As originally reported by Janet Burns of Forbes, the New York City Council has denied city residents access to additional ride-sharing services. In a 39-6 vote, the bill caps the current supply of New York City Uber and Lyft drivers for the next 12 months and implements a minimum wage of 17 dollars per hour. In what City Council Speaker Corey Johnson referred to as reforming an industry “without any appropriate check or [government] regulation,” Councilman Eric Ulrich argued, “This is like putting a cap on Netflix subscriptions because Blockbusters are closing.”
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“An explosion of drive-by shootings erupted on Chicago’s South and West sides this weekend. At least 74 people were shot, and 11 killed, between 3 p.m. on Friday and 6 a.m. on Monday. In one seven-hour stretch, starting around midnight on Saturday, at least 40 people were shot, four fatally, as gunmen targeted a block party, the aftermath of a funeral, and a front porch, reports the Chicago Tribune. Over two and a half hours that morning, 25 people were shot in five multiple-injury shootings, including a 17-year-old who died after being shot in the face. An 11-year-old boy, a 13-year-old boy, and a 14-year-old girl were also hit over the course of the weekend’s bloodbath. Mt. Sinai’s emergency room shut down for several hours due to the overload of bodies; in May, the entire hospital went into lockdown following a virtual riot in its lobby among gangbangers, reported Tribune columnist John Kass.” Here is a link to the status of gun laws in Illinois. This article says gun laws in the state of Illinois are “relatively strict” compared with those in other states of the US. As far as I can see, the level of shootings in Chicago is driven by drug gangs that thrive in one of the most corrupt, welfare-screwed cultures in North America. The level of violence in that city (Chicago has always been a rough town) is of a level that stands comparison with the grimier parts of Iraq during the post-invasion phase of 2003. Things are reaching the point where President Trump could, with some justification, send in US military forces and put that city under external control. Of course, with my classical liberal hat on, that would probably cause more harm than good in some ways, perhaps. I’d imagine that more law-abiding people are leaving the city, creating a vicious circle where the middle class has gone, and there’s a sort of mix of gangs, welfare dependents and political hucksters running the show, rather like the favelas of Brazil but without the entrepreneurial energy. And bear in mind that this is going on while the US is, at least according to official statistics, enjoying decent economic growth and low unemployment. But in such wrecked towns, I’d wager that labour force participation rates are weak and business dynamism isn’t all that evident. A final thought: in the UK the media reports, often to the maximum, on spree shootings (although as I noted before, things went weirdly quiet after a short while after the Vegas mass shooting). But the remorseless killing counts in Chicago, Baltimore or other cities barely registers a flicker. It’s as if it is seen as normal, or, to coin a phrase from London’s unpleasant and useless mayor, part and parcel of living in a big city. August 7th, 2018 | 43 comments - (Comments are closed)
Hmmm, I wonder who Aunt Agatha is referring to? 😉 July 19th, 2018 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
There is a lot to admire about Elon Musk. I thought the space car was glorious. The whimsicality of it, which so many objected to, delighted me. It is sad that Mr Musk has now shown that his whims can take a nastier turn.
Apparently it started when Mr Unsworth was rude about Mr Musk’s offer of his mini-submarine to help in the rescue:
If nothing else had been said, my sympathies would have been with Mr Musk. Even if it was something of PR stunt, I am sure Musk did genuinely want to help save lives. Still, I dare say tempers often flare in these high pressure situations. One man’s praiseworthy offer of aid can be another’s dangerous distraction from an urgent task. However then Mr Musk went on to call Mr Unsworth a “pedo”, not just once – in which case it might have been written off as a random zero-content insult like calling someone a “bastard” when you neither know nor care whether their parents were legally married – but repeatedly. Mr Musk’s “evidence” for this allegation out a blue sky was that Mr Unsworth is a white guy living in Thailand. Musk said that that in itself was “sus”, meaning suspicious. Angry comments are coming thick and fast to the Times article “Thai boys’ rescuer Vern Unsworth could sue Elon Musk over paedophile smear”. If even a fraction of those commenting on the Times website and those of other British newspapers who have said that they are about to cancel their Tesla order follow through with it, Musk’s UK operation could be in real trouble. That comes on top of the doubts already raised about the company by Tesla’s failure to live up to some of Musk’s earlier extravagant promises. For all the fame of the brand, the number of Tesla electric cars in the UK is still only in the low thousands, and Times subscribers are exactly the sort of people who would be most likely to buy them. Charismatic individuals can push forward scientific innovation. They can also screw up big time. July 16th, 2018 | 28 comments - (Comments are closed)
Canada’s second generation Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is in a spot of bother. The Guardian reports, “Justin Trudeau ‘does not remember’ groping reporter at festival”.
Which is only to be expected, given it was eighteen years ago. After such a long time it is surely unfair to drag up an unproven accusation from way back to blacken a man’s name now… Except that is exactly what the tousle-headed heartthrob of 24 Sussex Drive did to others. The Canadian National Post has two good articles on the subject. Firstly,
But what if he did not do it? Well, judging from the way Trudeau has treated others, that should make no difference. According to a second article in the National Post:
The price of the presumption of guilt can be heavier even than that. In not unrelated news, remember “Nick”, the man whose accusations of every crime from sexual abuse to murder against the former Conservative MP Harvey Proctor among many others were infamously described as “credible and true” by Detective Superintendent Kenny McDonald without the formality of a trial?
July 3rd, 2018 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Times reports:
And
My apologies to readers from New Zealand. The sarcasm of my title was just a rhetorical device to make a particular point. Of course I am aware that this type of madman can arise in any country. The roles could easily be reversed, with an American obsessive armed with knife, pepper spray and duct tape trying to break into the house of a fourteen year old New Zealand girl. Of course given that in New Zealand, as in the UK,
…if this had taken place in New Zealand or the UK the mother would have had no gun and the girl would have been raped and murdered. June 27th, 2018 | 37 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Whitehouse press secretary was required to leave a restaurant because the restaurant owner did not like her views. This seems like a perfectly civilised and non-violent way of objecting to views or actions. A restaurant owner should be free to require people to leave for any reason; the restaurant is private property. The Guardian article quotes Walter Shaub‘s tweet:
The Guardian article does not mention the obvious response:
It is surprising how often it is necessary to spell out the difference between not liking something and wanting the state to intervene to stop it. June 25th, 2018 | 83 comments - (Comments are closed)
Quite a few days ago now, Roseanne Barr tweeted this:
It seems that Roseanne is copying the technique pioneered by her “dually” elected President of the USA, by including grammatical and spelling mistakes in her tweets, thereby getting these tweets noticed and written about by pedants like me, who would probably have had nothing to say about them had they been more properly phrased. Even better would be if she had misspelt duly as “duelly”. Imagine POTUS being chosen by literal single combat. Hillary Clinton wouldn’t have won that either. (By the way, how do you not misspell “misspell”? Misspell doesn’t seem right. But miss-spell doesn’t seem right either.) See also: The liberal media “is” an absolute joke. Should be “are”, surely. On a more serious verbal point, I personally don’t like the way Roseanne Barr calls them the “liberal” media. I don’t like either “liberal” or “progressive” to describe people who seem to have no sane idea of what liberty or progress actually are. But at least Roseanne Barr refrains from calling these media the “mainstream” media. This is a usage I am starting seriously to dislike. It attributes to these very particular media a cultural dominance that they did once possess, but no longer do. “Mainstream” says to me that any other media only have significance if they are tributaries of this main stream. But now, other streams can find their own way directly to the great sea that is public opinion, with no help from that still supposedly “main” stream at all. I will now elaborate on what I mean. → Continue reading: Roseanne Barr denounces the regressive media June 15th, 2018 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
Media breaths a sigh of relief that a raccoon climbing Union Bank of Switzerland building in Minnesota distracts public from Trump’s diplomatic success with North Korea. Next: IRS audits raccoon & announces he has a Swiss bank account & ties to Vladimir Putin #MPRaccoon June 13th, 2018 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
This story, via that well-known extreme rightwing news outlet, Associated Press (sarcasm alert) ought, given the enormity of what is stated, surely lead to former President Barack Obama having his collar felt by the Feds. But he won’t of course because he was “hope and change”:
All those friends of mine on the libertarian side who rightly get annoyed by Donald Trump will, I trust, be equally oxidised about what the Obama administration has got up to. The situation is shocking because, in recent years, dozens of foreign banks have been punished by US authorities for breaching sanctions against countries including Iran. The most egregious breach was by French banking group BNP Paribas, paying a fine to the US totaling $8.9 billion. (One wonders if President Macron of France will lobby Donald Trump to refund some of this cash to France, if the previous administration was crapping on its own rules about sanctions.) Here is Ben Shapiro going into the increasingly unhinged one-sided media coverage of US public affairs. Back to the original article, it seems important to me that it is AP, not just a blog or some YouTube commentator, that has spelled out in devastating detail the dishonesty of the Obama administration over Iran. I recall (yes, I am that old), how White House shenanigans over Iran (the 1986 Iran-Contra scandal) nearly brought down Ronald Reagan and led to multiple hearings, firings and resignations. Obama may now hope that, as a former POTUS, he can relax, do his netflix thing, play golf, give socialist speeches for big bucks, and occasionally vent on how terrible it is that Biff is reversing some of his policies. But I do wonder. What powers, exactly, exist to bring a former Prez. to book for what appear to be lies on an epic scale, on matters affecting national security? OK, I do doubt that it could happen against the first non-white man to be elected to the office, but if there is any justice in this world, Obama should be contemplating life behind bars or at least, being made to sweat under intense questioning. The man is a snake and yet far too many intelligent people treat him as a sort of secular saint. It is nauseating. June 7th, 2018 | 36 comments - (Comments are closed)
A media that taught us to mock authority and culture was unprepared for the day when the audience would mock their authority and their culture. May 29th, 2018 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Armed gang pick on the wrong gran as she fires CROSSBOW at masked men who kicked down her door”, reports the Daily Mirror.
Don’t get me wrong, I am happy to read that this lady was able to protect herself and her family. But I am mystified by the supportive tone of the Mirror reporter, and of most of the comments, when exactly the same sequence of events but involving a gun-wielding grandma in the US instead of a crossbow-wielding one in the UK would have been dismissed as NRA propaganda and further evidence of the lunacy and barbarism of Americans in their “love affair with the gun”. April 26th, 2018 | 41 comments - (Comments are closed)
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