Going Down to the Big Demonstration Today

I'm tired and cranky, and that's about the right mood. I'm wondering if today's anti-gun demonstration will feed off the Stephon Clark demonstrations, or not. We'll see. It looks like it was a fun evening last night over at Florin & 29th: about four miles from my house.

DMTC’s “Wizard of Oz” Continues This Weekend!

Grad School

Video of the Beatles' "Revolution"

Always loved this song!

Clovis Man

Cave Man:

CLOVIS, N.M. (KRQE) - A homeless New Mexico man is living in a tunnel he made himself right near a public park, and the city where he has dug this intricate home in the ground can't do anything about it.

“Dig yourself a house underground and you always have a home. I think it's sweet,” said Rosey Burge, Clovis resident.

Eight feet underground is where Sean Heron lives. He decided to get some peace and quiet by living where the sun doesn't shine.

Heron didn't want to be on camera, but says he's been homeless for a year. It wasn't until recently that his hideout was discovered by someone who posted a tour on Facebook.

The underground tunnel has drawers, closets, a bed and more. All of this is just behind Beacham Field in Clovis, a recreational baseball field.

Just Starting To Catch Up With The Stephon Clark Shooting

In recent years, I've detached myself from the media stream to an unusual degree - media has been so bad in recent years - so sometimes I'm slow to realize when big news occurs. That's the case with the Stephon Clark shooting, which is now national news, of which I knew little, even though it happened just five miles from my house. So, trying to catch up with the available information.

Protesters shut down Interstate 5 this evening. Afterwards, they basically shut down Golden One Arena, and prevented large crowds from watching the NBA basketball game there. I saw brief TV coverage of that. I was looking for people I know among the protesters.

Who knows where this thing is going?

The Lights of Albuquerque - Jim Glaser

Forget The Oil - Secure The Data!

There's data in them thar hills:

To the service companies specifically, owning the data — enough to fill 20 million file cabinets since 2010 alone — would mean a whole new revenue stream, perhaps as they sell subscriptions to huge data libraries.

“It’s like Netflix for oil and gas,” said John Gibson, an advisor at Tudor Pickering Holt & Co. who previously ran the oil-services business for Halliburton Co. “Imagine that all data is like a movie that many different people want to watch, but they want to watch it at different times.”

To the producers, though, owning that data means one less check they’d have to write. And it would ensure competing producers couldn’t see their data while stealthily moving into a new field.

...EOG Resources Inc., dubbed by one of its analysts as the Apple of the oilfield, is widely considered a leader among explorers for bypassing oilfield service companies to generate its own in-house innovations.

“Data is king and one of our most valuable resources,” Sandeep Bhakhri, chief information and technology officer at EOG, said. “You have to own the data. You cannot outsource its collection, analysis or delivery.”

He Explained That He Never Saw Jesus

OK then:

A longtime teacher at an Orlando Christian day school has been taken into custody and charged with child abuse for allegedly stomping on a 5-year-old under her care because he failed to “speak with Jesus” during a time-out for acting up.

...The arrest report notes that another teacher at Kingsway noticed a bruise on the foot of the 5-year-old and asked what happened, only to be told that he had been sent by Williams to go “sit on the bench and talk to Jesus,” in an isolated “private prayer room” for misbehaving. He explained that he never saw Jesus, which infuriated Williams.

“When [Williams] entered the room a few minutes later, the teacher stomped on the student’s foot, leaving a bruise,” the arrest affidavit stated.

Tropical Cyclone Marcus Hits Darwin

I enjoyed this first person coverage of Tropical Cyclone Marcus hitting Darwin, NT, Australia, several days ago as a Category 2 storm.

Marcus has since grown to a Category 5 monster. It's currently offshore, but eventually Marcus will swing around and barrel east, maybe coming close to Western Australian cities like Perth, so its story is not over.

Various Tasks

Upgrading my version of the DMTC Master Cast List. Hope to soon start upgrading the online version of the list soon.

Making incremental changes to my Breaking Bad semiotics book manuscript. Discovering I need to rewatch "Breaking Bad" and "Better Call Saul" AGAIN! So, multitasking by upgrading the Master Cast List and watching "Breaking Bad" simultaneously.

Ramping up exercise. Took first post-heart-attack ballet class today. Took Zumba as well.

Two Problematic Movies

I saw two movies this weekend that I didn't really like all that much. Passed the time well enough, but....

Red Sparrow

This was like a dumb movie pretending like it was a smart movie. Weird, disembodied sexiness from Jennifer Lawrence. It was a nice, sadistic touch to have Charlotte Rampling in the movie, though.




Disney's Wrinkle in Time

This was like a dumb movie pretending like it was a smart movie. Weird, disembodied physics from Oprah.

The Great Martian War 1913 - 1917 (2013)

From imdb:

On the eve of the one hundredth anniversary of the beginning of WWI, this mockumentary - employing "archival footage", and interviews with "historians", "researchers" and those directly involved - tells of the Great Martian War (1913-1917), which supplants what looked to have been an imminent great war between Germany and the rest of Europe. The Germans asked their adversaries for help when the Martians invaded Earth via a remote field in southern Germany. The Martians went on the attack first in Germany, then moved west throughout the rest of continental Europe, with the ultimate threat of crossing the channel into Britain. The Martians also took their fight into the waters around Europe. They employed animal-like machines in their battles, the human race which coined the respective machines as "herons", "lice" and "spiders" most closely resembling such animals, each which had their own seeming purpose in the war. The presentation of the ebbs and flows in the human defensive against the Martians discuss what, in hindsight, looked often to be the Martians' luring humans into a longer term goal. Ultimately, the war officially ended when human discovered what was an Achilles heel in the Martian offensive, but ultimately not without great consequence to the human race. Researchers in present day still study the war, with one such researcher, Lawrence Mark, examining the recently found diary of Canadian First Nations soldier Gus Lafonde by his great-granddaughter, Kim Lafonde, most specifically with regard to some Martian code which Mark, in using the code to decipher Martian writing from the time, posits that the Martians had a greater plan than what was initially thought.
—Huggo

St. Pat's

Steve Bannon Knows You Better Than You Know Yourself

It's time to end Facebook:

The data analytics firm that worked with Donald Trump’s election team and the winning Brexit campaign harvested millions of Facebook profiles of US voters, in one of the tech giant’s biggest ever data breaches, and used them to build a powerful software program to predict and influence choices at the ballot box.

A whistleblower has revealed to the Observer how Cambridge Analytica – a company owned by the hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, and headed at the time by Trump’s key adviser Steve Bannon – used personal information taken without authorisation in early 2014 to build a system that could profile individual US voters, in order to target them with personalised political advertisements.

Christopher Wylie, who worked with a Cambridge University academic to obtain the data, told the Observer: “We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles. And built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons. That was the basis the entire company was built on.”

And it turns out Robert Mercer is from Albuquerque:

A powerful but previously obscure online data mining firm bankrolled by Albuquerque native Robert Mercer has been thrust into the media glare following revelations that it harvested Facebook user information to help propel Donald Trump into the White House in 2016.

Robert Mercer, a Sandia High School and UNM graduate turned New York hedge fund titan, reportedly plowed $15 million into Cambridge Analytica, which helped both the Trump campaign in the U.S. and the Brexit movement in the United Kingdom. The Journal profiled Mercer and his Albuquerque connections in November.

According to Forbes magazine, Mercer donated $24.6 million to the Republican Party in 2016. He has reportedly invested $10 million into Breitbart, the conservative news site. Financial journals place his net worth at from $900 million to more than a $1 billion.

Cambridge Analytica claims to use secret psychological methods to help mine online data that can be used to reach and influence potential voters. But now the firm’s aquisition and use of Facebook data in the 2016 election is drawing scrutiny from Congress, state and federal investigators and the British Parliament.

According to to a bombshell report in the New York Times on Saturday, Facebook initially downplayed knowledge of Cambridge Analytica’s work to influence the election, but on Friday suspended the company from its network.

...Mercer and his politically-connected daughter, Rebekah, initially backed the presidential candidacy of Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas in 2016. But they eventually supported Trump as the nominee.

If you think it all seems a bit much for a reportedly low-key guy who was once a member of the car club at Sandia High, you’re not alone. Deanna Cooper Koloc, who graduated from high school with Mercer, told the Journal last fall that she enjoyed catching up with her old classmate at their 50th reunion in Albuquerque three years ago.

“I was excited to see him at the reunion because he was one of the students I remembered well as part of a group I identified with, and I found him very pleasant and interesting to talk to,” Cooper Koloc recalled in a Journal interview last year. “We were both interested in hearing about mutual friends, and exchanged the sort of chitchat that always occurs at high school reunions. I’m glad I didn’t find out until later about his political leanings. I admire Bob for his accomplishments but vehemently oppose his politics.”

Mercer attended the reunion with Rebekah, who later introduced to Trump to Bannon. The father-daughter duo took an alumni tour of the Albuquerque school, attended the reunion dinner and reminisced with his old friends just like regular folks.

According to the 1964 edition of “The Crest” – the Sandia High yearbook – Mercer was active in extracurricular activities. The yearbook shows the bespectacled student as a member of the school’s chess, auto and Russian clubs.

An Albuquerque Journal article from the same year shows that Mercer – who later went on to become a pioneer in artificial intelligence and computer science – had a promising mathematical mind. He took top honors for New Mexico in the 1964 national high school math contest.Mercer attended the reunion with Rebekah, who later introduced to Trump to Bannon. The father-daughter duo took an alumni tour of the Albuquerque school, attended the reunion dinner and reminisced with his old friends just like regular folks.

According to the 1964 edition of “The Crest” – the Sandia High yearbook – Mercer was active in extracurricular activities. The yearbook shows the bespectacled student as a member of the school’s chess, auto and Russian clubs.

An Albuquerque Journal article from the same year shows that Mercer – who later went on to become a pioneer in artificial intelligence and computer science – had a promising mathematical mind. He took top honors for New Mexico in the 1964 national high school math contest.

Arming The Homeless With Shotguns

And if some of those shotguns get used in convenience store robberies, well that's your free market for you:

A Michigan candidate for US Senate has proposed arming homeless people with pump-action shotguns in an effort to reduce crime.

Brian Ellison, who is running against Democratic incumbent Debbie Stabenow, says homeless people are “constantly victims of violent crime” and providing them with firearms would provide a deterrent.

Ellison, a Libertarian who is expected to be the party’s candidate in the November midterm election, said he had settled on pump-action shotguns for practicality purposes.

“Frankly I think the ideal weapon would be a pistol,” he told the Guardian, “but due to the licensing requirements in the state we’re going to have a hard enough time getting homeless people shotguns as it is.

“Getting them pistols is probably next to impossible. The pistols need to be registered, people have to have addresses.”

Carrying a concealed pistol is illegal without a permit, Ellison said, “whereas open-carrying a long gun is completely legal”.

Matthew points out:

That particular candidate is part of the Libertarian Socialist Caucus of the Libertarian Party. (Yeah, I'm just as surprised as you they exist) Apparently they're causing quite the stir in the party, which I'm all for. This shotgun plan sounds like it's coming from a good place, but it will most likely lead to homeless people getting harassed and shot by cops even more.

Ron in Reno sends this: