Author: Kim du Toit

Liberal Male Backlash…?

Men & Women

Oh, this is just too delicious for words.  Longtime Reader Joe P. (good to see you again, buddy!) sends me a link to an article entitled Schadenfreude, and seldom has an essay been as aptly labeled.  A sample of his summation:

Ladies, you have been legally equal with men now for three generations or more, and by every metric one can measure, it has made you miserable, suicidal, infanticidal and crazy.

But enough from me;  hie thee hence and read it all.  It’s a lengthy piece, but worth every moment.

Clemency? I Think Not

Terrorism

Apparently the ISIS murderers have surrendered after getting the shit bombed out of them.

 

I can already hear the lamentations because, of course, there are Wimmens & Chilluns caught up in the whole mess so therefore we should give them all hugs and kisses and welcome them back into modern society.

Uh-huh.

After over a decade of rape, pillaging, murder and plunder from ISIS, it’s really hard for me to have any sympathy or call for any mercy for these assholes, especially given their track record in this regard (not to mention this recent discovery).  What the U.S. / coalition forces should have  done was hand all these “prisoners” over to the Kurds and Yaziris, after making sure that the latter had all the equipment they needed (e.g. bayonets, ammo etc.), and left it to the locals to mete out justice as they saw fit.

Feel free to add your thoughts in Comments, as did the Brits in the Daily Mail  articles.

Unhealthy Religion

Freaks & Loonies, Health

The waspish Sarah Vine tried becoming a vegan, and did not have a good time:

Evangelical vegans will tell you that following a purely ‘plant-based’ diet is not only morally commendable, it’s also much better for your health. But if my experience is anything to go by, the opposite is true.
I felt absolutely fine for the first few days. I didn’t miss meat at all, certainly not in terms of taste or flavour. The only thing I really felt an absence of was eggs. Since I embarked on my mammoth weight-loss project, eggs have become a dietary staple for me: nothing fills me up as well or gives me quite as much long-lasting energy as an egg.
I also found I had to eat larger portions to feel full — and I felt hungry again after a shorter period of time. But even that didn’t bother me, since what I was eating was so wholesome.
No, the real issue became apparent after the third or fourth day. Not to put too fine a point on it: wind.
…
One of the key arguments of vegans against livestock farming is the harm animals cause to the planet through the amount of methane they produce; if my experience was anything to go by, a vegan human is capable of producing just as much, if not more. I was a one-woman global warming hazard.
…
I don’t doubt that for some people veganism is a wonderful and fulfilling way of life. But the idea — widely promoted by its proponents — that veganism is something we can all embrace is, I’m afraid, at best baloney, at worst downright dangerous.

Read it all for the details, but all it did was make me want to attack a plate of ribs, just to be on the safe side.

Budget Rifles

Gratuitous Gun Pics, The Gun Thing

Over at Gun World, Brad Fitzpatrick talks about the change in gun manufacturing, whereby “budget” (“cheap”) no longer means “can’t hit the inside of a barn”, and gives his take on various offerings from some well-known American gunmakers.  He likes them all.  Here they are, in no specific order:

From what Fitzgerald writes, and as I see it — because I’ve never shot any of them myself — all the above are great value for money, in that they combine a “sensible” price with outstanding accuracy straight out of the box.  (As for long-term reliability, of course, we’ll have to see in a decade or so’s time because they’re all relatively new and haven’t been through the hell that we riflemen subject our guns to, yet.)

All the above companies have taken the lessons learned in their respective experience and applied those when using new (and improved) manufacturing techniques, to what seems to be a great advantage for us gunnies.

Nothing wrong with any of that.

However — and you knew there was going to be a qualifier from me, didn’t you? — I think that this new Kraft Durch Technik  stuff has led to a bunch of guns that all look the same, and are not that great-looking withal.

Once again, let me reiterate:  if I were looking to buy an inexpensive bolt-action rifle in .300 Win Mag to take to the Cairngorms in Scotland for a deer stalk with Mr. Free Market, Doc Russia and Combat Controller, every single one  of these rifles would be on my short list, in the same way that if I were looking for a budget-yet-well-made vehicle to take on a long drive trip across the United States, I’d certainly consider cars from Toyota, Nissan, Honda and so on.

But paraphrasing Jeremy Clarkson’s famous question:  would you get a thrill every time you took it out of the gun safe / saw it in your driveway?

I wouldn’t.  I’m sorry, but as much as I have said, and believe that guns are tools and cars just means to get from A to B, I just cannot reconcile myself with the blandness of modern products, and these budget rifles don’t do it for me.  Something like this one does:

It’s a Mauser M18, and in .300 Win Mag as pictured it retails for about $750 at Euro-Optic (~$300 more than the Winchester XPR above).  Yeah, it’s a “budget” Mauser.  My  kinda budget.

Update:  It appears that I screwed up and used the wrong pic (of a new Mauser 98), as the M18 is only available with a plastic stock.  Ugh.  So much for that thought.  Okay, let’s go with an older “budget” rifle in .300 Win Mag, the Savage 110 XP with the wonderful Accu-Trigger:

This one’s on sale at Bud’s Gun Shop for just under $600, and while it’s no Mauser, it will probably do just fine.

[exit, kicking sand]