Category: Bureaucracy

Too Polite By Half

Bureaucracy, Gummint, Legal Stuff, Politics, Resistance

Here’s a story which is quite heartening:

The people in question are with the American Accountability Foundation in Kentucky, and they are busily engaged in a project that I’ve been hoping to see all throughout the current presidential campaign. Tom Jones of the AAF received a $100,000 grant from the Heritage Foundation to do some important research work. They are poring through the backgrounds of federal workers, starting with the Department of Homeland Security. They are checking public comments and social media posts, looking for swamp dwellers who may be opposed to the policies of Donald Trump should he return to office next year. They plan to publish a list of as many as 100 names later this summer, and those people may have to rethink their future career prospects if Trump returns to the White House.

There are, however, a couple of things which make me do a Lemon Face.  Firstly, while “accountability” is all well and good, what I’d really like to see is some kind of awful consequences for the disloyal (and perhaps criminal and treasonous both) government stooges, especially those who proudly proclaimed that they were doing their best to undermine the Republican administration.

I’ve always said that the State Department implements the foreign policy of the Democratic Party, regardless of which party is in power.  It’s a mordant comment, good for an amused smile, perhaps.

The time for that accommodation is over, or should be.

Just as Trump came to power in 2016 with a pre-vetted list of federal judges ready to be nominated and sworn in, I want him to arrive in the Oval Office in 2025 with a similar list of judges, to be sure — but with another list of Swamp apparatchiks who need, at best to lose their jobs, but preferably with some kind of legal censure — e.g. prosecution — and not just the prospect of losing their little place at the poxy government trough.

That little totalitarian cocksucker Anthony Fauci, for example, needs to spend his last years on earth in some dank federal prison for causing — and admitting he caused — untold harm to American society by his actions as a federal employee.  And he’s just the most egregious example.  There are a lot more than “100 names” who need to be kicked out of government and punished for their disgusting behavior.  Losing one’s job is a pointless “punishment” if all it means is a well-paid talking-head job on NBC or any of the other alphabet soup socialist-supporting media companies.  These bastards need to be punished.  At the very least, they should forfeit their government pensions:  they abused their positions, and don’t deserve to reap any benefits.

I know, I know:  this is not a good precedent to set because it will make people leery of working on government.  That, my friends, is a feature and not a bug.

What I’d like to see in Trump’s very first week as POTUS is a head-of-state summit with Argentina’s Javier Milei, both as an amicable confirmation of shared principle, and an exchange of ideas as to implementation of policy.

It appears that the Socialists — people like Kathy Griffin, Joy Behar and Rachel Maddow — are scurrying around like frightened mice at the prospect of Trump throwing people in jail when he comes to power.  I would advise Trump and his advisors to do precisely that;  just not to waste time with irrelevant nonentities like the above harpies, but to get serious with the actual bad agents like James Clapper, the entire upper management of the Justice Department and the Pentagon, and the authors of this document — for starters.  The State Department, EPA and so on can wait until Year Two of the 47th President’s term.

We don’t need an accounting;  we demand a reckoning.

Papieren, Bitte

Bureaucracy, Mocking Furriners

…or however they say it in French.  This story made me howl with laughter, although I still think the paras should just have turned their little Fairburn-Sykes stickers on the bureaucrats.

If they’re still allowed to carry them, that is.

I see that the above is actually a replica, the FOX Fairbairn-Sykes FX-5934.  I love Fox knives, already have their 685 bush knife, and now I want this one really badly.

If anybody else is interested (and who wouldn’t be?) it’s apparently on sale here (as above) and here (in “tactical” black).

What He Said, And More Besides

Bureaucracy, Economics, Management, Marxists

Actor James Woods is a well-known conservative, despite his profession and location, and in this case he’s right on the money, as usual:

Specifically, here, is the fact that Democrats make it almost impossible for small companies to survive, weighing them down with not only horribly-burdensome but hostile regulations (as above) like minimum wage dictates.

Then, when the inevitable happens and the small companies go out of business or sell out to larger ones, the socialists like Warren moan about the concentration of trade and the need for “more competition”.  (“Price gouging” as referenced by Warren here is meaningless and a red herring.)

May we remind ourselves of food rationing, endless lines formed to get what little food there was, and fixed pricing which led to the ford shortages in the first place?  Where was this so prevalent… wait, it’s all coming back to me…

Ah yes, in the Soviet Union, where the State owned all means of production and likewise the entire food chain.

And Warren, lest we forget, is an outright Stalinist whose remedy for the current situation here would involve State control of pricing (and of course of production and the entire food chain), just to make the market more “efficient”.

Do people like this ever experience cognitive dissonance between what they think and say, while constantly seeing evidence that completely repudiates their worldview?

Clearly not, and Woods has the absolute truth of it.

Top 3 For The Chop

Bureaucracy, Gummint

Here’s the background to the question below:

Argentina just elected a new president, Javier Milei, and his first act upon being sworn in? He signed an executive order reducing their government departments from 21 down to NINE.

As Twitchy points out, we have only(!) fifteen FedGov departments (but innumerable sub-departments).

My question to my Readers:

You can eliminate three Cabinet-level federal government departments (to start off with) and all their sub-departments.  Which three would you eliminate first?

Mine:  Environment (an agency, not a department in the strictest sense of the word), Education (in toto) and Homeland Security (all their sub-departments to be reallocated to their original departments, e.g. Secret Service to Justice, Coast Guard to Defense, etc.).

I don’t know how it works in Argentina, but here in Murka, federal government departments exist at Cabinet level at the President’s pleasure — Richard Nixon, for instance, elevated the EPA’s chairman to Cabinet level by executive order — but departments can only truly be eliminated by Congress defunding them.  Nevertheless, play the game.

Point Of Principle

Bureaucracy, Government Thugs, Plagues and Poxes, Resistance, Rights

I see that the medical scaremongers and charlatans are now mumbling (soon to be shouting, no doubt) about how the latest ‘n greatest Covid variant is going to kill us all unless we do all that shit that didn’t work the last time.

I might as well get it off my chest now:

  • I will not wear a face mask, because they’ve been proven ineffective and hamper my breathing
  • I will not patronize any business (or government office) that mandates the use thereof
  • I will likewise not curtail my social or commercial activities under terms of any government-mandated lockdown
  • I will not get yet another vaccination of some unproven (and apparently also ineffective) drug against this new Covid, nor any other Covid strain for that matter
  • any attempt to coerce me into doing any of the above will meet with a hostile, perhaps (depending on the circumstances) even violent response from me.

Others may join me in this, or not — it is a matter of complete indifference to me, as this is a purely personal position.

Corollary: 

We know what you’re trying to do, and it’s not going to work.

Simplicity

Bureaucracy, Government Thugs, Lifestyle

This is not one of those rants that “the world’s getting too damn complicated” (although it is, in my opinion).  However, allow me to draw your attention to a couple of videos that illustrate my point, which is that simplicity does not mean “shoddy” or “primitive”, or anything like that.

Here’s the first video, about the wonderful Vespa scooter/moped and the men who created it.

Towards the end of the video, the narrator draws the very apt comparison between the Vespa and the Mini, which Jay Leno lovingly describes, in his inimitable manner.

And is there place in the modern world for simplicity, as Richard Hammond describes by the experience of driving the Mazda MX-5 Miata*?  Of course there is.

*Why, I wonder parenthetically, did Mazda go with such a long mouthful of a name for so simple a car?  “Miata” would have been fine;  “MX-5” likewise, even if less evocative, so why concatenate all those descriptive terms into a string that only boring motoring journos will use anyway?

Note too that I’m talking of simplicity of use, i.e. as experienced by the end user.  A bolt-action rifle is far simpler a piece of engineering than its semi- or full-auto counterpart, but even I — a die-hard boltie fan — will admit that an M1 Carbine is far easier to use than a Mauser K98k:  load it up, pull back the bolt, and it’s trigger time, compared to load, work bolt, pull trigger, work bolt, pull trigger etc.

Or, to wrench this thesis back on topic, it is undeniably simpler to drive a car with an automatic transmission than one which requires rowing through a manual gearbox, as long as one prefers steering over actual driving.  And if one is doing the daily morning commute to the office in stop-start traffic then yes, it’s a lot easier with an automatic.

Inside each of us, though, is a fundamental need not to have to tax our intellect or bodies to perform mundane tasks, although I think that choosing complexity over simplicity is a fundamental and personal matter of wanting to be in control of mechanical devices.  Nobody would be buying bolt-action rifles or cars with stick shifts otherwise, given the facility of the alternative.

Paradoxically too, as the world becomes more complicated and more complex, there is a persistent urge amongst people to “simplify” their lives, to cut back on both material possession and activities.  I think that’s a good thing, especially as one gets older.  When parents become empty-nesters, the hassle of maintaining a large house often turns into a desire to move to something more fitting [sic]  to the altered circumstances — not just for cost reasons, but once again, for a life of fewer complications.

Nothing wrong with that.  I’d never contemplate buying a Vespa, of course, because I don’t live in a built-up urban area and I don’t have a death wish.  And I already possess a little Fiat 500 with a stick shift, so if push came to shove I’d be perfectly happy to use that as my only means of transport (I “borrow” it from New Wife every chance I get).

But I’d still rather shoot a bolt-action rifle than a semi-auto (other than in times of errr urban unrest, when the old AK or SKS would obviously be preferable), and I’ve already expressed my preference for revolvers over pistols, recreationally speaking.

Just a simple soul, that’s me — but it’s a simplicity by choice rather than by governmental edict.

I told you all that so I could tell you this.

Allow me to introduce yet another rancid bitch (in the Hillary Clinton mold) who wants to tell us how to live our lives.

President Joe Biden’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration on Friday unveiled new fuel efficiency standards, which acting administrator Ann Carlson said will “reduce harmful emissions.” Carlson has long stressed the need to force Americans to live climate-friendly lives. As an environmental academic at UCLA, for example, Carlson published a 2007 piece titled, “Only by Requiring Lifestyle Changes,” which argued that people would not reduce their energy consumption “voluntarily.” As a result, Carlson wrote, the U.S. government must “induce behavioral change” by implementing policies that “make the bad behavior more expensive.”

In a similar 2009 blog post titled, “Save Us From Ourselves,” Carlson called on Americans to “use less electricity, take more public transportation, consume less, live more simply and so on” to fight climate change. Carlson argued that most people “could benefit from a simpler life” but will not “engage in dramatic behavioral change unless forced,” highlighting the need for government intervention. “Governments and markets need to take steps to make us pay for the full costs of the behaviors in which we engage … they need to limit our infrastructure choices to energy efficient ones,” the Biden administration official wrote. “In other words, we need to be saved from ourselves.”

My immediate thought is to have this foul watermelon bitch dragged from her “temporary” office and hanged from the nearest lamp post, but of course that’s never going to happen.

Alternatively, Congress could reduce the NHTSA’s budget by fining the agency per day the equivalent of her annual salary as long as she remains as the “caretaker” administrator — although that’s about as likely to happen as my first suggestion.

What, I ask, is the point of not confirming someone for a position when they can simply act as a “temporary” head of an agency and de facto determine policy and regulation in the absence of de jure?  Or did I miss something here?

Anyway, I’m so sick of all this “coercion” talk emanating from the mouthpieces of our beloved government.  Forced to wear masks, forced to stop using gasoline-powered engines, forced to quit using incandescent light bulbs, and forced to submit to any number of horrible and senseless rules and regulations that would make Gulliver in Lilliput look like a free man by comparison.

Most of all, I’m really fucking sick of being forced to pay taxes which fund the salaries of all these petty gauleiters.

All appearances to the contrary, I’m actually a very patient and tolerant man, but I have to tell you that my patience and tolerance are wearing very, very thin.

And I bet I’m not the only one.