Bits & Pieces #160

Okay, okay, so I was wrong! It’s not the first time and it won’t be the last, but I really thought Putin was too smart to lead his country into a disaster like this. People like Joe Biden were dead right. They saw that he is not just smart but also crazy; and for some reason the rotten part of the brain always takes over. It now becomes evident why he and Trump got along so well. They are both nuts whose twisted goals shine so brightly that they block out all the reality around them.

So where does little Vlad go from here? Does he now invade Poland or one of the other NATO nations that wee once part of the Soviet Union? How would that work for him? These are not helpless wanderers like Ukraine. These are nations united in a pact that will bring four times Russia’s military might to the game. Even without further incursion, Putin now faces sanctions that could bankrupt Russia and affect the rest of the world.

And what does Putin do now that he has troops in Ukraine? Does he try to occupy it the way he and the U.S. did in Afghanistan? How did that work out? Does he think it will work better here? Ukraine doesn’t have much of an army but they are well armed and determined and they will be a hell of a resistance. “Resistance;” that’s the process by which the winner of a war bleeds to death.

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NYC mayor Eric Adams has set his sights on the City’s crime and weapons problems. I think before we get into this we should acknowledge that a good deal of the crime is in the heads of the NY Post’s reporters. They wanted Curtis Sliwa to be mayor and still haven’t gotten over his landslide defeat. It wasn’t surprising. Sliwa is a useless publicity hound who, for the last 50 years or so, has been parading around the city with a bunch of equally useless followers, dressed in red berets and claiming to confront dangerous gangs that threaten the citizenry while actually getting in the way of the police. The reality is that NYC is one of the safest cities in the nation, but I understand it doesn’t matter to someone who just got mugged.

Adams has decided, pretty accurately to be sure, that most of the crime is being carried out by a small group of recidivist criminals who are taking advantage of recently passed bail laws that almost immediately put them back on the streets to repeat their crimes without threat of punishment.

Adams wants to reconsider the bail laws and possibly revoke some of them. He may be right on track. Maybe we should be considering the threat that recidivist criminals present to the general population just as seriously as the woke left is considering the violation of those same criminal’s rights. It’s fine to be as woke as you want about criminal’s rights, but letting some piece of shit, who has multiple arrests for mugging old ladies, back on the street to do it again is just plain dumb and certainly doesn’t make the city a better place to live.

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The announcement that Supreme Court Justice Steven Breyer would retire created a tidal wave of comment. President Biden’s promise to appoint a black woman to the Court raised a good deal of comment, much of it negative, especially by Republicans.

From where I’m sitting the members of the GOP should have nothing to say about anyone nominated by Biden considering that the last nominee to the Court, appointed by Trump, is a member of a religious cult that has been accused of sexually abusing their female slaves. People of Praise, the cult that owns Coney-Barrett is a bunch of fanatics that demand complete subservience from their handmaidens, one of whom is Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett. So when you hear an opinion from Justice Barrett, you can rest assured that it is coming directly from  People of Praise leader Kevin Ranaghan.

If you were in favor of Amy getting on the court you have absolutely nothing to say about anyone else and that includes the opinions of the guy with the tats, living on your corner in the pup tent under the construction bridge.

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What the hell has happened to the Republican Party? No one was surprised by its backing of the sociopathic con man Donald Trump. No one was surprised by its cowardly acceptance of the big election lie that claimed Trump had won. We were shocked by a frenzied mob attacking the capitol but not by the inane prattle of the likes of Ted Cruz, Tucker Carlson, Mike Pompeo or Laura Ingraham supporting the sociopath who had lost the election. These were all political moves and we already knew that the lowly scum of the GOP would do anything, no matter how immoral or cowardly to retain their cushy jobs.

But in Ukraine it’s a war; this is a foreign power invading a friendly country and rattling its nuclear saber at all that move to oppose it. This is the Republican Party that has always stood at the head of the line opposing those that threatened our country or its people. This is the same regiment from which we have always plucked our heroes and now what do we see? Well from here it sure looks like a bunch of traitors and petty grifters trying to save their jobs and appeal to the worst of their base.

We expected Trump to be trying to sell Putin as a genius. He spent so much time with his nose up the Russian’s ass he probably figures that’s what genius smells like, but to hear the same crap from a bunch of bullshitters who are one step from jail is just unacceptable.

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On February 22, 2022 Jeffrey Zucker, President of Warner Media and CNN Worldwide, announced his resignation, citing an undisclosed relationship with CNN President and Chief Marketing Officer Allison Gollust. The relationship had been made pubic during the network’s investigation into Chris Cuomo.

Neither Zucker nor Gollust were married, both were light years past the age of consent and as far as is known, neither is accusing the other of rape. So what gives? Why is a fabulously successful executive at he top of his field quitting cold and using an affair, which was obviously known by much of his social circle, as an excuse?

Did Zucker just get tired of the whole thing and decide to take his decidedly bad health into retirement or is there some woke element in the organization that was pushing him and made him decide to take this way out?

Zucker was one of the most functional men in the top levels of media management. It would be a shame if the business world would be deprived of his skills because some up-tight Calvinist didn’t approve of his personal life. We already have too much woke BS in our society. One would have hoped we had left much of that behind with the rest of the 1950s.