"We Have Taken Control of Your Television Set"

Except that it's not fiction. In an emergency, the Army now has (or soon will have) the capability to do just that. And FEMA is interested in adopting the Army's pysops capabilities.

Only wrinkle is, I don't know how they're planning to take over CATV systems. Not that ComBastards, Charter or any of the other weenies would even quibble about it.

Why Silencers Won't Go to Title 1 Status

As you probably know, most guns are "Title I", in that you don't need approval (and a tax stamp) from BATF to own one. Suppressors are Title II items; you need BATF approval and you have to buy a $200 tax stamp to own one. There has been talk for awhile about pushing suppressors down to Title I status (before 1934, they were unregulated be gun parts).

Why it won't happen is this: Last year, BATF processed about 500,000 applications to buy/transfer suppressors. If you do the arithmetic on that, last year, the BATF brought in a hundred million dollars in revenue from suppressor applications alone.

I don't see the Feds walking away from that kind of money anytime soon.

NYPD is Run by Geniuses

So the rocket scientists at 1 Police Plaza hit on this idea of asking people asked people to post on Twitter selfies of themselves with cops into the NYPD. What they got is a shitstorm of police brutality pics.

Smooth move, guys.

Pony Gun

My first Colt revolver: A `70s Detective Special.

Not my first Colt, though. I've owned 1911s and AR-15s. Still have two one one and one of the other. But other than a couple Colt Agents (aluminum-framed Detective Specials) that have looked as though they've been used hard, this is the first reasonably-priced Colt revolver I've seen in a long while.

Thanks, in part, to The Walking Dead, Pythons are almost always two grand or better. I've seen one for less than that in the last couple of years, but it was closer to two grand than one and it had speckles of surface rust. Colt Troopers seem to be getting pricey, as well. But then, so are Model 19s.

Older revolvers are getting up there in price. But this one wasn't bought for collecting, I bought it for carrying.

UPDATE: I dashed to the range at lunchtime and put a fast 18 rounds through it. Shot pretty much to point-of-aim at 7 yards, maybe a skosh to the left. That may be I just need more trigger time.

It works.

Cat Shit One

LawDog is right. Cat Shit One is a terrific short movie.

Jimmy the Perjurer's New Policy: Talking to a Reporter is the Same as Talking to a Chinese Spy.

Codification of the view of the Spooks that all reporters are spies:

Months after the Edward Snowden surveillance disclosures presented US intelligence with a more skeptical media landscape, the intelligence community’s leader has instituted a new media policy: substantive contact with journalists without prior approval can be a firing offense. ... At a “minimum,” the directive reads, incidents “will be handled in the same manner as a security violation.”

No doubt that in practice, they'll carve out a working exception for the national security stenographers of Fox News and the NY Times.

Score for Easter- Bangity

I committed to bring bread to Easter dinner. Normally, I bake my own bread for things such as that, but the dough was rising very slowly. I put the bowl on a heating pad, but out of caution that it wasn't going to turn out, I went to the store to buy a loaf of their bakery bread.

And I came away with this:

I'd not seen these in the store for ages. I bought one, obviously. The price worked out to five cents a round. Hard to beat that.

Anyway, the dough finally rouse enough. It came out fine.

The Difference Between the US and Russia- Not All That Great

Both nations are oligarchies. The Russian Federation is a blunt-force oligarchy, where the rich and powerful pretty much do what they want, as long as they don't individually challenge the structure of the state. The United States is an oligarchy with a constitutional veneer. Where the will of the people differs from the will of the rich and powerful in the United States, the government sides with the oligarchs.

It makes sense, doesn't it? It explains why the Clinton Administration was so helpful in removing what remained of the Glass-Steagall financial reforms. It explains why, even given the blatant financial abuses that went on immediately afterwards, there has been little appetite in Washington to reform the financial system. It explains why the Supreme Court has been so eager to eviscerate the Voting Rights Act and the various campaign finance reforms.

It explains why the Congress is a clubhouse for millionaires. It explains why so few members of Congress served in the Armed Forces.

It explains why the Koch brothers bought themselves a governor or two. It explains how Michael Bloomberg bought himself a third term as mayor, despite a city law enacted by two popular referendum term-limiting the mayor's office. Our system of popular elections is a fig-leaf to convince the 99% of voters that they really do have a say in what happens.

The political system in the United States is truly now based on a two word principle:

Money talks.

A Little Bit of Humor for Easter

JERUSALEM – In a recent boost for Middle Eastern peace efforts, the Defense Department confirmed that a raid by Navy SEALs in the West Bank had killed known extremist agitator Isa Ibn Yusuf.

The 35-year old resident was facing a federal indictment on several counts of supporting terrorism and had been accused of recruiting young men for a violent group of zealots.

BadTux's thoughts are worth a read.

I kind of suspect that if there was a similar religious prophet these days, he's be castigated for being a hippie-commie nut.

Your Sunday Morning Jet Noise

Antonov An-70.

It's not a turboprop aircraft. Those are propfans. NASA has done developmental work on propfans dating back to the 1970s, but those had the blades at the rear.

The An-70 was a Russian-Ukranian project. It might become a casualty of the brouhaha over the Ukrainian coup and the Crimean takeover.

Patriots' Day

Because today is about what happened 239 years ago, not about last year and not about the Brothers Kablamazov.

But even as I write this post, a week before Patriots' Day, the wailing and gnashing of bombing remembrances is going on damn near nonstop on cable news (when they can break away from covering missing Malaysia Air flight 370).

Fuck that noise. We should be writing about the brave militamen who resisted the Lobsterbacks and remembering their dedication and sacrifice for the cause of freedom. We should not be writing about two young assholes from Chechnya. Fuck those guys.

Caturday

Freshly-laundered "cat towels" must be properly seasoned.

Because It's Friday

A Sentinel steam bus.

Sentinel Waggon Works was building steam-powered road vehicles up to 1950.

Bloomberg's Megalomania on Full Display

Pointing to his work on gun safety, obesity and smoking cessation, [former NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg] said with a grin: “I am telling you if there is a God, when I get to heaven I’m not stopping to be interviewed. I am heading straight in. I have earned my place in heaven. It’s not even close.”

Really. It's possible to buy your way into Heaven, now? Kind of like selling indulgences, I guess.

But the article was full of blog-title fodder, such as:

You Keep Using That Term "Grass-Roots". I Don't Think That Means What You Think It Means.

I imagine that Bloomberg's top-down grass-roots organizations are going to be of little or no effect. Throughout much of the country, it will be bandied about that Bloomie's groups are operating at the will of a former NYC mayor whose signature achievement was a failed attempt to ban big cups of soda pop. I would hazard a guess that you'll see far more politicians running away from Bloomberg's groups than you will see embracing them. Most readers of this blog could probably toss together a storyboard for a 30-second anti-Bloomberg ad in no time.

But hey, it's his money. Even though $50 million would fill a bunch of food pantries or provide heating assistance or provide college scholarship aid to a hell of a lot of deserving students or any other thing like that there..

He thinks he's bought his ticket to heaven. A poorer man might be sent to a hospital for evaluation on his delusions, but money apparently buys a pass there, too.

Some Days Feel Just Like That

Burn After Reading was one of the worst movies I've ever seen. But this scene was funny.

Romney the Chump

So one of Mitt's offspring tweeted a photo of Mitt standing in line at the Post Office to prove that his dad pays taxes.

Riight. This is the same guy who regarded making over $300,000 a year in speaking fees as nothing more than chump change. He has over $20 million coming in each year in passive investment income. He's put a car elevator into his new house.

And yet, we're supposed to believe that ol' Mitt will go spend an hour or so in line at the Post Office to mail a tax return that his accountant can e-file in seconds for nothing?

I wonder, though, if this crap isn't a signal that Romney isn't done trying to become president. It does seem to be that Estes Kefauver was right when he said that the only cure for presidental ambition is embalming fluid.

"By Condensing, We Self-Actualize."

More:

The quantum matrix is beaming with a resonance cascade. Healing is the truth of guidance, and of us.

Nothing is impossible.

Eons from now, we pilgrims will heal like never before as we are recreated by the totality. Soon there will be a redefining of healing the likes of which the infinite has never seen. We are being called to explore the galaxy itself as an interface between joy and life.

Who are we? Where on the great story will we be aligned? Our conversations with other adventurers have led to a condensing of ultra-unified consciousness. Humankind has nothing to lose.

Sounds like the stuff of self-help books and seminars, no?

Well, it's all bullshit. Really. It's computer-generated bullshit.

Try it for yourself.

11 Years and Bupkis

The NYPD is shutting down its ethnic-profiling spy unit. Not because they routinely violated people's Constitutional rights or any of that shit, nosiree!

They're shutting down because, after 11 years on the job, they not only haven't prevented a single terrorist attack, they haven't generated a single usable lead.

Nothing, nada, nichts, nichevo. 11 years of sneaking informants into mosques and they did nothing. A single NYC meter maid does more for the city in a single shift than those "demographic detectives" did in over a decade.

But don't shed a tear for them, folks. No doubt that based on their perfect record of zero leads, zero arrests and zero convictions, the Department of Justice can easily find jobs for them in their bank fraud unit.

Brave Modern "Patriots"

Their plan was to hide behind their women if the Nevada Moocher Standoff turned violent.

Brave bunch of people, that.

Mack obviously was inspired by the hundreds accounts of how the Minutemen hid behind their wives' skirts on Lexington Green and Concord Bridge, and of how the ladies of the Old North Church were arrayed in battle lines up on top of Breed's Hill in Charlestown.

Ayup.

There's money to be made as a divorce lawyer in those parts.

Why is this Night Different from All Other Nights?

Happy Passover!

Grimm and the DC-3

A DC-3 made an appearance on the show Grimm. Unfortunately, "grim" also describes the writers' and the CGI artists' treatment of the DC-3.

The CGIers had the airplane cruising in flight with its cowl flaps open. That would impart a lot of drag to the airplane, as well as being completely unnecessary for proper cooling.

But that's small beer. The writers had one character that the airplane was observed leaving the coastline of France and then, seven hours later, being spotted over Newfoundland.

Riiiight. The great circle distance from Brest, France to Gander Airport in Newfoundland is 2,252 miles. Which would require that DC-3 to cruise at 325 MPH, which would be quite a feat. Even Basler's turboprop conversions would be about 80MPH slower than that. And then they flew from Switzerland to Portland, OR? The great-circle track for that flight takes them not over the French coast, but the Dutch coast, then over Scotland, Greenland and then coming across Baffin Island and the Northwest Territories.

Not to mention that the flight would have taken 30 hours. DC-3s had a fuel capacity of 822 gallons, they'd only have to cram another 2,200 gallons of gas into one to fly that far, which would have been far above the useful load capabilities of a DC-3.

Yes, I know at the core of Grimm, it's all fantasy. And it was nice to see a DC-3 on a wintery strip, snow falling and all. But on the non-Wesen crap, is it too much to expect that they hew a little closer to reality?

Neo-Nazi Kills Three People in Kansas City

Yesterday, a virulent racist killed two people at the JCC in Overland park and a third person at a nursing home. Asswipe has a decades-long record of being a Nazi, Klan member, failed political candidate and felon.

The subtle irony in this tragedy is that the two people Asswipe gunned down at the JCC were both Christians: A doctor and his grandson, who was an Eagle Scout. The child, Reat Underwood, was there to audition for a scholarship talent contest.

Update: The third victim, Terri LaManno, was Catholic.

Can We "Kickstarter" a One Way Ticket to North Korea for Mike Huckabee?

“My gosh, I’m beginning to think that there’s more freedom in North Korea sometimes than there is in the United States,” [Huckabee] said in his remarks.

He's welcome to go there. Since he'd probably bring his Bible, let alone try to talk to others about his faith, he'd be stood in front of a machine gun and executed. Or maybe the NKs would stick him in a political reeducation camp and see how long ol' Mike would last on a regimen of hard labor, summary executions and medical experimentation. Roughly 10,000 people die each year in North Korean prisons, as best can be estimated.

When it comes to freedom and liberty, there is probably no nation on Earth that has less freedom or liberty than North Korea.

But let's guess at how many conservatives will call out Huckabee on this bit of unpatriotic bilge. You would think that the self-styled patriots at the "Freedom Summit" would have grabbed their folding chairs and stormed the stage to give Huckabee a richly-deserved thrashing.

But sadly, no.

Musings on a Red Dot

I've had a bit of "trigger time" with this gun and the sight.

I have progressive-lenses in my glasses. If I look though the edges of the lenses, the dot gets fuzzy. The center of the dot is still distinct and usable. It's a hell of a lot easier to line up with on a target.

However, it is not as easy to acquire. If I bring the pistol straight up, pointing towards the target and then look though the sight, I might not see a dot. Then I have no clue which way to adjust to pick it up. It'd be a pretty uncomfortable situation in a match, trying to wiggle the gun around to find the dot as the time approaches for a rapid-fire string. Maybe if I sprung for custom-made anatomical grips, that's resolve itself.

But since I don't have such grips, what I do is to bring the pistol up with the barrel slightly elevated so that I can see the front sight at the bottom edge of the optic. Then I tilt the barrel down slightly, taking care to not move the barrel laterally and the red dot appears.

Whatever works.

I would imagine that on a rifle, things would come together a lot faster.

Update: Five shots, slow fire at 25 yards: 50-4x. This thing is a keeper.

Your Sunday Morning Jet Noise

NASA's WB-57:

Free Riding "Patriots"

BadTux brings the hammer down on the clowns lining up to support a poacher.

He's right about the selective vision of the self-styled patriots. When the cops were indiscriminately pepper-spraying the Occupy Wall Street protesters, it was real easy to find those same "patriots" snarking about how the cops should have been using live ammunition instead of pepper spray. And Lord knows, if that old fart who was illegally grazing his critters on Federal land had been drawing SNAP or welfare, those same "patriots" would be calling for his head on a pike.

So if you're a rancher with livestock and property and money, it's OK to help yourself to government resources. But if you're poor and you do something like that, you get to break rocks for ten years.

As BadTux often says: Alrighty, then!

Caturday

Now Muster All Available Howitzers at Ft. Meade!

And let's use them to reduce the NSA's buildings to rubble.

The U.S. National Security Agency knew for at least two years about a flaw in the way that many websites send sensitive information, now dubbed the Heartbleed bug, and regularly used it to gather critical intelligence, two people familiar with the matter said.

Part of the NSA's supposed mission is to promote American cyber-security. The NSA says that they weren't aware of Heartbleed until the press reports surfaced.

Which means that if the NSA wasn't turning a blind eye to one of the most serious security flaws in recent history (because it suited them to do so), then they're fucking incompetent.

Commence firing.

Shorter LASD: "Shoot the Hostage! Shoot the Hostage!"

That's just what the LA County Sheriffs Department did.

Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies mistakenly shot to death a hostage who was fleeing from a knife-wielding attacker at a West Hollywood apartment, authorities announced Thursday.

Look, I understand the concept of shooting the wrong thing.

The hardest thing to do in a fluid situation is to do nothing and assess the situation. There was an old-time airline pilot who once said that the first item on his emergency checklist was to wind his watch, so as to force himself to slow down and figure out what was truly going wrong (presumably, this didn't apply to in-flight fires).

There is a thing called an "OODA loop". The first two steps are more difficult than people think, especially when things are chaotic and adrenaline is kicking in.

I have little doubt of two things: First, there will be no little amount of training that will go on. And second, the LASD should start warming up their checkbook.

The South

Yes, this is an old quote, but I think it is a good one:

Don't get me wrong--some of my best friends are Southerners. But to tell you the truth, I've had it with the fucking South already. Some people are complaining about Al Gore being a sore loser, not knowing when to quit--hey, the South got its ass handed to it a hundred and fifty years ago, and they're still bellyaching about it, saying "save your Confederate dollars," and "The South Shall Rise Again," etc. It's just pathetic. You never hear anyone up here talking about the glorious Battle of Chattahoochee or Second Molasses or wherever. For me, the last straw was this thing about their refusing to take down the Confederate flag flying over the South Carolina state house. Like, shouldn't they sort of have to? I mean, didn't they lose the war? The Germans don't get to fly the swastika over the Reichstag anymore. Even the goddamned Nazis can admit it when they're beat! Would it be too much for the South just to stand up and admit it: "Yes, it was about slavery, and we were wrong, and we lost."?

And the artist's comments here, as well.

This sort of bears on my last post, which should also depress the living shit out of you.

Torture Nation- Do We Have the Moral Guts to Clean Up Our Own Mess?

This is a summary of the Senate committee's findings.

Do we have the integrity to start criminal proceedings against our own torturers and enablers, or are we going to wait, like the Germans, until our resident war criminals are in their 90s? Or do like the Japanese, and pretend that it never happened?

Do we have the guts to clear this up on our own, or are we going to let other countries bring charges, assuming that the people involved are now foolish enough to travel overseas?

I'm guessing that we are going to follow the leads of Presidents Obama and Bush:

Because It's Friday

Steam in Paraguay.

Shorter LAPD: "How Dare You Proles Monitor Us!!"

The LAPD cops have been vandalizing the equipment that was installed to monitor them.

Because having independent video and audio evidence of them abusing people is a bad idea.

Note that the reaction of the brass is to basically shrug their shoulders and say "whaddya want from us".

But I bet that if you were to shake up a can of spray paint and write "LAPD Sux" on the side of a patrol car, they'd figure out something to do to you.

(H/T)

And Yet Another Boss Bankster Avoids Jail

A New York judge is set to sentence Connecticut-based SAC Capital on Thursday after it pleaded guilty to criminal fraud charges in a $1.8 billion deal with the government.

But the guy in charge of it, one of the wealthiest men in the world, he skates free. Oh, some of his underlings are in the criminal justice system, but not the big boss. Because that's what minions are for: To do the dirty work and to be the sacrificial anodes in case something goes wrong.

Nothing ever changes.

A Radical Idea on How to Prevent Another Major War

Take all of the avowed nuclear nations. Choose a medium-sized city at random. Evacuate the city.

And then hit it with a 300-kiloton nuke.

Film the living shit out of it. Instrument the hell out of it.

Then show the world. Bring the leaders of every nuclear and wannabe nuclear nation to the ruins of the city to let them see just one one of those weapons can do. And leave the ruins untouched.

We have thousands of those weapons. So do the Russians. The Chinese, French and British have hundreds of them. The Indians and Pakistanis have roughly a hundred each. The Israelis may have a couple hundred (or far fewer). North Korea may have a dozen or so.

It would take an utter fool to contemplate using such weapons. Unfortunately, humanity has never had much of a shortage of fools, especially in high governmental positions.

A Major War Coming Soon?

Roberta X makes a very good point about the outer time limits for serious wars: When everyone who participated in the last serious war dies.

I think she's onto something. The pro-war caucus in the U.S., Russia, Japan and China (among other nations) all seem to be afflicted by some sort of naive optimism that the next war between front-ranked militaries will be sharp, short and decisive. They play their tabletop games or computer simulations and they all think that it won't be too bad for their side and they'll win.

Think of those fools in 1914 who thought that a general war would be a quick and sharp conflict that would be over by Christmas. The British had not fought a serious war in over fifty years. For the French, it had been forty years (and they were still smarting at their defeat by the Prussians). Other than maybe the Boer War (which was more of an insurgency), none of them had fought a major war with machine guns or repeating rifles, let alone mechanized transport and aircraft. No doubt they all had exhaustive war plans that described how the war would be a short one.

Well. It never seems to work out the way the planners think it will. War is a messy business. A war between nations who possess nuclear weapons and the means to attack with them anywhere on Earth may turn out very badly, indeed. And then, it is not uncommon for famine to follow war like a ragged stepchild. If nuclear weapons are widely used, a global famine is almost a certainty, a famine that no amount of "prepping" will ensure survival from its effects. Not to mention that when things break down like that, disease is almost certain.

The Russians have almost forgotten the suffering of the Great Patriotic War, suffering that was severe enough to deter the leaders of the Soviet Union from getting into a general war with the United States and NATO. The Chinese have almost forgotten the massive suffering of their civil war and the second Sino-Japanese War. As for our own warhawks, the oceanic moats have kept the effects of war away from our soil for 150 years (200 years since foreign armies trod on our soil). But the oceans will not keep ICBMs away. If nuclear weapons are indeed used, only a starry-eyed fool would believe that there would be any distinction drawn between "tactical" and "strategic" nuclear uses.

It takes all sides to a potential conflict to keep the peace and work things out. It only takes one side to start a war.

And right now, in April of 2014, if I had to guess which pack of fools would be insanely stupid enough to start such a war, I'd put my money on the lunatics in Beijing.

(And read Peter's take on this, too.)

Off to Jail, Bucko!

It started out as seemingly a textbook robbery. Walk into the quiet little general store when seemingly no customers were around, flourish a weapon and demand the loot from the cashier, and then jump in the (stolen) truck and head off long before the local sheriff's deputies could respond the several miles to the rural outpost.

But it didn't go by the book when Harley Johnson, 24, of Cadet [MO] reportedly decided to hold up Cobb's Grocery in Richwoods, in rural Washington County, early Tuesday morning.

Johnson was charged with attempted armed robbery Tuesday, a short time after he entered Cobb's and flourished a can of mace and a knife, and was subsequently shot by a store worker.

There's over 160,000 adults in Missouri with CCW permits. That number was as of the end of 2012, so maybe a few tens of thousands more. Rural areas tend to have more CCW holders than urban areas, so a robber who likes to knock over businesses in rural counties may stand a better chance of running across a citizen who is carrying a gun.

This is El Perp-o's mug shot from an earlier arrest:

He'll be a guest of the state for a good while.

A Scientific Finding to Explode the Heads of White Supremacists

Simply put: White folks have more DNA from Neanderthals than do people of African ancestry. People of African origin have purer Homo sapiens DNA.

"Capt. Janeway" Gets Promoted to My Short List of Celluloid Shitheads

I have a list that I call "Never See Anything That This Jackass is Associated With". It's pretty short: Mel Gibson, Robert Blake, OJ Simpson, Woody Allen and Roman Polanski.*

To that, I'm adding Kate Mulgrew:

Kate Mulgrew, who played the part of Captain Kathryn Janeway in the TV series Star Trek Voyager, has narrated a documentary which claims the Sun revolves around the Earth. The film also claims Nasa is trying to hide this fact from the public.

Outside of the point that the clown who came up with this chunk of filmed excrement is a rabid anti-Semite and and Holocaust denier, there is the little point that there is not a shred of reputable observational evidence to back up the geocentric view.

Did Mulgrew need a paycheck that badly, or did she sign a contract to narrate a piece of religious propaganda without inquiring too closely as to the subject of the film?

UPDATE: Mulgrew has stated that she was duped and that she had no idea that the "documentary" was a geocentric, Holocaust-denying piece of claptrap.
________________________________________
* A blatant racist, two wife-slayers and two alleged kiddie-fuckers.

In Lieu of the Usual Snark

A bit of a flashback to the funk-rock era.

Because I've nothing. I'm not even of a mind to write about the recent sexist bleatings of a certain Class A war criminal.

Dear Microsoft: Fuck You, Your Horse, and Everybody Who Looks LIke You

Microsoft Corp. is finally pulling the plug on a piece of technology that has refused to go away.

On Tuesday, the software giant will stop supporting Windows XP, the still ubiquitous computer operating system that's been around for almost 13 years, an eternity in tech terms.

According to the user statistics for this blow, more visitors use XP than do Windows 8, 8.1 or Vista combined. Barely more people use Mac's OsX. The #1 Os is Win 7.

(And there are a couple of folks still using Windows 98.)

It'd be nice if everyone still using XP kept their machines running and shifted to Linux or something like that, just to give a giant finger to Microsoft.

"Boom" go the Republicans

Erg-- Bangity Edition

I went to a bowling pin match yesterday. Shot .22 auto, .22 DA revolver and .38/357.

For .38/.357, I brought a Smith & Wesson Model 10-5 with a 4" barrel. Probably not the best gun for that match, my 6" M-19 would have been better. I only cleared the table once out of three tries. The load in the gun was 158grn LSWCs, pushed along by 4.0grn of Trail Boss. I'm a newbie at reloading; the nice thing about Trail Boss is it's damn near impossible to double-charge a case with it.

The 22/45 performed well, though the match is limited to open sights. I probably need to speed things up in my shooting. After I shot that part of the match, I went over to the neighboring range, re-mounted the red dot sight, and got it sighted in.

Anyway, there was another shooter who had a 6" Smith (either a M-27 or a M-14) who had aftermarket springs in for a lighter trigger pull. The downside for that was that he was getting light hammer strikes. I loaned him my M-10. He cleared his table twice in about eight seconds per try. Pretty damn good with a fixed-sight gun he'd never shot, and far better than I did.

It was a fun day.

ISS Forecast: "Tekneecal Deeficulties, Tovarish."

NASA has broken off all contacts with the Russians that don't directly involve operation of the International Space Station.

I'd look for some subtle forms of Russian retaliation. Maybe a scientific cargo that NASA wants to fly is "inadvertently" left out of the next Progress cargo flight. Or the per-seat cost for a Soyuz ride gets some Spirit-Air-type add-ons ("You vant oxygen on flight, Comrade? Is extra cost.")

So Long, Mick.

Mickey Rooney is dead at 93. Even though his career flagged once he aged out of playing juvie characters, he kept working wherever he could. According to the Internet Movie Database, he had a couple of upcoming gigs.

Frankie Shot Johnny

Turns out that it was based on a true story, but nowhere near as romantic as the song portrays it.

Your Sunday Morning Jet Noise

Tu-104:

Between the time that the Comets were withdrawn and the 707 entered service, the Tu-104 was the only jetliner in the skies.

Where is King Henry II When We Need Him?

I don't know if he would have considered sending his knights off to whack a certain cartoonist, but he should have.

(Pearls Before Swine, of course)

The First Amendment and Corporations

First off, let's review the text:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

And the relevant sections of the Fourteenth Amendment, which says that the rights of citizens under the Constitution also have to be respected by state governments:

Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Section 5. The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

You see who the First Amendment does not limit? You. Me. Your employer. Corporations. Every motherfucking entity which is not a government body or agency.

Do you get that?

So if you decide to become the local spokesman for The Promotion of Man-Sheep Love and your boss decides to take exception to that, you lose your job. If your boss doesn't have any problem with it, but then your company's customers are outraged that the Great Lakes Paperclip Company employs an admitted sheep-fucker and those customers start protesting and sales of their paperclips, guess what, Cupcake: Your boss is free to show you the door.

Which is why everyone who is bleating that Mozilla, by showing its CEO, Brendan Eich the door for his donating cash to the people who pushed for CA's Prop 8, is somehow violating Eich's free speech rights, are full of shit. To the point that it's dribbling out their ears.

But hey, if a high-ranking executive of Hobby Lobby was found to have donated significant cash t Planned Parenthood, and got fired for that, you can bet your left gonad that the very same people who are now whining about Eich being pushed out would either sit on their hands or cheer on Hobby Lobby.

Caturday

Jake was snoozing. He sensed that I was doing something and began to wake up.

Pour Me a Double, Put It on Jesus's Tab

I went to the store this evening. There was a minivan with a bumpersticker that read:

"Jesus Paid for Your Sins."

Sweet! Open bar!!

In Lieu of Something or Other

I got nothing....

Because It's Friday

Nambour sugar mill in Queensland, Australia

The mill closed in 2003.

"Please Stay on the Line, We Value Your Call"

If you valued my call, I wouldn't now be on hold for fifteen minutes in order to speak to one of your motherfucking "customer service" agents.

You cocksuckers.

Cat Yahrzeit

George passed two years ago.