bagerap

This has made me laugh longer and harder than anything i can remember this year, and I can't explain why.

I'm fat but I self identify as slim. I'm translender.

It may take a village to raise a child, but it takes an entire vineyard to home school one.

I appear to be on a roll, but this time I had a better idea of what I was buying. A So Called Dollar from the 1893 Chicago Columbian Exhibition. Under a fiver, happy days. Hastily grabbed phone picture, but this American seller's image gives you a better idea. https://www.ebay.com/c/170373125

Recently trawling through ebay I spotted something described as a Brussels exhibition medal. These are my bread and butter and with only a few minutes to go I put in a reasonable bid, considering that I didn't recognise it and had no time to research. Happily I got it for a few quid and it arrived today. Took a bit of research but it turns out to be a rareish 1874 Belgian masonic medal worth around £100.

Mine's arrived and it's exactly the same size as my laptop keyboard. I lkie it.

You know what Old Copper? I'm giving up and following the advice of Mark Twain. “Never argue with an idiot. They will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience.” Hope the laundry doesn't lose your white sheets in the wash.

Correlation is not causation. Blacks are 5 times more likely to be CONVICTED than whites for the same offense. This is particularly true for drug related charges, even more so in states where there are private "for profit" prisons. Under the three strikes and you're out legislation there are thousands of black men and women serving life for possesion of a drug that is now legal in eleven states. The following was published by the NAACP CRIMINAL JUSTICE FACT SHEET Incarceration Trends in America Between 1980 and 2015, the number of people incarcerated in America increased from roughly 500,000 to over 2.2 million. Today, the United States makes up about 5% of the world’s population and has 21% of the world’s prisoners. 1 in every 37 adults in the United States, or 2.7% of the adult population, is under some form of correctional supervision. CJ_StopFriskRacial Disparities in Incarceration In 2014, African Americans constituted 2.3 million, or 34%, of the total 6.8 million correctional population. African Americans are incarcerated at more than 5 times the rate of whites. The imprisonment rate for African American women is twice that of white women. Nationwide, African American children represent 32% of children who are arrested, 42% of children who are detained, and 52% of children whose cases are judicially waived to criminal court. Though African Americans and Hispanics make up approximately 32% of the US population, they comprised 56% of all incarcerated people in 2015. If African Americans and Hispanics were incarcerated at the same rates as whites, prison and jail populations would decline by almost 40%. Drug Sentencing Disparities In the 2015 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, about 17 million whites and 4 million African Americans reported having used an illicit drug within the last month. African Americans and whites use drugs at similar rates, but the imprisonment rate of African Americans for drug charges is almost 6 times that of whites. African Americans represent 12.5% of illicit drug users, but 29% of those arrested for drug offenses and 33% of those incarcerated in state facilities for drug offenses. Effects of Incarceration A criminal record can reduce the likelihood of a callback or job offer by nearly 50 percent. The negative impact of a criminal record is twice as large for African American applicants. Infectious diseases are highly concentrated in corrections facilities: 15% of jail inmates and 22% of prisoners – compared to 5% of the general population – reported ever having tuberculosis, Hepatitis B and C, HIV/AIDS, or other STDs. In 2012 alone, the United States spent nearly $81 billion on corrections. Spending on prisons and jails has increased at triple the rate of spending on Pre‐K‐12 public education in the last thirty years.

I keep coming back to this one phrase and its obvious implications: "the 5:1 greater proportion of black criminals per capita, which is revealed in the relative prison populations of each demographic" This does nothing to support your claim of inherent racial criminality, it simply demonstrates the overwhelming racial bias that prevails within American policing. A black/Latino/Hispanic person is up to five times more likely to be stopped and questioned * than a Caucasian. The stop and search is used as a basis for Probable Cause further investigation. They are more likely to face a misdemeanour charge than a white person and if it goes to court the disparity in sentencing can be seen in the two attached links. https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/publications/racial-disparity-sentencing#:~:text=type of crime-,Key findings%3A,sentenced than similarly-situated whites. https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/un-report-on-racial-disparities/ * this is a geographic variable, not simply South vs North

U. S. 2010 census, African Americans when including Multiracial African Americans form 14% of the total U S population. White Americans make up 63% of the U S population (2012 figures), that's 4.5 times the black population. So if that ratio is not present in prison inmate figures then we are forced to believe either that African Americans are inherently criminal or that the society that criminalises them is inherently fucked up. At the end of 2017, federal and state prisons in the United States held about 475,900 inmates who were black and 436,500 who were white. Near parity. Bear in mind that this is in a country that incarcerates a larger percentage of its citizens than any other nation on earth. Convict labour is an economic necessity in many rural parts of the South. In addition to being forced to labour directly for the government on a prison farm or in a penal colony, inmates may be forced to do farm work for private enterprises by being farmed out through the practice of convict leasing to work on private agricultural lands or related industries (fishing, lumbering, etc.). The party purchasing their labor from the government generally does so at a steep discount from the cost of free labour

Which is all well and good if you ignore the history of black peonage in the Southern States ante-bellum. Anti vagrancy and begging laws were introduced in the South as early as 1860 that specifically targeted recently freed slaves and put them into the prison farm system whereby their labour was once again free, These are the Jim Crow Laws that are being used to criminalise a huge swathe of the US population. Now, in our more enlightened times we have the school to prison pipeline whereby a percentage of deliberately under educated people are siphoned off into the school-to-prison-pipeline. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School-to-prison_pipeline Just have a guess as to the ethnicity of the people involved. Slavery in all but name is current in 18-20 states and is subject to legal challenge in 13.

About 9-10 years ago when silver had reached silly money, I put some pre 1919 culls through an ultrasonic cleaner before selling for melt. They all came out with a matte finish.

Opened the bathroom cabinet and three bottles of Omega 3 landed on my head. Luckily my wounds were only super fish oil.

When you're down by the sea And an eel bites your knee That'a Moray.

A work of genius that I shall be stealing forthwith

I'm interested in the mechanics of such a sale. How does it work? If the seller does not have a web site, ebay's watch dogs will surely put the kybosh on any attempt to strike a private deal. I've had messages censored for attempting to pass on my email address for a totally unrelated matter.

I ordered 500 yesterday: http://www.colincooke.com/other/envelopes.html

I know where you are Wayne, just opposite that fantastic building on the corner of Hannington Rd.

Fortunately for me, I stopped collecting encased coins some time ago. Problem with the French examples is that I do collect exhibition medals and coins.

Mike, this is a rarity but too rich for me. I thought that you may want to keep the images. https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/1931-Paris-Exposition-Coloniale-Souvenir-medal-T110/293581960715?hash=item445ad9360b:g:cksAAOSwuMVetqzq