Monday, June 1. 2009
This came in over the transom, I know not whence:
THE ULTIMATE ADVENTURE CRUISE
To The Point is excited to offer the ultimate adventure cruise along the pirate-infested coast of Somalia!
We board our luxury cruise ship in Djibouti on the Gulf of Aden near the entrance to the Red Sea, and disembark in Mombassa, Kenya seven adrenaline-charged days later.
Starting at $5,200 per-person (double occupancy, inside room) and $6,900 (veranda complete with bench rest), you'll relax like never before.
That's because you are welcome to bring your own arsenal with you. If you don't have your own weapons, you can rent them from our onboard Master Gunsmith. Enjoy reloading parties every afternoon with skeet and marksmanship competitions every night!
But the best fun of all, of course, is Pirate Target Practice.
For the object of the cruise is to sail up and down the Somali Coast waiting to get hijacked by pirates. The weapons rental costs are as follows.
Rent a full auto M-16 for only $25/day with ammo attractively priced at $16 per 100 rounds of 5.56 armor-piercing:
On a budget? Rent a full-auto scope-mounted AK-47 for only $9/day with 7.62 ball ammo at $12 per 100 rounds:
Hello! Nothing gets a pirate's attention like a Barrett M-107 .50-cal sniper rifle; only $59/day with 25 rounds of armor-piercing ammo affordably priced at only $29.95.
Need a spotter? Our professional crew members can double as spotters for only $30/hour (spotting scope included, but gratuities are not.)
Want to make a real impact? Rent an RPG for only $175/day with three fragmentation rounds included!
Also included: Free complimentary night vision equipment - and throughout the night, coffee, pastries and snacks are always available on the main deck from 7pm until 6am.
Our deluxe package comes complete with gourmet meals and all rooms offer a mini-bar.
But that's not all! Twin mounted miniguns are available for rental at only $450.00 per 30 seconds of sustained fire!
We guarantee that you will experience at least two hijacking attempts by pirates or you'll receive an instant $1,000 refund upon arrival in Mombassa.
How can we make that guarantee? We operate at 5 knots just beyond 12 nautical miles off the coast of Somalia, thus in international waters where pirates have no rights whatever. In fact, we make three passes through the area's most treacherous waters to ensure maximum visibility by Somali "mother ships".
We repeat this for five days, making three complete passes past the entire Somali Coast. At night, the boat is fully lit and bottle rockets are shot every five minutes with loud disco music directionally beamed shoreside to attract maximum attention.
Testimonials from previous participants in the Somali Cruise:
"Six attacks in 4 days were more than I expected. I bagged three pirates, my wife nailed two, and my 12-year old son sank two boats with the mini-gun. This wonderful cruise was fun for the whole family" -- Fred D., Cincinnati, OH
"Pirates 0, Passengers 32! Well worth the trip! Can't recommend it highly enough!" -- Ben L., Bethesda, MD
"I haven't had this much fun since flying choppers in 'Nam. Don't worry about getting shot by pirates... they never even got close to the ship with the crap they shoot and their lousy aim... reminds me of a drunken juicer door-gunner we picked up from the motor pool in Phu Bai!" -- Dan J. - Denver, CO
Come on board and bag your own clutch of genuine Somali pirates! But cabin space is limited so you need to respond quickly. Reserve your package before May 31st and get a great bonus - 100 rounds of free tracer ammo in the caliber of your choice. So sign up for the Ultimate Somali Coast Adventure Cruise now!
Addendum 9/13/09 - We have just learned that this post came from the fine Doug Ross Journal: http://directorblue.blogspot.com/2009/05/somali-coast-cruise-package.html
The reporters of this series were never allowed back into Cuba. This is Part 1 of 6, in Spanish:
The sheer size of the fiscal hole that the Obama administration is digging us into, or burying us within, is mindboggling enough. But, that isn’t stopping them from purposely adding to our confusion as they try to dig the hole deeper.
Tom Blumer exposes the tomfoolery at his valuable everyday read Bizzyblog.
Until now the US Treasury has hidden the size of our deficits by including Social Security taxes, and treating them as if in a Trust Fund although there is none and the monies have been spent, so Social Security is actually in negative cash flow within the next two years.
Now Blumer finds the Treasury Department under Wall Street-import Tim Geitner bringing along the tricks that sank Wall Street. The Treasury is now reporting the deficit of receipts versus expenditures as $175-billion less between last October and March. How? The Treasury is somehow calculating a Net Present Value of its TARP bailout expenditures, in other words what they think they’re going to be worth.
As Blumer points out:
Mixing hundreds of billions of dollars of NPV into what has essentially been a cash flow report turns the Monthly Treasury Statement, and deficit reporting in general, into an exercise that will become not only become ever more difficult to comprehend, but one that will also be routinely subject to political manipulation. Judgments as to what discount rate to use, how collectible loans are, and even what should and should not be considered an “investment,” will have multi-billion dollar impacts on the publicly reported deficit. NPV might even directly affect policy. Why should Geithner or Obama allow banks chomping at the bit to get out from under TARP to do so, when their repayments will only increase the reported deficit? Already, the administration, which has projected a fiscal 2009 deficit of over $1.8 trillion, has avoided the political embarrassment of estimating a shortfall that would round off to $2 trillion using true cash-flow reporting.
Hope ‘n Change requires prestidigitation, otherwise known as quick fingers, picking our pockets.
 Mr. Sun remains on vacation. It has been pleasantly cool.
At best, government economic stimulus is just a sugar high
LAPD High. Run by the cops. Sounds good to me. I never met a cop who assumed honesty, and that seems about right, statistically speaking.
Why are Conservatives so mean? That Andrew Klavan link is superb and right to the point.
Who is going to want to buy a Chrysler or GM car now? Chrysler is now Italian, and GM is Government Motors, from the folks who brought you the DMV and the post office.
This harsh detention has to stop. Gitmo inmates get free laptops
Our friend Jules bids us summertime blog adieu with many Brit Civil War links. (I will betcha the wife and kids padlocked his machine and threw the key into Boston harbor.)
Practicing medicine in MA. One quote:
She said, “I calculated that every time I have a Medicaid patient, it’s like handing them a $20 bill when they leave;”
Where are the serious men?
..foreigners have gone from owning $1.3 trillion (of US debt) at the beginning of the decade to now owning $3.3 trillion of such securities — a $2 trillion increase. More important and interesting than that, of the $2.8 trillion in net new issuances of Treasury securities during this decade, foreigners have bought $2.0 of the $2.8 trillion, a stunning 71%. (China alone appears to have bought over one third of the total of foreign purchases.) Who will purchase the debt to fund the upcoming $10 trillion in deficits is anyone’s guess, as the bond market seems to have figured out.
Put it another way. The US government is grossly negligent in creating the conditions that necessitate America’s importing up to 70% of its oil, making the country dependent on countries that are strategic adversaries. Now we also import 70% of the financing of the US government’s budget deficits, again making America dependent on potential adversaries or enemies. This can’t end well. Where are the serious men to address these strategic vulnerabilities?
The greedy, entitled American children all have their hands out for freebies. One quote:
Epiphanies are a dime a dozen among congressional Democrats as they discover urgent new reasons to experience the almost erotic pleasure of commandeering other people's money. For example, freshman Rep. Alan Grayson, a Florida Democrat whose district includes Disney World, was recently there and was inspired.
The world, he realized, would be a sweeter place if Congress mandated that all companies with 100 or more employees provide a week of paid vacation to those who work at least 25 hours a week. After three years, they would be entitled to two weeks, and companies with more than 50 employees would have to start providing a paid vacation week. Grayson would not mandate that paid vacations be spent at Disney World. With the welfare state approaching insolvency and businesses sagging, this is an odd time to augment Americans' entitlement mentality. But the travel and tourism industries think that Grayson's idea is neat.
No slobbering press in the UK:
The White House press corps is now completely supine, utterly shameless in its groveling cowardice. Stalin himself couldn't have wished for a more slobbering press corps. Rather than mailing them nice little Lipton tea bags, millions of sane Americans might consider sending air sickness bags to our Reigning Media.
But not, thank haven, across the broad Atlantic. There free speech and even laughter are still alive, among the well-lubricated scribblers of Fleet Street. The journos of Britain show little respect for American Presidents regardless of race, creed or color. They laugh hysterically at all of them. Not that it takes much imagination.
The Telegraph has done the awesome, and called Michelle's wardrobe "frumpy."
PJ O'Rourke on the end of America's love affair with automobiles. (h/t, Env. Repub). One quote:
Politicians, journalists, financial analysts and other purveyors of banality have been looking at cars as if a convertible were a business. Fire the MBAs and hire a poet. The fate of Detroit isn’t a matter of financial crisis, foreign competition, corporate greed, union intransigence, energy costs or measuring the shoe size of the footprints in the carbon. It’s a tragic romance—unleashed passions, titanic clashes, lost love and wild horses.
Read it (link above). Apparently making money from making cars was never an easy thing to do.
"[T]here is not a syllable in the plan under consideration which directly empowers the national courts to construe the laws according to the spirit of the Constitution."
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Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 81, 1788. Hmmm. I guess they meant what they said.
 Our commenting function is screwy. We'll fix it.
There has been a hobgoblin in our system for a week, performing all sorts of random mischievous acts (including shutting us down, hiding comments, and blocking comments) in order to give us fits.
How to be a child forever under a benevolent tyranny. Excellent and brief: Why are Conservatives so mean?, by Klavan at PJ TV.
(BTW, 43 degrees F here this morning. My tomato plants will not be pleased.)
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