Tag: Politics

Alliances And Such

Politics

I see that the French government has collapsed, for what seems the umpteenth time.  Coming hard on the heels of the German government’s problems, there is of course a common thread:  both were coalition governments, where two (of the many) political parties — some with diametrically-opposed platforms — decided to create an alliance to govern the country.  Both, of course, were doomed to fail, especially, as in the case with the Frogs, that the opposition party, the much-reviled Front National (or National Front, in English) was almost as large as either of the two melded parties, so the non-confidence vote brought by the FN needed only the support of one of the coalition parties to topple the government.  (The fact that the coalition, cobbled together simply to prevent the FN from assuming power, was always doomed to fail except in the minds of the idiots with the anti-FN mindset.)

I’ve often spoken with Americans who think that our two-party system is flawed, in that each party is often riven by various key issues which actually find favor with a small (or large) proportion of the other one.  Abortion, for example, is one such issue:  where there may be a small minority of pro-abortion politicians in the Republican Party whose ideology thereof is closer to a majority of abortion supporters over on the Evil Side of the room.  The problem, of course, is that these are generally single issues, around which it would be impossible to form, say, a Pro-Abortion Party to be pitted against an Anti-Abortion Party.  Ditto the Greens, ditto guns, ditto Trump, etc. etc.

Honestly, while our current two-party system is not ideal, it sure is better than the European multi-party.  Small, contained chaos around single issues is, I think, far preferable to the systemic instability of a multi-party system, almost without regard to the relative merits of their various  positions.

I should also point out that a fragmented polity is generally vulnerable to external threats or danger — witness the chaos of the French Third Republic in the 1930s, which in no small part enabled France’s crushing defeat by Nazi Germany in 1940.  (A sizeable proportion of Frenchmen, and their parties, actually welcomed the prospect of a strong national government on the lines of Hitler’s Nazi Germany or Mussolini’s Fascist Italy, simply because they were sick of dealing with the decades-long chaos of multi-party politics and weakness.)

In passing, imagine there was a single-issue party named, oh, the Anyone But Trump Party in our polity (composed of both Democrats and Republicans), and toss that into the standard Democrat/Republican mix.

Ugh.  If you can see only chaos resulting from that little political soup, then you’ll understand the European situation.

Shocker

Gummint

Oh, this is rich:

A paltry 6% of the federal workforce “report in-person on a full-time basis” while almost one-third of federal workers are remote on a full-time basis, in a sharp turn-around from the pre-pandemic era in which only 3% teleworked daily.

Of course, Elon Musk (the man who is aiming to fix this kind of shit) has the truth of it:

If you exclude security guards & maintenance personnel [i.e. the folks who have to be there — K.], the number of government workers who show up in person and do 40 hours of work a week is closer to 1%!

Furthermore:

Sen. Joni Ernst’s audits are finding as many as 23[%] to 68[%] of teleworking employees for some agencies are boosting their salaries by receiving incorrect locality pay.  Some employees live more than 2,000 miles away from their office and one “temporary” teleworker collected higher locality pay for nearly a decade.

Yup;  nothing like claiming D.C. cost-of-living support whilst living in W. Virginia, is there?  Or, as Harris Rigby puts it:

Get paid for big city expenses, live in the cheap suburbs, pocket the difference.

My thoughts on the above:

Hey, it’s not firing squads. (Which would have been my solution.)

Adding States

Mocking Furriners

Apparently, CanickiPM Castreaux’s visit with god-emperor Trump at Mar-A-Lago didn’t quite go the way the little socialist shit wanted it to:

Trump reportedly told Trudeau that “Canada has failed the U.S. border by allowing large amounts of drugs and people across the border, including illegal immigrants from over 70 different countries.” The once-and-future president “became more animated when it came to the U.S. trade deficit with Canada, which he estimated to be more than $100 billion,” and told his shallow Canadian counterpart that “if Canada cannot fix the border issues and trade deficit, he will levy a 25% tariff on all Canadian goods on day one when he returns to office.”

That was when Trudeau started whining and claiming victimhood status. After all, what else would you expect a leftist to do? Trudeau knows that playing the victim is the pathway to fame, favor, and fortune on the left, and apparently, he assumed this to be a universal tendency. So he told Trump, probably with tears glistening in eyes, that he just couldn’t impose such a tariff “because it would kill the Canadian economy completely.” There is nothing in the available reports about Trudeau offering to do anything about stopping the flow of migrants and drugs over the border. He just wanted Trump to withdraw his threat for nothing, out of his concern for the well-being of Canada.

Trudeau doesn’t seem to have realized, however, the implications of the fact that Trump is not a fellow socialist internationalist. It isn’t that he doesn’t care about Canadians; it’s that as president of the United States, he will act in the best interests of Americans. It’s actually Trudeau’s job, not Trump’s, to act in the best interests of Canadians. 

And so the America-First president-elect asked Trudeau, “So your country can’t survive unless it’s ripping off the U.S. to the tune of $100 billion?”

At the end of it, Trump joked about turning Canickistan into our 51st state.

Well, now.

I know it was just a joke, but let’s run with this one for a moment.  Assume that this all happened, and suddenly the Great White Empty Space to our north became attached to the U.S.A.  There’s no way the whole of Canada would be just one state, of course;  but the provinces could easily become lots of different states.

I for one would be perfectly happy to see Alberta, Manitoba and Saskatchewan as newcomer-states to the Land Of The Free, and I suspect that the citizens thereof might be just as happy at such a union.

Ontario, Quebec, BritColumbia and Atlantic provinces… eh, not so much.  Ontario and B.C. are absolute non-starters because to be quite honest, we have enough socialist states of our own (California, Illinois, Oregon, NY etc.) without adding some more socialist senators to Congress.  (I’m not familiar enough with New Brunswick and the Newfies to know their politics, but I suspect that they’d be closer to Ontario than to Alberta, so to speak.)

And then there’s Quebec, with that ultra-Francophone fetish.  While that leads to excellent French restaurants in Montreal and Quebec City, it’s not enough to overcome their grating insistence on French as The Other Official Language, with all the bollocks and inefficiency that bilingualism entails.

To be honest, though, there’s way too much Woke in the whole of Canuckistan for us to have to deal with — gawd knows, it’s going to take long enough just to end the bullshit in our own backyard, without having to deal with Ultra-Woke Canadians as well.

Like all good colonizers, we’d want all the good stuff:  oil, gold, natgas, forests etc.  But all that good doesn’t come closer to countering all the bad.

So yeah:  while it’s an amusing joke and all, it just ain’t gonna happen.  Sorry, my Canucki Readers — who are definitely not wokistas — but there it is.

Why They Lost

Elections, Good Stuff

Mostly, furrin commentators get things wrong when they analyze political events outside their own borders, and most especially when it comes to the U.S.  (I remember one Brit idiot on TV saying “President Obama should just abolish the Second Amendment!” and all the other panelists just sat there and nodded their heads, showing that none of them had the faintest clue about how our Constitution actually works.)

However, this little piece is absolutely spot on in terms of a realistic overview of the recent electoral fiasco (for the Democrat Socialists, of course).

And by the way, Rita Panahi’s channel is probably one of the better conservative ones out there (despite her rather annoying Strine accent), and Douglas Murray one of the more clear-headed no-nonsense political commentators.

Enjoy.

Incidentally, here are Mike Rowe and Victor Davis Hanson talking about the world — the podcast was made before the recent election — and it’s still more relevant than ever.

Burning Down The Climate Change Thicket

Bureaucracy, Eco-Crap, Good Stuff, Rights

Here are some very constructive ideas about how to unlock and/or break the raft of stupid eco-fascist laws and regulations.  I especially like this one:

Obama joined Paris Climate Agreement by executive action. Trump exited by the same method. And Biden rejoined, again by executive action, right on January 20, 2021.

Trump could follow the previous method and just quit again. But my preferred suggestion would be to submit the Agreement to the Senate as a treaty. There is zero chance that the Senate would ratify. That would kill this thing much more securely than the other method.

And this would be the time to submit it, while the Stupid Party controls the Senate.

I know, the Paris Climate whatever is pretty much a paper tiger and waste of time.  Don’t care about it?  Then try this one:

“Regulations” are different from mere Executive Orders and actions, in that in order to be adopted they have gone through some complex and time-consuming processes prescribed by the Administrative Procedure Act. The processes are designed to give these “regulations” some purported legitimacy and heft, to make them hard to undo, and to distract the gullible public from the fact that they have not gone through the only process that counts under the Constitution for valid legislative action, namely passage by both houses of Congress and signature by the President. The result of all the procedural rigamarole is that — if you buy the legitimacy of enactment of massive substantive regulations by administrative agencies in the first place — then the processes to eliminate the regulations are the same complex and time-consuming mess that it previously took to adopt them.

Do the Trump people really need to go through the same labyrinth to rescind these Rules? Here’s an approach I would take: First, announce that the legal opinion of the administration is that the Rules are invalid under Supreme Court precedent (i.e., the “major questions doctrine” of West Virginia v. EPA), and therefore they will not be enforced. Next, announce that permitting on power plant and other fossil fuel projects will take place as if these Rules did not exist. Finally, switch sides in the litigation, and join the red states and other plaintiffs seeking to have the Rules invalidated.

Here’s what I really, really like about this initiative:  it would also nullify, ipso facto, all the horrible regulations foisted on us by other Gummint agencies — such as the fucking ATF, for starters, and [add your favorite agency’s name here].

So when you follow the link above to see all the other Good Ideas, don’t just look at those suggestions as part of the destruction of the “climate change” myth, good as they are;  apply those principles to all areas of our life that the bureaucracy have (un-Constitutionally and illegally) affected over the years.

Roll on January 2025.

Too Old To Rock ‘N Roll

Politics, Resistance

Here’s what Elon and Vivek are doing:

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), led by X owner and Tesla CEO Elon Musk and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, is looking for what they described as “small-government revolutionaries” ready to work on what they described as “unglamorous cost-cutting.”

You know what?  If I was five or seven years younger, I’d apply.  Having worked in both big corporations and small startups, I know exactly how to squeeze efficiency into a process and cut unnecessary processes as well as anyone.

But alas, I turn 70 next week, and while the spirit may be sorta-willing to do this, the flesh just doesn’t have the strength to swing an axe anymore.

Damn it.

Then again, I’d have to move to D.C., and… nah, it ain’t worth it.