↓ Archives ↓

Posts Tagged → safety

New York City is dangerous and dirty

In the past three years I have had the unhappy necessity of visiting Manhattan a number of times for business and family. Last June was the last time I went, and hopefully the last time I have to be there until the place is cleaned up from top to bottom.

Last June I took the pickup to move our daughter out. She lived in New York City for eight years, from undergrad through dental school, and until the last couple of years she enjoyed her experience tremendously. But when we had loaded the last of her things into the bed of the truck, she got into the cab and said “I can’t wait to leave Manhattan. It’s so sad, because I used to love this place. But now it is dangerous and dirty and I want out. Let’s go.”

Manhattan is now looking like its worst days back in the 1970s and 1980s before Rudy Giuliani was elected mayor. Trash is blowing around everywhere, thugs hang out and loiter and saunter along every street and park bench, homeless bums are living in the parks and on building steps. People are being attacked on the sidewalks by demented mental patients prematurely released before their treatments are completed. People exit a restaurant and are immediately punched, kicked, and robbed by young people who laugh about it.

The police do nothing about this dangerous chaos because the Manhattan district attorney believes that holding criminals accountable for their violence and destruction is somehow mean, or wrong. And so the criminals now rule the streets, as an official policy.

The old Diamond District on 47th Street is a shell of its former self. A thousand years of jewelry making and watch making and world class talent all concentrated into one city block is now gone, because some communist in power decided that all this material excess violated some notion of “equity,” and so the jewelers and watchmakers were driven out. It is a sad ghost town now.

An old friend of mine who lives in Manhattan complained about how her own restaurants, which her architect husband had designed, and into which she had invested great amounts of time and money, were torched and looted in the riots of 2020. When I asked her if this destruction was a result of political failure, she went straight to blaming the Bad Orange Man. Who does not live in NYC, was not on city council or mayor of said city, and who had no control over the policing of Manhattan’s streets. It is impossible for me to understand the mental state of a person who appears sane but who reflexively blames their own mistakes on someone hundreds of miles away with no involvement in the matters that have made said person so unhappy.

So long as the citizens of New York City continue to believe they can vote for self-destructive policies and for the political candidates who promote them, and yet expect a different outcome than the mess we see, then Manhattan will continue to descend into madness and filth.

Making matters worse, the prior administration of mayor “Bill DeBlasio” (this is his fictitious name), had embarked on one of those “It only makes sense on paper and in terms of vague feelings” massive landscape changes. Such as turning streetside parking all over the city into un-used bike-only  lanes and on-street dining for restaurants. Even going so far as to fill in empty spaces where people used to park with gigantic flower pots and concrete containers. Anything to make NYC unfriendly to car drivers.

This makes no sense, because Americans in general and visitors to New York City in particular still drive cars. But such is the power of blind ideology: “Because all cars are bad, then places to park cars must also be bad.” This is crazy stuff, and it has resulted in a congested city being even more congested, even less user friendly and less accessible than it used to be. Which was difficult enough. If this gigantic failure is how you measure success, then further natural failures will continue to follow. As we see even right now today, failure is considered success in Manhattan.

I am glad I do not live there and don’t have to go there.

The concrete planters need a place to park where cars should be able to park. Because “cars are bad”

Median areas that used to offer car parking and delivery vehicle offloading are now clogged with concrete in order to stop “bad cars”

Rental bikes lined up in the most expensive and colorful virtue signal possible. No one uses these. But someone somewhere feels good about the symbolism

An empty and unused bike lane where cars used to park. Cars still need parking spaces, but don’t expect to find them in Manhattan, where virtue signaling is most important

Go ahead and make sense of NYC’s parking regulations. Try.

Restaurants have fully enclosed “outdoor” dining in the street, where cars used to drive and park. The cars still need to drive and park. Just more congestion and more exhaust fumes trying to navigate all the pointless virtue signaling

“Death is healthy, safety is dangerous”…wtf?

Few events have highlighted the sweaty, crusty butt crack separating America’s Left from the Normal people like the few recent US Supreme Court holdings over the past week. These holdings on Second Amendment rights, improper judicial legislating from the bench (Roe v. Wade), and religious liberty fly in the face of decades of Leftist activism and common establishment media narratives, and have elicited wonderfully violent public statements, violent actions, and promises of more violence from the Left and its Sinn Fein, the Democrat Party.

If the Democrat Party can’t control Americans with freedom-crushing iron-fisted laws, then they intend to control us through more murder, destruction, and mayhem.

As a long-ago former member of the Democrat Party, I am mystified how more Americans don’t walk away from this corrupt and morally bankrupt organization. How can it be that people are loyal to this lawless anti-America movement when its leaders:

  • cannot tell us what is a woman, but then say that women’s rights have somehow been diminished by allowing the fifty states to determine among themselves when a child can be killed by its mother
  • tell us that the death of a living, breathing child is “healthy” or is “healthcare”
  • say that a wide-open southern border over which child traffickers and deadly fentanyl pour daily unchecked and undocumented and uncontrolled is “fair”
  • catch and release violent criminals back into society, instead of jailing them, so they can continue committing violent crimes against innocent people
  • demand civilian disarmament to prevent citizens from keeping legal firearms close to them for protection because armed law-abiding civilians are “dangerous”
  • say that the practice of religion by just one person in public is the equivalent of establishing an official religion

We could easily have this list go on and on, but anyone paying attention to what is happening around our homes and families and businesses already knows that there is a significant percentage of Americans who do not identify as Americans, and who are attempting to use our collectively owned government to destroy America from the inside. This is not a what the f*ck (wtf) thing, it is a crystal clear philosophical separation between two different groups of humans.

These two groups could easily be associated with groups from the past, like the Democrat Party slave owners of 1861 and their Republican Party abolitionist (anti slavery) opponents. I think the choices facing Americans today are easily as stark as they were in 1861, except that instead of controlling a few million African slaves like in 1861, the Democrat Party is now trying to enslave all of America. All of us. You and me.

Santa Fe School Shooting: Liberal Democrats Sacrifice More Kids on Altar of Gun Control

Another school shooting today, in Santa Fe, Texas.

Yes, a good guy with a gun stopped the shooter, and he could have been stopped sooner.

But stopping that shooter (and the next one) would require taking the kinds of concrete, proactive steps necessary to actually protect the students from harm. It is as easy as having police stationed in the school, or armed guards (including armed volunteers), or arming the staff and teachers who want to be armed.

And these options are all too pragmatic, too simple, too real for liberal Democrats, who reject them all. They would rather use this latest blood in the streets to promote their nation-wide civilian disarmament schemes, because what they really want is political domination over every American citizen.

In fact, sacrificing a few school students on the false altar of gun control is one of those unfortunate but necessary “breaking a few eggs to make an omelette” things that liberal Democrats desire, to achieve their political goal.

The more blood, the more emotion, the more fear, the more crisis, the more they can take advantage of people’s emotions and ram through laws that will do nothing to solve the problem, but which will advance liberal Democrat goals of civilian disarmament.

When the ten-year Clinton gun ban sunsetted in 2004, liberal Democrats admitted openly that it had done nothing to lower crime. But they wanted it reinstituted, nonetheless. The high cost of disarming law-abiding Americans won’t do anything to make schools safer, either.  So why demand this?

Liberal Democrats want absolute control over you and me, folks, and that is all. They do not want solutions. An armed citizenry is the ultimate block against the Democrat Party’s goal of full control of America; this is the “problem” they are really trying to solve.

If you doubt this, look at this phony, illegal “Russia collusion” thing: It is just “resistance” against the Trump administration by any means necessary – legal, illegal, unethical, immoral. Liberal Democrats reject results of elections they lose. They reject laws they don’t like or don’t write. They enable an unsustainable illegal immigration invasion and illegal sanctuary cities to recruit illegal aliens who they want to convert into loyal voters and artificial political dominion. They use the democratic process to achieve non-democratic results.

After the Parkland shooting, liberal Democrats had meetings, marches, protests. Lots of demands. Lots of brutal demonization of the NRA, of law-abiding gun owners, of gun manufacturers, even of the US Constitution.  In all of that activity, they would not address how their liberal Obama-era PROMISE program had caught and released the violent criminal Nikolas Cruz half a dozen times, so that he could finally follow through on his public promises to commit mass murder in his own school.

I am sorry for the parents of the children hurt and killed in Santa Fe, Texas. I am sorry for their parents, and for their teachers and school administrators, and friends. I feel very badly for them, and if they are angry about this, they need only direct their focus on the liberal Democrats and their henchmen (teachers unions) who have blocked all natural, logical, and effective means to preventing these shootings from happening.

Liberal Democrats love political power and gun control more than they love school students. Remember that the next time you vote.

Stop Sacrificing Our Children on the Altar of Gun Control

http://www.pennlive.com/opinion/2018/02/making_schools_gun-free_just_t.html#incart_river_index

Making schools gun-free just turns them into killing fields | Opinion

Updated Feb 27; Posted Feb 27, 2018

By Guest Editorial

By Josh First

If public schools are dangerous sitting duck areas, falsely called “gun-free zones,” it is solely the fault of the myriad gun-control groups that have tried to stigmatize firearms to the point of demanding that historic reenactors use sticks and brooms, instead of historic muzzleloaders.

If the public is angry about lax school security, they can blame groups like CeaseFirePA, who hate guns so much that they would rather see children remain at dire risk than admit guns have a constructive and valuable role in America, and especially in public schools.

Gun control advocates increasingly admit they are anti-gun prohibitionists, who would really like to see guns removed from private ownership, or so heavily regulated to the point where government bureaucrats determine our individual liberties.

These wealthy, control-freak pressure groups are responsible for insane policies like “gun-free zones” at places like Parkland High School.

Time after heartbreaking time we see that a gun-free zone is anything but that, and crime after crime America’s gun control groups pull political stunts and try to blame lawful gun ownership and the NRA for the heartbreaking results of disarming law-abiding citizens and placing them at the mercy of criminals.

A gun-free zone is a foolish, impractical pipe dream promoted by gun prohibitionists.

In reality, it is a killing field, where only the criminal attacker has a gun, and where the victims can at best put up token resistance, like Parkland’s heroic football coach, Aaron Feis (imagine if Feis had a gun, instead of his body, to defend the students with).

Effectively defending gun-free zones, such as schools, is an impossibility that society does not inflict on other public venues, like planes, museums, government buildings, politicians, sports events and music concerts.

Trying to end the problem by blaming guns, the NRA, and then disarming the law-abiding citizenry, is an indication that gun control groups are not serious about finding a solution to Columbine or Parkland. Rather, they are shamelessly exploiting a situation they alone created to advance their unconstitutional and anti-America agenda.

Guns are protected in our Second Amendment for a reason, and not because our founders were afraid of deer or ducks. Our founders knew that an adequately armed citizenry was all that stood between freedom and tyranny. Yes, gun ownership in America is unlike any other nation, with good reason.

It was an armed citizenry that created the unique freedoms we all enjoy today, and that will never change.

It is time for serious people to hold gun control groups accountable for the carnage in our schools and demand that they stop sacrificing our schoolchildren on their altar of gun control.

Dear CeaseFirePA, stop standing in the way of safe schools; schools are not the place to teach children your anti-gun message.

Josh First, a businessman, writes from Harrisburg

[This was originally titled “Stop Sacrificing our Schoolchildren on the Altar of Gun Control,” but the openly liberal Patriot News opinion editor apparently believed that was too persuasive, and changed it]

PSA: Please Keep Pets Inside

A pet is an animal that lives in a house.

Pets that are allowed to run freely out the front or back door, to cavort, chase, defecate, and frolic off its owner’s property and in Nature’s wide open beauty, are by definition feral.

Once out of the house or off the leash, these feral animals become capable of great destruction and usually accountable to no one.  They also can easily be eaten by other feral animals and by coyotes, foxes, owls, and hawks. Or hit by a car.

Cats and dogs can get into traps set for fox, raccoon, coyote, and other furbearers.

Some of these traps merely restrain the animal by the foot.  They do not break bones or cut skin.  But other traps, like Conibears, will crush whatever sets them off, including a cat’s body or a dog’s face.  If this possibility bothers a pet owner, then think of your animal’s safety, and do not let it run on someone else’s property; keep the pet under control at all times.

Audubon International estimates that feral cats alone wreak terrible destruction upon native songbirds, already under pressure from excessive populations of raccoons, skunks, and possums, killing hundreds of millions of colorful little birds annually.

Feral dogs bite people, chase wildlife, and poop on others’ property.

In most states, a dog seen chasing wildlife is subject to immediate termination.  In fact I lost my favorite pet, a large malamute, after he broke out of his one-acre pen and a local farmer witnessed him gleefully chasing deer.  Months later the farmer deposited the dog’s collar and name tag in the back of our pickup truck, told my dad where the carcass was buried on the edge of his field, and walked away.  I was already heartbroken, but what could we say? Our dog had broken the law.

No responsible adult allows a pet to become feral.  When it happens, it means the owner no longer really cares about the animal.

If you are a pet owner, please show that you care by keeping the pet safe inside your home. Everyone will thank you for it, especially your precious animal friend.

Bad guys are on the run around Harrisburg

Toldja so.

Last year, several critical essays I wrote about PA AG Kathleen Kane were widely published, long before other people felt safe enough, I guess, to jump on the band wagon.

Kane’s incompetence and corrupt behavior were evident within a few months of her arrival in the PA Attorney General seat.  She only got worse and worse, and was on a downhill slide to the point where she has now been indicted by a grand jury.  Imagine that.

I feel vindicated.  Sadly.

Harrisburg’s top cop may go to jail, or be fined, disbarred, and barred from holding public office.  It says a lot about politics, that her Breck Girl smile and slow-motion hair tosses were enough for  her to get elected.

For the record, I believe that if Pennsylvania absolutely must have a Democrat AG, then Katie McGinty would be the right person.  McGinty is every bit as liberal and political as Kane, but Katie is also way too smart to let it show or implement it so egregiously.  So, we’d end up with a partisan professional and not the corrupt political hack we have now.  That’d be an improvement.

An even better improvement would be Ed Marsico as AG.  Ed Marsico is the stellar DA for Dauphin County, and he is so a-political that the Republican establishment has passed him over in the past.  Can you imagine, an AG who simply does the job of prosecuting bad guys?  How refreshing that would be.

On to Harrisburg City, my home town and my family’s home since at least 1745.  It’s a place I care about a lot.  We moved here from Washington, DC, to enjoy the high quality of life, easy commute, and low cost of living.  I love living in Harrisburg.

Yes, the city has problems.  OK, that is true and I think people are genuinely working to solve them, even as many of the same people have worked to exacerbate them because they stood to make money from them (think: Public Parking).  But that is another story.

Here’s a story that is just now unfolding: Harrisburg has decided to hold on to its illegal anti-gun laws.  Harrisburg City remains happily and blatantly in violation of two state laws barring any PA municipality from passing gun laws.  The city has been served notice that they may get sued over this, a costly loss because the city will have to pay money damages and legal fees to the winner.

And of course, the gun laws they have do zero to punish criminals or limit crime.  They are designed to punish law-abiding citizens and turn them into criminals, because the zealot prohibitionist crusaders pushing these laws are against guns per se.

Late last Friday night a deranged man attempted to forcefully enter my home through the front door.  He was banging away at it, working over the handle hard, and shouting at us.

My wife and kids cowered on the kitchen floor, with Viv talking with a surly 911 dispatcher (who actually yelled at me over the phone); our guests were in the basement.

I stood with a pistol pointed at the door, waiting for the guy to come barging through.  Every warning I shouted to him through the door elicited a curse-filled response and harder efforts to get through.

Even I was scared.  Someone trying that hard to break into your home is going to do damage once he gets inside.

Ten minutes later the Harrisburg police arrived and caught him, two doors up the street.  They were professional and friendly to us taxpayers, and they used force to capture the crazy man because he was violent.  I watched him fight with them and try to kick their police dog, Bo.  He had some white powder drugs on him and acted like he was insane.  Case in point here: Drugs are bad, m’kay?

Without my gun, immediately accessible, our family was a sitting duck for this guy.

We were lucky that he did not come through a ground floor window.  Sure, I would have shot and killed him had he entered our home, but who needs that?  And what about the other citizens who are neither armed nor prepared or able to defend themselves effectively against intruders?

Let’s ask the obvious question: What about “when seconds count the police are only minutes away” do you not understand, Mayor Eric Papenfuse?

Why are your illegal, ineffective gun laws more important than the safety of my family?

What makes people on the Left so cocksure about their illegal behavior? It must have something to do with the tradition of Leftist protests always being “right,” a mentality that undergirds everything they do.

We will see you in court, Mayor Papenfuse, because you may not inflict your illegal laws on the safety of my body.

Today’s Public Service Announcement: Headlights

Pennsylvania law and common sense require headlights to be ON when the car’s windshield wipers are working.  This is not so the driver of the car in question can see better, but rather so other drivers can see the car more easily.  Seeing the car more easily means safer driving conditions, fewer accidents.

While we are on the subject of highway safety, another reminder is in order: Left lanes are for passing, not cruising.

Pennsylvania law (gees, what’s with all these laws?!  Other states have the same law, too) requires motorists to get out of the Left Lane (AKA Passing Lane) as soon as possible, as soon as they have passed the vehicle(s) in the right lane.  Few acts create road rage faster than a driver determined to camp out in the Passing Lane, thereby keeping faster traffic bottled up behind them.  Drivers do not play the role of traffic cop; it is not the role of drivers to slow down other drivers they think are driving too fast.  That just leads to conflict.

Sunday Hunting in Pennsylvania

Hunters United for Sunday Hunting (www.huntsunday.com) filed a federal lawsuit yesterday, seeking to compel Pennsylvania to allow the Pennsylvania Game Commission the authority to establish Sunday hunting for various species beyond the crows, coyotes, and foxes presently allowed.

The merits are enormous, the case against it weak. It comes down to good government applying consistent laws, a hallmark of democracy. Religious freedom is also part of the suit, since the ban on Sunday hunting is religiously motivated and prevents equal participation by all citizens.

What is sad is hearing pro-gun, pro-hunting folks use anti-gun, anti-hunting arguments to prevent Sunday hunting, as if it does not come back to hurt them.

Here is my position: If you hunt and own guns, then you should desire a greater hunter recruitment rate to replace the people we are losing to age. More hunters means a stronger Second Amendment advocacy pool. Otherwise, if we fail to make up the gun owners we lose, then the gun owners lose political power, and watch their rights slip away as laws change and they are powerless to stand up.

School Safety TV Debate: Never Mind the Crazy Headline

Josh takes on gun prohibitionist CeaseFirePA and “Obama Cop” police chief Tom Hyers in this live broadcast TV debate from last week. Never mind the crazy anti-gun headline, dreamt up by some anti-Second Amendment activist…Cut and paste the link below:
http://video.witf.org/video/2335658815

Sandy Hook Tragedy Has Me on “Hold”

The Sandy Hook tragedy has me on hold right now.

Several friends have asked when I will write a piece about the massacre, and all I can say is that neither I nor the situation are right. Yes, some tasteless people immediately jumped on the anti-gun bandwagon, but what do you expect from Senators Schumer, Feinstein, and Boxer? From Obama? Their agenda is anti-freedom, and they are ready to pounce at any moment, ready to exploit any crisis for political gain.

Guns are dangerous tools, and I can tell you about my own close calls with guns throughout my life, a life of hunting, target shooting, and self-defense. Guns require diligence and caution always, and the second you let down your guard with a gun is the moment your life will change for the worse. But that is not a reason to try and ban them.

A well-written article is coming out soon, just as soon as I can clear the pain and horror from my mind. I am a father of three kids, and that’s all I can think about: Those little kids, and their parents. No policy, no politics can share room in my head and heart with that, yet.

Merry Christmas, friends, Merry Christmas.