Wednesday, March 07, 2018



An incompetent dickless Tracy gave the order not to stop Florida school shooter



One is reminded of Cressida Dick, the British Lesbian cop who was in charge of the operation in which an innocent Brazilian electrician, Jean Charles de Menezes, was shot dead by police while he was sitting peacefully on a London underground train

The Broward County Sheriff’s Office has identified to Fox News the captain who, according to sources, directed responding deputies and units to “stage” or form a “perimeter” outside Stoneman Douglas High School, instead of rushing immediately into the building, as the mass shooting unfolded there.

Multiple law enforcement and official sources said the commands in the initial moments after Nikolas Cruz allegedly opened fire would go against all training which instructs first responders to “go, go, go” until the shooter is neutralized. As law enforcement arrived, the shooter’s identity and exact location were still unknown.

Multiple sources told Fox News that Captain Jan Jordan was the commanding officer on scene. In an email responding to Fox News’ request for information, a BSO spokesperson wrote, “Capt. Jordan’s radio call sign is 17S1.”

The massacre on February 14 killed 17 people and wounded 16 others.

Sources told Fox News it was Jordan giving the commands because they were recorded on the dispatch logs coming from Jordan’s radio insignia 17S1, or “Seventeen Sierra One.”

SOURCE





Former YouTube worker alleges discrimination against white, Asian men in suit

 YouTube has been sued by a former recruiter who said he was fired in November following a protracted battle over the company’s hiring practices and culture. Photo: Dreamstime, TNS Photo: Dreamstime, TNS YouTube has been sued by a former recruiter who said he was fired in November following a protracted battle over the company’s hiring practices and culture.

A former YouTube recruiter is suing the company’s parent, Google, alleging YouTube discriminated against white and Asian male engineers in hiring, and perpetuated a toxic culture in its efforts to recruit more women and minorities.

The employee, Arne Wilberg, worked at Google for nine years and spent the last four as a recruiter at YouTube. He said he was fired in November 2017, after a protracted battle over YouTube’s hiring practices and culture. The suit was filed Thursday in San Mateo County Superior Court.

“For the past several years, Google has had and implemented clear and irrefutable policies, memorialized in writing and consistently implemented in practice, of systematically discriminating in favor job applicants who are Hispanic, African American, or female, and against Caucasian and Asian men,” the civil suit states.

A spokeswoman for YouTube did not immediately respond to requests for comment. A Google spokeswoman provided the Wall Street Journal a statement saying the company has “a clear policy to hire candidates based on their merit, not their identity. At the same time, we unapologetically try to find a diverse pool of qualified candidates for open roles, as this helps us hire the best people, improve our culture, and build better products.”

Wilberg alleges that in April 2017 he was told to cancel all interviews for junior and mid-level software engineering positions, except for those with applicants who were female, black or Hispanic, and to “purge entirely any applications by non-diverse employees from the hiring pipeline.”

Wilberg says he refused to carry out the directive and was penalized and threatened with termination. Ultimately, he claims, he was fired for resisting company policy.

Google’s workplace culture and hiring practices have become the subject of multiple lawsuits, both from those who argue that the company has gone too far in its attempts to diversify, and recently from a former employee who alleged that he was fired for speaking out about company culture in defense of women and minorities. The issues received national attention last year when former Google engineer James Damore released a memo that argued that men are biologically more suited to coding careers than women. Damore sued after he was fired.

Wilberg’s lawsuit more generally describes a company that moved erratically in its attempts to hire more women and minorities. “Google used Weekly Recaps to track the number of hires who were ‘Female,’ ‘Black,’ and ‘LatinX,’” and had quarterly hiring quotas for engineers, the suit alleges.

Wilberg alleges attempts to cover up those hiring practices. “Google on occasion would circulate e-mails instructing its employees purge any and all references to the race/gender quotas from its e-mail database in a transparent effort to wipe out any paper trail of Google’s illegal practices,” the lawsuit states.

According to Wilberg, some employees expressed disagreement with the policies, and complained at a meeting about the way managers “spoke about black candidates as the team needed to hire more blacks. ... One team member complained that managers were speaking about Blacks like they were objects,” the suit said.

SOURCE





How Silicon Valley went from ‘don’t be evil’ to doing evil

Once seen as the saviors of America’s economy, Silicon Valley is turning into something more of an emerging axis of evil. “Brain-hacking” tech companies such as Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon, as one prominent tech investor puts it, have become so intrusive as to alarm critics on both right and left.

Firms like Google, which once advertised themselves as committed to being not “evil,” are now increasingly seen as epitomizing Hades’ legions. The tech giants now constitute the world’s five largest companies in market capitalization. Rather than idealistic newcomers, they increasingly reflect the worst of American capitalism — squashing competitors, using indentured servants, attempting to fix wages, depressing incomes, creating ever more social anomie and alienation.

At the same time these firms are fostering what British academic David Lyon has called a “surveillance society” both here and abroad. Companies like Facebook and Google thrive by mining personal data, and their only way to grow, as Wired recently suggested, was, creepily, to “know you better.”

The techie vision of the future is one in which the middle class all but disappears, with those not sufficiently merged with machine intelligence relegated to rent-paying serfs living on “income maintenance.” Theirs is a world in where long-standing local affinities are supplanted by Facebook’s concept of digitally-created “meaningful communities.”

The progressive rebellion

Back during the Obama years, the tech oligarchy was widely admired throughout the progressive circles. Companies like Google gained massive access to the administration’s inner circles, with many top aides eventually entering a “revolving door” for jobs with firms like Google, Facebook, Uber, Lyft and Airbnb.

Although the vast majority of all political contributions from these firms, not surprisingly, go to the Democrats, many progressives — at least not those on their payroll — are expressing alarm about the oligarchs’ move to gain control of whole industries, such as education, finance, groceries, space, print media and entertainment. Left-leaning luminaries like Franklin Foer, former editor of the New Republic, rant against technology firms as a threat to basic liberties and coarsening culture.

Progressives are increasingly calling for ever growing tech monolith to be “broken up,” calling for new regulation to limit their size and scope. Many have embraced European proposals to restrain tech monopolies which now resemble “predatory capitalism” at its worse.

The right also rises

Traditionally, conservatives celebrated entrepreneurial success and opposed governmental intervention in the economy. Yet increasingly even libertarians, like Instapundit’s Glen Reynolds, have suggested that some form of anti-trust action may be necessary to curb oligarchic power. The National Review even recently suggested that these firms be treated as utilities, that is, regulated by government.

Conservatives are also concerned about pervasive political bias in the industry. The Bay Area, the heartland of the industry, has evolved as Facebook co-founder Peter Thiel notes, into a “one party state.” Ideological homogeneity discourages debate and dissent, both inside their companies.

More importantly, conservatives seek to curb their ability — increasingly evident as traditional media declines — to control content on the internet. As the techies expand their domain, America’s media, entertainment and cultural industries would seem destined to become ever less heterogenous in politics and cultural world-view.

A clear and present danger

Whether one sits on the progressive left or the political right, this growing hegemony presents a clear and present danger. It is increasingly clear that the oligarchs have forgotten that Americans are more than a collection of data-bases to be exploited. People, whatever their ideology, generally want to maintain a modicum of privacy, and choose their way of life.

The perfect world of the oligarchs can be seen in the Bay Area, where, despite the massive explosion in employment, even tech workers, due to high costs, do worse than their counterparts elsewhere. Meanwhile San Francisco, among the most unequal places in the country, has evolved into a walking advertisement for a post-modern dystopia, an ultra-expensive city filled with homeless people and streets filled with excrement and needles. It is also increasingly exporting people elsewhere, including many people making high salaries.

Of course, technology is critical to a brighter future, but need not be the province of a handful of companies or concentrated in one or two regions. The great progress in the 1980s and 1990s took place in a highly competitive, and dispersed, environment not one dominated by firms that control 80 or 90 percent of key markets. Not surprisingly, the rise of the oligarchs coincides with a general decline in business startups, including in tech.

We have traveled far from the heroic era of spunky start-ups nurtured in suburban garages. But a future of ever greater robotic dependence — a kind of high-tech feudalism — is not inevitable. Setting aside their many differences, conservatives and progressives need to agree on strategies to limit the oligarch’s stranglehold on our future.

SOURCE






Angela Merkel's real legacy is the lawless no-go areas that police fear to patrol where half of the locals have foreign roots and the German tongue is a rarity

On Saturday morning in the biting cold, a middle-aged man in a stout winter coat handed out free tulips in a west German suburb to mark International Women’s Day.

He cut an unusual figure in the market square of Marxloh, a rundown multi-cultural district where the German tongue is a rarity, on the edge of the once-thriving steel city of Duisburg.

Half the 20,000 residents in this suburb have foreign roots, many arriving thanks to a border-free EU and German chancellor Angela Merkel’s offer of welcome to the world’s refugees.

The outcome of Europe’s biggest migration crisis since the Second World war has been disastrous for Marxloh.

Many of the newcomers are jobless and so rely on state benefits, and hang around with nothing worthwhile to do.

A leaked police report says the streets are controlled by drug dealers and robbers who ‘view crime as their leisure activity’.

As for the Germans who remain here, some are frightened to go out after dark because of ‘conflicts between foreigners’, claiming that tram journeys through the area in the evenings are ‘nightmarish’.

‘We have many problems here and they do not get better,’ explains the tulip man in good English as he hands me an orange bloom from his basket.

Facing the end of her career if she failed to stitch together a loveless ‘grand coalition’ of political opposites, the ‘no-go’ admission was a dramatic climbdown for the German leader, who has welcomed more than a million new faces to her country in three years, while irritating an increasingly sceptical German public with the mantra ‘We can do it’.

Yesterday she survived only after an unlikely 11th hour pact was agreed between her own conservative-leaning Christian Democratic Union and the Left-wing staunchly pro-immigration Social Democratic Party.

Yet the road ahead will be rocky because the two parties have only a small joint majority in parliament. Both are under pressure from the Right-wing, fiercely anti-migrant party Alternative for Germany (AfD).

In elections last year, reflecting growing German dissatisfaction with mass immigration, it raced from the traps to become the country’s third largest political force.

In troubled Marxloh, a third of those entitled to vote backed the AfD. ‘We felt disillusioned,’ says a young German man with a ring in his ear, who was drinking on Saturday afternoon at the Crazy Monkey, one of the few pubs left in the Duisburg area thanks to the large teetotal Muslim population.

Smoking a cigarette outside before returning to his game of darts, he said: ‘It’s no surprise that people here are turning against Mrs Merkel and her policy of allowing so many foreigners in.’

In Marxloh market square itself, the main open-air restaurant, the Spar, is run by a Turkish 28-year-old who spent ten years in London’s Wood Green.

He came to Germany ‘because of family difficulties’ six months ago, refuses to give me his name, but announces that the district has ‘massive problems’.

‘There are many people from different places in the world who want control here,’ he said. ‘We don’t see the police often and they seem to stay away from the streets.’

Whatever the accuracy of this, Marxloh does not make you feel safe. The only policemen I encountered over seven hours were two outside their office in the market square.

They were standing near a heavily filled ashtray and refused to talk to me even through a German interpreter.

The streets come alive after dark when locals leave the market square, dominated by a mega-market called Istanbul and close to a street of gaudy wedding dress shops that are hugely popular with newly arrived migrants from Romania and Bulgaria.

Loud Arabic music floats out into the air from shoddy apartment blocks, there are wild gatherings of Roma with cans of lager, and flash cars with young men at the wheel suddenly zoom into sight and roar away again.

Marxloh is one of 40 problem areas cited in the German media as struggling to cope with large migrant concentrations, urban decay, high unemployment and chronic welfare dependency, which have become, they claim, ‘incubators for anarchy’ as well as drug-dealing and crime.

In an article called ‘Ghetto Report Germany’ the respected newspaper Bild – which described those 40 areas – labelled them as parallel societies, no-go areas and ‘burgeoning ghettos’.

Official police reports given to another respected newspaper, Der Spiegel, said spiralling levels of violence in Marxloh (and other places like it) show officers are losing control, and public order ‘cannot be guaranteed over the long term’.

‘There are districts where immigrant gangs are taking over streets for themselves,’ said the resulting account in Der Spiegel.

‘Native residents and business people are being intimidated and silenced. Policemen, and especially policewomen, are particular victims of a high level of aggression and disrespect.’

It doesn’t sound like the Germany of old. Marxloh, a 20-minute tram ride away from central Duisburg in western Germany, used to be a place for German families to visit on a Saturday afternoon for shopping, a picnic in the park, or a coffee and beer at the pavement cafes.

Not many outsiders visit here now, or dare to.

SOURCE

*************************

Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here

***************************



No comments: