This week’s DaTechGuy off DaRadio no frills livestream podcast comes via a new laptop (Thanks to all of you) and some new topics:
Goodyear Goodbye & fighting back
Netflix & the Weinstein / Epstein Culture
Bannon and the big lie
We’ll be talking about these and more on DaTechGuy off DaRadio today at 3 PM EST. You can watch the live stream here (the embedded placeholder of last week’s show will be replaced 5 or ten min before we start)
Looking forward to our time together.
FYI remember this podcast exists to do two things.
Boost the readership of the blog
Bring in an extra $180 or so a month.
If you like what we do here please share the podcast or consider kicking into DaTipJar. Of course there is the problem of us getting big and effective enough for google, youtube and twitter to ban but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.
Captain Troop:Now you just sit there and think about it.
Captains Courageous: 1937
Batman:No Joker. You’re playing the wrong game. The old game. Tonight you’re taking no hostages. Tonight I’m taking no prisoners.
Batman the Dark Knight Returns #3 1986
There are a lot of people on the left (and in NeverTrump) who are salivating over the President taking on Goodyear Tire.
That’s because the left is reactive and not stratigic. They see a chance at a short term gain and are jumping at it.
They’ve missed the entire point of what the President did.
If the President had just tweeted and said nothing else then it might be a minor story.
But when the press secretary was asked about this yesterday, the White House, didn’t spin, didn’t back down, they Doubled down!
And when the president was asked about it later, he didn’t budge:
“I would be very much in favor if people don’t want to buy there,” Mr. Trump told reporters at a White House briefing Wednesday, adding, “I think it’s disgraceful that they did this.”
Asked whether he’d be willing to swap out the Goodyear tires on the presidential limousine, Mr. Trump responded, “Yeah, I would do that. I would, I would swap them out, based on what I heard. We’ll see what happens. Look. you’re going to have a lot of people not wanting to buy that product anymore. And they’ll buy from a competitor, made in the USA, okay?”
What does this mean? It mean that the next time a BLM group or a consulting firm or a HR department full of woke leftist decide to tell a company to pony up, give in or to retrain their workforce, instead of instantly giving in or paying off and they have in the past they now know that they do, they are just one tweet away from slicing their customer base by tens of millions.
This is why we conservatives can’t spare this man: HE FIGHTS!
The best part? Donald Trump will still retain that power after January of 2025
The old rules are gone the days of fighting back have begun!
Philadelphia has managed this past week to create a “woke trifecta” at a country club, a university, and a park.
Just up the street from where I live, two city institutions are battling over the use of a Native American emblem.
For more than 150 years, the Philadelphia Cricket Club and St. Martin’s in the Fields Episcopal Church have been neighbors. Only recently, the church’s rector, the Rev. Jarrett Kerbel, asked the club to retire a logo it uses that is similar to the one used by the Chicago Black Hawks hockey team.
The use of the figure on the club sign that borders church property “represents the white supremacist legacy of our neighborhood.
“For a club founded for white Protestant elites during the height of the genocide against Native peoples to continue with this logo is to deny our horrific past,” Kerbel wrote Cricket Club president F. John White. “We ask you to retire the offensive logo and replace it with something more benign.”
So far, the club has not responded to the condemnation.
It’s unclear to me if the church wants the neighborhood to change the names of many of the streets I can’t leave my house without driving or walking upon, including Huron, Pocono, Seminole, and others. I guess that’s a battle for another day!
As I prepare for this semester’s classes, I received an email from my employer, Temple University, where it announced a plan to make us “anti-racist.” Since Temple is known as Diversity U in many circles because of its diversity in students and faculty, I was a bit nonplussed when I received the email from the Office of Institutional Diversity, Equity, Advocacy, and Leadership, or IDEAL.
I was informed that the university is creating a required assessment to “actively evaluate” my role in creating a more diverse and inclusive Temple as well as look for opportunities to develop my skills and literacy related to diversity.
Moreover, it was strongly suggested that I read Ibram Kendi’s “How to be An Anti-Racist” with IDEAL-trained facilitators.
The author, a graduate of Temple’s doctoral program in African-American studies, said: “Racist ideas have defined our society since its beginning and can feel so natural and obvious as to be banal… To be an antiracist is a radical choice in the face of this history, requiring radical reorientation of our consciousness.”
I have no idea what that means and no desire or the time to unpack it.
Meanwhile, the City of Philadelphia wants to remove a 150-year-old marble statue of Christopher Columbus, a gift from Italy.
Fortunately, a sane judge has stopped the city’s actions until a court hearing on the matter.
The critics failed to realize that the statue sits in a park named for Guglielmo Marconi, a pioneer of radio. That would be the same Marconi who was a good friend of Benito Mussolini, the fascist dictator of Italy during World War II.
I guess fascism against Jews, Poles, and other “inferior” white races doesn’t get much traction in the woke culture.
About twelve hours after I finished my DTG post last week about Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s get-tough policy on sunbathers in Chicago at Lake Michigan, Chicago became Detroit. That’s not to say that you can now drive for miles in America’s third-largest city–for now–and see nothing but a few lived-in homes among the vacant lots and abandoned houses. Just as you didn’t encounter that in Detroit after the destructive riots there a few days after the 1967 riots faded away.
The Motor City hit rock bottom in 2013 when it declared bankruptcy.
These things take time. Detroit is turning things around now. But its vacant lots will be there for many years.
“Seventy percent of Chicago’s economic activity takes place in and around downtown,” Mike Flannery said last night on his Flannery Fired Up program on Fox Chicago, “and it’s in more peril now than ever before.”
And that’s where the looting, likely directed by Antifa, was centered late last Sunday night and early Monday morning–in and around downtown. Flannery called it “Sad, organized-crime looting.”
So the simple story is that economically speaking, the heart of Chicago is the Loop and North Michigan Avenue, the latter has been known as the Magnificent Mile for decades. You kill that and Chicago dies. Welcome to Detroit.
Last Sunday afternoon a 20-year-old Englewood man was shot by Chicago police officers; he has since been charged with first-degree attempted murder. The accused allegedly shot at the police. A rumor spread online–or was it a manufactured lie?–that the cops shot instead shot an unarmed 15-year-old boy in the same impoverished Englewood neighborhood.
Then came the looting later that night.
The coordinated manner of the looting consisted of mobile criminals, a few of them armed, that quickly descended on the Mag Mile. Some of them came with specialized tools such as drills to hasten the break-ins. There were reports of U-Hauls being packed with stolen goods. The thieves were more organized, Flannery remarked, than the 400 police officers dispatched downtown to confront them.
Much like the people of Englewood, the residents of the downtown area–and the business owners–don’t feel safe there. That’s not to say the folks of the South Side–or the even-worse off West Side–don’t deserve to feel safe. They certainly do. Some of that 70-percent-of-Chicago’s-economic-activity makes its way to the city’s poverty-stricken areas. Should they receive more of it? Probably, but that discussion will belong to shoulda-happened-looking-back rants that you’ll find on Reddit soon.
A few days after the most recent round of looting it was reported that Macy’s is considering leaving the glitzy Water Tower Place mall on North Michigan Avenue, or just perhaps they’ll just downsize there. Under the Marshall Field’s name Macy’s was an original tenant of the mall. What of the smaller operations, the family-run retail outlets who have been devastated with two rounds of looting in just over two months? When they leave, because they don’t have the big names, it won’t make big news. But when Chicago’s downtown area is dominated by boarded up store-fronts with signs declaring “Move in now–lease rates reduced again–first month free!” you’ll know the downtown descent is well under way.
As for the residents of the Loop, the Gold Coast, Lincoln Park, and Lakeview, unlike those people in Englewood, they can afford to move and swallow selling their homes at a loss. A lot of them will. “Why should I stay here?” many will wonder, “there is so much crime, there are no good restaurants here, and there are no decent places to shop.”
You don’t believe me? Here’s what Alderman Brian Hopkins (2nd), a Lightfoot opponent, said on that same Flannery Fired Up show. He decried “the economic devastation and the blow to our collective psyche,” as well as “the sense that people have that they can’t live here anymore, their safety is at risk if they try to live here.” Hopkins believes with the right actions Chicago can be saved. Lightfoot certainly knows that she is facing a severe crisis. But I suspect because she is an ideologue she is incapable of instituting meaningful policy changes.
Right now I believe that for Chicago it’s a matter of mitigating its decline and fall. The looting and riots are of course just a symptom. Chicago hasn’t had a Republican mayor since 1931 but it’s best-known mayor–and possibly its best-ever–was machine boss Richard J. Daley, who ruled America’s then-second-largest city with an iron fist from 1955 until 1976. He was a New Deal Democrat–with a strong law-and-order bent. But Lori Lightfoot is Chicago’s first leftist mayor. After the spring round of looting and riots she seemed more interested in protecting the rights of protesters than protecting citizens and businesses. Sadly the line between rioters and protesters in 2020 is blurry and that sentiment was expressed by a Black Lives Matter organizer who said last week in front of a Chicago Police station about looting, “That is reparations.”
Yesterday a march on the South Side evolved in a violent confrontation downtown between protesters and the police. Cops were attacked with mace, one police officer was repeatedly struck with a skateboard.
Many accounts of this latest round of looting mentioned that the criminals seemed emboldened. Of course they are.
Chicago has other serious problems. Its municipal pension programs are the worst-funded of any major city. Detroit’s fall was hastened by enacting a commuter and municipal income tax in 1963. Chicago doesn’t have either of those but it has its pension bomb. So does Cook County and the rest of Illinois. Lightfoot, to be fair, didn’t create the Chicago pension crisis. It was Boss Daley’s son, Richard M., another long-serving mayor, who bears most of the responsibility for that disaster.
Welcome to Detroit.
If there is a way out for Chicago, here it is. State law needs to be changed so municipalities and government agencies can declare bankruptcy. This move will in the short-term be painful as pensioners will receive a “haircut” and vendors will end up with ten-cents on the dollar or so for money owed to them. And the federal government needs to allow states to do the same.
Yep, just like Detroit.
I’m not gleeful about such a move. I have friends and relatives who are collecting those pensions. And as a man of the private-sector I don’t like seeing businesses getting short-changed. As a property owner living just five miles from the city limits I might get caught up in the financial tsunami too.
But the money wasn’t there for pensions in Chicago before COVID-19 and the riots. There’s less of it now.
I was born in Chicago and I’ve lived one-third of my life there. This story is tragic.
Agitators in Chicago complain of “systemic racism” and “white supremacy.” Perhaps. But then again perhaps not. Lightfoot, Foxx, as well as the Cook County president, Toni Preckwinkle, are African-American women. Chicago’s new police chief is a black man, he succeeded another African-American male. The chief judge of the Cook County Circuit Court is a black man too.
Another way to cushion Chicago’s fall is its citizens to vote, regardless of party-affiliation, for leaders who are results-oriented and not ideologues.
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