This reminds me of a story my partner told me about her nephew when he was just starting school. His other aunt was sent to pick him up at a schoolmate's house where he'd gone with a bunch of other kids. The yelled conversation went something like this:
"Tommy! We gotta go! Which backpack is yours?"
"The black one."
"They're all black. Is it big? Is it little?
"It's big, and it's little. It's... medium."
So now I'll have to refer to that as Schrodinger's Backpack.
Eh. Being defective, I sensed all the way back in the Reagan years a Republican hostility to the little people knowing anything beyond the need to be compliant. So here we are. It's the endgame of the GOP reactionary project... Meanwhile, it seems like libs are still doing rails of hopium even after it's been well documented that it's not healthy...
I sent a gentle note to the publisher of one of our natural resource conservation textbooks, pointing out the order-of-magnitude error in a calculation about quantities of pollutants. I mean, pollution is bad enough without flouting it arithmetically...
Hell, Harlan Ellison did a couple essays for The Glass Teat back in August 1970 (#75 and #76) about Winston Cigarettes and their "Whaddya want, good grammar or good taste?" advertising campaign.
I produced some print ads for products we manufactured or at least repackaged for sale. My favorite was a photo of the product in situ with the words "BUY THIS NOW!"
Based on the social media posting of people who live in NJ, many if not nearly all of those freaking out about so called drones are also MAGA folk. As one poster put it, those two Venn diagrams are a circle.
Which makes perfect sense to me. MAGAs have been rage and paranoia addicts for years, and now they've got what they wanted. No Stop the Steal -- their guy won. All the opposition is folding -- media, the court cases. So they have a lot of displaced, free floating paranoia and anger that has to be directed SOMEWHERE.
"Quick, somebody give me a new conspiracy fix stat, or I'll go postal!!"
There's that, and then there's the overwhelming general ignorance of the population. Baffled by the most mundane things, they see magic and portents and conspiracies everywhere.
Now, couple all of the preceding with the fact that 99.99% of all people have a child's understanding of what they see in the night sky. Lights? Lights that are MOVING!?!?!?! Why, that's gotta be UFOs. No, um, it's, um DRONEZ!!!! Yeah, drones! From some Iranian mothership!!!
About 10 years ago, I got a frantic call from a friend. The guy's a respected scientist, the world's leading expert in a certain field of spacecraft propulsion. And he calls me breathless to tell me he and his girlfriend are chasing a UFO that just keeps retreating to the west. It's brilliantly lit, and it dances around at incredible speed, and it just keeps going west!!!! Yeah, well, the UFO turned out to be Venus. He'd never actually thought about what the night sky looks like, and so had never recognized Venus before.
When I worked nights at the local airport, I would occasionally get phonecalls from terrified locals that there was a bright light hovering overhead that made no noise. I had to assure them that Jupiter was not coming for them or their kids.
And New Jersey's drones? Well, it's remarkable how all those drones follow the same paths through the sky. Paths that lead to Newark, Teterboro, LaGuardia, and JFK.
"The flight plan curiously suggests their craft are forming letters in the atmosphere...hold on, I think there may be something...yes, definitely something – the letters spell out "HA HA!"
It’s weird how I grew up in a very rural area where the full panoply of stars was visible in all its majesty on every clear night, and I never heard anybody freaking out about UFO conspiracy theories. And I assure you, it’s not because we simple country folk were more sophisticated about astronomy.
One of the Quara questions for today is "why doesn't MAGA believe in science?" and the top answer begins with "science is when I'm smarter than you", roughly, and that's where we are. "My knowledge/experience/education is greater than yours on this subject" is now arrogant snobbery, like someone grabbing the book away you're reading in the high school cafeteria because it's large and looks too much like a textbook. (cue NOFX's "The Idiots Have Taken Over")
I once had my own "drone" experience - I looked up at the night sky and saw a bar with lights at both ends, probably miles long, slowly rotating above me. Then I pretty quickly realized it was a star and an airplane. Guess I'm just an arrogant snob.
So if science equals snobbery, what is your source of intellectual authority? The answer is punditry; if you have the right political ideology, then you are right about everything under the sun because political ideology determines reality, and being right about everything under the sun trumps anything your so- called “experts” with their so-called “ knowledge” can conjure up. We live in a culture tyrannized by punditry. I blame Bill Buckley, for making punditry chic. (Not that the left hasn’t had problems of its own in that respect; but I blame punditry envy for that.). And punditry is far more snobbish than science. At least with science you can look things up if you disagree.
No, just lefty professors who envy the cultural clout of right-wing pundits, so they emulate them by riding roughshod over everything to accommodate it to their ideology.
As a lefty Professor and scientist, I am going to have to give you a big old, screw you, that does not describe me at all. Frankly, I do not think it really describes anyone, but you do you
I'll admit I usually do lose consciousness in the middle of that long list of "begots", could be they slipped the frogs in there when I wasn't looking.
and you throw in people's bad depth perception at night and that most of the sighting appear to along airplane flight paths, much of the drone stuff appears to be airplanes that people can't recognize and then the paranoia/Q-data take over
Norman Spinrad, John Brunner, JG Ballard, Phillip K Dick, Alfred Bester were all writing dystopian how-to guides masquerading as popular science fiction.
Norman Spinrad! I just discovered him a couple years ago. Been going through his $2 titles on Kindle. The Iron Dream is great. And Osama the Gun is incredible. I can see why he couldn't get it published here.
Bug Jack Baron and the short story" No Direction Home really pertain to Roy's essay. It's also fundamental must read sci-fi. Also, The Men in the Jungle. Man , that book ... Not for everybody!
There's an account I follow on Substack that calls itself "Chad C. Mulligan" who I HAD to subscribe to for the handle.
We keep seeing references to Brave New World and 1984, but I think Brunner is closer to what we're actually living, if you combine bits of Stand, Sheep, The Jagged Orbit, and The Stone That Never Came Down.
I sent a question with a reference to The Sheep Look Up a while back to The Muckrake Podcast and I was delighted that Jared got it. Called it a "deep dive".
The analysis "The They aren't scared of advertisers using computers to spy on Them, but are terrified of imaginary personal drones surveilling Them" is great insight into madness in plain sight.
"Make Them think gnats (thawed in winter by warming climate)are the aforementioned surveillance drones" is conceivably real.
I knew a woman who had Alexa boxes in every room in her house. I asked her if it bothered her that Amazon was listening to everything that went on in her family. "Oh, Alexa doesn't listen unless you're telling it to do something," she said. I asked her how she thought the Alexa box knew when she said its name. She couldn't figure that out.
Harking back to last week's Fun Friday about toss-away lines from movies, this instance from Broadcast News when the station is laying off most of the newsroom staff. As the camera pans slowly across the desks, one supervisor can be heard talking to one of the newly laid-off people:
Supervisor: "If there's anything I can do for you . . ."
I was chatting with a friend in my kitchen and he mentioned how much he liked Bud Light. Alex, unbidden and unprompted, said, "Should I order Bud Light?" Thanks, bitch. Lesson learned.
It's Walt Kelly's punchline from a classic 5-day series of Pogo comic strips about a swarm of gnats that as they flew in their swarm they spelled out sports page headlines about the baseball season.
MV-S makes one good catch every few games. Along with him, the Saints have former Packers Equimenious St Brown (Aman Ra’s less talented brother) and Jamaal Williams, the best dancer in the NFL. Between the Saints and the Jets you could resurrect the 2020 Packers.
So I've been looking around substag* lately. A couple of observations - first, Roy deserves all the props and kudos for being able to write about his life and his observations without being relentlessly self involved. Most of reichstack** can be summed up with that phrase" relentless self-involvement" Who knew there was so many people just dying to write about themselves?
The other thing I've noticed is the place is turning into "Only Fans - Prose Edition"
I'm becoming convinced my solidly PG rated photo essay substack doesn't really fit in with all the blowjob stories.
Oh well, Hamish is probably just waiting around for Musk to buy the place.
The breathless email from On Substack yesterday celebrating the partnership of Substack and The Free Press, which prompted me last night to listen to the If Books Could Kill episode on Bari Weiss' Substack and her cheerful laundering of toxic reactionary voices.
The plan makes sense; people who never noticed a night sky before won't have noticed things living in the ground.
I appreciate this inside look. Vlad, Dylan, Sammi: demographics check out. Just the crew for cooking up a new source of mass hysteria, when the last one is "down to Patch and NextDoor."
Assuming this guy is credible, a drone user in NJ was tracking one of the "mystery" drones until he entered an FAA restricted space, at which point the radio connection to the drone was jammed (and that part is true; they do jam the common drone control frequencies), yet the drone he was chasing kept going.
If that's true, the mystery drones must be military (otherwise they'd be shitting themselves about jamming-proof drones in restricted airspace, which does not appear to be the case). So NSA, DIA, DARPA, M-O-U-S-E, take your pick. A nothing burger.
Many years ago, the cat our neighbors gave me (he was named Gato (the cat, not the neighbor)) was out in our backyard, and indicated he wanted in. I opened the door, and noticed something odd. There was a slender thing sticking our of his mouth, slowly twirling. So I got ahold of Gato, and pulled the mouse he had in his mouth out. I let it go in the canal area behind the yard. Needless to say, Gato was not happy.
Yea, I think we’re a bit too fast to dismiss those kinds of possibilities. The way the government is responding is how they would respond if there was some kind of possible emergency.
Bwahahaha! No, this is America (fuck yeah!). They shot Patriot missiles at the damn Chinese balloon. There would be a hell of lot more lights in the sky - missile trails.
Seriously, you think these folks have any kind of competence? Any idiot could have disarmed the Roswell business (a hilarious story in itself - "strange alien writing", yeah the scientists jury-rigging the Mogul balloon ran out of tape and went across the street to a craft store and got goofy tape. The magic material was Mylar) but no, the Army is stupid all the way to the top. You are assuming a level of competence that has never been shown in American history. Remember the "Domino theory"? Vietnam will come into the Chicoms orbit. Bullshit. They been fighting China for going on THREE THOUSAND YEARS. Morons.
Hanlon's Razor still applies: "Do not attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity"
ETA: "The University Of Ohio lost a high-altitude balloon designed to measure cosmic ray flux. Because of budgetary contraints the balloon was made of paper, Scotch tape, and a new plastic coated aluminium that returns to its original shape after crumpling. Some of the tape had various symbols of a birthday party theme, again due to the budget. The University is extremely embarrassed and has apologized to the Army and the media for the inadvertent panic"
I'm autistic, and wrote that off the top of my head. They could easily compel the University to go along...or else. Any static from the University would be written off as sour grapes. Think what an actual advertising person could have done. Needless secrecy bit the Army in the ass.
Dylan! I wondered how he was getting along, kid seems to be doing OK. Not what he'd hoped for, but isn't that par for the course as Arnold Palmer used to say in the locker room, swinging his Johnson like a golf club. There's a deep strain of mysticism in Real America, the factoids of the percentage of people believing in angels and ghosts, that woman who wrote a book about fundamentalists interviewing a woman who has a cup of coffe and a chat with Jesus every morning (He chats back of course, sittting in the other chair at the table). Q and drones and microchips and all the rest are cut from the same cloth, shortcuts to focus their anxiety, resentment and hope on easy answers. They will believe anything if it tickles the right anxiety and offers someone to blame. My new mantra to keep me going is None Of It Is Supposed To Make Sense. Trying to fit what were soaking in right now into a rational box is madness. Doesn't mean you embrace the Abyss, but that you just stop expecting an answer, because there is none. No one asks a tornado why it destroyed one house and left the one next door alone.
Dunno, I've been shaken by the election, by the realization that most Americans probably aren't paying attention to ANYTHING. You'd say to them, "Hey, whaddya think about this drone thing, huh?" and you get a blank look in return. Of course the news always focuses on the handful of idiots who are freaking out about something, anything, gotta fill that time slot somehow. But who knows what people are really thinking, or if they're thinking at all? I sure don't.
I don't like to make a big thing about it, but I have an enormous brain. And here's what I've sussed out. Drones became commercially available in the early 2000s. As the technology improved, prices dropped, and consumer demand grew. More companies started making drones for personal use. Best Buy currently has 141 different models for sale on their website. Say you've already got a top-end camcorder and a few Go Pros. You're gonna want to step up. Black Friday? Great deals. Maybe, just maybe, people are seeing more drones because there are more out there. I will await my Nobel nomination in my usual spot.
I've seen pictures of ones the Syrian rebel groups were using there. They look like store-bought ones, only with a camera and a bomb zip-tied to them. Something to take note of!
I like this theory, and want to introduce it to my own theory that hysteria and idiocy spread faster now that everyone has a pocket-sized computer than they consult regularly.
I haven’t been following the drone thing other than seeing the headlines and one article from someone purporting to be familiar with the military’s procedures for hunting radioactive substances such as might be used in dirty bombs. So you all think there’s really nothing to it?
Tangentially, if you get out in the lonesome desert and watch the night sky, it ain’t what it used to be. Satellites are everywhere and you can see Starlink in a line. In the long list of what’s wrong in this world, assholes being able to launch satellites is up there, though perhaps more of a symptom than a cause.
And I don’t think the Trans issue is going away, at least for as long as there is online porn. Those who are the loudest about it are obviously addicted to she-male videos, if not real life trans prostitutes. It’s the typical hypocrite’s response want to punish people for their own uncontrollable desires. They should be called out on it more in those terms. Maybe it would help to shut them up.
Microchips and salsa!
Schrodinger Salsa that is both mild and hot, until you eat it.
Use the Force, LukeWarm!
This reminds me of a story my partner told me about her nephew when he was just starting school. His other aunt was sent to pick him up at a schoolmate's house where he'd gone with a bunch of other kids. The yelled conversation went something like this:
"Tommy! We gotta go! Which backpack is yours?"
"The black one."
"They're all black. Is it big? Is it little?
"It's big, and it's little. It's... medium."
So now I'll have to refer to that as Schrodinger's Backpack.
The gnat is the mothership for the vaccines.
Eh. Being defective, I sensed all the way back in the Reagan years a Republican hostility to the little people knowing anything beyond the need to be compliant. So here we are. It's the endgame of the GOP reactionary project... Meanwhile, it seems like libs are still doing rails of hopium even after it's been well documented that it's not healthy...
Anyway.
Speaking of gross yet endemic stupidity, this:
https://x.com/JakeLahut/status/1869057318257914266
and
https://science.slashdot.org/story/24/12/17/0222233/huge-math-error-corrected-in-black-plastic-study
I sent a gentle note to the publisher of one of our natural resource conservation textbooks, pointing out the order-of-magnitude error in a calculation about quantities of pollutants. I mean, pollution is bad enough without flouting it arithmetically...
Good for you!
I marvel at the (apparently) endemic sloppiness in studies. Of course, the same happens in reporting generally. Speed over accuracy.
But we're living in those kind of times.
Hell, Harlan Ellison did a couple essays for The Glass Teat back in August 1970 (#75 and #76) about Winston Cigarettes and their "Whaddya want, good grammar or good taste?" advertising campaign.
That’s artistic choice in service to consumerism. What seems to be happening — emphasis on seems — is just lazy thinking, maybe simple stupidity.
Don Draper &c re Winston knew what they were doing with the Winston campaign, ditto Tareton or whatever the name was.
Well, Ellison COULD be just a tad hysterical at times.
This has indeed been developing for a long time, though.
I produced some print ads for products we manufactured or at least repackaged for sale. My favorite was a photo of the product in situ with the words "BUY THIS NOW!"
I mean, what's an ad for, anyway?
Both, Shirley...
Based on the social media posting of people who live in NJ, many if not nearly all of those freaking out about so called drones are also MAGA folk. As one poster put it, those two Venn diagrams are a circle.
Which makes perfect sense to me. MAGAs have been rage and paranoia addicts for years, and now they've got what they wanted. No Stop the Steal -- their guy won. All the opposition is folding -- media, the court cases. So they have a lot of displaced, free floating paranoia and anger that has to be directed SOMEWHERE.
"Quick, somebody give me a new conspiracy fix stat, or I'll go postal!!"
"Quick, somebody give me a new conspiracy fix stat, or I'll go postal!!"
But not like real postal, like working to save the Post Office.
No, not "go postal" like "Do some real work for a change."
There's that, and then there's the overwhelming general ignorance of the population. Baffled by the most mundane things, they see magic and portents and conspiracies everywhere.
Now, couple all of the preceding with the fact that 99.99% of all people have a child's understanding of what they see in the night sky. Lights? Lights that are MOVING!?!?!?! Why, that's gotta be UFOs. No, um, it's, um DRONEZ!!!! Yeah, drones! From some Iranian mothership!!!
About 10 years ago, I got a frantic call from a friend. The guy's a respected scientist, the world's leading expert in a certain field of spacecraft propulsion. And he calls me breathless to tell me he and his girlfriend are chasing a UFO that just keeps retreating to the west. It's brilliantly lit, and it dances around at incredible speed, and it just keeps going west!!!! Yeah, well, the UFO turned out to be Venus. He'd never actually thought about what the night sky looks like, and so had never recognized Venus before.
When I worked nights at the local airport, I would occasionally get phonecalls from terrified locals that there was a bright light hovering overhead that made no noise. I had to assure them that Jupiter was not coming for them or their kids.
And New Jersey's drones? Well, it's remarkable how all those drones follow the same paths through the sky. Paths that lead to Newark, Teterboro, LaGuardia, and JFK.
2 marks for Teterboro.
No love for EWR, Islip, or White Plains?
No, no that they are following the airport traffic trajectory only proves how deep the conspiracy goes!!
"The extraterrestrial UFOs are cleared for takeoff and landing with the local air traffic control!"
In other words THEY ALIGN PERFECTLY WITH THE CHEMTRAILS.
"The flight plan curiously suggests their craft are forming letters in the atmosphere...hold on, I think there may be something...yes, definitely something – the letters spell out "HA HA!"
Chemtrails By Day, Drones By Night: The Anatomy Of A Fake Panic
As Read Into The Congressional Record By Jeff Van Drew (R-NJ Moron)
It’s weird how I grew up in a very rural area where the full panoply of stars was visible in all its majesty on every clear night, and I never heard anybody freaking out about UFO conspiracy theories. And I assure you, it’s not because we simple country folk were more sophisticated about astronomy.
New Jersey isn’t rural, though; it’s suburban. You don’t get enough of the night sky there for the stars to register as real.
Yes, I know. That was kind of my point, which I was not clear enough about.
One of the Quara questions for today is "why doesn't MAGA believe in science?" and the top answer begins with "science is when I'm smarter than you", roughly, and that's where we are. "My knowledge/experience/education is greater than yours on this subject" is now arrogant snobbery, like someone grabbing the book away you're reading in the high school cafeteria because it's large and looks too much like a textbook. (cue NOFX's "The Idiots Have Taken Over")
I once had my own "drone" experience - I looked up at the night sky and saw a bar with lights at both ends, probably miles long, slowly rotating above me. Then I pretty quickly realized it was a star and an airplane. Guess I'm just an arrogant snob.
So if science equals snobbery, what is your source of intellectual authority? The answer is punditry; if you have the right political ideology, then you are right about everything under the sun because political ideology determines reality, and being right about everything under the sun trumps anything your so- called “experts” with their so-called “ knowledge” can conjure up. We live in a culture tyrannized by punditry. I blame Bill Buckley, for making punditry chic. (Not that the left hasn’t had problems of its own in that respect; but I blame punditry envy for that.). And punditry is far more snobbish than science. At least with science you can look things up if you disagree.
We seen it on the yoootooobz and thatz that!
Goddamn, you just made stuff clear that I've been thinking about but couldn't articulate. It's cultish, isn't it?
You can literally *make shit up* in punditry: no controls, no testing, no peer review.
Are their actual lefty pundits rather than pundits that play a slightly left of center person on TV?
No, just lefty professors who envy the cultural clout of right-wing pundits, so they emulate them by riding roughshod over everything to accommodate it to their ideology.
As a lefty Professor and scientist, I am going to have to give you a big old, screw you, that does not describe me at all. Frankly, I do not think it really describes anyone, but you do you
"Hicksville, Syosset, Cold Spring Harbor, Huntington. Change at Huntington for the train to Port Jefferson."
But how many people got off at Chappaqua?
I never rode that line.
"Next stop, Willoughby." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITusMLbZ0dI
Don't worry, MTG is on the job. She'll shoot the drones down herself!
https://www.newsweek.com/marjorie-taylor-greene-shoot-down-mysterious-drones-2002059
"I'll shoot the drones down myself along with every other red blooded freedom loving American."
Marjorie gonna spare the bluebloods, apparently...
Back in olden days there was a video of a woman who freaked-out because she made a rainbow while spraying water from a garden hose.
I remember that, wasn't it something they were putting in the water, to turn all the frogs gay?
Aren't tadpoles gestated in the male, or some goddamn thing? So frogs are ALREADY gay.
And they have their own chorus. QED.
Tell me what book you read that in, so it can be banned from our schools.
KJ's Bible. Gotcha, maga-boy!
I'll admit I usually do lose consciousness in the middle of that long list of "begots", could be they slipped the frogs in there when I wasn't looking.
July, 2006. I have an mp3 of that video saved.
was she worried about the leprechauns and their pot of gold?
He'll probably go postal anyway, but at least he'll have a REASON.
and you throw in people's bad depth perception at night and that most of the sighting appear to along airplane flight paths, much of the drone stuff appears to be airplanes that people can't recognize and then the paranoia/Q-data take over
Norman Spinrad, John Brunner, JG Ballard, Phillip K Dick, Alfred Bester were all writing dystopian how-to guides masquerading as popular science fiction.
Norman Spinrad! I just discovered him a couple years ago. Been going through his $2 titles on Kindle. The Iron Dream is great. And Osama the Gun is incredible. I can see why he couldn't get it published here.
Bug Jack Baron and the short story" No Direction Home really pertain to Roy's essay. It's also fundamental must read sci-fi. Also, The Men in the Jungle. Man , that book ... Not for everybody!
The Sheep Look Up is great dystopian fiction.
Stand on Zanzibar is one of my favorites. Still holds up!
There's an account I follow on Substack that calls itself "Chad C. Mulligan" who I HAD to subscribe to for the handle.
We keep seeing references to Brave New World and 1984, but I think Brunner is closer to what we're actually living, if you combine bits of Stand, Sheep, The Jagged Orbit, and The Stone That Never Came Down.
I sent a question with a reference to The Sheep Look Up a while back to The Muckrake Podcast and I was delighted that Jared got it. Called it a "deep dive".
For which the chilling climax (no spoiler here, really) is "Acid rain!" As if. (sigh) We were simple folk then. Ah, but we were happy.
Little Heroes is really good as well.
If alla them copters wuz white we wouldn't havin' this freakout!
This crew needs a sequel or two.
White helicopter privilege
The analysis "The They aren't scared of advertisers using computers to spy on Them, but are terrified of imaginary personal drones surveilling Them" is great insight into madness in plain sight.
"Make Them think gnats (thawed in winter by warming climate)are the aforementioned surveillance drones" is conceivably real.
I cranked my hearing aids to 11 and I still couldn't hear no drone!
were you not listenin to Trump's latest speech?
Among many other things not listened to, no.
I knew a woman who had Alexa boxes in every room in her house. I asked her if it bothered her that Amazon was listening to everything that went on in her family. "Oh, Alexa doesn't listen unless you're telling it to do something," she said. I asked her how she thought the Alexa box knew when she said its name. She couldn't figure that out.
D’oh.
"Alexa, would you die for me?"
Harking back to last week's Fun Friday about toss-away lines from movies, this instance from Broadcast News when the station is laying off most of the newsroom staff. As the camera pans slowly across the desks, one supervisor can be heard talking to one of the newly laid-off people:
Supervisor: "If there's anything I can do for you . . ."
Employee: "You could die soon."
Almost nobody ever harks forward...
Oh, I love that line, and will be deducting no points for late work.
I was chatting with a friend in my kitchen and he mentioned how much he liked Bud Light. Alex, unbidden and unprompted, said, "Should I order Bud Light?" Thanks, bitch. Lesson learned.
ALEXA. Not Alex. Leave Alex alone.
Will do, once he's handed over all his earthly possessions to those folks in Sandy Hook.
Clippy speaks up: "It looks like you're trying to get shit-faced. Can I help?"
A local reference: https://news.sportslogos.net/2015/07/11/this-team-bites-the-story-behind-the-savannah-sand-gnats/baseball/
Break Up The Gnats!
And now I'm thinking about TBogg and "Gnat" as his name for James Lileks' sprog.
It's Walt Kelly's punchline from a classic 5-day series of Pogo comic strips about a swarm of gnats that as they flew in their swarm they spelled out sports page headlines about the baseball season.
Comedy is cool.
Lol. Valdes-Scantling. And I thought Roy was a Ravens fan.
MV-S makes one good catch every few games. Along with him, the Saints have former Packers Equimenious St Brown (Aman Ra’s less talented brother) and Jamaal Williams, the best dancer in the NFL. Between the Saints and the Jets you could resurrect the 2020 Packers.
"Between the Saints and the Jets you could resurrect the 2020 Packers"
[insert Jeff Goldblum Jurassic Park meme here]
So I've been looking around substag* lately. A couple of observations - first, Roy deserves all the props and kudos for being able to write about his life and his observations without being relentlessly self involved. Most of reichstack** can be summed up with that phrase" relentless self-involvement" Who knew there was so many people just dying to write about themselves?
The other thing I've noticed is the place is turning into "Only Fans - Prose Edition"
I'm becoming convinced my solidly PG rated photo essay substack doesn't really fit in with all the blowjob stories.
Oh well, Hamish is probably just waiting around for Musk to buy the place.
* A Typo worth keeping !
** Not a typo - still worth keeping!
The breathless email from On Substack yesterday celebrating the partnership of Substack and The Free Press, which prompted me last night to listen to the If Books Could Kill episode on Bari Weiss' Substack and her cheerful laundering of toxic reactionary voices.
Is laundering oneself like taking a shower?
The plan makes sense; people who never noticed a night sky before won't have noticed things living in the ground.
I appreciate this inside look. Vlad, Dylan, Sammi: demographics check out. Just the crew for cooking up a new source of mass hysteria, when the last one is "down to Patch and NextDoor."
It's got verisimilitude, that's what it's got.
As always. That, and the mots justes to keep me coming back.
Too real.
Brill.
Assuming this guy is credible, a drone user in NJ was tracking one of the "mystery" drones until he entered an FAA restricted space, at which point the radio connection to the drone was jammed (and that part is true; they do jam the common drone control frequencies), yet the drone he was chasing kept going.
If that's true, the mystery drones must be military (otherwise they'd be shitting themselves about jamming-proof drones in restricted airspace, which does not appear to be the case). So NSA, DIA, DARPA, M-O-U-S-E, take your pick. A nothing burger.
I live in New Jersey, and all the homes in my neighborhood have recently been infested with mice. Coincidence?
Tee hee, you think they're regular mice! That's adorable.
BTW, we here at Casa Ubu are celebrating Wayne having caught his VERY FIRST MOUSE night before last. He is very upset though that I threw it out.
He got the action, he got the motion
Yeah, the boy can play
(Remember, since you can't or won't hunt for yourself, he has to help you.)
Humans, what useful skills do they have, other than knowing how to operate the can opener? It's sad, really.
Give Wayne 2 marks for me, thanks.
Many years ago, the cat our neighbors gave me (he was named Gato (the cat, not the neighbor)) was out in our backyard, and indicated he wanted in. I opened the door, and noticed something odd. There was a slender thing sticking our of his mouth, slowly twirling. So I got ahold of Gato, and pulled the mouse he had in his mouth out. I let it go in the canal area behind the yard. Needless to say, Gato was not happy.
Yea, I think we’re a bit too fast to dismiss those kinds of possibilities. The way the government is responding is how they would respond if there was some kind of possible emergency.
Bwahahaha! No, this is America (fuck yeah!). They shot Patriot missiles at the damn Chinese balloon. There would be a hell of lot more lights in the sky - missile trails.
Seriously, you think these folks have any kind of competence? Any idiot could have disarmed the Roswell business (a hilarious story in itself - "strange alien writing", yeah the scientists jury-rigging the Mogul balloon ran out of tape and went across the street to a craft store and got goofy tape. The magic material was Mylar) but no, the Army is stupid all the way to the top. You are assuming a level of competence that has never been shown in American history. Remember the "Domino theory"? Vietnam will come into the Chicoms orbit. Bullshit. They been fighting China for going on THREE THOUSAND YEARS. Morons.
Hanlon's Razor still applies: "Do not attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity"
ETA: "The University Of Ohio lost a high-altitude balloon designed to measure cosmic ray flux. Because of budgetary contraints the balloon was made of paper, Scotch tape, and a new plastic coated aluminium that returns to its original shape after crumpling. Some of the tape had various symbols of a birthday party theme, again due to the budget. The University is extremely embarrassed and has apologized to the Army and the media for the inadvertent panic"
I'm autistic, and wrote that off the top of my head. They could easily compel the University to go along...or else. Any static from the University would be written off as sour grapes. Think what an actual advertising person could have done. Needless secrecy bit the Army in the ass.
yes, there are a lot of very competent people in the government and military.
I'll just note that other things that our government is responding to as if they are emergencies include immigrants and the existence of trans people.
Is that the same Dylan that was trying to work for rightwing newspapers in your fiction thing? Love this sketch.
Dylan! I wondered how he was getting along, kid seems to be doing OK. Not what he'd hoped for, but isn't that par for the course as Arnold Palmer used to say in the locker room, swinging his Johnson like a golf club. There's a deep strain of mysticism in Real America, the factoids of the percentage of people believing in angels and ghosts, that woman who wrote a book about fundamentalists interviewing a woman who has a cup of coffe and a chat with Jesus every morning (He chats back of course, sittting in the other chair at the table). Q and drones and microchips and all the rest are cut from the same cloth, shortcuts to focus their anxiety, resentment and hope on easy answers. They will believe anything if it tickles the right anxiety and offers someone to blame. My new mantra to keep me going is None Of It Is Supposed To Make Sense. Trying to fit what were soaking in right now into a rational box is madness. Doesn't mean you embrace the Abyss, but that you just stop expecting an answer, because there is none. No one asks a tornado why it destroyed one house and left the one next door alone.
Dunno, I've been shaken by the election, by the realization that most Americans probably aren't paying attention to ANYTHING. You'd say to them, "Hey, whaddya think about this drone thing, huh?" and you get a blank look in return. Of course the news always focuses on the handful of idiots who are freaking out about something, anything, gotta fill that time slot somehow. But who knows what people are really thinking, or if they're thinking at all? I sure don't.
When Arnie gets to the locker room, everbody says "That's a gimme" and gives him a pass...
I don't like to make a big thing about it, but I have an enormous brain. And here's what I've sussed out. Drones became commercially available in the early 2000s. As the technology improved, prices dropped, and consumer demand grew. More companies started making drones for personal use. Best Buy currently has 141 different models for sale on their website. Say you've already got a top-end camcorder and a few Go Pros. You're gonna want to step up. Black Friday? Great deals. Maybe, just maybe, people are seeing more drones because there are more out there. I will await my Nobel nomination in my usual spot.
Periodic reminder that both Ukraine and Russia have been using drones in combat since the war started.
I've seen pictures of ones the Syrian rebel groups were using there. They look like store-bought ones, only with a camera and a bomb zip-tied to them. Something to take note of!
Whoa, WHOA...Slow DOWN. This gonna take some thinkin' juice.
I like this theory, and want to introduce it to my own theory that hysteria and idiocy spread faster now that everyone has a pocket-sized computer than they consult regularly.
Is that a computer in your pocket or are you just glad to see me leave?
or people are mistaking normal flying things for drones
I haven’t been following the drone thing other than seeing the headlines and one article from someone purporting to be familiar with the military’s procedures for hunting radioactive substances such as might be used in dirty bombs. So you all think there’s really nothing to it?
Tangentially, if you get out in the lonesome desert and watch the night sky, it ain’t what it used to be. Satellites are everywhere and you can see Starlink in a line. In the long list of what’s wrong in this world, assholes being able to launch satellites is up there, though perhaps more of a symptom than a cause.
And I don’t think the Trans issue is going away, at least for as long as there is online porn. Those who are the loudest about it are obviously addicted to she-male videos, if not real life trans prostitutes. It’s the typical hypocrite’s response want to punish people for their own uncontrollable desires. They should be called out on it more in those terms. Maybe it would help to shut them up.
Nothing to it? Who knows? But for me, the simple rule of thumb is when Joe Rogan gets involved, I check out.
I checked, and I found this thing was not on the list of things that I am obligated to have an opinion on.
I'm not liking the "she-male" in that comment. Not cool.
Not my description, I’m quoting. No offense intended.