I saw a stunning motorcycle at the Madonna Inn last year and could not get it out of my mind — but what was it? I did not know.
Some lucky couple parked one at the Hornet July 4.
It is a Victory.
The most affordable, and yet most essential, step in planning the purchase of a vehicle in Cali is to reserve and secure one’s custom license plate. O future first bike, I dub thee Nessun Dorma. How to fit that into seven letters?
I suppose I should probably learn to ride, too.
I keep finding things to beg Phil to weld up for me. The wife reluctantly admits she likes the ideas, so no need for me to divorce her, I suppose.
Thus: My wife and I helped create a robotics STEM summer camp for foster kids. Outside is this robust gate assembly.
Now, this is the kind of dangerous idea for the yard that will make me rip out a perfectly good wood fence.
Is that Avis-level work (“try harder”) or a good bead?
Sadly, I am old enough to remember when schools didn’t require steel barriers to keep predators out (or in, I suppose).
But hey, using prison architecture for public schools is For The Children, right?
…at Costco today, Santa Maria “fun-size”* wood-or-charcoal grills, with the endlessly-fascinating manual rotating lifter. Yours for just $149.99!
Here’s big brother, at $299:
Well, I can beat that:
Size matters! What you see here is a custom grill, easily half again the size of the Costco one, crafted by a nice young fella named Josh in the Santa Barbara hills. It starts with a 55-gallon drum and goes from there. 
Custom touches we picked include casters on all four corners, side and end mesh shelving, full mesh bottom with extra reinforcing, and the wife’s and my initials at top (click to embiggen). $400 and I’m happy with the pricing. Just what I needed to try an Ike Steak.
And yes, the shelves serve double duty for the menfolk to rest our beverages post-feast while playing with the rotating handle.
*that’s a shout out to my fellow losers of the late, lamented SFRedbook site, shut down by the Feds, those bluenose haters. Shoreline AMP FTW! etc.
Nor should you be.
Seattle would tax gun and ammunition sales and require owners to tell police about lost and stolen firearms under a pair of bills coming before the City Council.
City Council President Tim Burgess is proposing the legislation, saying revenue from the new tax would fund gun-violence-prevention programs and research.
“Gun violence is very expensive,†Burgess said, noting that the direct medical costs of treating 253 gunshot victims at Seattle’s Harborview Medical Center last year surpassed $17 million, with taxpayers covering more than $12 million of that. “It’s time for the gun industry to help defray those costs and this is a very reasonable way to do it.â€
The tax, imposed on gun sellers, would be $25 on each firearm sold in the city and five cents on each round of ammunition.
So, $25 tax per gun sold and a $2.50 tax per 50rnd box of ammunition sold within the city limits.
First: This won’t happen. It’s called “preemption”. State law says they can’t.
Second: Can you tell what kind of retail businesses they are trying to drive out of the city?
Third: This is a blatant attempt to cover the cost the city has to pay for criminal activity via the wallets of law-abiding citizens. If they truly wanted to cover those costs, they would bill and lien the criminals for the cost of the investigations.
Fourth: I don’t know where, but I read something similar to the following phrase somewhere not too long ago “If you cannot show how your proposal would stop criminal activity, then you are simply pushing a policy item.”
That at least 10% of the firearms owners in the US vote for the Democrat Party and favor Democratic Socialism
Gun Ownership and Uncontrollable Anger Go Hand in Hand, Study Shows
The more guns you own the more likely you are to be subject to angry outbursts that you cannot control.
This conclusion about Americans and their guns comes from a study published this week in the journal Behavioral Sciences. Researchers found that some 9 percent of people in the United States have both guns and significant anger issues.
“The new research also indicates that the 310 million firearms estimated to be in private hands in the United States are disproportionately owned by people who are prone to angry, impulsive behavior and have a potentially dangerous habit of keeping their guns close at hand,” the Los Angeles Times reports. “That’s because people owning six or more guns were more likely to fall into both of these categories than people who owned a single gun.”
The study, by psychology researchers from Duke, Harvard and other universities, states that “a large number of individuals in the United States self-report patterns of impulsive angry behavior and also possess firearms at home (8.9%) or carry guns outside the home (1.5%).”
Methinks they had a conclusion and built a study to show it off.
But, I have always said that 10% of any population will spoil it for the other 90%.
At least my theory was proven correct, even if theirs is defective.
They didn’t cause the corruption. They only benefited from the corruption.
The leftists/progressives hates having to repay debts. Student loans, mortgages, credit cards, national budgets, the lot.
So you know they love them some John Perkins, who wrote a book titled: “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man”.
John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, discusses how Greece and other eurozone countries have become the new victims of “economic hit men.”
John Perkins is no stranger to making confessions. His well-known book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, revealed how international organizations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, while publicly professing to “save” suffering countries and economies, instead pull a bait-and-switch on their governments: promising startling growth, gleaming new infrastructure projects and a future of economic prosperity – all of which would occur if those countries borrow huge loans from those organizations. Far from achieving runaway economic growth and success, however, these countries instead fall victim to a crippling and unsustainable debt burden.
That’s where the “economic hit men” come in: seemingly ordinary men, with ordinary backgrounds, who travel to these countries and impose the harsh austerity policies prescribed by the IMF and World Bank as “solutions” to the economic hardship they are now experiencing. Men like Perkins were trained to squeeze every last drop of wealth and resources from these sputtering economies, and continue to do so to this day.
…..
I’ve been following Greece for a long time. I was on Greek television. A Greek film company did a documentary called “Apology of an Economic Hit Man,” and I also spent a lot of time in Iceland and in Ireland. I was invited to Iceland to help encourage the people there to vote on a referendum not to repay their debts, and I did that and encouraged them not to, and they did vote no, and as a result, Iceland is doing quite well now economically compared to the rest of Europe. Ireland, on the other hand: I tried to do the same thing there, but the Irish people apparently voted against the referendum, though there’s been many reports that there was a lot of corruption.
In the case of Greece, my reaction was that “Greece is being hit.” There’s no question about it. Sure, Greece made mistakes, your leaders made some mistakes, but the people didn’t really make the mistakes, and now the people are being asked to pay for the mistakes made by their leaders, often in cahoots with the big banks. So, people make tremendous amounts of money off of these so-called “mistakes,” and now, the people who didn’t make the mistakes are being asked to pay the price. That’s consistent around the world: We’ve seen it in Latin America. We’ve seen it in Asia. We’ve seen it in so many places around the world.
While I have no doubt that people and situations such as Perkins describes exist, that is no reason to let the people who benefited off the hook simply because they were only following and encouraging the leaders. I don’t seem to remember protests of any scale saying not to raise the entitlement handouts or make people pay for college.
Hell, I can’t even remember a protest arguing for the arrest of corrupt bureaucrats or other public servants.
Sorry, Greece, but I’m having a hard time finding anyone under the age of 20 innocent in this. Those people have already left the country.
I set out with the torch and a fresh pair of oxy-fuel bottles to finish my bollard cutting duties.
Task complete!
And as you can see, I even had enough gas left to get my plate cut.
Since we don’t toss much plate steel at work for me to grab out of the scrap bin, I needed to improvise by cutting the flanges off of some bent channel that was in the bin.
I’ll be getting the grinding business done after I get home this afternoon and will attempt to attach the plate to the beam with my wire feed machine this upcoming weekend.
Sadly, I’ll need to refill my O2 bottle before I can punch holes in anything. Hopefully I’ll have time to make that happen on Wednesday.
Then I can look into getting some roundbar bent and paint bought next week and get these bad boys installed before school starts up again.
So, I’ve decided to take Barak the Boomershoot rifle to the next level
I’m looking to try the Tube Gun route.
I’ve been attempting to find a good chassis, most notably from the MAK Enterprises folks, only to find that they’re gone from the interwebz.
Anyone out there got a note on where I can find a good tube gun style chassis?
Over the weekend it was reported that Project Hillary used a rope to corral the members of the media who follow her campaign around the country.
The media didn’t like it much, and it became a topic on the Sunday shows.
The leftists did enjoy it. Mostly because they’ve deluded themselves into thinking that the only reason the media follows her is to try and destroy her.
One site went on to compare the corralling to the arrests of reporters during the protests that happened at the 2004 and 2008 Republican National Convention. As if these two things were equal (or the 2004 and 2008 happenings were worse).
Oddly enough, they were unable to post any evidence where these Democratic Party controlled cities took orders from any Republican candidate or other party member to arrest reporters. Most likely because there never were any.
They are comparing apples to horses. Making their comparison horseapples.
Or just never bothered to take the class in the first place.
Vetoing Liquor Privatization, Pennsylvania’s Governor Says Competition Would Raise Prices
Yesterday Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf vetoed a bill that would have privatized the sale of wine and liquor while liberalizing the rules for selling beer in the Keystone State. Wolf counterintutively argues that replacing the state monopoly with private businesses would be bad for consumers. “During consideration of this legislation,” he says, “it became abundantly clear that this plan would result in higher prices for consumers.” He also worries that letting private businesses sell beer and wine would result in “less selection for consumers.”
According to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Wolf and his fellow Democrats “warned that prices would rise as private businesses sought profit.” In other words, private merchants will jack up prices because they want to make money—unlike the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board (PLCB), which seeks only to raise revenue. If you think those two motives sound pretty similar, you are smarter than Pennsylvania’s governor, who fails to recognize that the relevant difference between these two models for distributing booze, when it comes to how high prices can be raised, is the presence or absence of competition. Other things being equal, more competition leads to lower prices, so it is hard to see why Pennsylvanians would have to pay more for a bottle of whiskey if the state monopoly were replaced by profit-driven businesses competing against each other.
As the resident of a state that recently privatized liquor sales, I can honestly state that the only reason the price of liquor went up after privatization is because of the increased taxes the state put on the liquor when they had a chance to amend the bill.
However, the part about there being less choice. Holy shit, that couldn’t be further from the truth. Not only do residents not have to drive dozens of extra miles to find one of the sparse number of state operated liquor stores like they did before privatization, the hours are much better, and the selection is easily a multitude better.
It used to be that you could only find something “rare”, such as Johnny Walker Blue Label, once or twice a year in the state-run monopoly stores. IF you were lucky and IF you made friends with the people who worked for the monopoly and they were kind enough to call you to tell you they got a couple bottles into their store. Hell, I bought a bottle from the duty free shop the first time I went on a cruise because I had never seen it in a state-run liquor store.
This morning at 9am I can find a bottle in 30 locations within 20miles of my house. And it doesn’t matter which one I buy it from because they’ll match their competitors price if theirs is higher because they’re competing for my business.
I hope the good people of Pennsylvania see this for what it is and recall this jive-turkey for lying to them.
That’d be a 21st Century Whiskey Rebellion.
