Tuesday, April 10, 2018

Modern New Yorkistan

"You approach Satan's wretched city where you behold a wide plain surrounded by iron walls. Before you are fields full of distress and torment terrible. Burning tombs are littered about the landscape. Inside these flaming sepulchers suffer the heretics, failing to believe in God and the afterlife, who make themselves audible by doleful sighs. You will join the wicked that lie here, and will be offered no respite. The three infernal Furies stained with blood, with limbs of women and hair of serpents, dwell in this circle of Hell." -- description of the City of Dis Pater, Fourth Level of Hell, Dante's Inferno


Before I get to the heart of this matter, there is some other business that needs tending to.

The first item on the agenda is to turn all of my minions on to a website I have followed for quite some time, and for the life of me don't know why I haven't linked to it before. The Victory Girls blog is simply awesome. Biting satire; wonderful commentary; pin-up girls. Who could ask for anything more?

Get your eyeballs over there. It's a wonderful site, and is a veritable smorgasbord of fantastic stuff!

Second item: Your Overlord will soon be celebrating one year at his new location. When I started this  new blog, I didn't know what to expect. I had only done it because friends had implored me to continue writing, something I had lost interest in. Since then, an average of 1,000 unique visitors a week, which is not tremendous by internet standards, but it is pretty awesome when you consider I do absolutely no promotion of this thing, and the plans I had to promote it were never seriously pursued (I seem to have less free time than I used to).

Thank you to everyone who is making this a regular stop, and let's see if I can't get more eyeballs looking at this thing. I appreciate your interest and your continued encouragement.

Something I saw today. And it made me want to puke.

I live rather close to the grandiosely-named College of Staten Island (aka The 13th Grade), which is part of the City University of New York system, once a standard of quality education, but now a repository for remedial cases whose continued presence in a New York City High School after a certain age (and number of convictions) can no longer be justified.

Although I can say with some truth that I'm told the Computer Science department is pretty good.

Anyway, I was driving by the campus this afternoon and saw something that struck me as both peculiar and insanely funny.

There was a Crossing Guard assigned to ensure students got across the street safely.

Mind you, these are supposedly college students. There is a crosswalk. There are traffic lights. And there was a grossly obese woman of a certain lower socio-economic group shepherding students across the street as if they were 6 years old to the bus stop.

And subsequently tying up traffic because, well, when you weigh 350 and don't play nose tackle you just don't move that quickly.

I'm certain the students don't actually need a crossing guard, but that this is yet another of the asinine circumstances puked up by Comrade Bill's Five Year Plan for...I'm sorry..."Vision Zero Initiative".

For those of you who don't live in New York City and who don't know what this is, I'll explain it, although it does defy explanation on some levels.

Basically, Comrade Bill and the members of the Junior Politburo of the New York City Council believe they can legislate, enforce, nag, bully, and babysit their way to a better future in which no pedestrian in the City of New York is ever hit by a car again.

A laudable goal, no doubt, and about as likely to happen as Maxine Waters earning a Rhodes Scholarship.

Anyway, the last two Mayoral administrations in this city (Michael Bloomdouche...erm...Bloomberg, and Red Billy) having gone out of their way to make driving a vehicle in this city a task on par with crossing the prairie in a Conestoga wagon 150 years ago (only slower), have consistently engaged in what is euphemistically known as "A War on The Automobile". The point, ultimately, is to ensure that no one ever drives here again. Especially not in Manhattan, where the oikophobes of the Upper Crust regard any transportation contrivance which forces them to share space and rub elbows with the hoi polloi with the same sort of open disgust I would associate with the experience of watching a neighbor's dog take a copious dump on your front lawn...as both dog and it's inconsiderate owner smile at you.

Between the installation of bike lanes that proliferate, but which ultimately go nowhere (and remove traffic lanes from use), bus-only lanes, restrictions of left turns, strategic street closings on weekends in Manhattan, the imposition of dramatic tolls on all crossings between boroughs (with the attendant removal of toll booths in favor of electronic tolling, requiring the purchase of an EZ-Pass to avoid billing), the imposition of a blanket 25 mph speed limit on every street and thoroughfare, and Governor Dickface's...I mean, Cuomo's...repeated attempts to impose "congestion pricing" (you pay for use depending on traffic and time of day) on the use of city streets, it's amazing MORE people haven't been killed by cars in this city.

Just out of sheer road rage.

But this takes the cake.

Crossing guards at a college campus....let that sink in.

In the end, "Vision Zero" is a vision of zero automobiles. It won't be long now before "Anything-you-can-do-I-can-do-dumber" Cuomo copies his even more-retarded counterpart in New Jersey, Phil "There's a reason why they call them Shanty Irish" Murphy, and tries to get a law passed where the police will be able to stop you for doing things the State finds naughty inside your own vehicle...like smoking a cigarette, drinking coffee, taking a hand off the steering wheel to change the radio station...just so some dingbat with a badge has "probable cause" to pull you over, write you a summons for "distracted driving", and presenting this intrusion of the police state even further into your private life as a means by which "safety on our roads" is improved.

Quite frankly, if they took the money they're spending on unused bike lanes, all the signage posted to remind you the speed limit is just above the velocity of a turd leaving your anus enforced by radar and camera, numerous "studies" which never end, and hiring fat fucktards to waddle behind a gaggle of supposed adults as they perform the relatively-simple task of crossing a street, they could probably make the roads a whole lost safer...

...by fucking PAVING THEM.

Most roads in this city look like a pale imitation of Colonial Times, with huge, water-filled potholes capable of swallowing small vehicles, tremendous ruts that are reminiscent of the wheel ruts still visible in Roman roads throughout Europe, traffic lights and signage obscured by overgrown weeds and trees on city-owned land, lacking simple turning lanes, and in some cases here in Staten Island, devoid of sidewalks, forcing people to walk in traffic..

Two months ago, I broke an axle on my Nissan Tie Fighter travelling the Major Deegan Expressway, and that's part of the INTERSTATE system, and there's a five-mile stretch of it that resembles a landscape from the Cambrian Era. I can't tell you exactly which pothole was guilty, because I lost count of them somewhere between 300 and 4,000.

But what can one expect in a city that thinks it should be okay for the homeless to defecate in public -- because compassion --  and that the solution to a wildlife management problem is to sterilize the male deer population at three grand a pop while doing nothing to prevent new deer from swimming across the Arthur Kill?

Speaking of EZ-Pass...

This is theft disguised as a convenience.

For the uninitiated:

EZ-Pass is an electronic tolling system currently in use throughout most of the Northeast. It's supposed benefit is that it reduces congestion at toll booths and reduces traffic bottlenecks at same by allowing a driver to use a radio device linked to an account so that one need not stop to pay a toll, or reduce one's speed traveling through a toll plaza, and to help reduce air pollution from idling vehicles.

And just in case you don't want to use EZ-Pass, the city and state went ahead and removed the toll booths -- where people used to collect tolls -- from most major roads, bridges, and tunnels, so that you are forced to use the system, unless you enjoy having your vehicle photographed and a bill sent to your home address every goddamned week where you are charged extra for not having EZ-Pass.

Basically, you set up an account with the agency that handles EZ-pass, put money into it every so often, and your tolls are deducted from the balance on the account. Alternately, you can give EZ-Pass access to your bank or credit card accounts, and have the toll automatically charged to them.

The potential for abuse is obvious. Abuse has, predictably, already occurred.Mistakes abound because EZ-Pass is run by the same people who run everything else in government: the lowest bidder and people who only have a job because they passed an illiteracy test.

Case in point: since I do not intend to give any government agency access to my financial accounts, I choose to make a trip to the EZ-Pass office every other month or so and deposit money on my account. Normally, this works for me, since I rarely travel very far, and as a consequence, hardly need to pay tolls.

This annoys the EZ-Pass Gods to no end.

For a start, it annoys them enough to send me a weekly e-mail reminding me to put money on my account, even when I haven't used it. Even better, they have the temerity to suggest -- based upon an analysis of my toll usage -- how much I should put in the till. As a matter of principle, I take their "suggestion" and then put far less in on fucking purpose.

If I leave Staten Island twice a month, it's a lot.

Anyway, because I was travelling long distances with Mrs. Overlord's recent illness, and therefore, encountering more EZ-Pass toll detectors, the monthly "suggested" input of funds skyrocketed from a minimum balance of $100/month to $320/month, and by the way, it would help a great deal if I stopped using the walk-in service, and just broke down and gave them a credit card (meaning I get charged interest or a "service fee" on top of the tolls? No thanks.).

For my convenience, naturally.

Now, mind you, they are asking for a minimum balance of $320 before I even use a toll. And given the infrequency of my usage of EZ-Pass, this is akin to giving EZ-Pass a couple of hundred bucks a month just for the privilege of having a service I'm not using enough to justify 1/3 of that expense.

Sorry but government gets enough of my money before I get it, already (it's called "withholding").

So here's a great, big FUCK YOU! to EZ-Pass. Kiss both sides of EZ_Pass-hatin' ass.

And it is here that we must return to our place of origin, the description of the torments of Hell.

In the quest to make life better, city and state government do nothing but make it worse. And the stink of it all is, the stupidity and arrogance are too obvious to ignore.

For here in New Yorkistan, we too live in a devastated plain surrounded by the iron walls of EZ-Pass. The fields are full of torment and distress as we're taxed to death, alternately underserved by city government and too frequently it's pre-occupation, lest we drive too fast, feel free to travel, or attempt to cross a street by ourselves. The Heretics collect welfare and the Wicked -- mostly imported from the REAL Hell of every other disgusting place in America -- adopt a variety of affectations believed to separate them from the common man, as they wolf down Organic Beaver Cheese Pizza, with a non-GMO, sustainable IPA, with just a hint of coriander and Atlantic Sea Bass overtones, cloistered in faux retro-Bohemian bars located in former ghettos, gentrified by the addition of a Whole Foods and wholesale condominiumization of former working lass streets, screaming about the need for affordable housing for all the people they priced out of the neighborhood...that someone else should pay for.

Because "poor people".

We are forced to accept the formerly unacceptable by our own troika of Furies named Cuomo, DeBlasio, and The Transplanted Hipster, considered inhuman and given no respite by the self-appointed arbiters of all that is good and right. All because we're normal human beings who don't like Brie, don't like Hillary, and pay the fucking bills with sweat. These assholes, who believe they are our "betters", aren't smart enough to tell us how to live.

But they are annoying and nasty enough to find ways to force us to.

Just imagine how much better life would be here if we spent the deer-neutering money on filling in a few potholes, starting with Comrade Bill's mangina, and we were allowed to hunt the hippies?

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