those damn assault dirtbikes.

A little boy gets shot accidentally by local apprentice hoodlums at a Boston playground. The apprentice hoodlums were riding dirtbikes while they were committing the crime.

The brave city officials of Boston take immediate and bold steps to crack down on…dirtbikes. I kid you not.

In all fairness, they already cracked down on guns, shooting people is already illegal in Boston, and cracking down on violent apprentice hoodlums is too difficult and dangerous.

Massachusetts: Blaming Inanimate Objects For Social Problems Since The Great Depression.

the latest TSA stumblefuckery.

Now we’re frisking the adult diapers of 95-year-old women in the name of safety.

Feel safer yet, America?

Tam says it best (as always):

Seriously, have we reached a point where we, as a nation, are so pants-pissingly scared of a bunch of self-immolating neolithic goatherds that we are willing to inflict any indignity on any citizen at any time rather than expose ourselves to the slightest bit of risk?

Some people say that this is the new Normal. It isn’t. This is the new baseline. With the TSA expanding this sort of nonsense from airports to train stations and even highway traffic, expect this kind of thing to become so common as to be unremarkable. If this kind of thing doesn’t result in a public outcry, a Congressional investigation, a few firings and high-level resignations, some tarring & feathering, or just a good old-fashioned ass-kicking, those people know that there’s nothing the American public won’t tolerate to be kept safe from the Boogeyman of the Decade.

And remember: these people are virtually unfireable, and impossible to sue. The old lady who got her Depends tossed by some blue-gloved airport crossing guard with a badge can sue the TSA at best…and if she wins the lawsuit, we all get to pony up the settlement.

This kind of nonsense is unworthy of a free society. But then again we’re not free anymore. Not only are we letting them wrap the chain around us tighter every year, we help them forge the links, and complain when they make the chain too loose. Children afraid of the dark, no more, asking for Daddy Government to get rid of the monsters under the bed.

For shame.

new york state gets it right for a change.

New York joins NH and all its neighbors in recognizing marriage equality. Good for them, I say, and congratulations.

I won’t pontificate at length on this particular subject, since most people who read this blog on a regular basis already know my opinion on gay marriage rights, and those who don’t already have their own opinions from which they’re not likely to deviate just because of some blog rant. I will, however, make a list of things of which I am absolutely sure when it comes to gay marriage.

I am absolutely sure that:

• The gay marriage culture war is over, and the equal rights supporters have won. The dominoes have started falling. The people who oppose gay marriage rights are fighting a rear-guard action that is already pointless. In another 50 years, it will be as uncontroversial for two gay people to get married anywhere in the United States as it is today for two people of different races.
• In 50 years, when gay marriage is a social non-issue, people will regard gay marriage opponents in the same light as we today regard people who support miscegenation laws.
• In 50 years, the children and grandchildren of the people who oppose gay marriage today will claim that their parents and grandparents never really opposed gay marriage.
• If you oppose gay marriage today, you may have arguments that are perfectly consistent to you, with a firm basis in religious conviction, but you are on the wrong side of Constitutional principles, morality, and history.
• Any religious arguments against gay marriage are not only hypocritical and self-serving (by using the Old Testament selectively to support prejudice), but also entirely pointless in this context (because our Constitution does not say anything about Biblical law having any weight in passing laws or running the country.) It doesn’t matter whether you think homosexuality is a sin, because nowhere in the Constitution does it say that any religion’s definition of sin has to have any sway in how we run our country.
• The folks who now struggle to fight the principle of equal treatment before the law brought this mess upon themselves because they’re the ones who brought government into the marriage business to begin with (ironically, to keep other undesirable marriages from happening.)
• You can’t be Constitutionally literate and support a system under which a legal non-qualification related benefit or status is not available to any citizen who demands it. If you do, you don’t know the Constitution as well as you think you do, and any argument you make can be used against you when it comes to the liberties you do support.
• My marriage isn’t threatened in the least by all the gay folks who have gotten married legally in my home state in the last year or so. If you think gay marriage threatens your hetero marriage, your marriage has bigger issues.
• This country can’t possibly be harmed–legally, morally, or in any other way–by two people loving each other enough to desire a legal status committing them to each other. If the government takes it upon itself to issue licenses to get married and gain the legal benefits of that status, it had better issue those licenses to any consenting adult couple that wants one.
• Gay marriage opponents don’t want to leave the issue with the churches and out of the hands of government because of the dreadful possibility that some churches wouldn’t refuse to marry a gay couple. Consider that the gay marriage opponents want to give churches the right to not marry gays, but will oppose by federal or state mandate the right of churches to decide to marry gays.

I’m for universal marriage rights for the same reason I’m in favor of universal concealed carry rights–because the government ought not be in the business of issuing licenses to exercise human rights, and because the government can’t be trusted to issue such licenses impartially and without bias. Free people shouldn’t need to ask permission to speak their minds, exercise their religion of choice (or not), own or carry a gun for self-defense, or get married to the consenting adult partner of their choice. Simply put, the straight people never had the right to use the government’s guns to claim a special legal status for themselves, just like white people had no right to legally deny the right to self-defense to people of a darker hue.

I applaud the NY legislature’s decision, and I consider it a good step toward that day when a gay couple can walk to the voting booth or into the church of their choice in the middle of Manhattan to get married while packing openly carried pistols, with nobody on the street giving them so much as a second glance.

everyone’s a moderate in their own mind.

Over at Atomic Nerds, the super-smart LabRat has a post up on the nature of media bias. It’s very much worth reading, so you should do so right away:

Fish in Blue Water (Atomic Nerds)

still working on the kindle edition.

I may be on the fence about self-publishing, but Quinn has no such reservations. He recently decided to skip the arduous query process and self-publish his first book. Here’s the first and only edition:

Sharpie pen on copy paper, four pages plus cover, staple-bound, no ISBN. (Very) Limited Edition, signed by the author. Get your bids in now, folks.

snake vs. dachshund.

Look what the doggies dragged in:

That’s a Northern brown snake (storeria dekayi), I think. Robin rescued it from the jaws of one of our intrepid Extreme Killer Dachshunds, who ferreted it out of a small hole in the backyard. It got a little punctured, and appeared dead when my wife deposited it on the sill in the picture, but it was pretty sprightly when I picked it up a short time later. I let it go in the front yard. Maybe it will recover enough to resume its snaky business.

Those snakes are useful critters. They rid the neighborhood of bugs and invertebrates. (They don’t fare so well against ferocious German badger dogs with a tendency to kill anything small and moving.) Like the New Hampshire Fish & Game Department says–there’s never a reason to kill a snake in this state. There’s no poisonous species here save for a tiny population of timber rattlers that is just about extinct.

This fella is at the very upper end of the brown snake size scale. The Wicked Smaht Wildlife Book says they rarely grow beyond twelve inches, and this one was every bit that long.

guns in bars, or ZOMG weesa gonna die!

If there’s one thing I can’t stand in a debate, it’s the tendency to toss out an emotional argument for one side of an issue, and then flat-out refusing to acknowledge that the other side may have a valid point or two as well.

Ohio has passed a reform of its concealed carry laws that allows permit holders to carry their legal guns into establishments that have Class D liquor licenses. Predictably, the people opposing that legislation are calling it the “Guns in Bars” law, to invoke mental images of drunken yahoos having a shoot-out over a ball game score or a sideways glance in a sports bar.

The main reason why gun rights organizations push for such laws has nothing to do with bars. (In fact, even with the new Ohio law, it will remain a felony to drink alcohol at those establishments while armed.) Those laws just make it legal for a permit holder to stay armed while eating at a restaurant (most of which have on-premises hooch licenses), or merely walking into an establishment that has a liquor license. That includes bars, technically speaking, but the intent and scope of the law precludes people getting legally tanked at Big Ed’s Sports Bar while strapped. Those laws just mean that Joe Permit doesn’t have to disarm and leave his gun in the car while eating at Chili’s. It keeps everyone safer because it eliminates gun handling in the parking lot, it doesn’t require a firearm to be left unattended in a semi-public space, and it doesn’t give criminals an obvious target for theft or robbery. (As for the “this will cost a life” argument–I know of at least one well-documented case where a permit holder died because he complied with the law and disarmed, only to be mugged and killed in the parking lot on the way back to his car. That argument cuts both ways.) I repeat: it remains a felony in Ohio to drink in those establishments while toting a gun, and will result in loss of carry rights and imprisonment. Also, the law has a provision for any business to opt out by posting a “No Guns” sign at the door.

Now, the argument that such laws will cost lives and increase deadly confrontations at bars is not supported by the evidence. Many states with legal concealed carry have laws that allow the carrying of guns in places that serve liquor. Some of them, like my own home state of New Hampshire, don’t even specify that CCW holders can’t drink while armed. And yet we make it through life without drunks gunning each other down in the bars and taverns of the Granite State over hockey or baseball scores every weekend. I can go down to the bar in town and legally have five beers and a martini while packing a gun. (Why don’t I do that? Because I have the sense to not intentionally make myself impaired while carrying a firearm–and if I didn’t, I wouldn’t have the sense to check or care about the law before I head down to the old watering hole.) Ohio’s law is way more restrictive, so why would you assume that this will be a problem, unless you think Ohioans as a whole are much less responsible and more violence-prone than New Hampshireites?

It’s a patently condescending and classist argument because it assumes that other people can’t act in a smart way (especially those low-brow, Budweiser-swilling, conservative gun-toting rednecks), and that the only people who want to legally carry guns are invariably uneducated, violent morons who just don’t have the good judgment to not drink and tote in public, and to not shoot their seat neighbor when they’re pissed off. (As if anyone prone to that kind of behavior is going to give two shits about the legality of the pistol in his waistband any more than he does about the fact that shooting people dead is illegal outside of legitimate self-defense.) 

I just don’t get how you can call yourself an educated, open-minded person when you’re perfectly willing to boil down an argument to the least honest, most emotional, most willfully misleading implication of the law while completely ignoring the other side of the debate…just because you disagree with the law in question.

mailbox baseball, and the assholes who play it.

Last week, I put up a new mailbox to replace the one our town plow mangled last winter. Yesterday, some little punk-ass douche did a drive-by and dented the living crap out of the brand new mailbox. I just finished hammering out the dents and reattaching the metal bracket that holds the box on the post. That’s an hour of my time spent on fixing the end result of someone else’s malice.

People suck, I swear. Where’s the fun in smashing someone else’s stuff?

And no, I can’t put up a bash-proof mailbox. We can’t do the brick enclosures or sheet-steel-box-on-truck-axle kind of constructions, because the plows can get damaged if they run into those. (Funny how the damage consideration goes only one way, but I digress.)

It is enough to drive one to misanthropy, it is.

you may remember me from such films as “writer vs. liquor cabinet III”.

A few months ago, Concealed Carry Magazine featured a profile article about that Munchkin Wrangler guy from Upper Cryogenica. (Friend Oleg Volk was here last fall to take pictures and ask questions for the article.)

For those of you who don’t subscribe to CCM, here’s a link to the online version of that article.

on a lighter note.

Just in case you haven’t found Hannah Hart and My Drunk Kitchen on the Intertubes yet, here’s a link. Watch it now and thank me later. (Just put all beverages away before you do.)

My new ambition and life goal is to have a lunch date with both Hannah Hart and Allie Brosh (of Hyperbole and a Half).