Originally published at: U.S. Senator Bob Menendez charged over Qatari gifts - Boing Boing
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You’d think, but look how not-bad and respectable Republicans remain when they not only fail to shun, but actively support their own scurrilous scoundrels.
I know that for Republicans, IOKIYAR, but oh how I wish the corporate media wouldn’t act like they agree.
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Speaking of those gold bars: how easily can an ordinary person spend those like money? Could one buy a car by bringing in enough to the local dealership?
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The Dems really have to kick him out. For more than a decade, the only news stories about him have concerned corruption allegations.
Thinking gold bars kept at home or on one’s person has any kind of use is a fantasy for paranoid people. Beyond a few ounces, there are better options for portable assets than gold bars.
They’ll talk about shavings or minting their own coins, but even post-apocalyptic warlords don’t have time for that nonsense.
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If I remember correctly he didn’t have to pay for the Mercedes either.
But, yeah, gold bars are probably hard to launder. Maybe, not? Chop them up and sell them to one of the cash for gold operators?
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It’s this sort of BS by NJ Democrats that led to the rise of Chris Christie. Democrats have to kick this guy out, or they risk getting a Republican voted in.
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Just asking for a friend?
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I’ve been checking for months, and so far neither of my own Senators from California have made any critical public statements about Menendez at all, let alone suggest that he resign. Pretty disgraceful. I’ve written both of them demanding that they push for his removal but didn’t even receive a form-letter response from their offices.
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Wow, right on the money!
In fact, just yesterday a friend and I were discussing him buying gold bars from Costco. I couldn’t see much sense in that but he has money to throw around.
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Gold bars are way more fun to throw around and hurt more
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A friend acquired an ounce of gold in typical form, and carried it in his wallet until an emergency forced him to sell it.
His lived in an envelope, made of a type of paper I’ve never seen before nor since.
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There are places you can take gold and get at or near the spot price. It is a decent hedge against inflation and against any one fiat currency tanking. It is also more compact than stacks of cash or explaining why you are depositing stacks of Qatari Riyal.
How useful it will be during true societal collapse is debatable, but gold was valuable even before we had the concept of currency, much less money.
Anyway, we really need to get rid of this guy. It USED to be back in the day, pressure from the party to resign was enough. If he refused to go, then expel him like Santos, whose crimes he’s accused of really pale in compared to this guy.
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Had a look at his portrait, and this lept to the front of my mind, and I can’t get rid of it:
Just mirror it to get the part on the same side…
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I do have a single 1 ounce silver ingot that was given to me some years ago for taking a test drive at a car dealership. Apart from that, a few gold coins are just languishing in the safe.
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For compactness; I’ll stick with my debit card and put efforts into avoiding a societal collapse.
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The problem with gold ingots is, well, you don’t really know what’s in there. Tungsten is close enough to gold in density that gold bars “salted” with tungsten are being found when people try to melt down their gold to make something or split it open to check that its real. Gold and tungsten are both about 19.3 g/cc, so the usual density check doesn’t do the trick, you have to either use a deep-penetrating sensing setup (hazardous radiation and very expensive), or drill or otherwise physically split the bar to check for any tungsten inclusions, requiring re-melting and packaging the gold part. Many of these adulterated gold bars even have the fancy imprinting, serial numbers, and so on from legitimate suppliers so you can’t even judge a bar of gold by its cover.
The point being, if you want to sell a gold bar nowadays, of any substantial size such as those 1kg bars in the article, you can’t just drive up to your local “cash for gold” place and drive away with the ~$60k cash – they’re going to need your name, take the bar for analysis, and in a few days to weeks you may get the cash, or be told your bar was 75% tungsten and get a lot less, if anything. I’m sure there are places which have all the resources to handle the checking on-site in real time, but I noticed when these tungsten bars started showing up in the news the vast majority of the local “cash for gold” places went out of business or changed operations to something else. This makes accepting gold as a bribe somewhat problematic: you can’t just sell it without a paper trail, in case it turns out to be counterfeit, and just sitting on your desk or in a safe it doesn’t do you any more good than a paperweight. It’s just more evidence of your guilt, and an unsalable and unusable albatross lashed to your neck.
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This is one case where the Democrats don’t get to say “at least we aren’t as bad as the Republicans about this kind of thing…”, especially given that the Republicans recently ousted one of their own guys from the House before he had a criminal conviction.
George Santos is a lying criminal scumbag but Menendez is still attending classified briefings after it was revealed he is an unregistered agent of multiple foreign governments. Even by Republican standards that’s pretty bad.
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In my line of work I have access to quite a bit of tungsten in convenient form factors. Maybe I’ll try my hand at electroplating.
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Oh, I am with you. I can’t really afford gold anyway.
I know someone finding tiny bits of gold dust in south Kansas, both in a creek and even in some of his yard dirt, and it prompted me to dig out this sandy silt I saw at the park, and now I gotta slowly pan it and see if I can find a flake or large enough bit of dust. I tried two scoops and thought maybe maybe I found something…
This obviously isn’t worth it time/money wise, but I just want to be able to say I found gold in the wild.
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i wonder if - especially given all the other cash and gifts - they were more of a souvenir than anything else. like: here’s your new house, would you also like this gold bar to go with it?
it doesn’t really seem like the gold was doing anything practical for him, other than inflating his ego
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