Tag: Stupid people

Kinder, Gentler, Stupider

Mocking Furriners, Modernism

From Scottishland comes this drivel:

Scotland seeks to ban words like ‘addict’ and ‘alcoholic’ in plan to tackle drug deaths

…to be replaced by?

New guidance published online calls for other words such as “junkie”, “clean” and “substance abuse” to be shunned in favour of “person with problematic drug use”, “person who has stopped using drugs” and “substance use”, respectively.

Nothing like a change in terminology to address the “problem” of drug deaths.

What amuses me about this bureaucratic bowdlerism is that the Scots are renowned for being among the plainest-speaking people on the planet — beating out even Australians — with their often-withering commentary about people and life in general.  (Listen to any Billy Connolly rant, for example, to get a taste.)

Imagine Billy describing a junkie using the above terms…

Yeah, We Knew That All Along

Lies and Untruths, Watermelons, Weather

From this article, the conclusion:

The fake climate catastrophe has spawned a fake energy paradigm – replacing fossil fuels with wind and solar electricity. Wind and solar are claimed to be cheaper than traditional sources of electricity but non-fake accounting reveals that wind or solar electricity costs five or even ten times more than traditional electricity, exclusive, of course, of government subsidies and mandates. The reason it costs so much is that the erratic nature of wind and solar requires maintaining the traditional electricity generating system intact and ready to operate when wind and solar fail. Solar fails every night, every cloudy day, and more often in winter. Wind fails at random times, or somewhat predictable times, and often has a seasonal cycle. If the renewable energy advocates were logical, they would be advocating for nuclear. Nuclear is reliable and does not produce CO2.
Climate change and wind and solar electricity are a snipe hunts, diverting the country from serious problems in favor of imaginary problems with imaginary solutions that enrich the promoters and their political friends with status and money.

So what is that thing we knew all along?   (And by “we”, I mean I and the Readers of this website.)

No climate model — not one, ever — has ever predicted the future reliably, even when the algorithms have been tweaked to the point where random data input yields exactly the same results.  Aggregating (“unifying”) multiple models haven’t done so either.

Now read the article for the complete story.

Always Has Been

Law and Order

In one of his customary well-reasoned comments, Longtime Reader GMC makes this statement (discussing this post):

“If citizens do not have faith that the State will hold up its end of the social contract, they will take matters into their own hands.”

Will, and should.

My only corollary to this is a reminder that in answer to all those who wail about people “taking the law into their own hands” (not the same as the above, but parallel to it), we have to note that the law has never left our hands.  The law is not the sole preserve of lawyers and judges, but of the People in general (a point that GMC likewise addresses in his comment about jury nullification).  Likewise, the enforcement of the law is deputized by the People to agents of the State — and if said agents are incapable of or unwilling to perform that responsibility, the the People have not only a right but a duty to take the enforcement back into their own hands.

The law belongs to us, We The People, not to all its priests and Sanhedrin, and even less so to its enforcers — despite all their delusions to the contrary.

Sue Them Out Of Existence

Anti-Gun Nannies, The Gun Thing

…Ford, that is, after the Waukesha incident where (according to the NYT) an SUV killed several people in a Christmas parade.

Ford is clearly responsible for the criminal misuse of its product. Yes, the company is selling a legal product through legal means, but it is ultimately Ford’s duty and moral obligation to ensure that criminals or those with potential future criminal intent are not able to acquire its products, whether through a Ford dealership, a used car dealer, a private party sale, or even by theft.

Silly, is it?  Change “Ford” to “Remington” or “Colt”, and “car” to “gun” — and this is precisely what the media and Left are advocating.

Evil bastards.

Accursed Menus

Business, Technology, Two-Minute Hate

Here’s a rant after my own heart:

I was puzzled, so I checked the website and got nowhere. The password I’d used for the account was suddenly not accepted.
So I phoned the number on the website. And got nowhere. This time the problem seemed to be my PIN.
Or maybe my account number. Or maybe my customer ID. Or my PCN number. Whatever that was. The recorded message didn’t really care. I gave up.
I had become the innocent victim of the new digital age in which the algorithm reigns supreme.
There was a time when a human being with a problem talked to another human being who helped to get it sorted. Those days are gone.
The lives of big companies and government officials are made so much easier if we customers or clients can be kept at arm’s length.

The online experience is bad enough — but when you dare to call the “Customer Care” (ha!) telephone number, that’s really when the SHTF.

A combination of the two above means that I will be changing my Medicare supplemental insurer, because it seems to be the only way I can punish these assholes for their bovine indifference to my situation.

I’ll let Humphrys finish this rant:

Increasingly, we are being deprived of even a semblance of what we once thought of as customer service.
We are left talking to a computer screen behind which sits not another human being, but an algorithm. Or a recorded telephone announcement that may or may not respond to our pleas for help.
It’s as though any human compassion in the relationship between customer and provider has simply disappeared. And that’s very sad.

Or enraging.  Ten guesses which side I’m on.