Month: September 2022

Storm Front: Ian, You Bastard

Disaster

Amidst all the tales of woe emanating from storm-battered Florida at the moment, few can be more tragic than this one:

Brand new McLaren hypercar worth over $1 MILLION is washed from Florida garage by floodwater from Hurricane Ian

Before:

After:

I mean, the poor guy’s going to be left with only his Rolls to fetch groceries… talk about suffering.

(Afterthought:  his insurance agent is probably going to commit suicide — I bet that when he included a “we’ll pay if your McLaren is washed away in a storm” rider in the coverage, he thought he was onto a sure thing.)

Reading Recommendation

Literature

Out of pure curiosity, I recently picked up a second-hand copy of J.K.Rowling’s (non-fantasy) novel, The Casual Vacancy.

What a delight.

The story involves an enormous cast of characters getting involved in a fairly mundane matter — the filling of a vacant town council seat — and its profound and often tragic consequences for the people of the town.  It’s not an easy read — Rowling writes in the Russian style, where characters are introduced and never again explained — but it is very well written.

This is also a novel for grownups and not a Harry Potter book.  It’s a searing and bleak sketch of modern British small-town life, and I can recommend it wholeheartedly to any of my Readers (especially of the Brit genus ) who want a decent few hours’ entertainment.

I’m definitely going to read it again, in the not-so distant future.  Thanks, J.K.

Giving It Away

Bad News, Marxists

I think this malfeasance started in earnest back in the Clinton administration:

The rare earths dependency on China stems in part from the fact that extracting rare earth minerals is an extremely polluting process that China has been willing to undertake, while most other countries have not, including the US, which ironically prides itself on having extremely strict environmental regulations in place.

The US, according to Reuters, has only one rare earths mine and no capability to process rare earth minerals. If China were to stop exporting them to the US, the country would fast run out of the basic building blocks required to produce the military hardware that the US needs, not to mention all the other items where rare earth minerals are needed.

And the article supplies a little extra perspective on China’s Belt And Road initiative.

Read it and weep.  (Or go to the range.)

Cinematic Crap

Entertainment, Movies

Via Insty, here’s another piece about how today’s movies suck, from a sound perspective.  (The article is only listed as “Updated Sep 22, 2022”, so it may actually be a rewrite — and a lot of it seems familiar.)

I was going to comment on it in a post, but a lot of what I planned to write seemed awfully familiar to me.  And somewhere in my broken memory, I remembered that I’d already done just that, in Mumbles In The Darkness earlier in June of this year.

So that’s my comment.

Which leads me to a tangential thought.  In looking to see whether I had written on the topic earlier, I used the “Search” function on this very web site, to the right of the page, just under the header.

All I did was type “movie” in the search bar, and a veritable timeline of my writings on the topic followed.

And I found myself wasting spending the next hour or so re-reading some of my old posts, and apart from anything else, I was amazed at how little my opinions have changed (not too surprising, considering the writer, but still).

Here’s a thought.  If ever you’re horribly bored with life, are sick of playing on the Internet but couldn’t be bothered to get out of your chair, type in a random topic (e.g. “rifle”, “travel”, “Colt” or “socialist” and so on), and go back in time to see what I’ve written on the topic.

As journeys go, it’s cheaper than driving or going to the range (!!!!!!).  As to how much you might enjoy it, I make no comment.

Florida vs. Davos

Good Stuff, Resistance

Here’s FuturePOTUS Ron DeSantis, talking about how conservative states rule, and the best way to bear the Internationalists.

I think the difference between then and now is, government is bigger and more powerful. But these agencies, particularly in law enforcement and national security, have been weaponized, so that they really represent the enforcement arm of one particular faction of society against the rest of us. And you do not have equal zeal with which they wield their power. People talk about the deep state like it’s some conspiracy. It’s not a conspiracy. What we have right now is the logical result of having an absence of constitutional accountability in the administrative state. And basically what human nature will do, of course, power is going to accumulate there. The founding fathers would have told us this if we had told them what was going on. So that’s the logical outgrowth of Congress abdicating its responsibility to hold the bureaucracy accountable for decades. It’s a logical result of Congress empowering the bureaucracy and letting them do a lot of the heavy legislating. And so that’s what we have. It’s not anything that really should surprise anybody.

All good stuff, and more besides.

Quote Of The Day

QOTD

From this article:

“Rule of thumb: assume anything and everything you say and do online is being watched by someone somewhere. Because more often than not, that’s exactly what’s happening.”

In case that’s happening to me:

(by your pathetic definition)