Reports are that a Baltimore high school has 77 percent of the student body reading at an elementary school level. That doesn’t surprise me. When I was a teacher, nearly half of my students were reading at a third grade level.
Uncategorized
Evil Property Owners
Let’s say that you want to borrow a quarter of a million dollars. The bank has you fill out an application and checks your credit. Do you ever ask the bank to prove that they are nice guys?
As a property owner, when a person wants to borrow my $250,000 house, I have them fill out an application. If an applicant ever demanded that I do likewise, I would assume that he was going to be a major pain in the ass and toss his application in the trash. That, according to the article, means
As if you needed any more proof that landlordism is the scum of the earth (sorry not sorry), a TikToker has revealed the wild response he got when he asked a real estate agent for a landlord reference…
Good and normal system we have! Where you basically have to beg someone to live in their spare house! While knowing that as someone under the age of 50 you will never be able to buy one (1) house of your own!
So because she can’t manage to buy a house and I am willing to invest my savings and loan her one, that makes me ‘scum of the earth.’ She goes on to say:
Honestly, this is a fucking baller move and ten out of ten way to figure out if a future landlord is a raging anal blister instead of a human being.
No wonder she can’t manage to be responsible enough to buy a house, or even get the references needed to rent one.
I also Google my applicants. Kathleen Farmilo is never renting a house from this anal blister.
Uncategorized
No Difference
Some Americans are upset that the Chinese government is pulling journalists from the air if they report on things that the government doesn’t want reported on.
Isn’t this what the American people want? After all, it’s what they are trying to do to Joe Rogan, it’s what happened to Mark Levin, Sean Hannity, and others. It’s what YouTube, Facebook, and the NBA are doing.
So what’s the difference?
Me
Tis the season
I received all of my tax forms this week, save my broker’s statement from ETrade. Those don’t go out until February 15. They are gonna suck, because I had some significant capital gains this year.
Thus begins the worst time of the year: tax season. I need to close the 2021 books on my businesses, then begin the process of figuring out how much money I owe the IRS.
My wife and I both have jobs. I collect a pension. Between us, we own 4 businesses. We have interest and investment income. In years past, I have paid a CPA. My wife wants me to try to do our taxes myself and save the $600 a year we were paying her. I’m going to give it a try.
economics
Who To Believe?
Two days ago, ADP released their monthly payroll report, saying that the economy lost 301,000 jobs during the month of January. Conservative Treehouse wrote a long article about this.
Reuters reported that U.S. private payrolls fell for the first time in a year in January as soaring COVID-19 infections disrupted business operations, raising the risk of a sharp decline in employment that would deal a temporary setback to the labor market.
Now keep in mind that the ADP report counts all active workers as employed regardless of whether they are paid or not during the survey week. In the government report, people who are out sick or in quarantine and do not get paid during the survey period are counted as unemployed in the survey, even if they still have a job with their companies. This means that if there were a pandemic causing large numbers of otherwise employed workers to be out sick, you would expect that the government job numbers would be significantly lower than the ADP number, but that isn’t what happened.
Two days later, just this morning, the US government claimed that there were 467,000 jobs added to the economy in January, even though the unemployment rate increased from 3.9 to 4.0 percent. The government is claiming that the economy is growing at a rate of 6.9% per year.
So which report is to be believed?
Uncategorized
Violence, that isn’t what it means
A student at a Pittsburg university wrote about his school’s pronoun policy, denouncing it in an article on Red State. Here is the policy:
Any individual who has been informed of another person’s gender identity, pronouns, or chosen name is expected to respect that individual. Point Park University fosters a community of inclusivity for every member at the institution. Misgendering, continued misuse of an individual’s pronouns, or using an individual’s deadname after being informed of a chosen name could result in a violation of the Policy on Discrimination and Harassment for gender-based discrimination.
So if you call someone by their legal name you can be disciplined. If you use proper English, you will be disciplined. A pronoun is a word that takes the place of a noun. Pronouns exist so that you can refer to an object without having to name it. Having to learn and remember each person’s preferred and personal pronouns completely destroys the need for pronouns in the first place. Why not simply refer to everyone by name?
Still, the nutcases demand that we bow to their demands. Refusal to do so, according to them, is literally violence. Literally. If I refer to someone who looks like a woman by using the pronoun ‘she’- according to the insane left- I am committing a violent act which makes legitimate the use of force in self defense. Check out this clip to see what I mean:
They claim that this is because transgender women (men who claim to be women) who are also black have the highest rate of violence perpetuated against them. This is because of math. Since the number of black men who believe themselves to be women is so small, any act of violence against one of them has a disproportionate effect upon the RATE of violence.
If there are only two cats in my neighborhood, and one is struck by a car, the RATE of cats being struck is 50 percent. If there are 200 dogs in my neighborhood, and 90 of them are struck by cars, the RATE of dogs being struck is 45 percent. That doesn’t mean that cats are more likely to be struck by cars, it means that the one who was struck was a statistical anomaly.
Regardless, that wouldn’t give me the right, if I owned a cat, to declare that driving a car near my cat was an act of violence which allowed me to shoot everyone who drives a car near my house. This is why I remain so opposed to so-called hate crime laws. It should be illegal to commit an unprovoked assault upon another person. It shouldn’t matter WHY I committed the assault. That isn’t how “hate crimes” work. To declare that a person who assaults another because of some characteristic is somehow more heinous than a person who commits the assault for no reason at all is ridiculous and leads to one inevitable conclusion:
It allows any person who possesses that characteristic to use it as a cudgel to subjugate anyone with whom the disagree. “You only disagree with me because you are xxxphobic.” This is what the entire cancel culture has become- using some claimed characteristic as a sword with which to attack your enemies.
The problem here is that there is also only one possible outcome from the course that is being followed here- this all inevitably ends with real violence. One or both sides will eventually move to use actual violence to prevail and eliminate the other.
Tranny Insanity
Makes Sense to Me
It seems that there is an American skier competing on the Chinese Olympic team. There are also some American hockey players who are competing as Chinese athletes. I guess they choose to identify as Chinese.
This makes far more sense to me than the IOC’s position of allowing a man to compete as a woman because he “identifies” as a woman.
Antigun
President Potato is Wrong
President Biden made a speech on gun control in New York. He said that
When the [Second] Amendment was passed, it didn’t say that anyone could own any kind of gun and any kind of weapon. You couldn’t buy a cannon when this Amendment was passed, so there’s no reason why you should be able to buy certain assault weapons.
President Joe Biden on gun control
The Amendment didn’t say that, for two reasons: First, the Amendments to the Constitution don’t say that people can do anything. The Amendments say that the GOVERNMENT can’t do things. The government can’t infringe on the right keep to bear arms, is what it says. Second, people DID own cannons. Privately organized and funded artillery companies in the colonies date all the way back to the 1630s. A century later, in the 1740s, there are records of Benjamin Franklin helping organize artillery companies while stressing that they were made completely of volunteers and armed at their own expense.
One of the driving forces behind the first major battles of the Revolutionary was because the British soldiers were coming to confiscate privately-owned arms – including cannons and mortars – such as ones that were being held by veterans of the French and Indian War as war trophies.
In fact, there were people who owned entire warships. See my post on this from 2013.
During the course of the Revolution, approximately 1,700 letters of Marque were issued to privateers. In the War of 1812, President James Madison issued more than 500 letters of Marque to privateers. These letters of marque created what was, essentially, legal piracy, and it was sanctioned by the government and even deemed necessary. So how did these privateers arm their vessels? With cannons that they purchased as individuals.
Our colonial navy had approximately 1,200 cannons on board less than 65 ships. The privateers, on the other hand, had almost 15,000 cannons – all privately owned.
The National Firearms Act of 1934, which is, by far, the most restrictive piece of Federal legislation related to the ownership of arms, says nothing about cannons. It wasn’t until 1968 that things we regard as modern artillery were regulated further when ‘destructive devices’ were added to the law.
But muzzleloading cannons, like the ones used during the Revolutionary War remain conspicuously absent in any legislation. You could buy a cannon as an individual in the Revolution era, and you can still buy one today as an individual.
The President then went on to say that the DOJ will be issuing restrictions on guns made at home within the next few weeks, what he calls a “National ghost gun enforcement initiative.” He also took a shot at the “assault weapon” boogieman.
You know, futures cut short by a man with a stolen Glock with 40 rounds. A magazine with 40 rounds. And it’s really a weapon of war. One of the things I was proudest of years ago when I was in the Senate, I was able to get these weapons and the size of magazines outlawed, that got changed, got overruled, but I don’t see any rationale why there should be such a weapon able to be purchased. It doesn’t violate anybody’s Second Amendment rights to deny that.
President Joe Biden on the ’94 Assault Weapons Ban
The law didn’t get overruled. It expired. Because the law had a ten year expiration date built into it.
The President is also claiming that outlawing weapons doesn’t violate your right to own them. Since when?
Criminals
Policing for Profit
After my post from a couple of days ago, it has become apparent that some people think that speed cameras are a good idea, saying that they don’t speed, and are tired of people who do. It’s cute that those people think that speed cameras have anything to do with traffic safety or actual speeding.
In Baltimore, a speed camera issued a speeding ticket to a stationary car. The real story here isn’t that one car was erroneously ticketed. No, the real story is the fact that Baltimore’s 164 cameras have issued $48 million in tickets over the last three years. If the amount of the ticket, $40, is typical, this means that 400,000 tickets a year are issued by those 164 cameras: roughly 2400 tickets for each camera. The officers that review the pictures before a ticket is issued review and issue 1200 tickets per day. On an 8 hour workday, that leaves just 24 seconds for each picture to be reviewed and a citation issued. In other words, this is nothing but a revenue generator with few safeguards or oversight.
Officials in Heath, Ohio installed 2 speed cameras to watch for excessive speed on Route 79, an area that had seen only one crash in the previous two years. Those two cameras alone accounted for 5,000 traffic citations in just 4 weeks.
Since it was such a money maker, ten more cameras were installed to watch intersections in town and look for red light runners. Those ten cameras were responsible for 5,000 more tickets their first month. At those intersections, light runners had been responsible for only 16 traffic accidents over the previous two years.
In all, the traffic tickets will cost the drivers in the area more than $12,000,000 in fines each year, of which the city will keep $10,00,000.
Then there was the Long Island traffic cameras that were responsible for $2.4 million in School Zone speeding tickets during the summer, when there was no school in session.
The big winner here is actually the private company that installs and runs the cameras. They frequently are involved in kickback schemes.
Miami, Washington, DC, and half a dozen other cities have been involved in this fleecing of the public. No oversight, with a private company running the camera while giving some of the take back to the city.
Uncategorized
So Go Back to NY
New Yorker who moves to Daytona hates Florida because it isn’t New York.