As one Black Lives Matter billboard is coming down in Pittsboro, another is going up in Raleigh, says a social-justice advocate involved in both projects.

Kerwin Pittman, founder of the nonprofit Recidivism Reduction Educational Program Services Inc. (RREPS), said he’s not surprised the Pittsboro billboard erected last month next to a Confederate flag on U.S. 64 Business didn’t last long.

The contract with Lamar Advertising Co. was supposed to be for a full year, until next July, but Sam White, the owner of the Confederate flag, didn’t want the black billboard with the white letters spelling “Black Lives Matter” on his land.

White is ending his land lease with billboard owner Lamar Advertising after almost 16 years. The lease expires Aug. 31, he said.

“I told them the 31st of August that sign better be gone, because Sept. 1, if that sign’s not down, they’re going to hear my chainsaw running,” White said in an interview with The News & Observer.

Fuck Sam White.

What happens when you realize “music theory” actually means “the harmonic style of certain 18th century European musicians”?

And what if you then start paying attention to the explicit intentions of the 20th C’s foremost music theorists and notice that they are, in fact, full of white supremacist cliches? And it’s still happening.

Or if you like pictures:

Pasco County Sheriff Chris Nocco took office in 2011 with a bold plan: to create a cutting-edge intelligence program that could stop crime before it happened.

What he actually built was a system to continuously monitor and harass Pasco County residents, a Tampa Bay Times investigation has found.

First the Sheriff’s Office generates lists of people it considers likely to break the law, based on arrest histories, unspecified intelligence and arbitrary decisions by police analysts.

Then it sends deputies to find and interrogate anyone whose name appears, often without probable cause, a search warrant or evidence of a specific crime.

They swarm homes in the middle of the night, waking families and embarrassing people in front of their neighbors. They write tickets for missing mailbox numbers and overgrown grass, saddling residents with court dates and fines. They come again and again, making arrests for any reason they can.

One former deputy described the directive like this: “Make their lives miserable until they move or sue.”

iPhone

Some bit of software in the chain of things from my phone’s camera to WordPress here has a terrible resizing algorithm.

The spot on my right foot, where the Achilles tendon attaches to my heel, has been sore for years. I’ve always suspected it was running-related. But, I even though I haven’t run in over two months, the pain never went away. Then, I had hernia surgery and was left unable to walk without a walker for the better part of a week. And now the pain is gone!

Who knew the Achilles tendon was attached to the abdominal wall!?

Can’t believe I have to say this, but here goes. Black Lives Matter and “antifa” are not the same thing. Let me repeat. Black Lives Matter and antifa are not the same thing.

The antifa folks make every protest they attend become all about them.

Hacked documents suggest that the FBI is concerned some people may be using Ring or other smart doorbells to watch the police.
The papers describe a 2017 incident where someone remotely watched live footage of police preparing to serve a search warrant.

The information was found online by The Intercept among hacked documents.

Previously, privacy advocates have raised concerns about data from smart doorbells being shared with police.

…

It is an interesting twist on the smart doorbell story. Previously there have been concerns about how much information from private cameras is being shared with police.

Amazon was criticised last year for partnering with at least 200 US law enforcement agencies to allow surveillance via its Ring doorbells.

Hernias, that is.

Doctor felt two, but not where the pain was. Once she got her robot inside me, she found three more.

This is a lot of pain.

I’ve noticed that tonic water is harder to come by since COVID19 showed up. Are people just relaxing at home with more G&Ts these days?

Probably not. But they might be buying it because internet quacks are telling people that the quinine in tonic water (of which there is only scant amounts) is close enough to hydroxychloroquine to be effective against C19.

Sigh.

Back in May, we wrote about a group of gun enthusiasts who love taking pictures of loaded weapons pointed at their dicks. On a long enough timeline, one of them was inevitably going to accidentally discharge their weapon, and on Tuesday, that appears to be exactly what happened to one member in the San Diego area.

A member of a Facebook group dedicated to taking pictures of loaded weapons pointed at dicks finally shot himself in the balls, according to bloody pictures and video he posted on social media and the Imperial County Sheriff’s Office, which confirmed the incident to Motherboard. Rather than step back and start questioning whether the practice is wise, the group made him an administrator and are now celebrating him as their king.

On August 11, a member of the group “Loaded Guns Pointed at [B]enis” posted a video of himself pointing a loaded 1911 handgun at his junk. There’s a brief pause before the gun discharges.

I encourage this behavior.