Search Results for: suits ties

New Regs

Business, Gummint, Marxists

In talking about yet another example of California foolishness, this statement caught my eye:

The rebuilt economy taking shape is based on freelancers working from home. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey just said his employees could work from home “forever.”

I expect that California, New York and the rest of the Usual Suspects will soon pass regulations that specify that “home offices” will need a special state inspection certificate, require that home offices must have x, y and z facilities, need to show proof of regular cleaning and maintenance… you get the idea.  All, of course, to harass people who just want to earn a living, and work in a manner which suits them.  Why would the government do this, you may ask?

Because they can.

You heard it here first.

The Real Redress

Crime, Gummint, Politics, Two-Minute Hate

So Gen. Michael Flynn has had the nonsensical case against him dropped because the lying cocksuckers at the FBI tried to frame and railroad him with a bullshit charge, and the new heads at the DOJ decided to give up a lost cause.  (Side note:  it’s now time to remove the criminality of lying to a federal agent, or else extend the same criminality and punishments to the federal agent lying to you.)

The problem is that an innocent man has been bankrupted trying to defend himself against this blatant banana-republic connivance, and still stands under a cloud for no good reason, and the question remains:  how do we compensate Flynn for the harm to his reputation and for his financial harm?  There could be a lawsuit filed, but we all know that’s utter bullshit, he’ll get (if anything) pennies to the dollar and his lawyers will go away rich.  Trump’s muttering about a heavy price, but color me dubious.

Nor, I think, will James Comey, Strzok and their little band of merry men suffer any real distress for their own lawlessness — and if you think they will, I have a cute little bridge in Manhattan to sell you.  Actually, I’d rather sell you this.

I think POTUS should appoint Michael Flynn as head of the FBI, effective immediately.  And I want POTUS to tell Congress to appropriate a “director’s signing bonus” for Flynn equal to the amount he lost while struggling to defend himself against these sniveling assholes.

And Flynn should get a real fire-breathing set of deputies and assistants extending down the top four layers of FBI management across all their divisions, so that they can start a serious and thorough investigation into not just what happened to Flynn, but to everyone subjected to the same treatment over the past… say, twelve years.

Some good things would come of this.

For one thing, there will be mass resignations at the FBI as the rats will scatter to save their own skins, which is a good thing.  The fewer of these vermin in the once-proud agency, the better.

The next good thing is that the investigations I’ve suggested will pretty much paralyze the FBI for a good couple years, tying them up with endless paperwork and such, with all sorts of people looking over their shoulders, second-guessing themselves and generally being too frightened to go to the can without three levels of authorization.  The busier they are with this, the less time they’d have to perpetrate similar mischief on others.

The third thing, and the best of the lot, is an old-fashioned word:  revenge.  I want Flynn to flay these assholes from stem to stern, laying about him with vim and vigor, fucking up their lives as much as they fucked with his — just because he can.

And POTUS should announce that as a matter of policy, Flynn’s enemies shouldn’t bother filing lawsuits against his actions because he’ll just issue pardon after pardon, basically as redress for Flynn’s hardships suffered these past three or so years.

I’m looking for some Old Testament-style retribution here, because reasons.

Feel free to argue with me, but I have to tell you, you’d better be good because I’m in a particularly vengeful mood at the moment.  However, if you have ideas to make things even  worse for these FBI pricks, legally speaking, I’m all ears.

Have Some Cheese

Politics

Via Insty, I see that some career diplo-twerp is having a conniption fit over God-Emperor Trump’s ill-treatment of career diplomats.

Within the senior ranks, however, we watched our assignment possibilities vanish as the White House left top diplomatic positions vacant and handed out others as rewards to political cronies, campaign donors, and members of President Trump’s golf clubs. Senior jobs at the State Department which had typically been filled by career foreign service officers went to blatantly unqualified appointees. Sensitive diplomatic special envoy positions were given to people such as an assistant to Trump’s son-in-law.

Boo fucking hoo.

I don’t know where this little fart has been — warming a chair in State for three decades, apparently — but along with Custer’s difficulties in Wyoming, the news is that ambassadorships have always  been a “spoils” position — doled out to political party favorites and donors.

It’s long been a truism that the entire State Department is simply a delivery vehicle for Democrat Party foreign policy, regardless of which party’s leader sits in the Oval Office or which party controls Congress, even.  And it’s also true that State hasn’t exactly covered itself in glory, either:  I remember full well how the U.S. Embassy staff in London had this huge party planned for Hillary Bitch Clinton’s coronation in 2016, and when it became apparent that she was having her broad ass kicked by the aforementioned Trump, how that party turned into a wake when the Electoral College count was concluded.

And now these apparatchiks are amazed, nay shocked  that the President places them lower than pond scum on his daily to-do list?  Frankly, I think that Trump’s swamp-draining efforts should have started with these fuckheads, and one of the few really bad hiring mistakes he made was Rex Tillotson, who as a lifelong corporate executive was always going to go with maintaining the status quo (i.e. the State Department position) in terms of our relationships with foreign powers — which is why Trump kicked him out, eventually, because Trump’s goal always was to change the nature of those relationships.

America pays a heavy price for turning statecraft into a playground for rich amateurs. Embarrassing blunders, scandals and mismanagement are commonplace for some of the most unqualified.

Uh huh.  I remember when Bill Fucking Clinton made Senator Symbol — Carol Mosely-Braun (D-IL), the stupidest senator in living history — into an ambassador, and who was so inept that the host country’s foreign services department threw a party when she finally left.  The country?  New Zealand.  Ask me how any Trump appointee could be worse than that.  (And don’t even get me started  on other Democrat SecState failures like Hillary “Libya” Clinton and John Fuckface Kerry, or we’ll be here all day.)

So the hell with these little placeholders in State.  Their influence has been either incorrect — former bootlegger-turned-ambassador Joe Kennedy telling FDR that the Brits were going to be defeated by Nazi Germany in 1939 — or even inimical to our national interests — Alger Hiss, anyone? — and the career diplomats’ much-vaunted “expertise and experience” in foreign policy is far too overestimated.

This whole lament as linked is simply a tantrum because the President isn’t doing what they think  he should be doing — almost a textbook definition of the Swamp that Trump promised to drain.

Don’t like what the Boss is doing?  Quit and put your diplomatic formal suits to good use as headwaiters, you limpwristed pantywaists, the sooner the better.

Appearances Matter

Grooming

Despite the “we’re all equal” trope that seems to be all the rage today, !Science! tells us that it just ain’t so (emphasis added):

People perceive a person’s competence partly based on subtle economic cues emanating from the person’s clothing, according to a study published in Nature Human Behaviour by Princeton University. These judgments are made in a matter of milliseconds, and are very hard to avoid.
In nine studies conducted by the researchers, people rated the competence of faces wearing different upper-body clothing. Clothing perceived as “richer” by an observer—whether it was a T-shirt, sweater, or other top—led to higher competence ratings of the person pictured than similar clothes judged as “poorer,” the researchers found.
Given that competence is often associated with social status, the findings suggest that low-income individuals may face hurdles in relation to how others perceive their abilities—simply from looking at their clothing.

I’ve banged on about this topic several times before, but now that I have !Science! to back me up, I’m going to say it again, with feeling:

Appearances matter.

Dress like a slob, get treated like one.  Even worse, if the above study is to be believed, is that if you dress like a slob your competence  is going to be dismissed, especially when compared with someone who doesn’t look (as I’ve said before) as though he’s just come from a beach party by way of working on his friend’s car.

It doesn’t matter, by the way, how unfair  you think this prejudice is;  it’s simply the way of the world, and bleating about the unfairness of it won’t change a thing.

Small Wonder

Culture, Travels

According to some organization, Vienna is the most “liveable” city in the world.  I can see why, and I could live there in a heartbeat.  I’ve often commented on my love for Vienna — to this day, it’s the only city that is so beautiful that the first time I went there, I walked the streets with tears running down my cheeks.

I don’t know what criteria the EIU set to decide livability, but here are mine:

1)  It must be beautiful.  Vienna has that, in spades.

2)  There must be lots of culture:  art, music and all the rest.  Feel free to tell me Vienna doesn’t have that  covered.  Here’s the Kunsthistoriches (Art History) museum, see also beauty (above)

…and as for music?  Even their street musicians are a cut above the rest (he was playing Mozart  tunes, FFS):

 

3)  The people must be well-mannered, well-dressed and classy.  Vienna:  check, check and check.  The Viennese are terribly formal, which suits me down to the ground.

4)  A relaxed lifestyle.  Vienna = café culture, maybe even more so than Paris.  And oooh the coffee…

5) Good food, and restaurants.  Here’s Vienna’s equivalent of Whole Foods, or maybe M&S Food Court.  Let me tell you:  I know  grocery stores, and Julius Meinl is the best in the world.

Let’s not forget the street markets:

So yeah:  if somebody stuck a gun to my head and said, “You have to go and live in Vienna!”, I’d snatch the gun away and shoot him before he could change his mind.

I would be remiss, however, if I didn’t list a couple of negatives about Vienna.  (A German I met once said, “Vienna would be beautiful, except for the Viennese”, and my only qualification of his opinion is that of the language.)

I speak German reasonably well, and can get around most of Germany without too much hassle (once I’ve been  there a few days and have caught up — you don’t use it, you lose it, and I’ve pretty much lost it).  That’s not true in Vienna, where the local patois is incomprehensible, even to a lot of Germans.  (In the early days in Munich, Hitler had to take a few elocution lessons because people couldn’t understand his Austrian-accented speeches.)

Also:  in winter, it’s witch’s tit cold.  Holy balls.  Even coming from Chicago as I did, Viennese winters are cold, Bubba.  The only good thing about winter there is that it keeps most of the tourists away — which brings me to my last quibble:  in summer, Vienna has more tourists per square yard than the average day at DisneyWorld.

But in summer, the weather is glorious and the whole city seems to sing.  The multitude of statues to Beethoven, Mozart, Brahms and Strauss (all of whom lived in Vienna) must have something to do with it…

Mein schönes Wien… I need to get back there, and soon.

As for the rest of the “ten most liveable” cities on that list?  Ugh.  As far as I’m concerned, it’s Snow White and the Nine Dwarfs.

And one wonders how anyone could put Vienna and Toronto (???!!!) on the same such list, with a straight face.

Isn’t That Special?

Bad News, Pussification Parade

“Never marry outside your class.”

As a conservative man, one of the old customs I’ve always respected is that nobility / royalty always kept a closed shop when it came to marriage.  If a royal princess came of marriageable age, some other royal prince would be found — mostly in Europe — to be her husband, and ditto for the future Earl Whatsit to find himself a brood mare wife among the dozens of well-bred girls available either locally, or else abroad.

Yes I know, such customs have led to inbred morons and black sheep in the various families, but over time, the benefit of said unions have outweighed the potential disadvantages.  Both parties know the rules of the game, and behave accordingly.

There have been some notable exceptions to this rule, of course, most notably in the case of Prince William’s wife, the former commoner Kate Middleton (now the Duchess of Cambridge) who will one day became Queen Catherine of Great Britain.  As a commoner-turned royal, she has been an outstanding success and is a tribute to Britain’s Royal Family.

Credit: Euan Cherry/WENN.com ORG XMIT: wenn29585715

The same cannot be said for the other prince (William’s brother Harry) who not only married someone way below his class, but a foreigner to boot, who not only has no background in the vagaries of Britain’s class system (not always a Bad Thing, mind you) but also seems determined to inflict her New Age / New Woman bullshit on the long-suffering Windsors.  Hence:

Once he was a beer-drinking bachelor with a penchant for fast food, who was most likely to be found at the heart of the party.
But then our action man prince met a free-spirited Californian actress living by the ethos that most things can be ‘cured with either yoga, the beach or a few avocados’, as she wrote on her now-defunct blog The Tig.
And the rest, as they say, is history.
Ever since Prince Harry met Meghan Markle something has changed. Last week they were spotted leaving a Notting Hill wellness shop which offers ‘energy healing’ and meditation with ‘singing bowls’.
Then it was revealed they had stayed at Heckfield Place hotel in Hampshire for three nights. It boasts an organic ethos, a yoga studio and a spa offering ‘all-natural treatments’, and holds mind-expanding talks on subjects such as ‘How the world thinks’.

And it gets better:

The Duchess of Sussex has delivered an astonishing snub to the Queen’s highly-regarded doctors, insisting she doesn’t want ‘the men in suits’ to oversee the birth of her first child.
The Mail on Sunday can reveal that, in a significant break with Royal tradition, 37-year-old Meghan has appointed her own delivery team, led by an unnamed female doctor.
Royal Household gynaecologists Alan Farthing and Guy Thorpe-Beeston – who is a specialist in high-risk births – attended at the arrival of all three of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge’s children. They are among the best in the world but neither has been given the leading role in Meghan’s care.

FFS.  The only was this could get any worse would be if the “unnamed female doctor” turns out to be that chick from Gray’s Anatomy.

Look:  Britain has had a long and storied tradition of eccentric royals, most of whom were kept out of view of the public (unless they were actual monarchs, in which case they were kept more or less in check by Parliament).  And over time, their effect on the Royal Family has been either minimal or else forgotten.

Nowadays, of course, there is no privacy for Royal Loons, and the tabloid press (no longer restrained by lèse-majesté  laws of old, more’s the pity) seize on every little eccentricity and bray it out loud to the world.

In the grand scheme of things, of course, none of this matters — especially to us Murkins, who look on these goings-on with, at best, bemused indifference — and in centuries to come, the Pussification Of Prince Harry will be (perhaps) just a footnote in someone’s book about royal foolishness.

But for those like me who are interested in things like tradition and long-established customs (especially when they’ve been proven to work), this dim-witted modernist broad has done more damage to the Royal Family than Hitler’s bombs.

AP Photo/Evan Agostini