Lifer. Writer. Commentator. #prison #crime #locksports #prisoners The OG prison blogger.
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Joined February 2024
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in 2009, at the suggestion of my now wifey, I began the first blog by a British prisoner.
They tried, and failed, to stop me.
I still add to it, and its worth a read if you have any interest in criminal justice.
prisonerben.blogspot.com
As a lifelong smokers, let me stress that at no point have I wanted smoke blown up my arse.
1774: they blew tobacco smoke up drowning victims' backsides to revive them, and the kits hung along the Thames like lifebuoys.
1863: they sold cocaine wine as a daily tonic, and a pope pinned a gold medal on it.
1898: they sold heroin as a cough medicine, and spooned it into coughing children.
1918: they sold radium water as a health drink, and the millionaire who drank 1,400 bottles was buried in a lead-lined coffin with most of his jaw gone.
1921: they put lead in petrol, and Britain kept it in the pumps until 2000.
1930s: they X-rayed children's feet in shoe shops, and kids queued to watch their toes wiggle on the screen.
1940s: they rubbed mercury teething powder into babies' gums, and about 1 in 500 of those babies was poisoned.
1946: they sold cigarettes on the line that more doctors smoked their brand, and put a man in a white coat on the advert.
1949: they gave the lobotomy a Nobel Prize, and doctors went in through the eye socket with an ice pick.
1952: they sold a cigarette filter made of asbestos as the greatest health protection in smoking history, and smokers drew it into their lungs with every puff.
1957: they sold thalidomide to pregnant women for morning sickness, and around 10,000 babies were born with missing or shortened limbs.
1960s: they sold margarine as the heart-healthy fat, and spread trans fat on a generation's toast.
1996: they sold OxyContin as barely addictive, and started an overdose epidemic.
1999: they sold Vioxx for sore joints, and pulled it five years later after tens of thousands of heart attacks.
2026: they're selling seed oil as the heart-healthy fat, and it's in almost every packet in your kitchen.
Every one of these came with an expert's blessing and the same total certainty.
The people telling you which fat to fear today sit in the same chairs as the ones who put radium in the water and a doctor on the cigarette packet, and they're every bit as sure.
"The experts recommend it" has the longest body count in medicine.
Ben Gunn retweeted
Scientists Have Been Quietly Studying Cats for Decades. The Results Are Unsettling.
Cats have been domesticated for roughly 10,000 years. In that time, they have changed almost nothing about themselves. Dogs were selectively bred into hundreds of shapes and temperaments to serve human needs. Cats, by most accounts, simply moved in, decided the arrangement suited them, and stayed largely the same animal they were in the wild. Biologists have a word for this: cats are functionally self-domesticated.
The engineering underneath that indifference is, by any measure, extraordinary. A cat’s inner ear contains a reflex system so precise that it can detect disorientation and begin correcting its body position in mid-air within 30 milliseconds, faster than the human eye can register movement. It is called the righting reflex, and it is why a cat dropped from height almost always lands on its feet. Biomechanics researchers at various institutions have spent years reverse-engineering it and still can’t fully replicate it mechanically.
Their purring turns out to not be purely emotional. The vibration frequency, between 25 and 150 Hz, sits within the range that stimulates bone density and promotes tissue regeneration. Some veterinary researchers believe this is why cats recover from orthopedic injuries at rates that consistently surprise clinicians. The cat, while appearing to simply sit on a couch, is running internal repair cycles.
The night vision advantage over humans, roughly six times greater sensitivity in low light, comes from a reflective layer behind the retina called the tapetum lucidum. It’s the same layer that makes cats’ eyes glow in the dark. Every feature that seems decorative has a function.
For 10,000 years, humans thought they adopted the cat. Current evidence suggests the cat evaluated the offer and accepted it on its own terms.
This is wild
FINAL: SpaceX Blocked A U.S. And NATO Satellite to Assist a Russian Intercept After Crippling Ukraine's Air Defenses
New 5-page institutional brief & 60s 3D SGP4 orbital reconstruction with Craig Pirrong, Ph.D. @streetwiseprof | Data & Forensics: RAB @LibertyLynx
Pages 1-3 & 3D animation below; Pages 4-5 in Post 2; full 5-page PDF link in Post 3 🧵👇
As Craig Pirrong's counterfactual framework establishes: The Russian intercept is not the smoking gun. The failure to maneuver is.
1. The Sprinting Satellite Paradox & -96.64% Target Freeze (Page 1): Between Oct 13 and 24, 2026, Russian counterspace weapon COSMOS 2612 (68762) converted a 5-month, ~170 m/s co-planar trailing option into a 0.759 km sub-kilometer hold against U.S.-licensed radar satellite ICEYE-X36 (59103), which guides Ukraine's autonomous deep strikes on Russian oil refineries without SpaceX links, at the exact moment SpaceX throttled Ukrainian military Starshield terminals (-23.0% USF air-defense hits).
In June 2026 (with no Starlink alert), ICEYE-X36 defeated a Russian approach by dropping 0.500 km, generating 71.08 km/day secular drift (3.62 km/h in the sprint frame), exiting Russia's 3.0 km braking box in 49.7 to 60.78 minutes, blowing past Russia's 12 km or under onboard KTZ sensor in 3.31 hours, and causing a 103.7 to 118.5 km miss.
In October, as COSMOS 2612 fired a -2.2184 km (370.8x perched shock / 449.1x fit jump) burn to sprint 14.29x faster (400 km/day / 278 m/min), ICEYE-X36's evasion collapsed by 96.64% (to 16.8154 meters or less, P3 = 3.363%).
* Why? The Alert Itself Was the Weapon: SpaceX maintained a 0.401 km (0.711 km Oct 16) public GP collision alert via STARLINK-35856 (67013) despite holding internal v3/v4 forecasts 4.80x to 5.00x wider (1.925 to 2.003 km) and withholding autonomous Starlink clearance (M_Starlink = 0, W_X36 = 1, W_COSMOS = 0), legally freezing X36 under David Goldman's 2023 FCC Condition 16 (DA 23-797).
* Rational Russian exercise across a 363.7 km blind gap required ex-ante certainty of K = (E1, E2, E3). Across all 5 capability levers, SpaceX is the sole actor (N = 1): Posterior = 99.893% to 99.978% (Tier A floor; 1 in 3,748 to 17,841) and up to 99.999% (Tier B K-set).
2. Four-Way Tracker Blindness & What NRO/USSF Saw Live (Page 2):
* Public Catalogs (18th/19th SDS): Blind for 21.824 hours (363.7 km unobserved closure) on sprint (k6 to k7) and 19.385 hours on brake (k9 to k10, -382.71 km SGP4 delta).
* Russian Ground Radars (SKKP Krona/Okno): Bounded by Earth curvature at 541 km to a 22.8 degree (2,530 km) horizon cone, blind for 8 to 10 hours/day (80% to 94.5% of the orbit) with zero Americas/Pacific coverage.
* The Sole Unblinded Commercial Panopticon: Only SpaceX's Stargaze (31,000 star trackers, 40M+ daily tracks, 17M associated, 850 sightings/day, 7 to 15 min global custody / 99.73% 10-min hit rate) and sub-1-minute Space Safety portal (Appendix A & Section 4(b), with Chinese operators onboarded Oct 6 & 16) had real-time visibility across the blind gap, while NRO & USSF watch floors watched live on the classified High Accuracy Catalog (HAC / Space Fence / Vantor WorldView NEI), realizing 348 Starshield satellites in orbit (245 NRO spy satellites) sit on the same SpaceX bus.
3. Contracted Capacity Is Not Combat Availability & The 6-Way C2 Collapse (Page 3):
* Combat Output = Sensor Availability x Link Availability x Platform Availability x Permission Arriving Before Mission Window Closes (T_permission <= T_mission).
* The Two-Pronged Pincer: SpaceX weaponized FCC Condition 16 to freeze the Sensor Layer in orbit and a Commercial ToS ($500 liability cap) to blind the Transport Layer on the ground.
* 70-90 km/h Civilian Baseline vs. 4 Collapsed Alibis: Civilian Starlink in Ukraine was already capped at 70 to 90 km/h since Feb 2026 (S. Beskrestnov). The Oct 13-24 101 to 161 km/h gate hit DoD-contracted military Starshield links (-23.0% USF hits; Oct 19 Nova Vodolaha strike). Musk cycled through 4 contradicting alibis in 12 days (blaming DoD/POTUS Oct 14 -> ToS offensive loophole Oct 24 -> "sympathy for poor Russian conscripts" Oct 25 -> Russian ASAT/debris fear Oct 26), while resolving the exact same "weapon ToS" objection on U.S. LUCAS suicide drones in Iran via a 5x price hike ($5,000 to $25,000/mo)!
* COCO vs. GOGO ($8.8B+ Sign-Off Chain): Under Contractor-Owned, Contractor-Operated (COCO/OTA) deals signed off by Pete Hegseth, Stephen Feinberg, CTO Emil Michael, Lt. Gen. Philip Garrant, Gen. Michael Guetlein, Col. Ryan Frazier, Clare Hopper & NRO's Dr. Chris Scolese, taxpayers fund the satellites while SpaceX's civilian NOC retains 100% of the physical thruster and velocity kill-switches.
(Continued in Post 2: Pages 4 & 5: Statutory Breach Matrix, CTO Emil Michael's $7M-$35M OGE Clock, the $19.5B SpaceX Bailout Loop, Iran Round Two Magazine Depletion & Subpoena Schedule. Full PDF link in Post 3 👇) $SPCX $TSLA
Fat Ladies singing in the bush
"The fast-moving Ebola outbreak in Congo has reached 10,000 confirmed cases..
It is the fastest-growing Ebola outbreak in history and nearly half of the 10,060 confirmed to have the virus have died..
The outbreak declared in May is caused by the rare Bundibugyo virus, for which there is no approved vaccine or treatment..
It has spread farther across Africa than any previous Ebola outbreak, reaching three regions with cases recorded in Kenya and Nigeria as well..
In Congo, the disease has spread to 66 health zones across eight provinces..
most of the first cases were confirmed long after people started showing symptoms or after traveling.."
After traveling..
’Congo’s Ebola outbreak tops 10,000 cases as authorities race to slow the spread in African countries’
nbcnews.com/world/africa/con…
