Tag: Regrettable Acts

Conundrum

Deep Thoughts, Rights

The old saying goes, “Those who choose security over freedom deserve neither.”

And yet… you have a situation like this one:

The man who transformed El Salvador from one of the most dangerous countries in the world to one of the safest, President Nayib Bukele, is despised by liberals.

When he won reelection in a landslide, liberal media outlets ran headlines stating that democracy had ended in El Salvador and that the country had become a one-party state. However, El Salvador is not Cuba.

Bukele did not eradicate opposition parties, nor did he imprison them or seize control of the press. Instead, he delivered on his promises. He made the country safe by locking up criminals.

And how did he do this?

In 2022, after a gang war resulted in the deaths of 87 people over a period of just three days, Bukele took action against crime. He constructed the country’s largest prison, the Terrorism Confinement Center (Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo or CECOT), with a capacity for 40,000 gang members. And he began filling it.

Human rights groups, who live in safe, wealthy Western nations, have criticized Bukele for violations of the rights of suspects.

But the logic is flawless. Only gang members have gang tattoos. If anyone else gets a gang tattoo, they will be killed by the gang. The same is true for tattoo artists.

They would be killed for giving gang tattoos to non-gang members. Additionally, part of the initiation to joining a gang is to commit a serious crime, often murder. Once they become a member, their full-time job is to commit crimes. So, logically, anyone with a gang tattoo is a gang member and has committed crimes.

If this makes one think, “That sounds like the foul MS-13 gang”, then one would be correct.

I have often thought about doing this right here in the U.S. of A., as whole areas of the country have become terrorized by gangs like MS-13.  And as the gang members proudly wear their clan tattoo, why not just arrest them as self-confessed criminals?

Because that’s wrong — basically, it’s un-Constitutional, and on more than one level.  And here’s how it was done in El Salvador:

Bukele decided to let logic prevail, arrest the gang members, and put them in prison. He was more concerned about the rights of street vendors, business owners, school children, working people, and ordinary citizens than he was about the rights of violent criminals.

The state of emergency he declared in 2022, and has renewed several times since, suspends the constitutional rights of the gang members and bypasses the corrupt courts and justice system, which had allowed the criminals to reign for decades. Since then, 75,000 gang members have been arrested, and 7,000 have been released.

Believe me, there’s a lot to be said in support about measures like those of Nayib Bukele.  After all:

Bukele claimed that his country went 365 days without a murder. And while the exact number has been called into question, it is an indisputable fact that the country now has the lowest murder rate it has seen in 30 years, plummeting by 70%, and now stands at only 2.4 per 100,000 in 2023, making it the second lowest in the Americas, just behind Canada.

Okay, maybe that worked in El Salvador, which started off being a shithole country, and just dug itself a deeper one over decades of corruption and your standard Third-World degeneracy.  Desperate measures were called for.

But the U.S. has never been a shithole country, in no small part because of the protections that our Constitution affords everybody — and not just non-gang members, either.

I am profoundly disturbed by the tone of articles such as the one I’ve linked to and quoted from in this post.  Of course I can see the benefits of actions like that of Bukele.

But I can also see how that kind of thing can be turned around and used against, oh, people like MAGA supporters or, for that matter, gun owners.

And to quote a wise man (not a politician, but a playwright), who saw where this could lead:

“William Roper: “So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!”

Sir Thomas More: “Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?”

William Roper: “Yes, I’d cut down every law in England to do that!”

Sir Thomas More: “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!”

— Robert Bolt, A Man For All Seasons

Train Smash Time

Train Smash Women

Oh yeah, baby:  it’s that time of year when the Grand National is run at Aintree, and when we can look forward to some Train Smash Women and their antics.

Only, this year?  Not as much fun as usual… so far:


Too many regrettable decisions to count, in that last one.

A couple, it seemed, didn’t get the memo:

…but a lot of others did, and dressed accordingly:

That said, I think these pics were taken mostly in the early morning, before the booze had a chance to do its work.

On the other hand, maybe it’s just that nobody could afford to get wasted.  HFS, look at those prices:

Racegoers will be expected to pay £7.50 for draught beers (not including Guinness) and ciders, while a 330ml can could cost up to £7.

Meanwhile, a single serving of wine is set to cost £9.50 with a full bottle priced at £37.50.

A bottle of Prosecco will set punters back £46 while a bottle of Gobillard Brut Champagne totals a staggering £85.

Cocktails are priced at £13 each, with soft drinks costing £3.20 and a can of water £2.90 itself.

We’ll just have to wait and see.  More to follow.

Update 1:  Okay, despite the cost of booze, that’s a little more Train Smash-y…


And then came… Ladies Day.

Au Revoir, Paddy

Entertainment, Morons & Idiots

I’ve spoken before of my distaste for “holidays” which simply serve as a catalyst for “social drinking”, not the least because like New Year’s Eve, they put a whole bunch of amateur drinkers out on the streets and behind the wheel of a car.

Most egregious of these is St. Patrick’s Day:  a time when, as the marketing goes, everyone turns Irish and drinks Guinness, Bushmills and Tullamore Dew.

Except me.  This would be like commemorating “St. Boromir Day” when I wear a Cossack hat and drink chilled neat vodka till I fall over.  What a farce.

Still, let me not be a killjoy.  There are always the costumes:

Makes you proud to be “Irish”, dunnit?

Carnies and Hucksters

Marketing / Advertising

Longtime Reader GT3ted sent me an email of the latest Sotheby’s auction catalog — the topic of this coming Saturday’s post, by the way — and when I commented that the prices seemed unusually-astronomical, even by Sotheby’s standards, he replied:

Yes, I thought the suggested bid ranges were high as well, But remember these are the the typical auction company’s “Projected” bid ranges which are often optimistic. And Sotheby’s does seem to have a better-than-usual lineup this year. The whole point of the catalog is to bring in as many Big Dollar buyers as possible since they need multiple buyers to run up the prices. Or at least the appearance of multiple bidders.

The Winter Arizona / Scottsdale Hype is strong thanks to “Bidenomics” / a soaring stock market and nervous investors looking for a place to park some equity before the possible collapse of the more traditional equities market place.

The world of high-end auctions is still just smoke and mirrors run by used car salesmen and ex-carnies all looking for the next greater fool, just at a much higher level.

It’s a very cogent statement.  But even among them what has more money than common sense, this (for example) seems egregiously overpriced:

Now let it be known that I loves me some 70s-era Bronco, but I would humbly suggest that even a handbuilt-from-the-ground-up item such as this isn’t worth anything like two hundred big ones.

It’s not an original — it’s a Kincer creation — and there’s another outfit that handmakes “classic” Toyota FJ45s, at similar nosebleed prices, and still another that does likewise with 1970s-era Mercedes G-wagens.  While I understand that hand-built cars involve an astonishing amount of labor — in some cases, hundreds of hours — I would suggest that it’s a fool’s gambit to try to recoup (and even profit from) the job.  As any amateur restorer will tell you, one never recoups the cost of restoration, and I just can’t see that restoring old cars as a production enterprise makes it worth the work and expense…

…unless, of course, the target market is not the brand’s loyal devotees but (as Ted puts it) Big-Dollar Buyers (“whales”, as the casino industry derisively calls them), for whom the car is not an object of desire but an investment.

And all investments, as any fule kno, carry risk.

Caveat emptor imprudens.

All that said, there are some juicy cars indeed in the Sotheby’s catalogue, but you’ll have to wait until Saturday to see them.  Just ignore the prices, and drool.

More “Health” Bullshit

Health, Nannies

Turns out that this “YOU HAVE TO WALK 10,000 STEPS A DAY OR YOU’RE GONNA DIEEEEEE!!!” mantra is absolute bollocks.  Actually, I always knew this instinctively, but here’s the !Science!:

By analyzing data on tens of thousands of people across four continents compiled between 15 existing studies, a team of researchers has landed on a more comfortable figure: the optimal number is probably closer to 6,000 steps per day, depending on your age.

Anything more is unlikely to further reduce your chances of stumbling into an early grave.

“So, what we saw was this incremental reduction in risk as steps increase, until it levels off,” said University of Massachusetts Amherst epidemiologist Amanda Paluch when the study was released in March 2022.

“And the leveling occurred at different step values for older versus younger adults.”

So… 10,000?

Half a century ago, the Yamasa Clock and Instrument Company in Japan sought to cash in on the buzz left by the 1964 Tokyo Olympics by producing a pedometer they called ‘Manpo-kei’ – a word that translates into 10,000 steps.

Why 10,000? Good old fashioned marketing. It’s a nice, round number that sounds taxing enough to be a goal, but achievable enough to be worth striving for. What it doesn’t have going for it is any scientific backing.

Yeah, but for the Health Nazis, that’s all they needed to boss us around.  It’s like that “drink 100 gallons of water a day” (or whatever bullshit “round” number they came up with for that bit of nannying);  everyone knows (or should know) that too much water is about as bad for you as too little.

Funny thing, that:  humans actually have a trigger mechanism to tell you when to drink.  It’s called “feeling thirsty”, and we’ve somehow managed to survive as a species for thousands of years by relying on it.  Also, we know when to stop, because we start feeling “full”, but clearly we have to ignore our bodies and keep on chugging back the water… until our overworked kidneys say “Fuck this nonsense” and quit.

As will our hearts when, as senior citizens (or “useless mouth-breathers” as the yoof calls us), we end up dying because those useless and as it turns out, dangerous extra few thousand steps will tax that organ into failure.

Every doctor or “health professional” or “fitness expert” who has ever insisted on the “10,000 steps and/or x liters of water per day” regime needs to get strapped to a scaffold and flogged, say, 10,000 lashes with a bullwhip.

Is that too much?  I dunno, but it’s a nice round number.

Quote Of The Day

QOTD

From Miguel Castejon, illegal immigrant, on why he’s leaving Chicago and going back to Venezuela:

“The American Dream doesn’t exist anymore. There’s nothing here for us.”

Welcome to the club, pal.

He continues:

“We didn’t know things would be this hard. I thought the process was faster,” he said about the job permit situation in Chicago.

LOL it took New Wife over a year to get her work permit — and she was here legally, married to a U.S. citizen.

And of course, as Chicago’s harsh winter is starting its annual bite:

“If we’re going to be sleeping in the streets here, we’d rather be sleeping in the streets over there.”

…because Venezuela is on the equator.

See ya.

And by the way:  well done, TxGov Abbott.