. . . but this one was staring at me funny, so I had to shoot it!
Click through to photobucket, where you can download it at 1680×1050 resolution – which by amazing coincidence happens to match the screen on my desktop!
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For the geeks: Nikon D7000 ISO 100 AWB 1/500 Nikkor 18-70@56mm f/5.6 Aperture priority.
There is a minor-grade push right now to have felons be able to vote in places where they currently are legally disenfranchised by (insert your government name here).
Sure, they did their time. They’ve paid their debt to society. Right, good, fine. Except not so much. The headline news when someone gets convicted of a felony is that they get sent to jail. That’s only one part of the punishment. The other part of the punishment is the loss of some rights of citizenship. That is part of the punishment for their crime. They haven’t fulfilled their entire sentence yet because they’re still alive. As long as that’s going on, in some places felons have no right to vote. Some States have said, once you do (insert felony crime here) you are forever less-worthy than full citizens, and you forever lose your right to vote.
Child molesters also have to register as Sex Offenders for life. Do you want them to not register as sex offenders? Consider that the recidivism rate of babyrapers is very high, and then consider having one of them move next door to you and he looks like your favorite uncle. Do you really want to not be able to find out this person is a babyraper before you leave the kids with him? No, you don’t. So we have Sex Offender Registries. It is part of the punishment for the crime.
So, you say it’s unfair we take their tax dollars and don’t let them vote? Unless you also think people should not be allowed to vote when they are net consumers of tax dollars, you are a person with logically inconsistent reasoning and should not be listened-to.
Hold on there.
There are some people who pay very little in the form of taxes taken out of their paychecks. Then they turn around at the end of the year and get “refundable tax credits” that give them back all the taxes they paid. Then they also get “refunds” of taxes they did not pay, as part of, e.g. the Earned Income Tax Credit. The EITC is a refundable credit, meaning after the tax refund is complete and the net tax bill is $0 for a year, you get a refund of your “earned” income and another few THOUSAND dollars are sent to you because you are broke and have a bunch of children. These people are allowed to vote AND they are getting literally free money from the wallet of the taxpayer.
If you think a net tax PAYER should have the right to vote, regardless of their status as a felon
then
You should also think a net tax RECEIVER should not have the right to vote.
or
You suck at this whole thinkin’ business.
Here’s one step farther, and it may be a road I can go with you for a ways: People (individuals, and *arguably* corporations) who pay more taxes should have more of a voice than people who pay less taxes. Disgusting evil filthy rich people who pay 10 times more in taxes than you make in income each year, should have ten times the number of votes as you.
No? It’s not fair, you say? Is it not unfair that someone can vote for the politician who will give them the most free money?
Some people shouldn’t have the right to say what happens to our society. SOME felons ARGUABLY fall into that category.
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Or would you rather allow felons to live without voting if they pay no more taxes?
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Would you rather people had the option to not pay taxes, if they gave up the right to vote? Did you know the supreme Court has an opinion about that sort of thing, as does the Constitution?
There has been much talk lately about queers being able to “marry” legally. Well they can’t, but that’s more because words have meaning than because it’s illegal. But that’s not my point just here.
One of the common arguments I’ve heard from people either ambivalent or in favor of “gay marriage” goes along the lines of
“If a loving gay couple decides to get married in some other State, how does that affect your life?”
Allow me to state for the record that this is one of the stupidest arguments ever, and is beside any sort of useful point in the debate*.
Let me rephrase the argument slightly, to illustrate the absurdity by being absurd. I will have to do this several times with varying degrees of appropriateness to the analogy, but an astute reader will grasp the point. The mentally dull reader will be offended at comparing ‘gay marriage’ to (fill in the blank) which I am not doing – but try telling that to a brick wall-brained modern fool.
Obviously, then the only reason you don’t want those things to happen is that you’re a h8tr. Hatehatehate that’s all you can do. You want to squash the happiness of that man and his chicken, that’s the only possible objection you could have to his enjoyment of his preferred sexual activity!
This is about the same level of argument as ‘you only hate obama cause he black’ when discussing current national economic policy.
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*and yes, it does affect my life. Whether you know it or not, the science says they damage their own bodies, costing the taxpayer-funded health care system more, costing me more tax dollars. If it’s not the taxpayers paying their medical bills it’s the insurance company – which drives up my premiums, costing me money I would rather use to feed-and-clothe my children. The more important thing is they add to the moral degeneracy of my society regardless of what they, or you, think on that point. Breaking down my culture does affect my life. In fact, I am harmed. Harmed and offended. So there!
In which I engage in some moderatly-disgusting navel gazing.
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I know there is at least one loyal reader out there who genuinely cares what goes on with me and mine. So here’s what’s up, feel free to pray for us.
The weekend started early when DW had me stay home from work. She had, as we say, bad guts. She felt better-enough by the evening that I took her out for a valentine’s day iced cream.
Big mistake.
Fast forward to 02:00 and I wasn’t quite sure which end to point at the porcelain god, so I laid on the floor shivering and sweating. Another 12 hours and (like her, the day before) I felt better enough to be up and about. Which was good because about that time #3 was yakking up the lasagna he’d just eaten, and DW was feeling terrible after eating the same, so I had her go deposit her lasagna the wrong direction into the commode as well, to prevent another day of bad guts. And #1 said her stomach felt weird as she lay on her bed watching a movie on DW’s computer (she had a bite of lasagna as well), and #2 was solid racked out on his bed for a few hours. Only #4 reports feeling fine, and he smells like something crawled up in him and died!
So. I hope we’re well enough that the Zoo can get to school and I can get to work on Monday. Tormorrow I think we will be pretty whipped . . . tonight isn’t looking like visions of sugar plums, not exactly.
So.
No, I don’t want more dead policemen. I want more court proceedings to end up with shooters cleared of charges for killing home invaders when the invaders were police executing a no-knock raid on the house. I want more policemen to realize they could be dead because they executed STUPID PLANS and the people who kill them will not necessarily end up in prison.
There is a general rule in America: Kill Cops and Go To Jail. This is not an absolute rule. One of my pet exceptions has long been: Knock on my door and wait for me to answer, and I will not shoot you dead. And vice versa. Break into a house in the USA by crashing through the door unannounced, and we’ll cap your ass no matter who your buddies say you are after you’re dead. Stated another way:
No. More. No. Knocks
The people in a house in the middle of the night are very nearly certain to leave sometime in the next couple of days. Have a team of heavies roll up and pile out of a van, rifles up, when they come out the front door to go to the grocery store. Fine. Make a dynamic arrest. But unless there is a very, very strong reason to believe somebody is being killed in the next couple of minutes, there is basically no reason to come crashing through the doors/windows of a house in the middle of the night. And when you do, and the sequence is not “POLICE SEARCH WARRANT! (BAM goes the door)” what you are doing is called a Home Invasion.
It is a reasonable fear of every homeowner, because it has happened before, that thugs dressed like modern police (all in black, with hoods, no markings anywhere) will break your house and rob you. The reasonable thing for a red-blooded American to do is to kill them first, on their way in. This guy did just that. But at his house it was the Police executing a no-knock raid. When the Only Ones put him up on charges, a citizen grand jury no-billed him. It’s not murder when you shoot someone who comes crashing in your door with a gun pointed at you, without telling you they are the Police, says the citizenry.
Good.
Knock, guys. Or hang out and wait down the block until they come out in the morning.
Or get killed dead trying to carry out an unnecessary no-knock raid, and the guy who was growing two pot plants in his house gets cleared of your murder charge because you shouldn’t have done what you did that got you killed.
