Tag: Evil Bastards

We Don’ Need To Follow The Steenkin’ Law

Government Thugs, The Gun Thing

Oh, this is jolly:

In an unprecedented move, twenty armed Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) agents carried out a raid on a gun store in Great Falls, Montana, seizing all Form 4473 – documents that record buyer’s information during firearms transactions.

“We have now confirmed that both the IRS and the ATF were at Highwood Creek Outfitters in Great Falls around 7 am this morning. Both the IRS and ATF would not say why they were there,” KMON Radio reported.

“A spokeswoman for the IRS would only say they were there on official IRS business. The ATF says it was providing assistance to the IRS. We attempted to enter the store today and were stopped by agents at the door who would only say that the gun store is closed and will reopen tomorrow,” the news outlet added.

Considering that this raid was conducted under the auspices of the fine folks at the IRS, one would question whether the agents needed to confiscate the 4473 forms — which, lest we forget, contain absolutely no financial information.

However, ’tis an ill wind that blows absolutely no good, and there’s this little snippet:

Highwood Creek Outfitters is America’s largest online firearms and accessories mall, according to its website. The store is known for selling what Van Hoose calls “fun guns,” including AR-15’s and AK-47s.

And they did all that despite my never having heard of them before.  Sadly, I’m not in a position to give them any business at the moment, but if any of you are thinking of making an online purchase of a gunny nature, you might want to give HSO a look.

As for the Gummint thugs… [taking the Fifth here, Boss]

What Woody Said

Big Brother, Surveillance Society

In one of his rare funny moments, Woody Allen once referred to people glued to their cell phones as “connectivity assholes”.  Here’s a story which, if true, provides ample proof of the pitfalls thereof:

Amazon reportedly shut down a customer’s smart home after the delivery driver claimed he heard a racial slur coming through the doorbell, even though no one was home. 

Brandon Jackson, of Baltimore, Maryland, came home on May 25 to find that he had been locked out of his Amazon Echo, which many devices, including his lights, are connected to.

Yeah… so much for that “convenience” that people are always bleating about when the discussion moves to “smart homes”, “self-drive cars” and all that similar nonsense.

So don’t complain when Big Tech, or Big Brother, or Biggus Dikkus turns off your lights, takes your house through “emininent domain” then bends you over the desk and gives it to you good and hard in your connectivity asshole.

Life Lesson

Gummint, Lies and Untruths

…well, not for me, nor for most of my Readers, but this story reminds us why we should never believe what the fucking government tells us:

Michael Shellenberger’s Public today released a blockbuster story, “First Person Sickened By COVID-19 Was Chinese Scientist Who Oversaw “Gain Of Function” Research That Created Virus,” which generously credits Racket. The story cites three government officials in naming scientist Ben Hu, who was in charge of “gain-of-function” research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, as the “patient zero” of the Covid-19 pandemic.

This is a major story, contradicting early official explanations pointing to zoonotic cross-species “spillover” at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, colloquially known as the Wuhan wet market. The mystery bat or pangolin suspected of transmitting the disease to humans at that market was never found. The Public story for the first time asserts the source of contamination: a Wuhan Institute scientist fell ill after exposure to a virus engineered at his place of work.

The implications of this are enormous and represent a major problem for the federal health bureaucracy, several intelligence agencies, and the news media, to say nothing of politicians in both parties (but particularly those on the Democratic side) who’ve deflected public interest from the Wuhan Institute and gain-of-function research. The secrets of both the pandemic’s origin and the reason for America’s at-best-sluggish investigation of same have become the mother of all political footballs, and today’s news is likely to be just the first in a series of loud surprises.

So all that bullshit about “markets” and “bats” was just that:  weapons-grade

My trust in government was always on the low side, having grown up in a totalitarian society.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered that our own American government is, if anything, worse than that.

Trust nobody — and most especially, don’t trust anything the government tells you, when the likely outcome is that they can increase their control over us, with our consent.

Like I said:  a life lesson.

Different Universe, Part 17

Economics

The usual snow job on the economy:

The CPI report shows that inflation rose four percent from last May, which is less than half of what it was at its peak in 2022, when it hit 9.1 percent year-over-year in June. Economic forecasts had predicted inflation would come in at 4.1 percent, meaning that the current economic climate is doing better than expected.

Uh huh.  Considering that our “expectations” were of the Four Riders genre, that doesn’t mean much.  And it gets worse:

However, core CPI – which excludes volatile food and energy prices – rose 5.3 percent from last May, which is a far less-rosy picture of the state of the economy.

Yeah, I’m so glad that the first inflation “estimate” just happens to exclude the two categories which affect ordinary people’s lives the most.  And for the record, I’m still of the mind that the “5.3 percent” inflation rate is only about a third of what I’m seeing at the grocery store — i.e. 15 percent would be closer to the mark, which is about how much my closely-budgeted grocery spend has gone up in the past three months.

By the way: has anyone priced tires recently?  Holy shit.

When the history of this era comes to be written, one of the most egregious falsehoods to be exposed will be the “official” inflation rate.

Down The Toilet

Freaks & Loonies, Legal Stuff, Perverts

That’s what’s going to happen to this poor guy’s business:

A women’s spa, where nudity is compulsory, has been ordered by a judge to admit pre-op trans women with penises after an activist complained when the owner tried to ban them.

Of course, where else but in the Blue Northwest?

The family-owned spa, which has a branch on the outskirts of Seattle and one in Tacoma, is modeled on Jjimjilbang – sex-segregated bath houses in Korea – and offers monthly memberships and day passes.

Needless to say, real women — i.e. those without dangling bits — are probably going to stop frequenting this spa because they don’t want to see hairy penises in a girls-only haven, and the place will soon have to close.

All because some blue-haired trannie freak felt slighted.

In the old days… let me not go there.  On the other hand, why the hell not?

Plus Ça Change…

Marxists, QOTD

I’ve just finished re-reading Barbara Tuchman’s The Proud Tower — which, if you haven’t read yet, I urge you to do so — and despite the fact that Tuchman was a tired old Lefty, she still was of an era where historians relied on facts, uncomfortable though they may be.  Unlike today’s crop of Newspeak toads, for whom the old adage “If the facts don’t conform with the theory, they must be eliminated” is carved into their stony little hearts.

Here’s one such fact, and it’s a quote of then-Speaker of the House Thomas B. Reed (R-Maine), who said of the Progressives of his era:

It was true of Progressives back then, and it’s still more true of their philosophical descendants of today, whether politicians, Greens or the Gender Studies Brigade [some considerable overlap].

Seriously:  think of Guam “tipping over”, the “trillion-dollar coin”, “defunding the police”, “anthropomorphic climate change”, “ESG”, “patriarchal hegemony”, “DEI”, “Green New Deal” and all the other modernist, oh-so fashionable tropes and tell me that these “philosophies” (actually more like religions because they rely on belief rather than substance) are not doing today exactly what Reed ascribed to the mountebanks of his era.

Actually, today’s “progressive” tropes are even more antithetical to knowledge than before, because they insist on ignoring or worse, destroying the fundamentals of civilization’s accrued wisdom — because it’s obvious that it’s only without that wisdom that their policies can survive the first question or challenge.

Even worse, when the time comes to write the history of their many failures, the historians, being of the same tribe, will almost certainly lie and ascribe the causes thereof to “fascists”, “counterrevolutionaries” (an old Marxist standby), “revanchists”, “Trumpists” or whatever their fevered little imaginations can devise — anything other than admit to the inherent fallacies of their policies and the crashing, grinding failures and concomitant miseries caused thereby.

Even Tuchman would weep.

[stupidity erased because embarrassing]