Category: Gummint

Wrong Headline

Gummint, Numbers & Statistics

Here’s a classic case of media slant:

Had They Bet On Nuclear, Not Renewables, Germany & California Would Already Have 100% Clean Power

This is what we non-journalists call “complete bullshit”.  In the first place, neither Germany or California “bet” on anything.  Germany closed all their nukes in a panicked reaction to the Fukishima disaster in Japan, and California deliberately closed their existing nukes and prevented new ones from being built because Californians are a bunch of fucking Green morons (as, by the way, are the Krauts).  There was no “gamble”, because everybody already knew that Green “technology” would be totally incapable of completely filling anybody’s power needs except maybe for the average sub-Saharan African country north of the Limpopo River.  For Germany and California?  Not even close.  And when even Al Gore is calling California foolish…

That said, I’m not taking a potshot at the author of the above piece, because authors seldom write their own headlines — this would probably be the doing of some Forbes   editor, who’s either stupid or purposely slanted.  In fact, given that Michael Schellenberger is TIME Magazine’s “Hero of the Environment,” a Green Book Award Winner, and President of Environmental Progress, the article is remarkably clear-headed and factual — which was clearly A Bridge Too Far for Forbes magazine, which used to be a go-to business publication but has recently become completely irrelevant — and the above should tell you why.

 

When Gummint Fails

Gummint

…which is to say, almost all of the time, it’s incumbent then for citizens to step in and fix the problem, if they can.  As did a couple folks in the People’s Collective of Oakland, Californistan:

We don’t need to remind Oakland drivers their streets are some of the worst in the country, costing locals an extra $1,049 a year in car maintenance on average.
The problem has prompted two Oakland residents to go rogue, pulling off covert missions to patch potholes in the middle of the night. They’ve dubbed themselves the “Pothole Vigilantes” and show off their work on an Instagram page by the same name.

Needless to say, Gummint isn’t impressed:

When asked about the unauthorized roadwork, Oakland Public Works empathized with the problem at hand, but made it clear that Oakland residents shouldn’t be taking to the streets to themselves.
Said Sean Maher, a spokesperson for the department, “We can’t recommend anyone do this work themselves, not least because it raises safety issues while people are working in the streets.”

Oh yeah, the old “safety” bullshit.  Like hundreds of people hitting deep potholes with their cars every day is a “safer” alternative.  I also like the other part:

Maher made a plea for patience, saying more resources to fix roads are on the way. The city council is set to vote on a $100 million plan to repave streets over the next three years. The money would come from Measure KK, approved by voters in 2016.

Okay, let me just make sure I’ve got the arithmetic right.  The voters approved the necessary spending in 2016.  We are now nearly halfway through 2019 — and the council is only now “set to vote” on the repaving plan?  Uh-huh.  No wonder people are getting impatient.  I wonder what else the OakGov may have been doing over the past couple years, that prevented them from working on the thing any earlier… never mind, I remember now:  Oakland City Hall was busy preventing ICE from rounding up illegal immigrants, making themselves feel all virtuous by defying federal law.  But back to our story:

“They are frustrated and fed up with the pavement condition in their neighborhood,” said Maher.

I bet this guy also works for the Oakland Department Of The Blindingly Obvious.

Iniquitous Theft

Crime, Gummint, Two-Minute Hate

I was watching some stupid BBC-TV show about how a titled earl’s mansion was saved from ruin only by royal intervention (Prince Charles and his Prince’s Trust), and how the place was restored to its former glory and was now in essence a museum (said earl having relinquished title to the property many decades ago).

Which house and which earl is not important.  What was not said was why the place had to be abandoned in the first place, which can be summed up in just two words:  inheritance taxes.

Of all instances of government bastardy — and there are thousands — this is the one which gets my goat, because there are two major principles in play, and neither of them is good.

1)  The State decides that your property doesn’t really belong to you, so the gummint takes part of it it away from you (or more properly, from your heirs) after your death and puts it into their coffers.  It’s nothing less than fucking theft, pure and simple.

2)  The principle that “unearned income” — i.e. that your wealth gets passed on to your heirs, who didn’t work for it and therefore it should be treated as a windfall — is a bad thing because it simply perpetuates the wealth inequality of society.  The underlying Marxist lie that underpins this idea is self-explanatory:  that wealth is a finite quantity, and that keeping it in the family prevents others in society from benefiting from it.  (Never mind that history shows that almost all  great fortunes are dissipated within four — and usually three — generations because of multiple heirs, wastage, poor judgement and so on.)

What we also know is that inheritance taxes do not affect the very wealthy much, if at all, because they protect their property by a multitude of (perfectly-legal) tax avoidance schemes.  Instead, the taxes hit the middle classes (and especially family business owners and farmers) hardest of all.

So it’s all very well for HRH the Prince of Wales to come riding in on his faerie chariot and save some great house from ruin, when in fact it was the policies of his (and his forerunners’) government that was the principle cause of that ruin in the first place.

Just so we know the extent of the villainy:  the family was going to be forced to sell off the household effects to help pay the bills.  Which sounds trivial except that the earl was the owner of the largest collection of Chippendale furniture in the world (simply because the fifth earl had seen the first-ever catalog of the Chippendale Brothers furniture company in the 1750s, liked what he saw and bought hundreds of pieces of the stuff for his new country home, and all of which had stayed in the house ever since).  To give you an idea of its worth:  just one large glass-fronted bookcase — now being used to house some of the family’s equally-valuable china — would have fetched at auction around £20 million, and each of the hundreds of Chippendale chairs around £50,000… yes, each.

All the household goods had been packed up in an eighteen-wheeler, and were actually halfway to the auction house in London when the truck was intercepted and turned back to the house.  All very heroic stuff — and all completely unnecessary.

What’s interesting is that here in Murka, where we don’t even have titles and such, the popular antipathy towards inheritance taxes is profound — something like 80% of people polled hate the very idea of it, even though the vast majority of people are unlikely ever to be affected by inheritance taxes.

That’s because we’re not stupid, and we can recognize theft when we see it.  It’s the principle of the matter, and as this nation was founded upon principle, we can recognize its villainy where other countries’ inhabitants might not.

By the way, here’s the Wikipedia entry for Dumfries House.

Strange Agreement

Gummint, Two-Minute Hate

Okay, mark today on your calendars, because I happen to agree with NYFC’s Commie Mayor:

Mayor de Blasio: ‘We Are Going to Ban’ Glass and Steel Skyscrapers

Okay, my reasons for agreement are not the same as his reasons for this policy.  He wants to ban glass and steel skyscrapers because of oh-so-fashionable Green reasons, while I want to ban them because they’re cold and fugly.

Long ago, I used to work across the road from this  Helmut Jahn-designed monstrosity:

…and I just loved  those afternoons when my office was turned into a combination sauna / tanning salon.  The company had to invest in smoked-glass office windows and blinds for an entire floor because of this bullshit.

They’re also a menace:  try driving in a city at dawn or sunset, turning a corner and being utterly blinded by the sunlight’s reflection off some architect’s wet dream.

One of my favorite scenes in a movie was the last few seconds of Fight Club, where a whole bunch of glass skyscrapers are blown up.

I have an alibi.

Not Just The Weather

Bad News, Gummint, Nature, Weather

A while ago, I drew attention to the floods which have inundated the Upper Midwest states like Iowa and Nebraska.  What I did not know at the time (but should have), is that when there is catastrophe, can the fat finger of government be far behind?

 There is much more to the “management” of the Missouri River basin than just how and when to drain water.
In the interest of habitat restoration, etc. (the highest priority since 2004), tens of thousands of acres surrounding the river and more than a thousand miles of riverbank have been mechanically altered by the Corps — not with an eye to controlling flooding, but rather to facilitate the “reconnection of the river with its floodplain,” believed to be a necessity in achieving the goal of species and habitat preservation and restoration.
When the Corps believed that protecting people and property was a more worthy aim than fish and wildlife, the riverbanks were stabilized, shored against erosion and high-water events. The channels were kept largely free of silt infill to facilitate the draining efficiency of the river that essentially deals with the runoff of vast millions of square miles of mountain and plains snow and rain.
Dikes were built and maintained. Levees, too. Chutes (secondary channels of a meandering river) were closed to inhibit the ability of the river to overcome its banks in seasons of high-water. All these things (and more) combined to permit millions of Americans to develop the reclaimed lands, for farming, ranching, and homes. Indeed, these millions of Americans were encouraged to do so by their elected representatives, who happily took credit for the resulting economic benefits and increased tax revenues.

And then in 2004, it all changed.  Read the whole thing, and be enraged.

Define “Dangerous”, Asswipe

Gummint, Nannies, Two-Minute Hate

Just when I’d got my blood pressure down to healthy levels, this kind of shit (from Britishland) gets published and back we go to 500/400:

Parents who homeschool their children will be forced to sign a register or face possible prosecution, according to government proposals.
The Department for Education plans to hold a register of all children not in mainstream schools in a bid to protect them from ‘dangerous influences’.
The move will help crack down on religious fundamentalists who send youngsters to secret schools where they are at risk of radicalisation.

We all know where this regulation is aimed:  at Muslims who want to turn little Abu Buma into Abu Ben-Bomba.  The only problem, as always, is that the law won’t be used against Muslims, ever  — but it will  be used, often, against conservative parents, Christian parents, and anyone, in fact, who dares to raise their children to be intellectual, inquisitive and independent (precisely the qualities that all state education systems seek to eradicate).  All that is dangerous to the control freaks and nannies who infest our modern-day bureaucracy, and don’t for a moment think that they’ll hesitate to brand it thus.

What time does the range open?