In short: forty or more people have said they have received packages in the mail from China containing seeds they didn’t order. Likely explanation: a paperwork error. Another explanation given in the story is “brushing,” some sort of scam where a company sends a random schmoe their product, and then they fabricate a positive review from said random schmoe. Explanation you’d best li1sten to: something nefarious.
1: Seeds with some biohazardous germ on them… open the package, you are infected.
2: The seeds are themselves biohazardous. They grow up to be some mutant strain of wheat or corn or taters or something that cross-pollinate with the local variety and create a generation of food crops that are damaged or dangerous or sterile.
3: F’n triffids.
4: Wherever they grow, the ChiComs will claim as part of a Chinese consulate.
Don’t plant them in your yard. Don’t flush them down the toilet… you don’t need them sprouting hentai vine-tentacles in the sewer or the septic tank. Don’t throw them in the trash; they’ll probably germinate in the landfill and you’ll end up with a Red Commie Jolly Green Giant that stinks of month-old diapers and cat litter. You know, like most communists.
Prodigy, as previously revealed, will follow a group of “lawless” teenagers who find themselves aboard a derelict Starfleet vessel—which we can only speculate for now will be called the Prodigy—that they take command of, before boldly setting off on their own adventures exploring the galaxy and doing things a bunch of teens probably shouldn’t get up to aboard a former military/science/exploratory vessel.
An illustration from a 1964 Boeing report on Saturn V first stage recovery and re-use. A number of concepts were studied, from balloons to parachutes. This particular one used parachutes to slow the stage and solid propellant retro-rockets in the nose for terminal braking, doing something akin to Falcon’s “hoverslam” just before splashdown. The forward LOX dome in the concept would be structurally strengthened to survive the impact. After the initial splash, rockets would be used to tip the stage over in a particular direction… and then more, bigger rockets would be used just before the stage fell over to keep it from hitting too hard.
Another concept was to use a design that would blow off the LOX tank forward dome before impact. The stage would thus hit the water like an inverted cup. As the water compressed the air within the LOX tank, blowout doors at the “bottom” of the tank would, well, blow out, giving the compressed air somewhere to go. This would serve as a pneumatic shock absorber for the stage, but it would pretty much trash the LOX tank.
Awww, ain’t that nice. These moms care so much about insurrectionists trying to burn down buildings with people in them and succeeding in intentionally causing permanent blindness among federal employees that they’re willing to come out in force to protect the criminal element from the nasty police who would stop the vandalism, arson and murders. But you know who they are *not* protecting? Children. Often enough, their own children.
What we have here is one Isaiah Jackson. Six foot two, 175 pounds, and kneeling on the neck of a restrained, terrified two-year-old, in a photo posted with the caption “Blm now mf.” Mr. Jackson is *not* the father of the child… but he is the childs mothers boyfriend. The mother, not the owner of the arm seen restraining the child, defended her winner of a boyfriends actions. The father now has custody of the child, and the boyfriend is in jail on unrelated charges.
One *might* argue that the mother was uninvolved in the incident and thus is not culpable. But Mr. Jackson here is not some random stranger who abducted her child… he’s her boyfriend, of her own free choice. And he has an extensive criminal record:
This is the man the mother entrusted with the care of her child. She had to know what manner of man he was, what his morals and ethics were like, what his politics were, how racist he was… and she left her child with him.
Lest you think that this is just one random scumbag, remember that a second adult participated in this by restraining the child, and probably a third by holding the camera. But wait! There’s more!
That’s Brian Papin, a *teacher* at Cedar Grove High School in Atlanta, Georgia. I do believe that that school has received a *lot* of unsolicited opinions regarding their current employment roster. Their Facebook page has a *lot* of comments on it…
Brian Papin is hardly likely to be alone in think that that photo not only is good and proper, but perhaps doesn’t go far enough. We are heading into some interesting times.
…
This is the kind of “mom” who would intentionally drag her unborn child into the firing line of rubber bullets, tear gas and Molotov cocktails in order to protect the scum of the Earth from the law.
Graphic: Shane V. Green, who is black, walked inside a NE Portland laundromat & used a sharp handsaw to attack two women. Responding police located him on a nearby street but the arrest was interrupted by Portlanders who screamed at & taunted officers, accusing them of racism. pic.twitter.com/qfi2NJEen9
George Orwell came close: “If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.”
One wonders how much of this the kid will remember, and whether he’ll be confronted with this photo as he grows up. And as a result, what his views of the world and the people in it will be.
A few years ago, the speech that was written for Nixon in the event that Apollo 11 failed surfaced. Obviously, Apollo 11 didn’t fail, so Nixon never had to deliver it. But thanks to the dubious miracle of deepfakes, now we can watch an episode from an alternate history. The audio is also computer generated (such as mentioned HERE), as opposed to read by an impersonator; somewhat counter-intuitively, the audio – at least to me – seems less convincing than the video, as there are numerous little discontinuities. The deep faked speech begins at about 4:35.
Insert now-expected warnings about how history, news and the justice system are about to be turned into muddled hot messes.
Ok, E., Qian, Y., Strejcek, B., & Aquino, K. (2020). Signaling virtuous victimhood as indicators of Dark Triad personalities. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Advance online publication.
Abstract
We investigate the consequences and predictors of emitting signals of victimhood and virtue. In our first three studies, we show that the virtuous victim signal can facilitate nonreciprocal resource transfer from others to the signaler. Next, we develop and validate a victim signaling scale that we combine with an established measure of virtue signaling to operationalize the virtuous victim construct. We show that individuals with Dark Triad traits—Machiavellianism, Narcissism, Psychopathy—more frequently signal virtuous victimhood, controlling for demographic and socioeconomic variables that are commonly associated with victimization in Western societies. In Study 5, we show that a specific dimension of Machiavellianism—amoral manipulation—and a form of narcissism that reflects a person’s belief in their superior prosociality predict more frequent virtuous victim signaling. Studies 3, 4, and 6 test our hypothesis that the frequency of emitting virtuous victim signal predicts a person’s willingness to engage in and endorse ethically questionable behaviors, such as lying to earn a bonus, intention to purchase counterfeit products and moral judgments of counterfeiters, and making exaggerated claims about being harmed in an organizational context.
