Author: Brian J. Noggle

Let’s see. New York’s banned guns. They’ve tried to ban toy guns. And it’s still not enough to stop criminals:

Dan Looney, a chief prosecutor with Nassau County, said that each time Trantel pulled off a heist, he handed the tellers a note saying he had a gun.

“He produced a robbery demand note detailing the threat of using a firearm and thereby placing the tellers in fear of injury from the use of the weapon,” Looney said.

Authorities do not know “whether, in fact, he had a loaded gun,” and no weapon was recovered, Looney said. The prosecutor declined to comment on a motive in the case.

Criminals are committing crimes and frightening innocent people with just the word gun. Therefore, in the interest of public safety, we should strike it from our language and make it a felony to use or write the word gun.

Of course, since criminals can convey the meaning with synonyms, such as pistol, rifle, niner, firearm, and so on, so of course, they’ll have to go, too.

And since they can, at least some of them can, convey the proper image through metaphors, such as hand-held volcano that erupts leaden lava, we’ll have to banish the entire concept of personal projectile weapons. Maybe taking it back to slingshots and atl-atls is a little much, but it’s for The Children somehow, so we must!

Report to public reeducation camps immediately.

So the Recording Industry Association of America is dressing up like law enforcement officials and conducting raids. This, my friends, cannot stand.

Though no guns were brandished, the bust from a distance looked like classic LAPD, DEA or FBI work, right down to the black “raid” vests the unit members wore. The fact that their yellow stenciled lettering read “RIAA” instead of something from an official law-enforcement agency was lost on 55-year-old parking-lot attendant Ceasar Borrayo.

The Recording Industry Association of America is taking it to the streets.

. . .

“They said they were police from the recording industry or something, and next time they’d take me away in handcuffs,” he said through an interpreter. Borrayo says he has no way of knowing if the records, with titles like Como Te Extraño Vol. IV — Musica de los 70’s y 80’s, are illegal, but he thought better of arguing the point.

The RIAA acknowledges it all — except the notion that its staff presents itself as police. Yes, they may all be ex-P.D. Yes, they wear cop-style clothes and carry official-looking IDs. But if they leave people like Borrayo with the impression that they’re actual law enforcement, that’s a mistake.

Oh, ramsexcrement. The RIAA is playing cops, although it’s using real ex-cops to do so. Win/win. Ex-cops get to pretend like they still have some sort of power–and don’t you believe for a moment they lack an attitude–and the RIAA gets to harrass citizens.

Meanwhile, our country steps slightly toward that dystopian future where corporations have their own cops out there enforcing the laws and shooting them up with bad guys. These guys with RIAA stitched onto their backs aren’t ED-209, but if this travesty is left unchecked, soon the Business Software Alliance, the Mystery Writers of America, and every other person whose copyright might be infringed will be fielding their own set of jackbooted thugs to menace and harrass society. So who loses?

• The citizens, of course, because its our right to be freed from persecution, and let’s face it, the RIAA’s persecuting and not prosecuting when its minions “raid”.
• True law enforcement loses because the weight of its actions are diluted by the other thugz and playaz conducting their own raids. If a citizen’s got a bunch of surly looking men with dark vests bearing an acronym ending in A standing on his property and acting menacing, he’s got to wonder if they’re surly looking men with dark vests bearing an acronym ending in A who are illegal trespassers whom he can shoot or if they’re surly looking men with dark vests bearing an acronym ending in A bearing legal warrants. Does law enforcement win whenever it puts someone who guesses wrong into the ground? Hardly.

It’s encouraging to see that the law might not take too lightly anyone antitrusting its monopoly on power:

But if an anti-piracy team crossed the line between looking like cops and implying or telling vendors that they are cops, the Los Angeles Police Department would take a pretty dim view, said LAPD spokesman Jason Lee.

I hope we see it loudly and soon. The RIAA, with all its subpoenas and lawsuits and whatnot has crossed the final line by adding physical intimidation and blatant deception to its playlist.

(Link seen on /. or Techdirt or both.)

What liberal media? The Associated Press, as reprinted in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch works both pro and anti-war viewpoints into this headline/subheadline combo:

Shells reportedly carrying blister agent are uncovered in Iraq
Six die when Iraqi policemen, British clash with demonstrators

I envy the news service’s flexibility. Cannot find an anti-war sentiment in a single incident? No problem! Just mash two completely separate instances together so you can create the proper “balanced” story. Yo ga, girl!

On the front page of today’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch, marginalized by the two columns of Rams’ agony, we have a hard-hitting story entitled “Pipeline for antibiotics is running dry“. Lead:

Major pharmaceutical companies have abandoned or scaled back research and development of drugs that kill bacteria in favor of anti-viral drugs, such as those to combat HIV, and medicines for chronic conditions, such as high blood pressure and heart disease.

Journalists see a lot of dots in the industry, from the drug reimportation ideas to the lawsuits to force legalized patent infringement for the generic drug producers to the lack of new drugs in development. All are Bad Things for the Proletariat, which undoubtedly the continued Marxist evolution state can better handle, but the journalists don’t have the time, foresight, patience, or perhaps open minds to realize that the first two lead to the latter, and to ensure that pharmaceutical companies can occasionally profit from the great financial risks they undertake would ensure a steady stream of new, innovative drugs.

Oops, I said profit with an F instead of a PH, didn’t I? Well, that’s not to be allowed. Perhaps the State could better run innovation with the same élan demonstrated by the nationalized shipping and passenger transportation companies.

Local or state politicians often like to make an argument like this one regarding getting “their slice of the pie”:

Officials in Killington want the town to secede from Vermont and join the neighboring state because of a dispute over taxes. They say the town’s restaurants, inns and other businesses rake in ten (m) million dollars a year for the state — but gets just a (m) million dollars of state aid in return.

You often hear that, whether it’s California griping about not getting one dollar of federal tax grants and goodies for every dollar they ship to Washington or little towns like this one griping about its high tax revenues not returning one for one. Are these politicos stupid, or cynically trying to drum up votes with this idiocy?

In case it’s the former, I offer the following explanation to our municipal or state leaders:

I told you a hunnert times, Lennie, when the bigger brother takes that money, it takes its taste, its viggorish from the top, and whatever he’s got left after paying off his string of highly-paid thinkers, legislators, and hangers-on and then pays down what he owns on all dem buildings and motorcars they go tooling around in, whatever he’s got left he splits among his friends and then littler big brother. Den he can put it towards a stake in a ranch, or he can blow it in a cathouse or pool room or on whiskey, or maybe all three which is a popular choice for govenment.

I suspect they’re just cynical, though, in which case I offer them a hearty Hi-ho, STFU. I know you’re all about shifting wealth from the private sector, where it was created, to the public sector, where you and your cronies can spend it lavishly, but it’s a real rock in my Reeboks to watch you public sector ticks argue about who gets to suck from the neck and who has to suck from the leg artery. I don’t turn on the nature channel to watch the jackals rip apart gazelles, and I don’t care to watch you guys fight over the spoils, either.

So get over the fact that Mississippi and Wyoming aren’t going to subsidize your schools, and maybe, you know, stop spending money profligately and maybe you could squeak by on whatever annual millions you can skim from the top while the citizenry makes do with green-capped milk.

(Link seen on Drudge.)