Rough Cobalt

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The Week’s Most Malicious, Flagitious, and Unpropitious Headlines

HAMBURGLARS AND FLIMFLAMBURGLARS
There have been many theories bandied about in recent months to explain the current explosion in violent crime hitting America’s big cities. Some pundits have pointed to the defunding and demoralization of police due to BLM-mania and George Soros-inspired “progressive” crime-enabling policies. Other commentators, specifically those who possess underdeveloped frontal lobes, have pointed to the Covid pandemic as the cause, because it…somehow…made black Americans egregiously murderous.

But there might be a third theory. Perhaps the eruption of unrest in largely black urban centers isn’t so much about the pandemic per se but the restaurant closures. After all, pre-Covid, a favorite black pastime was suing restaurants for poor dining experiences. Denied a reservation? Racial discrimination! Pay up, suckas! Dress code? Jim Crow on supersteroids! A restaurant closed for the evening that won’t open back up because one black man is hungry? Worse than a lynching.

How many media-hyped stories have there been over the past ten years of black waitresses being left racist notes on receipts by white customers? Sure, it always ends up that the waitress wrote the note herself, but that usually only comes out after the aggrieved waitress has cleaned up on GoFundMe.

In Beverly Hills, Korean-American-owned eatery Crustacean was sanctioned by the EEOC because black people claimed they weren’t being seated close enough to the window so that passersby could see black people dining. “Look, honey—a black man ingesting food. They’re just like us after all! I’m going to renounce my KKK membership.”

Given all that, the 2020 shuttering of indoor dining was a major blow to the black American psyche. Takeout only? No reservations, dress code, “check please,” or window seating? Well, no wonder there were riots; the usual outlets for easy reparations cash were closed. What was left except to sack Walgreens?

But now, thankfully, with life returning to normal post-pandemic, black “leaders” have restaurants to kick around again.

Black “comic” Byron Allen (of the late-’70s hit TV show Real People) doesn’t just tell jokes, he is a joke. Other comedians literally use this failed funster as the butt of their own humor. Yet as bad as Byron Allen is at comedy, he’s proven a very shrewd businessman, producing highly successful daytime-TV courtroom shows like “Judge Yomamasoblack” and “Jiveturkey Court.”

Last week, “media mogul” Allen decided to “mogul” a few billion bucks from McDonald’s by suing the company for not advertising on his “digital TV networks” Pets.TV and Cars.TV (not to mention PetsCars.TV, which consists of nonstop videos of dogs impatiently honking horns as their owners run into minimarts for sundries).

Allen claims he’s not trying to enrich himself by suing McDonald’s for ten billion bucks. Rather, he’s merely pressuring McDonald’s into spending at least 5% of its advertising budget on his networks, which for reasons unexplained will benefit all blacks.

Ironically, that’s the only funny thing the guy’s ever said in his life.

Still, don’t be so quick to laugh. McDonald’s is actually taking the lawsuit seriously. The fast-food giant told the WSJ last week that it would indeed commit 5% of its advertising budget to “black-owned” media entities, although the company stopped short of agreeing to pay for ads on Allen’s WatchingPaintDry.TV, which is billed as “replicating the experience of watching a Byron Allen stand-up set.”

Of course, Allen’s campaign to force McDonald’s to spend more advertising bucks on black consumers comes on the heels of several government and nonprofit reports slamming McDonald’s for being racist for targeting black consumers with too much advertising, thus causing obesity and nutritional deficiencies that led to greater numbers of Covid deaths in black communities.

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. But most of all, damned if you’re ever going to hear Byron Allen say anything intentionally funny.

Unintentionally, though…the guy’s a real (BLM) riot.

FARMERS’ GALLMANAC
Sticking with the theme of racial scam artists, let’s take a trip to farm country. Ah, America’s rich, hearty farm belt, with its streets of concrete, basketball courts, bums sleeping in alleys, 24-hour check-cashing liquor joints, and crack dens.

Wait, that’s not what you think of when you think of “farm country”?

Racist!

And speaking of “racists,” in March 2020 the ultimate evil racist, Donald Trump, signed the CARES Act, the unprecedentedly large stimulus bill that, in theory, was intended to provide Americans financial relief during the Covid crisis. In reality, it proved itself a gold mine for inner-city hustlers who found ways to bilk the big-money giveaway for all it was worth.

And now it’s been revealed that the part of CARES that was supposed to offer protection to “family farms” was badly, and rather amusingly, abused by those same hucksters.

Weird how so many people of color benefited from handout programs signed into law by a supposed white supremacist.

A core problem with the CARES handouts to “farmers” was that the program made it profitable for “alternative lenders” (sometimes referred to as “fintechs”) to make questionable loans, as those companies were offered a generous government-backed 5% fee on every loan under $350,000. One of those fintechs, “Kabbage,” which later spun off into “K Servicing,” was run by a black angus bossy named Laquisha Milner, and the entire loan program was overseen by the Small Business Administration and its agents, including Eastern Region Special Agent-in-Charge Amaleka McCall-Brathwaite, and SBA inspector general spokesperson Farrah Saint-Surin, who brought all the integrity to her job that one would expect of someone from her native Haiti, a nation known for its clockwork government and lack of graft and corruption (“Haiti: where the rape trains always run on time”).

Anyway, you might be getting an idea of how things went south with CARES’ farm relief bailouts. Last week, a report by ProPublica uncovered millions of dollars in loans to fake farms that were processed, mostly through Laquisha’s Kabbage/K Servicing (which produced a Michael Jackson-themed video to lure black employees and borrowers), and doled out to nonexistent “farms” with names like “Deely Nuts,” “Tomato Cramber,” and “Beefy King.”

One beneficiary of these loans was a Floridian named Latoya Clark, a self-described “African-American woman of Jamaican descent” who received, via Kabbage, over one million dollars for her “farms” named “Squeeze It” (oranges, most likely) and “Tastetunup” (no effing clue). When Clark’s bank, JPMorgan Chase, froze her funds after an internal investigation revealed that the businesses were likely fake, Clark sued Chase for depriving her of her stimmi bucks. Her lawsuit claims that Chase only froze the funds due to “institutional racism” and “racial profiling.”

In its response to the complaint, Chase provided ample documentation to prove that “Squeeze It” and “Tastunup” were shell entities created after the CARES Act was passed as a way of cashing in on the law’s “make it rain” philosophy toward anyone who could fill out a form and hold up a begging bowl.

The Chase vs. Clark case has yet to go to trial, but one hopes that the proceedings will put Ms. Latoya on the spot about what in the living hell “Tastunup” is actually supposed to be.

Not to be outdone by his predecessor, Joe Biden has actually expanded government programs giving money to “black farms,” and as for any loans to fake black farms that were made under CARES during the Trump presidency, Biden’s got that well-covered. On March 17 he appointed as the new head of the Small Business Administration one Isabella Casillas Guzman, who describes herself as (no joke) a “Mexican Chinese Jew.”

Well, surely she’ll clean house! At least the Mexican part of her will.

By the way, what do you get when you cross a Jew with a Chinaman and a Mexican? Someone who cooks their own takeout and pays themselves 50 cents an hour to wash the dishes.

Oh, you can do better? It’s funnier than anything you’ll hear at a Byron Allen show.

GOYTUS INTERRUPTUS
In the classic season 4 Simpsons episode “Mr. Plow,” Homer is driving home from Moe’s Tavern in a blizzard. Drunk, and with his ability to see the road ahead impeded by snow, he recklessly weaves through his neighborhood’s streets. With terrible suddenness, he crashes violently into another vehicle. Exiting his car, he sees that both vehicles have sustained heavy damage from the collision.

“Well, I got him as good as he got me!” Homer proudly declares, content that whatever his repair costs from the crash, the “other guy” will have to pay as much or more.

Then the snow lets up enough for Homer to see that he’s actually crashed into the Simpson family’s parked station wagon in his own driveway. The “other guy” was himself.

D’oh!

That’s kinda been Jews the past year regarding the disruption of outdoor dining by BLM. Encouraged by Jewish journalists, academics, and political moneymen, BLM in 2020 made a cottage industry out of screaming at, threatening, and outright assaulting whites who were dining outside in cities where outdoor dining was the only option due to Covid restrictions. This campaign of harassment produced clip after clip after clip of white diners (often elderly) being harangued, cornered, insulted, and in some cases even losing their food to hungry black reparationists who helped themselves because when Sam Jackson ate that doomed white guy’s tasty burger and washed it down with Sprite, it was, like, the coolest thing ever, right?

Sure, one or two Jews might have been among the besieged diners—after all, the average BLM simpleton can’t tell one whitey from another—but at least leftist Jews could take solace in the fact that for every Finklestein, Schmeckelberg, or Spielenschitz whose dinner was disturbed, ten times as many Andersens, Van Dykes, and O’Houlihans suffered the same fate.

“Well, I got him as good as he got me!”

At least that was the sentiment until a week ago, when a couple of Jews enjoying an outdoor dinner at a pricey West Hollywood restaurant were attacked by a bunch of pro-Palestinian rioters who disrupted their dining experience with insults, threats, and hurled projectiles.

And you know the classic poem…

First they came for the elderly gentiles enjoying the early-bird special at Denny’s, and I did not speak out—
because I am neither old, a gentile, nor a fan of crappy food.

Then they came for the country-club gentiles enjoying fried calamari at a gastropub, and I did not speak out—
because I’m not a country-club gentile, and that calamari isn’t glatt and such tiny portions they give you anyway.

Then they came for me, and—
what the hell? It’s the end of the world! Speak out for me already, why don’t you!

D’oy!

Yes, after voicing unwavering support for BLM as it attacked outdoor diners over and over again, the ADL declared a state of emergency over this one outdoor dining attack by akbars against Jews.

“Interrupting a Jew as he eats dinner? It’s an abomination! A Holocaust! A Chowschwitz! A Beef Stewchenwald! A Burger-Belsen!”

The ADL, aided by its parrots in the press, demanded action! And the LAPD obliged, quickly rounding up the two dining-disruptors—Samer Jayylusi of Anaheim and Xavier Pabon of Riverside. “How fiendish of these men to have traveled so far just to target Jews on L.A.’s Westside,” the ADL croaked, while deleting all the emails it sent a year ago praising BLM activists from South L.A. for coming to the Westside to target whites and Jews with looting and riots.

Because in the end, it’s not about the targetees, but the targeters. The shifty-eyed racial demagogues who run the ADL had no problem with noble blacks attacking Jews, because whites were targeted too. But filthy Ay-rabs attacking only Jews?

That cannot stand!

Indeed, Jason Isaacson, chief policy and political affairs officer with the American Jewish Committee, told The Hill last week that he’s troubled that Palestinian attackers are echoing the “racial justice” rhetoric that groups like his employed in defense of BLM.

How dare they!

Fortunately, with police across the country showing a willingness to arrest the anti-Semitic meal-breakers, hopefully soon enough, with summer on the horizon, the nation’s outdoor dining areas will once again be reserved for disruptions from the right kind of terrorists.

Bomb appétit!

BLANK SLATE, STANK STATE
It’s the late 1970s again, if you haven’t noticed. The Carter years are back and they’re worser than ever. Rampant inflation, gas prices through the roof, out-of-control government spending. A formidable, adversarial communist nation (about to host the Olympics) allowed to romp free by executive-branch cowards and appeasers who take the position “just be nice to them and they’ll be our friends.” Biden seems so intent on being the new Carter, he’s probably planning a river rafting trip just in the hope that he’ll be able to beat the snot out of a drowning rabbit.

It’s everything bad from that era, and none of the good (like the music, and ABC’s glorious T&A prime-time TV lineup).

But by far the worst aspect of the Carter years that Americans are having to relive at present is the soft-on-crime, screw-the-victim, “violent criminals are cuddly lil’ babies who need love ’n’ compassion” school of thought regarding criminal justice. For people who spent the 1970s in cities like New York, Chicago, and L.A., nothing defined the era more than scumbag repeat offenders being released with a slap on the wrist, as innocent citizens were slammed for being “intolerant” if they didn’t want the “Bronx Babyeater” rooming next door to them in a taxpayer-funded halfway house.

One of the most appalling 1970s criminal injustices that was reversed throughout the Reagan years was the idea that violent criminals should have their past crimes shielded from public view, that it’s “discriminatory” to force serial pedophiles, rapists, and murderers to have to live with a record of their previous acts. Clean slates are human rights! After all, “today is the first day of the rest of your life” (and, in the case of inveterate criminals, the last day of the life of their next victim).

Consider the example of Dominique Dunne, the young actress who hit the big time costarring in the 1982 blockbuster Poltergeist. The 22-year-old Dunne had started dating a hot young Hollywood chef named John Thomas Sweeney, unaware—because in 1982 there really was no way to be aware—that he had a history of strangling his girlfriends. So of course he strangled her to death.

At Sweeney’s trial, Judge Burton “Streicher Stereotype” Katz ruled that it was vital that Sweeney’s past strangulations not be mentioned to the jury. Just because a guy has strangled one, two, three women, doesn’t mean the fourth represents some kind of pattern or anything. And since all facts regarding Sweeney’s previous crimes were ruled inadmissible by Judge Thisiswhypeoplehateus, the jury rendered a verdict of involuntary manslaughter, and Chef Chokey McChickenstock was freed to strangle again.

But Dunne’s death was not in vain. Her father, a noted author and journalist, lobbied tirelessly to make it easier for people—jurors, potential employers, love interests—to learn of a person’s history of violent crime.

Thankfully for career criminals, the Democrats—with the help of big-money donors like George NoTHISiswhypeoplehateus Soros—are rolling back all of those Reagan-era reforms. In New York State, the “Clean Slate Act,” which would “remove publicly available criminal records for most felonies and misdemeanor crimes after people have completed the terms of their punishment,” is all set to pass, with backing from labor unions, big business, and big tech. Advocates for the bill aren’t even trying to disguise it as something that would only help “teens who have a record because they smoked a joint.” No, New York already has a law to expunge those records. This new one is targeted at erasing the records of violent felons, including murderers, kidnappers, arsonists, and domestic abusers.

Worse still, the law would require the “expungement” of “biometric information” like DNA databases (you can’t be a serial rapist if the DNA evidence of your previous rape has been sent to the incinerator!). For some wacky reason, feminist orgs are okay with this.

Amazingly, some state Republicans are on board with it too, more evidence that the RNC’s initiation rite of making new members eat lead paint chips has proven to be less than helpful in the long run.

And that’s the big difference between the Carter years and today. Back then, Republicans were not afflicted with mild-to-severe retardation. Indeed, back then, even some Democrats had integrity and morals. The nation’s come a long way, and the next Dominique Dunne who gets murdered in New York by a guy who should’ve been locked away three strangulations ago will surely use her final breath to curse today’s gutless politicos for ushering in a new, worse Carter era filled with all the murderousness but none of the ELO.

BLACK LIVES MATTER? HOW DARE YOU!
It was bound to happen. Climate-change apocalyptics have talked themselves into a corner. From “no more cow farts” AOC to Al “every time I said the world would end I was wrong except this time” Gore to Greta “HOW DARE YOU!” Thunberg to Bill “the earth is on fire!” Nye the Pseudoscience Guy, the screaming-meemie alarmists have made it clear: If we don’t abandon fossil fuels and start driving electric cars, the world will burn…or freeze…or explode…or implode…or suffocate…or something.

The details are sketchy, but pesky specifics aside, just know that we’re all gonna die! It’s electric cars or the end of the human race. The dinosaurs died out because they didn’t switch to electrics (that and the fact that they never engineered a steering wheel that could be reached by the tiny arms of a T-Rex…so many unnecessary road fatalities).

But what if the cost of saving the planet is black lives? We’ve been told that nothing in the world—hell, nothing in the universe—is as precious as a black life.

But there might be one exception to that rule…one thing that is more important than even a Chicago Southside crackhead.

Cobalt!

With no cobalt, there are no rechargeable lithium batteries. No lithium batteries, no electric cars. No electric cars? No earth!

So where does cobalt come from? Is it conjured by transgender wizards using grrrrl-power magic? Is it a by-product of the good feelings one gets from buying a cup of fair-trade cruelty-free eco-friendly coffee from a Seattle Starbucks where one dime of every purchase goes to burning down an ICE facility? Is it pooped out by Gwyneth Paltrow after she ingests too many organic figs?

No, unfortunately. It’s mined in places like the Congo. And apparently, those mines are taking out black children like Wayne Williams on Viagra.

“Our children are dying like dogs,” one mournful Congolese mother told the press last week, as she and a bunch of other perturbed Congolese parents pressed ahead with a lawsuit aimed at getting companies like Apple, Google, Dell, Microsoft, and Tesla to stop killing their kids for their earth-saving batteries.

“Hundreds, if not thousands, of children have been maimed or killed to produce the cobalt needed for the world’s modern tech gadgets produced by the defendants and other companies,” the lawsuit states.

In response to the suit, Apple declared that it has established a “hotline” where children being worked to death in the mines can call to complain. Sadly, as the grieving mothers pointed out, there are several problems with this strategy. First, the child miners don’t have phones. Second, they can’t read. And third, the complaint line is relayed to a call center in Bangalore where nobody speaks English and every operator tries to redirect the conversation to the malware in the caller’s Windows 10.

Not everyone on the receiving end of the lawsuit is unsympathetic, though. Elon Musk told the AP that he’d be more than happy to look into the complaints of the child laborers if they’d convert their investment portfolios to Dogecoin. After being informed that the children have no portfolios, Musk shrugged and said, “Well, then, call me if they get trapped in a flooded cave.”

For his part, Bill Gates released a statement assuring his investors that “in all my visits to Jeffrey Epstein’s island, I never once abused a black boy. They’re not my type.”

Funny enough, so far not a single young leftist Hollywood celebrity or social media “influencer” has volunteered to go to the Congo to relieve a child miner of his duties, if only for a week. After all, seeing how their beloved electric-car batteries are created might just ruin the smug pleasure of driving a Tesla with a BLM bumper sticker and NPR on autoplay on the radio.

Hollywood can’t afford to be sentimental here; if it takes a few thousand dead black kids to save Mother Earth, so be it.

Perhaps if the advocates of the carbon-friendly Keystone Pipeline could guarantee that the tunnels would be dug by African child slaves, the Democrats would reverse their opposition to the project.

It’s certainly worth a shot.