Author: hsoi

Good for him

/ hsoi

Colorado State University’s Board of Governors voted for a weapons ban on campus.

In response, Larimer County Sheriff James Alderden said he would undermine the ban in the interest of student safety. Read more here.

“I have told the CSU police chief I will not support this in any way,” Sheriff Alderden told The Gazette. “If anyone with one of my permits gets arrested for concealed carry at CSU, I will refuse to book that person into my jail. Furthermore, I will show up at court and testify on that person’s behalf, and I will do whatever I can to discourage a conviction. I will not be a party to this very poor decision.”

It’s simple. This Sheriff has set aside emotions and looked at the hard facts:

Alderden said ban advocates have been unable to cite a single study or statistic to show that students will be safer as a result of a weapons ban. He’s convinced they will be much less safe as a result of the ban, which will leave most students defenseless. The ban establishes the campuses as “soft targets,” meaning armed criminals will have a reasonable expectation their intended victims aren’t armed.

“There are volumes of statistical and anecdotal data that show populations are safer when law-abiding citizens are permitted to carry concealed weapons,” Alderden said.

Six years after Alderden began issuing permits, he noticed the homicide rate in his jurisdiction had dropped.

Amazing that. But like I said, the ban is about emotion. Don’t believe me?

“I made the whole case, based in provable facts. The teacher said, and I quote, ‘I don’t care about the facts.’ She only cared about her emotional response,” Alderden said.

Amazing. Isn’t it interesting how in so many other areas of life people want facts, people want proof, people want evidence, but here they don’t want facts. How… odd.

The Urban Hunt

/ hsoi

In response to my home being invaded by a duck, Rog pointed me to an article about The Urban Hunt. It’s about a man and his adventure in urban hunting: rabbit, pigeon, squirrel, duck, and so on.

It’s a good read. Well-written prose.

Hunting is ethically cleaner than buying meat at a market, in part because it is more difficult. Unlike urban progressives who shop in high-end organic grocery stores, hunters are not casual carnivores. Though often accused of being bloodthirsty, hunters simply know what blood is—what it looks like, how it smells. The division of labor is one of the good things about living in cities: Not everyone has to hunt his own food, make his own clothes, and perform his own open-heart surgery. But the luxury of urbanism lets us forget that eating is always about blood, about one thing suffering and dying so another thing can live. With every bite—whether ortolan, salmon, or chicken burrito—we swallow a mouthful of death.

Need a bathroom? Here’s how you can find one!

/ hsoi

Youngest child appears to have caught something… poor little guy is running at both ends.

So I went to see if Imodium was OK for kids to take (don’t have any at home, Wife at the grocery store calling me to ask if we needed anything else).

And lo, what do I find?

The Bathroom Finder

Wow.

The wonders of the modern era. 🙂

Sesame Street Style Guide

/ hsoi / 1 Comment

I was Googling around for something related to Sesame Street and stumbled across “The Sesame Street Style Guide“.

The following pages are excerpted from the Sesame Street Style Guide published 2001. They cover Sesame Street character art usage and advertising guidelines and are provided for your reference in preparing print materials in conjunction with the Sesame Street Presents: The Body exhibition.

It contains a lot of general guidelines about how the characters are to be used, and I love the sheer amount of Pantone® references.

Kinda cool. 🙂

Texas primary

/ hsoi

So the Texas primary is this coming Tuesday, and today is the last day for early voting.

Wife and I have been having a tough time deciding who to vote for. They’re all a bunch of professional politicians. They all know how to say something that ultimately says nothing. They all know the proper buzzwords to use today are “Constitution” and “States rights” and other such things to help them get elected, then be discarded once they have what they want.

In short, they all suck. It’s just a question of who sucks least.

Furthermore, I’ve found myself this election cycle being more concerned about who to get out of office than voting for who I truly think is best. I hate that. You should vote for who you truly believe is best. But in many respects there’s a bigger political game being played right now and I find myself sometimes wondering who will do a better job at getting someone out of office or keeping someone else from getting into office. *sigh*  I hate shit like this. That’s not the ideal way for things to be, but it seems the reality for how things are.

*sigh*

Metal detectors at the Texas capitol?

/ hsoi / 2 Comments

“Grits for Breakfast” takes a look at the DPS plan to put x-rays and metal detectors at the Texas capitol entrances.

One thing many don’t think about is the psychological consequences of such a thing:

After 9/11, the Austin city council turned their offices into their own little fortress, installing metal detectors and ceasing the longstanding practice of allowing constituents to go directly to councilmembers’ offices to talk to staff, the councilmember, etc.. The result was to make them much less accessible, more insular, and ultimately IMO more aloof and full of themselves. The physical infrastructure created to protect these “important people” more than the rest of us had an unintended side effect on officeholders and staff, creating an even more significant psychological distance from constituents than the physical one. The change dramatically altered the culture at city hall, very much for the worse as far as I’m concerned.

Indeed. One must wonder what makes them more important than the rest of us to warrant such measures? If it’s good enough for them, why not you and me? And if we went that route, what sort of world would we live in? And would it really solve anything or just amount to more psychological pain?

Even better: Maybe if legislators are concerned about security they should use some of their campaign funds to send themselves and their staff through the necessary training to get their concealed carry permits.

That’d probably do far more positive. However, I wouldn’t want to force anyone to do such a thing. If a staffer doesn’t want to do it, they shouldn’t be made to.

But for heaven’s sake, state officials shouldn’t let either fear or an overblown sense of self-importance spur security measures that degrade the fundamental culture of the institution. It’s important to protect legislators, but we hold elections every two years precisely to remind each of them that they’re replaceable. It’s not their capitol, it’s ours.

The key word is “self-importance”. If you believe you are that important that you need to work to preserve yourself, then work to enable measures that preserve yourself and enable the citizenry to do the same.

It’s my body

/ hsoi / 3 Comments

I find it odd how the liberal masses carry on endlessly about how “it’s my body” and how they should have the final say about what’s done to it, what goes in or out of it.  Then in the same breath, these people seem to also believe that more government is the answer, because when they do, sooner or later the gov decides it wants to control your body. Of course, it’s all for your own good… they’re just here to protect you. But what if you don’t want to be saved from yourself?

John Stossel writes about such government “nanny-ism”.

We’ll hear from people like Bruce Tower. Tower has prostate cancer. He wanted to take a drug that showed promise against his cancer, but the Food and Drug Administration would not allow it. One bureaucrat told him the government was protecting him from dangerous side effects. Tower’s outraged response was: “Side effects — who cares? Every treatment I’ve had I’ve suffered from side effects. If I’m terminal, it should be my option to endure any side effects.”

Indeed. I fail to see what they are saving him from. The cancer will kill him, so if this adult of sound mind makes the decision that he wants to try some new drug that could save his life, why shouldn’t he be allowed to? How much more miserable can it make his life? And why isn’t it up to him to make that choice for himself? I already have one mother, I don’t need another.

Dr. Alan Chow invented a retinal implant that helps some blind people see (optobionics.com). Demonstrating that took seven years and cost $50 million dollars of FDA-approved tests. But now the FDA wants still more tests. That third stage will take another three years and cost $100 million. But Chow doesn’t have $100 million. He can’t raise the money from investors because the implant only helps some blind people. Potential investors fear there are too few customers to justify their $100 million risk.

Way to kill innovation.

It gets worse.

The Drug Enforcement Agency’s war on drug dealers has led them to watch pain-management doctors like hawks. Drugs like Vicodin and OxyContin provide wonderful pain relief. But because they are also taken by “recreational” drug users, doctors go to jail for prescribing quantities that the DEA considers “inappropriate.” As a result, pain specialists are scared into underprescribing painkillers. Sick people suffer horrible pain needlessly.

Think I exaggerate? Check out the website of the American Association of Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) (aapsonline.org). It warns doctors not to go into pain management.

[…]

The DEA told us that good doctors have nothing to worry about. But … the DEA’s cherry-picked medical experts persuade juries that they should jail any doctor who administers higher doses of pain relief than the DEA’s zealots think appropriate. News of those jail terms spreads. Doctors learn to be stingy with paid meds.

But it’s all for our own good, right? Who are these bureaucrats to say what’s appropriate for me? Why isn’t that between myself and my doctor?

All drugs involve risk. In a free country, it should be up to individuals, once we’re adults, to make our own choices about those risks. Patrick Henry didn’t say, “Give me absolute safety, or give me death.” He said “liberty.” That is what America is supposed to be about.

Unfortunately America is no longer that. People seem to want safety over all things, and we’re willing to give up everything in vain hope of achieving it.

An unwanted guest in my home

/ hsoi / 4 Comments

Wife leaves the house last night to go do something. Just myself and the kids at home.

About 30 minutes after Wife left, I hear a muffled crash.. as if some plastic had hit the floor. Huh? That’s strange. Quick cat check and I know where they all are so it wasn’t them.

I get up to investigate.

Check the backyard in case some of the plastic lawn chairs had been blown over. No, that wasn’t it. Come to think of it, it sounded like it came from the garage.

Uh oh. But if it was a person, why didn’t I hear any noise with the garage door? Hrm.

I go to check.

Slowly open the door expecting the unexpected….

And unexpected it was.

“Hi, Sneeze.”

Big sigh of relief, then big sigh of annoyance… at myself.

Who is Sneeze? You know all those muscovy ducks that hang out at our house? Sneeze (named by the kids) is one of them. He’s like Norm from the TV show “Cheers”. My guess is as soon as Wife pulled the car out of the garage he waddled right in and got trapped. The crash? Muscovy’s are perching ducks and from the bottles on the floor it seems he failed at perching on one of the shelves.

This is ultimately my fault. The ducks have developed a Pavlovian response to the sound of the garage door going up. Many times before we go somewhere the kids will raise the garage door then go put down some seed for the ducks. So garage door sound is now associated with getting fed. The duck could be 5-6 houses down but hears our garage and it’s a quick flight over for food. At the time the ducks would never come into the garage. I don’t know why, but they seemed unsure and afraid of it. Then one day they were all standing at the open door waiting for me, Sneeze saw me with food in hand and slowly he braved into the great urban cave. I rewarded him with food. And now, he’s no longer scared of the garage. It’s just another food plot to him.

*sigh*

I did this to myself. 🙂