June 17, 2013

There's something a bit unsettling about Snowden's girlfriend...

This is a picture of Lindsay Mills, Edward Snowden's girlfriend:
?6

Now, this is a picture of Edward Snowden:


This just may be old MI suspicion rearing its ugly head, but really pretty girls like Ms. Mills tend to not date ugly guys like Mr. Snowden no matter how much money they have. Especially since this particular ugly guy doesn't seem to be able to keep a job. Those girls tend to prefer really cute guys who'll make their girlfriends jealous.

As a doubled agent, he could have been assigned her for a number of reasons.

What I'm saying is, Snowden looks like a spy to me. This is a HELL of a lot deeper than you think it is.

June 16, 2013

Five weeks to vacation.

Going to Seattle to take photos. (I have 25 rolls of film in the freezer and I'm gonna use 'em...)

I am going to shoot for a whole week without getting the Space Needle or the Pike Place Market in any frame. (On Day 1 I AM going to the Space Needle observation deck and shooting the town from up there.) Are there any "best kept secrets" I need to know about?

June 12, 2013

What are the Patriots going to do with Tim Tebow?

My first inclination is they'll waive the bastard before the regular season starts. Especially if Tebow's fans start demanding he be made starting quarterback.

Other than that...tight end?

June 11, 2013

Idaho GOP considers bringing back the smoke-filled room

http://www.idahopress.com/news/state/idaho-gop-to-consider-requiring-leaders-ok-to-run/article_3812c1bf-7400-5a8b-9c96-a437caff2e74.html

One of the acts of Idaho's last legislative session (there are 105 members of the Idaho legislature, 20 of whom are Democrats) was to pass a bill authorizing a state-based healthcare exchange. The rank-and-file Republicans are unbelievably pissed about that; they wanted the legislature to pass an Obamacare nullification bill, not an exchange.

In retaliation, the state's Republican Central Committee is considering requiring the Idaho Secretary of State to only put Republicans who have been approved by a Republican committee - state and federal-level officials will be approved by the state Republican Central Committee, state legislative candidates will be approved at legislative committees, and local candidates will be approved by county committees.

June 10, 2013

The art and theory of giving the governor a harrumph

My bet is, a certain car thief we've all grown to loathe is going to schedule Official Congressional Hearings on the NSA data-mining scandal. Unfortunately for him and maybe also for us, the administration has an iron-clad defense against Issa's latest grandstand: "Y'all SAID we could do it...oh, about thirty times..."

I have said this so often it's ridiculous, but it's time to say it again: The problem is almost never what people aren't allowed to do. It's what they ARE. The whole economic meltdown happened because our wonderful Congress decided the bankers could behave and repealed the parts of the Glass-Steagall Act that forced them to act responsibly, as just the first thing that came to mind. Thanks to our 100-percent-owned Congress, anyone who wants to fuck the consumer, fuck the taxpayer, fuck the brown people, erase privacy, or whatever they feel like doing either can legally do it now or can find someone willing to write legislation that allows them the freedom they desire.

The first step in correcting the Scandal Du Jour is root-cause failure analysis: Americans think there's a terrorist under their bed and a second one in the closet. Because OMG Al Qaeda Is Going To Kill Me This Morning!!!! we've decided to let the government do whatever it feels like, and what they feel like doing is tapping phones, demanding your library records, monitoring your credit card transactions and otherwise becoming Big Brother. Right now Markus Wolf, the East German spymaster, is looking up from hell and going, "damn, I wish I could have gotten away with half that."

We are not going to fix this problem through congressional hearings and impeachments. We are not going to fix it through nasty newspaper editorials. The first and most important fix is for the American people to realize there is no terrorist in the closet. There are terrorists in the world, true, but most of them stay close to home - and home for most terrorists is either southern Europe, subsaharan Africa, or the Middle East. Once we have agreed that normal vigilance, and not feel-bad measures like wiretaps and gropings, will take care of the handful of terrorists we've got in this country, we can unravel the police state George W. Bush built.

Otherwise, the leak of the NSA data-mining tasking memo will not be the last invasion-of-privacy shock.

June 10, 2013

Snowden couldn't have dropped out of Special Forces School

We've pretty much established that Mr. Snowden doesn't have a high school diploma or a GED. And he claims to have dropped from the SF school at Fort Bragg due to bad legs.

Problem is, JFK Special Warfare Center and School at Fort Bragg requires a high school diploma for entry into the course.

So...what the fuck? Dude claims to have been training to be a snake-eater and that's bullshit. Dude claims to have been given an NSA security clearance that will let you see "everything" and that doesn't exist - the Agency works on a need-to-know basis and NO ONE has the need to know everything the Agency is working on, except maybe a handful of people whose pictures are hanging on the wall.

Basically, Snowden's story is starting to smell worse than my MRE farts.

June 10, 2013

Post a picture of the machine you run for a living

This is a copycat thread, but what the hell...thanks, backwoods bob.

Mine:



This is a "computer to plate" unit; it is kinda like a laser printer but it writes aluminum printing plates rather than paper.

It hooks to...



The plates have to be developed before they can be used, and this is the machine that does it.

And once they are done, they go on a printing press...I can't find a postable picture of this thing, but it's pretty big.

June 9, 2013

Regarding the Philadelphia building collapse, I have been thinking...

does the fact that Sean Benschop, the excavator operator, was Smoking Reefers before the collapse negate the facts that...

(1) there were people not directly associated with the work in a place where the building could fall on them, and

(2) the building being demolished was not fitted with supports to reduce the odds that it would fall on the people who weren't supposed to be close enough to it to get hit by it?

June 9, 2013

What is up with all these "National Food Item Days"?

June 9, 2013

There are advantages to working for a newspaper...

Like when a Black Widow Spider comes down from the ceiling and lands on top of your computer, like happened to me about thirty seconds ago, the exact tool you need to squash the fucker flat is sitting right on your desk.