If it’s true that
if you’re doing nothing wrong then you have nothing to hide, why doesn’t the
government declassify everything?
Spooktalk 101...
And this from England...
Why you should care about surveillance.
When a computer programmer named David Mery entered a tube
station wearing a jacket in warm weather, an algorithm monitoring the CCTV
brought him to the attention of a human operator as someone suspicious. When
Mery let a train go by without boarding, the operator decided it was alarming behavior.
The police arrested him, searched him, asked him to explain every scrap of
paper in his flat. A doodle consisting of random scribbles was characterized as
a map of the tube station. Though he was never convicted of a crime, Mery is
still on file as a potential terrorist eight years later, and can't get a visa
to travel abroad. Once a computer ascribes suspiciousness to someone,
everything else in that person's life becomes sinister and inexplicable.
But think about this...For decades the government has had the right to to record the addresses on the outside of letters and parcels...who sent what to whom and when. The Supreme Court said that a person should have no expectations of privacy since dozens of postal inspectors had access to the information anyway.
The argument is, the phone company and all their employees have a record of who called who and when, etc, so you have, de facto, given up your right to keep it private.
Interesting argument.
I think this is an excellent idea...
There! I did my part.
Not that it would ever happen, but just in case: do not talk to
the FBI without your lawyer present. Chances are that the agents
will politely decline to interview you if you and your attorney insist on
creating an accurate record of an FBI interrogation.
With justification.
You really, really need to take the time to read all of this...
Watched "Cloud Atlas". Still not sure how I feel about it.
Very strange movie.
Irony #1...
If gay people don't use the phrase "I can't think straight around you" as a pick up line, then they have missed a genuinely great opportunity.
Some times when I'm bored I like to go to a parking lot and put sticky notes on people's cars saying "Sorry for the damage", then just sit and watch them look for it.
Irony #2...
Mosquitos are assholes.
#3...
One small step for fish, one giant leap for mankind...
Growing up, I was so poor I had to take the trash IN.
Russia
and Japan have never signed an official peace treaty with each other to end
World War II.
This was designed for WWII to function on gasoline which was always readily available...
In
1942, American radio DJs were prohibited from taking listener requests. The
government feared that enemy spies would embed secret messages.
I bet you 90% of Americans would get this wrong...
If aliens are smart enough to travel through space, who do they keep abducting the dumbest people on earth?
Am I the only one to notice that child's ass?! I mean, damn, ya'll, that ain't normal!
This is a bottle etched with a recording similar to Edison's first phonograph...
Most Americans would call this silly.
Most Americans are stupid.
I came upon this image and wanted to use it to make a point...or observation; to wit, I think shoes are some of the most maldesigned objects mankind has ever developed.
I'm not talking about specialized bootwear for mountain climbing or swimming under water, etc; I'm just talking about every day footwear for just traversing life.
I wanted to say that flip flops fulfills everything I respect in footwear. They are cheap, they don't deform the foot, they do not require any laces, zippers or straps and the materials are usually cheap. But that wasn't the primary comment I wanted to make. I think women's feet are beautiful (most of them) and flip flops allow me to marvel at their exquisiteness with impunity. Adornment of the appendages only heighten my enjoyment.
But then in this picture I noticed that this child's foot has been deformed by her other footwear. Notice how the big toe has been deformed to angle to the shape of her shoes. Sad really.
Behold the culprit of permanent deformed...
This is a normal foot. This young woman wears shoes that are shaped like....oh....FEET!
But if you want to adorn those assets, darlin', you go right ahead...I got no qualms with foot adornment...
And lastly something sort of topical...
It is almost impossible for me to read that without it being in his voice.
When you have just given me the hole in your logic and I am now patiently waiting for you to finish your flawed point...
A man describes what it was like to be swallowed by
a hippopotamus: "It was as if I had
suddenly gone blind and deaf. I was aware that my legs were surrounded by
water, but my top half was almost dry. I seemed to be trapped in something
slimy. There was a terrible, sulfurous smell, like rotten eggs, and a
tremendous pressure against my chest. My arms were trapped but I managed to
free one hand and felt around – my palm passed through the wiry bristles of the
hippo's snout. It was only then that I realized I was underwater, trapped
up to my waist in his mouth.
#4...
#5...
#6...
That awkward
moment when you ask a midget what he wants to be when he grows up.
?????????
#7...
#8...
Scientists have
discovered why some female spiders eat their mates. According to data analysis,
it turns out the male spiders deserve it.
One of my very own...
That little black dot is a rock that has rolled down a hill on Mars...you can see the track it left...
I once told my
daughter that nine months before she was born I brought her on a date and she
left with her mother.
Don’t you just
hate it when you shit so hard you get a nose bleed.
#9...
From Monopoly rules...
Alex, I'll take "Things that won't end well" for $1,000.
9 out of 10 people will say "Home Alone"...
(In the South we call that Saturday night.)
Does this look like what a grown man ought to spend his time doing? Seriously..............Really?
Is it just me or
does William Shatner’s last name sound like some weirdass German porn.
The best laid plans...and #10...
It’s hard to
contemplate world dominance with your dick stuck in the vacuum cleaner
hose….again.
You....ah....missed a spot....
Laughter is like a smile having an orgasm.
"With every crime and every kindness we birth our future."
The weak are meat and the strong do eat.
I've been giving a lot of time thinking about death...not in a morbid way...just looking at it as one would any other problem.
AND THEN THERE'S THIS...
Came across this today and thought it worth sharing...
Came across this today and thought it worth sharing...
"I am a
lifelong opponent of appeals to “the slippery slope”, but there is one
exception and that is the taking of human life. Take one, no consequences, and
the taking of the next gets easier, and once a society goes down the path of
deciding some lives are not worthy of life (“Lebensunwertes Leben”, in the
original German) it gets only too easy to go a little farther and decide that
the original batch was not far enough, and that if it was in society’s interest
to have gotten rid of them, then we can go down the path a little more and get
rid of some more “parasites” and “non-productives” and while we’re at it, one
or another minority group that “harms social cohesion” or some such."
(Think drone strikes)
5 comments:
lol, and you watch the WKUK guy! You impress me, sir.
" they don't deform the foot"
This is untrue. Footwear attached to the foot only via the toes changes the natural gait, and so does footwear with arch support or otherwise thick or foamy sole padding.
Anything which changes the natural gait by necessity alters the physiology of the foot (and through it, the legs and spine). If one wants natural looking feet and posture as opposed to mere attractive mien of the toes, one wears "barefoot" or "minimalist" style shoes which have:
* no elevation difference between heel & toe
* the thinnest sole one can get away with on given terrain
* no super-tight straps or laces
* attachment at heel and toe
* enough space in the toebox for the toes to splay naturally
* generally much less weight than sneakers or thongs
But yeah, high heels are silly and obviously deformative. Just as silly and deformative as pointe shoes or cloven-footed BDSM attire...
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Also, in a random fit of coinkydink, I have made a set of shelves like those pictured. That Matthias Wandel (of woodgears.ca) is neat.
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wrt banks, you might watch Mark Blyth demolish the economic idea of austerity and rant about the absurdity of having bailed out the banks in this hour-long presentation. Mad Scots = best Scots.
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"Does this look like what a grown man ought to spend his time doing? Seriously..............Really?"
I suppose gathering in a dome-shaped building to watch a homoerotic escapade of leather-flinging and sweat-exchanging gropery is a much more mature and manly endeavor?
Does sitting in front of a screen for hours on end arranging random pictures and characters for total strangers seem like something a grown man ought to do?
Consider this scenario:
Mssr. Henry, tuxedo-garbed, contemplatively smoking a pipe and sitting upright in a lounge chair in front of a crackling fire: "I say, Reginald, the young adults these days – they certainly press buttons in a most peculiar fashion, do they not?"
Reginald, similarly arranged opposite Mssr. Henry and pseudo-engrossed in a newspaper: "Mm. Quite right, old boy; most uncouth, these scallywags. The species is doomed. Tell me, what do you think this dreadful 'popular music' I've been reading about?"
Mssr. Henry: tripe, the lot of it. Once more than one person enjoys a thing, it becomes innately shameful and profligate.
Reginald: couldn't possibly agree more.
"I suppose gathering in a dome-shaped building to watch a homoerotic escapade of leather-flinging and sweat-exchanging gropery is a much more mature and manly endeavor?"
You, sir, are a very funny man. Remember, twas I who asked a quesiton. No harm in that.
Thanks for the thoughts.
"Does sitting in front of a screen for hours on end arranging random pictures and characters for total strangers seem like something a grown man ought to do?"
Yes. Yes it does. I consider my on line efforts an illustrated discusion and discusions are good things.
And, I've never met a stranger...total or otherwise.
I wasn't insulting your efforts! I was suggesting that "playing" and "blogging" are as good or bad as the caliber of playing or blogging under consideration. The notion that all video games are some flavor of Mario Brothers is wrong. Many of them are more like "interactive stories" than traditional "games". There's Dear Esther in which one simply explores an environment as a recollected narrative plays and then must intuit what transpired. TRAUMA is a sort of interactive film.
Then there's EVE Online, a competitive spaceship combat game mixed with a star system conquering mechanic. In that game, the stories are created by the behavior of the players, who band together into numerous ad-hoc groups to fight and/or cooperate to control otherwise-lawless space. All the ships used in the game are created in the game from virtual raw materials harvested by players; EVE has its own independent economy built on the collection and trade of these raw materials and components/ships. CCP Games employs a PhD economist to monitor, analyze and tweak the game's economy (because, as in real life, crafty EVE players often game the system so creatively that they break the economy). A sufficiently-intelligent person could write something like The Hero with a Thousand Faces having studied the ways in which disparate personalities and cultures in EVE create conflicting societies, each with their own competing flavors of propaganda and social narrative. That's all enabled by the player autonomy provided by a "game".
*shrug* I think your (apparently) dismissive attitude toward video games is the same attitude expressed by most people of an older generation when the younger generation adopts new modes of self-expression. There will come a time when gaming or perhaps more broadly "interactive media" is the dominant precious highbrow darling of the old generation as some new and vibrant upstart of a medium grows in its shadow. I hope that by that time I'm sufficiently open-minded to embrace the newness rather than mock it.
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Consumption and critique of architecture, illustration, sculpture, song, writing and film is widely accepted as worthwhile, but the content of those mediums spans the gamut of quality, from the most frivolous and shallow ideas to the most reasoned and poignant. The same is true of video games: there are frivolous time-passing games (Tetris) and popular and extremely-nuanced ultra-competitive games which millions upon millions play and spectate (DOTA 2) and then there are thoughtful story-driven games which gain widespread attention (Journey). Beyond all that, there are untold thousands of independent and small-scale games enabling experiences as moving and interesting as the content of any book or song (Cart Life, Kentucky Route Zero, Miasmata, anything made by Wadjet Eye Games).
Video games are as capable of communicating "art" as any other method of human expression. The discussion of games as an artful and worthwhile medium is relatively new, because video games themselves are quite new! You can't expect a rich soup of competing theories and analysis to emerge from nowhere; it took time for other mediums to mature and garner a respectable critical community, and that's taking time with games as well (although I'd say the rise of games as a popularly-accepted and widely-discussed medium is happening faster than it did with any older medium simply because our society is moving so quickly and is so info-saturated).
High-level discussion of video games as a culturally-important medium is coming into its own; it's been exploding in academia over the last decade, and intellectuals and artists the world over have flocked to game critique and creation. The creation of games is also being increasingly democratized through free and cheap production tools and tutorials. Exciting times.
I only have to say, I have been dipping my fries in my chocolate shake for at least a decade. mmmmm
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