When I held that gun in my hand, I felt a surge of power... like God must feel when he's holding a gun.

So when police officers not allowed to carry weapons they have trouble apprehending armed men? Well this is really a shocking development. If some of the people there had been armed, it also wouldn't have been so easy for this guy to just keep around shooting people with impugnity. I like the norwegians quote he would rather live in a country where the cops are unarmed because it sends a signal that it's a peaceful society. That would be nice if it was a peaceful society. I would also like to live in a society where cops don't need to carry weapons because people are killing each other, but that's not the society we live. This article doesn't mention anything about what is leading to the uptick in violent crime, it might be interesting to look at what's causing it. I would put immigration and bad economy as my 2 prime suspects without any knowledge. Some people might try to blame violent movies or some other thing. But in the meantime police officers should have guns. If you want to say not every police officers needs a gun, maybe i could get behind that. I can also believe taht having guns makes cops feel important and encourages them to act in more abusive ways towards the non armed people they are supposed to protect. So if you want to say only police officers who go through extensive extra gun training/pass various tests/whatever can carry guns that might be okay, but there needs to be a significant number of cops who have a gun readily available. (Of course i also would encourage a better armed citizenry, but that's a whole other issue.) Maybe there is nobody else in the country who has any interest in going on a killing rampage, but if there is even 1 or 2 others in the whole country, the ease with which this guy did is likely to encourage others to try. The now know there will be little to no resistance. Norway can keep living in a dream world where nobody ever attacks each other, but that dream is going to turn into a nightmare for the people who are attacked and have nobody to defend them.

Well of course, everything looks bad if you remember it

Another Stunning success for green jobs of the future. No wait, what's that other word, oh yeah failure. Of course this isn't unique to green business that's just an added bonus. Towns try to lure in new businesses by promising them money, business come, soak up the money and go bust. It was basically steve and barry's whole business model. Everyone wondered how they could sell clothes so cheap. It turned out they were selling so cheap because towns kept paying them to move in, and they would live off of that money. Until eventually there were no new towns, and not enough revenue from their stores, and they went bankrupt.

Smithers had thwarted my earlier attempt to take candy from a baby, but with him out of the picture, I was free to wallow in my own crapulence.

It almost seems cruel to continue to mock Krugman. He has lost so much credibility already that it's not entirely clear that there remains any point to pointing out his inconsistency it's like taking candy from a baby. On the other hand although i did quite a bit of mocking of him earlier, it's been several months plus he was a nobel prize winning economists, and still pretends that he's a serious person. I don't know, maybe in his own mind he still is a serious person. I don't see that anybody else could read what he writes and take it seriously, but the New York times continues to print it, so he (and by extensions them for continuing to employ him) must be mocked every once in a while as a reminder. What's particularly perplexing is that his columns are not just inconsistent or poorly thought out when writing about some sort of moral or philosophical problem, but when attacking specific economic issues like this. It makes you wonder how he could win a nobel prize for economics when he can't even keep his own thoughts consistent on the economic issues. Maybe he won one for work they thought he would do in the future, just like obama won one because everyone figured he would end US wars. But then instead Obama increased US wars (Libya, Somalia, etc.) claimed that they didn't even count as wars, and as such he could make the decisions entirely unilaterally and decide on his own recognizance to send drones off to bomb people. Maybe it turns out krugman is as bad an economist as Obama is a peacemaker only as it turns out the Nobel prize picking committee is even worse at picking nobel prize winners than obama is at fostering peace, or krugman is at economics.

I'm going to come back with the greatest gift a husband can give his wife: An annulment from his secret wife...

Mr. Simpson, under Nevada law, bigamy, or Mormon hold'em, is perfectly legal. Both marriages stand.

I have long said that although i support gay marriage in theory i am not that upset about not having gay marriage because supporters of gay marriage fail to advocate for similar rights for polygamists. Either the government has the authority to regulate marriage or they do not, if they do not that polygamist marriages should be just as legitimate as gay marriage or straight marriage. If they do then they have the right to ban gay marriage just as much as banning polygamist marriage. But this article reminds us that beyond the right to marry, polygamists don't even have the right to live together in peace. Because of common law marriage rules in some states a man can be declared to be married to multiple women if he is living with them and then he can charged with polygamy, which is a crime. This has happened. That even though they are just trying to live peacefully, not even trying to claim they should be allowed multiple government recognized marriages, just that they want to be left in peace. Polygamist rights are where gay rights were 40 years ago when sodomy was illegal, and cops could arrest gay guys just for having sex with each other if they wanted. So all those activist upset with government intruding in people's personal lives should stop worrying about getting gays the rights to marry and start worrying about getting polygamists the rights to live without government persecution. (or better yet, worry about both, but that seems beyond them.)

I'm having a little trouble with the government. Oh, those jerks, always walking over the small businessman. Don't get me started about the government

Why are governments allowed to get away with being so stupid. Since when does suitable mean common? That's just bizarre. On a list of the word suitable's synonyms common would not be in the top ten. Suitable means appropriate, not common. Now just think to yourself what would happen if this was a private company. Not that a private company could put somebody in jail, but if they mistreated some customer and claimed that because of some bylaw in their code book they had acted appropriately. And people said hey that's crazy, that doesn't make any sense, and it got into the newspapers and lots of people found out about it. A private company would apologize. They would say sorry for the mistake, we didn't mean any offense and we will look into updating out procedures so we don't have this kind of a mistake again. Or something along those lines. But does the government have to apologize? No, of course not. They claim they were right all along and come up with some convoluted theory about the meaning of words to justify putting somebody in prison. Similar things are playing out on a bigger scale right now. Are atlanta politicains/unionized teachers going to be punished for systemic cheating on standardized tests? Is the federal government going to be held responsible for letting guns be sold illegally and moved to mexico all the while under the watch of ATF agents? Are police ever held responsible when they deliver a no knock raid at at the wrong address, mistake a guy holding a remote for a gun and shoot and innocent man to death? No of course not. Those are all terrible accidents for which nobody should be held responsible. But rupert murdoch's company get's caught up in some wiretapping scandal (i haven't really followed the details because i don't care) and the company needs to be dismantled and everyone needs to lose their jobs and possibly go to prison. An innocent guy sitting at home has his home broken into by armed men who don't say what they are doing and defends himself by shooting one of them only to find later they were police delivering a no knock warrant, he needs to go to prison too. He should have known better than try to defend himself against armed men breaking into his home unannounced. But not the government, or government employees. They are immune to repercussions for their actions. In fact it's actually written into the law that government employees can't be sued for terrible behavior because they work for the government after all. If somebody else did it, it would be a crime and you could sue them, but because it's a government employee well we just couldn't allow that. How is this a democracy? Do a majority of people really think this a good idea?

I'm not gonna lie to you, Marge. Well, goodbye.

First off, i don't understand why anybody cares about the casey anthony case. In case anybody doesn't know, she is a 25 year who is accused of murdering her toddler child and recently was aquitted by a jury. A lot of people seem convinced she was guilty. Okay maybe she was, so what. There what 10,000 a 100,000 murders in the country a year, meanwhile for some reason this one is so important that this woman is going to be getting multi-million dollar deals for her story/appearing on various shows. And this isn't just a consequence of the outcome, this case was enormous the whole time. So she was convicted of lying to the police instead and will be let out soon because of time already served. But on a more important note it brings us to this article. people care so much about this girl getting off that they want to create new laws that she could have been charged with. This and similar laws ought to be unconstitutional. The purpose of this law is specifically to punish someone for a crime which cannot be proven. If police think that a woman killed her child, but cannot prove it they will try to use this law to punish her instead. That is only purpose of this law. The same thing goes on with anti-gun laws. Mobsters are killing people/dealing drugs/etc. and so the government wants to put them in jail. But they cannot prove the crimes against them, so they create artificially large punishments for basic gun law violations. Which is why plexico burress (football player) was sent to prison for 2 years. Because they set up automatic prison terms for anyone with an unregistered gun so that whenever they pick up a drug dealer or mobster with a gun, now they can imprison them without having to prove any charges against them. Ditto perjury trials against baseball players who used steroids. They couldn't prove that barry bonds had illegally used steroids, so they tried to imprison him for lying about using steroids. First off his crime is using steroids, you should try him for that or nothing, charging him with lying about his crime is bogus. Second if you are going to make an ass of yourself doing that you better at least win (which they didn't.) Third end result? The government spent $50,000,000 trying to put barry bonds in prison for lying about using steroids and failed. Job well done. Anyway back to the issue, all these laws are created not with the purpose of protecting citizens, or preventing crime, but imprisoning people. That should not be allowed.

a gun is not a weapon, it's a tool, like butcher's knife, or a harpoon, or ah... an alligator.

If I was a woman living in or near detroit i would definitely want to own a gun. Frankly if i was a 6 foot 2, 200 pound man living in or near detroit i would definitely want to own a gun. It's important to realize with all the anti gun feelings going on, that widespread adoption of firearms is the best thing a feminist could hope for. It evens the playing field. A man is not stronger or faster than a woman with a gun. There is plenty of interesting historical research of the correlation between the rise of the gun and the rise of democracy. Specifically that the ease of using the gun empowered peasants to stand up for themselves in a way that was far more difficult when fighting was done hand to hand. Peasants had neither the weapons nor the training to fight professional knights, and so had little option to stand up for themselves. While it might also have been difficult for them to get their hands on guns, once they did they could not be easily stopped. With no guns the weak are at the mercy of the strong, be it women to men, or weak men/elderly/disabled, etc. But once armed even someone who is wheel chair bound can defend himself against a mugger. Also plenty of studies showing that areas with looser gun laws, and a higher percentage of the population with a gun have lower crime rates. Even criminals would rather not deal with people who have guns.

Won't somebody please think of the children.

More shocking news. School systems in wisconsin (and therefore students) are better off now that unions have been curbed. Shocking i know. Although i don't think even unions would have argued that cutting union power could possibly hurt students in the short run. That's just crazy. The unions/teachers position aught to be that in the long term you won't get as many good teachers because people who might have become teachers will decide against it when they realize the poor wages/treatment non unionized teachers have. I'm not sure i believe that, but it's a legitimate argument. But in the short term teachers don't have anywhere to go. The same teachers will be teaching next year as last year, only now they will make less money which leaves more money for the school. To hire more teachers, or get new books/computers, or whatever. We have yet to see what the future holds for wisconsin teachers. When measured in absolute terms they rank as one of the better states for education, but when measurements are controlled for race they fall way down the list. (They have all white kids who generally perform better than hispanics or african americans but their white kids don't do better than most other states, and the hispanic and african american kids they have don't do better either. So once race is controlled for the performance is really mediocre.) I'm sure their will be a lot of eyes on wisconsin and what test results are in the next few years. This may give teachers the perverse motivation to do a bad job so kids do poorly and they can blame this change in the law. On the other hand they may fear for their job and thus work harder to make sure the kids do well. We'll just wait and see.

The trick is to say you're prejudiced against all races.

Of course. Now i get it. To prevent people from using race as a determing factor in a person qualification is unconstitutionally racist. Because if we don't use race to determine a persons qualification then we are unconstitutionally discriminating against them because of their race. No wait. How does this make sense again? It's one thing to support affirmative action and say it's a good thing if harvard decides they want to use affirmative action. It's quite another for a federal court system to tell a state it is illegal for them to ban race determination in their college admissions. An overwhelming majority of michigan voters decided they don't think it's appropriate for their state schools to determine admissions based on race, and a couple of federal judges get to overrule the entire state based on what exactly? It's just silly. Nor does preventing race determination actually prevent schools from encouraging kids who grew up in bad situations. They can still use low income affirmative action, inner city affirmative action, didn't grow up in a stable family affirmative action. The only difference is that that way rich black kids won't get preferential treatment over poor white kids. Is that's racist because?

Hmm. Your ideas are intriguing to me, and i wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

I enjoyed this guy rant.