It was a Pietta.
You get three retail choices in sixguns generally these days… Colt, Uberti, or Pietta.
Colt SAA is $2000. Too expensive to be used as a prop gun.
Uberti and Pietta are the Italian "replicas". But they are real as anything. They go for $500, and are pretty high quality. There is not a $1500 material or labor build difference between them and a Colt.
https://twitter.com/JakeSherman/status/1453418462890668035
Guess what, he was right there also. I read the bill. It was ridiculous, and the pinnacle of ridiculousness amidst a circle jerk of ridiculousness.
https://www.city-journal.org/billionaire-tax-will-not-work
While I think it’s a BS trope that billionaires aren’t paying significant personal federal taxes, I accept the reality of excessive tax avoidance by that class of people utilizing uber private banking and borrowing against their shares etc.
Hey congress… why don’t you just levy an excise tax against large personal loans collateralized by stock, so that you compel these people to make a stock sale and encounter the capital gains tax in doing so.
I mean, JFC, this is simple. Dem smarm wonks, just resist the high iq reflex to make it complicated, and do the simple thing. Cmon.
https://news.yahoo.com/controversial-democratic-irs-bank-reporting-150800993.html
"Manchin said he told Biden the idea was “screwed up” and that the president concurred."
No kidding, sherlock.
On HBOmax, cuz we have HBOmax and at that point it’s an easy reach.
I managed so far in 52 years to remain pretty Dune oblivious. I knew it was out there, and some people liked the book a lot. I’d never read the book or seen the 84 movie. And I’m not knowledgeable about sci-fi.
So I went into it with no expectations. Thots:
So George Lucas really ripped Dune off eh? Desert planet with bedouins, weird underground worm creatures, empire vs vassal state conflicts, messianic protagonist.
I liked the movie for it’s pretty serious and non-kid centric tone. I hate Marvel movies.
Great cast.
It’s been a thing for me to pick apart high profile police shootings on these pages such that Philando rilly, rilly bugged me. When I see an egregious one, I go on and on and on….
Thing about Boogie Smith is, he asked and probably deserved to be confronted by an armed police tactical team. When you’ve earned that, the process violations aren’t as significant. When you’ve earned that righteously, getting shot isn’t as big an injustice.
Bri’s Qs, and the answers:
1 & 2 – Standard self-incrimination stuff. Anyone can present themselves to the law for questioning in the manner they want, really, re 5th amendment. Cops and the union have a very institutional and structured and way of doing it, is all. Their lawyers are involved earlier.
3 – The no cams: that’s BS that DOJ has avoided camming up. Not against the law though. Why are they laggards? It’s just a place where cop culture is holding out and resisting better against public pressure.
4 – The no BCA interviews. See 1 & 2. Now, you’d think submitting to investigative interview requests would be a condition of cop employment, but… not generally true.
5 – Because he was wanted on a gun violation. We have state gun laws of course, but his gun charge warrant was federal, and the feds prosecute most of the gun realm.
6 – That’s what they do, shoot until “threat is stopped” or mag is empty. It was supposedly two guys shooting btw, so it could have 7 shots for each officer, where they each did stop where threat was deemed “stopped” but before say 15 round mags were empty. This bailiwick is not something that will be adjusted by police reform, it’s always going to be this way as a matter of practical policing and tactics.
7 – Guy is understood as a more accomplished criminal than that and he had a habit of showing off his guns on social media. He’s understood as armed. Interdiction teams don’t go one on one or two on one or three on one… they send a team.
8 – Waited? His social media was being surveilled to apprehend him. He popped up on social media, and the feds moved in.
9 – I don’t know what this point is… Bri is making the mundane into the malevolent.
10 – Yes… he was understood as an armed fugitive wanted on a gun warrant. That’s the deal. See point 7.
11 – Same, armed fugitive wanted on a gun warrant, and accomplished criminal
Ya know, guy was missing his court dates for weapons violations and running around on social media doing an instagram thing as a street outlaw and hustler. “They”, IE you all that live in MPLS or close, have a street crime problem. Ya want the cops to go after armed street outlaws or not? This is how it’s done. The possibility that there are all kinds of cop lies on the subsequent police reports is very real, course. But Boogie Smith isn’t a tragic injustice.
Now mind us all, “drawing” is mostly a figment of Hollywood. There mighta been only one gunfighter confrontation in the history of the west, that being Wild Bill Hickock vs Dave Tutt in the town square at Springfield, MO in 1865.
Cross draw though,,,, that’s where if you are a righthander you have your Peacemaker holstered on your left hip, butt forward. Such that men open carried revolvers at all in The West (…and they didn’t so much), butt forward on the opposite hip was the way it was done. Cuz Peacemaker holstered on your strong side gets in your way, a lot, just as you’re walking around doing your thing in life. But as I say, I think reality is people didnt have to draw guns dramatically on each other to commit murder, as is the same today.
I name checked Thell Reed Friday morning in my thing before most of the deets were out. His 24 yo daughter was the armorer on this Baldwin movie. It sounds like she’s culpable as a matter of cavalierness about her role.
The world of single action revolvers can be small if you’ve accomplished anything at all. I did in fact “accomplish anything at all”, say I’ve got a business card thumbtacked in the expansive bottom row of the mythical pyramidal hierarchy of that big cosmic corkboard. So I’ve talked to Thell, once. I’ve gunsmithed a little or more, but also I wrote a self-published collectors book about a start-up single action revolver company in LA in the 50’s (we ran 100 copies, it sold out… shoulda ran more.). Thell was an assembler there for a year as a jr high kid, say at 14 in 1957. I interviewed him. He was a fast draw prodigy when briefly fast draw was a hot thing. At that moment his world was configured to teach him everything there was to know about it. He worked at that little shop in west LA, and shot fast draw at shooting ranges that were operating in Downey and Montebello or Hawthorne or Long Beach etc as if they were mini golf courses. He’s a little guy, and he was understood as about as fast as you could be at fast draw. As an adult he made his bones doing self-defense instruction and movie armory. I recall him doing Hateful Eight last. I understand he’s 78 now.
Anyway, I riffed on Alec Baldwin and it turned out to be all projection on my part. Quite a bit of fuckery going on with the guns on that set that he’s not responsible for. His karma hypocrisy is he’s one of these yay union / guild people, but as an equity stake producer in the movie he wanted very tight purse strings on production that led to some slip shoddery.
Now, I really like him quite a lot, akshully. He’s in a ton of things I love. Hunt for Red October, Glengarry… whatever. I really like his podcast, “Here’s the thing.”
The thing of “Here’s the thing?’ He’s really, really smart. I dug it for what I guess I’d call his ability to express granularized thought. I liked listening to that. He’s uber lib though right. And caustic there. That never got under my skin such that we’re all supposed to assortate on that stuff.
But the causticness was a signal. That and getting in absurd fights with wives, his kids, photographers, and motorists.
So, this shooting… yaknow we’re all as news consumers supposed to adhere to the wisdom of letting the truth come out? Nah, not me. He’s doing a western there, and I have vocational expertise in six shooters and I’ve interviewed western movie armorers (Thell Reed, Jim Martin, then also people who worked with Arvo Ojala). I will stand on the notion it may not be a murder, but its Baldwin’s fault, and much less an “accident”.
It’s a western, and the prop guns are real guns, either the Colt Single Action Army or a modern clone, say the Uberti. There’s not a dinner theater grade non functional sixgun prop available for the purpose of film. They’re real, end story, ie, it aint a mistake of someone having a real gun on set. They are always real for westerns.
Their armorer probably was using Uberti’s. I love em and have em. Single action, so you have to have active participation in cocking it.
The most exculpatory thing you can say is Alec Baldwin picked up a loaded gun and for no good reason started started cycling it with 2 people standing in front of him. They ain’t actors, it wasn’t a scene, there’s no reason he should have been handling it. Blanks or live ammo could have killed that woman and maimed that guy.
I will say, a sixgun on a table will make an otherwise rational mature man pick it up and go ‘pew’. I mean, I’m past that… but the tactile feel and the aesthetic is what fed / led me to have a shingle hung in this very antiquated biz.
But you pick up a gun off a table and go pew with two people in front of you, that’s either misanthropy or solipsist stupidity to have handled a weapon that way. And that’s the exclamation point on the foul temperament. That’s the thing about Alec Baldwin.
And the idea that the Norse lived there. Cuz I’m Scandinavian, I guess
Ya know, whatevs. I try not to stray too far into Scandinavian chauvinism, cuz my logical mind tells me that’s BS. But I do have a visceral feel for what it might have been like to be a Scandinavian peasant, and I understand the anthropology pretty granularly whereas I don’t with the Germans and the Irish and the English such that I am that too.
So I like L’Anse aux Meadow
L’Anse aux Meadow is kinda the fourth leg on the artifact stool of Viking exploration in North America, the others being the Sagas, the Kensington Runestone, and the Vinland map. With a major problem being, the Kensington Runestone and the Vinland map are fake.
So I like L’Anse aux Meadow
My mom had the Blegen book on the Runestone around in the 1970’s when she was finishing up her history degree, and I’d see it on the table… had a black dust cover with a big picture of the real stone, not the replica. I still haven’t read the Blegen book. But I always knew the cover. I came to know the story, Olaf Ohman and his sidekick with a one inch bladed chisel…
But I had a nun prof at BSU, about 70 years old at the time, Sister Norman, teaching Minnesota history. She was always referring to Blegen, like, as the scholar who laid down the narrative of Minnesota history. And we were using his book for that.
And in her classroom at the lecture hall, she had an old cutout from a National Geographic or something, that was an article about the Vinland map, pinned to one of the wall cork boards. There came a point where I stopped and looked at that leaving class every day, gazing at the stub of Newfoundland that was drawn on the left edge (…it’s a fake map). I’m sure I did it 20 days or more leaving class at the end, gazed at that map. She gave me that article a couple days before the semester ended, said why don’t you take that. And I did. It’s around here, in the files somewhere.
So I like L’Anse aux Meadow.
And then, I took my wife on a date in Uptown to the Loft one time in the mid 90s where a guy lectured on the Vinland map. Twas a good date I’m sure.
So I like L’Anse aux Meadow.
1021 is about right from all ever read. And you do assume they cut those logs for the row houses in the first year.
I still don’t like it. I don’t know if this is the last thing I write on this, but I’m going to try and roll up the knowledge into one thing. Which includes saying some quiet parts out loud.
The proposal, to receive reporting on bank inflows and outflows over a year, would allow the Govt to get insight on income that is more often than not, not being reported. That’s true. The big number is prolly 10% of GDP.
It’s going to allow them to set a compliance letter and audit flag algorithm in their ginormous data warehouse. The algorithm will go something like, INFLOWS – w2s -1099s = UNREPORTED CASH FLOW, > ARBITRARY THRESHOLD, TRIGGER INQUIRY LETTER / AUDIT NOTICE.
The proposal isn’t really targeted at the rich such that the Dems say that. Thats “bullshit”, a “lie”. It’s targeted at the side hustle shadow economy: rideshare drivers, sex workers, real and virtual flea marketers, odd jobbers, gray market contracters, airbnb. That’s why the proposal’s original threshold was $600, so that EVERYONE and EVERY BANK ACCOUNT would be reported on and fed into the IRS algorithm. The amount of $ the Govt could get from this macro is way more than what they’d get from the deci and hector millionaire crowd.
But also… such that this thing is not actually targeted at the “really rich”, it certainly is targeted at some people who do pretty well. When we go over the bridge to Hudson I’m in the habit of telling my boys, some of those mid-continent yachts belong to, yes, accountants, physicians, lawyers, and operational execs. The other half belong to construction contractors and some other types who have trade or retail oriented practices. Both those groups have habit of slipping themselves non-taxed distributions, and enjoy the utility of non “income” economic power.
$10k threshold is much more reasonable such that it actually targets those people and will exclude common peoples’ odd and end cookie jar money such that the original proposal wouldn’t have. And you really gotta wonder about the misanthropy that led the Democrat smarm-wonks to set the original threshold at $600. But it’s the effort here that’s obnoxious, with the reporting and the data scheme… not the thresholds themselves.
Tax compliance in this country is both very good, and more than a little abysmal right. No one, hardly, is in literal compliance. I flea market to the tune of a couple thou year, my buddy does cash side jobs, the restaurant up the road pays the kids for some hours in cash… Joe Biden dodged $500k in FICA taxes. But even people who are not actively seeking to non-report are non-reporting.
But almost universally, everyone is paying a meaningful amount. That’s kinda the way it should be.
Achieving 100% tax compliance isn’t possible, and it makes the perfect the enemy of the good. It’s not worth a trade off that brings enmity and delegitimization to the government that tries to do it.
I tellya something else as a statement of serious, high ideological observation and principle. Ya know, my deal is I don’t want to file a Schedule C on my ebay shit and pay another $500 in taxes. And also, I don’t want to be subject to a warrantless evaluation of my financial affairs, especially given the lax rights afforded to the accused in tax matters.
A higher principle articulated, that’s totally not self-justifying bullshit, is… the shadow economy is the price government pays for protecting cartels and enforcing illegitimate administration and licensing schemes within commerce, preventing otherwise earnest participants from competing in markets at the expense of the common consumer…. and the shadow economy is the price the government pays for enabling rent seekers to thrive in this scheme at the expense of the common vendor and consumer.
So the Govt trying to have their cake and eat it too on that with the taxes is BS. Sod off and leave it alone. Consider the whole thing a bone I get thrown for having to solve the problem of having to buy 2 EpiPens for $700 under state sanction in 2012, and understand I have many more examples than that…. Like health insurance and pharmaceutical prices in general.
It’s also an illegitimate ask cuz the government doesn’t need the money. Govt finance is legitimate, alright. Contriving a reporting scheme with a contrived tax capture number so that it can offset a fantasy expense number on a 10 year budget and making me/us abide by that under threat of sanction is not legitimate. It’s bullshit. The pols and the aides are creating odious real world implications there for their fantasy game of pretending serious people are evaluating whether a social effort is revenue neutral, and that it should be voted up or down over its revenue neutrality. Truth bomb: that’s complete fantasy, it’s not real.
More fantasy enabling: it’s not a legitimate exercise when the money is so insignificant ($160B a year say) that the government could just as well borrow it. And it’s not a legitimate exercise when the fact is the government enables their borrowing scheme with a certain amount of fiat money (QE, etc…).
So fuck it… there’s no reason anyone should be compelled to be in support of this fantasy charade lest they be uncivic. No, these are not taxes that have to be paid, and you’re not a bad person if you’ve been paying taxes but not remitting these ones. That’s the way it works in America, that’s the way gold collar Dems do it as well.
Mind all, there’s still no legislative text and I doubt it makes into the reconciliation bill when the alternative is to not have this fight. Again, your civic puritanism has moved into silo’d misanthropy if you’re a Dem who thinks this is a must have.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/19/us/politics/irs-bank-account-reporting-requirement.html
https://www.wsj.com/articles/irs-bank-reporting-democrats-11634658560
Zingy Skyway Lunch 