If you believe your government and the national news media, the pornscan opt-out is so far a bust. Only a few American fliers are crotchety enough to object to displaying their junk to total strangers. When an intimate grope is the alternative, I suppose that's understandable.
If we paid attention, we saw it coming. Various polls have shown 70 to 80 per cent of us are willing to trade our Fourth Amendment protections for the illusion of security.
I live mostly rural these days and fly seldom, but I remain an American citizen who understands that what happens to my fellows in mobbed airports will, in due course, happen to all of us somewhere.
Do you doubt that the bureaucratic imperative of mission creep will eventually strip your mother naked during rush hour in the D.C.Metro system, at the AmTrak depot, and before she's allowed to enter a crowded theatre?
Nov 23, 2010
North Korea
Wait a minute. Didn't we pay up when Kim demanded a bribe a year or so ago?
Maybe it would be easier just to put him on our MasterCard. Automatic pay the first of every month.
Maybe it would be easier just to put him on our MasterCard. Automatic pay the first of every month.
Nov 22, 2010
Traver
The new BATF boss-designate likes to crow about his achievement in arresting "18 people who bought and traded 'illegal' guns at a shop in Rockford, Ill." He extrapolates; "Every illegal firearm removed from the hands of an unlawful possessor represents one or more potential violent crimes that was not and will not be committed..."
"Was not?" So, if you seize a gun at midnight there will not be a violent crime committed with it the previous noon? (Do you happen to drive a DeLorean?)
Look, Traver, we can create a better dialogue here if you familiarize yourself with some simple tenets of logic. Among other things, if the firearm is "illegal" then its owner is by definition "unlawful," and there's no need for the repetition -- beyond the euphonic requirement of cheap and redundant rhetoric.
Never mind your reliance again on "potential" for violence. We've all had enough of our Masters' protecting us from potential by any means their propaganda arms can shove down our throats. Two ounces of apple juice in a baby's sippy-cup is a potential 911 replay. Driving my pickup to the lumber yard creates a potentially tropical antarctic. Every Viagra tab is a potential geriatric rapist.
---
As you might expect, Paul Helmke is conducting the Traver-As-Second-Coming Hallelujah Chorus:
"Was not?" So, if you seize a gun at midnight there will not be a violent crime committed with it the previous noon? (Do you happen to drive a DeLorean?)
Look, Traver, we can create a better dialogue here if you familiarize yourself with some simple tenets of logic. Among other things, if the firearm is "illegal" then its owner is by definition "unlawful," and there's no need for the repetition -- beyond the euphonic requirement of cheap and redundant rhetoric.
Never mind your reliance again on "potential" for violence. We've all had enough of our Masters' protecting us from potential by any means their propaganda arms can shove down our throats. Two ounces of apple juice in a baby's sippy-cup is a potential 911 replay. Driving my pickup to the lumber yard creates a potentially tropical antarctic. Every Viagra tab is a potential geriatric rapist.
---
As you might expect, Paul Helmke is conducting the Traver-As-Second-Coming Hallelujah Chorus:
"Apparently the gun guys are upset that Traver did a TV interview where he helped demonstrate the lethality of an AK-47, while explaining, 'Pull the trigger and you can mow down people'.”
Get an Escalade. Push the accelerator and you can mow down people.
Then Traver added that, “the growing frequency of gang members and drug dealers using heavy caliber military-type weapons” is a problem we should be concerned about.
I don't know if the tendency is growing or not, and neither do you. Point 1: We don't know how many "gang members and drug dealers" exist. Point 2: We don't now how many of them use "heavy caliber military-type weapons." and neither do you. As a matter of fact, when objective and hard-working scholars who have investigated for years are asked about the the total number of guns in the country they reply, "Uhh, we really don;t know. We think about 200 million, or maybe 290 million, possibly 300 million but, but, but...".
So forgive us, Messrs. Helmke and Traver if we pee on your colongenic data about trends in tiny unknown subsets of an uncertain total number.
---
Just one more thing. You guys keep whining about "heavy caliber military-type weapons"in civilian hands, and you like to use the AK47 round -- 7.62 x 39 -- as an example.
Ballistic charts are free. They're on the internet. You can use them without applying for a big research appropriation. If you do, you'll discover that the AK47's heavy caliber is about the same as my great-grandpa's .30-30 lever gun.
(H/T Tam)
Get an Escalade. Push the accelerator and you can mow down people.
Then Traver added that, “the growing frequency of gang members and drug dealers using heavy caliber military-type weapons” is a problem we should be concerned about.
I don't know if the tendency is growing or not, and neither do you. Point 1: We don't know how many "gang members and drug dealers" exist. Point 2: We don't now how many of them use "heavy caliber military-type weapons." and neither do you. As a matter of fact, when objective and hard-working scholars who have investigated for years are asked about the the total number of guns in the country they reply, "Uhh, we really don;t know. We think about 200 million, or maybe 290 million, possibly 300 million but, but, but...".
So forgive us, Messrs. Helmke and Traver if we pee on your colongenic data about trends in tiny unknown subsets of an uncertain total number.
---
Just one more thing. You guys keep whining about "heavy caliber military-type weapons"in civilian hands, and you like to use the AK47 round -- 7.62 x 39 -- as an example.
Ballistic charts are free. They're on the internet. You can use them without applying for a big research appropriation. If you do, you'll discover that the AK47's heavy caliber is about the same as my great-grandpa's .30-30 lever gun.
(H/T Tam)
Nov 21, 2010
Trevanian's Pig Weather
Questions arrive here about the meaning of "pig weather."
It denotes a land saturated with unpleasantness from the skies. Mist, chill, sporadic rain accumulating as filthy slush. Low grey clouds portending not storms but a long siege of wet and boring discontent with the world outside your window, neither the balminess of a good spring and summer, nor the crispness of autumn, nor the challenge of winter's worst. Neither one thing nor another, merely enervation.
The phrase comes to me from Trevanian's great and gentle novel, "The Main," set in Montreal and following an adventure of aging detective Claude LaPointe. Trevanian called it a roman policier. Most Americans would probably refer to is as a police procedural, but that shorthand connotes too much of the mindless whodunit.
It is certainly possible that some better novel has been written about culture clash and human frailty and the innate compassion of the best police officers seeking to temper human violence. I haven't found it, and that is not for a lack of looking.
It denotes a land saturated with unpleasantness from the skies. Mist, chill, sporadic rain accumulating as filthy slush. Low grey clouds portending not storms but a long siege of wet and boring discontent with the world outside your window, neither the balminess of a good spring and summer, nor the crispness of autumn, nor the challenge of winter's worst. Neither one thing nor another, merely enervation.
The phrase comes to me from Trevanian's great and gentle novel, "The Main," set in Montreal and following an adventure of aging detective Claude LaPointe. Trevanian called it a roman policier. Most Americans would probably refer to is as a police procedural, but that shorthand connotes too much of the mindless whodunit.
It is certainly possible that some better novel has been written about culture clash and human frailty and the innate compassion of the best police officers seeking to temper human violence. I haven't found it, and that is not for a lack of looking.
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