Author: Kim du Toit

Gratuitous Gun Pic: Farquharson (.577 Nitro Express)

Gratuitous Gun Pics

Once more, that Evil Purveyor Of Death Steve Barnett shows us this (albeit misspelled) offering:

I talked a little but about the joys of single-shot hunting back here, and honestly, the rifle above touches all my buttons:  history, heritage, challenge, and peerless reliability.  Also, it looks wonderful.  (Here’s the whole story on this rifle and action type, and looking at this particular one, the “NP” — No Patent — stamp means it’s most likely a Gibbs-made rifle rather than an original Farquharson.)

The Farquharson action has been much copied, most recently by Ruger for its No. 1:


…and subsequent models of the same ilk.  But if you do a side-by-side comparison, the older rifle has it over the Ruger by a country mile.  Is that difference worth about $12,000?  Maybe not, but then someone who wants to buy a different rifle (that “history, heritage, challenge, and peerless reliability” thing) isn’t going to worry about such trifles.

Me, I’ll stick to my Browning High Wall — Chuck Hawks compares the Ruger and Browning here — but were I to venture into single-shot-dangerous-game hunting, I’d have to get something else, because the High Wall was never issued in anything larger than .45-70 Govt, and certainly not in the monster .577 NE.  (I suspect that the High Wall could handle the larger cartridge, but I’d only test it on someone else’s gun.)

Not that I’m ever likely to want to shoot the .577 NE, of course.  The Winchester .458 Magnum is about as high as (and maybe even a bit higher than) I would care to handle, according to my shoulder.

But for the collector, this Farq is lovely and in my opinion, worth every penny.

New Car, New Problems, Same Company

Drive Time

As much as I love Jaguars, even I have to admit to their manifold failings:  crap electrical systems, rust at the slightest hint of humidity (let alone rain or snow), and engines that should have been excellent (and often were), but not always so.

I knew a man who owned an XJS, and apart from the terrible V8 — they should have just stayed with the E-type’s 6, but nooooo — it just could not handle any road conditions that weren’t dry midsummer.  And this in Chicago.  (In our company bowling league, I gave him the lane name of Jagno Snogo.)

And was it but a couple days back where I castigated the company for buying into the Global Cooling Climate Warming Change© nonsense and deciding to go all-electric?  (Why yes, yes it was.)

Well, paint me white and call me Paleface:

A driver who was trapped behind the wheel of an out-of-control Jaguar I-Pace has revealed to MailOnline how he almost cheated death as his car accelerated up to 100mph on the busy M62 motorway without brakes.

Nathan Owen, 31, was on his way back from his first day at a new job when his 2019 electric car started malfunctioning, sparking a huge police operation to bring his car to a stop after 35 minutes of hell.

But in a shock revelation, Mr Owen told how his car had also gone rogue on the motorway in December, this time reaching up to 120mph. He claims Jaguar handed him his car back 24 hours after he had taken it in to be looked at.

Oh yeah, did I also mention Jaguar’s legendary customer service?  Which is to “service” as Rosie O’Donnell is to being a Playboy model:  not even close to acceptable.

He admitted: ‘In the back of my mind, I was thinking I’m going to end up crashing the car, I’m going to kill myself or I’m going to kill an innocent person on the roads.’

Mr Owen, originally from North Wales, added: ‘The car was in its own world — it just had no brakes. The worst thing about it is that it’s happened before.’

And yet you kept on driving the stupid thing (#Wales).

‘The car literally just started speeding up,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t press the brakes. The speed was going towards about 100mph in the high 90s, going to 100. I thought this was a bit wrong. [ya thaink? — K.]

‘It came up on the dashboard saying there was a battery malfunction in my car.’ [I’ll say — K.]

But here’s the best part:

Mr Owen’s car was finally able to be brought to a stop when the miles on his electric car started running out.

Yeah, that’s $80,000 of pure automotive quality and reliability right there.

I wouldn’t accept one as a gift.

Yeah, Pretty Much That

SHTF

From a realistic perspective, this is going to happen:

Around 2030 all Americans are going to have to turn on each other and carve that missing million out of their fellow citizen… This might be millennials becoming even greater debt slaves, this might be boomers kicked out of nursing homes to beg in the streets, this might be ethnic conflict to either make the white middle-class pay 2x the income tax forever, or a violent assault on the black inner-city to destroy the millstone of welfare America once and for all and free up millions in real estate in now unsafe cities… This might take the form of a communist revolution, the confiscation of all real estate, and the forcing of Americans into work camps, this might take the form of the mass slaughter of Federal employees and IRS agents so that no federal insurance schemes can ever be paid out and no pensions because the government employees are dead… This might take the form of mass Euthanasia of cancer patients, drug addicts, and the non-working… Everyone who shows up at hospital and isn’t expected to be net profitable, axe em.

My estimate is that 2030 is an optimistic forecast.  And we’re not going to be able to spend our way out of it, either.

Cataclysm.

Quote Of The Day

QOTD, The Gun Thing

After the NRA had its pee-pee whacked by a NY court, the Left and associated useful idiots rejoiced and went hallelujah (or whatever they say when the godless celebrate).  And then this comment appeared:

I’m getting a kick out of the MSM crowing that the back of the gun lobby is finally broken.
Sorry, kids – the NRA hasn’t been a player in a very long time now and the fact that you thought it was just goes to show how fucking ignorant you really are.

Yeah, what he* said.  The NRA is to gun ownership what the Democrat Party is to its anarcho-nihilist wing:  the polite face they want the public to see.  Most gun owners, myself included, see the NRA as a bunch of compromising lobbyists, and our interests are far better represented by Gun Owners of America (GOA) and the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF), to name but two.

Or else we can keep on being that seething, restless bunch of people who take gun ownership as a natural right, and prefer to argue more important issues — like whether the American .45 ACP is better for slaughtering Commies etc. than its limp-wristed Euro counterpart, the 9mm pellet.

I think we all know on which side I belong.

Can’t remember who said it, but if anyone knows, I’ll amend the above.

Not Red, Not Even Herrings

Asshole Cops, Government Thugs

You need to read the report about the “pipe bombs” that were discovered outside both the DNC and RNC heaquarters buildings in Washington D.C. on Jan 6 2020.  The report exposes either incomparable incompetence by the FBI, or else a degree of indifference about the supposed bombs and their implications, which leads me to suggest the executive summary of the whole business.

There were no bombs, and the FBI knew they weren’t bombs.  The bomb-like devices were a plant to increase the supposed imminence of civil unrest and insurrection and feelings of paranoia and fear among members of Congress and the public on Jan 6.  And the FBI were absolutely complicit in, if not the actual creators of this entire charade.

Now you can read the article, and see if the above summary is refuted by anything therein.

No Right At All

Friends and Family, Legal Stuff, Morons & Idiots

Here’s a story which is guaranteed to get me going, and it’s a topic I’ve discussed before.  Seems as though this Old Phartte popped his clogs at age 91, and decided that because his grandchildren had never bothered to visit him while he was in hospital, that they weren’t worthy of getting any of his loot once he was gone.  So instead of cutting them out of his will, he left them each only a few bucks.

Needless to say, the grandchildren sued the estate, claiming that they were “entitled” to a third, rather than the 0.0001% thereof specified in his will.

Where do these people get the idea that they should be entitled to anything?  FFS, his estate, lest we all forget, is his own property — something that people (and governments, a rant for another time) seem to forget.

So if Grandpappy wants to leave his dough to Someone Not His Foul Grandchildren because they ignored him while he was alive, he’s perfectly within his rights to do so — just as if he were to give a birthday present to one person and not another.

This business of heredity “entitling” someone something is all well and good when it is, ahem, an actual title (e.g. royalty / nobility), but in the cold hard world of law and finance, descendants are entitled to nothing, if the owner of said estate says so.

Anyway, this group of ingrates lost their case, and a damn good thing it is too.  And for the record, they’re as ugly as they are greedy.