Chicago’s southern suburbs are the sewer of corrupt Illinois

Posted: February 25, 2024 by John Ruberry in crime, elections, News/opinion, opinion/news, politics
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Blogger pictured in 2016

By John Ruberry

Illinois is a corrupt state. Rankings of the 50 states usually place in Illinois within the top five in the union in regard to public crookedness. 

Surprisingly, as bad as Chicago is, the city’s inner southern suburbs, are even worse in regard to political corruption. It’s the sewer of Illinois.

Sharp-eyed readers will recall I wrote a similar post here at Da Tech Guy several years ago, but the WordPress wormhole seems to have swallowed that entry up. 

So here I am again documenting south suburban Chicago sleaze, mainly because of the antics of Tiffany Henyard, the mayor of Dolton (rhymes with “Walton”), who has been accused of widespread corruption by her own village council. 

But you’ll find graft in nearby communities. More on them later.

Henyard is a double-dipper, a time-dishonored ILL-inois scam. The self-described “Super Mayor” collects $224,000 as a Thornton Township supervisor. But last year, the township’s board passed an ordinance that if voters remove her from office, her successor will earn just $25,000. 

As I wrote recently at DTG, township government in Illinois–a sinecure haven–should be abolished. 

Henyard’s salary as mayor of Dolton is $46,000. The village has 21,000 residents. As for her haul as a township supervisor, 49 of America’s 50 governors have a lower salary than hers.

Henyard, a Democrat, is accused of wasting village money on expensive trips to Atlanta and New York with village staff, wasting money on billboards with her picture. There is even her image in front of Dolton’s village hall. Yep. And I don’t care if you call me racist, it sounds a Third World-like cult of personality. I don’t care–because I’m not racist. Not surprisingly, Henyard is not above using the race card to deflect well-earned criticism. “You all should be ashamed of yourselves because you all are black. You all are black,” Super Mayor said recently in a livestreamed meeting. “And you all [are] sitting up here beating and attacking a black woman that’s in power.”

Henyard has only been mayor of Dolton for three years. She was defeated in a recall election in 2022, but a Cook County judge invalidated the results.

Meanwhile, finances in Dolton are a disaster. A lender is threatening to repossess 13 vehicles, including police cars. It could be at least $5 million in debt. Business owners are accusing Super Mayor of strong-arming them into making political donations to her campaign. Super Mayor is accused of shutting down businesses that didn’t cough up cash.

Speaking of donations, the Illinois attorney general’s office has ordered Henyard’s charity to stop collecting contributions, citing a lack of transparency and more.

Last month Super Mayor visited the White House and met President Joe Biden.

Is that all in regard to Henyard? No, but the FBI is investigating her.

Back to those other south suburbs.

In the 1990s, nearby Dixmoor’s Park District, which at the time had only one tiny tot lot under its jurisdiction, employed 80 people as police officers. Harvey, a poverty-stricken town has a long tradition of graft. While he has not been accused of wrongdoing, Eric Kellogg, who as mayor of Harvey until being voted out in 2019, Kellogg allegedly accepted kickbacks from a strip club that was offering prostitution. His brother was convicted for his role in that scheme. In Calumet City, which borders Dolton on the east, has recent sleaze to answer for. Its mayor is Thaddeus Jones. His wife, Saprina, collects $92,000 in a job working with state grants involved with Cal City. And the mayor’s son, Thaddeus Jr, collects $32,000 from the suburb.

Whose responsible for this debacle? Voters are. Yes, in the invalidated election Dolton voters chose to recall Henyard, but there were many red flags that should have been a sufficient warning to vote otherwise.

As the cliché goes, “Even a broken clock is right twice a day.” Barack Obama famously said, “Elections have consequences.” Indeed they do.

Finally, there is speculation that if Joe Biden backs out of the 2024 presidential election, Illinois’ governor, JB Pritzker, will jump into the race. On X, Pritzker, who of course earns less in public money than Henyard, regularly rails about the evils of “MAGA Republicans.” But Pritzker is silent about Super Mayor.

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

Day Three Total Confusion Convention 2024, Games, Developers, Vendors and zzz’s

Posted: February 25, 2024 by datechguy in fun, gaming, special events
Tags: , , , , , ,

On Day Three of Total Con I decided to shift my focus to the vendors and some of games being played. Started with a group about to play a miniatures game call Trilaterum.

I didn’t realize at the time that they were also a vendor selling miniatures and accessories to the game.

Next I talked to a fellow named Caleb who was about to start running a boardgame called Mosiac

There seemed to be an awful lot of grand march of Civilization games in the place, at least to me.

From there I spoke to Christopher White of Creatorpult whose 3D printer seemed to be constantly running every time I passed by his area.

The concept of being able to do this would be almost beyond the imagination of those who attended the first few Totalcons.

I then spoke to one of the playtesters of a RPG called Fae which had a rather interesting concept of being an RPG where you play the monsters.

It certainly had one of the coolest characters which is why I led with the image.

There were vendors who had gone completely old school like the folks at Arkensword Press who were doing their first Total Con as vendors.

Vendors who were selling and testing their own games were a common sight at Total like Jim Fitzpatrick whose game is Mission to Planet Hexx.

As I mentioned there is a different vibe from Pintastic and one of the difference was that by Saturday the director of the event Steven Parenteau had some time for me when he didn’t at the start.

I was actually surprised that the only sign of pintastic was Dave dropping off some cards promoting it, but there was one familiar face and taste that had been at Pintastic:

Quigley’s cakes have been at Total Con for a decade and they did in fact sell out of their entire inventory by the end of this night which means that on Sunday they’ll have chance to actually game. (Don’t worry if you want the cupcakes they’ll be back for Pintastic in April

Of course there are other side business like the Fabric Treasury that makes accessories for gamers:

You might have noticed that while I am, as always excited to interview people I was starting to seem a tad slower, the early mornings had been getting to me and despite a more reasonable 5 hours of sleep over a friend’s apartment that morning I was dragging having completely forgotten to eat. A trip to Linguini’s for lunch filled me up and I returned to my spot in the free play room where the continual Blackbeard game was set up by 3:30 or so.

I plugged in the laptop and the battery of the camera to recharge but apparently I needed recharging more because it was a little after 4:30 when I sat down and seemed to nod off and when I looked again it was nearly 6. I literally crashed right in the chair in front of the game and was out at least 60-90 minutes as the gaming went on around me.

When I came to I was a tad refreshed and even more importantly the Wars of Ozz table was being reset for a new group meaning that the gamemaster was free for an interview:

It turned out the fellow from my home town a year ahead of me in High School which was cool.

But the most intriguing interview of the day was my final one with Jeff Johnston whose games were very different than most of the elaborate setups in the place as all of his games were designed to be played in 15 minutes and made for the youngest of children.

That was it for interview. I spent the rest of the night running Avalon Hill’s Blackbeard for a group of players and finally teaching Groo to the group when Blackbeard ended. I didn’t end up back at the apartment till 1 AM.

I’m going to mention one thing in passing. There was a miniatures game that I thought was simply incredible and brought a huge smile to my face. The gamemaster had no time to talk early in the day but I swung by as he was packing up. He was very enthused about the game he had made but for reasons that people who attended Totalcon and played or saw his game will understand we decided that it was prudent to give the interview a miss and skip even the still photos of it.

Fortunately there were other games with cool images that were not a problem from the Star Wars universe.

To Cthulhu boardgames.

There is one more day of Total Con to see. Looking forward to seeing it.

Burn it to the ground first

Posted: February 24, 2024 by navygrade36bureaucrat in charity
Tags: , , ,

Man, did the MS Society screw up big this time. After firing a 90-year-old volunteer who asked “what pronouns meant,” then doubling down on the firing, then realizing people were willing to move their donation money elsewhere, they issued a non-apology that said they had “the best of intentions.”

Go ahead and read the “apology” here.

Plenty of people are calling for more than an apology, and I agree with them. It’s not enough to apologize. The fact that nobody was fired is always telling. Real apologies don’t contain excuses, they simply apologize and do right by the victim.

The leftist craziness that has taken over corporations and other organizations only stops when someone pushes back. Hard. Remember Target?

That drop in stock price was well understood. While Target is still a fairly woke store, it certainly has become far more restrained.

Budweiser too. And Harvard, Yale and Penn. And now the MS Society, because there are plenty of places to donate towards MS research. I guess MS Society might have to lay off some of the 118 employees that make over 100K a year, according to comments at Legal Insurrection.

Face it, the crazy left-wing folks want you to keep donating and buying their products while they wish you would die. I wish it wasn’t true, but it is. Stop donating to them. Don’t feel bad about donating to other causes. You can find better beer than Budweiser, better stores than Target, better colleges than Harvard, and better charities than MS Society. Walk away without looking back. Don’t fund the craziness.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.

Day 2 Total Con Marlborough Mass Less Totally Confused about the Role to Play and the Art

Posted: February 24, 2024 by datechguy in fun, gaming, online gaming, special events
Tags: , , , ,

My Trip home meant three extra games joined me for Day 2 of the Total Confusion convention in Marlborough. I took along Age of Renaissance, one of my old favorites, Groo because it’s quick, dirty and fun and a copy of the original Avalon Hill History of the World as I had mentioned in passing that I had two and a friend had inquired about buying one of them.

After a slight detour due to forgetting my wallet (fortunately discovered at the nearest Dunkin rather than after hitting the highway I got to Total con by 6:30 and found myself surprised. Having survived many an all night game I expected to find at least one crew with some kind of game, either board or a Role Playing Game (or RPG as they’re known) to still be in progress surrounded by beers and or chips but I went from one corner of the place to another and the only games that could be even slightly considered in progress where the two I had left set up ready to continue.

Now this might be due to it being the Thursday to Friday period rather than the Friday/Saturday period (I’ll check this morning when I get there) but I was still surprised. But slowly the gamers filed in after breakfast and the various games set up and the games were on.

As you might expect the crowd was much larger and more vendors turned up to tempt players with games, accessories and items of interest. I noticed a fair amount of families with younger children all playing various games most of which I didn’t recognize but the real scenes in the open play room where the huge elaborate setups for various games or giant boards, stuff that isn’t practical at the house.

It became very clear that many of these setups were labors of love and thus one of the joys of being there, but there was a second joy you saw a lot of, less elaborate but no less significant, the joy of teaching a game you enjoy to a new crowd and seeing them take the same joy in a game that you’ve had in years. That teaching element is a vital part of the main area. and I found myself sharing that joy as well with what I brought

I had several wandering players join into my Blackbeard and had three different leaders over the course of the day before a young man managed to take a huge treasure, upgrade to a squared rigger and get to 100 points to win outright. Alas the same interest was not in Source of the Nile, I did however have more luck with Dynasty baseball teaching a fellow how to play and recruiting him into my 1972 league taking the Reds.

It was near this time that it hit me that while I had some good shot and interviews from my own area (open board gaming) I had done very little with either the RPG crowd or the miniatures crowd that was located in between. This was part of the “Army of Niches” aspect of the event that I mentioned yesterday. Not wanting to miss that perspective I headed over the final room where RPG’s took place intending to start filming there and go down the all peeking into each to give an account of the incredible variety of RPG’s in progress.

Much to my surprise I was greeted by a fellow who asked me not to film in that room out of respect for the privacy of the players. It’s the type of thing that I might have expected to hear a quarter century ago when gaming wasn’t as mainstream but I was shocked to hear it in 2024. Either way people were there to enjoy themselves and that trumps video so I shot and gave the perspective from outside the room instead:

I had more luck in the miniatures painting area where a woman named Carol was painting with great detail some figures. She was kind enough to interrupt her work for a long interview.

You can find her work online here but I also should note that her artistry is not limited to items of small stature as evidenced by the large model ship behind me which was also an example of her work.

Alas the lack of sleep was starting to get to me and after some cheese pizza from Linguini’s (Friday in Lent you know) I was already thinking of crashing when I ended up as part of demoing the online version of the baseball game in the 4 pm tournament whose games were tight and kept the adrenaline pumping through the victory. But by this time I was pretty much spent so after packing up my games and setting up Blackbeard for a new session (leaving word that people were welcome to play it while I was gone) I prepared to head for my friend’s house in Westborough just 12 minutes away when I was intercepted by one of my Blackbeard players Kevin (2nd place) who insisted I meet and interview the gamemaster of the RPG they were running.

Bill was an affable fellow who was there with his grandchildren and they had one of the clubrooms put aside for their event and the interview frankly was golden.

When I think of role playing games I always think of my college crowd playing D & D and come from it from that angle. I didn’t realize how limited a view this was until talking with Bill.

Yes this is role playing but the forethought and preparation for this scenario was incredible. The aspects of writing, engineering and even specific props and costume for the particular scenario were stunning. This gave me a real understanding of what a convention like this can mean to those on the Role Playing side of the gamers aside. In theory one and practice one can play a RPG anywhere as the primary ingredient is imagination and there are plenty of people at Total Con doing just that.

But the kind of elaborate setup with months of preparation and props made and controlling the aspect to give the player the experience of being where they’re pretending to be. It’s in all practical sense, a theatre production and thus art generated by people with imagination willing to put in the time and effort to entertain a group of total strangers simply for the sheer joy of it.

If that’s not worth the price of admission to Total Confusion I’d like to know what is.

Here are a few quick clips before I go. More tomorrow.

https://rumble.com/v4fcohu-quick-clips-from-total-confusion-2024-day-two.html
Older Entries
Newer Entries