Tag: Stupid people

We Know What’s Best For You #2,572

Gummint

In future, every time someone suggests that the “government” should look after people’s needs, I am going to quote this story:

Thousands of school children in Rio de Janeiro have been left bitterly disappointed this Easter after council nutritionists replaced their traditional gift of a chocolate egg with a bag of rotting carrots following a major food ordering blunder.
Instead of buying 2,300 kilos of carrots, bungling officials mistakenly put a decimal in the wrong place and purchased a whopping 23,000 kilos, leading to a massive budget overspend of £15,860 (74,000 reais), ten times higher than the normal tab.

Let me count the ways:

  1. The “government” (doesn’t matter which branch) decided that kids would be better off getting carrots instead of chocolate treats, so they unilaterally changed the tradition because health. (Note the “we know what’s best for you” arrogance.)
  2. The same “government” no doubt decided on carrots because the vegetable needs no preparation, just washing. Also, carrots have a long shelf life before rotting — unless one stores them in plastic bags, which reduces the shelf life by 50% — more if stored in a warm, damp climate (such as can be found in, say, Brazil).
  3. The old “decimal place” problem: stupidity compounded by lack of oversight or controls.
  4. The article suggests that the replacement of Easter eggs with carrots was to cover up the ordering cock-up. Given that the carrots were sent in bagged portions and not in bulk makes me skeptical, ditto the inclusion of recipes for carrot cake etc. in the bags.

Frankly, I’m amazed they didn’t send fresh eggs instead of Easter eggs. In baggies.

Then we have yet another example of stupidity, this time at the local level:

Staff were left in a pickle as they tried to devise ways of getting rid of the mega-supply which needed to be eaten before the vegetables went off.

Milo Minderbinder’s chocolate-covered cotton comes to mind. Had I been on staff, I would have sent the bags of rotting carrots back to the council’s offices, to make it their problem. But you can’t expect any such initiative from government functionaries like school administrators because a.) they’re stupid and b.) they’re too timid to lash out at moronic managers.

Had I been a student, I’d have hidden the rotting carrots somewhere in the school principal’s office, to let him deal with the eventual smell. But that’s just me. (And in case anyone’s still alive from that time, I didn’t do it.)

The cynic in me also wants to ask whether any of the councilors owns a carrot farm and couldn’t sell his surplus, but I’m pretty sure that even such simple corruption may be beyond these idiots.

The best part of this comes at the end, when discussing the overspend:

The scandal comes at a time when thousands of council workers have been waiting for months for back-dated payments of late salaries.

One wonders of anyone will be fired for this gross incompetence… oh, who are we kidding? It’s government.

Quote Of The Day

QOTD

From Glenn Reynolds:

“Anti-gun groups have lots of money, lots of organization, and lots and lots of media help. What they don’t have is lots of supporters. “

…a.k.a. voters, which is what drives them crazy when they do all their “Ban this! and ban that!” screaming and nothing happens.

Unwanted Changes

Drive Time

I hate change.

This should come as no surprise to longtime Readers of my fevered rantings, most especially to Mr. Free Market who, while we were on a drive trip in Britishland, punctured one of my rants against ugly automotive modernity with the comment: “Basically, Kim, you’d be quite happy if cars looked the same as they did in the 1950s and 1960s.”

I’ve forgotten my actual response to this barb, but “Fuck, yeah!” would not be an inaccurate paraphrase.

So when I heard that Volkswagen (you know, the immoral bastards who brought you doctored emissions so as to sell more diesel-engined cars) announced that they were going to kill off the New Beetle, I didn’t care. I didn’t care because the New Beetle was, easily, one of the most revolting car designs ever inflicted on the public road. Compared to the older model, it looked like some retarded child’s experiment with Play-Doh, viz.:

Now granted, the old Bug was pig-ugly too, but at least it wasn’t pretentious — it was, as its name suggests, a People’s Car: cheap and reliable (almost unbreakable) and even a little eclectic, because while the auto industry was modernizing all around it, the old Beetle barely changed. The less said about its foul spawn, the better. (Ditto the Mini, which I’ve discussed before and of which pretty much the same can be said.)

So I don’t care about VW whacking the Beetle. I am furthermore unsurprised that they were surprised that the New Beetle never ever achieved the sales of the old girl. Because they’re marketing idiots. They thought that they could fool us Beetle lovers with some modernized monstrosity with a few cosmetic nods to the original, and we’d fall all over ourselves to buy this ugly piece of shit.

And speaking of German marketing stupidity: I see that VW’s sibling Audi has decided that it will soon stop making the excellent Audi 8 with a W12 engine option. I wonder when these fucking morons in what passes for a marketing department at Audi will realize that there will always be a customer segment of drivers who love 12-cylinder engines. The article notes that Bentley is not going to give up their W12, and car buffs will just chuckle because the W12 found in both the A8 and the Bentley is the engine designed by… VW, for their ill-fated Phaeton (a.k.a. “Piëch’s Folly”). What will happen (and you heard it here first) is that the people who love 12-cylinder engines in their luxury cars will,  rather than be content with the A8’s stepped-down V8, just buy ummmm… the Mercedes AMG S 65 (which, like the Bentley Flying Spur, costs about $100,000 more than the Audi A8 W12). Here’s the S 65:

…which quite frankly looks better than Audi’s blunt-nosed offering anyway. As nice as the AMG Mercedes looks, however, it’s still not as beautiful as one of its predecessors:

That’s a Mercedes 300 SC*, from 1954. Which takes me back to Mr. Free Market’s jibe.

Yes, you foul Brit toff: I would be perfectly happy if cars still looked like this.

*Before I get razzed: I know that the old Merc 300 used a 3-liter inline six-cylinder engine and not a V12. Didn’t need anything bigger, and anyway, the V12 engines of the time weren’t much good compared to today’s. But with the size of the 300’s engine compartment… is anyone at AMG listening? Nah, it’ll never happen. If Mercedes ever re-released the 300 SC it would probably look like today’s Maybach — i.e. even uglier than the new Beetle, and it would make women and small children scream as it passed by them in the street.

I don’t know why I bother.

OMG Rocks?

Bad News, Seen On Campus

Wait… so schools are now advocating bringing rocks to a gunfight?

A Pennsylvania school district is arming classrooms with buckets of rocks as a last-ditch defense against mass shooters.
David Helsel, superintendent of the Blue Mountain School District in Schuylkill County, told ABC News on Friday that every elementary, middle and high school classroom in the district is stocked with a 5-gallon bucket full of river stones for students and teachers to pelt an armed intruder.
“We’ve been trying to be proactive just in case,” Mr. Helsel said. “How can you aim a gun if you’re being pelted with rocks?”

I’m not even going to touch the obvious stupidity in this strategy.

However, when just a week ago the Army put out a statement that new recruits are unable to throw hand grenades further than a few yards because so few fathers can be bothered to play catch with their sons these days… good grief, what a bunch of pussies.

Liberal Dreams

Africa

It looks as though my advice to Let Africa Sink has been comprehensively ignored by ultra-liberal Ex-BritPM Tony Blair (OMG, not him again), who is suggesting that Moar Foreign Aid will fix Africa’s problems. (Predictably, in the manner of socialists everywhere, if their system fails, the answer is to do it again, only harder.) This is recommended despite the history of foreign aid sent to Africa:

This time, however, the loathsome Blair seems to have acknowledged the failure of the West’s foreign aid policies (tacitly, at least), and has therefore added a new wrinkle: more foreign aid, plus… recolonization. Details of this lunacy can be found here — and fair warning, it is a long, long read. However, it’s worth the hassle, because in explaining Blair’s case for aid plus recolonization, the article contains a massive number of graphs and charts which outline, in extraordinary detail, just how badly and how comprehensively the African continent has managed to fuck things up. Sample (from many such), which shows what actually happens to most foreign aid:

Blair’s answer, which is wonderful, can be summarized as follows:

  • We Shall Run Your Governments
  • We Shall Run Your Infrastructure
  • We Shall Run Your Economies
  • We Shall Run Your Education and Health
  • We Shall Colonize You by Bringing You Here

(The last, by the way, has already been liberal governments’ policy for decades.)

Given liberal / socialist Western governments’ own track records in running government, infrastructure, the economy, education and health, a sensible African would run from both Blair’s suggestions and their existing predicament. (But that assumes that anyone’s sensible over there, which is a stretch.)

The most breathtaking hypothesis put forward in the article comes right at the end.

“What if Africa really is a continent inhabited by those to whom natural selection has bequeathed a different behavioral heritage than the rest of the planet?”

For the mealy-mouthed phrase “bequeathed different behavioral heritage“, substitute the more realistic “rendered incapable of self-government“.

I’d suggest that Blair read Kipling’s trenchant and disillusioned poem, The White Man’s Burden, which says quite plainly that regardless of all the West’s good intentions and efforts, the Third World will nevertheless sink into the pit. But no doubt, Blair was taught that Kipling was an eeeevil imperialist and should therefore be ignored.

So, to sum up our opposing positions:

“The state of Africa is a scar on the conscience of the world [and we have to help them].” — Tony Blair

“It’s their own fucking fault. Let Africa sink.” — Kim du Toit

Feel free to disagree with me. But I have history on my side.

Many, many thanks to Reader Jason R, who got this ball rolling by sending me the link to the Those Who Can See article.

Terrorists And Their Organizations

Two-Minute Hate

To paraphrase one of our DFW morning drive-time radio hosts, every time a Democrat politician opens his mouth, there’s a 99% chance of asshole.

Such is the case with CTGov Dannell Malloy, who suggests that the NRA has become a terrorist organization. How so?

“They act, quite frankly, in some cases as a terrorist organization. You want to make safer guns? We will boycott your company. That’s who they are. That’s what they do.”

I guess this liberal tool has forgotten how the Left has called for boycotts of companies and their products who endorse or support activities that the Left finds repugnant. [list of 2,000 such instances omitted]  So this is what passes for “terrorism” in this idiot’s mind?

But that’s not the main point of this post. This is.

So, Governor Asshole of Connecticut: I’m a member of the NRA. Am I a terrorist, by your definition? 

Fuck you. When I was in the Army, we were fighting terrorists — real terrorists who planted landmines on country roads and massacred whole villages —  long before it became cool to do so. Hell, we were doing that while you were still a glint in your Daddy’s drunken eye, you little pissant. So again, fuck you; and fuck your facile little clever-dick sound-bites.

We now return to our regular programming. Oh wait: this is our regular programming.

Carry on.