You can listen to the audio of the Lake Huron shootdown in the video below, via The Drive:
It’s small (the size of a “four wheeler,” probably meaning an ATV), it’s dark metallic and gives a good sun glint, has strings dangling from it, looks like a “container.”
Hmmm.
The government might not be protecting us for Chinese spying, and certainly isn’t protecting us from what might be an industrial/environmental disaster on the scale of Chernobyl, but hey, they’re lashing out at party balloons like there’s no tomorrow.
Pay no attention to the massive chemical release behind the curtain:
THREAD: Photos, videos, and news reports about the train derailment and toxic chemical release in East Palestine, Ohio.
This may be the largest environmental disaster in U.S. history.
One might think that “entertainment industry weirdo performs satanic dance number, sponsored by Pfizer” would be the sort of thing I’d yammer on about. But… this schtick is old. What, am I supposed to act surprised that a weirdo is a weirdo?
I’m of two minds about people who mess about with Satanic imagery. On the one hand, since I don’t believe in Satan… meh. You just look like a goober. On the other hand, some of these people *do* believe in Satan. And if *you* believe in Satan and you’re playing at Satanic stuff… it makes me wonder about your sanity, in the same way I’d look askance at a Cthulhu cultist. But in this case, I suspect that the Freedom Toons people are correct: it’s a desperate bid for attention, an attempt to fill an inner emptiness that will never, can never, be filled with cheap and hollow pursuits.
And I suspect the Pfizer people didn’t see this coming. Like they didn’t see Project Veritas coming.
The third season is yet another misguided waste of everyone’s time.
Whoa.
The previews look better than the first two execrable seasons, but that’s a low bar indeed.
I am reminded of a reaction video I recently saw. Even in my advancing decrepitude that’s not that big of a mental achievement, considering I saw this video yesterday:
The young lady in question watched “Galaxy Quest” without the benefit of being a fan of Star Trek. Without, in fact, the benefit of actually knowing much about Star Trek. And yet, with minimal exposure to TOS or TNG… she got “Galaxy Quest.” Maybe a few of the jokes skipped past her, but the main themes? Fully understood, accepted and appreciated. A point she raised that caught my attention: near the end when the nerd-kid is contacted and learns that his favorite show is actually real, the young lady stated that she thought that this must have been the dream of many Star Trek fans. Little does she know: whole generations of Trekkies and Trekkers lived in the desperate hope of living in the world of Star Trek. For some this meant daydreaming about serving aboard the Enterprise. For some it meant doing what needed to to become authors or actors or film/TV show makers in the hopes of bringing their own dreams of trek to life (looking at you, Seth MacFarlane). For some of us it meant going into science and engineering in the hopes of starting mankind on the road to trekking the stars. And her realization got me thinking.
Over the last twenty-some years some “Galaxy Quest,” it has been almost universally hailed as one of the best Star Trek Movies. It is certainly one of the movies that shows most clearly a love and understanding of the original Star Trek. Within the movie, an alien race has picked up TV transmissions of the sci-fi series “Galaxy Quest,” and they decided to rebuild their entire society to conform to the vision of “Galaxy Quest,” and in doing so the saved themselves from oblivion and gave themselves hope and a new reason to go on. So… my thinking is this: the “Galaxy Quest Test.”
The test is simple: take a series or a movie that claims to be Star Trek, and imagine that it gets beamed out into space. It is picked up by an earnest alien race capable of understanding it. They have much the same ethics, hopes and fears as humanity, even if they don’t look anything like us and are really rather innocent, despite the fact they are being ground out of existence. What are the chances that these aliens will watch the show or movie and decide that the vision they’ve watched and understood is such a wonderful thing that they will choose to emulate it?
I can see this with TOS. I can see it with TNG. I can see it with Lower Decks and certainly Prodigy. I can see it with Voyager. I can kinda see it with Deep Space Nine. But the Kelvin movies? *Any* season of Discovery or Picard? Not a chance in hell.
So, when watching Star Trek Picard season three, keep this question int he back of your mind: “What would Mathesar think of this?”
Turns out the Chinese are zapping surface targets with lasers. This *seems* to be a benign scientific technique, checking atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide and pollution and whatnot… but this is the Chinese Communist Party we’re talking about, so…
This sort of thing would be weird as hell to see out in the wild. I’m not sure if this is naked-eye visible, however, or if it took sensitive cameras to pick this up.
I don’t know what the Russian military was expecting, but being on the receiving end of the first industrial-scale use of robots to hunt down their soldiers one at a time was probably not high on their list.
The video below is a bit yammery, but some important and interesting points are raised, discussed and… dunno. Apparently there’s drama going on among a number of twitch streamers; I’m a bit proud to say I don’t know who the hell these people are, but the crux of the matter is that someone set up a website that shows deepfakes of a number of these “e-girls” in X-rated situations. Some of these women kinda do that now; some of them don’t. What’s the law on this sort of thing? What’s the ethics? Is it wrong to look at such things? Part of the drama is that some e-guy was found to have, ah, utilized the website… and he and his wife are personal friends with some of these women. Awkward. Is he in legal trouble? Seems unlikely. Is he in trouble with the friends? With his wife? Seems pretty likely.
We are in early days of this sort of thing. With the rise of AI art generators and constantly improving deepfake-tech, this sort of thing will only get more prominent, and society is not even really trying to play catch-up yet. As always, people ignore science fiction at their peril.
Soon enough, it will be possible to spool up Naughty Imagery/Videos of *everyone*, made to order. Like do-it-yourself genetic tinkering, this sort of tech is inevitable and unstoppable, and lots of people will want to do it. How will society handle dirty imagery, fake vs real being indistinguishable, being readily available of *everyone?* Seems to me that, eventually as people grow up with it, people just won’t care anymore. You could walk past a giant billboard showing *you* going at it with a tapir and you’ll hardly notice. What effects will that have on society and on people? On one hand, it’ll be damned hard to blackmail people. The job of private investigators will become first really easy, and then really hard, as their photos and videos become unusable as evidence, much less proof. But a larger effect might be an acceleration of the baby bust. As such things become virtually universal, interest in going at it with the opposite sex might very well fall to prit near zero. And thus baby-making might become rather a niche interest, and the populations of developed nations will slip into the dark to be replaced with large numbers of imports.
