Andrew Brown Was a Career Criminal

Posted on | April 27, 2021 | Comments Off on Andrew Brown Was a Career Criminal

The shooting of Andrew Brown by sheriff’s deputies in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, has gotten a lot of national media attention, but I’ve avoided comment on the controversy because we haven’t seen video of the shooting, and therefore cannot evaluate assertions by activists that the shooting was unjustified. Based entirely on descriptions of the shooting, it sounds as if this was one of those situations where, once the first shot was fired, everybody felt a need to start shooting. This is what happens occasionally when you’ve got multiple armed officers on the scene, and Pasquotank County deputies were serving two warrants — a search warrant and also a warrant for Brown’s arrest — at his residence.

We haven’t seen the video and don’t actually know what happened, however, so I will continue to reserve judgment on whether this shooting was legally justified. However, I must object to the way the media is promoting a Sainted Civil Rights Martyr myth around this case.

Andrew Brown dindu nuffin, we are told. He was an innocent victim.

Excuse my French, but this is a steaming pile of bullshit. Andrew Brown was committing crimes his entire life. He never had any other career:

Public records show a history of convictions for drug dealing by Brown, and he was arrested in November 2020 on drug charges.
In 2004, Brown was convicted of speeding to elude arrest. Between 2006 and 2008 he was convicted of multiple misdemeanors for communicating threats and one for violating an order of protection. He had earlier convictions for assault, domestic trespass and wanton injury to person or property, in addition to multiple property and drug crimes.

His first adult arrest was at age 18, and he was busted for drug dealing as recently as six months ago. He “had a criminal rap sheet over 180 pages long and dating back to May 1988.”

The only reason anyone outside of Pasquotank County, North Carolina, is paying attention to this case is because Andrew Brown was black.

Well, like I said, we don’t know what happened that caused the deputies to open fire on Brown during that raid, and I’ll reserve judgment, but don’t expect me to buy any media myths about this BMW-driving dope dealer being some kind of hero, Saint Andrew of the Blessed Rock.

Category: Crime, North Carolina

Drunk Michigan Democrat Invoked Whitmer’s Name During DUI Bust

Posted on | April 26, 2021 | Comments Off on Drunk Michigan Democrat Invoked Whitmer’s Name During DUI Bust

This is not merely “alleged,” it’s on video:

A Michigan state representative fought with paramedics and state police troopers then demanded to call Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) in a dashcam video released Saturday.
State Rep. Jewell Jones (D-Inkster) crashed his vehicle April 6 and allegedly assaulted first responders who attempted to assist him and his passenger.
The video appears to show Jones repeatedly defying orders from Michigan State Police troopers and issuing threats. . . .
MIRS News reported the passenger’s “pants were down” as she vomited near the vehicle. The representative’s pants were “partially down” when paramedics arrived at the location on I-96, according to police reports.
The video shows two troopers attempting to work with Jones to obtain his license, which the state representative refused to provide. At that point, they took him to the ground.
“Let me sit up, (N-Word),” Jones demanded of the troopers, one of whom was black.
“I’ll call Gov. Whitmer right now,” Jones allegedly threatened. He continued, “When I call Gretchen, I need y’alls’ IDs and badges.” . . .
“It’s not going to be good for you, I run y’all budget, bro,” Jones said, according to the video. . . .
Michigan State Police say Jones’s blood-alcohol level was .191 — more than double the .08 legal limit.

Get drunk. Drive your car into a ditch. Without pants. That’s basically the Democratic Party platform, right there. And I repeat: It’s on video.

A “rising star” for Democrats.

Category: Democrats, Michigan

Rule 5 Sunday: Alina Becker

Posted on | April 26, 2021 | Comments Off on Rule 5 Sunday: Alina Becker

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Miss Becker is a cosplayer and model, frequently appearing in Reddit’s r/cosplaygirls subreddit. At first I was tempted to go with this humorous take on NieR: Automata’s 2B, but instead I opted for her portrayal of Neon Genesis Evangelion‘s tragic heroine Misato Katsuragi in her off-duty time.
Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley esse delendam.

Off duty.

EBL leads off again this week with Bridge & Tunnel, Lohengrin, Marilyn Monday, La Fanciulla del West, Scapegoat, Simon Boccanegra, Joni Mitchell, Happy Earth Day, Satyagraha, Fidelio, Stowaway, and Dialogues des Carmelites.

At Animal Magnetism, it’s Rule Five Taking The High Ground Friday and the Saturday Gingermageddon.

A View From The Beach hauls in Alexis Bledel, Election 2020: Who Will Apologize for the Sicknick Lie?, Fish Pic Friday – Crystal Babson, Sunshine, Your Wednesday Wetness, Maryland, Virginia Both Pass Balloon Bans, Tuesday Tattoos, Oregon, My Oregon: Masks Forever!, Your Monday Morning Stimulus, You Tell ‘Em, Gracie! and DIY Election 2020 Coverage: Going Fishing Edition.

Brian Noggle offers Amber Underwood, while Proof Positive’s Vintage Babe of the Week is Bo Derek.

Thanks to everyone for all the luscious linkagery!

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Category: Rule 5

The Spring Break Book Post

Posted on | April 25, 2021 | Comments Off on The Spring Break Book Post

— by Wombat-socho

Tax season ended for me on April 14; this was the first time since I started working for H&R Block that I haven’t worked April 15, but to be honest, this season has been enough of a pain in the ass for me that I didn’t mind knocking off a day early…well, a month and a day early, since the season was extended to May 17, but my contract ended on April 16 and I was in no mood to volunteer to work the extended season. Already done my part to keep the Las Vegas hotels afloat this year, thank you very much. Anyhow, before I pitch into the book reviews, a couple of links of interest to folks interested in SF and/or popular culture.
First, Nick Monroe does a thorough demolition of an idiot who blames the poor reception of the disastrous Star Wars sequels on Gamergate, Donald Trump, Q, white supremacy and God knows what all. Long but well worth reading, because this Rewriting Ripley is hardly unique – as those of us who were with the Sad Puppies a few years back can attest.
Secondly, Vox Day’s Arkhaven Comics has launched an alternative to Webtoons, Arktoons. The site aims to be competition not only to Webtoons but to the dying mainstream comics companies, who it certainly has beat on not only quantity of content but quality.
Thirdly, after neglecting the poor thing for far too long, I am updating Wombat’s Bookshelf, which is just what it says on the label: an index to the book reviews I’ve done here. I’ve gotten caught up through the end of 2019, and I should have 2020 and 2021 done by this evening. I invite you to take a look and see if there’s anything you missed; the site includes helpful links not just to the posts but to Amazon for the books reviewed.
Finally, I don’t remember often enough to beat the drum for the National Fantasy Fan Federation, now celebrating its 80th year. In addition to the monthly newsletter, the N3F also publishes eight zines covering just about every aspect of geek culture, with a ton of reviews. Public (non-voting) memberships are free, voting memberships start at $6/year, and all publications come to your email box in PDF format regardless of your membership level. (Disclaimer: I am the treasurer & membership/recruitment-wallah.)
Silicon Valley delenda est.

Probably the best thing I’ve read in the last month or so is the H. Beam Piper Megapack, which includes just about all the SF Piper ever published (except, oddly enough, Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen) plus two non-SF novels, Rebel Raider and Murder In The Gunroom. Now, if you have the Ace/Baen anthologies and novels from the 1980s, you already have most of what’s in this book, but for 99 cents it’s still a great deal – and a lot more portable than the paperbacks.

I was not nearly so impressed with Marko Kloos’ Aftershocks, the first in a new series from him. We meet the protagonist as he’s being released from a POW camp, having been on the losing end of an interplanetary war – which somebody seems to want to restart. Regardless of George R.R. Martin’s opinion, this is not nearly as good as Kloos’ Frontlines series; there was nothing about it that made me interested in looking at the sequels, whether or not they’re free through Kindle Unlimited. Now, Orders Of Battle, on the other hand, that’ll be worth the $6 it’ll cost to keep it. The seventh novel in the aforementioned Frontlines series, this tale of a reconnaissance in force against the former colony planet Willoughby, held by the alien Lankies since the beginning of the war, grabs you and drags you in – perhaps because you know the protagonist (and his wife) very well after six books, and perhaps because Kloos is writing a straightforward space opera instead of farting around with skulduggery and secret plots.

That’s something Peter Nealen does a lot better, quite frankly. Took me a while to finish up Thunder Run, which is the sixth in his Maelstrom Rising series, but when I did, it delivered. The story is still with the Triarii Grex Luporum teams in Europe, where the EDC is still trying to put the screws to Poland and the other Eastern European nations who are tired of their supranational shit. Things aren’t going well for the Poles and their fellow rebels, but the EDC isn’t having things all their own way, either. Nealen does a good job of covering everything from tactical combat up to and including the Big Picture, both military and political. I am looking forward to the next book, Area Denial, which is due out in September.

Some of you may remember Moe Lane from his previous life as a political blogger; he’s given that up to blog about books, music, movies, and role-playing games, and is also writing books, like the most excellent Frozen Dreams, Set in a post-apocalyptic Baja California, it’s a fantasy that starts with the premise that magic has returned with rather brutal effects on the America we know and love. Officially, there’s no magic or magicians in New California’s Cin City, but unofficially, the cleaning ladies and stagehands know more than they’ll say about the subject, and that’s a good thing for Shamus Tom Vargas, who’s been Called to Clear a murder case. If you ever wondered what a mashup of noir detective film and urban fantasy was like, well, here’s your chance to find out. An excellent deal at $2.99.

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Category: Books, Zeitgeist

Media: The Enemy of the People

Posted on | April 25, 2021 | Comments Off on Media: The Enemy of the People

Tom Bevan of Real Clear Politics remarks on Twitter:

Hard to imagine a more divisive, sensational, context-less headline. A textbook example of the media being the enemy of the people.

The story in question is by the Associated Press:

Even as the Derek Chauvin case was fresh in memory — the reading of the verdict in a Minneapolis courtroom, the shackling of the former police officer, the jubilation at what many saw as justice in the death of George Floyd — even then, blood flowed on America’s streets.
And even then, some of that blood was shed at the hands of law enforcement.
At least six people were fatally shot by officers across the United States in the 24 hours after jurors reached a verdict in the murder case against Chauvin on Tuesday. The roll call of the dead is distressing:
A 16-year-old girl in Columbus, Ohio.
An oft-arrested man in Escondido, California.
A 42-year-old man in eastern North Carolina. . . .
An unidentified man in San Antonio.
Another man, killed in the same city within hours of the first.
A 31-year-old man in central Massachusetts.
The circumstances surrounding each death differ widely.

Were they engaged in crime? Were they resisting arrest? Did they pose a threat of deadly violence? “Circumstances . . . differ widely,” we are told, but all the Associated Press and the headline writers at the Huffington Post are interested in is the number, with the implication that the lives of innocent Americans everywhere are endangered by the police.

Derek Chauvin’s knee is on all our necks — or so the media arsonists would have us believe. Here’s a point I made just yesterday:

What is the point of issuing pistols to police officers, if they never shoot any criminals? In 2020, about 1,200 suspects were shot to death by cops — a hundred a month — and very few of those shootings could legitimately be considered “controversial.” For every questionable police shooting, there are many dozens of cases that are strictly “local news” because either (a) the suspect was white, and there’s no racial angle to exploit, or (b) the suspect was so flagrantly dangerous not even Ben Crump would object to cops shooting him dead.
My point is that cops shooting bad guys is not a rare event in America, and thank God for that, because the potential of getting shot — the credible threat — is what makes law enforcement effective. Why would anyone cooperate with a police officer otherwise?

What the Associated Press has done is to foster the false impression — a standard trope of BLM propaganda — that suspects who get shot by cops generally don’t deserve to be shot, that police are routinely using deadly force where it is not necessary or lawful. The only purpose this propaganda serves is to encourage more criminals to resist arrest, which will predictably result in more suspects being shot by cops, while at the same time every report of a suspect being killed will result in more riots and more political pressure to reduce law enforcement.

Even if someone is charging at you with a knife, cops can’t shoot them — that’s the madhouse toward which the media seek to lead us.

The journalists responsible for this are truly “the enemy of the people.”

Category: Crime, Media Bias

FMJRA 2.0: And Then I’m Going To Kiss Your Pineapple!

Posted on | April 24, 2021 | Comments Off on FMJRA 2.0: And Then I’m Going To Kiss Your Pineapple!

— compiled by Wombat-socho

It was a beautiful sunny day in Tonopah today, so I opened the kitchen window while I played video games.
Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley esse delendam.

Jones v. Pushaw Update
EBL

FBI Knew About Indianapolis Gunman
Bacon Time
The Political Hat
Proof Positive
EBL

Cancel Mob Comes for QB Mac Jones
357 Magnum
EBL

FMJRA 2.0: Yes, That Song
A View From The Beach
EBL

Rule 5 Sunday: Hane Ame
Animal Magnetism
A View From The Beach
EBL
Proof Positive

Not All Heroes Wear Capes
EBL

In The Mailbox: 04.19.21
357 Magnum
EBL
Proof Positive

CHAUVIN GUILTY
Dark Brightness
A View From The Beach
EBL

In The Mailbox: 04.20.21
A View From The Beach
357 Magnum
EBL
Proof Positive

There’s Always a Backstory: Why Was Ma’khia Bryant Living in a Foster Home?
Moonbattery
First Street Journal
357 Magnum
EBL

Nika Holbert, the ‘Drug War’ and the Importance of Penalizing Stupidity
357 Magnum
EBL

In The Mailbox: 04.22.21 (Afternoon Edition)
A View From The Beach
357 Magnum
EBL
Proof Positive

In The Mailbox: 04.22.21 (Evening Edition)
A View From The Beach
357 Magnum
EBL
Proof Positive

In The Mailbox: 04.23.21
A View From The Beach
357 Magnum
EBL
Proof Positive

Top linkers for the week ending April 23:

EBL (12)
357 Magnum (8)
(tied) A View From The Beach & Proof Positive (7)

Thanks to everyone for all the linkagery!

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Category: FMJRA Award

Video: A Death in Omaha

Posted on | April 24, 2021 | Comments Off on Video: A Death in Omaha

Two important details about the death of Kenneth Jones:

An autopsy later showed that Jones’ urine and blood tested positive for phencyclidine, or PCP, a hallucinogen. . . .
Jones had a felony conviction on his record and would have faced a mandatory three years in prison if convicted on a charge of being a felon in possession of a weapon.

The loaded .45 Jones was carrying on the night of Nov. 19, 2020, had been purchased by his brother. We do not know — the article in the Omaha World-Herald doesn’t tell us — whether the brother acted as a “straw man” purchaser to provide his criminal brother with a weapon, which would be a federal felony. Liberals are always proclaiming they want “common sense” gun-control laws, and prohibiting convicted felons from possessing firearms is about as common-sense as it gets. Need I explain the relevance of this to the death of Kenneth Jones?

Contrary to what liberals would have us believe, there are already numerous laws — federal, state and local — which regulate the sale and possession of firearms.
Criminals do not obey gun-control laws. If it were in their nature to obey laws, they wouldn’t be criminals, would they?
and
The way to prevent “gun violence” (a phrase beloved by the liberal media) is to enforce existing laws.

Guess whose job it is to enforce laws?

Oh, wait — it’s the police! And liberals hate the police.

So it’s about 7:30 on a November night, a week before Thanksgiving, when Omaha police officers Dan Faulkner and Rich Martier are on patrol on the south side of Omaha, on South 27th Street about a mile west of the Missouri River. Let me ask the reader: What do you know about Omaha? And what do you know about standard police procedures?

Knowing nothing at all about the geography of Omaha, I would hazard a guess that the city’s south side includes what most people would call “bad neighborhoods,” that the south side is home to most of Omaha’s black population, and is also where most gun violence in the city occurs. Because the job of law enforcement is to prevent crime and apprehend criminals, I would further speculate that Omaha cops spend a lot of time patrolling the south side of the city: “Hunt where the ducks are,” as the old adage goes. All of which is to say, it was not a coincidence that officers Faulkner and Martier were in the vicinity of South 27th Street on the evening of Nov. 19. They’re both four-year veterans of the force, and had probably spent a lot of time in that neighborhood, so when they saw a Dodge Charger driving erratically, they knew what was up.

“Probable cause” — an impaired driver, that was what they suspected. There were three women in the car, and Kenneth Jones was in the back seat on the driver’s side. Even before they exited their patrol vehicle, the cops saw Jones reaching around in the back seat. If you’ve watched enough bodycam videos on YouTube — you are subscribed to the Police Activity channel, right? — you’ve seen this scenario played out dozens of times in office-involved shootings: Cops pull over a bad guy, notice him moving around in the vehicle in a way that suggests he’s trying to hide something, and the order is shouted: “Show me your hands!”

Before we get to the video, let me digress for a moment and ask you to consider something: What is the point of issuing pistols to police officers, if they never shoot any criminals? In 2020, about 1,200 suspects were shot to death by cops — a hundred a month — and very few of those shootings could legitimately be considered “controversial.” For every questionable police shooting, there are many dozens of cases that are strictly “local news” because either (a) the suspect was white, and there’s no racial angle to exploit, or (b) the suspect was so flagrantly dangerous not even Ben Crump would object to cops shooting him dead.

My point is that cops shooting bad guys is not a rare event in America, and thank God for that, because the potential of getting shot — the credible threat — is what makes law enforcement effective. Why would anyone cooperate with a police officer otherwise?

You’re driving 90 mph and see the blue lights in your rearview mirror, why not just keep going, if the cop can’t shoot you? The cop wants to put you in handcuffs? Just say “no,” because he can’t shoot you. That gun on the officer’s hip is there for a reason, you see. If cops were prohibited from using their guns, there would be no real law enforcement, and criminals would be able to perpetrate felonies with impunity.

This is the future anarchy toward which anti-cop rhetoric is leading us. America will become a society in which criminals have no fear of police, in which no one will be safe from violent predators. And while I’m digressing, let me ask: How many unsolved homicides have there been in Omaha in the past 15 or 20 years? I ask this because Kenneth Jones was 35 years old and had apparent been perpetrating felonies his entire adult life. He had been busted at least three times on weapons charges, and in 2014 was sentenced to prison: “Jones was released on May 3, 2018 after serving three-and-a-half years with 191 days of good time, according to records from the Department of Corrections.” Is anyone foolish enough to believe that Jones was in the habit of carrying weapons for peaceful and legal purposes? No, don’t be silly — he was a full-time criminal, and the pistol was a tool of his felonious trade. We will never know how many people Kenneth Jones robbed, assaulted, or murdered during the course of his criminal life, but we do know this: He’ll never shoot anyone again.

“I’ve got my f**king gun right on your face.”

Say what you will, but you can’t say Officer Martier failed to explain the situation clearly to Kenneth Jones. Everybody else in the car raised their hands, but Jones kept reaching around, because he knew damned well he was going back to prison if he got caught with that gun.

How often have you heard liberal advocates of gun control speak about the need to “get guns off our streets”? Well, how do they suppose this is going to happen? Whose job will it be to apprehend criminals and confiscate their weapons? Cops, that’s who. And what will happen when, predictably, criminals don’t cooperate with the program?

You just watched the video. Now imagine how many more shootings like this we’re going to see if Democrats enact new gun-control laws.

Maybe you think more laws are the answer to the “gun violence” problem, but in my opinion, the real solution to the problem is more effective enforcement of the laws we already have. And really, how could any American be against effective law enforcement?

Kenneth Jones could not be reached for comment.