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Banished to the Backcountry
As a matter of comparison, what would happen if the Board of Supervisors restricted unincorporated area political advertising to the same ten spots that were approved by the above 4-1 vote? After all, I am fairly certain that there is a silent majority of us who'd love to see such a restriction enforced on political advertising. Hmmm... I wonder if a popular unincorporated area backlash is building for Proposition 19 this fall... http://ballotpedia.org/wiki/index.php/California_…— July 2, 2010 2:18 p.m.
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Wow... the administrator has been busy!— July 2, 2010 1:46 p.m.
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RE #15: Or the lack of it!— July 2, 2010 12:34 p.m.
Union-Tribune. got rid of more than 30 editors and reporters
RE #17: Recent personal example: writing "eminent" in a blog when I was thinking "imminent"... ---- Sorry, Mr. Bauder: Looking at some of the above comments, I did not realize my sophomoric sarcasm in #1 would have you responding for me! As for the lack of CCDC/SEDC/et al transparency, I still can't figure out if the real reason for the Redevelopment Agency needing the up-coming July 13 $288 million HUD block grant loan write-off from the City of San Diego is that the new City SAP accounting software just plain "misplaced" it... which might also go far to explaining why the City is being asked not to charge any interest on the $288 million in loans to the Redevelopment Agency after June 2009?!?— July 2, 2010 12:25 p.m.
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RE #12: I could be wrong, but that's the worst Bill Horn political ad I've ever seen...— July 2, 2010 11:40 a.m.
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RE #4: I figured out that I was "not competitive" when my one stringer submission died on the vine. Blogging for free suits me fine right now, but I really, really need to do more servicing of that $70K+ in Sempra Energy court costs I still owe for getting dusted with asbestos like the Feds said we were. As for politics, mark me down as "conservative" as for me wanting to conserve American strategic and economic dominance. Make that "left-handed conservative" because I don't think we are going to see the kind of innovative thinking out of Wall Street Masters of the Markets that will keep us as a nation on top of the heap... there's too much money in their own individual fortunes to be made from speculating overseas and betting against us here.— July 2, 2010 11:35 a.m.
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I started blogging here after a federal trial jury returned guilty verdicts in 2007 for UNITED STATES OF AMERICA v. SDG&E (http://www.google.com/search?q=sdg%26e+guilty). I and a number of other people living in Lemon Grove and Encanto were named as federal crime victims. The picture you see with this comment was taken last year, nearly a decade after the Encanto Gas Holder site in Lemon Grove was supposedly cleared of friable asbestos waste material, which is what we still believe that white storm runoff residue in the picture was. From the Proposition 65 lawsuit we were involved in after the federal guilty verdicts, we obtained the kind of documents in discovery that would have gotten Erin Brockovich a nice bonus (she's still a member of my FEMA emergency management training group at myspace). We lost the Prop. 65 thing after I had a heart attack last year and couldn't write enough of the right stuff fast enough to oppose summary judgment in favor of SDG&E and Sempra Energy, although Judge Hofmann called my plaintiff-without-attorney effort "herculean." I see the Reader as a viable alternative to the Union-Tribune, where Reader bloggers are free to follow fact OR fiction, even if the facts are not obtained with a staff of 15 like some U-T ediorial staffers think things ought to be. I started out blogging about things I knew, such as things I discovered about SDG&E and its parent Sempra Energy. This evolved into following DJIA and Wall Street Masters of the Universe (mostly not here but at myspace), Royal Bank of Scotland and its connection to Dubai as a destination of smuggled Congo conflict Gold, and the connections between Royal Bank of Scotland and Sempra Energy through RBS Sempra Metals and its practices at the London Metals Exchange and the Dubai Gold & Commodities Exchange once 60 Minutes broke its story on Congo conflict gold last year. I now find myself reading San Diego City Council docket items in my spare time... I have a degree in mathematics. It interests and fascinates me. See: http://www.sandiegoreader.com/weblogs/encanto-gas… I don't consider myself to be anonymous. Anybody who wants to see my name can go to http://eghvsdge.stickywebs.com and find it all over the court documents from the Proposition 65 case. I encourage it as it may teach others about the nature of corporations as artificial persons under the law. I generally consider fact to be stranger and much more complex than any fiction I've ever run into. As a writer, just write. If it's good, most of us will appreciate it, including the vast majority who will read without leaving any comment at all. If it's really, really good, the kind of stuff that comforts the afflicted as it afflicts the comfortable, a lawyer on the other side of the conference table may show you your own blog postings in a hostile deposition and then demand to know if you wrote them. "Yes, I did."— June 30, 2010 9:28 p.m.
Union-Tribune. got rid of more than 30 editors and reporters
One of the reasons I write the blogs I do here is because I fear the U-T is losing its audience here in San Diego, and my main thrust so far has been to bring various California Public Utilities Commission filings to light that would otherwise be ignored as the electronic background noise of California living. I agree that we have an abundance of educated potential writers here locally, and therefore you are correct for the reasons you gave that any newspaper here will need more and not less editors... unless the contributors are self-righteous unedited bloggers like myself. As for the U-T becoming immaterial to any national debate due to narrow-minded parochialism... what ever gave you that idea? Is not San Diego internationally known for for being by the sea in large part for the cutting-edge well-nuanced transparent operating structure of our civic redevelopment agencies?— June 30, 2010 12:40 p.m.
A Safe Internet
When I was still a child playing with childish things and a radio-telephone operator (RTO) in an infantry platoon, we were taught a certain tactical standard for security. If we could not see the beginning, middle and end of a signal transmission system, then it obviously was not secure. If not secure, then we'd have no idea if anyone was tapping the line, intercepting classified messages, or re-directing our own troops into ambushes. The Internet is obviously not secure, because none of us is in the position to see all of the dozens to hundreds of computers or their interconnections as they transmit our messages and other files across the World Wide Web. Encryption might make a message seem secure, but it can't really be physically secure if on or between any of those intermediary Internet backbone servers, anyone from a super-secret government agency to Osama himself could be copying those messages for cracking at times and in places unknown to the rest of us. Of course, once cracked, so are our bank accounts, credit cards, and whatever else it was we imagined was secure in the first place. I don't sell or buy anything over the Internet that requires me to transmit any data about me over the Internet. I don't pay bills online, or bank online, and I avoid Meg's EBay like the plague it is, because everything I know as a data processing systems analyst tells me sharing any personal credit card or banking data on the Internet is the electronic equivalent of hitting up the exterior wall with my Social Security Number in big digits rendered in black spray paint, then hoping that nobody notices. As far as I am concerned, anyone soliciting me to do online banking or business transactions is either a scam of a crook or a corporation wanting to be a crook. Assuming less than that means I can't be all that bright. Anybody attempting to purchase anything I advertise on the Internet can break out the checkbook and send me payment by first class mail. In that way, I can never be liable for somebody having their identity stolen in an Internet transaction with me... and issues with check handling are somebody else's problem. I may have demo software on other people's servers for interested people to download, but if they want the paid-for full version, then they can wait for the CD in the mail. In that way, the individual who orders from the tribal area in Pakistan can expect to have her or his check returned as another security matter leading to no sale. Some people might think this is rather severe, but most likely these are the same kind of people who are walking around while wearing headphones when the last thing that goes through their minds is a fast-moving AMTRACK train through the intersection. Safety First!— June 30, 2010 12:24 p.m.
Be prepared for second recession in Calif.
RE #30: The latest rumor I am hearing now is that people with stellar credit numbers are being denied credit cards in favor of those with less credit-worthiness. Maybe I'm just paranoid, but since Goldman Sachs was found to be creating and trading synthetic derivatives on bad mortgages to the degree that congressional hearings have been held, what's stopping Wall Street firms from creating synthetic derivatives out of purchased unsecured credit card debt, marketing the derivatives to supposedly sophisticated speculators, then taking the short side of the trade as a bet that their new innovative financial product behaves as expected and implodes? I'm asking because from a systems-analytical view of Wall Street, those firms seem to be addicted to clever moves for quick profit, and I don't see economic conditions that favor people with marginal credit ratings to make more than minimum monthly payments in the short run,as long as they don't later end up under/unemployed... That, plus the people who creatively gave us mortgage-based derivatives are largely still receiving their annual bonuses as too valuable/too clever to be allowed to leave, even after causing the Crash of 2008.— June 29, 2010 6:40 p.m.