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Wait, What?

Crime, Legal Stuff, Two-Minute Hate

Okay, this one got my blood boiling:

A Texas man with a prior murder conviction is accused of running a “full-service drug operation” near several schools where authorities say surveillance showed what appeared to be teenagers purchasing narcotics and fentanyl pills disguised to look like ecstasy.

A convicted murderer was out free on the streets?  IN TEXAS?  How the fuck did that come about?  Why hadn’t he been executed, or at least still be behind bars for the rest of his worthless fucking life?

Also relevant:  whose signature is on the petition for release, and whose signature is on the release authorization?  (Yeah, we’ll probably never know that, because if we did, it could easily come about that the signatories would be dragged out of their house and beaten with iron bars and chains.  In any just society, that is.)

Read the whole thing to get the full horror of it.

Range time.

Difficult Issue

Legal Stuff

I’m faced with an uncomfortable dilemma here.

As any fule kno, when it comes to anti-Semitism, I’m with the Semites — lock, stock and barrel (if necessary).  I don’t think I have to prove that to anyone.

I am also steadfastly against the legal practice of attributing mindset and attitude (animus) towards crime:  murdering someone in cold blood is terrible;  whether the murderer shouts “Die, you Jewish bastard!” or “Bye bye, Jew bitch!” while committing the crime is in my mind irrelevant.  There’s no such thing as doubleplusterrible, in other words.  The crime should be sufficiently punished according to its severity.  (In the second example, are we going to add years onto the sentence for both misogyny and anti-Semitism?  Trebleplusterrible?)

Which is why this situation makes me profoundly uneasy:

Federal prosecutors have charged a man from the Bronx with hate crime offenses alleging he assaulted a security guard and a congregant in a racially motivated attack at a Manhattan synagogue last week.
Larry Montes was arrested following the alleged attack at Central Synagogue on Friday and was charged by New York State.
On Tuesday, the Justice Department charged him with two counts of committing hate crimes, each of which carries a maximum penalty of 10 years’ imprisonment, and one count of damage to religious property resulting in bodily injury, which carries a maximum 20 years’ imprisonment.

I don’t know whether “damage to religious property resulting in bodily injury” carries a heavier sentence in NYfC than does “damage to [any] property resulting in bodily injury” — I’ll leave that for my Powdered Wig Readers to establish — but it shouldn’t.

Once again, I’m going to restate that my personal inclination is to offer additional protection to, say, synagogues;  but I’m not so sure that it should be legal policy.

But given the above, I am also curious to know whether the murder of a White person by a Black person shouting, “Die, cracker!” is punished with the same severity as that of a White person murdering a Black person while shouting “Die, nigger!”

See where all this leads?

Hence my discomfort with the whole issue.

Quote Of The Day

QOTD

From NYfC, some politician:

“Most of what we saw were crimes of poverty-people who are stealing things like toothpaste, people who were stealing things like, you know, soap. And that means if you’re stealing those things, you need them.”

Justifying crime on the basis of need.  Were this not on the Planet Manhattan, I’d think we were all going bats.

Random thought:  think this asshole would say differently if someone broke into her house and stole her $10,000 Persian carpet because they “needed” some floor covering?

#RhetoricalQuestion

Keeping It To Yourself

Technology

Via Insty, I see this interesting report:

Nine PBS in St. Louis had a rolling annual contract with Open Source Storage (OSS), a cloud storage provider, but when the station went to renew the deal earlier this year, OSS didn’t respond.

On the day the contract expired, Nine PBS suddenly lost access to its data without any warning. That’s when staff there realized that OSS’s website was inactive and the state of Colorado listed the company as delinquent.

The station lost access to 50 terabytes of archival materials, which included all of its footage of historical events that have taken place in St. Louis.

Nine PBS sued OSS but paused the lawsuit after it was contacted by a managing partner of a group that had acquired OSS’s assets and revealed that the station’s archive was being held at the Iron Mountain Data Center in Colorado.

After the managing partner stopped replying, Nine PBS contacted Iron Mountain, which initially suggested that it would return the data, until it reversed course and refused to do so because OSS owned “the physical services housing the data.”

….translated, that means, “Unless you pay us jillions of razzbuckniks, we’re going to keep all that lovely data”.

Of course, I think that the amoral assholes who bought Iron Mountain (LOL) and are holding Nine PBS hostage should be impaled on stakes, but that’s neither here nor there.

More interesting is the followup from Driscoll which points out that on the same page there is this article about a 16TB storage unit (cost:  about $3 grand), and that with three (okay four) of those, Nine CBS could just have stored all the data themselves.  I’m willing to bet that the $12 thousand outlay is considerably less than their lawyers’ bill.

Idiots.

But we can learn from idiots, can’t we?

Lesson learned:  Forego the fucking Cloud, and keep your personal data to yourself.  Storage is cheap, your data is irreplaceable.

Which reminds me:  I need to back up my hard drive.  Tonight’s the night, baby.

News Summary

Bad News


...only about 10 million to go, then.  As the actress said to the bishop:  harder and faster, please.


...or it could not.
#WeaselWord


...must be fake news, because I can’t find them anywhere on Amazon.  And don’t give me that “LEO-only” bullshit.




...all hail the miraculous EV!


...three words:  saucisse de sanglier.  



...”almost all”?  Why the “almost”?


...considering that a common factor among older men is a need for woody-poppers and age-related glaucoma, I can’t see the problem.  Also:  older men already do eye health monitoring, to get stronger eyeglass prescriptions so they can see Paige Spirinac more clearly.

And that’s the news.