Category Archives: The Culture

Still More Random Thoughts

Well, of course the climate warriors have a following. As long as it’s just rhetoric and someone else’s burden. Until they realize they’ll have to make do without a refrigerator, the biggest electricity draw in any abode, owned or rented, or else spend all their money on the electric bill to keep it running.

Ponzi schemes work great as long as everyone keeps paying. Gen-Y, or whatever they’re called this month, better get off their self-important behinds and get to work. I don’t want my checks to be late.

Just once, just once, I’d like to see a lengthy report in a leftist journal on the dark power of sororities.

We need fewer crooked lifetime experts and more enthusiastic honest amateurs. Can’t be that hard if Cuomo and Christy can do it. Not to mention Wormtongue.

Politics and crime are the media’s two favorite subjects because, basically, the information is free. At least from the pols who push, push, push it all the time. The cops are getting less cooperative these days. And more trigger happy.

The hyperregulatory state (shown by the 3, 415 new federal regulations issued before Thanksgiving) is excellent for the bureaucrats who do the regulating. So many opportunities for personal enrichment. Better known as graft.

How Officer Unfriendly gets away with murder

In many states, including Texas, the law specifies that if a cop wants to arrest you and you run away, you are poised on the ragged edge of your death.

Because the law specifies that if the cop has a reasonable suspicion that you have committed a felony, s/he is authorized by the power of the state to kill you in cold blood.

One more law that needs changing. Flight should not be grounds for official murder.

UPDATE:  And, whatever you do, don’t point a banana at one of them. You could be jailed for “felony menacing.” They’ve got a law for everything.

Rule 5: Joni Ernst

 

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Like her campaign posters said: Mother, Soldier, Former Farmer. Iowa Republican Sen. Elect Joni Ernst, a lieutenant colonel in the Iowa Army National Guard, could be the next Sarah Palin without Palin’s baggage.

Ernst wants to repeal Obamacare, cut taxes, reduce the size of government, restrict abortions, etc. Her election Nov. 9 also helped kill the War On Women meme, though the election took down four Democrat women senators with one more anticipated.

A public trial would have been better

As much as I despise the rioters in Ferguson, and the race hustlers and news media that set them in motion and cheered them on, the killer cop going free because a grand jury said he should be just stinks. It makes the whole system look bad.

Grand juries are secret. It’s a very old story that they are manipulated by prosecutors. And cops across the country are killing too many people these days, many of them black, and we need to know why.

A trial in the Ferguson case would have helped us figure that out. Even if, as Reason magazine says, heck especially if, the cop walked free. At least there’d have been adversarial cross-examination of his and his supporting witness’s testimony. There isn’t anything remotely like that in a closed grand jury room.

Law professor Orin Kerr at the Volokh Conspiracy: “…there are strong reasons to be skeptical of a suspect’s [i.e. the cop’s] exculpatory claim to have acted in self-defense, just as there are reasons to be skeptical of a suspect’s exculpatory claim on any other legal basis. [But] all the grand jury is doing is making a probable cause determination, not ‘finding facts’ in a trial sense…”

Or as Reason’s Jacob Sullum concludes:  “A public airing of the evidence, with ample opportunity for advocates on both sides to present and probe it, is what Brown’s family has been demanding all along. [Prosecutor] McCulloch took extraordinary steps to deny them that trial, thereby reinforcing the impression that the legal system is rigged against young black men and in favor of the white cops who shoot them.”

Indeed, it looks like a corrupt system is protecting its own.

Via Reason & the Volokh Conspiracy.

UPDATE:  Likewise, New York City’s cigarette salesman Eric Garner should not have resisted arrest, but it was hardly necessary to kill him for it. Once again the local power structure (grand juries are not independent of politics) has decreed no sanctions against police for their independent decision to use capital punishment.

The times of Tittlemouse

Story-telling at MyOldRV whose author Andy is also working on his HAM radio license:

I did ask him if the truck was ‘hot’, had he run over a bunch of school chil’ren’s on the sidewalk in it?  Robbed a 7-11?  Any such thing as that?  He mumbled something about a problem with the registration and inspection and said that was about the size of it. Tittlemouse is a lot of things but a liar isn’t one of them.”

Worth a read, pard.

Via MyOldRV.

Ferguson small business will rebuild

Thanks to a crowd-sourcing campaign Ferguson small-business woman Natalie Dubose won’t be improverished by the idiot looters and destroyers who attacked her Natalie’s Cakes & More in the name of, what, sticking it to The Man?

“…The sweet lady who offered money from her social security check brought me to tears … Thank you to EVERYONE for the kind words, prayers, and emotional support.”

And the $98, 241 raised in 20 hours on the Internet. And more still coming in. Here’s hoping some of the other small-business owners who lost their life-savings-investments to the mob are similarly saved. And that the IRS doesn’t steal too much of what they raise. To give Joe Biden, et al, their cut.

Via Instapundit.

Expectations

I’d give the guy credit if I could remember where I read this or heard it. Probably only applies to those of us of a certain age who remember how things were waaay back before the Internet came along and, certainly, the Web.

Back in the old days (as recently as the 1970s), you’d write a letter or a postcard and mail it and figure, at the least, it would take three or four days to arrive. And, then, if the recipient was particularly conscientious, and responded fairly quickly, in a day or so, it would be another three or four days before you got your reply. Call it ten days from message to response. Ten whole days.

Today (drum roll) you send an email or you text a text and what? Are you patient? Do you expect to wait for as many as ten days for a reply? Heck no. In fact, if you don’t hear back in ten minutes, well… An hour, tops. Should you not hear back in 24 hours, oh my, you begin to wonder if your interlocutor is still alive. And when as many as 48 hours have passed you figure either s/he is dead or they wish you were.

From ten days to ten minutes. Max. Expectations. Wow.

UPDATE:  By McGeHee, a commenter at Dustbury: “I distinctly remember watching Wile E. Coyote send away for things and receive them seconds later. And that was back in the ’40s!”