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Quote Of The Day

QOTD

From the Greatest Living Englishman:

The Clarkson’s Farm star admitted that he couldn’t understand how machines can ‘spot what’s happening in every part of your body, apart from your bottom’.

‘They can photograph your ventricles and every bit of your brain, but if they want to know what’s going on with your prostate, which lives in the anus, for some reason, the doctor has to put his finger in there. I can only assume it’s because he likes it.’ 

 As funny as it is, he makes a really good point.  Why can’t scans detect bowel/colon/prostate problems?

I await comments from the Leech-People among my Readers.

Good Choice

Optics, The Gun Thing

Back when I used to hunt, I found that when it came to scope magnification, I very seldom used any power higher than 6x — usually 5x — because the loss of field-of-vision made target acquisition very problematic.  You see, it may be easy to spot your prey with the naked eye, but when you to try to find it again by looking through a scope set to 15x magnification, sometimes all you see is an aperture filled with leaves, grass or still worse, hair.

Also, those big-ass 5-35x56mm scopes are heavy, Bubba, which is fine if you’re benchresting but a lot less desirable when you have to lug the extra weight atop a serious hunting rifle.

Less, in scope terms, is often a lot better than more — whether in terms of weight or magnification.

So I saw this newcomer to the hunting scene with something akin to pleasure:

Burris Fullfield 2-8×35: The Do-Anything Hunting Scope

Let me tell you, I really like the look of this one:  small, compact, and it may be the perfect choice for hunters on a budget.

I’m a huge fan of Burris Fullfield scopes — I’ve owned about half a dozen of the things over the years — because I always found them a perfect compromise between quality, performance and reliability.  Sure, there are better scopes, but you’re going to pay a hell of a lot more than $160 or $190 (for the plex and illuminated variants, respectively) to get not much further up the quality curve.

Right now, I don’t have a need for one because my scope needs (for the .22 rifles anyway) are doing just fine.  But if one of them were to break or go sour on me, this new Burris would probably be at the top of the replacement list, you betcha.

Making Life Easier

Bureaucracy, Business

I really like a couple of the new business-friendly laws signed by TexGov Abbott this week, particularly this one:

Abbott also signed into law HB 2464, which prevents local municipalities from imposing regulations on certain home-based businesses.

I was stung by this one myself several years ago.  Even though Plano is a very business-friendly town (hence all the corporations headquartered there), there were a couple of regs which made it difficult for a home-based business to operate — especially when related to late-night deliveries (“noise abatement”) and so on.  (We frequently used FedEx’s 3am pickup service, for instance, because of deadline issues.)

And frankly, anything which makes it easier and less costly for businesses to open and set up operations is A Good Thing because #Capitalism.

Dept. Of Righteous Shootings

Righteous Shootings

From Chicago, no less.  Read it all, but here’s the executive summary:

Just 18 minutes before the shooting, around 10:30 p.m., a gunman robbed a man near the corner of Fulton and Kilpatrick in Austin and drove off with the victim’s gray 2025 Toyota Corolla, according to a preliminary CPD report.

At approximately 10:43 p.m., two women were robbed at gunpoint in the 2500 block of West Haddon in Humboldt Park. The victims, both 27, told police they were outside when a car pulled up, and a man exited the vehicle with a firearm, a CPD spokesperson said. The man demanded their valuables and fled with the victims’ purses, phones, and wallets.

For his third and final act, the robber steered the hijacked Toyota onto the 1400 block of North Artesian at 10:48 p.m. He decided to try to rob a 36-year-old concealed carry holder who was unloading a vehicle on the block, according to CPD.

As the robber displayed a gun and demanded the victim’s property, the victim drew his own firearm and shot the robber multiple times in the chest and head. EMS transported the robber to Stroger Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

I’ve heard of the “three strikes” principle, but this one takes the cake.  Clearly, our little 18-year-old choirboy played his property redistribution game just one time too many.

And if you didn’t get the giggles at the “multiple shots to the chest and head” thing, we can’t be friends.

Bite Me

Journalist Scum, Resistance

Well, it was fun while it lasted.

It seems like the PjMedia Complex — Townhall, Twitchy, and PJM itself are increasingly turning their websites into PPV.

So a link from PJM’s Godfather — Insty — on a big story such as this:

…has the embedded link:

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/leahbarkoukis/2025/06/17/fbi-hands-congress-documents-with-alarming-allegations-about-the-2020-election-n2658948

When you follow the link, of course it takes you to the Townhall page.  However, if like me you hate being bombarded with fucking Facebook links masquerading as ads, or ads that lead you to click-bait sites, ads hawking the books penned by hem hem PJM writers, and (my favorite) pop-up auto-start ads or links) you will have installed an ad-blocker like Adblock or Badger.

So when you get to the Townhall site via that link from Insty, you get a grayed-out screen with this set of options:

Okay, here’s the deal.  I can’t afford to be a “VIP” subscriber because quite frankly, my subscription budget is pretty much zero.  There’s a plethora of choices for my subscription pennies (note:  pennies, not dollars — this is important, as you’ll see later), and PJM VIP is not, shall we say, a premium choice.

Fine, say I, and so I resort to using archive sites like https://archive.is/ to bypass the paywall.  Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

So, because I want to read all about the Kash Patel / 2020 election thing, I go to DuckDuckGo and type in “kash patel 2020 election”, and get a series of choices.  Skipping the left-wing media (NBC, Daily Beast, Newsweek etc.) I find a link to the Washington Examiner, which finally gives me free access to the story I want to read:

FBI Director Kash Patel has turned over a batch of internal documents to Congress detailing allegations that Chinese operatives sought to interfere in the 2020 election by mass-producing fake U.S. driver’s licenses to facilitate fraudulent mail-in voting.

The intelligence, which Patel said on Monday night he had recently declassified, has been sent to Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), who has led oversight efforts into foreign election interference and pressed the bureau to release details surrounding the alleged scheme.

And even worse:

“These include allegations of plans from the CCP to manufacture fake driver’s licenses and ship them into the United States for the purpose of facilitating fraudulent mail-in ballots — allegations which, while substantiated, were abruptly recalled and never disclosed to the public,” Patel said.

Let’s be honest, here:  this is a really big fucking deal, and if it’s proven to be true, we have two major issues:  1) China was fucking with our election in 2020 — yeah, 81 million Biden votes, kiss my ass, and 2) the FBI knew about it and did sweet fuck-all about it.  (And Just The News‘s followup article is even more damning.)

But back to my main point.

Everyone who works has to make a buck to keep the head above the water, individuals as much as organizations, and nothing comes free in this world.  I know this, because I am one such person.  So PJMedia has every right to require me to pay for their work, i.e. to read their articles.

My problem is that I can’t afford to pay their monthly sub fee because as I said, there are literally hundreds of such subs available.  And to be brutally frank, while PJM’s content is quite good, it’s not that good (Stephen Green and only a couple of other writers excepted).  Few of the conservative websites are that good, either.

Frankly, if I’m going to be brutally honest:  if I can afford only one subscription, I think I may subscribe to the above-mentioned Just The News, because their coverage and editorial stance seems to be what I’m looking for.  And the price seems to be about right, too:

  OR: 

That’s about $0.12 (twelve cents) per day — about the cost of a newspaper print subscription back in 1960, which sounds about right, for digital content.  (I recently got a small tax refund from the IRS, which funded this sub. [irony alert] )

Of course, I may be disappointed — one usually is, in matters of this nature, as I was with an earlier subscription to Epoch Times, quickly canceled — but what the hell, it’s only money and information, right?

So I’ll be linking to a lot of JTN articles in the future.  Let me know if they start playing reindeer games with their pages (like PJM outlets do) and I’ll just post longer excerpts.