The Baretta Law

Remember "Baretta"?

That was the television series starring Robert Blake as NY Detective Tony Baretta.

Remember Robert Blake?

That was the Hollywood actor (and a darned good actor) who starred in the series.

His tagline:

"If you can't do the time, don't do the crime".

I'm sure you remember that one. It probably dissuaded countless felons (it's good advice) from "doing the crime". Well, it may not have stopped Blake from shooting his egregious wife, but that has never been proven ... but never mind.

(Case 0): Let's use this as a basepoint in our evaluation:

Using your Baretta to Shoot your wife in your Chevrolet: zero Baretta points.

The point of this exposition is that while some of us get away with murder, many of us don't get away with lesser crimes.

Let's look at three case examples, all of which were high-lighted in today's news (October 26, 2006):

(Case 1) from the Bay City Times (Michigan): Man Charged with Bestiality

A 44-year-old Saginaw man remains jailed today on charges of bestiality after he was seen engaged in sexual acts with a dead dog, Michigan State Police troopers said

Ugly story. At least.. The dude was getting it on with a dog that was three days dead. Is this a "Three Dog Night"? Decidedly not. It was his g-friend's dog, had been run over by a Honda Civic (I'm making that up, but it seems to fit) and there was a whole school-yard of children watching as he did the dirty deed.

In the words from Gremlins (or was it Gremlins II) :

"Civilized? Decidedly not.
Funny? Yes!"

Okay, we have a loser who can't get it on with his honey, or even his honey's dog until he/she (the dog, not the honey ... although who can tell?) is three days dead.

What do the authorities charge him with?

A "Crime Against Nature":
Sounds pretty lame, right?

Wrong.

Here's the Money Quote:

The official charge of crimes against nature carries a maximum penalty of 15 years in prison. If the person is a repeat offender, the maximum is life in prison.

SO, for those of you who care to know, 'molesting' a dead Labradore Retriever is gonna cost you 1.5 decades in the slammer.

Boy, when you get out, I bet you never do 'that' again!

(Note: an earlier version of the report mentioned that the officers on the scene approached the "witnessing" children in the school-yard and reassured them that the 'victim' was 'not hurt'. I have NO idea how they came to that conclusion, or why they felt it was important to mention it to the drooly-mouthed kids whose only comments were "Holy Cow" and "Bitchin".
Yes, I am making this up. in part; this is what I would have said under the circumstances. So sue me.)

Another note: I'm not entirely sure what constitutes a "Crime Against Nature" in that state, but I'm pretty sure I'm glad I'm not a resident. And I don't even KNOW a Labrador Retriever!~ I swear I'm not making that up.

Let's summarize:

Shooting your wife in your Chevrolet: zero Baretta points.
Porking a dead dog in the street: 1.5 Baretta points.


( Note: 1.0 Baretta points is equal to one decade in the slammer.
If you can't do the time, don't do the crime.
Besides, how satisfying is it to pork a dead Lab? Is it going to wake up and go "
HOWWWLLLLLL~ in an attempt to acknowledge your sexpertise?)

Get real, Dude. Get a life.

Get a room!

Or at least a kennel,

---

(Case 2) Here's a guy who drowned his 5-year-old daughter in the bathtub because, as nearly as anyone can figure, the voices in his head said it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Kam Shing Chan, also known as Daniel Chan, was convicted of murder after drowning his 5-year-old daughter in 1989.

He was found guilty of murder and ruled criminally insane after the drowning of his daughter Cindy in their SE Portland apartment’s bathtub on Dec. 6, 1989, according to a 1990 article in the Oregonian.

According to court records, Chan was found incompetent to stand trial due to his mental condition and institutionalized.

He was released conditionally from Oregon State Hospital in 1996.

Court documents stated Chan believed he was acting under God’s orders when he drowned his daughter. He interpreted two sirens he heard the previous night as God’s signal to kill her.

That's right folks. Kill your daughter, it's worth seven years

Then ... you walk.

Well, of course you were NUTSO at the time, so you get a free ride, essentially.

Do I have to tell you that this is A Bad Thing, or are you such a nutso freelance jerkoff that you need the input?

An update on the Summary:

Shooting your wife in your Chevrolet: zero Baretta points.
Drownng your five-year-old daughter for no apparent reason: 0.7 Baretta points.
Porking a dead dog in the street: 1.5 Baretta points.

NB: There's more on the story of Kam Shing Cam. I don't want to confuse the issue now, but I'll tell "The Rest Of The Story" at the bottom of this article

.

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(Case 3): A Brazilian man murders 42 children, and he is convicted of the first count of murder (whatver degree). Word is, he mutilated ast least some of his victims. The penalty?

Twenty years in jail. Total. (More to come: film at eleven!)

Oh, well "THAT'A Harsh!"

Francisco das Chagas Rodrigues de Brito, a 41-year-old bicycle mechanic, was given 19 years for homicide and one year and eight months for hiding the body of the 15-year-old victim, the court said in statement.

The box score is now:

Using your Baretta to Shoot your wife in your Chevrolet: zero Baretta points.
Drownng your five-year-old daughter for no apparent reason: 0.7 Baretta points.
Porking a dead lab in the street: 1.5 Baretta points.
Murdering and mutlating the bodies of young boy children, 2.0 Baretta pointsper child.

I'm not sure here, you will have to tell me.

Is "Porking a Ded Dog" more egregious than killing your wife, and getting away with t?

Is it worse than drowning your daughter?

Is is almost 3/4 as bad as killing and mutilating a child?

What's the objective standard here?


MORE ON KAM SHING CHAN:


Remember the guy who drowned his five-year old daughter?

Here's a quick review:
The authorities decided he was crazy, and put him in the hospital for mental evaluation, where he was treated. In 1995, (previously reported as "1996) after five years of 'treatment', they determined that he was safe to be released from the asylum. For the next 11 years he was "a model patient".

Last Wednesday, October 15, 2006, he entered a local church with a can of gasoline and a zippo with the full intention of burning everyone at the service alive.

He set several fires in the church, and couple of fires on the person of the congregation. Fortunately, nobody was killed (one lady was reported as having successfully used the "Drop and Roll" technique to put out the fire on her clothing) . Members of the congregation rushed Chan, immobilizing him, and managed to put out the fires he had set within the church.

The church members are to be congratulated, I suppose, for not rending him limb from limb. But they might have saved the Great State of Oregon a lot of awkward decisions if they had.

Now the State of Oregon finds itself in the uncomfortable position of having to explain why this man, who for the past 10 or 11 years has been described as "a model patient", suddenly snapped.

Two possible explanations occur:

1. He was never really 'cured', or his insanity was never really 'controlled' by his medication; only by him as he waited his chance:
2. He was never really insane; he is just evil

Not only can the judicial authorities establish a reasonable scale of 'evilness' to assign appropriate punishment according to his actions, but the medical authorities can't tell the difference between sanity/insanity/evilness.

When the "religious community" was exposed to the depth of his depravity, their decision was to pray for him.

I think he's past all of that. Sooner or later he will be released, again; and then it's only a matter of time until he strikes, again.

Lion 1, Pakistanis 0

As long as we're surfing YouTube, here's an interesting video titled "Lion Attacks Boy".

Looks to me as if it's a powerful argument for "Domesticated Lion Control".

It's appropriate here, because of the many proclamation by sheepish liberals in America who seem to feel that if there's a gun in the home, sooner or later it's going to shoot someone in the family. As if it had a mind of its own

Lions, on the other hand, obviously DO have their own minds and make their own decisions regardless of who owns them.

This lion would surely have been safer if it had been kept in a locked lion-safe, or if federal law would have mandated that it had been stored with a jaws-lock to protect the children in the home from an accidental shooting fang-attack.

But do we have Lion-control laws in America?

NOOooooooo!

We have 20,000+ gun control laws, and they work about as well as the non-existant Lion-control laws.

Moral of the story is, if you have a dangerous weapon/beast in your home, it behooves you to treat it with respect and caution.

On the other hand, if someone breaks into your home and threatens your family with bodily harm, don't bother pointing your Lion at them in hopes that they will be intimidated. Lion doesn't give a rat-fart whether you get robbed, as long as nobody pokes their paw with a bony knee.

Guns don't either, but you can control a gun.

Think about it.

Air-Soft Accuracy

I received an unsolicited email from a guy who identifies himself as "OKJOE". He's shooting an air-soft pistol in what appears to be some kind of private indoor range.

It's a nice setup, and he has taken full advantage of the non-lethal character of air-soft pistols to set up some fine down-range angles.

I liked his videos, and I was a bit envious of his one-hand shooting ... flying pop cans (point shooting) taking pie-plates on the move, and hitting 5 out of 5. Here's one where he's getting 10 shot out of 10 in the a-zone.

That last one kind of knocked me off-balance. It claims to be a 10-shot run, but I only see/hear five shot. And the picture at the end shows the pie plate with bullet holes in it, but the sound levels aren't consistent with live ammo. Frankly, all I can here are the pellets (?) hitting the tin plate; I don't see holes in the plate during the video. Maybe your eyes and ears are better than mine. Or maybe it's a typo. I don't know. I wasn't present at the filming (I never heard of the guy), so I can't attest to the accuracy of the captions.



He also had some "real-gun" videos where you could see him making a five-shot display ... not entirely impressive split times, and you can't see the score ... but he's doing it strong-hand-only, and starting from low-ready, using a really ugly gun.

Now, here there's no question: it sounds like a live-ammo stage to me.

And here's another real-gun stage, ostensibly using two hands, where his splits are noticably faster.

It looks like he's taking two shots at the paper target on the right, shooting at a steel plate (or is it the target hanger, and is he hitting the plate or the target-carrier protective bar?) and then shooting two shots at the target on the left.

Well, whatever it is, he has a good rythm ... his shots are paced so it sounds like the split times are about equal to the index times.

Maybe you can analyze what's going on better than I can. I present this for your enjoyment, and in hopes that you can figure out what's going on here.

Joe, I replied to your email and included the URL of this post. I would appreciate it if you can find the time to provide some descriptions of what's going on in the COMMENTS section.

Miscellaneous Current Thoughts

(I thought that "Miscellaneous Current Thoughts" sounded better than "October Blogmeat". You may not agree. So start your own blog.)

CNN is 'embedding' with "insurgents" in an effort to ... well, I'm not sure what their thinking is. CNN says they're trying to report the news. There's a revelation.

According to a foxnews article, CNN says:

... the decision to air the insurgents'video was"a difficult one, but for a news organization, the right one. Our responsibility is to report the news."

Isn't this the same television news-gathering organization which chose to suppress news of Iraqi atrocities under Sadaam Insane, because they wanted to protect their indiginous staff from reprisals?

Am I the only one who sees at least two levels of hypocracy here?


And in Hawkins, Tennessee, a bailiff (deputy sheriff) 'shot' an inmate with what appears to be an Airsoft pistol.

The powers-that-be canned his ass.

Why? Was anybody hurt? Was the guy who got 'shot' disconforted, discommoded, or disrespected?

Perhaps disconcerted, but that's about it.

Hawkins County Sheriff Roger Christian ...

... characterized the shooting as a horseplay incident involving what is basically a toy pistol, but he said it crossed the boundaries of professionalism that he has established for his staff.

The deputy should have lined up every inmate in the jail, plunked them all with his plastic pellet-shooter, and said "That's for nothing. Now, try something!"

Okay, maybe it would have hurt their feelings. I wonder what these people did to put themselves in jail in the first place.


And ....

according to Reuters, more victim remains have been found at the 9/11 (Twin Towers) atrocity site.

Good.

More 'closure' for the victim families, evidence that NYC Public Services people are serious about accounting for all of the victims.

Right?

Wrong.

Some Victim Families protested that NYC hasn't done enough. The insinuation is that this is part of a cover-up for an imperfect search for remains.

"It had very little to do with the families," said Monica Gabrielle, who has no identified remains of her husband, Richard. "This is another spin _ it's a diversion away from the issue, which is that management failed, not the workers. And management needs to be held accountable."

Uh huh.

I don't know about you, but I wouldn't have wanted to be part of the effort to find and identify body parts at the site. My understanding is that most of the search team members were volunteers. To me, this means that they didn't HAVE to risk their health and their life seaching through the debris for body parts; they did it because they realized it was a nasty job that someone had to do, so they did it.

The cited victim-survivor lady places the blame on 'management'.

I'll be damned if I can figure how ANYONE could have 'managed' this kind of search, and I think it reflects well on the NYC 'management' that they supported the searchers for years during the attempt to clean up the site.

NYC mayor Bloomberg admits that the search was driven by the need to identify victims:

"Were we under time pressure? Absolutely," Bloomberg said Tuesday. "I don't know any family member that didn't want to find out whatever they could about the loved one that they lost. And we did it as fast as we could, consistent with safety and completeness."

Do the families of the 9/11 victims adknowledge their gratitude that NYC is still trying to 'do the right thing' by announcing the discover of more victim 'body parts'?

No.

I understand the grief of the victim families, and certainly we all commisserate with them for the death of their loved ones. But I would think that a woman who still hasn't been given the small gift of receiving confirmation of the death of her husband would channel her anger in a more appropriate direction: toward the terrorists who caused this tragedy, not at the people who are doing their best to positively identify the victims, and doing so in the most transparent manner possible.

The Birthday Party Trip

I'm happy to report that I have returned from my trip to far-off Utah, where I was priviliged to join with my Son and Favorite-Daughter-In-Law (FDIL -- she who discounts my protestations of affection on the spurious grounds that she is my ONLY Daughter-In-Law) in celebrating the 2nd birthday of my grandson, Jakob.

(By the way, FDIL was careful to bake a separate cake for Jake, which he enjoyed very much. Whatever you THINK it looks like, he is really eating chocolate cake.)

I spent three days driving the 900+ miles from Corvallis, Oregon, to the Provo, Utah, area; it took me only two days to drive back, because I was really tired of sleeping in cheezy hotel beds. I missed SWMBO, I missed my waterbed, and I missed my predictable work schedule.

Okay, so I didn't miss being at the office. In fact, I took today off for 'recovery time'. (More on that later.)

The Damned Old Ford (TDOF) got me there and back with no problems. Hrummph! I'm still fully prepared to hate TDOF, but I can't deny that I wouldn't have attempted the trip with the Geek Geep which I traded in on TDOF on July 1. It probably didn't hurt to take TDOF to Oil-Can Harry's for servicing before I left. Sure, it cost me a hundred bucks to make sure that everything worked as well as could be expected, but it was worth it for the peace of mind.

Before I left I went to the local library and borrowed some Books On Tape (actually, CD). I distracted myself during the 7-hour driving days by listening to Appaloosa, by Robert B. Parker (of Spenser For Hire fame), "The Dilbert Principle" by Scott Adams (BORING!), Martin Cruz Smith's "Wolves Eat Dogs" (you may remember "Gorky Park"; this is a continuation of Arcady Renko's adventures), and Lillian Jackson Braun's memorable "The Cat Who Knew A Cardinal".

I had brought four other books-on-CD with me -- including Dan Brown's 'The Da Vinci Code" -- just in case, and I expect to listen to them, too, before I return them.

You may have noticed that I haven't provided a lot of detail about my visit with my son, daughter-in-law, and grandchildren (which includes Connor and Lizzie.) That's because I don't feel obliged to talk about my family in this public forum. You may assume (properly) that I enjoyed the opportunity to see my son and FDIL, my Utah grandchildren, and the impressive state of Utah.

BTW, if you're driving to Utah from the NW via Interstate 84, you should be advised that the last 66 miles out of Idaho is entirely without gas stations. I filled up at the first Utah exit (Snowville) with less than 2 gallons left in the tank, because I had no idea that I should tank up at Burley, Idaho, before transversing The Great Wasteland.

Well, that pretty much describes all of Idaho ... at least, the SW part.