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Residential Collectivization

Eco-Crap, Marxists, Seen On Campus

As any fule kno, Communism is all about taking away the individual and replacing him with a cipher that can be controlled and manipulated by a benevolent Big Brother.  Here’s one such manifestation, in the ravings of some Marxist college professor [redundancy alert]:

“If we want to keep cities safe in the face of climate change, we need to seriously question the ideal of private homeownership,” says Kian Goh, who researches urban ecological design, “spatial politics” and social mobilization “in the context of climate change and global urbanization.”
…
Proposed solutions, including a public takeover of Pacific Gas & Electric, are missing one of the most important factors in climate change-driven destruction, Goh warns: “economic development, aspirations of home ownership, and belief in the importance of private property.”
To prevent catastrophe, Americans must reconsider their ideas about “success, comfort, home, and family,” particularly the single-family homes that followed in the wake of the Homestead Act of 1862 and federally backed mortgage insurance, the professor argues.
These policies benefited white middle-class families and “became synonymous with freedom and self-sufficiency” even though they represented “[e]xpansionist, individualist, and exclusionary patterns of housing.”

So having a house in the ‘burbs is a factor in Glueball Climate We’re All Gonna DIEEEEE! Catastrophe.

As we all know, of course, this whole climate bullshit manifesto is just a fig leaf covering the true aims of people like this asshole academic — there is no climate catastrophe looming —  but it sure as hell allows them to create their little model society, doesn’t it?

What really, really  scrapes these Commie bastards is that home ownership is the end result of individualism, provides the individual a stake in the society in which he lives, and provides for private security in his abode.  Private property ownership also means that people will, in the main, resist any and all efforts of the State to confiscate or otherwise appropriate it — and for the Commies, remember, there is no private property because all property belongs to the State.

So yeah, they’d prefer to have us all live in tiny, State-managed apartments in an urban environment, using public instead of private transport, and working for the State rather than for ourselves.

Already, the eeeevil automobile has been blamed for the non-existent growth of carbon emissions which is going to melt ice caps etc.  Now pricks like this Goh creature can add suburban homes to the list of eco-evils, which means that they too can be circumscribed, reduced and ultimately, banned.

Feel free to dispute anything you’ve read so far in this post, but you’d better have something more than emotion, slogans and hysteria in your argument.

“Spatial politics”, my fat African-American ass.

Past Perfect, Part Deux

The Gun Thing

Sheriff Jim talks about a “trend” of people reverting to revolvers as self-defense weapons.

Colt has recently made a big splash with the reintroduction of their Python revolver. At the same time, we continue to see and hear from shooters who cleave to their Smith & Wesson J-frame revolvers. And there seems to be continued interest in revolvers manufactured by several other companies. A custom holster maker recently told me that 70 percent of his orders are holsters for revolvers. I am curious if we are seeing a solid trend back to the defensive revolver, or if this is just some sort of fad.
Of course, many of our older shooters have never quit the revolver. They learned to shoot it and shoot it well. In many cases these folks have had revolvers save their lives and it’s pretty hard to quit a gun that you could rely on in those circumstances. Many of these older shooters also passed their love of the revolver on to their children which has affected the choice for many of the younger generation.

Yeah, no prizes for guessing where I fall on this spectrum.  Despite my eternal love affair with the Colt 1911 Government pistol, my bedside gun is and always has been a revolver, because at the end of the day, a revolver is like a fork:  you pick it up, and it works.  No fiddling with safety catches, worrying about popping the mag by mistake, trying to remember if you racked the slide to load it earlier (in my case, that would be “always”) — your revolver is loaded and ready to go, period, end of sentence, end of story (for any goblin on the naughty end of its muzzle).

For me (and, I suspect, a boatload of others of my ilk), there is no “trend”;  the rest of the world is coming back to realize what we’ve known all along:  the more dire the circumstances, the more we need simplicity.

That was my very first bedside gun, back in South Africa:  a Colt 1917 (.45 Long Colt).  I never had to use it in anger, thank goodness, but there’s no doubt it could have handled pretty much any situation short of a regimental banzai attack.

My choice of cartridge may have changed somewhat in the fifty years since then (.45 LC to .357 Magnum), but my philosophy sure as hell hasn’t.

Speechless

Immigration, Mocking Furriners, The Gun Thing

Some time back I read this article about Germany, and filed it away because at the time, it actually rendered me speechless.  I’m still dumbfounded, but let me give it a shot anyway.

The executive summary is that as migrant North African men have turned rape into a spectator sport in Germanland, more people are getting gun licenses and guns for self-protection.  The response from the Kraut gummint has been predictable:

A survey of Germany’s 16 states revealed that 640,000 citizens are now able to carry a weapon. This number was only 260,000 in 2014.
In total there are 5.4 million privately owned guns with the proportion of licence holders being highest in Schleswig-Holstein, reports thelocal.
The Union of Police said ‘more and more people feel insecure’ since the sexual assaults on women outside Cologne Cathedral on New Year’s Eve 2015.
Germany has seen a number of high profile sex attacks since more than 200 women came forward to say they were assaulted during Cologne’s festivities.
Police later revealed that the majority of suspects were said to be of North African origin.
Union of Police chairman Oliver Malchow said the rise was sparked by a ‘latent feeling on insecurity’ in the population.
He added: ‘The problematic increase in small arms licenses shows that we need to work to restore a sense of security to many citizens.’

Trust a fucking bureaucrat cop to think that an increase in gun ownership in response to lawlessness is a “problem”, whereas we all know that the real  problem is mass rape, and the unwillingness of the Kraut courts to cut the rapists’ pee-pees off in the town square for Saturday entertainment.

Hey, Herr Gewerkschaftsvorsitzender  Malchow you fucking weasel functionary, here’s a tip:  if you’re feeling squeamish about the peasants arming themselves, then you need to tell your cops to start dealing with the problem in a manner designed to discourage the behavior.   Then the people won’t feel deserted by the law and its enforcers, and feel the need to help themselves when the fucking cops can’t or won’t protect them.

As the old saying goes, the primary function of the State is to monopolize the use of violence by denying it to the populace.  Here’s a classic example of just that.  Our Oliver sees people arming themselves as the problem, and not the behavior of foreigners which gives rise to that (very understandable) reaction.

And this, I don’t have to tell you, is the endgame of the socialists who have seized control of the Democrat Party:  a disarmed, fearful citizenry dependent on police protection from the predations of others.

Well, fuck that.  Here’s a suggested antidote to the problem above, in our local context:

Too bad ordinary Germans can’t get their hands on one of these beauties., but I think they have enough choices not to worry too much about it…

…until this prick Malchow decides that genug ist genug, and sends his policemen round to confiscate all those licensed handguns, seeing as the cops know who all the gun owners are, and which guns they own.  All in the name of safety, of course.

Now, what was that about the Democrats’ plans in Virginia…?

Beefeaters

Food & Drink

In my Boxing Day post, I omitted to acknowledge the source of the main pic (of a mouthwatering roast beef) — “omitted” in that the pic wasn’t labeled, and the now-forgotten website where I found it hadn’t labeled it either.  (Under copyright law, by the way, such copyright infringement is called “inadvertent”, which in my case it certainly was.)  So I fixed that.

But that’s not the point of this post:  this is.

The pic originally came from a crowd named Carnivore Style, and I urge you all to visit their website.

This referral has not been forced on me by legal assholes, by the way:  it looks like an excellent place and I for one am going to spend a lot more time there as I devote yet more time to eating red meat in the future.  (This is an interesting take on Keto vs. Carnivore diets, incidentally.)

AND of course, bedehr gesocht, it might cause mass suicides among vegans, Extinction Rebellion loonies and other such filth.  Which can only be a good thing.

Past Perfect

Technology

Right up front, I’m going to admit that I know diddly squat about farming — I can’t tell a cornfield from a minefield, nor a rake from a pitchfork — but at the same time, I think I understand what’s going on here.

Tractors manufactured in the late 1970s and 1980s are some of the hottest items in farm auctions across the Midwest these days — and it’s not because they’re antiques.
Cost-conscious farmers are looking for bargains, and tractors from that era are well-built and totally functional, and aren’t as complicated or expensive to repair as more recent models that run on sophisticated software.
“It’s a trend that’s been building. It’s been interesting in the last couple years, which have been difficult for ag, to see the trend accelerate,” said Greg Peterson, the founder of Machinery Pete, a farm equipment data company in Rochester with a website and TV show.
“There’s an affinity factor if you grew up around these tractors, but it goes way beyond that,” Peterson said. “These things, they’re basically bulletproof. You can put 15,000 hours on it and if something breaks you can just replace it.”

But why, you may ask, are farmers rejecting the New ‘N Improved Tractors, which come with all sorts of Gadgets And Software, Guaranteed To Make Life Easier For Farmers?

The other big draw of the older tractors is their lack of complex technology. Farmers prefer to fix what they can on the spot, or take it to their mechanic and not have to spend tens of thousands of dollars.
“The newer machines, any time something breaks, you’ve got to have a computer to fix it,” Stock said.
There are some good things about the software in newer machines, said Peterson. The dealer will get a warning if something is about to break and can contact the farmer ahead of time to nip the problem in the bud. But if something does break, the farmer is powerless, stuck in the field waiting for a service truck from the dealership to come out to their farm and charge up to $150 per hour for labor.

In other words, tractors are becoming like today’s passenger cars:  crammed with all sorts of shit that sound oh-so wonderful when listed under “Safety”, “Convenience” or “Efficiency”, but which have little actual utility and simply serve to drive the price of the fucking machine into the stratosphere faster than one of Elon Musk’s rockets, while making them more prone to failure  — because as any fule know, as complexity increases, Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) shortens exponentially.

Wrenching the topic into an area which I know better than farming (and cars, for that matter):  it’s the same reason I prefer a simple AK-47 to a tricked-out AR-15.  The AR is finicky, has all manner of geegaws that can break and render the thing useless, whereas you can drive a truck over an AK and it will still continue to send bullets downrange into an 8″ kill zone.

So to all those farmers who prefer 1970s-era technology over 2019 technology in their tractors, I am very much a kindred spirit, because I prefer simple 1947 rifle technology over most of what has happened to semi-auto rifles since 2000.

And just as they’d rather spend $50,000 on an old, fixable warhorse than $150,000 on some prima donna luxo-trax made by Rolls Royce/IBM, I’d rather take the money I save on an AK and spend it on ammo.

Fuck this modern bullshit.  Fuck it all to hell.

Old Joke

Funny Stuff, Mocking Furriners

This is the French estate of Vaux-le-Vicomte (right-click to embiggen in another tab):

While impressive, the picture doesn’t do it justice:  past the top of the pic is a series of man-made waterfalls which sends something like half a million gallons of water a day down the hill, where it ends up in the ponds and eventually in the moat which surrounds the main house.  The water is then filtered and pumped back up to the reservoir at the top of the hill, to start its trip back down all over again*.

Anyway, I showed this pic to a friend, who said, “Wow, I’d hate to have to do all the gardening there!”

To which I made the age-old response:  “Nah… give me a dozen Mexicans and I’d do it myself.”

I did warn you in the title…

*If you want to know how it all works, Monty Don explains it in his Netflix show, French Gardens.