Communick News

https://xcancel.com/JamieBonkiewicz/status/2075707641373008083#m

If you have a stroke or stop breathing does it keep beating even if the rest of you is gone?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicolored-spined_porcupine

I added a few layers of wood to the outside of the Norwegian wood stack, to create more space inside for the rest of the wood I have left to split. It is now 4 feet high. And yes, now I know how to keep the logs flat as I grow the stack, so it doesn't collapse after stacking up more than two feet 🙂

Here's a view from the center - although getting the camera and the tripod in there without the camera falling over and scratching the lenses is getting seriously sketchy:

The amount of wood I have left to split is getting tantalizingly small. I expect to be done and to finally cap this stack some time this week. At last!

This is a follow-up of this post.

Well, piss in my wheaties and call me Bill Ding. You guys know who Bill Ding is? He was the tutorial character for building in Lego's Island, which might take up kilobytes on your computer if you try to play it today. That game was hours and hours and hours of fun as a six year old, chasing the Brickster n shit. Then my mom died and then my dad cut me off from the rest of the family, so I never got to play it again at my grandma's. Part of the reason I faked schizophrenia to get out of the Army; the CIA had gotten to me by that point and told me to do that and I obeyed because I was masturbating in my window and shit.

...ok, it's more complicated than that, but that's the counterintelligence version. The reason I started this post is because I reread this comment I made in response to someone calling me insane and saying they liked that. I said that was one of my more favored compliments and went on to say I needed to be called Shakespeare three more times to earn an achievement. Someone then calls me Shakespeare jokingly, which led to me drinking. I do that a lot. Drink.

It wasn't authentic. They didn't read anything of mine; they were just jesting, and it's alright to jest, but I told God and Satan and Marlin Brando that if I could be good enough to be considered a good writer, I wouldn't have to do drugs. Well, I don't do illegal drugs anymore, just DXM and Hawaiian Baby Woodrose once and a while, and weed obviously (also my terrible addiction to stimfapping on Benadryl (DO NOT)), but I quit smoking cigarettes recently, which spiked my needs center of my brain, and now I'm drinking every day.

I'm not drinking to excess; I just drink at a frequency. Y'know, like a sine wave. Two or three beers a day. And I don't need it, meaning, like last night I fell asleep and woke up just before midnight, sober but fully awake now, and I thought I could jet over to the gas station for a bottle of something, and I said I didn't need that, and I was fine just chilling out to music.

Yet a got a double-shot of Fireball this morning; still only halfway gone. I don't like getting drunk. I actually hate alcohol inebriation. But there's the Ballmer's Peak, which is a real phenomenon that XKCD commented on once; shown. What this is, is not the alcohol that's causing this, but rather the sudden consumption of a substance that is not so often consumed. The Ballmer Peak is ONLY truly achievable by using [Substance] as a SACRAMENT.

What does that mean? Well, question; no jab or all jabs? No, it's one jab, stupid. Middle way. Between many and none lies one. As in, should you drink every day or never drink? No, drink once a week. Have a sabbath or as one homeless man in Portland with a PhD in mathematics taught me, have a sabo-domingo. Y'know, from noon Saturday to noon Sunday, that man partied, and on those other days of the week, he tended for other homeless people while getting his cult off the ground.

There's a lot of us forming cults, if you weren't aware. Amazing what the world is like outside of your small purview. I don't even know it all, and I've lived in twelve cities across America over my life. Sadly, a majority of people don't ever really see the world as they only ever live a few dozen miles from where they are born. You go on vacations, but then you're a tourist, not a local. I would prolly still be a drug addict of I never left Syracuse. It was the pilgrimage that healed me. Novel experiences beget novel perspective. And while I don't know everything, I can rein myself in to let my muse out with these limitations I place on my ingestment, and I strive to be better still.

Yet, I'm as good as good gets as far as skilled righting goes. I thought receiving a thousand compliments over the years would heal me. It's helped make me feel better about myself. But damn does the trauma and agony of my youth eat up my soul every minute of every day. I gotta sit with it. Learn to be ok with a fire waging war with me inside. Only by accepting it, will it go out. It's like a Chinese finger trap; you gotta do the opposite of what you think. Well, the fight sure would go down faster and simpler with a friend. I have none. Just a life partner who rules me. And I love him. Just wish he could see his mother in the mirror.

I'm not really in a good place right now or I guess I haven't been for a few years.

I've just been reflecting today on all the things that I haven't been doing and wondering if some specific things would have happened in my past to me maybe I would have been able to do things differently.. like I'm reflecting on my friends and how they develop their sense of self-worth and identity I'm just realizing so many things just didn't really ever happen to me and I'm just wondering what those things could possibly have been.

Like for example I have absolutely no doubt that I'm a great programmer and I deserve all of the things I have in my life because of it. I've work hard and created cool things and gotten jobs and been promoted so I have absolutely no doubt in my professional abilities.

And like I know I'm attractive cuz I'm tall and young and I look good and I take care of myself.. but no one's ever told me that.. like in the way that my friends have been told. Like in the way that would cause a friend to come up to me and ask for emotional advice about their relationship and they tell me their partner finds them attractive but they don't think they're attractive, I've never gotten to that.

That's the kind of I guess niche developmental milestones or mile-pebbles that are healthy to go through that I'm asking about.

cross-posted from: https://infosec.pub/post/49354520

Donald Trump’s Homeland Security regime has been at the center of two critical stories in the past two weeks. In the first, federal agents shot and killed a man and quickly got to work justifying the use of force under the flimsiest of pretenses. In the other, it made house calls to people who said mean things to them online.

Since taking office last year, the Trump administration has been telling us that fighting the good fight of white supremacy will make you look cool and noble. The DHS under former Secretary Kristi Noem spent $220 million to help her cosplay as a cowboy and call up ICE recruits as if we’re fighting a new World War, this time against our friends and neighbors. It’s all very embarassing.

The propaganda is cringeworthy. But the immigration crackdown it services has been, undoubtedly, cruel and deadly. In Texas just this Tuesday, an ICE officer shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a father of three who lived in the US for 35 years building houses and caring for his family. The agency immediately released a statement justifying lethal force on someone it alleges tried to “weaponize his vehicle.” Videos showing parts of the confrontation already suggest it’s probably another bullshit story like the ones we’ve seen from Minnesota. The feds later admitted they were looking for an entirely different person. Salgado Araujo nonetheless ended up dead.

ICE has proven it can’t handle public confrontation. That’s bad. But it also can’t even handle emails and Instagram posts. It’s demanding a total lack of accountability not only from the law, but from society itself.

Over the past year, DHS has invented its own novel version of “doxxing” — once the domain of angry gamers on the internet — wherein the public now dares to unmask and name federal agents who have been responsible for horrors like the killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis. The government doesn’t want us to talk about the agent accused of shooting her to death (whose name, by the way, is Jonathan Ross). Before being shot to death, Good told agents, “I’m not mad at you.” They killed her anyway, then called her a “fucking bitch.”

The government is very upset that people are criticizing it for shooting innocent mothers to death in the street. DHS stalked and intimidated a man who protested against state-sponsored killing, issuing him a “WARNING NOTICE” as flimsy as the nonjudicial “warrants” it uses now to bust into people’s homes. It’s like if Jay and Silent Bob showed up at your house because of an online comment you wrote, except with guns and the force of the federal government. It’s both deadly serious and deeply unserious. What are they afraid of? Well, we already know. Accountability in any form.

Minnesota officials had to sue the federal government for access to evidence that would aid in investigating ICE shootings because the feds won’t cooperate. It would be a weird thing for the feds managed by an allegedly pro-cop party to do, except when you consider it’s not really a pro-cop party, what with the January 6th insurrection. The current White House webpage about January 6th calls it “a date which will live in infamy” while moping about cop-killers being unfairly treated and saying Democrats did the real insurrection. Yeah, they’re lying. But also, seriously: weak crybaby stuff.

This of course all ladders up to Trump, whose project for more than a decade has been to accumulate power while eliminating the concept of shame and accountability. The man cannot tolerate a single slight without going off the rails, nor can his subordinates. This posture has trickled down to his army of fellow losers who mirror him in several ways: (1) denying any wrongdoing, (2) blaming others, and (3) intimidating anyone who crosses them. In some really bad cases, (4) obstructing justice. Then there’s also (5), looking really lame while doing it.

...

ICE is a menace to democracy and its murderous conduct should be soberly considered. But we should also recognize that these people are weak and sad and ought to be made fun of. Even for their stupid outfits, which look ripped from a “how to be tacticool” buying guide. And Americans are ridiculing these people. What better way to protest an army of clowns than by showing up as Portland did with a human frog at the front? Cops arrested that frog. Trillions of dollars later, we’ve learned nothing about counter-insurgency, because now there’s a frog legion.

These ICE agents are so small that they wear masks in public like a bunch of cowardly Patriot Front wannabes, who probably got a similar amount of training. You’d think the average DMV worker would have been masked up for years based on the abuse they get, but then again, the average government employee is far braver than these fools.

ICE is now the highest-funded law enforcement agency in the federal government. If you know anything about the actual waste, fraud, and abuse of federal funding for defense, you’ll know this is not something that guarantees quality or competence. This is just Donald Trump’s new private domestic army. I’d call them Stormtroopers except for the fact I’m pretty sure some of them are getting their uniforms and body armor from Temu.