Tag: Regrettable Acts

Maybe Not

Men & Women

Them times sure are a-changing… just not quite how Dylan envisaged it:

Tabitha Willett has sparked debate as she criticized ‘commuting men on their phones’ for not offering her a train seat – despite wearing a ‘baby on board’ badge. 

The Made In Chelsea star, 33, who is expecting her second child, took to Instagram on Tuesday to tell London commuters to ‘do better’. 

Sharing a short video of a busy train showing a number of people sitting and standing on their phones, Tabitha penned: ‘I don’t want to be a moan but… 

‘On the way back from the school run and a carriage full of men on their phones and no one stood up for a pregnant woman with a badge or elderly couple next to me. 

‘Do better London’.

Not gonna happen.

I mean, I myself will always stand up to offer my seat to a woman, pregnant or not.  But I’m not a younger man who’s had the shit kicked out of me since childhood by the public school system, by the media and by women in general for my toxic masculinity and frequent screams of “we can do anything that men can do”.

Well then, young men might say, you can bloody well stand on the train when there aren’t any open seats, just like men do.

And let’s be honest:  that passive-aggressive button (“Baby On Board”?  give me strength) isn’t going to help matters.

Back in the day, of course, such boorish and selfish behavior from younger men would have sparked a response from other men in the railway carriage, said miscreants being hoisted out of their seat by the collar, with maybe a few solid cuffs to the head thrown in.

Now?  No chance, chickie.

And you can think your ultra-feministicals for that, because men have a simple response for when the rules of the game are changed to their detriment:  they just stop playing.

Manners and courtesy, you see, have always been an indulgence and not a duty.  And the days of indulgence are over.

Like I said:  I’m not going to change;  the habits and manners of a lifetime are too ingrained in me for that simple rejection.  But when young men have never been taught those simple manners, those lubricants of polite society, and even been chided that said manners are arrogant and prime examples of The Patriarchy / Toxic Masculinity…

Well, they’re just going to stay in their seats.  As they should.

Scaling Down

Lifestyle

This is an interesting development:

Fewer booze buyers are reaching for the top shelf.

Americans aren’t thirsting for for the high-end tequila that once flowed freely, spirits companies said, as demand for $100 spirits has dropped off. Consumers appear to be trading down—or selecting less expensive versions of their preferred beverage—said Lawson Whiting, CEO of Brown-Forman (BF.A, BF.B), on Thursday, as sales of more affordable bottles fell less.

“We are seeing some weakening, for the first time, in terms of trade down,” Whiting said on a conference call, according to a transcript made available by AlphaSense. “When you look at $100 and above or $50-to-$100 [segments], those price points have weakened considerably.”

Industrywide, the number of $100-plus bottles sold has fallen 18% in the past three months, according to the market research firm NielsenIQ.

I’m not surprised.  All that high-end stuff, at the end of the day, delivers not much more in terms of taste and shall we say “knockdown power”, for a premium price.  And that would be okay, in isolation.

But when you have to spend $120,000 for an “economy” car — think I’m joking?  see how much you end up paying in total when you finance $45,000 over seven or ten years — and the cost of even the cheapest meal for two in a non-fast food restaurant will set you back well over $60, and your grocery bill rockets from $30 per week to $140… it doesn’t take a Nostradamus to predict that things are going to change when it comes to spending your money on what is after all an indulgence.

And the change can come with reduced consumption (as above) or simply learning to live with cheaper merchandise.

In earlier, less fucked-up times, I would now have been on my second or maybe even third car after the Tiguan;  instead, I now know that barring some kind of miracle, the Tiggy is going to be my lifetime vehicle.

I can’t remember the last time I bought a bottle of single-malt — years, I suspect — and it doesn’t matter because I seldom drink the stuff unless friends show up for dins, and a single after-dinner cocktail is called for.

It’s not just me, either:  the Son&Heir drinks maybe 10% of what he used to drink, booze-wise, and even my rowdy friends have cut back.

But spare me the sob stories of what this means for the manufacturers of high-end bling.  If ever there’s a case study in ripping people off for the “status” of using their products, vendors like Louis Vuitton, Glenfiddich, Porsche and Swarovski are headed for bleak times;  and I care not a fig for their predicament.

Giving Up

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.

Bondi Reflections

Anarchist thugs, Muzzies, Psychos, Resistance

Right up front, I’m going to say that I hope I’m never in a situation like one of the several mass shootings we’ve just seen.  I’m no hero, I’m too old for that kind of thing, and there are too many bad outcomes (for me) should I get involved with — i.e. by shooting back at — asshole gunmen on a spree.

That said, I also hope that if the situation is inescapable that I will have the gumption to perform my civic duty, i.e. by not running away and hoping that law enforcement will take care of everything, and doing my level best to end the threat.

I also hope I don’t get shot by the frigging cops, which is what seems to have happened in Sydney because to the untrained and panicked eye, the target becomes any guy holding a gun (or, in the case of the OzCops) and even standing next to the gun he just used, with his hands in the air.

What a shit show.

For those who think that I’m being silly to imagine such things happening, living as I do in north Texas:   let me remind everyone that there was just such a mass shooting at an outdoor mall in Allen, just up the road from my house, only a couple years ago.  (What makes it all the more chilling was that both New Wife and Mrs. Doc Russia had gone out shopping in Allen, and might well have ended up at the mall in so doing.)

So no:  if we’ve learned one thing from all this, it’s that this shit can happen anywhere.  And we would do well to be prepared to deal with it.

Once again, I’m absolutely not hoping that I get involved in some of this mayhem;  but at the same time, I will admit to doing some mental role-playing in my head, dredging up all the old “Coinops” (counter-insurgency operations) drills I learned back in those far-off days when we all carried muskets and bayonets.

One thing is for sure, though:  I will not be a helpless victim.

Quote Of The Day

QOTD

From Kruiser:

“It’s not just that Biden & Co. got so many things wrong — one expects that from Democrats — it’s that they got them so spectacularly wrong.”

And of course, so much effort is required by each and every incoming Republican administration to fix the mess (diplomatic, defense, social policy, economics — oy, the list goes on and on) before starting on any positive work.

Two (or three, or four) steps backwards each Democrat administration, half a step forward with the Republicans, then a single step forward again (if we’re lucky) — and then the ungodly get back into power by the usual means (fill in the blanks) and the whole horrible pattern starts all over again.

Small wonder that the U.S. is so much a failing neo-socialist state despite our economic strength.

And our only hope is that the Trump administration manages to get a few steps forward before the cataclysm so that the ungodly have to spend time trying to undo what he did — putting them on the back foot, for a change.

Hey, I can dream, you know.

It’s Not Just Beds

Bad News, Technology

While I was tempted to headline this post with “Smart Beds, Stupid People”, there’s a much bigger issue at stake here.

You see, as much as we might laugh at the idiocy of people who would depend on something as fragile as the Internet to operate their frigging beds (FFS), just stop and think about how much else is dependent on SkyNet:  communications, banking, traffic systems, logistics, security systems, even mapping services and cars (don’t get me started)… the list goes on and on, ad nauseam.

And yet people like me, who rail against the vulnerability of this encroachment on basic daily functions are patronized (“There there, Gramps, just take your pill and go to bed”) and called Luddites.

What about this much-lauded artificial intelligence thing?

An artificial intelligence system (AI) apparently mistook a high school student’s bag of Doritos for a firearm and called local police to tell them the pupil was armed.

Taki Allen was sitting with friends on Monday night outside Kenwood high school in Baltimore and eating a snack when police officers with guns approached him.

“At first, I didn’t know where they were going until they started walking toward me with guns, talking about, ‘Get on the ground,’ and I was like, ‘What?’” Allen told the WBAL-TV 11 News television station.

Allen said they made him get on his knees, handcuffed and searched him – finding nothing. They then showed him a copy of the picture that had triggered the alert.
close up of hands using a laptop keyboard

“I was just holding a Doritos bag – it was two hands and one finger out, and they said it looked like a gun,” Allen said.

Yeah, it’s all funny and stuff — until one day we discover that A.I.-generated police ROE training allows for lethal shooting at suspects “to eliminate the threat”.  Oh wait… you think robot cops are just a figment of Hollywood imagination?  Given that cops are facing staff shortages (#ThankYouBLM) and falling recruitment numbers (#ThankYouWokeCityGovernments), does anyone care to bet against me about this scenario?

Here’s the thing.  Try to write a story that has an unbelievable premise about the baleful effects of technology on a distant-future society, and I’ll show you:  tomorrow.  Bloody hell, the most prophetic form of hostile future technology that you can imagine is probably being beta-tested somewhere as we speak.

Even Blade Runner  is starting to look like a near-future dystopia rather than some far-off eventuality.

Having your bed controlled by SkyNet is the least of our problems.