More Antifa News – Prison is in Their Future

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Down in Texas, the Antifa cell members that attacked an ICE facility last Fourth of July were sentenced for their parts in the attack.  The man who shot a police officer in the neck got one hundred years in prison.  The shortest sentence of the eight was thirty years for a conspirator who wasn’t present but hid evidence from the police.  The rest got fifty-year sentences.

Okay, no one, not even I can say that these defendants were treated too leniently.  That’s throwing the book at them.  And not only did they get what they deserved but this will be an extremely powerful deterrent to other Antifa gangs who try to act up in red states.  Of course, in places like Portland, Oregon and Minneapolis, Minnesota the judges and prosecutors are leftists and very unlikely to punish Antifa to the full extent they deserve.  But even in these deep blue areas these sentences are going to throw the fear of God into these psychopaths.

It was interesting to hear how the shooter in Texas tried to justify what he had done.  He claimed that he shot the officer because he thought the officer was about to shoot one of the protestors.  So, in his mind he was the one defending the law and the police were the criminals.  Well, apparently the jury and the judge didn’t quite see it that way.  Maybe they figured that police officers were entitled to carry their guns without being shot by terrorists who were attacking a federal law enforcement facility that was carrying out its lawful activity of deporting illegal aliens.

I wonder how long the shooter will actually serve?  I looked up the federal sentencing guidelines and other than some small good behavior reductions he has to serve the whole sentence.  So, unless the next Democrat president pardons him he’s going to stay behind bars for the rest of his life.  And since he’s 33 years old that could be a very long time.  And I’m good with that.  That officer that got shot in the neck and his family probably aren’t upset that this nut will be safely behind bars for the better part of the twenty first century.  As for the rest of the Antifa maniacs that got very lengthy sentences, well there needs to be a penalty for being stupid enough to help a guy who’s willing to shoot it out with the police.  And they are paying hefty penalties indeed.  You rarely hear of fifty-year sentences for even some murder convictions.  I would say the judges were making a point.

Now without a doubt the convicts will appeal their sentences and that is something I’ll be keeping an eye out for.  The fact that it’s Texas this is happening in leads me to believe that even shortening those sentences will still leave the convicted Antifa members with a very long time to think over what they did.  So, this is a story where justice triumphed and chaos and anarchy took it in the neck.  About time.

Tom’s World – 23JUN2026 – Oil Rig

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TomD

Just happened to be near the Port of Pensacola yesterday and saw this.

 

This is a Gulf of USA (Mexico?, can’t get used to that) open water oil drill rig. It Is not a ship, it is built on a barge and towed to location. The drill rig has been in port for a few weeks for maintenance and repairs.

We have a years long history of getting some strange looking oil field boats in port for refit. If you look at the bow (left side of the image), you can see the helipad used to get workers on and off.

This rig can drill 35,000 feet deep. Hope the workers speak Chinese.

I’m definitely not a Naval Architect and I can’t fathom (to coin a phrase) how this can remain upright when loaded with the drill heads, pipe and whatever else is hanging on up there while in a 10′-15’+ sea.

NO PETS FOR YOU!!!! NEXT!!!

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For many years Camera Girl has been legendary among her friends and family for keeping an actual menagerie of varied pets.  She has kept insects, arachnids, crustaceans, mollusks, worms, marine invertebrates, salt and fresh water fish, frogs and toads, salamanders, various lizards, snakes, turtles (mostly tortoises), parakeets, canaries, finches, gerbils, hamsters, guinea pigs, rabbits and decades of dogs (everything from Newfoundlands and basset hounds to miniature long haired dachshunds and German short haired pointers).  She even has adopted some local wild life having become a close friend to a crow pair (Moe and Flo), an acquaintance of a raven pair (Poe and Mrs. Poe) and a witness to the frightening visitations of a pair of hawks that habitually pick off the less cautious mourning doves at Camera Girl’s feeders.  So, it goes without saying that she’s no amateur at keeping critters.

This week it was decided that in deference to Princess Sack of Potatoes’ summer sleep over schedule, her request to add a hamster to the local zoo would be granted.  Now why the present rodent in resident (guinea pig Laylee) isn’t sufficient representation for that phylogenetic order (Rodentia) in the house I could not say.  But youth must be served so we headed off into the rain today to bring home a handleable (and cute) representative of Mesocricetus auratus also known as the Syrian hamster who will forthwith be known as “Chucky.”

And we were successful in finding Chucky and establishing her bona fides vis-à-vis “nipping” and were requesting the sales help to package Chucky for the trip home when a catch appeared.  We were asked to provide “proof of enclosure.”  Now this is a New England thing.  The states here are more concerned with the rights and privileges of hamsters than they are with the rights of people.  And it’s not even close.  So, what these two young people wanted was a photo on a phone showing the cage that Chucky would inhabit when we got her home.  Now Camera Girl and I both travel through life “sans phone.”  Other than a land line back at the Compound we are solely connected to the world around us through sounds produced by our mouths without any electronic amplification.  So, no phone, no pictures of a hamster cage.

This floored the young sales staff.  They said it was forbidden to send out a hamster without proof of enclosure!  I thought this was hilarious but Camera Girl was incensed.  Basically, they were accusing her of not knowing how to keep a hamster which from her point of view was a deadly insult.  She began describing in gory detail the dietary, housing and psychological regimen for hamsters that she had learned over the years.  She demanded to speak to the manager and know why this requirement had not been communicated over the phone when she had called earlier to find a hamster at the store.  The young sales staff were noticeably chastened and retreated to the manager’s office for more instruction.  And of course, the manager used discretion noting that the “proof of enclosure” was understood to be a way of ensuring that novice keepers didn’t get home with their pets and promptly lose them because of inadequate housing.  And of course, Chucky was promptly packaged and purchased and headed home with us.

But on the way home I quickly adapted the scenario into a variant of the Seinfeld episode “Soup Nazi.”  In my version it became “Pet Nazi” with a short mustached tyrant in a Pet Smart uniform shouting to customers who wanted to buy hamsters without cage photos, “No hamster for you!  Next!!!!

And this was a comical event but just multiply this aspect of life by a thousand and you get an idea of the suffocating nature of life in the nanny states of New England.

Father’s Day 2026

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So, I got every father’s Father’s Day dream come true.  I didn’t have to go anywhere or do anything at all today!  I slept an hour late and I ate a leisurely breakfast and I went outside to breath in the Summer Solstice air and stare at the sky and enjoy the experience of time standing still at the top of the solar roller coaster ride before it comes crashing down in the Winter Solstice and Christmas.  And it occurred to me that I would only be getting a handful more of these.  How many exactly, was a secret that the big guy upstairs plays relatively close to the vest but a dozen or two is an optimistic range.  From the point of view of probabilities even zero more summers isn’t that very unlikely.  So, I decided I should treat this occasion with the proper respect and commune with the spirit of the day.

So, I saw something I’d never seen before.  Two rabbits were standing outside of the living room window and almost nose to nose facing each other.  And suddenly one of them jumped vertically in the air and landed in the same exact spot.  And a few moments later it did the exact same thing.  I was very curious about this ritual.  Was it a male and female in some strange mating dance or was it two males trying to decide who was the bull goose rabbit of the area.  But I never found out because just then they must have seen me moving behind the window and took off (like rabbits).  I thought it was interesting how an animal with such a lopsided set of limbs could manage to launch itself so precisely square.  Its entire back remained parallel with the ground throughout its rise and fall.  Or at least that is how it appeared to me.  Well, you live and you learn.

Today the neighbors began delving into their Fourth of July stash of high explosives.  For the most part it seemed to be some kind of a series of about ten detonations in a row that seemed larger than fire crackers but smaller than M-80s.If I were going to guess I’d say it was some kind of a small mat of interconnected charges that branch off from a common fuse.  And this moderate sized munition doesn’t have a bad effect on the dogs so far.  They haven’t gotten worked up or frightened or even seemed to notice them so far.  But that is a temporary situation.  My neighborhood is sort of the Yucca Flats of fireworks testing.  One of the close neighbors (although because of vegetation cover I’ve never been able to determine exactly which one) must have access to fairly large thermonuclear devices.  The seismic events are somewhere around eight on the Richter Scale.  The fact that the recoil of the ground has shifted the orientation of my house by forty degrees over the course of the last few years is a testament to the quality of his firework merchant.  But Dunwich doesn’t have a noise ordinance or an atmospheric test ban.  So, I expect the show will be spirited this year.  Let the games begin!