substitute

Streaming video of nauseating violations of the Constitution: http://qik.com/video/249011

The background to the video: http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/08/30/police_raids/

Thanks to The Enchanted Porkfist

Spineless "Opposition" Grants President Crazy Spy Powers

That photo. Wow. Thanks to jwz. No thanks to Dianne Feinstein.

Tin soldiers and Nixon coming,
We're finally on our own...

At UC Irvine today. This sign is clearly hand-lettered by cheerful sorority girls or their functional equivalent. What kind of collaborationist Quisling would work so hard for the Mafia music business? Do I even want to know?

Sometimes the IP logging feature on LJ is a beautiful thing, especially when Homeland Security employees think they're being all badass by flaming you for your political views from work.

Back to work, you. I pay you to beat up Mexicans and lose the city of New Orleans, not click around on the internet like a bunch of Kansas City faggots.

hotelsamurai pointed me to this Wired News story which has interesting implications.

These researchers have invented a scheme for finding interesting images. Computers aren't so great at it yet, but humans are. In fact, we're so good at it that we recognize important images before we consciously know it, and this recognition can be measured by EEG. In their setup, a human watches images go by, and the ones that register on the EEG as "of interest" are set aside to be looked at more carefully. In short, it's brain-aided image triage.

Given the current sources of funding for research, the examples given are surveillance camera shots, and the T-word has to be mentioned. This makes the whole project stink of 21st century panopticon. But that's not the important part.

Using a human as a coprocessor, literally as a brain rather than as a person, is new. I imagine it doesn't matter too much which brain you use, aside from some that are very good or very bad at recognizing images. It's also likely that this isn't fun "work." Just looking at rapidly changing images for a long time is tiring, and if you aren't able to do anything else but sit in the chair and let your unconscious processes do something, the boredom would be awful. From my own experience doing EEG biofeedback, the side effects of directly EEG-linked activity can be very unpleasant and unpredictable. I doubt anyone knows yet what the effect would be of long-term work as a rent-a-brain.

A Philip K. Dick dystopia looms, in which "braining" is something the poor do, like plasma donation or prostitution. Maybe it fucks you up pretty bad, but the Wal-Mart hasn't been hiring in a while and you need cash. Too bad about the week-long psychoses a person gets after doing the hookups for a couple of weeks of 12-hour days...

I for one welcome our roaming security robot spy overlords.

One of the best things about an oppressive, unaccountable government is the humorous situations. Inevitably, one part of the mechanism will crash into another, resulting in a laff riot. In this case, the evil, stupid robots in charge of the TSA and the No Fly List encountered a condensed symbol of American patriotism and defiled it really, really hard. In the butt. This article is from the Marine Times. It could only be better if each Marine had been holding a crying eagle and a model of the WTC.

TSA detains Marine escorts
Trio escorting body of fallen comrade are stripped of dress blue coats, searched at airport

By Gidget Fuentes
Times staff writer

It wasn’t the city of “brotherly love” for a trio of Marine noncommissioned officers escorting the body of a fallen Marine through the Philadelphia airport.

Each decked in their blue dress uniforms, the three enlisted Marines made their way through a security checkpoint at the Philadelphia International Airport about noon on May 3 when they were pulled aside by security workers with the federal Transportation Safety Administration.

The Marines — a sergeant and two corporals — were escorting the body of Sgt. Lea R. Mills from Dover Air Force Base, Del., to his family in Gulfport, Miss. Mills, who was married and lived in Oceanside with his wife, was killed in Iraq on April 28 by a roadside bomb. He was one of three leathernecks killed that day in Iraq’s Anbar province.

They were brothers-in-arms. Like Mills, the Marine escorts are members of the Camp Pendleton-based 3rd Assault Amphibian Battalion.

The trio had to go through the terminal’s security in order to reach their flight that would take them to Houston and make sure that Mills’ body was properly placed on the airplane. While their uniforms likely would trigger the metal detector, they had figured they would be able to zip through the screening process and get on with their business.

“Wearing the blues, the metal detector is going to go off,” said Sgt. John Stock, a mechanic, who was accompanied by Cpls. Aaron Bigalk and Jason Schadeburg.

But as the Marines went through the initial screener in their dress blues, they were stopped by several TSA agents. Each was told to remove their dress uniform blouse, belt and black dress shoes, which were scanned by the detector, as the agents scanned them with hand-held detecting wands.

“They had me take off my shoes and ran them through the screening,” Stock said, speaking by phone May 5 from Gulfport, where the men are helping with Mills’ family and funeral support. “We all got searched.”

Then they were taken to a nearby room, where TSA workers patted them down.

At one point, Stock’s shoes disappeared, leaving him to frantically search for them and retrieve them from a TSA agent. Separated from their belongings, which included the flag that they bore that would drape Mills’ casket for the rest of the journey home, they worried about getting to the gate in time to ensure his safe placement in the airplane.

Time, it seemed like a half-hour, clicked by. “I was like, hey, we need to be on the tarmac,” Stock recalled. “It just took longer than it should have had to take.”

The agents said nothing to explain why all three were singled out for additional search and the Marines didn’t protest. “We were just trying to get there as quick as we could,” he added.

In all, it was a humiliating experience that left them angry.

“They could probably tell that I was pissed off,” said Stock, who noted that he’s never encountered that kind of search when going through airport security in uniform.

“I understand if I was in civilian clothes. But with what we were wearing and what we were doing … ,” he said, noting that “we had the flag with us.”

A call into TSA’s public affairs office in the D.C. area was not returned as of press time.

“The Marine Corps is currently cooperating with (TSA) to resolve this matter,” the command said in statement issued May 5 and provided by 2nd Lt. Lawton King, a 1st Marine Division spokesman at Camp Pendleton.

kniwt points to this story about the Newton Free Library.

Law enforcement wanted at their computers without a warrant. They said no and held the line. God bless librarians.

GPS in the cellphone, unsurprisingly, turns out to be a mixed blessing. With that plus surveillance cameras, RFID, caller ID, and car-based tracking systems like OnStar, we're on our way to the Panopticon. Not a trend I like.