Unconcerned

Here’s something so outside my range of interest that I had never even thought of it.

Teen climate activist Greta Thunberg’s campaign to make people feel “flight shame” if they travel by plane has led to the reduction of bookings in her native Sweden. Now the U.S. airline industry is worried that the trend could take hold in this country.

“Flight shame”?  Let’s talk about this for a moment.

Every day I take people to the airport — most are going away on business, while others are jetting off to places like Aruba, Hawaii and Europe for their dream vacation, or else are taking their kids to a Disney Vergnügungslager  in California or Florida.  Others are going to visit family in far-off cities or countries (in some cases family whom they’ve not seen for years), while others still are proud grandparents off to annoy their children and spoil the grandchildren to death (as is their duty).

Does this sound like a bunch of people who would be “shamed” into foregoing their flights, all because some adolescent twerp thinks they shouldn’t be doing them?

Now I can see a couple of cases where there might be some kind of pullback on travel:  a corporation, for example, buys into the climate shame mantra, and as a form of virtue-signaling tells their employees to cut back — unless, of course, such an activity would have a serious impact on their bottom line, in which case… uh huh, you guessed it.  (“Yeah, boss, XYZ MegaCorp has canceled their million-dollar account with us because they haven’t seen any of our reps in a year…”)

Tell me that  wouldn’t set the stoat among the rabbits.

Another group who might be shamed into reducing their travel would be the International Backpack ‘N Sandals Set, who would otherwise be off to Explore Other Cultures And Enrich Their Lives, or do the eco-tourist thing [gag].  Quite frankly, this could only be A Good Thing in that normal people such as me would not have to sit for the following six hours next to someone who smells like a badger (and the male  travelers of this ilk are even worse).  Also, all those exotic eco-destinations would either go out of business (unemployment!) or have to raise their rates to compensate for the drop-off, making their business model affordable only to the extremely wealthy.

I can’t see Val d’Isère, Monaco or Kitzbühel losing much business, by the way:  the rich always carve out exceptions for themselves;  or else they just don’t care, nor do they buy into the eco-shaming, or both.  (About now, Mr. Free Market’s ears should be burning.)

Returning to the article:  it’s all very well for, say, Sweden  to experience a drop-off in air travel — there are many other ways to get from Sweden to other countries in Europe — but then again, all those countries are only a couple hundred miles apart.  However, the U.S. is not Scandinavia, nor even Europe:  I have to drive a couple hundred miles just to get out  of Texas, for instance, and further than that just to reach any other major city like Houston or San Antonio, still in Texas.

Finally, of course, we have the well-known hypocrisy of these holier-than-thou Greens, who think nothing of hopping on board a private Gulfstream just to attend a conference where they can scold other  people for burning fossil fuels and destroyiiiiing the planet.  Little Greta’s last scolding-trip to the New World, for instance, used more energy in total than a hundred and eighty families flying to Disney World for a week each*.

All that said:  if this foolishness does come to pass, what would be the reaction of the airlines to a sudden (and perhaps permanent) drop in passenger count?  We all know the answer to that:  discounted fares and “bundled” vacation packages to attract those lost customers back — with the concomitant drop in their balance sheets’ profit lines.

And wait till Delta/American/United discover that eco-fuel costs three times more than avgas, with a similar effect on their precious bottom line.

Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch.


*I just made that figure up — kinda like the Greens do in all their Doomsday predictions.

Yeah, Just Keep On Poking

Back when I was a young starving musician, I was driving the band’s van loaded with equipment back to our storage room after a long gig.  At about 3am I ran into a police roadblock — a common enough occurrence in apartheid South Africa.  The block was manned by a single cop who’d parked his SUV across the road and when he saw headlights approaching, would just turn on his flashers to cause the oncoming car to stop.  So I did.

“Where are you going?”
“Back home — well, back to offload all the band equipment first, then home.”
“Open up the back.”
“Now open up the side door.”
“I can’t see anything;  all that crap is blocking up the doors.”
“Yeah, we have a lot of equipment.”
“Unpack it.”
“Why?”
“I need to see that you’re not carrying anything illegal in there.”
“I’m not not carrying anything illegal.”
“Unpack it.”
“No.”
“What?”
“Look, be reasonable, can you?  It’s three in the morning, I’ve been working since 5 yesterday afternoon, and I’ve still got two more hours’ work before I can get into bed.”
“Not my problem.  Unpack the van, now.”
I lost it.  “No.  You want the van unpacked, you can fucking do it.  I’ll sit here at the side of the road, and after you’ve discovered that I’m not carrying anything illegal, you can pack it all back again, and then I’ll go home.”
I think he was more surprised that I wasn’t going to obey his orders — probably the first time it had ever happened to him.  He stared at me, I stared right back at him.  (My kids call it my “hitman” look.)
After a moment or two, he sighed and said, “Just get back in your van, and fuck off.”  (I think he figured out that he and I were alone on a deserted road in the middle of Fuck Nowhere, South Africa, and I was a LOT bigger than he was.)
So I got back in the van, and drove off.  As I did so, I touched the Colt Combat Commander strapped to my hip (which he hadn’t discovered), looked back at him in the rearview mirror, and murmured to myself:  “You don’t know it, sonny, but I just let you live.”
I was that  angry.

I told y’all that story so we could talk about this one.

We all know about the asshole who teases a normally-placid dog until it snaps at him, then beats it or kills it because “it’s dangerous”.

Feel free to read this article, then this one, and tell me if you don’t know exactly how that dog feels.

I should point out that almost every single incident of law-abiding people turning around and killing government agents or officials has been because someone’s property has been destroyed, confiscated or otherwise appropriated.

So if government agencies persist in this nonsense, do not be surprised if in desperation, angry and helpless citizens start doing stupid stuff.

Note that I’m not talking about those assholes who go round assassinating cops in cold blood — they need killing more than their victims do.  But at some point, a government official is going to fuck someone over because, in terms of Government Regulation #132-22-47, they can.

One day, the person they’re fucking with is going to snap, pull a gun and start shooting.  And of course, it’ll all be his  fault.

If you think this is unlikely, ask yourself why so many government agencies have started installing bullet-proof glass in front of their customer service counters.  They know how people feel, and still  they carry on doing it — because that’s what petty bureaucrats do when their actions are protected or even “justified” by some law or regulation.

The fucking government agencies (like those in the attached articles) need to start backing the fuck off before the shit really starts to fly.

The Moderates Step Forward

Going back to my earlier observations about the fucking Marxists Social Democrats wanting to “unify the country”, we have this latest little contribution from one of the so-called “moderates” among the Democrat Clown Show:

Amy Klobuchar Says English Should Not Be Official Language of U.S.

Very few public statements by today’s politicians makes me want to pack a picnic lunch, grab my Mauser and head for a tall building in D.C., but this certainly ranks in the top five.

I remember once, in one of my more fevered rants passim, saying this about language in this country:

  • Always — always — insist on speaking, and being spoken to in English, regardless of circumstance.  If the other guy continues to scream at you in Spanish, respond with random Spanish expressions such as “Tierra del Fuego!”  or my favorite, “Huevos y putas!”.  If being yelled at in Ebonics, simply say, “I’m sorry, but I don’t speak Zulu”.

Nothing divides a populace quicker and more decisively than not being able to understand what the other guy is saying, especially if bi- or multilingualism is being mandated by law.  It doesn’t work in Canada, it doesn’t work in Belgium, and it sure as hell never worked in South Africa.   In fact, everywhere bilingualism is tried, it does nothing but cause friction, enmity and in some cases, violence.

As far as I’m concerned, when a politician running for public office makes such a suggestion, it should result in automatic disqualification by their parent party.  And if that party refuses to do so, then it should face legal consequences.

I don’t care if Fernando Castro, Hua Li, Abu Hassam or any other escapees from the world’s shithole countries feel “left out” or “excluded” when they go to the DMV and can’t get anyone to talk to them, or who face incarceration because they couldn’t read the laws of this country.  Learn the language — English — or GTFO.

Here We Go Again

Oh FFS:

Climate change could wipe out up to HALF of all plant and animal life on Earth by 2070 if temperatures keep increasing, study warns
The impact of ‘maximum temperatures’ is more important for species survival
Experts tracked species in hundreds of locations to see how they handle heat
If temperatures rise by 3.6F we would still lose 20 per cent of plants and animals
If they rise by more than that we could lose up to half of all plants and animals

Yeah, and IF temperatures rise by 200 degrees we’d all melt into one big bouillabaise. As always, beware the weasel words like “could” and “if” (also “and”, “the” and all the other words these assholes use when they’re trying to scare us into doing something stupid).  And 2070, now?

The sad thing is that all this alarmism is affecting people — fortunately, just the ones who are fragile and easily conned.

People who suffer ‘eco-anxiety’ reveal their terror about the climate crisis is causing insomnia, depression and chest pain

I hope you all die from those symptoms because quite frankly, you’re all too fucking stupid to live.

News Roundup

Little snippets which don’t deserve a full post.

1) Ireland faces months without a governmentlucky Ireland.

2) Bernie admits that banning assault rifles is just the startwe already knew that, you Marxist motherfucker, but it’s nice to have you come out and say it.

3) Mayor Pete Butt-plug wants to free 74,000 drug dealerssounds like an election-winner right there, Homo Boy Keep those ideas coming.

4) Make gun companies responsible for gun-related deathsJoe The Doddering Fondler exercises his inner Swalwell.  I was gonna say more, but Red Flag.  LOL.

5) POTUS wants Pete Rose in the Hall of Fameget Hillary, Clapper, Comey and all those other coup plotters in jail first, and then we can talk about irrelevancies like this oneEye on the ball, Donald.

6) New Guy On The Borderone word, Brian:  landmines.

And finally:

7) Oscars Triumph — for the first time in living memory, I’d actually seen one of the movies nominated for Best Picture before the show (The Irishman), and it sucked.

Not A Chance In Hell

Quoth some Democrat “strategist”:

“This has got to be an election fundamentally about Democrats’ vision for bringing the country together and solving the big problems that confront us.”

Really?  This from a party which [deep breath]:

  • encourages urban unrest through its paramilitary Antifa movement
  • thinks voters for The Other Party are rubes, racists and “deplorable”
  • supports “open borders” (i.e. unlimited immigration) and calls those who don’t “racists” and “white supremacists”
  • resists ICE when they try to deport violent illegal immigrants
  • supports early release of violent felons from prison
  • supports Marxist electoral candidates and socialist/communist doctrine, in a nation which won the Cold War against that precise set of principles, and despite the obvious failures and appalling death tolls in all Communist nations since 1917
  • supports infanticide and unlimited abortion rights despite those being incredibly unpopular with the majority of Americans
  • wants to disarm the American population, despite Constitutional protection and (once again) massive popular support for private gun ownership
  • espouses insane social philosophies and policies such as gender-swapping surgery and gender-reassignment treatment for children
  • has Congressional representatives who ignore (and in some cases, even support) Muslim terrorism and the organizations which perform it
  • supports high taxation and increased government spending, when it is obvious that most Americans hate both
  • believes that climate catastrophe is imminent, excoriates all science (and scientists) that disproves their belief, and is willing to sacrifice both national- and personal prosperity to further their goals
  • thinks that America is still a fundamentally racist country
  • believes that international problems are mostly the fault of America, and supports diplomatic appeasement and accommodation of malevolent nations such as Communist China, Iran, Cuba and Venezuela (to name but a few)
  • demands First Amendment protection for themselves, while actively denying it to anyone who opposes their philosophy
  • continues to support failed education policies like Common Core
  • denies school choice to parents when those choices include non-state school education
  • refuses to allow failing and incompetent schoolteachers to be fired because of entrenched union opposition
  • allows radical college administrations to suppress any contrary positions to their own
  • supports radical feminism and its lunatic (and un-Constitutional) positions such as #BelieveAllWomen and similar policies which would deny the accused their right to a fair trial
  • has, through its adherents in the federal bureaucracy, attempted a coup against an elected President
  • has the support of a mainstream media which continues to excuse and obscure all wrongdoing perpetrated by Democrats;  and invents, magnifies and exaggerates the same for any organization or person who opposes them even marginally
  • sincerely believes in tropes such as “toxic masculinity”, Arab-inspired blood-libel of Israelis, and “climate catastrophe”
  • will attempt to enact “climate-friendly” legislation and regulations which will hobble America and indeed the entire Western world’s economies, while giving a pass to the major sources of global pollution:  China, India and the rest of the Third World
  • wants to resurrect ObamaCare and take it to nationalized “single-payer” medical care
  • will end America’s energy independence by outlawing fracking, construction of pipelines, destruction of the coal industry altogether and ending nuclear power generation.

There are more, but I think everyone gets the idea.  And if you think I’m inventing or exaggerating this behavior, feel free to study all California’s legislation and regulations enacted since 1990, or NYFC’s Mayor DeBlasio’s ditto.

Here are just a few pictures which encapsulate the incoherence in modern “progressive” thought:

And I’m not making this stuff up.  Look at the numbers in the chart below:

Considering that all the above are largely threats coming from Democrat politicians, supporters and Democrat-controlled organizations, explain this to me:

How will the Democrat / Socialist Democratic Party ever “bring the country together”?

The simple answer is:  they can’t, and they don’t want to.  Their entire philosophy is predicated on the Marxist principle of the class struggle;  and if they don’t have an economic class struggle (as in the U.S.A., where prosperity is the rule and not the exception), they will invent  another class struggle against a different enemy, e.g. “White Patriarchy”, “White Supremacists”, “Racists” or “The 1%” (to name but some), even if their own leaders  belong to said groups in one way or another.  This quite apart from their actual  opponents, e.g. conservatives and Trump supporters, whom they demonize with such exaggeration that reconciliation is quite impossible..

In other words, the Democrat Party thrives on disunity, and all their actions and policies are designed to exacerbate and not reduce it.  So their stated desire to bring the country together is just another political lie, and it’s nothing more than a transparent ploy to try to win the 2020 election.