It's rare for Amazon to sell Apple's wireless AirPods let alone have them on sale. I bought a pair in March and I really like how convenient and easy to use they are. Right now Amazon is selling them for $145 with free Prime shipping, which is $14 less than the price at the Apple store.
Leonardo Da Vinci kept a to-do list. The thing that struck me was his interest in seeking out experts to teach him and show him how to do things. This list is from 1490 or so.
It's fascinating to see how MAD's covers have evolved over the years. It started as a comic book in 1952 with covers drawn by creator Harvey Kurtzman. He also wrote the stories in each issue, but they were illustrated by artists like Wally Wood and Jack Davis. When the publisher, EC, was almost wiped out during the comic book moral panic of the mid-50s, EC stopped publishing their great horror and science fiction titles and converted MAD into a magazine.
Doug Gilford's MAD Cover Site has all 553 covers, from 1952 to the present day. As you browse through the decades, it's interesting to see how the covers reflect the culture of the time in which they were published.
From Open Culture:
To see the archive's covers in a large format, you need only scroll to the desired year, click on the issue number, and then click on the image that appears. (Alternatively, those with advanced Mad knowledge can simply pick an issue number from the pull-down "Select-a-Mad" menu at the top of the page.) Gilford keeps the site updated with covers right up to the latest issue: number three, as of this writing, since the magazine "rebooted" this past June as it relocated its offices from New York to California. Recent targets have included Donald Trump, Donald Trump, Donald Trump, and, of course, Donald Trump. Mad's longevity may be surprising, but it certainly doesn't look like America will stop providing the ridiculousness on which it has always survived any time soon.
John Oliver handily obliterates Facebook's desperate propaganda campaign to rehabilitate itself.
This is just the latest low point of Facebook. We've had to deal with controversies over everything from possibly contributing to a genocide in Myanmar to Mark Zuckerberg claiming Holocaust deniers weren't intentionally getting it wrong to the company using the disaster in Puerto Rico as a backdrop to promote their virtual reality tools.
A one-pound bolt dropped from 20 feet will easily impale a watermelon. From 30 feet it obliterates the watermelon. Lesson learned: protect your watermelon when you take it to work.
Ralph Teetor, a mechanical engineer who was blind since childhood, invented cruise control because his lawyer's driving nauseated him. Great Big Story has a short video about him and his other inventions.
In 2015, Alok Menghrajani wrote a simple game, including a floppy disk bootloader to run it, that fit in a tweet. Now that the tweet length is double what it was then, he's made a version that can be burned to CD. perl -E 'say"A"x46422,"BDRDAwMQFFTCBUT1JJVE8gU1BFQ0lGSUNBVElPTg","A"x54,"Ew","A"x2634,"/0NEMDAxAQ","A"x2721,"BAAAAYQ","A"x30,"SVVVqogAAAAAAAEAF","A"x2676,"LMBaACgB76gfbgTAM0Qv8D4uYAI86qqgcc+AXP45GA8SHIRPFB3DTeYSEhyBSwCa8CwicMB3rSG/sHNFbRFJjAke9rrwQ","A"x2638'|base64 -D>cd.iso
The code is compacted into Base64, but you get the idea: a ludicrously yet ingeniously simplified game wrapped in a perl script that dumps it into an iso file to burn to CD. The game is ~64 bytes long.
See also: the tweet-length demoscene.
I had to have this Fortnite tee-shirt. They keep finding ways to get me paying for this free game.
Fortnite 99 Problems T-Shirt via Amazon
Polygon has an amazing piece on why gaming culture and young white male gamers are so toxic. They interviewed a number of folks doing actual academic research and professional journalism on the topic, and the answers are sadly exactly what you expect. Scared racist white guys have had a lot of time to fester in their little bubble, and are very resistant to any change that means they aren't always Übermenschen.
Excerpt via Polygon, but read the whole thing:
Why are gaming’s toxic men so enraged?
Women and people of color are beginning to appear in games as powerful characters with their own agency. Slowly, women and minorities are starting to hold senior positions in game development and game criticism. Why is representation — within and outside the art — so offensive to gaming’s toxic men?
Soraya Chemaly:
There’s a lot of sociological research about hierarchy and status in the gaming space, and the misogyny and aggression that comes out of that.
We know that the dynamics of women’s visibility online, particularly in what are perceived as competitive situations, can often result in lower-status men feeling threatened, and then dogpiling on women who have more prominence, status and visibility.
We see that in gaming, and we see it in the same way on Twitter where they have a two-tiered verification system that makes women extremely visible in prominent ways.
Jen Golbeck (Golbeck is an associate professor at the University of Maryland. Her books on internet and entertainment culture include Introduction to Social Media Investigation: A Hands-on Approach.):
The mythos of heroic, powerful men who are in charge — who are respected, successful and dominant — is a narrative that is really changing. The status quo in video games is adapting, which feels threatening to white, conservative men, even younger ones.
It can be hard if you’re in the position of privilege to feel like something is being taken away from you. To fail to see that this is really about stopping other people being ignored or abused. I don’t like it, but I understand where that feeling comes from.
Paul Booth (Booth is an associate professor of media and cinema studies at DePaul Univesity. He researches fandom in new media and games. His books include Crossing Fandoms: SuperWhoLock and the Contemporary Fan Audience.):
When one is used to being catered to, and then suddenly other people are being catered to as well, it feels like you’ve lost something, even though you actually haven’t. So privilege absolutely plays into this, both male privilege and white privilege.
Charted by /u/draypresct at Reddit, this shows the death rates due to unintentional injuries by age for men and women.
Data from the CDC National Vital Statistics System. Cause of death methodology and other data descriptions here: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/mortality/lcwk1_hr.htm edit: I used Microsoft Excel to make the graph. The data I used were the tables that included all races and ethnicities.
I'm surprised that teenage boys appear to suffer less accidents than adult men of any subsequent age.
A quick registration at Donate Life can turn hunks of your soulless cadaver into the greatest gift you'll ever give.
In 2006 a heart donor gave my Uncle, Lee Krinsky, 12 more years of life. I can not tell you how much those 12 years meant to Lee, his wife Karen, our entire family, and a large community of people who loved him.
My Uncle Lee was the kind of Uncle who was always full of shit. As a kid it was great fun to listen to him tell stories. As an adult it was great fun to smoke a joint with him, and listen to him tell wild stories. One of the best was the story of his transplanted heart. Nothing about being a transplant recipient is easy, but Lee was always grateful, and knew he was living on gifted time. He had worn his old heart out.
You can line up to give that gift to someone else. Be it restoring vision, kidneys, liver or a beating heart -- any parts you aren't using any more are spare. As my Uncle Lee would say "Be a mensch" and sign up.
Harajuku Pop Princess Kyary Pamyu Pamyu is back, and there's no danger whatsoever of a "left tree" situation in this lavish, wonderfully-costumed and choreographed pop video. Previously.
"Aloha Poke [Co.] would prefer to settle this matter amicably and without court intervention," reads a letter from Olson and Cepuritis Ltd, lawyers representing Chicago's Aloha Poke Company, addressed to the owner of Honolulu's "Aloha Poke Shop." (more…)
Antarctica's brutal climate is taking its toll on the historic bases built by the original explorers and scientists. Now preservationists are working to preserve these important sites. (more…)
Francisco Huizar III had an affair with the woman Keith King was married to. King's marriage subsequently fell apart, so he sued for all sorts of alleged impropriety. Superior Court Judge Orlando Hudson awarded him $8.8 million.
via the Kansas City News:
A Durham County judge awarded the owner of a BMX bike stunt show company more than $8.8 million from the man he said seduced his wife and ruined his marriage.
Superior Court Judge Orlando Hudson awarded Keith King more than $2.2 million in compensatory damages and three times that in punitive damages from Francisco Huizar III of San Antonio, Texas.
Huizar’s attorney said they will appeal.
In the civil complaint filed in April 2017, King accused Huizar of criminal conversation, alienation of affection, intentional infliction of emotional distress, negligent infliction of emotional distress and assault and battery.
$1000 is a lot of money; too much for a new laptop if all you want to do is play games on the go. At Laptop Mag, Rami Tabari wrote a guide on how to hunt for a good one.
4. Whether you're going cheap or all out, avoid touch screens. All they do is hike up the price.
It's a good guide with all the necessary caveats; the most important one is that the GPU is by far the most important factor. The entry-level GPU is the Nvidia MX150, which gets you playing older and casual titles easily and fancy new games with the settings all on low. But if you're gonna bother, you may as well fork a little to get to a 10xx-series chip so you know it'll handle the hits of 2020.
Here's my one-sentence guide: go on Craigslist or Facebook marketplace or OfferUp or whatever, search for "1060 laptop", and buy the cheapest on offer that looks kosher to you. If you don't want to risk used, but want something good under a grand, this Dell is about $950 [Amazon link] and won't mark you as one of The Gamers, with only 2 (two) red LEDs and no leprechaun swastika logos.
Lucy the truffle-sniffing dog is helping Professor Ulf Büntgen and other researchers learn more about the ecology of truffles, which despite their great value remain enigmatic to scientists. (more…)
Five years after Oregon designated Saccharomyces cerevisia (AKA brewer's yeast) as its official state microbe, the New Jersey senate has unanimously passed S1729, which names Streptomyces griseus (which produces a powerful antibiotic and was discovered at Rutgers) to high state honor -- now the microbe bill goes to the state assembly and thence to the governor. (Image: Docwarhol, CC-BY-SA)
Facebook is said to be revealing today that it has identified “ coordinated political influence campaigns using fake accounts to influence the midterm elections on issues like “Unite the Right” and #AbolishICE,” reports the New York Times. The company has been working with FBI to investigate who's behind the campaigns. (more…)
The FDA has sent warning letters to seven companies selling quack "energy based" vaginal rejuvenation "therapies," in which repurposed laser and radio-frequency-based tools that are used to remove warts and precancerous growths are used to scorch peoples' vaginas, a process that is claimed to have benefits for sexual dysfunction, urinary problems, dryness, "laxity," itching and a host of ills. Some of these companies specifically target breast-cancer survivors. (more…)
Miniatur Wunderland in Hamburg is, according to the Guinness Book of Records, the world's largest model train set. It's so large—including airports, cityscapes and even seas—that to even call it a train set seems a good example of the German sense of humor. It covers 1,500 square meters, has 260,000 figurines in it , 9,250 cars, 1,040 trains, 42 planes, 385,000 LEDs, and cost 21 million Euros to construct.
After the Brexit vote, a lot of people pointed out that the areas that voted most heavily in favour of separating from the EU were also the areas that relied most heavily on EU subsidies, and wondered why British voters would decide to slit their own throats. (more…)
Trump finance secretary/supervillain Steve Mnuchin says he wants to unilaterally allow Americans to factor in inflation when calculating capital gains; the move would cost the US government $100 billion and 97% of that would go to the top 10% of US earners (66% would go to the 0.1% of US earners). (more…)
Mercatus (previously) is part of the Koch Brothers' network of thinktanks which allow the billionaires and their cadre of oligarchs to make it appear that their ideas are mainstream by all singing the praises of the wealthy in chorus. (more…)
Susan Crawford (previously) identifies one of the great and deadly paradoxes of late-stage capitalism, where predatory oligarchs prowl for state assets that can be sold off to them on the cheap, and target vulnerable regulators that can be dismantled so that industry can run amok: the best-functioning, most vital, best-run state systems are invisible, because they do their jobs so well we never hear about them. (more…)
UkuRobot is a programmable ukulele player. Here, it plays the haunting theme from Requiem for a Dream, since used in a kajillion movie trailers. In the video below, there's a second shot of its mechanisms. (more…)
'The Try Guys' started as a jokey part of a clickbaity but harmless YouTube genre, but they've been slowly edging into much deeper topics involving masculine insecurities around their appearance, most notably Should The Try Guys Get Plastic Surgery? (more…)
Boing Boing fave Simone Giertz (of "Shitty Robots" fame) had brain surgery earlier this year, so it's great to see her back with an update. (more…)
Web Typography Resources is a list of apps, tools, plugins and other stuff that will help you make words look nice on the world-wide web. Highlights include Bram Stein's typography inspector, Monotype's new SkyFonts webfont management service, and Matej Latin's book Better Web Typography for a Better Web. [Amazon]
Previously: Practical Typography [Matthew Butterick]
The researchers applied a signal processing technique for altering recorded speech under a neutral mouth position to what it would have sounded like had the speaker been smiling. They played 60 such recordings (some manipulated, some not) to 35 subjects, and asked them to judge whether the speaker was smiling. The researchers also measured the responses of two subject muscle groups while listening, the zygomatic (smiling) muscles and the corrugator (frowning) muscles. When the subjects correctly reported neutral expression or smiling in the speech, both of their muscle groups accurately mirrored the speech while listening (e.g., for smiling speakers, zygomatic tensing and corrugator relaxing). Interestingly, even when the subjects were wrong, their zygomatic muscles still mirrored correctly. This was not true for the corrugators, which instead reflected the subjects' report. Our mirroring capabilities go well beyond what we see, or even perceive.
After spending ~5 to ~10 minutes filling it out I get this message.
This item is only eligble for Amazon Verified Purchase Reviews.
What a waste of my time! I bought the thing, Amazon knows this, so what is this about "Amazon Verified Purchase reviews"
Note that I only got this message AFTER trying to leave a 2 star review. What would have happend if I had left a more positive review? Would that be allowed?
My favorite 'dark pattern' at Amazon was how you couldn't navigate away from the checkout page: the Amazon logo was unlinked and the rest of the usual layout was absent. They changed this recently to make the logo clickable, but they still aren't letting you leave that page without a fight, and there's only one place they wan't you to go back to:
Road diets (previously) have been proven to reduce fatalities and unsafe speed incidents. Here's how it works. (more…)
Children should conduct all interviews from this point forward because they get into it. They aren't afraid to ask the real questions.
Case in point: The HiHo Kids all got 20 minutes to grill Macklemore on anything they wanted. It starts with a bang when a young girl asks, "Is it hard to be a rapper with your kind of skin tone?" Unfazed, the rap star answers with a smirk, "What are you trying to say?"
Macklemore keeps it pretty real with the kids, except for maybe a couple times, like when he said that weird thing about the "sexiest animal hunters."
Surprisingly, some of the kids didn't recognize Macklemore. But this one did and he's a big fan (as you'll see if you watch to the end): 
Given that I started a keto diet last weekend, I couldn;t have stumbled across this video at a worse time (farewell, carbs. I knew thee well.) But just because I can only stare at this video longingly doesn't mean that you can't partake.
All dogs should come with their own GoPro camera. Every. Single. One.
On the latest episode of Fox News' OBJECTified, the Canadian-born game show host shared that he gave it a 50-50 chance that he'll renew his contract when it comes up in two yearsand that he already has a replacement in mind: sportscaster Alex Faust.
While we wait a couple more years for his decision, let's go back to that time when the nerdcore community rapped this song after Trebek insulted a contestant who said she was into the genre, shall we? https://youtu.be/3WQk7YGpFZ4
A little over two weeks ago, Russian feminist protest group Pussy Riot was arrested for crashing the field at the World Cup final wearing police uniforms. They were protesting illegal arrests. After serving 15 days in jail for their "crime," they were released, but then, to their surprise, were immediately arrested again. Looking at this video, it's obvious they weren't expecting this.
Their crime this time? According to The Guardian:
A tweet on Pussy Riot's official Twitter page said they had been charged with "the organisation and holding of public events without prior notice" and could face another 10 days behind bars.
our 4 activists (nika nikulshina, olya pahtusova, olya kuracheva, petya verzilov) are arrested again and brought to the police station; they're charged with article "20.2.2" - "the organization and holding of public events without prior written notice’ - up to 10 days of arrest.
— 𝖕𝖚𝖘𝖘𝖞 𝖗𝖎𝖔𝖙 (@pussyrrriot) July 30, 2018
Here they are at the world cup: https://youtu.be/FWg7cKeJHUc
Three people brought a net to the San Antonio Aquarium, and when no one was looking, they scooped up a 16-inch horn shark and placed it into a baby carriage. They then strolled it up a staircase and made their way to the parking lot, taking off in a red pick up truck.
The thieves were able to steal the shark from the aquarium's "touch pool," the area where people are able to touch and pet sea life, while the attendant was distracted by other visitors.
According to NBC:
They then ducked into a filter room and emptied out a bleach bucket, into which they deposited the shark, the aquarium said. They used the bucket to transfer the shark into the stroller and "hurried up the stairs and out to the parking lot," it said.
Unfortunately, the shark is still at large.
"We are offering a reward for any tips that lead to the recovery of this animal," says the aquarium. "We value the lives of all of our animals and take pride in the care that we are able to give them as well as the education that we are able to give to the general public about these treasured species."
Via NBC news
Image: by Ed Bierman from CA, usa - horn shark, CC BY 2.0, Link
I've enjoyed all of Dan Brown's thrillers. Great literature they ain't but they always keep me reading past my bedtime. I happened to miss Origin when it first came out, but since it's on sale for $3, how could I pass it up?
Motherboard reviewed a "device that looks just like an iPhone but is actually an Android that has been reskinned from top-to-bottom to seem as close to an iPhone as is possible... the phone is also loaded with backdoors and malicious apps."
Once I started trying some of Apple’s more recent and advanced features, though, things started going off the rails. Siri’s graphical interface has been recreated, but it doesn’t really work. My favorite thing about the phone is its “Face ID” system. I clicked over to Face ID in the settings menu, clicked “Add a Face ID,” and was hilariously bounced over to the camera, which did manage to draw a green box around my face. It said “Face Added,” and closed. I was then able to unlock the phone with my face. So was literally anyone else who put their face in front of the phone.
Clicking around further betrayed the phone’s actual software: the keyboard is clearly an Android keyboard; when the reskinned App Store crashed, I got a popup notifying me that the “Google Play Store” had malfunctioned. The “Weather” app is just Yahoo! Weather. The Health App is a third party thing that asked me to click cartoon avatars selecting whether I was a “boy or girl.” The “Podcasts” app just opens YouTube. Apple Maps opens Google Maps.
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It's always a pleasure to watch Chris Notap make a new tool. One thing he likes to make is mousetraps. This time, he made an ingeniously simple trap that lures mice into a cylinder made from a soda tube and dumps them unceremoniously into a bucket.
The 1949 book, Prophets of Deceit, A Study in the Techniques of the American Agitator, by Leo Lowenthal and Norbert Guterman, was written to explain how an aspiring dictator "molds already existing prejudices and tendencies into overt doctrines and ultimately into overt action." The authors intended to not "merely to describe prejudice but to explain it in order to help in its eradication." An admirable goal, but the book could also be used as a manual for indoctrinating members into a mass cult of hatred. Take a look at this list of four "grievances" that totalitarian dictators use to highjack the minds of the susceptible:
1. ECONOMIC GRIEVANCES. The agitator roams freely over every area of economic life. He may begin anywhere at all. Too much help is being extended to foreign nations. "If we have any money to offer for nothing, or to loan, or to give away, we had better give it to our own first. Of course, that is old fashioned."
Not only are foreigners taking our money, they also threaten our jobs. "People born in America have to commit suicide because they have nothing to eat while refugees get their jobs."
Behind such injustices stand "The International Bankers, who devised and control our money system, [and] are guilty of giving us unsound money."
Such situations constitute a danger to the American way of life, for "what is more likely to follow many years of Nudeal communistic confiscatory taxation, wool-less, metal-less, auto-less regimentation and planned scarcities than our finally becoming stripped by necessity to Nudism?"
2. POLITICAL GRIEVANCES. International commitments by the United States government jeopardize political liberties. "Like Russia, the United States is suffering from the scourge of internationalism." The American people are warned: "Be not duped by the internationalists who dwell amongst us."
Of course it is only reasonable that "treaties and agreements . . . shall be reached with other nations, but . . . we want no world court and no world congress made up of a few Orientals and a few Russians and a few Europeans and a few British . . . to make laws for us to obey. . .
From within, this country is threatened by radicalism, which prepares strikes that are "dress rehearsals for a forthcoming general strike that is meant to paralyze the Nation. . . ."
We face both the danger of a "Soviet America . . . where . . . an Aus- trian-born Felix Frankfurter presides over an unending 'Moscow trial.' ." and the rule of "tyrannical bureaucrats" who if they "could have their way completely" would institute a "dictatorship in America as merciless as anything on earth."
3. CULTURAL GRIEVANCES. The agitator is greatly disturbed because the media of public information are in the hands of enemies of the nation. "...the Hollywood motion picture industry is being exploited by Russian Jewish Communists determined to inject their materialistic propaganda into the fresh young minds of our children. . ." Hollywood is "largely dominated by aliens who have appropriated to their own use the inventions and discoveries of native citizens and who now specialize in speculation, indecency and foreign propaganda."
"The American press will never be free" until control "is removed from racial, religious and economic pressure groups."
4. MORAL GRIEVANCES. The enemies of the agitator are notoriously lax in morals: they engage in luxury consumption, they are a "crowd of Marxists, refugees, left-wing internationalists who enjoy the cream of the country and want the rest of us to go on milkless, butterless, cheeseless days while they guzzle champagne." And what is most galling of all is that "we gentiles are suckers." For "while we were praying they had their hands in our pockets."
Sound familiar?
Image: Michael Vadon/Flickr. Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)
(Thanks, Marina!)
It spit out believable names like Spankles, Astro Sparkin, and Space Rock Screamin Camp, as well as weirder names like Corn Viral Hammers, Wiq Renames Spaghette, and Hellball Lounge. Then it went with some truly bizarre ones like Cohnie Stacefur Ass Chaos, Sir Liberains the Wreck Middle, and Awes Orpoop.
The woman behind the experiment, research scientist Janelle Shane, writes:
Thanks to an anonymous burner, I had a list of 1593 past Burning Man camps to feed to a neural network. A neural network is a kind of machine learning algorithm that learns to imitate the data it sees. My starting point was a textgen-rnn neural net that had been previously trained on metal bands and roller derby names, so it had a few ideas of its own to bring to the table. It did not disappoint.
There's a bunch more of these machine-learned camp names over at Shane's site.
Let's hope life imitates art and some Burners out there actually create one (or more) of these camps this year on the playa!
Image via simon of the playa
Thanks, Dan S.!
Via Universe Today:
In astronomy, adaptive optics refers to a technique where instruments are able to compensate for the blurring effect caused by Earth’s atmosphere, which is a serious issue when it comes to ground-based telescopes. Basically, as light passes through our atmosphere, it becomes distorted and causes distant objects to become blurred (which is why stars appear to twinkle when seen with the naked eye).
Head over to the article to see a remarkable before and after shot.
• This is a photo of Neptune, from the ground! ESO's new adaptive optics makes ground telescopes ignore the earth's atmosphere (Universe Today) .
Jeff Whitman, driving a van emblazoned with a company logo and contact number, made it his business to follow another man home to let him "know how much of a N— you are."
The victim, who was black, filmed the encounter. Whitman, who is white, is laying low. Theodore Decker with The Columbus Dispatch spoke to him on the phone:
Whitman called again. He said he chose the wrong word and insists he is not a bigot. He provided a woman’s number and urged me to call her. He wouldn’t say why exactly, but I get the sense that he sees her as a character witness.
He rambled a bit and said a few other things, including one sentiment that would have many of his newfound enemies guffawing:
“I just don’t understand the intensity of the hate,” he said.
He just don't understand the intensity of the hate.
As part of Quiet Skies, air marshals are being asked to step off of the flights that they’ve been assigned to protect to undertake a new detail: gathering intelligence on civilians who aren’t on a terrorist watchlist – regular folks like you and me. Unlike ICE, which giddily has accepted a larger number of troubling new powers and responsibilities from the federal government, the air marshals are voicing their concern with the new marching orders being given to them. From The Boston Globe:
Since this initiative launched in March, dozens of air marshals have raised concerns about the Quiet Skies program with senior officials and colleagues, sought legal counsel, and expressed misgivings about the surveillance program, according to interviews and documents reviewed by the Globe. “What we are doing [in Quiet Skies] is troubling and raising some serious questions as to the validity and legality of what we are doing and how we are doing it,” one air marshal wrote in a text message to colleagues.It’s not just texts and mumbled complaints cherry picked by a whack of investigative journalists, either. Recently, John Casaretti, president of the Air Marshal Association, stated “The Air Marshal Association believes that missions based on recognized intelligence, or in support of ongoing federal investigations, is the proper criteria for flight scheduling. Currently, the Quiet Skies program does not meet the criteria we find acceptable.” According to the Boston Globe, TSA documents show there are about 40-50 Quiet Skies passengers pinged on domestic flights each day. On average, air marshals follow and surveil about 35 of them. Think about that: every day, 35 people, who have engaged in no criminal activity, are being researched and followed by undercover agents just because someone doesn’t like the look of them. We’re not talking about citizens of foreign nations here, either – Quiet Skies targets American citizens. For the time being, the TSA is mum on how they choose who the program targets or what makes those individuals worth the attention that they’re being given. Could it be skin color? Religious or political affiliations? Information gleamed from their private email or text conversations? Your guess is as good as anyone’s.
After a ton of digging, The Boston Globe uncovered that the purpose of Quiet Skies is to “unknown or partially known terrorists; and to identify and provide enhanced screening to higher risk travelers before they board aircraft based on analysis of terrorist travel trends, tradecraft and associations.” Dig that unknown. Maybe the person air marshals are being asked to follow is a terrorist – someone better be there watching, just in case they make any sudden movements. As part of the program, travel patterns are studied and acted upon. Some of the victims of this grossly sketchy surveillance program have included a federal agent, a flight attendant and some poor schlep traveling for work. In the case of the latter, it could very well have been you or me. From a civil liberties standpoint, Quiet Skies is a serious issue. If you want to learn more about it, you’d do well with checking in with The Boston Globe’s excellent coverage of it, here.
Image: by Sstrobeck23 - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link
After a month off, John Oliver is back and, where Facebook's bullshit apology for all of the greasy stuff they've been doing with their user's data is concerned, he's taking no prisoners.
