I’m sure he’ll fit right in.

From today’s San Antonio Express-News:

Report: Nets will reportedly pursue Spurs’ Gregg Popovich to be next head coach

Sure, OK. They’ll love him up there.

For the record, I wouldn’t care about Popovich being so vocal with his leftist opinions if the Spurs were actually winning games; as things are, though, with the Spurs missing the playoffs for the first time in more than 2 decades it just comes off as a distraction from the fact that they aren’t.

Yeah, I know. Five championships. We keep this up and we’re going to start sounding like Dallas Cowboys fans.

“Five championships? Well that’s all fine and good, but considering the latest one is old enough to drink…”

I know it’d be a while before the Spurs got to that point, but still, as I noted elsewhere, y’all know what he and Steve Kerr (the other “most woke coach in the NBA”) have in common, right?

Both of their teams sucked this season. Golden State’s record was even worse than that of the Spurs.

I was all ready to give Kerr credit, too.

And I don’t even like Donald Trump.

Well, that settles that.

So, if you had any remaining doubt that public officials have wrecked the American economy for no good reason at all, check this out.

Suddenly, Public Health Officials Say Social Justice Matters More Than Social Distance

…

Was it fair to decry conservatives’ protests about the economy while supporting these new protests? And if tens of thousands of people get sick from Covid-19 as a result of these mass gatherings against racism, is that an acceptable trade-off? Those are questions that a half-dozen coronavirus experts who said they support the protests declined to directly answer.

That pretty much says it all, doesn’t it? I mean, there’s always the possibility that they don’t think it’s an acceptable trade-off but are afraid of saying so, in which case I really couldn’t blame them — because, well, cancel culture and all that. But honestly, if they’re on record as supporting the protests, I don’t think that’s it. And that really only leaves one possibility here — namely, that their professional opinions are subject to sociopolitical considerations that of course things like viruses know nothing of and care nothing about, so perhaps those opinions aren’t worth anything. Perish the thought, amirite?

On a related note…

We should always evaluate the risks and benefits of efforts to control the virus. In this moment the public health risks of not protesting to demand an end to systemic racism greatly exceed the harms of the virus. https://t.co/s9DagyjQ1J

— Jennifer Nuzzo, DrPH (@JenniferNuzzo) June 2, 2020

Huh. I am just gonna come right out and say it: if Jennifer Nuzzo’s professional opinions are that subject to sociopolitical considerations, which they certainly appear to be from this tweet, she needs to surrender her medical license and go to work at the dollar store.

EDIT: I have been informed that Ms. Nuzzo is not actually an MD, but a PhD. Which, honestly, makes her opinions on this worth that much less. My opinion on her professional opinions in relation to sociopolitical considerations remains.

Get on outta here with that, dude.

If you’re a musical artist, and you want to use your platform to spread a political message, that’s your business. But belittling other artists who choose not to do that is a bit of an asshole move, if I may be so frank.

This observation was brought to you by a lyric from Jason Isbell’s new single, “Be Afraid”:

“And if your words add up to nothing then you’re making a choice to sing a cover when you need a battle cry”

Like, piss off, dude. Not everyone who picks up the mike wants to be the next Pete Seeger or whoever, and that’s their goddamned right. As I said a little more than three years ago:

“Seriously, this “all politics all the time” in every single thing is going to destroy us. You kinda should expect political commentary from Steve Earle or maybe (to a lesser extent) Jason Boland, but why should a George Strait or Randy Rogers be condemned for not going on anti-Donald Trump tirades in studio or on stage, or, fuck, anywhere else for that matter? It is grossly unfair to them as artists and to their fans, and as Americans they don’t deserve to be called out for bigotry they’ve never expressed by Progressive assholes who are all pissy about everyone not falling in line with their agenda.”

Sabra made the observation that you see a lot of folks smoke at AA meetings because former addicts tend to swap out addictions, and that Isbell just swapped alcohol for activism. That sounds about right to me, honestly.

Why I won’t be voting for Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders

These thoughts brought to you by Sabra telling me about someone walking in our neighborhood trying to get out the vote for Warren on Saturday…

#RaisetheWage, huh? More like #ScrewPeopleWhoBotheredtoLearnMarketableSkills, if you ask me.

I’m just gonna come out and say it: the real moral outrage here is Ilhan Omar and her thieving ilk agitating for the de facto devaluing of the skills that so many people, like me, worked to acquire so they could work their way up from that minimum wage part-time job.

Not sure I ever came right out and talked about this, but here you go.

I came to San Antonio 10 years ago this coming June. I was unable to find work in the field I was in at the time, so I took what I could get, which at the time was — and this is no shit — part-time work at Walmart for minimum wage. We scraped along by the skin of our teeth for about 16 months until I was able to find full-time employment (albeit in a different, entirely new field). I got that job, got more experience in that new line of work, and moved along to better-paying jobs in that field, and while I am not going to discuss my actual wage, I do feel comfortable saying that I am making more money now than I ever have in my working life.

And Ilhan Omar, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, and others, with that $15 minimum wage, want to take that away from me. They want to take that away from me to buy the votes of people who couldn’t be arsed to want to do better for themselves. If past performance is an indicator of future results, if I asked Elizabeth Warren if I was gonna get a raise commensurate with her minimum wage increase so as not to devalue the skills and experience I have acquired, she’d brush me off and laugh at me just like she did that man who asked if he was gonna get the money back that he spent on his daughter’s schooling when Warren was touting her student loan debt forgiveness plan on the campaign trail recently.

And it pisses me off. It pisses me off to the point that I could almost spit fire.

Narrative über Alles!

Wow, Francis, if you’re gonna lie, I guess you might as well be brazen about it, but wow.

To paraphrase what Sabra said:

26 people were killed in Sutherland Springs. What’d we do in response? We changed the law to allow people to carry guns in church. How many people were killed in Fort Worth? Two. Clearly, what we are doing is working.

To think that shitweasel wanted to be president. For fuck’s sake.

“So this is how liberty dies…”

…or, What conversation?

“O’Rourke promises he will ‘bring everyone in America into the conversation— Republicans, Democrats, gun-owners, and non-gun-owners alike.’ But if a gun owner says he’d prefer to keep his property rather than surrender it to the federal government, that’s too bad.”

That’s about right. Bob has made it quite plain he doesn’t give a shit about the gun owners’ side of all this. Which in its own way is admirable, because neither do any of the other Democrats running. Bob was just the one to say it out loud.

Of course, not only does his bold declaration expose the “no one wants to take your guns” as the foul and malicious lie that it has always been, but it also goes a long way towards killing certain other measures, i.e., universal background checks for ALL firearms sales.

How is that, you ask?

Well, think about it. How is the government going to know whether the law is being obeyed, i.e., whether a given weapon was sold with or without a background check? Registration, that’s how. And what do we always say?

“Registration leads to confiscation.”

To which liberals have always said, “No one wants to take your guns, you paranoid wing nuts!”

And Bob has come out here and said, in effect, “uh, yeah we do.”

To thunderous applause, even.

Heroes? Negative, Ghostrider.

…or, if you needed yet more proof that Houston police chief Art Acevedo is still a flaming pile of shit, here you go:

“I still think they’re heroes,” Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo says of the narcotics officers who shot and killed Dennis Tuttle and Rhogena Nicholas during a fraudulent drug raid at their Harding Street home on January 28. At a press conference Friday, Acevedo said Gerald Goines, the officer who instigated the raid by falsely claiming that a confidential informant had bought heroin from Tuttle at the house the day before, and Steven Bryant, who bolstered Goines’ cover story, had “dishonored” their badges and the Houston Police Department (HPD). But Acevedo insisted that the other officers who participated in the raid had “acted in good faith” and killed the couple in self-defense.

I do not mean necessarily to bash the other cops involved here. They may well have acted in good faith. They were put in a bad position by their superiors, and said superiors should fry for their actions. But calling them heroes is just a bridge too far for me. And “acted in self-defense”? Ah, no, Chief. People without badges don’t get to play that card when they’re the ones initiating the confrontation, and people with badges shouldn’t get to do it either, particularly in a situation like this.

Wednesday political musings, 21.08.2019

Quote from elsewhere:

“The gun industry and the gun lobby are the problem. They won’t even let us do common sense reforms.”

No. NO SIR. If you’re gonna point the finger at anyone for pro-gunners’ refusing to compromise anymore, you need to be pointing the finger at Dianne Feinstein for giving away the endgame on 60 Minutes right after the 1994 “assault weapons” ban was passed.

For anyone who might have forgotten:

“If I could have gotten 51 votes in the Senate of the United States for an outright ban, picking up every one of them — Mr. and Mrs. America, turn them all in — I would have done it.”

Also, while I say this specifically in the context of more gun control, it actually is more universal than that:

“Polls reflect that the public wants tighter gun control.”

Yeah, that and a five-spot will get you a sausage-and-egg taco and a cup of coffee at any Bill Miller’s here in San Antonio before 10:30 AM. All this supposed “silent majority” allegedly in favor of more gun laws has had to do since 1994 is vote in people who will pass those gun laws, but they have yet to get off their asses and do it, so they obviously don’t want it bad enough, if they want it at all, which at this point I frankly just do not believe. And if they don’t want it badly enough to vote for politicians who will vote for it, well, that has the exact effect of not wanting it at all.

Which, of course, brings us back to polls in general. How many polls, to cite perhaps the most infamous recent example, said Hillary Clinton was going to lay a 1984-level ass-whipping on Donald Trump in the 2016 election right up until she didn’t?

And I am really, really getting tired of the whole “b-b-b-but muh tanks and drones” when it comes to stopping tyranny with rifles. It’s as if no one has any concept of how guerrilla warfare works. That drone, just to take one example, is not going to be of much use if the pilot gets shot in his driveway, or the mechanic has his throat slit in some seedy Vegas strip joint, or the armorer has his morning coffee laced with cyanide.

WTFever, Billy.

 

Look, all you need to know about William Kristol is that he advocated the use of American taxpayer money to fund machine guns, RPGs and the like for Syrian rebels, but he doesn’t believe those same American taxpayers have the right to own so much as a semiautomatic rifle.

Well, that’s special.

From MetalSucks, via Facebook:

I’m not sure whether I’ve ever listened to The Amity Affliction before (if I did, their music didn’t stick with me). But vocalist Joel Birch’s latest Twitter thread has inspired me to give them another shot.

Birch spotted a fan wearing a Trump jersey at the band’s show at Brooklyn Bowl in Las Vegas, NV on January 5th and decided to call him out from the stage. Video of the incident doesn’t exist (or hasn’t surfaced yet)…

Well then. Allow me to translate Mr. Birch’s outburst:

“So here we are, trying to make a living playing music in a world where people increasingly think music isn’t worth paying for. And here we have one of that dwindling number of people who not only is willing to part with his money but also his time to come see me and the rest of the band do what we love to do (and, again, PAY US).

“But I don’t like his political beliefs, so I’m going to embarrass and alienate him and all our other fans who share his beliefs, because we have more than enough fans already.”

And for all that, I don’t even care for Donald Trump! Stop making me sound like I am defending him!