If you live in the City of Austin, today the City Council will be hearing testimony on a sneaky proposal to buy AI-enabled surveillance cameras that they scheduled without giving mere citizens a chance to comment. Louis Rossmann has the details:
“Today, I’m going be making the case for every single one of you who lives in the city of Austin to show up to City Hall September 25th, 10:00AM.”
“In a few videos I’ve done recently, I talked about these AI powered surveillance cameras that are everywhere and why I don’t like them.”
“These AI powered surveillance cameras [have] been going up all over the country. They’ve been used for everything from police officers spying on their exes to people getting pulled over on the side of the highway because the AI powered camera got a seven or a three or seven and a B wrong, and just nonsense like this.”
“And a lot of people signed up for a hearing that was 10:00AM on a Thursday morning.”
“10:00AM on a Thursday morning on a Thursday morning is a really bad time to have a hearing because most people are going to be at work. And many of you were saying, ‘I don’t think they’re going to listen to me anyway.'”
“I did a video, came out and they said, ‘There’s no way in hell these people are actually going to cancel after getting you to take off work at 10:00AM on a Thursday with no notice.’ Unfortunately, that’s what they did. Over 10 years in in lobbying, never seen some shit like this.”
So they bring the item back for September 25th, but do it in a really sneaky way. “I go to check the agenda. I search for LiveView. I notice it’s not in the agenda. However, even though it’s not on the agenda, it shows up in Public Communication General. The only two people that are scheduled to speak are Kevin Rabininoitz and Kohar Ramini…Investment into LiveView Technologies for cameras at Austin Parks. LiveView Technologies Parks and Rec contract for mobile security units. There’s no agenda item.”
“So, I’m not able to sign up to speak, but they are.”
Turns out you have to sign up to speak 21 days before the meeting. The meeting they didn’t announce in advance for the item that’s not listed. “A person who intends to speak during general public communication must register between 9:00AM on the 21st day before the council meeting at which the person intends to speak, and 4:30PM on the 14th day before the council meeting at which the person intends to speak via the online form of the city’s website, by telephone, or in person. And this is a separate form than the form that you use to speak on regular issues.”
“Here’s what’s going to happen on Thursday morning. People who work as the lead salespeople at this company are going to show up and they’re going to speak to the City Council and they’re going to speak to you and they’re going to tell you why it is you’re going to sign a contract for $400,000 to $2 million of AI powered surveillance all over your city and you’re not allowed to say anything back.”
The marketing representative for the company said that they’re not going to use the cameras for facial recognition, but guess what? Their website says “Video analytics is a technology that utilizes artificial intelligence and deep learning algorithms to automatically analyze video content from surveillance cameras, enables functionality such as facial recognition.”
Supposedly the cameras are for crime prevention. Fine. But that makes me wonder why they want to put them in parks rather than, say, crime hot spots like Sixth Street? Because they’re too bulky to locate there?
Though they say customers own all the data, it’s all be fed to LiveView’s own backend servers.
Rossmann is hoping that lots of people show up to express their opposition to the surveillance cameras, and has a page up on when and where to show up today to make your voice heard. (Given that I live outside the boundaries of Austin, I will not be going, though I’d still like to interview Rossmann on a variety of topics one day.)
There’s a case to be made for surveillance cameras in public places in crime hot spots, but not ones using unproven AI technology. And these bulky, solar-powered things aren’t going in crime hot spots, they’re going in public parks. True, there was been a plague of drug-addicted transients living in parks since former mayor Steve Adler invited them into the city, but these expensive, stationary things seem particularly unsuited to combing the parks for illegal campers; you’d be better off hiring more park employees to do that for the same money. Or, better yet, hiring more APD officers, as the city still hasn’t fully recovered from the damage done by the “defund the police” madness.
So there’s a case, but not for these bulky things, at this extravagant price, and not in city parks most days of the year. (I can see a partial exception for things like the gates of big outdoor public concerts, like ACL, or for the entrance to the Zilker trail of lights. Even then, there are better, cheaper alternatives available.) I also see a parallel with gunshot acoustic tracking systems, which were similarly hyped, similarly expensive, and seemed to yield practically no real-world benefits.
Rossmann is right: This thing stinks to high heaven, and it certainly smells like various palms have been greased to get this thing to slide through on the sly. Hopefully there’s enough outcry to put the kibosh on this bad, expensive idea.
Another ostensibly liberal YouTuber comes to the conclusion that lefties celebrating the murder of Charlie Kirk are actively evil “atomized bug people” that can’t be reasoned with.
“Charlie Kirk had many bad takes over the years. Like for example, the two most popular quotes I see people posting are the one where he advocated for stoning gays and black women are too stupid to be pilots. But guess what? Both those things, the two most popular quotes people are posting to justify this guy being murdered, are out of context. But idiots like Stephen King ran with it, then later had to apologize for spreading misinformation about a dead man.”
“These people will build a straw man of you in their minds. They get so fucking mad about it that they celebrate the real you dying. Horrifying.”
“But more importantly, even if everything was in context, who cares? Oh, he said this. Oh, he said this. I don’t care. There are many things he said that I disagree with. There are many things he said that I think are bad. Who cares? It is just a fact that nothing he said warranted his life being taken away. This is America. We have freedom of speech here.”
“One person may have pulled the trigger, but then we saw the reaction of many.” She then plays a sampler of clips of lefties ecstatically celebrating Kirk’s murder, including one who argued that his wife and children should also be murdered.
“There were thousands of videos like that. Some of these people posting with their full names and faces with hundreds and thousands of likes, thousands of tweets celebrating it with half a million likes. And it’s important to remember that all of those likes are a real person. Millions of people in this country apparently believe the acceptable response to speech they don’t like is murder.”
“They were teachers, professors, doctors, HR workers, healthcare workers, nurses, pediatricians, people who work with kids, people’s classmates, roommates. They are teachers showing our children the gory, horrifying video of Charlie’s murder on repeat. The hippie-dippy in this house we believe shitlib mask was ripped off and underneath was nothing but psychopathic bloodlust.”
She says the only time she ever saw anyone on “the right” celebrate a death was a dozen Stormfront losers, who were immediately condemned by the entirety of the Internet.
“This is different. It’s never been like this before. It’s never been this much. It’s never been this brazen. Normal people have to log into like an alternate Twitter account where they can post their more ‘unorthodox’ opinions. And these people are out here full face, full name, like ‘Hell yeah! Murder!”
“The smug, unearned confidence these people have to be openly sociopathic with their full name and face because they live under the pathetic delusion of being on the right side of history needs to end.”
“They will blame you for your death because words are violence.”
“So them killing you is just self-defense. That’s why they are using Kyle Rittenhouse as some kind of gotcha. ‘Oh, if you don’t condone political violence, why do you support Kyle Rittenhouse?’ They fundamentally don’t see the difference between killing someone over speech and killing someone over self-defense because these are the same things to them.”
“Why are most of them women? Most of the people celebrating are women. Like, it’s a good like 80/20 ratio all over the internet. What is going on, ladies?”
“Basically, the whole country is shook because last year they realized how many people would celebrate the murder of a president, and this year they realized how many people would celebrate the murder of them.”
“This is all the inevitable conclusion of the punch a Nazi thing from like 2017. Do you guys remember that? We always knew it was a slippery slope. That’s why we were against it. And they always say this dumb shit. Like, if you don’t want to be called a Nazi, stop being a Nazi. Even a congressman from my state, New York, was like, ‘Oh, if you want to stop being called a fascist, you should stop being a fascist.’ Yeah, that’s great. Except you’ve called everyone and their mother a fascist and a Nazi for the past like 15 years.”
She then reads a long, long list of all the things she’s personally being a called a Nazi or fascist over, including “making fun of Joe Biden eating ice cream.”
Quoting Blair White: “They don’t kill you because you’re a Nazi. They call you a Nazi so they can kill you.”
“I’ve been to the TPUSA AmericaFest in 2021. I actually went there planning to make a video making fun of it, but I had so much fun and met so many friends that I’m still friends with to this day.”
After Kirk was killed “I kept going to every single like lefty, liberal, left-wing person I know and like checking out what they have been saying about this. And besides maybe like four or five, every single one was being an unhinged psychopath about this, or saying some backhanded shit like ‘This is why we need gun control,’ which, first of all, we were just watching a whole bunch of people celebrate killing someone over political differences. You are never taking our guns now. That that is not happening.”
“I felt like I was in the middle of the ocean. I was trying to, like, grasp onto a flotation device, checking all of these accounts for their take. Like ‘Be normal, be normal.’ Nothing. Nobody. I’m just drowning in a sea of evil, apparently. Maybe I was just blind up until now.” So basically it’s as bad as conservatives have been saying for the last decade.
“This is how they would react to me, my family, my friends, you, your family, your friends that have ever stepped out of line from the nebulous, ever-changing definition of progressive.”
“These are people I thought were levelheaded. They were left-wing, but you know, like they were one of the good ones. Like you can joke with them. You know, they weren’t those like woke SJWs. Like they were cool. We can disagree and still be friends.”
“You know, your friend wouldn’t celebrate you being murdered, of course. But if they would celebrate an exact clone of you that wasn’t you, that had all the same opinions, or some of the opinions that you have, if they would celebrate that clone being murdered, they’re not your friend.”
“It’s just sick.”
“I would rather live in a world full of Charlie Kirks who would sit down and debate than a world full of people who agree with me, but would murder people who don’t.”
“You can’t say, ‘What if that was your dad or your brother getting killed for their opinions?’ Because they’ve already cut those people off. They’ve already cut those people off out of their lives. And posting videos and pictures of Charlie’s wife and young kids will not move these people at all because they hate their lives. They hate their families. They are atomized bug people.”
“From a political standpoint, not even a personal human standpoint, why are you celebrating the most popular college Gen Z political pundit dying? Like, why are you celebrating him becoming a martyr? Say goodbye to that young male vote. All the liberal Joe Rogans in the world are not fixing this.”
She ends with a Trumpism: “Thank you for your attention to this matter.”
I started this post to roundup reactions to the Charlie Kirk assassination, and it’s grown to enormous size due to the large number of ugly-souled leftists celebrating his murder. So let’s wade into the filth, and the reactions (and consequences) therefore.
When there’s a killing the left always tries to assign the killer to the right. We’re used to it. And the vast majority of the right always overwhelmingly condemns the killer.
Only this time all the moderate normie republicans out there saw MILLIONS of liberals celebrate and justify the brutal murder of a man… all because that man held beliefs similar to theirs. Beliefs that regular Americans consider completely normal and common sense.
These normal folks were going about their day, then they saw some shocking brutality, and before they could even process it all their liberal friends were dancing in the blood and gleefully justifying it. “He deserved it for believing X and Y.” And that normal person realized that they also believe X and Y, so them getting murdered would be just as celebrated too. At best they saw a “Murder is bad, BUT… he deserved it for believing X and Y.”
And the lights go on.
It doesn’t matter how hard the left scrambles to put the shooter in some particular ideological bucket to cover their asses and take no blame (as usual), because regular America saw how fucking gleeful libs were when somebody just like them dies horribly, and they realized that the left wants them dead. Not metaphorically. They want you to die. Some of us have known this for a long time because we pissed off the left somehow previously, but for the regular folks coming to that understanding is a life changing moment.
Democratic representative and “Squad” member Ilhan Omar reminds, yet again, that she’s simply a horrible person. “Kirk was a reprehensible human being.”
The TEA will be referring all posts that contain the “vile content” to its Educator Investigations Division, as the posts could be in violation of the Educators’ Code of Ethics and potentially result in a reprimand, suspension, or permanent dismissal.
One standard in the code of ethics includes that the educator “shall be of good moral character and be worthy to instruct or supervise the youth of this state.”
“While the exercise of free speech is a fundamental right we are all blessed to share,” the letter states, “it does not give carte blanche authority to celebrate or sow violence against those that share differing beliefs and perspectives.”
The letter directs Texas school superintendents to share potential violations and “inappropriate content” with the TEA’s Misconduct Reporting Portal.
A number of recorded such incidents involving Texas educators have circulated online, showing disparaging comments about Kirk’s assassination.
“A Middle Tennessee State University employee has been fired after commenting about conservative speaker and influencer Charlie Kirk’s death on social media, the university confirmed….University spokesman Jimmy Hart said Sept. 11 that the fired employee is Assistant Dean of Students Laura Sosh-Lightsy.”
Asmongold gathers several examples of brain-dead leftists celebrating Charlie Kirk’s murder, including employees of Blizzard, Bungie, Sucker Punch Productions and Wizards of the Coast, some of whom have already been fired:
FA: Texas Tech student Camryn Giselle Booker celebrated Kirk’s death, interrupted a vigil, and actually assaulted other students. FO: “Texas Tech confirmed to Texas Scorecard that Booker is no longer enrolled.”
There was a video of a nose-ringed girl who literally mimed to the “He had it coming” part of “Cell Block Tango” from the musical Chicago, and then starting bawling out because every one of her close friends said she was a shitty, horrible person for doing so. Did this make her stop in a moment of self-reflection to consider that she was, in fact, a shitty person? No. She was bawling because she now had to cut ties with all her friends. She seems incapable of self-reflection.
The hate orgy on BlueSky was so bad that the management of that infamous hive of scum and villainy had to step in and tell them to cut that shit out, that it violated their terms of service.
Plus Tranny developer/comic creator Gretchen Felker Martin (that’s the ugly in the thumbnail) got canned over celebrating the murder.
Despite that, some lunatics on BlueSky are now calling for J. K. Rowling to be murdered as well.
Others on the list include “podcaster Joe Rogan, Harry Potter author JK Rowling, conservative political commentators Ben Shapiro and Matt Walsh, among others.”
Ugly-souled rappers Bob Vylan celebrate the murder:
This clip of Bob Vylan mocking Charlie Kirk on stage makes my blood boil
Here’s another glimpse into what combat is like on the front lines in Ukraine. To my mind, the main takeaway seems to be that combat already seemed atomized and drone-heavy has become even more atomized and drone-heavy.
“What you’re watching right now is the most lethal weapon on the battlefield of Ukraine. 75% of casualties are produced by this. But because it’s not GoPro footage of the zero line, people don’t want to watch it or learn about it. Well, this is a Mavic 3T.” The Mavic 3T is a commercial-grade Chinese drone with thermal imaging that looks to run in the $6,000—7,000 range, depending on options. And the 75% figure is for both drone attacks and drone-enabled artillery fire.
“We’re watching Ivanivske…That’s right outside of Bakhmut and there’s one road that connects Ivanivske with Bakhmut.”
“So the enemy comes from Bakhmut, and they flood the area with infantry, but it’s slowly by two man teams, and then when they finally amount enough forces over a couple months with enough artillery preparation on a target, they move in to gain the ground.”
“Most of the time though they’re killed on routes and that is our main job as a Mavic pilot, to support the infantry holding the line by attritting the Russian reinforcements making the long trek to the zero line.”
“This is the background behind keeping the front line stable against a much larger adversary.”
“Usually right when they kick it off coming from Bakhmut to Ivanivske along that road, we catch them with flashlights on. We catch them carrying diesel to go and power the jammers, and that’s when we start eliminating them.”
“Most of the time they are killed on route and even run away. But other times they succeed despite tremendous casualties. We’re talking about 50%. Now they like to move during nighttime, mostly, but usually dawn and dusk. That’s when us drone operators switch to a different type of drone or we’re done with our 12-hour shift. So they like to move during that time. And at night time, of course, the drones, like us, can still find them with thermal imaging.”
“One of the problems is that they don’t have night vision equipped the normal infantry, so they struggle to conduct large-scale assaults. And the infantry in Ukraine on both sides are mostly just placekeepers, as a scared man in the way of any assault that might happen. Most of the killing is done by artillery and drones.”
“And if the infantry survives that back and forth bombardment until there’s a squad level at least to make an assault, they can finally move up and take what’s left of the position ahead of them. Oftentimes, those infantry men are there for a month or two, too far forward to safely move back, injured, starving, eating rats, and drinking their own piss, or a large enough force comes in and pushes with you.” Just sounds like a swell life in the Russian army, doesn’t it?
Sometimes the Ukrainian drone operator’s job is basic recon. “It begins with us setting up the drone with a new battery about two km dead reckoning to the area just outside of their jammer zone, which is in the middle of Ivanivske. And then we’ll hold a place to survey one sector of the battlefield as the commander gives us his intent. But other times we’ll have us rozvidka, which means reconnaissance, and we’ll be zooming in on different MSRs [probably Mission Support Request], different buildings that we know that are occupied. We’ll zoom in through roofs. We’ll try and find the enemy actively. But it all depends on the tasking.”
“Most of the night the movement by the Russians is limited to the very front line, the very zero line, or the very rear entering rozvidka. So if the AO [Area of Operations] is clear, we’ll be told to rozvidka, like I said, which will scan for targets rather than have a perfect view of the battlefield with overlapping surveillance, showing the commanders in the talk, the layout of the front line.”
“Once we’re given that rozvidka command, we’ll start testing the waters. We scan from MSR to MSR. We’ll scan areas with that we know that they’re hiding in the buildings and the basements underneath.”
“And we’ll even push up further into the village to see if their jammers are working. And often times, most of the time, they’re not, because they ran out of batteries and gasoline long ago. But other times, the Russians will surprise us by turning on the jammer randomly right when we’re over, even possibly for a movement, or just random, and we’ll get caught in the middle of that jamming bubble, and we’ll lose connections for minutes.”
“Sometimes we’ll lose the drone, it’ll crash into the field to the right of us. Or other times we’ll regain connection two minutes later and we’ll have to find our way back because our battery’s almost dead.”
“But it’s almost always worth the risk to look straight down on the buildings to find movement through the holes in the ceilings. This is a very typical frontline village in Ukraine…Nothing but the steel structures and a couple bricks cemented to them standing.”
“The Russians don’t move out from the basement until a plan is set. A maximum two minute run into some shelter ahead of them is what they’ll do. They’re not going to be doing large assaults two hours in the open. You’re going to die.”
You can’t just bomb every structure due to the cost and logistics. “Large drone teams like the Baba Yagas come over and bomb targets, but it’s mostly done at the very zero line where there’s a lot of action. And whenever that zero line Russian position is eliminated, a couple more from the second line, which we are watching as Mavic pilots, usually come in and replace them to keep the pressure on. It’s all about pressure and momentum. The only way to finish the war is to push. So both sides still need infantry.”
“And also the jammers do work. They they’ll work usually and they can take out very expensive large drones, which are not handed out like candy like a lot of people think.”
“You have to remember: This is one section of the front line out of thousands. And this is one night out of thousands of nights that the Ukrainian war has been going on. We have to have enough equipment and logistics to keep us going the next day. So we can’t be sacrificing everything for a couple kills.”
“So use cheap FVs, sure, but FPV teams are one of the most cumbersome units that you can have on the front line. They need like 10 bags, at least, full of batteries and drones and munitions and their own personal kit and water and food. And most of that stuff is only used once. And if you’re not careful, you can go through half of your supplies of FPVs in a single night when you’re supposed to be out there for five.”
Getting closer to the front lines for higher hit percentage is too dangerous for the drone teams. “We’re we’re 2 km away from the Russians and we survey and bomb them. Now it is separated by 10 km. The Mavic teams are pushed back 6-7 km. FPV teams similar or even 10 km. If you get closer, you’re going to be stuck there for a month or two without drones. So although it might be more effective for your hits, it’s only for a couple days and then you can lose a couple FPV operators along the way.”
“The most lethal weapon on the battlefield [is] a Chinese Mavic drone. Still today, that is the most lethal. FPV teams cannot operate without this Mavic. Artillery cannot operate without a Mavic. We do not use binoculars anymore. We have TRPs [Target Reference Point?] and the surveillance drones seen by the commanders will tell them where the enemy is at the specific moment so they can lob a couple more rounds that way.”
“Or sometimes those Mavic teams are dropping VOGs [probably VOG-17 or VOG-30 grenades] and they’ll they’ll drop one or two at a time and get multiple kills a night, and that adds up very quickly in one single deployment.”
“One of our guys had over 80 confirmed killed or wounded in just that section of the front line alone during one single deployment. And that is one team, one dude who’s the pilot. It’s insane.”
So Russia is sending two man teams in dribbles and dabs to hold positions in the front line, in the process of which getting most of them killed by drones and artillery, so they can gather enough men in one spot to take another building two minutes distance deeper into Ukraine. It seems like a slow motion strategy designed to produce maximum casualties for the most minimal territorial gains possible.
The Pacific campaign of World War II is often presented as uniquely tough for the Americans that fought there. But it was absolutely deadly for Imperial Japanese Navy seaman and aviators. Here are a couple of videos that say why.
First up: 91% casualty rates.
“91%. That’s how many Japanese carrier crew members were dead by August 1945. Not casualties, dead. For every 100 men who served on Japanese carriers, nine survived the war.”
“The Imperial Navy started with 10 fleet carriers. They ended with zero.”
“The Japanese started war with the best carrier pilots in the world. Each one had over 800 hours of flight training. By 1944, new pilots got less than 50 hours. Why? Because Japan made a fatal decision. They never rotated experienced pilots home to train replacements. Every veteran stayed in combat until they died. And they all died.”
“Here’s the brutal arithmetic. At Midway, Japan lost four carriers and 322 aircraft. But here’s what destroyed them. They lost 110 veteran pilots. Each one had over two years of training. Japan produced 200 new pilots per month. America produced 2,500.”
“The carriers themselves were death traps by design. Japanese damage control doctrine was offensive spirit overcomes material weakness. They literally didn’t train damage control.”
“American carriers had firefighting schools. Japanese carriers had buckets.”
“When the Taiho was hit by one torpedo, the crew didn’t know to turn off ventilation. Aviation fuel vapors spread through the ship. Six hours later, one spark turned the entire carrier into a 27,000 ton bomb.”
“A survivor from the Shokaku described it. ‘The American dive bombers came from the sun. Three bombs. That’s all. Three bombs and 20 minutes later, our carrier was gone. 1,360 men. The water was on fire. Those who escaped the ship burned in the ocean.'”
“Japanese carriers packed aircraft everywhere. In the hangers, on deck, in the passages. The Akagi carried 91 planes in space designed for 60. When one bomb penetrated to the hanger, it didn’t destroy one plane. It destroyed 20. The chain reaction of exploding aircraft turned carriers into crematoriums.”
“The real killer was Japanese carrier doctrine. They armed and fueled aircraft in enclosed hangers. Americans did it on deck. One bomb in a Japanese hanger meant every plane exploded in a confined space. At Midway, the Kaga took four bombs. 711 dead in 9 minutes. The survivors said the hangar deck turned into a blast furnace fed by aviation fuel.”
“Japanese carriers had no radar-directed anti-aircraft guns until 1944. They aimed manually at 400 mph aircraft. Hit probability: 2%. American carriers with radar directed guns 18%. That’s not combat, that’s mathematical suicide.”
“After losing four carriers at Midway, Japan had six fleet carriers left. In the next two years, they built seven more. America built 90.”
“Japan launched one new carrier in 1944. America launched 19.”
“The Japanese were fighting industrial capacity with human spirit. Spirit lost.”
“The pilot training collapse was even worse. By 1944, American pilots got 300 hours of training, including 100 hours in operational aircraft. Japanese pilots got 30 hours total, mostly in gliders to save fuel. They couldn’t land on carriers in calm seas, much less combat.”
“At the Philippine Sea, the Great Mariana’s Turkey shoot, Japan lost three carriers and 400 aircraft. But here’s the devastating part. They lost 450 pilots. Only 43 were rescued. America lost 29 aircraft. The kill ratio was 13 to 1. That’s not a battle. It’s an execution.”
“A captured Japanese naval officer admitted, ‘We knew after Midway. We knew we couldn’t replace the pilots. Every carrier operation after that was a suicide mission. We just didn’t call them that yet.'”
“The Shinano tells the whole story. The largest carrier ever built, 72,000 tons, sunk on her maiden voyage by four torpedoes from one submarine. 1,435 dead. The crew didn’t know how to use damage control equipment. They had watertight doors that they didn’t close. The pride of the Japanese Navy sank because nobody taught the crew basic damage control.”
“By 1945, Japan was using converted battleships and cruise ships as carriers. The pilots couldn’t actually land on them. They were one-way launch platforms for kamikaze attacks. The crew’s job was to sail to launching range and die. Survival wasn’t part of the mission profile.”
“The last operational Japanese carrier, the Amagi, was destroyed at anchor by American aircraft. The crew was still aboard, waiting for aircraft that would never come. Pilots who didn’t exist for a war already lost.”
“Japan started with 3,500 trained carrier pilots. By war’s end, 112 were alive. The carriers that revolutionized naval warfare became steel coffins for 25,000 sailors who believed offensive spirit could overcome mathematical reality.”
“The Japanese carrier fleet didn’t lose the war. It committed industrial sepukuku, taking 91% of its men with it.”
Second: The power of ice cream. Japanese POWs saw what Japan was up against. Instead of being tortured to death as their commanders had led them to believe, their captors provided them with more food than Japanese officers ate.
“He held a tray loaded with more food than his entire squadron had shared in three days. Fried chicken, mashed potatoes swimming in butter, green beans, white bread, apple pie, and a glass of cold milk.”
“The American sailor behind the serving line, irritated by the delay, gestured impatiently at the ice cream station. You want chocolate or vanilla? The question made no sense. Ice cream didn’t exist on warships. Ice cream required refrigeration that combat vessels couldn’t spare. Yet here, on America’s most battle hardened carrier, enemy prisoners were being offered a choice of frozen desserts.”
“That moment his understanding of the war, of America, of everything began to crumble. Across the Pacific War, approximately 35,000 Japanese military personnel would experience American naval captivity and witness abundance that shattered everything they believed about their enemy’s weakness.”
“They discovered carriers where enlisted sailors ate better than Japanese admirals, where machinery produced fresh water from seawater in unlimited quantities.”
“These encounters with American naval logistics would demolish the spiritual foundations of Japanese military ideology more thoroughly than any defeat in battle.”
“While Japanese sailors subsisted on rice balls and pickled vegetables, American crews consumed 4,100 calories daily of varied fresh foods.
“While Japanese carriers hand-pumped aviation fuel, American ships automated everything.”
“Commander Mitsuo Fuchida, mastermind of Pearl Harbor, who later became a Christian minister in America, documented his 1945 rescue experience aboard the USS Missouri.” They gave him coffee with cream and sugar and apologized for being out of donuts “while Japanese forces were eating leather belts.”
“The Imperial Japanese Navy’s own reports captured after the war showed that by 1944, enlisted sailors received approximately 1,400 calories daily.”
“Vitamin deficiency was endemic. Beri beri, scurvy, and night blindness plagued crews.”
“Japanese prisoners watched American damage control parties, exhausted from fighting fires and flooding, receive ice cream sundaes as battle rations. The cognitive dissonance was overwhelming. Their nation, fighting for its existence, couldn’t provide basic nutrition to forces. The enemy, supposedly decadent and weak, gave ice cream to sailors during combat.”
“The laundry facilities stunned Japanese prisoners accustomed to washing clothes in seawater. American carriers had industrial washing machines, dryers, and pressing equipment. Enlisted sailors received clean uniforms twice weekly.”
“The evaporators on USS Enterprise could produce 140,000 gallons of fresh water daily. More than the entire Japanese carrier force could produce combined.”
“Japanese naval medicine focused on returning wounded to duty regardless of condition. American sick bays treated enemies with the same advanced care as their own sailors. Operating theaters on carriers had X-ray machines, blood banks, surgical equipment matching shore hospitals. Antibiotics, particularly penicillin seemed like magic to Japanese medical personnel who watched infected wounds heal in days instead of killing in weeks.”
“Japanese ships limped back to homeland ports for any significant repair. American vessels fixed themselves while underway. Floating dry docks, repair ships, and carrier machine shops could manufacture replacement parts, rebuild engines, and fabricate entirely new equipment. USS Enterprises machine shop could produce any part smaller than an airplane engine.
“The welding shop operated continuously.The electrical shop rewired systems while the ship fought.”
“When kamikaze attacks intensified in 1945, Japanese pilots who survived crashes witnessed American damage control superiority firsthand. Ryuji Nagatsuka, rescued after his damaged Zero ditched near USS Randolph, watched the carrier’s crew repair kamikaze damage while conducting flight operations. They had foam that stopped fires instantly. Pumps that removed water faster than it entered. Metal plates that sealed holes while we watched. Teams worked with choreographed precision. No shouting, no confusion.They fixed in hours what would have sunk Japanese carriers.”
But always they get back to the food: “Bakeries produced 15,000 loaves of bread daily. Butcher shops processed whole beef carcasses stored in freezers larger than Japanese submarines. Ice machines produced tons of ice daily for food preservation and drinks. The galley on USS Enterprise used more electricity than entire Japanese destroyers.”
“Seaman First Class Hiroshi Nakamura, imprisoned aboard USS Saratoga, wrote in a hidden diary, ‘The Americans celebrated their Christmas while we attacked them. Every sailor received presents from organizations at home. Cigarettes, candy, books, razors. The mess hall was decorated with paper and lights. They sang songs and played music. They were happy. We were starving and dying for the emperor while our enemies celebrated with abundance. This was when I knew Japan had already lost.”
Back in the heyday of Cyberpunk and the beginning of the Internet Revolution, there was a saying bandied about by Bruce Sterling and others: information wants to be free. That tendency for information to escape the bounds placed by repressive governments helped pull down the Berlin Wall and end the Soviet Union.
Despite that, governments around the world still continue to impose censorship on information they deem to hurt their own preferred narratives, despite the colossal failure of all but complete totalitarian regimes like North Korea to prevent such information from spreading. Just look at how all the truths the Democrat media complex and European elites wanted to hide in 2020 eventually came out, and the effort to censor them in the name of “fighting misinformation” ended up backfiring.
The latest example of a regime attempting to hide information they don’t like comes from Nepal, where two days ago the commie government tried to ban social media platforms.
Nepal’s government has banned dozens of social media platforms after they failed to comply with new registration requirements, disrupting essential communication and raising concerns over free speech.
The 26 blocked platforms include messaging apps like WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram and WeChat, as well as websites like YouTube and LinkedIn.
The ban, which went into effect on Thursday after a one-week ultimatum to the social media companies expired, has caused confusion across the country. It has ignited fears about how it could affect press freedom and the tourism industry, and particularly about how families can continue to communicate with relatives working abroad as migrant laborers. About 7.5 percent of Nepal’s 29 million population was living abroad in 2021, according to census figures cited by the Nepal Economic Forum, a research institute.
Officials at Nepal’s ministry of communication and information technology said the ban was enforced after the platforms refused to comply with a new law regulating social media, despite several formal requests.
Sounds an awful lot like what the EU is trying to do, doesn’t it?
The proper response to all such government demands is “Get bent!”
Gen Z protesters have set fire to Nepal’s parliament and the prime minister’s house, forcing his resignation, amid a deadly crackdown on dissent sparked by a social media ban.
There’s video:
KP Sharma Oli, the four-time prime minister and leader of the Communist Party, stood down on Tuesday after violent youth demonstrations in Kathmandu left at least 19 people dead and more than 500 injured on Monday.
So a commie wanted to censor his own people. What are the odds?
The unprecedented violence left the capital shrouded in smoke and forced security forces to retreat, with ministers reportedly plucked to safety by military helicopters after some were chased down the street and assaulted.
Corrupt commies deserve to end up like Nicolae Ceausescu.
Oh yeah, corruption. People exposing that was a big reason why the government wanted to impose censorship.
What are the protesters’ demands?
Their two main demands have been clear: the government lifting the ban on social media, which has now happened, and officials putting an end to what they call “corrupt practices”.
Protesters, many of them college students, have linked the social media blockade with curtailing freedom of speech, and widespread allegations of corruption among politicians.
“We want to see an end to corruption in Nepal,” Binu KC, a 19-year-old college student, told BBC Nepali. “Leaders promise one thing during elections but never deliver. They are the cause of so many problems.” She added the social media ban had disrupted her education, limiting access to online classes and study resources.
Subhana Budhathoki, a content creator, echoed the frustration: “Gen Z will not stop now. This protest is about more than just social media – it’s about silencing our voices, and we won’t let that happen.”
What is the ‘NepoKids’ trend and how is it related to these protests?
A defining feature of the protest has been the widespread use of two slogans -#Nepo Baby and #Nepo Kids.
These two terms have gained popularity on social media in the past few weeks after a number of videos showing the lavish lifestyles of politicians and their families went viral in Nepal.
Protesters argue these individuals enjoy success and luxury without merit, living off public money while ordinary Nepalis struggle.
Viral videos on TikTok and Instagram have contrasted the lavish lifestyles of political families — involving designer clothes, foreign travel and luxury cars — with the harsh realities faced by young people, including unemployment and forced migration.
The slogans have become symbolic of a deeper frustration with inequality, as protesters compare the lives of the elite with those of everyday citizens.
William Gibson once said that the future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed. A cyberpunk revolution against an oppressive communist regime sounds like it should have happened in the 1990s, but Nepal is finally getting theirs in 2025.
Let’s hope they drive the commie scumbags out of power entirely.
Every year the timeless adage to “Never bring a knife to a gun fight” gets bandied about, and every year at least one dumbass does just that.
Today’s dumbass is Tikila Walker, AKA Florida Woman.
The incident happened on August 15 in Gulf County, Florida. Police in Port St. Joe responded to a call from a repo driver at 3:42 p.m. who said 41-year-old Tikila Walker had fled while he was trying to repossess her white Ford Fusion for failure to make payments.
Police located Walker, but she fled, getting involved in a hit-and-run at 4:19 p.m. The other driver didn’t press charges against Walker, but the repo driver caught up and police had to deescalate an argument between the two while Walker remained in her car.
Walker drove away to escape the repo man, but at 5:52 p.m., she was involved in another hit-and-run at a convenience store after the repo man had tried to box her in.
At 6:01 p.m., police located her again. She refused to get out of the vehicle after police tried once again to deescalate the situation. She then charged at them with a knife.
And yes, there’s video.
The money shot comes precisely 3 minutes in.
Keep in mind, this is after one of them has already tased her seven times.
She survived and was arrested after treatment at the hospital.
This is such a textbook justified shooting they’ll probably teach it in law courses next year.
If you are surrounded by three cops, one of whom has already tased you, and you find yourself thinking “I should grab this knife and charge one them,” this is the precise moment when you should stop, reflect on the possibility that you’re making a really bad decision, and reconsider your life choices.
As greed, bias and AI enshittification continues to degrade Google’s once-vaunted search dominance into barely usable garbage, similar problems are degrading the usefulness of video searches on YouTube.
For once it’s not the ad block wars, as the ad-blockers (and ad-block blocker blockers) seemed to have handily gained the upper hand for the last several weeks. What’s ruining YouTube right now are shorts and AI slop.
For some reason, the powers that be at Google/YouTube have decided that just being the most dominate video platform in the world isn’t enough, and what they really want to do is mimic the braindead hellscape that is TikTok. Hence the bite-sized morsels of annoyance that are Shorts. A good bit of the time, when I’m on YouTube, I’m looking for content to post here. (Or at least that’s my excuse, and I’m sticking to it.) Shorts, being non-embedable, are useless to me. Plus I have no desire to be shunted into your scrolling TikTok clone.
The first tool needed to reverse the enshittification of YouTube is a way to exclude Shorts from search results.
The second thing enshittifying YouTube is the AI Slop infecting the platform these days. Now, I don’t object to the mere existence of AI generated videos there, as some are pretty interesting and/or amusing, like those “Super Panavision” Star Wars re-imaginings, or the imaginary Wes Anderson remakes.
What I object to is those being plopped down in my video feed and search results without any disclaimer that they’re AI. Worse still, AI videos are not only being created and uploaded more than ever, they’re actually being created exponentially and algorithmically, as shown in this Speeed video from five months ago (which I think I’ve linked to before).
It’s one thing when a human tells an AI to create a video, but quite another when AIs are automatically spamming videos to YouTube without human intervention, a mindless army of sorcerer’s apprentices creating more sorcerer’s apprentices, just on the off-chance they’ll suck in enough eyeballs to monetize their ever-rising tide of slop.
Worse, these two flaws combine when setting the previously quite useful “Upload date” filter for video searches. For a lot of things, almost the entire feed is now AI slop shorts that combine the worst of both worlds. For a non-political example, a search for “dog rescue” videos quickly turns up obvious AI slop like this, or this, or this.
They second tool needed to fight the enshittification of YouTube is a new category for the “Report” button where you can label something “AI Slop,” and then have a search option to exclude things tagged AI slop from your search results.
These are two obvious moves to improve the quality of the user experience. So naturally, I don’t expect the powers-that-be at YouTube/Google to implement them…
Oh the glories of Intersectionality! Up in Ottawa, pro-Palestinian protestors blocked a gay pride parade.
Ottawa’s annual Pride parade was cancelled Sunday after being disrupted by pro-Palestinian protesters.
A group called Queers for Palestine – Ottawa had organized a rally to coincide with the Pride parade.
Queers for Palestine is every bit as logical as Cattle for Burger King.
Elected officials and other groups boycotted last year’s parade after Capital Pride released a statement expressing solidarity with Palestinians, but the statement has since been removed from the organization’s website.
A video posted online today shows a protester calling for Capital Pride to recommit to solidarity with the pro-Palestinian cause and for elected officials who boycotted last year’s parade to apologize.
Ottawa Mayor Mark Sutcliffe, who attended Sunday’s parade, says it was “deeply regrettable” that the group of activists chose to block the event.
I bet ordinary Canadians think it “deeply regrettable” that you’re such a spineless pussy that you let activists block a legal parade and do nothing about it.
Asmongold has some video:
“‘No Pride in Genocide.’ I’m going to be real, that’s a pretty good one.”
“Basically it’s two caterpillar Karens getting in a fight with each other about whose cause is more oppressed.”
“The left is cannibalizing itself. Oh, it will. The reason why is that it has no mechanism to rein in extreme actors.”
“Being a left-wing person is like living in a Russian nesting doll of infinitely many purity tests. And if you say no to any of those, you’re instantly a Nazi.”
“Virtue signaling civil war.”
“Muslims outrank LGBT.” Do they? Does anyone have an intersectionality chart that actually answers victimization on the head of a pin questions like this?
While there’s a question as to which social justice victimhood identity politics sect outranks which, there’s none as to how devout Muslims regard homosexuals They are to be stoned. Execution is explicitly authorized as punishment for homosexual acts in many Muslim countries, including those of Hamas benefactor Iran. In Palestinian-controlled territories, the killings appear to be “extra-judicial,” which I’m sure is a great comfort to the gays being murdered there.
“Social justice” is an unstable ideology design to cram disparate groups who otherwise have nothing in common together for the purpose of promoting far leftwing ideology and raking off government graft. It’s a deeply unstable mixture that can (and should) explode at any time…
