Gun Free Zone

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.

According to Mr. Andy Ngo, this individual was arrested for rioting in Portland.

I am sure that this individual goes to riots because he is into BLUF sub and is hoping to be beaten by police because.

Biden said that HBCUs were having financial problems.

That’s true but the implication that it was due to racism is wrong.  In fact, the problem is due to a lack of racism.

Enrollment at HBCUs is down because black students are choosing to go to non-HBCU colleges and are taking their tuition money with them.

The lack of racism and discrimination has ended the HBCU monopoly on black students.

The biggest loss in enrollment is from legacy students.

HBCUs are the preferred colleges for first generation to go to college black students from black communities, especially working class black communities. The culture shock is less.  Among middle class black kids who grew up in middle class homes with parents who attended college, they are more used to diversity and choose to go to non-HBCUs.

If your parents went to Florida or Alabama A&M, it’s more likely you will go to UF or Alabama Tuscaloosa.

This has been the trend for the last 10 years.

It’s worth supporting HBCUs because of their role in upward mobility for first generation to go to college black students, but don’t blame the HBCU financial problems on racism.