SHREVEPORT – Here we are, all the way at the end of September and there has been no Gulf hurricane. The weather-alarmists are in a panic.
And then.
And then, just like that there are now two named storms and areas of low pressure, tropical depression, and my social media feed is filled with spaghetti models and dire predictions of a possible Cat 4 hurricane coming to … where? Who knows?
But weather-alarmists are happy now, and in full alert mode.
What is it that causes this fascination with storms? Nobody wants a devastating storm. Some of this frenzy goes beyond mere interest-for-preparation-purposes. It’s very strange.
At any rate, it looks like Florida may be in the crosshairs this time with Ian, and not that I want anything to happen to Florida, but Louisiana is breathing a little sigh of relief. We all know things can change, but at least we don’t see terror right at the moment.
On a related note, you might be interest in checking out my friend Rob Gaudet’s new book: Cajun Navy Ground Force: Citizen-Led Disaster Response. Rob and I became friends back in 2012 when he was working with C.L. Bryant promoting C.L.’s documentary Runaway Slave. The story of the Cajun Navy is amazing and it is probably impossible to count how many lives they’ve saved, homes repaired, or people they’ve helped in various ways. Coordinating this effort is an exhaustive job and Rob does a great job. Get the book!
You don’t ever want to need the help of the Cajun Navy but thank goodness they exist if you do.
As much as I scoff at the weather-alarmists, in Louisiana we are within reason to worry about these storms: our coastline is vanishing at an alarming rate, and a lot of the reason is storm surge made so much worse by human factors. For decades we cut canals through the marsh for energy exploration and as a result the saltwater has encroached and contributed to erosion. It’s much more complicated than that, but the fact remains that we have a problem.
At any rate, as we move on into the hurricane season we keep our eyes to the radar, to the spaghetti models, and we pray. That’s about our best line of defense, it seems.
The latest media controversy in Illinois is the mailing of what the liberals call “pink slime” newspapers. The term was invented a decade ago by Ryan Zickgraf, a Washington Post reporter, to describe newspapers that aren’t “real,” such as the copy of North Cook News which was mailed to my home last week. On the other hand, as you can see in the photo, the North Cook News is printed on paper and it contains, get this concept, news. North Cook News, and similarly named publications (yes, I said it), is published by Local Government Information Services, which is run by Dan Proft, a conservative activist and former Illinois gubernatorial candidate, who is a co-host of a morning talk radio show on WIND-AM Chicago, part of the Salem News Network.
Proft is also the chair of the People Who Play By The Rules PAC, which has run a series of commercials, including “The Scream,” that have drawn much-needed attention to the SAFE-T Act. Among other things, the law eliminates cash bail in Illinois. Riding off of the emotion after the murder of George Floyd, the voluminous SAFE-T Act passed the Illinois state Senate at 5am on the last day of the lame duck session of the General Assembly early in 2021. It passed the state House that same day. Illinois’ Democratic governor, J.B. Pritzker, signed it into law a month later. Sensing trouble, Dem legislators, or whoever wrote the law, pushed the date that the SAFE-T Act takes effect until January 1, 2023, nearly two months after the 2022 general election.
As I noted in my Da Tech Guy post last week, in a discussion about the SAFE-T Act, Will County State’s Attorney, James Glasgow, a Democrat, told Fox Chicago’s Mike Flannery on his Flannery Fired Up show, “There are forcible felonies that are not detainable: burglary, robbery, arson, kidnapping, second degree murder, intimidation, aggravated battery, aggravated DUI, [and] drug offenses.” Not detainable means they’ll be set free until their trial date.
The mayhem of Chicago and Cook County will spread statewide. And the Chicago area will suffer even more because of the SAFE-T Act.
People Who Play By The Rules PAC television ads and the Proft “pink slime” newspapers must be working. Pritzker and Illinois’ attorney general, Kwame Raoul, say they are open to amendments to the SAFE-T Act–but they don’t offer details. My guess is that the Democrats are panicking. I have no sympathy for them, they’ve had nearly two years to make major changes to the SAFE-T Act.
Meanwhile, Pritzker, a billionaire, is pushing back. He cancelled an appearance at a forum with his Republican opponent, Darren Bailey, sponsored by the Daily Herald newspaper. That paper is published by Paddock Publications, which printed Proft’s Local Government Information Services newspapers; LGIS used Paddock’s bulk-mailing permit to distribute them. That infuriated Pritzker. The governor’s campaign manager, among other things, called Proft’s papers, “fake and misleading and newspaper-style mailers.” Tellingly, the Pritzker camp doesn’t specifically attack the content of Proft’s papers. They are committing the ad hominem fallacy. Paddock, in a statement, announced that it cancelled future printings of LGIS papers. The forum is back on.
The headline of my North Cook News is “Former Chicago chief of detectives: Violent offenders given ‘get out of jail free card.'” That’s true.
Not only have Pritzker and the Democrats, who thanks to gerrymandering enjoy supermajorities in both chambers of the General Assembly, been negligent in fixing the SAFE-T Act debacle, so has the local media. With occasional exceptions, the newsrooms of Illinois’ major newspapers are woke echo chambers. They still claim to be the watchdogs for the public, but these so-called journalists are mostly interested in protecting and advancing leftist narratives. Contemporary reporters are a toxic combination of “the cool kids” in high school, with all of their arrogance, and the false ethical superiority of Iran’s morality police. Community newspapers usually only report on petty crime, but if you need to locate the nearest bake sale, well, you know where to find that information. These weekly papers are in fact weakly ones.
If the Illinois media performed their jobs honestly and capably, there’d be no need for “pink slime.”
Fact-checkers have been unkind to opposition arguments to the SAFE-T Act. The worst of these fact-checks comes from Jeff Cercone at PolitiFact. He deemed such opposition as “false.” Politi-Farce, that is Dan Bongino’s nickname for them, is partially funded by Facebook; the social media giant has used Cercone’s fact-check to blur out a video pointing out the flaws in the SAFE-T Act. Interestingly, Cercone’s Tweets are protected on Twitter. Is he afraid of his readers? I’m not. You can find me on Twitter. Come and get me, I’m not a coward!
Who did Cercone seek out as experts in his fact-check? Cops? No. Prosecutors? Nope. County sheriffs? Uh-uh. He called on Pritzker’s press secretary, Jordan Abudayyeh, and two criminology professors. Oh sure, he included links to articles with opposing opinions. As for Cercone’s experts, I don’t believe their defenses of the SAFE-T Act.
Instead, Cercone should have reached out to John Curran, a suburban Chicago Republican state senator who is a former Cook County assistant Cook County state’s attorney. That, my friends, is what I call an expert.
“You cannot take deterrence out of the system,’ Curran told John Kass last week in the former Chicago Tribune’s columnist’s Chicago Way podcast, “They’ve been doing that for years, the SAFE-T Act is the final straw. Crime is rampant because people don’t fear getting caught. They [the criminals] don’t stop, the police can’t pursue anymore because of insurance issues, coverage issues, and safety issues. They run and then when they do get caught–they know they are going to get processed, booked, and be back out that day. When there is no fear of accountability in the system, what is going to stop someone who sees something and says, ‘I want to take that?'”
Keep in mind, Curran is talking about the current status quo–before the SAFE-T Act kicks in. When that law goes live, Curran warns, what he described will “put that in place permanently.” Only worse, I’d like to add.
For flight risks, apologists for the SAFE-T Act claim, accused criminals can be detained. “The problem with that,” Curran pointed out to Kass, “is to show that someone is a willful flight risk the prosecutor has to prove that they are planning or attempting to intentionally to evade prosecution by concealing oneself. That is never going to happen,” adding, “You literally have to catch them with the plane ticket in their pocket going to the airport.”
As I mentioned earlier the SAFE-T Act, which is 764 pages long, passed on the last day of the 101st General Assembly. Curran said he was given one hour to read it.
Social media regularly blocks or suppresses stories that the “enlightened ones” deem false. Most notably is the New York Post’s initial report on the information found on the Hunter Biden laptop, which has since been found to be as genuine as today’s sunrise. On a personal note, I’ve been repeatedly warned by Facebook that my blog entries that I’ve posted on Facebook will be pushed lower into the general FB feed, meaning of course that fewer people will see my posts, because my writings have been labeled “false and misleading.” I am fairly certain I am “shadowbanned” by Twitter. I used to oppose setting up alternative social media platforms for conservatives–it’s best that the libs see the truth, was my reasoning.
Only they don’t see it.
Twitter and Facebook used to suspend accounts of users who claimed that COVID-19 was manufactured in a Chinese laboratory. That story, still not debunked, may end up being authenticated. There are numerous similar tales
What to do?
Well, as a resort, to get an alternative message out, conservatives can mail out “pink slime” newspapers. As a last resort there is always the Howard Beale approach. You can open the window and scream, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not gonna to take it anymore!”
Proft is undaunted. In a statement he fired back at the billionaire, “Governor Pritzker believes his money guarantees him control of government and entitles him to make all media subservient to his government. He lords over Illinois through executive orders. He sees the Fourth Estate as no different than his equestrian estate in Wellington, FL. If he doesn’t like a television ad, it must be taken off the air. If he doesn’t like a newspaper, it must not be printed or circulated.”
In that same statement, Proft vowed that his papers “will continue to be printed and distributed even if we have to return to the Gutenberg press and must enlist fair-minded people across Illinois who want the truth, not Pritzker’s ‘truth,’ to hand deliver them door-to-door.”
John Ruberry regularly blogs from suburban Cook County at Marathon Pundit.
What hasn’t been discussed is safety equipment. I’ve worked in plenty of industrial environments, from shipyards to metal shops, and have had my share of flying metal objects that cracked safety helmets, broke safety glasses, and in general tried to kill me in a variety of unique and interesting ways. If Tik-Tok is any indication of the trajectory of our society (and one shudders at THAT thought), we should be teaching teenagers how to properly use safety equipment.
And yet, this Canadian teacher is not doing any of that.
Let’s start with the skirt. Unless you are a secretary, nobody in a shop wears a skirt. Even most secretaries in shops wear a long maxi skirt, especially if they have to walk out of the office for any reason. If you’ve ever had a burning piece of metal touch your skin, or brushed up against something sharp, you’ll only do that once or twice before you become best friends with your jeans. Let’s be honest, you can wear some pretty sexy jeans if you want, all while still protecting your legs from being impaled by the splinters flying out from a nearby cutting saw.
The other reason skirts aren’t a good choice is because rotating machinery tends to grab loose items, and having your skirt violently ripped off your body by lathe is just not appealing. Jewelry, especially necklaces and earrings, are also at risk of being forcibly ripped from your body. Hair is the same way. This Canadian teacher should have her hair (wig?) up in a bun, or at least in a ponytail secured with a hat, and most certainly not in her face. Not only is it at risk of being ripped out of her head, but it impedes her ability to see what she is working on.
Speaking of seeing things, I see no gloves or safety glasses.
Seriously, WTF?
Gloves and glasses are an absolute necessity when running a saw. I can’t tell you the number of times my miter saw has kicked up a chunk of wood that smacked me in the hand or the face. It sucks when it happens, but at least I can STILL SEE OUT OF EACH EYEBALL in the end. If you open any user manual, the first section will tell you to wear gloves and eye protection. Heck, the company that provides insurance for the school should be calling and complaining that this teacher is placing them at significant risk for an insurance claim.
All this makes me view this as a dumb, attention-grabbing prank. If this teacher cared about her students and also happened to be transgender, she would be dressing appropriately for class, teaching her students how to properly run saws and other equipment. As a teacher, she should dress appropriately anyway, and if she had large breasts like that (and some women do), she should at least wear a bra.
Which brings up my final point, and that is if the transgender community wants to be taken seriously, they are going to have to divorce themselves from these attention-grabbing idiots. It’s not dissimilar from the Westboro Baptist Church, a very small community that doesn’t represent anything close to mainstream Christian theology. Plenty of transgender individuals want us to believe that they are normal members of society, and truth be told, plenty of them are. But just like the Westboro Baptist Church, people should call out bad behavior when they see it, and most transgender people should join them in saying “This behavior isn’t normal.” Just because a teacher is transgender doesn’t mean we should allow that person to run roughshod over basic safety protocol and dress codes. Until we see more pushback on these people, its going to be harder for most people to normalize transgender individuals in society.
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. If you liked this article, you should purchase a book from the author for you or a friend, or drop a tip for DaTechGuy.
In some Conservative circles Libertarians are not too popular. The reverse is also true. For quite a while I’ve been at a loss for why this is true. I’ve studied both political philosophies in great detail, and they are very similar. The adherents of both camps share more than 90 percent of the same key beliefs.
Individual Rights and Individual Liberty are cornerstones of both Libertarianism and Conservativism. That is the direct opposite of all leftist philosophies, whether it be Liberalism, Progressivism, Socialism, Fascism, or Communism. All those Collectivist philosophies place thr supreme value of the State over the individual.
Free Market Capitalism is another cornerstone of both Conservatism and Libertarianism. Contrast that with the socialist economic policies of the Democratic Party.
Both Conservatives and Libertarians truly value the Constitution and founding principles of the United States. Democrats despise both of these.
Rather than unite against our leftist common enemies, we Conservatives and Libertarians seem to be engaged in a low level guerilla war on social media. This has bothered me for quite a while. Just the other day I finally realized why this is taking place.
At the root of this conflict is the fact that far too many individuals who identify as Libertarians have no idea what the word actually means. Some identify as a Libertarian because they think the words sounds cool. Others identify as Libertarians because they have a distorted understanding of this philosophy.
Many who identify as Libertarian believe that it a watered down version of Liberalism or Progressivism. That is most untrue. If you plot all political philosophies on a graph, Libertarianism is even further to the right than Conservatism because Libertarians place more of emphasis on individual liberty.
The concept of liberty is at the very core of the Libertarian philosophy. Liberty does not equal freedom, although freedom is at the root of liberty. If you combine responsibility with freedom, then you get liberty.
The framers of the Constitution defined liberty as the freedom to do as you wish as long as you do no harm to any other individual, or interfere with the rights of another individual. It is freedom with the responsibility to do no harm to others. Libertarians must respect the rights of all other individuals.
The framers of the Constitution considered Individual Liberty to be the very bedrock of our constitutional republic. Our Constitution was written to protect the liberty of every individual American.
A true Libertarian believes that protecting the lives and liberty of every individual are the only valid powers of any level of government, if governments do more then they will trample the liberty of individuals.
To prevent a libertarian society from descending into violence and chaos, individuals must restrain themselves. Christian morality was believed by the framers of the Constitution to be the perfect mechanism to achieve this, as long as no individuals were forced to join a religion.
For a society to functions and thrive there must exist social and cultural institutions. Libertarians believe that governments must play no role in these institutions, they must be voluntary. According to what I’ve seen, Conservatives believe that governments and laws should play a role in protecting institutions. It is a minor issue of disagreement.
The family is one of the most important institutions. Anything that is harmful to the family must be discouraged and fought against. Libertarians and Conservatives should make this a common cause.
Progressivism is about using all levels of government to force their beliefs on everyone. That violates the liberty of every individual. The belief system of progressives is extremely hostile to the social and cultural institutions that are necessary. Conservatives and Libertarians should join forces to preserve these social and cultural institutions, especially the family.
The Transgender Ideology of Progressives is one of the belief systems that Progressives are using all levels of government to cram down the throats of all Americans. It is a belief system that is harmful to social and cultural institutions. It is most harmful to children who are being indoctrinated into believing they are the wrong gender.
As a Libertarian I believe individuals have a right to identify as what ever they want to. However, no one has a right to force me, or any other individual, to play along with any other individual’s delusions. Using government to force all of society to play along is wrong and anti-liberty.
I’m almost 100 percent sure that single sex bathrooms, and similar facilities, were set up by social compact, and then later codified into laws. It was done for the safety, privacy, and modesty of the female sex. Progressives are using government force to overturn this, against the wishes of the vast majority of individuals.
I am a true Libertarian. I have a great many Conservative friends. I constantly talk politics with them. We agree well over 90 percent of the time. When we don’t we both respect each other’s point of view. We are united against Progressivism, and all other collectivist philosophies. With the Democrats destroying the United States, I suggest other Conservatives and Libertarians should follow my lead.
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