Shocked And Dismayed

 "I have not seen anything like this in my twenty-eight-plus years," Erie Police Chief Rick Lorah told a local news station. "I'm not sure that the city of Erie has ever seen the loss of life and the devastation that we just witnessed."

Why do we keep saying things like this? This statement comes from a guy who might consider himself a "peace officer" who goes to work each day with a gun strapped to his hip and wears a bulletproof vest as part of his uniform. 

Which is by no means a slight on Erie Police Chief Rick Lorah. I would guess that even the Sheriff of Mayberry, North Carolina would expect his deputy to carry more than one bullet in this day and age. 

Meanwhile, back in Erie, the scene described by Chief Lorah was one in which eight people were shot and killed before the idiot with a gun turned it on himself, bringing the grand total to eight. Reports in some quadrants are noting that one of the victims was pregnant, so the math may need to be amended. Additionally, there were children aged one and five years old among the dead. According to reports, all of the victims were related. 

So here's my quandary: SWAT teams were dispatched to the scene after reports of gunfire were made. Authorities said that by the time the heavily armed "peace officers" arrived, all the killing had been done. I wonder what might have happened if an emergency call had gone out to that family for counseling in the days leading up to the shooting? What if unarmed social workers had made their presence felt in the runup to the murders? If a mental health check had been made and the guns in the house had been removed as a precaution?

I'm guessing that's not anything Erie Police Chief Rick Lorah has seen in his twenty-eight plus years. Because we tend to solve our problems with guns. Immigration. Diplomacy. And as an added bonus, we can livestream the firing squad death sentence being carried out after the fact. 

If we do, in fact, hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness then maybe we should check in with the guys who wrote that Second Amendment and see how that squares with the Declaration of Independence. 

I hate to think that Erie Police Chief Rick Lorah might continue to witness mass shootings anywhere int he land of the free and the home of the moving targets. 

Worst Of The Worst

 Federal immigration officers opened fire on a Dominican man whom they were trying to arrest in New York because they believed their lives were in danger. Twenty-eight-year-old Oscar Belgal was shot in the neck last Thursday as he drove his car with a five-year-old boy inside. 

That's their story, including the part where Federal officers "were not aware" that the five-year-old was in the car. Oscar "was aware," according to the story that ICE goons issued, and yet he chose to evade officers, including the now familiar refrain about how officers used vehicles to block him in as he attempted to drive off,  then he accelerated his vehicle toward officers, smashing some of their vehicles. At which point the goons shot Mister Belgal "superficially" in the neck. 

Quick aside: I don't know if you've ever been shot "superficially," but I would expect if feels a lot like being shot profoundly. 

As this armed assault took place in New York City, Head ICE Goon Markwayne "Two First Names" Mullin took chose to remind everyone "Sanctuary politicians, they create an environment for criminal activity to thrive, not for the American citizens to be safe." 

Safe? Well, it seems like having plainclothes idiots with guns firing seven times into a vehicle on city streets does not seem to meet that distinction. I would categorize such an action as "unsafe."

No matter. The politician alluded to in "Two First Names" Mullin's statement was, most likely, New York City's mayor Zohran Mamdani. Mayor Mamdani's comments ran somewhat contradictory to the Goons of ICE: “There is no justification for what we have seen today." He also said the federal officers who surrounded the vehicle wore construction vests and masks, making it difficult to identify them as immigration officers.

This makes some sense, since in recent months New York City has been making an all-out effort to rid their streets not of dangerous immigrants, but potholes. The five-year-old in the car witnessing his father being shot by construction workers may flavor his perception of men wearing orange vests. Or the trauma suffered by the child may simply be slopped onto the shelf ICE likes to refer to as "collateral damage." 

You have the right to remain silent. In this case, I suggest we all go in a different direction. 

Gone

 Somewhere out there, baseball is being played. 

The major league playoffs are in, if you'll pardon the expression, full swing. 

I could care less.

A large and somewhat immovable chunk of this apathy can be traced from the hometown Oakland Athletics moving to (checks notes) a pasture somewhere near Sacramento. Another big piece of this mildly held disdain stems from the lack of having a team which I would root for when I was growing up. Colorado was without a major league franchise until 1993, the year after I moved to California. At that point, I was dropped into a decided wealth of baseball. I was just a BART ride away from the Oakland A's or a slightly longer BART ride and a couple transfers to various other public transit options to watch the San Francisco Giants play.

Seeing as how I had a slot open in my vicarious sports thrill menu, I latched onto the scrappy Athletics, winner of four World Series and tenants of one of the least attractive concrete bunkers in which any major sport was played. We made our way out to the ballpark on a number of occasions over the course of any given summer, with a keen eye toward which home games provided the best giveaways. This is how I collected a number of bobbleheads that now exist in basement boxes, waiting to be unearthed in those future days when we need to see what grandpa was up to all those years ago.

As a fan, I got to take the ride on the Moneyball express, those halcyon days that eventually starred Brad Pitt, and Oakland went on a twenty game tear back in 2002 winning twenty games straight. A modern day record that stood for fifteen years until it was bested by, of all teams, the Cleveland Guardians. For a couple of decades, I had a team. 

Then they moved away. Ostensibly to Las Vegas, but first a stop in that pasture outside of Sacramento. They never did win a World Series while we were together in Oakland. 

Now I hear that the playoffs are taking place again. Without Oakland. Without the Athletics. 

Without me. 

The Whole Shebang

 Homecoming. A time for celebration. A time for reflection. A time for senseless killing. 

Authorities in South Carolina are still looking for a suspect who shot and killed nineteen-year-old Jaliyah Butler. Eighteen-year-old Matthew Daniel McCoy was arrested and charged with Pointing and Presenting a Firearm at a Person, and Carrying a Weapon on School Property last year, but the other eleven people who were arrested for possession firearms on campus during the shooting did not net the killer. 

Fast forward a year, shifting focus a couple hundred miles to the south, we find two dead and thirty-five injured when gunfire erupted early this past Sunday morning over a four block radius of a neighborhood block party. A party celebrating the Dooly High School win in their big Homecoming Win. They beat the team from Wilcox County.

So there was a big party. 

Two twenty-year old men were killed. The injured ranged in age from fourteen to fifty-one. An incident like this might suggest that the twenty-somethings were the "targets" of all that gunfire, and the thirty-five others covering that wide range of age were collateral damage. They just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. 

Celebrating homecoming. 

A time for reflection.

A time for senseless killing. 

“I’ve been doing this for forty-two years,” Dooly County Sheriff Craig Peavy told reporters. “I’ve had a lot of cases I’ve been on, a lot of bad situations, and I think by far this is the one that has caught me off guard.”

It could be that Sheriff Peavy's experience has not taken him far from his home, since Georgia has experienced one hundred fifty-five mass shootings since 2020, and guns continue to be the leading cause of death among children. 

The investigation, along with the mourning, continues. 

Ugly

 Speaking at a campaign rally in Grand Island, Nebraska the past week, the doddering old fool said, “They can take out a city. Let them take out Los Angeles. Let them take out San Diego.” This suggestion was met with applause from the assembled Cornhuskers, who had gathered in their red-hat frenzy to support whatever cockamamie notions that might leak from the slit just below the Dear Leader's nose. 

If, for some reason, it was unclear these are two cities in California that continue to be part of the United States. The convicted felon's handlers reminded us that the adjudicated rapist was "only kidding" when he mentioned these two cities in a deeply blue state. He did not offer up a target within the borders of the country that we are currently at war with, Iran. 

Perhaps because as those overtaxed frontal lobes continue to deteriorate, more of the "truth" seeps out of that tiny little brain. He sent American troops in the form of National Guard units to California back in June of 2025 to "keep the peace." Never mind that their presence violated the Posse Comitatus Act and cost more than one hundred million dollars. It all falls into the category of "a small price to pay," a phrase he used to describe the high cost of putting gas in our tanks and groceries on our tables during yet another endless slog in the Middle East. 

The pile of angry misstatements and poorly imagined plans for the country he claims he wants to be "great again" continues to grow. Fact checking has become a fool's errand these days since the fool in charge seems completely comfortable saying whatever pops into his tiny mind. At another recent rally he claimed that his IQ was 1775.  Again, the people behind the podium rushed to spin that their boss was trying to riff on the amount of the checks he was hoping to give to America's service members, a "warrior dividend" of one thousand seven hundred and seventy-six dollars. 

"A small price to pay."

And the beat goes on. No day passes without some level of affrontery to the country that incomprehensibly elected him "president." Twice. Just a few days ago he worried that the frat-boy rapists at Cornell might not get "a fair shake" from prosecutors and that he felt "badly" for their predicament. 

A small price to pay for living during these unprecedented times. 

I agree with my son, who suggested some time ago now that he would like to start living in precedented times again. 

Don't forget to vote.

Olden Days

I lost interest in the evening's football game, so I decided to travel up the dial to see what might be showing on Turner Classic Movies. Lo and behold, the 1976 Classic Movie, All The President's Men, was just beginning. I saw it first when I was an impressionable fourteen year old all those years ago. I have come back to it over and over again, but I confess that I have not given it my full attention in the past decade. 

Because it seems so incredibly quaint now. A group of burglars who broke into the Watergate Hotel back in the summer of 1972 getting caught while attempting to bug the Democratic National Headquarters feels like a bit out of the Keystone Cops. Except this one didn't end in a pie fight, but rather the resignation of the President of the United States. Following the trail of bread crumbs in a world that did not include Al Gore's Internet, cell phones or word processors, these two young reporters helped topple a corrupt regime that was attempting to stay in power at any cost. Woodward and Bernstein exposed the links between the bungling burglars and the Oval Office and brought down a sitting United States chief executive. No gunfire. No special effects. No love interest. Just journalism.  For me, this was as close as I tend to get to a "feel-good movie."

When it was all over, and those clever programmers at TCM began unspooling The Manchurian Candidate, I decided to head off to bed, where on my dresser sat my most recent nighttime read: Regime Change. Written by New York Times journalists Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, it tells the tale of the second Trumpreich, contrasting it to the somewhat more benign version that ended just four years prior. It would be nothing short of an understatement to say that these two had an easier row to hoe than their Washington Post predecessors. Except that the Washington Post is now owned by one of the Chief MAGAts, while Haberman and Swan's reporting is still supported by their left-leaning publishers. Woodward and Bernstein worked feverishly back in their day to stay ahead of The Times. And TV News. And all the other ships at sea. 

These days, all the dirty dealings are laid out for everyone to see, and it is left up to anyone with half a brain to connect the dots. Haberman and Swan were able to put out a book in a matter of months encapsulating just the first year and a half of dirty tricks and dealings by all the convicted felon's men. As a point of timing, I should point out that the publication of Woodward and Bernstein's book was followed by the resignation of the Head CREEP, Richard Nixon, by two months. Haberman and Swan's book came out this past June. 

So my question is this: Why is it taking so long? 

Super Intelligent

 "Say, do you remember that crazy cartoon you guys did a while back that had me dropping poop on those protesters?"

"Yes sir, the 'No Kings' protesters."

"And you had me wearing a crown and all that with that Kenny Loggins tune in the background."

"Danger Zone. Yes sir." 

"And those ducks? That was hysterical."

"They were geese, sir. Canadian geese." 

"But you called them ducks."

"Yes sir. Donald ducks."

"Heh. Priceless."

"Yes sir."

"Which brings me to the reason I called you in here. How much are you getting paid?"

"Me personally? Just under two hundred."

"Two hundred dollars?"

"No sir . Two hundred thousand dollars. A year."

"Hmm. Well how would you like to double that?"

"Well, certainly, sir. What would I have to do?"

"Nothing that different. We would just have to come up with some clever name for your new job."

"Like AI Commander?"

"I like that, but it's not grand enough."

"How about Commander of Artificial Intelligence?"

"I'm not sure I like the 'artificial' part. It sounds so..."

"Fake?"

"Yes. That was what I was thinking. Why don't we call it something more intimidating?"

"How about 'Super Intelligence?'"

"Oooo. I like that!"

"So I get the raise and I get to be in charge of Super Intelligence?"

"Yes! Yes! I'm so glad I though of it!"

"Yes sir."

"Now can you get me one of those videos of me blowing up the refineries in Iran?"

"With or without poop, sir?"