Month: October 2018

Flattery, Imitation Being Sincerest Form Of

Africa, Immigration, Politics

Roger Simon, that eeeevil rayciss, thinks we should Let Central America Sink.

For as long as any of us can remember, those Central American nations have been failed states teetering on the brink of civil war (or over it) or awash in corruption and gangsterism, their peoples impoverished.
Foreign aid, of which they have had plenty, hasn’t helped.  After all this time, it is likely that in these instances the reverse has been true.  Foreign aid has hurt the development of these countries, creating a dependency that impeded progress.  It also — inadvertently, one hopes and assumes — encouraged conditions that allowed the corruption and drug dealing to flourish.
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The best hope for Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala and even Mexico is that they learn to fend for themselves.  In most of the cases, it could take a long time with considerable pain, but it is the only path that will succeed.  Further aid, with exceptions for emergencies, physical and medical, will only make matters worse.

Most of all, it will continue to support and deepen a dependency culture that is terrible psychologically for the recipients  The aid is not loving.  It’s self-interested on the part of the donors in a variety of ways for a variety of goals, few of them beneficial.

Now… where have I heard a similar sentiment before?

Oh, and by the way, Roger old buddy:  ixnay on the mergency-ay.  All the (good) drugs sent to Africa haven’t done diddly in terms of fixing anything;  I very much doubt that Central America would have a different outcome.

Changes Up & Down

Men & Women, Train Smash Women

A couple of years ago, the Daily Mail featured this creature in their coverage of the races at Aintree (Liverpool):

I know;  no man should, right?  Well, apparently the young lady saw the pic of herself, came to the same conclusion and did something bout it.  The following year at Aintree produced this pic:

Yikes.  Were it not for the tattoos on the feet [sigh],  you wouldn’t know it was the same girl.  Again:

Alas, thanks to the current trend towards radical feminism (“Your body is beautiful no matter what it looks like!”), coupled with the usual suspects (booze, bad diet, etc.), American girls seem to be headed in the opposite direction.

Try not to throw up.

Sad, especially when you learn that all the changes took place inside the space of a couple of years.

But hey… it’s a free country, so to speak, and these women should be able to abuse themselves as they please — just as men can exercise their choice and not date them unless there’s drunkenness and/or sheer desperation involved.

Invasion Imminent

Immigration, Politics

So it looks like the U.S. is about to be invaded by thousands of unwelcome foreigners:

Central American migrants advancing toward the U.S. border in Mexico has swelled to 7,000 people
Thousands of mostly Honduran migrants rose at dawn on Sunday and continued their trek northward
They walked towards the Mexican town of Tapachula, 10 abreast in a line stretching approximately a mile
Police in riot gear were deployed at highway junctions and a military helicopter circled overhead
Mexican immigration authorities only allowed some 640 migrants through the border crossing Saturday
The slow process prompted several thousand to cross the river illegally by rafts or even swimming
President Donald Trump has threatened to halt aid to Honduras and Guatemala, and potentially close down the U.S. border with Mexico if the march is not stopped

I wish he would, and I wish he would send the U.S. Army (and not just the Guard) to seal off our southern border.

Also, I wish he would carry out his threat to impose some kind of sanctions against Mexico for just allowing this rabble to pass more or less unhindered through their country en route to El Norte;  and frankly, if he were also to suspend foreign aid to Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, I’d be just fine with that too. There should be consequences for this nonsense, and considering that one of the primary functions of the federal government is to preserve our territorial integrity, and our nation from unwelcome incursions, it’s about time Washington fucking D.C. woke up to this duty.

Apparently, the Democrat Party leadership and their sponsored mobs are in full support of these illegal immigrants — of course they would be:  this invading mass consists of mostly future Democrat voters, both legal and illegal — and it provides current U.S. voters yet another reason to vote Republican in the upcoming mid-term election.

Let’s just hope that Trump follows through with his rhetoric — which, considering all his bluster about walls and protecting American workers, he bloody well should — and stops this bullshit in its tracks.

Enough, already.

Quote Of The Day

QOTD

From Glenn Reynolds, a few words of level-headed wisdom:

“When Saudis kill a Saudi in Turkey, it’s not hugely resonant. Sure, top American journalists care — because he was not just a journalist (the Saudis have killed plenty of those, as have the Turks, the Chinese, the Russians . . .) but one they knew personally. But hardly anyone thinks that the Saudis are nice people; they’re allies of convenience, not of sentiment. If they help us beat Iran, fine, but nobody thought they were our friends before.”

Exactly.  Plus, this “journalist” (Jamal Khashoggi) was actually a Muslim Brotherhood activist more than a journo, so fuck him.

And in a related post, talking about media outrage at Khashoggi’s murder, Charles Martin adds:

Let me get this straight. Saudi Arabia sponsored the 9/11 hijackers, stones rape victims to death for being unchaste, hangs people for being gay…and NOW you’re upset with them?

Yeah, because the obsequious diplomacy as practiced by Barack Cocksucker Obama was totes different.

All that said, let’s be honest and admit that in aggregate, both the Saudis and the Turks are foul assholes and should they decide to kill each other for fun, spite or profit, nobody else should care.  Ditto all the other Muslim regimes in the Middle East.

Hidden Depths

Culture, Men & Women

Like many of my contemporaries — people who grew up in a British colony — my childhood literary upbringing was primarily that of the Mother Country:  Rudyard Kipling, Enid Blyton, Agatha Christie, C.S. Lewis and so on.

Another was a female author, E. (Edith) Nesbit, who wrote Victorian-era children’s classics such as The Railway Children and The Story Of The Treasure-Seekers.  As a child, I remember my parents reading both to me at bedtime.

One always thinks of the authors of children’s literature — especially female authors — as quiet, spinsterly or even virginal.  In the case of Edith Nesbit, it turns out, nothing could be further from the truth.

So far, Edith had been rather a passive participant in ‘free love’, but she now began to even the score with Hubert, embarking on a series of romantic affairs with young writers whom she mentored. Some of these relationships may have been platonic rather than passionate, such as her fling with George Bernard Shaw, who she met through the Fabian Society.
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It’s likely her other lovers were less reserved.  The young poet Richard Le Gallienne was captivated by Edith’s beauty and unconventional style – she refused to wear a corset and cut her hair boyishly short, drifting around in flowing robes, her wrists jangling with bangles – and she contemplated leaving Hubert for him.
A young accountant, Noel Griffith, was the next to be dazzled by her, although he found her ménage à trois with Alice and Hubert bizarre, observing that Alice seemed uncomfortable and that Edith found Alice irritating.  The only real beneficiary was Hubert, who was ‘very hot-blooded’ and ‘abnormally sexual’ – which didn’t stop him moralising about the importance of fidelity in his newspaper columns.  Meanwhile, Edith let her children run wild, playing on the railway, and turned a blind eye to domestic chaos.

Sounds positively 21st-century, dunnit?

No Night Shifts

Business

This is why I work the hours that I do:

A young woman trying to reach her destination flew into a rage and beat up an Uber driver all because he refused to take her to her destination in Peru.
In a three-and-a-half minute video, Solange Estrada Liza, who claims she had previously had some alcoholic beverages before getting into the altercation, was attempting to get the driver to take her to her final destination.
But an argument ensued when the ride-sharing application’s driver refused to make the trip because he considered the area to be unsafe.

And this is why I don’t work the late-night shift.  I often joke that my reason is that I’m too old to be cleaning vomit out of my car at two o’clock in the morning, but the plain fact of the matter is that I have a very short fuse when it comes to dealing with drunk people — and had this drunken tottie tried that shit with me, she’d still be in hospital having her dinner through a straw.

People often ask me about strange experiences I’ve had as an Uber driver, and are amazed when I say that I haven’t had any.  (Sheesh, I’ve had stranger experiences driving my own kids around.)  About 80% of my passengers (and 90% of my earnings) come from sleepy businessmen and -women heading to the airport long before dawn to catch the first flight out, and the strangest request I’ve ever had was to stop for coffee en route to DFW, at 4am.  (I’m pretty sure that if I’d said no to the poor man, I’d have broken some state law.  Besides, he bought me a croissant.)

I especially like the fact that I have a small “stable” of regular riders who like me to drive them to and from the airport each week, which I do with the greatest of pleasure.  (The mechanics are simple:  I get to their house at the time they want to leave, and when they’re in the car, they call for a driver — which I’ll always get because I’m the closest driver to their location.)

The saddest drive I’ve had was to take a young man to a hotel because his girlfriend had tossed him out of the apartment at 3.30am.  (I knew he was in trouble — he was sitting on the sidewalk with four suitcases, a backpack and his dog.  Technically, I’m only supposed to take actual service dogs, but under the circumstances, I’d have been a bigger asshole than his ex-girlfriend to have refused him a ride.  And the dog licked my neck all the way to the hotel as though he knew what was happening.  I refused to take a tip, by the way.)

And just a final note:  I’m not a cab driver who is pretty much required to take passengers wherever they want to go.  I’m an independent operator driving his own car, and I don’t have to take anyone anywhere I don’t want to go.  (I think the skeeviest place I’ve ever taken a passenger was the VA hospital south of Dallas — and I took him because three Uber- and Lyft drivers had already turned him down, and anyway when it comes to Vietnam vets, I’m the softest touch in the world.  The Dallas VA isn’t a scary place, but the town it’s in most certainly is, especially at 5am.)

So my “job”, such as it is, is pretty uneventful, and I like it that way because I’m too old for the kind of excitement described in the article above.  And I’m way too old to get into fistfights with drunken idiots.