Category: Bad News

Horrible, unpleasant stuff

News Roundup

Bad News, Funny Stuff, Marxists, Mocking Furriners

Little snippets which don’t deserve a full post.

1) Ireland faces months without a government — lucky Ireland.

2) Bernie admits that banning assault rifles is just the start — we already knew that, you Marxist motherfucker, but it’s nice to have you come out and say it.

3) Mayor Pete Butt-plug wants to free 74,000 drug dealers — sounds like an election-winner right there, Homo Boy.  Keep those ideas coming.

4) Make gun companies responsible for gun-related deaths — Joe The Doddering Fondler exercises his inner Swalwell.  I was gonna say more, but Red Flag.  LOL.

5) POTUS wants Pete Rose in the Hall of Fame — get Hillary, Clapper, Comey and all those other coup plotters in jail first, and then we can talk about irrelevancies like this one.  Eye on the ball, Donald.

6) New Guy On The Border — one word, Brian:  landmines.

And finally:

7) Oscars Triumph — for the first time in living memory, I’d actually seen one of the movies nominated for Best Picture before the show (The Irishman), and it sucked.

Snooping Bastards

Bad News, Technology

Longtime Readers know that I detest the way tech companies strip-mine our personal information so they can sell it off to various other companies.  Here’s one take on it:

Over the weekend, The New York Times ran a frightening story about a small company named Clearview AI that can identify the person in a picture someone uploads to its service. The New York Times said Clearview AI has more than 3 billion images “scraped from Facebook, YouTube, Venmo and millions of other websites” and that more than 600 law enforcement agencies have started using it.
The report raises some really valid concerns about our privacy: If a picture of you exists somewhere online, and you participate in a protest or a rally, then it’s plausible law enforcement could upload a picture of you at the rally, run it through the Clearview system and easily find out who you are.

But fear not:

Facebook has a setting that can recognize your face so that you’re automatically suggested as a tag in pictures and video that your friends upload. (It won’t work if a stranger uploads your picture.) It’s not available for everyone, including people under 18. Facebook has been rolling it out in stages, and says it’s turned off by default, but I’ve had it for a while and have no recollection of how or when I turned it on.

  • Open Facebook.com in your web browser.
  • Tap the down arrow on the top right of the page.
  • Choose Settings.
  • Pick Face Recognition from the left side.  If you don’t see it, your account might not have the feature.
  • Next to “Do you want Facebook to be able to recognize you in photos and videos?” select No.

When you do that, Facebook says it will “delete your face recognition template” so you’re no longer recognized.

And if you honestly believe that your “face recognition template” has now actually been deleted, I have some snake oil to sell you, guaranteed to make you live forever, you witless simpleton.

I don’t trust any of these fucking bastards.

Deal-Killer

Bad News, Politics

Oh, this is charming:

By now you’ve probably heard at least a little something about California’s shocking new “freelancer” bill that went into effect January 1, 2020.  Assembly Bill 5 (AB5) is sweeping and vague but basically it redefines the relationship between employers and employees, effectively ending independent contract work and killing the “gig economy”.
…
Independent contractors across the nation could soon be suffering the same fate as their California counterparts.  A federal version has passed through committee and now sits in the House of Representatives waiting for a floor vote.  This is not a drill.  This is real.

As someone who depends utterly on the gig economy to supplement my shitty SocSec income, let’s just say that I’m casting a very baleful eye on this development.

I can’t see this bill making it into law — I can’t believe it would make it through the House, Senate and be signed by POTUS.

Its title is H.R.2474 — the “PRO Act” — and I would recommend that everyone reading this send a letter (not email, those assholes in Congress have installed layers and layers of screeners to ignore us) telling their Congressweasel and Senator to treat this foul bill like the rabid dog it is, and shoot it on sight.

I’m not going to threaten anybody or anything, but if this bullshit makes it into Federal law, I guess we’ll see just how “real” this gets.  I’ve been destitute before, and at age 65 I have no intention of going through that again.

And if any political wiseguy tells me to learn how to code… let’s just say I already know  how to code.  I also know how to grease a fucking rope — and I’ll leave it to someone else to tell me which one I’d rather do.

Speaking Of Licensing Guns

Bad News, Gummint, The Gun Thing

By now we all know what the godless socialists are planning in Virginia, to whit, licensing of gun owners with respect to the following:

An “assault firearm” means a semi-automatic center-fire rifle that expels single or multiple projectiles by action of an explosion of a combustible material that has the ability to accept a detachable magazine and has one of the following characteristics: (i) a folding or telescoping stock; (ii) a pistol grip that protrudes conspicuously beneath the action of the rifle; (iii) a thumbhole stock; (iv) a second handgrip or a protruding grip that can be held by the non-trigger hand; (v) a bayonet mount; (vi) a grenade launcher; (vii) a flare launcher; (viii) a silencer; (ix) a flash suppressor; (x) a muzzle brake; (xi) a muzzle compensator; (xii) a threaded barrel capable of accepting (a) a silencer, (b) a flash suppressor, (c) a muzzle brake, or (d) a muzzle compensator; or (xiii) any characteristic of like kind as enumerated in clauses (i) through (xii).

The little bastard is talking about something like this AR:

or this Dragunov:

or even this AK:

I am so glad I live in Texas;  but that doesn’t mean something similar couldn’t happen here in the future.

This means only one thing…  yep, you read my mind:  a trip to the local Eeevil Loophole Gun Show™ over the weekend for one of those private transactions that the would-be gun confiscaters hate so much.

I call it “civic duty”.  I don’t care what they  call it.

News Roundup

Bad News, Mocking Furriners, Pussification Parade, SHTF

Short — kinda like Michael Bloomberg — takes on the news.

1) Australian Navy Delivers 800 Gallons of Emergency Beer to Bushfire-Hit Town — only 800?  Can’t have been more than a dozen survivors.  At least the Oz squids have their priorities right.  The US Navy would have brought in useless shit like water, without Scotch.

2) Bernie Sanders garners the Slut endorsement — that figures [sic].  Here’s the slut in question:

3) Everybody Blames Trump For Starting The Train Of Events Which Made Iran Shoot Down An Airliner — okay, if we’re going to go back down the “blame” trail, it’s actually Jimmy Carter’s fault in the first place, for letting the murderous ayatollahs take over in Iran.

4) Prince Ginger and Princess Caring-Slut look for supplemental income streams — I think this says it best:

Sharing Rides

Bad News, Legal Stuff

Over in the UK, somebody had an Uber drive from hell:

Uber driver , 51, exposed himself to young female passenger and asked her to perform sex acts on him

What struck me most about the above incident was that it took a whole year to get this asshole into court.  I don’t know if that’s peculiar to Britishland, but I have to think it would have taken less time Over Here.

The other thing I noticed was that the guy was an immigrant from a Muslim country, where such behavior would probably never have seen a courtroom — in fact, the passenger might have been arrested for being out and about unaccompanied by a male relative, had she dared to report the incident.

Still more interesting was the fact that the dickhead thought he could get away with it — that he wouldn’t be reported and even if caught would be let off with a slight reprimand, if that.

No wonder some of my female passengers are a little nervous.

Of course, were I the judge, I’d have sentenced Chester The Molester to a short prison term, but with daily ball-kickings.  And publicized the sentence, pour encourager les autres pervertis.

No doubt someone would have a problem with this.