Angry New Yorker |
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Semi-Daily Rants from New York City's Angry Man
"As I know more of mankind I expect less of them, and am ready now to call a man a good man, upon easier terms than I was formerly."
- Dr. Samuel Johnson, Boswell, Life of Johnson, Sept. 1783
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Saturday, April 30, 2005
We're shocked, shocked to find New York paying too much to government worker union pensions! Shocked! From NY1.com Report Finds New York State Pension Payouts Are Excessive April 30, 2005 A new report shows New York taxpayers are funding fat pension payouts for government retirees. The report by the Citizens Budget Commission concluded that retirement packages offered to New York City and state employees are more generous than those provided by other governments or the private sector. The CBC says that by 2008 pension contributions are projected to grow to more than $$4.5 billion and health-insurance payments will increase to more than $$3.4 billion. Cutting pension benefits for current employees would require an amendment to the state constitution, action by two successive Legislatures, and a voter referendum. Friday, April 29, 2005
You Don't Think We Have An Illegal Alien Problem? Mira! What about this billboard for KRCA-TV Channel 62 that Gov. Schwarzenegger railed against yesterday in a radio interview, here, as promoting illegal immigration. The billboard clearly crossed out CA and instead has Los Angeles, Mexico on it instead, in apparent support of the "reconquista." ![]()
And latest update is some patriots took the situation into hand and modified the LA, Mexico billhoard per below: ![]() Thursday, April 28, 2005
And this guy almost became president? The fact he was thwarted may actually be proof God does exist. ;-) From LittleGreenFootballs.com: Gore Leads the Way
Asian Long-Horned Beetle Alert! We're nearly fanatical tree-lovers (not to be confused with tree huggers). As a result, the report that the devastating asian long-horned beetle was found again in Central Park today (having already caused much damage in Queens and Brooklyn over the past years) was not good news. Stay tuned. An update and some other thoughts... First, we wanted to let our readership know that posting between now and July 28th will be somewhat fitful. We have some other business-related committments that will require more of our time than usual, and business comes first (well after God, family, and country, of course. ;-) However, there are two items we wanted to highlight now. First, it drives us nuts when pundits spout the dribble that illegal aliens come here and do jobs that "Americans won't do." Oh, really? We don't buy it. In fact, rather than benefitting Americans and our culture, these illegal aliens have had a destructive effect on pay levels and our work ethic because they've swept entire job areas into jobs that then become self-defined as jobs that "only illegal aliens do." Case in point is one of our neighbors. No they're not illegal aliens, but they live in a small plot house, as do several of us here, and their front "yard" is roughly 25 feet x 15 feet -- certainly no more. One of their three kids is a strapping young lad; athletic and more than capable of physical work. Yet, this family has a lawn service come by weekly. A truck pulls up; several Spanish-speaking men disembark with their blowers, mowers and rakes and in a few minutes they've handled the front "lawn" without breaking a sweat. Beyond letting their now slothful son get away with no external chores, what sort of example lesson is this setting for our youth and their work ethic development? That only illegals cut lawns anymore? That their is some work that is beneath one? At the risk of dredging up a hoary "when I was a lad" tale, I handled the lawn work (and the snow shoveling in winter) at my childhood homes until I finished college, and even then I continued to cut the lawn (and shovel the snow) for several years at the four-family house where I rented an apartment (at market rates) from my parents after moving. And the four-family house was a large corner house with a front lawn of about 80 x 25 feet. I certainly didn't feel the work was either too much, or beneath me. I felt it was my duty. Are we breeding a sense of duty out of our kids these days? Second, Mayor Bloomberg and company continue to spout the nonsense that people are "coming back to New York in droves." First, demographically it's simply not true -- except for a very small segment of people, centered in a very small area of Manhattan. And as one of Bloomberg News' own columnists notes in an essay today, Sprawl and "Slurbs" Are the Wave of the Future, available here, the theory posited by Richard Florida of "the creative class" as cities' salvation is empty; the theory does not hold water I believe, despite its embrace by those on the left who envision themselves as "creative", because, as urbanologist Joel Kotin notes "[y]ou can't build a long-term civic culture around transient populations.'' Kotin's statement is so fundamentally concrete that arguments against border on irrational. But the reaity that urban centers are NOT gaining force is a fact that does not bode well for NYC's long-term health, and the quicker we face the reality, the quicker we can adapt. Read the whole thing:
Monday, April 25, 2005
Some Good News For A Change We tend to highlight the many, many things wrong in New York State politics, culture and financial matters, but when good news comes along we're the first to happily trumpet it. So, when we heard that New York City's murder rate is approaching a 40-year low, that's certainly good news in the midst of a culture that's still defining defiancy down. From today's NY1.com, here:
Sunday, April 24, 2005
A Few Brief Points And Then We're Off...
Thursday, April 21, 2005
Dem Babies Continue to Bash Bolton We're really at a loss at to what the issue is here regarding the accusation that John Bolton, nominee for U.S.'s U.N. Ambassador, was "verbally abusive" and chased a woman staffer around a hotel throwing things at her. First of all, at the risk of being undiplomatic, we don't care. In New York verbal abuse is almost the state pastime. So if some wallflower ten years ago was traumatized and couldn't take a dressing down -- deserved or not -- without quivering in her Legg's we're most definitely not getting teary-eyed about it. Granted, no one enjoys working for a jerk -- and there's no shortage of those in either New York City or in the broader work world. But we've also worked with plenty of idiots, incompetents and deadwood, and there are times when lighting a bonfire under someone's lazy ass is just what the doctor ordered. Wednesday, April 20, 2005
HABEMVS PAPAM - BENEDICTVM XVI ![]()
The Dems Keep On Taxing... People ask us why we're so angry here. After all life in New York and New York City is "pretty good" compared to life in other countries and cities, right? That depends what your frame of reference is. That is are you comparing your new life here in NYC to the life you had in Columbia, or the life in New York City you have now compared to the life you had a kid growing up here or somewhere else in the U.S.? If a neoconservative is a liberal that's been mugged, we're former democrats who were mugged by how the democrats and the left have acted since 1999, and most notably post 9-11. It was the 9-11 attack that provided a final tipping jolt to jog us into a top-to-bottom review of the democrats' positions and beliefs and what we learned repelled us, because in having minds apparently so "open their brains fell out", the left revealed itself as both morally bankrupt and a threat to the actual values they professed to hold -- a dangerous twosome. And today's standard bearers of the democrat party - Pelosi, Kennedy, Biden, Schumer, Rangel, Reid, the list goes on - are so often so over the top, and so distorting on average, that even when they're speaking a rare truthful tidbit it's impossible to take them seriously. Which brings us to the recent NYC democrat mayoral debate, which was a real carnival of clowns, with Ferrer offering a shocking new stock transfer tax that would guarantee an exodus of the exchanges to New Jersey, and Weiner offering to slap higher taxes on everyone above the "middle class", which he has never and continues to refuse to define, but which basically in his lexicon means anyone earning more than $150,000. Everyone living in NY knows $150K is by no means "rich" for a family with a few kids and mortgage in a city where even a basic house can cost $450,000 while still needing eighty-thousand dollars of work to whip into shape. So a little bit of advice to Weiner and his fellow tax-o-crats: keep on taxing if you want to drive us all out. Monday, April 18, 2005
Another Carpetbagger As Our Salvation? What is it with recent arrivals to New York? They're here for a few years, or in some cases, not even, and suddenly they have the answers to save New York. First there was Robert Kennedy back when, then Hillary, Bloomberg, and now the oily former democrat Senator from Nebraska, Bob Kerrey, is making noise about running for mayor. Hey, Bob? Can we call you Bob? What about your home state of Nebraska? Tired of having been the governor and senator from the great plains? We have to admire the cajones on Kerrey for thinking we'd vote for him. But it once again highlights the upper westside liberal echo chamber as the cacophony booms forth from their small liberal fishbowl. Good luck, Mr. Kerrey. May you have as much success in your mayoral bid as that other detestable senator with the homophone last name had recently in his quest for higher office. Tuesday, April 05, 2005
The Unbearable Buffoonery of Being Thomas L. Friedman Remember the saying "better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than speak and have all doubt removed"? Whenever we hear this epigram the prolix pundit Thomas L. Friedman comes to mind. After reading his breathless book, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, back in 2000 we realized "here's a man smart enough to be able to read the map, but not smart enough to realize his map is often upsidedown." That's a very dangerous combination. And apropos of nothing we were killing a few minutes this evening when we spotted the ever energetic Mr. Friedman regaling Charlie Rose with his bullet-point world view presentation. [ed. note - you'd think with a guy this tight with the intelligentsia someone would sign him up for presentation lessons by now, because while chewing the cud with Charlie he was hopping in his seat and flailing his arms like an overly-caffeinated palsy sufferer. ] But we digress. Here's a tip for spotting a blowhard pundit: eventually they all come around to the conclusion "we aren't graduating enough people in engineering and science." As corollaries to this earth-shaking theorem, the windbag spouting this inevitably isn't in engineering or science; doesn't work with engineers or scientists; and doesn't realize that, hey, we don't really need 50 million engineers and scientists in a country of 295 million to keep the lights on, computers humming and to come up with a few dozen good ideas each week. Then, as surely as electrons repulse each other what happens is once we climb on the "won't someone churn out more engineers" train the next boom cycle derails and suddenly untold legions of unemployed and unemployable programmers, physicists, engineers and bushels of other scientists are standing on street corners. In the spirit of global sharing, we have a tip for good Mr. Friedman: "what we need, Thom, are more people with good business ideas and business models so we can keep the engineers, chemists, biologists, researchers, physicists and other scientists we have happily and productively employed." However, to drop a dime in your krazy kitty we'd be more than happy to send you back to school to get an engineering degree. We'll even give you a choice of CalTech or MIT; that's - Calcutta Technical Institute and Mitrandishia Institute of Technomics. Just let us know which you'd prefer and, then, say hello to the rest of the Class of 2007!! Sunday, April 03, 2005
Steadily Putting Us in the Poorhouse Our illustrious state legislature, never one to leave a dime unspent, has just finished patting itself on the back for passing the first ontime budget in 21 years. (See Assembly Completes Passage Of Fair, Balanced, On-Time Budget, NY State Assembly, Press Release, Mar. 31, 2005, available at http://www.assembly.state.ny.us/Press/20050331b/). Let that sink in for a minute : an entire generation passed before NY State had an on time budget. Does this mark a rebirth of The Empire State? Hardly. This $105- to $106,000,000,000 (that's BILLION with a B) dollar budget includes various increases at three-times the inflation rate -- not exactly penny pinching -- and raises a wide variety of "fees." (See E.J. McMahon, Budget Hoax, N.Y. Post, Mar. 30, 2005, available here (detailing fiscal machinations in current budget process)). If New York State and New York City continue spending on their current trend we predict there will be many more people like Mrs. Helming of Long Island, below, who has thrown in the towel and called it quits. Her letter was printed in the Mar. 21, 2005, issue of Newsday, here, and recently read on the floor of the NYS Assembly during the budget process last week. It certainly speaks to the experience of many people in New York who are screaming "enough!" Not a week goes by without us wondering here at Angry New Yorker if NYS is the best place for our children to work and live when they're grown, and its increasingly difficult each year to convince ourselves it is. We hope Mrs. Helming doesn't mind if we reprint her letter here, too. Sad to go, but so long to the cost of LI living, |