Bygone Times

Reader Old Texan sent me an email with this enclosed:

…and purely coincidentally, The Divine Sarah published Long Ago, It Must Be, which starts with the hypothesis (not hers) that time stopped in 1999, and everything that’s happened since then has been just a dream.  In that piece, Sarah talks wistfully about how 1999 was a time when some of her friends were still sane, and of other friends since passed away.

Well, 1999 was an okay year for me, I think:  living on the lakefront in Chicago with Connie, doing consultant work and traveling to Britishland occasionally:


(that’s the Bath Weir in the background)

It was a good year, no doubt about it.  But if I look back to my favorite years pre-2000, I’d have to choose 1981.

Oh man, 1981…. I had a job I loved — imagine that — which also involved travel (only all over South Africa, not the UK) and which earned me a decent salary:


(Cape Town)


(just north of Durban:  Umhlanga Rocks, where my Mom lived)


(Port Elizabeth “PE”)


(Kimberly, with its “Big Hole” diamond mine)

In 1981, I was still playing in the Atlantic Show Band — we’d pretty much given up playing clubs and were doing gigs at proms, wedding receptions and office parties etc. — and that, believe me, was a blast.  The music we were playing?  Bette Davis Eyes, Fire, Angel Of The Morning, Stop Dragging My Heart Around, Another Brick In The Wall, Crazy Little Thing Called Love, Heartache Tonight, You May Be Right… aaah, kill me now.

I was driving a very nippy little Opel Kadett (company car, ergo free), and I was still single, with a very active Little Black Book.

I was twenty-seven years old, and I ruled my world.  If I could choose a year to relive, then 1981 beats all the others, in spades.

Feel free to tell me in Comments which year you’d like to go back to, with reasons.  (Email if Comments are still screwed up for you, and I’ll post it.)

Caveat

Here’s a little nugget from the Trump Tariff Front:

General Motors (GM) announced plans to invest $4 billion in three new U.S. assembly plants, including the production lines for the Chevrolet Blazer and Chevrolet Equinox, which the company currently builds in Mexico.

Yay and all that.  Another reaction:

The United Auto Workers (UAW) praised GM’s decision, calling it a validation of the effectiveness of global auto tariffs.

Yeah, fine, whatever.  Let’s just hope that you union assholes don’t jump on this opportunity to make unreasonable wage demands, which is what drove GM to move the plants to Mexico in the first place.

I’m not at all confident that this won’t happen, but as I am not and never will be a target customer of General Motors*, I personally will not be affected, especially as the newly-replanted assembly plants will be building Chevrolet Equinox, Chevrolet Bolt EV, Chevrolet Blazer, Cadillac Lyriq and Vistiq EVs and the Cadillac XT5.  (Lyriq? Vistiq?  WTF kind of names are those?)

I see that GM, with its customary foresight, has slated its EV models for some of the new plants, despite customer demand for said excrescences falling through the floor.

Pathetic.


The only GM car I’d ever consider buying is the Caddy CT4 Blackwing, except that while its engine is admittedly excellent, the CT4 looks like a primitive 1978-era CAD drawing:

In earlier times, we would have described that thing as “uglier than a bucketful of burst assholes”.

As for all GM’s other models:  pass, with extreme prejudice.

Tit For Tat

Seems as though there’s a fair amount of angst and anguish about Trump’s BBB proviso that (loosely explained) says:  “If you tax us, we’re gonna tax you right back.”

In testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee, Bessent said the legislation includes new tools to retaliate against countries that impose what he called “unfair foreign taxes” on American firms — including digital services taxes and top-up levies under the OECD’s (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) global minimum tax framework.

“The U.S. tax system will stand next to what is called Pillar Two, and other countries are welcome to relinquish their fiscal and tax sovereignty to other nations,” Bessent said. “The United States will not. So this bill will allow us to prevent our corporate revenues from being drained into foreign treasuries—and that is in the hundreds of billions of dollars.”

At the heart of the plan is a new measure that would impose escalating surtaxes on income earned in the U.S. by companies, individuals, and even governments from nations that target American firms with extraterritorial taxes. The same countries could also face higher withholding taxes on U.S. investments and tougher rules under the Base Erosion and Anti-Abuse Tax (BEAT). Sovereign wealth funds and central banks from those countries would lose long-standing exemptions and become subject to U.S. tax on their holdings.

The provision — found in Section 899 of the bill — is designed to pressure foreign governments to roll back taxes that the administration views as discriminatory and coercive. It would start with a five-percentage-point surtax and escalate annually to a maximum of twenty points above the standard U.S. tax rate unless the targeted country reverses its policy.

And the rightness of this approach can be gauged from the level of opposition from Global Capitalist Bastards Inc.:

Multinational firms, foreign banks, and global trade associations are mounting an aggressive campaign to weaken or eliminate the provision, arguing it could lead to retaliatory measures and complicate international investment.

Yeah, my heart bleeds for all those fat corporations and insanely-wealthy fucks whose international investments will become complicated.  This is aimed at the foreign governments who think that  theft   fleecing   taxation of foreign investment is okay if they do it, but not if we do it.

I know that a lot of what Trump does is just positioning — i.e. laying the battlefield for future negotiation — but this is one initiative where I hope he digs in and goes all the way.  Why should we support foreign governments’ enrichment programs at our own expense when we can’t do exactly the same to them?  Make no mistake:  these assholes are making billions of dollars out of this.

And lastly, anytime I see the words “OECD’s (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) global minimum tax framework” involved in an argument, I want to reach for my AK.  No greater argument against globalization can be raised than when their principles are involved.

Feel free to bring lofty economics arguments to this post, because I will really enjoy shooting them down in flames.

And The Hits Keep On Coming

Well, that wasn’t too hard, now, was it?

The man accused of supplying Los Angeles rioters with “bionic” face shields has been identified and arrested, the FBI said. If convicted, he could face up to five years in prison.

Now find out who paid for the face shields and go after them, and their funding, all the way up the chain to George Soros, and arrest all of them.

If ever there was a clear case of “aiding and abetting a felony”, this would be it.

Root and branch, folks.

Hand Me A Cigarette, Simon

Oh baby, there’s so much Trumpy goodness in this report:

‘What you’re witnessing in California is a full blown assault on peace, on public order and national sovereignty… with the aim of continuing a foreign invasion of our country. We’re not gonna let that happen,’ he said.

‘We will not allow an American city to be invaded and conquered by a foreign enemy. That’s what they are.

‘These are animals, but they proudly carry the flags of other countries, but they don’t carry the American flag. They only burn it.’ 

The president went on to call LA ‘a trash heap’ with ‘entire neighborhoods under control’ of criminals, adding the government would ‘use every asset at our disposal to quell the violence and restore law and order.’

‘We will liberate Los Angeles and make it free, clean and safe again,’ Trump said.

The ICE raids have sparked protests that brought Los Angeles to its knees, leading the mayor to introduce a lockdown from 8pm to 6am. 

But Trump is now set to deploy yet more ICE agents to five Democrat-run cities for sweeping arrests. 

The military-style units are set to storm New York City, Seattle, Chicago, Philadelphia and northern Virginia. Four of those five are heavily blue cities, while northern Virginia contains the Democrat enclave of Alexandria.

Just give me a moment… where did I put it?  Oh, here it is:

Or we could just nuke them all from orbit.

Okay, you all can quit that unseemly laughter and cheering now.