Author: Kim du Toit

That Said…

Politics

As I said in Comments to this post, torching a guy’s car just because of a bumper sticker is a felony.  Sorta like this:

A man in Vancouver, WA returned to the bar he had left his truck at the night before to find charred remains of what used to be his Nissan Titan. On the previous night, Johnny MacKay opted to take an UBER home rather than take to the roads under the influence. He left his truck in the parking lot, expecting to drive it back the next day. Except some anti-Trump terrorists got it to first, setting it on fire.

This being the Pacific Northwest, don’t hold yer breath waiting for any arrests.

 

Here We Go Again

Men & Women, Politics

We’ve come across this foul bitch before.  Fresh from her “triumph” of having a conservative guy ejected from a gym, Georgetown professor Christine “Anything But” Fair is back in the news, unfortunately:

A professor at Georgetown University known for making incendiary comments against supporters of President Donald Trump said white men deserve “miserable deaths” for supporting Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.
C. Christine Fair, an associate professor at Georgetown in the School of Foreign Service, tweeted Saturday, saying white Republican men should die and an added bonus would be if women “castrate their corpses and feed them to swine.”

This folks, is what happens when you’re so ugly you can’t even get a pityfuck at a drunken frat kegger.

 

 

 

 

And her Ugly isn’t just on the surface;  it permeates her entire being.

Yet she’s still employed at Georgetown, which used to be a reasonably-prestigious university.  Now it seems that the place is as fucked-up, rancid and poxy as this example of its academia.  Maybe they’re proud of her, which makes a sick kind of sense, I guess.

Over-Complicated

Drive Time

I am a lifelong VW fan.  While VW isn’t the only brand I’ve ever driven (mostly due to circumstance and timing), over the years I’ve owned nine, starting with a humble panel van like this one (I played in a band so duh):

Note the extreme simplicity:  divided flat windshield, swing-open doors, hard bumper over-riders, manually-adjusted rearview mirrors and single-beam headlights (the ones pictured are far sexier than mine were).  And that’s just the exterior.  The interior was equally spartan:

(This must have been a deluxe version — it had a radio.  Mine didn’t even have seatbelts.)

The only things I ever replaced were the headlights because the originals were so weak that a car coming up from behind would cast my shadow into my beams), and  a clutch plate (at about 80,000 miles).  The engine was the mighty air-cooled 1600cc, which made uphill travel with a full load an exercise in patience (for the cars behind me).

I owned “Fred” (as the band nicknamed it) for eight years.  Then I moved on, over the years driving a Beetle (original model), Golf, Passat wagon, three Jettas (!) and two Tiguans.

Imagine my surprise when (thanks to Insty) I read a review of the 2019 VW Jetta, which contained gems such as these:

Both Jettas we tested were top-of-the-line ($26,945 [WTF? — Kim]) SEL versions, so they came with all the bells and whistles. As an illustration of how interconnected all these various subsystems are, consider the following: switching among Eco, Normal, and Sport modes remaps the throttle, changes the transmission shift points, and can even tighten the steering. But it will also tweak how the adaptive cruise control behaves, changes the climate-control settings, and even changes the interior ambient lighting.

…and:

The interior tech might well be the Jetta’s strongest card. SEL Jettas come with the 10.25-inch “Digital Cockpit” display, a VW version of Audi’s “Virtual Cockpit” that I’ve raved about in the past. You can configure it to a great degree, from austere minimalism to information overload, and together with the MIB II infotainment system, the overall experience is slick. (Android Auto, Apple CarPlay, and MirrorLink are included.)

I should point out that my panel van had a new-car sticker price of about $4,000 in today’s currency, and my second (top of the line) Jetta had a sticker of $14,000 (also in today’s dollars), thus making the 2019 model nearly double the price, for nowhere close to double the utility.

I’m not saying that VW should return to the austerity of the panel van;  hell, my old Fred made Fred Flintstone’s car look like a Cadillac — it was absolute hell on a cold or hot day, let me tell you, plus it was about as safe to drive as a mobility scooter on the Long Island Expressway.  And no doubt some marketing genius at VW will tell you that this unheard-of luxury is what the market wants (while a VW accountant won’t tell you that all the doodads add thousands of dollars of profit per car, but they do).  I have no problem with many of the safety features demanded of today’s cars, but I absolutely have to question the need for “Eco, Normal, and Sport” gearbox modes in a small passenger saloon car with a farty little 1400cc four-banger engine.  (The next model year will feature VW’s superb 2.0-liter turbo engine — the same one used in my Tiguan — which will cause the 1400cc model’s sales to tank (you heard it here first) because given a choice between needless but anemic luxury and performance, only Alan Alda / Greenpeace types prefer the former.)

I also know that today’s “luxury” becomes tomorrow’s “indispensable”, such is the insidious upward creep of progress.  But as VW cars have become more luxurious, the “People’s Car” has transformed itself into the “rich people’s” car, and VW has opened a gap at the bottom of the market (which they used to own) for car manufacturers from other countries to fill.

I’m going to quit now, because I’m sick of pissing into this particular wind.  And my next  Tiguan will have the “parking assist” software because of all the automotive luxuries ever designed, this is one of the few which actually makes sense.  Yeah, I’m selling out.

Fallout

Culture, Men & Women

I begin this post by offering up a quote from Megan Fox, talking about the feministical anti-Kavanaugh protesters:

“What employers will hire women now?  If I were one, I wouldn’t.  What kind of sado-masochist do you have to be to want to take a chance on hiring one of these women who think accusations are enough to hang a man?”

That particular bullet, it seems to me, has long since passed through the church.  I am pretty sure that but for the presence of the (largely female-staffed) Human Resources departments in business today, most men would probably not hire young women unless forced to do so.  Hell, I’m not even sure that female managers would hire that many young women either.  Because this is the kind of employee you’re likely to get:

Here’s a quick question for a prospective employer:  assuming you weren’t paying attention and hired one or two of these mopes by accident, about how long do you think you’d have before they started disrupting your workplace, taking time off to attend protests, or filing protests against male coworkers for imagined grievances?

If you answered anything other than “Days, maybe even just hours”  to the above question, you’re deluding yourself.  And as for these prospective Yale attorneys:

…well, I’m pretty sure that few law firms (other than the neo-Stalinist ones) would give them a look, but the nice thing about getting a law degree from Yale is that there’ll always be a job for you at pinko outfits like the ACLU, SPLC, Greenpeace and the like.  Hell, you’d be a shoo-in as a staffer for some Democrat congressman, so no worries there.

In the real world, however, I’m predicting that all the ones at the top are going to have to get used to filling orders at Starbucks or waiting tables at Applebee’s, because #patriarchy.

That’s the beauty of being one of the Permanently Aggrieved, you see:  it’s always someone else’s fault.

Fucking children.

Quote Of The Day

QOTD

“You are beyond dreaming if you think 17 year old boys are not going to misbehave from time to time as they begin to attempt relationships with the opposite sex. That is just the way we animals are made!” —  Kris Long, veteran journalist at CBS affiliate KESQ-TV in Palm Springs, talking about the Kavanaugh hearings.

Needless to say, this being California, Long was fired.