Chronicling the depravities of the State.
I’m sure everybody here has seen many of those parodies of Hitler finding things out (like the price of the Bushmaster ACR for instance). Well it appears as though the company that created the movie being parodied, The Downfall, have hit YouTube with a rash of take down requests. I just did a quick search and it appears as though everybody’s favorite one, the Bushmaster ACR spoof, has been removed as well.
What suckage.
Every Day, No Days Off informs us that some marketing people don’t think their clever ideas through all the way:
A marketing stunt to promote a video game sparked an armed police callout after an actor pointed a fake gun at terrified pubgoers in Auckland’s Viaduct Basin.
About 20 revellers drinking outside Degree bar dived for cover after the promotions worker threatened them with a black imitation pistol about 8pm on Friday.
I can’t quite put my finger on it but something seems wrong with that promotional idea.
At least in Illinois. Days of our Trailers let us know that the city of Charleston, Illinois has decided kids having fun should be illegal and hence have banned the discharge of toy guns:
“WEAPONS: A. Discharge of Weapons: It shall be unlawful to discharge any firearm, air gun, BB gun, pistol, cannon, toy gun, bow, mechanically drawn bow, or any type of mechanical device projecting pellets, arrows, missiles or projectiles, leaden or otherwise or any other type of missile excepting in a regularly established shooting gallery or unless fired or discharged for ceremonial purposes with a weapon that may cause a report but does not deliver a projectile capable of causing serious injury and with the approval of the Chief of Police; provided, that this subsection shall not be construed to prohibit any officer of the law from discharging a firearm in the performance of his/her duty or for training purposes at an authorized police training facility; nor to any citizen for the discharge of a firearm when lawfully defending his person or property.”
If something could possibly be used in any manner to have fun we need to ban it immediately!
Everybody’s favorite organization is proving once again there are no people they’re not willing to fuck over hard. Here’s a video found via Dvorak Uncensored that shows what the U.N. is really doing in Haiti:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbieX5s-jHM]
Yup instead building shelters in convenient locations they’re kicking the Haitian population to the boonies while they drop down some nice air conditioned trailers in primo locations for themselves. Your donations at work ladies and gentlemen.
Well the pants shitting hysteria is upon us. Apparently Assemblywoman Lori Saldana (there’s supposed to be some goofy mark above the ‘n’ in Saldana but if it isn’t in the ASCII table I ain’t fucking with it) thinks the open display of unloaded handguns is evil and needs to be stopped. And of course she is citing that incident where 20 people were murdered by open-carry protesters… oh wait that never happened so she’s using this as her justification:
Saldaña cited an open-carry event in Pacific Beach last year as alerting her to the need for a ban on displaying guns, even unloaded, in public. There, with thousands of people at the beach on a Saturday, about 60 members of the movement walked along the boardwalk.
The gall of those people to peaceably demonstrate in a public area! My God somebody could get ideas that we should respect peoples’ rights! This must be stomped down immediately. But there’s more:
“Guns are an intimidating presence,” Saldaña said. “The average citizen can’t tell the good guys from the bad guys.”
Let me run this quick multiple choice question past you that should help the average citizen identify friend from foe.
You see a man walking down the street openly carrying a handgun. Is he:
A) Shooting at you?
B) Not shooting at you?
If you answered ‘A’ he’s a bad guy, if you answered ‘B’ he’s a good guy (as far as you’re concerned of course, if he’s not shooting at you he’s not a concern of yours).
Anyways the bill is Assembly Bill 1934. 1934? That number sounds familiars. Oh yeah it’s the year the National Firearms Act was enacted. A coincidence but a funny one regardless. Those of you in California need to stomp this law and a few others worming their way through your legislation down, HARD. I know your representatives don’t listen to you but make it damned clear if they pass anti-gun bills they won’t be getting another term. And follow that by actively working against them to ensure they don’t get another term.
Oh to close this we have a quote from a police officers:
Said Emeryville Chief James, “We view open carry as an officer safety issue. Officers are taught from Day One at the academy that guns are a threat. … We teach tactically how to respond to that threat.”
Holy shit how do the police deal with the guns other cops are carrying? After all the police are all openly carrying their firearms therefore all of your officers must treat each other as a threat. We know you can’t trust the uniform since people impersonate police officers quite often.
Well unfortunately for you, my readers, (probably more of a fortunate thing for you really) I got tied up in a side protect and didn’t get much blogging done. But I do have one post for you tonight directly from the local newspaper I like to call The Red Star. They seem to believe Minnesota needs to become a police state. This is a nice little piece I pulled from today’s story about DWIs:
Nearly 40 states allow police to set up sobriety checkpoints, often cited as one of the best tactics to keep roads safe. Minnesota started using checkpoints in 1990 but stopped four years later when the state Supreme Court ruled the tactic unconstitutional. There has been no major effort to change the law through a constitutional amendment. Police now rely largely on saturation patrols, which are less effective, to discourage drunken driving.
Minnesota also doesn’t impose enhanced penalties for extreme drunken driving unless offenders register a blood-alcohol level of 0.20 percent. Most states that impose extra penalties do so at lower levels.
Yes this state decided that assuming guilt was not constitutional. Good job! Of course The Red Star doesn’t agree and believes you need to subjugate the people of this state into proving their innocence without any evidence brought forth to accuse us of guilt.
Sobriety check points are a fancy say of saying, “We assume all people are criminals and therefore driving drunk.” You are in essence being pulled over (stopped at a check point) by police whom you must prove your innocence to before you’re allowed to drive on. That’s the definition of guilty until proven innocent. That is also one of the very ingredients for a police state.
Cripes I hate that paper.
Another story found via Dvorak Uncensored. Apparently 10 year-old kids are a lot tougher than I thought:
The release said that the officers, trying to prevent the child from hurting other children, staff members and himself, slapped the boy and then used a Taser to subdue him.
It’s a good thing they had that Taser otherwise somebody could have gotten hurt!
If there’s one thing I love it’s technology and gizmos. Because of my bizarre drive to have lots of electronic devices around I ended up buying a PlayStation 3 quite some time back. The feature list of this system is quite long although it’s been getting shorter as the system ages. This is really odd since most systems gain features as they get older. Well one feature I rather enjoyed was the ability to install Linux on the system. Sure it ran in a hypervisor and was gimped for the most part but it gave me the ability to write code for the cell processor and see what made it tick. Well Sony decided to take that away from me as well.
The latest firmware update released today removes the “Install Other OS” feature and removes any currently installed operating system. Of course I would put this off as some kind of April Fool’s prank but information regarding this has been out for a couple of days. And it’s truly bad form to pull an April Fool’s prank before the actual date.
This kind of shit really pisses me off. I realize this is a feature used by very few people but those few of us who used it really enjoyed it. The fact of the matter is one of the reasons I bought a PS3 was for this particular feature as I wanted to play with the cell processor which was all the rave at the time. Yes I paid for this feature and now Sony has decided to take it. Well I could always refuse to install the new firmware but then I can’t use the system for the other reason I own it, gaming. So no matter what Sony is ensuring I lose a feature I paid for.
Well it’s nice to see Sony has decided they no longer want my money. But this is only one piece of my two part rant. That’s right you’re getting two rants for the price of one! The other thing that’s pissing me off are the comments being made by people. For instance user HumanNature on Engadget had this to say:
Totally agreed. I blame Geohot for this mess. No one with a working common sense would not foresee Sony not fixing their security issue with OtherOs. I mean really, did Geohot really think Sony was going to congratulate him and let some other hacker make it easy to install like the PSP? Geohot releasing the exploit is the cause, Sony locking the OtherOs is the effect.
Do people really expect Sony to sit around and let the PS3 end up like the PSP? Like many things in life, it only takes one idiot to abuse something, and everyone will be force to pay the price.
That’s right people are blaming the well known hardware hacker who goes by the handle Geohot. What did Geohot do? Well you can go read his blog. More or less he found a convoluted way to accomplish nothing… yet. But as with all hacks it will eventually lead to bigger and better things.
Either way what he did was awesome. It should be seen as an accomplishment as it required ingenuity and understanding of the hypervisor. It was a good hack and he should be congratulated for figuring it out not blamed for Sony removing the “Install Other OS” capability on the PS3. The bottom line is Sony decided to take their ball and go home instead of fixing the flaw. This is akin to somebody finding an exploit in Windows Media Player and Microsoft reacting by removing Windows Media Player (granted not a horrible thing but I’m bias in my hatred of Windows Media Player).
Either way there seems to be a lot of blame and some hatred going towards Geohot for playing with hardware he owns. That’s the key thing. You don’t rent a PS3, you purchase it. Once you own it you can do anything you want with it. If I want to take mine to the range and blast the shit out of it I very well can because it’s my property. Geohot did what any good geek does, he developed an understanding of the device and decided to utilize that understanding to make the device to more. But the bottom line is this attempt to extend the capabilities of the device have nothing to do with game piracy as Sony claims.
Of course very few people really care about this exploit because few people use the “Install Other OS” feature. So I say the next exploit should focus on the Blu-ray player which people actually use. After all if that gets hacked it could allow the ability to play pirated games and therefore, using Sony’s logic, the Blu-ray drive would have to be disabled. Then people would actually be pissed.
Oh and I’m going to close out by saying fuck you Sony.
As everybody knows the United States Constitution requires the population of the United States be recorded every ten years. This is done by the Census Bureau and many of us are angry that they ask questions beyond what is constitutionally requires. Of course we’re called paranoid and asked what danger could possible exist by answering the other questions. Well that extra information has been used before to persecute a group of Americans.
The article talks about what happened shortly after the bombing at Pearl Harbor:
In the 1940 Census, the Census Bureau loudly assured people that their responses would be kept confidential. Within four days of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Census Bureau had produced a report listing the Japanese-American population in each county on the West Coast. The Census Bureau launched this project even before Congress declared war on Japan. The Census Bureau’s report helped the US Army round up more than 100,000 Japanese-Americans for concentration camps (later renamed “internment centers”).
Yup that extra “harmless” information in the Census helped the United States Army to round up a group of “undesirables.” If something has happened before it can happen again. People need to remember every time government tries to gain more information about you they will inevitably use it against you.
OK I hate the TSA just as much as everybody else, possibly more. But after seeing a story on Dvorak Uncensored I have to call bullshit. Let’s see if you can find what’s wrong with this story. The story is titled, “Child rape charge rocks TSA.” Here is the story opener:
A Transportation Security Agency worker who pats down members of the flying public was charged with multiple child sex crimes targeting an underage girl yesterday.
The bust outraged privacy and passenger advocates who say it justifies their fears about Logan International Airport’s full-body scanner.
So what do you think happened? If you answered the TSA agent used his authority to take a child to the back interrogation room and raped the child you would be completely incorrect. Here is what happened (Buried towards the end of the article):
The 14-year-old victim watched a movie at his house, Okeeffe said. She said during the film, he massaged the victim’s thigh and touched her under a blanket, then during the February school vacation the girl stayed at his house with his daughter.
So what’s the point of this article? The huge majority of the article makes a big fuss about the fact that the TSA have naked body scanners attended by agents. It makes a huge fuss about one of these TSA agents being a pedophile. But the fact the perpetrator was a TSA agent is COMPLETELY irrelevant here since everything he did was done at HIS house not the airport. At no point was any evidence brought forth stating he made initial contact with the child at the airport or through his “authority” as a TSA agent. In fact the kid was apparently friends with his daughter. Yes instead of focusing on the crime it’s made into a hit piece about the TSA.
I hate the TSA with a passion. The entire organization is nothing more than security theater run by people given a badge and just enough authority to feel they can toss people around. But this hit piece is fucking stupid. It’s akin to making a hit piece about a police department because on of the officers committed a crime off company time and at his place of residence and didn’t in any way use his position or authority to commit the crime. The fact that a man committed statutory rape and was also a TSA agent are completely irrelevant. Yes the article focuses almost exclusively on the fact the person was a TSA agent and purposely misleads you to believe the crime happened at the airport. Finally the fact that the crime happened at the agent’s house is briefly mentioned in the second to last paragraph. Fuck!
Oh and since I’m on a rant I might as well point out the following bloody obvious:
TSA spokeswoman Ann Davis said Shanahan had passed two background checks, neither of which picked up any record that would prevent him from getting a job.
That’s right background checks don’t determine if you’re going to commit a crime, only if you have committed a crime and got caught. But Dippity Dipshit says:
“It’s a huge, huge issue,” said Kate Hinni of FlyersrRights.org. “The TSA needs a complete overhaul… If you have a pedophile looking at those naked pictures, they’ve got all your information, it’s a gross violation of their authority…. They should make sure none of them is corrupted in any deviant sexual manner.”
So how in the Hell are those hiring TSA agents suppose to make sure any applicant isn’t corrupted in any deviant sexual manner? Answer me that. What you don’t have an answer? Maybe that’s because it’s fucking impossible. This article is just full of stupidity from start to end.