MaxRedline

Deported 6 Times, Murders 3

According to ICE:

Woodburn, Ore — The man accused of shooting and killing three people and injuring a fourth on a blueberry farm outside of Woodburn, has been deported from the U.S. six times since 2003.

Bonifacio Oseguera-Gonzalez is accused of shooting and killing 60-year old Ruben Rigoberto-Reyes, 26-year old Edmundo Amaro-Bajonero and 30 year old Katie Gildersleeve.  He also shot and injured 27-year old Refugio Modesto-DeLaCruz on June 27th.

He was last repatriated back to Mexico in 2013. But no worries, Obama assures us that our southern border has never been more secure than it is now.

Sleep well.

Ramming It Home (Trying For Another Light Rail Line)

Politicians dearly want to spend more billions of dollars to ram yet another light rail line through, this time into the southwest Portland metropolitan area. There's just one teensy little problem: voters in these affected areas saw what the politicians did to ram another one into Clackamas County over the objections of many residents, so they passed local initiatives to slow or stop it entirely over here.

The Tigard City Council voted unanimously Tuesday to refer a ballot measure to voters asking, in essence, whether they want to allow the city to support and cooperate in the construction of MAX light rail from Portland to downtown Tigard.

TriMet officials said this month that if Tigard votes against allowing the city to back the proposed MAX line, the project will very likely be scrapped.

Their "reasoning" goes something like this: "We've already spent around a hundred million dollars 'planning' this new 'southwest corridor', and if you rubes vote against supporting our plan, then all of that money goes to waste. You don't want that, do you?"

And so they completely ignore the fact that nobody asked them to spend all of that money "planning" for a new light rail line that would serve less than 3% of the population at a cost of around $3 billion in construction costs alone. They fail to realize that their "but hey, it looks really cool" attitude isn't flying.

Metro and Tri-Met hope to evade the issue by putting yet another property tax measure on the 2018 ballot that would go to voters throughout the region dominated by the Metropolitan Service District, the idea being that they might be able to convince enough of the renters and generally low-info liberals to pass the property tax, which would give them the needed matching funds to ram it through regardless of how residents in the southwest and suburban southwest feel about it.

So why is Tri-Met so dead-set on building more rail lines? That's obvious:

Tri-Met is dead broke. They only want to build more rail to keep the capital infusion for the project, so they can continue to juggle the books to show some semblance of liquidity. Once they stop building, the whole thing crashes.

They need to keep building stuff so that they can justify continuing to cannibalize bus services "to save money" and show how fiscally responsible they are. "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain".

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Safe With Symantec/Norton Antivirus?

Maybe not so much, as a number of vulnerabilities have been uncovered across those product lines. The researchers at Google's "Project Zero" state that "these vulnerabilities are as bad as it gets" since they require no user interaction and affect the default configuration while running at the highest privilege levels. Due to the configuration of the Symantec filter driver that intercepts system input/output, an attacker can simply email a file or a link to a victim in order to gain access to the system. The victim doesn't need to open the file nor click on the link; no user interaction is necessary.

All versions of Symantec/Norton product lines have been affected due to the Symantec engine flaw, both home and enterprise versions, on most operating systems (Windows, in which the kernel can be corrupted, along with UNIX variants such as Linux and OSX).

Symantec has jumped on it and has written - and continues to update - remedies for these potentially catastrophic vulnerabilities, although to date no exploits have been reported. On the other hand, owners of compromised systems hit by such an exploit might well have simply trashed their old systems and reimaged their data from backup.

In any case, people who use Norton legacy products such as Norton Security, Norton 360, etc. should have received, or will receive, the patches via the "liveupdate" subfeature in the various applications, no matter the platform OS.

Users of Symantec Endpoint Protection, Email Security, Protection Engine, etc. may need to do some work, as some of the products cannot be automatically updated (which may be platform-dependent). In these cases, Symantec has published advisories regarding their decomposer engine issue.

 

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Your Cat Is A Murder Machine

The rise of the cat empire is underway:

The Toronto man looked in ill health generally, had vague abdominal pains and was wheezing when he showed up at the emergency department after falling at home.

Two weeks later — despite major surgery and intensive antibiotic treatment — he was dead, septic shock having shut down his vital organs. The cause was as surprising as his precipitous decline: a bite on the thumb from a pet cat.

Although the wound seemed superficial and quickly healed, the damage was done; the cat's teeth had injected the unidentified man with a nasty microbe which spread aggressively throughout his body, undetected until it was too late.

The microbial attacker involved:

Pasteurella multocida, bacteria common in pets’ mouths and most often spread by the bite of felines, with their sharp and penetrating teeth.

Oddly enough, animal bites account for some of the most common causes of emergency room visits, and while in the past, ER doctors have generally blown them off as trivial, it's increasingly become recognized that anyone who has been bitten should probably be given a preventative course of antibiotics. Cats are among the worst, but the saliva of any animal can carry the pathogen.

The British Brexit Diet

Among the many issues arising in the wake of Brexit are concerns that British food may suffer (as though it could possibly get any worse). But it isn't their tendency to cook everything unto death (apart from fish & chips) that's the problem:  given that two of the main reasons underlying the initial establishment of the European Union involved maintaining peace and ensuring stable food supplies for the populations of the member states - and one need look no further than the recent food riots in Venezuela to grasp the significance of that particular goal - Britain's vote to exit is sounding alarm bells on that front as well.

As a country that produces only around fifty-four per cent of what it eats, Britain starts to look vulnerable to fluctuating markets.

In fact, some 40% of produce available in the island nation is imported from EU member states, so it appears without question that prices of fruits and vegetables will undergo a dramatic increase as supplies of these commodities are likely to decrease. On the other hand, Britain stands to benefit to some degree from a reduction in Brussels-imposed regulations, some of which have been, it must be acknowledged, just plain stupid; the EU's Common Fishing Policy, for example, required fishers to discard useful fish in order to meet imposed quotas. That is not only wasteful, but an environmental affront. Further along these lines, the Brussels-imposed CFP accepted no national sovereignty with regard to a member nation's own waters. Whereas the USA and many other nations enforce pelagic exlusion zones in the waters off their coasts, EU rules obligated member states to accommodate fishers from other member states; exclusion zones were banned.

To this extent, Brexit stands to return control of Britain's coastal waters to full control of the nation for the first time in decades, which should allow them to better manage their fisheries. Cheers for British fish & chips!

Nonetheless it will be interesting to see how the food situation in the U.K. pans out, so to speak.

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Rio Got Game

Never let it be said that the boys from Brazil don't know how to liven things up just before a big party:

Parts of a mutilated body have washed up on the sands of Copacabana beach in Rio de Janeiro just meters from where beach volleyball athletes will compete in the upcoming Olympics.

Extra hands, it should be noted, aren't permitted in beach volleyball competition.

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Oregon's Public Employee Jobs Tax (At Private Sector Jobs Expense)

In a typical display of what she calls "leadership", Oregon's accidental governor, currently running for actual election to that office, she gave a speech at the Westside Economic Alliance on Wednesday, at the end of which she was asked whether she supports the corporate tax on gross revenue, IP 28, that public employee unions are pushing. Her response:

Brown left without responding to the comment. Afterward, word spread that the governor’s staff had made it clear she was not to be asked about the measure, currently known as IP 28.

That's real leadership, Katie-style. There's no question that she favors it; she's a fiercely partisan Democratic from Minnesota, and she knows full well that if passed this measure will not - as the public employee unions insist - "earmark all revenue derived" for education and social services. If it passes (and they're counting on stupid Willamette Valley voters to do just that), all revenue derived will go to public employees.

But it will create jobs:

The study, released Wednesday by the Northwest Economic Research Center at Portland State University, projects the measure would trigger a nearly $3.38 billion jump in tax revenue from Oregon's wealthiest 1,000 businesses next year and then gradually escalate over the next decade to $4.3 billion in 2027. Our Oregon, the union-backed group behind IP 28, paid the research center $45,000 to do the study.

As for employment, the NERC study projects more than 30,000 government jobs would be created within a decade, almost double the state's estimate. The private sector, on the other hand, would lose roughly 20,000 jobs over 10 years, versus the state's estimate of 38,200 in half the time.

In other words, the sole function of IP 28 is to increase the size of an already bloated government, as the public employee union - financed study clearly shows. The unions (and our accidental "governor") are hoping that the rubes won't notice. And given the intellectual capacity of most Willamette Valley voters, they can bank on it.

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Drug Money

That's $70,000 in cash sitting on the table, with Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley on the left, Rep. Earl (The Pearl) Bluemanuer on the right. The man in the middle is Tyson Haworth, an Oregon marijuana grower and retailer. They're upset because federal law still classifies pot as a Schedule 1 drug, and possession of it remains a federal crime even in states that have legalized it for medical and/or recreational purposes.

As for that money on the table?

It’s money that Haworth owes in local taxes, but he can’t cut a check, because banks can’t legally work with drug dealers.

This is somehow a problem, despite the fact that traffickers in illegal drugs have never seemed to find handling large amounts of cash an impediment to business operations. Of course, they don't tend to pay taxes on that cash, but if folks like Haworth are going to pay up like good citizens, there's nothing to prevent him from stopping by the offices of the Department of Revenue and dropping it off.

In Washington state, some pot dispensaries have tried to establish home delivery services, and there's been some trouble on that front.

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City Folk Love Organic Farming (To Death)

In Bethel, New York, a judge ordered a farmer to stop using crushed eggshells to fertilize his hay fields.

A judge has ordered an upstate New York farmer to stop using eggshells as fertilizer after neighboring businesses complained the smell and clouds of flies drove away customers.

The owners of a restaurant and a distilling company adjacent to the fields took Hofstee to court, saying the rotting eggshells caused an unbearable stench and served as a source of fly larvae.

And now for the unreported Rest of the Story:

BETHEL - The owners of a restaurant and distillery and several neighbors have filed a lawsuit against a neighboring farmer for spreading what they say is a stinky mixture of egg shells and liquid duck manure near their property.

Stacy Cohen and Monte Sachs, who own the Dancing Cat Saloon and the Catskill Distilling Company, have been joined in the suit by Bethel Market Cafe owner Thomas O’Laughlin, Silvio Palaez, Laura Mariski and her mother Ophelia Singer.

They claim they’ve been harmed by the stench coming from the Hofstee Dairy Farm, located in an area zoned for agriculture along state Route 17B, and nearby land owned by the farmer, Peter Hofstee, according to the lawsuit.

They're asking Hofstee to not pile up any type of manure within 500 yards of their properties and to not stockpile the manure for more than 24 hours. They’re also asking Hofstee to not spread the manure on weekends or on any holidays from Memorial Day to Columbus Day.

Cohen and Sachs want unspecified compensation for the harm they claim has been done to the distillery’s business since Cohen said they began noticing the smell in July. Cohen said the smell from the manure drove away customers and brought in flies to the distillery and the neighboring restaurant during the summer.

The other residents who filed the lawsuit are also asking for compensation from Hofstee for intentionally ignoring their “rights to use and enjoy their respective properties.”

Mariski and Singer, who live on Dr. Duggan Road where Hofstee also owns property, say the smell is so bad they “cannot open the windows to their home or go outside in their yard.”

Cohen said the smell coming from the farm was something they never experienced in their first five years in business.

Hofstee couldn't be reached for comment Monday. But in September, he denied stockpiling the manure that was seen along the property line dividing the farm and the distillery. He also said he hadn’t changed his farming practices in the past 50 years.

So what we have here is a few city slickers who took it into their heads to move to the country, into an area zoned for agriculture, repeatedly taking the farmer, who has been farming there for half a century, to court because they don't like farm smells.

In a few years, they'll probably decide to live next to an airport and then sue because it's too noisy.

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But, But, Marijuana's Legal In Oregon!

Well, Manuel, some of it is, and some of it isn't. And when you're working with a Mexican drug cartel, you kinda fall into the latter category.

An illegal marijuana grow that was part of a Mexican drug trafficking organization was shut down by an Oregon State Police SWAT team early Tuesday morning.

Officers seized more than 6,500 plants valued at more than $9 million at the grow, located in rural Dayton near the Willamette River.

They also made an arrest of Manuel Madrigal, 42, on federal drug trafficking charges. Madrigal, who has an address in San Antonio, Texas, and a history of previous drug arrests, was transferred to U.S. Marshal custody in Portland.

Madrigal was found in an elaborate living area, complete with a kitchen, that was hidden by a tarp.

Manuel, it seems, was siphoning water out of the river to irrigate the crop, part of which is shown in the above photo. It evidently didn't occur to him that somebody might notice a pot plantation growing right out there in the open like that. They may put a lot of hard work into operations like this, but they don't appear to put a lot of hard thought into them.

In further agricultural news here in Oregon:

Rebekah Spinnett says all she wanted to do was help the city maintain a small piece of property and keep the area around her family’s business looking nice.

Tuesday, that plan was thwarted by a letter from Portland Parks and Recreation.

The letter, dated June 22, orders owners of Steve’s Imports to “cease and stop… all landscape activities” along the Springwater Corridor.

Spinnett says employees at the auto body shop have been mowing, mulching and trimming back blackberry bushes along the trail for years.

The city doesn't seem to mind the hordes of homeless campers in the area: Apparently, this is okay, but cutting back non-native Himalyan blackberries isn't. The city claims that they're planting native species along the trail, and somehow the employees at this woman's business are ruining it all by cutting back invasive blackberries. The campers are cool, though; they evidently float through the air and never bother any of the native plants.

Well, apart from that big fire last week that took out a camper's squat. The fire department has responded to 79 fires there in just the past several months, but that's no big deal; the city bureaucrats know that ashes are great fertilizer.

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