Tag: Regrettable Acts

Overvalued

Business, Travels

Back in the fall of 1982, I and Wife #1 came to the U.S. for the first time in my life — in fact, the first time I’d ever left the African sub-continent at all — and because I didn’t know diddly about New York City (our first stop), I booked us a room at the Hotel Edison just off 47st and Broadway because it was cheap.  I didn’t know, at the time, that the area was known as Hell’s Kitchen for a very good reason, but in those days I was tough and didn’t really give a damn — I was coming from fucking Johannesburg, how bad could New York be?  (Not bad at all by comparison, actually.)

Anyway, from memory, the room cost about $47+tax a night, and while it was awful, I’d stayed in much worse (errr South Africa, remember) and while we we assailed by Volkswagen-sized cockroaches a couple times, the hotel was close to most of what we wanted to see around Times Square, and was easy walking distance to Greenwich Village to the south and Central Park to the north.  Also, the delis on 8th Ave were fantastic — my first experience with a gut-busting NY-style pastrami sandwich was an eye-opener — and so we spent our days walking around the place, seeing the sights, eating deli food and holding our noses to block out the smells (garbage strike).

Anyway, years later (after the Great Wetback Episode of 1985) I had occasion to go from Chicago back to New York, this time on business, and as the Manhattan branch office was quite nearby, I booked into the Edison again, for nostalgia’s sake.

It was the same crappy hotel, same foul rooms, only this time the room cost $285+tax.  When I first saw the rate when I was booking the trip, I thought the hotel had to have undergone a huge refurbishment to justify that kind of price increase;  but of course it hadn’t:  it was just New York Fucking City.

Still later, I checked out the hotel again, just out of curiosity, and the rate was $385.  And from what I could gather, still no refurb of the place.

I should remind everyone that I have never shrunk from paying top dollar for a quality product, whether it was The Mayfair Hotel in London, the Madison in Paris, Imperial in Tokyo or wherever.  Five-star is five-star, and there ya go.  Paying five-star prices for total shit, however… nu-uh.  And from my experience, most Manhattan hotels were shit.  Even the “highbrow” ones like the Waldorf-Astoria or the Algonquin were overpriced flophouses, and their astronomical prices were justified either by the “cachet” attached to being in New York, NY [eyecross]  or else the high (overpriced) cost of the real estate.

So you can imagine my response when I saw this article via Insty:

During the second quarter ended June 30, average asking rents along 16 major retail corridors in Manhattan declined for the eleventh consecutive quarter, falling to $688 per square foot, according to a report from the commercial real estate services firm CBRE. The drop marked the first time since 2011 that prices dropped below $700, the firm said, representing an 11.3% decline from a year ago.
…
A number of retailers have outright stopped paying rent to their landlords during the pandemic, which in some instances is resulting in litigation.

Boo fucking hoo.  Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of supercilious chiselers and snooty price gougers.  And then there’s this, at the end of the article:

“I think there is a short-term and a long-term look at this,” NKF’s Roseman said. “Short-term, we are in survival mode right now. But when things do sort of turn back around, it will still be the same. There is only one Fifth Avenue in the world.”

If you look up “Wishful Thinking” in your dictionary, this sentiment will be under the heading.  (It probably links to “Dinosaur Perspectives” too, speaking as it does about L.A.’s Rodeo Drive and Chicago’s Michigan Avenue as being Places To See And Be Seen.  Dream on, Bubba:  we’re facing a new world.)

Anyway, I see that the Edison is “temporarily” closed because of the Chinkvirus — and from the looks of it, has had a refurb since I last checked — but one of the “business-class” hotels on Broadway, where I paid over $500 a night in 2007, is now asking $121.

No wonder they’re not paying the rent.

Portent

Anarchist thugs, BaconLettuceMayo, Righteous Shootings

As the Left ramps up its little reindeer games, expect more of this kind of thing:

“As we’re walking down passing Fourth Street, a blue car just come swerving out into the middle of the street almost runs over a bunch of protesters and everybody around starts like smacking the car trying to get him to slow down,” the witness said.  “He pulls down his window and he fires three shots into the guy.  From point-blank.  No words no nothing.  And then rolls up his window and zooms off.”

I’m not saying this is a good thing — despite my Yosemite Sam online persona, I dread having to shoot someone again — but at some point, the “kill everybody” switch is going to be thrown by ordinary people, especially when these rioting thugs start blocking roads, stopping cars and trying to assault the drivers and passengers.

Used to be that peaceful protests were confined (by the police) to sidewalks, with lots of chanting, signs and so on.  Peaceful stuff.  But that police action seems to have gone by the board — whether by negligence or design I can’t say — and inevitably, as police presence diminishes, the thugs will become bolder and more violent as they get the impression that “We own the streets!”

So I blame city management for this — muzzling police has long been a hallmark of Leftist government — and if the winds have been sown, both rioters and their government backers can expect whirlwinds;  which will invite rioters to start carrying guns to these “peaceful protests”, and off we go on the hurricane of violence.

Which, by the way, is exactly what the Leftist nomenklatura wants to happen.

Can’t Argue Much

Law and Order

The Street Pharmacist (excellent nick) thinks that the cops have brought a lot of the current shit on themselves:

The police have had a real image problem for years.  It is no surprise that when the crap hits the fan, many people are willing to watch them fry.  What is happening right now is a direct result of the mindset that police have had- the US-versus-THEM, “thin blue line” horseshit that they have been following.  Now they are paying for it, and the law abiding citizens will, too.  You have lost the support of much of the public, and you have no one to blame but yourselves.

Read it all, because the details are quite shocking.

I’m kinda with him, although my real ire is directed at the badge-carrying assholes who shoot innocent people at 4am when executing [sic]  a no-knock warrant at the wrong address.  And I’m doubly pissed when the prosecutor or whoever shrugs and says in effect, “Boys will be boys” and in the end the only bad thing that happens is to the victim and his family.

Compared to that, glad-handing a speeding ticket or two is small potatoes — although the consequences of refusing to glad-hand can be horrible.

I have many friends in law enforcement, and I know that a goodly number of my Readers are either serving- or retired LEOs.  Since arriving in the country in the mid-1980s, I’ve had nothing but good experiences with cops, even when I was busted (twice, in 35 years) for speeding or for some admin screwup (e.g. expired license) on my part.  So 90% of the time, I’m going to be on the side of the blue because I respect what they do.

But the converse of that is when they fuck up, they need to ‘fess up, take the lumps, and to hell with the blue wall of silence.  If that doesn’t happen, my attitude will do a 180 faster than thought.

I’ve written about the militarization of the police for years now, and the way the public is referred to as “civilians” (hint:  don’t do it).  That “us vs. them” attitude is understandable — the definition of police work is coming into daily contact with scumbags and scrotes — but it’s still wrong.

Once again, it’s also understandable that the aforesaid criminals will hate cops.  Where the cops have screwed up is turning the law-abiding citizens’ opinions of them away from respect to dislike.  (In Britain, even the law-abiding refer to the cops as “rozzers” or “The Filth”, and we’re starting to turn in the same direction.)

Speedbump #279

Grammar Nazism, Two-Minute Hate

From Townhall we get Kurt Schlicter, who is a reasonably good polemicist, as polemicists go.  All goes well with his latest piece, until this point:

Things are a mess, and the Democrats are doing everything they can to make them messier. They are holding onto their precious pangolin pandemic panic like Brian Stelter grips a pie, ferociously fighting to keep hope dying by denying our kids school and millions of us a livelihood, all to eek out a win in November.

What, are we five years old, and using phonetic spelling?

THE WORD IS “EKE“, NOT “EEK”.   FFS, IT’S A WORD CONTAINING ONLY THREE LETTERS. HOW DIFFICULT CAN IT BE TO GET THEM IN THE RIGHT ORDER?

Do they even have editors at Townhall ?

Welcome Wagon Offer

Immigration

I see that the Brits are going to offer asylum residency to something like 200,000 Hong Kongers, and I have no doubt that we Murkins are going to do something similar.

I think that’s excellent — as long as both countries structure the offer so that people of proven means and talent get to the front of the line, because we want immigrants who will want to work and be successful, and not come here simply to suck on the various government teats that we have misguidedly allowed to grow and fester, once again in both countries.  And if there’s a nation of people who have a track record of not wanting or needing the Helping Hands Of State to stick it in their asses  give them benefits, that would be the citizens of Hong Kong.  (Their attitude, in a nutshell, appears to be “Stay out of my way and let me make money”.)

There will be considerable culture shock, by the way, when these newcomers arrive in the U.K. and U.S. with relief to have escaped all that repression and control, only to discover that instead of paying 5% income tax once a year, they’ll be bent over and raped repeatedly by the fascist goons of Her Majesty’s Department of Customs & Revenue and our own Internal Revenue Service (“service” as in what stud bulls do to heifers) so that both nations can continue to provide free medical care, education and money to the ungrateful, shiftless and unemployable.

But hey:  democracy, whisky and sexy carries a cost, too.

All that said, however, I think that both the U.K. and the U.S. need to be extremely careful in vetting the people we welcome aboard, because China is asshole and it would not surprise me to learn that the godless fucking Commies would include a few (or many) spies and agents among the would-be immigrants so that they can continue their campaign of espionage and the undermining of Western democracy.

Any efforts of our own home-grown Commies to start wailing about “diversity” and “helping the needy” should be brushed off with utter contempt because, you see, they want to help the godless Chinese Communist Party to undermine our Western democracy.  All their yelpings, therefore, need to be seen in that context.

In fact, what we should do — both the Brits and ourselves — is to offer not asylum but an exchange of people wanting to live in a democracy with people who would prefer to live under Communism.

Hell, I’d give them a two-for-one offer:  two Ivy League university professors or two Portland/Seattle pantifas for every one Hong Kong entrepreneur.  Fuck it:  how about a five-for-one exchange?  I’d happily lose a million “Democratic Socialists” like Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar, the entire faculty lounge at Oberlin College and the wokeist New York Times editorial committee in return for two hundred thousand hard-working Hong Kong capitalists.

Change my mind.