Social Dictionary

Ambrose Bierce would heartily approve of this iteration of his own Devil’s Dictionary.  A sample:

* “OK, Boomer” – popular, reflexive and mentally-flabby retort of retarded children who cannot formulate a proper or logical response to an argument, question or premise. A sign of belonging to a group known collectively as “Millennials” whose main attributes include oversized thumbs, limited intelligence, hysteria, extensive knowledge of modern technology but inability to use a rotary phone, can opener or rake, hair-trigger cry reflex, navel gazing, overly-high self-value acquired through a program of low expectations, and a belief that everyone gives a flying fuck about what they’re eating at any given moment.

Much more goodness at the first link above.  (Oh, and if you don’t have a copy of Bierce’s Dictionary, hie thee to the second  link and remedy that unpardonable omission immediately.  For only 99c on Kindle… please.)

About Hacks

One of the real pleasures I had while living at Free Market Towers a couple of years back was going out to the mailbox very early in the morning, retrieving the fresh edition of the Daily Telegraph, then reading the thing cover to cover while drinking my morning coffee, trying to finish it before the Free Markets woke up for breakfast.

If we had a decent daily newspaper Over Here, I’d subscribe to its print version in a heartbeat, but of course we don’t:  they’re all total shit, and of course infested with socialist hacks.

This isn’t, by the way, the modern-day meaning of the word, where “hacking” means breaking into someone else’s computer coding program, and “hacks” mean “shortcuts” or “gimmicks”.

In The Oldie days (explanation to follow), the word “hack” usually meant “journalist” — more specifically, a bad  journalist.  And in perusing the pages of a magazine I’d never heard of before (thankee, BritReader Jeff W), I found a lovely article about journalism, and journalists.

Of course, nowadays journalists are despised, and mostly deservedly so, for being hacks:  opinionated assholes who reveal their ignorance with every sentence they write (e.g. when talking about guns), and moreover, who write badly, unsupervised by editors who used to be a moderating influence, but who are now best described as “last week’s journalists” — i.e. no better than the journalists they’re supposed to be supervising.

But it wasn’t always like that.  Here’s an excerpt from the article I linked above:

It’s easy to maintain a simplistic stance if you never leave your desk. Google will reaffirm what you already know – or think you know. However if you take the time and trouble to go out and meet the people who are living through the things you’re reporting, and ask them what they think, you’ll soon find your opinions are tempered by reality. Real life is complex and contradictory. Successful columnists are often dogmatists, but good reporters are pragmatists. Regular contact with the folk they write about has taught them that life, and news, is rarely black and white.

It’s also easy to forget that journalists once had to follow an apprenticeship path before they could land a job with a prestigious — or at least popular — newspaper or magazine, that path being:  learning how to write proper journalese and prose in a small-town newspaper, and simple things such as interviewing subjects, collecting background material and in short, learning about the topics before committing them to print — all before graduating to a larger, or national publication.

It’s also worth remembering that this path seldom if ever required a university degree which, I think, stopped journalists back then from becoming part of the story:  as perpetual outsiders to the system they were reporting about, their job was to be skeptical about the topic — indeed, learning about the topic meant looking at it from all sides so that they could see through the spin being put on it by the interviewees.

Contrast that with today’s J-school poseurs, who graduate thinking that they’re qualified to write about everything, whereas in fact they’re unqualified to write about anything.  Nowadays, of course, they just parrot the spin because they literally don’t know any better.

Read the entire article:  like all good pieces of writing, it will educate you about the topic.  It will also increase your loathing for today’s so-called journalists, if that’s indeed possible.

And en passant, read a few more articles in The Oldie.  It’ll be worth your time.

Sempiterna Sinistra

So the Britishland elections are over, and Boris “The Babe” Johnson has absolutely routed the evil Communists and Europhiles who opposed him (see link for body counts).

Of course, the Left has responded to their loss in typical fashion:

Yup… anyone who opposes them and their Marxist dogma is eeevil, raayyycisss and shellfish.

Kinda like our Lefties Over Here, huh?

Fuck ’em, and the class envy they rode in on.  And to the Stout Bulldogs among my Readers:  wave buh-bye to the EU and their minions:

…and allow me to share some of our favorite 2016 vintage with you:

Asshole Law, Loophole Reaction

Give this man a 2A medal:

Sheriff Scott Jenkins of Culpeper County, Va. proposed a way to exempt citizens from newly proposed Virginia gun laws that might otherwise bar them from owning certain firearms.
In a Wednesday Facebook post, Jenkins warned that some of the gun laws proposed in the Virginia General Assembly would “disarm or handicap our law-abiding in their defense,” and in turn suggested he would confer the label of deputy on thousands of law-abiding citizens to include them in law enforcement carve-outs included in new gun legislation.

For those ignorant of Virginia’s counties, here’s where Culpeper County lies:

In other words, close enough to D.C. that would make a difference.

Applause, Please

Tell me that you haven’t felt this way about corporate (or government-) intransigence at least once in your life, and I’ll call you a liar.

Bereaved relatives confronted staff at an insurance company with the body of their loved one after the firm refused to pay out until they proved he was dead.
Two women were filmed carrying the corpse inside a branch of the Old Mutual financial firm somewhere in KwaZulu-Natal province, South Africa, this week after their claim on a funeral policy was initially rejected.
Horrified bank staff watched on as the women took the body inside, having driven it to the branch from the morgue, and demanded a payout.
Alongside the corpse the women handed over paperwork for the man’s life insurance claim along with his ID and death certificate, local media reports.
Witnesses said the ladies told staff they would not leave the branch until Old Mutual paid out the death claim in full.
After hurried discussions between Old Mutual management and phone calls to head office, it was decided to agree to honour the insurance claim – as long as the ladies removed the dead body.
The witness said: ‘As soon as the ladies were promised they would be paid they marched back inside the office and in front of the counter grabbed an end each and carried the corpse back out. Two men went to their aid and helped them manoeuvre the body bag into the boot of the car that they brought the body in and people were just watching open mouthed as all this was played out. The women said a loved one was inside the body bag and that bringing him to the Old Mutual office seemed to be the only way to prove their claim to them that he had actually passed away’ he said.

But before you start applauding, there’s this:

Responding to the viral video on Twitter, Old Mutual said that the incident was ‘most unsettling’ and they insisted that they were ‘sympathetic towards the family during this difficult time’.

I’ll bet you were “sympathetic”, you pencil-pushing motherfuckers, which is why these poor people had to resort to such an extreme measure.  I hope you were so “upset” that you have nightmares for a week.

Now  y’all can applaud.

Dept. Of Righteous Shootings

It’s not often that we get to applaud a self-administered  Righteous Shooting, but this one deserves special mention as it happened in Britishland.  Try not to burst out with raucous and joyful laughter as you follow the link, lest you frighten the other people at the office.  Here’s a brief synopsis:

Choirboy wants to do a little impromptu (or maybe planned, see below) property redistribution by breaking into a parked car.  Holding a shotgun, he smashes the butt thereof into the car window.

Thus far, all is happening as per usual in these cases.  Here’s where it gets (wonderfully) different.

Perhaps being unaware of the maxim, “Keep the booger-hook off the bang-switch”, said choirboy has finger on the trigger, and when the shotgun’s butt hits the window, he pulls the trigger, blasting a full load of buckshot(?) into his own fool chest, and dying on the spot.

[pause to allow the laughter and cheering to subside]

But it gets better.

There is surveillance video (see the link) which shows the other  members of the choir seeing what happened, holding him, trying to revive him, and generally wailing with shock and horror before running away.

Now  you can howl with laughter, with my permission.  And if this tragic tale doesn’t help you start the week with a smile on your face, you need help.