Robin Hood Explained

If you've been following politics lately, you may have noticed that the political campaign for the President of the United States of America has devolved into name-calling. The current President has called his opponent "Romney Hood", and the response has been that this is "Obamaloney".

Leaving that aside, there's a huge error here, and I want to take a moment to correct the record on Robin Hood.

The presidential race is a dirty, negative affair, and I don't want to see a celebrated figure like Robin Hood tarnished. For some background on this, Obama said that Romeny's policy was to raise taxes on lower income earners to offset the lowering of taxes on higher income earners. This taking from the poor and giving to the rich, Obama said, was "Robin Hood in reverse" ergo, "Romeny Hood". Let's leave the politics out of it and focus on Robin Hood.

Robin Hood didn't take money from the rich people and give the money to the poor people. That's not what happened at all.

Does anyone remember who Robin Hood's enemy was? It wasn't rich landowners, or nobles, it was The Sheriff of Nottingham. The Sheriff, as the official agent of the government, was levying extreme taxes on the people of Nottingham in order to enrich himself and expand his power. Robin Hood repeatedly fought the Sheriff's men (i.e. government tax collectors) and he stole the tax money, then gave it back to the people who were taxed so highly to begin with.

Robin Hood didn't steal private property from the rich landowners to give to the poor; he stole tax money from the government and gave it back the poor people who couldn't afford to be taxed that much.

I just wanted to clear that up for our President, since he appears to be a little fuzzy on the whole Robin Hood story.

Five Gun Myths That Everyone Believes (Thanks to Hollywood)

Pretty good list. #4 is my personal pet peeve:

Machine Guns are Magical Death Machines

Where You've Seen It:

Starship Troopers, The Mummy, Max Payne, Commando, every John Woo movie, Scarface.

The Myth:

It's an old joke by now that nobody runs out of bullets in action movies (unless it's suddenly convenient to the plot, that is). Hollywood shows some restraint with revolvers--usually no more than 10 or 11 shots per six-shot cylinder--but damn, do they go hog-wild with anything that fires full-auto. So much so that that most of us have wound up with an utterly ridiculous concept of how those guns work. They're seriously depicting these things firing a hundred times more bullets than they can actually hold.

Because you can't actually see the bullets in a machine gun, Hollywood takes this as a blank check to treat the inside of a gun as a magical bullet factory. So in Commando we see Arnold fire without changing magazines for what seems like half the movie.

Read the whole thing. It covers body armor, the silly cocking of guns, and suppressors. The examples from the movies are contrasted with real-life YouTube clips.