Bad News – Page 2 – Splendid Isolation

News Update Update

January 6, 2026 Kim du Toit Bad News

That’s not a typo.

Over time, I’ve found that the weekly News Update has started to consume more time than I think it’s absolutely worth. (If you disagree, and can’t see your life continuing with any meaningful existence without it, feel free to let me know.)

Basically, the Updates are a way for me to poke fun at what passes for “news” these days, especially so when I edit a headline to point out, for example, that the appalling Kim Kardashian has once again flashed her massive tits/ass to gain yet more attention for her clothing line.

But if I add up the total effort required to produce such an item — finding an article worth including, saving the headline (sometimes as a pic), saving the link thereto, making a pithy (thorry) comment, and multiplying that by 15 or so — it comes out to well over a couple days’ work (albeit spread out over a week).

I don’t mind spending that amount of time — or more — on writing a decent post on a topic which has captured my attention. But to do all that work for a post which is eminently skimmable… I think you get my point.

So unless I hear differently from y’all (via email or comments, for those lucky enough to still be able to do the latter, don’t get me started), I think that the News Updates are going to become a thing of the past.

The only part I might consider keeping is the link-free , because that’s usually genuinely funny on occasion.

What you might see in its place is a series of stand-alone posts like this one:

Snow closes British schools and roads on first day back after Christmas as temperature plunges to -9.3C in south and warnings for ice and blizzards cover UK

Total time needed to create: about 45 seconds, including the pic creation. And there’s no link, because who the hell cares about the details?

Let me know what you think. (And yes I know, it’s free ice cream to do with what I want; but the reason for this website is twofold: a rant vehicle for Kim, and entertainment for my long-suffering Readers. Both are important.)

Giving Up

December 30, 2025 Kim du Toit Africa, Bad News

Of course, I read this with great regret and sadness, because it’s my home town being written off:

Johannesburg: The slow death of a city that may have outlived its purpose

Johannesburg is in an advanced state of decay, destruction, ruin, crime, waste, and all of it seems, sometimes, like a mirror image of South African society. We grieve over the once-great city in a veritable cult of grief.

But we are too afraid to look in the mirror because our vanity overwhelms our misery — we are, after all, a great people, and a great people we have to remain…

In and around the city, the families and communities in its suburbs and on the periphery are struggling to live full lives. As days and weeks go by, the denizens are losing reason to value their surroundings. The taps run dry frequently, energy supply is interrupted regularly, flagship institutions, and all those little things like roads, pavements, pedestrian crossings, traffic signs, road signs and robots are bleeding like wounds that will not heal on a body in terminal decline.

The city is depleted, and lacking in the nutrients and the energy necessary to bring it back to full functionality.

We can point, as we may, to mismanagement, maladministration, lack of planning, a lack of foresight and vision. We can, also, consider Johannesburg as a city that has reached the end of its natural life and is approaching the end of its purpose.

Johannesburg, as we came to know it, was established by European settler colonists in about 1886 for the sole purpose of exploiting the gold buried in the rocks below. Those gold deposits are finite. If it’s not entirely finite, mining it is becoming more expensive, while demand may well increase.

Yeah, what the hell. It’s just a shell of a place, an aggregation of concrete, glass and tarmac: it’s too difficult to govern or manage, so why bother?

One might also say the same thing about Manhattan or Los Angeles. In fact, one might say the same thing about all the major cities of the world, where concentration of the population has become too difficult and in most cases, too dangerous.

So let the animals take over and feast on the bones. And when the bones are gone and the animals need to go further afield to survive… then what?

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I think it’s time to go to the range.

Good Point

December 30, 2025 Kim du Toit Bad News

This is an excellent point:

I couldn’t agree more. I find it particularly depressing that even aggregators like Insty link mostly to these places — and I understand that Insty was the actual founding blogfather to the original PJMedia (Pajamas Media) so his loyalty and ties thereto are perfectly understandable.

But that whole media conglomerate known as

may be starting to get up my nose.

Apart from anything else, they’re an incestuous little bunch, journalistically speaking, and cover the same news items as each other, swapping columnists and opinions like it’s some 1970s suburban Connecticut key party.

I’m not suggesting that they merge into some ur-Fox News organization because that really would be a dangerous single point of failure. And yes, I understand that writers need to be paid, reporters’ expenses reimbursed, bandwidth costs covered and so on.

TANSTAAFL, and we conservatives are not freeloaders — except that when our exposure to news is slowly disappearing into the coils of a paywall python, that is not a healthy thing.

Right now, conservative media is tiptoeing along the tightrope that many mainstream news outlets are, trying to strike some kind of balance by making some articles free while lodging others behind a paywall.

That’s fine; but of late, if I find that a particular news item seems to be worth my reading but it’s behind a paywall — any paywall — I then just resort to searching for an outlet that carries it without that restriction, or getting access to an Internet archive. And I’m usually successful.

That’s not true of the commentary / editorials at all, because I’m perfectly capable of forming my own ideas on a topic; so any paywalled opinion piece (e.g. Vodkapundit) is simply ignored. (And Stephen and I go back many, many years together, so it really pains me to have to say this.) It’s especially true when I know that my own opinion is likely to parallel or coincide with that of the author, because then I’d simply be paying for something akin to my own thoughts. That’s just silly.

I’d get a Twatter account, only I don’t need to be exposed to the madness of crowds.

I don’t even mind advertisements, as long as they’re passive (like the old newpaper/magazine type) and don’t pop up shouting at me or linking me to their buy-me website (and thereby having me become part of their consumer giga-database exploitation schemes). Fuck that for a tale.

I don’t have a solution to all of this, other than to suggest that appealing for the occasional donation (in place of drip-drip-drip bank account bloodletting subscriptions) might be a better approach. Given my age and therefore precarious financial state, any subscription is a non-starter.

But I absolutely share Mr. George MF Washington’s opinion, so I think the Big Conservative Brains* need to figure it out.

*you can quit that derisive laughter, now.