Posting this from my iPhone.
Go read the folks on the sidebar. Hopefully, I’ll be back tomorrow.
Posted from my iPhone.
This will set the cat among the pigeons…
Days after his acquittal in the chokehold death of Jordan Neely, lawyers for Marine veteran Daniel Penny are floating the possibility of a malicious prosecution lawsuit against Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who secured an indictment against their client days after police let him go, then failed to convince a jury he committed a crime.
Penny, 26, was on his way to the gym after class when Neely, 30, barged onto a subway car and started threatening to kill passengers. Penny grabbed him in a headlock and held him as other riders called 911. By the time police arrived, about seven minutes later, Neely had lost consciousness. He never woke up.
“It’s not necessarily even about breaking the law,” attorney Steven Raiser told “Fox & Friends” on Wednesday morning. “It’s blurring ethical boundaries and failing to act in the manner in which you are expected, because of your office.”
Full article, HERE from Fox News.
It’s about time somebody took these idiots to task for their BS politics and political ‘statements’…
I would sure as hell contribute to a GoFundMe for that lawsuit! The previous one for his defense raised right at $3000000, and he might have a little left over after that one got him acquitted.
NYC and other ‘blue’ cities/states have tromped all over the little folks rights for a long time, and it should come to an end! Maybe this will be part of the fallout from the election too!!!
One hopes!
Is STILL biting the Navy in the butt…
Nearly half of the amphibious warfare ships Marines need to deploy often are unavailable due to maintenance, according to a government watchdog. How the Navy currently manages those repairs means jarheads will continue to deploy late to the fight.
The Dec. 3 Government Accountability Office report, which detailed an audit from April 2023 to December 2024 at Naval Station Norfolk, Virginia, and Naval Base San Diego, California, provided a decade’s worth of data regarding underperforming amphibious warfare ships.
In the report, Marine Corps data from 2011 to 2020 showed that the specific class of ships were available for operational tasks only 46% of the time.
Full article HERE from Navy Times.
Amphibs have always been ‘second hand’ children of the surface community, not a premier CO billet. And they have historically been rode hard and put up wet, spending a lot of time underway, with limited maintenance availabilities.
Half of the amphib fleet is not expected to make it to their service life, even with maintenance, but all of the fleet have to exceed their service life to maintain the current minimum amphib support requirements. Also, a revision to the ‘availability’ rules when in maintenance have resulted in more ships being put in a not capable of going to sea classification.
When sequestration hit with a vengence in 2013, they fell even further behind in maintenance, and the class replacement ships slid two or more years further out on construction. Also, you have to add in the administration’s distaste for using Marines as the striking force they are, so they spent a lot of time on ‘float’ at sea with no real mission.
Now, with maintenance periods running longer and longer due to the amount of work required to get ALL of the fleet back to basic capabilities, and lack of shipyards capable of doing the work, I cannot see any way for this situation to improve any time soon…
Grrrr…
Seems Bragg et al in NYC were a little TOO sure of themselves…
The Manhattan jury tasked with deciding Daniel Penny’s fate has acquitted the 26-year-old architecture student of criminally negligent homicide, a Class E felony that carries a maximum sentence of four years in prison.
Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Maxwell Wiley agreed on Friday to dismiss the more serious charge, manslaughter in the second degree after the jury deadlocked repeatedly. Assistant District Attorney Dafna Yoran, who is prosecuting the case, had requested the manslaughter charge be dropped so the jury could take up the lesser charge. The 12-person panel has now acquitted Penny of the lesser charge.
Full article, HERE from PJ Media, and another from Fox News, HERE.
Once again, Bragg et al bowed to public pressure and indicted Penny, a good samaritan 10 days later, for murder because he was white and the other guy was black. The judge bent the rules, just like in the Trump case, but this time, the jurors didn’t ‘listen’ and acquitted Penny! Yay!!!
Maybe, just maybe, a few folks up there are starting to take a hard look at what is going on in NYC and other blue cities… And they also have a ‘little’ illegal problem they’re also trying to deal with…
However, they have destroyed Penny’s life, and he will always be second guessing everything about helping others going forward. I feel for him, as this is going to make his life very difficult.
But hey, a win for the ‘little guys’, so I’m happy he beat the NYC ‘system’!!!
Now he just has to fight off a civil suit from the estranged father… sigh…
To start the week…
This one is from 2013…
Twas the month before Christmas
When all through our land,
Not a Christian was praying
Nor taking a stand.
See the PC Police had taken away,
The reason for Christmas – no one could say.
The children were told by their schools not to sing,
About Shepherds and Wise Men and Angels and things.
It might hurt people’s feelings, the teachers would say
December 25th is just a ‘Holiday’.
Yet the shoppers were ready with cash, checks and credit
Pushing folks down to the floor just to get it!
CDs from Madonna, an X BOX, an I-pod
Something was changing, something quite odd!
Retailers promoted Ramadan and Kwanzaa
In hopes to sell books by Franken & Fonda.
As Targets were hanging their trees upside down
At Lowe’s the word Christmas – was no where to be found.
At K-Mart and Staples and Penny’s and Sears
You won’t hear the word Christmas; it won’t touch your ears.
Inclusive, sensitive, Di-ver-si-ty
Are words that were used to intimidate me.
Now Daschle, Now Darden, Now Sharpton, Wolf Blitzen
On Boxer, on Rather, on Kerry, on Clinton!
At the top of the Senate, there arose such a clatter
To eliminate Jesus, in all public matter.
And we spoke not a word, as they took away our faith
; Forbidden to speak of salvation and grace
The true Gift of Christmas was exchanged and discarded
The reason for the season, stopped before it started.
So as you celebrate ‘Winter Break’ under your ‘Dream Tree’
Sipping your Starbucks, listen to me.
Choose your words carefully, choose what you say
Shout MERRY CHRISTMAS, not Happy Holiday!
+++++++++++
This is an article submitted to a 1999 Louisville Sentinel contest to find out who had the wildest Christmas dinners. It won first prize.
As a joke, my brother Jay used to hang a pair of panty hose over his fireplace before Christmas. He said all he wanted was for Santa to fill them.
What they say about Santa checking the list twice must be true because every Christmas morning, although Jay’s kids’ stockings overflowed, his poor pantyhose hung sadly empty.
One year I decided to make his dream come true. I put on sunglasses and went in search of an inflatable love doll. They don’t sell those things at Wal-Mart. I had to go to an adult bookstore downtown.
If you’ve never been in an X-rated store, don’t go, you’ll only confuse yourself. I was there an hour saying things like, ‘What does this do?’ ‘You’re kidding me!’ ‘Who would buy that?’ Finally, I made it to the inflatable doll section.
I wanted to buy a standard, uncomplicated doll that could also substitute as a passenger in my truck so I could use the car pool lane during rush hour.
Finding what I wanted was difficult. ‘Love Dolls’ come in many different models. The top of the line, according to the side of the box, could do things I’d only seen in a book on animal husbandry. I settled for ‘Lovable Louise.’ She was at the bottom of the price scale.
To call Louise a ‘doll’ took a huge leap of imagination.
On Christmas Eve and with the help of an old bicycle pump, Louise came to life.
My sister-in-law was in on the plan and let me in during the wee morning hours. Long after Santa had come and gone, I filled the dangling pantyhose with Louise’s pliant legs and bottom. I also ate some cookies and drank what remained of a glass of milk on a nearby tray. I went home, and giggled for a couple of hours.
The next morning my brother called to say that Santa had been to his house and left a present that had made him VERY happy, but had left the dog confused. She would bark, start to walk away, then come back and bark some more.
We all agreed that Louise should remain in her pantyhose so the rest of the family could admire her when they came over for the traditional Christmas dinner.
My grandmother noticed Louise the moment she walked in the door. ‘What the hell is that?’ she asked.
My brother quickly explained, ‘It’s a doll.’
‘Who would play with something like that?’ Granny snapped.
I kept my mouth shut.
‘Where are her clothes?’ Granny continued.
‘Boy, that turkey sure smells nice, Gran,’ Jay said, to steer her into the dining room.
But Granny was relentless. ‘Why doesn’t she have any teeth?’
Again, I could have answered, but why would I? It was Christmas and no one wanted to ride in the back of the ambulance saying, ‘Hang on Granny, hang on!’
My grandfather, a delightful old man with poor eyesight, sidled up to me and said, ‘Hey, who’s the naked gal by the fireplace?’ I told him she was Jay’s friend.
A few minutes later I noticed Grandpa by the mantel, talking to Louise. Not just talking, but actually flirting. It was then that we realized this might be Grandpa’s last Christmas at home.
The dinner went well. We made the usual small talk about who had died, who was dying, and who should be killed, when suddenly Louise made a noise like my father in the bathroom in the morning. Then she lurched from the mantel, flew around the room twice, and fell in a heap in front of the sofa. The cat screamed. I passed cranberry sauce through my nose, and Grandpa ran across the room, fell to his knees, and began administering mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
My brother fell back over his chair and wet his pants.
Granny threw down her napkin, stomped out of the room, and sat in the car. It was indeed a Christmas to treasure and remember.Later in my brother’s garage, we conducted a thorough examination to decide the cause of Louise’s collapse. We discovered that Louise had suffered from a hot ember to the back of her right thigh. Fortunately, thanks to a wonder drug called duct tape, we restored her to perfect health.. I can’t wait until next Christmas…
While this talks about fast food chains, there are the little restaurants that were also seriously impacted…
California’s fast food industry shed more than 6,000 jobs after Democratic lawmakers passed a bill mandating a $20 minimum wage for most fast food and counter service restaurants in the state, according to a new analysis of labor data.
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data show that between September 2023, when California governor Gavin Newsom signed Assembly Bill 1228, and June 2024, Golden State fast food employment dropped from 570,909 jobs to 564,743. That’s a loss of 6,166 jobs, or 1.1 percent, according to an analysis by the nonprofit Employment Policies Institute.
Full article, HERE from National Review.
I don’t believe this takes into account the delivery drivers like the pizza companies and others let go.
Some of the chains closed stores in their entirety, like Inn-n-Out closing the last store in Oakland, but that was also due to crime, but others closed from a few to dozens of stores.
And this doesn’t count the small restaurants that have closed their doors, some over 30 years old, because they could not stay in business at $20/hr, especially in San Francisco, LA, and San Diego. I’m sure there were/are others in smaller towns that are doing the same thing, but they don’t get the media coverage.
The other thing this is doing is pushing more of the fast food companies to go to ‘bots’ or ‘order screens’ so that they can dump employees. Yes, those systems are expensive, but they don’t draw a salary, take time off, or fight with other employees/management.
But the ROI on them is fairly quick at $20/hr…
But what is the ‘human’ toll?
Kids no longer have an entry level job to ‘learn’ to work. And those ‘low income’ workers who WOULD take a fast food job to have a job. Where do they go now?
What about the elderly that take those jobs to supplement their social security? What do they do???
I know I don’t have any good ideas…
Wow! This one is hard to believe!
Here is a story that neatly encapsulates the threat that the West faces and the weakness of its response to that threat. In Germany, a vociferous critic of jihad violence and Sharia oppression of women and others, Michael Stürzenberger, was stabbed several months ago by a jihadi precisely because of his opposition to those evils. Now, a German court has added insult to injury, convicting Stürzenberger of “incitement to hatred” and fining him €3,600 ($3,800). So it has come to this: what the jihadi began, the German government is now continuing. What will be the effects of this on the freedom of speech in Germany? That’s obvious: if this continues, Germany is dead as a free society.
In Spiked Wednesday, the publication’s Germany correspondent Sabine Beppler-Spahl was generally sympathetic to Stürzenberger, but added a significant and telling caveat. She asserted that “there’s little doubt that Stürzenberger can be offensive. He claims that his criticism only applies to ‘political Islam’, calling it a threat to democracy and an ideology that oppresses women. But he has also compared parts of the Koran with Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf,’ and – while saying that not all Muslims are rapists – has talked of ‘thousands of women’ who have been sexually assaulted by Muslims from Northern Africa and Arabia.”
Full article HERE from PJ Media.
At this point I can’t help but wonder if the EU is a dead letter at this point… Sweden, England, Germany, France (no go zones IN Paris!), Belgium, all of them have gone ‘quiet’ on the Muslim threat to their own people.
Where does it end? I sure as hell do not like the direction I’m seeing…
And one that is having some interesting reactions!
Donald Trump has once again broken the mold and has named a billionaire entrepreneur, Jared Isaacman, to head the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
Isaacman financed and flew two missions on Elon Musk’s Space X Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon capsule. He started his company, Shift4 Payments, in 1999 after dropping out of high school. He sounds like an anachronism, a throwback to NASA’s glory days.
“With the support of President Trump, I can promise you this: We will never again lose our ability to journey to the stars and never settle for second place,” he said. He added, “Americans will walk on the Moon and Mars, and in doing so, we will make life better here on Earth.”
Now that’s more like it.
Full article HERE from PJ Media.
This is, IMHO, a very interesting pick for head of NASA. Isaacman has put his money and his life where is mouth is, ponying up for two missions, and going into space himself.
And he’s an entrepreneur, so his approach is going to be radically different than the go along/get along/toe the administration line of the previous administrator who was given the job as a political sop.
Space is inherently dangerous, there are few if any second chances, and the lead time for an astronaut to actually ‘get’ a mission was a minimum of 2 years. I’m betting we’ll see that change, especially if SpaceX is used for launches.
The ISS times out in 2030, so I’m pretty sure a new design/set of agreements will also be on the agenda, along with at least some kind of ‘new’ shuttle, different from the Dragon capsule, simply because of the need for larger cargos coming in the future.
And apparently, the ‘man on the ground’ interviews with current NASA folks are positive, so maybe they are/will be happy to get back to actual science and development and stop playing the DEI game!
What say you???
Seven times??? Why the hell is he not in jail ‘somewhere’? He’s obviously been convicted here, so who let him go?
Deportation officers in November removed a repeat felon from the United States for the seventh time, highlighting the difficulties of preventing dangerous foreign nationals from sneaking into the country.
Julio Cesar Hernandez Funez, a 41-year-old Honduran national, was deported back to his home country on Nov. 16, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The illegal migrant, who has a lengthy rap sheet for drug trafficking and other crimes, had already been sent back to Honduras six prior times — once in 2006, 2013, 2014, twice in 2015 and again in 2016.
Full article, HERE from Daily Caller.
The numbers are interesting, especially compared to the previous years of the administration. But when you have effectively ‘open borders’, lack of personnel, and runaways, it’s no wonder these scumbags keep coming back.
And now that Xiden et al are on the way out, suddenly enforcement is being allowed to go their jobs. I can’t help but wonder how many NGOs are complacent in letting these people in/funding them.
Oh yeah, and he came in THIS time across the NORTHERN border from Canada. Canada…think about that. On the run, how did he get from Honduras to Canada???
Grrrr…
Oh yeah, and I survived another trip around the sun! Yay me!!! Now, if I could just get all the body parts cooperating again… sigh
Whew… got the short story finished, but it’s harder than hell to write when you’re on strong pain meds…just sayin…
Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society. [Mark Twain]
Eleven teens die each day because of texting while driving. Maybe it’s time to raise the age of Smart Phone ownership to 21. [unknown]
It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the establishment authorities are wrong. Voltaire]
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But the I repeat myself. [Mark Twain]
Everything is more beautiful because we’re doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are right now, and we will never be here again. [Homer, The Iliad]
After a 25-cent breakfast of canned bacon and powdered eggs in a tar-paper shack on the field at Dahar, . . . [Omar Bradley, Feb 1943]
In my youth I was often called lazy. In rather successful adulthood I was called efficient. Same behavior, different times. [Bob Fiegel]
Man is the only creature disposed to kill huge numbers of members of his own species, and his instrument is usually the state. [Joseph Sobran]
I’m not afraid of the media. Why should anyone listen to the media? Who are these people? What makes them experts? What have they accomplished? [Dana White]
There’s one thing worse than change and that’s the status quo. [John Le Carre]
The truth is that the State is a conspiracy designed not only to exploit, but above all to corrupt its citizens… Henceforth, I shall never serve any government anywhere. [Leo Tolstoy]
Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great. [Mark Twain]
To anger a conservative, lie to him. To anger a liberal, tell him the truth. [Teddy Roosevelt]
You have vanishingly little political influence and every thought you spend on politics will probably come to nothing. Consider building things instead, or at least going for a walk. [Conor Barnes]
A sword by itself does not slay; it is merely the weapon used by the slayer. [Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Roman Stoic philosopher, 4 B.C. – A.D. 65]
If gun control laws actually worked, Chicago would be Mayberry, USA. [unknown]
If enough data is collected, a Board of Inquiry can prove anything. [Unknown]
All middle-class citizens of education have a common belief that the tendencies towards centralization and paternalism must be halted and reversed. [Dwight Eisenhower July 1949]
No man can tame a tiger into a kitten by stroking it. There can be no appeasement with ruthlessness. [Franklin Delano Rosevelt]
Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it. [Ronald Reagan 1986]
There are two ways to go to the gas chamber: free or not free. [Viktor Frankl]
The fatal fallacy of gun control laws in general is the assumption that such laws actually control guns. Criminals who disobey other laws are not likely to be stopped by gun-control laws. What such laws actually do is increase the number of disarmed and defenseless victims. [Thomas Sowell]
When immigration is done by single individuals, it is immigration. When done by groups, it is invasion.” – Nassim Taleb
But test and prove all things until you can recognize what is good; to that hold fast. [1 Thessalonians 5:21]
I would sooner be governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than by the two thousand members of the faculty of Harvard. [William F. Buckley Jr]
In politics, never assume that because something is insane, it will not be done. [Thomas Sowell]
If the path before you is clear, you’re probably on someone else’s. [Carl Jung]