3.30.2022

Random Wednesday Morning Thoughts




This was a faithful reader submitted photo from downtown Fort Worth. At the time, the only thing I could find out about was: "The naked man was driving his car, yes naked. Ran red light, hit car, hit construction equipment and rolled on to curb. Then he got out of his car, naked."  I don't know anything more than that now. 

  • More videos from Jacksboro school surveillance cams are out. The elementary school principal almost had the ceiling come down on him a second after this screenshot. 

  • This guy honestly and correctly called CRT a "manufactured crisis" last week, and last night he got cancelled. No word on whether he had to walk by a book burning party on his way out the door. 

  • "HOUSTON — A Texas high school teacher who was sued after he tried to force a Black student who refused to say the Pledge of Allegiance to transcribe it . . .  has opted to forego trial with the payment of a $90,000 settlement."  

    • He told anyone who refused to write the pledge that they would get a zero and "launched into a tirade, secretly recorded by [the student], in which he made an offer to defiant students, aimed at [the student]: “If you can tell me two countries you’d rather go to, I will pay your way there if they’re communist or socialist. Most of Europe is socialist and it’s crumbling. Or it’s communism.”
    • By the way, compelled speech of the government forcing you to recite the Pledge was held to be unconstitutional in 1943. Forced speech has never exactly been a hallmark of democracy. 
  • At the Oscars, a White Men Can't Jump reunion had Woody Harrelson and Wesley Snipes joking about getting high before the show. On a related note, I noticed 14 people are in the Wise County Jail right now on marijuana charges because they are too poor to get out. 

  • Parker County is out busting up raves, but I had to pull out an oddly worded sentence from the story. Once you get passed there's probably a missing word in their somewhere, you next have to figure out what the phrase "edm lifestyle group" means since it isn't used anywhere else in the article. (Spoiler alert: It's "electric dance music." I'm guessing these folks are not.)

     

  • We need a documentary on 26 year old GOP Rep. Madison Cawthorn. 

     



  • This is a completely false claim of officers getting sick by simply being "near" Fentanyl. Heck, John Oliver just did a package on this false claim phenomenon just a couple of days ago on Last Week Tonight.

  • And another.

  • You know the F-35 has questionable value when the always eye-popping defense budget (just unveiled to be a whopping $773 billion - a 4% increase) will actually cut the projected purchase of the fighter jets from 94 planes to 61 planes. 

  • Idiocracy. 

  • Paragraph from Newsday (cover below): "Eve Wilkowitz, a 20-year-old publishing company secretary, was abducted, raped and strangled more than four decades ago when she returned to Bay Shore from her job in Manhattan. The case was never solved — until now. Suffolk County police and prosecutors told Newsday on Tuesday that advances in forensic techniques and genetic genealogy revealed that her killer is believed to be a man who died of cancer in 1991 . . . .
  • Messenger: Above the Fold

at 8:31 AM

3.29.2022

Random Tuesday Morning Thoughts




Someone had sent me this picture of six trooper cars parked at lunch at Chili's in Decatur. That photo still seems odd. Today you'd never see six troopers on duty in Wise County at the same time. (And how'd they find six spots together, anyway?)

  •  Final Will Smith/Chris Rock thoughts.

    • Something is weird about all this. 
    • Will Smith's going from laughing to storming the stage in the blink of the eye is bizarre. His rage made him do what could have been a career ending act, yet that rage was the result of a delayed reaction? 
    • Chris Rock's physical reaction to the slap was weird, too. You would think it would stagger him, but he took it soooo smoothly. And another thing: He never once touched his face after being slapped. How does he not do that?
    • Do I think it was all staged or fake? No, I don't. But something isn't quite right, and I can't put my finger on it. 
    • Side note: If you haven't seen Jomboy's video breakdown of the event, it's pretty good. 
  • Chris Fostel, son of the late Judge John Fostel, has passed away of cancer.  (I had reminisced about Judge Fostel's passing last Friday, but I had absolutely no idea that Chris had died the day before.)
  • Liberally Lean Take-It-To-The-Bank Wise County Weather Alert: Heavy rains with high winds during a window from 10:30 p.m. to 2:30 a.m.
  • Bridgeport PD is hiring officers (and they've even got a recruiting video.) 
  • Clay County is always a gold mine of fun news. 

  • The Dallas Morning News this weekend had a favorable feature story about the Paradise man who fell to his death off a rooftop bar. (I've long commented about the press and PR savviness of one the family's lawyers, and I wonder if she had something to do with this.)



  • This is a wild video. And narrator, and other people initially standing around, didn't seem to understand the danger that there were more cars coming. 

  • I've said from the beginning I didn't understand why Jerry Jones' alleged daughter filed the recent lawsuit accusing him of being her dad. The lawsuit really didn't ask for anything other than a declaration of parenthood.  Jones response to the lawsuit yesterday gave an answer: She was just following through on her threat to sue him for that declaration if he didn't pay her not to file it. Ugh:  I can't find an actual pdf of Jones' Answer. 

  • Trump Insurrection News:
    • A federal judge yesterday, in ruling that the emails of one of the coup architects. John Eastman, had to be turned over, concluded that Trump likely violated the law. 

    • But the greatest line in the ruling perfectly described the whole insane process of trying to convince Mike Pence to ignore the constitution and not certify the count of the electoral college votes on January 6th: "A coup in search of a legal theory." 

    • And this morning we've now got a Watergate Tapes feel to the whole thing. Seven hours and 37 minutes are missing.  Nixon was sunk because of a missing 18 minutes. 


  • We've got an update on the misdemeanor criminal trials in Tarrant County last week. The State went 1-7. 

  • I don't remember this double murder of teenagers in Weatherford in 1983. Story.

     

  • Legal nerd stuff: The Fort Worth Court of Appeals just rejected a man's attempt to gain access to the Wise and Jack County District Attorney's files by using the Texas Public Information Act. It originated out of an odd procedural posture in that he had already been convicted after a jury trial and his appeal had failed. He never complained that anything in the file was held back during the criminal appeal. 

at 8:29 AM

3.28.2022

Random Monday Morning Thoughts




Civil War veterans - from the Confederate side - pose in front of the still-in-use Wise County Courthouse in 1906. Source with background info.

  • Updated standings in the Liberally Lean Pick 'Em Tourney. Trey and Paul might be able to catch John even with my tricked up scoring system.  


  • If you haven't seen it, here is the video, unedited, of the footage of Will Smith slapping Chris Rock last night. (The American audience saw this as ABC was hitting the mute button.)  Here is slow motion video of the slap. Man, this is wild. 




    • All of this was instigated when Rock jokingly addressed Will Smith's wife from the stage: “Jada, I love you: G.I. Jane 2 -- can’t wait to see it.”  Quality humor, by the way, but we have to factor in that Smith's wife has suffered from alopecia, a condition of hair loss. She has a buzz cut because of it. 

    • The odd part is that Will Smith initially laughed at the joke. I think this is a big deal that he didn't take offense at all about it.
       
    • I'm siding big time with Chris Rock on this one. Will Smith was way out of line. 
    • Prediction I heard this morning: Next year Rock and Smith will be joint presenters at the Oscars. I bet that happens. 
  • The White House walked back Biden's off-script comment which I think is something they absolutely shouldn't have done. Then again, if they didn't subsequently tone it down, President Biden would be asked about exactly what he meant every time he comes in front of reporters for weeks to come. 

  • There are continuing to be reports of Russia being willing to settle the "conflict" if Ukraine were to be cut in half as was done with Korea. Little known fact: This isn't a new plan.  Stay with me here. 
    • You probably don't recall Trump's campaign manager, Paul Manafort, oddly shared campaigning polling data to to a Russian named Konstantin Kilimnik.  Why he was doing that was never known.
    • Kilimnik, during the campaign in 2016, flew all the way to the U.S. just to meet with Manafort to get the data and to discuss something which he believed to be very important. The meeting occurred at Grand Havana Room in Manhattan. 
    • Kilmnik, during the meeting, was actually trying to persuade Manafort to get on board with the divided Ukraine plan. (They wanted that part of Ukraine because that's were the oil and the coastline is.) He later told Manafort in an email,  “[A]ll that is required to start the process is a very minor ‘wink’ (or slight push) from" Donald Trump. 
    • This was all buried in the Mueller Report, and the only way I found out about it was when just finishing this book written in 2020. The prosecutor/author only spent a few pages on it, but my ears perked up because those pages dealt with Russia and Ukraine.   

  • There is security footage of the tornado hitting the gym at Jacksboro elementary. Here. 

  • A guy sent a drone up to take a look at the windmill damage in Jack County as well. It seems like a handful of them were damaged (but it's also a great way to see the number of them that have gone up over recent years. 

  • The only way this is true is if Columbia has far greater drug screening techniques than the U.S.  

  • I'll say it again, for such a high town area, there are sure a lot of shootings in Uptown. And they have this weird shared characteristic of occurring on Sunday evenings. 

  • What's up with hookah lounges? You'd think they'd be a pretty laid back place. We first had a shooting at one in Las Vegas, then I noticed we had one in Dallas, and then I saw this story from the weekend.

  • A faithful reader sent me this pic of  a T-shirt for sale in, of all places, a thrift store in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

  • The Tech - UT rivalry bled over into baseball this weekend when Tech won Friday's game via a player stealing home. Video. 

  • The Clarence Thomas failure-to-recuse scandal has already become yesterday's news. Now we can expect Ginni Thomas to be the featured speaker at CPAC. That's the way things work these days.



at 8:33 AM

3.25.2022

It's Friday -- Let's Get Out of Here

at 2:30 PM
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