Grumpy…

F**king looters…

It’s started down in South Texas, and apparently the first one got shot by the homeowner. Too bad the bastard survived… 🙂

That crap doesn’t play well in Texas, just sayin…

But there are ‘other’ types of looting, overcharging for staples, like water for up to $90/case, and who knows how much for plywood!

And while I’m at it, another pet peeve, these stupid idjit TV commentators and crews that get on TV, “I’m standing in 90 MPH winds to show you, blah, blah, blah… They have to be ‘on scene’ to record all this crap, until it’s too late, then they scream for the police, or somebody to come save their asses. If it was up to me, they could rot in place. Sooner or later, one of them is going to get decapitated on live TV by a piece of metal, and I for one, won’t shed a tear. Maybe THEN the other idjits will think twice about how they manage weather broadcasting.

Texas Guard folks are on standby, sitting in their armories waiting to go south, as soon as the requests get processed, there are 50 up here that have volunteered and they’ll have a long ride in those Hummers, but they will be a great help once they get there.

Oh yeah, and one more thing… This… A racist HORSE???

Some students are claiming USC’s longtime mascot, a white horse, is a racist symbol. 

The horse is named Traveler, which was also the name of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee’s horse. The name was called out recently by a leader of the USC Black Student Assembly at a rally following the Charlottesville riots.

Article, HERE.

OBTW, Lee’s horse was a gray American Saddlebred named Traveller, not a white horse that’s supposed to be horse ridden by a Trojan 3000 years before the Civil War. The rest of the story is Richard Saukko, a salesman who started USC’s horse tradition 56 years ago in 1961. He bought a horse named Traveler for $5,000 and rode him in the Rose Bowl Parade.

USC officials noticed the pair and invited Saukko to perform at their football games.

Sigh…

Comments

Grumpy… — 30 Comments

  1. There is a youtube vid showing a reporter getting a stop sign to the head.

    Dad and I were putting tin on a barn when the breeze started up. He said, “we’re done”, as soon as the first puff blew. He had a story about some tin that got loose in a breeze, and took a man’s arms off below the elbow. He saw it coming and pushed his buddy out of the way, the tin took his extended arms. The way he acted, I think he witnessed it.

    And, there’s a reporter taken out by a fish as well!

  2. The yahoos standing out in the rain giving free advertising to LL Bean and Cabela’s are always saying about how the power is out wherever they are…so exactly why are they out standing in the wind and rain?? So the rest of us who are hundreds and thousands of miles away can see it rain in wherever? Doesn’t make much sense to me…

    All you can hope is that karma gets the scalpers back. $90 for a case of water?! Wow, just stick a clean bucket outside and catch rain. That’s clean, and there is always a few empty bottles around the house.

    Hoping everyone stays safe in SE Texas. On the bright side, I guess Harvey will kick the drought to the curb y’all have been dealing with the past few years.

  3. The more obtuse your claims of racism, the more ‘street creed’ comes your way within your group of losers. Just a way of hollering, “Hey, look at me”. Sadly, some take it seriously. Not much critical thinking from the left, eh?

  4. STx- Yep, I’ve seen the ‘remains’ after tin got to flying when I was based in PI after a typhoon…

    Suz- Agreed, and North Texas still needs some rain. We’re far enough north that we won’t see it though.

    WSF- Hadn’t thought of it that way, but you’re right… sigh

  5. Growing up military, and in tropical or southern locations, wind speed was always a keen topic. (My dad hated when the wind howled, btw.)

    I will watch the ‘reporters’ talk about X speed of wind and it usually looks, from rain slant, tree and flag movement, about 20-30mph slower. Maybe it’s just me, but I tend to think ‘Fake News’ when I hear them reporting.

    And.. an old storm joke.

    How can you tell where a storm hits (1990s-2005 version?)

    If Jim Cantore is coming to your state, there is a storm somewhere.
    If he is coming to your county, it’s a little more serious.
    Your town? Batten down the hatches.
    Your house on TV with him in front of it? You’re screwed.

  6. I liked the mayor who told people that wouldn’t evac to write their SSNs on the arms with Sharpie, to ease ID of the bodies…

    And how all the progressives were howling for Trump to “do something”, before the storm even made landfall.

    I got admit, though, the video I saw on Twitter with the dude out in the middle of the street with Old Glory may have ben the more ‘Murica! thing I’ve seen all year.

    • Just before Katrina, I remember one of the feds warning people that “fire ants can climb. And swim. Can you ride out a storm in a tree with fire ants? If not, evacuate.” That was one of the best short, persuasive speeches I’ve heard on radio.

  7. Andrew- Yeah, good point…

    Drang- Agreed! I’d have told them to write it on their foreheads too… 🙂

  8. It would be poetic to have news crews discover a dozen people hanging from tree limbs with signs on them identifying them as price gougers.

    Justice Texas Style…

    USC needs to trade in Traveler for a more politically correct black horse, which they can name ‘Old Crow’.

    • Well if you are going to go that route wouldn’t JIM Crow be much more appropriate (and accurate) – of course the dems might object to that since they were the ones responsible for those ‘laws’.

  9. When supplies are low, prices rise. I have the same visceral reaction to ‘price gouging’ that you do, but I have also seen too goddamn many ‘price gouging’ stories in the Media that turned out, on examination, to be so much bushwa. I would rather deal with any amount of human greed (which us, after all, readily countered by opportunists with pickup trucks) than the degree of Government control necessary to ‘prevent’ gouging. I expect consumers and retailers to behave in their own best interests. I expect the government to be slow, stupid, power-greedy, and inept.

    • What C. S. P. Schofield said. Price gouging sucks, but government efforts to *stop* price gouging would be even worse. Oh, and it’s a little off topic, but I’m waiting for the first leftist “environmentalist” twit to spout off about “Hurricane” Harvey being caused by “Anthropogenic Climate Disruption” “becuz science!” It’s not a hurricane, it’s a tropical storm. There is absolutely no scientific, rational justification or evidence to support the claim that “Global Warming causes more storms!!1eleven!”. None. In fact, we’ve had fewer hurricanes than (as far as I can recall) *any* model predicted we would by this time. It’s (the claim that global warming causes hurricanes, etc, more than any other possible factors) nothing more than religious dogma, cloaked in a perverse veneer of “Scientific Respectability,” and vomited out by unthinking, dimwitted acolytes. *breathes deeply* Sorry…I’ll shaddap.

      I hope you all are safe, and your loved ones as well! Praying for the folks trapped in this mess.

      PS: It was awesome meeting you and Mr. Grant at Libertycon! You guys were really, really cool. Thanks for listening to my rambling, heh. I was a little nervous, if it wasn’t obvious… *sheepish expression*

      • Okay, I guess I should have checked again before opening my big mouth…apparently Harvey *was* upgraded to hurricane status. *sheepish expression* The rest of my comment still applies, though, if that bit of stupidity doesn’t overshadow it… *facepalm* sorry about that. :-/

        • Okay, this is embarrassing. Shoot. It *started* as a Hurricane, and is *now* (I think. I’m about ready to give up while I’m behind, frankly…) a tropical storm. If that’s wrong, too, just shoot me already. *headdesk*

  10. Several things, number one, here in the Texas Hill Country a bit NW of San Antonio we are just short of one inch of rain since this started and folks are sending us messages asking if we all right and we do need a bit more rain. Texas is a big place and the folks around Houston are really in a bad spot.

    Port Aransas, our daughter and her husband have a beach house down there and they went down last Thursday and boarded stuff up and helped their neighbors. They brought a friend who lives there back up here to their house, husband and wife their son and friend and great dane dog. Those folks still don’t know how much of a house they will have when they go home and son in law says they pay a lot for insurance and it will be a while before we know how soon anything will be back but no use in fretting a the moment.

    Third thing, an acquaintance of mine, not a friend because I am not sure if he has many friends at all was the medical examiner for Galveston County when they had their last bad hurricane. He said he became a medical examiner because his patients don’t have many complaints but anyway he did post mortem work on folks pulled out of the weeds and trees for weeks after the hurricane and he told me they were really messy and without DNA from somewhere it was hard to make an identification. Maybe the Sharpie on the arm is a good idea if a person wants to stay and die.

    Last thing – My fellow Texan dumbasses keep trying to see if cars make good boats when they drive into water, they don’t and they really don’t make good submarines so stay home and stay out high water running over the road. Always wait for a pickup smaller than yours to make it through first.

  11. What Sam L. and C. S. P. Schofield said. All the difference in the world — moral and economic — between looting and *offering* goods for sale. With a looter, you’re worse off. With a so-called “price gouger” — who has no obligation to supply you with anything — you can just say no and be as well off as you’d be if the merchant never existed.

    If you think water and other goods can and should be sold in the disaster areas for lower price…who, exactly, is stopping you?

  12. TxRed- If you’ve ever seen a nest of fire ants float by, you WILL stay out of the water AND the trees! :-0

    Sam- No good answer. Sorry…

    LL- Snerk, both of those would work.

    CSP- You do have a point.

    Old Tex- Yep, good folks ARE out there, and those idjits exist anywhere… Ohio a few years ago was a ‘classic’ example of the submersible cars…

    Jeffrey- Stop trying to put words in my mouth. I never said anything about selling for a particular price, but I do find a 2250% profit a ‘tad’ excessive. With a looter, you just shoot them, period, end of that problem. With a gouger, you don’t buy, and send someone to get the material/water/whatever at a reasonable price elsewhere.

    • OldNFO: Stop trying to put words in *my* mouth. I never said you wanted to restrict selling to a single price.

      What business is it of anyone else’s how much profit someone makes, in a mutually consensual transaction?

      (And by the way, how are you measuring the profit? Which costs count: The normal costs of someone who’s long since already been in the business during normal times, or the expected costs of replacing these goods after Harvey *and* the cost, risk and personal danger — especially for someone not used to selling these things?)

      If you don’t want people to think you want X treated like a looter, don’t call X “another type” of looter.

  13. Hey Old NFO;

    I have seen a bit of news especially with the flooding and some looting. I guess those flatscreens needed to be saved I suppose. it did do my heart fine to hear about a looter getting capped by the homeowner. You staying dry?

  14. I really don’t get why the major networks have so many news reporters out and about, stating the obvious. Shouldn’t their first priority be protecting their employees, rather than placing them in such dangerous circumstances? Do I really need to see my local weather girl tied to a boardwalk railing in a hurricane to understand that I should stay put until the storm is over?

  15. I saw a clip with the Texas Attorney General regarding price gouging. He said that those who charge exorbitant prices (IIRC he said anything over 10% above normal retail) can and will be prosecuted under Texas law. I forget the exact fine but I think it was around $5,000 per incident and double that if the ‘victim’ was 65 or older They might be better off being shot as looters!
    I wonder if anyone went after ‘less expensive than sand’ for what they did after Sandy Hook…………..

  16. Bob- Yeah, sigh… W’re 500 miles north, in the middle of a high.

    Mrs.C- Nope, me neither…

    Gomez- Just saw that tonight, and I don’t know on Sandy, which wasn’t a hurricane, it was a tropical storm when it finally came ashore.

  17. Bob: we were watching some guy saving his flat screen and the reporter was remarking on it.
    There were two more in the back of his truck that were almost unnoticeable.
    Was the reporter actually recording a looter?
    I think so.

  18. When there are fire ants nearby, I try to stay off the land as well as out of the trees and the water.

  19. Price controls don’t keep prices down- They ensure supply slows, then stops. The effect is the same as being forced to use inflated currency as a medium of exchange.

    I second the article on coyote blog- very succinct.

  20. What’s the difference between what we call “Congress” and “looters” anyway?

    From someone who just 1) did their budget for Sept. 2) just paid various property, personal property, and ambulance taxes and 3) has been on the phone with our state senator asking why the hell WV retirees are paying taxes on their retirement income and every thing else and why I shouldn’t move and take my whole damn pension out of the state.

    Looters, politicians, same thing.

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