Category: Politics

Trying not to start the public floggings

New Ideas

Marxists, Retailing

Longtime Friend & Reader Weetabix writes:

Given your history with grocery stores, do you have any thoughts on the Mamdani (Commie, Muslim) plan for government-run grocery stores (“public option”) in NYC?

I foresee:
– low prices because subsidized
– private stores and bodegas priced out of business
– “public option” stores lock everything up because of theft/vandalism
– public outrage at people’s unfair treatment due to what they brought on themselves
– “public option” stores close
– wailing and gnashing of teeth at the new “food desert”

…but, of course, I’m a cynic.

I have no thoughts other than Mr. Bix’s well-reasoned points — in fact, many thanks are due for saving me from having to think about the situation.

Every time Commies try this nonsense they encounter what we call “market experience”, and they call “greedy capitalism”.  There are many such (as outlined above) but allow to address but one, that of prices.

You can’t sell anything at “cost” (i.e. what you paid for the merchandise as it arrives at the store, or F.O.B. — free on board — as usually stated).  What that does is make your retail outlet a losing proposition (what’s nowadays referred to as “unsustainable”).  This remains true even if the operating costs of the establishment (rent, utilities, equipment, salaries etc.) are wholly assumed by city government, as this Marxist asshole proposes.  The drain on tax revenue will be horrendous, even for just the six stores — which by the way will also be denied the benefits of non-issued sales taxes under this loony scheme.  And I haven’t even touched on the city’s subsidization of yet-lower prices, which will not only drain revenues but also increase demand.  And speaking of which:

…ummm only six stores to cover the whole five boroughs of NYfC?  Expect long queues and lengthy waits at the registers as the stores struggle to cope with the (unexpectedly) high demand — and high demand there will be in plenty because if they think that only the Pore&Starvin denizens of NYfC will attempt to avail themselves of these lower prices, they don’t know much about New York.  [200 examples from personal experience omitted for reasons of brevity]

To use a not-so-long-ago example from Marxist establishments of, say, Soviet Russia (Moscow Version):

Whether the famously-impatient Noo Yawkers will stay as docile as their Moscow counterparts will be established on Day One of this Glorious Leap Forward — let me get out ahead of the thing by stating that there’ll be riots and rampant looting, you betcha.

But hey:  never let it be said that I stood in the way of stupid people making stupid decisions and trying stupid experiments, especially when the victims of said stupidity actually voted for all that.

I look forward to Comrade Mamdani’s “new” initiatives (and their unexpected! outcomes) with great anticipation, as will Reader Weetabix and the rest of you.

Let the (Hunger) Games begin.

When Facts Meet Dogma

Eco-Crap, Grifters & Cons, Watermelons

…it’s no competition at all.  Bernie Sanders must have been insane (I know, I know) to agree to go on Joe Rogan’s podcast.

“You gotta deal with this climate change issue,” Sanders insisted. “It ain’t a hoax.” He trotted out the standard leftist claim that the last decade was “the warmest on record” and promised that a green energy overhaul would magically create “millions of good-paying jobs.”
But Rogan didn’t let Bernie get away with that kind of simplistic narrative. Instead, he calmly pointed out that Earth’s climate is far more complex and historically volatile than Sanders wants to admit. “The Earth’s temperature has never been static,” Rogan said. “It’s always been up and down. There’s been ice ages and heat waves.”
Referencing a recent Washington Post piece, Rogan brought up the inconvenient truth that global temperatures, when viewed over a longer timeline, appear to be in a cooling phase, something that completely undermines the urgency of the left’s climate panic. “Look at the far end of that graph,” Rogan said, quoting the Post’s data. “You see, we’re in a cooling period.”
Sanders tried to pivot, admitting that he hadn’t read the article, but Rogan began to point out how climate change is a huge grift. “There’s a lot of money involved in this whole climate change emergency issue,” he said. “And there’s a lot of control.”

It’s the “control” part that gets me,  Telling me that after some date or other I’ll have to drive an electric car, or if I don’t, I’ll be restricted to x number of miles before my car gets shut down remotely;  that I’ll have to put up with regular brownouts / blackouts because electricity generation must be either wind- or solar-generated;  having to become a vegetarian because cattle-emissions damage the atmosphere…

The list goes on and on, and all that changes is that more and more means of control are introduced into our daily lives.

The hell with all of them, and the hell with Bernie Sanders who, despite being a self-confessed Marxist has somehow [eyeroll]  managed to become a multimillionaire property owner since be was elected to the Senate.

Bite Me

Journalist Scum, Resistance

Well, it was fun while it lasted.

It seems like the PjMedia Complex — Townhall, Twitchy, and PJM itself are increasingly turning their websites into PPV.

So a link from PJM’s Godfather — Insty — on a big story such as this:

…has the embedded link:

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/leahbarkoukis/2025/06/17/fbi-hands-congress-documents-with-alarming-allegations-about-the-2020-election-n2658948

When you follow the link, of course it takes you to the Townhall page.  However, if like me you hate being bombarded with fucking Facebook links masquerading as ads, or ads that lead you to click-bait sites, ads hawking the books penned by hem hem PJM writers, and (my favorite) pop-up auto-start ads or links) you will have installed an ad-blocker like Adblock or Badger.

So when you get to the Townhall site via that link from Insty, you get a grayed-out screen with this set of options:

Okay, here’s the deal.  I can’t afford to be a “VIP” subscriber because quite frankly, my subscription budget is pretty much zero.  There’s a plethora of choices for my subscription pennies (note:  pennies, not dollars — this is important, as you’ll see later), and PJM VIP is not, shall we say, a premium choice.

Fine, say I, and so I resort to using archive sites like https://archive.is/ to bypass the paywall.  Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

So, because I want to read all about the Kash Patel / 2020 election thing, I go to DuckDuckGo and type in “kash patel 2020 election”, and get a series of choices.  Skipping the left-wing media (NBC, Daily Beast, Newsweek etc.) I find a link to the Washington Examiner, which finally gives me free access to the story I want to read:

FBI Director Kash Patel has turned over a batch of internal documents to Congress detailing allegations that Chinese operatives sought to interfere in the 2020 election by mass-producing fake U.S. driver’s licenses to facilitate fraudulent mail-in voting.

The intelligence, which Patel said on Monday night he had recently declassified, has been sent to Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), who has led oversight efforts into foreign election interference and pressed the bureau to release details surrounding the alleged scheme.

And even worse:

“These include allegations of plans from the CCP to manufacture fake driver’s licenses and ship them into the United States for the purpose of facilitating fraudulent mail-in ballots — allegations which, while substantiated, were abruptly recalled and never disclosed to the public,” Patel said.

Let’s be honest, here:  this is a really big fucking deal, and if it’s proven to be true, we have two major issues:  1) China was fucking with our election in 2020 — yeah, 81 million Biden votes, kiss my ass, and 2) the FBI knew about it and did sweet fuck-all about it.  (And Just The News‘s followup article is even more damning.)

But back to my main point.

Everyone who works has to make a buck to keep the head above the water, individuals as much as organizations, and nothing comes free in this world.  I know this, because I am one such person.  So PJMedia has every right to require me to pay for their work, i.e. to read their articles.

My problem is that I can’t afford to pay their monthly sub fee because as I said, there are literally hundreds of such subs available.  And to be brutally frank, while PJM’s content is quite good, it’s not that good (Stephen Green and only a couple of other writers excepted).  Few of the conservative websites are that good, either.

Frankly, if I’m going to be brutally honest:  if I can afford only one subscription, I think I may subscribe to the above-mentioned Just The News, because their coverage and editorial stance seems to be what I’m looking for.  And the price seems to be about right, too:

  OR: 

That’s about $0.12 (twelve cents) per day — about the cost of a newspaper print subscription back in 1960, which sounds about right, for digital content.  (I recently got a small tax refund from the IRS, which funded this sub. [irony alert] )

Of course, I may be disappointed — one usually is, in matters of this nature, as I was with an earlier subscription to Epoch Times, quickly canceled — but what the hell, it’s only money and information, right?

So I’ll be linking to a lot of JTN articles in the future.  Let me know if they start playing reindeer games with their pages (like PJM outlets do) and I’ll just post longer excerpts.

Predecessor

Politics

This from Kurt Schlichter:

The problem is that he’s bad at his job. And he doesn’t even seem to like it. Whenever you see Gavin Newsom in his gov mode, you get the impression that he’d rather be anywhere else doing anything else. It’s not like he actually does anything as governor. With guys like Newsom, it’s not the doing. It’s the being. He wants to be governor; he doesn’t want to do the hard things a real governor does. And it would be the same thing if he were to become president. He wants to be the president; the doing stuff part is a huge hassle that gets in the way of him being the center of attention.

Here’s what resonates with me about this.  Note the changes I’ve made:

With guys like Obama, it’s not the doing. It’s the being. He wanted to be a Senator; he didn’t want to do the hard things a real Senator does. And it was the same thing when he was the president. He wanted to be the president; the doing stuff part was a huge hassle that got in the way of him being the center of attention.

Same shit, different Democrat asshole.

A Feature, Not A Bug

Diplomacy, Foreign Affairs, Wars & Other Fun Games

I hadn’t considered this, in the wake of the little Izzy / Muzzie disturbances.  Fortunately, some Big Brains have:

Israeli air and drone strikes during the early hours of June 13th crippled Iran — and severely set back Tehran’s regional ambitions. The Israel Defense Forces hit nuclear weapons development facilities and ballistic missile sites, and killed senior military officers, including Major General Mohammad Bagheri, the armed forces chief of staff, and Major General Hossein Salami, the commander-in-chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

Iranian media announced the death of Ali Shamkhani, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s top adviser.

Tehran said that Israel’s action was a “declaration of war.” This war is continuing, and Iran has struck back with ballistic missile and drone attacks.

Narratives will change as the fighting continues, but one conclusion is already evident: China, Iran’s long-time backer, is a victim of the fighting. That is a quick reversal of fortunes. Only last year, the Chinese looked ascendant in the region.

“China is closely following Israel’s attacks on Iran and is deeply concerned about the potential grave consequences of the operations,” the Chinese foreign ministry stated on X a few hours after the initial attacks. “China opposes actions that violate Iran’s sovereignty, security, and territorial integrity, and opposes moves that escalate tensions or enlarge conflicts.”

“China stands ready to play a constructive role in helping ease the situation,” it added.

Beijing may stand ready, but, apart from the Iranian regime itself, the region is not looking for Chinese assistance.

Yeah;  what the CCP may have forgotten is that nobody in that area — not just the Izzies — likes the idea of a nuked-up Iran, for the same reason one fears a drugged-up ghetto choirboy with a hand grenade.

“There were some very, very relieved people in the Gulf as the sun rose this morning…. The Saudis know that China had armed their enemy Iran with nukes and lesser weapons and fully backed the Houthis, who have been waging war on the Kingdom for years.” — Jonathan Bass, Chief Executive Officer, Argent LNG, to Gatestone Institute, June 13, 2025.

Put more bluntly:  “Oh noes we deplore all this warry bomb-bomb stuff!”  while thinking “Thank fuck for the Izzies.”

So much for that, then.

Tit For Tat

Foreign Affairs, Trumpism

Seems as though there’s a fair amount of angst and anguish about Trump’s BBB proviso that (loosely explained) says:  “If you tax us, we’re gonna tax you right back.”

In testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee, Bessent said the legislation includes new tools to retaliate against countries that impose what he called “unfair foreign taxes” on American firms — including digital services taxes and top-up levies under the OECD’s (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) global minimum tax framework.

“The U.S. tax system will stand next to what is called Pillar Two, and other countries are welcome to relinquish their fiscal and tax sovereignty to other nations,” Bessent said. “The United States will not. So this bill will allow us to prevent our corporate revenues from being drained into foreign treasuries—and that is in the hundreds of billions of dollars.”

At the heart of the plan is a new measure that would impose escalating surtaxes on income earned in the U.S. by companies, individuals, and even governments from nations that target American firms with extraterritorial taxes. The same countries could also face higher withholding taxes on U.S. investments and tougher rules under the Base Erosion and Anti-Abuse Tax (BEAT). Sovereign wealth funds and central banks from those countries would lose long-standing exemptions and become subject to U.S. tax on their holdings.

The provision — found in Section 899 of the bill — is designed to pressure foreign governments to roll back taxes that the administration views as discriminatory and coercive. It would start with a five-percentage-point surtax and escalate annually to a maximum of twenty points above the standard U.S. tax rate unless the targeted country reverses its policy.

And the rightness of this approach can be gauged from the level of opposition from Global Capitalist Bastards Inc.:

Multinational firms, foreign banks, and global trade associations are mounting an aggressive campaign to weaken or eliminate the provision, arguing it could lead to retaliatory measures and complicate international investment.

Yeah, my heart bleeds for all those fat corporations and insanely-wealthy fucks whose international investments will become complicated.  This is aimed at the foreign governments who think that  theft   fleecing   taxation of foreign investment is okay if they do it, but not if we do it.

I know that a lot of what Trump does is just positioning — i.e. laying the battlefield for future negotiation — but this is one initiative where I hope he digs in and goes all the way.  Why should we support foreign governments’ enrichment programs at our own expense when we can’t do exactly the same to them?  Make no mistake:  these assholes are making billions of dollars out of this.

And lastly, anytime I see the words “OECD’s (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) global minimum tax framework” involved in an argument, I want to reach for my AK.  No greater argument against globalization can be raised than when their principles are involved.

Feel free to bring lofty economics arguments to this post, because I will really enjoy shooting them down in flames.