“South by Southwest” is a music & movie festival. Because while First Ladies are forever keeling over – can hardly go a week without a funeral for one or two of them – entertainment is something that a hard workin’ guy like Obama just can’t seem to find the time for. Obama also skipped Supreme Court Justice Scalia’s funeral a week back.
In short: NYC’s wacky regulations have shut down a cat cafe, for reasons that seem at best arbitrary. This not only harms the humans who own the business, it harms the humans who are employed there and the humans who would like to frequent it… and it harms the cats who might have been “employed” at the cafe. These cats would be provided not only with a clean, safe environment that is more enriching than a simple metal cage in a shelter, they would also be made available to the human clientele for adoption.
This is just one of the reasons why I dislike major urban population zones like this. It compresses people… and power. Inhabitants surrender power to other people in order to take care of things and smooth over the social order; and once people (like city governments) start accumulating power, they don’t know when to stop. Or even *to* stop. So here you have Bill De Blasio’s jackbooted thugs clipboarded bureaucrats potentially economically ruining some people for reasons that make no reasonable sense.
Anybody else? Decades in the slammer.
Yee was a gun-grabbing State Senator from California who was put on the “Gun Violence Prevention Honor Roll” by the Brady Campaign for, in part, co-authoring the nations first bill to require “micro-stamping,” where a gun would stamp an identified into each cartridge it fired. He tried to ban conversion kits. He was quoted as saying “It is extremely important that individuals in the state of California do not own assault weapons. I mean that is just so crystal clear, there is no debate, no discussion.” He pushed bills to ban the sale of violent (read: fun) video games.
Yee was also a gun-runner, nabbed trying to buy rocket launchers from Filipino Islamic terrorists to resell to someone who turned out to be the FBI. He has been sentenced to a whole five years.
Guess what his party affiliation he is. Go on, guess.
No argument given in the piece provides an even remotely convincing case for banning civilian armor.
Eight-grader Anthony Ruelas walked out of his class without permission, and received a suspension as a result. Yay! Finally, a school that has rules and actually applies them!
So… why did this kid wander off? Well… a friend of his has having a bad asthma attack and the teacher sent an *email* to the school nurse. Three minutes on there’d been no reply, so Ruelas just picked her up and carried her to the nurses office. So… the school gave him a two-day suspension.
And then on the first day of his suspension the school called his mother to ask him why he wasn’t at school that day.
The main point: if you, Mr. or Ms. American, own an RC aircraft/drone/quadcopter/whatever that weighs between 0.55 and 55 pounds (including any payloads), you have until February 19, 2016 to register it with the FAA and pay a $5 fee.
The full set of rules is available as PDF on the FAA site HERE. I admit to having not read the whole thing… but then, it’s 211 pages.
I’m of two minds here. On the one hand, RC aircraft seem to becoming more and more common. The technology is getting cheaper and easier to operate; it has transitioned from something requiring considerable funds and skill to operate to almost something you can buy in the checkout aisle of the grocery store for your eight-year-old. With that comes the fact that more and more of them are ending up in the hands of jackasses and dumbasses; they’ll crash them into other peoples property (or other people); interfere with aircraft; use them to spy on other people, and just generally annoy the hell outta folks.
On the other hand… new federal bureaucracy. Which means new bureaucrats, new laws, new regulations. All of which will likely be not only immortal, but also liable to immense growth. Regulators who will see their purpose in life to stifle innovation at every turn.
Basically, I think the regulations were pretty much inevitable. Probably dodged a bullet here… the Feds could have easily decided to just outright ban RC aircraft. But that’s not saying that that couldn’t still happen down the line. The more the government gets involved in something, the more power the government has to ruin that something.
Whattaya wanna bet: coming soon, similar efforts to regulate lasers and high power LED flashlights.
First up:
In short… a little kid sent a message filled with random symbols, and the school and a bunch of parents freaked the frak out. Around 200 students were pulled out of school the next day.
And then there’s this perennial favorite:
Which includes this glittering nugget:
This week, a Montgomery County school removed Huckleberry Finn from its curriculum after a group of students said the book made them uncomfortable.
Gah. Algebra made me uncomfortable back in the day, but the school made me take it. Bullets made my Dad uncomfortable back in the sixties, but that didn’t stop the Army from shipping him off to Nam. If we’re to the point that *words* that make kids uncomfortable is cause enough to neuter their educations, we’re pretty much doomed.
And then there’s this (irrelevant, but approximately equally stupid):
at least he wasn’t hit by a car while lying on the sidewalk. The cops suggest, rather startlingly, that alcohol might have been involved.
The Chinese People’s Liberation Army (whoever said commies don’t have a sense of irony) tried to pass off (presumably American) hunters as Chinese soldiers, due to the impressively effective camo. However, you’d think the fact that the “soldiers” are armed with hunting shotguns and compound bows might be a tipoff that something is amiss.
Particularly well skilled and equipped modern hunters should be able to play hell with foreign invaders (see, for example, the famed documentary “Red Dawn”)… until the military whips out some modern tech. Camo generally doesn’t do diddly to hide you from IR sensors, millimeter-wave radar and acoustic detectors.
I think it’s fair to ask where this kids invite to the White House is, and whether he’s going to get piles of swag from the clothing industry.
So yet another nutburger goes and shoots up a joint. Any rational person would say This Is A Bad Thing. But for some people, This Is An Awesome Thing. It took approximately two seconds for *some* people to determine that todays mass shooting in Oregon is a fantastic opportunity to try pushing for their civilian disarmament programs. Yet again.
And elsewhere the mad scramble to find *anything* about the shooter that can be used to push a chosen political agenda. So far I’ve heard (note: any or all of these could be dead wrong):
Somebody wake me up when there’s an incident of a crazy person going buggo and politicians *don’t* promptly jump on it to push whatever their agenda is.
At least it should knock Clochmed out of the headlines.
