Houston Car Theft Precautions - Part 1

Houston undergoes a high figure of auto larcenies twelvemonth after year. Even though Houston have been blessed by not being one of the most 10 metropolises where autos are stolen or broken into, yet it still is a job that human faces most auto proprietors in Houston. Gratuitous to mention, that with the right safeguard in place, you can cut down the hazard dramatically.

Hence, this is not an article that would propose drive a auto that no 1 desires to steal, or locking the auto in a garage with an armed guard on duty. The figure 1 regulation is to never publicize you auto as one ready to be stolen. Yes, this is one of the most common grounds autos are stolen. By advertisement I am trying to hence to drivers that leave of absence the keys in the ignition while they pump gas, or maintain the auto running while they run into the store. If you have got got such as a wont and have been lucky so far, well you never cognize if the adjacent clip you come up back to your car, it will not be there for you. Hence, such as an enactment may ensue in a ticket from law enforcement agencies.

Another wont that shows the thieves you are encouraging to steal your auto is keeping the auto unlocked while you run for short errand. This basically lets the stealer to walk right up to your car, and if not drive away with it, he or she may at the very least steal anything and everything that have any value they happen in the car. By locking the doors, you are showing a mark of awareness, on the other manus keeping the auto unlocked shows your negligence. The importance of taking necessary safeguards reducing Houston auto theft, Pb me to compose a series of articles, of which to be followed. For more than information ready the remainder of the articles, or visit my website for a summarized decision included in a listing of safeguards to follow. Check Out the page dedicated to this portion of Houston Car Larceny Precautions below.

Crooks and Villains in Paradise

A tragic development on the Costa Blanca has been the recent influx of villains and crooks onto this previously unspoiled stretch of beautiful coastland. The Costa del Sol has had a reputation for harbouring such monsters for some years but until recently the Costa Blanca enjoyed some immunity from such influences.

Even in the last decade, the flavour of this region of Spain has undergone a metamorphosis, now featuring an alarming increase in the population of undesirable characters.

The mushrooming effect this migration of ne'er do wells has upon the community is deeply worrying. Too often we think of shady characters as distant, misty types who have nothing to do with us in our day to day lives. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.

These people have children, the same as the rest of us; unfortunately just because someone is of dubious character this does not necessarily mean they have no money. So, their children attend the same private schools as ours. They bank in the same places, they shop in the same supermarkets, and they frequent the same restaurants as the rest of us.

The problem is, of course, that often these people are hard to distinguish from any other family living and working here. Too often they have arrived here with a pocketful of money (usually someone else's) and they then set about building a new environment, sometimes with all good intentions of cleaning up their act a little to enjoy a more respectable lifestyle.

In the true tradition of the crook going straight, such people are notoriously bad money managers and it all goes pear shaped when they run out of funds and have to launch a new scam incentive to generate more cash. Their victims then become the very people they know best and are therefore better able to deceive and swindle.

The rising incidence of confidence trickery, indebtedness and general shady behaviour is unfortunately encouraged by the blasé approach of the Spanish courts in dealing with such people. It is all too easy to borrow a large amount of money privately and then not pay it back. When the poor devil at source tries to retrieve his cash he finds himself unable to do so due to the limitations of the Guardia Civil and the Justice System in general.

The appeal system is antiquated, long winded and guaranteed to stretch over years, so villains and crooks confidently ignore the rulings of the tribunal court system, knowing the next summons to a higher court will take months or years to bring home.

In the meantime, they continue their programme of building a cash reserve on the backs of any individual or finance company foolish enough to lend them money.

A couple who left Spain recently went back to their country of origin with a nice fat wad of money, having taken multiple erroneous deposits to rent a shop space they had absolutely no title to whatever. Such scams go unpunished all the time on the Costa Blanca and show evidence of growing more serious with each passing day.

Until the court system in Spain speeds up a little and begins to really address the problem of fraud amongst the expatriate community, there will be little chance of improvement.

Human Rights Violations in the World - US Prisons

Recently a socialist thinker emailed the Online Think Tank to complain about the human rights abuses in the United States and indicated the percentage of our population in US Prisons. In reality, the United States is such an open and free-society that it attracts folks of low integrity to a life of crime - easy pikens.

Indeed, they showed us a chart comparing the US to other nations and the number of folks in prison. Well, I am here to explain that figures lie and liars figure - it appears that the biggest culprits are Socialist organizations, which have an agenda in the reports that they put out on this subject.

Did you know that 65% of all those in prison in AZ, TX, CA, NM are illegal aliens, they are Mexico's criminals which came here. This number is growing in all US Prisons. Unfortunately we need a "shoot to kill" policy on our borders, which no one wishes to talk about until which time the PRI fixes their problems with corruption and Mexico fixes their crime challenges.

Secondly, the biggest human rights violation was the attack on the World Trade Towers, which killed innocent civilians going about their day. Further, any nation state that supports International Terrorism should be held fully accountable. Therefore we must act. We must hunt down the criminals, where ever they are on this Planet period.

Those who attack our Justice System, who do not live in our nation, need to wise up and look at other parts of the world, like China and discuss the human rights there before attacking the policies we voted for here in the greatest nation ever created in the history of mankind! My name is Lance Winslow and I thank you for listening.

CU and the Ward Churchill Affair - How Did This Happen in the First Place?

The delay is over and the inevitable have happened: the University of Centennial State yesterday formally dismissed Professor Ward Churchill. Interim President Hank Brown explained, in an unfastened missive to the school's donors:
To assist guarantee that accountability, we cannot stay academic misconduct. More than 20 mental faculty members (from copper and other universities) on three separate panels conducted a thorough reappraisal of Professor Churchill's work and unanimously agreed that the grounds showed he engaged in research misconduct, which required serious sanction. The record of the lawsuit his mental faculty equals developed shows a form of serious, repeated and intentional research misconduct that drop below the lower limit criterion of professional integrity, including fabrication, falsification, improper commendation and plagiarism. As a doctorial alumnus of CU, I care deeply about issues of academic unity at the establishment because they reflect, for good or ill, on my ain reputation. For this reason, if John John Churchill is guilty of academic dishonesty (and there looks small uncertainty at this point that he is), then he needed to go.

However, it's a immense error to see the Churchill lawsuit exclusively in footing of the events that have got made the presence pages. Crises like these go on for deeper, systemic reasons, and we'd all make well to understand the funny kinetics in Boulder that enabled these events.

Let's start with something else Brown said in that letter:
We are answerable to those who have got a interest in the university: the people of Centennial State who supply us $200 million annually in taxation dollars, the federal physical things that supply some $640 million annually in research funding, the givers who gave us more than than $130 million this twelvemonth to heighten academic quality, the mental mental faculty members who anticipate their co-workers to move with integrity, and the pupils who trust that faculty who learn them ran into high university and professional standards. We are also answerable to the givers who put their philanthropic dollars in CU. We have got the duty to you to guarantee that the University of Centennial State goes on to be a topographic point where your contribution heightens our academic strengths and polishes our reputation. Donors to copper gave a record $130 million this past financial year, and it is incumbent upon us to work to go on to be a topographic point worthy of your investment. Right - the university is answerable and it have a duty to guarantee the unity of its mental faculty and research. Ideally, though, that's the kind of thing that haps at the term of office reappraisal and publicity stages, not down the route when the professor states something that embarrasses the institution.

Churchill's professional advancement have been unusual, to state the least. For starters, he never earned a PhD, and while you can reason with that criterion if you like, a school like copper simply doesn't awarding term of office to non-PhDs (he was "one of lone 12 tenured instruction mental faculty at UCB who make not throw an earned terminus degree"). He was promoted to full professor in 1997, and it looks he underwent all appropriate reappraisals during his publicity procedure and since.

So how did his academic dishonesty travel unnoticed?

As it turns out, I might have got some penetration into this question...although I'll get with a caveat: this is an analysis of a general moral force and not a remark on the John Churchill lawsuit specifically. However, I believe that the bigger linguistic context I'm going to depict explicates how the University of Centennial State might meet jobs with the enlisting and publicity of minority mental faculty where other schools wouldn't. (And as always, I ask for remark from those with even more than penetration into the situation.)

A few old age back, while a Ph.D. pupil at CU, I was invited to function as a member of a mental faculty hunt committee. We were looking to engage a couple positions, and conducted a thorough national hunt for the best the field had to offer. Course Of Study vitae (that's the technical term for those thick, heavy long-form academic résumés - none of that one-page crap here, folks) flowed into Macky Hallway by the wheelbarrowfull, and we saw applications from a batch of seriously talented people. But as we winnowed corn from chaff, a distressing tendency started to emerge. All of the best campaigners we were seeing were white. We had a nice figure of minority applicants, but frankly, they just weren't as qualified (at least on paper) as the achromatic applicants.

Now, my initial reaction - the reaction of the full committee, in fact - was that something wasn't correct here. We knew damned good and well that there were plenty of talented minorities out there. Each of us knew talented minority people and people around the state who'd have got been antic candidates. So the job wasn't that they didn't exist, it was that they weren't applying.

I was baffled. Boulder is amazing. It's one of the most beautiful topographic points in United States and it's a cultural mecca. Who the Hell wouldn't desire to dwell there? A couple conversations with minority mental faculty members, though, showed me something I hadn't really thought about in any item before. A Dramatization

Minority Faculty Member: Sam, expression around you - what make you see?

Me: I see achromatic people. Right. If you didn't number CU's scholarship athletes, there were roughly six minorities in Boulder, and a couple of achromatic mental mental faculty members in my programme explained to me that no substance how cool Iodine thought Boulder was, the school was always going to have got problem recruiting talented minority faculty because there was nil there for them. No achromatic people. No achromatic neighborhoods. No achromatic churches. No achromatic clubs. No achromatic civilization of any sort. (It's harder for me to state how this dynamical looked to Native American people - there seemed to be even less in the manner of their culture, but I have got no personal experiences to pull on there.)

In a topographic point like Boulder, a town that's just overproduction by what we might name "salon liberals," we liked to state ourselves that we were largely past racial splits in structuring our personal lives and our communities. While that's admirable, it's also not terribly realistic, is it? When pushing come up ups to shove, it's easier to be greathearted and open-minded on these issues when you're surrounded by people who look like you and come from topographic points where they mostly share your cultural experiences and premises and practices. In truth, though, regardless of how unfastened the heads are all around you, it's going to be difficult life and working in a topographic point where you're a novelty. It may not be properly enlightened of me to state these things, but the truth is that while I experience like I have got a pretty clear caput on the issue of race, I'd be uncomfortable life in a town where achromatic common people constituted less than 1% of the population

That's the linguistic context in Boulder. Very white. But what makes this have got to make with the John Churchill case? Well, universities - especially state universities in topographic points like Boulder - are brutally witting of diverseness issues. It's a legal mandate, yes, but it's also a batch more than that. This is a community that understands the built-in value of diverseness in promoting a healthy educational environment and that experiences a moral duty to equity in hiring.

So the commission decided to acquire proactive on the inquiry by actively soliciting applications from specific minority campaigners we knew or knew of and thought mightiness be well-suited to the occupations we were hiring, and this procedure did bend up a couple people that the commission and the mental faculty at big were quite impressed with. I retrieve sitting in The Sink up on the Hill talking with one of the guys, a rise superstar from a major Midwestern newspaper who struck me as the kind of individual we'd be lucky to land, and I remember trying to experience out his involvement in coming to CU. He was nice, he was complimentary, he said all the right things, but I believe I knew right then and there that he wasn't coming to Boulder.

We injure up hiring a achromatic campaigner - a good one, too. But as good as she was, our hunt made Boulder one individual whiter than it had been the twenty-four hours before.

I maintain insisting this have some possible relevancy to the linguistic context in which John Churchill was hired and tenured. At CU, you have got a topographic point that's manner too achromatic to lawsuit it. The very composition of the topographic point is an hindrance to change. The community cognizes it have a race problem, but chasing Whites out of town and forcibly importing minorities isn't an option. So what tools makes the school have got at manus to turn to its hideous diverseness situation?

My hunt commission went the other mile, actually hunting down minority applicants, and if that piques some portion of you that believes race should play no function in hiring or recruiting or promotion, fine. I'm telling you how it is, and I'm also telling you that this is a procedure engaged in by good people acting in good faith. I cognize these people. I was one of them.

Meanwhile, across campus, you have got a cat - a minority campaigner (although that now looks at issue, too) getting term of office despite what a batch of folks see as a wholly undeserving record of scholarship. It have been asserted by people stopping point to the lawsuit that corners were cut, and the feeling that emerges is that copper promoted John Churchill not because of his qualifications, but because of his race. Bash Iodine cognize that this was the reasoning? No. Based on my cognition of the racial kinetics of the institution, can I believe this is what happened? Yup.

And I sympathize fully with those who made the determination to make so, even as a portion of me is appalled at the decision. But what make you make when a) you're committed to a diverse community, but b) qualified minority campaigners often state no thanks?

I can't always support the determinations that acquire made under these circumstances, but I can understand the complexness and struggle of the environment in which they occur. In the micro, these sorts of "demographically aware" determinations may hit us an unfair when we analyze them out of context, but if you reason that we have got got got to believe about the large picture, and that perhaps there are lawsuits where you have to seed the clouds if you desire it to rain, well, I have some understanding for that position. Maybe the lone manner to germinate a Boulder, Centennial State into the kind of topographic point that a top-tier minority campaigner would see as a desirable finish long term is to cut a corner or two in the short term. Maybe.

There is plenty about this statement that fusses me, so salvage your breath yelling the obvious and prefabricated at me. I'm also aware of the laughable naïveté of talking about Americans thinking or acting in the long term. I didn't compose this because I have got any sort of moral certainty in my caput or an acceptable policy in my heart. It is what it is - I'm not happy about the John Churchill affair, but knowing Boulder as I do, I can conceive of how it might have got happened.

Finding Shoeprints as Evidence

"Maybe you retrieve the Russian fabrication Cinderella. If the shoe fits, wear it."—Chekhov, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country

Crooks many modern times happen themselves heading consecutive for prison house if it is establish that their shoe fits. Shoeprints and feelings are very utile to criminal research workers for a assortment of reasons. For one, not only can they demo that a peculiar individual was at the scene of the crime, they may also corroborate or deny a perpetrator's alibi. For instance, say a neighbour claims that when he went adjacent door to borrow a cup of milk, he establish the lady who lived there lying on the life room flooring beaten to death. He adverts that the door was unlocked, so he checked for the woman's pulse, called 911, and waited for the government to arrive. The neighbour states that he went nowhere in the house. If law-breaking scene research workers (CSI's) detect the neighbor's shoeprint on a piece of newspaper, lying on the flooring of the woman's cupboard next to her empty safety sedimentation box, his narrative will not jibe with the criminal investigators.

Prints can also be declarative of the points of entry and issue at a law-breaking scene. Shoeprints establish in the soft soil of a flower bed underneath the pried-open window and matching dirt and dirt black and whites on the flooring inside the house propose the point of entry. Prints filled with blood pointed out through the rear door bespeak the point of exit. Shoeprints left on the tile or wooden floors, countertops, ladders, stairs, windowsills, and even chair seating may uncover the crook's motions within the house.

Following the shoeprints through a law-breaking scene helps CSI's to contract their hunt for evidence. When black and whites are establish in more than than one room of a house that have been burglarized, CSI's focusing their hunt in those areas. Following the issue way can bespeak to CSI's where the criminal tossed the arm or pieces of clothing, such as as a mask or gloves. The best grounds be givens to be establish when retracing a crook's path.

A shoeprint also can associate a criminal to respective crimes. Determination the same black and whites at respective different law-breaking scenes proposes that the same criminal may be involved in each crime. This association many modern times is important to solving the crimes. Each individual law-breaking scene may supply other grounds that when taken by itself is of no use, but when concerted with grounds from the other scenes may go crucial.

For instance, say that CSI technicians happen a blonde piece of hair at one law-breaking scene, brownish rug fibres from a Toyota at another, and, blood spattering forms that bespeak that the slayer was right-handed and about six feet tall at a 3rd law-breaking scene. If viewed individually, each point of grounds states research workers small about the crimes, but when the same black and whites nexus the law-breakings and propose that the same person committed all the crimes, a much clearer mental image is revealed. That image is of a six-foot-tall, right-handed man with blonde hair who drives a Toyota with brownish carpet. Although this profile makes not supply adequate conclusive identification, it, however, constructs a better verbal description of the perpetrator.

Multiple shoeprints can propose whether more than than one individual is involved and may even assist find exactly how many. When CSI technicians happen three distinct types of prints, they can state that at least three people are involved. More people may have got been involved in the law-breaking but failed to go forth behind any shoeprints.

Does The Polygraph Test Work?

It would be great if the polygraph test, otherwise known as the lie detector test, really worked.Certainly Melvin Foster would be happier. In 1982, when FBI profilers thought a taxi driver might be the Green River Killer, local police targeted Foster - a taxi driver - as a suspect. Foster generously agreed to a polygraph test, which he unfortunately failed.
It was unfortunate because he was entirely innocent.

Meanwhile, during a period of two to three years, the Green River Killer murdered four dozen or more women near Seattle and Tacoma, Washington. Gary Leon Ridgway was briefly a suspect, and he was given a polygraph test in 1984. It was determined that he was telling the truth about his innocence. Unfortunately, in this case, he was the killer, and he was free to keep killing, which he did.

In 2001 DNA evidence (and other evidence) finally proved that Ridgway was the killer. In 2003 he confessed, pleading guilty to 48 murders. After more than 20 years, Melvin Foster was finally cleared in the crimes.

Of course, the police never could gather enough evidence to arrest or prosecute Foster - this is usually difficult when the suspect is innocent. But Foster was under a cloud of suspicion for more than 20 years. In 2003, according to an article in the King County Journal, Foster asked the King County Sheriff's Office to finally "apologize and return his rock tumbler and all the rest of the stuff police took from his home in 1982."

It would be great if this didn't happen often, but how would we know? There are other stories about innocent people identified as suspects due to a failed polygraph test, but those are just the ones where the truth comes out. If Ridgway had not been caught, many people would still think Melvin Foster was the Green River Killer.

Perhaps many cases are left like that, with a cloud of suspicion over an innocent person. And what do people think if you fail a polygraph test? That you are guilty, or you must know something, since you are lying. And what do they think when you get the more common result of "inconclusive?" Many think, well, you didn't pass, so you must be guilty or know something. Isn't this what many of us really think when a criminal suspect or "person of interest" in the news can't pass the polygraph?

It would be of some value if the test at least consistently pointed out the real criminals along with few innocent people it wrongly identifies? But in addition to the example above, consider the numerous famous spies who passed the polygraph tests they were given (Ignatz Theodor Griebl, Karel Frantisek Koecher, and Jiri Pasovsky, among others). Many hardened criminals have also proven their ability to lie and still pass the polygraph.

"The US is, so far as I know, the only nation which places such extensive reliance on the polygraph....It has gotten us into a lot of trouble." - A quote from convicted spy (double-agent) Aldrich Ames, who passed two polygraph tests while spying for the Soviet Union.

By the way, most scientists don't believe in the effectiveness of the polygraph test. They consider it to be junk science. Of course it can "work" in some cases. Any lie detecting technique which points at enough possible liars will identify some of them, right? Even flipping a coin will produce an accurate result in some cases.

Is that good enough? What if you are telling the truth? Should you take the test just because you are innocent? Maybe not. If you rely on the polygraph test to prove your innocence, you're gambling with your reputation.

Libby and Rove Gave False Testimonies

Bloomberg's Richard Keil will reveal tonight: "Two top White House aides have given accounts to the special prosecutor about how reporters told them the identity of a CIA agent that are at odds with what the reporters have said, according to persons familiar with the case." The story reflects one given written by Murray Waas for the American Prospect.

Lewis “Scooter'’ Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, told special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald that he first learned from NBC News reporter Tim Russert of the identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame, the wife of former ambassador and Bush administration critic Joseph Wilson. Russert has testified before a federal grand jury that he didn’t tell Libby of Plame’s identity

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove told Fitzgerald that he first learned the identity of the CIA agent from syndicated columnist Robert Novak, who was first to report Plame’s name and connection to Wilson. Novak, according to a source familiar with the matter, has given a somewhat different version to the special prosecutor.

These discrepancies may be important because one issue Fitzgerald is investigating is whether Libby, Rove, or other administration officials made false statements during the course of the investigation. The Plame case has its genesis in whether any administration officials violated a 1982 law making it illegal to knowingly reveal the name of a CIA agent.

Robert Luskin, Rove’s attorney, said today that Rove did tell the grand jury “he had not heard her name before he heard it from Bob Novak.'’ He declined in an interview to comment on whether Novak’s account of their conversation differed from Rove’s.

There also is a discrepancy between accounts given by Rove and Time magazine reporter Matt Cooper. The White

House aide mentioned Wilson’s wife — though not by name — in a July 11, 2003 conversation with Cooper. Rove says that Cooper called him to talk about welfare reform and the Wilson connection was mentioned later in passing.

The leak case shows that administration officials have in effect been using reporters as shields by claiming that the information on Plame first came from them.


The truth is sweet, isn't it?