Kim du Toit – Page 17 – Splendid Isolation

What Would You Do?

October 17, 2024 Kim du Toit Funny Stuff

As a rule, I tend to avoid silly pop quizzes like the one below, because no matter how I answer the question(s), I always seem to end up proving that I’m actually a libertarian.

This one, however, is different.

Imagine you are driving home on a deserted road in a sports car in the middle of a stormy night. On your way home, you pause at a bus stop and notice four people desperately in need of transportation.

The next bus isn’t scheduled until the morning and you can only fit three of them in your car. You cannot bend the rules to allow you to fit all four in the car with you driving. For example, the child cannot sit on someone’s knee.

The test reads: You stop your car and meet the four people:

A pregnant woman who started to have excruciating pain and looks like she’s on the verge of giving birth. She’s pleading to be sent to any hospital or at least be helped while going into labor.
A young child crying and screaming because he/she wandered away from his/her parents and home. The child doesn’t know where his/her address is but knows the full name of his/her parents. He/she just wants to go back home.
A surgeon doctor with his briefcase that contains his medical tools. He needs to go to his hospital as soon as possible in order to perform a very critical surgery.
Someone who just wants to go home, but it happens that you already have known and met this person before. To you, that person is a very dear and close friend/love of your life/desired future spouse. It’s been a very long time since you have both seen each other. You’ve always wanted to meet this person again to reconnect and rebuild your relationship with him/her, and you can’t find a better opportunity to do that, because if you don’t take it, chances are that you may not have that opportunity again.”

Adding to the complications, you do not have a mobile phone so you cannot call anybody else for help, and there are no houses nearby to ask to use their landline. There’s no one else on the road to help them but you. The bus stop is located away from any public facilities (hospitals, police stations) and houses, so no one can take it for a walk, especially in this kind of time and weather.

What do you do in that kind of situation? How will you give your help and prioritize it for those people? Which one will you choose to be the first person to be helped? You have to think very quickly to come up with a solution for this predicament.

So, Readers: what say you? Give your answers in Comments. My response will be posted tomorrow.

Quote Of The Day

October 16, 2024 Kim du Toit Men & Women, QOTD

From SOTI, under the heading of “Things your mother never told you”:

“You can’t have it all without expecting to DO it all. And if you aren’t able or willing to do it all, you’re going to fail, either at one of the things, or at all of the things.”

I think that “you can have it all” is one of the biggest lies ever perpetrated on women by the so-called Women’s Liberation movement.

Unrealistic

October 16, 2024 Kim du Toit Men & Women

From the Daily Mail:

Hannah Waddingham wants a man to scoop her up, take her to bed and afterwards eat Marmite on toast with her.

The multi-talented Ted Lasso star said she can’t remember when she last had a first date but admits to being ‘just a bit picky’.

‘I’m 50 and I’m like, ‘Dude, if you are not going to step up, step off and be gone’.

Okay, if I may be a bit picky myself…

The redoubtable Hannah has a few things going in her favor, and quite a few not. For starters, she’s tolerably good-looking for an old broad in her 50s.

But, and I hesitate even to say this, unless she’s going to date bodybuilders, her Amazonian frame ain’t going to be “scooped up” anytime soon. Okay, cheap shot; it was a metaphor. But even then, she has to be aware that she’s an actress, with all the fuckwittery and moonbattyness attached thereto; most eligible men of around her age are quite aware of this, and will try to avoid it wherever possible. (Younger men, of course, would just go for the tits and celebrity she brings to the party, but they’re unlikely to be satisfactory outside the bed and red carpet. Unless that’s all she wants.)

Lastly, Marmite is a dreadful substance. It is regarded as a delicacy by some Brits, but it has also come to define something that you either love or hate. One hopes that she’s not insistent on the post-coital Marmite thing, because that too would cut out a considerable number of men from the dating pool.

Were I available for said Hannah-bonkery duty, I’d run a mile — and I’m probably not the only one.

Fundamental Principle

October 16, 2024 Kim du Toit Bureaucracy, Gummint, SHTF

I have said, many times before on this blog and elsewhere, that in America there is no such thing as “taking to law into our own hands”, for the simple reason that in America, the law has never left our hands. Oh sure, we have deputized its enforcement, mostly to local law enforcement and (lamentably) on occasion to the federal government.

But make no mistake: if our deputized law enforcement is unable or unwilling to enforce the law (most often the former, thank goodness), then it is indeed up to We The People to make damn sure that it is. Which is why we have statutes like the Castle Doctrine and “stand your ground” principles; we have every right to defend our families and properties, and that defense does not require us to “run away” in the face of such predation either. (Of course, in some states — Massachusetts, Minnesota etc. — such prescriptions are an anathema, which is why their citizens live in fear most of the time, whereas in Florida, Oklahoma and Texas criminals commit crimes at their own peril, and the law-abiding are not themselves prosecuted for providing that peril.)

Which brings me to the next issue involving fundamental principle: disaster recovery.

The United States, taken has a whole, experiences a wider range of natural disasters than just about anywhere else: tropical storms and hurricanes, blizzards and deep freezes, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, wildfires and floods; you name the manifestations of that bitch Mother Nature’s enmity, and we get ’em, good and hard.

Typically, the responses to such disasters take several forms: at state level, if the government has its ducks in a row, you have disaster preparation such as Florida having a veritable army of utility workers prepositioned to make sure that infrastructure can be restored quickly (thank you, Gov. DeSantis), or Texas having a “rainy day” fund for precisely that purpose. And if you can take anything to the bank these days, it is the generosity of ordinary Americans to help out where they can, trucking in supplies such as water, food, construction materials and so on, quite often without asking any form of compensation other than grateful thanks from the recipients.

And then you have the federal government’s attempts at recovery assistance. What a fuckup. The so-called Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) has proven itself most recently to be completely and utterly inept, which by the way is typical of any Big Government agency trying to address a local situation: they screw things up.

Worse still, when Big Agency can’t provide assistance, its inherent systemic arrogance often leads to hindering and even preventing assistance from being delivered by private individuals and organizations. (It’s a childish and petulant attitude that “If we can’t do it, then nobody can”, and it’s a typical manifestation of bad government.)

Over at PJMedia, Scott Pinsker has written a fine piece on just this topic. Go ahead and read it because it contains all the details that I can’t be bothered with; but at the end he comes to this conclusion:

Most FEMA fieldworkers [as opposed to FEMA management — K.] are doing the best they can. But something profound is going on: The American people have stopped expecting the government to help them. Instead, they’re turning to the Free Market.

And:

The majority of Asheville residents (the ones who are still left) probably couldn’t tell you who runs FEMA. But I guarantee you they know who Elon Musk is: He’s the billionaire who’s actually trying to make a difference.

And when help finally comes to North Carolina, it’ll be from Musk — not Uncle Sam.

Keep your eyes on this: The ground is starting to shift… and not because of natural disasters.

I expect that voters are going to demand from their state governments that they (state government) and not FEMA be held responsible and accountable for disaster recovery. What should follow after that is the state government should actively prosecute federal officials for getting in the way.

And I’m not advocating this, but I am warning of it: the next time some FEMA helicopter “propwashes” an “unapproved” private supply dump, do not be surprised if local residents react violently.

I’m pretty sure that I’d be tempted to, in such a situation — and I’m ordinarily the most law-abiding person I know. But catastrophe and disaster are not “ordinary” situations, and while a federal government agency may see it as just another bureaucratic exercise needing proper, orderly management, the people on the ground won’t, and shouldn’t.

Their lives and community are more important, and the sooner Big Government realizes that, the better — because if they don’t, a shit-storm will follow, and it will be their own fault.

The Other Side MIA

October 16, 2024 Kim du Toit Behind Enemy Lines, Politics

The Divine Sarah has just returned from her native Portugal, and reports as follows:

One of the scariest things about the trip to Portugal was talking to people and realizing they’re living in an alternate reality.

You know, all the things that the Junta has tried to sell, and push? From “We’re in a booming economy” to “Biden is a patriot who stepped down to save the nation” to “Trump is a criminal” to “The refugee crisis is the result of global warming” ALL OF IT is being bought wholesale in Europe.

Now as a caveat to this, actually two of them: My family is now very much what would be considered “laptop class”, i.e. they are all credentialed professionals of some description, who therefore pride themselves on being “well informed” a lot of which consists of following our MSM (NYT, CNN, etc) and the Portuguese translations thereof. And I was mostly associating with them, save for listening in when we were in public, as I pretty much do all the time out of habit and because I like to know what people “really” think.

However, as far as I can tell even if not uniform, Portugal — which probably means most of Europe — at least as far as its educated classes go, is taking the pap our MSM spews as the gospel truth. You literally can’t tell them the truth without their thinking you’re a complete lunatic. I.e. the reality on the ground here in the US seems to them like something out of the left field that we’re just saying for shock value.

Keep that in mind when you hear of all the European love for Kamala-rama-lama-ding-dong.

The thing is that Europeans (including Brits) have been accustomed to people telling them what to do (and to read, and to think, and to say) for so long that now, when it really counts, there is no “counter-culture” such as we have Over Here: no equivalent of PJMedia, RedState or Breitbart News, no conservative radio (e.g. as practiced by the much-missed Rush Limbaugh or even the still-living Sean Hannity), or fearless “alternative” bloggers with an enormous following such as Instapundit, and precious few independnet small blogs such as this one.

So in the absence of all that, all they have is state-controlled electronic media and leftwing-sponsored newspapers like Le Matin, Der Spiegel and so on. (I was amazed at how Lefty even Austrian newspapers were, the last time I was there, and Austria is easily one of the more conservative Euro countries.)

Small wonder that they believe the bullshit thrown at them about Glueball Wormening, Ev Inevitability and untrammeled Third World immigration as a benefit.

So of course, when confronted by the New Counter-Culture (as espoused by leaders such as Donald Trump, Viktor Orbán, Geert Wilders and Giorgia Meloni), they are utterly bewildered by such strange concepts because they have never been exposed to them before — and strangeness, as we all know, leads to fear, opposition and resistance, if not outright rejection for no other reason other than strangeness.

And as Sarah so correctly points out,the funny thing is that while European society is living in an alternate reality, they are convinced that it is we who are.

The prognosis for Europe is not heartening, just as it will not be happy for us if the upcoming vote is fixed to provide another four years of BidenHarrisObamaClinton policies.

News Roundup

October 15, 2024 Kim du Toit Bad News

Might need to have a toke or two after reading this news roundup…

From the Disaster Known As Government:

...one wonders, just out of curiosity of course, how the Blackhawk’s pilot would have responded if he’d started to take fire from the ground. Just idly wondering, of course.