Posts Tagged → street
Why RINOs keep on RINOing
Despite my working out in the boondocks, I still cannot get away from the politics of presidential campaigns and Washington, DC. Not only do I pay attention because EVERY American should pay attention to politics – it is the lifeblood of our constitutional republic, and without the involvement of The People, it dries up and blows away – but I pay attention because this 2024 election is the last gasp we Americans have for freedom and free air. We are ever so close to losing our freedoms to the DC Swamp.
Two particular forces are at work against We, The People and our freedoms. One is the Left, which includes the entire Washington, DC, professional establishment, including federal employees at every agency and commission, the media, and the Democrat Party. The second force is the Republican Party establishment, or the GOPe, which includes Conservative, Inc. and conservative establishment media.
Members of this second group are often referred to as “RINOs” because they are “Republican In Name Only.” They are not politically or culturally conservative, and they usually stop well short of doing anything that actually challenges the Left. Some people call RINOs controlled opposition to the Left, but I think that is just an occasional role that the GOPe must play in order to advance what they think their own interests are. More than anything, the GOPe RINOs are deeply self-interested people, with their own values, their own visions and views, and the truth is, their views are truly unique.
Not that being selfish, unprincipled, and lazy on a battleground where if the Left wins, everyone loses all their freedoms tomorrow, is such a uniquely cool thing. But it is true that the GOPe is made up of people who in their own minds believe they occupy some unusual and well-considered ideological place. And while the rest of us can’t see it or understand it, and while the GOPe in all their ideological purity seems to be really no different than the Left, practically speaking, the truth is, we average Americans are dealing with a group of people who think very differently than we do.
Someone recently commented online that Florida governor Ron DeSantis can never understand a President Donald Trump, or even Trump’s voters, because DeSantis is a product of elite educational institutions (Yale, Harvard), while Trump is a product of street work and street smarts and making deals to make everyone on the street a winner in some way. I think that comment is a true insight, because it gets at the roughly 20% “White Wine” voters in the GOP who really like DeSantis and identify with him. They are elites, or at least see themselves as elites, definitely as superior to the rest of us unwashed beer drinking “deplorables” who work for a living. And thus, they feel none of the raw fear of failure that everyone else in America is feeling right now. RINOs don’t see Trump as a lifeline in a storm, they see him as blocking them from getting the control they want (and which they are very good at getting even from an inferior force and position in Congress).
And so political careerist DeSantis is going to keep trying to claw his way up the political ladder, whether he makes a good impression or not as a presidential candidate (few Republicans doubt his good abilities as governor of Florida). He has the backing of the GOPe, the RINOs, the Republican “elites” who are not ever ready to rumble to win. Someone quipped that the RINOs are the people who always show up with a bag of golf clubs and a little white “I surrender” flag, and while they are not quite that useless and fickle, there is more than a seed of truth in it. They are not brawlers.
So why won’t the RINOs support President Donald J. Trump, who already gave us the best four years America had enjoyed in a very long time? Because RINOs can afford the economic downturns that destroy most other people, and like the Left, with whom they are almost always in bed, and which is committed to communist revolution, the RINOs are just as ideologically committed to being “moderate” at any cost. Makes no sense, but it works for them in their heads.
So RINOs are gonna RINO and there is very little hope of persuading them to join the ranks of the people who clean their pools, maintain their golf greens, and work on their cars. The GOPe RINOs occupy their very own little place on the political map, and they intend to stay right there. Just like they tried and failed with neon-green RINO Dave McCormick in the 2022 PA senate seat race, the RINOs are trying to get a very similar Ron DeSantis into the White House in 2024. DeSantis has more of a good track record to run on because of his successes in Florida, so he is a real candidate for president, but as we have seen in the past few days, DeSantis on the national stage is like a deer in the headlights.
And that is because RINOs cannot ever have the genuine answers to the critical questions that real Americans want to hear. They can’t, by definition; they just don’t see the world the way the rest of us do. RINOs are neither leftist revolutionaries nor conservative pragmatic survivalists. RINOs are self-limited by their self interest, and by their belief that they alone should be in charge of running things, and when pressed to explain this in public, they bumble and stumble like Ron DeSantis has done the past few days. RINOism only makes sense to RINOs.
So count on Ron DeSantis staying in the presidential race, no matter what, even though he has a snowball’s chance in hell (assuming Trump survives the efforts to assassinate him) of winning. It is because DeSantis is the RINO protest vote against all the Deplorables and their leader, Trump. This is all they got, and they are gonna play it. RINOs gonna RINO…
So to all the Deplorables out there, move on and expect nothing but protest after protest from the GOPe. They are not on America’s team, they are on their own team. We are going to have to win 2024 without them.
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
Hollywood trash
Whatever may be said about Hollywood’s corrosive effect on America’s collective soul through its films, there is no debating that it is also a physically disgusting and filthy place.
Blessing or curse, we had the recent opportunity to walk a lot through Hollywood. What we saw was the unfilmed insider look at the real, unfiltered Hollywood.
Beverly Boulevard of Beverly Hills fame was until yesterday loaded with heaps of rotting rubbish and trash. Both sides of the street, block after block after block.
Most of it was deposited by insane homeless bums who hoard every scrap of civilization they can get unto their respective shopping cart, and when it all overfloweth, they leave heaps of this detritus lying on sidewalks.
Everywhere. Every fifty feet, both sides of the street.
And this is Biblical crap: Defecation -covered clothing, food wrappers, styrofoam cups, stained rags, heaps of trash, everything buzzing with insects and smelling of urine and rotting food. Occasionally a dejected human is guarding a particular heap, but as we witnessed over a week, even homeless bums reeking of long-unwashed bodies and wounded spirits eventually abandon their treasure and castles. They seem to move in unison, crossing the street en masse and setting up their tattered tents and new trash piles against walls, sidewalk benches, each block having its own long line of stench and crap. Old or new, there’s a lot of crap.
But suddenly the city of Los Angeles descended upon the heaps on Beverly Blvd yesterday. Workers wearing environmental protection suits used large snow shovels to scoop up the garbage into green-colored and clean-themed trucks.
While the trash disappeared, stains in the concrete and smells in the air remained.
Talking amongst ourselves, we surmised the situation was so dire that not even Los Angeles city government could ignore it. After all, this situation is hardly representative of America, democracy, successful self-government or even just simple wealth. Wrong again, rational people!
Turns out this morning is the LA Marathon. Beverly Blvd, La Brea Blvd, and nearby connecting roads and streets were shut down to allow new masses of sweaty, smelly humans to stampede through today. All disgusting crap already in place along the route was in the way, and had to be removed.
Plenty more discarded trash will be available to walk around and through tomorrow, after the race has ended.
Takeaway here?
Los Angeles is full of people, run by people, who embrace all kinds of bizarre notions in general, and who daily live completely out of synch with nature, who live wildly consumptive and environmentally unsustainable lives, and yet who also believe they can and must berate the world around them about all kinds of real and fake environmental issues, like human -caused climate change, the evils of cars, etc.
Los Angelinos and their city are literally full of crap.
Historic American Art vs. NAZI ISIS People
In the 1930s, the German NAZI party identified “degenerate” art that was supposedly representative of “degenerate” culture, officially unfit for Germans.
Paintings, sculptures, drawings, pottery, books, poetry, you name it, if it had any artistic value, the NAZIs scrutinized it carefully. And if that art did not match the NAZI’s new standards, then it was forbiddden, burned, destroyed, or looted and hidden away, to be ransomed and sold off to future buyers outside of the ‘culturally supreme’ Deutchland.
Entire museum collections and privately owned collections throughout NAZI-occupied Europe were looted, damaged, and or destroyed, because the art did not comport with the new standard these Ultra Germans had created. Priceless artifacts were lost forever, at best melted down for their precious metal value.
If you want to see the long-term impacts of this intolerant approach to art, use www.duckduckgo.com to search the phrase “nazi looted art,” and marvel at the sad results. Real Western culture took a huge hit from the neanderthal NAZIs, and the ill effects are still felt today.
Fast forward six decades to ISIS, the puritanical Muslim movement that uses extreme violence and sadistic cruelty to achieve political domination. A lot like the NAZIs, come to think of it.
ISIS has a thing against most art and even historic artifacts, if they do not fit neatly into the Sharia law that ISIS followers believe in.
Ancient Buddhist cliff carvings, imposing and inspiring…detonated into rubble, by ISIS.
Ancient Assyrian cities, buildings, from the beginning of recorded human history….bulldozed and detonated into shards of broken rock, by ISIS.
Important archaeological digs providing useful history, bulldozed by ISIS.
Entire churches looted of anything of immediate value, then burned down, by ISIS.
Entire museum collections either destroyed, or looted and re-sold on the international black market, by ISIS.
Fast forward just a few years to ANTIFA, Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, etc., and now we have priceless American artifacts that belong to the public being outright destroyed by mobs from these groups.
Irreplaceable and beautiful bronze statues of long-dead generals and soldiers are being removed and destroyed either by street thugs enabled by big city mayors, or by the big city mayors themselves.
This is a war on history and art no different than the NAZIs or ISIS.
At the very best, this is simply the mistake of applying new understandings to old history.
Oh sure, the neanderthals claim that these statues are memorials to bad ideas, and sad times, and to some extent there may be some vague shred of truth in that. But to keep these cultural artifacts, these works of high art, is no endorsement of what they may have once captured long, long ago.
Rather, these statues are mute testimonials to our nation’s history, its struggles, and its triumphs. The fact that the Confederacy did not win, due to the intervention and huge sacrifice by hundreds of thousands of Caucasian men from the north, is the real story of these old monuments.
Today we have one American political party that is increasingly at open war with every basic value and idea that undergirds America, as it was founded. These public square symbols are caught up in that party’s war.
That political party has more and more officials doing cheap political stunts, like seizing old bronze statues in the public square, and declaring them “Cherem” (unfit, like ISIS does to the churches it burns), and culturally unfit, like the NAZIs did.
Frankly, there is zero difference between these mayors, and Virginia governor Terry McCauliffe, and the other totalitarian movements that preceded them, like the NAZIs, ISIS, and the Soviets (who tore down beautiful old Russian statues and replaced them with boring, utilitarian statues of Lenin and Stalin meant to project an intimidating political message).
Whether these mayors and governors act unilaterally and use publicly owned machines to take them down, or if they allow their allied street thugs from ANTIFA and BLM to tear them down, while the city police are ordered to make no arrests, it makes no difference.
In the end, these mayors and their violent street soldiers are no different than the worst people in history. But if they win, you can bet they will erect statues of themselves, glorifying their total transformation of America to…God knows what.
Now they are talking about destroying the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, DC. No lie.
I say we make a stand like a stone wall to protect this historic American art, and stop this insanity, stop this assault on America, by these modern day NAZIs and ISIS thugs.
Turtle Time
It is officially turtle time.
Every spring turtles of all types emerge from their muddy hideaways, under stream banks, under logs, or burrowed deep into the soft dirt on the side of a farm field.
Turtles are gentle creatures, hurting no one, and yet when they make themselves vulnerable by appearing on the sides of roads, or trying to cross roads, many drivers go out of their way to hit them. Seems obvious to say, a turtle hit by a vehicle will either die a long, lingering, painful death, or if they are small, they will be crushed outright.
What the hell is that about, anyway?
Seeing these sad, destroyed, dead little things strewn about on the roadsides is painful. Turtles really bother no one, and they should elicit human compassion and empathy for their slow but intense drive to find a safe and soft place to dig a hole and lay their eggs. It is not their fault that humans have built uncrossable roads with no wildlife tunnels, or that some humans delight in maiming little animals.
Please slow down along Front Street in Susquehanna Township and entering into Harrisburg, and give the turtles there a break. After millions of years of moving slowly, purposefully, and deliberately, they have earned it.