New Wife and I had our anti-Chinkvirus shots yesterday. Here’s my proof:
Now I want to have it silk-screened onto a couple white t-shirts, with the following statement:
Enough is enough with this timorous foolishness.
Category: Gummint
Fracture Lines
Looks like the Euros are having a problem or two:
The French blame the Germans and the Germans blame the French. The Eastern Europeans blame the Western Europeans. The Southern Europeans blame the North. And everyone blames the officials in Belgium.
As Douglas Murray adds: “In other words, business as usual.”
Once again, we see proof (if any were needed) that massive bureaucracies don’t respond well to a crisis. In this case, the Euros thought that they could get both research and supplies of Chinkvirus vaccines from the UK, but when the Brits told them to shove it — all hail Brexit! — the Euros were left holding the short end of the stick, and squabbling ensued.
The lesson is well learned Over Here, for all those who think that Big Gummint is the answer to our woes. In a crisis, it seldom is.
Down With Gravity
I absolutely love it when the Left ignores not only commonsense but history. Such as here, in (of course) California:
A new “Hero Pay” mandate in Long Beach, California has inadvertently cost some frontline grocery workers their jobs.
Ralphs and Food 4 Less, both owned by the parent company Kroger, announced Monday that they will be closing 25% of their stores in Long Beach after the city council passed an ordinance requiring companies with over 300 employees nationwide to pay employees an extra $4 per hour.
There’s nothing “inadvertent” about this, because an Economics 101 student could have seen it coming.
In an industry which runs on 2.5% net margins and where savings of 0.15% on costs can end up with a promotion to VP, adding $4/hour to an already-high California $14 makes it inevitable that management would close two stores to keep that district’s aggregate costs down.
What’s even worse is that the city council’s actions were unnecessary. Just about everywhere, supermarket employees were raking it in during the various Chinkvirus lockdowns through overtime, as demand for product in many cases outstripped the stores’ ability to restock shelves, or else led to more frequent deliveries, which meant that shelf-packers needed to work longer hours to refill front-store real estate. This is not just anecdotal, but hard fact, and if the Long Beach city council had had an ounce of smarts, they would have known all about it. But no-o-o-o. They had to make a grand gesture to “reward” the “heroic” supermarket workers, and now about five hundred of said heroes will be out of a job. Some reward.
The common sense part is also lacking. As any fule kno, if you drive up overhead in a part of any business, that part will either be scaled back, replaced with a cheaper option or else eliminated altogether. It is common knowledge that in the face of “living wage” demands and impositions, the fast-food industry (which has higher margins than supermarkets) is working on replacing high-cost workers with robots. Supermarket work is more complicated than fast food work, so robotics could only go so far (and not very, in most cases) to reduce staff costs. Hence: store closings.
Of course, I said “as any fule kno”, but the Left and gummint [some overlap] are, as always, not going to let little things like commonsense and experience get in the way of Marxist principle or virtue-signaling.
The key here will be if they can repeal this stupid ordinance before Kroger closes the stores — assuming that they even want to do that and be shown up as the fucking morons they are.
Don’t hold your breath.
Just One
I don’t want anyone to read something sinister in what follows; it’s simply a thought exercise.
A couple of days ago I read this article:
Two FBI special agents were fatally shot Tuesday morning while serving a warrant in Sunrise, the agency confirmed, calling it “a very dark day for the FBI.”
The agents, it turns out, were serving said warrant on some scrote who is a child molester and who did the right thing by offing himself after whacking the two feds, thus saving us all the hassle of a trial. He’s not important to the story, so forget all about him.
The article’s headline is what caught my attention, because what it showed was just how easy it is to ambush law enforcement officers; and what it reminded me of is a story of a WWII British fighter pilot who, during the dark days of 1940 when the Nazis had overrun Western Europe and were seemingly poised to invade Britain as well, went home for a brief bit of leave/furlough. Sitting chatting with his father about the state of the world, he was surprised when his father asked him if he could get him a pistol or revolver. When the pilot asked why, his father simply said:
“So I can get my one.”
“One what?”
“German.”
The old man, who’d fought in WWI, explained that he was too old to join a military unit, but he was determined to “do his bit” for the war effort, and had decided that if he and thousands of others could all just kill a single German each, the task of occupying Britain would be impossible. The fact that he would almost certainly be killed in return didn’t bother him at all, because his death would be part of a greater good. “After all,” he concluded, “if Britain is going to ask its young men like you to sacrifice themselves in this war, why shouldn’t we all be prepared to make the same sacrifice? We’re all in this together, after all.”
What makes this subject so current is all the threats being oh-so cavalierly thrown our way by the Left, whether by loony Leftist politicians or by their equally-loony acolytes in the Press and academe, with talk of “deprogramming”, “universal gun confiscation” and the like — in other words, compelling those who disagree with their politics (the “seditionists” or “Trumpists”) to change their philosophy and/or behavior and be forced to show support for and comply with their ghastly policies and governance.
There sure is a lot of compulsion being talked about, isn’t there? But none of that is possible in the face of a mass of people who, like the pilot’s father, are prepared to “get their one”. That’s what Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was lamenting when he wrote these words:
What would things been like [in Russia] if during periods of mass arrests people had not simply sat there, paling with terror at every bang on the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but understood they had nothing to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people?
Nowadays, of course, there’s a problem with Solzhenitsyn’s proposition in that the modern State knows so much about people that a concerted effort at resistance — even by half a dozen people — might well be anticipated and probably doomed to failure. Efforts to create a “militia” or any kind of ur-Maquis French Resistance are going to be compromised by infiltration by law enforcement and subsequent destruction.
But if the above stories from Florida and WWII Britain tell us anything, it’s that properly-motivated individuals acting alone are quite capable of deadly resistance, even when facing the nigh-certain consequence of death for themselves.
It’s an interesting hypothesis, isn’t it?
Law-Abiding
From Chris Muir, an excerpt:
So, because I’m a law-abiding type, I won’t use the term “China virus” — I’ll just carry on referring to it as the Chink virus, as I always have.
And when they ban that, I’ll ignore them. My respect for the law only goes so far, i.e. when the law runs afoul of the Constitution. As it has, here.
Just for the record: regardless of any executive order, law or regulation which says otherwise, I’ll call the Chinese-originated Covid-19 “Wuhan” virus whatever the fuck I want.
Not Quite True
Here’s an interesting situation:
Former congressional candidate Laura Loomer revealed that she was banned from owning a firearm. Loomer has gained notoriety for being subject to some of the most brazen forms of Big Tech censorship over the past two years.
Her firm nationalist views have made her an easy target for Silicon Valley censors. She has been banned from social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. In addition, her ability to do business has been greatly stymied after she was banned from GoFundMe, PayPal, and Venmo. Chase shut down her ability to do online banking. To make matters worse, Comcast prevented her campaign from sending texts and emails to voters, while the company donated to her opponent, Lois Frankel in Florida’s 21st congressional district.
This is only the tip of the iceberg as far as the private sector crusade against Loomer goes. The conservative activist was kicked off Uber and Lyft, on top of being prohibited from using UberEats.
But here’s the fun part:
Despite having no felony or domestic violence convictions and never been declared to be mentally unfit by a judge, Loomer’s name has allegedly been placed in a secret Federal “no buy” list that the FBI keeps. This list is part of the federal government’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS).
Of course, that doesn’t mean she can’t own a gun — just that she can’t buy a gun through “regular” channels that require the NICS check before she can take possession.
Here in Texas, by the way, any Concealed Handgun License (CHL) holder can buy a gun through said channels without going through the NICS check, because the state of Texas has already run all the background checks necessary and as far as they’re concerned, that’s that. If the feds have a beef with the individual that isn’t part of the standard background check, it’s up to them to inform the state. I don’t know if Floriduh has a similar setup — they should — but my FL Readers will no doubt tell me.
It’s one of the main reasons I got my CHL when I moved to Texas. I know all the arguments against having a “permit” to enjoy one of my principal Constitutional freedoms, but the way I saw it back then, if it kept the fucking Feddle Gummint out of the process, it was worth it. And subsequent events have proved me right.
In any event, Miss Loomer doesn’t seem to be a criminal; her greatest “crime” seems to have been uncovering malfeasance through Project Veritas, and as there’s no actual legal reason not to possess a gun — criminal record, mental incapacitation, etc. — there’s no reason why some friendly citizen of Florida can’t sell or give her a gun for her own protection.
Just sayin’.