Month: January 2020

And Suddenly… Nothing Happened

Eco-Crap

Amidst all the Glueball Wormening / Freezing / Wormening MkII / Climate Catastrophe / We’re all gonna dieeee!!!  hysteria of the past decade, it’s always nice to have it all wrapped up in a bow for us:

Al Gore’s legacy of lies continued to spill into the second decade of this century. Contrary to his predictions in the famous climate documentary  An Inconvenient Truth, polar bear populations increased, the Arctic and Antarctic remained relatively unaffected, and no major coastal economy was threatened by rising sea levels.

Read the rest for more major climate-idiocy refutations.

Language Beef

Grammar Nazism

One of my major beefs with European languages is that stupid custom of giving everything a gender — in Latin, a table  is feminine but a house  is masculine (sometimes, depending on the sense of the sentence);  in French a car  is feminine but a horse  is masculine;  and in German, a train  is masculine but a railway  is feminine, and so on.

No wonder they’ve had to declare war on each other every decade or so.

Basically, it’s Latin’s fault.  That Roman nonsense gave every word a gender (with the wonderful addition of a neuter gender which wasn’t very common).  Additionally, Latin has no articles (the, a, an etc.) — which I think is why words had  to have a gender, so that the listener could determine to which word an adjective was being applied to.  Here’s a little summary:

There is a stark difference between English and Latin’s treatment of gender. Only words in English that indicate a biological sex have a masculine or feminine gender. All others are considered neuter. Latin, however, applies gender to many words even when biological sex is not intimated.

No wonder the bloody thing died off.

But that’s not the end of the story, oh no.

As European languages modernized, they added articles — except that with gendered nouns, the articles had to change to continue the form.  Hence la roche  (rock), le matin  (morning) and so on.  German went the same way:  der Zug (train), die Eisenbahn (railway), etc.

All that, so that this little meme would make sense to everybody who’s not a language dork like I am:

Of course, as can be seen in the above, the Germans took the thing to its logical conclusion and over-complicated their language almost to the point of impossibility, making the article also reflect the nouns’s declension case  as well as its gender.  Don’t get me started.

At least the Germans are usually too polite to correct you when you screw up, and will sometimes even switch to English if they can.  The French, however, have no such scruples and will correct your grammar, loudly and often with a smirk — which makes my already-fragile temper turn homicidal in a millisecond.

Thank goodness English is gradually taking over as the international language of business, and is the backbone of this here Intarwebz thingy.

I still read Le Parisien  once a week, though.

Shuddup, You Little Prick

Two-Minute Hate

From perpetual pain-in-the-ass Has-Been Mayor of NYFC Bloomberg:

Yes, [California has] problems, including homelessness, struggling public schools and scarce, costly housing. But California “is something the rest of the country looks up to,” Bloomberg said. “California has been a leader in an awful lot of things.”

The only things looking up to California are the flies circling the turds lying in the streets. All the rest of us (sentient human beings, that is) think California is a Grade-A shithole.

And if I can use Hizzoner’s own words, just modified a little:

“California has been a leader in a lot of awful things.”

…which is more truthful than what he said.

Quote Of The Day

Gummint, QOTD, The Gun Thing

From Walter Williams:

“Knowing who owns what weapons is the first step to confiscation.”

I don’t think I have to caution any of my Readers about this, but anyway:  if ever some government apparatchik wants to register guns — any  kind of guns — resist, refuse to comply, make a noise about it.

I should point out that back in the police state known as Apartheid South Africa, all guns had to be registered to owners, who were themselves registered as such.

I had five  guns that the Gummint knew nothing about.  In fact, now that I think back, I had more un-registered guns than registered ones.  If it was possible under that government, it should be easy-peasy Over Here.

Do ye the same, O My Readers.

Return Of The Nat– I mean Colt Python

The Gun Thing

Several people have written to me about Colt’s re-release of the venerable Colt Python.  From the horse’s mouth:

What… no Colt Royal Blue?  I’ll wait.  I don’t want a Python Pimp Model, thankee verramush.

Anyway, I can’t wait for the gun mags to review the new Python.  What I’d really  like to see is some intrepid reviewer doing a side-by side comparison of an old 1970s-era Python with the new one, to see if Colt will be manufacturing guns to the same degree of quality as they did back then.

I don’t want to be all negative and stuff, but something in my water tells me that’s not gonna happen.

But just to be perfectly clear on this:   as a HUGE fan of the Python revolver — I still have my old 6″ Python holster, against the day when I get another one — I will be the happiest man in the world to be proved wrong.

Some of you may be wondering, if I’m such a Python groupie, why I ever sold my old one:

Answer:  I didn’t sell it.  I shot it till it broke, irretrievably:  frame bent, cylinder busted, the full catastrophe.  Only the barrel and trigger assembly could be salvaged for parts.

It was the finest handgun I’ve ever fired, by a day’s march — and believe me, I’ve shot a LOT of damn handguns in my life.

I still mourn its passing.

Enter Stage Somewhere

Gummint, Politics, The Gun Thing

I see that the NRA has promised to “work with gun owners to swamp the first hearing of the Virginia Senate committee considering new gun bans”.

NRA spokeswoman Catherine Mortensen told the Washington Free Beacon that the gun-rights group is mobilizing its members to appear at the first meeting of the Virginia Senate’s Courts of Justice on Jan. 13. The organization hopes that pressure from constituents will make newly elected Democrats, who helped the party capture control of the state legislature, think twice about supporting gun bans pursued by the state’s Democratic governor.

Uh huh.  Forgive me for pointing out the obvious, but over the past three decades or so, whenever some state government has decided to crap all over the Second Amendment, the NRA has been more conspicuous in its absence than in its action.

I remember down here in north Texas, a long-established and much-loved gun range was being targeted by a housing development, whose new residents were aghast that there was a working gun range a whole mile away from their backyards.  So said developers put pressure on the TX legislators to declare the range a public nuisance / danger and force it to close.  As it happened, there was already a weak law on the books which prevented this kind of thing, but as it was a weak law (it’s since been toughened up) it required legal representation which the gun range couldn’t afford, and the Texas State Rifle Association couldn’t afford to cover, either.  So the TSRA appealed for help from the NRA but was told that the NRA had more important things to do with its money at the national level, and as such it was up to us locals to come up with the funds (from memory, the shortfall was just over half a million dollars, or fifty of Wayne LaPierre’s shiny suits).

The range closed six months later, bankrupted out of existence by lawyer’s fees;  despite raising a goodly amount (I donated nearly a grand, as I recall), it wasn’t nearly enough and so they just said “fuck it”, moved over fifty miles away into the boonies, and we all lost a fine range and an excellent little gun shop located on the premises.  Every time I drive past the place (now a nondescript strip mall standing between the road and the McMansions of the development), I want to toss bricks through the windows of every single one of the buildings.

If I were a cynical man, therefore, I would suggest that the only reason that the NRA is suddenly so interested in what’s happening in Virginia is because that’s where NRA HQ is located, and most of the guns in their basement museum would become illegal overnight and have to be either moved or handed in.

Not so fucking funny when it happens to you, eh, Wayne?