Thursday, July 30, 2020

A Majority of One (Post-Snotpocalypse Edition)

"If you stumble, make it part of the dance..." -- Unknown

So much has gone wrong here in New Yorkistan as of late that it is difficult to believe that we're living in 21st Century America.

To be fair, the arrival of the Wuhan Death Sentence would have thrown even the most-prepared, most-efficient, most-competent administrations into a tizzy, but bearing this in mind, the mistakes being made and the shortfalls in efficacy of both State and City officials were made obvious within days.

Primarily, the pitfalls can be seen, both retro- and pro-actively, as failures of simple intelligence, mainly driven by ideology and the needs of modern state propaganda which operate 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and in which Truth is usually the first victim.

It is almost half-jokingly that I personally call the Great COVID-19 Panic of 2020 the world's first "Powerpoint Pandemic" for all the avalanche of seemingly incomprehensible charts, the obviously-inflated statistics, the great nonsense of "Flatten The Curve" and the reliance upon "computer models" which this trained eye -- for I am an automation programmer by trade, with 35 years of experience in mainframe computer operations, data processing and telecommunications, to boot, and with some experience in the infant "art" of Artificial Intelligence -- regards as the next best thing to unreliable.

Mostly because good programming requires hard data, and most "modelling" lacks this quality.

Where data lacks, assumption is ALWAYS substituted. Make enough assumptions not backed by hard data, or worse, cherry-pick your hard data and do the same with your assumptions, and you get a result that is worse than useless. The problem with "modellers", in my experience, is that like Henry Higgins in Pygmalion, they fall in love with their creation, thinking themselves clever and astute, the result being in all senses a reflection of their own vanities, and then they spend the rest of their lives defending the poor result in the same way a battered wife defends her abuser.

However, it would seem to me that the biggest failure was in the human capital involved, across the board. If a truly honest History of America's Response to Hong Kong Fluey is ever written, I would bet my as-yet-unravaged lungs that a serious historian would not fail to note the general sense of paralysis, the failures of "expertise", the confusion caused by multiple competing systems all responding -- and failing -- en mass, the unnecessary hysteria and concerted campaigns of mis-information driven by politicians and media, and the unusual brand of political and social stupidity, that has marked this unglamorous chapter of American History.

And then he would either weep bitterly or laugh his ass off.

The main problem, as I see it, is one of ideology coupled to the Cult(s) of Personality.

Donald Trump will be blamed for everything because that's all anyone is writing, broadcasting or asserting at this point in time. Part of this is the unfortunate result of just happening to be "the guy in charge" when the shitstorm started. That the shitstorm's clouds were seeded by previous administrations will be ignored. Especially since those previous administrations were peopled by the same sort of moron who does the writing and the broadcasting. Both endeavors long ago ceased being about truth and an examination of the Human Condition and fell victim to the Long March Through the Institutions.

But to concentrate my efforts here (or else I'll be writing a novel), I'd like to limit the scope of my effort: specifically, the ideology and (questionable) personalities of Andrew Cuomo and William DeBlasio.

For if the Worker's Influenza is, indeed, a case study in just how weak links affect the entire chain, this seems a reasonable place to start.

If only because, they too, happened to be "the guy in charge".

Because what's good for the goose is good for the gander, as they say.

To begin with "Governor" Cuomo, for those of you who have never had the distinct pleasure -- which I would liken to a sulfuric acid enema -- of living under the "enlightened" despotism of a Cuomo (alas, this is my second), let me fill you in on just who this unabashed shitbag truly is.

Andrew Cuomo is a loudmouth. He is a know-nothing, do-nothing political apparatchik who collects political jobs like kids collect baseball cards. He is the consummate Swamp-Dweller whose primary value to the Swamp is that he can be counted upon to do, say, enact, whatever the Swamp tells him he needs to. It is the condition under which he operates -- if he wants to continue to collect political jobs, appointments, and elected offices, because if he didn't, he would find himself having to find real work. Upon discovery that he's about as useful as AIDS and lacking in talent and intelligence, if he had any sense of self-awareness, he would kill himself because he is merely taking up space and breathing air that could be better used on a more-worthy individual.

The man has no "core values" except that which brings value -- in the form of government paychecks -- to Andrew Cuomo. He is a bully, a yeller, a furniture-tosser, who quickly retreats (and often disappears) should anyone have the temerity to push back. Ninety percent of the time, we're unaware that we actually HAVE a governor, because if he has anything to say or does anything, no one notices. The rest of the time, he's like the state version of Chuck Schumer: he sees it as his duty to attach himself to whatever nonsense the "mainstream" left professes to believe today, and then practically kills people in his mad rush to get himself in front of a television camera.

That's when he isn't literally killing people by sending infected patients into the vulnerable communities of nursing homes, complete with their own, one-size-fits-all body bag.

Cuomo was once quoted, as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (little reality check: look at your local urban; does it seemed developed to you?) that "80% of what I do here is public relations".

It's all an act. Staged plays. Kabuki theater.

In the meantime, if you look at the "Cuomo record" you find a man who has escaped prosecution many times by the skin of his teeth. You find a man who had to be chastised by, of all people, Eliott Spitzer, for his reckless and illegal activities. In his last election he was harried by a second-rate actress whom he would hardly deign to debate (for fear of being outed as a fucktard), while the local newspapers took great delight in portraying him as a chicken.

Cuomo has a "system" of "public relations" that he uses so often that it has become easy to predict what he'll say at any given press conference before he can read someone else's words off the teleprompter. It goes something like this:

1, Whatever it is -- hurricanes, rising crime, budget deficits, pandemics --  it's always someone else's fault.

2. That someone else is always a vile, evil, uncaring Hitler wanna-be, and the fact that Andrew Cuomo is a stupid, vicious, useless prick is to be ignored. We fake taking the high road by insisting we do not justify bad behavior by pointing to the bad behavior of others, and then do nothing but highlight said bad behavior while ignoring our own.

3. Grandstand on tragedy. Make sure the cameras are rolling, refuse to answer uncomfortable questions by yelling and blustering, and turn the softballs into 20-minute dissertations on how good you are and how the rest of humanity is bad.

4. Threaten to sue someone. Do this a lot.

5. Bury the topic -- and your culpability --  in a sea of statistics, charts, and meaningless words.

6. If challenged, repeat 1-5.

7. If challenged strongly and with justification, play martyr and repeat 1-5 again.

8. If challenged strongly, with justification and physical evidence of your personal culpability, disappear. Drop off the radar. Hide like your life depended upon it; you suddenly avoid the cameras and even the softball questions. When someone finds you under your rock, protest that you're the victim of an unfair, republican-led political witch hunt. Cry like a little girl. A lot.

9. Repeat as needed.

Understand that while Andrew Cuomo has the title of "governor" he does very little of the work this entails. Unless it means his picture on TV or a sound bite that can be useful in his interminable campaign of angling for a presidential nomination. Otherwise, he's AWOL, and the business of running things here is left to the Legislature in Albany or to local elected officials, a system which is akin, experience tells, to giving the keys to a nuclear reactor to a mob of speed-addled chimpanzees.

Albany never met a dollar it wouldn't spend three times and then borrow again. The Unions have counties and municipalities in a headlock and give them noogies 24/7. Half the state is a ward of the state. New Yorkers pay some of the highest taxes in the world and get absolutely nothing for it.

Except public hospitals and nursing homes full of dead people.

There's no one steering this ship, and when the captain does make an appearance, it's to threaten a lawsuit, insist he's not to blame, and to feign support for whatever anti-social, very-expensive, designed-by-committee-of-chimps shiny object is likely to garner him national attention and local votes.

Andrew Cuomo is to good governance what gingivitis is to good oral hygiene, with this caveat: you can get rid of gingivitis. A Cuomo, on the other hand, clings to power and public office with all the tenacity with which a limpet clings to a rock in heavy surf.

And leaves an oily track in his wake.

He's like the wet spot left by the previous occupants on the mattress at the No-Tell Motel. The turd in your Banana Split. The unexpected long hair you've pulled out of your apple pie in the diner. The skunky, frothy, yeasty dregs at the bottom of the beer barrel. He's about as welcome and liked as open herpes sores at a gang bang.

The second problem we have is our nominal Mayor, Warren Wilhelm, Junior. Because that's his REAL name, and much like Stalin or Tito, he, too, has changed his name like a good little communist.

If Bill DeBlasio has any quality whatsoever, it is in his ability to be both absent and omnipresent simultaneously.

So, that if something goes wrong in the City of New York, say, Crime is on the rise, Bill can be counted upon to be at the forefront of this week's "Let the Homeless Shit Wherever They Please" parade.

If the City is in the grips of an economic crisis caused in large part by his own policies, you can find the Mayor at the Manhattan 92nd Street "Y" (favored meeting place of the useless and pretentious), pretending to "work out", and follow his progress by tracking his prodigious motorcade as it makes its way through Brooklyn -- tying up traffic and inconveniencing commuters -- to deliver him there (because, really, there is an app for that).

That's when he's not running for President (as if?).

In fact, if DeBlasio has any talents whatsoever, they seem to be for running a new incarnation of Tammany Hall, in the open, and for somehow finding a way to direct billions of taxpayer dollars to his wife, where they quickly disappear into a black hole of collusion, political back-room-dealing, and old fashioned graft.

Never mind the Clinton Foundation. By comparison, that was Bush League stuff. The Clintons merely got away with a paltry few hundred million on the sly over a few decades. DeBlasio and his tamed lesbian took BILLIONS in broad daylight...in less than 8 years.

The Mob will study his methods and wonder just how it was that they missed this golden opportunity.

The Mayor is simultaneously "hands on" -- so long as the subject is something that advances his election prospects or lines his pockets -- and "hands off" in that he's never responsible for anything, either, and is never in the vicinity of the important problems because he's been too busy leg-humping the bullshit issues.

Between the two of them, there isn't enough intellectual firepower to burn calories, yet they've somehow managed to fold their mistakes into "a New Normal".

The stumbles became part of the dance.

In the meantime, the pace of the City of New York's once lazy descent into a new post-Rudy Giuliani Hell (only alternately slightly slowed and briefly accelerated by the insufferable Michael Bloomdouche...erm...Bloomberg) has hit the afterburners; the streets are filthy again; the Homeless have multiplied like bedbugs in an old mattress; crime is back in vogue as attacking and assaulting police officers becomes the new sport of the nouveau riche Millennial Douchebag set that gentrifies ghettos while screaming for "affordable housing" for the losers they've displaced, and the losers, lacking any positive outlet for their discontent or amelioration of same, take to the streets, burning, looting and shooting at cops and firemen.

And that Millennial Douchebag set is just as likely to be white and upwardly mobile...and not native to the city. They are the worst of the progressive lot ejected from every decent shithole in America. The Native New Yorkers have all fled, or soon plan to.

Mrs. Overlord and myself among them. There's no point in staying here, any longer.

But, never forget the wise old adage that says "Shit Floats". No matter how badly these two fuck up, they simply can't be held down.

Because Andrew and Bill have their (personal) priorities in order. So, while businesses are shut down because the governor and mayor thought it was a good idea to close 16 public hospitals just before a pandemic hit, and because they are all in on policies that ensure the remaining ones were inundated with a flood of infected illegal aliens whose numbers literally pushed the native elderly into nursing homes, and while one says not to worry about COVID-19 and the other screams that he doesn't have any "ventilators", and they argue about re-opening schools, and how many people can eat outdoors at a restaurant, and place padlocks on public playgrounds in selected neighborhoods to ensure "the wrong people" (sorry, Jews) can't congregate while ANTIFA and the criminal element can riot unfettered and unmasked, be assured "the important stuff" is being seen to.

For after all, if we can't collect sales and payroll taxes because no one is in business, we can at least make sure new red light cameras are going up (three in my neighborhood in the last fortnight), and we can at least establish that the Traffic enforcement officers are out in force writing tickets and looking for vehicles to tow (I saw five of their vehicles staging in a local parking lot this morning, and they've been patrolling the neighborhood all day looking for scofflaws and tickets to write).

The public hospitals may be a fucking mess, lacking staff, equipment and supplies, but that's okay -- we'll just send the National Guard and the State Police into the for-profit hospitals (that didn't fail) to steal their protective gear, drugs and respiratory equipment.

And then blame Trump for sending "stormtroopers" into New York City, when he finally gets around to quelling the disturbances here.

Even if the streets are full of Karens (I'll be posting about some recent encounters tomorrow), flaming debris, homeless shit, dirty needles, rampaging criminals, illegals and transplanted, fucktarded Iowans and Minnesotans living their fake cosmopolitan experience in a New York they're rapidly forcing back to the 1970's (just like on TV!), and you're unemployed, don't worry -- the City is making certain you get "food assistance" in various forms, so that your diabetic auntie gets "donated" (translation: didn't sell because no customers) four-day old doughnuts, your children get cottage cheese that used to be milk (still in the original container! I wonder if either Bill's or Andy's picture is on the carton?), and that rotting-in-100-degree-heat pile of vegetables that graced the front page of the New York Post earlier this week will be delivered -- without human contact! -- to your door sometime next month, complete with all the unpopular-flavored potato chips you can handle.

It is here that I must remind My Minions of something I've said on this page many times before (well, at least once):

The Left is very good at making it's dreams come true. It doesn't matter how many lies they have to tell to make it happen, nor how they have to warp reality to see the vision made fact, but they always succeed in getting what they want. In this case, they want America's largest cities to become open sewers of discontent, violence, illness, filth and disorder in order to provoke a few specific responses.

The first is that normal people should feel fear. They should be afraid of everything, all the time. The fear justifies whatever perversion a leftist government wishes to employ in order to either exert further control over your life, or to cover their failures. COVID fit the bill wonderfully. Because of the Asian Apocalypse, you have been made prisoners in your own homes; many of you have had your livelihood taken from you;  you have been forced to conform in your activities -- the ones that haven't been banned, of course -- and have had to accept a reduction in your freedoms of movement and speech.

If you complain, you're a Nazi. If you fail to comply, you're a murderer. People who will insist there's nuance and gray areas in sexuality, suddenly don't know what that means if you've removed your mask for half a second to scratch your nose. That's just an excuse to start an impromptu Maoist struggle session.

And this all makes you fair game for the Great Unwashed and Brainless Mob roaming the streets with nary a restriction, a rebuke, or a clue. They have been granted greater freedoms than you have now, because those freedoms and how they're exercised are useful to the leftist cause, i.e. "get Trump". You can be assaulted, maimed, burned, shot, berated, piled upon, because you're not part of the racist, sexist, heterophobic, real-Nazis Privileged Castes (who insist it's everyone else who has both privilege and a problem).

The second is that they know that by making normal, civilized life impossible, eventually the backlash will come, and after four years of shouting that Trump is the new Hitler and those who support him are no better than a virus, being all racists, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, slave-owning haters, the backlash will consist of the police, federal law enforcement, and maybe the military, sent in to restore order, and the left will collectively rise on it's hind legs and say "WE TOLD YOU SO!" completely ignoring it's provocations and scheming.

If it isn't true, they MAKE it true.

You have been lied to since the Very First Day. The evidence is before your eyes. The liars and the incompetents are easy to identify, as well. They all have a "D" after their names -- Cuomo, DeBlasio, Whitmer, Murphy, Pelosi, Schumer, Waters, Newsome, Wolf, Wheeler, Brown, Garcetti, Lightfoot, and that's just the "B" Team.

The "A" team is sucking up to Joe "Hidin'" Biden, who won't come out of his basement, to be his veep.

They all should be held responsible, either by vote, a court or a mob with a rope.

After all, they're "the guys in charge", too. Aren't they?








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