Author: Kim du Toit

Snapping The Junk

Food & Drink, Gummint, Subsidies

A whole bunch of people are getting their knickers in a knot about this little development, whereby Pore Folks who qualify for food assistance (SNAP) will in future not be allowed to buy candy and such with these handouts — and are suing the Fed to be allowed to do so.

Recipients of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) on Wednesday, challenging its food restriction waivers that reduce the types of foods that can be purchased with benefits.

Represented by the National Center for Law and Economic Justice (NCLEJ), a nonprofit focused on advancing justice for low-income families, five SNAP recipients from Colorado, Iowa, Nebraska, Tennessee and West Virginia sued the USDA for implementing its waiver restriction pilot projects.

The restriction waivers bar SNAP recipients from using their benefits on junk foods, sodas, energy drinks or other “non-nutritious items.” The USDA has approved 22 restriction waivers so far, with the types of barred foods varying across states.

I have two competing thoughts about this.  On a point of principle, if money is being given to you (note:  given) then the donor has every right to determine how you spend it.

On the other hand, however, is the thought that the fucking government has no business telling people what and what not to eat and drink, regardless of donor status.

“Oooooh but they’re spending money on unhealthy foods!”

So fucking what?  They’re adults, and should be treated as such, not as children guided in their food choices by Mother Government.

Just remember, however, that every SNAP dollar spent on Red Bull eventually ends up here:

Not that I care, one way or the other.

Shooting Them Down

Self-Defense, Shooting Sports, Wars & Other Fun Games

Interesting stuff, this (via Insty):

I Have Seen the Future of Anti-Drone Warfare, and It’s Dirt-Cheap

I vaguely remembered reading something about the Sting a year or more ago, but I just learned today that they’re both dirt-cheap and extremely effective — mostly at shooting down Russia’s Geran-2 one-way attack drones, which are licensed copies of Iran’s Shahed that have caused us considerable trouble in Operation Epic Fury.

Ukraine needs tons of these things, because Geran is essentially a terror weapon aimed in large numbers — currently 100 to 200 per attack — at Ukraine’s cities and infrastructure. Larger attack waves include anything from 300 up to just over 800 Geran-2s in one night.

So the concept behind Sting is simply enough: Make something cheap and fast to build, easy to use, yet still capable of knocking a Geran-2 out of the sky far enough out from its target for some degree of safety.

And the Ukrainians did just that.

Of course, that’s all well and good in a military context, and our own .dotmil needs to hop onto this with all due dispatch, if they haven’t done so already.  (I assume they have, but whatever.)

What interests me as a civilian, however, is a solution closer to home [sic], in that these little airborne nuisances can also be used by anti-social elements to both spy on people and, in the worst case, to kamikaze themselves into a target — such as, for instance, your home or similar.  Why go to all the trouble of kitting yourself up with a suicide explosive vest or a rifle in order to inflict death and damage on (say) a church or synagogue, when you can essentially outsource the suicide bit to something you hand-built in your garage?

And in the above scenario, how would ordinary people — say, adherents of the Second Amendment — defend themselves or their communities against such nefarious electro-mechanical mosquitoes?

I’m thinking of something like this, of course:

That’s the semi-auto 12ga Browning Silver Hunter (and of course there are less-expensive options because America).  This differs from your standard home defense shotgun, say a 12ga Mossberg Maverick 88:

…in that the Hunter is not a pump action device but semi-auto (ergo  a higher rate of fire) and it has a much longer barrel (ergo  much greater accuracy at distance, ask any bird shooter).

I’m interested in this concept because it raises a couple of practical issues such as the type of ammo that would work best to bring down a drone (00 buck, or perhaps something lighter?).  Obviously, a 12ga slug would end the flight path of a drone with spectacular effect, but it has to be accurate:  far easier to spread the terminal effect with shot… but which shot?  00 buckshot is excellent, but it also kicks like hell — and getting followup blasts off quickly with said semi-auto action means a quicker target re-acquisition time is necessary.  Would 7/8 birdshot do the trick as well?  For that matter, would a 20ga shotgun be as effective as a 12ga under such circumstances?  (Almost all semi-auto shotguns are offered in both chamberings.)

I’ve owned a 20ga semi-auto shotgun in the past, and I have to say that the effect downrange is almost as effective as a 12ga (if those watermelons and milk jugs are at all indicative), but the recoil was far less problematic.

Of course I think that the Silver Hunter is just dreamy, in so many ways:

…and yes, the addition of a red-dot sighting device may certainly be of assistance (even though I think it spoils the look of the gun).

Feel free to discuss this topic in Comments, of course.

Dept. Of Righteous Shootings

Righteous Shootings

[Monty Python] ♫ ♪ ♫ ♪ Heeeeere comes annnnother one. ♫ ♪ ♫ ♪ [/Monty Python]

Oh boy [sic]:

A mom in Philadelphia should be very proud of her brave 11-year-old son. The young man showed the heart of a lion and tremendous courage when he witnessed over-the-top violence against his mother from her boyfriend and then took action to protect her.

The perp Jaimeer Jones-Walker, aged 30…or old enough to know better, barged into his “girlfriend’s” home. He began screaming at the woman, whose 11-year-old son was right there watching it unfold. Terrorizing a family that wasn’t his to wreck, Jaimeer escalated his verbal attack into a full-on vicious physical assault. Jones-Walker hadn’t been taught not to beat women, but he would soon learn that lesson in a profound way.

According to police reports, as he was physically battering the woman, her 11-year-old son went and grabbed her handgun. The young man acted decisively, shooting the rampaging abuser with a single shot to the face.

As the article goes on to say, the only sucky part of this tale is that the kid is going to have to live with the results of his fine reaction… but however bad it may be, it’s better than having to grow up without a mother.  (I know, there’s no evidence that her scrote of a boyfriend would have killed her, but the stats are on my side for this one.)

In the meantime:

Irrelevant

Friday Feature, The Worst

I said a long time ago that I am not interested in hearing anything said by Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, and here’s a good reason to add Megyn Kelly to make a list of the Three Worst.

I’ve come to loathe the appellation of “influencer” because the problem with being one of these vacuous fools is that (if they’re collecting money for their opinions, as most are) whether they’re being contrary or else sycophantic, there’s always a motive for those opinions:  the more outrageous, the more attention they get, the more cash flows their way.

Well, good for them.  There’s nothing wrong with being a pimp after all, because all you’re doing is bringing a product to the attention of the market.  Of course, I don’t have to buy the product, but some people are quite in thrall to said blandishments.

And as Scott Pinsker points out in the above linked article, other people — in this case, the liberal media — have an ulterior motive to pimp the pimps, because in this particular case Carlson, Owens and Kelly are pushing an agenda that happens to coincide with that of the liberal media — i.e. trying to split up the MAGA movement.  Even though I don’t go along with this, I will at least acknowledge that it’s an acceptable tactic:  a fractured enemy is always easier to defeat than a cohesive one.

The point is that I don’t trust the motives of these three foul influencers, because in the end, whatever they say is all about drawing attention to themselves and not necessarily coming from principle.  In Carlson’s case, I’m fairly certain that someone else is actually deciding what it is that he has to say because from what I can gather, some of his sponsors look extremely dubious (in a bad way).

Whatever.  Frankly, I think that if money is the issue — and Carlson seems to have that nailed down — Owens and Kelly should consider an OnlyFans presence because their opinions are fucking worthless.

People Who Matter

Advice

In talking about how he has had to deal with online hatred and attacks, Greg Lukianoff passes on the advice he got from some wise man:

You can have friends whose opinions you don’t take seriously, and you can have opponents whose point of view you very much do. So, pick your ten. Figure out who the small number of people are whose judgment you genuinely trust, the people who know you well enough and love you enough to tell you the truth when you’re wrong, when you’re being unfair, when you’re getting carried away, or when — to use the technical term — you are full of shit. Then, when the crowd is screaming, when the internet is losing its mind, when strangers are confidently informing you who you are and why you did what you did, bring it back to those ten. Ask yourself what they would think. Ask yourself whether they would be disappointed in you. Ask yourself whether they would tell you that you had acted unfairly, or out of vanity, tribalism, or cowardice. Or even better, go and ask them yourself.

In my case, I don’t have ten people to call upon, because quite frankly, I don’t give a flying fuck what strangers think of me, and never have.  I do care what certain people think of me, but that number is really small — far fewer than ten — and which people depends on which topic is under discussion anyway.  I am friendly with people who are more liberally-minded than I am, or who are deeply religious, for example, so occasionally I might pause before opening my big yap to expound on what has raised my irritation level, but I have to say, I don’t pause for very long.

People who know me also know about my opinions, and by and large they accept them, or not, as the case may be.  I don’t change my opinions very often anyway, because in most cases they have come after long and detailed contemplation, so (in the absence of further information) there’s little reason to change them — and “because this might offend Person X” is not a reason for change.

That said, if I am occasionally guilty of being full of shit, I will accept the excoriation from these few people and either change my position or else at least acknowledge my stupidity.  Most of the time, it’s because they know more about the topic than I do, and I bow to their expertise without a second thought.

But for the rest?  I don’t care a fig, and never have.

Welcome Change

Elections

As anyone who’s read this website for any length of time should know, I love the country of Chile.  In fact, of all the Third World countries I’ve ever been to or even lived in, Chile ranks #1, by miles.  I love its people, its scenery, its way of life, the women are among the sexiest I’ve ever seen and the climate is wonderful;  so despite the language difficulty, if someone were to say:  “You have to go and live in Chile”, my response would be:  “Gimme the ticket.”  I’d learn Spanish just to go and live there.

I can’t remember if I’ve told this story here before, but in case I haven’t, here goes.

You will recall that at one point, our family traveled extensively around the world (either on vacation or on business), and over three years we visited nearly two dozen countries, several repeatedly.  We knew that the travels were going to end at some point (for all sorts of reasons) so at the end of what turned out to be our final trip, we polled our three kids with the following question:

“Assuming that you could afford to live there (had a job, etc.), which are the top three countries you’d choose to live in?”

The answers were as follows:

Daughter:  1. Tokyo, 2. Paris
Son&Heir:  1. London 2. Heidelberg (Germany)
#2 Son:  1. Tokyo 2. London

All three picked Chile — specifically, Viña Del Mar — as their third choice.

My only reservation about Chile — it was one of my top choices, too — was that I got the feeling that it was just one revolution from becoming Communist.  And incidentally, that fear was also prevalent among many of the native Chileans I met on our trip there.

Which makes the most recent political news from Chile all the more exciting:

In December, former congressman José Antonio Kast found himself in a runoff against the Communist Party’s Jeannette Jara. Thankfully, Kast won in a decisive victory with nearly 60% of the vote.

But the people of Chile are ecstatic. The country has more or less been taken over by socialists and leftists for decades, and its most recent president, 40-year-old Gabriel Boric, may have been the most hardcore — and least popular — of all.

So, let me warn you that as you peruse the fake news media today that you’ll probably see a lot of headlines about how Kast is “far-right” or “ultra-conservative” or a big fan of the country’s former dictator, Augusto Pinochet. First of all, Kast has praised Pinochet’s economic reforms — he was a big capitalist, free market kind of guy who saved the country from full-on Communism — but Kast has also condemned him for his human rights abuses and all the bad stuff he did. It’s not like he has posters of him hanging on his office walls. Sheesh.

Second, Kast has been called “Chile’s Trump,” and that right there is enough to make the MSM lose its collective mind.

Kast campaigned on being tough on crime and restoring law and order to the South American nation. That includes deploying the military to cities with high crimes, strengthening the country’s borders, mass deportations of hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants, putting the interests of native Chileans first, and getting tough with cartels and terrorist organizations like Tren de Aragua.

Sounds like Chile, at last, is in the right [sic] hands, even though it seems unlikely that ChilePres Kast is going to revive Air Pinochet, which is rather sad.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to see what it costs to fly to Chile… wait, less than $900 return?  Whoa.

Oh, and one last story.

When we arrived in Santiago and checked into our hotel (Four Points Sheraton), we got a call from the kids’ room:  “We’re hungry;  can we get room service?”

Well, a week prior to that we’d been in Zurich, where room service required a credit check.  So with great trepidation I scanned the Four Points’ room service menu, converted the CLP$ (peso) into USD$, and said:

“You can order everything off the menu.”
“You mean anything?”
“No, I mean everything.”

I don’t remember what anything cost, but it was about 20% of what the same thing would have cost in a U.S. hotel, and about 1% of what it cost us in Zurich.  (I’m not exaggerating.)

So yeah;  add “affordable” to your travel plans.

I am seriously considering this idea, funds permitting.

Note:  It appears that Chile no longer charges U.S. citizens an entry fee of $160 per person, nor does the U.S. do likewise for Chileans entering the U.S.  This was the only fly in the ointment on our trip there, and thankfully it is no more.