You Will Anyway: An All-American Vacation

Tuesday, August 26, 2014

An All-American Vacation

Highway signage and Internet advertising beckons visitors to stop in, fire a machine gun and enjoy a meal at the Bullets and Burgers enterprise at the Last Stop, about 25 miles south of Las Vegas.

Review Journal

Hey kids! Wanna shoot an uzi? Me first, Daddy!

A nine-year-old girl accidentally killed the instructor.

Mohave County Sheriff Jim McCabe [...] said the girl safely and successfully fired the 9 mm weapon several times when it was set in the “single-shot” mode.

He said the weapon was put into the “fully-automatic” mode before the girl fired again with the instructor standing off to her left. The weapon recoiled and drifted left as the girl squeezed off an undetermined number of rounds as she maintained possession but lost control of the Uzi as it raised up above her head.

“The guy just dropped,” McCabe said of shooting instructor Charles Vacca, 39, of Lake Havasu City, who suffered at least one gunshot to the head.

And speaking of guns…

First, there was the law passed earlier this year that expands Georgia’s Stand Your Ground law and allows firearms in airports, libraries, churches and nightclubs. Now, there’s Dennis Krauss.

Providing a new example of the [Georgia’s] notoriously permissive gun measures, Ian Millhiser at Think Progress explains how Krauss, an ex-cop who was convicted of sexually assaulting a woman in 1999, regained his gun rights — despite the fact that he initially attempted to rape the woman with his gun.

Salon

Oh, it's worse than that. The woman had called the police for protection from her husband.

And it's worse than that.

Krauss was also charged with several other instances of harassment or disturbing physical violence, including beating a prisoner “so severely the man’s brain bled” and threatening to file false charges against another man in order to have sex with his wife, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. But neither those allegations nor his sexual assault conviction have permanently prevented Krauss from owning firearms; he regained that right in 2013.

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"It takes only a bit of knowledge of history to realize how dangerous it is to think that the people who run the country know what they are doing." -- Howard Zinn

"It’s not about not having something to hide; it’s about having something to lose. What we lose when we’re under observation is our humanity...Rights are inherent to our nature, they’re not granted by governments, they’re guaranteed by governments. They’re protected by governments." -- Edward Snowden

"Terrorism is the willingness to kill large numbers of people for some presumably good cause.” -- Howard Zinn

"What we have is a foreign policy which is essentially a marketing strategy for selling weapons." -- Jill Stein

"We should always remember that the danger to societies from security services is not that they will spontaneously decide to embrace [Stasi style] mustache twirling and jackboots to bear us bodily into dark places, but that the slowly shifting foundation of policy will make it such that mustaches and jackboots are discovered to prove an operational advantage toward a necessary purpose.” ~ Edward Snowden

"America: just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable." ~ Hunter S. Thompson

"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws." ~ Mayer Rothschild

"News is what somebody does not want you to print. All the rest is advertising." ~ LACUNA

"What matters in journalism isn't politics, which are as universal and inescapable as breathing. What matters -- along with a fundamentally adversarial attitude toward government, without which "journalism" is simply public relations -- is integrity, transparency, evidence, coherence, and principle. These are the principles on which we should evaluate the quality of journalism, and their absence is why some journalists are so desperate to get you to focus on something else." ~ Barry Eisler

"There is no inverse relationship between freedom and security. Less of one does not lead to more of the other. People with no rights are not safe from terrorist attack." ~ Molly Ivins

"The brain of our species is, as we know, made up largely of potassium, phosphorus, propaganda, and politics, with the result that how not to understand what should be clearer is becoming easier and easier for all of us." ~ James Thurber

"The highest patriotism is not a blind acceptance of official policy, but a love of one's country deep enough to call her to a higher plane....When you hold up your arm and swear to uphold the Constitution, you don’t say, 'Except in wartime.'" -- George McGovern

"I’ll believe that corporations are people when Texas executes one." ~ Bill Moyers

"When did hope become a political dynamic? Hope is right below wishful thinking and right above performing a rain dance on the scale of activity." ~ Rich Hall

Life, as Explained in "Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead"

GUILDENSTERN: What a fine persecution---to be kept intrigued without ever quite being enlightened.

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ROSENCRANTZ : The only thing that makes it bearable is the irrational belief that somebody interesting will come on in a minute.

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GUILDENSTERN: But for God's sake what are we supposed to do?!

PLAYER: Relax. Respond. That's what people do. You can't go through life questioning your situation at every turn.

GUILDENSTERN: But we don't know what's going on, or what to do with ourselves. We don't know how to act.

PLAYER: Act natural. You know why you're here at least.

GUILDENSTERN: We only know what we're told, and that's little enough. And for all we know it isn't even true.

PLAYER: For all anyone knows, nothing is. Everything has to be taken on trust; truth is only that which is taken to be true. It's the currency of living. There may be nothing behind it, but it doesn't make any difference so long as it is honoured. One acts on assumptions.

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GUILDENSTERN : We act on scraps of information... sifting half-remembered directions that we can hardly separate from instinct.

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PLAYER: Life is a gamble, at terrible odds-if it was a bet you wouldn't take it.