FFS

I stopped watching his channel a while ago, but I don't think a national from a nation that LITERALLY made quarantine facilities concentration camps to house the people who refused the COVID vaccine has a lot of room to be critical about the level of freedom in America.

How's the freedom to own a gun going on down under?  Or to mod your car?  I feel a lot freer than you...

There's no truly FREE nation.

The tyranny of a million tiny regulatory cuts bleeds a lot of liberty away in every Western nation. 

But the entire point of the video is "Empire is BAD, America has become an Empire, therefore America is BAD."

You want to explain how your quarantine facilities were different from concentration camps?  Tough shit, Hitler was EVIL, Hitler made concentration camps, therefore YOU are EVIL for making concentration camps!  And I know this line of reasoning because you made the exact same argument about the internment camps the US put up for Japanese-American citizens. 

The last video I bothered watching he mentioned his school of thought for how to do history and I don't think that's a good method of doing it.  Ethno-History seems to be a means of applying guilt to a society with modern filters instead of the lenses used by the people of the time.

It's a lot like blaming a 5 year old for things as if they were an senior citizen.

Something else you need to understand about Americans, Mate:  "Shiny, let's be bad guys."  It's a cultural trait that if we keep being treated as if we're guilty, when we're innocent, to say, "fuck it, let's crime!"

Are you certain that after decades of the world accusing us of shit we weren't up to that you're not just seeing us saying "fuck it"? 

PS: I loathe to call any form of quarantine facility or internment camp a concentration camp because the National Socialists "feature" of gas chambers and crematoria is absent in Australian and American iterations of the idea.

PPS: This is a half-cocked rant about a particular YouTuber and not a well researched document on all of Australia.  Apologies to my readers Down-Under who feel they got tarred by the same brush. 

Could Be A Twofer

The elections in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Columbia, Ecuador and Honduras give me hope that our problem at the southern border might be self correcting as sane, non-socialist, policies take hold and allow business and commerce to thrive.

Improving the economic situation at home will make it less likely their citizens want to leave there for here.

That'd be great for all nations involved.

Now, if we could get Mexico on board... 

Blacked Out

Harvey and I were out back watching movies last night and we could clearly hear helicopters.

Definitely 4+ blades. 

Normally that means a Coastie Jayhawk, the sheriff's 406 or a Lifeflight EC145.

I always go out to look.  Just in case it's a Hind sneaking up on me.

No lights.

Sometimes the sheriff's helo will do that.

Look up the ADSB.

The only thing in the area was a Cessna 152 that I'd seen and they were in the opposite direction of the rotor sounds.

The closest helo on ADSB was the county to the south's sheriff helo and that was way too far away and the wrong direction.

I am wondering if we're hearing training from MacDill up and around here.

They've done it before. 

No Kings Rally At Casa McThag

 

For 2037 for when the REAL 250th birthday happens!

Don't Say Nothin About Mom And Dad

I've long been willing to concede that anyone born here is a citizen.

But if their parents aren't and are here illegally, there's nothing about that child's citizenship that allows those parents to stay.

The child is a citizen and therefor ours. 

Our fellow citizen gets to stay, and be raised by their fellow citizens, while Mom and Dad are swiftly and surely returned to whence they came.

Yes, I am saying we're going to be separating families.

For the good of the child and our nation.

Wanna bet this small change stops birth tourism in its tracks?

Worth Your Time

I love how Europeans are reacting to seeing actual America instead of touring our cities.

 Link if playback don't work.

 

We'll Do Better Next Time

Somewhere, Blue Angel #1 is looking at themselves in the mirror and saying, "I knew I should have shifted left just a tiny bit."

Pic flagrantly stolen from this tweet.

Finally A Car That's Not An Import

Alice, was made in Spring Hill, Tennessee.

Moxie and Noxious, like many 2nd generation Equinoxes were made in the CAMI plant Ingersoll, Ontario, Canada.

The Beast, like all WM Caprice PPV's was made in the Holden Elizabeth Plant, South Australia, Australia.

The Precious, a 6th generation Corvette, was made in Bowling Green, Kentucky.

Flossie, a 7th generation Honda Civic sedan was made in East Liberty, Ohio!  My import was domestic!

The Biscayne SS left Willow Run Assembly in Ypsilanti, Michigan as a 4th generation Caprice Classic.

Both of Harvey's Dodge Ram D150's came from Warren, Michigan.

Her Caprice 9C1 was made in Arlington, Texas.

That's all the Florida cars.

The Camaros were from Van Nuys, California and Norwood, Ohio.

My '86 Civic hatchback came from Suzuka, Japan.

The '82 Linx was made in the USA, but I don't remember which plant.

The Passat was, obviously, made in Germany, but it wasn't an import where I owned it.

I guess I buy American more often than I remember.

How's This For An Exonym

Ever since known Canadian Sean "Kromm" Punch ticked me off toeing the Party line of inclusion and fairy dust at SJG Forums, particularly about exonyms...

Then all the bitching about getting silver in Hockey...

"Syrupean."

This handily takes the place of "Snow Mexican."

Nail Biter

Damn, that was a Hell of a game!

Glad I managed to avoid seeing who'd won before I watched the rebroadcast.

U!

S!

A!

Happy hockey dance!

How Did We Get Here

We forget things.

Well, call me a primary source.

I was all set, once I'd left the Army, to be an aerospace engineer.

If you've been keeping notes, I got out of the Army just about the same time the Cold War ended.

With the massive contraction of the defense industry, there were lots of overqualified engineers on the job market.  Lots of engineer supply, low engineer demand.

So I changed majors.

In that job market it was difficult to find even drafting work because a company could hire an experienced engineer for what I'd ask.  Many of them just needed a small income to bide the time to when they could retire.  (Oh, and when they finally did start retiring, drafting had become so automated that you no longer needed a specialist to do the job.)

This situation created a disruption in the supply of new engineers.

That created an opportunity to import engineering talent from overseas.  We had engineering jobs sitting empty because of a lack of qualified candidates.

Back to back, glut of engineers and using a supply of engineers from the third world got companies used to the idea that engineers worked cheap and could be rode hard and put away wet.

When the American education system started cranking a few new ones these newly frocked kids wanted jobs that would pay the bills AND service their student loans.

Why would a company do that when they could get three H1B dudes from India.  Never mind that the person in charge of engineering is, now, from India and those three new guys know their place in the caste structure he still believes in.

Smart people entering college can see this.  They know what their chances of getting a good job as an engineer look like and see that it's very dependent on luck rather than merit.  So they chose a different major!

And here we are.

You say you want talented, creative, smart and driven American engineers?  Well you're going to have to create incentives so that creative, smart and driven Americans WANT to be engineers.

That will mean dumping the cheap labor model and getting protectionist.

Yes, that will be expensive.  But it's an investment.

Employers have to learn to think longer term and for that to happen we must look to changing the laws around the stock market.  There's no inducement to making a 20 year plan because you have to show the stockholders an increase every quarter.  The incentives are only for short term gains and the people who can do it for a couple of years get away rich after the things they did to get the short term returns collapse the company.