Samizdata

This was too good to pass on… while browsing the Telegraph pages and stumbling across their Review of 2004, I must have caught one of the billion monkeys at work!

This is an excellent story. I got to it from here.

A bag of bills stolen from a casino was snapped up by beavers who wove thousands of dollars in soggy currency into the sticks and brush of their dam on a creek in eastern Louisiana.

“They hadn’t torn the bills up. They were still whole,” said Maj. Michael Martin of the St. Helena Parish Sheriff’s Office.

The money was part of $70,000 to $75,000 taken last week from the Lucky Dollar Casino in Greensburg.

Is there not some kind of law saying that you are not allowed to do this kind of thing in the USA? No doubt the beavers have by now appointed a lawyer to represent their interests. An eagle perhaps? Never mind.

Current blogger enthusiasm of mine Harry Hutton says that this is an interesting story. It is.

Nguyen was discovered trying to enter Hong Kong illegally hiding beneath a truck crossing the border with the mainland. A routine search revealed the Nguyen was carrying two bullets inside his right shoe and a small kitchen knife wrapped in plastic.

Despite the grave threat to public order posed by these weapons, Judge Sweeny contemplated waiving jail time and deporting this dangerous felon … at which point Nguyen became indignant and insisted that he be imprisoned for the maximum possible term.

The defendant explained that he had paid HK$1,500 (US$200) to a snakehead to arrange his illegal entry into the SAR, with the hope of being caught and jailed on immigration and weapons charges. The fee included transportation the cost of the two bullets and a knife, which were provided by the smugglers. Once captured, Nguyen counted on receiving, courtesy of Hong Kong’s taxpayers, room, board and prisoner’s pay of HK$5,600 (US$720), or about US$25 per month, after deducting the snakehead’s fee.

Nguyen considered this a better prospect than those on offer in Vietnam.

Applying the Solomonic wisdom for which he is renowned, His Lordship pondered the situation for a while and then declared that the law is, after all, the law and, moreover, releasing Nguyen wouldn’t be fair to other Vietnamese immigrants – of whom it turns out there are quite a few – currently serving time for trying to cross the border with two bullets and a kitchen knife …

The Washington Times further elucidates:

Hien is the latest in a series of mostly young Vietnamese men arriving in Hong Kong on the “two bullet tour,” for which they pay a fee to a gang in their homeland. The package deal includes transport to mainland China, instructions on how to cross into Hong Kong, plus two bullets and a knife.

The weapons are to ensure that the immigrant will get a long prison sentence. For Hien it means free shelter, food and $50 a month in pay while he is incarcerated. He paid about $200 for the package deal.

Goodness, they must be short of prisoners in Hong Kong. They pay people to attend. Oh well, I suppose this is a nice, simple, market-based solution to the problem of getting udesirables off the streets.

Everyone says how clever those Vietnamese were to defeat the USA in the Vietnam War. But winning was stupid. The clever thing to do would have been to lose.

Racial profiling may be too controversial too touch but just wait until somebody suggests species profiling:

An escaped pet cat created a scare on a Belgian airliner, forcing the crew to turn back to Brussels 20 minutes into its journey.

“We 100% support the decision made by the captain,” Geert Sciot, the airline’s communication vice-president, told the BBC.

Nobody, he said, could tell what an agitated cat what might do in the circumstances, scrabbling around amid the sensitive equipment in the cockpit of the Avro RJ.

An agitated domestic cat is a truly frightening thing. It could have been armed with a machine-gun or a bomb. Who knows what it could have done? Maybe it intended to overpower the crew, take over the plane and crash it into a building? Nobody would be able to stop it!! Terror in the skies!!!

“It took a long time to catch it,” he noted, describing the offending beast – said by Brussels newspaper La Derniere Heure to be a tom by the name of Gin – as “very aggressive”.

It was wielding a box-cutter and screaming ‘death to the Yankee imperialist dogs’.

This is a tragically inevitable result of the constant human meddling in the domestic affairs of cats.