Category: Gummint

Lickspittle

Asshole Cops, Government Thugs, Gummint, Surveillance Society

In this specific case, the above insult is directed at that girlyman Rich Lowry at National Review.  (Back in the Buckley Days, I actually had a subscription to the Dead Tree National Review for many years.  Now?  I’d drink old motor oil first.)

Basically, Lowry is fawning all over the foul Flock company and their little snooping cameras, signing their praises to the heavens because:

There’s a reason, though, that police departments so rapidly adopted the cameras — they are an extremely useful investigative tool.

I bet they are.  How much so?

The cameras routinely aid in the identification and apprehension of the perpetrators of serious crimes and the location of missing persons.

According to the Jacksonville, Fla., sheriff’s office, the cameras since 2024 have “helped solve 15 murders, 17 kidnappings, 6 forcible sex offenses, nearly 100 shootings, and 172 missing-persons cases.”

That’s over two and a half years, which, compared to the crime stats of said area, is not so great a proportion — and let’s not kid ourselves, we’ll never know how many of those would have been solved anyway, without the “assistance” of Flock..

Here’s the thing.  Unlike Lowry, I’m not interested in the entire country surrendering their privacy just to help the fucking police solve a few crimes, any more than I support universal gun confiscation to help the police (I know, it wouldn’t, but it’s the principle I’m arguing here).

You can make an argument for any kind of totalitarian abrogation of rights for the same reason — the old “security vs. freedom” argument we’ve heard so often before.

And finally, we all know that this wholesale collection of individuals’ private information is going to be abused.

“Really, Kim?”

Newsflash:  it’s already being abused.  From Lowry’s selfsame article:

According to The Washington Post, “Authorities have charged or accused at least 50 law-enforcement officers of using license-plate readers for unauthorized purposes, including to stalk their exes.”

I know that’s not a large number:  but it’s a lot greater than zero (which is what it should be).

Lowry’s idiocy continues:

But license plate readers aren’t the only offender.  There are all sorts of other surveillance cameras, many of them privately owned and operated, that the police access during investigations.

We let our mobile phones and various apps track us all day long.

And something like 60 million households have Ring or other security cameras that record what’s happening on their property, and often in the immediate surroundings.

Good grief:  this idiot can’t even tell the difference between private security activity and State steamrolling.  Just because we (voluntarily) do it for ourselves, does not justify the Gummint doing it to us all, without our consent.  And the final insult:

The only reliable way to ensure that you aren’t being recorded is to stay inside — and draw the curtains.

Fuck you, you supercilious, condescending little turd. Do you even know what you’re saying?

It’s bad enough when the Commies want to fuck us all over;  but to have a nominally “conservative” commentator spew nonsense like this?

Somebody reserve Lowry a seat on the next Air Pinochet flight.

Manufacturing Boom

Bureaucracy, Business

Well, yeah:

Both overseas and domestic business leaders recognize that investing domestically in the U.S. makes sense under a restrained regulatory environment that encourages innovation and allows America’s entrepreneurial spirit to thrive. That legal and compliance framework is also now bolstered by an aggressive energy agenda that unleashes the full potential of America’s resources to power industry well into the future with plentiful, reliable U.S. energy.

Good.  Now do the same for agriculture.

Theft

Taxes and Theft, Wealth Envy

Of course, the foundation policy of all Marxist policymakers and politicians is to punish the rich.  So nobody should be surprised that Hizzoner Comrade Mamdani of NYfC has a plan to tax residences in Manhattan that are adjudged to be non-primary — i.e. the so-called pied-à-terre dwellings of those people who need a place to doss down during the week before fleeing to their houses in Lawn Guyland or Scawsdale for the weekend.

To my surprise, this little smash ‘n grab tax thievery has had its peepee severely whacked by a judge:

Staten Island Supreme Court Justice Wayne Ozzi issued a temporary restraining order effectively prohibiting any action on the luxury second home tax until an August 31 hearing on a lawsuit filed by three disgruntled homeowners.

Ozzi also hit out at Mamdani’s decision to release a list of the homeowners who could potentially be hit by the tax, many of whom were sent notices warning they would be liable unless they filed an exemption.

‘No law permitted or required the City to publish such a list of the names, addresses and property values of more than 900,000 New York City homeowners, or to publicize that list through an irregular, mid-year publication,’ Ozzi wrote in his decision.

‘[The judgment] annuls and vacates [the] city’s mailed notices, and any determination that such mailed notices constitute proper notice under tax law.’

He added that city officials should have conducted an ‘individualized statutorily-required initial determination’ before issuing the notices to homeowners, so as to not place the burden on the property owners.

The judge then barred city officials from taking any further action on the 17,000 notices sent by the Department of Finance, which warned they would face a five-figure tax bill unless they requested an exemption.

Hubba hubba.  For once, a New York judge got it right.

Sadly, it’s not going to end there, because the Marxists’ ravenous appetite to punish the wealthy and successful knows no bounds — even legal ones like this one — and at some point in the future, sure as sugar, those taxes will be imposed.

While I hate Marxists with a passion, especially when they engage in theft of this nature, I have to suspect that among those 900,000 unfortunate people are an awful lot — 50%?  60%? — who can be reliably counted on to vote Democrat in their elections, because New York.  So in this case, they’re getting what they voted for, good and hard.

And I’m not sympathetic.

Skidding Leftwards

Men & Women, Rights, Unintended Consequences

Seen at Insty’s:

I wonder sometimes, from way back when men voted in favor of giving wimmyns the vote, whether they would have been so keen to check the “Yes” box after seeing this little chart.

But steering away from those shark-infested waters for a moment, I have a good idea as to why the chicks are becoming Maoist.

The problem is that most of them bought into the “You can have it all”  tripe  trope of Teh Feministicals, and went to college (as favored by the Smart Set) to become “educated” — except that being women, they picked the wrong stuff to learn, doing soft shit like “Gender Studies” and the like (which had been installed by feministical academics — male and female) rather than the difficult ones, like microbiology, applied mathematics or even accounting / finance.

Then, after graduating (with a boatload of tuition debt), they discovered that those soft degrees meant fuck-all in the workplace, and pretty much only qualified them for positions in HR (or back at college in a low-paying job like adjunct professor, if they could even find one).

Oh, and they can’t have kids because being a stay-at-home mom is impossible by the current economic situation (tuition debt) and anyway, Having A Career was part of the “Womyn’s Independence” schtick.  So now they’re not having kids, suppressing within themselves that most intrinsic and fundamental instinct of women.

So, burning with outrage at the “unfairness”, of course they want to dismantle the “system” (the fault of the “patriarchy”) and when it comes to demolishing institutions, nothing works as well as Marxism.

And because they are young — and therefore stupid, as most youngins are — and have no real grasp of the history which proves only too well how disastrous Marxism actually is, they are pushing us all towards the pit.

Oh, and by the way, the boys that have become feminized during the whole process of primary, secondary and tertiary education, are just as likely to support Marxism as Teh Gurlz.

And of course, because Baby Boomers — who started the whole “Turn on, tune in and drop out” and “Burn it all down and start again!” bullshit in the 1960s and early 70s — are just as fucking stupid as their kids and grandkids, it’s no wonder that protest marches these days consist mostly of young blue-haired women and grey-haired old farts.

Morons, the whole lot of them.

Interesting, But Irrelevant

Gummint, Legal Stuff, Rights

Before you read what I say next, you first need to read this article:

The Department of Justice has officially walked away from its appeal in one of the most important Second Amendment cases involving ordinary federal property. That’s a major win, but gun owners should understand the ruling before changing how they carry.

On July 23, 2026, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit dismissed the government’s appeal in Firearms Policy Coalition v. Blanche at the government’s request. Chief Judge Reed O’Connor’s permanent injunction therefore remains in place.

The federal government may not enforce the challenged post office firearm restrictions against the individual plaintiffs or any present or future member of the Firearms Policy Coalition, or the Second Amendment Foundation, when they possess or carry firearms in an “ordinary” United States Post Office or on surrounding postal property covered by the order.

The federal ban hasn’t disappeared for everyone. Every post office isn’t covered, and other laws still matter.

Etc., etc.

Fine, all good stuff, but…I haven’t set foot inside a Post Office building for about five years, so it’s irrelevant to me.

Read more

Constitutional Lesson

Rights, Sports

All those English people who came over here and swooned about the United States — the freedom, the politeness, the hospitality, Buc-ees (and did I mention the freedom?) had a somewhat rude awakening after their team got beaten by the Argies in the semi-finals.

Seems as though some things are not easily forgotten, among them being the Margaret Thatcher-era beating dished out to the Argies when the latter tried to invade the Falkland Islands (a.k.a. the Malvinas).

So after beating England at their own game last week, the Argie football team had a little celebration in their dressing room, waving a banner which said “Malvinas are Argentina” (or something like that).

Well, the response was an outburst of “How dare they?” from the UKgov:

“It prompted a fierce response in London as Business Secretary Peter Kyle demanded a FIFA investigation into the matter before (then-BritPM) Sir Keir Starmer publicly backed those calls.”
A FIFA spokesman said: “As is standard procedure, FIFA’s independent Disciplinary Committee is currently assessing the match reports and considering the relevant circumstances before deciding on potential further steps based on the FIFA Disciplinary Code.'”

Yeah, well fuck FIFA, their disciplinary code and the UKgov.

You see, this particular World Cup match was played in the United States of America, where we have a First Amendment — basically guaranteeing the right of the Argies to be as rude and disrespectful as they want.  (I should point out that the Brits still mock the Krauts for having lost the last pair of World Wars, so their peevishness is somewhat ironic.)

So here’s the lesson for the Brits:  freedom of speech sometimes means putting up with stuff that you find offensive.  I know that BritLaw seems to have overridden that simple precept recently — where people can get arrested just for posting naughty things on Teh Intarwebz — but there ya go.  Deal with it.

As for FIFA:  your little disciplinary code doesn’t supersede our laws, so if you don’t want stuff like this to happen during your precious tournaments, feel free to hold your future World Cups in countries that don’t have a First Amendment.

Good luck in North Korea.

Footnote:  The Argies lost the final to Spain (0-1), in the most boring football match ever played.