Category: Disaster

Closing Fast

Disaster, Resistance

Interesting take by ZMan over at Taki’s Mag:

One of the remarkable things about the collapse of the Soviet Union is that it just melted away without a struggle.  It was as if everyone could not think of a reason to keep it going.  The reason for that is the trust in the key institutions had drained away.  There was no reason to defend them or participate in them.  The people running the institutions had used up all of the social trust to maintain their positions.  When it was gone, the institutions collapsed.
Something similar is happening in America.

Many years ago, a dystopian novel entitled The HAB Theory  was published, whose premise was that as the ice caps grew larger, the added weight would create an imbalance in the Earth’s rotation — and when the “wobble” became too much to support, the Earth would upend itself, the heavy poles would realign along the equator (and eventually melt), whilst new ice caps would naturally form in the northern and southern latitudes, as before.

While that theory is (rightly) regarded as nonsensical now, what was interesting was that when the tipping point arrived, the collapse was very sudden — anyone who’s ever spun an old-fashioned top with string can attest to that.  Everything’s fine when the top is spinning fast, but as it slows it begins to wobble — and in less than a second, it’s flying all over the floor on its side, still spinning uselessly in its death throes.

I just wonder, given ZMan’s hypothesis, how close we are to that point in the U.S.

 

No More A Refugee

Boomershoot, Disaster, Two-Minute Hate

Yesterday we got news that our apartment is nearly finished, having had to be rebuilt from the studs up following that burst water main during the Big Freeze back in February.

Yes, we’ve been living in a hotel room since then.  But now, there’s light at the end of the tunnel, so to speak, and we’ll be able to move back into our place over the next week or so…

…which is when I’ll be at Boomershoot.

Think kind thoughts and say a few good words for New Wife, as she struggles to rebuild the nest without me.

But before anyone gets any strange ideas, you have to know this about her:  she lives for this kind of thing, and I don’t.  In fact, I am the worst possible person during a move:  I rage at stuff, I slam fingers in doors, I drop boxes, I kick stuff, I throw things into the pool out of frustration — all that, because of one of my life’s guiding principles:

I refuse to take any shit from inanimate objects.

She, however, is the complete opposite:  nothing makes her happier than organizing stuff.  So she’s going to be puttering around, re-packing kitchen cabinets, hanging clothes, singing happy songs and bossing the movers around — yes, I’ll be arranging for a moving company to move all the heavy stuff from the garage back into the apartment (a distance of a few feet only, but there are doors to wrangle the sofas and beds through — and when they don’t go, that’s precisely when I see red, descend into rage and start to break things).

Had I not invested so much into Boomershoot already, I’d have canceled it — but it’s too late for that at this point, so there it is.

Women Drinking

Disaster

As the West descends further into Covid Madness, articles like this (via Insty)are becoming more common:

During the pandemic, alcohol has become an easy way to self-medicate, aided by the fact that liquor and wine stores were deemed essential services from the start. Many even offer delivery, with apps like MiniBar filling in the gaps. New Yorkers who ache for fresh air and company have been able to order cocktails to go from restaurants and enjoy them on the sidewalk.

[Aside:  sorry about the NYfT link, but it’s necessary this once.]

It’s not just New York, of course, which is suffering from pandemic alcoholism, as they call it.  (Much as New Yorkers like to think that they’re the only people on the world, or at least they’re the only people in the world who matter, they aren’t.)  In fact, this is happening in London, Berlin, Sydney, Paris and pretty much in all large cities suffering not only from fear of getting the Chinkvirus and dying, but from autocratic politicians who are intent on putting everyone under house arrest out of fear — fear that if lots of people start dying on their watch, they may be blamed for doing nothing.  (The more cynical may just think that assholes like MichGov Wilmer are doing this stuff just because they can, but let’s ignore that for the moment.)

Any time people are imprisoned, or feel like they’re being imprisoned, all sorts of bad behaviors start to emerge, of course, and boozing is just one manifestation;  rampant sexuality and domestic violence are two others.

Actually, the situation of women drinking too much has been going on for a long time — far earlier than March/April 2020, for sure.

New Wife and I have been watching modern Brit TV dramas — especially crime — for a while now, and if there’s one thing you can bet the house on, it’s that whenever the female lead or heroine arrives home in the evening after a long day of catching murderers / treating patients / dealing with sexual harassment at her place of work / [insert your favorite example of female superiority here], there’s going to be a glass or bottle of wine waiting for her when she walks in the door.  I know it’s fiction, but entertainment reflects the Zeitgeist, and women drinking alone or on a regular basis when coming home is pretty much ubiquitous.

These days, there is a general, distorted sense of what healthy and acceptable drinking is, Dr. Kirane said. “Responsible drinking is reinforced by structure in people’s lives — going to work, taking their kids to school, interacting and maintaining a home,” he explained. “The pandemic has turned such boundaries on their head and created more space for alcohol.”

I really have no opinion on this issue, because it’s one of those “If A then B” facets of the human condition.  Nor, of course, am I going to pass judgment on people who have become hopeless drunks, because there but for the grace of God, etc. etc.

I am, however, going to suggest that the motherfucking control-freak politicians and medical charlatans who are ultimately responsible for all this foolishness should be tarred and feathered, but that reason is just the latest in a long line of reasons, as appear on these pages on pretty much a weekly basis, for such an action.

Lockdown Partner

Beauty, Disaster, Food & Drink

Forget for a moment that we’re mostly all Old Married Pharttes, and imagine that you’re going to be in lockdown with a hottie — to be more specific, a hottie chef, because regardless of how hot she is, at some point you’re gonna have to eat, and you don’t want to be stuck in that situation with Jennifer Aniston, who can’t boil a lettuce.

So here are the contenders, in no specific order:

Nigella Lawson

Rachel Allen

Rachel Khoo

Giada De Laurentiis

Lisa Faulkner

Marcella Valladolid

Rachel Ray

Ingrid Hoffmann

Cat Cora
Okay, Cat Cora is probably disqualified because sadly, she’s a lesbianist.  In her place, therefore:

Mary Berg

(That’s for my Canucki Readers…)

As an aside, three of the above are named Rachel.  Coincidence?  I think not.

 

And for my long-suffering Lady Readers, who are always being left out of these things:

Curtis Stone(I know, Australian therefore should be disqualified.  Shuddup or I’ll add Guy Fieri.)

James Martin

Jean-Christophe Novelli

Phil Vickery

And in the interests of good taste and such, I haven’t bothered with Gordon Ramsay, because I would refuse to pay your hearing-aid bills after you’ve been in a three-week lockdown with him.

 

Feel free to add your favorite chefs in Comments.

Just So We’re All Clear

Disaster, Two-Minute Hate

Over time, several Loyal Readers have contacted me, warning that I might suffer the recent fate of several conservative websites, whose hosting services have blocked them (a.k.a. “de-platforming”) with weasel excuses such as that of The Conservative Treehouse’s lot:  “given the incompatibility between your site’s content and our terms, you need to find a new hosting provider and must migrate the site by Wednesday, December 2nd.”

I, of course, am at risk because of my occasionally-intemperate rants and my all-round “bad” behavior.

Firstly:  thank you all for your concern.

Secondly:  Of course, Tech Support II has a backup plan — to quote him exactly, “There’d just be a little downtime while we execute. ”

Thirdly:  “Execution” might very well include what could be called a “porcupine consequence” for these Lefty assholes if I am ever de-platformed.

As long as I’m left alone, nobody gets hurt.

Acceptable Risk

Disaster, Gummint, Nannies

The inimitable Heather Mac Donald takes the Nannies to task, in her inimitable way.  This paragraph in particular struck home for me:

We set highway speeding limits to maximize convenience at what we consider an acceptable risk to human life. It is statistically certain that every year, there will be tens of thousands of driving deaths. A considerable portion of those deaths could be averted by “following the science” of force and velocity and enforcing a speed limit of, say, 15 miles an hour. But we tolerate motor-vehicle deaths because we value driving 75 miles an hour on the highway, and up to 55 miles an hour in cities, more than we do saving those thousands of lives. When those deaths come—nearly 100 a day in 2019—we do not cancel the policy. Nor would it be logical to cancel a liberal highway speed because a legislator who voted for it died in a car accident.

Bill Whittle once said more or less the same thing about accidental gun deaths:  while even one such death was tragic, the plain fact of the matter is that some freedoms come with risk, sometimes deadly risk;  and the overall benefit to our society is far, far greater than the danger that may (or may not) ensue.   Using statistics of “gun deaths” (even correct ones) to bolster calls for gun control / -confiscation is likewise irrelevant.

It’s called the price of freedom, and We The People have been balancing those freedoms against the collateral harm to individuals ever since our Republic was formed and the Constitution and Bill of Rights promulgated.  All individual rights are potentially harmful, whether it’s freedom of speech, assembly, religion, gun ownership, privacy or any of the others.

And to Heather’s point above:  driving isn’t even a right protected by the Bill of Rights.  How much more, then, should our First- and Second Amendment rights (and all the other rights for that matter) be protected, even when we know that some tragedy is bound to follow thereby?

“If it saves just one life” sounds great on a bumper sticker, but as a basis for public policy, it’s not only foolish but in many cases more harmful in the long run.  Heather again:

We could reduce coronavirus transmission to zero by locking everyone in a separate cell until a vaccine was developed. There are some public-health experts who from the start appeared ready to implement such radical social distancing. The extent to which we veer from that maximal coronavirus protection policy depends on how we value its costs and the competing goods: forgone life-saving medical care and deaths of despair from unemployment and social isolation, on the one hand, and the ability to support one’s family through work and to build prosperity through entrepreneurship, on the other. The advocates of maximal lockdowns have rarely conceded such trade-offs, but they are ever-present.

The current wave of totalitarianism and loss of freedoms caused by State overreaction to the Chinkvirus needs to be rolled back, and fast.  It just sucks that we have to rely on judges — many of whom, to judge from their records, are not especially friends of freedom — to hold back the mini-Mussolinis in their totalitarian quest for absolute power over the governed.

And just so we know what kind of “acceptable risk” we’re talking about, comes this from Fox News: