Insanity and guns in Arizona

A guy with a geranium in the cranium pulled a cross-town shooting spree Sunday. He poured dozens of shots into the front doors of his back-fence neighbors, and proceeded to drive across the north side of Tucson, managed to shoot 4 policeman, 2 of them in the head. While driving. Using a military-style rifle. One of the officers, who died, had served 21 years in the military and had decided to work for TPD. The kind of cop who is there to serve, to help.

Our governor here in Arizona has vetoed several of the psychopathic bills presented by right-leaning Arizona congresspeople that would have allowed such things as waving your gun in someone's face whenever you want, carrying concealed guns on school campuses, and concealing guns in your car.

The support for such bills seems to come from a kind improvised-cowboy mentality, as if some schmo driving down the road is going to have a chance against a crazy guy with an assault rifle, the kind of guy who not only managed to shoot 4 policeman in an hour on city streets, but whose acquaintances said was way off the deep end and clearly needed to be in a psychiatric hospital.

The signs were everywhere. The guy's mental health is described in this article in the Arizona Daily Star. (Their links only last a couple weeks) He had threated to kill at least 3 people, including the poor girl who went to a highschool prom with him 7 years ago. She had called police, encountered an administrative wall of do-nothingness, and had ended up telling everyone she knew that if something happened to her, to look for this guy.

All this craziness was clearly illustrated on his MySpace page, the focus of the Star's article in the link above. That this guy should have been in a rubber room with a few straightjackets in the closet was clear.

But what happened instead. Looks like his parents bought him a house, nobody lifted a finger to intervene in spite of the obvious signs of serious mental illness.

It may be true that popular trends in mental health care may result in someone like this going away for a month or two but they have a tendency to come back, get scooped up by the police and end up in the jails instead. In this case the only thing to be thankful for was that his over-the-backfence neighbors weren't home, and he did not end up at the University or some other puplic gathering place, like the other horrors we've all read about recently.

Everybody knows there's a problem with folks like this. The poor guy just has a very serious mental disease, adult-onset schizophrenia, it was obvious to everyone he was off his rocker but for some reason he was out walking around, had a car, a house, no need to work. The article said he came over the neighbor's fence to complain about BarBQ smoke. The MySpace page had a photo the crazy guy had taken of the neighbor, along with the death threat.

There's not much of a point to made here, but an obviously insane person should not have had military rifles. It's mostly just sad, and it seems preventable. Mental health sevices, law enforcement, need to change their ways, to look for the signs of someone who is just gone and can't change. Have you ever had to call the police and had the dispatcher say, "well we can't do anything until they hurt you?"

Proliferation of guns is not the answer, the instant cowboy is not the answer. And you don't need a rifle capapble of destroying the house across the street to defend yourself against the kind of people who kick in you door in the middle of the night.

If anything the key lies with acknowledging this kind of thing happens again and again, defining what you see prior to that, and committing some individuals for at least 10 years, forget about helping healthcare organizations maintain their profit margins by letting these poor crazy souls go. It seems like popular medical theory is under corporate influence here. As if it's a sin against corporate dogma to realize that some folks are obviously dangerous. Protecting the rest of us means a life at shady acres is necessary for some folks.

Here is the interactive map of how the crazy guy drove across our pretty foothills neighborhood and filled the town with lead directed at his imaginary adversaries.

Sheldon Brown, 1944-2008

THE bicycle guru Sheldon Brown died in February. He'd been diagnosed w/ MS but apparently it was a heart attack that took his life. If you've never heard of him, he was famous for his encylopedic bicycle website out of Harris Cyclery in West Newton Massachusetts. If you ever need to unstick a stuck seat post, set a proper chainline on a singlespeed, build a wheel, tighten a loose cone, put on new brakes, well you can look it up there and find it explained in clear language with good photos. He was famous in biking circles as a great great mechanic, bicycle advocate, a talented and practical man who shared everything he knew. Before I do anything major to any of my 5 bikes, I always consult his site.

Thank you Sheldon, you continue to be a great influence on all of us riders, and have helped many of us develop decent bike mechanic skills.

Wikepedia has a nice entry on Sheldon, with a good list of relevant links. Here is the gear calculator, a real masterpiece, which you'll certainly appreciate if you're at all geeky about bikes.

Quadruped robot

I think we are finally getting there with the quality of our robot technology. It's like in the 50s they write, "yes we will eventually build robots that move in a fashion eerily similar to animals..."

Boston Dynamics created the robot. But hey, don't kick it, that just seems wrong. Sure it's just a machine that can walk on ice or hustle through the forest, but would you kick your new Prius or your brand new mountain bike?

This thing can carry 340 pounds, climb a 35 degree slope, has a gasoline engine and some nice computers. More about Big Dog here.

Yes I read about it on the wonderful Boing Boing

BushCo National Security incompetency

Philip Shenon's new book The Commission : The Uncensored History Of The 9/11 Investigation fingers Condoleeza Rice in the Bush administration's national security failure of 7 1/2 years ago. This excerpt from Shenon's book published in The Sydney Morning Herald shows the U.S. intellegence apparatus doing its best to warn the Administration about Bin Laden's crazies and just how dangerous they were. The book paints Rice as almost a highly-paid do-nothing, choosing to ignore intelligence and focus instead on promoting the administration, focus on what appears to be PR, game-playing, a big show. As the book follows the 9/11 commission one Richard Clarke emerges as a true soldier, intent on protecting the country. Clarke was at the time the National Security Council's counter-terrorism director. He'd been demoted by the time of the attacks. From the excerpt:

Other parts of the Government did respond aggressively and appropriately to the threats, including the Pentagon and the State Department. On June 21, the US Central Command, which controls American military forces in the Persian Gulf, went to "delta" alert - its highest level - for American troops in six countries in the region. The American embassy in Yemen was closed for part of the summer; other embassies in the Middle East closed for shorter periods.

But what had Rice done at the NSC? If the NSC files were complete, the commission's historian Warren Bass and the others could see, she had asked Clarke to conduct inter- agency meetings at the White House with domestic agencies, including the Federal Aviation Administration and the FBI, to keep them alert to the possibility of a domestic terrorist strike.

More:

Repeatedly in 2001, Clarke had gone to Rice and others in the White House and pressed them to move, urgently, to respond to a flood of warnings about an upcoming and catastrophic terrorist attack by Osama bin Laden. The threat, Clarke was arguing, was as dire as anything that he or the CIA had ever seen.

He pushed for an early meeting in 2001 with Bush to brief him about bin Laden's network and the "nearly existential" threat it represented to the United States. But Rice rebuffed Clarke. She allowed him to give a briefing to Bush on the issue of cyber terrorism, but not on bin Laden; she told Clarke the al-Qaeda briefing could wait until after the White House had put the finishing touches that summer on a broader campaign against bin Laden. She moved Clarke and his issues off centre stage - in part at the urging of Zelikow and the transition team.

Shenon's book seems to offer a thru-the lens glimpse into a shameful and tragic chapter of U.S. history: the bumbling incompetence of an administration created by the most hated and destructive U.S. president of all time.

Amazon.com's reference to Shenon's book is here.


This guy is a hell of a journalist. It should be hilarious to hear what Limbaugh and the other highly-paid fart-generators say about him.

About the author, quoting Amazon:

Philip Shenon is an investigative reporter with The New York Times, based in Washington. He was the lead reporter on the investigation of the September 11 commission and has held several of the most important assignments of the Washington Bureau, including chief Defense Department correspondent, diplomatic correspondent, Congressional correspondent and Justice Department Correspondent. He was one of two Times reporters embedded with American grounds troops during the invasion of Iraq and worked in pre-war Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Iran for Times foreign staff.

Buddy Miles

Buddy Miles, Hedrix' drummer in the outrageous Band of Gypsies, died Tuesday in Austin Texas, his home. He was 60, died of heart failure. He was also a stroke survivor.

Buddy Miles was one of those singing drummers, playing well and singing well, being the heartbeat of the band and its voice simultaneously. Miles founded the Electric Flag in the 60s and in the 80s was involved in TV advertising-music, singing in the animated claymation ads in the California Raisins.


Band of Gypsies was a milestone in Hendrix' career after the Experience broke up. Three black men playing soul-influenced funk, marked by Hendrix' indelible guitar-power were a bit of a new thing in those days, and reflected the music Hendrix was working on when he died.


"machine gun" pt.1
Black and while uTube videos of the Band of Gypsies are out there, but somehow putting on the original record album, holding the album cover in your hands and looking at its vivid color photographs shows how the music really is, vivid and transfixing and timely.



"them changes" Buddy Miles

Arizona conservatives try to liberalize gun laws again.

In a further affront to the basic principles of civilization, Arizona Republicans, this time led by Rep. John Kavanagh of Fountain Hills, have come up with a bill that would allow concealed guns in cars- whether a concealed-weapons permit is involved or not. Almost thumbing their noses at another in a series of school campus gun attacks, the great right wing minds of Arizona have now united themselves to not only allow concealed weapons on school campuses, but to allow concealed weapons in cars too. Brilliant. Thanks for endangering more of the public, you fucking morons.

In this article, the AZ Daily Star details the brilliant logical process by which Kavanagh justifies this timely legislative action. It's sad that these great legal minds have a role in protecting the public.

Rep. John Kavanagh, R-Fountain Hills, said the current law regulating where someone can have a gun is confusing, not only to individuals but even to police.
"You shouldn't have to have a table of yes-no locations taped to your dashboard so you can figure out where you lay the weapon whether it's legal or not," he said.
Kavanagh said the current law can make a criminal out of an otherwise innocent citizen. For example, he said, a person without a permit might put a weapon on a car seat, where it is visible, only to have a jacket fall over it inadvertently. Or a driver could hit the brakes, causing a formerly visible gun to slide under the seat.

For Christssakes, ya dimwit, Arizona law already allows you to put your six-shooter in the glove compartment or trunk.

Karl Rove consulted in Arizona congressional race

I got a creepy feeling when I heard Republican AZ State Senate president Tim Bee was planning to run for the very fine young Gabrielle Giffords' seat in the U.S. Congress. Giffords, a democrat, won Jim Kolbe's seat, and has been busy doing great things for Arizona and the U.S. ever since. Naturally, Arizona Republican morons, like Tim Bee, apparently, are not happy with such positive events. It was with further distress that I read in this article that Karl "Mr. Dethroned Neocon Asshole" Rove was in Tucson the other day. The scourge of scourges, the worst of the worst, except of course Lord Cheney. Two more things added to my unhappy feeling: One, Bee ran straight to Rove for advice in the upcoming campaign. Rove's advice in such matters would no doubt be some kind of dirty trick, smear campaign, or other form of widespread lying. Two, Arizona Democrats did not like the fact that the scumbag Rove was in Arizona at all, and protested about it. The problem was the Star's gutless way of reporting what happened, using standard Rush Limbaugh/Fox News code words:

Democrats, meanwhile, became completely obsessed with Rove's trip to the Old Pueblo, devoting an ample amount of their week to drumming up all their hatred for him and allowing the brief visit to get them all down-in-the-dumps.

Right, it's just hatred, those bad Liberal commies just like to hate. Forget how pissed most people in the country are about the things Rove and his ilk have done to the wonderful place we call home. It's just hate. No reason. Nope.

So, you can bet Rove was up to no good here in Arizona, something much more insidious than the fundraising dinner reported in the Star. So today, this story in the Star reports that Bee, the very man who ran to consult Rove for advice, is proposing something: a change to the State constitution that would divide the people of Arizona, and support discrimination against gay people. A constitutional amendment to ban same sex marriage will show up on the November ballot- If Arizona Republicans get their way. Who's hating now? Kolbe was gay, you morons.

Now where do you think that divisive idea came from? People like Rove are adept at polarizing people, causing fights and disagreements, problems, trouble, destruction everywhere they go. And Arizona's right-wing morons in the State government are eager to jump on the bandwagon, in denial about the fact that people like Giffords, who work to undo some of the damage caused by the Bush Administration, are getting elected.