Reviewing the 14-Year-Old Blogroll

(My God, my blogroll is older than the girls trump and Epstein like!!)

It's been a while, so I figured I would see which blogs I blogrolled were still active.

I also have two new ones to add, when I get energetic enough to update the blogroll, FireLawBlog (firelawblog.com, duh...). Attorney and retired chief officer Curt Varone's fascinating and informative analyses of legal problems affecting the fire service. The second is Statter911 (statter911.com, of course), by retired newsman Dave Statter... a great way to keep track of news of importance to the fire service. Pay special attention to his SMACSS pieces -- Social Media-Assisted Career Suicide Syndrome (similar to Chief Varone's YCMTSU category).

Political
BadTux, but he's at a new address: https://snarkypenguin.wordpress.com/
Skippy, The Bush Kangaroo, https://xnerg.blogspot.com/
Mustang Bobby, https://barkbarkwoofwoof.com/
Blue Gal, http://bgalrstate.blogspot.com/
Jurassic Pork, http://welcomebacktopottersville.blogspot.com/
Mock, Paper, Scissors, https://mockpaperscissors.com/


Medical
Ambulance Driver, http://www.ambulancedriverfiles.com/
Rescuing Providence, http://rescuingprovidence.com/ (Providence lost a great firefighter/medic when Michael retired)
The Happy Medic, http://happymedic.com/



Apparently Defunct
Ambulance Ranger
Firegeezer
Life Under the Lights
My Two Cents
White Noise Insanity

News From Rock Ridge...

"Badtux Johnson is RIGHT!"

"The Duckiban are coming!"

That is all.

Updated to add this comment: You know we're screwed when bin Laden looks friendlier and more reasonable.

New Hampshire Courts and Interpreters

The court system in New Hampshire has adopted some new rules governing the use of interpreters in legal proceedings, saying "a comprehensive, publicly available plan will better ensure that the services are reliable and consistent."

In a dissenting opinion, Justice Robert Lynn disagreed with a provision in the plan that requires interpretation services to be provided regardless of the user’s ability to pay for the services.

Just in case you couldn't guess, Lynn was appointed by then-Governor Judd Gregg to the trial bench, and to the state Supreme Court by Craig Benson, both Republicans.

To paraphrase the bleeding hemorrhoids at the Ayn Rand Center, "fair treatment in the legal system isn't a right, it's a privilege."

It's this kind of reasoning that buttresses what Badtux and Jurassic Pork (among many others) have been saying, that the 1% is determined to obliterate the middle class and take us back to a feudal system.

If your community has a deaf person who needs professional assistance in translating court proceedings, and that person is denied a sign language interpreter's services because he cannot afford to pay the interpreter (the average charge for interpreter services is $50-$75 per hour), does that person receive "due process of law?" If the person suffers a loss in the legal system, as a result of not being able to pay for interpreter, could that person be "deprived of life, liberty, or property," or could his "private property be taken for public use, without just compensation[?]"

In the words of Caribou Barbie, "you betcha, by golly."

By preventing us from obtaining healthcare, or fair legal representation, or education, or even FOOD, the 1% can weaken us to the point where we can no longer resist their oppression.

But that is exactly what the rethuglicans want. They want to strip us of our rights, our protections, our very humanity, to fill their coffers and feed their greed. They want to grind us down and eliminate any rebellion.

Which, by the way, is why so many toothless mouth-breathers in the deep South are rethuglican: they think slavery is just a dandy idea. Duck F***er Phil Robertson expressed his views rather succinctly:

"I never heard one of them, one black person, say, 'I tell you what: These doggone white people' -- not a word!" he said. "Pre-entitlement, pre-welfare, you say: Were they happy? They were godly; they were happy; no one was singing the blues."

Yup, them darkies sure had it good.

 

 

 

Just look at the programs the Teabaggin conservative scum-burping murderers want to eliminate:

 

• Headstart (why do people need an edgimacation, when we're gonna tell 'em what to do?)
• SNAP (aka food stamps; after all, who needs anything more than subsistence rations?)
• Section 8 Housing Assistance (Sheriff Arpaio has the right idea, just use tents)
• Student Loans (keep 'em dumb, and they won't fight us)
• Healthcare (if you get sick, die quickly... don't clog our hospitals with your worthless carcasses)
• Due Process of Law (if they're incarcerated, they work cheap, and if they don't get due process, we get their stuff!)

 

 



 

 



Gimme That Old Time Music - Holiday Edition

From a friend's Facebook post...

...And, for my friend Badtux, the cat-owned penguin®, a bonus, because they're just that good...

 

 

Mencken and TMF are looking forward to it.

 

 



Guns and Racism... No Connection. None Whatsoever.

Via skippy... 

"racism linked to gun ownership" 

Whodathunkit? [All emphasis added] 

A new study of symbolic racism among white American voters yielded strong links between latent biases toward blacks and increased favor of gun ownership and oppositions toward gun control.

Wow, that's is a "stop-the-press" moment... that the small-penis-compensation-device-loving crowd would also be jealous of the stereotypical big black jungle dick?

Published in the journal PLoS One, the study used voter data of white Americans that, after accounting for political ideology, income, and education, still revealed startling connections between racism and gun ownership. For every one point increase in symbolic racism — measured on a five-point scale — the chance someone had a gun in the home rose by 50 percent, and the chance the respondent supported policies that allowed people to carry concealed guns rose by 28 percent.

This would certainly explain the South. As BadTux and others have pointed out, the Southern social norms have traditionally included slavery -- which is racism in it's purest form -- and violence to keeps the slaves from rebelling. When one couples that with the still-extant desire to secede and rebuild the Confederacy, it's obvious that disarming the rednecks isn't going to happen.

"We were initially surprised that no one had studied this issue before,” said study co-author Dr. Dermot Lynott, from Lancaster University, in a statement. “However, the U.S. government cut research funding for gun-related research over decade and a half ago, so research in this area has been somewhat suppressed." 

Well, yes, the funding was cut at the demand of the National Feckin Rifle Association, since they didn't want folks to realize that the gun nuts were also racist bastards (among their many other un-American failings). God forbid anyone should think that guns.. oh, I don't know, kill people?!?

Gun control debates are set against a bleak backdrop of school shootings, homicides, suicides, and gun violence in a country that routinely tops the list for most gun-related deaths in a given year. A study performed earlier this year found that the more guns a U.S. state owns directly relates to an increased homicide rate. Covering 30 years from 1981 to 2010, and controlling for a laundry list of variables, it is the largest and most comprehensive study to date examining homicide’s relationship to gun ownership. 

Part of the answer is simply freedom. Americans whose family is steeped in the traditions of southern conservatism tend to enjoy exercising their second amendment Constitutional right. Another is irrationality, or an ignorance of the facts. Gun ownership often proceeds under the assumption that one will be attacked. So people buy guns fearing someone else will use one on them, despite the supposed closeness of people inhabiting gun-heavy regions. 

And if there is anywhere on Earth that epitomizes “irrationality” and “ignorance,” it is the disease-ridden Trashcanistan hellhole home of our Bible-thumpin’, hooker-humpin’, sister-marryin’, rifle-rack-in-the-pickmup wingnut “breathren” below the Mason-Dixie line.  

This whole concept of "home defense" lead Mrs. Lanza in Newtown to buy a poopload of weapons to protect herself. How did THAT work out for ya, Mrs. L?

The present study also found associations in their data between opposition to gun controls and conservatism, anti-government sentiment, party identification, and being from a southern state. Even controlling for these factors, the team found racism associated with gun control opposition and gun ownership. 

Yeah, I’d say that pretty much covers it.

 

To be fair, though, it's not just the Southern racists that are frickin lunatics. Here in Maine, we've had small-penis-compensators like David Marsters, who advocated the assassination of our President; Steve Collins, who advocated the assassination of our President; we have the Maine Tea Party Patriots -- the ones who support Fat-Ass Paul LePage, he of more chins than a Chinatown phone book; the National Socialist American Labor Party, a buncha neo-Nazi twats and Volksfront, representing the racist skinhead crowd. Every one of these assholes keeps agitating for unfettered access to firearms... especially assault rifles.

 

Since they're such firm believers in guns...

 

They oughta be shot.

 

 

 

 

 

Some Changes at 618Rants

I have spent virtually my entire working life trying to help people, to make them safe, to make sure they go home to their loved ones at night. All too often, though, I put the needs of the many ahead of the needs of the few, or of the one, as Mr. Spock might say. My career in law enforcement and private-sector security cost me two marriages, a couple of intervening relationships, and almost cost me my life. It left me an alcoholic, vicious, mean, bigoted bastard; it took me almost twenty years to recover from that (I haven't done any drinking since 1989, and had it not been for the lovely yet talented Mrs618, I might never have recovered).

More recently, I've been engaged in firefighting and yet another round in EMS (my third). Because these are paid-on-call jobs, they weren't as time-consuming as police work, but I still tried my very best.

No more.

A couple of things happened yesterday, including hearing my alcoholic, psychologically-abusive father tell my drunk junkie brother that HE was the reliable one... after the lovely yet talented Mrs618 and I left a pair of $50,000-a-year jobs and moved to Maine to take care of my parents. After I've been fixing their house -- at MY expense -- for six years. After putting myself in the hospital a bunch of times with exhaustion, chest pains, bad knees, pneumonias, and a few things that looked like strokes or heart attacks.

Plus, I've been getting some really snotty emails from the local logistics person at the Red Cross, who seems to feel it is MY job to verify all the logistical issues for a class (if that is the case, why do we pay a full-time logistics person? And what does she do to earn her keep?).

I lay awake all night, thinking about things. About 4:00 AM, I felt a door close, then I got really cold, then everything just kind of mellowed out.

I had made my decisions:

• No more caring about anybody other than the lovely yet talented Mrs618, Emily (the Lab), Joey (the cat), and my son.
• I will continue to do the best job I can with the FD and EMS, but that's all it is now, a job. If you live, fine. If you don't, well, sucks to be you.
• Someone else can do the 14 or 15 different functions I'd been filling at the Red Cross for the last six years, including getting up in the middle of the night to go to house fires (I'll still go for the FD, cause they pay me).
• No feelings, no emotion, no empathy, no sympathy. Talk to the hand, dude.
• Ditto with their cultural norms, belief systems, languages, religions or other ethnic crap. You live in the United States, you adjust to OUR way of life. You don't like it? Go back to Trashcanistan.
• I'm not going to worry about watching my tongue anymore. Fat-Ass Paul LePage is a fat-assed teabagging douchbag. So is his fat-assed daughter. So is Rafael Eduardo Hijo de Puta Cruz, Canadian-born anchor baby spawn of cigar-sucking Cuban émigré, Castro supporter and Desi Arnaz wannabe Rafael Bienvenido Chinga tu Madre Cruz. So is Bible Spice and her oxygen-thief brood. And all the other cretinous yahoos who need to chlorinate their little corners of the gene pool, like the various Kardashians: Kleenex, Klepto, Klamato, and Klimax. Half of those fucks oughta be shot. Hell, most of 'em oughta be shot.

I don't know if this blog is going to continue. I may post again, I may not. I don't know.

For those who have stopped by and commented in the past -- the folks like BadTux, Jurassic Pork, The Dark Wraith*, skippy the bush kangaroo, the gone-but-not-forgotten Firestarter5 -- thank you. You gave me the encouragement to continue, and you let me think that maybe I had something worthwhile to offer. For the newer folks, the medical and fire service folks like Michael Morse, Justin Schorr, and Curt Varone, we may not agree on everything, but we tried. By God, we tried. To the folks on the old Yahoo wildlife groups, DLP in particular, thank you for the encouragement (and the occasional ball-busting).

BTW, I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Jurassic Pork and his missus are in pretty tough financial straits; if you can toss a few coins his way, please do. They really do deserve to have a roof over their heads.

* The Dark Wraith has been missing in action for a couple of years now, and Google is now showing his old site (and the companion site BigBrassBlog) as possibly infected with malware, so no links. DW, if you should happen to see this, you are missed. Same for Firestarter5.

_

Heh, Indeed...

What "The Cat-Owned Penguin" says...

Sequestration (and Castration*?)

Our local Mouse Channel affiliate, WMTW Channel 8, has a story today about Acadia National Park in Bar Harbor closing its famous Loop Road and other amenities until mid-May, as a result of the Rethuglican-inspired sequestration. The same process eliminated public tours of the White House, leading some Rethugs to bitch mightily about the BMITWH "holding the nation hostage" to his budget plans or some such nonsense.

Now, granted, I do not have the economic knowledge or training of Badtux or JurassicPork, but allow me to offer some alternative plans to reduce the cost of government:

• Congresscritters -- both Senators and Representatives -- do not get paid until a budget has been passed and signed by the President. Some will claim the Constitution prohibits "adjusting" Congressional pay or benefits until after the next succeeding election; the Rethugs like to say their financial emergency trumps all else -- including national defense -- so it should also trump their financial well-being. Hell, if we gotta suffer, it's only fair they suffer with us.
• Congresscritters no longer get free or discounted travel anywhere for any reason, including official business. They get to fly Grayhound like the rest of us.
• Lobbyists must deposit their bribes campaign contributions into the Treasury, rather than the bottomless pockets of the pols.
• Eliminate free healthcare for Congresscritters. Let them see what it 's like to go without insurance.
• Eliminate free parking privileges for Congresscritters and their staff.
• In fact, eliminate their freakin' JOBS.

Wouldn't you LOVE to see the Zombie-eyed Granny Starver standing on the corner with a little cardboard sign that says "Will teabag for food"?

Scroom.

Scroomall.

* I vote for cutting their nuts off. No anesthesia, no bandages, no mercy. That's the only way to keep them from reproducing.

And A Follow-Up

A couple of posts back, I went off on the small-penis-compensatin' National Fecking Rifle Association asswipes for their obsessive lust for killing devices.

Badtux left a comment saying "The only argument the right wing has that actually has any validity is the 2nd Amendment argument, where the 2nd Amendment by any reasonable reading protects both an individual and collective right to keep and bear arms."

But, alas, Badtux -- along with many other Americans, most of whom are small-penis-compensatin whackjobs -- forgot the first clause of the Second Amendment:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. [emphasis added]

And by "militia," the Framers were not thinking about the small-penis-compensatin', gun-totin' whackjobs like the Michigan Militia and the rest of the Militia/Patriot/Redemptionist genre, they were talking about what is today's National Guard.

The current crop of small-penis-compensatin', gun-totin' whackjobs wouldn't know "well regulated" if it bit them in their doughy asses.

It is astonishing how many people manage to miss the reference to a "well regulated militia," in their mad dash to justify keeping murderous devices in their homes.

Not that Badtux is in that crowd, mind you; I have a feeling he's pretty much on the side of common sense.

The Cereal State Strikes Again

Yes, the land of nuts and flakes has come up with yet another amazing way to showcase their ultimate lack of common sense.

California "is considering a bill that would allow the state to begin researching the use of electronic license plates for vehicles." Yup, those electronic billboards aren't distracting enough, now we'll have to worry about license plates that would switch to digital ads or other messages when it is stopped for more than four seconds, whether in traffic or at a red light.

Your average California driver (I am specifically excluding BadTux) has the attention span of a hyperactive gnat to begin with. Can you imagine the back-ups that will ensue as thousands of California drivers get mesmerized by the pretty, flashing messages on the plates ahead of them at traffic lights?

And just think about the ads you'll see:

• granola-bar-dispensers for your Prius
• Birkenstock tires
• tourism ads from Arizona ("offer void if dark-skinned")

This has to be one of the worst ideas ev--

Ooooh, look, a bunny!

Badtux and My Missus....

Badtux has a post up with a picture of his accomodations whilst he's on vacation (hope he doesn't mind that I swiped his pic).

Badtux probably considers this to be "living the high life:"

The lovely yet talented Mrs 618, on the other hand, considers this to be "roughing it," if the TV doesn't get SoapNet:

Personally, I tend more towards Badtux's point of view.