16 July 2026
H.I.T.s - When they go off track
News of the useful sort was as sparse this week as last week, and with Jem ill, I decided not to dig for more.
Baltimore area bus crash still under investigation
Around 6 p.m. on July 8, an MTA (Maryland Transit Administration) bus went out of control in Pikesville, a northwest suburb of Baltimore. It ran a red light, sideswiped an SUV, and then collided with at least seven (and possibly as many as eleven) other vehicles as it crossed into oncoming traffic and veered toward the sidewalk. It took out a power pole and a freestanding sign for a beauty shop before finally ramming into a Fed Ex location.
Ultimately, 36 people were taken to the hospital, most with relatively minor injuries. The driver, Tavon Giles, had to be extricated from the wreckage and was taken to the hospital with life-threatening injuries. A co-worker told reporters that Giles has a broken neck but is expected to survive.
The street—Reisterstown Road—is a busy one, and tends to have a lot of accidents, but few have been as bad as this one. It is still not clear what caused the driver to lose control of the bus, but I did find reference to someone named Tavon Giles being featured in a February 2026 webinar by the Brain Injury Association of Maryland as a Traumatic Brain Injury survivor. If this is the same person, the accident may be related to a former brain injury. The incident is still under investigation.
Gov. Pritzker has minor brush with his luxury beliefs
Dwayne Cortez Milton (age 46), who had 60 previous criminal cases in Cook County, Illinois, was placed on electronic monitoring on June 17, 2026 by Judge Aleksandra Gillespie after his latest felony theft charge. His release was conditional upon remaining in his home overnight. Despite his device registering a violation each night from the evening of the 18th to the morning of the 24th, the violation was not brought to the attention of the Judge Gillespie until the 25th, when she issued a warrant for his arrest. (Note that he was probably fitted with an RF-style monitor, which requires remaining within range of a home base station, rather than a GPS-style monitor, which would have allowed him to be tracked in real time and arrested.)
This case points to a failure in the “improvements” promised by Cook County Chief Judge Charles Beach II back in February. Beach changed the “major violation” threshold—after which the violation is supposed to be immediately investigated—to 3 hours instead of the previous 48 hours. This change, implemented because of the case of a woman being set on fire on a Chicago transit train in November 2025 by a man wearing an ankle monitor, may have been overly ambitious, considering the average number of monitoring violation alerts triggered weekly: over 8,500.
Milton was eventually apprehended on the evening of July 4th. Illinois State Police observed him on security cameras attempting to scale the wall around the yard at Gov. Pritzker’s Gold Coast neighborhood mansion. He was arrested in the governor’s back yard (Milton admitted to police that he had a warrant for his arrest), charged with trespassing, and then…released with a warning not to return to the property. It is unknown whether Pritzker was home at the time or not.
Perhaps surprisingly, Milton actually showed up in court on July 7 to plead guilty to the felony theft charge that resulted in the ankle monitor. He is likely to be free again before the end of the year, despite a one-year jail sentence: he was given over two months’ credit for time served (which included his time on the monitor, despite repeatedly going AWOL), and Illinois law allows a standard 50% reduction in sentence. He is due back in court on the (misdemeanor) trespassing charge on July 27.
Canadian woman detained by ICE after assaulting teen
On July 3, a teenage girl and three friends were walking on the Point Pleasant Beach boardwalk in New Jersey. The girl and one of her friends were wearing “patriotic colored” sweatpants, and the girl’s pants also had “Trump” and “ICE” blazoned on them. A Canadian woman—Kaitlyn E. Tracey (age 33) of Asbury Park (some sources say Allenhurst)—decided to record herself confronting the girls. Evidently Tracey couldn’t restrain her fury, because security cameras caught her “slapp[ing] the victim across her face and body.”
Tracey seems to be married to an American citizen, Matthew Geroni, and entered the U.S. in 2024 on a passport. According to a Homeland Security post, she had a six-month visa which expired in September 2024, and which she overstayed, making her an illegal alien. Based on the couple’s own TikTok videos (as reported on TwiX), they’ve been married for about three years, and they lived in Texas with Geroni’s father before “abruptly relocating to NJ” as a result of “a dispute with another leftist.” She seems to be a member of a punk band, while her husband is a prolific Tik-Tok-er who posts anti-Trump videos and cheers on the illness and death of Republicans. In August 2025, he posted a video of himself praying for everyone in the Trump family, including children, to get cancer.
Tracey was taken into custody on Monday (her husband claims she turned herself in) and was charged with endangering the welfare of a child, simple assault, harassment, and obstruction. But things quickly got worse for her: instead of being held at the Ocean County Jail, she was turned over to ICE, and is now being held in the Delaney Hall detention center, which suggests that deportation is a possibility.
Geroni has posted a number of videos begging for help for his wife, although he has carefully avoiding addressing the actions that led to her being arrested, claiming that “the situation” is “kind of irrelevant.” A GoFundMe campaign was started, but it was shut down due to the company’s policy of not allowing fundraisers for anyone accused of a crime. A court appearance is scheduled for August 1.
Got news?
Speaking of crazed TDS people -- an inexhaustible supply, apparently, I responded to a post (there are several) mocking Trump et all for warning about the encroachment of what is essentially communism infiltrating the D Party. The person who posted it argued that this is not a real threat, that it's all hyperbole, blah blah blah...
To which I responded: No it isn't. I went on to describe the self-proclaimed "equality" obsessed people I work with, the union, the race hysteria, Biden calling "white supremacy our nation's greatest threat) etc -- and someone responded: YOU MAGA PEOPLE ARE ALL ALIKE. YOU THINK THAT COMMUNISM IS A REAL AND PRESENT DANGER BECAUSE YOUR CULT LEADER SAYS SO.
Now that told me a lot more about HIM than he realizes. Because I saw the communism coming way way way back, and my observations became particularly acute during the George Floyd anti-police hustle.
In my comment I noted: ignore this at your own peril. In Elie Wiesel's NIGHT, a neighborhood fixture named the Beadle disappears from the town, and resurfaces several weeks later with a warning that extermination is coming for the Jews and they'd better protect themselves. What did they do?
They mocked him.
DSA: “It’s been said that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. But just because it isn’t easy to imagine now doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to make it happen.”
https://program.dsausa.org/#narrative
That woman harassing people on the boardwalk -- what is wrong with these people? It's a never ending source of wonder that I can somehow politely deal with the Useful Idiots I work with (there is one person I used to like, but struggle to forgive for a) immigrating into this country b) taking our jobs c) calling us all racists d) indoctrinating (or trying to) our students into this race obsession)...yet they can't leave perfect strangers alone?
There was a guy (who unfriended me for this) who blamed Trump for the demise of his marriage. His husband is a Chinese national. They were terrified constantly that meanie Trump would deport the husband who is in the country legally.
So I tried to tell him that legal immigrants are not being deported.
And he unfriended me for that.
Thanks for the nod to Comrade Prickster, Celia. Fasten your seatbelts, kids. He wants to be the POTUS SO BADLY he would, and does do, anything. Your article is a small foreshadowing of how chaotic and lawless the USA would be under his dictatorship.