James R. Rummel

I am a self defense instructor who lives in Columbus, Ohio.

Talk About Jaded

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I came across this rather odd news article a little while ago. “Ultimate Thrill: Get Abducted For $1,226“.

Well heeled executives in France are paying big money to a company that arranges faux kidnappings. It seems that the thrills of bungee jumping and alpine skiing have faded, and adrenaline junkies with more money than sense are looking to add a little spice to their life.

After the contracts and liability waivers are all signed, and I suppose the check has cleared, the kidnapping kompany will lie in wait, lurking until the best time to strike! That way the surprise and emotions are at their most fevered.

A spokesperson for the firm which arranges these hijinks goes all psychobable in an attempt to justify the service. The clients are facing their worst fears in a controlled setting, hence it is good for their mental health!

I loved this part….

“While paying “victims” might find the experience cathartic, however, there’s little guarantee of how innocent bystanders might react to witnessing a kidnapping in broad daylight.”

For some reason, I don’t see an American version of the company having too much success if they set up shop in Texas.

(Cross posted over at Hell in a Handbasket.)

Throwing the Falklands Under the Bus

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Anyone else see this? The Obama administration declared neutrality on the issue of the sovereignty of the Falkland Islands!

Go ahead and click on that last link. The author of the op-ed, James Corum, seems to think that the Obama administration is lacking a coherent foreign policy. Adding to the chaos is a clueless President, and a Sec. of State that does not have the intellectual resources necessary to do the job.

I think Mr. Corum is wrong on all counts, but I can certainly see why he would form such opinions.

This essay by Walter Russell Mead makes the case that Obama is pursuing a Jeffersonian foreign policy. This is where the US would limit alliances and foreign entanglements, and dismantle our military as much as possible.

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An Island Of Sick, Perverted Freaks

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Last year, I read about an incident in a water park in the United Kingdom.

A father took his kids to the park so they could frolic in the cool and refreshing waves. When the children said they wanted to hurl themselves down the water slide, the proud father decided that this would be a perfect opportunity for some action photos of the apples of his eye.

Kid Having Fun!

He positioned himself at the end of the slide, camera at the ready, only to face a muttering and hostile crowd that apparently wanted to lynch him then and there!

The justification for the violence was that he must be a pedophile. After all, what other reason would a grown man have of snapping shots of young children in swimwear? The explanation that he was only photographing his own progeny were rejected out of hand. What else would child molesters say to escape just punishment when the righteous crowd gets their blood up?

Lucky for all concerned, the police were notified by someone in the mob. A police officer arriving at the scene averted any ugly actions.

Unfortunately, I cannot now find the online article to prove to my readers in the United States that such a ridiculous incident actually occurred. It seems unbelievable, that such a climate of suspicion and paranoia can actually exist in Old Blighty. I wouldn’t blame you one bit if you thought that I was simply writing as fact a bad comedy I once viewed on cable TV, or some uncomfortable dream I once had where everyone around me turned into bizarre and violent zombies.

But such an environment of hatred and prejudice is all too prevalent in Great Britain, and simply scanning the online news article from that country proves it to be so with appalling regularity.

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I Don’t Mind This Type of Spin

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More revelations concerning the university professor who allegedly slaughtered some of her colleagues. (Hat tip to Ace.)

Seems she killed her brother with a shotgun 24 years ago, fled the scene of the crime after the death, and tried to carjack a passing motorist. It is tough to say if this is a true account, since police reports of the incident have been missing since 1988.

I worked for some years as a fingerprint technician for the local police force. Standard procedure was to keep all arrest records on hand until the person taken into custody died, and the death was verified via fingerprints taken from the corpse. Some of the cards were from before the First World War, and were the very first set of prints taken by the police.

fbi sample fingerprint card

Of course, I live in Columbus, Ohio. I have no idea what guidelines the cops in Alabama use. Something tells me that it is not all that different, though.

I found the following passage from the news article I linked to above to be interesting…

“After she left the room, the police said, she dumped the gun — for which she did not have a permit — in a second-floor bathroom.”

I’ve seen that mentioned in several news stories now. She did not have a permit! (“No permit! No permit!“) It seems the reporters writing these articles want to make sure that their readers know this.

In Alabama you don’t need a permit to purchase a firearm, only to carry a concealed handgun.

One of two things are happening here.

It could be that the journalists working on this story want to include the fact that the crime was premeditated, as the suspect cannot claim that she just forgot to leave her gun in the car when she came onto the university campus that morning. Not only is it illegal for someone in Alabama to carry a firearm on to school grounds, CCW permit or not, but it was illegal for the suspect to even carry a concealed handgun at all. This strongly indicates that she was planning this attack in advance.

The second possibility is that the reporters writing these news items hail from places with such draconian gun laws, that they simply cannot conceive of anywhere you can purchase and own a firearm without government permission. The fact that the suspect owned a gun at all when she didn’t have a license is a crime in their eyes.

Considering how much anti-gun bias I’ve encountered in the news over the past two decades, I’d have to say that the latter explanation is more credible than the former.

But, whatever their motivations, it turns out that they are actually doing a favor for those who advocate armed self defense. The suspect wasn’t one of us!

(Cross posted at Hell in a Handbasket.)

Incompetence, Thy Name is TSA

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Via Glenn we find out that the TSA is using legal muscle to go after a couple of bloggers.

It seems that new security procedures were rushed into place right after the Panty Bomber incident, but the Feds say that the directive wasn’t supposed to be revealed to the public. They want to know who leaked the info.

The fact that bloggers are in the litigation cross hairs will be of primary interest to other people who write online. But I want to know how the TSA thinks it can keep out terrorists who are aching to blow up commercial airliners if they can’t keep their internal, secret security directives from being emailed to those who are supposed to be kept in the dark. Since they allowed some known al Qaeda stooge without a passport or luggage who was carrying a syringe full of acid just waltz on a flight to Detroit, I suppose that is a silly question.

On a side note, fellow gunblogger Breda has the final word on the failures of TSA security…

“…tell me again why I have to bear the humiliation of being groped and swabbed every time I fly? Someone please explain it to me because, clearly, I don’t understand. Can’t they just put me on a terrorist watchlist so that TSA will leave me alone?”