My Blog

Category: Society

  • Athens Burns

    [B]uildings burned across central Athens and violence spread around the country.

    Cinemas, cafes, shops and banks were set ablaze in central Athens as black-masked protesters fought riot police outside parliament.

    State television reported the violence spread to the tourist islands of Corfu and Crete, the northern city of Thessaloniki and towns in central Greece. Shops were looted in the capital where police said 34 buildings were ablaze.

    via Reuters.

    Does anyone think this cannot, will not, happen here?

  • Athens: Our Future?

    BBC News has a few shots of Athens.  On one of the photos there’s an interesting quote by on of the protesters.

    “Even if they eat the flesh of the people, bankruptcy will not stop.  It will just get worse.  That is why we support a write off of the whole debt and to be free of the European Union.”

    This is an interesting sentiment.  Perhaps the protester is upset that he (or she) is young and did little by way of voting to create the debt problem in the first place.  And yet they refuse to blame their parents and the voters of the previous generation who first caused and then continued down a path to bankruptcy.

    It is either that or the protester simply doesn’t believe in taking any personal responsibility for decisions made; that debt is just something that one can just walk away from at any time.  That running up a huge debt that you cannot afford to pay and walking away is  just something that is completely acceptable.

    Neither rational is good.

    Our day is coming.  How will our youth react to the misdeeds of their parents?  Will they assign blame where it belongs or will they instead believe that just simply walking away is the best option?

  • Traveling to Mexico?

    “Gunbattles have occurred in broad daylight on streets and in other public venues, such as restaurants and clubs. During some of these incidents, U.S. citizens have been trapped and temporarily prevented from leaving the area,” the travel advisory said.  …

    More than 47,500 people have been killed in Mexico since late 2006 when President Felipe Calderon took office and sent the Mexican armed forces to crush powerful cartels battling for lucrative smuggling routes to the United States.The State Department advisory noted that 130 Americans were reported murdered in Mexico last year, up from 111 in 2010 and 35 in 2007. Among recent atrocities have been a fire set by masked gunmen in a casino in Monterrey, Mexico’s industrial capital in Nuevo Leon, that killed 52 people, mostly women.

    via Reuters.

    Yikes!

  • Peoria Illinois Carp Hunters

    My throat hurts from laughing.

     

  • Let’s all Welcome ThyssenKrupp to Chicago

    As ThyssenKrupp plans to dramatically increase its presence in Chicago it’s finding out just what life here is really like:

    … [T]he German-based ThyssenKrupp manufacturing company is facing allegations that company supervisors in the city created a hostile and intimidating work environment for an African-American employee.

    A superintendant at ThyssenKrupp used the N-word “routinely” around African-American sales representative Montrelle Reese, according to a November finding by the state Department of Human Rights.

    Another supervisor applied brown make-up to his face to make his skin tone darker during a skit at a sales conference in Indianapolis, according to the report, which concluded that there was “substantial evidence” that Reese was harassed because of his race.

    Though the supervisor later claimed he was impersonating a rapper of Asian descent from the musical group Linkin Park, the skin-darkening showed the company “fosters an environment of accepted racial intolerance,” the report states.

    via Chicago Tribune.

    It goes without saying that there’s just no room for this.  We don’t care what flies in Germany; welcome to America.

    That said… doesn’t it just seem like every time there’s some good news it’s immediately followed by a story about some moron doing something stupid?  We’re going to have to keep an eye on this story to see where it ends up.  If ThyssenKrupp is found not guilty in the end then it stands to reason that this Reese guy should get run out of town.

  • Occupy Chicago Gets a Home

    Occupy Chicago has secured a new home base to coordinate its winter activities.  The group is leasing two units on the fifth and seventh floors of Riverfront Work Lofts at 500 W. Cermak Road.  …

    The fifth-floor unit is nearly 3,400 square feet, while the seventh-floor unit is about 2,500 square feet.  Kaunert said protesters will use the units for office space and not for temporary overnight lodging.  The lease terms were not immediately clear, but a previous post on the group’s website said the combined monthly rent would be about $5,600.

    via Chicago Tribune.

    This is interesting.  Nearly 7,000 sq-ft for office space?  That could be offices for 100 or more people.  That’s a lot of “office help” for a group of hippies who want to camp in the park.

    And who’s funding all this?  $5,600/mo through May is a lot of money for a bunch of kids using Twitter to organize a protest.

    Looks like this post had it right.

  • Church Groups Getting Public Money

    Here’s something:

    Faith-based groups that have become the face of community support for Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s controversial plans to lengthen the school day and close failing schools also receive millions of dollars in grants from his administration.

    …

    One of the key players touting grass-roots support for Emanuel’s agenda is the Rev. Roosevelt Watkins, a minister and longtime ally of former Mayor Richard Daley who has seen an uninterrupted flow of contracts to provide services to Chicago Public Schools students. …

    A roughly one-month, $1 million contract was awarded for this spring to three groups, including HOPE, for a program designed to keep children off the street during school breaks. In June, Emanuel’s then-newly appointed schools CEO, Jean-Claude Brizard, lauded the Safe Haven, Safe Summer program, which the district said involved about 100 churches.In July, Watkins’ group was among 10 community organizations that collectively received a one-year, $6.3 million Safe Passage contract to watch over children going to and from school and to defuse potential conflict, according to public records.

    via Chicago Tribune.

    If CPS is giving all this money away to religious groups for after school programs then there should be no problem moving to a voucher system and giving CPS money away for during school programs.

    This could be the birth of a nice school choice program for the city.

  • #OCCUPYCHICAGO

    I found a post on Second City Cop about the madness coming this spring.  SCC was concerned that the kids were going to “live without dead time for a month in May and see what happens.”  Hardly a threat.

    What I found interesting was their claim that:

    On May 1, 50,000 people from all over the world will flock to Chicago, set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades and #OCCUPYCHICAGO for a month. With a bit of luck, we’ll pull off the biggest multinational occupation of a summit meeting the world has ever seen.

    via Adbusters.

    Really?!  50,000 protesters?  Do they have any idea what a hotel costs in this town?  Where are they all going to stay?  Oh, wait… they have a plan:

    And this time around we’re not going to put up with the kind of police repression that happened during the Democratic National Convention protests in Chicago, 1968 … nor will we abide by any phony restrictions the City of Chicago may want to impose on our first amendment rights.

    What exactly are “phoney restrictions”?  Would those be the laws that you simply disagree with?  I see.  Occupy the parks.

    And if they don’t listen … if they ignore us and put our demands on the back burner like they’ve done so many times before … then, with Gandhian ferocity, we’ll flashmob the streets, shut down stock exchanges, campuses, corporate headquarters and cities across the globe … we’ll make the price of doing business as usual too much to bear.

    The completely misappropriate reference to Gandhi aside; do you think they care at all about the rights of the good hard working people who live here and don’t want them shutting down the streets that we use to pick our kids up from school, get to the hospital, visit our parents?

    I think a whole lotta people are going to get hurt.

  • Occupy The Courts

    Now this I have a problem with:

    Lawyers representing about 800 Occupy Wall Street protesters arrested in the past month demand that prosecutors drop the charges.

    If not, they say they won’t deal and will insist on going to trial – putting pressure on the already overloaded Manhattan criminal courts.

    “I’d like to suggest to the DA’s office the appropriate way to deal with these cases is outright dismissal,” said defense lawyer Martin Stolar.

    via the New York Daily News.

    Civil disobedience is fine, necessary at times and perhaps even cool once in a great while.  But if you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime.

    What these people appear to want is to have the law simply not apply to them.  That’s not how things work.  The law applies equally to all people; including protesters.  Justice demands that if you break the law you be treated fairly under it and pay the appropriate price for your misdeeds.

    For those that don’t know, this is a strategy right out of the Cloward-Piven playbook.  This is the progressives great play in order to collapse the American economy.

  • Residents Flee St. Louis

    Does this sound familiar?

    St. Louis is losing residents, according to U.S. Census figures released Thursday, and the population decline goes deeper than being another blow to the proud city’s image.  The drop will mean a financial loss that could cost the already cash-strapped Gateway City millions of dollars.

    Figures from the 2010 census were a bitter disappointment, as the city’s population dipped to 319,294.That’s down more than 29,000 – a staggering 8 percent – from 2000.

    (Full story here.)

    But wait, there’s more:

    The mayor said the ongoing struggles of the city school district are a big part of the problem.

    “A lot of families are leaving the city for better educational opportunities, especially public education opportunities,” Slay said.

    Increasingly, they’re moving further and further out.

    Why yes.  Yes, that does sound familiar.

    We have the change the way we do things as a city.  Change the way we look at problems and potential solutions.  We’re $27 billion in debt, have high taxes, bloated social programs, failing schools, corrupt politicians, and criminals running around loose in the streets.

    These problems exist as all levels: local, county, state, and federal.  We need comprehensive reform nationally in order to survive.