Ditto

Yeah, you can count me among those people who no longer go to the Drudge Report for daily news.

I don’t know when it happened, but I think Matt decided that the role of his website is to be the “loyal opposition” to whoever’s in power.  Obama as POTUS?  Run links to anti-Obama events.  Trump as POTUS?  Ditto.

Or maybe, as a homosexual man, he believed the propaganda that Trump was going to set up gulags for fairies, hence his change of attitude.

That’s fine, I suppose.  Trouble is, I just couldn’t be less interested about another anti-Trump news outlet:  we’ve got plenty enough already with CNN-CBS-MSNBC-ABC-NBC-NYT-WaPo etc.  So like many, I’ve switched to WhatFinger News for my news jollies.  To be honest, I prefer the old Drudge Report because he always showed both sides of the aisle — but he doesn’t anymore.

Hell, I go to Insty more often than any of them, really.

Mother Of The Year

Imagine locking your kids in a room and leaving them unattended just so you can go to a hotel and screw a random stranger.  Think it’s unlikely?  Think again:

A mother who locked her three young children in a bedroom with some toilet paper and a bucket as she met her new boyfriend for sex at the Holiday Inn has been jailed for 18 months.
The 32-year-old locked them away on her eldest son’s seventh birthday as she left for the Holiday Inn Express in Burnley, Lancashire.

I have no problem with the jailing, of course, except insofar as the sentence did not include the words “daily floggings” and “mandatory sterilization”.

Go ahead.  Change my mind.

 

Both Sides

There’s apparently been some nastiness between Taylor Swift and her erstwhile recording company which has turned even more unpleasant since Swift egged her fans on to torment said record company.

I don’t claim to know all the ins and outs of this issue, but the rule of thumb in any imbroglio of this nature is that the money people (in this case the record company) are always going to try to screw the ideas people (that would be Swift, here);  so the default position in all this would be to think, with lots of justification, that once again, the record industry is trying to chisel the artist.  (Think of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s John Fogerty not able to perform Proud Mary  for years  because of the record company bastards and publishing deals.)

That said, however, this is  the serial feuder and generally-spiteful Taylor Swift we’re talking about, so I think I’ll reserve judgment, just this once.  Millionaires squabbling with millionaires:

Straightening Out The Military Brass

Actually, I think the so-called “brass” need to be hammered flat like their namesake metal, but let’s move on.

During the awful Obama years, it became obvious that soldiers were not, in fact, supposed to really act  like soldiers.  And when they did, the criteria for punishment were not “this is what happens on a battlefield” but instead, “it’s not a battlefield, it’s a garden party.”

Soldiers got prosecuted for shooting bad guys because said bad guys hadn’t actually done anything bad, yet.  In WWII terms, this would have equated to not gunning down a column of advancing Nazi bastards because they hadn’t started shooting, yet.

Which as any fule kno, is ridiculous except when Obama-era senior officers say it isn’t.  Here’s the story behind the conviction of one unfortunate officer:

He ordered his men to shoot three Taliban insurgents who were charging at his platoon on a motorcycle in Afghanistan on July 2, 2012.
The Taliban did not heed orders to stop. Lorance could have let them men pass and possibly kill some of his own American soldiers by blowing themselves up with a suicide bomb (as has happened in other cases) or by gunfire. He chose to stop them and save American lives.
Sending a soldier to prison for defending his troops in a war zone should never have happened and should never happen again.

God-Emperor Trump, however, seems to know what’s what, and has pardoned or reinstated those unfortunate soldiers who fell foul of the Obama milquetoast rules of engagement.

And it’s about time.  He should have done it on Day One of his presidency, is my only criticism.

Now the next  item should be to go after the fucking officers (up to and including generals) who approved both the rules of engagement and this travesty of justice — it’s the .dotmil, there’s a signature on a document somewhere — and either demote them or toss their asses out.  And the sooner the better.

We need fighting spirit in our senior officer corps, not rules-bound wokeness and pussyfooting.

Good Question

The old Second Amendment joke used to be:  “If you ban our guns, can we at least carry swords?”

Over in Spain, where handgun purchases are strictly controlled, the local (actually imported ) scumbags have taken that to heart:

A massive machete brawl that broke out between rival Pakistani gangs on Tuesday night in Barcelona has left one man dead and two others badly injured.
Local reports say that up to 30 men from two groups of rival Pakistani gangs were involved in the street fight where weapons like machetes, knives, and baseball bats were used.

And before we think it’s sectarian (Sunni vs Shia, etc.) violence, allow me to reassure you that it’s the traditional  cause of street mayhem:

Police also said that they’re looking into whether the two rival groups had set up the brawl to settle scores that are a part of a drug-related turf war.

I once had an argument with an anti-gun advocate who suggested that knives etc. are better than guns because of the lowered risk of collateral damage.  Clearly, he had never actually seen a fight between machete (panga) gangs;  but I had, back in South Africa.  Absolutely all the participants were horribly injured and a few bled to death before the cops and ambulances arrived.

Nasty things, machetes [puke warning].

Here’s a sample, from Cold Steel:

Brrr… I think I’d rather take my chances with guns, thankee.

Capital Flight

I haven’t spoken at all about the situation in Hong Kong before, mostly because there wasn’t much to be said:  (somewhat) free colony opposes colonial power’s aggression, mayhem ensues.

Several people have wondered why the ChiComs haven’t sent in the tanks, à la Tienanmen Square, to crush the waves of protests, but the answer is simple:  Hong Kong provides a means whereby the ChiCom government can move money around the world without provoking too much notice because currency movement in Hong Kong is completely unregulated.  Crush the protests, make Hong Kong just another province (like, say, Jiangxi or Shandong) and that flexibility disappears.

It is, however, a two-edged sword.  What has transpired since the protests began is that capital (money owned by individuals, that is) has been pouring out of Hong Kong and flooding into Singapore — to name just one such destination — thence on to parts unknown.  Which means that if Beijing does finally send the tanks into Hong Kong, they’re likely to find, like Old Mother Hubbard, that the cupboard is bare.  And the flow of  money is truly a deluge:  if you study how many major corporations have been purchased by Chinese-sourced money over the past few months, you’d be amazed.  Even better is that by and large, the corporations being thus purchased are characterized by their cash flow operations — in other words, the Chinese billionaires, canny businessmen that they are, are not just parking their money under an offshore mattress, they’re putting that cash to work and generating a revenue stream.

The ChiComs may not only be running out of other people’s money — they may soon be running out of their own.

Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of totalitarians.


By the way, you may have noticed that the above is somewhat short of details;  that’s because if I say more, I could jeopardize my several sources who are not only well placed in the area, but who do a ton of business there too and are close to said wealthy people.  One can never be too careful when dealing with Commie bastards.