Author: Kim du Toit

Perennial Question

Literature

I was idly looking at the graphic below, which depicts Britain’s new royal line of succession:

Now like for most people, the succession thing is about as interesting to me as which rain droplet will reach the bottom of the windowpane first, but it does bring to mind a question which has bothered me since high school, and has never been satisfactorily answered.

It’s Shakespeare’s Hamlet.  Now as any fule kno, the plot is that Hamlet’s eeeevil uncle Claudius poisoned Hamlet’s father the king, then married Hamlet’s mother Gertrude to become the new king.

Given that Hamlet was alive when his father was murdered and was therefore first in the line of succession, why did Hamlet not become king?  If I understand the rules properly, when the king dies, his wife becomes irrelevant to the whole thing, and anyone she marries afterwards even less relevant.  Claudius, therefore, had absolutely no claim to the throne (despite being Hamlet’s father’s brother) and could never have become king, unless he’d had Hamlet killed beforehand.

Or does / did Denmark have a different succession plan?  I don’t think so.

So the entire plot of Hamlet, then, is a load of old bollocks:  the uncle’s accession to the throne being simply what Alfred Hitchcock called the “mcguffin” (a device upon which to hang a plot line, requiring the suspension of disbelief from the audience, e.g. John Huston’s stolen Maltese falcon, or Casablanca‘s “letters of transit signed by General de Gaulle”).

Not that I care, mind you;  without that Shakespearean mcguffin, we’d never have been given the deathless “To be, or not to be”  speech, or seen that old busybody Polonius get a rapier through his arras.

Conflicting Advice

SHTF

We are constantly being told about the merits of a “cashless” society, mostly by government agencies and other totalitarians who want to be able to see how We The People are spending our money, and for whom cash usage represents an anathema:  anonymous transactions.

It’s ironic, therefore, that Sweden, so long in the forefront of digital payments, seems to be having second thoughts about the whole thing:

Cashless payments are all the rage but people in Sweden have been told to squirrel away notes and coins in case of a cyber attack on the nation’s banks.
Digital payments offer convenience for both buyers and sellers alike and the Scandinavian nation has been an eager adopter of the technology.
Now, government experts are concerned that people could be left without any money should its computer networks become victim to an attack.
Sweden’s Civil Contingencies Agency has issued guidance to every household telling residents to stockpile ‘cash in small denominations’ for use in emergencies.
The warning will ring alarm bells around the world as developed nations increasingly make the move to a cashless society.

Trouble is, if the digital SHTF and all electronic banking becomes impossible, you’re going to need more than “cash in small denominations” to get by, unless you have many thousands of same at hand — and few people do, except for drug dealers [irony alert].

In most similar societal breakdowns in the past, alternatives to cash have been (in order of utility):  gold, liquor, cigarettes, ammunition and vaginas.

Most of my male Readers probably have on hand plenty of all but the last (to their everlasting credit), and cigarettes probably wouldn’t have much demand nowadays anyway (except in the rural areas, maybe).  But if you can’t afford gold, booze and ammo — and especially ammo — would work for a time, at least.

I can offer no advice concerning vaginas, but I suspect that if you have enough of the cash alternatives, you’d have little problem gaining access to the latter.  (My late stepfather once told me that after WWII, a pack of Lucky Strikes would get you an all-nighter with even the most beautiful Italian girls in Naples, but those were the days when everybody smoked.)

Better still would be to be married, so the whole vagina issue would become irrelevant.  (I still chuckle over Third-World society men offering up their “sisters” in exchange for food or money.  I was actually made such an offer — which I politely declined — by a guy in a Bangalore parking lot, in 2005.)

As it happens, the Swedes are fortunate in that they seem to have a plentiful supply of vaginas, which is probably just as well because Sweden’s relationship with its bullion dealers is problematic, to say the least:

Last month, Sweden’s largest precious metal dealer posted a notice that their bank account had been closed without their consent.
Tavex Guld & Valuta posted a notice on June 30th [2016 — K] that their bank account had been unilaterally closed. This left the dealer without an efficient way of accepting payments for good, racing to establish a new payment system.

As Tavex stated:

The banking system in Sweden is operated however vigorously towards a cashless society, as you probably are aware of, and Tavex has, as one of the largest wholesale suppliers of physical notes and investment metals in Sweden, as we see it become a target for the major commercial banks.

So on the one hand, Sweden’s government can and has moved towards a cashless society, but on the other hand they’re recommending that people hoard cash “under their mattress”.

The Swedes probably have plenty of booze lying around in their homes — they’re not renowned for being teetotallers —  but I doubt very much that they have much ammo at all, even in rural areas, as sales thereof are severely restricted because “nobody should need excessive quantities” of ammunition.  (Sound familiar?)

Thankfully, we are not Sweden, so my advice is to have lots of all the above — and especially guns and ammunition — on hand.  Don’t trust the Internet of Things to stay in operation forever, and do become independent of it when it falls over, regardless of cause.

Now, for all our government alphabet agencies:  how I spend my pitiful supply of money is nunya.  I only use cards for convenience, and most of my (ahem) “suspicious” purchases — those would be of guns and ammunition, you godless gummint snoops — have been anonymous.  So fuck you.

Well, Duh

Mocking Furriners

Seems like the Frogs have something called “social envy”, as discussed here.

A leader of the Yellow Vest movement, Ingrid Levavasseur, criticised “the inertia of big corporations over social misery while they are showing themselves capable of mobilising a crazy amount of cash overnight for Notre Dame”.
Philippe Martinez, head of France’s largest trade union, CGT, said: “Now understand that there are billionaires who have huge amounts of money and in one click put 200m, 100m on the table. It shows the inequalities in this country, which we regularly demonstrate against.”
Such criticism has been widespread. On French breakfast television last week, a guest insulted the Notre Dame donors as “rich bastards”, and even the moderate newspaper Le Monde wrote that “too much is too much”.

Even  Le Monde?  The irony is strong with this one, as that rag is typically to the left of Hillary Clinton.

No, what surprised me was this little snippet:

The international Ipsos Mori survey, in which dozens of questions were submitted to respondents, showed that the French have a particularly critical attitude towards rich people. Based on its findings, a Social Envy Coefficient was calculated, making it possible to measure how strong social envy against rich people is in a country.
According to this coefficient, social envy is highest in France with a score of 1.26, followed by Germany with 0.97. It is significantly lower in the US (0.42) and the UK (0.37).

I don’t know where they conducted the U.S. part of the survey — I’m suspecting the East- and West Coast major cities — but I am amazed to learn (by this survey’s metrics) that we Murkins are more socially envious than the Brits.  We aren’t.  There is no expression over here that is in any way similar to the withering “fucking toffs”, for example, and our initial impression on seeing someone driving a Ferrari is “I want one of those”, and not “I want his“.

We may hate our self-professed social elites, but we sure as hell don’t envy them, or their wealth.  Our loathing is directed more at their paternalistic bossiness.

But that’s not to say that we are aren’t occasionally tempted to borrow an old custom from the Frogs and apply it to scum like, say, the entire Humanities Department at Harvard or the editorial committee of The New York Times...

Sound Advice

Advice, SHTF

Kurt Schlichter tells us to be self-reliant (or, as he calls it, “rooftop Koreans”) during times when the SHTF, and lo, he speaketh da troof.

I suspect that the majority of my Readers have long since decided on that course of action — and if they haven’t, they’re either disarmed Brits (cricket bats are not much use on rooftops) or else Murkin denizens of liberal enclaves where they’ve been told to “leave it to the police” — and pretty much have  to do that because their local gummint has made the Koreans’ AR-15s illegal.

For discussion in Comments today:  assuming that possession of eeeeevil-looking AR / AK rifles is verboten  in your locale, what would be your alternative “rooftop” gun?  State gun type and chambering, please, with reasons.

Strange Fascination

Guy Stuff, The Gun Thing

This pic at C.W.’s blog got me thinking.

It makes me smile, too.

I have written before that men like to be in control of machinery — that many men, very much including myself, prefer stick shifts to automatic gearboxes, bolt-action rifles over semi-automatic rifles, ditto revolvers over pistols and so on.

Where we do use the auto / semi-auto doodads, it’s for practical reasons only, like buying a car with an automatic gearbox when having to navigate stop-start traffic on a daily basis, or needing the greater firepower in a pistol’s fifteen-round magazine compared to a revolver cylinder’s six, to give but two examples.  But those are simply reasons of practicality, while our enduring fondness for being in control — i.e. working  the action of a thing — can be found in the fact that the auto/semi-auto versions haven’t replaced the manual versions completely.

When it comes to rifles, men of the manual-operation persuasion are blessed in that we have several types of operation to choose from:  bolt action, lever action and pump action are all there, and all are still popular, hence our reaction to the pic above.

As Longtime Readers will know, I have an abiding love for all three of the above, and have fired countless rounds through all of them.  Don’t ask me to pick my favorite type, but I have to say, when it comes to pure fun, it takes a lot to beat an open field filled with old tin cans, fruit and suchlike, a pump-action rimfire rifle and a couple thousand rounds of .22 ammo.  I know, it takes a while to reload the tube magazine, but that also allows the barrel to cool, which is no small thing.  So let’s look at a few choices among the latter.

Browning Model 90 / Winchester Model 62 are the originals, and are still available today.  The fact that these old guns (discontinued in 1959) in good condition can fetch well over a grand at gun shows today is testament to their popularity.

But are they that popular?  Recent events seem to prove otherwise.  Of all the gunmakers extant, Henry is the only one which continues to make old-style pump-action rimfire rifles:

It’s a beautiful little rifle — that octagonal barrel! — but I think Henry does us gunnies a real disservice by pricing them so high.  I mean, if Marlin and Ruger can make semi-auto rimfire rifles which retail for less than $150, why do Henry pump rimfires typically cost close to $500 for an action which is much less complex?

I would love to own one of these rifles, most of all because it shoots .22 WMR as well as .22 LR and I can think of few better varmint-whackers than a magnum pump action, but at that nearly-$500 sticker?  Sorry.

Actually, I do know why Henry pump rifles are priced so high:  they have no competition.  Which brings me to my next gripe.

I don’t understand why Taurus discontinued manufacture of their Model 62 knock-offs, either.  (I know, they’ll say “no demand”, but they continue to make other guns which hardly sell at all — the Judge revolver in .45-70 Govt comes to mind, for some reason — so I don’t buy the excuse.)

My Taurus stainless-steel carbine model is beyond beautiful, and as I’ve said before, when I take friends shooting with this little thing, I have to take at least  a brick of .22 ammo with me, so much do people enjoy shooting it.  (Hell, I always carry over a hundred rounds in its case, just to make sure I don’t commit the cardinal sin of .22 ammo shortage at the range.)

Finally, we have a sorta-pump (in that it has a pump action, but doesn’t have an exposed hammer), the sleek, beautiful (and expensive, at around $600!!! new) Remington 572 Fieldmaster:

Look, I’ve fired the 572 dozens of times and sent many a hundred rounds downrange through its 21″ barrel, and if someone gave me one I’d never sell it — but I’d trade  it in a heartbeat for a rifle with an exposed hammer.  Like the Taurus Mod 62 long-barreled model:

It all has to do with that “manual operation” thing — and the more parts you can control, the better. De-cocking is easy with an exposed hammer, impossible with the Remington’s hidden one.

Anyway, let me end by saying that if you don’t have a pump-action rimfire rifle, you’re missing out on a whole lot of fun.  You know what to do.