Never A Truer Word Spoken

In his Devil’s Dictionary, the late and very-much-lamented Ambrose Pierce once wrote the following:

“When politicians speak, no matter the topic, they’re talking about money.”

…and boy, was he ever right.  Here’s an example.

For the past couple of years, governments have been talking about the “obesity epidemic” (as though getting fat can spread from one person to another over the air, instead of being the result of a conscious decision by individuals).  And of course, along with such alarums and panic from the Usual Suspects — those who Know What’s Best For You — have come clamors that Something Must Be Done.  And when people use the dreaded passive voice, of course, that means one, and only one thing:  government intervention.

So, of course, in steps Nanny Government to the rescue.  Of course, instead of pointing out that people get fat because they eat too much, or that their children get fat because their parents give them too much of the wrong foods, Big Nanny sets about punishing people for ingesting said wrong foods — and the easiest thing to target, because of its ubiquity, is sugar.

We all know that too much sugar is A Bad Thing, and if you eat too much of it, you get not only overweight but various health problems.  Let me repeat:  we all know that.

But how to punish excessive sugar consumption?  Do we (i.e. Nanny Government) ration the stuff?  No, too difficult and costly to implement, manage and police (although I would bet against it in the future — such difficulties have seldom stopped government in the past, e.g.  ObamaCare coff coff )  But sugar is not only bought and sold per se , it’s also a ubiquitous ingredient, and most egregiously so in the case of carbonated soft drinks (to normal mortals, that would be Coke, Pepsi, Mountain Dew etc.) wherein can be found the equivalent of a dozen or so teaspoons of sugar per can.  Not that this is always A Bad Thing:

So, goes Nanny’s thinking, if we punish people for drinking Cokes and reduce consumption thereof by making it more expensive to do so, the very best way to implement such policy is… to tax it.

Which brings us back to Ambrose Bierce.  And lo, there we have proof of the man’s sagacity:

The UK’s sugar tax has raised almost £154 million in its first six months, Government figures have revealed.
From April, companies selling drinks with added sugar have been taxed between 18p and 24p per litre for certain drinks containing high levels of added sugar.
The new levy was introduced in an effort to fight childhood obesity, as more than a third of 11-year-olds in the UK are now overweight and soft drinks are one of their main sources of sugar.

With that degree of success, replication must surely follow:

Raising so much money from the tax was ‘encouraging’, one expert said, but they urged the Government to extend the levy to calories in sweets [candy] as well.

And there you have it:  Nanny Government at its absolute finest.  It’s even more nasty in that with the above policy, the BritGov didn’t increase the sales tax on carbonated soft drinks — too difficult to implement, police and collect, see above — so instead they levied the tax at its source:

 There are 457 companies registered to pay the tax, and more than 90 per cent of the money came from charges on drinks with higher levels of sugar.

Much easier.  And needless to say, most of said companies simply raised the price of their product and passed it on to consumers — that would be us — to whom rising prices are a fact of modern life, and therefore the added cost went pretty much unnoticed.

Which actually makes it a perfect government tax policy:  it’s barely noticed by the public, it’s easier to collect / enforce (457 companies vs. many thousands of retail outlets), and best of all, if it fails to have the desired effect (making people drink less of the stuff), Nanny Government can simply increase the tax rate until it does — or until the supplier companies either quit or go out of business, which won’t happen because Coca-Cola / PepsiCo / Dr. Pepper / Cadbury-Schweppes etc. are collectively richer than Great Britain.  So there is theoretically no limit as to how much tax revenue the BritGov could collect from this policy.

And all because you, you fat bastards, insist on buying your kids Big Gulps and pouring  Dr. Pepper over their sugary breakfast cereals (a rant for another time, coming very soon to these pages).

And at the bottom of all this, of course is the reason why Gummint — in this case the Brit manifestation thereof — should care about fat children at all.   It’s not because they’re concerned for the chillins’ health (although that’s the figleaf), but because when obesity causes health issues, then said issues have to be covered by the foul (but government-funded) National Health Service.

Which brings us back — AGAIN — to Ambrose Bierce’s dictum.  It’s all about the fucking money.

At the beginning of this post, I said that Bierce’s death was much lamented but as I think about it, I’m glad that my favorite cynic of all time isn’t around to see all this.  He’d probably commit suicide.


And as a footnote, allow me to recommend unreservedly The Devil’s Dictionary, which under the reign of World-Emperor Kim would be a required textbook in all high-school curricula.

Discrimination!!!

From an article detailing how ex-President Token and his harridan wife are making millions, we find this little nugget:

In October 2017, Michelle Obama was a keynote speaker at the Pennsylvania Conference for Women, a non-profit that promotes education and networking. The New York-based Harry Walker Agency Inc., which books both Obamas for speaking gigs, billed the Pennsylvania Conference for Women $225,000 in 2017, according to the non-profit’s most recent tax filings.

Barack Obama currently rakes in $400,000 per speech, and earned at least $1.2 million for three talks to Wall Street firms in 2017.

But, but, but… #IncomeInequality !!!

Barack Shithead Obama earns twice as much as his Pore Wife, for doing the same job!

#ShameOnBarack #PayTheBitchMore #FairnessInSpeakingFees

Whatever all that shit means.

Hyperbole — Or Is It?

So having taken back the U.S. House, the Socialists are starting to feel their oats:

WASHINGTON — A Democratic congressman has proposed outlawing “military-style semiautomatic assault weapons” and forcing existing owners to sell their weapons or face prosecution, a major departure from prior gun control proposals that typically exempt existing firearms.
In a USA Today op-ed entitled “Ban assault weapons, buy them back, go after resisters,” Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., argued Thursday that prior proposals to ban assault weapons “would leave millions of assault weapons in our communities for decades to come.”
Swalwell proposes that the government should offer up to $1,000 for every weapon covered by a new ban, estimating that it would take $15 billion to buy back roughly 15 million weapons — and “criminally prosecute any who choose to defy [the buyback] by keeping their weapons.”

And when he got some blowback, the little turd went full Stalin:

It is a recurring fantasy of socialists that they can disarm Americans without too much difficulty.  Of course, we know that’s not true, and if the FedGov were ever to try it, the cost would be prohibitive (in so many ways).  And for the record, let’s forget all about nukes.  That’s just a wet dream on the part of socialists like Swalwell;  they want to wish the problem away with a wave of a magic wand — it’s a recurring fantasy of theirs for just about every issue — and “nukes” is just a shorthand.

Where this socialist scumbag and his ilk are dangerous is this bullshit talk of “common ground”.  Let me make this clear:  between gun owners and gun confiscators, there is no common ground.  It’s the same with the “commonsense gun control legislation” that they bat around:  there’s no such thing.  Every single piece of legislation suggested by gun controllers has one, and only one goal in mind:  the eventual disarming of the American people.  They can protest all they want, but we know the truth of the matter, which is that all gun control legislation is incremental, because they know that sweeping gun control (confiscation and disarmament) just ain’t gonna happen, dreams of the Swalwell types notwithstanding.

It is quite possible that gun confiscation might have some small success — e.g. in Swalwell’s own district (see below), where the incidence of legal gun ownership is probably quite low and the Democrat Socialist-majority voting population might even support the idea of giving up whatever guns they have.  (And I know what you’re thinking:  nuking the 15th district, and especially with the concomitant fallout, would actually solve quite a few problems, but let’s not go there.)

Also, Swalwell might have at his behest the loathsome assholes of the California State Police, who were so notably efficient in disarming households in New Orleans during the Hurricane Katrina floods.  So yeah:  it’s quite feasible that confiscation could work there.

In North Texas, not so much.  In the first place, the would-be confiscators would have to overcome Texas political sentiment about guns — good luck with that — and according to our last county sheriff, the confiscating force would first have to go through his deputies to get to our guns.  And I’m sure that north Texas isn’t alone in this attitude, not just in Texas but all over the U.S.

We don’t have to worry about gun confiscation, the wet dreams of pissants like Swalwell notwithstanding.  What we have to worry about is, as I said above, all the “reasonable” gun control legislation such as, for example, legislation that would limit the type of gun you can own, or equally bad, limits on things like the amount or types of ammunition you can own, or whether you have to register with government as a “gun owner” before being able to buy it.  (Don’t laugh;  that’s the situation that faces  Californian gun owners right now.)

Did I already mention that today is National Ammo Day?

Let me offer a little additional advice:  if you don’t already own a semi-automatic rifle (and we all know what I mean by that), you might want to improve your gun collection by buying an AK-47, AR-15/20 type, SAR-58 or HK-91 (to name but some options) — and buy it today (along with a “sufficiency” of ammo for the rifle, of course).  Send me an email if you want some more details.

Yeah, I’m Going To Do That

Then there’s this news:

Google has unveiled its plan to put a smart device in every room of the home as part of its digital ‘ecosystem’ that could be manipulated to eavesdrop on users.
The tech giant’s smart home concept, unveiled at a one-off event in San Francisco, showcased Google Assistant at its full potential.
It combined speakers, smart plugs, voice controlled vacuums, smart displays and cameras throughout the house.
Its digital ecosystem is designed to enable communication between rooms and family members – even if they are not at home.

Yup… here’s when I’ll be doing this:

And probably not even then.

I don’t care how “convenient” they make my life but Google Home and Alexa can go fuck themselves, they and their parent companies both.

Seriously?

Here’s an interesting news snippet:

Antifa expands its hit list as political violence escalates

Well, well, well.  I wonder just how far Pantifa will go to expand their little “hit list”.  And when you’ve lost Stephen Colbert

I mean, I’m not as well-known as Tucker Carlson, but I am kinda known around the place thanks to my various blogs over the years — and quite frankly, when it comes to being conservative, I make ol’ Tucker look like an old-school liberal Democrat.  If this crowd is all about Smash Racism, I did write Let Africa Sink, after all (not that I think the essay is racist, but then again, it’s exponentially more controversial than anything Tucker has ever said).  So could I make the Pantifa Expanded Hit List in the future?  This might get interesting.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to the range.

About That Single-Payer Health Service

Not that I need to belabor the point, but any “free” government health service is going to cost you.  In almost every such case, it’s when Gummint decides that you’ve had enough.  Here’s one from Britain’s NHS:

A hero RAF rear gunner who evaded capture by the Nazis in 1942 after being shot down over Belgium has been told to sell his house to pay medical bills as he has ‘survived too long’.

(I have to warn you that if you read that whole story, you ought to remove all throwable objects and guns out of reach — and even more so for the next one.)

Over in oh-so caring Europe comes this horrifying story:

Dutch authorities are prosecuting a doctor for euthanising an elderly woman with dementia in the first case of its kind since the practice was legalised in 2002.
The doctor, who was not named, has been charged with secretly drugging the woman’s coffee with Dormicum to make her drowsy and asking her family to hold her down as she was lethally injected in a care home in The Hague in 2016.
Whilst the 74-year-old patient was receiving the lethal injection she woke up and began fighting the doctor.

(I should also point out that the Dutch doctor was a woman, which somehow just makes it worse.)

I know, I know:  “Oh, that could never happen over here in the U.S.” — until it does.  When to comes to money, every government will eventually resort to violence;  try to find someone who has ever dealt with the I.R.S. over an unpaid tax liability, and not felt threatened by the experience.  You won’t.