The rain was bucketing down last night, and we have the bucket to prove it.
It rained like a mad bastard here last night, with lightning strikes aplenty and one thunderclap that sounded like the SWAT team triggering a flash-bang before hitting the door.
The cacti got a charge from the evening’s rain.
The weather probably kept the cops and citizens from doing it hand to hand again downtown, as they did on Sunday night. Call me simple, but I don’t see how setting Dumpster fires and trashing the KiMo Theatre advances the Revolution.
Nor do I believe one achieves peace through superior firepower. The Albuquerque Police Department apparently broke out the flash-bangs, tear gas, and rubber bullets in honor of the occasion, saying some miscreant fired on them.
But hey, this is Albuquerque. If you don’t hear gunfire when the sun goes down, that just means everyone’s busy reloading.
The journalism performed in honor of the hullabaloo was so comically inept that it’s hard to get any sense of what actually went down. Much noise, very little signal.
Why, it’s enough to make a fella open up one a’ them whatchamacallits? Social-media accounts! I hear they come with cute kitten videos and everything.
Tags: Black Bandana Brigade, cops
Mad Blog Media 
June 2, 2020 at 4:29 pm |
Hey, the fact that the APD didn’t mow down half a dozen people speaks volumes to the effectiveness of the Federal Consent Decree. Amiright?
Meanwhile, some protesters were blocking the Old Santa Fe Trail/Paseo de Peralta intersection up here and one got into a pissing match with a motorist. The motorist brushed the protestor’s bum with the side of his car. Being Fanta Se, that was a major incident to our delicate Fanta Se progressives. Shit, I went over the hood of a pickup truck once while being a strike picket captain back in Hawaii and thought of it as a badge of honor, not an excuse to break out the crying towels. If you are gonna get out in the street, HTFU.
Talked to my brother Steve last night after hearing about the two cops deliberately run over by a peaceful protestor in an SUV back in Buffalo, NY. Steve’s wife works for the P.D. but she was out of the loop.
Apparently both cops hospitalized with serious injuries and I think a couple people in the Urban Assault Vehicle may have holes in them. Steve had to duck home from his job as an on call supervisor with the water authority using a special pass because of the emergency curfew. In Buffalo, fixing shit during off hours is a normal occurrence. You pray the rosary when you drive under a train overpass.
Steve is pretty cynical. Without people breaking shit, no one pays attention to the underling disease. When the shit starts hitting the fan and the dumpster fires start, suddenly the cure is worse than the disease. Choose your poison. Gotta agree with Steve. We got to get the pressure regulator unjammed from the national pressure cooker or there will be food and shrapnel all over Uncle Sam’s Kitchen.
June 2, 2020 at 6:05 pm |
Trust me mi amigo, open a bottle of Black Butte Porter before opening a anti-social media account. It’s safer and better for the health, especially mental health!
June 3, 2020 at 6:37 am |
Every time I think about relaunching the old Twitter account … I think again.
June 4, 2020 at 10:42 am |
Twitter sucks.
June 2, 2020 at 6:09 pm |
By the way, the Soma DC Disc hasn’t sold yet. I told my buds in the shop to never mind. We are going to do what you did, turn it into a townie complete with Microshift thumb shifters. I already have some flat bar Shimano 600 brake levers that handle disc brakes.
June 3, 2020 at 5:48 am |
POB I encourage you to consider avoiding a flat bar in lieu of a swept back style. Your neck, wrists and breathing will reward you with no complaints. Although I personally find the Rivendell crew too full of themselves, they got bike positioning down. I did find once I went more upright that a wider saddle was called for. Good luck with conversion and steel IS real it turns out. But not for kayak paddles!
June 3, 2020 at 6:18 am |
What Herb said. It was interesting to experiment with a swept-back bar, and maybe if I made the Double Cross my daily driver for a while I’d get more comfortable with it, but I much prefer the flat Easton bar I use on the Voodoo Wazoo. Thus my Double Cross will be getting one of those bad boys directly.
June 3, 2020 at 6:51 am |
Thanks guys for the advice, and that is where I am going. I should have been more specific. It will be a riser bar, probably from Soma, and a stem change might be required as well. I have a Terry Liberator which will replace the Terry Ti Fly that is currently on the bike. I will finish up with a set of Shimano M324 pedals that I saved from one of Sandy’s bikes. A bigger rack on the back, and perhaps a IRD 30/46 crank in the future, and Bob’s my uncle!
June 2, 2020 at 6:31 pm |
IMHO many (most?) young people today (or snotty little snowflakes as I am more and more inclined to refer to them) have spent their whole lives being force-fed the Gospel of Victimhood & Entitlement by a politically-correct hustler class. They are now excoriating the Richmond police because they got a little whiff of tear gas. BFD. Back in the day™ they would have been herded by horses, walloped with nightsticks, and chewed on by German Shepherds. Not to mention the actual arrests for vandalism that would have ensued. The cops deserve a lot of credit for how far they have progressed, and how restrained their behavior has been.
Back when I was in the streets, the police chief was a WWII vet. His behavior & leadership has always made me wonder which side he was on. Unfortunately, I missed his funeral. The mayor back then never apologized to us, either.
I’m afraid Steve is probably right, though.
Givens:
I loathe political correctness.
No, I won’t diagram any of my sentences.
Everybody better stay off my damn lawn, such as it is.
I can find plenty of cat videos without getting any nearer to that antisocial media §¥~# than this, thank you very much.
BTW I ordered a new bike today for the first time in about 15 years.
Maybe I’ll be less crotchety when that comes in.
June 2, 2020 at 8:57 pm |
I agree with you that we have a little too much delicacy expected by today’s youngsters. My mom and stepdad were both Great Depression kids brought up by a single mom. In my mom’s case, after her father (my grandpa) slid his motorcycle into the path of a Buffalo streetcar. Not sure how my stepdad’s old man died but he flicked it in early as well.
I finally got around to asking my stepdad why he wanted to move back to Alden. Turns out that was where his grandpa’s chicken farm was before it all went to hell. Some history there I wish I had known about.
Back then it was about Harden the Fuck Up. We lost that steel edge.
June 3, 2020 at 7:13 am |
A buddy of mine left the regular Army to become a full-time West Point professor, and has now taught 3 generations. He had observed that every year, the Ps talk about how soft the kids are, and yet, as soon as they graduate, we expect them to do twice as much as their predecessors. So he dug through the archives, analyzed cadet evaluations from CPT and LTC tactical officers, and found that we’ve been saying “kids today …” since, well, since Adam and Eve.
The funniest part is, ‘proximately the same argument was made by old farts and explaining how women should not be in combat arms assignments. The same argument in the sense that it was a bunch of old guys looking back, not through rose colored glasses, but through distorted lenses. Every time somebody pointed out that women can’t do as many push-ups as men can, my buddy pulled out his chart that showed that women in 1990 we’re doing more push-ups than men were in 1950. Turns out it was the old guys talking about how soft everybody was who had the softest set of numbers on their PT scorecards.
But back to the kids …
The worst part is, we blame the kids instead of looking in the mirror at who’s been a-raising them. If the kids grew up expecting participation trophies just for attending the first practice, exactly who’s fault is that?
I’ve training 18 year olds and taught K-12 … seen a lot of bad parents. Never seen a bad kid. And from a sheer toughness standpoint, we’re asking way more from the West Point Class of 2020 than we did of my peers in the ‘80s.
June 3, 2020 at 7:19 am |
How many of y’all are active participants in your neighborhood PTA/PTO? You want to hear a bunch of sniffling and whining, the loudest bunch in any school isn’t any of the classrooms, it’s the 30-year-olds running the PTA.
I challenge you to attend PTA meetings for one semester and then tell me that the problem is actually the kids.
June 3, 2020 at 8:15 am |
I’m not blaming the kids. You don’t come into this world fully formed. I do blame the parents if there are problems. Like I said, having been raised by two Great Depression era parents, I was not coddled or given the Participation Trophy. My youngest brother, 14 years my junior, grew up when our parents were older and stopped caring. You can tell the difference between him and all the rest of us.
Good friend of mine who has kids said he went to the PTO meetings back in the day. No one else did. He tried refereeing youth soccer and saw parents get into fistfights over their kids relative performance.
My post doc who I mentored from 2012 to 2014 was raised by a single mom who is a QA/QC engineer in the FN factory in SC. He is tough as nails, disciplined, and four times as bright as I am. Parenting matters. I have a friend who recently retired from one of those big Federal labs that will remain nameless. He said that when he criticized the junior scientists who he was mentoring as not knowing the difference between modelling and critically testing their models, they just got flustered and complained he was tough. I don’t recall having that luxury when I was a newbie trying to figure things out.
I had just started my Ph.D. in the isotope lab. The instructions for doing lead separations was not crystal clear. On my first try, I ended up throwing away the sample and saving the residue. Told that to my advisor, complaining about the written procedure. He literally giggled and said “well, I guess you won’t do that again”. So after feeling like an idiot for a few minutes, I went back in and did the whole procedure a second time, thinking a little more carefully.
But the safe zones, trigger warnings, banned campus clubs, all that stuff to separate young people from adversity? Not sure I buy into that.
June 3, 2020 at 8:09 am |
My sis and I had it easy-breezy compared to our parents. Old man born in 1918, mom in ’24, so they got to see some shit. High-school educations, splintered families, Great Depression, WWII (“The Big One”), etc.
We got the prototypical middle-class upbringing. Dad had a good job, free medical care, discount grub and goodies at the commissary/BX, housing allowance or actual on-base housing, an excellent retirement plan, your basic American Dream.™ Mom was a “homemaker,” which was a lot harder than being a homebuilder and took a lot longer, too.
So we got three hots and a cot, the liberty to roam more or less at will without the regimentation of “play dates,” and serviceable educations (augmented by parents who believed in same). We went to college, and found careers that weren’t just jobs.
This is the long way around to noting that I ain’t nearly as hard as the old man and woman were. I knew that unless we got nuked I was gonna be OK, if I didn’t fuck up too outrageously and go to the stripey hole. I wonder how many of today’s young people have that sort of confidence in the future.
June 3, 2020 at 10:26 am |
On your last paragraph. I always knew I had it easier than my parent’s generation and that I had it easy because they had it hard, but nothing was ever certain. That’s been true for most of my cousins and in-laws, who saw how their parents came back from the Depression, the Big War, etc,, etc. and took jobs that were below their abilities, had they had the opportunity to go on with higher ed and all that. We kids all had, as you say, 3 hots and a bedroom, playtime, and always knew there would be food on the table. Not to mention abundances of college choices and state and Federal loans.
My mom and stepdad came out of their own rough youth with their own sets of issues, which sometimes erupted into situations where my brother and I said “I think its time to get the hell out of the house for a few centuries”. I finally put a stop to one of those bad hair days by throwing a pair of lawn shears at someone and saying enough already. The old man and old lady finally figured out their own devils but it left a bad residue in the kid’s brains. But we all recovered. I even have a good relationship with the Old Man. Took a quarter of a bleeping century….
So I wonder sometimes if I am so hard on others because nothing was ever easy, nor did I expect it to be. The old “if it doesn’t kill you, it makes you stronger”. But sometimes it just makes you bitter, not better.
June 3, 2020 at 6:47 am |
When I was a young pinko we skipped the random-vandalism bits. It was hazardous enough just being a hairy commie peacenik marching in the streets. We settled for denouncing small shopowners as petit-bourgeoisie. That sure showed ’em.
June 2, 2020 at 8:46 pm |
It’s scary that the storm was bad, its terrifying that you know what a flash-bang sounds like……..
June 3, 2020 at 6:51 am |
I have a vivid imagination that is proving less and less remunerative. Plus I used to watch the occasional TV cop show.
I got tear-gassed once, but that was in junior high when some dimbulb who found a round managed to puncture it in science class. Boy, did that ever clear the room.
June 3, 2020 at 6:55 am |
I got a whiff of tear gas in Chicago in 1968. Once during the riots, and once during the Democratic National Convention. Just happened to be downwind in the wrong place on my commute back home from work. During the riots, I got stuck at work since my office was on the West Side.
June 3, 2020 at 7:07 am |
My only experience with tear gas was in summer NROTC training. They put you all in a room and let in the gas, Treblinka style. You gotta put on the gas mask (I think that was the drill, but its been 46 years) and stand there for a while. Then everyone gets to come out, unlike Treblinka.
Or something like that. Most of us got a whiff of the gas as we fumbled with our equipment but not exactly a full blast as one would get downwind of the DNC.
Goofiest thing I ever did in science class? The teacher was showing us how reactive alkali and alkali earth metals were by taking sodium out of an oil filled jar and letting spontaneously combust and then lighting up some magnesium ribbon. That was cool, so I swiped some of the ribbon. We snuck down to the boy’s crappers and turned off the power and shorted a bunch of the electric outlets with strips of Mg ribbon. Then turned on the power. Was quite amusing, until I got the mandatory march to the Principal’s Office.
June 3, 2020 at 10:24 am |
In basic training we put our masks on, then when in the CS gas house. Once in, and when we all believed our masks did work, they told us to take them off. Then we stayed until everyone took a breath. I think the military still does it. Funny thing is that overseas a favorite prank was to CS some assholes bunker or tent. That shit is serious in an enclosed space.
June 3, 2020 at 10:28 am
That’s it, Pat. Thanks for recovering my memory.
June 2, 2020 at 9:18 pm |
If there is any good news tonight, it looks like Steve King is getting the boot ride in Iowa.
June 3, 2020 at 6:34 am |
Yup. Off he goes. Downside is, his replacement is likely to be another gibbering Trumpetista who is just a little less obvious.
June 3, 2020 at 11:37 am |
“Nor do I believe one achieves peace through superior firepower. The Albuquerque Police Department apparently broke out the flash-bangs, tear gas, and rubber bullets in honor of the occasion, saying some miscreant fired on them.”
When they’re given the tools, they have to use them. Production for use.
June 3, 2020 at 5:20 pm |
Once again history rhymes!
“I see no hope for the future of our people if they are dependent on frivolous youth of today, for certainly all youth are reckless beyond words… When I was young, we were taught to be discreet and respectful of elders, but the present youth are exceedingly wise [disrespectful] and impatient of restraint”.
(Hesiod, 8th century BC)
June 3, 2020 at 5:56 pm |
Speaking of tools, or fools, somebody wrote a book on what many of us have been thinking and saying for some time.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/6/3/21257133/trump-2020-election-meltdown-lawrence-douglas
June 3, 2020 at 9:32 pm |
Gosh, I knew I needed to read something to put me in a better mood. Now where is that icepick I can drive into my skull?
June 4, 2020 at 6:20 am |
You don’t want to read this graf a half-cup of joe into your morning: