Tag: Good News

Christmas Present

Good Stuff

Wow, now this is interesting:

A single ticket sold in Arkansas won the second largest U.S. lottery jackpot in history, a $1.817 billion Christmas Eve bonanza in the Powerball game.

Ho ho ho, indeed.

Talk about a life-changer — and I didn’t buy a ticket, because reasons.

“What reasons, Kim?”

Here’s the thing.  The cash option on that beast was about $500 million, making the lucky winner a semi-billionaire.  And that life-changing thing is what stopped me from buying a ticket.

Don’t get me wrong:  it’s not that I wouldn’t be able to spend the money — I have plenty of relatives and friends, all of whom I could make extremely happy/wealthy.  But honestly, I don’t want to change my own life that much.

Believe me:  change it would.  With 500 big ones to your name, you become a target for all sorts of undesirable people:  kidnappers, scam artists, robbers, whatever.  You might think that you could disappear from public life and become anonymous, but you can’t;  that sum of money is just too big.  So you’d have to hire lawyers, accountants, financial planners and personal bodyguards… and that all adds up to a massive lifestyle change.

And speaking quite honestly, I’m too old for all that shit.  Not only that, but what would I want to buy?  A new house?  Two new houses?  An expensive vintage car?  Three expensive vintage cars?

Don’t even get me started on guns.  That hurts, because as much as I’d like to own some pretty shotguns and rifles, the truth is that the time in which I could shoot them is becoming increasingly shorter.  I’m in my seventies, FFS, and even though I’m in good health, my meeting with that old bastard Death is not a remote possibility, is it?  So a safe or three full of Purdeys or whatever is just not appealing, anymore.  Ten or twenty years ago?  Now that’s a different story;  but I am where I am and that’s all there is to it.

Bloody hell, I couldn’t even buy a ton of books either, because of the time it would take me to read them.

Here’s a bad one.  I don’t want to travel that much,because I’m pretty sure that most of my old haunts have turned to shit in my absence over these past few years.  London?  Paris?  Vienna?  Judging by what I’ve recently been reading about them, they’ve all turned into dangerous shitholes #Muslims #Africans #Gypsies #etc.  And cruises have never held much fascination for me, because at the end of the day, you’re in thrall to other people’s choices or itineraries and that is not the way I want to travel.  (Never mind the oceangoing part of it, because it just wastes time — that I don’t have, see above — and I don’t do sunbathing anyway.)

Frankly, the only thing that holds any attraction to me is a large-ish ranch somewhere in Texas where I could set up a few ranges of the clay pigeon, rifle, pistol and rimfire type, and blaze away to my heart’s content.

And I wouldn’t need half a billion dollars to afford that.

Anyway, I see that the Powerball jackpot has now returned to sane levels — just over $9 million for the cash option as I write this — and that would do me just fine.

Sure, my family and friends wouldn’t see much (or any) of that, once I’ve handed over the several pounds of flesh to the IRS and bought that ranch etc., but them’s the breaks.  Nobody has ever stopped them from buying their own lottery ticket, after all. Call me selfish if you want, but there it is.

And our lucky winner in Arkansas?  You’re going to need even more good luck to survive your windfall, buddy.  I hope it comes your way.

Malice Aforethought

Journalist Scum, Legal Stuff, Trumpism

I haven’t been keeping up with the Trump vs. BBC saga much, because as a rule trials make my eyes glaze over.  This one, however, may be different:

MAKE no mistake, Donald Trump’s $5billion (£3.7billion) defamation lawsuit against the BBC, filed yesterday, is a formidable document: it is a tightly constructed, meticulously argued claim that accuses the Corporation not merely of error but of intentional deception on a scale that, if proven, could be the most damaging legal defeat in its history.

Filed in the US District Court for the Southern District of Florida, the complaint names the BBC, BBC Studios Distribution, and BBC Studios Productions as defendants. It seeks $5billion in damages for defamation and for alleged violations of Florida’s consumer protection laws.

What makes the filing so potent is that it weaves the BBC’s factual admissions, internal whistleblowing, patterns of bias in BBC coverage, timing, motive and governance failure – caused essentially by the BBC acting as its own judge and jury – into a coherent narrative of wrongdoing.

…and the article just gets better and better as Dave Keighley lays it all out for TCW’s Brit readers.  Read the whole thing.

Best part of all this?  The suit has been filed in Florida, where Trump’s a longtime resident (at Mar-A-Lago, for my Brit Readers).  In Florida (as opposed to NYfC or Kollyfornia) the jury is going to be made of Floridians, nay even a goodly number of Trump voters who, if all goes Trump’s way, will deliver a sound financial wacking to the BBC’s corporate pee-pee.

Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of smug, Leftist assholes, who will have their bias and underhanded skulduggery exposed to the entire world.

It’s just too bad that in the end, the financial penalty will be borne by the BBC’s license holders, i.e. the public, rather than by the BBC executives who perpetrated this travesty.

But hey… all the more reason for the Brits to dump the whole licensing bollocks altogether.  The public hangings can come later.

Lessons Learned

Immigration, Politics

For the longest time, I would have been one of the loudest voices opposing the idea that we Murkins should copy anything much from the Scandi countries — okay, maybe some of their darkest noir crime TV shows, but not much else.

However, I think that when it comes to immigration policy, there’s much to be learned from the Danes.  Watch the video to see how they fixed their erstwhile ruinous position on immigration.

What interests me the most is that highly-restrictive immigration controls, so often a feature of conservative (what they call right-wing) parties, have become very much a part of the Social Democrat (what we would call left-wing) party policy.

You see, the Danes are if nothing else, highly pragmatic in their pursuit of what they consider the ideal society.  And yes, while a strong welfare state is the sine qua non  of Danish society, they also understand that without social cohesion, a welfare state is not a tenable system.  Those two pillars — the welfare system and social cohesion — form the foundation of their society, and what the Danes realized, long before any of their European neighbors did, that untrammeled immigration of Third Worlders of the Arab Muslim and African persuasion was rending their social cohesion asunder, and undermining their cherished welfare state.

You have to hand it to them for swinging their immigration system by 180 degrees:  in fact, it’s harder to immigrate into Denmark than it is into the United States because the Danish requirements for residency are unbelievably restrictive, including such concepts as civic indoctrination and the linking of conformity to any kind of welfare.  If you don’t fit in, the Danes will force you to fuck off back to your shithole country of origin, with neither remorse nor pity on their part.

And naturalized Danish citizenship is almost impossible to come by without lengthy permanent residency and complete assimilation via a rigorous civics examination process.  (Fail that test, and you’re on the next plane back to Shitholistan.)

I would really, really like to see that happen Over Here.

I’ll leave it to y’all to decide, though, how likely it is that the foul Democrat-Socialist Party of today would perform a similar change in their position on immigration.  And quit laughing.

We need more attitude like this:

“If you don’t share our values, contribute to our economy, and assimilate into our society, then we don’t want you in our country.”

No, that wasn’t the Danish PM.  That was President Donald J. Trump, December 2025.

So Long, Faerie

Corporate Wokism, Drive Time

It’s probably too late, of course, but I see that Jaguar Land Rover (JLR, to use their stupid non-brand acronym) has finally decided to can the woke twerp who turned Jag into… well, nothing.

Just the “relaunch” ad’s smug payoff line was enough to set my teeth on edge:

“We’re here to delete ordinary. To go bold. To copy nothing.”

I hate to tell them this but if Jaguar was anything, it wasn’t “ordinary”.  And frankly, if anything was worth copying, it was Jaguar’s heritage of wonderful, sleek and bold designs.

I’d post pics of the suggested modern replacement for the above (as envisaged by the now-departed Gerry McGovern), but I don’t want to ruin anyone’s appetite.

I just wonder what Jag is going to do now?

Update:  OMFG

Deep Freeze

Illegal immigrants, Immigration, Trumpism

No, this isn’t a post about winter weather.  It’s about this:

President Donald Trump’s deputies have shut down the legal migration pathways for people from 19 countries, pending the completion of security checks and interviews.

And about damn time too.  When the “huddled masses” want to come over here to avail themselves of our freedoms, solely to commit crimes… we owe it to ourselves to try to stop them before they get going.

(After these ingrates commit their little nefarious wealth redistribution games, however:


…I think you get the picture.)

Just to be clear, the nineteen affected countries are:

Afghanistan, Burma, Chad, the Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan, and Venezuela.

Basically, a bunch of Muzzy and Commie countries, the lot of them, and while some of their citizens may be fleeing those shitholes for all the right reasons — and I have a great deal of sympathy for their plight, for obvious reasons — all refugees and prospective citizens should absolutely require serious (i.e. non-Biden-style) vetting to make sure that the ungodly don’t try to sneak in to, say, set up a drug network, rape women, embezzle the welfare system or murder National Guardsmen.

When I think of all the hassle and scrutiny we went through with New Wife’s citizenship a couple of years back — she having done nothing other than teach children for nearly forty years — it sticks in my craw that during that same Biden presidency, a whole bunch of criminal scumbags were given the keys to the house because… well, just because.

And yes I know, some genuine refugees are going to be inconvenienced by this deep freeze.  But that’s the nature of laws:  the innocent get shafted by the need to contain the criminals (see for an example: every single useless gun control law).