A Triumph For Feminism

Let’s see:  because #feminismrules, you assign a female guard to an all-men’s prison.  What could possibly go wrong?

Quite a lot, apparently.

Lauren McIntyre, 32, is accused of having a sexual relationship with convicted double murderer Andrew Roberts over a four-month period at HMP Isle of Wight, Metro reported.
Prison guard McIntyre — believed to be a mother-of-two— is accused of willfully and without reasonable excuse or justification misconducting herself in a way which amounted to an abuse of the public’s trust in the office holder because she had secret sex with murderer Roberts.

And the choirboy?

Roberts was convicted of strangling girlfriend Louise L’Homme, 23, and their eight-month-old daughter at the home they shared in 2003. He is serving a life term in prison.

This is what happens when you mix men and women together in a closed environment.  (And for the benefit of the dense:  whether it’s in a prison, a co-ed campus dormitory or on board a Navy ship, they’re gonna have sex.)  ‘Twas ever thus, and no amount of Feministical Theory or Woeful Handwringing will prevent it.

In the old days, prison guards were called “screws”.  Nowadays, that nickname seems to have a whole different meaning, dunnit?

Under The Knife

I remember the day I quit exercising.

I was thirty years old, in really good shape, and while visiting my mother I went for my regular morning jog.  At the time, she lived in Umhlanga Rocks, a little seaside resort town just north of Durban, and to say that the Indian Ocean coast has a tropical climate is to understate the thing.  It’s not only hot, it’s humid — so humid that I, a Joburg boy, actually had trouble breathing the thick, moist air (Johannesburg is 6,000ft above sea level).

But I had to stay in shape, and I liked the way I looked, so off I went.  I kept the jog short, maybe two or three miles up the coast road, and then I turned around and went back, taking a little detour along the concrete boardwalk that runs past the luxury hotels and separates them from the beach.

By now, I was deeply uncomfortable and miserable:  the sweat was pouring off me, I was tired and more than a little sunburned because while I usually jogged without a shirt up in Johannesburg, it was not an issue there — but down here, in the blazing tropical sun, my fair skin was going extra-crispy, and fast.

I was coming up to the last leg of the trip, where I could make the turn and head back to my mother’s house.  At that point, one of the hotels had a patio cafe right on the boardwalk, and sitting at a table under a large Cinzano umbrella were two rather pretty younger women.  As I ran past, one whistled and called out in Afrikaans, “Nice bod!”

I waved over my back at her, ran about a dozen more yards, and stopped dead in my tracks, chest heaving and my breath wheezing like a beached whale as the epiphany struck me.  I was doing all this — the tiredness, the sweatiness, the sunburn, the aching muscles — just so a stranger could compliment me on my “mooi lyfie” ?

I walked back to my Mom’s house, and never jogged again.

All this came back to me when I read the story of how Ozzy Osbourne’s daughter Kelly has had gastric sleeve surgery and thus lost over 80lbs.

Now I’m not going to go into some stupid amateur psycho-analysis as to why she would want to do this.  She was always a plump little thing, and clearly she didn’t like the way she looked (hence all the tattoos she had inflicted on herself, tattoos which she is now having removed — draw your own conclusions).  And she looks quite fetching now (see the link above)… but that just leads me to my earlier conclusion:  why would she undergo so radical a surgery, just so a stranger like me could think she was “quite fetching”?

I know several women who have had gastric sleeve surgery, and every single one has told me that had they known what the consequences were going to be (other than the massive weight loss), they would never have done it.  You see, the weight loss may be all very well, but what the gastric sleeve does is make eating food a profoundly uncomfortable experience:  nausea, pain, discomfort and a general malaise all follow if you eat so much as a single forkful of food too many, and after a while you begin to hate the sight of food.  Any food.

And what happens next is that some of the joy goes out of your life.  Eating is such a wonderful and enjoyable experience, really:  nothing quite compares to the feeling of satisfaction, of well-being and happiness that a good meal gives you.  It’s one of life’s simple, and paradoxically one of life’s greatest pleasures.  And with gastric sleeve surgery (which is irreversible), it’s gone forever.

So while everyone — and every one a stranger — is complimenting Kelly Osbourne on how great she looks, know too that her previous unhappiness at being overweight has been replaced with a much greater one.

And frankly, I never thought she was that fat to begin with.

Straws

You know, whenever we see reports of people going nuts and gunning down government officials (not cops or state troopers, just ordinary workers), we are justifiably appalled.

Should we be?  Try looking at these two little examples of governmental overreach.  In Connecticut:

A Connecticut selectwoman alleged on Facebook that she and her husband are facing a fine of $1,000 for violating the state’s coronavirus travel restrictions. Amy St. Onge (R), first selectwoman of Thompson, posted to Facebook that, on Labor Day, she and her husband Jason left home to visit their son Caleb, who is training at the Air Force base in Altus, Oklahoma, and preparing for his first deployment.
Upon the parents’ return, St. Onge said she received an email from the State of Connecticut informing her that she and her husband had violated Gov. Ned Lamont’s executive orders regarding travel during the coronavirus pandemic.

Here’s the thing:  somebody in government was either monitoring their Faecesbook account, or else responded to a fink’s complaint.  Either way, the response was uncalled-for and excessive.  (Connecticut is facing a massive budget surplus.  Just sayin’.)

Now Maryland:

Shawn Marshall Myers from Maryland threw two parties at his own home that violated the governor’s social distancing executive order and now he’s going to spend a full year behind bars.
They were at his own home and they were outdoor bonfire parties.
He threw one and the cops showed up and convinced him to break it up. He threw another less than a week later and he refused to tell his guests to leave when the cops arrived and told him to do so. He said he had the right to have a party at his house and told his guests not to leave.
And now he’s going to prison for a year.

Note, in the latter case, the following:

“He was given a warning,” Charles County State’s Attorney Tony Covington said. “It’s not like the police just swooped in there and said you’re going to jail. They gave him a warning.”

Yeah, that makes it all hunky-dory, of course.  You fucking little totalitarian cocksucker.

 

Killing Golden Geese

The late and great Margaret Thatcher had it right (as usual) when she said of Communists that sooner or later, they run out of other people’s money.  What’s happening in many of the neo-socialist hellholes like New York lately is that the “other” (i.e. wealthy) people aren’t necessarily running out of money, they’re running out of patience with the filthy nest their government has created, and are running away.

It’s snapshot simple. The wealthy and the companies they work for pay most of the taxes. The poor consume most of the taxes through social programs. COVID is driving the wealthy and their offices out of the city. No one will be left to pay for the poor, who are stuck here, and the city will collapse in the transition.

Of course, that would be bad enough, because even if the wealthy folks came back to their Upper East- or West Side domiciles once the Chinkvirus had subsided, NYFC could continue to fleece them in the manner to which everyone has become accustomed.  But if their toney little brownstone houses and chi-chi apartment buildings are surrounded by homeless, aggressive beggars and rioting assholes of the BLM / Pantifa persuasion, the millionaires and billionaires will say (and are saying) “The hell with this shit” and leave for more hospitable climes — and their companies will go along with them.

I have another post bubbling under about the death of the traditional office-work model, but that can wait for another time.

What’s really interesting, from a socio-political perspective, is how quickly this has happened.  It might have happened at some point or another anyway, as the Blue Model metropolises collapsed under the weight of their underfunded pension plans and failing social services and infrastructure — but the Chinkvirus has been the Catalyst Supreme for our little domestic Lenins and Maos.  What’s even more interesting is that, being economic illiterates, our socialist pols have looked to Europe, their favorite model, and said, “But France isn’t collapsing!”

Oh yes, it is.  The difference is that rich Frogs can’t exactly load up U-Hauls and move to — where?  Germany?  Belgium?  Britain?  It’s the same situation in those countries.  There are no prosperous and successful business-friendly, low tax states in Europe like Texas, Florida or Utah — they’re all soft socialist states;  and the Chinkvirus is having the same effect on their economies and traditional business models as it is in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles.

So even in the best of times (booming Trump economy, no virus, no BLM / Pantifa riots), Illinois, California and New York — to name but three — would be sucking wind soon enough, and the writing has been on their walls for some time.  But in the current environment?  They’re screwed.

My only concern, as I’ve often said before, is that these fleeing rats don’t come to our happy little ships and infest them with their shitty ideas and political morality.

Overvalued

Back in the fall of 1982, I and Wife #1 came to the U.S. for the first time in my life — in fact, the first time I’d ever left the African sub-continent at all — and because I didn’t know diddly about New York City (our first stop), I booked us a room at the Hotel Edison just off 47st and Broadway because it was cheap.  I didn’t know, at the time, that the area was known as Hell’s Kitchen for a very good reason, but in those days I was tough and didn’t really give a damn — I was coming from fucking Johannesburg, how bad could New York be?  (Not bad at all by comparison, actually.)

Anyway, from memory, the room cost about $47+tax a night, and while it was awful, I’d stayed in much worse (errr South Africa, remember) and while we we assailed by Volkswagen-sized cockroaches a couple times, the hotel was close to most of what we wanted to see around Times Square, and was easy walking distance to Greenwich Village to the south and Central Park to the north.  Also, the delis on 8th Ave were fantastic — my first experience with a gut-busting NY-style pastrami sandwich was an eye-opener — and so we spent our days walking around the place, seeing the sights, eating deli food and holding our noses to block out the smells (garbage strike).

Anyway, years later (after the Great Wetback Episode of 1985) I had occasion to go from Chicago back to New York, this time on business, and as the Manhattan branch office was quite nearby, I booked into the Edison again, for nostalgia’s sake.

It was the same crappy hotel, same foul rooms, only this time the room cost $285+tax.  When I first saw the rate when I was booking the trip, I thought the hotel had to have undergone a huge refurbishment to justify that kind of price increase;  but of course it hadn’t:  it was just New York Fucking City.

Still later, I checked out the hotel again, just out of curiosity, and the rate was $385.  And from what I could gather, still no refurb of the place.

I should remind everyone that I have never shrunk from paying top dollar for a quality product, whether it was The Mayfair Hotel in London, the Madison in Paris, Imperial in Tokyo or wherever.  Five-star is five-star, and there ya go.  Paying five-star prices for total shit, however… nu-uh.  And from my experience, most Manhattan hotels were shit.  Even the “highbrow” ones like the Waldorf-Astoria or the Algonquin were overpriced flophouses, and their astronomical prices were justified either by the “cachet” attached to being in New York, NY [eyecross]  or else the high (overpriced) cost of the real estate.

So you can imagine my response when I saw this article via Insty:

During the second quarter ended June 30, average asking rents along 16 major retail corridors in Manhattan declined for the eleventh consecutive quarter, falling to $688 per square foot, according to a report from the commercial real estate services firm CBRE. The drop marked the first time since 2011 that prices dropped below $700, the firm said, representing an 11.3% decline from a year ago.

A number of retailers have outright stopped paying rent to their landlords during the pandemic, which in some instances is resulting in litigation.

Boo fucking hoo.  Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of supercilious chiselers and snooty price gougers.  And then there’s this, at the end of the article:

“I think there is a short-term and a long-term look at this,” NKF’s Roseman said. “Short-term, we are in survival mode right now. But when things do sort of turn back around, it will still be the same. There is only one Fifth Avenue in the world.”

If you look up “Wishful Thinking” in your dictionary, this sentiment will be under the heading.  (It probably links to “Dinosaur Perspectives” too, speaking as it does about L.A.’s Rodeo Drive and Chicago’s Michigan Avenue as being Places To See And Be Seen.  Dream on, Bubba:  we’re facing a new world.)

Anyway, I see that the Edison is “temporarily” closed because of the Chinkvirus — and from the looks of it, has had a refurb since I last checked — but one of the “business-class” hotels on Broadway, where I paid over $500 a night in 2007, is now asking $121.

No wonder they’re not paying the rent.

Portent

As the Left ramps up its little reindeer games, expect more of this kind of thing:

“As we’re walking down passing Fourth Street, a blue car just come swerving out into the middle of the street almost runs over a bunch of protesters and everybody around starts like smacking the car trying to get him to slow down,” the witness said.  “He pulls down his window and he fires three shots into the guy.  From point-blank.  No words no nothing.  And then rolls up his window and zooms off.”

I’m not saying this is a good thing — despite my Yosemite Sam online persona, I dread having to shoot someone again — but at some point, the “kill everybody” switch is going to be thrown by ordinary people, especially when these rioting thugs start blocking roads, stopping cars and trying to assault the drivers and passengers.

Used to be that peaceful protests were confined (by the police) to sidewalks, with lots of chanting, signs and so on.  Peaceful stuff.  But that police action seems to have gone by the board — whether by negligence or design I can’t say — and inevitably, as police presence diminishes, the thugs will become bolder and more violent as they get the impression that “We own the streets!”

So I blame city management for this — muzzling police has long been a hallmark of Leftist government — and if the winds have been sown, both rioters and their government backers can expect whirlwinds;  which will invite rioters to start carrying guns to these “peaceful protests”, and off we go on the hurricane of violence.

Which, by the way, is exactly what the Leftist nomenklatura wants to happen.