Seen SOTI:
…which may go towards explaining shit like this:
Not excusing or sympathizing; just saying.
Category: Politics
Trying not to start the public floggings
Germany Comes to Austria, Again
…just not at the head of a column of Panzers, this time:
As with Germany and France, losers big and small immediately decided they wouldn’t play with the party that had pulled nearly 30% of the votes cast or let the FPO ‘win’ at all. They moved to form a coalition to ice the Freedom Party out of government.
Like the National Rally in France (and the AfD in Germany — K.), all other ruling parties are uniting to keep the FPÖ out of government.
Hasn’t worked in Austria, either:
The announcement came more than three months after the legislative election on September 29. In that, the FPÖ, led by Herbert Kickl, emerged as the most popular party with 28.8 per cent of the vote.
The FPÖ had been unable to form a government due to a political cordon sanitaire imposed by other parties, labelling it as “far-right”. The ÖVP finished second with 26.3 per cent, followed by the Social Democratic Party (SPÖ) with 21.1 per cent. The FPÖ has however taken part in previous government coalitions, the last time being 2019 (with ÖVP).
Austria’s President, Alexander Van der Bellen, a member of the Green Party and a vocal critic of Kickl, announced on January 5 that he would meet with the FPÖ leader on January 6.
In a brief televised address, Van der Bellen acknowledged that opposition within the ÖVP on collaboration with Kickl had softened after Nehammer’s resignation. “I have used the last few hours to speak to numerous political decision-makers. During these discussions, the picture emerged that the voices within the People’s Party that rule out cooperation with an FPÖ under Herbert Kickl have become significantly quieter,” he said.
In an emergency meeting following Nehammer’s decision, the ÖVP leadership appointed Christian Stocker, the party’s general secretary, as interim president. The ÖVP also expressed its willingness to negotiate with the FPÖ to form a coalition.
So off they go, kicking and screaming, into a political future that puts Austrian citizens first, and immigrants second.
Like the Germans, like the French, and for a bonus, like the Canuckis as well.
Of our own MAGA revolution we will not speak.
Hubba hubba.
Expansionism
Robert Spencer gives one of his normal cogent opinions on God-Emperor Trump’s musings about annexing Canada, Greenland and the Panama Canal.
There’s the bottom line: if the United States doesn’t control the Panama Canal and Greenland, China or Russia likely will, and the consequences could be severe both for the American economy and for national security.
Yeah, forget about Canuckistan; we absolutely do not need a colder and more Commie-fied version of California in our republic, and 51 is an unwieldy non-round number. (I think Trump was just trolling the soon-to-be ex-prime minister anyway.)
As for Greenland and the Canal: why not annex them both and make them U.S. protectorates like Guam and the USVI? I find Spencer’s arguments quite compelling in both cases.
Enough With The Bananas
Over at Intellectual Takeout, John Horvat talks about bananas on walls:
My reasoning centers on a recent event in New York City in which the renowned Sotheby’s auction house sold a 2019 art piece dubbed “Comedian” by Maurizio Cattelan. The work consisted of a fresh banana duct-taped to the wall.
The bidding started at $800,000, and within five minutes, the item sold for $5.2 million plus auction house fees, which came to a total of $6.2 million. The new owner is Chinese-born crypto-businessman Justin Sun.
The actual banana cost thirty-five cents when bought in the morning at an Upper East Side fruit stand. The new owner will get a certificate of authenticity and installation instructions should he want to replace the banana before it rots. Mr. Sun has already announced that he will eat the original banana “as part of this unique artistic experience, honoring its place in both art history and popular culture.”
Commenting after the sale, Billy Cox, a Miami art dealer with his own copy of “Comedian,” says the work is something of historical importance that comes only “once or twice a century.”
Uh huh. Like the paint-splattered “art” of Jackson Pollock, to describe this as “art” at all, let alone something of “historical importance”, is to underline the folly of the so-called cultural elites and their absurd mania for post-modernist deconstructivism.
We are living in a society where certain liberal sectors inhabit an alternative reality where thirty-five-cent bananas are handled as multimillion-dollar works of art. The problem is that they want to force everyone else in society to believe their madness.
“Pull the other one” would be the obvious rejoinder. But Horvat takes it further:
The first are those who do not want to see the absurdity of the banana on the wall and dogmatize that it is art. They create their own reality and impose it on the nation.
The second group consists of those tired of being told a banana taped to the wall is art. They long to live in a world where art is art and bananas are bananas.
In the [2024] election, some of the latter group said, “Enough is enough.”
This reaction was not against a single banana on one wall.
You see, there is [also] the banana that claims a man is a woman and a woman is a man. Other bananas claim that people can choose their pronouns, pornography in libraries is literature, or that it is just fine for men to compete with women in sports. We are told drag queen story hours are suitable for children, after-school Satan Clubs are educational and it is not a human baby but a clump of cells.
It is all part of a vast banana extravaganza that we are asked to admire and make believe is the blueprint for a dream society.
Quite right. There’s only one thing to do when faced with these bananas:
yup. Dip them in boiling oil.
Degradation
When I first moved to the U.S. back in the mid-80s, I was impressed by how well things worked. I mean, you have to understand that all around the world — such as in Third World countries like Zimbabwe, India and Italy — things often just do not work as one would expect them to. Whether it’s because they are badly made, or badly assembled, or just operated by fucking idiots (try doing a relatively simple thing like booking a flight out of Rome’s Leonardo Da Vinci airport — which isn’t even in Rome but miles and miles out on the coast, a story for another time) and you’ll soon see that not much works as originally intended.
I am also familiar with concepts such as planned obsolescence, where corporations deliberately design products that will eventually fail or fall to pieces so that you will be forced into buying a new one as a replacement.
But there’s another factor in stuff not working, and this is the one which really, really sets my teeth on edge, and it’s embodied by an appliance which is common in households all over the U.S.: the dish washing machine, or dishwasher.
When I first came over, I fell in live with the dishwasher, because I had never owned one. Most families in South Africa didn’t, either because they had Black servants to hand wash the dishes, or they were too poor to afford such expensive (and they were expensive) machines.
But these GE/Frigidaire/Whirlpool dishwashers? Oh man, there were great. You piled your dishes in, coated with caked-on gravy or food particles or whatever, added a little detergent, and switched the thing on. All sorts of magic would happen behind the closed door, and when the thing stopped running, you waited about ten minutes and then opened the door, and there were your dishes: clean, dry and warm (maybe even still hot) to the touch.
And that was it.
Sadly, that is no longer the case.
Now, you have to pretty much hand wash the dishes first, or at least rinse them into near-cleanliness before loading them into the dishwasher, then do the same stuff as above and then, when the buzzer sounds or a light goes on, you open the door to find that your dishes are not completely clean, still wet or at best damp, and in fact, many times you will have to rinse them off and do the whole fucking thing all over again — with no guarantee that the outcome will be any different.
And why is this?
Because the dirty fingers of government have been stuck into the operation. Thanks to an excess of Green zealotry, dishwashers can’t use as much water as they used to so the spray can’t be as fierce (and effective), and the heating element has been turned from its furnace-like operation into something that wouldn’t keep you warm on a cool autumn day if you gripped it in your fist.
Our dishwashers, in short, have been turned from appliances that once worked perfectly at their intended function into flabby little things that are the equivalent of convict labor: surly, unproductive and unreliable.
There’s no point in complaining about this because Green Worship has become so ingrained in our culture that anyone daring to rail against the Great God EnergySmart (blessings be upon its name) might well face severe sanction and even penalties.
Such as happened to my friend Patterson when he rewired his 2015-model dishwasher to 1980 specs and made it work properly. Me, I’m too stupid to do something like that, and too old to want to kick against the pricks in that manner.
So my private little rebellion against this nonsense is that I just wash my dishes again and again until they are as clean as I want them to be. (I do the same with my low-flow-low-use low-efficiency toilet, which requires two and sometimes three flushes to take care of the old #2 bowel movement discharge, and has been know to rise to five, after a particularly stupendous roast beef dinner.)
Or I power-rinse my dishes with steaming-hot water before loading them, using twice as much electricity (via the water heater) as I would have used to run the dishwasher if it was working properly.
End result: I use twice or three times as much water and much more electricity to wash my dishes as I would have in 1986.
And all this just so I can have clean dishes to put away in the cupboard. Or else I do my part for the environment by using paper plates which don’t need washing and just end up in the landfill.
I know this sounds like a really pointless and futile gesture, doesn’t it? But it’s far less ummm radical than, say, were I to assassinate the CEO of Whirlpool or the politicians responsible for turning once-efficient U.S. products into pathetic Third World failures.
Isn’t it?
My Thoughts Exactly
From The Daily Wire:
Influential conservative activist Charlie Kirk says the party should make lawmakers that get in the way of the Trump agenda pay the price.
Yup. Enough of the GOPe RINOs. Anytime someone doesn’t support MAGA principles — or worse, sides with the socialists against the Trump agenda — we should have him/her tossed out of office, to be replaced with someone with fire in the belly. Kirk warns, however, not to go after the Republicans who are in marginal districts — because of the “incumbent advantage” — which is a smart play.
But those who represent deep-Red districts but still play footsie with the Left?
Open season.