Posts Tagged ‘obnoxiousness’

Bananaman apprehended.

Saturday, August 21st, 2010

Police believe Kohnert — fully costumed in the yellow banana costume — exposed himself to a woman at the Port Angeles Wendy’s restaurant and drove through Four Seasons Ranch brandishing a shotgun.

Anthony Marks Maybury, 21, was arrested for investigation of reckless endangerment.

An 18-year-old woman was in the car with them, but Pieper did not name her because she was not arrested nor is she thought to be involved in any crimes.

“The banana costume has been seized and put into evidence,” Pieper said.

“[Kohnert] couldn’t really tell us why he was in the costume.

“All we know is he was drinking earlier in the day, but he didn’t really have a reason for the costume.”

The Port Angeles Police Department received the first report about a costumed man at about 6 p.m., after he was seen at Wendy’s, Pieper said.

After leaving Wendy’s in a Dodge Stratus, Kohnert — the costumed man — and Maybury drove to Saar’s Market on U.S. Highway 101 on the east side of Port Angeles, Pieper said.

“They then were called in for a car doing a burnout — in other words pulling 360s in the Saar’s Market parking lot,” Pieper said.

“They did not, it appears, get out at Saar’s, though.”

After leaving Port Angeles, the group made a stop at Four Seasons Ranch, where Kohnert — still dressed in the banana costume — got out, brandished a shotgun and began yelling, Pieper said.

“We believe he was yelling something or other about white supremacy,” Pieper said.

Deputies arrest man in banana costume with shotgun” by Paige Dickerson, Peninsula Daily News 8-20-10

Only two letters’ difference between “plantain” and “plantation”.

Just sayin’.

Have fun and cuídate.

Foundation and Google Earth

Tuesday, August 3rd, 2010

The investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time — and says it uses that information to predict the future.

The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents — both present and still-to-come. In a white paper, the company says its temporal analytics engine “goes beyond search” by “looking at the ‘invisible links’ between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events.”

The idea is to figure out for each incident who was involved, where it happened and when it might go down. Recorded Future then plots that chatter, showing online “momentum” for any given event.

“The cool thing is, you can actually predict the curve, in many cases,” says company CEO Christopher Ahlberg, a former Swedish Army Ranger with a PhD in computer science.

Which naturally makes the 16-person Cambridge, Massachusetts, firm attractive to Google Ventures, the search giant’s investment division, and to In-Q-Tel, which handles similar duties for the CIA and the wider intelligence community.

So, the banally evil bedfellows at Google and the CIA are into playing Hari Seldon now, which would be hilarious were it not so obscenely obnoxious.  Meanwhile, Julian Assange has dropped a 1.4 gig file of what may or may not be highly volatile dirt to WikiLeaks’ Afghanistan page, to be decrypted in the event of his capture, and some scumfuck congressfiend has called (may it not be returned) for Bradley Manning‘s head on a plate.

Mad props to Assange and Manning, unripe raspberries to yinz  psychohistorians and cuídate.

Upadate, 8-7-2010

“If I look at enough of your messaging and your location, and use Artificial Intelligence,” Schmidt said, “we can predict where you are going to go.”

“Show us 14 photos of yourself and we can identify who you are. You think you don’t have 14 photos of yourself on the internet? You’ve got Facebook photos! People will find it’s very useful to have devices that remember what you want to do, because you forgot…But society isn’t ready for questions that will be raised as result of user-generated content.”

In addition to predicting personal behavior, diseases and other crises will become predictable as well, Schmidt said.

On the misuse of information for criminal or anti-social purposes:

“The only way to manage this is true transparency and no anonymity. In a world of asynchronous threats, it is too dangerous for there not to be some way to identify you. We need a [verified] name service for people. Governments will demand it.”

Google CEO Schmidt: ‘People Aren’t Ready for the Technology Revolution’” by Marshall Kirkpatrick, ReadWriteWeb 8-4-10

That wretched demiurge the Gangster Computer God has again redefined obnoxiousness: Facebook and Google are going to war getting all Republican and Democrat, with Google dropping some kind of social networking shit called Google Me.

Unfuck you.

Mr. Fusion

Monday, August 2nd, 2010

powers the time circuits and the flux capacitor.

Doc Brown, Back to the Future III

  • Fusion Center of the Year–The Colorado Information and Analysis Center (CIAC) was recognized for exemplifying every aspect of a robust and mature fusion center. CIAC leadership has been a strong advocate of fusion centers, organizing and supporting the national build-out of the network. They were specifically recognized for their recent support to the Najibullah Zazi terrorism investigation as well as their leadership during the 2008 National Democratic Convention.
  • Fusion Center Federal Representative of the Year–FBI agent Leslie Gardner, assigned to the Los Angeles Joint Regional Intelligence Center (JRIC), was nominated for her leadership in developing the JRIC into a nationally recognized model of cooperation and collaboration between agencies of all sizes and missions. She has been responsible for initiating policies, processes, and programs which exceeded expectations and drove standards across the national network of fusion centers.
  • State/Local Fusion Center Representative of the Year–Mike Sena, Deputy Director, Northern California Regional Intelligence Center (NCRIC), was recognized for his leadership and management of the NCRIC’s growth and maturation. Under his leadership, the fusion center has expanded its all-crimes/all-hazards mission by providing superior customer service and expanding its partnerships across all levels of government.

Bart Johnson, DHS Principal Deputy Under Secretary for Intelligence and Analysis, said of the award winners: “It is an honor and a privilege to recognize the outstanding contributions of partners at all levels of government in support of the national network of fusion centers as they continue to evolve to enhance our national security.”

Ed Wall, Administrator of Wisconsin Emergency Management, received the National Fusion Center Leadership Award on behalf of the National Fusion Center Association. He was recognized for his ongoing support to the national network of fusion centers.

U.S. Honors Award Winners At National Fusion Center Conference” by DHS, 2-26-10

What is a fusion center?

The answer depends on your perspective. If you work for the Department of Homeland Security, it is a federal, state, local, or regional data-coordination units, designed to improve the sharing of anti-terrorism and anti-crime data in order to make America safer. If you are privacy or civil-rights advocate, it is part of a powerful new domestic surveillance infrastructure that combines data from both the public and private sectors to track innocent people and so makes Americans less safe from their own government. In that respect, the fusion center is reminiscent of the East German stasi, which used tens of thousands of state police and hundreds of thousands of informers to monitor an estimated one-third of the population.

The history of fusion centers provides insight into which answer is correct.

An American Stasi?” by Wendy McElroy, The Freeman 7-28-10

See something, say something and cuídate.

Obama strikes Netroots.

Saturday, July 31st, 2010

Cutting-edge “activists, journalists, and bloggers” were still fawning over God Emperor Barry after he personally cluster-bombed their conference rooms to Formica splinters from Air Force One last Sunday, an act 84% of survivors praised for its decisive progressiveness.  “Half my face got blown off, but I appreciate the remaining half so much more now.  Like with Healthcare and The Economy, I think He’s taken courageous steps toward helping us all appreciate just how much we have in this country,” one attendee gushed, ineffectually applying a glossy pamphlet to stanch the blood before splashing to the asphalt, departing this vale of tears half-beaming and clutching a first-run campaign button.

Obama blamed the attack on Al Qaeda, Congress, Cyberterrrists, Iran, My Predecessors, Sky Pirates, Tea Partiers and WikiLeaks and called it a day.

Three by-the-grace-of-Eris-unscathed Netroots Nationals responded to the announcement by backing the God Emperor up every step of the way, taking it personal and making it personal with the velveteen touch of a dandy fop, and uttering nonsensical advice, respectively.

Have fun and cuídate.

Typo no trifle for Dallas couple.

Friday, July 16th, 2010

“Pretty smart bit of work, eh?”

Agatha Christie, N or M?

Mitchell’s “honest mistake” hand-waving is yet another opportunity to point out that police accountability remains, by and large, a fiction.  Were some pals & I to menace folks with obnoxious flashing lights and firearms, accuse them of stealing stuff they never stole, ignore their pleas and protestations of innocence, force them to kneel and don handcuffs and then admit to having done so and blame our behavior on a fucking typo, odds are pals & I would wind up doing some kinda time for our actions.

Will the cops involved here do any time for what they did?  Will they compensate their victims in any form, to any degree whatsoever?

We’ll see, but I’m'a go, pretty confidently, with, “No,” to both questions.

And why not?

‘Cause, costumes.

Have fun and cuídate.