Tag: New York

Illinois Made New York And New Jersey Look Like Weedless Dorks

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❝ Illinois just became the unofficial 11th state in the nation to legalize marijuana for recreational use. But more important than that, it bent legal weed hopefuls New York and New Jersey over its knee and gave them a vicious spanking that they will not soon forget. Both Eastern states have been fighting to put cannabis legalization on the books since dinosaurs walked the Earth, but everyone involved with the process keeps showing up for work in clown shoes.

❝ For whatever reason, lawmakers in that part of the country are confused about how to establish a taxed and regulated pot market while also keeping the social equity aspect in mind. And we have got to hand it to them – they almost convinced the nation that passing such a comprehensive bill through legislative channels was like pulling a shark’s teeth while it gnaws on your leg…

But then Illinois swept in last week and approved what is considered the most progressive cannabis law in the nation. And it did it just hours before lawmakers called it quits for the summer…

❝ A report from Crain’s Chicago Business indicates that the Land of Lincoln will have one of the most lucrative cannabis markets in the United States. It is a cash cow that is expected to grow in upwards of 20 times larger than its medicinal sector, creating tens of thousands of new jobs and generating revenue to the tune of $1.6 billion annually.

Much of the same could have been readily available to New York and New Jersey, but pettiness and the inability to compromise ultimately sabotaged prosperity.

❝ Nice job, dorks!

School bus driver turned in for hit-and-run by bus passenger

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❝ A college student from Buffalo, New York, was surprised to find his car mysteriously dented last week, but he was even more shocked by the note left on his car.

The note was not left by another driver, but rather, someone too young to be responsible for a hit-and-run…

❝ The note writer specified it was a Buffalo Public School bus that hit Sipowicz’s car. That’s right, the anonymous good Samaritan was just a kid, on her way home from school. She signed the letter: “a 6th grader at Houghten Academy.”

Andrew Sipowicz, owner of the dented vehicle, tracked down the 6th grade schoolgirl who left him the note and plans a reward for her good deed. As for the bus driver…?

The most depressing barge in the world

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Click to enlarge

❝ New York City Prison Barge, The Vernon C. Bain Center, is an 800-bed jail barge that is designed to handle inmates from medium- to maximum-security in 16 dormitories and 100 cells. It resides on the East River approximately one mile west of SUNY Maritime College.

❝ The barge falls under the New York City Department of Corrections and is part of the vast Rikers Island jail complex, the world’s largest penal colony. The prison barge was built in New Orleans for $161 million and brought to New York in 1992 to reduce overcrowding on the island’s land-bound buildings. Since the jail is not permanently moored to the shore, Coast Guard regulations require that she have 3 maritime crew on board at all time, including a mate, an engineer and an oiler.

Class-ridden NYC at its typical best. Let’s find an efficient and cheap way to warehouse folks we deem to be criminals. Rikers’ reputation for murder, rape, beatings, maltreatment and subhuman conditions is world-class.

One old gangbanger mate of mine was a screw at Riker’s for decades. He finally transferred to the Transit Coppers to regain his sanity.

Freight train only missed him by this much!

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State police say a man escaped injury after being run over by a freight train while sleeping in the middle of railroad tracks in an upstate New York town.

Troopers say 38-year-old Aaron Collins of Stillwater was highly intoxicated when he went to sleep Wednesday night on tracks in the Rensselaer County town of Schaghticoke, 20 miles north of Albany.

…A Pan Am freight train more than a mile long approached around 10:30 p.m. The conductor spotted Collins on the tracks and stopped the train, but not before the first two engines passed over him.

Troopers say the engines were separated and the first engine was moved forward to free Collins, who was uninjured but still drunk.

He was taken to an Albany hospital for evaluation.

Actually, not too unusual in our neck of the prairie. But, then, it’s no surprise for part of the country that leads everyplace in DWI to also lead the pack in every other kind of drunken strupidity.

Yes, drunks sleeping on railroad tracks usually die.

Life with a Tesla — spent more on tires than electricity

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David Noland always knew electric cars were cheap to run, but this is ridiculous. [OK – Back to first-person]

After I bought the first set of replacement tires for my 2013 Tesla Model S (at 26,000 miles), I crunched the numbers and came to a startling conclusion: I’ve spent substantially less per mile for my electric “fuel” than I have for my tires.

The tires weren’t cheap. The Michelin Primacy MXM4 all-season grand-touring tires set me back $250 apiece, plus mounting and balancing, for a total of $1,131.

Over 26,277 miles, that works out to 4.3 cents per mile. Pretty typical for a high-performance luxury sedan.

Over those same 26,277 miles, I used a total of 8,531 kilowatt-hours of electricity.

But, thanks to Tesla’s network of free high-power Superchargers, I didn’t pay for all of it.

As best as I can figure, I drove about 5,500 Supercharged miles during that time, including a 2,500-mile round-trip to Florida from my home in New York’s Hudson Valley.

That means I probably sucked up around 1,800 free kWh from the Superchargers.

So let’s say I paid for 6,700 kWh…My local utility, Central Hudson, charges about 14 cents per kWh. (Unfortunately, it offers no special night-time or electric car rates.)

So, let’s do the math: 6,700 kWh x 14 cents/kWh = $938…Divide by 26,277, and my total “fuel” cost per mile works out to a remarkable 3.6 cents per mile.

That’s 20 percent less than the per-mile cost of the tires that carried me on all those miles.

Yes, you can spend more – or less – on electricity or tires. Or tyres [I spent more years selling tyres than tires – few countries use American spelling for English].

RTFA for the fun and satisfaction of driving a car absent fossil fuel and the direct pollution that results. Tesla also takes advantage of the rate of torque transmitted directly to the road by a DC motor. It is a feeling that demands gobs of horsepower from anything that requires fire inside.

Thanks, Smartalix

Drunken narc shoots pals in tussle over gun

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One of the two shooting victims on the way to hospital

Cops swatted a .40-caliber Glock out of a drunken state narcotics agent’s hand Friday night after he shot two drinking buddies on the Upper West Side, authorities and witnesses said.

Amsterdam Ave. erupted in gunfire and blood-curdling screams just after 9 p.m. when Victor Zambrano Jr., 49, shot a 31-year-old woman in the left foot and the woman’s 42-year-old boyfriend in the right calf during an argument over his weapon…

The three pals had been drinking together and were walking on Amsterdam Ave. near W. 82nd St. when the woman asked the New York State Bureau of Narcotics enforcement agent for his pistol, a police source said.

Zambrano handed it over, but quickly demandegd it back, cop sources said. As the argument became increasingly heated, the agent fired a round. The bullet ricocheted off the concrete and hit both the woman and her boyfriend…

As diners along Amsterdam Ave.’s restaurant row ducked for cover, the narcotics investigator bolted.

The boyfriend chased after him, and Zambrano allegedly turned to shoot but misfired — causing a live round to fall to the ground as he ran toward W. 83rd St., stunned witnesses said…

It was not entirely clear why the woman wanted Zambrano’s gun, but early reports suggested she was concerned about his intoxication level.

Someday, I hope to read a stupid tale like this and no one will try to excuse dangerous behavior by saying, “he was just drunk and things got out of hand!”

You have some sort of idea what happens when you drink – or drink too much. You have the responsibillity and supposedly enough smarts to make decisions on your own. Like should I drink or not? Should I bring my gun with me when I’m out drinking? You are responsible for your own decisions.

Boy Scouts make statement by marching in gay pride parade

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James Estrin/The New York Times

The color guard leading the annual Gay Pride March down Fifth Avenue in Manhattan on Sunday carried flags of sky blue, navy blue, red-white-and-blue and rainbow. But, for these marchers, the colors that mattered most were the ones they wore.

Khaki shirts, olive pants and rainbow neckerchiefs: the Boy Scout uniform, pride-style — a uniform that had never been seen on a group of marchers in New York City’s pride parade before.

They had come to mark progress — the Boy Scouts of America’s breakthrough vote last year to end a decades-old policy of prohibiting openly gay youths from being scouts — and to call for more. However, the organization, a touchstone of traditional America, still bars openly gay adults from participating as troop leaders or volunteers. Ending that ban has become a signature cause for the gay-rights movement…

The marchers’ uniforms were a provocative statement. Boy Scout officials have said that scouts are forbidden to wear their uniforms in events that support social or political positions, including gay pride events, and have disciplined scouts and scoutmasters in other states for doing so. But the New York area council has adopted a nondiscrimination policy that leaders of the parade group, called Scouts for Equality, said they believed would protect them.

A spokesman for the national organization declined to comment on the group of marchers, which included parents and straight supporters of the gay rights movement as well as gay and straight scouts and leaders…

The scouts did not take their “marching” lightly. No meandering on the asphalt for them, no dancing and high-fiving the spectators. As they stepped off to frenzied cheers from the crowd, lifting their flags, Peter Brownstein conducted their progress in low, determined tones, as if he were directing a military procession: “Left, right, left right left right.”

As the group passed the Stonewall Inn, the West Village bar known as the birthplace of the gay-rights movement, he and the other marchers paused and gave the Scout salute.

Mr. Brownstein, a Boy Scout leader from Utah, was forced to leave his troop after marching in the Salt Lake City pride event last year. That did not deter him in the least from coming to New York’s celebration.

“We’re showing,” he told his fellow scouts, “that we belong.”

Power to the People still means all the people, folks. Cheers to the scouts who marched for progress.

Minister to repay $1.2 million he “borrowed” from charities he ran

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A New York City minister who was the subject of an Associated Press investigation about misspent 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina charity funds has agreed to repay $1.2 million that he took from his congregation to buy an 18th-century farmhouse on seven acres in rural New Jersey.

The Rev. Carl Keyes and his wife, the Rev. Donna Keyes, who jointly led the Glad Tidings Tabernacle in Manhattan, signed a legal judgment Wednesday settling a probe by the New York attorney general into a series of questionable church financial transactions.

Those deals included an illegal loan the couple took from the church in 2008 to buy a house in Stockton, New Jersey, near the Delaware River, and $500,000 the church loaned to an anti-poverty charity controlled by Carl Keyes, called Aid for the World.

Some of that money, the attorney general’s office said, was used to buy the minister and his wife a BMW. According to the settlement, which was scheduled to be officially announced Thursday, other funds were used to finance family trips to California, West Virginia, Africa and Florida, where the couple’s sons went to college.

Glad Tidings former executive director, Mark Costantin, agreed to repay $482,000 he still owed Glad Tidings on $1.2 million in loans he’d taken from the church, some of which were used to pay off the mortgage on his house in Chester, New York…

Three former members of the Glad Tidings’ board agreed to pay $50,000 in penalties for neglecting their oversight duties.

The attorney general’s office began its investigation after the AP raised numerous questions about Carl Keyes and two charities he controlled, including one that had received $4.8 million in donations intended to help victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and Hurricane Katrina…

Using a combination of internal documents and public records, the AP also chronicled how the church disposed of $31 million it made by selling off its historic Manhattan church in 2007. That report included detail on some of the loan transactions that were the subject of Wednesday’s settlement. After the AP began asking questions, Keyes filed eight years of tax returns for Urban Life Ministries and three years for Aid for the World.

Nice to see the Fourth Estate behaving with traditional backbone. In a craft so often dazzled and dumbed-down by reclassification as media and entertainment, commitment to ethics, functioning as a genuine watchdog is too rare.

I holler at AP folks frequently enough – mostly their editors – about politics. Always nice to witness dedication to traditional standards of journalism.

New York Congressman hit with 20-count indictment

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grim Grimm

A two-year investigation into U.S. Rep. Michael Grimm’s campaign finances resulted in his indictment on Monday — on federal charges of cheating the government out of taxes on his restaurant.

Grimm was slammed with a 20-count indictment charging he fraudulently underreported the wages he paid his workers at Healthalicious on the Upper East Side and concealed the eatery’s actual income…

Grimm, 44, is also charged with obstruction and perjury for allegedly lying about his involvement in the business in a sworn deposition…

The feds said Grimm ran the day-to-day operations of the restaurant between 2007 and 2010, and “engaged in schemes to fraudulently under-report the wages he paid his workers — many of whom did not have legal status in the United States — and fraudulently under-report the true amount of money the restaurant earned to both federal and New York State tax and insurance authorities.”

He pulled off part of the scam by paying a “large portion” of employees’ pay in cash, “thereby lowering the restaurant’s payroll tax costs,” the feds said.

In all, prosecutors said, he hid more than $1 million in Healthalicious sales and wages…

FBI Assistant Director George Venizelos noted that…“As a former FBI agent, Rep. Grimm should understand the motto: fidelity, bravery and integrity. Yet he broke our credo at nearly every turn. Rep Grimm lived by a new motto: fraud, perjury and obstruction,” Venizekos said…

Last week, Grimm’s lawyer said the investigation into his Republican client was politically motivated and predicted he would be vindicated of whatever the charges were…

Grimm made headlines in January after threatening a New York 1 reported who’d asked him about the investigation.

In the exchange, which was caught on camera, Grimm said, “Let me be clear to you. If you ever do that to me again, I’ll throw you off this fucking balcony.”

A real class act – Congressman Grimm. As an ex-Marine, an ex-FBI agent, you’d think the concept of standing up for law and order might have made an impression on him. Though his behavior towards the press – and not so incidentally ordinary working people in his employ – makes it seem that exploitation is more in his line.