Posts Tagged ‘datechguy's magnificent seven’

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
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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.

Burn it to the ground first

Posted: February 24, 2024 by navygrade36bureaucrat in charity
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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.

More proof Liberalism is a dangerous mental disorder

Posted: February 22, 2024 by Jon Fournier in Uncategorized
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The political left is a vast echo chamber where ideology greatly outweighs reality, groupthink has replaced individual awareness.  Basic scientific truths do not exist at all, nor do philosophical and moral truths, because of this reality is malleable.  It is impossible to live in environment devoid of reality without experiencing a breakdown of sanity. 

These Marxists that call themselves Progressives, Liberals, or Democrats have infested all of the major institutions here in the United States and across the world.  Because of this the world is descending into a chaos caused by this ideologically driven abandonment of reality.

Transgenderism is the epitome is this rejection of reality.  The political left has completely rejected the fundamental scientific truth of biological sex.  This article is proof of how far into insanity the left has descended: This British Health Official’s Take on Transgender ‘Chestfeeding’ Is Something Else (townhall.com)

A health official in the United Kingdom claimed that breast milk from biological males who “transitioned” to live as women is just as healthy as breast milk from a female who has given birth. 

The Telegraph reported this week that a leaked letter from a University Hospitals Sussex NHS Foundation Trust medical director claims that breast milk produced by “trans women” as a result of taking so-called “gender-affirming” drugs is “comparable to that produced [by a mother] following the birth of a baby.”

This insanity is now endangering new born infants.

Lottie Moore, who works at the think tank Policy Exchange, told The Telegraph that the letter is “unbalanced” and “naïve in its assertion that the secretions produced by a male on hormones can nourish an infant in the way a mother’s breast milk can.” 

“A child’s welfare must always take precedence over identity politics and contested belief systems that are not evidence-based. The NHS should not be indulging in this nonsense,” Moore added.

Young girls are now at risk of serious bodily injury from the left’s insanity:  ‘Trans’ Athlete Causes Multiple Injuries in Girls’ Basketball Game (townhall.com)

A male athlete who identifies as a woman reportedly injured three female athletes in a girls’ basketball game earlier this month. As a result, the game ended in a forfeit.

The trans-identifying player for KIPP Academy in Massachusetts reportedly injured three girls at Collegiate Charter School of Lowell before halftime on Feb. 8. According to The Daily Wire, the male player who thinks he’s a girl is six feet tall and has facial hair. KIPP has reportedly refused to confirm the player’s gender.

The reaction from the offending school is pure insanity.

“The Charter School supports this decision and reiterates its values of both inclusivity and safety for all students,” the statement added. “We take the standards set by the MIAA and our Board of Trustees seriously and strive to uphold them on and off the court. We also follow the guidance from the MIAA and state laws regarding equity and access for all student-athletes.”

The statement omits the fact that these female athletes were injured by a male who was allowed to play against them in the name of “inclusion.”

“A man hitting a woman used to be called domestic abuse. Now it’s called brave,” women’s sports advocate Riley Gaines said on X. 

Here is another major denial of reality by the political left that is causing serious mental health repercussions: Understanding and Managing Climate Anxiety: A Modern Mental Health Concern (mrctv.org)

The media has a lot to answer for – namely, for making people (including children) so petrified of an impending climate apocalypse they can barely function in daily life.

In a recent Bloomberg article, reporters interviewed therapist Caroline Hickman, who described using exposure therapy to help a child who was afraid of dogs. However, she was reluctant to see climate anxiety as the same type of irrational fear. 

“We don’t 100% know how to deal with it,” she said, adding that “it would be a huge mistake to try and treat it like other anxieties that we are very familiar with that have been around for decades. This one is much, much worse.”

…Climate anxiety disrupts the ability to function day to day. Children and young people in this category feel alienation from friends and family, distress when thinking about the future and intrusive thoughts about who will survive, according to Hickman’s research. Patients obsessively check for extreme weather, read climate change studies and pursue radical activism. Some, devastatingly, consider suicide as the only solution. 

The Biden Regime is the very embodiment of the insanity of the political left: Biden Admin Shells Out Taxpayer Dollars On Getting Americans To Eat Trash-Fed Bugs | The Daily Caller

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) began funding research into trash-fed crickets as an alternative to conventional and “unsustainable” protein production in July 2023, a federal grant listing shows.

The $130,000 grant supports research that “addresses the need for more cost-efficient production of crickets as a sustainable protein source,” according to the listing. Specifically, the grant will support research into using municipal landfill waste to feed crickets that will later be harvested for human consumption.

USDA awarded the grant to Mighty Cricket Inc., a private firm that sells cricket flour, cricket protein powder and cricket oatmeal. The agency believes that using landfill waste to feed crickets could help the firm “procure cricket feed at lower cost than what is available on the market,” leading to savings that could then be passed along to the consumer.

USDA’s grant listing criticizes traditional animal farming for being too resource-intensive and too harsh on the environment.

Norovirus and my cruise ship trip

Posted: February 18, 2024 by John Ruberry in business, medicine
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By John Ruberry

Okay, let me get say this before I get into the details of our ten-day cruise. Yes, barely, we can afford a cruise. So I’m not bragging about our wealth. Because we have nothing to brag about.

To celebrate an anniversary birthday for Mrs. Marathon Pundit–I’m not going to reveal the year–we departed on a Caribbean cruise earlier this month which concluded last Friday where it began, Fort Lauderdale.

Which cruise line? Let’s just call it Joyful Cruises.

This post is designed to start an honest conversation about cruise ships, one that you will be less likely to find in dinosaur corporate media, largely because cruise ships are major advertisers with them. 

I have no such restraints. Oh, I am not a doctor or any sort of health professional.

On the upside, a cruise makes affordable–barely again, for us–visits to remote places such as Carribean islands. I can drive from my home near Chicago and reach Key West, Florida in a couple of days. I can make it a week-long trip with extended stops. I cannot drive from Key West to the Bahamas. 

The highlight of the cruise for us were the excursions in Charlotte Amalie, US Virgin Islands, St. Lucia, Martinque, and Antigua. Issues with high waves cancelled plan stops at “Joyful Cay” in the Bahamas and Dominica. I understand, snowstorms and hurricanes force highway closures and baseball games are rained out. But according to a cruise Facebook group, those stops were also cancelled on that same Joyful cruise ship, which departed the same day our cruise ended. 

To compensate for the missed stops, our already paid for excursion was refunded and we each receivedc a $75 on-ship credit.

Fewer stops means more time on the ship–more time to interact with other passengers–and more time to become ill.

And people get sick–not just motion sickness–on cruise ships. Norovirus, commonly but mistakenly referred to as “stomach flu,” is a big problem on cruises.

From Today.com last year:

Outbreaks of the stomach bug have surged on cruise ships this year, reaching the highest levels seen in 10 years. Since January 2023, there have been 13 confirmed norovirus outbreaks [My note–there were just 12, one of those was salmonella and E. coli] on cruise ships under U.S. jurisdiction — that’s more outbreaks in six months than there have been during any full year since 2012, according to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

More…

Most recently, a norovirus outbreak in June on the Viking Neptune sickened 110 passengers (over 13% of the ship’s guests) and nine crew members with vomiting, diarrhea and abdominal cramps, according to the CDC. The CDC has tracked outbreaks of gastrointestinal illness on cruise ships through its Vessel Sanitation Program (VSP) since 1994. 

Several weeks prior, a Celebrity Summit cruise ship reported an outbreak of norovirus that sickened more than 150 passengers and 25 crew members, per the CDC. It was the third norovirus outbreak on a Celebrity Cruises vessel this year. Another popular cruise line, Royal Caribbean International, has reported four outbreaks since January.

Late on the eighth day of our Joyful Cruise, Mrs. Marathon Pundit became quite ill, and her symptoms were fever, vomiting, and diarrhea. I visited the medical center of the ship on her behalf, the medical staffer explained that my wife would need to be confined to our stateroom–really, it was a tiny cabin—for 24 hours. Or longer if her symptoms continued. Notably, he didn’t say “quarantine.” Per CDC protocol, my wife was required to complete a form about her illness and conditions. He provided her with anti-diarrheal medication, the charge for it was $14. 

A day later it was my turn to get sick. How sick? 

While sitting on the toilet doing, well, you know, I took advantage of the compact bathroom in our stateroom, which allowed me to simultaneously and painfully vomit into the sink. A two-for-one cruise ship special! And four days later the soreness remains. The lower back muscular pain from the unnatural vomit-induced contortions severely challenged my fit body.

I didn’t bother to visit the medical center–I already knew what was wrong with me. And I didn’t need fill out a report. As we disembarked our ship in Fort Lauderdale, I overheard a few other passengers complain about “stomach flu,” and there was a mention of it on the unofficial cruise Facebook page organized by another passenger.

Getting sick with norovirus on a cruise is surprisingly common. Last year, the Miami Herald reported, “Some people know it as the ‘cruise ship virus’ because it’s often the cause of over 90% of diarrhea outbreaks on cruise ships, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.”

Neither Mrs. Marathon Pundit nor I were officially diagnosed with norovirus. But that 90 percent CDC statistic works for me. 

Yes, norovirus on cruise ships is also an official thing, a federal thing. The CDC even has a Facts About Noroviruses on Cruise Ships page on its website.

So far in the seven weeks of 2024, the CDC has reported official illness outbreaks on two cruise ships, one was confirmed as norovirus.

On the flipside, norovirus is not a cruise ship-exclusive bug, it’s far more common in schools and nursing homes, according to the CDC. 

The CDC reports on norovirus cruise ships outbreaks are incomplete, because they don’t include people like me who silently suffered in their staterooms, or passengers who didn’t exhibit symptoms until after disembarking. 

Still, not everyone gets sick on cruise ships. Most don’t. And of the folks we mingled with on our Joyful cruise, most said, even after over a dozen cruises, that they’ve never gotten sick.

Where did we go wrong? Out of convenience, we ate all but one of our cruise meals–three of them most days–in the crowded “hot bunk” style set up in the buffet dining hall, even though our cheapskate package allowed us, with a reservation and paying an eighteen percent “cover charge,” to dine in some of the restaurants. Mrs. Marathon Pundit, who you’ll remember got sick first, spent a lot of time in the ship’s spa.

Our cruise ship boasts that it can hold over 3,600 passengers–our trip was sold out–and it has a crew of over 1,300. Most of the crew sleep in compact steerage rooms in bunk beds. Perhaps that’s too many people in too small of a space for too long of a time.

Our two port cancellations increased the odds of illness. You’re more likely to get sick with any bug on a massive cruise ship as opposed to a beach or a rain forest. 

I’m not a germophobe. During the COVID pandemic, I was against the lockdowns and mask mandates. While I don’t have any specific suggestions, I believe cruise lines can do better, even if that means simply informing passengers that they face a norovirus risk. COVID warnings, many that have turned out to be exaggerated, have desensitized us to health advisories, so it’s no surprise that the handwashing stations outside the buffet halls were little used. Washing hands of course is a good thing.

My guess was that the median age of the passengers on our cruise was 65–and most were overweight. That meets my definition of a vulnerable population. 

When I returned home, I entered “norovirus” into the Joyful Cruises website search box. I received just two matches.

Do better.

Will we go on a cruise again? Perhaps on a smaller ship. And not for ten days. Supposedly a norovirus vaccine is in the works. If it’s available and we decide to head to sea again, I’m taking that jab.

I’m going out for a run now, despite that back-muscle pain from the puking.

And once again, Happy Birthday Mrs. Marathon Pundit!

John Ruberry, pictured on that cruise, regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

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