Archive for March 20, 2021

Cryptocurrency for conservatives

Posted: March 20, 2021 by ng36b in blogs, Uncomfortable Truths
Tags: , , ,
Cryptocurrency and their symbol, from coinmama

Boycotts and deplatforming seem to be all the rage in 2021. Won’t stand for the National Anthem? People will vote with their remote controls and watch something else. Don’t like someone’s opinion? Easy, just demonetize their videos, like what YouTube is doing to PragerU right now. It’s easy to sit back and watch this as a passive observer when you don’t really care about ESPN or make YouTube videos.

But when your bank cancels your account, or you can’t use a credit card, it makes that passive stance no longer tenable. You might not care about ESPN, but not being able to purchase gasoline with a credit card becomes a regular nightmare. Worse still, what if no major bank will carry your money? Almost all employers pay employees electronically. What would you do?

If that sounds far fetched, its not. Bank accounts associated with conservative groups like the NRA have been under pressure to get canceled. Mastercard and Visa, the biggest names in credit cards, stopped donations to the David Horowitz Freedom Center (although they eventually restored it). Attacking financials hits home for everyone, because you can’t boycott banks, and that makes them a juicy target for radical liberals wanting to hurt conservatives.

While we should all be standing up and fighting these efforts, we should also protect ourselves. If you own a business that risks cancellation, you should be accepting cryptocurrency as a form of payment. Cryptocurrency, like Bitcoin or Ethereum, is a disaggregated ledger system where individual nodes on a network verify accurate transactions, and pay for that with a coin. If it sounds confusing, it is, however, so is trying to understand how banks process your money electronically. A good Bitcoin primer is this video from 99 BitCoins:

More importantly, Bitcoin and other blockchain cryptocurrencies have now been around for a while. Most of the bugs are worked out, and major companies are accepting them as payment. Tesla is the most notable, but add AT&T and even Burger King (only in Venezuela) to that list. Its growing and its not going away.

For conservatives, cryptocurrency offers the ability to pay people in a peer-to-peer mode that nobody can cancel. No government can freeze your account. No financial institution can be bullied into canceling you. Even better, the money transfers between crypto wallets (think of them nominally as the account that holds your cryptocurrency) only lists account numbers. This makes it incredibly difficult to track down or dox people that are frequenting a business or donating to conservative candidates.

Speaking of donating, since we’ve seen a fair amount of doxxing of people who donate to PACs, Political Action Committees can accept cryptocurrency, and its happening more frequently. Conservatives that think they shouldn’t get hassled about legal donations should consider telling their candidates to take cryptocurrency. Most PACs right now immediately cash the cryptocurrency into US Dollars and report it, which is fine, and it still maintains a decent level of anonymity for the donor.

Now is the time to get started. I recommend all conservatives learn about cryptocurrency, get a cryptocurrency wallet, and purchase some common cryptocurrency (Bitcoin and Ethereum are good candidates due to their popularity). For individuals, you should get an account that allows easy bank transfers, such as Coinbase, which doesn’t charge for ACH transfers. Even better, Coinbase has a series of short videos that teach you about different cryptocurrency and pay you in small amount of crypto to help you get started. If you use this link, it also helps me out.

For businesses, Coinbase offers a commerce site, https://commerce.coinbase.com/. The site generates a separate commerce wallet for common cryptocurrency and makes transferring to your commercial bank account easy. Even better, if your bank tries to cancel you, you can hold your money in cryptocurrency until you setup at a different bank.

Cryptocurrency is going to be the conservative answer to financial cancel culture. Now is the time to start, so that when the times get bad, you’re one step ahead of the liberal juggernaut.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.

Five thoughts under Other People’s Fedoras Stacy McCain on Police Stops, Don Surber on Golden Silence, Adrienne’s on Kids Social Skills, William Hoge Channels South Park of old and Jeff Dunetz on Voter ID (and a story of my mom)

Posted: March 20, 2021 by datechguy in Uncategorized

Stacy McCain on why so many Police Confrontations these days:

One reason you’re seeing more situations “escalate” in this manner is simply that technology has shifted the balance toward law enforcement. More and more police vehicles are equipped with scanners that automatically read tags of passing cars, so that if you’re driving a stolen vehicle or, as in Nika Holbert’s case, driving a car whose owner is wanted on arrest warrants, the cops are gonna get you. Five or 10 years ago, you could be driving around with a car full of felonies and cops wouldn’t know it, unless you did something to attract their attention. Nowadays, it’s a lot harder for criminals to get away with crimes, which is why we keep seeing videos like this. Race has nothing to do with it.

Now I know why Massachusetts considered a dirty license plate a “safety issue” to flunk me on an inspection a few years ago.

Don Surber reports (among other things) on moments when silence is apparently golden:

The New York Post reported, “A federal judge on Thursday agreed with Ghislaine Maxwell’s request to keep certain details in the criminal case against her secret — finding that information would be too ‘sensational and impure’ to reveal to the public.
“US District Judge Alison J. Nathan issued a ruling on redactions that Maxwell had asked for regarding transcripts the government filed under seal last month.”
After watching the Grammys, nothing is too sensational and impure to reveal to the public.
Obama judge. He’s covering up for some Democrat. Likely the name rhymes with Blinton.

I guarantee you that if Maxwell or Epstein had videos of Trump among their blackmail collection they’d would have been out in the public years ago.

An excellent point on well adjusted kids at Adrienne’s Corner:

Comment from an esteemed blogger buddy:I worry about my grandson on a daily basis. I worry about all of the issues you brought up. I can see his social skills declining, and it worries me. The democrats had a plan and I’m afraid it isn’t fully implemented yet.

My answer:

I would look to how home-schoolers handle their kids. In all the years of hubby teaching music the most well adjusted, happy, socialized, and smartest kids were the home-schooled. Therefore, I have to wonder what is going on to make the public school kids so unable to cope. Is it how the parents are handling all this?

Given what our schools are apparently teaching our children I’d say the continued closing of the Public schools are the biggest silver lining of this entire pandemic shutdown. Parents would be wise to find permanent alternates to public schools.

William Hoge channels South Park on the cold dark effects of reality on journalism’s narrative:

after years in attack mode, they’ve been unable to find good news to report to sell the new Narrative. For example, years of ranting about kids in cages has made it hard to put a positive spin on a sudden surge in minor children being detained at the border. Masks still required after vaccination, no Fourth of July, and renewed bombing in the Middle East are not an easy sell as good news. Reality keeps interfering with The Narrative, and the public is beginning to suspect that the warm fluid on our legs isn’t rain.

Alternatives to the Main Stream Media and Main Stream Social Media are popping up and some are getting traction because the compete with The Narrative rather than colluding with it. There’s a market for news and truth, and I suspect that many of the legacy media companies will be replaced by new organizations.

You can see signs of panic in the calls for censorship that are beginning appear, some from media outlets beginning to sense they are at a disadvantage competing with truthful reporting.

The real problem is that when you decide to live on a niche market of exclusively serving the left you find yourself more and more needed to bend reality to keep that decreasing niche watching.

Finally Jeff Dunetz on the universal popularity of Voter ID.

Per a Rasmussion poll, support for voter ID runs across political parties. 60% of Democrats the party pushing HR1,  89% of Republicans, and  77% of unaffiliated voters support voter ID.  Support is also high for conservatives (91%) and moderates (68%). But almost half of the self-described liberals (47%) support voter ID also. Even likely voters who are African-American (69%) support  ID laws.

Photo ID is needed to get on an airplane, buy cigarettes, get into many office buildings, enter comedy clubs, and establish other establishments selling alcohol. Photo ID is even needed at the Democratic National Convention to receive their official credentials (at the GOP convention too). Heck, you can’t even get into the DNC office in D.C unless you can prove who you are.

I’ve said it over and over again I’ll believe that Voter ID is racist when I see lawyers suing banks, airlines and business for requiring them, and frankly if Democrats wanted to have the people believe the last election was on the up and up Democrats would jump to embrace it but not at the expense of losing the ability to steal election they can’t win otherwise.

Personal story my late mother used to work the polls and she knew the neighborhoods well, during key election large groups of people would show up at the polls (usually bussed in) to add last minute votes. Such people would come to her table and give an address. Mom would look at them and bluntly say. ” I know that address, you don’t live at that address.” Invariably said people rather than complaining would dash away quickly. Nobody every complained or challenged her on it likely because the game would be up.

L.A. traffic report

Posted: March 20, 2021 by datechguy in Uncategorized

Based on a couple of drives around Los Angeles the last couple of Friday mornings, traffic in the city has distinctly increased from a few months ago, at the height of the pandemic. While a couple of drives are hardly conclusive, others have noticed, too. The days are growing longer, the California sun is feeling warmer, and the shutdown is, if not quite in the rear view mirror, at least in the slow lane, everyone zooming past.

American cities are about to undergo a unique experiment. The rise of remote work has made much office space obsolete. A friend of mine, an animator on a popular cartoon series, has been working remotely since the pandemic began. The producers recently told much of the staff that they won’t be required to return to the studio, once the city opens back up. They can continue to work remotely, out of state, for all the producers care. In California, the top tax rate is 13.3%, with anyone making more than $58,000 paying almost 10%. That’s going to chase people out of state, especially when Nevada is next door, with no state income tax.

Strange time, then, for new District Attorney George Gascon to hollow out law enforcement. Gascon, sounding like some Tea Party pork cutter, touted the hundreds of millions of dollars the county will save by reducing prison sentences for convicts. He’s also vowed to do away with the death penalty, and is going after police officers accused of misconduct. Gascon apparently kept up with how such reforms have treated Minneapolis.

Back in L.A., these “reforms” have so far prompted the city of Beverly Hills to issue a vote of “no confidence” in the district attorney, and L.A. suburb La Mirada is expected to do the same. And a victims’ group is launching a recall effort against the D.A., with support from the county sheriff. So things are going great in L.A.

Now with crime bound to rise, demand for office and industrial space collapsing, commercial property values sinking, city budgets reliant in large part on property taxes, and so city services dwindling — the city previously announced deep cuts to the police force — and with drought to only worsen, L.A. may soon resemble one of those wasteland dystopia’s the city’s artisans are so fond of depicting on screen.

Tough luck. I always preferred “Blade Runner” over “Mad Max,” but you get the dystopia you deserve, I guess. Installations have consequences, after all.