Up-side

In the caption above, your ride is blown, and it’s a long way to another one, but you’re alive. There’s always an upside to things. It’s more of a glass-half-full way of looking at life.

I was looking for a quote for my headstone (when the time comes, I’m not rushing things).

‘Quod sumus hoc eritis‘ – Such as I am, you will be.

Death is inevitable, whether you are a peasant or a king. RIP Chuck.

Chuck Norris once went skydiving, and his parachute failed to open.

So the next day he returned it for a refund…

Blackbeard and Branding

The night before the most famous pirate battle in American history, Blackbeard was warned that strange ships had entered the inlet. He dismissed the warning, kept drinking rum, and went to bed. The next day would be his last.

On the morning of November 22, 1718, Lieutenant Robert Maynard crossed the shallow sandbars of Ocracoke Inlet in North Carolina on two small sloops with no cannons on board, looking for the most feared pirate in the Atlantic. He found him. What followed was one of the most violent and documented hand-to-hand battles in the history of the Golden Age of Piracy, and when it was over, Maynard wrote up his official account, cut off Blackbeard’s head, hung it from the bowsprit of his sloop, and sailed home to collect his reward.

Edward Teach, known as Blackbeard, had built his reputation as carefully and deliberately as any modern brand. He was not the most violent pirate of his era. Historical records suggest he rarely needed to be. His genius was theater. He grew his black beard long and tied it with ribbons, tucked slow-burning cannon fuses under his hat so that in battle his face was wreathed in smoke and flame, strapped three pairs of loaded pistols across his chest in a leather bandolier, and cultivated an appearance so deliberately terrifying that most merchant captains surrendered without firing a shot the moment they recognized his flag.

Captain Charles Johnson, whose 1724 book A General History of the Pyrates is the primary source for much of what we know about Blackbeard’s life, wrote that his appearance was frightful enough to have raised an idea of a fury from the regions below. The performance worked so well that Blackbeard captured over thirty ships in his career using almost no actual violence, which tells you everything about how thoroughly he had understood the economics of fear.

What he ate and how he lived on board is documented in the accounts of the ships he captured and the testimony of his surviving crew members. Pirates ate considerably better than the Royal Navy sailors sent to catch them because they took what they wanted from every vessel they boarded. Captured merchant ships in the Atlantic trade carried spices, wine, sugar, rum, salted meats, dried fruit, flour, and whatever provisions the crew had loaded for a long voyage. When Blackbeard blockaded the port of Charleston for an entire week in May 1718, holding prominent citizens hostage and demanding a chest of medicines as ransom, the specific demand for medicines tells you something about the practical reality of shipboard life, tropical disease, infected wounds, and the daily medical emergencies of a crew living in close quarters at sea were constant concerns that no amount of rum could fully address. When Lieutenant Maynard’s men searched Blackbeard’s sloop Adventure after the battle, the only goods found on board were sugar, cocoa, and cotton, the remnants of a recently captured merchant cargo, alongside a mysterious letter that historians have been debating ever since.

The night before the battle has been documented in multiple sources, and the accounts agree on one detail. Blackbeard was drinking heavily. Captain Johnson wrote that he spent the evening in his cabin drinking rum with a local merchant captain named William Bell, who had come aboard to trade, and that when one of his crew members suggested they move the sloop to a safer position because they had seen strange ships in the inlet, Blackbeard dismissed the warning and kept drinking. Johnson’s account of what Blackbeard said when he finally acknowledged that Maynard’s ships were there is one of the most quoted lines from the entire era of piracy: damnation seize my soul if I give you quarters, or take any from you. He had 25 men. Maynard had 57. The battle lasted two hours.

The Boston News-Letter published a firsthand account of the final moments that has survived in full. Maynard and Blackbeard fought each other directly, sword to sword, Maynard thrusting so hard that his sword bent against Blackbeard’s cartridge box and buckled to the hilt. Blackbeard broke the guard of Maynard’s sword and wounded his fingers. Then a Scottish sailor in Maynard’s crew stepped in and gave Blackbeard a cut across the neck. Teach reportedly said, ” Well done, lad, and the Scotsman replied, ” If it be not well done, I’ll do it better, and cut off his head with the second stroke, laying it flat on his shoulder. Maynard’s official report recorded that Blackbeard fell with five shots in him and twenty dismal cuts in several parts of his body before he finally went down. He had taken wounds that would have killed most men several times over and kept fighting until the last one.

Maynard hung the head from the bowsprit. The body was thrown into the inlet. A local legend around Ocracoke has been maintained ever since: that on clear evenings, you can see Blackbeard’s headless body swimming through the water, searching for what Maynard took from him. The shallow channel at Ocracoke, where all of this happened, is still called Teach’s Hole. The Adventure sloop on which he was killed remained visible in the shallows of the inlet for years afterward as the wood slowly rotted into the sand.

Thirteen-year-old Benjamin Franklin, living in Boston at the time of the battle, was so moved by the accounts published in the newspapers that he wrote a ballad about it and tried to sell it on the streets of Boston. He later described it in his autobiography as wretched stuff and was grateful it had not sold well enough to damage his reputation.

Missile Testing

Investor Kyle Bass announced a successful live-fire test of Aeon’s Zeus shoulder-fired missile system on his East Texas ranch on March 20, 2026. The launch, captured on video, showed the weapon striking its target with a clear detonation.

Bass credited Aeon founder Naweed Tahmas and the team for delivering the milestone rapidly. He highlighted that the system achieves more than 90 percent cost reduction compared to the Javelin missile, which costs around $175,000 per shot.

Aeon Industrial focuses on modular, American-made tactical weapons suitable for shoulder, vehicle, or unmanned launches, using low-signature propellants to support quick production scaling. The test drew praise for advancing domestic defense innovation and addressing precision-weapon affordability amid rising global threats. Bass has previously backed efforts to revitalize U.S. manufacturing for military hardware.

Normally, the cautionary advice would be “don’t try this at home,” but maybe that’s going out the window?

Scamming

Ilhan Omar’s husband runs a $60 million ‘ghostg firm’ out of a WeWork mailbox. Journalist Angela Rose just exposed the latest chapter in the Tim Mynett scandal. She walked every floor of the Washington, D.C. WeWork building listed as the headquarters for Rose Lake Capital — the firm co-owned by Rep. Ilhan Omar’s husband. No office. No signage. No one had ever heard of it. Yet this supposed powerhouse claims to manage $60 billion in assets. This mirrors the earlier “phantom winery” fiasco with eStCru LLC, where a California address turned out to be an abandoned custom-crush facility with zero wine production and no business license. That operation’s reported value jumped from under $50,000 to billions overnight on Omar’s financial disclosures.

Rose Lake Capital pulled the same trick. Valued at pocket change in 2023, it ballooned to between $5 million and $25 million in 2024 — pushing the couple’s combined holdings up by tens of millions in a single year. Meanwhile, Mynett’s business partner testified in court that the firm had virtually no capital or investments. House Oversight Chairman James Comer launched a probe in February 2026, demanding records, financials, and travel details tied to foreign nations. The sudden spike in wealth raises red flags, especially amid Minnesota’s massive welfare fraud scandals and past investor lawsuits accusing Mynett-linked ventures of swindling.

Omar calls it a “political stunt.” Conservatives call it what it looks like: elite-level grift hiding behind congressional privilege. If a regular American tried this, the IRS and FBI would already be knocking. Time for real accountability — no more free passes for the connected.

Bullet Points:

** BRM asks the same questions that I do. You should check out this blog post. What if the US Navy is NOT in a hurry? Somebody in the Eurozone woke up, called the other Euro members, and explained it to them. Ah. The geldings will gather and complain, but they need to come to the table with a consensus. Even if the shooting war with Iran stops in 60 Days (War Powers Act), President Trump does not need to bring the US Navy back to port…and they can act defensively. And the matter of insurance and who the big dog is needs to be resolved and agreed upon. Hint: It won’t be Lloyds of London.

** ICE agents are still being paid. What if DHS announced that ICE agents were supplementing TSA personnel (not being paid by USGOV at the moment) at airports! What a great idea!

** Code Pink leftists are being mocked nationwide after they fly to Cuba to tell people suffering under communism how bad President Trump is. Just a few weeks ago, Sec. Marco Rubio flagged the deranged leftist group as a “vector of Chinese influence operations.” RUBIO: “Organizations like Code Pink denigrate the United States, whitewash the violence of Marxist regimes, and run cover for narco-terrorists like Maduro while enjoying an influx of cash from a donor network with connections to the Chinese Communist Party.”

** RCC’s Petroleum Down Under Report – Locally, diesel and petrol are about $11.00 per USA gallon, up from the $5.50 to $6 range.  More remote areas are $14 to $18.00.  Lots of farming areas keep running out as it is harvest/planting season in many locations.  Just one farm near where I hunt sometimes uses 1100 gallons per 12-hour shift, running four planting rigs and usually 24 hours. There is about a month of fuel in the country, as the Labour government has shut down most of the refineries, leaving only two. A lot of our crude oil is sent to Southeast Asia for processing and then shipped back to other parts of Australia because of geography. Most of our oil is in the northwest, but most people are in the southeast.  The distance between oil in Alaska and people in Florida.

Identify the Ship

1

Identify the Aircraft

2

75 built

3

14 built

4

350 built

End