Author: Kim du Toit

Ending It All

Old Age

I remember reading David Niven’s wonderful autobiography The Moon’s A Balloon, back when I were but a callow yoof, and being saddened by Niven’s story about the brilliant actor George Sanders.

Sanders declared that at age 70 he would commit suicide, because “my cock will have stopped working, my memory will be fading and all the joy will have gone from my life.”  And he was true to his word.

The above was sparked by reading this article:

The Kessler twins — a German entertainment duo who became famous both in the US and throughout Europe beginning in the 1950s — have died at 89 after choosing to end their lives together.

The singing and dancing sisters reportedly died together in their home in Grünwald, near Munich.

The Kessler twins once were known for making the rounds on American talk shows and performing with multi-hyphenate entertainment giants, including Frank Sinatra, Fred Astaire and Sammy Davis Jr., among other stars.

Apparently, the sisters ‘no longer wanted to live’ and ‘had chosen to end their lives together.’ 

Here they are back then:

As I said, back in my youth I would not have understood that feeling, that life had passed and now needed to end.

Now, on my 71st birthday, I can understand that feeling a whole lot better.

Before anyone starts reading something else into that statement, let me assure you all that there’s no cause for alarm.  My health is excellent — not just for a septuagenarian, but for a man of any age, my doctor reassures me — and I still have some unfinished business on Ye Olde Bucquette Lystte (patience, Salma).  Please do not concern yourselves.

I truly understand how George Sanders and the Kessler sisters felt — but I don’t feel that way for myself.

We can revisit this topic, however, when I turn 90.

Random Totty

Gratuitous Chick Pics

Because it’s my birfday, I’m going to indulge myself with today’s totty, and feature an actual totty:  Brianna Beach.  She’s a one-time model and more recently an actress in, shall we say, a more dubious genre (feel free to find yer own links, ya pervos).  Here she is as a youngin:

By The Numbers

Economics, Marxists

We’ve all marveled at the stupidity of Manhattan voters, in voting into power some Marxist asshole who is promising all sorts of free stuff in exchange for higher taxes and malevolent gouging of successful businesses and the individuals who made them or run them.

This might work if Manhattan was truly an island, i.e. well away from any mainland, where the population is in essence imprisoned on the island and can’t move out of the Marxist hellhole.  This, by the way, is how Marxist governments have traditionally been able to bend their citizens over the desk:  by forbidding them to leave or physically restricting their ability to do so.

Fortunately (for the would-be recipients of the looming Marxist economic rape in the Five Boroughs), they have a chance of saving themselves from catastrophe by simply leaving for sunnier climes (in every sense of the word), taking themselves, their businesses and their tax payments with them.

And the scale of said catastrophe?  Here’s the pitiless financial analysis:

Put simply, by any normal accounting, New York State is using federal funds to pay $21 billion to NYC. By the same standard, New York City too is presently bankrupt, in the old-fashioned sense that it cannot pay for its extravagant spending, collecting $86.8 billion in total revenue versus outlays of $119.8 billion. The $31 billion needed annually by New York to survive comes, directly or indirectly, from the federal government. That will not last.

But all this is mere prelude to the Mamdani tax-the-rich onslaught about to hit New York City. The numbers are frightening.

At the individual level, in a city of 8.5 million people and 4 million taxpayers, the top 1%, or some 40,000 individuals, account for an estimated 45% of the city’s total $17.4-billion personal income tax receipts. While the New York Post talks of 1 million potentially exiting New York, it is highly likely that at least half of high-income taxpayers will choose escape over life in Mamdani New York. So goes roughly $4 billion, from a mere 20,000 departing for greener pastures. Others are sure to follow. Seventeen point four billion dollars will be the high-water mark for New York City personal income tax revenue.

It gets markedly worse when businesses choose to exit New York, especially financial firms.

The city collects roughly $13 billion in direct taxes on businesses, but the impact of business exit would be far greater, as associated spending ripples through the economy, conservatively tying $30 billion in city tax revenue to business-driven activities. Ten major financial firms alone could reduce NYC tax revenue by $5 billion. The city is at enormous risk, made all the greater by the well understood impact of technology. At a minimum, no financial firm needs to be in New York any longer, especially when the most needed 1,000 firms are specifically targeted by Mamdani for sharply higher taxes.

Put it all together, and New York City revenues are likely to decline, permanently, by at least $10 billion due directly to Mamdani’s actions, adding to $5.5 billion in structural deficits, on top of an already slapdash concoction of sticks and glue that is New York State, made worse by implementation of devastating, and costly, Democratic Socialist Party principles, with President Trump vowing to restrict federal spending to the “bare minimum required by law.”

Read the whole thing for the full gory details.

I read somewhere that actor John Voigt has implored POTUS to somehow overturn the NYC election results, but of course Trump can’t — and shouldn’t.  Why not?

Because at some point the vacuous dreams and economic stupidity of Marxists need to explode, spectacularly, so that the people who did not learn the lessons of 1990s Detroit can have their noses rubbed in the foul dirt of utter financial bankruptcy.

And then they have to shoulder the burden of rebuilding the whole thing from the ground up, just as the Germans had to rebuild the shattered German state after 1945 — only without the lifeline of any kind of federal Marshall Plan, because New York City doesn’t deserve it.  New Yorkers have always had an unhealthy sense of their own importance and urban grandeur, and this time their collapse through stupidity and cupidity will actually be well deserved.

H.L. Mencken once defined democracy as “the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.”  Well, New Yorkers exercised their democratic rights… and now the fun begins.

Avoidance

Men & Women

From a Deep Thinker:

“Young men prefer to avoid their female peers.  It’s unpleasant and, if the women view an errant look or bad date or breakup as ‘rape,’ it’s also dangerous.  If you have internet pornography to satisfy your sexual needs, internet games to satisfy every young man’s natural desire for adrenaline, and legal pot to make all the pain go away, who needs women?”

Not to mention having to exist in a gynocentric atmosphere in almost every social institution — schools, workplaces and so on — where the male instincts of risk-taking, adventure and creativity have been ruthlessly suppressed so that men can be… more like women.

One more time:  of course I’m not suggesting that risk-taking, adventure and creativity etc. are the sole preserve of men — that’s a common feministical trope, and of course that would be… what’s the term I’m thinking of?  Oh yeah:  total bollocks.  But even the most superficial observation of the human condition will show that men are more likely, for example, to be risk-takers while women are more likely to be risk-averse.

So if you can’t do that kind of thing in real life, the next best thing is to simulate it — I remember reading somewhere that Call Of Duty, for example, has an 80% male gamer profile, and I bet that the Formula 1 simulation games have a similar profile.

And yeah, you don’t need a female partner for that activity, any more than if you’re indulging yourself in a little porn-watching.

I’m not sure that this male-female schism would have worked for me back when I was in my teens and twenties, but then again I didn’t grow up in this toxic environment, and anyway, back then girls and women were a lot more grownup than today’s crop of frail, weeping faeries.  (Probably the most cutting comeback I’ve ever seen was a guy’s description of one such creature as a “Fleshlight that cries.”  Sheesh.)

I don’t know how this all is going to play out;  I suspect badly, and it seems that at some point women are going to choose more masculine men — or a grotesque and dangerous parody thereof, most likely of the Third World genus.  Hell, I think that’s already happening in countries where the native menfolk have become terminally feminized — the Scandinavian countries come to mind, here — and the results there are not grounds for optimism.

I’d really like to think I’m wrong about all this, but I suspect that I’m not.  More’s the pity.