Category: Disaster

Women Drinking

Disaster

As the West descends further into Covid Madness, articles like this (via Insty)are becoming more common:

During the pandemic, alcohol has become an easy way to self-medicate, aided by the fact that liquor and wine stores were deemed essential services from the start. Many even offer delivery, with apps like MiniBar filling in the gaps. New Yorkers who ache for fresh air and company have been able to order cocktails to go from restaurants and enjoy them on the sidewalk.

[Aside:  sorry about the NYfT link, but it’s necessary this once.]

It’s not just New York, of course, which is suffering from pandemic alcoholism, as they call it.  (Much as New Yorkers like to think that they’re the only people on the world, or at least they’re the only people in the world who matter, they aren’t.)  In fact, this is happening in London, Berlin, Sydney, Paris and pretty much in all large cities suffering not only from fear of getting the Chinkvirus and dying, but from autocratic politicians who are intent on putting everyone under house arrest out of fear — fear that if lots of people start dying on their watch, they may be blamed for doing nothing.  (The more cynical may just think that assholes like MichGov Wilmer are doing this stuff just because they can, but let’s ignore that for the moment.)

Any time people are imprisoned, or feel like they’re being imprisoned, all sorts of bad behaviors start to emerge, of course, and boozing is just one manifestation;  rampant sexuality and domestic violence are two others.

Actually, the situation of women drinking too much has been going on for a long time — far earlier than March/April 2020, for sure.

New Wife and I have been watching modern Brit TV dramas — especially crime — for a while now, and if there’s one thing you can bet the house on, it’s that whenever the female lead or heroine arrives home in the evening after a long day of catching murderers / treating patients / dealing with sexual harassment at her place of work / [insert your favorite example of female superiority here], there’s going to be a glass or bottle of wine waiting for her when she walks in the door.  I know it’s fiction, but entertainment reflects the Zeitgeist, and women drinking alone or on a regular basis when coming home is pretty much ubiquitous.

These days, there is a general, distorted sense of what healthy and acceptable drinking is, Dr. Kirane said. “Responsible drinking is reinforced by structure in people’s lives — going to work, taking their kids to school, interacting and maintaining a home,” he explained. “The pandemic has turned such boundaries on their head and created more space for alcohol.”

I really have no opinion on this issue, because it’s one of those “If A then B” facets of the human condition.  Nor, of course, am I going to pass judgment on people who have become hopeless drunks, because there but for the grace of God, etc. etc.

I am, however, going to suggest that the motherfucking control-freak politicians and medical charlatans who are ultimately responsible for all this foolishness should be tarred and feathered, but that reason is just the latest in a long line of reasons, as appear on these pages on pretty much a weekly basis, for such an action.

Lockdown Partner

Beauty, Disaster, Food & Drink

Forget for a moment that we’re mostly all Old Married Pharttes, and imagine that you’re going to be in lockdown with a hottie — to be more specific, a hottie chef, because regardless of how hot she is, at some point you’re gonna have to eat, and you don’t want to be stuck in that situation with Jennifer Aniston, who can’t boil a lettuce.

So here are the contenders, in no specific order:

Nigella Lawson

Rachel Allen

Rachel Khoo

Giada De Laurentiis

Lisa Faulkner

Marcella Valladolid

Rachel Ray

Ingrid Hoffmann

Cat Cora
Okay, Cat Cora is probably disqualified because sadly, she’s a lesbianist.  In her place, therefore:

Mary Berg

(That’s for my Canucki Readers…)

As an aside, three of the above are named Rachel.  Coincidence?  I think not.

 

And for my long-suffering Lady Readers, who are always being left out of these things:

Curtis Stone(I know, Australian therefore should be disqualified.  Shuddup or I’ll add Guy Fieri.)

James Martin

Jean-Christophe Novelli

Phil Vickery

And in the interests of good taste and such, I haven’t bothered with Gordon Ramsay, because I would refuse to pay your hearing-aid bills after you’ve been in a three-week lockdown with him.

 

Feel free to add your favorite chefs in Comments.

Just So We’re All Clear

Disaster, Two-Minute Hate

Over time, several Loyal Readers have contacted me, warning that I might suffer the recent fate of several conservative websites, whose hosting services have blocked them (a.k.a. “de-platforming”) with weasel excuses such as that of The Conservative Treehouse’s lot:  “given the incompatibility between your site’s content and our terms, you need to find a new hosting provider and must migrate the site by Wednesday, December 2nd.”

I, of course, am at risk because of my occasionally-intemperate rants and my all-round “bad” behavior.

Firstly:  thank you all for your concern.

Secondly:  Of course, Tech Support II has a backup plan — to quote him exactly, “There’d just be a little downtime while we execute. ”

Thirdly:  “Execution” might very well include what could be called a “porcupine consequence” for these Lefty assholes if I am ever de-platformed.

As long as I’m left alone, nobody gets hurt.

Acceptable Risk

Disaster, Gummint, Nannies

The inimitable Heather Mac Donald takes the Nannies to task, in her inimitable way.  This paragraph in particular struck home for me:

We set highway speeding limits to maximize convenience at what we consider an acceptable risk to human life. It is statistically certain that every year, there will be tens of thousands of driving deaths. A considerable portion of those deaths could be averted by “following the science” of force and velocity and enforcing a speed limit of, say, 15 miles an hour. But we tolerate motor-vehicle deaths because we value driving 75 miles an hour on the highway, and up to 55 miles an hour in cities, more than we do saving those thousands of lives. When those deaths come—nearly 100 a day in 2019—we do not cancel the policy. Nor would it be logical to cancel a liberal highway speed because a legislator who voted for it died in a car accident.

Bill Whittle once said more or less the same thing about accidental gun deaths:  while even one such death was tragic, the plain fact of the matter is that some freedoms come with risk, sometimes deadly risk;  and the overall benefit to our society is far, far greater than the danger that may (or may not) ensue.   Using statistics of “gun deaths” (even correct ones) to bolster calls for gun control / -confiscation is likewise irrelevant.

It’s called the price of freedom, and We The People have been balancing those freedoms against the collateral harm to individuals ever since our Republic was formed and the Constitution and Bill of Rights promulgated.  All individual rights are potentially harmful, whether it’s freedom of speech, assembly, religion, gun ownership, privacy or any of the others.

And to Heather’s point above:  driving isn’t even a right protected by the Bill of Rights.  How much more, then, should our First- and Second Amendment rights (and all the other rights for that matter) be protected, even when we know that some tragedy is bound to follow thereby?

“If it saves just one life” sounds great on a bumper sticker, but as a basis for public policy, it’s not only foolish but in many cases more harmful in the long run.  Heather again:

We could reduce coronavirus transmission to zero by locking everyone in a separate cell until a vaccine was developed. There are some public-health experts who from the start appeared ready to implement such radical social distancing. The extent to which we veer from that maximal coronavirus protection policy depends on how we value its costs and the competing goods: forgone life-saving medical care and deaths of despair from unemployment and social isolation, on the one hand, and the ability to support one’s family through work and to build prosperity through entrepreneurship, on the other. The advocates of maximal lockdowns have rarely conceded such trade-offs, but they are ever-present.

The current wave of totalitarianism and loss of freedoms caused by State overreaction to the Chinkvirus needs to be rolled back, and fast.  It just sucks that we have to rely on judges — many of whom, to judge from their records, are not especially friends of freedom — to hold back the mini-Mussolinis in their totalitarian quest for absolute power over the governed.

And just so we know what kind of “acceptable risk” we’re talking about, comes this from Fox News:

Exemplary

Business, Disaster

When I finally arrived in the U.S. following the Great Wetback Episode, I lived in northwest Austin with Longtime Buddy Trevor while waiting for my visa to be processed.  Having come from the supermarket business in Seffrica, I was keen to see just how good U.S. supermarkets were by comparison, so I went off to the local H.E.B. store just a couple hundred yards away from his apartment.  It was good, very good;  and I became a huge fan of the chain and its operation.  (Full disclosure:  I did once apply for a job at H.E.B., but I was turned down — not by HR, but by an exec VP who called me, complimented me on my resume, and semi-apologized for not hiring me because, as he said, I was not only over-qualified for a senior position there, but horribly over-qualified and they couldn’t fire someone just to take me on.  Classy move — executive to executive instead of fobbing it off onto some HR clerk — and it only increased my admiration for the chain.)

My only quibble with living here in metro North Texas is that there are no H.E.B. stores anywhere nearby (Central Market is owned by H.E.B., but it’s a different division altogether and caters mostly to upscale customers).  I don’t know why there aren’t — the common saying is that 50% of South Texas shopped at an H.E.B. last week — and as I see it, the only reason that it isn’t 50% of all Texas is that they don’t have any stores up here.

This article (found via the Knuckledragger, thankee Kenny) is just one reason why I respect their business and miss their stores.  If H.E.B. were to open one nearby, none of the others — Kroger, Tom Thumb, Market Street, Aldi or Wal-Mart — would ever see me again.

Come on, Steve;  get your South Texas asses up here.

Risky Bidness

Disaster, Health, Science!

Apparently, some “experts” (standard warning applies) over in Britishland (same warning) have come up with a list of activities that carry a risk of catching Chinkvirus cooties, ranked according to risk level:

All FYI — as much of what is listed is pretty much commonsense.  I do wonder, though, how “protest march”, “rioting” and “looting” (some overlap) did not make the list.