Monday, August 31, 2009

Maybe Danny Glover can go there


& Al Sharpton can come along for the ride. There have been within the past four months four cabdrivers shot to death here, three in the Bronx and most recently one in Yonkers and in all cases the motive was robbery. In May cabby Roberto Pita, 37, was shot to death on West Tremont Avenue in the Bronx. On August 17 cabbie Amadou Ndiaye, 46, was shot to death at Boston Road and Wilson Avenue. On Aug. 23 cabbie Jose Pena-Seguira, a 42-year-old father of four was shot to death by a paroled murderer near St. Mary's Park in Mott Haven (that's the South Bronx). Digression but it's not - lock Madoff up and throw away the key, KEEP SOCIETY SAFE! Most recently in the early morning hours of Sunday August 30 another cabby, Pericles Salas, 32, was shot in the head in Yonkers on Jessamine Avenue and pronounced dead at St. Joseph's Hospital which is the hospital in Yonkers if you read the local paper here that most crime victims in Yonkers seem to go to, busy place. Salas was an illegal immigrant from Mexico who supported a wife and 5-year-old daughter by driving long hours into the night. Fernando Mateo, head of the New York State Federation of Taxi Drivers said "there was no partition and no camera in his vehicle (as per the law and safety regulations - ed.). We're going to hold them responsible for his death" referring to the Mexicana Cab Service.

While that's all well and good the real killer here as usual is Political Correctness. Yeah we all know by now many cabbies don't pick up black fares, there's always much ado about this every few years or so in New York City. It's weaved its wave into edgy urban comic monologues but in all of this it's assumed as a matter of course for a cabdriver to do this is wrong as in racially immoral when the fact of the matter is cab companies should be allowed a certain latitude in exercising discretion and professional judgement when their drivers have to go into bad neighborhoods. OK I said it, nobody can talk about it but the elephant in the living room is black crime and when actor Danny Glover raised a beef a few years back about cabbies driving past black fares cab companies were told in no uncertain terms that this is illegal, an example of the grossest form of discrimination and ya wanna know something? when things calmed down and the racial activists had their way cabdrivers getting shot to death began to go up again. Now I've hashed this over with a good handful of people from time to time, the most honest place in the country right now is the living room and while most reasonable folk can see it from the black angle if you will they also say they're not seeing it from the cabdriver's perspective at all. It's a thankless job and a risky one as well and have the Revs. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson ever attended the funeral of a slain cabdriver? NO, they only pop up when there's a racial grievance in the air. Big Al has to go to the beauty salon every week to get his hair done for his next media appearance...

I feel the old blood-pressure rising, gonna stop here for now.

Friday, August 28, 2009

Think tanks, beavers and other things conservatives won't talk about


My friend and I are what you would call non-ideological conservatives. In my view the main problem with politics today is that the vast majority of libs and cons read from the same playbooks. Do libs have to be for abortion at every turn for instance? Anyway we got on the subject of think tanks.

Think Tanks

Many companies today use them. My friend seems to have a thing for supermarkets, always seemed to have been working in one at any given time so he was telling me he has it on good authority that the supermarket business in particular is heavy on the think tank stuff, hiring expensive consultants to implement their recommendations. Think tanks, yes they literally do meet in a house and chart the course of your workday from giving everybody only one day off a week to making most workers part-time but giving them almost full-time hours. Being pro-Big Business the average conservative is not going to talk about these things which is why you have me. On the other hand a rather small but not insignificant portion of the population seems to be happily unemployed and that's where the rest of my conservatism kicks into high gear. If I have to work so do you. At least work gives a discipline and structure to your life as opposed to all these people I just saw waiting for the library to open. What's wrong with this picture?

The Environment

Geez it would be nice if conservatives had at least some love for the environment. I remember when I was a kid my Dad took us behind Warehouse Lane in Elmsford, NY Back then it was mainly UPS there and in this stream you could see the beavers working, gnawing at twigs and building their dams, using their tails to pat the mud down and so I was telling a friend about this and we went there the other day. Have to relegate it to a fond memory though as the place has been more built up since those days with other businesses now but the thought occured: now we're not what Rush would call lefty-commie-enviro-whackos but considering that the beaver population had been so heavily decimated in the past due to early trapping when you do encounter actual beavers today in a populated area doing their thing one would think it has a special value. One would think SOMEONE would have left the place alone since a more reasonable environmental philosophy would recognize that the beaver should have a higher status than the snail-darter and so be worth protecting. In short I want the Palisades Mall AND the beaver and don't see why such things have to be overly political, either/or political pigeonholing. Gotta build! Gotta build! Well having gone there the other day it did bother me, ya gotta leave some things alone not only on an environmental level, there are romantic and poetic considerations as well. Maybe it's my midlife crisis but you should be able to relive some of your childhood memories.

So think tanks make your job rough and you don't even have the solace of looking at the beavers anymore. My schematics say something is wrong here.

Thursday, August 27, 2009

Our over-the-top media (as usual) - why I'm not into political necro

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy 1932-2009

I'm sorry but whenever I hear Phil Collins' "In the Air Tonight" I think of him ("If you told me you were drowning I would not lend a hand") but more on that in a minute. It's funny to hear the msm refer to Kennedy as the liberal lion of the Senate but that's because he described himself as a liberal so it was ok, the msm had no choice. It's kind of like coming out of the closet, the media won't do it for you (the responsible media anyway), you have to get the ball rolling yourself. If not they would have happily referred to him as a moderate because in the universe of the msm, must have something to do with the warping of space/time, parallel universes and wormholes but there are no liberals. OK on to the murky waters of Chappaquiddick.

MY THEORY and it's a darn good one is this and it was first proposed to me by a woman -- Ted was not in the car that night. He gave the keys to Mary Jo when he shouldn't have, everybody must've had some that night and so she was the one who drove off the bridge all alone. This helps enormously to help clear up some discrepancies like why he didn't notify the police immediately afterwards and why he was spotted early the next morning outside his hotel room all clean and with fresh clothes on and seemingly not a care in the world and that's because he didn't know at the time. Not exemplary behavior to be sure but not the monster he was often made out to be by right-wingers to this day.

OK a true John John story. JJ went to a nice restaurant with a woman and the head waiter told this other couple he was relocating them to make room for the Kennedy scion and so the guy was naturally miffed. JJ must have sensed this because after he came in he invited the other couple over to join them for dinner. Years later JJ bumped into the man again and remembered him and asked "so how was your dinner?" That to me speaks volumes, that's all I need to know about the man.

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Liberal and conservative views on the CIA

Pretty much conservatives are very pro-CIA. I've a more varied view of the spooks but before I get to that I do think it's a terrible terrible mistake for Obama's AG Eric Holder to decide to prosecute any CIA officials for authorizing or using certain interrogation techniques of terror suspects that liberals have felt went too far. You might make the case from a technical moral standpoint that the methods were somehow wrong but what I for the life of me don't get is this apparent soft spot among the leftie community for those who wish to do us great harm and for Obama to approve of this prosecutorial approach merely cements his repuation as a liberal. From stimulus to health-care to this, it ain't hard to figure. It's not a centrist or moderate pattern at all, it obviously masturbates his base but to point this out you risk the ire of folks like Bill Moyers who, how do I put this? you're engaging in hateful mythology even though you're merely connecting the dots and highlighting the truth. Anyway to balance out my view of the G-men found this under the Wikipedia link for LSD:

"Beginning in the 1950s the Central Intelligence Agency began a research program code named MKULTRA. Experiments included administering LSD to CIA employees, military personnel, doctors, other government agents, prostitutes, mentally ill patients, and members of the general public in order to study their reactions, usually without the subject's knowledge. The project was revealed in the US congressional Rockefeller Commission Report."

Yeah so Bill O'Reilly is not a big fan of those Matt Damon/Jason Bourne movies because it casts a bad light on the CIA, liberals can't bash the CIA enough and so perhaps BB can shed some light. Perhaps the late Bob Novak had the best take on politics in general: "Always love your country but never trust your government."

Monday, August 24, 2009

The Anonymous Blogger, anonymous no more

Chances are you've heard of cases of cyber-bullying or cyber-harassment, cowards who post anonymous slurs about Whomever and hide behind the safety of a blog. A tipping point came recently in the case of 37-year old model Liskula Cohen. The blogger who ran the well-known "Skanks in NYC" website called her a "skank" and a "ho", Ms. Cohen deeply resented that of course and finally got Manhattan State Court judge Joan Madden to order Google to reveal the identity of the anonymous blogger who has turned out to be a light acquaintance of Ms. Cohen's, 29-year old Rosemary Port who met each other in the summer of 2006. They had mutual friends on Facebook, yada yada yada, yada yada yada.

OK, so here's how the issue breaks down for me. Can't speak for the soapster but since we both share that strong quirk of libertarianism it's problematic. Calling somebody a slut, not nice, not to be endorsed so preach away but is calling somebody a slut the same thing as calling somebody a pedophile, an embezzler or a wifebeater? Is it true defamation and slandering of another person's character? Blogbullying, calling somebody you may hardly even know a skank and a ho, it's generally nasty but vague, you can't IMO prove it one way or the other unless somebody is a nun or a porn star and even then...I mean we're not following this person who was defamed around 24/7. After how many partners do you rise to the level of slutdom, of superskankdom? But cybervictims are feeling heartened by Ms. Cohen's victory in court but, um, this can apply to any number of things. Vanity Fair writer and best-selling novelist Dominick Dunne fell into a huge vat of doo-doo when he came up with the most fantastical scenarios involving then Congressman Gary Condit and the very dead Washington D.C. intern Chandra Levy, an Arab sheik threw her body from a plane into the Atlantic Ocean or something along those lines and, ya know? can you OPINE anymore? ummm...ya get where I'm coming from?

yeah folks just thinking out loud here, don't sue me!

Tuesday, August 18, 2009

The Freedom of Choice Act

Interesting that Obama has spent so much time on health-care "reform" when he had made a promise at some Planned Parenthood confab a few years back that signing the FOCA into law would be the first act he'd do, Priority Numero Uno. Everyone (libs included) should start seeing him for the bullshit artist he is. Gotta laugh though, when Obama was elected many in the liberal msm sounded the death knell for conservatism as a movement, funny how a few fringe people can derail such a massive project as health-care reform. He tackled too much too soon, wanted to ram everything through and couple impatience with arrogance and it ain't a good combination. Conservatism was never really dead, just waiting for the right moment to reenergize itself and as for FOCA I'd be really surprised at this point if anybody brings it up. With 40 million+ abortions to date since 1973 where is the legislative urgency? Obama has been a boon to the conservative movement so be glad he was elected. We as a country got to Make History and we get our country back too, not a bad deal by any stretch!

Monday, August 17, 2009

Obama is in deep denial

Even many Democrats have turned against the public option and so the best analogy I can use is that Obama is like some man who has so much to offer and yet he's being rejected and so the initial stage is denial, it ain't happening, people don't understand, maybe I need to 'splain better. I said this over at Pamela Hart's blog but Obama putting out a government website to "correct" all the "misinformation" about health-care reform would be like to expect a bunch of JFK conspiracy theorists to consult the Warren Commission Report. Hey dude you need to get over yourself, you ARE being rejected and that cute little tv spot of a bunch of cars cutting off the ambulance (i.e. those special interests blocking much-needed health-care reform) well it was clever but it ain't gonna change anyone's minds. Obama has to know in the back of his head that this is soon gonna be the first major failure of his presidency, no amount of shucking it up at those townhallers is gonna help and he's like some guy coming out of the local porn emporium with his little care package and the pastor sees him, the town widow, the postman, Brian with his yo-yo and the wind opens up his trenchcoat and what comes flopping out but it says SOCIALIST all over it. No man public option wasn't a make or break deal, I got these here for a friend and ah fuck it man, I'm more liberal than my own Congress. I got my Harvard cred, I thought you were with me on this. Nothing personal about your Grandma but that AARP crowd, they're what's known in the game as a bunch of useful idiots. I had the msm on my side all along and even they couldn't help me now how depressing is that?

Friday, August 14, 2009

Interesting questions

Is there free will in Heaven? http://catholicdiscussion.yuku.com/topic/1585/t/Is-there-a-potential-for-sin-in-Heaven.html

Why is there no repentance after death? http://catholicdiscussion.yuku.com/topic/1513/t/Why-no-repentance-after-death.html

As well as my own: If God is Eternal then that means He existed for all Eternity going backwards in Time, how is this possible?

Beth and I discussed the importance of appreciating the gift of life God gave you (and presumably this also means if your life sucks) so basically if you wind up in Hell you can say you had no say in the matter of YOU coming into existence so you're only there 'cause God created you in the first place (for this you'd need a good lawyer).

AND the really really BIG QUESTION of the day: Why is Charles Manson follower Squeaky Fromme getting out of jail but Bernard Madoff has something like 8 life sentences or something?

A new blog I found

For pro-life news and other stuff from Canada go to http://bluewavecanada.blogspot.com/

Just as depressing as the news here in America but just up north.

Thursday, August 13, 2009

The msm really really really really wants health-care reform

I wish they'd just go back to reporting the news instead of giving opinions. Hey Charlie Gibson pal, if it bothers you that much write an Op-Ed and oh, those Fact Checks they can shove up their ass. Funny how the "facts" always seem to go against the critics. I don't want some government bureaucrat sticking his finger up my rear, I have my own doctor to do that thank you. Better yet since Obama's so worried about little old me maybe he can put on the latex himself. Hillary seems a little testy of late. I don't think she's happy as Secretary of State, I think she really wanted his job, the bitch wanted the whole enchilada. Maybe they can have a Cash for Clunkers program where you can turn in your fat wife.

Rick Pitino, another crumb

OK so a few years back famed University of Louisiana basketball coach Rick Pitino had an affair with this Karen Sypher woman and gave her money to have an abortion. So unless my closed-captioning deceived me and I seemed to read the same thing in the paper the next morning they had sex in some restaurant. I've said it before but a main problem with the whole pro-choice movement is the basic fact, there's no getting around it that widespread abortion fosters and encourages social irresponsibility and yet the pro-choice movement never seems to care or talk about the moral context in which many of these "procedures" take place. The other thing is with Bill Clinton sexual scandal made him stronger, boosted him up in the polls but with everyone else it's wrong and maybe a career death sentence. Call this the Bubba Triple Standard, some asshole woman reporter by the name of Nina Burleigh once wanted to give him a blowjob for his role in keeping abortion legal, hell put a dead fetus in the room and maybe this chick can start squirting. Hey Rick keep the snake in its cage next time! if your wife won't give you a Slurpee go to 7-Eleven.

Wednesday, August 12, 2009

Life is like the bad job that never changes

A blog inspired by Beth's theme of late and as I said there sometimes I have to rejigger theology in my own head from time to time due to events. The late playwright Arthur Miller who as I recall was not known for being a religious person had this to say in his autobiography TimeBends: "Fuck you Death!" Probably for many of us we've come to accept death as natural and normal if not really a great thing, it's not and I think Miller tapped into something here basic to Christian thought without even knowing it and that is there is something fundamentally flawed with the Universe, in the original Christian understanding death did not enter the world until Man sinned and I covered alot of this ground already in my blog about why emotionally I can never be pro-choice (http://not-the-left.blogspot.com/2009/01/spiritual-view-on-pro-life-im-entitled.html) .

It's not an either/or situation, you can hold that God exists and yet Life is absurd and without meaning at the same time (although this is largely subjective since the happy and the unhappy cannot seem to relate to each other). The atheist "solution" besides ignoring Intelligent Design is too easy and doesn't address this central existential problem head on. Now whenever I've drifted towards this view people call you depressing, negative, pessimistic...relax, I'm merely stating a hard philosophical truth and do counsel people to get as much out of Life as you possibly can, you can and should enjoy Life to the max anyway but the answers religious folk give in such situations are too pat. So why do those of a spiritual bent continue to fool themselves insisting that God has plans for all of us which are too inscrutable for us to even figure out, always on some unknowing mystical plane? What about the 8 dead in the Taconic tragedy? I'd have thought a divine plan would not be so easy to foil.

The thought occured during my walk in Piermont this morning that maybe we're not meant to be here that long anyway and yet we cling to this life with all its absurdity and tragedy and yet maybe the good angels are whispering to us to just let it go. As soon as we're born we start to die, life's a bitch and then you die so why do we try to reconfigure a reality that isn't? Man sinned, we muffed it and can't seem to get back on track. Why are we here? Why were we born? I have no answer to that just know that it's not our true destination so if it's merely a sojourn does the duration really matter? IMO the real problem is secularism which teaches us to become too attached to this one life and meaning then becomes derived through materialistic means: career, house, money, sex etc. Final Thought - Your life here on Earth is very short, even the average lifespan of say 75 years is short when you stop to think about it so how the tragic affects us emotionally and spiritually is finite too and when the time comes when everyone looks back on this dot called Life, well as I said it really didn't make a whole lot of sense and we're in Heaven now so seen against the backdrop of Eternity its relevance is only temporary.

Monday, August 10, 2009

Obama, the black Hitler?

OK, so now before Bill Moyers gets his knickers all in a twist and I become some blip on some stop the hate liberal watchdog radar screen I'm merely reporting what the conservatives are saying. To hear them tell it ObamaCare is all about creating a vast governmental bureaucracy to ration care so the disabled, the elderly and others deemed not productive to Society are shunted aside and left to die, put out to pasture if you will kind of like what Eskimos do to other Eskimos who get too old. They push the guy off in his kayak off the ice floe and he's slowly drifting away into the sunset with a sign posted to a pole "Ready to Rock." IF this be true then Obama wants to do dastardly deeds indeed, maybe push your grandmother off a pier. I have enough on my plate as it is and these people are giving me nightmares. I am against ObamaCare for obvious conservative reasons but that doesn't mean you have to get all Stephen King about it. All HEIL Obama!

Thursday, August 06, 2009

If it's Bubba it has to be bad

Now you'd think the safe return of those two American journalists being held prisoner by North Korea would be a happy event even if it did take Bill Clinton himself to go over there but listening to Hannity during my drive the other day and, must be manic-depressive politics or something but he seemed to be saying Clinton shouldn't have done that and what did we give them in return? Oh I don't know, maybe Bill got Kim Jong-Il a couple of strippers or a little ulterior motive action, maybe he just wants a little Asian favor in return (once you go Asian you never go Caucasian), how the hell do I know? Wonder if the families of Laura Ling and Euna Lee feel the same way as Hannity but somehow I doubt it.

Well since I brought up strippers funny story. Many years ago my friend and I were supposed to go to my brother's birthday party or party of some sort or some type of social occasion involving brother, brain cells dying on a daily basis so the details are fuzzy at best but long story short we didn't go. We wound up at our old haunt Barnes & Noble as we didn't feel the party was socially obligatory and when I talked to my mother later she scolded me, said we were supposed to go and that we were probably at some strip joint instead having a good time. No Mom we really are that boring.

Saturday, August 01, 2009

He's sleeping well now

Doesn't look good for Dr. Conrad Murray but I never heard anything like this in my life. I've gone on the record as saying I don't believe Michael Jackson was a pedophile but that's as far as I'll go, everything else falls into the Weird Zone. Now I realize chronic insomnia affects millions of Americans and the alternatives, remedies and solutions are all over the map (Z's is the classic Christian Brothers, 1/2 VSOP, 1/2 Canada Dry on the rocks 2X with the only side that you wake up at 3 in the morning for a trip downstairs) but being hooked up to an IV every night so that a powerful anaesthetic exclusively reserved for major surgery can course through your veins that's off the charts brotherman!! The drug Propofol (other name Diprivan), wasn't your natural sleep either, ten gay men could've had sex with him and he wouldn't have known it. I can't believe I'm living.

The Beer Summit

Couple people said to me the Sarge shouldn't have gone. With those rather large beer steins I can imagine after the happy little get-together maybe Gates and the cop rapping at the urinals later. It's all good. Word is they're gonna get together again but maybe we should just put this one in the can and put a happy little bow on it. Next one might just be a beer brawl (the J. Geils Band "Centerfold" blasting from the jukebox, Biden says something stupid and the Professor hits Crowley over the head with a bottle of Jack).

PS Thanks for the help in setting up the new labeling system Beth, everything looks fine and dandy. Now there's an index to my mind and funny thing, after saying everyone should talk about nonpolitical topics every once in a while what do you think my most common category by far is?