Category: Politics

Trying not to start the public floggings

Not So Sure

Politics

Then there’s this little development:

Former U.S. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard ripped into national Democratic Party leaders, calling them “elitists” who no longer care about individual freedom.

Gabbard, a former Democratic candidate for president, later added that her former party bares no resemblance to the party as it was when John F. Kennedy was president.

I know she quit the Socialist Party and all that, and she’s rather cute-looking:

… but I still don’t trust her, because guns.

And by the way, it’s “BEARS no resemblance” — holds, not strips off. 

Living by Their Own Rules

Mocking Furriners, Watermelons

I see that the German Watermelon Party is doing their usual outrage thing:

Members of Germany’s Green party are furious after the country’s ruling Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, ordered that the country’s remaining nuclear power plants be kept in operation beyond 2022, reversing an earlier plan to have the facilities decommissioned by January 1st 2023.

…this despite the fact that Germany is facing catastrophe without their beloved Russian natgas supply over the winter.

Here’s my thought:  the Germans are famous for their ability to interfere with the lives of its individual citizens — their “rain tax” alone is evidence thereof — so why doesn’t the KrautGov simply turn off all Green politicians’ household electricity from, say, November to April, and give these fuckwits a taste of what their outrage would mean to ordinary citizens, if allowed to direct national power policy?

I know, that’s way too simple a thing to ask, and no doubt the Kraut media storm would be deafening as older Greens start to die of cold (a feature not a bug, but you know what I mean).

I’d suggest mass executions (to save electricity, of course), but the Germans do that kind of thing a little too well, as we all know.

Bullshit

Economics, Politics

Headline:

First Task for a GOP Congress: Subpoena the Jan. 6 Committee

With all due respect:  fuck that nonsense.

The first task for a GOP Congress is to stimulate the economy, which they can do not by playing meaningless little political games like the above, but by reining in government spending — the management of which, lest we forget, is the primary purpose of Congress.

Here’s a pro tip for the politicians:  if the economy is whizzing along, unemployment is close to zero, people’s retirements aren’t being eroded by inflation, energy costs are low and all the things that make for a happy populace are in place, then you won’t have any problem getting reelected (which, lest we forget too, is the primary focus of all politicians — yeah, I know, it sucks but there it is).

Unfortunately, reining in public spending is difficult — it shouldn’t be, but to our betters in Congress it is — whereas making cheap political gestures (e.g. nailing the Jan 6 clowns or “impeaching the President”) are very easy, even though they don’t do diddly about making the voters’ lives more affordable.

You want some ideas?  Sure.

Reduce every single government department’s budget by 25% (this number being close to the actual rate of inflation for the past two years).  No exceptions.

Start the process of repealing the 16th Amendment, towards an end goal of a replacement Amendment which institutes a flat, universal, no-exemptions income tax of 5% that can only be raised by a Congressional (both House and Senate) vote majority of 75% — or, even better, repealing all wage, corporate, estate and cap gains taxes to be replaced by a national end-user sales tax.  (I can dream, too.)

Pass a law which institutes a blanket “sunset” provision of ten years for every law in the U.S. Code, past, present and future.  (If a law’s that good, it should pass a re-vote easily;  if not, it should die a well-deserved death.  If this makes Congress too busy to create more laws, that’s a feature, not a bug because we have too many laws on the books already.)

Start the process of repealing the 17th Amendment.  The state legislature, not the people of the state, should decide who should be sent to represent the state’s interests in Congress.  (The people can control this by voting for their U.S. House and local legislatures, as originally envisioned by the Constitution.)

Of course, there are more suggestions, many more.  But none of them have anything to do with empty political gestures.

Beaten To The Punch

Gummint, Politics

I was actually going to write this post, except that someone far more qualified than I wrote it first.  And with far less profanity than I would have, too.  A sample:

Fascism didn’t really come into play as a functioning ideology until Giovanni Gentile and Benito Mussolini, defined it as the state as an organic being, controlling everything. “Everything in the state, nothing against the state, nothing outside the state” became the definition of a totalitarian state (total control over the economy, society, and culture). Where Marx envisioned the “withering away” of the state (totally skipping over human nature and the drive for power and control, whether over other people or just your own life), Mussolini and Gentile envisioned the state as the sole arbiter of life, the universe, and everything.

Small-government conservatives, by definition, are therefore not fascists.

It’s a lot easier to define “fascism” or “fascist” as an epithet by using George Orwell’s remark, written in 1944:

The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable.’

…to the accuser.

Giving It Away

Bad News, Marxists

I think this malfeasance started in earnest back in the Clinton administration:

The rare earths dependency on China stems in part from the fact that extracting rare earth minerals is an extremely polluting process that China has been willing to undertake, while most other countries have not, including the US, which ironically prides itself on having extremely strict environmental regulations in place.

The US, according to Reuters, has only one rare earths mine and no capability to process rare earth minerals. If China were to stop exporting them to the US, the country would fast run out of the basic building blocks required to produce the military hardware that the US needs, not to mention all the other items where rare earth minerals are needed.

And the article supplies a little extra perspective on China’s Belt And Road initiative.

Read it and weep.  (Or go to the range.)