AKA “The First Season Sayan”

Tater tots

Alex Jones was a CIA plant to discredit conspiracy theories that were a liiiiittle too close to reality.

Basically, the government saw some conspiracy theories that were edging too close to what was actually happening. But they couldn’t just outright deny those theories. Because the government spontaneously going “no, we didn’t get microwaves from aliens, and those aliens definitely don’t live among us now as billionaire lizard people” would look suspicious as hell. Any outright denial would only lend credibility to those theories. Like the Streisand Effect, denying them would catapult them to fame. So instead, they created a patsy.

Enter Alex Jones. He’s an idiot, very opinionated, and very vocal about it. But most importantly, he has that spark that makes mediocre white dudes feel smart when they listen to him talk. All the government had to do was give him a platform, and occasionally feed him some juicy conspiracies for his next script. Alex doesn’t even realize he’s being helped along. The government used Alex to give conspiracy theorists a recognizable face and a household name. When Alex Jones hit the air, conspiracy theories were suddenly up front and center in the zeitgeist. Largely due to the government’s help, though he didn’t even know he was the controlled opposition.

And they intentionally got him to parrot those too-close-to-reality conspiracy theories, right alongside the super crazy ones. By making Alex Jones a household name, they were able to collectively discredit all conspiracy theorists. And all they had to do was set him up to skyrocket to fame, and then fail very publicly.

Sandy Hook happened, and that was what the CIA had been waiting for. I don’t think they caused the shooting, but they certainly capitalized on it by getting Jones to fall down the conspiracy rabbit hole with it. Once he had time to work through all of the theories they wanted to discredit, they realized he was getting out of control, and they needed to burn him. And so they did, by leaving him completely disgraced. And the best part (from the government’s perspective) is that burning him only helped further discredit those real conspiracy theories.

This conspiracy theory is called Last Thursdayism. Basically, the conspiracy is that the entire universe was created last Thursday. But we were all created with “memories” of time before last Thursday, so we all collectively believe the universe is much older. Basically, all of the evidence we have of an old universe was also created last Thursday.

That’s a key component of the Illuminati conspiracies. Basically, they believe that Illuminati members are required to create symbolism, as a way of telling the plebs “hey, we’re here and there’s nothing you can do to stop us.”

This isn’t a conspiracy at all. Plastic recycling was originally driven by plastic producers, to shift the blame for pollution away from themselves. Basically, it was a way for the producers to go “it’s not our fault the world is full of plastic. It’s the consumer’s fault for failing to recycle all of it!” They saw the inevitable plastic mountain on the horizon, and took steps to ensure they weren’t going to be blamed for it.

Yup, it’s the “annoying and invasive, but easily cracked DRM” of the retail world. It annoys legitimate customers, while doing very little to actually deter theft. Most of those beep tags can be quickly and easily removed with a strong magnet.

Easier said than done, if your end users run Chrome. Because Chrome will automatically block your site if you’re on double secret probation.

The phishing flag usually happens because you have the Username, Password, Log In, and SSO button all on the same screen. Google wants you to have the Username field, the Log In button, and any SSO stuff on one page. Then if you input a username and go to start a password login, Google expects the SSO to disappear and be replaced by the vanilla Log In button. If you simply have all of the fields and buttons on one page, Google flags it as a phishing attempt. Like I guess they expect you to try and steal users’ Google passwords if you have a password field on the same page as a “Sign in with Google” button.

I actually have OP tagged as “Top-Tier Psychosis Poster” because of this post. So yeah, I’d say it checks out. OP has been separated from reality for a while.

It’s even worse than that. He has been noted talking about the Nazi symbol several times throughout the years. So the man has been saying “I didn’t know it was a Nazi symbol” for a long time now. He only claims to have covered it up now because it finally blew up in his face.

adding he was unaware until recently that the image has been associated with Nazi police

Apparently he has a pretty generous definition of the word “recently”. Or, the more likely answer, he has known for a long time (likely even when he got it) and has only recently seen it stop his grab for power.

Apparently we don’t even need to pay the actual army. We can just revoke their paychecks and force them to keep working anyways. Nothing can go wrong with that, right?

My mother-in-law’s job has a similar policy, except the range is 80 miles… She lives almost exactly 79.9 miles away from her job. The company refuses to budge, (“if we gave an exception to you, we’d have to do it for everyone”), and requires her to come in three days a week. So she commutes an hour and a half, three times a week.

It also means they could expect to need it after the renovations are complete. Could be part of why things seem so rushed.

This is unironically the type of preaching that megachurch pastors use to incentivize people to donate. It’s called prosperity gospel. Basically, it’s the belief that God rewards his most devout followers with material wealth. So if you’re not rich, it’s because you’re not a good enough follower and need to keep donating. It’s what pastors like Joel Osteen and Kenneth Copeland use, to get their followers to buy them new private jets.

Also, tithe is supposed to be a percentage of your income, not a flat amount. Most Christians will say 10% of your annual income goes to the church as tithe. Asking for a flat amount unfairly burdens the poorer parishioners, in the same way that flat rate taxes unfairly burden the poor.

Yeah, Adam Savage was saying that as a highly skilled person. I’ve worked with personality hires. I’ve worked with military-grade weaponized autism. I prefer the autism, because at least I don’t need to babysit them and double-check all of their work.

With the autists, at least you can reliably know “if I give them {A}, I’ll get {B} in return. Not {B-1}, not {B+1}. Always {B}.” I don’t mind teaching. It’s inevitable in any job. But working with personality hires always ends up being an exercise in patience, because there’s only so many times I can show someone how to do something. I work in an industry with extremely strict deadlines where your work is presented to hundreds or thousands of people at a time. So if a personality hire needs to be re-trained on things because they can’t grasp something, (or just keeps doing things wrong because they don’t want to ask for help), then it puts an extra burden on the rest of us to keep meeting those deadlines.

Geez, that half second of hardcore porn somewhere in the middle was worth the watch. Holy shit, it’s been a while since I’ve seen anything like that.

That’s largely because one half of the elected officials are dedicated to defunding and deconstructing government organizations, so they can then point at those same organizations and go “look, the government doesn’t work! We should stop funding it!” The government is actually great at organizing a lot of things. But they’re all so engrained in society that you don’t even think about them as being organized by the government. Systems that just work, reliably, all the time.

The government’s job is stability and reliability, not being as efficient as possible. Where a corporation may only have one person doing a job, the government will have four or five. Those people aren’t bloat; They’re on the payroll because the government is expected to keep functioning during emergencies. People would lose their minds if the streets department (responsible for clearing downed trees out of public roads) shut down after a bad storm rolled through, just because a few government employees had a tree branch fall on their house. What if firefighters stopped working because a local wildfire burnt a few firefighters’ houses? What if the city water department shut down because three or four city employees’ water supply was affected? What if the health department shut down during a pandemic?

The people who work in government also live in the same areas they serve. Which means that they are affected by the same emergencies. The government needs enough redundancy to be able to continue functioning, even after those employees are affected by the same emergencies as the general public. If some emergency affects 75% of the public in a given area, then 75% of the local government employees are likely going to be affected. So if the government doesn’t have enough redundancy to be able to redistribute the work, people will see their government shutting down in the wake of the emergency. And to make matters even worse, during (and in the wake of) those emergencies, people look to the government for help. Which means that’s the most critical time for the government to continue functioning.

I say all of this because the same is true for the infrastructure that runs critical government systems. The government expands and implements things slowly by design, because everything critical has to go through multiple levels of design approval, and have multiple redundancies built in. If the government has updated a critical system, I can guarantee that new system has been in the works for the past two years at least. That process is designed to ensure everything works as intended. I wouldn’t want my city traffic lights managed by a private company, because they’d try to cut costs and avoid building in redundant systems.

Yup.

“Oh hey, we have a partial outage right now due to AWS. Most of the site still works, but users can’t log in, because that is handled on AWS… ^{Which means users can’t access the “most of the site” that still works…} But at least we can say we weren’t completely down during the outage.”

My worst back injury was from picking up a loaf of bread after a long day of very heavy work. I had been slinging 300 pound pieces of gear all day long. Lots of heavy lifting, bending, pushing, pulling, etc… I handled all of it just fine. Got in the car, baby-wiped my face and arms to clean up a little bit, and headed to the grocery store on my way home.

20 minutes later, I was at the store. I just needed two things: Milk and bread. I headed to the back to grab the milk, then went past the bread aisle on the way to the registers. I stooped down to grab the bread, and felt a little twinge in my lower back. I barely even thought about it. Then the closer I got to the registers, the worse it got. By the time I was to the registers, I was hobbling around like an old man who needed a walker. Hell, I felt like I needed a walker; I was cursing myself for not grabbing a shopping cart, because I had nothing to hold onto.

That was on a Friday at like midnight. I suffered through two days of agony until my doctor opened on Monday. Doc was just like “oh yeah, that just happens sometimes.” Doc, can we make it fucking not happen? He said it was probably because I worked hard and then cooled down.

Apparently it’s an extremely common phenomenon, where industrial athletes will get injured after work. Because they’ll be good about staying safe during work… Then they get injured by something stupid and small after cooling down. Because when you’re warmed up and being mindful about how you lift, your risk of injury is low. But then you head home, cool down during the commute, and some muscle or tendon decides “nah, I’m done stretching for the day. Time to rip instead.”

Over a decade later, and I still occasionally have issues with that spot on my back.