“Let law enforcement determine if it’s a threat…and let the experts decide.” Earlier this week, I made note of the security cameras popping up all over Kabul. Today, though, brings news that suggests the surveillance impulse is just as alive and well here in Los Angeles. The below clip is from iWATCH, the LAPD’s:
community awareness program created to educate the public about behaviors and activities that may have a connection to terrorism. This program is a community program to help your neighborhood stay safe from terrorist activities. It is a partnership between your community and the Los Angeles Police Department. We can and must work together to prevent terrorist attacks.
A noble aim, true, but must the campaign come off sounding—and looking—so creepy? I’m not sure what’s more desperately transparent here: the pandering to youth culture with that lowercase “i,” or the PSA’s carefully calibrated casting?
I mean, do people not watch these things and realize that each and every one of these “LA voices” is an actor who, to land the gig, underwent a rigorous audition process? A process that, at some point, probably hinged on how “threatening” their own ethnicity might be perceived? And not to read too much into one PSA, but isn’t it odd that the more gratuitous close-ups belong most frequently to those of the white guys?
The Home Duvet lets you sleep under a cardboard box so a homeless person doesn’t have to! This high quality duvet cover features a photographic print of a cardboard box. This produces an extremely sharp image that stays flexible because the ink is printed directly in the cotton. The image will stay crisp after frequent washing. The duvet cover is produced in Pakistan and child labour is not used.
Indignation levels starting to rise? Consider this: 30% of the gross profits go to Centrepoint, the UK charity for homeless young people. The Duvet Cover King is currently on back-order, but, later this month, DBD plans to release a second print that looks like pavement.
“The suspect is followed from camera to camera, from every angle of view—until they’re identified as a threat or not.” Spotted over at Wired’s Danger Room, the shape of the Afghanistan to come:
Surveillance cameras have a pretty lousy track record of fighting terrorism and crime, here in the West. But that hasn?
Engrossing story in today’s New York Times that’s as moving as it is revealing. Michael Graczyk, an AP reporter on the death row beat in, of course, Texas has covered, since the ‘80s, every single execution the state has carried out. That seems creepy enough, but, in this age of media downsizing, Graczyk has become the only person at these events “who doesn?
Oh, to have been a fly on the wall Monday when L.A. City Atty. Carmen Trutanich and Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley got the dual bad news—well, bad news for them at least—about the U.S. Justice Department’s memo regarding marijuana policy and the California Superior Court’s injunction, which bans enforcement of the city’s moratorium on cannabis dispensaries, issued that same day.
Employees of medical marijuana dispensaries in Los Angeles have been showing up for work daily for the last few weeks fearing imminent police raids and participating in “raid drill” workshops, but these nerve-wracking preparations were for naught in the wake of the court’s injunction and Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr.‘s statement when he released the new guidelines. ?
Wow did this story get even weirder (as if that were possible). Turns out the whole hoax was a ruse, not merely for Richard Heene to become more famous—as we all know, he got that particular wish in spades but probably not in the manner he intended—but also for Heene to become a celebrity for a higher purpose: to warn the world about the “reptilian agenda” and the 2012 “apocalypse.”
Apparently, Heene fancies himself the Yankee version of conspiracy theorist David Icke, the former U.K. footballer and sportscaster who infamously declared himself the “son of God” in a televised interview with talk-show host Sir Terry Wogan in 1991. Icke is the author of 20 books with titles like “And the Truth Shall Set You Free,” “The Biggest Secret: The Book That Will Change the World” and “Children of the Matrix.” Icke’s agenda—and now Heene’s, too, it would seem—is to expose the global elite who control us all.
In Britain, Icke is a walking punch line. His zany conspiracy theories include what he terms the “pyramid of manipulation” a hierarchical ranking of crime bosses, bankers, the military, members of the mainstream media, politicians, etc., etc. These nefarious elites want to keep us enslaved, Icke says, and are controlled themselves by shape-shifting extraterrestrial “reptilian beings” at the top of the pyramid, who include the British royal family, the Bush family, actor-musician Kris Kristofferson, beloved hobo country-and-western singer Boxcar Willie and others. The “prison warders,” as Icke calls them, are from the constellation Draco and are hybrid crossbreeds of human and reptile. These reptilian beings appear to be fully human when they drink human blood.
If this sounds suspiciously like the “V” sci-fi television miniseries, it should, because that’s where Icke cribbed it from.
But he was motivated by theories I thought were far-fetched. Like Reptilians—the idea there are alien beings that walk among us and are shape shifters, able to resemble human beings and running the upper echelon of our government. Somehow a secret government has covered all this up since the U.S. was established, and the only way to get the truth out there was to use the mainstream media to raise Richard to a status of celebrity, so he could communicate with the masses.
As the weeks progressed, his theories got more and more extreme and paranoid. A lot of it surrounded 2012, and the possibility of there being an apocalyptic moment. Richard likes to talk a lot about the possibility of the Sun erupting in a large-scale solar flare that wipes out the Earth. It got to the point where he was really pressing me, saying we’re running out of time, we’re running out of time, the end of the world is coming. And we have to take necessary precautions to make sure that we’re not among the majority that’s going to be killed.
Here is Icke returning to Wogan’s TV program several years after his original “son of God” announcement. The cutaways to Sir Terry’s perplexed face during the interview are priceless:
Rabbits can’t get a break, these days. I remember not too long ago where German breeders were in talks with North Korea about sending them giant rabbits for food. Today, though, brings news of bunnies as the new bio-fuel:
Thousands of rabbits, some of them pets abandoned by their owners, are being shot, deep-frozen and burned in a heating plant in Sweden, a professional hunter who works for the city of Stockholm said on Tuesday.
The center of the Swedish capital is being plagued by thousands of rabbits, some of them wild and some of them stray pets, and 3,000 have been culled this year, down from 6,000 in 2008, Tommy Tuvunger, who hunts rodents for the Stockholm city administration, told SPIEGEL ONLINE. ‘We are shooting rabbits in Stockholm center, they are a very big problem,’ said Tuvunger. The rabbits are eating their way through the city’s central parks. ‘Once culled, the rabbits are frozen and when we have enough; a contractor comes and takes them away.’
The frozen bunnies are shipped to a heating plant in Karlskoga in central Sweden which uses them as biofuel and incinerates them to heat homes, media reports said. A spokeswoman for the plant declined to comment. The plant’s supplier, Konvex, a company that produces biofuels from animals, could not immediately be reached for comment.
Cross posting this little gem from Brand X, where I also blog:
L.A. City Atty. Carmen Trutanich, who has been very open about his intentions to rein in the proliferation of medical marijuana clubs in L.A., came out last week with an entirely new complaint against the facilities. In an Oct. 9 appearance Fox News 11, he explained that a pesticide used to kill Mexican fire ants had been found on medical cannabis distributed by local dispensaries and is evidence that the weed is both potentially poisonous and possibly being supplied by Mexican drug cartels.
Having previously argued that any over-the-counter sale of marijuana is illegal in a controversial interpretation of the California Supreme Court?
