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.
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.
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.)
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.)
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.
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.
the kids is playing them vid-jo games again.
We have now passed that developmental milestone where the kids can out-play the Old Man on the Xbox 360. They each got a new 360 game under the tree last month, and both of them have finished the “Brave” game from start to finish. I know that as children of the Gadget Generation, mastery of a gaming console is practically encoded in their DNA, but it’s still amazing to see how quickly they figured out the Xbox controller and the game mechanics without any prior instruction (and in Lyra’s case, without being able to read the on-screen directions.) This is especially remarkable because our gaming console prior to the Xbox 360 was a Nintendo Wii, which has a controller that’s completely unlike the two-handed/dual-stick multi-button affairs for the Xbox and the PS3.
(I tried a first-person shooter on the console once and couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn from the inside. As a PC gamer, my hands and muscle memory are calibrated for mouse and WASD keys.)
It’s absolutely amazing to see the strides that gaming consoles have made since the days of the Atari 2600. Playing Iron Man or Batman:Arkham Asylum on the Xbox 360 driving a 47” screen with the audio coming from a Bose home theater speaker set would have reduced 12-year-old Marko from 1983 to an incoherently blubbering pile of gamer bliss.
Now I just need to get the kids their own World of Warcraft accounts and teach them tanking and healing, so we can do our own little in-house instance groups on Saturday evenings.
the right to own and drive cars.
Forty thousand people die on American highways every year. Do we just shrug that number off as the price of freedom?
Why is it perfectly legal to buy a 500HP Corvette capable of 180MPH top speeds in a country where no state has a legal speed limit higher than 75 or 80MPH? And you can buy those irresponsible death machines without a license, or any proof of mental or physical competence to handle a high-performance sports car. Give me a good reason why we shouldn’t ban those things?
We can start with sensible car control and ban cars with “racing style” features first. If it has any two of the features listed below, it’s a racing-style car and has no place on civilized streets:
- Front or rear spoilers (whether add-on or molded into the bodywork)
- Hood scoop
- Decals
- Five-point harness (no reason for those unless you intend to wreck at high speeds)
- Tailpipes with a diameter of larger than <$ARBITRARY_NUMBER>
- Cockpit tachometers
- Manual gearboxes and stick shifters (to include those loophole “Tiptronic” and similar semi-manual shift features of automatic transmissions)
- Bucket seats
- “Race car style” engine start buttons that let you turn on the vehicle without manually turning a key
- Road clearance of less than twelve inches
- Alloy rims mounting tires wider than P185/75R14
Can we all get behind this, folks? After all, the Constitution doesn’t recognize a right to drive, and if it did, it would refer to horse buggies at best, not 200MPH death machines that can catapult the driver from 0 to 60 in four seconds.
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.
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.