San Diego Local Order of Bloggers Launch Windows 8.1 App

San Diego's Finest tea party bloggers just released a Windows 8.1 app. This app is an update to one of the first Windows 8 political apps available in the Microsoft store. The Windows 8.1 app is free (click here) as is their android app (click here). No app is currently available for apple devices, however, the website at www.theslobs.org is highly responsive and adaptive for various screen sizes.

The San Diego Local Order of Bloggers is a group that formed during the beginning of the tea party movement in response to out of control government growth. The group includes conservatives, Libertarians, Democrats, Republicans and Independents. It consists of a close nit group of writers, radio and television personalities, activists, organizers and concerned citizens who occasionally meet over beers.

The term app is short for application. It is shorthand for small, restricted programs that run without full access to the systems they are installed on. Windows 8.1 apps can add an informative "live tile" to the start screen (also referred to as the "lock screen") of the latest Windows operating system.  These "live tiles" allow applications to present live information in a condensed and standardized format. Users can choose tile sizes for each program and organize them on the screen.  The latest SLOBs app adds support for the largest and smallest available "live tiles" and other Windows 8.1 improvements.

Finally, the group's website and apps are designed to sharing stories as easily as possible. All include links to share stories on Twitter, Facebook and other social media. The bloggers also add the standard news reporting of the top topic at the bottom of the page/app. This helps users compare what the bloggers comments to what is being released in the news media. This feature is used by other bloggers and commentors to quickly get up to speed on the current hot topic in order to add to the discussion .

Go download the app and review the website.

San Diego School Police Get Armored Vehicle, Lockdown Elementary School to Justify

September 10th, 2014 in San Diego was an eye opener.

The U.S. Department of Defense has given the San Diego Unified School District's police a 14 ton military armored vehicle. As the news became widely available, an elementary school went into lockdown. The timely set of events seemed to justify the acquisition, but it turned out to be an off-campus argument between a mother and her 19 year old son.

Fletcher Hills Elementary school parents were terrified when notified that the school had been placed in lockdown. Parents were not subsequently told that their children were available for pickup or that the situation had not been a threat to the school.

NBC San Diego:

El Cajon Police officers say the commotion started Wednesday when Christopher Wilson, 19, was walking down the street and got into a confrontation with a homeowner, about a block away from Fletcher Hills Elementary.

 ...

The district said the rescue vehicle is one of the ways it is responding to the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut, and preparing itself for potential disasters in the future.

We have since been told that the homeowner in question was Mr. Wilson's mother. She had thrown him out of the house and then called the police. Wilson's mother told NBC 7 that her son also has a restraining order against him by his father.  We did not find any reports of Wilson's mother accusing him of brandishing a weapon.

Several reports specified that Wilson had removed a hatchet or other wedged object from a bag and then walked past the school. It is unclear who witnessed him remove the object from the bag.

UT San Diego:

Later, a campus supervisor told police the suspect walked past the school, (El Cajon police Lt. Rob) Ransweiler said. The supervisor recognized the suspect and followed him to the front yard of his Chatham Street home near North Westwind Drive, just east of the campus.

Officers arrived and tried to convince the man to come outside. They also called his mother, who made similar pleas (via bull horn), but he wasn't in the home, Ransweiler said. A hatchet wasn't located either.

Given the current information, Wilson may have grabbed a cell phone from a backpack and simply left.  However, the news media immediately painted him as a mad-man who "forced a school into lockdown." News reporting sensationalism isn't a surprise, but the timing is particularly convenient.

...back to our new school tank...

The Mine Resistant Armored Vehicle (MRAP) was acquired via the 1033 program. The program allows the federal government to provide surplus military equipment to law enforcement. San Diego Unified paid just under $5,000 shipping cost for the vehicle. The cost to remove weapons from the vehicle was not reported. The vehicle's capability of rearmament was not revealed, but we suspect all the weapon mounts are intact and available.

If memory serves, our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan could not get these MRAP for several years. Now, SDUSD says the vehicle is needed to truck around donated medical supplies?  This acquisition is so unjustified that even instilling fear for "the children" doesn't resonate.

Additional Sources:
Fox 5 San Diego
CBS News 8 San Diego
KPBS San Diego