Tag: Things that totally suck

Reading Stuff

Media Assholes

You know what I miss?  Reading newspapers and periodicals.  And one of the things the Brits do better than we do is this:

When I was the house guest at Free Market Towers, the first great pleasure of the day was not that first cup of coffee — at least, not altogether the first — it was the opportunity of reading an actual (dead tree) newspaper, great huge sheets of newsprint crammed with articles, essays, news and all sorts of stuff which could satisfy a polymath like me, learning all sorts of unlikely things that I wouldn’t ordinarily glance at.  But there, pint mug of coffee in hand, was the Daily Telegraph  which has somehow managed not to become  a complete waste of paper like so many others, e.g.  New York Times and Chicago Tribune, to name but two.

Back when I lived in the Chicago ‘burbs and caught the 5:30am train into the Loop each morning, I’d stop at the little kiosk at the Arlington Heights Metra station, buy a donut, cup of coffee and the Tribune ;  and let me tell you, the 90-minute journey into town took no time at all, because the Trib back in those days was not the Lefty rag it is today, boasting as it did wonderful writers like the late Mike Royko.

Which leads me to my next point.  For an old fart like me, who likes holding paper (whether newspaper or a book) to read, what the hell am I supposed to do?  There’s not a single U.S. newspaper worth the paper it’s printed on — go on, name me one, I challenge you — so even if we did have a corner newsagent like the one in the pic, there would be absolutely no point in calling on one unless it was to stoke my already-high morning irritation level up to boiling point.

And I’m quite aware that some of the smaller local newspapers are pretty good, but I don’t want a suburban newspaper:  I want a nice big fat city newspaper whose “World News” section isn’t just Associated Press feeds or cribs of CNN.  I want London’s Sunday Times  (just for its peerless Business & Economics section) and the Daily Telegraph, tailored for the U.S.

I don’t want to get my news online anymore;  mostly, it’s complete bullshit and clearly aimed for people with the attention span of mayflies.  Just when I’m getting interested in a topic, it ends with some trite sign-off from the writer, as though a topic actually worth about a thousand words is only given two hundred.  (I don’t know if that’s the fault of the Editor — always trying to pander to the aforesaid mayflies — or of the journalist, for whom a 1,000-word article would be beyond his writing capability and might require [gasp]  both a grasp of the topic and some journalistic research to reach that target length.)

I feel like my reading ability is being stifled, and it’s deteriorating;  and I don’t know what to do about it.

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.

Mass Disobedience

Resistance

This article made me think:

THIS is the moment more than 30 conspiracy theorists descended on a Tesco store without masks in a “selfish” protest.
Dozens of people flouted Covid restrictions and brazenly went about their shopping trip in the store in Chelmsford, Essex.

Basically, a bunch of people got fed up with all the bullshit about the Chinkvirus, and in a wonderful gesture, said “Fuck you!” to authority and went shopping without their masks.

There are a couple of things to take away from this.  Despite the article’s blatant editorializing (calling them “conspiracy theorists” and calling what they did a “selfish protest”), this group of people could be  characterized by a couple of factors:

  • this was quite definitely a grassroots protest — no group nor even a leader spurred them on to to it — and:
  • this was not a crowd of Lefties — the Usual Suspects one sees doing the protest thing — but from what I can see, a group of ordinary middle-class people, in fact the kind seldom seen protesting.

Despite the bluster, Brits are usually quite a subservient lot — even without the Chinese Plague, they are bossed around by officialdom and petty bureaucrats on a day-to-day basis to a degree that would amaze most Americans — and also quite law-abiding (the two are not the same).

So for this to erupt is going to be quite worrisome to a whole bunch of the little Stasi-wannabes.  And indeed, from the article:

The council and police are now working to find out how this maskless protest was able to happen.
…
“Organising a maskless shopping trip is not big, not clever but it is illegal.”

And a little editorializing and scolding from the article’s author:

Customers are required by law to wear masks inside all shops, unless they are exempt for medical reasons.
…
And social distancing must be enforced unless you are from the same household or bubble.

Well, Our Heroines didn’t actually care about the government’s fucking little “bubbles”, did they?

Here’s why this little activity got me thinking.

In his excellent article American Exodus, Angelo Codevilla makes a telling point (and read the whole damn thing).  He says this about the stranglehold that today’s oligarchy (politicians, Press, corporations and technology companies) have over our society Over Here:

The federal government, the governments of states and localities run by the Democratic Party, along with the major corporations, the educational establishment, and the news media set strict but movable boundaries about what they may or may not say—on pain of being cast out, isolated from society’s mainstream. Using an ever-shifting variety of urgent excuses, which range from the coronavirus, to the threat of domestic terrorism, to catastrophic climate change, to the evils of racism, they issue edicts that they enforce through anti-democratic means—from social pressure and threats, to corporate censorship of digital platforms, to bureaucratic fiat. Nobody voted for this.

Then he offers up this little nugget:

Some sort of mostly peaceful exodus is within our powers to achieve.
…
We can withdraw our compliance, go our own way, and build anew.

And:

Our American exodus won’t be led by a Moses. The Republican Party, with the exception of a few national-level personages, may be as useless as ever. But politics is a collective activity, and the lack of top-down leadership notwithstanding, our exodus is already in progress, thanks to Americans’ legal structures and traditions of state and local autonomy, as well as our Tocquevillian taste for organizing ourselves into ad hoc groups for the common benefit.
…
Ordinary citizens who are oppressed by COVID-inspired overregulation have also organized themselves to take advantage of the fact that safety in numbers is the first rule of civil disobedience. Thus, hundreds of California restauranteurs jointly defied the governor’s order to keep them closed, and sued him. Joint action is also the key to transforming what the authorities want to treat as disciplinary or criminal matters into political ones.

And finally:

That is why going one’s own way, while paying no more attention to the woke than is absolutely necessary, should be the agenda of the country party, which in this case includes all of those who still feel an attachment to the ideals of republican citizenship that we once shared in common as Americans.

And returning to those doughty British women once more:  there were only thirty.  No doubt, the Filth will be going after them, aided no doubt by the many little Quislings that exist in today’s tattle-tale culture.

Now imagine if there weren’t thirty, but three thousand, spread across every store in town?  Think the cops would be able to go after all of them?  Here’s the kind of job facing the Brit authorities elsewhere in the country.

Codevilla calls it the American Exodus:  the severing of ties by ordinary people like us with the foul bureaucrats, technocrats and their Leftist sympathizers in all the institutions.

Many weeks ago, I talked about my refusal to use Google products as much as is possible (Chrome, Google search, and so on), having no Twitter or Facebook accounts, and my absolute refusal to have anything to do with anti-2A corporations like Levi Strauss — to name but a few.  I make no claim to be a groundbreaker in all this, of course — in fact, I admit to being something of a latecomer to the party — but this is something we need to do en masse from now on.

Withdraw from those societal institutions which are part of this totalitarianism.

Become homeschoolers if you have small kids, or offer to homeschool your grandchildren because the poison that is being dripped into their ears every day not just by state schools but lamentably even by some private schools is the poison that will infect future generations of Americans.  And if you can’t do that, confront your schools and demand that they stop teaching children monstrosities like “critical race theory” (anti-White racism is what it is, and what you should call it).  And by all means enlist your state legislators to your cause (as Ohio did).

We have to do something, anything;  and even though what we each do may seem small and insignificant, those little grains of sand may turn into a landslide, if we all get involved.

And don’t forget to teach your children and grandchildren how to shoot.  In times to come, it may be as important as knowing how to read and write.

Backwards

Third World

In 1985, I came to New York City for the first time.  I remember the almost unimaginable expectations I had:  the Big Apple, “If I can make it here”, and all that.

Of course, I arrived in the middle of a garbage strike, so the streets were filthy, mountains of trash bags were on every street, and rats the size of fox terriers roamed the streets like packs of hyenas, in broad daylight.

I remember being hustled on every block by someone, not asking but demanding that I buy their cheap tat of dubious origin, and every shop along the street was proclaiming that they had to sell sell sell all their merchandise NOW! because they were losing their lease.  (A total lie, like so much about New York.)

Then I went to the Lower East Side.

I was forcibly reminded of all this yesterday morning, when I saw this front page pic:

…and the accompanying article:

It’s been six months since the mayor promised to pump more money into the city’s street-cleaning efforts. And the trash problem has only gotten worse.
De Blasio in September announced initiatives to reallocate Sanitation Department funding to bolster litter-basket pickups in communities hit hardest during the pandemic, including Bushwick in Brooklyn. But according to the official mayoral report of “acceptably clean city streets,” street cleanliness there plummeted to 33.3 percent in January, compared with 86.1 percent the month before.
The same neighborhood scored 95.4 percent a year ago.

But this post isn’t about New York fucken City.  It’s about the whole country.

NYFC Mayor Bill de Blasio is quite clearly the most Marxist of all elected officials in the United States (residents of San Francisco, Portland and Seattle may quibble), and it is quite clear that what he is doing as mayor is just a microcosm of what his fellow Marxists are attempting to do all over the country.

They’re taking us back into the Third World.

Anyone who has ever spent any time in Third World countries will know that one of the most obvious manifestations of Third Worldliness is the amounts of trash that people there just toss out into the streets and out of car windows;  and when you travel through the countryside, fences will be plastered with plastic bags and other trash blown against the wire by wind.

Here’s Los Angeles:

…and San Francisco:

…Chicago:

 …and Philadelphia:

I could go on, but you get my point.

Let’s look at other aspects of the Third World… such as their elections.

In the main, Third World elections are corrupt, whether through the actual process or whether by fraud, suppression of the “incorrect” vote or denying impartial monitoring of the process.

Oh look, it’s Detroit in November 2020:

Here’s another example of blocking observers from checking the counting process:

Oh wait, that’s not Detroit;  it’s Nigeria.  I was distracted by the razor wire atop the wall.

Does any of this ring any bells?

A new report on the vast expansion of mail-in ballots in the 2020 election is set to spark new concerns among some Republicans who back former President Donald Trump’s charge that some states went too far to change the rules — illegally.
Among the three “key takeaways” cited was this: “28 States changed their policy to make it easier to use a mail ballot.”
As a result, it added, “For the first time ever, more people voted early with a mail ballot or in-person than filled out a ballot at the polls on Election Day.”

Of course, the typical Third World mantra about elections is, “One Man.  One Vote.  One Time.”

So here’s the U.S. version:

It would be an understatement to describe H.R. 1 as a radical assault on American democracy, federalism, and free speech. It is actually several radical left-wing wish lists stuffed into a single 791-page sausage casing. It would override hundreds of state laws governing the orderly conduct of elections, federalize control of voting and elections to a degree without precedent in American history, end two centuries of state power to draw congressional districts, turn the Federal Elections Commission into a partisan weapon, and massively burden political speech against the government while offering government handouts to congressional campaigns and campus activists.

And that’s the opinion of the National Review, surely the most ineffectual and milquetoast collection of conservatives around.

And finally, let’s consider the corruption through nepotism that is a fact of life in the Third World — and now in the U.S. as well:

During his long senatorial career, Joe Biden cast himself as an everyman, “Amtrak Joe,” known for taking the train daily to Washington, D.C., from his home in Delaware. The image he sought to create was one of a simple legislator independent of the usual corrupting influences pols face.
In truth, Joe Biden knows those influences all too well. He heads up a family of wealthy lobbyists and political operatives who have spent decades trading on his last name.
In Profiles in Corruption, Peter Schweizer points out that the Biden family’s wealth “depends on Joe Biden’s political influence and involves no less than five family members: Joe’s son Hunter, daughter Ashley, brothers James and Frank, and sister Valerie.”

It’s taken the Left some time to effect their change of the United States, surely the first among First World nations, into a Third World state.

But here we are.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to the range.

Not Ready For Prime Time

Architecture

Oh good grief.  Here’s something that at first seems like a good development [sic], but when you see the details…

AUSTIN, Texas — A Kansas City developer has announced America’s first 3D-printed homes for sale.
3Strands is partnering with Austin-based construction technology company ICON to leverage ICON’s proprietary 3D printing construction technology, software, and advanced materials to deliver the two- to four-bedroom homes in Austin.
“We want to change the way we build, own, and how we live in community together,” says Gary O’Dell, 3Strands’ co-founder and CEO. “This project represents a big step forward, pushing the boundaries of new technologies, such as 3D-printed homes.”

Sounds perfect for a town like Austin, dunnit?

And then comes the pic of the likely dwelling:

Yikes.  It looks like a prototype for a CIA detention / torture center.

Let me know when 3D printing can produce one of these, and then we could talk:

Until then, nope.

Suspended Plans

Bad News, SHTF

It looked as though New Wife and I would be able to move back into our apartment around next Monday (March 8), but that was before we went back there yesterday evening to get a few things.  Here’s what greeted us, firstly the living room:

…and the laminate flooring has gone bye-bye too.  Next, the entrance hall:

And finally, the master bedroom:

…but amazingly, the carpet (which was soaked) is being covered up to protect it from the carnage — which means they don’t plan on replacing it.  Uh huh.  Time for a little explanation of the facts of life to Management…

But it looks as though month-end will be a more realistic move-in time, now.

And once again, folks:  Thank you all so much for your unbelievable generosity.  It has made all the difference, by enabling us to order replacement furniture and such before the insurance company made its final settlement offer — the excellent news being that we’ll be getting a full settlement of our stated replacement value, and the funds will arrive either tomorrow or the next day.  But having that little bit of financial security immediately after the catastrophe made all the difference to our mental well-being, and we are eternally grateful.