Monday, February 8, 2016

Leftover Wings, Chips, And Dip

     Good morning, Gentle Reader. I’m a bit fuzzy this morning – the Super Bowl can do that to an older man – but that doesn’t mean I won’t try to provide you with an interesting potpourri column. It’s just that the C.S.O. and I have made some sad discoveries:

  • When you habitually get up at 4:00 AM, 10:30 PM can seem awfully late.
  • Despite a nominal shortage of objective reasons, we dislike the Carolina Panthers about as much as we dislike the New England Patriots. (Cf. Jerry Seinfeld on “cheering for clothes.”)
  • After one reaches a certain age, the finger foods that once made the Super Bowl an event to anticipate with glee are no longer all that easily eaten, digested, or, ah, disposed of the morning after.
     “Youth is the most wonderful time of life. What a pity it’s wasted on the young!” – variably attributed to George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde.


     It seems quite a large fraction of America was rooting for Denver yester eve. Peyton Manning’s fourth Super Bowl appearance certainly worked out better than his previous one, but somehow I doubt that had much to do with the widespread desire to see his Broncos win. He’s just that widely liked and admired, while Cam Newton has managed to antagonize a few folks with his antics and statements about race.

     These days, bizarre statements about race and racial discrimination from prominent Negroes are hardly surprising. They get their lines from a fairly compact and consistent set of sources. Nor could you expect those sources to react otherwise than as they’ve done toward racial heretics such as Stacey Dash. The Left can’t afford to let any of them darkies get uppity, y’know. They might walk off the plantation, and then where would their Democrat masters be? Got to keep ‘em all singing the same racialist spirituals.

     Oh, by the way, Cam: there have been other black quarterbacks who’ve done well and have been widely admired. Warren Moon. Randall Cunningham. Donovan McNabb. Doug Williams. There will surely be others. If you want to be numbered among them, you’d be best advised to keep your mouth shut, your passes on target, and your touchdown celebrations dignified. The rest will follow.


     Via WRSA comes a bit of news I can only applaud:

     A hacker, who wishes to remain anonymous, plans to dump the apparent names, job titles, email addresses and phone numbers of over 20,000 supposed Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) employees, as well as over 9,000 alleged Department of Homeland Security (DHS) employees, Motherboard has learned.

     The hacker also claims to have downloaded hundreds of gigabytes of data from a Department of Justice (DOJ) computer, although that data has not been published.

     I’m sure the government worshippers in the audience will be aghast at this...as will, of course, those roughly thirty thousand “outed” federal employees. But reflect on this: those thirty thousand men are federal law enforcers. They have firearms privileges you and I have been denied. And they use those privileges to coerce private citizens and organization under color of law. If their identities are kept secret, doesn’t that make them secret police? If they serve the political agendas of those in power – which, these days, is more often than not, even for that supposed bastion of LEO integrity the FBI – doesn’t that make them secret political police?

     Think about it, and about just how free men should regard such police.


     Stories such as this one are growing ever more frequent:

     While New York City deals with an increase of random stabbings lately, yet another person has been slashed inside of a subway station.

     It happened right before 4 a.m. Saturday morning in The Bronx.

     The 32-year-old victim was walking down the stairway of the East Tremont and Boston Post Road station when two men approached him. Police say there was an argument but the victim eventually walked away. However, he was followed and slashed in the face.

     He was the 11th victim in a spree of city subway slashings this year and it has some commuters thinking twice before riding the subways.

     Democrat-controlled cities can be like that. Even New York, which Giuliani and (to a lesser extent) Bloomberg did so much to recivilize, can descend into chaos under the hand of an administration more concerned with propitiating mouthy interest groups than maintaining the peace of the streets. The incentives to predatory behavior never go away; all that varies is the response of officialdom...and, perhaps, that of private citizens who’ve had enough:

     The possibility of picking the wrong victim has a significant deterrent effect on the predators among us.


     When Dave Brat was elected to the House of Representatives to replace Republican Majority Leader Eric Cantor, it shook the Republican establishment to its foundations. Yet listen to this supposed conservative maverick and ask yourself whether he can be relied upon any further than his Congressional predecessor:

     Speaker Ryan said that by this spring, we'd have down on paper big, bold conservative reforms dealing with comprehensive tax reform, Obamacare replacement and significant entitlement reform. We basically have a four-year window to get that started, or the nation will face serious consequences in ensuring these programs continue for the next generation.

     So the overall sense, one is that we're going to solve big problems in the year after the presidential [election]. And again, we've funded the government through September, so we've given up some of our leverage this year. So there's a balancing act going on, and that's, I think, what most people came away with.

     This does not sound all that good to me. It sounds more like an ongoing surrender to “the way things are done around here,” with the Democrats demanding both arms and both legs and the Republicans, who hold robust majorities in both Houses of Congress, “bargaining them down” to one arm and one leg...and perhaps a player to be named later.

     Would having a Republican in the White House make much difference when the GOP exhibits this sort of spinelessness before the Democrats’ demands?


     We now begin that dismal portion of the year during which there is no football. Yes, there’s ice hockey, and some other game that’s played on hardwood courts by serial bastard producers, and an even less interesting game played mostly by Europeans without arms. But the void is felt nevertheless. Happily, baseball’s spring training starts soon, and we’ll get to see what adjustments the Steinbrenners have made to my aging, inept Bronx Bombers. Until then, I anticipate spending a lot of time struggling to save Sanctuary.

     Later, Gentle Reader.

1 comment:

Avraham said...

Maybe on the streets people can't carry but I had a neighbor in NY that had a gun. But that was a different kind of world. In Israel the only people with guns were in the Army or police and that seemed to fit the situation a little better. People's tempers were from what I recall kind of short. Different strokes for different folks.