Tag: Things that totally suck

Yeah, Maybe

Logistics

This also from the American Thinkers:

There were many good reasons for the United States and Israel to finally move against Iran this month, and the need to end the Iranian mullahs’ control of their clients in nearby countries—Lebanon, Gaza, Yemen, etc.—is at the top of that list.

However, if regime change in Iran also enables the Houthis to be defanged and the Suez Canal to be reopened at last—as it must—the billion-dollar-per-day transportation savings to the world economy that result from it will, in itself, have made it all worthwhile.

This isn’t about Israel and the United States alone; it’s about every developed and developing nation on earth. Everyone uses the Suez Canal; everyone needs it.

Errr nazzo fast, Guido.  I appreciate that the Suez Canal may be an important sealane, so to speak, and most certainly for Yurp and Britishland.  But is it that important to the U.S.?  I’m thinking, not.  Most of our trade comes from the Far East over the Pacific, and from Yurp over the Atlantic.  I’m struggling to think what doesn’t use either of those routes;  and if so, why would we care — other than for purely altruistic reasons, i.e. to bail the Euros out of yet another mess — to intervene in the Red Sea?

For that matter, the Straits of Hormuz aren’t that important to Magaland either;  as DJT has pointed out, the U.S. gets nary a single barrel of oil out of the Persian Gulf because we roll our own.

Now I can see why Suez might be an important military thoroughfare for our Navy, each time we want to leave the Mediterranean Sea to whack Persian pee-pee, so to speak.  But even that is not a priority, really.

Discuss.

Shutdown

Advice, Drive Time

As Longtime Readers know, I’m not shy to take the occasional swipe at Oz and the Strylians.  This, however, is not good:

We are fifteen days into the Iran–US war. The Strait of Hormuz, the narrow stretch of water through which 20% of the world’s oil and gas normally flows, is effectively closed. Tankers have been hit. Insurers have pulled coverage. Commercial shipping has ground to a standstill for over a week. Brent crude closed Friday at US$103 per barrel, up from $70 before the war, having already spiked to $119.50 during the week. Iran’s military spokesperson has warned oil could reach $200.

Australia imports over 90% of its refined petrol, diesel and jet fuel, almost all of it processed in Asian refineries that are now hoarding output for their own populations. China has banned refined fuel exports. Thailand has suspended petroleum exports. Singapore and South Korean refineries are operating under force majeure. The International Energy Agency has just announced the largest emergency stockpile release in its 50-year history — 400 million barrels across 32 nations.

When the world’s energy watchdog fires its biggest gun, you don’t need a PhD to know the situation is serious.

I hope my Oz Readers (both of them) will take this warning to heart, if they haven’t already.

It’s no longer a joke.

Doing My Bit

Muzzies, Two-Minute Hate

As I don’t have a Twatter account, I can’t do as Mr. Gervais requests.  The best I can do, however, is this:

As for the underlying message (that Muslims think dogs are unclean — “najis”), I heartily concur with Ricky’s suggestion.

Ditto U.S. Rep. Randy Fine (R-FL), who said “If they force us to choose, the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one.”


(pic borrowed from C.W.)

And not just as it pertains to dog-hatred, either.  I feel the same about “honor killings”, forcing women to wear niqabs, sha’ria “law”, “fatwas”, banning liquor, and all the other vile dogmatic slop these tits bring to our treasured Western civilization.

It may really be time for us to consider adding an asterisk to the First Amendment.

No Voter Fraud?

Illegal immigrants, Scam Artists

Lost amidst all the stories of massive benefits fraud and fraudulent mass voting are the stories of mere individuals who’ve gamed the system, illegally of course.  Here’s one such example, sent to me by Alert Reader Mike L.:

A Colombian woman living illegally in Boston has been convicted of identity theft and voter fraud after living under a stolen identity for over 20 years.

In a news release from the Department of Justice, 59-year-old Lina Maria Orovio-Hernandez obtained a Massachusetts Real ID and eight other state IDs, fraudulently received over $400,000 in federal benefits, including rental assistance, Social Security, and SNAP benefits. She also used the stolen identity to cast a fraudulent ballot in the 2024 presidential election.

One’s immediate reaction to this incident might be to toss the bitch out of the country and ship her back to Shitholia.

I would disagree.

She needs to be incarcerated for at least twenty years — the period she lived here illegally — while working at a prison job that earns money which can be used to repay as much of the defrauded taxpayer money as possible.  Yeah, “slave labor”, cry me a river.

Assuming she’s still alive at this point, she should then be removed from jail and sent back to Shitholia — i.e. immediately escorted from the prison gate to a U.S. Marshals Service bus en route to a nearby airport and waiting plane.

And just to show that I’m not completely heartless, she can take the money she earned during the final month of her confinement back with her.

Good Point

Bad News

This is an excellent point:

I couldn’t agree more.  I find it particularly depressing that even aggregators like Insty link mostly to these places — and I understand that Insty was the actual founding blogfather to the original PJMedia (Pajamas Media) so his loyalty and ties thereto are perfectly understandable.

But that whole media conglomerate known as

may be starting to get up my nose.

Apart from anything else, they’re an incestuous little bunch, journalistically speaking, and cover the same news items as each other, swapping columnists and opinions like it’s some 1970s suburban Connecticut key party.

I’m not suggesting that they merge into some ur-Fox News organization because that really would be a dangerous single point of failure.  And yes, I understand that writers need to be paid, reporters’ expenses reimbursed, bandwidth costs covered and so on.

TANSTAAFL, and we conservatives are not freeloaders — except that when our exposure to news is slowly disappearing into the coils of a paywall python, that is not a healthy thing.

Right now, conservative media is tiptoeing along the tightrope that many mainstream news outlets are, trying to strike some kind of balance by making some articles free while lodging others behind a paywall.

That’s fine;  but of late, if I find that a particular news item seems to be worth my reading but it’s behind a paywall — any paywall — I then just resort to searching for an outlet that carries it without that restriction, or getting access to an Internet archive.  And I’m usually successful.

That’s not true of the commentary / editorials at all, because I’m perfectly capable of forming my own ideas on a topic;  so any paywalled opinion piece (e.g. Vodkapundit) is simply ignored.  (And Stephen and I go back many, many years together, so it really pains me to have to say this.)  It’s especially true when I know that my own opinion is likely to parallel or coincide with that of the author, because then I’d simply be paying for something akin to my own thoughts.  That’s just silly.

I’d get a Twatter account, only I don’t need to be exposed to the madness of crowds.

I don’t even mind advertisements, as long as they’re passive (like the old newpaper/magazine type) and don’t pop up shouting at me or linking me to their buy-me website (and thereby having me become part of their consumer giga-database exploitation schemes).  Fuck that for a tale.

I don’t have a solution to all of this, other than to suggest that appealing for the occasional donation (in place of drip-drip-drip bank account bloodletting subscriptions) might be a better approach.  Given my age and therefore precarious financial state, any subscription is a non-starter.

But I absolutely share Mr. George MF Washington’s opinion, so I think the Big Conservative Brains* need to figure it out.

*you can quit that derisive laughter, now.

Failed State

Bureaucracy, Gummint, Health

Every time I get into any kind of discussion with Brits and Euros (no longer a single entity, of course) about the relative state of our nations, I get hit with the “at least we have free health care”  jibe.

Well, sometimes “free” is better than nothing;  and sometimes, it’s a lot, lot worse:

Our 15 hours of hospital hell after my mother’s stroke. We saw patients urinating in the corridor, nurses being slapped and ambulances queuing for hours… the NHS is truly broken.

I had called my mother for a quick catch-up when it became clear that there was a serious problem.

It was about 10.30am, an average Wednesday two and a bit weeks ago, when my usually sparky, chatty, bright and switched-on mum answered the phone in a way that suggested something was terribly wrong.

With a befuddled voice, she told me she wasn’t feeling well. She was confused and couldn’t work out how to open the back door to let the dog out. ‘I’m supposed to be at work,’ she told me, ‘they keep calling. But I can’t understand how to do anything.’

Because I’m paranoid, and because her mother – my grandmother – had died of one 20 years ago, I immediately suspected she was having a stroke.

I remembered the famous F.A.S.T test to recognise the signs – F for facial drooping, A for arm weakness, S for speech problems, T for time being of the essence if you recognise any of these symptoms.

My mum couldn’t tell me about her face, or her arms, but her speech was confused in a way I hadn’t encountered in all my 45 years on the planet, so I immediately told her to stay where she was while I called 999.

The emergency operator told me the call was marked as high priority and that an ambulance would arrive as a matter of urgency. I would soon discover that my definition of terms such as ‘urgency’ and ‘high priority’ were very different to the definitions used by the NHS in 2025.

Read the whole thing, for the full horror.