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Easy Fix

Gummint, Taxes and Theft

So there’s this little back-and-forth between various IRS employees:

A deep state Internal Revenue Service (IRS) official has been attacking President Donald Trump’s agenda after one of her colleagues was ousted for allegedly targeting conservatives.

IRS Appeals Officer Niki Wilkinson commented on a LinkedIn post and claimed Republicans were “fear mongering” when it came to the work of the IRS official whom the Daily Caller on Wednesday identified as Holly Paz.

“Wilkinson made the remarks in a comment on conservative activist Chuck Flint’s post about Holly Paz, a former IRS official who served as a deputy to Lois Lerner. Lerner was head of the IRS division responsible for the Tea Party targeting scandal during the Obama administration,” the report said.

Flint is the president of the Alliance for IRS Accountability. He was quoted in his post as saying, “Paz’s Biden-era pass-through unit is now bludgeoning conservative businesses with fines and must be disbanded. Commissioner Long is flexing his muscles on the IRS Deep State and sending a signal to rogue bureaucrats by placing Paz on leave.”

In response, Wilkinson said, “Such a farce! Interesting how Senators outside the IRS are fear mongering and falsely describing the work. They have no idea what Examiners found in those audits, which in fact exposed fraud or noncompliance in the passthrough area as for years the IRS didn’t effectively audit them — there was a history of ‘no changes’ because Examiners didn’t have the skill or the time to do the work. And Paz was not diving charge of this unit, but rather it was one of many under her umbrella as the LB&I Comm’r.”

Yeah, whatever.  As there are all these claims and counter-claims refuting each other, it’s impossible to divine the truth from the smoke.

I have a modest (Alexandrine) suggestion for a solution:  close down the fucking IRS altogether and fire all IRS employees, to be replaced at some later stage by a minuscule group of newcomers (previous employment at the IRS being an immediate disqualifier).

I don’t actually care what replaces it — 5% national sales tax, [your suggestion here] — but just get rid of these meddling, intrusive bureaucrats who seem to think they own your income when in fact it’s your money and not theirs to control.

Burn down the whole village, not to save it but to save us.

Lottery Odds

Elections, Foreign Affairs, Politics

No, not the lottery;  the odds against this happening by pure coincidence:

Several candidates for the populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) have died in the lead-up to this month’s local elections in the country’s most populous state.

According to the German paper of record Die Welt, at least seven AfD candidates have died ahead of the September 14th elections in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. Germany’s Deutsche Presse-Agentur wire service noted that a total of 16 candidates have died before the upcoming vote. Yet, no other party besides the Eurosceptic right-wing party has suffered more than one death..

And then this:

Authorities have stressed that there is so far no evidence of foul play in any of the deaths.

Considering that there’s a non-zero chance that the “authorities” may have been behind at least some of these deaths… well, okay.

Let’s look at it more closely:

Police have already confirmed natural causes in four of the AfD candidate deaths and said there are so far no indications of foul play in the others.

So (counting on fingers) that leaves a dozen or so “non-natural” causes.

Then there’s the “it happens all the time” rationale:

A North Rhine-Westphalia election commission spokesman told the DPA that the number of deaths was “not significantly higher” than in past elections, with tens of thousands of people running for seats in the state.

Speaking as a one-time analyst of data, though, I’d love to see a per-thousand number of deaths by party affiliation.

I’m not by nature a conspiracy theorist, but when I’m confronted by a low-probability / massively-coincidental series of events, I do become suspicious.  The scale of untimely pre-election and party-specific deaths here is positively Clintonian.

Let me go out on a limb and suggest that the high mortality of AfD candidates is extremely suspicious.

Silliness

Anti-Gun Nannies, Psychos

Here’s one that made me send an extra couple mags’ worth of ammo downrange yesterday:

President Trump has again threatened to take away Rosie O’Donnell’s citizenship, as she has moved to Ireland and is in the process of obtaining Irish citizenship to become a dual citizen.

“As previously mentioned, we are giving serious thought to taking away Rosie O’Donnell’s Citizenship. She is not a Great American and is, in my opinion, incapable of being so!” Trump posted.

And to think I once ridiculed Jimmeh Carter for getting involved in such minutiae as deciding White House parking privileges…

Dear POTUS:  why the fuck are you bothering with this kind of silliness?  Has the DOGE finished its job?  Have you done with Putin?  Are you going to make the Brits pay dearly for their anti-free speech activities?  Have you even started to address the dire state of the national debt, not to mention next year’s budget?  [200 more Presidential / CEO-type high-level issues deleted, for reasons of space]

Stop pissing around with the small stuff, and get serious about the important stuff.

And speaking of stupid shit… this one’s for AG Pam Blondie.

One of the several things that upsets me about the MAGA-Trump Administration is how they can forget that sometimes governmental action not only doesn’t work, but has been proven not to work in the past.  Take this next bit of foolishness, for example:

The Department of Justice is actively exploring a ban on gun possession for transgender individuals in the wake of a mass shooting at a Catholic school by a transgender gunman, Breitbart News reported, citing “multiple sources familiar with the matter.”

The Office of Legal Council has reportedly organized multiple meetings to explore the possibility of denying transgender people access to firearms on grounds of mental illness.

Sigh.

Just a little reminder:  gun bans don’t fucking work.  (If they did, there would be zero gun-related deaths and crimes in Britishland, to take but one example.)  Not only do they not work, but the cost of policing such bans is astronomical.

And just who, pray tell, is going to be the arbiter of “mental illness”?  You? A panel of “experts”?  The local school’s PTA?

Stop wasting your time with “multiple meetings” (because they too don’t work, and waste time withal).

Here’s something that has a far higher chance of success:

Order that all public schools maintain an armed and trained security force on the premises.

What we know for a fact is that even the psychos shy away from playing their little reindeer games when there’s a good chance they’ll be shot dead right before they take aim at someone, or right after they’ve fired their first shot / stabbed their first victim.  (Feel free to check the stats on this:  it will be a far better use of time than these multiple meetings, for starters.)

And to force the gun-fearing wussy school administrators (e.g. in California, New York and Illinois) to comply, make all federal funding dependent on the installation thereof.  (I mean, the Education Department exists for just such a reason, as opposed to promoting the ghastly LGBTOSTFU agenda in said schools with taxpayer money.)

But no, by all means go with what doesn’t work.  If nothing else, it will prove that government, whether conservative, MAGA or Screaming Commies, doesn’t have a fucking clue.

Not that we ever needed such proof.

Security

Drive Time, Old Fartism

I have often — and it must be said, not unreasonably — been accused of being an old stick-in-the-mud who too often prefers the old days and old ways to much of modern life.  Here’s an example.

Back when I first lived in the Chicago suburbs (circa 1987-92), I drove an ancient 1970s Subaru GL like this one (only in nowhere near as good condition):

I don’t remember exactly how many miles it had been driven before I got it, but I suspect it was around the upper-120,000 mark.  This car had the advantages of a) being fully paid-off and b) having astonishingly-frugal gas consumption.

Reliability was likewise excellent, in no small part due to its regular maintenance at the hands of Dave, the cheerful owner of Eurocar Services in Des Plaines.  It was Dave who would call me to explain yet again how this or that part was starting to fail, always mentioning how long I could continue to drive it before it actually did, how much it would cost to fix it, and his recommendation as to when I would have absolutely no choice but to do so.  (He also taught me how to “cheat” my way past the strict Illinois emissions test, because there was no way it would have passed without said cheating.)

In this way, I managed to drive the “Scoobydoo” (his affectionate name for it) for about four more years before finally having to get rid of the thing;  because when your clothes start to smell of exhaust smoke when you get out of your car, it’s usually a sign from God or whoever that The Time Has Come.

I should point out that while Dave owned a computer diagnostic machine for the newer cars which could accommodate it, he was just as happy to work on ancient cars like mine that didn’t.

The above memory was triggered by this little story:

More than a million Range Rover and Jaguar drivers could face huge delays in getting their motors repaired after a devastating cyber-attack crippled Jaguar Land Rover.

The British car manufacturer has become the latest big-named firm to have been hit by hackers.

Bosses at Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) were forced to scramble on Sunday, hastily shutting down global computer systems to protect sensitive information.

Efforts are still ongoing to reboot the company’s stricken systems, with the fallout effectively paralysing dealerships and garages, which can no longer order new parts from JLR.

Mechanics across the Indian-owned firm’s franchised dealership network rely on JLR’s diagnostic tech to identify faults and electronic catalogues to order replacement parts.

However, with these systems still crippled, it means owners of vehicles like the Range Rover, Discover and Defender models, as well as Jaguar sports cars, that need to be repaired are now stuck in limbo. 

JLR has insisted it is working to resolve the issue but warned its retail and production activities have been ‘severely disrupted’. 

It is unclear how long it will take the car builder to restore its IT network.

This would never have happened to my friend Dave, because of course he used to order parts by phone from a local supplier, or (as happened more than once) actually driving over himself to a supplier or junkyard to get what he needed.

Was it as efficient as the process is today?  Of course not.  Was it as vulnerable to outside interference as today’s techno-dependent process?  Also not.

Here’s my take.  If it were possible, I’d drive a 1974 Subaru GL (assume new or low-mileage secondhand) today long before I’d drive a JLR product of any variant — not the least because if your driving needs are relatively modest (as are mine), you can get by very well indeed without all that modernistic, expensive and vulnerable bollocks.

As long as there was a Dave around to maintain it.  And I know that Dave is a vanishing breed;  but I also know that he’s not extinct, and never will be — because there will always be some guys who take pleasure in tinkering with mechanical stuff, and gawd love them for it.

Okay, there are a couple of Jaguar (not “JLR”) cars I’d be equally happy to drive, but they would require a winning lottery ticket.

…and nary a computer chip to be found anywhere in them.  For these cars, there will always be a Dave.