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Archive for 2017
July 12, 2017
WHAT REAL OPPRESSION LOOKS LIKE: Bangladeshi Muslim Husband Chops Off Wife’s Fingers Because She Won’t Drop Out of College.
THE COST OF DOING BUSINESS WITH TYRANTS: Apple to Build China Data Center to Meet New Cybersecurity Law.
Apple will build its first Chinese data center in the southern province of Guizhou to house data for customers of its iCloud service. The data include photos, documents, messages, apps and videos uploaded by Apple users throughout the mainland, the company said Wednesday.
The center will be operated by a company owned by the Guizhou provincial government, and whose chairman was a local government official until last year.
Of course.
21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Syphilis rates are on the rise, and dating apps may be playing a role, experts say.
KREMLIN STOOGE: US Approves $3.9 Billion Patriot Missile System For Romania.
MICHELLE MALKIN: The crisis in America’s crime labs.
Law journals and scientific publications are filled with similar horror stories that have spread from the New York City medical examiner’s office and Nassau County, N.Y.’s police department forensic evidence bureau to the crime labs of West Virginia, Harris County, Texas, North Carolina and jurisdictions in nearly 20 other states.
It’s the wrongfully prosecuted and convicted who suffer the heaviest deprivations — and taxpayers who must foot the astronomical bill for all the costs and damages incurred by crime lab corruptocrats and their enablers.
As I’ve been chronicling in my newspaper columns and CRTV.com investigative reports, many state crime labs and police departments are particularly ill-equipped and inadequately trained to interpret DNA evidence, especially “touch” or “trace” DNA — minute amounts of DNA of unknown origin often transferred through incidental contact — which has resulted in monstrous miscarriages of justice against innocent people.
The aura of infallibility conferred on crime lab analysts by “CSI”-style TV shows exacerbates the problem when juries place undue weight on indeterminate DNA evidence of little to no probative value. Just last week, North Carolina’s Mark Carver, who was convicted of murdering a college student based on dubious touch DNA that was likely the result of investigators’ contamination, won a new court date for a hearing that may set him free.
Costly errors and gross misconduct will continue as long as politicized prosecutors operate with a “win at all costs” agenda and stubbornly refuse to admit their failures.
Read the whole thing.
NO. #BringBackObama?
RAND PAUL ON SENATE HEALTH COVERAGE BILL: I’ll vote “no” as it stands now.
CAN THEY BOTH LOSE? News industry decries Facebook’s “digital duopoly,” wants government help.
DO IT AGAIN: Illegal immigrant who sneaked into US 7 times was drunk during deadly crash, prosecutor says.
Douglas County [Nebraska] prosecutors said in court Tuesday Nemias Garcia-Velasco, 32, was deported in 2009 and 2011 and “voluntarily returned” to Mexico five times in 2005, the Omaha World-Herald reported. He was convicted of making a false claim to U.S. citizenship in 2005.
Garcia-Velasco’s bail was set at $2 million. Prosecutor Ryan Lindberg in court on Tuesday requested a high bail for the illegal immigrant because he feared the man might flee the country — again.
“If this is someone who bonds out, I don’t think we’ll see Mr. Garcia-Velasco again,” Lindberg said.
Well, maybe not in Douglas County.
WELL, IT’S LIMITED LEVEL 3 AUTONOMY, REALLY: The Audi A8: the World’s First Production Car to Achieve Level 3 Autonomy.
The 2018 Audi A8, just unveiled in Barcelona, counts as the world’s first production car to offer Level 3 autonomy.
Level 3 means the driver needn’t supervise things at all, so long as the car stays within guidelines. Here that involves driving no faster than 60 kilometers per hour (37 mph), which is why Audi calls the feature AI Traffic Jam Pilot.
Go ahead, Audi’s saying, read your newspaper or just zone out while traffic creeps along.
Well, in LA, this would be almost full-time autonomy. . . .
WINNING: American LNG exports blow past 2016 tally.
April’s exports alone quintupled on the year to 50.6 billion cu. feet, according to data released at the end of June by the Energy Information Administration. Latin America and the Caribbean account for 44% of exports, and Asia for 28%, said Executive Vice President Anatol Feygin of Cheniere Energy, the sole company constructing and operating LNG export terminals in the lower 48 states.
The U.S. now exports its LNG to 23 countries. Poland began imports in June, and Japan’s Chubu Electric Power imported the first American LNG derived from shale gas in January.
The shale revolution has made the U.S. the world’s top producer of natural gas. The Obama administration greenlighted projects to help export LNG from the mainland, such as a Louisiana terminal that began exports in February 2016. By the end of last year, America had turned from an importer into a net exporter.
Its 2016 exports amounted to a paltry 4% of top exporter Qatar’s total, according to statistics from BP. But tougher competition will be unavoidable as more large-scale LNG export projects come online in the second half.
Have you hugged a fracker today?
THAT’S DIFFERENT BECAUSE SHUT UP: Lawmakers Cite Evidence Russia ‘Colludes’ With US Green Groups to Block Fracking.
GIVING BACK: Woman picks up $405 restaurant tab for group of firefighters.
A woman who was eating at a Denny’s in Southern California picked up the $405 bill for a group of firefighters after they finished battling a massive blaze.
The City of Colton Fire Department shared an image of the receipt on Facebook Sunday, thanking the woman who paid for the meals of about 25 firefighters who had finished fighting a fire in the city.
“After all of the firefighters finished fighting the La Cadena Fire in La Loma Hills this evening, they were sent to Denny’s for dinner. While eating, an anonymous woman told the Denny’s staff that she wanted to buy all of the firefighter’s meals,” the Facebook post says.
“We are all honored to serve the citizens of our communities,” it added.
In addition to picking up the tab, the woman bought $100 worth of dessert for the firefighters.
Nice.
IN THE MAIL: The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life.
Plus, fresh Gold Box and Lightning Deals.
KIM JONG UN THREATENS TO TURN THE U.S. INTO “A PILE OF ASH”: Yeah, the usual verbal threats, but his missile technology is improving and he’s acquiring nukes. We’re going to have to act.
RELATED: Japan is purchasing Norway’s Joint Strike Missile. It’s a small, smart cruise missile with a 250 kilometer range. Japan will deploy the JSM on its F-35s. It’s yet another weapon in the U.S., Japanese and South Korean arsenals, (like the U.S. Army ATACMS), that is capable of turning North Korean missile launchers and similar targets into piles of ash.
GET BACK TO WORK: McConnell Delays Senate’s Summer Vacation by Two Weeks.
“THEY DIDN’T HAVE THE JUICE”: New Information In A Bizarre Story About A Quest To Hunt Down Hillary Clinton’s Deleted Emails.
BOUGHT FOR 100 EUROS, SOLD FOR 45,000: The flea market typewriter turned out to be a WW2 German Enigma cipher machine.
Cristian Gavrila, the collectible consignment manager at Artmark, told Reuters: “The collector bought it from a flea market. He’s a cryptography professor and… he knew very well what he was buying.”
Great find, great story.
MEGAN MCARDLE: No wonder the right distrusts academia. It has turned downright hostile to conservatism.
So why, just in the last couple of years, would conservatives turn against colleges with a vengeance?
What’s changed, I submit, is that colleges have readily supplied conservatives with images of an institution that is not merely left-leaning, but actively hostile to conservatives, as conservative speech on campus has increasingly been threatened. It started with students pressing for speakers to be disinvited from graduation speeches — sometimes liberals, but often conservatives. Then angry minorities were allowed to shut down conservative speeches with increasingly raucous protests that eventually turned to violence. And when violence occurred, schools seemed noticeably uninterested in identifying or punishing the people who committed it.
Indeed, schools’ responses to leftists’ riots have been: to make it maximally inconvenient for conservatives to speak (or be heard); to deliver a slap on the wrist against violent protests; and to allow students to corner, bully and imprecate upon professors.
Academia is a left-wing institution, and I suspect that when the people in charge of it look at left-wing protesters, they see basically good-hearted kids who are overexuberant in their pursuit of the common good. And who wants to wreck the lives of a nice kid who made a bad mistake out of the best possible motives?
Whatever the reason that this has been allowed to happen, the picture that emerges from these events is of an academia where orderly conservatives are unwelcome, but disorderly — even violent — leftists are tolerated. No wonder conservatives’ opinion of academia is falling.
Compare the welcome that the socialist Senator Bernie Sanders received at fundamentalist Liberty College to the chaos when right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos spoke at Berkeley. If Sanders had gotten the Milo treatment, liberals might start to question whether academia is an unalloyed good.
No, they’d just blame Baptists.
OTHER PEOPLE’S MONEY: State EV Rebates on Hiatus in California (Unless You’re Poor).
According to the Center for Sustainable Energy, California’s Clean Vehicle Rebate program has almost run out of funding — for a second time — after Governor Jerry Brown neglected to include it in the state budget.
As a result, the program can no longer offer rebates to purchasers of zero-emission vehicles and has placed those who made a purchase after June 30th on a refund waiting list. It’s bad news for anyone in California who wanted to by an electric car. Well, unless you’re poor, because the State of California really wants to convince low-income households to buy electric for some reason.
This isn’t the first time California has showed a bias toward low-income individuals in regard to EV purchasing. Earlier this year, the state mandated that Volkswagen reserve a portion of its charging network for disadvantaged neighborhoods — instead of the higher traffic or commercial areas electric vehicles are more likely to occupy.
The state is also considering the California Electric Vehicle Initiative, which would apply additional incentives directly at the time of purchase, rather than forcing taxpayers to wait for a refund. That bill provides $3 billion in state incentives on top of the federal rebates based on manufacturer quotas. If passed, it would also set aside $500 million per year in cap and trade program funds to ensure that disadvantaged communities, schools, transit buses, and freight benefit from the electrification push.
California’s current EV program reimburses shoppers after the purchase of plug-in electric or fuel cell vehicles. Current state-based rebates range between $1,500 and $5,000, depending on the type of vehicle and the income of the buyer — prioritizing higher rebates for lesser incomes.
While there is absolutely nothing wrong with aiding the poor, why California thinks green vehicles are an essential aspect of that endeavor is bewildering. Electric vehicles provide numerous advantages, but affordability is often not among them.
California’s common people voted for this, and now they’re getting it — cars they don’t want which plug into charging stations they don’t need paid for with debt they can’t afford — good and hard.
UPDATE: Link was broken before. Fixed now — sorry!