Missing

Alert Readers will notice that the “5 Worst” feature has disappeared from our Friday fare.

That’s because I was getting bored with it and sheesh, it’s been going for over a year.  From now on, it will only reappear when something truly foul suggests itself to me.

Crushing The Peasants

Here we go again:

Despite having many of their demands met when French President Emmanuel Macron caved to the increasing public pressure, the yellow vest squads are still out in the streets calling for his resignation. It seems that the French government has had enough of this unrest and is preparing new legislation aimed at tossing the unhappy peasants into the dungeon if they don’t go home and shut up.

Governments never seem to learn:  the harsher the punishments you heap on people you’re oppressing, the more violence will be inflicted on you in response, eventually.  You heard it here, first:  if the gendarmes start shooting, I wouldn’t be surprised if a whole bunch of WWII-era weapons are unearthed (sometimes literally), to make an appearance at a forthcoming demonstration, or when somebody faces one of these new punishments.

Vivez les giles jaunes!!  

LMAO

You’d have to have a heart of stone not to laugh hysterically (as I did) at this report:

Footage released by the hunt saboteurs shows several people standing in front of a van, blocking it from leaving.
A man wearing a baseball cap appears to threaten the occupants with a pool cue, as they shout: ‘Oi, you’re on camera.’
A woman in a red hoodie jabs her finger at the sabs and says: ‘Dirty f****** scum, you’re not going nowhere.’
A man inside the van can be heard desperately calling police for help and tells the operator they are being boxed in by hunt supporters wielding pool cues.

Lemme see: when hunt saboteurs (“sabs” — how cute) break the law, trespass on private property, try to pull hunters from their horses and scatter pepper in the noses of the dogs, it’s all “right to protest” / “save the animals” etc.  But when their violence results in violence against them in retaliation, they’re all “Oh please, P.C. Plod, please please please  come and rescue us!”

The woman in the red hoodie had it right:  they’re dirty fucking scum.

Opting Out

According to this report, our household appliances are about to become snitches on just about every aspect of our lives:

One day, finding an oven that just cooks food may be as tough as buying a TV that merely lets you click between channels.
Internet-connected “smarts” are creeping into cars, refrigerators, thermostats, toys and just about everything else in your home. CES 2019, the gadget show opening Tuesday in Las Vegas, will showcase many of these products, including an oven that coordinates your recipes and a toilet that flushes with a voice command.
With every additional smart device in your home, companies are able to gather more details about your daily life. Some of that can be used to help advertisers target you — more precisely than they could with just the smartphone you carry.

And the news just gets better and better:

Despite the fact that there’s plenty of information available showing how these devices collect data about every aspect of your life and the manufacturers both use and sell that data on the open market, the majority of people seem to either not care or are willing to accept this “new reality” as part of living in the modern world.

Once again [sigh], it appears that I’m in a minority.

No doubt, there will appear at your local drugstores condoms which measure the number of thrusts, such data sent back to the manufacturers of K-Y “Duration” gel, said antidote for premature ejaculation to arrive at your bedside by special delivery within two strokes of initial insertion.  And that’s a benevolent  outcome for such intrusiveness.

Never mind that.  Here’s a situation already in being:

T-Mobile, Sprint, and AT&T are selling access to their customers’ location data, and that data is ending up in the hands of bounty hunters and others not authorized to possess it, letting them track most phones in the country.

I don’t often agree with church leaders about, well, anything much.  But I’m in absolute agreement with this man.

Allow me to offer a suggestion for a brand-new industry.  When a new generation of “smart” phones arrived on the market and appeared to be “locked” to a specific carrier, within days we saw phones being unlocked by street vendors, sometimes right outside  the stores selling the damn things.

I’m calling on all privacy-minded geeks of the world to unite, and to design apps or hacks or whatever to bypass the Big Brother mechanisms of these new infernal fink machines so that people (like me) who aren’t interested in letting Global MegaCorp Inc. snoop into the most intimate areas of our lives may avail themselves of their inventions.

I will be at the head of the fucking line to buy them.  I promise.

Dept. Of Righteous Shootings

Choirboy saunters up to a young woman on street corner, shows her a weapon and attempts a little involuntary financial redistribution, whereupon Our Heroine pulls her gun and shoots the little asshole in the neck, said wound eventually sending him to join Hell’s Chorus.

[pause to allow cheers and applause to die down]

This incident would be fairly unremarkable except that it happened on Chicago’s South Side, and the young lady in question had an Illinois carry permit (!!!), which as any fule kno is of hen’s teeth scarcity.  [Note to the gun confiscators:  this is how you reduce violent crime; not by disallowing law-abiding citizens to carry guns.]

Note too that this is an incident of gun violence (duh), but as any right-thinking person would agree, the right kind of gun violence.

(Thanks to Reader Brad_In_IL for the heartwarming report.)