Search Results for: node/It takes a good prosecutor to convict a guilty man

On Those Dopes on Wall Street

What he said.

All I can say is very well put Robb.  My father growing up was a contractor and paid all the insurance for the family out of pocket.  We had 0 debt other than the mortgage.

Moving forward to now.  My wife has been working any extra overtime she can.  I’ve been working on trying to find a way to have a second job that I can work from home.  We both have debt but we’re working on a snowball to clear it.

We spend most of our free time trying to figure out how we can earn more money.  Both by means of fire and forget, and good old fashioned labor.  We have a few ideas, it’s a matter of solving the implementation now.  Many of our ideas are outside our immediate area of expertise and we’re having to self educate.

The idea that you can quit your job to go protest the people working their asses off just boggles the mind.

And That Illustrates the Problem

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They want it now.  It seems that many in my generation think that good things happen overnight.  That overnight you will find yourself rich and without cares.  The problem is it never happens overnight.  It happens after years of toiling and working  that eventually you start to reap the fruits of your labor.

It can be viewed like a garden.  You till the soil, plant the seeds, continue weeding, and caring for the garden so 4 –5 months later you can start bringing in the harvest of your labors.  It does not happen overnight, it does not happen right now, it happens after endless tireless work.

I got one shirt design done this weekend, I have a couple more on the burner that I’m doing the graphic design on.  If I make ANYTHING in the next 6 months I’ll be amazed.  The goal is a year from now as I build up products people might find interesting that I can sell them something.  Not to mention there’s a whole separate branch that I’m eventually going to spin this into.  But that’s for another time after I have stuff available for show.

Bottom line is the American Dream is under fire because lazy bums are asking the government to steal the rewards from those who worked to achieve it.  I worked my ass off through school, am paying down debts as fast as I can, and I know I have no one to blame for those decisions but myself.  Get off your ass and go find a job.

Unpossible – TSA Violated Policy

More from our best and brightest that is our TSA.

In response to ongoing criticism for removing the back brace from an elderly woman who claims Transportation Security Agency (TSA) officers strip-searched her an airport, the TSA issued a “clarification” about their position on the incidents, claiming — contrary to an earlier TSA statement — that the woman’s back brace was removed because the security personnel thought it was a “money belt.”

Is anyone really surprised by this incident?  We have given a much of power hungry uneducated morons the power to force anyone to do anything.  Refusal can result in the revocation of your rights and being detained on arbitrary charges that center around you not being a good little sheep.

My favorite line though from the TSA was this which shows exactly what they think about this incident.

The TSA denied that any strip-search ever took place, adding that they “truly regret that these passengers feel they had a bad screening experience.”

Note they refuse to admit the agents did anything wrong in the handling of these customers. Even though they admit that back braces are not supposed to be removed yet the agents can do no wrong.  The agents violated policy and didn’t correct their behavior upon noticing the error.  Yet these women should perceive their experiences as negative despite the TSA agents screwing up?

You know, I keep telling myself that actually going after these people isn’t worth it. The behavior of both the agency and the agents though is beginning to make me think that liberal applications of both tar and feathers is required at all levels. Seriously.

The First Car Meme

JayG posted a meme this morning that I’ll hop on board with mainly because… well you might notice.

So here’s the meme. Long answers or short.

1. What was your first car? Model, year, color, condition?

2. What adventures did you have in it, good or bad?

3. What happened to it, what’s the end of the story?

So my first car was a 1994 Chrysler LeBaron my parents bought used in 1996.  It looked very much like this.

1993 Chrysler Le Baron 4 Dr LE Sedan

Those became my primary wheels in 2002 once I finally started driving.  I was late to the party since I had no reason to drive anywhere prior, second my parents used my drivers license as leverage to speed me up in getting my Eagle Scout, it didn’t work.  I finally bothered to give a crap and get my license so I could go visit the future Minutewoman while she was home on break. The interior was in quite decent shape, though the paint was flaking off by the time I got it.

I had a couple interesting road trips in it.  Mainly between the Seattle area and the Palouse where I now reside.  The most memorable was a trip where I told the future wife I had to go help my mom with some stuff and I’d be on IM later that night.  I then drove the 5 and a half hours and knocked on her dorm room door with roses while wearing a tuxedo.  This car was also the source of a personal record for the Pullman Seattle run.

One night on the cross state strip I found a dead deer in the middle of my lane on highway 26.  I shaved it’s belly after straddling it.  It sprayed entrails all over the firewall and engine block.  It stunk to high heaven for about 2 months until the rest of it burned off.

I had a lot of fun in that car and loved it cause it always treated me well.  I traded her in because she was starting to burn oil and maintenance bills were increasing expensive.  We replaced her with the 2003 Explorer Sport in 2007.

SSCC #129-131 – Kingwood PD


Here’s one of the text messages we found between officers on their in-car computers: At 1:29am, one officer writes one officer to another, “We just got 5lb of marijuana and a ton of other crap.”

Sitting in their police cars in a Kingwood parking lot, that’s what Houston cops bragged to each other what they’d found. The problem for them is that when they got downtown, it’s not what they turned in.

When the officers showed up at the city jail to book Hill a short time later and turn in their evidence, the five pounds of marijuana they bragged about an hour earlier somehow had become a pound and a half.

Why would officers steal the evidence?  Were they trying to turn around and sell them to make some extra side cash?

Nope they stole it for personal use to use while on the job.

Hill’s lawyers found them and let us see them. At 2:44 that morning, an hour after finding five pounds of marijuana, “So H I G H!” “Good munchies” writes another officer. Reassuringly, the first writes back, “Everything should be open when we get done.”

These officers arrested an individual for smoking pot and then did it themselves while the tax payer was footing the bill. The war on nouns only serves to provide a reason to further expand government and law enforcement agencies. It does nothing to protect the public in general. Actually it does quite the opposite by making the general public possible victims of an ill conceived or poorly execute no knock warrant.

The actions of these officers do nothing but to further illustrate at prove why every last war on nouns should disappear. Whether it be guns, drugs, poverty, or any other “nobel” cause.  It does nothing but make victims out of what would otherwise be victimless crimes, or perpetuate their condition.  It also creates a separate elitist class where the laws do not apply.  

The officers are under investigation. Internal Affairs is working on it. But even after we told HPD about this most recent development, their status hasn’t changed. They remain out on the street on patrol.

(Emphasis Mine)Don’t worry though, the poor kid who was in the apartment though will be back in court next week.

State Sponsored Criminal Count: 131 – All Doe Officers.  If you have names please leave them in the comments.

Because the snozberries taste like snozberries.

h/t Phssthpok

Not the Way to Begin an Evening

Last night was not one of my best nights.  Mainly it was compounded by one very sad annoying fact.  A woman who loved animals wouldn’t just take the hint to drive on and leave.  It would have eased and prevented an extra 40 minutes of suffering.

Let me start at the beginning, on my way home I rounded a bend on the highway and at the top of a hill there was a car on the side of the road with it’s 4 ways on.  At the last minute I saw the yearling lying in the middle of the road and swerved to avoid it.  I immediately pulled in in front of the car, grabbed flares out of the tool box lighting them up.  Some how in the process I burnt a shirt lighting them.  

While laying out flares for the deer it became quite clear to me how the night was going to end.  Broken spine, blood dripping from it’s snout and mouth.  The deer was trying to stand up but it’s rear legs wouldn’t move.  It was a bad situation for the deer.

I told the woman driver to go ahead and go home and I’ll take care of calling it in and reporting it.  She insisted on sticking around.  So the option of just dispatching the deer and moving it off the road is now out since I’ve got a witness who won’t be supportive.  I call Whitcom, inform them of the location and what’s happened, they attempt to connect me with WSP.  Every time they transfer the call, the call was lost.  I call Whitcom back, inform them the call was lost, and ask for the number for the WSP office handling the incident.  They tell me not to worry about it and just stay away from the deer.  I tell them again the deer is in the highway, alive, attempting to move, and needs to be dispatched.  He tells me to just wait for the officer.

I now begin the wait in the cold, the deer is obviously in a lot of pain and attempting to pull itself off the road whenever a semi rolls by.  It eventually pulls itself off the road and rolls down the embankment.  Wailing as it tumbles over.  Now that it’s off the road I kick the flares off the road.  The woman gets out of her car to ask what happened.  I tell her and suggest that she just go home.  She suggests that WSU could take the deer, I know that will never happen.

A firefighter rolls up on his way home.  He calls in and gets authorization from State Patrol to dispatch the deer.  At this point he comes back with his revolver and the woman decides now is the time to leave.  One of us got authorization from the state for what needed to have been done 35 minutes earlier.  He fires one shot hitting the deer in the head.

About 45 seconds later the WSP officer arrives.  The firefighter informs him he just dispatched the deer.  The cop is elated because he won’t have paperwork for discharging his service arm.  At about this point the deer starts groaning again and thrashing.  Now often animals will go into the death throws but this wasn’t just the twitch of the nervous system shutting down.  The firefighter had already put his weapon back in his vehicle.  The officer said, “I’ll go grab the shotgun.”  Without missing a beat I said, “Would you like me to save you the paperwork?”  His response was, “That would be great.  Need a flashlight?”

I walk down with my tac-lite and pull my XD.  I plug two at the base of it’s brain stem with the second making a obvious entrance wound.  Immediately it falls dead silent and only one leg continues to have a minor twitch.  At this point it’s been about 40 minutes since I arrived on the scene.  The deer has been removed from any pain that it did have and the whole way home I was nothing but pissed off because it took 40 minutes to get me permission from the state to do what was ethically best for the deer.

Had the woman left I would have just dropped the deer and pulled it off the road into the ditch.  From talking to the officer after, had the dispatcher given me the number I would have been authorized to dispatch the animal.

Thanks to this whole mess, I now have the Colfax State Patrol number in my wallet.  This is by no means how I wanted to end up shooting my first deer.  Doubly so since I got to listen to it suffer for 40 minutes.  40 minutes of suffering for the animal so someone could feel like they’re being a good Samaritan trying to save it.  

Blogging might be a bit light today and tomorrow.  I really wish I had just killed that deer on the spot.

Winter is rolling onto the Palouse

I spent most of yesterday out in the garage cleaning out and putting stuff away that had accumulated there over summer.  Now that it’s cleaned up it can continue use as my make shift shop.  Getting space back was aided by switching the tractor back to winter mode with the snow blower.  It is now sitting primed at the entrance to the garage awaiting the first real snow fall.

I have a small chicken and the egg problem with my shop.  It’s currently storing a lot of stuff such as camping equipment, Christmas decorations, dive equipment, other tools and miscellaneous stuff.  It’s taking up a good chunk of the floor space and there’s no room for my tools.  The ceilings are high enough I can put up loft storage to store all of it but there’s no room for the tools to build it currently. 

So I at least got the standby shop into a condition I can begin working again.  The goal is to finish up storage location A and move out all the stuff destined for the first location.  I have one problem left to be solved in the first storage system design.  I think I have it solved but I need to do some math to verify it will hold the weight.  Then next will be ammo storage racks and doing some rearranging in the shop.  Followed by some high shelves in the house to finish unpacking knickknacks and family memorabilia.  I will post pictures and details as I progress through the projects.

Lastly will be two custom workbenches.  One will be for the express purpose of reloading and firearm maintenance. This will be unique because it will be fully seal-able to keep wood dust and other shop dirt out of the work area and drawers.  The second will be my main workbench and will have built in storage for some of my more awkward tools. 

At this point I should be able to move my tools and then I can start building the rest of the material to finish up the shop, such as a planer stand, and a permanent router table.

I do want to get the shop finished up because I there is some stuff I would like to start making to sell.  Not to mention I have some other ideas of stuff I can make and sell.

Speaking of which I made a simple shirt yesterday as well for AepilotJim that I just noticed I put in the wrong store.  It should be up here in the near future with a much wider selection than just t-shirts.  If you want to know what the shirt is, you can either listen to last Friday’s VC or wait for it appear in the store.

See instead of bitching about life and how it’s unfair I continue to work my ass off in one form or another.  Hell I spent time doing a bunch of work that I’m sure those who wasted time on useless degrees would never bother doing.  Doubly so since I didn’t even get paid for it, I did it to help some friends.  Thing is they probably could have offered to help for compensation and it would have been accepted.  Shoving insulation into walls suck but someone’s got to do it.  Running conduit and wiring has to be done by someone.  Taking care of all the plumbing has to be done by someone.  Notice a pattern here?  Next time actually get an education in something useful and in demand.

Do I Look Like a Maternal Copulating Opossum?

It seems that particular parts of humanity wish to surrender their place on the top of the food chain and force that decision upon others.  Every week there is a new article showing how bad this situation is getting.  Lets start off at the beginning and work our way up to the idiocy which indicates how how we are ensuring our own destruction.

Starting off there is the wolf issue that has been created by a bunch of tree huggers that don’t have to live with the problem.  The wolf is endangered I hear you cry.  Well when you introduce a predator into an area with 0 other predators you end up with a serious problem.  Doubly so when that predator is a non-native species.  They start decimating herds of animals that aren’t used to the new predator, and nothing kills the new predator.  They multiply like rabbits, meaning they need more food to survive, further destroying the local herds of elk and deer.

How bad can it really be though?

In a highly unusual move for wolves, they killed about 120 adult male sheep in one incident on the Rebish/Konen Livestock Ranch south of Dillon last week.

That compares with a total of 111 sheep killed by wolves in Montana in 2008, according to Carolyn Sime, the statewide wolf coordinator for Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks

Even with numerous incidents like this going on, you have people and groups who live well outside the area that don’t have to deal with the problem saying the wolves shouldn’t be hunted.  It took multiple federal law suits to finally get the ban on hunting lifted.  The scariest thing about all this though isn’t the effect on live stock, it’s the view that the predator begins to take towards humans.  They no longer view us as a threat.  Don’t believe me, here’s an incident out of Alaska.

Authorities were in an Alaska Peninsula village Tuesday investigating whether a 32-year-old schoolteacher, found dead off a road leading out of town, was killed in a wolf attack, according to state and local officials.

Wild animals are dangerous, yet we have groups screaming  who consist of people like this woman.

The moose was reported to be in the Town Square Park area in Anchorage, and had been seen there all day feeding on the trees. The woman, reported to be in her 20s, was kicked in the chest and shoulder by the moose after attempting to pet it. After she was checked by medics, she amazingly didn’t have to go to the hospital.

Mother nature is not a Disney movie, Bambi isn’t real, and four legged varmints still see you as a possible meal.  Doubly so when you are no longer providing a reason for them to fear us.

How dangerous can wolves really be though.  Yeah they killed the woman in Alaska and they’re problematic for ranchers.  Does that really mean they can easily kill people though?

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via Email at work

That predator is big enough that it can take down a person for a meal, doubly so when it’s running in a pack.  This problem isn’t just restricted to wolves though.


Here is an incident out of St. Louis that is strangely familiar as there is a similar problem here in Washington.

Aldermanic President Lewis Reed is sounding the alarm. “I’ve witnessed packs of dogs, 10 and 15 dogs running together, and I’ve seen all these dogs I’m talking about they don’t have collars, they don’t have tags, these are truly wild dogs,” he said.

Reed says stray dogs are terrorizing the north side. ”It’s obscene that parents have to walk their kids to school, in some parts of the city, with a golf club to fend off wild dogs.”

Think about that for a second.  The animals have been left alone to the point where they are acting predatory to humans.  Instead of actually really doing something about the problem, their solution is to hire a bunch of dog catchers at the cost of a half million.  Arming your current catchers to immediately remove them from the population can help solve the problem.  If the dogs react in fear to humans even if they’re wild the threat is diminished.  For those who say, arm them with what.  You can use an air gun, if they can take a hog they can take a dog.  No serious threat to the public by over penetration either.

The problem is when we let animals view us no longer as a predator, they naturally see us as prey.  Our culture as well as our laws are forcing more people to surrender their status.


In other areas we have people being terrorized by, wait for it, wild turkeys!

Neighbors told Duffy the turkeys have been in the area for years and usually scurry away when folks walk by. They say only recently two turkeys broke off from the flock and are intent on standing guard in their own empty lot.

They don’t see us as a predator anymore.  When you run away, that ingrains that belief that you are weaker further in their brain.  If you’re not willing to fight for your position on the top, or cannot fight and maintain it, you are not the king predator anymore.


From Clayton Cramer and Sebastian we see how crazy this push to remove our status on the top of the food chain is. 

The sign warns you that mountain lions are a problem, and if threatened, you are supposed to not run, do not panic, try to appear larger than you are (which only works for me when I am dieting), and attempt to pick up small children who are with you without bending over or turning away from the mountain lion.

And best of all: firearms are strictly prohibited in the nature preserve.  So, remember, if all else fails, fight the mountain lion in hand-to-hand combat.  Look, I have had house cats that made me regret trying to pick them up, and I’m supposed to fight a 150 pound mountain lion unarmed?

I hate putting all that in here but it just makes the point of how dumb these people are.  They recommend beating the mountain lion with a stick, which is ok if you’re unprepared (which you shouldn’t be).  Clayton goes on to prove why beating a cougar with a stick shouldn’t be a your first line option.

That’s what bugs me.  Just like the anti rights people, these other groups seem intent on making people be prey, whether it be for two legged or four legged predators.  They want to make the decision regarding self defense for everyone else.  Concern is given for the predator completely ignoring the prey.

Which brings us to the biggest piece of idiocy I have seen in a long time.


Via Uncle this morning I found this:

Cuccinelli said D.C.’s new rat law–the Wildlife Protection Act of 2010 (Wildlife Protection Act of 2010.pdf) –is “crazier than fiction” because it requires that rats and other vermin not be killed but captured, preferably in families; no glue or snap traps can be utilized; the rodents must be relocated from where they are captured; and some of these animals may need to be transferred to a “wildlife rehabilitator” as part of their relocation process.

Mice are like rabbits.  No matter how hard you try you can’t kill them all.  Not only that, you’re effort here to save the mice is for what?  Do you want to help spread Bubonic Plague and all the other diseases that rats spread.  Seriously, what in the hell is the problem with killing varmints and vermin that are a detriment to the public health?  Not to mention the damage that they can do.

Seriously the only upside of this is if there was a plague outbreak that wiped out DC to destroy the idiots that passed this dumb ass legislation to begin with.  I know that won’t happen though and it’s doubly annoying since you’ve also got legislation that is preventing the use of effective pesticides.  Just like a ‘yote, the only good mouse is a dead mouse.


So here we have our government joining with a bunch of tree huggers that are throwing rational logical thought out the window.  We have a group of people forcing their morality on others despite the injury and detriment it can have on others.  We have the government aiding in creating victims of 4 legged predators as well as diseases from varmints and vermin.  The worry about extinction to me falls short of killing people. 

If you think that people should die instead of the predators, my only request is you do it first.  Leaders lead by example and if you think someone shouldn’t be allowed to carry a firearm to fend of a wild animal, you need to live in that area and suffer the effects of living there.  If you want to tell someone they can’t kill the mice infesting their house, you need to live in the mouse infested house.  No one has any business forcing their morality on another.

I am not going to play dead for any predator.  Two or four legged and I’m not going to walk around unarmed to make some hippie feel like he’s saving the environment.