Suspicion Confirmed

I suspected that I’d been “randomly” selected for additional screening when I left Britishland (see below), and I was correct. After reading this article, I found my old boarding card and lo: there in the corner was the “SSSS” notation.

This is why I couldn’t check in online, this is why the ticket-chickie was so curious about my trip Over There, this is why I had a pat-down at the entrance to the secure area, and this is why I had another body-cavity search at the gate, without even the courtesy of a reach-around.

What interests me is that the TSA had selected me for additional screening and then communicated that to American Airlines so they could tag my record locator to start the whole process. And they hadn’t done it for both legs of the flight, just the return.

AA is already on my Shit List because even when one has the proper U.K. temporary firearms licence, they flatly refuse to transport any privately-owned guns to the U.K.  — long guns, not just handguns, which I’d understand given the Brits’ mortal fear of the latter. This means that when I go to visit Mr. Free Market for a bit of birdshooting or deerstalking, I can’t fly on American; I have to use British Airways. As they’re “OneWorld partners”, it doesn’t affect my airline miles, but it does limit my travel options somewhat. And to judge from the comments on frequent-flier websites and forums, BA seems to have turned into a pretty second-rate airline over the past few years.

And yes, you read that right: an American airline refuses to transport legally-owned long guns to Britain, while a British airline has no problem doing so. Were it not for the fact that I fly out of DFW (American’s major hub), I’d using another airline, you betcha — but all other U.S. airlines out of DFW require that I connect in another city rather than fly direct to Heathrow. And in a couple of those connecting cities (Newark, Boston, New York), possession of a firearm can result in harassment at best, and being arrested at worst — even though you’re just passing through their little gun-hating jurisdiction. (Amazingly, Chicago isn’t a GFW city, in this situation anyway.)

Bah. A pox on all their houses.

You Mean “Unwise”

Some old codger offers advice to some wannabe mercenaries, and I can’t argue with a single thing he says. Sample:

“You’ve got no idea what road you are starting down. Romance and idealism wears off really fast when you’re lying in a pool of your own blood trying to stuff your intestines back into your torn abdomen.”

It’s the thing which sometimes keeps me awake at night: not that I’m the guy on the ground, but that I might be the cause of it.

9/11 Reminder

We are taught the Christian virtue of forgiveness — well, some of us are, anyway. But when you’re faced with some of the most ghastly acts of wanton wickedness, I’m afraid that Christianity needs to take a temporary vacation while we root out pure evil. Here’s a brief reminder, lest we have forgotten:

Kill them. Kill them all, whether they’re Al-Qa’eda, ISIL, Muslim Brotherhood, Boko Haram, whatever they want to call themselves — kill them all.

Then, when these barbarians have been removed, we can get back to building civilization.

 

Different Perspective

With the plethora of spy (okay, “surveillance”) cameras in Britishland city streets, this pic has often been described as ironic:

Me, I just see another typical IngSoc cock-up: the camera stand is too short to see into the window, so they turned it around to face the street instead.

That’s how Orwell got to write Animal Farm and 1984, unnoticed by the authorities.

Speed Bump

Via Insty, I was reading this article which talks about how the First Amendment is designed to protect unpopular speech, and everyone’s speech in general, when this little sentence stopped me in my tracks (with my emphasis on the part which did so):

For White and Czjetanovic, being white nationalists has no impact on their ability to do their jobs. Had they held other jobs in which their white nationalism would directly affect their job performance, perhaps the internet mob would be justified in its quest to take heads (white nationalists shouldn’t be teaching WWII history to impressionable middle school students, for example).

Here’s where this little thing falls apart. We conservatives have been aghast at how “impressionable middle school students” have, for decades now, been taught by Frankfurt-School socialists, who have been busy with their little Gramscian plan of inculcating Marxist principles and Weltanschauung into our kids — and now I’m supposed to bristle at the thought of white nationalists teaching in middle-school classrooms?

The author (Bethany Daniel) has done precisely what she argues against in her article: she’s conflated white supremacists with Western Civ devotees (like myself). Frankly, if a white nationalist teacher kept herself in check and kept the racist shit to herself while extolling the value of Western Civilization when teaching history to middleschoolers, I’d rather see that than some vapid socialist twerpette interpreting WWII as a struggle between the patriotic proletariat of the glorious Soviet Union and the oppressive capitalist systems of the West.

The difference is that socialists are quite unapologetic about their propagandizing — even while teaching impressionable middle school students — while we Western Civ boosters have to be constantly on the defensive about our position lest we offend someone in the Perpetually Offended Set because racism.

Screw that. Given that bias is inevitable in any teaching system, the goal should be to stop not just white nationalists from teaching, but Marxists as well. Sadly, the education hierarchy in the West is only doing half the job.

Males Under Every Bush

No, that’s not a sexy double entendre. Apparently, some academic feministicals [redundancy alert] have decided that there are too many male-sourced citations in scholarly literature, or something like that:

In a recent academic journal article, two feminist professors claim that citing sources in scholarly articles contributes to “white heteromasculinity.” Rutgers University professor Carrie Mott and University of Waterloo professor Daniel Cockayne advance the claim in an article published last month in the Feminist Journal of Geography, but also suggest that citation can serve as “a feminist and anti-racist technology of resistance” if references are chosen with the explicit intent of promoting “those authors and voices we want to carry forward.”

Note that the second of these two feministicals is (I think) a man, ergo completely pussy-whipped into compliance with Teh Narrative. Of course, they don’t let actual, you know, facts get in their way:

The authors say that “white men tend to be cited in much higher numbers than people from other backgrounds,” but dismiss the idea that this is due to the relative preponderance of white male geographers.

And yes, the picture of Professor Mott (from Rutgers’s website, no less) should come as no surprise to anyone:

My sincerest apologies to anyone who is now unable to eat their breakfast. The other idiot’s picture will also be unsurprising:

Good grief, they’re making professors out of 12-year-olds. It’s becoming easier and easier to see why The Onion is no longer either relevant or funny, because bullshit like this and people of this ilk render satire totally irrelevant.

By the way, their final comment is really funny:

They caution, however, that this approach entails a certain risk of “basing assumptions of gender or cisnormativity on particularly gendered names.”

Speaking of cultural nominal cisnormativity (I think I got that right), I’d like to point out that the word “mott” is South African slang for a vagina.

And as an African-American with a gender-opaque first name, I can only hope that somebody leaps to cite my writings as a source, preferably when writing to professors Vag and Cockless.