Modern Valiance

An ATF agent off-duty caps a guy armed with a flashlight for having an intoxicated argument with his girlfriend.  Brilliant use of force, Agent Clark.  I hope they burn you.

Crucify this "agent". Shooting a guy armed with a flashlight 5 times is justifiable force? What a tough guy. Why not just drive away, since he was in his car? Why didn't he have a non-lethal weapon like OC/CS to use instead? A regular citizen with a permit to carry would be in deep guano if he were in this situation. Why should Clark receive special treatment? Because he's a "federal" agent? Of the ATF (Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms), not the FBI! A thug with a badge is still a thug.

Gun Control Commentary

I should really quit reading CNN.  My remarks:

To all the mental midgets who want to ban guns, fine: I'll destroy mine when the police and military destroy all of theirs. After all, if guns only exist to kill people, then morally speaking police and military shouldn't have them either. Or does that badge or uniform somehow magically make them better than everyone else? Oh, I know, you wanted someone to protect you so you don't have to think about doing it yourself. Now that's sheer, irresponsible laziness.

"Benevolent law enforcement" is every bit as much an idyllic myth as "benevolent government." Gun-haters are typically the naive sort who think that trusting in a class of people with special power over everyone else is actually a desirable thing. Abuse of privilege is a truism: "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."

The Role of Ron Paul

Comments on RP winning the CPAC straw poll:

Obama's senior advisor Valerie Jarrett, who's Iranian, said it best: "that president-elect Obama is prepared to really take power and begin to rule day one." The President's job as head of the executive branch is to see that the law as put into effect by the legislative branch is carried out, not to directly wield authority over the citizenry. The administration may suggest direction to Congress, but ultimately they are the lawmakers, not the President. Legislating from the Oval Office (via executive orders and other less overt action) should be abhorred even more than Supreme Court justices legislating from the bench.

Ron Paul makes sense, and the guy is on the money on just about everything. There are two issues: 1) he's too old to take office in 2012 (Reagan was the oldest to be inaugurated at 69) and 2) he's eminently un-electable, as evidenced by censorship of his 2008 campaign, not only by the liberal media, but the neo-con media, including Fox News and the NRA.

Make no mistake, if he got on the ballot, I'd vote for him. However, my take is that Dr. Paul's role is not to become President, but to reform U.S. politics, get the right kind of people in Congress, and to pave the way for when someone like him can actually get elected.

Save the Whales but Not the Universe

I've been posting too many CNN comments lately. On the idiot activist who boarded a Japanese whaler to affect a "citizen's arrest":

Treat these "activists" for what they are: pirates and/or terrorists! Shoot 'em and dump 'em!

And:

@Guest: Way to comment, anonymous coward! Like it or not, "terrorist" is a political term. The activists have no business harassing Japanese whalers. If they don't like the law, pursue changing it in a court of law. If they don't, they're operating outside the law (by definition) and are vigilantes (if the whalers can be considered objectively criminal, which is doubtful) or terrorists (the term used against people on the wrong side of the law). They've been watching Star Trek IV too much.

Chubs on Planes

Comment on a CNN article—I'm sure I'm gonna get some hate over this one ;-)

As a frequent international traveler, I admit that I dread being seated next to a person whose girth spills over into my space. On the other hand, I can appreciate that the seats are generally too small, both in width and in depth. I'm 6' tall, of average build, so I always have my knees in the seat in front of me. As such, perhaps the available width is unreasonable as well. (Furthermore, why are the armrests so narrow?! They're barely wide enough to put one person's arm on, much less share between two people! If the adjacent passenger is large, then by default you lose the armrest....) Thus both the airlines and passengers are culpable to some degree.

Personally, I advocate charging by weight of the passenger plus luggage. (I say this as a 195-lb male who tends to take a lot in luggage.) A 90-pound woman carrying only her 5-lb handbag shouldn't pay as much as a 300-lb man with 50-lbs of luggage. Clearly they contribute differently toward the fuel usage. (All eco-activists should be for this one, since it's clearly an incentive to be greener!) Granted other public transportation like buses and trains don't do this, but they're short hop (using less fuel) and have the need to quickly board and unboard passengers, making pay-by-weight impractical. For airplanes you already have to check in, and people already seem to be willing to give in to cavity searches to board planes, so why not step on the scale? Could it be that some people fear being weighed more than being rectally probed?! ;-)

News Dump

Well, it's not news when it gets old. Maybe I should call my lingering browser windows "olds"....

Product review: Vibram Five-Fingers Classic [barefootrunner.com]
Why a Big Meal Makes You Hungry [WSJ]
Newly-Found Windows Bug Affects All Versions Since NT [Slashdot]
Why do we give to disaster relief? [CNN]
Boogie Board writing tablet [CrunchGear]
Understanding Race - Human Variation

"Common Sense" Politics

Rebuttal to a stooge in CNN commentary:

Moron! The President has to "battle" for his stated policies because a large percentage of the population thinks the policies are stupid! Certainly you're not in any position to comment on anyone else's intelligence. This administration spent more in 2009 ($1.6T) than any single year of any prior administration, and they want to spend even more? You're not even smart enough to realize that no one knows whether the varied proposed solutions will work or not -- in every piece of legislation there are unintended consequences (as well as a mountain of pork). I don't trust the stooges in Congress, Democrat or Republican, to get it right. The solution? Quit monkeying with the economy, passing so much stupid legislation, and spending money we don't have. Pretty simple, but so many "smart" people don't seem to get it!

"Climate Change" My Ass

A bit of a blurb on a CNN article on U.S. opinion of climate change going the other way:

The "need to educate the American people" ?! Please, spare me the arrogance and self-superiority complex. Educate the people when you have something worthwhile to teach other than half-baked theories. The jury is still out on "climate change" -- yeah, they had to change the name because "global warming" didn't fit the cooling that's been seen. The alarmists are insisting the problem is now now now when science takes time. Yes, we should reduce consumption. No, that doesn't mean that Al Gore and his cronies who are getting rich off of the "green" movement (sweet deal using politics to corral dollars into one's pockets) are right about what they're pushing.

Haiti Violence & Pittsburgh Racism

Commentary on a CNN article:

Who's talking about Africans? Haitians may've descended from African slaves, but it's been a while now. Were you being racist, or do you just not know where Haiti is?

This street justice seems fine to me. A judge and jury may look more formal and take longer to get the job done, but you get the same result. Think of it this way: In that situation, losing your limited supplies of food and water may mean that you perish. Maybe that guy didn't have a choice because he had nothing, but that's what happens when resources are in contention. That's why people will never stop fighting.

And yet another article on racist cops on a power trip:

If the cops didn't identify themselves verbally and pull out their badges, which I highly doubt they did, then they were 100% in the wrong. I dislike pinning things on race, but how do you chalk this one up? Lucky for the cops that the guy didn't have a CCW. It's a lot harder to be a racist psycho when your victims are packing heat.

Bye-Bye FEC

Commentary on comments in this article:

Supporters of universal health care advocate mandatory use of individual income to fund a cause that many of those individuals object to. In other words, it's theft. If UHC is such a critical issue, why not create a mandatory venue for providing care for people who can't afford it? In other words (in case you have trouble with reading comprehension), make UHC a charity that people can contribute to according to their conscience and their cash flow. Most people would agree that it's more important to take care of their own families with their incomes first. So there's a solution for you, and one that doesn't involve stealing from the public.

Also:

Who's the brilliant person in the White House, the Presidential chef?

Seriously, though, you should be happy about this. It means that Hollywood and the bevy of liberal tech CEOs (Steve Jobs of Apple and Eric Schmidt of Google come to mind) can spend their billions on their causes. Who specifically were you thinking of?

The fewer unnecessary laws, the better. We'll see how things go. SCOTUS can always reverse the decision in review of a later court case.

Also:

Hey, remember, the USA is a democratic republic, as in *Republic*an, and not a direct democracy. Hah! Also, your opinion doesn't represent that of everyone else, so keep your blanket pronouncements of disgracefulness to yourself unless you can provide a cogent reason as to why you think that is.

News Dump

• Google hacked, may leave China [Google, CNN, c|net]
• Wi-Fi powered gadget charger @CES [c|net] - I had an idea a few years back on how to monetize wireless power...this is getting too close for comfort
• LPD displays [xconomy linked from /.] - seems like the phosphor-zapping technology found in CRTs just won't die?
• Genetically modified corn is bad for you [International Journal of Biological Sciences] - the paleos say plain corn ain't good for you, but then again the good stuff made from corn, bourbon whiskey, ain't good for you either

Full-Body Scanners

Of course the scumbags would have a way to store and forward the images from the full-body scanners. It's evidence, right? Plus, the TSA mofos need something to jack off to when they get bored. I mean, they even have a little room to do it in! Anyone who doesn't think that the body scanners are an outrageous violation of civil rights deserves to be decapitated with a dull knife.

A link on /. points out an issue in the UK that scanning kids violates child porn laws. Especially if the images can be stored!

As typical, some idiot from a repressed 2nd-world country (the UK) posted that guns are the problem in the U.S. An interesting viewpoint followed.

Oh please! can we just cut through the bullshit? You are probably from Europe, yes? Well let me explain how things are here in the USA: Here if you have a single dope bust the rest of your life is pretty much "deal or steal" since nobody will hire you for shit and many aid programs won't do jack for your junkie ass, so you have this HUGE underclass, that can't get any legitimate work, yet have their dope habit to pay for. How do you think they are gonna do that, hmmm?

By robbing your dumb ass, that's how!!! You wanna know what would happen if you magically made all guns disappear from the USA tomorrow? I'll tell you what would happen, you would have machete slaughters all over the news like you get in Africa, that's what. Here the middle class is all but extinct, the underclass is growing by the day, and many have no jobs, no future, and no reason to give a fuck about you and your ideals. Do you HONESTLY think making all the guns disappear if gonna make Johnny Junkie gonna forget about the pain gnawing in his guts because he ain't had his fix? Get fucking real pal. There are places in every major city here where even the cops are afraid to go after dark. You think no guns is gonna make those into happy places?

As long as you have huge masses of poor and drug addicts with no future and no reason to give a fuck you're gonna have violence, I don't give a crap if you ban guns or not. BTW drugs are illegal too, but I can score anything I want in under 30 minutes, you think I wouldn't be able to do the same with a gun?

The Decade From Hell?

A Cato Institute VP posits that 2000-2009 wasn't the "decade from hell". He does have a few convincing arguments. But what about things like intrusive full-body scanners in airports, irrational health care legislation, and arbitrary "hate crime" legislation, forcing the U.S. economy a leap further toward a socialist police state?

I for one am not counting on the country to remain stable. With all the insanity going on, it can't. Perhaps stability was only an illusion to begin with, though.

Comment on Int'l Marriage

My remarks on an article:

I bet you don't have many friends from other countries, eh? Indeed, most people don't care about issues that don't affect them. Even so, America's origins are in its immigrants -- the opinion you're espousing is quite un-American.

As long as the institution of marriage exists, the U.S. has legal responsibility to handle diplomatic cases involving cross-border custody. Now if we got rid of marriage, then I might agree with your position. Even as a small-government advocate, diplomatic issues are one of the few legitimate roles of the Federal government.

I would be interested to see the divorce statistics for marriages where both parties are from the same culture versus where one or both parties are foreign-born. My guess is that they aren't that different.

There were several problems with the guy who tried to steal back his kids: 1) he was married in Japan, and never divorced there, 2) he became a naturalized Japanese citizen, thereby losing his U.S. citizenship, 3) his kids were born in Japan, and 4) he cheated on his wife before divorcing her in the U.S. and marrying his mistress. Not exactly an open-and-shut case in his favor.

Immigration Comments

Navarette is a dillweed in general, but he knows how to get a rise out of the reader.

Useyerhead: I agree that it sucks that Spanish gets special treatment. I would require English for all legal doings, but suppose that signage is at the discretion of the locality -- their tax dollars.

In my case, I'm a native English speaker, but speak Japanese with my wife. Since I'm not white, I know that some people are probably put off when we're out and not talking in English. She can understand English well enough, so it's not an issue. Not having most people know what we're talking about is way useful =)

Incidentally, in the more metropolitan areas of Japan, most signs also have English (sometimes Chinese and Korean also). Of course, we occupied them, so that's not so strange.

YBR: I'm mixed as well, although not as resentful of being treated differently. People think what they're going to think. How you're perceived in the long term is up to you. On the other hand, I do have a CCW just in case: "minorities" in particular benefit from being armed.

Prohibition Commentary

Just had a discussion with the co-op in the lab about the "war on drugs", then I hit this article on CNN.

Agreed that the "war on drugs" is the same as the Prohibition. The problem with legalizing drug use is that what are all those law enforcement officers going to do afterward? Several months after the 21st Amendment repealed the Prohibition, Congress passed the National Firearms Act, giving the long arm of the law another, similarly injust, malum prohibitum to crack down on.

The populus still seems to be torn on the morality of the drug issue. A number of people support the legalization of marijuana, but they have yet to reach the kind of critical mass that is necessary to sway the lawmakers. Part of the issue is how hard the crackdown is for drug-related violations of the law: People who would be inclined to conduct civil disobedience might think twice about an infraction that could land them serious time and a felony record. No, the government is seriously out of control in forcing citizens to play by their rules.

Medical

The wife was asking about whether or not we should have the kid get the H1N1 vaccine. Personally I don't like flu shots because I got the flu from one the last time I did. However, since the wife and kid are going to PAIIR now and are additionally exposed potential sources of infection, it may be a wise idea.

CNN had posted a couple things regarding the H1N1 vaccine, basically cribbed from the CDC [1 2].

There was also a decent piece regarding how to avoid having mistaken operations performed on you in the hospital.

S.G. told me about thiomersal/thimerosol in multi-dose vaccines. I'd heard of the alleged relationship between vaccines and autism, but not the mechanism. Maybe there's no correlation, but why the hell should I take a chance with my kid?

Wingnuts, huh?

On a CNN op-ed "piece" from 10/7: Since when is the 'center' the right place to be? They're a bunch of people who don't stand for anything substantial and don't really care about anything but their tiny little lives. The article attempted to seem unbiased by mentioning leftists, but obviously this was a tirade against the so-called "right-wing extremists". Wingnut? Better than being a fucknut centrist, Johnnie Avlon.

The Viability of Monogamy

CNN published an article on the viability of monogamy, which was likely intended to inflame. There was a good point or two, for instance:

"[Americans] think if an affair happens, it's the end of the story, the fairy tale has been completely shattered, the person isn't the person we thought they were. The knee-jerk reaction is you have to get a divorce," Druckerman said.

"[In France,] there's less of a sense that the person who cheats is a terrible human being or that this is a marker of a person's whole character."

Perhaps that's the Puritanical character of the country showing up. And yet, even saying that it's bad, it still happens—the forbidden fruit must have the most attraction.

Well, I suppose the people who get the most bent out of shape when a partner cheats are the ones who have the lowest self-esteem. In that case, infidelity impacts the person's self-image. I would think that most people who have an affair do so not to hurt their partner. On one hand, if the expectation is total fidelity, then a breach is a violation of trust. On the other hand, one could view it as "no harm, no foul", or that one has to do things to make oneself happy. I would define the line between the pursuit of happiness and hedonism as the presence of patience and circumspect in the former, and wanton shortsightedness in the latter.

Maybe. I haven't hit that seven-year itch yet.

Commentary on Health Care

Forgot to post this one. CNN had an article that was actually an opposing viewpoint to the one they usually espouse regarding health care. However, I think their motive was to paint the opponents of universal health care as heartless, money-grubbing bastards. A lot of the commenters pointed out that "afford" to a doctor is still a lot higher than a lot of people. That pisses me off! Yeah, a doctor spends like 10 years in college to learn his trade. I bet a lot of those irate commenters are unskilled laborers who can't fathom the forbearance of investment in education. What's so bad about wanting to secure a financial future for oneself and family? Where does one draw the line between prudence and greed? The self-righteous shitheads who are pro-UHC seem to imply that they have it all figured out. Too bad their blustering is all for show.