Month: May 2019

Sippin’ Stuff

Food & Drink

From Reader Neville H:

“Last weekend you talked about “sipping” that new gin you discovered [Sipsmith–K.].  What other liquor do you sip, as opposed to mixing with tonic, water etc?”

Good question.  If I’m in a party mood amongst friends, I generally drink “mixed” spirits — e.g. Myers/Captain Morgan rum & Coke, gin & tonic, J&B and water, Jack Daniels & Coke, Richelieu brandy and ginger ale, and screwdrivers, to mention but some, the choice depending on my mood or the time of day — because when I’m in a party mood, I seldom have a brake pedal and I chug the lovely stuff down by the pint, often with disastrous results.  (When I’m in Britishland, I’ll do the same with Wiltshire’s Wadworth 6x, Fuller’s London Pride and Cornwall’s Tribute ales, by the way.)

But when the guests are over at my place and it’s just a quiet evening spent chatting about this and that and having a civilized (as opposed to raucous) time, I’m more of a mind to sip neat liquor, the choice of which also depending on my mood at the time.

In no specific order, I like to sip Southern Comfort Original, any number of single malt Scotches (I have a few favorites, but mostly Glenmorangie 10 y.o.) and now, Sipsmith London Dry.

 

Of course, one could add port and sherry to the list of sippin’ stuff (not wine, which is generally consumed like ale, so to speak), but let’s not get carried away now.

And of course if I’m Over There and in the company of Mr. Free Market, The Englishman or The Sorensons, however, all that can get set aside for Adventures In Drinking Gallons Of Whatever.

Where was I?  Oh yeah, my sippin’ choices.  I hope that answers Reader Neville’s question.

I think I’ll go and get one now.  All this writing makes a man thirsty, what?

Bloodhound Gang

Music

I’d never heard of this band before (unsurprisingly, as I regard rap as somewhere below anthrax), but I love  their song titles and lyrics.  I mean, who can resist stuff like this:

A Lapdance is So Much Better When the Stripper Is Crying
and
I Wish I Was Queer So I Could Get Chicks

Besides, tell me you can argue with this statement:  “Stephen King was a better writer when he drank.”

True dat.

The best thing I can say about Bloodhound Gang is that if I were forty years younger, I’d be doing this — not in rap, of course, because I would want to play actual, you know, music — as long as I could find a like-minded bunch of musical anarchists to accompany me.

And try as I may, I cannot think of a better motto for a band than

NO REASON TO LIVE BUT WE LIKE IT THAT WAY

Fuckin’ A.

Tell Us More

Politics, The Gun Thing

From Socialist President-Wannabe #257 comes this cheery little opinion:

Democratic presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg wants more gun control, and says policies like universal background checks and making it tougher to obtain assault-style rifles don’t infringe on Second Amendment rights.
“The biggest thing I can tell you about some of these weapons that I trained on and saw and carried is that there are some weapons that have absolutely no place in our neighborhoods in America in peacetime,” Buttigieg, a U.S. Navy Reserve veteran who served in Afghanistan, told a full house at Somerville Theatre on Tuesday.
The South Bend, Ind., mayor said, “We need to make it harder to obtain assault rifles. We need to have red flag laws that disarm domestic abusers. We need to establish universal background checks.”
But his ideas were, “not anti-Second Amendment, because every right and every freedom in the Constitution comes with responsibilities” he said, adding the right to bear arms “does not entitle you to … other weapons of war.”

So… “there are some weapons that have absolutely no place in our neighborhoods”, are there?  Which ones, specifically, do you have in mind, my little Socialist politico?

Because if you’re talking hand-grenades, RPGs or Claymore mines, then I might concede the point.  Everything else?  Go fuck yourself.

As for “the right to bear arms does not entitle you to … other weapons of war”:  well, I hate to break it to you, my little Indiana Mussolini, but way back when the Second Amendment was being debated, this little thought appeared:

“Congress have no power to disarm the militia.  Their swords, and every other terrible implement of the soldier, are the birth-right of an American … the unlimited power of the sword is not in the hands of either the federal or state governments, but, where I trust in God it will ever remain, in the hands of the people.” — Tench Coxe, Philadelphia Federal Gazette, February 20, 1789

And speaking of the federal government bringing the power of the sword nukes to the party (this applies especially to your butt-buddy-in-crime, Eric Swallwell), Coxe added this afterthought a few months later, in the same publication:

“As civil rulers, not having their duty to the people before them, may attempt to tyrannize, and as the military forces which must be occasionally raised to defend our country, might pervert their power to the injury of their fellow citizens, the people are confirmed by the article in their right to keep and bear their private arms.”  —  June 18, 1789

“Private arms” means not only hunting rifles and sporting shotguns, but mean and nasty assault rifles like AR-15s and AK-47s, i.e. those other  terrible implements of the soldier.  To protect us from you, and Swallwell, and all the others of your ilk when you start stepping on our Constitutional rights.

We’re not Venezuelans, and we’re not going to let you turn us into them.

Now fuck off back to South Bend, and disappear into your well-deserved obscurity.

Eye-Fucking

Modernism, Two-Minute Hate

By the way, when did this bullshit become acceptable?

and:

I know, it’s supposed to do… what, exactly?  Fuck with my eyesight?

This works perfectly:

Rule #1 of photography:  no damn unfocused blurriness, unless for effect — and then it must be the focal point of the pic.

Blurring the borders just makes my head ache after a while, and I loathe this affectation with a passion.

What’s The Fuss?

Lies and Untruths

Possibly because my Sensitivity Antenna isn’t dialed up to 11, I actually don’t think this cartoon is So Bad It Causes Cancer:

When I first saw it, I saw an attempt to paint the (blind) Trump being guided (in his foreign policy) by Israel’s Netanyahu.  I thought the cartoon was stupid, but not especially offensive.  Stupid because it paints Trump as a Jooo — or a Joooo-sympathizer — by wearing a yarmulke*, when he isn’t Jewish at all — and because it uses a dachshund to represent a guide dog.  (Why a dachshund?  Oh yeah, a Lab / Alsatian is a big dog, and we can’t have Israel represented by big, powerful dog, can we?)  Like I said, it’s stupid, and it’s also kinda simplistic.

It’s also not true.  But that’s unimportant.  If truth was important to cartoonists, then Ted Rall would be mopping floors at the Hollywood YMCA.

Is it inflammatory?  Of course it is:  that’s generally the whole purpose of political cartoons.  Is it anti-Semitic?  Maybe if you’re ultra-sensitive to anti-Semitism — which, by the way, I usually am — but to my eyes, the cartoon is clumsy, the cardinal sin of cartooning.

And OMG!  the cartoonist had a Jew represented by a DOG! (Shades of Julius Streicher everywhere! ) — well, what other animal could he have used?  Last time I looked, there was a distinct shortage of guide-cats, guide-bears, guide-pigs (now that  might actually have been anti-Semitic) and seeing-eye squirrels around.

Was it a sin for the poxy New York Times  International Edition to publish the thing?  No more than it was sinful for the Danish Jyllends-Posten to publish their Mohammed cartoon.

And we all know who got so bent out of shape about that.

Here’s my First Amendment take on the whole episode:  the more a media outlet publishes bullshit (anti-Semitic, anti-Black, anti-male whatever), the more it can be identified for the disgusting piece of shit that it is.  In this case, the New York  fucking Times stands exposed for being horribly anti-Israel (Zion) and anti-Semitic (the two are not  the same, although Anti-Zionism is generally the camouflage behind which anti-Semites lurk).  And the fact that it published the cartoon in its international edition simply shows me how anti-Semitic the Europeans continue to be (Europe accounts for a large proportion of its sales), and is very much of a piece with all the shit their editorial pages contain on a daily basis.  (Today, Jews;  tomorrow, Christians;  the day after, gun owners… and the band plays on and on.)

What’s delicious about this is that the oh-so politically-correct NYT  (which, by the way, has more than a few Jews working for it, and was once even owned  by Joooos) is being crucified [sic]  at the altar of its own political correctness.  It is, as my kids say, to LOL.

I don’t buy for one moment that the stupid cartoon is going to fuel the fires of anti-Semitism, or give cover to anti-Semites to perpetrate atrocities towards Jews, any more than the Mohammed cartoons would cause the same among anti-Muslims.  All this is a classic case of ultra-sensitivity in the Snowflake Age, where everyone is triggered by someone saying “nigger”, “rag-head”, “fag”, “cunt”, “lesbo”, “trannie” or even “snowflake”, and the minute one says anything outside the P.C. canon, one will immediately be labeled a Nazi or [shudder]  a “hater”.

I’m more upset that the P.C. “priesthood” seems to have tossed anti-Semitism out of its canon.  (Does this make them  Nazis?  Discuss. )

But hey, sooner or later (and I suspect sooner), everything we say or think will be streng verboten… which is what the totalitarian mental midgets in government, academia and the mainstream- and entertainment media are aiming for anyway.  Otherwise, how else can they control us?

Here’s my opinion of the whole stinking outrage:

I’m so sick of the Perpetually-Outraged, of whatever persuasion, deciding what can and can’t be said.  They’re children, the whole fucking lot of them.

*to me, “kippah” (the way I pronounce “kipper”) means kippered herrings, such as what one has for breakfast

I grew up calling the Jewish skullcap thingy a “yarmulke”, and that’s what I’m going to continue to call it.  Otherwise I’m going to think of observant Jews wearing a smoked fish on their heads, and giggle.

Economists Confused

Business

…because they’re fucking idiots.  From Sundance:

The professional financial punditry can’t explain it. Flummoxed academics run around bumping into walls amid economic numbers that continue to defy expectations. All caused by a simple return to common sense ‘America First’ MAGAnomics.
Low unemployment (3.8%); wages growing (+3.2%); inflation stable (1.6%). These measures all have a cumulative impact on paycheck-to-paycheck Americans. Prices for durable goods are stable and wage growth is exceeding inflation. That means more disposable income in the middle-class…DUH. Which, when combined with the increased pay from lower middle-class tax rates, is exactly the intended outcome of MAGAnomics.

One more time:  come the reign of Emperor Kim, economists will all be forced to wear wizards’ hats in public.  To put it even more simply (for those of the economist persuasion):

The U.S. is where the growth is. We are in the period where exporting U.S. wealth (globalist policies) has been slowed/halted. We are confronting protectionist tariffs abroad which impede our exports, and simultaneously applying reciprocal tariffs toward those who want access to our U.S. market. As a consequence, capital investment is returning to Main Street USA (nationalist policy).
This is the heart of MAGAnomic policy.