Tuesday, October 23, 2018

Beautygate

I-phone users who take selfies complained their phone cameras are using a filter that smoothed out imperfections. Their hair appears softer, their crow's feet are erased, their mouth lines disappear, their aging décolletages are made youthfully smooth, facial lines, pimples, freckles, scars, spots all vanish.

They insist that Apple phone is using a filter on its camera  and they don't want that.

Turns out it's true. Except it's not a filter. The camera's compression is using a lot less detail and that gives the appearance of smoothing.

Story at Mashable.

I was watching Trump/Cruz @ Houston last night through what I thought was RSBN's deplorably compressed telecast that panned into the crowd on the bleachers behind Trump and  had women in makeup look like ghouls, one in particular. Red clothing, white faces, white hair, Foundation applied thickly erasing all character, translated as white, bright red lipstick, two black smudges for eyes, no nose. Then up front on a lower tier opposite side of Trump, a younger thinner version of the same thing. As the camera zoomed in it went:
ghoul
ghoul
ghoul
ghoul
ghoul
ghoul
ghoul
person.

But weirder than this is the opposite in a Vice video about a woman checking out the human-like dolls. This time male dolls marketed for women. Sex dolls. And people want weird things like just the feet. The whole video is gross and extremely weird. It becomes apparent as it goes that the journalist has bought such a doll and she's there to record the process. She shows herself with the doll at the end.

In the beginning the discussion is about details. Women ordering the dolls want imperfections, dots, and birthmarks, lines, skin discolorations and such. The longer you watch the more deeply strange it gets.

The video is hosted on Educate Inspire Change / science-technology.

Comedian Steve Coogan as Alan Partridge

The character Alan Partridge if you're interested. The joke is that a conservative attempt at creativity is doomed at the start to be lame.



The video was posted in a discussion responding to this article about Anucha Saengchart in Indonesia, or some place with squiggly writing that takes a thousand squiggles to write Coca-Cola, whereby he makes cosplay costumes on the cheap and posts the results to Instagram. They're made for the camera, for a single photograph, they're too inept to perform as an actual costume, and that's what makes them so funny. He copies a photograph with makeshift elements to varying degrees of success.

Trump rally for Cruz, Houston

This rally is epic, daresay historic. Trump covered a lot of ground in his speech, longer than usual. Several good speakers besides Trump, but as always, the crowd is awesome. Breitbart did a tour through the crowd leading up to person who was first in line, pausing here and there to speak with whoever would talk, male, lots of women, black, gays, Latin, fer'ners, the range of humanity drawn to Texas and the Texans themselves are all perfectly lovely, nothing at all as caricatured. I think the guy said the video will go up tomorrow. It's very long.

Very much worth watching.



Monday, October 22, 2018

The Deuce

                                             
I have been catching up on the HBO series "The Deuce" which is about Forty Second Street back in the day. My day.  The 1970's and the 1980's.

This series specialized in the sex trade. Whores, pimps, massage parlers and bars of Times Square. It is by the same guys who did the Wire and it is just about as great as that series. David Simon, George Pelecano's and Richard Price are the main writers and they do an unbelievable job.

I started working in Times Square in 1970 when I was about 12. I would go with my Dad to an accounting firm where he did taxes and I made copies or filed or ran off downstairs to get coffee or sandwiches. It was the way it was depicted in this series There were whores all over the place but they pretty much left you alone. Later as a teenager I used to go with my buddies to the movies on the Deuce. Bruce Lee. Kung Fu. Pam Grier and the Hammer. All of the flicks that used to play in the movie houses that you see on the marquees on this show. We would go to the Garden and catch a Knick game and then go to Thads steakhouse for a three dollar steak I think I ate many times in the diner they show with Leon the dude who went upstate for shooting a pimp. It was always full of pimps and hos. And cops. I know I had hung out at the bar that they called the "High Hat." It was based on a couple of joints from that time that we were real familiar with so to speak. I started going to hang out when I was about 15, I was big for my age and if you had money nobody carded you. The thing that they show about the Mafia is right on the money. In fact there was a half a wiseguy we knew from President Street that got us into a couple of after hours like the one they use as a main part of Season Two.

The scenes with the cops on the pad also brought back a lot of memories.. I remember having to hand over an envelope. Both to the cops and the wise guys who both wanted a taste. You know what? Things were better in those days. Sure you had to pay but you got service you know what I mean. Homeless guys couldn't set up shop outside your store. You could call the cops and they would take care of it. Or better yet you could call the crooks and they will really take care of it.

I have been nostalgic the past few days. I am rereading a bunch of Lawrence Blocks books about his alcoholic detective Matt Scudder. His life was a lot more like mine as opposed to Vinnie the Barman in this series. Still and all they remind me of how it was.

I have to say the whole thing is right on the money and very well done. Gritty and realistic. Highly recommended if you want to know what New York was really like back in the day.

(Enjoy the clip. I heard variations of this rap several times when a pimp was working on a girl in one of the gin mills like Smiths or the Blarney Stone. Shit you could hear while you were waiting on a light to cross the street. The scene is really well written and Method Man can really act. He's got some chops)


Oo koo ley ley

I have no idea what that Hawaiian was warbling about, but he should leave haole songs alone.


That is Francis Scott Key's grave - my father's gravesite is right over there, to the left a bit.


Now that is how it is supposed to be sung.

Monday means ASL class. Here are two ASL renditions of our National Anthem.


This version has a better audio track, but the terp has an unusually flat affect.

This one has an amateur musical performance but the terp is very good, very emotive. 


I like to compare and contrast things like the word "yet". Little things make a big difference.

And if I never hear a singer go up an octave on the word "free" ever again I will be good. Stop it, really, don't do that. It upsets my dogs. Even the deaf one.

Beware...take care

Just an ex bogey man

Army recruitment video 2018, American vs British


National Anthem, Hawaii

Rose

Viola Smith

PETA: Cow's milk is a symbol of white supremacists

Story at kron4, with reasoning behind why this is so. Too stupid to even read. So instead I'll regale you with a milk-related anecdote.

I resist shopping which is strange because I have a lot of fun whenever I do. I buy a lot of milk, usually freeze half it, then I don't have to go back for awhile. Since it's the heaviest thing I go to the milk chiller first. So there I am loading 8 gallons into an empty cart.

A tall large man wearing loose gray cotton clothing came up to my cart as I was bent down reaching for gallons on the lower shelf. He loomed above me.

You must put on your Arnold Schwarzenegger voice for full effect.

"Is all this milk for you?"

     "Yes."

"You really can drink all this milk?"

     "Yes."

His face communicates incredulity. He's thinking Americans are strange. He's will go back to Germany and relate this encounter of the man he saw loading 8 gallons of milk.

     "I can drink a gallon a day."

His eyes bulged and his mouth opened, his head pulled back in shocked disbelief. It's true. One day I did drink a whole gallon. But that was only once.

     "But I'm trying to cut back ... to half gallon a day."

"Oh, okay."

As if half gallon a day is reasonable where a gallon a day is not.

Back in that heavy milk drinking period I bragged about being able to drink a whole gallon in one day to the check out clerks as they are running the gallons over their scanner. One time a teenage boy was bagging and he overheard me bragging and he interjected, "I can too."

And that caused me to cast back to my own teenage years standing in front of the refrigerator and ignoring civilized use of a drinking glass, lifting the whole gallon to my mouth, tilting it and veritably inhaling nearly the whole thing without stopping. My brother did the same thing.

George Soros

[who funding caravan]

Results turn out to be
Soros
Soros
Soros
Soros
Soros
Soros
Soros
Soros
Soros
Soros

Through the group Pueblo Sin Fronteras

People without borders, what a lovely name and sentiment. I fell like playing Imagine and Age of Aquarius.

Certain photographs struck me today. Young men carrying Honduras flags and other men burning an American flag with swastika drawn on it. Yet the lovely idea is no national borders. No difference between one culture and the next, a blending, as if some cultures aren't so shitty they're left behind with intention to barge into another.

A young woman in High School said, "I'm not going to have children. I cannot bring a child into this miserable world." Yet, women in Honduras, a country so miserable they abandon it but not before bringing more children into it.

And the country they desire to end up is so miserable to its own citizens that people swear to leave it if Trump is elected. And many of them actually do.

Where does Pueblos Sin Fronteras get its funding?

This was uncovered when previous caravans came up.

Fronteras is supported by CARA Family Detention Pro Bono Project that includes
* Catholic Legal Immigration Network,
* Immigration Council
* Refugee and Immigration Center for Education and Legal Services
* American Immigration Lawyers Association

Former AILA President Victor Nieblas Pradas is behind the Soros-led caravans and contends that detaining mothers and their children who break into the U.S. illegally is inhumane, unfair and unjust.

Contends. I contend paying them to invade the United States en mass enticing them from their home countries and exposing them to danger and hardship and agonizing uncertainty is inhumane, unfair to everyone else, and unjust to Americans. And illegal.

What is so difficult to have sink through one's thick pointed head that encouraging and funding, "mothers and their children who break into the U.S. illegally ..." is illegal?

Right there is Trump's grounds for legal pursuit.

“The caravan is organized by a group called Pueblo Sin Fronteras, but the effort is supported by the coalition ...
*  CARA Family Detention Pro Bono Project, which includes
*  Catholic Legal Immigration Network (CLIN), the
* American Immigration Council (AIC),
* the Refugee and Immigration Center for Education and Legal Services (RICELS) and
* the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) – thus the acronym CARA,”
 WND reported. “At least three of the four groups are funded by George Soros’ Open Society Foundation.”

"There is simply no humane way to detain families,” Pradis declared in an AILA announcement. “Asylum seeking families should be given due process, not expedited removal – and the end of the road must be the end of family detention entirely."

Nonsense. This is Cloward-Piven in practice. Cynical as always. He knows it is not possible to process mass movement of asylum seekers. He's simply denying the U.S. can do anything and insisting the U.S. and every U.S. citizen simply accept his invasion and on moral grounds!

The arrogance is sterling.

Additionally Pueblo Sin Fronteras is a member of the
* National Day Laborer Network affiliated with
* United for Justice and Peace, and
* Caravan Against Fear and the
* Freedom Road Socialist Organization

Alex Mensing is one of the organizers of the Pueblo Sin Fronteras groups. He identifies himself as a paralegal at the University of San Francisco's Immigration and Deportation Defense Law Clinic and works with CARA and regularly briefs leftist website magazine Mother Jones, also a recipient of Soros grants.

Democrats are uniting with Soros to push a pro-immigration platform. Cash-strapped Democrats forward his anti-Trump, pro-immigration agenda.

What we have here is straight up battle of the billionaires.

There are links to Democrat Party. Oregon's governor Kate Brown accepted a Soros contribution to her re-election then three days later announced that Oregon National Guard would not be participating in Trump's effort to get the Guard to provide border security.

Soros pledged in September 2016 to invest up to half a billion in programs and companies benefiting migrants and refugees "fleeing life-threatening situations."

Last fall Soros transferred 18 billion to the Open Society Foundations.

Then, an interesting bit.

And Soros’ repopulation legacy will not die out once he passes away.
“Inside Philanthropy reported in 2016 that Soros – who has said that he considers himself to be ‘some kind of god’ – began laying the groundwork for the foundation to continue his mission after he dies,” WND recalled. “Hacked Open Society Foundation documents published last summer shed light on the way in which Soros has used his foundation to advance progressive, open-borders policies – both domestically and abroad.” 
Anti-law enforcement and anti-Trump groups inside America’s borders have also been funded by Soros, who has a long-established track record of attacking conservatives and biblical values. 
“In the U.S., his foundation has provided funding for the Black Lives Matter movement and open borders activists,” the independent Internet daily continued. “The foundation has also provided funding to anti-Trump ‘resistance’ groups, funded opposition research on critics of radical Islam and attempted to influence Supreme Court rulings.” 
More at One News Now, dated May 1, 2018

I would like to see Trump use his government departments to sue the living shit out of each of these people and every one of these organizations to the extent that they're financially destroyed. Tie them up in our courts forever.  I would really like to see them declared enemies of United States and their assets seized.

What an amazing thing that would be, Soros at 89 financially ruined with nothing left for his son. The article says his foundations are ways to avoid inheritance tax.

Billionaire against billionaire and Trump with the full force of United States government and a conservative Supreme Court.

Sunday, October 21, 2018

Democrat organized Migrant caravan swells to 5,000

Trump mocks, "If it swells 15x it will match the attendance expected at my Houston MAGA rally. Losers."