Gun Free Zone

A number of conservative websites and Twitter users I like are mad that the former CEO of Twitter said this:

Me-first capitalists who think you can separate society from business are going to be the first people lined up against the wall and shot in the revolution. I’ll happily provide video commentary.

— dick costolo (@dickc) October 1, 2020

The replies are all…

“Millionaire capital hypocrite wants to shoot other capitalists.”

Sorry, but no.

I am a capitalist, but I have come to hate the Capitalism Uber Alles that some on the Right have embraced.

“Me-first” capitalists are the CEOs who lay off an entirely factory, outsource production, kill a small town, and drive thousands into bankruptcy to pocket a fat bonus.

And yes, when the last American factory worker is laid off so the next holding company manager can make another billion, I suspect a lot of people will be stood against the wall.

Capitalists who create and innovate, that make money providing good and services that people want are good.

It’s the capitalists who lay off, leverage buyout, and outsource their way to wealth, leaving a wake of misery and destitution behind them that I have a problem with.

If conservatives can’t understand that difference and understand why the latter is bad, then we deserve the socialist revolution.

Let me put it to you like this.

The town of Ilion, New York is dead and a 204 year old American company is no more, all because the half dozen guys who owned Cerberus Capital pocketed $600 million in Remington’s money.

I guess you’re okay with that because capitalism uber alles.

Yes, you keep trusting the USPS for your delicates, see what happens.

There was a meme floating around about how the Postal Service does not advise sending cash by mail and AFP did a “fact check” on the meme and sort of tagging it as as false, but there is something interesting in the Fact Check.

AFP does the usual job of trying to dismiss the fears of Mail-In Voting even including the President, but the quote from an USPS  spokesman makes me wonder how was the question asked.

David Partenheimer, a spokesman for USPS, told AFP by email: “Regarding sending cash in the mail, no, we do not prohibit it and continue to advise customers about the options they have.” (Bold are mine)

The meme did not say prohibit but advise. I have the strange feeling that our friends at AFP kinda/sorta may have fibbed just a tad to make politics via their “fact check.” But just a little.

And next comes something that we can do with mailed cash that we  should not have to do with Mail In  Ballots.

Partenheimer also said that cash sent through the mail can be insured for up to $15, or up to $50,000 for Registered Mail.

Can we send out Mail In votes registered and insured up to $50,000? Wouldn’t that be a modern equivalent of a poll tax? If you create a deficient system that will not guarantee a Constitutional right unless you pay a fee, that would be a violation of Civil rights, but as usual, IANAL.

Anyway, I am voting in effing person this year, I am having serious trust issues anyway. What the hell, I am just ranting over here.

From The Hill:

California approves task force to consider paying reparations for slavery

California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) signed a bill Wednesday approving a task force to consider paying reparations for slavery.

Newsom said the bipartisan support for the bill, which passed in the state Senate on a 33-3 vote last month, is “proving a paradigm that we hope will be resonant all across the United States.”

The bill will require a commission study the lingering impact of slavery in the state and make recommendations to lawmakers by July 2023. The recommendations should include details on what form of compensation should be awarded as well as its recipients.

“California has come to terms with many of its issues, but it has yet to come to term with its role in slavery,” said Assemblywoman Shirley Weber, a Democrat who authored the bill. 

California was admitted as a free state. If California owes anything to any minority group, it’s the Chinese, but you know that’s not what they are talking about.

So what happens if they decide that California will pay reparations?

How many people who would qualify for reparations would move to California?

How many people who would pay into a reparations fund but not get reparations and leave.

Now I’m not suggesting the people who would move to California for reparations are bad or malicious, they are just humans as susceptible to perverse incentives as the rest of us.

What I do know is such a system would bankrupt California fast,  assuming there is anything left of the state that isn’t burned down by that point.

This is an excerpt from the Smithsonian Magazine about the infamous meetings of Mafia Capos in Apalachin, Tioga County in New York on November 14, 1957.

“That meeting literally changed the course of history,” writes Michael Newton in The Mafia at Apalachin, 1957. The arrested men were soon recognized as powerful members of the Mafia, having gathered to discuss the logistics and control of their criminal syndicate. The aftershocks of the raid at Apalachin upended the criminal justice system, forced the Department of Justice to revise their policies, and proved to the American public that the Mafia, whose existence the FBI had vehemently denied, was real. All while spending decades building up legitimate businesses, these mafiosi engaged in racketeering, loansharking, narcotics distribution and bribing public officials.

See that? It is 1957 and the official position of the Federal Bureau of Investigation was that the Mafia did not exist, even though at this time, there has been plenty of evidence otherwise for at least the previous 5 decades.

A newspaper clip from July 9, 1901.

Some of the most notorious cases of extorsion come from the Mafia’s custom of setting tenements on fire as reprisal against those building owners who did not pay for the privilege of being “protected by the thugs. Unfortunately, several times the poor people living inside at the time of the fire, did not have  chance to get out and perished in the flames, some of the “incendiary fires” would be classified today as Mass Murder.

The FBI is founded  on July 26, 1908, well after the Mafia had hit the papers plenty, but it takes it almost 5 decades to acknowledge there is a Mafia in the United States. Do you think I give any seriousness at the actual director of the agency discarding Antifa’s threat and characterizing “White Supremacists” as a bigger threat?

And if you think going back over a century does not mean much, I remind you of a closer fuck up by the FBI and other agencies not recognizing and acting upon threats they had info about and resulted in catastrophic consequences. You may have heard about a event called the terrorists  attacks of September 11, 2001?

PS: And if you are thinking about I left out the infamous Italian Black Hand, you are right, I did. They go back  at least till the mid 1890s, but I left them out to concentrate just on the Mafia as mentioned in the papers. I did not want to get too longwinded explaining both criminal enterprises. 

During the shit-show of the debate, the President and Biden argued over Antifa.

Biden made the point that the FBI director said the real threat is from white supremacists.

The Nation published this article:

As Trump Equivocates on White Supremacy, the FBI Warns of Right-Wing Terror

Asked at yesterday’s presidential debate if he would condemn white supremacist violence by groups like the Proud Boys, President Trump was defiant, remarking: “Almost everything I see is from the left-wing, not the right-wing.” But that very same day, the FBI issued an intelligence report warning of an imminent “violent extremist threat” posed by a far-right militia that includes white supremacists—identifying the current election period up to the 2021 inauguration as a “potential flashpoint.”

The report, obtained exclusively by The Nation and titled “Boogaloo Adherents Likely Increasing Anti-Government Violent Rhetoric and Activities, Increasing Domestic Violent Extremist Threat in the FBI Dallas Area of Responsibility,” warns of the threat posed by the far-right militia group known as the “Boogaloos.” Marked FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY and LAW ENFORCEMENT SENSITIVE, the document was prepared by the FBI’s Dallas Field Office and is dated September 29, 2020. It draws on a wide array of intelligence sources, making specific mention of human sources—suggesting that the Bureau may have confidential informants within the group. The document points to several catalysts for the rise in the group’s membership, including resentment over perceived government overreach embodied by the Covid-19 shutdown and the presidential election.

I’m don’t want to sound like a conspiracy theory nut job, but I really don’t think that FBI threat assessments are accurate.

We know that high ranking people within the FBI conspired with Hillary and Obama to spy on Trump using fabricated evidence of Russian interference.

Why should we believe that the FBI threat assessments are based on fact and not the desire to push a narrative and make Trump look bad?

The damage caused by rioters since the start of the George Floyd protests have cost insurance companies $2 Billion.

We have watched live-streams of protesters trying to set government buildings on fire, setting private business on fire, throwing firebombs and IEDs at law enforcement, and threatening people in their homes, but the FBI doesn’t warn of that threat as much as the “imminent threat of right-wing or white supremacist violence” which never seems to materialize.  Especially the “right-wing violence.”

I feel like this meme sums up the situation perfectly:

Is the FBI doing to just to undermine Trump’s talking points?

I don’t know.

I want to make this perfectly clear, I am not defending white supremacists in any way.  During the lockdown our Synagogue was vandalized here in Huntsville, so I know that it exists and is a threat.

However, so far the bill for the cleanup of Antia violence could buy an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer while all the guys in Hawaiian shirts with Pepe frog morale patches haven’t broken a window between them.

Only an idiot messes with a woman while doing ablutions. That is one the reasons married men will not buy a domicile without at least one and a half bathrooms.

My wife has one of them flat irons and I do believe you can crisp a strip of bacon under 15 seconds with that thing. Imagine what can it applied to your body.

Then again, they need to support its clientele.