☕️ JOCK ITCH ☙ Saturday, March 30, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

A deep-dive into New York’s Orwellian subway response; a modest hiring policy proposal; Proxy War update as Russians keep connecting dots and so do we; White House confusion over Easter; more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Saturday! It’s time for the Weekend Edition. Your roundup includes: a deep-dive into New York’s Orwellian subway response to its “persistent challenges”; an obvious question about government hiring practices; Proxy War update as Russians keep connecting dots and so do we; and the White House seems profoundly confused about Easter.

🗞💬 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 💬🗞

🔥 Buckle up, New Yorkers! The mental midgets manipulating the City’s managed meltdown are now planning to turn the convenience of the subway into an invasive and mindless security ritual resembling the Orwellian world of airport ‘security.’ The New York Times ran its ridiculous, narrative-warping story yesterday. It was as impressive a bit of journalistic malpractice as ever saw digital print, headlined “The Challenge of Making New York’s 472 Subway Stations Safer.”

From the first line, the story’s narrative goal was obvious: to disguise the militarization of New York’s subways inside a springtime wrapper of ‘safety’ — a safety that the reporter then described as basically being an irrational, paranoid artifact of New Yorkers’ social media addictions.

Actually, it started even before the first line. The story’s headline picture, floating above the initial paragraph, bore a cleverly deceptive caption: “The effort to protect the subways took on urgency yet again this week after police said a man died when stranger shoved him off a platform.”

See the journalistic sleight of hand? “Police said” somebody got shoved off the platform. Why not report it straight, that some lunatic shoved a guy off the platform in front of a train? Why blur what happened behind “police said?” Wouldn’t the sentence have been more powerful without the confusing “police said” in the middle?

Was the reporter unable to verify whether it happened or not?

Nope. The reporter used those words in that way to sow subconscious doubt over whether it happened, which obscured and softened the impact of what was otherwise pretty terrifying news.

That kind of obfuscation seems to be a Times policy for these attacks. Here’s how the Times reported the original attack in a separate story:

Haha! That headline and subheadline feature at least four different ways they used passive voice and euphemisms to confuse readers about what happened. Maybe the worst one was the Times minimizing a dangerous lunatic violently shoving innocent people right in front of oncoming subways trains, by primly labeling the murderous episodes as merely a “persistent challenge.”

A “persistent challenge” is a not a series of violent, murderous attacks.  A “persistent challenge” is a difficult case of athletic itch, or a husband’s perfectly understandable failures to pick up his own gym clothes off the bathroom floor, or possibly trigonometry.  Your author feels confident that the phrase “persistent challenge” is perhaps, well, somewhat insufficient as a rhetorical device for describing a string of terrifying subway killings.

Maybe a better story would have been about figuring out why the subway-killer “challenge” is so bloody “persistent.” Maybe if we could answer that question, we could more easily solve the actual problem .

But never mind about all that. Let’s get back to the safety story. Note the reporter’s carefully chosen words and phrases describing the persistent problem (lightly edited for clarity):

Public officials have sought to tamp fears about a string of frightening crimes in the transit network by flooding it with wave after wave of police officers, mental health workers and cameras. But after every deployment, another violent event has followed. The string of recent subway attacks have been impossible to predict. Some occurred on moving trains and others on platforms far from the center of Manhattan. Some have happened in the still of night and others during busy rush hours.

Notice once again how woefully shrunken was this otherwise alarming story. The very first sentence quoted above explained, “officials have sought to tamp fears about a string of frightening crimes.” Get it? Officials have a goal of tamping your fears. Not arresting criminals. Not stopping crime. Not making the subway safe again.

Nope. Their goal is just to tamp down your unreasonable fears. Which coincidentally, is the same as the story’s goal. (And, how about the twisted, passive-voiced euphemism, a “violent event?”  An event? Is that a New York Times code word for ‘killing spree’?)

That framing wasn’t just a one-off accident. Later, the article explained how the mental midgets running the Big Apple have come up with the idea of cracking down on non-violent fare jumpers using mechanical devices that will make it much harder to get through the subway and will slow everything down. But guess why they are doing it:

Law enforcement experts have said that reining in petty offenses like fare evasion minimizes disorder in the subway, and, as a result, can act as a deterrent and make riders feel less likely to be victimized.

There! Now do you feel better, knowing that they are making the subways a lot more of a hassle that so you will feel less likely to be victimized? Are you feeling safer yet? Or, do you need even more oppressive security features added to your day?

The beatings will continue until morale improves.

In other words, you’ll still face the same chance of getting randomly shoved in front of a moving train, but maybe when it happens, you’ll feel — okay, maybe not better — but you’ll feel less likely to have been victimized. It was just bad luck.

Explain how expensive, high-tech body scanners will stop drug-fevered madmen from shoving people off the platforms:

In other words, they can’t keep you safe. They just can’t. Sorry. It used to be possible, but for reasons we are forbidden from discussing, it is just no longer possible.

Now let’s look at the City’s many “solutions” to its “persistent challenge.”  As the story kept reminding readers, New York’s subway system is vast. And there are only a few bad actors (generously and repeatedly described as people with mental health concerns). I’ll call them murderous lunatics. Whatever you want to call them, there might only be a few dozen of these jokers running around.

Keep that in mind. There might only be a few dozen criminally insane people wandering around the subways and shoving people in front of oncoming cars. Call it a hundred if you like. Now let’s see how much cash New York is dumping on its “persistent challenge:”

At least $89 million has been spent on police overtime alone during the pandemic to make New Yorkers feel safe in the subway. Another $20 million was budgeted this month for teams of mental health workers to move mentally ill homeless people out. Thousands of surveillance cameras have been installed in the past two years, adding up to a total of about 16,000.

The M.T.A. is testing new fare gates to stop turnstile jumpers and metal platform barriers to keep riders safe in an effort to address some of the subway system’s most vexing problems. Rows of waist-high, canary-yellow protective screens made of perforated metal were bolted onto some platforms this year. Transit leaders have also tried making the system feel safer and less claustrophobic by adding bright lights. The M.T.A. announced last month that it would convert all 150,000 fluorescent light fixtures in the system to LED lighting by the middle of 2026.

In other words, New York has stroked checks for well over a hundred million dollars — up to a million dollars per offender — all so as to avoid arresting a few dozen criminally insane minorities.  But that’s not all. They’re also surging waves and waves of law enforcement in the problem’s general direction:

Officers had already been working an extra 1,200 daily overtime shifts to patrol the system when officials roughly doubled their presence by deploying an additional 1,000 officers. Then another 1,000 National Guardsmen, State Police troopers and transit officers were added this month, and 800 more police officers this week. In her announcement about the National Guard deployment earlier this month, Governor Hochul proposed sending 10 additional teams of mental health clinicians and police officers.

Behold with quiet amazement: it’s democrat governance at work! All those soldiers and police and mental health teams aren’t there to arrest criminals. After all, that would be mean. The soldiers and police and mental health teams are there to tamp down on your fears. To make you feel safer, even though everyone knows you aren’t actually safer.

You aren’t actually safer since the criminals are still there. Plus, the criminals know that if they are arrested they’ll be released anyway. They simply aren’t deterred by all the soldiers and police and mental health teams. They are riding in the justice system’s first class section.

Well, the soldiers and police are there to make some arrests. Just not the criminals. They’ll immediately arrest you, if you step out of line. Don’t try anything stupid, like defending yourself or anybody else. Just ask courageous veteran Daniel Penny what happens when you take the law’s inaction into your own hands:

Why are the public officials putting soldiers and police where it’s mostly citizens, instead of in another spot I could think of, a spot where you might cut the “persistent challenge” off at the source?

I am familiar with the popular view that these incompetent and incomprehensible democrat policies and programs are part of a careful, deliberate strategy by a secret cabal of demonic, America-hating oligarchs committed to destroying or depopulating the country or making us into good little communists or something.

But what if it were much simpler than that? What if the problem is they are really that stupid? I realize that kind of bottom-scraping stupidity is difficult to imagine. But let’s face it, New York Mayor Eric Adams may be many things. He’s probably a terrific guy. He’s politically savvy. He’s ruthless. But he’s never been accused of being any kind of mental giant. Let’s just leave it at that.

Or look at it another way. I’ll bet that you personally know someone, maybe even in your own family, who would agree with or even passionately defend the policy of not arresting criminally insane illegal migrants. Now imagine putting that person, the one you know, in charge of the police department.

See what I mean?

Oh well. Who knows. Maybe there is a secret cabal of elite oligarchs bent on destroying the country. By definition, we can’t know for sure. But what we do know for sure is, if that is true, there are a lot of people in this country dumb enough to help those evil oligarchs.

Maybe the oligarchs can’t succeed without all that help from sold-out liberals? That’s why the counter-revolution is so important.

🔥 Would you agree with an employment law requiring the federal government to hire only the best qualified, cheapest person who applies for any particular federal job? In other words, it would become illegal to use any other criteria for hiring, apart from merit and cost. Maybe the law could even be broader than that. Maybe it could require the government to regularly re-advertise every position, and replace incumbents with better qualified or cheaper alternatives.

Isn’t that just good stewardship of the collective treasury?

The reason I ask is the stable, continuous unelected government workforce used to protect the public from the worst side-effects caused by unqualified or incompetent elected public officials like Mayor Adams or Governor Hochul. But unfortunately, the government workforce has now been diluted or partly replaced, maybe by DEI, with people just as incompetent and unqualified as are the elected officials.

So we are now flying the national airplane without a political parachute.

And why should government hire anyone for any reason besides merit and cost anyway?

🔥 It’s been a momentous week in the Proxy War. If you want a thoughtful, neutral take on the Moscow terrorist attack, former British diplomat and author Alistair Cooke wrote a piece for AlJazeera headlined, “The Crocus Concert Hall Atrocity: No Going Back.”

Cooke explained why the U.S. seems hell-bent on denying Ukraine involvement in the attack. It’s simple. If Ukraine is involved, and people find out, it could lead to loss of support for Kyiv:

Why is it that the EU and the US are so adamant about who is behind the Crocus Concert Hall atrocity, that they will not wait out the investigation? Within 55 minutes of the attack, the US spokesperson said ‘Ukraine wasn’t involved’. Now the US is saying – definitively - that only ISIS was involved. Why has the West been hyper-adamant about the ISIS sole attribution? Why does it wish to pre-empt the Russian investigation?

Why are Western states so certain?  It is most unusual for Intelligence services to pronounce within the hour. Though the actual perpetrators are now known, the key question remains: Who stands behind the attack? Things are not always as they seem.

Against the reality of last summer’s failed Ukrainian military offensive, the fervour for ‘Project Ukraine’ persists -- and trumps all other considerations. Beijing’s Global Times warned that support for Kiev would dwindle if Ukraine’s involvement in the terror attack were to be established.

According to various Russian reports (Western media is fussily refusing to cover the developing story), Russia has made over 40 arrests in three countries and is currently interrogating those suspects. One suspects they are being vigorously interrogated. Russia has also captured lots of phones and laptops and has gathered other evidence, which its security services are now analyzing with gusto.

So far, Russia seems to think someone in Ukraine was somehow involved. Russia Today ran a story this week headlined, “Investigators establish link between Moscow terrorist attack suspects and Ukrainian nationalists.” And the Moscow Times ran a story late this week headlined, “Russia Arrests Concert Hall Attack ‘Financier,’ Claims Ukraine Link.”

As far as I can tell from publicly-available information, there are two main reasons why Russia suspects Ukraine was involved: that the terrorists were fleeing toward Ukraine, obviously expecting to be able to somehow cross the heavily-defended wartime border. And second, the Russians announced over the last couple days that they found emails and direct messages on the terrorists’ devices showing cryptocurrency payments received from Ukraine.

You could also add to those facts that Ukraine had motive and had opportunity. It seems very odd that, at this point, anyone would rule out Ukraine.

The U.S. has had access to none of the forty arrested witnesses or the captured electronic evidence. But that hasn’t stopped the U.S.’s Ukraine booster John Kirby from crudely dismissing the results of Russia’s investigation even before it has issued any kind of formal report.

As for the war, things are not going well for Ukraine. Yesterday, the Washington Post ran a strange op-ed. It was strange because the op-ed was written by a Washington Post reporter, who had interviewed former comedian Zelensky for the story. Why wasn’t it published as a straight news piece? Who knows. Here’s the headline:

The … article? op-ed? ... included a threat, right in the very first paragraph:

President Volodymyr Zelensky, the actor who became a wartime president, delivered a stark message to Congress in an interview on Thursday as Russian missiles were pounding southern Ukraine: Give us the weapons to stop the Russian attacks, or Ukraine will escalate its counterattacks on Russia’s airfields, energy facilities and other strategic targets.

Hmm. I get why Zelensky’s terroristic counterattacks would be a threat against Russia. But why were they also a threat against Congress? Is Zelensky tacitly admitting that the U.S.’s infrastructure is also at risk if Ukraine keeps attacking Russia’s infrastructure?

In other words, Zelensky seems essentially to be admitting that Russia blows up a U.S. refinery every time Ukraine blows up one of Russia’s refineries.

Which is what we’ve been saying all along.

🔥 Yesterday, Fox News ran this remarkable story:

Um. Who wants to tell them? Easter is a religious holiday.

As for me and my family, we’ll be celebrating Easter tomorrow with religious theming. I hope, whatever your beliefs, tomorrow you will also enjoy a joyful and fulfilling Easter.

Have a wonderful weekend and a Blessed Easter! Catch up with C&C on Monday morning for another illuminating and entertaining roundup.

We can’t do it without you. Consider joining with C&C to help move the nation’s needle and change minds.  I could use your help getting the truth out and spreading optimism and hope, if you can:  ☕ Learn How to Get Involved 🦠

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