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The Sex Scandal Blowing Up Oakland's Police Department
http://www.vice.com/read/oakland-underage-sex-work-scandal
Not so long ago it was possible to point to Oakland as a police reform success story. In the last decade, the cops have gone from conducting an average of 3,000 searches without probable cause every year to 280 in 2015. Officers are now required to wear body cameras. After decades of abuse, violence, and corruption, the police department seemed to finally be changing.
In the last few weeks, though, a scandal has emerged that threatens to tear the department apart. In brief, 14 Oakland police officers are currently under investigation for sleeping with an 18-year-old sex worker—three of them when she was 17, thus allegedly committing rape and sex trafficking under California law. The woman, using the alias Celeste Guap, told the East Bay Express earlier this month that she was having sex with the cops for money and protection; she had been given a friend's arrest history and information about undercover prostitution stings.
Hints of the scandal surfaced last year, after a suicide note written one of the officers involved, Brendan O'Brien, mentioned Guap, prompting an investigation. But the higher-ups allegedly dragged their feet, and the supposed cover-up has only widened the sordid scandal has since expanded. (According to Guap's later comments to the media, she's actually had sex with "more than 30 officers" from multiple agencies around the Bay Area.)
The shocking and salacious events were the catalyst to Oakland appointing four police chiefs in two weeks. Initially, Sean Whent, who was promoted to top cop at the end of a similarly messy 2013 shuffle that saw three new police chiefs in three days, got canned because he allegedly knew about Guap sleeping with Oakland cops but didn't press for a speedy and public investigation.
Well, Most of the mess is cleaned up...
I had the HTML and other electronic versions of Random Scribblings done a couple of months ago. I should have uploaded it without an index to test it on my phone, and I should have examined it more closely on the computer. Some of the code was REALLY bad.
One page, the longest, still wobbles in Android Firefox on a phone, but is fine in the phone's built-in browser. I haven't tested it in Opera or Chrome.
I went to the pawn shop and bought a tablet just to see if it was okay on a tablet. It isn't, at least on a Samsung Galaxy 3 tablet; the text is teensy, more so in Firefox than its native browser but hard to read anyway. I guess I need to google a little; in the computer if the text is too small I can hit Ctrl +. The reverse pinch thing on a touchscreen isn't good enough.
Anyway, one page is very long and has quite a bit of code, and looking for clues of where the errors were by examining the page in a browser, how I debugged back in my programming days, wasn't cutting it. So I ran it through the W3C code validator, and egads! Over 1700 errors and warnings! I settled down a little when I realized all but a half dozen or so were simply the lack of an "alt" tag in images where that tag was not only unnecessary but would get in the blind reader's way; the graphic is a one pixel clear PNG I use for tab stops at the beginning of a paragraph (<img src="tab.png" width="25" height="1" align="left" border="0">).
The first error was from a useful habit I got into back in my programming days: re-using code. Re-inventing the wheel for each wagon you invent is just stupid, so I would simply copy everything above the <body> statement. But the twenty year old doctype was no longer recognized. Some other ancient code wasn't recognized, either.
Well, I'd better get back to work on it... It's here.
Year Zero
Aristarchus was right. Angry and stupid won the world.
Oh, and before I go any further, if you want any citations you can use google.
Society has become a reflection of the worst features of Internet social media. Memes, sloganeering, doublespeak, the willful and proud ignorance of facts, bigotry, hatred, irrationality, and general meanness have become the order of the day.
The latest manifestation of this is the recent UK referendum on whether the UK should leave the European Union, i.e. the "Brexit."
As you know, the Leave side won by a narrow margin. The campaign on one side (Vote Leave) was worthy of an Eastern Bloc dictatorship or a banana republic while the Remain campaign was half-hearted.
The UK is a union of four countries (plus various other bits and pieces), but most significantly England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales. We have lived in relative peace and harmony for a few hundred years.
A global financial meltdown and years of right-wing austerity government with no credible alternative have left the UK (as many other modern countries) in a miserable state. Along comes Nigel Farage, a far-right nationalist, who got himself elected to the European Parliament, who openly denigrates foreigners in the course of his official duties (those he's supposed to be working with in order to represent the UK's interests and to get deals done) and offers the disengaged populace that age-old chestnut of being able to blame foreigners for all of their problems.
The right-wing of the Tory Party (the natural party of government in the whole of the UK, pretty right-wing itself) defects in part to Farage's party, UKIP ("the Kippers") and all the slimy bigotry oozes out of the woodwork. The best one was blaming gay marriage for the 2014 floods.
Next thing you know, we're having a referendum (free public vote on a single issue) on the UKs continued membership of the EU.
Farage's henchmen in all this, the official Vote Leave campaigners (even Farage was too extreme to be allowed on the official team) are Iain Duncan Smith, presider over some of the most draconian cuts and changes to the benefits system (for the disabled, sick, old, unemployed, homeless etc.) ever and Michael Gove who was Education Secretary and harboured some paranoid delusional fantasy that professional English state education teachers were Marxists out to deliberately brainwash and ruin the education of the young.
So the gist of their argument was as follows: "This is Great Britain. We are admired the world over. Everyone loves us and wants to do business with us. Only, we have to leave the EU first. The EU will still want to do business with us because we are so great. By the way, if we leave the EU we can keep foreigners out. Foreigners keep taking your jobs. We can also have a bonfire of red tape. The EU gives us lots of red tape. We can get rid of inconvenient laws that make things expensive but limit pollution and protect workers. And we can get rid of Human Rights legislation. You're British, we invented Human Rights, so we don't need them written down."
There was no plan. Just platitudes, slogans, repeated inverted logic worthy of Goebbels, national pride, "Take Back Control" (we already had control), "Take our country back" (we already had it).
The public lapped this up, or at least the more motivated ones did. The Internet is still alight with it. (Hi guys! Keep at it, providing your "balance." Beat those green blood-drinking lizards with your super powers of logic and reason.)
Michael Gove got tired of struggling to answer questions and declared that he was "sick of experts." The experts warned of the great economic dangers that lay ahead. This was hand-waved away as a conspiracy, of the Elite and the Establishment protecting themselves: Project Fear.
The official Vote Leave election literature (flyers, leaflets, posters) contained outright lies. In fact some companies who warned of the dangers to their on-going UK business due to the uncertainty caused by a Brexit decision were mis-quoted. There was also a very dubious claim about £350M per week that we give to the EU that "could be used to fund the NHS - a new hospital a week."
So along comes the referendum which, incidentally, is not legally binding. Members of Parliament must vote laws through. The results of a referendum may be used to influence their decision. More of that in a minute.
So Vote Leave won 52% to 48%. Gibraltar voted by about 94% to remain. 95% of Gibraltarians work in Spain. Scotland and Northern Ireland voted to remain. Two years ago Scotland had a referendum on independence from the UK and voted to remain by 60% to 40% on the premise that it would have to remain in the UK to be in the EU. Wales and England voted to leave the EU.
Since the result (which is not legally binding) the value of Sterling has fallen to its lowest in 31 years. Billions (trillions?) have been wiped off of stock markets. Large numbers of workers in the City of London are facing redundancy or being relocated to the continent (i.e. EU countries) to continue their business.
Very worryingly, racism is now overt on the streets of England. The first targets are the Polish, who came over in large numbers to work in the last 20 or so years, and, of course, everyone's favourite ne'er-do-well, the Muslim. Poles have had "Polish Vermin Go Home" cards put through their letter boxes. People have been verbally abused and threatened in the street, even by sweet little old ladies as well as skinheads with swastika tatoos and St George's Cross flags and T-shirs. There are "immigrants out" banners in the streets.
You see, many of the salt-of-the-earth Vote Leave people thought they were voting to kick out the foreigners, and straight away.
Other people from the other nations in the UK are no longer welcome in England by some, it would seem. They want "their" country back. The problem is, this is still the UK. The referendum wasn't about English independence, it was about the UK leaving the EU.
If you listen to the Kippers and Brexiters, the financial downturn is a conspiracy by the Elite and the Establishment to punish the common man for daring to vote. It's not due to uncertainty. Oh no, that would be too simple. It's another manifestation of the Project Fear conspiracy.
England has shot itself firmly in the foot here. Now Scotland is demanding a second independence referendum as soon as possible, because Scotland doesn't want to leave the EU.
Northern Ireland wants to remain in the EU as well and has a number of options, one of which is reunification with Eire. It is very important for the Peace Process (before the Muslim bogeyman we had Irish Republican Terrorism here) for there to be an open border between the two countries. It could choose independence within the EU or maybe an alliance with Scotland.
Vote Leave are currently being sued by some of the companies whose views on the Brexit they misrepresented (they said the opposite, essentially).
The £350M for the NHS was just pure fiction.
Remember that the turmoil in the financial markets is just a conspiracy by the Elite to keep the common man down.
The UK is highly likely to disintegrate. England and Wales (and many of the "take our country back" people don't want Wales) will be on their own.
Meanwhile, millions of EU citizens living and working in the (soon to disintegrate UK) don't know if and when they're going to have to leave and find new jobs etc. Millions of UK citizens who work in the EU are in the same situation, including many retirees who settled in sunny climes such as Spain.
Farage, Gove and Duncan Smith were cock-sure that the EU would be desperate to trade with us if we left, but the EU has basically returned Nigel Farages compliments by saying "No, get lost. If that's what you think of us, we'll manage fine without you." There is a possibility that they'll let us trade with them under similar terms as today (i.e, with all that pesky commie red-tape and free movement of goods, capital and labour) but without any democratic representation, i.e. no Members of the European Parliament.
You know, what? This time I'm in favour of Scottish independence and we'll move there in a year or two and laugh as the Little Englanders spend the next two or three decades clearing up the mess that they made for themselves.
Sick of experts, indeed. "Take back control" "Take our country back."
So, in summary, the UK will disintegrate, England has made enemies of its trading partners, the Weimar Republic has come to town and it looks like they're going to end up still over-run with filthy foreigners from the EU and elsewhere but with no say in how the EU is run!
"That's democracy!!!" Well, if you say so.
Nice one England! Own goal!
PS That nice Mr Putin is a great friend of Nigel Farage (and Marine Le Pen, of France) and has donated money to UKIP (and the Front National). Just so you know.
[Updated to fix some typos.]
GIMPy Text
(There's an illustrated copy of this at mcgrew.info)
The GNU Image Manipulation Program is an excellent free and open source graphics program that will do almost anything you want to a bitmap image.
Almost. When text is needed in an image, GIMP is indeed gimpy. Rather than use fonts installed in the computer’s operating system, it has its own, very limited set of fonts, and no way to exactly position your text.
The workaround is easy: don’t use GIMP for text.
Today’s word processors can all write PDF files, both closed source commercial word processors and open source tools. My favorite is Open Office Write. GIMP can import them as images, and it does an excellent job of it.
Say you wanted to use the above image (a 35 mm slide I took in 1974 and digitized with a cheap plastic slide viewer, a phone, a rubber band, and adhesive tape) and add “your move” in the upper left hand corner of the image. First, open your word processor and choose the font you want. Any font installed on your computer will work, and there are literally thousands of fonts you can download from the internet and install in a few seconds. One I’ve downloaded is Callistroke. We’ll use that one for the example, and I’ll explain why shortly.
Once the font is chosen, type in the text and highlight it, center it, and make the font size large enough that it stretches from border to border.
Next, export it as PDF and open GIMP. Once GIMP’s stuff has all loaded, you can open the PDF as an image. I simply put it on the last page of this document rather than making a new document. Before you tell GIMP to import it, raise the resolution to 600 DPI or higher to prevent pixelation. You can make it smaller later.
When it opens, select Tools --> Selection Tools --> Rectangle Select, and outline your text.
Now select Image --> Crop to Selection.
The reason I like the outline fonts in most illustrations and graphics is that I can have white letters outlined in black, which will show up clearly in any image. If your text is going to be in a landscape with a blue sky, a non-outline font in a contrasting color is as good or better. Don’t use red letters on a green background as it will be invisible to some people.
There are a couple of steps to get there. First, select Tools --> Color Picker. Place your cursor over the white and click. Then choose Tools --> Selection Tools --> Select By Color. Now click anywhere white and press “Del” and everything white will be transparent.
Now, select Select --> None.
Transparent parts will show up as a two shades of gray checkerboard. as in the illustration below.
Now choose Tools --> Paint Tools --> Bucket Fill to fill in the white part of your text.
Now open the image you want to put the text in. There will be a ruler at the top of the screen showing how many pixels in a given area. In our image, where we want the text is about 750 pixels wide. In the text image, select Image --> Scale Image. The following dialog opens:
Place the cursor in the “Width” field, then type in the number. We’re changing 1024 to 750. Now press “Tab” once and the “Height” field will change. Now just click “scale”.
When it finishes scaling, press Ctrl+A to select the whole image, than Ctrl+C to copy it. Tab to the image you’re adding text to, make sure the “Rectangle Select” tool is chosen (see earlier in this article) and press Ctrl+V to paste the text in.
Now put the cursor on a letter and hold the primary mouse button and move the text where you want it.
Now merge the two images by pressing Ctrl+M then Enter. Here is the final image:
You can add all sorts of fancy things to your text with different images.
To make the above image, I got a picture of fire from Google, Wrote the word “FIRE” in open office, exported as PDF, selected black (lettering), deleted, and pasted it over the fire.
So finally, GIMP has everything I need. Well, maybe except the ability to make moving PNGs and vector graphics.
Taking it out on the daily fail
So by rights today should be a really shitty day: The Brexit morons have condemned us to a national atmosphere of poverty, oppression, overt racism and, worst of all, Nigel "the mollusc" Farage's supremely kickable smug excuse for a face all over the TV for the next month. But at least I got a nice chance to vent today.
I sometimes do online marketing & academic research surveys in order to pick up a little extra cash. It's worth about £50-60 a month, which is really handy. Often it's boring grind work, but other times it can be interesting. Sometimes you get to see previews of new films & products, and sometimes, just sometimes, something more serendipitous.
Half way through a marketing survey about newspapers I realised it had been commissioned by the Daily Mail. In the wake of today's news I really wanted to give those hate-stirring shits a piece of my mind. I completed the survey honestly (which wasn't hard) and at the end of it there was a lovely free-text field for me to give any comments and feedback about the Mail brand. I let them have it. I told them about the lies and the hypocrisy, about the profiteering fearmongering. I told them they are a laughing stock online, mocked them for the Clickbait Sidebar of Shame and suggested they all give up their jobs and go live in the wilderness. I only wish I'd had the presence of mind to copy-paste it all before hitting submit, but I feel soooooo much better now. So thanks Daily Mail, for letting me vent my spleen upon you, it goes some tiny, insignificant way towards redeeming for all the damage you done over the years.
If you're interested in the survey websites I use BTW:
Swagbucks - earn money & vouchers from surveys and other online tasks My Swagbucks referral link, sign up here and I get commission
Prolific.ac - et paid to take part in academic research
Don't Blame Life Extension for Right-Wing Fox News
A funny article I found on NBF:
Which is a response to: Bonus Level: The World's Most Powerful Humans are Getting Another 10-15 Years on Earth
A common argument against life extension is that it would allow the elites to live indefinitely, accruing more power, wealth, and influence for themselves. To that I say: If you're so worried about it, stop waiting for them to die, and start killing them.
Damn it, Microsoft, you incompetent sons of bitches!
I like Open Office but needed .doc file to send science fiction to magazines, so I needed Word; I wasn't sure Oo would write the files properly and it turned out it can't export to anything except PDF, so I installed Libre Office. It will write the files, but MS Write can't read them.
I had an idea for an article about playing cards, so googled for open source playing card images. There should be plenty since playing cards have been around for hundreds of years. However, finding them was really difficult. I managed to find an .eps vector graphics file that Windows didn't know what it was, so more googling.
The internet said GIMP would open it, but it couldn't; it repeatedly crashed trying to open it. I tried importing it into Open Office, and got a blank screen. The internet said you could import it with Word, so I opened Word... or tried to. It wouldn't open and that I should try again or go to Control Panel to "repair" it. Tried reopening Word, same thing. Booted the computer and tried again, same thing. So I go into control panel and tried to repair, and that stupid fucking thing said I needed an internet connection. IT'S ON THE INTERNET, DAMN IT!!!
I don't know where Microsoft finds its programmers, skid row? Homeless shelters? Crack houses?
It's done this before. I had to reinstall the God damned OS to fix that stupid, stupid, program.
They've always been terrible at networking. DOS and Windows 95 had no native networking at all. When I first got on the internet in 1997 I had to buy a floppy with a network stack and that primitive browser that the U of I came up with. They STILL can't do networking well. I assigned this computer's "documents" folder as the A: drive on the HP. Whenever I try to access it, it says the Acer isn't running, but if I go through "network" it works.
Look, you idiots running Microsoft, here's a suggestion: the next time you roll out a new OS, how about making sure it actually WORKS?
I'm in a really bad mood right now.
XKCD 703
Just had an automatic email from Paypal in response to a withdrawal request I made today. It contains this nugget of enlightenment:
Funds will take up to 2 hours to appear in your bank account, but may take longer, depending on your bank.
Right, so it will take less than 2 hours, unless it takes more than two hours, in which case it will take longer. Thanks for that.
Who the fuck is writing this? I mean is someone actually getting paid to spout this non-information? It might be a trivial thing, but I think it points to a serious dumbing-down of society, when a massive worldwide organisation worth billions can't even hire someone capable of putting together a meaningful sentence, or someone else capable of checking it. How do they allow something that makes them look so STUPID out in front of actual users?
Geez.
"Bama Camera" Arrested After 1st Amendment Audit Call Flood
Alabama ACLU and Newspaper Criticize Police for Arresting Citizen Journalist by Bama Camera
The Alabama police department that had a man arrested on a felony charge of jamming up their emergency lines – even though he did not make a single call – is now taking heat from the local ACLU as well as the local newspaper.
But the Wetumpka Police Department is still sticking to its guns, threatening to arrest anybody else who posts their non-emergency phone number of (334) 567-5321.
They claim that by calling that number, it somehow leads turns into a 911 call, which they claim makes it difficult to respond to actual emergencies.
But all they were doing were exercising their First Amendment right to petition for redress of grievances by complaining about how officers ripped a camera out of Keith Golden’s hands for recording the police department from public property.
First Amendment Audit (Wetumpka PD) "I don't care about your 1st Amendment Rights"
Arrest Update by Bama Camera
**UPDATE**FPS-USMS-BAM CAMERA by News Now Houston
How to digitize all of your film slides for less than ten do
(The version at my web site is illustrated)
I was an amateur photographer in my youth, starting in high school when I bought a Canon 35 mm Single Lens Reflex (SLR) camera. I’d been interested in photography since I was about twelve, when I somehow obtained a Three Stooges photo developing kit. That toy hooked me, even if I could only do contact prints until I got a job when I was a teenager and bought a cheap enlarger. Color film went to a commercial developer, as I had neither the knowledge nor equipment to develop color film.
So I have a lot of photographic slides and prints to digitize, since film photography is now obsolete; Kodak put itself out of business when they invented the digital camera which made their cash cow, film, obsolete. Prints are easy to digitize, as scanners are cheap and make good digital photos out of film prints. But what about my slides?
I asked at Walgreen’s photo department if they could digitize slides, cringing at what was sure to be expensive since I’ve dug up half a dozen boxes of them. But they couldn’t, and the lady said there were only two places in the country that could. I looked them up. Both were prohibitively expensive and you don’t get the slide’s frame back, only the film.
Then I had an idea, remembering the slide viewer I used to have and may still have somewhere. All I had to do was put my phone to the viewer’s eyepiece and snap a photo! I looked, and bought one on the internet. It was only six bucks after shipping.
Alas, when the viewer came, there were complications; keeping the camera and viewer lined up still was impossible, making the digitized images awful.
So my next step was holding it together with a rubber band to keep it steady. I didn’t have any, so the final cost was closer to ten bucks; you can’t just buy one rubber band, you have to buy the whole bag.
If you have no computer, it will cost you the price of one, because later you’ll need an image editor.
Here’s what the phone/viewer/rubber band combination looks like:
The next step is to turn the phone’s camera on and line the viewer up.
Next, carefully lay it flat on a table and tape the viewer to the phone. Any kind of adhesive tape will do, just make sure it’s tight before removing the rubber band, which will interfere with the photo if left on.
Of course, you can use any source of illumination. I used a table lamp; a flashlight would do. You can vary the brightness and contrast by moving the contraption closer to or farther from the light.
Here’s what the raw output from the camera looks like, which is why you need an image editor:
I use the Gnu Image Manipulation Program (GIMP). It’s free and open source and has everything you need to manipulate images, although it has a large learning curve. Here the slide is; digitized, cropped, and rotated:
One advantage of digital photography is very evident in this picture of Dover Air Force Base from the stairway to my barracks in 1972. The color has faded almost completely, leaving a pink tinge to the right, and bits don’t fade.
So the final picture is saved as grayscale rather than RGB.
So now my slides, at least the ones I’ve found, are digitized. I’m keeping them, maybe I’ll have a better camera to better digitize some time in the future.
Here’s a slide I digitized of a friend and co-worker when I was a teenager; time was kinder to this almost fifty year old slide, although all the green color is faded; I restored it with GIMP the best I could. It’s obvious that where you had the slides developed matters a lot.
Now I need to buy a scanner...
