Category: Bad News

Horrible, unpleasant stuff

Your Money No Good Here

Bad News

I have long viewed the efforts of banks, retailers and government to make us a cashless society. I’ve heard all their reasons: money-laundering, efficiency and so on, and I remain unconvinced.

It’s even worse over here, and Ross Clark of the Daily Mail takes aim at the process:

The argument in its favour is convenience, but the truth is that it’s all about greed.
Firstly, there is the opportunity to collect fees. The Boston Consulting Group estimates that banks and payment companies such as Visa and Mastercard currently make $1 trillion annually worldwide in fees — typically paid by the retailer — for processing electronic payments.
…
And it won’t be just the retailers who are being fleeced. Currently, consumers are rarely charged fees to use credit cards and debit cards, but you can bet that would change if there was no option to pay in cash.
An even bigger prize is the opportunity that cashless payments offer to large corporations to collect vast amounts of personal information about individuals.
We are familiar with how tech giants such as Google, Facebook and Twitter harvest information about us via our internet searches and so on.
But few of us are aware that we are also feeding a vast data machine whenever we use our credit and debit cards.

It’s worth reading the whole thing, because Clark’s analysis is very good, especially hw going cashless makes us completely vulnerable to the vagaries of computer systems, their inefficiencies and the hacking thereof.

And while I share his cynicism about Big Business and its Marketing Department, I am even more cynical about Government and its attempt to make all transactions cashless — because as a former marketer myself I can at least understand the desire for more information about consumers (even if I don’t agree with the ruthless harvesting thereof) — but when it comes to government knowing every little detail about how I spend my money, certain part of my anatomy start to twitch uncontrollably.

And yes, we’re mostly talking about my various fingers.

Whenever I’m faced with any attempt to make a massive, wholesale change in society’s behavior, I get that same twitch — and this one strikes me as especially worthy of some digitized action. So I’ll start with the most innocuous one first.

Note to government and business: want me to stop using cash?

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to the range, to rid myself of another twitch.

Unaffected

Bad News, Politics

A youngin asked me the other day what changes I’ve noticed in my personality as I’ve got older. The principle one, I told him, is that as I’ve got older, I’ve begin to care less and less about more and more. Here’s an example.

So apparently Facebook does ugly things to conservative Facebookers (or whatever they’re called).

I don’t care, because I don’t have a Facebook account, nor will I ever surrender that much control, to anybody. This is why I have a private blog: I can post anything I want, say anything I want, and as long as I don’t murder anybody, I’ll be fine*.

If my hosting service were to suspend my account, I’d go somewhere else (I’ve had several offers to host this site for almost no money), and if my blogging software were to be disabled, I’d just build my own blog from scratch — done it before, was too lazy to do it again this time. Anyone remember this?

…or this?

…or this?

Hand-built. And I can do it all again, if I have to. In the meantime, I’ll stick to this:

And I don’t care about traffic, or pageviews or any of that crap either. BobbyK once told me that this site has about 10 percent of the traffic of my older one, and I don’t actually care. I seek neither validation nor popularity. I do what I do, and people can agree with me, disagree with me, ignore me, or whatever. Hence: splendid isolation.

As I look back, my whole purpose in life has been to deny control of that life to others, and I’m too old to change that purpose now. So fuckem.

*I should point out that since the death of Senator Teddy The Traitor Kennedy, the odds of me being arrested for murder have fallen precipitously. Still, every time I see a chair, duct tape and a baseball bat in the same room, I get flashbacks.

Disaster Squared

Bad News

The other day, I was idly wondering what would happen if a Harvey-like storm / hurricane were to hit an area like Houston again — only this time, because Evil Glueball Wormening, all the cars were not powered by gasoline or diesel but by government-mandated electricity.

Fear not; in a fine example of synchronicity, Longtime Reader Mike G. sends me this little study which, if you’re too busy to read the whole thing, can be summed up quite simply: everyone would be fucked. Hard. A sample:

Imagine if the environmentalists had had their way and had managed to force the US into electric cars…something that is underway now in some countries like Norway, the UK and soon France. Germany recently has been discussing in earnest banning by 2030 the internal combustion engine.
And now imagine with Irma approaching if the millions of citizens evacuating populated south Florida had had electric cars instead to make the 400-mile journey to get out of harm’s way. After 100 miles or so these cars would have lost their power, and charging stations quickly would have become overrun with cars waiting to make the one-hour charge-up.
Traffic would have rapidly come to a halt.
These millions of stranded people then would have been sitting ducks waiting to be blown away by nature’s fury.

I await with bated breath to see how the Greens will respond to this hypothesis. (Of course, given that most Greens hate people in principle and espouse a policy of going back to nature, they’ll most likely shrug and say something about staving off over-population by natural means, the amoral assholes.)

This whole unicorn philosophy of the Greens is going to end up killing more people than the internal combustion engine.

Grabbing Guns

Bad News, The Gun Thing

Not sure how this little idea would have played out in Texas:

U.S. Virgin Islands Gov. Kenneth Mapp signed an emergency order allowing the seizure of private guns, ammunition, explosives and property the National Guard may need to respond to Hurricane Irma.

Couple-three questions here:
1) Why would the Guard need any privately-owned weapons in an emergency? Don’t they have enough, and if not, why not?
2) What happens if people are unable to protect their houses and such from looters and other associated filth? (“Bend over and spread ’em” is the likely government response.)
3) How would the government know where to get said weapons?

Oh, lookee here. From Wikipedia:

The U.S. Virgin Islands have a stringent and restrictive licensing process to purchase or carry a firearm. A person must be 21 to get a non-carry weapons license, along with several other requirements. Applicants must pay $75 licensing fee, submit a signed application, be fingerprinted and photographed, and be of good moral character. That process is just for a permit to purchase firearms to store in a residence or business, and not for a concealed carry permit. There are six types of licenses:

  • Blue, Business Protection
  • Yellow, Home protection and handguns only
  • Gray, farming and long guns only
  • White, all active law enforcement
  • Pink, current and retired law enforcement, personal protection, and special circumstances
  • Green, target shooting, sports use and home protection

To qualify [for any of the above] you must belong to a gun club. To acquire a concealed carry permit, or “Pink” permit, a person must meet a specific set of criteria. To apply, you must either be a government employee, valuable goods carrier, firearms manufacturer, or be a bona fide resident or business person of the islands. You must prove you have good reason to fear death or great injury to your person or property and present at least two affidavits from credible persons who attest to that need. Due to this process, in most cases concealed carry permit applications are denied for normal resident applicants unless in grave circumstances.

The next time somebody of your acquaintance suggests that guns be licensed, or that only cops should carry guns… well, you know the rest. Wear Army boots.

Afterthought: here is yet another reason, as if any were needed, that everyone should own at least one gun about which government knows nothing.

Goopery

Bad News

I swear on my life that I had not read this before I made Gwyneth Paltrow the worst-possible dinner guest of all time. (And you must read it too, all of it. Yes, it’s long. Don’t care.) Here’s the opening salvo:

In retrospect, I find it rather odd that I never paid much attention to Goop. Goop (or is it goop?), as you might recall, is Gwyneth Paltrow’s beauty/health/wellness website (and, of course, online store) that’s been in the news a fair amount over the last several months. The reason is that Paltrow combines celebrity, beauty, and “wellness” with pure quackery, and every so often Goop publishes something advocating pseudoscience so outrageous that it attracts the attention of not just skeptics, but of the mainstream press and even late night comedians like Stephen Colbert. What I didn’t realize is just how broad the quackery is, and, more importantly, how it is facilitated by actual physicians working with Goop. Before I get to that, though, let’s take a brief trip down memory lane, where I’ll explain how I became aware of just how much a wretched hive of scum and quackery Goop has become.

Me myself, I don’t care about Goop, its expensive snake-oil products or the fact that it hides good old-fashioned snake-oil sales techniques behind Gwyneth Paltrow’s skinny frame. I don’t even care if The Perpetually Gullible (i.e. people who espouse the value of homeopathy) end up sticking expensive jade eggs up their vaginas and die from the agonizing infection this lunacy can cause. (Yes, such a product is available at Goop and yes, it’s solemnly pitched as an answer to various ailments such as Trump Derangement Syndrome. That last part is an absolute fabrication on my part, but it’s no less plausible than all the other earnest-but-bullshit nostrums put out by Goop.)

I bet there’s an absolute direct and full correlation (like, 1.0000) between people who believe Paltrow’s  bullshit and Hillary Clinton / Bernie Saunders supporters. Not all the above are Goop acolytes, of course — but all Goop acolytes are, without a shadow of a doubt, liberals of that ilk. If you can still believe that socialism is a cure for all society’s ills after all the proof extant that it isn’t, you’ll believe anything, So feel free to clean out your colon with a Goop-endorsed boutique ostrich feather if you believe it will make you feel better about your bowel movements.

And if Goop ends up being the latest Jonestown Kool-Aid to liberals, who am I to deny their right to be a bunch of stupid, vapid morons, even if it kills them?

Charles Darwin, call your office.

Merger News

Bad News

I see that CBS and the BBC are going to join forces:

CBS News on Thursday announced a new “editorial and newsgathering relationship” with BBC News “that will significantly enhance the global reporting capabilities of both organizations,” the networks said in a joint statement. “CBS News is completely committed to original reporting around the world — a commitment clearly shared by the BBC,” said CBS News President David Rhodes. “There’s no better partner to strengthen and extend our global coverage than BBC News. I look forward to working with James Harding as we increase the capabilities of both organizations.”

Of course, to conservatives like us this would be, in Orwell-speak, “doubleplusCommie”.

I’ve been watching BBC-TV while Over Here, and needless to say, I can think of at least one good reason why people here aren’t allowed to own handguns. The attrition rate of TVs would be horrendous.