sweasel.com

I like smugglers¹. Smugglers are at the heart of the free market and represent the natural tendency of free people to actually act like free people even under the eye of those who want to control them forcibly and take their money and possessions.

It’s good to see the juxtaposition of (actor) smugglers with the fair goers who, once inside the quasi-pseudo-cordon-sanitaire, happily go about their free associations as usual. Good on ’em!

1. Except for slavers, i.e. smugglers trafficking in human beings. Those smugglers are in need of being stopped by any means necessary, preferably messy means. Messy for them, of course.

Yesterday, I think. What’s today? It doesn’t matter.
Instapundit promoted a book by Andrew Wareham titled ‘A proper end,’ which is book 4 in a series. I would prefer to start a series with book one, so I searched it out and found ‘Bold and Blood’ which details the civil unrest (circa 1640) leading up to Cromwell.

It was not entertaining. It was educational, but I am suspicious of all the similarities between then and now. I don’t believe they were coincidental, nor accidental.
Some of it I already had an idea, but this narrative was unsettling. I have no clue just how historically accurate Wareham’s details are.

I would like to know if this work was historically accurate.

Are you still feeding your neighborhood badger?

Mme. Ermine, if muzzle loaders are unregulated (or significantly less regulated) over there, you may be interested to know that there have been some modern advances there. Although you will always have to load the powder and shot through the muzzle because of the legalisms, there are a few bolt action muzzle loaders that use the bolt to seat the primer at the rear of the chamber and to do a MUCH better job of handling higher chamber pressures.

One of them I’ve read about, the Paramount HTR, fires a 225 grain .40 caliber bullet at a very impressive 2,740 ft/sec, and holds MOA or better accuracy out to 400 yards.

In most U.S. states, you can get one of these shipped straight to your front door. No licensed firearms dealer required, no govt forms to fill out.

@Skandia Recluse — You’ve piqued my curiosity. I just checked and all four of the series’ books are available for Amazon’s Kindle (if anyone’s still hanging on guiltily like me and not kicked the Amazon habit yet), and furthermore all four are in the Kindle Unlimited library.

OMG! I’ve made THREE comments here. At least they’re all relevant in different areas. I’ll try not to let it happen again.

edit: Uncle Al here. But you figured that out.

I try not to give Amazon any money, but I’ve not found a solution to the Kindle issue.

Amazon Kindle

I would pay a dollar or two more if I could buy a .pdf format version of an eBook If I could buy it directly from the author’s webpage. I don’t know how much the transaction costs would be, nor how much it would cost the writer to put up a storefront. Perhaps several authors could share a webpage/storefront.

Get you a slightly more modern Brown Bess – an Enfield. Percussion cap. Not sure what the model was the preceded the rifled musket, but you can load buck and ball and make life interesting for things at 100 yards.
Also Redcoats. If you want to play cowboys and Indians SOMEONE has to be the Indians.

I’m probably going to go Kobo for my next ereader. They have a decent store, and DRM can be removed from ebooks.

Thanks for the tip, Mrs Peel. They look excellent!

Finally got to spend part of an afternoon doing nearly normal things in a local town. One shop still forcing people to wear masks if you came inside, elsewhere mostly mask-free.
Unfortunately, I feel in my bones that it won’t be long for the next catastrophe to be invented/exaggerated so that even more power is concentrated in the hands of the Covidcracy.

@Scandia Server shares, redundancy, backup, storefront security all have to be managed. ISPs can and will perform these tasks for additional fees.

But the most important consideration is data transfer, a popular, high-traffic ebook could really rack up data transfer fees…backhaul ain’t free or cheap. The big sites have the wherewithal to contract huge pipes directly with the backbone providers and it behooves them to fill ’em, cuz unused capacity is the most expensive of all. I guess I’m saying scale matters re costs.

That’s just a few reasons why many self-publishers sell on one of the big online bookseller sites.

You might try Project Gutenberg too if you are into classics.

BJM

Thank you for that information. I had not thought about data transfer costs.

I’ve been getting all my ebooks recently from the public library. Didn’t cost a thing, except sometimes having to be put on a waiting list for more popular books.

Quick question for the weasel or the ET experts, what species of alien is that peeking over the smuggler’s left shoulder?