Tag: Regrettable Acts

From Comfortable Heritage To Modern Banal

Corporate Wokism, Marketing / Advertising

We’ve all seen how modernist logo design has turned the proud familiar into simplistic trash:

…and of the recent Cracker Barrel rebrand we will not speak, as they’ve been forced into a U-turn.

Now if one thinks of modernistic Philistines and Wokery Gone Mad in the civic sense, it’s hard to imagine a better example than that “blueberry in a bowl of tomato soup”, Austin TX.  Who have “progressed” from a traditional city seal to… well, a 1970s-era representation of a homeless person’s tent shelter:

Bloody hell.  It’s an encapsulation of everything that’s wrong with the Left:  ahistorical, simplistic and ugly.

Silliness

Anti-Gun Nannies, Psychos

Here’s one that made me send an extra couple mags’ worth of ammo downrange yesterday:

President Trump has again threatened to take away Rosie O’Donnell’s citizenship, as she has moved to Ireland and is in the process of obtaining Irish citizenship to become a dual citizen.

“As previously mentioned, we are giving serious thought to taking away Rosie O’Donnell’s Citizenship. She is not a Great American and is, in my opinion, incapable of being so!” Trump posted.

And to think I once ridiculed Jimmeh Carter for getting involved in such minutiae as deciding White House parking privileges…

Dear POTUS:  why the fuck are you bothering with this kind of silliness?  Has the DOGE finished its job?  Have you done with Putin?  Are you going to make the Brits pay dearly for their anti-free speech activities?  Have you even started to address the dire state of the national debt, not to mention next year’s budget?  [200 more Presidential / CEO-type high-level issues deleted, for reasons of space]

Stop pissing around with the small stuff, and get serious about the important stuff.

And speaking of stupid shit… this one’s for AG Pam Blondie.

One of the several things that upsets me about the MAGA-Trump Administration is how they can forget that sometimes governmental action not only doesn’t work, but has been proven not to work in the past.  Take this next bit of foolishness, for example:

The Department of Justice is actively exploring a ban on gun possession for transgender individuals in the wake of a mass shooting at a Catholic school by a transgender gunman, Breitbart News reported, citing “multiple sources familiar with the matter.”

The Office of Legal Council has reportedly organized multiple meetings to explore the possibility of denying transgender people access to firearms on grounds of mental illness.

Sigh.

Just a little reminder:  gun bans don’t fucking work.  (If they did, there would be zero gun-related deaths and crimes in Britishland, to take but one example.)  Not only do they not work, but the cost of policing such bans is astronomical.

And just who, pray tell, is going to be the arbiter of “mental illness”?  You? A panel of “experts”?  The local school’s PTA?

Stop wasting your time with “multiple meetings” (because they too don’t work, and waste time withal).

Here’s something that has a far higher chance of success:

Order that all public schools maintain an armed and trained security force on the premises.

What we know for a fact is that even the psychos shy away from playing their little reindeer games when there’s a good chance they’ll be shot dead right before they take aim at someone, or right after they’ve fired their first shot / stabbed their first victim.  (Feel free to check the stats on this:  it will be a far better use of time than these multiple meetings, for starters.)

And to force the gun-fearing wussy school administrators (e.g. in California, New York and Illinois) to comply, make all federal funding dependent on the installation thereof.  (I mean, the Education Department exists for just such a reason, as opposed to promoting the ghastly LGBTOSTFU agenda in said schools with taxpayer money.)

But no, by all means go with what doesn’t work.  If nothing else, it will prove that government, whether conservative, MAGA or Screaming Commies, doesn’t have a fucking clue.

Not that we ever needed such proof.

Pedro

Travels

Back in 2004, one of our training trips took us to Chile.  We’d just come back from two weeks in Germany/Austria, and only a few days later saw us in the skies again, this time towards South America.  None of us had ever been there before, so we looked forward to the chance keenly.

Santiago was nice, but the job kept us very busy, and I was only able to spend one day downtown with the kids, but whatever — we loved it and all said they’d be happy to return someday.

Then we added on a few days in Viña Del Mar, just over the river from Valparaiso, and that place we really loved.

Climate-wise, we were just heading into winter — May in the southern hemisphere — but that meant only light coats and sweaters, so we set about exploring Viña on foot.

What a lovely place.

One of the things we noticed about Viña was the plethora of stray dogs.  Coming from the Land Of The Free (and most recently from Yurp) where all dogs are on leashes or indoors, this was a strange sight.  There were scores, maybe even hundreds of dogs wandering about in the streets, some in groups/packs, others on their own.  None of them gave any sign of being dangerous, so we just did what everyone else in Viña did, and ignored them.

On our third day there, however, one dog attached himself to us.  He was a tan puppy of (duh) indiscriminate ancestry, and he trotted along with our little group, stopping when we stopped to window-shop or take pictures, then resuming the trip when we started walking again.

He was as cute as hell, and the kids named him Pedro.  They would have petted him, except that Dad threatened them with death if they did so, because I sure as hell was not going to deal with the inevitable flea infestation that ensued.

After while, he would dart ahead of us towards the next street corner.  The first time caused us a little panic because we thought he would run out into the street and get run over by a car, but Pedro was streetwise:  he’d stop and sit at the edge of the sidewalk, glancing back over his shoulder, waiting for us to catch up.  Then he’d walk across the street with us, his street smarts obviously telling him that he’d be safe with us.

Anyway, we got to the street that ran along the beach, and eventually we came upon a fishing pier that stuck out into the bay.  Halfway along the pier was a hamburger stand and a long queue of people waiting to get served.  (I know, Third World street food is muy peligroso, but the number of people reassured us.)  So we got our burgers, and good grief they were among the best burgers we’d ever eaten, anywhere in the world (not to mention costing us only about 75c each).  It was also the first time I’d encountered fresh avocado used as a spread on a hamburger bun… delicious.

So of course I had to get a burger for Pedro.  What astonished all of us was that he didn’t snatch the food away, but took it gently from my hand and then lay under our table to eat it.  He didn’t gulp it all down either, but ate it like a human:  tearing off mouthfuls one at a time, eating slowly — much slower than my ravenous kids, come to think of it — and when I tossed him a few of the thick, wonderful fries, he ate them in similar fashion.

Anyway, we made our way back to the hotel, but Pedro got a shock because when he tried to follow us in the entrance, the doorman shooed him away, gently but firmly.

I will never forget the look of disappointment and sorrow on Pedro’s face.

He wasn’t waiting for us outside when we went out the next day, and as we walked around, we all kept looking for him, but he’d vanished;  and every one of us was devastated.

The day after that we got in the car and drove up the coast.  I’m pretty sure that had Pedro showed up and asked, we would have welcomed him, fleas and all, into the car for the trip.

We never saw him again.

Stable Door

Law and Order

Following on from the Minnesota Catholic school shooting we have this bullshit:

FBI director Kash Patel used a post on X to make clear the Minneapolis Catholic school shooting will be investigated as a “hate crime targeting Catholics.”

FFS.  Talk about a waste of time.

In the first place, the thing is over.  The sicko trannie shot up a church, killed and wounded a bunch of people and then offed himself/herself/whatever.  I hate to sound cold about it, but what’s to “investigate”?

Of course it was a “hate crime targeting Catholics”, numbskull.  The fucking loony talked all about it a hundred times on social media beforehand.  But even if it was a “hate crime”:  so what?  Does it add to the posthumous legal punishment?

Kash, ol’ buddy:  quit wasting your organization’s time on this idiocy.  Use your agents to go after the Clintons, Soros, the H-1B fraudsters, the real estate fraudsters — you know, the people who committed crimes and are still alive to prosecute.

And by the way, if all this leaves you short of agents, then I have another word of advice:  close down the ATF and reassign those agents into something that doesn’t involve harassing FFLs and other law-abiding gun owners.

Yer welcome.

A Matter Of Privacy

Manners

This silly situation got me thinking — it’s about a mother rifling through her 17-year-old daughter’s handbag, and finding the morning-after pill — all about the whole topic of privacy and personal space.

Am I the only man in the world who, if his wife asks hims to “get it out of my purse”, just hands her the bag to get whatever it is out for herself?

If ever there’s an article which exemplifies the concept of “private space”, it’s a woman’s handbag.  When I’m asked why I didn’t just look in the bag, I usually make a joke of it, saying things like:  “There’s things with teeth in there!”

It’s not that I’m afraid of what I’ll find in there — I doubt very much whether there’s anything in there that could upset me — but it really is a concern for my wife’s privacy.

Everyone needs a private space.  It’s not necessarily a space that might harbor something that the owner doesn’t want anyone else to see, although it very well might be;  but there’s a concept involved which I think should be respected at all costs.

There’s another old saying that covers this:  if you invade someone’s privacy, don’t be shocked or angered by what you may find.

My old friend Patterson once told me how his wife was always asking him, “What are you thinking about?”  and he, quite understandably, took umbrage at her impertinence.  “For fuck’s sake,” he expostulated to me, “are there no parts of my life that she doesn’t want to examine or look over?”  Anyway, the next time she asked him that intrusive question, his response was epic:  “I was just thinking about how I’d spend the insurance money if you died.”  And when she got upset, his response was equally cutting:  “Do you just want me to lie to you?”  End of discussion, and much later, end of marriage (his second or third, I don’t remember).

I remember once reading about a guy who got pissed off when he discovered his wife going over his workshop, opening cupboards and looking into his toolbox.  And when he confronted her — “What the fuck did you think you’d find?” — his wife couldn’t understand his anger, because she had no clue about how men want their privacy kept sacrosanct.

Here’s the thing.  We men are evil fuckers.  In every man, there’s a quiet, secret space which harbors impure thoughts, impure activities and pathological impulses.  Sometimes, to be sure, those secret spaces include nefarious activities:  infidelity, criminality, shameful behavior, whatever.  Whether it’s a phone, a hiding place or a secret credit card / bank account, it doesn’t matter;  they exist.

The point is that even if that secret space doesn’t involve something nefarious, it’s still private and we will guard it zealously.  Think of it as a personal manifestation of the Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment:  the right to privacy being the ability of an individual to keep their personal information and private life out of the public domain.  And in this case, “public” doesn’t just mean “the public”;  it means everyone else in the fucking world, including wives, children and parents.

So yeah, our concerned mother in the above article was being snoopy — even though I think she had every right to be concerned about her not-yet-adult daughter — but it’s quite understandable that her daughter would feel utterly betrayed by the invasion of her privacy, nevertheless.