Splendid Isolation

Quote Of The Day

From Glenn Reynolds:

“At some point, the government’s behavior is sufficiently illegitimate that people will start acting outside of the usual channels. We’re getting dangerously close to that point, and our feckless overclass either doesn’t know, or doesn’t care, or actively wants that to happen.”

He’s talking specifically about the attempt to muzzle Trump for the 2024 election, but in fact you could apply it to pretty much everything they’re doing right now, whether it’s gun control, primary school education, destruction of the oil industry or [fill in the blank].

Broken Neighborhoods

I was interested, although not surprised, to see this development:

High-end retail shops in California’s iconic Beverly Hills have reportedly begun to shutter their doors amid an epidemic of smash-and-grab robberies.

To be fair, a whole bunch of them had already closed because of California’s stringent WuFlu lockdown a couple years back.  But this latest “epidemic of smash-and-grab robberies” is absolutely the fault of the politicians and the voters who put them there.

Yup:  being soft on crime, whether allowing overt riots of the BLM genre or having the “shoplifting isn’t really a crime” mindset, can only lead to more and yet more lawlessness — something you’d think would be blindingly obvious to the dumbest of the dumb.

Clearly, Californians fall even below the above definition.

Let Beverly Hills sink — and the rest of that poxy state along with it.

Mixed Reaction

I’m going to tread very carefully around this one:

An agent with the IRS is dead after being accidentally shot by another agent during a training exercise Thursday at a federal gun range, according to officials.

Arizona’s Family reports a spokesperson for the Federal Bureau of Prisons confirmed that an incident occurred at its gun range in the Phoenix area. The gun range was reportedly being utilized by multiple federal agencies at the time of the shooting through an interagency agreement.

Here are my thoughts on this rather touchy topic.

If this kind of training tragedy befalls actual federal law enforcement agencies  (FBI, DEA, Secret Service, etc.) then I am truly sorry, and mourn their loss.

But far as all the other federal alphabet agencies (IRS, DoE — Education or Energy — BLM, etc.) are concerned:  I don’t care.  They shouldn’t be armed in the first place, and therefore have no business being around a federal firearms training facility.

My reason for saying this is quite simple:  what the federal government has been doing for the past seventy-odd years is turning misdemeanors or regulatory infractions into federal crimes, and ordinary citizens into criminals every chance they get.  But for all that, the latter agencies are not law enforcement departments, as much as the government would like them to be such.

Let me get specific.

It is a totally abhorrent idea that the IRS — who are nothing more than a bunch of accountants and debt collectors — should be sending their agents to get firearms training (on the use of, lest we forget, full-automatic firearms).  Who are they going to use those guns on?  And don’t insult me with the “self-defense” argument:  we ordinary folk aren’t allowed to use automatic rifles and machine guns to protect ourselves;  why should these jumped-up bureaucrats get special treatment?  Let’s be honest:  when an IRS agent is issued with an actual assault rifle — that would be a full-auto rifle, not some semi-auto AR-15 — it’s not to protect himself or his home from rampaging tax delinquents, it’s most likely because he’ll be ordered to storm someone else’s home or place of employment (that would be the very definition of “assault”).  And by the way, that’s the job of the FBI, not the bean-counters.

So no:  as much as I feel the suffering and loss of this agent’s life for his family, the plain fact of the matter was that he had no damn business being there in the first place.

And the fact that he was there is entirely the responsibility of the federal government.

By the way, should any of the alphabet agencies read this, you should know that my opinion in this is probably the mildest you’ll encounter among the vast majority of the population.  Out there, if you listen carefully, you’ll hear the popping of champagne corks.  The federal government offers little comfort to the population of this country;  they should expect little in return.


Update:  both in Comments and by email, Readers take issue with my stance on the Dept. of Energy not needing guns, in that they have to guard installations like nukes and other such power plants.

No.

If those installations are so important to the national security (and they are), they need to be guarded by the military and not by the paramilitary.  The point is that the military is Constitutionally restricted in terms of its deployment (against citizens), whereas a paramilitary force isn’t.  I’d rather that power be held by the Army (and therefore by Congress) than by a bunch of bureaucrats.

Still Relevant?

I’m going to make my position on this quite clear right at the beginning:  I love cities.  I’m a city boy by birth (born in Hillbrow, Johannesburg, kinda like the Bronx in NYfC, and at one point, one of the most densely-populated places per square mile on Earth).



(Hillbrow/Berea, circa 1970)

Even though my parents moved to the suburbs when I was a kid, I missed the city and moved back as soon as I could.

I love city life.  Whether it’s walking along a rainy London street en route to a cozy pub, sitting in a Paris bistro drinking coffee or buying a snack at a Viennese imbiss — you put me there, and ol’ Kimmy’s one of the happiest men on the planet.

That’s the ideal, of course;  but the plain fact is that city life isn’t like that anymore, when walking along a rainy London street means that you’re going to get robbed of your watch, when sitting in a Paris bistro will result in gypsies stealing your shopping bags, and buying a snack at a Viennese imbiss will end up with your pocket being picked.

There was a time when I wanted to live on Paris — oh, how I longed to live in Paris — but the truth of the matter is that the Paris I wanted to live in doesn’t exist anymore.  (Of Johannesburg, we will not speak.)

Granted, there was always the risk of those things happening, in any city and at any time.  But nowadays, the risk of being a victim of urban crime has risen exponentially — not to mention the risks one takes when trying to navigate a street filled with homeless encampments, and avoiding the piles of trash and the detritus of drug addicts.  In circumstances like these, the appeal of city life evaporates pretty quickly.

So on to a recent article which asks the question:

America’s Urban Desolation: Does Anyone Really Care?

The problems in urban America are at their core, policy problems. Politicians end vagrancy laws, attack law enforcement efforts to enforce property crimes (in many cases decriminalizing retail theft), and de facto if not actual drug legalization are making many cities unlivable. When combined with local education systems which simply fail to educate anyone as the teacher union power brokers pick their local elected bosses through sparse turnout elections, America’s cities are in distress.

And unfortunately, the very politicians who benefit from their votes don’t seem to care.

But that’s not the real question.  We know that urban politicians don’t care, not really, about the state of the cities they’re supposed to be running because they’re unqualified, feckless Democrats and socialists [some overlap].  And the recent activities of some city managers haven’t exactly made the prospects of living there any better:

Fourteen major American cities are part of a globalist climate organization known as the “C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group,” which has an “ambitious target” by the year 2030 of “0 kg [of] meat consumption,” “0 kg [of] dairy consumption,” “3 new clothing items per person per year,” “0 private vehicles” owned, and “1 short-haul return flight (less than 1500 km) every 3 years per person.” 

C40’s dystopian goals can be found in its “The Future of Urban Consumption in a 1.5°C World” report, which was published in 2019 and reportedly reemphasized in 2023. The organization is headed and largely funded by Democrat billionaire Michael Bloomberg. Nearly 100 cities across the world make up the organization, and its American members include Austin, Boston, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New Orleans, New York City, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Portland, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and Seattle.

And they hope to get all that “0 kg [of] meat consumption, 0 kg [of] dairy consumption, 3 new clothing items per person per year, 0 private vehicles owned” bullshit done in the next half-dozen years?  I ask for the umpteenth time:  how do they think they’re going to achieve that, and what planet are they living on?

Clearly, the real question is:  in this modern era, and given their apparent suicidal tendencies, how important are cities to a nation as a whole?

Let’s be honest about this.  With the growth of technology, a huge number of “office jobs” in a city have proven themselves to be irrelevant in terms of their location.  The Covid nonsense, if it did nothing else, proved that.  (Whether the actual output from those work-from home jobs is as productive as in-office performance is a topic for another time.)

So with the work force being dispersed to areas outside the city — heck, outside the state or even the country — one has to ask whether a tight concentration of workspaces and residences (a city) is all that necessary anymore.  It used to be that cities were the places where factories and other such manufacturing activity were based.  But no one would argue today that a Ford factory should be based in downtown Detroit rather than in Dearborn — that decision was made a long time ago — and as urban real estate prices have skyrocketed, more such moves have been happening for decades.

When I was still working, I liked working in the city — whether it was in the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, a giant grocery chain’s headquarters building, or at Leo Burnett Advertising in downtown Chicago — there was something about the bustle of the city which created the right frame of mind to work, and work hard.  The Great Big Research Company’s headquarters, in suburban Chicago, was less exciting;  and later on, working from home still less so.

But the question remains:  given that cities — all cities, not just Chicago, L.A. or NYC — seem to be in an irreversible decline, are cities still relevant, or even necessary?

One More Time

Saw this recently and it got my blood boiling:

I just looked at my electricity bill, and it went up 25% compared to last year this time (i.e. summer compared to summer).  Other commodities show similar increases, the lowest being 12%.  So:

Where the FUCK does that 3.2% number come from?

I want to see exactly which categories showed less than 3.2% inflation, to bring the average down.  And don’t insult me with bullshit like “Office Rents” (which go down, on the aggregate, when people move out and stop paying the rent): I want to see like for like.

Wait, I can see my future… and it involves shooting double the amount of ammo at this afternoon’s range session.

Quote Of The Day

From Lincoln Brown at PJMedia:

“MindGeek doesn’t care about free speech. Porn is big money, and MindGeek and its associates want as much of that money as they can get, no matter what the human damage may be.”

All very noble and moral etc.  Now let’s just substitute a few words:

“The federal government doesn’t care about free speech. Taxation is big money, and the government and its associates want as much of that money as they can get, no matter what the human damage may be.”

Works, dunnit?