Saturday, May 29, 2021

In Which Our White Fragility Is Exposed…*

It was as close to a sleepless night as it gets outside of Seattle. So all I’ve got are these covert photos of an assassin plying his trade in the dead of night:

I can't breathe cat

Is it any reason we’re losing the war? The enemy has infiltrated our inner defense system and exposed our white fragility.

*Alternate Title: “Ah Cain’t Breathe!”

Quick Raj update: the surgery team has determined him to be fit for his second knee replacement and it is scheduled for June 9th, assuming his own Doc concurs following his appointment next Wednesday. I still have some underlying concerns but at this point I guess getting “a leg to stand on” is the next step. So unless we hear otherwise it’s game on.

Friday, May 28, 2021

“Let’s Not Bicker And Argue About Who Killed Who” *

Does anyone else find it irritating that the only time Progressives feel the need to “drill down” to get to the “root cause” of a problem is if it will a) implicate Trump – e.g. the January 6th “uprising” or b) demonstrate how white privilege is responsible for all the racism in the world?

Case in point, Zeke Emanuel advises us why it’s unimportant who/what/where/when and how the Chinese Murder Virus came to be:

Although it might seem fairly elemental to most people that understanding how this one happened might prove useful in trying to prevent it from happening again – unless of course it exposes your Chinese Overlords for the evil bastardos they are.

So Zeke, you partisan hack, why don’t you try telling Louis Pasteur, Alexandre Yersin and Jean-Paul Simond  that the source of a pandemic doesn’t matter to the effective handling of it?

Your Medieval mentality deserves a Medieval Monty Python reference, so this - from the lips of the King of Swamp Castle himself:

monty python red wedding who killed who

“Please! Please! This is supposed to be a happy occasion! Let's not bicker and argue about who killed who.” - Monty Python and the Holy Grail, scene 16

 

* Alternate title: “What Difference At This Point Does It Make?”

Thursday, May 27, 2021

Diagnosis Murder

Anybody care to guess what this week’s progressive talking point is? The Truth About Guns recaps:

psaki guns

That’s right: Guns kill, ergo more guns kill more people as the Jr. Senator from Connecticut explains to us blockheads.

murphy gun control

Nope, not a coincidence: they’ll tell us when something is a coincidence. And since this is NOT a coincidence,  it must be SCIENCE!

See how simple that is?  Or how simple it would be if mini-Marxist Hogg hadn’t confused the issue with a countervailing progressive doctrine:

david hogg guns3

I think it’s about fear. I think it’s about the fact that as a country, oftentimes we would rather turn on each other and point to someone’s skin color, or point to someone’s immigration status, or their gender, or their sexual identity and claim that’s the threat, when in reality, we should all be working together against the sources of evil that are creating this gun violence and the injustice that promotes this gun violence and gun purchases in the first place.

Boy, he can be a loose canon. They’ll have to be more circumspect about using such a thoroughly propagandized deep thinker to advance their cause du jour. Such iconoclasts can’t be relied on to stick to the message-of-the-day. That’s what happened yesterday to Alisyn when Little David just couldn’t resist showing off his command of party precepts by contending that gun sales are a symptom of the patriarchy, toxic masculinity and white privilege.

Oh well, at least he didn’t contend that the current murder spree had anything what-so-ever to do with letting criminals go free without bail, defunding police and criminally prosecuting law enforcement for doing their job. Which leaves the conclusion self-evident to progressives: more gun sales equals more crime. ergo we must have greater control over gun sales. They can’t even wrap their brains around the fact that it is the other way around: more crime leads to more gun sales as people grow alarmed that defunded police forces augmented by more social workers will do nothing but make them more vulnerable to the criminal element which is growing and thriving under the left’s nurturing.

 

diagnosismurder3diagnosis murder

By Progressive Principles

Wednesday, May 26, 2021

You Can Always Go Woke Again Tomorrow

As you know we’ve replaced Hump Day around here with Chicken Day. Here’s my weekly submission:

QUEERS FOR PALESTINE

Dx__3n-W0AAtAis

BE LIKE…

sheep for wolves

AND

chickens for kfc

I think it serves as an excellent Chick-Day meme as well as an important PSA warning of the inherent danger of suicide when you actually try to apply liberal logic to real life situations. Sometimes it doesn’t matter all that much...

this red bag is green

Other times it’s like watching the annual Darwin Award winners in slow motion.

altytoleranceislammuslimsheikh-vi

It does so hurt your head when you realize you can’t reconcile two of your favorite special interest groups/causes. 

SnowflakeNOOOOOOOO

Might I  recommend either a nice Chick-fil-A  sandwich

chick fila

or a big bucket of KFC?

kfc-bucket

You can always go woke again tomorrow.

Tuesday, May 25, 2021

The Importance of Being Important

“How you can sit there, calmly eating muffins when we are in this horrible trouble, I can’t make out. You seem to me to be perfectly heartless.” – Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

 

whitmer blue muffinsMight want to let up on those blueberry muffins a bit, Gretch

Michigan’s Governor Gretchen Whitmer has had her state in various levels of lockdown since March of 2020 that continue to this day – first by fiat and executive order, then via edicts from state agencies she controls. My liberal acquaintances have defended her and praised her “brave” actions from day 1; they truly believe she “did what was necessary” to protect the people from the Chinese Murder Virus.

Of course you remember that earlier this spring, while telling the rest of the state to “stay put, stay home” and “stop the surge” Gretchen herself flew on a private jet to visit her father in Florida. Her story, which was made up and released 3 weeks after the story broke and she’d had a chance to get her ducks in a row is still under investigation but like all such things will quietly be put to rest. For the record, the best she could come up with, given she’d intimidated some business leaders with access to a private jet to shuttle her back and forth from Florida, was that she paid for “her share” of the “charter flight” (the airplane isn’t licensed for individual charter flights per the FAA, not that that matters) and was there to “cook and clean” for her father. Her father, Richard Whitmer, is retired president and chief executive officer of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan and and former senior government official (ha! aren’t they all?) is apparently in good health and certainly capable of paying for cooking and cleaning services.

Restaurants – which the Governor has ordered closed completely to indoor dining for much of the past 15 months were “allowed” to reopened in February at 25% capacity and increased to a whopping 50% or 100 guests, whichever is less, at the end of March. A string of other stupid rules such as parties no larger than 6 at any table and all tables required to be a minimum of 6 feet apart remained in force. This type of stranglehold control over a business’ ability to survive is what makes this current story so abhorrent:

Whitmer apologizes after photo shows her at bar violating her own order.

Whitmer%20at%20Landshark%20bar_iThat’s our Guv, 4th in line from the left, enjoying an outing with 12 of her closest friends at, fittingly and unironically, Lansing’s Landshark Bar and Grill

Screenshot_2021-05-25 The LandShark Bar MSU on Instagram “Sharkbowls at the Landshark Open today 11am - 11pm”

But hold on, everything’s cool! The Guv apologized, officially. Via her office.

apology

“In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing.” - Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

And not just that, she’s deemed to let the little people do as she and her friends did: gather legally in a restaurant again! The 6 peeps per table rule is rescinded as of yesterday!

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s administration on Monday rescinded a rule that limits restaurant tables to no more than six people, a day after she apologized for ignoring the COVID-19 regulation while gathering with friends at an East Lansing bar.

So yay! the Controller/Manipulator-in-Chief has granted us, the unwashed masses, this small freedom! Along with the right (this year) to buy bedding plants from nurseries and big box stores! She’s like some kind of hero or something; imposing rules on the little people that are very important to keep us safe from each other while the elite class remains free to move about the cabin of their chartered jets in order to carry on with their important duties of being important.

vip

“I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being good all the time. That would be hypocrisy.” -  Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

Don’t worry Oscar, that will not prove to be the case with these scoundrel's.

Monday, May 24, 2021

Happy Birthday Robert Zimmerman!

“Every songwriter after him carries his baggage. This lowly Irish bard would proudly carry his baggage. Any day.” – Bono

 

What does it mean when “your generation’s” preeminent poet/tunesmith turns 80?

Young Bob Dylan (2)

It can only mean one thing really, the one thing that Boomers never thought would be true: we have grown old along with our remaining icons. By all rights, we should be the wise ones but as has always been the case you don’t just wake up at 70 and find yourself to be wise, it requires a life’s work as well as some innate intelligence to begin with. Bob Dylan, nee Robert Zimmerman, is such a man, famous by age 21 he used the experience of the intervening years to hone his intelligence into wisdom.

94582f24cb048cdbdf71e0a45b777515

Although his early songs remain the most well known and popular the real genius of his songbook emerged slowly over the years and requires a degree of cerebral effort to fully appreciate – hence the reason the greater popularity of the earlier songs which people though they understood - quite well, thank you -  in the context of the political, social and cultural milieu of the time. In truth a true understanding of Dylan’s songs has always demanded more than a surface hearing of the words. Which is why of all the 20th century songsters out there Dylan will be remembered long after the likes of the Rolling Stones, any of the Beatles and Elton Johns who are simply tunesmiths.

Dylan is timeless, if you understand him, which many don't. For example take this lyric from 1962’s A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall: a lot of people today of all generations think its “timelessness” can be translated to refer to the earth’s impending doom due to global warming:


I'll walk to the depths of the deepest dark forest
Where the people are many and their hands are all empty
Where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters
Where the home in the valley meets the damp dirty prison
And the executioner's face is always well hidden
Where hunger is ugly, where souls are forgotten
Where black is the color, where none is the number
And I'll tell and speak it and think it and breathe it
And reflect from the mountain so all souls can see it
And I'll stand on the ocean until I start sinkin'
But I'll know my song well before I start singin'
And it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard, and it's a hard
It's a hard rain's a-gonna fall

A bit of research and they would discover that what he’s really referring to is disinformation, presumably even that about global warming:

In a 1963 radio interview Dylan said, “In the last verse, when I say, ‘the pellets of poison are flooding the waters’, that means all the lies that people get told on their radios and in their newspapers”

And while there’s nothing particularly unclear about this, from 1983’s Sweetheart Like You -

They say that patriotism is the last refuge
To which a scoundrel clings
Steal a little and they throw you in jail
Steal a lot and they make you king
There's only one step down from here, baby
It's called the land of permanent bliss
What's a sweetheart like you doing in a dump like this?

the unwise wags amongst us will think he speaks of the likes of Donald Trump, not Joe Biden and Company. It is the burden of the unwise to politicize everything.

 

921d1fd8eb86d19ffa122c61b3eed56dRebel with a cause, but he suggests you find your own

One could write volumes about Dylan, but I’ll just wrap it by saying happy birthday Robert Zimmerman – you did your generation proud. And thank you, from the bottom of my heart.

Please post your favorite Dylan tune from his 60 years of recordings.

life 50Make that 60…and counting

Sunday, May 23, 2021

A Capital Sin In The Church of the Perpetually Woke

 

equality freedom freidman

In a sane world – which we haven’t seen in well over a decade – this letter would not even be marginally controversial: Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke Speaks Out Against Woke Capitalism.

Business Insider reports that the CEO of the e-commerce platform Shopify, Tobi Lütke, recently sent a letter to the entire staff reasserting the company’s commitment to competitive enterprise and rejecting calls for it to embrace social activism. In an age when woke politics are increasingly infecting corporate America, he wanted to “remind everyone that we are a business,” and, “more importantly, a hugely ambitious one.”

“We are trying to create a world class product that gives superpowers to the merchants that we are obsessed over,” Lütke wrote. “Everything Shopify does is to accomplish this, and everyone at Shopify should be able to describe how their job, through a series of direct or indirect steps, furthers this mission.”

Unlike many of today’s CEOs, Lütke seems cognizant of the basic morality behind old-fashioned, profit-focused business - actual free-market capitalism - operating within bounds.

freidman

“Shopify, like any other for-profit capitalism company, is not a family,” he continued. “The very idea is preposterous. You are born into a family. You never choose it, and they can’t un-family you. The dangers of ‘family thinking’ are that it becomes incredibly hard to let poor performers go. Shopify is a team, not a family.”

“We cannot solve every societal problem here,” Lütke warns. “Shopify’s worldview is well documented—we believe in liberal values and equality of opportunity. Sometimes we see opportunities to help nudge these causes forward. We do this because this directly helps our business and our merchants and not because of some moralistic overreach.”

It reminds me of something our General Counsel used to say during negotiations when he sensed somebody on our team was willing to concede too much just to make an acquisition. After dutifully reminding us that we couldn’t do anything illegal or unethical he would always add “but remember, we’re a business not a church” by which he meant we didn’t operate as a charity so there’s no need to give money away.

Unfortunately when your religion is progressive liberalism, your higher power is Government and the basic tenet of your faith is wokeness, then your business is a church. Or perhaps more accurately, your church is your business. And in the Commie Church of Perpetual Wokeness capitalism is not just a sin, it’s the capital sin.

sign your church is woke