Presto Agitato

Bimbo Eruption

Some things never change:

In a giggly interview with TMZ, the adult films stars photographed with Bill Clinton at a fundraising gala in Monaco on Wednesday explained how they met the former president.

‘He kind of was looking over at us every once in awhile.  And we’re huge, psycho fans of Bill.  We just think he's really cute’, porn star Brooklyn Lee said.  ‘So we end up wandering by.  And we were going to approach him to take a picture and his Secret Service sort of brushed us away.  And as we were walking away, Bill actually had the Secret Service guy call us back, to come hang out.’

Calling Clinton ‘really, really sweet’, Lee said.  ‘I told him I loved him, that he was a great president and he just kind of winked and smiled and gave us hugs and stuff.’

Tasha Reign, the porn star on Clinton’s other arm, added that he did not inquire about their professions.

‘We feel sympathetic for Bill and I hope this doesn’t hurt his reelection or whatever he's trying to run for’, she said.

His life, I'm guessing….

Inna-Gadda-Da-Vida

It's seventeen minutes, folks. You'd best settle in....

I don't know who kept spilling his kool-aid on the camera lens, but I hope they fired him.

Fixing the Headline

Drudge had the headline: Velvety underground spider in Israel named for Lou Reed...

That's Loureedia annulipes to you.

To Boldly Go

SpaceX's Dragon capsule has arrived at the International Space Station:

The privately bankrolled Dragon capsule arrived at the International Space Station for a historic docking Friday, captured by astronauts wielding a giant robot arm.

It succeeded in making the first commercial delivery into the cosmos.

U.S. astronaut Donald Pettit used the space station's 58-foot robot arm to snare the gleaming white Dragon after a few hours of extra checks and maneuvers.  The two vessels came together while sailing above Australia.

Ok, so I wouldn't refer to low Earth orbit as ‘the cosmos’ and NASA wasn't so bold about capturing the capsule as Elon Musk was in creating it, but Hooray!, Huzzah!, and Yahoo! for Musk's private enterprise!

Update:

Two hours after the capture, the crew attached the Dragon to the space station as the congratulations poured in.  They'll start unpacking the capsule on Saturday.

And with that, we can stop depending on other countries to supply the ISS.  Now if we can just find a way to get people there and back!  Alas, the Space Shuttle program was terminated a couple years too soon.  Yes, it needed to end, but only as soon as a good substitute could be found.  The decision to end it when we did was a mistake.

Considering Harvey

Jim Parsons, who plays the social-misfit (dysfit) Sheldon Cooper in ‘Big Bang Theory’, is recreating Jimmy Stewart's Elwood P. Dowd in a Broadway production, this summer, of Harvey.  Shit, I might have to see that!

From a New York Times interview with Parsons:

‘One of my very early teachers said over and over again: “What are you bringing to the party?”  That expression never left me.

‘Well, what about it?  What am I bringing to this party?’

‘If I’m not making a choice with each and every line’, he continued, ‘then why are you bothering watching me?’

Yes, yes, that's exactly it.  If the performer doesn't care about every word of every line of the play, or every phrase and every note of a song, then why in hell should I care?  How can I care?  The ultimate purpose of a performance – the goal of the performer – is to evoke a particular emotion or set of emotions, and perhaps with them to inspire a thought.  Without that evocative purpose, the performance is nothing — or less than nothing, reducing to agonizing mush what, in other hands, might have been great and beautiful.

The same goes for professional writing: If the writer can't be bothered to fuss over every thought, over every paragraph, every sentence, every phrase, and every word, then he's just a lousy blogger.  (Sorry about that….)  The reader, who's laid down his money and his time for this, deserves better.

Well Spent

Not learning the lessons of their involvement with Ayers and Dohrn (and why would they), the whacked-out Hollywood left is supporting sociopathic nutter Brett Kimberlin, who has now forced blogger Stacy McCain's family to flee their home.

Given the left's tolerance of Ayers and Dohrn and the history of OWS violence, ‘sociopathic left’ is rapidly becoming a redundancy.  And, apparently, ‘effective law-enforcement in Maryland’ has become an oxymoron.  Yike!

What a Maroon

The education (and reasoning) standards for some reverend members of the North Carolina clergy could use some, um, improvement:

A North Carolina pastor has come under fire after calling for gays and lesbians to be killed off by keeping them locked up behind an electrified fence.

During his sermon at the Providence Road Baptist Church in Maiden, Pastor Charles Worley said he figured out a way to ‘get rid of all the lesbians and queers’.

‘Build a great big, large fence – 100 miles long – put all the lesbians in there, fly over and drop some food’, Worley said during his May 13 sermon.  ‘Do the same thing with the queers and homosexuals and have that fence electrified so they can’t get out … and in a few years they will die out.’

Uh, come again?  Leaving aside the matter of decency (!), I must point out to Pastor Worley that homosexual couples aren't reproducing (ref: Biology 101 … um, never mind!), at least not without a lot of help.  But yet new ‘lesbians, queers, and homosexuals’ are coming from somewhere and always have.  Clearly the man's plan has a few holes in it.

But maybe we could institute a DNA screening program.  I'd start by screening for the propensity to be a jackass.

Heartbreaker

A Clear Case of Self-Defense

Much of the evidence in the George Zimmerman case has been released, from which we learn a few things:

1.  Martin was almost certainly the aggressor, as explained to police that night by multiple witnesses, including one who identified Martin as straddling Zimmerman and punching him ‘MMA-style’.  (I note that the UFC has referees to put a stop to such a beating before it becomes deadly — and also, apparently, some fighters who will wave-over a slow-moving ref.  I'd kiss that guy, but I'm sure he's against the plan and I don't care to piss him off.)  Also:

• When they arrived, Sanford Police Dept. (SPD) officers found Martin face-down on the ground (and turned him over to perform CPR) and that Zimmerman's back was wet and grass-stained.  (Police reports here.)
• Zimmerman had a broken nose and multiple abrasions and lacerations on his face and the back of his head.  I also note, from a photo taken at the station, that the back of Zimmerman's head is dented.  (It's hard to explain all these injuries, nor all the screaming for help that 911 operators and eyewitnesses and that night attributed to Zimmerman, if Zimmerman was brandishing his firearm when he confronted Martin.  Also, as noted at the arraignment, the prosecution can't say that Zimmerman did confront Martin rather than the other way around, only that there was a confrontation.)
• Martin had bloody and abraded knuckles (and Zimmerman apparently didn't) and significant levels of THC (a few hours old) in his system.  (Zimmerman thought the guy was acting like he was on drugs, and apparently knew what he was talking about.  Whether the intoxication had been from drugs or alcohol, it was worth noting.)
• One witness came forth later to say that he had seen a larger man on top of a smaller, and that, based on Zimmerman's old mugshot and pictures of a thirteen-year-old Martin, which the witness saw on TV, he concluded that the larger man was Zimmerman.  But at the time of the shooting Martin was a seventeen-year-old (looked twenty to the EMT), 5'11" (according to the autopsy) football player, and Zimmerman has lost a lot of weight and was several inches shorter, so it's not clear how much ‘larger’ than Martin he would have appeared.  And let's not forget that this ‘witness’ made himself known well after the incident.  As witnesses go, he's not very reliable, especially compared to the people who talked to the police on that night and could speak for certain at the time.  No sane prosecutor would ever put him on the stand.

2. Zimmerman's behavior when the police arrived was perfect.  Yes, absolutely, tell them loudly and clearly that you're armed and let them take your gun from you.  Keep your hands in the open air, preferably outward and upward!  Frightened police are not your friends!

3. The iPhone photos of Zimmerman, seen online a few weeks ago, were apparently taken by an SPD patrolman who ‘responded’ to the scene.  It was not clear that anyone had yet taken pictures of Zimmerman's injuries, so the patrolman made it so.  Indeed, no other photos were taken of Zimmerman until he arrived a the SPD station.  How they were released prematurely is, I'm sure, a matter of some investigation.

4. The Martin family's claim that they recognize Trayvon's screams on audio is not what they told SPD investigators.

5. The alleged audio-analysis experts hired by the Orlando Sentinel (who purported to determine that the screaming voice was not Zimmerman's) were also lying, either about the analysis or about their expertise to perform the analysis.  The FBI's experts could not come to any such conclusion, either way; the best current technology is inadequate to the task.

6. The Washington Post is desperate, dishonest, and sloppy, but at least they're not as bad as MSNBC.

In short, Zimmerman's claim of self-defense survives deep scrutiny.

SPD Detective Serino's desire to charge Zimmerman with negligent manslaughter (not murder!) is unsurprising; it is common for the police to automatically kick such a case up to the state attorney (prosecutor) who can then decide whether to proceed.  As it happened, on the night of the shooting, the prosecutor said: No.  Based on the evidence to date, he was right; with or without ‘Stand Your Ground’, a person claiming self-defense must show reasonable fear of imminent death or great bodily injury to himself or another person, a standard which Zimmerman has clearly, I think preponderantly, met.  Further, under Florida law, the prosecutor must prove that the killer's belief was not reasonable.  The burden of proof is on the state.  Given the evidence above and a reasonable jury, the state's case is beyond hope.  This is well past ‘reasonable doubt’.

Quote of the Day: Démarche from de Chair

We're deeply opposed to the militarization of civil society.  We have all kinds of aversion to it.  This is importing it because it's cheap, easy, silent.  [The use of remote-controlled aircraft for domestic surveillance is] something that you can easily deploy.  It will be I think the bane of our existence. Stop it here.  Stop it now.  Strong letter to follow. — Charles Krauthammer, ‘Special Report with Bret Baier’

And the military's involvement is certainly illegal.  Heads should roll, starting at the top.

They Came Looking for Racism...

According to our ever-vigilant Department of Justice, distribution of this picture around the Maricopa County Sheriff's Department is proof of their racism:

Huh?  So, is this racist too?

Erhem.

Do I really need to explain the difference between race and nationality (or culture) to the civil rights division of the US Department of Justice?  Or, for that matter, humor?  (Apparently yes.  Sigh.)

Quote of the Day: Hyphenate This!

There can be no divided allegiance here.  Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn’t an American at all. — Theodore Roosevelt

Thought for the Day

In my inbox:

It only takes a second to show someone how you feel.  The police call it ‘indecent exposure’, but whatever….

Khaaaaaaaan!

AK47 vs. M16

That's pretty much the  argument for the 5.56X45 NATO vs. the 7.62X39 Russky: The recoil is much ‘lighter’, allowing for more ammo on target in a given time.  But the M-16 is NOT a machine-gun and shouldn't be used that way for more than a couple seconds.  (Ditto for the AK.)  That's what a SAW (etc.) is for.  Aimed fire (or semi-aimed, in a pinch) is what you want from an assault weapon, and effective ammo is vital.  The 5.56x45 ain't it.  Not all 7.62X39 is, either, due to poor terminal ballistics, but the larger-diameter round still has the advantage.

That said, even with aimed, slow fire, the M-16 is a much more accurate weapon than the AK-47.  The Kalashnikov (that's with an ‘a’, Gunny!) barrel is cheap steel and thus, as you can see in the slow-speed video, flexes horribly when fired.  You need bigger bullets from an AK because they strike wide.

Given a choice, I'd take a modern M-14 (NOT M-16) variant in 6mm caliber or larger.  The standard for that platform is 7.62x51 NATO (equivalent to a .308 Winchester and thus more effective than the 7.62ComBloc), but 6.5mm (e.g., the Creedmoor or the Lapua) is plenty — and plenty accurate, too.  As for price, well, no one beats former commies for bulk, surplus ammo with highly corrosive powder and dubious terminal ballistics.  You do get what you pay for!

Cry Freedom

Chinese human-rights dissident Chen Guangcheng has escaped to the U.S. embassy in Beijing:

The dramatic nighttime escape of a blind rights lawyer from extralegal house arrest in his village dealt a major embarrassment to the Chinese government and left the United States, which may be sheltering him, with a new diplomatic quandary as it seeks to improve its fraught relationship with Beijing.

The lawyer, Chen Guangcheng, one of the best-known and most politically savvy Chinese dissidents, evaded security forces surrounding his home this week and, aided by an underground network of human rights activists, secretly made his way about 300 miles to Beijing where he is believed to have found refuge in the American Embassy, according to advocates and Chinese officials.

No fair: He had the advantage at night. 

He's a clever lawyer, too, giving the Chinese government a way to save face by blaming ‘corrupt local officials’, à la the recent scandal in Chongqing, for his house-arrest, the beating of his wife and mother, and the consequent embarrassment of ‘our party’:

After escaping from house arrest, blind Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng issued a dramatic video message calling on Premier Wen Jiabao to protect his family, punish the people who had attacked them, and combat corruption, recounting alleged abuses he and his family suffered at the hands of police.

‘Premier Wen, so many people do not know whether such illegal acts are the acts of corrupt local officials or commanded by the central authority.  I think you must thoroughly investigate the truth and give your people a clear answer,’ Chen said.  ‘If you continue to ignore this and do nothing, what will the people think?’

Brilliant!

Flashbang

It requires a certain amount of, um, camouflage, but damn!

Get a Clue

Of Loud Guitars, Big Guns, and Fast Cars

I'll bet you didn't know Ted was born a poor black child!

Dog Eat Dog

‘Why coudn't it be that damned terrier, Stasi?’

Life, Liberty, and Property

Even in Chicago, decency, right, and law have their day (good writing, not so much):

Chicago police released a South Side man who fatally shot [an intruder] earlier this week, saying that the shooting occurred during an attempted home-invasion at the man's Englewood [neighborhood] home….

The unidentified 24-year-old man shot and killed Darryl Turner, 28, at about 8:30 a.m. Sunday just outside his single-family home in the 5800 block of South Shields Avenue, according to police.

Authorities said that Turner first approached the man, seeking drugs.  The man rebuffed Turner, who walked away but returned moments later armed with a pistol.

Officials said that Turner then tried to force his way into the man's home.  The man retrieved his own handgun and opened fire on the intruder, authorities said.

Turner, of the 6700 block of South Parnell Avenue, was dead at the scene.

Prosecutors later declined to file any criminal charges against the homeowner and he was released from custody this morning.

[Punctuation, etc., occasionally repaired.]

Three cheers for the Cook County state's attorney (!), and a stern ‘Boo!’ (and hiss) for the cops who shouldn't have arrested the man in the first place.  And an extra ‘Huzzah!’ for the Supreme Court of the United States, without whose intervention the good citizen would have been powerless to defend his home and his life.

(And please notice the 72-hour rule — 72 hours from arrest to freedom — while police and prosecutors tried to make a bad case.  This is one of the injustices that Florida's ‘Stand Your Ground’ self-defense law was designed to prevent; without probable cause sufficient to bring charges, Florida's law-enforcement officials can't arrest a citizen.  A decent respect for liberty requires that much self-restraint, but police (and special prosecutors) don't always see these things my way.)

Not So Much Unusual as Cruel

Mark Steyn on the recent Supreme Court hearings:

‘What happened to the Eighth Amendment?’ sighed Justice Scalia the other day.  That’s the bit about cruel and unusual punishment.  ‘You really want us to go through these 2,700 pages . . . ?  Or do you expect us to give this function to our law clerks?’

He was making a narrow argument about ‘severability’ — about whether the Court could junk the ‘individual mandate’ but pick and choose what bits of Obamacare to keep.  Yet he was unintentionally making a far more basic point: A 2,700-page law is not a ‘law’ by any civilized understanding of the term.  Law [actually, that's ‘the rule of law’ , opposite to ‘the rule of men’ — ed.] rests on the principle of equality before it.  When a bill is 2,700 pages, there’s no equality: Instead, there’s a hierarchy of privilege micro-regulated by an unelected, unaccountable, unconstrained, unknown, and unnumbered bureaucracy.  It’s not just that the legislators who legislate it don’t know what’s in it, nor that the citizens on the receiving end can never hope to understand it, but that even the nation’s most eminent judges acknowledge that it is beyond individual human comprehension.  A 2,700-page law is, by definition, an affront to self-government.

Perhaps more to the point than Scalia's gag line, a previous version of the bill did contain a severability clause.  That clause was removed in the course of making and arranging the many bargains and kickbacks that were necessary to pass the bill.  A blunt observation of this fact is all that is necessary to identify congressional intent and thus to put an end to the entire 2,700 pages.  Not that I expect the Court to do this, vulnerable as some members are to the anticipated Lefty howls of execration.

But would that it were constitutionally possible, as Steyn offers (only somewhat tongue-in-cheek), for the Court to also declare that all future laws must be limited to twenty-seven pages.

Missing You

Of Fear and Reason

I saw, on TV a few nights ago (I forget the cable channel), a show about the disaster at the Fukushima Dai-ichi (tr. ‘Number One’) nuclear power facility and the consequences of that disaster for the nuclear power industry ‘going forward’, as they say.  (Consequences usually don't happen in the past….)  I don't know why I expected a thoughtful, balanced, and honest representation of reality, but I was thoroughly disappointed.

The narrator mentioned that a Japanese nuclear engineer (working for TEPCO, the company that owns the Fukushima Dai-ichi facility) predicted, a few years ago, a one-in-ten chance of a serious nuclear accident, somewhere in Japan, in the next fifty years.  I have no idea, since no one seems to want to report the details of his reasoning, whether he was right or just some lucky Chicken Little, so I predict a high probability that we will have a 3.0-or-greater earthquake in Minnesota, causing structural damage and moderate loss of life, because, um, I hate broccoli.  If it happens, I expect everyone to declare me a geological genius and an ignored prophet of doom — and please, when reporting my prediction and my pending sainthood, please omit the details of my reasoning.  They aren't relevant, you understand, because I was right!

So, having reported the fact that this engineer predicted as he did, the narrator intoned: Would you cross the street if you knew there was a one-in-ten chance you'd be run over?  Um, you mean a one-in-ten chance that I will be run over sometime in the next fifty years?  Yes I would.  And then I'd be careful, knowing that such statistics are averages of the consequences of prudent behavior with those of imprudent, damn-the-Freightliners behavior.  Duh.

Medical Econ 101

Funny thing about heathcare markets, they work just like every other market.  Go figure.

Beside the Point

More from Reason Magazine on the irrelevance of Florida's ‘Stand Your Ground’ law to the Zimmerman-Martin case:

Even if Zimmerman started the fight (by pushing Martin, say), Florida law still allows him to argue that the response from Martin was such that he feared for his life and that he had no realistic opportunity to escape.  Sean Bugg sums up that possibility this way: ‘Did you start a fight and get your ass kicked?  Bang bang bang!  Problem solved.’  Not quite, because you have to reasonably fear ‘death or great bodily harm’, and you have to exhaust ‘every reasonable means of escape’ (or, alternatively, you can disengage from your opponent and make it clear you no longer want to fight, only to be attacked again).  That is the old ‘duty to retreat’ standard, and ‘stand your ground’ does not enter into it.

As it happens, Zimmerman told police that he had lost sight of Mr. Martin and thus returned to his vehicle, where he was attacked.  That would certainly qualify as ‘disengagement’ even if there had been a previous scuffle.  (Not that there's any evidence that there had been.)

Also in the news today was police video that clearly showed (when news producers permitted the relevant clip to be shown) Mr. Zimmerman with a large — 5" to 6" — gash on the back of his head.  Dan Riehl has more video, on which he notices what he thinks might be a bandage on Zimmerman's nose (he's probably referring to the 4m 20s point of the video).

However you might interpret Riehl's video (I interpret it as ‘too grainy’), it is clear that Zimmerman had a head injury that was consistent with eyewitness testimony and Zimmerman's claimed fear for his life, and would also seem to preclude an attempt to flee.  It doesn't, of course, answer the question of who was the aggressor.  In most states, getting your ass kicked as a result of your own damnfool aggression presents a sucks-to-be-you moment; starting the fight extinguishes your claim of self-defense no matter what happens after.  (So don't!)  Florida may be different, as noted by Reason, but only slightly.