Truth in Satire

President* Donald Trump has declared a state of emergency on the U.S. border with Mexico and is deploying thousands of National Guard troops there to masturbate, eat MREs, and play with personal knives, sources confirmed today.

The soldiers will also be tasked with playing card games and generating PowerPoint briefing slides for generals in Washington, according to defense officials, who added the slides will likely lead to questions of overall government capacity on counter-narcotics operations and DEA/SOUTHCOM institutional dynamics, as if they give a shit about any of it.

I am not certain, though, how Trump's order works. He can't order the National Guard to do anything related to law enforcement. But the state governors can, because unless a Guard unit is "federalized", they obey the orders of the governor.

More to the point of the worry of the Pentagon is the fact that soldiers are not cops. Their job, when it comes to guns, is to go places, break things, and kill people. That's what soldiers do. In a civil setting, as was found nearly fifty years ago, shit can go sideways when soldiers are used for police functions.

Given Spanky's bellicosity, it's possible that if he insists on the Guard troops conducting armed patrols, that the Mexicans will deploy armed troops to watch. It takes very little thought to realize that may not go so well.

But rational thought is one thing that nobody has ever accused Spanky of doing.

UPDATE: As I suspected, Trump can't order jack-shit in regards to the Guard. He has to ask the governors. At least one has said "no".

Skydivers and Airplanes

Luckily, nobody was killed in this collision.

Others have not been so lucky.

A long time ago, I flew into an airport where there was a skydiving operation. As I was taxiing out, a whole lot of skydivers began landing. I pulled the mixture, shut down, and waited for them to finish. One landed close enough to my airplane that it might have been interesting.

I set a new rule that day: I won't fly into or near an airport with an active drop zone.

Wicked Stahm Comin'

Hope you folks in New England are ready!

Murder: Just the Facts, Ma'am

You can, if you desire, take a look at the FBI's uniform crime statistics for 2011 and previous years. If you look here, you can see what weapons were used in homicides from 2007 through 2011.

Except for a category listed as "other guns"[1] , the type of firearm least likely to be used in a homicide is a rifle. Any by "rifle", that's all rifles. That's everything from a black-powder Sharps up through the latest civilian variant of the M-4 carbine.

You are more likely to be beaten with a blunt object, knifed, or be punched and kicked to death than you are to be killed by someone wielding a rifle.

Which means that the entire debate in Washington about Evil Black Rifles is just bullshit. It is about a horrific event, certainly, but it is by no means about the things that are most dangerous to children.

Because it is all about the optics and, yes, the agenda of some people and news outlets.

NB: Commenters, please, note the House Rules on comments. Play nice. A couple of comments are skating close to the edge.

NB2: Comments are now closed.
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[1]Other than handguns, rifles or shotguns, that is. Artillery pieces? Mortars? Smoothbore flintlocks?

Riots

A story about being in the LA riots without a gun.

(H/T)

You can find similar stories about Hurricane Katrina. Or you can read how Mayor "No Guns For You" Bloomberg turned Staten Island into a looters' paradise in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy.

I have a relative who was in LA for the riots. See, he moved to LA from one of the Dixie states. When he moved there, one of his new neighbors came over to brief him on neighborhood things. The neighbor told the tale of a local miscreant who had a penchant for breaking into houses, with the lament that "nobody has been able to do anything about him." Relative asked: "Has anybody tried shooting him?" Miscreant never bothered him.

So fast-forward a few years. Relative has made friends with the family across the street. His counterpart in that family occasionally gave Relative some good-natured shit about how Relative owned guns and Neighbor won't have a gun in his house.

Riots broke out. The rioting came within a few blocks of the neighborhood. Relative still had to go to work; he carried some flavor of a 1911 with him. At Relative's house, he loaded his other guns (a couple of shotguns and an EBR) and put them where he thought they would be useful.

Neighbor came over and asked "can we stay with you?" Because everybody knew that calling 9-1-1 would result in either no response from the cops or even a busy signal.

After the riots were over, Neighbor learned to shoot. And bought weapons.

Maybe civil order only breaks down every so often and maybe less often than one might think. But when you need a gun, you probably really need one, in the same way that when you need a fire extinguisher, there isn't time to putter on over to the local hardware store for one.

I sincerely hope that you go through life without ever needing either a fire extinguisher or a firearm. Hope, though, is not a plan.

What is your plan?

Rural Life

This post takes, as a launching pad, the story of the man's house who was allowed to burn down because he hadn't paid the $75 annual fee to the local fire department.

I have lived in areas that run the gamut from sketchy urban to very rural. Currently, I live in an area that is sort of exurban in that there are still a few working farms around.[1] I live within a town's borders, but there is no town police force.[2] The town is part of a neighboring town's school district. Fire protection is by a volunteer fire department.

I can't praise the volunteers enough. They have to have all of the training of professional firefighters, which is a shitload of training, and many of them also have paramedic certifications. To my mind, volunteer firefighters deserve all of the praise and glory that we give our servicemen and women.

But there is a problem inherent in living outside of the cities and larger towns: If you call for emergency assistance, the response times are long. I now live within earshot of a fire station. Early one morning, as I was feeding the cats, I heard the fire siren go off. Twelve minutes later, I heard the siren of the first truck leaving the station. Add in the time it took to drive to wherever they were going and get set up, well, that's a long time to have your home on fire.[3] (In their defense, they do have paramedics on duty, so if you call for a medical emergency, those folks roll immediately.)

I lived for a time in a rural county that had one state patrol car on duty at night. If you called for an emergency, even if the officer had responded with a high-speed lights-and-siren run, it could be as long as 20 or 30 minutes before he showed up, and that was if he wasn't busy at another call. You might get lucky and a town cop or another state trooper might show under mutual assistance. In that town, the unofficial motto of the volunteer fire department was "we've never lost a cellar hole."

I have had personal experience with calling the cops in my current location for a trouble call, and that one was an incident where two people were beating the shit out of each other right out in the parking lot. It was at least a quarter-hour before a cop came by and by then the combatants had given up and limped away.

Living away from the city has its charms. It's usually quiet. You can look out your window and see the green of forests, marshes or grasslands. Muggings are rare. Life seems slower. Other than you have to have a car or two, it's less costly to live here.[4] On the other hand, if you want good coffee (not Dunkin Donuts) or food other than American, pizza or Chinese, you are shit out of luck or you make it yourself. If you want to see an indie film or a documentary, you'd best join Netflix and you're not going to be browsing through quaint bookstores.

The biggest drawback is that you are often on your own for a first response in an emergency. You need a good first-aid kit, fire extinguishers (depending on your home size, at least a few) and a gun. For you cannot count on help arriving in time to do more than clean up.

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[1] Horse farms don't count.
[2] 911 calls go to the county sheriff's dispatcher. If people around here call for the cops, they almost universally pray that the state police show up, not the sheriff's deputies.
[3] That assumes that the first truck is a tanker truck. If a tanker truck doesn't respond and the first truck is either a ladder truck or engine truck, then all they can do is make sure that everyone is out and then watch the fire spread.
[4] City folk have been known to load up on groceries here before heading home because the prices are cheaper and the selection is more varied.

Mike, Look Up the Definition of "Emergency Preparedness"

Republican National Committee chair Michael Steele defended GOP opposition to pandemic preparedness funding in the stimulus bill in an interview with CNN Tuesday, saying the party had no way of knowing that such a threat might actually materialize. "Did we know this at the time of the vote?" Steele asked. "Don't come back and make this link six months after the fact ... we don't know what tomorrow holds." He added, "I'm not going to sit here and accept that connection."

That has to rank among the top of the list of Lamest Political Excuses in History. I gather that Steele figures that the Gods of Fire will make an appointment before a fire breaks out in his home.

Bobby Jindal and the Volcanoes

I had it in my mind to write a little screed about that ignorant twit's contempt for volcano monitoring and mention, among other things, how a volcano destroyed an entire Air Force base about 20 or so years back and that tens of thousands of lives were saved and hundreds of millions of dollars worth of military hardware was saved because of volcano monitoring.

Nate Silver beat me to it.

I had it in my mind to also write about how many American cities are close to known volcanoes and how many thousands of people will be killed if even one of those big fuckers erupts without warning.

The Ornery Bastard beat me to it.

I just don't get it about the party of Hoover. Who do they think will fund research into volcano monitoring, other than government? Is it so hard for them to understand the benefits of being able to monitor a volcano and to generate a forecast of when it is going to erupt? Mount Pinatubo had been inactive for 500 years before it erupted. The Chaiten volcano in Chile erupted last year for the first time in 9,000 years.

What is it about the Hooverites and science? Why are they so opposed to the Federal government engaging in any sort of scientific research (unless it produces a better way to kill people)?

What also bothers me about the party of Hoover is that they have a proven track record of staffing government agencies with incompetent party loyalists and then, when the agencies predictably wind up being completely inept, they blame government for that fact.

Let's look at the record.

Under the party of Hoover during the Reagan and Bush I administrations, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, who we all know as FEMA, was viewed as a political dumping ground, a place to stick party loyalists who were too stupid to hold a real job. As a result, FEMA botched the responses to Hurricanes Hugo and Andrew. Bill Clinton appointed a man with some experience at running an emergency management agency, James Witt. Witt fired all of the party hacks and brought in professionals who knew how to do disaster relief. Witt turned FEMA around.

Then came Our Beloved Chimperor, who reverted to using FEMA as a place to stash Republicans who could not hold a real job in the private sector (you know, people just like Dubya). His first pick was the guy who ran his campaigns, but he didn't last too long, so he put in a guy whose previous experience was at bankrupting a horse association.

And we all know how well that worked out. (Which is why President Obama, like President Clinton, is going to appoint someone who has experience in emergency management.)

Deliberately destroying the functionality of the government and then pointing to the resultant lack of functionality as a reason to not have government is like the Menendez brothers pleading for lienency because they are orphans. It counts on the American people being exceedingly stupid.

I don't think Americans are that stupid.

Bobby Jindal evidently disagrees.