What a weekend, am I right? Woof. I need a weekend to recuperate from the weekend.
So here’s an oddly interesting read.
Mel and I will be at Comic Con International once again this year, same booth as always: #1230. If you’re there, stop by and say hi. We’re actually very nice people at a convention. We won’t hurt you unless you deserve it. Just getting word out, because dozens of people see our booth at Comic Con every year, and say “I HAD NO IDEA YOU WERE GOING TO BE HERE!!!” Yes. We are going to be there, as we have been for the last 8 years. EXPECT US.
We’ll be splitting the booth this year with Rob Tritthardt, one of my favorite old-skool cartoonists. So stop on by, you lice. Come say hi and buy our shit and have completely inappropriate conversations with us.
This video killed me, partly because I think O’Reilly should stick to selling auto parts, and partly because I firmly believe that weed should be legal, even though I don’t smoke it.
I honestly think that Bill can’t handle weed. He’s never smoked it and has no idea what it’s about. He really does believe that someone takes a toke, and then gets balls-high and can’t function.
If he ever smoked weed, his career would collapse. He’d have a few hits off a pipe and say “Gosh, is that what all this uproar is about? Wait, why am I so angry? Hmmm. Maybe I should calm the fuck down…”
8:42am Swiss time and the strip has updated.
I think I fell through a wormhole into an alternate dimension. And I likes it!
Like I said, I have no idea WHY the strip auto updates some days, and other days it does not. Makes no fucking sense at all.
Utterly and TOTALLY unrelated to the comic or the links… wtf man?!?!? I just found out about this.
http://burners.me/2014/07/13/breaking-burner-dies-at-utah-regional/
Massive bummer… JGrant, I just wanted you to know, on the off hand chance you did not.
As a follow up, I may have friends at that burn, waiting for them to get back to report if they made it or not… fucking tragic.
He jumped into the fire? Even with suicidal tendencies it’s hard to overcome our inner instinct to get away from intense heat, it’s possible that he fortified himself with some substance before he jumped. Awfully inconsiderate of him to ruin the day for so many people, it’s bad enough that his family will have to deal with it.
Yeah. The burn communities in Texas are discussing it a lot.
Actually, I quit doing weed long before I quit everything else, because one toke and I DO get balls-high and totally nonfunctional. Last things I quit were alcohol and nicotine.
I’m the same way these days. Used to have a pretty good tolerance and could be socially stoned.
Now, One good hit and I am higher than giraffe pussy.
Plus, I have too much shit to do. So that’s that.
“…higher than giraffe pussy…”
I am SO stealing that line.
The Economist article (Obviously a Brit, from his spelling and colloquialisms), lost me halfway through the piece. As soon as he quoted Cook and Ludwig, it was over.
i must have been one of the few who actively looked for you guys at SDCC. meeting you two was a priority.
O’Reilly is an idiot. And a hypocrite.
Most RW Libertarians never read Locke’s Treatise on Gov’t; instead they worship at the temple of Ayn Rand because of ignorance and the thought of being “Free-Loaders” on the backs of others. They figure “fuck it I’ve got mine from the state screw everyone else!!!!” Instead they need to read the whole spectrum of Libertarian Literature including Locke to see what’s required for them to have “freedom” and not be ignorant little spoiled fucktards.
First off, everyone should pay taxes and their fair share of them. Our current corporations are woeful RW Libertarian in being outright tax cheats who owe this nation around $30 Trillion in back taxes for everything done including getting those tax breaks. But it’s cheaper to pay lobbyists and Congress Critters to write laws and give your corporation money to make a profit rather than actually do it. In fact many smaller corporations are actually living off their tax breaks and corporate hand outs by the gov’t while literally being just above broke but keeping themselves in the black by selling their products such as firearms to cartels and other interests as a way to avoid closure when the gov’t should seize their business and shut them down. They stay open because we’re addicted to war mongering and even create small conflicts to justify our Trillion Dollar+ NDAA budget that should be half of the size it is.
If our gov’t purged most of these Fascists in power and went back to pre-Reagan leadership we’d see huge change in the state about control by the state. Ironically both sides are the problem in having manipulated people to believe the other side was the problem in certain areas. For example most of these “Liberal” social workers who come out are run by Conservatives bosses who allow them too much power in their actions and give them illegal free reign over others rights without accountability. The same applies to the EPA who have members that are bribed and corrupt as fuck. While others are trying to do their job but attack people’s businesses for the wrong reasons for political or social malfeasance without realizing that these folks are just trying to make a living and not harming anyone. They ignore real criminals who their bosses protect because of the bribery and corruption, but then go on to attack folks over pissant issues and make the have to go to the SCotUS to win their rights back using dirty tactics every step of the way.
It’s the shitty deals because these petty power mongers who were likely bulled in school have never leaned to be adults and know what responsibility is. They see their station as a tool for misdeeds of petty revenge against other because of being offended. Cops in America are much the same way; sure there’s a bunch of good ones who want to do their job protecting and serving the community. But it seems that many are more interested in nowadays fucking over society as much as they can. They go beyond their “quotas” and also unless caught by videotaping or other recording of their actions to get caught. The same applies with other public officials maybe if they were on camera more and monitored for their misconduct the courts would do their jobs and punish them vs. letting them remain in office. I’ve seen plenty of petty tyrants in the military and we had to wait until they left or got busted. But at the same time they were often protected because of being able to suck up to the bosses which is why we don’t see things change when they’re broken.
Are you implying a causative relationship between having been bullied in school and being unreliable or untrustworthy in public office?
I’m not denying such a relationship could exist, but it’s something that ought to be backed up with research before you go saying “never trust anyone who was bullied in school.”
Maybe you should also quantify how much is “someone’s fair share”, so that next time they change it on us, we can quantitatively discuss how it’s actually unfair… Although, I believe taxation is highly correlated to outright theft, no matter to what ends a thief puts the money he takes.
I could go for a flat income tax, OR a flat consumption tax (which I like a little better), provided that
a) we get rid of every other federal tax, and i do mean EVERY other federal tax; and
b) it truly is flat — no exceptions, with a definition which of what gets taxed that uses 20 words or less; and
c) it is sufficiently low — around 5% sounds right to me.
A better treatise than Locke’s is Augustine’s City of God.
The feds set themselves up for another giant ‘broken promise’ scandal a couple decades ago when they set up the rules for the “Roth IRA”. They promised that that money would be taxed WHEN INVESTED, and never again… So of course any plan to replace the income tax with a sales tax (consumption tax? I presume they’re similar) violates that promise, and we should rightly flog whoever willfully disregards it.
I think your grasp on economics is shaky at best. Where do you think ‘corporate taxes’ come from? (Hint: it’s out of your pocket.)
Public subsidies to corporations are a whole ‘nother ball of cat-hair, and need to be stopped immediately.
“…selling their products such as firearms to cartels…”?!?! Citations to evidence needed, please. Surely you’ve reported this to the BATFE, right?
The rest of your rant was amusing, but only tangential to reality, and frequently self-contradicting. Please revise and resubmit for aditional review.
It´s funny in a way because O´reilly founctions somewhat like a compass to being a decent person. If he says something, going the oposite way is generaly the best thing to do.
I say generaly, because broken clocks are right twice a day too. Unless it´s a digital clock, then it´s just useless.
The ‘rape whistle’ t shirt elicited an extended lol from me. I have to sit down and think about the open carry concept every time I run across it. I can see the merits of it, but my thoughts also turn a little to quickly to the possibility of a modern day Tombstone scenario across the country.
If a modern-day Tombstone scenario were going to happen, it would have, by now.
The Tombstone scenario, “blood gonna run in the streets”, has failed every time it’s been tested by loosening gun laws. Violent crime never increases, and usually goes down. As laws permitting some form of carry have spread across the nation, violent crime has dropped to its lowest levels in decades, despite numerous other factors that one might expect to increase crime. (Increasing poverty and, yes, drug use, for example.)
We here in Arizona would like to thank you for your interest in Tombstone. Please understand that while your state may wish to acquire your own version, no other state may take Tombstone from us. Other states have adopted the free and open carrying of firearms which has led to no greater deaths. Please educate yourself on the REAL Old West and remember that places such as Dodge City and Tombstone were anomalies rather than the norm. Tombstone was a unique town that crossed silver miners and cowboys vying for property rights. Stir in a healthy mix of corruption and saute it with a liberal dose of alcohol and you get a rather deadly mix. Even Tombstone wasn’t as bad as they make it out to be. Per capita it had a lot of deaths. But again, you have to take into account that there were hardly any people there, aside from gamblers, miners, cowboys and drunks.
In other words, “The Tombstone Scenario” failed even in Tombstone.
The Wild West was in fact a demonstration that an armed society is a polite society. Very little formal law enforcement, very few laws, comes to that, and people still built a nation with their own two hands.
Er… Not quite. Most frontier towns actually had laws prohibiting the carrying of firearms inside the town limits. Guns at home? Fine. Guns outside the limits? Fine. But no carrying. Dodge City in 1878 had a billboard announcing that it was illegal to carry firearms in town. It was the very first law passed in Dodge City. In Wichita, you were expected to turn your gun in at the police headquarters upon entering town.
“Most”? Er… Not quite. Very few, and mostly only the exceptionaly rowdy cattle- or mining-boom towns.
P.S. http://www.guncite.com/wild_west_myth.html
There’s something important to be aware of about Old West Tombstone. It was an anomaly among Old West towns in two ways. First, it did indeed have at least a reputation for lawlessness, although I’m not clear on whether the crime rate was actually worse there than other towns. Second, unlike many Western towns, it had strict gun control. The famous Gunfight at the OK Corral, although having many factors leading up to it, actually started when the Marshal attempted to disarm people who had been carrying guns in town illegally.
I’ll let you draw conclusions on what that means as far as the conditions that lead to a Tombstone scenario.
O’Reilly’s not a hypocrite, exactly, he simply holds different values than most here. He weights goals and values differently. He even defines certain terms differently, and often, his definitions are older, stricter, more useful than those of far too many progressive-socialists.
He’s still wrong, at least on this issue.
He knows that drugs do an incredible amount of damage to individuals, and to our society. He knows that a free society requires self-discipline on the part of its citizens. He knows that the philosophy of “if it feels good, do it” corrodes the soul like toxic acid.
However, he fails to understand that the political equivalent of a heroin/amphetamine/ketamine/arsenic IV drip is the desire to tell other people what to do for their own good and especially for the good of society.
He doesn’t get that nothing in the Constitution empowers the federal government to forbid us, the people, to ruin our lives as we see fit.
He doesn’t get that you cannot declare certain things contraband, and have the rights instantiated by the Fourth and Fifth amendments. The Fourth and Fifth, taken honestly, gut any contraband law you can write. There’s a reason Prohibition was made a Constitutional amendment. And the reason it had to be repealed was that it created an intolerable tension, an existential self-contradiction within the Constitution.
The reason the Drug War is so deadly is that it is the State ignoring the Constitution outright.
He doesn’t understand that drugs, like guns, like cars, like everything else, are both good and bad, and that only individuals are fit to undertake the cost-benefit analysis for themselves.
He is unwilling to accept that some people will get that analysis wrong, and that that is just too damn bad.
He is unwilling to accept that liberty itself has costs as well as benefits, and that failure is not only an option, it is an absolute necessity for the proper functioning of society. Gotta pull the weeds somehow. “Think of it as evolution in action.”
Again I turn to the Wisdom of Og: Liberty doesn’t mean you can do whatever you want, nonono. It means that people you don’t like can, with malice aforethought, do shit you hate, and there ain’t fuck all you can do about it.
“He is unwilling to accept that liberty itself has costs as well as benefits”. You nailed it.
In the aftermath of 9/11, one of those costs became very clear. The freedom for me to live my life free from surveillance also means somebody can potentially do something harmful because THEY are free from surveillance. The question is which is worse for society. Unfortunately, freedom has clearly visible costs; the costs of lack of freedom are far less straightforward.
“Zat’s freedom for you. No vun ever said it vas [i]nice[/i].” -Otto von Chriek
As much as i’d like to believe the whole dichotomy, “no surveillance=terrorism; surveillance=no terrorism” the facts simply don’t back it up. The NSA with all of its wide ranging surveillance didn’t stop the boston bombers, the underwear bomber, the shoe bomber, Hasam shooting etc. etc.
And as an added caution we still have no clue about what exactly the NSA has. Russ Tice tried to blow the whistle in 2005, saying that the spy programs began in February of 2001, 7 months before 9/11. Others have come out and said that the NSA is so compartmentalized that it is probable that Snowden only collected evidence on a very small percentage of the NSA’s ongoing operations.
Oh, I absolutely don’t agree that “surveillance=no terrorism”. But that’s the line that gets fed to people, and it’s what makes them give up their freedom for perceived safety.
Frankly, we have a government that SUPPLIES MOTIVE to people around the world to want to harm it, then it steps aside and lets them harm US instead, and claims the only was it can protect us ‘next time’ is to take OUR liberties as well as those who resisted the last wave.
This has no more end to it than a blood feud. The difference is we can get rid of a government. Sorta like a tumor, we may need to think about NOT replacing it with something else…
Strangely enough, I’ve never touched weed (and, I don’t want to), but I want it legalized. IMO, the harm it can do is far outweighed by the harm keeping it illegal does. IMO, it should be treated just like alcohol.
Heavier guns in a crosswind I can confirm from my experience. Even a bullpup gets blown around in a gusty crosswind. The 16lb scoped-and-loaded L86 may as well have been a battleship on a duck-pond. Mere wind is as nothing to the weight of that thing.
The wind may not affect the accuracy of the rifle, but it may break it. A light breeze on the firing pin of an L86 would snap it in half
Happened to the man in the bunk opposite mine in basic, but never to me. I got the slightly-too-high magazine catch … and the magazine with the slightly-too-low hole in the side for that catch. Range officer had to kick the cocking handle to chamber the top round, so I swapped the mag for someone else’s normal one. A few swaps later, maybe I got it back, because my rifle tried to chamber the top two rounds from the magazine together. Everyone else was having a great time and I was trying to pry unexploded bombs out of the breech with a pocket knife.
So a couple of things O’Reilly is not a hypocrite because he actually believes he is telling the truth. The man is incapable of recognizing his “truth” contradicts the previous truth he spouted 10 minutes ago. The legalizing of Weed gives me a lot misgivings. I voted for people with terminal illness to have any controlled substance they want, because they are dying a painful death and if anyone deserves to get high it should be them. However, I do have drug addicts in my family and it makes it really difficult to accept the concept of making drugs more available, but the addicts in my family just switched from illegal to legal drugs with Adderall being their favorite. Adderall is legal, so were heroin and cocaine.
On the other topic, I also live in the good state of Arizona and we have always had open carry for handguns. My father even used to carry a gun. However, I always leave a place when I see someone carrying a gun. A gun on display does not make me feel safer. I prefer concealed weapons. I was really mad that in Arizona you do not need a permit to carry a concealed weapon as long as you stay in Arizona with it. I want people to have permits and gun safety classes. You need a license to hunt, fish, and even to own a dog. Therefore, a permit for a concealed weapon that required a concealed weapon instruction class was the best idea to ever come out of Arizona. The last thing anyone should want is firearm owners that do not understand the ramifications of using their weapons.
At my boyfriends work, a co-worker went through the concealed weapon training class. The co-worker thought it was the best idea because the class discussed the legal and personal ramification of firing a gun. If you hesitate you die is easy to say outside of the heat of the moment. In addition, the class pointed out that even if the person was an intruder, you need to get a lawyer. The laws even in Arizona are very complex. A fleeing intruder cannot be shot because the danger has been mitigated. I do not agree with the concept that you can only shoot certain intruders! However, too many people have ended up convicted of a murder, manslaughter etc. because they did not understand the legal ramifications of their actions. An argument could be made that everyone convicted of a crime did not understand the legal ramifications of their actions but that is another topic for a different conversation.
“Gosh, is that what all this uproar is about? Wait, why am I so angry? Hmmm. Maybe I should calm the fuck down…”
99.5% of the worlds’ problems could likely be solved this way….
HA Nice punch line on this one; I actually lol’d.
😀
You thought that O’Reilly was pissed off… let me dissect that “oddly interesting read” for you:
1. “make it costlier to get guns in high-crime areas;” Costlier… so no guns for poor people?! sounds like Jim Crow laws mk2. Lets just outlaw poverty while we’re at it. And don’cha think that maybe the law abiding people in those areas deserve to defend themselves?
2. “improve the records available for screening gun buyers (with more information on possible mental-health problems);” Who defines mental health? sounds like an easy way to prevent most people from having guns. Note that in some jurisdictions prior drug use would be considered a mental health problem.
3. “keep a paper trail to help connect legal gun owners to illegal gun-use;” AKA “close the gun show loophole.” AKA “improved background checks.” I don’t care what you call it, this one STINKS. IF this goes through there will be no way to exercise your second amendment right without government approval. What other constitutionally guaranteed RIGHT do I have to get government approval for?
4. “and offer better law enforcement against illicit gun use. For example, a crackdown on gun violence that has proved effective in Boston involves police informing gang members that a crime involving one member would have consequences for everyone.” Bullshit, there are already plenty of laws on the books that can used to punish the illegal use or possession of firearms. It’s already illegal for felons to have guns, yet in that same article “91% [..] had a prior arrest record.” If you won’t use what you’ve got, why do you need more? oh yeah, thats right, most law enforcement thinks that only LEO should have guns.
And the cherry on the shit cake, “Sensible stuff, though we probably won’t be seeing much of it any time soon. This is a shame.” No, it’s not sensible and it’s not a shame. As the author goes on to say, “Access to guns does not in itself explain why folks in New Hampshire can sing karaoke with pistols on their hips while kids in Chicago are getting shot.”
The author shouldn’t go around advocating more gun control when they readily admit that guns probably aren’t the problem. Decreasing access to guns in this country has never statistically reduced crime rates, especially among the demographic that doesn’t have a prior arrest record.
> You thought that O’Reilly was pissed off… let me dissect that “oddly interesting read” for you:
Calm the fuck down.
6:50 CDT 15 Jul : no FtF update, Two Lumps link broken. :-/
Thanks – but TL has not been down this month. People need to start rebooting their comps or manually clearing their DNS cache more often.
“However, I always leave a place when I see someone carrying a gun. A gun on display does not make me feel safer. I prefer concealed weapons. I was really mad that in Arizona you do not need a permit to carry a concealed weapon as long as you stay in Arizona with it. I want people to have permits and gun safety classes.”
The Second Amendment doesn’t need any sort of class or permit to be exercised. In that case the State of Arizona has it right (and 3 other states) by implementing constitutional carry and all the other states are wrong in my opinion. Deviating from what the Founding Fathers had in mind.