This is true or not, but dayum…
The bridge that just collapsed in the city of Pittsburgh was set to be restored in 2016. Instead of replacing the completely rusted out supports, they diverted the money to bike lanes, green energy programs and lanes for self driving cars.
The whole twitter string, HERE, definitely points out a ‘significant’ problem if an entire support was rusted through at least 3 years ago…
Interesting how this got done ‘on the quiet’… in 2019… And it’s just now coming to light?
NSO Group’s Pegasus product allows access to a smartphone user’s messages, camera, and microphone without action by the victim, according to the Pegasus Project, an investigation organized by the news outlet Forbidden Stories. Pegasus has attracted attention from surveillance-focused watchdogs and from governments interested in becoming users.
The FBI told The Washington Times there was no operational use of the tech in support of any investigation and it procured a limited license for “product testing and evaluation only.”
Uh-huh…sure… Cross our hearts, we never used it! We promise!!!
But if you connect the dots, this sure does look like what was used to ‘link’ the Jan 6 ‘rioters’ to each other!
Full article, HERE.
The fact is, ANY connectivity of any kind is currently hackable, snoopable, and traceable by .gov. The only question is when/how it is being used or will be used against you. Unless you go completely off the grid, you ARE trackable. And if you travel in any big city, your face is scanned x-times/trip/day and that ‘track’ goes somewhere in the cloud for recall either by your face or date/time information.
Sure, you can turn off ‘location’ on your phone, or your watch, or your fitness device, but it still logs your location and that information is retrievable at any time unless you physically destroy the device. Even then, the MAC address can be accessed from locations it was on, like cell towers, ‘free’ wireless, etc.
The actual memorial was yesterday, 36 years since Challenger was lost. I’m old enough to remember all the way back to Mercury and all the losses.
Our crew participated in the searches for Challenger’s astronauts off the coast, praying but not holding much hope.
May they all rest in peace, and know they did not die in vain.
Space, like aviation is inherently dangerous, and few second chances are given.
LA DA does another outrageous prosecution… And gets away with it!
A Los Angeles County judge on Thursday ordered Hannah Tubbs, a transgender California woman, to serve two years in a juvenile facility after she pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting a 10-year-old girl in 2014 — but not before excoriating far-left District Attorney George Gascon, whose office declined to prosecute the repeat offender as an adult.
Tubbs, 26, just recently pleaded guilty to molesting the girl in a woman’s bathroom eight years ago when she was two weeks away from turning 18. At the time of the crime, she identified as male and went by James Tubbs. She did not identify as female until after she was taken into custody, according to prosecutors.
Full article, HERE.
And here is ‘her’ picture…
James Tubbs, Nov. 11, 2021. Tubbs, 26, just recently pleaded guilty to molesting a girl in a woman’s bathroom eight years ago when she was two weeks away from turning 18. At the time of the crime, she identified as male and went by James Tubbs. She did not identify as female until after she was taken into custody, according to prosecutors.
This is patently ridiculous! All I can say is it’s a good thing he didn’t molest one of MY children… There wouldn’t have been any issue about where to house him then.
Grrrr…
What is it going to take to get some ‘reality’ back in these DA’s offices?
On the koof front, pretty much recovered, just a non-productive cough. Energy is coming back. Thanks again for the emails and support!
No throwback today, unless it’s me…
Just not feeling it…
But I did see this and… well make your own judgements!
Well, I’m five days into the coof, four days into treatment. No fever, no loss of smell or taste. Feeling tired, but that’s about it. Coughing, but nothing productive. One side note- Monday evening the FDA cancelled all monoclonal antibody treatment for the coof, HERE, but are continuing to push the Pfizer’s pill Paxlovid, but good luck finding it…
There is a version that does seem to work against the current strain, but .gov is controlling that with an iron fist, and it’s questionable if that version is still approved.
Thanks to friends, I’m taking those pills that can never be named, in addition to the prescribed meds, which are tearing my stomach up (remind self- get yogurt to replace probiotics- yech). And my sinuses are running full time! Gotta love sinusitis on top of this mess…
Thank you to the many that have texted, emailed, and called to check on me. I’m still around and as grumpy as ever.
Also, thank you for the honest reviews on Rimworld- Diplomatic Immunity. One of my frustrations is the 3 an 4 star reviews without any comments! If you gave me a low review, PLEASE tell me what you didn’t like. How else are we supposed to improve as writers if we don’t get that feedback from the readers??? Sigh…
I haz the coof…
Got the ‘usual’ prescription, Z pack and a Steroid. We’ll see how this progresses.
So blogging commenting may be light for a couple of days while I fight this mess off, I hope…
Oh yeah, and I DID get the vaccine (Moderna)… sigh
As if Loudoun County wasn’t bad enough, now Fairfax County has doubled down on the stupid…
On Friday, Jan. 21, 2022, Fairfax County Public Schools Superintendent Scott Brabrand issued a “Principal Briefing” that orders administrators to suspend students who don’t wear masks to school, according to a copy of the briefing that a whistleblower provided Parents Defending Education.
The edict is in defiance of an executive order by Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin giving parents the right to choose whether their children wear masks to school or not.
Full article, HERE. I’m really not sure why they think open defiance of the state government is a good idea, but then they ‘think’ since they are the ‘elite’ and know better…
I don’t see this one ending well either. The AG’s been pretty clear he’s going to investigate school systems that don’t follow directives.
And this one is worth thinking about…
Dave Freer is out with a new novel Cloud Castles
As always, click on the cover for the Amazon link!
The blurb-
Augustus Thistlewood was an idealist. The youngest scion of a vastly wealthy family, he’d come to help the poor, deprived people of the strange world of Sybill III – a gas-dwarf world with no habitable land. The human population, descendants of a crashed convict transport, lived on a tiny, crowded, alien antigravity plate they called ‘the Big Syd’, drifting through the clouds in the upper atmosphere. It was a few square miles of squalor, in a vast sea of sky, ruled by the degenerate relics of two alien empires.
The problem was that the people of the Big Syd wanted to help themselves, first – to his money, his liberty, and even his life.
Only two things stood between them and this: the first was his ‘assistant’ Briz, – a ragged urchin he’d picked up as a guide. She reckoned if anyone was going to steal from Augustus, it was going to be her, even if she had to keep him alive so that she could do it. And the second thing was Augustus himself. He didn’t know what ‘giving up’ meant. Actually, he didn’t know what most things meant. As a naïve, wide-eyed innocent blundering through the cess-pit of Sybill III, he was going to have to learn, mostly the hard way. Some of that learning was going to be out in the strange society that existed on the endless drifting clumps of airborne vegetation, and the Cloud-Castles of the aliens who hunted across them. Most of it was learning that philanthropy wasn’t quite what they’d taught him in college.
Next up is Pam Uphoff with the fourth novella in her Fall of the Alliance series- Murder at Kozolov House
The blurb-
A Murder Mystery in the Fall of the Alliance series.
A Garden Party at Kozlov House, the Host murdered! Detective Inspector Smirnov is back to find the killer. Was it the angry Wife? A Political Rival? The son? The professor? Or . . . something more sinister?
And last, but certainly not least, our own Bessie BIngle is out with a new short story Sedna
The blurb-
If you produce Intellectual Property (IP) and copyright it, you need to pay attention to this…
For years companies like Google and Spotify, whose revenue streams depend on content and profits depend on how cheaply they can acquire it, have worked to weaken copyright protections. They know they can’t get what they want through a transparent legislative process, so they’ve set their sights on effectively changing the law by using “a well-established legal organization to ‘restate’ and reinterpret our copyright laws for the nation’s judicial system.”
The organization, American Legal Institute (ALI), an invite-only organization for legal scholars, is known for its Restatements of Law, which have been described as “Cliff’s Notes” guides to various legal topics:
Full article HERE, from J. Van Laar at RedState
And a follow-up article.
Now a massive astroturfing effort is happening in the field of copyright law, and anyone who produces creative content should be paying close attention. As I wrote last week, there are major problems with the American Law Institute’s Restatement project, starting with how the project was initiated (at the request of a Google-funded, anti-copyright law activist professor) and the Lead Reporter’s unacknowledged conflicts of interest.
Full article HERE, from J.Van Laar at RedState
And then there is THIS stupidity…
As if they aren’t coming after us hard enough, now they want more… Especially Google.
If you use Google Docs, you REALLY need to read the TOS. Effectively they ‘own’ anything you put up there, and if you use Google drives, they can take everything down and kill your account and you have NO recourse to recover any items.