Excellent: Bloomberg's High-Capacity Soda Magazine Ban Struck Down

From the March 11, 2013 Wall Street Journal:

A state judge on Monday stopped Mayor Michael Bloomberg's administration frombanning the sale of large sugary drinks at New York City restaurants and other venues, a major defeat for a mayor who has made public-health initiatives a cornerstone of his tenure.

The city is "enjoined and permanently restrained from implementing or enforcing the new regulations," New York Supreme Court Judge Milton Tingling decided Monday.

The regulations are "fraught with arbitrary and capricious consequences," the judge wrote. "The simple reading of the rule leads to the earlier acknowledged uneven enforcement even within a particular city block, much less the city as a whole….the loopholes in this rule effectively defeat the state purpose of the rule."

I can see some other high-capacity magazine bans Bloomberg wants perhaps subject to this problem.


"You can have my 32 ounce Coca-Cola when you pry it from my cold, dead hands."

Busy Grading Western Civ Papers

Don't expect much blogging for a couple of days.

Colorado Residents: Contact Your State Senators Now

The final vote on assault weapon bans and high-capacity magazine bans will take place Monday in the Colorado State Senate.  Be polite, but insistent: these laws are going to accomplish absolutely nothing, except guarantee that some members of the state Senate will not be there after the 2014 election. We have already killed at least two of these ridiculous bills, and there is a chance to kill the rest still.

Oh yeah, Mark Kelly, Gabbie Giffords' husband, who has been pushing for assault weapon bans and high-capacity magazine bans? It turns out that he went into a gun store in Arizona a few days ago to buy an AR 15 and high-capacity magazines, and other customers recognized him. Now he admits that yes he did, but claims he is not going to keep them.  No, he got caught: stinking hypocrite, like the preacher who preaches against homosexuality, but gets caught soliciting sex from a man.

There's A Lot of Paranoid Black Helicopters Crap Floating Around

Most of the time I can pretty quickly identify serious factual or logical flaws in it. For example, during the Bush Administration, various leftists were ranting and raving about how the government was setting up enormous concentration camps in Alaska, big enough to hold 2 million people. Within a couple years of Obama getting elected, I was seeing the same ranting and raving about these to the in-person concentration camps in Alaska. My first question was: if you are with the lock up 2 million political dissidents, why would you build the camps in Alaska? The sheer cost of flying that many dissidents to Alaska would be insane, and transporting them by train across Canada has its own set of absurd problems. If our government was actually doing something like this, with some nefarious motive, the place to set up such camps would be Wyoming or Nevada. There's plenty of unused federal land, and you could transport all the political dissidents to those places in a day or two by train.

There were people here in the Boise area hollering up a storm about how FEMA was setting up concentration camps just east of Boise to hold political prisoners. My response was always this: so, why haven't you taken some pictures of these FEMA concentration camps just east of Boise? It's not that far away.  Dead silence.

Here is something pretty scary that isn't quite so easy to demolish with factual or logical flaws, and I would like to hear from my readers what I am missing on this.  It purports to be a discussion of a U.S. Army Field Manual 3– 39.40 which is titled Internment and Resettlement Operations. (And yes, there is a US Army Field Manual by this number and title that I can see at the U.S. Army's website, but for some reason I am unable to download it.)  Most of it is material that would be appropriate in any theater of war where you have refugees, enemy combatants, unlawful combatants, and other persons who would need to be either housed or at least temporarily imprisoned. What changes this from a very detailed discussion of something that would be appropriate to overseas setting is Chapter 7 "Confinement of U.S. Military Prisoners."  On page 7 – 4:

IDENTIFICATION
7-16. Individual identification photographs are taken of all prisoners. The prisoner’s last name, first name, and middle initial are placed on the first line of a name board, and the prisoner’s social security number is placed on the second line. A prisoner registration number may be added on the third line. Two front and two profile pictures are taken of the prisoner. Fingerprints are obtained according to AR 190-47.

The Social Security number tells us that these are not foreigners, but American citizens and residents. If this chapter is about confinement of US military prisoners, meaning members of the US military, then wouldn't they be using the soldiers military ID number, not a social security number?  I'm absolutely sure that all members of the US military are fingerprinted on induction. Why would they need to fingerprint them again?

UPDATE: A number of readers tell me that Social Security Number was, until 2011, the military ID number, and this manual is dated 2010.  Fingerprinting makes sense to verify identity.  Perhaps this isn't quite as bizarre as it seems.

Every Gun Is Loaded If You Point It At A Person

From the March 8, 2013 Idaho Press-Tribune:

Court records said Shain told police he thought he was pointing an unloaded gun at his friend when he shot and killed him last March.

Defense attorney Mark Manweiler has noted that Shain made sure to unload the gun before he and Arlen were handling it and dry firing it that night and that Arlen reloaded the gun without Shain's knowledge.

Fortunately, these accidental gun deaths are pretty rare.  They should be zero.

Another Area Where We Are Getting More European

This article in The Atlantic points to another area where if progressives really wanted to be more like Europe, they would be making common cause with social conservatives:

The state's new law restricting abortions to the first 12 weeks is blatantly unconstitutional -- and not that different from what a lot of European nations have in place.

One of the great ironies of American abortion-rights law is that it is one of the few areas of social regulation where America is to the left of Europe. The latest explosion in one of the laboratories of democracy is a piece of legislation in Arkansas outlawing abortion after 12 weeks of pregnancy, which passed this week when the Republican legislature overruled the gubernatorial veto of Democrat Mike Beebe.

Should this clear violation of the viability framework laid out in Roe v. Wade be allowed to stand -- and experts on both sides of the abortion fight predict that it won't be -- it would serve to make Arkansas the most restrictive state in the nation when it comes to the legal availability of abortion. (It may not actually become the hardest state to in which to obtain an abortion; other states already have less functional though more legal access to abortion). It also serves to make Arkansas the one American state to take a direct European-style approach to the regulation of abortion.

You can argue whether abortion should be lawful or not, but progressives fundamentally believe in the right of the government to tell you what to do about every other part of your life.  If pregnancy resulted from capitalism or attending worship services, I am sure progressives would have no problem banning abortion.

I Dreamed Of a CNC Mill Last Night

I was watching it machine a firearm receiver, throwing chips everywhere.