Gun Free Zone

I will fully admit I am a coward when it comes to sick kids. One of the clients we had back in Venezuela was a government-run Oncology Hospital and it I just could not deal with the little ones all full of tubes and looking emaciated and still managing to come up with a smile and a hello wave. As I said, it was a government-run hospital and you knew their chances of survival were between zero and big fat chance and I simply could not deal with that.

Now this happened to me, it would take a team of Clydesdales to drag out of  of whatever dark corner of the house I choose to polish a bottle of Jack Daniels* and a ton bandanas.

The respect I have for anybody working with sick and dying children cannot be measured. Sure as hell I cannot do it.

*For those who do not know, I have almost no tolerance for alcohol. I usually get tipsy by just reading the label.

Two weeks ago I wrote a post about the Lincoln Project and Rick Wilson decided that Trump didn’t deserve 6th Amendment rights.

Now a New Jersey Congressman has jumped on that bandwagon.

PASCRELL SEEKS DISBARMENT OF GIULIANI, 22 TRUMP CAMPAIGN LAWYERS

Congressman Bill Pascrell, Jr. (D-NJ-09) today filed letters with the legal bar authorities in Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, New York, and Pennsylvania, seeking the disbarment of Rudolph Giuliani and 22 other lawyers representing Donald Trump in his attempts to overturn the election and demolish democracy.

“We live together in extraordinary and increasingly dangerous national circumstances. At present, our sitting President has refused to accept the outcome of our national election and is attacking the integrity of our electoral system to keep himself in power. The pattern of behavior by these individuals to effectuate Mr. Trump’s sinister arson is a danger not just to our legal system but is also unprecedented in our national life. In carrying out that perversion, they have clearly violated the [] Rules of Professional Conduct they swore to uphold and should face the severest sanction your body can mete out: revocation of their law licensures,” Pascrell writes the legal disciplinary authorities in five states.

? I’ve just filed legal complaints with the AZ, MI, NV, NY, and PA bars against Rudy Giuliani and 22 other lawyers seeking their disbarments for filing frivolous lawsuits and trying to help Trump steal the election and dismantle democracy. pic.twitter.com/0kd3PN6q1h

— Bill Pascrell, Jr. (@PascrellforNJ) November 20, 2020

This is his complaint:

This fascist fuck doesn’t like the fact that Trump is executing his legal rights to have his grievances redressed by the court.

So he is going to take away his lawyers by abusing the disbarment processes.

This is the state of the Democrats.  Absolute totalitarianism.

If they can do it to Trump they can do it to you.

Sue for your rights and they will knock down your lawyers one at a time by threat or disbarment until you have no legal counsel.

They are using social media to take away your soap box.

There is evidence that they have taken away your ballot box.

Now they are going after your right to the jury box.

This is fascism.

Walter G. Ehmer.

Ehmer is the CEO of Waffle House.

His compensation is $700,000 per year, for a company that makes on average $1.3 billion per year.

When COVID forced closures, and the company shut down 20% of its locations and lost 70% of its revenue, he took a 50% pay cut to keep money in the business and people working.

He gave a press conference where he said he wasn’t going to shut down any more locations because he doesn’t want to put any more people out of work.

“A lockdown is going to put a lot of people out of work,” Ehmer told Business Insider. “It’s really not about the business — it’s about the people. These people have jobs, they have livelihoods, they need to take care of their families.”

“The only reason we think that we would shut a dining room down at this point is if the local government made us do so,” Ehmer said.

“The true way to solve a crisis is to go stand in the middle of it, and figure out how to take care of people and figure out how to help put things back together,” Ehmer said. “That does not change regardless of what the crisis is.”

If you know anything about Waffle House and how they handle crisis, you know they have a jump team that comes in a gets their restaurants working again after things like hurricanes.

It’s so reliable that FEMA uses Waffle House closures as a metric of natural disaster severity.

But I think my favorite part of this was how he gave his press conference.

That’s the CEO in a fucking polyester work shirt and name tag.  He is dressed the same way that his staff is in every restaurant in the country.

He could stand there in a $10,000 custom suit but he showed up in a work shirt and name tag like a fucking team player.

When he retires from Waffle House, some he needs to go into teaching executive management skills to other CEOs.

This guy should be the metric for how to run a company.

Libraries at business schools should be filled with theses from students getting MBAs on Waffle House management techniques, and other executives who don’t heed that advice should have their nose rubbed in them while beating beat with a rolled-up newspaper like a dog who shit on the carpet.

https://twitter.com/zerosum24/status/1330311370722697217

For those of you who don’t get it: the reference.

Yesterday was the Trans Day of Remembrance.  That is the day, every year, in which we remember all the trans people who were murdered in the United States.

It trended on Twitter.

It came the day after International Men’s Day.

If you want to understand Leftist Woke intersectionality, unlike #InternationalMensDay, the countless corporations and several US politicians were sure to Tweet their supports for #TransDayOfRemembrance.

The real reason I wanted to bring this day up, was because the focus of the day is on the “epidemic” of trans homicides in this country.

At least 37 transgender or gender-nonconforming people have been murdered in 2020. Most are trans women of color. On #TransDayOfRemembrance, we re-commit to ending this epidemic and the violence, discrimination, and poverty too many transgender Americans experience every day. pic.twitter.com/C3mPUAxY5C

— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) November 20, 2020

All, 37 of them.

I don’t want to seem too flippant about that.  Murder is bad, always.

My point is this:

Take the homicide rate from 2019.  It was, according to the FBI, 16,425 people.

If you extrapolated that to this year, 37 trans homicides amount to 0.22% of all victims.  Studies have suggested that 0.5% of the population is “gender non-conforming.”  That means that the murder rate is disproportionately low for trans people, roughly half the rate for representation.

But, that’s not the only factor to consider.  If you look at the 37 trans homicide victims in this country, the majority were not killed for being trans.  They were the unfortunate victims of everyday crime, mostly robberies.

I must point out that Out is an LGBT magazine, but that article points out when trans people were misgendered or “dead named” by the media.  For local crime stories, the local media generally gets information straight from the police.  If a trans person has ID with their “dead name” and the coroner identifies a body from anatomy, and that is what gets reported, that’s not a hate crime against a transperson.  It’s not the like press goes around and getting personal biographical information for a one-paragraph local crime story.

But I digress…

So most murdered trans people are not murdered for being trans.  That is, as far as murders go, good news.  It seems that the US is not a terribly transphobic place in which citizens go around hunting trans people.

But in 2020, this day really rankled me.

Here is why.

Progressive politics have caused a spike in murders across the country.  Defunding the police, politicians attacking the police, politicians letting criminals out of jail due to COVID, bail reform, every bad progressive idea on law and order has radically increased the homicide rate in just about every major city in this country.

Minneapolis 2020 homicides surpass last year’s total in just 8 months

Chicago murders up in 2020, outpacing national increase: FBI data

LA’s 2020 Murder Rate 25% Above Last Year

Murders and shootings are up in New York City, and it’s not just a ‘spike’, analyst says: ‘We’re in uncharted waters.”

What’s behind Houston, Harris County’s rising homicide rates?

Another killing means St. Louis ties record homicide rate

Detroit homicides up 30%, non-fatal shootings in the city up by nearly 50%

These are just some examples.

Let’s look at Chicago.  Homicides spiked in Chicago in 2016.  In the following three years, homicides decreased substantially.  Then 2020 reversed that and 2020 is going to beat Chicago’s 2016 record.

Last year, Chicago had 472 homicides, so far this year it’s 711.  That is an increase in 239 homicides as of me writing this post.

Progressive policies directly lead to 239 (so far) more homicides this year than last year.  That’s 6.4 times as many trans people murdered.

In Los Angeles, as of October, there were 261 homicides, a 25% increase over the previous year.  That means 53 more homicides this year over last, due to Progressive policies.

In New York City there were 321 between January and September of 2020, compared to 230 in the same time period in 2019.  That is 91 more murders.

Over and over again we have seen cities that have had more murders this year than last year.

Yet the Left only stops to have a day of remembrance for 37 murders, and only because the victims were gender non-conforming.

The Left doesn’t care about murders unless they can use them to advance some political agenda.  In this case, Woke victim status.

This year, it is uniquely disgusting to take mostly random homicides and try to claim victim status from them when these same people are causing hundreds and thousands of more people to be murdered with their policies.

Clearly, some murder victims are more equal than others.

I admit I love a good stunt. That is the main reason I watch Bond movies and Hooper has  a special place in my heart.  I remember watching my first Buster Keaton movie and realize “there are not the same old stunts. These are the dawn of the stunts!”

And yes, there were some before. but he was the Merlin of them all.