Author: Kim du Toit

Not Bad For A Newbie

Politics

I’m so sick of people (mostly in the Comintern media) yammering about how The Donald hasn’t achieved anything during this, his first year as POTUS (or “God-Emperor”, as one of my favorite commentators puts it).

Allow me to quote Patrick J. Buchanan, surely the sourest of conservative commentators, on the topic:

The largest tax cuts in decades. Elevation of Neil Gorsuch to the Antonin Scalia seat on the Supreme Court. A record number of new [conservative, originalist – K.] U.S. appellate court judges approved by the Senate. The U.S. is out of the Paris climate accord and out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

NAFTA is being renegotiated. Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge will be open for drilling. The U.S. is at full employment, with minority unemployment near record lows. The stock market has consistently broken records, with the Dow having added 5,000 points. The Obamacare individual mandate tax is gone. Obama-era regulations have been cut and some eliminated.

Can’t add much to that, except for the inevitable:

Ol’ Pat forgot that one. All by itself, it’s a major Trump accomplishment.

 

Groucho’s Moustache

Beauty, Gratuitous Chick Pics

It’s all Phil Collins’s fault.

Perhaps I should explain myself.

Phil has a daughter named Lily who is a fashion model, and an extraordinarily beautiful girl she is, too:

However, she is distinguishable from most other girls by her signature feature, those thick, glossy eyebrows. And if there’s one thing we know about the fashion business, it’s that they slavishly copy anything that could be called “trendy” or “in” or whatever term they use to justify lemming behavior.

Yesterday I was riding on London’s Tube system, and across from me were sitting two girls of exquisite beauty — had they not been fuller-figured than the norm [2,000-word rant on the Anorexia Look deleted], I would have thought they were models. (I’d like to show a pic, but nowadays if you take an unsolicited photo of a woman, the next thing that happens will be you finding yourself spreadeagled on the ground while protesting to an unsympathetic audience of the fuzz that you’re not a stalker.)

However, both said beautiful Tube girls were (in my mind anyway) disfigured by having painted their eyebrows thicker — grotesquely so, like this:

…and in so doing, they’d transformed themselves into caricatures of Greek peasant women.

And forgive me, but the Greek peasant woman look doesn’t go well with blonde hair.

I would suggest that younger women take a pass on this particular trend, no matter how many fashion mags suggest that the simian look is the latest hot thing. What looks natural on Lily Collins looks freakish on everybody else — because no matter how good you think you look, all we see is that you’ve done a Groucho on your eyebrows (and hence the title of this post):

Of course, nobody’s going to listen to me. I just hope Phil Collins is satisfied.

Top 14 New Guns Of 2017

The Gun Thing

Via Insty comes this list.

My comments: I already own one (the Ruger Mk IV .22), and most of the others look like line extensions of guns I either have owned (e.g. Bond Arms Derringer) or am not especially interested in owning (e.g. striker-fired semi-auto 9mm pistols or AR15 5.56mm variants).

I do find this one interesting, though. It’s a .45 ACP carbine:

It might make a decent companion piece for a 1911 pistol, IF it could accept 1911 magazines as well as its issue 25-rounder (which is yummy).

Mostly, though, my overall opinion of the list is… meh.

I’ll be attending the SHOT Show in Vegas next month, and if anything stirs my loins there, I’ll let you know. (It will be a tough sell, by the way.)

Reverse Psychology, Or Something

Politics

I tend to look at things in a fairly simplistic manner: if what we in the U.S. are doing is pissing off the EU, then we’re doing the right thing.

I’m just pleased to see that I’m not the only one who thinks this way, at least in the case of the new law which lowers corporate tax rates, and which has caused the EU to whine:

The GOP tax plan will cause companies to flee Europe and return to the US.
The plan will cause companies to move operations to the US, creating jobs for American workers, creating more demand for American labor. And in increase in demand invariably (this is really basic economics here) drives up the price meaning American workers, on balance, can be expected to be paid more.
…
More companies doing their business in the US rather than overseas is almost by definition growth in the US economy. And economic growth means a larger base for the taxation that remains which offsets the reduced rate.
In short, what Europe is complaining about is that the tax reform will do exactly what the GOP promised for it. The Democrats can scream about “the one percent” and “tax breaks for the rich” (tax break, as a percentage is actually mostly on the middle class, but they never let truth stop them, neither the Democrat politicians nor their cheering section in the major media). Meanwhile finance ministers in Europe fear not the claims of the Democrats, but that it will actually do what the GOP promised.

So there ya go. Trump/Republican tax plan 1, EU 0.