Don't Paint The Camera

People are not being creative enough when they break the law.

I'm not saying anyone should go out and do this.  But I have decades of murder-hobo wrangling that cause my mind to think about crimes and both how to commit them and how to stop them (depending on the party's law abiding level). 

If one really wanted to cause issues with a Flock camera, one should do something that causes it to degrade performance over a longer period of time.

Problems have solutions.  Dilemmas are never ending. 

Like spraying the solar panel with a UV blocking, etching, clear primer.

This reduces the amount of power the panel provides and the etching makes them ultimately have to replace the panel instead of cleaning it off.

But they get days or weeks of trying to figure out why that camera is working intermittently.

Again: Don't do this!  It's a crime to vandalize or destroy private property.  The proper way is to get off your ass and start eliminating all of the elected officials who support this statist shit by electing better officials from dog-catcher up. 

Peele Was Right

The police are expending a lot of resources to figure out who's cutting their little cameras down.

And I say they are their cameras because Flock doesn't install them where there's nobody paying them.

The thing the cops need to recall is something Sir Robert Peele said:

"To recognise always that the power of the police to fulfill their functions and duties is dependent on public approval of their existence, actions and behaviour, and on their ability to secure and maintain public respect."

That sentence is almost 200 years old.

It's still true.

The cops wasting resources finding the people who are cutting these cameras down is undermining public approval of their existence at a time when half the body politic has been clamoring for their elimination.

Good show!

Getting back to Peelian Principles would go a long way towards mending the rift between the police and the citizens who've delegated their powers to them. 

Heck Of A Contrast

More murders in Chicago than all of Florida's major cities combined!

Except for one teensy problem...  Jacksonville.

According to the article, Chicago has had 211 murders this year.  The three cities they cite had 29.  Jacksonville had 27.

The headline is still correct, but you have to include Jacksonville when you talk about major cities in Florida, especially since Jax is punching above its weight for crime. 

They Should Sue

DSArms aka DSA should sue the Democratic Socialists of America also aka DSA for use of their trademark.

I think they are due substantial financial compensation for the clear damage done to their reputation. 

Hang Anyone Who Answers

Jim Geraghty wants someone to publish how many rounds we have in our critical munitions stockpiles.

During a shooting confrontation.

Something about "aid and comfort to the enemy" comes to mind about anyone who gives Jim the "straight answer" he seeks.

I might even go so far as to include Mr Geraghty as an accessory before the fact for soliciting the information from someone who would divulge the information. 

Gotta Read The Whole Article

Road rage or self defense?

Iowa is a Constitutional Carry state, so what does, "one count of being a person ineligible to carry dangerous weapons," mean?

Is that how Iowa phrases, "felon in possession?"

But look how far down the article you have to get before you find out that the person with the gun is the victim of a rear-ending and the person who rear ended them has a history of driving without a license and insurance.

That mentioning the behavior of this person post-impact was, in fact, criminal is tossed in as an aside.

This case might end up, eventually, at the Supreme Court over whether felons have the right to own a gun to defend themselves.

And since the cops have, repeatedly, used "tried to run me over" as a positive defense for shooting someone trying to run them over, pulling a gun to get someone who's just rear ended you from continuing to move their car seems fairly justified. 

The Spirit Of Aloha

Hawaiian cops have, so far, declined to call assault a hate crime despite use of racial slur.

Racism is racism and if we're going to have hate crime provisions, then they need to be applied to everyone equally. 

Heroes

The California Highway Patrol is staffed by heroes.

 Ayup, that's one super deadly gun there.

Not one mention of returning it to its rightful owner, is there? 

Stupid Attitude

 

I would say that I don't care how much enjoyment the thief gets from my stolen property, but that's not true.

I do care.

I want them to be utterly miserable from their theft.

Far more unhappy than I am about the loss.

I want them to contract a slow moving, incurable, untreatable, painful disease that also, perversely, prolongs their life.

I want them to experience this in a poorly run prison, where their cellmate considers their affliction a kink.

For Fuck's Sake!

Where does the idea that someone who steals from you being happy about stealing being a good thing come from?

Perhaps the idiots who think this way should be treated more harshly than thieves.

The thief's depredations are far more limited in scope than the idiot depicted in the comic.  That idiot will go out to vote, get laws changed and make it impossible to punish thieves.

Shitheads like this think, "property can be replaced, so it's wrong to kill thieves," and, "your property isn't worth more than their life!"

I shouldn't be surprised to find that's a close quote to something Che Gueverra said, "The life of a single human being is worth millions of times more than all the property of the richest man on Earth."

That's wrong-think.

The proper attitude is, "nothing here is worth getting killed over."

It's not me deciding that my property is worth more than their life, it's them deciding that their life is worth less than my property.

It's illegal for me to act morally on this. 

Hold On I Got This

Apparently, illegal aliens being detained in Miami are being treated like animals...

I will bet that they will be treated like people in their home nation.

Since they find how they are treated in MY nation not to their liking, I invite them to head home.

90% of the reason they are being detained is a refusal to just be deported.

Fuck 'em.

However...

I wish someone would treat me like an animal based on how my friends and I treat our pets.

Yet another example of how the media and these illegals don't understand America. 

I'm Just Not Imaginative Enough

A company that just went bankrupt had a heck of a scam.

You send them money and they say you bought some gold or silver, which they hold for you.

As long as the music keeps playing, and there's chairs left, this works.

But one day the music stops when someone notices there was no actual gold or silver, just pieces of paper.

Whups!

I'd have never thought of this. 

I Have A Better Solution

How's about you keep your citizens in your country where ICE has never had to shoot them?

Mexico's president wants to sue ICE for her citizen getting shot.

I think I like the cut of her jib.  We should endorse punishing the nation that's enforcing its laws in accordance with their own legal system.

Time to sue Mexico back to the dark ages over arresting Americans who accidentally, but illegally, brought a firearm into Mexico.

Or, is that different? 

That Name Sounds Familiar

Mother of five, an innocent bystander, dead after gunfire erupts at gas station in Ferguson, Missouri.

Ferguson, Missouri?

Isn't that one of those "fiery but peaceful" places? 

It doesn't seem a very nice place to live. 

 

 

The tragedy is it appeared she'd had a successful GoFundMe campaign to allow her to get a place outside Ferguson and was only at the BP station to get celebratory slushies for her kids. 

Why It Wasn't A Problem

In 1868 granting birthright citizenship to anyone born on our side of the line wasn't an issue because all you got was citizenship.

If you didn't get to work, like everyone else, you'd starve.

If you worked it was, relatively, simple to become a productive member of society rather than a burden. 

It's an issue now because of the lavish, and unending, handouts and, as was pointed out in the comments, the penumbral right to bring everyone with even 1% consanguinity with you here to live.

The issue compounds.

Personally, I'm in favor of killing the handouts.  We really can't afford them.

Ideally we only let the citizen stay and send their parents packing.  I'm not sentimental about breaking up a family whose only goal is to punch out an anchor baby and start hanging from the welfare teat.

Especially now that we've seen how much fraud came with it. 

I Predicted This

Marv and I discussed going on the Hot Rod Power Tour because of the anniversary of Route 66.

Then we noticed much of the route was in Illinois.

We snarked that a bunch of cars would end up missing because the start point was in Joliet.

Well...  Guess what happened. 

Gods it must suck walking out of your hotel to find an empty parking spot where your car was parked.

Surprisingly, it wasn't older cars, which are generally easier to steal.

Must have been manuals. 

Still Or Again?

Another end to the National Basketball Association season.

Another championship won.

Another riot with death and destruction in the winning team's home town.

It's so common it shouldn't be news.

Or it should be, "The annual NBA championship riot was held tonight in New York City.  In related news, the Knicks won." 

I was in Chicago when the Bulls won a championship.  Riots!  Fun!  Excitement! 

That was 1997.  Nothing has changed except the team that won and the places destroyed.

I have a, possible, solution.

"Your fans riot, you don't play next year.  Since you're not playing, no worries about draft picks."

Wanna bet the owners of the teams manage to convince their city to do some effective crowd control after that?  They're rich, after all. 

But that's punishing the wrong people.

The real solution is to figure out a way to degrade the value of being a sportsball fan.

The people living vicariously through the performance of a group of millionaires playing a children's game on TV enough that they need to break and burn other people's property is the problem. 

Of course, the real solution to these riots is the solution to ALL riots.

Belt fed and water cooled.

That and a whif of grape and they'd just stand in the square cheering next year. 

What If We Said, "OK"?

Reading about how someone outside the courthouse where the trial for Karmelo Anthony was going on said that the US is a racist nation and this was a war.

War?

"Don't talk at me [Sir] as if I've never seen a war!" Col. Ludlow.*

Clearly you haven't.

If this were a war, you wouldn't have gotten two words in edgewise before someone dropped a round on you.  Considering how many like minded people surrounded you, probably a mortar round; because juicy target.

There is, currently, no race war and you don't want to start one.

I keep mentioning it, you don't wanna play the Indians when Western Civ decides to solve the Indian Problem.  Western Civ will take the position that it didn't make this about race, you did, and since it's about race now it can work with that.  Less of that pesky sorting to see if it's getting the innocent with the guilty.

Speaking of guilt, Western Civ will write reams and reams about how bad that was and how sorry they are for it.  While maintaining the reservations and not returning anything conquered...

Western Civ is big on the ends justifying the means after the fact.  So many of the historians whining about how horrible a given act was almost always forget to include decades and decades of trying to peacefully live next to the, now, conquered people. 

*Colonel Ludlow did not say "sir," but considering the complexion of the person saying there's a race war going on, I have changed it because the word used could be considered a slur in this context and I intend no slur. 

It's What Happens

Most rational people aren't racist.

They really believe that you shouldn't punish groups for the crimes of individuals.

But when the police refuse to punish an individual because they are a member of a group, rational people start to become mistrustful of that group.

This is not because the group, as a whole, is bad; it's because they know that a small number of the members of that group will realize they can commit, virtually, any crime with impunity.

So they become rationally racist.  The rational part is what distinguishes them from bigots.  Bigotry is irrational racism.  It's both simple and difficult to tell the two apart.

A corollary to the cops not enforcing the law, when the members of a protected group commit the crimes, is the rise of vigilantism.

Measures to put distance on the protected group become notable. 

The law needs to be colorblind, and what matters is the crime not the demographics of the perpetrator.

Otherwise the people will reclaim the power they delegated to the police and decline to recognize the legislation promulgated in their name by politicians they'd previously delegated to represent them. 

Then it won't be a republic any more. 

More Anarchotyranny

If you call the cops for the same thing too many times, you will be fined for it.

The most common version of this tale is a false alarm of your security system.

The cops come out when your alarm goes off, find nothing, and after a certain number of calls order you to fix your alarm or be fined.

So you call the alarm company and discover that there's nothing wrong with your system.

But the alarm keeps being triggered.

So the cops fine you.

This does not sit well with the average business owner at all.

What's happening?

The burglars know the police response time and how they operate.  They trigger the alarm and disappear.  They know that the most common end response of the business owner is to shut the alarm off rather than face the fine.

Then they can burgle at their own pace.

The crowning moment is when the place gets cleaned out and the owner calls the cops in the morning they say, "you should have had an alarm."  They will then proceed to do a cursory investigation and the crime will never be solved no matter how obvious it is to everyone in the neighborhood whom the criminals are.

Oh, and don't you dare figure out what the thieves are up to and sit inside your business waiting for them to break in.  There's no defending mere property allowed.

And THAT is how you end up with a law making it legal to shoot burglars.

And by the bye, if you don't make it legal to shoot burglars, you eventually get cops getting shot by citizens because the cops are only getting in the way of justice and things have progressed to the point where the only path to justice is unlawful.

Remember:  The deal is we give up the right to vendetta and The State catches and punishes criminals.  If The State reneges on this deal, we get our vendetta back.

We don't want our vendetta back.  It really is better if the professionals catch and punish criminals, it's one of the things that allows for a high-trust society. 

1 Of 57 Um 50

Tennessee did a solid for the law-abiding and passed a bill making it legal to defend property with deadly force.

While it might only be stuff, it's MY stuff.

It's not a case of me valuing my stuff over someone's life.  It's them not valuing their life over my stuff.

It wasn't that long ago we put the heads of thieves on pikes to warn others of the price of stealing.

That's extremely unsanitary, but it underscores that Western Civilization didn't always condemn the idea of defending hearth and home by any and all means at hand.

Perhaps if the police embraced Peelian principles more, it would not have come to this, but they appear to have reneged on the deal that they would handle thieves if we surrendered shooting them in the back when they were fleeing with our property.

Well, Officers, how many burglaries have you solved?

Does your state have a "good faith" clause that lets pawn shops out of being charged with dealing in stolen goods?

If the answer to that first question is, "not many," or, "a very small percentage of burglaries reported;" and the answer to the second question is, "yes." then it's time to let the honest citizen waste some criminals.

Remember, a dead criminal has a 0% recidivism rate.  Also, liberal judges and district attorneys can't release a dead criminal to commit more crimes while they fail to appear for trial, no matter how much money George Soros spends on electing them!

Being able to legally shoot criminals is a solid win for society!

Wanna know a secret?

I doubt we're going to see more than a handful of criminals shot stealing from a home.

For the same reasons that conceal carry liberalization had a chilling effect on assault, rape and robbery.

Thieves don't want to get shot committing crimes.