they would do if their employer told them to return to the office full time, nearly half said they would look for another job.

 

Good luck with that in this economy, idiots.

 

 

No, Japan was finished at the end of the Second World War, even if a handful of generals didn't want to believe it: 

For his 2011 book Hiroshima Nagasaki, Australian historian Paul Ham pored over the minutes of high-level Japanese meetings and discovered that the country’s ruling military elite had a shocking indifference toward the atomic bombings. On Aug. 9, Japan’s six-member supreme war council was meeting in a bunker under Tokyo when word was first received that Nagasaki had been destroyed. Engrossed in discussions about the Soviet invasion, the assembled men did not seem to care. “A runner comes in and says ‘Sir, we’ve lost Nagasaki, it’s been destroyed by a new ‘special’ bomb’ … and the sort of six Samurai sort of said, ‘thank you, and run along,’ ” Ham told an interviewer in 2011.

 

Yes, about that ...

The battle-weary Soviets were goaded into war with Japan and thus were decidedly ill-prepared for a full invasion of that country. With the bombing of Nagasaki on August 9th and the late emperor Hirohito, ruling over a handful of war-mongering generals, declared Japan's surrender six days later. The Americans moved in long before the Soviets could establish a long-term military presence in Japan.

And now you know the rest of the story.

Speaking of surrender:

Taliban insurgents captured an Afghan provincial capital and killed the government's senior media officer in Kabul on Friday amid a deteriorating security situation as U.S. and other foreign troops withdraw.

Oh, things don't look good for Andrew Cuomo:

Albany County’s sheriff said his office is starting a criminal investigation against New York Governor Andrew Cuomo after receiving a complaint against him.

Sheriff Craig Apple said he’s also reached out to the New York Attorney General’s office for more information following its report earlier in the week accusing Cuomo of sexually harassing 11 women and creating a “climate of fear” in his offices.

 

 

You b@$#@rds:

If these allegations are true that scientists at the University of Pittsburgh were harvesting kidneys of unborn babies while their hearts were still beating, they should not only have their taxpayer funding immediately suspended, everyone involved should face criminal charges. pic.twitter.com/TjfN7IvJmd

— Sean Parnell (@SeanParnellUSA) August 5, 2021

 

 

 There is a Batman joke in here somewhere and I'm struggling to find it:

A bat made the longest recorded migration flight from Britain, only to be killed by a cat when it arrived in Russia.

The nathusius’ pipistrelle, which weighed just 8g, had made a journey of 1,253 miles. It was found on July 30 in the small village of Molgino in the Pskov region of Russia by local woman Svetlana Lapina but had been injured by a cat and died despite the best efforts of a bat rehabilitation group.

 

 

This was an actual sport and they replaced it with skate-boarding: