Friday, July 31, 2015

The death of Boston 2024 a rare victory for taxpaying hosts

The news broke early on Monday, July 27. Boston would not have the Olympics in 2024. Mayor Martin J. Walsh announced that he would not place the burden of overruns on the taxpayer and, hours later, the United States Olympic Committee (USOC) cancelled the bid.
Ah, gee, you mean that only a decade after The Big Dig project disturbed life for everyone in the city—and whose lasting image is that of Milena Del Valle, crushed when the ceiling of the Ted Williams tunnel collapsed—Boston residents won't be subjected to yet more union thuggery, corporate kickbacks and legislative hijinks, all in the proud name of the World's Greatest Spunkfest?
I'm so depressed overjoyed. 
It's not often that the libertarian right, such as Citizens for Limited Taxation, and the loony left, the Black Lives Matter rabble, come together, but they did in Boston to oppose the business elites who wanted to foist the Olympics on the city and deny those who live and work there a say in the proceedings. 
Progressive Boston city councillor Tito Jackson was one of the biggest heroes behind Boston 2024's collapse. On July 20, Jackson ordered a subpoena of documents from the USOC. The subpoena was approved by the City Council and this was the beginning of the end of the bid. 
"Why are you asking the citizens of Boston and the Boston City Council to go forward without complete disclosure?" Jackson demanded as he requested the subpoena.
In desperation, the USOC asked Massachusetts governor Charlie Baker for his position on the Olympics and to let them know immediately. Baker, however, was still working out the figures and could not give them a yes or no answer.
In the end, it came down to Boston mayor Marty Walsh who, on Monday, put the kibosh on the whole sordid affair by announcing, "I cannot commit to putting the taxpayers at risk. If committing to signing a [taxpayer-backed] guarantee today is what's required to move forward, then Boston is no longer pursuing the 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games."
The people behind the Boston 2024 partnership were not exactly what you would call transparent. They endorsed a referendum for the city in 2016, but then downplayed it by telling the USOC that it would have cost too much money to launch a ballot initiative and that the opposition consisted of just a small group of whiners on social media. In other words, money was talking too loudly for it to ever have been a reality. Boston 2024 would have collected signatures for the ballot, but then feigned an ink spill had destroyed them. They would have gone to the state Attorney General Maura Healey and asked how much she enjoyed her job, then sided up to judges and schmoozed the Legislature in opposition to the ballot. Referendum? What referendum? We don't need no stinkin' referendum.
To parse Boston 2024 chairman John Fish: "Now just sit in your cars in four-hour traffic jams, you silly little serfs, and think about how lucky you are. You're getting the Olympics! Whattaya' got to complain about?"
The whole Boston Olympics was a sham. Boston, while a big city, does not have the space to support the infrastructure for such a huge undertaking. As the city's Seaport development during the Big Dig proved, space comes at a huge premium. The Olympics would have ignored, and continued to delay, the city's need for affordable housing and school renovations. It would have snatched private land for public use, an act known as compulsory purchase or eminent domain. And, as all Olympics do, it would have raised nowhere near the revenue needed to break even on the billions spent on the travesty, never mind make a profit.
To neatly sum it up, as Howie Carr told a caller on Tuesday, "Can you imagine what it would be like when the Olympics are going on, and you are pushed over to the side of the road while stretch limos are going around you on a lane your tax dollars built? And in return, you, your children and your grandchildren are going to be saddled paying off the bonds that these rich bastards used to put this Olympics in Massachusetts. And then on top of everything else, the rich bastards are going to get the land that had been taken from other less affluent citizens by eminent domain."
I saw those priority lanes during the London Olympics. How much clearer of a message do you need that three weeks worth of corporate sports competitions are more important than you and the time, effort and investment you make everyday by living and working in that city?
It is time to do away with the Olympics. We're not the Athens of antiquity. We don't have ampitheatres to watch guys in togas grapple. So of what use, exactly, are the Olympics in this modern world?
You want to know what the Olympics are good for in this day and age?  Big business/sponsorship, big labor and their bum-kissing acolytes in government.  That's all.
Cities and countries all over the globe are either kicking the can down the road, saying they're not ready yet, but are pursuing a bid for the future. Or they're saying, no way, we're not prepared to deal with all the corruption that this event invites on a massive scale. I around during London 2012. Why would I wish that on the area I was born and raised in and where my relatives still live?
And don't give me any nonsense that it would have created jobs. If a normal schmuck like me approached a job site and asked about employment, I guarantee you that the first words out of the foreman's mouth would be, "what's your local?" No, these jobs were in the satchel. Only the illegal aliens standing on street corners every morning, chanting "¡trabajo!", would have gotten the non-union work.
Isn't it remarkable that the city in which an Olympics event is being held is called the "host city" and that the mayor of said city is required to sign a "host contract"? In what context is the word host so often used? That's right, in the context of another word: parasite. A parasite sucks your life blood and weakens you and puts you in a fragile state. A most fitting analogy for the Olympics, wouldn't you say?
How do you kill a parasite? You deny it its source of sustenance. In the case of Boston 2024 and the USOC, it was by withholding the money.
Good riddance to this Olympics bid.  May it never darken the city's doorstep again. Boston is famous on a global scale; it has never required the debt the Olympics would wish to saddle it with just so it can have a velodrome and a track stadium that will be nothing more than crumbling "legends" by the end of the decade.

Thursday, July 30, 2015

For every imbecilic parent, there should be a Darla Neugebauer on stand-by

Damn. So much has happened over the course of the five weeks since the last time I reported on here:
Dylan Roof and why it is criminal to give your inbred, severely troubled son a gun as a gift.
The senseless, discriminatory and insensitive ban on the Confederate flag.
CIA diversity training.
The trendy Supreme Court decisions on Obamacare and gay marriage.
Ariana Grande's bratty "I hate Americans" comment.
The continuing, self-aggrandizing saga of Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner.
The severe beating of a white man by black youths in Cincinnatti on Independence Day that predictably enraged no-one in the Obama-media or our liberal elite.
The Chattanooga recruitment center shooting by yet another American Muslim terrorist.
The judicial tyranny in Oregon gagging the owners of the now-closed Sweet Cakes by Melissa bakery—shut down because of gay bullies—who now can't even speak about their ordeal.
MTV airing a show called "White People", engineered to make Millennial Caucasians feel guilty and hate themselves.
Donald Trump and the flak he has had to endure for telling the truth about how Mexico deliberately takes advantage of a complete breakdown in U.S. immigration policy to offload their troublemakers on to us.
The fallacy and danger of sanctuary cities, and how it cost Kathryn Steinle her life.
The continued spinelessness and uselessness of the Republican "opposition".
And, the most humorous topic among them, Environmental Protection Agency chief Gina McCarthy not knowing how much carbon dioxide is in the atmosphere when asked by a senator. (The answer, as any competent third-grader could tell you is 0.03 percent.)
All good topics, but if you know me, then you should know where I stand on every single one of them. The hot-button story I want to comment on here involves one moonbat couple from New York and their two-year-old daughter, who had apparently never experienced a disciplining, in a Maine diner.
Tina Carson and her husband brought their young daughter into Marcy's Diner in Portland. The girl whined, cried and hollered for not just a few minutes. By most accounts, the child screamed non-stop for about 40 minutes, by which time patrons of the diner had definitely taken notice.
The Carsons' daughter was causing a ruckus because the parents ordered pancakes but wouldn't give her any. The situation was so bad, driving customers out of the diner, that the establishment's owner, Darla Neugebauer, eventually stormed over to the Carsons' table, slammed her hands down on it and shouted at the kid, "This has to stop!" The young girl immediately stopped her bawling.
Predictably, the parents were outraged. Tina Carson said in an interview that she had never before witnessed behavior like Neugebauer's. Yes, Tina, we can tell. I believe you. Your parents obviously let you scream your head off too.
Neugebauer said in her defense, "It made her shut up, which made me happy, it made my staff happy, it made the 75 other people dining here happy." Hallelujah, sister.
Despite the outcry manufactured over this "incident," Neugebauer has, refreshingly, received the support of thousands of people on Facebook and Twitter. The inanity of not giving the pancakes they ordered to their obviously hungry daughter was not the central issue. It is rudeness, plain and simple, on the part of the parents to not even try to calm their daughter down. Could they not have had some Cheerios on hand (as one Facebook post suggested) to feed her or taken her outside until she did settle down?
Why have we become a society in which we are expected to accept squalling infants as part of the background wherever we go? Because of hippies like the Carsons who wouldn't dare tell their precious angel to pipe down. Let them scream, it's natural, they say. Yep. And so's the end product of angelcake's digestive system in her diaper. Why don't you just let her smear that all over the walls, you brainless breeders? That, apparently, is natural child behavior as well. Then you will have something else to kvetch about to the media when the restaurant's owner understandably loses her temper.
People like the Carsons are the reason why I don't like to go out. You would think a dinner and a movie would constitute a great night out, but then you have airheaded so-called parents who ruin both excursions for you by tagging along their cantankerous progeny. When exactly did we become a society that apparently regards babysitters as obsolete? Why do the rugrats have to go EVERY-DAMN-WHERE with mommy (and daddy, if he exists) these days?
There are other types of morons who will easily ruin a day or night out for you as well (I submit Exhibit A for proof of that), but people who lose all sense of the world around them the moment they have a kid are the worst.
Just yesterday, after checking out at the supermarket, I had stop short for a woman who decided, in the middle of the store's exit corridor, to feed her child in its pushchair. When I said "excuse me," she pulled the pushchair away the tiniest bit. I only just got through with my carriage. You see what I mean? These people are either certifiably cretinous or they no longer acknowledge the world going on around them.
Or they are quite possibly just arrogant and self-entitled and need the unapologetic ass-whooping of a Darla Neugebauer delivered to them.