Conditional Conjunctive: Update On "A Long-Struggling Corner"



Up early per usual hitting the touch-illuminated keyboard on a Surface Pro 2 drafting a new post to update what's going on - or not - here in The New Urban Downtown Mesa while a short-lived phenomenon of bursts of lighting flash in the southern sky through the window over the home work-station.
Just a few weeks after the City's Office for Downtown Transformation inflates the spoon-fed mainstream media hype for yet another "trial-balloon" for another Pie-In-The-Sky plan by Arizona State politician-turned-private-real-estate-developer Bob Worsley for a 75-room 15-story hotel and 75 above-market rate apartments plunked down in a nondescript mixed-use proposal over a parking lot in the downtown historic area behind the south side of Main Street, let's step back to another one of those "it could happen here" Make-Over stories that has not gotten off-the-ground 17 months after getting published:

Downtown Mesa property could see $42 million makeover 
Maria Polletta, The Republic | azcentral.com Published 8:02 a.m. MT March 30, 2016 | Updated 11:41 a.m. MT March 31, 2016
"The project would inject new life into a long-struggling downtown corner, shaking up the negative image the property has had for years. . . "
Question: Just another one of those bites-the-dust things?
Tapping into the current lingo for urban planning gone-bad - or going nowhere-fast - is this just another empty "eyesore" here in the urban landscape?
Or transit-oriented development temporarily stalled?
The NWC of Country Club @ Main Street is a high-visibility location. No doubt about that for sure; but why is it still sitting empty except for one last vestige of Mesa's car-driven culture: Bailey's Brake Service.
Another Question: Did someone "put the brakes on" progress  moving this forward?
Like most of downtown Mesa's real estate and property history, this site-selection has a long and twisted story that's taken a number of detours creating drama that are detailed in the good reporting by Maria Polletta back in March 2016 about market-rate housing.
Please take the time to read the report 17 months ago for this site's history:  
Link > http://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/mesa/2016/03/30/proposed-market-rate-housing-project-aimed-revitalizing-long-struggling-corner-downtown-mesa/82088846/
Did this market-rate housing initiative get stopped in-the-tracks just a few months ago by an alleged demand to the developer Chicanos Por La Causa by Mayor John Giles getting into negotiations by the City to steer the financing to a Utah-based lender?
Any actions like that to specify what lender to use would no doubt, if true, cross over the line of what's acceptable practice in real estate law: it's called STEERING.  

 

BREAKTHROUGH: Local News That's Not Controlled by The Chain-of-Command

Your MesaZona blogger is a strong stalwart supporter of independent news reporting that's not restrained by spoon-fed established mainstream media - like this narrative:
A ProPublica Podcast:
The Breakthrough:
How a Small News Outlet Brought Down the State Hero
by Jessica Huseman ProPublica,  11.08.2017 @ 08:00
 

It's a take-off point that inspires this blog site from the get-go to creatively disrupt what passes as "news" here in The New Urban Downtown Mesa on a number of fronts, without any investigative reporting.
Too often what is in the public interest gets hijacked by official press releases from the City of Mesa Newsroom, , or an on-call cadre of "contributors"  and/or staff writers for corporate-owned media outlets like The East Valley Tribune or The Arizona Republic, or a new outlet published by former CNA Kelly Mixer calling itself MyMesaNews.com, who graduated from a leadership training workshop sponsored by the Mesa Chamber of Commerce that does "unilateral" coverage of what they want [that means 'one-sided'].
In spite of a second-hand telling of a side-remark by Sally Jo Harrison, President/CEO of the Chamber that your MesaZona blogger is "a trouble-maker" and Mesa Mayor John Giles calling yours truly to-his-face "a rabble-rouser", any reasonable person might ask Why?
It is in the public interest to have an option to make you think even in spite of verbal attacks for making trouble or for rousing residents here in Mesa whom the mayor refers to as "Rabble" - the majority of people who have disconnected from civic involvement, dis-enfranchised and un-engaged in what passes as government where few participate in the oversight of those elected and employed inside City Hall.

What can go way wrong in this status quo, is brought to light in a report from Vermont that inspired the publishing of this post: it starts out the story like this and is, once again, a cautionary tale about what does happen all too frequently until  a citizen-journalist digs into the fake fog hiding fraud, crimes and misdemeanors of not-so-minor proportions: 
You can listen to the podcast by hitting this link > https://soundcloud.com/propublica/the-breakthrough-how-a-small-news-outlet-brought-down-the-state-hero


Or take the time to read a transcript
"Bill Stenger was a local hero. One of Vermont’s most important businessmen, he had created hundreds of jobs with mega-developments across the state. In 2011, the Vermont Chamber of Commerce named him “citizen of the year.” And, for years, a sign hung on the door of the City of Newport’s offices that read, “Thank You, Bill Stenger.”
But not all of Stenger’s businesses were what they seemed, a small nonprofit news organization revealed. . . "

 

Anne Galloway is the founder and editor of VTDigger. When she launched the online outlet in 2009, she was its only employee. Today, she has 11 reporters and an annual budget of $1.3 million. Much of her newsroom’s success has stemmed from its dogged investigation into Stenger, his Miami-based business partner Ariel Quiros and their project, Jay Peak ski resort.

When the multimillion-dollar development was announced
in 2012, it immediately smelled fishy to Galloway . . . and it promised 10,000 jobs.
“It just seemed too good to be true,” she said. “It seemed too big.” She was right.
Galloway and her team dug deep, fought multiple legal battles over records and worked to gain the trust of investors losing confidence in the project. They chronicled complaints that this development was starting to feel like a scam, and reported on the cozy relationship Stenger had with state oversight authorities. . .
Newer projects were left incomplete, and investors were left bilked. Galloway and her team knew about almost all of this — they just couldn’t get anyone to go on the record.Galloway and her team dug deep, fought multiple legal battles over records and worked to gain the trust of investors losing confidence in the project. They chronicled complaints that this development was starting to feel like a scam, and reported on the cozy relationship Stenger had with state oversight authorities. . .
Hear how it all began on The Breakthrough, the ProPublica podcast where investigative reporters reveal how they nailed their biggest stories.

VTDigger.org | Vermont News

https://vtdigger.org/

VTDigger.org is an independent, investigative news organization covering Vermont

 

From WikiLeaks: Another Vault 7 Release > COUCH POTATO

 CouchPotato

10 August, 2017                  

Today, August 10th 2017, WikiLeaks publishes the the User Guide for the CoachPotato project of the CIA. CouchPotato is a remote tool for collection against RTSP/H.264 video streams. It provides the ability to collect either the stream as a video file (AVI) or capture still images (JPG) of frames from the stream that are of significant change from a previously captured frame. It utilizes ffmpeg for video and image encoding and decoding as well as RTSP connectivity. CouchPotato relies on being launched in an ICE v3 Fire and Collect compatible loader.
Original source: https://wikileaks.org/#CouchPotato 

WikiLeaks Exposes CIA CouchPotato Tool For Hacking Security ...

https://hothardware.com...

3 days ago - These documents are part of what WikiLeaks calls Vault 7, the latest of which ... According to WikiLeaks, CouchPotato is a remote tool for ...

 

 

CIA Uses ‘CouchPotato’ To Record Video Streams From Security Cameras #Vault7

Short Bytes: Wikileaks’ second leak in the month of August is a CIA hacking tool called CouchPotoato which dates back to 2014. The tool can be controlled using the command line to extort footage from RTSP/H.264 video streams, mostly used for security cameras, and save them on a disk.

According to the leaked documents, CouchPotato leverages a modified version of FFmpeg – an open source library for encoding and decoding various audio/video formats. Many of the unwanted codecs and features have been stripped to reduce the size of the tool.

The tool only requires the URL of the video stream to sniff the data. Thus, it eliminates the need to compromise a network. In the case of restricted networks, the CouchPotato can be initiated from within the network.
The H.264 codec and RTSP protocol in the story are used for streaming media, like movies and other video content, over the internet. A well-known application is in the case of surveillance cameras. So, CouchPotato might have been designed to extract footages from such devices saving video streams to some storage over the internet or inside some private network.

The leaked documents also describe some shortcomings of the alleged CIA hacking tool. One of the significant issues observed is high CPU usage which was somewhere between 50% to 70% during the internal tests on a Windows 7 64-bit virtual machine.
There have been several years since the tool came into existence, the leaked user guide dates back to February 2014. CouchPotato is another addition to Wikileaks’ Vault7 series, under which they are publicizing CIA-related tools almost every week
Link > https://fossbytes.com/couchpotato-cia-hacking-tool/

Inspiring Creative Living Transforms The New Urban DTMesa Landscape

It's a work-in-progress accelerating what's next for affordable and attainable housing downtown here on Main Street when a company named Community Development Partners envisions and re-imagines what can get built from the ground-up by moving ahead quickly with the ongoing construction of Phase 2 Rancho Del Arte - two new buildings are "raising the roof" sky-high with stunning designs drawn up by Perlman Architects for El Rancho Del Sol located on East Main Street - it's a turning-point tipping around the prevalent old and tired and typical mindset that "it's OK for Mesa to be boring" . . .
A new vision is getting real, very real.

The Problem With Confederate Monuments

NOLA Mayor deals with "sanitized history"

Published on Aug 13, 2017

Views: 2,756

Towns across the American south are reckoning with whether or not to tear down Confederate statues in public spaces. For New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu, taking down the monuments felt like a necessity, despite the tension it brought forth in his city. “I didn’t start the problems with race in this country, but I did force the people of New Orleans to confront them,” Landrieu reflected in in this short interview at the 2017 Aspen Ideas Festival.

Shut Down The SHOWDOWN: North Korea vs Donald Trump.

When in a fix > start another war

Published on Aug 13, 2017

Views: 57,391

Pie discusses the pros and cons of going to war with a madman

GOT A NEED-TO-KNOW?? How To Survive A Nuclear Attack ⚠

Mad, Mad Mad World

Published on Aug 13, 2017

Views: 2,055

What should you do in case of nuclear war? Do you have a plan to survive a nuclear attack? If you don’t have a clue what supplies you should consider, we’ve put together the top 20 things you absolutely must have to survive a nuclear war and total economic collapse.

Nobody ever wants to experience the devastation caused by nuclear weapons. For decades, the Soviet Union and the United States have built and tested hundreds of different nuclear bombs. With so many nuclear blasts documented with video evidence and after the U.S. bombed Japan, seeing first-hand the devastation, the world clearly doesn’t want to experience it ever again. Fortunately, we’ve avoided all-out nuclear war in the 21st century. But today, the threat of nuclear war is still very real. Whether in the hands of a small country or a top nation state, nuclear war is something everyone should be prepared for. Much like planning for economic collapse and other events, it’s important to have a plan and supplies in place.