Friday Links - 10 January

Mike Rowe is first with a report on the Los Angeles fire. A Postcard From the Edge

I met a woman last night, sitting where I’m sitting now, staring in disbelief at the flames rushing through her neighborhood two miles to the north. Like most everyone else in the restaurant at the top of The Huntley Hotel, she was a Palisades Refugee who had evacuated a few hours before. Last night, there was nothing to be done but watch and wonder if she’d have a home to return to.

Flopping Aces is next with more on the disturbing stories out of the UK. Sexual Genocide Exposed: Elon Musk’s Twitter War Against Britain’s Corrupt Elite

This week, Elon went to war. He is running a social media color revolution against the British government, trying to overthrow the current regime. Yesterday, Forbes ran the story, kind of, under the headline, “Elon Musk Pushes For Britain’s King Charles To Dissolve Parliament—As Lawmakers Say Tesla CEO Is ‘Misinformed’.”

The useless Forbes story was intellectual Ozempic. The article crouched in the dark recesses of the long shadow of the media’s omertá on one of the most hideous pedophile scandals in history.

Tam at View From The Porch - Privacy Nightmare

Technically you don't have any reasonable expectation of privacy while you're just driving down the open road, on public thoroughfares.

I don't know that the Founding Fathers had thought through the implications of license plate readers, though...

Pixy Misa at Ambient Irony - Daily News Stuff 7 January 2024: Unpleasant Professions Edition

A study found that Chinese propaganda network TikTok is a vehicle for Chinese propaganda. (Gizmodo)

I am shocked.

Also, Chinese propaganda network TikTok is banned in China.

Clayton Cramer - Your Skirt Was Too Short

I am not sure if police ever made this statement to rape victims in the U.S., but this 1/6/25 BBC story about the failure to prosecute grooming gangs in Britain.

Sultan Knish - Don’t Take the Train

The subway was always a metaphor for New York City. Its trains rushing between the depths of tunnels and the heights overlooking busy streets linked a bewildering city into one whole. Over a hundred years ago, Joyce Kilmer sketched the subway as a collection of “tired clerks, pale girls, street cleaners, business men, boys, priests and harlots, drunkards, students, thieves” thundering “through the dark”, but the balance of power has shifted away from the clerks, girls, boys and business men, over to the drunkards, thieves, along with the killers and the monsters.

SiGraybeard - NASA Punts Decision on Mars Sample Return

Since I first heard of it in 2021, I've been trying to keep on top of the Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission originally conceived as an add-on to the Perseverance Rover (and the Ingenuity helicopter) currently on Mars.

Thompson Blog - Come One, Come All

There follows a horror-show catalogue of incompetence, dishonesty, and inassimilable monsters, with criminal records of prodigious length, pious newcomers calling for the murder of “every critic of Islam,” and in which the word machete crops up quite a lot.