October Blogmeat

Doug Giles, one of the columnists over at TownHall.com has the second installation of his new series "Raising Girls that Pimps and Thugs Will Hate: Teach Them To Shoot Guns"

I got into this late, so I missed Part 1: Teach Them How To Fight.

We'll be going back to Townhall to see the rest of the series in the coming weeks, and you may find it instructional, too. Here is the whole list:

1. Teach Them How to Fight.
2. Teach Them How to Shoot Guns.
3. Teach Them How to Sense BS.
4. Teach Them How to Rebel.
5. Teach Them How to Be Classy (That’s mostly my wife’s job.)
6. Teach Them to Despise Anti-Intellectualism.
7. Teach Them to Be Visionaries.
8. Teach Them How to Party.
9. Teach Them the Value of Hard Work.
10. Teach Them the Importance of Traditional Convictions.

There are a lot of comments on Part II, and I've found that interesting. I'll be reading Parts III through X over the next two months. I probably won't be updating the above as a Link List, so if you're interested you'll just have to become a regular visiter to TOWNHALL.COM, or at least the Doug Giles portion of it.

Here's the core of his thesis:

Father, if your daughter is doing extra work on soft porn music videos, or posting sex pics on mySpace.com, or bearing it all for a Girls Gone Wild DVD, or inflating their chests to ocean buoy size proportions to appeal to the most appalling, pusillanimous pigs on the planet, then you have clearly not done your job as a father.

Hey sperm donor—if you bring a little girl into this world, then it is your job to make certain she’s grounded. That’s right, Pappy . . . you are the principal player in keeping your young woman from being the next Anna Nicole Smith.

Brrrrr ... a chilling thought.

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You've got new chrome rims on your ride, and when you hear a car pull into your driveway that night you naturally step outside to see what's happening, bro?

You find a bright red car pulled up behind your truck, and two ski-masked wanna-be desperados jump out.

One of them sticks a gun up under your chin and says "Give me the keys to the truck, or I'll kill you!".

In the immortal words of Karl Malden ... what will you do, what WILL you do?

Answer: you take the gun away from the creeps and put the jackers down.

Clearly, our Florida lad isn't combat-trained, because only one of the GOOBERS dies. But he has the mind-set thingie working for him, and he knows that the only way to stop crime in the streets ... er, driveway ... is to refuse to be a victim.

I'm thinking, we hang a medal on this lad, and buy him a day-ticket to Thunder Ranch.

Let's call him a Talented Amateur.

When you go to the Sun-Sentinal link, be sure to see the video.
No, it's not gory. Geez!

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1984 is running a little late this year ...

You think you're not Winston Smith?

Think again.

Our English Friends are busily working to turn Great Britain into "Oceania" by using their largest Insurance Company to mandate the installation of 'trackers' into automobiles.

Ostensibly, this will allow the Insurance Company to set rates based on driving habits.

Essentially, it will allow the Bobbys to track your ass all over the island. Imagine an electronic Big Brother who never sleeps, and whose agenda is anti-Santa who "Knows When You've Been Sleeping, Knows When You're Awake".

The headline for this Daily Telegraph Story is "Insurance Car Tracker is Spy for Police", and if you think it will turn out any different, Bubba, you're nothing more than an undigested bit of gristle from last night's dinner.

The insurance company, Norwich Union, swears that

“We have to provide the data if the police request it but only if it is part of an investigation. It is only right for people who have been breaking the law and driving dangerously to be prosecuted. But we do not use the system ourselves to check speed and it is the insurer’s job to pay out on claims regardless of liability.”

Yeah, right. When is the last time that the Government had a new tool to track the movement of private citizens, and didn't abuse it.

That's correct, we're still waiting for The First Time.

Think It Can't Happen Here?

Think again.

My own native state, Oregon, is champing at the bit to track vehicular milage to determine how much they can tax an individual for automobile usage and mileage. They'll tax you a certain amount for 'normal' miles, and a higher rate for 'rush-hour' miles.

You probably use more 'road-time' in "normal time" than in "rush-hour", so it's probably fair ... right? (Wrong, if you live and commute in The City ... and who decides what is "Rush-Hour" time and what is a "Metropolitan" area? Uh huh, you got it the first guess.)

So, how happy are you about knowing that the police have EVERY mile you drive, EVERY stop you make, on their electronic records?

"I've got nothing to hide" you exclaim.

An honest man has nothing to hide, but who can know how a government which depends on tax revenue will interpret the available data.

Only a Police State keeps this close track on the movement of its citizens. They don't do it for your benefit. It's going to cost you time, trouble, money, or anything else the government can use to shaft your ass.

If I ever bought a GMC car in The States, the first thing I would do would be to take a hammer to the OnStar mechanism.

You can always have CarToys install a CD player in the resulting hole in your dashboard, but remember you have to disable the GPS POS under the hood, too.

The worst thing?

they charge you $17 to $35 a month for the "feature".

I'm a Computer Geek. When a program costs you more in penalties than it provides in Service Benefits, we try to call it "A Feature" instead of "A Bug".

Trust me, it's "A Bug".