Search Results for: San Jose

Arizona city shuts down church program that fed the hungry for the last 25 years

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Nieves Riedel, mayor of San Luis, Arizona
Nieves Riedel, mayor of San Luis, Arizona, and
very hostile to churches feeding the hungry

They’re coming for you next: In 2022 a new mayor and administration arrived in San Luis, Arizona, and immediately thereafter the food program of Gethsemani Baptist Church in San Luis, Arizona, came under harassment, with repeated citations and bureaucratic demands that it limit its operations, to a point that the threatened fines (more than $4,000) and potential jail terms for its pastor forced the church stop the program, despite operating peaceably and acceptably for a quarter of a century.

After new officials took over in San Luis, the city sent a letter last fall ordering the church to stop using semi-trucks for food delivery at its property. Attempting to resolve the order, the church offered to use smaller trucks. The city denied the request and told the church it must stop the food ministry entirely. These limitations make it functionally impossible to carry out the ministry in the same way.

Since receiving the city’s letter, Pastor Jose [Castro] had to significantly cut back on the food ministry. He’s tried to continue feeding the hungry as best he can under these limitations. But this wasn’t enough for the city of San Luis and its new Mayor, Nieves Riedel. Just a few weeks ago, while Pastor Jose passed out emergency food supplies to a small group of people at the church, a city code enforcer showed up unannounced and issued him four citations. Less than a week later, when a third party parked a truck in front of the church for just five minutes, the code enforcer returned and issued Pastor Jose four more citations. Not only will Pastor Jose have to pay fines in municipal court, each future violation may result in criminal charges.

These aggressive tactics have now forced Gethsemani to pause its ministry, as the church and Pastor Jose cannot afford the heavy fines or to relocate. Because of the City and Mayor Riedel’s intimidation tactics, the church cannot feed the hungry. That means people are going hungry right now.

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Pushback: Federal court rules against ban of Christian student group by San Jose Unified School District

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San Jose Unified School District:
San Jose Unified School District: Where Satan
worshipers are welcomed and Christians banned.

They’re coming for you next: On September 13, 2023 the Federal Ninth Circuit Court overturned a ban of the student group, the Fellowship of Christian Athletes (FCA), by San Jose Unified School District, stating that the district cannot allow some groups it agrees with to meet on campus but ban religious groups it dislikes.

The history:

In April 2019, controversy erupted at the San Jose Unified School District’s Pioneer High School in California over a Fellowship of Christian Athletes requirement that student leaders comply with the group’s Statement of Faith and its Sexual Purity Statement. The former requires student leaders of the group to hew to the tenets of traditional Christian theology and the belief that “marriage is exclusively the union of one man and one woman,” while the latter affirms that “the appropriate place for sexual expression is in the context of a marriage relationship.” After a teacher complained about FCA’s faith requirements to the school principal and later presented his concerns to a school leadership “Climate Committee” composed of several school department chairs and administrators, the school revoked FCA’s official recognition as a school student club.

For the 2019-20 school year, FCA applied for recognition again and, predictably, was denied. Yet as the Ninth Circuit notes, the Satanic Temple Club, which even the complaining teacher believed was formed to mock FCA, was approved despite having its own set of non-religious “tenets” similar to FCA’s faith requirements.

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Pushback: California county sued for using cellphones to track movements of church-goers

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Santa Clara seal

They’re coming for you next: Santa Clara county in California is now being sued by Calvary Chapel San Jose and its pastor Mike McClure for using without warrant the GPS data from the cellphones of the church’s members to track their movements without their knowledge.

On August 22, 2023, a lawsuit was filed by Advocates for Faith and Freedom on behalf of Calvary Chapel San Jose against Santa Clara County, California, for utilizing geofencing methods to spy on church members during the COVID-19 pandemic. Earlier this year, Santa Clara County imposed a $1.2 million fine against the church for not abiding by the State’s and County’s COVID-19 restrictions.

Santa Clara County utilized an investigative method known as geofencing. Geofencing is a technological tool the government uses to track people relative to their location and likely locations. This tool is typically used in police investigations of criminal activity and, in these instances, requires a warrant– which is not always granted.

The lawsuit complaint can be read here [pdf]. As it notes:
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California: where politicians consider criminals their base and ordinary citizens their enemy

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Three stories (two from today and one from two days ago) illustrate starkly the fascist mentality of California Democrats, clearly more interested in giving criminals as much freedom as possible while restricting the freedoms of ordinary law-abiding citizens.

The first story is especially grotesque. Senator Harris (D-California) wants to release criminals into the general population, even though these individuals cannot generally be relied upon to follow any quarantine restrictions. In prison however they are in the perfect quarantine, easily isolated from others.

Harris however is horrified by this. As she writes,

[The Federal Bureau of Prisons] is responding to the threat of coronavirus with extreme measures that both maintain current levels of incarceration and penalize the incarcerated community— including by suspending social and legal visitation, suspending inmate facility transfers, and potentially locking down institutions.

O the horror! We must release these individuals immediately, since restricting their freedom is so against what America stands for!

Meanwhile, the second story illustrates how California politicians have no problem imposing these same restrictions on innocent citizens. While Harris wants to release criminals, San Francisco politicians have imprisoned every citizen in these counties, while shutting down numerous businesses at great cost to their owners.

And the third story reveals the hidden fascist reasons for these actions in California. Because a flu-like virus might someday infect a lot of people, San Jose officials decide they have to shut down a gun shop.

Makes sense to me. We can’t have those evil Wuhan viruses buying guns, can we?

The goal of Democratic politicians in California (and elsewhere) isn’t to stop the virus. Their goal is to establish a totalitarian state, with them in power. This epidemic is only making this fascist desire more obvious.

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Federal court allows attacked Trump supporters to continue lawsuit against San Jose

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The Ninth Circuit Court has ruled that a lawsuit by injured Trump supporters against San Jose and seven of its police officers can proceed.

A three-judge panel unanimously affirmed U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh of the Northern District of California’s 2017 ruling denying the city of San Jose’s efforts to dismiss the suit against seven police officers. The plaintiffs say the officers channeled them into a violent crowd on June 2, 2016, as they exited a rally for then-presidential candidate Trump at the McEnery Convention Center. Rally-goers say they were punched and pelted with eggs while nearby law enforcement officers did nothing to protect them.

“We find the officers violated clearly established rights and are not entitled to qualified immunity at this stage of the proceedings,” Senior Judge Dorothy Wright Nelson wrote for the panel, which also included Judges Andrew Kleinfeld and William Fletcher. “Being attacked by anti-Trump protesters was only a possibility when the attendees arrived at the rally,” Nelson wrote. “The officers greatly increased that risk of violence when they shepherded and directed the attendees towards the unruly mob waiting outside the Convention Center.”

The panel also declined to block the 20 plaintiffs’ claims against San Jose, which Koh allowed to stand, saying it lacked jurisdiction to consider that portion of the city’s appeal.

Unfortunately, the big fish will get off scott free.

The suit originally named San Jose Police Chief Eddie Garcia and Mayor Sam Liccardo. Liccardo was dropped as a defendant from an amended version of the suit in November 2016 and Koh’s ruling dismissed claims against Garcia.

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California to prosecute pro-life activists

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Fascist state: California has charged two anti-abortion activists with 15 felonies for making undercover videos that proved Planned Parenthood sold baby parts for profit.

Prosecutors say Daleiden, of Davis, California, and Merritt, of San Jose, filmed 14 people without permission between October 2013 and July 2015 in Los Angeles, San Francisco and El Dorado counties. One felony count was filed for each person. The 15th was for criminal conspiracy to invade privacy.

Daleiden said in an email to The Associated Press that the “bogus” charges are coming from “Planned Parenthood’s political cronies. … The public knows the real criminals are Planned Parenthood and their business partners,” Daleiden said.

The conversations included officials from Planned Parenthood and StemExpress, a California company that provides blood, tissue and other biological material for medical research and had received fetal tissue from Planned Parenthood. In one of the pair’s videos, Daleiden poses as “Robert Sarkis” of the phony Biomax Procurement Services and is shown discussing liver tissue with the chief executive of StemExpress at a Northern California restaurant.

The article tries to imply that the videos were edited deceptively, but anyone who has watched the full tapes can see that Planned Parenthood does exactly what filmmakers say, harvest baby parts for profit. For the Democratic officials that run California, revealing such facts is unacceptable, and must be punished.

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Lawsuit against San Jose by Trump supporters to go forward

9:08 pm

A federal judge has given the go-ahead to a lawsuit by Trump supporters against the city of San Jose for not protecting them from attacks by anti-Trump protesters during a Trump rally in June.

The city police essentially forced Trump supporters into the anti-Trump mob, and then stepped back and did nothing when that mob attacked them. You can see some of the videos of these attacks here.

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Trump rally attendees sue San Jose

5:00 pm

Fourteen attendees of a San Jose Trump rally on June 2 have filed a class-action suit against the city, the mayor, and the police chief for their failure to protect them from rioters.

“Law-abiding citizens leaving the Trump rally were victimized by being forced by armed police to walk into a riot in full swing where many were assaulted while police looked on,” said the plaintiffs’ attorney, Harmeet K. Dhillon, who is also the vice chair of the California Republican Party.

Dhillon says her clients range from a 14-year-old who was assaulted by two different individuals and denied assistance by the San Jose Fire Department to a 71-year-old woman whose glasses were ripped off and destroyed by three rioters. She said it was made clear that the “inaction” of 250 San Jose police officers “was colored by political viewpoint considerations.”

As documented at the time, the San Jose police actually arranged things so that the Trump supporters were forced to take a detour that would put them directly in the path of the violent protesters, and then stood down and watched them get attacked.

I hope they win big, and bankrupt the mayor and the police chief.

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San Jose police herded Trump supporters into mob

1:43 pm

In this op-ed today by a Trump supporter, describing how leftwing thugs broke his nose at a Trump rally in San Jose, there was the very significant sentence, highlighted below:

My trouble began once the rally was over.

My friend and I joined a crowd of Trump supporters who had all left the convention center around the same time. The garage where we had parked our car was right next to the building, but police were directing everyone around the block to another garage entrance instead. The farther we walked, the fewer Trump fans were with us — people began peeling off to go to restaurants or bars in the area, or to other garages nearby.

And suddenly, there were protesters everywhere. Some were holding Mexican flags, or burning American ones. They were yelling “F— Trump!” at us and cornering us. [emphasis mine]

In other words, the San Jose police, who had been given the stand-down order by their mayor, who hates Trump and has sent campaign money to Clinton, had arranged things so that Trump supporters couldn’t simply go to their cars. They had to run the gauntlet through these violent thugs, without police protection, thus guaranteeing that some ot them would be hurt.

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Another company enters the orbital remote sensing field

6:56 pm

The competition heats up: A California company, Hera Systems, has announced plans to launch 9 cubesats late in 2016 to provide commercial imagery of the Earth.

Hera Systems of San Jose, California, is planning to launch nine cubesat-class spacecraft in late 2016 that will be able to provide images at resolutions of up to one meter over several spectral bands, as well as video. That initial constellation could grow in time to up to 48 satellites, allowing the company to take images of the same location several times a day.

This field is becoming very crowded. Either there will be a significant shake-out, or we will see a burst of profits that will invigorate it even more. The companies all seem to think there is enough business to justify their existence.

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Vizio smart televisions watch YOU

10:12 am

If you are going to buy a smart television, don’t buy one by Vizio, as they by default track your viewing and provide the information to advertisers.

The feature, “Smart Interactivity,” is already turned on as a default setting for millions of people who have purchased the device. Viewers are able to turn off the setting, that is, if they know it even exists. “Non-personal identifiable information may be shared with select partners… to permit these companies to make, for example, better-informed decisions regarding content production, programming and advertising,” Vizio said in a statement.

Vizio seems to be taking a new approach by tracking viewers by default, while competitors like San Jose-based Samsung or LG Electronics leave it to customers to turn the setting on. Vizio’s sharing with advertisers also reportedly lets them target devices like your phone, which other companies do not.

Somehow this seems to be a direct violation of privacy, which also might be quite illegal.

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The seas of Titan

9:27 am

Thar’s black gold up thar! Data from Cassini has confirmed the presence of ocean waves on Titan’s seas, while also providing suggesting that they are made mostly of liquid methane, not ethane as had been predicted.

The maximum depth of Kraken Mare appears to be 160 meters, and Ligeia Mare could be as much as 200 meters deep, reported Marco Mastrogiuseppe of Sapienza University of Rome. The fact that the radar signals could bounce off the sea bottom suggests that the seas were more transparent than expected and thus must contain mostly methane, not ethane. Hayes says his best estimate is about 90% methane. Essam Marouf, a planetary scientist at San José State University in California, reported on the first results from a separate radar experiment that sent radar reflections to Earth instead of back to the spacecraft. Those tests provide independent evidence that the seas are dominated by methane, Marouf says, and it implies that the lakes are kept filled by precipitating methane.

As the article also notes, this methane is “55 times Earth’s oil reserves.”

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