Tag: You Can’t Cure Stupid

PSA Fail

Another great post was thrown up over at Every Day, No Days Off. It’s a link to a video of a public service announcement (PSA) for the Amber Alert e-mail notification system. The video is trying to convince you that you do not need a gun to protect your children. Unfortunately for the people who made the video they totally failed at that. Watch is and then ask yourself, would I fuck with these mothers’ kids?

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oi13LczGlsE]

I certainly would not.

Also is that lady holding a RPD that is both belt fed and has an attached drum magazine at the same time? Can that even work?

More Climate Change as a Religion

Borepatch has a nice post showing yet another link between the followers of Al Gore’s Apocalypse and other mainstream religions. This time it’s a comparison of Catholicism (the church in which I was raised) and their use of the Index Liborum Prohibitorum, a list of books ostracized by the Church, and the Worshipers of Al Gore’s new mechanism trying to silence those who dare question the wisdom of The Gory One.

It’s amazing how much time Al Gore and his posse spend trying to discredit the people who oppose them instead of trying to discredit the research done by the people who oppose them. That, tied with the amount of money to be made off of the carbon credit scheme, ultimately is the reason I don’t buy Al Gore’s bullshit.

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.

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.

More Anti-Gun Rhetoric

I’m sorry have I deprived you of your daily spoonful of bull shit? Well fear not because here it is! Via the “fair and balanced” Washington Post we get to learn the “facts” about gun control “myths.” And boy are there some real winners. The first one, guns don’t kill people, people kill people:

But in a groundbreaking and often-replicated look at the details of criminal attacks in Chicago in the 1960s, University of California at Berkeley law professor Franklin Zimring found that the circumstances of gun and knife assaults are quite similar: They’re typically unplanned and with no clear intention to kill. Offenders use whatever weapon is at hand, and having a gun available makes it more likely that the victim will die. This helps explain why, even though the United States has overall rates of violent crime in line with rates in other developed nations, our homicide rate is, relatively speaking, off the charts.

Funny because according to another researcher holding a Ph. D more guns leads to less crime. Of course we can’t trust somebody like John Lott because he refuses to write a book on the subject… oh wait. Also I love this stupid quote:

As Ozzy Osbourne once said in an interview with the New York Times: “I keep hearing this [expletive] thing that guns don’t kill people, but people kill people. If that’s the case, why do we give people guns when they go to war? Why not just send the people?”

Why not just send the guns? Funny enough if you send the people without guns there are still going to be deaths, if you send the guns without people there won’t be any deaths. What part of the equation leads to death then?

Next up is the “myth” that gun laws only affect law-abiding citizens:

The ban on felons buying guns, part of the 1968 Gun Control Act, doesn’t stop them entirely, of course. In fact, most homicides involve someone with a criminal record carrying a gun in public. Data from 2008 in Chicago show that 81 percent of homicides were committed with guns and that 91 percent of homicide offenders had a prior arrest record.

Here’s a hint when debating something, don’t support the opponents argument by making it for them. And in classic anti-gunner lack of ability to use basic logic:

But the gun laws provide police with a tool to keep these high-risk people from carrying guns; without these laws, the number of people with prior records who commit homicides could be even higher.

So according to this article convicted felons are still obtaining guns but these laws prevent convicted felons from obtaining guns? I’m sorry but it’s either one or the other. “Myth” number three is when more households have guns for self-defense, crime goes down:

The key question is whether the self-defense benefits of owning a gun outweigh the costs of having more guns in circulation. And the costs can be high: more and cheaper guns available to criminals in the “secondary market” — including gun shows and online sales — which is almost totally unregulated under federal laws, and increased risk of a child or a spouse misusing a gun at home.

Almost totally unregulated? Really? Seriously? Go to a gun show some time. That’s what Matt Snyder did when he found out gun shows are not an unregulated source of firearms. Likewise try buying a gun on GunBroker and see if the seller will ship the gun to your home. Guess what? They won’t, it has to be sent to an FFL holder in your state and transferred to you (which includes the NICS check and you having to fill out ATF Form 4473). Unregulated my ass. Also I love this dribble:

Our research suggests that as many as 500,000 guns are stolen each year in the United States, going directly into the hands of people who are, by definition, criminals.

So what you’re saying is gun laws only affect law-abiding citizens since criminals will just steal them from said law-abiding citizens? Nice you once again countered your own so-called argument. Also since when have we punished law-abiding citizens (the gun owners in this case) because of what criminals do (the gun thieves)? Well I guess for a while now but that shit has to stop. Let’s move onto their fourth “myth,” in high-crime urban neighborhoods, guns are as easy to get as fast food:

Our own study of the underground gun market in Chicago, with Columbia sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh and Harvard criminologist Anthony Braga, contradicts this claim. Handguns that can be bought legally for around $100 sell on the street in Chicago for $250 to $400. Surveys of people who have been arrested find that a majority of those who didn’t own a gun at the time of their arrest, but who would want one, say it would take more than a week to get one. Some people who can’t find a gun on the street hire a broker in the underground market to help them get one. It costs more and takes more time to get guns in the underground market — evidence that gun regulations do make some difference.

So according to your research over 500,000 guns are stolen every year in the United States. But now you’re saying guns are hard for criminals to get. Riiiiiiiiight. But I thought they could just walk into any gun show or buying guns on the Internet and not have to worry about an regulations preventing their criminal asses from obtaining guns. Make up your fucking mind. This isn’t an argument so much as a spastic tossing of random ideas on the wall hoping people reading will be dumb enough not to know how to use logic (an anti-gunner). Let’s move onto “myth” five which is, repealing Chicago’s handgun ban will dramatically increase gun crimes. Wait that is an actual myth. For fuck’s sake make up your mind!

Local officials from Dodge City to Chicago have understood that some regulation of firearms within city limits is in the public’s interest, and that regulation and law enforcement are important complements in the effort to reduce gun violence. Even before the repeal of D.C.’s handgun ban, the city’s police reestablished a gun-recovery unit and focused on seizing illegal firearms. The city’s homicide rate has been relatively flat the past several years. If the court decides that Chicago must follow D.C’s lead in getting rid of its handgun ban, we can only hope that it leaves the door open for sensible control measures.

So much double-speak it hurts. D.C.’s homicide rate has remained flat even with the repeal of their handgun ban. But only after said ban was lifted did the police actually work on recovering illegal firearms. Does that mean illegal firearms were available in D.C. only after the handgun ban was lifted? Seriously my head hurts from the lack of basic understanding of forming a logical argument.

And even though D.C.’s homicide rate has remained flat after the ban the author hopes if the ban falls in Chicago it leaves the door open to “sensible” control measures? Would you like to maybe, oh I don’t know, give an example of such a measure that was used in D.C. to keep the homicide rate flat? Because if you meant the reestablishment of the gun-recovery unit as being a “sensible” control it’s not a control at all, it’s enforcing laws already on the books at a federal level. That’s not further regulation or additional “sensible” controls.

What a dip shit. Seriously this is why we win, the anti-gunners can’t form a coherent argument.

A Testament to Human Ingenuity

We’ve all seen advertisements for The Club, a metal rod that attaches to the steering wheel of a car to prevent theft. Unfortunately it doesn’t actually work, and makes the care easier to steel. Bruce Schneier’s blog once again brings the fact security snake oil just doesn’t work. See the club is easy to remove and works as a tool to assist in the actual theft:

At some point, the Club was mentioned. The professional thieves laughed and exchanged knowing glances. What we knew was that the Club is a hardened steel device that attaches to the steering wheel and the brake pedal to prevent steering and/or braking. What we found out was that a pro thief would carry a short piece of a hacksaw blade to cut through the plastic steering wheel in a couple seconds. They were then able to release The Club and use it to apply a huge amount of torque to the steering wheel and break the lock on the steering column (which most cars were already equipped with). The pro thieves actually sought out cars with The Club on them because they didn’t want to carry a long pry bar that was too hard to conceal.

Yup the one thing about people, we’re an ingenuous bunch. Since we’re talking security against car theft I’ll explain what I do. I have insurance against theft, if my car is stolen and can’t be recovered my insurance company pays me money. It works pretty well as I really have no sentimental attachment to my vehicle.

Our Government at Work

Whether you’re on Israel’s or the Gaza Strip’s side in the recent incident you should agree with my sentiment: why the fuck are we giving either of them taxpayer money:

US President Barack Obama has said the situation in Gaza is “unsustainable” and promised millions of dollars in new aid for the territory.

Seriously we have a massive national debt. I know $400 million isn’t even on the register of our debt by why the fuck are we giving money to other countries when we don’t have any money? Shouldn’t we use every dime we can get to lower our outrageous spending? Cripes!

Crimes vs. Civil Disputes

Apparently the Star Tribune doesn’t realize criminal cases aren’t the only things our court system can be used for. In their effort to sell more papers to avoid their quick spiral into bankruptcy the are trying to scare people into thinking the legal system is being illegally used to collect debts:

You committed no crime, but an officer is knocking on your door. More Minnesotans are surprised to find themselves being locked up over debts.

Apparently the paper is up in arms over the use of what is akin to debtors’ prisons. Honestly this isn’t happening nearly as much as the paper is trying to scare you into believing but alas they’re making a big deal out of this. Let’s step through the article and pull out some interesting quotes:

As a sheriff’s deputy dumped the contents of Joy Uhlmeyer’s purse into a sealed bag, she begged to know why she had just been arrested while driving home to Richfield after an Easter visit with her elderly mother.

No one had an answer. Uhlmeyer spent a sleepless night in a frigid Anoka County holding cell, her hands tucked under her armpits for warmth.

So this woman was arrested and held overnight without being told what she was being arrested for? I believe that’s illegal. I’m pretty sure you must be informed of why you’re being arrested as you’re being arrested. If this case is true maybe she should sue the police department. Oh and I love this:

“They have no right to do this to me,” said the 57-year-old patient care advocate, her voice as soft as a whisper. “Not for a stupid credit card.”

Congratulations you are a potential victim of police abuse. There is a support group down the hall. Cookies and juice are being served. I’m glad your eyes have been opened to what happens when law enforcement is held unaccountable. Or are the police acting illegally?

Remember these people broke no laws right? Not so much:

In Illinois and southwest Indiana, some judges jail debtors for missing court-ordered debt payments. In extreme cases, people stay in jail until they raise a minimum payment. In January, a judge sentenced a Kenney, Ill., man “to indefinite incarceration” until he came up with $300 toward a lumber yard debt.

I asked Bad News Bear about this and he delivered bad news as usual. Get this, if a court orders you to do something and you don’t they can issue an arrest warrant. HOLY SHIT! Did you know if you’re arrested for driving while intoxicated you can be ordered by the court to attend counseling? Did you also know if don’t show up for said counseling an arrest warrant can be issued against you? Yes if you are ordered to do something by the legal system you are legally obligated to do it. Also fire is hot.

On the second page we get this:

How often are debtors arrested across the country? No one can say. No national statistics are kept, and the practice is largely unnoticed outside legal circles.

This is the Star Tribune’s method of saying they found a couple of potential examples that there are a few isolated incidents of something happening but no proof can be found that the trend is increasing. In other words there are no facts to scare people with, not even crappy statistics made up to strike fear into your heart. But they need to sell papers which requires scary stories.

Those jailed for debts may be the least able to pay.

“It’s just one more blow for people who are already struggling,” said Beverly Yang, a Land of Lincoln Legal Assistance Foundation staff attorney who has represented three Illinois debtors arrested in the past two months. “They don’t like being in court. They don’t have cars. And if they had money to pay these collectors, they would.”

If that’s the case maybe they shouldn’t have obtained a credit card and used it to the limit. Maybe they should have decided to live within their means. I know a novel concept. Here is a lesson to learn, you don’t need a credit card. It’s that simple. If you can’t pay for something don’t get it. For instance I know you want that super awesome 50″ plasma T.V. but you don’t have the $8,000.00 to spend on it. Know what you can do? Not buy it! You don’t need that television to survive or even get by in life.

This process happens several times a week in Hennepin County. Those who fail to appear can be held in contempt and an arrest warrant is issued if a collector seeks one. Arrested debtors aren’t officially charged with a crime, but their cases are heard in the same courtroom as drug users.

No it’s not a crime, it’s a civil dispute. For instance if you are throwing shit onto your neighbor’s lawn they can take you to court over it. If you don’t show up for the court date a warrant can be issued to retrieve you and bring you to court. Crimes aren’t the only reason our court system is used. No, it’s also used to peacefully settle disputes between two members of society. In this case the court acts as a mediator and attempts to determine if one person has infringed on another person’s life in as neutral of a manner as possible.

“I was surprised that the police would waste time on my petty debts,” said Williams, 45, of Minneapolis, who had a $5,773 judgment from a credit card debt. “Don’t they have real criminals to catch?”

The police generally don’t get to determine what crimes they will work on and what crimes they will put on the back burner. If a judge issues an arrest warrant the police have to act on it regardless of what they think. It’s their job. You know what a job is right? It’s where you are paid money by somebody to perform tasks asked of you. If you don’t perform said tasks the person paying you can chose to no longer pay you and find somebody else to perform the task. It’s actually a very simple concept when you get right down to it.

“They may think it’s a mistake. They may think it’s a scam. They may not realize how important it is to respond,” said Mary Spector, a law professor at Southern Methodist University’s Dedman School of Law in Dallas.

But the second you receive a court order you know it’s not a scam. That’s when you realize it’s important to respond. Also I’m just impressed some people have enough use of their brain to continue breathing:

Though she knew of the warrant and unpaid debt, “I wasn’t equating the warrant with going to jail, because there wasn’t criminal activity associated with it,” she said. “I just thought it was a civil thing.”

So you know there was a warrant out for your arrest but didn’t equate it to going to jail? You seriously fail at cognitive abilities. At this point I’m just pointing out stupidity:

“Thank God, the police had mercy and left me and my baby alone,” said Nielsen, who later paid the debt. “But to send someone to arrest me two weeks after a massive surgery that takes most women eight weeks to recover from was just unbelievable.”

Yes because I’m sure they obtained your medical records to see if you had a recent surgery so they knew whether it was OK to have you arrested or not. Oh wait they can’t because medical records are confidential. So they didn’t send the police after you because they knew you recently had surgery, they sent them after you because how the fuck are they supposed to know you just had major surgery? Sorry you aren’t so important that they keep constant updates on your well being.

He still has unpaid medical and credit card bills and owes about $40,000 on an old second mortgage. The sight of a squad car in his rearview mirror is all it takes to set off a fresh wave of anxiety.

“The question always crosses my mind: ‘Are the cops going to arrest me again?'” he said. “So long as I’ve got unpaid bills, the threat is there.”

Maybe you should pay off those bills then huh?

Seriously this article isn’t about abuse of power, it’s about civil disputes. Whether you like this system or not it’s established and if you live in this country you live under the system. This article is a perfect example of the main stream media blowing something out of proportion so they can make money. The actual moral of the story is this: if you owe somebody money and are ordered to appear in court you will be arrested if you don’t show up to court.

With Friends Like Them Who Needs Enemies

A while ago I mentioned a Sea Shepard dip shit who illegally boarded a vessel was arrested and would be standing trail in Japan. So what are his fellow crusaders saying? They are most likely cheering their martyr whom is being wrongly persecuted for their rightful crusade against those who would dare defy the will of Sea Sheppard, right? Nope.

The organization Sea Sheppard has Severed ties with Mr. Bethune because he carried a weapon on the super expensive Ady Gil which was stupidly parked in front of a much larger vessel and ultimately destroyed. The weapon? A bow and arrows.

Either way it’s funny to see how loyal these organizations truly aren’t.