Month: April 2022

Bedehr Gesocht

Funny Stuff, Men & Women

Alert Reader Mike M sends me this cheerful little piece:

A Florida man is facing criminal charges for alleged “lewd, indecent and obscene acts” aboard a Boston-bound flight.

Yeah, fine, whatever, Florida Man doing strange shit, nothing to see here, move along.  Until we read the very next sentence:

Donald Edward Robinson, 76, Bonita Springs, was arrested Sunday morning at Logan International Airport and charged by criminal complaint with one count of lewd, indecent and obscene acts.

Seventy-six years old?  Man deserves a medal, not prosecution.  Then further on:

Robinson is accused of masturbating and exposing his penis in front of a 21-year-old woman who was seated next to him.  The woman recorded a 24-second video clip of Robinson allegedly touching and manipulating his penis through his pants shortly after the flight took off, authorities said. Robinson allegedly then exposed his penis.  The woman tried to point Robinson out to a flight attendant after landing but was unable to point him out due to the number of people trying to exit the aircraft.  Security footage captured Robinson exiting the terminal.

Spoilsports.  As the title of this post indicates, we should all be so lucky to have such lascivious thoughts, so well past our threescore years and ten.

Tectonic Shift

Economics

ZMan has a typically-mordant look at the global economy:

The Global American Empire has been supported for the past half century by a novel form of seigniorage. This is the difference between the value of money and the cost to produce and distribute it. In the old days, the king would make a profit from the minting of coins used in his kingdom. This was usually a tax added to the total cost of a coin on top of the cost of production. This was the king’s profit from coinage.

Since the Louvre accords in the 1980s, Washington has been able to swap securities for newly printed banknotes by the Federal Reserve. This would normally impose an inflation tax on the public, but the dollar being the reserve currency of the world spread this tax over the global economy. Inflation rates in the United States remained low, as long as global growth remained high and the world was willing to tolerate this system.

The bigger issue is that the rest of the world is losing interest in the system that profits Washington at their expense. China has been manipulating its currency for a few years as a way to prevent Washington from exporting inflation to Beijing. She has also been quietly building parallel financial structures, along with Russia and India, in order to escape the perfidious rules imposed by Washington.

Which means that if the $US is replaced by some other form of currency, we’re fucked.  The only bright side of that scenario is that other currencies are even more shaky than ours (yuan coff coff)  and a commodity-based system such as gold is impossible because quite frankly, there is no commodity on Earth large enough to replace the dollar without a radical devaluation of, well, everything.

Sobering stuff, all the same.  Read all of it.

Recalibration Necessary

Crime, Gummint

Good grief.  In talking about some shady assholes who have been bribing SecServ agents, we find this laughable part:

Second, they were heavily armed:

[F]irearms and ammunition were seized. Specifically, a Glock 19 9mm handgun loaded with 17 rounds of ammunition, including one in the chamber, seven rounds of .308 caliber ammunition, and an ammunition box with over 35 rounds of handgun ammunition…
***
Law enforcement also seized firearm components typically used with long guns or assault rifles including, among other things: (1) a firearm barrel of an unknown caliber; (2) weapon stock attachments1; (3) foregrips2; (4) pistol grips; (5) a magazine cartridge; and (5) scope(s). In addition, law enforcement recovered a spotting scope, which can be used in a sniper/spotter team.
***
law enforcement seized a Sig Sauer P229 with five fully loaded magazines, containing a total of 61 rounds.

Heavily armed?

Lemme see… in my immediate reach as I sit here in my armchair, I have a 1911 with one loaded mag in the gun, one round in the pipe and another three mags next to it  (33 rounds), and a S&W 637 with a loaded cylinder and two speedloaders (15 rounds).

Five steps away in one direction will get me to a pump shotgun (5 rounds) and an AK-47 (60 rounds in three mags), as well as to a loaded Browning High Power and four spare mags (46 rounds).  Don’t ask what happens if I manage to open Safe #1.

Five steps in the other direction (I live in a small apartment) is a little less promising, with only a loaded S&W .357 Mag revolver (Ye Olde Beddesyde Gunne) with four speedloaders (30 rounds total).

And by the way:  seven whole rounds of .308 Win, and three dozen handgun rounds in an ammo can?  My God, it’s… an arsenal!

Which leads me to the contents of Ye Olde Ammoe Locquere, which are nunya, but I can assure you that it contains a little bit more than three dozen rounds.  (Even after Doc Russia and Mr. Free Market tried manfully to deplete my supplies a couple weeks back…)

Finally, I have more gun-related stuff in any one of my “Gun Junk” trunks than these mopes have.  Including spotter scopes, bipods, grips, stocks and rifle scopes.  And bayonets, too.

I don’t own any brass knuckles, because I prefer sap gloves.

Good thing I’m not working for Iran and bribing Secret Service agents, then.