Tag: Evil Bastards

Unreadable

Deep Thoughts

When we have our pictures taken for ID docs like drivers’ licences in the U.S.A., we usually have the option of smiling or unsmiling poses. I tend to smile, because in repose I look like this:

That’s my picture as it appears on some British railcard ID — and it’s a perfect example of what my kids call my “hitman” expression. (I think it’s more like “Wanted In 25 States For Murder”, but that probably means the same thing, really.)

When I had said pic taken, the photographer told me that H.M. Government doesn’t allow smiling pictures on IDs, because if you smile, their facial-recognition software can’t identify you.

Ponder on the implications of that, if you will.

Happily, my passport photo is of Smiling Kim, so the BritGov may never be able to identify me — and as I have no intention of breaking any of their poxy little laws, there’s no problem with that… right?

One of the reasons to travel abroad is that we can see how other countries screw their citizens / subjects over, and we can therefore resist similar bullshit on the part of our own government, which is already too fucking big for its boots.

Now read this.

You Motherfuckers

Politics, Two-Minute Hate

Even though I’m never going to qualify for this little “bubble” tax, it still makes me want to empty my gun into the TV the next time a Republican congressman shows his face.

Write to your U.S. Republican representative (if you have one), and tell him that if this piece of shit finds its way into law, you’re going to vote for his opponent next time round — because at this point, then, he’s no different from a fucking Democrat.

Your Money No Good Here

Bad News

I have long viewed the efforts of banks, retailers and government to make us a cashless society. I’ve heard all their reasons: money-laundering, efficiency and so on, and I remain unconvinced.

It’s even worse over here, and Ross Clark of the Daily Mail takes aim at the process:

The argument in its favour is convenience, but the truth is that it’s all about greed.
Firstly, there is the opportunity to collect fees. The Boston Consulting Group estimates that banks and payment companies such as Visa and Mastercard currently make $1 trillion annually worldwide in fees — typically paid by the retailer — for processing electronic payments.
…
And it won’t be just the retailers who are being fleeced. Currently, consumers are rarely charged fees to use credit cards and debit cards, but you can bet that would change if there was no option to pay in cash.
An even bigger prize is the opportunity that cashless payments offer to large corporations to collect vast amounts of personal information about individuals.
We are familiar with how tech giants such as Google, Facebook and Twitter harvest information about us via our internet searches and so on.
But few of us are aware that we are also feeding a vast data machine whenever we use our credit and debit cards.

It’s worth reading the whole thing, because Clark’s analysis is very good, especially hw going cashless makes us completely vulnerable to the vagaries of computer systems, their inefficiencies and the hacking thereof.

And while I share his cynicism about Big Business and its Marketing Department, I am even more cynical about Government and its attempt to make all transactions cashless — because as a former marketer myself I can at least understand the desire for more information about consumers (even if I don’t agree with the ruthless harvesting thereof) — but when it comes to government knowing every little detail about how I spend my money, certain part of my anatomy start to twitch uncontrollably.

And yes, we’re mostly talking about my various fingers.

Whenever I’m faced with any attempt to make a massive, wholesale change in society’s behavior, I get that same twitch — and this one strikes me as especially worthy of some digitized action. So I’ll start with the most innocuous one first.

Note to government and business: want me to stop using cash?

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to the range, to rid myself of another twitch.

Bloody Commies

Business, Politics

Given the history of Communism’s brutality, the headline could be regarded as a truism, but in this case it’s simply an insult. Red Robbo has died, and sadly, far too long after he should have. Leo McKinstry describes it perfectly:

Leyland had inherited great motoring marques such as Austin and Rover but, in large part because of Robinson’s malign influence and that of others in his thrall, quality and innovation rapidly declined.
Increasingly synonymous with shoddiness, the company struggled to compete in the marketplace — not that Robinson cared. As a far Left ideologue, he did not believe in the market. [emphasis added]
But his gospel of permanent workplace revolt exposed a fundamental paradox of Robinson’s career: the man who constantly prattled about the protection of workers’ rights was the greatest destroyer of jobs in the UK motor sector.

But there’s a bright side to this bastard Commie’s activities, as McKinstry notes:

Through his spectacular recklessness, he ultimately repelled the British public and paved the way for the election of Margaret Thatcher — she described him in her memoirs as a ‘notorious agitator’ — with a mandate to tackle the unions. His very name was a vote-winning weapon for the Conservatives in 1979.
It is a rich irony that, in his communist fervour, Red Robbo was inadvertently one of the Tories’ strongest allies as they embarked on ending Labour’s disastrous experiment in trades union domination.

Needless to say, the death of this ghastly pustule has had all the current Commies in the Labour Party lauding his career because that’s what Commies do, the fuckheads.

Wherever Robinson is now, I hope the temperature is set to “Broil”…

Unaffected

Bad News, Politics

A youngin asked me the other day what changes I’ve noticed in my personality as I’ve got older. The principle one, I told him, is that as I’ve got older, I’ve begin to care less and less about more and more. Here’s an example.

So apparently Facebook does ugly things to conservative Facebookers (or whatever they’re called).

I don’t care, because I don’t have a Facebook account, nor will I ever surrender that much control, to anybody. This is why I have a private blog: I can post anything I want, say anything I want, and as long as I don’t murder anybody, I’ll be fine*.

If my hosting service were to suspend my account, I’d go somewhere else (I’ve had several offers to host this site for almost no money), and if my blogging software were to be disabled, I’d just build my own blog from scratch — done it before, was too lazy to do it again this time. Anyone remember this?

…or this?

…or this?

Hand-built. And I can do it all again, if I have to. In the meantime, I’ll stick to this:

And I don’t care about traffic, or pageviews or any of that crap either. BobbyK once told me that this site has about 10 percent of the traffic of my older one, and I don’t actually care. I seek neither validation nor popularity. I do what I do, and people can agree with me, disagree with me, ignore me, or whatever. Hence: splendid isolation.

As I look back, my whole purpose in life has been to deny control of that life to others, and I’m too old to change that purpose now. So fuckem.

*I should point out that since the death of Senator Teddy The Traitor Kennedy, the odds of me being arrested for murder have fallen precipitously. Still, every time I see a chair, duct tape and a baseball bat in the same room, I get flashbacks.