When Gummint Fails

…which is to say, almost all of the time, it’s incumbent then for citizens to step in and fix the problem, if they can.  As did a couple folks in the People’s Collective of Oakland, Californistan:

We don’t need to remind Oakland drivers their streets are some of the worst in the country, costing locals an extra $1,049 a year in car maintenance on average.
The problem has prompted two Oakland residents to go rogue, pulling off covert missions to patch potholes in the middle of the night. They’ve dubbed themselves the “Pothole Vigilantes” and show off their work on an Instagram page by the same name.

Needless to say, Gummint isn’t impressed:

When asked about the unauthorized roadwork, Oakland Public Works empathized with the problem at hand, but made it clear that Oakland residents shouldn’t be taking to the streets to themselves.
Said Sean Maher, a spokesperson for the department, “We can’t recommend anyone do this work themselves, not least because it raises safety issues while people are working in the streets.”

Oh yeah, the old “safety” bullshit.  Like hundreds of people hitting deep potholes with their cars every day is a “safer” alternative.  I also like the other part:

Maher made a plea for patience, saying more resources to fix roads are on the way. The city council is set to vote on a $100 million plan to repave streets over the next three years. The money would come from Measure KK, approved by voters in 2016.

Okay, let me just make sure I’ve got the arithmetic right.  The voters approved the necessary spending in 2016.  We are now nearly halfway through 2019 — and the council is only now “set to vote” on the repaving plan?  Uh-huh.  No wonder people are getting impatient.  I wonder what else the OakGov may have been doing over the past couple years, that prevented them from working on the thing any earlier… never mind, I remember now:  Oakland City Hall was busy preventing ICE from rounding up illegal immigrants, making themselves feel all virtuous by defying federal law.  But back to our story:

“They are frustrated and fed up with the pavement condition in their neighborhood,” said Maher.

I bet this guy also works for the Oakland Department Of The Blindingly Obvious.

Down The Road

This article got me thinking:

Republicans are enjoying their ride in the White House and basking in the glow of a divided Democratic presidential field, but a monumental identity crisis is looming for the GOP.
Whether you think President Donald Trump won’t be president in two months, two years or six years, Republicans are going to have a difficult time moving on to the next chapter.

I agree.  It would be a mistake to try and find a Trump 2.0, because no such animal exists.

What the Stupid Party should do, starting immediately after Trump wins the 2020 election, is to start looking for a person who has bought 100% into Trumps’s agenda, and into his methodology of getting all that done (minus the cringe-making Twatter texts).  In other words, find a younger man (or woman, but not both) who is, if you’ll excuse the expression, a quieter fire-breather.

As much as I like and respect VP Mike Pence (and I do, a lot), I don’t think he’s the guy for the job — just as GHW Bush wasn’t the right guy to follow Ronaldus Magnus in 1988 (which he soon proved by getting into an alliance with Swimmer Ted Kennedy, may his room temperature be set to BROIL  right now).  If Pence wants to be taken seriously as Trump’s successor, he needs to start getting out from under Trump’s massive shadow, and start establishing his credibility with the people who continue to support Trump.  If not, then it’s time for new blood.  Here’s what’s on the cards for Teh New Guy.

Certainly, a refusal to compromise with the Socialists would be a major plus, but in order to stop their bullshit, he needs to be either media-savvy or hire people who are.

And speaking of compromises:  totally off the table is any thought of compromise on immigration.  Whoever wants to get this POTUS gig should have to take The Pledge.

Ditto the rolling back of the tiresome raft of bureaucratic regulations (the “create one, delete five” Trump directive).  Do not  repeal this excellent Executive Order.  Don’t even think of weakening  it.

Keep walking away from the whole “climate change” religion.  Let the Socialist luminaries (e.g. AOC) claim this nonsense for their idiotic Green New Deal platform, and live with the consequences.

Keep making new jobs instead by hauling manufacturing back to the U.S., and to hell with all the globalist bollocks.

Support the military, with more ships, more planes, more men, more (and better) technology.  The Socialists won’t do any of this, so he needs to grab it with both hands.

Missing from all the above is who  I think can do all this.  That’s because I don’t know who fits this bill.  (Most certainly, however, the list of prospective candidates should not include any of Trump’s kids — Trump, Kushner, whoever — or anyone named Bush, Rubio and the Usual Suspects, including Rand Paul, who is often the Republicans’ version of AOC.)

But whoever it is, the Stupid Party needs to get working on it soon, and should heed my advice on the above because:

At this stage, the Republican Party is primarily a collection of Trump followers. While a majority of GOP primary voters didn’t support candidate Trump early in the 2016 race — some Republicans were skeptical of his conservative bona fides, and others outright opposed him — the party has since largely coalesced behind the president.

Once again, a whole bunch of people (me included, quite often) don’t necessarily agree with Trump’s style of doing things, but we sure as hell support what he’s doing — and because most of that is anathema to the Stupid Party Establishment (GOPe, in old terms), they either need to get on board, or quit to allow others to take over.

Fat chance.  They’ll fuck it up, just like they always do when presented with a great opportunity.

Iniquitous Theft

I was watching some stupid BBC-TV show about how a titled earl’s mansion was saved from ruin only by royal intervention (Prince Charles and his Prince’s Trust), and how the place was restored to its former glory and was now in essence a museum (said earl having relinquished title to the property many decades ago).

Which house and which earl is not important.  What was not said was why the place had to be abandoned in the first place, which can be summed up in just two words:  inheritance taxes.

Of all instances of government bastardy — and there are thousands — this is the one which gets my goat, because there are two major principles in play, and neither of them is good.

1)  The State decides that your property doesn’t really belong to you, so the gummint takes part of it it away from you (or more properly, from your heirs) after your death and puts it into their coffers.  It’s nothing less than fucking theft, pure and simple.

2)  The principle that “unearned income” — i.e. that your wealth gets passed on to your heirs, who didn’t work for it and therefore it should be treated as a windfall — is a bad thing because it simply perpetuates the wealth inequality of society.  The underlying Marxist lie that underpins this idea is self-explanatory:  that wealth is a finite quantity, and that keeping it in the family prevents others in society from benefiting from it.  (Never mind that history shows that almost all  great fortunes are dissipated within four — and usually three — generations because of multiple heirs, wastage, poor judgement and so on.)

What we also know is that inheritance taxes do not affect the very wealthy much, if at all, because they protect their property by a multitude of (perfectly-legal) tax avoidance schemes.  Instead, the taxes hit the middle classes (and especially family business owners and farmers) hardest of all.

So it’s all very well for HRH the Prince of Wales to come riding in on his faerie chariot and save some great house from ruin, when in fact it was the policies of his (and his forerunners’) government that was the principle cause of that ruin in the first place.

Just so we know the extent of the villainy:  the family was going to be forced to sell off the household effects to help pay the bills.  Which sounds trivial except that the earl was the owner of the largest collection of Chippendale furniture in the world (simply because the fifth earl had seen the first-ever catalog of the Chippendale Brothers furniture company in the 1750s, liked what he saw and bought hundreds of pieces of the stuff for his new country home, and all of which had stayed in the house ever since).  To give you an idea of its worth:  just one large glass-fronted bookcase — now being used to house some of the family’s equally-valuable china — would have fetched at auction around £20 million, and each of the hundreds of Chippendale chairs around £50,000… yes, each.

All the household goods had been packed up in an eighteen-wheeler, and were actually halfway to the auction house in London when the truck was intercepted and turned back to the house.  All very heroic stuff — and all completely unnecessary.

What’s interesting is that here in Murka, where we don’t even have titles and such, the popular antipathy towards inheritance taxes is profound — something like 80% of people polled hate the very idea of it, even though the vast majority of people are unlikely ever to be affected by inheritance taxes.

That’s because we’re not stupid, and we can recognize theft when we see it.  It’s the principle of the matter, and as this nation was founded upon principle, we can recognize its villainy where other countries’ inhabitants might not.


By the way, here’s the Wikipedia entry for Dumfries House.

Define “Dangerous”, Asswipe

Just when I’d got my blood pressure down to healthy levels, this kind of shit (from Britishland) gets published and back we go to 500/400:

Parents who homeschool their children will be forced to sign a register or face possible prosecution, according to government proposals.
The Department for Education plans to hold a register of all children not in mainstream schools in a bid to protect them from ‘dangerous influences’.
The move will help crack down on religious fundamentalists who send youngsters to secret schools where they are at risk of radicalisation.

We all know where this regulation is aimed:  at Muslims who want to turn little Abu Buma into Abu Ben-Bomba.  The only problem, as always, is that the law won’t be used against Muslims, ever  — but it will  be used, often, against conservative parents, Christian parents, and anyone, in fact, who dares to raise their children to be intellectual, inquisitive and independent (precisely the qualities that all state education systems seek to eradicate).  All that is dangerous to the control freaks and nannies who infest our modern-day bureaucracy, and don’t for a moment think that they’ll hesitate to brand it thus.

What time does the range open?

Lest We Forget

As Britishland totters on the edge of Brexit/ No-Brexit/ Hard Brexit/ Soft Brexit/ Whatever-Brexit, it behooves us to remember just why they hate the EU enough to want to leave its clutches warm embrace.

Example #1:   Control

‘Intelligent speed assistance’ is at the centre of a European road-safety shake-up.
These systems are capable of automatically stopping cars from exceeding the limit or cutting the speed if they pass into a slower zones. But the Department of Transport insists that mandatory systems will not physically slow a car.
It says drivers will simply be alerted by a dashboard light and an audio alert, similar to existing warnings when seatbelts are left unfastened.
The technology will have to be installed in all new cars from May 2022 and in existing models two years later. Other features include automatic emergency braking and a system which keeps a vehicle in the centre of a traffic lane.
The EU Commission claims the mandatory devices could help avoid 140,000 serious injuries by 2038.

Note the weasel word “could”.  The infernal things “could” also cause still more deaths from equipment failure, because none of this shit has ever been tested, yet.

Example #2:   Hobbling the Internet

The directive, which passed by 348 votes to 274, seeks to update the EU’s copyright legislation in light of recent technological changes. Its most controversial elements, passed much more narrowly, are Article 11, a “link tax” requiring social networks and news aggregators to pay publishers to display snippets of their output, and most of all Article 13, an “upload filter” making larger online publishers like YouTube responsible for copyright infringements in material uploaded by their users.

This is akin to the “holding gun manufacturers responsible because a few assholes murder people with guns”  rationale.

Example #3:   Unstable currency

IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde told a Paris conference that the currency union ‘is not resilient enough’ to emerge unscathed from ‘unexpected economic storms’.
Lagarde acknowledged that the currency union was now ‘more resilient than a decade ago when the global financial crisis struck.
‘But it is not resilient enough,’ she said. ‘Its banking system is safer, but not safe enough. Its economic well-being is greater overall, but the benefits of growth are not shared enough,’ Lagarde told the gathering, which was organised by the French central bank.
The warning comes as signs are multiplying of slower economic growth, especially in powerhouse Germany and the bloc’s second-biggest economy, France.
On Friday, indications of a weak first quarter for the eurozone mounted as a closely-watched survey pointed to March output being dragged further down by manufacturing weakness.
Manufacturers in the 19-nation single currency bloc ‘reported their steepest downturn for six years’ as pressure mounted from trade wars and Brexit fears, data company IHS Markit said.

This is what happens when you couple one or two “strong” economies (Krautland, Frogland) to fucked-up economies (Eytieland, Spicland, Porroland etc.) and expect good results.

So the Brits want out of all this shit (they’re quite capable of fucking their country up all by themselves, without any assistance), and no wonder.

The only thing which still puzzles me is why a “hard” Brexit — in essence, just telling the Europigs to FOAD  — is seen as a Bad Thing for the UK.  I’m sure there’s some sophisticated response to that simple question, but as said response would only come from the turds who lost the Brexit referendum (a.k.a. the Remoaners Remainers), I think we’re safe in ignoring it, and them.

Wut’s Da Cawst?

One of the (oh so many) bad things that came out of the Obama Years was that the word “trillion” (as in, “this will lead to a national debt of x trillion”) became normalized, in the way that after WWII, the word billion  became a substitute for million  in government-speak.  (I remember the rueful joke made in the early years of the Obama presidency, when the deficit and debt skyrocketed:  “What comes after a trillion?”  “Whatever it is, just don’t tell Obama.”)

So never mind the devaluation of the currency — an equal, and possibly worse devaluation occurred in political discourse.

Thus, when we learn that the fanciful dreams suggested policies of the radical Left will cost a hundred trillion dollars, we are somehow less alarmed because a “hundred” of something — anything — doesn’t sound like much.

And because Leftists (whether socialists, communists, Democrats, whatever) have a fairly cavalier attitude towards money (AOC:  “We’ll just create more!” — like that’s a simple exercise), this escalation of the quantity of money and the accompanying devaluation of the terminology just becomes another means whereby they can disguise the true effect (and intent) of whatever nonsense they dream up next.

This works especially well with two groups:

  • the extremely wealthy, who may be quite cognizant of the concept of vast sums of money being wasted, but who are sheltered from the consequences of political- and economic excesses by their own personal fortunes;  and
  • the very poor, for whom the purchase of a secondhand car or a modest house is about the limit of their concept of money, and who can therefore be fooled into accepting whatever large sums are bandied about both because they can’t comprehend it and because they won’t have to pay it.

It is hardly surprising, therefore, that both groups are core constituencies of the Socialist Party, here and elsewhere.

It is we poor bastards in the middle who are going to get shafted, viz.:

I don’t want you to think that I’m making a damn joke about this, because I’m not.  At some point, and soon, there’s going to be a financial and economic reckoning — and we of the middle class are going to lose everything:  houses, jobs, savings, retirement benefits, the lot.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to the range.