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Despair And Rage

Terrorism

After the bombing at the concert in Manchester, Katie Hopkins wrote a despairing article about carrying on:

After the Westminster terror attack on March 26 I said we were cowed. That we were like ants, carrying on as normal, waiting for the next footstep to fall.
And today I see this to be true. Ants, squashed by a car, hewn in half by a truck, bounced off the bonnet of a 4×4, punctured by ballbearings and shrapnel from a hardware store.
And the only thing we ants can do is act busy. Whip ourselves up into a frenzy of activity. Move this way and that. Scurry about carrying things. Film ourselves walking to work. Make posters about ‘having a cup of tea’, get cross about what is said on twitter.
…
The terrorists want us dead. They want the infidel to be slaughtered. And they spread their message most effectively by targeting our children, our little girls.
Try and deny you don’t feel a change in the mood of our country. Try and deny you don’t feel we are a little bit less.
Tell me you don’t feel like you’ve taken a battering, made it to the twelfth then someone punched you square in the stomach, drawing the air from you in one long ooof.
…
When the only option is to carry on as normal, what the hell else are we going to do?
Carrying on as normal is not defiance. Or strength. It is the default.
When someone dies in our family, we carry on as before because the alternative is to lie down under our duvet and hope the world goes away.
And sometimes we even try that for a bit, too.
But in the end, reluctantly, we default and carry on as normal. This does not make us strong. Or united. It makes us desperate to feel better.
This country is sick. It is calling out for a doctor. We need to know what will cure us. What action do we take? What do we do? How can we stop the hurt?

I can suggest a few actions, Katie, but you’re not going to like them because they’re difficult and harsh.

Outlaw the Muslim religion in Britain. Close the mosques, then tear them and the minarets down. Deport the known radicals — start with the imams, even the “moderate” ones — and go from there. Reestablish Christianity as the official State religion. Start persecuting the remaining Muslims: make it difficult for Muslims to hold State jobs — start with the Muslim members of Parliament by mandating that no Muslim can hold elected office (like you used to do with Catholics, by the way), then spread that ban out to any State job, national or local. Close their bank accounts, stop all welfare payments and withdraw council housing privileges. Confiscate their real estate properties out from under them if they refuse to leave Britain. Outlaw halaal establishments. Make it more difficult for Muslims to stay in Britain than to leave. Confiscate their British passports, revoke their citizenship and make them “stateless”. Reverse the “refugee” flow back into the other direction by giving all Muslims thirty days to leave the country — and make sure they can only go on to Muslim countries, because we sure as shit don’t want more of them over here, and I’ll bet most of Europe doesn’t want them either.

In case you’re wondering why I’m suggesting something so brutal, and where I’m getting all these ideas, the answer’s simple: it’s what the Arab Muslim nations have been doing for over sixty years to the Jews (and in some cases to Christians too) living in their countries.

Yeah, they’re going to hate you. Stop being pussies about it.  They hate you already. Try hating them back, in greater measure. If the incidence of terrorism increases, speed up the deportations, imprison them until it’s their time to go — hell, the British invented the concept of “concentration camps” in 1900 in South Africa, remember? — and if they start screaming about legal protections, change the laws.

And if you don’t have the national will (what we Septics call “balls”) to do all that, then give up, submit to the will of Islam and lick the hands of the religious police of Islam who beat you in the streets for wearing short skirts or eating pork pies, because that’s all you deserve.

Yeah, it’s going to hurt. It’s going to hurt your economy, your famed sense of decency and even your fabric of nationhood. Sometimes, when you fight fire with fire, everyone gets a little burnt. That’s still much better than being the only one who does. And right now, your children are the only ones getting burnt by the fire of Islam. Do nothing, and all this — 10/10, Manchester, and the many atrocities to come — will never end.

Yes, this is horrible. But remember: you didn’t cause this, or start it; they did. You just need the resolve to finish it.

Update: Yes, you may consider this a “backlash“. The first of many.

Bird & Bees

Men & Women

For no reason at all, I’m declaring today to be “Sex Day” on this here back porch of mine. Yes, what the hell: the entire Zeitgeist and its acolytes the media seem to have declared every day to be about sex, vid.:

So why should I not follow this trend for just one day at least?

In any event, it’s got to be more interesting than talking about Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and those other tools. Oh, and by the way, speaking of tools: No-Class Michelle Obama dresses like a slut when visiting a cathedral in Italy. I know that this last bit has nothing to do with sex per se, but it’s all part of the coarsening of society, innit? More articles and thoughts on sex below… if you can stand it.

The “Right” Time To Get Busy

Men & Women

The last time I found myself in this particular situation was during the presidency of George H.W. Bush, and I have no intention of ever being in this situation again. So I think I’m probably outside the target audience for this article. But hey, in the interests of Sex Day:

How long should you wait to have sex? Nearly 50 percent of straight couples in a new survey reported holding out one week to a month before getting it on with their partners.
What’s more, 21 percent of the couples waited up to two months and 10 percent waited up to half a year to have sex, according to the survey of 1,000 Americans and Europeans from DrEd.com. Only 18 percent of the men and women surveyed reported waiting less than a week to have sex.

Actually, I’m rather heartened by this study (here’s the original) — I thought the “can’t wait” number would be a lot higher these days. Although I’d like to see the age breakdown of the various responses, because I suspect that there’s a considerable difference thereby. Anyway, all the data is suspect because people lie like dogs when it comes to interviews about sex. What managed to arouse my ire, however, was this Clintonian paragraph:

“I know plenty of couples that did a bit of a courtship dance around sex and took the slow road,” he said. “They learned to appreciate each other, and they learned to enjoy kissing, touch, oral sex, and all of those activities that don’t get consumed by intercourse.”

For the last fucking time [sic]: oral sex is not part of the “courtship dance” — blowjobs are sex acts, despite Bill Clinton’s casual assertion that they aren’t.

And frankly, if oral sex isn’t “consumed by intercourse”, you’re not doing it correctly. That, or you’re doing it in parking lots or behind bus stops instead of in bed.

Or am I just being hopelessly old-fashioned about all this? (Wouldn’t be the first time.)

One Dozen

Men & Women

Some people were asked what they thought was the “magic number” of sex partners — more than X being too many, and less than X showing likely sexual inexperience.

The number X: twelve (or to be accurate: not X but XII).

My guess is that most of the respondents weren’t around in the 1970s. “Twelve” would have been an annual average, back then.

Here’s a totally gratuitous pic of a Seventies girl (Christina Lindberg), just to show what we guys had to deal with, temptation-wise, in those days:

Yeah, call me old-fashioned (take a number), but I love the clothes women wore back when I was in my late teens and early twenties.

 

Bucket List Entry #4: Old Battlefields

Bucket List

Back when I still lived in South Africa, a couple of my jobs required car trips to small towns to check on stores or visit cooperating agencies. Several of these out-of-the-way places happened to be near old battlefields of the Boer War, so I’d try to set aside a day or two to visit them and “touch history” (my shorthand expression for such activities). Over time, I visited Spion Kop, Paardeburg, Ladysmith, Mafeking and Majuba. I also got to see a couple from the earlier Zulu Wars, Isandlwana and Rorke’s Drift (described in the movie Zulu) . I wrote about my trip to the last one years ago, but it’s buried in the archives and if I can find the thing, I’ll re-publish it sometime.

Anyway, one week from today is Memorial Day, and as always, it’s the day I remember my late grandfather Charles Loxton, who fought and was badly wounded at the Battle of Delville Wood in 1916. As the saying goes, it’s “where 25,000 men marched in; and one week later 2,500 marched out.” Here’s Delville Wood now:

..and as my grandfather probably saw it in 1916:

After battle for Delville Wood France

So #4 on my Bucket List is to visit not just Delville Wood, but as many old WWI battlefields as I can. Time permitting, it’s one of the activities I’d like to get done during my upcoming sabbatical in Britishland, because to see most of them would require a trip of only a few days across the Channel.

Mr. Free Market suggests that I do my pilgrimage during late November or early December, “…when the weather is foul and one can appreciate the absolute misery — the cold, the rain and the mud — that the poor infantry had to deal with.”

Sounds like a plan.

Bedside Guns

The Gun Thing

Over the years, many people have written to me asking what I would consider the ideal home-defense handgun. (And yes: I know that a handgun is what you use to fight your way to a shotgun. But sometimes your shotgun in locked away in your safe. So let’s just stick with the handgun, for the moment.)

Now, let’s understand what I mean by “home defense”. I don’t mean that your house is under siege by Al-Qa’eda fanatics or even the local neighborhood homeowners’ committee (California residents will know exactly what I mean).

No, what I mean is that you’re fast asleep, when suddenly you wake up and realize there’s mischief afoot, inside your house.

Let me be perfectly clear about what I’m going to say next.

If you have practiced and practiced and practiced with your trusty 1911 or SIG whatever, and the operation thereof is as automatic as breathing, by all means keep a semi-auto in your bedside drawer.

But unless you’re a total loony, if there’s a round in the chamber you should have the safety engaged. Or, if there’s no round in the chamber, it means you have to chamber one first — noise and fumbling may ensue. In other words, operation of your gun is a two-step process.

Or you can just do it the easy way, and use a double-action revolver. Nothing to think about, nothing to operate except the trigger (like that wonderful line: Smith & Wesson — the original “point and click” interface).

Ultimately, of course, you’re going to do what you want to do, with the gun that feels the most “comfortable” to you — i.e. the gun that you feel is most likely to get the job done.

And that’s fine. Just be aware of the potential drawbacks and advantages of all the options.

After all the hundreds of hours and many thousands of rounds I’ve spent with my beloved 1911 pistols, my bedside gun is a double-action .357 Magnum revolver, chambered with Federal Hydra-Shok 125gr. JHP (jacketed hollowpoints).

Ultimately, as I’ve said before, it all depends what you’re comfortable with—and if you’d rather park your Glock 17 next to the bed, be my guest. Just be sure when you’re half-awake and fumbling for the thing that you don’t hit the magazine release by mistake (it’s been known to happen, more than once)—and that can happen with any semi-auto pistol.

A revolver is like a fork: you pick it up, and it works. Here’s my old S&W Model 65, just to illustrate the concept:

 

Now for some other thoughts:

I talked a little about ammo earlier, and I need to offer some advice to people who own guns in GFW states like Massachusetts, California or New York.

If you whack a goblin in your home in a Righteous Shooting, there’s always a chance that some asshat prosecutor (or lawyer for the dead goblin) will go after you because you used “killer” ammo.

Yes, I know, all ammo is supposed to kill, but there’s no arguing about this when you’ve just used a full cylinder of Black Talons you picked up at that gun show in Alabama. If that happens, you’ll be painted as a “bloodthirsty vigilante killer” quicker than Tom Sawyer’s fence.

Here’s a tip: Use the same type of bullets as your local police force does. If you use “police” cartridges, then no one can paint you as a vicious killer.

Ask one of your neighborhood cops what kind of bullet (not just caliber) his department uses. Mostly, they’re going to use CCI/Speer Gold Dot, Winchester PDX or Silvertips, Remington Golden Saber or Federal Hydra-Shok. The caliber may vary, but the bullet type is probably going to be one of those brands. Generally, the same bullet type will be available in your caliber.

(Ditto shotgun shells, by the way—you may think it’s a really cool idea to BBQ the goblin with one of those “Dragon’s Breath” rounds, or turn him into a pincushion with a “flechette” shell, but, regrettably, it’s not a good choice. Use “game” loads: you’ll be a “sportsman”, not Rambo, and he’ll be just as dead.)

And one last caveat for everyone: whatever you’ve got in your bedside drawer, make sure that your kids or grandkids can’t get hold of it.

How you arrange that is up to you.

My kids, even when small, knew better than to go into my bedside drawer — but even so, I used to lock my bedside gun away during the day anyway, and take it out again at night. Did I ever forget to do that? Not once. After a while, it becomes a ritual, like cleaning your teeth in the morning and at night.

Trigger locks are okay, I guess, if you don’t want to mess with locking the gun away — just remember to lock it every morning, and unlock it every night. That I have forgotten to do (unlock it, I mean) — and it’s no fun to be fumbling with a trigger lock when all hell is breaking loose in your house, which is why I prefer to lock it away during the daytime.

I can’t stress this enough. A gun is a lethal object in a kid’s hands. A dozen or so kids, and their parents, find that out every year, and I just want to smash my head against the wall every time I hear about another incidence of that, because it’s so unnecessary.

And when the kids get older, teach them about guns and about gun safety. The incidence of accidental shooting deaths among kids who have been trained in gun safety is almost zero. Follow the stats, folks.

But most importantly of all, if your kid have friends over to play, lock the damn gun away. You may be able to trust your kid, but a group of kids has the collective responsibility of a treeful of drunken chimpanzees, and that will include yours.

Don’t give yourself a broken heart by your carelessness — and don’t give the gun-fearing wussies more ammo to use against other gun owners, either.

Here endeth the lesson.