Apparently, Bette Midler caused something of a stir when in having a snit about Sen. Joe Manchin’s refusal to go along with the BBB lunacy, she said bad things about the people of West Virginia:
Left-wing Hollywood star Bette Midler has insulted the people of West Virginia, describing them as “poor, illiterate and strung out”
The response was immediate, and wonderful:
[snigger]
Aaaaaand once again, we see “well-meaning” actions having unforeseen consequences — unforeseen only by those without common sense and / or brains, that is.
Last year, Burlington, Vermont, cut its police budget by nearly 30% through attrition. Now, people are afraid to speak up because they know they’ll be called “racist.”
It’s been more than a year and a half since the city cut its police budget, and now even the city councilor who proposed the cut is unhappy with the consequences.
Oh, and what consequences would those be in sleepy little Burlington VT, home to so many hippies, academics and Lefties? [some overlap]
The move to slash the police budget, however, has led city leaders, as NBC reported, “to reckon with the unintended consequences of that decision, including problems with public safety and quality of life, police and residents say.”
…
The unintended consequences of the resolution apparently showed up quickly, NBC reported. The council thought attrition would take years, but it was completed in months, leaving the police department understaffed. Police officers left en masse, leaving only about five to patrol at night. The police have had to shift focus to high-priority crimes and less on quality of life issues. Burglary, vehicle theft, mental health issues, and overdoses all increased with fewer cops on patrol.
You don’t say.
Local business owner Mark Bouchett told NBC that people were afraid to speak out about the problems that have arisen due to the reduced police force.
“If you speak out against defunding the police force, you’re labeled a racist,” he told NBC. “Or at least an idiot that doesn’t understand the problem.”
Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of Lefty assholes. It’s just too bad that the good (conservative) folks of that part of Vermont have to suffer the consequences as well.
At least they’re not unarmed…
So here’s this report:
Retired generals urge Pentagon to take steps to avert ‘civil war’ after 2024 election
“The Defense Department should war-game the next potential post-election insurrection or coup attempt to identify weak spots. It must then conduct a top-down debrief of its findings and begin putting in place safeguards to prevent breakdowns not just in the military, but also in any agency that works hand in hand with the military.”
I’m all over that thought. But I should caution these old assholes that as usual, they’re preparing to fight the last war, not the next one.
You see, there will be no problems among military or even among ex-military, as they seem to be so nervous about, because the outcome of the next election is likely to be a resounding Republican victory.
But amongst all their little wargames, I hope these guys actually implement their action plans for when the Left starts an insurrection after Election 2024. That, my old Rockjaws, is the more likely prospect.
In the latest insanity emanating from California, we see this:
The California Air Resources Board (CARB) passed a regulation aimed at “Small Off-Road Engines” on Thursday that will ban the sale of portable generators in the state — which includes generators mounted in recreational vehicles.
The ruling bans the sale of gas-powered leaf blowers and lawnmowers in the state beginning in 2024. Portable generators will be required to meet more stringent standards in 2024 and meet zero-emission standards starting in 2028.
In the 2024 model year, portable generators will have to improve their efficiency by somewhere between 40% and 90%, which seems unrealistic in such a short period of time, so the reality is, it will be very hard to find a generator in Cailfornia in two years.
The song will be rewritten to show that the lights all went out not in Massachusetts, but California.
Morons, fools, imbeciles.
N.B.: Insty wants to open up a portable jennie store in Nevada, just over the CA border. Won’t work: California will be stationing some Stasi state agents in the parking lot to report the car numbers back to the Fuehrer HQ , and woe betide the CA plates caught “smuggling” generators back into the Dark State.)
In the Comments to yesterday’s post, Longtime Reader and Friend geekWithA.45 said this:
Looking across The Pond, where this Green foolishness has reached its apogee, you get statements like this one:
“Shared mobility” means at best enforced carpooling and such, and at worst public transport, which denies people the freedom to go anywhere except where the bus routes and train lines so they can. Individual choice, then, is left to bicycles or this confounded electric scooters.
But note the condescension towards “20th-century thinking” — that would be the twentieth century which outdid the Industrial Revolution in its engineering development and progress, that created the explosion of knowledge distribution which outdid the invention of the printing press, and gave individuals all over the world freedoms unknown since the beginning of recorded history.
In fact, if you think about it, the junior minister’s statement would put individuals back onto trains, buses and bicycles — i.e. the transport systems of the nineteenth century — and no doubt for reasons of animal cruelty, no horseback travel would be allowed, thus making the twenty-first century’s inhabitants even worse off than their nineteenth-century forebears.
A couple years ago, BritPM Boris Johnson decreed that internal combustion-engined cars would be banned from manufacture by 2027 — by what law he didn’t say, which is a topic all by itself — thus making the hapless subjects of the Crown eventually reliant on electric-powered transport, to be powered by an electrical system which is even now insufficient for its existing purpose, let alone the gargantuan future needs of all-electric transportation — hence the suggestion of the junior minister (age 45).
All the same is true over here, although I would suggest (or hope) that any U.S. president who decreed the end of car manufacture as we know it would be thrown out of office at the next election — if not before — and the sheer size of the U.S. market would make the demise of gasoline-powered cars and trucks a remote eventuality indeed.
Although, as The Geek has suggested, the internal combustion engine will most likely meet its end by the death of a thousand cuts rather than by any single authoritarian decree.
It may well be, however, that the key word here is “remote”. I’ve seen several studies among the future generation (under 25 years old) that they are all in favor of the above foolishness — electric cars, mass transport systems etc. — and to be perfectly blunt, if all this is a matter of demographics, then fine: let the future generations revert to nineteenth-century transportation and be governed by twenty-first century totalitarianism.
My generation will all be dead by then, and the little buggers can live with the consequences of this Green silliness that they and their parents adopted oh-so willingly.