Tag: Things that totally suck

Outright Theft

Taxes and Theft

Here’s a little snippet that caught my eye briefly, then buzzed around in my subconscious until it turned into a raging tornado.

Inheritance tax receipts increased to £5.2billion in the eight months from April to November, data from HM Revenue & Customs reveals.

This marks a £400million increase from the same period a year ago, and continues the upward trend over the last decade.

Last month, the Chancellor shied away from slashing inheritance tax in the Autumn Statement, as it emerged the levy is on track to raise nearly £10billion a year by the end of the decade.

The body text concerns me hardly at all because it’s Britishland, and for centuries their governments have always stolen from the country’s wealthier citizens.

It was really just the first two words which snagged me like an errant fish hook.

Here’s how it’s defined by our own beloved IRS:

The Estate Tax is a tax on your right to transfer property at your death. It consists of an accounting of everything you own or have certain interests in at the date of death. The fair market value of these items is used, not necessarily what you paid for them or what their values were when you acquired them.

There are a whole bunch more words which on the surface are supposed to clarify the matter, but which in true IRS form serve only to create more questions, to be clarified by tax accountants and lawyers, and which can be re-interpreted (in the State’s interests, natch) by IRS agents in any way they choose.

Yeah, you have a right to transfer property — your own private property, how nice that they call it a “right” — but that right can be taxed (is it then still a right?) because reasons.

Basically, the State is saying that your private property isn’t really yours, it belongs to the State and therefore they are entitled to a piece of it.

Yeah, I know, it really only applies to “the rich” and we little peasants shouldn’t worry our silly little heads about it.  (The ceiling for application of the death tax is currently set at an estate value greater than $13.6 million.)

Even among people not affected by the estate tax, it is one of the most hated taxes in the nation.  Worse still, it used to cost the State more in the collection thereof than the income it generated — in fact, it only recently “broke even”, and now the revenue : cost relationship stands at something like 1.24 ($1.24 dollars is collected for every dollar it costs to collect it).

If ever there’s a piece of governmental thievery which needs to be taken outside and shot in the back of the neck, this one is it.  (Don’t even ask me about the politicians who support it and the government agents who collect it, because my response would put me on the Naughty List.)

Yes I know, there is a difference between “inheritance” taxes and “estate” taxes.  Regardless of how the godless IRS defines it or how/when it gets collected, however, the principle is the same for both.

Dept. Of Righteous Shootings – International Division

Anti-Gun Nannies, Righteous Shootings

Here’s one Righteous Shooting that has had an unhappy ending:

Mario Roggero shot at three thieves in Grinzane Cavour on April 28, 2021 after they entered his store, bound his daughter’s hands behind her back, threatened to kill his wife and helped themselves to expensive jewellery and watches.

Fearing for his life, Roggero was seen on CCTV chasing them out of the shop and shooting at least five times.

Andrea Spinelli and Giuseppe Mazzarino died a few yards from the shop entrance, one in the street and the other on the corner with a side street. A third robber was injured and later arrested.

Of course, had this happened in, say, Texas and not in Yurp, there’d be parades in his honor and several attaboys from the police (and me, for instance) for ridding society of three violent assholes.  Instead:

Roggero has been sentenced to 17 years in prison.

Disgusting.  But not entirely unexpected in gun-hating Europe.

Also, in Texas the asshole prosecutors would be facing all sorts of anger from the voters and almost certain loss of office;  but in Yurp, they’re quite happy to lick the chains that enslave them.

Range time, Kim?  I think so.

Update:  And it gets worse.

Looking Backside

Sports, Wokism

Now that the 2023 Formula 1 season has ended, Max Verstappen has been crowned King Of All Drivers, etc., some questions still remain.

Asks Onetime Drummer Knob:

Simple answer:  Liberty fucking Media.

Long answer:  Liberty fucking Media, a bunch of woketard American businessmen who bought into the trope that grid girls were “exploiting” womyns and glorifying “unnaturally beautiful” women because of the race organizers’ consistent refusal to make grid girls “more representative” of womyns by adding Lizzo-style fatties to the mix.

Imagine introducing this:

…to this:

…and I think you’ll see where I’m going, here.

So Liberty fucking Media just banned the whole institution from F1, the wokist assholes.  Which worked everywhere except Monaco, where the race organizers told them to take a hike.

Expect to see Monaco dropped from the F1 circuit at some point soon.  Oh there’ll be Reasons, e.g. “the Monaco streets are too narrow to race the new F1 cars*”, but it’s going to happen.

*The streets aren’t too narrow;  it’s the cars that have got fat and bloated.

…like Lizzo vs. the old-style grid girls.

Keeping It Anonymous

Big Brother, Deep Thoughts, Rights

POTUS-wannabe Nikki Haley and some others have come right out and said that Internet anonymity should be banned.

I think that’s bullshit, despite the fact that I myself have eschewed Internet anonymity (for the most personal of reasons).  I think that while anonymity can breed mischief, it can also protect someone from retaliation when, for example, shining light on the inner workings of an institution.

Whistle-blowers in large institutions (especially government and large corporations) would almost certainly be silenced because of (justified) fears that they’d lose their job by so doing — even if they were exposing extreme malfeasance or negligence.  That cannot be a good thing.

Of course, anonymity affords trolls and other such excrescences the ability to say awful things — such as defamation or character assassination — not to mention unacceptable utterances such as… racism?

Oh yeah, and that’s the problem.  Because the minute you say “You can say this and not that”, there’s a little question of who decides the parameters of accepted speech.

We have a First Amendment that addresses that issue, I believe, and it was thoroughly covered in the Anti-Federalist by — ho! — the anonymous “Brutus”.

There is a vulnerability in that freedom, of course, just as there’s vulnerability in all our social and political freedoms.  But confining ourselves to speech for a moment, we know the old adage that a lie travels round the world before the truth can get out of bed, and anonymity is the prime facilitator thereof.

Online commenter “Fred_The_Wise” can post on Xwitter that he has proof that Bill Clinton is a serial molester of underage girls, and even Clinton’s feral lawyers would have a problem stopping that “untruth” from spreading and “contaminating” Clinton’s good name.  “Kim du Toit” can do no such thing, of course, unless he has the actual proof that Bill Clinton is such a pervert.

The problem, as we all know, is that “Fred_The_Wise”, even if he has actual proof of said molestation, is not going to be the next “suicide” at the hands of the Clinton “Hit Squad” because nobody knows who he is;  whereas “Kim du Toit” would have to be extremely careful of slippery soap in the shower and random nooses hanging from trees, if you get my drift.

That “Fred_The_Wise” might just be indulging in a little gratuitous character assassination is just a malevolent by-product of the freedom of speech.

Which is terrible, but unfortunately for goons like Nikki Haley, they’re just going to have to live with it, as we all have to do.

Teacher, Teacher

Education

Via Insty, I see that another teacher at the same school has been canned for her side gig:

A second teacher at a small Missouri high school has landed in hot water for supplementing her income by peddling porn on OnlyFans — after a student slipped a note under her classroom door that they “knew her secret,” according to a report.

Megan Gaither, 31, an English teacher and varsity cheerleading coach at St. Clair High School, told the Post-Dispatch that she was put on leave Friday after her X-rated moonlighting job was revealed.

Gaither said she joined the subscription-based site in May to help pay back more than $125,000 in student loans. Her total pay last year, including a coaching stipend, was about $47,500, the paper reported.

Her colleague Brianna Coppage, a former freshman and sophomore English teacher at the school, recently resigned to devote all her time to porn after she was placed on leave when it was revealed she was running an OnlyFans page with her husband.

It’s only fans fair to see what all the fuss is about:

I know:  cue the “They didn’t look like that back in the day when I was using a quill to write on papyrus!”  wails.

My question is of a different nature.  How the hell did she expect to pay back $125,000 in student loans on a teacher’s salary anyway?  (Corollary:  what kind of non-medical / legal degree ends up costing well over a hundred grand?)

Look, I’m no prude, but I am a realist.  The appearance of subscriber sites like OnlyFans has given women a non-academic economic opportunity.  Low up-front cost (a camera, access to a streaming outlet) and away we go.

Granted, one needs to have a fairly relaxed set of morals and (perhaps) a willing partner (or two, if we’re going to get really adventurous).  But given the apparent lack of modesty and morality among young women today, that doesn’t seem to be much of a problem.

And being even more realistic, an OnlyFans gig is a million times safer than other prostitution options, which involve walking the streets and being at risk from all those Green River Killer wannabes, not to mention the chances of being abducted and sold to some Arab in a Gulf state.

At least we have equal opportunity here, among women anyway.  Unlike a “straight” movie career, looks aren’t that important because, let’s face it, there are no limits to male depravity — okay, male tastes — in this kind of thing.  Even someone who looks like Hillary Clinton will find a willing (and paying) audience in the “GILF” world.

Sorry about that, but you get my point.  Even the most hardened, tattooed and pierced chick is going to be guaranteed an audience that is not confined to still pics on hotbikerbabes.com;  in fact, that seems to be a positive advantage.

Anyway, before this post turns into a treatise, I deplore the fact that people who are supposedly “educating” our kids academically are in fact giving them another kind of education altogether.  Witness the fact that somehow, the little sneaks in the above article seemed to have had no problem in not only finding and identifying Teacher Dearest on OnlyFans — a whole ‘nother topic all by itself:  what the fuck were teenage boys doing on OnlyFans?  where did they get the money?  where were their parents? — but these boys were apparently going to blackmail the hapless teachers (which has happened before).

For all the opprobrium heaped on the religious schools of yore (I know, lust-filled Catholic priests and nuns with rulers blah blah blah), I can’t help thinking that Napoleon had a point:  let the Church educate children until age 12, and then toss the little shits out into the world to earn a living, was his dictum,  Certainly, cossetting them in schools until age 24 (which is what we have today) doesn’t seem to be working that well for them either.

It’s a little sad to think that the kids in the above pic are going to end up with untold thousands in tuition debt, and only the girl on the end is going to have the OnlyFans option to pay it off.

On the other hand, maybe that’s all they deserve.

“Modern”

Fine Art, Modernism

Whenever one is confronted with the random squiggles and daubs that are a feature of “modern” art, there is an irresistible impulse to say dismissively “Looks like something my kid could do”.

Because it’s true.

I defy anyone to argue otherwise when seeing this travesty in what is quite possibly the world’s most cultured city.  (via Insty, thankee Sarah… I think)

Fucking hell.