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Friday links

13 Comments

  1. MamaLiberty
    MamaLiberty April 17, 2015 7:15 am

    Fitbit monitor? Strap it on? Oh, I had an immediate naughty vision of this thing strapped to Laddie… while he diligently runs at top speed up and down the fence while the trucks pass our place in the morning, or the deer come by, or the boy across the ravine rides his four wheeler around and around with his dogs chasing him. There’s enough “activity” out there on any given morning to overload the “monitor,” I think.

    Do you suppose they’d consider that cheating? 🙂

  2. jed
    jed April 17, 2015 8:04 am

    … know when you’re having sex. I’d say that’s an optimistic prediction, and I look forward to actually having sex in the future. 🙂

  3. Laird
    Laird April 17, 2015 9:53 am

    You’re just trying to get us riled up before the weekend, right?

    I very much enjoyed Bovard’s essay. To me, the money quote is: “In the same way that any citizen has a right to defend himself against a mugger or a murderer, so citizens in general have a right to defend themselves against violent political predators.”

    He quotes from the New Hampshire Bill of Rights, noting that it dates from 1784, but he isn’t clear that those words still appear in it today. Here is the complete text of Article 10, which is aptly named “Right of Revolution”:

    Government being instituted for the common benefit, protection, and security, of the whole community, and not for the private interest or emolument of any one man, family, or class of men; therefore, whenever the ends of government are perverted, and public liberty manifestly endangered, and all other means of redress are ineffectual, the people may, and of right ought to reform the old, or establish a new government. The doctrine of nonresistance against arbitrary power, and oppression, is absurd, slavish, and destructive of the good and happiness of mankind.

  4. MamaLiberty
    MamaLiberty April 17, 2015 11:54 am

    Who decides what constitutes “common benefit?” What is “public liberty?”

    The only purpose for any government is to control things. A non-voluntary government decides what makes the “common good” and will use force against those who don’t agree.

  5. LarryA
    LarryA April 17, 2015 2:57 pm

    [Could a health insurance company identify a customer who was getting lucky in multiple locations per week, and give that person a higher medical risk profile, based on his or her alleged promiscuity?]
    Young writers lack imagination. The real health risk is when your monitor is going off, and your spouse’s isn’t.

  6. Old Printer
    Old Printer April 17, 2015 9:18 pm

    At least your local sheriff fired his former campaign manager and fund raiser after the SHTF, but it’s probably cost him reelection. Now that he’s been humbled a little, it will be all for naught. Too bad. He’s a good guy, and not at all what you may think, Claire. It is a fine balance between getting elected and being open about who you are.

  7. Bear
    Bear April 19, 2015 8:20 am

    NASA is to space travel what the FEC is to free speech.

    Always has been, always will be.

  8. Shel
    Shel April 19, 2015 9:21 am

    The shooting part of the Tulsa incident seems simply a result of poor training (as opposed to, of course, the apparent attempt at cover-up and subsequent police actions on the video). If the man weren’t in good shape, he wouldn’t have been accepted into the program even though he’s 73. The TASER units used by police and the handgun function very similarly. Normally the firearm is carried on the dominant side and the TASER on the non-dominant side. What very likely happened is that the man hadn’t trained carrying both of them together and wasn’t conditioned to using his “off” hand for the TASER, but used his dominant hand as he may have been trained. It appears to be a completely unintentional tragedy compounded by bad subsequent behavior.

  9. Claire
    Claire April 19, 2015 11:05 am

    Shel — You’re being too kind. If the allegations are correct, the cover-up began long before the shooting when superiors were ordered to falsify the deputy’s records because he was a rich friend of the sheriff.

    And there was nothing “simple” about any poor training involved. Heck, people have to train for months before being allowed to braid hair! If somebody is put out on the street to make life-or-death decisions, there’s nothing simple about being ill-trained or incompetent.

    If true, this is a matter of fatal corruption and abuse of power, and not just on the part of the friend-of-sheriff reserve deputy.

  10. Shel
    Shel April 19, 2015 12:15 pm

    My bad. Brain fart. Didn’t put brain in gear before typing. Mistaking a revolver for a TASER doesn’t seem too easy to do, either. Sounds like another wannabe cop, although unlike Zimmerman, this guy did commit a crime.

  11. Claire
    Claire April 19, 2015 12:33 pm

    Shel — not your bad at all. Actually, “just an understandable accident” is the spin the Tulsa County cops have been putting on this all along. I was thinking pretty much the same thing at first — exactly what we’re “supposed” to think. And as far as that goes, I still don’t know. Hard to say whether this play cop actually wanted to kill the guy or not — but his bosses appear not to have cared one way or another.

    And yeah, I wonder just how easy it actually is(n’t) to mistake any handgun for a Taser, even if the heat of the moment.

  12. Shel
    Shel April 19, 2015 2:36 pm

    I don’t have any reason to believe, unlike some of the cops Holder failed to prosecute when he was the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/crime/fbi-overstated-forensic-hair-matches-in-nearly-all-criminal-trials-for-decades/2015/04/18/39c8d8c6-e515-11e4-b510-962fcfabc310_story.html that the shooting was intentional. The suspect was being subdued; there just wasn’t any reason to shoot. On the video you hear the guy say, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry” and then actually drops the revolver, which appears to be a lightweight snubbie.

    If that is what he was carrying for a primary weapon, he couldn’t have known much about firearms. Snubbies worked well for Hoover’s FBI agents, but those men were very professional and highly respected and high capacity pistols were rare. The general opinion of the agents among current LEO’s isn’t nearly as charitable.

    If he didn’t know much, then he probably didn’t know the four rules of gun safety and didn’t know to keep his finger off the trigger until he was ready to fire. A retired LEO friend once told me that a standard story of such an event consisted of the following sequence: (1) a suspect was being held at gunpoint, (2) the officer heard a shot, (3) the suspect fell down, and (4) the officer realized it was his gun that fired. Now that I’m actually thinking (for a change) about it, I’m of the opinion that the shooter’s ignorance of gun safety likely caused the problem and that he lied about believing it was a TASER to try to lower the consequences to himself.

    And I wonder if he was the guy driving the vehicle, since the passenger had to say “stop right here” many times before the vehicle actually stopped.

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