The Kim Award for Honest Speech and Straight Talk goes to Sheriff Grady Judd of Polk County FL for this outstanding comment:
People have a right to be safe in their homes… I highly recommend, if a looter enters your home, you grab your gun and you shoot him, you shoot him so he looks like grated cheese.
I bet he drinks straight bourbon with a vitriol chaser.
No doubt some fainting goats will have a problem with his fine suggestion; just nobody on this website.
Just a lovely story, one that makes me want to take the barrel of tar off the boil, hang the rope back on the wall and postpone a trip to the range:
“Today at my local supermarket, there was an elderly lady in front of me, kept checking how much she’s spending. Long story short, the amount came to over what she had, and she asked for certain items to be credited off.
“The Aldi cashier turned around and said, ‘It’s only £1 something over, I’ll pay it for you.’
“When it was my turn I said ‘what a lovely thing to do’ and the reply was ‘we are all battling at the moment and we need to eat’.”
Nothing like a bit of gratuitous kindness to help assuage the rage, is there?
…actually, Bob Marley’s granddaughter, who was getting yelled at because she wore a t-shirt with “White Lives Matter” printed on it, which of course upset the Usual Suspects. They climbed onto Twatter and sent off many broadsides calling her the usual names.
Good for you, sweetheart. Everyone should respond in the same way to the Snowflake / Wokist / BLM / Permanently-Aggrieved when they start the Cancellation Derby.
To all my Tribe Readers: G’mar Chatimah Tovah.
For us non-Jews: it’s about Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, which starts at dusk today.
As well as refraining from food and drink, many Jews spend the whole day in synagogue, with a special service called Kol Nidre taking place soon after the fast begins the night before, and services for the whole of the following day until the fast ends at sundown.
In addition to fasting, people also abstain from bathing, wearing leather and wearing perfumes or lotions, while marital relations are also a no-no on the day. (As my buddy Selwyn Shandel once sourly remarked: “So in that respect, it’s no different from any other day.”)
Yom Tov, y’all.
Café Raymond is a favorite destination and, as usual, both floors, the balcony and the sidewalk tables at the diner are packed with patrons.
None of the people waiting for his signature stack of ricotta pancakes stuffed with blueberries, his home-cured smoked salmon and caper platter or his savory sunny-side-up egg and brisket hash have any idea the man behind the kitchen counter — Ray Mikesell — has placed his beloved restaurant up for sale. He’s calling it quits two decades after he returned home from Baltimore to raise his children and carve out a life in Pittsburgh.
Through tears he says he simply has had enough — not of his customers, not of creating new dishes or specialized drinks, but of all the uncertainty that has dogged nearly every small businessman in the country since the beginning of the pandemic.
“It started with COVID and just over time, the uncertainty, the stress of trying to stay open, the inability to hire people, the underlying tension in society, the inflationary cost of everything you need to purchase to create quality food, that is, if you can get it…” he says, his voice trailing. He stops and pauses to hold it together.
The food costs are crushing him, he said, but so is the cost of doing business, period. His utility bills have skyrocketed, as has the cost of fuel to pick up fresh meats and vegetables from local farms or to deliver food for catering jobs. The costs are crippling, he says, and they are creating a barrier to investing in a business he has loved for so long.
“It just breaks you down no matter how strong you are,” said Mr. Mikesell.
Here’s my take on this. Every time a politician says he cares about small businesses and their owners, he’s lying in his teeth.
This new crowd of socialists (including, alas, the Socialist Lite Republicans) absolutely loathe small, successful businesses, for the same reason they hate people owning cars: having your own car gives you freedom of movement, and your own business makes you part of a community, a community that binds you to itself because they now have the freedom to decide when, where and what they want to eat, and not have to go at specific times to a dreary commissariat like the hapless Winston Smith in Orwell’s 1984, and be fed the same slop and gruel as everyone else.
And the government absolutely hates that you have those freedoms.
If that’s not the case, please then explain to me why commuter and passenger rail systems are so popular with neo-socialist governments and why, when businesses like that of Ray Mikesell experience the same ghastly misfortunes (created, it must be said, by government), the government policy does absolutely nothing to help those businesses except by ladling out one-time, piddly subsistence-level “incentives” instead of addressing the main issues that cripple both the businesses and their customers: soaring inflation (created by the government printing too much money), high fuel prices (even though we are the most self-sufficient energy-producing nation on Earth), the double whammy of ever-higher food prices and shortages (in America!!!), and logistical / transport operations that are crippled by (all together now) government regulations.
I know that anecdotes are not data — except that they are, when the owner of a business like Café Raymond is not a statistical outlier, but just one of tens of thousands in a similar or worse predicament.
Explain to me why Ray Mikesell, and all those other business owners, should not just quit and go somewhere else. Explain also why the millions of ordinary people who are affected by the closing of small businesses and their own personal misfortunes should not be heating barrels of tar, oiling ropes, and loading up their semiautomatic sporting rifles.
But then we’re the bad guys. Yeah, right.
Chalk this little episode up to a “nick of time” coincidence:
According to authorities, the woman in question had just picked up her pistol the day before, after waiting the 10 days required under California law between the time of purchase and when gun owners can actually take possession of their newly-bought firearm. Little did she realize that she would soon end up using the gun to fend off an attack on her husband in their own home.
And here’s the good part (with my emphasis):
In a 911 call at 10:20 p.m., a resident of the Wilding Ranch subdivision on the city’s east edge reported that a neighbor had called and said she had just shot an intruder at her house.
When deputies arrived, they found a dead man near the home’s front entry. The residents — a 50-year-old woman and her 45-year-old husband — said that the apparently intoxicated stranger had tried to force his way into their home.
According to the sheriff’s report, as the husband fought with the intruder near the front door, his wife ran to the bedroom to get a revolver, which she said she had brought home on Friday. Returning to the entry, she fired all its rounds into the intruder.
None of this one-shot or double-tap stuff for Our Heroine: ALL SIX bullets pumped into the choirboy’s worthless ass.
Sing it from the rooftops, brothers and sisters.