Go onto Techdirt ( here ) and check Tim Cushing’s blog. His beat is the abuse and corruption of our justice system. The latest issue I recall was using drones to peek into fenced backyards, into windows and deep across property lines, all without a warrant or probable cause.

During the 2010s IMSI spoofers were being used but the Stingray corporation required precincts sign an NDE so parallel reconstruction (creating an alternative plausible path of investigation to lead to the same discovery of evidence) was the norm. Eventually defense lawyers learned to press the issue, as even FBI would drop cases before admitting they used IMSI catchers to spy on where a suspect’s phone was.

One of my bigger beefs is the misuse of detection dogs, which have up to a ~90% false positive rate, called Probable Cause on Four Legs it’s known that most departments prefer trick-pony dogs who just signal a lot, in contrast to dogs who can actually detect stuff.

Interestingly, there is a subset of the K9 sector who train and handle detection dogs (which are still legitimately used, say to detect explosives in long lines of luggage at airports), and thanks to the common use of dogs to force a search, the public has been losing confidence in them, and courts who believe dog searches are for real.

The problem is luck plays an enormous role in whether or not a company fails or makes bank. This is how we end up with idiots who become hundred-millionaires or billionaires. Though being savvy helps improve your chances.

If you’re good at playing the dailies, you will inevitably go bust, possibly while owning a bunch of rotting commodities that didn’t sell in time, but once you have a reputation friends will lend you money to get back on your feet (which you pay back with interest.)

So white-power mail?

On the first day it was released to the public.

The encryption specialists at universities knew about the eliptic curve backdoor before it was implemented, and kept recommending that it not be.

Remember that if the police can read your stuff, so can foreign interests, industrial spies, organized crime and militants of large scale political movements.

Besides which here in the States, law enforcement is notorious for abusing their access to technology to bypass protections of the fourth amendment to the Constitution of the United States, often relying on getting a warrant post hoc or lying to establish probable cause.

And usually the judges don’t mind.

Some of us were around when leaded gasoline was the norm, and every municipality had a crime rate drop that corellates to their unleaded gas mandate.

Then there’s lead in candy which was a problem until the FDA shut that down.

There still is lead in fuel, and so kids who play in urban playgrounds are supposed to wash their hands before eating anything.

So if our people have detectable elevated lead levels (it has a plenty-long bio half life), I’d question automotive exhaust and industry before worrying about guns at the range. Unless someone is squeezing off a hundred rounds a day.

Yes! That was a vast improvement. It’s not the only way that Americans are felons if the state needs to decide they are, or if they need to add charges / sentencing considerations if the prosecutors really want to throw away the key, such as embarrassing VIPs or killing rich people.

Still, you don’t want the police looking at your entire internet history, even if you believe you have nothing to hide, they will find things that they find objectionable enough to justify treating you roughly.

Extraordinary Rendition is the euphemism from the aughts from which the movie Rendition was titled. It means taking your detainee somewhere else, often across national borders, to a black site, usually to do things there for plausible deniability (e.g. we don’t torture in the United States )

All Americans who have ever used the internet have violations of the CFAA, since website TOS violations are legally as criminal as hacking NORAD (the CFAA was passed after Reagan saw wargames ) normally letting your twelve-year-old start a Facebook account gets you 25 years, if some prosecutor wanted to enforce it. And they think that’s ridiculous and don’t.

However, if that prosecutor wants to turn a five month sentence into a ten year sentence, then the suspect’s CFAA violation history might be useful after all.

And that is just one of the laws that overreaches and is easily broken and not usually enforced.

Suddenly you may have something to hide after all, say if they’re rounding up gay felons and any petty felony would make your gay ass qualify. (The German SD and US ICE both ignore violent felon requirements when they’re rounding up folk to be detained and deported)

Oh it turns out we needed NSA to do its actual fucking job after all rather than holding onto exploits for the surveillance state.

Now — for the second time — we have an adversarial administration eager to weaponize government departments while Americans are vulnerable. Why? Because America is the good guys and would never abuse its extrajudicial powers (say, by detaining, rendering and torturing Americans with names similar to those of POIs.)

We could have had twenty-four years of robust communications security developments if NSA didnt sell the public out like Judas.

The terrorist charges suggest they want to make an example of him: this is what we do to those who mess with the ownership class.

But by doing so, it only highlights how our society, including the justice system is grossly stratified, so the ownership class is protected bit not restrained, and the working class is restrained but not protected.

The public is already looking at Thompson as a single example of an elite deviant (white collar criminal) who has a high body count, and yet isn’t even regarded as a criminal, much less is being investigated for all the death he is responsible for.

And he is one instance representing a single company in a single industry that goes without regulation. Then there’s cars, guns, opioid addiction, PFOA in the water supply, war profiteers and so on.

(This is why it’s weird that Lucifer in his eponymous show is content with helping an LA police officer hunt down petty serial killers instead of the Brian Thompsons of the world. He, of anyone should know where the true evil is — But the writers either do not, or are not allowed to acknowledge elite deviance.)

Wait until you see the difference between a 1920 fighter and a 1940 fighter.

This is also pretty much the plot of Satisfactory.

Thank you.

So long as Federal shennanigans don’t accelerate my situation (say by killing Social Security) then I should be okay.

But yeah, I’m super vulnerable like brain surgery during a hurricaine.

Weapons of terror tend to be messy. There were railroad guns that could hit Paris from seventy miles but couldn’t accurately target a spot within Paris, so it was used to stomp civilians.

Nukes are terror weapons in that they dont just kill the target but plenty of territory around it as well, which is an exclusion zone for a while.

I can’t speak for the Star Destroyer but the Death Star super-laser is clearly a mining tool used to crack open planets to get to the gooey center minerals. It can be used to annihilate a planet, but that’s usually a waste of real estate.

I don’t. I’m literally on suicide watch trying new psych meds and wondering if the emotion storms are triggered by news, or the new drugs. Whee.

When the entire country is tilting day by day over the precipice about to fall into the abyss of fascist, one-party autocracy, it feels like the night before the Martians emerge with their tripods and heat rays. I feel like Fiver seeing the notice board portending the disaster of Sandleford Warren. I feel cursed for slighting Apollo somehow.

People are carrying on as if there’s nothing wrong or nothing we can do, and I can’t understand how they continue to function.

Borderlands 2 was written by Anthony Burch, and featured a lot of HAWP style humor. It had plenty of material that didn’t land but plenty that hit the mark.

Burch also set a bar that 3 failed abysmally.

Now wondering if there are six-year-olds in Africa using M16/AR-15 style rifles as part of some warlord’s army. I guess they don’t get to go to kindergarten, though.

Ultimately, there can be only one, which is why J. P. Morgan scared Andrew Carnegie quite a bit. They just didn’t get to the part where Morgan would actively bring Carnegie to ruin.

The rich are tasty even to other rich, though they’ll eat the rest of us first because we can’t defend ourselves or escape.

History teems with famines, and with famines you’ll find cannibalism.

This is what we expect after the world runs out of water to run our farms. Mad Max with fewer cars and more cannibalism.

Oh that’s a good one. Get the pope to pass a bull offering everyone salvation, past, present, future, fictional, factual, human, animal, spirit.

They’d reverse it quickly, but it would be too late. It happened.

And because the Holy See has ecclesiastic jurisdiction (as we all learned in Dogma ) then it would totally count. Heaven for everyone.

And if there are angels in Wisconsin cursed by God and breaking divine infallibility unmakes the universe (it doesn’t) then the world would end.