Hello Everyone:
This is going to be our Fall Finale.
I won't be in the city next week, so I don't think I'll have time to bust another blogpost out before the Christmas Eve Special. In fact, I'm also not sure I'm going to be able to put a Christmas Eve special out either. If I do, it will be very bare bones. Christmas Eve is 9 days away and I haven't come up with anything that sounds like it would be fun to do. Again, I am open to any and all suggestions.
I was kind of hoping to keep this one light, and we will have some fun stuff at the end of this, but I'm going to start with a couple of hard news stories...
CRIME- Daniel Penny Acquitted-
I wasn't as glued to this story as I might have been back when I was working at the Post more than one day week or even still living in the 5 boroughs, but as the case went on more friends and family were weighing in.
On May 1, 2023, Jordan Neely a 30-year-old homeless man, boarded a northbound F Train at the 2nd Avenue stop. What seems to be universally agreed upon was that Neely began to yell about needing food and water and that he was ready to die. Several people that were near him began to move away. At some point, Penny, a 24-year-old former Marine, approached Neely and put him in a chokehold.
Penny told the authorities that the chokehold was applied for less than 5 minutes. Prosectors said the chokehold lasted for 6 minutes. After initially declining to press charges, the Manhattan DA's office announced they were opening an investigation. A week later they announced they were charging Penny with 2nd degree manslaughter. Later, a grand jury added a charge of criminally negligent homicide.
The trail got underway on November 1st. Per CNN.com...
The defense argued Penny “was justified in the actions he took to protect the other riders.
”Neely “was on a collision course with himself” and Penny “acted when others could not,” defense attorney Steven Raiser said during his two-hour closing argument.
The defense has also challenged the medical examiner’s determination Neely died from the chokehold and suggested the charges were brought because of “a rush to judgment based on something other than medical science.”
Prosecutor Dafna Yoran, in her closing arguments that lasted more than three hours over two days, said it was admirable Penny intended to protect fellow passengers but “he just didn’t recognize that Jordan Neely’s life too needed to be preserved.”
“We are here today because the defendant used way too much force for way too long in way too reckless of a manner,” she said.
The prosecutor told jurors self-defense is legally justified on rare occasions. While Neely might have threatened deadly physical force on the subway, a reasonable person should’ve known he wasn’t capable of carrying out the threat, Yoran argued.
Finally, she acknowledged to the jury that this was a difficult case but said Penny must still be held accountable.“This is a hard case. It’s hard to find someone guilty of a killing that they didn’t intend on,” she said.
The deliberations went on for 5 days. On Friday the 6th, after the jury told the judge they were deadlocked, the prosecution requested and got a dismissal of the manslaughter charge, leaving the jury to decide on the lesser charge of criminally negligent homicide. On Monday the 9th, the jury returned a not guilty verdict.
The morning after the verdict came down, I heard Boomer Esiason on WFAN refer to Daniel Penny as a hero. Captain Orange and JD Vance invited Penny to Saturday's Army-Navy game.
On the other hand,. a state senator named Julia Salazar described Penny's actions as "a lynching." Congresswoman Alexandria Ocosio-Cortez called it a murder.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that most of us fall somewhere in between these two extremes.
Any of us who grew up in New York City have been approached by homeless people on the subway, most of them are harmless. And we have also most certainly have had to deal with some who were loud and threatening. It's not a pleasant experience and it can be frightening.
I still believe NY has the best police department in the world, and they do an incredible job of keeping us safe. They can't be everywhere at once. In my heart of hearts, I believe that Daniel Penny was only trying to help. I do. And I don't believe he intended to kill Neely or even injure him.
I just can't help but wonder if there was anyway Penny could have restrained Neely without the use of a chokehold. I've never served in the military (as I've said countless times, sending me off to war is a surefire way to lose said war) and I've never served in law enforcement, so I can't say for sure, but there has to be non-lethal ways to handle a difficult situation.
I don't think Penny should have had to spend the rest of his life in jail, or even the 5 to 15 he was looking at on the original charge. I'm also not sure he should have gotten away Scot-free and I sure as hell don't think he should be the guest of the President-elect at a football game, even if the President-elect is himself a convicted felon.
It's just a rotten situation. It seems like Neely needed some serious help, and as tempting as it is to ask "where was his family before this happened?" (as opposed to now, where they have filed a lawsuit, because of course they did) It's a fair question, but the fact of the matter is we don't know that story either. Maybe they tried and couldn't help or maybe they couldn't afford it, and/or maybe they didn't have the insurance coverage. Which leads me to our next story...
CRIME Part II- CEO of United Healthcare Murdered
Brian Thompson, the CEO of United Healthcare was shot and killed on December 4th outside the Midtown Hilton in Manhattan.
The 2019 Joker movie, starring Joaquin Phoenix, was set in 1981. Back in the real 1981, the movie Escape from New York came out, depicting a New York that was supposed to be so bad in 1997, they made the whole island of Manhattan a maximum-security prison.
I'm not sure what thought scares me more... thinking in 1981 that things were going so bad that by 1997, Manhattan would be inhabitable or being in 1997 (when crime in NY had dipped precipitously) or even watching Joker in 2019 and wondering how any of us survived living in New York City in 1981.
Think about it. We just passed the 44th anniversary of John Lennon getting gunned down on the Upper West Side, Jimmy Breslin summing it up by saying that the former Beatle was now "another person who died after being shot with a gun on the streets of New York" That line, reading all these years later, still sends chills down your spine, mainly because if you remember back then, you know that it was a lot more commonplace than it has been recently.
Brian Thompson was nowhere near as famous as John Lennon, but he was by all accounts as successful businessman. The suspect police have in custody was apparently carrying around a handwritten document decrying the parasitic health insurance industry, and disdain for corporate greed and power.
As they say on the cops shows, "That sounds like motive to me"
And while it should go without saying, I'm going to say it anyway because nowadays, you can't assume anything can go without saying.. Splattering the brains of the CEO of a company you have an issue with is not the answer to whatever the issue is.
All of us at one time or another have to deal with medical insurance companies, either for yourselves, or a loved one. I happen to deal with them at work all the time. Verifying coverage, obtaining authorizations, submitting and coding bills for re-imbursements etc. Believe me, I know how difficult they can be. I also know how frustrating it can be to have a claim denied. There are way too many stories in this country about people going broke because of medical bills that are either not covered or under covered.
And I honestly don't know what the ultimate answer is. I do know what the answer is not though.
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OK, like I said, I really wanted this to be more uplifting. So, I have to tell you all about a book I just finished...
BOOK REVIEW-Reunion-A Rock and Roll Fairy Tale
BY: Gary Burr
I was plowing through Bob Woodward's most recent book War, which was dealing with the October 7th war in the Middle East, the Russia-Ukraine war, and the way both President Biden and former President Trump were handling them, as President and Presidential candidate respectively.
After the November 5th election, I couldn't get motivated to read it anymore.
But I was jonesing for a good book to read. I had read in one of the gossip pages in the paper about Gary Burr, who had written a book about a hypothetical Beatles reunion. Well, that sounded like something that could cheer me up, so I went and downloaded it.
And it really is just what the doctor ordered.
I don't want to give too much away, because if you are a music fan in general, and a Beatle fan in particular I think you will really dig this book.
I'll give you this-the premise of the book is the Beatles getting back together in the wake of Linda McCartney's death from breast cancer in 1998. Paul, holed up on his farm in Arizona and not doing much of anything, is encouraged by his daughters to start playing again. With their encouragement, he runs the idea of getting his old band back together for a concert to raise money to fight breast cancer. How John Lennon managed to survive December 8, 1980, is explained in quite satisfactory detail in the book's prologue.
Burr obviously knows his stuff, because the details he puts into this book are amazing. I mean there were maybe one or two things he said that I was like "Oh, I doubt that would have happened", but for the most part, it was entirely plausible. This was that period of time between the rise of internet, but pre Facebook and Twitter. There were things that he had the guys saying to each other that literally had me laughing out loud.
There's a chapter that details John's solo career, a couple more albums he would have put out in the 1980's. Bittersweet. thinking about what could have been.
What should have been.
On the other hand, with things around here going to hell in a hand basket, this book was a nice escape from reality.
I realize not everyone is as Beatle obsessed as I am, so maybe you wouldn't get as big a kick out of this as I did, but I'm going to give it a high rating anyway. It came around at a time where I needed it. it's amazing how a book can do that for you.
4.5 Auggies.
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Santa-Con was Saturday night, and for once, the second Saturday in December wasn't an unseasonably warm day. If anything, it was colder than average. Maybe that’s why I didn’t see that many Santa-clad partiers as opposed to prior years.
That’s all we got.
Christmas Eve Special next Tuesday night at 8:00PM
Stay Safe
and Have a Great Week
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