I gotta say, I’ve never come across top secret documents about ongoing Presidential security matters just flopping about on the road. The story is unclear, but this seems to be an Irish document rather than a White House document. Which, given this White House, is honestly a bit surprising.
So there I am minding my own business when a text message comes in from my dad. Nothing unusual there. But the message is long, rambling, kinda stream-of-consciousness, seemingly part of a conversation I wasn’t a part of. I have received messages meant for other people before, but the format of the message, and the length of it, were quite unlike my dad’s normal type of messages. So I send him a “WTF” response. A few minutes later, clarification: the phone *listened* to my dad as he held a conversation with someone else, transcribed both sides of the conversation into a single kinda gibberishy paragraph, and then decided to send that transcript to me.
At no point in the process was my dad clued in to this; the phone did it itself.
So… who else gets these transcripts? The NSA? FBI? IRS? The Russians? And as seems most likely, the Chinese?
Something to keep in mind: if your phone, or Alexa, Siri, HAL, or any other modern device *can* hear you, it *does* hear you. And sometimes it does stuff with what it hears.
Now pardon me while I wrap my cell phone in a few layers of tinfoil.
National Weather Service confirms a tornado touched down a few blocks from here. It was puny as such things go… EF-1, winds of 95 miles per hour. But it did raise a ruckus.
| Date | 04/04/2023 |
| Time (Local) | 09:41 AM – 09:43 AM |
| EF Rating | EF-1 |
| Est. Peak Winds | 95 mph |
| Path Length | 1.6 miles |
| Max Width | 150 yards |
| Injuries/Deaths | 0 |
| Summary:
A brief tornado touched down in Rock Island, Illinois. The tornado knocked over and snapped large trees and produced minor damage to several roofs. Widespread damaging straight line winds up to 90 mph also caused significant damage across the city. |
|
In Colorado Springs:
“D20” here is “district 20.” The new trend isn’t “19-year-old tries to shoot up a middle school and some churches.” Guess what it is.
Go on, guess.
Here’s a subtle hint:
William Whitworth who identifies as “Lilly” has been charged with felony criminal attempt to commit murder …
Did you spot it?
That’s right: the mass shooter was arrested *before* the mass shooting.
Nothing else here is noteworthy. Nothing.
A healthy, sane society would see bystanders reacting with outrage when someone shoplifts thousands of dollars of non-essentials. But we live in a society where madness is celebrated, and thus we get this:
Storms took out my power this morning. I drove around and looked at the damage…. it was quite extensive. I figured it would be days before power came back, but it was restored a little while ago. My neighborhood saw little actual damage, but just a block away big trees were yanked out at the roots. The derecho a a few years ago did not do this sort of damage, so I wonder if small tornadoes came through.
…the premiere of Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power TV series had 25 million global viewers on the day it premiered. That’s quite a lot! But as it turns out, by the time the first season ended, a shocking number of those viewers as had already given up. In a new examination of Amazon Studios, the Hollywood Reporter mentions that only 37 percent of Rings of Power’s U.S. viewers stuck around through the Prime Video series’ eighth episode.
Yes, I’m surprised. I’m surprised that a full 37% stuck around to the end of that garbage show. I imagine most that did did so, like me, out of pure spite. And to see just how disrespectful the writers/showrunners would be to the source material. Answer: All. All the disrespect. Every last bit.
A few years ago:
It’s been left outside for an extended period, so it’s in pretty rough shape. According to Google Maps, the wings have been removed, but it’s apparently still outside, dissolving.
For some reason, a Chinese construction company was hired to do highway work in Serbia. For some reason, the Chinese construction company decided to demolish a war memorial.
Lots of WTF in this story. The first being: “Why is a European nation using a Chinese construction company?” The second being “Why can’t a European nation do this sort of work themselves?” Third being “What exactly did you expect?”
When you hire people who are not of your nation, culture or people to do your work for you, don’t act surprised when they don’t value your nation, culture or people. And hiring ChiComs? That’s just asking for trouble.
It shall prove interesting when the ChiComs start paving over Russian cultural locations.
Brandon Herrera covers some initial memes about the Nashville mass shooting:
Donut Operator did a breakdown of the bodycam footage of the sweep of the school and the takedown of the transurrectionist. *THIS,* as many have pointed out to the Uvalde police, is how you do it: get it done quickly and efficiently, before the badguy (or badgirl, in this case) has time to prepare and before they can turn a mass shooting into an absolute massacre. The shooter got shot by two copes, one with a carbine, the other with a pistol… essentially the weapons *she* had.
A case can be made that mentally ill people should not have access to firearms. I’m all behind a legal approach that takes care of this… not those BS “red flag laws” that allow the authorities to strip you of your rights without a proper review or anything resembling due process. Self-harm would seem to be a giant sign that someone is a danger to themselves or others; a woman pumping herself with testosterone, or anyone chopping their bits off, would seem to apply. Men, who are designed and built to be full of testosterone, can go buggo if they are pumped full of the stuff; I can only imagine how whackadoodle it would make a woman to be loaded with the stuff.