The NSA may be the only government entity that listens to you but the private sector has gone crazy doing the same thing. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Apple have all been outed as doing the same type of surveillance.
Listening
Today, a report has surfaced that Apple has fired their Siri transcription company in Ireland with virtually no notice.
Apple is terminating the contracts of 100 of workers who were hired to listen to Siri recordings according to a report from the Guardian.
Last month, Apple was revealed to be sending audio data over to contractors to improve Siri. The contractors would accidentally hear private or personal information sometimes, and a few users were scandalised that this wasn’t made clear when signing up for Siri originally.
The firm has put an abrupt end to the program, leading to mass job loss.
As per the report, more than 300 employees have been fired in one facility in Cork, Ireland, and some have been sent home with less than one week’s notice.
Microsoft is also listening and plans to continue the practice.
After Apple and Google, it turns out Microsoft is also doing the same thing.
According to a report from Motherboard which cites an anonymous contractor, Microsoft is listening in to your Skype and Cortana audio as well. Much like Google and Apple do, the firm sends a little bit of audio to its small army of human contractors around the globe for analysis, ranging between 5 – 10 seconds.
The bone of contention here appears to be that while Microsoft does tell users that some of their audio will be analysed, it leads them to assume that it would be AI-based as opposed to human contractors.
Microsoft terms of service authorize third party folks to listen.
In a statement released to Motherboard, the firm said:
“We’re always looking to improve transparency and help customers make more informed choices. Our disclosures have been clear that we use customer content from Cortana and Skype Translator to improve these products, we engage third party expertise to assist in this process, and we take steps to de-identify this content to protect people’s privacy.”
The Motherboard report reveals that contractors are mean to transcribe up to 300 pieces of audio per hour and are paid between $12 and $14 for it with a max bonus taking it to $15 per hour. Contractors have noted that personal and private information has slipped into these audio snippets as originally reported.
Yesterday, Amazon received national coverage for allowing law enforcement access to Ring video cameras, without any warrant or suspicion of wrongdoing.
Always home, always watching
Amazon-owned doorbell-camera manufacturer Ring has formed partnerships with hundreds of police departments that allow them to automatically request access to footage after the fact, according to a report in The Washington Post.
Ring has arrangements with more than 400 departments, under which they can request recordings within a specific time and area, according to the Post. Ring gives homeowners the option to decline requests, according to the Post.
Police can use a map interface to select the time and geographic range, which will generate an automated email to all users within the range with a message from the department, according to the newspaper.
Ring, as a private-sector enterprise, has found “a clever workaround for the development of a wholly new surveillance network, without the kind of scrutiny that would happen if it was coming from the police or government,” he added.
Ring also sells consumers both external and internal cameras so what keeps law enforcement or other interested parties from viewing the inside of your house in real time? Also, please note the weasel words in the article above; homeowners are given “the option to decline the requests.” This sounds like a one-time, blanket terms of service option given when the system is first being configured. If so, is a third-party installer giving Ring (Amazon) that permission as part of the equipment setup or the actual resident of the dwelling? This point might be potential legal fodder in the not too distant future.
Bottom Line
If you are on the Internet using any program, device, or service, then rest assured that you are under surveillance by someone; the only question is whether the other party is a program or person. Most folks just want to legally separate you from your money but others harbor more nefarious intentions. If you own a smartphone then Apple, Google, and Microsoft know where you live, work, and shop. If you own a car, then the automakers and others in their industry know where you’ve been in your car.
Amish–the only folks living “off the grid”
If you truly want privacy, build a Faraday Cage in your home or become Amish. Trust me, your digital footprint is way bigger than your carbon one and much more likely to be dangerous to your liberty.
Thanks to Facebook, I frequently get to see posts from “the other side” no not the physically dead, just the spiritually dead. One person that I frequently see posts from is a retired Liberal relative of my wife. Since she’s family, I normally show restraint and don’t respond—except on two occasions. Over the weekend I saw a post that I thought deserves rebuttal. Instead of doing it on Facebook and giving her the satisfaction that she hit a nerve, I thought I would respond here instead.
As it turns out, the article is three years old anyway. That’s another gripe I have with Facebook, you don’t know if the post is fresh or years old. It just shows up in your feed. This gem is from GQ Magazine. Before getting into the details, I have two thoughts. First, why is this in a magazine that is supposedly, Gentlemen’s Quarterly (GQ)? Second, it’s written by a woman saying disparaging things about a successful businessman. Am I the only one finding this ironic and counter to the stated purpose of the publication?
The article invokes as proof, a fellow named Rick Alan Ross. Ross is identified in the article as “America’s leading cult expert.” Sorry Mr. Ross, but I’ve never heard of you so I’m having doubts about your credentials. As a diligent guy, I did what any enterprising fellow would do, I looked you up on Wikipedia.
Ross’ first dust-up with a cult (as he defines it) was with a group of Messianic Jews. Being that Bob Dylan is also a Messianic Jew, I’m not seeing the offense that he took to these folks. I guess Jews trying to convince other Jews that Jesus is their Messiah is offensive to a Jew that rejects Jesus. Ross identifies as Jewish but in my experience such identification is often more cultural than religious. Oh, Ross is described as having “a personal hatred for all religious cults.” He also was a prominent figure in the government’s treatment and subsequent assault on the Branch Davidian complex in Waco, Texas.
Using Ross as their source, GQ identifies three marks of the Cult of Trump.
Sign I: His campaign is fueled by charisma.
For his followers, the appeal of Trump is Trump himself: his take-no-bullshit attitude, his (greatly embellished) only-in-America success story, his apparent business savvy. His policies, which are largely vague or nonexistent, aren’t the main draw (his 180 on immigration, one of the defining issues of his campaign, doesn’t appear to bother his supporters). And that’s where he perfectly fits the cult archetype.
“The single most salient feature of a cult is a person who has become, essentially, an object of worship,” Ross says. They’re the “defining element of the group,” the heart of the movement.
This is the first of several prima facia arguments put forth to bolster this narrative. Every successful person in politics has some measure of charisma. I guess compared to Hillary Clinton, Trump would win in that category.
But Trump an object of worship? Really? Heck no. Do I want him to be successful? Yes, but worship?
Ross and the GQ author don’t define a cult in terms of theology but power and control. I see nothing on his website condemning Communism or Socialism, if control is an identifying mark of a cult or false religion then both these political systems should qualify in spades.
Why is it that Liberals think we are all a bunch of mind-numbed robots that hang on someone’s every syllable? Did it ever occur to Ross that Trump says the things that we already feel and believe? This article was written after Trump was made the nominee at the Republican convention but before the General election. Our hope at the time, which has generally been true since he took office, is that Trump would be disruptive to the good old boy system in Washington and that he would undo the attacks on Christianity and traditional American values perpetrated by Barack Obama.
Trump is trying to do things differently. Do I always agree with him? No, generally I support him and want him to be successful. Frankly, I’m more interested in what he actually does and not so much what he says. However, I do enjoy that he confronts Democrats on Twitter and irritates the snot out of them.Prior to Trump, Democrats did whatever they wanted, and Republicans would cower in the corner in fear of what the media would say if they responded. Trump has shown what we always knew about Democrats, they have no morals, principles, or backbone. Their ideology is without foundation and is only one slogan thick. They can’t stand it when someone pushes back at them. Which brings us to the second point.
Sign II: He’s a raging narcissist.
“Cult leaders are most often narcissists,” Ross explains. “They see themselves as the center of the known universe, and everyone revolves around them.” Trump, he says, fits the warning signs of narcissistic personality disorder—an exaggerated sense of self-importance, preoccupation with success, power and brilliance, behaving in an arrogant or haughty manner—to a T (for Trump, probably). Lest we forget, Trump says he went to the “best school in the world,” has “the world’s greatest memory,” and will be “the greatest jobs president God has ever created.”
Trump has a big ego, but so does everybody in politics. Humble people don’t run for office. It is true that Trump doesn’t care what his opponents think. It is on this point that comparisons to Donald Trump diverge from Arnold Schwarzenegger. Arnold caved completely but Trump has stood tall in the face of assault after assault.
If you want a raging narcissist, look no further that Barack Obama. The man can’t give a speech without using, “I”, “me”, “my” at least a hundred times in 20 minutes; even if its at someone’s funeral. Everything he said and did was about himself.
If this accusation was true of Trump, trust me, the media would be all over it. Trump has a big ego, but he doesn’t talk in terms of himself but what he thinks is best for America. That is a huge difference.
Sign III: What he says is always right. Even when it’s not.
“You just can’t put that material in front of a true believer and it has any effect,” Ortega says. “And I think people are seeing the same thing with Trump. Trump creates this sort of field, this bubble, that the people inside of it are just incapable of seeing these things as those on the outside.”
That reality distortion field is in full force with Trump’s supporters. Despite his bankruptcies and spectacular business failings (Trump Vodka, anyone? No?), the notion that he’s a successful businessman who would bring the same acuity to running the country is one of the pillars of his campaign. And though nearly 80 percent of the things he says are outright lies, he manages to pin the blame on the “dishonest” and “biased” media. Many of his followers, already distrustful of mainstream news outlets, accept whatever rationalization he provides, no matter how outlandish.
Talk about irony. This point is where any attempts to portray Trump supporters as cultists hits the wall and explodes. Liberals are nonresponsive to facts and information. They can only argue from emotion and claim that facts are different than truth. (If I have my way, Joe Biden will never live down that claim.)
The biggest shocker to folks in Washington was that after he was inaugurated, Trump began to implement the things he promised in his campaign. What he said is what he tried to do. Granted, he has met with much resistance, but he has followed through where he could.
I don’t get the meme that everything Trump says is a lie. I can understand if Liberals don’t like 80 percent of what he wants to do but… this lie thing is without substance. I tried to look up so called “fact check” stuff on Trump and the one thing I noticed was they kept moving the goal posts and making false equivalences. Trump shoots from the hip quite often but generally his recall is good; compared to Joe Biden, Trump is a genius in this department.
Liberals have a preset template that they use to filter anything Trump, they won’t consider anything contrary to their presuppositions. Thus, they reject any evidence contrary to what they want to be true. As previously documented here, the repeated accusation that Trump is a racist is exhibit one in this regard. It is untrue but they keep saying it anyway.
Conservatives care about a man’s character not their skin color. Liberals would think that since I like Trump and I happen to have pale skin that I must be a racist. This is untrue and intellectually lazy. In fact, such a statement is racist not me.
Ok want an example. I’ll give you two.
Meghan Markle—the babe that married Prince Harry I had no interest in her racial make-up. Why would I? I know she is attractive and had some interest in being in movies. I have previously blogged about her and the false conversion into Anglicanism not because she trusted in Christ but to please the Queen mother. It never occurred to me that she might be all or partly black until I read it in some British tabloid. My reaction was oh, that’s interesting trivia, as I wondered why it mattered. For some reason, its a big deal in England.
Kamala Harris Another nice-looking babe, but I don’t like her because of her politics. She has “San Francisco values” and was a horrible Attorney General in California. As AG, she refused to enforce the laws that she personally didn’t like. In the Senate, she was no upgrade from Barbara Boxer. She is all in on rainbow people and murdering the unborn thru all nine months of pregnancy and expects my tax dollars to pay for it. It never occurred to me to inquire about her race. I really don’t care. It wasn’t until I read articles about former Assembly Speaker and ex-SF Mayor Willie Brown fornicating with her in exchange for boosting her political career that I ever read anything about her skin color. Again, prior to this year, it never occurred to me to inquire on her race. It was her character that I disagreed with. She is wrong on policy.
I believe this is true of most people including President Trump. Only Democrats look at people in terms of their group membership not as individuals.
Mr. Ross and the author are wrong that followers of Donald Trump are cultists. We want a change in the direction of the country, especially after the destruction wrought to the Republic by Barack Obama. Trump is a supporter of the First Amendment, the Second Amendment (for the most part), and will give us better judges on the Supreme Court than anyone else in either Party. So, what he says may be entertaining but we support him for what he has done. He has done his best to keep his campaign promises because he meant what he said, that is both rare and refreshing in politics.
Oh, on his website, Mr. Ross has a copy of the GQ article with a disclaimer at the bottom.
[Note: Historically, a destructive cult leader, such as Jim Jones, David Koresh or Charles Manson has no meaningful accountability. Destructive cult leaders are typically not elected and therefore not subject to the checks and balances of a democracy, such as the judicial and congressional branches of government. For this reason an elected President of the United States (POTUS) cannot be seen as a destructive cult leader. Donald Trump may have a cult-like following and possess certain character traits similar to a cult leader, but he cannot be seen simply as a cult leader, without careful qualification. Donald Trump was elected and must be reelected to continue as POTUS and as POTUS he is accountable to the American people, our elected government and the Constitution of the United States, which he publicly swore to uphold at his inauguration. — Rick Alan Ross]
Only in a world where wrong is right and up is down could anyone believe that Trump is bad for Israel but that’s the latest claim of smoldering fecal matter published by The Atlantic.
Please note the fact claims of the author in these paragraphs.
The upshot is that Jewish organizations have lost control of the narrative on Israel. Trump’s actions and statements about Jews and Israel have little to do with the Jewish people—they reflect the mode and priorities of his largely Christian, right-wing base. In practice, Washington’s bipartisan consensus on Israel mostly remains intact, but the story about Israel has changed radically. Jews have become characters in a larger political drama over Israel and anti-Semitism, two of the issues they have historically cared about most. The endless cycles of outrage are not meant to benefit Jews, and they’re not really about Jews.
Trump, in particular, has changed the bipartisan playbook on Israel. The president repeatedly singles out Representatives Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, who have been critical of Israel and were recently barred from entering the country at Trump’s urging. When Trump says these women hate Israel, hate Jews, and are anti-Semites, that gives permission to “the president’s people to say, ‘We don’t care about traditional ways of approaching the U.S.-Israel relationship,’” Solow said. “It also frees up all the president’s opponents in the Jewish community to say, ‘You know what? All the rules have changed.’” As a result, politically conservative and progressive Jews, who might have once found common ground on the Israel issue, are constantly at one another’s throats.
President Trump is right to go after the haters of Israel but when he defends the Jewish state, Liberal Jews are somehow offended. Like Trump, I don’t get it. The Democrats have thrown the Jews overboard and as long as the they remain Liberals first and Jews second, the Democrats will let them have a seat at the table…for now.
Folks, the followers of Islam were brought into this country by President Obama in the millions, not for the purpose of finding a better life in America, but to colonize our nation and expand the caliphate. Everywhere you turn, Liberal places are allowing special rules and practices to accommodate the worshippers of Allah. Liberals are afraid of them.
Please don’t get me wrong, I favor anyone from anywhere coming to the United States, but only those that want to be Americans. If they want to turn America into a place like the third world hellhole, they came from then go home. If you didn’t come here for freedom—religious and economic—then stay home.
Truth is the Liberals are using the people who practice Islam as a way to teardown the beliefs and institutions derived from Christianity; ironically, Christianity and Western Culture are the only thing that can stop the spread of Islam.
Liberals think the enemy of my enemy is my friend but the analogy they should really be concerned with is the one about giving the scorpion a ride across the flooded river or in this case Atlantic Ocean. The uneasy alliance they have made with Islam will—if they ever succeed—be their undoing.
Trump is pointing out that Jew haters are allowed to spew their hatred and the Democrat leadership is silent.Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota are Democrats, not only in good standing but along with the other two, are the new face of the Democrat Party. Nancy Pelosi may be Speaker until they carry her out of the House Chambers feet first but she in not running the show. Nancy is just the crazy aunt in the basement.
Dear Nancy, the generation coming up behind you believes all that crap you have been spewing since you guys took over the Party that fateful summer in Chicago back in 1972. Funny, you are now the stale generation of out of touch leaders. How do you like being replaced by younger and more Leftist children. Call it Karma or what goes around, but your goose is cooked.
Trump may be upsetting the traditional apple cart of Jewish folks trying to play both sides of the aisle (a lament of this article quoted above) but the truth is those days were over when Obama took-over the reins of power a decade ago.
If Trump is guilty of anything concerning the Jews and Israel, it is this, choose this day whom you will follow, one Party leads to life and the other to your destruction. Or as Bob Dylan said it many years ago, “When you gonna wake-up?”
Trump is right to defend Israel. Trump is right to attack Tlaib and Omar. Sadly, Nancy Pelosi has put herself in a box that to chasten these two racist idiots will make her appear to agree with Trump and she can’t have that; it would be her undoing. Perish the thought that the adults would discipline the children. If Nancy slapped down these two, it would open up a world where both Parties might work together, and the Democrats have so poisoned the well (or swamp if you prefer) that they can’t have that be an outcome. Better to get rid of Trump than do their jobs.
Trump is right to attack these two babes. They are friends of terrorists and murders and the hate they spread is a deadly toxin. The Democrats won’t clean-up their own House and Trump is just pointing that out. The only conclusion that rational people can draw is that the Democrats must really agree with Tlaib and Omar.How is he the racist by pointing it out?
What do you get when you cross an Ikea display, a tiny house, and the private sector?
That’s the proposal from new startup Rent the Backyard. The company is tackling rising home prices in the San Francisco-Bay Area by building backyard studio apartments, and splitting the rental profits with homeowners.
“This is a long-term partnership that we have with the homeowner,” Rent the Backyard Co-Founder Brain Bakerman told Yahoo Finance during a recent interview.
Homeowners can make $10,000 to $20,000 in additional income each year, according to the company.
If, you own a home in the Bay Area, have a 30 x 30 area, and you live in your home most of the time, then you could take part in this experiment in affordable housing.
In recent years, math has become a weapon of social and political warfare. Often it is abused to promote junk science like the myth of global cooling, warming, err…climate change or whatever the hell they’re claiming this week. Numerical manipulation is also used as a tool to find new and creative reasons to get more grant money pumped into academia.
68 Percent Error
Here’s an example. Did you know that 68 percent of the universe does not exist and never did?
Yes, it’s still the gospel if you look on the NASA website, but there’s no such thing. Two years ago, a study was published that proved it is a false theory but it is still taught as true in schools all over the world.
Scientists believe that enigmatic dark energy make up 68% of the universe. But according to a Hungarian-American team, it may not exist at all. The team publish their results in a paper in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The researchers believe that standard models of the universe fail to take account of its changing structure, but that once this is done the need for dark energy disappears.
Dark matter is now thought to make up 27% of the content of universe (in contrast ‘ordinary’ matter amounts to only 5%). After observing the explosions called as Ia supernovae, scientists concluded that dark energy, made up 68% of the cosmos, and is responsible for expansion of the universe.
In the new work, the researchers, officially led by PhD student Gábor Rácz of Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary, explained that models of cosmology particularly rely on approximations that ignore its structure, and where matter is assumed to have a uniform density. They questioned the conventional concept of existence of dark energy and suggest an alternative explanation.
Dr László Dobos, co-author of the paper, and currently working at Eötvös Loránd University, explains: “Einstein’s equations of general relativity that describe the expansion of the universe are so complex mathematically that for a hundred years no solutions accounting for the effect of cosmic structures have been found. We know from very precise supernova observations that the universe is accelerating, but at the same time we rely on coarse approximations to Einstein’s equations which may introduce serious side-effects, such as the need for dark energy, in the models designed to fit the observational data.”
If you keep rooting around on the subject, what you find is that scientists studying the universe rounded the speed of light and took other shortcuts in their math that introduced an error so big that they had to invent 68 percent more mass in the universe called “dark matter”; theoretical stuff that could not be observed in any way, just to account for the error.
Labor Department Revision
The US Department of Labor this week offered their own version of “Dark Matter” revisions to their universe.
This week, the US Department of Labor did some similar math adjustments and made 501,000 jobs that they said had been created by the Trump Administration disappear.
The Labor Department revised down total job gains from April 2018 to March 2019 by 501,000, the agency said Wednesday, the largest downward revision in a decade.
The agency’s annual benchmark revision is based on state unemployment insurance records that reflect actual payrolls while its earlier estimates are derived from surveys. The preliminary figure could be revised further early next year.
The Department maketh up and the Department taketh away, blessed be the math of the Department.
Folks, color me skeptical about this revision. I think the Labor Department has been cooking the books since Bush was President and they certainly were when Obama was President so why the change in methodology for just one year?Oh, coincidentally, this revision comes when Democrats finally figured-out that the only prayer they have in 2020 is if the economy goes down before the election—which they also are coincidentally trying to make happen.
“What’s good for the goose is good for the gander” as my dear departed granny used to say. Why stop at one year? If the Labor Department wants to change their methodology let’s go back, say ten years and see what has really been going on.
Bureaucracy First
Folks this is an illustration of what some folks dumbly call the “Deep State”. Personally I hate that term. I think what they are trying to say is that, in a sense, the government bureaucracy is so large and unwieldly that it is a force unto itself that can’t be led anywhere its career management is unwilling to go. Above all things, they are statists and will defend their institution from any outside forces of change.
Trump is an insurgent and as such needs to be taken down a few notches and shown who is running things. The boys in Labor decided that the time is ripe to make their contribution to the cause and it’s substantial. Trump has wed his fate to that of the economy and now is the time to stick him with it.
As I have stated before Trump is more of a cheerleader for the economy than he is an actual owner of its success or failure. The Market is overvalued and needs correction but how and what will trigger that is yet to happen. Sadly, the possible catalysts of correction are a target rich environment. The real question is will Trump advocate interfering with the Market (like Bush) or allow it to correct itself. Given that Democrats will not willingly help Trump, as Republicans were willing to do for Obama, Trump may have no choice but to let the Market correct naturally —which in the long run is the best outcome.
I’m just surprised that this story has gotten so little attention. Are Democrats really so busy fighting amongst themselves that they can’t take time to pummel Trump on his claim that “this is the greatest economy ever” or are they just so tone-deaf that it doesn’t matter to them. On the other hand, in the Dem’s defense, the revision was a loss of private sector, non-union jobs so maybe they don’t count anyways.
From my point of view, this was a real body blow to the President but I can’t find anything from pundits on either side of the political divide make hay about this revision.
So if Trump doesn’t lash-out at his own Dept. of Labor on Twitter then the media doesn’t care? What gives with that?
Back in 2015, a young Grant High School football player, Jaulon “JJ” Clavo and 3 friends were in a car going to get fast food prior to their game. Clavo was shot and killed, and his teammate Malik Johnson was shot but not killed. A few days later teenage thug Keymontae Lindsey, a high school transient was arrested and charged with killing Clavo.
Lindsey fit all the descriptions of a killer, he was 15, in the Strawberry Manor Bloods gang, not in school, troubled home environment, and owned a gun. He killed an icon in the area’s football team! Should be an open and shut case, right? Incorrect.
Enter SB1391, which was passed by the Legislature and signed by Governor Brown. This law bars anyone under the age of 16 from ever being tried as an adult. Since this law was signed in 2016 it should not apply to Lindsey, right? Incorrect, language hidden in the law actually allows cases to be re-opened and, in most cases, re-sentenced in juvenile court. So, the bill was like the DeLorean actually going back in time instead of setting a forward-thinking precedent. So, Lindsey, whom juvenile court had already decided could not be rehabilitated (jail doesn’t rehabilitate anyway ask any corrections worker), now had his case re-opened. Citing this law, the judge ruled he had to be tried as a juvenile. The Sacramento DA appealed, and the CA Supreme Court affirmed the judge’s decision. Ultimately, he was to be tried as a juvenile.
Lindsey was found guilty in a bench trial of premeditated first-degree murder, premeditated attempted murder, and discharging a firearm into an occupied vehicle. That sounds very serious because it is, and if Lindsey was an “adult” at the time, life in prison without parole was the likely outcome. Because he was tried as a minor, he must be released from custody before his 25th birthday, Lindsey is 19 now.
Wait a minute. Back up. Did you say what I thought? Correct. A very dangerous person now will get his walking papers from jail at age 25, after killing 1, and make no mistake, he could have killed 3 more, as the bullet was not meant for Clavo it was meant for Jackson. How is this justice when a mother lost her son, and another family likely will lose theirs as Jackson has since joined a gang for protection? If you are unfamiliar, Grant High School is located in a very rough part of Sacramento, where even the police take their time responding to emergencies as to not get caught in the crossfire.
JJ’s sister and mom
So, what about this law was “well intentioned?” I am of the belief that every story has at least 2 sides, yours, mine, and the truth. I don’t like reading stories of people going away for life based on just one thing, however Murder and anything with aggravated violence is a different story. This Lindsey guy was a gang member and did the deed. Why does he get the same treatment as a first-time offender who may have a real chance to turn his life around? In this deep blue liberal state in which we live, I understand the thought behind the process, it gives a second chance. I reject this thinking but at this time we have no opposition party willing to get into the mud and fight these things. I guess this country was built on second chances, but the person who authored the law (Ricardo Lara) doesn’t seem to understand the way gangs work or worst doesn’t care. First you create a blanket policy, removing the judge from the judicial process, and contrary to public belief, most gang members (especially those currently incarcerated) are very bright when it comes to the law. This case should underscore it, Jackson was not killed by Lindsey, Lindsey killed him because as someone under the age of 16, they knew he would be out at 25.
Don’t believe me? Ask any sheriff who works in the jail, or an officer who works in a gang suppression unit. The law related books are always sold out in the jail library and the members who are incarcerated read them all day…they have nothing better to do. They rely the info back to the street members, and viola, you will soon see a spike in under 16-year olds killing people, because they then can kill another one after being released! The Bible may need to be rewritten to an “eye for two eyes.”
An eye for two eyes
Long ago there was a similar law that was repealed after the gangs exploited it to kill people by getting their youngest members to pull the trigger. Thus, the law gave birth to initiation by murder. Oh, anybody was fair game not just other gang members. It took much effort to repeal the law and give discretion to the courts and local law enforcement. In this case, we are literally repeating the mistakes of the past. Like socialism, apparently some folks on the Left think that the only problem with the idea is that the right people just haven’t tried it yet.
In conclusion I hear a lot about unfairness in the judicial system and this underscores it! Think about the victim’s family. She already must live a daily reality of her son being taken from her and now she gets to go to bed knowing the killer will be out in about 6 years? Where is the justice? I hear from lawmakers all the time claiming that our system punishes people of color…in this case they were both black! (Statistically, blacks are almost always killed by other blacks.) Where is Black Lives Matters here? Clavo was by all accounts a good kid…this Lindsey…a scum of the earth thug. When did the GOP stop caring? Where are the DA’s, the Sheriffs, the judges, the people we are told actually are tough on crime? More people will die because of this, and all I hear about is a half-baked recall plan to remove Governor Newsom or about how we need to spend millions more on “homeless” initiatives; we need to wake up people! Why do I get a feeling this Lindsey fellow probably wouldn’t be turning in his gun if we passed a law saying he must do so? Anyone want to take bets this Lindsey is back in prison or 6 feet under within a short time of being released?
The Blog Father and I speak often about liberalism and both of us believe it is a disease. I think that thesis is supported by laws like these. It’s a feel good, well intentioned law, but it winds up backfiring. Also notice, it was never voted on by the people, it was legislated, and signed by the governor as to not allow us pawns to weigh in. The ruling Party can’t risk a disaster like when we voted for Prop 8. Like I said above, I think a repeal vote should be in order, but I don’t have the money or the knowledge to run something like this. When you are a super minority party, it’s time to fight the battles you can win on.
The Chief
Ricardo Lara pay-to-play Insurance Commissioner
Oh, by the way Ricardo Lara, the author of this garbage, is the Insurance Commissioner and boy does he have some radical ideas he is working on! Too bad worthless Aaron Park won’t share them on his blog…strange since Aaron claim to be an insurance agent in a wildfire zone!
Folks, having this blog is a hobby and frankly therapy for me to vent about the world. I don’t always get to everything as quickly as I would like but an article published recently by The Atlantic “The Future of the City Is Childless” really deserves your attention.
Sadly, the article is not about a dystopian future but a current reality. I highly recommend that you read it. The thesis is that big cities are for single, working people with careers and suburbs and rural areas are for families.
New York is the poster child of this urban renaissance. But as the city has attracted more wealth, housing prices have soared alongside the skyscrapers, and young families have found staying put with school-age children more difficult. Since 2011, the number of babies born in New York has declined 9 percent in the five boroughs and 15 percent in Manhattan. (At this rate, Manhattan’s infant population will halve in 30 years.) In that same period, the net number of New York residents leaving the city has more than doubled. There are many reasons New York might be shrinking, but most of them come down to the same unavoidable fact: Raising a family in the city is just too hard. And the same could be said of pretty much every other dense and expensive urban area in the country.
In high-density cities like San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, D.C., no group is growing faster than rich college-educated whites without children, according to Census analysis by the economist Jed Kolko. By contrast, families with children older than 6 are in outright decline in these places. In the biggest picture, it turns out that America’s urban rebirth is missing a key element: births.
Cities were once a place for families of all classes. The “basic custom” of the American city, wrote the urbanist Sam Bass Warner, was a “commitment to familialism.” Today’s cities, however, are decidedly not for children, or for families who want children. As the sociologists Richard Lloyd and Terry Nichols Clark put it, they are “entertainment machines” for the young, rich, and mostly childless. And this development has crucial implications—not only for the future of American cities, but also for the future of the U.S. economy and American politics.
But if big cities are shedding people, they’re growing in other ways—specifically, in wealth and workism. The richest 25 metro areas now account for more than half of the U.S. economy, according to an Axios analysis of government data. Rich cities particularly specialize in the new tech economy: Just five counties account for about half of the nation’s internet and web-portal jobs. Toiling to build this metropolitan wealth are young college graduates, many of them childless or without school-age children; that is, workers who are sufficiently unattached to family life that they can pour their lives into their careers.
Cities have effectively traded away their children, swapping capital for kids. College graduates descend into cities, inhale fast-casual meals, emit the fumes of overwork, get washed, and bounce to smaller cities or the suburbs by the time their kids are old enough to spell. It’s a coast-to-coast trend: In Washington, D.C., the overall population has grown more than 20 percent this century, but the number of children under the age of 18 has declined. Meanwhile, San Francisco has the lowest share of children of any of the largest 100 cities in the U.S.
Again, please read the rest of the article. I think this explains—in part—some of the divide in our country on many issues. The populated areas that favor singlehood are very self-focused. In a culture that is very present oriented anyway and values that “new is better” (after all that value works well when applied to technology), is it any wonder that, God, family, and children—future oriented values—are distant to them? Feelings and immediate gratification are incongruent to a future orientation.
Given what you’ve read above, is it any wonder that this headline is in the news today?
Nothing complicates career and immediate gratification more than pregnancy, consequences are so messy. Once you’ve committed to the proposition that life is all about you, it can be jarring to have that attitude challenged.
If the future is childless then how can there be a future?
Last month the San Francisco Examiner published an article posing the question, what will San Francisco do if PG&E shuts the lights out to prevent causing a fire?
In a recent filing with the California Public Utilities Commission, PG&E explained that if the utility has to turn off, or “de-energize,” high-voltage transmission lines in the East Bay to prevent the start of a wildfire, power to the entire city of San Francisco could also be turned off. And it could be up to five days before power is restored.
Are we as a city — and each of us individually — prepared for that?
Imagine The City with no working traffic lights. Cellphone networks and internet phone lines could fail. People who depend on medical equipment, like oxygen machines, could be at risk. Food could spoil without refrigeration, both in restaurants and in homes. Schools would likely close for the duration of the outage. Hospitals, police stations, and the airport could continue to operate on backup generators, but with reductions in services offered.
And then there’s water and sewage. Gravity helps move water from Hetch Hetchy and other sources into the City’s largest reservoirs. But we need electricity to pump water from the reservoirs to homes and fire hydrants. And we need electricity to operate wastewater treatment plants.
Imagine The City with no working traffic lights. Cellphone networks and internet phone lines could fail.
The author also mentions that preparing for PG&E to pull the plug for a few days would be good practice for when “the big one” hits.
Folks, this whole idea of purposely shutting off the power to one of the most populous cities in the country is just nuts. If it weren’t for the wacko environmentalists in this state, no one would even think this was a rational idea; especially in the case of a “preventative blackout”.
If the power went out for a mere 24 hours, San Francisco would start turning into a Mad Max world. After a week of no food, electricity, drinking water, and gasoline; is there any doubt that the place would need the National Guard? Do you really think a city whose citizens can’t afford toilet paper and hates the Second Amendment will voluntarily maintain social order in tough times? I think roving bands of Oakland Raider fans will be raising all sorts of chaos. Add a few fires into the mix when firefighting is a sketchy proposition and the place has real potential to go downhill fast.
PG&E might be the catalyst that ends the idea of San Francisco as a sanctuary city. Playing XBOX surrounded by armed guards at an ICE holding facility might look like paradise in comparison.
In this age of just in time delivery, any interruption to supplying stores with inventory will have huge consequences. A prolonged blackout or severe earthquake in SF or LA will see additional loss of life and property. I, for one, don’t want to be anywhere near the epicenter of either event.
If Elon Musk had a dollar for every dream he has inspired in utopian Liberals, this might be a fair fight. Wally World is suing Tesla in New York State for causing rooftop fires due to defective solar panels. This looks to be a fun scrap. This is doubly juicy because Tesla in making solar panels in New York State with taxpayer subsidies.
Walmart Inc. sued Tesla Inc.’s energy operations, formerly known as SolarCity, for breach of contract, claiming it failed to live up to industry standards in the installation of solar panels on top of hundreds of stores, resulting in multiple fires across the country.
The retailer said it had leased or licensed roof space on top of more than 240 stores to Tesla for the installation and operation of solar systems. But as of November 2018, fires broke out at no fewer than seven of the stores, forcing the disconnection of all the solar panel systems for the safety of the public.
In a complaint filed in New York state court Tuesday, Walmart said its inspectors found that Tesla “had engaged in widespread, systemic negligence and had failed to abide by prudent industry practices in installing, operating and maintaining its solar systems.”
Many of the panels had defects that could be seen by the naked eye or were easily identifiable with proper equipment, Walmart said, indicating that Tesla had deficient inspection procedures or hadn’t been inspecting the sites at all. The retailer’s inspectors saw dangerous connections, including loose and hanging wires at several locations.
“Many of the problems stemmed from a rushed, negligent approach to the systems’ installation,” Walmart said. “Tesla’s predecessor-in-interest — SolarCity — had adopted an ill-considered business model that required it to install solar panel systems haphazardly and as quickly as possible in order to turn a profit.”
Tesla didn’t immediately address the retailer’s complaint.
Oh, speaking of Tesla and product liability, I’ve been sitting on this one for a while.
Tesla sued for homicide…again.
A Tesla car, running on Autopilot, skidded 1,600 feet after sliding under a semitruck at 68 mph, shearing off its top and killing its driver, according to a lawyer who is suing the carmaker.
The crash in west Delray Beach happened four months ago when a tractor-trailer pulled out in front of a bright red Tesla Model 3 driven by 50-year-old Jeremy Banner.
The Autopilot system failed, according to a lawsuit Banner’s family filed Thursday in Palm Beach County. The system should have braked or swerved to avoid the semitruck, Trey Lytal, the family’s attorney, said at a news conference.
About 10 seconds before the crash, Banner engaged the Autopilot system, according to a preliminary report from the National Transportation Safety Board.
I know they are still working the kinks out of opening their new restaurant in Elk Grove, but I’m offering this early review. Please note that until Johnnie Does submits his official review that this one is preliminary.
Anyway, last Thursday, I took the wife and son to try out MacQue’s BBQ place. The owners are neighbors and we wanted to support them and their local business. The restaurant is tucked-in between the Arby’s and the Golden1 ATM in the strip mall on Elk Grove Blvd next to Highway 99.
The first thing that I noticed was a number of people waiting in the front area for their takeout orders. Next you will notice the very small type font used for the menu board. I was not the only customer having difficulty reading the menu board. If you look around, you can locate a printed menu near the counter.
MacQue’s with micro-font menu
When we got to the front counter to order, we each decided to get a different menu item. This just worked out that way and helped with my decision to write a review. (Johnnie Does is a thin lad and it would be most unfair to make him consume too many calories to write a proper review.) Since we were there for dinner, we each ordered a meal from the menu. The boy got ribs, mom got chicken, and I ordered tri-tip. Food can be ordered with BBQ sauce of various types either on the food or on the side. Each of our orders came with two sides and each of us ordered a drink. It was just over $46.00 plus tip.
Seating area
We ordered the following six sides: cole slaw (2), baked beans, corn, macaroni & cheese, and macaroni salad. There was nothing memorable about the sides except the corn was drowning in butter—not good, and the mac & cheese was not buried in cheese—good.
Tri-tip
After a wait of 15 minutes or more, the food arrived. It was very much like KFC. Each item was separately packaged in a disposable container with lid. If you’re from Davis or Berkeley, avoid this place; the amount of plastic going into the trash will shock you. Napkins, towelets, and plastic forks are available next to the soda machine. If you want a knife—which we did—you must ask at the counter. Even though we each had a fork served with our meal, the only way to get a knife was to get a sealed to-go packet with knife, fork, spoon, napkin, salt, and pepper. Again, this seemed like a waste of plastic and profit.
Bone dry chicken looks better than it tastes
The ribs were the best menu item, the tri-tip was ok, and the chicken was…well, like sawdust. After trying it, I had the mental image of Gordon Ramsey yelling profanities and flinging it across the kitchen and toward the nearest trash can. Oh, my son was the only one of the three of us to ask for BBQ sauce served on his food. Although he got two layers of ribs on his plate only the top layer had any BBQ sauce. Get it on the side, you will be happier that it arrived at your table in yet another plastic container.
Rib plate
This article contains some of the photos that I took during our visit. I will leave it up to Johnnie Does to give the place a numerical rating.
