Outer Range

I’m halfway through the first season and it is a good sci-fi mystery.

No politics.  No wokeness.

Just a deeply intriguing mystery.

Josh Brolin and Will Patton are as excellent as ever.

Highly recommend.

This story was left by reader Z:

Plano man gets life in prison for fatal punch outside pizza shop

A 38-year-old Plano man will spend the rest of his life behind bars for a sucker punch that killed another man who just happened to be picking up a pizza for dinner at the same time.

The victim had stopped at the Little Caesars Pizza restaurant on Park Road in Plano after work, ordered a pizza and waited inside.

James Gutierrez and his fiancé arrived a few minutes later and also ordered a pizza but decided to wait in their car.

Prosecutors said surveillance video showed the victim later walk out the restaurant with a pizza in hand. He puts it down on the hood of his truck as Gutierrez calls him over. Without any warning, Gutierrez punches him in the head with a closed fist.

Jurors heard testimony about Gutierrez gang affiliation and past criminal history including sex offenses before deciding his punishment. He was also accusing of assaulting his fiancé while out on bond awaiting trial.

One sucker punch and the victim died.

I didn’t see the video but I am almost positive that the victim lost consciousness when he was struck and fell over hitting his head on the concrete parking lot, possibly a curb or parking block.  Usually that’s the part that’s fatal.

The lessons here are two fold:

Maintain your situational awareness so you don’t get sucker punched.

A bare fisted punch from a grown man can be fatal, we need to make the laws relating to self defense acknowledge that.

Faithful readers who followed this blog through our analysis of the Broward (Coward) County Sheriff response to the Parkland shooting understand the limitless seething contempt I have for disgraced Sheriff Scott Israel.

I didn’t think it would be possible for a LEO chief to be worse than him, but Uvalde School Police Chief Pete Arredondo may have cleared that bar.

Uvalde school police chief ditched his radio during shooting because he ‘thought it would slow him down’ and claims he ‘didn’t know he was in charge’ as he describes standing outside classroom while 12 kids and teachers inside waited for help

The Uvalde School Police Chief widely blamed for the disastrous cop handling of the massacre at an elementary school has revealed he intentionally ditched his radios because he thought they would ‘slow him down’, and said he didn’t know he was in charge of the operation.

He has been widely blamed for not responding to the shooting more promptly, and Texas officials even said he gave directives to cops telling them not to try to breach the classroom where Ramos had barricaded himself inside with kids.

Now, in his first interview since the atrocity, he told The Texas Tribune that he gave no such directive or any others – because he didn’t think he was in charge.

‘I didn’t issue any orders. I called for assistance and asked for an extraction tool to open the door,’ he said.

He also says he didn’t know there were kids still alive inside the classroom because he didn’t have his police radio on him.

He had decided to ditch it on his way into the school because he thought it would ‘slow him down’ – a decision that experts have slammed as unheard of.

‘Arredondo believed that carrying the radios would slow him down. One had a whiplike antenna that would hit him as he ran. The other had a clip that Arredondo knew would cause it to fall off his tactical belt during a long run.

‘Arredondo said he knew from experience that the radios did not work in some school buildings,’ the Texas Tribune reports.

Let us break down these failures:

He is the chief of police for the Uvalde school district but didn’t think he was in charge of what is clearly the worst crisis in Uvalde school district history.

He abandoned his communication equipment because he thought it was a hindrance.

One had an antenna that annoyed him.  The other would fall off his belt.  These are the most absolutely worthless and pathetic excuses I have ever heard.

He tried to justify it by saying he knew the radios didn’t work in the school buildings.  As the chief of school police it was his responsibility to make sure they had radios that work in schools.

Try to comprehend a chief of police explaining why they have communication equipment that they know doesn’t work inside their specific jurisdiction and thinking that’s okay.

There is so much bad leadership and incompetence in this interview I’m floored.

I can guarantee you that the reality is that Pete Arredondo assumed this job was a sinecure.  Chief of school police sounds like an easy government job with a fat salary and great pension he could coast on until retirement.

Shit went down and he ditched his communication equipment so he could hide from responsibilities he was totally unprepared for and incapable of dealing with.

But it gets worse.

More than a DOZEN of the 33 children and three teachers trapped in Uvalde school during massacre were alive and awaiting rescue for an HOUR as cops scrambled for key to unlock classroom and up to 60 officers waited outside for bulletproof shields

More than a dozen of the 33 children and three teachers trapped in the Texas school during the massacre were alive and awaiting rescue for an hour as cops scrambled for a key to unlock a classroom door, a review has found.

The terrified victims were stuck inside the building for 77 minutes as bungling officers tried to figure out how to get past a ‘steel jamb’ entrance to the room Salvador Ramos, 18, was in, the study of video footage showed.

Pete Arredondo, the embattled chief of Uvalde school police, was among the first officers to enter Robb Elementary during the original siege.

But when he and his officers were pushed back – with two injured in the gunfire – he did not let them enter again for another 40 minutes as they waited for better equipment to arrive.

Ramos managed to butcher 19 children and two teachers at the school in the time it took for police to shoot him dead an hour and a half after he broke in last month.

All of the breaching equipment in the county and they fucked around waiting for a key.

And they fucked around for over an hour while the shooter casually killed teachers and children.

Arredondo cost lives.  He absolutely made it possible for the casualty count to be as high as it was.

Every single thing that the department did was wrong because their chief was a worthless cowardly piece of incompetent shit.

Unfortunately for the people of Uvalde and fortunately for Pete Arredondo, he’s protected by qualified immunity.

The only honorable thing for him to do though (and I said this about Scott Israel too) is to pull a Budd Dwyer during a press conference.

Miguel posted the clip from CNN about the ballistics testing of rifle and pistol ammo from Wayne State University.

Yes, rifle ammunition generally has more terminal performance than handgun ammunition.

The thing I don’t get about this point is this:

Are they arguing that handgun rounds are more survivable than rifle rounds so handguns are less bad?

We in the shooting world know our gold rule is “Never point the gun at anything you don’t intend to destroy.”

We understand that the intent of shooting something alive is to kill it.

We don’t bet on survivability of a wound as a safety factor.

Nobody says “don’t point a rifle as something you don’t intend to kill but you can take that risk with a handgun because they’re not as dangerous.”

I fundamentally cannot wrap my mind around the implied argument that maybe if a school shooter used a handgun or a 22 those kids would have been wounded but alive, but because he used an AR they are all dead.

No.

We understand guns and we understand that one should assume that anything hit with a bullet is going to die.

Of all the attacks on guns that the anti-gun world is making, this is one that really shorts out my logic circuits.

From NPR:

Inflation soars to an over 40-year high. These are the ways Americans are coping

Clay Watkins loves LaCroix brand sparkling water — especially the watermelon flavor.

So the suburban Chicago school teacher was excited when he spotted it on sale at his local grocery store: two packages for $8.

“I went to grab the package and I was like, ‘Wait a second,'” Watkins recalls.

He was surprised to find a package that once held 12 cans of sparkling water had been downsized to 8 — with no change in price — a common practice known as “shrinkflation.”

“I’m not a mathematician,” he says. “I teach science. But I think that’s a 33% price increase.”

The Labor Department said Friday that consumer prices in May were 8.6% higher than a year ago — the largest increase since December of 1981. Prices rose 1% between April and May, led by jumps in the price of gasoline, groceries and rent.

Davey says since that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine pushed gasoline prices through the roof even middle-income consumers have begun pushing back against price hikes. They’re increasingly turning to discount stores and opting for cheaper generic products.

Joanne Lee buys regular eggs now, not the more-expensive, free-range kind she prefers. She’s traded down on her salad toppings as well.

“There’s a certain crouton that I like. But that is like $1.50 more than the generic Kroger brand, so I’ve switched over,” Lee says. “They’re not bad. But they’re not the quality that I usually like.”

LaCroix is the favorite swill of AWFLs, so it can go to $8 a can for all I give a fuck, and I hope it does.

This whole article is just grotesque in its framing:

Woe into the poor bottom rung of the elite who are forced to buy the store brand of their favorite elite free range organic products like the rest of us haven’t been scrimping and saving on generics and buying in bulk for a while now.

But maybe this is a good thing. When some AWFL has to settle for generic zero calorie artificial fruit flavored carbonated piss-water over the brand with the elitist French name, maybe she can Karen at a Democrat fund raiser and they might actually fucking do something.

I’m going to keep bringing these up because they are important.

Fight at MSG #NYR #NoQuitInNY #Fights #TampaBay pic.twitter.com/xxL9oD1if1

— Scott Kaplan (@ScottKaplanOn) June 10, 2022

The victim did not die, thank God.

But he did lose consciousness, which means a concussion and some sort of brain injury.

The most dangerous part of these sucker punches is that when the victim falls over and his his/her head on the ground.  That is usually what is fatal.

This guy probably survived because the way he fell he hit butt first then hit his head.  When the guys topple over sideways and strike the ground head first is often fatal.

The attacker was charged with two counts of assault, but really this should be attempted murder.

Unarmed does not mean not dangerous.  A sucker punch from an adult male is devastating.

A buddy sent me this:

I spent $95 on gas this week. He could’ve been planning to roll tanks through the house of reps and building gallows for traitors… I still wouldn’t care about Jan 6th. https://t.co/ATDBJEm88c

— Pleasedontinfringe (@noinfringing) June 10, 2022

I can’t buy groceries for a family of four for under $175/week.  Most weeks are creeping up on $200.  I was buying the same stuff for $100 maybe $125 in 2020.

It costs me $65 to fill up a 13 gallon tank on a compact car.  I’ve pretty much stopped driving my pickup because it’s too expensive to fill a 26 gallon tank at 13 mpg.

I don’t care if it’s Trump or DeSantis or whomever.

If a president can bring gas, milk, and chicken breast back under $1.79 per gallon or pound, he can appoint himself God Emperor of the United States and level DC into a parking lot for all I care.