Update from Nephew Mark in Turkey:
Also, from regular media, some more good news.
Update from Nephew Mark in Turkey:
Also, from regular media, some more good news.
I have to say that I’m on the side of the dad in this one:
Father, 41, ran over two 15-year-old boys who were ‘bullying his son’ before repeatedly driving over one of the boy’s legs
Here’s the thing: as a parent, you’re often helpless when your child is being bullied — the “authorities” (school admin, police, whatever) are frequently helpless or indifferent to what’s happening to your child, of course you’re not allowed to confront the evil little shits responsible, and I’m all too familiar with that feeling of impotent rage that builds and builds when you’re rendered incapable of protecting your children.
So as I said, I’m already empathetic about this dad fucking up the bullies. But what pushes me all the way over to a “Well done!” attitude is this:
The enraged father-of-three had hunted the pair down after his porch window was smashed by one of their group and they fled the scene. After the group vandalised the family home that night, Connolly’s son chased after them and Connolly got into his car to look for him.
And finally, there’s this:
One of the boys was treated for fractures to his foot with metal plates inserted and skin taken from his thigh. ‘There will be permanent scarring to the foot and the thigh as a result of the surgical procedure. He was not able to bear weight on his foot for six weeks and will have permanently reduced mobility.’
Good. The feral little fuck deserves to be reminded, daily, of why people shouldn’t be assholes — my only quibble is that every one of the group of bullies won’t suffer the same fate, because they should.
Our Hero Dad was originally charged with attempted murder (!!) but common sense prevailed and he’ll only be charged with assault etc. Still, he’s facing some serious consequences.
I’d like to say that I wouldn’t have done what he did, but I’m not so sure. Protecting your family and property is so deeply embedded in the male psyche — despite all efforts of Modern Woke Society to eradicate it — that sometimes we men have no choice in the matter. Deplore it all you want, it’s an inescapable fact.
…or, not all heroes are gunfighters.
I thought I’d share a few WhatsApp exchanges with y’all. This is about SARZA, which is a privately-funded search & rescue organization based in South Africa (!), and which sent a team to help out in Turkey. Here’s a first-hand account from one of the SARZA team:
A little background:
“Mark” is a skinny kid of about 23. He’s also one of the top S&R operators in South Africa — hence his selection to join the SARZA team — and has been involved in countless life-and-death rescues all over South Africa. He’s also a skilled drone pilot, which they use to find people in distress, pinpoint trouble spots and so on.
“Sally” is Mark’s mother, and her husband is New Wife’s brother (who just spent Christmas with us) so Mark is my nephew by marriage, so to speak.
Words cannot express our pride in him and his work.
One way that British pubs have tried to cut down on hooligan behavior is to ban the kinds of clothing that the typical hell-raiser wears: hoodies, sweat pants (“track suits”) and so on.
I like this trend.
So you can imagine my response when I read this sad little tale:
Jo, from Paris, was on the hunt to sample some traditional Scottish food and drink with her husband. They decided to head for the George IV Bar after hearing rave reviews from locals, Edinburgh Live reports.
Jo said: “My husband and I are from France and for a first night in Edinburgh, we really wanted a nice pub where we could eat food and listen to music at the same time.
“The place was very well noted and the food looked delicious so we tried to get in. My husband was refused entry by the security guard that deemed his pants ‘inappropriate for a restaurant.’
“Very disappointed and I definitely won’t recommend it. We’re currently eating at a pub that doesn’t have live music, too bad for us, but at least we are welcome and we’re eating well.”
The response:
However, the bar’s general manager hit back, writing: “We have a policy of no tracksuits/cottons/jobby catchers in the bar in the evenings.
“Many bars in Edinburgh have the same policy. We work hard to cater for our clientele.”
Once again, my policy of always dressing well when traveling is vindicated.
As it happens, I’ve been to the George IV a couple of times, and it’s a lovely place — not the least because it’s free of trashy yobs and their equally-trashy cock holster girlfriends. And the food is brilliant.
Add the George IV to your “the next time I’m in Edinburgh” list. I’ll be going back, for sure.
The other evening I was watching a rather good TV bio of the Virgin wunderkind (not so much of a kid anymore) Richard Branson. I love “rags-to-riches” stories at the best of times, and while Branson was not really a “rags” case — comfortably middle-class, rather — the fact remains that he built the Virgin conglomerate from nothing into what it is today. And he wasn’t schooled, much, because he’s severely dyslexic and this in no small part caused him to leave school at age 16 and never look back.
And now he’s gone and cocked it all up.
You see, he’s bought into the nonsensical “climate-change-we’re-all-gonna-diiiieeeee” philosophy hook, line, sinker and rod, as have so many successful people of his ilk.
And I can’t help thinking that it’s because he’s uneducated. Now granted, in today’s world such stupidity can and has sprung from the academe (not to mention other Marxist ideologues), but that’s beside the point.
You see, without a proper education, someone like Branson is more likely to be swayed by plausible-but-still-nonsensical arguments, especially when uttered and backed by “experts” (scientists, doctors, academics, whatever) because uneducated people always give more credence to these mountebanks than the latter deserve.
This is why so many wealthy people buy into stupidity — they’ve been so busy making money that they’ve ignored a substantial amount of the real world (whether political, sociological, scientific or academic) unless it has a specific impact upon their business.
It’s also why the wealthy buy into the arrant bullshit as propagated by the World Economic Forum (WEF), because they feel as though only they have the power to move the lumpenproletariat (that would be you and me) into a direction that they feel is the “proper” way, regardless of whether the way is actually proper or not (mostly not, as it turns out). Add to this the naked and unashamed thirst for power by the usual Socialist assholes (most politicians) — who, by the way, already have the power to make the wealthy a lot less wealthy — and you have the hopeless naïveté of people like Bill Gates and Oprah Winfrey who think that simply throwing money (their own money, to give them some credit) at a health- or education problem in the Third World is going to solve that problem, when they’ve never read Kipling’s White Man’s Burden poem (or if they have, they’ve misunderstood its actual meaning — that lack of education, again).
And just to be clear: when I say “education”, I mean it in its Nockian sense. Many of my Readers, for example, are highly educated despite not having university degrees; and many more have university degrees but have educated themselves way past their academic discipline. I was able, for example, to see right through the forecasting nonsense of the Greens, despite not (yet) having a university degree because I had earlier learned how algorithms work — and more importantly, how they are tested. When you realize that not one of the near-term doomsday prognoses of the Greens has come even close to being fulfilled, you will understand why their latest climate-change warnings are all pointed away from the near-term and towards times decades or more hence. (Traditionally, algorithms have had a terrible time in making long-term predictions because of the instability of the world in general, but that’s been conveniently and deliberately ignored by the climate doomsayers.)
Which is why Richard Branson and his cohorts have bought into the Green nonsense completely — they have no idea why (or even that) the forecasts won’t come true, but because “scientific consensus” says they will, they believe them.
They’re as gullible as the fools who bought products from snake-oil salesmen or Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop (serious overlap), but unlike the aforementioned, who buy the products for their own benefit, the Bransons believe that their wealth will help them become world-saving philanthropists.
Idiots.
Okay, maybe three and seven out of the ten listed. (I read Undaunted Courage, about the Lewis & Clark expedition, not Lewis’s account, but that should count for something.)
Of the others, Storm of Steel impressed me the most. Ernst Jünger must be the greatest soldier who ever lived, if for no other reason that he survived all four years of WWI in the trenches of the Western Front, not as some staff flunky or quartermaster’s orderly, but as a front-line rifleman. And not a whiny little brat like Remarque‘s Paul, either: just a man of steel — which could have been the title of his book, come to think of it.
I’ve been wanting to read Last Train for years, but just never got around to it. Ditto Death Company, if for no other reason than to fill in the many gaps of my knowledge of the Italian Front. Both duly ordered.
I’ll get after the rest in due course — it’s an excellent list, so thanks to the folks at Intellectual Takeout for that. (If they aren’t on your list of daily reads, fix that now.)