BRING ON THE GUNS - The Sequel
Or, really, "Bring on the Guns?" because questions abounded, and answers absconded. So the sub-title of the second installment is (as though destiny could be defeated) "Doing the math".But first the...
View ArticleMARIELITOS: When the federal prison system exploded
I believe that the Mariel Boat Lift is the sort of thing that people only know about if they remember it from 1980, or, for some, they have roots in Cuba, and stories told in their families.For me, I...
View ArticleA "small" drug war story?
If you have to go to prison, choose the federal system over any state prison. And if you don’t have to go, don’t, because the person who walks out the door will not be the same one who started the...
View ArticleThis looks like hanky-panky on Utah public lands to me.
Utah, as all western states, has large holdings of lands granted to state government by the feds in the process of settlement/attainment of Statehood. Here the managing entity has the acronym of SITLA,...
View ArticleThe first nark at Utah State University
The reason why we have the "undercover officer" approach now to fighting The Drug War is because of what we had before that. Okay, look, everyone knows that snitches are far more prolific and effective...
View ArticleWho wants to live in a country like this
Third of July: A pretty mundane small blurb in The Salt Lake Tribune. Title - "50 bullets found in passengers bag at airport" - Uh, make that "carry on bag". Okay, .22 and 50 rounds you gotta be...
View ArticleI'm old enough to remember "entrapment".
I'm afraid that for younger cohorts of our citizenry the term "predisposition" is, largely, just another fancy word. For others of us, the connection to the erosion of Fourth Amendment...
View ArticleAnatomy of a dysfunctional Federal District Court district.
Hopefully this comes across as something other than only routine sour grapes. "The First and The Fourth" subject matter area is, if anything, at least as important as the most committed proponents are...
View ArticleI just got questioned about a dead body
This is totally new to me. Not being questioned by the police. And not even being questioned over something that I was innocent of. But death, I'm not a complete stranger to death, but never before...
View ArticleGun Safety
Uh oh. Someone in the government just banned certain firearm activites.So far I've only seen one stupid reaction from the 2A people. However, it's pretty early on still, and we are talking the truly...
View ArticleNRA wants to increase access to pistols by young people
The case is called Payne v. ATF. The Briefs were just filed with SCOTUS. In this instance ATF is short for the "Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms". Payne is a named Plaintiff recruited by the...
View ArticlePres. Obama now favoring big banks on housing finance
This story is already being covered on DK (see below), but I know it to be a bigger story than has yet been apprehended here. I'm one of the majority of folks on DK who wishes that Obama were a better...
View ArticleCall me stupid - My latest experience with "Insurance in name only"
My wife, feeling poorly, had a visit with her "provider" (no longer "Doctor" because even now who can afford an actual M.D.)? Then the "Explanation of Benefits" arrived in the mail, followed,...
View ArticleSOCIALISM! SOCIALISM. SOCIALISM?
The political right vociferously argues that much or most of the current agenda of the political left violates the intentions of the Founding Fathers, i.e. is unconstitutional. The claim being, in...
View ArticleFamily in Philippines - need news/contact urgently (w/update)
We need information. Any information at all at this point.Our last contact with family in the Philippines was by phone yesterday evening, around 5:00pm MST. The government had already cut the power for...
View ArticleTyphoon Haiyan/Yolanda - A ray of light from the black hole of silence
How in the hell can an area be almost entirely destroyed, and cell phones still work. Land lines out, electricity gone, and, yet, the relief of hearing good news, tales of survival, in real time. Amid...
View ArticleThird Typhoon update: We're sending in a relief vehicle
With initial survival accomplished, our order of priority for care and comfort is my 86 year old father in law, the 8 year old little girl who we've supported since providing all prenatal care, and...
View ArticleFourth Typhoon Update: Danger past, only the hard part is left
Food was on the way yesterday, only now that food is on the way today instead. Rain happened! Nothing notable, especially with this being the tropics. But then fear happened! Again, completely within...
View ArticleFifth Typhoon Update: Please feed the police first
Willingly or not, prison will be a learning experience for anyone sent there. For me, the lesson learned most pertinent to the ongoing disaster was when I served on the Jaycees popcorn crew for the...
View ArticleSixth Typhoon update: Human suffering
Philippines is the third world. It has little in common with life as we know it except for human suffering. In the best of times all third worlders know more about human suffering than most of us in...
View ArticleSeventh Typhoon update: Not 2,000,000 homeless, but 2,000,000 without housing
The numbers, truly comprehended, are more soul searing than merely tragic. Also, there are no official numbers released because no one oficially does or can keep track. Information that the First World...
View ArticleEighth Typhoon update: Did God give the candy to all of the children
All of the kids who could make it there went to the house of our family on Northern Cebu Island, and all of those kids left with candy. That was never the intent back in October when we launched that...
View ArticleRKBA: Iceland Edition
Police in Iceland shot and killed a guy the other day (search "Iceland" on Google News). He had a shotgun (presumably because Iceland doesn't really have a big old smorgasboard when it comes to...
View ArticleNinth Typhoon Update: Philippine Historical Record Natural Disaster Death Toll
Official death tolls for Supertyphoon Yoland are hard to find, but the one I got the other day was five thousand eight hundred something (with "Official Missing" at 1,800, and I have no idea how that...
View ArticleDecember Seventh: Maybe not what your expecting
The John Birch Society is mildly up in arms over some "gathering of the states", or somesuch, that other far righties are holding even as this is being written. They call themselves "The Mount Vernon...
View ArticleProblem Solved: The Washington Landlords
"Indians" connotes India, and I'm not sure that anyone back then really believed that the "India" of spice fortunes was really that much closer by heading west by ship, than it was known to be by...
View ArticleTenth Typhoon Update: Looks like the end of land line telephones
First a short quote from a news piece I just read on the Huffpost:"Twenty-seven bodies, all unidentified, were among the latest to be recovered under debris in typhoon-stricken coastal areas including...
View ArticleRhino and Elks, sauteed in Greenbacks
Of course, Rhinos and Elk are not the same, but, thanks to "one percenter conservationism" they gain more similarities every year. Consider this! The permit to kill a Black Rhino in Namibia, auctioned...
View ArticleSeeking advice on my age discrimination case
Today is a couple of days away from two years since I was laid off from the last job that I've so far been able to obtain. No paychecks since then, unemployment insurance long since ran out, job...
View ArticleGreenbacks, "Trophy" big game heads, and Kossacks
At 14, as I recall, I was first age eligible for a big game license, and shot, skinned, butchered, and ate a mule deer (with assistance, obviously, but still). The rule of capture applicable to this...
View ArticleGetting the guns into the prison turned out to be the easy part
Dude made it into my newspaper the other day in what I consider to be the hard way. Offed himself in prison. And my only connection with that is that I once did a year in the same joint he died in. And...
View ArticleAccidental gunshot? NO. Insanity!
With due respect for David Waldman and Tom Begnal, some gun craziness, some gun fails are just so egregious that they scream out, asking to be noticed as widely and as broadly as possible."A 9-year-old...
View ArticleWhen the hunters shoot the hunters the animals must be laughing
For the unintiated, a "hunting club" is a place where "hunters" go to kill without actually having to hunt first. Clearly a fraud, but "no harm, no foul" because everyone but the animals being killed...
View ArticleA death in the family - A modern story of real poverty
She was really a cousin, but when hardship drove the sister of the mother of my wife to drop her young daugther off to be raised by others, my wife came to feel like it was the younger sister she never...
View ArticleElectoral Racial Prejudice in Deep Red Utah
This is kind of a shorty.Upon getting elected, the Republican Candidate for the 4th U.S. Congressional District of Utah would (or, really, will, but what the hell) be the first Black Woman ever elected...
View ArticleThe Problem with Las vegas
And I'm not trying to do anything exhaustive here. Just trying to, hopefully, help explain why garden variety logic never quite works when the subject is "Vegas", or oft times even "Nevada", etc.L.V....
View ArticleThis Obama? This Obama!
If you've seen one State of the Union Address you've seen them all. The visuals anyway. A pronouncement. The camera pans. One side grumpy, one side happy. My personal impression after watching years...
View ArticleSPECULATION: Is Cliven Bundy with the government now?
Even a dumb prosecutor could come up with a litany of charges against Cliven Bundy, at least some of which would stick anywhere, everyday. Then there's the certain reality that what Mr. Bundy is...
View ArticleThe FCI El Reno I know is not the one Pres. Obama now knows
Sorry, this will be a quickie. I was convicted of smuggling 26,000 pounds of pot in 1981, and ended up doing 100 months in the federal system from 1985 into 1993. Back then, at least, El Reno was known...
View ArticleKim Davis has nothing on this guy
Phil Lyman was just awarded Utah's "2015 County Commissioner of the Year" by the Utah Association of Counties. To be so honored Commissioner Lyman (R San Juan County) only needed to organize an illegal...
View ArticleA story of two gun deaths
The remains of the only reputable newspaper in Salt Lake City is still called The Salt Lake Tribune. The main headline on my edition from this morning reads "Millcreek man was trying to protect family,...
View ArticleI don't remember Eisenhower so good
I was born in 47, and started reading a daily newspaper at the age of 10, so take that for what it’s worth.It’s only in the last twenty years or so that I’ve really started to yearn for a woman...
View ArticleSolitary confinement? Or what?
I have no doubt that people are not supposed to know some of the stuff I know. And if I could not have gone to some of the places I’ve been, I would have had to give serious consideration to becoming...
View ArticleNO JOKE: Michelle Obama should be picked to replace Antonin Scalia
Back when Nixon was nominating racist Republicans to fill SCOTUS vacancies, the objective was not to actually get one of those guys confirmed, it was to build the base. Same with the Reagan/Bork...
View ArticleTHE CURRENT BUNDY FAMILY REALITY
Throughout that gigantic clusterfuck at his ranch recently, daddy Bundy made it crystal clear to the entire world that he is a special person. He intended to, and believed that he did, speak on behalf...
View ArticleOne lesson from the Nixon and Reagan electoral triumphs
Oh how I cringed every time I heard their slogans. Whether they each really were playing to “majorities” would only be known in the end (and that part, tragically, played out in the real world)....
View ArticleI WONDER IF TRUMP HAS EVER READ A REAL NEWSPAPER
Who knew that the actual nuts and bolts of being POTUS could be so complicated? Fortunately Bush Jr. at least had a clue, having been of that lineage and what not. But the new guy, he comes...
View ArticleMy shout out to Sen. Kamala Harris
In one very real sense, the new Senator from California has the second greatest level of democratic legitimacy in the U.S. Senate. Her Senate votes carry the backing of more citizens than any Senator...
View ArticleCIVIL RIGHTS VIOLATED AT THE STUDENT MARCH IN SALT LAKE TODAY
The ending point for the march today was at the State Capitol building (starting at a high school not many blocks away). A fairly routine rallying point locally, but this gathering was not treated...
View ArticleTHE TIME FOR THE SECOND AMERICAN CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION IS FINALLY HERE?
When Justice Stevens says that the anachronistic Second Amendment is part of the core of what is wrong with trying to run the modern U.S, with an antique Constitution, there is no room to find fault....
View Article
