July 2020 – Page 7 – Splendid Isolation

Annoying Junk

July 21, 2020 Kim du Toit Marketing / Advertising

I’ve recently been going through my Inbox, deleting and unsubscribing from various news feeds. Why?

Because while I like having news delivered to me, I hate it when I get an email from a news organization that contains not news but something that, if followed to its intended conclusion, will involve money leaving my bank account for someone else’s.

The org that triggered this one was either Washington Times or Patriots4Truth (can’t be bothered to look up which, as I nuked both), which initially promised good things but soon degenerated into spam delivery services. The WT actually has sent me some interesting reports, but the spam : content ratio is hopelessly overcome by the former. So: tchuss.

And FFS: if I do subscribe to your feed, and you send me a link to a serious article, could you at least do away with the need to log into your poxy site when I get there? You called me at my email address. (Which is why I seldom read much at the otherwise-decent Epoch Times.)

And by the way, all those people who want to pay me money to publish articles on this website? Fuck off.

In the first place, I don’t do guest posts, ever. In the second, in only a very few instances are the organizations ones that I would even be remotely interested in supporting (by linking to their articles or websites).

A good example was one which said something like, “We LOVE your website, and especially [link to a post about travel] ! We’d love to publish an article which feeds off that post, as we suspect that your readers are pretty much the same as ours! And we’ll pay you $50!”

Right: considering that I equate going on a cruise liner to some Mexican port with being strapped into a dentist’s chair for ten days… I don’t think so, Scooter. And the online casino sites…? Give me strength.

Now, I don’t even bother opening their bullshit letters. I see them in the Inbox, and delete them unread. Then I’ll get a “follow-up” letter which is also ignored. (If a third letter then comes in, I respond with vitriol, foul language and ALLCAPS.)

My email activity is nowhere close to what it used to be in Ye Olde Blogginge Days (around 400-500 emails from Readers daily back then), but it’s still pretty high (thankee for all the kind words, btw, and keep ’em coming because I love to hear from y’all). But I have to delete around a hundred bullshit emails a day, which bugs me only because it takes time to answer the genuine correspondence — which is why it sometimes takes me ages to respond, and why sometimes a letter will fall through the cracks, so to speak, mistakenly deleted and collateral damage in my irritated frenzy of spam deletion. So write away, guys.

All the rest can FOAD.

Oh, To Be In England

July 21, 2020 Kim du Toit Travels

…in normal times (whatever those are these days).

In Boscastle, Cornwall, where The Englishman has a holiday cottage, a local restaurant has set up a 24-hour webcam to show the outskirts of the village where the river runs down the hill on its way to the Atlantic. Yesterday I went there, expecting to find a black screen. Silly rabbit, I forgot it was England (note the time stamp):

I sat for a while, just watching as the occasional car went past on the road and people walked up and down the paths which run along both sides of the stream, and my mind went back two and a half years, when I was there all by myself…

A pint of Tribute Ale (local Cornish brew, on a par with Wadworth 6x) at the Cobweb Inn, hot fresh rolls from the little Spar grocery store behind from where we’re watching, and of course, the matchless fish ‘n chips from Sharon’s Plaice, just behind us to the right.

It’s a scene as familiar to me as my own backyard, it was one of the best weeks of my life, and I wish I was there right now.

Update: 15 minutes later:

Time to turn in.

Update 2: The Englishman writes:

I too logged on yesterday to see the sunset. The little building opposite the Old Store House has been turned into a bijou restaurant.
A lady staggered out with a bunch of flowers and meandered up the path to the bus stop which provided much needed vertical stability. It was a joy to watch, especially with the jeopardy of the stream edge which she was close to several times.
I wish I had been there.

Speedbump #279

July 20, 2020 Kim du Toit Grammar Nazism, Two-Minute Hate

From Townhall we get Kurt Schlicter, who is a reasonably good polemicist, as polemicists go. All goes well with his latest piece, until this point:

Things are a mess, and the Democrats are doing everything they can to make them messier. They are holding onto their precious pangolin pandemic panic like Brian Stelter grips a pie, ferociously fighting to keep hope dying by denying our kids school and millions of us a livelihood, all to eek out a win in November.

What, are we five years old, and using phonetic spelling?

THE WORD IS “EKE“, NOT “EEK”. FFS, IT’S A WORD CONTAINING ONLY THREE LETTERS. HOW DIFFICULT CAN IT BE TO GET THEM IN THE RIGHT ORDER?

Do they even have editors at Townhall ?

Missing Boolets

July 20, 2020 Kim du Toit Media Assholes, Military, Mocking Furriners, The Gun Thing

Reader JD sends me this little snippet:

Germany’s armed forces, the Bundeswehr, has confirmed it is missing more than 60,000 rounds of ammunition.

…or, about the same number of rounds we expended in a single afternoon at a Nation Of Riflemen shoot a dozen years ago. But here’s the not-so fun part:

Another 48,000 rounds from an elite special unit with links to right-wing extremism are also unaccounted for.

Just so we’re all clear on what these media assholes are implying: a study taken a while ago showed that a few members of Krautland’s G9 Special Forces group were — gasp! — of a conservative bent. None were actually ever proven to be members of any right-wing extremist groups, it’s just that some of their opinions were the same as those of the BLM (Kraut wing — they’re a neo-Nazi crowd, not Commies like our version).

What DW is implying, therefore, is not that their army and SF are careless with ammo, or that they’re not accounting for their ammo properly; they’re hinting that some of their soldiers may be shipping ammo to neo-Nazi groups.

There’s fuck-all evidence that any of this is happening, of course: it’s just part of the leftwing media agitprop. As the Emperor Misha has so rightly stated:

Rope. Tree. Journalist. Some assembly required.

Bad Stats

July 20, 2020 Kim du Toit Lies and Untruths, Numbers & Statistics

Back when I worked for the Great Big Research Company in Johannesburg, I had a boss who had the unnerving habit of doing random checks on my calculations. (I should point out for my Readers who were born after we discovered the wheel that computations were done not with slide rules but with the newfangled invention called a “calculator” — which could do only the basic math functions of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division — and the literally thousands of numbers were taken off pages and pages of computer printouts from a thing called a “mainframe”.)

Anyway, if the Poison Dwarf (as we not-so-jokingly called him) discovered a single mistake, he would tear it all up and make me redo the entire job, with the rationale that “If I can’t trust one thing, I can’t trust anything.” The result, after only a couple of these episodes, was that I not only took an inordinate amount of time in performing the calculations, but spent almost as much time rechecking everything to make sure that absolutely every statistic or number I presented to my clients was 100% correct, and they could take the actions I recommended with complete confidence in the strength of the data.

The time spent in doing all this was based on another of the Poison Dwarf’s aphorisms: “There’s never enough time to do the job properly, but there always seems to be enough time to do things over.” Well, I never had enough time to do things over — I had client meeting deadlines — so I had to get it right the first time, regardless of the time taken.

That habit persisted with me for the rest of my working career.

I say all this so everyone will know exactly where I stand on bullshit like this (with emphasis added):

A young Florida resident who died in a motorcycle accident is included in the state’s official COVID-19 death count, a state official reveals.
FOX 35 News in Orlando discovered this after asking Orange County Health Officer Dr. Raul Pino about two young COVID-19 patients in their twenties who died, and whether they had any preexisting conditions that contributed to their deaths.
“The first one didn’t have any. He died in a motorcycle accident,” Pino said. Despite this shocking answer, Pino was not aware of this person’s data being removed from the state tally when asked.
“I don’t think so. I have to double-check,” Pino answered. “We were arguing, discussing, or trying to argue with the state. Not because of the numbers — it’s 100… it doesn’t make any difference if it’s 99 — but the fact that the individual didn’t die from COVID-19… died in the crash.”

You stupid fucking quack. It’s not whether it makes a difference between 99 and 100 — it’s how many more mistakes of this kind have occurred in your compilation of the data.

Remember the Poison Dwarf: “If I can’t trust one thing, I can’t trust anything.”

So if one death (1%, in this case) was incorrectly attributed to the Chinkvirus, how many more cases are incorrect? 10%? 20%? 90%? We don’t know, because the numbers were obviously not checked after being submitted.

Here’s something from Powerline which makes the same case quite succinctly:

Funny, but not so funny.

Here’s the thing. A lot of decisions, very weighty and momentous decisions, are being made based on the data our much-vaunted medical establishment is presenting. States’ economies are being damaged or destroyed, people’s livelihoods ditto, and I’m not even going to start to estimate the social cost of foolish governmental decisions taken on the basis of what may turn out to be fatally-flawed data.

So I’m going to mimic the Poison Dwarf (for the first time ever): I’m not going to trust a single fucking piece of data these assholes present to us, ever again. As far as I’m concerned, it’s all lies and bullshit, and I don’t trust any of them.