Category: in the news.

in the news.

LOLjet.

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“Hi! I’m Mahmoud from Teheran. I’m into religion, Jew-hating, and building really big model airplanes.”

Iran just unveiled its next thirty-twelfth generation air superiority stealth fighter, the Revell  Qaher-313.

That thing looks a lot like the fighter planes I designed when I was twelve. Downswept wings! Huge canards! Outswept vertical stabilizers! Aggressively angular fuselage! Apparently, Iranian engineering technology is so advanced that aviation experts can’t see a single rivet, weapons hard point, or service hatch on the thing. It’s almost like they made it completely out of model resin.

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.

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.

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.

idiots. in the news.

this person’s vote cancels out yours.

And this is why we don’t ever read comment sections at YouTube or CNN or pretty much any news site on the Interwebs:

I think currency is the root of all evil. Take away all the inequality and government interference laws like drug and prostitution,etc etc then you take away any reason to commit a crime

I would say that’s a stunning display of lacking education, but there is of course the possibility that this commenter is a humanities professor.

idiots. in the news.

a thrill before dying.

Teenage flight student steals plane for a joyride with two buddies, crashes same, and kills everyone on board.

That’s some stunning overconfidence right there. Doesn’t even have his pilot license, has only flown a single-engine Cessna a few times, and takes a twin out at night in IFR conditions, with predictable results. He may have had a few hours in a flight school 172, maybe even soloed one, but Twins are a little trickier to handle than single-engine planes, and they are much less forgiving of pilot error. Three lives snuffed out and a perfectly good Piper Twin Comanche turned to charred scrap metal, all because of teenage hormones switching off good judgment.

One guy in the comment section probably has it right when he predicts that the owner of that Twin Comanche will get sued by the families of the deceased teenagers, for failing to adequately secure his bird against unqualified kids flying off with it.

in the news. masters and servants. things that go boom.

the impartial media and virtual scarlet letters.

So a newspaper called The Journal News put up an interactive map marking the location of every single registered pistol permit holder in two New York counties. Predictably, they’re getting a little bit of flak for that.

Also predictably, the paper’s defense is all “that’s public information, and the public has a right to know.” This is a weaselly cop-out. Lots of things are public information, but not smart to collate and present on an interactive map for easy access. Can you imagine the (rightful) uproar if  a conservative-leaning rag published the names and addresses of every single gay married couple in their county? It would be correctly interpreted as an attempt to intimidate and stigmatize the gay couples, and lambasted as a shopping list for gay-bashers to find homes to deface and people to harass. Yes, you can still get that information if you really want it, but you’d have to file a FOIA request and put together all the data by yourself, which is not something the average knuckle-dragging gay-hater is going to do.

To anyone who is entirely honest with themselves, the newspaper’s publication of gun permit holders has only one purpose: to stigmatize gun owners along the lines of sex offenders. There is no public safety interest in this. The map only shows the legally licensed handguns in the area. It does not show the illegally owned guns (which are far more likely to be used in a crime), nor does it show shotguns and rifles, which do not need to be registered in New York state. (With all the concern about “assault rifles”, why publish a map that only shows the handgun owners, and only the properly licensed ones at that?) More importantly, it also exposes the “call for sensible gun laws” as a lie. The map makes no distinction between someone with a .22 target pistol, a five-shot revolver, or a Glock 19 with those evil high-capacity magazines. The people on that map are already following the “sensible laws” that are being proposed by anti-gun activists on a federal level. They are a.) licensed, b.) registered, and c.) subject to an “assault weapons ban” (New York has one that closely follows the expired 1994 AWB they want revived on the federal level.) Why pick on the legal handgun owners if assault rifles are the problem? Why pick on the legal handgun owners if lack of registration or licensing are the problem? Why do so in a state that already has mandatory handgun registration and an assault weapons ban?

The answer, of course, is that they don’t care about that sort of stuff. To them “sensible gun laws” really mean “no guns in private hands”. They also don’t care about the public safety they proclaim their map serves. People who care about public safety don’t provide criminals with an easy-to-use map of who owns guns and who doesn’t. If you know where the legally owned guns are, you know where to break in while the home owner is at work. If you know where there’s no legally registered gun, you know where to break in if you want fewer occupational hazards. And if you’re a disgruntled ex-husband whose battered former spouse chose to back up the restraining order with a pistol permit and a .38 in her purse, you can find her new address and map out directions to her place with two mouse clicks. No, there is nothing you can do with that sort of map that actually enhances public safety.

But like I said—that’s not what it’s for. It’s an attempt of a nominally impartial newspaper to influence a public policy debate by taking a side and clumsily attempting to stigmatize the other side by equating them with sex offenders. Regardless of where you stand on guns and private gun ownership, that sort of tactic should raise eyebrows.

in the news.

poor wittle mass murderer.

Anders Breivik, the Norwegian crackpot who massacred 77 people last year, isn’t happy about the conditions at his new residence at Ila Prison near Oslo. Apparently he doesn’t get enough butter for his bread, and the handcuffs they put on him when he gets moved around are “too sharp for his wrists.”

Let me just get out my really tiny violin case for the appropriate music.

It’s amazing how concerned with human rights and existential comforts someone can get who snuffed out seventy-seven lives without any concern whatsoever for their human rights. His Viking ancestors would have treated his offenses rather more harshly, to put it mildly.