Tag: safety_fetish

Simulant Youth

boy scouts in the us, unlike elsewhere, are an abomination. between all the pedos and the paramilitaries, so much disgusting stuff going on.

The Boy Scouts of America apparently have a youth anti-terrorism training program here in California, partially dedicated to simulated border patrol exercises.
“The Explorers program,” as it’s called, “a coeducational affiliate of the Boy Scouts of America that began 60 years ago, is training 1000s of young people in skills used to confront terrorism, illegal immigration and escalating border violence – an intense ratcheting up of one of the group’s longtime missions to prepare youths for more traditional jobs as police officers and firefighters.”

End of Farmers Markets?

kickbacks for big farming under the always popular safety fetish banner.

What this will do is force anyone who produces food of any kind, and then transports it to a different location for sale, to register with a new federal agency called the “Food Safety Administration.” Even growers who sell just fruit and/or vegetables at farmers markets would not only have to register, but they would be subject inspections by federal agents of their property and all records related to food production.

Laptop Search

Federal agents may take a traveler’s laptop or other electronic device to an off-site location for an unspecified period of time without any suspicion of wrongdoing, as part of border search policies the Department of Homeland Security recently disclosed.

only morons store any interesting data on a laptop.

Letting 9 YO Ride the Subway Alone

for weeks my boy had been begging for me to please leave him somewhere, anywhere, and let him try to figure out how to get home on his own. So on that sunny Sunday I gave him a subway map, a MetroCard, a $20 bill, and several quarters, just in case he had to make a call.

No, I did not give him a cell phone. Didn’t want to lose it. And no, I didn’t trail him, like a mommy private eye. I trusted him to figure out that he should take the Lexington Avenue subway down, and the 34th Street crosstown bus home. If he couldn’t do that, I trusted him to ask a stranger. And then I even trusted that stranger not to think, “Gee, I was about to catch my train home, but now I think I’ll abduct this adorable child instead.”

Long story short: My son got home, ecstatic with independence.

good for her. there are enough sheeple with a safety fetish already.

Lying Media

American media is complicit in an immoral propaganda campaign against China. Now that 2 Chinese officials are dead over the fiasco, the Vice President of Mattel admits that the news was all lies. “The vast majority of those products that were recalled were the result of a design flaw in Mattel’s design, not through a manufacturing flaw in China’s manufacturers.” It’s a bad day indeed for America when the VP of a toy company comes across as being more honest and transparent than the American media.

2007-11-30: another industry that deserves to, and will, die.

Now I want to highlight the subscription offers that magazines send through the mail. They’re full of lies. Here’s one I got today, which I’ve taken the liberty of annotating:


2013-03-28: when legacy media feeds technopanic you gotta wonder about ulterior motives. creating fear to stave off christensen style obsolescence?

What’s not OK is a company trying to scare the internet’s residents thinking they’re the residents of Dresden in order to drum up business. There are plenty of scary things, people, and plots online. There are plenty of bad guys. There are plenty of attacks. There will be plenty more. If you’re in the anti-hacker business, business has no signs of slowing down. So if your product is worth a damn, you shouldn’t have to lie to the internet to sell it. Don’t believe the hype.

2014-02-10:

The gardener used a “lawn mower” to “mow” the lawn.

technopanic at moribund organizations like the NYT runs very deep indeed.
2019-06-12:

Yes, the world has changed. But the NYT seems to think that the government should now just force the internet companies to hand over money after their own members spent years twiddling their thumbs and squandering any attempt to build up loyal followings and sustainable business models. It’s not easy to keep a media business sustainable these days, but so much of it has to do with those companies refusing to recognize how the internet was changing the business, and how to take advantage of those changes.

Mall Cop School

“Extremely quietly, a Maryland school district has launched the first public high school in the country dedicated to teaching homeland security. “From all I could tell researching the piece, this doesn’t mean questioning assumptions about national security and so forth — it means funneling 15-year-olds into a very profitable industry, and providing future workers for the companies that comprise it. Creepy/lousy.”

continuing the tradition of staffing this industry with illerates

More than 200 colleges have created homeland-security degree and certificate programs since 9/11

the us “education” system is worthless.