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The Zimmerman case here has gotten quite a bit of coverage. So far, all that is being done is jury selection. One of the jurors questioned today firmly believes the media is biased, and avoids Fox.  When asked about
the difference between opinion and news, she responded: “The difference
between FOX and CNN.”

She voiced that she thought the case presented a “very, very tough”
concept, regarding the fact that “someone who was unarmed being shot by
someone who is armed.” This has interesting implications for those of us who carry a firearm. If the time comes that you must shoot an unarmed person because you are in fear for your life, your attorney is going to have to explain how a person who is unarmed can present a realistic threat of great bodily harm to you. Many people think that the possession of a firearm is some sort of talisman that will protect you from harm, and see an unarmed person as non-threatening.

Another prospective juror took the position of many antigun forces when he said that he believed “murder’s murder, no matter what. Even if it’s
self-defense.  Self-defense doesn’t make it right to kill somebody.” In other words, this man believes that no matter what, you must accept that another person is about to kill you, and there is nothing that you should or could do about it.

A husband and wife are shopping in their local Wal-Mart. The husband picks up a case of Miller Lite and puts it in their cart.

“What do you think you’re doing?? asks the wife.

“They’re on sale, only $10 for 24 cans,” he replies.

 “Put them back, it’s a waste of money,” demands the wife. He does, and they carry on shopping.

A few aisles further along, the woman picks up a $20 jar of face cream and puts it in the basket.

“What do you think you’re doing?” asks the husband.

“It’s my face cream. It makes me look beautiful,” replies the wife.

Her husband retorts: “So does 24 cans of Miller Lite, and it’s half the price.”

Look at the police recruitment videos, and you see why we have a problem with overly aggressive cops:

Note that the video is all about ass-kickin’ SWAT, K-9, and other assorted testosterone filled activities. Now it would be easy to say that you don’t get a lot of quality recruits with a video that emphasizes customer service, but that is kind of the point. When you have an advertisement that is full of ass kicking authoritarianism, what you get is people that are overly aggressive that want to be ass kickers. Greeneville isn’t alone:

Six sigma is a system that seeks to reduce errors to less than 3.4 errors per million operations. What if I told you that it was possible to greatly exceed this standard? Can you imagine a company that delivers 2 million packages every day using 5,000 employees, and make less than one mistake every 16 million deliveries?

Can you believe that such a company has existed for over 125 years with no work stoppages? The dabbawallas of Mumbai pickup lunches from people’s homes and deliver them- still hot- to the breadwinner’s workplace 2 million times a day, and they make less than one mistake per week. They do all of it without a single piece of modern technology.

About 90% of American households own a phone. There are over 200 million of them. The average cell phone owner talks for 12 minutes a day. Americans use 1.1 Extabytes of data on their cell phones each year, and send over 2 trillion text messages.
To store the phone calls and data from one year alone would require over 1 yotabyte of storage space.
The facility in Utah that is being run by the NSA is capable of handling data at these scales, if reports are to be believed.
So to the government employee that is undoubtedly reading this:
Doesn’t it bother you that you are supporting a police state? We know the information being gathered is being used wrongly for political gain. Why are you supporting this?

To everyone else: begin encrypting everything. There are so many cheap ways to encrypt your stuff. Even if the government has the computing power to break the encryption, it takes time and computer power. Lots of it. If everyone, or even a significant percentage of people, began using encryption, there would not be enough computer power to handle the data.

Free hard disk encryption
Zfone telephone encryption
Hushmail for email

Symantec now owns the PGP technology. I don’t know, and have no way of checking, if the government has inserted back doors into the software.

Here is a great article on this.

Fire Captain Smart will get no discipline for the screaming rant that I posted on a few months ago. The fire chief says that since the Captain never told the man to stop filming, he did not violate policy. I have to say that this is obviously a public official that is covering his employee’s ass.
As a retired firefighter with over 25 years on the job, I can tell you that this is an embarrassment. As the title says, dickheads are everywhere. This is what happens when you give authority to a dickhead.

So a girl is graduating from a private High School, and decides to put an eagle feather on her tassel for the graduation ceremony, even though she was told not to. The school’s answer? A $1,000 fine, and withholding her transcripts and diploma until it is paid.
Another student was told that he could not get his diploma without performing 20 hours of community service, because his family cheered too loudly during the ceremony.
The valedictorian of an Oklahoma school used the word “hell” in her speech, and had her diploma withheld.

Each of these students performed all of the acts and lessons required of them to complete school and receive a diploma and are entitled to them. The things that happened to cause the school to deny their diploma were things that would result in detention, at most. To deny them the rest of their lives, and to deny them that which they have earned is a travesty. These are each cases of petty tyrants using the power of their positions to dictate the behavior of others.

More and more, I am beginning to oppose formal education at all levels.