Living in 2021 NYC is an Intelligence Test

 if you stay, you have failed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q53Wxx7aLrs

Louis is fixated on all the vacant retail spaces because he is ( or was ) a walk-in street level business in NYC.

what i'm noticing is the dearth of traffic.  both foot and automobile.  look at pictures of NYC from the 1970s, when Times Square was an open air porn store and peep show emporium.  look at the streets jammed wall to wall with cars.  look at the sidewalks so jam packed with pedestrians they can't hardly keep from falling into the street and getting run over.  this NYC of 2021 ain't that NYC of 1975.

NYC has always been a shithole.  Guilani made some baby steps towards getting to not be a shithole but, in the end, New York City is full of New Yorkers ... there's only so far you can get when you're starting with that kind of raw material.

on the plus side, it was a really, really busy shithole where grifters could get grifting done.  but a grifter can't grift if he doesn't have any marks to run his game on

...

and what i'm seeing is a serious scarcity of marks.

How to Rhetoric: Jon Stewart rams the Wuhan Virology Lab "conspiracy theory" down Colbert's throat

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QynoJjm2lU

 

 

as Rhetoric, this is a master class in getting the shitlib audience to laugh and applaud the "racist" concept of the Wuhan Coronavirus originating from the gain-of-function research which everyone admits was being conducted at the Wuhan Virology Lab ... with funding authorized from the US Govt by Quack Anthony Fauci.

as Dialectic, of course, Stewart is playing a little fast and loose with the facts.  the normal English language transcription of it's Chinese name is as the "Wuhan Institute of Virology" and "Wuhan Virology Lab" is a common transposition.

but who am i to quibble with someone who just told the Truth to the ( few ) people who watch Colbert's show?  and got them to applaud it?