Archive for May 21st, 2010
VOCABULARY UPGRADE: Criminal entrants vs. illegal aliens
Here’s an interesting note we got from a reader, asking us to start using the term “criminal entrants” instead of “illegal aliens”.
Words have immense power.
The “aliens” always lends itself to cute ET or Roswell green imagery.
The “undocumented workers” garbage the PC-police on the Left keeps trying to push is something we never used for the Mexican reconquista invaders who illegally cross our borders and believe American immigration laws do not apply to them.
“Criminal entrants” is the term we’re going to start using…unless you can think of a better one.
Remember: the Left is always brand-managing, always running psy-ops, and always calling cockroaches “hug-a-bugs” to make them more palatable. They use creative vocabulary for everything. Yesterday, when a rat darted in front of Obama at the White House during one of his professorial lecture sessions, the MSM reported it as “a small mammal” or “a small creature”. They refused to use the word rat.
Just as the Left refuses to call the reconquistas what they are: CRIMINALS.
They’re breaking immigration law.
People who break laws are criminals.
They are, thus, criminals.
Call a rat a rat, and never let the Left choose your vocabulary for you.
QUESTION: Do you think the euro and EU are zombies — still shambling around, but effectively dead?
Please chime in on this one, especially those of you who follow Europe closely.
Years ago, in college, some of us here were very big on the idea of a United States of Europe, with a president or supreme chancellor, and the European countries becoming, eventually, very much like Georgia, Ohio, Florida, and the rest of our US states. Why we wanted this is anyone’s guess, but maybe it was some desire to see Europe become a twin to America, and together we could oppose Islam and whatever future threats arose in the world. Freedom and democracy would, thus, have two superpowered defenders in the New and Old western worlds.
But, Islam conquered Europe in the last ten years. Europe, as we see it, is a failed continent. It’s a decade away from being second, if not third, world.
We don’t mourn this loss, as the fools that ran Europe into the ground did it to themselves.
Are we being too harsh in this…or do you think Europe has a chance to rebound?
Do you think the euro is a goner and the EU itself will collapse, or can this be saved?
We tend to see the whole mess as comparable to all the Zombie Banks that are still shambling around here in the US. These are insolvent, failed ventures that keep all the lights on, maintain the pretenses of existence, but for all intents-and-purposes these are failed institutions that will never recover. They are dead, or rather undead, and just not buried yet.
Is that how you see the EU and euro?
What think you?
Pie Hole Pizza Joint Update
Well, our favorite pizza place in Boystown is closing soon, so tonight we’re going to have our last sausage-and-marshmallow After School Special pizza. It’s very sad, actually, for a lot of reasons — but most interestingly because this is a bigger story than just a pizza shop closing in a bad economy.
Yesterday, we did an interview with the Chicago Tribune on Pie Hole, for their token gay section. A reporter’s covering the closing of the shop, and wanted our take on it, because so many of you out there were so kind to Pie Hole and sent them loads of encouragement and support when we told you about this little slice of Boystown that had lost its lease. We were very vocal supporters of Pie Hole, and contacted the neighborhood Alderman, Merchants’ Association, and other business owners on Halsted to see if anyone could help them keep their lease or alternatively find a new spot on the street to reopen.
We were amazed at how little support anyone in Boystown wanted to give this little business — and how much it seemed that everyone WANTED Pie Hole to close, because the perception was that this place had become a nuisance.
Or, more apt, a nuisance-attractor.
What we saw as a fun place to get pizza super late at night, with a great staff we loved talking to, and great product we loved ordering up, was also a main draw for all of the young criminals who’ve invaded Boystown and have been terrorizing the neighborhood since the Center on Halsted opened a few years ago and started actively recruiting gangs from the Southside to head north “to hang out”. After the Center closes each day, it discharges the “youth” its given a club house to all day. They’re on the street then, far from home, looking for ways to get into trouble…and then there’s Pie Hole, open late, with a policy of giving them a new late night club house.
The owner is a very nice man whom we like very much. He should be running a troubled youth center — on the Southside — to help these kids. He is a born social worker.
As a businessman, he’s not so much doing what he needs to do to run a thriving business. At best, Pie Hole broke even at the end of a week, mainly because so many customers were driven away by the gangs of loud, obnoxious, pushy, underaged, and often criminal thugs that Pie Hole allowed to congregate on their property. Because of Pie Hole’s proximity to other businesses on Halsted, others lost customers because people didn’t feel safe — or didn’t feel like putting up with these “kids” — by going out in Boystown.
It’s a damn shame, all of it. The problem starts with the misguided Center on Halsted, and it’s exacerbated by the well-intentioned-but-delusional stance Pie Hole’s owner took on all of this. The owner has a very big heart, but he never understood that his main mission should have been running a pizza shop the neighborhood wanted…not a pizza shop/late night center for troubled Southside youth. The two things do not go together.
It’s a shame there isn’t room in the Center on Halsted itself to have just folded Pie Hole into that building…then those kids would have never had to leave. Add a troubled youth pancake shop on the roof or something, and it could be open 24/7 and then those gangs would never have to leave the building. They could focus on terrorizing the well-intentioned-but-delusional occupants and proprietors of the Center instead.
Then everyone would win.
All of this is fascinating to us because when we started writing about Pie Hole, it was because something we personally liked was in jeopardy and for our own purposes, we wanted to save it — so that we could personally enjoy the pizza we liked late at night.
But, investigating WHY it was closing and WHY absolutely no one wanted to help save this business we realized just how complicated some things are. There are times when what we personally want needs to take a backseat for what’s best for the neighborhood. Sometimes, the damage something is doing far outweighs the enjoyment we personally get from it. As much as we love everything about Pie Hole as a business, we don’t think Pie Hole as a Late Night Troubled Southside Youth Center is what Boystown needs.
We’re curious to see what take on all of this appears in the Tribune next week when the article is written up. Will it be more of the same “everyone’s picking on those kids!” or will it be similar to what we’ve said, that it’s a shame this business is closing, but the business owner should not have mixed his business with a well-intentioned-but-delusional effort to run a late night youth ministry?
Friday Open Thread: May 21st, 2010
What’s on your minds this Friday?
What are people talking about in your part of the country?
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We’re seriously debating what we want to do going forward around here.
This week, we’ve been very busy with work…work that we need to, you know, earn money to buy stuff, pay rent, and survive here in Chicago. This is a feast or famine town for us as freelancers, and when the weather’s nice, we take absolutely every gig we can get to make sure we’re covered during the lean times. So, if we don’t have the free time to put out 15,000 words a day, it’s because we are off at the various and sundry things we all do to earn a living.
The sheer nastiness we receive from some of you for not writing the equivalent of a small magazine a day for your enjoyment is remarkable. Some of you complain because some comment you made didn’t turn up from moderation yet. Others of you complain because we didn’t talk about something in the news yet. Some of you lie in wait for months waiting for a week like this when we’re just too busy to keep up with everything, so you can launch your little attacks.
It’s a lot like being trapped in a carwash, inside a tiny little car, with firehose-grade streams of criticism aimed directly at you, nonstop.
It is exhausting.
Last night, our friend Althea was over and we were checking email and she looked at the screen and couldn’t believe what she read. ”Who are these crazy people?”, she asked, scrolling through the 800 emails that came in yesterday, alone. ”Why do they behave like this?”. She was supposed to help us by going through the moderation queue and sorting through what was in the spam filter for us, but after 15 minutes Althea didn’t want to do it anymore. ”How can you read all this garbage every day? I don’t want to sit here and sort through this, it’s just too nasty”.
And, honestly, for some reason the trolls aren’t the hardest things to deal with — it’s all the “Why hasn’t my comment posted? When will my comment post? I spent an hour writing a comment and it’s not posted? Blah blah blah”. It’s just so tiresome.
The cumulative effect of all of this tends to be that when we’re running nonstop, working doubles and triples, and we have only 45 minutes to an hour of free time, the absolute last thing we want to do is sit in front of a computer and be hammered with this garbage…not when the sun is shining, the sky is blue, and we could be reading a book somewhere verdant and peaceful. Althea couldn’t put up with this for a quarter of an hour…dealing with comments alone is at least an hour a day of our time. And that’s before getting to the email.
Part of why we keep writing for this site is because it bothers Obama supporters so much and because, for whatever reason, we seem to drive many on the Left so crazy, just by existing. The other part of it is that we want to be able to have some sort of impact on the 2012 race, since all of us want to do everything possible to make sure Dr. Utopia is defeated, and every last Leftist is driven from office so that normal people can take back this country and begin to undo the damage of The Golden Age of Hope and Change.
But, going forward, we’re going to have to find some better way to handle how we operate things. Either we’re going to find someone in our circle of friends who will take over comment moderation and email reading completely, so that none of us have to be directly subjected to this, or we’re going to stop reading the comments and emails. It’s just too much complaining and negativity in our day, and it’s just too tiresome and repetitive for us to subject ourselves to any longer.
Call us crazy, but it’s just no fun being criticized nonstop, often in the most hateful of ways possible, by thousands of strangers every day. It would be one thing if we wrote for a newspaper or magazine or something, and this was our actual jobs — then it would be part of our job description to put up with this. But, as private citizens doing this as a hobby that has taken over our lives, it’s just soul-killing to come home drained from very hectic and tiring days to find so much complaining and negativity waiting for us.
Something’s got to give.
