Category: Politics

Trying not to start the public floggings

Random Fact

Culture, Numbers & Statistics, Politics

I read somewhere recently that about a quarter of the world’s prisoners are incarcerated in America.

Non-Americans are going to draw all sorts of conclusions about this, and most of them will be wrong. Here are the facts.

All the stupid surveys apart, the United States is one of the most free countries in the world — which by the way is why so many inhabitants of shithole countries (to quote some famous guy) want to come and live here.

We take our freedoms seriously, and one of the freedoms we cherish is the freedom to fuck up. Fucking up can be the result of larceny, or failed experimentation, or any such human endeavor which falls outside the usual norms and conventions. This is why we are a leader of innovation in the world — pick an industry, and we’re in there kicking ass — and it’s also why we throw more people in jail: because we are a nation of laws. (Too many laws for my liking, but that’s a rant for another occasion.)

Here’s the best example. Want a gun? Go ahead and get one: there’s a special on S&W revolvers at Academy Surplus. Use it in any way you want: self-defense, plinking at tin cans, target competition, whatever. You’re free to do all that, and except in Euro-style shitholes like New York and California, you don’t have to be licensed or belong to a club or any of that jive. Go ahead and enjoy your gun; it’s your individual right, the second-most important right in our Constitution.

However: use your gun to commit a crime, and it’s to jail you’ll be going. And we Americans don’t issue sentences of just a few years for that kind of crime either (unlike some countries I could name). No, we slam you in a cell for decades or the rest of your life (sometimes we even shorten your life if you shortened somebody else’s).

That’s why we have so many people in jail. They were all free to choose, and they chose poorly. On the whole, it’s a better system than all the others, unless of course you’re a control freak who wants to do what’s best for people because you know what’s good for them, better than they do. (These assholes we call “Democrats”, and this is why they’re trying to turn the U.S. into Europe. But that too is a rant for another time.)

By the way: the reason that China, with its enormous population, doesn’t have as many people in jail as we do is that their people aren’t free. Another reason is that the Chinese summarily execute more people than we do, thus helping their incarceration numbers. Ditto North Korea, a shithole to beat all shitholes.

Proportionality My Ass

Politics, Sports

Ah yes… so with the Winter Olympics approaching, it’s time once again for some people to indulge in stupid wishful thinking — in this case, setting quotas where none should be set:

The U.S. Olympic Committee says it’s taking its most diverse team ever to a Winter Games, an impressive and deserved boast that requires a caveat of sorts.
Yes, USOC officials are pleased the team includes more African-Americans and Asian-Americans — and even the first two openly gay men — than recent winter squads. But they also realize this year’s U.S. Olympic team, not unlike those of most other nations gathering in PyeongChang this week, is still overwhelmingly white.
“We’re not quite where we want to be,” said Jason Thompson, the USOC’s director of diversity and inclusion. “. . . I think full-on inclusion has always been a priority of Team USA. I think everybody’s always felt it should represent every American.”
Team USA numbers 243 athletes, which is the largest team any nation has ever sent to a Winter Olympics. Of that group, 10 are African-American — 4 percent — and another 10 are Asian-American. The rest, by and large, are white. The Winter Games is typically a much smaller contingent than its summer counterpart, but the demographic differences are striking. The United States took more than 550 athletes to the 2016 Summer Games in Rio de Janeiro. Of that group, more than 125 were African-American — around 23 percent.

I’ll play along with this little game, as long as we apply it fairly — so come the next Summer Olympics we should make the Team USA Basketball squad of twelve equally representative: it should contain at least six White guys, three Black guys and the other three can be divided among Hispanics and Asians. (If we are going to make this team truly representative of America, one of the Hispanic dudes should be an illegal alien. And if he’s gay, that would be doubleplusgood.) Of course, with this squad we would lose more than win, but who cares about Citius, Altius, Fortius when we’re more about iustitia civitate, right?

Fucking idiots. Twenty years ago there were no Black athletes in Team USA Winter Olympics because Black people didn’t do winter sports. Now the team is one-fifth Black — progress by any other name — except that this isn’t quick enough for the race-conscious quota warriors, oh no: we have to shoehorn in more Black athletes right now, regardless of actual ummm merit because slavery (or some equally-specious bullshit).

And for the few Black athletes who are given a pass onto the team regardless of whether they can compete or not, they’ll be part of Team Loser (just as the White-quota basketball players would be) but that’s okay because the United States wins too many medals anyway and it’s only “fair” that we redistribute those golds among the lesser teams who deserve it because they work just as hard as we do.

One second thoughts, these tokenist tools aren’t fucking idiots at all. They’re just adhering to Leninist doctrine, the bien-pissants [sic].

And finally: if the USOC has funding for a “director of diversity and inclusion” in their budget then we’re giving them too much damn money.

Every time I think I’m getting a grip on my high blood pressure, some crap like this comes along to push it into the stratosphere.

Not So Outlandish

Politics

That Hanson fella has done it again, pointing out in irrefutable detail how conspiracy theories turn into actual conspiracies.

“Everyone should be keen to distinguish conspiracies from conspiracy theories. The [details] are real events, not the tales told by the paranoid.”

And it should be read in tandem with this outstanding piece by Daniel Greenfield:

“Guns Are How A Civil War Ends… Politics Is How It Starts”

I wonder how many Lefties are truly aware of the consequences of their actions?

 

Planning

Politics

Here we go again. It’s that time of year when Congress can’t / won’t do the job we send them there to do, can’t agree on a budget, and then come all the threats and dire warnings of a government shutdown.

Here’s what I would do if I were God-Emperor Trump: get within 24 hours a list from every Cabinet Secretary and department chief of all the government employees who absolutely, positively cannot be spared from their jobs as public servants — and then create the obverse of that list, and warn those people that if Congress fails to reach a budget agreement, then they are the ones who will be furloughed. Any and all complaints should be addressed to their Congressional representatives.

Just so we’re clear on the parameters, here: note that I said “cannot be spared from their jobs as public servants” — which would include people such as the people at the SocSec offices cutting checks to pensioners, air traffic controllers, Park Rangers overseeing national parks and monuments etc. — so that the public can continue to be served and not face childish games such as allowed nay encouraged by the previous Administration. All non-essential services can be placed in abeyance through furlough.

We can talk later about whether the furlough should be made permanent.

On a similar train of thought: all public service unions should not only be dissolved but made illegal, and Congress-only medical benefits ditto. (Let ’em suffer like we are, and we’ll see how long it takes them to clear up the medical insurance mess they’ve created.)

I’m stopping now before I get angry and start proposing the kinds of action which would get me noticed by Gummint.

Global Domination

Business, Politics

Contradictory to what Citizen Obama once said, it appears that we can drill our way to prosperity. (Like so much of what that asshole said, it was completely wrong.)

Surging shale production is poised to push U.S. oil output to more than 10 million barrels per day – toppling a record set in 1970 and crossing a threshold few could have imagined even a decade ago.

That’s all good, of course, because it means that the other oil-producing shithole countries (the various Arabs, Russia, Venezuela etc.) get shafted and their economies flushed down the toilet, which is all good and proper.

Tucked away in the article — and unlike most crap from Reuters, this one is worth reading all the way through — is a lovely little nugget:

Fears of dire energy shortages that gripped the country in the 1970s have been replaced by a presidential policy of global “energy dominance.” [emphasis added]

Wait, wait… you mean that President Trump can count this as yet another one of his first-year achievements? Because it sure as shit wasn’t Obama’s policy — he wanted to put our energy industry out of business.

How it must have hurt those tools at Reuters to have to admit that — but note that they left out Trump’s name, lest they actually be seen to acknowledge his policy as a good thing.

I’ll leave you to read the whole article, but let me add one last little thing of beauty:

“New wells can be drilled in as little as a week,” he said. A few years ago, it could take up to a month.

Gold Standard?

Health, Politics

The next time some liberal fool tries to convince you that a “single-payer” healthcare system is the bee’s knees and holds up Britain’s NHS as an example of “free” medical care, feel free to point him to this little snippet:

The NHS is struggling with its worst winter ever as A&E waiting times hit their highest on record, damning figures released today reveal.

New data from NHS England shows the health service is operating at a poorer level than at the same point in 2016, which was branded a ‘humanitarian crisis’ and saw the British Red Cross drafted in to help.

The alarming statistics, collected from between New Year’s Day and January 7, show:

  • One in five patients at major casualty units waited longer than four hours – the safe limit set by the Government – to be seen in December
  • The statistics showed that for all A&E units, 85.1 per cent of patients were seen within the four-hour period – equaling last January’s record low.
  • More than 300,000 patients were forced to wait for at least four hours in all A&E units – the highest amount since figures began in 2010.
  • Ambulance delays have also risen to record proportions, with more than 5,000 patients left stuck in the back of the vehicles waiting to be transferred to A&E.
  • While bed occupancy levels have hit their worst point yet this winter, with 24 trusts declaring they had no free beds at some point last week, the figures show.

With government, when there is over-demand there will always be under-supply, and rationing.