Tag: Stupid people

Plus Ça Change…

Marxists, QOTD

I’ve just finished re-reading Barbara Tuchman’s The Proud Tower — which, if you haven’t read yet, I urge you to do so — and despite the fact that Tuchman was a tired old Lefty, she still was of an era where historians relied on facts, uncomfortable though they may be.  Unlike today’s crop of Newspeak toads, for whom the old adage “If the facts don’t conform with the theory, they must be eliminated” is carved into their stony little hearts.

Here’s one such fact, and it’s a quote of then-Speaker of the House Thomas B. Reed (R-Maine), who said of the Progressives of his era:

It was true of Progressives back then, and it’s still more true of their philosophical descendants of today, whether politicians, Greens or the Gender Studies Brigade [some considerable overlap].

Seriously:  think of Guam “tipping over”, the “trillion-dollar coin”, “defunding the police”, “anthropomorphic climate change”, “ESG”, “patriarchal hegemony”, “DEI”, “Green New Deal” and all the other modernist, oh-so fashionable tropes and tell me that these “philosophies” (actually more like religions because they rely on belief rather than substance) are not doing today exactly what Reed ascribed to the mountebanks of his era.

Actually, today’s “progressive” tropes are even more antithetical to knowledge than before, because they insist on ignoring or worse, destroying the fundamentals of civilization’s accrued wisdom — because it’s obvious that it’s only without that wisdom that their policies can survive the first question or challenge.

Even worse, when the time comes to write the history of their many failures, the historians, being of the same tribe, will almost certainly lie and ascribe the causes thereof to “fascists”, “counterrevolutionaries” (an old Marxist standby), “revanchists”, “Trumpists” or whatever their fevered little imaginations can devise — anything other than admit to the inherent fallacies of their policies and the crashing, grinding failures and concomitant miseries caused thereby.

Even Tuchman would weep.

[stupidity erased because embarrassing]

Targeted Action

Law and Order

…so to speak.  Tribe Reader Brad sends me this little example of governmental initiative:

LOS ANGELES — The largest city in California took a step closer to establishing an Office of Unarmed Response to develop alternative responses to some emergency calls, KNBC reports. 

Los Angeles City Council approved a motion Tuesday that has the framework of what the Office of Unarmed Response will look like. The framework outlines the scope of funding, staffing, work and determining primary objectives.

The motion required the chief administrative officer to create a program within 120 days for performance management and evaluation of the city’s Unarmed Model of Crisis Response Pilot. The data collected from this study will be utilized to inform the development of the Office of Unarmed Response.

The council also directed the Los Angeles Police Department to provide a report within 90 days, listing the 911 calls that can be appropriately redirected to alternative response models instead of involving armed police officers.

Now before we all start falling about with laughter, let’s consider this one seriously for a moment.

As much as I’m a supporter of the “Kill ’em all, let God figure it out”  school of law enforcement, I will allow that some situations absolutely do not require an armed cop on the scene.  A good example of this is when the Heavy Boot Of Officialdom is applied to the neck of, say, a child running an unlicensed lemonade stand on the public street, someone littering in a park, or someone playing loud music in their apartment, or “domestic disturbances” — you know, when a man and a woman can no longer deal with each other’s shit and start yelling and screaming.

Likewise, someone breaking the speed limit or driving without current vehicle registration does definitely not require an armed cop to enforce what are, after all, simple misdemeanors.

What all the above situations require is a cool head, a counselor if you will, to speak kindly to the miscreants and persuade them of the folly of their ways.

I see nothing but satisfactory outcomes.

And I think the City of Angels is the perfect laboratory in which to test this laudable initiative.

Fixing The Mess

Media Assholes

I see that CNN has canned their CEO after only about a year on the job:

CNN CEO Chris Licht will be leaving the media company just 16 months after being picked for the position.

Licht announced Wednesday that he will be leaving CNN after meeting with Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav. The 51-year-old CEO will be replaced in the interim by a three-person leadership team which includes longtime CNN executive Amy Entelis, who worked closely with former cable news boss Jeff Zucker before Zucker’s resignation in February of 2022.

“For a number of reasons things didn’t work out and that’s unfortunate,” Zaslav said. “It’s really unfortunate. And ultimately that’s on me. And I take full responsibility for that.”

Zaslav told employees that CNN is “in the process of conducting a wide search” for a new leader that could “take a while.”

I want this job.  Here’s how I see it working.

If CNN is serious about rebuilding its image and ratings, what better way to signal that change than by picking an avowed conservative (i.e. me) who will not become enthralled by blowjob pieces by the New York Times  and Atlantic Magazine?

My first pledge would be to make CNN’s principle business about actual news instead of opinion — all their talking heads would be fired on Day One of my tenure — and my job would be to make their ad line “This… is CNN”  something that doesn’t instantly cause mocking laughter and isn’t used as a punchline.

See this shit?

Politicians and media personalities from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Joe Scarborough were angered by CNN’s decision to host Trump on the platform that has consistently offered friendly coverage to Democrats.

Gone.  I pledge to give unfriendly or at best skeptical coverage to everybody.  If that frightens off the Lefties, c’est la vie.  (For some reason, conservatives have no problem with this, as long as they are treated fairly — Tim Scott went on The View  recently, even.)

Sure, I know nothing about running a media company.  So what?  “Industry experience” doesn’t seem to have helped them very much in the recent past, has it?

I’d move all their New York offices to somewhere like Fort Worth, cutting the cord of the New Jersey Turnpike, so to speak, and okay, I’d make the sacrifice myself and relocate to Atlanta.

Oh, and by the way:  I’m cheap.  Best way to increase profits is to cut costs, most especially salaries (see “terminated talking heads”, above) and the best way to signal that is for the CEO to be the first to take a pay cut.  All media people are overpaid anyway.  And to those who would say that I’d be hiring cheap (ergo inferior) replacements, I would point out that the overpaid assholes they’ve currently got on staff have not exactly covered themselves with glory.

I’d be satisfied with a two-year contract at $12 million p.a., no shares or stock options (conflict of interest), with further annual extensions at $12 million each (because I don’t want to work there for too long lest I get cooties).

They could use one of these as my profile pic:

It would frighten all the right people, and please all those on the right.

To quote Roger Ailes:  “Half the market.”

What could CNN lose, any more than they’ve lost already?

Betting Against The Smart Money

Business, Sports

I got a good chuckle about this one.  (For those of you who don’t care about professional golf or golf in general, what follows isn’t about golf, despite the circumstances.)

It’s been announced that the breakaway LIV golf circuit (funded by the Saudis) is going to merge with the established PGA circuit, which means that all the Sturm und Drang sobbing about “rebels”, “traitors”, “mercenaries” and so on is just meaningless piffle (as it was at the time anyway).

Here’s what got me chuckling:

Former President Donald Trump is nothing if not prescient on some of the biggest cultural and business issues of the day.

The latest example of his Nostradamus-like ability to see into the future can be found in his 2022 prediction that the upstart league LIV Golf would merge with its rival the PGA. That pronouncement came to fruition on Tuesday.

“All of those golfers that remain ‘loyal’ to the very disloyal PGA, in all of its different forms, will pay a big price when the inevitable MERGER with LIV comes, and you get nothing but a big ‘thank you’ from PGA officials who are making Millions of Dollars a year,” he shared on his social media app Truth Social in July 2022.

Of course, some people had a problem with this because Trump:

“To be clear, only Trump is talking about possibly merging the organizations,” author Michael D’Antonio wrote in July 2022.

And as for the announcement itself:

In response to the news, CBS Sports reporter Kyle Porter tweeted, “Truly gobsmacked today. Of the 10,000 different outcomes, this was never talked about, never discussed, never even floated. Everyone who would have known was at the PGA two weeks ago, and nobody even came close to hinting at it!”

…except Donald Trump, a year ago.

Getting Your Money’s Worth

Business, Management

Let’s face it:  I don’t want the U.S. to be compared with France on anything (okay, maybe when we start making better food).

From none other than Martha Stewart:

In an interview with the magazine Footwear News, the author, TV personality and entrepreneur slammed hybrid work culture, saying that people cannot “possibly get everything done working three days a week in the office and two days remotely.”

Stewart’s comments come as more managers push for an end to the work-from-home trend that took hold more than three years ago at the start of the pandemic.

Stewart compared the state of in-person work in the United States to France, calling it “not a very thriving country.”

And of course, she’s right — and not just about France.

Here’s a humble suggestion for managers whose employees refuse to stop working from home:  for all those days that they don’t come in to the office, pay them 33% of their rate.  Then, for those who still refuse, use the savings to train their replacements who will want to show up for work.

I’m so sick of people who expect to get paid well, but refuse to do the amount of work that deserves such compensation.

And say what you like about ol’ Martha, but nobody ever accused her of being a slacker.

Stick To Souls, Padre

Religion, The Gun Thing

From Da Church:

Amid a mounting debate in America over the constitutionality of gun control, Cardinal Joseph Tobin of Newark has entered the fray with a different argument: That people should voluntarily forgo their Second Amendment rights for the betterment of society.

“I honestly believe it is the best thing we can do to change the culture of violence that threatens us today,” Tobin said.

“Let’s voluntarily set aside our rights in order to witness the truth that only peace and never violence, is the way to build a free society that is lived concretely in our homes, our neighborhoods, our communities, our nation and our world,” he said.

Tell you what, Yeronner:  you introduce unicorns into your liturgy first, because that’s where your “never violence” wishful thinking leads to.

And “setting aside rights” never ends well — as the revocation of the First Amendment’s freedom of worship would show you, after about half a second’s thought.

Just… shuddup, you self-righteous asshole.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to the range.