“It’s not enough,” a distraught mother told DeSantis. “Imagine if your children were in there. You are going to leave here and you are going to take a nice picture. I know you are doing everything you can, but it’s not enough.”

Mother of Surfside building collapse victim lashes out at DeSantis for not ‘doing enough’

I understand pain and desperation, but they are trying to safely move tons of concrete so they do not make things worse and in case there are survivors. Truly I believe they are all gone.

I hope I am wrong at least one time.

Many jokes have been laid upon Barry Manilow, but Mandy is a great song.

Sent by MC

Rehab that works
After 6 burglaries, 3 car thefts, multiple illegal trespasses, an ongoing cocaine and alcohol addiction, committing 2 violent home invasions, 3 armed robberies, dealing with fentanyl and meth, passing counterfeit money, beating 4 victims senseless and being arrested 19 times since 1998, George Floyd has not committed a crime in over eleven months now.

You can’t argue with success.

I went to Lowes for more safety chain for the U-Haul trailer I’m pulling.

It comes with the DOT safety chain in case your hitch fails.

I wanted chain to padlock the trailer to the truck so it’s harder to steal the trailer by disconnecting it from the truck while it’s  parked.

So I ask for two 5-foot lengths of 5/16 trailer chain while holding some heavy duty padlocks.

The Lowes person and I have this conversation.

“What are you trying to secure?”

“I’m not”

“What’s the chain for?”

“Chain fights.”

“What?”

“Chain fights.  Two men enter, one man leaves.  You’ve never beat a man with a padlock on a chain? ”

“Umm….”

“It’s a hell of a rush.”

“Okay….”

“Chain fights.”

I’m gonna get banned from Lowes.

Have you ever watched a period drama that takes place in the 18th or 19th century and wonder why so many rich British were Colonels?

After the end of feudalism and the rise of the “modern” military, the officer class still came from and saw themselves as lesser nobility.

That was was separated the officers from NCOs.

NCOs were poor or working-class who enlisted and by effort worked their way up.

Officers were gentlemen of good families and education who joined the service to legitimize themselves.  Today we’d call it credentialziing.

Officers (except in the Navy where everyone is on the same boat) didn’t expect to do much fighting.  They sat on a horse on a hill overlooking the battle while giving orders by bugle.

Even among enemy armies, it was ungentlemanly to kill another officer.  There was also a good chance the other officer was a distant cousin in the lesser nobility bloodline.

So some son of some lesser noble would become an officer, serve some period in the British Army, then upon leaving be given colonial land in Africa or India or somewhere else, enriching the family and increasing their prestige.

We saw some of this during the Civil War.  Wealthy and well-connected families would pay or rub elbows and a son would get a commission as a Captain or Colonel, despite having no real military training or experience.  They would do their duty far away from the battlefield and still receive honors and prestige.

This changed by the end of the Civil War and was one of the victories of the Confederacy that improved America.  The war got to be so bloody with so many casualties that those prestige officers were killed and many of the branches of the well-conected family trees were pruned.  This lead to a reordering of post-Civil War society.

This happened similarly to European armies during WWI.  Officers were killed in droves.  Being an officer on horseback from a good family didn’t protect you from belt-fed machineguns and artillery.

As a result, the officer classes were improved and became more meritocratic.  The military gives newly commissioned officers shit, but in reality, it’s far better than it was a century or two ago where most of the officers were there because they came from the right families and got their commissions through nepotism.

It may be a new reordering of society.  It may be that war has become too easy with drones and missiles doing a lot of the killing, with very little Iwo Jima and Market Garden type hard fighting for months where whole units are wiped out.  But we’re going backward with our officers.

They are now, once again, a noble class.

Let this sink in. Tucker Carlson on live Fox TV called Gen Mark Milley the Chairman of the JCS “Stupid” and a “Pig”. Why hasn’t he been terminated? Who talks like this about a public official? Mark Milley …Princeton and Colombia. Years in combat.

— Barry R McCaffrey (@mccaffreyr3) June 25, 2021

Yes.  Our generals are elites with Ivy League educations.  They are the new nobility.

How many Leftists have I covered who were officers and then come out into politics using their military service as a credential while simultaneously saying their service is why they know you can’t own certain types of guns.

They were officers and so they are just better than you.  They earned their nobility through service the way the knights of old did, and you didn’t, you shitty civilian.  Why didn’t you serve, are you a traitor or a coward?  Either way, you have no right to question them, no matter how much it seems that they hate America, you are beneath them.

Driving a desk while receiving a DOD paycheck has become one of the tools of credentialism in America, which is why you see Progressives flocking to the military that the Left used to hate.

When the military was a meritocracy that elevated the working classes, they hated it.

Now that getting a commission is like getting an MBA from Harvard and officers get to study the same sorts of pseudo-intellectual bullshit like CRT, the officer class of the military is wonderful and how dare you question it.

Progressives are regressing our military too.

I want to be clear, I am not victim-blaming.

No to go off on too much of a tangent, but that is a phrase that I have come to hate.  To me, victim-blaming is when you say or imply “the victim deserved X because he/she did Y.”  Unfortunately, it has come to mean “finding any fault with the victim’s actions that lead to their demise.”

I approach these situations from the point of view of a forensics expert, i.e., that it’s necessary to understand the totality of what happened, and that includes the actions of the victim.  Such an analysis can be done without saying the victim deserved their fate.

For example, no woman deserves to be stabbed to death by a vagrant.  Still, it should be noted that a woman, walking alone in a secluded area under an overpass where mentally unstable vagrants are known to live, is taking an unnecessarily high risk.  If the point of forensic engineering is to understand why something bad happened so it can be prevented in the future, we need to understand what happened so that we can tell other women to avoid going into secluded areas under overpasses where mentally unstable vagrants are known to live.

This to me isn’t victim blaming, it’s understanding the situation fully.

No to the prime topic of this post.

A Good Samaritan with a gun, an armed civilian, stopped a mass shooter in Colorado.  However, he was killed by the responding police.

More people would have died if not for the heroic actions of Johnny Hurley, who was killed in the Arvada shooting, according to police

A Denver man, who was one of three people killed during a shooting in Arvada this week, is being remembered as a hero for his actions.

The tragic shooting took place on Monday in Olde Town Arvada, claiming the lives of Arvada Police Officer Gordon Beesley, Colorado resident Johnny Hurley, and the suspect.

“If not for the heroic actions of Mr. Hurley and Arvada Police Officers on that day, more innocent lives would have been lost,” Detective David Snelling with the Arvada Police Department wrote in a release on Wednesday.

This news article explains how this tragedy unfolded.

“Samaritan” who killed Arvada gunman was shot by officer while holding suspect’s AR-15, police say

An Arvada police officer fatally shot “good Samaritan” Johnny Hurley in Olde Town after Hurley killed a gunman intent on murdering police officers and picked up the gunman’s AR-15, investigators said Friday.

Minutes earlier, the gunman ambushed Arvada police Officer Gordon Beesley, fatally shooting him. Hurley shot the gunman, identified by police as Ronald Troyke, and was holding Troyke’s AR-15 rifle when an Arvada officer arrived, according to a timeline of events released by police.

Investigators found a note written by Troyke with multiple statements about wanting to kill police, including, “Today I will kill as many Arvada officers as I possibly can.”

The incident began with a 12:49 p.m. call to police from Troyke’s brother who asked for a welfare check because Troyke was going to “do something crazy,” according to the timeline.

Soon after, at 1:17 p.m., police dispatch received a call about a “suspicious person” in Olde Town Square, police said. A teen reported being approached by an older man who made a weird noise and showed them a condom, police said.

Beesley responded to the square at 1:31 p.m., parking on Webster Street before walking through an alley toward the plaza.

Troyke pulled up in his truck, parked and ran after the officer with a semi-automatic shotgun, police said. Troyke then yelled at Beesley, and shot the officer when he stopped and turned around, according to the timeline.

After he killed Beesley, police said, Troyke shot out the windows of a patrol car and fired shots in the air. He then returned to his truck to retrieve an AR-15 rifle.

As the gunman ran back toward Olde Town Square, Hurley shot him with a handgun, according to police. Hurley, 40, of Denver, had been shopping inside the nearby Army Navy Surplus Store when he saw the gunman walk by, a witness previously told The Denver Post.

“A responding Arvada Police Officer then encountered Mr. Hurley, who was holding the suspect’s AR-15,” police wrote. “The officer shot him.”

Now look at this from the point of view of the police.

They have a warning that there is a crazy guy out there who wants to kill as many cops as possible.

One officer has already been killed in an ambush.

They have a potential mass shooting event on their hands.

They roll up on the scene and see a guy holding an AR-15.

They stop the potential mass shooter with the exact and appropriate tactics that police (except the BrCoward County Sheriff’s Department) have been trained to use since Columbine.  Shoot the fucker before he can kill anyone else.

Except that this time the guy with the AR was a Good Samaritan who just took out the real threat.

This is absolutely tragic but totally understandable.

The key element that made this go from “hero CCW stops cop killer” to “Good Samaritan killed by cops” is the moment Hurley picked up the AR.

Hurley did not deserve to die for what he did.  I understand the impulse to control the bad guy’s weapon so he can’t use it again.  But the cops rolling into a potential ambush didn’t know that and did what they were trained to do.

Take Hurley out of this for a second.

Had the cops rolled up, saw Trokey with his rifle, stopped, and immediately took him out, we would all be saying “good shoot.”

We need to look at it from this point of view so that we don’t make this same mistake in the future.

CCW permit holders are good at taking out mass shooters.

The lesson to learn is what do to once that has been done.

DO NOT TOUCH THE MASS SHOOTER’S WEAPON

If you’ve done your job he’s incapacitated.  If he moves towards his weapon, shoot him again.  But do not try to secure his weapon.  You are not a cop, that is not your job.

When the police start to roll up on the scene, DO NOT APPEAR TO BE A THREAT.

Reholster or put down your weapon.  Put your hands up.  Appear as not threatening as possible.

Of course, if you have time call the police yourself and tell them you are the good guy, but you may not have time for that.

The police are going into a dangerous situation.  You want all their snap judgments to be in your favor as an innocent to be protected.

You survived the bad guy, now you have to survive the police encounter.

This was tragic but totally avoidable.

I am not victim-blaming.  I am doing a forensic analysis of this event to impart lessons to other CCW Good Samaritans so they can make it home alive instead of being praised as heroes posthumously with a Go Fund Me for the family (verified by the Arvada Police, see the first news article).

Othal Wallace had shot a Daytona Police Officer a couple of days ago.

The Daytona Beach Police released this video of suspect 29-year-old Othal Wallace. Investigators say he shot an officer in the head. The condition of the officer is not known. pic.twitter.com/qKbOOxVRmP

— Dave Bondy (@DaveBondyTV) June 24, 2021

I understand down here in South Florida, the news of this particular shooting was not as relevant because of the Surfside Building collapse, but I did not see much coverage anywhere either. And I will presume that all references to a NFAC and “Black Militia” will be downplayed or scrubbed  if this ever hits the big Media Circus Tent.

Unfortunately for Mr. Wallace, Florida is not Minneapolis or Seattle or Portland.  He won’t get bailed out by generous progressive groups because I doubt he will be granted bail. His best bet is whatever lawyer gets to defend him tries his/her best to contest the extradition for as long as possible.