Anyone want to know how much I care about Whitney Houston dying? Not much anymore. At first I considered it a tragic event and a reason to reflect on why so many creative people seem to destroy themselves with booze and drugs. Then Hollywood decided to to turn it into a goddamn sideshow. Now every time I hear the name "Whitney Houston" I cringe.
The title of this brief rant was blatantly ripped off borrowed from this post by the ever snarky Tam.
A group of animal rights activists calling themselves SHARK, intended to launch a drone to monitor a pigeon shoot at Broxton Bridge Plantation. When the sponsors of the shoot failed to stop the activists the shoot was cancelled. The Sharks launched the drone anyways and it was shot down.
H/T to Global Guerillas
A recent posting at We The Armed explains some of the benefits of domestic drones from a law enforcement point of view.
There have been times when having an airborne FLIR system would have been very helpful. We can call the highway patrol, but sometimes their aircraft are down. We've chased burglars when it would have been very useful and we've had elderly walk away from their residence, especially in winter time, when that would have helped also.
Nothing but the purest of intentions. Right?
A few people still remember what good intentions are the paving stones for.
I'm sure the US Government had good intentions when it demanded Google build a backdoor to its Gmail accounts. The real world result was Chinese hackers breaking in and using Gmail to gather intelligence. I'm sure the restrictions on Sudafed are done with the purest of intentions, too. The real world results are an estimated $1.5 billion in higher costs to health insurance companies and more demands on the time of primary care physicians who are already in short supply.
So, next time you have to wait an extra hour to to see a doctor or your medical insurance premiums go up again, you can thank the pure as driven snow intentions of the bureaucracy. Don't expect the bureaucrats to care -- in the strange fantasy land that statists inhabit only the good intentions matter. Any bad result is just used as an excuse to lay down even more paving stones.
How will the domestic use of unmanned drones play out? I don't know -- I am an observer, not a prophet. My observation of history and the natural tendency of government power to increase prompts me to believe it will not work out in a manner that increases individual liberty.
A young girl taking a walk in the winter cold spies a freezing rattlesnake at the side of the road. She takes pity on the poor reptile and takes it home with her so it can warm up. After it recovers, it bites her.
As she is dying she ask the snake, "Why?"
The snake replies, "You knew what I was when you took me in."
In the recent brouhaha over the battle between the Catholic Church and Obamacare remember that Catholic Charities, the Society of St. Vincent DePaul, and the Catholic Health Association all supported the legislation. This letter (PDF) to members of Congress on the letterhead of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops urges passage of the bill and calls health care "a basic human right".
Now that the new law is being implemented, the Catholic Church is upset to discover government money has strings attached. Nevertheless, behind the curtain it is still perfectly happy to have that same government take money from me and transfer it to them. Well, I have news for Papa Ratzi: Being a socialist buttwipe doesn't get you the the moral high ground. If the Catholic Church wants to play whore to the state then it has no complaint when John Bureaucrat wants to stick his dick in.
The current objections sounds more like sour grapes than any principled opposition. They are perfectly happy to have the government force me to support their hospitals but get all self-righteous when that government tells them how they have to spend some of the swag. Here's a thought: Instead of getting all pissy about birth-control and abortion, how about they start by respecting, "Thou shalt not steal."
If the Catholic Church really wants to do something useful then let them oppose the whole concept of tax supported health care. Until then they are just another mouth hanging around the cannibal pot.
The people of Detroit are taking no prisoners.
Justifiable homicide in the city shot up 79 percent in 2011 from the previous year, as citizens in the long-suffering city armed themselves and took matters into their own hands. The local rate of self-defense killings now stands 2,200 percent above the national average. Residents, unable to rely on a dwindling police force to keep them safe, are fighting back against the criminal scourge on their own. And they’re offering no apologies.
Read the rest here.
Like it or not, violence is a normal human function intimately linked to survival. Like any such natural behavior, the expression of it can be trained but it cannot eliminated without a substantial cost. Whenever a basic human function is repressed, behavioral distortions result.
Every human being has a natural desire to defend itself. By denying the victims of crime a legitmate outlet to that desire, the state creates behavioral distortions. One of these is to form groups (mobs) and track down a malefactor after the fact. In a civilized society where self defense is recognized and robustly supported we get a few dead offenders. Take away that and the results will be vigilantism. We may be seeing the beginning of that in Detroit.
So far it looks like Mitt Romney will be the Republican nominee for President. He doesn't seem like a good choice for a party that wants to present a conservative face but that doesn't seem to matter as long as he is "electable." Who is deciding this a priori electablilty is somewhat vague.
OK, it is true that compared to Obama, Romney is a "conservative" but the same can be said of a lot of politicians not normally considered as such. A good example is: Compared to Obama, Hillary Clinton is a "conservative". That would be a good argument to vote for Hillary? Gods! I hope not.
The lesser of the evils argument has never been compelling to me.
One observer said it didn't matter who the Republicans run since Obama was elected because of the anti-Bush vote and the Republican candidate will elected because of the anti-Obama vote. I have to admit that I find it amusing that the best the Republicans can come up with is Not Obama. Ao, after all the apologetics (pun intended) are through, the campaign boils down to this.
My opponent:
If we didn't have enough to worry about, John Robb over at Global Guerrillas has an article on the future of drones as a replacement for "gunboat diplomacy" in international affairs. Additionally, he did not miss the very real possibility that a coercive state will use them to suppress dissent.
All the money is on cyber intel (to generate targets based on "signatures") and drones to kill them. When domestic unrest occurs in the US due to economic decline, these systems will be ready for domestic application.
Oh joy
Oh joy, indeed. All states are coercive
Full article: Drone Diplomacy: Comply or Die
Back on July 26, 2010 I posted a short entry about a site called "Instant Hitman". The site is obviously a joke but, yesterday, I saw a search for "instant hitman comments" in my Site Meter statistics. When I checked my comments awaiting moderation, lo and behold, I saw the following:
Would you help me? Jacqueline Marando life is ruin'B/C Walmart Home Office in Benton is messing up w/ Jacqueline's b/c Walmart Home Office in Benton are cold, greedy, &snobby. Would you help me?
Maybe someone is just screwing around or maybe he really is that dumb. In either case, for those who donlt get it Instant Hitman is a JOKE. Got it, dipstick?
I'm not sure yet exactly why this happened and it might be interesting to see how Blogger Bob and the TSA spin it. Frankly, I suspect it will just be another entry in the Big Book of Stupid Things the TSA got Away With.
Rand Paul Has Been Detained By The TSA At Nashville Airport
H/T to Claire Wolfe
Dutch teen Laura Dekker on Saturday became the youngest sailor to complete a solo circumnavigation of the world, a year after going to court for the right to make the attempt.The 16-year-old completed her solo round-the-world journey when she sailed into harbour on the Caribbean island of Sint Maarten at 3:00 pm (1900 GMT).
Dekker, who left the island nearly a year ago to the day -- January 20, 2011 -- beat the previous record by some eight months.
Read the rest here
It is good to see a youngster tackling challenges like this. It is sad that Western Civilization has eroded so much she had to fight child welfare services in the courts for the "right" to do it.
Good job, young lady
