LOL Arsenal

From Fogs Noose  comes this breathless tale (emphasis added):

A Wisconsin man was founding living in an undetected underground bunk in the Milwaukee woods for years with a dog and a stockpile of weapons and ammunition.
Deputies discovered hermit Geoffrey Graff’s odd, hidden abode on Wednesday after responding to a call of shots fired.
After entering the 8-foot-by-8-foot bunker – which was also 20-feet-long – the deputies found an arsenal of weapons including two shotguns, a rifle, a handgun, three knives, ammo and a bow with arrows fashioned from “snowplow stakes,” Milwaukee County Sheriff Earnell Lucas said at a news conference Friday.
Lucas said Graff’s bunker also had a grill, propane tanks, a generator, various power tools, boxes of food and canned goods.

I haven’t checked recently, but I think I could lay my hands on all that stuff (apart from the bow) within a few paces from my living room chair, a couple more are at arm’s length, and let’s not even talk about the contents of my nightstand.

I am curious, however, as to how one fashions arrows from snowplough stakes… I mean, how does one affix the flights to the shaft?  Are the stakes made of wood, or metal?

I think we need to know all that, but of course media.  They won’t even tell us the caliber of the firearms, which tells you all you need to know about journalistic standards.

Economics Lesson

As the “climate change” foolishness grows apace, we find bullshit like this increasing at a similar rate:

Shoppers have been left furious as Sainsbury’s has doubled the cost of its plastic bags to 20p in a move dubbed ‘day light robbery’ and ‘profiting from forgetfulness’.
The supermarket’s bosses have said it is part of a strategy to reduce the stores plastic footprint by ‘encouraging customers to develop a re-use mindset’.
There is an incentive to cut plastic use by more than 50 per cent in five years, with the profits going to good causes, Sainsbury’s claimed.

Of course they will.  Actually, what this is really all about is Sainsbury’s doing a little “virtue signaling” (as I believe it’s called nowadays).

It’s been a while since I looked at the numbers, but I believe that plastic supermaket bags carry a F.O.B. price of something less than a penny per bag, so that’s quite a profit margin to pass on to the so-called “good causes”.

I think I use canvas bags about 50% of the time, mostly because I either forget to pack them in the car before going shopping, or I do some impulse (i.e. unplanned) shopping on the way home.  When I remember, I keep the canvas bags in the car, but it’s not a big deal in my life, because I reuse all supermarket plastic bags at least once, as bathroom trash bags or similar.

Here’s a word of warning about canvas (or any reusable) bags:  you have to wash them frequently (errr involving electricity, hot water and detergents, oh dear) as over time they will become portable petri dishes of bacteria, especially if you carry raw meat or fish home in them.

When I travel in Britishland and Euroland, I carry a little polyester bag (folded, it’s about the same size as a handkerchief) in my coat pocket just so that I don’t get caught without one and have to pay for the bags — and in some Euro stores, they don’t offer any bags at all.

If this pisses you off (and it does me), then your revenge should be to pack your groceries away yourself before paying.  It slows down the transaction, and cashiers are measured on a simple “time/#items scanned” efficiency metric.  Take your time, for added pleasure.