2 suspects tied to organized retail theft crew arrested in Redondo Beach as police see more thefts at the Galleria — ktla.com
Good! Police gotta crack down on these smash-and-grab robberies. Just one more sign of the wave of white supremacist violence sweeping the country.
The suspects’ names are Malik Trevon Oaks and Jamol ClaytonPhillips.
Wait — what?!
Fuckin racist cops . . .
— WWB
One of my online chess games. A pretty even game all the way until it ended with a colossal mistake, as chess games sometimes do. Some annotations below . . .
5. b3 Rubinstein Opening
37. Qf1 I kind of wonder about this move as it lets Black deliver a queen check on the 2nd rank.
39. Nf6+?? We were both running short of time (in a 2+1 bullet game) and I was about to offer a draw when White did this, missing that he can’t recapture.
40. Qfx6+?? So he recaptures anyway.
I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every word, all of it.
RIP Joan Didion
For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.
Do not forsake wisdom, and she will protect you; love her, and she will watch over you. Wisdom is supreme; therefore get wisdom. Though it cost all you have, get understanding.
Now I’m in a quandary . . .
The times that we’re living in right now are forcing lots of people on both sides of the aisle to look at a thing, or hear a thing, and be told that what they’re seeing and what they’re hearing is not real. And you can’t do that to people indefinitely and expect them not to push back somehow. You can’t tell people that the border is secure and then show them images of tens of thousands of people flooding over it. You can’t tell people that the evacuation of Afghanistan was a success and then show them people falling off of a plane. … And you can’t ask people who are watching a NASCAR race at home, who clearly hear the crowd yelling ‘F*** Joe Biden’ to pretend that what they’re really hearing is ‘Let’s Go Brandon.’
I think what’s happened is people have just become sick and tired of being told that what they’re seeing and what they’re hearing is not what they’re seeing and hearing.
And this is the perfect trope. I don’t think people who yell it are necessarily enemies of the president. I think they’re enemies of being told that what they’re seeing and what they’re hearing isn’t real, that it’s somehow a figment of their imagination. People are sick of that.
One of my online chess games. Some annotations below . . .
4. Nxe5?! I never saw this before in a Four Knights Game but it actually has a name: the Halloween Gambit. In exchange for a knight, White gets to chase black knights around the board with pawns.
9. …c6? This is not such a good move if White had played 10 h4 because the knight at g6 doesn’t have many options. Instead, 9 …cxd6 10 exd6 Qf6 11. Qe2+ Qe6 12. Nb5 Qxe2+ simplifies with a material advantage.
11. Nxb5? Just backing the bishop up to d6 looks better.
14. …a5? White could have played 15 Bd2 attacking the pawn.
15. O-O?
15. …Nh6? This gives White time to play 16. Be3 (which he doesn’t) and cut off the diagonal to his king so Black can’t play 16. …Qb6+, which I should have played this move.
16. f5?? I’m going to give that two question marks because I think it’s pretty much over now.
16. Qd5? 16. …Bxh6 gives Black one less piece to attack with.
22. f6? I don’t know if it makes sense to hand out question marks in a completely lost game but 22. Rae1 is an obvious move here.
24. fxg7? There aren’t any good moves left. This leads to a forced mate.
25. hxg4 Or 25. Kg3 Qf2+ 26. Kxg4 Be2+ 27. Qxe2 h5+ 28. Kg5 Qf6#.
annie died the other day
never was there such a lay—
whom, among her dollies, dad
first (“don’t tell your mother”) had;
making annie slightly mad
but very wonderful in bed
—saints and satyrs go your wayyouths and maidens: let us pray
Schools in Inglewood, CA shut down completely for more than 400 days due to COVID-19, eventually reopening in a “hybrid” model of in-person and distance learning.
Kids can be deprived of an education, but in February 2022, Los Angeles will host Super Bowl LVI, mashing more than 100,000 ticket-holders together (plus I don’t know how many ushers, food vendors and other support staff) in a mostly enclosed Inglewood, CA stadium.
Draw your own conclusions.
[See You in Hell is a feature by our guest blogger, Satan — PE]
Greetings mortals —
Here is Colin Kaepernick’s opinion on the recent Kyle Rittenhouse verdict:
This only further validates the need to abolish our current system. White supremacy cannot be reformed.
Abolish our current system! What a great idea! What should we replace it with — a system that only renders verdicts that Colin Kaepernick likes?
I’ll say one thing for this kid Rittenhouse, he was a lot more accurate under pressure than Kaepernick was during a 3-16 streak that got him replaced as a starting NFL QB by Blaine Gabbert.
Blaine Gabbert!
Of course, he blames that on white supremacy as well.
Of the three people Rittenhouse shot, one was pointing a gun at him, one was trying to grab the rifle out of his hands and one was clubbing him in the head with a skateboard.
There’s a legal principle in play here as reflected in the jury’s not guilty verdict and that is “Fuck around and find out.”
Both of the deceased are now in Hell. In addition to their bad behavior in Kenosha, they have criminal records including domestic abuse and child rape. No one misses them and they’re better off dead.
See you in Hell . . .
One of my online chess games. Some annotations below . . .
2. …Bg7 Modern Defense
11. Ng5?! 11. b4 is a safe alternative.
12. Ne6?! 12. Nf6 is positionally better than leaving a pawn hanging at e6, but then what was the point of moving the knight to g5 in the first place? (Spoiler alert: This move will turn out okay.)
14. …Rb8 14 …b6 would have been better.
15. Rd1? In hindsight, I think 15. c5 would have been stronger. The rook move gives Black time to play 15 …c5 (which he doesn’t do) and prevent White’s c-pawn from advancing.
15. …Nf6? Much worse than 15 …c5.
16. …c6?? The game is pretty even here, but Black needs to get the king to h7, out of the White queen’s line of fire. Instead he makes the worst move on the board, allowing a discovered check, losing the queen and the game.
OK grandpa, now go take a nap.
That’s the only Biden quote I have. Nothing on the latest jobs report, massive layoffs, high gas and energy prices, high food prices, high crime, empty shelves, open borders or Afghanistan.
If you have any good ones, let me know and I’ll post them here.
I don’t like to play a game unless I know I can win. It’s a characteristic trait of the sociopath or psychopath, I forget which.
Getting old: It used to be I went to a lot more weddings than funerals. In recent years, I’ve noticed it’s the other way around..
“I can’t eat a big lunch because it makes me feel sluggish in the afternoon, you know what I mean?”
“No.”
“You never eat a big lunch then feel sluggish in the afternoon?”
“No, my job is too exciting. Never a dull moment.”
The essential notion of a capitalist society is voluntary cooperation and voluntary exchange. The essential notion of a socialist society is fundamentally force. If the government is the master, you ultimately have to order people what to do. Whenever you try to do good with somebody else’s money, you are committed to using force. How can you do good with somebody else’s money unless you first take it away from them? The only way you can take it away from them is by threat of force. You have a policeman, a tax collector who comes to take it away from them. Whenever you use force, the bad moral value of force triumphs over good intentions.
My boss showed up late as usual for a conference call . . .
“Sorry I’m late,” he said, when he finally arrived.
“No problem,” I said. “You’re my role model. Someday I want a job where I can just show up whenever I want to.”
This pack of chips caught my eye at the Circle K today so I bought one. The clerk pointed out on the back of the package that the chips were classified as “FREAKIN’ HOT,” accompanied by a temperature gauge with the needle pegged in the far-right, bright red FREAKIN’ HOT sector.
To no one’s surprise, except the Circle K clerk, the chips weren’t any hotter than a bag of Doritos.
Have you ever gone to a fast food place where they sell a product like a jalapeno burger advertised as SCORCHING HOT? Then you take a bite and you’re like, “That’s it?”
No company can produce a mass market food product that can only be tolerated by maybe one percent of the population because they can’t sell it, which is the opposite of what they want to do. They want to sell a lot of them.
If you want to eat something really freakin’ hot, go to a hole-in-the-wall Thai restaurant and tell them you like your food really spicy. If you’re in the Southern California area, I recommend Jitlada in Hollywood for this experiment.
If every cell in your body is not crying out for death, send me the receipt, I’ll pay for it myself.
From a podcast featuring Michael Shellenberger:
Progressives have controlled California for decades. Democrats have a supermajority in Congress. We spend more than any other state per capita on homelessness and mental illness, and we have the worst outcomes.
So I wanted to write “San Fransicko” to both get to the bottom of what’s really going on and also figure out what the solutions are because, obviously, we’re dealing with a catastrophe. I mentioned drug overdose deaths rose from 17,000 to 70,000 by 2017. Last year, drug deaths were 93,000, which is almost three times as many people than die from car accidents and four times as many people as die from homicide. Clearly, we are in the midst of a massive drug crisis, and it felt like nobody was offering a particularly clear explanation of it or offering very good solutions.
San Francisco remains one of the most spectacularly beautiful cities in the world. . . .
But as soon as you drive downtown, you see . . . what are euphemistically called homeless encampments, but they are more accurately described as open drug scenes. . . .
In the 1980s, what we called homelessness—I point out in the book that homelessness is a propaganda word. It was designed to mislead people about what’s really going on. It was designed by progressives to mislead people into thinking that people live on the street because they can’t afford the rent. That’s not the case. The people on the street, we know, are there because of addiction and untreated mental illness. . . .
You see people openly using drugs, smoking fentanyl, which is responsible for about half of the drug deaths, people defecating in public. It’s very common to see that. . . .
The drug crisis is the result of deliberate policies that are imposed by progressives, demanded by progressives, to not treat addiction, not treat mental illness, and to basically defend the right of people to sleep anywhere, defecate anywhere, and not be arrested, not be mandated treatment. . . .
At the very simplest level, you do not need to have anybody living on the street if you just build enough shelters and require people to use them. That’s what most developed and civilized cities around the world have done. Before the pandemic, New York basically sheltered 99% of its homeless.
The reason that we have so many people unsheltered living on the street in California is because the progressives have opposed building sufficient shelters and requiring people to use them.
So at the simplest level, it’s just that. It’s just that we have had what’s called a “housing first” policy rather than a “shelter first” policy. Housing first, of course, meaning this idea that anybody who wants their own apartment should be able to get one. It’s completely ludicrous. Even if you are a socialist, even if you’re radical left, it doesn’t make any sense. You can’t provide that much apartments and housing for people.
First of all, you just can’t build it in San Francisco because there’s so much NIMBYism, and the regulations are so strict against building housing. But also, there’s just not the money for it. You can’t just provide free apartments for everybody. That may seem more obvious to listeners of Heritage Foundation than listeners to MSNBC, but it’s just the fact of the matter. . . .
What you basically have is massive untreated mental illness, including severe mental illness. You have the ACLU, which I think in many other contexts has done good things, I have been a longtime supporter of ACLU, but in this case, we have the ACLU irrationally defending leaving people with schizophrenia on the street, in states of psychosis, using hard drugs, living in totally unsafe, unsanitary conditions; having a complete double standard when it comes to requiring people with dementia, for example, our grandparents who suffer from dementia, either from Alzheimer’s or something else, we don’t let grandma and grandpa wander onto the streets, and yet we allow people in psychotic states to do that. They use a double standard to justify it.
What I get at, the bottom line here, is that this is a victim ideology, meaning that there’s an ideology here. And it’s just as dumb as it sounds, unfortunately. It’s the idea that you can classify certain groups of people as victims.
The racist aspect of this is that progressives classify all African Americans, all people of color, except for Asians, as victims. But they also classify people with mental illness as victims. They classify children. They classify women, gays and lesbians, people suffering addiction are all classified as victims. That’s the first thing they do.
The second thing they do, which is as insidious, is that they believe that, to victims, everything should be given and nothing demanded. This is terrible for . . . dealing with people suffering from addiction and mental illness.
The fact of the matter is a fair number of the people on the street have been victimized. It’s true. There’s a higher percentage of people on the street that were abused, foster kids, and were physically or sexually or emotionally abused, and that’s terrible, but that does not merit giving people the cash to use drugs, giving them hotel rooms in which to use drugs, giving people the paraphernalia in which to use drugs.
During the pandemic, the city of San Francisco … the social workers for the city were actually buying people alcohol and delivering alcohol and drugs to people’s hotel rooms. It’s so bonkers that when I describe it, it sounds like I’m describing a fictional dystopian film, but this is actually what’s happening in San Francisco.
The San Fransickness that the title refers to, yes, it’s referring to the folks that are living in squalor on the streets, but it also is referring to a kind of compassion sickness, a compassion unchecked by discipline, by reciprocity, by personal responsibility, by the things that people need in order to improve their lives. . . .
And the drug scenes need to be shut down. You can’t allow open-air drug dealing in a city. It’s absurd. We have literally two dozen drug dealers selling you any amount of drugs in, not just San Francisco, but other major cities in the United States. We have to shut that down. This is not rocket science. You can’t allow open drug dealing.
Does that mean that you’re going to eliminate drug dealing? No. But I’ll tell you, it’s interesting, if you’re an addict and there’s no open drug dealing, you often have to spend a bunch of your day finding your drugs, buying them, and that means you end up doing less drugs. So it’s not great. I’d love to see fentanyl eliminated and meth, but these are highly-concentrated drugs. We haven’t been able to get rid of them.
I think the idea that we can stop China or Mexico from getting them over the border is a fantasy. You can mail enough fentanyl to somebody through FedEx to supply an entire city. But you can shut down the open drug dealing. That’s easy. Shut it down. The addicts will end up using less. Right now, it’s too easy. The open drug scenes are addicts living in open drug markets, and they’re just ending up using hard drugs every four hours. It’s barbaric, and it makes them sick and they die. You can’t allow that.
“You’ve got people your age just coming into the business who will be running Paramount in five years, along with Warners and Columbia and Fox and MGM — all of which will be run by companies that have nothing to do with pictures — who have never heard of Minnelli or Preminger, or just might be erudite enough to think of Liza when you say her father’s name. Then you’ve got people like me who have been around long enough not to have much romance about any of it anymore and are just trying to find some cover because we have no idea what’s going on. Biker pictures are winning prizes at Cannes and pictures about cowboy hustlers in New York getting sucked off in the cheap seats are winning Oscars, so the execs upstairs who are old enough to be my grandfather — which means we’re talking Dawn of Man here — feel gripped by a kind of cultural dementia. When my mother was in her last years, in her mid-eighties, she would wake at four in the morning and look out the window and wonder why it was so dark at four in the afternoon. The reasoning process by which you realize it can’t be four in the afternoon but has to be four in the morning had broken down. That’s what’s going on with these gentlemen. . . .”
