Where a Hispanic Catholic, and a Computer Geek write about Gun Rights, Self Defense and whatever else we can think about.
It did not matter that I asked for a review on a content they found offensive the second they “temporarily” suspended and then a couple of times more, they simply kept the bullshit that I did not ask for a review, they went ahead and killed it.
And of course, I would never start a duplicate account and behave the same way I was behaving. Nah, Nevah!
It is the summer in late 60’s. Two kindergarten boys roll down the slope between their houses and come to a stop. They climb back to the top and look up at the beautiful blue sky. They pant from running around the yards playing cowboys and indians.
One of them turns to the other and says “What are you going to do when you are drafted? Are you going to Vietnam or are you going to Canada?”
The other boy thinks hard, “Dad is in the Navy. I’m going to join up and be an officer like him.”
“I don’t know what I’m going to do. I might go to Canada.”
War just was. Two young boys discussing what they were going to do in 13 years when they were drafted to go fight in a war that the government refused to call a war. A war that had been going on for decades, even before the US got involved.
The media was peddling the same narratives, the US military was evil. That our soldiers committed atrocities on a regular basis. Just a few years later, in April of 1971, John Kerry, future presidential candidate, testifies in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about the horrible atrocities he witnessed.
At every turn the media delivered a story of failure.
Still a young boy was ready to go to war to defend his country. He didn’t understand all those big words, but his father was fighting for his country and he would go do his father and his country proud.
A small truth that is forgotten, an 18 year old man drafted and sent to Vietnam in this time period had a better chance of living than his civilian counterpart back in the states. Car safety was not as good as it is today. Many young men lost their lives on the streets and highways of this country. More per capita than lost their lives in Vietnam.
Please don’t misunderstand me, war is horrible. It does things to the body and mind that most, thankfully, will never experience and few will understand. I still thank those vets when I meet them. I’ve talked to them when the war was still fresh in their minds. I have huge respect for those that fought and continue to fight for our country.
Note also that my respect is for those that fight for our country, not all that are members of the military fight for our country.
Convicted criminal and Left Winger (but I repat myself) Lula Da Silva, apparently managed to squeeze over President Bolsonaro by the thinnest or margins. Both sides took to the streets and not for the better.
Bolsonaro fans have been blocking roads… and that is pretty much what US Media is showing:
Rodovia Anchieta em São Bernardo do Campo. pic.twitter.com/a0BN3NyoU7
— Islene Boiça (@BoicaIslene) November 1, 2022
? BR-116 – FORTALEZA (CE) começando as paralisações !!!
O foda é que o local é perigoso… rezem por nossos guerreiros caminhoneiros ????? pic.twitter.com/OUlvlSMUwW
— bielconn ta de volta ?? (@bielconnkkk) November 1, 2022
Supporters of Lula are also celebrating on their own way. Nice people, aren’t they?
Narcoterrorists, convicts and gangs in Brazil’s favelas are celebrating Lula’s win over Bolsonaro, who was tough on crime. pic.twitter.com/6MmjBN4tNX
— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) October 31, 2022
Anarchy in Brazil. pic.twitter.com/qeBtIOGaaf
— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) November 1, 2022
FAFO
Era uma vez um petista que do nada resolveu jogar pedras em uma manifestação de apoio a Bolsonaro em Nova Iguaçu. O petista então, cheio razão, apanhou só de tapão. Fim. pic.twitter.com/zDWQXB0ne6
— Eni Aquino (@ENIAQUINO) November 1, 2022
And the standard Latin-American response is on the way:
Na maioria das cidades de #Brasil os movimentos de militares e equipamentos começam a ser vistos, especialmente em #RiodeJaneiro ⤵️ diz-se que a divisão CyberDefense tem todas as evidências de uma fraude digital… pic.twitter.com/mPH6E31oQ6
— Gustavo. (@gustamito22) October 31, 2022
Brazil is gonna be very interesting for a few days.
My latest in @TheAtlantic https://t.co/w6GIOEMhZv
— Emily Oster (@ProfEmilyOster) October 31, 2022
The article linked in the Tweet:
LET’S DECLARE A PANDEMIC AMNESTY
We need to forgive one another for what we did and said when we were in the dark about COVID.
In April 2020, with nothing else to do, my family took an enormous number of hikes. We all wore cloth masks that I had made myself. We had a family hand signal, which the person in the front would use if someone was approaching on the trail and we needed to put on our masks. Once, when another child got too close to my then-4-year-old son on a bridge, he yelled at her “SOCIAL DISTANCING!”
These precautions were totally misguided. In April 2020, no one got the coronavirus from passing someone else hiking. Outdoor transmission was vanishingly rare. Our cloth masks made out of old bandanas wouldn’t have done anything, anyway. But the thing is: We didn’t know.
Some of these choices turned out better than others. To take an example close to my own work, there is an emerging (if not universal) consensus that schools in the U.S. were closed for too long: The health risks of in-school spread were relatively low, whereas the costs to students’ well-being and educational progress were high. The latest figures on learning loss are alarming. But in spring and summer 2020, we had only glimmers of information. Reasonable people—people who cared about children and teachers—advocated on both sides of the reopening debate.
The people who got it right, for whatever reason, may want to gloat. Those who got it wrong, for whatever reason, may feel defensive and retrench into a position that doesn’t accord with the facts. All of this gloating and defensiveness continues to gobble up a lot of social energy and to drive the culture wars, especially on the internet. These discussions are heated, unpleasant and, ultimately, unproductive. In the face of so much uncertainty, getting something right had a hefty element of luck. And, similarly, getting something wrong wasn’t a moral failing. Treating pandemic choices as a scorecard on which some people racked up more points than others is preventing us from moving forward.
We have to put these fights aside and declare a pandemic amnesty. We can leave out the willful purveyors of actual misinformation while forgiving the hard calls that people had no choice but to make with imperfect knowledge. Los Angeles County closed its beaches in summer 2020. Ex post facto, this makes no more sense than my family’s masked hiking trips. But we need to learn from our mistakes and then let them go. We need to forgive the attacks, too.
No.
I remember how those of us who were not Covidians, who did not blindly obey every Fauci pronouncement, were dehumanized.
I remember how pundits and opinionated assholes celebrated the deaths of the unvaccinated.
How they called those of us who resisted masking murderers and should be denied any form of health care and left to die in the streets.
I remember how they cursed us for wanted to put our kids back in school.
We on this blog have systematically cataloged all the destruction they caused.
Setting kids back years.
The cancers and other diseases that went untreated in hospitals that shut down for the COVID wave that never came.
The deaths from overdose and despair from people locked away.
The businesses that shut down and the business owners that went bankrupt.
In the end we were vindicated.
They narrative has collapsed.
What they did caused more harm to children than it did good.
They vaccines were useless to stop the spread and vaccine policies did more harm than good.
They destroyed the economy and caused the worst inflation in generations.
Had we done nothing in reaction to COVID we’d be better off.
Those who were going to get it and die did, regardless of lock downs and mask mandates.
Perhaps more lives would have been saved had drugs like Ivermectin not become political footballs.
And now that we know they everything they did caused pain and suffering beyond our ability to quantity it and didn’t save one life, they want amnesty and forgiveness.
No.
I want retribution.
I want them to suffer for how they made us suffer.
I want ditches filled with the bodies of Covidisns.
And if you read the replies to that Tweet, I am not alone.
Amnesty is the worst think they could ask for.
It will only make us madder.
When justice fails, people will take it into their own hands.
We can either have truth and reconciliation or we can have frontier justice.
But what we can’t have is the people who caused this mess to be forgiven and to maintain the status quo.
It seems one of the new Cause Celebres is ranting against tall vehicles because allegedly the drivers cannot see pedestrians and may run over them.
If you truly fear this possible event, I am going to give you an advice that dates back to the days of the Model T: Look both ways before you cross the street. And go to the eye doctor if you cannot see one of these things coming.
That you are a walking mass of insecurities is not the problem of the owner of the truck or anybody else. That is your crap to deal with, so seek mental help.
PS: Never play chicken or stupid with any moving vehicle.
Discrimination exists. Anybody that tells you it doesn’t is lying. Some discrimination is good, some is bad. People telling you that all discrimination is bad are ignorant, lying, and/or evil.
You use discrimination when you pick one apple over another. You use it when you pick one barber shop over another. You use it when you pick one route over another. You use it any time you choose between two or more options.
Since The Panic one of my clients left. Because of that I no longer drive into the city. Because of that it is now inconvenient to use my old barber. I <b>needed</b> a haircut. There is a newish shop in town. I tried four times to get a haircut there. She was booked and told me to go away and come back some other time or make an appointment. Twice I showed up to find the shop closed. Twice I was told she was booked and to go away.
My lady was with me for the last one. When asked she told me her opinion, she didn’t like the lady. I didn’t like the lady. I didn’t like the shop.
Google is my friend and with a little looking I found another local barbershop. It was actually a little closer. Went there. It was hard to find, inside a business building. No real outside signs. I walk in and it feels right.
There are two young men and one immediately leaps up to get his chair ready. It is well lit and decorated with American Flags, some Vet Honors, Police Patch board, hunting stuff over one chair with fake (plastic) rifles. Over the other chair were car things. Everything about the shop yelled “We Love Our Country!”
And indeed they do.
Was I discriminating against a female when I choose a male barber over her? No. I was discriminating over the type of shop and the difference in attitudes. Turns out that the guy that did my hair is a “master barber” and interned under a his father-in-law, a “Master Barber Instructor”. Didn’t know that was a thing.
Yeah, it was a good haircut. I’ll be going back next month.
Discrimination works.
Discriminating based on inmutable external characteristics is not as good. You might agree that discriminating over a person in confined to a wheelchair would be bad. Just because they are in a wheelchair doesn’t mean they can’t do the job.
These are not auditions for the next Police Academy sequel. This is an actual IRS recruiting program: pic.twitter.com/KUFqxmbDpW
— Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) August 16, 2022
Note that the fact checkers say this isn’t really IRS training agents. Nor is it a recruiting exercise, instead it is an opportunity for college students to pretend to be IRS CI agents to help convince these accounting students to join the IRS, NOT recruiting which is doing things with people in order to get them to join your organization.
I have no problem with working with people of other races, genders, or religions. That is because I do discriminate based on merit. If you are good at your job, I do not care what you look like, who your partner is, or what god(s) you do or do not worship.
When discrimination is because of an immutable trait, then it starts to become bad. If you refuse to hire somebody because they are black, that is a bad discrimination. If you refuse to hire somebody because the are a female or because the are a male, that is a bad discrimination.
We just watched Something the Lord Made, based on the life and work of Alfred Blalock and Vivien Thomas. The casual discrimination contained within was saddening. Dr. Blalock didn’t discriminate against Thomas, but he didn’t see the institutional discrimination that was taking place.
I did grow up in a time where that casual discrimination still existed. In highschool I hung out with the “smart” crowd. I already knew I was going to be going to University to study Computer Science. In preparation I took a personal typing course. I was the only male in the class.
In talking to one of my friends, also one of the smart crowd, I found that she was also going into computer science. I asked her why she didn’t take a typing class.
“If I take a typing class I will become a secretary for the rest of my life.”
That was a casual discrimination. So she showed up at University with a significant handicap for being a computer science. She couldn’t “talk” to the computers easily. If you can’t touch type at 50+ WPM including special characters, you aren’t going to be doing very well in computer science. You can certainly do ok as a copy paste person, but there is now way you can write hundreds of lines of code in a day if you can’t type.
(Nor can you write long blog entries in a timely fashion.)
Because the Democrats refused to stop discriminating against blacks we ad to pass the 13th and 14th amendments and later the Republicans pushed the Civil Rights Bill through Congress and forced LBJ to sign it into law. A good thing.
The law basically says that you can discriminate against people based on immutable characteristics.
Enter the world of word redefinition. According to the left, a person is born gay. Since they are born gay and it can’t be changed then it is an immutable characteristic and as such is protected via the anti-discrimination laws.
Well it turns out that the won that battle. Mostly because nobody was really fighting it all that hard. Yes there were some people that thought that religious tracts said that homosexuality was a sin. Yes there were people that were badly hurt because they were homosexuals. In general, unless you flaunted it in the work place nobody knew, nobody cared.
Unfortunately we ended up in a situation where “You will be forced to care.” The act of discriminating morphed from actively discriminating to not celebrating enough.
And then we ran into the issue of anti-discrimination laws vs. the rights of people to choose who their clients are.
If somebody comes to us and requests that we do work for them, we can flat out refuse. A customer came to a client, they wanted a site to facilitate getting an escort for events. If you were a successful but fat slob, you could go to them and have some eye candy on your arm when you went to the awards ceremony. Everything appeared to be on the up and up. They had both male and female escorts. Everybody seemed to be of age. Everything was strictly of a non-sexual nature.
My client almost refused this customer. One of the devs had an “ick” moment. In the end, my client excepted and that customer was a customer for a good many years, paying well. At no time did it ever appear that they did anything even approaching illegal.
We have the right to reject a client for any or no reason. Except…
In Colorado they have an Anti-Discrimination Act. This was used to attempt to drive Masterpiece Cakeshop out of business in retribution for refusing to make a custom wedding cake for a long time customer. The baker had been doing business with this gay couple for years. When they were able to get married they came to Masterpiece Cakeshop and requested a custom wedding cake.
The baker told them that he would not make them a custom cake but that they were free to choose from any of the other wedding cakes his company made. He also suggested another bakery which had no religious beliefs stopping them from making custom wedding cakes for same sex marrages.
This went all the way to the supreme court and in 2018 they issued their opinion
Held: The Commission’s actions in this case violated the Free Exercise Clause. Pp. 9–18.
(a) The laws and the Constitution can, and in some instances must, protect gay persons and gay couples in the exercise of their civil rights, but religious and philosophical objections to gay marriage are protected views and in some instances protected forms of expression. See Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U. S. ___, ___. While it is unexceptional that Colorado law can protect gay persons in acquiring products and services on the same terms and conditions as are offered to other members of the public, the law must be applied in a manner that is neutral toward religion. To Phillips, his claim that using his artistic skills to make an expressive statement, a wedding endorsement in his own voice and of his own creation, has a significant First Amendment speech component and implicates his deep and sincere religious beliefs. His dilemma was understandable in 2012, which was before Colorado recognized the validity of gay marriages performed in the State and before this Court issued United States v.
Windsor, 570 U. S. 744, or Obergefell. Given the State’s position at the time, there is some force to Phillips’ argument that he was not unreasonable in deeming his decision lawful. State law at the time also afforded storekeepers some latitude to decline to create specific messages they considered offensive. Indeed, while the instant enforcement proceedings were pending, the State Civil Rights Division concluded in at least three cases that a baker acted lawfully in declining to create cakes with decorations that demeaned gay persons or gay marriages. Phillips too was entitled to a neutral and respectful consideration of his claims in all the circumstances of the case. Pp. 9–12.
This meant that the Supreme court said that Rights guaranteed by the Constitution could not be usurped by state laws, even if those laws were designed to stop discrimination.
So we now walk a delicate line. If you belong to a religion that hates white Christian Men, does that mean you can discriminate against white Christian Men? Likely “no” as discrimination because of race is Unconstitutional. Your right to be free of discrimination because of your race is balanced against his right to practice his religion free from government interference.
In 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis the issue is back again. In this case 303 Creative is a web designer that creates websites celebrating marriage. She is refusing to create a website to celebrate a gay marriage because her religious beliefs say that it is not a real marriage.
We know that separate but equal doesn’t work. If a employer was discriminating against a openly gay person, is that a violation of that person’s rights? What if it is a Catholic School and they have a religious requirement that all employees act in keeping with the morals of the church? Since the church believes that homosexuality is a sin this means that the school will not higher homosexuals.
Is that discrimination?
In some cases it seems simple enough. If there are 1000s of web-designers that are willing to do the web page, is there really cause to force this particular one to do the site?
And how do you force somebody to do their best work when they are doing it under duress?
I don’t think there is a simple answer.
