“Misunderstanding” of the Left

A number of credit card companies, on the demand of the Federal government as washed through the International Standards Organization, are going to start explicitly listing gun sales by lawful gun stores to individual average Americans. Among those credit card companies are Visa, Mastercard, and AmEx.

The Federal government now is going to track us average Americans and build a database of who among us has a firearm.

For what purpose?

…gun control advocates who argue that a separate category for gun store sales will help track suspicious quantities of firearm sales that could potentially lead to a mass shooting.

Because buying a firearm is ipso facto suspicious under the ideology of the Left and their Progressive-Democratic Party. But wait—suspicious quantities—what’s wrong with that? This is the camel’s nose. It won’t be long before the Feds decide that one is a suspicious number of firearms to buy. And then one is a suspicious number of firearms to own.

The concern of us average Americans is justified by this misleading claim by New York City Mayor Eric Adams (D) as he demonstrates his “misunderstanding” of the tracking.

When you buy an airline ticket or pay for your groceries, your credit card company has a special code for those retailers. It’s just common sense that we have the same policies in place for gun and ammunition stores[.]

Buying “guns and ammunition” is an explicitly protected activity under our Constitution. Buying firearms—keeping and bearing Arms—is an entirely unique activity for us average Americans, quite apart from the ordinary, day to day, activity of grocery buying, or the process of buying a travel ticket. There is no reason to track Americans going about our Constitutionally protected behaviors.

Other than identifying who has firearms for further Progressive-Democrat “control.” This is another effort of the Progressive-Democratic Party’s desired surveillance state.

Racist Banks

Bank of America is trying out a new program.

Bank of America announced August 30 that it is launching a trial program, called the Community Affordable Loan Solution, offering mortgages that do not require closing costs, down payments, or minimum credit scores. People in predominantly Hispanic or Black neighborhoods in Charlotte, North Carolina; Dallas; Detroit; Los Angeles; and Miami that meet specific income requirements will have access to the program.

JPMorgan Chase is following BAC down that walk of shame.

…expanded its grant program in February 2021 to offer $5,000 for closing costs and down payments to homebuyers purchasing homes in predominantly minority neighborhoods.

But other groups of Americans in other inner-city sections need not apply.

It’s not actually income that’s the determining criterion. It’s skin color.

These banks are behaving insultingly, too. BAC and JPM are telling blacks and Hispanics that they think blacks and Hispanics are incapable of competing, much less getting ahead, on their own capabilities, their own intelligence: blacks and Hispanics need special treatment from institutions.

Echoes of Democrat Woodrow Wilson’s infamous claim that blacks should be grateful for the protections of segregation.

These are two banks with which I will never do business.

YGTBSM

Another installment, this one from Canada—Vancouver, BC.

That city has a brand new fire engine. It’s all electric: not a drop of evil hydrocarbon in it for fuel or any other power. Never mind that it can’t function as a fire engine. It’s ALL ELECTRIC. Yay.

[T]he new e-truck will cost $300,000 more than a comparable diesel model, pump 40 per cent less water and have such a short range (30 km) because of its enormous weight that it will have to have backup diesel power in case it runs out of juice on the way to a blaze.
But, the city points out, it won’t give off diesel fumes and will be much quieter than existing diesel fire trucks.

Jayjuz.

They’d have done better with a horse-drawn, hand-powered pumper.

More here.

H/t Ralph Schwarz

Surveillance State, Part 2

Another one from New York. It seems that US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley’s Stand for America PAC, a 501(c)(4) organization with a legally protected list of donors has had that list released by the NY AG’s Charities Bureau to Politico, which then proceeded to publish that list.

The Charities Bureau is an arm of New York Attorney General Letitia James’ (the same one who “consulted” with then-FBI Director James Comey to suppress any hint of investigation of Hillary Clinton’s classified email handling ‘way back in 2016) Attorney General office.

Never mind that the leak was illegal. Never mind that the Supreme Court in Prosperity Foundation v Bonta—just a year ago—had ruled that the California AG’s blanket demand that all charities disclose donor information was unconstitutional.

Letitia James, a Progressive-Democrat through and through, cares not a fig for any law that’s inconvenient to her. She’s going to collect non-Progressive-Democrat data and release it whenever she takes a notion to.

Location Apps on Smartphones

A techy article about the wonders of location apps in our smartphones—if “properly shared”—in Sunday’s Wall Street Journal caught my eye. The author’s piece centered on the alleged benefits of automatically sharing your personal location data with a selected audience (usually family members) and the app providers’ directions for how to achieve “proper sharing,” supposedly limiting the location sharing to that selected audience.

The author missed the larger problem, though: the intrinsic lack of security on those apps, especially given the historical disdain for personal information security on the part of some of those providers.

I won’t share my location, ever. It wasn’t necessary before such apps became available, and it isn’t necessary today. My smartphone has a—wait for it—telephone app that I can use to check in with and/or check on the ones about whom I care.

The location data in these apps simply aren’t as secure as the touters make them out to be. Data that are held anywhere but on my personal devices are vulnerable to exposure, whether by “mistake”—last week’s IRS release of tax records (which is all too routine for this government agency) comes to mind—or programming mistakes, or cloud or providers’ servers being hacked, or the receivers’ devices being hacked, or location history being vulnerable to government information demands, or….

Location data that aren’t in the cloud or on those other servers and that aren’t being transmitted to a supposedly limited audience aren’t available to exposure.

Along those lines, a commenter in the comment thread for that article had this:

I checked FindMy to see if my wife was lost coming to an appointment at the bank (she was). The banker gasped, “Does she know you’re tracking her?” Her reaction? “It’s a sign of a secure marriage.”
She once missed where I-26 turns and followed the connector straight ahead into downtown Columbia, SC. I was able to guide her through town back to I-26 by a convenient route. I had been tracking her anticipating that very thing.
Very useful app, but one has to be careful with it.

Leaving aside the Banker’s intrusion into a family matter having nothing to do with the family business being conducted, I had this reaction:

Before location apps were available, my wife had a similar missed-turn-now-lost experience trying to get to a location in a large city in Texas hours away from the large city in Texas in which we live, and where I still was.
Her solution? She exercised the telephone app that happened be on her smartphone and called me. I brought up the map function on my laptop, and from her description of the landmarks she was seeing, I quickly located her and then talked her back onto her route. She finished her trip with no further trouble.

Telephone apps. What will Big Tech think of next?