Motherfuckers… too late now, and I don’t have the money for another air ticket.
Category: Gummint
Never Again
It is only when one leaves America does the shattering truth emerge that as much as we hate U.S. bureaucracy and deplore its inefficiency and tortoise-like attitude, just one encounter with the Third World has us weeping with relief when all we have to do, say, is renew a driver’s license down at the local DMV.
So New Wife and I decided to deplete our savings and try to repeat our earlier, abortive attempt to visit her #1 Son and family (grandchildren!!!) in Sydney, Australia. (The first trip, of course, was nuked by Covid and the OzGov’s pathetic overreaction thereto. That only cost us $1,500 for NW’s air ticket.)
Of course, even without Covid, Straya throws all sorts of shit at anyone who might want to spend some tourist dollars to visit their poxy country (pop. 25,000) — you have to apply for a visitor’s visa (from a list of about 50 different categories) before you can even get onto an airliner. Cost of said application: ~$340 per person. However, the Dept. of Home Affairs boasts, it only takes as little as 36 hours for it to be approved (except where otherwise indicated by 
). Of course, using Covid as an excuse, the time was not 36 hours, oh no: New Wife applied in February of this year, and it arrived promptly on May 15; I applied for mine on April 1, and ATOW it still hadn’t arrived.
So I wasn’t able to get on the plane with her last Friday evening, but I was told that if I changed my flight to Sunday evening, they would help me take care of my little visa problem.
Which is where the (further) problems began. I wasn’t able to change my flight because Expedia can’t do anything if the departure time is less than 10 hours away (on Friday evening, it was about two hours away by the time I’d got home). No problem, thinks I, I’ll just go to Qantas’s website and change it there. Except that Qantas must have used the same guy to build their website as homeaffairs.gov.au — there is no way to “manage” your booking — nowhere to enter your ticket number or reservation number, nada.
Last night I discovered the following: because I hadn’t been able to change my flight, Qantas was going to take the whole fare and give me a “coupon” for $500 to use for my next flight; additional expense to fly out on Sunday night: $800.
Even worse was my visa experience. I could actually get an ETA visa (don’t ask) approved in about 20 minutes, except for a couple of teeny-weeny little problems: the Qantas mobile app downloaded onto my phone, but couldn’t open; and the visa application cost was going to be another $340, because this was a new visa application fee, you see, and no they couldn’t (okay wouldn’t) credit me for the failed visa application because they are two different visas.
Oh, and did I mention that the Sunday flight was overbooked anyway?
The hell with that. I would rather take that $1,100-odd and pay for the grandkids to come and visit me.
Hence the title of this post. Ain’t gonna happen, never, no way, uh-uh am I going to try to visit Australia ever in the future. It’s just too much frigging hassle, and expensive, to visit a place that was never high on my Wannagothere List in the first place.
It’s not like I don’t have other options; here’s one just arrived in my Inbox last night:
Cheap Flights: Dallas to London $566-$589 r/t
Don’t need a visa, either. Buy a ticket, arrive at the airport, fly eight (not seventeen!) hours, and it’s tea and sausage rolls at Greggs for brekkie the next morning.
Other destinations ditto, with local cuisine variations.
Too bad, for everyone.
I think I’ll go to the range later today and get some AK-47 practice. That’s one thing I can do that I’d never be able to do Down Under.
Our Leaders
Two different takes on the people who purport to be our nation’s leaders, first a global view from VDH:
As the nation sinks inexplicably into self-created crisis after crisis, debate rages whether Joe Biden is incompetent, mean-spirited, or an ideologue who feels the country’s mess is his success.
A second national discussion revolves around who actually is overseeing the current national catastrophe, given Joe Biden’s frequent bewilderment and cognitive challenges.
But one area of agreement is the sheer craziness of Biden’s cabinet appointments, who have translated his incoherent ideology into catastrophic governance.
…The common denominator to these Biden appointees is ideological rigidity, nonchalance, and sheer incompetence.
They seem indifferent to the current border, inflation, energy, and crime disasters. When confronted, they are unable to answer simple questions from Congress, or they mock anyone asking for answers on behalf of the strapped American people.
We don’t know why or how such an unimpressive cadre ended up running the government, only that they are here and the American people are suffering from their presence.
And then a local perspective from Kurt:
The clusterfark in Uvalde is just a symptom of a much bigger pathology. It is a symbol of the failure of every institution in our society. And the solution is never to revamp the institutions and eject the parasites heading them. It’s always – always – to take power from us and give it to the people who screwed up in the first place.
November 2022 can’t come quickly enough (and we need November 2024 to come even more quickly) so we can get rid of these lying, incompetent and corrupt assholes at federal, state and local level.
There are quicker ways, mind you, but I’m not going to go there.
Too Hot, Too Cold, Never Just Right
So much for the morons* entrusted with ensuring that Texas has uninterrupted electrical power:
With unseasonably hot weather driving record demand across Texas, ERCOT* continues to work closely with the power industry to make sure Texans have the power they need. This afternoon, six power generation facilities tripped offline resulting in the loss of approximately 2,900 MW of electricity. At this time, all generation resources available are operating. We’re asking Texans to conserve power when they can by setting their thermostats to 78-degrees or above and avoiding the usage of large appliances (such as dishwashers, washers and dryers) during peak hours between 3 p.m. and 8 p.m. through the weekend.
If I were to set my thermostat to 78F, I’d have to have about three cold showers daily to stop dying of heatstroke. JHC.
Did anyone actually predict that come the middle of May, Texas summer heat begins its annual upward climb to “Broil”?
Incompetent asswipes.
Genetic Slavery
From GeekWithA.45, commenting at this post:
One of my old friends, a scholar of Talmud and Kaballah, once opined that there was a really important reason $DEITY lead Moses and the Israelites around the desert for 40 years between their deliverance from slavery and arrival at the promised land, and it had little to do with petty Divine annoyance on the subject of golden calves. It was, he explained, to give that society time to let the slave generation die off and train the new generation to conditions of self reliance, to become people fit to determine their own fate. I think there’s a lot to that. Slave instincts of servility are pernicious, and difficult for even the hardiest to shake off.
There’s more than a lot to that. There is so much truth in that brief summation that I’m mortified that I’ve never put it into words.
“Private” Property?
The concept of private property has always been a contentious one. It shouldn’t have been, as one of the few actual duties of any government is to protect private property — but ask any landlord in, oh, California how difficult it can be to evict tenants who haven’t paid the rent.
It’s even worse in Scotland — surprise, surprise — where temporary tenant-relief laws passed during the Covidiocy are now set to become permanent:
Previously, once a landlord could prove three consecutive months of rental arrears or more, eviction would have been guaranteed.
Under these latest plans, no eviction will be guaranteed, regardless of circumstance or grounds. It will be all discretionary.
The Bill proposes that a tribunal will still be able to grant an eviction if it considers it reasonable, including where late or no-payment of rent is the reason why the landlord is seeking an eviction. But campaigners have questioned what is deemed reasonable.
Instead of making it an ironclad guarantee — if tenants haven’t paid rent for X period, you may evict them — there’s now good chance that a court may say that such eviction may be “unreasonable”, by some standard undefined. Of course, that’s an egregious injustice which runs contrary to the concept of private property, and the landloards know it:
‘Generally, a landlord will have a reason to recover their property and once they’ve evidenced their grounds, they should be entitled to recover it.
‘It is unclear what – if any – evidence the Scottish Government are analysing to consider the removal of mandatory grounds for possession.
‘Abusing temporary provisions to satisfy a long-term policy objective appears to be an underhand tactic and the intention to permanently make all grounds for possession discretionary simply highlights the Scottish Government’s wilful and continued disregard of the value of the private rented sector.’
And here’s the weaselly response from the ScotGov:
‘It simply means a Tribunal can take into account all of the circumstances of both landlords and tenants relating to a case before making a decision. Good landlords recognise the case for keeping tenants in their homes where possible, so adding a final check from the tribunal will support responsible management, recognise financial and other pressures that tenants can face and help prevent homelessness.’
What utter, Class A, Deluxe bullshit.