Also, he went into the hospital Wednesday sue to light-headedness. There was some early speculation that it was another stroke, but apparently it wasn’t. It’s being downplayed… but as I understand it he’s *still* hospitalized. For light-headedness. Everything is fine. Nothing to worry about.
I can’t imagine why America’s opponents are seeing us as weak and ineffectual these days. Regarding which:
Another balloon. It’s reportedly smaller than the Chinese spy balloon (with a “car-sized” payload), was flying at about 40,000 feet, and it took an F-22 and an AIM-9X to bring it down. Wreckage crashed onto ice and has been recovered.
… photos taken by high-altitude U-2 planes confirmed the presence of the equipment, including “multiple antennas … likely capable of collecting and geo-locating communications” and “solar panels large enough to produce the requisite power to operate multiple active intelligence collection sensors.”
So, it was listening to us. Interesting to ponder just what it was listening *for.* Being a balloon, it would have had only minimal ability to target a specific site; it would have been able to scan a swathe of the country. Was it listening to cell phones? Was it listening for military-type transmissions and where they came from (looking for hidden bases/missiles/whatever)? Is the US going to start taking air defense seriously?
Now that the Chinese “spy balloon” has crossed the entire United States, the Air Force *finally* got the order from Biden to shoot the thing down. Looks like a fighter launched a missile… a missile that doubtless cost way more than the balloon. Happened over Myrtle Beach, South Carolina… you know, the far side of the country from where it entered.
Increasingly, the admission “I send my kids to public school” is tantamount to “I abuse my kids.” If this sort of thing is a reasonable prospect to be inflicted upon your kid… move to a better district or homeschool. Along with getting a better, safer, less CRT-based academic education, you also have the opportunity to teach them subjects such as “basic self defense” and “how to recognize danger.”
Several of the children in this video need to be removed from not just school, but *society.* Hopefully the little girl will recover. And hopefully she’ll learn some valuable lessons.
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.
If she was a Democrat, this would be the *perfect* story for the national media. There would already be rent-a-riots gearing up to to go. But she was a Republican, so I don’t expect this story to gain much traction.
WOW. This woman is the very epitome of entitled. I *hope* she’s stoned or drunk or whacked out on *something,* cuz if this is how she is sober… WOW.
Clearly she is well practiced at this. This behavior has gotten her what she’s wanted in the past… and it more or less worked here, too. It won’t last forever, of course. Someday she’ll try that with someone with a lot less patience than the cops shown here. Someday she’ll try it with quota-stuffer cops like the ones who beat Tyre Nichols to death. That will be an interesting experience for her.
Once again, virtually inevitable technology. And once again, people are dreaming up terrible uses for it. In this case, brain wave monitoring devices to track your mind while on the job to make sure that:
1) Your mind doesn’t wander from the task
2) That you don’t think about other employees
3) That you don’t make plans with other employees for things the company doesn’t want
Minority Report in action. A WEF speaker explains how future wearable tech could collect your brainwaves and use that data to enable your employer to make you more “productive” and for law enforcement to prevent criminality and illegal behavior.
