Toronto police’s advice to car owners is to leave your keys at the front door so that thieves who kick in your door to steal your car, they’ll take what they want and leave.  As you can imagine that’s caused quite an uproar and this author sums things up pretty well I thought.

The message from the Toronto Police Service couldn’t be clearer: we surrender, and you, the peace-loving, law-abiding citizens, should surrender, too.

For your own safety.

Regular Line readers will know — hell, anyone who pays any attention at all to the news will know — that auto thefts have been surging in this country, relative to recent years (yes, yes, I know — they haven’t yet gone past historic levels). It’s particularly bad right now in my hometown. The issue has finally percolated up into the public consciousness enough that it’s become a political issue. We’re getting new task forces and all that jazz — the kinds of things politicians announce when they realize, always belatedly, that they have to announce something. But while those announcements are made and repeated and recycled, thus giving the politicians their coveted ass-covering material, the thefts are continuing.

And the Toronto Police have reflected on the problem. They’ve mulled it over. Thought long and hard. And they’re advising people just give up. To stay safe.

Source: The Line

One of my pet peeves is when politicians or authorities tell me what to do to stay “safe” and the author makes a good point about what we are experiencing now is not the norm but rather the exception.  War, violence, stealing, murder and death is the norm something our society was able to shift away from but if the law and justice does not maintain the faith with the people, it’s very easy for society to break down.  As the author says too, heaven forbid someone protect themself or their property then the cops will definitely arrest the victim and charge them with whatever they can.

What’s the point of having a police force and justice system if they won’t do their jobs and why are the rights of criminals greater than the rights of their victims?

Aliens don’t visit us because they see that we fight over the stupidest things…  In the latest episode of those stupid humans according to US intelligence (and I hate to quote them) Russia is developing nuclear space weapons to destroy satellites.

The weapon is still under development and is not yet in orbit, Biden administration officials have emphasized publicly. But if used, officials say, it would cross a dangerous rubicon in the history of nuclear weapons and could cause extreme disruptions to everyday life in ways that are difficult to predict.

This kind of new weapon — known generally by military space experts as a nuclear EMP — would create a pulse of electromagnetic energy and a flood of highly charged particles that would tear through space to disrupt other satellites winging around Earth.

Source: CNN

EMPs are not new, we’ve known about them since the 60s and what this story is conveniently ignoring is that if an EMP is detonated in space yes it’ll cause problems for satellites but the blast portion that hits the planet could destroy the electrical grid on the ground too.  Funny enough a lot of satellites are relatively hardened against EM radiation, since they’re in space and have to deal with the sun and cosmic rays but if an EMP’s energy hits the ground, we’re pretty much screwed.

And it being in space means we’d have like no warning too, at least with a missile the militaries can track its movements (though whether the government would inform the people, I highly doubt) but with space based weapons maybe a mere few minutes.  This is a first strike capability and if something like this gets into orbit, you can bet the militarization of space will happen.