What!? A bonus Quick Hits? Yep! Clearly your karma must be getting better. Well, either that or the stories are coming in faster than I can keep up with them and I didn’t want to let these three go.
“It wasn’t me!”
Not even the great Chuck Berry could extract Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot from this one.
In a stratagem right out of the Trump playbook, the Lightfoot campaign dispatched an electronic missive to CPS teachers claiming “enthusiastic, curious, and hardworking young people” could earn “class credit” working 12 hours a week on her flagging mayoral campaign – on official virtual campaign stationary, no less.
I’d say “truth is stranger than fiction” one more time, but the truth is there is no truth in the post-COVID era.
The most incredible thing about this blatant ethics violation, which starts with the Chicago mayor’s complete power over the Chicago school system, is that she somehow thought it wouldn’t go public. For a variety of reasons, Lightfoot has long since been crossed off the teachers union Christmas card list, so what could possibly make her believe those perpetually offended educators wouldn’t rat her out?
Because that’s exactly what they did, correctly calling this boneheaded maneuver a “shakedown” and duly noting it was “unethical and wrong on so many levels.” A nonplussed Lightfoot spokesperson responded by claiming their office was, “currently gathering information to determine which, if any, policies have been violated.”
Oh! I don’t know. How about all of them?
When that “explanation” failed to stop the excrement from hitting the rotating air propelling device, Lightfoot blamed a “well-intentioned” staffer for the “mistake,” referring to the incident “a learning moment.”
Yeah! As in she failed to heed her legendary predecessor’s warning about not getting caught.
Everyone within the sound of my voice damn well knows that Little Napoleon would NEVER let an email of that nature go out without her express written consent, and her campaign staff damn well knows it, too.
Though come to think of it, Heronner might be onto something. This kind of student recruiting effort could go a long way towards offsetting the Second City’s massive $128 million budget deficit. Think about it! The City could offer extra credit for students clearing snow from those O’Hare runways, mowing Grant Park grass, and putting out fires.
What could possibly go wrong with that?
My advice to potential murderers
Of course, my initial recommendation to nascent assassins would be not to do it for all the obvious reasons. But if you’re dead set on giving it your best shot, considering the number of murder trials I’ve observed, here are some specific homicidal pitfalls you really want to try to avoid.
For reference purposes, those of you who reside in the great city of Chicagah can ignore the remainder of this story because you can clearly embark upon a homicidal spree without fear of getting caught or prosecuted.
“What spurred this magnanimous murderer intervention effort,” you ask?
It’s a combination of two things.
First, CNN online is clearly obsessed with a sociopathic Massachusetts husband who allegedly murdered and dismembered his wife rather than endure a divorce. And second, journalists tend to follow these kinds of grizzly scenarios because it’s always fascinating to watch the average criminal “mastermind” at work.
Put more simply, these folks rarely rise to the level of a Lt. Columbo adversary, and our New Englander did absolutely nothing to dispel that stereotype.
As for that promised advice, here goes:
1. Don’t Google any of the following from your home PC, laptop, or phone
- 10 ways to dispose of a dead body if you really need to
- How long before a body starts to smell
- How to stop a body from decomposing
- How To embalm a body, and
- Dismemberment
Because our intrepid uxoricidal* lunatic did just that and it hasn’t worked out too terribly well for him, now has it?
* (Believe it or not, “uxoricide” is term used to describe killing one’s wife.)
2. Don’t buy any of the following items at your local Home Depot prior to the murder:
- Cleaning products
- Mops and buckets
- Brushes
- Tape
- Tarps
- A Tyvex suit with boot covers
- Goggles
- Baking soda, and most of all
- A hatchet
Because even if you don’t use a credit/debit card, the store’s surveillance cameras will pick it all up and you’ll be convicted on the basis of that evidence alone.
As I’m frequently prone to saying, “I’m here to help!”
I never get tired of being right
Much like Danny DeVito’s Louie DePalma on the “Taxi” episode that introduced us to Ted Danson, I’m not nearly above saying “I told you so,” because that’s exactly what I’m gonna do! To wit, per my statistical and scientifically based prognostications, the newest soon-to-be-dominant Omicron XBB.1.5 variant, dubbed “Kraken,” is once again, more contagious and less severe/lethal than its soon-to-be defunct ancestors.
In fact, the coronavirus is well on its way to becoming the basic equivalent of the annual flu with a mortality rate of just 0.0018 percent. And it doesn’t take a rocket scientist – or epidemiologist for that matter – to understand why that viral pandemic progression is always the case.
It’s simple. The prime directive of all living organisms is to survive, thrive, and live on through its progeny, and if you kill off your host, that’s the end of the line. Since all pathogens undergo a random mutational drift, those strains that better fit that evolutionary bill are the iterations that quickly supplant their predecessors to become the dominant form of the disease.
And this “non-expert” told you that back in those early 2020 plague days when I was publishing five coronavirus reports a week. Should you continue doubt my forecasts’ accuracy, please refer back to those reports because every last one of them is remains available right here.
Why am I being such a bleep about all of this? Because I had to endure a boatload of criticism, spite, and hateful attacks just for telling the truth and I’m not about to let it go. Oh! And the truth is, the Jeff Ward I Told You So Tour 2023 is a lot of fun.
Of course, now those very same critics are even quieter than a Trump supporter at a Black Lives Matter meeting and I can’t tell you how fascinating it is to watch them squirm when I remind them of how wrong they really were.
Even the semi-fake press is finally catching up with me. Though they’ll never admit they were the ones spewing pandemic panic porn at every turn – and they’d do it again in a flash if they thought it would increase their Internet hits – the Tribune finally turned on Fauci by running this op-ed excoriating his pandemic response today. The delicious irony there is the column was written by an MD, most of whom fully supported Fauci’s regular flip-flopping.
After COVID continues to evolve into an afterthought, just like the 1918 influenza, it’s next and final step will be to leave it’s genetic imprint on the annual flu for centuries to come. Considering that no one’s heeded the take-better-care-of-yourself coronavirus lesson, the next pandemic will likely rear its ugly head sooner rather than later.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to post this on a number of peoples’ timelines.
