Month: June 2023

Heads On Walls

Hunting

The Greatest Living Englishman has an opinion on big-game trophy hunting:

People who hunt big game are evil…

That’s why Boris Johnson (remember him) received universal support in 2019 for pledging to end the practice of big-game hunters bringing back the severed heads of animals they’d shot in Africa.

I was so supportive, in fact, that I went outside and banged my frying pans together, like we used to do for the nurses.

Because I just cannot understand why anyone could go to Botswana to shoot a lion or a giraffe.

It simply doesn’t compute in my head.

Fear not, however, because:

…but here’s why they are necessary

Because as the House of Lords debated the ban on severed heads this week, six African governments wrote to The Times newspaper begging them to let the hunting continue.

And they have a point.

They argue the big, wild animals in Africa often attack villagers and trample crops.

They are seen as a nuisance and are often shot by farmers.

But if a rich white hunter arrives on the scene and is prepared to pay upwards of £20,000 to shoot an animal, it’s suddenly worth the farmer’s while to make sure he has something to shoot at.

So instead of killing the wildlife, he starts to protect it.

Because he’s going to get a LOT more money from Hank the Texan dentist than he is from half an acre of maize.

The fact is that the rich white hunters who do this kind of thing are actually paying for the animals to be protected and looked after beforehand by the locals.

They’re even reintroducing rhinos to areas they haven’t been seen in for decades.  I know this. I’ve been to a park and witnessed it happening.  And I’ve met the locals who patrol the area at night, hunting the poachers.

If hunting was banned, all that would stop.

So it’s a weird conclusion but if a halfwit with way more money than sense and no moral fibre at all wants to fly to Africa to shoot an elephant, the kindest thing we can do as a nation of animal lovers is . . . let him.

Here’s my take on all of this.  Firstly, as Clarkson notes, without hunting the game will just disappear.  Farmers will either shoot, shovel and shut up or else they’ll set out poisoned bait.  To a farmer, a predator isn’t just a dangerous pest:  it’s something that takes away his property — and as I’ve said before, a leopard will kill an entire flock of sheep, just because it can, before taking one away to eat.  Lions are not any better.  A large herd of springbok will eat all the farmer’s grazing for his sheep or cattle, and the farmer will end up with starving herds.  Don’t get me started on elephants, which are more destructive than governments.

So spare me the maudlin “O the pore wee beasties”  PETA nonsense.

All that said, however, I should also point out that I’ve never been a trophy hunter.  I’ve hunted either as part of a (very unofficial) game management system — helping a farmer protect his herds from lion and springbok, for example — or on very infrequent occasions for the sheer joy of the stalk, in terrain and climate so inhospitable it would make your nuts retract into your body.  On the latter occasions, I’ve been close to death so many times that my ultimate survival was a matter of pure luck.  That’s why I did it — and that’s why I don’t hunt anymore.

All that said, however, I understand the point of trophy collecting. When you have hunted something and taken its life, it is the ultimate form of possession, and there is a profound intimacy between hunter and prey — an intimacy that demands that one keeps a part of that animal, not as proof, but as a form of gratitude.  Even on those stupid “wilderness survival” TV shows, you’ll see someone who has just killed an animal for food say, “Thank you giving me your life so I can survive.”  It’s not hokum:  it’s about as primal a ritual as one can find, and it’s embedded deep within our hunter-gather gene code.

People like Jeremy Clarkson, who’ve never experienced that emotion, will say that they don’t understand that need to keep a bond with one’s conquest.  The key lies within the phrase “who’ve never experienced that emotion”.  You can’t explain it to them, and they’ll never understand it because, of course, food comes from the supermarket and not from the barrel of your gun.  (You’d think that Clarkson would understand this, seeing as he keeps cattle and — at one time — sheep.  But there ya go.  He may be the Greatest Living Englishman, but he’s not perfect.)

Of course, trophy hunting isn’t about getting food.  But the emotion it brings out is no different — “moral fibre” has nothing to do with it — and if we weren’t so coddled and anesthetized by our oh-so civilized society, we’d all know that.

That aside, we’ll just have to justify big game hunting as “game management” to assuage the hurt feewings of the Weepy Animal Lovers Set.  Like Jeremy Clarkson.

Random Totty

Gratuitous Chick Pics

Here’s the lovely TV actress Samia Longchambon, who first appeared on Britsoap Coronation Street  back in 2000 at age 18, and twenty-three years later, is still at it.  Here she is as a youngin:

   

And now, at around age 40:

…this one was taken last week:

Lovely.

3 Bad Things

Disaster, The Worst

…about Titanic 5:

  • if they ever find the thing and bring it to the surface, what are the odds that there will be ONE guy alive — who killed all the others right at the beginning so there’d be lots of oxygen left to breathe
  • when you go on an already-dangerous trip in a vessel built by the lowest bidder

…and finally, from MasterCard*:

*okay, maybe not.

Not So Sure

Corporate Wokism, Marketing / Advertising

Here’s an interesting take on the whole Bud Light debacle:

“When the company was bought over by InBev, a lot of things changed [from] when it was owned by Anheuser-Busch. You know, it’s an American brand,” the whistleblower remarked.

He explained that the company previously offered many benefits prior to its purchase by InBev. Through the fall in sales for the Bud Light brand, the former employee stated, the corporation could restructure both employee benefits and its company standards through layoffs and renegotiating contracts.

“Bud Light has been failing for many years. We’ve talked about that for many years. The numbers of just, you know, little by little deteriorated. And it feels like they said, ‘Let’s put this nail in the coffin,’” he said. “Now we have a lot of layoffs, a lot of loss in production. It would be easy for them to restructure, let’s say, pay or contracts.”

“It’s too obvious that they wouldn’t just mistakenly do this and not expect these repercussions. Anybody could tell you what was going to happen,” he commented.

Um, maybe.  Okay, I’m not so sure about that.  In the first place, when it comes to giant corporations, never ascribe to malice what can also be ascribed to stupidity.  Sometimes it happens, but that ain’t the way to bet.

The most telling rebuttal to this assertion is quite simple.  Regardless of whether Bud Light was in decline, or not, it was still the best-selling beer brand in the United States.  And yes, while A-B might have stood to gain from restructuring salary scales or employment contracts, I hardly think that those savings would equate to anything like the amount of money that’s been lost (and will continue to be lost) from their plummeting sales and the equally-dismal drop in their share price.  If some toad in Finance suggested this, he needs to be castrated, in the corporate sense, because if even someone like me can see this, then he’s truly stupid.

Regardless of everything else, you just don’t willfully destroy your #1 brand, especially when it’s as large a brand as Bud Light.  The sums of money are just too vast, the possible repercussions too dreadful because they’re unknown — the ramifications could see A-B split up as a company into separate operating companies (Michelob, Busch, etc.) and the loss of economies which stem from shared brands would cripple all of them.  They’d become no different from a bunch of craft brands — and regardless of what anyone thinks, A-B brands are about as far from craft beers, in both quality and consumer regard, as one could get.

No, the whole thing is just way too Machiavellian and too complex — and trust me, it’s not like InBev is staffed with people of the strategic vision of, say, the German General Staff of WWII, even.  They’re a bunch of Belgian and American bureaucrats, a breed not known for their perspicacity.  And let’s be honest, the Belgies are among the wokest people on the planet, so I’m more likely to ascribe all this bullshit to simple corporate vanity.

Of course, if I’m wrong and this really was just part of some diabolical Master Plan, I hope it all falls apart and the whole A-B/InBev house comes crashing down.  The world will survive and who knows, we might just end up with a few decent beers out of the wreckage.

You Have To Ask?

Government Thugs

The Federalist asks the question:

It’s probably more pertinent to start guessing under what pretenses the fucking Fibbies will frame him.  Some thoughts:

  • tax issues
  • campaign finances
  • breaking the Sabbath
  • discovering FBI spies among his campaign staff
  • unpaid speeding tickets
  • criticizing the federal government
  • running an unlicensed lemonade stand in 1973
  • transphobia
  • reading a comic book on an airliner
  • flirting with a woman during his college days
  • wearing white after Labor Day in 1982
  • owning a gun
  • misogyny
  • having a cancer survivor for a wife
  • putting mayo on his fries

…and if there aren’t any federal laws addressing some of the above crimes, they’ll invent them.

Keyword?

Africa

Longtime Reader Jack B. sends me this little snippet with the comment that it should perhaps be filed under “Africa Wins Again”:

Much of the domestic water supply here depends on electricity to pump it from the source to the vast high plain on which the cities of Johannesburg and Pretoria sit.

South Africa’s recent electricity woes – with regular lengthy scheduled blackouts – have had a knock-on effect on the supply of water.

“All of our stations, they need electricity, they need power. You have to pump water everywhere where it is needed,” says Sipho Mosai, the head of state-owned Rand Water, one of the country’s main water providers.

“Electricity is really at the heartbeat of what we do and if we don’t have it externally, at least for now, it becomes a problem.”

“At least for now.”  The perfect African answer to an immediate problem which if left unresolved will result in the usual African catastrophe.

Filed under “Africa Wins Again”?

So mote it be.

If you follow the link, you will note that the obligatory dig at “the wealthy” and the concomitant reference to “inequality” occur quite late in the piece, but it’s all there nevertheless.  Sic semper BBC.