Seventeen
Tarbos
“Sandy, would you look at this?”
Sandy Gutierrez had been doing casual duty helping her Vice President husband with note-taking and keeping track of his schedule of committee meetings, working breakfasts, and the various other functions taking place as the Convention worked through the vagaries of forming a Galactic government. At the moment, though, they were lunching in the courtyard outside the Conference Center’s main building, enjoying Tarbo’s pleasant summer sunshine.
A few meters away the Gutierrez’s daughter, Maria, sat sharing a bench with the younger Michael Crider. They faced each other on the bench, noses almost touching, sharing a bowl of some Tarbosian dish or other. Their eyes were locked together, wondering smiles on both their faces. As Sandy watched, Maria picked up a napkin, dabbed something from the Crider boy’s chin.
“Well, Heck, what do you expect? Maria’s a grown woman now. She’s turned nineteen right here on Tarbos, remember?” For her birthday, the Crider boy had presented her with a lovely green silk shawl and hair cover fashioned from the fleece of an animal native to Avalon. Maria had worn the lace about her shoulders almost continually since.
“I know, and Mike’s son is a great kid. He’s honest, he’s strong, he’s open, he washes his face and keeps his fingernails trimmed – everything I’d expect in a suitor for Maria. But…”
“But what, Heck?”
“Sandy,” Hector lowered his voice a notch. “He lives on Forest. That’s – well, I don’t know how far, but it’s light-years from Earth. We’re going back to Earth when this is over, Sandy, and he’ll go with his father back to Forest! How’s that going to affect those kids?”
Sandra Gutierrez sat down, laying her hand on her husband’s knee. “Heck, look at them. Look at the way Maria looks at Mike. Look at the way he looks at her.”
“That’s what I’m saying, I…”
Sandra cut her husband off. “Heck, it wasn’t that long ago you and I were young, remember.” She smiled at her husband. “You know, you looked at me just like Mike looks at Maria. And you know, sometimes, when you’re not being all Vice Presidential, you still do.” She waved a hand at the young people. “You said it yourself – young Mike is like his father, he’s honest, he’s strong. He’d make a fine husband. And Maria’s a grown woman, and she’s been here on Tarbos for almost six months now, falling in love with that young man.”
Hector Gutierrez looked helplessly at his wife, forced to the conclusion that he’d been subconsciously avoiding. Sandra, with the intuition borne of twenty-five years of marriage, read his mind for him. “Yes, Heck, I think we’d better accept the possibility that our daughter may be going to Forest when this is over, and not back to Earth with us.”
“It’s such a long way…”
“I know.” Sandy kissed her husband, and her eyes were damp. “But you know, this is another side of what we’re doing here. In the old days on Earth, you know, young people would go off to the New World – like our ancestors did, Heck, yours from Spain and mine from England and Germany – and their families would most often never see them again. As this Confederacy you’re building grows, this will happen to other families too, you know. And these kids aren’t growing up thinking of just Earth. They’re seeing a larger society. It’s not just America, Russia, Europe, Brazil, and the other hotspots on Earth. With this new government, kids are going to look out to Tarbos, Caliban, Zed, and new worlds we haven’t even found yet. History is starting all over again.”
“It doesn’t make it any easier knowing it’s inevitable. And it’s strange, but it doesn’t even make it any easier knowing that she’d be getting a fine young man.”
“I know.” Sandra Gutierrez stood up. “And, my dear husband, I’ve got a committee meeting of my own to get to – we’re designing a flag for this Confederacy of yours. We’ll be looking for some agenda time later this week to present our design for a vote.”
“A flag?” The Vice President looked surprised. “I don’t think anyone thought about that.”
“A nation has to have a flag, doesn’t it?”
“A nation?”
“The Confederacy. It’s a nation, isn’t it? The nation of humanity?”
“It is, isn’t it?” This gave Hector Gutierrez something new to think about. I wish Tony were here. He always was better at seeing the big picture.
“I’ll see you later, then.” Hector stood up, kissed his wife. He took one last look at his daughter, who was still lost in Mike Junior’s eyes. He shook his head and headed for the Conference Center for a committee meeting of his own.
Tarbos, OWME Engineering Design & Development
“How long will it take to build this?” Bob Pritchard wasn’t generally a man of great urgency, but the hyperphone messages from Earth and Caliban had made him break his usual habit.
Frad Gilpin looked the plans over casually, wiping a bit of egg sandwich out of his mustache as he did so. A fat, sloppy and profane man, he was a master with electronics and computer technology – good enough to lead to a prestigious posting as Chief of Tech on a high-status planet like Tarbos. “Two days, three maybe.”
Pritchard looked at his watch: Seven-thirty-four. “You’ve got until tomorrow afternoon. I want you ready to go to the Skyhook at fifteen tomorrow, to catch a shuttle to the Cachalot. You’ll install the scanner on the ship.”
“You want to spend a half a million dollars on hardware to stick on a freighter?”
“Just do it, Frad.”
“You’re the boss. You’re signing off on my equipment expense vouchers, right?”
Evening
Tarbos’ short day made the sunsets sudden; in the space of a few minutes, the sun slipped into the ocean off Mountain View, and darkness fell. Several committees were still meeting in the Conference Center, and the delegates not in committee were in and outside the Center. OWME Security Sergeant Gerry Stiles walked into the building, his uniform allowing him to pass the security guards unchallenged. He didn’t see the person he wanted to talk to, but he saw someone that would do almost as well.
“You’re Mike Crider’s son, right?”
“Yeah, that’s me.” The boy was hanging onto a tall, dark-haired girl Stiles didn’t recognize.
“Your Dad around?”
“He went off looking for something to eat,” the younger Crider answered. “Should be back in a little bit.”
“Damn. I needed to talk to him.”
“I could take you to him – I think I know where he went.”
Stiles looked the young man over. “Sure, I guess.”
“I’ll just be a minute, sweetie – will you wait for me here?”
Maria Gutierrez nodded, kissing Mike Junior on the cheek. “I need to go talk to my Mom for a minute anyway.”
They left the conference center together, angling around the corner of the building. “Dad’s been eating at that place across the Plaza – we can cut through the trees right over here.”
It was dark and still under the trees. Stiles was starting to sweat now. “Are you sure he went this way?”
“Pretty sure.” The boy stopped suddenly. Stiles almost bumped into him in the dark. “Well, I think he did.”
“You think?”
“He thinks right,” a soft voice came from behind him.
Stiles reached reflexively into his jacket pocket, but three sharp clicks from the darkness stopped him. “I wouldn’t,” the voice advised. “Junior, light us up.”
Mike Junior pulled a light-wand out of his pocket and snapped it, lighting up the area with a bright yellow glow. Stiles turned his head, carefully keeping his hands visible. Mike Crider Senior was leaning casually against a tree, an ancient – but no doubt fully functional – revolver in his hand, pointed at Stile’s heart.
With his free hand, Mike tipped the brim of his big gray hat back a little. “You’ve never been a hunter, have you? It’s all about setting up a stalk. Sometimes,” Mike continued in a conversational tone, “you even use a lure. But the trick is to draw your game into the place of your choosing.”
Pounding footsteps announced the arrival of a squad of Security troops, led by a lieutenant. “His right-hand jacket pocket,” Mike advised.
Two of the troops pinioned Stile’s arms while the Lieutenant searched him, quickly and efficiently. “A compressed-gas hypo,” he reported.
“Let’s get it analyzed. Be careful with that,” Mike advised. “I’m sure it’s dangerous as hell.”
Mike had expected Sergeant Stiles to be defiant, but instead, he was subdued – almost deflated. Mike pulled his jacket back and holstered his antique Colt before stepping up to the captured traitor.
“Gerry, you’ve been just a little too anxious to help since this whole thing started, and you’ve been a little too anxious to get me suspicious of the rest of the group. I began to wonder why, and then it hit me. The people who set off that bomb had to have someone on the inside, someone who could get them past all the security stations around the Conference Center. And it occurred to me that I hadn’t seen you that day; I checked with the Duty Sergeant and found out that you’d asked for the day off, and that nobody had seen or heard from you that whole time. And then it just sort of all came together, and it wasn’t hard to figure out what your next move would be.” Mike smiled; his hand still rested on the ivory grips of the ancient revolver. “You know, Bob Pritchard wanted to let his men handle this, but I wanted to be the one who caught you. I wanted to look you in the eyes when you knew you were caught. I can’t imagine why you’d want to betray your own kind, but that’s just what you’re doing, isn’t it? Somebody gave you orders to kill me, and that somebody was probably tall, skinny, and alien, weren’t they?”
Stiles remained silent. Mike frowned at him.
“All I want to know is, why?”
Stiles looked Mike in the eye and set his jaw. “I’m not telling you anything.”
“Oh, you will,” the Lieutenant snorted. “Get him out of here,” he ordered his men.
“Good work, Junior,” Mike told his son. “Let’s go get some supper.”
“Sure thing, Dad. OK if Maria comes with us?” After having faced his first charging roc at age sixteen, the capture of a would-be murderer was tame stuff for the younger Crider.
The Director’s Office
“Those entryway scanners were a great deal,” the Security Lieutenant told Bob Pritchard. “Whoever your guy is that cooked those up, he did a great job. They picked up Stile’s hypo easily enough.”
“Frad’s a pain in the ass in a dozen different ways, but he’s a hell of a technician. Thanks, Lieutenant, that’ll be all for now. Why don’t you head home? It’s been a long night.”
“I’ll do that, sir, thanks.” The Lieutenant spun on his heel and left.
“Has he told you anything yet?” Stefan Ebensburg asked from his chair near the window. Outside, the surf rolled in against the nighttime beach.
“No,” Pritchard replied. “But it’s pretty obvious where he’s getting his orders, isn’t it? There’s a cloaked ship up there, and somehow, they’re getting messages down to the surface without being detected. We’d have picked up a transmission or an orbital shuttle coming down.”
“We don’t know how their ship cloaks work,” Ebensburg pointed out. “It’s possible they can cloak a shuttle.”
“Yeah, but according to these messages, we might be able to put something together to track it. I’ve put Frad on that, too.”
“This is getting complicated. I’m sure Stiles wasn’t the only person they have on the payroll.”
“I’m sure he wasn’t,” Pritchard agreed. “There was Sergeant Stiles, and the two that were killed in the bombing. None of them were what you’d call take-charge types; the two bombers were just warehouse workers. There’s someone running the show, someone with some authority. He’s the one we’ve got to smoke out.”
“Jah,” Ebensburg agreed. “And now, mein freund, may I suggest you follow the advice you’ve given the Leutnant? You look as though you have not slept in several days.”
“I managed about three hours last night,” Pritchard chuckled, “but you’re right, I’m not sleeping much. I want to get this thing started off right, Stefan.”
“Then you must rest, Robert.”
The Cachalot, the next morning
After ten long, boring days watching Tarbos rotate uneventfully under her ship’s hull, meeting a fat, sloppy technician from the surface didn’t make Captain Benton’s day. But that’s precisely what she was doing. She and Gillian Furst, the Cachalot’s Executive Officer, were facing the man across a table in the freighter’s tiny wardroom, which at least was in the section of the ship that was spun to provide gravity.
“Let me get this straight. You want to wire this gizmo into my main forward navigational scanner? And for what?”
Frad Gilpin tapped a pudgy forefinger on the display pad. “This here will enable you to track quantum anomalies and non-random distributions of normal spatial matter, both normal matter and dark matter.”
“And that is important, why?”
“Well, Captain, if you wanted to track a ship that’s not visible, that’s a pretty good way to do it.”
“So, you’re saying I’ll be able to track a cloaked ship with this? A cloaked Grugell ship?”
“That’s the only kind of cloaked ship I know about.” Gilpin was brilliant, but infuriatingly rude.
“So, what you’re telling me is that Director Pritchard suspects that there’s an armed and cloaked Grugell ship somewhere in orbit here? And we’re just setting here big as life in plain sight of this thing?”
“I don’t know anything about that,” Gilpin demurred. “I’m just the techie, all right? Just the techie.”
Jan Benton threw up her hands. “Great. What am I supposed to do when I detect it? This is a freighter, you know? I don’t have any armament, no guns, no missiles – what am I supposed to do? Those things have already cut apart, what was it, four freighters in the last year? Freighters exactly like this one?”
“Captain, it’s like I said, I’m just the techie, OK? Mr. Pritchard told me come up here and wire this thing in your ship, and since he’s the local Project Director, what he says goes, like it or not. Plus, he’s the guy who signs my paycheck, so I do what he tells me. So, by your leave, ma’am, I’m going to get to work.”
“Sure, go ahead.”
The fat man stood up and, bracing himself in the two-thirds gravity of the wardroom level, moved out into the passageway.
“What do you suppose the Company has in mind?”
“Well,” the Exec answered her Captain, “I suppose, if the thing works, and we pick them up, we can always ram them.”
“You’re real funny, Gillian, that helps a lot, thanks.”
Meeting Room E, the Conference Center
Maps of the area around Mountain View covered the conference table, all of them liberally marked up with scribbled notations. OWME Security Colonel Perkins was holding forth to the assembled group.
“We’ve had patrols out day and night, all around the area, within a day’s march of the city, and of the Tide Pool resort up the coast. We’ve placed remote sensors, we’ve flown recon droids out farther than the patrols have gone, we’ve covered every damn inch of ground within fifty kilometers of the city. If somebody’s infiltrating by orbital shuttle, they aren’t doing it anywhere around here.”
“Well, they sure aren’t coming down the Skyhook,” Bob Pritchard pointed out. “They’ve got to be coming down by shuttle, and someplace closer than we think.”
“If you’ll permit me, Mr. Pritchard?”
Pritchard nodded assent to the tall, weird figure at the end of the table. Clomonastik III stood up and rubbed his narrow jaw contemplatively.
“It’s not at all uncommon, in exercises, you understand, for an audacious Commander to place his reconnaissance assets actually inside the enemy’s perimeter wherever possible. That may well be the case here. You have searched the area outside the city, I am certain, with great efficiency, and as a result of that we may now rule out the likelihood of a landing site in the countryside. We therefore should begin to look inside the city itself.”
“In the city? We’ve got enough radar coverage over this city to cook birds in flight,” Colonel Perkins objected.
“Ah, yes, but radar has its limits, Colonel. How small a craft could your radar detect?”
“Well,” Perkins said, “We don’t have any military stuff; what we’ve got is traffic-control radar. Frad Gilpin has tweaked the frequencies to allow us to track ships down to six or seven meters long. That’s smaller than any landing shuttle I’ve ever heard of.”
“But not smaller than a Grugell infiltration pod.” Clomonastik held up a sketch on a large notepad. “An infiltration pod is designed to do precisely what we are speculating happened here; namely, to land one operative safely in a heavily patrolled and guarded area. The pods are one-time devices; they can only descend to the planet’s surface. There is no provision for them to return to orbit.”
“So, the operative is expecting to be picked up by follow-on troops?”
“Or to die in the course of his mission,” Clomonastik agreed.
“Nice,” Colonel Perkins observed.
“Sometimes necessary,” Clomonastik pointed out. “Your recent history makes it plain that your military members are expected to return from their missions, successful or not; you even plan campaigns to minimize losses when possible. The Empire knows no such scruples; an officer assigned a task is expected to succeed or die in the attempt. There is no return from failure. Which, of course, explains the initial reason for my own presence among you.”
“So, what we have to do, is to find this pod…” Bob Pritchard began,
“…and we’ll have a clue to finding our infiltrator…” Colonel Perkins added,
“…he may very well lead us to whoever he’s working with,” Clomonastik concluded with a sharp-toothed grin.
“Who’s got the map of the city?” Colonel Perkins asked.
Detention A
“Still isn’t saying anything, is he?”
“Nope.”
Two Security troops were detailed to watch the former Sergeant Gerry Stiles, currently Mountain View Detention A’s sole resident. A vidcam inside the block covered Stile’s cell, and since the prisoner was currently sleeping, the guards took the opportunity to grab a bite of lunch in the block’s office.
“He’s still crashed, is he?” The younger of the two guards was extracting a sandwich from his lunch pack.
“Yep,” the other answered, glancing up at the video monitor as he chewed. “They had him up half the night, grilling him. Used drugs and everything. But he’s not saying shit.”
“Huh.”
The guards ate their lunches and argued about the upcoming zero-gee football championships on Terra Station in high Earth orbit, and it was twenty minutes before they looked at the video monitor again.
“Holy shit!” Plainly visible on the monitor was the bunk that, until just recently, prisoner Stiles had occupied. All that was left was a few charred bits of cloth and half-molten metal.
To see more of Animal’s writing, visit his page at Crimson Dragon Publishing or Amazon.
A lot going on in this installment.
<===
Of course it wouldn’t be that easy. Mike has new game to stalk.
Thank you for the story Animal.
Looks like we are rushing towards the conclusion.
Stiles didn’t incinerate himself!
🙂
“Ripped from the headlines”
Several people spontaneously combust each year. It’s just not widely reported.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TW6W9iOjTKM&t=26s
Their humors were imbalanced. Too much Yellow Bile and you combust.
It was a hot topic back in the 80s
Remember when HotTopic was rock?
Of course not. You never let the kites fire their own cortex charge, that function is held by the case officer. “Oh, Agent SWORDFISH missed his scheduled check-in? *beep beep boop beep* Problem solved, problem staying solved.”
Yes, more alien intrigue and less girlie cooties stuff
Alien Cooties are worse.
I need that chubby tech to invent a time warp to get me to the end of this work day.
Meh, waiting for me at the end of the day is more snow cleaning….
Qualuudes.
Does the chubby tech have some?
You’ve got some ludes, man? Far out.
“Dudes on ludes should NOT drive.”
-J. Spicoli
You just need to move to a planet with a shorter day.
Working on it.
Crazypants
But Greene urged the president’s supporters to imagine how they would react if a similar situation happened under the Biden administration, which Greene accused of too aggressively going after Jan. 6, 2021, rioters.
——-
The former House member urged both parties to evaluate the situation objectively, rather than from partisan perspectives.
“Both sides need to take off their political blinders,” she said. “You are all being incited into civil war, yet none of it solves any of the real problems that we all face, and tragically people are dying.”
Stop and take a breath? That’s crazy.
Screw the “24 Hour Rule”, let’s stick with the “24 Second Rule”.
I’ve never been a fan of the 24-hour rule. All it does is sacrifice the narrative playing ground to the less rational and more emotive side. It’s a Heckler’s Veto that you apply to yourself.
That said, if you’re gonna opine early on an unfolding topic, you’d better be willing to publicly reconsider your opinion in the face of new evidence.
publicly reconsider
BWAHAHAhahahahaha – that’s right up there with Grugell empathy.
They won’t even privately reconsider; as for publicly double down and damn the torpedos!
Have I also mentioned that I believe in Santa Claus, and that Kermit and Miss Piggy will eventually get married?
I am going to make the controvertial stance of being against interspecies marriage.
Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy are both Muppets. Your argument is invalid.
Even if your absurd claim were true, it wouldn’t invalidate my stance, sheepfucker.
*slaps UnCiv with glove*
I am Irish, not Scottish! I have never once fucked a sheep. Name your second, sir!
Whats green and smells like pork?
Kermit’s finger.
As the challenged party, I choose Nuclear MIRV ICBMs, with the Department of War as my second.
The left and right must unite to fight against the ……. yeah, we know where this is going
Commies?
More episodes of Saturday Night Live?
Guess who
Noem has repeatedly claimed it as a fact that Pretti intended to harm officers. “This individual showed up to a law enforcement operation with a weapon and dozens of rounds of ammunition,” she told reporters. “He wasn’t there to peacefully protest. He was there to perpetuate violence.” Miller flatly asserted that Pretti was a “domestic terrorist” who “tried to assassinate federal law enforcement.”
I’m sorry, these are lies. They have no evidence that Pretti wanted to kill anyone. Even if evidence were unexpectedly to come out tomorrow that he was secretly a would-be assassin, it would still be wrong for officials to state as fact that Pretti intended to kill. There are no known facts that establish murder as his motivation. This is a man who was watching officers interact with protesters and recording it on his phone. Contrary to what the Department of Homeland Security wrote on X, he did not approach law enforcement, let alone with a gun drawn.
These willful omissions and obvious lies do not inspire confidence that the federal government has any interest in discovering the truth of what happened. That is a glaring indictment of the Trump administration’s approach to immigration enforcement specifically and law enforcement in general.
Close, but no hand grenade. You’ve got it backwards. This is standard issue law enforcement policy. Any civilian with a firearm is a clear and immediate lethal threat to law enforcement. As soon as they spotted the gun he was a goner, and it doesn’t matter if he was “observing” ICE or being detained for smoking too close to a business entrance.
Trump has fuck-all to do with it.
People with legally carried pistols and illegally carried as well are arrested without incident on a regular basis. That being said, it’s not the brightest idea to get into an avoidable scuffle with the cops, with anyone really, while carrying a piece.
^This.
Chris Rock was right with his “
How not to get your ass kicked by the police”
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uj0mtxXEGE8
+ turn that shit down
I haven’t seen a good video that shows the whole scene and why ICE started interacting with Pretti, and once they are in the scrum it’s hard to tell who’s who. I don’t think he was a domestic terrorist, and neither was Goode, but they weren’t mere observers either. Observers don’t insert themselves into the action. A buddy of mine has been an election observer for the UN. If he sees something wrong, it’s his job to document it, but it’s not his job to fix it, because doing so would make him extremely vulnerable. I’d expect the same here.
I’ve never taken a concealed carry training, but I would assume that part of it is dealing with cops while armed, and I would assume the guidance says something about not mixing it up with the cops while armed. I seem to remember it being part of my hunter safety class, but I could be misremembering. Maybe someone can share their training, though I guess Chris Rock already has.
They were anti-ICE group members there for the sole purpose of interfering with lawful operations.
Fuck them both.
Basic-level CCW training absolutely should include how to interact with the police without fucking things up.
Unfortunately a lot of CCW training is garbage taught by idiots.
Mine did.
This is really much the same as all of the generals talking up the great success of withdrawing from Afghanistan.
I’m with Rep. Thomas Massie, who writes on X: “Carrying a firearm is not a death sentence, it’s a Constitutionally protected God-given right, and if you don’t understand this you have no business in law enforcement or government.”
Very good.
And Massie misses the same fucking point. He wasn’t killed for carrying a weapon. He was killed for committing the crime of interfering with lawful arrest of another person and then fighting with the arresting officers who were detaining him.
Yes, the whole things stinks of the “comply or die” mindset that is pervasive through all levels of law enforcement. But the specifics of this case still leave plenty of reason to think it was a lawful shoot . . . . or not. It is far from a clear cut case.
YMMV
I’m not even sure it was that. It looks like a standard fuck up on the law’s part. One person fires mistakenly or from a malfunction and the rest join in because they’re not sure what the hell’s happening.
I have not watched any of the videos. I don’t have the stomach for it anymore.
From multiple accounts:
1) many officers were in a scuffle with Pretti;
2) Someone determines that Pretti has a weapon and yells “gun”;
3) A different officer draws his weapon;
4) Some officer (probably the one that yelled gun) gets Pretti’s gun and moves away from the scrum with no other announcement;
5) Pretti’s gun fires (uncommanded or negligent discharge);
6) The officer who drew a weapon earlier sees “something” and then shoots.
Three outcomes:
A) it is determined to be a good shoot. Pretti’s family goes away unhappy.
B) it is determined to be a negligent shoot. Pretti’s family collects money from the Feds.
C) it is determined to be a criminally negligent shoot. The shooter does time, and Pretti’s family collects money from the Feds.
I don’t there is anyway that C) happens.
Personally, I am on the fence between A) and B) but leaning towards A) for all the same reasons that were written in the article posted in the morning thread.
I think Mackie’s comment was a response to Noem’s moronic blathering (that heavily implies that merely possessing a firearm in the presence of one of The King’s Men is enough reason for them to kill you.)
Personally, I am on the fence between A) and B) but leaning towards A)
Find myself similarly positioned. My concern is that I have biases towards both. A) because I’m annoyed as hell at the protesters directing their anger in the wrong direction and/or just being completely off their rockers with regards to immigration period. And B) because I have a deep skepticism towards cops, federal power, and the general exercise of police power by the state. I have to be aware and try to avoid coming to one or the other ‘conclusion’, not objectively, but because one hatred wins out over the other.
When I try to control for those biases – I’m still torn. In general, I find law enforcement to be too ready to ‘control the situation’ through force, not “only if necessary”, but almost by default. And the training is too often hyper-focused on “everyone out there is your enemy and will kill you as soon as look at you”. And unfortunately, as is often revealed by body cam footage or by additional information later, in these sorts of confrontations, they are often confronted with assholes who instigate everything, directly create the confrontation, and are a threat. And I don’t know which dominates, if either, in this particular situation.
But I lean towards B) – whether that’s objective or because one of my biases is stronger (though I’m not sure anything is stronger than my dislike of commie agitators – let them be and you end up with Russia in the late teens, early twenties), I’m not really sure…
Noem’s comments were stupid as fuck and completely counter-productive.
So if that was Massie’s target, then truce.
Did #5 actually happen?
I should have noted that #5 it still not certain. My bad.
That does seem to taken on a life of its own. A LOT of people seem to be believing it, but I’ve never heard anyone submit a video clip or give any other evidence supporting it.
As I said, I have not watched myself. I’ve seen people comment both ways.
A gun, even a gun other than a P320, going off unintentionally during an entangled fight, is entirely believable. Ask me how I know…
D) it’s criminally negligent, nothing else happens, and every one involved gets the Lon Horiuchi Award for Excellence in Public Service.
Fuck Massie.
See also: Kent State
False shooting narratives for eveyone!
If being stupid was a capital offense the population of this country would be less than ten million.
You say that like it’s a bad thing.
While we are in Vegas and missed the duration of the storm I will be arriving to cleaning up, shoveling, making sure the dogs didn’t ‘accidently’ eat the cats or the cats stuck in the chimney.
Wonder 50deg weather to -5 upon landing early tomorrow morning.
On a good note..Vegas house is ready for deep clean, yard manicure, and up on the market. Neighbor is like 80 and has friends that want to buy. Neighbor’s son-in-law wants to buy. Also the market in our area has been quite stable and been moving. While not 2021 prices, still an investment we will hopefully be paid handsomely
I wish you the best in your sale.