Armored Facilities Manager

5:45pm: Police Harassment....
This is of a different sort....

Lori, take note....

5:25pm: New Trial For Cory Maye...
This is about equal protection, self defense AND limits on government power.

Cory Maye had a man break into his home, he fired in self defense. The man he shot was it turns out, a police officer. Officer Ron Jones died of his wounds. Cory Maye was arrested and charged with murder for the killing of the police officer.

A Confidential Informant stated that he'd seen large quantities of drugs in both sides of the duplex where Cory Maye lived on one side. Officers attempted to enter the house via the rear and front. When the officer entered the rear he was shot at in self defense by Cory Maye. Apparently the police never announced that they were police until Cory was Defending himself. The vast quantities of drugs were not found at either home. In Cory's home there was the remains of a roach according to the police reports. The officer, Ron W. Jones, who obtained the initial statement from the informant was the officer who was shot and died at the scene.

At his first trial Cory was apparently convicted. An appeal's court has found that there were issues with his trial and has set aside the verdict and ordered a new trial.

Interestingly, here is the court of appeals oral arguments.

9:49am: Veterans day....

12:51pm: Code Pink...
This past Halloween, the White House hosted a Trick-or-Treat event for the families of soldiers/sailors/air-men. The event was for the kids. Good thing to do too. What did Code Pink do? They showed up to harass the children and specifically target them for harassment. Say what you want at a political protest. Show up and target children? Potentially foul up a child's already possibly unhappy issues with an absent parent to further your own political goals, you loose all class and credibility, even morality in my opinion.

Watching the video, I have the thought that these particular women from Code Pink are now squarely in the "Needs to be Horsewhipped" category if you ask me.

Fucking harpies.

9:32am: Happy Birthday to the Corps...
Give a silent (or loud) thanks to the guys what act like misfits half the time and heros the other half....

3:34pm: Jen, John....
Spotrep? You guys ok?

Anyone else at Ft Hood?

8:40pm: Even More Transparency...
Secret copyright treaty leaks. It's bad. Very bad.

The internet chapter of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a secret copyright treaty whose text Obama's administration refused to disclose due to "national security" concerns, has leaked. It's bad. It says:

* That ISPs have to proactively police copyright on user-contributed material. This means that it will be impossible to run a service like Flickr or YouTube or Blogger, since hiring enough lawyers to ensure that the mountain of material uploaded every second isn't infringing will exceed any hope of profitability.

* That ISPs have to cut off the Internet access of accused copyright infringers or face liability. This means that your entire family could be denied to the internet -- and hence to civic participation, health information, education, communications, and their means of earning a living -- if one member is accused of copyright infringement, without access to a trial or counsel.

* That the whole world must adopt US-style "notice-and-takedown" rules that require ISPs to remove any material that is accused -- again, without evidence or trial -- of infringing copyright. This has proved a disaster in the US and other countries, where it provides an easy means of censoring material, just by accusing it of infringing copyright.

* Mandatory prohibitions on breaking DRM, even if doing so for a lawful purpose (e.g., to make a work available to disabled people; for archival preservation; because you own the copyrighted work that is locked up with DRM)

I don't know HOW this is workable...

Still, I guess that's the Change people can believe in. Or something.

10:20pm: Election Results...
States are turning red. Interesting that. New Jersey will have a Republican Governor for the first time in ages.

I wonder what caused that...

5:40pm: City of Atlanta....The Eagle Raid.
I've commented on the Atlanta forum on LJ. But I feel taht something is warranted here.

The City of Atlanta Police Department decided to conduct a raid upon the patrons and bar known as the Atlanta Eagle. The Eagle is a famous (or infamous if you're more conservative) gay bar in Atlanta. It's been there for absolute years. I've never heard of any significant issues there and the Gay population in Atlanta is, from what I've seen of other cities, rather well behaved all things considered. The gentrification of the Highlands/Midtown area as much as it has progressed, is a direct result of the two income couples that have moved into the Highlands/Midtown area. Suffice to say while I'm not gay or terribly friendly to some of their political causes, I'm not exactly given to considering them anything remotely like a threat to civil order or peace.

Some time back (a few months) APD's Vice unit apparently did an undercover sweep of the Eagle and apparently the officer in question saw some lewd and possibly indecent public behavior that day. He made note of it and a month or two following, the Vice unit, with assistance from the Atlanta Red Dog unit and other officers conducted a mass raid on the Eagle. From the City's own press statements they appeared to lack both probable cause, a warrant and any sort of reasonable articulable suspicion that there was crime going on at the Atlanta Eagle. None the less, they detained the entire bar full of people, patrons and staff alike, forced them to lie on the floor, took IDs, searched, ran the name/DL#s against he computer and apparently assaulted a few people for good measure. Bar patrons were apparently released and the staff were all arrested. Staff arrested also included an off duty manager who lives upstairs in a building attached to the Eagle and who rents the property from the Eagle as his own private residence (actually an odd but nice old house from what I've seen from the street).

It's amazing that police departments and city officials, can be so institutionally blind deaf and dumb that they think they can roust people out, detain them and search them absent any legal foundation to do so. More or less, it sounds like they acted like JBTs, knew they acted like JBTs and felt it was completely legal to do so.
It simply will not do. To do so en masse is absolutely dumb founding.

All in all, it sounds like a standard sort of Section 1983 Lawsuit that the City, the Atlanta Police and various officials set them selves up for. I'm glad I'm not a City Of a Atlanta Tax-Payer because the City, if it comes to a lawsuit, is probably going to be fighting a very bad defensive fight in court.

Here's hopping they clean the city's clock in court. The city, the police brass and it's elected officials need to get a clue as to what is and is not lawful behavior of police.

2:13pm: Nationalized health care...
While looking for an image on kidney stones I happened across this little snippet on the BBC.co.uk.

Longest hospital trolley stay
Tony Collins from the UK spent 77 hours and 30 minutes on a hospital trolley waiting for a bed at the Princess Margaret Hospital, Swindon, UK, between February 24 and 27, 2001.

Tony, a diabetic, had contracted a virus and although he was taken in at 3 pm on the Saturday, it wasn't until 8.30 pm on the Tuesday that a bed became available for him.

77 hrs on the gurney he was wheeled in on.


And here's another of someone admitted and kept on a gurney for 88 hours. She broke Tony Collins' record apparently.

1:33pm: Thin skin...
Over the past year, I have lost acquaintances who are decidedly Democrat or liberal due to political differences and their own choice. Conversely, I have not abandoned yet any friends whom are Democrats who merely disagreed with me, even if vehemently. Rather, it has been they who parted ways with me.

In a few very glaring cases, I tolerated Bush Derangement syndrome esque commentary from people for years who, when I pointed out the same issues or worse with the Obama candidacy, I was cast as being intolerant and shunned because I was more or less mean spirited towards Obama.

Conversely, I can think of some specific friends whom I know are still VERY liberal in some views and yet we're able to argue points and then still remain friends. I know I can be polemic and blunt, but I generally try to avoid ad hominems and go for the guts of the problem in a workman like fashion. Still, at the end of the day, I can smile and be friends with people who I disagree with. Why cannot some people do this? Do they have to live in a room of harmonious agreement and assent to their views?

Why can't people from the self described more tolerant side of the political aisle do this?

How many of my conservative or (more accurately) centrist friends have experienced this sort of thing? Have you shunned people because they disagreed with you?

11:01am: NIH to examine firearms again...
The National Institute's of Health is going to be looking at guns again.

More than a decade after Congress cut funding for firearms research by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), another federal health agency has been spending millions of dollars to study such topics as whether teenagers who carry firearms run a different risk of getting shot compared with suffering other sorts of injuries.

I find this interesting. The core principle behind these gun/health studies is whether or not the presence of the firearms constitutes an increased risk. This is tantamount to saying that since people who sunbathe in bathing suits are at increased risks to cancer, the simple act of wearing a swim suit increases your risk to cancer.

The firearm in defensive uses in their sample sets is a response to increased risk factors of neighborhoods which are hazardous. Further, hazardous behavior by the criminally inclined. Teenagers carrying handguns in the inner city falls under the qualifier of criminally inclined. Regardless as to whether or not they're carrying handguns, the increased gang activity increases their risk to death. Take a bunch of boy scouts, train them all properly in gun safety and send them off to their jamboree's and you're not going to see the same incidence of violence. The gun is NOT the causative factor.

Some have surmised that this will be one of the disqualifying factors or higher costs factors for the Government Option Health Care at some point. That or they're just trying to gin up some support for the next wave of attempts at gun control. Good luck with that.

12:24pm: Judicial thoughts...
Judge Silberman on the 2nd Amendment and the Heller decision which was upheld by the Supreme Court...

As Dave Hardy at Arms and the Law comments, Judge Silberman initially thought, on taking the case that the collective view was the correct interpretation. HE'd never looked at the facts and after looking at the facts and the various briefs, it was clear to him that the collective view was incorrect and that the individual view, that is to say that the individual owns the arms, not the government, is the correct view.

11:26am: There's a new'ish Simon's Cat...

4:08pm: More bad news for President Obama...
and the Nobel Prize he didn't win.

2:45pm: RHINOs
So when a Republican Gov Schwarzenegger signs a California ammunition sales bill I'm reminded that just because they're a Republican doesn't mean that they'll actually grasp the futility of the legislation they back in spite of it's apparently benefit on camera.

In the vein of safety, there are far too many regulations put into place which accomplish nothing but make life more complex for everyone else and present little if any hurdle's to citizens. Further, they cost money that isn't free in order to implement the procedures, both from a red tape standpoint AND from a compliance checking standpoint. What do you want to bet, it'll be a felony to make errors on this paperwork? How many places in California will stop selling firearms due to this additional set of regulations?

I wonder if many people would be just as happy with this ammunition sales requirements as they would be if every time they bought gas or alcohol, they had to provide a thumb print and pass a background check. After all, we can't have people who drive drunk buying fuel or booze!

12:46pm: Weekend accomplishments...
I've been playing Gates of Troy again. Partially to entertain myself, but also partially to stick with the cheap side of geekitude. It's engaging for a time. Though I have the battle tactics and strategy down so well that even on hard it's not so very hard. The toughest part is the start of the game where you're nearly defenseless and have to critically balance limited resources and the various attacks by aggressive neighbors and barbarians.

Sunday I roused myself after uniting most of Epirus, Thessaly, Central Greece, the Sporades, parts of the Cyclades and Attica to spend some time working around the house. (I avoided going after the Peloponnese because it never pays to pick a fight with Sparta, Companions and Phalanxes notwithstanding). I managed to dig, lay in rebar and pour a foundation for a brick column that I want to add to a wall to bolster the strength of a new gate for the back yard. The current gate is old, wooden and tacky. The best thing about this is the bricks are ones I already have from, residue of landscaping that the folks who built the house had around. I'm taking them up from edging and will be replacing those with rough field stone that I'll pour a foundation and mortar in place. Anyhow, once the foundation (covered in plastic now) cures, and the rain lets up, I'll be able to start tying the column into the brick wall as I build it. Then I'll have to see if the boards I have in the attic are good for this project or if I have to buy new wood.

Possibly I'll use cedar as it's very wet weather rot resistant.

11:32am: Edgrrr doing what he prefers...

5:21pm: Seen on the inter-tubes...
"Hey, waitaminute, those clothes have no emperor!"

1:09pm: SNL.....

1:24pm: Civilian Response to Crime...
I have to wonder if this is in the cards for Atlanta and some of it's suburbs...

Ash Street shootout: The night that changed Tacoma's Hilltop
20 years ago, a tense Hilltop neighborhood erupted in hundreds of gunshots as gangsters fought Army Rangers for control. The shootout gained national attention and brought changes to the neighborhood and the city.

3 p.m. – Army Ranger Bill Foulk and neighbors on South Ash Street hold a block party barbecue at Foulk’s home.

Foulk and other Rangers confront gangsters at 2319 South Ash, who are throwing rocks and threatening neighbors.

9:20 p.m. – Shots fired at Foulk’s house from the west and east. Rangers return fire.

Tacoma police car enters Ash Street, responding to 911 call. Shots continue – car backs out.

Additional police arrive – suspects flee. Foulk and Rangers surrender to police.

Police locate a pair of suspects at nearby Irving Park on South 25th Street

Did the 1989 shootout between Army Rangers and some Hilltop gangsters make a long-lasting difference? Five views:
( Read more... )

10:38am: Hollywood, Ethically obtuse and morally irrelevant.
So Roman Polanski was arrested on a charge he pled guilty to and then fled the country to avoid the sentence for. The charge was for drugging and raping a 13 year old girl.

138 of the Hollywood elite, including Woody Allen, are calling for Polanski's release on some sort of humanitarian grounds. Explain this to me. Please. Do they really think THEY are some sort of higher nobility that gets to eschew law, ethics and basic morality and side step the rest of what we're held to as citizens and adults?

When I rail against liberal politicians, it's when I see things like this, where they have extra privileges and perks which are legally denied the rest of us. The best example being armed guards or firearms that the hoi polloi are legally forbidden from owning or unable to afford, but that politicains are given as part of their jobs OR are allowed to own because hey have connections. This is especially evident in the North East and the Left Coast.

Yes, there are people on the right who preach morality and then turn around and sin, badly. Frankly, that is disgusting BUT there's no one filing legal charges against people for adultery. There ARE charges for a lot of the things that the Left's elite seem to think they should get away with. Most notably gun possession and the like in places like Chicago or New York or Boston. This is why I give them such short shrift.

If they have those perspectives but dont' force it upon us legally that is different. this is why I have less issue with local politicians like Ga State Rep Stephanie Stuckey-Benefield. Her peer, Rep Mary Margaret Oliver is not however a politician I've had good discussions with.

However, when it comes to this hollywood bunch, 138 of them, their core perspective REALLY seems to be that "the rules apply to thee but not to me." Among those names in Hollywood who argue that a child rapist should get off scot free...they are:

Martin Scorsese
Woody Allen (at least he's consistant)
David Lynch
Michael Mann
Wim Wenders
Pedro Almodovar
Darren Aronofsky
Terry Gilliam
Julian Schnabel
Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu
Ettore Scola
Jonathan Demme
Tilda Swinton
Monica Bellucci
Asia Argento
Giuseppe Tornatore
John Landis

Thoroughly execrable.

7:56pm: Mutable Legal Code...
I consider myself a republican. The core value being adherence to basic laws and dislike of tyranny. One of the core problems the colonists had with King George and Parliament was that they could change the laws on us and we had no say (ie taxation without representation).

One of the core values that most people I consider like minded as friends and who also tend to be Republican if not libertarian is that laws should mean one thing and only one thing. This runs from the Constitution delineating what the federal government may do to how long your grass can grow and all the things in between.

In my own case, I have been presented with a clear example of "we don't like you so we'll throw something at you and bend the law to make it fit." This, if you haven't noticed, has riled me up. Combine this with the general temper of things in Congress at the federal level, and I'm given to being a bit disputatious when it comes to things of political temper. This may be boring to some, but this is deadly serious stuff folks. Really. When it comes to the law, you want to know what it is. HAving lots of laws that anyone with a mind to hang you with can do so is NOT a recipe for a free society. Anyone who says otherwise is either a fool or a goon.

First some background on my current legal issue. I have a truck, it's a relatively big truck, larger than an SUV but still, on the scale of trucks, not that big. It's 7 tons empty and 12 tons with a full load. Those big semi's you see on the road, they're able to gross up to 40 tons with no special permits and can be far heavier with permits. They're big, really big. My truck is, in essence an overgrown Jeep.

Someone in my neighborhood has seen fit to decide that they don't like my vehicle. One would think the response would be, "Sorry you do your thing, I'll do my thing, if you don't like it, you can go pound sand." In this case, they've managed to convince the DeKalb County legal department that they should not like me either. So they, the legal department, saw fit, through the code enforcement unit, to charge me with parking a "Business Vehicle" in a residential district.

In the DeKalb County Code, "Business Vehicle" is a term that is not defined. Further, it is not defined in state or federal law. Moreover, it's not in Black's Law Dictionary. Lacking any definition articulated in law, such terms are called 'plain language' and they are given to mean very much what they mean. In this case, one, with some reasonable education, would presume that a Business Vehicle means a vehicle used for a Business. Not all vehicles, because that would then, simply be all vehicles. Since this is a penal violation because there is potential jail time AND a fine attached to the violation, the language if vague, must be construed strictly in favor of the defendant.

DeKalb County has not done this, they have in fact, twisted the language and stretched it many different ways to try to make the term Business Vehicle mean more or less what they want. At one point, the county attorney attempted to state that since I wasn't using the vehicle for profit, I was a non-profit organization and was therefore operating a business vehicle. This is a very circular stretch where she more or less tries to channel Humpty-Dumpty.

Today I received a note from my County Commissioner relating what the Legal department communicated to her. More or less that they feel my vehicle falls into a category of vehicles not allowed in a residential yard. The clear problem with this is that there is not "class" of vehicles the county commissioners have defined. Instead, the county attorney has decided that he doesn't like the truck, so he's going to try to make it fit.

The problem here is the law doens't define a set of vehicles. The county attorney doesn't get to define them either. The County Commissioners define them. Lacking a set of defined vehicles NOT allowed, or in my case, my vehicle not falling into the set of vehicles not allowed, they have nothing to stand on. One would THINK that they would desist, no, that would make too much sense. Instead they press on like a lemming running towards it's inexorable doom.

There's a clear legal principle, I'm not sure where it comes from, but it fits right square with what I consider to be republican principles of freedom. It certainly fits with Libertarian views.

"That which is not clearly defined as illegal is implicitly legal."

This is to say that only illegal acts are defined. In this case, the DeKalb county Code Enforcement unit AND the County Attorney's office have decided that they can hand-wave into existence proscriptions against certain vehicles absent any clear legal foundation. Clearly, the county legal department is utterly eschewing this basic principle. They will use ANY and all means they have to get their way, regardless of the legal fact or in this case, lack of substantive legal basis for any of their arguments.

To date they have argued:
1. That all vehicles over 10,000 are commercial or business vehicles. This is not the case at all.
2. That using a vehicle in a not for profit function makes one a non-profit organization and thus your vehicle a business vehicle.
3. That my truck a 12 ton capacity vehicle is larger than an over the road tractor. Not really the case.
4. That my truck is oversized. It is in fact not oversize.
5. That the truck is a hazard. Huh?
6. That the truck is a business vehicle when it is clearly NOT a business vehicle.
7. That the truck is NOT a business vehicle.

6 and 7 are utterly contradictory. Yet, they are in fact, the very fundamental core of the legal argument the legal department is taking. One one hand they argue that the vehicle IS a business vehicle and now, at appeal they argue that it is not. And they don't argue that this is a concession.

At the core of this issue is that laws which are confusing are hard to enforce and harder for the citizenry to comply with. A government should one, err on the side of NOT enforcing confusing laws. The law I was charged with violating is confusing. Yet somehow, lacking legal foundation AND clearly articulated law, I'm being persecuted anyhow.

This is dangerous folks. A government which can decide that a person or a group is a target and bend the law at it's whim without complaint is a hazard to it's citizens.

2:59pm: The hockey stick just got broken.
Researchers have apparently been able to get access to the data used to formulate the Anthropogenic Global Warming Hockey stick. They have looked at the data sets used and determined that there was a cherry picking of a very small subset of the data to get the desired results.

Interesting stuff....

7:49am: More legal tapdancing on quicksand...
I was served the papers regarding the appeal of the Judge's order from the 25th of August this morning.

A quick read of the petition yields this lovely bit of legal argument.

8.
The respondent in Ceteriorari improperly granted Defendant in Certiorari's Motion to Dismiss and committed clear legal error by her order and conclusions of law which permits a M35A2 military cargo truck to be parked in a residential district contrary to § 27-766(b)(9). this code section only permits business vehicles or ordinary passenger vehicles to be parked in residential districts. There is no evidence that a M35A2 military cargo truck is an ordinary passenger vehicle or business vehicle.

Ms. Afflick spent pages and pages and pages of brief at the earlier hearings TRYING TO make the point that my truck WAS a business vehicle and that it violated § 27-766(b)(9) which prohibits parking of Business Vehicles in residential districts.

She also argues in section 9 of her petition, that an M35A2 is larger than recreational vehicles and motorhomes and other restricted vehicles. Which it is in some case and in other cases no. There are Motorhomes, aka motor coaches which are 55 feet long and weigh upwards of 30 tons Gross Vehicle Weight. My M35 is under 22 feet long and only weighs 7 tons empty and and can carry 5 tons of cargo (12 tons GVW).

EDIT:
And she references the certified copies of Exhibit 2 twice in her brief. Which is just a photocopy of the county code. She references another copy of Exhibit 2 which is just the cover page and nothing within.

She also cites that the Judge erred by taking into account my costs in putting in the driveway and the DOT's letter as to what constitutes a Commercial Motor Vehicle. Ignoring the fact that Afflick was arguing that "Commercial Motor Vehicle" and "Business Vehicle" were essentially the same thing (at some times), the judge did not such thing. Judge Withers argued that the definition of "Business Vehicle" was vague and ill defined and therefore difficult to properly enforce. By having no definition, the code section had to be interpreted strictly. My truck was thus deemed, by lack of a definition reading plain language, NOT a "Business Vehicle".

Your tax dollars at work.

If this didn't cost me money to pay for costs for the response to the appeal, I'd be positively gleeful laughing at her legal arguments.