Quote Of The Day

From the Z-man:

“[E]galitarianism inevitably flips the natural order on its head, elevating the bottom over all else.  The ideological enforcers in the human resource department are no different from the ideological enforcers in communism.  These people are not selected for their skill, but their stupidity.  They are too stupid to contemplate what they are doing.  Instead, they puff out their chests and stiffen their backs for having memorized the latest party fads.”

Next time you have any  dealings with some self-important H.R. flunky, feel free to use the parts of the above which are appropriate, because it’s absolutely true.  Totalitarianism doesn’t run on evil, but on the stupidity of its apparatchiks.

Annoying Junk

I’ve recently been going through my Inbox, deleting and unsubscribing from various news feeds.  Why?

Because while I like having news delivered to me, I hate it when I get an email from a news organization that contains not news but something that, if followed to its intended conclusion, will involve money leaving my bank account for someone else’s.

The org that triggered this one was either Washington Times or Patriots4Truth  (can’t be bothered to look up which, as I nuked both), which initially promised good things but soon degenerated into spam delivery services.  The WT  actually has sent me some interesting reports, but the spam : content ratio is hopelessly overcome by the former.  So:  tchuss.

And FFS:  if I do subscribe to your feed, and you send me a link to a serious article, could you at least do away with the need to log into your poxy site when I get there? You called me at my email address.  (Which is why I seldom read much at the otherwise-decent Epoch Times.)

And by the way, all those people who want to pay me money to publish articles on this website?  Fuck off.

In the first place, I don’t do guest posts, ever.  In the second, in only a very few instances are the organizations ones that I would even be remotely interested in supporting (by linking to their articles or websites).

A good example was one which said something like, “We LOVE your website, and especially [link to a post about travel] !  We’d love to publish an article which feeds off that post, as we suspect that your readers are pretty much the same as ours!  And we’ll pay you $50!”

Right:  considering that I equate going on a cruise liner to some Mexican port with being strapped into a dentist’s chair for ten days… I don’t think so, Scooter.  And the online casino sites…?  Give me strength.

Now, I don’t even bother opening their bullshit letters.  I see them in the Inbox, and delete them unread.  Then I’ll get a “follow-up” letter which is also ignored.  (If a third letter then comes in, I respond with vitriol, foul language and ALLCAPS.)

My email activity is nowhere close to what it used to be in Ye Olde Blogginge Days (around 400-500 emails from Readers daily back then), but it’s still pretty high (thankee for all the kind words, btw, and keep ’em coming because I love to hear from y’all).  But I have to delete around a hundred bullshit emails a day, which bugs me only because it takes time to answer the genuine correspondence — which is why it sometimes takes me ages to respond, and why sometimes a letter will fall through the cracks, so to speak, mistakenly deleted and collateral damage in my irritated frenzy of spam deletion.  So write away, guys.

All the rest can FOAD.

Speedbump #279

From Townhall we get Kurt Schlicter, who is a reasonably good polemicist, as polemicists go.  All goes well with his latest piece, until this point:

Things are a mess, and the Democrats are doing everything they can to make them messier. They are holding onto their precious pangolin pandemic panic like Brian Stelter grips a pie, ferociously fighting to keep hope dying by denying our kids school and millions of us a livelihood, all to eek out a win in November.

What, are we five years old, and using phonetic spelling?

THE WORD IS “EKE“, NOT “EEK”.   FFS, IT’S A WORD CONTAINING ONLY THREE LETTERS. HOW DIFFICULT CAN IT BE TO GET THEM IN THE RIGHT ORDER?

Do they even have editors at Townhall ?

Missing Boolets

Reader JD sends me this little snippet:

Germany’s armed forces, the Bundeswehr, has confirmed it is missing more than 60,000 rounds of ammunition.

…or, about the same number of rounds we expended in a single afternoon at a Nation Of Riflemen shoot a dozen years ago.  But here’s the not-so fun part:

Another 48,000 rounds from an elite special unit with links to right-wing extremism are also unaccounted for.

Just so we’re all clear on what these media assholes are implying:  a study taken a while ago showed that a few members of Krautland’s G9 Special Forces group were — gasp! — of a conservative bent.  None were actually ever proven to be members of any right-wing extremist groups, it’s just that some of their opinions were the same as those of the BLM (Kraut wing — they’re a neo-Nazi crowd, not Commies like our version).

What DW  is implying, therefore, is not that their army and SF are careless with ammo, or that they’re not accounting for their ammo properly;  they’re hinting that some of their soldiers may be shipping ammo to neo-Nazi groups.

There’s fuck-all evidence that any of this is happening, of course:  it’s just part of the leftwing media agitprop.  As the Emperor Misha has so rightly stated:

Rope.  Tree.  Journalist.  Some assembly required.

And They’re The Opposite

Both New Wife and I had to deal with this kind of shit before in South Africa.  Every time we insisted on punctuality, we were told to observe “Africa Time”, which makes “mañana” or “domani” look positively hidebound.  Appointment times are simply guidelines, and meeting times wild approximations, but always, always on the late side.  (I’ve always suggested that if these pricks really want to go onto Africa Time, then their salaries can be paid anytime their employer feels like it, ditto welfare payments, and visits to the ER at a hospital would involve a six- to eight-hour wait, regardless of emergency.  Also, bus service would be sporadic, and stores can be opened and closed whenever the proprietors feel like it.)

Here’s what I’m talking about, in part:

The National African American History Museum suggests being on time, self-reliance, avoidance of conflict and intimacy, and rugged individualism are markers of “whiteness.”

So I guess that “non-whiteness (actually, Black)” markers would be:  extreme tardiness, dependence on others (especially government), conflict-seeking and herd behavior.  (I’m not going to touch “intimacy”, although I would suggest that judging from the unwed motherhood statistics among Blacks, they probably need to avoid it a lot more.)

Sorry, but I’m afraid all that’s not American, but African — and we are not Africa.

Of course, these Marxist fuckers want to turn us into Africa (and they already have, in places like Minneapolis), but that’s just not gonna happen.

All this nonsense is just so wrong, I can barely begin to refute it.

I can’t wait for November.

Darwin Tourism

I see that some idiot was trapped on a volcano, can’t be rescued and will no doubt be dead by the time you read this:

A tourist is stuck close to the crater of the highest active volcano in Eurasia with rescuers unable to reach him by foot or helicopter.
The ailing man is stranded some 650ft below the rim of the giant 15,580 ft Klyuchevskaya Sopka in Russia’s Kamchatka peninsula.
Spewing volcanic activity and a melting high-altitude glacier is preventing rescuers getting close to the tourist, aged 35.
A helicopter bid to lower rescuers onto the rim of the volcano so they could climb down to the man had to be aborted due to extreme toxic gas and vapour emissions and atrocious weather.

I have the same reaction to this as when some mope is eaten by a shark while swimming among a bunch of them, or when some “adventurer” falls off a mountain while climbing it “because it was there”:  they were asking for trouble.

I have a simple policy when it comes to travel:  don’t do stupid shit that will endanger your life, and don’t go to dangerous places (e.g. an active volcano, a shark-infested lagoon or any Middle Eastern- or primitive Third World country, some overlap).

That’s my own personal policy;  yours may differ in that you get off on danger or want to see exotic (read: shithole) places and so on.  I am never going to be bitten by a shark, for instance, because my idea of a maritime adventure is sitting in a dockside restaurant in Cannes or Boothbay Harbor drinking a fine wine and eating the local delicacy — not swimming in a sea full of riptides and stuff with spikes or sharp teeth.  Of course, said restaurants are not without their own set of perils, e.g. prices where you need a magnifying glass to find the decimal point, scrofulous Frenchmen or New Englanders and so on, but on the whole, the mortal peril thereof is somewhat lower than coming face to face with a fucking tiger shark in its own habitat.

Call me a coward, or “unadventurous” if you will, but I will point out that I was once surrounded by Puerto Rican gangsters in Hell’s Kitchen simply because I had an urge for a pastrami sandwich from the local deli.  (That story for another time.)  So I’m not that much of a coward, and sometimes there is a decent risk/reward balance.

But the reward of a wonderful deli sandwich is far greater than a “look, I’m standing on the crater of an erupting volcano” moment, and in any event, I’d rather risk death by choking while trying to inhale the entire sandwich than knowing I’m going to be cooked alive by molten lava.

Your mileage may vary, of course, but you’re not going to change my mind.