Month: September 2023

Dept. Of Righteous Shootings

Righteous Shootings

From Melbourne (Florida, not Strylia duh) comes this little story:

One man is dead and two others wounded after West Melbourne police said a group of people broke into an apartment early Sunday and were met by an armed homeowner.

The shooting happened at about 2:25 a.m. at the Reserves of Melbourne apartment complex in the 2200 block of Launch Court, just south of West New Haven Avenue. The suspects are believed to be in their 20s, said Graig Erenstoft, spokesperson for the West Melbourne Police Department.

The latest incident unfolded after several people, possibly armed with at least one firearm, forcefully broke into an apartment, police said. The homeowner, who had a gun of unknown caliber, fired on the group, striking at least three of those carrying out the home invasion, police reported. Police arrived minutes later along with paramedics.

One unidentified suspect was taken to Holmes Regional Medical Center where a doctor later pronounced him dead. Another suspect turned up on his own at the hospital and was treated for his wounds, police said. No details were released about the third person who was shot.

Hey:  one out of three ain’t bad, but clearly Our Hero needs a little range time, should any such occasions arise in the future.  (Because if his house was targeted, there may well be a repeat performance.)

Anyway:

Busted !!!!!

Grammar Nazism

From Alert Reader Ray G in Colorado:

Hi Kim,

I know you’re a grammar nazi. Don’t know if you want any feedback on your own English usage. But anyway, it’s “to wit”, not “to whit”. You can look it up…

To say that I was confounded by this gentle rebuke is to make an understatement on the scale of “Kelly Brook has decent boobs”…

…because Ray is absolutely right:  it is “to wit” and not “to whit”.  And I have no idea why I’ve been doing it wrong all these years.

So what to do?  Of course, I went back into my archives and corrected as many of those malfeasances as I could find (thank you, Winston Smith).  And here’s the reference to the above understatement:

You may consider that penance for my mea maxima culpa.

And by the way:  thank you, Ray — and anyone can correct me, at any time, if you think I’ve screwed up in similar fashion.

Want Ads With That?

Business

How nice:

Amazon Prime to streaming customers: pay $2.99 per month or go back to watching commercials

Streaming services are in a heated tug-of-war over viewers and users are growing more adept at jumping in and out of those services, often depending on price. The platforms risk losing customers with price hikes, but they could lose them if they don’t generate new content that wins over users.

Disney will begin charging $13.99 a month in the U.S. for ad-free Disney+ in mid-October, 75% more than the ad-supported service. Netflix already charges $15.49 per month for its ad-free plan, more than twice the monthly subscription for Netflix with ads.

Amazon said limited advertisements will be aired during shows and movies starting early next year so that it can “continue investing in compelling content and keep increasing that investment over a long period of time.”

I haven’t seen much evidence that Amazon has created much in the way of “compelling content” (i.e. stuff that we actually want to see), so I’m not sure how I’m going to respond to this new little bit of Shylockian chiseling.  We don’t buy that much from Amazon anyway, unless there’s absolutely no local shopping alternative or the products’ manufacturers don’t offer online sales, so our shipping costs aren’t that high to begin with, ergo  there’s not much in the way of saving through Prime.

And am I the only one who spends almost as much time looking for something decent to watch as actually watching a show?  (Ditto Netflix, by the way.)

I understand the business model — there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch TV show — but included in the business model is the fact that some consumers won’t go along with the latest pricing structure.  And in fact I don’t really mind if ads play before a show, even though they’re irritating.  But during a show?  Forget that shit.

What I’ll most probably do is suspend our Prime subscription altogether after Christmas, and if we absolutely must shop through Amazon thereafter, wait and consolidate our purchases into one delivery.

I guess we’ll see how all this plays out.

Roost, Chickens Coming Home To

Corporate Wokism, Crime

Well, well, well.  Here’s the macro event:

Hours after murder charges against a former Philadelphia police officer were dropped on Tuesday, large groups, mostly made up of teenagers, looted multiple stores in the city. 

Police started receiving calls around 8 p.m. Tuesday night about a large crowd moving into Center City, the main dining and shopping scene in downtown Philadelphia, NBC 10 reported. The crowd eventually turned riotous, ransacking a Foot Locker, Lulumelon, and an Apple store, among other businesses, before at least 20 were arrested. 

Note that Philly has one of those “Soros-style” prosecutors who distinguish themselves by not prosecuting anyone for crimes like this.  There’s also evidence that, far from being “spontaneous”, the raids are being coordinated and targets established via social media — almost the very definition of organized crime.

And speaking of targets, here’s a micro event:

Target is closing nine stores in major cities across four states, claiming theft and organized retail crime have made the environment unsafe for staff and customers – and unsustainable for business.

The big box chain is part of a wave of retailers – both large and small – that say they’re struggling to contain store crimes that have hurt their bottom lines. Many have closed stores or made changes to merchandise and layouts.

…which is likely to cause an epidemic of Schadenböners among conservatives because the Minneapolis retailer is easily one of the wokest corporations in the world.

The only good thing about the Philly situation, by the way, is that unlike the Portland OR police, some Philly cops are getting into the spirit of the thing.

Try to contain your guffaws of delight.  I couldn’t.

3 Modern Affectations

3 Inexplicable Things

…that make me want to go out into the street and slap random people in the face, just on the off-chance that they support this bullshit.

  • Gender reveal parties:  apart from maybe the grandparents, who the fucking fuck cares about someone else’s unborn baby’s gender?
  • “Hate speech”:  it was fucking iniquitous before it started becoming ingrained into law;  now it’s getting to be really toxic, as a tool for censorship and career destruction.
  • “Net Zero 2030”:  or, how to utterly ruin the global economy with quasi-religious fervor.

Feel free to add your particular contemporary triggers (another fucking burr expression in my shorts)  in Comments.

Wake Up, Lil’ Susie

Illegal immigrants, Immigration

…in which we see that at long last, some kind of realization is beginning to dawn that the Great Multicultural Assimilation Project is not living up to its promise.  From Brit HomeSec Suella (Susie) Braverman:

“Uncontrolled immigration, inadequate integration, and a misguided dogma of multiculturalism have proven a toxic combination for Europe over the last few decades. I’m not the first to point this out. In 2010, Angela Merkel gave a speech in which she acknowledged that multiculturalism had utterly failed, and then, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and British PM David Cameron echoed similar sentiments shortly thereafter.

“Multiculturalism makes no demands of the incomer to integrate. It has failed because it allowed people to come to our society and live parallel lives in it. They could be in the society but not of the society, and in extreme cases, they could pursue lives aimed at undermining the stability and threatening the security of our society.”

Yeah, like nobody of sane mind could have seen this coming.

Meanwhile on the other side of the Channel:

Germany plans to halve the federal aid it allocates for states to cover expenses of receiving and integrating refugees next year as part of budget-tightening amid soaring inflation after years of generous spending.

And why so?

Germany has ‘hit the limit’ of the number of migrants the country can take, the country’s president Frank-Walter Steinmeier has warned. 

Steinmeier said that the fact that a third of all migrants who reached the EU in the first six months of this year went through Germany first means the nation, ‘like Italy, is at the limit of its capabilities’. 

His warning comes seven years after Steinmeier called for ‘open borders’ in a move that saw a million people enter Germany in 2015 and 2016.

Yeah, maybe that wasn’t such a good idea, Frank-Wally old chap, especially as those newbie “citizens” don’t have the exactly the same ideas as yer average Volksdeutsches when it comes to  things like robbery, murder, rape and similar forms of criminality — not to mention those other little peccadilloes like their savage treatment of women, honor killings, religious intolerance and tribalism.

Next thing the Germans (and Brits) will be re-commissioning nuclear power stations and overturning the Duracell car mandates.  I await such developments with bated breath, but I’m not holding my breath.

Such profound stupidity, especially when encased in law, takes a long while to be tossed out.

As we Over Here are going to be finding out soon.