Category: Good Stuff

More, Please

Education, Good Stuff

Finally, Florida Man does something right:

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) announced Friday he is officially putting an end to the Common Core Standards in his state and replacing them with standards that “embrace common sense.”

Of all the (many) failures of government and the education establishment, Common Core ranks up there, probably in the top three.

Message to other governors:   keeping this appalling system in place means that you are willing to consign your states’ children to a future of permanent ignorance, and leave them both under-educated and unprepared to be productive members of society.

As an aside, Texas never adopted this stupid and malignant set of standards — thankee, former Gov. Rick Perry.

About Damn Time

Good Stuff, Men & Women

I have always pressed for a relationship where the men and women have clearly-defined roles — and preferably, one where the man is the earner and dominant partner, while the woman takes care of the home and children.  Needless to say, the feministicals come after men like me, spitting and clawing, and spouting bullshit about the “patriarchy” and (in times past) “male chauvinist” etc.

Now, after all the feministical nonsense, we finally seem to have something of a return to sanity:

Amid the Me Too movement and radical feminism, a new opposing trend has emerged across Britain – the ‘tradwife’ trend.
Harking back to 1950s Britain, and already established in the US, the trend sees women reverting to the traditional roles of housewives, practiced in the fifties and sixties.
The belief behind the movement is that wives should not work, and rather spend their days cooking, cleaning, wearing modest and feminine dress, and practice traditional etiquette, being submissive to their husbands and ‘always put them first’.

“Tradwife”… okay, I can live with the term.  I could (and do) happily live with someone who believes in it.  Even better is this perspective:

‘My view on feminism is that it’s about choices. To say you can go into the working world and compete with men and you’re not allowed to stay at home -to me is taking a choice away’.
Distancing herself from the movement’s right-wing links, she argued: ‘Being a tradwife is investing in your family and being selfless. So I would say the opposite of that is someone who is selfish and just takes’.

We need more of this, and more women like her.  Society will be all the better for it.

And my favorite line from the article:

‘We say to feminists: thanks for the trousers, but we see life a different way’.

Priceless.

Pub Culture

Culture, Good Stuff

Tom Utley (one of my all-time favorite columnists) waxes rhapsodical about the revival of pubs in Britishland:

This week’s cheering news is that after years of precipitous decline, the number of pubs and bars opening in the UK has outstripped closures by 320 in 2019. So says an analysis of labour market figures from the Office for National Statistics.
…
Indeed, as I may have written before, my idea of heaven on Earth is an English village pub — ideally at least a couple of centuries old, with a thatched roof and a low ceiling supported by gnarled oak beams. On winter evenings, there should be a blazing log fire to greet us (sorry, Greta Thunberg) and a labrador stretched out on the hearth (‘just taking the dog for a walk, dear’).
On summer afternoons, there will be trestle tables out at the front, from which customers can watch the cricket on the village green or just listen to the drone of the bees in the roses above the door.

Of all the things I miss about being in the UK (and one of the very  few things I miss about living in South Africa) would be the weekly evening visit to the pub and / or the daily lunchtime visit thereto during the work week.  Lest anyone has forgotten, this was my “local” when I was variously staying with Mr. Free Market and The Englishman:

I desperately want to have a “local” Over Here, but we don’t have a pub culture:  ours is more a “get wasted after work” culture (not that this is altogether a Bad Thing, of course, but people don’t generally cluster around the pub (okay, bar) around these parts as a social venue).  The closest I’ve found is the Londoner in Addison, and it’s not close at all — a 20-minute drive away, assuming no traffic.

There is the Holy Grail a few steps from my apartment, which has excellent food but a somewhat patchy collection of ales — from week to week, they’re likely to be out of whatever I had the previous  week, which gets old very quickly — and as the website pics will show, it’s too damn big and very noisy.  (Aside:  why are  Americans so loud?  Is it because they have to shout to be heard above the earsplitting music/game on the TV?  Never mind:  that’s a rant passim.)

One thing, though, about Utley’s article:

It is run not by an ever-changing cast of managers on their way up the career ladder but by permanent fixtures in the community — landlords and landladies who have lived on the premises for years, know all the local gossip and are ready with their regulars’ preferred tipples, without having to be told (‘The usual, Tom?’).

Yeah, but that’s also a double-edged sword.  While an independent innkeeper can occasionally be persuaded to whip up a makeshift plate of sandwiches outside regular food-service hours, he could also be a cantankerous old fart, as per this story of Mr. Free Market, who arrived at his local one afternoon with a crowd of business friends and associates, and begged that the pub be opened to accommodate over fifty thirsty customers, to be met with the withering response:  “Fuck off;  I’m watching Corrie!” (Coronation Street).  Not yer model of customer service, innit?  And as the owner, he wasn’t going to get fired, either.

So there ya go.

All that said, I miss having a real local — but a place “where everybody knows your name” seems to have become a figment of TV fiction, hasn’t it?

I envy Tom Utley.

How About Both?

Good Stuff, Terrorism

The bony Ann takes issue with POTUS nailing Iran, suggesting that there are bigger fish to fry.

While I take her point — and it’s a good one — I certainly feel that we as a nation are capable of doing both.  To use Insty’s expression:  La Coulter (and POTUS) should embrace the healing power of “and”, i.e planting minefields along our southern border while dropping guided missiles onto sundry evil Iranians.

Somebody buy that girl a plate of pasta.

The Ultimate Long-Distance Rifle

Good Stuff, The Gun Thing

As I posted yesterday, I’m going to be setting up a fund to buy and then ship a high-quality long-distance rifle and scope to some lucky guy.  Here are the details (and if you enter, please follow them faithfully):

  1. You can only make one $40* donation per household, and only $40.  More than $40, and I’ll send the surplus to Greenpeace.  Believe me on this.  If you send me two checks, one for yourself and one for your “brother”, the checks had better be in two different names and addresses, or the second goes to Greenpeace.  Husband & wife get no exception.  One entry per household.  Don’t test me.
  2. Checks or money orders only, with your current address listed — I need the paper trail — to the sooper-seekrit mailing address (6009 W. Parker Rd #149-141, Plano TX 75093), made out to Kim du Toit.  Make sure the “Note” on the check says ULD Rifle 2020 and your website ID (if you have one) so I know it’s for the rifle and not just a donation.  By sending me a check, you agree that I can publish your name / ID (but not address) as the winner.
  3. The drawing will be notarized, i.e. performed by a third party and witnessed by a notary public or some such official, to keep this kosher and the ATF happy.
  4. I get to pick the rifle, and the scope — and what I get will depend on how much I get in donations.  The winner gets what I picked out, and no whimpering or complaining.  (Sheesh… you’ll be getting a fine long-distance setup for $40.)
  5. It will be chambered in .3x caliber, so that I can get better results past the 400-yard mark (from experience, the smaller 6.5x55mm bullet gets blown around a little too much for consistent accuracy at 400+ distances — and the wind always  blows at Boomershoot).  It will most likely be in .308 Win or thereabouts, but I’m not ruling out .300 Win Mag and the like, if I can get a decent deal.
  6. If there’s a surplus from buying the set, I’ll round off the amount to the nearest couple of dollars by setting aside some for the postage, packaging and such.  If there’s still more left over, I’ll use it to defray some of my travel costs (it’s a six-day roundtrip drive ugh), if that’s okay with everyone.
  7. The winner will be notified personally before the result is posted, and I’ll also add a certificate of the “provenance”.
  8. The gun and scope will be shipped to your FFL — even in the state of Texas.  (That paper trail thing, again.)
  9. My family are prohibited from entering, as are Doc Russia, Combat Controller and Tech Support II.
  10. Remember, I’ll be shooting it at Boomershoot 2020.  It may come to you with a scratch or two.  Deal with it.
  11. Regrettably, I can only make this work in the United States.  As much as it would delight me to ship this equipment off to a GFW country, it ain’t gonna happen.  Sorry.  If you send me a check from England or Japan, the money will get passed on to Greenpeace.  Don’t test me.
  12. Whatever rifle I get, it will be legal in all 50 states.  For that reason, I won’t be getting an AR-10 HB or anything that could be classed as an “assault” rifle (not that I would, anyway).  If your state bans “sniper rifles” during the interim period, however, you’ll be SOL, and I’ll have to make another drawing.  I’m not going to break any gun laws on this, no matter how stupid I think they are.
  13. I reserve the right to close the fund at any time, when I judge that the fund has reached an acceptable level.  Judging from the popularity of the idea the last time I did this, I’m going to set an arbitrary shut-off date of January 31, 2020 but I also reserve the right to extend the date too.
  14. Conversely, if I don’t get enough money to buy a really decent rig, I’ll just close the fund, refund your donations and go with what I’ve got.  I don’t want to do that.

Obviously, this is open to anyone, not just Readers, so if you have a friend, relative or neighbor who fancies his luck, have at it — but via a separate check, or else Greenpeace gets the surplus and he gets nada.

If this idea gets really popular, I might make it an annual event.

*One last thing:  the old raffle tickets only cost $20, but at that time I had about ten times the daily readership that I have today, PLUS I don’t have to tell you what’s happened to the price of guns in the past dozen-odd years.  [20,000-word rant deleted]

If you wanna blame someone, blame Has-Been President Obama and the other Commies for driving up demand with their stupid threats of confiscation.