Respect Mah Authoritah!

There's been a lot of recent media attention revolving around the 72-year-old Grandmother in Texas who was tasered by a cop who pulled her over for a routine speeding ticket.

Early on, she got on the media and claimed that the cop lied about her being verbally abusive. Frankly, I believed her--this due to the fact that it seemed more reasonable to me that a cop tasered this woman for jollies than she was verbally abusive.

Well, the police released the video, showing exactly what happened in all it's glory.

And yes, the woman was a bit verbally abusive towards the officer.

But does that give him the right to taser her? Would your opinion be different if he had hit her with his fists or his nightstick? What if he had shot her with his gun?

Frankly, I see no difference between a taser, a gun or a nightstick. All are weapons, and all can, and do, kill.

Now, yes, this woman was speeding, and Texas law does require you to sign a reckless driving summons. So, yes, this woman was in violation of the law by refusing the ticket.

At which point, the officer should have taken her and placed her in the back of the squad car as he was doing.

Which if you've watched the video, it is on this being escorted to the squad car that the woman said she would go ahead and sign the ticket. It is this point, at which this government-mandated goon should have allowed the woman to sign the ticket and go about her merry way.

Instead, he proceeds to push her against the back of her truck, and when she attempts to return to her vehicle, he blocks her, pushes her again, tosses down his ticket book, and then tasers her as she turns away from him.

Yes, this big man, tasered a grandmother who had her back turned to him. Big man there. Oh wait, I'd better not say that, don't want him to come taser me.

But you know what, none of that matters. Sure, the woman was being argumentative, and wasn't the most responsive to the officer's demands. But so what? That's not a reason to taser her.

And as is usually the case, it gets better! The officer in question has been praised by his direct superior, because the officer in question did everything by the book. He treated this woman just the way that the Officers of the Law are expected to treat any one who dares to not immediately bow down in obeisance to said Officers of the Law.

As if wearing a state-approved costume automatically grants you the wisdom and right to be above the citizens who pay your salary.

Most of the people who are approving of this cop's actions are doing so because the lady didn't listen to what the cop said, and worse, because she had the audacity to argue with him.

Maybe if more folks argued with the Powers That Be, we would have less Powers That Be.

No, I cannot think of any legitimate reason that this woman should have been tasered. She had no weapons, and was not physically violent. She was merely argumentative, and unwilling to a) sign a summons and b) place herself into the back of a car driven by a man that she did not know, and was attempting to physically restrain her.

God forbid that there's someone who's not instantly deferential to the "Boys in blue."

Now for some blatant emotionalism!

I despise emotionalism. I hate it in church. I hate it at work. And above all things, I hate it in my politicians. To me, there is nothing more cowardly, and despicable than a politician who takes someones tragedy, and then tries to create an unconstitutional law in order to score political favor-points off of it.

What am I talking about? Why the recent Megan Meier Cyberbullying Prevention Act which was introduced into the House by Ms. LINDA T. SANCHEZ of California, Ms. KAPTUR, Mr. YARMUTH, Ms. ROYBAL-ALLARD, Mrs. CAPPS, Mr. BISHOP of New York, Mr. BRALEY of Iowa, Mr. GRIJALVA, Mr. HARE, Mr. HIGGINS, Mr. CLAY, Mr. SARBANES, Mr. DAVIS of Illinois, Mr. COURTNEY, and Mr. KIRK.

Well, there's a nice list of those despicable, cowardly politicians I was talking about.

Of course, now you're probably wondering just what it is about this law which has earned it, and its writer, such harsh and severe descriptions? Well, frankly, what this law is trying to do is make me a felon. The thing is that the way I wrote this blog post alone, is enough to get me sentenced to no less than 2 years in a federal penitentiary according to this law. Here's the meat and potatoes of this law:

`(a) Whoever transmits in interstate or foreign commerce any communication, with the intent to coerce, intimidate, harass, or cause substantial emotional distress to a person, using electronic means to support severe, repeated, and hostile behavior, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.

`(b) As used in this section--

`(1) the term `communication' means the electronic transmission, between or among points specified by the user, of information of the user's choosing, without change in the form or content of the information as sent and received; and

`(2) the term `electronic means' means any equipment dependent on electrical power to access an information service, including email, instant messaging, blogs, websites, telephones, and text messages.'.

What this translates into is that anyone who tries to coerce someone through aggressive words (which the entire point of this blog is to coerce folks to my line of reasoning, and I'm not above using aggressive and severe words to do so) can be charged and sentenced under this proposed law.

My only guess is that list of despicable, cowardly politicians above just did not get that whole First Amendment thing.

I also have to question if they truly understood their Oath of Office where they swore to protect and uphold the Constitution. Of course being politicians, I guess they figured that they were above such petty things as the Law of the Land.

I'm sorry that Megan Meier lacked the moral fortitude, and the thick skin generated by traditional play yard play, that she felt the need to kill herself for what someone wrote on the internet. Yet that is no excuse for what these despicable, and cowardly politicians are trying to do in her name.

Knife Ban--but at police discretion

One and a half inch. That's not a lot of length. In fact it's somewhat pathetically small.

I can admit, the pocket knife that I carry on a daily basis has a 1.5 inch blade. But that's a personal choice, and it wasn't that long ago that I carried a 4 inch blade on a belt holster every day.

Why am I bringing this up? It's because Worcester, Pennsylvania wants to infringe upon its citizens rights and attempt to strip them of the wonderful tool which is a knife. In fact the city council will be having a hearing on it tonight (11/6/08).

BUT it gets better!

It gets better because the imbeciles who want to be Big Brother to the citizens of Worcester actually told us their thoughts on the matter. Let's take a gander at what Council District 3 Councilor Paul P Clancy, Jr. had to say on this:

We have a zero tolerance for these weapons in our schools and now we need to extend it out into the community. This is an ordinance the council needs to pass. It will make it a safer community for all.

Yes, the same lunacy which is Zero Tolerance is shifting out of our schools and into the general populace.

Here's a not so secret, secret: I don't believe in Zero Tolerance policies. If I had my way, I would remove funding from every school district that imposed them until such time as they were rescinded.

But that's me, I believe that we should raise our kids to be mature, capable adults, so what do I know.

Digression aside, I hate Zero Tolerance policies, but let's take a look at this from a fundamental point of view. They want to make it illegal for anyone to have a blade over 1.5 inches in their possession. There's no clauses, no riders, it's just that simple.

My first concern would be for fishermen. My tackle box has a knife with a seven inch blade used for cleaning fish, and another with a smaller blade used for cutting line and other misc. tasks. If this law passed, I could no longer carry my tackle box.

Oh, but the morons writing this law thought of that. After all, District Attorney Joseph D. Early Jr. has assured the city councilors that said law would be targeted primarily at the after-hours bars and nightclubs where all these knifings have been occurring.

So, why wouldn't they write that into the law?

Why not put a simple rider, stating that you can't have a knife over x inches on your possession while at a nightclub or bar? Oh, that's right, because these things are all happening AFTER the bars and nightclubs close at folk's personal properties.

So, not only can you not have a knife while fishing, but you can't have it at your house, because someone might stab one of your guests with it. So much for cooking.

Unfortunately, that's not the stupidest part of D.A. Early's statement. Early claims that the police would be able to "target" the law. Which is insane, as that means that someone could easily prove that the law wasn't being fairly enforced and either a) have it thrown out or b) sue the city government for racial discrimination and/or profiling (it'd be simple to prove that a cop didn't charge a white man for the law, but did a black man)--and the city would be lucky if it didn't end up being both.

All in all, kind of scary if you ask me, and if I were a citizen of Worcester, I would be up in arms over this latest example of zero tolerance nonsense and Orwellian government.

Food Fight!

The simple joys of life are fairly well and truly dead. Especially for children. Our schools have become war-zones, where if a child has the audacity to protect themselves, they are suspended if not outright expelled.

Additionally, such childhood rights of passages as the simple food-fight are now arrest-able offenses. An unattributed story on the WLBT Channel 3 website states:

A food fight leads one Jackson public school to recommend several students be arrested and suspended.

According to JPS, a food fight started around noon Wednesday at Peeples Middle School on Treehaven drive. Eleven students participated and the fight lasted under thirty seconds.

Fourteen students were recommended for arrest and all were recommended for suspension. There are only two full days left of school this year.

Let's put this into perspective here: a bunch of middle school students (as in pre-pubescent to just barely pubescent kids) had a food fight. Eleven participated, while fourteen were suspended and recommended to be put up for arrest.

To start off with, how exactly did more people get punished than participated? That's the first utter and total stupid thing that I'd like to know.

But even going beyond that, since when did childhood pranks warrant an arrest? I can understand the participating students being suspended. They broke the rules, and as such should be punished. Personally, I think a half-dozen or so Saturday detentions would work better, but what can one do about that. At the same time, I have to firmly believe that the officials in this scenario are taking things way too far.

These kids do NOT deserve to be arrested. Who didn't participate in at least one food fight growing up?

What is wrong with my generation, and the generation before me that we feel the need to suck the life and joy, and the sheer utter childhood-ness from our children's childhood?

What is wrong with school officials that zero-tolerance policies are more important than common sense.

Oh, right, busy-body Leftists.

I mean, a set of policies have GOT to be bad when even Lawyers are saying that these things are counter-productive. Consider this quote from this article:

"Schools are confusing equal treatment with equitable treatment. . . . Kids in middle school and high school care most about fairness. When they see two students whose 'offenses' are vastly different being treated exactly the same, that sense of fairness is obliterated and replaced with fear and alienation."

An attorney said that, in an American Bar Association article. The article goes on to state how Zero Tolerance policies even contravene the ABA's non-discrimination rules. So not only are Leftist oppressing our children through these policies, but they're actively fostering an environment of fear and alienation as well as subtly discriminating against minorities, especially those of the African-American persuasion.

How's that for Zero Tolerance. Then of course is the fact that the teachers and administrators are rarely, if ever, subject to the same Zero Tolerance style of punishments.

What is left? How can we fight these zero-tolerance nightmares?

It's simple, we just have to vote in common-sense back to our governments. We can start with Ron Paul

Fear in a book

It's not often that a book can scare me. It's not. Consider, I was reading Stephen King in the fourth grade.

I found his books mildly amusing.

Horror movies were a staple growing up. It's just not in me to be scared of the things most folks are. Oh, sure, I can be shocked or startled by sudden onslaught of sound and light, but scared? That's hard for me. I don't get that rush of adrenaline, that understated fear that I've felt in the past when I have been scared.

For the record, the last time I had felt that was when my first son was being born and the doctors discovered that he had had his umbilical cord wrapped around his neck three times.

Tonight, I finished a SF novel that scared me. It left me feeling paranoid and suffering under that intense fight-or-flight syndrome one gets when confronted by things that scare you.

Which book might that be?

Cory Doctorow's Little Brother.

This is a novel that combines technology with common, daily events, and then shove them out until you reach their ultimate conclusion. The fact that Big Brother is watching you. Using everything from wifi sniffing to Bayesian statistics, Mr. Doctorow spins a story about the DHS and its crackdown on the civil rights, all in the name of security, in the setting of San Fransisco.

What is sad, is that I can so see this happening.

Maybe it's because that I knew all the technology he discussed, and the small bits he created I could see how they are logical extensions of existing tech. Maybe it's because a large part of my job is sorting through datasets, and creating algorithms to help people do tasks. In fact one project I worked in the past on required that I track where every login came from, passing authentication information back and forth transparently to the user.

I must be afraid because I can see it happening today.

The closest I've ever come to this feeling before was after reading the novel Dark Rivers of the Heart (0-553-58289-5). That particular novel teaches much the same story, with a focus on how our Congress has taken a liking to writing laws which they are exempt from. For example the drug search and seizure laws, and of course the various perks they give themselves such as free tax filings (for more, see this fun Time article).

Regardless, read the book. Become scared with me.

And remember these two quotes:

Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.

That was from the Declaration of Independence. This one is from Ben Franklin:

He who would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will lose both and deserve neither.

Emotional Profiling

Seattle PI has an interesting article on the TSA entitled: Airport Profilers: They're Watching Your Expressions. Frankly this is yet another TSA program that just flat out scares me. It is giving a huge amount of power to individuals with no true way to verify their opinions. It's subjective and emotionalism, and scary to me.

Consider this quote:

But a central task is to recognize microfacial expressions -- a flash of feelings that in a fraction of a second reflects emotions such as fear, anger, surprise or contempt, said Carl Maccario, who helped start the program for TSA.

Basically, if you have a serious hate on concerning authority figures, guess what, if you fly, you make get a strip search.

Yet, if that wasn't scary enough, the fact that it's spreading should scare you. Additionally, one must question why such a program is spreading. After all, here's some statistics from it:

Since January 2006, behavior-detection officers have referred about 70,000 people for secondary screening, Maccario said. Of those, about 600 to 700 were arrested on a variety of charges, including possession of drugs, weapons violations and outstanding warrants.

One percent. Out of the 70,000 people inconvenienced by this emotionalism, less than 1% have been arrested. Additionally, those arrests were due to drug possession, weapons violations and outstanding warrants, which would have most likely been caught via normal operational security. So not only are the numbers on record a 1% success rate, but that is inflated by not removing those from the numbers who would most likely have been caught anyways.

In, parting, I'd like to leave you a passage from a classic work of literature.

It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself -- anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example) was itself a punishable offence. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime, it was called.

-- 1984 by George Orwell

The New Deadbeat Dad

Let me tell you a story about a man named Gary. He is a loving father, a U.S. Navy Seal, and an all around good citizen. Gary got deployed to Afghanistan. While there he wrote lullabies for his son. A son that he is no longer allowed to see.

Apparently, his wife visited family in Israel, and decided to stay, and requested a divorce from abroad. Gary has been fighting in the California courts (which may explain SOME of the problem) to gain some form of access to his son. He's not asking for full custody, but we're talking visitation. Oh yeah, let us not forget that Gary must pay $2,100 a month in support.

Gary is the new deadbeat dad. He lost his wife and child while on deployment, and was given the deadbeat moniker while nowhere near where he could defend himself. No longer are deadbeats the wife beaters, the uncaring scum that have been portrayed through the years. While they still do exist, today's deadbeat dads tend to be stable upright citizens, which the "family" court system has punished just because they are the father.

What is saddest is that Gary is not alone. There are thousands of Reservists out there who are facing government sanctions, huge back payment debts, and even possible jail times because their active duty military pay is nowhere near the amount they made in their civilian jobs. Of course the Family Support Act of 1988 allows non-custodial parents to request a child support modification for decreases in income; but most state agencies do not honor the requests. One of the main reasons they do not is that the agencies are reimbursed by the federal government for every dollar they collect. That is a lot of incentive for them to keep the child support payments high.

This is all due to the idiocy of zero-tolerance laws. Rather than having intelligent guidelines, the government places hard and fast rules which must be applied regardless of circumstance. A good example of that would be Mr. Bobby Sherrill. Mr. Sherrill worked for Lockeed in Kuwait prior to the first Gulf War, and was captured and held hostage in Iraq for about five months during that conflict. When he was released, and finally made it back to the states, Mr. Sherrill was arrested by our government. What did he do wrong? Well, while he was being held hostage, he did not pay his child support.

While I think Child Support laws are a good thing, especially with the advent of the no-fault divorce, they need to be fair to non-custodial parents, especially fathers. Without this fairness, all you have is prosecution of fathers, which is of course what the feminists want.

Could it be a 1% Tolerance Policy?

Escambia County School District (FL) possesses a Zero-Tolerance Policy for students concerning both weapons and drugs, to the extent that both fingernail clippers and aspirin warrant suspension, if not expulsion. Yet this same school district has been ordered by an EEA arbitrator and a judge that a school teacher that was found to have a massive (50X a positive test result) dosage of cocaine in his body has to be rehired.

What type of message is this for students? Drugs are ok, if you're an adult?

If Mr. Sites is supposed to be a role model for students, should he not be held to the same rules and regulations that students are? Why should he have his job, working with children, when he has proven himself to be a criminal (drug usage is still a crime you know). But ultimately I blame the EEA, yes the teacher's union which originally threw fits about Sites being fired. Now tell me, whose interest is this in? The students? Mr. Sites? The union (can't collect union dues if the guy's fired)? I applaud Superintendent Paul for not going along with this. In my opinion, as a tax payer, voter, and soon-to-be parent in Escambia County, Mr. Sites has NO business having anything to do with children.

End of story.