“On Saturday and particularly Sunday, I heard people saying all over, ‘Hey, there’s no police anywhere, police ain’t doing nothing’. “
Which of course led to rioting, looting and all-round entertainment, the most violent day since the 1960s, except that this time, the welfare offices were surprisingly untouched.
Note that the above quote came from that idiot Southside priest who wants to ban all guns except those held by the police. Don’t expect him to change his views, though.
Now we hear the following breathless announcement:
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) warned on Friday that another lockdown might be necessary if the country suffers a “dramatic” rise in coronavirus infections.
They’ll soon discover that what they think is a “dramatic” rise is not what we think it is.
I’ve got news for you “experts” and government types: if you think that “civil disobedience” is an abstract concept or an impossibility in this country, try pulling that shit on us again.
And the harder you push us, the harder we’ll push back. If you go full aggro on us (and you should never go full aggro), the result will make the current BLM / Pantifa riots look like a Sunday school picnic.
You heard it here first.
Longtime Friend and Ex-Drummer Knob and I were swapping texts about the resumption of the Formula One season — we’re both keen fans thereof — and amidst all the talk about Vettel staying at Ferrari and what-have-you came this priceless line from Knob:
“If they all kneel at the first race, I switch off.”
This kind of echoes God-Emperor Trump’s attitude:
President Donald Trump criticized American sporting organizations for making steps to allow players to kneel in protest during the national anthem.
“I won’t be watching much anymore!” Trump wrote, sharing an article reporting the United States Soccer Federation repealed a rule banning players from kneeling during the national anthem.
But hey… if the various sports’ controlling bodies want to piss in their own soup, who are we to stop them?
I think they’ve forgotten that sport is actually a non-essential commodity — i.e. you no likee, you switchee offee — and they’ll pay the penalties for their arrogance.
As NYFC seems to be about to crash and burn, and given that the situation seems to be echoing in other large, similarly-Democrat-governed cities and states around the country, it raises rather an interesting discussion point.
Should the federal government even get involved? (That explains the hidden Nero reference in the title, by the way.)
In the first instance, we all know that as a federal republic, the states have a great deal of autonomy when it comes to various policy initiatives and experiments — the famed laboratories of democracy of which USSC Judge Louis Brandeis once spoke. Logically speaking (I know, I know), should a state like New York have no problem with abolishing the NYPD, should it not be regarded as such an experiment? Ditto Seattle, where Pantifa seems to have created an enclave within the city and declared it a Soviet collective or something. In both cases, the attitude of these states’ respective governors is best characterized by a “boys will be boys” laissez-faire response.
My question is: in the absence of any state action, is there a compelling reason for the federal government to step in and end such experiments?
I’m not sure there is. And yes, there’s a certain degree of Schadenfreude involved, in that I know that this foolishness will end in tears; but at the same time, I also have a kind of Let Africa Sink attitude towards the whole thing — as long as when the cities implode, the federal government is not expected to be part of either the deconstruction of said stupidity, nor the mini-Marshall Plan that will be required to rebuild the fools’ paradises.
The question arising from the above, therefore, is: as the nation’s economy has greatly decentralized away from the large urban centers, are cities still that important to our country? Strip away the romantic public relations veneer, and I think we can find that they aren’t.
Take Wall Street, for example. With the growth of the Internet and the ability to conduct stock trades remotely, i.e. away from the actual floor of the NYSE, I can think of no compelling reason why the stock exchange should occupy any real estate at all. The importance of New York as a financial center is not what it was, say, in the 20th century, and if the Wuhan virus has taught us anything, it is the degree to which the Internet has taken away the need for such centralization.
I know, it sucks for those fools wealthy people who plonked down $5 million for that 2BD 2BA condo on the Upper West Side, and who would have to pull up the drawbridges against hordes of rampaging looters every night; but quite frankly, I don’t think there’s going to be a great deal of sympathy for these people in the population at large — even though The Donald is one of those same people. (His hotels, for one thing, are going to go under in such a scenario, but the vagaries of fortune of overpriced urban real estate investments are not, as a rule, the concern of suburbanites and country folk in Ohio, Missouri or Utah.)
So, to quote a one-time quasi-revolutionary: “You say you want a revolution?” Go ahead, have fun. Just don’t expect taxpayers from Texas, South Dakota or Arizona to bail you out when it all goes pear-shaped; because while you’re screwing around with anarcho-socialist communes (which have always — always — failed in the past), we Deplorables in Flyover Country will be too busy making America great again to have the time or money to waste on helping you out. And contrary to your expectations, American greatness does not depend solely on places like Seattle or NYFC anymore.
Of all the do-gooder organizations out there, the American Cancer Society ranks up near the top on my personal Pain-In-The-Ass Scale — and I say this as someone who has lost one wife to cancer, and am currently married to a cancer survivor.
The problem is that the ACS is always quick to warn (i.e. scold) people about the risks of getting cancer, when as any fule kno, Joe Jackson had it right: Everything Gives You Cancer. It’s the likelihood thereof that needs to be judged if one needs to modify one’s behavior.
So bullshit like this doesn’t help the cause at all:
New guidelines on cancer prevention recommend cutting out alcohol completely
Wait, what? But the details can be found somewhat further down the page:
In the United States, the ACS estimates that alcohol use accounts for about 6 percent of all cancers and 4 percent of all cancer deaths.
Right; so I have to give up something which gives me untold pleasure, makes good times with friends even better, and dulls the pain of everyday life — because there’s a 4% chance it may cause me to die from cancer: me, with no family history of cancer, who has never smoked nor worked with cancer-bearing substances of any kind?
And it gets worse:
“Alcohol use is one of the most important preventable risk factors for cancer, along with tobacco use and excess body weight,” according to the ACS.
Other significant changes included more physical activity and eating less processed and red meat — although the ACS also now recommends completely cutting processed and red meat from one’s diet, as well as sugar-sweetened beverages and “highly processed foods and refined grain products.”
Cut out biltong too? For a 4% risk?
As Glenn Reynolds says: I’ll take my chances. Or as Oliver Reed once said:
And then we have things like this to laugh at:
Far-left actor Tom Arnold took to Twitter over the weekend to announce it is time for “white liberal men” to borrow their dad’s hunting rifles “and go nose to nose with Trump’s gang of misfit tools” in the wake of the death of George Floyd, amid nationwide Black Lives Matter protests.
“2nd Amendment is for everyone including black men with long guns but it’s fucking time for us white liberal men to stand up for our brothers & sisters,” tweeted Arnold. “Borrow our dad’s hunting rifles & go nose to nose with Trump’s gang of misfit tools.”
Actually, Tom, we Trump Misfits know that hunting rifles are really not the proper weapons to be used at arms’ length — unless, of course, a bayonet is attached to something like one of my own “hunting rifles”:
I’m too old to mess with close-quarter fighting anyway, and prefer to engage at, shall we say, a little further than arm’s length:
But your call to arms has been noted, Mr. Arnold. Go ahead, keep prodding the bear, and let’s see how it turns out.