Category: Foreign Affairs

Nazzo Fast, Guido

Foreign Affairs, Politics, Subsidies

I’m not so sure that this is a good idea.

President Donald Trump told reporters on Sunday that his administration is considering importing beef from Argentina to lower its price at home and help Argentina stabilize its struggling economy, which he described as being in critical condition.

Dear  King  God-Emperor Donald:  Those are both laudable goals, i.e. to help a loyal ally and simultaneously help U.S. consumers who are being flattened by stratospherically-high beef prices at home.

However, I can’t help but think that you should also consider trying to ease the crushing burden of federal regulations that beef farmers — actually, all farmers — have to deal with, regulations that are a legacy of the Leviathan State you’ve inherited.  That will lower their cost of production, and should make beef less expensive.

Lowering beef prices through imports will simply make our beef farming less profitable — not that it’s all that profitable to begin with — and frankly, I care more about our farmers than about the Argies.

After all, it’s Make America Great Again, not Make Argentina Great Again.  With all due respect to Señor Presidente Milei, he has to deal with problems of his country’s own making, just as we have to beat back the Commies Over Here.  We can and should help him, but not at our own expense.

Just a thought.

Nazzo Fast, Guido (Part 2)

Foreign Affairs

I also have reservations about this one.

President Donald Trump and Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese signed a rare earths and critical minerals deal Monday at the White House.

On the surface of it, this is a Good Thing in that it very much loosens the stranglehold that the fucking ChiComs have on rare earth production, which they have signaled as a boycott threat in dealing with the U.S.

However, I note with some displeasure the comment also made after the signing:

Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum praised the deal.

“Critical mineral independence is essential to our national security, and thanks to @POTUS, America is finally prioritizing the resources essential to our defense, technology, and energy sectors!”

That statement is quite true… but there are a couple of home truths we have to deal with here.

The first is that when it comes to rare earth reserves, the United States has the largest such in the entire world, much larger than the next two or three countries combined.

The second home truth is that while we have all the rare earth minerals we need, we are prevented from producing it because of the raft of ecological and NIMBY regulations and barriers hamstringing its mining.

So it’s all very well to sign agreements with countries like Australia, but that’s not actually “mineral independence”, is it?  Lest anyone forget, the Australia of today is far from the Australia of, say, post WWII.  Now their government is a bunch of frigging Commies — politically speaking, OzPM Albanese is at about the same level as Nancy fucking Pelosi, their diplomats are just as bad — and I don’t trust Commies of any stripe, furriners especially.

Of course, I mean no disrespect to my several Oz Readers, because judging from the tone and temper of their many emails to me, I gather that they (and many other Strylians) have an even deeper loathing for their Lefty government types than I do.  But these politicians, lest we forget, have nevertheless been elected by the populace, so my Oz readers are in the distinct minority.

From a global realpolitik  perspective, of course we should strengthen our ties with nations like Australia who are threatened by ChiCom expansion plans.  But let’s also tread carefully all the same, because in the end, Commies are Commies and there’s no telling how they may behave in future.

Nazzo Fast, Guido (Part 3)

Foreign Affairs, Military, Trumpism

The problem with Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky) is that he’s a firm believer in this Constitution Nostra.  In a way, he’s like the Constitution Goblin that sits on our shoulder whispering, “Show me where in the Constitution it says you can do that”.

As he does now.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) claimed President Donald Trump’s military strikes against suspected drug boats were not legal.

Host Kristen Welker said, “President Trump has authorized military strikes against suspected drug boats in the Caribbean, as you know, so far more than 20 people, senator, have been killed in six different strikes. Do you believe that these strikes against these suspected drug boats are legal?”

Paul said, “No, they go against all of our tradition. When you kill someone if you’re not in war, and not in a declared war you really need to know someone’s name, at least. You have to accuse them of something and you have to present evidence. All of these people have been blown up without us knowing their name and without evidence of a crime. For decades and if not centuries when you stop people at sea in international waters or in your own waters you announce that you’re going to board the ship and you’re looking for contraband, smuggling or drugs. This happens every day off of Miami, but we know from Coast Guard statistics that about 25% of the time the Coast Guard boards a ship there are no drugs. So if our policy now is to blow up every ship we suspect or accuse of drug running, that would be a bizarre world in which 25% of the people might be innocent.”

And I agree with him.

In the first place, these are not Venezuelan Navy ships that our boys are sending off to that Big Drydock In The Sky;  they’re privately-owned.  And yes, they may have been sponsored by that godless Commie VenPres Maduro, but we don’t really know that, do we?

Me, I’d rather have the Navy board a ship when intercepted, and if they find evidence of drugs — like, sacks of cocaine powder in the hold — they should thank the ship’s crew politely, get off the ship… and then blow it the shit out of the water.

I don’t agree with this part of ol’ Rand’s little diatribe, though:

“The other thing about these speed boats is they’re 2,000 miles away from us. If they have drugs they’re probably peddling drugs to one of the islands of Trinidad or Tobago off Venezuela.”

Don’t care where the destination of the drugs may be:  la coca  is illegal in pretty much every country on earth — oh, and by the way, just because the drugs may be headed for Trinidad or Tobago, that doesn’t mean that those islands are their final destination:  they might just be a stop over, en route to the U.S. (and probably are, being just part of the distribution network).

I also suspect that the “25%” of the time statistic is because the drug runners see the USN or USCG ships coming, and dump the contraband overboard — which is fine because whatever, the drugs aren’t going to reach their destination.

I know why The Donald is doing this:  it’s to create a negative incentive for drug smuggling, a way to persuade these assholes to find another way to earn a living.  It might work;  but it’s not legal.

And we’re not (yet) at war with Venezuela, last time I looked, and given the craven nature of Congress as it stands right now, I doubt very much whether they’d give the go-ahead to nuke Caracas, tempting though that prospect might be.

It’s a tough problem, but I’m not sure that bombing ships out in the middle of the ocean is the correct one.  Rand Paul doesn’t;  and I think in this case, he has the right of it.

I am prepared to hear opinions to the contrary, of course.

Lottery Odds

Elections, Foreign Affairs, Politics

No, not the lottery;  the odds against this happening by pure coincidence:

Several candidates for the populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) have died in the lead-up to this month’s local elections in the country’s most populous state.

According to the German paper of record Die Welt, at least seven AfD candidates have died ahead of the September 14th elections in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. Germany’s Deutsche Presse-Agentur wire service noted that a total of 16 candidates have died before the upcoming vote. Yet, no other party besides the Eurosceptic right-wing party has suffered more than one death..

And then this:

Authorities have stressed that there is so far no evidence of foul play in any of the deaths.

Considering that there’s a non-zero chance that the “authorities” may have been behind at least some of these deaths… well, okay.

Let’s look at it more closely:

Police have already confirmed natural causes in four of the AfD candidate deaths and said there are so far no indications of foul play in the others.

So (counting on fingers) that leaves a dozen or so “non-natural” causes.

Then there’s the “it happens all the time” rationale:

A North Rhine-Westphalia election commission spokesman told the DPA that the number of deaths was “not significantly higher” than in past elections, with tens of thousands of people running for seats in the state.

Speaking as a one-time analyst of data, though, I’d love to see a per-thousand number of deaths by party affiliation.

I’m not by nature a conspiracy theorist, but when I’m confronted by a low-probability / massively-coincidental series of events, I do become suspicious.  The scale of untimely pre-election and party-specific deaths here is positively Clintonian.

Let me go out on a limb and suggest that the high mortality of AfD candidates is extremely suspicious.

Same Tactic, Different Places

Foreign Affairs, Marxists, Politics

I often hear this complaint when I’m at the liquor store to replenish my gin supplies:

“Kim, why the hell do you spend so much time talking about what’s happening in Yurp?  What they do has so little to do with us here in Murka!”

Rather than argue the rationale, I’ll just go to the example reel, and play the movie:

France’s New Guillotine: Silent Dictatorship

On March 31, 2025, the Paris Criminal Court sentenced Marine Le Pen to five years of electoral “ineligibility” with immediate effect…. This sentence, described by the defendant as a “witch hunt”, bars the frontrunner in the polls from standing in the 2027 French presidential election.

The aim of this maneuver is clear: to remove the opposition leader from competing for the highest office in the land.

Never mind that this happened over The Pond in Frogland.  If anyone can’t see the similarities between that and what the Left tried to do to Trump a few years ago, they are, to put it bluntly, fucking dense.

The Left, in both countries, have enlisted the aid of the politicized judiciary (and its lapdogs, politicized law enforcement) to try to stymie the election of someone who is far and away the most popular politician in the country:  Le Pen Over There, and Trump Over Here.

Of course, what the Leftist DOJ did to Trump happened, as I said, some years ago, whereas the same thing happened to Le Pen just a couple months ago.

The order is unimportant.  What’s important is that the Left are not going to stop trying to do the same, over and over again.  Whether it’s because of alleged “wrongspeak” (in Yurp) or manufactured crimes (Trump), the end goal is the same:  stop the voters from electing the “wrong person”.

Or the “wrong” political party.  Step (goose-step?) forward, our old friends from Krautland:

Germany’s spy agency on Friday classified the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) as “extremist”, enabling it to step up monitoring of the country’s biggest opposition party, which decried the move as a “blow against democracy”.

A 1,100-page experts’ report found the AfD to be a racist and anti-Muslim organisation, a designation that allows the security services to recruit informants and intercept party communications, and which has revived calls for the party’s ban.

“Central to our assessment is the ethnically and ancestrally defined concept of the people that shapes the AfD, which devalues entire segments of the population in Germany and violates their human dignity,” the BfV domestic intelligence agency said in a statement.

“This concept is reflected in the party´s overall anti-migrant and anti-Muslim stance,” it said, accusing the AfD of stirring up “irrational fears and hostility” towards individuals and groups.

And anyone who can’t see the parallels between the actions of the  Gestapo  BfV and our own beloved Biden-era CIA and FBI are also fucking dense.

So yeah:  I continue to observe the goings-on outside our shores (especially in Yurp), because for those who still haven’t seen the wood for the trees, the Stalinist Comintern is alive and well.

These Commie bastards have comrades-in-arms all over the world.

Alternative

Foreign Affairs, Immigration, Trumpism

There’s a good reason why this is happening:

Mass protests have exploded outside migrant hotels across the country this weekend as furious families gathered in major cities including Birmingham and London.

Hotels across Dudley, Epping, London, Manchester and Norwich have also braced for protests as communities seek to replicate the ruling for The Bell Hotel which, pending an appeal, must be closed within weeks. 

It comes after more than 30 protests under the Abolish Asylum system were held in towns and cities across the UK on Saturday. 

These included Bristol, Exeter, Tamworth, Cannock, Nuneaton, Liverpool, Wakefield, Newcastle, Horley, Canary Wharf, Aberdeen and Perth in Scotland, and Mold in Wales.

A separate batch of protests were also organised by Stand Up to Racism in Bristol, Cannock, Leicester, Liverpool, Newcastle, Wakefield, Horley and Long Eaton in Derbyshire.

Quite frankly, the Brits are rebelling against their government’s accommodationist [sic]  policy towards illegal immigrants — I’m sorry, I meant “asylum seekers” — because Britain doesn’t have anything like this*:

And here’s the big difference.  We have facilities like the above because:

The Brits, on the other hand, never voted for “asylum hotels”, but had them thrust upon them by their (elected) government.  So it’s all very well blaming the Britgov for doing this, but let’s be honest about the whole thing:  it’s not like the awful Labour Party ever disguised their intentions — and the Brits voted them into power anyway because the “Conservative” Party had cocked up the whole migrant issue themselves, and I suppose the Brit voters wanted to “teach them a lesson”.

Well, that worked well for them, didn’t it?

Now, the Tories are but a shadow of their former [ahem Thatcherite]  glory, and the party most likely to replace them as the proper Opposition is…

That’s assuming, of course, that Farage can survive the typical (and tiresome) British tradition of political treachery and backstabbing.

But if all the above popular demonstrations are anything to be believed, it means that native Brits have finally fond their voice, and a principle to rally around.

And it’s about damn time.  Let’s just hope that it’s not too late.

*I know, I know:  some idiot judge has rued that AlliAlc must be closed or something, so we’ll just have to find another place that doesn’t upset the local Democrats Indian tribe.  (Maybe we should just offer to convert AlliAlc into a fucking casino in ten years’ time, just to shut them up.)