Posts Tagged ‘datechguy's magnificent seven’

Is the post office suffering from high crime?

Posted: June 24, 2023 by navygrade36bureaucrat in crime
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I work as an instructor for a few companies, none of which reside in my local area. Whenever I finish a teaching gig, the company I taught for pays me, sometimes electronically, sometimes with a check. So naturally I was curious when I saw this headline the other day:

Now, reading a bit further (because I don’t trust any headline, and you shouldn’t either), I realized its NOT the Postal Service saying this, its instead a member of the Better Business Bureau. That person had good reason to say this, because she noted that check fraud jumped from 300,000 incidents to 680,000 incidents in 2021, despite Americans writing less checks every year.

From: https://goodmorningwilton.com/break-in-reported-at-wilton-post-office-outside-mail-box/

The issue doesn’t seem to be with residential mailboxes, but rather with the large, outdoor blue post boxes. Post boxes are being broken into at an alarming rate. In some cases, the criminals rob the postal worker to get the key to open the blue boxes. In other cases, they simple beat the boxes open with some blunt instrument. Once they get the checks, it’s not hard to erase the amount with a chemical solution and re-write the check for significantly more than was originally intended.

Checks are probably one of the few items to still be regularly mailed, and the post office was quick to note that its still safe (in their words) to mail checks:

“The Postal Service delivers about 130 billion pieces of mail over a year to 163 million customers,” said Paul Shade with the U.S.P.S. “It still remains the most secure way to transmit anything from any type of mailing.”

Paul Shade, USPS

The Post Office also noted it was installing high security boxes that are more difficult to break into.

There is a trend in the statistics. Going city by city, each “bubble” lists the incidents and arrests. Take a look at California:

Los Angeles: 54 incidents, 1 arrest
Oakland: 51 incidents, 4 arrests
San Francisco: 20 incidents, 2 arrests

And at Texas:

Houston: 97 incidents, 12 arrests
Dallas: 25 incidents, 2 arrests

Vs. Florida:

Miami: 15 incidents, 7 arrests
Tampa: 3 incidents, 3 arrests

Although I didn’t have full access to the data to calculate an arrest to incident ratio, I suspect that California would come out on the losing end of that calculation. Florida’s numbers are significantly lower than expected, and I’d reason its the fact that they make arrests and actually prosecute crimes. If you knew you could simply steal a bag of mail, cash a bunch of washed checks and face little to no chance of repercussion, well, why wouldn’t you?

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.

Progressives are trying to replace Independence Day with Juneteenth

Posted: June 22, 2023 by Jon Fournier in Uncategorized
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Progressives, and other leftists here in the United States, demonstrate a very open and deep loathing for the founding principles of the United States.   They have been on a decades long mission to transform the United States from a Constitutional Republic, built upon individual rights and freedoms, into to socialist Democracy built upon collectivism.

These collectivists have been using the fictional 1619 Project to erase Independence Day as the founding date of our nation.  They are trying to erase the fact that the United Sates was built on freedom and liberty.  They want to concentrate all attention on slavery and away from all of the positives this great nation has achieved.

Juneteenth is another effort similar to the the 1619 project.  Most Americans are still unaware of what Juneteenth is all about.  This article provides a great explanation: Juneteenth becomes federal holiday after Biden signs bill (cnbc.com)

Juneteenth celebrates the emancipation of the last enslaved African Americans. On that day in 1865, Union soldiers led by Gen. Gordon Granger arrived in the coastal city of Galveston, Texas, to deliver General Order No. 3, officially ending slavery in the state.

The final act of liberation came months after the Confederate army’s surrender ended the Civil War, and more than two years after President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation.

On the surface Juneteenth seems rather innocuous and actually maybe positive.  This article, however, documents the sinister motivation behind the holiday: Juneteenth Threatens America’s Civic Traditions (thefederalist.com)

The very name of the legislation is incredibly revealing. Referring to it as a “National Independence Day” — as opposed to the Fourth of July, America’s original Independence Day, that doesn’t enjoy the “national” language — is semantic manipulation intended to convey that this is the real independence day. This bestowal of honor on Juneteenth is an exercise in refounding the country in accordance with the priorities of the intersectional identitarian left (e.g., direct democracy, expansive legal privileges for preferential political groups, and the weaponization of government against “bitter clingers”) in the pursuit of casting aside the few remaining constitutional and republican norms of the American founding such as a societal reverence for natural law and federalism.

Those of us on the political right need to stand tall and prevent the left from replacing our true Independence Day with Juneteenth.  We need to stand strong for our nation and our founding principles. 

Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson makes $10 million “growing pains” error with e-signature blunder

Posted: June 18, 2023 by John Ruberry in crime, News/opinion, opinion/news, politics
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Johnson in photo.

By John Ruberry

If I screw up at work, to the tune of $1,000 or so, I’ll get hollered at by my boss. 

And an error of mine that costs my employer $10,000 will see me filing for unemployment benefits the next morning. 

Chicago’s newly sworn-in mayor, Brandon Johnson, just made a $10 million whopper of a mistake. 

ShotSpotter, which this year changed its name to SoundThnking, is a firm that sells gunfire-detection software, has few friends in Chicago. It is blamed, wrongly in my opinion, for setting up the chain events that led to the death of 13-year-old reputed gang member Adam Toledo in a police shooting. A Northwestern University study found that 86 percent of Chicago police deployments initiated by ShotSpotter alerts led to “dead-end deployments.”

During this year’s mayoral campaign, Johnson vowed to cancel Chicago’s contract with SoundThinking. But earlier this month, a contract with his e-signature approved a $10,184,900 payment to SoundThinking, covering a contract extension approved by his predecessor, Lori Lightfoot, last autumn.

The mayor’s senior advisor, Jason Lee, says Johnson’s e-signature was mistakenly attached to the document authorizing the hefty payment. Of the contract carelessness, Lee said, “That’s not the procedure that we will have moving forward, but that’s what was done.” 

The SoundThinking snafu was a two-day story last week in Chicago. Kudos to the Chicago Sun-Times for breaking the story but had Johnson’s moderate opponent in April’s runoff election, Paul Vallas, made a similar mistake, we’d still be hearing about the $10 million e-signature debacle. And of course, the national media, which is a phalanx of the far-left, is completely ignoring this story. 

Hunter Clauss, who writes the Rundown, a popular political newsletter on behalf of Chicago’s NPR affiliate, dismissed the $10 million blunder as nothing but “growing pains” for the Johnson administration.

Chicago, because of its massive unfunded public worker pension debt, is essentially bankrupt. Its former cash cow, the North Michigan Avenue retail strip, suffered another departure last week when AT&T announced it was closing its local flagship shop there. Macy’s, Disney, Banana Republic, Verizon, and the Gap have shut down their North Michigan Avenue locations since 2020. The retail strip, also known as the Magnificent Mile, was hit by two rounds of rampant looting and rioting three years ago.

Chicago cannot afford $10 million “growing pains” errors. Don’t forget, ShotSpotter has not served Chicago well as a crime fighting tool.

Prior to his election, Johnson was a Cook County commissioner while also serving as a paid organizer for the Chicago Teachers Union. He was a Chicago Public Schools teacher before being hired by his union. 

Vallas was the former CEO of Chicago Public Schools. He was in charge of three other school systems. 

Prior to becoming mayor, Johnson was in charge of nothing of importance. Well, he does own a large home on Chicago’s West Side. But Johnson owed over $3,000 in unpaid water bills and fines until he paid up shortly before he was elected this spring. He also recently owed over $1,000 in traffic tickets.

As Barack Obama famously said many years ago, “Elections have consequences.”

John Ruberry regularly blogs five miles north of Chicago at Marathon Pundit.

Is America resembling the French Revolution?

Posted: June 17, 2023 by navygrade36bureaucrat in crime, culture
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On a recent visit to Colonial Williamsburg, I had the good fortune to listen to a speech by a Marquis de Lafayette re-enactor. He was good. He was really, really good. After his speech I chatted with him, and he recommended reading the book Lafayette by Harlow Unger. So I grabbed it off Audible and over the past two weeks it has entertained me on my drive to work.

If you need a book to read or listen to, get this one. Unger does a great job of being historically accurate while remaining interesting. He highlights not just the events that happened, but the personal relationships and how they influenced history. While I knew about Lafayette from my time studying the Battle of Yorktown, I did not know about how pivotal his financial contributions to the Revolutionary War were, nor how important he was to opening French markets to America after the war.

But perhaps the most stunning portions of the book relate to the French Revolution. Unger does not mince words describing how Lafayette blundered trying to replicate the liberty and ideas from the American Constitution into France. At multiple times, Lafayette turned down opportunities to lead his country in establishing a constitutional monarchy or a republic, which eventually fell into the hands of terrible men like Robespierre and Danton, whose bloodlust plunged France into terribly bloody revolution that likely killed over 1 million citizens and 2.5 million military in the ensuing wars. Random people were pulled off the street, beheaded and then had their heads displayed on pikes. Unger’s direct quotes from a multitude of direct sources, many of them Americans such as Thomas Jefferson. None mince words describing the horror of mob rule. While Lafayette himself would escape execution, France was never the same again.

The beheading of Robespierre, which “ended” the Reign of Terror in France

The chapters that describe the fall of France’s government were telling in that they had many parallels to modern-day America. The gradual descent into lawlessness, while good men either sat idly by or refused to take action, seems eerily reminiscent of the descent of many large American cities into chaos following BLM-related riots. The takeover of the government by the Jacobins, who seemed to lust only for more blood and power, resembles so many statements from prominent lawmakers, whether its to strike down white women from positions of authority, kill Trump supporters, or call people a threat to democracy. In French Revolution fashion, its even OK for people to display a severed head of a politician. I’m just surprised it wasn’t placed on a pike.

Anyone clamoring for revolution should read about the horrors of the French Revolution, and how multiple missed opportunities for a peaceful removal of the King resulted in massive violence that plunged France into darkness. Anyone who thinks they will run the mob should read about how Robespierre and Danton both faced the very guillotine that they used to execute thousands of their own countrymen. Anyone that thinks we should strive for this style of revolution is a madman.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.

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