A rare occasion
When it comes to the opinion pieces written by Ruben Navarette, I usually disagree with his positions and perspective. However I find myself in agreement with a recent piece of his. He writes that the 80 year old Long Beach man who shot and killed one of the two people who broke into his home while he was there.
The issue isn't that the 28 year old woman who died had begged him not to shoot her, because she claimed to be pregnant. In fact, she was not pregnant at the time. The problem is, he chased her beyond his doorway and outside of his home before firing the first shot. Yes, the duo attacked him inside of his home. When they saw he had managed to get his gun, they fled. Once they were outside, any legal justification for pursuit and deadly force vanished.
That is the case legally, and in my opinion, morally. Don't try to justify his actions by saying he was old, had been robbed before, and was in fear it would happen again. That isn't justification for the use of deadly force.
Worse yet, his victim had been shot once and was lying on the ground, bleeding from her wounds and begging for her life; at the moment he fired the fatal shot. It is reprehensible to shoot someone who is already wounded and therefore no longer present any threat to the person holding the gun. He should have just held her there until help arrived. Instead he became judge, jury and executioner.
Kudos to Navarette for getting one right. One out of how many?
* * *
Do you shop online? Do you shop using websites that have no physical presence in California? If so, you probably owe a tax you were unaware of, or were ignoring. It's called "use tax" and it is the sales tax that California would have collected had you purchased that online item in a brick and mortar store here in the Sunshine State.
Now here's the good news. If you didn't buy anything online for your personal, non-business use, that had a purchase price of more than $1,000; there's a way to pay an estimated amount of use tax that is actually not all that much. If your Adjusted Gross Income is less than $100,000, your estimated use tax for all purchases that didn't exceed $1,000, is less than $70.
The bad news is that if you made even one online purchase in excess of $1,000, then you have to go through the process of calculating the use tax you owe using worksheets and stuff.
Personally, I'd rather pay less than $70 a year than someday having the Franchise Tax Board come after me for years and years of unpaid use tax, that would have penalties and interest added. But that's just me.
* * *
Those of you who read here regularly know I'm not really partisan toward either Democrats or Republicans, but when I see one side of the aisle doing something dumb, I will call them out on it. Today it happens to be House member Sheila Jackson Lee, Democrat from Texas. She said the following in a speech on the floor of the House:
"A historical fact that President Bush pushed this nation into a war that had little to do with apprehending terrorists. We did not seek an impeachment of President Bush, because as an executive, he had his authority. President Obama has the authority."
The problem with those comments is that in the year 2008, Ms Jackson Lee was one of 11 co-sponsors of House Resolution 1258, titled "Impeaching George W. Bush, President of the United States, of high crimes and misdemeanors." What's really funny is that when reporters brought up this little discrepancy, one of her spokespeople said "she misspoke" but wouldn't elaborate on just how this wasn't an out and out lie.
No one is going to make a serious effort to try and impeach President Obama. This is all electioneering.
* * *
Random Ponderings:
The fact Andrew Jackson was a racist back in the early 1800s isn't the same as being a racist in this more enlightened age.
Torrance honoring Louis Zamperini is a great thing.
There's a McDonald's that still deep-fries their apple pies? Yes there is, in Downey.
I could not not buy the Diet Coke in a bottle that said "share a Diet Coke with ______" and the blank was filled with my own first name.
Only in a religiously repressed place like Salt Lake City would a teacher of ESL be fired for teaching homophonia (the study of homophones).
You'd think 26 or 27 tries at setting off a fire alarm would be enough to "test" the whole system. Apparently it isn't.
A sex manual checked out from the New York Public Library more than 50 years ago was returned by a relative of the person who'd checked it out. The book was found among his effects after he'd passed away. The library generously waived the fines. Just how much would those fines be at this point?
Calling Kendall Jenner a "supermodel" is laughable. There's nothing super about her or her modeling.
I'm still chuckling that ABC 7 news fell for DWP spokesperson Louis Flungpue.
After the above occurred, I thought news operations would be a lot more careful. If you want to hear an older version of a similar prank, these are links to prank public address announcements made in England:
http://www.netjeff.com/humor/audio/Colleague.mp3
http://www.netjeff.com/humor/audio/Better.mp3
http://www.netjeff.com/humor/audio/Need.mp3
http://www.netjeff.com/humor/audio/Ihate.mp3
http://www.netjeff.com/humor/audio/Ihate.mp3
* * *
August 1st in History:
30 BC – Octavian (later known as Augustus) enters Alexandria, Egypt, bringing it under the control of the Roman Republic.
69 – Batavian rebellion: The Batavians in Germania Inferior (Netherlands) revolt under the leadership of Gaius Julius Civilis.
527 – Justinian I becomes the sole ruler of the Byzantine Empire.
607 – Ono no Imoko is dispatched as envoy to the Sui court in China (Traditional Japanese date: July 3, 607).
902 – Taormina, the last Byzantine stronghold in Sicily, is captured by the Aghlabids army, concluding the Muslim conquest of Sicily.
1192 – Richard the Lionheart landed on Jaffa and defeated the army of Saladin
1203 – Isaac II Angelos, restored Eastern Roman Emperor, declares his son Alexios IV Angelos co-emperor after pressure from the forces of the Fourth Crusade.
1291 – The Old Swiss Confederacy is formed with the signature of the Federal Charter.
1498 – Christopher Columbus becomes the first European to visit what is now Venezuela.
1620 – The Speedwell leaves Delfshaven to bring pilgrims to America by way of England.
1664 – Ottoman forces are defeated in the battle of Saint Gotthard by an Austrian army led by Raimondo Montecuccoli, resulting in the Peace of Vasvár.
1714 – George of Hanover becomes George I of Great Britain, marking the beginning of the Georgian era of British history.
1715 – The Riot Act comes into force in England.
1759 – Seven Years' War: The Battle of Minden, an allied Anglo-German army victory over the French. In Britain this was one of a number of events that constituted the Annus Mirabilis of 1759 and is celebrated as Minden Day by certain British Army regiments.
1774 – British scientist Joseph Priestley discovers oxygen gas, corroborating the prior discovery of this element by German-Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele.
1798 – French Revolutionary Wars: Battle of the Nile (Battle of Aboukir Bay) – Battle begins when a British fleet engages the French Revolutionary Navy fleet in an unusual night action.
1800 – The Acts of Union 1800 is passed in which merges the Kingdom of Great Britain and the Kingdom of Ireland into the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.
1801 – First Barbary War: The American schooner USS Enterprise captures the Tripolitan polacca Tripoli in a single-ship action off the coast of modern-day Libya.
1831 – A new London Bridge opens.
1834 – Slavery is abolished in the British Empire as the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 comes into force.
1838 – Non-laborer slaves in most of the British Empire are emancipated.
1840 – Laborer slaves in most of the British Empire are emancipated.
1842 – The Lombard Street Riot erupts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States.
1855 – The first ascent of Monte Rosa, the second highest summit in the Alps.
1876 – Colorado is admitted as the 38th U.S. state.
1894 – The First Sino-Japanese War erupts between Japan and China over Korea.
1907 – The start of the first Scout camp on Brownsea Island, the origin of the worldwide Scouting movement.
1914 – The German Empire declares war on the Russian Empire at the opening of World War I. The Swiss Army mobilizes because of World War I.
1927 – The Nanchang Uprising marks the first significant battle in the Chinese Civil War between the Kuomintang and Chinese Communist Party. This day is commemorated as the anniversary of the founding of the People's Liberation Army.
1937 – Josip Broz Tito reads the resolution "Manifesto of constitutional congress of KPH" to the constitutive congress of KPH (Croatian Communist Party) in woods near Samobor.
1944 – World War II: the Warsaw Uprising against the Nazi occupation breaks out in Warsaw, Poland.
1946 – Leaders of the Russian Liberation Army, a force of Russian prisoners of war that collaborated with Nazi Germany, are executed in Moscow, Soviet Union for treason.
1957 – The United States and Canada form the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD).
1960 – Dahomey (later renamed Benin) declares independence from France.
1960 – Islamabad is declared the federal capital of the Government of Pakistan.
1961 – U.S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara orders the creation of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the nation's first centralized military espionage organization.
1964 – The former Belgian Congo is renamed the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
1966 – Charles Whitman kills 16 people at the University of Texas at Austin before being killed by the police.
1966 – Purges of intellectuals and imperialists becomes official China policy at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution.
1968 – The coronation is held of Hassanal Bolkiah, the 29th Sultan of Brunei.
1974 – Cyprus dispute: The United Nations Security Council authorizes the UNFICYP to create the "Green Line", dividing Cyprus into two zones.
1975 – CSCE Final Act creates the Conference for Security and Co-operation in Europe.
1980 – A train crash kills 18 people in County Cork, Ireland.
1980 – Vigdís Finnbogadóttir is elected President of Iceland and becomes the world's first democratically elected female head of state.
1980 – Patrick Depailler, French Grand Prix driver was killed in a crash at Hockenheim during a private test session.
1981 – MTV begins broadcasting in the United States and airs its first video, "Video Killed the Radio Star" by The Buggles.
1984 – Commercial peat-cutters discover the preserved bog body of a man, called Lindow Man, at Lindow Moss, Cheshire, northwest England
1993 – The Great Mississippi and Missouri Rivers Flood of 1993 comes to a peak.
2001 – Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore has a Ten Commandments monument installed in the judiciary building, leading to a lawsuit to have it removed and his own removal from office.
2004 – A supermarket fire kills 396 people and injures 500 others in Asunción, Paraguay.
2007 – The I-35W Mississippi River bridge spanning the Mississippi River in Minneapolis, Minnesota, collapses during the evening rush hour.
2008 – Eleven mountaineers from international expeditions died on K2, the second-highest mountain on Earth in the worst single accident in the history of K2 mountaineering.
Famous Folk born on August 1st:
Claudius, Roman emperor
Emperor Kogon of Japan
Emperor Go-Komatsu of Japan
William Clark
William B. Travis
Herman Melville
Robert Todd Lincoln
Dom DeLuise
Teri Shields
Yves Saint Laurent
Ron Brown
Dennis Zine
Tim Bachman
Tommy Bolin
Jack Kramer
Jerry Garcia
In the novel Gardens of Stone, the author writes about a young soldier in a bar with two older soldiers and the old guys are griping about the music on the jukebox. The young one says, "but it's the Grateful Dead" and his older compatriot fires back, "well if they were dead, I'd be grateful." Don't know why I think of that passage every time I think of the late, great Jerry Garcia.
Andrew Vajna
Avi Arad
Bunkhouse Buck
Trevor Berbick
Tom Leykis
Taylor Negron
Kiki Vandeweghe
Jesse Borrego
Coolio
Sam Mendes
Stacey Augmon
Tempestt Bledsoe
Taylor Fry
The issue isn't that the 28 year old woman who died had begged him not to shoot her, because she claimed to be pregnant. In fact, she was not pregnant at the time. The problem is, he chased her beyond his doorway and outside of his home before firing the first shot. Yes, the duo attacked him inside of his home. When they saw he had managed to get his gun, they fled. Once they were outside, any legal justification for pursuit and deadly force vanished.
That is the case legally, and in my opinion, morally. Don't try to justify his actions by saying he was old, had been robbed before, and was in fear it would happen again. That isn't justification for the use of deadly force.
Worse yet, his victim had been shot once and was lying on the ground, bleeding from her wounds and begging for her life; at the moment he fired the fatal shot. It is reprehensible to shoot someone who is already wounded and therefore no longer present any threat to the person holding the gun. He should have just held her there until help arrived. Instead he became judge, jury and executioner.
Kudos to Navarette for getting one right. One out of how many?
* * *
Do you shop online? Do you shop using websites that have no physical presence in California? If so, you probably owe a tax you were unaware of, or were ignoring. It's called "use tax" and it is the sales tax that California would have collected had you purchased that online item in a brick and mortar store here in the Sunshine State.
Now here's the good news. If you didn't buy anything online for your personal, non-business use, that had a purchase price of more than $1,000; there's a way to pay an estimated amount of use tax that is actually not all that much. If your Adjusted Gross Income is less than $100,000, your estimated use tax for all purchases that didn't exceed $1,000, is less than $70.
The bad news is that if you made even one online purchase in excess of $1,000, then you have to go through the process of calculating the use tax you owe using worksheets and stuff.
Personally, I'd rather pay less than $70 a year than someday having the Franchise Tax Board come after me for years and years of unpaid use tax, that would have penalties and interest added. But that's just me.
* * *
Those of you who read here regularly know I'm not really partisan toward either Democrats or Republicans, but when I see one side of the aisle doing something dumb, I will call them out on it. Today it happens to be House member Sheila Jackson Lee, Democrat from Texas. She said the following in a speech on the floor of the House:
"A historical fact that President Bush pushed this nation into a war that had little to do with apprehending terrorists. We did not seek an impeachment of President Bush, because as an executive, he had his authority. President Obama has the authority."
The problem with those comments is that in the year 2008, Ms Jackson Lee was one of 11 co-sponsors of House Resolution 1258, titled "Impeaching George W. Bush, President of the United States, of high crimes and misdemeanors." What's really funny is that when reporters brought up this little discrepancy, one of her spokespeople said "she misspoke" but wouldn't elaborate on just how this wasn't an out and out lie.
No one is going to make a serious effort to try and impeach President Obama. This is all electioneering.
* * *
Random Ponderings:
The fact Andrew Jackson was a racist back in the early 1800s isn't the same as being a racist in this more enlightened age.
Torrance honoring Louis Zamperini is a great thing.
There's a McDonald's that still deep-fries their apple pies? Yes there is, in Downey.
I could not not buy the Diet Coke in a bottle that said "share a Diet Coke with ______" and the blank was filled with my own first name.
Only in a religiously repressed place like Salt Lake City would a teacher of ESL be fired for teaching homophonia (the study of homophones).
You'd think 26 or 27 tries at setting off a fire alarm would be enough to "test" the whole system. Apparently it isn't.
A sex manual checked out from the New York Public Library more than 50 years ago was returned by a relative of the person who'd checked it out. The book was found among his effects after he'd passed away. The library generously waived the fines. Just how much would those fines be at this point?
Calling Kendall Jenner a "supermodel" is laughable. There's nothing super about her or her modeling.
I'm still chuckling that ABC 7 news fell for DWP spokesperson Louis Flungpue.
After the above occurred, I thought news operations would be a lot more careful. If you want to hear an older version of a similar prank, these are links to prank public address announcements made in England:
http://www.netjeff.com/humor/audio/Colleague.mp3
http://www.netjeff.com/humor/audio/Better.mp3
http://www.netjeff.com/humor/audio/Need.mp3
http://www.netjeff.com/humor/audio/Ihate.mp3
http://www.netjeff.com/humor/audio/Ihate.mp3
* * *
August 1st in History:
30 BC – Octavian (later known as Augustus) enters Alexandria, Egypt, bringing it under the control of the Roman Republic.
69 – Batavian rebellion: The Batavians in Germania Inferior (Netherlands) revolt under the leadership of Gaius Julius Civilis.
527 – Justinian I becomes the sole ruler of the Byzantine Empire.
607 – Ono no Imoko is dispatched as envoy to the Sui court in China (Traditional Japanese date: July 3, 607).
902 – Taormina, the last Byzantine stronghold in Sicily, is captured by the Aghlabids army, concluding the Muslim conquest of Sicily.
1192 – Richard the Lionheart landed on Jaffa and defeated the army of Saladin
1203 – Isaac II Angelos, restored Eastern Roman Emperor, declares his son Alexios IV Angelos co-emperor after pressure from the forces of the Fourth Crusade.
1291 – The Old Swiss Confederacy is formed with the signature of the Federal Charter.
1498 – Christopher Columbus becomes the first European to visit what is now Venezuela.
1620 – The Speedwell leaves Delfshaven to bring pilgrims to America by way of England.
1664 – Ottoman forces are defeated in the battle of Saint Gotthard by an Austrian army led by Raimondo Montecuccoli, resulting in the Peace of Vasvár.
1714 – George of Hanover becomes George I of Great Britain, marking the beginning of the Georgian era of British history.
1715 – The Riot Act comes into force in England.
1759 – Seven Years' War: The Battle of Minden, an allied Anglo-German army victory over the French. In Britain this was one of a number of events that constituted the Annus Mirabilis of 1759 and is celebrated as Minden Day by certain British Army regiments.
1774 – British scientist Joseph Priestley discovers oxygen gas, corroborating the prior discovery of this element by German-Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele.
1798 – French Revolutionary Wars: Battle of the Nile (Battle of Aboukir Bay) – Battle begins when a British fleet engages the French Revolutionary Navy fleet in an unusual night action.
1800 – The Acts of Union 1800 is passed in which merges the Kingdom of Great Britain and the Kingdom of Ireland into the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.
1801 – First Barbary War: The American schooner USS Enterprise captures the Tripolitan polacca Tripoli in a single-ship action off the coast of modern-day Libya.
1831 – A new London Bridge opens.
1834 – Slavery is abolished in the British Empire as the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 comes into force.
1838 – Non-laborer slaves in most of the British Empire are emancipated.
1840 – Laborer slaves in most of the British Empire are emancipated.
1842 – The Lombard Street Riot erupts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States.
1855 – The first ascent of Monte Rosa, the second highest summit in the Alps.
1876 – Colorado is admitted as the 38th U.S. state.
1894 – The First Sino-Japanese War erupts between Japan and China over Korea.
1907 – The start of the first Scout camp on Brownsea Island, the origin of the worldwide Scouting movement.
1914 – The German Empire declares war on the Russian Empire at the opening of World War I. The Swiss Army mobilizes because of World War I.
1927 – The Nanchang Uprising marks the first significant battle in the Chinese Civil War between the Kuomintang and Chinese Communist Party. This day is commemorated as the anniversary of the founding of the People's Liberation Army.
1937 – Josip Broz Tito reads the resolution "Manifesto of constitutional congress of KPH" to the constitutive congress of KPH (Croatian Communist Party) in woods near Samobor.
1944 – World War II: the Warsaw Uprising against the Nazi occupation breaks out in Warsaw, Poland.
1946 – Leaders of the Russian Liberation Army, a force of Russian prisoners of war that collaborated with Nazi Germany, are executed in Moscow, Soviet Union for treason.
1957 – The United States and Canada form the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD).
1960 – Dahomey (later renamed Benin) declares independence from France.
1960 – Islamabad is declared the federal capital of the Government of Pakistan.
1961 – U.S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara orders the creation of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the nation's first centralized military espionage organization.
1964 – The former Belgian Congo is renamed the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
1966 – Charles Whitman kills 16 people at the University of Texas at Austin before being killed by the police.
1966 – Purges of intellectuals and imperialists becomes official China policy at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution.
1968 – The coronation is held of Hassanal Bolkiah, the 29th Sultan of Brunei.
1974 – Cyprus dispute: The United Nations Security Council authorizes the UNFICYP to create the "Green Line", dividing Cyprus into two zones.
1975 – CSCE Final Act creates the Conference for Security and Co-operation in Europe.
1980 – A train crash kills 18 people in County Cork, Ireland.
1980 – Vigdís Finnbogadóttir is elected President of Iceland and becomes the world's first democratically elected female head of state.
1980 – Patrick Depailler, French Grand Prix driver was killed in a crash at Hockenheim during a private test session.
1981 – MTV begins broadcasting in the United States and airs its first video, "Video Killed the Radio Star" by The Buggles.
1984 – Commercial peat-cutters discover the preserved bog body of a man, called Lindow Man, at Lindow Moss, Cheshire, northwest England
1993 – The Great Mississippi and Missouri Rivers Flood of 1993 comes to a peak.
2001 – Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore has a Ten Commandments monument installed in the judiciary building, leading to a lawsuit to have it removed and his own removal from office.
2004 – A supermarket fire kills 396 people and injures 500 others in Asunción, Paraguay.
2007 – The I-35W Mississippi River bridge spanning the Mississippi River in Minneapolis, Minnesota, collapses during the evening rush hour.
2008 – Eleven mountaineers from international expeditions died on K2, the second-highest mountain on Earth in the worst single accident in the history of K2 mountaineering.
Famous Folk born on August 1st:
Claudius, Roman emperor
Emperor Kogon of Japan
Emperor Go-Komatsu of Japan
William Clark
William B. Travis
Herman Melville
Robert Todd Lincoln
Dom DeLuise
Teri Shields
Yves Saint Laurent
Ron Brown
Dennis Zine
Tim Bachman
Tommy Bolin
Jack Kramer
Jerry Garcia
In the novel Gardens of Stone, the author writes about a young soldier in a bar with two older soldiers and the old guys are griping about the music on the jukebox. The young one says, "but it's the Grateful Dead" and his older compatriot fires back, "well if they were dead, I'd be grateful." Don't know why I think of that passage every time I think of the late, great Jerry Garcia.
Andrew Vajna
Avi Arad
Bunkhouse Buck
Trevor Berbick
Tom Leykis
Taylor Negron
Kiki Vandeweghe
Jesse Borrego
Coolio
Sam Mendes
Stacey Augmon
Tempestt Bledsoe
Taylor Fry
posted by me at 1:46 PM
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