Tag: Good Guys

Disturbing

Music, Tragedy

I’m a little worried about all the hoopla surrounding the songs of latest phenom Oliver Anthony.  (For those who don’t know who he is, here is his story, and here are his two latest songs: Rich Men North Of Richmond and I Want To Go Home.  Listen to all of that, and what follows may make more sense to you.)

There are two points to be made here, the first being the more important.

Jeff Reynolds at PJM says that Anthony’s voice is evocative of American singers like Levon Helm, B.B. King and John Fogerty.  I am fans of all of them, but I can listen to them sing all day.  I can’t do that with Oliver Anthony, because there’s too much pain there, and it hurts to listen to him.  His voice reminds me of Amy Winehouse, whom I also find difficult to listen to for precisely the same reasons.

It’s clear that Anthony will run the risk of ending up like Winehouse (whose tragedy I explored here):  manipulated by others for their own purposes and benefit (whom, thankfully, he’s so far managed to keep at bay — not the least by telling the music industry to fuck off with their multi-million-dollar poisoned apples).  I hope he stands firm.

The second part of this is that the agony of which this young man sings is clearly resonating with millions of Americans, because what he’s talking about is real.  People are being fucked over by government and people who control the media, people are being fucked over by companies, and people are facing a future that is, frankly, as bleak and horrible as he sees his own.

And here’s where the second bunch of bloodsuckers come into the picture.  Expect soon that the political types will step forward, trying to claim the ground that Anthony and so many others like him are standing on, and making politicians’ promises to fix the circumstances that they — all of them — have been complicit in the creation thereof.

I hope that Oliver Anthony tells them, too, to fuck off.

Here’s the takeaway from all this.  The reason for Anthony’s runaway success is that millions of people not only feel his pain, but share his pain.

And unless I miss my guess, come 2024 those millions of people are going to vote for the candidate whom they think will best help alleviate it.

The political establishment had better hope that they do it through the vote, by the way, because the alternative is kinda messy.

Calm Invective

Culture, Writing

Here’s a little oeuvre which deserves airing, despite the appalling grammar:  Indiana Jones And The Last Franchise.

Even though I was not familiar with about 60% of his cultural allusions, the writing was enough to engage me.  After all, you don’t need to be a military strategist to understand that combat is awful, bloody and destructive.  I especially liked this little turn:

And, if you ever haul yourself out of bed and find that you have little to smile about… just look up Disney on Google News. It may not bring you joy, but the schadenfreude will most likely bring a smile to your face. At least a little grin.

That happens early in the piece, and it gets better.  Here’s the pre-climax exposition:

My great-grandfather was a mason. A brick-layer, I mean, not the… well, you know the other type. He was a master of his craft. Back in the 20’s, his skill was in such high-demand that he was paid to travel the world and build structures in places like Shanghai and Glasgow that stand to this day. In an age of cheap, third-world labor, it can be a bit difficult to imagine the artistry, skill, and talent of a good mason. There’s more to it than slopping mortar onto a brick and stacking another on top. You just don’t see a lot of work like what he was doing, these days. Men like him labored to build cities not just for themselves, but their descendants. They spent their lives – some of them gave their lives – so that their descendants would live in a world that they themselves could scarcely imagine. They build us sprawling, glittering skylines of glass and steel and lights. Man-made miracles of engineering and architecture that would be, quite literally, incomprehensible to most humans from before a certain time.

Yet, the cities they built for us, that they left us, are no longer ours. My great-grandfather did most of his work in Pennsylvania and the North-East. He lived in Philadelphia, in a neighborhood his descendants can’t walk through, day or night. His house is still there. I don’t know who lives in it now, if anyone does. I don’t really want to know, either.

All I know is the fruits of his labors, his house, his city — it’s not just that they don’t belong to his descendants, and, arguably, the country he built them for. We can’t even enjoy them. They were wrested out of the hands of the people, and, without consent, broken, smashed, and destroyed by wicked people, who now hand us the smoldering ruins of our predecessors’ lifetime of work, and say with a smile, Here! We made it better! And, if you dare say otherwise, you’re an ungrateful asshole who should be grateful that they’re deigning to give you a damn thing.

Excellent stuff, and well worth the long read.

But Of Course

Good Stuff, Legal Stuff

You will remember last week’s post wherein we all giggled upon seeing some shoplifting scrote getting his just deserts at the hands (stick?) of a shop owner who was fed-up by having said scrote stealing from him for the third time.

Well, because this happened in Cali-fucking-fornia, we now have this development:

Apparently, while many California cities have no desire to actually enforce the laws against people who steal from business owners and put them in financial peril, they are interested in enforcing battery laws involving the protection of said businesses. According to a new report, the Sikh man is now facing criminal charges as local police investigate the incident.

My own modest suggestion would be to borrow the man’s stick and beat the shit out of whoever actually charges this hero, but no doubt somebody’s going to have a problem with this.  (Just nobody, I suspect, among my Readers.)

But here’s what gets the RCOB moving:

Some are making the argument that the force used on the shoplifter in the video was excessive, and as a purely legal matter, that may be true. The shoplifter was begging for mercy while the store owner continued to swing back and strike him. The question is at what point the store owner is expected to disengage, and he likely passed that point.

The store owner “disengaged” before breaking any bones or causing any lasting damage to the asshole.  All he did was deliver a sound beating, and only in today’s pussified society could this be termed “excessive”.   Nobody cares if the scrote was “begging for mercy”, especially after the store owner tried his best to stop the overt shoplifting in a non-violent manner before resorting to the stick.

I am so glad I’m going to the range this afternoon with the Son&Heir…

Highly Recommended

Heroism, History

I just finished reading Lynne Olson’s Citizens Of London, and all I can say is I wish I’d read it before Tony Judt’s Postwar (which I recommended earlier).

Of course, as a keen student of 20th-century European history, I’m very familiar with the WWII period — or at least, I thought I was.  In fact, I’ve always been more interested in the military history thereof rather than the diplomatic side… and Citizens Of London  took care of that for me, in spades.

Oh, good grief:  how could I have been so ignorant?  Of course I knew about Edward R. Murrow (“the voice of the Blitz”), and Averill Harriman (more so for his post-war career).  But Gilbert Winant?  All I knew about him was that he was successor to the horrible-in-every-way-imaginable Joe Kennedy as U.S. Ambassador to Britain, and I vaguely remember him as one-time governor of New Hampshire.

Olson’s book has set me straight on that, and if you are similarly ignorant about this period and these characters, it will do the same for you.  Run, don’t walk, to your favorite bookstore or to Amazon, and buy this book because it will change your perspective on WWII completely.

I should point out in passing that in this history, Franklin D. Roosevelt does not come out well (not that this is a Bad Thing, of course), and nor does his successor Harry S Truman.  And I have never read so personal and compelling a story about not just Winston Churchill, but also the entire Churchill family during this period.

It is clear that but for Murrow, Harriman and Winant — with an excellent assist from Dwight D. Eisenhower — there may well have been a completely different outcome to the events of 1939-45.

And if that doesn’t get you to read Citizens Of London, we can’t be friends.

Handling The Situation

Good Stuff

Reader Andy T. sent me this little video, and it had me giggling like a little girl.  As he put it:

“Not quite a Righteous Shooting (this apparently occurred in NYC), but definitely a Righteous Beating thanks to a couple of PO’ed Sikhs…”

Taking the law into their own hands, and righteously so.  I bet the beatee doesn’t come near that shop again.

I must have watched the thing a dozen times, and I bet you will too.

Dept. Of Righteous Shootings

Righteous Shootings

Seems as though this man’s car was stolen, but the thieves were unaware that nowadays, you can track your car’s location.  Which is what Our Hero did, and confronted said scumbags in a mall parking lot.  He made them get out of the car at gunpoint and sit on the ground while everyone awaited the arrival of the San Antonio police.

Well, our Senior Scumbag wasn’t going to take this lying (sitting?) down, so he pulled his own gun and popped off at the car owner.

Whereupon Our Hero wasted the fucker AND shot Scumbag’s accomplice in the leg, I assume lest she wanted to retrieve her late partner’s gun and continue the festivities.

Quote of the day comes from the SAPD chief:

‘Certainly a case of self-defense, is what we have.’

Then, for the lawyers, he added (no doubt with a shrug):

‘We would prefer that they call the police before taking that into your own hands, but he did what he felt he needed to do.’

I think some applause for both the chief and Our Hero would be appropriate:

Texas, baby.

Of course, the family of the corpus delicti is all boohoohoo about it (sent by Longtime Friend and Reader John C.):

“Whether my brother was wrong or right, he had a gun pointed at him. I guess he took it upon himself to defend himself. The guy who shot him is a vigilante, not a hero,” Jose Garcia told KENS 5. “A vehicle is not worth taking someone’s life, I don’t care what kind of car it is. You don’t take the law into your own hands. Now my mom, my family, we all have to suffer and just deal with it.”

Errr well, I hate to break it to you, Jose, but under Texas law, self-defense during the commission of a crime is not justifiable. And the law is always in the hands of the citizen — we just deputize its enforcement to government.  But when the government is late to the scene, or absent altogether, it is absolutely the right of the citizen to enforce it.  Deputization is not the same as abrogation, despite what government wants you to think.

Also, if a vehicle is not worth a life, your deceased choirboy brother didn’t think the same way — or else he would not have been carrying a gun himself.  Clearly, he thought that a car was worth more than a life, which is why he ended up the way he did.

In any event, fuck him, he’s dead, the dangerous criminal asshole.  And while you’re right to mourn him, I’ll bet this wasn’t the first time he’d caused the family grief and heartache.  Everyone (your family included) is better off without him, as it is without all dangerous criminals.