Tag: Stupid people

“Take Away Their Guns”

Bad News, Numbers & Statistics

…and they’ll just use something else. Such as knives:

London saw four fatal stabbings on New Year’s Eve, taking the total of such knifings in the capital to 80 for the whole of 2017.
And the use of knives in general is now a serious problem all over the country. In June 2017, the Office for National Statistics listed thousands of ‘blade offences’ in the previous 12 months, including 214 killings, 391 attempted murders, 438 rapes, 182 other sexual assaults, and 14,429 robberies.
There were also more than 18,500 assaults involving an injury or intent to inflict harm with a blade and 2,816 threats to kill with a knife.

So much for taking away guns to reduce crime. But that’s not the worst part of the linked article. This is:

I have long known that crimes which would once have been classified as murders are often now downgraded to ‘manslaughter’. This is done to save money and time, and to make it easier to release the culprits early to stop the prisons from bursting. But in most cases it is legally difficult to point this out.
The Johnson case is different. He is a murderer, but people who should be alive are now dead because he was wrongly convicted of a lesser crime.
In 1981, Johnson pushed his wife Yvonne off the balcony of their ninth-floor flat, after first hitting her with a vase and an ashtray. He was allowed to plead guilty to manslaughter on the grounds of ‘provocation’. She had, he said, been arguing with him.
She was, of course, not there to give her own version of who did the provoking. He was sentenced in 1982 to three years in prison. That’s right. Three years, though in those days it really meant three years. He was out by 1985.
In 1992 Johnson strangled another woman, Yvonne Bennett, with a belt. She had annoyed him by refusing to accept a box of chocolates which he had bought her to try to win back her affections.
He tried to hang himself from a tree, but the string snapped. String? Yes, string. He was much better at killing others than at killing himself. Doctors decided he was suffering from a ‘depressive illness’ and he was sent ‘indefinitely’ to a secure hospital.
Not indefinitely enough. He was out and under ‘psychiatric care’ after two years. He went on to kill a third woman, Angela Best, by beating her with a claw hammer and throttling her with a dressing-gown cord.
As after his second killing, he tried and failed to commit suicide afterwards, this time by jumping in front of a train.Now, having first tried the manslaughter plea again, on the grounds of ‘diminished responsibility’, he has pleaded guilty to murdering Angela Best.
His injuries from the attempted suicide have left him in a wheelchair, though I wouldn’t like to guarantee that he is harmless even now. Far too late, the courts have sentenced him to 26 years, which might just be enough.
Once, I would have said this was all evidence of a system which had lost all force since it stopped treating murder as a specially hideous crime. So it is. Once, I would have said that we should restore the death penalty for heinous murder. Now, I know this cause is lost. So I can only urge you to take care.
The law refuses to protect you. Those in charge of it lack the courage or the resolve to do so. Get used to it.

The next time some idiot tells you that the death penalty doesn’t prevent murders, feel free to use the above example to show that the death penalty applied to this asshole after his first murder would indeed have prevented two more.

Fortunately, we in the United States don’t have to “get used to it”; it’s our criminals who have to get used to the fact that a career of crime might be deadly — to themselves.

Carry a gun, and make sure you know how to use it. The life you save might well be your own, or of your loved ones. The life you take will be of no consequence to anyone except the goblin’s future victims.

Remember: when anyone asks you if your wallet is worth a life, remind them that that decision was not yours, but your assailant’s. He made the decision that your wallet was worth taking a life (yours), and all you did was go along with his decision, simply substituting his life for yours.

And be glad that you live in the U.S. and not in Britain, where you would face imprisonment for self-defense, instead of congratulations.

Warning Sign

Business

When I first saw this little foray into feminism, I was amused:

People who yearn to become entrepreneurs may find guidance at the new Feminist Business School, an online program that aims to help women launch businesses founded upon the theory of “feminine entrepreneurship” and “body-loving business practices.”

But it gets better:

The only faculty member of this school appears to be [its founder] Armbrust, who does not appear to have any direct business experience, but did take a few business classes at Portland Community College. She concedes that her program will not teach any direct business skills, such as bookkeeping or legal knowledge, but suggests that she may offer such a course in the future.

Now when you’ve all stopped that cis-male giggling (and you Lady Readers are included in this), there is one positive aspect to this unutterably stupid venture: if any manager sees a graduate of this “business school” in an employment interview, the warning bells should go off, because if the applicant should be hired, the company can look forward to not only an incompetent employee but to endless complaints and whining about patriarchal hegemony or whatever they call ordinary business practices these days.

So this “Professor” Armbrust has done us all a great favor; her students, not so much.

And Evergreen State “College” should be proud of themselves: they’ve made their institution an even bigger laughing-stock than before, if that’s even possible. Here’s their mission statement:

Evergreen emphasizes collaborative, interdisciplinary learning across significant differences. Our academic community engages students in defining and thinking critically about their learning. Evergreen supports and benefits from local and global commitment to social justice, diversity, environmental stewardship and service in the public interest.

Translated: you won’t get an education here, just liberal indoctrination. Enroll at your own risk.

Fuck Off Granddad, They Explained

Business

As a sexagenarian who has pretty much resigned himself to an employment future which consists of WalMart greeter or Uber driver, I read this little piece (found at Insty’s) with something of a mordant attitude:

A few weeks ago, Verizon placed an ad on Facebook to recruit applicants for a unit focused on financial planning and analysis. The ad showed a smiling, millennial-aged woman seated at a computer and promised that new hires could look forward to a rewarding career in which they would be “more than just a number.”
Some relevant numbers were not immediately evident. The promotion was set to run on the Facebook feeds of users 25 to 36 years old who lived in the nation’s capital, or had recently visited there, and had demonstrated an interest in finance. For a vast majority of the hundreds of millions of people who check Facebook every day, the ad did not exist.

In other words, they’re only interested in hiring younger people — no doubt because inexperienced young people don’t cost as much in salaries as experienced older people who might actually, you know, be productive on Day One.

Fine; it’s their business, let ’em hire who they want. When companies like Verizon discover that their future employees have the loyalty of dockside prostitutes and are not only ignorant of finance beyond their student debt, but insist on being accommodated in all their snowflake demands, the companies deserve everything that happens to them.

Older employees are not only more knowledgeable about the work, they’re also less demanding because they’ve walked this road many times before and understand how the world works.

For myself, I’m perfectly happy to try and find some kind of employment which makes me my own boss — the thought of working for Global MegaCorp Inc., with all its bullshit PC workplace regulations, makes me feel slightly ill. And by the way, Verizon is guilty of a bald-faced fucking lie in the above ad: all their employees below a certain level in the hierarchy are just numbers — witness how layoffs always refer to “headcount” which, lest anyone doesn’t know, is a number.

And just in case anyone from Global MegaCorp / Verizon happens to read this post, allow me to be completely honest with you: go fuck yourself.  I don’t need your pissy little job that badly, even though I could probably do it in my sleep. And frankly, if you don’t hire the best person for the job regardless of age, you’re even bigger fools than I thought you were.

And just FYI: I don’t read Faecesbook anyway.

Groucho’s Moustache

Beauty, Gratuitous Chick Pics

It’s all Phil Collins’s fault.

Perhaps I should explain myself.

Phil has a daughter named Lily who is a fashion model, and an extraordinarily beautiful girl she is, too:

However, she is distinguishable from most other girls by her signature feature, those thick, glossy eyebrows. And if there’s one thing we know about the fashion business, it’s that they slavishly copy anything that could be called “trendy” or “in” or whatever term they use to justify lemming behavior.

Yesterday I was riding on London’s Tube system, and across from me were sitting two girls of exquisite beauty — had they not been fuller-figured than the norm [2,000-word rant on the Anorexia Look deleted], I would have thought they were models. (I’d like to show a pic, but nowadays if you take an unsolicited photo of a woman, the next thing that happens will be you finding yourself spreadeagled on the ground while protesting to an unsympathetic audience of the fuzz that you’re not a stalker.)

However, both said beautiful Tube girls were (in my mind anyway) disfigured by having painted their eyebrows thicker — grotesquely so, like this:

…and in so doing, they’d transformed themselves into caricatures of Greek peasant women.

And forgive me, but the Greek peasant woman look doesn’t go well with blonde hair.

I would suggest that younger women take a pass on this particular trend, no matter how many fashion mags suggest that the simian look is the latest hot thing. What looks natural on Lily Collins looks freakish on everybody else — because no matter how good you think you look, all we see is that you’ve done a Groucho on your eyebrows (and hence the title of this post):

Of course, nobody’s going to listen to me. I just hope Phil Collins is satisfied.

Beta Royale

Men & Women

And so it begins… the pussification of Harry.

Prince Harry will not be taking part in the traditional royal Boxing Day shoot because he doesn’t want to upset his fiancee Meghan Markle. The 33-year-old was just 12 when he took part in his first festive shoot but has pulled out because Miss Markle is a keen animal rights campaigner. Miss Markle, 36, doesn’t like hunting and Prince Harry is said to have shocked gamekeepers at Sandringham after he informed them he won’t be there on December 26.

Couple of points need to be made, here.

I have it on good authority that Harry is an excellent shot, and as the article indicates, he’s been doing this for two decades — i.e. most of his life. Why should he care what this totty thinks about hunting? He’s a bloody royal, FFS, and she’s the one who gets the most out of their upcoming nuptials. Hell, he can get pretty much any woman he wants — and better-looking than her, for sure. (He certainly has in the past; here’s Cressida Bonas, for one.)

So why he has to accommodate this Markle woman’s silly nonsense is beyond me.

She’s a “part-time vegan” and an animal-rights activist, according to reports. Oh, isn’t that special. Well, he’s a member of a royal family, a decorated war veteran and a keen birdshooter, which I think is a lot more special than some two-a-penny divorced actress.

I never cared about this relationship one way or the other, because it’s none of my business and celebrity stuff bores me to tears. But I get truly irritated when a woman comes into a family with traditional values — and it’s hard to think of a family with more traditional values than Harry’s lot — and wants to make everyone change around her. Arrogant bint.

I always used to think that the penchant for royals to marry other royals (or at least nobility) was silly. But the more I see of it, the more I think it makes sense: the odds are always better if you marry into your own class. No good is going to come of this marriage; you heard it here first.