Believe it or not, the title is not all you need. There’s a key detail in this one that’s missing.
Man sentenced for smuggling king cobras in potato chip cans https://t.co/sTE9LbUrPH pic.twitter.com/5hhITlgMvG
— New York Post (@nypost) January 24, 2018
Continue reading Tweet of the Day, Snakes In The Mail edition.
Found here. Short version: it’s a great way to complicate your players’ lives. And they don’t have to even be playing bad people in order to be smugglers, either! I mean, look at the Underground Railroad, or those people who smuggled Bibles into Communist nations (still do, when it comes to North Korea).
As in, like, maybe a crate or two?
“There’s a black market,” says Julie Gunlock, who directs the Culture of Alarmism Project at the Independent Women’s Forum in Washington, joking about “kids with trench coats lined with potato chips and other things they can’t get at school.”
“God bless innovation and entrepreneurialism, but that’s not the goal of reforming the school lunch program,” says Ms. Gunlock. “It was intended to get kids to eat their veggies because they like them, but instead it’s created a culture where kids are disgusted by the food because they’re not allowed to flavor it. So, it’s had an opposite effect, and created a much bigger problem.”
Continue reading So you’ve been caught smuggling potato chips into your school.
That’s… not a euphemism. The kids are smuggling pepper and salt into the schools, and selling it*.
Geez, guys, keep it down. What’s gonna happen if some other administrator – one with more slavish devotion to the ill-thought-out nutrition guidelines peddled by the Obama administration than good sense – sees this, and starts cracking down on the pepper suppliers? Will all those poor kids – whose plight, again, is solely the responsibility of the Democratic party – really thank you for letting the cat out of the bag?
During a hearing before the House Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary, and Secondary Education, chaired by Rep. Todd Rokita (R., Ind.), a school administrator told Congress of the “unintended consequences” of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act.
“Perhaps the most colorful example in my district is that students have been caught bringing–and even selling–salt, pepper, and sugar in school to add taste to perceived bland and tasteless cafeteria food,” said John S. Payne, the president of Blackford County School Board of Trustees in Hartford City, Indiana.
Continue reading The Washington Free Beacon inadvertently narcs out school pepper smuggling rings.
There are days when I wish that classes in Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century European history were mandatory for government officials – wait, no, I always wish that. There are simply days where my desires are given explicit validation by a new report: “More than half of the cigarettes sold in New York State are smuggled in from other places to avoid the Empire State’s taxes on smokes, which have soared nearly 200 percent since 2006, according to a report issued by the conservative Tax Foundation.” And apparently that’s also true for a bunch of other places in at least the Northeast.
Now, the reason for the history: if our erstwhile public servants had ever read any (books that have ‘Peoples’ or ‘Social’ in the title don’t count) they’d know that when you create a situation where a legal good is available in one place for price X, and available in another for price X+Y, with Y being a protective / ruinously high government tariff, something inevitably happens. And no, that inevitable thing is not smuggling. Human beings already smuggle as naturally as we breathe. It is practically instinctive for us. No, what inevitably happens in that situation is that the population enthusiastically joins in on breaking the law. And gets remarkably close-mouthed when tax men start nosing around*. Continue reading Cigarette smuggling business booming in NYC. Of course.
So I hear (as did our own Dan McLaughlin, last week) that New York is the place to go for an exciting and remunerative career in the cigarette-smuggling trade:
Last week, The Mackinac Center for Public Policy released a report chronicling the rate of cigarette smuggling in the United States, revealing what retailers in New York have long known: state-to-state smuggling has become a big problem. This especially true for higher taxed states like New York, which boasts both the highest state excise taxes in the country ($4.35 per pack) and the highest rate of smuggling (with 60.9% of all New York’s cigarettes entering the state illegally).
Do you know what the real problem is, with our modern Left? It’s not their anti-science crazies*, or their general blind spot when it comes to anti-Semitism, or even the way that some of them tend to project the voices in their heads into our mouths. No, the real problem is that most of ’em don’t seem to recognize that history started prior to the mid-Nineties. Because anybody could have told New York what happens when you combine high excise taxes and unsecured borders. Take it away, Rudyard Kipling and Michael Longcor: Continue reading The Smugglers of Old New York.
“…so I can’t say that I’m particularly happy to see you”:
A German man who stuffed 44 small lizards into his underwear before trying to board a flight has been sentenced to prison in New Zealand for plundering the country’s protected species.
Hans Kurt Kubus, 58, will spend 14 weeks behind bars and must pay a 5,000 New Zealand dollar ($3,540) fine before being deported to Germany as soon as he is released, District Court Judge Colin Doherty ruled onTuesday.
Kubus was caught by wildlife officials at Christchurch International Airport on South Island in December, about to board an overseas flight with 44 geckos and skinks in a hand-sewn package concealed in his underwear.
(via Drudge) I have to ask: if your current career path requires you to illegally transport wild animals in immediate proximity to your genitals… well, don’t you think that maybe you should consider finding alternative forms of employment?
Moe Lane
PS: Heh. The Other McCain went with the same joke.
Well. How reassuring.
LOS ANGELES, Jan. 13 (Xinhua) — Three men were accused in an alleged conspiracy to illegally export nuclear technology to Iran, federal prosecutors said on Wednesday.
The three suspects, a Los Angeles resident and two Iranians, violated trade sanctions imposed on Iran, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
[snip]
An indictment returned by a federal grand jury in Los Angeles on Dec. 30 charges Jiraiir Avanessian, 56, a Los Angeles resident, and Farhoud Masoumian, 42, of Tehran, with multiple violations of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) and the Iranian trade embargo, including smuggling, money laundering and other crimes.
[snip]
A third man, Amirhossein Sairafi of Iran, was charged on Jan. 4 in a criminal complaint filed in U.S. District Court in downtown Los Angeles for his alleged role in the scheme.
This is technically via Hot Air Headlines, but the LA Times article that it linked to somehow managed to obscure critical details. It’s a hell of a thing when the press arm of the freaking People’s Republic of China gives you better basic information than a major American newspaper…
Moe Lane
Crossposted to RedState.
