MaxRedline

Money Laundering?

This seems more than a little ridiculous: the day after Thanksgiving of last year, a guy drove his Caddy into a Washman car-wash place - there are a dozen of them scattered around the Portland area, many of which offer auto detailing in addition to the standard wash. He chose the detailing service, and he left his backpack, containing $4,000 in cash, on the passenger seat. Imagine his surprise to find the cash missing! He thought he might have left it at home, so he went back and looked; nope, no cash there either. So he went back to the car-wash, explained what had happened, and wanted his cash back.

There are signs all over the place, telling people not to leave valuables in the car, which he admittedly ignored.

As it turned out, one of the kids on the detailing crew was a 16 year-old meth addict, who checked the backpack, found the money, took it, and ran straight to his drug dealer with it. At 46 years old, you'd think that Ed Wallace would know better, but no:

That left Wallace without the cash he had planned to deposit in the bank for his party bus limousine business.

Wallace asked the company to pay up for the actions of its employee. Washman declined, pointing to signs at the business warning customers not to leave valuables in their cars.

That led Wallace this month to file a lawsuit in Multnomah County Circuit Court.

He wants his money, plus legal fees. The company did offer Wallace $2500, but he turned them down. So now he's suing. Good luck with that, Ed - I don't think a judge is going to support you on this one, so you'll be out four grand plus legal fees for both yourself and the company you sued. You don't have to be smart to run a business, but it certainly helps.

Something Seems Wrong, Here

PORTLAND — A Pacific Northwest tribe is traveling nearly 5,000 miles across Canada and the United States with a 22-foot-tall totem pole on a flatbed truck in a symbolic journey meant to galvanize opposition to fossil fuel infrastructure projects they believe will imperil native lands.

So they're driving a diesel truck - which I believe runs on "fossil fuel" - in order to protest "fossil fuel" projects. The Lummi Nation, from northwest Washington, will spend 19 days lugging their 1.5-ton totem pole across the country and up into eastern Canada. Nothing says "environmental concern" like a nice relaxing drive in a diesel-powered truck.

Here they are in Bellingham, Washington last Tuesday, where they paused to bless their totem pole with smoldering sagebrush smoke. Because smoldering sagebrush is actually very "environmentally-friendly". The Lummi have been doing this for the past four years, evidently. It's unknown how much evil CO₂ and particulates they've pumped out during the course of their protests.

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Trump Edges Upward, Clinton Edges Downward

WASHINGTON, Aug. 26 (UPI) -- The UPI/CVoter daily presidential tracking poll released Friday shows Donald Trump leading Hillary Clinton by less than 1 percentage point.

Over the course of last week, support for The Donald has increased by 4 points; Pantsuit recorded a decline of 3.3 points. The general consensus seems to be that this election stinks, as neither candidate is exactly wildly popular among voters. Whichever one ends up winning in November, he or she appears unlikely to be able to lay claim to a mandate.

It speaks volumes about the state of our country when these two are the best the two dominant parties can put forward.

Yesterday In History

In 1928, the Kellogg-Briand Pact, outlawing war as a means to settle international disputes, was signed by 15 nations in Paris. World War II began 11 years later.

The pact was more formally referred to as the Treaty for Renunciation of War. It's a good thing these guys all got together for this....

I imagine that Obama's "deal" with Iran will prove equally successful.

Interesting Light Rail Technicality

With light rail being built at a frantic pace in cities across the country, I wonder how many other transit agencies have this little clause in their insurance policies:

ST. PAUL, Minn. -- Minnesota's No-Fault Insurance Act doesn't extend to passengers on light rail transit lines, which was a huge surprise to a woman injured this month on the Green Line.

Linda McBrayer of St. Paul suffered multiple knee and leg injuries Aug. 4 when the westbound train suddenly stopped near the intersection of University Ave. and Park St. near the State Capitol.

She filed a claim, as she was hospitalized and presently wears leg braces and uses a walker to get around. The claim was denied:

"Light rail vehicles are not 'motor vehicles' as defined in the No-Fault Act," the letter from a Metropolitan Council claims representative read.

"Please be advised that treatment has been denied because Linda McBrayer was not in a motor vehicle at the time of the incident."

Had she been injured on a bus, that would have been a different story, because they are considered to be motor vehicles.

On the other hand, it's kind of a Darwin thing - she and her husband, after moving from Arizona to St. Paul, "made a conscious decision to not own a car, it was the responsible thing to do for the planet."

Smug only takes you so far, Linda.

The Widder Finicum Jumps Back Into The News

The widow of Lavoy Finicum, the 54-year-old Arizona rancher and key figure in the Malheur Wildlife Refuge occupation earlier this year, plans to sue the Oregon State Police and FBI for civil rights violations relating to his death, her lawyer told The Oregonian/OregonLive on Saturday. 

Break out the popcorn; this should be entertaining should it ever come to pass. The guy reminded me of a banty rooster, strutting around and fully involved in his own sense of self-importance. Of course, his now ex-wife (and I believe she was wife number three) has been running around claiming that he was "murdered in cold blood". That doesn't square with the video evidence, but in her world, it doesn't have to.

It seems unlikely that we'll see this alleged impending lawsuit, since it's evident that "LaVoy" repeatedly ignored police commands on multiple occasions in the minutes leading up to his assumption of ambient temperature, and was finally shot while reaching for a loaded gun in his jacket pocket.

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Speaking Of Fire,

This was the scene in close-in southeast Portland near the downtown area after another homeless camp went up in flames yesterday afternoon and spread to nearby buildings. There's been around one of these a week, of late. Keeps the fire crews busy, I guess. Just another day in Portland.

Probably, if the city "leaders" didn't spend nearly $71 million a year providing "services" to them, they'd mostly thin out and go someplace else. Some of these people can be helped, and should be helped. But the fact of the matter is that the majority of them are bums (or in today's vernacular, "travelers") and are more interested in panhandling or stealing and parting out bicycles and other stuff so they can get money for their next fix or their next bottle of vodka than in doing anything productive. Many others are mentally ill, but can't be forced into treatment because that would violate their constitutional rights, even though they're so out of it that they don't even understand the concept of constitutional rights.

There's not much to be done in the case of the bums, apart from withdrawing their "services". It's hard to say what to do about the nutters, but it appears that the current approach is to let them run loose until they end up dead. As long as they're not stealing your bike, it seems to be okay.

Now Daesh Are Into Flamethrowers

Always looking for exciting new ways to kill perceived enemies and people of the "wrong religion", they've done scaldings, boiling people alive in hot tar, and have now found something else:

Truss them up and burn them to death with a flamethrower. Apparently, there's a competition between L'il Kim in Best Korea and these pigs to see who's best qualified for permanent residency in a rubber-room facility.

"The six ISIS leaders were executed by their counterparts using flamethrower," Iraqi News quoted Ismat Rajab, a Kurdistan Democratic Party official in Mosul, as saying. "They were executed as they tried to escape to Syria."

 

Tactical nukes increasingly seem to be in order to cauterize the infection. Barry's drone strikes aren't cutting it.

 

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The Entrepeneur

Tyrone Poole is a big-thinking 33 year-old. Growing up in inner northeast Portland, he graduated from the worst-performing high school in the city, Jefferson, in 2001, then went to Portland Community College to become a firefighter, earning both his fire science degree and emergency medical technician credentials by 2005 - and in the process, the workouts made him "look like an action figure", in his words. Tragedy struck in December of that year when he fell during a training and tore a muscle in his left leg, also destroying lymph nodes. He was out of the firefighting business. Then it got worse:

Without a paycheck, he couldn't afford rent. After nine months of hospital visits, he had lots of debt, nowhere to live and a leg that had to be elevated most of the day.

He couch-surfed for a while. But his friends grew tired of taking care of him. One night, around 10 p.m., a friend told Poole he could no longer stay.

"I grabbed all my stuff and left,'" Poole said. "I was carrying my entire life with me on crutches."

He hobbled a few miles toward a MAX station, each step like walking on glass. By the time he arrived, he could barely stand. He laid down and vomited.

A police officer found him, Poole said, and assumed he'd been drinking. Poole explained his injury, and the cop offered him a ride.

The cop drove him to a shelter at the YWCA, where the beds were full, but they dragged out a broken cot for him to sleep on. So there he was, ten years ago: broke, homeless, on crutches still, and sleeping on a busted cot. Times were bad.

The next morning, he limped out of the shelter. A worker stopped him and offered a voucher for a year of paid rent, wherever he could find a place. Poole agreed to stay and volunteer at the shelter while he searched for an apartment.

"I looked for four months," he said. "Denied. Denied. Denied."

Poole tried to tell managers he had a year of guaranteed rent. But they saw his drawbacks: Poole had been evicted while in the hospital. His car and his storage unit had been repossessed. His credit was bad. And because his doctors had yet to clear him for work, he had no income.

What's a guy to do? Many would have given up. Instead, he came up with an idea based upon the difficulties that he, and others he knew, had encountered when trying to score a new crib. He figured there had to be a better way.

The application process, as he saw it, needed an overhaul, so people wouldn't be wasting time and money on application fees only to be turned down.  And landlords/managers could benefit as well, by not spending time interviewing applicants, money running background checks, etc., and not having it work out.

So he pitched his idea, and people liked it.

Poole imagined something automated, a program that could pull a renter's background once — and then screen it against new rentals as they become available.

He didn't have the money or credit to start a business. He wasn't a coder. He didn't have a business degree that taught him how to succeed.

Poole won a spot in the development commission's 2014 start-up incubator. Agency leaders gave him free rent and paid for lawyers to set up his business. They introduced him to investors and city bigwigs. Poole hired coders to build his platform.

It went live yesterday in Portland and Atlanta. There are 4000 rentals listed here, and 10,000 rentals in the Atlanta area.

"We pull all your life data," Poole said. "We plugged into all of the courthouses. We plugged into TransUnion. We wrote algorithms to read the documents and extract the information we need."

When users log in, they will see every vacant property, along with an icon that notes whether they qualify. If they don't, the website explains why. For instance, if a manager requires three times the rent in monthly income — say $4,000 — and an applicant's household earns $3,000 a month, the website will tell the tenant they are $1,000 a month short.

Applicants initially pay $35 to use NoAppFee.com. Landlords — grateful to be spared the hassle of meeting people who don't qualify, Poole said — then take $35 off the tenants' move-in fees.

So for the tenants, there's no application fee, because they get it back. Hence the name of the startup. People have been investing in his vision, and he's been able to set up an office on Hall Blvd. in Beaverton, Oregon to run the operation. Their promise: "We can house any family regardless of rental barriers in 24 hours."

In the future: to license the software to agencies using it for affordable housing. This guy is no dummy, not by a long shot.

Obama Admonished Louisiana's "Cajun Navy"

Sensing somehow from his perch at the ninth tee that there might be some racism goin' on down there in the floodwaters, Obama apparently fired off a memo which read in part:

“Care must be taken to ensure that actions, both intentional and unintentional, do not exclude groups of people based on race, color, national origin (including limited English proficiency), religion, sex, or disability.”

“Those planning for Katrina appeared to assume most people could rely on personal vehicles to evacuate and failed to consider the transportation needs of all segments of the population.”

“Many seeking temporary housing immediately encountered discriminatory advertisements that explicitly refused to rent to African Americans.”

You can see why he might have had cause for concern.

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