Archive for June, 2020

Report from Louisiana: Into the Mighty Mississippi

Posted: June 15, 2020 by Pat Austin in Uncategorized
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By:  Pat Austin

SHREVEPORT – The issue of monuments persists.

John Ruberry asked in this space, “Where does it all end?”  I’ve been asking myself this question for several years now as we fight in Shreveport to save our Confederate monument. Perceived symbolism aside, our monument is a beautiful work of sculpture in its own right, and fairly unique among other Confederate monuments.

The unhinged left continues to destroy and deface monuments and it seems that logic and reason has gone further and further out the window. All that matters now is that the target is a monument, never mind what it stands for.

In New Orleans this weekend, protesters attacked a bust of John McDonough (1779-1850) in front of City Hall. Armed with a chisel and a skateboard, they tore the bust off its pedestal and tossed it into the Mississippi River:

A group of protesters used a chisel, rope and a skateboard to tear down the bust of John McDonough in Duncan Plaza, doused it in brightly colored paint and rolled it into the Mississippi River on Saturday.

The New Orleans Police Department said at 5:30 p.m. that two people who drove the bust to Jax Brewery to dump it in the river were “apprehended and transported to NOPD headquarters.” Protesters began gathering at the jail near Tulane Avenue and South Broad Street known as the Orleans Justice Center and there were roughly 200 there by 7 p.m.

Their grievance seems to be that McDonough owned slaves.

While McDonough wasn’t a saint, he did leave his fortune to Baltimore and New Orleans for the purpose of forming schools for poor black and white children.

Two of those who attacked the monument have been arrested.

In Kentucky, armed residents formed a line of protection around their Confederate monument against potential attackers.

Nancy Pelosi has called for the removal of eleven statues from Statuary Hall at the Capitol Building. While her letter does no specify which eleven statues, she does specifically mention Jefferson Davis and Alexander Stephens who served as President and Vice-President of the Confederacy.

Louisiana’s two statues there include Huey P. Long and Edward Douglas White. White was a U.S. Senator and a Chief Justice of the United States, but he also served as a soldier in the Confederacy. Is she targeting this statue as well? It’s not clear.

But again, you see the problem? Where does this end? We can remove monuments, relocate statues, throw busts into the Mississippi, but where does it end? Who gets to decide which ones go? Under whose sensibilities are we all to live? Whose rights take precedence over any others?

Honestly it makes me crazy. I want to wash my hands of all of it and live on a houseboat in the Atchafalaya Basin.

We need to find our way back to reason and learn to get along. Mind our own business. Find a balance. Enough.

Pat Austin blogs at And So it Goes in Shreveport and is the author of Cane River Bohemia: Cammie Henry and her Circle at Melrose Plantation. Follow her on Instagram @patbecker25 and Twitter @paustin110.

Society Without Police: Meet the New Bosses, not quite the same as the old ones

Posted: June 15, 2020 by datechguy in Uncategorized

Mayor Perkins: …You all know the situation. There’s us here in Calendar. There’s Galena, where we gotta ship our gold. There’s the Danby ranch half way in between the two. The road even runs through their property.

Thomas Devery: All right fine then we build the road around their property.

Mayor Perkins: How? They own that whole valley.

Fred Johnson: Besides, if they don’t get their 20 per cent, they just hold up every stage that comes through and take all of it.

Thomas Devery: All right, but we’ve got to do something. Even if it means bringing troops in here.

Support your local Sheriff 1969

Henry Hill: Hundreds of guys depended on Paulie and he got a piece of everything they made. And it was tribute, just like in the old country, except they were doing it here in America. And all they got from Paulie was protection from other guys looking to rip them off. And that’s what it’s all about. That’s what the FBI could never understand. That what Paulie and the organization does is offer protection for people who can’t go to the cops. That’s it. That’s all it is. They’re like the police department for wise guys.

Good Fellas 1990

The newest in my series of what society without or with defunded police will look like.

One of the things I mentioned in my last piece is how suddenly smaller shipments like UPS trucks would become targets as soon as it was clear that police would not be there or would be too busy to bother and I mentioned the increase int he cost of insurance. But there is another type of “Insurance” to be paid.

Once it becomes clear that there is good money and easy to be made from business’ that have no cops to call or can’t count on them bothering to show bigger factions will start to get involved, particularly in large cities. Organized crime, whether it’s mafia or drug gangs or ethnic games will quickly discover that they will be able to extract a toll from the local businesses and those who choose to enter their areas. And that toll is going to have to be paid, or else.

Henry Hill: [narrating] Now the guy’s got Paulie as a partner. Any problems, he goes to Paulie. Trouble with the bill? He can go to Paulie. Trouble with the cops, deliveries, Tommy, he can call Paulie. But now the guy’s gotta come up with Paulie’s money every week, no matter what. Business bad? Fuck you, pay me. Oh, you had a fire? Fuck you, pay me. Place got hit by lightning, huh? Fuck you, pay me.

Good fellas 1990

This however does come with compensations as was illustrated just last week in Chicago:

 In Chicago’s Hispanic neighborhoods, the Latin Kings and other street gangs are reportedly stepping up and doing what their elected officials and police departments have not been able to do: protecting their neighborhood businesses from arsonists and looters.

and one of the things about ethnic gangs is they not only don’t care about cancel culture or political correctness when dealing with things:

On Sunday afternoon, Little Village neighbors came together to protect 26th Street businesses after people looted shops. Ald. Michael Rodriguez (22nd) said as the night went on, a few Latino men became “antagonistic” and were indiscriminately targeting Black people driving through the neighborhood.

. . . .  In a Facebook Live video shot at 50th and Cermak in Cicero at 7 p.m. Monday, groups of people with bats and metal pipes were gathering near the intersection.

“Non-Black, Latinx gangs [are] armed with bats, machetes,” said Luz Chavez, who shot the video. “Any car that passes by with Black people in it, they are yelling at it and throwing s—,” she said.

Chavez, founder of online magazine Gozamos, urged Black people to “stay out of Cicero.”

The irony of course is that the business owners, seeing other completely wiped out and likely unable to get insurance might just decide that paying these guys for protection from everyone (except them of course) is worth it and if a few thugs end up dead instead of arrested, well they’ll figure it’s a powerful incentive not to do that anymore.

This is happening in Chicago, I suspect it will start happening in Seattle when people decide they don’t want to be ruled by ANTIFA and if this defend disband the police business continues

Closing note: On the June 3rd podcast I stated that if I was a Mafia down I’d be moving into cities, offering protection from the mob and cleaning up both on protection money & stealing from the thugs and get cheered for it. Who knew that a less than a week later it would actually start to happen?

The war on statues may never end

Posted: June 14, 2020 by John Ruberry in culture, News/opinion, politics
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Lincoln and Douglas at Freeport, Illinois

By John Ruberry

While we’re not–yet–at the French Revolution level of destroying then recreating society, the Angry Left is focused on defacing and toppling statues of men deemed racist. Or by having sympathetic politicians remove them, such as what happened last week with Jefferson Davis’ statue at the Kentucky state capitol. So far women in bronze and marble, to my knowledge, have been spared, but one of Illinois’ representatives at National Statuary Hall at the US Capitol just might be inflicted with induced restless legs syndrome. I’ll get to her later.

Monuments of Confederate generals and of course Jefferson Davis have been the hit the hardest by the vandals. But the rage is now world wide. Winston Churchill’s statue at Parliament Square in London had “was a racist” spray painted on its pedestal. There’s an Abraham Lincoln statue there too, Black Lives Matter activists defaced that one. Up in Scotland, a statue of medieval monarch Robert the Bruce, whose views on black people are unknown, had “BLM” and “was a racist king” spray painted on it.

Because I’m from Illinois, I’d like to zoom in on my state. Let’s return to Lincoln. While Honest Abe was always anti-slavery, his views on black people prior to the Civil War would be classified as racist today. Lincoln’s stance on slavery in the 1860 election was to confine it to states where it already existed. By 1863 he was an abolitionist, at least in areas held by Confederate forces. Two years later the Great Emancipator enthusiastically backed the 13th Amendment that finally ended slavery in America. Oh, Lincoln saved the union too. That’s why he is considered the United States’ greatest president by most historians.

Lincoln gained national prominence in 1858 during his campaign for the US Senate against Stephen A. Douglas. Other than his connection to Lincoln, Douglas, “the Little Giant,” is largely forgotten now. His Kansas-Nebraska Act, which eliminated the Missouri Compromise in determining which states would be slave or free, ignited Bleeding Kansas, a brutal warmup to the Civil War. But Douglas was a political dynamo in the 1850s and he was the nominee for president for the northern Democrats in 1860.

Douglas and Lincoln agreed to a series of seven debates throughout Illinois during the 1858 campaign, the famous, or make that formerly famous, Lincoln-Douglas Debates. Late in the 20th century bronze statues of both men were placed at each of those sites.

Hmmm.

Douglas’ views on slavery were purposely murky, he believed in “popular sovereignty,” that is the voters, who comprised only of white males in the 19th century, should decide where slavery should exist. The Little Giant owned a plantation in Mississippi with slaves. Well, not exactly, but it was in his wife’s name.

How long will it be before those Douglas statues in Illinois will be vandalized? When will the call for their removal begin? And those seven plazas with Lincoln and Douglas will look unbalanced with just one man. Will Lincoln, who at one time of course was a racist, albeit most whites were bigots in the 1800s, get yanked too from those spots too?

Nancy Pelosi is calling for the removal of eleven statues honoring Confederates at Statuary Hall. Each state gets two statues, some of these honorees are well-known, Andrew Jackson represents Tennessee, George Washington is one of Virginia’s statues. Both men of course owned slaves. Some of the honorees are virtually unknown. Frances Willard, the longtime president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, a group that assisted in establishing Prohibition in America, represents Illinois in the hall. Like Douglas, she was a big deal in her day. But Willard held racist views and she feuded with African American civil rights leader Ida B. Wells.

When you remove the Confederates, the slave holders, and the racists, how many statues will be left in Statuary Hall?

How many statues in front of libraries, village squares, or county courthouses will be removed?

Where does is it all end?

And if all of the statues are gone, then what?

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

John Adams and Cops Shows Cancelling The Future to be Woke Today

Posted: June 14, 2020 by datechguy in crime, culture, entertainment, News/opinion
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Public business my son, must always be done by somebody.— it will be done by somebody or other— If wise men decline it others will not: if honest men refuse it, others will not. A young man should well weigh his plans. Integrity should be preserved in all events, as essential to his happiness, thro every stage of his existence. His first maxim then, should be to place his honor out of the reach of all men

John Adams to his son Thomas Sept 2 1789

Because of it’s nature Television has an over-sized ability to influence culture to the good or to ill. It is no coincidence that many of the cultural changes that have had negative connotations for society have been pushed by the celebrity culture for the sake of their own justification over the years for example: Sex in the City

I do wonder what my life would have looked like if “Sex and the City” had never come across my consciousness. Perhaps I’d be married with children now? Who knows, but I can say for sure that, as clever and aesthetically pleasing as the show was — and, as much as I agree with its value of female friendships — it showed too much consumerism and fear of intimacy disguised as empowerment.

It’s like candy: In the moment it feels good to eat it, but afterward, you feel sick. Whom you’re dating, what you’re wearing, or how good you look at that premiere — none of that s–t matters unless you genuinely love yourself. Solid relationships are what really matter.

Truth be told, I wish I had never heard of “SATC.” I’m sure there are worse role models but, for me, it did permanent and measurable damage to my psyche that I’m still cleaning up.

Sure, I could have been a dating columnist for the rest of my life but, honestly, I gave really bad dating advice — and so did Carrie Bradshaw.

Many women fell for this fantasy and are regretting it now. It’s worth noting that Sarah Jessica Parker got married in 1997 at age 32 and has been married to Matthew Broadrick ever since. She knew it was just a show.

However there were and are plenty of shows that can influence for the good. How many people became engineers because they wanted to Scotty from Star Trek or got into science because they wanted to be the Professor from Gilligan’s Island?

Cop shows are like this. I suspect there are plenty of people who became cops because they wanted shows about police as a kid and decided they wanted to be the honest cop the person of integrity and honor , who serves and protects others from the dangers of the world. Even shows like Barney Miller, which highlighted the monotony of the job, featured good people doing good things.

Now I ask you. If you decide to teach that the police are evil and to be rejected and you remove that image of the honest cop from the culture what will replace it? And more importantly WHO will replace it when it comes time to seek people to actually do one of the most thankless jobs of society.

Let me remind you again of John Adams’ quote that started this piece

Public business my son, must always be done by somebody.— it will be done by somebody or other— If wise men decline it others will not: if honest men refuse it, others will not.

This is being demonstrated in Seattle today. If the Police don’t do the policing others will who just might not be wise or honest or worried about serving and protecting.

The Demonetization of Police by the media/left for their political purposes is going to have great damage to our society in the short term. But the removal of the image of the honest cop and policeman who protects and serves from our cultural stream will do even more damage, not now but 20 years from now, because when you don’t inspire people to be honest men and women with integrity, with no other agenda than to make their living serving the public to be cops, then those looking to exploit such a job for it’s perks while hanging back from it’s responsibilities will be the ones who fill those positions and you and your children and grandchildren who follow won’t like the result.

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