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In Pursuit Of A Dream

Deep Thoughts

I was watching some Eeewwchoob show about the evils of the lottery and how it’s just a disguised tax on stupid people and the poor and yadda yadda yadda.

One of the statements was that if you were to win a lottery with an advertised value of, say, $100 million, if you chose to take the lump sum payout instead of the annual payout, you’d end up with only $26 million, after taxes and so on.  ($100 minus the “lump sum penalty minus income tax.)

“Only” $26 million.  (Here’s where the “opportunity cost” canard, so beloved of finance people and con artists, comes into play.)  In other words, you’d be “losing” $74 million dollars because It’s All A Big Ripoff, Man.  Except of course that you wouldn’t be losing anything, but gaining many millions that you never had before.

And I don’t want to hear the old hackneyed saying about whether you buy a lottery ticket or not, you still have about the same chance of winning — which would be true if nobody had ever, ever won a lottery prize.  But as the newspapers are full of stories about how X won a lottery and then went broke after only a few years boo hoo, we have to assume that at least some people hit the jackpot.  So while the odds against are cripplingly high, they are not impossible.

So I play the lottery every week.  I only drop a few bucks at a time, because my feeling is that a $2 ticket is the cheapest dream you can get, and in any event I don’t live close to a casino where the odds are better but the payout is pathetic.  And if you know how the stock market can be and is being manipulated by huge institutions and giant index funds like Blackrock and Vanguard, you’d forget trying that form of legalized gambling too.

And I’m not saying the following is true in my case, not at all.  But something has occurred to me, as I’ve watched the economic news get worse and worse (thank you FJB) and the outlook becomes gloomier and gloomier, with prices skyrocketing and incomes remaining stagnant or even decreasing, with more and more hints that Social Security will end at some point, etc. etc.

I can’t help wondering that if all that shit really does hit the fan:  how many truly desperate people will not just turn to crime, but might take (in Tammy Keel’s immortal words) a sack lunch and a Mauser to the roof of a tall building, in the ultimate expression of nihilistic fatalism and despair.

And I wonder too how many people right now are being held back from doing so by having just the faint hope of that little lottery ticket in their pocket.

That Collecting Thing

Guy Stuff, Toys

Other than guns and maybe knives, I don’t know that I’ve ever been much of a “collector” of anything.  Oh sure, I’ve thought of collecting stuff before — watches, for example, if I were ever in a position to afford such a collection — but perhaps it’s a factor of growing older that the desire to own stuff of any one particular kind is no longer as attractive to me as it once was.

A good example is that of the aforementioned watches.  I’ve long had a list of watches I’d like to own, simply because I love the workmanship and craft involved in the creation of such creatures.  Then my list began to shrink, and a few criteria started to assert themselves:  no battery-powered — or “quartz” — movements, and even automatic movements began to lose their desirability because, frankly, they keep shitty time, almost regardless of their cost.  So:  manual-wind watches.  And then when I acquired my plain-Jane Tissot as a gift (thankee thankee, you-know-who):


…my earlier desire for other watches just evaporated.  (I have a couple others which I wear, very occasionally, for specific occasions, but this Tissot works wonderfully well for me, 99% of the time.)

Shocking as it may be to some, this “shrinkage” has started to manifest itself in my most long-time passion, guns.  (You may administer smelling salts at any point, now.)

Seriously.  I have a few guns that I judge as essential for self-, home- and social defense needs, and a very few sentimental favorites — the Browning High Wall 1885 in .45-70, the Winchester 94 in .30-30 and of course the Mauser K98 in 8x57mm, to name but some, and then the plinking equipment (which don’t count because, of course, .22 guns are household appliances and not guns, as I’ve stated ad nauseam  in the past).

Unlike many of my acquaintance, I have absolutely no interest — none whatsoever — of chasing after the latest whizzbang offering from SIG or Canik or whoever, so forget newly-manufactured guns, in toto.

But as I cast my eyes upon the contents of Ye Olde Gunne Sayfe on occasion, I sometimes wonder whether I should perhaps just get rid of a few outliers not because of financial reasons*, but simply because I cannot see myself shooting them ever again.  And having reached that realization, what point is ownership?

In one of my occasional Lottery Dreams (see the post above), I often wonder what car or cars I’d get to replace the Tiguan, and what’s interesting is that I’m having precisely the same feelings that I have with guns and watches:  nothing of recent manufacture at all — especially given that they’re all without exception loaded with electronic gizmos I don’t care for, or else gizmos that spy on you and/or could possibly be used to control your driving.  In fact, the more I think about it, I’d probably have to go back to pre-1970s cars — fully resto-modded of course — to find a car that has not a single computer chip in its driving operation.  And yes I know, modern cars are so much more efficient and economical than their forebears, but frankly, I’m prepared to put up with all the hassles involved with a stick shift and carburetors, for example, just as I’m prepared to have to manually wind my wristwatch every day or work the bolt of my rifle.  (If push came to shove, I could even go with a wheelgun, much as I love me my 1911s, as any fule kno.)

Hell, I’ve even tossed out the kitchen knife block in favor of just two or three basic knives hanging on the magnetic strip on the side of the fridge.  (I haven’t reached this stage with my other knives, however:  I’m sentimentally attached to pretty much all of them for one reason or another, but I don’t know if I’m ever going to buy another one.)

It’s an interesting thing, this change that is coming over me:  the desire to cut back, to simplify, to accept less in favor of plenty.

Anyone else out there feeling this way?

*Loyal Readers may recall that I had to hock all of them a while back, but I am pleased to report that the status quo has since been restored.

Time For The Old 1498?

Health

Waddya mean, Kim?

Go ahead and watch this video, and wait for this magic line to appear:

…and ask:  why not?

Look, I’m a capitalist, and I believe in the sanctity of patents.  But when the loaded cost of a product is around $5 — hell, call it $10 even — and the retail price ends up being $1,000, even my capitalist free-market mind starts turning towards government intervention.

We Americans are getting screwed, and it’s time Uncle Sam did something useful for its people, for a change.

And after all, the Danes of all people should understand the concept of government intervention in the market.

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Vigilance

Gypsies Tramps & Thieves, Immigration, Resistance

So let’s be charitable and say that of the 450,00-odd dangerous scumbags of foreign origin that are roaming around the country (thanks to FJB and Heels-Up Harris), maybe half are still in Texas.  (As if we don’t have enough domestic dangerous scumbags already in situ.)

Now ask me again why I don’t ever leave the house without at least one gun close to hand… or why I’m seldom more than arm’s reach from another gun in the house.

Or why all my guns are somewhat more than the double-barrel shotgun (capacity: 2 rounds) as once suggested as “sufficient” by said FJB.

Fuck him and his gun-confiscating VP, and woe betide the scumbags foreign and domestic — the latter to include any official who wants to deny me my self-protection.  I’m in no mood to be charitable, if anything the opposite.

Enough, already.