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.
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.
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.
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:
(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.
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.
I’m getting heartily sick of people yammering on about America’s “gun culture” (usually spoken in terms of horror and disparagement).
It’s not a “gun” culture; it’s a culture of self-reliance . For the same reason, we’re also a “car” culture, because while guns give us freedom (in general), cars give us freedom of movement. Just as we’re not wholly dependent on the State to protect us thanks to our guns, with our cars we’re also free to move around freely, not dependent on Government to supply us with transport.
Some time ago, I laughed at the way that liberal “intellectuals” (who are neither) and European weenies used “cowboys” as an epithet — little realizing that the cowboy embodies everything we true Americans love about our society: he’s on a horse (independent transport), and being armed, he doesn’t need the sheriff to look after him. Cowboys, by the way, were and are largely self-employed, moving from one ranch to another as need for the cattle roundups and drives changes — and we all know that the above-mentioned bastards would prefer that we all work a.) for the State, or at least b.) for companies and institutions (like colleges) that are under the control of the State. (The first system is Communism and the second is Fascism, just so we’re all clear on this topic.)
So when misguided children and malevolent gun-confiscators talk about doing away with the “gun culture”, please be aware that what they’re really talking about is making us all dependent on, and subservient to the State for our protection. For the kids, that’s an unintended outcome because, duh, they’re kids and can’t think past the next hour; and for the confiscators and their ilk, that’s the intended outcome, as per Marx and Mussolini.
The same, by the way, is also true of people who want to do away with cars and make us all use public transport, thus taking away our freedom of movement and subjecting it to government diktat. (It’s another reason why I think “driverless” cars are going to prove to be an abomination — giving up driving means giving up control of your own movements, eventually. Just watch.)
I once wrote that I don’t just want the freedom to bear arms, I want everything that goes along with it: responsibility, personal safety, freedom from government control, the whole damn thing. But what that really means is that I want to be part of a culture of self-reliance. And in the spirit of that culture, allow me to post the following pics:
…or if others feel exactly as I do, but would prefer to be All-American:
That’s my dream, and a pox on those who would deny me that dream, whatever their oh-so noble intentions.
Dramatis personae, from top:
All four are, if you’ll pardon the expression, loin-stirrers for us self-reliant types — and objects of horror and loathing to the weenies (who would go with *911 and an auto-drive Prius).
I’m pretty sure I can guess which option my Loyal Readers would choose.