Author: Kim du Toit

Piling On

Journalist Scum, Lies and Untruths, Two-Minute Hate

There are many times when I wonder (as do many of you) why I bother with the Daily Mail, which is a truly horrible publication.  (It’s difficult to call it a “newspaper” because so much of it is utter rubbish.)

However, I can deal with “rubbish”.  It’s when they publish outright misleading falsehoods that I get upset.  Here’s an example:

Never mind “correlation” not being related to “causation”;  the difference between “causation” and “coincidence” is even greater.

As we read this silly article, only in paragraph eleventy-hundred do we come across this embarrassing factoid:

Progressive Furniture, a division of Sauder Woodworking based in Claremont, North Carolina, announced its plans to close down and fire all 30 of its employees by the end of the year. 

The firm grew to be the seventh largest furniture manufacturing company in the world – and was a much-loved brand, selling high-quality traditional and modern homeware at Walmart, Target and Home Depot. 

Uhhhh Lauder may be large — and it is — but its tiny 30-employee subsidiary?  Much less so.  But it gets worse.  You see:

Although it is an American company, its main supplier was based in Rosarito, Mexico. That manufacturer, Baja Wood, was responsible for more than 60 percent of Progressive’s inventory.

So Progressive is really just an assembly- and shipping operation?  (That would account for its tiny workforce.)  But what about this Baja Wood?  In fact…

…the Mexican supplier’s internal dilemmas resulted in [Progressive’s] demise.  Problems began back in January, when about 60 of Baja Wood’s 320 employees rallied in front of the factory in protest of reduced hours.  Government labor investigators were called upon to evaluate the situation and production halted.  However, once the investigation was closed, Baja Wood never reopened. 

So that’s why Progressive failed:  its major supplier went tits-up.

Trump’s tariffs, despite the screaming headline, had sweet fuck-all to do with it.

In future I think I’ll just stick with the Mail’s T&A content.

Caveat lector.

Speed Bump #3,248

Grammar Nazism

At Insty’s place, I saw this:

…and I was irritated by the non-clarity of the post.

There’s always an issue when using numerical values when writing.  You can write “Ninety-nine out of a hundred people think that George Soros is an evil cunt” — which is acceptable — or “99 out of 100 people think that George Soros is an evil cunt” which is equally so.  One can argue that the latter usage is more effective in that the scale is better described, and that is generally true when using large numbers, e.g.

“The chances of that cunt George Soros being hit by a meteorite while crossing Sunset Boulevard on any given Thursday are 1 in 174 trillion” works better than “one in one hundred and seventy-four trillion” (too many words, albeit expressing the same distressingly-small likelihood).

However, in the above Twatter post, the writer should not have used the numeral in his sign-off sentence, because there’s another “1” preceding it — referring to the other cunt, Nancy Pelosi — and the sentence as written causes a mental speed bump because in actual fact it is Pelosi (#1) who has changed her position / sold out on the tariff issue.  (Trump (#4) has never changed his position on tariffs:  he’s been arguing in their favor since about the 1990s, long before he  became a politician.)

“Only one hasn’t sold out” would have been the proper way to write it.

Great Idea, Never Happen

Advice, Economics, Taxes and Theft

Turning Britishland into Singapore?  It’s an intriguing concept, as explained here.  An excerpt:

There is nothing new in the comparison between modern Britain and circumstances in Singapore when it gained independence in 1965. Like the UK following the Brexit referendum, Singapore was involved in a rancorous divorce from a much larger geopolitical entity that left it facing an uncertain path. For one island’s withdrawal from the European Union in 2016, read another’s split from the Federation of Malaysia 55 years ago.
As many a minister has pointed out in recent years, Singapore went on to conjure an economic miracle. In the space of a generation, it has transformed itself from a country where the average citizen was two and a half times poorer than the average Briton, to a hotbed of soaring prosperity where total economic output is now 70 per cent higher than in the UK.

Here’s what the Brits would have to do, though:

In a country where the average monthly salary is about S$70,000 (£40,000), [Singapore] residents pay income tax of just 7 per cent – less than half of the 20 per cent charged in the UK – while a salary equivalent to £46,000 would attract 11.5 per cent tax.
The individual tax ceiling is 24 per cent, payable only by those earning more than 1 million Singapore dollars; the equivalent rate in the UK is 45 per cent, a bracket that comes into play for anyone with a salary of more than £125,140 (about 217,000 Singapore dollars).
The country’s more favorable tax regime extends to corporation tax, which stands at 17 per cent in Singapore compared with 25 per cent in the UK. There is no capital gains or inheritance tax.

Cut and eliminate taxes?  In Britain?

Hence the title of this post.

No Frigging Chance

Marxists, Third World

And it was all going so well.

I was reading an article at American Greatness which shows in detail how California has screwed things up,whether by Net Zero foolishness, taxation, over-regulation and so on, e.g.

If the builder [Gov.] Pat Brown was an exemplar of “Responsible Liberalism,” California’s government today has been ranked by Wallet Hub as the least efficient in delivering services relative to the tax burden. Pat Brown’s son Jerry – who was governor from 1975-1983 and then again from 2011-2019 – and his successor, Newsom, epitomize the triumph of ideology over effectiveness. Theirs is a kind of performative progressivism that shrugs about things like roads that are now among the nation’s worst, a high-speed bullet train plagued with endless delays and massive cost overruns, and a failure to boost critical water systems in a perennially drought-threatened state.
In exchange for all this, the progressive regime has stuck ordinary Californians and businesses with some of the nation’s highest taxes and greatest regulatory burdens.

So far, so good, and the article goes on to show exactly how, why and to what extent California is doomed.  Then, in the very last paragraph, this:

Yet, for all its problems, California is far from hopeless, and its promise is not extinguished. It remains uniquely gifted in terms of climate, innovation, and entrepreneurial verve. Sitting at the juncture of Asia, Latin America, and North America, it can once again become, as Kevin Starr noted, America’s “final frontier: of geography and of expectation.”

Nope.  Unless the CalGov is purged by a mini-DOGE — or maybe even a greater DOGE, given its entrenched Marxism — as well as a 180-degree change in voting patterns, there is no way for the Golden Shower State to survive.  None.

It is a hopeless state, and the mass exodus of Californians to other states over the past ten years reflects just that.

Wallpaper

Fine Art

This one got my attention, so up it goes:

It’s funny:  you think it’s just a rendition, and then you go to London’s King’s Cross or the Gare du Nord in Paris on a chilly misty morning… and it looks almost exactly like that.