Author: Kim du Toit

Nominations

Gummint, Politics

As FuturePOTUS Trump is announcing his various Cabinet picks, I think you can judge how well they’re going to do in their new jobs by the level of hysteria that the Left has greeted their nominations, one by one.

By “well”, of course, I mean the degree to which they are going to root out and eliminate the DEI and Commie assholes from their fiefdoms.  Here are a few, as I write this:

Matt Gaetz: Attorney-General
Pete Hegseth:  SecDefense
Marco Rubio:  SecState
Tulsi Gabbard:  DNI
Kristi Noem:  DHS
Elise Stefanik:  UN Ambassador
Mike Huckabee:  Ambassador to Israel
Lee Zeldin:  EPA
Mike Waltz:  NSA  (note the spelling, it’s not that Walz)
Jim Ratcliff:  CIA
Tom Homan:  Border Czar
Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy:  DOGE (Gummint Efficiency, a non-government post)

There are a couple of names in there that made me wrinkle my brow somewhat, but I think they should work out okay.

And I know that this shouldn’t be a factor, but all the ladies thus far nominated are total hotties.  Noem, Gabbard and Stefanik?  Do a search on their pics — no wait, let me do it for you:

What would make me chortle like a well-fed baby would be if Trump doesn’t announce a replacement head for the Dept. of Education, “as I’m abolishing the entire department on Day One”.  (Ditto a couple others, come to think of it.)

I don’t know for a fact, but I would imagine that there are an awful lot of resumes being refreshed and printed out in Washington D.C. round about now.  And that’s a good thing.

JBT

Government Thugs

Nice to see that the Fibbies are making jackbooted hay while the sun still shines (before the darkness falls over their little empire courtesy of Trump AG nominee Matt Gaetz):

The New York Post reported Wednesday that “the FBI seized Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan’s phone and electronics early Wednesday morning — just a week after the election-betting platform successfully predicted President-elect Donald Trump’s win.” The raid was as theatrical and histrionic as the raid on Mar-a-Lago was: “The 26-year-old entrepreneur was woken up at 6:00 a.m. in his Soho home by law U.S. enforcement officers who demanded his phone and electronics.” Why show up at 6 a.m.? Why demand Coplan’s phone and electronics? Whatever this was about, was it really necessary to treat Shayne Coplan as if he were armed and dangerous? 

Apparently, the answer is yes, because Polymarket had the audacity to represent accurately the electoral groundswell for Trump. The Post quoted a source calling the raid “grand political theater at its worst,” and adding sensibly: “They could have asked his lawyer for any of these things. Instead, they staged a so-called raid so they can leak it to the media and use it for obvious political reasons.” 

Even worse, the feds didn’t even tell Coplan what it was all about. He was “not provided any reason for the incident, but the source said they expect it is political retribution since Polymarket accurately predicted Trump’s win – not traditional polls.” The raid is likely a prelude to more political persecution: “The government is likely trying to accuse Polymarket of market manipulation and rigging its polls in favor of Trump.”

Here’s a thought for FutureAG Gaetz:  Day One of your tenure, find out who originated the idea for this raid, who authorized it, who went on it, then fire all of them without benefits and nuke their pension.

Don’t even ask me what I really think about this.

Common Thread

Good Stuff

Getting a little sick of all the “look at the Left exploding, aren’t they a bunch of fuckwits” videos and such.  They sucked (and still do), they lost, they don’t deserve our attention, fuck ’em, time to move forward.

Like Oz commentator John Anderson has done with Victor Davis Hanson in this podcast.  Now go and spend a couple hours to a) see how a real interviewer approaches a topic and b) bask in the clear wisdom and analysis of VDH.

By the way — and this next isn’t a political interview — go and watch Rick Beato talking with maestro keyboardist Rick Wakeman of Strawbs, Yes, etc.  As with Anderson, Beato only asks a few questions — I think it’s fewer than half a dozen over the entire 90-minute interview — as Wakeman walks us through recording techniques, musical history and how Yes put their wonderfully-complex songs together.

And finally, even if you aren’t at all interested in Formula 1 racing, spend some time as former team principal Otmar Szafnauer (American, not German) shows his considerable managerial capabilities in an interview with some guys I’ve never heard of, but who also give the interviewee the extreme courtesy of asking only a few questions, not interrupting his answers, and basically giving the audience the benefit of his insight.

It’s a common thread running through all three, and I don’t want to hear any bleats of the foul “tl;dr” genre.  Knowledge isn’t gained from bumper stickers, but from knowledgeable people giving us the benefit of their wisdom and experience.  And the more time we give them to share with us, the deeper our understanding becomes and the more our lives are enriched.

I happen to know a great deal about all three topics, and I still learned a whole lot from all three interviews.

You’re welcome.

Added Snoopery?

Government Thugs, Surveillance Society, Two-Minute Hate

I started reading this article in the DM  more for entertainment value than any other reason:

I do not have a TV license as I only watch Netflix and Amazon. However, I’ve heard I will now need to buy a license. Is this true?

I know, I know:  the premise of the question is puzzling to my Murkin Readers, in that the very concept of a “TV license” is unfamiliar not to say abhorrent.  But leaving that aside for the moment, I found my amusement turning into something else altogether as I started reading the answer:

The general rule is that under UK law you need to have a current TV license if you, or anyone within your house, flat or premises, watches live television on any channel or service, record television programs as they are being broadcast live or watch anything on BBC iPlayer.

So when you tune in to watch ‘on demand’ television, such as Netflix, Amazon and other similar streaming services, no TV license is needed.

This is because here you are not watching ‘live’ programs – i.e. shows that are being broadcast when you watch or record them but, instead, choosing from a catalogue of options.

So far. so good (well no, not at all good, but whatever).  Here’s where I started to feel a familiar itch in the old trigger finger:

What you have heard about relates to Netflix, the US streaming giant which has 17.1 million UK subscribers and has launched a new service where it broadcasts ‘live’ events – for example the former heavyweight champion Mike Tyson versus Jake Paul boxing match being broadcast on Friday.

This is therefore ‘live’ television, meaning if you watch this, or any other Netflix live event, as it is broadcast, or even if you record it to watch later, you fall squarely into the territory of needing a TV license.

To clarify, you can continue to watch Netflix without a TV license if you chose not to watch the live events.

Which begs  raises the question:  how EXACTLY does the BBC licensing Stasi know whether you’re watching a movie or a live show?

It seems quite a simple deduction that that the answer is twofold:  either Netflix is sharing the viewing choices of the subscribers with the BBC, or the BBC is able somehow to monitor the channel feed, whether terrestrial or wireless.  Either answer is fucking terrible.

I should point out that the only way the BBC can enforce this ridiculous license fee nonsense is because Brits are largely disarmed.  If some Lizenzinspektor  came to the average Texan’s door and started with the strong-arm bullshit, there’d soon be murders.

And just so we know what this is all about:

The standard TV licence now costs £169.50 per year.  If you are required to have a license but fail to buy one, you risk being fined up to £1,000, plus any legal costs and compensation you may be ordered to pay. 

Let’s hear it for the Surveillance Society.

Random Totty

Gratuitous Chick Pics

Here’s a lass named Wendy Glenn, who joined some Brit soap opera or other as a youngin, and stayed on for decades:

 

She even inspired some bloke to paint a pic of her:

And I have to say that now, some decades later, she’s still quite toothsome:

When The Traffic Lights Stopped

Mocking Furriners, Politics

For a nation that’s supposedly laden with hard-headed common sense and a strong work ethic but is in fact more left-wing than anything else, Germany has slammed into the wall that bedevils similar political philosophies all over:  they’ve run out of other people’s money to spend.

And with what is so common among nations afflicted with a multi-party political system, their latest coalition government has therefore collapsed, crucified by essentially three factors: immigration (and growing popular resistance thereto), insane socio-economic policies fueled by Green eco-nonsense (e.g. an EV mandate which has led to closure of auto factories and concomitant unemployment), and a screaming insistence (via a cordon sanitaire* ) on preventing anything resembling a “Right-wing” party (the Alternative for Germany — AfD) from coming to power, either outright or even by parliamentary coalition.  In no small part, this is because the German Left persists in labeling anything not left-wing as “Nazi” or “fascist”, which tactic may be familiar to my Murkin Readers.

The Germans can’t embark on deficit spending so beloved of Leftist governments (e.g. the UK’s Labour Party and the U.S. Democrats), because the German constitution forbids it.  Even when they try all sorts of accounting legerdemain, the German courts wag their judicial finger and say, “Nein.”

Of course, the solution is simple:  firstly, end the flood of Merkel-enabled immigration (which is proving to be, surprise surprise, an economic drain on even the well-funded German welfare state, not to mention a social flashpoint as the Muslim immigrants are violent and not assimilating into the Kultur );  and secondly, the German government should end the slavish adherence to radical Green policies which, as anyone with common sense knows, are impractical, costly and doomed to failure.

Unfortunately, those initiatives seem to be precisely the two main policies of the AfD political platform.  Oops.

For a very clear analysis of all the above, feel free to wander over here.

And thennnnn… there is the looming prospect of a Trump Administration which will refuse to bankroll any of this shit, will insist on Germany spending more on their military NATO obligations (which they can’t afford to do)  — and all this with the Russo-Ukranian war raging right on their doorstep.

An historical aside:  the leftwing SDP (Social Democrat Party) has been a political disaster pretty much since its inception, despite being traditionally the largest political party in Germany.  They pretty much enabled Hitler’s rise to power in the 1930s by refusing to participate in any centrist government coalition, and they remain a political speed bump to this day.

The Krauts are in deep shit:  rocks are meeting hard places all over the polity, and it couldn’t have happened to a nicer bunch of eco-insane Socialists.

In this modern German context, a “cordon sanitaire”  is shorthand for “stop the AfD from coming to power, by any means necessary”.  Hence the parliamentary alliance between three parties with diametrically-opposed philosophies (that has just collapsed).