Quote of the Day–Law Dog (07/22/2011)

Burger King is hiring. Do yourself a favour; do your department a favour; and do the rest of us a favour — find a job doing something else … before you cripple or maim an innocent "putting lumps" on them, or you "put ten rounds" into someone who doesn’t need killing.

You complete, utter and total jackass.

LawDogWhat The Hell…?

[For those who haven’t seen the video, here it is: (Language makes it NSFW, if you do make sure you have headphones on.)

Normally I would have a nice long commentary of my thoughts on the subject, but I just am too severely enraged by the incident.  Seriously the thick necked Neanderthal of an idiot is nothing more than a high school bully who then went and got a badge and a gun.  This man should not be in law enforcement, he is not there to protect and serve, he is there to harass and intimidate.  May the legal system he supposedly represented come down upon him like a ton of bricks.  Then may an individual who ended up in jail because of him make that officer his bitch.

-B]

Friday Gun Porn–07/21/2011

Thompson Center Encore in 308

Dave does have some very sweet toys.

New Service Promotes Bigotry

It appears that there is a new service out there catering to doing online background checks of potential employees.  Overall I don’t have much of a problem with this, a private company certainly has a right to use any information that it feels would affect performance in the workplace.  This new middleware company does the work to keep the employer from seeing information that could lead to other biases which are currently legislated against.  For example they make sure to strip off marital status, sexual orientation, religious views, etc.  What did catch my attention however was the following statement from the companies CEO.

Then it assembles a dossier with examples of professional honors and charitable work, along with negative information that meets specific criteria: online evidence of racist remarks; references to drugs; sexually explicit photos, text messages or videos; flagrant displays of weapons or bombs and clearly identifiable violent activity.

What’s wrong with that?  If the individual has broken no laws what is the issue.  If you dig through my website you will find many photos of firearms.  Numerous pictures of explosives going off.  As well as numerous articles involving self-defense, which is a violent response against someone doing violence against you.

Mr. Drucker said. “We also see flagrant displays of weapons. And we see a lot of illegal activity. Lots and lots of pictures of drug use.”

He recalled one man who had 15 pages of photos showing himself with various guns, including an assault rifle.

There’s that set of words, assault rifle.  Obviously this man is a puritan who is projecting his belief system on others and judging them based upon his world view.  There is nothing on my site which promotes illegal activity.  I have gone through extra effort to make sure I am legal and as a result have had myself placed on numerous government lists.  Why sir are you attempting to limit the employment of gun owners who are proud of their stance on gun rights?  I might advise Mr. Drucker to be quite careful since I’m sure if someone finds out that their ownership of firearms caused a negative report from his company and thusly resulted in missed employment opportunities, his company now carries the liability for the discriminatory action.  It might be quite difficult to prove, but eventually given enough people it can happen.

Wise Investing

So it appears that the government bailouts of Chrysler cost the government taxpayer $1.3 billion.

Originally, the government committed a total of $12.5 billion to the struggling automaker, Old Chrysler, and the company’s newly formed Chrysler Group. Of those funds, $11.2 billion has been returned through principal repayments, interest and cancelled commitments, the Treasury said.

Isn’t it great to see people invest money that isn’t theirs so wisely. Frankly I’m very pissed off and want my 4 dollars and 33 cents back from the pocket of the ass-hats who said it would be a good investment. My money is not to be used and lost paying for some company to avoid failure. The whole point of investment involves risk vs reward. We have destroyed any and all risk in doing business. We have rewarded people for making poor decisions and sent the bill to the American taxpayer. If we look at what I’m actually owed as a taxpayer instead of just applying it to every citizen it’s about 10 bucks.

I do not pay taxes to give some ass-hat who couldn’t get himself a real job capital to play with. I would prefer to invest my own capital as I see fit since apparently the Treasury thinks a 10% loss is some how a good investment. Some claim that the recession would be even worse had they not done that. I fail to see how that is possible considering the chilling effect it had economically overall. There has been no major upshot of this other than bailing out a bunch of execs and giving them bonuses.

Ultimately though this result is completely unsurprising. It is unsurprising because what else would you expect someone to do when they hadn’t actually earned the money. They have no concept of the value or worth of it. If they loose it they can just go tax more from us right? That’s Obama’s solution to the deficit problem.

The real question is, why are we trusting people with the fruits of our labor who have no concept of it’s value or worth? It must be noted though that cash ultimately is worth nothing, even more so now that our governments solution is to print more.

In the Midst of a Heat Wave

So the heat is climbing throughout most of the country and heat like cold is detrimental on most things.  I stumbled across a nice article that quickly lays out some of the issues that causes problems in the power grid when it gets hot out.  I have decided to permanently move the power series articles to the weekend.  This should make it easier to push them out since the amount of time it takes to write one section.

Though it appears that if you’re in Texas, this can work to your advantage in the short term, go buy a side of beef.  Expect the prices to go back up, if not climb higher due to the end effects of having to thin the herds. 

Know Your Target

When dealing with firearms: Know your target and what’s beyond it.

Betty Walker escorted the children inside and came back with a .38-caliber revolver. Finding her husband holding the barking dog with both hands, Betty Walker fired two shots, one of which hit her husband in the chest and the other struck the dog in the leg. Robert Walker Sr. 53, later died at a local hospital.

Incidents like this do nothing but add fuel for the Brady Campaign and their ilk. It is extremely sad that this woman lost her husband, however it was negligent to discharge a firearm given the current information. I have no clue what exactly happened, details are not that specific. However it is clear that her husband was holding onto the dog indicating close proximity. Given that the dog would have been trying to pull away, being sure of your target would have been extremely difficult in this instance. Not only that but in this instance over penetration could have also easily resulted in a hit on the husband.

Remember that your actions will reflect on all gun owners and not just yourself. A bullet once fired cannot be recalled, be absolutely sure when you pull that trigger.

If only we could spend like they do…

This started off as a comment over at Robb‘s place but then turned into a post in and of itself. Robb pointed out that if we could act like the government we would all be doing something different right now.

[begin sarcasm]
Now Robb, know you’re roll as part of the 1/3 of Americans who actually pay taxes. You are responsible for paying for all the unnecessary crap we don’t need. We don’t need to stop spending, we just need a bigger credit card. That will solve all of our problems, I promise!
[/end sarcasm]

It’s amazing to me that when you look at the minority who actually support the debt ceiling increase, amazingly non pay taxes and they’re in the lower income brackets. Maybe it’s because they did exactly what the government wants to do and haven’t made the correlation that increasing your debt limit != making more money. Debt’s have to be paid back, you don’t just get the money for nothing. Debt when used wisely can be beneficial, however in this case it is being used to support programs and items that are not actually needed for the general welfare of the public.

I spent a hard 5 years in school to get my degree and I’m seriously wondering if it was wasted since pretty soon the government is going to auger this place into the ground like a 747 nose down at full throttle. I’ve heard rumors of a 70% effective tax rate and the return of pre-Regan taxes rates.

I have a bright novel idea for those ass-hats in Washington, STOP SPENDING MONEY YOU DON’T HAVE. I would like to point out that credit card companies and banks determine how much I can take out on loan. The government (who is borrowing the money) is determining their own limit, does no one see a problem with this. The running joke about democracies (we’re a republic) is that, “They last just as long as it takes for people to discover they can vote themselves money from the treasury.” In this case people have found a way to do it through the elected representatives. It appears that we should have had some sort of check on our representatives because it appears that they figured out how to do the same.

The states, and even people throughout this country have tightened their belt in this economic mess and our elected representatives have spent as if we’re in the middle of a boom. I have cut out numerous things I did have after my wife was fired from her last job. Thanks to fearless leaders economic environment, finding a job is difficult if not impossible. Don’t believe me, here’s what Steve Wynn had to say on the subject:

And I’m saying it bluntly, that this administration is the greatest wet blanket to business, and progress and job creation in my lifetime. And I can prove it and I could spend the next 3 hours giving you examples of all of us in this market place that are frightened to death about all the new regulations, our healthcare costs escalate, regulations coming from left and right. A President that seems, that keeps using that word redistribution. Well, my customers and the companies that provide the vitality for the hospitality and restaurant industry, in the United States of America, they are frightened of this administration.And it makes you slow down and not invest your money. Everybody complains about how much money is on the side in America.

Our government as usual is making problems worse. Instead of realizing that, they are compounding the issues more and more claiming they can make the problems go away. Government is not suited to solve problems like this, never has been nor will be.

On the debt and debt ceiling: News flash for everyone, we are ALL responsible for that debt. It doesn’t matter if you are a D a R or an Independent. The government is writing checks with your name on it. You might want to tell your representatives that is enough. It’s your lively hood Washington is selling down the river, you might want to take notice before the bill collector shows up at your door.

My dad often apologized to me for the actions of his generation, at the time I didn’t quite understand. Now that the chickens have come home to roost, I perfectly understand what he was talking about. We have gone so far up shit creek I don’t know how we’re going to get back without getting covered in shit. And those who have put us here will be gone by the time these problems are in full swing, it will be my generation and my kids who get to clean up this mess. Unfortunately most of my generation has been brainwashed by the previous one and it’s going to take a full crash to wake them up.

Day Off

So I spent this morning working on cleaning up stuff around the house while trying to come up with a blog post.  I couldn’t come up with a clear cut train of thought.  My brain kept coming back around to the ATF and Operation Fast and Furious.

For those who have been under a rock since last December, here’s Friday’s daily feature from Say Uncle on the subject.  I have previously touched on it in passing and the amount of rage it fills me with is beyond measure.  It is that rage as to why I’m not going to really post on anything else today.  That rage was peaked again last night by Linoge with his posting of an internal ATF letter.  That letter proves that my gut instinct regarding this incident has been correct from the beginning.  The ATF coerced dealers into breaking the law and in turn the ATF uses that as evidence for further restrictions, powers, and regulations the ATF will be responsible for enforcing.

Instead I’m playing with some toy’s I got and trying to figure out a project to make use of them.