You Know why I hate Bad Cops? Because of Good Cops.

Mr. Blunt and Cranky has always followed a two-career path: Music and/or the humble Microchip. One or both of the two have helped keep body and soul together since the 1970’s, and although the musical side is preferred from the standpoint of personal satisfaction, the IT Biz has most often provided the bulk of the family income. C’est le guerre. And as you’d expect, some of those manifold IT gigs have been more rewarding than others.

One of the best of those IT gigs has been working for Law Enforcement (yeah, I am sometimes surprised by that, too). On the first day on the job, the marching orders were given, and were simple: “Make sure the right people (guilty ones) go to jail, and the wrong people (innocent ones) don’t go to jail”. Said orders coming from a 30+ – year veteran cop who started off as a patrolman and worked his way up. And the criteria for who belonged in jail was simple: evidence and a conviction. A good attitude, and something an IT geek can help with.

In the course of that employ, a LOT of cops have been met and worked with. Ditto prosectors. Ditto-ditto other types of lawyers and support personnel, the vast majority of whom are on board with those same marching orders. Good cops, you’d call them.

A fair few crap cops have also been met, and they have provided some of the best opportunities to effect change. You see, if we improve the quality of, say DNA analysis, lab analysis, cameras and reporting software, it becomes harder for rogue cops to get away with their fascist, abusive, un-American bulls***. Because of efforts by this writer and thousands of others in and out of IT, many innocent people have been freed and lots of guilty motherf***ers (including some bad cops and their bosses)have been jailed.

It’s a nice warm fuzzy, sure, but the more important reward for your humble correspondent has been seeing how many good, honest, justice-loving people there are in Law Enforcement at local, State and Federal levels. From the blanket 70’s – era labeling of “Pigs” this and “Pigs” that, living in the belly of the beast has been a revelatory experience, one that showed that unique individuals exist everywhere, even in groups we love to heave stereotypes at.

Bad cops suck, and they need to be treated as the corrupt/disrespectful/murdering/lying filth that they are. Lock the f***ers up and throw away the key. Both because they deserve censure and punishment, and because of the pain they cause to good cops, and the damage they cause to the fabric of society.

Some good cops out bad cops, and get punished for doing the right thing. (Serpico is but one example of many.) Other good cops try to avoid bad cops, or even cover for them, to save their own skins or out of a misguided sense of loyalty. Some good cops quit in disgust at the way bad cops have perverted the institutions of justice. All of these are tragedies that hurt us all, by damaging the rule of law that our nation was founded upon. And all of them are the fault of bad cops.

Today in America, there are a lot of stories about bad cops in the media. Other bad cops and numbnuts among Right-Wing, Teavangelical, “Republicans” are trying to shut the discussion down before we can clean up the mess and sweep out the garbage from the Law Enforcement community (a cleanup that is already long overdue).

Some on the Left and Right Wingtips would like you believe that all cops are bad. This is also bulls***. There are good and bad people in blue uniforms, like there are in every occupation. The good need rewarded and the bad need spanked. It does no good to punish the innocent along with the guilty: all it does is encourage lawless behavior.

Remember those marching orders? The bad cops (guilty ones) need punished, and the good cops (innocent ones) need to not be punished. Hammer the bad cops and praise the good cops. That, friends is true justice: the same justice for the police as for the rest of us.

Mr. Blunt and Cranky

The NRA is Full of S***: A Horrific School Shooting in Pakistan Proved It.

Pakistan just had its own version of the Newtown school massacre. Heavily-armed lunatics stormed an army-run school in Peshawar and killed lots of innocent children. And this writer has already heard more than one gun nut say this proves the need for more private gun ownership. They draw a parallel between the two killing sprees and smugly proclaim that more “good guys with guns” could have protected the kids in Peshawar.

There is a teeny-tiny problem with this “argument”: it is bulls***. Pakistan is full of gun owners, good and otherwise.

Pakistan barely regulates guns at all. Their gun culture is NRA Nirvana. In fact, the Pakistan government hands out licenses for automatic weapons to citizens who are afraid of being attacked. Hell, you can legally carry grenades and rocket launchers in some parts of the country.

Plus, the school in question is operated by the Pakistani military. Do the gun nutters really think that country’s army is a bunch of anti-gun activists? Puh-leeze.

No, Gentle Reader, what this despicable atrocity demonstrates is that guns aren’t the solution for every criminal problem. You can carry all the firepower you want on your person, and still wind up dead if some a**hole gets the drop on you. And your kids can still be killed by homicidal motherf***ers like the Taliban, Timothy McVeigh, or Adam F***ing Lanza, no matter how many guns you sell to the general population.

Security cannot be obtained by guns alone. It is a product of careful thought, law, justice, collaboration and intelligence. NONE of which the NRA bothers with.

Guns are a Constitutional right, and one which this writer believes in and exercises. Carefully and in a responsible manner, with a focus on varmint control and home defense.

The only way to keep our kids safe from gun violence is to have a society with less violence. We will never achieve that by pushing our citizens to own and carry more guns so as to be ready to commit violent acts of their own.

Mr. Blunt and Cranky

Want to change things? Ferguson shows us the way: VOTE, God-F***ing-Dammit.

We won’t get change by rioting. Nor by shooting unarmed citizens. Those are both s***ty ideas. Instead let’s look at one of the first actions taken after the deplorable murder of Mr. Michael Brown: a voter-registration tent.

Yes, that is correct. The majority of Ferguson is black, but due to various disenfranchisement measures, only 12% of that community votes. On the other hand, lots and lots of white people vote, so guess who gets represented in city government? Yep, the people who vote.

That being the case, people are registering black voters (and anyone else too, of course) in order to use the ballot box to change how things are done in that town. If enough of the majority residents of Ferguson turn out and vote, they can get a government that actually represents, you know, the majority of the people. The way democracy is SUPPOSED to work.

The response to these voter registration efforts has been sadly predictable: racist Repubs hate it, and everybody else supports it. Repubs as a rule oppose increasing the voter pool, because they know it doesn’t work for them: higher turnout favors Dems.

We all need to do what people in Ferguson are doing: register to vote, and then vote. Use our power to get the government we want and deserve.

Register. Vote. Every election, every year.

Mr. Blunt and Cranky

The Ferguson protesters are a lot like our Founding Fathers:

They are upset about oppression, a non-responsive and discriminatory government, and taxation without representation. Yes, that is correct. The good people of Ferguson we see out there picketing and marching may not be dressed like, say, George Washington, John Adams or Thomas Jefferson; but their complaints are eerily like the ones identified in the Declaration of Independence.

Here is a good article on the matter. Ferguson is making up for revenue shortfalls by levying burdensome taxes and fees upon the populace; said charges not having the consent of the governed:

Traffic fines are the St. Louis suburb’s second-largest source of revenue and just about the only one that is growing appreciably. Municipal court fines, most of which arise from motor vehicle violations, accounted for 21 percent of general fund revenue and at $2.63 million last year, were the equivalent of more than 81 percent of police salaries before overtime.

And the fees are applied in a discriminatory manner, much like what King George did back in the 1770’s:

“If you’re black, they’re going to stop you,” the study quoted one traffic defendant as saying.

In 2013, 86 percent of all Ferguson police traffic stops involved black drivers, the largest share since the Missouri Attorney General’s Office began tracking the data in 2000. According to 2010 U.S. Census data, the city is 63 percent black and 34 percent white.

Got it? The local government is a minority oppressing the majority, and doing so via corrupt, discriminatory and violent means. Just like what sparked the American Revolution. The differences are minor when compared with the similarities.

And just like the American colonists, the people of Ferguson aren’t asking for anything unreasonable: to be treated fairly, have their rights respected, and to have a voice in how they are taxed by the government. Unfortunately, the local administration is likewise resembling its historical counterpart and therefore refusing to change its corrupt and mendacious ways. No way this is gonna end well.

If you repeat the mistakes of the past, you’ll repeat the consequences of those past mistakes. There may not be many powdered wigs to be seen on the streets of Ferguson: but then, when s*** was getting real back in 1776, not many of the American Revolutionaries were wearing them out in the streets, either.

Mr. Blunt and Cranky (whose ancestors were here before the revolution in 1776)

Hey, Ferguson Cops: You Deserve to be Hated.

When you are acting like a repressive regime, people will respond as if you are a repressive regime. Gunning down unarmed citizens, beating and gassing the populace, and arresting reporters who are telling the world about what you are doing is no different than what has been done under apartheid, Soviet Russia, mainland China, and so on. If the shoe fits, put it on.

When you are a minority oppressing a majority, guess what? The majority doesn’t like it.

SIEGEL: We’ve all heard about how few black police officers there are in Ferguson. There aren’t many black elected officials either – 1 councilman in 5. Why is that?

BYNES: Well, anything other than a presidential election there is low voter turnout. And the African-American community has been disenfranchised for a very long time. When you have people who are worrying about can I get a job – can I get to work – can I put food on the table – when election day on Tuesday comes around, that is the furthest thing from their minds. And the whites that live in the community – they participate. And so they vote for who they want for counsel and mayor , and they don’t always put practices in place that are best for the majority population there.

When you and those like you are clearly a bunch of bigoted, racist f***s, rhe people you hate just might hate you back.

You did the crime (racist, violent repression). Now do the time. You deserve it.

Mr. Blunt and Cranky

Marionville, Missouri, where anti-Semites rule. Literally.

By now, you’ve heard quite a lot about the nutbar who shot up a Jewish community center there, killing mostly Gentiles in the process. He’s in jail, and will likely stay there for the rest of his life, thank God. But it turns out the town’s newly-elected mayor is just as bigoted as the shooter.

In this article, Mayor Daniel Clevenger says things like:

“Kind of agreed with him on some things, but I don’t like to express that too much.”

“I am a friend of Frazier Miller helping to spread his warnings. The Jew-run medical industry has succeeded in destroying the United State’s workforce.”

“Made a few Jews rich by killin’ us off.”

“Jew-run government backed banking industry turned the U.S into the world’s largest debtor nation.”

No wonder Frazier Miller felt free to kill people he hated in Marionville: the future mayor, via the newspaper, was right there with him, helping to spread his filthy hate. Talk about encouraging terrorists…

Mr. Blunt and Cranky

Lying Sack of S*** of The Week; Wayne LaPierre

This week’s winner of the Crown O’ Polished Turds is the mouthpiece of the arms industry, AKA the NRA (they used to represent we gun owners, but times change, times change).

He earned the title not only by lying throughout his conference, but also twisting the few truthful things he did say:

http://m.washingtonpost.com/politics/remarks-from-the-nra-press-conference-on-sandy-hook-school-shooting-delivered-on-dec-21-2012-transcript/2012/12/21/bd1841fe-4b88-11e2-a6a6-aabac85e8036_story.html

Read it and weep. Or, if you’re more akin to Mr. Blunt and Cranky, read it and curse loudly. Ladies and Gents, we give you (and please keep him) Wayne LaPierre, the Lying Sack of S*** of The Week.

Mr. B & C

Hey, American Family Association: Let’s Blame You Instead

As noted yesterday, the incredibly misnamed “American Family Association” has decided to blame all sorts of “liberal” organizations for the recent horrific events in Aurora, Colorado: said organizations including Mr. Blunt and Cranky’s ancestral church, which in fact is decidedly NOT liberal (one of its nicknames is “God’s Frozen People”, which should give you a fair idea of how ossified an organization it is).

Let’s put the shoe on the other foot for a moment. This writer could make the case that the erosion of personal responsibility could just as easily be blamed on groups like the AFA (who blamed “liberals”) and individuals like Russell Pearce (who blamed the theatre audience for not stopping the shooting).

In each case, they shift responsibility away from the actual perpetrator and place it on others.  By so doing, they take the shooter off the hook to some extent: “the shooter was encouraged by (liberals or fake Christians or fill-in-the-blank) to take this action”. 

Firstly, these loudmouths have no idea what was going on the shooter’s mind, so they have no business saying such crap (unless there is case-specific, documented evidence to support what they are saying). Secondly, it creates an environment in which personal responsibility is diminished, because offenses committed by criminals become the fault of said loudmouths’ political and cultural “enemies”.

When everything becomes a tool for partisan advantage (even the acts of criminals and the grief of their victims), we find ourselves in a world that tells would-be mass murderers that they will not bear the blame alone. We tacitly assure these scumbuckets that others will have at least part of the responsibility foisted upon them, whether deservedly or not; all in the service of political gamesmanship.

So, we have shifted the blame from the criminal (and liberals and audience members) to the AFA and Russell Pearce. How’s that shoe feel, now that it is on your foot, gentlemen? Does it fit? Is it comfy? Do you like “wearing” the responsibility for mass murder? No, you say? Imagine that.

Your curmudgeonly neighborhood blogger most humbly suggests that we all shut the f***ing f*** up about how factor x or y is responsible for the actions of criminals (unless there is actual data to support such a claim), and instead let criminals know that they, and they alone, will take all of the blame and bear all of the punishment imposed for their crimes.

Mr. B & C

Let’s Hope Zimmerman Really is That Stupid

Mr. Blunt and Cranky hopes that George Zimmerman really is so stupid as to not understand that “God’s plan” most likely did not include him gunning down a innocent teenager (hint: God could have struck the kid dead Himself if He had wanted to).

He further hopes that the man really is so stupid as to not have realized that having many thousands of dollars in a bank account was something to have told the judge about while filing court papers.

He also hopes that the man really is so stupid as to not know the meanings of “murder”, “abuse”, and other relevant terms.

Not to wish even more stupidity upon a world that already seems to have more than its share; but the prospect of Zimmerman’s being nearly brain dead is far less scary than his truly believing that God wants him to kill people, commit abusive acts towards his partners and others, lie to courts, and commit various and sundry criminal acts as part of His Divine Plan.

Mr. B & C

A New Word for Doing Stupid Things: “Zimmermaning”

Lost in the debate over the shooting of a young man in Florida by a self-appointed guardian of public order is the amazing stupidity of said self-appointed Judge Dredd-Lite, one George Zimmerman. A judgmental, puffed-up fool with a handgun, running around, looking for trouble should have expected to find trouble, or at least, that’s what one would think.  But when he found it, he was clearly unprepared. Such a moron deserves to have a variety of stupidity named after him. 

So, in honor of His Zimmermanness, some classic examples of Zimmermaning:

Sticking one’s hand in a fire, and then being shocked when the flesh on said hand is burnt.

Drinking two fifths of Jack, driving immediately afterwards, and then being shocked when the cops pull one over.

Ignoring the “Do Not Feed the Bears” Sign and then being shocked when one gets mauled.

Ignoring police advice to leave an apparently law-abiding citizen alone, and then being shocked when he reacts negatively to being stalked and harassed.

Regardless of how the trial turns out, George Zimmerman is a walking reminder to us all of the consequences of crossing boundaries, not listening to advice, and failure to respect the right of others by minding our own business.  And of being just plain stupid.

Have you Zimmermaned today? If so, stop. If not, good for you.

Mr. Blunt and Cranky