“Palestinians” decided it would be not only a good idea to launch thousands of rockets into Israel, but to send a large number of invaders into Israel to slaughter civilians. I’m not sure what they thought they’d gain from this; it sure as hell won’t be the overthrow of Israel. Perhaps it will be the conversion of Gaza into a depopulated buffer zone.
Palestinian Fighters are continuing to roam the Streets in Southern Israel where they are continuing to Massacring any Men, Women, and Children that they see. pic.twitter.com/yxo5Bpvq5G
Is it proper to shoot a stranger who follows you around at close distance, behaves menacingly and has his buddies film you? This jury said “yes.” My main question: “Why did this even go to trial?”
This is a good precedent. Pranksters suck. They *pretend* to be an immanent threat, then when faced with physical force, claim “It’s just a prank, bro!” Naw. Acting like a threat makes you a valid target for responding to you as if you are a threat. Maybe instead of trying to terrify people for clicks, you do something productive.
Sadly, the victim was convicted of some firearms charge, which doesn’t make sense given that the jury recognized that this was a self defense situation. Never forget: even in the most obvious self defense situation, where everything is as clear as can be… we’re operating in a system of anarcho-tyranny where the government *wants* you to live in fear of actual criminals. Defend yourself, your stuff, your friends or family, the government will do what it can to drop an anvil on you. Because you defending yourself offends the powers that be somehow.
Here’s one of the videos of the incident filmed by one of the villains co-conspirators:
According to a criminal complaint, Davis obtained an involuntary commitment under the Mental Health Procedure Act for a woman with whom he had a relationship.
There. Right there. That’s enough to go “Hold up, wait a minute, something ain’t right.” But even better, he found her out in the wild, tackled her and rolled her around on the rocks. Weird enough, but he’s substantially larger than her. In the video she *seems* reasonable enough under the circumstances. Of course the video starts with the action already in progress; perhaps she was going bugnuts prior to this. But what seems to be an ex boyfriend cop hunting down a woman out with another man, is a story that doesn’t sit right from the get-go
Some of the comentariat are complaining that the cameraman – possibly the new boyfriend – isn’t physically intervening. I get the impulse to do so… but I also understand that documenting the event is in all likelihood the best approach. Are you going to fight off the cop? Maybe, but then *other* cops will come hunt you down. Assuming the first guy doesn’t plug you or arrest you. Stand back, film, and see justice done in the end. Not as manly, not as satisfying… but a lot smarter.
Note that states that have laws against “high capacity” magazines and “assault” rifles typically have set-asides for off duty cops.
Yet another article about how young men are simply giving up on ever meeting anybody. The article isn’t *wrong,* it simply provides no solutions. Which… is kinda understandable. Nobody really knows how to solve this other than to destroy, outlaw, ban, erase social media and online dating and the ability for people to search *far* afield for their matches.
“That was his first date in three years. He says he once went six months without getting a single match on a dating app, even though he pays $30 in monthly fees between OkCupid, Bumble, and Hinge. If you count high school, when he went to the movies with a classmate, Jammall says he’s been on a total of three dates his entire life.
“And now, driving home from his date, it hit him like a ton of bricks: Why do I even do this at all? “
This sort of description is bad news for society, and it’s only getting worse.
Once more I’m left to wonder if this is an unintended consequence of various social and technological phenomena… or if it was intended from the get-go. Who benefits from the men of Western nations giving up on marriage, families, satisfaction, happiness? Certainly not Western nations. Perhaps certain sectors of those nations, looking to remake them into something else; perhaps enemy nations playing a long game, hoping to cause population collapse and demoralization in the West. And just maybe, as always, alien invaders looking to depopulate the more effective nations prior to invasion and conquest. Shrug.
Lots of people think we’re on the cusp of ditching fossil fuels in favor of an all-electric “renewable” and “green” world. There are of course a vast number of problems with this… when they say “all electric” they almost never mean “all nuclear,” but instead want to pave over the fields with a million acres of solar panels and fill the seas with whale-confounding wind turbines. But there are issues beyond just what method will produce the volts and amps. For instance… all the batteries will need to be filled with metals dug out of the Earth; electric motors and a billion miles of power lines will need to be processed from all the copper we can scrape up. And the problem seems to be that at current resource extraction (i.e. mining) rates, we’re nowhere near able to deliver those materials.
So it seems we have a few options:
1) Turn Earth into a giant open pit. To hell with the environment… we need to save the environment!
2) Go all-electric… and just tell people to suck it up, they’ll learn to live with less. 15-minute cities will seem like the wildest dream of raving libertarians. Personal vehicles? Gone. Traveling any sort of distance at all? Prohibitively expensive to simply prohibited. Air conditioning? A myth from the Old Ones.
3) Asteroid mining. Everything we might need is available a million times over floating out in space; the effort to retrieve it will open spaceflight to mankind in a way never before dreamed, spreading civilization and terrestrial biology to the furthest regions of the solar system.
Which will it be?
There is physically not enough material at current extraction rates to produce one generation of technology (which needs to be replaced every 20 years or so) to phase out fossil fuels. We either better start ramping up our mining efforts or drop this fantasy. pic.twitter.com/XMNngP9cc3
Russia’s war in Ukraine has driven home the usefulness of dropping things from quadcopters. They can carry surprising payloads a good distance and place them with some fair accuracy; in war, payloads such as grenade, mortar shells, RPG warheads are obvious and useful choices.
But then there’s this:
It’s not immediately obvious why the owner of a heating & cooling company would use a drone to drop dye packs into private and motel swimming pools. This makes the pools undesirable for swimming and costs the owners large sums to not only flush the pools but clean them. And it does not seem like his business benefits from that; if his company specialized in pool maintenance, it’d make sense. Maybe he just doesn’t like swimming pools.
The dye packs seem unlikely to be much of a health hazard… even if they are somewhat toxic, the sickly green color would dissuade people from getting in the water. But there are other things that could be easily dropped that would be much less obvious and far more dangerous. If the drone operators goal was terrorism or simple mayhem, I can think of a *lot* of things that could be dropped in a pool (or elsewhere) that would be nightmarish.
The goal of *most* crimes is not terrorism. Most criminals, I suspect, would be just as happy if their crimes went un-noticed. In those cases, drones are somewhat limited. They are useful for smuggling… crossing borders with drugs, say, or dropping drugs, phones, weapons, cash into prison yards. Most crime would seem to involve some sort of theft, and, so far, quadcopters seem of limited utility there. Given that shoplifting is not only a largely unopposed crime, in many of the worst districts it’s not even a *crime* anymore, you hardly need to make much effort to technologically innovate in the field.
Maybe there’ll be a bank robbery (or a heist movie) where the thieves get out of the bank and, instead of trying to escape with large sacks of cash, they hook them to waiting drones. The cash flies off, and now the thieves are unburdened as they attempt to make their escape.
And then there’ll be the *darker* bank heist movie: drones are used to make off with the sacks of cash. But that’s not the end: on some sort of predictable basis, subsets of that cash are released by drone over a public area. So people begin to gather in their masses to snag the bills. And then once a big enough crowd is gathered, another set of bills is dumped on them. This time, though, the bills have been soaked in smallpox or some such…
It sure seems like the era of “superhero movies” being a license to print money is over. Granted the DCEU flicks have not had a great track record, but the latest outing, “Blue Beetle,” seems to be shaping up to be a *disaster.*
The production budget was $104 million. The marketing was probably the same, so the cost of the movie was $208 million. As of today, it has taken in $59M domestic, $46M foreign. But the studio only gets half the US box office ($29.5M) and about a third of the foreign ($15.3M), for a total of $44.8M. The movie was released 19 days ago, so it still has time to rake in some more moolah, but unless some amazing miracle occurs I have trouble seeing it reaching $60 in actual returns to the studio. If it does it will have lost Warner bros “only” $148 *million* dollars.
Couple “superhero fatigue” with “Blue Beetle? Who’s that?” and you could have predicted that this wouldn’t do so great. Add in the disastrous marketing (a DC superhero movie that features a prominent character calling Batman a fascist is not a great idea) and this flick was doomed from the get-go.
Methane levels in the atmosphere seem to be rising steeply. Since methane is a much more potent “greenhouse gas” than CO2, this could, perhaps, maybe, result in the end of the ice age that we’re currently in… within a few decades. The one good thing is that methane does not have a long lifespan, getting oxidized within a few years. But that’ll only help if the methane release – which seems to be coming from African wetlands – stops. of course, if the climate suddenly gets way hotter, the African wetlands releasing methane via decomposition of dead vegetable matter might turn into desert area, resulting in the eventual end of the methane release. Which means within a dozen or so years of that the methane will have burned out and the climate can descend back into good ol’ ice age status. *Proper* ice age, with glaciers covering continents and land bridges everywhere. This will be aided by the fact that humans will have been largely wiped out at that point. Doubtless industrial civilization will have either moved off-world or simply been exterminated; and with no easy access to oil or coal anymore, anthropogenic CO2 emissions will be minimal.
A sad percentage of my cyanotypes fail… faded, blurry or spotty. Sometimes these failure are due to bad craftsmanship; sometimes to material deficiencies, and surprisingly often, environmental factors (humidity has wreaked havoc, see the “spots”). Mostly these get simply tossed, meaning a lot of material, time and effort are wasted.
But it occurred to me that while they’d stink as proper blueprints, they might make dandy giftwrapping paper. So I’ll try that. I’m thinking of ebaying this lot of A-12 diagrams. These are all about 24X36 inches. Five sheets; if these were all successful, that’d be more than three hundred dollars worth of blueprints. Obviously not worth that, some fraction. And instead of being mailed rolled, they’ll be simply folded and sent in a padded envelope. If interested, send an email. If I get an offer that overcomes my depression at the failure these otherwise represent, that’d be great. Otherwise, ebay.
It’s well known that a lot of cops are not great people. Ill tempered, quick to anger and violence, ready to smack someone around, break rules, break laws, corrupt, willing to enforce unjust and unconstitutional laws. Why are they like this? Well, part of it is doubtless due to some of them having been not great people before they were cops, and were drawn to being a cop by the allure of power. But then there are doubtless other not great cops who started off as great people, intending to protect and serve. And then they spend years encountering the very worst of society. Murders, rapists, thieves, Socialists, the worst of the worst. This has got to grind a person down. But it seems to me that even more damaging to a cops psyche are the run of the mill scumbags they run into more commonly than TV-movie villains. People who are riding the Dunning-Kruger effect *hard,* marrying stupidity with unearned entitlement. Making every second of the interaction a misery. People like these specimens:
And then you get the lunatics, the type who are celebrated by our social betters, but who really aught to be in loonie bins:
Said it before, will say it many, many more times: we need phasers with stun settin
