Tag: Evil Bastards

“Take Away Their Guns”

Bad News, Numbers & Statistics

…and they’ll just use something else. Such as knives:

London saw four fatal stabbings on New Year’s Eve, taking the total of such knifings in the capital to 80 for the whole of 2017.
And the use of knives in general is now a serious problem all over the country. In June 2017, the Office for National Statistics listed thousands of ‘blade offences’ in the previous 12 months, including 214 killings, 391 attempted murders, 438 rapes, 182 other sexual assaults, and 14,429 robberies.
There were also more than 18,500 assaults involving an injury or intent to inflict harm with a blade and 2,816 threats to kill with a knife.

So much for taking away guns to reduce crime. But that’s not the worst part of the linked article. This is:

I have long known that crimes which would once have been classified as murders are often now downgraded to ‘manslaughter’. This is done to save money and time, and to make it easier to release the culprits early to stop the prisons from bursting. But in most cases it is legally difficult to point this out.
The Johnson case is different. He is a murderer, but people who should be alive are now dead because he was wrongly convicted of a lesser crime.
In 1981, Johnson pushed his wife Yvonne off the balcony of their ninth-floor flat, after first hitting her with a vase and an ashtray. He was allowed to plead guilty to manslaughter on the grounds of ‘provocation’. She had, he said, been arguing with him.
She was, of course, not there to give her own version of who did the provoking. He was sentenced in 1982 to three years in prison. That’s right. Three years, though in those days it really meant three years. He was out by 1985.
In 1992 Johnson strangled another woman, Yvonne Bennett, with a belt. She had annoyed him by refusing to accept a box of chocolates which he had bought her to try to win back her affections.
He tried to hang himself from a tree, but the string snapped. String? Yes, string. He was much better at killing others than at killing himself. Doctors decided he was suffering from a ‘depressive illness’ and he was sent ‘indefinitely’ to a secure hospital.
Not indefinitely enough. He was out and under ‘psychiatric care’ after two years. He went on to kill a third woman, Angela Best, by beating her with a claw hammer and throttling her with a dressing-gown cord.
As after his second killing, he tried and failed to commit suicide afterwards, this time by jumping in front of a train.Now, having first tried the manslaughter plea again, on the grounds of ‘diminished responsibility’, he has pleaded guilty to murdering Angela Best.
His injuries from the attempted suicide have left him in a wheelchair, though I wouldn’t like to guarantee that he is harmless even now. Far too late, the courts have sentenced him to 26 years, which might just be enough.
Once, I would have said this was all evidence of a system which had lost all force since it stopped treating murder as a specially hideous crime. So it is. Once, I would have said that we should restore the death penalty for heinous murder. Now, I know this cause is lost. So I can only urge you to take care.
The law refuses to protect you. Those in charge of it lack the courage or the resolve to do so. Get used to it.

The next time some idiot tells you that the death penalty doesn’t prevent murders, feel free to use the above example to show that the death penalty applied to this asshole after his first murder would indeed have prevented two more.

Fortunately, we in the United States don’t have to “get used to it”; it’s our criminals who have to get used to the fact that a career of crime might be deadly — to themselves.

Carry a gun, and make sure you know how to use it. The life you save might well be your own, or of your loved ones. The life you take will be of no consequence to anyone except the goblin’s future victims.

Remember: when anyone asks you if your wallet is worth a life, remind them that that decision was not yours, but your assailant’s. He made the decision that your wallet was worth taking a life (yours), and all you did was go along with his decision, simply substituting his life for yours.

And be glad that you live in the U.S. and not in Britain, where you would face imprisonment for self-defense, instead of congratulations.

Not Bad For A Newbie

Politics

I’m so sick of people (mostly in the Comintern media) yammering about how The Donald hasn’t achieved anything during this, his first year as POTUS (or “God-Emperor”, as one of my favorite commentators puts it).

Allow me to quote Patrick J. Buchanan, surely the sourest of conservative commentators, on the topic:

The largest tax cuts in decades. Elevation of Neil Gorsuch to the Antonin Scalia seat on the Supreme Court. A record number of new [conservative, originalist – K.] U.S. appellate court judges approved by the Senate. The U.S. is out of the Paris climate accord and out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

NAFTA is being renegotiated. Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge will be open for drilling. The U.S. is at full employment, with minority unemployment near record lows. The stock market has consistently broken records, with the Dow having added 5,000 points. The Obamacare individual mandate tax is gone. Obama-era regulations have been cut and some eliminated.

Can’t add much to that, except for the inevitable:

Ol’ Pat forgot that one. All by itself, it’s a major Trump accomplishment.

 

Cult News

Business

My hostility towards Apple (the company and its poxy little products) is a well-known fact of this blog. It dates back to when I first used an Apple IIe — I was the very first person at the Great Big Research Company to own a personal computer, back in the early 1980s — and discovered that while the Apple was a fun toy, it clearly lacked the serious horsepower to perform any complex or large data management/manipulation. And that situation never changed.

Along the way, though, Apple developed into a cult: first of personality, through its founder/tinpot dictator Steve Jobs, and then its ethos, through its “cool” design and cutesy, “user-friendly” operation.

The writing was on the wall, though. For such a cool company, Apple was always remarkably totalitarian — closed operating systems, inflexible programs, antagonistic towards non-corporate developers and hostility to DIY improvement and maintenance by its users — witness the “unlocking” commotion when the iPhone originally mandated AT&T phone service with its product. Without the logo and corporate blessing, it seemed, everything was pretty much streng verboten — but implicit with all this, as with so many totalitarian systems, was the promise of “Trust Apple”.

So much for trust. It appears that Apple has been caught with its grubby little fingers in some pretty shameful corporate skulduggery, slowing down the operating system of its older iPhones to “persuade” users to upgrade to newer (and, of course, more expensive and more profitable) models:

Apple has long inspired an almost religious devotion among customers and tech aficionados — but it just seriously undermined its fans’ faith and loyalty.
The company on Wednesday acknowledged what some people have long suspected: that it has been secretly stifling the performance of older iPhones.
Critics have accused the company in the past, based on anecdotal evidence, of purposely slowing phones to compel users to upgrade to the latest model.
While Apple admitted to the practice on Wednesday, it sought to underscore that it had done so for a purely altruistic reason: to prevent older phones from shutting down unexpectedly.

Yeah, of course you only had good intentions, you bastards. That’s like telling the judge you raped the woman not for your own benefit, but so that she could have an orgasm.

And this is not the usual weasel “some rogue employees done it” bullshit: this was corporate policy. Management had a meeting, and decided on this action.

There are two lessons to be learned from this little bit of malfeasance. The first is for Apple users: your little idol has not only feet of clay, but claws under the velvet glove. (Non-Apple users like me have known this for some time, but all we got was abuse from Apple acolytes and groupies.) Enjoy your pain and disillusionment.

The second lesson is a broader one for all of us: Never trust a corporation, no matter how altruistic they may sound, even when — and maybe especially when — their corporate mantra is “Don’t be evil”. Your benefit is not their primary concern; their primary concern is either market share or profit, or both.

I’m not saying that this is a Bad Thing, necessarily; profit is the sole purpose of a corporation, after all. Just don’t let them fool you into thinking that your benefit won’t get compromised if it interferes with their ultimate goal (see: Microsoft, elimination of Outlook Express, MS Paint, etc., to name just one other example).

And cultists are always easiest to fool because all religious adherents are easier to fool, by whatever deity they follow, be it companies like Apple, charities like the United Way, or Big Government.

Don’t be gullible, don’t be fooled by the marketing and the PR, don’t follow the herd, don’t be loyal. Trust no one, and  especially do not trust institutions created by men for motives of profit or power, because ultimately, you too will get “throttled”.

What It Means

Africa, Travels

As I said yesterday, the African National Congress party (ANC) held its leadership elections yesterday, the chief candidates being former socialist / trade unionist Cyril Ramaphosa and ex-wife of current SAPres, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, rabid African Nationalist and so on (whom I predicted would win in a walk, she being the worst possible choice for ANC leader, and this being Africa).

In keeping with most of my political predictions (i.e. total crap), I was wrong about this one, and Ramaphosa won, albeit by only 179 votes out of many thousands cast. His victory was greeted with sighs of relief by the SA business community and most financial institutions (e.g. Moody’s, who are considering upgrading Seffrica’s rating from Not-Quite-Venezuela to Better-Than-Zimbabwe). Even the trade unions seem to be okay with the result, Ramaphosa being one of their erstwhile heroes.

However.

This is South Africa, so things are seldom that simple. You see, one of the ANC’s platform planks is that lovely euphemism, “expropriation” — which, in this case, means “taking land away from Whites to give to Blacks”. A large number of ANC supporters and officials support this policy, and many are complaining that Ramaphosa will ally himself with the “big business interests” (Whites) and not carry out the expropriations. White land- and business owners are hoping he’ll end, or at least severely curb the policy — and given the implications, he should.

But the ANC also has to make sure that they maintain their hold on power, and in the next general election in 2019, they’ll have to fend off a party of rabid assholes called the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) who, according to their electoral rhetoric would not only take Whites’ property away, but their lives as well if resistance were offered. Needless to say, this policy would sit quite well with their philosophical comrades inside the ANC, who have been quite content to ignore (and even tacitly approve of) the ongoing slaughter of White farmers in rural areas.

So when the time comes to take the place of current SAPres Jacob Zuma, Comrade Cyril is going to have to walk that little tightrope very carefully: accommodate the business community and bring investment back into South Africa, and try not to alienate the land-thieves inside the ANC.

And by the way, that’s only one of the problems facing Ramaphosa. Another one is that Zuma might not want to go quietly into that long (albeit well-financed, bribe-fed) dark night of retirement — in fact, he’s kinda acting that way right now. (In the rest of Africa, Zuma would simply be assassinated, but this is the kinder, gentler South Africa now.)

The next few months are going to be interesting, in an African kind of way.

Oh, and one last thing. I’ve said several unpleasant things about Dlamini-Zuma, the loser in the current leadership contest. But credit where credit is due: despite the slenderness of her defeat, she’s not behaving like certain (all?) Democrats we know, and is not going to the courts to challenge the results of the election. Granted, the courts have repeatedly signaled that the ANC has to fix its own problems, but still. Party unity seems to be of paramount concern for the ANC, and it should be: the last general election gave them a very slender margin of victory (from memory, 54%). Anything less than 50% would force them to create a coalition government with one or more of the smaller political parties in South Africa — and man, an alliance with some of those (e.g. the rabid EFF above) would mean economic disaster for the country. To some, economic disaster in this still-capitalist country would be a feature, not a bug (as it is with their philosophical allies Jeremy Corbyn in the UK, Maduro in Venezuela, and Bernie Sanders in the U.S.). But I’m pretty sure the ANC does not want to see “Venezuela” happen south of the Limpopo River, and that may be the only thing that saves the country.

My cynicism in matters African, however, tells me that I’m an idiot for thinking that way.