Category: Gummint

Abolition

Government Thugs, Law and Order

Peter Hitchens (the lesser of the two Hitchens brothers, but still better than 90% of his peers) writes a conclusion to this article:

There is no longer any point in pretending that they have not failed. And when institutions fail, the best thing to do is to replace them from top to bottom. That would be a truly special measure.

Most of what he writes is specific to the Britfuzz, of course, but certainly his sentiment and exasperation must also apply to… oh, let’s just start with the FBI, who were once a proud and effective crime-fighting organization, but who have allowed themselves over the past four or five decades to become so politicized as to be pretty much the secret police for the political elite.

Was I the only one who started oiling the rope when the Justice Department (don’t get me started on them) ordered the Fibbies to investigate and treat concerned parents as domestic terrorists?

Who pursue high-profile “wrongdoers” (step forward, Martha Stewart) but let real scumbags (Jeffrey Epstein, the Clintons, etc.) just skate away scot-free?

Or when that slimy little lizard James Comey, who after “investigating” Hillary Clinton’s private email account — which as a point of fact was completely illegal, given her position as SecState — declared to Congress that his conclusion was that her actions were not worthy of prosecution.

And I’m pretty sure that most thinking people in this country have their own example of egregious behavior (or rather misbehavior) on the part of the FBI, which alone should make a companion of Hitchens’s suggestion of complete abolition thereof a realistic, and reasonable demand.

Seriously:  how much worse off would we be without them than we are now?

Never Saw This One Coming

Anti-Gun Nannies, Bad News, Government Thugs

…although I should have:

“The U.S. Military is actively considering shutting down the sale [of] M855/SS109 ammo from Lake City to the commercial market.”

Yeah, if you can’t ban the guns, strangle the ammo supply — the rationale behind National Ammo Day was never more appropriate than today.

You all know what to do.  Me, I’m going to lay in some more 7.62x39mm, because we AK guys are even more vulnerable.

Never Again

Gummint, Mocking Furriners, Third World, Travels

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

Gummint, Law and Order, Military, Two-Minute Hate

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

Gummint

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.