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Sounds Familiar

Deep Thoughts

It appears that the Royal Ginger is into meditation (through the efforts of his Hollywood strumpet consort, of course).

So am I, and always have been.

However, I don’t do it by way of yoga or Buddhism or any of that mystical bullshit.  I just call it “thought and reflection”, and I do it when I wake up — in that delicious period of time when my mind can wander freely — or else when I’m otherwise alone (e.g. in the car or on a long flight).  During that wonderful break, I think about life, my life, my priorities in life and my goals and ambitions.  I also reflect on my problems, my faults, and the hindrances which prevent me from living properly.

See, I always thought that everybody  did this stuff.  But apparently not.  Maybe it’s because everyone is too caught up in the here-and-now, or is being enslaved by technology, or is entangled in the machinations of others.

And in today’s world, it’s so difficult to cut oneself off, even for just a half an hour;  and even if one does, there’s a real need to empty the mind of the clutter before turning inwards for those Deep Thoughts.

Myself, I think a little range time is the perfect way to clear the mind — there’s no time to think about life’s minutiae  when you’re trying to slow your heartbeat, concentrate on the sight picture and drop each round into the X-ring.  And in that wonderful aftermath of a range session when the adrenaline levels drop and you reach that calm state we all know so well, you’ll find that this  is a good time for quiet contemplation and reflection.

So there you have it:  shooting  helps with meditation, not that airy-fairy yoga bullshit.

The King Is Dead

Business, Men & Women, Modernism

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.

Heeeere Comes Another One

Technology

It seems that every day I have to rant about technology and its nefarious outcomes for us ordinary folks.  Here’s the latest:

If you own a Ring doorbell camera system, we’ve got some bad news. The smart home company owned by Amazon, which the internet retail giant shelled out more than $1 billion to acquire, has apparently been violating its customers’ privacy in a pretty shocking way.
A new report from The Intercept quotes unnamed sources who confirm that engineers and executives at Ring have “highly privileged access” to live customer camera feeds, utilizing both Ring’s doorbells as well as its in-home cameras. All that’s apparently required to tap into the live feeds is a customer’s email address. Meaning the company has been so egregiously lax when it comes to security and privacy that even people outside the company could have potentially done this, using merely an email address to begin spying on customers, according to the report.
Within the company, a team that was supposed to have been focused on helping Ring get better at object recognition in videos caught customers in videos doing everything from kissing to firing guns and stealing.
This news, we should add, also comes less than a month after Ring was in the news for a different potential privacy flap. As BGR reported, a new patent application has begun to spur fears that Amazon would use Ring as a tool for creepy surveillance.

I have a suggestion: don’t buy any electronic device made by Amazon.  This would include the Alexa spy system, the Ring spy system and any other so-called “efficent” things that purport to make your life easier, but in fact only make it easier for others to spy on you.

If I had one of these horrible things, the last  video it would ever record is me firing a gun… at the camera.

And I find offerings by the other tech companies (e.g. Google Home, Apple Siri) equally disgusting.  As Pop Mech says:

Companies like Google, and Amazon, and Facebook let us down, but they were always going to. Absent significant changes to the nature of the tech industry or wide-ranging regulation, they always will. The problems arise when we act as though they won’t.

The only way to win is not to play.  And I won’t, unless I can dictate the rules.

By Its Real Name

Funny Stuff

Victor Davis Hanson calls it “pseudo-authenticity“;  I call it by its real name:  fake.

“It” of course refers to how people create fake or at best misleading backgrounds for themselves (VDH provides a list of the more modern ones) in order to make them more appealing to prospective employers, voters, whatever.

I’ve always joked that if someone hires me, they can check a whole slew of “desirable” boxes:  Kim = female, Du Toit = French-sounding, Africa-born = racial minority quota, etc.  Of course, instead of the Black French-speaking woman they expect, the company would get this employee:

…but that would just serve them right, wouldn’t it?

At least my pseudo-authenticity (and this post) is humorous;  that of “Beto” O’Rourke (fake Meskin), Elizabeth Warren (fake Injun) and Rachel Dolezal (fake nigra) is quite serious.

Unimaginable

Politics

Over at Reason magazine, Ryan Bourne does a scholarly debunking of Rep. Ocasio-Horseface’s suggestion of a top marginal rate of 70% on “the rich”.  Here’s an excerpt:

The idea that the value of rich people to the rest of society rests solely on their tax contributions… is bizarre. In fact, the risk that higher tax rates might deter entrepreneurial activity by reducing the future payoff to innovation should worry us greatly.

In language designed for ordinary citizens, that thesis actually leads to a question: what if rich people (and their expensive tax attorneys) resist the idea that they and their activities are simply money sheep waiting for the government to shear them?

And quite frankly, I have another, more relevant question.  Why the fuck are we even giving any credence or time to anything that this Commie ingenue says?