John Leguizamo has a net worth of about $23 million. He was paid $2.5 million for The Odyssey, and gets millions each year in residuals from his previous movies.
Communism
Kidnapper’s Morality
From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. That’s what the communists claim, is it not? My question has always been- “How do you determine ability and need?” Well, Ayn Rand already answered that question:
Whose ability and which of whose needs comes first? When it’s all one pot, you can’t let any man decide what his own needs are, can you? If you did, he might claim that he needs a yacht — and if his feelings is all you have to go by, he might prove it, too. Why not?
If it’s not right for me to own a car until I’ve worked myself into a hospital ward, earning a car for every loafer and every naked savage on earth — why can’t he demand a yacht from me, too, if I still have the ability not to have collapsed? No? He can’t?
Then why can he demand that I go without cream for my coffee until he’s replastered his living room? Well, anyway, it was decided that nobody had the right to judge his own need or ability. We voted on it. Yes, ma’am, we voted on it in a public meeting twice a year. How else could it be done? Do you care to think what would happen at such a meeting? It took us just one meeting to discover that we had become beggars — rotten, whining, sniveling beggars, all of us, because no man could claim his pay as his rightful earning, he had no rights and no earnings, his work didn’t belong to him, it belonged to ‘the family’ — and they owed him nothing in return, and the only claim he had on them was his ‘need’ — so he had to beg in public for his relief from his needs, like any lousy moocher, listing all his troubles and miseries, down to his patched drawers and his wife’s head colds, hoping that ‘the family’ would throw him the alms. He had to claim miseries, because it’s miseries, not work, that had become the coin of the realm
The key to getting treasure in a communist system is to be needy. To prove need, one needs to have a tragic story, one must claim your victimhood. The contest, then is to be a victim. That’s why social media has become what it has. In this world, the crowd has decided that a black man who has been accused of being a domestic abuser is less of a victim than the mother who has to live with poor mental health and three dead children, even if she is the one who killed them.
The landlord isn’t a victim. The corporation isn’t a victim, and neither is it’s billionaire founder. The victim is the looter, the thief, the person who doesn’t produce anything. Why is this? Because it must be in order for the communist system to work.
Again to Ayn Rand in the morality of the kidnapper. The kidnapper holds a physical captive for ransom. Those who would take from society are holding those who producers captive using the producer’s own morality as a weapon. The “morality of altruism” holds a good person’s conscience, empathy, and sense of duty as a ransom.
theirs is the morality of kidnappers. They use your love of virtue as a hostage. They know that you’ll bear anything in order to work and produce, because you know that achievement is man’s highest moral purpose, that he can’t exist without it, and your love of virtue is your love of life. They count on you to assume any burden. They count on you to feel that no effort is too great in the service of your love.
your enemies are destroying you by means of your own power. Your generosity and your endurance are their only tools. Your unrequited rectitude is the only hold they have upon you. They know it. You don’t. The day when you’ll discover it is the only thing they dread.
learn to understand the nature of your own power and you’ll understand the paradox you now see around you. You do not have to depend on any material possessions, they depend on you, you create them, you own the one and only tool of production. Wherever you are, you will always be able to produce.
You have a desire to succeed, to build things, to accomplish things. My entire life, I have always worked, and built, and struggled to accomplish things. Those who would take advantage of me know this, and so they take advantage of my desire to do things, to work, to be useful. They take from me in the form of taxes, of asking that I do the right thing. They take small pieces of my time, my effort, my production for themselves, secure in the knowledge that I will continue to do so. They do the same to you.
As long as we continue to provide, they will continue to take. Like the old plow horse, the useless breeders in our society will continue to take our labor until we collapse under the whip. Not just us as individuals, us as a society. They will continue to take until the entire system comes crashing down.
It’s always been so, and will be until we have decided that we’ve had enough.
Crime
Breach
A police officer Plant City left his password for the Florida DMV in his unsecured cell phone. Criminals gained access and used it to steal Florida DMV records, includong names, dates of birth, addresses, vehicles owned, and other information.
Uncategorized
Stolen From the Dead
I guess one of the things that bothered me about the guy who claimed to be a SEAL working on the pile at ground zero was due to the sound in this video: (watch it with the sound on)
Every firefighter wears an alarm that alerts those nearby that a firefighter has been motionless for 30 seconds. The alarm is called a PASS device and emits a loud noise to facilitate finding a downed rescuer. We jokingly referred to it as the “lazy man” alarm. Once you have been motionless for 30 seconds, it emits a soft beeping noise. On fire scenes, you will hear one device chirp, and every firefighter on scene will wiggle to reset the alarm.
The sound in that video is the sound of 343 PASS devices sounding their cry for help, all at the same time. Each of those noises is emanating from a PASS device that it attached to a dead firefighter. That noise gives me chills to this day. Those rescuers each entered the building, knowing that they may not come out. In fact, some of the firefighters who went into the north tower had already seen the south tower collapse, and knew what was going to happen.
They went in anyway.
There are people out there who claim the buildings were downed in a controlled demolition. There are people who claim to have worked the pile, but were never there. They can all kiss my entire ass.
Then, not one of the dozens of rescuers, investigators, or other workers at ground zero would see a thing, or you would have to believe that the ones who noticed were willing to keep it a secret even though many of the dead firefighters were related to those same investigators.
I know people who were both at the towers and at the Pentagon. I was at the Pentagon site afterwards.
Explain to me how:
- a demolition crew of at least several dozen people could spend several weeks in a building where 50,000 people worked every day and 150,000 people used the building as a transit station, place several thousand pounds of explosives, several hundred feet of det cord, wire all of it for demo, all while having not single person notice and wonder what those guys were doing,
- Either none of the thousands of rescuers who were there noticed anything, or still marched into the building knowing it was wired to explode. One of them was a Battalion Chief who ordered his own brother into the building. Can you imagine giving your brother an order that resulted in his death? Now tell me why he would then keep it a secret when the government did something like this.
- nor would anyone of the people involved say a word about what really happened.
In order for this conspiracy to work, thousands of people would have to be in on it. Some of the people who were in on it lost close relatives.
The FDNY’s deployment included:
- 121 engine companies
- 62 ladder companies
- All 5 rescue companies
- 6 squad companies
- 27 chief officers
Over 1,000 personnel in all, and more than a third of them perished.
Don’t even claim it was crisis actors. There is no way to get a hundred imposters into a group where everyone knows someone who knows you. Fire Departments are a close knit community. Once you go up in rank, you know people. There are classes, seminars, conferences, etc. Firefighting is a family business. There are brothers, sons, fathers, cousins, and even wives and daughters who work in that community. To think that 343 people would die in a building collapse, all of whom were friends and relatives of those in the fire service still living, and not one of the living would say a word? That’s simply unbelievable.
That battalion chief I talked about earlier? Battalion Chief Joseph Pfeifer, the first FDNY chief at the World Trade Center. He survived. The firefighter killed was his brother, Lieutenant Kevin J. Pfeifer of Engine 33. You can see him here in the white shirt and hat in the only known video of the first plane striking the towers:
Engine 33 was only 1.5 miles away from the towers and was one of the first to arrive. Joseph ordered Kevin’s company into the North Tower to help evacuate occupants; Kevin died when it collapsed. Here he is in the National Geographic documentary on those first responders. Watch this and imagine your pain in sending your own brother in to die:
Now picture a building wired with demolitions. Every firefighter there would have know- you can’t secretly wire a building that large for demo without it being obvious.
One wall in my game room is filled with department patches and pictures of people who I know in the fire service. Even today, my wife is amazed at how we will go some random place and some firefighter will walk up to me and say hi. I’ve been retired for more than 15 years, yet I still know and talk to people who work in the fire department- including from New York, Maryland, Virginia, and I live in Florida. In fact, I know people in departments all over the east coast and beyond. We were in Fairbanks, Alaska in 2017, and ran into a firefighter I knew from Maryland.
There is no way that you could pull something like this off without at least one firefighter saying something.
Sorry, dude. I trust people that I have known for decades more than some Internet rando doing a pseudo analysis of a youtube video who then sets up a webpage where he claims to have solved the crime of the century. Any engineer or architect who tells you they can prove it was a controlled demo from watching a video is full of shit. If this were the case, why wouldn’t that same government simply have eliminated whoever it was? A government that killed 3,000 people in front of the entire world would be too squeamish to eliminate the guy running that website and destroy his “evidence?”
This is the same government that couldn’t even keep it a secret when a President got a blowjob in the Oval office. Anyone who seriously believes this hasn’t thought it through.
It’s easier for me to believe one of the following than it is a controlled demolition:
- The government was completely inept and just dropped the ball by not knowing what was coming
- the government knew something was afoot and screwed up by allowing it to happen, like they did in OKC
- the government knew what was going to happen, but allowed it to happen for some unknown reason
If you believe this bullshit about a controlled demo, you are a moron and are spitting on the graves of people I knew and respected. There is just no other way to put it. Not everything that happens is a government conspiracy. Don’t dishonor dead people who gave their lives to save others by calling them liars.
EDITED TO ADD:
I’ve shown my work here. Going forward, please refer to rule 6 of this blog:
If you demand that anyone provide evidence for an assertion that they are making, then you must hold yourself to the same standard when making a counterargument. It takes time and effort to research sources, and replying with “Nuh, uh, I refuse to believe that” while not providing sources of your own to refute them is how an 8 year old debates. If you demand that the person with whom you are disagreeing show their work, so do you.
Gaming the Courts
It Turns Out I Was Wrong
I said yesterday that the AWFLs would drop the attacks on the Lone Standout after discovering he was black. It turns out that I was wrong. They will protect their own even more so than they protect the slaves on their plantation.
They are investigating and attacking the guy. The latest attack includes references to his having a domestic violence restraining order. These DV restraining orders are bullshit that women frequently use as a weapon in divorces or just to get even with a man who has done something they don’t like. I have twice been accused of this by angry ex-girlfriends who were trying to get revenge on me for daring to be their ex:
- In the first case, the woman used it in an attempt to extort cash from me, and a cop told her how to do it.
- In the second case, the woman learned about it from me after I had foolishly told her about the first time. She made all sorts of claims about things that she claimed I did. The big thing that saved me was that I had proof that I wasn’t even in the country when some of the events supposedly took place.
the law is abused. Here are the disturbing statistics:
25% of all divorces include accusations of domestic violence.
50% of all domestic violence restraining orders are issued without allegations of violence.
70% of domestic violence restraining orders are trivial or false. (PDF warning)
85% of restraining orders are against men
In fact, a New Mexico woman filed a restraining order against David Letterman in 2005, alleging that she was a victim of his domestic abuse. He had never met the woman. She said that he was using secret code words during his television show to threaten her. The judge in the case found her claims to have merit and granted the order, even though it was later overturned.
To me, if there is no accompanying criminal charge for domestic violence, then the entire issue is a woman making things up because she is a mad cow. The way it works, is a woman accuses a man of domestic violence. She is granted an ex parte hearing, where her accusations are all the court hears. If the court agrees that the claim has merit, the DV order is issued. The first hint a man has that one of these has been issued is when the cops show up with the order, which includes suspension of any concealed weapons permits, and an order that he turn his guns into the police within 48 hours.
Then he gets a hearing sometime in the next couple of weeks. He had better bring a lawyer, because she will have one, provided free of charge by the taxpayers. If he loses, the order becomes permanent, and he is now prohibited from owning firearms or ammunition. For life.
Most men don’t fight it because it costs money to hire a lawyer, money they don’t have. They figure they are never going to see her again, so what’s the big deal. Most don’t find out they are prohibited persons until after it is too late.
The law says that women can make an accusation of domestic violence and the court will punish the man by issuing a restraining order without him being allowed to defend himself. He gets a hearing two weeks later, but by that time his guns have been taken and his concealed weapons permit revoked. There is no fee for the woman to do this.
She gets a free lawyer. He does not. When it is discovered that she lied, nothing happens to her. She will not be prosecuted, and cannot be sued or punished in any way.
The Florida State Supreme Court has this to say on the matter:
Unfortunately, the current version of section 784.046 does not seem to permit the trial court to simply dismiss a sworn petition that does not allege facts that fall within the statutory language. Instead, section 784.046(5) requires that “[u]pon the filing of the petition, the court shall set a hearing to be held at the earliest possible time.” The result is the use of scant judicial resources to conduct unnecessary hearings based on pleadings that could never support the issuance of an injunction. These same hearings often serve only to inflame the parties’ emotions and foster further uncivil behavior. I would encourage the legislature to consider amending the domestic violence and repeat violence statutes to allow judges to dismiss petitions that, on their face, do not contain allegations sufficient to meet the statutory requirements without prejudice to the petitioner refiling a legally sufficient petition if he or she can do so.
Women who lie to use the law as a weapon cannot be punished. From the same decision:
Further, nowhere in section 784.046 is there any provision for an award of sanctions against a petitioner who uses the statutory provisions concerning injunctions as a sword rather than a shield.
The message is loud and clear- you will do what the AWFLs say, as a jury member, you will do whatever they want, or they will destroy your life.
At the end of the day, this is jury tampering. I don’t see how this is any different than a criminal threatening a witness.
Intimidation of a juror in Mass:
Using a juror’s identity or personal information to intimidate, harass, threaten, mislead, or retaliate against the juror (or their family) is a felony under G.L. c. 268, § 13B (intimidation of a juror). This covers both during and after a trial if the intent is to interfere with or punish participation in the proceeding.
Penalty:
- Up to 10 years in state prison, or
- Up to 2½ years in a house of correction, and/or
- Fine of $1,000–$5,000.
- If the underlying case involved a crime punishable by life imprisonment, the maximum prison term rises to 20 years.
This campaign to dox and harass this guy is nothing short of jury tampering, and is a felony.
Cops
Death Penalty
This case is a prime reason why I oppose the death penalty. Not in theory, but because I don’t trust the government with the power of life and death.
A former state forensic scientist on Tuesday was sentenced to 10 years in state prison after altering more than 1,000 samples in labs that prosecutors say could have disproportionately affected sexual assault victims over many years.
In this particular case, she made the DNA appear to not match, resulting in people who were guilty being able to walk free, but that isn’t going to be the case with every nutball in government service with the power to alter test results. For example:
- The FBI Lab underwent massive restructuring in the late 1990s following a whistleblower report by Dr. Frederic Whitehurst, who exposed flawed scientific testimonies and contamination within the lab.
- In 2004, former FBI biologist Jacqueline M. Blake pleaded guilty to a federal misdemeanor charge for providing false statements in her laboratory reports.
- A massive 2015 joint review by the FBI and the Innocence Project revealed an even deeper systemic issue: for over two decades before 2000, microscopic hair comparison examiners from the FBI gave flawed, scientifically invalid testimony in over 95% of the trials reviewed, contributing to numerous wrongful convictions across the United States.
It’s a certainty that at least some people have been sentenced to death for crimes they did not commit. If we execute even one innocent person, we are all collectively murderers. I just cannot support that.
Anti American left
Stupid and Uneducated
Democrats have had to pull support for Democratic North Carolina House candidate Shelly Headen when a past statement came back to haunt her:
I think our only hope is an attack on US soil, preferably Alabama, Louisiana where the stupid people live.
It isn’t that what she said was forbidden, because this is what most Democrats think about anyone who isn’t a liberal: uneducated and unintelligent. After all, if you were smart and knew stuff, you would be a commie like them.
Aloha Snackbar
Quarter of a Century
A quarter of a Century, and I still remember that morning in more detail than all but of a few of the mornings that have come since. The sky was a beautiful blue, the sun was warm, and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. A typical Central Florida day. My shift, C shift, had just started our 24 hour workday.
I was driving Engine 2 that morning. Dennis was riding in the seat next to me as the Lieutenant, and Justin was the back seat firefighter. Our shift had begun at 7:30 that morning as it always did. We did our morning routine as we always do. At 8:30, we left the station to do annual flow testing of fire hydrants.
By 8:45, we were behind the Winn Dixie and just about to test our first hydrant. Our Battalion Chief called us and told us to return to the station and turn on the TV. I remember jokingly asking Dennis who the guy on the radio was and what they had done to the Chief, since he would never tell us to watch TV during the workday.
We arrived back in the station just in time to see the second plane hit the south tower. I remember watching Fox news and seeing them switch to the DC bureau, where reporters said they could see a column of smoke. Things were happening so fast, I couldn’t figure out what that smoke was coming from. I commented “There is no way that the smoke from NYC is visible in Washington.” It was then that a fellow firefighter told me that the Pentagon had been hit.
The chief called us to disclose the plans for the remainder of the day. While I was on the phone with him, the first tower fell. The chief said to me, “Oh my God. 30,000 people just died.” I remember being stunned that so many people could be in a building.
By noon, we had an armed SWAT officer with an MP-5 riding along with us on all of our calls “for security.”
For weeks, we firefighters were stunned at the loss of 343 firefighters. I had friends who were in New York and in DC that day- military, firefighters, and paramedics who I’ve known for years. I felt a sense of awe and respect for the guys who went into that second tower after watching the first tower fall. They went into that building knowing that they would never come out of the second tower. What was going through their minds? I asked myself if I was capable of making the same choice if I knew that I would not come out?
We all wanted to be able to say yes. It isn’t the same thing when you go into an ordinary fire. Firefighters are a cocky, professional bunch. When we run into a burning building, we tell ourselves that we are trained and experienced enough that it will not happen to us. Not so with those guys in the towers. They went in KNOWING that they wouldn’t come out. That is a time that you don’t know what you would do until the moment of truth comes.
I just hoped that I would have the fortitude to make the choice that needed to be made, to have the courage to choose duty and honor over self preservation and the fortune to never be placed in that position. I hoped that I would never have to make that choice.
I spent the majority of my adult life in one uniform or another, dedicated to the protection of American lives and values. I spent six years in the Navy, doing two combat tours in the Persian gulf. I wasn’t a big hero or anything. I, like millions of others, did my job. After that, I spent two decades in a firefighter’s uniform. In that time, I ran into hundreds of burning buildings, jumped into a dozen lakes, thousands of medical scenes, and traveled to 22 natural disasters. I was injured three times in the line of duty. I saw a couple of thousand dead bodies, dozens of shootings and stabbings, and saved more than a few lives.
In 2011, I retired. I had seen enough death, misery, and blood for one lifetime. In the intervening years, many changes have come about. Dennis is dead. Justin is dead. I thought that the time of risking life and limb for the good of this nation and its people was over. I had given enough. I deserved to be left alone to grow old and enjoy the rest of my life in as much peace as I could manage.
What we should be mourning today is the death of a free nation. The terrorists killed it that morning. The Patriot Act, TSA’s warrantless searches at airports, shopping malls, sporting events, and even on the highways, the NSA spying, the establishment of secret prisons, secret courts, and secret searches of people’s homes all began on that day. Sure, there were people who had sought these powers before that day, but it was people’s fears of further attacks that were used to destroy the freedoms that made America what it was.
What made America special was the fact that we were, each of us, free individuals that were fiercely protective if individual liberties. The last of that spirit died when those towers fell. Now we are neither free, nor are we safe, except we are now using our military to protect the very organization that slaughtered our countrymen and our freedom. We stand in line to be searched at the airport, when we go to public gatherings, and when we drive on the highway. Our electronic communications are monitored, and our homes searched at the whim of authorities, without even the benefit of a warrant. Our police organizations are more heavily armed than many nations’ military forces.
Yet today, the mayor of New York has given a ceremonial pen to one of the associates of the very people who carried out that attack. Our President gave billions of dollars in weapons, ammunition, and other military supplies to the same people who were part of that.