Happy 1 May, Comrades

And while very few work, and are hardly paid, and very few are paid, and hardly work, here is another memory from the happy times where using one’s hands was not considered degrading, and trade wasn’t yet a religion.

The Mathematics of Lung Disease.

Every day, at about 7 o’clock, I wake up and, after the usual morning rituals, get out and take the bus to work.
Every day, at about 10 o’clock, my brother wakes up and, after the usual morning rituals, starts chain smoking.
My life choices (not driving and not having children so that the offspring of some bitch who only dates men with cars can have a semi-inhabitable planet), apparently, give me a roughly 1 in 500 chance of contracting Coronavirus, and therefore a 1 in 50000 chance of dying.
My brother’s life choices (voluntary unemployment because one can’t freely smoke in any office any longer) give him a roughly 1 in 5 chance of contracting lung cancer, and therefore a 1 in 6 chance of dying.

According to the experts, COVID-19, if left unchecked, will kill about 200 people in Denmark this year and then pretty much fade away. Lung cancer will kill about 3600 people, after which it will, well, kill another 3600 next year.

Forbidding smoking would remove about 3200 of those deaths; reducing city pollution to the levels of the country about 600.

Removing everyone from public transport would save the lives of…hard to tell. Probably a few dozens. Increased pollution would boost deaths from virtually every other lung condition, including lung cancer. The disruption to the environment and the economy would cripple the country for decades.

Therefore, to a rational government wishing to save lives and lungs, and to do so by making the lives of its citizens less comfortable, the choice would be obvious: recommend that people stop smoking and, if that doesn’t do anything (which it wouldn’t: remember my brother?), forbid tobacco.

However, lung cancer is old news, while Coronavirus is a hot topic; therefore, the Danish government has advised people to stop using public transport, and is talking of suspending it.

And this is a left-wing government, the kind that a hilarious political commentator calls “shite light”: imagine what the other guys would do.

Remember, comrades: inform yourself. Use numbers. Use science. Use your head. Your leaders will do nothing for you except for role-play in hazmat suits.

Happy 1 May, comrades

…and I would post the usual Soviet poster, but some more active comrade collected quite an enjoyable set here: http://russiatrek.org/blog/art/soviet-propaganda-of-may-1-international-workers-day/

Arseholes Baiting Idiots

I am coming out of my virtual retirement with a piece of Danish news that illustrates perfectly what is wrong with the left wing and its creepy fetish for Islamism; this is the piece of news: http://nyheder.tv2.dk/politik/2018-10-02-personer-fra-12-lande-skal-lettere-kunne-faa-arbejde-i-danmark
For those of my readers who are fortunate enough not to read Danish, this is a new law proposal that would let in workers from 12 select nations as long as an employer is willing to pay them 3688€ per month. It supplements an existing law that allows workers from just anywhere to come in if they can get a salary of 4672€ per month, which in turn is an extension of an older law (introduced to import select scientists and immediately abused for athletes and managers) which allowed employers, for a limited time, to hire foreign workers for an amount that, after inflation, was double that.
It is, in practice, a way of doing what pretty much everyone but the richest 1% of every country fears: it promotes immigration as long as it takes away jobs from the residents and reduces salaries; and, while I can imagine that, to most people in the world, 3688 Euro are a lot of money (they certainly were for me, before I moved to Denmark), one has to keep in mind that half of it you never see (taxes are detracted before salary is paid, in Denmark) and that you will need at least 500€ to eat and 500 to rent a place, in Denmark. Then you can start paying bills and, unless you bike, transport will cost you at least another 100€; all in all, 3688€ is the edge of living, around here.
So, this is a law to favour the rich and make the poor poorer: with the arseholes that sit in the Danish parliament today, it’s no surprise. But where is the baiting part? Well, the list of countries that would be allowed to inflate the Danish proletariat is as follows:
– USA
– Singapore
– China
– Australia
– Canada
– Japan
– Brazil
– Malaysia
– India
– Thailand
– Mexico
– Russia
This list, I have to admit, is genius. As soon as it came out, the idiotic Danish left took the bait and started griping that it contains no muslim countries. Of course, technically, Malaysia is a muslim country, but the idiotic Danish left can’t be arsed with this kind of detail. Also, China and India, combined, have a Muslim population of 200 million, but this is the same kind of detail. The genius is that, in fact, 58% of immigrant workers already come from these country (the vast majority from India and China, the rest is basically decoration), and this is without counting that much of the remaining 42% comes from EEA or Nordic countries, which have free movement into Denmark already. Effectively, this law would simply lower the minimum salary of immigrant workers: but the left is too busy bitching at the fact that Tunisia is not on the list to notice. After keeping the pantomime up for a few weeks, the government will magnanimously add a few Arab countries to it, the law will pass in a landslide, and Denmark will again see its unemployment raise, its salaries drop, and dozens fighting for each toiletless studio in Copenhagen. But arsehole politicians and idiot activists will be showing us their smug smiles: rejoyce.

Happy May 1

…a proper post will follow.

What Happens in Brussels

…is exactly nothing at all. Years of pervasive surveillance have failed to predict the location of (let alone prevent) a single terrorist attack, and so it shall always be. If something happens in Brussels, it will be after the hysteria blows off; in the meanwhile, islamists have attacked Bamako, resulting in this entertaining piece that tries to explain the facts, as well as where Mali might be, to the English public.

Update (7/12/2015): as Brussels no longer is in a state of emergency (also not to disturb the pre-christmas consumer orgy), absolutely nothing has happened there, albeit there was a shooting in California, which, as usual, hit the NSA, FBI, Homeland Security, and so forth as a ton of bricks. But, hey, if you download a film illegally, you’re in serious trouble, punk.

Paris past the Bullshit

So, ISIL (most likely) has killed 129 (so far) in Paris. Conservative newspapers are ranting about the end of Western Civilization, governments are thinking of putting more attention into reading your email, people are committing inane acts of solidarity, like putting the French flag on Facebook, and you are thinking of a friend of your second cousin who goes to Paris once a year and is therefore, most likely, lying in a pool of blood.

The only people who should be happy about this hysteria are ISIL; because, if you look at it objectively, 129 people are very few. ISIL kills twice as many every time it conquers a new village in Syria, which happens several times a week. Every time your government fires a nurse to hire some email-reading spook, it dooms far more people than that to a far more unpleasant death. Really, the only way one can achieve anything by killing 129 people is if the media blow them out of proportion and people start having their face in three colours on Facebook. And the only way you can fight terrorism is by thinking rationally. Rational thought will tell you that, yes, you have a high chance of being killed by an islamic fundamentalist in Paris; but this is not if you stroll downtown and happen to be involved in a shooting that happens once a year; it is if you stray too far from downtown and end up in the enormous, atrocious banlieu, the suburbs of Paris that the French government, with no other purpose than an idiotic celebration of its colonial past, has filled with unintegrated immigrants from North Africa, and where crime and fundamentalism walk side by side. Which, incidentally, means that, if France closes its borders, it is the rest of Europe that is safer.

Anyhow, if you stick to downtown, that is, if you have money enough, don’t worry: you’ll be able to enjoy that world of laicité, grands écoles, cognac and threesomes that ISIL hates so much (and please, don’t tell me you believe it is because France is actually doing something to hurt them in Syria) for a while still: santé.

Update (16/11/2015): as a Kurdish counter-offensive has taken back Sinjar, graves of 128 Yazidi killed by ISIL have been found; Facebook offers no Iraqi flag option, conservative newspapers fail to rant while France, and your cousin, don’t really give a shit.

Happy Anniversary, Comrades

Staunch communists like me, of course, will know that today is the anniversary of the October Revolution (the “October” part is a misnomer due to the use of a different calendar). For the others, here is an old poster whose original yours truly owns, by a freak accident of fate.

An old-school Soviet soldier about to slay the Dragon of Capitalism; after the drawing was made, however, the soldier rode along, and the dragon went away to a 83-years course about how to devour people more efficiently

Vous n’êtes pas Charlie

A while ago, I pointed out that there is no such thing as Islamosocialism. My conservative readers (which are the majority, and are probably looking for hints at when the revolution is coming to them or something of the kind) kept their smug smile. My leftist readers kept eating their kebab and feeling very conciliatory.
Two and a half years laters, matters have come to head: socialists, not the clamouring fascists, have violated the self-imposed censorship that has, for the past 14 years or so, effectively kept all Western media respecting Islamic law, and have ended up being killed.

At this point, both conservatives, whose smile has become even smugger, as they are moving to appropriate the moment and leftists, who really don’t want to give up their kebabs, have found a way of showing “solidarity”, the idiotic “Je suis Charlie” flag:

Why is this idiotic? The Charlie Hebdo people exposed themselves to danger by being provocative; to show that there is no point in respecting anybody’s imaginary friend. There is nothing provocative in this flag; being Charlie means showing courage to change society. Showing this flag does nothing of the kind. If you want to be Charlie, show this:

and watch your back.

Update (18/7/2015): with the kind of contrived bullshit your girlfriend will give you when she dumps you for being unemployed, the editor of Charlie Hebdo has finally admitted that he doesn’t like the idea of being shot, and promised never to publish Muhammad cartoons anymore. In French, Charlie n’est pas Charlie non plus.

A Reminder to My Associates

About a month and a half ago (but the corpses have only been discovered now), 43 Mexican students, basically for no other fault than having leftist sympathies, were arrested by the police, handed to a drug syndicate, tortured and burned–some of them alive. I had to interrupt my silence to point this out, because I am a sort of political scavenger, taking up minor, unimportant causes; I leave the really important ones to to my honoured co-fighters in the European Left. Among those (and I only touch the really important subjects here), we can count:
– A woman with a tight shirt, walking for 10 hours in Manhattan was addressed almost half a dozen times as “Hey, beautiful”.
– The length of paternity leave in Denmark is not quite as long as in Sweden.
– Not enough people calling the woman of point 1 “beautiful” were white, which questions the fact that it happened at all, as several of my honoured co-fighters had decided that they just had to be.
Important stuff, people, important stuff. Far too important for this blog.