Google News on My Pixel 6 Tells Me to Put Toilet Paper in the Freezer. Failing American Economy. Venezuelans Don’t Like Chicago.

Google News on My Pixel 6 Tells Me to Put Toilet Paper in the Freezer. Failing American Economy. Venezuelans Don’t Like Chicago.

There’s been a steep decline in Google News on my phone, and now it recommends stories saying “Life hack, put your toilet paper in the freezer.”

This after Google laid off at least 50 people from their News division. So why wouldn’t it behave more like MSN floating garbage and nonsense to the top now?

I’ve noticed a sharp increase in sources like the tabloid sites as well.

In just a generation, we’ve gone from Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather, to Lester Holt and Bill O’Reilly, to THIS.

The billionaires bought the news figuring they could run it as a propaganda rag that people would pay money to read. Then when they erected paywalls, they noticed they lost their ad revenue with very few subscribers, thus losing more money than they gained in subscriptions, and then after that they decided to do mass layoffs or even put the companies into bankruptcy and walk away from it.

The news is dead.

I was on the phone with my mother, who is a nurse and so hasn’t had trouble finding work since the early 1980s recession.

It’s so long ago now, plus my dad confiscated all the money and paid the bills himself and kept it all in his checking account, so she had no idea what inflation was running in that era, but I did manage to finally get through to her what finding a job is like now.

The U6 unemployment rate, which counts workers working REALLY bad jobs that are way beneath their skill set, or a few hours a week because they can’t find anything else, and “discouraged” workers is over 7.5% in Illinois right now. (October 2023, latest data, BLS)

It’s over 10% in Los Angeles and New York City.

7.2% in the US overall.

The early 80s recession was considered horrific, but the worst that unemployment ever got was near 11% by this measure, which they don’t publish conspicuously anymore, and in 1981 when she became a nurse it was about like it is now.

I asked her “So how were you doing in the jobs market in 1980 and 1981 when you weren’t a nurse yet?”

She said, something like “Oh it was terrible out there. All I could find was a waitress job at Richards (a restaurant in Indiana, I don’t know if it’s still there, but it had decent food in the 90s), and it barely paid me $2 an hour after I counted my tips and I had to go in for 10 hours every day to be on the clock for 7 because they did split shifts where I had to sit 3 hours with nothing to do then clock in for the next rush.”

I said, “Did you try to find anything better than this?”

She said, “Oh yeah, I was out there pounding the pavement. I tried to get a job at GM and they wouldn’t hire me. I went out to RCA and they hired both of your dad’s sisters but didn’t call me back.”

My dad’s sisters both have severe mental illness, so I can’t imagine they even had that job 3 months later knowing them. But they wouldn’t hire mom.

She said, “Finally I spent $1,600 on nursing school.” ($6,000 in 2023)

The State was running some sort of program where 160 people applied for 24 spots where the State would help them with some of their expenses.

My dad tried to sabotage her by not allowing her to study during the evenings “Because you have other things to do.” and turning off her alarm so it wouldn’t ring. Knowing that if she missed one day that they’d kick her out.

At first, he said “If you can find $1,600 you can go to school.” and walked off laughing and puffing a cigarette. He never figured she would. My grandmother and great-grandmother pooled the money together and paid for everything, so he resorted to sabotage saying “You’ll leave me if you become a nurse.”

He was always paranoid that she’d leave, but he would never treat her well so she figured out a way to leave. Her next two husbands were much worse.

But she got around the alarm clock sabotage by setting a second alarm. He can’t be woken up by anything so she set that for 3 AM and got a couple hours sleep, woke up, studied, and slipped out the door, and he never figured out what was going on.

But, it was bad out there in the 80s, real bad.

The news SAID it was bad, which is something they won’t do today even though it’s as bad finding a good job as it was in 1981.

The Chicago Tribune reported yesterday that many Venezuelan migrants were shocked that they came here and there’s nothing for them and they’ve been sleeping on the floor at the airport or in a tent city in a public park for months.

It’s starting to get cold and it’ll only get worse.

Many of them now apply for funds from the State through Catholic Charities to self-deport back to Venezuela, or to give up and go back down to a State where they won’t freeze to death.

They all got snookered in thinking it would be better in America for them than it would be in Venezuela, and the news quoted one man who came to Chicago as saying, “The American Dream no longer exists. […] If I’m going to sleep on the ground in Chicago I’d rather do it in Venezuela.”

So, all they did was walk through a jungle in a caravan, sneak into the US, and realize that it’s a real estate scam with bad winters, bullets flying everywhere, no jobs, and a lot of people who REALLY don’t want them here (including Chicagoans after they passed a “Welcoming City Ordinance” and then got 20,000 Venezuelans), and now they want to go back to Venezuela, where they will be treated worse than if they had never left for “failing to support the revolution”, which has left them with money worth so little that they “throw it in the trash because it’s not worth the trip to the bank” and “we still owe De La Rue millions and millions of dollars for printing it” according to one of the SeaMonkey (web browser suite) developers I’ve spoken to, who is in Venezuela.

I asked “tomman” what he thought about the mass illegal migration to the US, and he said “The last thing we need is more defectors.”, he seemed to be distraught by the idea that they’ve given up fixing anything and left.

In my opinion, this whole thing probably started because a few people spread rumors that in America the streets are paved with gold, and instead they’ve come to ANOTHER third world country that’s only “rich” because there’s about 1,600 people in the entire country that have amassed nearly all of the wealth. They hide in the shadows, control everything, buy the government you see, and don’t pay their taxes, so everything has been falling apart HERE too since about 2003 (five years later than Venezuela).

I also asked “tomman” how they could be so poor when they have more oil than Saudi Arabia. He said, “No Latin American country has ever been smart enough to do anything with that.”

Chicago and Los Angeles Chapters of “Burn, Loot, Murder” (Black Lives Matter) Say They Support Hamas.

The Chicago and Los Angeles chapters of “Burn, Loot, Murder” (Black Lives Matter) say they support Hamas after the past week’s devastating attacks on Israel.

I was told to be ashamed of myself two years ago when BLM was burning and looting in Chicago and Wisconsin and all over America, using the death of George Floyd (which was terrible and unforgivable) as an excuse, for seeing BLM for what they show themselves as now. The mask has come off!

At the time, it was setting fires to stores to run out with TVs and expensive sunglasses. It was destroying an Indian man’s gas station in Chicago twice in one summer until he didn’t bother to reopen it, it was destroying Ronny’s Steakhouse in Chicago at the Thompson Center, a Black-owned business that I ate at frequently.

BLM is a terrorist group. It’s completely undeniable now. It should really surprise nobody that they support another terrorist group that has so much blood on its hands, which has committed such heinous crimes against humanity.

The United States Government should tear BLM apart using mafia control laws such as the Hobbs and RICO Acts if it has to. It is an illegal organization designed to promote hatred, racism, and violent crimes including mass murder.

When will President Biden do something about this? I’d say, probably never. Who do you think that BLM is voting for (any of them that vote)?

We need another election and we need one soon or America won’t last much longer.

American insanity: Black Lives Matter’s Chicago affiliate used Hamas paragliders—the ones who slaughtered 260-plus teens and young adults at a music festival—in their poster art expressing that they “stand with Palestine.” Black Lives Matter’s Los Angeles chapter proclaims that “when a people have been subject to decades of apartheid and unimaginable violence, their resistance must not be condemned, but understood as a desperate act of self-defense.” 

–Israel Hit From All Sides (Reason.com)

Chicago Considering Making Cell Phones Buzz During “Youth” Rioting.

Chicago Considering Making Cell Phones Buzz During “Youth” Rioting.

Some sort of buzzing and warning people to stay away. My God, I wonder when my phone will not be screeching if this happens.

The Democrats haven’t lost control of the crime problem in this city. Not at all. This is deliberate.

They’ve caused it, and failed to respond to it, and cut 40% of the police officers so the city couldn’t respond to it if it wanted to.

Then Walmart left.

All you can do is get out. Walmart was losing hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars to project wokeness and eventually called it when it was only getting worse.

You can only eat the costs of so much looting and arson. I mean, they do have a business to run.

Not that anyone in the Gimmedat Party understands how that works, oh now, you’re supposed to run stores at a loss forever because “Social Justice”.

There are alternatives to closing everything and saying “fuck this” due to Mayor Brandon Johnson and State’s Attorney Kim Foxx, which is why Chicago Walgreens makes you ask for anything that costs more than $5 using a kiosk now.

Meanwhile, Chicago churches are coming together on Saturday – when another large teen gathering is planned – to walk Michigan Avenue. Their goal is to round up 500 men to send a message to the youth.

“Black men owe it to our younger counterparts to say this is not the way, and that we grew up in some of the same conditions, oftentimes, but again, for whatever reason, by the grace of God, we will be given alternatives and when we listened, we found out that our worth was not in violence and negative things,” said Bishop Horace Smith, Apostolic Faith Church.

-Fox 32 Chicago

Chicago Democrats Fume Over Homeless Illegal Aliens.

It’s going to be awfully hard to end homelessness in Illinois.

Between the Democrats making life more horrible in Illinois, and more expensive every damn day somehow, and Governor Pritzker’s latest bill to “end homelessness”, when every action he takes puts me and my spouse closer to the edge of the knife, and Bidenflation, it’s not hard to see that this was coming.

Every time our fat vile windbag of a governor opens his stupid yapper to talk about ending homelessness, our rent goes up another 10%. It’s so amazing how we’re ending homelessness through rent hikes, right? I know!

Certainly as a hotel heir who has never worked and has $5 billion he can quit tearing toilets out of his spare mansion to save on property tax, and chip in? No? I know!

Chicago Democrats Fume Over Homeless Illegal Aliens.

It’s funny how there was never any money to do anything about homeless American citizens, but now that we have tens of thousands of illegal aliens being bused in from Texas, the Illinois and Cook County government found a spare $100 million for it in the middle of having the credit rating of Russia, and the worst debt to Gross State Product of any State in America.

Priorities.

The libloon.so.7 down in Chicago are apparently furious, and the aldermen are smart enough to act as outraged as they are, that Brandon Johnson is going to set up camps for homeless Venezuelans in their public parks. Yeah. Have fun walking your dog or trying to play, or relax, or use the park as a park now, idiots.

Your tax dollars at work. Just remember you had the opportunity to vote for Paul Vallas and you blew it.

Maybe we’ll need a libloon.so.8 soon.

Now that Biden has waived 26 federal laws to trample a nature preserve, pollute the water, and kill endangered species, to build Trump’s border wall because Democrats are screaming about illegal immigration causing homeless encampments in their public parks next to their $3,000 micro-apartments.

Up until the rich Democrat woke mob assholes living in these things had nowhere for their dog to take a shit, the border wall was inhumane, cruel, and didn’t work. Remember?

Hey, where will their dog take a shit? I think that’s the key issue here. Think of the dogs!

My spouse is a Permanent Resident.

We obeyed the law, spent thousands petitioning the government for things, and he’s as frustrated as I am that these people just get to cross over illegally, half a million of them get work permits to compete with us and lower wages everywhere in the country, from Biden, and there’s absolutely no punishment at all, even though Texas found that about 14% of the illegal aliens (“refugees”) it does catch had enough fentanyl with them to kill a small American town.

It is so very frustrating trying to be a decent person in the world, watching the Democrats shit on you while they’re allowing an invasion by drug smugglers, sex traffickers, violent criminals, and worse.

After all the Hell USCIS puts legal immigrants through, to make sure they won’t be a drain on the State, get a load of this shit.

This is a clear abuse of TPS, which is meant for migrants who are unable to safely return home. The federal government may designate a country for TPS if there’s an armed conflict or a natural disaster—think civil war or an earthquake. Is there a civil war or the threat of one going on in Venezuela? Are there any natural disasters present other than those being inflicted by the current regime on its people?

Of course not, and Biden’s decision will certainly encourage many more migrants to begin to make the journey.

There is a misconception that TPS grants only the privilege of living and working in the U.S. for a finite amount of time. Truth be told, TPS beneficiaries may be eligible for Medicaid, Family Health Plus, or Child Health Plus. So, America’s CEOs are getting an ever-expanding workforce desperate to work at any wage, and the cost of paying them less than what they can live on is getting passed onto tax paying citizens.

-NewsWeek

So, what about the Public Charge Rule that lawful immigrants have to follow? Nope.

And “Temporary” protected status often becomes permanent. Some people are still in the US because of an earthquake that happened in the 90s somewhere.

They’ll die of old age here when their own country has been safe to return to for decades.

Drug Overdoses and Crime Surge in the United States. Decriminalization is the Worst Possible Option.

Drug Overdoses Surge in the United States. Decriminalization is the Worst Possible Option.

The New York Times likes to normally engage in pro-United States anti-China propaganda, so I was somewhat taken aback when they described the almost RoboCop-like situation brewing in Oregon and across the country right now.

Titled “Private Security Guards Become Last Resort for Public Safety”, the article dives into the now $40 billion a year industry of companies, exasperated by the “Defund the Police” movement, hiring private security to try to deal with the Democrat-State crime.

I suppose that nothing bad could happen from turning policing over to Omni Consumer Products.

Of course, the Times went and covered Oregon. I guess this has become a pattern since there are only 8 police officers left on some shifts for the entire city of Portland, and sometimes it takes 2-3 hours (if they show up at all) for a 911 call for an attempted kidnapping or murder.

The only thing the security guards can do is try to call the police, walk around with Narcan to reverse as many Chinese Fentanyl overdoses as possible, and bribe the bums away from the stores with cigarettes or a hotdog.

The Chinese Fentanyl has gotten so potent that it only takes less than 50 cents worth to kill a person, and it’s getting so bad that Narcan can’t be relied on to reverse the overdose half the time now.

Not that the government gives a flying fuck. Oh no.

In yet more evidence that it wants you to die and be replaced if you’re an American citizen, the drugs to kill you are 50 cents a hit, while the Narcan at the Walgreens is $50, and wrapped in anti-theft devices and behind glass.

Biden’s America values American lives so much that while all of this is going on, we also have illegal immigrants flooding the country by the millions and being fed and put in $300 a night hotel rooms and given work permits, millions of American citizens are living on the streets dying of overdoses.

The Times said that Portland’s fire department responds to more overdoses than fires. They said that one fire station out of over 30, responded to over 300 overdoses last year.

They also described typical Big City Democrat Values, of a junkie laying dead in the street for more than an hour with hundreds of people walking past them that didn’t even care, before someone called 911. By that time, it was just scrape them off the pavement and get the corpse out of the way of the Democrats walking to Starbucks.

“Wash, Rinse, Repeat” was the exact phrasing by the medical examiner talking to a security guard in that case.

Cook County, Illinois, the other day, said they were spending $14 million of US taxpayer money buying hotels to put illegal immigrants in as well as $30 million to give them a tent city with heat and plenty of blankets and foul weather gear before winter sets in.

This is the same city (Chicago) where the Democrats sent the Chicago Police Department out, under Rahm Emanuel (now Biden’s Ambassador to Japan), to tear down a homeless encampment on Lower Lower Wacker (where waste heat from buildings kept them warm), beat them up, and burn their stuff.

The only thing the Democrats have for Americans is contempt. After they cause American citizens to lose their job and replace them with people who shouldn’t even be here, they spend money putting them up in fancy hotels, the Biden Administration, well, let’s face it, they’re an arm of the Chinese Communist Party at this point.

He let their spy balloon fly over everything and report on it and once it no longer had any value to them, only then was it shot down, but that’s pretty minor compared with conspiring with Xi to flood the streets with cheap drugs that kill people the Democrats abandoned and don’t want to hear from again.

This fentanyl crap is Biden’s holocaust. It’s the Democrat Party’s plan for America.

We should not be decriminalizing anything or defunding the police.

We should instate the death sentence for anyone caught selling, trafficking, or smuggling this. Death to drug dealers was one of the few things they got right in Russia.

Only days into the Democrat “SAFE-T” Act in Illinois, the Lake and McHenry Scanner has been publishing the kind of “non-detainable” criminals they’ve let back out, and it’s every bit as bad as Darren Bailey tried to warn us about.

Some sexually abused children, others violated a protective order, kicked down their ex-wive’s door, and admitted to the arresting officers that they planned to kill her if they got inside, another killed a veteran by supplying him with drugs, and another guy punched and grabbed the cops by the balls during an arrest for threatening to kill a woman, saying that he knew how to dismember her body.

The Lake County State’s Attorney, Eric Rinehart, doesn’t even try to detain drug dealers. He’s a Democrat, of course.

In McHenry County, a man who pulled a gun on a train conductor was released, “because it wasn’t violent”.

The Illinois Black Caucus wrote this bill and passed it in the middle of the night, and it’s so obvious why they did.

It has nothing to do with fairness. It’s meant so that the public just has to sit back and accept the 1,000% violent crime surge that follows, and can’t really even arm themselves because constitutional rights to carry a gun (which you now need because the police don’t do anything, can’t do anything), is so hard to use that most people don’t even bother. And it’s not the criminal.

The law in Illinois, has been completely re-written by a group of politicians that want the criminals out of prison and voting for them while the State decays into anarchy and the judges and politicians live in gated communities with armed private guards.

The media is actually doing a fine job of documenting the decay and ruin of this country, and it’s the Democrats doing it. It’s the Democrats ruining everything.

I am never going to vote for a Democrat again. This is insanity.

Ring Doorbells Don’t Solve Crime. They Are a Felony to Use.

Yesterday, my spouse told me we were going to his friend’s house.

When we got there, it was yet another friend with one of these damned Ring Doorbells.

I don’t recall the part of the Illinois Felony Eavesdropping Law or the Biometric Information Privacy Act, where I gave Amazon or random homeloaners (they usually don’t own their house, they owe debt to banks) permission to record me, my face, my voice, or my conversations.

Yet it seems the government is promoting these. Chicago even has a program that pays people to put them in.

Something that causes the homeloaner and Amazon to commit felonies every day and open themselves up to civil lawsuits for stolen biometrics at $5,000 per incident be damned, the police have people to spy on!

The people who install these things have been hoisted on their own petard before, like that dude in Michigan who got convicted after he filmed himself shooting at the black kid who “missed the school bus” and ended up with video footage from his own doorbell, which they pulled from Amazon’s server, which he could not delete, center stage at his own trial.

Typically, they tell people who don’t like Ring that we are paranoid nutcases.

No, the paranoid nutcases are the people who install the Ring. They are committing serious crimes, at least in Illinois, just by having it there and doing what it does, and they are all freaked out that someone will break into their house and steal from them and rape them by a hyper-sensationalized news media, which is working with the government to make Americans suspicious of each other.

Where making them fear a crime wave that isn’t actually going on hasn’t worked, the media has started blasting more garbage about COVID.

The situation in America benefits when people don’t want to know or care about anyone else, and adopt a bunker mentality where it’s all about them and the things they need….to protect their television set, or something, I don’t know. It’s fucking stupid, isn’t it?

I have never installed a Ring and I never will.

This is Surveillance Capitalism and police state horseshit.

The police don’t even solve very many crimes when you do have a video camera. (NBC News. They admit it to your face and people still buy these things.)

Anecdotally, my ex was mugged in Chicago and the mugger actually grinned real big at the camera. The Chicago police gave us a report number and nothing ever happened after that.

The Ring doesn’t solve crime.

The Ring turns you into a criminal for recording me.

(720 ILCS 5/14-4)(from Ch. 38, par. 14-4)
Sec. 14-4. Sentence.
(a) Eavesdropping, for a first offense, is a Class 4 felony and, for a second or subsequent offense, is a Class 3 felony.
(b) The eavesdropping of an oral conversation or an electronic communication of any law enforcement officer, State's Attorney, Assistant State's Attorney, the Attorney General, Assistant Attorney General, or a judge, while in the performance of his or her official duties, if not authorized by this Article or proper court order, is a Class 3 felony, and for a second or subsequent offense, is a Class 2 felony.
(Source: P.A. 98-1142, eff. 12-30-14.)

–Illinois Felony Eavesdropping Law 720 ILCS 5/14

COVID and Vaccine Jingoism. The Politics of a Plague.

COVID and Vaccine Jingoism. The Politics of a Plague.

There was a strange phenomenon during COVID, well, a lot of them.

It wasn’t just every two-bit politician in America acting like a dictator with unlimited authority, sweeping the feckless courts and legislatures aside, ruling by “public health decree”. Forcing everyone into ineffective Hygiene Theater, including “sanitizing surfaces” and “masks”, whose sole purpose was psychological. (So the economy wouldn’t collapse.)

Oh no, there was a lot of noise in the “media”, like NPR, BBC, and NYTimes, regarding “Chinese” and “Russian” vaccines, and “What’s even in them? Who knows? They probably have lousy quality control because, again, Russia and China.”

In the mean time, as we in the Northern Hemisphere go into the Cold, Flu, and COVID season yet again, I’ve decided not to take any more of the “COVID shots”.

I’ve stopped calling them vaccines. I took four of them.

The fourth being the “bivalent booster”. So did my spouse.

Just 6 weeks after the bivalent booster (all doses were Pfizer), we both got COVID at the same time.

COVID actually made my spouse less sick than the COVID shot. The COVID shot made it impossible for him to get out of bed for nearly 4 days.

He ended up calling into work, losing most of his sick time, and then when he did get COVID, having to take unpaid Family and Medical Leave Act time off, which they only give you when you have COVID, not “COVID shot side effects”. Which they gaslight the public and claim don’t even exist.

I wasn’t even as lucky as him. I ended up very sick with COVID, and then developing chest pains that dragged on clear into this summer and didn’t stop for for EIGHT months.

We both took the “COVID antiviral pills”, he got the Pfizer ones, I couldn’t take them and had to take Molnupiravir. Just as soon as I was starting to come around, 4 days later, the COVID weakened my immune system to the point where I had a Shingles outbreak, and spent another few weeks taking pills to stamp that out, as well as painkillers three times a day (the maximum safe dose!).

I’ve decided this year, we’ll skip the shots, because they clearly do nothing and they can make you sicker than the damn bug.

I don’t feel like a repeat of last year where my spouse risks getting in trouble with his job, over a defective COVID shot, for absolutely no benefit.

So we will be taking the flu shot on Monday and calling it.

We are not anti-vaxxers. We have taken all of the CDC recommended vaccines. Most of them were put through a legitimate Scientific Process.

The clear and only point of Pfizer and Moderna’s COVID shots is to make money for Pfizer and Moderna, while the government sweeps all of the information under the rug about how badly they can hurt you.

This year, the Biden administration, allowed both companies to increase the price of each dose from $16, which the government paid and led to record profits for both companies, to $180 per dose, which is going to make insurance companies raise premiums again, to pay for shots that are dangerous and don’t even work.

Naturally, to grease the wheels on Phase II of the Great Heist, Moderna has said they’ll cover the shots for the uninsured, for now.

Given that these things very clearly don’t work, given the media gaslighting, which I’ll admit even got me until I had to experience the fact that they don’t work myself, and just the level of dishonesty and corruption about the entire thing (including anti-Russian and anti-Chinese propaganda that didn’t even leave the COVID shots out of it), I can’t justify accepting more.

It was the Democrats, as usual, who had such a horrible program, that they had to bribe and threaten people. Through their employers, naturally.

Take it, you get fifty bucks, don’t take it and potentially get fired.

Biden tried his best to make everyone who refused the heart damage and other oddities unemployed, during a recession, with hyperinflation.

This America is a dystopian Hell, and despite the rare media mention of COVID anymore (because they took their “emergency powers” and never gave them back, thank you very much), and now they want you out there shopping, rumbling of the Lockdown Fetishists are starting to make the news again.

This whole thing was an exercise in raw power.

After they eased up a little and like half of the jobs lost to the Lockdown came back, the corrupt New York Times spun up the KrugmanBot3000 to proclaim the Dead Cat Bounce as the Economic Miracle of Biden.

A “recovery” that brings back half the jobs, and puts the government in twice as much debt is a Miracle.

Hallelujah. Praise Be! I saw the light, I saw the light, no more darkness no more night! Then Jesus Biden came like a stranger in the night. Praise the Lord Joe Biden, I saw the light!

Ironically, after encouraging people who know how to knock a fence down and enter a place illegally to come to Chicago, ex-Mayor Lightfoot of Chicago was horrified when they did the same thing to her chain link fences around open air parks.

What public policy sense did it make to lock down open air state and local parks when there’s this germ going around mostly killing people who don’t even go out and walk?

(Of course, in Chicago, that’s defensible since not exercising is more healthy than being shot while exercising, I suppose.)

Also, true to Democrat form, we had to spill reams of digital ink, chiding people for going to church, and not say anything about the vandalism, looting, and the “house parties” where someone shows up with a machine gun, which were spreading COVID, but it wasn’t the people you CAN berate in the media doing it.

Excusing open and outright criminal actions while condemning people for engaging in their Constitutionally-protected right to freedom of religion did not weigh well on me. I think we deserve better than this from our government.

Calling rioting and arson and looting “mostly peaceful” while people are dying, the city is on fire, and businesses are being destroyed is never okay. But the Democrats and their pet media did this.

At the same time, the Civil Alert System was going off telling me not to enter Kenosha, Wisconsin or Downtown Chicago. Mostly peaceful, you know.

I’m planning to take my spouse to some Libertarian Party meetings.

It’s only right that if he’s planning to become an American that we should do this right.

I find it very ironic that the government universities, who basically load people up with so much debt they’ll never see the light of day again, most of them, and at only 18, would brand the faculty as such “Progressives” while actually promoting so much actual wealth inequality. Sure, yeah, finance it all and hand it to them. Whatever.

I don’t respect them. There’s nothing to feel good about when you’re a “university” and you load a bunch of rubes down with $60,000 in debt at 6%+ interest, knowing what you’re doing to them, and then you tell them that they’re a victim of “evil White people”.

Yeah, a lot of those “evil White people” are running the university. Ever stopped to think about it?

Those are the ones saying that the “evil White people” are the ones who are too poor to buy a bag of beans, and aren’t even threatening anybody.

The elitist “Left” is too stupid to realize that by openly mocking and slandering people who are on hard times, portraying Rural Americans as the Great White Satan, that they are making people like Trump and DeSantis more palatable.

They won’t do anything for the poor White rural voters, but they say they have the answer to everything, and point out how toxic and stupid the “Left” is all the time to score points because the last part is….not untrue.

You won’t like their answer to the problems though. Keep pushing, you’ll find out.

You thought Trump was bad the first time? Just wait and see what he does next. And if not him, someone like him.

The Observations of Leaving the House Contradict Paul Krugman’s “Robust America”.

The Observations of Leaving the House Contradict Paul Krugman’s “Robust America”.

Yesterday when driving my spouse to a medical appointment in the south suburbs…

I noticed that there are miles of abandoned offices, and businesses that closed years ago and have not been replaced by anything else.

For a 50 mile stretch in the Chicagoland area, things are dead. The city proper apparently even has several empty Sears Tower-equivalents of empty office space.

The other day, Grindr (the gay sex app) made the news for a “not layoff layoff” whereby half the company (over 80 employees) resigned en masse over a “return to the office deadline”.

Some of them said that they wondered how, without their presence in the office, an app where people have been kidnapped and stabbed to death by a stalker, which the app told their location to, will “remain safe”. Yes, I wonder.

Roy Schestowitz commented that this is getting fairly common.

The managers impose deadlines and anyone who doesn’t come back is not technically a layoff and doesn’t qualify for any benefits.

We spoke of Walmart cutting people’s hours and how pressuring them to quit “also isn’t a layoff”.

I told him, Walmart absolutely lays people off and gives them severance, but only when they’re closing the entire store down with three days warning and they stick up a sign that says ‘Dear Shoplifters and Arsonists, valued Chicago customers, the store will close on Friday. Employees who can’t commute three hours to the nearest store will get a little bit of WARN Act Money. It’s been real, and it’s been fun, but it ain’t been real fun. C’ya!’.

(Not what the actual sign says, but it’s the thought that counts.)

Then we discussed the movies. I said, they wheeled Hiyao Miyazaki out (for those who don’t know, he’s been called the Japanese Walt Disney, because everything he touches sells like hotcakes) to make one last movie and the local theater has been hitting my email inbox hard with it because they know if people like me and my spouse go out to see a movie twice this year, one of them will be that one.

It’s just getting harder to justify movies.

It’s not only that barely any of them are worth watching at all, it’s that money is suddenly so tight for many Americans that something that costs $12 for two people on Tuesday isn’t even justifiable on a weekly basis anymore. You look at what’s out and 4-6 months goes by before you even consider watching the movie.

The local Marcus Cinema theater used to do $5 movie tickets on Tuesday, now it’s $6 and you have to use an app, and no Holidays, and some movies (the good ones) are special and are never $6.

So the “$6 Tuesday with an app that has dozens of spyware libraries in it” is a way to make theaters showing bad movies “not empty” so that they might sell a bucket of popcorn.

What I see unfolding in America right now is like the Second Great Depression, but even during the Depression the federal government admitted to everyone what was happening and enacted programs to help them muddle through.

Today, they cut programs. They tell disabled people in their late 50s “Go find work, bum!”, and with the cost of everything spiking, those lucky enough to have any work find themselves with almost all their money going out to rent and food and gasoline.

This last couple of months my electric bill was running 10% higher than it normally does this part of the year. I looked on my bill this month to find that the Democrats added $10 a month to my bill to save us from “the carbon”. Oh no, not carbon!

My extra $10 a month on the electric bill will certainly make the smog in India and China that’s as thick as pea soup better, and save the planet, the trees, the bees, the whales and snails, and the endangered horny toads.

His Excellency J.B. Pritzker, Lord above us in the high castle, is a very Progressive man.

He made $5 billion the old fashioned way, by inheriting a hotel fortune.

He strongly and earnestly believes in redistributing the wealth to people who don’t do anything except make babies.

Not his own wealth, but if I have an extra five bucks in my pocket that week, not for long if Morbidly Obese 400 pound “Health Expert” Lord Farquad (Seven COVID Shots and Counting) has anything to say about it.

This country is basically dying. What’s going on is the Democrats benefit from people who are too illiterate to understand the issues finding their way into a voting booth, so they enact policies where people who litter the place with unemployable children who will shoot at each other, deal drugs, and scare the taxpayers out of the State don’t have to use any of their own money to reproduce.

They then reduce school by getting rid of the arts and literature, and replacing an increasing amount of actual education with propaganda.

Then they make college so expensive that most people can only dream of going there, even though you’ll also be poor if you don’t.

They’re also the Party of Lockdown Fetishists who basically have wet dreams of killing more businesses, which still employ a few people, with taxes and another winter of discontent, because once all the businesses and taxpayers are gone, you can run a corrupt welfare State on nothing but loans from the Central Bank why not?

It’ll be paradise. Just wait and see!

The Democrat answer to the criminals shooting up the place is to make it difficult for law abiding citizens to arm themselves and shoot back.

The police around these parts are so dumb and corrupt, that the other day, a black man was shot in the head, and the cops ignored the bullet hole in his window, and the bullet in his head, dumped him on the funeral home, and wrote down in the police report that he fell and hit his head and died accidentally.

“Just put him in the ground! We have places to be! People to falsely accuse! Donuts to eat!”

-Waukegan Police Department

Yes, they will protect us all from the bad criminal people! You do not need a FOID card, dear friends!

Anyway, there’s hardly even a reason to leave the house anymore.

They’ve ruined just about everything you could possibly want to see. I mean, some people still walk around in the forest preserves because the Democrats only took the trees in open air parks away from people during “COVID Lockdowns” which they want to bring back this winter. But trees are still there. They don’t employ very many people, but the trees are still there.

At least the ones that didn’t get knocked over to make the suburbs, which are now rotting malls and empty offices.

It should be very interesting to see how long anyone keeps reading the KrugmanBot3000 in the New York Times and doesn’t wake up and see with their own eyes what is actually going on in America.

The United States’ Internet Faces Growing Resemblance to China’s Great Firewall as the Crooked New York Times Acts as the Party’s Mouthpiece.

The United States’ Internet Faces Growing Resemblance to China’s Great Firewall as the Crooked New York Times Acts as the Party’s Mouthpiece.

When Edward Snowden revealed that the United States government basically spies on everyone and logs their Internet activity in case they ever become interesting, it should have been a Five Alarm Fire wake-up call to Americans everywhere to do more to safeguard their privacy.

You could read anyone’s email in the world, anybody you’ve got an email address for. Any website: You can watch traffic to and from it. Any computer that an individual sits at: You can watch it. Any laptop that you’re tracking: you can follow it as it moves from place to place throughout the world. It’s a one-stop-shop for access to the NSA’s information. … You can tag individuals … Let’s say you work at a major German corporation and I want access to that network, I can track your username on a website on a forum somewhere, I can track your real name, I can track associations with your friends and I can build what’s called a fingerprint, which is network activity unique to you, which means anywhere you go in the world, anywhere you try to sort of hide your online presence, your identity.

-Edward Snowden answers “What could you do if you would use XKeyscore?”

However, even as these shocking revelations became public information, the response was just like the RIAA v. The Internet era, where copyright lawyers working for filthy rich executives and multi-millionaires like Metallica, sued poverty-stricken single mothers over some MP3 files they found on KaZaa, and extracted millions of theoretical dollars, (due to driving someone who was already too poor to pay the damages into bankruptcy).

Americans hit the Snooze button yet again. “Remind me Later.” What did they do to increase their privacy? Nothing.

Now, the corrupt New York Times is backing Apple and Arkansas in their War on the Internet.

Apple is trying to use threats of being booted out of the App Store against Reddit, to force them to clean up the porn.

Even though Reddit’s porn content is not enough to make them covered by the Arkansas “card people to use this site” law (it has to be like 51% or something), Apple’s threats of booting them from the App Store carry serious weight behind them, as useds of the iPhone have no Freedom to simply go around Apple and install Reddit themselves, like Android users can with things that are not allowed in the Play Store, or when we want Free and Open Source Software from F-Droid.

Reddit’s business is advertising, so they will balance the threat of being booted from the App Store (where they can spy on people’s iPhones and gather tons of useful information about them for selling ads) with how many ads they can plaster everywhere around the pornography, and try to figure out which is the least damaging route for Reddit.

If they cave, which they are starting to, and delete the porn or make it difficult to casually access, then they’ll go the way of Tumblr, which gave into Apple’s threats and deleted the porn, and that’s the last anyone ever heard of Tumblr.

On top of Apple, which has this sick, almost clinical, fascination and disgust about porn on the Internet, the “Republicans of Gilead” in States like Arkansas have implemented laws that make porn sites (defined by arbitrary amounts of content) demand to see government ID to get in.

Only a few sites are even complying with the Arkansas law, but one of the ones that is, is PornHub, which detects if you have an Arkansas-based IP address and blocks you if you do.

Laws like this are stupid easy to bypass. If the person gets a VPN and uses a VPN server that’s not in Arkansas, they can see the site again.

If they don’t have $4-5 a month in their pocket for a VPN, they can just install the Brave Web browser, and open a Private Window with Tor, and load the site in the Tor Window.

Or even use the Tor Browser itself.

These laws are comically ineffective, because Tor is doing what it was designed to do.

“Route the victim of an oppressive regime around the censorship.”

Once these people “go dark”, the government will actually have a harder time monitoring them at all, and so will the sites that are tracking them all over the Web.

So the government doesn’t “clean up the Web”.

It just makes it so everyone who wants to do another legal thing on the Internet, without forking over their ID, goes encrypted and routes their traffic through something else.

The people using Tor and VPNs to get around the Arkansas law aren’t committing any crime.

The law doesn’t claim to make it a crime for the user to bypass the ID check. It just lays out penalties for sites that should know that a person is in Arkansas, who don’t check for IDs.

There’s really no strong incentive for the site to figure out if a Tor or VPN user is in Arkansas. The only thing they could do is ask the user.

For my part, I usually browse the Web through a VPN server in Sweden, Switzerland, or the Netherlands, where there are laws regarding privacy. It’s horrible, sometimes, trying to access American Web sites, because there’s no privacy laws to protect Americans, so they just shut out anyone with an EU IP address and say they don’t comply with the GDPR.

It also causes a lot of cookie screens, that I have my browsers configured to swat back down with the ad blockers, so that I can never consent. And then, just in case, my browsers toss the cookies and local site data, with limited exceptions for half a dozen sites or so, on exit.

Google kind of messes with you if you do that, but I don’t use Google search.

I use Searx Belgium, and here’s why.

Google does a lot of annoying things to lean on VPN and Tor users to “log in” and identify themselves for searches. (Never log in to a search engine.) Then they’ll know it was you and record it, even if they can’t currently see your real IP address.

With Searx Belgium I can go to the Settings and persistently prefer United States -English results.

The United States Internet is basically becoming unusable.

I don’t own any Apple devices. I certainly never consented that Apple could decide what I can see on my browser on my computer, because I’ve never agreed to any Apple licenses for any Apple software.

(Except for that one time I agreed not to make any atomic bombs with Safari on Windows, a long time ago. Seriously, this was in the license file.)

However, their corrupting influence is affecting what sites feel free to host.

Not that any of this is in defense of Reddit. They’re bad too. They have every reason to pressure people to sign in so they can track them. They’re an ad company.

If you sign into Reddit, you should put Reddit in a container where it can’t see your Web activity outside of this, or use Private Mode with Tor in Brave or browse over a VPN, give them a fake email you don’t use for anything else.

That way they don’t know who they watch.

For now, you can get around the “log in or get the app” nonsense with Old Reddit Redirect, but who knows how much longer they’ll let users opt out of the New Reddit mess.

Increasingly, the way to deal with the US Internet is “Don’t browse without a VPN or Tor.”

Bill Gates has lobbied for the end of encryption and privacy for everyone except rich criminals.

They’re finding it hard to control and monitor people when they disappear from the radar.

The government doesn’t belong in people’s homes. Especially not to decide what (otherwise legal) things they are doing or watching.

If parents really have a problem with things on the Internet, they need to step up, be a parent, and take control of the devices in their own home.

But increasingly, this issue is just a distraction to legitimize government spying, like the programs that Snowden revealed.

This is because they know nobody will dare say anything about it if they say it’s to protect kids.

Protect kids? Which kids and what are the government protecting, and from what?

In Illinois, where I live, kids tend to be habitual offenders by the time they’re 14 or 15.

There’s no career prospects in the State and only 70% of the kids where I live can even graduate high school. It’s almost like something out of Somalia.

In the news, every day, they’re shooting people, dealing dope, stealing cars, and mugging people.

Gangs in Chicago use kids as soon as they’re old enough to hold a gun and reach the gas pedal in the car they stole from you.

Maybe the government should focus on this.

I strongly believe they should bring back the electric chair, find the adults who are putting kids up to this crap, and have the adults ride the lightning for it. You turned the kids into monsters, you pay the price.

But no, the government isn’t worried about this or they would do something about it.

Instead, they have crooked Apple, “Conde Nasty” (Reddit), the corrupt New York Times egging on a moral panic about pornography.

When I was a teenager, I saw porn on the Internet. I think everyone I know did. We’re in charge of the world now. I mean, my parents’ generation is thinning out and can’t be blamed for everything.

We should never allow the government to become so tyrannical that they start mandating laws against privacy, encryption, and what software we are allowed to run, and I believe it’s sick that we’re allowing them to use children as props while they’re not cleaning up the mess in Chicago.

What the Crooked New York Times proposes is far worse than what we have now.

The article suggests not one, but two Supreme Court decisions (Reno v. A.C.L.U and Ashcroft v. American Civil Liberties Union) should be reversed, and that instead of the essentially open access to the Web we have today, we would have something even more restrictive than the Arkansas law imposed on every American.

Under this proposal, any person who wants to access legal material would be forced to provide their driver’s license or credit card information, essentially allowing porn sites, credit card companies, banks, and advertisers to track exactly who is viewing what content.

In Russia, such information is frequently used for blackmail (they call it “Kompromat”), where they compile a list of a person’s online activities and use it to portray them as a demented pervert, even though a majority of the country views such content every day.

The fact that this idea is being discussed in The New York Times suggests that it’s on the Democrat Party’s agenda, although the Republicans may have arrived at similar proposals earlier.

The proposal by the New York Times is even worse than it sounds in yet another way.

Because part of the Child Online Protection Act that the US Supreme Court took issue with in their Ashcroft verdict, was that the law tried to censor things that could be considered by reasonable and logical people to have serious literary, artistic, or scientific merit.

If Ashcroft were to be reversed fully, then the entire law would go back into effect, having a chilling effect on our First Amendment rights. Far beyond what most normal people would agree is pornographic.

So you can also consider this another attempt by the Radical Left to gather around a bonfire of books.

Perhaps the liberals are hoping for what Darth Vader asserted, “There will be nobody to stop us this time!“

The Quest to Get My Spouse a Bus Card Because People are Vicious.

The Quest to Get My Spouse a Bus Card Because People are Vicious.

I drop off and pick up my spouse from work every day. It’s fine in the morning because nobody else is even awake yet, so I can get there and back about as fast as I feel like driving, with the occasional stop light. It’s great.

But then I have to get up and go get him in the evening when everyone is getting off work, coming in from Chicago, schools letting out, schoolbuspocalypse….

Then there’s always some jalopy that’s broken down or someone in another stolen Kia or Dodge Charger that was going 100 in a 30 and slammed into someone.

It’s impossible to make good time, and gasoline is like crazy expensive now on top of that.

Today, the security guard/rent-a-cop guy at Walmart that hasn’t had any effect on the shoplifters got bored and decided to chase me out of the place that’s not really a parking spot, but it’s not a handicapped or fire zone. He walks over, looks at the other cars, glances at me for a moment, walks back over, gets in his little rent-a-cop mobile, and turns his yellow flashers on and parks next to me and gets out and starts writing down my plate number in a little pad of paper. I decide I’m getting the hell out of there, and throw it in reverse.

People behind me, so the security officer just doesn’t want to deal with this and tears up the paper and told me don’t worry about it, just don’t park there again.

I told him he could have just asked.

Then when I went up the ramp to get home there was a rather large woman in a white van that threw it in reverse and almost caused a 4 car pile up because she lost a $10 blue Coleman cooler she could have replaced at Walmart.

So I rolled my window down and told her she was crazy and “What the hell does she think she’s doing?”, and drove off while she was trying to backtalk me because I don’t care.

I have a dashcam that records everything all around it because there’s a lot of insurance scammers in Illinois and there’s like three lawyers for every human that lives here.

Half of the entire state GDP is basically just lawyers in Chicago asking people if they’ve swooped-and-squatted anyone, you know, and gives them a fake neck brace to wear in court. Saul Goodman stuff.

Your insurance cuts them a check, they go after you, you can’t afford to drive again.

So I got on the Ventra Web site right now and loaded $10 on a card and they said it will come to my mailbox in 7-10 days.

I figure with the price of gas alone these days, it’s good to have.

Walmart keeps giving him a 5.5 hour shift here and there because of the ongoing national hour cuts, and it’s just not worth going through all of this, ESPECIALLY on one of those days.

Get 4 hours sleep and go through something pretty much like what I just described to try to get him home in the evening when the Pace bus is $2.

Even if I just go park in the abandoned pizza business’s lot over by the bus stop and drive him home the last bit of the way, it would still make more sense than dealing with people pushing and shoving and some crazy asshole backing down the up ramp.

In the past few years, the attitude of the American public has gotten to where half of them are crazy and will kill you just as soon as look at you (“Bish don’t tell me to wear a mask! BANG BANG MOTHERFUCKER!”) and the other half ready to stick a gun in their own mouth so they don’t have to deal with another shift at the McDonalds. (“Bish, don’t tell me to wear a mask!” *SMACK SMACK SMACK goes the COVID plexiglass on the minimum wage worker’s head!*)

The COVID masks are gone but the attitude is still there. “Don’t talk to me, or else!”.

Could you imagine having to work for minimum wage, getting your hours cut, and then deal with a public of crazies and idiots ready to go off on you, along with a stupid boss that knows less than you do, and an HR department that is cutting hours because they don’t want to say layoff?

That’s what these people go through. That’s why I never give service workers crap. Whatever you think they’ve done, be nice to them. Someone else will be so mean that they’ll have to deal with too much anyway.