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[Tex]

OT re politics

The canadian border discussion was part of a geography lesson graciously offered me without charge after I demonstrated F-level mastery of the non-Mexican border.

I had no idea when I read your post that the V.Tech killer was a Korean immigrant. It'll definitely stir the pot. When I read he was an Asian (that was the best ID I'd read thus far) I was promptly contacted by some joker telling me that it was a pity he died, because the US Postal Service is always looking for skilled workers; so I joked back (what else can one do?) that adding an Asian to the list of domestic mass-killers was progress in diversity. Some nuts may smell blood and begin to bay, I'm sure, but it's hard to believe that the anti-foreigner crowd is so ironically funny as to pin on non-whites what's traditionally a white-male past-time.

The xenophobic wingnuts are gonna try using this as an excuse to throw out all non-whites (even though OKC, Columbine, Waco, Ruby Ridge, and any number of other mass murder situations were a bunch of white guys).

Lat I checked, the killings at Ruby Ridge and Waco were committed by federal agents immune to local prosecution. Based on the Ruby Ridge assassin's name, I'd assumed he was Japanese, but I'm willing to take correction on it. Lack of consequences is something that OKC and Columbine and Va. Tech didn't have going on for the mass-killers there. The OKC let to an execution, and there wasn't enough left of the shooters at Columbine, Univ. Texas, and now Va. Tech to try. It's interesting to note the Univ. Texas shooter was found to have a substantial brain tumor on autopsy, suggesting his pathology included biologically-demonstrble brain disease. One wonders if much of the violence we lament isn't a product of mental health problems gone unchecked. Maybe state health mandates for mental health coverage aren't so expensive after all, and federal benefits laws that stop their enforcement do more harm than suspected. Maybe Lon Horiuchi is also crazy, and not just evil. (The possibility exists that he is a lethally incompetent sniper, but I have a hard time believing that level of incompetence in a professional sniper.) Who knows. At any rate, Ruby Ridge isn't a schoolhouse shoot-up; it was a law enforcement operation gone terribly wrong with the assistance of, as I understand it, a court which didn't care the date was wrong on the information it gave the defendant for his hearing, a federal informant who may have made up the whole offense behind the prosecution, a clerk that told a man his verdict could impact the security he gave for his appearance bond, a prosecutor who didn't like the advice he got from the Marshals about how to re-start with a lower profile and a better chance of avoiding blood, and a trigger-happy sniper who was either too incompetent to realize he was shooting a woman, not the target defendant, who was holding an infant ... or was just evil enough to peddle this kind of lie to cover his bloodthirst.

I have an acquaintance who'd been in the Army special forces, and a bit before Waco he declined to re-up. He kept being subjected to psych exam questions that asked him to assume, for example, a riot in LA, and other scenarios within US borders and outside Federal lands, and then propose an operations plan ... so eventually he concluded the Army was looking for people who were excited to have this sort of operation in their heads and didn't care about posse comitatus, and he got out before the work disgusted him. He was naturally unsurprised at the subsequent behavior of the federal government, and unsurprised at the apparent participation at Waco of certain elements of the Army.

In his explanation why the US didn't need a Bill of Rights (none of those terrible things would come to pass without it, or so went the argument he and the federalists advanced), Webster made some interesting comments about the power of the central government and its natural limits. I wonder what he'd say about Ruby Ridge and Waco. The things the federalists said about the limits of a standing army and the superiority of local militias to resist a hypothetical federal tyranny would be pretty funny to a lot of folks these days, I imagine.

to these jackasses it'll still be open season on all non-Caucasian, non-native-born U.S. citizens

For a year or two after Iran attacked the US embassy, you could buy an Iranian hunting license at gun shows in Texas. My sister bought one on a lark. No bag limit, it said. I expect if you read it carefully, it's still valid.

The US has problems, including with violence (domestic and otherwise), and in the last few presidential elections there's been some fairly widely-tolerated rhetoric that suggests we're moving away from even our longstanding reliance on the political process to enable peaceable transfer of government. The thing that concerns me most is that as bad as I see things getting, I don't immediately see a better alternative domicile. I'm open to suggestions

Incidentally, my wife is looking to move to Florida. I expect the jokes to get a lot worse ....

Take care,
--Tex.

PS Comparable mass-killings, in my view, might include the Columbine murders, the Luby's murders in Killeen TX, the McDonalds murders (can't remember where ... San Ysidro?), and the killings from the clock tower of the University of Texas. I think law enforcement-instituted operations that escalated into mass-killings is a different species of problem, though it is of course a problem.