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Improvement?

General

Got sick of dealing with Chrome’s little quirks, so over the weekend I installed Firefox instead.

So far, so good.  I was able to transfer my bookmarks over without too much hassle (once I’d figured it out), and installed AdBlock (which annoyingly, requires three menu clicks to temporarily disable it on a specific website, as opposed to only one on Chrome;  but an ad-free existence is worth almost any inconvenience short of self-amputation).

That’s two conscious decouplings from the Evil Google Empire:  DuckDuck Go as a search engine instead of the awful Google Search, and now Firefox for Chrome.  Annoyingly, I can’t really do without Google Maps, because those fuckers have sunk their fangs deeply into almost all shopping sites, and anyway, Uber seems to require Google for their vehicle tracking — assuming, that is, that I can ever get back to driving for Uber.

One day soon I’ll go back to using a paper journal / diary instead of the foul Google Calendar.  Back when I was a Great Big Executive (in the Pre-Personal Computer Era), I used a tiny calendar to manage my entire life, and somehow I got by even though my daily life was littered with office appointments, birthdays, weekend plans, band practices / performances.  The best part of this practice, in retrospect, came from knowing that the details of my personal life were absolutely confidential and impervious to snooping from commercial interests, Chinese and Russian hackers, and bored, basement-dwelling neckbeards (who snoop just because they can).  I could also open up my diary without having adverts screaming at me and / or redirecting my attention (and often, dollars) to malevolent data strip-miners.

I long ago quit using any of the over-complicated MS Office products, of course, as the (free) Open Office suite gives me everything I need to run my life from a writing, mathematical and accounting perspective.

Oh, and one last thing:  if you feel the need to comment on this post, please refrain from making any sentences which include the word “Linux” because they will be deleted.  Just as I refuse to grow my own wheat to make bread, I refuse to use an operating system that requires knowledge of concepts like “kernels”;  and similarly, word processing is streets better than poring over type trays and composing sticks while having to think about kerning (no relation).

At some point, a complicated life gets simplified by invention and ingenuity, and then the invention and ingenuity start to take over whereupon life becomes complicated, once again.  All I’m trying to do is pull back a little, to simplify my life a tad and slow things down so I can get halfway through the day without going “WTF?” and tossing shit into the swimming pool.

And did I mention that all the area shooting ranges — my favorite panacea for dealing with irritability, confusion and rage — are still closed?

News Roundup

Bad News

In and out in ninety seconds, just like a teenage boy’s first sexual encounter.


…a rough guess as to why would be that the banks will have zero chance of getting any money back from the airlines, and it’s easier to stiff millions of individuals than try to sue a few airlines.


…which would piss me off, if I ever used the bloated and stupid MS Word for anything.


…wait:  China’s been lying?  Excuse me while I go and borrow Sarah Hoyt’s shocked face.


…except that the MexGov, unlike China, wasn’t lying;  they’re just stupidly inefficient.


…serve her right, the little cock-teaser.


…and in other news, the Japs Asians just bombed Pearl Harbor.


…see “Pearl Harbor”, above.  Gotta hand it to the DHS:  always a day late and a billion dollars short.  Also, I’m hanging onto Sarah’s shocked face for a while, because


…you mean Politico isn’t a dependable source for news, and is just like all the other China-asskissing media?


…oops.


…ooohh, he is going to be in SO much trouble for flouting the “social distancing” regulations so egregiously.

Out Of Their Hands

Education

One of the few things about the Chinkvirus pandemic that has given me amusement is the panicked reaction from the Education Establishment against homeschoooling — you know, the dread fact that children’s education has slipped from their grasp and back to (where it really belongs) the parents.

Of course, the screaming and wailing is all utter bollocks, as City Journal‘s Max Eden explains:

It would be useful to know how homeschooled students perform academically compared with their public school counterparts. A 2017 literature review, focusing only on peer-reviewed articles, found that the majority of studies showed positive academic, social and emotional, and long-term life outcomes. Bartholet dismisses much of this literature, noting that it tends to focus on a not necessarily representative sample of homeschoolers who “emerge from isolation to do things like take standardized tests.”

Eden takes this apart for the nonsense it is:

James Dwyer, co-organizer of the event, has declared that “the reason parent-child relationships exist is that the state confers legal parenthood. . . . It’s the state that’s empowering parents to do anything with children. To take them home, to have custody, to make any kind of decision about that.”
Such sentiments would horrify most parents, and Bartholet’s proposed ban on homeschooling would never win at the ballot box, as she knows. She laments how the Constitution “with its negative rights structure is an anomaly, outdated and inadequate by the standards of the rest of the world.” But she expresses hope that litigation campaigns may lay the groundwork for an eventual national ban. It wouldn’t be the first time that coordinated progressive litigation has yielded profound, counter-majoritarian policy change. With elites like Bartholet and her colleagues pushing their vision of family subordination to the state, homeschool parents have good reason to be on guard.

Yeah, that damn antiquated Constitution and its “negative rights structure”.  For those of you either ignorant of or impatient with academic-speak, what this foul woman means is that she would prefer a constitution which lets the State tell the citizens what they may do, as opposed to our Constitution which says that government  may only do this and that, and the rest is up to We The People.

Her preference is always the default position with statists, tyrants and dictators.

Were it not for that “negative rights structure”, I’d suggest that Bartolet be punished or at least censured for wanting the State to take parents’ rights away;  but there’s that annoying little First Amendment thing which affirms her inalienable right to utter anything she wants — even dangerous bullshit like this.

And I have the right to call it “dangerous bullshit”, protected by that same outdated principle.  And the right to tell her to fuck off and die.

Excellent Advice

SHTF, The Gun Thing

Peter Grant has a post about equipping and handling a rifle, and there’s not a single thing he says that I disagree with.  An excerpt:

It’s easy to say, “I can get rounds on target out to 500 yards” – but that’s probably not true in all circumstances. On a square range, on a calm, sunny day, with no interference or distractions, and a well-braced position, and using good optics, perhaps you can. Now, take a wild, stormy, windy day, with you out of breath, panting and puffing, sweat running down your forehead and into your eyes (having just run a couple of blocks to get away from trouble, with “bad guys” in the offing who are after you, and your family bunched behind you with the kids screaming in fear because they don’t know what’s going on), and you with just “iron sights” or a red dot sight on your close-combat carbine, and no time to take up a settled, stable shooting position . . . now make that critical shot, at whatever range. Go ahead. It’s only your life at stake, and your families’ lives.

Absolutely true.  We had guys in our unit who were absolute monsters on the range, but when faced with serious trouble, it all went to hell in a hurry.  This is also why I know I was a far  better handgun shooter back when I did timed IDPA drills every week, as opposed to the leisurely range sessions I do now.  I went from “average” to “much-better-than-average”, and now I’ve slipped back to “marginally-better-than average” (to be extremely charitable).  What I do know is that the habits I picked up from all those hours of IDPA drills are still there, and can be resurrected (even if a half-second or so slower) in a pinch.

Peter’s thoughts about maintaining your battle rifle are also why I prefer the AK-47 over the AR-15:  throw an AK in the mud, drop it off the back of a truck, and it’ll still shoot.  Good luck doing that with your AR-15, with all its electronic doodads and plastic furniture.

And if you don’t own a copy of Jeff Cooper’s Art of the Rifle, that should be your next book purchase.

Teaser

Beauty, Gratuitous Chick Pics

Here’s an easy one. We all know that this pic of some Miss Universe (1952) contestants contains something “wrong”.  But time yourself to see how long it takes you to discover it.

Start counting the seconds… now.

Lovely, aren’t they?

Silver Lining

Disaster, Health

If anything good has come out of the Chinkvirus pandemic, it’s this:

A comprehensive study of behaviours and attitudes since the outbreak began found that three in five people will stop greeting friends with a hug and a kiss, and will also avoid crowded places in the future.

Include me in that number, although I hardly ever did it anyway.  This modern thing of men hugging other men who are not family has always given me the heebies.  I hug my son — and not even that often — and occasionally my friend Trevor (who insists on doing it because he knows it bugs me, and I don’t kill him because he’s my friend).  Other than that, ugh.

I don’t mind shaking hands, however, because I was brought up to do that with men, further affection being communicated by a punch or slap on the shoulder.

But not with women.  Unless it’s a business thing, I’m always tempted to turn a handshake with a woman into kissing her hand;  mostly, it’s greeted with giggles and sighs.  If I add, “Sorry, but I was brought up to love and respect women,” the response is universally positive.  Hugging is too intimate;  kissing a hand denotes respect.

As for hugging and kissing women I know… well, I’m never going to stop doing that.  (At the doctor’s the other day, I complained to his nurse practitioner — whom I’ve known for over fifteen years — that I wasn’t going to molest her as I usually do when I visit.  She shook her head sadly and said, “And I always look so forward to it, too.”  Aaah, Texas.)

Ultimately, though, I think that for the next few years we as a society are going to be more comfortable about keeping other people — and certainly strangers — at arm’s length, so to speak.  And that’s a Good Thing.  But as time passes, we’ll forget all about pandemic behavior and relapse into over-familiarity, which isn’t.