Month: August 2020

Not Racism

Celebrities, Media Assholes, Two-Minute Hate

Here’s another example of the stupid calling out the equally-stupid:

Bette Midler faced an angry backlash last night after ridiculing Melania Trump’s accent and calling her an ‘illegal alien’ while the first lady spoke at the Republican National Convention. The award-winning performer, 74, launched a tirade against Melania on Twitter in which she said: ‘Oh, God. She still can’t speak English.’
Midler was immediately branded a ‘racist’ and ‘xenophobe’ by critics including Piers Morgan, and accused of ‘dunking on an immigrant’ who became a US citizen after emigrating from Slovenia in the 1990s.

When faux  outrage is uttered, can Piers Morgan be far behind?  Let’s attack this quantum stupidity on all fronts, starting with the woman who got her start singing in the Turkish baths of New York.

Dear Bette:  after you reach a certain age, your vocal cords stiffen, becoming less and less able to speak in different tongues, so to speak, without retaining your original accent.  (The cut-off age seems to be about age 18 or so.)  That’s why it’s best to teach young children a foreign language as early as possible rather than attempting to do so as adults.  After nearly a quarter-century of living in the United States, for example, my own accent is irretrievably that of my native Johannesburg — for the simple reason that I was in my early 30s when I embarked on the Great Wetback Episode and my vocal cords were as stiff as boards by then.  I can imitate the occasional Joyzee or Texan phrase, but not carry on an entire conversation in the patois without sounding like an idiot.  (When speaking Afrikaans, however, my accent is perfect — no South African can tell if I’m Afrikaans or “English” — simply because from birth I grew up speaking both English and Afrikaans.)  So if the First Lady — who emigrated Over Here in her 20s — still has much of her native Slovenian accent, that’s why.  It’s not stupidity, Bette, and certainly nowhere near the level of yours.

Let’s move on to Our Piers and his ilk.  If I make fun of an Irish or Scottish accent, or (to be even less microscopic) a French or German one — which I frequently do — how can it possibly be “rayciss” when all members of the above, including myself, are of the same (sorta-Aryan) race?  It’s a simple matter of confusing “race” with “ethnicity”, unless we’re going back to the time when talking about the Irish or Spanish “races” when meaning ethnicity.  The problem for these dweebs is that there’s no pejorative term for ethnic mockery or chauvinism, so they have to get sloppy  and use the “eeeeevil rayciss” epithet.  It’s not only imprecise but incorrect;  but I don’t expect morons like Morgan to understand that.

And finally:  making fun of other people’s accents is about 50% of all humor, and maybe still more in my case.  I mock, with equal frequency and ferocity, the various accents which make up these United States and Europe — whether Joyzee, Texan, Frog, Kraut, whatever —  and that’s all fair game and funny;  but as soon as I be makin’ fun of Ebonics, nigger, or mock an actual African expression like “Aiiiisssshhhh, yehbo Bra!”  that’s suddenly OMG Beyond The Pale [sic] ?

Fuck that for a tale.  All these Wokesters and scolds can kiss my lily-white African-American ass.

Afterthought, for Bette Midler:  Melania Trump speaks five languages, while you speak only one, stupidly.

Not That Bad

Gratuitous Gun Pics, Gun/Ammo Tests

Via Insty (thankee Squire), I see that our favorite shooting rag has a piece about a new Bond Arms Derringer:

Speaking personally, I think it’s pig-ugly;  but no doubt someone will soon be telling me how matte is the new black, or something, and all the cool kids are carrying it.  Whatever.  I like ’em shiny (and without that sissy trigger guard):

But anyway, it was Insty’s comment which got my attention:

IT’S BASICALLY A .45 DERRINGER, SO I EXPECT IT TO KICK

That has not been my experience (remember that I am an infamous recoil wussy).  I’ve had two of these beauties in my time — in .45 Long Colt /.410ga, and in .38 Spec/.357 Mag — and I didn’t find the recoil in any of the four chamberings to be too unpleasant.  Here’s why.

I think that the teeny lil’ barrel helps.  Basically, it seems to me that before the burning powder can get up to full oomph in the chamber, the boolet has already left the building, so to speak.  Even .410 slugs were stout, but quite manageable — especially when you remember that Derringers are “halitosis-range” guns, in that even if the scumbag doesn’t immediately die from the boolet, the muzzle flash should set his fucking clothes on fire to complete the carnage.  And forget the loss of muzzle velocity from the tiny barrel — at 4″ distance from the target, it’s very much a moot point.

I wouldn’t want to let off hundreds of rounds of serious centerfire ammo in a single session at the range with a Bond Arms Derringer, mind — half a dozen would do just fine, thank you — but frankly, even a dozen-odd rounds of .45 ACP wouldn’t be too much of an imposition on one’s shooting hand.

What I’ve always liked about the Bond Arms guns is that they are heavy, baby — which means if you hold it in your hand and give someone a swift smack on the side of the head with it, he is going to go down.

Manly guns.  I love ’em.

Throwing Shoes

Grammar Nazism

I have spoken before of what I call “linguistic speed bumps”:  egregious grammatical and/or spelling errors which interrupt the flow of reading (and which, in my case, cause a WTF? Moment).

Here’s one that never fails to set my teeth on edge, and I saw it only yesterday:

“None of this is to say that Trump is a shoe-in come November.”

“Shoe-in”?  What the fuck does that mean?  That somebody’s going to kick him into office?

The expression comes from the verb “to shoo” (usher gently) — one shoos away a goose, or puppy, when one wants it to move away.  To “shoo” somebody into office (as in the above situation) means that his victory is assured, and requires only a gentle nudge to take effect — in other words, it’s an expected outcome.

“Shoe-in”  doesn’t mean anything at all;  the writer might as well have said “show in” or “schwing in” for all the sense it makes.  And just as the last time I blew up about it, this bullshit was printed by The Federalist, which one would think might edit their writers’ input, but clearly does not.

I know:  “spell-check” is at fault.  [20,000-word rant deleted]

Where did I put that flamethrower?

News Roundup

Bad News

With commentary more acid than a busload of hippies.


…if this was the U.S.A., these would be classified as “Covid deaths”.


…Joe Biden couldn’t bounce if you dropped him into the ocean from a helicopter at 10,000 feet — but I’m willing to try an experiment to see.


…actually, it’s the socialists who are sounding desperate.  POTUS (and the rest of us conservatives) are doing fine;  we’re just waiting for November, Chuck.


…that’s nice;  so now we don’t have to bring our own to the party?


…West Nile virus:  “Hold my blood.”


…what’s surprising about this incident is that it didn’t take place in Floriduh.  (Portugal?  Really?)


...a male teacher did this?  I didn’t know there were any left.


…and Baby Vulcan smiles.


…this would really suck if the spy was named something like Prof. Jim-Bob Goodoleboy;  but his name sounds like a menu item from Yuk Foo’s Takeout Palace.  More to the point:  someone ‘splain to me why we still allow these Commie fucks on campus.


…apparently self-imposed, btw.  I know:  “Who she?”   Just some Brit reality show slut [multiple redundancies]

Old Rifle, Old Cartridge… Heaven

Gratuitous Gun Pics, The Gun Thing

As everyone knows, I love Old Gunny Stuff — and a good-looking pre-WWII hunting rifle in a proven chambering pretty much checks all my boxes.  Here’s a Savage 99 in .250-3000 (.250 Savage) at Collectors:

As I’ve also said before, I am not a fan of the 99 when it’s chambered in a larger caliber like .303 Savage, .308 Win and so on, because of the stiff recoil.  But a nice quarter-incher like the .250 Savage?  And in a handy little carbine?  (And did I also say before how much I love the Savage’s slick lever action and box magazine which can hold pointy spitzer boolets, unlike the WinMar lever guns with their tube mags?)

The age of rifles doesn’t bother me at all, provided that they’ve been reasonably well-looked after:  I’ve owned many pre-WWII rifles, and honestly, I’ve loved pretty much every single one of them:  Swiss K-11, Swedish 1896 Mausers, SMLE and Enfield No.4s, Mosin-Nagants, gawd knows how many Mauser 98s, and so on.  The one rifle of this genre that got away, by the way, also gives me the deepest regret at its loss:  a pre-WWI Winchester 94 in .32 Win Special (as I recall, made in 1910), which I bought from a dear friend who a year later demanded I sell it back to him because he was missing it too much.  Now I miss that rifle, still.  Here’s one, also from Collectors.

Were it not for their respective price tags — which reflect how many people love these rifles as much as I do — I’d buy them both in a heartbeat.

So yeah:  old rifles and old cartridges don’t frighten me, and they shouldn’t frighten anyone.  These fine old ladies are flat-out wonderful and gorgeous, their cartridges are just as effective as any modern cartridge, and everyone should own at least one.

Touch history, folks, while you still can.  You can thank me later.

Killing Golden Geese

Anarchist thugs, BaconLettuceMayo, Business, Gummint, Marxists

The late and great Margaret Thatcher had it right (as usual) when she said of Communists that sooner or later, they run out of other people’s money.  What’s happening in many of the neo-socialist hellholes like New York lately is that the “other” (i.e. wealthy) people aren’t necessarily running out of money, they’re running out of patience with the filthy nest their government has created, and are running away.

It’s snapshot simple. The wealthy and the companies they work for pay most of the taxes. The poor consume most of the taxes through social programs. COVID is driving the wealthy and their offices out of the city. No one will be left to pay for the poor, who are stuck here, and the city will collapse in the transition.

Of course, that would be bad enough, because even if the wealthy folks came back to their Upper East- or West Side domiciles once the Chinkvirus had subsided, NYFC could continue to fleece them in the manner to which everyone has become accustomed.  But if their toney little brownstone houses and chi-chi apartment buildings are surrounded by homeless, aggressive beggars and rioting assholes of the BLM / Pantifa persuasion, the millionaires and billionaires will say (and are saying) “The hell with this shit” and leave for more hospitable climes — and their companies will go along with them.

I have another post bubbling under about the death of the traditional office-work model, but that can wait for another time.

What’s really interesting, from a socio-political perspective, is how quickly this has happened.  It might have happened at some point or another anyway, as the Blue Model metropolises collapsed under the weight of their underfunded pension plans and failing social services and infrastructure — but the Chinkvirus has been the Catalyst Supreme for our little domestic Lenins and Maos.  What’s even more interesting is that, being economic illiterates, our socialist pols have looked to Europe, their favorite model, and said, “But France isn’t collapsing!”

Oh yes, it is.  The difference is that rich Frogs can’t exactly load up U-Hauls and move to — where?  Germany?  Belgium?  Britain?  It’s the same situation in those countries.  There are no prosperous and successful business-friendly, low tax states in Europe like Texas, Florida or Utah — they’re all soft socialist states;  and the Chinkvirus is having the same effect on their economies and traditional business models as it is in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles.

So even in the best of times (booming Trump economy, no virus, no BLM / Pantifa riots), Illinois, California and New York — to name but three — would be sucking wind soon enough, and the writing has been on their walls for some time.  But in the current environment?  They’re screwed.

My only concern, as I’ve often said before, is that these fleeing rats don’t come to our happy little ships and infest them with their shitty ideas and political morality.