Nobody Cares: PRS

[Innula Zenovka]

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

Student suspended after she records teacher using n-word in class


Mary Walton, a student at Glendale High School in Springfield, said she was told Friday that she would not be allowed to return to school until Wednesday because she violated district policy on inappropriate use of electronic devices, the Springfield News-Leader reported.

The teacher, whose name has not been released, was put on paid administrative leave after using the racial slur on Tuesday.

On Saturday, attorney Natalie Hull said she plans to issue a “demand letter” in an effort to get the suspension lifted so Walton can return to class as soon as Monday. The family is also seeking an apology, Hull said.

Walton said the teacher used the racial slur six times — two of which were recorded on her video. Walton wasn't sure what prompted the exchange but she said the teacher asked some of her classmates why they were allowed to use the slur but he wasn't.

 

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Student named and not teacher. Odd.

 

[Lexxi]

The teacher has been removed.

The student in the video, it turns out, was correct. It turns using racial slurs in class is heavily frowned upon (at least in Springfield, Missouri). The teacher is now no longer employed with the school.

Student name and age again reported in the article. Name of ex-teacher again protected and not revealed.

Missouri Teacher Who Used Racial Slur No Longer Employed With District

The school continues to stand by suspending the student who filmed the incident

www.riverfronttimes.com

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

The name of the student is reported because she and her family are the ones who went to the press to begin with, after she got suspended. Understandable concern but it's above-board in this instance.

 

[detrius]

On that note, here is a story about a pilot that will NOT fly again.

There is a man named Trevor Jacob, a former Olympic snowboarder and self-styled social media influencer who operates a YouTube channel in which he does things like snowboard, hang-glide, four-wheel, and other EXTREME! Adventure Stunt Bro type content, including a lot of aviation-centered things like flying various airplanes, owing to the fact that he is a pilot. I can't really say more than that about his channel generally because it's not my type of content.

Near the end of last year, Jacob posted a video in which he takes a solo cross-country flight from Santa Barbara to Mammoth Lakes in southern California, supposedly to take his late friend's ashes to spread on top of some mountain they liked to snowboard at (long story, I guess). While high above the mountains of Los Padres National Forest in a small prop plane, Jacob (who is holding a camera) announces that his engine has stopped! After doing some unclear random control movements, Jacobs in a panicked voice says that he has to ditch. A camera mounted on the exterior of the plane aimed at the pilot-side door catches the movement when he pushes it open and dives, selfie-stick in hand, out of the airplane. The video then cuts to his selfie footage in which, after tumbling a little, he takes care to frame a shot of himself and the abandoned airplane in the sky behind him, before eventually pulling his parachute that he happened to be wearing. Finally, other exterior cameras mounted on the plane itself capture its dramatic eventual crash after some time into the mountainside. The rest of the video has Jacob having hiked to the crashed airplane to retrieve his cameras, and finally selfie-vidding himself flagging down a passing motorist on a nearby road who took him back into town.

Almost as soon as this video went live, other actual pilots on YouTube and elsewhere who watched it were immediately suspicious that the "engine failure" had been staged for a whole litany of reasons, including things like the actions Jacob took (or didn't take) to address the engine failure before just bailing out, the fact that the footage seems to carefully avoid showing the state of the engine controls or instruments, the fact that Jacob was conveniently wearing a parachute and that the door was clearly unlatched before the "engine failure", and that the selfie footage that Jacob took while free-falling and then parachuting happened to catch an enormous flat valley very close by where he easily could've glided and landed the plane safely.

Jacob didn't do much to try to respond to any of these criticisms, except to claim that he "always wears a parachute when flying", a weird claim to make when he has a channel full of content showing him never wearing a parachute when just flying, including other videos where he is flying that same airplane. He did, however, quietly hire a helicopter operator a couple of days later to fly out to the crash site and retrieve the wrecked plane and convey it to some undisclosed location for storage or disposal - an act which just basically gave away his guilt in the eyes of many, who considered it an obvious attempt to prevent any potential investigation from examining the wreckage itself, because those guys really can tell whether even a wrecked engine stopped due to some actual mechanical failure, or ran out of gas, or was just - y'know - turned off mid-flight by the pilot.

In the end though it wasn't enough. After a few months of investigation, the FAA had enough evidence to announce that it was convinced the entire accident was staged for views and revoked his pilot license.

I followed that story when it came out and it was fascinating how people were able to track that guy's flight path and examined every detail in the video, such as the fire extinguisher that idiot had strapped to his leg.

ETA: I almost forgot about the zip-lock bag that supposedly had his friend's ashes in it!

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

If you seem to remember a time back in the late-aughts/early 10's when clean diesel passenger cars, especially European makes, were becoming like a big thing for some reason in the US and then one day it was just suddenly never heard about again, your memory isn't faulty. It really happened, and you can credit the meteoric fall of diesel mainly to Volkswagen.

At the time, Volkswagen was doing what other car manufacturers were trying but just not managing to do, which was create small diesel engines that were cleaner, greenhouse-emissions-wise, than gasoline engines, and also didn't require a big tank of urea-injection fluid, which is what most diesel engines use to get their emissions down to a permissible level. It was a big thing - diesel cars started to catch on, although I'm not sure they got quite to the adoption level that electric cars are at today, but they easily could've gotten there in a few more years I think. The problem was, that first part was a lie; Volkswagen's non-urea-injected diesel engines were actually extremely dirty, they just SAID they weren't, and then used a software trick to fool American emissions tests.

The emissions testing that the EPA uses when certifying cars, and that states that require regular emissions testing use, is a computer-controlled program that runs the vehicle at a few particular speeds for very particular amounts of time. Volkswagen programmed its cars' computers to recognize these control inputs as an emissions test and switch the engine into a secret cheating mode in which it would run extremely poorly, weakly, and inefficiently, but produce low enough detectable emissions to meet the test requirements. Whenever the engine was NOT in this cheating mode - that is, whenever the car was just being driven around normally - it was found that the engines produced up to 40 times the legal limits for certain pollutants.

This was all discovered and went down in 2015 and, as a kind of collateral damage, basically destroyed diesel cars as a thing in the US. Volkswagen was heavily penalized in the US and in Germany, and I only bring this up now because one of Volkswagen's execs has just pleaded guilty in a criminal trial stemming from this scandal.

 

[Kalel]

https://www.npr.org/2023/05/16/1176334055/florida-investigating-teacher-disney-movie-gay-character-desantis

"A Florida teacher is under investigation by the state's Department of Education after she showed her students a Disney movie that features a gay character.

Jenna Barbee, who teaches fifth grade in the Hernando County School District, says a student's mother lodged a complaint with education officials after Barbee showed the film Strange World in her classroom."

 

[Soen Eber]

There are going to be a LOT of fictional gay and trans characters named Desantis in the future, aren't there?

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

You bet your Santorum.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

According to federal prosecutors, the ANG analyst who copied and gave away classified files about the Ukraine War on his Discord Minecraft server for clout had been caught more than once browsing files outside the scope of his job.


The Massachusetts Air National Guardsman charged with leaking a trove of military secrets was twice admonished by his superiors last year over "concerning actions" he took with regards to classified information, federal prosecutors said in a court filing on Wednesday.

Jack Teixeira was told by superiors in September and October "to no longer take notes in any form on classified intelligence information" and to "cease-and-desist on any deep dives into classified intelligence information," prosecutors wrote in the filing.

But even after being warned, a superior in February found Teixeira viewing classified materials that were not related to his primary duties, according to a Feb. 4 Air Force memo cited by prosecutors.

LOL dude got caught browsing through the Classified Folder and his bosses were just like "now now...". Obviously I don't know what the people who make disciplinary policy know or how they choose to make their rules, but it just feels to me like abusing a security clearance should be a one-strike-you're-out kind of thing?

 

[Free]

Electronic traffic sign in Orlando altered to show threatening, anti-gay message, police say

The Orlando Police Department is attempting to determine who tampered with a digital traffic message board so that it would display a threatening, anti-gay message.

www.fox35orlando.com

The Orlando Police Department is attempting to determine who tampered with a digital traffic sign so that it would display a threatening, anti-gay message.

Officers on Wednesday morning responded to a report about a suspicious incident in Orlando's Medical City, near Lake Nona Boulevard and Nemours Parkway.

When they arrived shortly before 5 a.m., they found a traffic sign had been alerted to read "KILL ALL GAYS" in bright orange letters.

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

According to an anonymous insider who spoke to Reuters DeSantis wants to enter the presidential race next week.

Florida Governor DeSantis to enter presidential race next week

DeSantis will likely file paperwork on May 25.

www.reuters.com

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

If you seem to remember a time back in the late-aughts/early 10's when clean diesel passenger cars, especially European makes, were becoming like a big thing for some reason in the US and then one day it was just suddenly never heard about again, your memory isn't faulty. It really happened, and you can credit the meteoric fall of diesel mainly to Volkswagen.

Indeed. The problem why they cheated was that it is indeed technically possible to make Diesel engines clean enough - but if you are serious about that the necessary amount of urea is quite substantial. But since they wanted to couple the consumption with normal maintenance cycles, and not having to fill it up more often - which is by the way now the norm - they cheated. And probably many people knew about this, because in companies like Volkswagen even if only one screw is changed there are at least 5 or 6 people signing that off. It is virtually impossible to cheat on such big scale without the top management knowing and supporting it.

Diesel is in Germany subsidized, meaning less taxes on it, normally around 0.2 - 0.3 EUR less per liter than normal fuels at every public gas station. So when normal fuel became expensive, many people made that switch here. So when Dieselgate became a thing the resale value of these cars dropped at large scale, with court trials for compensations all around the globe.

Well newer Diesel engines are supposed to be "real clean" now, but many people lost their trust in such claims.

 

[Veritable Quandry]

According to an anonymous insider who spoke to Reuters DeSantis wants to enter the presidential race next week.

Florida Governor DeSantis to enter presidential race next week

DeSantis will likely file paperwork on May 25.

www.reuters.com

He had to wait for a change in Florida law. Until a week ago, he would have had to resign as Governor if he ran for President.

 

[Free]

Anti-Fascist. Armed to the Teeth

Hateful rhetoric is leading to armed protests from the far right. But now, they’re not the only ones with weapons

www.rollingstone.com

THE YOUNG WHITE nationalist across the street from the drag show starts to panic. He and his friend — two white men, probably in their early twenties, with baseball hats, and faces masked by the kind of stretchy gaiters middle-aged guys wear on fishing boats — hold a big sign with bold, black letters: “Pedophiles get the rope.” But their expressions change as they’re suddenly surrounded by figures dressed in all-black with combat boots, military helmets, balaclavas, body armor, and tinted goggles, their gloved hands balled into fists.

It’s a Monday afternoon in Fort Worth, Texas, and the group in all black are mostly members of the Elm Fork chapter of the John Brown Gun Club (JBGC), a left-wing anti-fascist organization created to level the playing field with right-wing militias that show up armed to protests around the country.

Only a matter of time.

 

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

John Brown Gun Club

I just had a wordgasm.

 

[Essence Lumin]

According to an anonymous insider who spoke to Reuters DeSantis wants to enter the presidential race next week.

Florida Governor DeSantis to enter presidential race next week

DeSantis will likely file paperwork on May 25.

www.reuters.com

I don't think he has a chance in the primary against Trump but it should make for some fireworks.

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

Uber's head of diversity was suspended, because she held an event named "Don't call me Karen", where white women could talk about this kind of persona.

The head of diversity was suspended after lots of employees talked to Uber's management about their concerns that the framing of the term Karen as hurtful because it minimized the harms of racism.

By the way the head of diversity, Bo Young Lee, is of Korean descendance.

https://news.yahoo.com/dei-exec-uber-placed-leave-034641289.html

#

 

[Beebo Brink]

Uber's head of diversity was suspended....

All-round cluster-fuck at Uber. And an excellent opening to completely discredit DEI initiatives, as shown by all the vile comments.

My personal experience with our corporate DEI initiative makes me cringe. From what I could see, it was mostly theatrical performance to show "our white people care". Meanwhile, management promoted the same majority of white men up the corporate ladder.

Our corporate communications team was hyper-sensitive to any imagery that was not diverse, so every stock photo we use must have minorities in it. But not everyone got the message, and for a company anniversary, the congratulatory video -- filled with employee interviews -- was nothing but a sea of white. Great consternation at the last minute before its release!! HR was pulled in to identify the (very few) minorities working at the company, so they could be interviewed, too.

I can't speak for how Black people in our organization feel, but the LGBT+ group gives me vibes of surface gloss. Yes, we have our own ERG and webinars, but HR didn't know how to handle partnership benefits when I joined. Our small company was acquired by corporate back in 2000, so we were onboarded as a group. I walked up to the employee orientation table and asked "Do you offer partner benefits?" and none of the three HR people had a clue. It's as if I was the first person to even ask. They weren't hostile, but they were completely clueless, and that was not, for me, a good sign.

I suspect that this is the stage where our company is still stalled: they aren't actively discriminatory, they are vaguely welcoming and mean well, but they haven't truly integrated diversity into their business.