What If?

Apparently, there’s a mayoral election in Chicago today.  In any other city (peopled by sane voters), an incumbent and incompetent mayor like Lori Lightweight would be not only tossed out of office, but out of her tenth-floor office window.

But this is Chicago, so she may well be reelected, simply because she’s running against the seven nine dwarfs. and the vote will be so splintered that a runoff is a distinct possibility.

Frankly, I’m looking at the thing the same way I look at two lions fighting on Animal Planet:  morbid curiosity, indifference, detachment, no favorites, and so on.  Where this differs from a lion fight is that if Mayor Betelgeuse is reelected, the Chicago voters are going to get what they deserve, good and hard (to quote Mencken).

And I’ll still be morbidly curious, indifferent and detached, because stupid people need to have the consequences of their stupidity shoved in their stupid faces.

Death Of A City

Here’s something to watch:  Seattle Is Dying

Yeah, it’s long — an hour or so — but it’s a classic case study in how misguided crime policies can corrupt a city, and cause it to fall.  I knew things were bad out there, what with all the Antifa and BLM riots, and what have you.  But this is everyday civic rot and degeneracy.

And of course, the answers are simple, and will work. Rhode Island, as you will see in the video, has come up with a workable solution.

But the elected politicians in Seattle refuse to change, and laugh when confronted by civic anger and resistance.

This is what the Soros prosecutors and Democrat politicians have in mind for every city and town in the United States.

Predictable Outcome

It’s amazing how often the word “unexpectedly” appears in the public discourse when it comes to government policy, e.g. “we provided free housing for poor people, but we still have a homeless problem”.

So this probably comes as unexpected news to those of the socialist persuasion, but to the rest of us, it’s as predictable as the dawn:

The prime minister of Sri Lanka, Ranil Wickremesinghe, declared in remarks to the nation’s parliament on Wednesday that its economy had “completely collapsed.”

The socialist country is facing the worst economic crisis in its modern history, prompting acute shortages of food, medicine, gasoline, natural gas, and other core goods since March. Lavish spending under the Rajapaksa dynasty’s rule coupled with socialist mismanagement of the economy, a “green” policy that banned chemical fertilizers and made the country reliant on food imports, and trade deals in which Sri Lanka took out predatory loans from China all contributed to the nation’s rapid decline.

Almost sounds like 2022 Murka, dunnit?  But most importantly:  is Sri Lanka running short of Tampax?

Honestly though, when you have no natural resources, and your primary exports are tea and Sri Lankans, you probably need to be a little more careful in how you run things.

Of course, Sri Lanka is no longer “Ceylon” (part of the terrible British Empire), so there’s that.

Short Answer: No

…and:

The simple  answer is the title of this post.

Longer  answer:  Do not expect help from those whom you hate and actively seek to destroy.

Fuck ’em;  their medieval belief system, their backwards society, their honor killings and their hijabs:  fuck ’em all.

They’re savages and should be treated as such.

Needless to say, our Congress is no doubt authorizing a few billion dollars in aid, which just makes me all the more eager for November 2022.

Never Again

It is only when one leaves America does the shattering truth emerge that as much as we hate U.S. bureaucracy and deplore its inefficiency and tortoise-like attitude, just one encounter with the Third World has us weeping with relief when all we have to do, say, is renew a driver’s license down at the local DMV.

So New Wife and I decided to deplete our savings and try to repeat our earlier, abortive attempt to visit her #1 Son and family (grandchildren!!!) in Sydney, Australia.  (The first trip, of course, was nuked by Covid and the OzGov’s pathetic overreaction thereto.  That only cost us $1,500 for NW’s air ticket.)

Of course, even without Covid, Straya throws all sorts of shit at anyone who might want to spend some tourist dollars to visit their poxy country (pop. 25,000) — you have to apply for a visitor’s visa (from a list of about 50 different categories) before you can even get onto an airliner.  Cost of said application:  ~$340 per person.  However, the Dept. of Home Affairs boasts, it only takes as little as 36 hours for it to be approved (except where otherwise indicated by ).  Of course, using Covid as an excuse, the time was not 36 hours, oh no:  New Wife applied in February of this year, and it arrived promptly on May 15;  I applied for mine on April 1, and ATOW it still hadn’t arrived.

So I wasn’t able to get on the plane with her last Friday evening, but I was told that if I changed my flight to Sunday evening, they would help me take care of my little visa problem.

Which is where the (further) problems began.  I wasn’t able to change my flight because Expedia can’t do anything if the departure time is less than 10 hours away (on Friday evening, it was about two hours away by the time I’d got home).  No problem, thinks I, I’ll just go to Qantas’s website and change it there.  Except that Qantas must have used the same guy to build their website as homeaffairs.gov.au — there is no way to “manage” your booking — nowhere to enter your ticket number or reservation number, nada.

Last night I discovered the following:  because I hadn’t been able to change my flight, Qantas was going to take the whole fare and give me a “coupon” for $500 to use for my next flight;  additional expense to fly out on Sunday night: $800.

Even worse was my visa experience.  I could actually get an ETA visa (don’t ask) approved in about 20 minutes, except for a couple of teeny-weeny little problems:  the Qantas mobile app downloaded onto my phone, but couldn’t open;  and the visa application cost was going to be another $340, because this was a new visa application fee, you see, and no they couldn’t (okay wouldn’t) credit me for the failed visa application because they are two different visas.

Oh, and did I mention that the Sunday flight was overbooked anyway?

The hell with that.  I would rather take that $1,100-odd and pay for the grandkids to come and visit me.

Hence the title of this post.  Ain’t gonna happen, never, no way, uh-uh am I going to try to visit Australia ever in the future.  It’s just too much frigging hassle, and expensive, to visit a place that was never high on my Wannagothere List in the first place.

It’s not like I don’t have other options;  here’s one just arrived in my Inbox last night:

Cheap Flights: Dallas to London $566-$589 r/t

Don’t need a visa, either.  Buy a ticket, arrive at the airport, fly eight (not seventeen!) hours, and it’s tea and sausage rolls at Greggs for brekkie the next morning.

Other destinations ditto, with local cuisine variations.

Too bad, for everyone.

I think I’ll go to the range later today and get some AK-47 practice.  That’s one thing I can do that I’d never be able to do Down Under.