Tough Morning, Chief?

I said a prayer, and I hope you will as well. Austin Police Chief Acevedo must have been having a rough morning early this morning.

First there was an officer-involved shooting. One of his men had to* chase down a fleeing suspect and ended up shooting the dude DRT when he went for the officer's gun. Nelson Lender and his racist-hate-mongering finger pointing act swung into action immediately because the decedent was dark brown.

Then there was an officer-involved shooting. One of his men responded to drunk guy wandering around WalMart and the dude shot the cop in the neck, fatally wounding him. The murderer was caught on film and then caught, tackled, and disarmed by some heroic soon-to-be-ex WalMart employees. Nelson Lender probably just can't find a microphone to talk about this incident. Or something.

And all this before the first pot of coffee. Yikes.

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*Yes, he did too have to chase the sweet innocent choir boy down. We still don't know why the traffic stop was initiated, but we do know that somebody in the car bolted. The sworn duty of a policeman is to enforce the law, right? That's his job - somebody is breaking the law and an officer MUST go after him. Yes, that is the way. No, you can't just let them run off. That's how you have dead hostages, guns tossed into drainage culverts, drugs ditched, and stolen cars turning into more stolen cars. A cop HAS TO give chase. That's his JOB. The report is that the cop tackled the fleeing suspect and his taser failed to deploy so there was another chase and another fight. Reaching for the gun of a uniformed policeman during a fight you initiated is the same thing as shooting your own silly brains out, as far as the cop being right or wrong goes.

You wouldn't know it from the kneejerk reaction in public defense of the dead by Nelson Lender, but the APD actually has a record of shooting people to death much less than other cities the size of Austin.

The New Dog

Looks like a wirehair chihuahua, but appears to be a Norwalk terrier. Well, we could do worse for a free rat dog. I mean, we could have ended up with a pair of chihuahuas.

Oh, wait.

Obama is Hitler!!!!1!

Boortz made an interesting point today. You will recall with what liberty the Democratic-leaning press repeated the charge that George W. Bush was like Hitler - and nevermind the pesky near-total lack of similarities! Well, Boortz said, during the Year of Speaking Dangerously we draw a different comparison with a different circumstance:

President Obama is very like Adolf Hitler in many ways, according to a personality profile of Herr Hitler made for the United States' Office of Strategic Services. The informed consumer of news will have little difficulty with this. The Obama voter will hardly notice as it bounces well off of his thick head.

I skimmed the profile. Most of what I read was at least close to The Obama enough to be disturbing, but I did notice one difference: Hitler didn't do much entertaining. The Obamas have made themselves a spectacle with frequent parties. Another difference: Hitler was a genuine warrior, whereas Obama might wet himself during a battle.

You people really should start listening to Boortz. Yes, he is abrasive. Deal with it, or miss bleeding-edge stuff like this.

How Some People Get To Be As Old As They Are, I SWEAR!

I like to think, for the sake of humanity, that I am not so very outstanding. But then stuff happens. Somebody is looking FOR something while looking AT what they are looking FOR, and they miss it. They read something and fail to comprehend, when the answer is laid out in plain American*. They walk in front of traffic, they bypass safety measures in dangerous ways and then use equipment and lose parts of themselves. Every once in a while, I ask myself (and sometimes I ask an eavesdropping co-worker) how these people managed to survive to adulthood.

Case in point (the thing that set me off just a little, just now): I told you something was dangerous, and then told you how to work around the danger to an effective (i.e., known-effective) solution. Then sumdood mentioned that a counterpoint to my article is another article pointing out that the government recommends not working around the dangers, because nobody ever did a taxpayer funded study to prove what millions of Americans already found out first-hand.

People, look, I know some of you mean well, but PLEASE either read more critically or chose your examples better.

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American. Not English. Deal with it.

Kicking And Screaming

I was browsing slashdot earlier and read a story, then I found a link to a question that made me waste the next hour and a half (check the time stamp on this post). Life After Firefox 3.6.x?

I hate firefox for its memory holes but it's better for my use for everything else. The progress from version 3.6 to (weeks away from) version 14 in the space of a year and change has left me unimpressed and with a bad taste in my mouth about the whole affair. I used it for two major releases and it must say somewhere in the US Constitution that Firefox only gets updated big-time so they change the version number every few years, but now we're on Firefox 11? I've got 3.6.x running how I like, thank you very much and I'll keep it! Except that it's about to be as unsupported as Windows 3.11 (for workgroups) is, and you really ought to keep something like up to date with security patches. So I started digging. For at least the next year or so I will likely be using Firefox 10 ESR and thumbing a rhetorical nose at the rapidreleasecyclefrenzymania until Firefox 17ESR becomes the next least-new thing out there.

Along the way I found that I will probably be able to keep using the same theme and user interface that I know and don't-hate. I also found out that some people actually think so much of security updates that they would consider forcing your software to break than to allow you to use it without installing security patches. What a mess.

Whatever happened to the good old days when you could buy a computer and run it for a decade with no security worries? Oh, wait, that never really happened, did it? I look forward to the time when Jesus comes to show us how to really run a planet. I betcha there's no computer virii then, eh!

Done, Son

+1 hour labor and maybe another cleanup hour. Thanks God, the sink she drains again. I shoved that snake in there till it got to a funky kink in the cable and pulled it back out. Dozens of feet of gunky snake. I put some warm water in the sink and went to look in the drain line in the yard. I got there just in time to see a wave of mud, followed by muddy water that eventually ran clear with chunks. Thank'ee Jesus!


Always rinse the funk off the snake because the next time you'll be all EEEEEEEEeeeeeEEEEEEWWWWWwwww! Then let it lay out to dry. The funky kink in the cable was a misfeed. I fought it until it payed out right, then fed it all back in.

Two More Stories To Shuttle Directly To The Memory Hole

The Obama campaign website allows unverified donations from foreign entities and identity thieves. Enabling massive violation of Federal laws, just like in 2008. But what do you want from a campaign associated with such high-quality individuals?

From Instapundit, because God knows you won't hear about these stories anywhere else. Unless one of the newbies at an alphabet network forgets to report only the narrative, and then FOX picks up on it. But to pick it up first? Hah!

Stupid Drain

The drain in the kitchen sink is slow. Slow enough the dishwasher backs up into the sink. My baby 1/4" x 10 foot snake found nothing interesting. Boiling water has succeeded so far only in melting the thin Chinese PVC attached to a P trap. Drain-O, it does nothing.

I guess I should be glad it's been three years since the last time I had a snake down this drain, and two years since I replaced smashed-broken pipes. The last time I was in there, I said I would make a more-conveniently located clean-out fitting if I ever had to open the wall again so I wouldn't have to open the wall again. Guess what time it is. Must. Resist. Urge. To. Use. Compressed. Air!

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Always buy new PVC glue. You don't want to do this twice because you went with old glue from two years ago.

Dat YO Dawg!

It is still a matter of debate, who wanted VFDDawgs #1 and #2 but this one is pretty incontrovertible. My Darling Wife showed up WAY late tonight, with another rat-dog looking dog. Some sort of a terrier puppy.

Great. Just what we needed, another mouth to feed.

Sure he's cute but he's NOT going to be called my dog!

You Know You Need More Sudafed When

When you're nauseous from all the phlegm draining into your stomach. Welcome to Central Texas.