One year ago today: June 5, 2019, acquired & energized.
Five years ago today: June 5, 2015, my toy airplane.
Nine years ago today: June 5, 2011, the missing day.
Random years ago today: June 5, 2009, sub-prime mortgage.
Working on the speaker, it turns out super easy to duplicate these cabinets. They are not special or strengthened much. That material however, that was somebody’s brain-fart. Equally sharing the booby prize is the person who invented a speaker material that looks and acts like wood—until it gets wet. This speaker is destined for a special purpose. The box looks like a regular speaker, grill and all. But the speaker faces downward. It projects the sound down into the floor. You don’t just hear me play bass, you can very slightly feel it, too. I know this business.
From this point onward, however, I’ll have a phone number they can chew on. I’m not kidding, when I declined to give them a phone number, they almost reached for their pistols. That’s a little hyperbole, but folks, you done been told. That’s twice this has happened both this year and in a row. I don’t know how the average person could get around this. Remember, they’ve made it illegal to lie to the police, even if not under oath. But there isn’t much they can do if you don’t remember or make mistakes..
They also want the address of where you are staying while in the area, another “requirement” which is none of their business. For contact information, I tell them to use the address on my driver’s license. They are trained to ask you they could get in touch with you in an emergency. Sounds legit, but that is bullshit. If it’s an emergency, dial 911. The recent round of protests is bringing police corruption and brutality to a new light, I wonder about potential restraints on their behavior. That won’t happen voluntarily and I also wonder how the police will fight back. My opinion is the police have all the power they need to fight crime but are remorselessly using that power against ordinary citizens. And it would seem some people are finally tending to agree with me, the hard way.
TMOR, in America you do not have to talk to the police at any time. And you shouldn’t. The police are experts at getting you to blurt out things. There is not such thing as being “detained for questioning”, but we do have the last three generations taught from birth that pleading the Fifth [Amendment] is a tacit admission of guilt. It is nothing of the kind. But try to tell that to anybody these days. When you are questioned by the police against your will, always lawyer up immediately.
Boss Hogg, yes, it has largely dropped out of the picture. See what that tiny change to a jazz format can do? I’ve said it before, I don’t like jazz or people that like jazz. They have that attitude, you know, that they like jazz and you don’t, you bumpkin. Same with blues. I’ve been tempted to merge those two words into one, but might run afoul of the propaganda ministry. The mornings are still the old format. That’s when I’m least likely to be working near a radio. Monsoon season started right on the calendar day this year and visibility is down to twenty feet. So take a look at my newly installed squirrel guard. It works and they are angry. I can’t talk squirrel, but I get the message.
Still searching for info on the latest camera, the one that takes pictures of individual atoms. I’ve always wondered if they would match my mind’s-eye concept. One thing nice about microcontrollers is they have drastically lowered the cost of “robots”. That’s a loose term here, because I mean the housing and movement of sensors. What? Yes, I mean like drones (quadcopters) and underwater cameras. These have become cheap enough to be expendable. Scientist might hesitate to fly a $100,000 drone into an erupting volcano, but for $100 why not? It’s sad my microcomputer studies came to a standstill when I bought this place. The good news is the interior may be finished soon and I can partially get back to my preferred hobbies.
Legendary bush plane.
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What the? A picture of my utility bill? Yes, it’s a demonstration of how little this lockdown has affected me. After three months, the city still owes me a hundred bucks. I keep the bill paid in advance because of my travels. How is this possible, you may ask? With four-fifths of Americans living payday to payday. It’s simple. I don’t use credit. The average person has three times my income and they are struggling. It’s not only the credit, but that the use of it alters one’s lifestyle
Still using your smart phone? So are the police, according to the NYT today. And according to this blog over fifteen years ago. Back then it was triangulation of cell signals, now all the do is head over to the Google data vaults and get a fix on everybody whose phone was near a riot zone. Called geofence warrants, the police cannot possibly arrest every protester, so you have to wonder what criteria they are using to choose who gets cuffed. My position remains unchanged, that places like Google who keep such data on people in the first place are in violation of many laws. The Fourth Amendment outlaws blanket surveillance. Here’s an actual “zone” search that targets devices within 150 meters of a bank robbery.
The law is quite clear—if your records of any kind are searched behind your back, the people who keep such records are required to tell you who looked and they reason they gave for looking within 90 days. This rule is rarely enforced and subject to gag orders. We’ll soon see countermeasures, such as spoofing and intentionally leaving phones at remote locations to avoid suspicion. There is already an app for obscuring faces in photos, but these are band-aid measures.
The geofence warrants are issued to the record-keeper, but the law is still clear. In my day, such police tactics brought massive protests that continued until there was a regime change. The likelihood of that with the brainwashed generations is vanishingly small.
I’ve been watching the links, sifting through the garbage on-line. One good thing about all the protesting. Other crimes have tapered off. Most amusing is the cry to defund the police. The reactions are all wrong on both sides. They are all about the collapse of law and order, but if you think about it directly, defunding the police may work simply because constantly increasing their budgets has not worked. Give them just enough money to enforce criminal laws. Cut the amount they get for handing ou traffic tickets and driving armored personnel carriers. The rioting has lost any touch with ;justice for the people. This is the disarray the liberals said they would cause until Trump is out of office.
But he’s not out of office and likely won’t be. Nobody believes in the pre-Trump system any more. That’s not to say Trump is right, rather that there is no going back. The climate has changed from the nonsense of pulling together to make the system work to one of fix the system so we don’t have to pull. The concept has a lot of merit—unless you are a liberal leftist with an agenda of forcing people to do things they may personally detest.
ADDENDUM
Here are a couple pictures of this newest and latest airplane, the XB-58A. This illustrates the staggering progress the US has attained for the trillions of dollars entrusted to it since the last big one. Just goes to show you the great leaps forward that . . . what? It is? The Bell X-1? 1948? Oops.
The French just announced they killed the head of Al-Qaeda. What? Again? This was the newest guy with another unpronounceable name, some Afghani who fought the Soviets. The news article was two days old and did not say where. My guess is Mali, a place so primitive they still build houses out of mud. It’s mostly desert but is a gold producer. What are the French doing there? Well, it used to be a colony and they asked the French to send some soldiers. Seems the terrorists are better equipped than the Mali army. It caught my eye since the French aren’t usually associated with military successes. But, it could be more of a demonstration of what happens to terrorists when they attack anybody who can fight back.
