1 Bloomberg is the latest in a long long line of puritan lefties.

2 Meanwhile, crime increases -- even if the police statistics show otherwise.

3 It was Andrew Dice Clay who said almost 20 years ago;

"These days, you can butt-fuck your buddy on a street corner but you can't light up a Marlboro"

4 New York City, like San Francisco, should levy a 50 percent tax on foods for consumer or restaurant purchase that originate more than 400 miles from the City -- you know, to cut down on wasteful transportation that causes greenhouse gas emissions. The restaurants, of course, should have the tax levvied on the menu prices. No more of this Tuscan olive oil - New Jersey olive oil will do fine. And any seafood you can't catch in Long Island Sound isn't allowed. Let's see if they really want to put their principles into practice. And then we can talk about the 100 percent carbon tax on hotel rooms rented to visitors from out of town, who should know better than to create all that CO2 by traveling to those cities.

5 To too many in the press the answer would be Guiliani.

6 They want to control everything that goes in, and everything that comes out. 

7 " ‘Where can I smoke now?’ one New Yorker said to a newspaper. ‘In an underground fortress of shame?’" I've been in that fortress. It's really crowded, especially when it rains.

8 I find a delicious irony in the attitudes of urban Lefty elite control freaks who hold up Europe as an ideal

Yet the French, British, and Germans smoke like chimneys and think the health nuts are a pack of killjoys

I'm reminded of an incident where Wayne Gretszky was interviewed at an underground cigar bar;

"In Canada, we discovered we hate fascism more than smoking"

9 Did anyone see the menu from the State Dinner for Angela Merkel last week?

Jam packed with fare that Moo-chelle and Mayor Mike would forbid to us peasants

10 Yet New York and California are sending delegations to Texas to find out how and why they've weathered Great Depression 2.0

Don't they read the scribblings of Paul Krugman, Super Genius who said that Texas is on the verge of collapse while New York is poised for a new golden age?

Or didn't they read Thomas "Cliff Clavin" Friedman who pounds the table that we should emulate China (which is quietly collapsing)

11 Don't forget the sneaky way around the Second Amendment, by suing states that have almost non-existent gun control laws.

12

Scary piece. Very familiar sounding...

 

"In Canada, we discovered we hate fascism more than smoking"

Posted by: kbdabear at June 12, 2011 12:43 PM (so1xa)

I think I remember those days. Now, it's a polite, genteel fascism, all for our own good. My hometown has large bike figures painted every 100 meters showing which way to ride your bikes on the street. Seriously.

13

Nurse Bloomberg's form of soft fascism has little to do with perceived ideals found in Europe and a lot to do with being a mean-spirited needle dicked finger-wagging buzzkill who thinks everyone should live like him.

The Mayor is not the first to impose his particular lifestyle choices on the population that elected him, but he is the worst.

14 In NY we have an education system that's a complete failure, but our Upper West Side betters, worry about trans fats and second hand smoke, new York Fucking City pretty much says it all.

15 The whole city is one big racket.

16 What are ya'all so shocked about??? We COVERED this in Chapter 8.

17 My hometown has large bike figures painted every 100 meters showing which way to ride your bikes on the street. Seriously.

Posted by: Stateless Infidel at June 12, 2011 01:02 PM (GKQDR)

Are you from Portland, OR?  They painted those damn things all over the place a few months ago using what I'm sure was eco-friendly paint.  It's wearing off already.  Tax dollars at work.

18 Bloomberg didn't kill NYC; the rebels, including those I despise for their lefty, anarchist ways were priced out of NYC, paving the way for unchecked Bloomberg fascism.  Or, alternatively, there just aren't enough young people around due to birth rates.  Bloomberg is effect; not cause.

19 Every time I go back to NY these days I can't help but notice how tired and used-up the place feels, no matter how many digital billboards and crawls they put up.

20 When I lived in Saratoga everyone talked about how much better NY would be without 'The City". I guess things have not changed much.

21 I love how one of the dimwits in the comments section notes that it's usually right-wingers who usually push control.  I mean, has anyone learned yet that it's not the right that is continuously pushing for legislation that seeks to add yet more social controls on people?  How is it that leftist governments continuously push through these liberty-sucking programs, yet the right is constantly deriding as seeking to determine how people live their lives?  It's simply amazing.

22

Posted by: richard mcenroe at June 12, 2011 01:33 PM (qvify)

It's always hard to know how much of one's perceptions are real, and how much = getting older, and knowing more, and becoming jaded (or something), but I think New York is pretty much dead.  In fact, I suspect 9/11 and the Internet both killed NYC.  The saddest thing is that I think the energy that was here didn't go somewhere else; it just evaporated.  Brownstone Brooklyn (where I live) is still nice, and more energetic than Manhattan, but even here, I believe, a certain golden age is over.

Are there any cool cities anymore?  Maybe the creative energy of cities died when the Internet made it possible to a certain critical mass of things from anywhere?

The new WTC tower looks about 1/2 finished (the structure).  Will anyone care when it opens?

23

Posted by: Paul Zummo at June 12, 2011 01:48 PM (DScmV)

Totally.  The Right: lets limit abortion.  The Left:  left control everything else you do

I just started reading Mamet's new book.  So far, it's very good.

24 Paul Zummo at June 12, 2011 01:48 PM (DScmV)

You just don't get it, do you?  The Left are your betters and they really, really mean well.  And it's for the children... and stuff.  Report for re-education immediately, you EVIL RETHUGLICAN!!!11!!

25

Are you from Portland, OR?  They painted those damn things all over the place a few months ago using what I'm sure was eco-friendly paint.  It's wearing off already.  Tax dollars at work.

Posted by: aDuck at June 12, 2011 01:24 PM (3K+M

Small town in Ontario, Canada.

I've said it before, but one think I loved about South Korea were the motorbikes delivering food. They would drive through traffic between cars, park ON SIDEWALKS while making deliveries; I can't count the number of times they passed a few feet from me as I was walking through the streets until I got used to them.

They would deliver the food, ANY kind of food, soups, noodles, whatever then later come to pick up the dishes when you were done. And no tips! It was a beautiul chaos. I imagined how fantastic such a thing would be in my part of Canada. But then I knew it would never be possible. It just added to my list of why I no longer wanted to be Canadian.

Canada - "Come for the Human Rights Tribunals, stay for the rules and regulations into every facet of your lives..."

26 Are you from Portland, OR?  They painted those damn things all over the place a few months ago using what I'm sure was eco-friendly paint.  It's wearing off already.  Tax dollars at work.

We got those stupid bike figures with directional arrows on CT city streets last year.

27 It's just too easy to bitch about the Nanny State and then vote for people who want to make everyone like *you*.

The complaint that Republicans are unfairly tarred with Nanny State ambitions is correct, but relatively recent. Though the right (in America, anyway) has not been anywhere near the left for an awful long time, even 30 years ago there was more "balance" on that issue.

The American right has largely given up on government-driven social controls, the left is wedded to them more than ever. The ground-level left hasn't figured this out yet (also they lie a lot).

The "American" point is critical because the Nanny State is an assumption for both sides in most of Europe. There aren't enough Libertarians in England or Germany to hold a rally. (And whatever you say about Libertarians, and who doesn't, they're the opposite of the nanny state.)

28 A rose by any other name would smell as sweet. These are just the birth pangs of modern-day communism/totalitarianism.

Posted by: Soap MacTavish at June 12, 2011 02:19 PM (vbh31)

Because Detroit isn't enough of an example for them.

Or, you know, Pyongyang.

29 Should ONeill be our first International Co-Blogger?

30 @29: Detroit had its own Life After People episode. No special effects necessary.

31 Why do the dicks get all the comments?

32 32 Why do the dicks get all the comments? Posted by: Merovign, Dark Lord of the Sith at June 12, 2011 02:34 PM (bxiXv) I guess they grow on you.

33 Screw New York City with Anthony's wiener.

34 I don't understand the thing about smoking. You can smoke almost anywhere outdoors in the City, from public sidewalks to metro stops to right outside the subway stations...the only places you can't smoke (at least in Manhattan) are parks and "plazas" (don't have that much park space versus non-park space, let me tell ya). Is it really such a big deal that tourists or even native parents have some places they can take their kids without being subjected to unwanted cigarette smoke? The City is a hell of a lot more crowded with pedestrian traffic than probably anywhere else in the USA, so it's not hard to understand how overwhelming the crowd crush can get, especially in the tourist-magnet parks and plazas. The rest of the regulations are also fair enough, given the current state of public healthcare funding. I don't agree in principle with the statist regulation of, say, junk food, but especially in a nanny-state like New York, with its expansive social-welfare programs, it actually works out in my favour for people to be prevented by tax from pigging out on Reese's and Big Macs every day of their lives, then demanding that the government pay for the cardiovascular consequences of their lifestyles from age 50 till death. I don't think it's necessarily RIGHT to prevent people from doing lasting damage to their bodies with poor eating habits, but as long as the government is taxing me to help pay for those individuals' healthcare, I don't mind imposing restrictions, in the form of punitive taxation, on the amount of damage they can do to their bodies. Get rid of the greater evil (publically-funded healthcare), and then start talking about fighting the taxes on admittedly unhealthy trans-fats. Indeed, the ONLY tax that really makes logical sense is the consumption tax...other taxes (especially the progressive income tax, which New Yorkers pay twice or even thrice) are simply unfair and at wrongly punitive on their faces. Although the subset of consumption taxation that taxes especially dangerous forms of consumption (smoking, drinking, junk food, and so forth) is usually termed, derogatorily, a "sin tax", I put te question to you: doesn't it make SENSE, in the presence of public health funding, to tax unhealthier forms of consumption more heavily? Think of it this way: if the type of consumption in which you are taking part makes it more likely that you will one day drain the coffers of public health subsidies/Medicare/Medicaid, shouldn't you pay more into those coffers in the first place with higher taxes up front? It's almost like an insurance model. What tend to piss me off more are all of these "fat power" movements that have sprung up lately to "celebrate" the obese body, as though being obese is as trivial and unconscious a matter as being blond. Naturally, a good percentage of these people "celebrating their bodies" are the ones who would blame "healthy food" for being "expensive" or blame McDonald's for "selling poison", conveniently glossing over their refusal to spend 30 minutes cooking up a healthy dinner (which could easily be put together for the $7 a Big Mac "value" meal costs in the City) each night. It's not the government's place to regulate cultural shifts, by ANY means, but if the culture has regressed from tolerance to CELEBRATION of blatantly unhealthy lifestyles, and if the culture is simultaneously demanding that the government partially subsidise the treatment of the medical consequences of its unhealthy lifestyles, then I think the government sort of has a right to ask that the culture pay a little more for every instance of engaging in blatantly-unhealthy activities. Again, I'm not FOR "sin taxes", in principle. It's just that until the public-healthcare wind is ceased to blow, there's no reason to take down the "sin-tax" windmills. They sort of help the people who are responsible adults (and of course, PERSONAL responsibility is the essence of what has come to be known as "conservatism") by rightfully shifting some of the public-health burden to their less-responsible counterparts. In principle, I agree that we should as a matter of course let people do whatever they want with their bodies...but, and this is CRUCIAL, only if they will reap their own consequences. In a world such as ours where the public reaps part of the consequences, in the form of tax dollars, of every excessively unhealthy citizen's personal choices, then there should be a way to ensure that those unhealthy citizens pay their fair share of the tax burden. And the no smoking in parks is just good sense. Again, you can smoke anywhere you want on the sidewalks...is it too much to ask that there be a few public outdoors places where children can be taken to be away from smoke?

35 How is it you're paying for the Big Mac eaters' healthcare?

36 I grew up in NYC...moved out in '86. Today, I drove across 34th Street, from the Midtown Tunnel to the Lincoln Tunnel--ONLY ONE WESTBOUND LANE FOR CARS in 2011, thanks to a buses only lane (there were few buses spotted as I drove west on 34th.