Category: Money Matters

Soaring Auto Insurance Rates

I received the bill for my 2013 Jeep Wrangler Sport the other day: $302.89 for six months. For the preceding six months I paid 274.09, and the six months before that 260.42. So yesterday I paid my agent a visit and reminded him of my stratospherically high credit rating, my lack of claims, my sterling driving record, my low mileage, my loyalty to the company, the whole shot.

He explained that  rates had gone down during the Great Covid Scare (my term not his) due to less driving but now were headed up again; Biden-flation (my term not his); and because e-vehicles are much more expensive to repair than gas drinkers (my term again).  All true. So I paid the bill and left.

On arriving home I flipped on Jesse Watters who had a segment  on young people and how they are getting hammered on rates. His focus was on onboard surveillance technology. Now if old people are unduly cautious on the roads and dangerous for that very reason, young people are worse, being impetuous, reckless, ignorant of physics, bereft of a proper sense of their mortality, without experience of life automotive and otherwise, distracted by their devices, distractive of each other, etc.   So they do stupid things at the wheel, the data gets sent to the insurance companies, and their rates skyrocket.

For example, I'm 'hauling donkey' in the fast lane doing 75-80 mph and some punk in a compact death-trap is on my ass.  I'm doing everything right, driving my Jeep as if it were a motorcycle: exercising due diligence, maintaining situational awareness, cycling through my mirrors and gauges, planning escape routes, staying out of blind spots, keeping my distance from other vehicles and especially from overloaded junk wagons.  I am engaging in automotive profiling. So the punk in the crapmobile tries to get around me, endangering himself, his passengers, and everyone around him.

The punk's high rates are the just wages of his automotive sin.

Of course, this is a deep and vexing topic. I don't want to live in a Sino-styled, omni-surveillant, Stasi-redolent police state! Damn you Dementocrats! Liberty trumps security! If you don't agree you are axiologically unfit to be an American. Go live in China or board the next time machine back to the USSR. Or the DDR. On the other hand, when the people lack virtue, automotive and otherwise, and will not govern themselves, then the plutocratic-pathocratic-totalitarian thugs have a plausible justification for their clamp-down and 'plausible deniability' of their malfeasance.

There is a lot to discuss. Here is something that I didn't know but that comports well with the pathocratic scumbaggery of wokeassed leftards:

Not all states allow car insurance companies to take gender into account. These six states prohibit the use of gender when pricing auto insurance:

How unspeakably stupid can an unspeakably  stupid reality-denying leftist be? But that is exactly what you would  nowadays expect in the once great and golden State of Californication and the People's Republic of Taxachusetts. 

The Cashless Road to Totalitarianism

During the Great Covid Scare, some restaurants stopped accepting  cash payments for health reasons.   Whatever the intention, that is a policy that aids and abets an incipient police state.  Exaggerate some health threat. Inspire fear in a gullible populace of highly suggestible conformists. Ban cash in the name of public health.
 
Result? Everyone making payments leaves a paper trail. People can be monitored as to where they go, where they shop, what they eat and drink., what they read. Too many visits to Joe's Real BBQ for paleolithic vittles and your social credit score goes down. Get the picture?
 
Corollary:  Cede control of health care delivery to the government and they can tell you how to live, what to eat, drink, ride. Ride a motorcycle? Dangerous activity! Government has a reason to ban them if they are picking up the tab for health care.
 
Addendum: Are we a gullible populace of highly suggestible conformists? Well, do you remember all the people walking around in the open air wearing masks? Or people driving alone in their cars with windows up wearing masks?   
 
Where is the independence of mind? Are we Americans or obedient Germans?
 
CBDC? Up yours, fascist.

Money

Whether or not the U. S. dollar remains the world's currency of choice, money itself will always be the ultimate currency and criterion of human seriousness and human understanding.  Money matters. "Money doesn't talk, it swears." (Bob Dylan) "When money talks, ideology walks." (Lee Iacocca) Just ask Traitor Joe.

As if in illustration of Lee's line, Anheuser-Busch walked back their Dylan Mulvaney wokery when their bottom line felt the sag.

Awake yet? Crank this one up. 

Billionaire Donors Withholding Loot from Leftist Seminaries

Long-time donors are finally waking up to the wokeassery* of once-great universities that have for decades been transmogrifying into leftist seminaries. ('Seminary' is etymologically related to 'semen' and in the seminaries in question the origin of the jism is masturbatory: nothing productive comes from these seed beds.)

I predicted the donor revolt on 13 October about a week after the Hamas savagery of 7 October. Case in point: Leon Cooperman.  He's given some $50 mil to Columbia but will give no more citing the cranial feculence (my polite phrase, not his) of the Hamas-supporting  students. 

What is astonishing to many of us, however, is how the Cooperman cohort could be so clueless for so long. Cooperman just now discovered what has been going on since the '60s, namely, the "long march through the institutions"? Only now you decide to stop funding the anti-civilizational scum?

Better late than never, but no fool like an old fool.

Copperman's 80. The elderly tend to live in the past.  They tend to be fat, lazy, complacent, inattentive, and lost in the petty particulars of their self-centered quotidian round, even if they are not, like Joey B., physically decrepit, non compos mentis, morally corrupt to the core, and a disaster for the USA and the world.

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*A coinage of mine which I am sure has occurred to others. Modelled on jackassery, a word recognized by Merriam-Webster. The donkey or jackass is the symbol, an aptro-symbol if you will, of the Democrat party in the USA which, once respectable, is now hard-Left and destructive of our republic as she was founded to be.

The End of Liberty is Nigh: The Digital Pound and Cancel Culture

And to add insult to injury, irony to outrage, the end of liberty is being ushered in by the mother country.  Here:

The digital pound would be a new type of money issued by the Bank of England for everyone to use for day-to-day spending. You would be able to use it in-store or online to make payments. 

This type of money is known as a central bank digital currency (CBDC). You may also hear it being called ‘digital sterling’ or even ‘Britcoin’. We call the UK version of CBDC the digital pound.

The digital pound would be denominated in sterling and its value would be stable, just like banknotes. £10 in digital pounds would always have the same value as a £10 banknote.

If we introduced it, it would not replace cash. We know being able to use cash is important for many people. That’s why we will continue to issue it for as long as people want to keep using it.

And you can take that italicized paragraph to the bank! (Italics added.)

In a parallel assault on liberty, the Brits are going cancel-crazy. Dreher:

It’s a country that gave the world George Orwell, but now, it’s a ‘Brand’ new world for free speech in once-great Britain, which these days specializes in doling out the unwelcome gift of Orwellianism.

Dame Caroline Dinenage, the chair of a British Parliamentary committee, has been writing to social media platforms Facebook, TikTok and Rumble, asking them if they plan to follow YouTube’s lead and demonetize the accused sex pest Russell Brand. On committee letterhead, Dame Caroline wrote to express the committee’s concern that Brand will not be able to make money on the platform and thereby “undermine the welfare of victims of inappropriate and potentially illegal behavior.”

Potentially illegal. This Conservative MP is using her powerful position to attempt to crush Brand’s ability to make a living, even though he denies the allegations, and they have not been subject to any sort of trial. This member of the British government is attempting to demonetize Russell Brand himself, based solely on allegations.

If this outrageous intimidation is allowed to stand, no one is safe in Britain. All it takes is for the right people to level fashionable accusations against you—ones having to do with racism, sexism, LGBT-phobia, ‘toxic masculinity,’ and whatnot—and you could see your livelihood evaporate overnight. You could even see your own government persecute you, as the committee headed by Dame Caroline, Baroness Lancaster of Kimbolton, is doing to Brand.

The Anglosphere is lost, and America is no exception. The push-back is too little, too late. But it ain't over 'til it's over.

We fight on in the gathering gloom. No defeatism! On the other hand, don't be a fool who sacrifices his life on the altar of activism. We have but one night to spend in this bad inn.  But a night is not nothing. I'll leave it to you to figure out the right mix of commitment to the fight and Gelassenheit. And it is up to you to balance praeparatio vitae and praeparatio mortis.

"So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late."

"War, children, it's just a shot away."

Globalist Greenies Go after Cryptomining in New York State

Story here. To understand the issue,  bear in mind that bitcoins are not literally mined, they are 'mined' using supercomputers  which consume a lot of electricity.

Anthony Flood sent me the hyperlink. He comments:

Bitcoin threatens globalist/statist "green" agenda . . . and everything else on their to-do list. No monopoly on money via fiat central banking? Then no "democratic" imposition of lower living standards. With respect to achieving global decentralization, the spontaneous, market-based decentralization of money "moves the needle." It's happening slowly, almost imperceptibly so, but it's in a race with globalist countermoves.

The Biden Inflation Octopus

He looks like a farmer because he is one.  He invariably talks sense.  No deracinated globalist, he is rooted, grounded, and  'based' — to stoop to an unnecessary innovation in current lingo.  He's my man, Hanson:

The Democrats will suffer historic losses in the November midterms. 

This disaster for their party will come about not just because of the Afghanistan debacle, an appeased Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the destruction of the southern border, the supply chain mess, or their support for critical race theory demagoguery.  

The culprit for the political wipeout will be out-of-control inflation—and for several reasons.  

One quibble. Tactically, it is not a good idea to predict loss for our enemies. It makes our side complacent. It is better to assume that the fight is tooth and nail, bite and scratch, right up to the end.   

Leftists are not likely to be intimidated or demoralized by our bold predictions. They live for the political. That is their sphere and for them it exhausts the real.  That's all they've got and so they fight to the end by any and all means.  We are at a disadvantage.  I call it the Conservative Disadvantage. Not only are we hobbled by our virtues, we cannot bring to the fight the full measure of our enthusiasm  precisely because we understand that the political does not exhaust the real.

And seriously, do you think the Dems are likely to abjure the electoral chicanery that contributed to their win in 2020?

Now go read the article.  Excerpt:

Fifth, Americans know that our current inflation is self-induced, not a product of a war abroad, an earthquake, or the exhaustion of gas and oil deposits. 

Biden ignored the natural inflationary buying spree of consumers who were released from being locked down for nearly two years unable to spend. 

Instead, he encouraged gorging that huge demand by printing trillions of dollars of funny money for all sorts of new redistributionist entitlements, green projects, and pet congressional programs. 

The Biden Administration eroded the work ethic. It kept labor non-participation rates high by subsidizing with federal checks those staying at home. 

It nihilistically slashed gas and oil production by canceling federal leases, oilfields, and pipelines while pressuring banks not to lend for fracking. 

In just a year, Biden reduced America from the greatest producer of gas and oil in the history of civilization to an energy panhandler begging the Saudis and Russians to pump more of the oil that America needs but will not tap for itself. 

The Mighty Tetrad: Money, Power, Sex, and Recognition

Money, power, sex, and recognition form the Mighty Tetrad of human motivators, the chief goads to action here below. But none of the four is evil or the root of all evil. People thoughtlessly and falsely repeat, time and again, that money is the root of all evil. Why not say that about power, sex, and recognition? The sober truth is that no member of the Mighty Tetrad is evil or the root of all evil. Each is ambiguous: a good liable to perversion.

Read the rest at Substack.

Linked at my Facebook page. You may leave a comment there if you wish, or send me an e-mail message.  I have come to refer to Facebook as Furzbuch because its suppression of free speech surely stinks to high heaven. 

There I must walk the line. But I won't back down.  It's going to be a long twilight struggle* against the forces of darkness, my friends. (Wo)Man up, gear up, but be of good cheer. Long live the Republic!

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*"Now the trumpet summons us again–not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need–not as a call to battle, though embattled we are– but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, 'rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation'–a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease and war itself." JFK Inaugural Speech, 1961.

Of the four, tyranny is greatest threat at the present time, the tyranny of the deep state wokesters who control the Democrat Party and pull the strings of the puppet-in-chief, Joe Biden.