Jeremy is TTAG's Deputy Editor, working mostly behind the scenes but, when he attempts to write, he focuses on comprehensive gun & gear reviews. Jeremy strives to collect objective data whenever possible, and looks to write accurate reviews that reflect the true user experience. He lives outside of Austin, TX.
Methinks a box of “throwing size” river rocks would be effective too. One middle and high school supplied such rocks in every classroom. Good throwers were designated in every class to ward off school shooters from entering the classroom.
Modern day stoning.
Whoever came up with the idea was stoned.
Glad to see you are still sucking air Gov.
Rock in a sock.
Does it come with one of those helmets with the horns? Ya can’t LARP without horns!
Those are out of fashion since the Q Anon Shaman tried to overthrow the safe and effective election 😉
He was this close to hanging Mike Pence! This close!
I know a guy who owns several pistols and rifles. However, when something goes ‘bump’ in the night, he grabs a baseball bat because he does not want to accidentally shoot someone.
Me, bumps get guns.
LoL…got a full size baseball bat behind the front door. But I always have my full size pistol ready to go when the JW’s knock on my door🙄😀
Even Winnie the Pooh grabbed a gun when something went bump in the night.
Winnie the Pooh is a pervert who does not wear pants.
So is Donald Duck.
Winnie the pooh is a bear. How many bears have you seen wearing pants.
“one morning i shot an elephant in my pajamas.’
And why was the elephant wearing your pajamas?
And Mickey thinks Minnie is f**king Goody.
No way that table is stable.
To be fair, neither is anyone who buys it for “home defense”.
strych9,
That got a laugh that brought my wife in from the kitchen to find out what had happened.
I’ll be here all week and show myself out.
Try the veal.
Unexpected (and sharply on-point) wisecracks like Strych’s there is one of the reasons TTAG is so fun to read…
Has anybody heard from Ralph of late? Talk about cracks.
“Has anybody heard from Ralph of late?”
A month or so back he popped in briefly.
Tom in Oregon is MIA over a year by now… 🙁
Tom seemed to come back strong from his medical adventure. I certainly hope he didn’t have another.
After Jay in Florida disappear I sort of worry when regulars have a medical issue and then don’t show up. With Jay, I think we know what happened. Hopefully nothing remotely similar happened with Tom, who has excellent taste in long range packs.
Weapons of the post-US Bond Apocalypse?
(Also known as the “SVB Incident”.)
The under 250 thou depositors will be covered by the FDIC.
The multi-*billion* dollar depositors I really couldn’t care less about, since a lot of them are venture capitalist firms.
As far as I’m concerned, the VC need to be treated it as if it was one of their failed startups that lost them money…
Oh, and they bought the whole DEI/CRT line of crap, so they need to suffer for it…
They won’t suffer. That isn’t how it works. We will suffer. That’s how it works.
The Dude (above) Abides…and is unfortunately right.
They will likely cover some percentage of the uninsured loss because they are afraid of additional fallout, shades of too big to fail. The FDIC isn’t exactly overburdened with cash so some of those guys are gonna lose a pile of money. The average deposit was 2.5 million…way more than the 250 thousand coverage.
Under $250K depositors represent $9 trillion in deposits. Total depositors represent about double that. The FDIC can cover ~1.29% of the lower number. They can tap a line of credit with the Treasury and boost it to a bit over 2% of the $9T.
Past that, we’re in deep shit. And considering that the root of this little problem is .gov bonds being held by banks, if SVB is insolvent then so are most other banks because they’re basically required to carry T-bills and T-bonds for “safety” reasons.
That’s how the execs at SVB knew to get out when they did. They knew they were about to post massive mark-to-market losses on illiquid assets.
Which the Feds obviously KNOW because they’re letting the banks have access to the discount window and other funding mechanisms using their collateral (the stuff we’re discussing) at par instead of at market for their illiquid assets. Because the Fed knows this is all about interest rates on US debt held by US institutions.
At the same time five of the major banks made a splash today when they went shopping for another ~$65B in liquid capital. That’s not a good sign, at all. It suggests that this is what they think will cover the outflows from depositors.
On top of that all your regional banks are cratering as I type this. If that continues for a day or two we have real, serious problems. “Print $20 Trillion and pray to Christ it works” kind of problems.
The question to ask here is this: If you hold a bond that pays 1% and other people can buy that same bond today at 4%, what’s the value of your bond?
If you answered “Sweet fuck all until it matures” you’re right. This is what bit SVB.
Which might be tied back to what Wells Fargo was “glitching” on Friday.
Oh, and if that all sounds crazy, allow me to quote the Fed on this:
“The financing will be made available through the creation of a new Bank Term Funding Program (BTFP), offering loans of up to one year in length to banks, savings associations, credit unions, and other eligible depository institutions pledging U.S. Treasuries, agency debt and mortgage-backed securities, and other qualifying assets as collateral. These assets will be valued at par. The BTFP will be an additional source of liquidity against high-quality securities, eliminating an institution’s need to quickly sell those securities in times of stress.”
And:
“The Board is carefully monitoring developments in financial markets. The capital and liquidity positions of the U.S. banking system are strong and the U.S. financial system is resilient.
Depository institutions may obtain liquidity against a wide range of collateral through the discount window, which remains open and available. In addition, the discount window will apply the same margins used for the securities eligible for the BTFP, further increasing lendable value at the window.“
Yeah, that ain’t normal. At all. The discount window is not something anyone wants to use and to be allowed to use it at par is pretty much unheard of.
Dear Lord…as if the first go around wasn’t bad enough.
$7T proposed budget. They aren’t even pretending to care anymore. They think they can just change the subject to diversity and smashing glass ceilings (first! the first! another first!), and all of the sheep will swoon in delight.
“$7T proposed budget. They aren’t even pretending to care anymore“
$7T? Apparently you don’t care to be accurate:
“Biden’s budget by the numbers
The budget total is $5.8 trillion for fiscal 2023, including $1.6 trillion in discretionary spending.
The budget also projects a $1.2 trillion deficit in fiscal 2023 – a significant drop from the last two years.“
https://about.bgov.com/presidents-budget-2023/
“Apparently you don’t care to be accurate”
Miner, you linked the 2023 FY budget proposed in 2022! Thank you for giving us a window into your world. You aren’t even aware of what is happening around you unless it’s news on the latest Trump witch hunt. “We’ve got him now! For real this time!” You are part of the above-mentioned sheep coalition. You make this disaster and impending suffering possible. You don’t even care as long as there’s someone telling you it’s all Orange Man Bad’s fault.
Thursday, March 9, 2023
President Biden on Thursday proposed a record-shattering $6.8 trillion budget…The budget, which would set the U.S. on a course for record spending as a percentage of the economy, calls for an 8% increase over what the government is projected to spend in the current fiscal year.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2023/mar/9/bidens-68-trillion-budget-calls-massive-social-spe/
Your assignment for the day is to learn how inflation works. If people actually understood what causes inflation, there would be an angry mob at the White House right now. Who got fired over lying to us about imminent inflation while your boys were trying to pass their insane, completely unnecessary spending bills above and beyond the budget?? No one did! You don’t even care. Are they incompetent or liars? (They’re liars and competent thieves.) Partisan politics is for the shallow sheep coalition.
Thoughts Miner?
@Dude:
To be entirely fair, not all of the current inflation rate (which, yes they’re way undercounting) is due to the printing of money in the past few years.
There are systemic issues with labor and shortages caused by the batshit crazy response to mUh ViRuZ! that lurk behind this too.
Back of the envelope I’d say that out of the 15% or so real world inflation, probably about 8% of it is labor shortage and other shortages in materials, some of which were created by current “green policy”. (For rando insights on how this affects ammo, Fenix Ammunition is worth a follow on Twitter.) The remaining ~7% or so is split between a 2% background inflation rate and 4-5% based on money printed in the past few years.
No matter how you cut it, you should expect a baseline inflation rate of in the neighborhood 9-10%/year for the foreseeable future. There simply are not enough Xers to replace the retiring Boomers nor enough Zoomers to replace Millennials who are no longer working entry level jobs.
That’s wage inflation everywhere, especially in retail.
It all comes back to stupid government policy. Yes some inflation resulted from the lockdowns. That was part of the reason for the high gas prices. There wasn’t enough production. Instead of helping to remedy the situation, the Puppet hurt production further. Now he’s blowing our strategic reserves to hide high prices.
Inflation isn’t due to low interest rates, therefore the fix isn’t high interest rates. They’re “fixing” it by squeezing us until we stop spending money. THEY should be the ones that stop spending money. You don’t have to destroy the economy to stop inflation. You have to seriously stop the government from pumping money into it. They did the opposite because they aren’t going to suffer. They’re still on a gluttonous spending spree. They’re perfectly fine with us suffering. The proposed budget is yet another slap in the face from an abusive parent. People should be pissed over this. We don’t have to live like this. People are unaware of the options.
Awaiting moderation. Posting from phone so I’m not copying and reposting. I think I removed the offending words, but it’s still awaiting a moderation blessing.
@Dude:
Moderation sucks. This comment probably will get stuck in it.
On the actual topic:
When you look at the stats you can see that a spending spree like the end of the Trump Admin/beginning of the Biden Admin runs through to monetary normalization in about 18 months.
That’s what a bolus of money printing will do.
Now, you’re quite correct that the root cause is a government that cannot control it’s own spending and so endlessly prints money. Every year that they do this results in normalization about 1.5 years later. If they never stop, normalization never happens. True.
However, this is also the root of why I would disagree with your statement ” You don’t have to destroy the economy to stop inflation.”
Yes, you do. Why? Because the entire system has been hooked on free money for longer than we’d like to admit and the real world version of kicking financial heroin is a savage withdrawal period that will be “destroying the economy” via the destruction of Zombie Corporations and the employment derived therefrom. You cannot get back to sober without this. And it’s going to SUCK. On the other end you will not have the same system that you did going in because that system involved injecting addictive substances. A sober person, fundamentally, has a different “life system” than a junkie does.
In this vein, let us examine the theory of how “fractional reserve banking” is supposed to work and juxtapose that against how it actually works today. I’m going to use a simple example but it’s all based on the first concept I’ll state.
A business makes profit by doing something that increases the value of the final product by more than it costs to buy the input materials and refashion them to something else. This is sometimes known as “added value” and stupidly attacking it is the root logic behind a VAT (Value Added Tax).
This being the case and the Law of Supply and Demand being real we have a quandary that was noticed millennia ago and which “loans” solve for, but do so poorly by themselves. To actually solve the problem we need a “Mint” (Federal Reserve sort of thing in the modern parlance) too.
Imagine for a moment, a farmer. He grows wheat. If all goes well he plants wheat in the spring, harvests and sells it in the fall and he makes, let’s just say 25%, by “leveraging” the increase in value provided by inputs of sun, his own work, water etc.
Well, he will run into a problem that we’d call “cash flow”, and this problem is relatively extreme in an ancient society. Farmer homie is gonna spend $100 (a number I’m selecting for ease, not relation to reality) and make $125 some months later. He will then live off the $25 profit until the next planting cycle can be harvested to make another $25.
But life, over that period of time, costs $35 and he only made $25. So, when he comes to plant he’s short $110. But his ROI is good, so a loan is no big deal here as long as there isn’t a plague of locusts or blight or something (which can be hedged for but that’s making this too complicated).
Some homie borrows $110, makes $125, pays back $115. Over time he can get to the point that he can just pay cash for seed and make it through. Great.
However, if society is healthy we need a food source that is 1. stable and 2. can grow as population does which it will in a healthy society. That means you’ll always have some level of expansion. Maybe more land or maybe new fertilizer, whatever. Those costs are borne MOST by new farmers or farmers expanding quickly to meet demand.
But this society, as all societies that function do, runs on that excess capital because it’s the grease for the whole system. That spare money, when not being used for farming is being used for pottery, or iron working or medicine or something. We’re always borrowing against the future and, statistically, we win more than we lose so this can, and does, function. My gains become the farmer’s gains and then the potter’s gains and then come back to me in an expanding cycle.
Again, great. But this produces a major problem. Run this forward far enough and without some method to expand the currency supply you will end up with yearly DEflation. And because people respond to incentives, that will damage every other aspect of society when business locks up as people await lower prices because their currency gains value. Now we are no longer pulling value forward and growing, instead we’ve seized the engine of that growth.
But you can’t just throw new currency at this because you also don’t want inflation. What’s the answer?
Interest that is commensurate with the statistical risk of loss for each venture and accounts for the projection economic growth of the investment being pulled forward is the answer. Hence “money from nothing” on loans in the form of interest. But it’s not coming from “nothing” as many people will argue.
It’s the repayment of the value pulled forward from the future catching up to the present later on in such a manner that it keeps the value of the currency stable.
This can be statistically calculated based on prior experience to actually be pretty close to reality. Over time you’ll have some short years and some long years but the average will fall very close to reality. You now have a stable currency. This is generally true over time except for major society wide changes that are rapid. The invention of the steam engine, for example.
But that’s GOOD. Yeah, there’s some chaos as we figure out the new world we’ve created but we have decades or centuries of growth that led to people having the ability to invent new things and now we have steam power as the upside. It’s worth the short-term cost of the disruption.
But that stability, where it exists, must come from banking data. Which is to say that the Mint must take the information from each bank about its requirement for more currency (or lack of requirement for more) at the end of each year and provide that currency. This works in a way similar to a price. A price aggregates stupid amounts of data into a single number that you can use quickly and easily.
Ultimately, this is one of the major failures of gold and silver currency, because their creation comes with other constraints like mines.
But, quite obviously, such a system is gameable and its ultimate failure point is when the Mint decides to game the system on behalf of the politicians that ostensibly employ the people who run the Mint.
This happened in Rome under the emperors and it’s happening to us now.
To change the system in a way that makes sense, by definition, will destroy the current system the same way chemo destroys cancer. The goal here is the same, a poison that kills the cancer faster than it kills the patient so that the cancer can be eliminated without causing the patient’s death.
But how do you do that in a situation where an arm and leg are gaining from the cancer in such a way that they actively oppose treatment? Because that’s what society is right now in this analogy. You’ve got to knock the person out, strap them to a bed and get rid of this cancer.
You can’t do that without wrecking the portions of the society that benefit from that cancer and they will actively resist you trying to get rid of it. That fiscal cancer is also the source of their power to resist you. Ergo, it’s gotta be destroyed.
So yes, the current “system” has to go. Otherwise its death will kill us all. It is that simple. Like treating actual cancer though, the solution isn’t easy to actualize.
At root this is one of the reasons I’ve been so opposed to generational warfare since its inception. It’s not hard to see where this goes for the Lefties, and if you play into their hands your walking into a trap from which you will not escape. And that trap is going to be sold as the only option and pure logic.
I see an Indiana Jones moment in that guy’s immediate future.
former, I don’t get much un-expected company. Except Jehovah’s Witnesses. (Cough a couple of times. They can’t get off the porch). I had an unexpected knock a few days ago. My S.O.P is to pick up the Sig P-220, next to me now, move out of the direct line of fire, and ask, “Who’s there!”? Imagine my surprise when it was the Chief of Police, the Deputy Chief of Police and the Mayor. Chief Ash didn’t bat an eye. I thought the Mayor was going to faint when she saw the firearm. (I wasn’t pointing at anyone. Just a a strong hand low ready. They were going door to door to announce a new program to check on the home bound elderly. (That ain’t me). Turns out the Mayor is up for re-election next month. What a surprise.
maybe she’s up for a range trip.
“Chief of Police, the Deputy Chief of Police“
“They were going door to door to announce… “
Sure they were, just a teeny weenie looksee.
I’ve known those guys for a couple of decades. They didn’t need a peek. The Mayor though… they should have given her a heads up. Minor why don’t you go away. I mean, you must know you’re irrevelivent by now. Why don’t you comment on a web site that specializes in say…Tricyles. Someone might take you seriously
Miner is like the clap….
the kind that can’t be cured…
Right, you don’t see any issue with a door to door inspection by the chief of police?
Bye-bye fourth amendment…
I’d buy one for grins and giggles, but as a self-defense option in the home? Nope.
A bat is still a lethal weapon, and if the threat warrants the potential use of lethal force, I’m going to use a firearm. Especially if there’s multiple assailants. TTAG ran a story some years back who confronted some teens trying to steal his car. They took his bat away from him and nearly killed him with it.
But yeah, it’s kinda cool all that same. How much did you say they were…?
And if that fails, moose antlers are a good stand by.
A møøse once bit my sister…
Mynd you, møøse bites kan be pretti nasti… 🙂
my hovercraft is filled with eels. but gimme that narwhal tusk.
I keep sand on my nightstand.
“SHI- SHI- SHAAA!”
Ok I’ll bite…huh?
King of the Hill.
Dale Gribble says Shi-shi-sha! all the time and has pocket sand to throw in people’s eyes to make his escape.
I have an actual steel shield and broadsword hanging on the wall. Along with a couple sabers and a couple axes. Part of my collection of antique arms. I don’t just collect firearms.
I also collect antique logging and wood working tools. Real working, usable cross cut saw are getting hard to find and nearly impossible to replicate. While I know how to sharpen and set a saw I don’t have the skills to make one.
Where I live, if something or someone shows up in the night a firearm would be a more likely choice than a bat and table top shield.
My girlfiend has one hanging on her wall. Crosscut saw that is.
You could probably go steal some of that sht from the Amish. ?
If I was a big strong guy and vikingish that clubnsheild ain’t a bad idea. If”, is the biggest word in the dictionary grandma always said.
I know an older guy, 70 years old, who repelled a home invasion of two bad guys with a golf club. It actually worked… until they came back the next night with two other bad guys and shot him as he was swinging his golf club around again. He lived, but despite his stance previously of not agreeing with having guns (although he wasn’t really vocal about it) he went out and bought guns after that. A year later three bad guys broke, one of them was one of the guys who had broken in previously. He yelled at them a bit from down the hall in his bedroom telling them to leave and that he had called 911 – the one bad guy who had broken in previously taunted him with “what ya gonna do old man, bring out that golf club again?” and the bad guys started down the dark hall way towards the dark bed room with its open door. They were surprised when this old guy started pulling the trigger of his MSR in that dark bedroom door, and all three of the bad guys went down. One lived long enough to make it to the hospital where he too expired.
A bat or golf club might, possibly, work in some weird way maybe once. But when they come prepared, bullets beats club. And heck, most victims who try to use some type of club against multiple bad guys end up having it taken from them and being beaten or killed with it. Stand off defense with firearms is much better.
But you guys who are gonna use a bat – you do you. My wife and I prefer the best chance of survival against bad guys, the only thing proven to actually provide the best chance, what has proven to us in actual use to provide the best chance, our firearms provide that best chance of no injury or death by more than 94% vs you bat guys (no firearm) having a more than 80% chance of serious injury or death by not being able to employ DGU.
I read an article once, a few years ago now, about a problem with how porch pirates worked and how they had prey’d upon a community that was mostly elderly people.
It related the tale of the 80 year old woman who got her notification that Amazon had left a package at her door. So a few minutes later she went to the door to retrieve her package. When she opened the door she found a guy bending over picking up her package. He looks up at her, she looks down at him and says ‘Just a moment” and reaches for an aluminum baseball bat she had behind the door and brings it out. The guy turns to run towards a car waiting out front. This woman is a spry little thing and actually chases this much larger guy down before he can reach the car and starts beating him with the bat.
The driver of the car drives off leaving him behind. Shes beating on him and cursing and screaming at him, neighbor comes out to see what the commotion is about and calls 911. She is still beating on him with the bat when the cops roll up and they have to pull her off him. He’s unconscious and bleeding and has a bone sticking out of his arm but still breathing. Transport him to the hospital, take her into custody for a bit then let her go. She finds out he lived and is conscious, she goes to the hospital and finds the cops are there too but no one is with him at the time. Walks into the emergency room and into his cubical and closes the curtain behind her, hes got his eyes closed so she stands there not saying a word for a bit then says “Hey!” real loud. He opens his eyes and sees her, then falls off the gurney bed thing trying to get away from her and breaks his other arm in doing so because hes cuffed to the gurney bed thing. She says very firmly “You will never do this again.” and walks out. There were no more porch pirate incidents in the area after that.
Well good for her if it’s TRUE and if the whole community worked together like this law enforcement could be defunded down to traffic stops.
I tell you what, for being ” peace officers” they’re got some military look alike blow you to pieces weapons of war shit. That is you know, just because their public servants. And in the mean time a musket loader with the cap under ball and key is the weapon of fire power that’s allowed We The People. the salary payers, the ones that never get a ” Thank You For Your Service ” of holding down a job at the factory or owning the factory they all pay taxes to the War machine, ThankUs the taxpayers for our service.
They’re going to have to update the saying “Don’t bring a knife to a gunfight” to
“Don’t bring a wooden baseball bat and wooden shield to a gunfight.”
But this nightstand is probably illegal here in New Jersey, anyway!
If it was a sword itd be cool,specially if the wooden shield had kevlar backing , extra thick in the handle area,,with an iron spike in the middle.
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