MaxRedline

Taking Names And Numbers

ICE is getting serious when it comes to tracking illegal aliens in the USA:

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency has officially gained agency-wide access to a nationwide license plate recognition database, according to a contract finalized earlier this month. The system gives the agency access to billions of license plate records and new powers of real-time location tracking, raising significant concerns from civil libertarians. 

Cool. It's long overdue. Your cell phone and your car already report your location. Plate recognition data is just another tool for the kit.

 

Helluva Job, Brownie!

In his 16th and final State of the State address, California governor Jerry Brown made a case that his policies have charted a glorious future for the Golden State.

Sane people might disagree, but the public employee unions just love him - he managed to increase the state payroll by $1 billion. Presently, under his "leadership", the income-tax rate, at 13.3 percent, is the nation's highest - and also boasts the highest base sales tax, at 7.5 percent. And if they protest high taxes, residents are "freeloaders", in his words.

The state has billions of dollars in unfunded liabilities, to which he has added. People and businesses are leaving in droves, even big companies like Honda and Toyota have relocated their national headquarters and much of their manufacturing to other states, taking thousands of jobs with them, under Moonbeam's tenure.

We're slowly making progress, though: one Brown down on the left coast; one more to go.

 

Oregon Turkeys

governor Kate Brown is a turkey, but she's not an Oregon turkey - like many of our pests, she came here from back east.

But in Pilot Rock, the pests have been these guys:

They've been causing property damage (mostly scratching up cars) and crapping all over the place (sort of like Kate), so the USDA's APHIS division has been given the go-ahead to deploy lethal options, if necessary. Unfortunately, they can only be used with problem birds, rather than Brown.

But after the kill order was passed, the birds moved out, and haven't been a problem since. It seems that there must be a communication pipeline between politicians and other turkeys.

 

Jade Hameister

Earlier this month, the 16-year-old became the youngest person to conquer the Polar Hat Trick – having skied to the North Pole, skated across Greenland’s largest ice cap, and skied to the South Pole.

The feat is considered almost impossible to pull off – and at her young age, it’s particularly impressive.

But when Jade gave an inspirational TEDx talk in Melbourne, the comments were flooded with misogynists throwing retro sexist putdowns at her.

Many suggested that she find a husband and make a sandwich for him.

Well, she hasn't married, but she did make a sandwich:

‘I made you a sandwich (ham & cheese). Now ski 37 days and 600km to the South Pole and you can eat it. xx’

The Latest From Formerly Great Britain

Rawlett School, in Tamworth, Staffordshire, has issued “nail legislation” as part of new uniform guidelines stipulating the length and colour of students' nails.

Oddly, some people have a problem with the school's nail legislation. Even the Brits, who love rules, regulations, and high taxes, seem to have limits on occasion.

 

Tesla, Meet Fire Truck

It turns out that the autopilot "feature" increasingly incorporated into cars has sort of a problem: the software's okay when it comes to detecting and avoiding objects that are in motion, but it sucks at detecting stationary objects, as this guy in L.A. discovered when his Tesla drove straight  into a stopped firetruck on I-405. At 60 miles an hour. It didn't even slow down, because the "feature" didn't see a freakin' firetruck. That's a feature, not a bug:

It sounds like a glaring flaw, the kind of horrible mistake engineers race to eliminate. Nope. These systems are designed to ignore static obstacles because otherwise, they couldn't work at all.

That's not nearly as crazy as it may seem. Radar knows the speed of any object it sees, and is also simple, cheap, robust, and easy to build into a front bumper. But it also detects lots of things a car rolling down the highway needn't worry about, like overhead highway signs, loose hubcaps, or speed limit signs. So engineers make a choice, telling the car to ignore these things and keep its eyes on the other cars on the road: They program the system to focus on the stuff that's moving.

If it's all the same, I'll pass on the forthcoming autonomous cars.

 

Never Been To Florida?

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has declared the eastern cougar subspecies (known as both Felis concolor couguar and Puma concolor couguar) officially extinct and removed it from the Federal List of Threatened and Endangered Wildlife.

 

California Loons

Billionaire Tom Steyer is refusing to donate any more money to the Democratic Party after party leaders compromised on a deal that reopened the federal government. Steyer, who financed former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, told Fortune Magazine Wednesday that he can no longer give money to a party that sells out on principles.

Democratics have principles? When did that happen - when they founded the KKK? Or maybe when they passed the Jim Crow laws? Or was it when LBJ said of his "Great Society" thing, "I'll have them niggers voting Democrat for the next 200 years"?

The former hedge-fund guy blew a lot of money on the Pantsuit campaign, and he's really ticked that he lost. So he's hopping around, insisting that Trump be impeached (hey, wasn't Pantsuit's hubby impeached?), demanding that Trump be removed from office, and now, since the Democratics didn't do what he told them to do, he's taking his ball and going home. Good. A lot of us got tired of Tommy a long time ago.

Let him go visit the Acid Queen, and pay before they start.

And if you want to know why the state of Oregon is so screwed up: 1/5 of the current residents moved here from California, and brought their politics with them. Many of the others came from back east, and did the same. There's a reason why so many Oregonians want to live somewhere else today. 12% of moves into Washington hail from Oregon.

Personally, I thought about moving to Idaho, but they're being invaded now as well. Montana or Wyoming are looking a lot more attractive.

 

Widder Finicum Sues

You knew we'd not heard the last from the Bundy Bunch. Paw Bundy's filed suit in Nevada, asserting his historic rights to keep running his cows on public lands on account of the feds don't have any right to claim ownership of Western lands. And the Widder also filed a federal lawsuit yesterday in Portland:

The lawsuit filed Friday in U.S. District Court in Portland seeks at least $5 million in damages for Robert "LaVoy" Finicum's widow and each of their 12 children. The United States of America is listed as a defendant, along with the FBI, Oregon Gov. Kate Brown and others.

Among other things, she claims that her hubby was "deliberately executed by a pre-planned government ambush."

Maybe he shouldn't have kept reaching for his handgun.

 

Census In Seattle

Volunteers are hitting the streets in the USA's sixth-most expensive city to do their annual census of the number of homeless people, which will supposedly guide city strategy for the coming year regarding their "fight" against homelessness. Maybe they can tally up the number of needles, as well.

It's one thing to be living in a tent, but there's no excuse for living like pigs. No offense intended to the pigs.

Here in Portland, there was a guy living in Forest Park, which is the largest such greenspace of any city in the country - the Wildwood Trail alone extends some 35 miles. You'd never have known he was there; he was camped downslope, and he kept it clean. It was only discovered when a ranger stumbled across it while inspecting trees in the forest for signs of insect infestation. The guy had even set things up down there to collect and purify water for use at his camp. No sign of trash or needles anywhere.

The photos of his place were impressive; he may have been knocked out of housing during that recession, but he was no bum.