Nazzo Fast, Guido

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)

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.

Quote Of The Day

From Kurt Schlichter:

“Quick, everybody care what a bunch of impotent, fussy foreigners think about us! No, really, we should give a damn that some herring-gobbling fjord jockey is mad about Donald Trump. Yeah, Norwegians totally matter. But not really. No foreigner matters. Not Canadians, not the English, not the Arabs (especially of the nonexistent Palestinian variety), not the Papua/New Guineans. Here’s the reality. Most foreigners are trash. Most people who aren’t Americans suck. And treacherous Americans who presume to leverage the puny outrage of second-rate cultures against ours deserve our contempt and mockery almost as much as the foreigners themselves. They think we’re dumb, New World rubes with too much in the way of guns, calories, and Jesus.

“In contrast, we barely think of them at all.”

And that’s only the beginning of his most excellent rant.  Read it all, and chortle.

Lottery Odds

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.

Fiddling & Fraud

I see that Walmart has been caught with their hand in the cookie jar:

A very high-ranking Walmart executive was allegedly tossing American tech workers aside while pocketing massive bribes to bring in Indian H-1B workers from shady “visa mills.” And once again, the globalist lie about “filling jobs Americans won’t do” is blown to pieces.

This scandal was never about talent shortages or innovation. It was about greed, lining pockets, cutting costs, and selling out the American workers who built Walmart into what it is today.

It should come as no surprise that the corporation whose business mantra is all about the lowest possible prices should treat their own workforce any differently.

I’ve written about this whole situation before (Screwing Americans and Racial Preferences), so to say I am unaware of this bastardy would be some kind of understatement.

But I’m now well past the point of just observing such things and shaking my head about it.

Here’s my suggestion to the Trump Administration.

  • find out how many of these fraudulent H-1B visas were given to Walmart employees since, well, forever;
  • calculate the average annual salaries of each of those jobs, if held by U.S. citizens, and multiply those dollar amounts by the number of frauds;
  • add three zeroes to that aggregate;
  • fine Walmart for that amount, with a massive daily penalty for non-compliance;
  • then go after every other company which has benefited from this kind of fraud, and sue them in identical fashion (ahem Google etc.).

Or just go through the all finance and HR departments and in classical Roman fashion, randomly select one in ten employees for summary termination* (the original meaning of the word “decimation”).  Repeat the process on a monthly basis.

A precondition for the above is the immediate “reshoring” of all fraudulent H-1B visa holders, along with their families.

I’m sick of us pussyfooting around this nonsense, and I’m pretty sure that a large number of Trump supporters feel the same.


* I first wrote “execution” but some people may have a problem with this because Krool & Hartless, Kim.

Good Question

Over There, Richard Littlejohn asks the question:

Why do Americans care more about Britain than Labour?

On everything from Net Zero and defence to immigration and crime, they make a great deal more sense than most of the Westminster Bubble’s arrogant, out-of-touch political class.

The latest was a report from the US State Department accusing Britain of backsliding on human rights – especially freedom of speech and the frightening rise in anti-Semitism.

First out of the blocks was Vance with his damning speech in February, not just about the erosion of civil liberties but the contempt for popular democracy among the political elite.

Addressing his remarks to Europe as a whole and Britain in particular, he said: ‘No one on this continent went to the ballot box to open the floodgates to millions of unvetted immigrants.

‘But you know what they did vote for? In England, they voted for Brexit. And agree or disagree, they voted for it.’

As Trump warned on his recent visit to Scotland, if we don’t get a grip on immigration we’re not going to have a country any more. Who, outside of the far-Left and the yuman rites brigade, could argue with that?

The President has also ordered the National Guard to take back control of the streets of Washington, America’s capital city.

In London, the police have withdrawn from the streets, leading to a surge in stabbings, shoplifting and violent phone thefts. How many people in our capital city would object to a few squaddies on the streets if it crushed crime and saved lives?

Trump reserves some of his harshest criticism for Britain’s suicidal Net Zero nosedive. He maintains that our War Of The Worlds windmills, as well as being a hideous blot on the landscape, are the ‘worst form of energy, the most expensive form of energy’.

And he simply can’t fathom why Labour refuses to exploit our vast reserves of oil and gas, which would produce great wealth for the country, support tens of thousands of jobs and slash energy bills.

As for the “why?” part of the question, it’s quite simple.  Despite all the efforts of Leftists on both sides of the Pond to sabotage the Special Relationship between us, I believe that many Murkins still feel some vestiges of affection to the Old Country.

And why not?  We inherited the concepts of parliamentary government and of human rights, to name but two, from Britain.  We share a common language and many cultural ties (once again, despite efforts of the Left to destroy them).  These are not small things;  they are the ties that bind.

But it pains us to see that despite that shared heritage of, say, free speech, we see British police arresting people for posting “anti-social” statements or “hate speech” on the Internet.

Of private ownership of guns, we will not speak — even though that same concept is a key part of why Americans aren’t being arrested for posting “anti-social” statements or “hate speech” on the Internet.

So, as I say so often on these pages, we look on happenings in the UK with something approaching dread, because we ask:  if the famously-tolerant Brits allow this shit to happen to themselves, why could it not happen Over Here too?

Back in the 1940s, Americans supported Britain in their war against tyranny.  Nowadays?  If Russia invaded Western Europe and the UK, I’m not so sure we’d raise a finger to help them.  Why should we, when those shared ties of freedom have been tossed aside unilaterally?