Pere Marquette #1225
Understaffed But Understood
25 minutes ago
A blog by a "sucker" and a "loser" who served her country in the Navy.
If you're one of the Covidiots who believe that COVID-19 is "just the flu",
that the 2020 election was stolen, or
especially if you supported the 1/6/21 insurrection,
leave now.
Slava Ukraini!
Pattis [dead guy's lawyer] said the defense team will continue to seek a trial to clear his name.That is just silly AF. The state isn't going to waste its money trying a dead guy. The maximum imprisonment in Connecticut for murder is life and, here, the defendant croaked himself. I fully expect that the prosecutor will file two papers: A "suggestion of death" and then a dismissal, neither of which require the other side to consent.
“We intend to proceed on as if he were alive to vindicate him,” Pattis said.
The last surviving Battle of Britain ace pilot from World War Two has died aged 101.There are two other pilots left, both centenarians, as one might expect.
Wing Cdr Paul Farnes was among the 3,000 airmen - The Few - who defended Britain's skies in 1940.
He died at his home in Hampshire on Tuesday morning, the Battle of Britain Memorial Trust said.
Fotis Dulos, the Connecticut man accused of murdering his estranged wife, Jennifer Dulos, last May in a case that received national attention, died on Thursday, his lawyer said, two days after he attempted suicide at his home.Being "convicted in the court of public opinion" doesn't seem to have bothered Messers. Simpson and Blake. The idea that Dulos offed himself because people thought that he killed his wife and likely chopped her up into bits is risible at best.
Mr. Dulos had been in critical condition after suffering carbon monoxide poisoning on Tuesday, when the police found him unresponsive in a vehicle in his garage in Farmington, Conn., a suburb of Hartford, officials said.
The lawyer, Norm Pattis, told reporters outside the Jacobi Medical Center in the Bronx that Mr. Dulos was declared dead at 5:32 p.m.
“Mr. Dulos was tried and convicted in the court of public opinion,” Mr. Pattis said on Thursday in a text message.
You're not going to vote to remove the President from office. Regardless of the evidence, regardless of whether or not the Senate calls witnesses, you're not going to vote to remove the President. You wouldn't do that even if video showed the President strangling the last porn star he had sex with. You don't have the guts to do that. We all know what the outcome of this so-called trial is going to be. Go ahead and vote.The rest of what Trump's legal team has been saying is nothing more than bullshit and eyewash. There's one piece of ambulatory sleaze who now decries the "age of impeachment" while ignoring the hand he had in the last one. There's another self-styled scholar-for-hire whose argument apparently flips, depending on who's paying him the most or what network will interview him. Another's main talent is making good TV appearances on Trump's favorite network. There's another one who allegedly let Trump skate on fraud charges after he dumped cash into her political PAC.
President Donald Trump’s comment Wednesday that U.S. troops suffering concussion-like symptoms had “not very serious” injuries clashed with a yearslong, hard-fought U.S. military campaign to spread the message that a brain injury is not something to be minimized.That's about what one would expect from a guy who regards soldiers as props in his unreality show.
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“I heard that they had headaches and a couple of other things,” the president said Wednesday during a news conference in Davos, Switzerland. “But I would say, and I can report, it is not very serious, not very serious.”
After a Boeing 737 crashed near Amsterdam more than a decade ago, the Dutch investigators focused blame on the pilots for failing to react properly when an automated system malfunctioned and caused the plane to plummet into a field, killing nine people.One of the longest-running gripes of pilots is that, when there is an accident investigation, it seems that the easiest thing to do is blame the pilots. They're usually dead and they can't speak as to what happened. Manufacturer's reps on an investigation are almost always going to be biased, ever overtly on unconsciously, toward deflecting the blame away from their company.
The fault was hardly the crew’s alone, however. Decisions by Boeing, including risky design choices and faulty safety assessments, also contributed to the accident on the Turkish Airlines flight. But the Dutch Safety Board either excluded or played down criticisms of the manufacturer in its final report after pushback from a team of Americans that included Boeing and federal safety officials, documents and interviews show.
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In the 2009 and Max accidents, for example, the failure of a single sensor caused systems to misfire, with catastrophic results, and Boeing had not provided pilots with information that could have helped them react to the malfunction. The earlier accident “represents such a sentinel event that was never taken seriously,” said Sidney Dekker, an aviation safety expert who was commissioned by the Dutch Safety Board to analyze the crash.
Dr. Dekker’s study accused Boeing of trying to deflect attention from its own “design shortcomings” and other mistakes with “hardly credible” statements that admonished pilots to be more vigilant, according to a copy reviewed by The Times.
The first #SpaceForce utility uniform nametapes have touched down in the
— United States Space Force (@SpaceForceDoD) January 18, 2020
Pentagon. @EsperDoD @SecAFOfficial @SpaceForceCSO @GenDaveGoldfein @DeptofDefense@usairforce pic.twitter.com/Jvzt5bvNl7
The number of people already infected by the mystery virus emerging in China is far greater than official figures suggest, scientists have told the BBC.In You may recall that in World War Z, the virus that begat the zombies arose in China.
There have been 41 laboratory-confirmed cases of the new virus, but UK experts estimate the figure is closer to 1,700.
Two people are known to have died from the virus, which appeared in Wuhan city in December.
Nearly one dozen American troops were wounded in Iran’s Jan. 8 missile attack on Iraq’s al-Asad air base. This week, they were medically evacuated to U.S. military hospitals in Kuwait and Landstuhl, Germany, to be treated for traumatic brain injury and to undergo further evaluation, several U.S. defense and military officials have confirmed to Defense One.Either TBI is still not considered to be an injury by the Pentagon, or they are lying.
Senior military and Trump administration officials had said on Jan. 8 that 11 Iranian missiles had caused “no casualties, no friendly casualties, whether they are U.S., coalition, contractor, et cetera.”
A bill proposed in Missouri this month represents a transparent, shameful attempt to legalize book banning in public libraries within the state, PEN America said today.Because you just know that it will be the local members of the Christian Taliban who will run for those positions and then they'll ban all of the books that they deem to be "unfit".
The bill — the Parental Oversight of Public Libraries Act or House Bill 2044 — aims to add several provisions to the state’s funding law for public libraries. These new provisions establish “parental library review boards” that would evaluate whether any library materials constitute “age-inappropriate sexual material.” Members of these five-member boards, who would be elected at a town meeting by a simple majority of voters, are empowered to determine whether material is appropriate, including by evaluating its literary merit. Public librarians are explicitly barred by the statute from serving on such review boards, even if they are from the community
The U.S. Senate opened the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump with quiet ceremony Thursday — senators standing at their desks to swear an oath of “impartial justice” as jurors, House prosecutors formally reciting the charges and Chief Justice John Roberts presiding.From both of their statements in the weeks leading up to the impeachment hearing, they have made up their minds and they have zero intention of obeying their oaths.
The White House violated federal law in withholding security assistance to Ukraine, an action at the center of President Donald Trump’s impeachment, a federal watchdog agency said Thursday.Apparently Trump has hired one of the attorneys that got OJ off for killing his ex-wife and her boyfriend (and who helped Jeffry Epstein avoid serious jail time).
Microsoft released a patch for Windows 10 and Server 2016 today after the National Security Agency found and disclosed a serious vulnerability. It's a rare but not unprecedented tip-off, one that underscores the flaw's severity—and maybe hints at new priorities for the NSA.That's a good thing that the NSA found a severe flaw and then alerted Microsoft so they could patch it.
The bug is in Windows' mechanism for confirming the legitimacy of software or establishing secure web connections. If the verification check itself isn't trustworthy, attackers can exploit that fact to remotely distribute malware or intercept sensitive data.
"[We are] recommending that network owners expedite implementation of the patch immediately as we will also be doing," Anne Neuberger, head of the NSA's Cybersecurity Directorate, said on a call with reporters on Tuesday. "When we identified a broad cryptographic vulnerability like this we quickly turned to work with the company to ensure that they could mitigate it."
The flaw is specifically in Microsoft's CryptoAPI service, which helps developers cryptographically "sign" software and data or generate digital certificates used in authentication—all to prove trustworthiness and validity when Windows checks for it on users' devices. An attacker could potentially exploit the bug to undermine crucial protections, and ultimately take control of victim devices.
Squads of sheriff’s deputies in military fatigues and riot gear arrived just before dawn Tuesday outside the old three-bedroom house on Magnolia Street in West Oakland, Calif. A BearCat armored vehicle rolled down the still-sleepy residential street. Officers broke through the reinforced front door with a battering ram and sent a small, camera-equipped robot into the home to check for any potential threatsFSB,.The "knock on the door on the middle of the night" is the hallmark of a police state. Against four families that evinced no intent to resist by force, the cops rolled up in the dark with all of their paramilitary toys on full display.
When the deputies finally entered the home, they called out for the occupants to surrender. They did, saying they wanted the standoff to end peacefully.
But the tense, militarized raid didn’t target anti-government zealots or drug traffickers. Instead, deputies aimed to arrest a small coalition of homeless parents who were trying to live inside the long-uninhabited home without paying rent.
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Days after the judge’s ruling, sheriff’s deputies in military gear arrived at 5:15 a.m. Tuesday to pull the families out of the home.
German disposal experts have detonated two unexploded bombs from World War II that were discovered in the western city of Dortmund. Some 14,000 residents were ordered to leave their homes for the operation.I don't buy that they were 550lb bombs. They were 500lb bombs. Neither the Brits nor the Americans did metric shit during the Second World War.
Two 250-kilogram (550-pound) bombs were safely defused in Dortmund's southwest on Sunday following a large-scale evacuation and the closure of the city's main train station.
The city administration said earlier that special disposal teams had discovered four suspected bombs from World War II in the densely populated Klinikviertel (clinic quarter). But substrata searches of the area confirmed that two of the objects were not explosives.
The other two devices — an American bomb and a British bomb — were successfully detonated on Sunday afternoon.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Confronted by persistent questions about his military action in the Middle East, President Donald Trump and his top officials offered a string of fresh explanations Friday, with Trump now contending Iranian militants had planned major attacks on four U.S. embassies.The problem is, as everyone in the world (except the Trumpanzees) knows, is that Trump is a pathological liar. He has nobody on his team who has the gravitas or public respect to successfully lie for him.
The Duchess of Sussex has returned to Canada to join her son amid discussions over the future role for her and Prince Harry in the Royal Family.As far as I'm concerned, this is a dispute among the upper management at one of the world's oldest set of theme parks.
Meghan and Prince Harry had been in Canada over Christmas with baby Archie.
It comes as the Queen, the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Cambridge asked staff to find a workable solution after the couple announced they will step back as senior royals.
The Royal Family was said to be "hurt" at the couple's statement.
A Justice Department inquiry launched more than two years ago to mollify conservatives clamoring for more investigations of Hillary Clinton has effectively ended with no tangible results, and current and former law enforcement officials said they never expected the effort to produce much of anything.There is no there, there, but don't expect the conspiracy whackaloons on the Right to shut their yaps. They'll be blubbering about the Clintons well into the next century.
John Huber, the U.S. attorney in Utah, was tapped in November 2017 by then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions to look into concerns raised by President Trump and his allies in Congress that the FBI had not fully pursued cases of possible corruption at the Clinton Foundation and during Clinton’s time as secretary of state, when the U.S. government decided not to block the sale of a company called Uranium One.
A California man has pleaded guilty to setting fire to the same D.C. pizza place targeted by a man investigating a conspiracy theory that falsely connected 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton to an alleged child sex trafficking ring under the restaurant.
YOUNGSTOWN — [Some Asshole] could get about 20 years in prison after pleading guilty Wednesday to “swatting” law enforcement agencies in communities from six states from 2016 to 2018 — but prosecutors are recommending he get none.I most certainly do not agree with this. Swatting is a very serious crime; it's sending out a bunch of cops with drawn guns against innocent people. It is assault with deadly weapons by proxy. If this asshole had pointed a gun at six different people, there's no way that he'd get a slap on the wrist. But because he's some lazy-ass fat fuck behind a computer in his mother's basement, he gets a slap on the wrist.
Instead, Mahoning County prosecutors are recommending that Judge John Durkin of Mahoning County Common Pleas Court sentence [the Asshole] on Jan. 31 to one year of incarceration, five years of probation and restitution of $12,972 to the communities victimized. The sentencing is at 8:30 a.m.
Prosecutors are recommending that [the Asshole] get credit for the nearly 10 months he has already been locked up in the Martin P. Joyce Juvenile Justice Center since Feb. 28, 2019.
Mike Yacovone, county assistant prosecutor, said it means [the Asshole] would go free Feb. 28 if the judge agrees with the recommendation.
Atlanta Police Chief Erika Shields sent out a department-wide email notifying officers that the department will no longer chase suspects.This is the text of the email Chief Shields sent out last Friday:
Shields cited the risk to the safety of the officers and the public for each chase, and “knowing that the judicial system is largely unresponsive to the actions of the defendants.”
Good Morning,I get why she's doing that. Some critter runs from the cops, the critter's vehicle slams into some citizens and the reaction is not "why was that critter running, charge him with felony murder or some shit", but "why were the cops chasing him?" The politicians then slam the cops and now, the cops are saying that the only way to prevent other people from being hurt in chases is to not chase them, and, by the way, fuck you, Mr. Mayor, for not having our back on this, and fuck you, Mr. District Attorney, for not charging people who run.
Allow me to first say "thank you " to all of you. I know the job is difficult, perhaps now more so than ever, but I could not be prouder of the work that is done by the Atlanta Police Department. As we move into 2020, I ask that you commit yourselves to safety; both individually and to others. It is along those lines that I must revisit the department's current police pursuit "chase" policy.
I am acutely aware than an overwhelming number of crimes are committed where a vehicle is involved in some capacity; and that some of the most significant arrests we have made as an agency have been as a result of zeroing in on a specific vehicle. In reviewing the department's current pursuit policy, I must weigh these critical successes against several factors. Namely, the level of pursuit training received by officers who are engaging in the pursuits, the rate of occurrence of injury/death as a result of the pursuits and the likelihood of the judicial system according any level of accountability to the defendants arrested as a result of the pursuit. At this point and time, the department is assuming an enormous amount of risk to the safety of officers and the public for each pursuit, knowing that the judicial system is largely unresponsive to the actions of the defendants.
The Executive Command Staff will work to identify specific personnel and certain specialized pursuit training to enable the department to conduct pursuits in limited instances, but until these standards have been formalized, effective immediately, the department has a zero-chase policy. The department has a zero-chase policy and this is effective immediately.
Please know that I realize this will not be a popular decision; and more disconcerting to me personally, is that this decision may drive crime up. I get it. But at the end of the day, I want all of you to keep your jobs and to have a strong and positive career. Thank you, Chief Shields.
(Emphasis as in the original)
The Trump administration is seeking to delay a Democratic effort to require the Secret Service to disclose how much it spends protecting President Trump and his family when they travel — until after the 2020 election, according to people familiar with the discussions.The SS is required to file yearly summaries of what it costs to protect the First Family, but they haven't done it for years. The obvious conclusion, when any government agency refuses to file required reports, is that they have something to hide.
The issue has emerged as a sticking point in recent weeks as Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and key senators have been negotiating draft legislation to move the Secret Service back to his department, its historic home.
Iran attacked two bases in Iraq that house American troops with a barrage of missiles early Wednesday, Iranian official news media and United States officials said, fulfilling Tehran’s promise to retaliate for the killing of a top Iranian commander.I don't know whether or not the Iranian missiles have GPS or GLONASS guidance, but I would wager a small amount that they do. I'd wager a lot more that Iranian agents have marked the location of every structure on those bases larger than a fire hydrant.
“The fierce revenge by the Revolutionary Guards has begun,” the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps said in a statement on a Telegram messaging app channel.
Iraqi military officials said that Iran had fired 22 missiles at two military bases in Iraq where American troops are stationed. United States officials initially said there were no immediate indications of American casualties, and senior Iraqi officials later said that there were no American or Iraqi casualties in the strikes.
The U.S. won’t issue Iran’s foreign minister a visa to travel to the United Nations later this week, contending there was not enough time to process the request.That's just bullshit. It's nothing but petty-ass bullshit because Trump is likely peeved that he can't order the Pentagon to commit war crimes.
As part of the incendiary and escalating crisis surrounding the assassination of Qassem Soleimani, there has come an explanation of why the Iranian commander was actually in Baghdad when he was targeted by a US missile strike.Normally, it would be inconceivable that a hit would have been carried out in such circumstances. But we're talking about Trump, an impulsive and aggressively ignorant man. If he indeed knew why Soleimani was in Baghdad, then one needs to ask why deescalating tensions in the Persian Gulf is something that Trump opposes.
Iraq’s prime minister revealed that he was due to be meeting the Iranian commander to discuss moves being made to ease the confrontation between Shia Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia – the crux of so much of strife in the Middle East and beyond.
Adil Abdul-Mahdi was quite clear: “I was supposed to meet him in the morning the day he was killed, he came to deliver a message from Iran in response to the message we had delivered from the Saudis to Iran.”
#Iraq is reconsidering its relationship with the U.S.?— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) January 4, 2020
A relationship in which we give them $2 billion a year & they privately beg us to stay & help them fight #ISIS & counter-balance #Iran. But they get to publicly condemn us for protecting our troops?https://t.co/Qu8zhKhGS8
The Sabino steamboat is the oldest wooden, coal-fired steamboat in regular operation in the U.S. Built in 1908 in East Boothbay, Maine, by W. Irving Adams, she spent most of her career ferrying passengers and cargo between Maine towns and islands. First she operated on the Damariscotta River in midcoast Maine. After sinking during an accident in 1918, she ran on the Kennebec River. From 1927 to 1960 she served the islands of Casco Bay, running out of Portland. For this service her narrow hull was widened with sponsons to make her more stable in the open waters. Although her configuration and passenger capacity changed through the years, her engine did not. The Sabino Steamboat is still powered by the two-cylinder Paine compound steam engine installed in 1908.Until now.
The museum has announced plans to its donors to install an electric propulsion system in the steamboat Sabino, whose coal-fired engine is now used to take visitors up and down the Mystic River during warm-weather months.There is no "magical experience" of riding a battery powered boat. Part of the fun of riding a steam-powered anything with a reciprocating engine are the smells, the sights and the sounds of an operating steam plant. Yes, the coal smoke is a feature of that.
While the steam engine will remain operational and be used on occasion, Chris Gasiorek, the museum’s vice president of watercraft preservation and programs, said most of the trips would be powered by electric batteries.
He said the electric power would allow more visitors to have the “magical experience” of riding aboard a historic steamboat.
Iran's most powerful military commander, Gen Qasem Soleimani, has been killed by a US air strike in Iraq.Let's dispense with Trump's comments: Everything Trump says about anything is either hyperbole or a flat-out lie. This is no different.
The 62-year-old spearheaded Iranian military operations in the Middle East as head of Iran's elite Quds Force.
He was killed at Baghdad airport, along with other Iran-backed militia figures, early on Friday in a strike ordered by US President Donald Trump.
Mr Trump said the general was "directly and indirectly responsible for the deaths of millions of people".
HERINGTON, Kan. (WIBW/Gray News) – A Kansas police officer is no longer employed after admitting he “fabricated” a story about a McDonald’s employee writing an expletive on his coffee cup over the weekend, according to the Herington police chief.It seems that the McDonald's joint had cameras everywhere and could prove that nobody there did it.
Herington Police Chief Brian Hornaday confirmed in a news conference Monday that the officer resigned from the agency, calling it a “black eye on the law enforcement community.”
After initially standing by his story, Hornaday said the officer has since told him the note was “meant to be a joke.”
Mike Bloomberg was presiding over his inaugural Bloomberg New Economy Forum in Singapore in 2018 when, to the surprise of some in the audience, he gushed about one of China’s top government officials.Xi is not dictator? Tell it to the Uighurs. Tell it to the citizens of Hong Kong. Tell it to the Chinese whose every utterance online is monitored.
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Then in September, amid mass pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong and human rights activists decrying China’s imprisonment of Muslim minorities, Bloomberg seemed to go out of his way to defend Beijing, saying in a television interview that President Xi Jinping “is not a dictator.” Bloomberg said Xi “has to satisfy his constituents or he’s not going to survive.” Pressed by the interviewer, Bloomberg said Xi “has a constituency to respond to . . . they really are responsive.”
CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa — Former vice president Joe Biden said he wanted to spend Monday celebrating the role organized labor has played in improving the lives of Americans. But moments into his first Labor Day appearance, the presidential candidate turned instead to the nation’s latest mass shooting, which left seven dead in the west Texas town of Odessa on Saturday.The gun banners have been yammering for awhile that they're all for taking away guns "if it saves one life."[1]
“It is irrational, with all due respect to the governor of Texas, it is irrational what they’re doing on the same day you see a mass shooting . . . and we’re talking about loosening access to have guns,” he told reporters at a picnic in Cedar Rapids.
“To be able to take them into places of worship, store them in schools, I mean, it’s just absolutely irrational, and it’s all about special interests, and it has to stop.”
A gunman killed two people during a Sunday morning service at a church in White Settlement before a member of the congregation fatally shot him, authorities say.That doesn't exactly fit into the "forbidding guns from these places keeps people safe."
Police in White Settlement, about eight miles west of Fort Worth, were called before 11 a.m. to the West Freeway Church of Christ at 1900 South Las Vegas Trail after one member, who is part of the church’s security team, opened fire on the gunman.
European Union laws require you to give European Union visitors information about cookies used on your blog. In many cases, these laws also require you to obtain consent.You're here, you've consented. If you don't like it, go read some other goddamn blog. It's not as if you're paying me.