A man was arrested in a small California beach town for putting pieces of paper on cars that impersonated a parking authority.
According to a police department release, the scam citations used a QR Code to direct potential victims to a website for payment.
He was charged with unlawful use of a computer and fraud.
I’ve written and presented extensively on racist origins and continued abuse of jaywalking laws.
It’s encouraging to see California start the process of removing what has always been an intentionally bad law.
Jaywalking was initially a crime lobbied for by the car industry, and is seen by some as a law that unfairly targets people based on race and economic status.
The Freedom to Walk Act for 2023 will prevent California police from targeting random walkers with bogus criminal charges and instead requires a simple test: “immediate danger of a collision.”
It sounds like just some common sense because that’s how bad the old racist jaywalking laws were.
Stephen Norris, Russian history professor at Miami University, offers this comparison:
One of the more worrisome trends in Putin speeches, especially in the last six or seven months, has been how amorphous, almost existential they’ve been. The Ukrainian war has been framed in existential terms — it’s a war to save Russian civilization. In the speech when he signed the treaties that annexed the four territories, he said Western culture is nothing less than satanism and this is the new threat against Russia. It was kind of scary and quite apocalyptic in the way his speeches had ever been. And in that speech, Putin actually referenced Goebbels. He said what the West has done is create a culture of lies about Russia that’s reminiscent of Goebbels.
[…]
In a speech in May of 1943, Goebbels said weirdly similar things. This was after Nazi Germany had lost at Stalingrad after the Soviet Union was turning the tide of the war. Goebbels gave a speech that turned the seeming defeat into victory and into a more existential question, saying the allies are trying to eliminate German culture, German history, the German people.
The Twitter CEO has a speed/speech problem. He repeatedly crashes things that other people made, pleads for public help, and leaves others paying dearly for his failures.
Lack of simple regulations hurts everyone as he bounces around like a malicious Tesla driver who thinks freedom means slamming passengers into every obvious tree while claiming forests are a liberal myth.
Of course he refers to himself as a “free speech extremist”, but really how different is that from extreme thinking that vehicles shouldn’t be regulated (shouldn’t have any suspension or brakes) and allowed to repeatedly stupidly crash instead?
Chinese authorities are investigating a new deadly accident involving another speeding Tesla Model Y that ran through a traffic light crashing into two vehicles resulting in the deaths of two people. This latest incident comes just weeks after a different Model Y was filmed accelerating out of control before crashing, killing two people and injuring three more.
Tesla safety is a joke and yet sadly it’s been allowed to become reality.
There’s even a site tracking the huge number of “sudden acceleration” incidents related to “free speed extremism” of the Tesla CEO.
Recent reports suggest the latest Tesla engineering by design may ignore speed laws, lights or guidelines (reject regulation) and stupidly crash into anyone and everyone around them.
