Rolling Advertisements and the Lead Ammunition Loophole

Very seldom can you get two completely unrelated topics into one news article. But that’s what I found. The main gist of the story is talking about how California is planning to make money. They’ve tossed around tons of ideas but this one most certainly takes the cake. California is looking into using electronic license plates so they can turn your car into a rolling billboard. The idea is if the car is stopped for more than four seconds the license plate goes from your standard license plate to a billboard displaying advertisements.

I’m sure no mechanism would be introduce to opt out of certain adds leading some hilarity such as a car with an anti-gun bumper sticker displaying an add for the NRA or visa versa. Oh wait this California they probably won’t allow the NRA to advertise. Either way not only would you get the privilege of paying California for a new license plate but you would also get to be an advertisement system for them.

Things I’m curious about are how do they plan on updating the ads? Cellular connection maybe? So then California would have to pay up for cellular data plans to one or more of the big carriers. I also couldn’t wait to see some ingenious hacker get into their electronic license plate and display far more fun and interesting things.

But that’s not all this other little quip was in the same news article:

Lead ammunition would be banned completely from state wildlife management areas under a bill by Assemblyman Pedro Nava, D-Santa Barbara. While state law already requires hunters to use nontoxic shot to hunt waterfowl and big game, certain migratory birds and small game species are not protected. Nava’s AB2223 seeks to close that loophole. He says lead ammunition can spread through the food chain when animals ingest the casings. The bill is scheduled to be heard Tuesday in the Senate Natural Resources and Water Committee.

Emphasis mine. Once again the anti-gunners are claiming a law is a loophole and it needs to be closed. I wonder what got them started with this word. Did Mr. Hennigan open up a dictionary one day and randomly come across this word? Did he think, “Gee golly that’s a neat word. It’s pretty long too so I bet I’d sound smart saying it.”

Also I find it funny how lead ammunition can spread through the food chain by animals ingesting casings. I would think that would happen if the animals ingested the lead shot not the plastic casings. It’s almost as if the person talking about this doesn’t actually know anything about the subject at hand. But that’s impossible, nobody would hire somebody who didn’t know anything about guns to write a law involving guns… oh wait.

Tornado Destruction

So we had some harsh weather here in Minnesota last night. In fact said harsh weather canceled the USPSA match. Wadena and Albert Lea didn’t have a fun night as their towns were messed up by tornadoes. Three people were killed by Mother Nature and 20 others were treated for mostly minor injuries.

Thankfully Governor Pawlenty is taking time off from his job his presidential campaign to size up the damage. Hey he still might not be doing his job but at least he’s in the state which is a huge improvement.

HTTPS Everywhere

I like this idea a lot. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has released a new plug-in for Firefox that attempts to encrypt every web page you visit via HTTPS. This prevents people from being able to sniff your web traffic when you’re browsing sites. Obviously I’m going to install it and give it a spin then let you know how well it works.

Another Senator Shows Great Ability to Manage Money

Senator Dodd sure knows how to use money. According to an article I found via Dvorak Uncensored Senator Dodd just awarded $54 million in stimulus money to a very profitable casino. Here’s the gist of it:

The tribe runs the sprawling Mohegan Sun casino, halfway between New York City and Boston, which earned more than $1.3 billion in gross revenues in 2009. Each tribe member receives a cut of the profits, a number a tribal official said was “less than $30,000” per capita per year. The stimulus money is a loan from a U.S. Department of Agriculture rural development program that is meant to help communities of less than 20,000 people that have been “unable to obtain other credit at reasonable rates and terms and are unable to finance the proposed project from their own resources.”

So some of our tax money just went to another country. Although somebody is going to yell racism because I’m bringing this up some education is truly in order. Native American (I’m not using this name to be politically correct, I’m using it so there isn’t confusion with people from India) reservations are sovereign soil, not part of the United States. We gave them land after we took it from them as compensation for practically wiping them out. Part of this compensation is the fact the land given back to them was not part of the United States but sovereign soil for the Native American tribes.

Because of this people living on Native American reservations do not pay taxes to the United States (unless they buy goods and services off of reservation land in which case they have to pay that state’s sales tax). This makes sense because they are not in the United States while on their reservations. Likewise as a mechanism for generating wealth most reservations have built casinos. Gambling is usually restricted or outright banned in most states making casino construction difficult if not impossible. Since Native Americans are not bound by the laws of the state their reservations are in they are able to build casinos.

Here’s my problem, that stimulus money is tax money. It’s money stolen by the government from it’s citizens. Now it’s being given to another nation whom do not contribute to said taxes. So I don’t care if each member of the tribe is getting less than $30,000 they shouldn’t be getting tax money since they don’t pay taxes (and they shouldn’t have to as they aren’t members of our country).

Oh I love this one:

“As with all beneficiaries of funding through this program,” said DeJong, “the loan will be repaid to USDA with interest.

Hopefully by that they don’t mean the loan will be repaid by taking government from another source as with GM.

Execution on the Cheap

I’m sure most of you have guessed I’m against the death penalty simply on the grounds that I don’t believe a government has the right to kill citizens outside of the defense of a human life (in other words the same rules that apply to the citizens apply to the government in my book). But if you’re going to execute somebody at least do it on the cheap.

At 0000 MDT Ronnie Lee Gardner was executed by .30 Winchester rifle round to the chest:

Four of the .30 calibre Winchester rifles were loaded with live bullets but a fifth carried a blank, so that none of the men would have known with certainty that he had shot a lethal round.

Gardner was asked if he had any final words and said: “I do not. No.”

He was hooded and strapped to a black metal chair, with a white target pinned to his chest.

Gardner was then shot at a range of 25ft (7.6m).

I have to say I don’t mind this method of execution if we’re going to do it. It’s cheap and effective. Lethal injection requires chemicals that I’m sure are fairly expensive, the electric chair isn’t always reliable, but good old bullets are cheap and reliable. Also this may go down at the best use of Twitter ever:

Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff used the Twitter micro-blogging site to say he had given the go-ahead for execution.

“May God grant him the mercy he denied his victims,” Mr Shurtleff tweeted.

That’s right his execution was Tweeted. I wonder if that’s a first.

I’m also not sure if I would call this an execution so much as natural selection:

He was convicted in 1985 of fatally shooting a lawyer during an attempt to escape from a court where he was facing another murder charge dating from 1984.

Real bright buddy. You’re up on murder charges so at the trail you shoot a lawyer and try to escape… from a courtroom most likely to guarded. You’re a smart one aren’t you. I guess I should say you’re were a smart one weren’t you.

But alas this method of execution was deemed too efficient and both in it’s ability to execute the target and in the small cost to the taxpayers:

Gardner, 49, chose the firing squad before Utah banned the method in 2004. Critics say it is barbaric, harking back to the Wild West.

Critics say death by firing squad is barbaric? Really? Wouldn’t it be better to say execution in general is barbaric? I mean between being electrocuted to death, injected with lethal chemicals, or shot I’d rather be shot. But the bottom line is killing somebody outside of self defense is a barbaric act. Changing the method of execution doesn’t all of the sudden make it all rainbows and unicorns.

How Much is Too Much

As I checked my Facebook feed I found a story being posted quite a bit with some interesting comments. The story is the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities Board of Trustees awarded their Chancellor a $40,000 bonus. This is pretty inflammatory news to many of my friends who are still going to college in a MNSCU school.

The Chancellor makes $360,000 a year which people are screaming is too much. So that raises the question how much is too much? For most people it’s roughly $1.00 more than they themselves make. I personally hate the phrase, “He/She gets paid too much.” Why do I hate it? Because what right does somebody have to say another is making too much unless they are that person’s boss? Yes if I’m your boss and don’t believe your doing a good enough job to earn your salary then I have some reason to claim you’re making too much money and thus can fire you or lower your pay. But I’ve not heard a single person come up with an exact formula that determines if somebody makes “too much.” Last I heard businesses have a right to determine how much they pay their employees. Now complexity can be entered into this since MNSCU receives public funding but I’m unsure if the Chancellor’s pay comes for tax payer money received by the state or a different source. Either way even lowering his wages to $50,000 wouldn’t cut the tuition of each student by any noticeable amount.

The other thing that nobody seems to bring up is the fact $40,000 isn’t a whole lot of money for MNSCU. According to their website they have 32 public colleges and universities. $40,000 divided by 32 mean if that money were evenly distributed throughout MNSCU each college would get a whopping $1,250 each. In layman’s terms that means each school would get just about absolutely nothing.

Looked at another way they have 54 campuses so each campus would get about $740.74 which is less than some students pay for books in a semester.