Okay, these may have been NSFW in 1931, maybe.
I’ll try to do better next year.
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Giving Up
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.
Right Attitude
It’s so nice to see that at least some people have the right idea about curbing illegal immigration and enforcing mass deportations of criminals.
Good Point
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.
News Roundup
There isn’t one because I’ve been too busy. Take comfort in the one piece I did manage to (un)cover:
...not at all bad for a 53-year-old granny, and nobody cares what she eats anyway:
Till next week.
Sand In The Shoe
Over here, a couple of guys gripe about ten most irritating things about modern cars. To save you time, I’ve listed them here, with my thoughts:
- Beeping — It’s like being locked in your car with a nagging Catholic/Jewish mother: do this, don’t do that, why haven’t you etc. etc. Whether it’s seatbelts, lane changing (more of that later) or any one of the many things that someone else thinks that you should/shouldn’t do, I am often tempted just to cut the fucking wires to the speaker.
- Wireless phone chargers — I haven’t come across this nonsense myself because I last bought a car in 2015, but the guys in the video sum it up perfectly: it makes your phone hot, and doesn’t perform as advertised unless your phone is perfectly positioned. It’s all part of making everything bluetoothed instead of cabled.
- Artificial engine noise — First they soundproof the car, and then because some drivers would actually like to hear the sound the car makes, or want their car to sound all shouty without the necessary engine to make it so, the car pipes in fake engine noise. If that’s not a good analogy for the A.I./fake/digital/artificial times we live in, I can’t think of a better one.
- Voice-activated assist — I call this “creeping Alexa”, where one has to rely on some fucking software to recognize your voice (which it often can’t, with comical / disastrous consequences), all instead of you just turning a switch or pushing a button. And speaking of which:
- Screen buttons instead of actual switches — There’s no excuse for this, and this has nothing to do with “safety” (the usual excuse) because the plain fact of the matter is that screen switches are cheaper than mechanical switches, and that saves the manufacturer money (which savings are never passed on to the customer, needless to say). And speaking of safety: the screen buttons require that one be at the correct screen to enable the things to work; if not, one has to scroll backwards or forwards until the correct screen puts in an appearance — and all this requires taking one hand off the steering wheel for an extended period, and taking one’s eyes off the road. Anyone else see a potential problem here?
- Modern headlights are too bright — I’ve noticed this trend, and it’s fucking dangerous to other drivers, especially in rainy and/or night-time conditions. You’re not having to land an airliner on a narrow runway; you’re driving down a street, FFS, with oncoming traffic. (And if you’re out in the boonies and need brighter lights, add a spotlight bar.)
- High-gloss finishes (e.g. piano black) — I don’t even like shiny finishes on gun stocks (hello, Browning!), and I see no need for something similar in a car that is basically a dust/fingerprint collector.
- Subscription services / features — Once again, just another way for auto manufacturers to bleed money out of the customer once the car has been sold. The nice part of this is that not having some of these features (seat warmers, etc.) has the effect of taking us back to earlier times when we managed perfectly well without all these luxury geegaws. But I await with bated breath the time when things like windshield wipers, turn signals and high beams all become something you have to pay monthly fees for, instead of them just being part of the (horribly-inflated) sticker price of the car. And when I say “bated breath”, I mean when the breath becomes “unbated”, that will be a signal to load up the AK.
- Start/stop buttons — I have ranted about this piece of automotive excrescence more times than I can count. Yes, I know that you can disable the thing; but the latest wheeze from these godless fucks is to make it reset every time you switch off the car, which means you have to disable the function as part of the starting procedure every time you want to drive somewhere. The days of getting in, turning a key and moving on are so far in the distant past that one wonders how the Three Wise Men made it to Bethlehem without satnav — which, by the way, is fast becoming yet another subscription service.
- Lane assist / traffic distancing — It’s one thing when these functions beep at you as a warning; it’s another thing altogether when the functions takes over the driving for you. Apart from the foul nanny philosophy behind the thing, it can also be life-threatening.
Now go and watch the video — especially the last couple of minutes — because those guys are funny where I’m just fucking enraged.