Monthly Archives: April 2023

We’ll Soon Learn Two Things

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We’re about to learn two things about the Canadian government. The Public Service Alliance of Canada, which represents nearly a quarter million government employees, have gone on strike for…DEI claptrap like mandatory “unconscious bias” training; an intrinsically racist $1,500 bonus that’s only for Cree, Inuktitut, Dene, or any other Canada Indigenous language speakers; more racism in the form of special time off just for Indigenous employees; government-paid, which is to say Canadian taxpayer-paid, time off for union “training;” a union-administered “Social Justice Fund,” which PSAC carefully declines to say is its purpose—just give the union the money—and on and on.

One of the things we’re going to learn is how much courage Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and his government have in standing up to this union’s strike, an action (not unique to PSAC) that is, essentially, extortion in that a striking union is saying it’s not going to allow the struck entity to operate until the entity pays the union’s demanded vig. In particular, will the Trudeau government show the same “courage” against this employee strike that it showed against a recent trucker protest, and will it use similarly heavy-handed tactics, which included freezing/seizing bank accounts, to break up the union strike?

The other thing we’ll learn is how much, or how little, these workers are missed as Canada’s government continues to function without them.

The PSAC 224-page program of demands can be read here.

Another Reason to Not Take Federal Dollars

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Aside from the fact that those dollars aren’t actually Federal government dollars; they’re OPM, the tax remittances of us ordinary Americans from all over our nation that then get transferred to other jurisdictions than the ones we live in.

Here’s the latest reason.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development is proposing a rule that would require towns that receive federal money to create “equity plans” for fair housing and take action to end racially unbalanced neighborhoods.

In other words, as the Wall Street Journal‘s editors put it,

the Biden bureaucracy wants to socially engineer suburban neighborhoods to its racial and ethnic liking.

Not to the liking of us citizens.

Never mind that such plans are intrinsically racist, handing out funds as they do based on race, no matter the high-minded pretenses of the politician pushers. And never mind that “racially unbalanced neighborhoods” would balance out on their own—to some extent—in an unfettered free market. “Some” because in that free market, buyers and sellers would make their own decisions on where to live and among whom, and many free Americans would choose freely to live in the company of others like themselves.

In the end, the way to be free of Government strings attached to Government funds transfers is to stop taking Government funds. Breaking the addiction to OPM, as with any other addiction, will be deucedly hard. But hard means possible.

Punishing Success

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You’ve earned your wages; husbanded them carefully; spent wisely, living within your means; paid your debts promptly and in full. As a result, you’ve gained an excellent credit rating.

Your reward? An artificially inflated mortgage cost, courtesy of the Progressive-Democratic Party-run Executive Branch, and redistribution of the fruits of your success, arbitrarily, to those who haven’t done those things.

A Biden administration rule is set to take effect that will force good-credit home buyers to pay more for their mortgages to subsidize loans to higher-risk borrowers.
Experts believe that borrowers with a credit score of about 680 would pay around $40 more per month on a $400,000 mortgage under rules from the Federal Housing Finance Agency that go into effect May 1, costs that will help subsidize people with lower credit ratings also looking for a mortgage, according to a Washington Times report Tuesday.

But. But, but, but. The Federal Housing Finance Agency, the Biden administration entity responsibility for this nonsense has long sought to give consumers more affordable housing options.

Under the new rules, consumers with lower credit ratings and less money for a down payment would qualify for better mortgage rates than they otherwise would have.

This is silly. The transfer of wealth from those who’ve earned good credit scores to those who have not will not make the latter better credit risks. It will increase the rate of default.

Here’s a thought: cut back on the regulations related to banking, lending, housing, landlording, construction, and utilities so as to bring down the cost of housing generally. See if that will give consumers more affordable housing options.

Stop punishing success; instead, encourage folks to work toward success.

Lose Your iPhone…

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…and lose your data, along with access to your financials. For instance,

thieves who stole [one man’s] iPhone 14 Pro at a bar in Chicago wanted to drain cash from his bank account and prevent him from remotely tracking down the stolen phone. They used his passcode to change [his] Apple ID password. They also enabled a hard-to-find Apple security setting known as the “recovery key.” In doing so, they placed an impenetrable lock on his account.

The thieves got his passcode by shoulder-surfing and watching him tap in his passcode before they stole his phone. And Apple can’t help him: without the recovery key, there’s nothing they can do. In addition to the money stolen, the man has lost the only copies of eight years of photos of his young daughters, which he was storing exclusively on his cell phone.

And this example:

After [a man’s] iPhone 13 Pro was stolen from a Boston bar in August, [he] said he spent hours on the phone with Apple customer support trying to regain access to over a decade of data.

Again, Apple was helpless to help without that now thief-altered recovery key.

The recovery key business is specific to Apple’s iPhones, and it’s irrelevant to my questions here. My questions apply to Android phones and other kinds of cell phones just as much.

My first question is this: when the cell phone owner was in any sort of public place—bar, office, park, etc, what was that cell phone doing anywhere but in the owner’s hot little hand or in an interior pocket? Leaving the cell phone out on a counter or a bar or a park bench, even if the owner is right there, is the same as taping a “Free for the Taking” sign on the phone.

My second question is this: convenience comes with a price, and these theft victims provide examples of the price to be paid for that convenience: the loss of those precious personal items, the loss of years of personally important data, or the loss of company or other business data and correspondence (whether text or email), the loss of the moneys in the various financial accounts to which the owner has given cell phone access, and on and on. Why are these data kept on cell phones at all? Why are they not, at the least, backed up on a separate device—a laptop, for instance, or the company’s desktop back at the office or in the home office?

There’s no excuse for the theft, but there’s no excuse, either, for the personal laziness that magnifies the outcome of the theft.

Ban Assault Weapons

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President Joe Biden (D) wants to ban assault weapons completely.

His Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives Director Steve Dettelbach, testifying under oath before a House Appropriations subcommittee, flat refused to say what an assault weapon was when asked by Congressman Jake Ellzey (R, TX).

…if Congress wishes to take that up, I think Congress would have to do the work, but we would be there to provide technical assistance. I, unlike you, am not a firearms expert to the same extent as you maybe, but we have people at ATF who can talk about velocity of firearms, what damage different kinds of firearms cause, so that whatever determination you chose to make would be an informed one.

Weasel words. You define the term, Dettelbach said, we’ll “help.” After all, he could have provided his own definition; those same experts could have advised him as he prepared for his testimony.

Biden wants to ban, and his ATF honcho—the man and the agency responsible for “regulating” the weapons us American citizens choose to keep and bear—refuses to say what it is that this administration would ban.

The obvious, and only logical, conclusion from this deliberate obfuscation is that Biden and his fellow Progressive-Democratic Party syndicate members intend to ban all of our firearms.