And yes, this is from some time ago. It only recently came to my attention by way of the video embedded below.
The body camera footage following an officer involved shooting last month in Decatur was released on Thursday. Now, there are also new details about what led up to it.
Decatur Police said that 54-year-old, Michael Boliard pointed a crossbow at people and officers on April 22 in broad daylight and near a busy transit center.
He pointed a crossbow at police. He got shot, multiple times. Cops then rendered aid, until an ambulance could arrive and take him to a local hospital.
Boliard is sitting in the Macon County Jail ahead of his trial. He’s been charged with aggravated assault of a peace officer, aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, possession of a controlled substance and armed violence.
Macon County, Illinois, is home to Decatur. It is 135 miles due west of Indianapolis, Indiana. It is about a 180 mile drive south-southeast of Chicago.
The three officers were not charged in the shooting.
Def Con just finished in Las Vegas. Def Con ran from 5 August to 8 August. Black Hat, also in Las Vegas, was from the 1st to the 6th. In theory, Def Con is a hacker conference, and Black Hat is Security Consulting conference. I'm not sure how segregated the two conferences are these days.
There are usually warnings about using your personal cellphone anywhere near either conference, or WiFi anywhere in the area, without a lot of extra precautions.
It seems someone was doing a deauthentication attack on the inflight WiFi, on Delta Flight 591 from Las Vegas to Atlanta.
Which was probably not a smart thing to do.
In a deauthentication attack, clients connected to a Wi-Fi network receive forged packets pretending to be from the legitimate access point (AP), telling them to disconnect.
You then provide your own access point, hoping people will connect, which puts you in the position of doing a Man in the Middle attack. This is why you shouldn't use a public WiFi unless you are also using a VPN.
Mary Perrault, a member of online frequent flyer groups with no formal affiliation to Delta Air Lines, states that the fake Wi-Fi network showed a phishing page that collected “personal credentials and Google login data.”
After the aircraft docked at the gate, federal authorities and airport police boarded the aircraft to question the suspects and seize their portable Wi-Fi hardware, Perrault said.
They don't say what that equipment is, but a Hak5 Pineapple is between $250 and $1200, depending on the model. That isn't your only choice of course. They may have also confiscated any computers, and maybe even phones. So not too smart. Unless the feds swept up the wrong people.
Just in case you missed it, Massachusetts, which is a rich, liberal enclave in North East America, just signed into law a bill which permits abortion at the point of birth. Reflect on that. At. The Point. Of. Birth. As in, kill your baby as you give birth to it. There's no nuance here, no grey area, just sheer demonic infanticide.
The Dragon Award winning novel Gun Runner, by me and John D. Brown, is being adopted into a graphic novel by Hound Dog Media. The writer is the legendary Mike Baron (The Punisher, Nexus) and the art is by Marcelo Salazar.
Click thru for some cover art. There is a short video at the Kickstarter link (click thru).
While I'm probably not the target audience for this book, I might look up the original. It is fascinating to me to see an independent comic industry grow up around Kickstarter, and Rippasend. Just when I thought the American comic book was dead...
It turns out taking the entire Marvel and DC comic universes, and turning them woke, turning everyone gay, race swapping and/or gender swapping major characters hasn't worked. Diamond, the comic distributor, had a de facto monopoly, and they still went bankrupt. Marvel comics should have been able to print money during the height of the MCU, but the comics division had already gone woke. While Iron Man was in the theaters, in the movie Captain America: Civil War, Ironheart was in comic book shops.
Ironheart was in the comic shops. Is anyone shocked it didn't sell?
And after going Woke drove the Marvel comics division into the ground, they did exactly the same thing with the MCU. Why? Because Hollywood (today's Hollywood) hates money.
Online database service Metabase was compromised. (Bleeping Computer)
Not foolish enough to use an online database? No problem, rest assured that you have your personal registered with someone who was foolish enough.
The Democrat Party’s America: Victor Davis Hanson – A history problem. The news business.
Lord Carney’s Canada: No prayers for you. Only approved news allowed.
They Were Voted Out. They Refuse to Leave. Now What?
Avenal, Calif., a city in the rural Central Valley, has become an unlikely example of election denialism months after a recall election.
From Ace, Trump Settlels In for Long Siege of Iran, "I had hoped for a more "kinetic" operation with Iran done and dusted a year before the mid-terms. But that's now impossible, of course, so a long slow strangulation will do."
Billionaire Heiress Who Backed Mamdani Now Funds House Dems
Billionaire Democratic donor Elizabeth Simons has given $354,000 to the party’s establishment campaign while simultaneously funding far-left socialist causes that alarm party leadership.
3. One of the most thoughtful experts on Islam and its consequences in Western nations is Elaine Ellinger. She has just posted this article on Muslims on juries where the accused is a Muslim. Well worth clicking over to read. A short excerpt:
Northern Virginia is US Intel Central, so it is crawling with even more surveillance than the rest of America, and you know how much is in normal America. Whoever this is, must be confident they control the surveillance, and it must not be any agency under US Government control.
Gun sales surged in Twin Falls the day after a mass shooting at a local In-N-Out restaurant, with at least one gun store reporting one of its busiest sales days in years. Local firearms dealers say the spike in purchases is a reminder that owning a gun and knowing how to use it are two very different things.
One of the things, that even the NY Times has mentioned, is that after Jordan Salinas witnessed a mass shooting years ago, he decided to train up, to be prepared if he ever encountered a similar situation. He did, and he was able to act, and he had a positive impact on the outcome of the recent incident in Twin Falls.
Law enforcement has credited armed citizens who responded to the mass shooting at In-N-Out with saving lives.
"We have hero citizens in our community and these citizens ... did, and undoubtedly saved lives," Twin Falls County Sheriff Jack Johnson said.
Training is key. And while the gun-store owners quoted in the article might be trying to sell training, I am not. I used to do NRA safety training, but that was long, long ago.
I find it odd that the article doesn't mention Mr. Salinas by name, which is why I included a link to my post on his actions. (Hat tip to Libs Of TikTok)
Paula Solanas de Miguel spent years helping young people recognize the warning signs of gender violence. On 31 July, the 27-year-old Red Cross volunteer was found bleeding to death on the floor of her flat in Santander, stabbed by her Moroccan boyfriend, whom she was trying to leave.
The hat tip goes to Paul Joseph Watson and his video It Happened Again.... (less than one minute.)
Another song and artist I was reminded of thanks to WXRT and Saturday Morning Flashback. Granted, it was a long way back that it was featured on WXRT. It has been languishing in drafts for a very long time.
Greg Kihn passed away on 13 August 2024, at the age of 75.
Measuring the Pareto Frontier of AI models. (DeepSWE)
A Pareto Frontier is a line drawn on a chart through a set of solutions that are each the best at a different task, but there is no single winner.
An interesting point is that GPT 5.6 Luna - which I have never tried - is nearly as good as Claude Fable but much, much cheaper, with the total for the test suite coming to $0.61 vs. Fable's $21.63.
Meanwhile, if you’ve been following the various WNBA dramas - and what organization full of angry, ungrateful women would not be full of drama? - you’ll enjoy these pictures. Only one is altered.
The Chicago Public Schools’ (CPS) annual financial crisis played out again and will once again drag Chicago into providing financial assistance which will provide a temporary financial reprieve while making it significantly harder for the city to address its own financial crisis.
It’s called weather. Humans have done fine with the weather throughout our history. This is just the cult being the cult, doomsaying, blaming things that really have nothing to do with the weather and everything to do with the kiddies really just spending a lot of time alone at home, playing games, doing social media stuff, etc.
This whole thing kicked off over a beer run and two strangers who had absolutely nothing invested in this man's night still tried to talk him down and walk him out of the door like grown folks, which is the part everybody's going to skip past on the way to the arguing about guns.
The video is 6 minutes.
A bit more from the video...
Those same two men who tried to diffuse it are the ones who ended it. And I want people to actually hold both of those facts in their hands at the same time. Because the caricature of the concealed carrier is a guy praying for a reason. And what we got instead were two guys who spent their first move trying to keep everybody alive. And their last move trying to keep everybody alive. Same objective, just different tool.
ASSAULT Two municipal police officers were injured in a knife attack late Monday afternoon in Toulouse. The suspect was arrested after the attack and reportedly made terrorist-related remarks.
Toulouse, France, is about a 405 kilometer drive west of Marseille, or about a 675 kilometer drive south of Paris.
Both officers were injured during the attack. One sustained an elbow injury, while his colleague was hit in the arm and neck. They were taken to Rangueil University Hospital. Their injuries are not life-threatening.
Barely a news item.
Police stabbed in Toulouse by "allahu akbar" screamer again today.
I didn’t mean for it to last this long. When I started InstaPundit, it was just the latest in a series of Internet ventures, ranging from Internet radio stations, and bands, on MP3.com, to RaveRights.com, an electronic music civil-rights site I set up because the DEA was at the time prosecuting raves under the so-called “crack house law,” which criminalizes owning or operating a building for the purpose of taking drugs.
Click thru for Glenn Reynolds' reflections.
In the middle of 2001 was still thinking that I wanted my career in corporate America. By the middle of 2002 I was living on my boat in Florida. And in 2004, I was so angry about the election coverage in the lamestream media, that I started the first incarnation of this blog. It still exists, but I had to make it private. Too many broken/hijacked links for the folks at Alphabet. The Trolls kept reporting me.
If you follow Heavy Metal, you probably know that Black Sabbath gave its final concert on 5 July 2025 in Birmingham, where they got started. Ozzy Osbourne passed away from a heart attack on 22 July 2025.
Iommi also appears on two tracks of Osbourne's last album, Patient Number 9, which came out in 2022.
On the upcoming album Iommi is joined by Norwegian vocalist Jorn Lande, Mercyful Fate bassist Becky Baldwin, and English drummer Karl Brazil. I have not seen anything about a tour, but given that Tony Iommi is 78 years old, there may not be much in the way of a tour.
This song is "World Alone" by Tony Iommi. It was released on July 29th as part of the announcement of his upcoming album, From the Dark. There is, of course, an official video; I find it very distracting, the way I find most official videos. It is easy enough to find if you're interested.
They don't say why this guy was raging, but it is usually some perceived slight. "You cut me off," or something equally inane.
A Dodge Journey followed closely behind, at times less than a foot away, witnesses said.
When both vehicles came to a stop in a construction zone in western Hancock County, prosecutors said the Dodge driver exited his vehicle and aggressively confronted the Volkswagen's occupants, threatening bodily harm.
He didn't even stop being an idiot, when the driver of the Volkswagen got out with a gun, and told him to get back in his car.
The Dodge driver continued advancing and was shot multiple times. He retreated to his vehicle, where he later died.
There was a witness who gave a lot of info to the police. This is the key statement.
The witness also told police, “If I was put in that predicament, if I was the guy in the Volkswagen, I would have been scared for my life.”
Hancock County, Indiana, is in the Indianapolis metropolitan area. The county like is roughly 10 miles east of downtown Indianapolis.
Considering that this incident took place on July 21st, we have another district attorney making a determination at warp speed. (Hat tip to US Carry)
Given how incredibly rare it is for the New York Times to give positive news coverage to a civilian who stopped a mass public shooting (and these occur all the time without getting news coverage), you have to give them credit when they do cover such a story.
A pro-gun/pro-gunowner story in the NYT... Surely this is a sign of the End Times. Or something. Maybe Hell has frozen over.
Pro-Second Amendment organizations and individual plaintiffs originally filed the suit in December 2023, accusing California jurisdictions of charging excessive fees and being dilatory in processing applications for carry permits. The group celebrated the settlement with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department (LASD) in a Thursday release.
The Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) was the organization that made the announcement.
Other plaintiffs in the case included Gun Owners of America (GOA), Gun Owners Foundation, seven individuals and the California Rifle and Pistol Association (CRPA).
The settlement addresses exorbitant fees, length of time spent processing applications, and the creation of a non-resident permitting scheme.
She Hulk was a disaster of a Disney+ show produced by Marvel back in 2022. It is too bad really. Somewhere around here I have a framed, reproduction cover of the The Savage She-Hulk, from 1979. (See the image below.) It isn't the best comic ever. It was created because at the time it was commissioned, The Hulk TV show was going, and The Bionic Woman had been launched, a female version of The Six-Million Dollar Man, and it was doing quite well. Marvel wanted to get to the copyright of a female Hulk before the network did.
The 1989-1994 run by John Byrne is the version everyone loves. She Hulk was mostly a member of the Avengers and The Fantastic Four during this era, though she did have at least one solo comic. This is the era when She Hulk began breaking the 4th wall.
I also like the early 2000s run starting with Single Green Female. Well, I like the art. I only read that online by way of my local library, so I may be misremembering how it was. I don't remember much about the story.‡ The image to the left is from that era.
I'm not sure if Single Green Female, from the early 2000s, is better or worse.
I was living on a boat in 2004, when Single Green Female was published. Comics were contraindicated by the humidity and the lack of space for collecting.
Her origin was that she was Bruce Banner's cousin. When she was critically wounded in an assassination attempt, he saved her with a blood transfusion, but she became She Hulk as a result, with a milder version of his condition. That origin is not allowed by Disney-Marvel. A man save a woman? We couldn't have that in 2022.
With all of that, the videos/posts making the rounds are about the disasterous Disney-Marvel TV show. And it was a disaster, though Disney thought it did well enough.
Then this X post, came up on Friday Night Tights. (That is an excerpt from the full FNT episode, just dealing with Marvel.) The bit dealing with the She Hulk show, starts at 9 minutes and 50 seconds into that excerpt. I don't have it queued up, because I like the whole thing.
The head writer and showrunner of “She-Hulk” was Jessica Gao. She was best known for being the credited writer on the “Pickle Rick” episode of “Rick and Morty.”
During the production of that episode, “Rick and Morty” showrunner Dan Harmon cast Susan Sarandon as the family’s… https://t.co/zNn8s73b4u
‡ I have strange tastes in comics, just like I have strange taste in music. In addition to liking some She Hulk that others don't, I also like The New 52 introduction of Batwoman, which most people hate. I thought the art was good, and the first story was OK, but it was Woke, and the 2nd and 3rd story arcs were not so good. (Batwoman in The New 52 was a lesbian kicked out of the military under "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," who went on to train with mercenaries. She was NOT Bruce Wayne's cousin.
While most people (except for the members of Bauhaus) consider the song "Bela Lugosi's Dead" to be the first Gothic Rock record, it didn't appear out of nowhere. And for whatever reason, Bauhaus always denied being Goth. The band described their style as "dark glam." Instead, they referenced other bands, specifically Siouxsie and the Banshees, as the pioneers of Goth.
I found this video a long time ago, during the dark ages of the 2020 lockdown. It has been in my drafts for that long. I was going to delete the post, but listening to the video again, I decided it is worth sharing. Some of you out there may be fans of Punk, and a fair number are probably fans of Post Punk (or New Wave, as suits insist on calling it). Goth is sort of Post-Post Punk, though there are several genres that can claim that title.
The video starts with Screamin' Jay Hawkins and "I Put a Spell on You." I prefer Nina Simone's 1965 cover of this song, and I will feature this version eventually. You might be familiar with the Creedence Clearwater Revival cover of the song.
Then it goes on to The Doors, who were the first band to be called Gothic Rock in a newspaper article. The song "The End" has a lot of the hallmarks of Goth. Dark lyrics being what I consider the cornerstone.
The Velvet Underground is often credited with starting a lot of things, everything from Punk to New Wave, Shoegaze and Goth. And of course launching the career of the singer Nico.
Nico of course left The Velvet Underground. Her first solo album was warped by the label into something she hated. The Marble Index, her 2nd album, was a rejection of the Pop sensibility of that 1st album. She died her hair red, and wore all, or mostly, black. This gives her a good claim on the title of the first Goth girl.
Alice Cooper is next with his odd lyrics, and stage antics, and makeup. His stage show was especially dark in the early years.
One of the things that most people miss, is the influence of Glam Rock, as an inspiration to Goth. You can see it in the makeup of Bowie, and in the song "In Every Dreamhome a Heartache" by Roxy Music.
While it's generally assumed that goth evolved from Punk, the dark-hued tendencies The Damned and Siouxsie and The Banshees bridging the gap, Glam Rock is where Goth's influence started in earnest.
Aesthetically, there's a short space between the two genres with Glam's sexual ambiguity, attraction to eyeliner and pale foundation, and the exaggerated clothing choices mirroring those of gothic culture. Sure, T. Rex, Roxy Music and David Bowie were more into glitter than their gloomy siblings ever would be, but there's a reason why all the key British Goth bands list at least one of them as a key influence.
Brian Eno gets a mention, because of the work he did after leaving Roxy Music.
Punk. There are a couple of bands mentioned, I doubt you've heard of them, unless you're into Punk.
Post Punk. Siouxsie and The Banshees and the Cure were two bands that moved into Goth, eventually. And Joy Division.
Finally we get to Bauhaus, and their 1979 single "Bela Lugosi's Dead."
According to Lighthouse Point police, two dogs got loose after escaping a fenced-in yard and began to roam through the neighborhood.
While in the area, police said they encountered a much smaller dog on the front porch of a home
One of the two dogs grabbed the small dog.
A family friend identified as Joe described the attack as "vicious," stating that the dog "grabbed onto the puppy... and shook it." He said the owner was forced to shoot the dog after other efforts to stop the attack failed.
The other dog fled, and then attacked a person nearby, biting that person on the leg.
Lighthouse Point, Florida, is about 10 miles north of Fort Lauderdale.
The owner of the large dogs eventually secured the other dog. As I type this, the incident is under investigation.
While I am not a lawyer, it is my understanding that you can defend your animals against other animals.
