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Lollypops from the Labryinth


Owls Head lobsterman Jeremy Willey cuts an entangled seal pup free while his sternman, Jeffery Dorr Jr. films the rescue. The men were fishing 25 miles offshore when they spotted the entangled pup. Video by Jeffery Dorr Jr., courtesy of Krystal Gamage.

What could possibly go wrong? Researchers have started developing artificial intelligence with imagination – AI that can reason through decisions and make plans for the future, without being bound by human instructions. Google has started adding imagination to its DeepMind AI – ScienceAlert

For the first time, a US company is implanting microchips in its employees – ScienceAlert Half of their sheep agreed to take the implant.

The Military Coup Against Donald Trump of 2018 “Oh, I don’t know, Senator. Ask the Vietnamese. Or the Afghans. Look, we need speed and focus. Step one is to decapitate the government by eliminating the current leadership, via capture or … otherwise. Step two, take the the key control nodes before the administration can react. Step three, use the inertia of the military and law enforcement. We get them on our side – whether they know it or not – and keep them moving and following orders so they do not have time to reflect and react against us. But you need to understand and to go into this with your eyes open. If we do this, people will die. Are you ready for that?”

 

They were big, a foot to two feet long – that’s the size of a cat. Rats will eat mice and they will eat each other as they live and when they die. So it’s possible that these rats got so big by attacking and eating smaller rats. These are the biggest I’ve ever seen. I wouldn’t want to corner one or be face-to-face. They will fight and they will bite and they will defend if they have to. It is a serious issue. They are getting bigger and bigger. Attack of the Bloodthirsty Giant Rats | Mysterious Universe

File Under: “If you can’t judge a book by its cover, what reason do you have for buying it?”
The Dunkirk din One of the first things I noticed about the movie was the assaultive, hideous sound, which even the earplugs couldn’t dull enough for me. I felt the need to push them in deeper with my fingers and kept covering my ears, too. And even then, the blasting percussive bass made the seats vibrate so forcefully that it almost felt as though those Spitfires were flying right over us.

The competition for worst tattoo in the history of the known universe is now closed. We have a winner!

Lost things are always found in the last place you look: Doctors have found 27 contact lenses lost in a woman’s eye

Which once again leads me, as a ground combat-experienced female Marine Corps officer, to ask, what are we trying to accomplish by attempting to fully integrate women into the infantry? For those who dictate policy, changing the current restrictions associated with women in the infantry may not seem significant to the way the Marine Corps operates. I vehemently disagree; this potential change will rock the foundation of our Corps for the worse and will weaken what has been since 1775 the world’s most lethal fighting force. Get Over It! We Are Not All Created Equal | Marine Corps Association


Lightning Strikes Car, Then it Gets Weird – Neatorama A car is moving down the street when it is struck by lightning. It seems like forever before the vehicle stops and people get out. It looks like everyone’s okay. The car is still smoking, and so is the spot where the strike hit. Then a huge mob of zombies dressed in black appears out of nowhere and approaches the car to consume the lightly-fried occupants.

Hamas and the sons of Hamas

The war on terror has laid waste to large swaths of the Middle East and Northern Africa. Cities, towns, and villages have been reduced to smoking, bombed-out rubble, chaos reigns, the carnage is ubiquitous. The US military keeps count of its own personnel wounded and killed, a number in the thousands. Civilian casualties —or collateral damage as the military calls it—across Chaostan (Richard Maybury’s apt coinage) are in the millions, as are the number of people displaced (an estimated 11 million in Syria alone). Imagine the American fury and media sensationalism if a small US town was carpet-bombed by a foreign power. YouTube’s servers would melt from the overflow of viewers watching videos of parents pulling their dead children from collapsed homes. Killing Them is Killing Us, by Robert Gore


Cracking the mystery of egg shape After crunching the numbers, the scientists found the links they’d been looking for: the length of an egg correlates with bird body size. The shape of an egg—how asymmetrical or elliptical it is—relates to flying habits. And the stronger a bird’s flight, the more asymmetrical or elliptical its eggs will be.

In the fullness of time, the smart kids get to be right. That’s the lesson of history. The people who rule over us are trapped in a frenzy of purging anyone who notices anything about the world. They are systematically and aggressively estupidizing themselves, by driving off anyone with the temerity to ask a question. By herding all of the smart white guys into the Dissident Right, they are not saving themselves. They are creating the army that will destroy the prevailing order. AmRen Diary Part II | The Z Blog


Mick Hartley: Highway Patrol Old-style Country – a twangy guitar and a gravelly voice singing of tough men doing tough men’s jobs. Could be Hank Snow or Ernest Tubb in the Fifties, but it’s Junior Brown, and it’s 1993.

LUCKY STRIKE Storm chaser and Your Shot photographer Vanessa Neufeld captured this scene in Keyes, Oklahoma. The day before she was to fly home, she and her fellow chasers “thought we’d go for one last chase and hope for something more than just a squall line,” she remembers. “As the evening descended, so did a barrage of lightning in northwest Oklahoma. ”

Executioners have a short ‘life’. They get tired of the work. The soul sickens of it. After ten, twenty, a hundred death-rattles, the human being, however sub-human he may be, acquires, perhaps by a process of osmosis with death itself, a germ of death which enters his body and eats into him like a canker. Melancholy and drink take him, and a dreadful lassitude which brings a glaze to the eyes and slows up the movements and destroys accuracy. When the employer sees these signs he has no alternative but to execute the executioner and find another one. — From Russia With Love, Ian Fleming

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  • ahem August 1, 2017, 4:44 AM

    That rat’s almost as tall as a Chicago alderman.

    War is indeed a horrible thing, but the only truly virtuous way to stop inadvertently killing civilians is to give up. What a crock.

  • Casey Klahn August 1, 2017, 7:56 AM

    I can’t get it all in in one reading! This new format is a bonus format – love it.
    The coup riff has this gem:

    “You just send in some soldiers and take over everything,” said the younger and, astonishingly, stupider California senator. “You know, with guns. How hard can this Army stuff be?”

    Retired – actually, fired by Trump – General Leonard Smith, who had been promoted by Obama after failing to win in Iraq and Afghanistan, but who successfully spearheaded the transsexuals in foxholes initiative, tried to explain.

    “Look, it’s a matter of numbers. We take all our land forces in CONUS…”

    “What’s CONUS?” asked a former Clinton Deputy Assistant Undersecretary of Defense.”

    Later, someone asks how a bunch of Americans with deer rifles can defeat an army. I’ll start by noting that the army uses carbines. Deer rifles have greater reach, and considerably better hit ratios at 200 yards plus. They’re rifles, not carbines. Now, consider the numbers. ‘Nuff said. I’ll go to the almost comedic, but half serious, suggestion of mustering an NG division of deer hunters to block the Norks in an initial assault. I think with proper arty support, you might be surprised at how effective that would be.

    Rats. Just seagulls without wings.

  • John A. Fleming August 1, 2017, 10:57 AM

    Hmm. Think I’ll supply up on some boxes of .22LR ratshot. Plus another firearm to use them. Maybe also a short-barrelled .410. Effective pest control.

  • ed in texas August 1, 2017, 4:52 PM

    The company that is pushing the microchips for employees builds and installs office vending machines and breakrooms.
    I personally think a boycott is in order. (Although that would probably just lead to barcodes tattoed on foreheads or somesuch.)

    JA Fleming: buy a Taurus Judge. It’s the perfect varmit carry.

  • ghostsniper August 3, 2017, 7:39 AM

    That old fisherman trick, to make your catch appear larger than it is, hold it closer to the camera – use an extension stick if you have to. Do they still taste like chicken, or has the estrogen laced sewer system caused them to take on a soy-tofu flavor?

    Remember, if you shoot it you’ll have to do something with it.