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Careful Reflection

Drive Time

I’ve always had a soft spot for the Mercedes Geländewagen (“G-wagon/-wagen”) in pretty much all its versions because… well, because despite all its flaws (brick-like aerodynamics, gas-guzzling engine, tank-like ride blah blah blah) all wrapped up in an astronomical price:

I still want to own one.  Badly.  And even despite Mercedes having done away with a stick shift in the early 2000s (pppppbbbbbbbbbtttttt).

Maybe it’s because of all those flaws, or maybe it’s because at the end of the day, the ur-military design and engineering means that the G is pretty much indestructible and will take you to places that would overturn a Jeep, overpower a Range Rover and make even the old Toyota Landcruiser shake with fear.

Not that I myself would ever put any of that to the test, of course, because a.) I’m too old for such foolishness and b.) my idea of a “challenging ride” is negotiating the speed bumps in my apartment complex without becoming airborne or blowing out the suspension.

So why would I want a G-wagen?  Just because.  Because in a world of cars designed and built for today’s softer man, there is still an option to say, “Fuck it” and drive something that makes a statement — that statement being:  “This asshole has too much money and is wasting it on a truck that costs almost as much as a Bentley.”

To which the typical G-wagen owner will reply, “Yeah?  And so?”

It’s the ultimate middle digit directed at the Greens, the wealth-envious, the nannies at the NHSA and pretty much all the little petty totalitarian wannabes who want to tell us how to run our lives and prevent us from owning this and making our only choice that.  And it’s always been that way, from earlier times:

1984

…to the early 2000s:

2005

…and today:

G55

…and if there’s a better picture that encapsulates the hulking body and brooding spirit of the G-wagen, I haven’t found it yet.

Needless to say, of course, Mercedes being no longer the militaristic- and engineering-focused company that it once was, has bowed in obeisance to the Global Cooling Climate Warming Change© hysteria, and will now produce… an electric G-wagen.  Here’s a pic:


(yeah, it looks more like the new Ford Bronco and relaunched Land Rover than a G-wagen)

What amuses me is that Mercedes were going to call it the EQC or some such bollocks, but realized that making it sound like something Apple would make might be a bad idea — so they dropped that and called it the G580 (because the Duracell-powered engine produces 580hp and gets it to 60mph in under five seconds, whoop-dee-doo).

And this?

They’ve dropped the spare wheel to accommodate the massive, pythonesque charging cable that will be needed to recharge the Duracells every 285 miles — uh-huh — with no mention of how long said process will take.  Of course.

By the way, the Duracell G-wagen weighs about 3.5 tons (6,800lbs) compared to the “normal” G-wagen’s 2.5 tons (5,500lbs).

And to complete the cynicism of the whole exercise, it has a CD player under the hood which creates a fake “G-wagen roar” instead of the typical electric engine’s “Thunberg whine”.

Here’s an overview of the thing.

Anyone who knows me will be able to predict that I regard this fucking piece of shit with something akin to sex with Rebel Wilson or Lizzo — i.e. no man should — and I haven’t even discussed its price yet.  Okay, I will:  $190,000 (compared to the G550’s $150k).

Considering, as I’ve said before, that the G-wagen I really want is the diesel-powered

1984 300GD

…with a manual gearbox and separate transfer case for serious 4WD activity, you may understand how far off the new Mercedes is from my radar screen.

And the fully-reconditioned- and rebuilt G-wagen above has a F.O.B. sticker price of $55,000.  The hundred-odd grand in “savings” would be spent on a sports car like a second-hand low-mileage Mazda Miata:

…and guns like this H&H Cavalier.

Note that the Mazda has a manual transmission and the shotgun is a side-by-side:  still more pointers that as far as I’m concerned, the modern world and all its whizz-bang technology can go and fuck itself.

Then And Now

Bad News

As pointed out in this article, the United States has changed.

The national mood in the mid-twentieth century was very different from now.

    • The United States was respected around the world — even if not necessarily liked.
    • Technology was advancing faster than at any time in human history.
    • Our cities were mostly orderly, safe, and clean.
    • We believed there were few hardships which couldn’t be overcome with hard work. Opportunities seemed endless, as was our optimism.
    • We were completely naïve about the danger posed by our own government.

And now, in the 21st century, there is a completely different worldview.

    • The United States is a corrupt and impotent international laughingstock.
    • We’ve become technically stunted. Replacing the Francis Scott Key bridge is expected to take three times longer than building the Golden Gate bridge almost a century ago.
    • Our cities are becoming unlivable post-apocalyptic hellscapes.
    • “Living the American dream” is no longer a middle-class expectation.
    • We know that fear of our own government is a prudent mindset.

As the man said:

Oh, The Hardship

Education

Must our children suffer any more?  Yes, according to the headmaster of this school in Britishland:

A [school principal] has insisted that a 12-hour school day will give pupils ‘buckets full of endorphins’ – as the 7am to 7pm scheme comes into effect today.

Children at All Saints Catholic College in the affluent neighbourhood of Notting Hill, west London, will partake in a whole host of activities instead of spending the time at home on their devices when classes finish at 3.15pm.

This includes homework time and activity clubs from dodgeball, basketball, art, drama and cookery classes in a bid to break the cycle of smartphone ‘addiction’.

The controversial decision to introduce a 12-hour school day comes after the principal found ‘shocking’ things on confiscated mobile phones, including pupils blackmailing strangers and catfishing one another.

[He said:] ‘It’s pretty clear across the sector this is a real issue in terms of the vacuum that phones fill for children when they go home. There’s a crisis in attendance and if we look at the last 10 years or so there’s a depletion in services that are available to children after school. He said the school will ensure homework is done within that time, while also making sure that children take part in activities so they go home ‘with a bucket full of endorphins’.

Not to mention that the little shits should be too exhausted to get up to mischief.

Not that this is anything new, of course.  Allow me to present a typical day in the life of a schoolboy at my old school, St. John’s College, back in the day:

6.40am:  Rising bell
7.02am:  Roll call
7.10am:  Breakfast
7.35am:  School prep (make beds, get books together for class, etc.)
8.00am:  Morning Chapel
8.25am:  Classes begin
1.25pm:  Lunch
2.10pm:  Reading and study (classrooms or dorm rooms)
2.50pm:  Sports (compulsory; cricket, swimming, athletics, tennis, squash in summer;  rugby or field hockey in winter)
4.15pm:  Roll call
4.20pm:  Free time, unless taken up by extra duties: sports, choir practice, punishment (detention, hard labor etc.)
Day scholars could leave for home after roll call or after extra duties.  For boarders:
6.30pm:  Dinner
7.10pm:  First Prep (homework), in classrooms, with a 10-minute break at 8pm
8.10pm:  Second Prep, until 9.15pm
Lights out:  9.45pm

If the daytime classroom hours seem to be less than in U.S. schools, remember the two hours’ prep each night, and allow me also to point out that Saturday mornings were the same as weekday mornings, and pupils were only free after lunch — “free”, that is, unless the school sports teams were engaged in matches against other area schools, and attendance was compulsory (roll call again!) at First Team matches.

Boarders stayed in school on Saturday nights, which were taken up with “club” activities such as Bridge, Drama, Chess, Debate, History, Photography, Geography, Literature, Film, Pioneer (nature/history studies) and so on.  Membership of at least three clubs was compulsory. Then Sundays:

8.30am:  Rising bell
8.55am:  Roll call
9.00am:  Sunday Chapel & Communion
10.00am:  Boarders were excused to leave, with parents only
6.30pm:  Roll call
6.35pm:  Dinner
7.00pm:  Evensong & Sermon, until 7.45pm
8.30pm:  Lights out
…and the whole thing would start again the next day.

So when I read about “12-hour days”, I just giggle.

We were so exhausted (endorphins? pah) that we seldom had time to get up to mischief.  Officially, that was the theory, anyway.  The reality, especially for thugs like the Four Muscadels, was a little different.

And we didn’t even have phones.  Wouldn’t have mattered if we did, because the school would have banned and confiscated them.

Just like our Brit headmaster has.  In that, at least, we have something in common.

Eyeworm

Gratuitous Chick Pics

From Longtime Friend & Reader Mark Alger:

“So, if a song that catches your ongoing attention is an earworm, what is an image that accomplishes the same end? An eyeworm?”

Yes.  Here’s one of mine:

Try as I may, I just cannot.

More to follow.

Conundrum

Deep Thoughts, Rights

The old saying goes, “Those who choose security over freedom deserve neither.”

And yet… you have a situation like this one:

The man who transformed El Salvador from one of the most dangerous countries in the world to one of the safest, President Nayib Bukele, is despised by liberals.

When he won reelection in a landslide, liberal media outlets ran headlines stating that democracy had ended in El Salvador and that the country had become a one-party state. However, El Salvador is not Cuba.

Bukele did not eradicate opposition parties, nor did he imprison them or seize control of the press. Instead, he delivered on his promises. He made the country safe by locking up criminals.

And how did he do this?

In 2022, after a gang war resulted in the deaths of 87 people over a period of just three days, Bukele took action against crime. He constructed the country’s largest prison, the Terrorism Confinement Center (Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo or CECOT), with a capacity for 40,000 gang members. And he began filling it.

Human rights groups, who live in safe, wealthy Western nations, have criticized Bukele for violations of the rights of suspects.

But the logic is flawless. Only gang members have gang tattoos. If anyone else gets a gang tattoo, they will be killed by the gang. The same is true for tattoo artists.

They would be killed for giving gang tattoos to non-gang members. Additionally, part of the initiation to joining a gang is to commit a serious crime, often murder. Once they become a member, their full-time job is to commit crimes. So, logically, anyone with a gang tattoo is a gang member and has committed crimes.

If this makes one think, “That sounds like the foul MS-13 gang”, then one would be correct.

I have often thought about doing this right here in the U.S. of A., as whole areas of the country have become terrorized by gangs like MS-13.  And as the gang members proudly wear their clan tattoo, why not just arrest them as self-confessed criminals?

Because that’s wrong — basically, it’s un-Constitutional, and on more than one level.  And here’s how it was done in El Salvador:

Bukele decided to let logic prevail, arrest the gang members, and put them in prison. He was more concerned about the rights of street vendors, business owners, school children, working people, and ordinary citizens than he was about the rights of violent criminals.

The state of emergency he declared in 2022, and has renewed several times since, suspends the constitutional rights of the gang members and bypasses the corrupt courts and justice system, which had allowed the criminals to reign for decades. Since then, 75,000 gang members have been arrested, and 7,000 have been released.

Believe me, there’s a lot to be said in support about measures like those of Nayib Bukele.  After all:

Bukele claimed that his country went 365 days without a murder. And while the exact number has been called into question, it is an indisputable fact that the country now has the lowest murder rate it has seen in 30 years, plummeting by 70%, and now stands at only 2.4 per 100,000 in 2023, making it the second lowest in the Americas, just behind Canada.

Okay, maybe that worked in El Salvador, which started off being a shithole country, and just dug itself a deeper one over decades of corruption and your standard Third-World degeneracy.  Desperate measures were called for.

But the U.S. has never been a shithole country, in no small part because of the protections that our Constitution affords everybody — and not just non-gang members, either.

I am profoundly disturbed by the tone of articles such as the one I’ve linked to and quoted from in this post.  Of course I can see the benefits of actions like that of Bukele.

But I can also see how that kind of thing can be turned around and used against, oh, people like MAGA supporters or, for that matter, gun owners.

And to quote a wise man (not a politician, but a playwright), who saw where this could lead:

“William Roper: “So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!”

Sir Thomas More: “Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?”

William Roper: “Yes, I’d cut down every law in England to do that!”

Sir Thomas More: “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!”

— Robert Bolt, A Man For All Seasons