Doing Nothing

I am curious to see My Readers’ response to this bit of bastardy, bureaucracy and pussification:

A homeowner was left disgusted after a stranger parked their Range Rover on his driveway for days.
Zekarias Haile, who lives a five-minute drive from Manchester Airport, said he waited four days for the owner of the grey car to return and pick it up. The 51-year-old man woke to find it abandoned on his driveway on Thursday and he suspects the cheeky owner had jetted off for a holiday from the nearby Jet2.com and Ryanair hub.
The father-of-two, who lives in Wythenshawe, Manchester, said: “Someone, without my permission, had put the car there and they didn’t care. I just went out and it was there. Then it was there Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. On Monday morning when we woke up it was gone. I was very angry but I resisted doing anything to the car – just. I definitely didn’t feel alright about it. We couldn’t access our garden and we couldn’t take out our bins.”
Zekarias, a lecturer in Engineering at a college, called the police but was told it was not a criminal offence and there was nothing they could do. They said Zekarias’ car, parked on the road, wasn’t being blocked in so their hands were tied.

Okay, firstly:  what kind of asshole parks his car in another guy’s driveway and just takes off?

Secondly:   what kind of pussified man does nothing about the situation for four whole days?

Thirdly:  what kind of police force won’t have the car towed?

Finally, what would you have done in a similar situation?

Amateur Hour

Oh gawd, it’s that time when everyone has to wear Teh Green, affect stupid Oirish accents while singing the revolting “Wild Irish Rose”, and drink vast quantities of Guinness.

In other words:  watch out on the roads, because there are going to be a whole lot of amateur drunks out there.

Worse still, because St. Paodrioiaich’s Day falls in a Thursday, the whole nonsense may be carried over till tomorrow night.


Update:  Oy.

Facing Up To Reality

Boy, it’s all very well to have those Green Dreams of making us all free of Evil Oil&GasCorp International, but when someone punches you in the nose and says, “No more oil!” you’d have to be completely stupid to keep on with the foolishness.  Take Germany, for example:

Germany is considering reopening some of its decommissioned coal power plants in the hopes of getting a handle on its ongoing energy crisis.  The reopening of shuttered plants is seen as an option as the country struggles to ween itself off of its addiction to Russian fossil fuels.

However:

However, the RWE head was keen to emphasise that no U-turn on the phasing out of fossil fuels was occurring, and that the stop-gap measures being suggested did not represent a rollback of the country’s climate change plans.
“It’s not a backwards roll, but at most a step aside for a limited time,” the energy Tsar said.

Uh huh.  Till the next crisis, when they’ll have to step aside again, and again, and again, when that back-and-forth is going to resemble a country two-step dance competition.

Morons.  And lest we forget, most of their problem is being caused by their panicked overreaction to the Fukushima meltdown and the resulting knee-jerk shutdown of all their own nuke power plants.  Morons times two.

I thought Germans were supposed to be pragmatic and logical, but clearly I’ve been misinformed.

Fun With The Bureaucracy

Executive Summary:

British mother worries that her incel loser son may be dangerous, and reports him to the rozzers under the Prevent Terrorism thing.
Rozzers, of course, are doubtless too busy chasing down racists and other hurtful people on Twitter, so they sit on it.
Incel Boy gets his shotgun license and shotgun back because rozzers did nothing to stop him getting one.  (Added stupidity:  it had previously been revoked and his shotgun taken away after Incel Boy assaulted a couple in a park the year before.)
Incel Boy takes newly-reissued shotgun, then shoots and kills his mother and three other people, as well as a three-year-old girl.
In the only good news of the day, Incel Boy eats his shotgun muzzle before the rozzers can arrive.

Needless to say, there will be no consequences for this atrocity for the incompetent assholes in the bureaucracy — okay, maybe a note in their HR docket, but not the public stoning that one would expect and enjoy.

Anytime Democrats and other associated filth start blathering about “commonsense” gun laws, remember this tragic incident.

Stupid Times Two

From some newsletter comes this snippet:

Apart from the delicious irony (not to mention the blatant hypocrisy) of a Democrat politician being caught with a gun where he shouldn’t, there’s also the rank stupidity of forgetting that you have a gun in a bag which you know is going to be X-rayed at the airport.

That said, in studying Cooper’s official record, he doesn’t seem to be as bad as the other Californian Democrat snakes as far as guns are concerned.  His only “anti-gun” position seems to be his opposition to home-made guns (the stupidly-named “ghost guns” the Democrats are always moaning about).  Likewise, his district is a mix of Sacramento suburb (Elk Grove) and a ton of farmland stretching all the way south to Lodi and Galt, so it’s fair to assume that he’s not going to be as strident an anti-gun asshole as his Democrat buddies in San Francisco and L.A.

I would be really curious, though, to see his position on concealed carry.  Perhaps my few CA Readers can help me on this point.

Lever Monstrosity

Reader John C sends me a pic (with all sorts of apologies) and a plaintive cry of “How can anyone do that to a lever gun?”

Strangely enough, I don’t think it’s completely horrible, especially given the times we live in.  If you take away the lever action and replace it with a bolt action, it becomes a simple “chassis” rifle, e.g.

Is it ugly?  Oh hell yes, and I’ve made my feelings clear about this plastic nonsense on many an occasion.

If we are going to level criticism at the chassis lever rifle (CLR), it would be this:  note that while the CLR has a bipod, it’s fitted with a red-dot sight and not with a scope — and for good reason, because at its heart, the primary terrain of the lever rifle is in the deep woods, where a scope is more often than not counterproductive in that it can limit the shooter’s field of vision.

The second criticism is this:  removing the standard wood stock and adding a bipod and chassis must add weight to the rifle, which therefore takes away the lever rifle’s most important features:  its lightness and handiness.

All that said, I don’t have a problem with adding a bipod to a lever rifle;  there are times when I, for one, would have found it quite useful — i.e. when faced with a 100-plus yard shot across a clearing in the woods.

(As an aside, if you do a search for “lever rifle with bipod”, there are precious few pics thereof, which might mean something.)

Lastly, I would suggest that unless the bipod is extended quite substantially (as in the above pic), the downward drop of the lever will slam on the ground and prevent the action from cycling properly.  Shooting from prone, therefore, would be awkward.

Also, I quite like the idea of adding a red dot sight to a lever rifle, although it compromises the clean, classic shape of the thing.

So yes, the chassis lever rifle is as ugly as Nancy Pelosi with a hangover, and definitely falls foul of the maxim that “even if you can do something, there’s no reason why you should.  Frankly, though, I think its impracticality is more of a reason why it should be ignored with extreme prejudice.