“Fourth instance of mob violence this year shuts down Chicago’s fanciest shopping district”
Water Tower Place isn’t what it used to be.
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Conspiracy theory
So Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, CNN, and probably the Bavarian Burgerbilders got together and kicked Alex Jones off the internet. That’s ironic in two ways. So Big Tech conspired to silence Jones – for peddling crazy conspiracy theories. But Jones wasn’t really a conspiracy theorist. Maybe he is now.
Irony aside, this is foolish. Now that Google and all of them have shown that they can kick someone offline, they’ll have to explain why they haven’t kicked X off line. X is an obnoxious idiot; X is a racist homophobe; X is literally Hitler. Why does X still have a weblog, email, phone service, paypall?
Someone a little more to the left is sure to ask.
SpiderOak’s canary
I used SpiderOak for a while a couple of years ago, and liked it, but not enough to pay for it. When they stopped offering their free tier I went back to Dropbox. SpiderOak said they encrypted everything, but that wasn’t important to me and I didn’t rely on it. In any case I’m not going to trust any encryption product that isn’t open source. More, I don’t trust anything I don’t understand, which in practice limits me to the Imelda’s-shoes protocol. SpiderOak said they were committed to having everything open source eventually, but they seem not to have got there yet.
Now it seems SpiderOak’s Warrant Canary Died. They say it didn’t really die, but that they changed to a transparency report or something. As far as I can tell, that means either that they accidentally killed their canary, and so don’t rely on SpiderOak for encrypted file storage, or that the canary functioned as designed, and so don’t rely on SpiderOak for encrypted file storage.
Again, SpiderOak worked fine for me when I used it, and there’s no reason I know to trust them less than Dropbox; but there’s no reason to trust them any more than Dropbox either.
Gliders in World War II
Can’t top that
“When I was in Dushanbe, the Korean-Tajik ladies who ran the (tiny) cafeteria would serve this daily. We would also get it in Turkmenistan, but it was less common there.”
Well, once I was served roast lamb in a Navy mess hall. It was pretty good. The Marines didn’t know what it was.
Clever
Very clever
In another brilliant operation by The Committee to Re-elect the President, the New York Times defends newest hire Sarah Jeong amid controversy over racist tweets.
Don’t know much about history
Particularly California history:
“Originally, [Mision San Francisco de Assis / Mission Dolores in San Francisco] comprised a fairly vast area, with 10,000 head of cattle, 10,000 sheep, many horses, etc., as well as workshops, farms and gardens. In a very real sense, it was San Francisco. Several thousand native Americans lived and worked there. Following Mexican independence, in 1834 the missions were ‘secularized’ meaning, in effect, that all their lands except that upon which stood the church buildings and cemeteries were seized by the Mexican government and given to private citizens. This impoverished the mission and lead to a decades long decline. By 1842, only a few Indians lived at the mission, and what remained of the building fell into serious disrepair.”
There’s an article in Wikipedia, I don’t know how accurate, about the Mexican secularization act of 1833.
The 1986 movie The Mission, with Robert DeNiro and Jeremy Irons, takes place a hundred years earlier on another continent. King Henry’s dissolution of monasteries was a couple of hundred years before that.
Toy guns
“This isn’t even about guns. For a child that age, guns have nothing to do with danger, or violence — much of the fascination has to do with remote control. I can stand over here, and change the state of that object, clear over there. This might be a curious thing for someone to bring up about it, but we should be discussing that aspect of it more often because far from being merely harmless, that’s an important part of a child’s development. Children have a need to become accustomed to achieving direct effect on the world around them; getting comfortable with the idea of engaging action, as a leader, on an individual level, and seeing that action translated into a consequence. Later on they can become acquainted with the concept of irreversible investments, and point-of-commitment. What you do today, you cannot undo tomorrow. From that, comes the understanding of responsibility.” — The Next Thing to Destory: Toy Guns
http://www.peekinthewell.net/blog/the-next-thing-to-destory-toy-guns/
Items
- Legalizing abortion certainly implies a significant degree of depravity, but so does putting the question in the first place. By the time people are invited to vote whether or not to let women have their children killed in utero, a lot has already been lost.
- “How true membership in a body differs from inclusion in a collective may be seen in the structure of a family.”
- People say nobody’s supposed to talk about Tommy Robinson, but a lot of people are.
- Why is there no lead-homicide connection in Eastern Europe?
- Patriotic prayer candles?
- In this rather long music video, mean girls mock and humiliate some creepy little geek who comes on to them. That’s not going to end well.
Pompeo redacted Clinton dossier, says source
…or something like that. I’m sure I heard that on NPR, or somewhere. Shocking.
If you can’t get enough from the news, here’s a headline generator:
PROPER NAME: Trump Comey Mueller Stormy Pompeo Clinton Obama McCabe Pelosi DOJ FBI ABC NBC CBS NPR BBC Zukerberg Putin Russia Cohen Florida Man
VERB PAST: redacted Googled investigated leaked named
OR
VERB FUTURE: to leak to investigate to pardon to indict to appeal to prosecute to appoint to name to fire
PROPER NAME
‘S
NOUN: dossier report investigation appointment prosecution indictment
BOILERPLATE: says claims
SOURCE: report source insider memo dossier
