Category: Things that make you say hmmm?

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Something that completely Blows my mind

I had no idea that there were still separatist movements in the US.

Yeah I’ve joked about it, but I figured that ship had sailed a long time ago. I know that Kentucky still calls itself a commonwealth and that potentially could lead to Kentucky being part of a succession from the US. 

But who’d have thought of an instant that anyone would consider this with any seriousness?

And yet… Here is a list of states that have parties in support of breaking away from the US. (Thanks to Wikipedia)

Main article: Secession in the United States
See also: List of U.S. state partition proposals
Secessionist movements
Autonomist movements

Who would have thought?

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I hadn’t’ planned to comment

I believe that a safer city, state, and nation, is a place where owning weapons is not only allowed but encouraged.

That’s my personal opinion but I’m not completely alone in that thinking.

I grew up in a place at a time when guns weren’t status symbols, or romanticized, or mystical. They were tools.

You respected any weapon, treated it as if it were loaded

If you didn’t know about how a particular model of gun worked…  you asked. It was that simple. There were guns all over Dad’s house, all of them loaded, all unlocked and none in a safe.

A locked, unloaded, gun in a safe is completely and absolutely useless to anyone. Except the thief  that manages to open the safe to take the guns and valuables to the local pawn shop.

There were no shootings, no children played cowboys & indians with a loaded weapon and the guns didn’t spontaneously go off randomly killing members of the family. We all knew from an early age what a gun was, and how to appropriately handle one if it came to protecting the family. Obviously, when there were toddlers around, the weapons were place out of reach.

 

I wasn’t going to comment on SB 249. I’ve been aware of it for a while and was not too interested. I knew it was another idiot gun ban bill that would probably fail or simply be ignored like so many Bills/Laws that are enacted in California.

Then I read the Bill…

This bImagesill is  one of those things that you just have to read to believe.

SB249. The link will download a PDF document. showing the amendments as of 2012 / 08 / 07.

This Link will take you to the original bill as introduced 2011 / 02 / 10 by California Senator Yee.

Part of what has caught my attention is how the bill has metamorphosed.

As introduced, it’s an agricultural bill that seems to be concerning itself with the business of a regional agricultural district and how members of a local association will be selected and appointed. This is standard stuff dealing with the business of governing California.

SB249 as it currently exists is about firearms.

Specifically, in it’s latest iteration if passed the bill could be used to remove almost any semi automatic weapons from law abiding citizens.

The Law and Lawyers are interesting. The definition of a word is EVERYTHING in law. Remember Bill Clinton and his request for clarification about what exactly defines sex?

Think about it.

What is Sex? Is sex defined as mans penis in a woman’s vagina? If that’s the definition you apply then mutual touching, oral and anal activities are not sex and therefore do not fall under any laws prohibiting adultery.

That’s why Sodomy laws are so very specific about the activities that are punishable offenses. Many Sodomy laws start out by defining ANYTHING that isn’t a mans penis in a woman’s vagina as sodomy and therefore punishable.

Masturbation falls under that definition so when your girlfriend gave you a quick hand job under the bleachers at the homecoming game you both could have been arrested.

I use sex here because it’s one of the easiest examples of how much turns on a definition. Mainly because the desire for puritanical control of who does what and to whom in the bedroom has led to some of the silliest laws ever.

Senator Yees Bill says and I quote;

“This bill would define “detachable magazine” for this purpose to mean any ammunition feeding device that can be removed from the firearm without disassembly of the firearm action, and to include a magazine that may be detached from the firearm by depressing a button on the firearm either with the finger or by use of a tool or a bullet.”

This paragraph isn’t talking specifically about rifles or assault weapons. Because it’s defined “detachable magazine” as any ammunition feeding device it’s broadly encompassing almost any semi-automatic pistol, so called “Assault Rifles” and a number of hunting rifles including standard bolt action types.

At first glance you scan down the items that are listed as strictly forbidden (defined as an assault weapon) and you think “Oh it’s only AR-15s or AK replicas.

You even get to Item 18 (4) which says;

(4) A semiautomatic pistol that has the capacity to accept a detachable magazine and any one of the following:

(A) A threaded barrel, capable of accepting a flash suppressor, forward handgrip, or silencer.

(B) A second handgrip.

(C ) A shroud that is attached to, or partially or completely encircles, the barrel that allows the bearer to fire the weapon without burning the bearer’s hand, except a slide that encloses the barrel.

(D) The capacity to accept a detachable magazine at some location outside of the pistol grip.

So you think “OK cool, my Glock, doesn’t meet all of those requirements so while this is a bad law it’s not going to take all my semi-automatic weapons away”.

Then you get to item 29 (5) which says;

(5) A semiautomatic pistol with a fixed magazine that has the capacity to accept more than 10 rounds

Again… this still doesn’t ban yoImages 1ur normal Glock. But it’s ONE single word away from making the possession of a semi-automatic pistol illegal in California.

A Fixed magazine is a magazine that still requires tools to drop & reload. All that has to happen now is for Yee or one of his co-authors to delete the word “Fixed“.

Since most semiautomatics can take high capacity magazines which accommodate more than 10 rounds, if they delete fixed, then because your standard Glock, SIG, or S&W CAN have 11+ round magazines now they’re all banned in California.

Remember how the definition of a word is so important? 

With the deletion of one single modifier, this law could be used to ban most weapons in California.

Yee goes on to open the door to unreimbursed confiscation of weapons but hasn’t actually written that into the bill as of yet. However, due to the rather broad definition of assault weapons, possession of any weapons defined under this law would become illegal.

Even if you’d purchased the weapon when it was legal to do so.

This brings up a constitutional issue. You’re not supposed to have to worry about something being made illegal after the fact.

Again, let me use sex as a vehicle for example.

You’ve got 10 children, some dimwit in the government makes it illegal to have more than 2 children.

Since you’ve got 10 you’ve obviously violated the law 8 times. That gets you and your wife 20 years in a detention / re-education camp and your children all get sent to the state run orphanage where they’re told they’ll be a scum underclass of workers all their lives because daddy and mommy couldn’t be socially responsible.

That’s why way smarter people than me set up a basic framework that was designed to protect the individual from abuses of power by the government.

Think about it… the “Founding Fathers” had been screwed over time and time again by an oppressive government that was all about power, privilege, and wealth.

It makes sense that those same men would want to prevent that kind of thing from happening in a country where they were trying to create a better system of government.

And lets be realistic here… that better form of government was a form of government that favored people like the founding fathers.

But here comes Senator Yee.

He knows better, and is wiser than our founding fathers. In the best interests of the people of California Senator Yee is willing to circumvent the constitution allowing an Ex post facto implementation of the law… just this once…

…to take the guns away. It’s for the good and safety of the people of California. Think of the children…

Well Senator Yee,

I’ll give my right to have a gun up, the day that no criminal in the united states has a gun.

Until then, having the ability to protect myself and my family is my first concern.

Apparently sometime in the past two weeks Senator Yee has pulled the bill. This doesn’t mean he can’t put it back on the docket. 

The major point here is about gun control

But there’s another point that may actually be far more important.

This bill started out as an agriculture bill and is in some cases still listed as an agriculture bill.

This begs the question,

How many other innocent sounding bills are being voted on and PASSED that are eroding any of the myriad rights we believe are un-assailable?

Authors note: I’m sorry that this piece has been republished and edited so much. For some unknown reason when it published this morning it was really garbaged up. After taking the piece through three editors and finally stripping out and re-inserting most of the HTML code, it’s stable. There are line breaks and spacing that make no sense but the piece is readable. I’m not editing it anymore.

I am going to see if I can figure out what happened and why.

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I figured it out

LS012477

I’ve mentioned in the past how frustrated I’ve become with the job search.

I’ve been puzzled as to why this task is so darn frustrating for me.

I finally figured it out.

It’s the difference between the Old and New way.

In the old days, back in the beginning of time when dinosaurs roamed the Earth we would look religiously through the newspapers each day or every other day.

We’d read small descriptions of the jobs being offered then dutifully write a cover letter. We’d stuff the cover letter and our resumes into an envelope then put a stamp on it and drop it in our local outbound mail box.

I’d sometimes send out 5 or 10 resumes a day. Sometimes I’d send to a company I knew of “Blind” because their HR would actually file a resume for 6 months or so, sometimes longer…

Often, these applications would generate nice little letters addressed to me.

Many times these letters would say in a nice way the position had been filled but that my resumes would be kept on file.

Other times the letter would be something like “Thank you for your interest in our company we have no openings but will call you if we do.”

The best day was when a company you applied to called you to schedule an interview. That was a WHOO HOOO DAY!

Now we apply online and each application requires MORE time to fill out than writing/mailing a simple cover letter & resume.

Dice

Monster

Cybercoders

Careerbliss

Careerfinder

All of them have their own method of accepting information. They all want you to have an account, and then you have to cut and paste your resume into their form. You’d think that would be that… once the information was in their format… You click apply and all that data would be sent to the hiring company HR and bing, bang, boom, you get called for an interview.

You’d BE WRONG!!!!

You log in, search for the job, click on apply, THEN you get to fill out a 20 minute survey about the job, followed by an essay exam “Tell us why you think you should be presented to our client.” “Make us believe that you are worthy of our attention.”

The problem is this, when I start talking about what I do 50% of the words don’t make sense to the average person. Those that actually understand the words still don’t understand what I do. So I’m faced with a conundrum… Do I write something simple enough that an average person will get it without bleeding from their eyes, or do I write something assuming that a hiring manager is going to see what I wrote and understand? 

I’ve tried both ways with little difference in result.

(I’ve noticed that the job application process gets a WHOLE lot easier with these people if there are a lot of jobs and very few applicants)

Where I could crank out a nicely customized cover letter  and have it and a resume in the mail, in about 15 minutes. NOW it takes closer to 45 minutes to apply for some of these positions.

There is ONE of the above headhunter sites that is awful in this regard.

Almost every single fucking application requires that you answer different questions and move little sliders around then enter the number of year experience you have. It’s maddening! Especially since all this information is already contained in my resume. And that same information is already contained in their specific forms that I filled out when I created my account.

I’ve actually gone back to sending a fax or mailing a cover letter & resume whenever possible!

Even that can be fraught with difficulties.

Since so many of these sites link to other sites which link to other sites it’s pretty easy to get messed up thinking you’re responding to an ad from one site when it’s really from someplace entirely different.

In general, I prefer to send something I wrote, and had control over from start to finish rather than turn my future over to a snot nosed idiot.

Back in the day… If you were going to use a professional placement agency… you’d contact someone that specialized in your industry and you’d work with a single agent.

That way you could actually build a relationship and that person could sell you because they knew you. It was an implicit recommendation.

Now, you never speak with the same agent twice and you’re damn lucky if they speak English.

So to all you job placement firms… Understand that some of us have little to no desire to spend our days filling out 4 job application forms online when we can type and stuff 8 or 10 of our cover letters and resumes into an envelope or fax machine in half the time.

Heck, I have a fax machine and a nifty little usb fax modem… I might as well get some use out of them!

Maybe I should get into the job placement gig. Perhaps it’s time for OLD SCHOOL standards to return.