Tag: Good Guys

Getting Rid Of The Burden

Bad News, Business, Economics

Salma Zito has done it again:

Café Raymond is a favorite destination and, as usual, both floors, the balcony and the sidewalk tables at the diner are packed with patrons.

None of the people waiting for his signature stack of ricotta pancakes stuffed with blueberries, his home-cured smoked salmon and caper platter or his savory sunny-side-up egg and brisket hash have any idea the man behind the kitchen counter — Ray Mikesell — has placed his beloved restaurant up for sale. He’s calling it quits two decades after he returned home from Baltimore to raise his children and carve out a life in Pittsburgh.

Through tears he says he simply has had enough — not of his customers, not of creating new dishes or specialized drinks, but of all the uncertainty that has dogged nearly every small businessman in the country since the beginning of the pandemic.

“It started with COVID and just over time, the uncertainty, the stress of trying to stay open, the inability to hire people, the underlying tension in society, the inflationary cost of everything you need to purchase to create quality food, that is, if you can get it…” he says, his voice trailing. He stops and pauses to hold it together.

The food costs are crushing him, he said, but so is the cost of doing business, period. His utility bills have skyrocketed, as has the cost of fuel to pick up fresh meats and vegetables from local farms or to deliver food for catering jobs. The costs are crippling, he says, and they are creating a barrier to investing in a business he has loved for so long.

“It just breaks you down no matter how strong you are,” said Mr. Mikesell.

Here’s my take on this.  Every time a politician says he cares about small businesses and their owners, he’s lying in his teeth.

This new crowd of socialists (including, alas, the Socialist Lite Republicans) absolutely loathe small, successful businesses, for the same reason they hate people owning cars: having your own car gives you freedom of movement, and your own business makes you part of a community, a community that binds you to itself because they now have the freedom to decide when, where and what they want to eat, and not have to go at specific times to a dreary commissariat like the hapless Winston Smith in Orwell’s 1984, and be fed the same slop and gruel as everyone else.

And the government absolutely hates that you have those freedoms.

If that’s not the case, please then explain to me why commuter and passenger rail systems are so popular with neo-socialist governments and why, when businesses like that of Ray Mikesell experience the same ghastly misfortunes (created, it must be said, by government), the government policy does absolutely nothing to help those businesses except by ladling out one-time, piddly subsistence-level “incentives” instead of addressing the main issues that cripple both the businesses and their customers:  soaring inflation (created by the government printing too much money), high fuel prices (even though we are the most self-sufficient energy-producing nation on Earth), the double whammy of ever-higher food prices and shortages (in America!!!), and logistical / transport operations that are crippled by (all together now) government regulations.

I know that anecdotes are not data — except that they are, when the owner of a business like Café Raymond is not a statistical outlier, but just one of tens of thousands in a similar or worse predicament.

Explain to me why Ray Mikesell, and all those other business owners, should not just quit and go somewhere else.  Explain also why the millions of ordinary people who are affected by the closing of small businesses and their own personal misfortunes should not be heating barrels of tar, oiling ropes, and loading up their semiautomatic sporting rifles.

But then we’re the bad guys.  Yeah, right.

Dept. Of Righteous Shootings

Righteous Shootings

Chalk this little episode up to a “nick of time” coincidence:

According to authorities, the woman in question had just picked up her pistol the day before, after waiting the 10 days required under California law between the time of purchase and when gun owners can actually take possession of their newly-bought firearm. Little did she realize that she would soon end up using the gun to fend off an attack on her husband in their own home.

And here’s the good part (with my emphasis):

In a 911 call at 10:20 p.m., a resident of the Wilding Ranch subdivision on the city’s east edge reported that a neighbor had called and said she had just shot an intruder at her house.

When deputies arrived, they found a dead man near the home’s front entry. The residents — a 50-year-old woman and her 45-year-old husband — said that the apparently intoxicated stranger had tried to force his way into their home.

According to the sheriff’s report, as the husband fought with the intruder near the front door, his wife ran to the bedroom to get a revolver, which she said she had brought home on Friday. Returning to the entry, she fired all its rounds into the intruder.

None of this one-shot or double-tap stuff for Our Heroine:  ALL SIX bullets pumped into the choirboy’s worthless ass.

Sing it from the rooftops, brothers and sisters.

Florida vs. Davos

Good Stuff, Resistance

Here’s FuturePOTUS Ron DeSantis, talking about how conservative states rule, and the best way to bear the Internationalists.

I think the difference between then and now is, government is bigger and more powerful. But these agencies, particularly in law enforcement and national security, have been weaponized, so that they really represent the enforcement arm of one particular faction of society against the rest of us. And you do not have equal zeal with which they wield their power. People talk about the deep state like it’s some conspiracy. It’s not a conspiracy. What we have right now is the logical result of having an absence of constitutional accountability in the administrative state. And basically what human nature will do, of course, power is going to accumulate there. The founding fathers would have told us this if we had told them what was going on. So that’s the logical outgrowth of Congress abdicating its responsibility to hold the bureaucracy accountable for decades. It’s a logical result of Congress empowering the bureaucracy and letting them do a lot of the heavy legislating. And so that’s what we have. It’s not anything that really should surprise anybody.

All good stuff, and more besides.

Fair Warning

Legal Stuff, Rights

Following on from the decision of credit card companies to “flag” sales made at gun stores, we have this development:

Twenty-four Republican attorneys general sent a letter to Visa, Mastercard, and American Express Tuesday warning them to drop plans to code and compile gun sales in America.

The new code will not protect public safety. Categorizing the constitutionally protected right to purchase firearms unfairly singles out law-abiding merchants and consumers alike. First, efforts to track and monitor sales at gun stores would only result in vague and misleading information. This categorization would not recognize the difference, for example, between the purchase of a gun safe and a firearm. Nor would it capture firearm purchases made at department stores, resulting in arbitrarily disparate treatment of “gun store” merchants and consumers.

More importantly, purposefully tracking this information can only result in its misuse, either unintentional or deliberate. Creating and tracking this data only matters if your institutions are considering using that information to take further, harmful action—like infringing upon consumer privacy, inhibiting constitutionally protected purchases by selectively restricting the use of your payment systems, or otherwise withholding your financial services from targeted “disfavored” merchants.

And my favorite part:

Social policy should be debated and determined within our political institutions. Americans are tired of seeing corporate leverage used to advance political goals that cannot muster basic democratic support. The Second Amendment is a fundamental right, but it’s also a fundamental American value. Our financial institutions should stop lending their market power to those who wish to attack that value.

Be advised that we will marshal the full scope of our lawful authority to protect our citizens and consumers from unlawful attempts to undermine their constitutional rights. Please keep that in mind as you consider whether to proceed with adopting and implementing this Merchant Category Code.

Give it to the bastards good and hard, boys and girls.  Make ’em sweat, and make ’em bleed if they ignore you.

Hail To The Chief

Mocking Furriners, Politics

My name (Kim) is not actually a name;  it’s an old Anglo-Saxon title, meaning “chief” or “chieftain” — the ancient Brit tribes not caring whether their chief was a man or a woman.  It’s the reason that it can be given to either a boy or girl.

So the title for this post is to welcome the new BritPM, Liz Truss, to 10 Downing Street.  Let’s have a look at her:

Okay, so she seems to have the proper ummm attributes for a chief, if you get my drift, and apparently the BritCommies and the Euros think she’s The Next Hitler, so she can’t be all bad.

Let’s see how she does.

That’s Gotta Sting

Veggies & Vegans

Forgive me for chuckling. but this story is just too rich:

A vegan restaurant has decided to put meat on the menu after being hit by the cost of living crisis – angering many customers who are ‘saddened’ by the change. The Mango Tree in Taunton, Somerset, closed its doors on Saturday to undergo renovations including an updated menu which will include meat. They are not the only vegan restaurant to struggle in recent years due to a lack of uptake, but those who loved the plant-based values have hit out saying ‘selling meat is worse than closing’.

Yeah, easy to say when it’s not your livelihood.

‘Veganism isn’t a business venture. It’s an ethical philosophy that does the best for the animals, the planet, and public health.’

The owners, however, have the proper perspective:

The restaurant, however, insisted they were left with ‘no choice’ and said: ‘The only other option was to close permanently.  Ethics extend to the jobs and welfare of our wonderful team, to whom we owe a great deal, and another chance.’

Exactly.  Good for them, and a pox on the fanatics.