Because It's Friday

Welsh narrow-gauge steam.

The Fourth

IN CONGRESS, JULY 4, 1776

The unanimous Declarationof the thirteen united States of America

hen in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

Unpatriotic Motherfuckers

Every swinging business that is open today and which doesn't absolutely have to be open.

Co-Ops Can Be as Reactionary as Any Company Run by the Koch Brothers

Oh, you might think that food co-ops are a bunch of lefty groups all in favor of promoting sustainable agriculture, social consciousness and recycled whatnot and so on and so forth.

But just let the workers at one of them think about forming a union to better their own conditions and the co-ops will go all Homestead on their asses.

Shorter "Privacy Board" Declaration: "There Ain't No Such Thing as Privacy Online."

That's pretty much the Privacy Board's take on the NSA collecting data on the Internet.

Oh, sure, the NSA denies collecting everything on the Internet (though the Obama Administration says they can), they say that their collection is "targeted", but they are lying. They always have been lying. And yes, they are collecting your phone calls.

I don't know what the answer is. Passing laws to change what the NSA does is going to be almost as futile as passing laws to outlaw global warming.

Some Things Never Change; War Correspondents Edition

"History of the Gatling Gun Detachment, Fifth Army Corps, at Santiago" by John H. Parker:

The newspaper correspondent in Cuba was of a distinguished type. You recognized him immediately. He was utterly fearless; he delighted in getting up on the firing-line—that is, a few of him did. Among these few might be mentioned Marshall, and Davis, and Remington, and Marcotte, and King, and some half-dozen others; but there was another type of newspaper correspondent in Cuba, who hung around from two miles and a half to three miles in rear of the firing-line, and never by any possibility got closer to the enemy than that. The members of this guild of the newspaper fraternity were necessarily nearer the cable office than their more daring comrades; in fact, there were a few who were known to have been eight or nine miles nearer to the cable office during battles, and those correspondents were the ones who made the great "scoop" in the New York papers, by which a regiment that laid down and skulked in the woods, or ran wildly to the rear, was made to do all the fighting on the first day of July. This latter class of journalists were a menace to the army, a disgrace to their profession, and a blot upon humanity.

A Non-Profit Company That Will Kick Your Doors In and Gun Down Your Dogs?

In Massachusetts, the po-po in part of the state have set up a regional SWAT team. They claim that the SWAT group is a private non-profit and is not subject to the state open record's law.

So if they're a private company, then presumably the "qualified immunity" given to police agencies when they do shit doesn't apply to them. And neither should it apply to their so-called members.

It is past time that we do something about these masked fat men with their M-4, who seem to get a special amount of jollies out of abusing people and gunning down their pets.

UPDATE: I'm not the only one to ask this question.

Tyrant

I finally got around to watching the pilot of Tyrant. The protagonist is the son of a brutal Middle Eastern dictator. The son had gone into self-imposed exile at age 16 and became a pediatrician in Los Angeles. He and his nuclear family go back to the Old Country for his nephew's wedding and, as you might imagine, shit happens.

The country seems to be loosely based on Syria, though there are differences. One is that being the dictator of that country is the family business gong back several generations, which is pretty much not true of any nation in the Middle East, other than Iran. The similarities are that the dictator's son who was the heir apparent died in a car crash, leaving the son who was a doctor in charge. For Syria, the time between the first son dying and the dictator croaking was several years, not the greatly-compressed timeline of the show.

In the pilot, the doctor becomes really withdrawn once he and his family make the trip. His wife is rather clueless, she apparently pressured him into making the trip so he could have closure or some such nonsense. Their son is vapid and shallow and their daughter, like her father, wanted to stay home in LA.

In watching it, the only thing that was not boringly predictable was the series of flashbacks to an assassination attempt thirty years previously. Without that, I'd have written this one off. But I'll watch a few more to see if F/X can do this without it being a one-dimensional cartoon.

Though "cartoon" isn't the right word, for there are more subtleties in an average episode of the Simpsons than there was in Tyrant.

Garbage Trucks and Firefox

You know those side-loading garbage trucks that pick up and empty the bins in residential areas?

Nobody ever sees what's in those bins. So what's to stop somebody from using them for disposing of inconvenient bodies?
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Any reason to update to FF30? I hate the look of it (if I wanted to use Google's Chrome, I would).

In Milwaukee, When Seconds Count, the Cops Are Up to a Half-Hour Away.

Because the cops are "proactive policing", they're not available for reactive policing.

So tell me, how is calling 9-1-1 going to save your life in such a situation. Effectively, if you need a cop in Milwaukee, you're on your own.

(H/T)