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Florida Prosecutors Drop Charges Against PINAC Reporter Jeff Gray – Again

For the fifth time since 2010, Florida prosecutors were forced to dismiss criminal charges against PINAC reporter Jeff Gray before even going to trial, proving once again what we have known all along.

That his arrests are always unlawful and unconstitutional; nothing but an attempt to keep him from doing his job.

The latest case was dismissed Monday; the trespassing charge from last month where he was standing on the sidewalk in front of St. Augustine High School holding up a sign that read “The First Amendment is Not a Crime” on one side and “Public Records Access is Not a Crime” on the other side.

St. Johns County Schools Superintendent Joseph Joyner had barred Gray from stepping within 500 feet of any school to keep him from investigating safety oversights regarding school buses.

The trespass order stated he was only allowed to drop off or pick up his children, attend public meetings or submit public records requests to the district’s main office. Other than that, he needed to stay outside the “School Safety Zones,” which is defined as 500 feet within any school. Even if his three children attend the school as they do.

However, Joyner and his lawyers failed to do their research because Florida law does not bar citizens from peacefully assembling and protesting within these so-called school safety zones, which is exactly what he had been doing on March 14 when he was arrested.

[...] But Joyner has been desperate to jail Gray, even trying to convince a local state attorney to file felony wiretapping charges against him last year as we discovered by making a public records request for his emails. Joyner has also filed a lawsuit against Gray, which is still pending.

Previous entry: Florida Deputy Illegally Arrests Protesting PINAC Reporter.

This is something you don't see often: somebody openly saying "breastfeeding might not be worth it." A choice quote:

Do we really want to embrace breastfeeding with the passion we have, given that it sets us up for wildly unequal parenting obligations and has little health benefit for our children?

Basically in the minds of most people, you don't go around saying stuff like that. Which means it's a topic that is long overdue for some alternative opinions.

As a father of 8 whose wife was not able to breastfeed (prior surgery, plus an extraordinary protein intolerance for one of our babies meant he couldn't have even had donated breast milk) I've watched the militant breastfeeding culture from the side for years. They are not a group you go up against lightly unless you just really feel like a good flamefest. There are certainly plenty of good decent breastfeeding advocates, but there are also a lot of completely shrill judgmental jerks who think they have the right to tell everybody else what to do and judge what "best" means for everybody else, and who are willing to gamble with the lives of other people's children by encouraging everybody to believe that they can and should breastfeed no matter what surgical trauma their mammary glands might have in their past.

The militant breastfeeding advocacy culture makes for some strange partnerships, too. You have radical feminists and ultra conservative fundamentalist Christian women joined hand in hand to advocate for the right of women to breastfeed anywhere they want to no matter how other people feel about it and for the need to reeducate boys to grow up to not believe breasts are sexually arousing.

Chinese Cartoon Warns Against 'Dangerous Love' With Foreigners Who May Be Spies

In a colorful, 16-panel cartoon called "Dangerous Love," China is warning female government workers that romancing handsome foreigner strangers can lead to heartbreak — and espionage.

Posters seen around Beijing show a cartoon government worker named Xiao Li striking up a relationship with a bespectacled, red-haired "visiting scholar." They share a romantic dinner and stroll through a leafy park. "Having a handsome, romantic, talented foreign boyfriend is pretty nice!" Li says to herself, according to The New York Times' translation.

But "pretty nice" turns to nightmarish after Li's new paramour persuades her to lend him internal government documents. Suddenly, the foreign boyfriend is nowhere to be found. Li weeps in front of two gruff police officers, who tell her she has a "shallow understanding of secrecy for a state employee," according to The Guardian.

"Dangerous Love" was posted in Beijing's subway and streets to mark National Security Education Day, which was "established after China passed a National Security Law in July outlining greater security efforts in 11 areas, including political, territorial, military, cultural and technological," the Times reports.

Image.

The BBC has an update on France's new bootlicking trend.

A bunch of links that will not make the cut in today's article. I will tidy up and add some more later. While Vice certainly covers drugs more than other news outlets, most of these just didn't fit with the hard facts focus of this year's article, and I didn't want to overuse any particular news source. There will be plenty more to find on aggregators like Google News today.

http://www.vice.com/read/how-decriminalizing-drugs-could-reduce-islamic-terrorism-in-france-and-belgium
http://www.vice.com/read/war-on-drugs-tool-of-minority-oppression
http://www.vice.com/read/luxury-weed-uk
http://www.vice.com/read/veterans-affairs-hospitals-still-wont-give-veterans-weed-medical-marijuana
http://www.vice.com/read/a-prosecutors-regret-how-i-got-someone-life-in-prison-for-drugs
http://www.vice.com/read/why-do-the-irish-take-more-drugs-than-any-other-country-in-eu
http://www.vice.com/read/how-parents-talk-to-their-kids-about-drugs-in-2016
http://www.vice.com/read/this-drug-smuggler-and-hippie-mafia-leader-was-an-og-in-the-weed-legalization-movement
http://www.vice.com/read/the-worst-time-i-ever-did-drugs
http://www.vice.com/read/a-professional-stoner-explains-how-to-smoke-pot-properly-in-2016
http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-36055297
http://www.vice.com/read/what-the-un-still-gets-wrong-about-drugs
http://www.vice.com/read/yes-you-can-be-allergic-to-pot
http://www.vice.com/read/drugs-have-been-used-in-pretty-much-every-war-ever-shooting-up
http://www.vice.com/read/the-war-on-drugs-isnt-even-working-in-prison
http://www.vice.com/read/a-cannabis-cook-explains-how-youre-making-edibles-wrong

I love the way stuff like this online just sort of gravitates to me. In this case it was a mere two clicks off of a current Drudge Report headline.

The day they levitated the pentagon.

the authorities finally agreed to allow the Pentagon to be elevated three feet in the air, down from the 300 feet that organizers had initially requested — but three feet is not nothing when you’re talking about the largest office building in the world!

[B]y chanting ancient Aramaic exorcism rites while standing in a circle around the building, they could get it to rise into the air, turn orange and vibrate until all evil emissions had fled. The war would end forthwith.

The cool thing is this is the time of year my family usually breaks out the Peter, Paul, and Mary music, and Peter Paul and Mary were there, although it doesn't say if they participated in the levitation attempt.

Bonus link to a great PPM song I hope my kids learn.

So I just wrote a super-long comment and tricked myself into wanting to share this tidbit as well (but it had no business being over there).

Monospaced because you'll know. Meant to be less than 80 characters wide so if it breaks oddly on your screen you might want to try scaling down the page (whatever browser you use probably does its own thing but [Ctrl]+[-] usually does the trick for me, [Ctrl]+[+] to go back up and [Ctrl]+[0] to get back to default size).

It's already dark.
You're eaten by a Grue.
But this is not the end.

You wake up in darkness.
You are a Grue.
You have always been.

To your left you see the path to the hole.
In front of you is a smoothened black wall with darker flecks of beautiful
  chondrite.
To your right is the path towards the Greylands and further beyond the cursed
  Hurt.
Behind you is your den.

Health: 15(15) Agility: 13(15) drowsy Hunger: 8(15) Lethality: 46(55)
/* hunger 15 gives slavering status */
(L)eft (F)ront (R)ight (B)ack (G)urgle (I)nventory | command:i

Inventory:
a: Extremely sharp fangs, +15 consume, Cursed (in mouth)
/* cursed can not be removed unless blessed... good luck with that :) */
b: Razor claws, +10 slice, Cursed (on hands)
c: A thick blindfold, +11 darkness, Unknown

(U)se (R)emove (D)rop (P)ut (M)ore (S)top looking at inventory | command:_

Maybe it's a bit misleading to call it fiction, or what I'm actually trying to say: feel free to turn it into what it portrays itself to be (and that isn't fiction, or not fiction in the usual sense of prose).

I glanced at yet another smartphone article. The specs table lists support for up to 200 GB of expandable storage for the Samsung Galaxy S7, and 2 TB for the HTC 10 and LG G5. 2 TB SD cards don't exist yet.

2 TB (actually 2 TiB) has been the theoretical maximum capacity for the SD standard for some years now. Although there was an update to the standard recently, it only specified larger block sizes and faster speeds, not capacities greater than 2 TiB. Newer SD cards could hit the limit soon... think 3D QLC (4 bits per cell) NAND, or just the 3D TLC which will become ubiquitous in SSDs soon. Currently, the largest SD card is 512 GB, and the largest MicroSD card is 200 GB. A Falcon 9 Heavy full of 512 GB SD cards would make for some fast data transmission.

All three of the smartphones I mentioned come with a 2560x1440 screen and 4 GB of RAM. Samsung could be the first manufacturer to bump that to 6 GB as soon as next year. With unnecessary specs like these, it's inevitable that they will market smartphones as VR inserts or desktop replacements.

There’s a loud corner of Reddit where millennials look to get rich or die tryin’

“Y-O-F**KING-LO,” the teen wrote, flashing his trading statement. “900 to 55K in 12 days!”

On Reddit, he’s known as “World Chaos,” a Florida high schooler who earlier this year multiplied his money by betting against the S&P 500. His real name is Jeffrey Rozanski, and the 18-year-old’s appetite for risk would make many seasoned market players facepalm.

In one corner of the Internet, though, praise rained down. “You magnificent bastard,” read one reply. “Sailing away on your yacht while the rest of us f**kers who went long are looking for the nearest window.”

That was peak “WallStreetBets,” the Reddit forum where “YOLO” is the war cry, Martin Shkreli is a role model, and irreverent traders trawl for tickets to quick wealth. It has become what one member calls “the beating heart of millennial day traders.”

“It’s tasteless, hilarious and subversive,” said Erik Johnson, a 28-year-old manufacturing worker and forum regular from Boston. “And you definitely need to have a thick skin to partake.”

So in the near future we'll be taking the kids to Scarborough Renaissance Festival in the metroplex. The thought always gets the song "Scarborough Faire" running through my head. So I'm sitting here coding and suddenly my mind sang: "Are you parsing a sage data file?" Maybe I'll sing that to the kids for fun when they get a bit older and are working on programming assignments. :)