McCain Implosion

"McCain raised $25 million in the first half of the year, and has spent almost all of that. His campaign has just $2 million in hand, and owes more than $1 million. 'The responsibility is mine," McCain told New Hampshire Public Radio last week. "We didn't use the money in the most effective way.'" -- MSNBC


Poor Senator McCain was acting as though he was already President, with an unlimited pot of taxpayers' money to piss up the wall in any way he chose.

Mission Creep

Billionaire blowhard Michael Bloomberg has had a bit of a setback in his crusade to charge people to drive in Manhattan south of 86th street (as though anybody does that for fun). While sipping a martini on the deck of his yacht he came up with this idea to screw yet more money from hard working people, to fund more useless fuckwits and his cronies in no-work jobs.

Of course the other big advantage of this system is it requires license plate reading cameras to blanket the city so that the Gummint always knows who is driving and where.

That's not paranoia... that's what the system in London is now going to be used for

Scotland Update

I just saw some figures about Scotland. Here's what you get after 60 years of municipal socialism:

The city of Glasgow contains 70% of Scotland’s most deprived neighbourhoods.

A third of people of working age are economically inactive

50% of all households have no earned income.

They should all thank the working people of England, then - the 50% of their wages they have taken off them in tax, is funding 50% of households in the fair city of Glasgow

More from the KGB

This chap is former KGB Major Yuri Shvets, who had the misfortune to get into the KGB and end up in Washington right at the end of the Soviet experiment. By that time it was even beginning to dawn on the lame-brains at the BBC that Soviet Communism might have some flaws. They realised the KGB funding was going to dry up and took the decision to change their editorial stance, to promote the EU as an alternative. But that's another story.

So anyway Yuri came to Washington and claims in his book to have recruited an American journalist as a confidential contact. Whether this is true or not is a matter of some debate.

Perhaps he should have left his uniform (above) back home in Russia instead of wearing it while hitting the Washington cocktail party circuit!

Anyway the good news is you can hire Yuri to speak at your business function or bachelor party, or whatever. Beware though, Vodka is the Russian spy's favorite tipple, and they tend to be able to drink rather a lot of it!

KGB In Action

With the CIA recently deciding to publish its so-called "family jewels" - notes on the slightly dodgy stuff the agency got up to in the Cold War - my thoughts have again turned to my favorite subject, the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti (KGB). They certainly gave the West a run for their money. It's ironic that the Soviet Union provided ultimate proof that the only way Government can run everything is if you turn the entire country into a giant prison camp, but politicans of all parties today still believe more Government and more laws are the answer to every problem.

So here are a couple of KGB agents "in action" in Beirut in 1969.



The spindly fellow on the left is Rem Krassilnikov, the "Silver Fox of Tchaikovsky Street" who later headed the Second Chief Directorate responsible for operations against foreigners within the Soviet Union. This usually meant following the comically inept members of the British security service, MI6 as they blundered about Moscow. Rem was a hardline commie, much like the Mayor of London today, in fact. Rem is short for "Revolutsky Mir" - World Revolution. His lady wife's name was Ninel - which is Lenin spelled backwards.

On the right, with the slightly bourgeois hair-do is the legendary Viktor Cherkashin. He is the man who recruited famous turncoats Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen. The picture comes from his excellent book Memoir of a KGB Officer. They may have lost the Cold War but the Russians write the best memoirs.

The picture is used without permission - Viktor if you're reading this, I'd love to meet you and chat sometime .... but let me make the tea, ok!

One can only speculate what may have caught Viktor and Rem's attention on this occasion. Perhaps the entrance of a sultry dancing girl - or given that it's Beirut, an easily blackmailed British Politician, in search of young boys, perhaps?

Sicko

Bloated millionaire socialist Michael Moore has produced a film hailing the brilliance of socialised medicine like they have in Great Britain and rubbishing the health system here in America.

Despite what seems to me to be overwhelming evidence that government serves largely as a sponge to soak up those members of the workforce who are incapable of doing a real job, he thinks the government should nationalise the health system here so that everybody could enjoy the same lousy level of service regardless of ability to pay.

That's his privilege - I'm sure if he got sick he'd head off to a Swiss clinic anyway. He'd have no luck in Britain, where the health service wouldn't treat him, because he's obese.

So what kind of doctors do they have in the UK? Well, because it's government run most of the health service money goes in to failed computer systems. When it comes to hiring doctors, the cheaper, the better. You can be washing cars in Beirut one week and doing brain surgery in London the next.

Here's one guy who left Jordan to work in the NHS



He's Mohammed Asha. He'll not be doing his rounds this morning, though, because he's been arrested for trying to blow up a night club. In fact he's one of a bunch of international terrorists who during the day were employed by Britain's Health Service

This is obviously causing consternation in the British Department of Health. If their doctors keep getting arrested for suicide bombing, the waiting list is going to get even longer.

The latest news is that the British Health minister has called for an emergency meeting of her senior advisers to discuss the problem...

Hoots mon mind me sporran!

Scotland has come a long way since the days it produced people like John Logie Baird, Robert Napier and James Watt. Now 25% of the Scottish workforce are employed by the government. (Imagine living in an apartment block of 100 tenants of working age, and 25 of them worked for the management company). If it wasn't for the billions in welfare payments sent North from England, the whole country would collapse in anarchy.

So all these do-nothing guys just got through spending over $800M on a new headquarters building (initial estimates - about 1/10th of that)

That means there are a bunch of guys earning 100,000 a year off the taxpayer with nothing to do. Panic!

Here's a novel idea- require a license to wear a sporran

This is not April 1

It is not the Onion

This is socialism in action!

Envirodickheads

So let's say you aren't very bright, and you're not a big enough liar and dirtbag to survive as a politician but you still want to live off the public purse and force your views on other people through legislation. Simple - become an environmentalist.

- The toilets in all new houses in America are pathetic tiny things (like I remember from elementary school). You need to flush them half a dozen times after having a turnout and they block easily. Why? Environmental legislation to save water

- Millions of kids die in the third world due to Malaria, which is completely avoidable if you spray with DDT to kill mosquitoes. But DDT was banned because some lame brain wrote a book about how it thins the shells on birds' eggs. So at least there are now plenty of vultures around to feed off the corpses of the dead children

- Why is gas more expensive in some Chicago suburbs than others. "According to Bill Fleischli, executive vice president of the Illinois Petroleum Marketers Association, Naperville falls within a 'non-attainment area' that encompasses Chicago and most of the western suburbs. The Environmental Protection Agency mandates that these areas must only use reformulated gasoline, a cleaner-burning fuel that is more costly than regular petrol." --- rough translation: a bunch of guys sucking off the public tit who never did a day's actual work, are causing me to pay more for my gas on my way to my real job. Way to go boys! My kids look forward to paying your generous pensions as well.

Waldheim Dies

Former UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim just died aged 88.

His main contribution while in that post was to the field of medicine. He suffered from a condition now known as "Waldheimer's Disease".

It is a form of Alzheimers where sufferers find they cannot recall anything during the period 1933-1945

Here is Kurt with some buddies in happier times

Latest Computer from Apple

Simple. Functional. Elegant.

Thought for the day

Sunrise, wrong side of another day,
Sky high and six thousand miles away,
Don't know how long I've been awake,
Wound up in an amazing state


-Lemmy

Olympic Boondoggle

London was lucky enough to win the 2012 Olympics. That means the fortunate British taxpayer is going to be picking up the tab until about 2042, just so a bunch of insiders can get a warm and fuzzy feeling. Of course, given that this is the country which took 20 years to build a 40 mile railway line to join London to the Channel tunnel, it's likely that as well as adding to London's third-world congestion levels, the entire project will be a complete disaster, and the athletes will be competing in a building site.

Anyway, they are kicking things off as they mean to go on. The great thing about socialism is that the kind of idiots who in the commercial world would never be let anywhere near the purse strings, get the chance to splash around the taxpayer's hard-earned money. After all, there's plenty more where that came from, isn't there? And if not, just raise taxes and blame climate change!

By way of example consider that the Olympic committee gave about $800,000 to coke-sniffing bullshitters Wolff-Olins to come up with a new logo. And after literally ten minutes ceaseless toil the British taxpayer got this (if you suffer from seizures look away now)




Unfortunately when they put this in an animation to warm up the lucky residents of London who will be paying for all this, a number of them did suffer from seizures - and not just because of the cost.

Another money making scam

So a bunch of big city mayors, encouraged by the fact that former Communist mayor of London, "Red" Ken Livingstone, now charges you $16 a day to drive, are trying to promote similar schemes here in the USA under the guise of fighting so-called "climate change".

London's as gridlocked as it ever was, caused by constant, pointless, uncoordinated roadwork. You'd think that a central authority could coordinate those. But no, they'd prefer instead to implement road pricing using a network of cameras to monitor drivers every move and send automatic fines by mail. And the revenue can go into hiring more useless fuckwits!

Message to Bloomberg: fuck off to your country club and hang out with your flunkies and brown-nosing millionaire friends, and get your hands out of the pockets of working people.

Helping the sick and needy

Here in Illinois, Tony Blair lookalike Rod Blagojevich has got a great idea for swelling the states coffers. It's called the Gross Receipts Tax

Basically it's a way of soaking wealth creators across the board and raising money to fund healthcare for the poor.

Results:

1. fewer wealth creators
2. more poor people
3. more bureaucracy

Way to go Rod! You can use some of the money to put up more of those $15,000 tollway signs with your name on them.

If you want to see what ends up happening when you let the government run healthcare check out this heartwarming story from the UK where they've had socialised medicine for 60 years.

Long story short there's a 37 year old woman being treated for emphysema because she's been toking up 10 times a day since she was 14.

Funded by the British taxpayer!

This Just In

"A third-rate, tin-pot dictator of a minor third world nation"

And on the right is Colonel Muammar Gaddafi

Socialised Medicine

People complain about the health system here in the US. I have myself gone half mad dealing with the half-wits insurance companies staff their call centers with. And I notice that in hospital there are as many accountants as doctors. But having said that, if you have insurance, the hospitals in the US I have seen are like five star hotels with nurses thrown in.

The British equivalent is the "National Health Service". According to Wikipedia its annual budget in dollars is $206BN. What does the British taxpayer get for this sum - which is a full 10% of the Gross Domestic Product of the UK as a whole?

So where does that money go? Well since 2002 approximately $30BN has been spent on the "National Programme for IT". That's right, the caring lefties in the British government have managed to blow an amount equivalent to the purchase price of 6 Nimitz-class nuclear aircraft carriers - on a failed computer system upgrade.

So that's the British taxpayer doing their bit to support the booming Indian IT sector then.

And what of the hospitals themselves? Should you fall sick after a lifetime paying contributions, you then fall in line behind whoever else is not feeling too well that day - a Somalian asylum seeker and her ten kids, or a bunch of addicts jonesing for their methadone.

And should you survive the wait for treatment, you'll find that because all the money's been spent on computer consultants, and all the people who could be cleaning hospitals are instead paid to sit home watching cable TV, you are exposed to the second-worst rate of MRSA infection in Europe, second only to Greece.

If you feel like catching MRSA in Chicago, your best bet according to today's Sun-Times is The Cook County Jail

Creating excellence in the quality chaos

Remember back in the 1980s everybody in the West was trying to emulate Japanese business techniques? Kaizen, Kanban, Just in Time, turning up to work once in a while, you name it, Western business tried it.

Of course the Japanese economy fell on hard times and they never did end up owning the entire US West Coast.

But it seems to me that our leaders could still learn something from the way politics is conducted over there - particularly in the UK.

here we have the tale of a lowly agriculture minister, Toshikatsu Matsuoka, who got caught up in some run of the mill bid rigging and spending too much money doing up his office. I mean come on - what public official hasn't spent $50,000 installing a shower every now and then.

But things are done differently in Japan. When this story came out, honest Tosh did the decent thing and topped himself!

Why can't Tony Blair and his cabinet do the same?

A menace on the roads

If there's one thing socialists hate, it's that the car gives ordinary people the freedom to go where they want, do what they want. Graduated licensing, compulsory insurance, road checks, speed cameras, absurdly low speed limits, are how they deal with the motorist while recognizing that their social programs and cronies in no-work jobs rely on the tax revenue from all the economic activity generated by the motor car.

A while back megamillionaire former Goldman Sachs boss Jon Corzine was trying to decide what to do with his retirement. With most of his millions stashed safely in offshore tax havens, he decided to spend the balance buying the New Jersey governorship.

Now naturally the main benefit of a governorship is it enables you to reward your cronies with no-work jobs at the taxpayer's expense. But for a guy who's spent most of his life in the back of a limo dawdling along at 55, it also offers the opportunity to be driven in convoy at over 90mph by a posse of heavily armed state troopers on your way to a few rounds of golf. Wow, ma! Look how all the peasants get out of my way! This is how Joe Stalin must have felt on the Moscow ring road!

And of course the hypocrite wasn't wearing his seat belt either. After all, they're for little people to wear and big government socialists to lecture them about.

Socialists have been bleating 'speed kills' for years and making millions of dollars of revenue in tickets issued to working people. Of course, what they mean is 'speed kills if you're not driving an official vehicle'. Earth to Jon: Speed kills if you don't pay attention and don't know what you're doing.

More Here


This is justice in so many ways.

Ramblings from the EU

For those that don't know, the European Union (EU) is a project to turn the sovereign nations of Europe into something like the old Soviet Union where decisions are all taken centrally by unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats and forced onto an unwilling populace.

However, it started out in 1957 with the Treaty of Rome, with entirely different aims. It was originally planned as a place to give useless windbags who never held a proper job, had completely failed at everything they had attempted, and had no meaningful contribution to make in any sphere, somewhere they could not do too much harm while continuing to receive generous salaries and benefits from the public purse.

Here's somebody who fits that description to a "T" and also looks like he wouldn't be out of place in the STASI high command.

Richard Corbett, MEP

So in the article I link to above he waxes lyrical about how much Prague has changed since he visited in 1978 (probably invited by his mates in the Politburo). You can read how sad he is now Communism has been relegated to a museum. He probably fancies himself as a mid-ranking Politburo member waving from Lenin's tomb. Anyway I doubt many Czechs share his nostalgia, particularly not those who had their testicles wired up to the mains in the torture chambers of the notorious StB, the Czech intelligence service.

Richard Corbett - what a prick. Funded by the British taxpayer to the tune of over $200,000 a year, and he doesn't need to submit any receipts for his expenses under EU law.

The Germans

It's so easy to rubbish the Germans. I've never met one who didn't come over as a major liberal. Yet in the past 75 years, that same liberal, wouldn't-hurt-a-fly warm and cuddly nation has managed to give the world Adolf Hitler, the Nazi Party, Belsen, Dachau, Auschwitz, the Gestapo, the Stasi and Hohenschonhausen.

The last person "shot while trying to escape" the fatherland wasn't some British aviator trying to do a runner from Colditz castle disguised as a pantomime horse, oh no.

He was in fact, Chris Gueffroy, who tried going over the Berlin wall in February 1989 and was shot for his trouble.




So now a lot of ex-STASI are working in the German security services. How else to explain the fact that the old-time STASI preoccupation with collecting scent samples of dissidents to make them easier to track by dogs has made a reappearance?

Don't Mess with the KGB - Part 2

In the last post I indicated that Russia's special services, the FSB and SVR are making a welcome comeback and giving the US alphabet soup agencies something real to justify their budgets, taking their attention off of you and me.

Now the key thing to remember with these guys is, just don't piss them off. And be very skeptical if they invite you for tea.

Here's Viktor Yushchenko of Ukraine sporting his matinee-idol looks



and here he is not long after having dinner with somebody from the "competent organs"




And of course everybody has heard of Alexander Litvinenko who worked for the FSB




Another good-looking guy who bizarrely decided to make a career vocally criticizing his former employers. Fair enough, but the really bizarre part, was that he then decided to have tea with them. Can you see where he might have made a mistake? Poor old Alex didn't see this coming:




and of course, he's no longer with us, and his house in North London is unlikely to be habitable for about the next 100,000 years.

Don't Mess with the KGB - Part 1

Everybody's heard of the famous Soviet-era secret police force, the KGB and its fearsome reputation. There are signs lately that Russia's special services (the Russian leadership refers to them as the 'competent organs' which is ironic because their enemies have frequently found themselves missing some organs) are enjoying something of a renaissance.

And I'm here to tell you why that's a good thing.

First let's dispel a myth. The foreign intelligence arm of the KGB, the First Chief Directorate, was not a refuge for thugs and maniacs. In fact, given the rarity of investment banks and international law firms operating in the Soviet Union, the FCD was the go-to place offering career advancement and foreign travel for all the top graduates. So they were an excellent adversary for the CIA and its allies.

Now since the collapse of the Soviet Union and until 9/11, the CIA, NSA, DIA (bet you've not heard of that one!), FBI, and so on, have had to struggle to justify their enormous secret budgets. In the absence of any real threat they are forced to turn inwards and start making up absurd movie-plot threats like this one, and building databases and spying on ordinary citizens.

But with the Russians up to their old tricks again the kind of nonsense that leads to cartoons like this...
















should be a thing of the past!

In praise of Putin

So I admit to being an admirer of the Russian president Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin and of Russia in general. That's not in the same sense of, say, the way a large number of British and European politicians like Russia, in that they would have eagerly signed up to the Warsaw pact given half a chance. But I admire Putin for his strong leadership and the Russian people for their determination in the face of adversity, and for giving the Germans a good kicking in World War II.

First you have to admire the man's ability to remain on the top of Kremlin politics. Can you imagine a grinning weasel like Tony Blair lasting a week as Russian president?



He would have fallen victim to some misfortune quicker than you could say 'slimy turd'.

Here's Putin visiting the new multi-million dollar HQ of Russian Military Intelligence, the GRU and brushing up his skills with a pistol.







Can you imagine Blair brandishing a Makarov? No, while denying the same ability to law-abiding British citizens, he leaves that sort of dirty work to his publically funded team of heavily armed bodyguards. At the first sign of trouble Blair would either be quivering under the table or in the arms of his minder, while Vlad would have either despatched the miscreant with a single Haraigoshi













or failing that blown his head off with his trusty Makarov.


Seriously folks, how could you not like a world leader who could tell George Bush "we don't want the same sort of democracy in Russia that they have in Iraq!"

Welcome

Welcome to my world

Where I laugh at socialism because my doctor tells me that it's more healthy than getting mad

Plus, from Michael Moore to Tony Blair, there is so much material!