NYC street sign warns ‘drone activity in progress.’ Wait. What?

The red-and-white street sign posted near the Brooklyn Bridge–the one just below the NO STOPPING ANYTIME–looks legit until you stop and ponder its message: “Drone activity in progress.” Wait. What?

OutFront digital producer Mark Joyella grabbed a photo of the sign and fired it off to the show team. Is this new? The NYPD’s warning people of drones? When did this happen?

It didn’t. The sign–one of a series of seemingly legit street signs posted around the city–is the work of a 28 year old Army veteran turned “radical art student” who told The New Yorker he worked with drones during two tours in Iraq, but was chilled by the idea of drones patrolling the skies here at home.

The sign got Erin Burnett thinking. “The strange thing is how easily we believed that sign about drone activity. Maybe we’re conspiracy theorists. But it seemed to say something the world we live in. We were disturbed, but not, frankly, surprised that our government was watching us. Maybe we were just surprised they would tell us they were watching us.”

Getting us–and you–thinking, of course, is what the provocative art project is all about:

  Near each sign, they also stenciled a quote from a Founding Father, such as a warning from Ben Franklin that seems particularly apropos: “They that can give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

Erin put it this way in her commentary:

  “The sign in Brooklyn made us confront how we’d feel if drones were watching us here at home. If the drones caught a terrorist, or a murderer, would we be okay with the drones then? Ten years after 9/11–and ten years after the Patriot Act–we’re still debating how much of our freedom are we actually willing to give up to maintain American freedom.”

The linked webpage includes a short video that shows a photo of the sign.

From what I read on the description it’s about a Magician who posed as a Chinese male but after his death it was revealed he was really a caucasian. Even then his apparent “real identity” was fraudulent. I’ll wait until after I get a job before I think about buying the book. Has anybody else read it?

From what I can gather even his on stage accidental death seemed suspicious.

Oh and did I mention the bad acting?

WATCH

I’ve been busy doing a lot of stuff and I’ve done my part in troll bashing on other websites. This isn’t the off-topic chitchat page, so I’ll make it brief:

There’s a big filipino myth I wanted to bash and see if it could make the webpage.
http://definitelyfilipino.com/blog/2011/08/06/filipino-inventors-the-harsh-reality/

Filipinos love to believe that our race is the best race (I can’t be racist to myself, can I?) and one of these sources of excess pride is this. Filipino “Inventors.” I won’t say who wrote this, since he wants to remain anonymous, but he’s a good friend of mine and I helped with the research. Filipinos believe in the myth that many of the foreign inventions are made BY filipinos. Example? The m16, colloquially known here as the Armalite, is made by “Armando Lite.” Hence the name.

This is mostly perpetuated by the schools and by many wikis (mostly filipino.) and I think it’s shameful to believe in such delusions. I’ve scoured the web, and some books, but they all lead to the same thing; text messages and urban myths. There are a lot more frauds here in the Pinas, but I can only supply this link right now. It’s a nice hoax that deserves attention since it has a LOT of Filipinos believing in it.

Thing is, people aren’t so nice when they see something they don’t like. If there are any other filipinos browsing this thread, I hope you become open-minded about this; I’ve been heckled and denounced as a fraud whenever I present my evidence, and really, there is no evidence supporting them.

I’m voting hoax. What do other people think?

It does look a bit suss with the way it’s all been conveniently edited and how the iPad screen seems a little too scratch-free after “falling from the edge of space”.

*I’m an Australian so amasing (with an “s” not a “z”) is correct for me.

I found this article on the MSN home page today and it was an interesting read.

Ghost Ship

It’s the stuff of maritime legend: a ship sighted in the distance, hailed without response, and boarded to reveal a vessel under full sail, its wheel creaking aimlessly, cabin doors slamming open and shut in the wind, and ... not a soul onboard. 

On Dec. 4, 1872, it actually happened. The Mary Celeste was discovered between the Azores and Portugal—her crew vanished without a trace of a struggle, the ship still fully provisioned. What calamity befell the ship remains a mystery. A final log entry, on Nov. 24, showed no hint of distress. The cabin of Capt. Benjamin Briggs was untouched, right down to the sewing machine and parlor melodeon belonging to his wife and infant daughter; the child’s ghostly indentation remained visible on a bed. The crew must have “left in a great hurry,” reported the boarding party, for their pipes and tobacco were still there—and no sailor, they noted, willingly abandons ship without his pipe.

Theories on the cause of the disappearance have ranged from cargo fumes to mutiny to (inevitably) alien abduction. The Mary Celeste’s fate inspired fictional solutions in an Arthur Conan Doyle story (which blamed a race war), a 1935 Hammer horror film (a hook-armed Bela Lugosi), and a Dr. Who episode (Daleks, of course.)

What’s not as well-known is that the Mary Celeste was also at the center of a second mystery. The disconcerting disappearance of its crew notwithstanding, the Mary Celeste still had plenty of life left in her, and soon went back into service. Thirteen years and 17 hapless owners later, Mary was mostly infamous for being in poor shape and for losing money on runs from Boston to Africa and the West Indies. It was merely one final indignity when she wrecked off Haiti in January 1885, slamming squarely into Rochelois Reef, a known hazard. The ship didn’t sink, but its hopelessly splintered remains would never leave the reef. Capt. Gilman Parker declared the cursed ship a loss, and then went ashore to sell the salvage rights to a load of ale, cutlery, and shoes for $500. That’s where the story might have ended—except that police showed up at the captain’s door in Boston three months later. The Mary Celeste, they charged, was a 282-ton, fully-rigged insurance scam.

[More at the link…]

https://chronicle.com/blogs/percolator/wait-maybe-you-cant-feel-the-future/27984

We have, of course, heard this argument from psychics before. The rebuttal is simple. If your psychic powers will not function in the presence of skeptics, what you have is a skeptic detector. Being verifiably able to detect skepticism is ALSO a valid display of psychic powers. I think even the JREF would hand over the cash if that could be proven.

If you do..please share your thoughts why