Banzai

I don’t quite know what to make of all this:

London Pride maker Fuller, Smith & Turner, better known as Fuller’s, is to sell its entire beer business to the European division of Japanese brewer Asahi.
In a deal which values the division at £250million, the London-based brewer will sell the production and distribution of its well-known beers, including its flagship drink London Pride, as well as its ale, stout, porter, craft lager and cider brands.

Considering that London Pride is my second-favorite beer (after Wadworth 6X), I can only hope that Asahi won’t look at Pride’s miniscule U.S. distribution and decide that it’s not worth it.

On the other hand, they might also think that Fuller are a bunch of morons for not getting Pride greater exposure in the U.S., with the result that I could soon buy it at Kroger.

So it’s “wait and see”, not something I typically enjoy doing.

Gah.  I hate  change.

Tragedy

As Longtime Readers may know, one of my favorite stops when I’m in Britishland is Patisserie Valerie, which makes some of the best pastries I’ve ever tasted (along with outstanding croissants at breakfast time).  Apparently, quality merchandise hasn’t been enough:

Patisserie Holdings plc announces today that, as a direct result of the significant fraud referred to in previous announcements, it has been unable to renew its bank facilities, and therefore regrettably the business does not have sufficient funding to meet its liabilities as they fall due.
As a consequence, the directors have appointed partners at KPMG as administrators to the company and its various subsidiaries.
The Chairman Luke Johnson has personally extended an unsecured, interest-free loan to help ensure that the January wages are paid to all staff working in the ongoing business.
This Loan will also assist the administrators in trading as many profitable stores as possible while a sale process is undertaken.

Needless to say, stores will be closed and people will lose their jobs.

This after one of its senior executives siphoned money out of the place to support his jet-set lifestyle.  And if I could get hold of the asshole, his legal and financial problems would be the least of his problems.

Yes, I take my pastries that  seriously.

The King Is Dead

One wonders what King Gillette would think of his company’s current manifestation of anti-masculinity:

A new short film released by the shaving brand dedicates itself to tackling toxic masculinity in a video that relies more on berating men for not living up to the standards of feminists than selling razors.

Knowing but a little of what King Gillette was like, and knowing how many years of toil and financial hardship he endured to get his disposable razor blade to the market, I think he’d probably burn the whole fucking thing to the ground, and I’d be handing him the cans of gasoline.

In the grand scheme of things, I’d be one of the men refusing to buy Gillette products in protest at their foolishness.  But the truth of the matter is that I haven’t used a Gillette product in well over a quarter of a century, simply because I refuse to spend about $5 for a blade which lasts me less than a week*.  (Good old safety singles or bargain-priced Trac II blades for me;  and if I run out, I use a straight, or “cutthroat” razor without a qualm.)

As for Gillette’s parent company, Proctor & Gamble:  I have suffered untold toiletry privations at their hands, the miserable Cincinnati MFCS bastards:  brand “extensions” which end up replacing much-loved products, only to see said extensions later withdrawn, meaning that I have to find replacements for products I’ve used sometimes for decades.  Try to find, in supermarkets or drugstores anywhere, Old Spice Original Fresh Stick deodorant with the the light blue label — not the anti-perspirant variant, which smells like cat piss.  I’ve been using Old Spice Fresh sticks for well over fifty years, and now I’m forced to buy them online in packs of 24 because they are nowhere to be found otherwise.  And if that supply dries up, I’ll stop using deodorant altogether, because every other male deodorant on the market nowadays smells like an attractant for homosexual prostitutes during Fleet Week.)

To use Gillette’s line on P&G:  50 years of unswerving loyalty is “the best a man can get”, you incompetent fuckers.  Too bad it means nothing to you.

A pox on all of them.  I can’t wait for “woke” to become “choke”, and may they burn in the fires of toiletry hell.


*En passant:  I once tried one of those 5-blade things — a disposable — just for the hell of it, and it felt like someone was dragging the hair out of my face with sandpaper.

Comings And Goings

This story pissed me off, for all the usual reasons:

“For years, TWC has deceptively used its Weather Channel App to amass its users’ private, personal geolocation data — tracking minute details about its users’ locations throughout the day and night, all the while leading users to believe that their data will only be used to provide them with ‘personalized local weather data, alerts and forecasts,’” the complaint reads.
The data serves no weather-related purpose, but was only collected in order to allow TWC to turn a profit, the complaint reads. The data was sold to at least 12 third party websites over the past 19 months.
The Weather Channel app has about 45 million users, according to the complaint.
TWC intentionally obscures this information” in a 10,000-word privacy policy “because it recognizes that many users would not permit the Weather Channel App to track their geolocation if they knew the true uses of that data,” the complaint goes on to say.
The lawsuit is seeking an injunction prohibiting TWC from continuing to collect and sell the data, along with civil penalties of up to $2,500 per violation.

Just this week, I went through a store (Forever 21) instead of using a mall entrance because my car was parked closer to the former than the latter.  And on leaving the mall, I went back out the same way.

Needless to say, when I got home I had one of those “personalized”, annoying little requests:  “Tell us about your shopping experience at Forever 21” with a link attached.  Being annoyed, I went there and wrote the following:

“I walked around your store TWICE today, and not once did anyone from your staff offer to help me.  In fact, given that the people I THINK were employees were dressed like customers, it was hard to tell whether there were in fact any employees in the store at all.  Certainly, most people in the store were standing around chatting to their friends and ignoring everyone else completely, so there was no way of telling.  It will be a long time, if ever, before I visit Forever 21 again.”

And every single word of that is true.  Yeah, it’s possible the wrong people will get punished.  I don’t fucking care.  If enough people turn this data snooping around and use it against these “marketing” bastards, maybe they’ll stop using it.  If not… did I mention I don’t fucking care?

And to return to my original gripe:  I deleted the Weather Channel app off my phone, just in case and just because.

A spokesperson for The Weather Company — which operates the Weather Channel – provided CBS2 with the following statement:
“The Weather Company has always been transparent with use of location data; the disclosures are fully appropriate, and we will defend them vigorously.”

Fuck them and their transparency.  I hope the lawsuit costs them many millions, and they go out of business.  And I wish I knew which dozen organizations bought TWC’s tracking data so that I could boycott them too.  If anyone knows who they are, please share that information in Comments.

Alternative Path

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.