Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker Makes the State More Like Communist China by Forcing Non-Chicago Residents into Chicago Courts.

Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker Makes the State More Like Communist China by Forcing Non-Chicago Residents into Chicago Courts.

Illinois is becoming more like China.

Governor Pritzker signed a “law” that says you have to sue the State over the FOID Act in either Chicago or Springfield.

This is so they can get the case into courts with Democrat judges who will always side with the State and won’t even pretend to respect our Constitutions (State or Federal).

It’s like Communist China forcing Hong Kongers into mainland courts so that they can’t get a fair trial. It will be Communist Party judges who don’t have to apply the Hong Kong Basic Law.

It’s so nice to see where the Democratic Party of Illinois gets their inspiration from.

Nevertheless, a case involving a FOID Act lawsuit (there are multiple moving through various courts right now) was recently removed to a federal court for the Southern District of Illinois, where it can eventually make its way into the Seventh Circuit and to SCOTUS if necessary.

Gov. Pritzker, theoretically, has no power to strip American citizens of their federal rights. He’s only a State governor.

Nevertheless, he’s doing his best to sabotage our access to free and fair court hearings, by throwing the State cases to courts that absolutely never rule against him.

I knew that a second Pritzker Administration would be even worse than the first.

The first time, he claimed he had unlimited power to suspend any Illinois law, indefinitely, due to a “COVID Emergency”. The actual LAW says he can only do this for 30 days and then the legislature has to review it, but he kept saying that it was a new emergency every month and nobody ever stopped him.

He messed with hundreds of laws to see if anyone would stop him and nobody did, and it went on for years. This is not a democracy, it’s not a republic, and there are no checks and balances. This fat fuck is running the State of Illinois like Xi runs China.

Democracies decay into dictatorships when one person is allowed to do whatever they want. On both the State and Federal levels, Americans are being treated to a series of ever more Imperialistic presidents and governors.

Obama signed laws claiming he could indefinitely detain American citizens without trial, he tried to claim that he had unlimited authority to make recess appointments.

I thought this was bad until Trump did something more egregious than either of those practically every day for four years and it was questionable whether he would ever leave office or if we’d ever have another election again, free and fair or otherwise, if he didn’t go quietly.

Honestly, I’ve never been more terrified of what’s unfolding in front of us.

The government realizes that it can’t control Free People, so it will make our lives terrible and get us fighting with each other over unimportant issues like who uses what bathroom.

America is basically gone. I don’t even know what this is, but it’s not America anymore.

As to what’s going on in Illinois, people in Illinois who are affected by the State Police refusing to answer the phone or their E-Mails and telling them why their FOID Card was denied, only to sue and have them act as if you didn’t even try to figure it out and that they’re exempt from the Freedom of Information Act, they should sue in a court where they live, and in that complaint ask the court where they live to strike down the law that says they have to go to Chicago to file this in a Kangaroo Court hundreds of miles away.

Pritzker might have signed something that claims he’s stripped your local courts of their jurisdiction, but judges don’t tend to look kindly on that. They may strike down that law even if they rule against you on the FOID lawsuit.

Then at least other people can sue Pritzker where they live and possibly win.

The Firearm Services Bureau is basically a Democratic Party tool to control who gets gun permits. They’re supposedly following a set of rules, but they often make inexplicable decisions and then won’t say why they did it.

If you don’t even know, and they won’t tell you, it becomes impossible to challenge it.

For some reason, the crooks who are allegedly judges, know what the law is, they just don’t care, and they will make up any reason to avoid enforcing what the law actually is.

This whole system is a fraud.

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.

I Endorse Darren Bailey For Congress in Illinois’ 12th Congressional District

I encourage voters to support Darren Bailey in the 12th Congressional District Primary Election.

When Darren Bailey ran for Governor of Illinois, I voted for him, despite being a gay man in an interracial marriage to an immigrant.

Mr. Bailey seems like a generally decent man who supports legal immigration and our Second Amendment rights, which have been stripped away from us by Dictator Pritzker (governing by emergency decrees and unilaterally suspending the rule of law for three years, a month at a time, citing COVID) and his Kangaroo Illinois “Supreme” Court, which has ceased functioning as a check on unconstitutional power grabs by the other two branches of government, and has become a small legislature of partisan quacks.

I endorse Darren Bailey for the 12th Congressional District because he’s the best there’s going to be down there.

As a result of the Democrat Party’s extreme gerrymander to steal the right to vote from Illinoisans statewide, that district is going to be represented by a Republican no matter what.

If I have any misgivings about Mr. Bailey, they are easily outdone by his opponent, Mike Bost, who is a career do-nothing Washington insider, and worse, an Anti-Asian racist.

Mr. Bost has repeatedly made Anti-Asian racial slurs, and has no place in our elected government.

On the issues, Mr. Bost couldn’t be more terrible if he tried.

In his Wikipedia page alone, consider all of these things.

But I would like to draw special attention to his Anti-Asian Hate Speech.

At a March 2017 meeting with editors of the Southern Illinoisan, Bost said that he did not do “town halls” because they had become too combative. “You know the cleansing that the Orientals used to do where you’d put one person out in front and 900 people yell at them? That’s not what we need. We need to have meetings with people that are productive.” His use of the word “Orientals” made national headlines. Bost apologized, saying he had “used a poor choice of words.” His spokesman said that Bost had been referring to public humiliation sessions during China‘s Cultural Revolution.^[40][41]

Look, there’s going to be a Republican in this district anyway. The “orientals” slur alone is enough of an embarrassment and I struggle to see how supporting Darren Bailey could be any worse.

It’s bad enough that I feel like I need to put a shock collar on my own parents that goes off whenever they openly say something racist. It’s quite another thing when it’s a guy like Mr. Bost representing Illinois in the national government.

The Second Amendment rights apply to Citizens as well as lawful US Permanent Residents.

I keep saying that the best way to protect yourself is get licensed and get armed. When seconds count, the police are only half an hour away.

Mr. Bailey will be a fighter for our Second Amendment rights so that when the criminals try to rape and carjack and pull a home invasion on you, you’ll be able to defend yourself. It’s too late for Illinois at the State level. We need more fighters for our freedom at the federal government.

The Founders of this country didn’t envision a failed New Deal Welfare State that has conditioned a significant part of the population to think that they’re entitled to what you have, to the point that when the legal system starts getting repealed by Dictator Pritzker and his cronies, they skip applying for government benefits, and just grab your car at gunpoint.

The Democrat Inner Party all has their FOID cards. They tried to carjack the Illinois Democrat Senate Majority Leader in Chicago, and her husband shot back at them.

You can see where they have set up a two-tiered system where the rest of us are just supposed to die, give up the car, or try to fight them off with a wiffle bat.

Matthew Garrett in TechRights (before his ban) called himself “Snowball”, allegedly as a reference to Animal Farm.

Yes, I have read Animal Farm, and it describes perfectly what’s going on in Illinois. Emergency Decrees. Democrat Inner Party members with FOID cards shooting back at THEIR carjackers.

All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.

Re-Certifying For ObummerCare in STATE OF ILL.

In Illinois (known as STATE OF ILL on your tax return), you have to re-certify for any Medicaid program every year.

Their Web site, ABE, is a giant piece of shit designed by some crooked contractor who was obviously wanting to get “support ticket” revenue from STATE OF ILL forever.

Anyway, it won’t just be Medicaid cases that deal with this soon.

Governor PRICKSTER just signed a bill that takes the entire Obummercare exchange (including the private plans) away from the federal marketplace by 2026, so that everyone can suffer.

Then you can deal with (Microsoft) .aspx shit that randomly crashes and warns you not to use the back and forward buttons in your browser or it might fuck your form and make it denied (for pressing the back button!).

Every year you go to use ABE and then it manages to shit something out that’s totally a “THAT’S NOT WHAT I SAID! THAT IS NOT WHAT I SAID!”

So then at the end when you think you’ve got it right, you add “Additional Information” and go line by line re-stating a summary of everything you just thought you told them.

Government sites in general are crap in the United States. The Federal ones usually at least work, some States (like Indiana) are smart enough that they want to pay once for something and get what they paid for.

I’ve never seen anything in the US that more directly reminds me of the government in the Philippines (which uses Microsoft (storm)FrontPage 2000 to shit out new pages on their Embassy site) than what’s going on in STATE OF ILL.

Months back, I suddenly couldn’t pay my electric bill at ComEd with SeaMonkey anymore.

ComEd (Exelon) is not technically STATE OF ILL, but they’re “regulated” closely by corrupt politicians, some of which are now facing federal felonies for kickbacks, bribery scandals, etc. such as Michael Madigan, the former Democrat Speaker of the House.

The STATE OF ILL controls the power company and so as if what goes on in Ukraine disrupting world energy markets and Biden’s shitty “green” energy plan wasn’t driving your bill high enough already, the STATE OF ILL forced them to sign a contract with Microsoft Azure, and move everything over.

Now it shits out diarrhea “HTML” and bogus self-contradicting “JavaScript” meant for GULAGCRASH (Chrome) and Microsoft’s ALSOGULAGCRASH (Edge).

So I went back to paying my bill through the mail, with a stamp, and writing down my credit card number on the payment coupon.

I’ve blogged before about Microsoft deals with STATE OF ILL, to the point where interacting with PUBLIC courts, you get warned that if you don’t use Microsoft’s ALSOGULAGCRASH (Edge) to edit PDFs, your petition could be denied.

It’s not like people using standards-compliant Free Software to deal with PDF court forms deserve to be taken seriously as members of the public and taxpayers, right?

Not in STATE OF ILL.

PRICKSTER just obligated taxpayers to foot the bill for a $500 million dollar a year landlord bailout under the guise of “reducing homelessness”.

Sure, they could have just given out homes that people can’t sell because they fled Illinois and decided to lose the house in a property tax sale (because paying the county $10,000 a year for a house you “own” is legit, right?) or to the bank (which sits on them to drive up the price of everything else).

Certainly the issue of not being able to design a Web site isn’t a money thing.

They throw money around worse than Congress.

Car insurance and the Gender Tax. Take 5 Seconds to Tell Them You’re a Man and Pay $100 More than “Non-Binary”

My car insurance company has been offering Non-Binary drivers the ability to identify as such for about a couple of years now.

If you tell them you identify as a Man, you will pay them $100 more a year for car insurance than if you identify as “Gender X” or “Non-Binary”.

In Illinois, Governor J.B. Pritzker signed a law in 2019 that allows drivers to choose “Gender X” on our license, but it does not go into effect at the DMV until 2024.

You can sign a form saying you’re Male or Female, and without any medical documentation, submit it at the DMV with your old license, and then tell the car insurance people you are now “Female” and get lower rates, if you’re a Man.

I don’t know of too many Men who would do this, but with Gender X, it may be more tolerable.

I mean, who is to say that you identify as either Gender?

If your car insurance bill goes up 9% for being a Man vs. “Gender X”, and it’s just a damn plastic card, why wouldn’t you “identify as Gender X”?

After all, we all know by now that gender is just a social construct and doesn’t actually exist, right?

As far as I can tell, the insurance companies pushed for this and if they can’t figure out why only Women and Gender X sign up for car insurance now, if it becomes widely known, isn’t that their own problem?

Women always go on and on about the “Woman Tax” for tampons (which most states have repealed and Illinois gives them away for free in school and college bathrooms), and the “gender pay gap” (even when it’s posted on the door what EVERYONE starts out at for this job, like it is at most jobs).

I’ve never heard a 20 year old Woman complain that her car insurance is $1,000 a year less than a 20 year old Man’s, have you?

Even when you get older, the disparity persists.

Six states have, so far, made Gender an illegal and discriminatory rating practice among the insurance industry, but the majority haven’t.

Insurance companies have been subsidizing Female drivers by charging Male drivers more every year, even though Gender is not a reliable predictor of risk.

My 66 year old mother talks on her iPhone and holds it up to her ear, and yet, she’ll pay less than a 30 year old Man who has more use of his mental faculties and vision and hearing, who puts his phone in the pocket, where it belongs.

Insurance companies have found just about every way to be horrible to people, even when it’s impossible to justify.

For example, until about 20 years ago, credit ratings were not a big factor in rates, and now they can be between 9 and 20% of a risk model.

If you filed for bankruptcy in 1990, your car insurance didn’t go up, but if you do it now, you’ll pay them thousands more over the next 7 years.

They do this because they’re opportunists. All they really need to do is pay some “consultants” to claim that filing bankruptcy makes the same person more likely to have a car accident, but only for 7 years, then it goes back down. And they were driving with cheap insurance for 20 years before the bankruptcy and weren’t a “bad risk”.

They tend to prey on people who society won’t defend as much.

If you’re a Man and complain the world is unfair, nobody listens, so they stick you with a higher insurance bill.

If you’re bankrupt? Well, that’s a “moral failing” because you’re “irresponsible”, you irresponsible person who got cancer and couldn’t keep up with your medical bills, you! Naughty naughty! Here’s your car insurance bill, which has doubled.

Enjoy the cancer, and your bankruptcy, and the car insurance bill. At least, that’s what GEICO, the evil lizard will say.

I encourage Men to get more open-minded about “Gender X” at the DMV. Nobody likes Men, so you know, just “think less like a Man” and tell it out loud.

Just tell them you don’t identify as a Man because who needs ’em anyway?

Apparently society doesn’t need Men for anything anymore anyway. So it’s time to burn the jockstraps and get a better quote.

It is rather stereotypical, dated, and offensive, to suggest that there are Gender Roles, unless you want to talk about stereotypical Male ones that are negative, like war, domestic violence, and drinking beer. I mean, then everyone is suddenly game.

Why is that? Why can’t we, as enlightened (apparently, heading into World War III and the collapse of the Earth’s biosphere, with Oligarchs ruining everything) species, just take a step forward and admit that Women can screw things up too.

How many Women voted for the recent wars. Hillary Clinton is a Woman and she voted for the wars, didn’t she? I mean, did we just cross a line somehow by not making Hillary Clinton accountable for voting for the wars?

I voted for the people who wanted to end the wars, you know, back when I thought I was a Man and was seriously misinformed because my social evolution wasn’t as far along as it is now.

It is time to move past our social constructs.

Facebook is dying as the tech bubble bursts.

Facebook is collapsing right in front of us.

All you have to do is look at their stock price.

It’s “worth” less than 25% of what it was 13 months ago, even before you adjust for the fact that the money lost another 30% this year under Biden and (locally worse) Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker.

Where you have to pay for three dozen eggs at 2020 prices to get only a dozen and you have to pay for two pounds of butter to get a pound, and you have to pay for 1.2 months worth of rent to get a month.

This is Illinois and this is America under the Democratic Party.

Phoronix is talking about Facebook’s code contributions to the BtrFS file system for Linux, which I admit I use personally.

Since it’s all under the GNU GPL, it will survive the collapse of the Second Tech Bubble, when Facebook is long gone. As did much Free and Open Source Software the last time, much of which is still developed and in use today.

But what will be gone when Facebook itself collapses?

Cat pictures?

Terror content that they don’t see anything wrong with (because there’s no human moderators and they try to cover it up with software that detects words)?

Anti-vaxxers? People denying that we had an election and they lost?

They don’t care what kind of an open sewer they’re running as long as people engage with advertising, but in Biden/Pritzker’s economy, ad revenue is worth very little right now and many of the ad firms themselves are shutting down and having 100% layoffs.

Meanwhile, the company is mostly being mocked for spending down all of their assets on something that looks like characters in a Nintendo 64 game where nobody has any legs, on a $600 VR headset.

Facebook truly is burning while Zuckerberg fiddles. This is priceless. I shall watch with great amusement and then laugh in “I still use IRC and lost pretty much nothing.”.

There’s nothing particularly unique about what’s happening to Facebook (“Fakebook”) in the economy of the Bay Area. Layoffs Tracker shows mostly what’s unfolding in failed blue cities and states.

Yesterday, a “self-driving” car company based in Pennsylvania called Argo AI went under, and 2,000 people lost their jobs, as their clients took possession of the company’s “intellectual property”.

Self-driving cars are a pipe dream. Tesla is now under CRIMINAL investigation by the feds for advertising that their cars are “self-driving”. (NewsWaffle proxy. Original.)

I mean, it’s technically true that “self-driving” cars can mostly manage to stay in a lane, but you can’t trust them not to run people over and say they were a shopping bag or slam into the back of a parked police car in Florida, so you still, legally, have to be paying attention to the road and ready to take over at a moment’s notice.

I linked to the ARGO AI story in Techrights IRC yesterday, highlighting Matthew J. Garrett, joking “You’re next, Bubbles.”.

(Which is what Peter Venkman told the judge in Ghostbusters II while the ghosts were flying away with his court reporter.)

He didn’t reply as far as I know. I’m not telling him anything he doesn’t already know.

The Federal Reserve may be fixing to lose all credibility.

I saw a report yesterday that says that many investors feel that the Fed will crater and stop aggressively hiking interest rates in December. The Fed hasn’t commented, but I guess we won’t have to wait long to see.

I don’t subscribe to the notion that jacking up interest rates through the roof and causing immediate and rampant destruction is the best or only way to get hyperinflation under control, but it is what’s available considering that Congress won’t quit throwing money around and bailing out Zombie Corporations like Japan did in the 90s before it gave up because the government deficits were just too large and the population wouldn’t stand for it anymore.

If true, this means that instead of just a Depression or just a hyperinflationary period, we’re going to get both as the Federal Reserve throws its hands into the air and gives up trying to deal with this using the tools it has available.

My Illinois mid-term election ballot was “challenged” and I refused to “vote” using one of those fake provisional ballots that they throw in the trash later.

My Illinois mid-term election ballot was “challenged” and I refused to “vote” using one of those fake provisional ballots that they throw in the trash later.

The County Clerk’s office of Lake County, Illinois tried to “challenge” my ballot.

I was pretty furious last night when I read this on their Web site and may have let loose with some expletives. We Americans already have almost no control over the government, and now they’re trying to steal my right to vote too!

I spent half an hour trying to fix it this morning, before I spoke to the Clerk herself, Robin M. O’Connor, and cleared the challenge with a sworn statement that I really am who I say I am.

I showed my Illinois driver’s license and my Firearm Owner’s Identification Card, and the Challenge was cleared.

Along the way, a poll worker tried to get me to use a “Provisional Ballot”.

I said, “I know what those are…” with a tinge of annoyance in my voice. I continued, “The American Civil Liberties Union warns voters about ‘Provisional Ballots’, which are essentially fake ballots that poll workers give to voters who insist on voting, when you really don’t want them to vote, and that more than half of them go into the trash on election night.

I would like to speak to the County Clerk about curing my REAL ballot, not vote using something that Congress created in 2002 to trick mostly poor and Black voters into going away.

Furthermore, I’m frankly shocked, shocked and dismayed, to find that the dirty election tricks that we were told were only going on in places like my home state of Indiana are going on in a state and county which claims that the right to vote is sacred.

I also consider this a personal insult and stand ready to prove my identity using the appropriate forms of identification as set forth in the Illinois Compiled Statutes”.

The poll worker, who was Black, looked at me for a moment (So did the Sheriff’s Deputies sitting in the box next to her, but what are they going to do? Arrest me for Orderly Conduct?), and said “Go down the hall over there into the office and ask to speak to Mary.”.

Mary got ahold of the Clerk and I made a sworn statement. O’Connor said to me that the Web site should update “sometime in the next week” showing my ballot as “accepted”.

As Boston.com reported in April 2022, almost 60% of “Provisional Ballots” in Massachusetts were thrown out on Election Night in 2020.

The ballots are fake, they’re basically totally fake.

They just sit there counting them right before the deadline to finalize the results so there’s no challenging them, as a voter, at that point.

So if yours is one of the 60% that get thrown in the trash, there’s no way to cure it!

But the election officials at the Lake County, Illinois Clerk’s Office swore up and down that “they all get counted 14 days after they election”.

Also, they’ll probably sell you the Brooklyn Bridge for two dollars if you let them.

Some might even say that the poll workers throw them out to reach the final results that they are trying to get to in that County Clerk’s office.

Since we don’t know why they throw them out and can’t ask them to come up with a solid explanation for why some count and others don’t, we just don’t know why they do it, but there’s motivations for a stolen election no matter who is doing the stealing, aren’t there?

It’s not hard to imagine that if they have 10,000 “Provisional” votes, then they just say “This one good, this one bad. Because reasons….”, until “the right” candidate has enough votes.

“It is immensely frustrating that, in communities with the largest Black and brown, low income, and immigrant communities, thousands of individuals tried to vote, but did not have their votes counted,” Cheryl Clyburn Crawford, Executive Director at MassVOTE, said in the release.

I’m a White man and I was trying to vote for a split ballot with some Republicans, some Democrats.

I voted Republican for Governor, the Illinois Supreme Court, the Illinois Treasurer and Comptroller, and Lake County Treasurer, Sheriff and Appellate Court Second District.

Democrat for US Senate, US House, Secretary of State and Attorney General, as well as State House and State Senate, Lake County Regional School Superintendent, and Lake County Clerk.

YES on the Worker’s Rights Amendment.

I suppose that the “problem” might have been that the Lake County Clerk changed parties and I voted for her Democratic Party competitor.

But who knows?

I thought that they didn’t open those ballots until Election Day, so how do they know who I voted for yet?

Nevertheless, it’s wrong to say that Election officials only target racial minorities. This is Democrat bullshit, you know. “You’re only doing this because I’m Black!”. Clearly, they don’t “only” do it to Black people. They do it to White people as well.

I got challenged in Indiana at the polling booth one year because there was another voter with a similar name in the same county, and the poll worker tried to threaten calling the police if I tried to vote “again”, so I went and talked to the Allen County Clerk and sorted it out.

I’ve had it happen twice, in two different states, and I’m only 38. It’s troubling that this happens so frequently.

But, before this turns into much more of a meandering mess wondering who these folks target and why, let me just say with 100% sincerity….

Don’t ever let them give you a Provisional Ballot and then walk out thinking you’ve voted, because you probably haven’t!

I promised them that I would be keeping an eye on the status of my ballot and “I’ll be back if it doesn’t update correctly.”.

No more masks or COVID tests for nursing home workers soon thanks to Bailout Biden. Bonus: Lots of Democratic Party nonsense lately.

No more masks or COVID tests for nursing home workers soon thanks to “Bailout Biden”.

I was on the phone with my mother in Indiana last night and learned something very troubling.

Mom informed me that very soon, they won’t have to test or wear masks at the nursing home she works at because “Bailout Biden”‘s Administration won’t be buying masks and COVID tests for people who have to work where the 90 and 100 year olds live.

Instead, he gave Intel $20 billion so they could fire all those thousands of people today instead of buying PPE for nurses.

On the vaccine front, whatever Fully Boosted even means anymore in Vaccine Choose Your Own Adventure, your guess is as good as mine I suppose.

So I think we need to give up on trying to suppress every mild case of illness and just try to keep the more extreme outcomes away, and figure out what the minimum number of doses that does this is. The fact that they’re seriously talking about “four boosters per year” is very alarming. So, we need to scrap this idea and go to something that’s actually tenable.

That’s what an ethical person would say to do.

Unfortunately, anti-Free Software troll Matthew J. Garrett had a bad episode last night on IRC to try to disrupt the room, and the topic changed to vaccines for a while to distract from chat about the criminal activities of one Bill Gates.

(Garrett may be working for Microsoft soon if his employer doesn’t go under before that. Their CEO is trying to get Aurora Innovation, Inc. acquired. It’s currently running out of money, losing three-fourths of a billion dollars a year on barely a tenth as much revenue, having never turned a profit.)

There’s no evidence that the vaccines shape the spread of COVID much.

That seems to have happened mainly from damned near everyone getting it at once last winter (look at the graphs) despite being vaxxed and boosted.

The reason we won’t see a surge on a graph again this winter won’t be because COVID’s not spreading, it’s because “Bailout Biden” scuttled the tests, even for nursing home workers, and all the money for the masks too.

It went to the Intel Bailout instead.

By that, I don’t mean literally went to Intel, but that Congress could have chosen to put the $20 billion into COVID supplies instead of a failing chip company making buggy processors for Windows PCs that nobody wants to buy. CHIPS Act was basically like the GM bailout, except I don’t even think Intel will last 10 more years.

The several thousand getting sacked are largely marketing and R&D. They’re keeping the managers to preside over a smaller cubicle farm with less stuff in the pipeline. This is insanity.

Meanwhile, rush hour gridlock is back in Chicago because instead of shutting down the offices with the expensive rent and $5,000 coffee machines, CEOs adopted a “quit working from home, get your shots, and come back, or don’t bother coming back” policy, and now the Democrat Party wants to turn all freeways in Chicago into Toll Roads.

It’s amazing that instead of putting a lid on COVID, saving money, and reducing traffic fatalities, it was decided instead to cause a surge of COVID with lots of expensive offices, by bringing rush hour back in the middle of a global energy crisis.

If “Bailout Biden” really wanted to help the climate and punish the Saudis for colluding with Vladimir Putin on oil production cuts, we’d go back to mandatory work from home and be done with a terrorist state dictating our policies in exchange for some oil.

I don’t really like the term “government corruption”, because when you try to point something out as being an example of government corruption, you make it sound like it’s the exception rather than the rule.

It would be more notable to try to point at any examples of government virtue, if any such examples were to exist.

“Today in a shocking and rare case of government incorruption….”, the news from a parallel universe could say, “Democrat Mayor Lori Lightfoot of Chicago was caught funneling taxpayer funds intended to help police beat up the homeless and burn their belongings into public housing.

When pressed for a comment, Governor J.B. Pritzker of Illinois said ‘I’m shocked. Shocked and dismayed! And I vow, as your Governor who packed that ballot box fair and square, to get to the bottom of this incorruptibility and alarming level of accountability involving taxpayer funds. This is exactly the kind of behavior that my Administration has been working very hard to root out here in the Prairie State.'”

It really does amaze me how obtuse Matthew Garrett can be when he wants to be. He tried to imply I was racist when I said people in Chicago are woke and the only reason Lori Lightfoot is the Mayor is because she’s a black lesbian.

I was saying that the “qualifications” aren’t the best policies, it’s ticking off boxes.

I said I’m gay and I wouldn’t want anyone to vote for me if it was only because I was gay. That’s not important. You have to worry about how they’ll run your city or state and affect your life.

I’ve passed up voting for two gay people (Lori Lightfoot and Pete Buttigieg) because I didn’t feel they were qualified to do what they were running for.

I don’t feel Pete Buttigieg should even be the Transportation Secretary. He had his “let them eat brioche” moment the other day when he said you’ll never worry about gas prices if you buy an electric car.

So many things wrong with that, like the fact that those cars are an unreliable burden with sky high maintenance costs and that California’s electric grid is on the verge of collapse and they already can’t beg, borrow, or steal enough of someone else’s electricity to run what they have now.

I say this because these crooked assholes actually had the nerve to bomb my email box this morning begging me to go vote for their candidates. Saying that “internal polling” shows they may actually lose the Illinois Supreme Court.

I already voted, for the Republican, Mark C. Curran.

If the Democrats keep up what they’re doing, the 40% surge in violent crime since Pritzker was elected in 2018 will look like a walk in the park.

I support knocking over the FOID Act and letting the people lock and load and shoot back if the police aren’t going to do anything.

Imagine how pissed I was when I found out that John Idleberg, Sheriff of Lake County, Illinois, supports the bill the state House has passed that would turn up to 3 grams of fentanyl, crack, or heroin into a Class A Misdemeanor.

(Three grams of fentanyl is enough to kill 1,500 people of a drug overdose. We do not need this bill in the middle of a drug crisis! This would benefit dealers, not people who are using.)

So I voted Republican for Sheriff too.

Illinois is giving up on having a justice system under the Democrats, and our state economy is almost unbelievably bad even by the abysmal standards of what’s left of this country.

Pritzker is bragging that we took out more loans to pay off loans from the Federal Reserve, that we in turn took out to cover his COVID spending, which honestly mostly had nothing to do with COVID anyway.

He’s spent the last two years with dictatorial powers and it’s time for that to stop. I doubt he gets voted out, but I voted to try to box him in. You do what you can.

Walmart fires 200 corporate employees in the “Don’t Call it a Recession” Recession. Bonus: Celsius “crypto” investors beg bankruptcy judge for help.

Walmart fires 200 corporate employees in the “Don’t Call it a Recession” Recession.

CNBC: Walmart lays off corporate employees after slashing forecast

Web / Gemini (NewsWaffle) / “WebWaffle”

Walmart has had a problem with too many managers since at least when I worked there in the mid-2000s.

Now Biden’s “Democrats have an election. Don’t say recession.” has claimed more victims, and I doubt they’ll be the last.

The corporate layoffs are a complete blood bath all over America as companies tighten their wallets and try to get spending under control so that they’ll survive and can appease Wall Street with layoffs during falling revenue.

It’s an old, old, trick.

I certainly have no love for Donald Trump. I didn’t vote for him. But if Trump was in office, the media would be wall-to-wall “recession” right now. You’d be hearing it 24 hours a day. They’re holding off because of Biden.

They want Biden. They want Democrats. That’s why they’re not going to throw them any hard balls about the economy, Monkeypox, mass layoffs, hyperinflation, or any of the other messes we’re in.

I can’t bring myself to vote for either party in Illinois this year.

Pritzker is just Biden in miniature. He’s trying to contain public anger until after the election. Trying to buy my vote with $50 of the taxes the state stole from me to begin with leading up to a major gas tax hike that drains it all back out of my wallet and then some. It’s an insult.

The other guy, the Republican, Darren Bailey, is a straight up Nazi, and a dumbass.

It’s beneath me to get into the middle of this.

The Democrats have been throwing tons and tons of bailout money into the economy, except none of it is helping average people. It’s all TARPS and CARES Acts and it’s getting worse. The American Rescue Plan worked, obviously. 😛

Now there’s a law regarding inflation. Diocletian was famous for commanding inflation to go away.

True to form, even people like Richard Stallman have been duped into repeating Democrat propaganda. The United States debt has almost doubled in about three years and we haven’t even began to see the worst of things yet, but just as Diocletian, they were blaming “profiteering” when there are other, primary causes.

(In our case, reckless public spending and a tanking domestic economy that is the only real source of value for our money.)

Living in America under these morons reminds me of the Community episode where they find an aging hippie living under the school, hasn’t been above ground since the 70s, and he says he doesn’t know if millions of dollars are worth anything anymore because they were “Nixon Dollars”.

I read an article a while back comparing the times we’re living in to the Nixon years, but it was about the conservatives on the Supreme Court at the time, not about the man himself. It accidentally made a good point.

Biden is a lot like Tricky Dicky. He wants cheap money and he wants a lot of it now, and this is what happens.

I was also reading Don Melton’s blog for some reason. Wikipedia led me to it I think. He was the lead developer of “Safari” at Apple. He posted that Biden and Harris were good people and our national nightmare was over. That certainly aged well, didn’t it?

Bonus: Celsius “crypto” investors beg bankruptcy judge for help.

CNBC: Homeless, suicidal, down to last $1,000: Celsius investors beg bankruptcy judge for help

Web / Gemini (NewsWaffle) / “WebWaffle”

As bad as fiat currency is, the government can at least make it legal tender and threaten people who don’t use it for things, including taxes, but some people have invested their life savings into magic beans like Bitcoins, and now plead with the United States Bankruptcy Court to stop outfits like Celsius from squandering assets, such as the $4.5+ million dollars per week on executive pay while freezing “investors” out of their accounts.

The whole thing was a Ponzi Scheme to begin with and the only reason they “had money” was rounds of “investor funding”. Now that the Fed has raised rates and destroyed Bitcoin and people aren’t borrowing cheap monkey to recklessly gamble with, the scam is exposed.

Well it’s exposed to everyone who has a brain and two eyes, but CNBC and other outfits are still not going for the throat and calling it what it is.

They act as if there’s still actually something to “crypto” other than a highly volatile imaginary token that draws worth from finding an even bigger idiot to take it. I assume that’s because there’s some wealthy people out there who got roped into it and want the court to prioritize them over the plebs.

The problem for the “investors”, both “Venture Capitalists” and people stuffing their mortgage money into “crypto” coins is that even if they somehow convince the judge to pay out the little guys first (and when has that ever happened?) or to declare bankruptcy fraud and sic the FBI on Celsius, it doesn’t change the fact that they’re not going to get very much back.

One man wrote to the Southern District of New York Bankruptcy Judge pleading with him to take some of his money and give it back to him “so I can make my mortgage payment next month”.

The man took screenshots of his Celsius account, which says there’s nearly $50,000 in it.

They can put whatever they want on a Web page, that you’re locked out of, but there’s hardly any money according to Celsius’s own filing.

Not even 10% of what they need to pay out their liabilities, and that’s if they’re even being honest on their Bankruptcy Schedule and not just buying executives time to finish draining what’s left and flee the country.

I hate to be callous considering that the guy’s family shouldn’t have to suffer because of Dad, but I wasn’t really surprised to find “Mr. Sophisticated Investor” left $1,000 of real money in his checking account while handing Celsius $50,000 and it turned out he was using Chrome on a Mac.

Ooops.

This particular guy will be lucky if he gets $500-1000 when the dust settles. He may yet get nothing at all.

When I was a kid, my grandparents (mom’s side) fell for every scam that made its way through the church.

Most of it was Multi-Level Marketing bullshit like King’s Vitamins or Destiny Telecommunications, but the concept is always the same. You find rubes, marks, who have absolutely no idea what they’re doing or where their money will really be, and don’t know to be skeptical of something that isn’t regulated, bonded, and insured, and you go for them.

That’s exactly the sort of thing these “crypto” companies have done.