Da Techguy's (no longer backup) Blog

If Friday’s at Romano’s was a time of fellowship Saturdays was a time of Family.

That because Mike’s sons Josh Romano and Todd Romano would be in the house working alongside their father.

Both have full time jobs. Josh is a School Principal in Winchester and a former Major in the Army who had deployed in Afghanistan, Iraq and Gitmo Todd is in sales, but when Saturday came they became the local butchers along with their father as they had since they were very young. During the busy season you would also see son CJ and before she got married his daughter and occasionally his wife would be down too.

Just about every grandchild in the family who was old enough has worked behind that counter or at the cash register. If Mike had lived a few years longer you never know if one of them might have decided to take the work on themselves, or perhaps open a couple of days a week

And there were folks like Katie who had been there for years, and Michelle who has worked there for the last ten and carried the ball all this week working. Occasionally the thought came that they might keep up the business, but the same two problems came up.

You couldn’t have a part time butcher shop because of spoilage. The meat has to be sold and sold within a specific period of time. Even closing Sundays posed a problem along those lines after the funeral and as for another person taking over, once the Business was sold 100 years of updated laws that Romano’s had been grandfathered in would have to be observed by the new owners. Combined with the cost of buying the business it became prohibitave.

So for the last time today I will buy a steak and some hamburg and enjoy the meats that I’ve eaten for the nearly three decades that I’ve lived in this neighborhood, but that loss will pale before the lost of the people that I whose faces I’ve seen for decades, the boys and girls who have grown into men and women with kids of their own and who have watch my own kids grow from being carried into the shop to coming in to do their own shopping.

They are like a family and I will miss them an awful lot and I suspect that as much as we all will miss Mike, the loss of that entire extended family will be the thing that me, mine and I suspect hundreds of others will miss the most.

I thank the all the Romano’s for letting me & mine be a part of it.

And Josh and the Romano’s would like to thank you too

Mike Bloomberg is having a bit of a bother over his statements concerning Stop and Frisk when he was mayor of New York. (He must have anticipated these problems as he asked that there not be video of same).

Ann Coulter had plenty to say on the matter:

To stop crime, he said, you “put a lot of cops where the crime is, which means in minority neighborhoods.”

Bloomberg further explained that frisking young black and brown men for minor crimes is how you keep guns off the streets generally: “And the way you get the guns out of the kids’ hands is to throw them up against the wall and frisk them. And then they start, they say, ‘Oh, I don’t want to get caught.’ So they don’t bring the gun. They still have a gun, but they leave it at home.”

Does anyone with a functioning frontal lobe disagree with this?

This instantly brought to mind something I read Bernie Goldberg’s classic book Bias about covering riots in a predominantly black country where his video had been rejected by the network because the people being arrested were black.

He pointed out that yes the perps were black, and so were the the owners of the shops that were being looted and so were the police who were arresting them.

This brings up a fact that is usually ignored concerning policing in minority neighborhoods when loud complaints are made concerning it.

The vast majority of victims of these perps are black and that when you use aggressive policing in minority neighborhoods where crime is high, the lives you are saving are black lives who would otherwise be the victim of violent crime , robbery, extortion etc etc etc.

Coulter again:

By pursuing the wacky idea of having cops frisk kids in high-crime areas for minor offenses like turnstile jumping, Mayor Rudy Giuliani cut the murder rate from more than 2,000 per year to about 600. No one thought it could possibly go any lower — and then Bloomberg got murders down to an unfathomable 300 or so per year.

Giuliani and Bloomberg did more for young minorities than all living Democrats combined. In New York City alone, at least 20,000 more black men are alive today than would be under the genius crime-fighting ideas of prior administrations 

Or in other words while activists scream “black lives matter” to Rudy and Bloomberg at the time, black lives actually mattered so they acted to preserve the black victims of these crimes.

Now it’s true that you have to look at individuals and you can’t nor should base policing on race it should be based on fact.

So here is the fact, if a particular neighborhood is where the crime is and the victims of said crime are the people of said neighborhood that’s where you deploy your police to stop it and you police that neighborhood aggressively if it’s a high crime neighborhood if you want to protect the potential victims of said crime no matter what the race of the people involved.

That is, you do if you think black victims matter.

Apparently said victims did when Bloomberg was the Mayor of NY, but now that he is running for president black votes in the Democrat primaries matter more than black lives did in NYC

Unexpectedly of course.