Bring Back The Magic*

Nothing can tear you apart

If you keep living straight from the heart

Though you know that you're gonna hurt some

The magic will come

If you keep living straight from the heart

You will know when to stop and to start

Once you see that no one really wins

Then the magic begins

Bring back the magic

Don't make life so tragic

Bring back the magic

Don't make life so tragic

This magic doesn't work. Not even in Margeritaville, and certainly not at Dunwoody City Hall. It seems that one former councilman did not get the memo. Neither did the Blue Bag Rag as they have been spending ink letting him vent his disappointment and frustration. 

This is quite baffling. This councilman was a vocal supporter of forming a city, certainly had access to the proposed city charter (everyone did), and also must have known that the neighbors we could elect to council or to be mayor would be powerless. It is there in black and white. Given this, how in the world can "local control" exist? Is he, or anyone else for that matter, at all surprised at this bloated, self-serving bureaucracy, with its insatiable greed for outside money? If he wants the city to "do the right thing" he surely understands that for them the "right thing" comes with lots of money. All he needs to do is scrounge up a grant. 

But this is getting a bit tiresome, like watching and listening to Ernest Angley: entertaining at first; amusing at its best; but mostly unbelievable as all faith healings are. There is no pentecostal politician, certainly not a former politician, who is going to lay hands on these bureaucrats, yell "Heal!" and suddenly they become righteous, faithful or even honest servants of the citizens of Dunwoody. 

He made a deal with the devil and took the road paved with mere intentions. Welcome to hell.

* Apologies to ParrotHeads everywhere.

It's A Sign

 If you have visited God's country lately you may have noticed a couple of things. First, there are not many billboards, at least not compared to Georgia. And, a significant number of the billboards they have look a lot like this:

This Might Backfire

Much of what they say is true, well, at least the facts they lay out verify. But the messaging...that could use some work. At a glance, folks seeing this billboard might assume that school teachers in NC are not being paid, or not being paid enough. Relative to other states the pay is low. Relative. But relative to other states, outside of Raleigh-Durham, Charlotte and Asheville, the cost of living is relatively lower. It would also be interesting to compare median public school pay to median private school pay and compare those state-to-state. In this state, and presumably most, private school teachers' pay is less than public school. 

A verifiable claim is made regarding 2000 or more open teaching positions, so do private schools have a larger number of open positions? Relatively speaking. If NC is anything like GA, there are lots of "teaching" positions in the schoolhouse that do not include any in-class activities. Then there is a possibility, there as well as here, of the fox and the henhouse, as it is they who assign these classifications, and they who declare the staffing requirements. That is something they can, and do control. 

That's the quantitative story: more money; more teachers. Maybe. There is the qualitative story, which the casual reader, like the one doing 70 MPH on I-85, may, to be kind, infer: that more money means the current teachers on the payroll will do a better job, thereby creating better schools. Is this to say that the teachers they have are holding back and could do a better job? This also begs the questions of "what does better mean?" and "who defines better?" How do we, the taxpayer, audit for improvement, IE better, when the taxpayer doesn't even control these definitions? Or maybe the taxpayer does. DeKalb County Schools have been enduring declining enrollment, some caused by underlying demographic changes, but some attrition is due to parents, taxpayers, taking a different path. A powerful message given these parents still pay for public schools but are concerned enough to also pay for the other option, be it in money, or time, or both. 

DeKalb has the answer to our problem: hire a PR firm to run a campaign. Looks like NC has done the same. 

It's A Tough Job

DeKalb County Schools have engaged a firm to entice parents into bringing their kids back to public school. Seems the approach of right-sizing evaporated under the withering heat of parental resistance. In this case these parents already had their kids in public school placing them outside the target market for the PR firm. Thankfully, the PR firm gets paid for each student whose ass they can get back into class. For that one magic day when attendance counts for annual state funding. 

That should tell you pretty much everything. It isn't about learning. It's not about education. It's all about money. Based on the amount of state funding each little backpack toter represents and what the firm charges DeKalb may yet be able to fill that new admin building. All the while existing schools, of which there are arguably too many, will continue to deteriorate. But hey, you like your Vanderlyn, you can keep your Vanderlyn. Happy now?

For the casual observer this is going to be interesting.  Convincing parents who've decided on a better option than DCSD, to reconsider and possibly bring back the funding is formidable. Parents with children approaching school age may be no easier to convince. It just so happens these parents talk to other parents whose kids are already in school. These parents are more likely to be swayed by their neighbors than some out-of-town marketing firm. This summer should be fun.

EFF-ing Flock

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) focuses on privacy and liberty in the internet age and has taken aim at Flock and their ubiquitous cameras. In the first case, they saw, and reported on mission creep. This included a case directly contradicting Flock's statements that their technology "is not used to enforce traffic violations" even though a Georgia State Trooper ticketed a motorcyclist for holding a phone with the notation on the ticket that it was captured on a specific Flock camera. 

Obviously, Flock do nothing to actually ensure their system does not do what they say it cannot do. 

In a follow up a month later, EFF reports that due to lack of judicial supervision cops have expanded their [mis]use from specific violations to whatever the hell tickles their fancy. They suggest that lack of a warrant requirement has created a culture of off-label, unrestricted access to sensitive location information. PoPos' justification, provided by Flock, is to point out all the high-stakes crimes these cameras assist in, despite the facts proving the technology's more common use in very low-level investigations. Buford City Schools is using this technology for residency verification, which on the surface seems, well, lazy. BCS claims they are so good that they are subjected high levels of residency fraud but have failed to clearly explain how this happens and why Flock's technology is such a godsend. Lest you think the cesspool is restricted to Georgia, this is happening across the country. Governments, predominantly law enforcement agencies, are now doing searches as pre-employment background searches.  Now that these eyes now have ears, the technology is being brought to bear on noise complaints, including our very own DeKalb County PD. 

Across the board, the justifications range from cherry-picked examples to the downright silly, insulting the intelligence of any subjected to this blather. Like you. These are obfuscations deflecting attention from their end-around on due process. It may not be illegal (yet), maybe not even unethical, but it is clearly immoral, and this mission creep is only going to get creepier. 

Flock O' Worries

Flock, of ubiquitous camera fame, is an interesting phenomenon sitting at the intersection of technology, demographics and politics. Politics of the left, especially the "defund the police" movement, dramatically improved Flock's prospects allowing them to body-surf on the wave of political virtue signalling, a poorly understood, but virulent characteristic of the left. Flock gave the DtP pols cover. They could claim they support the police, but market Orwellian surveillance as a safety measure. All for the greater good, eh? Especially when you could watch PDs waste away due to attrition. A win-win for the left. 

The market is huge, and geographically concentrated, as the left who embraced and marketed the technology tend to dominate urban areas with dense populations and lots o' crime. And Flock played the collaboration card, as their technology allowed bad guys to be tracked across geo-political borders. No criminal, nor anyone else for that matter, can escape Sauron's never-blinking eye. The technology was sold as "license plate readers" simply tracking plates that the "good guys" told them to watch out for. Then it was gun shot tracking. And next? Who knows.

But all was going well until... 

...along came Trump.

The left fled their Maid Cafés, where they had been gorging on the empty calories of their word salads, to enlist-in-resist. They all did. And that is all they had...all they have. That is their dilemma and our entertainment as it is always fun to see the haughty hoisted on their own petard. Locally, the left pivoted very quickly, very anti-Flock, and suddenly anti-surveillance-state, as if the U.S. Constitution is a new-found friend. A friendship that will not long endure. Or, we would not have Flock in the first place. 

The left does have a real issue, at least in their mind, and it isn't just that they hate Trump, or that the score is Bad Orange Man two, Pant Suits zero. About the only thing they've had as a real, non-knee-jerk, policy position in the last 20 years has been "open borders." That's the real issue, and they dare not say it out loud. They gag at the current administration's enforcement of federal law, and their possible access to Flock's capabilities to do that job. The left's sanctimonious idealization of any and all who "ain't from 'round here," lawfully or not, resulted in serious atrophy in the reasoning parts of the human brain, so they cannot see the logical contradictions of their words and actions. They are also ignorant of how cartels are now into migrant trafficking and their business relationship is not transactional, it is recurring. These migrants will do the cartels' bidding lest the family they've left back home should suffer. Many are not the saints of the left's imagination---they are cartel operatives embedded in our society. But they prefer that over having this administration gain access to Flock services they somehow feel is theirs. 

It will be amusing to see if the left embraces their surveillance state or maintains their "resist" posture. 

Vigilante Wars

Now that the primaries are over, perhaps it isn't too soon to point out some silliness. A week prior, around 0630-0700 a tall, thin man with a small dog, an ankle-biter-kick-dog, was seen on Chamblee Dunwoody near the Knoll. This man, and kick dog, scurried across C-D. Why did the kick-dog cross the street? Glad you asked: so the thin man could uproot a couple of political yard signs. It gets better. Then they scurry back across so the thin man could uproot a real estate sign. This was not in the Village Overlay but one must wonder if he's a diligent vigilante there as well.

Clearly the thin man never took a course even resembling Ethics 101, for if he had, he'd know that if it isn't yours you don't touch it. Unless he is a Dunwoody Slumlord and owns these two properties, it is far from believable that all these signs were his. It is hard to speculate on what was going thru the thin man's mind, why he thought he should do this, and why he thought he could. From outside his addlepated brain it only seems that he shouldn't. Perhaps that's the real problem with vigilantes. They are enforcing a law that exists only in their mind. It is a bit funny when you know that one of the signs was for a sitting judge known for respecting the constitution (state and US) and state laws, rather than an opponent who wanted to legislate from the bench. Now that is the signs of the times.

AJC: Do Better

Really? 85 Today?

Didn't You Report His Death A Couple Weeks Ago?

Red Light District

Started on 1 May.

Is DeKalb trying to tell us something?

Cleanup After Yourself

We shouldn't have to tell you.

Student Driver

Fob Off

'Shroom On Over