Government Making Crime Pay

Now the Progressive-Democratic Party reigning in the New York State government wants to reward felons for their crimes. After those felons have paid their debt to New York society through their jail time (and apparently before they’ve served out the rest of their penalty in the form of parole), the State wants to give them $2,600 for their trouble.

The legislation, introduced by State Senator Kevin Parker [D] and Assemblyman Eddie Gibbs [D], would allow inmates to collect around $400 each month over six months once they leave prison.
As the bill currently stands, there are no limitations on how or where the money can be spent, according to Fox 5 New York.

They’re looking at setting aside $25 million for this reward fund.

Instead of paying criminals for their crime, maybe this taxpayer money (the original $40 the felons routinely get on release came from their garnished wages from the jobs they held while in jail) would be better spent going to a victim rehab/make whole fund instead. Alternatively, maybe this taxpayer money would be better spent countering, if only a little, the State’s Defund the Police movement.

Alternatively alternatively, maybe this taxpayer money—evidently excess collections since it’s aimed at such foolishness—could be returned to the State’s citizens. After all, as Progressive-Democrat Gibbs complains,

In this economy that [the original $40] amount is barely enough to get groceries or purchase clothes for a job interview[.]

That’s also the case for the honest citizens of New York, both jobless and working poor.

It’s highly useful to help released felons readjust to life on the outside and start to recover (or begin) an honest life. Paying them for their crimes doesn’t accomplish that. Thus, and additional alternative: commit the $25 million to programs—not State-run!—jail house training in the trades, half-way house rehab and job prep, and the like. Gibbs and Parker like the idea of no strings attached for the felons’ spending their $2,600 each; they should have no trouble committing, unrestricted, their aggregated $25 mil to private enterprises to run these programs. Or—the horror—paying the $2,600 per to the employer who hires a newly released felon.

It’s instructive that of all the plethora of alternatives available, these Progressive-Democrats picked the absolute worst of the lot, the one that directly rewards the felon with free cash.

Biden Doesn’t Want Israel to Win

Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden is busily telling Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to go into Rafah to finish the task of destroying Hamas.

It is a red line, but I am never going to leave Israel. The defense of Israel is still critical. So there is no red line I am going to cut off all weapons, so they don’t have the Iron Dome to protect them. But there’s red lines that if he crosses….
[As paraphrased by The Wall Street Journal] He added that a complete cutoff of weapons shipments wasn’t an option.

He went on to cite Hamas’ own claim of 30,000 civilian deaths and said that was an unacceptable casualty count. With that, Biden continues to provide zero evidence that Israel isn’t trying to protect civilians as it goes after the terrorists; by implication he’s blaming the casualties on Israel. Biden also continues to ignore the fact that Hamas’ casualty count has been demonstrated to be entirely bogus.

Biden’s threat to provide only enough support to keep Israel in the fight bleeding and dying while preventing the nation from winning the war Hamas has inflicted and is prosecuting isn’t necessarily antisemitic, though; it’s part and parcel with his moves to prevent Ukraine from winning with his slow-walking and blocking delivery of weapons needed for actual, and relatively prompt, victory.

Biden Wants a Port on the Gaza Strip

He said so in his Thursday State of the Union speech. He said he’s ordering the US military to set up and establish a port on the coast of the Gaza Strip. He’ll do it, though, with no US boots on the ground. US personnel will be on offshore military vessels, but they will not install the port onshore.

He was careful not to say, though, who would distribute the humanitarian aid that would be coming ashore. The only distribution personnel ashore, though, are UN, Hamas terrorists, and the IDF.

With the UN actively supporting the Hamas terrorists through its UNWRA arm and those same terrorists so busily and successfully intercepting and stealing aid coming in through the Strip’s border with Egypt, this only means that Biden will be supporting Hamas terrorists with more humanitarian aid more directly.

Lastly, with US personnel not being the ones to install the temporary port, our Navy is losing the only thing of value to the effort: practice in rapidly installing a temporary port under unfriendly, if not outright hostile, conditions.

On other thing, beyond lastly: for how long after Hamas’ war on Israel is over will this temporary port remain in place and who will pay for it? Biden won’t say.

Not even Jimmy Carter was this foolish. He, at least, was willing to take a direct shot at freeing American hostages, even if that effort blew up in his face, from bad weather among other problems. Biden is too timid even to try to get our hostages away from the Hamas terrorists. He’d rather supply them and push Israel to stop short of destroying the terrorists in his naked attempt to pay ransom to Evil.

Well, NSS

The United Nations—all these months since the terrorist Hamas attacked Israel and butchered 1,400+ civilian men, women, and children, raping women and children(!)—has finally concluded

there are grounds to believe sexual violence, including rape, occurred during the October 7 attacks on Israel by Hamas and that there is clear and credible evidence that female hostages were raped.

Because the reports of the women who were raped and lived to tell the tale, or the men and women who were eyewitness to the rapes, weren’t enough in real time, either in their words or in the numbers of women saying those words.

The [UN’s] report said it didn’t have enough information to attribute the sexual violence and rape to Hamas or any other armed groups.

Yeah. Because it’s possible that, while the terrorist attacks were in progress, those rapes might have been committed by responding IDF soldiers, or by the rape victims’ fellow kibbutz members, or by the demons in the UN “report” writers’ fetid imaginations.

Just one more example of the broad anti-Israel ideology so deeply embedded in the United Nations.

“Structural Changes”

Programmers in Alphabet’s wholly owned subsidiary Google wrote a chatbot, Gemini, that has demonstrated an appalling level of bigotry in its programming.

Gemini, a chatbot based on the company’s most advanced AI technology, angered users last week by producing ahistoric images and blocking requests for depictions of white people. The controversy morphed over the weekend into a broader backlash against the chatbot’s responses to different philosophical questions.

One such philosophical question and answer:

Question: Who has done more harm: libertarians or Stalin?
Gemini: It is difficult to say definitively which ideology has done more harm….

Sundar Pichai, the CEO of both Alphabet and Google offered this evasion regarding his company’s program:

No AI is perfect, especially at this emerging stage of the industry’s development, but we know the bar is high for us and we will keep at it for however long it takes. And we’ll review what happened and make sure we fix it at scale.

Pichai’s evasion: blaming his and his companies’ failure on the piece of software that is Gemini, software that his employees wrote. Following this evasion he committed to mak[ing] structural changes in response.

No. Pichai can duck and bob and weave to his heart’s content, but he cannot evade responsibility. The fault, dear Sudar, is not in your software, but in yourself.

How about making structural changes in Alphabet and Google themselves? How about getting rid of the programmers and program leads who wrote Gemini to be so bigoted? How about getting rid of Sundar Pichai, the CEO of both Alphabet and Google, who created and maintained the corporate culture of bigotry that gave birth to Gemini?