Not Your Money

Upset that multinational corporations use such things as legal tax havens and the law to minimize their tax burden, the Germans want to impose some sort of “international” tax on technology companies like Google and Amazon.

“We need a minumum tax rate valid globally which no state can get out of (applying),” Scholz, a social democrat in conservative Chancellor Angela Merkel’s coalition government, told the “Welt am Sonntag” weekly.
Europe is trying to devise a strategy to tax profits from the likes of Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple and digital platforms such as YouTube and Airbnb which currently manage to keep fiscal exposure to a bare minimum.
Digital platforms “aggravate a problem which we know well from globalisation and which we are trying to counter — the shifting of profits to fiscally beneficial regions,” said Scholz.

Of course they do.  In the minds of statists and the governments they support, the State owns all capital and corporations and individuals have no right to avoid (note: not evade) paying the taxes said governments feel they are owed.

Shareholders of said corporations, however, insist on the companies’ avoidance of paying unnecessary taxes.

Mind you, I’m anything but a fan of Big Tech myself, the poxy monopolists;  but given the option between Big Tech and Big Government… no prizes for guessing my choice here.  To paraphrase Trey Parker (of South Park fame):  I hate Big Tech; but I really hate Big Government, and the foul neo-socialist European governments most of all.

Threats

Some fuckwit sent me one of these email messages the other day.  I don’t know what he/she expected me to do, but I ignored it.  Then I got a follow-up email, threatening me with still worse consequences if I didn’t pay up, whereupon I replied as follows (using an anonymized go-between server):

I don’t know what you expected to get from me, but instead of money, here’s my response:
Do what you want, then fuck off and die.  Preferably from some painful cancer.  Even better, I hope your entire family dies from the same illness.
P.S. What you referred to as my “password”, isn’t.  You’re not even competent enough to threaten me.

Sheesh.  They must think I’m vulnerable, or something.  I wish I could spend ten minutes with one of these people — just me and a Sawzall.

Quote Of The Day

From Glenn Reynolds, a few words of level-headed wisdom:

“When Saudis kill a Saudi in Turkey, it’s not hugely resonant. Sure, top American journalists care — because he was not just a journalist (the Saudis have killed plenty of those, as have the Turks, the Chinese, the Russians . . .) but one they knew personally. But hardly anyone thinks that the Saudis are nice people; they’re allies of convenience, not of sentiment. If they help us beat Iran, fine, but nobody thought they were our friends before.”

Exactly.  Plus, this “journalist” (Jamal Khashoggi) was actually a Muslim Brotherhood activist more than a journo, so fuck him.

And in a related post, talking about media outrage at Khashoggi’s murder, Charles Martin adds:

Let me get this straight. Saudi Arabia sponsored the 9/11 hijackers, stones rape victims to death for being unchaste, hangs people for being gay…and NOW you’re upset with them?

Yeah, because the obsequious diplomacy as practiced by Barack Cocksucker Obama was totes different.

All that said, let’s be honest and admit that in aggregate, both the Saudis and the Turks are foul assholes and should they decide to kill each other for fun, spite or profit, nobody else should care.  Ditto all the other Muslim regimes in the Middle East.

Never Mind The Joke

So this asshole got some joke award for his charlatanry:

The man who published a widely-dismissed paper claiming the MMR vaccine could make children autistic has been ridiculed with an award for bad science. Andrew Wakefield, a former gastroenterologist who is now believed to be in a relationship with the model Elle Macpherson, has been awarded the ‘Rusty Razor’ award for pseudoscience by magazine The Skeptic.
Wakefield’s so-called research fueled the ‘anti-vaxx’ movement, by suggesting jabs could make children autistic, but his studies were fabricated.
Experts have called the paper, published in medical journal The Lancet in 1998, but retracted in 2010, ‘the most damaging medical hoax of the past 100 years’.

Never mind the Rusty Razor Award, someone should have used a rusty razor to cut this fucker’s head off.  Countless children have died and others fallen dangerously ill because of his “pseudo-scientific” study, and at least he should be in prison for life instead of dating a dim-bulb ex-supermodel.

I am not a vengeful man by nature, but if one day some bereaved parent were to shoot Wakefield in the face and I were in the jury at the parent’s trial, my vote would be an unshakable “Not Guilty”.

Silly Rabbit

At RealClearPolitics, Betsy McCaughey asks this question at the end of her article:

“Democrats in favor of socialism need to take a hard look at the results in Venezuela and Cuba.  Is that what they want for America?”

Oh good grief, of course they do.  They just want to ensure that they are at the top of Failed Socialist Experiment #76 so that they can a.) get obscenely wealthy and b.) thus be shielded from the outcome of the failure.  What happens to the working classes is, as always, irrelevant.

As for the author:  it’s well-meaning but naïve people like this who fail to understand fully the evils of socialism and its proponents.

No Way

Talking about some fresh unhinged lunacy perpetrated by the Democrats last week,  Insty’s Ed Driscoll opined:

As Conquest’s third law of politics states, “The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.”

With all respect to Ed (and to Mr. Conquest), I would suggest that there is no way that the hapless Republicans could engineer such a mess.  The GOP couldn’t organize an orgy at a brothel, let alone control this bag of cats.

Nope;  the Democrats’ current insanity is completely self-managed, fueled by copious amounts of liberal stupidity and Marxism [some overlap].