Posts Tagged ‘Da Magnificent Seven’

Sadly dear readers, this will be my last post here for DaTechGuy. Unfortunately, it’s been a struggle to keep revenue coming in, and when Peter said he would have to start cutting writers, rather than let others deliberate over the decision, I made the choice to step down.

It’s not all a loss though. I recently retired from the military (hence the lack of “This post doesn’t represent the DoD…), so I’m starting a fresh new phase of life as a self-employed person. I started working for Peter when my daughter was in Yale’s Children Hospital. It was a good distraction from an otherwise depressing situation. She passed away right as we were house hunting, and that experience prompted me to write “To Build A House.” Had I not been regularly blogging on DaTechGuy, I don’t think I would have had the writing skills needed to finish the book, let alone the audiobook.

My last years in the military were busy, so although I have two books I want to write, I haven’t had the time to do so. Any writer out there knows that if you don’t keep writing, your skills diminish, so sometimes my weekend blogging for DaTechGuy was the only real writing exercise I could get. Peter gave me the freedom to write about whatever I wanted to, and often it was my escape from an increasingly oppressive military culture hell bent on DEI initiatives, white supremacist witch hunts, and anything else that would distract from its lack of warfighting ability.

As I leave DaTechGuy, I don’t get any less busy. I’m now working with a team of folks at Walk The Talk Foundation to try and bring some accountability to the military, particularly the flag and general officers that have run our services into the dirt. The media has missed the big story on the decline in military recruiting. It’s less about DEI and a lot more about the poor treatment of service members. Every person I know getting out has said they won’t recommend the service to their family members. Given that a large percentage of military members serve because mom/dad/grandpa did, that by far has been the biggest depressor of military recruiting. Since the GOFOs can’t bring themselves to apologize for losing Afghanistan, poorly managing our shipyards and not fixing military pay, people like me have responded in “Atlas Shrugged” fashion by shrugging off the expectation that we keep supplying the military with our sons and daughters. At some point it’ll break, and hopefully like in Atlas Shrugged, something better will rise from the ashes.

So between helping Walk the Talk, writing two more books, teaching travel classes and helping churches and non-profit organizations with their computer networks, plus raising 5 kids….yeah, I’ll be busy.

If you’ve made it this far, I’d like to ask that you consider either donating to DaTechGuy or buying one of his books on Amazon. Leftist extremists’ pour money into their fake news organizations and make it hard for those of us willing to write and publish to make a living. Buying what we write and engaging with us online helps build that support community that we need. It’s not enough to not watch CNN or stop buying coffee from Starbucks…you have to take that money and put it to good use elsewhere. Think of it as you’re helping to prop up the folks punching back against the mainstream narrative…you may not be able to do the punching yourself, but you can support those that do, and it’ll make a difference. Even better, more money for the smaller groups of individuals forces Republican lawmakers to take them more seriously. It’s a slow and imperfect process, but its far better than donating to the Republican general fund and praying for results.

My only other ask is you get out and vote this year, and seriously consider volunteering as a poll watcher. I assisted on Governor Youngkin’s campaign in a small way, and it was because many of us went door-to-door and supervised voting booths that he swept in and kept Virginia from going overboard on blue policies. Yes, it requires you to get off your couch, stop commenting on social media and start doing something useful. Your opponents are doing this in droves, and our institutions will crumble unless good people stand up to take them back.

And if you think “I’m in a red state, it can’t happen to me,” remember that your opponents aren’t content to leave you alone…they will come after you until you bend the knee…just look at the Jewish students being hunted on college campuses if you need an example.

Take care, fight the good fight, and always punch back twice as hard!

Equality before the law should mean just that: equal treatment before the law, no matter who you are. Supposedly women are equal to men, yet time and time again, women are allowed to engage in awful, illegal behavior and get lighter sentences.

Look no further than this week, where Heather Pressdee, a nurse, murdered multiple old people in different nursing homes in Pennsylvania by administering more insulin than their bodies could handle. She did this deliberately, often timing it so the person would die before being taken to a hospital in order to hide her crime. It’s outrageously despicable, yet she avoided the death penalty.

You can read the sob story of Christa Pike, who brutally murdered Colleen Slemmer in 1996. The argument is she was 18 and made a mistake. Sounds reasonable right? A quick Wikipedia search describes Christa Pike’s crimes:

  • On January 12, 1995, Pike, Shipp, Peterson, and Slemmer signed out of the dormitory and proceeded to the woods, where Slemmer was told they wanted to make peace by offering her some marijuana.[5] Upon arrival at the secluded location, Slemmer was attacked by Pike and Shipp while Peterson acted as lookout. According to later court testimony, for the next thirty minutes Slemmer was taunted, beaten, and slashed; and a pentagram was carved in her chest.[6][7] Finally, Pike smashed Slemmer’s skull with a large chunk of asphalt, killing her. Pike kept a piece of Slemmer’s skull.[5]

Keeping a piece of her skull? Carving a pentagram on her chest? That’s not a crime of passion or an accident. While not slated for execution yet, she lost her last appeal recently.

Lastly, how about the story of Miranda Cassarez, a San Antonio woman who starved her four-year-old stepson to death? The kid was only 28 pounds when he died at the local hospital. She was completely unrepentant and attempted to push the blame to anyone but herself. She’ll get 99 years in prison. I have a 4 year old at home, and while the kid sometimes drives me crazy, I can’t bear the thought of starving him to death.

Women are literally getting away with murder. True equality means we allow people, despite their gender, to suffer equal consequences before the law.

By John Ruberry

Kim Foxx, the state’s attorney of Cook County, is the chief prosecutor in Chicago and its inner suburbs. 

The George Soros-funded catch-and-release Democrat has been a disaster for Cook County residents, except for the many criminals living here.

Nationally, the leftist ideologue is best known for botching the Jussie Smollett case. Yeah, I keep bringing that up, largely because Foxx supposedly throws a fit whenever her name is attached to the hate-crime hoaxer. 

Feel her rage.

By throwing his considerable weight around, both literally and symbolically, Illinois’ governor, JB Pritzker, who hopes to run for president in 2028, brought the 2024 Democratic National Convention to Chicago. This may prove to be Pritzker’s undoing. Chicago was hit hard by riots after the George Floyd murder, and the crime rate in Chicago and its core suburbs has soared since Foxx took office in 2016.

Fortunately, Foxx chose not to run for a third term. 

The campaign to succeed her was essentially a referendum on her time as state’s attorney. The winner by a hair was Eileen O’Neill Burke, who said at the end of a debate, “If you like the way things are going right now, you have a candidate in this election. It isn’t me.”

Last week, the Chicago Tribune reported that Foxx will get a little tougher in prosecuting crime. “You may not be aware, but for the last four years the public policy of the Cook County state’s attorney’s office has been not to prosecute criminal violations tied to protests and demonstrations,” the Trib’s left-of-center editorial board wrote, “if the office deems those actions ‘peaceful.'” 

“That means the office as a matter of policy won’t prosecute protesters arrested for disorderly conduct,” the op-ed continued, “unlawful gathering or criminal trespass to state-supported land, among other laws.”

As people with common sense–that is, non-leftists–know, small-time violators of the law sometimes become felons. Peaceful protests, or what liberal journalists laughingly call “mostly peaceful protests” sometimes become quite violent ones. 

Foxx’s end-of-term conversion does not mean she’s been suddenly blessed with wisdom. Crime is a very serious problem in Chicago. Nationally, liberal apologists for criminality regularly tell us that the crime rate in major cities is going down, but not only do they use the COVID year of 2020 as a comparison point, they ignore Chicago. While murder the murder rate is down slightly in Chicago, other crimes are becoming more numerous. Foxx is largely to blame, but Chicago’s mayor during the pandemic, Lori Lightfoot, as well as her neo-Marxist successor, Brandon Johnson, should hold their heads in shame too.

Instead, Foxx has cynically, in regard to DNC protesters, decided to do her job. 

Leftists are obsessed with history repeating itself. Looking past the calm 1996 Democratic Convention, they fear a repeat of the riot at Grant Park during the 1968 DNC, when Mayor Richard J. Daley’s angry cops beat up hippie protesters as millions of voters watched on television. Liberals blame that chaos for Richard Nixon’s victory that fall. 

At a protest earlier this month Joe Iosbaker, a left-wing gadfly, offered an ominous warning with a couple of questions. “Have you heard that the Democratic National Convention is coming to Chicago? Are we going to let ’em come here without a protest? This is Chicago, goddamn it — we’ve got to give them a 1968 kind of welcome.”

Foxx doesn’t want to be blamed for Donald Trump defeating Joe Biden in November. She cares more about her political party than fulfilling the duties of her job.

Pro-Hamas and anti-Israel protests are regular disturbances in downtown Chicago. Protesting, both peaceful and “mostly peaceful,” has become a habit in the city. Throw into the mix Chicago’s violent crime epidemic, and the result will be a vile stew that is set to turn toxic in late August, when the DNC convenes at the United Center.

Foxx’s “conversion,” in my opinion, will prove to be too little–too late.

Let the bad times roll. History will repeat itself in Chicago.

After the DNC leaves, Foxx can return to not prosecuting protesters who break laws until Eileen O’Neill Burke is sworn in.

John Ruberry regularly blogs in Cook County at Marathon Pundit.

Liberal college campuses typically try to distinguish and distance themselves from the military. For the longest time, many campuses had banned or essentially banned ROTC, although that has waned in the past decade. The longtime myth was that the military was a place of last resort for people who couldn’t otherwise make it in college. Given the recent trend of college life breeding anti-semitism and people that can’t seem to perform basic activities like reading, I give the military the upper hand on this one.

College and the military now share one very dark truth when it comes to prosecuting crimes. President Biden recently changed many Trump-era Title IX regulations that required due process in dealing with sexual harassment claims. In the past, if you accused someone of sexual assault on campus, the accused person had a right to confront the accuser and demand evidence. That seems so basic, yet campuses howled in pain at being required to take seriously accusations and, you know, actually look for evidence before disciplining students.

That’s entirely gone now. You can now, quite literally, accuse a fellow student of sexual assault, not provide evidence, and if the judge is persuaded by your story, your fellow student can be kicked out of the school without ever getting the chance to provide his or her side of the story.

That sounds insane to anyone who thinks justice is important. But its exactly like another system that exists in the US Military called non-judicial punishment (NJP).

Now, the “non-judicial” title might make you think it is some sort of proceeding that will be swept under the rug and not really hurt you. That couldn’t be further from the truth. NJP can impose some harsh punishments, such as cutting half of your pay for up to 2 months as well as restricting you to a barracks room for up to two months. More importantly, any NJP action can basically end your career. The military’s high year tenure system means if you don’t advance to a certain rank after so much time, they can separate you with the stroke of a pen.

The military has been under the gun to “do something” about sexual assault, so its not uncommon anymore to see someone accused of sexual assault get punished at NJP even with a lack of evidence. That’s because NJP, like Title IX, uses the “preponderance of evidence” standard, meaning that you don’t have to prove something beyond a reasonable doubt, just that there is some evidence that might point to the person being guilty. It could simply be a statement from the accuser. It doesn’t have to be scrutinized, it just needs to be persuasive to the military officer holding NJP.

The military and college campuses can now both hold claim to being centers of injustice in America.