Archive for the ‘News/opinion’ Category

Droogs’ paradise: Rough first week for the “Purge Law” in Illinois

Posted: September 24, 2023 by John Ruberry in News/opinion, opinion/news
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By John Ruberry

A legal challenge, struck down by the Illinois Supreme Court, delayed the start of Illinois’ ludicrously misnamed SAFE-T Act, but it finally went into effect last Monday. 

The SAFE-T Act’s opponents refer to it as the “Purge Law,” a reference to the movie about a generally peaceful dystopian society, except for an annual 12-hour period where all crimes, including murder, are legal. The SAFE-T Act abolishes cash bail. Accused criminals are either set free after their arrest to await trial. Or they are locked up with no bail. The latter category is reserved for the most heinous criminals, as well as flight risks, and those who are suspected of being likely to intimidate witnesses, and the like.

Most accused criminals in Illinois, public safety be damned, will walk free, albeit some while wearing an electronic monitoring ankle bracelet, which, in case you didn’t know, are very easy to remove.

Of course, without cash bail, which often is paid for by a friend or relative, accused criminals can be expected to be more likely to skip out of town and blow off their trial dates.

Welcome to Illinois, the criminal paradise, where Alex and his “Droogs” of A Clockwork Orange fame, will feel at home.

Here are some of the lowlights of the first week of “the Purge.”

One of the first accused thugs arrested and set free pretrial was a woman raising hell during an unofficial, and at times disruptive, Mexican Independence Day automobile caravan celebration in downtown Chicago. Esmerelda Aguilar of suburban Cicero allegedly attacked four Chicago police officers with pepper spray. Prosecutors didn’t even ask the Cook County judge presiding over her hearing to detain Aguilar.

Cook County prosecutors, in another case, didn’t ask for another accused criminal to be detained in another egregious case. A Ukranian national, Ivan Muryn, was ordered by a Cook County judge not to drive, to submit to electronic monitoring and to surrender his passport. According to CWB Chicago, Muryn has been “charged with failure to report an accident involving death.”

That death was of his wife. According to the Arlington Cardinal, Muryn was arguing with his spouse while driving in Inverness. His wife removed her seatbelt and she “fell” out of his car, and then she was fatally struck by another vehicle. Muryn kept driving. Yeah, she “fell” out of her car.

Outside of the Chicago area, two California men were pulled over in Henry County, near the Quad Cities, driving an old bus that contained over 5,000 pounds of marijuana. The value of the drugs is estimated to be worth between $6 million and $14 million. They were not jailed, even though the duo is accused of committing an Illinois Class X felony. The drug bust is being called one of the largest in Illinois history. 

Eight days ago, the sheriff of Williamson County in southern Illinois released 30 jail inmates, because of the SAFE-T Act, the sheriff said he could no longer detain them as they awaited trial. 

Back to the spiritual descendants of Alex’s Droogs.

Criminals are risk averse. If criminals believe they can get away with lawbreaking, or if they are caught, they won’t get locked up, they become emboldened. 

Early Thursday morning, at least 10 people, including a 72-year-old man who was beaten, were robbed on Chicago’s North Side. 

In an encore performance on Saturday night, in at least five incidents, a dozen people were robbed at gunpoint in a two-hour period on the city’s Northwest Side.  No one has been arrested for either wilding spree.

That last story led CWB Chicago to quip, “Did anyone in Chicago NOT get robbed or shot last night?” Oh yeah, of course people have been shot in Chicago this weekend, including an 86-year-old man.

Violence also hit DePaul University’s North Side campus on Saturday night. Four students were mugged, and one of them was beaten, another was pistol-whipped.

The Purge is here.

No one has recently heard from the SAFE-T Act’s primary champion, possible presidential candidate Gov. J.B. Pritzker, who is on an extended vacation with his wife. Citing “security concerns,” the Democrat governor’s staff isn’t saying where Pritzker is. The governor, laughably but repeatedly claimed that the SAFE-T Act was about, “Making sure that we’re also addressing the problem of a single mother who shoplifted diapers for her baby, who is put in jail and kept there for six months because she doesn’t have a couple of hundred dollars to pay for bail.” The truth is, and Pritzker knows it, is that these Jean Valjeans of motherhood weren’t being jailed in Illinois, and they haven’t been so in quite some time.

Oh, back to Pritzker and his vacation: What about the security concerns of Illinois’ 12 million residents?

Kim Foxx, the Cook County state’s attorney who is more of a social worker than a prosecutor, says Illinois is “on the right side of history” now that the SAFE-T Act is up and running.

Well, history sometimes takes an evil turn.

John Ruberry regularly blogs, more nervously than ever, just outside of Chicago at Marathon Pundit.

Tide is our woke laundry detergent

Posted: September 17, 2023 by John Ruberry in business, News/opinion, opinion/news, politics
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By John Ruberry

After years of calling out the outrages and absurdities of political correctness and its successor, wokeness, I still manage to be regularly shocked. Yesterday I stumbled across a box while grocery shopping that boasted, “Ultra concentrated Tide–turn to cold to use 90 percent less energy***.”

Yes, even laundry detergent has gone woke. 

Okay, who wants to save money?

Pretty much everyone. 

However, when you look at the triple asterisks–you mean one isn’t enough?–you learn about the cold water claim, according to Tide, it occurs “on average when switching from hot to cold water.”

What if you mostly use warm water laundry washes?

Tide’s propagandistic green marketing push goes back to 2021. The ultimate goal of Tide, which is owned by Proctor & Gamble, is to “save the planet.”

Of course, it is.

When Mrs. Marathon Pundit and I purchase detergent, we look for fair prices, which means we don’t buy overpriced Tide, but more importantly, we want soap that cleans our clothes without damaging them. 

That’s all. We are modest folks.

The Marathon Pundit household is confident that the fate of Earth is not connected to our choice of laundry detergent.

As for Tide, it has a sustainability page on its website, where among other things, Tide claims people washing their clothes can “get great results, no matter the water temperature. Tide is specially designed to give you the best clean in every wash, even in cold water. Tide even cleans better in cold water than the bargain brand does in warm.”

Sorry I don’t believe it.

I have reasons to be skeptical of overreaching claims, as I am old enough to remember being told that carbon emissions would lead to a new ice age. That is, until I was lectured by my “betters” that carbon emissions would lead to global warming and the melting of the polar ice caps, as soon as the last decade. Al Gore predicted that last one. Yes, he did–don’t believe the lying fact-checkers.

Not only am I skeptical of leftist claims, but I am also doubly so of marketers’ claims.

As a liberated 21st century male, I do a lot of our family’s laundry. Unless a fabric is super-delicate, most of what I wash is–sorry Tide–done in warm water. Our clothes come out cleaner and there is no soap residue, as is usually the case when, against my better judgement, I wash clothes in cold. With whites I use the hot water cycle.

But Tide tells us cold water is better.

Hogwash.

Oh, my guess is that the marketing geniuses with Tide are out-of-touch rich slobs who have hired help handling their laundry chores.

If you are squeamish, you may want to skip the next three paragraphs.

I’m a runner and I run about 40 miles a week. Athletes’ foot and jock itch, usually caused by the ringworm fungus, is something I have to cope with every summer. The best way to eliminate this pernicious fungus is to wash infected garments in hot water. You hear that, Tide? Color garments might get damaged by hot water, yes, but apple cider vinegar soaking for infected color garments is great way to kill fungus.

Let’s stick with white socks. And if you had any doubts, now you know why athletes wear white socks.

Not only is cooler water, both cold and warm, ineffective in killing fungus, washing in such temperatures runs the risk of spreading the fungus to other garments. Oh, if you have a significant other who you share a bed with and you are infected with a fungus skin rash, and then your partner pulls a sheet from you as you are sleeping, guess who might acquire that rash? Even after your bedsheets go through a full cycle of a cold or warm water wash.

Oh, I’ve unknowingly put on infected clothes months after a failed wash, and guess what happened?

Let’s just say fungi are survivors.

Once again, Tide, I buy laundry detergent to clean our clothes. My way. Without wokeness, haughtiness, and without soap stains and the spread of fungus.

Back to bed sheets: Hot water washes, not cold or warm, kill bed bugs.

And finally, I don’t believe Tide’s claim that using cold water while washing clothes and bed sheets consumes “90 percent less energy.” I’ve been lied to way too many times.

Use Tide detergent. Save the planet. Get bitten by bed bugs. Spread fungal infections.

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

Just How Hard Up are Nurse Practitioners in Virginia?

Posted: September 13, 2023 by datechguy in News/opinion
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The Susanna Gibson story, the nurse practitioner in Virginia running for state who is apparently selling her live sex shows online is the definition of click bait for media.

And while the censored still pictures are all over the net at the moment there is one aspect of the story that jumps out at me, and that’s the financial one.

The various stories all note that Gibson asked for premium payments for those watching her perform online. If you wanted to see a particular sex act the viewers online had to pay for ahem…services rendered.

And that brings me to Salary.com and the average wage for a Nurse Practitioner in Virginia:

The average Nurse Practitioner salary in Virginia is $121,463 as of August 27, 2023, but the range typically falls between $112,710 and $131,956.

Now I’ll concede Virginia can be an expensive state to live in but it would seem to me that a nurse practitioner in the state just might make enough cash that she doesn’t need to sell premium sex acts displays online to keep the home finances intact.

If I was the GOP I’d be pushing the idea that the Biden economy is so bad that a highly educated nurse practitioner have to pimp themselves out.

Five Leominster Flooding Thoughts Under the Fedora: Once every 35 years, Maz paying off, Nasty Commutes, Now comes the rebuild, Sheer Personal Luck

Posted: September 12, 2023 by datechguy in local stuff, News/opinion, under the fedora
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Yesterday the rain came in a way it hasn’t been in about 35 years when one of the bridges in Fitchburg over the Nashua river was washed out in a storm, yesterday it was Leominster’s turn the rain kept coming down and the city was drenched, bridges washed out, basements flooded, sink holes appearing and route two the major artery east into Boston impassable.

I’ve not gone outside to shoot any video myself because the last thing Leominster needs is another person on the roads filming while they’re trying to clear to get blog posts.

Leominster Mayor Dean Mazzerella has been in office practically forever and it paid off yesterday here he is from facebook

and from a press conference today:

There is likely no mayor in the area more familiar with the various departments of his city and it seemed to me that they were really on the ball in terms of getting people out. You really can’t stop the rain if a front decides to pause over your area but the various crews allowed the city to weather the storm without loss of life and given the degree of flooding is quite an accomplishment.

Last night people were in dire straights in they had to head west or east on Route 2, to wit:

That is the primary exit from Route 2 for people going into the center of Leominster or into Fitchburg and it’s the primary exit to take route 2 east To Boston or 495 or Devens etc. People were stranded for literally hours on this road

With route 2 flooded people needed to take side routes such as 117 and with the side roads in conditions like this:

That simply added to the disaster because it diverted cars to these locations which the police and fire had to deal with.

What’s really going to hit people for six as the British would put it is the fact that many of the places that got nailed don’t get a lot of flooding. I suspect few if any of the residents whose basements are underwater or foundations were washed out had flood insurance so the cost of repairs is going to be astounding.

I have never had a better illustration of the parable of the house built on a solid foundation then when I saw this video:

The damage to personal property is likely going to be at least in the tens of millions possibly in the hundreds of millions, perhaps the governor can divert some of that illegal immigration emergency money to help rebuild and re-locate the people here.

Given that Massachusetts is one of the most reliably blue states in the country one might except the Biden Administration to come through, but given what we’ve seen in Maui located in an even bluer state I don’t know if that will matter. Time will tell in terms of how both the state and the feds do here.

On a personal level I was briefly trapped on the road with DaWife and my oldest who had just finished Eucharist Adoration together in Fitchburg as we were going to go to dinner together. We were on airport road when the emergency message came through and frankly there was no place for us to go so it took about an hour to turn around and hit a restaurant near my home in Fitchburg that had no issues.

But the real good fortune for me was that Pintastic NE 2023 had been moved and because of that move I had requested this day off weeks ago. If not I would have if I was luckily barely made it to work in Devens for around 3 pm. (the first drops of rain began at 1:10 pm in Fitchburg) and getting out at midnight I would have found every road home impassible at best and at worst would not have been able to clearly see dangers in the road that would have been submerged by water. I’m frankly a little iffy on what route I can use to get to work today but I guess we will see.

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