Category: Gummint

Why Not $50 Million?

Gummint, Wokism

More insanity from San Francisco:

A San Francisco reparations committee proposed a plan to city officials last month that would pay longtime black residents of the Northern California metropolitan city $5 million each while granting total debt forgiveness for facing decades of “systematic repression.”
The San Francisco African American Reparations Advisory Committee submitted the report to the Board of Supervisors just before the New Year, which addresses public policies created to “subjugate” black residents in the Bay Area city and includes a list of financial compensation, such as the lump-sum reparations payment of $5 million to each eligible individual.
“Centuries of harm and destruction of Black lives, Black bodies, and Black communities should be met with centuries of repair,” Eric McDonnell, committee chair, told The San Francisco Chronicle. “If you look at San Francisco, it’s very much a tale of two cities.”

Unfortunately, unlike in the Dickens novel, there will be no guillotines.

As for who qualifies for this oh-so generous handout:  well, pretty much everyone.

Such residents who qualify for the payment must meet at least two criteria from a list of requirements, which include applicants to be at least 18 years old at the time the city enacts the committee’s proposal, have identified as black or African American on public documents for at least ten years, and prove they were born in the city between 1940 and 1996.
Other requirements from the report include residents that have lived in San Francisco for at least 13 years or personally been incarcerated — or the direct descendant of someone imprisoned — during the War on Drugs, which U.S. Pres. Richard Nixon declared in 1971.

And how are they going to fund this virtue-signaling generosity?

[thunderous crickets, with scattered murmurs of “higher taxes”…]

Never an errant 12.5 Richter-scale earthquake when you need one, is there?

Non-Negotiable

Eco-Crap, Gummint, Watermelons

Jon Sanders writes about this latest trend from governments:

It already seems as if people are being conditioned to expect talk of rolling blackouts whenever the weather outside seems frightful.

To be very clear: rolling blackouts are not now, nor have they been, normal in the US. Therefore, having to expect rolling blackouts going forward would be abnormal. Nevertheless, as utility providers and power grid monitors have recently warned, the more grids are saddled with intermittent, unreliable wind and solar facilities, the more unreliable they are becoming. They’re more prone to capacity shortfalls and blackouts.

And this, my friends, is utter bullshit.

I don’t want to live under the constant threat of “rolling blackouts”, “load shedding” or any of the other cutesy little euphemisms these bastards come up with to disguise their incompetence.

I expect — no, I demand — to have uninterrupted electricity, 24/7/365, no matter the weather conditions or for any other reason.

If this means that power generation is achieved through burning coal, gas, oil or hippies, I don’t care.

Despite what the Greens and other eco-freaks think, electricity is not an indulgence or a luxury;  it is as important to our civilization as food or water.

And I demand that our elected governments come to terms with that reality, and make the decisions that ensure it — or else be replaced by voters.

Enough of this climate change nonsense, its lies and its fantasies.

Rats Etc.

Gummint, Numbers & Statistics

Here’s a little bit of news:

New York City has imploded, with crime soaring and homeless people everywhere. Every day brings a new tale of an attack against an innocent person on the city’s street or subway.

To make matters worse, New York City is losing its top taxpayers. According to a study by the city’s Independent Budget Office, the city has lost 10% of taxpayers who earn more than $750,000 and 6% of those who make between $150,000 and $750,000.

The New York Post said many taxpayers are fleeing New York’s sky-high taxes.

And the latest study by the Budget Office only included data up to 2020. There’s no telling how many more have left since the COVID lockdowns that crushed the city.

The exodus is costing New York City billions. The Post reported in June that some 300,000 of the city’s wealthiest residents “earned $21 billion in total income in 2019, according to new data released by the Internal Revenue Service.”

That sum, the paper said, “represents the largest flight of capital from the Big Apple ever recorded.”

Now while I’m sure while that my Readers will share my chuckles of schadenfreude, there’s also the worrying caveat that these rich liberal assholes will infest parts of Free America that, quite frankly, shouldn’t have to put up with their baleful influence on our hitherto-happy, Constitution-loving homeland.

Unless, of course, they just increase the Liberal Asshole Quotient in places like Austin TX or Miami FL.  It’s when they start voting in places like Plano or Boca Raton that the barrels of tar need to be warmed up and the pillows emptied of feathers.

I should point out too that these high-dollar asswipes’ incomes are of little actual value to places like Florida and Texas because unike NYFC, we don’t tax income.  No, their only economic effect (and it’s a dubious one at best) is to drive local real estate prices higher — which helps sellers, of course, but also moves housing out of the reach of local middle-income folks.

Still, I guess anything that hastens NYFC’s slide into the abyss is welcome.

Diddly Squat

Business, Gummint

Ben Ainslie and his wife Georgia Thompson are probably not known to many Murkins, although in the yachting world he’s very well known as the most successful Olympic sailor of all time, not to mention the head of Britain’s America’s Cup team.

So during the Covid Lockdown Silliness they created a podcast / TV show called Performance People in which they talk to various successful people such as F1 Mercedes AMG team principal Toto Wolff and his equally-accomplished wife Susie — surely the absolute exemplars of the “power couple”.

The show that got me, however, was their interview with The Greatest Living Englishman and his man Kaleb, on the Diddly Squat Farm.  Funny as always, the pair are wonderfully entertaining, right up until the discussion moves to farming, and what farmers have to deal with.

I have no idea whether our farmers have to put up with the same degree of red tape as the Brits do, but when Jeremy Clarkson points out that the suicide rate for British farmers is the highest of any profession in the U.K., things get really serious.

If you do nothing else today, watch this show.

Stupid And Futile Gesture

Anti-Gun Nannies, Gummint, The Gun Thing

Here’s the latest good news for our side, and bad news for them:

Numbers released Monday show that the FBI ran 192,749 National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) background checks on Black Friday 2022. The National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) noted that the 192,749 NICS checks on Black Friday 2022 “[rank] it third in the Top 10 Highest Days for NICS checks and…[represent] a 2.8 percent increase from Black Friday 2021.”

The FBI conducted 187,585 NICS checks on Black Friday 2021 and 186,645 checks on Black Friday 2020, Breitbart News reported.

The NSSF observed that there were 711,372 NICS checks “during the week leading up to and including Black Friday.”

The strong Black Friday NICS check numbers come after surges in gun sales during recent years.

For example, on October 6, 2022, Breitbart News reported retailers had sold over one million guns a month for 38 consecutive months.

You have to ask yourself about the Gun Control Set:  “Why do they even bother, anymore?”

I mean, if you look at the thing clinically, the whole concept starts with that innate human characteristic, that instinct of self-preservation that has been baked onto your genetic structure, perhaps only alleviated a little by the “fight or flight” reaction to danger.  So there has to be an enormous amount of cognitive dissonance to resist that impulse, and I can only think that it’s assisted by constant propaganda of the “guns are evil” mantra of the media and politicians.  On the one hand, you have people who are genuinely upset by violence (and there’s nothing wrong with that) but think (mistakenly) that removing weapons from individuals will end violence;  and on the other hand, you have the malignant power-seekers for whom an unarmed populace is the sine qua non  for societal control.  (There is an overlap between the two groups, and I’ll address that later on when it becomes more relevant to the discussion.)

Then, of course, came a group of wise men in 1779 who, when starting up a new country pretty much from scratch looked at the situation and said, “The natural instinct for self-preservation is so obvious, only a fool would attempt to gainsay it.”  (Okay, they called it a God-given right, but it’s the same thing, really.)  And having just escaped the clutches of a tyrannical* government a couple of years earlier, they were even more mindful of the fact that men needed tools to resist those bastards who would want to control whole populations.  But then came an even wiser man who realized that one day there would be fools who would want to take away that God-given right, and governments who would work really hard to do so, and so he said, “Right.  We’re actually going to codify this thing so that even a moron can understand that the right of people to self-defense (both personal and societal) cannot simply be legislated away by some asshole that may look like John Kerry, Chuck Schumer or Joe Biden,”  and thus, the Second Amendment to the Constitution.

And yes, over the years that followed the anti-weapon hoplophobes were able to chip away at that natural and legal right, as the government had been reasonably successful at preventing bad people from inflicting violence on innocent people and society at large.  So people were duped into thinking that just because some mope shot at a President with a mail-order Italian WWII military-surplus rifle, therefore nobody else should ever be able to order a rifle from Amazon;  or that when the Constitution was written the authors thereof didn’t know about AK-47s — an efficient semi-automatic rifle being way more dangerous than a muzzle-loading musket and therefore should of course be banned — without realizing that muskets are all very well, until the government brings AK-47s (or their Mattel equivalent) to a little oppression party.

All this was fine and dandy until the Third American Revolution began in, of all places, Ferguson, Missouri and people suddenly realized that the government, largely composed of knaves, cowards and Socialists (some overlap), was no longer going to guarantee the safety of innocent people against mobs of murderous thugs and vandals.

Which is why, as the above article points out, ordinary people have gone out and bought over 38 million guns since Ferguson  — to the surprise of absolutely nobody except the hoplophobes and government stooges.

One would think, returning to the original question posed at the top of this post, that supposedly intelligent and rational people would see the absolute common sense of all this, and say, “Screw it.  There’s no point in trying to overcome this gun ownership thing, because doing so is just a stupid and futile gesture and so we’re not going to bother with it anymore.”  And indeed some have: 

Gun control advocate Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) said Sunday that Democrats in the Senate “probably” do not have the votes to pass a ban on “assault weapons.”

But these hoplophobes are people who have attempted to deny basic human nature, and their government allies have attempted to suppress it;  so I suppose it’s just a battle which we’re going to have to fight over and over again, ad infinitum et nauseam.  And speaking of idiots, there’s this statement from President Braindead:

“The idea we still allow semi-automatic weapons to be purchased is sick,” said Biden. “It has no socially redeeming value… Not a single solitary rationale for it except profit for the gun manufacturers.”

My only regrets are that a) we didn’t get to 200,000 NICS** checks last Friday, and b) the purchases weren’t all semi-sutomatic rifles.

*the concept of “tyranny” is very much a relative one;  the Founding Fathers may have thought that a 3% consumption tax on tea was iniquitous and therefore justified rebelling against the greatest world power since the Romans, so we can only guess what their reaction would be to a government which takes away over a third of a person’s wages at gunpoint, and The People just shrug and say, “Okay.”

**yet another little institution which would cause the Founding Fathers, were they alive today, to reach for their AK-47s.

Stick It, Simon

Gummint, Plagues and Poxes

And in so-called “medical’ news, we have this asshole sounding off:

White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha declared that the best way to “move on” from COVID-19 is actually to submit to an endless booster campaign for eternity.

Let’s just be polite and say that I am extremely skeptical of the efficacy of such “boosters”.

Why?

Despite having been vaccinated twice (as per government decree), both I and New Wife caught the Omicron pox soon after the second jab.  And nobody has yet proved to me that the new shots are going to be any more effective than the previous ones, or that having more pricks than Madonna on a random Saturday night will stop the ‘Rona.

So, not to be polite:

Get fucked, Jha’ll.