Hijack This Thread

[AndyinPA]

Just watched Casablanca within the last month.

[RTH10260]

The Ghanaian giant reported to be the world’s tallest man

Favour Nunoo - BBC News Pidgin, Gambaga
Mon, January 2, 2023 at 1:21 AM GMT+1

When I heard rumours of a new contender for the world's tallest man in northern Ghana, I set out to find out if it was true. The only problem? Measuring him.

A local hospital in northern Ghana told 29-year-old Sulemana Abdul Samed during one of his recent check-ups that he had reached the height of 9 ft 6in (2.89m).



https://www.yahoo.com/news/ghanaian-gia ... 57612.html

(original: BBC News)

[Chilidog]

My dad was a huge Chicago Bears fan.

We were watching the game on TV when Chuck Hughes died.


Tonight was deja Vu.

I hope it turns out better

[sugar magnolia]

Can a "notice of claim" be filed against individuals or organizations that are not government entities?

[Foggy]

I can't answer that, but if anyone else can, please assist.

[RTH10260]

Young Sudanese archaeologists dig up history as ‘west knows best’ era ends
On a continent that has long attracted western expeditions, a wave of young people are now exploring sites

Jason Burke and Zeinab Mohammed Salih in Khartoum
Tue 27 Dec 2022 12.35 GMT

Alate morning in Khartoum. Inside a low, dusty building in the centre of the Sudanese capital, there are crates of artefacts, a 7ft replica of a 2,000-year-old stone statue of a Nubian god, and students rushing through the corridors. Outside is noisy traffic, blinding sunlight and both branches of the Nile.

Heading down one staircase are Sabrine Jamal, Nadia Musa, Athar Bela and Sabrine al-Sadiq, all studying archaeology at Khartoum University. Not one of them is older than 24 and they see themselves as pioneers, breaking new ground on a continent that has long attracted western expeditions, specialists and adventurers but whose own archaeologists have received less attention overseas.

“It is very important that Africans do African archaeology … because then we will have our own archaeological cultures. There is a lot we understand because we are from here. The idea that people from the west know best is changing,” said Sadiq.

Jamal, 22, from the remote and war-torn South Kordorfan province, said stereotypes promoted by films and literature in the west were out of date. “There is an idea of what an archaeologist looks like … But they should not have a certain image or colour or features or gender,” she said.



https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/ ... t-era-ends

[Flatpoint High]

this is hilariously horror=bull

[RTH10260]

in the age of the VPN ...

Louisiana residents will now need a government ID to access porn online
Pornhub is already asking visitors to verify their ages using their drivers licenses.

Mariella Moon·Contributing Reporter
Wed, January 4, 2023 at 7:55 AM GMT+1

We're now in the first week of 2023, and that means different things for different people, such as taking another stab at a New Year's resolution that's been on the list forever or getting started on a plan to reach a goal before the year ends. For Louisiana residents, it also means having to verify their ages if they want to access porn online.

A new state law (PDF, courtesy of Motherboard) went into effect on January 1st, requiring websites containing "a substantial portion" of "material harmful to minors" to ask users to prove that they're 18 or older. "Substantial portion," according to the new law, is more than 33.3 percent of a website's content. As Gizmodo notes, Pornhub, Youporn and Redtube have already started asking visitors to verify their age.

Websites that host content that can be considered porn have to implement "reasonable age verification methods," including asking users to present a government-issued ID or a digitized form of it. Pornhub, Youporn and Redtube had chosen to ask visitors to prove their age by using their LA Wallet app, which is the state's digital wallet app for drivers licenses. A video posted on Twitter shows how Pornhub uses the app to check for a user's age.

Hello from the surveillance state of Louisiana. People in Louisiana have to use their drivers license to go to pornhub. This is truly wild. Under his eye.




https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/loui ... 36172.html

(original: engadget)

[AndyinPA]

[noblepa]

in the age of the VPN ...

Louisiana residents will now need a government ID to access porn online
Pornhub is already asking visitors to verify their ages using their drivers licenses.

Mariella Moon·Contributing Reporter
Wed, January 4, 2023 at 7:55 AM GMT+1

We're now in the first week of 2023, and that means different things for different people, such as taking another stab at a New Year's resolution that's been on the list forever or getting started on a plan to reach a goal before the year ends. For Louisiana residents, it also means having to verify their ages if they want to access porn online.

A new state law (PDF, courtesy of Motherboard) went into effect on January 1st, requiring websites containing "a substantial portion" of "material harmful to minors" to ask users to prove that they're 18 or older. "Substantial portion," according to the new law, is more than 33.3 percent of a website's content. As Gizmodo notes, Pornhub, Youporn and Redtube have already started asking visitors to verify their age.

Websites that host content that can be considered porn have to implement "reasonable age verification methods," including asking users to present a government-issued ID or a digitized form of it. Pornhub, Youporn and Redtube had chosen to ask visitors to prove their age by using their LA Wallet app, which is the state's digital wallet app for drivers licenses. A video posted on Twitter shows how Pornhub uses the app to check for a user's age.

Hello from the surveillance state of Louisiana. People in Louisiana have to use their drivers license to go to pornhub. This is truly wild. Under his eye.

(original: engadget)

Isn't that just asking for identity theft? From what I've heard, porn sites are often loaded with malware. Providing identifying information like that sounds extremely dangerous.

Its not the same as showing your license to buy cigarettes or alcohol. It that case, the seller does not have a copy of your license. They just take a quick look at it. Providing a digital image or even a DL number to a website has the potential of allowing them to keep a copy and perhaps use it for nefarious purposes or sell it to someone who will.

[Tiredretiredlawyer]

https://www.openculture.com/2023/01/wei ... racks.html

“Weird Al” Yankovic Breaks Down His Most Iconic Tracks: “Eat It,” “Amish Paradise,” “White and Nerdy,” and His Other Hilarious Songs

Few things could have been more amusing to a twelve-year-old in 1996 than an Amish-themed parody of the late Coolio’s portentously grim life-in-the-hood anthem “Gangsta’s Paradise.” As luck would have it, “Weird Al” Yankovic released just such a song in 1996, when I happened to be twelve years old myself. Like everyone who’s been a kid at some point in the past 40 years, I grew up hearing and appreciating Yankovic’s prolific output of parodies, pastiches, and even original songs. From “Eat It” to “Smells like Nirvana” to “White and Nerdy,” there was hardly a pop-music phase of my childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood that he didn’t make funny.

That’s to make funny, as distinct from to make fun of: unlike that of a predecessor in comedy songwriting like Tom Lehrer, Yankovic’s body of work evidences not the least tendency toward harshness or ridicule.

Hence his appeal from his very first recording “My Bologona,” an accordion-based parody of “My Sharona” recorded in the bathroom of his college radio station, to no less an advocate of silliness than Dr. Demento, whose airplay launched the young Weird Al’s career — a career that, as Yankovic acknowledges while telling the stories behind his iconic songs in the GQ video above, has not gone without its strokes of luck.

Yet few living performers more clearly personify the old aphorism describing luck as the meeting of preparation and opportunity. “Weird Al approaches the composition of his music with something like the holy passion of Michelangelo painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel,” writes Sam Anderson in a 2020 New York Times Magazine profile. Seeing Yankovic’s notes for “White & Nerdy” “file felt like watching a supercomputer crunch through possible chess moves. Every single variable had to be considered, in every single line.” To work in musical form, even the silliest humor demands his total dedication.

Yankovic has long showed a willingness straightforwardly to discuss what it’s like to be Weird Al, as well as what it takes to be Weird Al. For a considerably less straightforward version, we can watch The Roku Channel’s new Weird: The Al Yankovic Story. Most biopics take artistic liberties with the lives of their subjects, but Weird goes all the way, parodying the very form of the biopic itself while performing colossal (and surely fan-delighting) exaggerations of the facts of Yankovic’s life. In the GQ video, for example, he mentions getting the idea for “Like a Surgeon” by hearing Madonna throw it out in an interview; in the trailer above, Madonna turns at the door at his opulent mansion, a veritable succubus ready to drag him into the musical underworld. And it seems a safe bet that things only get Weirder thereafter.

[raison de arizona]

Welcome to Arizona, here's your coyote.

[AndyinPA]

We have them around here, too, but they are not quite so in your face.

[raison de arizona]

We have them around here, too, but they are not quite so in your face.

Our cameras catch them trotting down the middle of the street in the early AM hours sometimes.

[Foggy]

I hear them just before dawn here. They're nationwide.

[RTH10260]

the privately built "wall" contraption

They Built the Wall. Now Some in Texas Fear It May Fall Down.

J. David Goodman
Thu, January 5, 2023 at 8:19 PM GMT+1

MISSION, Texas — Along a bend in the Rio Grande, shorn of all brush except for an occasional palm, looms an 18-foot fence of galvanized steel a few feet from the muddy water’s edge.

The fence, constructed three years ago with private funds, was once at the center of a bitter national debate over border security, its builder touted by President Donald Trump and promoted in a fraudulent scheme by Steve Bannon known as “We Build the Wall” that resulted in criminal indictments and convictions.

Now the 3-mile-long barrier is essentially orphaned, functionally useless — because of a federally constructed border barrier a short distance behind it — and, according to an engineering report commissioned by the Justice Department, at risk of falling over in a major flood and floating away.

And because of its location and construction along the water’s edge, federal officials worry that the fence could end up redirecting the Rio Grande in such a way that the land it sits on would end up as part of Mexico.

The fence has been opposed in litigation brought by the nearby National Butterfly Center, which attracted threats of such vitriol last year that it briefly closed, and by the Justice Department, which accused the private builder of the fence, Fisher Sand & Gravel Co., of violating an international treaty.

The Justice Department reached a settlement with Fisher last year that allowed the fence to remain in place and required a subsidiary of the company to maintain it. The butterfly center, which sits just upriver, is continuing its effort to force the demolition of the fence. A trial could take place this year.

“The whole thing was stupid,” Ryan Patrick, the former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Texas, said of the fence, whose construction on the edge of the river, he argued, was a violation of a treaty with Mexico. “The erosion began almost immediately,” Patrick said. “I would not be happy if I lived in the vicinity of this thing.”




https://www.yahoo.com/news/built-wall-n ... 34032.html

(original: NYT)

[Foggy]

fogbow_laboratory_1.jpg

[Tiredretiredlawyer]

From Hubby:

[MsDaisy]

Some people can be serious assholes! We live off a 2 lane wooded country road and I took Wally (the dog) for a ride in the truck up to the mailbox and found that someone took a big runny shit and wiped their ass with tissues and left it all right in the middle of our driveway. It's not like they couldn't have walked 4 feet into the woods that run right along side the driveway, no they squatted right smack in the middle of the road.

I hope they get hemorrhoids

[sugar magnolia]

Some people can be serious assholes! We live off a 2 lane wooded country road and I took Wally (the dog) for a ride in the truck up to the mailbox and found that someone took a big runny shit and wiped their ass with tissues and left it all right in the middle of our driveway. It's not like they couldn't have walked 4 feet into the woods that run right along side the driveway, no they squatted right smack in the middle of the road.

I hope they get hemorrhoids

And chiggers on their ass.

[MsDaisy]

Some people can be serious assholes! We live off a 2 lane wooded country road and I took Wally (the dog) for a ride in the truck up to the mailbox and found that someone took a big runny shit and wiped their ass with tissues and left it all right in the middle of our driveway. It's not like they couldn't have walked 4 feet into the woods that run right along side the driveway, no they squatted right smack in the middle of the road.

I hope they get hemorrhoids

And chiggers on their ass.

[Kriselda Gray]

I've decided to try my hand at blogging again, and my new site is up and open. It's called "Earthbound Valkyrie" and you can find it at https://earthboundvalkyrie.com (I also added the addy to my signature if you want to find it later )

I'm trying out a new commenting system, so if you'd like to help me test it out, please comment on any of the posts and let me know of any problems you run into. You might see a red banner at the top of the page saying OAuth is missing, but you can ignore that. I'm not sure how to fix it yet, but whatever is going on, it doesn't seem to actually cause any problem with signing in to the comment system (you can log in with Google, Discus or WP) or leaving a message.

I'm going to crosspost this to my personal thread and ask that you post comments on it there so that it doesn't take up space in this thread. This link will take you to the last page of that thread. viewtopic.php?t=1532&hilit=Kriselda%27s+stuff&start=100

Thanks!!

[RTH10260]

Montana lawmaker wants to revisit idea of reservations

ASSOCIATED PRESS AMY BETH HANSON
Sat, January 7, 2023 at 2:25 AM GMT+1

HELENA, Mont. (AP) — A white state lawmaker in Montana is questioning whether land set aside long ago for Native Americans should exist anymore.

Republican Sen. Keith Regier is proposing asking Congress to study alternatives to reservations. The measure, submitted this week and riddled with racial stereotypes, is unlikely to pass and would have no practical effect if it did. But it's causing tensions to surface at the Republican-controlled Montana Legislature that kicked off this week.

Native American lawmakers say they're now spending time responding to the proposed resolution rather than focusing on their own legislative priorities, including extending the state’s Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons Task Force for another two years, creating a grant program to train community-based groups to search for missing people and encouraging the state to determine the economic impact of reservations on the state’s economy.

“I hate spending energy and time on this kind of stuff because I feel like it sidetracks us,” state Sen. Shane Morigeau, a member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, said Thursday. “But at the same time, it clearly signals to me that we have a lot of educational work to do in this state.”

WHO PROPOSED THE RESOLUTION?

Regier said the language in the resolution was written by Mark Agather, a retired businessman who is involved in conservative politics in Kalispell near the Flathead Indian Reservation in western Montana.

Reiger has submitted the draft to legislative staffers, but he did not respond to an email Friday asking if he would formally introduce it.

Agather didn't respond to inquiries from The Associated Press, including on whether he sought input from tribal members.

The draft resolution argues that reservations have “failed to positively enhance the lives and well-being” of Native Americans, led to substance abuse, domestic violence, welfare dependence, poverty and substandard education. It also argues tribal members who don't own land have the highest poverty rate and lowest life expectancy of any ethnic group in America.

It also argues reservations are “not in the best interests of either the Indians inside our borders or for our common Montana Citizens.”

Morigeau said that if legislators want to consider any alternative, it should be “giving the land back that was taken in the first place, not robbing the last bit of land and resources that we have.”



https://news.yahoo.com/montana-lawmaker ... 32538.html

[Lani]

It also argues reservations are “not in the best interests of either the Indians inside our borders or for our common Montana Citizens.”

Morigeau said that if legislators want to consider any alternative, it should be “giving the land back that was taken in the first place, not robbing the last bit of land and resources that we have."

https://news.yahoo.com/montana-lawmaker ... 32538.html

[/quote]
Ya think?

I have been on Navajo land several times in my life. I've driven people to grocery stores bc food on a reservation is horribly priced. I took people to medical care. I took them wherever they needed to go. The treatment of the original Americans is horrific.

[AndyinPA]

I guess he means the whole state should be given back to the original "owners," as they were there first?

Racist moron.