While there is a lot of public pressure to repeal the no duty to retreat and the self-defense immunity provisions, this task force should not bow to the uninformed opinions and allegations being made.
Instead, it should recommend that the Legislature take action to correct the deficiencies in the law and to make clear once and for all that law abiding Floridians and visitors to our state should never be forced to turn their back on a violent criminal attacker and should not have to fear that they will lose their livelihood, their freedom, or their financial future and become a victim twice.
Public pressure frequently has little to do with the facts. Public pressure is often a lot more like a mob. Rumors, inflammatory rhetoric, and high emotions substitute for data and logic.—Joe]
[I]t’s widely known that anyone carrying a Glock has mental issues. In fact, I’m surprised that potential Glock owner’s aren’t disqualified by default when filling out the 4473 form!
Mike Lubrecht November 1, 2012 WA-CCW email list. [I find this funny even if I disagree with it.
I found your email when you were sticking up for that republican bitch michelle malkin. If you know whats good you will keep your fucking mouth shut about Obama or you will come up missing on the news.
Joseph C. jcXXXXX@yahoo.com
November 10, 2012 8:43 AM
Original email and header is here.
[I suspect he was referring to this web page. I haven’t checked my log files yet but I suspect he found it via this blog post.
Whtepages.com found one result (Chula Vista is a suburb of San Diego):
[redacted]
Chula Vista, CA 91913-2332
He is 28 years old.
Additional information forJoseph C.:
I value my privacy and take somewhat extreme measures to protect it.
On my desk in front of me is a business card of one of my previous jobs. My title was Senior Research Scientist II at a government laboratory where I worked on “Cyber Security” projects.
Any place that I frequent should be considered a known distance gun range.
We need gun control. Obama, if you’re reading, which I know you are of course, it’s time to tackle gun control now that your second term is in the bag. Be a badass. Do it.
I got carded at Dominick’s the other day for buying natural cough medicine. Ingredients? Honey and eucalyptus – a real meth lab waiting to happen. We live in a world where cough medicine is regulated, where you need a license to fish and in most states, women have to endure mandatory waiting periods for a certain medical procedure. Our cars have to pass emission inspections. Restaurants have to adhere to health codes. But guns? Oh, you just buy those and toss ’em in your closet for your kids to find, sell them on the black market or twirl them around your thumbs like Yosemite Sam. Root ’em toot ’em! Guns are dangerous and yet remain highly unregulated.
She recognizes being carded for honey and eucalyptus is silly but rather than call for an end to that she demands guns, a specific enumerated right, be more regulated than they already are.
From a legal standpoint governments have the power to, and do, regulate honey and eucalyptus. There is even a good chance they could ban both and no court would overturn it (the voters probably would be different story). A specific enumerated right such as your religion, speech, reading material, firearms, a speedy trial, right to legal counsel, and right to not incriminate yourself? Not so much.
But she is from Chicago, you shouldn’t expect her to understand freedom and rights.—Joe]
There are three possible parts to a date, of which at least two must be offered: entertainment, food, and affection. It is customary to begin a series of dates with a great deal of entertainment, a moderate amount of food, and the merest suggestion of affection. As the amount of affection increases, the entertainment can be reduced proportionately. When the affection IS the entertainment, we no longer call it dating.
Under no circumstances can the food be omitted.
Judith Martin AKA “Miss Manners” [I was reminded of this Saturday after making dinner for Barb L. A great number of our dates have not involved any food. It is clear that neither of us are “customary” and this is just one more data point.
For more background–her daughter insisted that Barb change her match.com description of herself to say “eclectic” rather than “eccentric”. I don’t think it would have mattered to me. If eccentric or even weird were to be an issue then the first ten minutes of the first date would have been the end of it.—Joe]
[H]ostility can only grow between liberals and conservatives, haves and have-nots, public and private workers, taxpayers and recipients. We wish Mr. Romney luck, but he’ll have his hands full merely trying to keep blood from running in the streets, never mind returning America to prosperity.
RickAckerman November 2, 2012 Liberal/Conservative Divide Only Grows Uglier [I think there is more than a little truth in this statement even if the assumption of a Romney victory was incorrect. With the Obama victory I don’t see prosperity being an option but blood running in the streets will probably be postponed for a few years. The thing is that I see the blood running deeper when it does start running as I suspect it must when the looters run out of places to loot.
Also mentioned in the post (in reference to this article):
It seems the matchmaking business has declined in recent years because clients seeking mates are increasingly putting political compatibility at the top of their lists. “In this neck-and-neck, ideologically fraught election season, politically active singles won’t cross party lines,” the Journal noted. “The result is a dating desert populated by reds and blues who refuse to make purple.” So much for romance these days.
I can’t say how things were 10 years ago or even 10 months ago but when I was doing the online dating thing a couple months ago I saw similar signs. There were many woman who explicated said they were conservative/liberal and wanted to find someone compatible.
Although I do hear talk these days of violence being a viable means of resolving the political differences the talk seems to be less serious than it did in the late 1990s. But it could be that it I was, and am, just more in touch with the gun rights community than with the liberals who seem to be doing most of the talking these days. In the late 1990s gun rights were under severe attack and there are now times it could be claimed that liberalism is being threatened.—Joe]
As pointed out at the end of the video as soon as someone talks about “the gap” between the rich and the poor they have revealed themselves and their true nature.
It was over 20 years a friend of mine, Susan K., told me essentially the same thing as part of a pitch about her love of Ayn Rand’s work. I read Atlas Shrugged years earlier when I was in my late teens. I really liked it but I hadn’t really followed up with her other works. Susan got me started again. Susan’s explanation of the preference of the left for poorer people as long as the gap was less was effective on me but it wasn’t as simple and as forceful as the way Ms. Thatcher expressed it.
For a different and more rigorous approach read Thomas Sowell’s book Black Rednecks and White Liberals or one of his many of his other works. The gist is that a critical item overlooked by those that complain about “the gap” is that different people are in the category of “poor” and “rich” over time. Of course someone in their first job is going to be earning far less than someone who has been working and learning about their area of expertise for 40 years. And over larger time spans it is pointed out there used to be complaints about the “railroad barons” and the super rich oil tycoons and others in steel and automobile industries. Those have been replaced by people in new industries and many of those older industries are essentially dead in this country. And even within an industry those with a seemingly invincible grip in one decade can be struggling or gone the next.
Economics is about the optimal allocation of scarce recourses. Optimal allocation obviously increases the total wealth of society. But what the statists don’t realize, or perhaps don’t want you to know so they can obtain personal power or wealth, is that something much closer to optimal allocation occurs when markets and minds are free rather than when dictated by the central committee with their decisions backed up by guns.
Don’t ever be at a loss for words when someone whines about the rich getting richer. Don’t try to explain that it doesn’t or shouldn’t matter if some people get rich or that it means there is opportunity for others to get rich. Handle it as Ms. Thatcher did. Follow it up by forcefully making the case that if the gap between the rich and the poor is a valid cause for government and/or social action then they will never be satisfied until full equality is achieved. And there are those that admit what they demand is full equality in just those words. But what they cannot seem to comprehend is that full equality can only be approximated by everyone being in extreme poverty. Full equality comes with death. And it should come as no surprise the political left is well acquainted with death on a very large scale.—Joe]
What happened since the 1960s is that capitalism morphed towards socialism by accepting all those rules on enterprise which the gov’t wrote, and socialist governments got used to the capitalist bribes, and learned to relax the rules at the right times to promote “welfare capitalism”.
A third political force, libertarianism, sprang up to replace pure capitalism with it’s property rights-driven theory, and a fourth force, Marxism, arose to inject pure collectivism back into what used to be socialism.
The entire process is like watching clouds form and dissipate over the mountains.
I wish we In the Right could/would stop using the term “capitalism”. It’s a Marxian canard, founded in the notion that what we’re about is a system of belief, rather than free markets, and free commerce, which are the natural, self-organizing systems that arise spontaneously when individuals are left in liberty, each to pursue his own enlightened self interest.
Nor is “socialism” the only evil of the Left. Together, the lot of them all bear a single earmark: they are collectivist in nature and deny the sovereignty of the individual. The rest is just persiflage, allowing leftists to pettifog minor distinctions of no matter or moment, rather than getting to the basic point.
Mark Alger November 2, 2012 Comment to Capitalism v. Socialism [A very good point. The problem is, of course, that “free markets and free commerce” is not as succinct. And “Liberty” and “Freedom” are too vague. On the other side I think “collectivist”, “collectivism”, and probably even “statist” and “statism” work adequately.
See also his blog post on this same topic here where he says, “Joe is brilliant”. He forgot to mention that I admire myself for my modesty as well.—Joe]
Mayor Emanuel, like his former boss in the White House, doesn’t have a plan that works. Since he seems unwilling to follow the court’s wishes, and appears unable to lead his city out of despair, perhaps he should just get out of the way and give his citizens a level playing field against violent criminals.
And if I were to have my way I would go further than Gottlieb and demand Mayor Emanuel be prosecuted under 18 USC 242. But I’m an extremist who believes those who violate rights protected by the Bill of Rights should be punished.—Joe]
The Second Amendment clearly states that citizens of the United States have the right to “keep and bear arms” for “traditionally lawful purposes.”
Stanley G. Buford October 29, 2012 Why Gun Control Has Nothing to Do With the 2nd Amendment. [It would appear Buford has a reading comprehension problem. There has been some debate over the existence of commas in the Second Amendment but Buford had to be closing his eyes and imagining things or spending time in an alternate reality to come up with what he claims it says. The Second Amendment in my universe as passed by the Congress:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
As ratified by the States and authenticated by Thomas Jefferson, Secretary of State:
A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
All the terrible instruments of war are the Natural Birth Right of the American citizen.
Attributed to Thomas Jefferson
[Awesome quote!
I received this in email recently and it looked just a little too good to be true. I went searching for it and was only able to find one instance of it. This instance does not appear to be supported by any reference to any of Jefferson’s writings or speeches. I did extensive searches on http://www.monticello.org which I have found to be a good source for Jefferson quotes in the past.
I must conclude this is not correctly attributed to Jefferson.
While searching I did discover two other quotes I had attributed to Jefferson are probably bogus as well. I have update my posts here and here.—Joe]
When I came into this police force I wanted to help people, but the civilian population, they’re being hunted. Instead of being protected by us they’re being hunted and we’re being hated.
NYPD Officer
On the Department’s Feudal “Stop and Frisk” Policy.
From 11:28 in the following video:
Also of interest is, from 2:11, “I had this captain who walked into the precinct and gave a speech about harassing the public. His words were, ‘We’re going to go out there and were going to violate some rights’.”
The police should realize this will not be tolerated for long. If legal recourse fails to get them in compliance then they should expect ‘game on.’ With no rules.—Joe]
I want to honor my son, Ty Woods, who responded to the cries for help and voluntarily sacrificed his life to protect the lives of other Americans. In the last few days it has become public knowledge that within minutes of the first bullet being fired the White House knew these heroes would be slaughtered if immediate air support was denied. Apparently, C-130s were ready to respond immediately. In less than an hour, the perimeters could have been secured and American lives could have been saved. After seven hours fighting numerically superior forces, my son’s life was sacrificed because of the White House’s decision. This has nothing to do with politics, this has to do with integrity and honor. My son was a true American hero. We need more heroes today. My son showed moral courage. This is an opportunity for the person or persons who made the decision to sacrifice my son’s life to stand up.
That doesn’t even address what Hillary Clinton said. She said they would “make sure that the person who made that film is arrested and prosecuted.” Yet we now know the Whitehouse had a live video feed of the attack and could not have seriously believed it was a riot rather than a planned attacked with mortars. The wounds that killed the SEALs were from mortar shrapnel!
