Californians Can Again Be Their Own Boss in the ‘Gig Economy,’ Also Known as the Free Market
In a unanimous decision last month, California’s Supreme Court upheld Proposition 22, approved by 58 percent of voters in 2020, allowing workers for companies such as Uber and Lyft to work as independent contractors. This decision was fallout from Assembly Bill 5, a virtual declaration against the independence of workers, and not just rideshare drivers and truckers.
The original measure, by Democrat Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, limited freelance writers to 35 submissions per year, less than one a week. The measure also restricted editors, videographers, and photographers and forced musicians to become employees of whichever club would take them on. As trumpeter Joe Mazzaferro of the Jazz Cooperative told reporters, musicians should have the right to negotiate their compensation and “it’s our right to work as we choose.” California Democrats, including AB-5 supporter Kamala Harris, don’t think so.
By 2020, the bill had affected more than one million independent contractor and freelance workers in California. As they struggled to earn a living, AB-5 also harmed the effort to counter the Covid pandemic. That was particularly true in rural California, where hospitals and clinics lack the patient loads to support full-time staff in some nursing specialties. Independent contractors can provide those services, but AB-5 backers were unyielding.
“Furloughed Californians stand on the verge of being wiped out financially because the law prevents them from working part time in a variety of indispensable positions,” read a letter from more than 150 of California’s leading economists and political scientists. “Blocking work that is needed and impoverishing workers laid-off from other jobs are not the intentions of AB-5, but the law is having these unintended consequences and needs to be suspended. Gov. Gavin Newsom declined to suspend the measure, but went on to violate his own rules on masks and impose a rigid lockdown on the people.
AB 5 fundamentally transforms independent workers into employees, where they can be dragooned into unions that faithfully fund Democrats. Trouble is, contrary to establishment media claims, unions do not represent “labor” in any meaningful sense.
According to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, a full 90 percent of American workers are not union members. Only 10 percent of workers nationwide are union members. In California, according to the BLS, 84.6 percent of workers are not union members, with only 15.4 percent taking union membership.
Those numbers reflect the freewill choices of workers, who know that master doesn’t know best and want to be their own boss. AB 5 forces workers to go against their own best interests, and if any worker thought it was a totalitarian-style measure it would be hard to blame them.
Rideshare companies are now being portrayed as “gig companies” but the people should not be fooled. This is all about the independence of workers, from drivers to handymen to writers and musicians. They are living the life of their own choosing, according to their own values and needs. The upholding of Proposition 22 provides some relief but the vile AB 5 needs to be completely dismantled. For all but the willfully blind, the reason should be clear.
Politicians rail against the “gig economy,” which is really the free market, the greatest generator of goods, services and wealth. The more politicians leave the market alone, the more the state will prosper.
https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=15024&omhide=true&trk=title
***************************************************UK crackdown on language turns free speech on its head
The British courts jailed a 61-year-old Sutton man, David Spring, for 18 months on Tuesday, according to Your Local Guardian, for yelling “who the f..k is Allah” and calling police officers the C-word at an anti-immigration protest near Downing Street in July.
It came out in court that the retired train driver, now mainly a carer for his sick wife, was contrite and embarrassed by his behaviour, but not enough to avoid jail time in what is a ludicrous, obscene infringement of what should be the man’s fundamental rights.
The riots and protests across Britain last month and this month that centred on extreme immigration have triggered a raft of shocking arrests and incarcerations of ordinary Britons for their opinions and social media posts, including of one elderly man who barely understood what he was being arrested for, in his home, by two police officers.
Geopolitics Expert Roger Gewolb says the underlying cause of riots erupting in the UK is 14 years of Tory rule that “didn’t take their electorate seriously”.
“You’ve made some comments that are offensive or obscene and people have made complaints,” the officer told him as she put her gloves to search him. You really have to see it believe it.
Even if some British people now feel safer (from hurt feelings?), it has been a deserved public relations disaster for Britain, especially in the US where mockery and condemnation of the UK have gone through the roof, particularly after one senior British police officer threatened to extradite Americans for posting offensive material.
“The fact that they’re comfortable with finding people who’ve said something that they disagree with and putting them in a f..king cage in England in 2024 is really wild,” Joe Rogan, a supporter of Bernie Sanders and Robert F. Kennedy, said last week on America’s most popular podcast.
X owner Elon Musk has urged his 189 million followers to “Support freedom of speech in the UK!” as part of a barrage of memes and mockery of British rough justice, echoed by countless influencers across the political spectrum. It is indeed shocking to see a country once at the vanguard of individual liberty so zealously arrest its own people over intemperate, rude or intolerant remarks, often made in their own homes, seen by relatively few people, and therefore falling far short of the “clear, present and imminent danger” required, in the US at least, for incitement to violence charges.
Earlier this year British pundit Konstantin Kisin told former Nationals leader John Anderson Britain had arrested more than 3000 individuals for online posts in a single year compared with 400 in Russia, which has about 2½ times the population.
Whatever the exact figures, it’s suggestive of how the West is becoming more censorious than even traditional authoritarian regimes. In China, online “wrong think” attracts a demerit from one’s social credit score; perhaps that’s where Britain is heading once its jails become too full of working-class “racists”.
Australia is surely on the same path, given it was legal to arrest a pregnant woman in her home in Victoria for posting on Facebook her understandable disdain for destructive multi-month pandemic lockdowns.e
The poorly written laws that permit such arrests in Britain – such as the 2003 Communications Act, which makes it illegal to send any message on an electronic messaging system, even among private chat groups, that is “grossly offensive or indecent, obscene or menacing, or false, for the purpose of causing annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety to another” – have been around for some time.
A generation ago police and governments were wiser, realising that jailing or censoring people for their beliefs would only draw attention to the remarks and stoke further political resentment, which is what has happened in Britain. What has changed is the culture, an obsession among elite policymakers and some journalists with stamping out “misinformation” and “disinformation” – words that were barely heard a decade ago, when right, wrong, lying and propaganda were sufficient – and purifying public (even private!) debate of any remarks deemed politically incorrect.
This week a Washington Post reporter seriously asked White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre ahead of Musk’s interview with Donald Trump: “What role does the White House or the president have in sort of stopping that or stopping the spread of that (misinformation)?”
In a world where much of the mainstream media outlets are increasingly biased, it’s even more important that ordinary people can have their say unimpeded, despite the offence or “wrongness” they generate.
Even the elite California audience of US comedian Stephen Colbert burst out laughing this week when he told CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins: “I know you guys are objective over there, that you just report the news as it is.”
“Is that supposed to be a laugh line?” she said awkwardly.
It wasn’t.
Many of us flippantly like to say “we’re a free country”, but increasingly that’s not so, despite all the well-funded human rights outfits.
Too few people realise democracies are capable, wittingly or unwittingly, of doing stupid, even evil things and trampling over rights that earlier generations have taken for granted. The idea governments, themselves often the biggest purveyors of misinformation, are well placed to police the truth or the limits to taking offence is egregiously wrongheaded.
Right and wrong are highly slippery concepts, best left to civil society to sort out. Let bigoted sentiments be called out by more and better speech.
Americans who don’t like what they see in Britain should beware a Harris-Walz administration.
“There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy,” Democrat vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz told MSNBC last week, in what ironically was itself misinformation: there most certainly is, as numerous Supreme Court verdicts have declared.
At least Britain’s spate of arrests for offensive statements and memes has drawn attention to the dwindling rights of the individual across Western nations, as an increasingly culturally remote ruling class seeks to impose its values on everyone else.
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Experts reveal the seven odd behaviors linked to a high IQ
I think most of this applies to me - JR
1. If you talk to yourself, you're not crazy. It may actually be a sign that you're smarter than the average person.
Even though this behavior is somewhat irrational, a growing body of evidence has suggested that it has big cognitive benefits - including better memory recall, confidence, focus and more.
In a 2012 study, a team of American researchers showed participants 20 pictures of various objects and asked them to find a a specific one.
Scientists found that people who talked to themselves while looking at the images were able to identify the object faster.
Another study, conducted in 2017 by UK researchers, discovered that our brains act much like those of monkeys when we stop talking to ourselves - activating separate visual and sound areas of the brain for each task.
In the experiment, researchers asked participants to repeat meaningless sounds out loud, such as 'blah-blah-blah,' while performing visual and sound tasks.
'Because we cannot say two things at the same time, muttering these sounds made participants unable to tell themselves what to do in each task,' Paloma Mari-Beffa, senior lecturer at Bangor University, wrote in The Conversation.
'Under these circumstances, humans behaved like monkeys do, activating separate visual and sound areas of the brain for each task.'
So the next time you're caught muttering to yourself, don't be embarrassed. That strange habit is helping you process information and stay sharp.
2. Staying up late
The early bird may get the worm, but evidence has suggested that night owls actually have higher IQs.
A study, published in January, analyzed data from 26,000 adults, finding those who stay up late scored significantly higher on cognitive tests than early risers.
Night owls scored about 13.5 percent higher than morning types in one group and 7.5 percent higher than morning types in another group.
Many brilliant minds have been known to have nocturnal habits, including Darwin and Marcel Proust.
If your mind is most active while the rest of the world sleeps, you may have a high IQ.
3. Daydreaming
Getting lost in daydreams is often perceived as absent-mindedness. But scientists have said that this is actually a sign that you're smart and creative.
'People with efficient brains may have too much brain capacity to stop their minds from wandering,' said Eric Schumacher, a Georgia Tech associate psychology professor, said in a statement.
His research found that people who report more frequent daydreaming score higher on intellectual and creative ability tests.
MRI scans also showed that these people had more efficient brain systems.
This evidence suggests that daydreaming is actually a great workout for your brain. So if you find your mind wandering, that's a good sign.
4. Thriving in clutter
Some people can't stand a messy room or desk. But the highly intelligent don't seem to mind it - or perhaps even prefer it.
A team of researchers set out to determine why that is. They put study participants in either a messy or tidy office space and asked them to come up with new uses for ping pong balls.
Though both groups came up with a similar number of ideas, the researchers found that the participants in the messy room came up with more creative and interesting ideas.
'Disorderly environments seem to inspire breaking free of tradition, which can produce fresh insights,' said Kathleen Vohs, lead scientist behind the experiment, in a press release.
'Orderly environments, in contrast, encourage convention and playing it safe.'
So, leaving your space untidy may help you think outside the box.
5. Asking lots of questions
If you're constantly asking how things work, where they come from, and dozens of other questions that pop into your head, you're probably highly intelligent.
Curiosity is one of the most common signs of brightness. It's a sign that your mind is always seeking to understand the world around you.
It also means that you're always learning and storing new information. The more questions you ask, the more your understanding expands.
To some, it may seem annoying. But for people with high IQs, this insatiable curiosity is natural.
As Einstein once said, 'I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.'
6. Being introverted
Many geniuses have been known to hide themselves away to work or think in peace and quiet.
It makes sense - it can be difficult to focus while surrounded by the constant chatter and stimulation of a social environment.
Plus, studies have shown that introverts tend to engage in deeper cognitive processing than extroverts. They tend to think more thoroughly and critically, which can be associated with a higher IQ.
Introverts also tend to prefer activities that require concentration and sustained mental effort, such as reading and research, which can foster intellectual development.
7. Devouring books
Avid readers are constantly learning new information, vocabulary words, complex ideas and different perspectives. It's like a workout for the mind.
Additionally, reading helps strengthen mental focus, imagination and our ability to empathize with others.
People who read a lot are constantly developing their intelligence, which means they're more likely to have a high IQ.
Take business mogul and investor Warren Buffet for example. He spends almost eight hours a day reading.
So if you constantly have your nose in a book, you're actually getting smarter by the page.
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Britain's multicultural disaster
It’s as if a cultural wire has tripped, or a fuse has blown.
The murder last week of three little girls aged six, seven and nine at a school in Southport, in a stabbing attack by the British-born son of Rwandan immigrants which left several others injured, detonated the beginning of some of the most serious rioting seen in Britain for years.
Inflamed by false accounts spread on social media that the attacker was a Syrian Muslim asylum-seeker and that he was on an MI6 watch list, violent mobs in Southport rioted, attacked a local mosque and left more than 50 police officers injured.
Since then, increasingly violent clashes have ensued in around a dozen cities. Whipped up by agitators such as Stephen Lennon (aka “Tommy Robinson”) and other influencers, anti-immigrant mobs attacked mosques and horrifyingly tried to set fire to a hostel for asylum-seekers, with Muslim mobs in turn seeking out white people to attack. In Bolton, Muslim groups shouting “Allahu akhbar” clashed with anti-Muslim rioters. A mob in Middlesbrough shouted “smash the p—s” and “there ain’t no black in the Union Jack” while targeting the homes of migrants, while footage on social media from elsewhere in the city appeared to show groups of Asian men attacking white men.
This is the result of years of ignoring the incendiary twin developments of mass immigration and progressive Islamisation, which I wrote about in my 2006 book Londonistan and which have got so much worse since then.
There’s been a remorseless series of attacks by Muslim extremists. After the 7/7 London bombings that killed 52 people in July 2005, the attack in 2017 on an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester killed 22 and injured more than a thousand. Eight people were murdered and 48 injured in the London Bridge attack a month later. In 2021, a teacher in Batley, West Yorkshire, went into hiding for his life after showing an image of Muhammad to his pupils in a lesson about the limits of free speech; he is still in hiding. In 2023, a 14 year-old autistic boy in Wakefield who dropped a copy of the Quran in the corridor of his Wakefield school during a prank received death threats and was harassed and demonised. Earlier this year, Muslim activists took London’s secular Michaela school to court in an unsuccessful attempt to get the school to kowtow to demands for a prayer room.
These and other such incidents are never discussed honestly. The issue of Muslim aggression that underlies them is ignored or censored. Problems with Islamic religion or culture are regarded as taboo; the issues are discussed in euphemisms. Anyone who does speak plainly about such matters is immediately hung out to dry as “right-wing” or “far-right”, the incoherent labels that are fixed onto anyone who contradicts left-wing dogma in order to stigmatise and silence them as social pariahs.
This is not to excuse what has happened in the current riots. The anti-immigrant violence has been appalling; the targeting of the Muslim community and asylum-seekers has been inexcusable and should be dealt with by condign measures taken against the perpetrators.
But this is a tinderbox that has been under construction for years by successive administrations, starting with Tony Blair’s government which set out to transform the country into a multicultural society through mass immigration.
Multiculturalism, for the benefit of those who have been asleep inside a cocoon for the past several decades, is not the template for a tolerant society. Tolerance of other cultures and ethnicities should be a given in any civilised country. Multiculturalism, by contrast, is a doctrine which says all cultures must be deemed to have values that are no better or worse than any other. Multiculturalism therefore makes it impossible for a western society to require new arrivals to conform to its precepts such as equality for women, freedom of speech and tolerance of minorities.
It is therefore a recipe for the destruction of the west — and indeed of society itself, since it effectively produces tribes warring against each other for power and supremacy, creating divisions which destroy a unified society. Far from producing racial harmony, multiculturalism is a formula for racial and ethnic hatred and worse.
For years, some of us warned that the wilful destruction of British and western culture, the deliberate concealment of what was happening and the denigration and harassment of anyone who objected would not only destroy social cohesion but risked a violent backlash from neo-Nazis, thugs and agitators of various stripes (and the rise of “populist” politicians) alongside ordinary people who had simply had enough. That’s what we’re now seeing playing out on the streets of Britain.
What’s driving people absolutely wild is the double standards that are on such egregious display. The prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, speaks as if the only problem is “right-wing” thuggery. Certainly, that problem has been shockingly evident and should be dealt with. But so too should Muslim and left-wing thuggery. There have been numerous examples during these riots of Muslim mobs gratuitously attacking white people. Yet Starmer never calls these people “thugs”.
One of the incidents that sparked the current disorder took place at Manchester airport, where a police officer was filmed kicking the head of a Muslim man who was lying prone on the ground. That created understandable outrage and the officer was rightly pulled up on a disciplinary charge. But it took nearly a day before the rest of the video footage was released, revealing that the police had just been viciously attacked, and a female officer’s nose was broken, by a group of Muslim thugs of whom the kicked man was one.
It is the profound sense of injustice and double standards that has finally ignited the already combustible public resentment over race and immigration, and enabled neo-fascist and other agitators to exploit this situation.
Starmer’s strictures against “right-wing thugs” are in stark contrast to the solidarity he expressed with the Black Lives Matter anti-police, anti-west, anti-white rioters in 2020 who destroyed poor neighbourhoods in Portland, Oregon and elsewhere — and to whom he actually “took the knee” and proudly tweeted the picture.
The double standards go wider and deeper. During those violent BLM riots, liberal commentators earnestly asked what lay behind such black anger. Yet those liberals wouldn’t dream of asking what lies behind the anger of today’s white rioters.
Liberal commentators have claimed that demonstrators screaming for jihad, the destruction of Israel and the murder of Jews on the weekly pro-Gaza hate marches are just a few extremists who shouldn’t tarnish the majority of those demonstrators who are all decent people marching for a worthy cause. Yet the same liberals claim that if any decent people are on the anti-immigrant riots, these are utterly compromised by the participation alongside them of the tattooed thugs performing Nazi salutes.
On those pro-Gaza hate marches, police arrested Jewish counter-demonstrators simply because their very presence was said to be a provocation to the Gaza supporters. Yet in the current disorders, Muslims aren’t being arrested on the grounds that their very presence is a provocation to the anti-immigrant mobs.
Here’s another connection. Some of the Muslim mobs who are supposedly organising in self-defence against anti-immigrant thugs are equipping themselves with … Palestinian flags. Why is this? Are we supposed to think that the Palestinian flag now represents British law and order? Or are the Muslim mobs perhaps motivated by something other than self-defence?
On social media, a video clip from the riots has gone viral of a Sky News reporter forced off air by a bunch of Muslim thugs — one of whom pulls up his motorcycle next to her and screams “Free Palestine”.
Those denouncing as “far-right” anyone who criticises the multiculturalism debacle claim that the comparison between the riots and the Gaza hate marches is spurious because the latter haven’t been violent. That’s actually untrue, since although these demonstrations haven’t set out to attack anyone (unlike the anti-immigrant mobs) they have resulted in many instances of violence. In addition, the harassment and intimidation perpetrated by many demonstrators and the calls on these marches for the mass murder of Jews and for the destruction of Israel are all against the law. Yet with few exceptions, there’s been relatively no police action against them.
All these things have created the widespread public impression of two-tier policing. Starmer has denied this; and the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, became so enraged when a reporter asked him about it that he knocked the reporter’s microphone to the ground as he stormed off.
We can surely predict what will now unfold. Mass, uncontrolled immigration will continue, with an increasing collapse of social cohesion, escalating Muslim demands and intimidation and yet more double standards and demonisation of critics. This will create a further backlash which will include serious anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim thuggery and violence. The government and police will continue to enforce a one-eyed approach, acknowledging only such white violence and ignoring legitimate public concerns.
The issue of Muslim antisemitism, at eye-watering levels but already hard to discuss without being smeared as an “Islamophobe”, will become unmentionable. With the media and other liberals in sanctimonious support, Muslims will increasingly wrap themselves in the mantle of victimhood and insist upon draconian moves against “Islamophobia”. This will lead to an increasing crackdown on anyone trying to draw attention to these issues, and will be used by the Starmer government as a useful weapon to silence its political foes.
Neo-fascists and other thugs and agitators may be piggy-backing on such tensions; but this social disaster now under way is owned by the west’s entitled liberals, whose arrogant disdain for the culture they have so wilfully ruined knows no bounds.
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My my main blogs below:
http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://jonjayray.com/ozarc.html (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See
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