Category: Wall of Fame Assholes

I’m No Longer Doing Business with Crossbreed Holsters

Crossbreed Holsters, as the name implies, makes some damn fine holsters. Although the religious connotations behind the name don’t really jive with me the company’s customer service and warranty are good enough that I’m willing to let it slide. At least I was. I just found out that the company is suing Alien Gear for violating its intellectual property. Those of you who have been reading this blog for a while know that I am against all forms of intellectual property so that’s the first strike. The second strike is against what the patent covers:

The abstract of the filed patent is as follows:

A concealable handgun holster is disclosed with a handgun encasement supported within clothing of a wearer by one or more attachment clips, the attachment clips being hidden “in plain sight” by decorative features that deceive an observer into thinking the clips are decorations rather than part of a holster. In preferred embodiments, the holster is a hybrid holster with a handgun encasement formed by a leather sheet attached to a rigid plastic cover, preferably made of Kydex.RTM.. The clips can be plastic or metal, preferably steel, and can be attached to the encasement by rivets, screws, or any other suitable fastening means known in the art. Decoration of the attachment clips can be by shaping of the clips, perforation of the clips with decorative shapes, engraving on the clips, printing on the clips, and/or attachment of decorative items to the clips.

Really? Crossbreed is suing because it has a patent on putting designs on belt clips that attach to holsters? That is right up there with Amazon’s patent on 1-click shopping and Microsoft’s patent on double-clicking.

Hopefully this patent gets shot down in the courts and Crossbreed is made to pay all of Alien Gear’s legal fees. Trying to take out competitors using the state’s intellectual property apparatus is low. It’s even more low when your patent is one something so glaringly stupid.

That Will Teach Him a Lesson

A woman wanted to teach her teenage son a lesson. Obviously you know where this is going. She talked to the dad and together they came up with a very clever plan that involved embarrassing their son slightly so he would learn to behave next time. Just kidding. What she actually did was plant a handgun into her son’s backpack and then reported him anonymously to the school:

A 28-year-old woman was sentenced Thursday to three years in prison for planting a pistol in a child’s backpack and anonymously reporting him to the school.

Heather Hodges, who pleaded guilty to unlawful carrying of a weapon on restricted premises in exchange for the dismissal of two lesser charges, was the live-in girlfriend of the boy’s father but they had struggled as a blended family.

Hodges wanted to teach 13-year-old James Bailey McKeegan a lesson for what she considered to be the mistreatment of her own children, ages seven and four.

So she took her boyfriend’s 9-millimeter Smith and Wesson handgun, replaced the child’s cologne and deodorant in his backpack, and then called Magnolia Junior High School from a nearby payphone to report him by name.

Yup, that sure taught him a lesson. Never trust a parental figure because they’re constantly plotting to get you into seriously trouble with the law. At least I’m assuming that was the lesson she was trying to teach the kid because I can’t see any other lesson that could have been taught from this exercise in stupidity.

Kudos go to the investigator for actually doing his job:

Retired MCSO investigator Mike Price said this was an important move, because of his experience as an interrogator, since it took multiple interviews to get Hodges to open up about what happened and her motives.

“It was very unusual,” Price said. “Initially, we wanted to know what was (McKeegan’s) intent with the pistol. Did he bring it to school to harm someone, or just to show to his friends? He kept insisting that he knew he brought a gun to school, but he didn’t realize it until the principal found the gun in his backpack. He was insistent.

“He was so consistent with his story and he came across so sincere, not just emotionally, but how he just stayed with his story and would not waver from it, that my position was that there’s something to this. I was the lone wolf at that point.”

Too many investigators would have crucified the kid regardless of his protests of innocence. Mike Price actually used his head and came to the conclusion that the kid was telling the truth. That kind of quality work is seldom witnessed this day and age and deserves to be acknowledge.

Feed the Homeless, Go to Jail

Fort Lauderdale decided that it wasn’t fighting hard enough in the war against the decided to change its strategy a bit by making it a jailable offense for many groups to feed homeless individuals:

The city of Fort Lauderdale last week passed an ordinance that effectively outlaws several humanitarian groups from feeding the homeless in public with a penalty of up to 60 days in jail. The law kicked in Friday, setting up a potential showdown between those groups and police.

[…]

Fort Lauderdale Mayor Jack Seiler said that is exactly what his city will do.

“Just because of media attention we don’t stop enforcing the law,” said Seiler. “We enforce the laws here in Fort Lauderdale.”

“So it’s fair to say if they break the law this weekend they will be arrested?” asked Norman.

“If they break the law and it’s observed by one of our law enforcement officers they are subject to arrest,” Seiler said.

On the upside one of the people who has been feeding the homeless, Micah Harris, said that he will continue to feed the homeless in spite of the damn law. It’s nice to know that there are people out there willing to give the state a gigantic middle finger. I only wish there were more.

Civil Forfeiture Laws Apparently Cover Your Identity

The war on unpatentable drugs has seen the state sink to lower and lower levels in its pursuit to arrest anybody who might challenge their corporate pharmaceutical partner’s monopolies. Civil forfeiture laws are one of the lowest levels. But it seems that civil forfeiture laws don’t just cover cash and cars. If you are suspected of being involved in a drug crime or charged with a drug crime the state can now confiscate your identity:

The Justice Department is claiming, in a little-noticed court filing, that a federal agent had the right to impersonate a young woman online by creating a Facebook page in her name without her knowledge. Government lawyers also are defending the agent’s right to scour the woman’s seized cellphone and to post photographs — including racy pictures of her and even one of her young son and niece — to the phony social media account, which the agent was using to communicate with suspected criminals.

All this, the start argues, is legal and moral as is anything that helps it fight the war on unpatentable drugs. As Radley Balko points out the state is effectively arguing that it can put people individual in very real danger if it means catching drug offenders:

The DOJ filing was in response to Arquiett’s lawsuit. Consider what the federal government is arguing here. It’s arguing that if you’re arrested for a drug crime, including a crime unserious enough to merit a sentence of probation, the government retains the power to (a) steal your identity, (b) use that identity for drug policing, thus making your name and face known to potentially dangerous criminals, (c) interact with those criminals while posing as you, which could subject you to reprisals from those criminals, (d) expose photos of your family, including children, to those criminals, and (e) do all of this without your consent, and with no regard for your safety or public reputation.

It’s funny, in a twisted way, how fervent the state has been in fighting its war on drugs at the expense of its reputation (it’s hard to believe now but before the war on drugs the state had a much higher reputation), the lives of the citizenry, and having to arm almost every police department with enough equipment to qualify them as military forces in most countries. However it can barely find the time, and often can’t, to protect the people, which we continue to hear is the primary job of the state (which is laughable to say the least).

Bombing Made Easier

Some time ago Obama declared stricter criteria for deciding who was going to get bombed and who wasn’t. This declaration was made under the auspices of reducing civilian casualties. That was then. This is now:

The White House has acknowledged for the first time that strict standards President Obama imposed last year to prevent civilian deaths from U.S. drone strikes will not apply to U.S. military operations in Syria and Iraq.

A White House statement to Yahoo News confirming the looser policy came in response to questions about reports that as many as a dozen civilians, including women and young children, were killed when a Tomahawk missile struck the village of Kafr Daryan in Syria’s Idlib province on the morning of Sept. 23.

This is why you don’t give any credence to anything politicians say. They will tell you what you want to hear and even pass regulations that make it look like they’re giving you what you want but when those regulations hinder their desires they will vanish in a puff of smoke. Keep this in mind when a politician promises you something because that promise is empty.

I wonder if Obama wears his Nobel Peace Prize when he orders bombings just for the irony.

A Discriminatory Gun Range

I’m sure you’ve heard about the gun range that decided to ban Muslims from its property. If you want a writeup that includes the names of the range and its owner you can find a good one over at Gun Nuts Media. Needless to say I’m not going to provide the name of the range because I don’t want to give free publicity to a range operated by bigots. In fact I feel kind of dirty even bringing this up because I know the owner is reveling in the publicity stemming from this stunt.

As you know I don’t really care about the legality of this or what the courts might do. The state isn’t in my pantheon of gods so what it might do is irrelevant. What I will say is that this is the kind of shit gun control advocates love to read about. Here we have a story involving a gun owner being a bigot towards and entire group of people. Besides this being a propaganda wet dream for anti-gunners it’s also an example of how fucking gullible some people are.

If you’ve been watching the daily Two Minutes Hate, and I know you are all good citizens of Oceania so you have, you know that Emmanuel Goldstein is a Muslim and therefore we must all hate Muslims. Most of us who have enough intelligence to discern propaganda from reality give little heed to the Two Minutes Hate. But a lot of people, especially self-proclaimed conservatives, lap this shit up and ask for more. They’re probably working on designs for the arm bands they’re planning on making every Muslim wear as a demonstration of their hatred of Goldstein and his religion.

But the truth is that there are roughly 7 billion people on this planet and 1.6 billion of them are Muslim. That’s right, almost a quarter of the entire population of this planet are Muslim. If Islam really was a religion of violence a huge number of us would be dead. But Islam is just like any other major religion, it has some crazies mixed in with a vast majority of good people. So when idiots ban all Muslims from their shooting range they’re really performing an act of collective punishment against a vast number of good people for the actions of a handful of assholes. I really hate bigots and that hatred makes me hope that that shooting range will go bankrupt over this.

I Wonder if Obama Wears is Nobel Peace Prize Whenever He Orders Bombings

If there’s one thing to say about Obama it’s that his legacy will go down in the history books. Specifically it will go down in the Guinness Book of World Records as the most countries bombed by a Nobel Peace Prize recipient:

The U.S. today began bombing targets inside Syria, in concert with its lovely and inspiring group of five allied regimes: Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Jordan.

I think it’s going to be a while before another person is able to beat this world record. Speaking of Obama’s pre-presidential anti-war legacy, he has also been urging people to support war:

On the eve of Sept. 11, President Barack Obama on Wednesday made a prime-time plea for Americans to support an open-ended war on the brutal fighters of the Islamic State — an escalating Middle East campaign with ill-defined conditions for victory and a timetable that will likely take it into his successor’s term.

This is what happens when you hand a Nobel Peace Prize to somebody who didn’t actually do anything to further peace. If you remember Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize for not being Bush. How ironic that Obama has turned out to be George W. Bush II.

Be Careful When Defending Your Home

I’m guessing, based on what I commonly write about, most of you reading this post have some kind of home defense plan. If you don’t waiting until somebody is kicking down your door at oh dark thirty probably isn’t the best time to develop one. But whether you already have a plan or are developing a plan make sure you keep one thing in mind: if the thugs kicking down your door at 05:30 unannounced are wearing a badge you may be killed even if you survive the initial ordeal:

Prosecutors will seek the death penalty against a man charged in the shooting death of a veteran Killeen police officer.

Marvin Louis Guy, 49, has been indicted for capital murder in the shooting death of police Detective Charles “Chuck” Dinwiddie, 47, and is named in indictments charging three counts of attempted capital murder, as well.

During a hearing Thursday, Bell County District Attorney Henry Garza said he’ll seek the death penalty.

The charges stem from a shooting, which occurred as officers served a so-called no-knock search warrant just after 5:30 a.m. May 9 at 1104 Circle M Dr. Apt. 3 in Killeen.

In other words you better have some good fucking night visions because you can’t safely assume that just because somebody is kicking down your door in the wee hours of the morning that you have a valid self-defense claim. If you fail to see those little badges and assume the invaders are non-state thugs and thus believe you can defend yourself you may very well end up facing the death penalty.

Oh, and if you’re wondering, after 12 rigorous hours of searching the home the police didn’t find any drugs.

The Double Standards of Police Dogs

It’s no secret that police officers love executing dogs. In fact officers murdering dogs has become so common that there’s a term for it: puppycide. What makes matters worse is that officers who shoot a dog seldom face any consequences. On the other hand if you shoot a police dog the wrath and fury of Hell itself will fall upon you. This is one of those fun double standards that are common in police states. Once you pin a badge to something it suddenly becomes more important than the commoners. But what happens when a badged creature kills another badged creature? What if a police dog is killed by a police officer due to that officer’s negligence? It’s a question many have probably wondered but now we know:

DUPLIN COUNTY, NC (WWAY) — A Duplin County Sheriff’s K-9 died last month after sitting in a hot squad car all night.

The sheriff disciplined Kela’s handler, but the punishment is not as harsh as some people think it should be.

“I just think it’s crazy, because they get on everyone else for leaving their animals in the car and dying, and they want to throw them in jail, but they can’t do nothing about their own officer that kills one of their K9s,” Duplin County resident Michael Foss said.

All badges are equal, but some badges are more equal than others. It seems that a police dog is a sworn officer unless it’s killed by a human police officer. So now we know that a badged dog is worth more than a commoner but a badged human is worth more than a badged dog.