From his island lair somewhere in the Caribbean, Longtime Friend Knal N. Domp writes (with my response underneath):
I think the preference of the Afghan Muzzies for the AK demonstrates that it’s the choice of insurgents all over the world — mostly because it’s easy to operate, reliable and needs little maintenance. (Pretty much the same reasons that I like them, incidentally.)
Not that I’m an insurgent, or anything.
…and I don’t mean the airline, either. Try this refreshing dose of commonsense:
America’s Frontline Doctors, that brave group of physicians who have resisted the enforced party line on COVID, has published a video from Britain that takes 3 minutes to show that the appearance and rapid spread of the delta variant in England has led to a decline in hospitalizations and deaths. It is well worth watching as it methodically graphs the data on Covid there, proving that the scaremongering is deceptive propaganda.
Also in the link: yet more proof (as if any were needed) that Fauci is a mendacious bastard.
My reaction: 
Great Caesar’s bleeding hemorrhoids… it seems like only yesterday when Sarah Hoyt’s husband upgraded me to Windows 10 (which I’d thus far refused to do, mostly as a reaction to the constant nagging every time I restarted my laptop).
But Dan got Very Stern with me, and refused to let me leave the house with whatever operating system I was still using (XP? Vista? I have no idea). So I said, “Only if YOU do it, and it has to look EXACTLY the way it was, and all my files and bookmarks have to be exactly where they are right now.”
So he did, and they were.
Frankly, given that the sum of my computer use is blogging, email (not using MS’s poxy Outlook even) and searching for topless pics of Salma Hayek on the Internet, I fail to see why I need to change anything.
But I know I’m wasting my time, because all too soon I’ll get those unsolicited nagging messages every five minutes again, and then MS will say that they’ll no longer be “supporting” Win10 (like they ever did before ha ha), and then one day my laptop will refuse to start (just like Outlook Express did), and I’ll start the long drive up to Redmond with a rocket launcher, flamethrower and a thousand rounds of AK ammo to take care of the survivors.
And no doubt someone will have a problem with this.
So when the blessed event does finally occur, I’m going to need one of my tech-savvy Readers living within a few miles of my zip code to rally around and do it for me, mostly because I don’t want to drive all the way to Sarah’s house (Colorado? Kansas? Idaho? who knows?) to have Dan Hoyt do it all over again for me.
And by the way, Microsoft? I don’t need a “new” Start button, Mac-style features, or Android apps on my desktop.
What I really need is to get to the range…
This is probably not going to make me too popular with Woke Nation, but I see that there’s a huge brouhaha arising from the decisions of various Woke officials to open up women’s sports to wannabe women (i.e. men who are “gender-confused” or similar). Said brouhaha, of course, has to include the World’s Most Irritating Blowhard (Piers Morgan, no link because Morgan), who talks about “destroying women’s athletics” and similar.
Frankly, I don’t care a rat’s ass about that, because (deep breath) I don’t think women’s athletics should even include strength events such as weightlifting and shot put (to name but a couple), and let’s not even get started on women’s rugby, boxing and MMA.
Considering that most female weightlifters take testosterone to build up their strength anyway, I see little difference between the ladymen who identify as women and the burlywomen who take drugs to resemble men.
“O but Kim,” I can hear already, “womyns have every right to have events such as shot put and weightlifting, you male chauvinist woman-hater [20,000-word diatribe deleted].”
You see, this is mostly because I prefer to think of women as ladies — a quaint, old-fashioned concept in these modernist times — and while I have no problem with physically strong women, I think most men and women prefer that they aren’t. Witness, for example, the support for the slender, petite Chris Evert vs. that of the ultra-manly Martina Navratilova — and the development of women’s tennis since then has shown that even the most talented of the “ladies” (Gabriela Sabatini, Anna Kournikova, Arantxa Sanchez, Hanna Mandlikova, Amelia Mauresmo and so on) would stand about as much chance against the Williams sisters as a haystack against a Tiger tank.
That’s fine; but if women are going to have strength and bulk be part of their sports, blurring the line between women and men, so to speak, then they can’t really complain when the line is extinguished altogether, can they?
So do I think that trannie men should be allowed into women’s sports? Absolutely not; but if they are, I’m not going to cry over it, either.
I’m sure there’s a market for all these sports; I just want no part of them.
Full disclosure: Chris Evert is only a month younger than I am, and I still have a huge teenage-like crush on her.
Responding to this article:
The second night of protests followed Thursday’s fatal shooting of 32-year-old Winston Boogie Smith Jr., who was wanted on a weapons violation and fired a gun before two deputies shot him.
The top comment was:
And I’m not even going to touch on the irony of the victim’s name.
Two articles have surfaced, and I believe they should be read one after the other.
The first is by Victor Davis Hanson, and of course is therefore worth reading all by itself:
[U]ntil recently there were still a few institutions we considered sacrosanct, incorruptible, and invincible amid faith-based assertions, toxic woke fads, civil dissension, and hatred of the past. One certainly was the military. Another was “science,” or rather the scientists, researchers, and investigators who devoted themselves to disinterested empiricism. And, a third, was the sacred idea of the “law,” or the idea that Americans respect our statutes because they were crafted by ourselves and applicable to all, equally, and without exception.
All three have lost their luster. Americans do not trust them, at least not in the old way. Perhaps it was the 2020 perfect storm of plague, quarantine, recession, riot, a contentious election, and red/blue antipathies that ripped off the scab and exposed beneath something far different than what the public had assumed.
Read it all, then follow up with this one:
It isn’t just BLM against bikers, or school systems against parents, or black against white, or Hispanic against Asian, or young against old, or left against right, or gay against straight, or vaxers against anti-vaxers, or mask wearers against mask refusers; it is the intent of government officials to inflame these conflicts to the point of violence that is the concern. His response was a slow shake of the head, a shrug of the shoulders saying what he preferred not to say.
The fact is, there is no D-Day, but rather the slow accumulation of grievances until the load can no longer be carried. His words came back to me over the whole conversation. “We’re not that stupid.” The trouble with combat veterans, like my father (Korea), is they tend to be non-confrontational in such situations, because they can smell an ambush, not because they fear engagement, but half measures won’t suffice and until they are ready to go full-on, all other responses seem tepid, but the rage builds.
This climate is being manufactured. Those who are sure they will win are goading on the conflict. Those who are not sure they will win, refuse to fight at half measure, harming only their families and friends, enraging a brutal enemy without the resolve to complete the mission. What the enemies of the people should be afraid of, if they had any sense, is a fighting force having put it off until there was nothing left to lose, but coming out dedicated to the eradication of their enemies as the only possible solution.
Caught in the middle of this brewing conflict is law enforcement. This is something they should recognize, but they have not thus far. They seem willing to be the fodder; the useful idiots of the tyrannical regimes. If they could only look into the face of what confronts them, they might choose differently, but I doubt they would. Most of them agree to impose tyranny as a means of securing their pensions, as if they can suspend their duty as American citizens while in uniform and pick it back up when they shed it. Consciously or sub-consciously they are making a decision to violate their oaths in order to receive their shekels from tyrants.
This situation, by the way, seldom turns out well for the camp followers. At best, they’re treated as collaborators and shunned, or else they lose everything — rank, prestige and respect — and at worst they’re killed, either by the resistance in situ or by the regime that follows. “Just obeying orders” has held no water ever since 1945.
Both the above are bleak theses; but these are bleak times we live in.