As IF Times

link Restaurant with No Weapons, No Concealed Firearms Sign Robbed at Gunpoint.

It sure is crummy when a good plan goes awry.  Sure, it makes sense to some; simply post a prohibition against something and voila, problem solved.  As long as two things are present: firstly, that people can actually read and secondly that people give a flying flick about what’s on the sign.  It may have just occured to the owners of this restaurant that posting a no guns sign at their premise is as useful as a no poop sign for dogs at a fire hydrant.  To the crooks who robbed the place at gunpoint, the proprietors may just as well have placed a neon arrow at the register saying “take me, I’m yours”.

But this logic is lost on much of that segment of society who believe that waving their “I’m a Vegetarian” t-shirt will prevent them from being eaten by a lion in the wild.  A similar gesture of stupidity is occurring now in another context, that involving the fate of 300 odd girls in Nigeria being held captive by a terrorist Muslim group whose name sounds amusingly similar to the band that sung “Whiter Shade Of Pale” from the 60’s.   The brilliant campaign that has been thought up is to use Twitter and mount a social media campaign: specifically, hashtag, bringbackourgirls:

pleading celebs

Undoubtedly, the pressure brought to bear by celebrities and social media will convince the armed militants to give up their control of the poor girls.  The consequences of not complying are too fearsome to consider.  What if they get unfriended?  If only someone had the foresight to place a no kidnapping sign at the girls’ school at the time.  They wouldn’t be in the pickle they’re in now. Also, this same social media campaign aims to shame the men who would be potential buyers of these girls as slaves:  “Real men don’t buy girls”.  Boy, I bet the market for buyers of the girls has dried up completely.  Given that the terrorists have threatened to sell the girls off at $12 apiece, why doesn’t someone just offer to take the entire bunch for $3000 on a bulk discount?

Increasingly, the delusional are living in a bizarro world of theoretical benigness and faux moral piety wherein the intrusion of harsh reality is an affront to be dismissed contemptuously. Those that choose to live in reality are shamed at best or at worst, demonized, even criminialized for actions that offend the delusional.  And of course, woe be to any who would willfully or unwittingly say something that is deemed to be offensive by the PC gestapo.   Even the normally brash Mark Cuban had to backpeddle a bit when he candidly stated that if he saw a black kid with hoodie walking his way, he’d cross the street.  Apparently, “black kid in a hoodie” was dog whistle speak for Trayvon Martin.  Cuban used to have more cojones, but now is bowing  to the PC police too.  Mark, Mark, Mark.

Putting up signs and imagining that bad things won’t happen to good people is an admirable life philosophy…if you’re an 8 year old girl.  Usually, people grow out of that stage of naivete and become adults.  It’s not clear to me why the views of the delusional have become mainstream, but I suspect it has something to do with the state of protracted adolescence that’s epidemic in the West.  The bemusement turns to despair when you realize that it’s the delusional people who are in positions of influence and that adolescence for them is a permanent state.

Link Mark Cuban: Donald Sterling’s Comments ‘Abhorrent’ « CBS Dallas / Fort Worth.

Somehow, intemperate comments made in private by Donald Sterling has managed to usurp all other issues ailing the world and is the primary focus for all mainstream news.  His ‘abhorrent’ behavior has given news outlets respite from reporting on abstract things such as the Benghazi scandal or war in the Ukraine.  He’s even managed to push the remarkable Kim Kardashian off the front page of America’s news outlets.  What we are witnessing is nothing less than the most public lynching of an individual since Paula Deen.

Sterling’s history of behavior is not exactly the sort that would befit a NAACP achievement award, as that organization embarrassingly found out.  In the aftermath of the accusations, people who were once proudly associated with Sterling (or his money) disappeared with a ping and a swirl of dust, like the Roadrunner in a Wile E Coyote cartoon.

Apparently, the revelation that Sterling may hold some antipathy towards elements of the black community was a shock to people on the looney left but also to those on the newly sanctimonious right.  His comments were not made in a public speech or in an open forum.  They were uttered in private and we don’t even know the circumstances.  Oddly, someone (the offended gal pal) just happened to have a camera rolling. Maybe she was insisting that ebonics was a language.  The resultant firestorm was powerful and it was immediate.  The chorus of tsk tsking from all quarters was like the drone of cicadas on a summer’s evening in the Midwest.   Sterling became an instant pariah.   It’s hard to feel any pity for the guy, since as the old saying goes, if you lie with dogs, you’re going to get fleas.

What we should all feel pity for, if not absolute outrage, is the blatant assault on something infinitely more sacred and which is rapidly disappearing from our society: that is, privacy.  Even fellow NBA team owner Mark Cuban, noted foot in mouth guy,  recognizes that the circumstances that led to the public lynching of Sterling are the beginnings of a very slippery slope for privacy.  When you couple the fact that most everyone has a cellphone capable of recording any conversation and that many topics these days are strictly off limits as determined by the PC police, the opportunities for future extortion and character assassination are now objects of lawyers’ wet dreams.

As it is, every owner of any professional team is now on notice that they too can be brought before the PC kangaroo court and be stripped of their teams and their reputations if an offhand remark offends any of the exhaustive list of aggrieved members of society.  That’s not a small thing.  Imagine that anyone can be stripped of a multi-million dollar enterprise just because somebody doesn’t like what they said…in private.   That’s essentially state sponsored confiscation…or outright theft.  We can bet that this wouldn’t stop with owners of sports teams.  This policy will affect anyone who runs a large entity, holds public office, anyone who can be gainfully extorted.

It’s amusing that for all of the rhetoric about due process and free markets, the fortunes of Sterling’s ball team is not decided by the wallets of the public, but by a kangaroo court of sanctimonious sycophants.  Naturally, ‘appropriate’ buyers are already in the wings willing to take over the successful operation.  This is huge shot across the bow for American society.  The rule of law is giving way to tribal rule.  With these kinds of stakes at risk, you can be sure that an entire wave of rude hand gestures will emerge in place of verbal insults.  If anyone gets called on it, they can always claim they were misunderstood.