Tag: Stupid people

Halloween Diversity

Africa, Mocking Furriners

From the annals of “countries whose policies we should emulate” (say the socialists), let’s take Sweden.

Or maybe not.

Police fear that Black Ax, an international criminal organization based out of Nigeria, is beginning to gain a foothold in Uppsala after already establishing itself in cities like Stockholm, Gothenburg, and Malmö, SVT Nyheter reports.
“They are mainly involved in human trafficking,” says Uppsala police spokesperson, Jale Poljarevius.
“They are holding women hostage, and through voodoo, they are tricking them into believing they will end up badly if they leave the job. But they are also involved in selling cocaine and heroin,” Poljarevius added.

Maybe I missed something, but before Sweden started importing people and their cultures from other countries, was this kind of stuff a problem for them?

Asking for a friend.

Strangely Satisfying

Eco-Crap, Gummint

You know, if an Alpine mountain community lived in constant fear of avalanches, one could feel a certain sympathy if said avalanches caused severe damage to the place each year and some loss of life among its inhabitants.

I suspect, however, that one would feel somewhat less sympathetic if the community refused to deploy snowplows and rescue helicopters purely because of the emissions from those vehicles.  Indeed, one might even get unworthy feelings of smug satisfaction and even Schadenfreude  from the annual, tearful news reports of death and destruction.

How then, are we expected to feel when California gets plunged into darkness and suffers loss of property and life through the regular occurrence of wildfires?

Fire conditions statewide made California “a tinderbox,” said Jonathan Cox, a spokesman for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. Of the state’s 58 counties, 43 were under red flag warnings for high fire danger Sunday.

And just so we know exactly why these conditions have reached the point to where they have:  despite the fact that hot Santa Ana winds create an annual risk of deadly wildfires, California continues to ban the clear-cutting and controlled burning of deadwood and -brush in wilderness areas as well as in areas close to suburban development because of supposed-ecological concerns.  That’s the “tinderbox” referred to above.

Moreover, it’s hard for the rest of us to feel pity for Californians when it’s clearly the fault of their own elected officials and legislature who continue to force their wrongheaded Gaia-worship on the Golden Shower State, with consequences that have become not only annual, but predictably horrible.  (And which some, equally-predictably, somehow manage to escape.)

I should feel guilty about my Schadenfreude, but I really don’t — just as I don’t feel sorry for Californians who complain about high taxes, iniquitous government interference in their lives, high real-estate prices and the whole dreadful litany of self-inflicted ills, all without exception imposed on them by, once again, their stupid, venal and self-serving elected politicians.

Let ’em burn.  Maybe at some point they may even be forced to try and get some change enacted through the ballot box, but I don’t see that happening anytime soon.

Update:  unusually, I seem to have understated California’s problems.

Triggering Update

Pussification Parade, Snowflakes

Here’s one which should make all grown-up people spit their breakfast gin into the Rice Krispies:

With the fragile millennial generation seemingly getting weaker by the day, a university in Scotland has fond it necessary to issue “trigger warnings” for college students asked to read Grimm’s fairy tales for class.

Now that said, I should point out that many of Grimm’s fairy tales — in their un-bowdlerized form, that is — are genuinely terrifying:  if one is five years old.

I remember being quite frightened by some of the darker fairy tales myself, but that, of course, is the entire point of the things:  they’re cautionary tales for children.  Just take Hansel & Gretel as an example:  don’t wander away from the house unaccompanied, or bad things will happen to you.  (I bet that young Miss Bambridge’s parents regret never having read that  story to their daughter during her childhood.)

But that supposed adults — university students, no less — who can vote, drive and buy alcohol (sometimes all at the same time) should require precautionary warnings before reading Grimm’s Fairy Tales ?  Just think:  some day these little weenies may be running countries and corporations.

Thankfully, by that time I should be dead.

And Back We Go Again

Two-Minute Hate

It’s not often that I agree with the doings of the foul European Union bureaucrats, but I see that they’ve just voted to do away with daylight savings time.  And as we’re coming up to the day (next Sunday morning) where we set the clocks back to Standard Time (where they bloody should be), I gaze across the Atlantic with something approaching envy — or rather, I will next year when DST becomes a thing here again.

Of course, this being Euroland, some people are going to be inconvenienced:

If member states give it the go ahead, EU countries will no longer put their clocks back in autumn and forward in spring.  But this would mean a time zone difference between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, with the province still adhering to Greenwich Mean Time and British Summer Time.

As if the Irish need a way to cock their lives up any further… in discussing the matter with Mr. Free Market during our regular Sunday night drunken phone call, his suggestion is to let the Micks have one time zone (either one, no matter), after pouring a boatload of guns and munitions into the hands of the Northern Irish DUP, and let them all fight it out among themselves, while the rest of Britain sits aside in (to coin a phrase) splendid isolation.

If they’re going to fight about a version of Christianity, they may as well fight over an artificial timekeeping system, too.

Snowflake Report

Freaks & Loonies, Pussification Parade, Seen On Campus

Good grief, why bother to go if clapping is going to intimidate you?

Snowflake students at Oxford University are the latest to demand that clapping should be banned because applause noise can trigger anxiety and want ‘jazz hands’ to be used instead.
The idea for a British sign language alternative for clapping involving the waving of hands was put forward at the student union’s first meeting of the year on Tuesday.
Sabbatical Officers Roisin McCallion, Vice President for Welfare and Equal Opportunity and Ebie Edwards Cole, Chair for Oxford SU Disabilities Campaign, successfully passed the motion to mandate the encouragement of silent clapping.

My suggestion is that for “clapping”, substitute “slapping”, but no doubt some fainting fairy is going to have a problem with that too.  And if the noise of clapping triggers that much anxiety in them, I wonder how they’d react to gunshots.

And note the caption for a couple of the pics:

Sabbatical Officers Roisin McCallion (left), Vice President for Welfare and Equal Opportunity and Ebie Edwards Cole (right), Chair for Oxford SU Disabilities Campaign, successfully passed the motion to mandate the encouragement of silent clapping

Yep, that’s what education is all about.  “Sabbatical Officer and VP Welfare and Equal Opportunity”, my aching ass.

And to think that one of my greatest dreams once was to attend Oxford.

The 100

Music

Let’s face it:  Rolling Stone  magazine was always awful.  I think it was them Frank Zappa was talking about when he characterized their writing as “people who can’t write, interviewing people who can’t talk, aimed at people who can’t read.”  (I still miss Frank, a lot, as much for his intellect as for his music.)

RS‘s latest attempt at a “greatest” list (of singers) is a typical example:  muddled, ignorant and open to ridicule.

The muddle is easy:  they attempted to combine several genres of singing — rock, r&B, blues etc. — but while there may be some crossover in those particular ones, it falls completely on its face if you try to include people like Sinatra and Mel Torme, especially when it comes to ranking  the singers.  The muddle is also ignorant of actual vocal quality — and even worse if one tries to include “iconic” as part of it.  There are singers of extraordinary quality (such as Paul Rodgers of Free/Bad Company) who don’t have iconic tonality, and “ordinary” singers of limited range (like Ozzy Osbourne) who almost define an entire genre.  You can’t attempt to rank Rodgers and Ozzy against each other because they are two totally different singers, albeit in more or less similar genres of music.  Now rank Rodgers against Aretha Franklin, which the hapless Stoners did.  It is, as they say, to laugh.  (And by the way:  any compendium list of 100 singers which does not include Ian Gillan of Deep Purple or Steve Marriot of Humble Pie — to name just a couple which caught, or rather didn’t catch my eye —  is fatally flawed.)

Each genre of music requires a different kind of voice, and very few singers can cross over without failing.  And a singer’s inclusion in whatever genre is horribly personal, in any event.  (In the “jazz crooners” club, for example, Harry Connick Jr. is an infinitely-better singer than Sinatra, but without Sinatra there would likely be  no jazz crooners club.  YMMV.)

So Rolling Stone should have broken up the list into genres, just for starters, with the first being the aforementioned “iconic”voices — those which defined the genre — and then some attempt at vocal quality if they’re to be ranked at all.

I’m not going to do that, at least, not today.  But here’s an example of ten of my favorite Rock vocalists in no special order, just as I think of them:

Robert Plant (Zep)
Joe Cocker
Paul Rodgers (Free, Bad Company)
Cilla Black
Graham Bonnet (Marbles, Rainbow)
Stephen Stills
David Bowie
Freddie Mercury
Ann Wilson (Heart)
Ian Gillan (Deep Purple)

And just for the hell of it, ten from R&B/soul, likewise unranked:  

Otis Redding
Wilson Pickett
Aretha Franklin
Joe Tex
Tina Turner (who could equally have been classified under Rock)
Al Green
Ella Fitzgerald
Sam Moore
Lionel Ritchie
Etta James

And both lists could change tomorrow.