Category: Gummint

Government Told To Fuck Off

Gummint

There are times when one should feel sorry for the apparatchiks of our beloved federal- and state governments, because few people are taking them seriously anymore.

Okay, that was a joke;  1) nobody loves them except the Swampies themselves, and 2) there’s no reason to feel sorry for them because, in the manner of idiots everywhere, their problems are self-inflicted by poor choices.  Here’s one (of many).

After  having clamped down on our freedoms with the excuse of OMG The Chinkvirus, many local gummints outlawed all private firework displays for July 4th.  Result:  the skies lit up like it was WWIII — even (or especially) in liberal havens like Los Angeles.

Now, amidst breathless shrieking from the Jackals Of The Press (never missing any excuse to foretell doom ‘n gloom because headlines / clickbait), Gummint is threatening to enforce another lockdown, Just In Case And If It Saves Just One Life It’s Worth It, Seriously.  Here’s my own prophecy of America’s likely response to said coming lockdowns:

As a rule, we Murkins are a law-abiding lot (excepting Leftist assholes, always), but the laws have to make sense before we follow them — and indeed, the (un-Constitutional) regulations and such laid down by Leftist fuckwits like CalifornicateGov Newsom, MichigaNazi Witmer and ILGov Fatboi all had one thing in common:  they fucked up the economy for very little tangible benefit.

Add to that the propensity of the aforementioned and their minions to be the lickspittles of lawless mobs like Pantifa and BaconLettuceTomato, and it’s small wonder that ordinary Americans looked at all this carnage and Wokedom, and said in unison:  “Fuck that shit.”  Then they went out and let off fireworks, and cheered our President’s stirring July 4th speech to the echoes.

Even here in Texas, where we kinda-sorta don’t mind TexGov Abbott, we still don’t trust our local bureaucrats much (it’s in our state constitution: the most restrictive social compact in the world).  I note with interest that local entities are going softly-softly on the lockdown business, mostly because 1) while the infection rate seems to be climbing, the death toll is dropping and b) I suspect that most Texans are going to ignore any Chinkvirus: Round Two Everybody Panic, other than doing what makes the most sense:  wearing PPE masks, sanitizing common areas and not sneezing all over other people in public.

We could have prevented most of the infection uptick, I suspect, by shooting all the Pantifa Commies and rioting looters  as soon as they started with their reindeer games in the streets, then hosing down their twitching corpses with hydrochloric acid  bleach, but no doubt someone would have had a problem with this.

Or we could have just nuked all those Democrat-controlled cities (quit that cheering) at the very beginning, but some might call this remedy too extreme as well.

Just nobody on this Internet back porch.

Just Plain Incompetence

Bad News, Gummint, Marxists

One of the common features of socialist leaders is  incompetence, and one of the best examples is Has-Been POTUS Obama, whose cool demeanor was actually a cover for just that — an inability to make decisions (other than those dictated by Marxist doctrine, of course).  Bad leaders don’t just make bad decisions;  bad leaders, frozen by fear and incompetence, make no decisions.

But the very best example is NYFC Mayor De Blasio who, faced with “popular” demands to “defund the police” has actually done so, even when faced with skyrocketing violence.

Commonsense, of course, is almost a tautology in this regard:  when crime is soaring, that’s precisely the wrong time to reduce police funding and manpower, but as De Blasio firmly believes that the NYPD is the problem — and has always done so — it makes perfect sense (to him) to reduce police effectiveness, whether by funding or by demoralization (which, paradoxically, he has done to perfection).

The fool still has eighteen months in power before he’s term-limited out of office, and even then, the list of replacements, such as it is, seems to indicate that his successor will be of the same ilk.

As anyone with a brain can see where this is heading, and there’s no Rudy Giuliani to ride to the rescue.  New York is sunk, and will become no different from all the other third-World socialist armpits around the world.

Given NYFC’s malevolent influence on the rest of the country (gun control, failed social policies, out-of-control welfare spending, the aforementioned crime wave and the New York Times) has been a cancer on American society for too long, and prudence would suggest that the federal government steps aside completely and lets it implode just as Detroit, Chicago and the other cities have done.  The denizens of the Big Apple have voted themselves democratically [sic]  into this situation and, to paraphrase H.L. Mencken’s Seventh Maxim, they deserve to get their comeuppance, good and hard.

Sadly, all the bad things about New York are just as prevalent in Washington D.C., a fact which De Blasio and all the other mayoral Marxists are counting on for their salvation.

Americans Second

Bad News, Business, Gummint, Two-Minute Hate

Looks like the fix is in again:

U.S. employers keep roughly 600,000 foreign H-1B visa workers in jobs throughout the United States, according to an unprecedented report released by the Department of Homeland Security’s U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services agency.
The total number of resident H-1B workers has successfully been kept secret for decades, mainly because Fortune 500 companies do not want voters to recognize the massive outsourcing of jobs for themselves and their college graduate children.

Based on personal observation, I think that about a quarter of the above number live within a square mile of my apartment, but that’s a topic for another time.

Whenever people show faith in the powers of “the market”, I want to kick them in the balls.  Here’s why.

In the normal course of events, “the market” can and should address the problem of shortages by creating a price increase — in this case, if there are apparently not enough Americans to fill the skilled positions needed in Corporate America, the pressure is put on salaries so that existing skilled workers can change industries to take advantage of the higher wages, or (in the longer term) prospective employees can adjust their training from, say, a university-centric Women’s Studies major into an IT profession.

But that would Cost The Companies Money;  and gawd forbid that costs rise, affect the balance sheet and, most importantly of all, jeopardize executive management bonuses.  So said companies lobby the government saying, “Oh we need  skilled workers, and these lazy idle Murkins don’t wanna do the jobs so please pretty please O Benificent Government, can we import furriners to save us from going out of business?”

Whereupon Congress, whose members are all either stupid, unpatriotic or else beholden to Corporate America for campaign contributions (I know:  massive overlap) will turn around and say, “Sure thing.  Get these H-1Bs from anywhere you like — say, India or China — and just add a zero to your next contribution, will you?”

The fact that these foreign workers stay a while then go back to their home countries taking their expertise with them, is, of course, irrelevant.  (I should point out that I myself was one of the above H-1B workers back in the 1980s, except that I had skills which my sponsoring company did not possess at all, AND I was coming over as a senior executive to implement a brand new business model which I had created back in the Old Country and made successful.  Also, I stayed and became a U.S. citizen, and the rest you know.)

So “the market” works fine, mostly — except where the sticky and incompetent fingers of Gummint get placed firmly on the scale of surplus : scarcity, and the results are what we see now.

There’s another part of the article which engendered a scowl from me:

The USCIS report admits that “no unique identifier exists for all H-1B petitions in the USCIS electronic [system of record, so] we use a methodology of statistical inference.”

For those not familiar with bureaucrat-speak, “statistical inference” means “we took a wild-ass guess”.  Or, to be more polite:

For years, [DHS] has deliberately not stored [visa worker] information into their databases. They only enter selected information into the computers. That was deliberate so that no one could know what is going on. We have sent in all kinds of [Freedom of Information Act] requests, and often the response is “we don’t keep track of that.”

And to make matters still worse:

“Close to a quarter of the records — dealing with workers who often make $100,000 a year or more — there is no Social Security number.”

In other words, we let them in, and allow a situation where people don’t necessarily have to pay taxes.  How charming.  But it gets worse (and I’ve added emphasis):

The failure to track legitimate H-1B documents and workers — or to punish groups for using fake H-1B documents — is routine. For many years, business advocates have kept legislators in the dark by splitting and subdividing oversight of the visa-worker economy between the Departments of State, Homeland Security, and Labor, he said.
This fragmentation has helped to minimize awareness of the scale among journalists and the public. For example, very few reporters describe the scale of the H-1B population to their readers, and most rely on talking points from business advocates who say the program brings in 65,000 or 85,000 “high skilled” workers each year when companies cannot find U.S. workers.
In reality, up to 85,000 H-1B visas are given out to companies each year, while roughly 15,000 are provided to non-profit groups, including hospitals, research centers, government agencies, and hospitals.

Now let’s add a little “China is asshole” to the mix:

The new USCIS report does not estimate the number of fake H-1B documents in circulation despite myriad cases of fraudulent work permits and made-in-China green cards.

And in India, procurement of green cards is an entire industry, catering to U.S. corporations — I’ve seen it in action at first hand.

Several years back, I posited the situation where if one won a large foreign lottery (e.g. Euromillions), whether it would be better to bring the earnings back to the U.S. and pay the 40% tax, or just to vanish into a European tax haven like Monaco with the (untaxed) millions.  My conclusion was that I wouldn’t do that, because I am of course a loyal American citizen.  As I read stuff like the above, however, I’m starting to think that “loyal American citizen” is rapidly approaching the status of “sucker”.

Change my mind.

Damn Good Question

Gummint

Over at American Thinker, a good point has been raised:

Where are all the guns and ammo purchased under Obama?

During the last two years of the Obama administration, some unusual purchases were made. Large quantities of ammunition were purchased, as were firearms, mostly for somewhat obscure agencies or agencies with no real need for such weaponry. Estimates are that over 1 billion rounds of ammunition were ordered, which resulted in making ammunition scarce for the normal civilian market.

And the catalog of who got all these guns is really interesting:

  • The Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service spent $4.77 million purchasing shotguns, 7.62mm caliber rifles, night-vision goggles, propane cannons, liquid explosives, pyro supplies, buckshot, LP gas cannons, drones, remote-control helicopters, thermal cameras, military waterproof thermal infrared scopes and more.
  • The Small Business Administration [!] loaded up their arsenals with Glock pistols.
  • The Fish [and Wildlife] folks spent approximately $410,000 on their Glocks and rifles and modified their Glocks with silencers.
  • The Department of Health and Human Services was outfitted with sophisticated weaponry normally carried by Special Forces, stored at an undisclosed location.
    Others include:
  • Department of Energy: approximately $50,000 worth of M-16 fully automatic rifles
  • General Services Administration: approximately $16,000 in shotguns and Glocks
  • Bureau of Reclamations: approximately $697,000 for firearms and ammunition
  • EPA: almost $70,000 for ammunition
  • Smithsonian [!]: approximately $42,500 for ammunition
  • Social Security: approximately $61,000 for ammunition
  • $426,268 on hollow-point bullets, including orders from the Forest Service, National Park Service, Office of Inspector General, Bureau of Fiscal Service, as well as Drug Enforcement Administration, U.S. Marshals, and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The latter three, sure, but the Forest Service, National Park Service, and Inspector General’s Office?
  • Bureau of Engraving and printing: approximately $100,000 on firearms
  • U.S. Mint: almost $180,000 for ammunition
  • Bureau of Fiscal Services [!]: approximately $672,000 on ammunition and firearms
  • Department of Agriculture: $1.1 million for weapons and ammunition

Read the whole thing, because one of his conclusions is more scary than your imaginations can conjure up.

I Don’t Think So, Scooter

Disaster, Gummint, Health

Now we hear the following breathless announcement:

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) warned on Friday that another lockdown might be necessary if the country suffers a “dramatic” rise in coronavirus infections.

They’ll soon discover that what they think is a “dramatic” rise is not what we think it is.

I’ve got news for you “experts” and government types:  if you think that “civil disobedience” is an abstract concept or an impossibility in this country, try pulling that shit on us again.

And the harder you push us, the harder we’ll push back.  If you go full aggro on us (and you should never go full aggro), the result will make the current BLM / Pantifa riots look like a Sunday school picnic.

You heard it here first.

 

Failure

Gummint, Marxists

For those who’ve seen Band of Brothers, there’s a very telling conversation between Carville and Winters, as the sergeant complains about his platoon commander, Lt. Dyke:

“It’s not that he makes bad decisions;  it’s that he doesn’t make any decisions at all.”

Any time you see that situation in a manager, any manager, it is a flashing neon sign of incompetence.

One of the reasons why Marxists make such poor managers is that if they are presented with a situation which cannot be addressed by Party doctrine, they are largely indecisive.  Even worse, if that doctrine runs counter to good management, they will use that as the underpinning for their indecisiveness.  We saw this a lot under Obama, who was pathetically underqualified as a manager, having had no executive experience in his entire life before becoming POTUS.  More often than not, when faced with a decision, he simply froze and allowed events to dictate the outcome, even if that outcome was inimical to the interests of the country he was supposed to be governing.  (And to prove my point above, his Marxist doctrine held that the United States was a malignant force in world affairs, so allowing harm to befall the country was — to his mind — actually the proper thing to do as it “corrected” or atoned for America’s past sins.)

And of course, today we see the same thing happening in New York City, where the doctrinaire Marxist Mayor De Blasio faces a situation of riots, looting and general lawlessness and mayhem on the city’s streets.  Bob McManus at the NY Post  sums it up perfectly:

In 1991, anti-Semitic rioting in Crown Heights took two lives and then ran for three full days and nights — allegedly with the approval of then-Mayor David Dinkins. He denies he let it run, but the fact is that when he finally ordered his deputy police commissioner, Raymond Kelly, to end it, it ended.
So even belated firmness works.
But in December 2014, ever-escalating anti-cop protest turmoil was tolerated — even wink-and-nod encouraged — by de Blasio’s City Hall. Each day was more violent than the one before — and it didn’t end until a suicidal lunatic drawn by the disorder opened fire on two cops sitting in a patrol car in Brooklyn, killing them both.
Feckless acquiescence of the sort we’re seeing now bred tragedy — and worked only insofar as the shock of the assassinations took the steam out of the demonstrations, and they faded on their own.
So there are two models here.

– De Blasio can go the firmness route — and Cuomo, who has never before hesitated to interfere in the mayor’s business, can back him up. That is, if need be, he can force de Blasio’s hand.
– Or they both can stand by and let the rioters roll.

Then there will be more looting, more burning, more victims — and an ever-escalating sense that the city is incapable of preserving the public peace and that it lacks the courage even to try.

I’ll take “stand by and let the rioters roll” for $10,000, Alex.

And the reason I can be so confident of my prediction is that De Blasio’s Marxism puts him on the side of the “people” — in this case, the rioters and looters who are either protesting racism — which he has to  support — or else going after The Man (looting Macy’s and redistributing wealth) — which he also supports.  (That he would have the tacit support of his state’s neo-Marxist Governor Cuomo is likewise a given.)

I should point out, seeing as I started with a historical anecdote, that the situation we now face in New York and other socialist-Democrat cities is pretty much the same as Chile faced during the presidency of Marxist Salvador Allende.  Unfortunately, Donald Trump is no Augusto Pinochet (as much as his Marxist opponents would like to paint him as such), so it is unlikely that what saved Chile from Communism will be replayed here, to save the United States.

But tell me that the thought of Mayor De Blasio being tossed out of a helicopter at 2,000 feet over Long Island Sound doesn’t give you at least a mild frisson  of pleasure…

Lest anyone think I’m being too radical, let me point out that if the Marxists could do it, they’d do it to you.  Except that they don’t do small stuff like helicopters;  no, they have things like gulags, “education camps” and insane asylums for their opposition — i.e. oppression and suppression on a mass scale.

And if you don’t believe me, I have a New York City bridge to sell you — if it’s still standing and hasn’t been burned up yet, that is.

Interestingly enough, what we need now is not leadership of the Dick Winters type:  cool, cerebral and logical.  No, what we need is more Lt. Ronald Speirs:  get in and get the job done, regardless of how many assholes you have to kill.