Terrorist Trials in NYC – a Distraction?

I bet the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed drags on for a looooong time.

Where the hell are they going to find twelve unbiased jurors in the United States? The whole idea of giving constitutional protection to a non-citizen of the U.S. is just wrong. And besides that, we know he’s guilty, he’s bragged about it. Shoot him now and save us a lot of money and time. This would have the added benefit of denying a whole bunch of lawyers from feeding at the public trough.

While all this hoopla is moderately important, we need to keep our eyes on the ball.

Isn’t it interesting that this kind of thing comes up to distract us just when other interesting things are going on.

Such as the fast one Obama, Pelosi and Reed are trying to put over with their 2000 page plus ‘health care bill’? Shucks, The Holy Bible is only 608 pages long (in this edition). God gave us our entire owner’s manual in less than 1/3 the pages of this health care bill. By definition, it is an atrocity waiting to happen.

Or the cap and trade bill, which will constitute the largest increase in the cost of living in the United States in history, and which is totally ineffective at it’s stated goal of stopping the alleged global warming, but, if passed, will make Al Gore obscenely rich.

BOTH of these bills have the actual purpose of putting more of our economy in the direct control of the government, furthering the statist and socialist goals of Obama, Pelosi and Reed. Neither of them will actually achieve anything the American public wants.

-Popgun

Interesting Gotcha’s in Pelosi’s Health Bill

Isn’t it interesting that these little gotcha’s come to light AFTER the House has already passed the bill?

Gotcha #1 – Taxes and Tort Reform.

Gotcha #2 – Abortion Funding.

This points to a major flaw in the way our laws are created. These issues were buried in that 1900 plus page bill that, among many others, come to light only after it passed in the House. Did those who voted for it know about them?

This is how abusive legislation gets passed.

-Popgun

Thinking About ‘Profiling’

In current usage, ‘Profiling’ is the idea that the police (or anyone, really) uses race (or religion, or other non-legal criteria) as a basis for indicating whether someone is potentially guilty of a crime of some sort. That’s not the dictionary definition, by the way.

This has become politically incorrect because it smacks of prejudice. Here in the South, profiling is most commonly the assumption by police officers that a black or hispanic person is more likely to have committed a crime then a white person. So when a house gets broken into, absent a witness, the cops are more likely to randomly pull over the vehicle of black or hispanic persons than white people, if they see a suspicious vehicle in the area. This causes the appearance that the police are prejudiced. Therefore, the police actively try not to ‘profile’.

The question is, does profiling have any validity as a tool for winnowing out the guilty?

Well, the short answer, IMHO, is yes. Why?

Where I live, if you watch the local news for a period of time, you will find that probably 70% to 80% of perpetrators of violent crime are black or hispanic. This is my informal observation, I have not actually done any surveys. But that is, by my estimate, about the ratio of crimes by race in this area and at this time.

There are historical reasons for this disparity which I won’t go into here, but I do observe that this probably does not pertain everywhere in the country. Some areas it may be the other way around, or some other ratio – I wouldn’t know. And I do expect it to shift slowly over time, as the various cultures intermingle more thoroughly; but that is a very slow process. I would expect that eventually it would align with the actual ratio of races in a given area.

Given that informal statistic though, for this area, if you are a careful person, you are careful of all strangers – but you go one notch up on your internal alertness scale if the strangers are black or latino. Around here, that is.

So profiling does figure into your situational awareness at least to some degree. I have to conclude that it makes sense as a reasonable tool to help evaluate those around you. However, if it is your only criteria, then it has become racist, and is both illogical and immoral.

Now let’s think about the situation with Hasan, the Muslim murderer at Fort Hood. There seems to be a feeling that he may have still been in the military only because of a fear by his superiors that kicking him out would have been seen as profiling and prejudice against Muslims.

Hasan gave plenty of clues that he was potentially about to go critical. It seems likely that his commanders were aware of these clues, but ignored them to avoid being branded as prejudiced. Our ‘politically correct’ culture has thus indirectly resulted in the deaths of 13 people.

Muslim extremists (not all Muslims, mind you) have been the perpetrators of almost every terrorist conflict in the last twenty years. They killed over 3000 people on 9/11/2001, and have been responsible for many other bombings, shootings and killings world-wide, before and since. Given these facts, it makes sense to be a bit hypersensitive to signs of instability in anyone who is a Muslim. Not to condemn – but to be watchful and aware.

If this is profiling, so be it.

I walk in the woods near my home occasionally. I see snakes. Probably nine out of ten of them are non-poisonous. But I still ‘alert’ every time I see a snake. This is a survival trait instilled in humanity by millions of years of practice at staying alive. It’s also ‘profiling’. And this is a very good example of why profiling works.

In the same context, I don’t shoot every snake I see. I watch them, and if they threaten me I kill them. This is correct action. Now, a racist is somebody who shoots every snake he comes to.

That’s a pretty good analogy.

-Popgun

The Obscene Cap and Trade Bill

You know, I’ve opposed the Cap and Trade Bill ever since I heard about it. It stands to increase indirect taxes by an incredible amount. It will literally double your electric bill, and gasoline will go up around $2 a gallon.

This morning, I found out this bit that is in that bill. From Powerline:

“The cap-and-trade bill recently passed by the U.S. House of Representatives, for example,” Mark writes, “is a bold assault on property rights: in order to sell your home–whether built in 2006 or 1772–you would have to bring it into compliance with whimsical, eternally evolving national ‘energy efficiency’ standards, starting with a 50 per cent reduction in energy use by 2018. Fail to do so and it would be illegal for you to enter into a private contract with a willing buyer.“

Now, that, I didn’t know about. Wow.

I live in a pier-and-beam frame house built by Jim Walters about 30 years ago, which has had additions several times over the years. It’s clean, but all the windows are single pane, and the insulation is not the best. It’s true that we’re not planning on going anywhere – I expect I will die in this house. But here’s the thing.

When I do pass on, my sons will have to spend a lot of money to make this house compliant with these regulations, if they elect to sell it. I have not actually read this bill, but now I wonder if this provision extends to inheriting a home. If so, they would have to deal with it at the time they inherit.

It will probably be more cost-effective to destroy our home than to bring it up to their standards.

That is what the Democrats do for you when they are in power. These damned liberals take value created by hard work and a lot of payments, and destroy it with the stroke of a pen, all to support their social agenda. They can’t get voluntary support for this kind of thing, so they ram it down our throats, just like they are trying to do with health care.

This bill has passed the House already. If it passes the Senate, it will become law. We need to stop it.

-Popgun

Pocket Knives

The world has really gotten ridiculous. This young man is on suspension for having a small pocket knife locked in his car in a school parking lot.

Shucks, I carried a pocket knife bigger than his every day to school from the fourth grade on, completely without incident. So did most boys. A lot could be learned about a young man, based on what kind of knife he carried.

Farm boys like me carried a Case or maybe an Old-Timer 3-blade pocketknife, usually big enough to wear a hole in your bluejeans pocket. Boy scouts carried a Swiss Army knife. A couple of the more edgy kids carried a cheap switchblade (yes, that was illegal). I think I remember seeing at least one butterfly knife.

Big woo. Nobody got stabbed.

The only knife wound that happened in my entire school career was this one boy who stabbed himself in the belly trying to cut a button off of a shirt (why? I have no idea – but that’s what he told me he was doing). And he did that at home, with a hunting knife.

This whole knife thing is vastly overblown.

Having said that, I realize that I grew up in a time when most parents taught their kids that it isn’t nice to stab other people. This entire scenario has more to do with the failure of the concept of parental responsibility than anything else.

I think the failure to consider the context and just blindly assign penalties is wrong. Our country’s judicial system has a certain amount of leeway built into it to allow for special circumstances, and pig-headed school administrators should apply that concept as well.

-Popgun

Tax, In General

I personally would like to see the U.S. government convert all federal taxes to the Fair Tax or something similar. It would eliminate all federal withholding taxes, the need to figure your tax each year, and save a lot of money and hassle. There are many reasons it would be an improvement, not least of them that it would make the IRS unnecessary, at least in its present form. It would also make it far easier to know how much the federal government takes from us.

The Fair Tax should be the sole method of income generation for the federal government. All other federal taxes should be outlawed.

They will likely never enact this, though. The fed uses taxes to exert influence on the people, to control us through economic means. If you smoke, you’re paying an extra 63 cents a pack to pay SCHIP. The fed funds SCHIP, and they thereby ‘encourage’ you to quit smoking. All ’sin’ taxes work in this way. Even as I write this, the democratic congress is pushing for a tax on soft drinks to encourage people to live a ‘healthy’ lifestyle. “For our own good.”

The arrogance of this is breathtaking.

Taxes levied on businesses get passed down to us in terms of higher prices, and thus are indirect taxes. We are largely unaware of these indirect taxes – because they are rolled into the prices of things we buy.

If Cap and Trade passes the Senate, we’ll see our electric bill double after it goes into effect, and the cost of everything we buy will also be affected since we pay for the electric bills of factories and businesses through the cost of what we purchase. It will be a HUGE tax increase, yet a Democrat will tell you that your taxes won’t go up.

They are splitting hairs. Your taxes WILL go up radically – but indirectly. And they will look you right in the eye and say your taxes aren’t going up.

Shucks, coming up with new ways to tax us is a favorite sport of Democrats and Progressives. That’s where the expression ‘tax and spend liberal’ comes from – it’s so prevalent, it’s proverbial.

We need a law that taxes may not be levied for any purpose other than income generation. That tax should be the Fair Tax, and there should be no other.

Sometimes I feel like I’m buck nekkid in a room full of mosquitos and vampire bats. We need to reign in these blood-suckers.

-Popgun

Justice – Slow, but Sure

As they say in my line of business, “One ‘Oh Crap!’ cancels out 10,000 ‘Attaboy!’s.”

More than 100 Hollywood people have signed a petition in defense of their colleague Polanski.

Polanski did the crime; a particularly heinous crime. He drugged and raped a 13 year old girl repeatedly. He needs to do the time. No matter what achievements he has in the film industry.

The idea that somebody should get off scott free for ANY kind of crime, much less rape, just because he has a following in Hollywood, is itself obscene.

There’s a reason that the statue of justice has a blindfold.

-Popgun

A Couple of Issues

First issue:

Some school officials are being sued because they prayed in the presence of students in Florida. This is just plain wrong, on many levels. Next thing you know, you’ll get arrested for praying in the waiting room at the airport. What is America coming to when you can’t even pray without worrying about getting sued?

So I’ve got an idea. Those of us who pray, let us do so every chance we get – but do it silently. So we can be praying and those who hate us for doing so won’t know for sure if we are or not. Just a silent prayer every once in a while, with your eyes closed.

That’ll piss them off. They can’t sue you for closing your eyes for a few seconds.

Second issue:

Maxine Waters, Democratic congresswoman (and nut case, IMHO) from California, wants demonstrators and opponents of ObamaCare to be probed for racism. I wonder what happened to freedom of speech? It is not illegal to be racist – it’s just illegal to act on it (as it should be).

I would like to point out something very fundamental at this point.

There is no law in the U.S. that governs how you are allowed to think.

What matters is what you DO. You can go to jail for what you DO. So far, at least, you cannot go to jail for what you THINK. This is a really big deal, and we need to pay close attention to anyone in the government that starts wanting to censor how we think.

The advent of different penalties for ‘hate crimes’ is a step in the direction of mind control. A crime is a crime whether you do it for fun or because you hate someone, and the penalties should not be different. If the standard penalty is not enough to deter criminals from committing a crime, they need to raise the penalty. Why the crime was committed should not be a factor in assessing the penalty.

Hate crime legislation puts a jury in the position of determining what a person was thinking when they committed a crime. This is absurd on the face of it, and certainly will assess unjust penalties.

The mind is the last bastion of freedom. Let’s keep it free.

-Popgun

Apolitical

I used to be completely apolitical. Up until 9/11, I didn’t even watch the 5 o’clock news on TV, except for the weather. In the newspapers, I only read the funnies.

Robert A. Heinlein once pointed out that politics was only slightly less important than your pulse, but I didn’t understand him at the time. It seemed to me that politics was just a bunch of old guys taking care of business.

Silly of me.

On 9/11, I started paying attention.

From this ignorant perspective, I was startled at some of the things I found. Maybe ignorance really is bliss. I discovered that there is a war going on right here within the U.S.A., between those who believe in personal freedom and responsibility, and those who believe the government should control every aspect of our lives. Unbelievably, I had never known this battle was going on.

Then, a few years ago, my son re-introduced me to shooting. I owned some guns, but had not done any shooting in around 35 years, due to a shoulder injury. I had been convinced that recoil would be an issue, and I just assumed I could not do that sport. My son pointed out that shooting a pistol probably wouldn’t bother my shoulder, I tried it, and I was hooked.

Again, starting from an ignorant perspective, I was surprised to find the state of gun laws in Texas and the U.S.. When I was growing up, I got my first .22 at age 13. I had friends who were teenagers that had pistols. Back then, people had rifles in gun racks in the back windows of their pickup trucks. My dad had a .38 police special in the glove box of his truck. I didn’t know gun ownership was any big deal, or that I needed permission from the government to purchase one.

I had no idea what the laws were. So I started studying the subject, starting with some of John Lott’s excellent books. I read Ayoob’s books and articles. I learned the philosophy and practice of self defense using lethal force – Cornered Cat made a big impact on me, with the best philosophical logic I’ve yet seen, and helping me relate it to my Christian beliefs. I decided to get a concealed handgun license, and learned some more. I studied a lot of crime statistics, and began to take notice of the number of home invasions I see on the local news. I saw, not too long ago, that a family of five over in Shreveport was murdered during a home invasion. I’ve seen news media reports of at least three cases of people going into a church and shooting a bunch of defenseless people. This, within a few hundred miles of where we live. I began to carry even in church. I’d probably never need it, but it would only take once to be worth the hassle.

I learned that the war between the freedom lovers and the government lovers extended to gun control. In fact, gun control was one of the major sticking points between the two sides. The people who want government control of the populace don’t want the populace to have practical means to defend against their control. This is the philosophy of every totalitarian government anywhere on the globe.

To me, it seemed inherently obvious that anybody would want to be able to defend themselves by any means available. I see no logical reason to limit that. I believe in my heart that the good guys need to have equal or better firepower than the bad guys. I don’t like politicians that would really prefer that I be unarmed, when I know that evil people would be armed, not being constrained by the same laws. Laws that take away your right to defend yourself are not laws written for your benefit.

I saw news of several massacres (with guns) which took place in gun-free zones. Funny how those signs don’t stop killers, but they do stop law-abiding citizens from defending themselves with equal firepower. I became opposed to laws which keep the law abiding citizens like myself from defending ourselves on a level playing field.

I have lived to see a day when the news media distorts and omits facts based on their political leanings; the recent election being a perfect, obvious example. When I was a kid, you could count on getting reasonably accurate information from the news – this is no longer true. Statistics on this subject are available – it’s amazing how the news media tends to suppress the use of guns for self defense.

The United States is still the best place on the planet to live. But I have come to realize that it is a constant ongoing battle by those who love freedom, to keep that freedom. Freedom requires maintenance. This country is at a cusp – the big-government lovers are in control of all three branches of our government. We are very near the point of losing everything our founders wanted for us. It has been somewhat of a shock to me to realize that we have reached that point. How can any freedom loving person sit back and say nothing?

I am no longer apolitical.

-Popgun

Challenge to Our Government

A challenge to the United States Government:

Do not pass ObamaCare – unless you can guarantee that it will provide equal or better health care than we are getting now, for equal or less money than we are paying now.

Do not pass Cap and Trade – unless you can prove without doubt that:

• Man-made Global Warming is a real phenomenon (given that for the last ten years the planet has been cooling! – an inconvenient truth…)
• This legislation will result in an improvement in the human condition that is worth the incredible cost that you already know it will inflict on each and every U.S. citizen, and the real poverty that will ensue as many, many businesses are shut down.

I don’t think you can guarantee any of that.

Do not pass ANY legislation – that you haven’t read line-by-line, in person, and understood. The rule is simple: if you haven’t read it, vote no. This simple rule will prevent poorly considered legislation from being passed.

I’m just one man, watching the upper management of the U.S. cause our country to descend into chaos through complete and total mismanagement and the inflicting of poorly fitting political ideologies. I don’t have any faith at all that anybody in our government will actually do any of the above…

-Popgun