It is called the stairway to heaven
Daily Archives: August 4, 2015
WTF? 2 Illegal immigrants in US named to city commissions
Two immigrants in the country illegally have been appointed to commissions in a small city in southeastern Los Angeles County.
The Los Angeles Times reports 21-year-old Julian Zatarain was sworn in Monday to a position with the parks and recreation department in the city of Huntington Park. The Mexican immigrant came to California when he was 13. He is a college student who has volunteered for the Red Cross.
Twenty-nine-year-old Francisco Medina, another immigrant who is not a legal resident, won an appointment to the health and education commission.
Huntington Park is a working-class city of about 58,000 residents – many from Mexico and Latin America.
The newspaper says the appointments mark a bold – and controversial – step to boost the participation of immigrants in local government.
I knew this was a matter of time. First off is it legal? But who cares anymore I guess.
If people want to be a part of Guvment why don’t they do what is the legal and right thing to do and become citizens. Having someone not here legally undermines the entire process and leads to more dire consequences later on. This is a bad precedent to start.
Where do we draw the line in this immigration crap anymore? It appears we do not.
We have lost our sense of right and wrong for the cause these days
70’s retro ad: Dawg stylin and profilin……..
Video Shows Kentucky Officer Handcuff Crying Third-Grader At School
A school resource officer in Kentucky handcuffed a crying third-grader with disabilities last year, according to a new video released by the American Civil Liberties Union.
The video accompanies a federal lawsuit filed Monday by lawyers on behalf of two children against the Kenton County Sheriff’s Office in Covington, Kentucky. The complaint alleges that a school resource officer unlawfully handcuffed an 8-year-old boy and a 9-year-old girl, both of whom have disabilities, in the fall of 2014.
“As a result of being subjected to unnecessary and excessive handcuffing, Plaintiffs experienced pain, fear, and emotional trauma, and an exacerbation of their disabilities,” the lawsuit reads. The complaint alleges violations of the U.S. Constitution and Americans with Disabilities Act.
Colonel Pat Morgan, a spokesman for the Kenton County Sheriff’s Office, told The Huffington Post that he was waiting for their attorneys to review the lawsuit before providing comment.
In the video, the boy, who allegedly has attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and a history of trauma, is shown crying as an officer handcuffs his biceps behind his back. The ACLU claimed that he was placed in handcuffs for 15 minutes because of behavior related to his disabilities.
In the video, the officer tells the boy, “You don’t get to swing at me like that.” As he shackles the third-grader, who weighs about 50 pounds, the boy starts to cry and says that the officer is hurting him.
The use of shackles on youth in courtrooms, as well as in schools and treatment centers, is controversial. At least 100,000 children are shackled in the U.S. every year, David Shapiro, a campaign manager at the Campaign Against Indiscriminate Juvenile Shackling, told Mother Jones.
The U.S. Government Accountability Office reported in 2009 that it found hundreds of cases of alleged abuse and death related to the use of shackles and seclusion on school children over a two-decade period. The office identified at least 20 allegations that involved restraints and resulted in death.
They noted the case of a 7-year-old girl who died at a private treatment center after being restrained face-down on the floor for hours. “The staff was allegedly unaware she had stopped breathing until they rolled her limp body over and discovered she had begun to turn blue,” the GAO wrote.
Card Skimming at ATMs Explodes
Credit reporting group FICO has reported that attacks on ATMs on bank property jumped 174% year on year in the first part of 2015. Attacks on non-bank machines jumped 315% in the same period.
Matters are so grave that leading ATM maker NCR on July 23 issued an alert to its customers that said, “NCR is tracking an increasing frequency of card skimming attacks in both the U.S. and in Mexico.”
An NCR spokesperson said that direct losses globally due to ATM skimming is $3 billion.
It gets worse. Until recently many skimmers were crude and attached directly on top of the ATM card slot. For them, the usual self-defense prescription has been to shake the slot. If something comes off in your hand it’s probably a skimmer. No more. Owen Wild, an NCR expert, said that NCR is seeing more skimmers that are inserted down into the card slot and thus are invisible on the exterior. There also is a rising incidence of cases where a criminal drills a hole into an ATM, inserts a copying device, then covers the hole with a decal. Wild said many of these devices are slick enough that they defeat some anti-skimming technologies in use on ATMs.
Momentarily, we’ll tell why there is an explosion in skimming but by now you want to know what your liability is.
The news is mixed. On paper you have little to no liability. The Federal Trade Commission says losses are capped at $50 if the loss is reported within two days of learning of it. The cap is $500 if reported within 60 days. More than 60 and the losses are unlimited.
But it gets worse. Several victims of ATM fraud have told The Street that their bank refused to restore any monies, insisting the victim must have given the crook his card and PIN. Remember: the crook has a card with the right data and the PIN, so it looks like the accountholder is withdrawing cash. Who knows the real facts in these cases — just do not assume all will be well with ATM theft because it isn’t always.
In just about all cases, too, there are delays – often short, occasionally long – in restoring money taken from an account. With a bogus credit card charge, it’s put in suspense the instant it is challenged. With a debit card, real money has to be restored to the account and while that is happening, rent checks may bounce, car payments may be late and more mayhem may befall the victim. It is not pretty.
The best defense: don’t become a victim.
So, why is ATM skimming sharply jumping? “The ability to buy pre-assembled or programmed skimmers have turned what was once a complicated scam, into something that the average Joe could do if he’s willing to pay for it,” said Luis A. Chapetti, software engineer and data scientist at Barracuda. Chapetti also provided a URL where many skimmers are for sale, generally at prices of $1,000 and up.
Snag just two or four cards and the skimmer paid for itself. The rest is gravy.
This availability of off-the-shelf skimmers is key to the epidemic. Before a crook needed some fabrication skills and tools. No more. Ready cash buys the gear, so any klutz can become an ATM crook. It won’t stop soon, either. Experts anticipate a sustained attack on ATMs, because they are where the money is.
How can a consumer protect himself?
“Shield the [ATM] pad from prying cameras as you enter your PIN, and regularly check your account for evidence of fraud,” said Steven Weisman, a lawyer in Amherst Mass. who frequently writes about scams. The first part is crucial: cover your actions with your other hand as you enter the PIN. That probably will thwart the crook’s attempt to grab the PIN and, by doing that, you have dramatically reduced — maybe eliminated — this card’s usefulness.
As for checking your account — and setting up account activity alerts — that’s key to minimizing your actual losses. The sooner you notify the bank, the lower your losses generally will be.
Well? Male or female can you?
DAWG CAN!!!(not)
Amazon has big plans for drones
But last week came the latest sign that Amazon is deadly serious about getting into the drone delivery business. In a pair of brief white papers released at a NASA conference in Silicon Valley, Amazon laid out its vision for regulations that would govern a world where thousands — perhaps millions — of drones buzzed over American cities every day.
Ubiquitous drones will require new rules and infrastructure
Drone technology today is in a similar place to automotive technology in the early 20th century. Cars existed back then, but were still a niche technology limited to hobbyists and rich people. There were so few cars that the rules and infrastructure that support cars today — stoplights, speed limits, controlled-access freeways, parking laws, and so forth — mostly weren’t needed. That changed as cars became mainstream.
Amazon thinks that we’re on the cusp of a similar transition with drones. The e-commerce giant believes — or hopes — that there will be exponentially more drones in the sky in a decade than there are today. And the company is advocating new rules to ensure that those drones don’t crash into each other, or conventional planes, birds, or other obstacles.
Amazon’s vision for drone traffic management looks like this:
Above 500 feet is “integrated airspace,” where conventional aircraft fly today. Current regulations place strict limits on flights below that. But Amazon wants to carve out a zone between 200 and 400 feet for a new class of small, autonomous, unmanned vehicles — like Amazon delivery drones.
To prevent crashes, Amazon would establish high technical standards for vehicles that use this new airspace. Autonomous drones would need a GPS and highly accurate geospatial data, a reliable internet connection, the ability to communicate wirelessly with other drones, and sensors to detect and avoid collisions with other objects in the sky.
The result could be a dramatic transformation of the space above us. Right now, people see an occasional airplane or helicopter overhead — usually thousands of feet in the air. But in the future, drones buzzing overhead could be as commonplace as cars driving on a nearby street. And Amazon hopes that many of those vehicles will be owned by Amazon and delivering packages to customers in less than an hour.
The ex-cop who shot Michael Brown a year ago opens up about his life
As the one-year anniversary of the shooting of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown approaches, The New Yorker has a new profile of the former Ferguson, Missouri cop who killed him.
That cop, Darren Wilson, has gotten thousands of letters from supporters including cops, but he can’t find work as a police officer and lives in a house where his name isn’t on the deed.
Despite the civil unrest that occurred in Ferguson after his acquittal, Wilson still contends what happened was “not a race issue .”
Wilson explained: “When a cop shows up, it’s, like, ‘The cops are here!’ There’s no ‘Oh, s—, the white cops are here!'”
He continued: “Everyone is so quick to jump on race. It’s not a race issue. There are people who feel that police have too much power, and they don’t like it. There are people who feel police don’t have enough power, and they don’t like it.”
When asked if he thought young people around St. Louis use the racism of police in past decades as an excuse, Wilson said: “I think so.” He continued: “I am really simple in the way that I look at life. What happened to my great-grandfather is not happening to me. I can’t base my actions off what happened to him.”
Wilson also showed little sympathy for Ferguson residents who are out of work.
“There’s a lack of jobs everywhere,” he said. “But there’s also lack of initiative to get a job. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.”
Wilson shot Brown in August last year after stopping him and a friend for walking in the street. Wilson claims he shot Brown in self-defense. He told investigators there was an altercation in his police vehicle and Brown grabbed his gun. However, other witnesses have told a different story and said Brown had his hands up in a sign of surrender and was running away when he was shot.
Protests broke out in Ferguson, a St. Louis suburb, after the shooting, and Wilson has kept a low profile since then.\
Writer Jake Halpern explains how Wilson has been living his life since he was officially cleared of criminal wrongdoing in the shooting. The profile also describes how Wilson thinks about the shooting one year after the fact.
Here’s what Wilson’s life is like post-Ferguson:
- Wilson lives on a “nondescript dead-end street on the outskirts of St. Louis,” according to The New Yorker. Few people know his specific location and his name is not on the deed of the house he lives in. Wilson reportedly paid for it with the help of $500,000 in donations he received in the wake of the shooting.
- He can see who comes and goes through security cameras that are synced to his phone.
- Wilson has not read a US Justice Department report about systemic racism in Ferguson. Wilson told The New Yorker: “I’m not going to keep living in the past about what Ferguson did. It’s out of my control.”
- He wanted to rejoin the police force in Ferguson after the grand jury cleared him in the shooting, but he was told that his presence on the force would jeopardize other cops.
- Instead, Wilson went to work doing inventory at a boot store for two weeks but quit when reporters found out he worked there and started calling the store.
- Wilson keeps a low profile now, but still ventures out occasionally to places “with like-minded individuals,” he told The New Yorker. He continued: “You know. Where it’s not a mixing pot.”
- He said he writes thank-you notes to his supporters, who have reportedly sent him thousands of letters. Wilson keeps police-department patches that cops have sent him in a drawer in his living room.
Wilson also talked to Halpern about what led him to the police job in Ferguson. Here’s what he said about the early years of his career:
- Wilson says he had a troubled childhood. His mother was constantly in debt and was known for stealing money from people, so Wilson had two bank accounts as a teenager so he could hide his earnings from summer jobs. His mother died unexpectedly in 2002, and Wilson started skipping school and seemed “directionless and unhappy,” according to the profile. After high school, he worked in construction until the real-estate market crashed in 2008. He then applied to the police academy, figuring it was a stable, “recession-proof” job.
- He wanted to work on the poor north side of St. Louis because he thought it would be good experience for his career. Wilson told The New Yorker: “You go there and you do three to five years, get your experience, you can kind of write your own ticket.”
- But Wilson was uncomfortable at times. He relied on another officer, Mike McCarthy, who grew up in North County and, according to The New Yorker, had many black friends growing up, for help. Wilson told the magazine that he said to McCarthy: “Mike, I don’t know what I’m doing. This is a culture shock. Would you help me? Because you obviously have that connection, and you can relate to them. You may be white, but they still respect you. So why can they respect you and not me?”
- When Wilson was laid off from a police job in North County, he wanted to keep working with the black community. He said: “When I left Jennings, I didn’t want to work in a white area. I liked the black community. I had fun there. … There’s people who will just crack you up.”
No matter what the sign carriers say I still think all lives matter…….
Retro of the day: Earth Wind and Fire
“After the Love Has Gone” was nominated for a Grammy for Record of the Year and won for Best R&B Vocal Performance by a Duo or Group.[2] The song also won a Best R & B Song Grammy Award for Foster, Graydon and Champlin as its composers. “After the Love Has Gone” has been placed on Bruce Pollock’s list of The 7,500 Most Important Songs of 1944-2000
Weekly singles charts
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