General

Why I Need Assault Weapons- Chuck Woolery’s commentary is slightly inaccurate. FactCheck.org said, “Advocates of gun rights often argue that in World War II Japan was deterred from invading the U.S. mainland by a fear of American citizens with guns in their closets. They frequently quote Japan’s Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto as saying: ‘You cannot invade mainland United States. There would be a rifle behind each blade of grass.’ But this quote is unsubstantiated and almost certainly bogus, even though it has been repeated thousands of times in various Internet postings. There is no record of the commander in chief of Japan’s wartime fleet ever saying it.”
Stark Difference

Krugman and DeLong Gang Up on Murphy

How to Solve Problems Without Calling the Goons

FBI Lab's woes cast a growing shadow

Congress Avoids the Cliff by Selling Us Down the River

Reducing Defense...Cuts

Re: * December 2012 low content thread *

Malachi — Mon, 31 Dec 2012 16:47:00 GMT

http://m.youtube.com/#/watch?feature=endscreen&v=3E-Ix_aaDhg&desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3D3E-Ix_aaDhg%26feature%3Dendscreen

sandy hook audio reveals police officers discussing multiple suspects. He says he got somebody (" 'em" meaning "him" or "them" proned out, which wouldnt happen if the only shooter shot himself).

Re: * December 2012 low content thread *

Bert — Mon, 31 Dec 2012 15:00:33 GMT

Assault rifles are selling out:

“Our phones are ringing every 10 seconds and people are saying, ‘Do you have any assault rifles?’” said Dennis Pratte, owner of My Gun Factory in Falls Church, Va., a store that also sells products online. “They’ve sold out of just about every gun shop nationwide and just about every distributor is out of stock.”

Online retailers are running out of semiautomatic rifles — known variously as assault weapons, tactical rifles or modern sporting rifles — and magazines that can hold more than 10 rounds.

Brick-and-mortar gun shops are also working furiously to meet demand. Semiautomatic rifles, which fire one round for every pull of the trigger, and high-capacity magazines are flying off the shelves.

“The retail market is completely sold out of anything with high-capacity magazines,” said Pratte. “We get people 20-deep waiting to buy.”

Re: * December 2012 low content thread *

Anenome — Mon, 31 Dec 2012 03:37:08 GMT

Bert:

From here:

Fairfax Delegate Tim Hugo plans to introduce legislation at next month’s General Assembly session that would do away with Virginia’s 17.5 cent gas tax. Instead, he wants to raise the state’s sales tax from 5% to 5.9% to help pay for road maintenance.

Hugo says his plan would raise $500-million a year for transportation.

If the bill were to pass, Virginia would be the first state in the country to get rid of the gas tax.

Which would you rather have, 5.9% sales tax or a 17.5 cent gas tax (for ever gallon I assume)?

Officially I think both are wrong and should be eliminated and the roads sold off to private owners, of course.

But, between these two, it should be noted that a gas tax is a direct use tax, and one pays it to the extent they use the roads, even though it's a bit shotgun of an approach (ie, some will pay for highways they never use, etc.).

The sales tax would tax even those whom do not use the roads, and thus I think is less moral from our perspective, even though both are dubious. So, given a choice, I'd take the gas tax as more akin to a direct usage fee than the sales-tax which would have even children paying for roads by their purchases.

Re: * December 2012 low content thread *

HabbaBabba — Sun, 30 Dec 2012 23:26:52 GMT

Where I live, the tax/gallon is like, twice that? And the sales tax is 7.25 mandated minimum so... I would rather have either.

Re: * December 2012 low content thread *

Bert — Sun, 30 Dec 2012 21:46:42 GMT

From here:

Fairfax Delegate Tim Hugo plans to introduce legislation at next month’s General Assembly session that would do away with Virginia’s 17.5 cent gas tax. Instead, he wants to raise the state’s sales tax from 5% to 5.9% to help pay for road maintenance.

Hugo says his plan would raise $500-million a year for transportation.

If the bill were to pass, Virginia would be the first state in the country to get rid of the gas tax.

Which would you rather have, 5.9% sales tax or a 17.5 cent gas tax (for ever gallon I assume)?

Re: * December 2012 low content thread *

Bert — Sun, 30 Dec 2012 14:10:01 GMT

Lol. When will these corps learn to first look at their employees for theft?

It's generally known in the theater/movie biz that most of the pirating actually comes from the production side and not from the outside. Most theaters now have to upgrade to digital projectors, of which corporate can monitor compared to 35mm projectors that they cannot (since they are not plugged into the system). For Regal they are beginning to check to see if anyone's playing films outside the scheduled times, generally between 1-8 am. Problem? Managers at my theater like to watch movies on their own time; of which falls during those hours.

Anyway for something more "fun" this is a track I recorded with a Korg Monotron ribbon synthesizer (mini synth) and a Boss Loop Station. I didn't really have any plans on what I was doing. I didn't have it for more than an hour when I did this, just plugged it in and went with it.

Re: * December 2012 low content thread *

Malachi — Fri, 28 Dec 2012 23:13:33 GMT

The length of time between those two statements is incredibly vast relative to the length of the average american's attention span. Like 100 trillion attention spans.

Re: * December 2012 low content thread *

fountainhead — Fri, 28 Dec 2012 23:05:46 GMT

So the fiscal cliff Chicken Littles are out in force as the deadline approaches and it got me thinking. They're horrified at the prospect of taxes going up on middle class Americans because of the expiration of the Bush tax cuts. Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't these the same tax cuts that were called "tax cuts for the rich?" Now, conveniently, they're tax hikes on the middle class!

Re: * December 2012 low content thread *

Malachi — Fri, 28 Dec 2012 22:43:23 GMT

http://larrycorreia.wordpress.com/2012/12/20/an-opinion-on-gun-control/

So how often are guns actually used in self-defense in America? http://www.guncite.com/gun_control_gcdguse.html On the high side the estimate runs around 2.5 million defensive gun uses a year, which dwarfs our approximately 16,000 homicides in any recent year, only 10k of which are with guns. http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/homicide.htm Of those with guns, only a couple hundred are with rifles. So basically, the guns that the anti-gunners are the most spun up about only account for a tiny fraction of all our murders. But let’s not go with the high estimate. Let’s go with some smaller ones instead. Let’s use the far more conservative 800,000 number which is arrived at in multiple studies. That still dwarfs the number of illegal shootings. Heck, let’s even run with the number once put out by the people who want to ban guns, the Brady Center, which was still around 108,000, which still is an awesome ratio of good vs. bad. So even if you use the worst number provided by people who are just as biased as me but in the opposite direction, gun use is a huge net positive. Or to put it another way, the Brady Center hates guns so much that they are totally cool with the population of a decent sized city getting raped and murdered every year as collateral damage in order to get what they want.