Author: Kim du Toit

Scaring The Neighbors

Drive Time, Funny Stuff, The Gun Thing

At my advanced age and concomitantly-advanced skepticism, it’s not often that something has the power to cause roars of laughter of a volume sufficient for the neighbors to call apartment management to check in case I was injured or violently ill or something.  Reader Gwalchmai sent me this article via email, and I would caution you all to read it in a secluded spot, lest your laughter cause similar mayhem.

A (very) brief sample:

For the wilder Microturbo Thrust unit, advertising claimed for the model T-16-A Formula J Thrust Engine an additional 1,980 hp was at your fingertips. In reality a small rocket-thrust engine, once ignited, hot gases were instantaneously unleashed, spinning small turbine blades in the housing, with an optional turbine wheel available to create “spectacular flaming night runs,” according to Turbonique hype. This option was for those needing more sensorial input than the shockwave of 600-psi ignited rocket fuel slammed into a 100,000-rpm Inconel orb—all taking place right behind your head, as you glide an inch or two off the ground.
The snail-looking device, with what looked like a child’s bicycle horn protruding from one end, came with “easy to follow installation and operating instructions.” We assume the operating instructions were basically, “Don’t do it!” As for the bicycle horns, those were aluminum nozzles used by NASA in space. They were just for publicity, and in actual use would have melted in seconds.

And it gets better, when instances of “actual use” are described.

Now, in similar spirit, allow me to show a prototype cartridge I’m working on:  the .750 Kimbo self-defense cartridge* (shown with a .357 Mag cartridge to provide scale):

Manly men only need apply.  Even Ken Barrett took one look and went pale, as did the guys at Magnum Research.  Someone at Taurus apparently committed suicide when they saw the photo, and Smith & Wesson responded in the negative, via their attorneys.  Ruger called it “interesting”, but that’s all.

Only the folks at Bond Arms thought it looked “cool”, and are thinking of including a Derringer thus chambered in their 2020 catalog. Read more

That’s Not The Issue

Politics

When I first came to live in the U.S., there was the usual delay while my application got processed.  I wasn’t able to work (and I wasn’t going to do any sub rosa  work because a.) it was illegal and b.) if discovered, I feared being tossed out of the country).

So I watched TV.  All day and every day, for months.  As soon as the banality of daytime TV got to me (rough guess, about four days in), I looked for something else to watch that wasn’t going to bleed me of brain cells faster than a medieval doctor, and discovered C-Span TV.  Yup, live coverage of the daily business of Congress.

I watched it obsessively, as much from fascination as from wanting to discover exactly how my soon-to-be-adopted country worked.

And one of the highlights of that time was when proceedings of the Senate Judiciary and -Foreign Relations Committees came on.  I knew hardly anything about the judicial stuff, but more than a little of world politics.  A common speaker was Sen. Joe Biden, about whom I knew nothing, and as I watched more and more of his appearances and his speeches and questions, I soon realized that this was the most stupid man I’d ever seen on TV.  When he was reading from a prepared speech, Biden was fine:  articulate, witty and engaging.  As soon as he wandered off-script, and especially when he was interrogating witnesses appearing in the Senate, his stupidity and ignorance were always in evidence.  What he said sounded  plausible and in keeping with his speeches;  but the substance  of what he said was vacuous, ill-informed and often devoid of any kind of logic, let alone rhetoric.  I actually started to cringe whenever he was handed the microphone because I thought that surely, surely he would embarrass himself.  And he did, constantly — but he never once realized that he had.  (In this regard, Biden was very similar to how Socialist Rep. Ocasio-Cortez is today, incidentally — and he’s only better than she is now because of his many years’ experience in politics.)

When Biden ran for president back in 1988, I actually had an outside opportunity to work for the outfit handling his polling in Texas (Longtime Readers may recall that I was a researcher back then).  I turned it down because I couldn’t face the thought of working for this guy, no matter how peripherally.

Given all the above, I was perhaps the only man in America who was unsurprised when the equally-vacuous Barack Obama chose Biden as his VP — anyone brighter would have shown up Obama’s intellectual vapidity, and Biden’s superficially-plausible-but-intellectually-empty speechmaking was on a par with the future president’s.

So I don’t care about all the current brouhaha surrounding Biden’s current presidential prospects:  his fondling of women, his political platform (such as it is), or his age.  I do care that we only recently emerged from eight years of a stupid president (Obama), and I have no wish to be subjected to the same weapons-grade presidential stupidity all over again.

Isn’t That Special?

Bad News, Pussification Parade

“Never marry outside your class.”

As a conservative man, one of the old customs I’ve always respected is that nobility / royalty always kept a closed shop when it came to marriage.  If a royal princess came of marriageable age, some other royal prince would be found — mostly in Europe — to be her husband, and ditto for the future Earl Whatsit to find himself a brood mare wife among the dozens of well-bred girls available either locally, or else abroad.

Yes I know, such customs have led to inbred morons and black sheep in the various families, but over time, the benefit of said unions have outweighed the potential disadvantages.  Both parties know the rules of the game, and behave accordingly.

There have been some notable exceptions to this rule, of course, most notably in the case of Prince William’s wife, the former commoner Kate Middleton (now the Duchess of Cambridge) who will one day became Queen Catherine of Great Britain.  As a commoner-turned royal, she has been an outstanding success and is a tribute to Britain’s Royal Family.

Credit: Euan Cherry/WENN.com ORG XMIT: wenn29585715

The same cannot be said for the other prince (William’s brother Harry) who not only married someone way below his class, but a foreigner to boot, who not only has no background in the vagaries of Britain’s class system (not always a Bad Thing, mind you) but also seems determined to inflict her New Age / New Woman bullshit on the long-suffering Windsors.  Hence:

Once he was a beer-drinking bachelor with a penchant for fast food, who was most likely to be found at the heart of the party.
But then our action man prince met a free-spirited Californian actress living by the ethos that most things can be ‘cured with either yoga, the beach or a few avocados’, as she wrote on her now-defunct blog The Tig.
And the rest, as they say, is history.
Ever since Prince Harry met Meghan Markle something has changed. Last week they were spotted leaving a Notting Hill wellness shop which offers ‘energy healing’ and meditation with ‘singing bowls’.
Then it was revealed they had stayed at Heckfield Place hotel in Hampshire for three nights. It boasts an organic ethos, a yoga studio and a spa offering ‘all-natural treatments’, and holds mind-expanding talks on subjects such as ‘How the world thinks’.

And it gets better:

The Duchess of Sussex has delivered an astonishing snub to the Queen’s highly-regarded doctors, insisting she doesn’t want ‘the men in suits’ to oversee the birth of her first child.
The Mail on Sunday can reveal that, in a significant break with Royal tradition, 37-year-old Meghan has appointed her own delivery team, led by an unnamed female doctor.
Royal Household gynaecologists Alan Farthing and Guy Thorpe-Beeston – who is a specialist in high-risk births – attended at the arrival of all three of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge’s children. They are among the best in the world but neither has been given the leading role in Meghan’s care.

FFS.  The only was this could get any worse would be if the “unnamed female doctor” turns out to be that chick from Gray’s Anatomy.

Look:  Britain has had a long and storied tradition of eccentric royals, most of whom were kept out of view of the public (unless they were actual monarchs, in which case they were kept more or less in check by Parliament).  And over time, their effect on the Royal Family has been either minimal or else forgotten.

Nowadays, of course, there is no privacy for Royal Loons, and the tabloid press (no longer restrained by lèse-majesté  laws of old, more’s the pity) seize on every little eccentricity and bray it out loud to the world.

In the grand scheme of things, of course, none of this matters — especially to us Murkins, who look on these goings-on with, at best, bemused indifference — and in centuries to come, the Pussification Of Prince Harry will be (perhaps) just a footnote in someone’s book about royal foolishness.

But for those like me who are interested in things like tradition and long-established customs (especially when they’ve been proven to work), this dim-witted modernist broad has done more damage to the Royal Family than Hitler’s bombs.

AP Photo/Evan Agostini

Quote Of The Day

QOTD

Found at some bloke’s place in North Central Idaho:

Day 1:  Wish violence, rape, or even death on @NRA members & anyone who supports gun rights — and their children for good measure.
Day 2:  Wonder why the people you just threatened don’t want to give up their guns just yet.

Oh, and speaking of Joe Huffman:  I cannot attend this year’s Boomershoot (again! ) for family reasons, but next year, Rodders… and that’s a promise.

Safety

Behind Enemy Lines, Travels

And I’m not talking about the usual stuff (guns, SHTF supplies etc.):  it concerns overseas travel.

I’ve been following The Zman’s adventures in Scandinavia, Russia, and parts between with some interest.  (Go ahead and read them first, if you want, starting with the Out Of Lagos post — I had no idea he’d been living there for years — and his point about London’s Heathrow Airport is absolutely spot-on.)  I’ve never been to any of the countries he’s talked about so far (Finland, Estonia, Russia), so I was of course interested in his observations.  

Then something which happened to him in Tallinn caught my attention:

In Estonia, I realized I had no cell service at all.  I was not worried until I tried to buy something and all three credit cards were declined.  To make matters worse, I had no cash of any type with me, as I planned to just charge everything.  That meant I had no money and no way to call the credit card company to get the issue resolved.

I don’t care how much you think the rest of the world has modernized:  it often hasn’t, and sometimes that realization hits you hard, with a potentially-serious outcome.  In those situations, you need cash.  Hence my admonition:

Never travel overseas without cash.

How much cash you take is up to you — I usually take about US$100 (or £100, or 100€) per day I’m going to be out of the country, mostly in small bills (5s, 10s or 20s).  Don’t piss about with some piffling sum like $10, either:  it won’t get you diddly Over There except maybe a couple bottles of water and some chewing gum.  Back in 2017 when I went over to Britishland on my extended sabbatical, I didn’t take that much because a.) I didn’t have that much available and b.) the UK is pretty much a cashless society anyway, so I only carried a few hundred or so, in total, some of which went towards buying a burner phone to escape the ruinous roaming fees.  But when I go on my next trip to a place where nobody speaks English, French or German, I’ll be cashing up beforehand, you betcha.

Now a lot of seasoned travelers are going to throw up their hands in horror because “you’re a target” / “you’ll lose it all” / “blah blah blah”.  Of course  you have to be smart about this:  I have two wallets, a well-hidden one with my real cards, ID and maybe a quarter of my cash in it, and another in an outside pocket with fake ID (got it in some junk mail, a reasonably-accurate facsimile of a California driver’s license with another guy’s photo), a couple of “sample” credit cards (also courtesy of junk mail) and maybe $50 (small bills, to make it look thicker with cash than it actually is).  If I do get mugged, the fake one will be handed over quickly.  Most of my bring-along cash is hidden elsewhere on my person, to be found pretty much only if I’m dead and the money has become irrelevant.  (I also carry a fake phone:  an old, decommissioned cell phone with a stone-dead battery, which I use only as an alarm clock, plugged into the wall socket at night.  Good luck stealing that  one and expecting to get anything out of it.)  And of course you have to be cautious —  to top up your on-hand cash, you only resort to the “roll” at night in your hotel room or in the train toilet, for example.

Here’s the thing.  I have been poor a couple of times in my life — I mean, no cash, no job, sleep-in-the-car-soon-to-be-repossessed, only a small suitcase of clothing / possessions kind-of poor, and the only thing I fear about being this poor again is to be in this situation in a foreign country where I don’t have any friends I can call on somehow.  For those who’ve never traveled in a country where the language is completely unintelligible (in my case, that would be Finland,Russia and Estonia, to name but three), nothing beats the feeling of helplessness at not being able to hail a cab / catch a bus to the U.S. Embassy, buy some street food, buy a burner phone, or check into a cheap hotel.  Take my word for it:  being broke and on the streets in a strange land fucking sucks, Bubba.

Oh, and by the way:  this is especially important if (unlike Zman) you’re not traveling alone.  By yourself, you can get okay with pretty much nothing for a short-enough period of time.  With a wife, girlfriend or (eek) kids?  The dangers of short-term poverty become exponential.

People always talk about safety when you travel:  avoiding skeevy areas, staying with crowds, having complete situational awareness and so on.  But you only have a modicum of control over those things, especially in an unknown country.  How much cash you can carry, however, is completely under your control.  So control it, and minimize your vulnerability in a place where nobody  knows your name (or speaks your language).

Proper Analysis

Numbers & Statistics

Over the years, several people have pointed me to Willis Eschenbach’s Skating Under The Ice, and it’s very, very  good.  Of late, however, this post has (and should have) become a landmark in the seemingly-endless debate on climate change, in that Willis applies an age-old accounting principle to the issue of carbon dioxide levels, thus:

Now, for me, discussing the “social cost of carbon” is a dereliction of scientific duty because it is only half of an analysis.
A real analysis is where you draw a vertical line down the middle of a sheet of paper. At the top of one side of the paper you write “Costs”, and under that heading, you list the costs of whatever you are analyzing … and at the top of the other side of the paper you write “Benefits” and beneath, you list those benefits. This is what is called a “cost/benefit analysis”, and only considering only the “Costs” column and ignoring the “Benefits” column constitutes scientific malfeasance.

…and then, in brilliant detail, he shows the other half.  It’s a very long read, but if you don’t do it all, you’re doing yourself a disservice.  His conclusion is stunning:

[T]he benefit that we get from emitting that additional tonne of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere is an increase in goods and services of $4,380 … which dwarfs the assumed social cost of carbon of $40. When we do an actual cost/benefit analysis, the result is almost all benefit.

I admit that I had only thought in vague terms about this topic, because I always took it for granted that social benefit came from industry, and that the greater the industry, the greater the benefit.  What I had never done was quantify  the benefit;  and now I don’t have to, because now it’s been done, irrefutably.

Bravo.