Dept. Of Righteous Stabbings

Okay, it wasn’t actually a shooting, but I think everyone will agree with my bending the rules in this case.  Here’s the headline:

Schoolchildren disarm robber and stab him to death after being held at gunpoint

The 40-year-old man reportedly approached the two schoolchildren, a girl and a boy, on a bike. They reported that he was armed with a gun and knife and tried to steal their phones. The Public Prosecutor’s Office said that the victims got into a struggle with the man, with one of them snatching the knife off him. The man was stabbed two or three times but managed to get away on his bike. Shortly after he was found lying in the road.

I guess the moral of the story is:  Don’t mess with Chilean teenagers.

And this last item will come as a surprise to exactly nobody:

The prosecutor also confirmed that the deceased had previous criminal records.

…which ended right there, on a dusty street somewhere in Chile. [/Hemingway]

Great Idea; Never Gonna Happen

I beseech all of you to read this article in full.  Here’s a taste:

Put simply, Trump is trying to beat countries with a stick until they agree to dismantle red tape that is holding back global demand for US goods and services. America is resorting to tariffs for one main reason. Over the past four decades, many countries have followed the US in lowering their tariff regimes, but they have not torn down regulatory barriers, or dealt with anti-competitive distortions. 
Trump’s masterplan is to create a new “coalition of the willing”, with the world divided into those who welcome competitive dynamism and those who cling to stagnation.

Then the writer puts forward an argument which contains so much common sense that it makes adopting it a slam-dunk for even the most foolish and doctrinaire of governments.

Which is why Britishland’s Labour Party will never adopt it.

Keeping Up

I am a man of advanced years and much-reduced mental- and physical capacity thereby, so I’m having trouble dealing with all the MAGA / Trumpist / Musk-y goodness these days.  Quite apart from Saturday’s posts, there’s this:

Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Sec. Scott Turner has announced the end of Federal Housing Administration (FHA)-insured mortgages for any “non-permanent residents,” effectively eliminating illegal aliens’ access to the taxpayer-funded program.

and this:

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is slashing 10,000 full-time employees as part of its effort to trim fat and reorient the department around Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “Make America Health Again” (MAHA) agenda.

“We aren’t just reducing bureaucratic sprawl. We are realigning the organization with its core mission and our new priorities in reversing the chronic disease epidemic,” said HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. “This Department will do more — a lot more — at a lower cost to the taxpayer.”

not to mention this:

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that as many as 300 foreign students have had their visas revoked due to President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.

Rubio confirmed the number of revoked visas when speaking at a press conference in Guyana.

“Maybe more, it might be more than 300 at this point,” Rubio said. “We do it every day. Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visa.”

Okay, let’s not let my enfeebled state and stamina be a hindrance to all this most excellent and long-overdue Chainsaw Activity.

Wasted Money

I see that the Department of Labor, not to be outdone by other federal departments in Extreme Chainsaw Activity, has done The Right Thing:

The U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) has canceled nearly $600 million in grants to foreign countries in another round of major funding cuts.

John Clark, a DOL official appointed by President Donald Trump, directed the department’s Bureau of International Labor Affairs (ILAB) to axe all 69 of its active grant programs on Wednesday due to a “lack of alignment with agency priorities and national interest.”

Quite what the Department of Labor was doing in giving money to furriners in the first place… well, we all know the answer to that one.  [humming the tune to “The Internationale”]

And seeing as the U.S. is no longer part of the international socialist collective — or at least we’re heading in that direction, at long last — there’s no reason for us to fund the wellbeing of foreign workers anyway.

One particular item did catch my attention, though:

“$3 million for ‘safe and inclusive work environments’ in Lesotho”

I’ve been to Lesotho several times, know the place quite well in fact, and for three million bucks you could probably buy the country’s entire industrial infrastructure, pay the workers a fat cash bonus and still have some money left over to  gamble  invest in a couple of their casinos.

Of “$3 million to ‘enhance social security access and worker protections for internal migrant workers’ in Bangladesh”, we will not speak.  (It’s a Muslim country;  let the fucking Arabs pay for it.)

Similar arguments can be made for all the other useless items.  Read the article for the full flavor of the wastage, and if you have specific knowledge of the circumstances of any of them, feel free to comment.

In the meantime:

And About Damn Time, Too

Getting our act together:

President Donald Trump’s administration is eliminating taxpayer-funded housing program benefits going to illegal aliens.

This week, Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Scott Turner and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem announced the “American Housing Programs for American Citizens” memorandum which will prevent taxpayer money from being used to aid illegal aliens.

“American tax dollars should be used for the benefit of American citizens, especially when it comes to an issue as pressing as our nation’s housing crisis,” Turner said in a statement:

This new agreement will leverage resources, including technology and personnel, to ensure the American people are the only priority when it comes to public housing. We will continue to work closely with DHS to maximize our resources and put American citizens first.

Yup.

  • For illegal aliens:  tent cities and return tickets;
  • U.S. citizens in truly parlous circumstances:  subsidized housing.

Taxpayer money for our own, not for strangers.