Healing Powers

…because nothing says “Government Cares About You” more than a new tax:

Supermarkets are being urged to introduce a new 1p charge to use self-service machines as part of a plan to ‘heal divisions’ blamed on Brexit.
The proposal comes from a cross-party Parliamentary panel on social integration (APPG) which claims £30million could be raised by the scheme to help fund community projects to bring together people from different generations.
But retailers say it would penalise shoppers and effectively be a new tax to use the supermarket.

Read the whole thing to understand what’s going on here.

And do not think for a moment that this couldn’t happen Over Here, because if there’s one thing that’s common to all  governments it’s that when their money runs short, there is no limit to their creativity when it comes to generating new revenue streams.  Even something stupid like a soda tax.

Animals

And people ask me why I never go out without carrying a gun.  Here’s a little fun and games for you:

A mob of eight to 10 males wielding hammers descended upon bystanders at the East Bank Light Rail station on Friday night injuring several.

Just so everyone’s clear on this:  all ten* of the “males” were Somalis.  And it happened in Minneapolis, where carrying concealed handguns is not common.

Curious that this doesn’t seem to happen much in areas where a lot of people do  carry guns, e.g. in my neighborhood.

Wow.  Looks like Minnesota’s policy of allowing thousands of Muslim “migrants” from Africa to settle there is working out just as planned, huh?


*Ten?  Looks like I need to start loading the 1911 with these bad boys.  Good thing I have one or two on hand.

Major Affront, Meet Corporal Punishment

I think what pisses me off most about modern-day “petty” crime is not the robbery of cell phones from people’s hands, or the theft of cars for the sake of a “joyride”, or even the painting of graffiti on walls — although each one in its own way renders me irritated beyond belief.  Try these “petty” crimes, however, and see how they make you feel:

Arsonists destroy 250-year-old oak tree that has stood since George II was on the throne

Hunt for yobs who vandalised model town and brutally kicked a cat in the head as they made their escape

Mindless vandals wreck a charity model railway show

Correction to that last piece:  they’re not mindless;  they’re amoral, antisocial and spiteful, and their vile actions are those of childish anarchists.

Unlike a lot of people (especially on this website), I don’t think these little shits should go to prison for these crimes — although there’s a lot to be said for taking them out of society for a while.

What’s needed here is for these childish hooligans to be treated like children — but not in the modern manner of making them sit in the Penalty Corner or “grounding” them (whatever that means).

Prison’s too much punishment, they (usually) have no money to pay restitution, and “community service” is a fucking joke when by their actions they have demonstrated that they have no ties to the community whatsoever.

No.  We need to bring back flogging, because that ancient punishment is precisely what these kinds of actions call for.  We need to catch these assholes, make sure they’re guilty (of course), and then immediately  after sentencing lead them off to a punishment cell where they can be given ten lashes with a heavy cane.  (And for the feministicals:  female miscreants of this nature, although much rarer than their male counterparts, should get the same punishment, except with a light  cane.  Feel free to insist on equality for the womyns, however;  I’m not feeling too charitable at the moment.)

I know, corporal punishment is supposed to be barbaric and all that.  Remember, though, that the reason that these horrible people are called “vandals” is because their behavior is of a kind with the ancient and barbaric tribe named Vandals — and we should punish them accordingly.

The hell with them.

Monstrosities

…and I’m not just talking about the Modernist buildings, either.  My own loathing of this architectural form is, I think, well documented (here, here).

What Theodore Dalrymple talks about is how awful the first actual Modernist architects were:  Gropius, Van Der Rohe and of course, the execrable Le Corbusier (to name but three) were all either pure totalitarians (Le Corbusier) or Nazi sympathizers and supporters.  But we all knew that.

What Dalrymple explains further is how this “school” of architectural thought has turned into the leitmotif  of all modern architectural teaching (just as Marxism has infected the liberal arts disciplines):

[He] knows that he is arguing not against an aesthetic, but against an ironclad ideology. The architectural Leninists have been determined so to indoctrinate the public that they hope and expect a generation will grow up knowing nothing but modernism, and therefore will be unable to judge it. (All judgment is comparative, as Doctor Johnson said.) In Paris recently, I saw an advertisement on the Métro (a few days before the fire in Notre-Dame) to the effect that Paris would not be Paris without the Centre Pompidou—which, of course, has a good claim to be the ugliest building in the world. In the face of such an advertisement promoted by the cultural elite, what ordinary person would dare demur?

That description of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, by the way, is not egregious:

…and that’s the “pretty” side. Here’s the hideous one:

I am also heartened by Dalrymple’s characterization of the horrible Tour Montparnasse  as “said to be the most hated building in Paris” (and with good reason):

Never a jihadi-piloted airliner when you need one…

Read the Dalrymple piece for the full horror.

Interesting Thought

During one of those interminable Brexit / Remainer arguments in Britishland, one of the ripostes from a young Brexiteer was this priceless gem:

“The 17 million who voted for Brexit aren’t all angry, racist, 50+ year-old men.”

Which led me to a tangential question:  what if the 17 million who voted for Brexit were all angry, racist, 50+ year-old men?

In the broader sense of the thing, what happens when an “undesirable” group of people become the majority of the voting population?

Actually, we all know what happens, because we’ve seen it since late 2016.  What happens is that the once-entrenched “elites” — especially if said elites are on the Left side of the political spectrum — will try to overturn the election results.

In Europe (and more recently in post-Brexit U.K.) the Left resorts to re-running the elections until they get the result they wanted in the first place.  Hence the endless delays and negotiations involved in the Brexit debate, with all the obfuscations about “tax union”, “backstop” and all the other smokescreen terms used essentially to slow and eventually stop the process.

In the United States, the Left over the years has resorted to all sorts of underhand and illegal methods to get their desired result, such as trying to overturn the winner’s election through multiple recounts (Bush/Gore 2000 et al.), trying to get states’ electors to vote against the wishes of their voters (Trump/Clinton 2016), trying to undermine the winner’s election by asserting foreign collusion (Trump/Clinton 2016 again), or trying to pad the electoral rolls with illegal voters (every election in living memory).

All the above are a consequence of a group of people labeled by the Left as “undesirables” (clingers, flyover country voters, deplorables, angry old White men etc.) growing in number until they achieve an electoral majority.

What’s interesting in Britain is the emergence of a single-issue political party (the Brexit Party) which is draining voters away from both the Conservative and Labour parties and which will basically serve to enforce once and for all the desire of a majority of British voters to leave the European Union.  I am reliably informed that even a large number of people who originally voted to remain in the EU have become disgusted with the EU’s arrogance and bullying of Britain’s hapless PM Theresa May, and will change their vote in favor of Brexit if the Remainers manage to arrange another referendum on the topic.

That hasn’t happened Over Here.  There has been no hint of a third (TRUMP!) party to force the political establishment to follow the MAGA principles and policies.  Instead, the Socialist Democrats of the Left have wrenched the once-dominant Democrat party into the loony extreme-Left sliver of the political spectrum, and their lunacy has managed to drive not only moderate Democrats but also a large number of one-time Never-Trumpers (excepting some egregious hardliners) to coalesce into support behind the President and his policies — aided greatly, it should be said, by the massive surge of economic growth and the concomitant reduction of unemployment since Trump’s inauguration.  When one-time Leftist hardliners like Nancy Pelosi are now seen as the “voice of reason” in Congress, you have to realize that despite all the Left’s insult and invective, the country seems to have resolved itself not into three camps like the U.K., but into a near-supermajority of moderates and conservatives drawn from all socio-economic classes on one side, and a segment of extremist Marxists in a small (and still-shrinking) minority out on the other.  (This, by the way, is why the Democrat party — what’s left of it — is grasping so firmly at the amiable but forever unelectable Joe Biden as their “centrist” white knight, despite his eternal and unshakable catastrophic awfulness as a presidential candidate.)

None of this bodes well for the Left, by the way, especially as Trump — as he promised back in 2015/2016 — is populating the courts with Constitutionally-sound judges, a policy which will deny the Left their favorite method of undermining the popular will and even laws by a sympathetic judiciary.  (Had Supreme Court Chief Justice Roberts not somehow transformed himself into an Anthony Kennedy “moderate”, the effect would have been greater still.)  When even the loony and oft-overturned Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals is driven to support the President’s policies on topics such as immigration, you know the writing is on the wall.

Of course, none of this is written in concrete.  British voters may decide to split their votes between Brexit and Labour — thus dooming the Conservative Party to irrelevance (a fate, it should be said, that is richly deserved) — which may even bring that foul and unrepentant Communist Jeremy Corbyn to power at the head of a Labour government.  (The wealthier Brits can see that possibility all too clearly, by the way, and are making the necessary SHTF preparations.  Always follow the money.)

On this side of The Pond, things are equally uncertain.  Moderate (traditional) Democrats may refuse to vote rather than vote for Trump in 2020, and the traditional Black- and Hispanic voter blocs may yet vote for the “interest-group” party (Democrat) instead of voting for the man whose economic policies have allowed them to climb out of poverty in greater numbers than ever before.  (I know, it makes no sense to me either, but such is life.)  And just as most Brits are quailing at the thought of Prime Minister Corbyn, most Americans should be afraid of a President [deep breath]  Biden / Harris / Booker / Buttigieg / Warren / [add your favorite Dwarf’s name here].  We should also, as a nation, be afraid of the reelection  of House Reps Ocasio-Cortez, Tlaib and Omar — to name but the three most egregious socialists — but with metro New York, urban Michigan and suburban Minneapolis / St. Paul, there’s no telling.

In Britain, there used to be a political party known as the Raving Loony Party (headed by the wonderful Screaming Lord Sutch) and in Canada there likewise used to be the Rhino Party (whose party manifesto stated that if elected to power, they would immediately resign and call for new elections).  Both parties gave voters a chance to vote for “none of the above” by virtue of their absurdity.  How interesting that the modern-day Democrats are trying to create such a party in the United States — but unlike the Raving Loonies and Rhinos, they  are actually deadly serious about putting their own policies into practice.

Over at samizdata.net, Andrew Douglas had this to say in Comments about the post referendum polity in the U.K.:

The only things we certainly know more about since the referendum are that neither the Conservative or Labour parties are to be trusted, the top echelons of the civil service are staffed by quislings and traitors, and the EU is an even less desirable place to remain than it was in 2016.

Substitute “Election 2016” for referendum, Republicans and Democrats for their respective British counterparts, leave the “civil service” part alone, and you have pretty much my opinion of our own polity.

Scum

Somebody explain to me why we should ever — ever — trust the fucking FBI again, when they get involved in this kind of bullshit, trying to entrap a U.S. citizen into committing several federal crimes.

When did they do this?  In 2017:  after Donald Trump’s inauguration as POTUS.

And under whose auspices did they do this?  Why, those of Special Counsel Robert Mueller and DOJ prosecutor Andrew Weissmann, of course.

Why  did they do this?  All in the cause of trying to bring down President Donald Trump and overturn the fully-legal election result of 2016.

So to repeat myself:  somebody explain to me why we should ever — ever — trust the fucking FBI again.  With anything.