No matter how much your three-year-old kid loves Thomas the Tank Engine, you should never

a.) purchase a Thomas the Tank Engine musical toothbrush that regurgitates a cutesy song for exactly three minutes every time you push the button, and then

b.) give in to your toddler’s request to show him how to “play the music song again”. 

The preservation of your sanity depends on the scrupulous adherence to this advice.

Sometimes, my neurons fire in just the right pattern, and I crank out something like Why The Gun Is Civilization. Whenever that happens, I usually have a few people suggesting I run for President.

That, my friends, is never going to happen. Even if you were to eliminate the Constitutional barriers in place (I’m a naturalized citizen, not a natural-born one), I wouldn’t want the job. Who in their right minds would trade in their privacy and ability to shop for a few books at Borders without a platoon of Secret Service dudes and a regiment of reporters in tow for the privilege of being national whipping boy (or -girl)? Also, I’m aware of the constitutional limitations of the job (unlike everyone in the Oval Office since, oh, Calvin Coolidge), and while I wouldn’t try to act outside my authority, I’d still get assassinated within a week of taking office. That’s not just because my interpretation of executive authority is rather narrow, but also my interpretation of Congressional authority. I’d basically sit in the Oval Office with a big red stamp that says “VETO: I see no constitutional authority for this law,” and I would go through gallons of stamp ink every month.

A while ago, Rachel Lucas picked up a meme about ten things you’d pass into law if you were elected Temporary Supreme Dictator of America. I only have five rules I’d put into place, and I consider them sufficient to keep the Republic on the straight-and-narrow for a while. My list is rather less specific than hers, but I feel that they’re comprehensive enough to take care of all the piddly stuff like marijuana legalization.

So, assuming that the Temporary Supreme Dictator gets to start with a blank sheet and unlimited authority, I’d make just a few changes to our political system. I don’t even need all ten slots–half of them will be more than sufficient. Here’s my list of Five Things I’d Pass Into Law:

Congress will meet once a year.

This full-time lawmaking business is not good for the country–that’s how we end up with 800-page laws and regulations dealing with the permissible size of oranges. To further ensure the passage of only the bare essential business, Congress is also relocated to the most inhospitable places in the country, on a rotating basis. One year, it might be the outskirts of Nome in January, the next year it might be Death Valley in August. Put up a bunch of tents, give ‘em some hand-held fans or pocket heaters, and let them go about the business of Making Laws, and see how quickly they find the ability to distinguish between essential and non-essential business.  It’ll also free up all that nice real estate in D.C. for more useful purposes…we could turn the Capitol into a totally awesome library, for example, and stock it with all the books that have ever been banned, censored, or burned.

All laws are vetoed by default unless they are qualified.

You pass a law and put it on my desk, and I will veto it unless these three conditions are met:

1.) The proposed bill has a cover page citing the exact Article and Section of the U.S. Constitution that describes Congressional authority to pass a law on the subject matter.

2.) The cite is precise, relevant, and unambiguous–none of that “commerce clause” or “general welfare” crap that has been serving as a Universal Constitutionality Adapter until now. If I roll my eyes or laugh when I read the cover page, that VETO stamp is coming out faster than a pack of Oreos at a Weight Watchers meeting.

3.) The proposed bill has fewer pages than the Constitution itself, and can be read in the same amount of time without consulting a legal dictionary. No more obfuscation–if the Founding Fathers were able to draft the legal foundation of our nation in comprehensible English and on less paper than needed for a Pizza Hut sales flyer, then Congress can pass concise laws that aren’t designed to obfuscate through language inflation.

Congress is elected by lottery.

We put the names of every eligible citizen into fifty huge hats, one for every state. Every two years, we fill the allotment of Congressional seats at random by pulling names out of those hats. We can make it a TV special, or something. Whoever is nominated gets to serve one term in Congress, which should take a week out of their schedule every year, tops. (See the preceding item on the list.) That will eliminate the vote-whoring, and the incessant stream of campaign ads, two of the most annoying aspects of the current system.

You abuse your public job, you die.

Any public servant found to have used their position to a.) enrich themselves unjustly, or b.) deprive a citizen of their civil rights without due process will get a blindfold, a last cigarette (or celery stick, depending on preference), and a public date with a firing squad.

All federal laws and statutes other than the Constitution are repealed.

You think your law about ethanol subsidies or the size of oranges is a great idea? Resubmit it, under the new guidelines listed above, and see whether it makes the cut, but don’t come crying to me if your fellow legislators beat you to death for making them read an 800-page draft at a House session in the middle of the Everglades…in July.

That’s it–those are your five new rules when I am Temporary Supreme Dictator of America. I’d like to think they’re sensible and balanced, and I sure wouldn’t mind living under those rules myself.

most powerful pistol

If you mean “semi-automatic”, it’s the Magnum Research Desert Eagle in .50 Action Express. If you count revolvers, and you mean “factory stock”, it would have to be the S&W 500. There are also all kinds of custom conversion jobs out there, like Rugers converted to .500 Linebaugh and such, and the single-shot Contenders can be had in downright silly calibers, all the way up to stuff that hurts when fired from a ten-pound rifle.

desantis speed scabbard k frame

Good holster. That’s what I use to carry my S&W M13 most of the time. It rides flat, pulls the butt of the gun up high and tight, and offers good retention despite the lack of a tension mechanism. Excellent choice in carry guns, by the way.

marko kloos website

Hey, you found it!  I used to have a “personal” page, but our new ISP (HughesNet) doesn’t offer personal web space, and this blog has assumed the same function anyway.

company laptop at home, porn

Generally not a good idea, as most companies are a bit touchy about finding nudie pics on company hardware (snert). But if you don’t have a PC at home, and you absolutely can’t curb your Slutty Coeds addiction, I’d get a cheap USB drive and install a mobile version of Firefox on there. And if you save the pictures for, uhm, archiving and research purposes, keep them on the thumb drive as well. Those IT guys are wicked efficient when it comes to ferreting out smut on hard drives.

you are gay as can be and ur a douche bag

Why, thank you! That’s the nicest thing anyone has said to me all week. I totally embrace my gayness and my douchebaggery.

“raghead obama”

Oh, look. They finally hooked up Violent Acres trailer park & riverfront campground to the Intarwebz.

how much does munchkins weigh?

It depends on how much you feed them. Mine weigh seventeen and thirty-five pounds, respectively. Our friends back in Knoxville have a one-year-old who wears the same size diapers as Quinn, who’s three and change, so you can see that munchkins come in all kinds of weights. (That kid is huge…he weighs only a pound or two less than Quinn.)

sehrwuss

I’m going to assume that this is the phonetic spelling of “servus”. That’s an informal salutation used in Bavaria and Austria, and it means “hello” or “goodbye”, depending on context. It comes from the Latin word for servant, so it stands for “I am at your service.” Linguistically, it’s the equivalent of the northern German “moin” (which means “morning”, for “good morning” in dialect, but is used at any time of the day), and the Italian “ciao”, which is also used to say both “hello” and “goodbye”.

(I really need to resharpen the Snark Blade. This is another installment where I’m mostly providing information, rather than derision.)

Anyone want to pool their spare change with me and go in on this Douglas C-47/DC-3 on eBay Motors?

I’m sure we’d be able to come to some sort of sharing agreement.

Buy It Now price is only $88,000!  That’s a bargain for an airworthy piece of history.

“Where they burn books, they will in the end burn humans as well.”

-Heinrich Heine, Almansor:A Tragedy (1821)

As you can see, the beverage holder in the Grand Caravan is entirely inadequate for its stated purpose.  My Merlot glass keeps tipping over on the bumpy dirt roads here in rural NH.

I shall have to write a letter of complaint to the manufacturer.

Hillary says:

“The voices of the voters in Florida and Michigan should be heard.  Their votes should count at the DNC, or we betray the principles of our party.”

Hillary means:

“They voted for me, and I’m trailing Barry, so I want those votes counted.  Never mind the fact that the Florida and Michigan Democrats chose to disenfranchise themselves after repeatedly being warned of the consequences.  And never mind the fact that if they had voted for Barry, I’d harp on party rules and principle, and fight tooth and nail to keep their delegates off the tally sheet at the DNC.”

Here’s one thing that will never fail to make me chuckle when I see an occurrence of it: the use of a Roman ordinal as part of a name.

This seems to be a uniquely American thing, and it’s (thankfully) not all that common, but who came up with that particular idea? Is there any way to put “John P. Smithers, III” on a business card and not look just a little pretentious?

I understand the motivation behind the use–it’s supposed to fill the same function as the regnal ordinal for distinguishing between two people of the same name–but the problem is that the rest of the world uses it exclusively in the kings-and-queens-and-Popes context, so it sounds a bit pompous when some lawyer family from Poughkeepsie adopts the practice. In addition, the monarchical ordinal is used because regnal names are usually first names only, and the limited supply of those made the use of distinguishing ordinal suffix a necessity after the second king with the same first name.

The lawyer family from Poughkeepsie, on the other hand, consists of individuals who not only use their last name, but usually receive a first and middle name at birth, which means that there’s no need for ordinals if you don’t give all your kids the same first and middle name.

Am I missing something here? Is there a good and pressing reason to employ that particular affectation other than ego or pretentiousness? I mean, if you name your kid after yourself and stick a regnal ordinal onto his name because you want to feel like you’re building a dynasty, it should be clear to you that your offspring has a 50% increased chance of getting teased by his shift mates at Burger King sixteen years down the road.

This is the funniest thing I’ve read all year:

Pulp Fiction, as Shakespeare would have penned it.

Excerpt:

J: Thou sayest thou dost hail from distant What?
   I know but naught of thy fair country What.
   What language speak they in the land of What?
B: What?
J: English, base knave, dost thou speak it?

Genius.  Pure genius.

Update:  Here’s the Wiki with the script to date.

This little guy found out the hard way that glass is more dense than air.  When Robin got home yesterday, he zoomed past her and smacked head-first into the window by the door, stunning himself for a good fifteen minutes.

Robin put him onto the ledge by the door, and when she came back to check on him ten minutes later, she said, “I think he’s dead.”  He was sitting there with his eyes all glassy, not moving so much as a feather.

And then, as if he had heard her, he spread his wings and took off for an uncoordinated, low-level flight around the front of the house.  It sort of reminded me of the old guy in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail”, who protests his pickup by the corpse cart.

“I’m not dead!  I feel fine!  I want to go for a walk!  I feel happy!”