The really cool thing about today’s SOTD was that Tommy Shaw & the crew did the official video in one take. Never cared for Styx, but this was a great song.
Senators played five games this week, and the hitters didn’t hit, so it didn’t matter that the starting rotation turned in five quality starts; we finished the week 1-4, but we’re only one game behind the Red Sox. Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley esse delendam.
Ah, high school graduation — a time to celebrate with random gunfire! While I have not fully investigated each of these shootings, and police have not yet made arrests in some of them, I will wager that none of the gunmen who opened fire at these graduation parties was a Trump voter.
The atrocities that make national headlines tend to be different, statistically speaking, from the vast majority of “mass shooting” incidents, and this difference is actually important. In the aftermath of massacres like Uvalde, the demand for new gun-control laws becomes a media-drive political drumbeat without any platform being provided to those who would point out that (a) the measures proposed would not have prevented the atrocity and (b) the best way to reduce gun violence is to enforce existing gun laws by putting criminals in prison.
The country’s eyes are trained on high-profile massacres in Texas and Buffalo, but most mass shootings bear little resemblance to those.
Of 267 incidents this year classified as mass shootings by the Gun Violence Archive, nearly all can be tied to gang beefs, neighborhood arguments, robberies or domestic incidents that spiraled out of control.
Indiscriminate slaughter by a lone gunman blasting away at a store, school or some other public place is rare, according to a Washington Times analysis of the archive’s data, accounting for less than 4% of the total.
Ninety-six percent of mass shootings don’t fit the “lone gunman” scenario, and yet you don’t hear about “gang beefs” in this context. Trump adviser Stephen Miller has an idea why this is so:
The information below is critically important as the key to preventing these shootings is clear and proven: more cops, arrests, prosecutions & jail. Go after *criminals* with weapons. But Dems oppose because they want to end “mass incarceration,” letting thousands needlessly die. https://t.co/7Wx11Qzgdw
So, apparently the idea for this escapade was to showcase how fit and healthy the 79-year-old alleged president is. There has been a lot of talk that Biden is too old to run for re-election in 2024, and so his handlers put him on a bicycle and sent him out to show that the septuagenarian is a fine, vigorous specimen. Great idea, right? WRONG!
Let me tell you a story. Some of you may have heard this before. Others of you witnessed parts of it in real time.
It’s a cautionary tale. And it runs up against the push by 11 GOP Senators to imperil my natural right to defense, protected by the Constitution.
?
— Probably Mulder’s Intern’l House of Pandemicakes (@banishedprotein) June 17, 2022
I went out for a time, and by the time I came back, this leftwing professor of risk management had become so unglued that she was threatening my then 2-year-old son.
Fox News ran a piece on it after @michellemalkin highlighted it on her “Vent” for Hot Air.
The professor…
— Probably Mulder’s Intern’l House of Pandemicakes (@banishedprotein) June 17, 2022
…apart and her relationships began to crumble, she picked my family — in particular, my son — to blame for her self-inflicted travails.
She began posting pornographic entries about a 2-year-old boy. She began making public accusations that my wife and I were molesting my son.
— Probably Mulder’s Intern’l House of Pandemicakes (@banishedprotein) June 17, 2022
…lived out of state, the law couldn’t touch her. She’d begun attacking the lawyers who’d helped me or represented me. She attacked the judges.
All of this continued until right around 2014, when a detective in my small town found a legal means to being charges, citing an
— Probably Mulder’s Intern’l House of Pandemicakes (@banishedprotein) June 17, 2022
…warning parents to keep their kids away from my house on Halloween.
She’d been able to find where we lived using voter records. She called the surrounding schools warning them that I was a pedophile and that my son was in danger. She contacted child services. She contacted
— Probably Mulder’s Intern’l House of Pandemicakes (@banishedprotein) June 17, 2022
…means that for 14 years, prior to her felony convictions, had she phoned in an anonymous “tip” on me, she may have convinced a judge to file an ex parte order requiring me to surrender my weapons.
I took us 14 years to get her convicted of clear crimes. I’ve been through
— Probably Mulder’s Intern’l House of Pandemicakes (@banishedprotein) June 17, 2022
…apparatus, further clogging up an already glacially-moving legal system and costing the accused time, money, worry, and liberty.
Reject them. And consider those who promote them your enemies.
Because trust me. They are.
— Probably Mulder’s Intern’l House of Pandemicakes (@banishedprotein) June 17, 2022
Jeff makes some important points here. The way our legal system operates — the built-in prejudices of courts, based on decades of precedents intended to “protect” the rights of the mentally ill — it is very difficult to get a dangerously deranged person locked up. Whenever a mentally ill person commits an atrocity (or gets shot by the cops), you’ll see commentators saying that this shows problems with our nation’s mental health system, when in fact it was liberal judges in the 1970s and ’80s who decided it should be nearly impossible to keep crazy people locked up in lunatic asylums, where they belong. These same judges, however, will probably be willing to sign “red flag” orders based on unproven claims, without due process for those targeted by such orders.
This story is a perfect example of how the media undermines law enforcement by giving voice to bogus criticism, especially in cases like this one in Florida, where an armed felon was shot by sheriff’s deputies investigating a string of crimes in the community. Simply because the suspect is black, many in the media seem to believe, he must be a victim of injustice, and the police must be in the wrong. Therefore, the TV cameras seek out the suspect’s family or a “civil rights” activist or, as in this case, the suspect’s lawyer, to condemn the cops, no matter what the circumstances were that led to the shooting. Watching the video of this incident doesn’t give you the necessary knowledge to understand what happened, or why it happened. Once you do understand it, however, it becomes impossible to deny that the person responsible for this 19-year-old suspect getting shot was — wait for it — the 19-year-old suspect.
Say hello to Jamall Frederick. According to the Indian River County Sheriff’s Office (IRCSO), the events that led to him getting shot were as follows: Deputies were investigating a homicide that happened Thursday in the Gifford community. In the wee hours of Saturday morning, deputies responded to a report of shots fired a few blocks away. Subsequent investigation (i.e., surveillance camera video) gave them a description of a vehicle suspected of involvement in that incident. The same vehicle was also connected to a number of burglaries, including burglaries of vehicles in which firearms were stolen. Thus, the deputies had reason to believe that the occupants of this vehicle were armed and dangerous. So they began monitoring the area in which the shots fired incident had occurred. About 9 p.m. that evening, deputies spotted the suspect vehicle, and that’s when the incident occurred.
As I say, just watching the video doesn’t add much to your knowledge of what happened, because it happened very quickly at night. One of the deputies saw the pistol in the back seat next to Frederick and told him not to reach for it. He grabbed it and ran, and they opened fire, and it’s something of a miracle that Frederick survived the shooting.
Civilians may ask, “Why did they shoot? He was running away.” Yes, but he had a gun in his hand. Are cops just supposed to let an armed fugitive run free in the community? And what are the chances that Frederick would have turned around and shot any deputy who pursued him? There’s no rule that requires cops to let bad guys get the first shot.
Frederick is from Fort Pierce, 18 miles away from the scene of the shooting. The deputies also found another gun in the car and arrested 18-year-old Zbryius Jones of Vero Beach. Both guns were stolen, one from South Vero and the other from Fellsmere. Frederick was a convicted felon on probation, and Jones was also charged with violating probation. Sheriff Eric Flowers said: “These guys are countywide criminals. We will not tolerate known felons endangering our community. Our community expects us to prevent crimes and keep them safe.”
There has been much critical attention directed toward rampant crime in Democrat-controlled cities like Los Angeles, where Soros-sponsored District Attorney George Gascon is being blamed for releasing a felon who shot and killed two police officers. You don’t have problems like that in Indian River County, which has not voted for a Democrat in a presidential election since 1944, and which went 60% for Trump twice.
The media can (and should) help fight crime by discarding the anti-cop bias that treats all critics of the police as inherently legitimate. It is one thing — and a very important thing — to expose genuine abuse or corruption by the police, but it’s a whole ’nother thing to portray cops as racist villains when they’re just doing their job.
CNN’s Brian Stelter, who delights in parroting leftist and Democratic Party narratives on his show “Reliable Sources,” will be out of his job soon, according to a new report. . . .
In May, Chris Licht, who has supposedly emphasized less opinion-oriented reporting, became the new head of CNN. Last Sunday, “Reliable Sources” had its worst-rated episode since September 2019, reaching only 580,000 viewers, the smallest audience since September 15, 2019.
In a memo to employees, Licht wrote, “… too many people have lost trust in the news media. I think we can be a beacon in regaining that trust by being an organization that exemplifies the best characteristics of journalism: fearlessly speaking truth to power, challenging the status quo, questioning group-think, and educating viewers and readers with straightforward facts and insightful commentary, while always being respectful of differing viewpoints.” . . .
In April, the daily version of “Reliable Sources” was dropped by CNN after they pulled the plug on CNN+. . . .
Stelter has displayed his partisanship for years.
I’m tryna get some right wing pundits together to start feeding Tater quotes and tips on background.
Like, we can alert Tater when we’re about to say something that is potentially cancellable, so he can be first to try to cancel us. Anything to get him clicks.
We can’t let Tater just fade away. We have to keep this incompetent’s career going despite his utter lack of qualifications or skill at it.
Tater is the straw that stirs the drink of conservative media. What are we, without Tater?
I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to wake up in an “America” where there isn’t a grossly obese effeminate clown compulsively scanning rightwing Twitter feeds with his fat clumsy canoli-frigging fingers, just so he can issue stupid hot-takes and insipid snapbacks with that retard smile that says “Aren’t I clever” and also “I might have made in my pants again.”
We at least need to get him over on YouTube.
Too little, too late, I fear. We were insufficiently appreciative of Tater and, now that he’s about to get axed, we lament our impending loss. If it is indeed true that he will be fired from CNN — say it ain’t so, Tater! — I suppose he’ll go back to doing what he was doing before, but does anyone remember what that was? Because I had to Google it:
After graduating from college in May 2007, Stelter joined The New York Times as a media reporter in July of that year, aged 22.
In November 2013, he became the new host of CNN’s Reliable Sources and also chief media correspondent.
Wow, hired by the New York Times right out of college, and then grabbed up by CNN six years later. What a rapid ascent of the media hierarchy! It’s almost as if he were the beneficiary of some kind of favoritism in the media’s hiring practices. But how could that be? I have been assured that Our Journalism Overlords are exemplars of equity and fairness.
Could it be that I’ve been misled? Perish the thought!
