Ummm Okay

From Racist-In-Chief Louis Farrakhan:

“But God has something else for us! Let me tell you what’s gonna happen. Yes, I’m after a separate state. A separate nation. In the ’60s, what was our cry, Rock? We weren’t saying we want to integrate, we were saying ‘It’s nation time!’ Black Power to do what? To integrate a lunch counter? Black Power to build a nation for 40 million — now near 50 million — Black people.”

Errrr Yer Reverendness… Black people already have their own nation.  It’s called “Africa.”  Here are some suggestions for you and the Nation of Islam:
Somalia (100% Muslim), Sudan (97% Muslim), Senegal (96% Muslim). Mali (95% Muslim), Burkina Faso (~60% Muslim), Chad (~60% Muslim), Djibouti (97% Muslim), Gambia (95% Muslim), Guinea (89% Muslim), Niger (98% Muslim), Sierra Leone (~90% Muslim).
Assuming that non-Muslim Black people who want their own country don’t want to live where your Muslim buddies can fuck them over, they can have their pick of the rest of sub-Saharan Africa, e.g. Kenya, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Angola and Mozambique.

And no, you don’t get to turn some large part of the U.S. into some kind mega-Detroit.  You can feel free to leave anytime you want, asshole, but I bet that ordinary Black people don’t want any part of that segregationist bullshit.

Beyond Redemption

When we moved from Chicago to north Texas back in 2002, I have to admit to some mixed feelings.  On the one hand, there was conservatism, no gun-prohibition laws, non-intrusive state government, no union bullshit, no Communist representation in the U.S. House;  and on the other hand: all the above.

But there was this, the dawn view from our apartment in Lakeview:

…and the view to the south (it was a 10th floor corner apartment):

…and let’s not forget the Chicago River (view of my office window, back when I worked downtown):

 

But time has passed, and now we have shit like this:

Deerfield Sen. Julie Morrison introduced Senate Bill 107 on Wednesday. It would prohibit a range of rifles, pistols and shotguns and require every such weapon in the state to be registered with the Illinois State Police. Owners would pay a $25 fee for that registration. A person found in possession of one of the prohibited weapons without registration could face a Class 3 felony, which carries a prison sentence of up to five years and a $25,000 fine.

In other words, you have to register your “illegal” rifle in order to be grandfathered into “forgiveness” of your “crime” — and in return the state of Illinois would promise, cross its heart, never to come and confiscate said rifle in the future.

Uhhhh, sure.

Now I am glad I left (and tossed my Illinois Firearm Owner ID — the hated FOID card — into the Mississippi River on my way down to Texas) — and not for the first time, either.

I could live with the freezing winters, I could even live with the Commie Bitch In The House (Jan Schakowsky).  But as for the rest?  Fuck that.

Uneasy Feeling

Well now, this little development  gives me the Warm ‘N Fuzzies:

This would allow the IRS to meaningfully link tens of millions of tax returns, billions of information returns, and trillions of bank and credit card transactions, phone records and even social media posts. For example, if a U.S. citizen moves money from a Swiss bank to some other offshore bank, then uses credit or debit cards to spend the money in the U.S., Palantir’s software can link those transactions. It could also flag a person whose tax return shows relatively low annual income but whose social-media posts indicate something entirely different.

As Gummint is so fond of saying:

Me, I feel more like this:

…preparatory to this:

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to the range for a little AK-47 time.

Threatening

Although I seldom go out of doors without a hat of some kind, I don’t wear baseball caps because a.) I’m not a baseball player, b.) they’re uncomfortable in hot weather (synthetic material makes me perspire), c.) I’m not eight years old and d.) I’m not a farmer.

However, if it turns out that wearing one of these foul things “triggers” the political sect whom I hate and despise, I might break with a lifelong tradition.

I’ve always been just ornery enough that when someone tells me not to do something, and that thing seems quite innocuous, then I’m driven to do it.   And if the forbidder is a total whackjob, the urge simply intensifies.

I just wish “MAGA” was printed on a fedora or decent straw Panama hat… if anyone knows of such a thing, I’ll wear it.

And as for someone threatening me with violence for wearing the blessed thing… it is, as the kids say, to LOL.

Heeeere Comes Another One

It seems that every day I have to rant about technology and its nefarious outcomes for us ordinary folks.  Here’s the latest:

If you own a Ring doorbell camera system, we’ve got some bad news. The smart home company owned by Amazon, which the internet retail giant shelled out more than $1 billion to acquire, has apparently been violating its customers’ privacy in a pretty shocking way.
A new report from The Intercept quotes unnamed sources who confirm that engineers and executives at Ring have “highly privileged access” to live customer camera feeds, utilizing both Ring’s doorbells as well as its in-home cameras. All that’s apparently required to tap into the live feeds is a customer’s email address. Meaning the company has been so egregiously lax when it comes to security and privacy that even people outside the company could have potentially done this, using merely an email address to begin spying on customers, according to the report.
Within the company, a team that was supposed to have been focused on helping Ring get better at object recognition in videos caught customers in videos doing everything from kissing to firing guns and stealing.
This news, we should add, also comes less than a month after Ring was in the news for a different potential privacy flap. As BGR reported, a new patent application has begun to spur fears that Amazon would use Ring as a tool for creepy surveillance.

I have a suggestion: don’t buy any electronic device made by Amazon.  This would include the Alexa spy system, the Ring spy system and any other so-called “efficent” things that purport to make your life easier, but in fact only make it easier for others to spy on you.

If I had one of these horrible things, the last  video it would ever record is me firing a gun… at the camera.

And I find offerings by the other tech companies (e.g. Google Home, Apple Siri) equally disgusting.  As Pop Mech says:

Companies like Google, and Amazon, and Facebook let us down, but they were always going to. Absent significant changes to the nature of the tech industry or wide-ranging regulation, they always will. The problems arise when we act as though they won’t.

The only way to win is not to play.  And I won’t, unless I can dictate the rules.

Unimaginable

Over at Reason magazine, Ryan Bourne does a scholarly debunking of Rep. Ocasio-Horseface’s suggestion of a top marginal rate of 70% on “the rich”.  Here’s an excerpt:

The idea that the value of rich people to the rest of society rests solely on their tax contributions… is bizarre. In fact, the risk that higher tax rates might deter entrepreneurial activity by reducing the future payoff to innovation should worry us greatly.

In language designed for ordinary citizens, that thesis actually leads to a question: what if rich people (and their expensive tax attorneys) resist the idea that they and their activities are simply money sheep waiting for the government to shear them?

And quite frankly, I have another, more relevant question.  Why the fuck are we even giving any credence or time to anything that this Commie ingenue says?