By way of Hacker News, and I only discovered this 15 minutes ago so I haven’t had time to go through all of it yet:
“Snoop unto them, as they snoop unto us”.
Here’s the original description:
The first link will get you to slides, video of the talk, files, and code. As you know, Bob, Bluetooth is a thing for this blog, so this is relevant to my interests…
Shot:
Chaser:
A retired doctor was arrested Tuesday after police allegedly discovered guns, drugs and prostitutes on his 70-foot yacht in Nantucket — following reports a distressed woman had possibly overdosed and “did not feel safe” onboard.
Scott Anthony Burke, 69, was slapped with drug trafficking and weapons charges after cops raided his luxury vessel — Jess Conn – and uncovered the trove of guns, cocaine and ketamine, court records obtained by The Boston Globe allege.
First, it was “no personal watercraft on Lake Austin during the holiday”.
Then, they put up big electronic signs telling us not to “drag chains” or “toss lit cigarettes” because of “wildfire risk”.
And now, it appears you can’t even have hookers, blow, and guns on your yacht. What am I supposed to do with my weekends now? And what’s the point of even having a yacht these days?
Joyless fun-suckers, sucking the fun out of everything.
The street finds its own uses for things.
New Jersey business owner arrested for using a drone to drop dye packets into local swimming pools.
Oddly, it seems like his business was not a pool service business, but a heating and cooling service company. If it was a pool service company, that’d at least be understandable to me.
The Elvis gun went for $199,750. I don’t know if that’s inclusive of the bidder’s premium. (Previously.)
I wrote a while back about the criminal charges against Thomas Moyer, Apple’s security head and the somewhat related (I think) case against former Santa Clara County Sheriff Laurie Smith.
I missed, however, that the case against Moyer was dismissed in 2021.
But: a California appellate court reinstated the charges last week.
Appellate decision here. Interesting quote:
During the relevant time frame, the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office rarely issued CCW licenses. Indeed, the office’s practice was to not even process an application for a CCW license absent a special instruction to do so. Only Sheriff Laurie Smith and a small number of others in the Sheriff’s Office had the authority to give such instructions. One of those individuals was Rick Sung, who appears to have run Sheriff Smith’s 2018 re-election campaign and after the election became the undersheriff, second in command to the sheriff. Undersheriff Sung also had authority to place license applications on hold even after licenses were signed by the sheriff.
Missed this previously, but Mike the Musicologist pinged it over to me.
Patrick Wojahn, the former mayor of College Park, Maryland, took a guilty plea.
Sentencing is scheduled for November 20th, per the article.
Austin Police chief Joseph Chacon is stepping down and retiring from APD after two years as chief.
I really don’t have anything much to say about this: Chief Chacon didn’t do anything in his time to really rise to my attention, either positively or negatively. There are things to be said about poor police response time, ongoing issues with the homeless, and other things going on within the department. But I feel like many of those issues are the results of poor decision making by our city government, and were out of Chief Chacon’s control.
I wish him well in his next endeavors, and I think a Fist Rockbone Brian Manley for mayor/Joseph Chacon for city council ticket would be a fantastic idea.
One of last year’s big flaming hyena stories was about Harry Sidhu, the mayor of Anaheim, who resigned over land deals with the Los Angeles Angels (and his “illegal registration of a helicopter“).
I kind of lost track of this story because California newspapers. But thanks to the Field of Schemes blog, I found out: former mayor Sidhu is taking a guilty plea.
…
…
Really, seriously, just shut the f**k up.
…
…
Remember, my people: the coverup is almost always worse than the actual crime.
Scott Cobb will be paroled in August after 34 years in prison.
Richard Barancik has passed away at 98.
Mr. Barancik was the last surviving member of this group.
Mr. Barancik (pronounced ba-RAN-sick) was one of four members of what was formally called the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives Section to receive the Congressional Gold Medal in 2015 in Washington for their “heroic role in the preservation, protection, restitution of monuments, works of art and artifacts of cultural importance.”
On the day of the ceremony, Mr. Barancik told The Los Angeles Times: “The Americans cared about the cultural traditions of Europe. We did everything we could to salvage what the Nazis had done. It’s the best we could do.”
At first, the murder of Mr. Reynolds’s daughter, Kimber, seemed like just one more statistic. An 18-year-old college student home in Fresno on summer break, she was attacked one night in June 1992 by two men on motorcycles who tried to grab her purse.
When she resisted, one of the men, Joseph Michael Davis, shot her in the head, in front of dozens of witnesses. She was rushed to a hospital and died 26 hours later.
One of the murderers was killed in a shootout with police.
His efforts stalled out at first. Then Polly Klass was murdered.
Almost overnight, public outrage over Polly’s murder turned into support for Mr. Reynolds’s campaign. Calls came in to his Fresno headquarters in such volume that they overloaded the city’s 1-800 system. Within weeks, he had the signatures he needed.
The bill also found a new life in the Legislature, as state and national politicians, facing election in the fall of 1994, raced to appear tough on crime. Senator Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat, and her Republican opponent that year, Representative Michael Huffington, both endorsed the bill.
This time it sailed through both chambers of the Legislature, and Governor Wilson signed it into law in March. That fall, the accompanying ballot initiative passed with overwhelming support. In the years that followed, two dozen states, inspired by California, enacted their own three-strikes laws.
Tiny violin watch:
The law had, and continues to have, its detractors. Critics claimed it would overcrowd the prisons, drive up the cost of incarceration and clog the courts, as criminals facing life in prison would be less likely to reach a plea agreement.
It was also derided as unfair: Even a felony as minor as stealing a slice of pizza could result in a 25-year sentence, a situation that befell one man, Jerry Dewayne Williams. Though a judge later reduced Mr. Williams’s sentence, critics used his case as an example of the law’s unfairness.
More about Jerry DeWayne Williams.
Andrea Evans, soap star. IMDB.
Mikala Jones, surfer.
Jones had been staying at the Awera Resort with his family, when around 9:15 a.m., he likely impaled his left groin on his surfboard fin, suffering a 4-inch-long gash, according to the surfing website Surfline, citing official reports.
While the exact circumstances of Jones’ death remained unclear, those close to Jones wrote on social media that he died after slashing his femoral artery, leading to massive blood loss.
Remember: Stop The Bleed isn’t just for shootings.
Lawrence emailed obits for Manny Coto, producer, and Betta St. John, actress.
I don’t think this quite qualifies for the “Burning In Hell Watch”, but it does belong at the bottom: James W. Lewis, who was suspected, but never actually charged, in the Chicago Tylenol poisonings.
Mr. Lewis spent more than four decades under scrutiny in connection with the notorious unsolved poisonings, in which someone laced Extra-Strength Tylenol with deadly potassium cyanide, killing seven people in the Chicago area in September and October 1982.
Mr. Lewis was never charged in the murders, and he denied any involvement in them. But in October 1982, he sent a letter to Johnson & Johnson, the parent company of MacNeil Consumer Products, the manufacturer of Tylenol, saying he would “stop the killing” if he were paid $1 million. He was convicted of extortion in 1983 and spent 12 years in federal prison.
LA City Council member Curren Price was charged yesterday with:
There are a couple of things going on here.
…
According to the complaint, Del Richardson & Associates received six checks from companies either incorporated or co-owned by affordable housing developers whom Price later voted to fund projects for or sell city property to.
In 2021, Price voted to slash the price of a property sold to GTM Holdings from nearly $1 million to $440,000 six months after a company incorporated by GTM Holdings wrote a check to his wife’s firm for about $51,000, court records show.
In 2019, according to the complaint, Price voted to fund a $4.6-million real estate project involving developer Thomas Safran & Associates after his wife’s firm received checks totaling about $35,000 from a company incorporated by Safran.
The second thing that’s going on involves health insurance, believe it or not.
Noted:
Price is the fourth current or former council member to face criminal charges in four years.
…
This year, Councilmember Mark Ridley-Thomas was found guilty of conspiracy, bribery and fraud for extracting benefits for his son from USC while voting on issues that benefited the school.
Councilmembers Mitch Englander and Jose Huizar also pleaded guilty to federal corruption charges in recent years after an FBI investigation.