“25 million individuals over age 100 remain in the Social Security database even though there are fewer than 100,000 people aged 100 or older alive in the U.S. today.” — DOGE
Let’s hear it for Gummint efficiency. And if it’s not inefficiency… then it’s fucking fraud, and the recipients of said fraudulent payouts need to go to jail.
And while we’re there, the people responsible for checking for and preventing such anomalies should be fired.
Congressman Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) reminded the country last week why the Second Amendment is so vital to the United States.
The former Long Beach mayor called on the Democratic Party to “bring actual weapons” in the “fight for democracy.”
So you’ll bring your “actual” weapons to fight for democracy — what you call democracy, at any rate.
Challenge accepted. Be White, and make the first move. We’ll see how this plays out.
Are they really this stupid?
In keeping with the Musk Activity Report, allow me to list the five things I did last week — almost all of which, I’ll agree, I do every week. Bearing in mind that I’m actually retired and not therefore required to do anything, here they are:
1) Prepared and posted about 30-odd articles for this here blog. Some require little preparation — such as the Caption Competitions, Sunday’s Classic Beauty and Random Totty categories, of which I typically do a month’s worth in advance. Others such as the Comment Of The Day also require little preparation other than formatting, but I typically do those as I stumble on them. The heavy hitters (e.g. Gratuitous Gun Pics, political analysis and social commentary) take a lot longer because in many cases they concern subjects with which I’m not familiar and require that I delve into the topic at some depth. Reports on daily news take very little time, but commentary thereon does involve at least a little contemplation if not ancillary research, as does the weekly News Roundup. As I’m committed to publishing at least four posts per weekday and one each for Saturday and Sunday, you can see how this all adds up, timewise. And I count this as only one thing I did last week, and pretty much every week. No doubt some Gummint bureaucrat would spin those out into at least a dozen things — such is the nature of make-work Gummint activity — but for me, it’s one.
2) Reading and answering mail. I get upwards of two dozen emails a day from Readers. Some require a response, some are FYI. Whatever, thank you for all of them — regular correspondents know who you are — and I value every single email. (I don’t get much if any hate mail, but that’s fine. If I wanted that kind of thing, I’d get a Twitter/X account.)
3) Grocery shopping. Because New Wife works a day job (more on this below), it falls on me to keep the household running, and typically this involves about three separate trips per week (because I prefer to eat fresh foods rather than canned or frozen). Once again, this I count as one thing not three.
4) Meal preparation. There are two such activities. Firstly, each night I prepare a “brown-bag” lunch for New Wife’s consumption the following day. It involves a fresh garden salad, some kind of meat and a dessert (pitted cherries and full-milk yogurt). Secondly, because she works five days a week, I see no reason why she should come home exhausted and then have to prepare us a meal; so at least three nights a week, I prepare dinner for us both. Friday nights we’ll either share a frozen pizza or whatever. We don’t do takeout unless we’re desperate. Weekend meals are an ad hoc kind of thing — cheese or chicken toasties — unless we decide to treat ourselves to a roast, beef or lamb) which I typically do while she does household stuff like laundry. (In passing, I keep the apartment tidy, bed made and the kitchen spotless because I loathe the alternative with a passion).
5) Range trip. I view this as part of my civic duty. Choice of guns depends on my mood or “rotation” (“damn, I haven’t shot Gun X for a while, it’s time”). 5a) Maintenance. I also clean and oil my guns once a week — not just those I fired at the range, but also one or two others on a rotation basis. (I’m not compulsive about this because I don’t have to be. While I have the cleaning kit out, in other words…)
Those are the five things I do every week, which I consider cumulatively as my “job”. I didn’t include the voluminous reading (paper and Internet), because that’s recreation. Ditto the many WhatsApp messages to friends and family.
6) Ad hoc jobs. Last week, I also fixed the headliner on the Tiguan — after only 135,000 miles, the glue weakened and the liner started flopping down, don’t get me started on quality control nowadays. I also re-glued the gearstick shroud in New Wife’s Sputum (which had worked loose after only 26,000 miles because Fiat), and took it in for an oil change.
In government-worker terms, that list would probably exhaust most of them and require some time off.
On the other hand, I can’t get fired.
And a reminder, before we get to giggling:
The other day, somebody asked me why I needed a 2TB hard drive…
Now, a special section devoted to the horrors of the Trump Administration:
Now back to our regular programming:
And to change the subject completely, here are some ladies walking the streets, who may or not be actual streetwalkers:
And last, but most certainly not least:
One TWO of the wonders of the modern world…
What can you say about an actress who was independently famous in three countries? Well, Pola Negri first became a household name in her native Poland as a stage actress, then in Germany as a movie star, and then became the first foreign actress to be hired in Hollywood — before Dietrich, Banky and all the other, perhaps more famous names.
Today, she seems to have been largely forgotten, but in her time she was not only famous, but infamous — not the least because she was the lover of (among many) Charlie Chaplin and Rudolph Valentino.
She also popularized the fashion of painted toenails, which no one had ever done before (except maybe prostitutes, which may have been why she was regarded as scandalous).
She also became fabulously wealthy — in 1922, her personal fortune was estimated (in today’s dollars) at just under $100 million. Her house in Hollywood looked like the White House.
I don’t think the photos of the time did her justice, largely because of the clothing fashions of the 1920s were terrible. And her acting style would today be called “histrionic” or “over-dramatic”, but that was the style back then in the silent movie era — and in any event, she was very definitely a product of her Polish upbringing, being passionate and over-the-top.
So what did she look like?
Here she is, snogging Chaplin:
…and giving ol’ Rudi Valentino the glad eye:
And here’s what she looked like in the 1940s, when clothing styles were better and the makeup less stagey:
Exquisite.
It’s been just over fifty years since Margaret Thatcher became BritPM, and ever since then the Left has been acting like rabid dogs towards her — once in power, doing what was necessary to reverse the tide of socialism that had essentially held Britain in its grasp since the post-WWII Attlee Labour Government and had led Britain right up to the edge of the abyss; once out of power (stabbed in the back by the British Conservative Party’s equivalent of the RINO cabal in the U.S.), continuing to stab her over and over again; and upon her death, vilifying her, spitting on her grave, rejoicing at her passing, and in general acting like the animals we all know they are and have always been.
So it’s been really good to see someone redressing the imbalance — in this case the brilliant publication TCW (The Conservative Woman) — in three fine articles, all written by Paul Horgan. If you haven’t already seen them, go there now.
Fifty Years On: Margaret Thatcher is still demonised by the left
If a lie is repeated long enough, it will become accepted by the less intellectually-endowed sections of the populace. We see this in the denial of the Holocaust. Some really awful people with a sick agenda know that their twisted beliefs are destroyed by accepting the truth of historic facts. So to further their immoral thinking, they will deny these events ever happened and were faked as part of some global conspiracy. The vindictively superstitious portions of our population will prefer the lie, especially after its repetition.
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Here in the UK we are experiencing a similar phenomenon over the premiership of Margaret Thatcher, which started 40 years ago last month. Rather than a conspiracy to lie over this, numerous people who are separately working towards the same goal realise that it is vital that they distort the Thatcher years. Those vulnerable to their propaganda are people too young to have lived through them, or to have lived through the years prior to Mrs Thatcher’s premiership when this country was known as the ‘Sick Man of Europe’ whose government ran out of money and could not borrow any more from its usual creditors.
Fifty Years On: The big lies about Mrs Thatcher
There are two main lies. The first is that Mrs Thatcher destroyed the ‘post-war consensus’. The second is that her policies devastated communities, particularly in the North of England. Both are false. Here I discuss the first lie.
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All Margaret Thatcher did was to take action based on the objective reality of the situation which was that a state-shackled economy needed liberation from the chaos that was causing the country to be ungovernable amidst accelerating economic collapse. All that is happening now is that the people who could not oppose her then are rewriting history now to brainwash anyone born after 1990.
Here I deal with the accusation that Thatcher’s policies devastated communities, when corporatist governance and incompetent planning were actually to blame.
The reform of the economy forms part of the second lie, accusing Thatcher of this devastation, particularly of those who depended on employment by state-run businesses. In fact, these communities were already devastated, and had been for years. The corporatist post-war consensus model was based on centralised economic planning, epitomised by the saying ‘the man from Whitehall knows best’. There had been calls for more central planning from the 1930s onwards by political and economic commentators and the planning started in earnest with the return of the Attlee government in 1945. It is therefore reasonable to believe that by the 1970s, whatever condition these state-dependent communities were in was as a direct consequence of state planning. However, it is clear that the planning did not include the contingency that these planned businesses on which the communities apparently utterly depended might not be able to sell to customers at a price the customers were willing to pay.
There was also the issue of the strikes, where customers, faced with unreliable supply, would take their business elsewhere. Working in an uneconomic coal-mine or loss-making steelworks was still hazardous and unpleasant, perhaps made more so by the lack of funds necessary to improve conditions, since all the money had to come from an increasingly-burdened taxpayer. The poor working men in these state businesses in this case were being subsidised to take part in a pointless, monotonous, and dangerous kind of work-based theme park, all according to a central plan made in Whitehall. It was a failure of state planning not to cater properly for change and innovation, but then all socialistic planning has that fault at its heart.
Fifty Years On: Mrs Thatcher was polarising, not divisive
THE third big lie about Margaret Thatcher’s term in office is that she was a ‘divisive’ figure. This lie really started to be propagated in 2013 when it became the main narrative of the BBC and elsewhere after the Iron Lady died. What these media outlets probably meant was not ‘divisive’ but ‘polarising’. Margaret Thatcher presented a stark choice between consensus socialism and reformist capitalism. The voters chose the latter in decisive numbers in four General Elections. Despite unemployment, inflation and the miners’ strike, Britain still kept voting Conservative, keeping the party in power for a record-breaking 18 years.
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If Margaret Thatcher had been divisive, the response of her opponents would surely have been to form a ‘popular front’, where differences amongst themselves would be forgotten in an anti-Conservative electoral alliance. In fact the precise reverse happened.
The excerpts above do not really do the articles justice; they are there merely to whet your appetite.
Why did I do this? Why talk about some long-dead British politician? Just to remind everyone that Shakespeare was right: “the evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.”
In Margaret Thatcher’s case, the good — the truth of the matter — is that she almost single-handedly saved Britain from ruin. The “evil” is in fact how the Left has demonized her, and that evil does indeed live after her.