Author: Kim du Toit

Long Time Coming

Legal Stuff, Rights, The Gun Thing

I’ve always maintained that it’s an injustice for someone to lose their Second Amendment rights because of a criminal record imposed by the commission of a non-violent crime.  By all means, deny the Second to recently-paroled armed robbers and the like — but for non-violent offenses like forgery or tax evasion?  No.

Seems as though some judges are coming to the same conclusion.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit held this week in Range v. Garland that the government cannot disarm people convicted of minor, nonviolent offenses.

Unless I miss my guess, this is headed straight for the Supremes — and they’d better get it right.

Monday Funnies

Funny Stuff

For some reason, that pic made me think of the Gummint.  Hence the following:

 

From the despairing New Wife:

And after all that:

Now hand me that can-opener and get on with your day.

Update:  From ever-alert Reader and former Army CPT David B. comes this note:

“Just a heads-up. On the lovely ladies in body armor, you indicated you wanted a can opener. My belief is that those are military uniforms, so a P-38 can opener would be the prescribed tool.”

Bygone Broads 7

Drive Time, Gratuitous Chick Pics

In this, the penultimate of the series for now, we look at another two examples of teenage boys’ boner-starters of a bygone era.  First, the 1965 Ford Shelby Mustang GT 350:

…and as their contemporaneous companion piece, so to speak, the pouty Brigitte Bardot:

 

What a pair.

What Woody Said

Big Brother, Surveillance Society

In one of his rare funny moments, Woody Allen once referred to people glued to their cell phones as “connectivity assholes”.  Here’s a story which, if true, provides ample proof of the pitfalls thereof:

Amazon reportedly shut down a customer’s smart home after the delivery driver claimed he heard a racial slur coming through the doorbell, even though no one was home. 

Brandon Jackson, of Baltimore, Maryland, came home on May 25 to find that he had been locked out of his Amazon Echo, which many devices, including his lights, are connected to.

Yeah… so much for that “convenience” that people are always bleating about when the discussion moves to “smart homes”, “self-drive cars” and all that similar nonsense.

So don’t complain when Big Tech, or Big Brother, or Biggus Dikkus turns off your lights, takes your house through “emininent domain” then bends you over the desk and gives it to you good and hard in your connectivity asshole.

Life Lesson

Gummint, Lies and Untruths

…well, not for me, nor for most of my Readers, but this story reminds us why we should never believe what the fucking government tells us:

Michael Shellenberger’s Public today released a blockbuster story, “First Person Sickened By COVID-19 Was Chinese Scientist Who Oversaw “Gain Of Function” Research That Created Virus,” which generously credits Racket. The story cites three government officials in naming scientist Ben Hu, who was in charge of “gain-of-function” research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, as the “patient zero” of the Covid-19 pandemic.

This is a major story, contradicting early official explanations pointing to zoonotic cross-species “spillover” at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, colloquially known as the Wuhan wet market. The mystery bat or pangolin suspected of transmitting the disease to humans at that market was never found. The Public story for the first time asserts the source of contamination: a Wuhan Institute scientist fell ill after exposure to a virus engineered at his place of work.

The implications of this are enormous and represent a major problem for the federal health bureaucracy, several intelligence agencies, and the news media, to say nothing of politicians in both parties (but particularly those on the Democratic side) who’ve deflected public interest from the Wuhan Institute and gain-of-function research. The secrets of both the pandemic’s origin and the reason for America’s at-best-sluggish investigation of same have become the mother of all political footballs, and today’s news is likely to be just the first in a series of loud surprises.

So all that bullshit about “markets” and “bats” was just that:  weapons-grade

My trust in government was always on the low side, having grown up in a totalitarian society.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered that our own American government is, if anything, worse than that.

Trust nobody — and most especially, don’t trust anything the government tells you, when the likely outcome is that they can increase their control over us, with our consent.

Like I said:  a life lesson.