No Kidding

Yet another news snippet that should come as no surprise to anyone who knows anything about the Third World:

Just over half of the world’s urban greenhouse gas emissions come from just 25 mega-cities — 23 of which are located in China — a study has reported.
The cities that emit the most greenhouse gases included Handan, Suzhou, Dalian, Beijing and Tianjin in China — but also Tokyo, Japan, and Moscow, Russia.

And for the gullible eco-weenies:

China’s President Xi Jinping has pledged to cap carbon emissions by 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality by 2060 — part of its commitment to the Paris Agreement.

Of course he has;  provided that such capping does not stand in the way of his aim of global domination.  If it does, he’ll just ignore those goals, relying on the foolish lickspittle Western media [some redundancy]  to assure us all how wonderful this is in raising poverty levels in China.

And lest we also forget this:  the Yangtze and Yellow Rivers are responsible for almost 90% of ground-sourced pollution in the northern Pacific Ocean as well.


Update:  Seems like I’m not the only one.

Backwards

In 1985, I came to New York City for the first time.  I remember the almost unimaginable expectations I had:  the Big Apple, “If I can make it here”, and all that.

Of course, I arrived in the middle of a garbage strike, so the streets were filthy, mountains of trash bags were on every street, and rats the size of fox terriers roamed the streets like packs of hyenas, in broad daylight.

I remember being hustled on every block by someone, not asking but demanding that I buy their cheap tat of dubious origin, and every shop along the street was proclaiming that they had to sell sell sell all their merchandise NOW! because they were losing their lease.  (A total lie, like so much about New York.)

Then I went to the Lower East Side.

I was forcibly reminded of all this yesterday morning, when I saw this front page pic:

…and the accompanying article:

It’s been six months since the mayor promised to pump more money into the city’s street-cleaning efforts. And the trash problem has only gotten worse.
De Blasio in September announced initiatives to reallocate Sanitation Department funding to bolster litter-basket pickups in communities hit hardest during the pandemic, including Bushwick in Brooklyn. But according to the official mayoral report of “acceptably clean city streets,” street cleanliness there plummeted to 33.3 percent in January, compared with 86.1 percent the month before.
The same neighborhood scored 95.4 percent a year ago.

But this post isn’t about New York fucken City.  It’s about the whole country.

NYFC Mayor Bill de Blasio is quite clearly the most Marxist of all elected officials in the United States (residents of San Francisco, Portland and Seattle may quibble), and it is quite clear that what he is doing as mayor is just a microcosm of what his fellow Marxists are attempting to do all over the country.

They’re taking us back into the Third World.

Anyone who has ever spent any time in Third World countries will know that one of the most obvious manifestations of Third Worldliness is the amounts of trash that people there just toss out into the streets and out of car windows;  and when you travel through the countryside, fences will be plastered with plastic bags and other trash blown against the wire by wind.

Here’s Los Angeles:

…and San Francisco:

…Chicago:

 …and Philadelphia:

I could go on, but you get my point.

Let’s look at other aspects of the Third World… such as their elections.

In the main, Third World elections are corrupt, whether through the actual process or whether by fraud, suppression of the “incorrect” vote or denying impartial monitoring of the process.

Oh look, it’s Detroit in November 2020:

Here’s another example of blocking observers from checking the counting process:

Oh wait, that’s not Detroit;  it’s Nigeria.  I was distracted by the razor wire atop the wall.

Does any of this ring any bells?

A new report on the vast expansion of mail-in ballots in the 2020 election is set to spark new concerns among some Republicans who back former President Donald Trump’s charge that some states went too far to change the rules — illegally.
Among the three “key takeaways” cited was this: “28 States changed their policy to make it easier to use a mail ballot.”
As a result, it added, “For the first time ever, more people voted early with a mail ballot or in-person than filled out a ballot at the polls on Election Day.”

Of course, the typical Third World mantra about elections is, “One Man.  One Vote.  One Time.”

So here’s the U.S. version:

It would be an understatement to describe H.R. 1 as a radical assault on American democracy, federalism, and free speech. It is actually several radical left-wing wish lists stuffed into a single 791-page sausage casing. It would override hundreds of state laws governing the orderly conduct of elections, federalize control of voting and elections to a degree without precedent in American history, end two centuries of state power to draw congressional districts, turn the Federal Elections Commission into a partisan weapon, and massively burden political speech against the government while offering government handouts to congressional campaigns and campus activists.

And that’s the opinion of the National Review, surely the most ineffectual and milquetoast collection of conservatives around.

And finally, let’s consider the corruption through nepotism that is a fact of life in the Third World — and now in the U.S. as well:

During his long senatorial career, Joe Biden cast himself as an everyman, “Amtrak Joe,” known for taking the train daily to Washington, D.C., from his home in Delaware. The image he sought to create was one of a simple legislator independent of the usual corrupting influences pols face.
In truth, Joe Biden knows those influences all too well. He heads up a family of wealthy lobbyists and political operatives who have spent decades trading on his last name.
In Profiles in Corruption, Peter Schweizer points out that the Biden family’s wealth “depends on Joe Biden’s political influence and involves no less than five family members: Joe’s son Hunter, daughter Ashley, brothers James and Frank, and sister Valerie.”

It’s taken the Left some time to effect their change of the United States, surely the first among First World nations, into a Third World state.

But here we are.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to the range.

And Yet Again

As I’ve said in the past, here and here, Chile’s Augusto Pinochet was a conundrum.  Others, it seems, are even more positive than I am:

Almost nobody is more reviled by the international intelligentsia and media than the late Augusto Pinochet, the late 20th -century Chilean dictator. He holds a prominent position in the political left’s “rogues’ gallery” comprised of those who stood in opposition to their goals.
His supposed “crimes” included conducting a military coup to illegitimately grab control of the Chilean government from a popularly elected president, rounding up and torturing huge numbers of innocent citizens (killing as many as 80,000 in the process) and corruptly stealing vast sums of money while ruling as a dictator.
But many of those claims are either false or exaggerated — most credible estimates of those killed are below 5,000 — or they must be viewed in context. More important, if we raise the examination of Pinochet from the bitter soil of leftist ressentiment to the question of human flourishing, he appears as one of recent history’s shining lights.

Read the whole thing — and my earlier posts on the topic too, if you haven’t seen them before.

I will never forget two things about my visit to Chile:  the sight of old women placing flowers on the sidewalk outside Pinochet’s modest private home (now a museum) in Valparaiso, and at a formal dinner one night, one of the toasts was:  “To General Augusto Pinochet, savior of Chile.”

It was delivered without irony, well received and supported by all the guests, and even more telling, it was said in English — no doubt for our benefit, and to make a point.

Interesting stuff.

As Usual

Following on from yesterday’s news about Chile voting to “change” their constitution — really, overturning the one passed into law by Augusto Pinochet and putting in a new, “progressive” (Marxist) one — the Left in Chile did the usual:

Violence, looting, and disorder erupted in Chile on Sunday evening after an overwhelming majority of people voted in favor of destroying the country’s constitution, replacing it with a new document more favorable to the nation’s left wing.

On the night of the elections, local media reported that police arrested at least 19 people for looting a pharmacy and a supermarket. In the commune of Melipilla outside Santiago, rioters attacked a police station, injuring eight officers, while also installing barricades on a carriageway to prevent the movement of traffic.

No doubt, this was all part of the “wild celebrations” that followed the vote result.

So just to be clear:  if the Left loses, they riot and loot;  and if they win, they riot and loot.

Something we can probably expect in the U.S. when Trump cleans their clock next week.  See the next post for details.

I think I’ll head off to the range as soon as it opens in a couple hours.  Handgun practice this time?  I think so.

Goodbye Chile, Hello Venezuela

And another one bites the dust:

Wild celebrations have been seen across Chile after the country voted to rid itself of its dictatorship-era constitution left behind by Augusto Pinochet’s regime.
Chileans voted overwhelmingly in a landmark referendum on Sunday to replace the constitution, long seen as underpinning the nation’s glaring economic and social inequalities.
Thousands of people flocked onto the streets of Santiago amid a cacophony of horn-blaring to celebrate a crushing victory for the ‘Approve’ campaign – by 78.28 percent to 21.72 percent, with over 99 percent of the votes counted.

And its replacement?

People hope a new constitution would expand the role of the state in providing a welfare safety net, ensuring basic rights to health, education, water distribution and pensions.

Ah yes, an expanded state… [sigh]

And why not?  After all, they voted for it, despite the dismal track record of an “expanded state” failing everywhere it’s been implemented.

My post title says it all.

Segregation

I see that some Black people want to start an all-Black community somewhere:

“We are dealing with systemic racism,” Scott wrote in an op-ed for Blavity last month. “We are dealing with deep-rooted issues that will require more than protesting in the streets. It’s now time for us to get our friends and family together and build for ourselves,” Walters, who serves as the president of the organization, said in an interview with Yahoo News. “That’s the only way we’ll be safe. And that’s the only way that this will work. We have to start bringing each other together. We really just want you to come and hang out and feel safe,” Walters said. “You don’t have to worry about the Karens of the world and anything like that. You just come in and have fun. We’ll have a sportsman area, like a Black sportsman area with fishing, hunting, shooting range, ATV trails. We really just want to build a tight-knit community for our people to just come and breathe.”

Scott said in the report that black Americans need to own land and create their own social, political, and economic institutions.
“Amass land, develop affordable housing for yourself, build your own food systems, build manufacturing and supply chains, build your own home school communities, build your own banks and credit unions, build your own cities, build your own police departments, tax yourselves and vote in a mayor and a city council you can trust,” Scott wrote. “Build it from scratch. Then go get all the money the United States of America has available for government entities and get them bonds. This is how we build our new Black Wall Streets. We can do this. We can have Wakanda! We just have to build it for ourselves!”

Let’s hope this is the start of a trend.

I know, this may sound strange coming from a lifelong and bitter opponent of apartheid.  The fundamental difference between apartheid and this idea, however, is that apartheid was forced upon people by government policy.  This, however, is a bunch of people who want to band together — a natural right of free individuals, as enumerated in the First Amendment.

And I want it to work — I really do.

However, not only have I seen this fail elsewhere in the world, but we have ample evidence right here in the U.S. to suggest that even with all these good intentions, it’s likely to fail here too.  But hey:  if it worked for the Mormons in Utah, who’s to say that it wouldn’t work in Georgia — if the right people get to congregate according to this plan.

Good for them, say I.  Just as long as they don’t expect too much help from government — because that, you see, would be un-Constitutional.