Alert Readers will notice that the “5 Worst” feature has disappeared from our Friday fare.
That’s because I was getting bored with it and sheesh, it’s been going for over a year. From now on, it will only reappear when something truly foul suggests itself to me.
Despite having many of their demands met when French President Emmanuel Macron caved to the increasing public pressure, the yellow vest squads are still out in the streets calling for his resignation. It seems that the French government has had enough of this unrest and is preparing new legislation aimed at tossing the unhappy peasants into the dungeon if they don’t go home and shut up.
Governments never seem to learn: the harsher the punishments you heap on people you’re oppressing, the more violence will be inflicted on you in response, eventually. You heard it here, first: if the gendarmes start shooting, I wouldn’t be surprised if a whole bunch of WWII-era weapons are unearthed (sometimes literally), to make an appearance at a forthcoming demonstration, or when somebody faces one of these new punishments.
Vivez les giles jaunes!!
You’d have to have a heart of stone not to laugh hysterically (as I did) at this report:
Footage released by the hunt saboteurs shows several people standing in front of a van, blocking it from leaving.
A man wearing a baseball cap appears to threaten the occupants with a pool cue, as they shout: ‘Oi, you’re on camera.’
A woman in a red hoodie jabs her finger at the sabs and says: ‘Dirty f****** scum, you’re not going nowhere.’
A man inside the van can be heard desperately calling police for help and tells the operator they are being boxed in by hunt supporters wielding pool cues.
Lemme see: when hunt saboteurs (“sabs” — how cute) break the law, trespass on private property, try to pull hunters from their horses and scatter pepper in the noses of the dogs, it’s all “right to protest” / “save the animals” etc. But when their violence results in violence against them in retaliation, they’re all “Oh please, P.C. Plod, please please please come and rescue us!”
The woman in the red hoodie had it right: they’re dirty fucking scum.
According to this report, our household appliances are about to become snitches on just about every aspect of our lives:
One day, finding an oven that just cooks food may be as tough as buying a TV that merely lets you click between channels.
Internet-connected “smarts” are creeping into cars, refrigerators, thermostats, toys and just about everything else in your home. CES 2019, the gadget show opening Tuesday in Las Vegas, will showcase many of these products, including an oven that coordinates your recipes and a toilet that flushes with a voice command.
With every additional smart device in your home, companies are able to gather more details about your daily life. Some of that can be used to help advertisers target you — more precisely than they could with just the smartphone you carry.
And the news just gets better and better:
Despite the fact that there’s plenty of information available showing how these devices collect data about every aspect of your life and the manufacturers both use and sell that data on the open market, the majority of people seem to either not care or are willing to accept this “new reality” as part of living in the modern world.
Once again [sigh], it appears that I’m in a minority.
No doubt, there will appear at your local drugstores condoms which measure the number of thrusts, such data sent back to the manufacturers of K-Y “Duration” gel, said antidote for premature ejaculation to arrive at your bedside by special delivery within two strokes of initial insertion. And that’s a benevolent outcome for such intrusiveness.
Never mind that. Here’s a situation already in being:
T-Mobile, Sprint, and AT&T are selling access to their customers’ location data, and that data is ending up in the hands of bounty hunters and others not authorized to possess it, letting them track most phones in the country.
I don’t often agree with church leaders about, well, anything much. But I’m in absolute agreement with this man.
Allow me to offer a suggestion for a brand-new industry. When a new generation of “smart” phones arrived on the market and appeared to be “locked” to a specific carrier, within days we saw phones being unlocked by street vendors, sometimes right outside the stores selling the damn things.
I’m calling on all privacy-minded geeks of the world to unite, and to design apps or hacks or whatever to bypass the Big Brother mechanisms of these new infernal fink machines so that people (like me) who aren’t interested in letting Global MegaCorp Inc. snoop into the most intimate areas of our lives may avail themselves of their inventions.
I will be at the head of the fucking line to buy them. I promise.
Choirboy saunters up to a young woman on street corner, shows her a weapon and attempts a little involuntary financial redistribution, whereupon Our Heroine pulls her gun and shoots the little asshole in the neck, said wound eventually sending him to join Hell’s Chorus.
[pause to allow cheers and applause to die down]
This incident would be fairly unremarkable except that it happened on Chicago’s South Side, and the young lady in question had an Illinois carry permit (!!!), which as any fule kno is of hen’s teeth scarcity. [Note to the gun confiscators: this is how you reduce violent crime; not by disallowing law-abiding citizens to carry guns.]
Note too that this is an incident of gun violence (duh), but as any right-thinking person would agree, the right kind of gun violence.
(Thanks to Reader Brad_In_IL for the heartwarming report.)
I have often ruminated that young men need to evaluate their career choices very carefully before picking the one they think will work best for them.
Increasingly, it’s become apparent that going to college is not a worthwhile option for them — unless they want to be hounded, harassed and vilified just for the “crime” of being a man, that is. (10,000 instances of false accusations, man-hating professors and the courses they teach have been omitted on grounds of brevity.)
Now, we’ve seen in other spheres what men do when they feel that the game rules are loaded against them, or that participation leads not only to inevitable failure, but even to a compromised future. The dating game is one such activity, where men have either deliberately turned the rules of the game against women and used them to their own benefit — or have simply eschewed all participation in the face of assured failure (going their own way — MGTOW) and simply created a parallel life outside the game.
I’m suggesting an alternative to the career game.
Don’t go to college, at least until the rotten system has collapsed under the weight of its own prejudice and misogyny misandry, and been replaced with a better deal. Ignore the vested interests of people and institutions who preach the lie that you can only be successful with a college degree.
If you’re super-smart and driven like Michael Dell or Bill Gates, of course, you don’t need to be told this. But only a very few men, in any activity, are in that rare 0.00001% of super-achievers.
But for the vast remainder, there is an option: work in industries where the vast majority of women can’t or won’t participate. I’m talking about the heavy, dirty and sometimes thankless jobs (Mike Rowe-type Dirty Jobs) which not only don’t require a college degree, but where a college degree might even be a hindrance and not a qualifier.
Just last week I came across a guy who was an oil field worker. He’d fled from Venezuela right after that thug Hugo Chávez came to power, and in the eighteen years since had worked his way up the ladder, in oilfields all over the world. Now, at age 45, he’d finally reached the point where he didn’t have to work the oil rigs, just visit them and see how things were going. Along the way he’d acquired a wife, two preteen kids, and a $750k house in Plano where I picked him up to take him to the airport. He’d completely lost his Hispanic accent (when he left Venezuela he couldn’t speak a word of English) and was also fluent in Arabic and (ahem) German. When I asked him if he had a university degree he just laughed and said, “What for?”
What for, indeed.
Here’s the point. I know it’s going to be difficult for Millennials and their successors to handle this, but working dirty jobs is hard. It requires dedication, stubbornness and of course a willingness to get one’s hands dirty, and sadly, because of the education industry’s indoctrination of kids, this choice is often dismissed or demeaned.
It shouldn’t be. If you weigh the eventual benefits of dirty work — where, by the way, your exposure to militant feminism is going to be minimal to nonexistent — against a useless degree coupled with crippling debt, this should not be a difficult decision.
Is this risky? Not as much as you’d think. Just the other day, our local community college broke ground on a campus which apparently is going to be dedicated almost exclusively to the “hard” careers — automotive service and repair, construction, welding, plumbing, electrical work, manufacturing and so on — but I’m not going to suggest you look to such an institution for your education / training; what’s important is simply to realize that for such an event to have taken place, there must be a crippling shortage of young men willing to get into those fields, and this is the Establishment’s attempt to address it. (It’s complete bollocks, of course — you’d do better by getting an apprenticeship at a real place of work.)
So, in the paraphrased words of Ayn Rand, go “Galt” and make your own way in the world. You may not succeed, of course, but remember that failure is equally (or, in these times, more) likely with a freshly-printed college diploma clutched in your hand.
Become a watchmaker, if you’re mechanically inclined. Work in construction, if you’re strong in body. Get an apprenticeship in a trade, preferably an ugly, dirty and tough one where just by virtue of being a man you face no competition from women. I guarantee you, there’s a tough job out there for any man if he’s prepared to go for it. And if your first one (or several) choices don’t work out, find another one that does.
Let women take over non-jobs like human resources, clerical jobs at the DMV, cubicle management, bank tellers or benefits administration at Global MegaCorp Inc., and laugh as the life force is drained from them.
Here’s the challenge: be a man. Not today’s version of “male” figures who argue over craft beers and fashion accessories. I’m talking about real men, who do things for themselves, push aside barriers with confidence and, eventually, end up with women (like my friend Raul, above) who appreciate them for their qualities and for the security and families they can provide.
When I asked Raul if his wife worked, he looked at me in puzzlement and said, “What for?”
If this guy taught a class, he’d create a generation of achievers. He would never do such a thing, of course, although he would (and does) train other men to succeed as he has.
Now get out there and make something of your life that does not include words like “curriculum”, “term paper” and “Diversity Studies”. You’ll be a world better for it.
Postscript: there was a time when enlisting in our nation’s Armed Forces would have been a viable career choice for a young man. Not today, unless you try out for Special Forces, SEALs or similar.