Then there's the guy with the shovel and the wheelbarrow

The political class and journaloids can't seem to get over the Ryan-Murray "budget agreement."  It not only "reduces the deficit," but also ushers in a new era of "bipartisanship."

I think we plebians are supposed to see a nice little Jewish girl,. She and her husband  worry an ass to Bethlehem where she gives birth in a barn.  And they called the baby Bipartisan. Kneel and praise.

My faith is weak, so I reviewed what I know of our Constitution and  Amercan political history. No where can I find biprtisanship listed as a stated national ideal -- or even a very good idea.

It is not even very well defined.The closest you can figure it, the word means "We got caught doing something stupid as Hell, but  they helped so it's their fault, too."

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Jimmy Durante raises his eyebrows in mock amazement and asks the cop, "What Elephant?"


















The pachyderm of the moment is Ben Bernanke, soon to be replaced by one Janet Yellen.  For six long years, Ben has taught Janet the art of plopping flops along the parade route, then decreeing  them to be "money" or even  "weath."

She thinks she has the knack now, even finds the thought of being the head flopper and decree-er  rather exalting.  She campaigned to be ringmaster of the printing press, and His Ineptness bought it, as will his Senate, probably in a more or less bipartisan way.

Bringing us back to the Ryan-Murray deal which saves a few bucks here, spends a few more bucks there and, in the end, promises (fingers crossed) to reduce the federal deficit by $23 billion over two years, or ten, or something. 

Every little bit helps, but there's that damned elephant again. Jumbo Ben has been creating Federal Reserve Cartoons at the rate of 85 billion a month.   This arithmetic for avoiding bankruptcy does not appear promising to this obsrever.

And just how does Ben go about creating the money to pay Barack for those IOUs (to which, conveniently, the president is permitted to sign your name, and mine)?

Easy as pie, as I earlier suggested.

"Plop."

My Underpants

Getting ready to go visiting, I changed into fresh clothes a few minutes ago. It's cold, so I decided on long johns and grabbed the set on top, a high-tech, micro-fibered, odor-destroying, item. Probably thirty or forty bucks worth of  redneck lingerie which came my way, unnoticed,  in an inventory buyout.

They're camo.

Camoflage underwear?

A guy can only assume someone has identified a niche market of perv hunters who like to flash Bambi before they shoot her mommy.

I don't think I could get this one by the TSA metal detector.

It's in fair condition, speaking generously, because someone was more in love with his six-inch 3400  rpm coarse grinding wheel than he was with this old veteran. You can't quite call it "poor" because it still has the skinny saw blade. True, Barney ground the teeth off when he finished worrying the big blade,  but judging from the ones for sale online, a fair number of them are missing the saw blade entirely.

I'm not always too fussy about the condition of my World War Two relics, and for the $6 bid which earned this one, I'm not fussy at all. That cheap, it could pay for itself as a spare canoe anchor. Big fella, sometimes called the "giant jack knife" by the pilots who carried it. It must weigh better than a pound and measures six inches closed and 15 1/2 with both blades open.

It was one of the solutions to the survival knife problem late in the war. Colonial developed it . This one was made by United Tool Co. in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

A fellow over on the knife forum seems to have all the other information you're likely to want.

Excuse me. I must retire to my dressing room and pare my nails.

Duelling news

I keep trying to save my friend's soul. He +tries+ to be a good anti-statist, but always get hung up on guns, and I think in his heart of hearts he's believes they  should be confiscated and converted to manhole covers. My latest effort, below,  is  generated by the Exeter, Rhode Island, gun squabble, and the congressional spat over what to do about plastic guns.

Personally, I trace part of the problem to the ready availability of The New York Times in his region. A copy can be purchased every day in undetectable cash deals, no permit required, no cooling-off period, no age limit, no restrictions on concealed -carry or  even brandishing. 

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I suppose your  "Exeter Swamp Yankees" and my Iowa Hog Lot Wranglers share a passion other than oiling and stroking our barrels as we contemplate the the pleasure of our next mass murder.

I refer, of course, to our well-known study of epistemology and our curiosity about why, to certain groups, knowledge becomes valid by virtue of publication in the New York Times.

Why, just the other day my epistemology advisor, Melvin "Pigs" Dykstra, blew his nose on his sleeve and announced that he had been reading BusinessWeek lately and found (in his own quaint words), "By golly, guys, blamed if I ain't startin' to think that there's some other stuff to read and a lot of it ain't wrote by pointy headed interlecturals who genufuct or however you call it to that picture of Ol' Abe Rosenthal on their desks."

Here's what I think he was referring to:


A sample about "undetectable" guns: We’ve been down this road before. In the late 1980s, gun-control advocates tried to ban an Austrian-made Glock that was fabricated mostly from industrial-strength plastic and demonized as a weapon that would defy airport security. Congress held hearings and then passed the original undetectable gun ban. Strangely, though, the Federal Aviation Administration concluded that the Glock wasn’t really a threat at all. If screening personnel paid attention, they could detect the gun-shaped piece of plastic, not to mention the bullets needed to make the Glock lethal, the FAA said. “That was a big ‘oops’ moment,” Richard Aborn, a former president of Handgun Control, now known as the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, once told me. “We made the classic mistake of failing to do our homework.”

And about self-willed guns killing  people: 

Apart from politics, dispassionate observers must question the simplistic liberal slogan that more guns equals more crime. The U.S. has seen a two-decade period during which private gun ownership has continued to soar (some 300 million firearms are now in civilian hands), while crime has diminished.

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Mel's opinion got back to the Democrat who lives in his county. He flicked the dust off his Hillary button and yelled that Business Week is just another one of those right-wing tea-party rags owned by Rush Limbaugh and edited by the National Rifle Association.

That made Mel maddern a wet hen, but he calmed himself and quietly corrected the button man. He allowed as how he thought the magazine belongs to (former) Mayor Whatzizname Bloomberg who started up Mayor's Against Illegal Guns.  And who, he might have added, openly and blatantly reads (and even approvingly quotes)  The New York Times.

As an aside, I need to note that Bloomie usually doesn't quote the Times about free-for-all Terry Stops of New York City citizens guilty of EWBBB, that is, Existing While Being Black or Brown.