Author: luimbe

NYPD “Demographics Unit”

Standard
The NYPD is finding the best Middle Eastern Food.

The NYPD is finding the best Middle Eastern Food.

Seems like an NYC runs its own COINTELPRO:

“A mosque is different than a church or a temple,” said a former senior NYPD official involved in the effort. “It plays a bigger role in society and its day-to-day activities. They pray five times a day. They’re there all the time. If something bad is going to happen, they’re going to hear about it in the mosques. It’s not as sinister as it sounds. We’re just going into the mosques. We just want to know what they’re saying.”

[…]

Surveillance turned out to be habit-forming. Cohen and Sanchez’s efforts also reached beyond the Muslim community. Undercover officers traveled the country, keeping tabs on liberal protest groups like Time’s Up and the Friends of Brad Will. Police infiltrated demonstrations and collected information about antiwar groups and those that marched against police brutality. Detectives monitored activist websites and copied the contents into police files, including one memo in 2008 for Kelly that reported the contents of a website about a group of women organizing a boycott to protest the police shooting of Sean Bell, an unarmed black man killed the morning before his wedding: “This boycott was set for May 11, 2008 (Mother’s Day) there will be NO shopping for cards, flowers, clothing, shoes or dining out. Spend time with Mom at home, serve her dinner, or buy her flowers from a black-owned business. We can be effective if we unite in the name of our children.”

[…]

There were those in the NYPD itself who’d begun to doubt the program’s efficacy. Hector Berdecia was one of those. A sturdily built NYPD lieutenant with a shaved head and broad, boyish smile, Berdecia inherited supervision of the Demographics Unit in 2006 after a yearlong tour in Iraq with the Army

[…]

Some of the rakers in his unit felt conflicted. They were cops, eager to protect the city. But they also knew they were building files on fellow Muslims—immigrant business owners and members of their communities who’d done nothing wrong.

Berdecia reassured them there was nothing insidious about what they were doing. They weren’t collecting anything that couldn’t be observed by any other member of the public.

“At the very least, we can eliminate this guy from our list if he’s not a terrorist,” Berdecia told his men. “And we can find out who the terrorists are. And that’s your job.”

The truth, though, was that raking didn’t eliminate anybody from a list. It just expanded the NYPD’s files. One Brooklyn business that the NYPD labeled a Bangladeshi hot spot, for instance, was a restaurant named Jhinuk. The list of “alleged activities” included being a “popular location for political activities” and attracting a “devout crowd.”

[…]

Because the rakers never received specialized training, their reports contained numerous errors. Sephardic Jews and Lebanese Christians were mistaken for Syrian Muslims.

via: Has the NYPD’s Demographics Unit Stopped Any Terror Plots? — New York Magazine.

Also, for the record: some catholics go to mass daily and many protestants tend to ministries daily and many jewish folks are in synagogues multiple times a week and many muslims are active in mosques but aren’t there 5 times a day. It’s just a different way of saying: churchgoers be all like: “I am going to mass every day”. and mosque goers be like: [angry voice] “I am going to mosque every day”.

No new friends

Standard

Why so little hiring? Make the current employees do it:

A related interpretation, favored by Steven Davis of the University of Chicago, Jason Faberman of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and John Haltiwanger of the University of Maryland, is that companies have reduced their “recruiting intensity.” They advertise jobs but don’t have much interest in filling them.

But it is consistent with anecdotal evidence that external applicants are facing more onerous interview processes and that companies are hiring outside job candidates only slowly and cautiously.

Companies have a certain amount of work to be done to make money. If they can use various pressures to make workers accept more responsibilities for the same money they are effectively cutting costs and making the positions new hires would fill redundant. So they don’t have interest in filling them because it costs money (even before factoring in the fact that hiring and training is expensive). With more to do and the same paycheck it’s a way to decrease workers benefits without decreasing workers benefits.

Overwork can negatively affect an employee’s ability to meet expectations to compete for career advancement, being able to actually take paid time off and cash compensation per real work hour.

Opposition as an ideology

Standard

 

Somehow this is something to be angry about. (Photo Credit: csmonitor.com/Larry Downing/Reuters)

Somehow this is something to be angry about. (Photo Credit: csmonitor.com/Larry Downing/Reuters)

Digby runs the math on Presidential vacations via

President Obama was on vacation for 26 days during his first year in office (2009). Ronald Reagan spent 42 days on vacation during his first year in office (1981). President George H.W. Bush was on vacation less than his son, 40 days, in 1989, his first year in office. President Obama was on vacation less in his first year in office than the previous three Republican Presidents.

No President since Reagan was on vacation less than Bill Clinton. Presidents Clinton and Carter vacationed the least of any of the last seven chief executives.

All Presidents point out that work is being done on vacation.

Republicans continually decide to argue nothing on merits. Presidents work hard, they’ve got a lot of stress and these are as much for their families and kids as much as it is for them. Does it cost a lot of money? Yes, because we are the most powerful nation in the world. Good thing is, they’ve overspent on defense and national security forever so we have all the resources to take care of this kinda trip all the time. This is shiny objects for lazy reporters waved around by even lazier Republicans who won’t just fundraise on good ol’ birtherism.

Boehner, McConnell and Priebus are leading party that’s business is opposition as a matter of ideology not circumstance.

Conan O’Brien Interviews Statistician Nate Silver

Video

Since Nate Silver has announced his move from the New York Times to Disney aka ESPN and ABC I wanted to post an interview with Silver that wasn’t of the antagonistic “aren’t you lucky” or the self involved media claiming “the real winner of the election was Nate Silver” sort. Conan O’brien did a good job of that when he talked with Silver during his “Serious Jibber Jabber” web series.

Statistician Nate Silver – Serious Jibber-Jabber with Conan O'Brien – CONAN on TBS – YouTube.

Nate Silver and other (even right wing) statisticians/modelers who use sound methodologies and helped those of us who paid attention have some empirical cocoon to avoid the hysteria willingly wrapped around every sound bite, non scandal or spin in long American Presidential election seasons.