Hong Kong Bra Protest after Woman Jailed for ‘Breast Assault’
This is epic.
H/T Naked Capitalism.
Category: 40yrs
Those Cheeky Kiwis
Some headline writer at The Press, in Christchurch, NZ, understands Ted Cruz better than the whole of the Washington press corps(e).
H/t Jim Romenesko.
Headline of the Day
DEA Warns of Stoned Rabbits if Utah Passes Medical Marijuana.
The dead enders in the drug prohibition industry have become increasingly shrill as the rest of the population realizes that prison works to fight drug use like gasoline puts out fires.
The story gets even weirder:
Utah is considering a bill that would allow patients with certain debilitating conditions to be treated with edible forms of marijuana. If the bill passes, the state’s wildlife may “cultivate a taste” for the plant, lose their fear of humans, and basically be high all the time. That’s according to testimony presented to a Utah Senate panel (time stamp 58:00) last week by an agent of the Drug Enforcement Administration.
“I deal in facts. I deal in science,” said special agent Matt Fairbanks, who’s been working in the state for a decade. He is member of the “marijuana eradication” team in Utah. Some of his colleagues in Georgia recently achieved notoriety by raiding a retiree’s garden and seizing a number of okra plants
.(emphasis original)
Illegal pot growing does constitute an environmental issue, frequently the farms contribute to erosion, and apply various agricultural chemicals to excess, but stoned bunny rabbits?
Seriously?
I think that this “Reefer Madness” bullsh%$ needs to be called out.
I will note that the Utah senate panel went with sanity, as opposed to the, “Think of the poor bunnies,” claptrap, and passed the bill along to the state senate.
This Reminds Me of My Mother-in-Law
It’s Titled, “So Papa, hod do you like the iPad we got you?”
My Mother-in-law is a nice lady, and we get along quite well, but my occasional forays into being her IT help desk seem a lot like this video.
I’m Wondering who has Call-Sign Rainbow Dash………
To quote the great Anna Russell, “I’m not making this up, you know.”
It appears that the USAF has a Brony squadron:
Earlier this month, word hit the Internet that an Air Force unit training to fly America’s most advanced military aircraft are wearing a patch inspired by the television show My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.
Now the Air Force has confirmed it: bronies are flying jets.
“We train world-class pilots who will go on to defend our great nation,” 1st Lt. Tom Barger, a public affairs officer at Vance Air Force Base in Oklahoma, tells War is Boring. “Fostering camaraderie, morale and unity on a regular basis and through small means — like a tastefully humorous patch — enhances our ability to complete the mission when working as a team is essential.”
The pink and purple patch — first spotted by My Little Pony fan site Equestria Daily — and worn by 24 flight students from Joint Undergraduate Specialized Pilot Class 14-05, references the cable cartoon show about a team of magical ponies. Although criticized by some as a cynical bid to get children to purchase plastic pony products (it’s a reboot from the 1980s), the show — which airs weekday afternoons on the Hub Network — became a cult phenomenon that’s now spread to the armed forces.
My son is a Brony, and he was stoked about this.
I still do not get the whole “Brony” thing.
H/t ECop at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.
We Have a New Definition of Chutzpah
Obviously, the classic definition, the story of a boy who killed his parents, and then asked for mercy as an orphan remains the front runner, but the fact that Freedom Industries is asking for prosecutors to recuse themselves because they were among the 300,000 people whose water they poisoned:
A federal judge will take up whether the U.S. Attorney’s office can prosecute cases against former Freedom Industries executives or if a conflict of interest exists.
U.S. District Judge Thomas Johnston is scheduled to hear disqualification requests from former Freedom President Gary Southern and former company executive Dennis Farrell in a 1:30 p.m. hearing today.
Both Southern and Farrell have asked the federal judge to disqualify U.S. Attorney Booth Goodwin’s office from the case, saying there is a conflict of interest because the prosecutor’s employees were affected by last January’s chemical leak, which affected 300,000 people in nine counties.
Farrell’s motion only took issue with Goodwin’s office but Southern’s motion also sought to disqualify “agents and investigators” working with the office.
“The conflict of interest is real: the U.S. Attorney, his assistants, investigators and office staff were actual victims of the crimes charged against Mr. Farrell,” Farrell’s motion said. “Of equal or perhaps greater gravity, husbands, wives and children of the prosecutors and staff of the (U.S. Attorney’s office) also were, and allegedly may continue to be, actual victims of the crimes charged.”
In a previous filing, Goodwin said no one in his office has a personal or financial stake in the outcome of this case. He said no one on the prosecution team is an “actual victim” because the general public is the victim in Clean Water Act violations. He also said no one on his staff is a claimant in the class action lawsuits or in the Freedom bankruptcy case.
Seriously?
Because they are arguing that because they contaminated the water for half the f%$#ing state of West Virginia, no one should be allowed to prosecute them?
Seriously?
I guess that it is proof of the old adage, “If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts. If you have the law on your side, pound the law. If you have neither on your side, pound the table.”
I Have Never Partied this Hard, Nor Will I Ever Party this Hard
Ho ……… Ho ……… Ho ………
Red and white as camouflage
You may have heard about the SantaCon, a costumed pubcrawl that has, since its founding in (where else?) San Francisco.
Increasingly, it has been the accompanied by drunkenness, violence, public urination, and general mischief.
Well, a criminal mastermind, in what is certain to be a movie or a cable release in the next 18 months, robbed a bank disguised as Santa and then vanished in the crimson clad crowd:
Roughly after 1 p.m. on Saturday, at the peak of SantaCon debauchery, a 40-something white man in a Santa suit walked into a San Francisco bank and handed the teller a note demanding money. The teller handed him an undisclosed amount of cash, and then—like in the St. Patrick’s Day scene from “The Fugitive”—the man walked outside and disappeared into the crowd of Santas.
So far, the police have made no arrests, and it seems very likely the man might actually get away. It was a perfect heist—a festive, vomit-soaked “Ocean’s 11.”
My only question is whether this was a run of the mill criminal who had a bright idea, or a really smart guy.
If it’s the former, he’ll do something stupid now that he has the money.
If it’s the latter, this guy will be calling a literary agent when the statute of limitations runs out.
Headline of the Day
“Get Me Off Your F%$#ing Mailing List” is an actual science paper accepted by a journal
(%$# mine)
It’s actually an interesting story, about how phony scientific journals are proliferating.
Desperately Hydrating
Went to work today.
We are still working on that deadline.
For the first time in a really long time, I milled some simple parts.
Some people will handle this without batting am eyelash; no sweat.
Some people shut down in such a situation.
I kind of fall in the middle: I just go too work, but until I am comfortable, I sweat.
I sweat a lot.
So I was flop sweating while I was “Making Chips,” and I really needed some supplemental hydration.
I am just glad that it wasn’t August.
Posted via mobile.
If Sid Vicious Had an iPhone, He Would Be Alive Today
Roll Tape!
Because it appears that Mr. Vicious’ band mate, John “Johnny Rotten” Lydon, has discovered a new mode of dysfunctional addictive behavior, overdoing the Apple App store:
I wasted – you’re the first to know this – 10,000 f‑‑‑‑‑‑ pounds in the last two years on apps on my iPad. I got into Game of Thrones, Game of War, Real Racing, and I just wanted to up the ante. And like an idiot I didn’t check myself. I’ve been checked now. But there’s a kid in me, see? A bit of my childhood was taken from me and I’m determined to bring it back.
I guess that it beats doing heroine, as Sid and his former girlfriend Nancy Spungen’s all too brief lives demonstrate.
But still, app abuse?
It boggles the mind.
More on That Zeppo Thing
Basically, I was trying to come up with a way of holding two things together that would allow for simple installation and removal of a payload on top of a mast.
After coming up with a number of rather ugly potential solutions, I remembered that Zeppo (Herbert) Marx had developed a clamp in his post showbiz career as an Engineer and manufacturer, developing the Marman Clamp* (pictured), which found extensive use as a stage separation mechanism in space craft in addition to securing the “Fat Man” inside the B-29 “Bock’s Car” when it dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki.
The clamp, plus a couple of pins for alignment, and I had a solution that was clean, dirt cheap, robust, and nearly soldier proof.†
Needless to say, I am feeling rather smug about this.
*It appears that Zeppo did not invent the clamp, but rather he was the one to bring it to mass production.
†Nothing can be made soldier proof. It simply can be made somewhat soldier resistant.
Not the Onion
You can get a slightly translation in the subtitles
A motorcycle gang from the Netherlands is going to Syria to fight ISIS:
Already battling air strikes from the US and its allies, including the UK, terrorist organisation Isis (Islamic State) now have a new threat to look out for – a motorbike gang from the Netherlands.
The Dutch bikers, who go by the name No Surrender, reportedly journeyed to Iraq to fight alongside Kurdish troops against IS militants last week.
Charged with commenting on the legality of that move, the Dutch public prosecutor said that the bikers are not necessarily committing any crime.
Prosecutor spokesman Wim de Bruin told AFP: “Joining a foreign armed force was previously punishable, now it’s no longer forbidden.”
“You just can’t join a fight against the Netherlands.”
If it weren’t for the likelihood, that they are going to end up on the next ISIS beheading videos, the skills associated with being a bad-ass biker are not necessarily the same as those required for urban or desert warfare against a dedicated foe who is not constrained by the requirements of law enforcement in a western society.
This is not going to end well.
A Triumphant Fist Pump for Stephen Hawking, Because He Cannot for Himself
We now have some experimental verification of the existance of Hawking radiation:
Scientists have come closer than ever before to creating a laboratory-scale imitation of a black hole that emits Hawking radiation, the particles predicted to escape black holes due to quantum mechanical effects.
The black hole analogue, reported in Nature Physics1, was created by trapping sound waves using an ultra cold fluid. Such objects could one day help resolve the so-called black hole ‘information paradox’ – the question of whether information that falls into a black hole disappears forever.
The physicist Stephen Hawking stunned cosmologists 40 years ago when he announced that black holes are not totally black, calculating that a tiny amount of radiation would be able to escape the pull of a black hole2. This raised the tantalising question of whether information might escape too, encoded within the radiation.
………
Hawking radiation, the result of attempts to combine quantum theory with general relativity, comprises these escaping particles, but physicists have yet to detect it being emitted from an astrophysical black hole. Another way to test Hawking’s theory would be to simulate an event horizon in the laboratory.
To this end, Jeff Steinhauer, a physicist at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, used a collection of rubidium atoms chilled to less than 1-billionth of a degree above absolute zero. At such temperatures, the atoms are tightly packed and behave as a single, fluid quantum object and so can be easily manipulated. The cold temperature also ensures that the fluid, known as a Bose-Einstein condensate, provides a silent medium for the passage of sound waves that arise from quantum fluctuations.
Using laser light, Steinhauer manipulated the fluid to flow faster than the speed of sound. Like a swimmer battling a strong current, sound waves travelling against the direction of the fluid become ‘trapped’. The condensate thus becomes a stand-in for the gravitational event horizon.
Pairs of sound waves pop in and out of existence in a laboratory vacuum, mimicking particle-antiparticle pairs in the vacuum of space. Those that form astride this sonic event horizon become the equivalent of Hawking radiation. To amplify these sound waves enough for his detectors to pick them up, Steinhauer established a second sonic event horizon inside the first, adjusting the fluid so that sound waves could not pass this second event horizon, and are bounced back. As the soundwaves repeatedly strike the outer horizon, they create more pairs of soundwaves, amplifying the Hawking radiation to detectable levels.
I would also note that this is a wicked cool experiment.
Using a moving fluid and sound as an analogue for an event horizon is completely sick. (In a good way)
Science, Bitches!
Not The Onion
President Obama blasted Republicans as the party of “billionaires” on Tuesday while mingling with high-rollers at the $26 million estate of Rich Richman — yes, that’s his real name — in Greenwich, Conn.
Richman, who built his $10 billion company developing rental housing, lives in the Conyers Farm area, where the minimum lot size is 10 acres. Twenty-five donors paid $32,400 each to get their photo taken with the president. Others paid $10,000 for dinner.
To quote Depeche Mode, “I think that God has a sick sense of humor. “
Someone in the Bowels of Bureaucracy has a Sick Sense of Humor
The new headquarters of the Department of Homeland Security used to be an insane asylum:
Washington D.C. is often used as a backdrop for tales of idiosyncratic power (Veep, House of Cards, Homeland, 24, Newsroom, The West Wing, just to name a few) and why not? The architecture’s symbolism and ideology can be matched only by the cynicism and suspicion these structures inspire. So therefore it seems somehow fitting that DC’s next major addition, the Headquarters for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), will be perched on a hilltop just across the Anacostia River, physically and gesturally overseeing all before it.
Yet beyond maintaining constant visuals on the terrain, this headquarters represents a change in the city’s views on temporality, functionality and even irony. Because this is a space with a past, one it both embraces and fears.
The Ghost Across the River
In 2007, the announcement came that a long abandoned former mental institution was to be renovated in order to create a headquarters for the DHS (the agency which oversees immigration, customs, border control and the secret service, along with several other federal functions). Aside from sounding like the plot to a bad action/horror movie, the site was a bit of an odd-duck: an enormous campus, fifteen minutes drive from the White House and full of old buildings barely anyone had ever heard of. For its own part, St. Elizabeths Hospital was founded in the 1850s as “The Government Hospital for the Insane”, hosting generations of doctors, nurses and patients. Some of which having been infamously linked to the powerful of DC, including: Ezra Pound, brought there on charges of treason in 1945; John Hinckley Jr., for shooting President Reagan in bizarre attempt to impress actress Jodie Foster in 1981; Richard Lawrence, who attempted to shoot President Andrew Jackson in 1835, failed, and was then beaten mercilessly by the President himself and Charles Guiteau, after killing President Garfield in 1881.
I am amused, but not particularly surprised.
F%$# You for that Mental Image
Talking with a Gentile cow-orker about Rosh Hashanah, and the blowing of the Shofar.
We talked about how some are short (ram’s horns) some are longer. (some sort of gazelle, and rather more melodic)
I noted that while the Shofar is played much like any brass instrument, i.e. with buzzing lips, but it differ in that the Shofar blower traditionally blow from the corner of the mouth, not the middle.
He said, “Kenny G. style“.
GAH!!!!
Not The Onion*
The Egyptian government is urging restraint by the police in Ferguson, Missouri:
Egypt on Tuesday urged U.S. authorities to exercise restraint in dealing with racially charged demonstrations in Ferguson, Missouri – echoing language Washington used to caution Egypt as it cracked down on Islamist protesters last year. It is unusual for Egypt to criticize such a major donor. Ties between Washington and Cairo were strained after Egyptian security forces killed hundreds of Muslim Brotherhood supporters following the army’s ousting of freely elected President Mohamed Morsi in July 2013.
To quote Anna Russell, “I’m not making this up, you know.”
*But it should be.
This is Unbelievably Awesome
Sam Waters is a freaking genius!
Seen on Facebook
I will note that this is still less scary than giving my cats a bath.
I must confess that I have never seen Sharknado, and I might have no urge to, but this I might want to see.