73 here in Retroville today under cloudy skies, drizzle, and MIL on her way up from points south (about 35 miles) bringing flower bulbs for us to plant. Got one raised bed set up and another one underway, lawn mowed, weeds whacked, bratwurst and boneless pork chops grilled, and studies underway for ITIL v3 Foundation cert, along with certs in CompTIA A+, Network +, Server +, Security +, etc., etc. Mrs. OFD has her sea glass jewlery organized and new acquisitions from Fort Bragg, Kalifornia, and also has her presentation down for tomorrow at the state department of health who are interested in getting her organization’s Mental Health First Aid program running here in Vermont for youth. As I pointed out to Mrs. OFD just now, our publik skools up here are, according to the nooz media accounts, simply rife with rampant bullying, racism and suicide, so not a moment too soon.

We find the racism claim quite hilarious; Vermont takes turns each year with Maine, Wyoming and Iowa as the whitest state in the country; our exotic minorities here are Bosnian Serbs, found only in our largest city (about 50k) and college town, Burlap. There is also the occasional Somali; one of whom was caught ripping off his foreign student tenants for rent while working them like navvies in his somosa restaurant in the state capital, and another found stalking and assaulting young women down there in that den of iniquity, Burlap. And of course we have our Latino farm workers and Jamaican orchard people, rarely, if ever seen.

There’s no need for them to look like thrift store mannequins.

You say thrift store mannequin like it’s a bad thing. My wife aspires to having her mother in law looking like a thrift store mannequin. At least then her clothes would be clean.

At the assisted living, all tenants are responsible for their own laundry and there are free machines on all floors. However, many residents either hire someone to come in and do their laundry, or they send their laundry out to a local place that picks up and delivers. But even at the assisted living, everyone is urged to identify their laundry with markers.

But we still pay their salaries and OT and for their toyz anyway. Like we pay for the teachers and get back kids who are illiterate and innumerate but feel great about themselves until they don’t and then go on a killing spree before offing themselves. All hail Our Nanny the Almighty State! Ave Caesar! Sieg Heil!

Re: snap shooting. Yep, neat trick but very tricky to pull off; in this case the guy was evidently a raving lunatic and perhaps not amenable to such nuanced persuasion.

OK, rant off; good thing I don’t drink coffee, eh?

I’m with OFD here. I wasn’t there, and I refuse to Monday-morning quarterback the guy who was. I’d bet he did the best he could in the circumstances. The outcome was horrible, but one of the things they teach in business school is that decisions and outcomes are not necessarily related. That is, one can make a bad decision that has a very good outcome (such as buying a lottery ticket), and one can make a good decision that has a very bad outcome, which may well be the case here.

Incidentally, he supposedly fired eight shots, which means it’s unlikely that he “emptied his gun”. If I had to guess, I’d guess his first shot killed the girl. It may well be that the bad guy pointed his gun at the cop, the cop pulled the trigger aiming for the guy’s head, and the guy pulled the girl in front of him just as the cop fired.

One of the things we used to practice was snap-shooting at short distances. The idea is that you convince the bad guy to lower his pistol as you lower yours. Once both pistols are down, you snap yours back up and shoot him in the head. With a lot of practice, it’s possible to get pretty good at that, but even then it’s a last ditch maneuver. And I doubt this cop had much, if any, practice at snap-shooting.

In a microbiology course I once did we were supposed to buy a lab coat and *leave* it in the lab after each prac, rather than take it home, where the (non dangerous) bacteria on it might cause problems. Okay, so I did that. My coat disappeared the first week. I got narky with the department and eventually they paid for me to get a new one, which I then took home. I’m sure the bacteria on my coat were safer than the average keyboard, or even KFC outlet.

We have whitewashes in Canada, too. One fairly recent case had an RCMP officer shooting a prisoner in the back of the head, while the perp’s hands were cuffed behind his back. The official verdict was “defense”. I called it execution.

I’m a bit confused by the police telling him to call 000 right away, rather than defend himself. Does he do that between hits of the bat? Or does he wait until after he is dead?

Yes. Been going on like this since OFD worked the gig, last year was 1986. One-hour annual qualification with stationary Feebie paper targets then; they had just started with the moving targets and night firing when I left. I’d had better training fifteen years earlier in the AF in east TX. They may well have state-of-the-art targets and tactical gunfighting classes now but it’s only a couple of hours once a year, still; the brass says they don’t have the money for the ammo or the training instructors. But they have it for all kinds of other bullshit, just like our national regime.

Some years ago, too, I used to see hiring requirements for these jobs and psych testing was always mentioned; I don’t see that anymore, but I have seen what appear to be real psychos out there in uniform and doing cop work.

The joke about the different nationality cops is at least correct concerning ours. 14-round semi-auto pistols that they’ll spray all over the landscape and/or empty into the perp (hopefully just the perp) and any post-shooting investigation is done by them and always a whitewash.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-05-20/13-yo-bashed-with-baseball-bat/4699320

Bob’s original point was his anger at the way the story got put out, i.e. ‘police kill young woman’ or whatever it was, and he was right about that. It was a fucking accident, that maybe coulda been avoided but who’s to know now?”

Given the way the story broke, yeah I can see Bob’s anger, but that’s the fault of journalists. They go for the juicy headline, not the most accurate.

Yeah, we weren’t there, and I’m not a cop. One of the bigger reasons I’m not a cop is my inaccuracy when shooting pistols. I won’t put myself in the situation this poor cop found himself. Please don’t get me wrong. I have sympathy for the cop, split second decisions yadda yadda, but now his life is truly going to be a mess, and it didn’t benefit the victim. Maybe the LEOs should take the Hippocratic Oath and promise to do no further harm? Certainly, they shouldn’t be issued firearms they cannot control. If police forces are handing out lethal weapons without proper training, well WTF? Stop!

I don’t know if he thought he was a TV Cop or not, but the Law of Unintended Consequences is a Bitch. One thing for sure, he better not be given a pass, or every future hostage will be shot on sight, as being simply more expedient. “Kill them all, God knows his own”, and all that. And if this gets glossed over for being an accident, well I can also accept that, but I don’t ever want this cop to be re-issued a side arm, and if I was to ever suffer a similar accident, that I receive similar treatment. I just want the cops to be treated like everyone else would be.

Funny, or perhaps oddly, I received this joke in my inbox just a couple of days ago:

How do you tell the difference between a Canadian Police Officer, an Australian Police Officer and an American Police Officer?

QUESTION:

You’re on duty by yourself walking on a deserted street late at night.
Suddenly, an armed man with a huge knife comes around the corner,locks eyes with you, screams obscenities, raises the knife, and lunges at you.
You are carrying a Glock 40 and you are an expert shot, however you have only a split second to react before he reaches you. What do you do?

ANSWERS:

CANADIAN POLICE OFFICER

Firstly the officer must consider the man’s Human Rights.

1) Does the man look poor or oppressed?
2) Is he newly arrived in this country and does not yet understand the law?
3) Is this really a knife or a ceremonial dagger?
4) Have I ever done anything to him that would inspire him to attack?
5) Am I dressed provocatively?
6) Could I run away?
7) Could I possibly swing my gun like a club and knock the knife out of his hand?
8) Should I try and negotiate with him to discuss his wrong doings?
9) Does the Glock have appropriate safety built into it?
10) Why am I carrying a loaded gun anyway, and what kind of message does this send to society?
11) Does he definitely want to kill me, or would he be content just to wound me?
12) If I were to grab his knees and hold on, would he still want to stab and kill me?
13) If I raise my gun and he turns and runs away, do I get blamed if he falls over, knocks his head and kills himself? .
14) If I shoot and wound him, and lose the subsequent court case, does he have the opportunity to sue me, cost me my job, my credibility and the loss of my family home?

AUSTRALIAN POLICE OFFICER:

BANG!

AMERICAN POLICE OFFICER:

BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! ‘click’…Reload…
BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!
(Sergeant arrives at scene later and remarks: ‘Nice grouping!’).

“Excuse me now as I mop up this bit of drool on the keyboard…”

You should have seen my Year 12 maths teacher. Tall. Very tall. Legs that went on forever. Very long brown hair. Nice rack, and didn’t mind showing it off, so I’m told.

You’d want to do a PhD in maths if you had her as a teacher. And she was really nice too.

“If I’d been one of the male students in her class I’d be mowing her lawn, shoveling her snow, doing her laundry, whatever she needed. Maybe she wouldn’t do a certain shot for Hustler but what about me, a 16-year-old bundle of High-Grade T?”

She does nude according to that article and is looking for a gig with Playboy. I’d volunteer to scrub her back in the bath. Dirty job but someone has to do it. But not when I was 16. I was only interested in girls +/- a year of my age.

“I was prompted to upgrade to Firefox 21.0 today. I recommend skipping that. First thing that happened after the upgrade restarted Firefox was a massive crash. Of course, I was looking at this:

http://main.aol.com/2013/05/13/victoria-james-bikini-pictures_n_3275496.html

That wouldn’t have anything to do with it, would it?”

Sacked for bikini shots? Geez. What a nark.

I rebooted the computer yesterday, and had to kill FF (21.0) just now because it froze solid. I don’t even remember being asked if I wanted to upgrade.