05.10.11
Posted in Crazy Weapons, Phlogiston at 12:41 pm by George Smith
Occasional humor is found upon reading spam blogs which accumulate material through content scraping.
The scraped material is then laundered through an algorithm — or person.
It’s rewritten, so to speak, very badly, to unintentional comic effect.
I dug this out of the spam filter today, an example from a blackhat content scraper who’d taken material from this old DD post.
Rewritten by the content scraper, part of it now reads:
All about the cult of the electromagnetic pulse Crazy is heinous. Accordingly, one of its new leaders is Trent Franks, Republican MP relatively unimportant famous only for his extremist beliefs.
Of course, this could be a power outage. What happens when the weather is bad, which is not this day. The electricity company can work on the lines, but they are not. And even it they were, which could not account of failure of your cell phone or does your car – and the other on the road – all died at a time.
All the electric modern conveniences that we take for granted on a daily basis in the 21st century to go kaput – without an obvious explanation. And, therefore, modern life as we know, it’s a virtual moratorium.
The President is not an American, global warming and evolution are hoaxes, African-American had better under slavery, Sharia is poisoning the precious bodily fluids of the American judicial system and extended ammunition magazines are an American law.
This type of General world view of the people pushing for protection against pulse electromagnetic doom influences the way in which it considers their arguments. Even with the mildest interpretation, they were suspicious and hairless characters.
Bravo, machine!
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05.07.11
Posted in Crazy Weapons, War On Terror at 7:38 am by George Smith
As one might have expected, the US media lost its mind over the Osama bin Laden hit. It quickly dipped into fantasies clinging to thin reeds of evidence.
There’s been the special forces dog in his “doggles.”
There’s been the magic face recognition software, probably made by the same crap company that screwed up my CA driver license.
“Tech nailed Osama’s ID,” brag the witless.
Ignore all the stuff where the people left alive in the place, Osama’s wife or kids or helpers, said something like:”Yeah, that’s him. You got him. Now please don’t shoot me.”
Or any of the commandos: “Yes, that sure looks like him and it’s what all these papers and letters say.”
However, for bragging, invention and exaggeration nothing has topped the stealth helicopter stories, started by a fragment image passing for a photograph and Aviation Week magazine.
So maybe there was a non-stock helicopter in operation.
Here’s what the NY Times had to say on the 5th, one pretty standard example:
The assault team that killed Osama bin Laden sneaked up on his compound in radar-evading helicopters that had never been discussed publicly by the United States government, aviation analysts said Thursday.
The commandos blew up one of the helicopters after it was damaged in a hard landing, but news photographs of the surviving tail section reveal modifications to muffle noise and reduce the chances of detection by radar.
The stealth features, similar to those used on advanced fighter jets and bombers, help explain how two of the helicopters sped undetected through Pakistani air defenses before reaching the Bin Laden compound in Abbottabad.
[The non-standard tail rotor] could have allowed operators to slow the rotor speed and reduce the familiar chop-chop sound that most helicopters make.
Now, let’s review the first news of the raid, from the Pakistani Twitter user in Abbottabad:
1. “Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event).”
2. “Go away helicopter – before I take out my giant swatter :-/”
3. “A huge window shaking bang here in Abbottabad Cantt. I hope its not the start of something nasty :-S”
4. “Since taliban (probably) don’t have helicpoters, and since they’re saying it was not “ours???, so must be a complicated situation #abbottabad”
Didn’t read muffled or particularly stealthy.
Instead of stealth, one could easily argue for a certain lack of capability in the Pakistani military. Predator drones violate Pakistani airspace daily. Do they track all of them? Can they? And if radar sees drone or helicopters with similar radar signatures and/or flying the same speed, how — in Pakistan — do they distinguish between the two?
Anyway, the genes for myth-making are strong in the US.
They’re inextricably bound up with the American talent for fabrication and reflexive bragging, further embroidered by the reality that the US government is in the habit of not giving accurate accounts of anything in the last decade.
You can’t clear that up overnight.
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04.22.11
Posted in Crazy Weapons, Permanent Fail at 3:27 pm by George Smith
In the empire the only businesses in growth are the peddlers of dog shit.
Arms manufacturing, General Atomics, Northrop Grumman’s pirate-shooting laser arm, etc.
On the day the Pakistanis give a purely for show ceremonial boot to US drones flying out of Shamsi in order to appease the angry locals, the American drone business gets a boost everywhere else.
Most famously, to Libya, drones now being the symbol of what American corporate military minds come up with when they’re engrossed in another war they hope to never end. Because people in the Middle East do so love the things.
Now, remember the crappy company near DD — Aerovirnonment — and its hummingbird drone? The one I likened to a flying toilet paper core painted green?
They’re one of the many small poxy faces of alleged American progress, or as I wrote:
One salient feature of the US press is the continued fascination with robots that aren’t quite as wonderful as described. The stories and people in them try to convey the impression that innovation and revolution in American technology are everywhere.
The world is always radically changed by the allegedly eye-popping robots and drones produced for the military.
For everyone else, though, it still pretty much sucks.
The economy may be stagnant, the AfPak war conducted forever with the enemy unimpressed and unmoved by US technological might, record numbers of people on food stamps. It’s a sci-fi dystopia from the world of paperback novels. But there are always some sucking off taxpayer dough …
From Reuters we learn that just as the Pakistanis profess undying hatred of US drones, we’ve sold them a bunch of toys, courtesy of AeroVironment. The better to spy on their own people, presumably, who do so love (shown by their many placard-carrying assemblages) made-in-America flying things over their heads.
It reads:
The United States will provide Pakistan with 85 small “Raven” drone aircraft, a U.S. military official told Reuters, a key step to addressing Islamabad’s calls for access to U.S. drone technology.
The official, speaking on Thursday on condition of anonymity, declined to disclose the cost of the non-lethal, short-range surveillance aircraft, which are manufactured by the U.S.-based AeroVironment Inc (AVAV.O) …
The Raven, according to the company website, has a wingspan of just 1.4 metres (4.5 feet) and a weight of 1.9 kilos (4.2 pounds). It can deliver real-time colour or infrared imagery, giving troops on the ground an edge on the battlefield. (Yes, it always sounds good. Repeat as necessary.)
A senior U.S. defence official, also speaking on condition of anonymity, said the Raven drone order is separate from U.S. plans to offer Pakistan much larger, longer-range surveillance drones, a proposition put forward by U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates during a visit to Pakistan in January 2010.
That offer delighted Islamabad at the time but Pakistani officials say those talks have been held up over complaints about the cost proposed by Washington and a slow timeline for delivery.
The U.S. defence official suggested those talks were nearing conclusion.
“We’re in final discussions about which one they really want. They think they want the Shadow,” the senior U.S. defence official said.
Gates had originally offered Pakistan 12 Shadow drones, manufactured by AAI Corporation, a unit of Textron Systems (TXT.N).
AeroVironment stock finished only slightly up today. Wait until next week, maybe, although it’s still perceived to be generally worthless.
Textron stock has been flat, about the same virtually worthless place as AeroVironment.
From which we might deduce the Pakistani deal is the equivalent of giving them a load of flying metal gadget crap no one really cares about.
What, oh what, will the white flesh androids masquerading as people in America’s weapons shops come up with next to offset our very negative balance of trade in manufacturing!?
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04.15.11
Posted in Crazy Weapons at 12:59 pm by George Smith
The US taxpayer has given 98 million to a Northrop Grumman corporate job program — the Maritime Laser Demonstrator — this week’s top dogshit news story at DD blog.
Let’s see what we bought for our money.
First — a viral hit on YouTube — 600,000 or more views, it’s said. (Now it’s over 1 million.)
Even at one million, I’d have thought almost 100 million smacks would buy you more, all things considered.
Anyway, what if you took seriously pitchmen claims that the US navy could put it into action against pirates!?
Here’s an assessment of pirate attacks off Somalia from recent news:
Piracy hit an all-time high worldwide in the first three months of 2011 led by a surge in incidents off the coast of Somalia, a maritime watchdog said Thursday.
The International Maritime Bureau said a record high of 142 attacks in the first quarter came as Somalian pirates become more violent and aggressive.
The International Maritime Bureau’s piracy reporting center said 97 of the attacks occurred off the coast of Somalia, up sharply from 35 in the same period last year.
OK, 97 attacks. Multiply by four for the entire year, round up, and you get 400.
How many pirate attacks was the US Navy in a position to head off last year? Let’s be generous and say half a dozen.
Or double it and say an even dozen.
Let’s assume it will be the same next year.
What’s the percentage that one US navy ship, armed with the Maritime Laser Demonstrator, will be in any force or traveling alone when it comes in contact with Somali pirates?
One in hundred? One in fifty? One in ten?
You see where DD is going.
Get a chance to burn a pirate for 98 million, or two for about 50 M each.
I’d say it’s like getting a hammer made of gold to go after a few bugs you might stumble into but even that seems to come up short.
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04.14.11
Posted in Crazy Weapons, Permanent Fail at 11:54 am by George Smith
One mid-day speech doesn’t make for a fix.
From the Boston Globe, hat tip to Pine View Farm:
Meanwhile, the US Census last year said the rich-poor income gap reached record levels, nearly doubling gaps of the late 1960s. The United States is the richest nation on earth, yet we rank 97th in family-income equality, according to the CIA Factbook. Our inequality is so profound that we rank behind nations we associate with corruption, poverty, oppression, or collapsed governments — Nigeria, China, India, Ivory Coast, Tunisia, Egypt, Burundi, Nicaragua, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, and Greece. The most economically equal country in the world is Sweden.
Even the CIA says the United States is now a nation where “those at the bottom lack the education and the professional/technical skills of those at the top and, more and more, fail to get comparable pay raises, health insurance coverage, and other benefits. Since 1975, practically all the gains in household income have gone to the top 20 percent of households.’’
For all of those “gains,’’ we are sliding backward with each announcement of CEO pay. The gain for a few has become the great American loss.
It was just about exactly one year ago that your host went to work for the US Census. Pasadena is thought of as a well-to-do place. The census disabused everyone working it of that. Its working poor live right next to the wealthy and their upper middle class shoe-shiners in often terrible conditions. And those working the census were either those unemployed from the great recession or struggling to keep their heads above water by working two or three underpaying jobs at a time.
Meanwhile, today from the alleged “weapons of doom” beat aka corporate welfare/jobs programs for arms manufacturing, the underwhelming Maritime Laser Demonstrator!
We’ll use it on pirates!
[An alleged expert named] Gibbon-Brooks said the new laser “absolutely” could be deployed against pirates, but says a sniper rifle could work just as well. He suspects the Navy has bigger hopes for its sea-based laser. The Navy released a video of the test on YouTube. It’s been viewed more than 600,000 times.
“It’s a very, very interesting moment for naval warfare in that we have a whole new genre of weapons,” he said.
“It’s certainly a remarkable step forward. The ability to apply more power in a burst or the ability to manipulate that power is really where I see this going,” he said. “I think if you watch the video and think that’s what they intend to do to Somali pirates in a year, you don’t understand what’s being set out in front of them. It could be used in any type of naval warfare.”
The laser test was carried out by the Navy and Northrop Grumman as part of a $98 million contract.
Six hundred thousand views on YouTube! It’s a viral hit! Whoopie!
Ninety-eight million bucks of swag for Northrop Grumman for, maybe, use against a handful of pirates.
Now, if they’d pitched the laser for use closer to home — like Goldman Sachs, 85 Broad Str (use the satellite photo and magnify) — I might change my tune.
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04.12.11
Posted in Crazy Weapons at 10:18 am by George Smith
Wall Street Journal:
Pakistan has privately demanded the Central Intelligence Agency suspend drone strikes against militants on its territory, one of the U.S.’s most effective weapons against al Qaeda and Taliban leaders, officials said.
Ahh, grasshopper, they will find that unless they’re willing to send up their air force to shoot ’em down, de Uncle Sam drones will decline to move along.
The political disadvantage of having an inept military that can’t and won’t fight, to be demonstrated.
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04.11.11
Posted in Crazy Weapons at 5:42 pm by George Smith
DoD weapons programs are some of the best demonstrations of crap lots of money can buy. At a time when everyone gets told that they’ll have to tighten their belts, the only people who don’t are the wealthy and arms manufacturers.
So I point to Wired on-line’s story about the Maritime Laser Demonstrator by Spencer Ackerman, who — it is advertised — writes stories on weapons of doom, aka the plutocracy’s tech dog excrement/corporate welfare jobs programs.
Fatuous quote of the day, from the piece, which as an unimpressive video of a 15-kilowatt laser taking a long minute to set the engine of a motorized harbor scooter on fire:
“This is an important data point,??? the admiral says, “but I still want the Megawatt death ray.???
Only 985 kilowatts and a quarter the size of the Rock of Gibraltar to go.
Immediately followed by the teasingly entitled piece, Libya 2030: Lasers vs. Tyrants, presumably a fun read based on the idea that the way things are going here it’s another place where we’ll be stretching out a war 19 years from now.
You’d be hard-pressed to make a comic book better than this stuff.
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04.07.11
Posted in Crazy Weapons, Made in China, Permanent Fail at 4:40 pm by George Smith
The answer has always been obvious to me. But through inaction we are living the wrong one.
This post comes out of simple inspiration from a trip to Guitar Center yesterday.
The US invented rock and roll. It had Leo Fender, the inventor of the first widely used electric guitar, the Telecaster. And the founder of Fender Electric Instrument Manufacturing, subsequently Fender Musical Instruments, the quintessentially American company founded on innovation in affordable products that gave joy to everyone.
And then you have General Dynamics Lands Systems.
The fundamentally American mega-corporate ogre, a company that makes the M1 Abrams tank and other armored fighting vehicles, most definitely not for giving joy to anyone except the mentally ill who get erections over military gear and the CEO of, well, GDLS.
Unlike the guitar, for use in endless war, selling to tyrannical regimes in the Middle East acting as toadies, and for continuing the rigged exercise of big corporate socialism.
Anyway, most of the merchandise, by weight, in the Guitar Center showroom in Pasadena is make in China although it conspicuously stills carries the names of famous American brands.
My friend needed a small 2-speaker PA system and power amplifier for his studio. And so we went into the live sound showroom at GC to look at PA speakers and power amps. After a number of minutes he’d narrowed his choices to Yamaha and Peavey merchandise.
He wanted to know where they were made. So I suggested turning them over and looking at the base plates where the speaker cables plug in.
The Yamaha was offshored from Japan to sweat shop labor in Indonesia. The Peavey — a famous American brand — was offshored to China.
“Which is better,” he asked me. He knows “China Toilet Blooz” by heart now.
I laughed and shrugged. So he picked the Yamaha because it looked better.
Peavey was a company founded in Meridian, Mississippi by Hartley Peavey. Peavey had worked for Fender and when it was bought by CBS and expanded to some detriment of its still very much American-made product line in the early Seventies, he left to form his own company and successfully exploited the perceived drop in quality.
In the years after Peavey established its name as a solid substitute of American-made guitars and amplifiers.
Now this is all gone.
The American manufacturers of rock and roll equipment have all offshored to China.
What remains in the US is essentially custom shop business. The American-made items are ten times or more the expense of the same models made in China. And the former are reserved largely for people with major label music contracts and that part of the upper middle and plutocrat class which dabbles in guitar playing. For them, the expensive American made guitar is a status symbol for a gilded age.
All down the line in the Guitar Center showroom, all the famous American-made guitar lines are now produced in China. Gretsch, like Fender, divided into two tiers. The famous big semi-hollow body guitars popularized in Nashville and Memphis, played by the inventors of rock and roll — the guys in the bands backing Elvis and Gene Vincent — are made in China. If you want to pay ten times or more for one, the premium models are still made here.
The Epiphone Casino, popularized by John Lennon and pictured here — now made offshore.
The middle class jobs and factories that produced those instruments which made the sound that went worldwide are gone. And this country, and the rest of the world, isn’t better for it. It was profit driven decision-making in a race to the bottom. And it destroyed tradition and a proud legacy in something the made the whole world a brighter place. You could be proud of working in a factory that made guitars and amplifiers for everybody in the USA.
And what jobs have we protected at all costs? You know the answer.
Tanks, rockets, missiles, bombs, jet aircraft, mines, tear gas rounds, and fighting ships.
All guaranteed by the US taxpaying middle class and inviolable.
Here, from Armchair Generalist earlier in the week, is another big parcel of mechanized joy from General Dynamics Land Systems:
U.S. ships delivered the 87th of 140 planned Abrams tanks to the Iraqi Army’s 9th Division earlier this month. The delivery is part of a $2.16 billion deal to ship the tanks and necessary logistics support vehicles to Iraq.
Built by General Dynamics Land Systems, the first M1A1s arrived in September. The deliveries are scheduled to be completed by the end of this year, when U.S. forces finish their pullout in December, [LTG Robert] Cone [USF-I] said in February before he returned to Fort Hood, Texas.
——-
The necessary parts have arrived in Iraq, but the country’s rudimentary logistics system cannot deliver the parts to military units yet. Iraq’s Army warehouses in Taji remain stocked, but the parts rarely reach the units. One Iraqi mechanic said he only receives parts for his Humvees twice a year.
“They have to figure this out, or we’re just going to end up with a bunch of 60-ton paperweights sitting out here,” [LTC David] Beachman [senior advisor] said.
Protect the manufacturing jobs for premium tanks for an army of Iraqi stumblebums. Yeah!
But protect the manufacturing jobs for non-military things — an everyman’s musical instrument — that arguably had a much larger and finer impact on the world? Fuhgeddaboudit!
Leo Fender died in 1991. If he were alive today he’d turn white.
The idea that the country of guitars and rock and roll would devolve into the country of computer-networked armored fighting vehicles and smart bombs is as disgusting as it is astonishing. Think about the state of affairs and you don’t know whether to shit or go blind.
With regards to tank sales to Iraq, J. at Armchair delivers a thought puckishly delivered as if pinched from a recent Dale Carnegie correspondence course: “But hey, if this model works for Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait, why stop now? What a great way to win friends and influence enemies.”
One could put it a different way. We influenced people worldwide and much more to the nation’s credit with the electric guitar than the M1 Abrams tank. The former, not the latter, is one of the reasons people liked us.
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03.09.11
Posted in Crazy Weapons, Imminent Catastrophe at 8:51 am by George Smith
The western press always inflates stories of electromagnetic pulse rays and bombs.
It’s in accordance with the rule of law.
A four paragraph newspaper story in a Korean newspaper story earlier in the week triggered the latest round of promises on the unseen weapon that’s always coming but never quite arriving.
South Korea, said one SK military man, had an electromagnetic pulse bomb. And I have a Fender Eric Clapton Signature Stratocaster. (Well, at least one of these items actually exists.)
Here’s the first story.
Keep in mind that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence — except in the case of the Iraq war or statements to the effect that “we’re broke.”
In electromagnetic pulse bomb stories, just the opposite holds true.
Since the early Nineties, any and all claims can be aired in the western press about the existence of non-nuclear EMP bombs. And none of them have to be true.
The collateral result: Tons of computers games, some big budget movies, countless telemovies and loads of tv adventure shows, some airing this season, using electromagnetic pulse bombs as plot devices.
If you’re a script writer and are asked to make all electronic devices fail at once so something bad can be allowed to happen, you take the literary EMP bomb out of the writer’s toolbox.
But none exist in the real world unless you count the ridiculous homemade things on YouTube. Sure, the military has conducted tests of such ‘bombs.’ And they don’t work in any interesting manner.
However, when that happens reality only gets more tortured. Failure was long ago redefined as success.
The Chosun Ilbo newspaper story took a couple days to get noticed. However, now the electromagnetic pulse bomb stories are starting to roll in courtesy of the rest of the western press.
“North Korea Nears Completion of Electromagnetic Pulse Bomb,” reads a story from ABC news today, one with no significant evidence.
“North Korea appears to be protesting the joint U.S. and South Korean military maneuvers by jamming Global Positioning Devices in the south, which is a nuisance for cell phone and computers users — but is a hint of the looming menace for the military,” reads the lede, rather lamely.
Nuisance jamming, in the context of the story, means electromagnetic pulse bombs are on the way.
“The scope of the damage has been minimal, putting some mobile phones and certain military equipment that use GPS signals on the fritz.” it continues.
On the fritz. Hmmm, sounds serious.
Then, voila, we go from nuisance jamming to using an undefined as such atmospheric atomic explosion:
The North is believed to be nearing completion of an electromagnetic pulse bomb that, if exploded 25 miles above ground would cause irreversible damage to electrical and electronic devices such as mobile phones, computers, radio and radar, experts say.
Then the echo from the four paragraph South Korean news story is heard, one confirming the EMP weapon arms race. We have one, too, claims a South Korean military man. Keep in mind South Korean defense high-ups have made a decades-long habit of claiming lots of rubbish in SK newspapers:
Park Chang-kyu of the Agency for Defense Development … confirmed that South Korea has also developed an advanced electronic device that can be deployed in times of war.
S. Korea behind North in electronic warfare’, reads a related Korean news article.
“We can, and will, use EMP bomb, says South Korea,” reads an Australian news article.
“News of EMP attacks has increased of late, on the heels of a documentary called Iranium, which discusses the possibility and fallout of Iran detonating a nuclear device 400km above the USA,” it observes.
At DD blog and Globalsecurity, Iranium was reviewed.
It’s “the movie aimed at getting the bombers and cruise missiles flying toward Iran,” I wrote. A devastating Iranian atomic electromagnetic pulse bomb attack could end US civilization, the movie explained. Unless stopped, nine out of ten Americans dead within a year.
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03.04.11
Posted in Crazy Weapons, Phlogiston at 3:31 pm by George Smith
The Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy has no shortage of comical characters. While they are always well-treated on the pages of America’s newspapers, there’s are — occasionally — wrong venues.
William Forstchen, the Cult’s semi-famous author, made an appearance at the Homefront game’s balloon debacle in San Fran this week. He had the misfortune to be the opener for the Dillinger Escape Plan, a metalcore band with which I have some familiarity.
As an opener, if you’re not up to snuff, Dillinger fans will heckle you.
From a web game pub:
The event kicked off at noon, with the publisher first inviting foreign relations expert Tae Kim to speak on Homefront’s fictional future timeline, which finds the Greater Korean Republic occupying the United States in the year 2027. As the clean cut Kim spoke from behind a podium, a restless crowd shouted “Dillinger!” in his face as he did his best to keep calm.
Kim was followed by Electromagnetic Pulse blast expert and published author, Dr. William Forstchen. As Forstchen tried to explain the real (and quite terrifying) dangers of an EMP attack on the United States, the crowd continued to get rowdy, and shouted “Dillinger!” in his general direction. (One person even noted that he had an “awesome comb over.”)
The crowd was obviously ignorant of the toil Forstchen has put into peddling his book, One Second After, for the last century. And they were doubtless oblivious to the fact that he is Newt Gingrich’s co-author, too.
Shameful.
To set the scene more accurately, of the Dillinger Escape Plan, I once wrote:
It has been claimed that the Dillinger Escape Plan are kingpins of M.I.T.-inspired science rock. The band is the ultimate combination of skills in arithmetic calculation, progressive composition, and fantastically technical heavy metal. If you don’t get it, goes the argument, your brain is not of the cloth of Ph.D. material the band’s listeners are required to be cut from. A fine and entertaining story it is but the horse doesn’t trot well when the brags are dismounted.
On video, of which there is plenty, the Dillinger Escape Plan resemble nothing if not a squad of men doing calisthenics during basic training. The singer flexes and shakes his muscle at the audience like he’s captain of the wrestling team at the Danzig-Rollins Magnet School for Physical Fitness. This means, naturally, that he loses something on record. And it’s obvious on the new Miss Machine that Dillinger don’t even need a singer, really, for whatever it is they’re performing. The last 10 or so minutes of the CD veer between bursts of riff noise more smoothly recorded than expected and washes of music to watch soft porn by, indicating the charm of being proudly abrasive and busy is wearing off.
“Highlights include the shocked faces of those passing by as [Dillinger] wrecked the stage,” reported the game journal.
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