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!“

Vivek Ramaswamy Represents the Rodrigo Duterte-ing of America.

Vivek Ramaswamy Represents the Rodrigo Duterte-ing of America.

(This article makes heavy use of sarcasm and so requires a certain level of intelligence and familiarity with the English language.)

I have to say that I am very impressed with the Republican Party of America.

They have finally found an even bigger tyrant and an even bigger piece of trash than Donald Trump. It took a lot of years and hard work to get here, and they should be congratulated for this, in a way.

While the Democrat machine is figuring out all the ways it may be able to imprison Donald Trump and is masturbating publicly about using the 14th Amendment to disqualify him from office, something worse than Trump is out there now.

Vivek Ramaswamy

One look at the Wikipedia page of Ramaswamy’s political opinions make it very clear that he is like some sort of clone of Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, a man so vile he may yet face an international arrest warrant from the Hague for crimes against humanity.

(In Techrights, Roy and I call Duterte supporters the “Dutertards” as we both have spouses from the Philippines and so are somewhat familiar with the issues, including his police as death squads and the lack of a functioning court system.)

Nobody took Vivek Ramaswamy seriously until recently, but then something happened and suddenly his Republican opposition suddenly feels a need to talk about him. So far they are dismissive.

They dismissed Donald Trump too. All of them did. The mass media made fun of him, his opponents never took him seriously. The result was that The Wrecker (as Richard Stallman calls him) was the President for four years, and now they have to scramble to figure out reasons he can’t run for office again, and even try to imprison him.

They’re making such a concerted effort to subdue Donald Trump because Biden’s term hasn’t been going a lot better and the Democrats are scared that if Trump comes back it will be a close election where the Republicans have had years to regroup.

While Trump was awful, even his judicial picks have made rulings that have expanded gay rights.

What does Ramaswamy say about gay people? Well, he’s the biggest homophobe of them all. He says gay people “are a cult”.

He also says he would “govern almost exclusively by executive action”. Something so extreme that Trump and Biden have limited the number of times they were willing to dabble in it. Neither Obama, Trump, or Biden had total success once it reached the courts.

The problem with courts is that it takes forever to have things play out there, meanwhile the policy may be in effect already. All you need is for a guy like Ramaswamy to bury us alive in “executive actions” and wait about 1,000 years for the courts to try dealing with all of it. By the time they manage, the damage will be done.

And what might Mr. Ramaswamy’s actions be? Oh nothing obscene, nothing grotesque, nothing terribly unreasonable.

He only wants to do things like invading Mexico and stripping people under 25 of their voting rights.

Like I said, nothing huge. Invading Mexico without Congressional approval. Laws? Hah! What laws! International relations? What are you, some kind of a chump?

He says he wants to “gut the FDA”, which is hardly perfect. But why don’t we just shut that down and start buying mystery meat out of a barrel again? Certainly nobody ever got sick from doing that. It can be Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” all over again.

How bad did food get before the FDA and USDA? Here’s a clip from the History Channel’s article showing a couple examples.

“Food manufacturing was unregulated. There was a license to do whatever you wanted to maximize profits,” says Deborah Blum, author of The Poison Squad: One Chemist’s Single-Minded Crusade for Food Safety at the Turn of the Twentieth Century. “There’s nothing that could be done to the food that’s illegal because there [were] no food safety laws.”

And Americans were dying because of it. The chemical-laced “embalmed beef” fed to soldiers during the Spanish-American War proved more lethal than combat. And by one estimate, writes Blum, food and milk tainted with formaldehyde killed 400,000 American infants a year.

-History.com

It sounds like your food really will be an exciting adventure under President Ramaswamy. (Bring a toilet for when it starts coming out of both ends.)

Why do you need a regulatory framework for prescription drugs? It’s not like powerful chemicals designed to treat complex medical conditions need safety reviews and efficacy studies. What are you? Some kind of a hippie?

Mr. Ramaswamy also promises to abolish any agency he feels like, without waiting for Congress naturally, and also plans to fire every career government employee who reaches 8 years. Because who needs experienced people writing regulations that carry the force of law?

Mr. Ramaswamy has already figured out the cause of the 9/11/01 attacks. It was FBI agents and a false flag operation. This is a very mainstream view and not utterly remarkable at all.

Mr. Ramaswamy, perhaps rapping like Eminem as he has been known to do on stage, said that he supports major concessions to Vladimir Putin. Putin is the very democratically elected President for Life of a famously well adjusted country, you know?

Mr. Ramaswamy supports the Independence of Taiwan. Well, sarcasm aside, so do I.

Unfortunately, Mr. Ramaswamy believes that throwing guns at everyone in Taiwan will keep the Red Chinese out, and then we can abandon our promise to protect them from Communist aggression. Mr. Ramaswamy says we should abandon Taiwan after America is “semiconductor independent” in “2028”.

America only supports freedom in exchange for oil and semiconductors, and a lot of them.

I doubt anyone ran it by Ramaswamy that the reason we don’t have semiconductor capabilities is because treacherous neoliberal politicians, including Bubba Bill Clinton, signed NAFTA and got the ball rolling. (And then put cigars in Monica Lewinksy’s vagina.)

Immediately after, 11,000 people in Indiana lost their jobs making TV sets and obviously it didn’t stop there, and now the US is a broken drug-addicted, poverty-stricken Red Chinese debt colony.

Anyway, it’s worth noting that TSMC, a Taiwanese semiconductor company, set up a plant in Arizona already and then realized that all the Americans smart enough to run it died of old age or have dementia in a nursing home while their kids got degrees in underwater basket weaving and then asked Bonehead Biden to forgive $60,000 worth of underwater basket weaving debt.

America has a severe problem with college-educated adults who have no useful skills and mop the floor while acting like they own the company they mop the floor at and are better than people who didn’t take on student loans. This comes from most colleges operating as de facto diploma mills whose sole purpose is to load adult teenagers who don’t understand what they signed with debt.

So there are problems with the entire semiconductor thing too.

Moving on, Mr. Ramaswamy says he’s not a climate denier, then denies climate change.

While there is room for debate on how bad this problem actually is or what priority it should be, there should not be a debate on whether or not it’s happening, with yourself, with one sentence following another. This shows that Mr. Ramaswamy can’t help but to directly contradict himself in the same breath.

But who needs politicians that can remember what they said in the same sentence?

Mr. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. would be in the running for Vice President, according to Mr. Ramaswamy, so wait, there’s more. You and your children can be massively exposed to vaccine-preventable childhood illness!

“Whats’s an iron lung between friends?”, I say.

So as you can see, Mr. Ramaswamy is clearly their best candidate in all of American history and I hope you enjoy four years of this by the time anyone takes him seriously.

Absolutely none of the serious issues America face can be fixed by one man, and people should be skeptical and scared-as-hell by a person running for president who claims they can fix things in a short time span without any actual collective effort.

Mr. Ramaswamy is nothing more than the latest politician who plays to the lowest IQ members of our public trawling for votes.

Even Joe Biden isn’t this bad.

Today’s Democrats Are Yesterday’s Republicans. Bonus: “Work, Catholics, and Pensions.”

As a person who has an immigrant spouse (who entered the United States legally and has always been here legally), I have insights into the US Immigration System and what the Democrat and Republican position on the issue is.

Take the 2018 midterm. The Democrats ran on stopping Trump, on impeaching Trump, then the House Democrats didn’t even sue the administration for swiping money from other programs to build the “border wall”, even though this clearly goes against Constitutional separation of powers and the Constitution giving the House of Representatives primary control over taxation and spending issues, and then Nancy Pelosi gave him money earmarked to upgrade the border fencing near her own district in San Francisco.

Then in 2020 Joe Biden got in, defended Title 42, and then enacted a new program that’s almost exactly like it when it got struck down by a court.

So it’s clear what this really is. The Democrats are all for illegal immigration when they think that the illegal immigrants will end up in Florida and Texas, not California.

And this is crazy strategy because once you get to the next census and it counts illegal immigrants living in Florida and Texas, they gain clout in the federal government, and California loses it.

George Carlin called it “NIMBY”. So the Democrats want us to take in illegal immigrants, but “Not in my back yard!”

Part of the reason I voted for Biden anyway, was that he’s a “Yesterday’s Republican”.

Much like Reagan’s amnesty program or the bipartisan Immigration and Nationality Act, Joe Biden mainly restored the status quo for legal immigration (such as my spouse’s case) while Trump’s position on the issue was more like the episode of Parks & Recreation where Ron Swanson said “Some of this will be easy like ‘Take down all the traffic lights.’ and ‘Dismantle the Post Office’. The rest could take more time, like ‘Bring this all crumbling to the ground.'”

That was basically Trump’s methodology for destroying everything about America whether it was worth keeping or not. “Bring this all crumbling to the ground.”

Richard M. Stallman, Founder of the Free Software Foundation, had a number of terms for Donald Trump, including “The Wrecker” (my favorite), “The Infant”, and others.

(I usually went further and said “Cheeto Hitler” or the “Creeping Orange Menace”.)

As a Libertarian (mostly, I suppose), I find Biden and Trump both to be the wrong thing for this country at the wrong time. The United States needs an enema for sure, and the federal government in particular.

But the whole country is falling apart under this system. Both Trump and Biden are responsible for the hyperinflationary mess and the debt crisis and the ruined economy.

Trump gave trillions of dollars in “tax cuts” to the wealthiest and the corporations at the worst possible time, and then Biden and the Democrats followed up by not taking any action to correct that while also implementing deficit tripling new spending and entitlement programs and getting us bogged down in a quagmire where every time Ukraine blows up a 1950s tank that Putin vomited out on their land, they’ve won the war again, same as every day, except that this has all happened before and will happen again.

The Democrats, and most of the Republicans like these wars. The situation in Ukraine is a 2020s rehash of 1980s Afghanistan which was made into the movie “Charlie Wilson’s War”. (A movie everyone should see.)

It will most likely end the same way. If they ever do oust the Russians, their country will be in ruins and Congress will lose their appetite for spending money and Ukraine will devolve into a third world country.

At the end of “Charlie Wilson’s War”, Congressman Wilson was trying to get bills through to rebuild Afghanistan. It was a modern and beautiful country and a democracy at one point, but Congress “beat the Russians” and that’s all they thought matters.

When you get involved in something, it means you own it. What happened in Afghanistan next was what was obviously going to happen.

The United States was giddily “poking the bear” to harass the Soviets and didn’t seem at all concerned that it was setting up the “War on Terror”, which is a ridiculous concept on its face, unwinnable by definition, and the major victims have been Americans who now need “national ID cards and passports” to conduct business with government agencies, and who face nebulous and unconstitutional domestic spying programs.

I recall in the 6th grade (I think) watching “Channel 1” (a classroom news thing for students that kept them well informed with accurate reporting on world events…the government has no interest in keeping Americans informed now, of any age…they call it “deceptive” and “fake news” and “disinformation” when you get good, solid, information that they used to provide every school child).

They had a segment on the Taliban in Afghanistan, and their barbarism against women and death squads, etc. They ended up blowing up World Culture that can never be truly replaced, including the Buddhas of Bamiyan, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

I don’t like Biden, but the threat of Theocracy comparable to the Taliban coming to America is what the Republican Party has turned into.

We have a Theocracy already in one branch of the federal government (the US Supreme Court). We have “Catholic Sharia Law” controlling women’s ovaries, and with time, it’ll get worse.

Since there is no election for the Supreme Court, we have to pray that they’ll eventually keel over from something and a Trump or a DeSantis won’t be in office to name their successor.

So while I liked a lot of what George Carlin had to say, I can’t say I agree with him on voting. You vote, it’ll be bad, but if you want 9-0 “Catholic Sharia Law”, just put another Republican in office and you’ll get to live under it in short order.

If one can measure these things, Catholicism (especially the conservative wing) is one of the greatest tragedies to unfold on America. It’s a cancer.

They are child molesters, who stole much of my mom’s pension after she worked for them for over 25 years, and now they command people who are not Catholics that if they have an abortion, they will be found and sent to prison.

They don’t even hide how corrupt and and what a garbage “church” they are.

Back in the day, when people were (rightly) more skeptical of the Catholics, they wrote in safeguards against things like indoctrination of children using state education dollars, that are being torn down by this unhinged Trumpian Supreme Court.

Catholic Schools only exist for two reasons. Brainwashing/Indoctrination, and to give their pedophile pervert priests a constant supply of young boys to rape.

The irony, of course, is that an industrial strength serial-bankrupt adulterer that my parents voted for is the one that gave them control of our highest court.

Living in America under today’s media reminds me strongly of Captain Picard being tortured and repeatedly asked “How many lights do you see? and being electrocuted and beaten every time he refuses to be broken.

And of course my parents are eating shit and grinning about it and gladly saying “I see five lights, of course, thank you, may we have some more bullshit please?”.

Their goal is to make everyone insane.

(Picard told his Cardassian torturer he saw four lights, which is the correct amount of lights, all throughout the process. In the end, I think he confided in Riker that he had been exposed to so much abuse that he really did start to see five lights, but he still said “four” because he wasn’t about to give his torturers the satisfaction of having broken him.)

I view American politicians and their “news” as the Cardassians of Star Trek. Evil, menacing, gaslighting fucks. They’ll plunder and rape an entire population while telling it they are their benevolent protectors.

The United States went from Chattel Slavery to Wage Slavery.

The way it works is “You’re free, but the invisible whip (not to be confused with Wonder Woman’s) is that if you don’t work, you don’t have food, medical care, or shelter, and you will run out of money quickly. Then they steal your retirement from you. But you’re free and the government is your benevolent protector. Oh, and don’t get any funny ideas about saving money because we’ll raise government spending and inflate it all away.”

My spouse comes home every day, pissed off. Walmart is cutting hours again (to the just and the unjust alike, because fuck morale) to do a “quiet layoff”, boss yells at you for doing what their handheld computer told you to, then the next day you get called in and told thanks for never being late for work in three years.

Then I get to deal with him in that mood until he settles into bed and does what we all do these days. Try to imagine a world that doesn’t so closely resemble Hell.

By not having children, my gift to the world is less contention for jobs, food, oil, resources in general, and healthcare and education to the next generation. They have enough of a mess on their plate already. More than anyone deserves.

The wealthy elite that Lord over us run this system and try to make this an argument about race and generational blame and stuff.

I mean, Bill Gates alone hoards $150 billion dollars and pays next to nothing in tax. “I gave all my money away and it doubled because that’s how philanthropy works.” while everyone else is fucked.

The system has stolen, the Republicans and the Catholic church, has stolen my retired mother down to the point where she didn’t have a hundred bucks to have the muffler welded back onto the 2003 Impala that I had fixed up and then gave back to her.

She backed over a curb the other day and was dragging it around and the mechanic felt sorry for her and said she could come back and pay him on Wednesday.

She let a series of increasingly domineering and abusive (her second one physically) men in her life that drained the bank account and mostly took up space (the only one she was married to that pulled his goddamn weight financially, and never cheated on her or beat her was my father, but he was a tyrant in his own ways), so it does stand to reason that she would vote for them too.

Facebook is dying. Part II.

In my last post, I mentioned that Social (Control) Media is dying off, and we’re no worse for wear because of it.

I noted that Musk was ruining Twitter (as a business) and clearly had no idea what to do, because he has no successful businesses on their own merit, which make profit without ripping off the public via government theft of wages. (Taxation to give to private companies as endless bailouts.)

Musk is hardly alone. Many of the large US corporations operate this way.

Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, has gone totally crazy. Like Vladimir Putin deciding to invade Ukraine crazy.

He’s thrown so much money into the “Metaverse” VR crap, which everyone mocks, and most people who actually did buy the expensive headsets gave up trying to use within their first month, that he’s wiped out over $268 billion of wealth and climbing just with this, and only with the top 10 investors in Facebook.

Most of the loss goes to Zuckerberg, but in many cases, Facebook shares were stuffed into people’s retirement accounts like some sort of a Ponzi scheme, without their consent, because it was part of a passive fund.

(Most American workers have no control over their retirement investments, either because a pension fund “takes care of that” or because they’re in some sort of corporate savings schemes like 401(k) and 403(b), where they have to choose between funds, and they all have some shit in the plumbing so there is no perfect outcome.)

Facebook is failed. It has plunged in “book value” by over $700 billion in the past year. It just sacked 11,000 people today in “Round 1” (means more to come….), and it admits it will lose many more billions of dollars in “Metaverse” before Mark Zuckerberg runs the company into the ground completely.

Any one problem that Facebook has would be bad for the company, but probably not fatal.

Unfortunately for them, they’ve seen ad revenues decline as America enters quite possibly a worse recession than 2008, and their CEO has not only failed to see the recession coming, but blew through their cash reserves instead of investing it into the products people are actually “engaging” with. They have some, but they’re being utterly neglected due to the VR nonsense.

Zuckerberg takes advantage of the somewhat unique structure of Facebook to do whatever he wants with it (he set it up so he gets a lot of votes) and his investors only have two options. Sit there and continue to get thumped by a CEO who is squandering assets, or dump their shares for whatever they can get today, which floods the market with shares that nobody wants at lower and lower prices.

I do wish the people who are losing their jobs the best of luck in the 2023 Hunger Games.

Maybe some of them can even find a job that _benefits_ society next time instead of pampering my parents, both of which are right-wing cranks who are level 12 susceptible to paranoid conspiracy theories and propaganda, with a feedback bubble which makes them feel validated, or like they’re in some sort of clear majority in their political opinions, which get even more fringe by the year thanks to this gaslighting.

If my parents were a lot more astute than they actually are, they would notice that it was Jack Welch (GE/RCA merger, dad) and the Catholic Church (mom) who screwed them on their retirement and left them to rot, and Republicans that allowed it and are coming for their Social Security money while they worry about non-existent threats like “brown people from other countries”, like the Fox News telescreens order them to.

In his case, he got his from a wealthy Republican businessman, and in her case, the pension turned out to be nothing more than an unsecured promissory note from a Mafia-affiliated group of pedophiles with a city-state in the middle of Italy. Will they never learn?

(Rhetorical. People who haven’t figured it out by 71 or 65 probably won’t. Mom still swears up and down that the Archdiocese told them their pensions were guaranteed for 20 years. Just like they were previously guaranteed for “as long as you live”, and before that they were “guaranteed to grow until you’re 66”, then “63”, then “62”, then “nobody new gets a pension and yours is frozen NOW”. How much money is there really? Nobody will say. Where is it invested? “Don’t worry!”)

Even if the unemployed Facebook and Twitter workers take a job at Taco Bell, slinging cheap tacos and burritos at people who are stoned at 2 AM is neutral to the fabric of our society.

Facebook and Twitter are as corrosive as Xenomorph blood and I wish the platform a swift and total demise. But they’ve already done insurmountable harm to people like my parents.

Mom spent all of COVID bashing me for being responsible and levelheaded enough to get me and my spouse our vaccines. For wearing masks at large gatherings. For using hand hygiene. And we didn’t get COVID, and they got….COVID and the flu at her house, at the same time.

She lacks the ability to comprehend how vaccines work, or even the very basics of germ theory, which is unfortunate since she’s a nurse.

Many political confederates of mom and dad are no longer with us because listening to the Party of Trump was the last mistake they ever made.

But even as they witnessed millions of each other dying on ventilators, they still proclaim it was all a hoax.

This is what happens when you’re watching Fox News and looking at Facebook all day.

Facebook waited until this country was on the verge of being overthrown in a coup before they even thought to ban Trump. It took _days_ after for them to claim they made a very brave decision.

In the background, they didn’t want to do it. They wanted dimwits looking at Facebook, even if Trump was the reason why. It helped them sell ads.

Facebook is too dangerous to continue. Fortunately, I doubt we will need to endure it for too much longer.

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.

The Twisted Logic of Republican migrant busing to “Sanctuary States”.

In the news lately, is a lot of stuff about Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, and Governor Greg Abbott of Texas sending migrants to blue states, which spent the Trump years passing “Sanctuary laws”.

These states and cities (Illinois has one, and so does Chicago, which goes even further.) spent years passing “Sanctuary Laws“, which shield Immigrants from ICE by way of State non-cooperation.

However, in most of these cases, what’s happened is that the Immigrant in question only came to the attention of the State government because they were arrested for committing a crime, against another Immigrant or even a United States Citizen or Lawful Permanent Resident.

In other words, it protects the bad ones more than it does the good ones.

Most countries don’t take kindly to illegal immigration even when it’s relatively benign (migrant farm workers or something), but I presume that they take less kindly to illegal immigrants coming to their country to rape and murder their own citizens, drive drunk, and raise hell, but when Democrats in the United States pass laws to shield these people so that ICE can’t remove them, what happens is they all go to the place they know allows that and crime surges.

It’s hardly any wonder, then, why Governors DeSantis and Abbott have had no trouble at all getting illegal immigrants on planes and buses and sending them here. They’ve sent at least 800 of them to Chicago alone, and that was the last time I checked, so it’s probably more by now. Maybe even over 1,000. More are coming.

What’s more telling is that when they get to Chicago, Chicago officials directed by Her Hineyness Mayor Lori “Beetlejuice” Lightfoot, are there to implement the “Welcoming City Ordinance”….. by putting them on another bus and turning them around to go stay in small towns in Illinois that haven’t generally been experiencing lawless disorder like Chicago has, and quite often they have Republican local governments.

In other words, it’s becoming a shuffle because the liberals don’t even want these people, and it’s not hard to see why.

Even if Dictator Pritzker hadn’t destroyed the economy of Illinois with his illegal lockdown orders and overspending on mafia unions which blow up perfectly good roads, repave them, and then two days later are out ripping pieces out of the road they just redid again, and pensions we can’t afford on “teachers” who are managing a bunch of dropouts who are more likely to get addicted to drugs, become a single mother, or get an STD, than to graduate in a Chicago School, these illegal immigrants certainly don’t have permission from USCIS to work anywhere, so what the hell are we going to do with thousands of them?

Maybe the next bus will be to Canada, where Justin Trudeau has an even stricter and more racist Immigration system than the one Donald Trump wanted, but nobody says anything about it.

Anyway, the black humor in giving the liberals what they want, is watching them scream when they get it.

Far-right Illinois Gubernatorial candidate Darren Bailey blames “high gas prices” for low rally turnout. One attendee was a January 6th rioter.

Far-right Illinois Gubernatorial candidate Darren Bailey blames “high gas prices” for low rally turnout.

As amusing as a failed rally may otherwise be, at least one attendee was a January 6th insurrectionist.

This isn’t the first time it’s happened. Bailey keeps trying to distance himself from January 6th rioters.

Recently, the FBI had to shoot and kill one of the rioters when he tried to break into their building to murder agents.

What does it say about Darren Bailey and who he would be as our governor that he keeps having to “distance” himself from these people, who keep endorsing him for some reason anyway?

As the first article also points out, people who believe in Darren Bailey are committing acts of domestic terrorism against Illinoisans and their places of business.

We know exactly who is supporting Bailey and what he is. It is a Neo-Nazi movement.

We know how to get him to run away though. Have reporters start asking him questions. He can’t help himself, just like most people like him can’t. Last time he let them put him in front of a microphone, he made the unforced and unprompted error of trivializing the Holocaust.

Participation in Facebook and Twitter can and will be used against you. You have no right to remain silent after you’ve already spoken. If you need an attorney, good luck with that.

Participation in Facebook and Twitter can and will be used against you. You have no right to remain silent after you’ve already spoken. If you need an attorney, good luck with that.

(The US Supreme Court is dismantling the Bill of Rights, starting with a major opening salvo against your Miranda Rights recently.)

In one recent post, I linked to an archived Nitter mirror showing that a company called FAMA doxxed a man’s Twitter account for “bad language”, “risky likes”, etc, and sent his employer a 350+ page printout.

Pointy Hair Bosses are too dangerous to be allowed access to information like this.

They get snookered by con artists at companies like this in order to fire or refuse to hire people based on what that person’s legitimate beliefs and speech are.

If you can’t find a job, or get laid off, can you say definitively that FAMA wasn’t the reason why? That was rhetorical. You aren’t even supposed to know that they exist.

What starts happening to you when Landlords start using it to see if you are “trouble” without getting to know you?

The answer, of course, is that Twitter, which is already worth nothing, is definitely causing people to become unemployed, and potentially homeless.

I certainly hope you’re hearing about FAMA from me and not after it’s already too late and you’re living in a box under the CTA train.

Nobody should want to live in a world where things like this exist, and the only way to be safe from ambush “reports” like FAMA is to have no “social media” presence on Facebook or Twitter. It’s likely that even if you “go private”, Facebook is selling them data. You can opt out by refusing to participate in your own drumhead.

However, other sinister uses of “Social Media”, primarily centered around Facebook, but also Twitter and some others, involve regulations formulated by the Social Security Administration during the Trump presidency.

The Republicans have been looking for ways to knife Social Security for years, and one of their repeated talking points centers on convincing people that anyone with a severe mental impairment is faking it and should just find a job. Let’s set aside the fact that 20 million Americans who would like to work lost their jobs under Trump in addition to the 18 million who would have liked to have one and couldn’t before him, and most of those jobs haven’t returned. (140,000 jobs short in Illinois alone vs. March 2020), and we’ll focus on what Social Security is doing to try to play gotcha game bullshit under Trump’s regulation created by former Social Security Commissioner Andrew Saul (who was locked out of his office and fired by President Biden).

The first prong of Trump’s attack on the mentally ill involves Facebook. It says that the SSA shall look at the Facebook pages for anyone on Disability and comb them over for evidence that contradicts the disability they claim they have.

In other words, did you have a good day and go mow the lawn and end up in Facebook with pictures mowing your lawn and having a beer?

Did you go on vacation for 3 days and smile once while you were at a restaurant and you didn’t want to be the party-pooper so you smiled on command, even though you weren’t actually, you know, in the mood?

Well, all of that is “evidence” against you.

Trump tried to go further than this in a regulation canceled by Biden. The canceled regulation says that Social Security was to start harassing mentally ill claimants every two years, doing a full 11 page Continuing Disability Review, and basically what that is, is where they go digging through your life every few years looking for reasons why you may no longer qualify for Social Security benefits.

Some people get better, enough to work, but most people don’t. 99% of the people pulled for a CDR are found to still be disabled, because being approved for Disability in the first place was a tough row to hoe and so putting people through this is not only barbaric, but it’s a waste of money too.

Congress never gives the SSA enough money to do much more than spot check people with long form reviews 5% of the time, and the rest of the people who get full reviews are “scored” by a computer program based on a number of factors that produces a “statistical likelihood” of medical improvement.

To clear their backlog, they send out “short form reviews” as well, and these ask basic questions designed to probe to see if they will put you through the ringer. If you don’t make any comments, have been seeing your doctor regularly for the condition you were approved for, haven’t worked, and haven’t gone back to school, you’ll very likely be waved through.

I have an Aunt who has Schizophrenia. It’s very bad. On top of this, she has severe Osteoporosis, and a number of other problems. She’s had Social Security for years and would not be able to support herself without it. She’s in her early 60s. What would have happened to her if Trump got a second term?

Many lawyers advise their Social Security clients to either delete Facebook and Twitter, or at least make their profiles “Friends Only”, so the government can’t go combing through them.

The problem with the “Friends Only” advice is that the government is the government, and if Facebook or Twitter have information on you, the government is going to get it. It’s only a matter of time.

So the only way to be safer from “Social Control Media”, which the police also find very handy if you read the news even badly, is to stay off of it. The government isn’t the only threat, but it is a big one.

The other threats can be psycho exes that stalk you or creepy in-laws like mine, who are members of a cult that arranges to have people assassinated. My sister-in-law tried to blackmail/extort us for money. When I refused, she tried to take reprisals. Then she took out a million dollar life insurance policy on her brother, which I shut down.

She forged his signature to obtain it, and I have no idea what she planned to do.

Was she going to arrange a hit, or just try to wait it out and hope he died?

I set his profile to “Friends Only”. I’ve encouraged him to ditch Facebook because she’s crazy and the police did nothing when I went to them. Absolutely nothing.

The best I could do was report the fraud, shut down the policy, get him on an insurance company blacklist, and then get a FOID card.

We don’t live in the safest neighborhood.

One day when I looked out my peephole, there was a scary looking man just standing there staring at my door, like he was waiting for someone to open it and come out.

Did she send him? I don’t know. He eventually left after staring at my door without any possible good reason to be doing that, for over 20 minutes. I felt helpless, I felt scared. I firmly believe that everyone should use their Second Amendment rights to never have to be a victim of violent crime, property crime, or rape.

If people can’t obey the law and stay out of your stuff and home, then they should expect what’s coming to them. Some leftists can’t agree with that publicly, but the fact that Illinois is now the #1 state in America for legal gun sales and background checks tells us that people vote one way, and then when it comes to their own safety, they act in another one.

Biden isn’t the one panicking people into buying guns. It was the rioters, the looters, the carjackers, the rape gangs, that the police and judges in Illinois either can’t control or aren’t interested in punishing and imprisoning.

There have been a lot of home invasions in my city. Even if she doesn’t send someone to pull a hit, there are people who pretend they’re with the city and get you to open the door. Or say they’re with the water or gas or electric company and they just need you to come to the door for a minute.

I’m not coming to the door, and if they insist on breaking in, they won’t like what’s on the other side of it.

All you can do, really, since the police are useless, is arm yourself and make breaking into your home to hurt you and your loved ones the last mistake the criminal will ever make.

But back to Social Media. It’s not that every Social Media platform is disgusting and terrible.

There are some open ones that could be called a social platform, including IRC chat. They go way back, many of the old ones have never needed a “Code of Conduct”. If you don’t like what’s going on there, leave.

The governments have been trying to push people off of things like IRC, because it’s much easier to plant spies and censors (often automated) into centralized “servers” like Discord, Facebook, and Twitter.

Some platforms, such as Mastodon, may be too small for companies that make fake background checks for your Pointy Haired Boss to bother trying to monitor. They may rely on your PHB only ever hearing about Twitter or Facebook. But you still need to watch what you say, and use a pseudonym.

Element (formerly Riot) has alternative servers other than the official ones. If the room and private chats use End to End encryption, that’s a lot better than nothing.

The safest thing to do is go dark, but if you won’t go dark, run silent and run deep. Use an anonymizing VPN or Tor Browser. (Although spyware in Microsoft Windows makes these worthless! Use GNU/Linux.)

Use open source and decentralized services, and E2E encryption, never use your real name, and never trust that anyone is really who they appear to be.

I feel that people shouldn’t have to hear this, but you hear how people get busted and convicted of crimes every day for shit they posted on Facebook or Twitter, or told someone in an app (which can also never be unsaid), without which the police would have otherwise had zero evidence to show the court.

Considering that such “services” are essentially useless wastes of time where, at best, you’ll show off, or show what an asshole you really are to the world, or post pictures of your vacation that literally nobody else cares about, except maybe as evidence, can you really afford all of the potential consequences of “using them” (they use you), both foreseeable and unforeseen?

If that answer is no, or you can’t decide, then odds are you should not be on these vile platforms.

Out, out, damned Facebook! Out, out, damned Twitter!

Google YouTube (GulagTube) removes incredibly racist and transphobic political ad from Illinois state Rep. Jeanne Ives.

YouTube (GulagTube) removed an incredibly racist and transphobic political ad from Illinois Rep. Jeanne Ives.

You can’t rely on Google to preserve the Web or anything that happened on it.

Case in point, when Illinois state Rep. Jeanne Ives ran against Governor Bruce Rauner in the Republican Primary in 2018, she released a a very racist and transphobic ad (which had an obvious man with a five o’clock shadow in a dress excited that he would be in “the little girls bathroom”) which also accused all immigrants of being criminals.

But you can’t see it on YouTube (GulagTube) today, because Google removed it, or maybe they allowed her to. It won’t say, only that the video is unavailable. I can’t seem to find it anywhere else.

So if Ives comes out of her gerrymandered state house district again and wants to appeal to voters, nobody can say “See what she did last time? Here’s a link to YouTube!” because it won’t work.

Google once again helps people do repulsive things in public and then hide the evidence later.

If you’re a public official, you shouldn’t be able to do this. It should be illegal. All of these things should be illegal to remove and exempt from copyright law.

And if you’re that proud of what you said, you shouldn’t try to remove it.

Illinois: Trump appears for a stump speech for Darren Bailey that turns into a Nazi/White Pride rally.

Illinois: Trump appears for a stump speech for Darren Bailey that turns into a Nazi/White Pride rally.

Donald Trump appeared in Illinois yesterday to stump for downstate Republican Congresswoman Mary Miller, who slipped and called the Supreme Court decision to reverse Roe v. Wade a “victory for white life”.

Then if that wasn’t bad enough, as Trump was stumping for Gubernatorial candidate Darren Bailey of Xenia, Illinois, Bailey “waved” at the crowd and it looked to me to be more of a Nazi salute than a wave.

You tell me though…

The Republican Party is turning into a complete shitshow even in Illinois.

I requested a Republican primary ballot this year and voted for a fairly diverse slate of candidates, and moderates, but Trump showed up and instantly endorsed two Nazis, making them the GOP front runners.

So I may have no choice except to hold my nose and vote for JB Pritzker again.

Yes, there is a difference between Richard Irvin and Darren Bailey, and anyone who says there isn’t is an idiot. Richard Irvin is fine with the LGBT residents of Illinois and is a fiscal conservative.

Darren Bailey is one of those folks that would rather pretend LGBT people don’t exist and wipe us from the history books so that people don’t learn all of the really horrible shit the government used to do to us, even in Illinois.

If you can make people forget the crimes against the public, it’s easier to chip away at the protections from that being allowed to happen again. Rep. Mary Miller quoted Hitler last year, as saying “whoever controls the youth controls the future” and now she’s on stage with Trump beaming with joy that the Roe decision is a victory for “white life”.

When people slip like this and immediately “correct themselves” by saying, “Oh, I meant the ‘right to life’.”, it’s a way for them to say what they really mean vs. gaslighting you by saying you didn’t hear them say what they said.

Mary Miller, if she remains in Congress (and the new district was gerrymandered to be R +58 or something, so there’s no way she won’t be there), she’ll be part of the push behind a national abortion ban that does not respect “state’s rights” like the Supreme Court said their ruling was all about. Then they’ll go even further into their demonstration that their party is all about “state’s rights” by agitating for DOMA to be restored. They want to turn the entire country into Alabama.

Throughout the 1990s and the 2000s, the Republican Party pushed for abortion bans and marriage equality bans by Constitutional Amendment. Now that they have fake judges on the bench, they no longer have to gain the consensus required to pass any amendments.

They can just have 6 unelected lifetime dictators in black robes telling us how we’ll live.

Back to Illinois, Darren Bailey is one of those types that would not win a general election here, because he thinks he’s campaigning in Kentucky or something, with the Klan, on the march.

So it’s only fitting that Donald Trump would land and show up to support him. At least from a purely “I like this guy!” standpoint.

I supported Richard Irvin in the Republican primary, and the Republicans can have my vote for Governor unless they see fit to nominate Darren Bailey, the trash from Xenia that showed up on the stage with Trump.

If Irvin can’t win a primary in Illinois, it will simply confirm that there is no place for a moderate voter like me in today’s Republican Party, anywhere in the country.

The threat, locally, isn’t that Darren Bailey can win the general election.

The threat in Illinois is that people like Darren Bailey will make people like J.B. Pritzker an inevitability by pushing out Social Libertarians who believe in the entire bill of rights and who are Fiscally Moderate (Hello!) completely out of the Republican Party here forever.

It’s little wonder why the Democratic Governor’s Association released an “attack ad” calling Bailey “dangerously conservative” and “handpicked by Donald Trump”.

They know exactly what I just said, that they can manipulate the MAGA people downstate into propping up Bailey, who will go on to lose, instead of Irvin, who has appeal in (let’s face it) the most important region of the state, where fully half the people live, Cook County.

It’s dirty politics, but politics are dirty, and it’s in Illinois, so…. What do you do?

I have no idea where Donald Trump came in with his endorsement. He always likes to fly in and endorse people he knows will win, and with Bailey, he’ll get articles like “Trump-endorsed Bailey loses with 39% of the vote” or something. It just doesn’t follow that he’d even bother to come here or let Darren Bailey on that stage.

The rally for a deeply gerrymandered House seat, I get. Bailey, not so much.

It proves that not only are Republican voters so stupid that they are manipulated with ads influencing them to vote for Bailey that say “Paid for by the Democratic Governors Association” at the bottom of the TV, but that not even their former president is intelligent enough to see what’s happening and plays into the hands of J.B. Pritzker by supporting Bailey the Bomb Thrower, who will go on to completely ruin the Republican Party in Illinois for a generation.