Archive for 2022

Report from Louisiana: Working two jobs

Posted: July 18, 2022 by Pat Austin in Uncategorized
Tags: , , , , ,
Photo by Yassine Khalfalli on Unsplash

By:  Pat Austin

SHREVEPORT – I am no economist and so would have poor skills in predicting where this incredible inflation will end, but man, it has got to end somewhere.

When I retired from teaching a year and a half ago, my pension was comfortable. Now? It doesn’t go nearly as far as it did then. That’s why when my church needed a part-time receptionist in the office, I took it on. I figured the extra money would ease the pain. And then, when they asked me to add another day and work four days a week, I agreed to that, too.  Picking up that extra four or five days a month looked good. Now I’m thinking I need to ramp up my paid writing sideline a bit and earn even more.

We just returned from a trip to Iowa where my husband’s family lives. From Louisiana, we usually spend about $200 to $250 in gas there and back each year. This year it was literally double, costing us right at $100 every time we filled up. On top of that, rising food prices are causing pain at the grocery store, too. Across the nation, more and more people are looking for supplemental income. According to the Washington Post, “the percentage of employed people working multiple jobs in the United States has steadily increased since March 2020 from 4 percent in April 2020 to 4.8 percent in June 2022…”.  That percentage seems somewhat low to me.

In Iowa, where we just spent a week, we were in the south-central region. I know there are very liberal pockets in Iowa, but there are plenty of conservatives, too, and we met a lot of them. I saw one lady in the grocery store wearing a t-shirt that said, “Buck Joe Fiden.” Uh, okay. I saw a lot of Trump flags, and I saw zero Biden signs although I know there are Biden supporters there.

The chatter I heard at baseball games, in the stores, and in the shops were all full of angst at the state of the economy. My husband’s family is a farming family with a generational farm. The cost of fuel to run tractors and trucks is just crippling and many farmers will not make it because of this. It is devastating in the Midwest.

Like I said, I’m not sure where all this will end up, or who will be left standing when it’s over, if it is ever over, but I, for one, am working double time to get debts paid off and sock something back before everything implodes. I have one friend, an older lady who has seen some things in her day, who is selling off assets and putting up cash. She is downsizing, selling off jewelry with no sentimental meaning, putting up cold cash whenever she can. “I’m scared,” she told me. “I’ve never seen it like this, and I’m scared.” She is not usually this reactive.

She’s not wrong.

Liberal Police Contradictions, BLM Contradictions, A shock to David French, Bill Clinton’s Victory and A solution Under the Fedora

Posted: July 18, 2022 by datechguy in Uncategorized

As of the latest Uvalde revelation the left has decided on their talking point:

You can find this tweet or a variation of it repeated all over the blue check world as the talking point which is essentially: 400 police with guns didn’t act to protect teachers therefore only police should have guns.

Idiots

Of course one of the reasons why the police might not have gone in at Uvalde can be illustrated by the reaction over the shooting of Tekle Sunberg who was pumping rounds into an apartment with a single mother and little kids:

Anything that can be exploited by the left is to be celebrated and kids being in danger? Meh!

If Sundberg had killed her and/or her kids it wouldn’t have been news, just a statistic to the BLM grifter crowd.

David French is shocked SHOCKED that when you import a large group of people who are religious into the country they tend to vote with the only political party that views belief in God as a positive thing:

A party that’s culturally disconnected from (or perhaps even scornful of) traditional religious faith is going to alienate itself from tens of millions of voters it could otherwise reach.

You would think a so called “conservative” would be thrilled with conservatives gaining votes from Spanish Speakers but they aren’t paying his bills anymore.

If this keeps up the Biden Admin will have a wall up by lunchtime.

Bill Clinton, take a victory lap:

In the documentary, Oral Sex Is the New Goodnight Kiss, Sharlene Azam, a Canadian filmmaker, says, “If you talk to teens [about oral sex], they’ll tell you it’s not a big deal. In fact, they don’t consider it sex. They don’t consider a lot of things sex.” In the documentary, teenage girls talk casually about their sexual experiences and even their forays into prostitution. One girl sums up the new attitudes: “Five minutes and I got $100. If I’m going to sleep with them anyway because they’re good-looking, might as well get paid for it, right?”

This is how the phony feminist movement empowered women. More like enslaved women. Those men-hating parasites have ruined the glorious exaltation of women in 20th-century America.

My wife would disagree, with their definition of what is sex and what is not.

All I could think of was positive reaction to the Belle Knox story. I suspect that the day will come when college women are encouraged to service Booster and administrators to pay their way and nobody will blink at it.

Don’t tell me that men didn’t win the sexual revolution.

Finally Shot and chaser

Virtue Signaling and Victim Envy

Posted: July 17, 2022 by datechguy in Uncategorized

Real Old Lady Ground Controller: This is ground control, you don’t appear to have flight clearance.

Cat: [expecting young hot GC from the CGI] You’re the ground controller?

Real Old Lady Ground Controller: Please state your name and clearance code.

Cat: Reality Sucks!

Red Dwarf Back in the Red Part 3 1999

For quite a while we have seen the phenom of “virtue signaling” whereby a person rather than practicing virtues like temperance, generosity, charity which involve effort, will, time, inconvenience and occasionally expense simply exhibits a ribbon, or a tag on a twitter account or a list of “pronouns” thus signaling to the “right” people that one has “virtue” without all the messy effort of having to practice any such inconvenient things.

We have now seen an increasing amount of another phenom which I like to call “victim envy”.

One of the things about modern life is how, even during a time of hardship, EASY it is.

The dishwasher, clothes washing and the AC alone broke the bonds of heat and water that enslaved millions prior to the 1900, the computer, the ability to work remotely and the common delivery of food and almost any product that we might want in as little as two days means that all the comforts that people spent centuries sweating for and dreaming of are a button push away.

Furthermore higher education which was once the province of the elite (I don’t comment on the quality) is available as is quality medicine ( I don’t comment on the vaccine madness here) is common and regular.

Even more amazing a degree of protections for races creeds and various groups enforced by laws rigorously enforced removes many of the roadblocks that as recently as 50 years ago were in some places were only overcome by the most determined people out there.

Yet even in all of this prosperity and ease we see people, particularly people with every possible advantage considering themselves “oppressed” and “victimized” over things as slight as “pronouns” or “misgendering”, we even have people of color who fifty years ago were fighting for integration demanding “safe spaces” and “segregation” and suggesting that the lack of such conditions is a cause for at best distraction and at worst failure.

In short, we have a generation of people who are more determined to be victims then their forebears were to avoid such indignities.

But the question is why? Why would someone wish to be a “victim”? Why would anyone want to feel oppressed.

The answer is quite simple: Victimhood provides a perfect excuse for failure.

Given all the advantages I had outlined and all the successes that our forebears had managed in the face of real hardship there is little excuse for failure. But after a generation of trophies for showing up and informing people how special they are, the realities of the world where effort must be exerted to achieve goals proves to be too much for those so coddled their failures need to be justified, particularly in a world comparably as easy as ours.

But if one is a “victim” it all changes.

  • Suddenly it’s not YOUR fault if you didn’t become a movie, or music or artistic star
  • Suddenly it’s not YOUR fault if you have tens of thousands of college debt and no job prospects
  • Suddenly it’s not YOUR fault that you’re still living with your parents and unable to make it on your own
  • Suddenly its not YOUR fault if you don’t have the aptitude for work that an employer needs.

None of your problems are YOUR fault, you’re a victim so every failure in your life can be the province of someone or something else.

There are few things more dangerous than an excuse, and the excuse for failure that victimhood provides is the most dangerous of all, both for society and for those who claim its mantle and cling to it for dear life.

Review: Season 2 of Capitani

Posted: July 17, 2022 by John Ruberry in culture, entertainment
Tags: , , , , , , ,

By John Ruberry

Earlier this month the second season of the Luxembourgish crime drama Capitani began streaming on Netflix. 

In the first season, set in 2019, the titular character, gruff and laconic police detective Luc Capitani (Luc Schiltz) arrives in the fictional small northern Luxembourg of town of Manscheid to investigate the murder of an identical twin teen girl. Similar to British crime series Broadchurch, Luc Capitani is confronted by clannish locals who are harboring secrets. Capitani meets an old flame in Manscheid, Carla Pereira (Brigitte Urhausen)–her presence might have been the real reason for his visit to the village.

The following paragraphs contain a Season One spoiler. 

At the end of Episode 12, after solving the case of the murdered twin, Capitani is arrested for the murder of a drug lord that happened years earlier, a crime in which Pereira is entangled in. At the start of Season Two, after serving eighteen months in prison, he is released due to lack of evidence.

Capitani is now working as a private detective in Luxembourg City. A sex worker, Bianca Petrova (Lydia Indjova), calls him to look into the disappearance of another prostitute. Capitani quicky finds her body in a park. It turns out the sex worker hired Capitani at the request of the owner of what is called here a cabaret, but in reality it is a strip club and a brothel. That proprietor is Valentina Draga (Edita Malovcic). After the murder of another prostitute, the owner of a competing cabaret, Gibbes Koenig (André Jung), reaches out to Draga. Each of them has an ambitious son, respectively Dominik Draga (Adrien Papritz) and Arthur Koenig (Tommy Schlesser), who are seeking to expand their operations.

And business is poor. This is the first television series that I have viewed that has incorporated the COVID-19 pandemic into its plot. The lockdowns have been devastating to the cabarets and those two sons look to narcotics to make up the difference. Drugs in Luxembourg City are sold openly on the streets by Nigerian immigrants–much in the manner that I’ve witnessed on the West Side of Chicago–while under surveillance of two cops, Elsa Ley (Sophie Mousel), who was Capitani’s unofficial partner in Manscheid, and Toni Scholtes (Philippe Thelen). One of those drug dealers, Lucky Onu (Edson Anibal), is in Luxembourg not to peddle narcotics, but to find his sister, Grace (Jennifer Heylen), another sex worker.

Similar to Clint Eastwood’s character in A Fistful Of Dollars, a work that was based on the Akiro Kurosawa film Yojimbo, Capitani works both sides of the brothel competition. And he hasn’t completely broken ties with the Luxembourg Police. There’s a third angle being played, Capitani is regularly speaking with a senior police official, Pascale Cojocaru (Larisa Faber).

If you enjoy Nordic noir movies and television shows–as I do–you’ll like Capitani. There is no Netflix wokism here, the performances are captivating, and the cinematography succeeds by capturing views of beauty and squalor in Luxembourg City. And the plot keeps you guessing enough to make things interesting. Both seasons have twelve episodes, with each entry lasting around 30 minutes.

Both seasons of Capitani are currently streaming on Netflix. It is rated TV-MA for nudity, violence, drug use, obscene language, and sex. You can watch in the original Luxembourgish with subtitles, although there is much English dialogue here, or in dubbed English.

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

Older Entries
Newer Entries