Aspiring Rapper Update: Frères Jacques

Posted on | May 30, 2022 | Comments Off on Aspiring Rapper Update: Frères Jacques

Say hello to Kenard Jacques, Ahmad Jacques and Ameko Jacques of Miami, who are in custody for multiple crimes that include murder charges against Kenard and Ahmad. Two months ago (“Aspiring Rapper Update: ‘Baby Cino’ Gets Out of Jail, Immediately Gets Shot Dead”) we told you the story of Timothy Starks, a/k/a “Baby Cino,” who was only 20 years old when he “died in the hail of gunfire,” shot in broad daylight shortly after he got bailed out of jail. More than 40 shots were fired in that ambush, and “Baby Cino” died while “still wearing the wristband given to inmates at the Turner Guilford Knight Correctional Center.”

We are now learning the motive for the murder of “Baby Cino”:

Three brothers are behind bars in connection to a quadruple shooting, and two of them are facing murder charges.
Investigators now say that the quadruple shooting is connected to another shooting on the Palmetto Expressway that shut down traffic for hours.
Now, at least two of those brothers are behind bars for the murder of Troyvon Smith, 26, that happened in February 2022 in northwest Miami-Dade.
This isn’t the first time these brothers have been behind bars.
Kemard Jacques and his brother Ahmad Jacques both face first-degree murder charges and faced a judge.
Police say the two were involved in Smith’s murder. Investigators say six men were involved, including Timothy Starks.
Starks, known as Miami rapper Baby Cino, was shot to death on the Palmetto back in March. Detectives now say his death was likely in retaliation for Smith’s murder.
According to police, Starks had set up the car rentals for those two Mercedes sedans involved and even paid for them to be cleaned after.
Kemard and Ahmad’s brother, Ameko Jacques, also appeared in front of a judge. Police say he was an accomplice in the quadruple shooting in northwest Miami-Dade.
Ameko Jacques was also the driver police arrested for a hit-and-run crash in Brickell in December 2022, when two college students were walking along Southeast 7th Street were hit and seriously injured.
We’re also learning that Kemard Jacques has a lengthy rap sheet. He was shot at in Miami Gardens in 2014 and arrested for bringing a gun inside Miami Northwestern Senior High when he was a teen.
Police say Ahmad was actually hit with a bullet in that quadruple shooting, and say he had somehow gotten shot in the arm and drove one of those Mercedes to the hospital.

Here’s the background on that February shooting:

Three people were shot and critically wounded and a fourth was killed in an ambush-style shooting in Northwest Miami-Dade late Wednesday afternoon [], according to Miami-Dade police.
A group of men pulled up in two newer model sedans — one black and one white — in the area of Northwest 99th Street and 21st Court, just after 4 p.m., according to police spokesman Alvaro Zabaleta. The men then jumped out of the cars and ran over to the victims, who were on foot, and began shooting. After a barrage of gunshots, he added, the men ran back to their sedans and drove off.
The white sedan headed east on 100th street; the black one headed west.
“They were clearly targeted,” Zabaleta said. “This occurred at 4:12 in the afternoon and there were multiple rounds fired and we could have had more people that had nothing to do with this become victims of the gun violence.”
On Thursday, police named Troyvon Smith, 26, as the man who was shot and killed.
According to Zabaleta, officers responding to a ShotSpotter alert found three wounded men on the street. Smith died at the scene, and two others were taken to Jackson Memorial Hospital’s Ryder Trauma Center in critical condition.

So, “Baby Cino” rented the cars that were used in the February shooting that killed Smith and wounded three others. Someone — associates of Smith, we may presume — then put the hit on “Baby Cino,” and now the Jacques brothers, associates of “Baby Cino,” are behind bars in connection to Smith’s murder. Recall the definition:

Aspiring Rapper
North American euphemism for a member of the urban criminal class. This unusual occupation is usually mentioned in conjunction with the subject either being slain or being taken into custody for a violent or property-related crime. A relative of the subject usually points out that the subject’s demise or incarceration comes at an extremely inopportune moment, occurring just as the subject was “turning they(sic) life around.”

Miami has a large “aspiring rapper” population, and the violent deaths and arrests among them barely make a dent in that population.

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Category: Aspiring Rapper Update, Florida

Late Night With Rule 5 Sunday: Dorothy Lamour

Posted on | May 30, 2022 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

May 29 is Bob Hope‘s birthday, but since Bob doesn’t exactly meet our Rule 5 criteria, let’s instead enjoy this pic of his frequent co-star in the famous Road movies, Dorothy Lamour.

Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley esse delendam.

NINETY MILES FROM TYRANNY: Hot Pick of the Late Night, The 90 Miles Mystery Box Episode #1729, Morning Mistress, and Girls With Guns.

ANIMAL MAGNETISM: Rule 5 Energy Reality Friday, and the Saturday Gingermageddon.

EBL: Memorial Day Weekend Military Nurses, Ice Mining On The Moon, The Lincoln Lawyer, Taylor Ham Vs. Pork Roll, Ukrainian Spring Planting, Baby Formula, Night Sky, and Khatia Buniatishvili.

A VIEW FROM THE BEACH: Laura Vandervoot, Fish Pic Friday – Motivator Fitness Fishing, Gone Fishin’, Shoulda, They’s Owed Them Crabs, A remarkable Recovery, Tuesday Tanlines, ‘I Don’t Know How Much Worse It Can Get’, The Monday Morning Stimulus, Scientists Seek To Fix Bird Blenders and Palm Sunday

Thanks to everyone for all the luscious links!

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Visit Amazon’s Intimate Apparel Shop
Shop Sex & Sensuality Gifts

Category: Rule 5

Everybody Hates Amber Heard

Posted on | May 29, 2022 | Comments Off on Everybody Hates Amber Heard

For reasons related to testimony in Johnny Depp’s defamation suit against his ex-wife Amber Heard, two of the popular Twitter hashtags about the trial are #AmberTurd and #MePoo. While we don’t know what verdict the jury will reach — it’s very difficult for a public figure to win a defamation case in America because of the Sullivan precedent — clearly Johnny Depp has scored a victory in the court of public opinion.

How badly did the trial go for Amber Heard? Bad enough that the liberal media had to blame the public reaction on “right-wing extremists”:

The narrative of the trial has been shaped in part by what appears to be, according to multiple researchers, an army of bots spreading rhetoric favorable to Depp. One researcher found more bots favorable to Heard, but said most of those bots were from third-party apps trying to capitalize on the trial; meanwhile, they found the highest pro-Depp bot post was shared nearly 20,000 times. The work of those bots has been further amplified by “men’s rights activists” — the part of the far-right-leaning extremist “manosphere” that seems to have decided discrediting Amber Heard is the key to destroying every woman who accuses men of abuse or domestic violence.
Conservative media outlets have also promoted a one-sided narrative of the case; Vice recently reported that Ben Shapiro’s popular conservative news platform the Daily Wire has spent nearly $50,000 promoting ads about the trial on Instagram and Facebook — most of it trashing Amber Heard. The presence of these bad actors has, if anything, only exacerbated the vitriol Heard has received within the mainstream.

So, if the Daily Wire sees this high-profile celebrity trial as an opportunity to attract more readers, then their $50,000 ad buy means they’re responsible for “vitriol” against Amber Heard? But the online reactions we’re seeing — including the memorable reaction of Iraq War veteran Kurt Myers — seem to be organic, based entirely on ordinary people’s experience of watching the trial on TV. Which I haven’t done, by the way. I’ve never been a fan of “pack journalism,” scrambling to compete with a swarm of other reporters and commentators all covering the same story. My preferred mode of operation is to find some angle everybody else is ignoring and try to turn that into a story. So I’m not one of those people who watched every minute of the trial and issued daily updates on the proceedings. My position on Amber Heard remains what it was long before the trial began: Never trust a bisexual.

Your honor, I rest my case.

Category: Celebrities

FMJRA 2.0: RIP Vangelis

Posted on | May 29, 2022 | Comments Off on FMJRA 2.0: RIP Vangelis

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Evángelos Odysséas Papathanassíou, better known as Vangelis, is perhaps best known for his soundtracks to Chariots Of Fire and Blade Runner, but I first encountered him as the composer of quirky electronica albums such as Albedo 0.39 and Spiral.
Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley esse delendam.

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In The Mailbox: 05.23.22
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In The Mailbox: 05.27.22
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What You Should Do This Weekend
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Ukraine: Bad Week in the Donbas

Posted on | May 28, 2022 | 1 Comment

You can click on that map to view it full-size, but the story it tells is of Russian success in its attempt to cut off and encircle Sievierodonetsk, the linchpin of Ukraine’s attempt to maintain a foothold the eastern (or northern) bank of the the Siverskyi Donets river. The Ukrainian supply line for Sievierodonetsk, running west through Lysychansk and Siversk would normally run through Bakhmut, 40 miles to the south, but the Russian advance from Popasna has cut off that route.

From the latest tactical summary:

The hottest points in Donbas remain Lyman and the area between Bakhmut and Popasna. Russian army has superiority in the region and are slowly advancing north-west, threatening to cut-off Ukrainian troops stationed in Sievierodonetsk and its vicinity. . . .
Russian troops attacked Ukrainian positions near Bohorodychne, but they weren’t successful and retreated.
The enemy entered Lyman from the north-west and captured a portion of the town. Heavy battles are ongoing. . . .
[A] road connecting Bakhmut and Lysychansk is now in range [i.e., of Russian artillery] and de-facto blocked. The only remaining “safe” road connecting Bakhmut and Lysychansk is leading through Siversk now.

As I argued in a post nearly two weeks ago (“Ukraine: Donbas Battles Intensify,” May 16), the best move for Ukraine would be to reinforce Lyman for a counteroffensive there, “toward Zarichne and Kreminna, [which] would force the Russians to retreat from the river at Yampil and would also relieve pressure against Sievierodonetsk.” Surely this must have been as obvious to the Ukrainian military leadership as it was to me, and the fact that such a counterattack has not been made tells me that Ukraine lacks the necessary reserves of manpower and materiel to mount such an offensive. With insufficient troops and equipment to break through at Lyman and threaten the flank and rear of the Russian forces attacking Sievierodonetsk, the Ukrainians are compelled to maintain the tactical defensive, which in the long run will be a losing game.

The optimism that followed Russia’s retreat from Kharkiv earlier this month has now been replaced by apprehension for the critical situation farther east in the Donbas. Let’s hope that this gloomy prospect is merely the darkness preceding the proverbial dawn.

Category: Military, Russia, Ukraine

For Crying Out Loud! ‘The Paramilitary Wing of the American Right,’ Ma’am?

Posted on | May 28, 2022 | Comments Off on For Crying Out Loud! ‘The Paramilitary Wing of the American Right,’ Ma’am?

Michelle Goldberg lives in Brooklyn and writes for the New York Times, and I doubt she has ever actually spoken to any member of “The American Right.” In a column that endeavors to connect the Uvalde massacre to the 2021 Capitol riot, she seems utterly unhinged:

It will be impossible to do anything about guns in this country, at least at a national level, as long as Democrats depend on the cooperation of a party that holds in reserve the possibility of insurrection. The slaughter of children in Texas has done little to alter this dynamic.
Republicans have no intention of letting Democrats pass even modest measures like strengthened background checks . . . Victims of our increasingly frequent mass shootings are collateral damage in a cold civil war, though some Democrats refuse to acknowledge it, let alone fight it. . . .

Permit me to interrupt this to point out that (a) Democrats certainly will not be satisfied with “modest measures,” (b) it has been demonstrated that “strengthened background checks” would not have stopped the Uvalde shooter, and (c) “mass shootings” are not “increasingly frequent.” Such incidents continue to be rare, but we have had two this month — in Buffalo and Uvalde — to which the national media have devoted saturation coverage, while habitually ignoring the daily death toll from the wave of violent crime in major cities. Goldberg continues:

Throughout the country, reported The New York Times, “right-wing Republicans are talking more openly and frequently about the use of force as justifiable in opposition to those who dislodged him” — meaning Trump — “from power.” Expecting those same Republicans to collaborate with Democrats on public safety is madness.
The horrifying irony, the hideous ratchet, is that the more America is besieged by senseless violence, the more the paramilitary wing of the American right is strengthened.

You can read the rest of that, but you see how the lazy demonization of gun owners and Republicans (whom Goldberg seems to assume are one and the same) gives way to this paranoia about the threat of the “paramilitary wing of the American right.” When Republicans are in power, Democrats proclaim themselves the “resistance” fighting against the allegedly “authoritarian” GOP. Oh, but when Democrats have power, they immediately start hatching plans to criminalize dissent and speak of opposition as if everyone who voted Republican is a neo-Nazi menace who needs to be arrested. Remember how, when Bush was president, Democrats insisted that “dissent is the highest form of patriotism,” but once Obama got elected and the Tea Party movement started, we were told that dissent is RAAAAACISM! Liberals like Michelle Goldberg don’t even notice, much less admit, the hypocrisy of their attitude on this subject. In their minds, because Republicans are evil, anything that hurts Republicans is good, and their habitual slanders must always be flexible, adaptable to whatever the circumstance may be.

Isolated from the rest of America, hunkered down in her bunker in Brooklyn — in a neighborhood that boasts “one of the city’s finest collections of nineteenth-century houses,” including the home in which Winston Churchill’s mother was born — it may be easy for Michelle Goldberg to imagine that everything south of the Hudson River has been taken over by “paramilitary” Republicans. After all, didn’t her own newspaper report that “right-wing Republicans are talking more openly and frequently about the use of force as justifiable”? That was last November, and their evidence for this assertion included, for example, Republican candidate Josh Mandel, the grandson of Holocaust survivors, declaring in a video, “When the Gestapo show up at your front door, you know what to do.” This was apparently a reference to Biden’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate, and if Mandel was engaged in hyperbole, well, it was a contested primary. But having recently been to Ohio, where my wife’s family lives, I could assure Michelle Goldberg or any other fretful Brooklyn liberals that right-wing paramilitaries are not — repeat, not — running rampant in the Buckeye State, no matter what any Republican candidate in the Senate primary might have implied or suggested.

Residents of the Cobble Hill neighborhood in Brooklyn, forced to rely on the New York Times to tell them what’s happening out in the provinces, can be forgiven for thinking latter-day Sturmabteilung have taken over vast swaths of America. After all, didn’t that dangerous extremist Glenn Youngkin get elected governor of Virginia last November? Here’s how the NYT article about the Republican “menace” concludes:

But even at right-wing gatherings of the like-minded, there is a shared assumption that political confrontation could escalate into violence.
At a Virginia rally last month for conservative supporters of Glenn Youngkin, the Republican candidate for governor, the urgency of a call to arms was conveyed right from the opening prayer. The speaker warned of the looming threat of “communist atheists.”
“Heavenly Father, we come before you tonight,” said Joshua Pratt, a conservative activist. “Your children are in a battle, and we need your help.”

Has Terry McAuliffe ever denied being a “communist atheist”? Did these enterprising journalists from the New York Times ask him that question on the campaign trail? But never mind that. The martial reference to the Lord’s children “in a battle” and in need of help from their Heavenly Father is not alarming to anyone with access to a hymnal:

Stand up, stand up for Jesus,
Ye soldiers of the cross;
Lift high his royal banner,
It must not suffer loss.
From victory unto victory
His army shall he lead,
Till every foe is vanquished,
And Christ is Lord indeed.

This “paramilitary” anthem (which I recall being the tune played when our children marched into the sanctuary during Vacation Bible School) was composed in 1858 by the Rev. George Duffield Jr., who “was known as a zealous advocate of abolition and Union causes during the U.S. Civil War.” Given its author’s sentiments, and its origins in those days of “Bleeding Kansas” and other provocations that subsequently led to the Civil War, I suppose Duffield’s hymn could be considered “extremist,” but most listeners understand these verses as a poetic metaphor. Surely no one could be hired as a reporter for the New York Times who doesn’t know what a metaphor is, but we are expected to believe — and apparently, Michelle Goldberg does believe — that Joshua Pratt’s prayer was some kind of coded message, a threat of armed violence.

How is the opening prayer at a Glenn Youngkin rally, or the “Gestapo” reference in a Josh Mandel campaign video, related to the Uvalde shooting? This is unclear to me, but Michelle Goldberg is certain that these things are related, perhaps by a syllogism as simple as this:

A. Guns are bad
and
B. Republicans are evil,
therefore
C. Vote Democrat!

Strip away the finely crafted verbiage and this is the core of her “argument,” although I doubt any student of rhetoric would dignify Michelle Goldberg’s column by that name. It’s really just an 876-word insult, but what else do we expect from “communist atheists”?

Well, she hasn’t denied it, has she?

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!

Category: New York Times

What You Should Do This Weekend

Posted on | May 27, 2022 | Comments Off on What You Should Do This Weekend

Very simple plan:

1. Download the Fox Nation app.
2. Watch America’s Top Ranger.

Three hour-long episodes. Keep an eye out for Team 41.

Happy Memorial Day!

Being America's Top Ranger takes guts, passion, and stamina. Pete Hegseth, @abbyhornacek, and @Johnny_Joey take you through the gruesome 64-hour competition in 'America's Top Ranger 2022.' Stream here! https://t.co/ASmSzxBoci pic.twitter.com/EcaAG5OMAs

— Fox Nation (@foxnation) May 24, 2022

Category: Family, Military

In The Mailbox: 05.27.22

Posted on | May 27, 2022 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Talk about mixed emotions – the friends I was going to hang out with this afternoon got summoned to emergency babysitting duty in Baltimore, so now I have time to do this post…
Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley esse delendam.