Author: Marko

in the news. masters and servants.

a thought on the LAPD manhunt.

torrance

Only the police should have guns. Because with qualified immunity, they’re not personally liable for turning uninvolved trucks into Swiss cheese in the middle of a residential neighborhood.

If you think that the LAPD shooting up random pickup trucks in pursuit of a single threatening suspect is almost comically excessive, think about what would happen if DiFi gets her “assault weapons” ban through Congress, just a half dozen of those retrograde gun nuts decide that they won’t give up their property without a fight, and a few of L.A.’s Finest get injured or killed. The resulting mobilization and Fourth Amendment Gang Rape Party would make the L.A. riots and the Katrina aftermath look like a post-lunch corporate PowerPoint presentation.

Then multiply that kind of mayhem times, say, the number of large metropolitan areas with heavily geared and militarized police departments. Sounds like a recipe for kicking off a peaceful and violence-free America, doesn’t it?

in the news. masters and servants.

a suggestion.

“Assault weapons”. “High-capacity magazines.” “Military-style rifles”.

The Department of Homeland Security buys 1.6 billion rounds of small-arms ammunition in just a little over a year, and 7,000 fully automatic machine guns for “personal protection”. Police departments all over the country have tanks and drones, and you can’t tell the difference between a police SWAT team and a Marine infantry section at first glance anymore. One guy threatens the LAPD personally and kills a cop, and they piss all over the Fourth Amendment and make the whole city a free-fire zone in search of the suspect.

I suggest we just call them “police-style weapons” instead.

intertubes flotsam. masters and servants.

a left argument for gun rights.

I’ve had an essay in the works for weeks now. It’s mostly for my liberal and left-leaning friends and lays out in great detail why opposition to civilian gun ownership is fundamentally un-progressive, historically and philosophically speaking.

And out comes The Polemicist with an article that precisely lays out the argument for gun ownership from a left-socialist perspective, thereby blowing all my work away.

It’s a very good and thorough read, and immensely thought-provoking.

castle frostbite. new hampshah. weather.

castle frostbite is IFR.

Wee bit foggy out today, eh wot?

PEA. SOUP.

47 degrees after weeks of snow and biting cold will do that. I didn’t even see the school bus coming until it was about 30 yards away.

asshole of the month. in the news. masters and servants.

he didn’t see the “no violence” sign.

Rachel Lucas wins at Internets again, this time for her spot-on assessment of the effectiveness of restraining orders.

Of course, if the woman in the video gets a gun and a carry permit to protect herself from a violent psycho who thinks nothing of beating the shit out of her in the middle of a courthouse, nothing good can come from it, because he’s only going to take the gun away and use it against her. Because 240-pound males have no way to kill a woman if they don’t have access to guns. Or something.

Now imagine that assault in the woman’s kitchen at 2 in the morning, and her with nothing but a cell phone in her hand. There was a cop within shouting distance of that fracas, and Violent Psycho still had enough time to hurt or kill her. What chance would she have had in her kitchen at 2AM, armed with nothing but a cell phone?

Oh, she got the restraining order. A temporary one. And he got a $25,000 bond, which means he has to put up the princely sum of $2,000 before he can walk the streets again until his trial. But I’m sure it will be fine. He doesn’t seem like the type to hold a grudge, or violently lose control of himself.

masters and servants. things that go boom.

the amazing morphing definition.

When you or I have them, they’re called “assault weapons”, and they’re made for nothing but killing large numbers of people rapidly, and totally useless for self-defense besides.

When law enforcement officers have them, they’re called “patrol rifles”, and they’re the best tool for protecting innocent citizens from violent criminals.

When the government orders 7,000 of them, they’re called “personal defense weapons”, and the DHS wants them because they are “suitable for self-defense in close quarters.”

Which is it? Are they only made for killing lots of people rapidly, or “suitable for self-defense in close quarters”? If they’re only good for rapid indiscriminate killing, why would cops and DHS agents need them? And if they have a legit self-defense function, why should they be banned for civilian use? The Federal government seems to think that these kinds of rifles are ideal for personal protection, otherwise they’d be ordering something else to fit the “personal defense” role. They can, after all, order whatever they want.

(And the versions ordered by the DHS are fully automatic machine guns, unlike the semi-automatic rifles available to Joe and Jane Citizen.)

tv guide.

tonight’s TV guide listing.

CINEMAX

8:00pm “ZULU” (2013), 120min. (PG-13)

In this 2013 remake of the classic ZULU, the British at Rorke’s Drift fight South African steampunk Nazis, and the Brits prepare for battle by building a combat mech out of mealie boxes. (Starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Lt. Chard, Summer Glau as Lt. Bromhead, Christoph Waltz as Oberst von Umlaut. Directed by Michael Bay.)

health. in the news.

the cost of end-of-life care.

So the new Japanese finance minister said something about not keeping old people artificially alive because it incurs unnecessary public costs, and some folks went predictably ballistic over it. See? This is an example of socialized medicine! They’ll just discard old folks when they’re no longer useful! ZOMG DEATH SQUADS!

Here’s the thing I don’t get about a lot of Conservatives, who are for the most part stringently against socialized health care:

Most of lifetime Medicare costs are incurred in the last year of life and palliative care. You can’t bitch about the insane costs of the health care system and then not have a problem with taxpayers being on the hook for a quarter million dollars so that a 93-year-old lady can live for another five months in a nursing home, bedridden and unaware of her surroundings. (Ask anyone who works in one—a lot of those places are about “let’s bill what we can while the patient is alive, because at death, that money is ‘wasted’.”) But suggest that it may not be a wise expenditure to buy Grandma another five months of morphine-hazed semi-sleep with a suitcase full of looted public cash, and people flip out. How dare you quantify the value of a life! That’s a slippery slope! You want to disconnect feeding tubes and respirators next to save a few bucks?

Well, if every life is so valuable that no amount of public money should be spared to extend the life of a 93-year-old hospice patient a few months, then STOP BITCHING ABOUT TAXES. And stop bitching about socialized health care. If five months of your grandma’s life are worth an unlimited amount of taxpayer cash, so are five months of life for the bum under the highway bridge who pickled his liver with cheap hooch for twenty years. Anything else is a slippery slope, right?

It seems to me that if the pro-life Conservatives were consistent in their views on the priceless nature of life, they’d be flag bearers for socialized medicine.

family.

ten years of us.

Robin and I got married on this day ten years ago. The ceremony took place in a ramshackle little Baptist church on Chapman Highway and was performed by a little preacher with a speech impediment. His wife managed to blur every single shot she took with my camera. The day couldn’t have been more perfect.

Happy tenth anniversary, my love. I don’t know how I managed to con you into putting up with me, but I’m glad I got so lucky.