Speechless

Some time back I read this article about Germany, and filed it away because at the time, it actually rendered me speechless.  I’m still dumbfounded, but let me give it a shot anyway.

The executive summary is that as migrant North African men have turned rape into a spectator sport in Germanland, more people are getting gun licenses and guns for self-protection.  The response from the Kraut gummint has been predictable:

A survey of Germany’s 16 states revealed that 640,000 citizens are now able to carry a weapon. This number was only 260,000 in 2014.
In total there are 5.4 million privately owned guns with the proportion of licence holders being highest in Schleswig-Holstein, reports thelocal.
The Union of Police said ‘more and more people feel insecure’ since the sexual assaults on women outside Cologne Cathedral on New Year’s Eve 2015.
Germany has seen a number of high profile sex attacks since more than 200 women came forward to say they were assaulted during Cologne’s festivities.
Police later revealed that the majority of suspects were said to be of North African origin.
Union of Police chairman Oliver Malchow said the rise was sparked by a ‘latent feeling on insecurity’ in the population.
He added: ‘The problematic increase in small arms licenses shows that we need to work to restore a sense of security to many citizens.’

Trust a fucking bureaucrat cop to think that an increase in gun ownership in response to lawlessness is a “problem”, whereas we all know that the real  problem is mass rape, and the unwillingness of the Kraut courts to cut the rapists’ pee-pees off in the town square for Saturday entertainment.

Hey, Herr Gewerkschaftsvorsitzender  Malchow you fucking weasel functionary, here’s a tip:  if you’re feeling squeamish about the peasants arming themselves, then you need to tell your cops to start dealing with the problem in a manner designed to discourage the behavior.   Then the people won’t feel deserted by the law and its enforcers, and feel the need to help themselves when the fucking cops can’t or won’t protect them.

As the old saying goes, the primary function of the State is to monopolize the use of violence by denying it to the populace.  Here’s a classic example of just that.  Our Oliver sees people arming themselves as the problem, and not the behavior of foreigners which gives rise to that (very understandable) reaction.

And this, I don’t have to tell you, is the endgame of the socialists who have seized control of the Democrat Party:  a disarmed, fearful citizenry dependent on police protection from the predations of others.

Well, fuck that.  Here’s a suggested antidote to the problem above, in our local context:

Too bad ordinary Germans can’t get their hands on one of these beauties., but I think they have enough choices not to worry too much about it…

…until this prick Malchow decides that genug ist genug, and sends his policemen round to confiscate all those licensed handguns, seeing as the cops know who all the gun owners are, and which guns they own.  All in the name of safety, of course.

Now, what was that about the Democrats’ plans in Virginia…?

Beefeaters

In my Boxing Day post, I omitted to acknowledge the source of the main pic (of a mouthwatering roast beef) — “omitted” in that the pic wasn’t labeled, and the now-forgotten website where I found it hadn’t labeled it either.  (Under copyright law, by the way, such copyright infringement is called “inadvertent”, which in my case it certainly was.)  So I fixed that.

But that’s not the point of this post:  this is.

The pic originally came from a crowd named Carnivore Style, and I urge you all to visit their website.

This referral has not been forced on me by legal assholes, by the way:  it looks like an excellent place and I for one am going to spend a lot more time there as I devote yet more time to eating red meat in the future.  (This is an interesting take on Keto vs. Carnivore diets, incidentally.)

AND of course, bedehr gesocht, it might cause mass suicides among vegans, Extinction Rebellion loonies and other such filth.  Which can only be a good thing.

Past Perfect

Right up front, I’m going to admit that I know diddly squat about farming — I can’t tell a cornfield from a minefield, nor a rake from a pitchfork — but at the same time, I think I understand what’s going on here.

Tractors manufactured in the late 1970s and 1980s are some of the hottest items in farm auctions across the Midwest these days — and it’s not because they’re antiques.
Cost-conscious farmers are looking for bargains, and tractors from that era are well-built and totally functional, and aren’t as complicated or expensive to repair as more recent models that run on sophisticated software.
“It’s a trend that’s been building. It’s been interesting in the last couple years, which have been difficult for ag, to see the trend accelerate,” said Greg Peterson, the founder of Machinery Pete, a farm equipment data company in Rochester with a website and TV show.
“There’s an affinity factor if you grew up around these tractors, but it goes way beyond that,” Peterson said. “These things, they’re basically bulletproof. You can put 15,000 hours on it and if something breaks you can just replace it.”

But why, you may ask, are farmers rejecting the New ‘N Improved Tractors, which come with all sorts of Gadgets And Software, Guaranteed To Make Life Easier For Farmers?

The other big draw of the older tractors is their lack of complex technology. Farmers prefer to fix what they can on the spot, or take it to their mechanic and not have to spend tens of thousands of dollars.
“The newer machines, any time something breaks, you’ve got to have a computer to fix it,” Stock said.
There are some good things about the software in newer machines, said Peterson. The dealer will get a warning if something is about to break and can contact the farmer ahead of time to nip the problem in the bud. But if something does break, the farmer is powerless, stuck in the field waiting for a service truck from the dealership to come out to their farm and charge up to $150 per hour for labor.

In other words, tractors are becoming like today’s passenger cars:  crammed with all sorts of shit that sound oh-so wonderful when listed under “Safety”, “Convenience” or “Efficiency”, but which have little actual utility and simply serve to drive the price of the fucking machine into the stratosphere faster than one of Elon Musk’s rockets, while making them more prone to failure  — because as any fule know, as complexity increases, Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) shortens exponentially.

Wrenching the topic into an area which I know better than farming (and cars, for that matter):  it’s the same reason I prefer a simple AK-47 to a tricked-out AR-15.  The AR is finicky, has all manner of geegaws that can break and render the thing useless, whereas you can drive a truck over an AK and it will still continue to send bullets downrange into an 8″ kill zone.

So to all those farmers who prefer 1970s-era technology over 2019 technology in their tractors, I am very much a kindred spirit, because I prefer simple 1947 rifle technology over most of what has happened to semi-auto rifles since 2000.

And just as they’d rather spend $50,000 on an old, fixable warhorse than $150,000 on some prima donna luxo-trax made by Rolls Royce/IBM, I’d rather take the money I save on an AK and spend it on ammo.

Fuck this modern bullshit.  Fuck it all to hell.

Old Joke

This is the French estate of Vaux-le-Vicomte (right-click to embiggen in another tab):

While impressive, the picture doesn’t do it justice:  past the top of the pic is a series of man-made waterfalls which sends something like half a million gallons of water a day down the hill, where it ends up in the ponds and eventually in the moat which surrounds the main house.  The water is then filtered and pumped back up to the reservoir at the top of the hill, to start its trip back down all over again*.

Anyway, I showed this pic to a friend, who said, “Wow, I’d hate to have to do all the gardening there!”

To which I made the age-old response:  “Nah… give me a dozen Mexicans and I’d do it myself.”

I did warn you in the title…


*If you want to know how it all works, Monty Don explains it in his Netflix show, French Gardens.

Speaking Of Licensing Guns

By now we all know what the godless socialists are planning in Virginia, to whit, licensing of gun owners with respect to the following:

An “assault firearm” means a semi-automatic center-fire rifle that expels single or multiple projectiles by action of an explosion of a combustible material that has the ability to accept a detachable magazine and has one of the following characteristics: (i) a folding or telescoping stock; (ii) a pistol grip that protrudes conspicuously beneath the action of the rifle; (iii) a thumbhole stock; (iv) a second handgrip or a protruding grip that can be held by the non-trigger hand; (v) a bayonet mount; (vi) a grenade launcher; (vii) a flare launcher; (viii) a silencer; (ix) a flash suppressor; (x) a muzzle brake; (xi) a muzzle compensator; (xii) a threaded barrel capable of accepting (a) a silencer, (b) a flash suppressor, (c) a muzzle brake, or (d) a muzzle compensator; or (xiii) any characteristic of like kind as enumerated in clauses (i) through (xii).

The little bastard is talking about something like this AR:

or this Dragunov:

or even this AK:

I am so glad I live in Texas;  but that doesn’t mean something similar couldn’t happen here in the future.

This means only one thing…  yep, you read my mind:  a trip to the local Eeevil Loophole Gun Show™ over the weekend for one of those private transactions that the would-be gun confiscaters hate so much.

I call it “civic duty”.  I don’t care what they  call it.

Morality Issue

Needless to say, I’ve never watched a single minute of the Brit TV show Love Island, in which (I think) a bunch of single people are thrown together in a closed-off environment to see which of them will pair off and find “love” — after bonking like bunnies, no doubt.  (My Brit friends tell me it’s as bad as it sounds, maybe worse.)  But that’s not why I’m talking about the stupid thing;  this is.

One of the contestants was recently revealed to be [gasp]  a keen big game hunter, and has had several photos published of him posed next to some dead animal or other.  Needless to say, in today’s culture, that makes him Literally Hitler or some such bullshit, and there have been calls for him to be tossed off the show — curiously, considering that the show revolves around wholesale fornication, he should be fired as an “issue of morality”.

So promiscuous sex is okay, but hunting is streng verboten?  Got it.

However, the producers of the show — at least at the time I write this — have refused all demands to fire the man, and basically told all the wokescolds to FOAD.

Good for them.