Tag: Government

Work Ethic

Good Stuff, Gummint

The State (i.e. governments large and small) can always find ways to stifle individuality, especially when that individuality manifests itself in young people.  Here’s a recent example:

Bored and looking for something to do this summer, Danny Doherty hatched a plan to raise money for his brother’s hockey team by selling homemade ice cream.

But a few days after setting up a stand and serving up vanilla, shaved chocolate and fluffernutter to about 20 people, Danny’s family received a letter from the Norwood Board of Health ordering it shut down. Town officials had received a complaint and said that the 12-year-old’s scheme violated the Massachusetts Food Code, a state regulation.

No surprises there, this being Massachusetts.  (My only question:  who complained?  Some goody-goody, or someone fronting for the local ice cream shop?  Either way, they need a swift slap.)

Back in the late 1980s/early 1990s, I lived in in one of the Chicagoland suburbs — Palatine, a modest middle-class neighborhood of the kind that’s so Norman Rockwell it’s almost a caricature.  And while my house itself was small, it sat on just over a quarter-acre, which meant a large lawn in the backyard.  Said lawn took well over two hour to cut and edge, and in the short but warm, fecund Chicago summers, the grass grew quickly, meaning it had to be cut at least weekly;  actually, I would cut it about five times a month.  And it was a hot, sweaty business:  Chicago’s summers can be sticky, especially when contrasted with its icy winters.

At that point I was working from home (long before it became the cool thing to do) because the company was based near Fort Lauderdale.  And I really couldn’t afford to spend the time doing the lawn.  Anyway, one afternoon I was just about to go out and cut the thing when the doorbell rang.  When I opened it, there were two boys standing there, aged about ten.

“Cut your lawn for ten bucks?”

Hell, yes.

Whereupon these two little buggers (each had their own, okay, most likely Dad’s lawnmower) cut the lawn — good grief, they ran behind the mowers, and the grass was cut to almost professional standard in just about fifteen minutes.  They didn’t do edging (“Our Dads won’t let us because they say it’s dangerous”) but that was really just a half-hour job, and easily done after 5 o’clock.

“See you again next week, boys?”

They actually sounded surprised.  “You want us to come back?”

Hell, yes.  And over the next couple years, I never cut my own lawn again. And nor did a lot of my neighbors, once I told them about these kids at the next block party.  These boys made an absolute fortune, and worked their tails off.

And if the local council gauleiters  had ever tried to stop these kids from earning some money from good, honest hard work, I do believe that the neighborhood dads would have burned down their offices.  They didn’t interfere, of course, either because they never learned about these budding entrepreneurs or because they just ignored them (as they should).

Now I’m not suggesting that whenever Gummint does what they did to young Danny Doherty above, the neighborhood dads should torch their offices or tar and feather the bastards.  That would be incitement, and I’m never going to do that no sirree not me not ever.

But I sure as hell wouldn’t try to stop those irate folks if they did.  I would offer to hold their coats, however, just as a good neighbor should.

Quiet Skies

Government Thugs, Surveillance Society

Apparently, Tulsi Gabbard is on the dreaded “SSSS” list:

This story began two weeks ago, when the former Hawaii congresswoman returned home after a short trip abroad. In airport after airport, she and her husband Abraham Williams encountered obstacles. First on a flight from Rome to Dallas, then a connecting flight to Austin, and later on different flights for both to cities like Nashville, Orlando, and Atlanta, their boarding passes were marked with the “SSSS” designation, which stands for “Secondary Security Screening Selection.” The “Quad-S” marker is often a sign the traveler has been put on a threat list, and Gabbard and Williams were forced into extensive “random” searches lasting as long as 45 minutes.

“It happened every time I boarded,” says Gabbard. The Iraq war veteran and current Army reservist tends to pack light, but no matter.

“I’ve got a couple of blazers in there, and they’re squeezing every inch of the entire collar, every inch of the sleeves, every inch of the edging of the blazers,” she says. “They’re squeezing or padding down underwear, bras, workout clothes, every inch of every piece of clothing.” Agents unzipped the lining inside the roller board of her suitcase, patting down every inch inside the liner. Gabbard was asked to take every piece of electronics out and turn each on, including her military phone and computer.

I suspect she’s on the SSSS list because of stuff like this:

Not having flown on any airline for many a year, I wouldn’t know if I was (still) on the SSSS list (story here and here) and it doesn’t look like I’ll be doing so anytime soon either.  But should I take to the Friendly  Quiet Skies again, it will be interesting to see if my inclusion has lapsed, so to speak.

I think I’ll pack the 1911 in my checked luggage, just for giggles.

And I wasn’t aware of this little thing.

Speed Bump

Law and Order, Surveillance Society

…and this one isn’t grammatical.

It turns out that when local law enforcement offered the SecServ their drones to overfly the Trump rally in Butler PA, the SS (perhaps unsurprisingly) turned down the offers, repeatedly.

“According to one whistleblower, the night before the rally, U.S. Secret Service repeatedly denied offers from a local law enforcement partner to utilize drone technology to secure the rally. This means that the technology was both available to USSS and able to be deployed to secure the site. Secret Service said no,” Senator Hawley wrote in a letter Thursday to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. “The whistleblower further alleges that after the shooting took place, USSS changed course and asked the local partner to deploy the drone technology to surveil the site in the aftermath of the attack.”

So far, so good.  Fleeing horse, meet stable door:  standard Gummint cock-up.

Here’s what caused me to choke on my morning G&T, though:

The failure to deploy drone technology is all the more concerning since, according to the whistleblower, the drones USSS was offered had the capability not only to identify active shooters but also to help neutralize them.

Wait, WTF?  Are we to understand that the local Barney Fifes in Fucknuckle PA have drones that can take out targets?  Like what the Ukes are using on Russkis, or the CIA uses on Muzzy terrorists?

Fucking hell.  I thought Meal Team Six was bad news…

Or am I misreading the thing?

Many A True Word

Taxes and Theft

Last week I created this snarky meme after the Labour Party won the general election in Britishland:

And it was meant to be a bitter joke.  (The tarty redhead is Labour’s Deputy Prime Minister, Angela Rayner).  So imagine my interest when this little snippet appeared in the news a few days later:

How to protect your money if Labour mounts an inheritance tax raid on pensions

Pensions, for example, have been a safe haven for those who want to pass on their wealth without the taxman taking a cut. And millions of people have ploughed money into their retirement savings with this in mind. But even this last bastion could now fall into the clutches of inheritance tax.

Chancellor Rachel Reeves has been urged by policy wonks to consider an inheritance tax raid on pension pots, amid rising pressure to meet public spending targets. Leading think tanks have told her the move could raise up to £2 billion a year in takings from grieving families.

So, as the title of this post suggests, sometimes the jest turns into reality.

Basically, the takeaway is this:  any chance the Communists can get to steal your money and / or property, they’ll grab it in their greedy little claws.

Too Polite By Half

Bureaucracy, Gummint, Legal Stuff, Politics, Resistance

Here’s a story which is quite heartening:

The people in question are with the American Accountability Foundation in Kentucky, and they are busily engaged in a project that I’ve been hoping to see all throughout the current presidential campaign. Tom Jones of the AAF received a $100,000 grant from the Heritage Foundation to do some important research work. They are poring through the backgrounds of federal workers, starting with the Department of Homeland Security. They are checking public comments and social media posts, looking for swamp dwellers who may be opposed to the policies of Donald Trump should he return to office next year. They plan to publish a list of as many as 100 names later this summer, and those people may have to rethink their future career prospects if Trump returns to the White House.

There are, however, a couple of things which make me do a Lemon Face.  Firstly, while “accountability” is all well and good, what I’d really like to see is some kind of awful consequences for the disloyal (and perhaps criminal and treasonous both) government stooges, especially those who proudly proclaimed that they were doing their best to undermine the Republican administration.

I’ve always said that the State Department implements the foreign policy of the Democratic Party, regardless of which party is in power.  It’s a mordant comment, good for an amused smile, perhaps.

The time for that accommodation is over, or should be.

Just as Trump came to power in 2016 with a pre-vetted list of federal judges ready to be nominated and sworn in, I want him to arrive in the Oval Office in 2025 with a similar list of judges, to be sure — but with another list of Swamp apparatchiks who need, at best to lose their jobs, but preferably with some kind of legal censure — e.g. prosecution — and not just the prospect of losing their little place at the poxy government trough.

That little totalitarian cocksucker Anthony Fauci, for example, needs to spend his last years on earth in some dank federal prison for causing — and admitting he caused — untold harm to American society by his actions as a federal employee.  And he’s just the most egregious example.  There are a lot more than “100 names” who need to be kicked out of government and punished for their disgusting behavior.  Losing one’s job is a pointless “punishment” if all it means is a well-paid talking-head job on NBC or any of the other alphabet soup socialist-supporting media companies.  These bastards need to be punished.  At the very least, they should forfeit their government pensions:  they abused their positions, and don’t deserve to reap any benefits.

I know, I know:  this is not a good precedent to set because it will make people leery of working on government.  That, my friends, is a feature and not a bug.

What I’d like to see in Trump’s very first week as POTUS is a head-of-state summit with Argentina’s Javier Milei, both as an amicable confirmation of shared principle, and an exchange of ideas as to implementation of policy.

It appears that the Socialists — people like Kathy Griffin, Joy Behar and Rachel Maddow — are scurrying around like frightened mice at the prospect of Trump throwing people in jail when he comes to power.  I would advise Trump and his advisors to do precisely that;  just not to waste time with irrelevant nonentities like the above harpies, but to get serious with the actual bad agents like James Clapper, the entire upper management of the Justice Department and the Pentagon, and the authors of this document — for starters.  The State Department, EPA and so on can wait until Year Two of the 47th President’s term.

We don’t need an accounting;  we demand a reckoning.

My Kinda Guy

Government Thugs

Forgotten in the mists of time is the awful totalitarianism perpetrated on us by the fucking dotgov, whether Federal or state, during The Great WuFlu Insanity.  Of course, the legal nonsense — charging, trying and so on — has dragged on and on and persists to this day, but at least there’s been one happy outcome so far:

The co-owner of Atilis Gym in Bellmawr, New Jersey, who fiercely defied tyrannical lockdowns in 2020, has won a monumental victory after a court dismissed all 80 charges against him.

Ian Smith famously reopened his gym in the middle of lockdown, defying Democrat Governor Phil Murphy’s draconian COVID-19 lockdown orders.

At the time, Smith challenged the Murphy administration’s mandates, arguing they were unconstitutional and detrimental to small businesses.

Wait:  80 charges?  Even for the People’s Soviet of Noo Joizee, that’s a little much, don’t you think?

Anyway, here’s the story:

A swarm of police officers burst through the door of Atilis Gym in Bellmawr, New Jersey arrested the owners for violating Governor Murphy’s authoritarian shutdown order.

“Well, this was a first,” Dowlen said in a Facebook post. “I stayed the night in the gym writing, my book clients Ian & Frank were just waking up, I’m gathering my computer & notebooks, just waiting for the guys to come out for a few final questions, and then a SWARM of Camden County Sheriffs & local Bellmawr police (with K-9 units waiting in a vehicle) come bursting thru the door….to me, sitting there, writing, by myself.

Surprisingly:

First & foremost, the law enforcement officers were polite & respectful.

Lucky they were only NJ cops, not the Oz Schutzpolizei.  But it’s a good thing he didn’t have a gun, though, or else the NJ fuzz would have gone all Canberra on his ass.

Anyway, it got worse;  much worse.

The State’s aggressive response did not end with the arrest. In a controversial move, Governor Murphy and his administration seized $165,000 from the gym’s accounts—funds that Smith claims were amassed through donations and apparel sales to support the gym’s legal battles. This act was a punitive strike meant to cripple the gym financially and serve as a stern warning to others who might consider similar defiance.

“Governor Phil Murphy seized 100% of our assets today – $165k, all of which came from donations and apparel sales. This is done in the middle of ongoing litigation defending ourselves against these fines, our 80 charges, the revocation of our business license, and the unconstitutional health department shutdown.⁣ This was never about protection, it was always about control.”

However, since he has been acquitted of all the bullshit charges — with prejudice! — Our Hero has not gone humbly off into obscurity.  No sir.  Instead:

Smith did not mince words, directly challenging Governor Murphy with a phrase that has since gone viral: “Suck my dick Phil Murphy.”

…which is why he’s my kinda guy.