I had to laugh over the trombone meme. That and Gunny the bear. There’s some arsonists around here who need a helicopter ride…
(The fire boss is complaining about the recular occurance of illegal drone flights in the fire area. The “unexplained” caused fire that was likely arson. 2 + 2 = ?)
If one cannot suppress utterly and totally every single quantum of one’s knowledge of military uniforms and rank, one should never, not ever, watch the pilot episode of Stargate: SG-1.
Oh. My. Flaming flamingos of doom. Holy moly, did whoever they hired to do costuming for the pilot mess up US uniforms. Maybe it was Canuckistan locals? There must be some show lore site somewhere that explains how… All Of That… happened.
Luckily they quickly acquired military advisors and some folks who knew how to read the frelling manual on uniforms insignia and such. But man, that pilot.
Dad was drafted late in the war (he was a draftsman for a steel company and likely got a deferment until enough factories were built) and originally was training for chem warfare. A broken collar bone in a “perfect” parachute landing exercise got him hospitalized and switched to be a (wait for it) draftsman. He was in the 8th Air Force, but late enough that his ocean cruise was to Okinawa, not England.
I got the impression that if the bombs didn’t happen/work properly, he would have found himself back in the chem warfare slot. $OLDEST_BROTHER was born before Dad deployed, but could have been an only child…
If anyone attempts to attack the CEO of Flock, Joe Carr needs to be charged for inciting it.
Assuming the quote is true; if not, then the website that made it up and promoted it needs to.
That evil shit wasn’t OK when they went after the health care CEO, it’s not suddenly cool when the “libertarians” think they found an acceptable target.
Odd how the fellow writes so much about ignored steps to deal with violations of the constitution, while utterly ignoring the constitutional steps for doing so.
In favor of flipping the board as a first step, which the Revolution didn’t do.
One of the features of the Constitution was making it difficult to change it, “for light and transient causes”. That same difficulty makes it difficult to change it even, “when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism”.
The government can almost instantly impose those abuses and usurpations at the stroke of a pen, while the constitutional steps for preventing them, or overturning them, is beyond the financial and temporal means of the majority of people in this country. Now add that to the 10-minute attention span of today’s citizens, and it is small wonder that many are in favor of flipping the board first. Especially when we see the Looney Left assaulting, smashing, stealing, and burning with virtual impunity at the drop of a hat. The only thing that seems to have held the Right back so far is pure conservative inertia.
We can do it quick and dirty, but it won’t last long; or we can do it the long, hard way, and it will last a lifetime (or 10).
Nobody mentioned needing to change the Constitution.
The issue is the guy who wants to set it on fire because he doesn’t get what he wants, and clearly thinks the processes in place won’t get what he wants, either. Isn’t even going to the point of making a rational argument to persuade others that his conclusion is correct– just assuming it, and going straight to blow it all up.
But wants to wrap himself in the armor of the folks who did the dang work, built the case, and only after many years laid out a rational reason that they did, indeed, need to fight.
I’m definitely getting suspicious of the anti-Flock stuff. (It doesn’t help that the guy with the “how to take down a flock camera tutorial looks like the platonic ideal of an Antifa goon.)
Sure, maybe they’ve just stupidly presented themselves as a convenient lightning-rod for a bunch of free-floating anger.
Or maybe a bunch of politicians who want to do even worse have decided that condemning Flock is a way to take the heat off themselves.
Whatever the case, Joe Carr was absolutely out of line. Especially if his signature is anywhere on the Flock contracts for his county.
A little girl was almost snatched this week, in Huston.
The multiple Flock cameras on the school right next to the park were all vandalized, and nobody saw nothing so probably organized bad guys, there, too.
Your argument is essentially “it’s for the children”. Consider all the other causes promoted or justified with the same phrase, you may understand why many people here remain unconvinced.
And it should be noted that the ubiquity of video recording is not going to go away even if this particular pole-saw-ing effort, and the more powerful politician pandering, succeeds.
The video records will be in the cloud from every single vehicle’s 360-degree-coverage cameras, doorbell cams (local PD already has a program where they request and one can voluntarily make one’s doorbell cam available for investigations in advance), red-light cameras, and the cameras on robotic lawn mowers.
Effort would be much better expended thinking about how to allow proper constrained public safety access to all of that, including from clankers, while protecting individual privacy in a society awash (aflooded?) in continuous all-angles video of all public and many private spaces.
All it will do is make it harder for private groups to get proof they are being attacked.
I would like a lot of reforms– one that came up recently in a private chat was data brokers being required to give a chain-of-custody for how they got the data.
I’ve got an address floating around which literally only existed in the Navy files which were breached by China.
I pity the poor State Security new hire, or these days the poor captive State Security clanker, who has to read the immensely boring SF-86 forms they got in their “extract everything” haul.
OTOH knowing I am in there means any thoughts of travel to the Middle Kingdom I might have entertained are tempered by extra visibility concerns.
Incidentally, my argument is the polite form of “hey, retards, this is why you’re being urged into mob action to remove a system that produces proof beyond ‘trust me, bro’.”
It is also an argument made much more elegantly by GK Chesterton:
“Suppose that a great commotion arises in the street about something, let us say a lamp-post, which many influential persons desire to pull down. A grey-clad monk, who is the spirit of the Middle Ages, is approached upon the matter, and begins to say, in the arid manner of the Schoolmen, “Let us first of all consider, my brethren, the value of Light. If Light be in itself good–”
At this point he is somewhat excusably knocked down. All the people make a rush for the lamp-post, the lamp-post is down in ten minutes, and they go about congratulating each other on their unmediaeval practicality.
But as things go on they do not work out so easily. Some people have pulled the lamp-post down because they wanted the electric light; some because they wanted old iron; some because they wanted darkness, because their deeds were evil. Some thought it not enough of a lamp-post, some too much; some acted because they wanted to smash municipal machinery; some because they wanted to smash something. And there is war in the night, no man knowing whom he strikes.
So, gradually and inevitably, to-day, to-morrow, or the next day, there comes back the conviction that the monk was right after all, and that all depends on what is the philosophy of Light. Only what we might have discussed under the gas-lamp, we now must discuss in the dark.”
You play GK Chesterton; I raise you James Madison:
“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
The sheer galling irony of calling on Madison’s “secure in your persons, houses, papers and effects” to support a gun-ban argument against security cameras is simply mindboggling.
Or maybe a bunch of politicians who want to do even worse have decided that condemning Flock is a way to take the heat off themselves.
Reminds me…. One of the notable things about Flock, the company, and their cameras… is the records are under control of the folks who own the camera, and they record every time they are accessed. It’s even recorded if they choose the “send to Flock for processing” option, which isn’t default.
Which means if you’ve got Flock, and “somehow” the data gets out, then there’s a record of who set it so that was possible, and who accessed it.
Which means if you’ve got Flock, and “somehow” the data gets out, then there’s a record of who set it so that was possible, and who accessed it.
That is indeed what the design documents and salesweasel brochures say happens. Stories every week provide lots of data points that there might be “over promise and under deliver” involved.
The stories every week about the Flock company are demonstrating that the data is accessed, and the access cannot be hidden. Even when it’s the company itself that accessed the data, they couldn’t delete the access logs, nor who accessed it.
Now consider how many of those freak out stories avoid telling you who set the access the way they did, and which specific person accessed it.
Question if you should be setting your hair on fire at their demand.
And before the “but the NSA” argument comes up, if you are going to set your hair on fire whenever a theoretical capability of state-actor-level hackers could potentially allow files to move without any audit trail, well, you’d be continuously bald.
:nod:
The way to deal with possible misuse/abuse is to make it so that the methods of covering that up are detectable, so you can catch people.
Husband pointed out that since the ’90s, the push for more logging of access to data has been sold to groups as catching when an outside actor breaks in, but has been very effective at catching inside actors who had very obviously been doing the sneaky stuff well before that point.
There just wasnt’ any way to catch them.
Day job has me still slightly IT- and infosec-adjacent, and to my understanding almost everything leaves discoverable tracks these days, so the fight between black hats and white hats is now how rapidly the white hats can detect those tracks and start to hunt the intrusions down.
It all starts to sound like body cams for cops – before they were widely adopted they were supposed to show the good guys not being good guys, but in real life they end up being used to show bad guys doing bad guy things and do prosecutions more effectively.
And the “ban kids from having phones in schools” push that started after kids started recording, and posting, proof that teachers were being utterly insane.
To Chase Oliver (and any other morons who think like him):
They had FLOCK cameras in 2020. What they didn’t have is Image Processing AI available at scale, so that all the levels of STASI from your HOA to the FBI had to spend time actually looking through the images, rather than 5000 clankers trained to classify your bumper sticker as contagious badthink.
God was merciful. He allowed us to see where this was headed, and try to do something about it. We’re still working on that part..
“… trained to *incorrectly* classify your bumper sticker…”
FIFY
There have been a number of incidents in which cops pulled over the wrong person after a flock license plate ping, usually at gun point, and even have sometimes released a dog on a puzzled motorist who doesn’t understand why he or she is being treated as a “most wanted criminal”. Flock collects data on misidentifications, but reportedly refuses to answer questions about the misidentification rate.
RE: Coffee plants evolving caffeine so as not to be eaten.
On an individual level, being something that humans find tasty kind of sucks, but on a species wide level, being tasty means that your kind will thrive and may very well outlive the ground you walk on, if humans find a way to take your species to the stars.
RE: The causes of death map.
Actually, the cause of death for Nevada should be Tony “The Ant” Spilotro. You could literally see the change in the murder rate whenever he moved into town.
Had a co-worker from South America. Used to come into the break room, fill his 2-cup mug halfway with sugar, then 1/4 coffee, 1/4 cream. I suspect he didn’t like ‘coffee’ he liked his ‘coffee flavored dessert’.
Never really got the hang of black coffee; like mine adulterated.
Some people, sure. Maybe a lot, I dunno. The vaguely coffee-ish sweet drinks are mostly what the wife and daughter like, although the wife has slowly come around to appreciating lightly sweetened coffee. I’m not sure those syrupy flavored lattes really count as coffee, but sugar and caffeine can be a potent combo.
Me, I’ve loved coffee for itself since I first tasted it. Grew up in a religion that wasn’t supposed to drink it, but tried it in my late teens and never looked back. We had Postum as a breakfast drink when I was a kid, and I’d drink it strong and unsweetened; turns out coffee falls into a category of flavors that I just naturally like. (I like it best with a small dash of heavy cream, but will take it black if I have to.) As a diabetic, liquid sugar is anathema, so a stimulating beverage that I don’t even want to put sugar in feels a bit like a gift from God.
Some people get all excited about beer and wine…while I can appreciate them, they’re an acquired taste that took a long time to develop, and I don’t seek them out. Whiskey, on the other hand…wife hates it, but it was love at first sip for me. (Bourbon, it was; Jim Beam, so not the best out there, but good enough. Might have been different if it’d been an Irish or a smoky Scotch; those, I don’t like so much.)
Anyway… YMMV. Horses for courses. De gustibus non disputandum. Etc., etc.
I suppose that’s the real question, then. How many would go for it even without the pick me up, and how many have grown to like it because they associate it with the pick me up?
The caffeine thing evolved to deter insects, which get so overstimulated on consuming those compounds that they basically shake themselves to death.
The fact that the caffeine is concentrated in a pit inside an edible fruit, said fruit famously eaten by civets and subsequently collected from their poop, roasted and ground to make that uniquely flavored coffee, implies a nuanced approach by the plant to “deterrence” in its pursuit of survival.
No, no, no — the Communist thinks that the individual exists for the sake of the Communist state. That’s why they can object to things that they would do to you without hesitation.
Evil clowns, eh? There’s room under my bed but I think my Roomba scares them.
Personal space – oh, yeah.
Water slides; glad I am not a Pharoah. Aside from being dead for a few thousand years, I don’t like water slides.
And that’s an example of Special Ed. The act of telling, or maybe the guy.
I don’t think those drones will go to suburbia.
Why is there a whisky-swilling demon in my living room? He smells of carp!
Kirk was right – too high a price!
Revenge story: Lived in a dorm in San Francisco in college, and eventually the school arranged that we could get phones in our rooms (long pre-cell phone). Room mate and I signed up. We kept getting random calls for ‘Kathy’. Turns out SF had a limited pool of numbers (equipment problem) so numbers could not be held out of service very long. So we began to answer those calls with ‘Sorry, she can’t come to the phone right now, she’s in bed with [other room mate].’ Sometimes I wonder who Kathy was.
Girl Scouts, Cav Scouts – it’s all the same, right?
Zeroing my M203 might make me unwelcome at my gun club. Looks like a 37 mm launcher and 10 rounds (5 flash bang, 5 concussion) is available for $470; real M203s are NFA, and so is the ammo. If the NFA does finally go away the $200 tax stamp on. each. round. goes away.
Okay, now I’m picturing “Kathy” as a 98-year-old great-great-grandmother. And all of Kathy’s acquaintances hang up the phone saying, “Gee, Kathy has apparently turned into quite the cougar since the last time I talked to her. I wish I were getting half of the action she gets!”
(Why, was that a whisky-swigging demon in a sequined waistcoat that just popped out of my soul? I believe it was!)
any “anti personnel” 37mm round is a “destructive device” NFA item. (Solid slug, beanbag, rubber pellets, etc) Basicly limited to signal smoke/flare and line throwing.
it is “highly” unlikely the current SCOTUS will dispell NFA. Expect a pretzel-logic on par with “tax/non-tax obaminationcare”.
I expect them to throw out the tax cut, not the law. The dissent from Thomas will be epic.
You can also expect the next congress will re-apply the tax, even if they only go for a $1 or $5 “compromise” that most RINOs will back. Even if they just require a postage stamp as tax, the monster survives.
I showed the trombone meme to a retired trombonist. He got the most interesting look on his face. I may never look at the symphony’s brass section in quite the same way …
One day she went with some friends to try out – social thing, completely. Tried a couple brass, made a noise come out of a trombone, music director said ‘that’s the one!’
So we bought her a student trombone for 3 years; donated it to the school just before we moved up from CA. Always could tell when she had actually been practicing – she played better, surprise surprise. Sat behind the band section in the stands for a couple football games. Rowdy bunch!
That’s how she got to drive to school – backpack of school stuff, trombone, 0730 practice kind of made bus impractical.
Anyway, thereupon became familiar with trombonist jokes. My favorite:
Q: How do you tell the trombonist’s kids at the playground? A: Can’t swing, don’t know how to use the slide.
There’s a couple pages of those on line somewhere.
The trombonist mentioned above is quite happy to remind everyone that in the Brahms Requiem, the scripture is translated into German as “then shall the last trombone sound and the dead be raised” rather than trumpet. Makes me wonder if he has … Plans.
”…used to track people and punish them for doing things like going to church…”
Yeah, instead of surveilling a local church first person and compiling lists of attendees as they actually did out here, they could do the exact same thing much more efficiently using a clanker cam.
Given that open source reporting had Mossad thoroughly penetrating traffic cams across Iran, allowing them to track and target high value targets in real time in their bombing campaign, and also given Mossad had to build the AI tracking layer from scratch themselves to analyze the live camera data where Flock has already done that bit, the better question would be “How long has the PRC been inside Flock’s computer systems?”
There are pictures from the PRC of traffic light arms that look like they’ve got a flock of birds hanging out on them… until you zoom in and notice that each of the “birds” is actually an individual camera.
And if you think the guy in the ghillie suit is blowing smoke, why were there Koreans on the roofs of those stores in ‘92 or why was Kyle Rittenhouse (and others) on the streets that. Sure, the police departments were still extant, but they were all tied up, weren’t they?
Now I’m disturbed by that serpent-colored somethingorother floating above Miz Medusa’s head like an out-of-place cartoon eyebrow. If those wavy snakelocks are detachable or can jump or slither away at will, that makes Miss Litho-Lady even more of a menace…
Re the Ghost One: I knew a saloonkeeper in Okinawa City many decades ago. Apparently, a typical female ghost in Okinawa has pale skin and long, black hair. Further, the Vanishing Taxi Passenger story is as well-known over there as it is in the U.S. The saloonkeeper, a bit pale with long, black hair, tended to make older cab drivers nervous if she needed a ride late at night. She said she always wondered what would have happened if she’d been wearing a white kimono as well. Driver would probably have had a coronary!
I keep saying Fauxi’s place in history should be right next to Mengele; I neglected to include Goebbels. So Fauxi belongs right between Goebbels and Mengele.
I’ve just learned that in April of this year, Cambridge University Press published a paper with the following points (very rough paraphrase, particularly item #2) –
1.) The women’s equality movement that started in the ’60s has allowed women to improve themselves
2.) This has caused them to view the majority of men as no longer being good enough to raise kids with
3.) This has caused a fertility crisis
4.) Resolve the crisis by taxing men and using the money to encourage women to become single mothers
I’m both disgusted… and not at all surprised that this was published.
V/R William Lehman ________________________________
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Mmmmm…. memes! Yummmmmmy! Thanks!
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Now add getting paid well for dealing with those monsters and you have the premise for Monster Hunter: International.
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I had to laugh over the trombone meme. That and Gunny the bear. There’s some arsonists around here who need a helicopter ride…
(The fire boss is complaining about the recular occurance of illegal drone flights in the fire area. The “unexplained” caused fire that was likely arson. 2 + 2 = ?)
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The first detail I noticed about the Data centaur was his collar. Four pips. Completely ruined.
This must be the barest taste of what ex-military types feel when looking at Hollywood ‘uniforms.’
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If one cannot suppress utterly and totally every single quantum of one’s knowledge of military uniforms and rank, one should never, not ever, watch the pilot episode of Stargate: SG-1.
Oh. My. Flaming flamingos of doom. Holy moly, did whoever they hired to do costuming for the pilot mess up US uniforms. Maybe it was Canuckistan locals? There must be some show lore site somewhere that explains how… All Of That… happened.
Luckily they quickly acquired military advisors and some folks who knew how to read the frelling manual on uniforms insignia and such. But man, that pilot.
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And more to your point: Data Centaur somehow achieved the rank of “Captain” while still wearing an operations-gold uniform tunic.
Paying attention is a curse.
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Freddy from Germany compilation.
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I want coffee!!!! 🐲🐲🐲🐲🐲🐲🐲🐲🐲🐲🐲🐲🐲🐲🐲🐲
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Another fine crop; congratulations.
I would say the rice cooker one is
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Dad was drafted late in the war (he was a draftsman for a steel company and likely got a deferment until enough factories were built) and originally was training for chem warfare. A broken collar bone in a “perfect” parachute landing exercise got him hospitalized and switched to be a (wait for it) draftsman. He was in the 8th Air Force, but late enough that his ocean cruise was to Okinawa, not England.
I got the impression that if the bombs didn’t happen/work properly, he would have found himself back in the chem warfare slot. $OLDEST_BROTHER was born before Dad deployed, but could have been an only child…
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If anyone attempts to attack the CEO of Flock, Joe Carr needs to be charged for inciting it.
Assuming the quote is true; if not, then the website that made it up and promoted it needs to.
That evil shit wasn’t OK when they went after the health care CEO, it’s not suddenly cool when the “libertarians” think they found an acceptable target.
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BOLDIN: Constitution Enforcement – The Solution from the Revolution – Granite Grok
https://granitegrok.com/national/2026/08/boldin-constitution-enforcement-the-solution-from-the-revolution
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Odd how the fellow writes so much about ignored steps to deal with violations of the constitution, while utterly ignoring the constitutional steps for doing so.
In favor of flipping the board as a first step, which the Revolution didn’t do.
Odd, that.
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One of the features of the Constitution was making it difficult to change it, “for light and transient causes”. That same difficulty makes it difficult to change it even, “when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism”.
The government can almost instantly impose those abuses and usurpations at the stroke of a pen, while the constitutional steps for preventing them, or overturning them, is beyond the financial and temporal means of the majority of people in this country. Now add that to the 10-minute attention span of today’s citizens, and it is small wonder that many are in favor of flipping the board first. Especially when we see the Looney Left assaulting, smashing, stealing, and burning with virtual impunity at the drop of a hat. The only thing that seems to have held the Right back so far is pure conservative inertia.
We can do it quick and dirty, but it won’t last long; or we can do it the long, hard way, and it will last a lifetime (or 10).
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Nobody mentioned needing to change the Constitution.
The issue is the guy who wants to set it on fire because he doesn’t get what he wants, and clearly thinks the processes in place won’t get what he wants, either. Isn’t even going to the point of making a rational argument to persuade others that his conclusion is correct– just assuming it, and going straight to blow it all up.
But wants to wrap himself in the armor of the folks who did the dang work, built the case, and only after many years laid out a rational reason that they did, indeed, need to fight.
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This is likely to be half a duplicate.
I’m definitely getting suspicious of the anti-Flock stuff. (It doesn’t help that the guy with the “how to take down a flock camera tutorial looks like the platonic ideal of an Antifa goon.)
Sure, maybe they’ve just stupidly presented themselves as a convenient lightning-rod for a bunch of free-floating anger.
Or maybe a bunch of politicians who want to do even worse have decided that condemning Flock is a way to take the heat off themselves.
Whatever the case, Joe Carr was absolutely out of line. Especially if his signature is anywhere on the Flock contracts for his county.
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A little girl was almost snatched this week, in Huston.
The multiple Flock cameras on the school right next to the park were all vandalized, and nobody saw nothing so probably organized bad guys, there, too.
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Your argument is essentially “it’s for the children”. Consider all the other causes promoted or justified with the same phrase, you may understand why many people here remain unconvinced.
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Your argument is literally “I am scared of this, it must be banned.”
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And it should be noted that the ubiquity of video recording is not going to go away even if this particular pole-saw-ing effort, and the more powerful politician pandering, succeeds.
The video records will be in the cloud from every single vehicle’s 360-degree-coverage cameras, doorbell cams (local PD already has a program where they request and one can voluntarily make one’s doorbell cam available for investigations in advance), red-light cameras, and the cameras on robotic lawn mowers.
Effort would be much better expended thinking about how to allow proper constrained public safety access to all of that, including from clankers, while protecting individual privacy in a society awash (aflooded?) in continuous all-angles video of all public and many private spaces.
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Yep.
All it will do is make it harder for private groups to get proof they are being attacked.
I would like a lot of reforms– one that came up recently in a private chat was data brokers being required to give a chain-of-custody for how they got the data.
I’ve got an address floating around which literally only existed in the Navy files which were breached by China.
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I pity the poor State Security new hire, or these days the poor captive State Security clanker, who has to read the immensely boring SF-86 forms they got in their “extract everything” haul.
OTOH knowing I am in there means any thoughts of travel to the Middle Kingdom I might have entertained are tempered by extra visibility concerns.
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Incidentally, my argument is the polite form of “hey, retards, this is why you’re being urged into mob action to remove a system that produces proof beyond ‘trust me, bro’.”
It is also an argument made much more elegantly by GK Chesterton:
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You play GK Chesterton; I raise you James Madison:
“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
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That card might hit if you weren’t talking about public roads.
Which are neither persons, houses, papers, nor effects.
Still waiting for a rational argument.
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Actually… on scrolling back up… I notice you haven’t bothered to engage with any of the arguments.
You just keep throwing stuff out at random.
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The sheer galling irony of calling on Madison’s “secure in your persons, houses, papers and effects” to support a gun-ban argument against security cameras is simply mindboggling.
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Reminds me…. One of the notable things about Flock, the company, and their cameras… is the records are under control of the folks who own the camera, and they record every time they are accessed. It’s even recorded if they choose the “send to Flock for processing” option, which isn’t default.
Which means if you’ve got Flock, and “somehow” the data gets out, then there’s a record of who set it so that was possible, and who accessed it.
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That is indeed what the design documents and salesweasel brochures say happens. Stories every week provide lots of data points that there might be “over promise and under deliver” involved.
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:dryly:
The stories every week about the Flock company are demonstrating that the data is accessed, and the access cannot be hidden. Even when it’s the company itself that accessed the data, they couldn’t delete the access logs, nor who accessed it.
Now consider how many of those freak out stories avoid telling you who set the access the way they did, and which specific person accessed it.
Question if you should be setting your hair on fire at their demand.
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And before the “but the NSA” argument comes up, if you are going to set your hair on fire whenever a theoretical capability of state-actor-level hackers could potentially allow files to move without any audit trail, well, you’d be continuously bald.
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:nod:
The way to deal with possible misuse/abuse is to make it so that the methods of covering that up are detectable, so you can catch people.
Husband pointed out that since the ’90s, the push for more logging of access to data has been sold to groups as catching when an outside actor breaks in, but has been very effective at catching inside actors who had very obviously been doing the sneaky stuff well before that point.
There just wasnt’ any way to catch them.
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Day job has me still slightly IT- and infosec-adjacent, and to my understanding almost everything leaves discoverable tracks these days, so the fight between black hats and white hats is now how rapidly the white hats can detect those tracks and start to hunt the intrusions down.
It all starts to sound like body cams for cops – before they were widely adopted they were supposed to show the good guys not being good guys, but in real life they end up being used to show bad guys doing bad guy things and do prosecutions more effectively.
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And the “ban kids from having phones in schools” push that started after kids started recording, and posting, proof that teachers were being utterly insane.
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Yeah, I think we need to issue body cams to students. And teachers. It’s for the children. And the income from the compilation episodes on YT.
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To Chase Oliver (and any other morons who think like him):
They had FLOCK cameras in 2020. What they didn’t have is Image Processing AI available at scale, so that all the levels of STASI from your HOA to the FBI had to spend time actually looking through the images, rather than 5000 clankers trained to classify your bumper sticker as contagious badthink.
God was merciful. He allowed us to see where this was headed, and try to do something about it. We’re still working on that part..
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“… trained to *incorrectly* classify your bumper sticker…”
FIFY
There have been a number of incidents in which cops pulled over the wrong person after a flock license plate ping, usually at gun point, and even have sometimes released a dog on a puzzled motorist who doesn’t understand why he or she is being treated as a “most wanted criminal”. Flock collects data on misidentifications, but reportedly refuses to answer questions about the misidentification rate.
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RE: Coffee plants evolving caffeine so as not to be eaten.
On an individual level, being something that humans find tasty kind of sucks, but on a species wide level, being tasty means that your kind will thrive and may very well outlive the ground you walk on, if humans find a way to take your species to the stars.
RE: The causes of death map.
Actually, the cause of death for Nevada should be Tony “The Ant” Spilotro. You could literally see the change in the murder rate whenever he moved into town.
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Eh…
I’m going to note that I don’t find coffee tasty. In fact, I rather dislike coffee-flavored things such as candies, and I don’t like the smell of it.
Also note that I’m not a coffee drinker, and as a result I don’t rely on it to “wake up”, or otherwise influence my day.
My suspicion is that without the caffeine addiction, people wouldn’t like the taste of coffee all that much.
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Had a co-worker from South America. Used to come into the break room, fill his 2-cup mug halfway with sugar, then 1/4 coffee, 1/4 cream. I suspect he didn’t like ‘coffee’ he liked his ‘coffee flavored dessert’.
Never really got the hang of black coffee; like mine adulterated.
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Some people, sure. Maybe a lot, I dunno. The vaguely coffee-ish sweet drinks are mostly what the wife and daughter like, although the wife has slowly come around to appreciating lightly sweetened coffee. I’m not sure those syrupy flavored lattes really count as coffee, but sugar and caffeine can be a potent combo.
Me, I’ve loved coffee for itself since I first tasted it. Grew up in a religion that wasn’t supposed to drink it, but tried it in my late teens and never looked back. We had Postum as a breakfast drink when I was a kid, and I’d drink it strong and unsweetened; turns out coffee falls into a category of flavors that I just naturally like. (I like it best with a small dash of heavy cream, but will take it black if I have to.) As a diabetic, liquid sugar is anathema, so a stimulating beverage that I don’t even want to put sugar in feels a bit like a gift from God.
Some people get all excited about beer and wine…while I can appreciate them, they’re an acquired taste that took a long time to develop, and I don’t seek them out. Whiskey, on the other hand…wife hates it, but it was love at first sip for me. (Bourbon, it was; Jim Beam, so not the best out there, but good enough. Might have been different if it’d been an Irish or a smoky Scotch; those, I don’t like so much.)
Anyway… YMMV. Horses for courses. De gustibus non disputandum. Etc., etc.
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Ah. You and I have similar palates.
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I suppose that’s the real question, then. How many would go for it even without the pick me up, and how many have grown to like it because they associate it with the pick me up?
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The caffeine thing evolved to deter insects, which get so overstimulated on consuming those compounds that they basically shake themselves to death.
The fact that the caffeine is concentrated in a pit inside an edible fruit, said fruit famously eaten by civets and subsequently collected from their poop, roasted and ground to make that uniquely flavored coffee, implies a nuanced approach by the plant to “deterrence” in its pursuit of survival.
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Not so sure about “slower”. I’ve done more dumb stuff in the last 12 years than in the previous 65.
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No, no, no — the Communist thinks that the individual exists for the sake of the Communist state. That’s why they can object to things that they would do to you without hesitation.
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Evil clowns, eh? There’s room under my bed but I think my Roomba scares them.
Personal space – oh, yeah.
Water slides; glad I am not a Pharoah. Aside from being dead for a few thousand years, I don’t like water slides.
And that’s an example of Special Ed. The act of telling, or maybe the guy.
I don’t think those drones will go to suburbia.
Why is there a whisky-swilling demon in my living room? He smells of carp!
Kirk was right – too high a price!
Revenge story: Lived in a dorm in San Francisco in college, and eventually the school arranged that we could get phones in our rooms (long pre-cell phone). Room mate and I signed up. We kept getting random calls for ‘Kathy’. Turns out SF had a limited pool of numbers (equipment problem) so numbers could not be held out of service very long. So we began to answer those calls with ‘Sorry, she can’t come to the phone right now, she’s in bed with [other room mate].’ Sometimes I wonder who Kathy was.
Girl Scouts, Cav Scouts – it’s all the same, right?
Zeroing my M203 might make me unwelcome at my gun club. Looks like a 37 mm launcher and 10 rounds (5 flash bang, 5 concussion) is available for $470; real M203s are NFA, and so is the ammo. If the NFA does finally go away the $200 tax stamp on. each. round. goes away.
That Fifth Horse(wo)man …
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Okay, now I’m picturing “Kathy” as a 98-year-old great-great-grandmother. And all of Kathy’s acquaintances hang up the phone saying, “Gee, Kathy has apparently turned into quite the cougar since the last time I talked to her. I wish I were getting half of the action she gets!”
(Why, was that a whisky-swigging demon in a sequined waistcoat that just popped out of my soul? I believe it was!)
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any “anti personnel” 37mm round is a “destructive device” NFA item. (Solid slug, beanbag, rubber pellets, etc) Basicly limited to signal smoke/flare and line throwing.
it is “highly” unlikely the current SCOTUS will dispell NFA. Expect a pretzel-logic on par with “tax/non-tax obaminationcare”.
I expect them to throw out the tax cut, not the law. The dissent from Thomas will be epic.
You can also expect the next congress will re-apply the tax, even if they only go for a $1 or $5 “compromise” that most RINOs will back. Even if they just require a postage stamp as tax, the monster survives.
Its not over yet. Keep pushing. We will win.
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SFBS!
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best memes yet
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I showed the trombone meme to a retired trombonist. He got the most interesting look on his face. I may never look at the symphony’s brass section in quite the same way …
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My daughter played trombone in HS marching band.
One day she went with some friends to try out – social thing, completely. Tried a couple brass, made a noise come out of a trombone, music director said ‘that’s the one!’
So we bought her a student trombone for 3 years; donated it to the school just before we moved up from CA. Always could tell when she had actually been practicing – she played better, surprise surprise. Sat behind the band section in the stands for a couple football games. Rowdy bunch!
That’s how she got to drive to school – backpack of school stuff, trombone, 0730 practice kind of made bus impractical.
Anyway, thereupon became familiar with trombonist jokes. My favorite:
Q: How do you tell the trombonist’s kids at the playground? A: Can’t swing, don’t know how to use the slide.
There’s a couple pages of those on line somewhere.
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The trombonist mentioned above is quite happy to remind everyone that in the Brahms Requiem, the scripture is translated into German as “then shall the last trombone sound and the dead be raised” rather than trumpet. Makes me wonder if he has … Plans.
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”…used to track people and punish them for doing things like going to church…”
Yeah, instead of surveilling a local church first person and compiling lists of attendees as they actually did out here, they could do the exact same thing much more efficiently using a clanker cam.
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Does the PRC use Flock?
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Given that open source reporting had Mossad thoroughly penetrating traffic cams across Iran, allowing them to track and target high value targets in real time in their bombing campaign, and also given Mossad had to build the AI tracking layer from scratch themselves to analyze the live camera data where Flock has already done that bit, the better question would be “How long has the PRC been inside Flock’s computer systems?”
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There are pictures from the PRC of traffic light arms that look like they’ve got a flock of birds hanging out on them… until you zoom in and notice that each of the “birds” is actually an individual camera.
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And if you think the guy in the ghillie suit is blowing smoke, why were there Koreans on the roofs of those stores in ‘92 or why was Kyle Rittenhouse (and others) on the streets that. Sure, the police departments were still extant, but they were all tied up, weren’t they?
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TOFCIITMT just doesn’t roll off the tongue the way TANSTAAFL does. :)
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YFCITM (your free cheese is in the mousetrap)
You just have to massage it a bit. :)
Hmmm… Still doesn’t have the same ring as an acronym. You’re right.
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Now I’m disturbed by that serpent-colored somethingorother floating above Miz Medusa’s head like an out-of-place cartoon eyebrow. If those wavy snakelocks are detachable or can jump or slither away at will, that makes Miss Litho-Lady even more of a menace…
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Re the Ghost One: I knew a saloonkeeper in Okinawa City many decades ago. Apparently, a typical female ghost in Okinawa has pale skin and long, black hair. Further, the Vanishing Taxi Passenger story is as well-known over there as it is in the U.S. The saloonkeeper, a bit pale with long, black hair, tended to make older cab drivers nervous if she needed a ride late at night. She said she always wondered what would have happened if she’d been wearing a white kimono as well. Driver would probably have had a coronary!
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https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HQbxDxRWQAAkf4M?format=jpg&name=4096×4096
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I keep saying Fauxi’s place in history should be right next to Mengele; I neglected to include Goebbels. So Fauxi belongs right between Goebbels and Mengele.
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Not a meme, though it ought to be…
I’ve just learned that in April of this year, Cambridge University Press published a paper with the following points (very rough paraphrase, particularly item #2) –
1.) The women’s equality movement that started in the ’60s has allowed women to improve themselves
2.) This has caused them to view the majority of men as no longer being good enough to raise kids with
3.) This has caused a fertility crisis
4.) Resolve the crisis by taxing men and using the money to encourage women to become single mothers
I’m both disgusted… and not at all surprised that this was published.
/sigh
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https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/9eb6a4e4-f43f-4d4e-8308-1d4e620a9323_742x766.png
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