Tag: Evil Bastards

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.

Adding Profit

Corporate Fuckery, Travels

If ever we needed more proof that Big Air (not Congress, that’s a rant for another time) are a bunch of chiseling bastards, here’s the latest:

American Airlines announced Tuesday that it plans to add seatback screens to its aircraft and to increase the number of premium and extra-legroom seating in some aircraft.

I don’t care about the screens because I seldom if ever use them unless it’s to follow the flight’s progress on that little map thingy.

I really care about the seat issue because lest we forget, some twenty or so years ago airlines began reducing seat sizes and cramming the smaller seats into ever-smaller spaces within the planes.  Yeah, the feeling went in Big Air Finance, that’s fine, especially as that enabled them to buy smaller-and-yet-smaller aircraft without losing passenger count.

Now, of course, to ride in their cramped aluminum tubes you have to have the approximate body shape of Victoria Hervey to fit in the seats, coupled with the approximate height of Peter Dinklage to have any kind of legroom.


(photos not drawn to scale;  Dinklage actually comes up
to just above Hervey’s navel)

Now, as customer discontent has grown to a fever pitch — most especially, of course by those poor souls (i.e. everyone who can’t afford the bloated fares of first- and business class) thus cramped into a fetal position for a lengthy flight — American is now installing “premium” seats with “extra legroom”.  (The “premium” refers to the prices they’ll be charging, and the “extra” is how much more you’ll have to pay.)

How much extra?  Here’s an example:

Note that the departure times are different — i.e. different flights — because the earlier flight had sold out of Premium Economy seats.

If the above doesn’t give you the Warm & Fuzzies, then you obviously aren’t an American Airlines accountant.

For the rest of us, however:

At this point, I need to warn y’all that at some time next year I have to fly to the Old Racist Republic — details unimportant, because personal — and I’ll be raffling off several guns to be able to afford the Economy fare (don’t even think about Premium, of course).


(Delta because I refuse to fly on any Muslim airline, fukkem)

Wheeee… eighteen hours in steerage:  I can hardly wait.

Please set your budgets accordingly.

Wait, What?

Crime, Legal Stuff, Two-Minute Hate

Okay, this one got my blood boiling:

A Texas man with a prior murder conviction is accused of running a “full-service drug operation” near several schools where authorities say surveillance showed what appeared to be teenagers purchasing narcotics and fentanyl pills disguised to look like ecstasy.

A convicted murderer was out free on the streets?  IN TEXAS?  How the fuck did that come about?  Why hadn’t he been executed, or at least still be behind bars for the rest of his worthless fucking life?

Also relevant:  whose signature is on the petition for release, and whose signature is on the release authorization?  (Yeah, we’ll probably never know that, because if we did, it could easily come about that the signatories would be dragged out of their house and beaten with iron bars and chains.  In any just society, that is.)

Read the whole thing to get the full horror of it.

Range time.

Difficult Issue

Legal Stuff

I’m faced with an uncomfortable dilemma here.

As any fule kno, when it comes to anti-Semitism, I’m with the Semites — lock, stock and barrel (if necessary).  I don’t think I have to prove that to anyone.

I am also steadfastly against the legal practice of attributing mindset and attitude (animus) towards crime:  murdering someone in cold blood is terrible;  whether the murderer shouts “Die, you Jewish bastard!” or “Bye bye, Jew bitch!” while committing the crime is in my mind irrelevant.  There’s no such thing as doubleplusterrible, in other words.  The crime should be sufficiently punished according to its severity.  (In the second example, are we going to add years onto the sentence for both misogyny and anti-Semitism?  Trebleplusterrible?)

Which is why this situation makes me profoundly uneasy:

Federal prosecutors have charged a man from the Bronx with hate crime offenses alleging he assaulted a security guard and a congregant in a racially motivated attack at a Manhattan synagogue last week.
Larry Montes was arrested following the alleged attack at Central Synagogue on Friday and was charged by New York State.
On Tuesday, the Justice Department charged him with two counts of committing hate crimes, each of which carries a maximum penalty of 10 years’ imprisonment, and one count of damage to religious property resulting in bodily injury, which carries a maximum 20 years’ imprisonment.

I don’t know whether “damage to religious property resulting in bodily injury” carries a heavier sentence in NYfC than does “damage to [any] property resulting in bodily injury” — I’ll leave that for my Powdered Wig Readers to establish — but it shouldn’t.

Once again, I’m going to restate that my personal inclination is to offer additional protection to, say, synagogues;  but I’m not so sure that it should be legal policy.

But given the above, I am also curious to know whether the murder of a White person by a Black person shouting, “Die, cracker!” is punished with the same severity as that of a White person murdering a Black person while shouting “Die, nigger!”

See where all this leads?

Hence my discomfort with the whole issue.

Sneaky Stuff

Corporate Fuckery

From Reader Steve S. via email:

“This is the next step with the ‘add a tip’ option on the kiosks & checkout pads. Shake Shack’s kiosk demonstrates what happens when you don’t have a printed menu, but instead the kiosk displays what the computer is programmed to do. It asks for a ‘tip’, and if you chose ‘zero’, it increases the price of every item ordered by $0.50. As he notes, the kiosk in this case put up a pop-up noting the ‘price adjustment’, but how many kiosks are programmed to do it in the background where you will only see the total?

“I note it is Shake Shack, but have to believe that other vendors will do the same thing as long as they feel they can get away with it.”

I know a basic response to this bullshit.

Pay cash instead of using a card.

This, by the way, will actually have two effects.  Firstly, you won’t be caught up in this little bit of highway robbery.  Secondly, paying cash — actual cash — will remind you just how expensive so-called “convenience” food has become, which may result in you visiting these places on fewer occasions.

Just another way that “convenience” + “technology” = “ripoff”.

Oh, and one last thing:  for most retailers, the extended cost of handling cash is actually higher than paying the card transaction fee.

Yer welcome.

On a personal note, I have to say that I last bought a burger from Shake Shack about four years ago, and was thoroughly unimpressed.  Never again.

Our local BBQ joint has a menu item called a “French Fries Plate”, which consists of a hearty portion of pulled pork, mixed with cheesy fries, for about $14.  That may sound like a lot;  but when I say the portion is “hearty”, I mean that it’s enough to feed both New Wife and me — and $7 each for a takeout meal is not all that bad.  Plus, the food quality is excellent, something few people can say about takeout burgers, from any establishment.