Background Books

With the Chinkvirus lockdown and associated Zoom-y nonsense, we’ve all become familiar with people filming themselves with bookcases in the background.  What used to be the standard backdrop for lawyers’ vanity pics (with tomes and tomes of legal texts behind them, as though they’d ever read one, the bastards), now seems to be the norm, especially with politicians.  Here are a couple of examples:  BritPM Boris Johnson:

…and some other BritGov flunky:

Now I’m quite aware that most of the displayed books were probably chosen by assorted political handlers and PR flacks [vast overlap], so their appearance can probably be discounted.

But it gives me an idea for a game entitled:  “Suppose You Were To Appear On A Zoom Live Feed, Which 12 Books Would You Want To be Displayed Behind You?”  (I know, the title may need a little work, but you get my drift.)  Assuming such things were important to you, and you wanted to Send A Message About Yourself (e.g. if you were being interviewed by some Lefty TV show host or similar), which books would you display?

The difference between the above poseurs  and yourselves, O My Readers, is that you can only nominate books that you actually possess, i.e. that are already on your bookshelves (no cheating).

My dozen, in no specific order, are:

           

(The last is:  Leo: A Tribute to Leo Burnett.  It’s handed out to all new employees at Burnett on their first day, and the agency is still run on the same principles.)

Those are mine.  Yours?  (You can select fewer than twelve, but no more.  Multi-volume compendia such as Churchill’s History Of The Second World War  count as a single selection.)

Another Chink In Our Security

Here we go again:

A University of California-Los Angeles researcher has been arrested for allegedly throwing away a damaged hard drive while the FBI was investigating him for transferring sensitive U.S. data to China’s National University of Defense Technology.

As I noted in my post on a previous such incident, it would be a terrible thing if the spying motherfucker’s name was something like Professor Laydback Surferdude — but no, he’s an omelet-complexioned virus-spreader:

The U.S. Department of Justice announced Friday that 29-year-old Guan Lei “falsely den[ied] his association with the Chinese military” during interviews with federal law enforcement officials. Lei has since admitted that he participated in Chinese military training.
According to authorities, one of Lei’s faculty advisors in China also served in the Chinese military.
The Justice Department further alleged that Lei hid digital files from federal law enforcement and lied about having contact with the Chinese consulate during his time in the U.S.

I’m generally not a huge fan of piling on offenses just to add to the sentence, but I’m going to make an exception in this case because the little prick is so young.  So:  destruction of evidence (20 years), lying to a federal agent (5 years) and espionage (25 years), all sentences to run consecutively.

Or we could just shoot him in the back of the head, and make his family pay for the bullet — it’s what the ChiComs do to spies, after all.

I’m getting heartily sick of both this spying nonsense, and the aiding and abetting being given by academia.

We need to clean house, thoroughly, by expelling all Chinese nationals from faculty positions in academia.  And before the profs start squealing about “loss of intellectual capital” or some such bullshit, I would suggest that the only loss of intellectual capital is being caused by having these spies sending our work back to their Commie bosses.  Should our academic wailers wish to continue to work with these assholes, they should be quite free to do so:  in China.

Same Advice, Different Situation

I see that the Pantifa / Black oLives Matter crowd have taken to invading restaurants now:

Chanting “silence is violence,” the protesters demanded that people they encountered in the street, as well as the patrons of various restaurants, raise their hands to indicate solidarity with the goals of BLM.

My natural inclination to this kind of neo-Nazi thuggery and intimidation, of course, would be to raise my fist in solidarity, thus: 

…but that would probably be unwise.  Let me therefore remind everyone that the proper initial response to this nonsense is to insert earplugs in the proper manner:  This should be done for two reasons:  firstly, it will help drown out the silly chanting of this little shits.

I shouldn’t have to tell y’all the second reason, which might be necessary after you’ve put in the earplugs and then raised your (left*) fist in the manner above, and the Pantifastas take umbrage and attempt to do violence to you because they were “provoked”.  (Personally, I might be provoked to violence just by having some pasty-faced little middle-class weenie screaming in my face, but no doubt somebody’s going to have a problem with this.)

Anyway, this public service announcement comes on the heels of the first one.  Always have earplugs handy, folks.


*right hand, if you’re left-handed.

Nobody There

I see that the Stupid Party did well the other night:

C-SPAN’s live stream of night one of the Republican National Convention (RNC) garnered nearly 440,000 views, a major increase over the start of the Democratic National Convention that drew 76,000 views.

That’s because most voting supporters of the Democratic Socialist Party were either out looting, or still in the cemeteries.

Killing Golden Geese

The late and great Margaret Thatcher had it right (as usual) when she said of Communists that sooner or later, they run out of other people’s money.  What’s happening in many of the neo-socialist hellholes like New York lately is that the “other” (i.e. wealthy) people aren’t necessarily running out of money, they’re running out of patience with the filthy nest their government has created, and are running away.

It’s snapshot simple. The wealthy and the companies they work for pay most of the taxes. The poor consume most of the taxes through social programs. COVID is driving the wealthy and their offices out of the city. No one will be left to pay for the poor, who are stuck here, and the city will collapse in the transition.

Of course, that would be bad enough, because even if the wealthy folks came back to their Upper East- or West Side domiciles once the Chinkvirus had subsided, NYFC could continue to fleece them in the manner to which everyone has become accustomed.  But if their toney little brownstone houses and chi-chi apartment buildings are surrounded by homeless, aggressive beggars and rioting assholes of the BLM / Pantifa persuasion, the millionaires and billionaires will say (and are saying) “The hell with this shit” and leave for more hospitable climes — and their companies will go along with them.

I have another post bubbling under about the death of the traditional office-work model, but that can wait for another time.

What’s really interesting, from a socio-political perspective, is how quickly this has happened.  It might have happened at some point or another anyway, as the Blue Model metropolises collapsed under the weight of their underfunded pension plans and failing social services and infrastructure — but the Chinkvirus has been the Catalyst Supreme for our little domestic Lenins and Maos.  What’s even more interesting is that, being economic illiterates, our socialist pols have looked to Europe, their favorite model, and said, “But France isn’t collapsing!”

Oh yes, it is.  The difference is that rich Frogs can’t exactly load up U-Hauls and move to — where?  Germany?  Belgium?  Britain?  It’s the same situation in those countries.  There are no prosperous and successful business-friendly, low tax states in Europe like Texas, Florida or Utah — they’re all soft socialist states;  and the Chinkvirus is having the same effect on their economies and traditional business models as it is in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles.

So even in the best of times (booming Trump economy, no virus, no BLM / Pantifa riots), Illinois, California and New York — to name but three — would be sucking wind soon enough, and the writing has been on their walls for some time.  But in the current environment?  They’re screwed.

My only concern, as I’ve often said before, is that these fleeing rats don’t come to our happy little ships and infest them with their shitty ideas and political morality.