Even if this video of a three year old being overly aggressively searched by a typical TSA thug isn’t upsetting to you, you have to admit that it really underscores how pointless all this “security” is. Some little three year old white girl whose dad is a TV reporter is pretty f-ing far from being on some future FBI’s most wanted list for blowing a jetliner out of the sky with a diaper bomb. Come on, profiling isn’t always a bad word. Even taking away her teddy bear to X-ray it is ridiculous (and even if you want to tell me that sometimes kids toys are used to smuggle drugs, I’ll remind you that the TSA has no mandate or legal right to search for anything but direct risks to air travel safety — they are given this special ability to bypass normal search warrant law on that condition).
Fingers crossed that this video stays up as it’s been getting take-down notices on the ‘Tubes.
In “good” news it looks to me like the porno-scanners are on their way out, but at the same time, using them was only a part of the motivation, thus the air quotes. The half-core of what was driving it was corporations using fear — the engine of American politics — to sell showy and very expensive yet useless equipment… And now that the contracts for those sales are signed, those corporations would rather if the machines never get plugged in. That way they get the money, and don’t have to worry about follow-up, let alone the inevitable lawsuits that could severely cut into profits. And so we’ll move on to the next stage of the scam with new gear and new procedures… and whether you’re concerned about government abusing its sheeple, or whether you’re concerned about politicians conspiring with lobbyists to funnel tax money into private already-very-wealthy hands, this terror-war scam has got it all.
Let me begin by making up for the horrible unfriendly human “abuse” video of last night with a much more fun friendly animal “abuse” video… some Japanese TV show in which they put a big plush penguin on an RC car and take it to a zoo. The real penguins are blown away, and eagerly follow around the giant penguin with glee — “we love you giant penguin,” they squawk happily.
We always try and do a little clean up on the weekends, so Nefarious made me the deal that if she helped by taking the garbage to the bin (in the rain in her high heels no less), in return I would pull her back to the studio in the wagon. At first I thought to myself how nice it was to hear her laughing boisterously, you know, the purity of childhood happiness and all that. It wasn’t until I went back and looked at the photo that I realized that the laughter and said childhood joy was not entirely “pure”.
If it’s not obvious, the devil is in the details.
Nefarious went to the toy store to spend some of her savings and got one of those foam puzzle mats (with a printed car track) and it fits perfectly in front of the doll house. Following are a couple of night time pictures of the house that I quite like. As you might notice, we’ve slowly been adding furniture and so on, and various decorations, including some for the Christmas holidays.
Other than that, I have some unusual swelling in my leg which I’ve already theorized could be the result of walking around on a broken bone and not knowing it (due to the severed nerves), but could also be another bone tumor growing near the first one… Either way, I think it’s about time to go get it x-rayed. And I do always like getting x-rayed, so any excuse works for me.
Other than that “other than that”, let me post just a couple more animal videos that I bookmarked ages ago. You’ve probably seen them, but for those few of you who are have a low viral load when it comes to the things one catches online, here’s a dog parkour video (which to my surprise you can find lots of) and a video of a foal playing with a ball — I always enjoy watching videos of animals playing, especially when they’re not dogs (because that’s in the “seen it a million times” category) or cats (because I despise cats and have been given non-humorous thought to forming an organization to ban them as pets due to the dangers of trichomoniasis).
Oh yeah and while I’m posting videos, I wanted to say that I think I’m going to build the bike with legs in this video, which is obviously based on the work of Theo Jansen, who I’m a fan of. Finally (for real this time), I just saw the greatest project car ever on eBay. If you bid in the next couple days, you can get it for, as of now, about $2,000, which is incredibly given the amount of work invested so far.
First some pictures:
It’s an eight-wheeled Corvette-sort-of-thing, with a double GM front and a double Jaguar rear. The start of a custom interior (including LED gauges) is installed, and the lengthy gull-wing-door fiberglass body looks fairly complete. The engine is totally nuts, made up of a pair of Mazda twin rotary engines put together into a single mega-engine managed by four MSD ignitions. I have no idea how close to running it is, but seriously, what a kooky and inspiring project. This is the kind of crazy backyard engineering that makes up for the stupid shit in the previous entry and makes me love America again. I can’t imagine how much fun that would be to drive around. Holy head turner. Anyway, I’m done now.
Oh wait, speaking of head-turner vehicles, I like these “Big Ass Trucks” too.
My seven year old daughter is going to be flying to the USA to visit her mother for Thanksgiving soon, and I’m really worried about what she’s potentially going to be facing with the TSA. I’ve been reading and hearing more and more about their new “enhanced pat downs” in which TSA agents, not even limited to same gender, are permitted to do extended fondling of genitals and breasts. Full on grabbing and groping and rubbing and stroking and squeezing and detailed manual examination of genitals. Not some back of the hand frisking, but actually grabbing hold of the vulva (or penis and scrotum) and “checking it out” in detail, plus breast exams that involve squeezing and twisting (enough to be described as “painful”) to make sure the person doesn’t have explosive implants (I kid you not — it’s this ridiculous).
Alternately, naked photos are taken of the person, including explicit child-pornographic images of little boys and girls. Little girls being genitally fondled or nude photographed by adult men. How is this OK? How is this stopping terrorism? How is this protecting freedom? I have no doubt that cavity searches will be added very soon, because they’re the next “logical” step. Oh, and it should come with minimal surprise that most of the abuse is being done to children and attractive women, because that’s what it is — abuse. It’s not even security theatre any more. It’s purely abuse, the government showing you who is boss.
It’s beyond sickening. This video above, which I hope you’ll watch and perhaps pass it or one of its many twins on, gets particularly gross about half way through. If you don’t want to trust Alex Jones (the hard to listen to part of this video isn’t him, but one of his employees describing her TSA encounter along with her eight year old and 20 month old — who they also did this sexual assault to) then I’m sure you can follow the bread crumbs of related videos and spend the next hour being sick to your stomach. There is an endless stream of both news reports and individuals sharing their traumatizing government rape stories. What a sad and disturbing fall from grace America is continuing to experience.
I had a very emotionally taxing day at the hospital — my eyes are still red and smarting and I used up an entire box of the doctor’s nose-napkins I’m a little ashamed to admit — which I have mixed feelings about but I’m once again extending trust that this doctor can take me to a better place. I hope that I’m not betrayed again… I’ve committed to spending the Christmas holidays in the hospital, which will be good if it is helpful, but sucks because I wanted to take a “just us” trip with Caitlin which will have to wait until March Break now.
Anyway, I was watching an old David Blaine special and in it he was doing a card trick in which the shot briefly is a little low and you can see the bottom of the card. Unfortunately the card is blurred, I think intentionally rather than from motion so you can’t see the card name. However, I noticed that for a single frame in the middle of the shot they’ve edited “NICE TRY” onto the card in red block letters which I thought was quite funny.
Nefarious and Caitlin and I watched one of his old specials, Street Magic I think, and he was doing a lot of mind reading tricks, which are very easy to write off as being done with plants when you see them on TV, or as shots that fail 95% of the time and he only guesses right through perseverance. However, the first time he flipped through and said “say out loud the card you’re thinking of”, I did just that, and BOOM! he says the same card as I just did. Next time Nefarious said her own card guess, and again BOOM! it was correct. I’m sure it’s something like when he’s flipping through only one of the cards is the right way around, or there’s a tiny flipping delay around that card or something, because he definitely does seem to be “forcing” the thought in some way.
Speaking of secrets, I’ve been making loads of these secret compartment books:
This one is made out of an old book of Nefarious’s (as it was made for her and no old book of mine sits convincingly on her shelf), on which in addition to cutting out the storage area, I’ve lined it with green velvet (sorry, I know the picture doesn’t show that) and framed it in foil. It really turned out nicely. I’ve made a few others as well, including some non-square ones to fit specific items.
After the break are more pictures and some food experiments too.
Here’s a foil taxidermy I made for no particular reason. I don’t like how it turned out. I wanted it to be cute but it isn’t at all, and making it out of foil rather than a darker matte finish was a poor choice. So I think this is a failure (trust me, this is a good picture of it — it really doesn’t look very good).
Today we went to the Royal Winter Fair and looked at all the animals and then the halls filled with people selling stuff that they’d imported from China masquerading as local craftsmanship (I got a gorgeous wooden bowl that I was a lot less happy with once I realized it was made by slave labor, which is my fault for once again falling for a too-good-to-be-true price), as well as lots of people selling preserves and other skills that are much more satisfying to do oneself at home. I’m probably grumpy from the difficulty and discomfort of walking so far (admittedly I spent much time sitting while Caitlin took Nefarious around the halls), but I’m really struck every time I go to the events at the CNE grounds what a horrible crowd of gelatinous ugliness I find myself surrounded with. Most people are just horrible, and maybe I forget that because I’ve spent most of my life surrounding myself with beautiful people, both in my real life and with BME, which is, to me, the very definition of self-actualized beauty. But the bunnies sure were nice.
Anyway, I used the last of my leftover silicone to try and cast a mold over a sculpture that I’ve grown less happy with over time. My drive is to make complex and detailed masters, but really for soap, it’s better to just keep it simple in terms of the design. This is not. But it didn’t matter because I didn’t have enough silicone to make a proper mold, and the front half broke apart (so the nose is all messed up) and this was a one-time-deal because the bits of the mold are now in the garbage.
In a couple days I’m back at the hospital’s pain clinic and I’m dreading it. If it wasn’t for needing to stick through this long enough to discover whether I’ve passed this curse on I wouldn’t bother because it’s been such a continual betrayal by a healthcare system that I desperately want to believe in. The last few times they’ve treated me like a drug-seeking addict and done nothing to help me. Not that prejudiced profiling is ever OK, but I suppose I understand how they could do that back when I had no “medical evidence”, but I’ve had diagnostic proof that something was going very, very wrong for a long time (ie. the CT scan, the nerve/muscle conductivity tests, strength tests, and so on) and it didn’t do a bit of good convincing them to help me. All I have now that I didn’t have before is a name for the disorder. Why should that make a difference? And if they don’t help me, what then? I mean, do I sue them? At what point does what they’re doing become so obviously cruel that it’s as wrong as any wartime torture? How is it OK to allow someone to live like this? I can sympathize with my family doctor, who is not an expert in either pain management let alone exotic muscle diseases saying that she’s afraid to lose her license — doctors have been criminally prosecuted for being too generous with pain treatment — but what is someone in my position to do? I have done everything they’ve asked and it sure feels like it’s never enough for them… We’ll see what happens, but given that they’ve already misplaced the paperwork with my diagnosis (thankfully I had the sense to take a photo of it before leaving), I’m more than a little worried.
Some more work has been done on the dollhouse, but it’s being played in now so it’s more like living in a house and renovating it at the same time. Much of what’s left is stuff that Nefarious can do on her own as well which is nice.
Oh and in more interesting news, Nefarious starts — after much begging (from her, not from me) — her BJJ classes in a few days. Should be a better outlet for all that energy than the ambitious and committed [but all in good fun] play fighting at school which is surely going to get someone hurt and/or in trouble eventually. It’s nice to have someone — two people really, as Caitlin has become a junior gym rat this year — to live vicariously through.
Well, as always I’m not bothering to proof read this rambling nothing, so I hope I have at least not reversed any meanings. And don’t think it’s all sadness and pain here. I’m sure I’m just off-loading my exhaustion and hatred of my physical experiences into this keyboard. Caitlin and I spent an hour last night laughing over my pronunciation of “alumimum” (to say nothing of “pronoun-ciation”). I guess those are the things that get you through. Oh and I’ve been liking streaming Netflix too. Unless I’m missing something it’s an awesome deal being able to watching any movies I want, non-stop 24/7, for under $10 a month.
