Category: The Law

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Nice day even with a heck of a drive

Had a dental appointment today. The last under my current insurance plan.

Thankfully I’ve got good teeth. Otherwise I’m sure that insurance would decline to cover me calling it a “pre-existing” condition.

My teeth, and gums are a bit sore. But I’m going to be fine even if I just want soft food tonight.

I barely missed all the excitement coming home, I passed a sign saying that “all the mountain roads were closed” it was a bit of a concern.

As it turns out CALTRANS was overstating the issue. The mountain roads into the Big Bear area were closed. Not all mountain roads.

The police say that they’ve cornered Christopher Dorner. Apparently, Mr Dorner has been killed in a fire in a cabin.

I’ll wait until the forensic report comes out.

I’m amazed that the Dorner issue has preempted the POTUS State of The Union Address on some of our local TV stations.

This is the first time I’ve created a blog post on an iPad. So if there are any really goofy typos… I’m blaming the iPad!

Signing off to watch the State of the Union.

Should be interesting.

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This is such a major WTF I can’t believe it.

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I was reading about the Manhunt for Christopher Dorner.

This is the former LAPD officer that is supposedly is running around on some kind of vendetta. I personally think that there’s a lot more to the story than we will ever know.

What we do “know” right now is that in 2009 Dorner was fired from LAPD for making false statements.

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Say What? LAPD makes false statements all the time usually when answering brutality charges made against them!

Yes Dorner has clearly lost it, but you have to ask did he lose his mind because he was pushed beyond a breaking point and saw no future or hope?

Nothing justifies Droners current course of action and god knows killing those young people in Irvine was wrong. I’m reminded of the old biblical injunction about the sins of the fathers…

Whatever you think about Dorner the “CURE” is perhaps worse than the disease.

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Thus far we’ve had two women in Torrance shot by Police because the police saw them driving a pickup truck that looked like Dorners.

Later and again in Torrance we’ve had police open fire on a man who was driving a pickup truck that looked like Dorners. I’m avoiding Torrance for the time being and that would be doubly true if I was driving a pick-up truck of any kind.

There has been one LAPD officer wounded in Corona, and two Riverside officers shot, one of them died, the other is in critical condition.

Thus far the tally is 5-3 shootings 3-0 deaths. Dorner leads. It’s only a matter of time before the police shoot and kill an innocent civilian.

My tally doesn’t include the emotional trauma caused an elderly man in San Diego who was tied up when Dorner allegedly tried to steal his boat. The theft was aborted because Droner got the prop fouled with an errant rope. Remember that Dorner is an Ex-Navy reservist.

imagesReally? The guy couldn’t launch a small boat without screwing it up?

Now this guy is supposedly in the Southern California mountains. I have to ask how many more people are going to be shot or injured by mistake before this guy is caught?

Maybe we need some real police not the Keystone cops from LA looking for this man. Clearly, he’s well beyond the LAPDs skills.

It’s only a matter of time before gun control gets tied into this, I cringe at the prospect but know it’s going to happen.

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An interesting thing

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Honestly I’d never thought about this until recently.

I firmly, completely and totally believe that the 2nd amendment insures my personal right to have a gun.

I realize that there are those who would disagree. Fine, that demonstrates yet another freedom we have in this country. The freedom to think for ourselves, do what we believe to be right and hopefully pursue our own personal happiness.

Your choice not to have a gun is as personal to you as my belief in upholding the 2nd amendment is to me. I’m totally good with that because we’re both pursuing our respective forms of happiness.

When you’re looking for a job and thinking about relocation, you start considering all the factors that moving your stuff from one place to another entails. You start making a packing list. That list has the stuff that you’d need immediately and the stuff that you could leave in storage, or have shipped.

If one of those items happened to be a gun, now you have to consider your destination.

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A responsible gun owner would be far more inclined to keep the gun or guns in a safe and would be hesitant to let that safe and it’s contents get too far out of their control. 

The gun owners I know don’t want to ever have the possibility of one of their weapons being stolen.

Problem is a gun safe is pretty damn obvious going onto a moving truck or coming off of one. It’s not like you’d be able to be subtle about a 900lb safe that’s labeled “American Guns Safe” .

This is especially true if you’re wheeling it into your new digs with the help of 20 day workers.

My luck would have me moving into a house between a cop and a liberal do gooder who felt it necessary to report to authorities that they’d seen GUNS!!! and ammunition being wheeled into the house… 

I’d never really thought about it too much…

Mainly because I’ve always assumed my business was well… my business. Since we didn’t live in Nazi Germany or the USSR I never worried about my neighbors tattling on me.

Well that is until now, thanks in part to the newspaper in New York publishing gun permit owners names & addresses. I was surprised that anyone sided with the paper thinking it was OK for the public at large to know what you had in your home.

Of course the excuse of “the Children” was trotted out  as a justification for invasion of privacy.

Personally I think,  “The Children” are at far more risk from sexual deviants than guns.

In the interest of protecting The Children, perhaps we should make everyone purchasing vibrators, leather restraints, or pornography register these materials then publish their names and addresses weekly. 

That is after all the conflation the Journal News was trying to make with their gun ownership map. They were drawing a parallel between gun ownership and sexual molesters.

Which brings me to the question.

If you were to be offered a position in New York for instance or Massachusetts or Illinois… what do you do with your guns?

Both New York and Massachusetts are insane about their regulation, permitting, registration, and god only knows what all else.

I’ve been told that these states also make a lot of additional money from anyone choosing to exercise their 2nd amendment right. Something on the order of hundreds if not thousands of dollars just to get the permit that allows you to exercise your constitutionally guaranteed right

This mountain of bureaucratic nonsense probably isn’t about protecting the public as much as it is about discouraging all but the hardiest or masochistic of individuals from obtaining or keeping weapons legally.

I could probably head to Harlem or some of the less savory neighborhoods in Boston and obtain a weapon in 30 minutes or less with the right amount of money. No papers, no background check, no reporting or waiting periods either.

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And were you to land a job in Chicago (A safest place on Earth Gun Free Zone…) well I suppose you’d have to sell your guns…

A job transfer to Chicago would , I guess mean you’d have to go to one of those unsavory areas and sell your guns, associated ammo, and any accessories, the day you got there.

Again without background checks or any reports on to whom you sold the weapons.

Then you could go to your new apartment and lay your head down to sleep in peace knowing that you’d done the right thing and complied with the law.

Sarcasm aside, I realized that there are in fact places in this country where I absolutely will not even consider moving. 

I don’t want an arsenal, I don’t want mil spec weapons. But I damn sure do want the right to own guns, and I want the ability to go to the store put my money on the counter and buy a rifle, or ammunition 

So I’ve altered my job search / willingness to relocate parameters.

I’ve also responded “No” to an invitation to apply for a 6 month position in NY with the following:

Thank you for thinking of me.
 
However, I do not wish to move to a state like NY where I must for the most part forego my 2nd Amendment right to keep & bear arms, and where I also would be subject to the loss of personal privacy about the contents of my home.
 
All the best.

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Perhaps fighting gun control isn’t all about fighting with law in the courts.

Perhaps it’s about fighting oppressive laws in the economic arena too.

After all if companies can’t get employees or lose business because their corporate offices are in gun control states they’ll move somewhere else.

All that has to happen is for their employees to be honest when they leave, and for their prospective employees to be honest about why they’re not interviewing for positions. 

It’s the long way around but it does make a statement.

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Patience has paid off.

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After many days of tweaking and patiently letting my computer do whatever the hell it needed to do, I now have an alternate backup.

Not only do I have an alternate backup, It’s working very nicely and for the time being all is peaceful in computer land here.

Getting the backup took days (Still scratching my head over that one…) But now the incrementals are quick, efficient, and on a par with the TimeCapsule. Even though they’re being made on a Western Digital NAS

I’m over the hassle for the time being. I’ll probably do something like put the Time Capsule into maintenance mode when I’ve got nothing better to do. For the time being I’m just going to take a breather. None of the other computers backing up on the TimeCapsule seem to be having problems. I can only assume the problem I was having is some kind of corruption in the backup for my machine alone.

I can’t stress how much everyone needs to have a backup of their computers or at least their data. That is one thing I can say Apple has done mostly right, The Apple backup system in it’s various iterations has saved my behind on a number of occasions. 

Were it not for the automated system I can’t tell you how many times I’d have been lamenting over losing all the stuff on various computers.

Whatever you do to back your system up, be consistent about it.

DAMN! 

As I was sitting here typing I pondered the question about why the WD drive was so slow. It occurred to me that I have several really fast ethernet ports on the back of my TimeCapsule. Those ports while nice, had never really mattered all that much because the rest of the devices in the network are incapable of capitalizing on their speed.

I wondered what speed if the WD drive? Sure enough, it can capitalize on the additional speed so I took a break from writing this blog and did a little reconfiguration. Now time will tell if I notice the different in access speed. 

When I plugged the WD in a year or so ago after the Buffalo drive died I just used the same port and really didn’t think about it. I was so focused on saving what data I could save I just wanted a drive that was online. In retrospect I probably should have given a little more thought to the situation.

Yet another time when I’m doing the Homer Simpson “D’OH”

Now before my non technical readers start bleeding from their eyes I’m going to change the subject.

OK I’m going to break yet another taboo… Gun Control!!!

I don’t know how many of you watch Piers Morgan… ( I don’t as a rule, I think he’s a pompous ass and wish that CNN would just shut him down.)

However, poor Piers has really been taking it on the nose the past few weeks.

Most recently he was pretty much outclassed, out thought, and out maneuvered by a young Attorney, Author, and supporter of the 2nd amendment named Ben Shapiro.

 You can view the interview here 

http://youtu.be/hJ8jcsaDK1k

I like what Mr Shapiro has to say. He’s asking for a logical description of gun control. His point that relatively few murders are committed with AR type weapons is interesting and that if you’re going to ban weapons to be consistent you really should ban handguns. They are, after all used far more often in crimes of violence than assault weapons.

It’s an interesting point and In general I agree with him.

However I believe that banning handguns in this country is a lost cause. Therefore President Obama, Vice President Biden, and the congress are choosing a weapon to “Ban” as nothing more than simple theater.

It’s a way for the government to look like they care, and they’re doing something.

They may get assault weapons banned. Then what? 

Automatic pistols are sold in California with 10 round magazines

Depending on how good a shot you are that single magazine represents 10 people dead. I’ve posted previously that the people most likely to carry out the kind of insane crimes we’ve seen in recent history are planners. They think long and hard about what they’re going to do, how they’re going to do it, and they practice.

Remember Anders Breivik in Oslo? There’s evidence suggesting that he tested his bombs on a farm outside the city limits, prior to his rampage in 2011. 

Given the proposition that these people practice their murderous plans beforehand, nothing short of a complete ban on all weapons is going to stop the violence.

But then do you really think the violence will stop?

Even if by some feat of draconian socialist government control you manage to remove all firearms from this country. If someone wants to kill another person or multiple people… explosives, incendiary  devices, bows and arrows will do the same job just fine.

So are you going to outlaw gasoline? How about basic chemistry? Gunpowder is a really simple compound to make. I’ll grant you, it wouldn’t be high yield, but the Chinese were using gunpowder in explosives 1000 years ago. And the basic recipe can be found in a StarTrek episode.

Oh wait… One of the oldest human traditions is the good old fashioned club, There goes baseball bats and forget about Cricket bats. OH wait I guess we’ll need to cut down all the trees.

My point is this, a reasonably intelligent NUTJOB who wants to make a statement, or commit suicide by cop will find a way to express their violence or make their point.

The sad part is that a lot of these people are reasonably intelligent.

They may be crazy but they’re not stupid, unlike our politicians and TV pundits.

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Time for journalistic responsibility.

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I couldn’t resist the Reagan poster. But you have to admit if anyone aside from James Brady could speak to the subject it’s Reagan. 

CBSNews Is reporting the New York paper responsible for publishing a map showing the addresses of registered gun owners in two NY counties has added to their grandstanding by hiring armed security guards to protect one of their offices.

The so called “journalists” are kinda missing the point.

I love the irony in that they’ve turned to armed security to protect them.

Registered gun owners are law abiding citizens which by default means that these people aren’t likely to go to the newspaper to exact revenge.

Law abiding citizens are going to choose weapons of mass destruction…. LAWYERS!

The Lawyers will be far more devastating to the newspaper than anyone with a gun.

If I were one of the people affected I’d be seriously pissed off. Not because now the world knows I have guns, but because of the invasion of privacy for no good purpose other than headlines.

Essentially this newspaper has stigmatized the gun owners of these counties. What they’ve done is tried to equate gun owners to sex offenders. “Who are the gun owners in your neighborhood?”, Who are the sex offenders in your neighborhood?”

I’m sure that the editors of the newspaper have gotten some really negative mail and deservedly so.

The gun owners affected have committed no crime, they’ve done absolutely nothing that should have resulted in the forfeiture of their privacy and yet… They’ve lost their privacy. Their homes may be targeted for potential break-ins by criminals who would like to steal guns and resell them to other criminals.

Now the newspaper is trying to look like the victim, and spin the story that they’re scared of the gun owners. 

I have a few things to say to that;

1 Buck up. You published the piece, you must have thought about the invasion of privacy you were enabling and if you didn’t well you’re not very good journalists. You need to accept the consequences and responsibility for your actions.

2 You have nothing to fear from the registered gun owners. You need to fear their attorneys.

3 In the years to come you need to fear the criminal element that breaks into these houses and manages to steal the weapons. They’re the people that are going to mug you, rape you, and shoot you. The blood of innocent victims, and the blood of the home owners occupying these houses will be on your hands.

In my opinion, a single injury or god forbid a death caused because a criminal targeted these homes should result in prosecution of the journalists involved in the story.

I’m for freedom of the press, but with that freedom also comes responsibility. 

There’s a quote from one of the Star Trek movies. “Just because we can do a thing, it doesn’t necessarily follow that we should do a thing.”

Yes, it wasn’t said by a statesman, or a scientist, or a politician. But it’s nonetheless a wonderful cautionary statement.

I suspect that the movie quote is based on something Robert Oppenheimer said;

“When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb. – J. Robert Oppenheimer”

The point is, sometimes it’s important to take a step back to look beyond your ability to act and decide if the ends are really justified. 

How many wars, how much harm would have been avoided if people had simply considered the ramifications of their actions?