Tag: Politics

Amateurs Vs. Professionals

Diplomacy, Marxists, Politics, Wars & Other Fun Games

In which some smart guy compares the hard-headed and realistic professionalism of Trump’s foreign policy towards Iran vs. that of the feckless Obama administration.

While then-Secretary of State John Kerry famously treated Iranian negotiators like esteemed colleagues, Vice President JD Vance just treated them like a landlord dealing with a delinquent tenant who thinks he owns the building.

I’d like to think that was Kerry’s underpinning philosophy — simple foolishness and a massive misread of the room — but then I’d have to think that Fuckface’s dealings with Iran didn’t involve in-depth discussions with Barack Traitor Obama, who always had another, more malevolent attitude towards his adopted country.

The fact of the matter is that the Obama administration sold the United States out to Iran — with cash as well as white-glove treatment — and it’s taken us this long to reverse that ghastly policy.

No Immunity

Legal Stuff

I think I’ve been ranting about this topic since I were but a Baby Blogger, even pre-Pussification-Instalanche-fame/infamy.

To recap:  under Hammurabic Law (which pre-dates the Hebraic Pentateuch  by a couple of centuries or so), if a judge freed an accused murderer, only for said murderer to go on to commit another murder, then the judge would face the same fate as the murderer (once captured), i.e. execution.  I don’t have access to any relevant stats, but I cannot help but think that judges became extremely leery about giving some obviously-violent scrote a slap on the wrist and sending him home for tea with his Mum, instead of helping him up the stairs to the gallows.

Then some legal  asshole  mind said, “Oh noes!  This is a terrible idea!” and thus was born an even worse idea, that of “qualified immunity” whereby a judge who made a piss-poor decision was now shielded from any kind of retribution.

Kevin Finn at American Thinker  puts it far more eloquently than I:

Politicians, bureaucrats, and judges routinely issue rulings and enact policies that carry enormous ripple effects on society — yet they are insulated from the human and financial costs incurred when those choices prove misguided. We see this being played out in the criminal justice system, where decisions about release, bail, and sentencing directly shape public safety.

Judges exercise considerable discretion in pretrial releases, sentencing guidelines, and immigration-related detentions. Meanwhile, politicians shape the statutory frameworks that govern these processes, from sanctuary policies to sentencing reforms. When an individual with a documented history of violence is released and later commits additional crimes, the consequences fall squarely on their victims, their families and communities. The decision-makers themselves face no equivalent personal stake. Federal judges enjoy lifetime tenure, which brings its own issues. State judges may face infrequent retention elections, and elected officials can pivot to new priorities or blame systemic factors.

Then later down the page of said article comes this little ray of sunshine:

Florida Chief Financial Officer Blaise Ingoglia has publicly broached a direct and startling, albeit satisfying response to this dynamic. In a recent statement addressing sanctuary policies, he advocated treating politicians who enact or defend such measures as accessories to crimes committed by those shielded under them — charging them with complicity in resulting murders, rapes, or other offenses. “The easiest way to get rid of sanctuary policies,” he argued, “is to start charging the politicians that support sanctuary policies as accessories to murder, rape, and pedophilia.”

His formal legislation targets fiscal accountability — codifying oversight mechanisms like the aptly-named Florida Agency for Fiscal Oversight (FAFO), allowing recommendations for removal of local officials for financial abuse, malfeasance, or misfeasance — the accessory principle he mentioned suggests a broader framework. Were this to be applied thoughtfully to criminal justice, it suggests that judges or politicians whose actions foreseeably enable violent recidivism could face similar scrutiny, transforming enablers into accountable parties rather than distant observers.

Once again, Florida has beaten Texas to the punch — as least as far as I know — because if ever there’s an idea which should resonate with all right-thinking Texans, it’s this one.

I have little reason for optimism that this worthy initiative will become law — nobody wants to be shielded more for their actions than a politician, and lawyers [with some considerable overlap]  will likewise strive with might and main to protect their own, both using all the political- and legal legerdemains at their disposal.  Politicians, at least, have some accountability in that they are exposed to electoral consequence;  but judges, as noted above, face little such accountability other than at the local level.

But the very horror that would greet Ingoglia’s initiative imposed at the federal level makes me think that it’s a really good idea, and very much an idea whose time has come.

And I’m pretty sure that King Hammurabi would agree with me.

Un-Constitutional, Illegal And Nonsensical

Anti-Gun Nannies, Bureaucracy, Government Thugs, Rights, The Gun Thing

…and yet the National Firearms Act (NFA) is still with us, becoming evermore ridiculous, evermore illogical, and always (still) un-Constitutional.

Here’s the best history of the disgusting thing I’ve ever seen which — as with so many of the bullshit laws and bureaucracies that still bedevil us to this very day — stemmed from the diseased liberal New York mind of the sainted Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

And the Act’s very vagueness of terminology makes it almost unique among our forest of laws in its ability to turn any gun owner into an instant felon without him knowing about it until the AT-fucking-F agency thugs drag him away in chains.  And said feature alone should make it legal poison, except that the Department of (alleged) Justice is too busy fucking around with irrelevancies like the Epstein files.

Kill the NFA.  Kill it stone dead, and then abolish the ATF in toto, because the government has no business in the alcohol, tobacco and (especially) the firearms business.  I might make a teeny exception for the oft-elided “E” — explosives — part of the agency’s nomenclature, but those first three initials?  X marks the spot in the back of the neck, for each of them.

Otherwise?  Line ’em up.

False Alarm

Numbers & Statistics

Here’s one that is supposed to make us all alarmed and stuff.

A fifth of Europeans surveyed said that they would in some circumstances prefer to live under a dictatorship amid growing dissatisfaction with the current democratic order or indeed lack thereof in their countries.

Given the countries in which this poll was taken, I’m amazed that the number is that low.  But that’s not the point.

The point is that four out of five Euros would not consider living under a benevolent dictatorship.  And given that they all live under some kind of soft- or hard socialist system — which is more or less like a benevolent dictatorship (only less efficient), this is the part that’s quite surprising.

I’d love to see the results of the same poll, conducted Over Here in these United States — provided, of course, that I could design the sample so as to reflect reality and not just the views of the Harvard faculty lounge or the New York Times editorial committee.

Welcome Change

Elections

As anyone who’s read this website for any length of time should know, I love the country of Chile.  In fact, of all the Third World countries I’ve ever been to or even lived in, Chile ranks #1, by miles.  I love its people, its scenery, its way of life, the women are among the sexiest I’ve ever seen and the climate is wonderful;  so despite the language difficulty, if someone were to say:  “You have to go and live in Chile”, my response would be:  “Gimme the ticket.”  I’d learn Spanish just to go and live there.

I can’t remember if I’ve told this story here before, but in case I haven’t, here goes.

You will recall that at one point, our family traveled extensively around the world (either on vacation or on business), and over three years we visited nearly two dozen countries, several repeatedly.  We knew that the travels were going to end at some point (for all sorts of reasons) so at the end of what turned out to be our final trip, we polled our three kids with the following question:

“Assuming that you could afford to live there (had a job, etc.), which are the top three countries you’d choose to live in?”

The answers were as follows:

Daughter:  1. Tokyo, 2. Paris
Son&Heir:  1. London 2. Heidelberg (Germany)
#2 Son:  1. Tokyo 2. London

All three picked Chile — specifically, Viña Del Mar — as their third choice.

My only reservation about Chile — it was one of my top choices, too — was that I got the feeling that it was just one revolution from becoming Communist.  And incidentally, that fear was also prevalent among many of the native Chileans I met on our trip there.

Which makes the most recent political news from Chile all the more exciting:

In December, former congressman José Antonio Kast found himself in a runoff against the Communist Party’s Jeannette Jara. Thankfully, Kast won in a decisive victory with nearly 60% of the vote.

But the people of Chile are ecstatic. The country has more or less been taken over by socialists and leftists for decades, and its most recent president, 40-year-old Gabriel Boric, may have been the most hardcore — and least popular — of all.

So, let me warn you that as you peruse the fake news media today that you’ll probably see a lot of headlines about how Kast is “far-right” or “ultra-conservative” or a big fan of the country’s former dictator, Augusto Pinochet. First of all, Kast has praised Pinochet’s economic reforms — he was a big capitalist, free market kind of guy who saved the country from full-on Communism — but Kast has also condemned him for his human rights abuses and all the bad stuff he did. It’s not like he has posters of him hanging on his office walls. Sheesh.

Second, Kast has been called “Chile’s Trump,” and that right there is enough to make the MSM lose its collective mind.

Kast campaigned on being tough on crime and restoring law and order to the South American nation. That includes deploying the military to cities with high crimes, strengthening the country’s borders, mass deportations of hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants, putting the interests of native Chileans first, and getting tough with cartels and terrorist organizations like Tren de Aragua.

Sounds like Chile, at last, is in the right [sic] hands, even though it seems unlikely that ChilePres Kast is going to revive Air Pinochet, which is rather sad.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to see what it costs to fly to Chile… wait, less than $900 return?  Whoa.

Oh, and one last story.

When we arrived in Santiago and checked into our hotel (Four Points Sheraton), we got a call from the kids’ room:  “We’re hungry;  can we get room service?”

Well, a week prior to that we’d been in Zurich, where room service required a credit check.  So with great trepidation I scanned the Four Points’ room service menu, converted the CLP$ (peso) into USD$, and said:

“You can order everything off the menu.”
“You mean anything?”
“No, I mean everything.”

I don’t remember what anything cost, but it was about 20% of what the same thing would have cost in a U.S. hotel, and about 1% of what it cost us in Zurich.  (I’m not exaggerating.)

So yeah;  add “affordable” to your travel plans.

I am seriously considering this idea, funds permitting.

Note:  It appears that Chile no longer charges U.S. citizens an entry fee of $160 per person, nor does the U.S. do likewise for Chileans entering the U.S.  This was the only fly in the ointment on our trip there, and thankfully it is no more.

Yeah, About That

Good Stuff, Marxists, Muzzies

So Iranian protestors are burning down mosques?  Why?  Well, here’s the reason:

These mosques are not places of worship, they serve as operation bases for the regime’s militias in residential neighborhoods. Mosques house armories for the Basij militias. They function as headquarters for repression and temporary detention centers for protesters.

Sounds like an excellent reason to set fire to the things and destroy them, then.  Then there’s this:

In Iran, for decades, mosques served as recruitment and indoctrination centers for the regime. The regime uses them to radicalize vulnerable people and transform them into hate filled killing machines against their own society.

If that sounds familiar, then it should, because we have similar institutions right here in the U.S.

Now I’m not going to suggest doing the same to American Ivy League universities, even though they’re doing pretty much the same thing (and not just with radical Islam, but with radical Marxism as well).  But the above link does help us focus our thinking, does it not?

And for the faint-hearted, I’m suggesting that we shut the damn things down and not burn them to the ground.  (College campuses could be used for so many good things, e.g. art galleries, shopping malls and shooting ranges;  it’d be a waste just to level them.)