Monthly Archives: December 2018

Pay the Vig

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…or else.  The truth will out, at least for a significant fraction of the “caravan.”

One group of a hundred, under the alleged leadership of Honduran Alfonso Guerreo Ulloa, has gone to the US Consulate in Tijuana with an extortion demand: give us $50,000—per each, which works out to $5 million in all, if my third grade arithmetic doesn’t fail me—to go home and start a small business (we promise), or we’ll storm your border and break in forcibly.

Wait—I thought one of the major reasons these folks left Honduras was to escape the gangs’ extortion of small business owners/operators.  So now they want 50 large to go back and…pay off those gangs?

Questions arise.  Under alleged leadership: who’s really running this group?  What’s the real motive for this gang at the consulate?  Who’ll really get those $5 million when they get back home?

Speedy Trial

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As I write this on Tuesday, the question of bail for Huawei’s Meng Wanzhou remains unsettled.  The problem centers on a couple of things.  One is her husband’s offer to be responsible for Meng, guaranteeing her appearance at all court proceedings.  The presiding judge, Justice William Ehrcke, is having trouble believing that offer, even were it sincere.  Meng’s husband, Liu Xiaozong, is not a Canadian citizen, Meng’s lawyer had no information on any other immigration status for Liu, and Ehrcke expressed doubt over his ability to control Liu’s whereabouts—and so of Meng’s whereabouts.

Another concern is Meng’s health, of which she claims several problems and the impact being incarcerated in a jail cell would have on them.

A third is the People’s Republic of China’s naked threat of “severe consequences” for Canada if it doesn’t release Meng forthwith.

In reverse order: the People’s Republic of China’s threats a should make it impossible for Canada to do anything other than deny bail and promptly extradite Meng to the US.

While the extradition question is being decided, in satisfaction of Meng’s health concerns, hold her in a prison hospital where she can get the care and medications she says she needs rather than a cell.

Finally, speedily extradite Meng, and get her out of Canada’s hair and into US custody—it’s our laws she’s alleged to have violated.  Then let’s have a speedy trial and a prompt acquittal if her behavior turns out to have been legal, or a speedy conviction and sentence execution if not.

Unfortunately, Ehrcke has decided to grant bail to Meng.  It’ll be instructive to see how long Meng remains in Canada.

Union to Management:

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“Nice little company you have here.  Be too bad if something was to happen to it.”

That’s what the railroad union EVG said to Germany’s major railroad company, Deutsche Bahn, last Monday as it took its workers off the line, shutting it down, during the rush hour period—a timing intended to inflict maximum damage to DB.  It’s not just the railroad this union extortion strike affected, either.

The strikes also caused major disruption on the roads. Germany’s most populous state, and one of the worst affected by the strike, North Rhine-Westphalia, saw a combined 450 kilometers (280 miles) of tailbacks [backed up traffic from traffic jams], according to regional broadcaster WDR.

The union’s beef?  It wants higher pay for its workers, which is not, in principle, a bad thing.

However.

DB management had offered the union’s workers a pay raise of 5.1% in two increments and a “signing bonus” of €500 ($569).  The union, though, is demanding a 7.5% pay raise and the option for individual workers to decline that in favor of more time off or shorter hours.  Never mind the labor scheduling mess and associated increased cost that would create.

This comes, too, in the face of the fact that Germany’s inflation rate this year works out to just a skosh over 1.9%; it was roughly 1.65% each of the prior two years, essentially flat in 2014-2015, since 1995 it’s been above 2.5% exactly once (~3.2% in 2007, just before the Panic of 2008); and DB having raised its ticket rates this year by 1.9% just to cover the current year’s inflation.

The workers are being offered a handsome pay increment in real terms.  The union is demanding more just because it can.

Nice little company….

Brexit Botch

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British Prime Minister Theresa May yesterday pulled today’s planned Parliament vote on her Brexit deal with Brussels when it became clear that not even her fellow Tories supported the deal in sufficient numbers to pass.  What’s more, she’s not suggested a new date for the vote, even though something is required to be presented to Parliament by 21 Jan 2019.

The deal as it stands is a terrible one, worse IMNSHO than a plain, unadorned breakout from the European Union.  It represented May’s meek submission to Brussels on nearly every one of their demands—including functional retention of EU immigration “rights” and EU court rulings within what used to be sovereign Great Britain for several years after the British nominal departure.

Nevertheless, May’s failure before Parliament represents further damage to Great Britain.

And this:

[May] will tour European capitals and then go back to Brussels to try to secure sweeteners that might buy off huge opposition to the package.
She insisted her blueprint was still the “best deal negotiable”, and said she still planned to put it to a vote once “reassurances” had been secured on the Irish border backstop.

Never mind that the Brussels “negotiators” have already said the present deal is a done deal and there will be no further negotiations on the matter.  There can be no sweeteners, as a result, nor can there be any reassurances: in particular, Brussels has already given all the assurances on the Irish border matter that they intend to putter around with.

Stand by for further May surrender to Brussels.

Gullible

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That’s what NBC‘s Chuck Todd and his cronies of the NLMSM, Andrea Mitchell and Hallie Jackson, says 63 million of us Americans are because we voted for now-President Donald Trump.

I knew the gaslighting was out there. I knew it was every day.  But I think there was part of me in my head assumed people were discerning it out, knew the BS from the non-BS. So, I think what my sort of shock to the system was just sort of how gullible a big chunk of the country was to this and gullible because maybe they want to be gullible.

Oh, we recognized the gaslighting, and we did a fine job of discriminating the BS from the non-BS.

But because us irredeemably deplorable racist, homophobic, Islamophobic, misogynist religion-clinging gun-toters of flyover country were so foolish that we saw through the dishonesty of Hillary Clinton and the slanted nature of the plainly pro-Progressive-Democrat “press,” we continue to be disparaged by our Betters.  Many of us chose for Trump, many others of us chose against Clinton, and all of us chose the way we did because we saw through the press’ studied spin.  We chose not to take the NLMSM as seriously as those members of the press thought we should.

And here we are, two years on, and those persons still are attacking the man while ignoring his policies, still disparaging us for attending to his policies while not giving journalists’ weight to the superficialities of the man.

These worthies are so deeply immersed in their obsessive-compulsive neurosis that they cannot even recognize their own bias.