Guns + the wrong people = kill people

Guns don't kill people?

I've never owned a gun or lived anywhere with a gun culture or general gun ownership. I fully understand the lobby for making guns illegal.

The problem I have is that here, for example, there actually isn't a ban on owning guns. Earlier this year a local farmer shot a sweet-natured family pet that had merely strayed onto his land. The police aided and abetted the farmer and displayed no more knowledge of the legalities than the general public, who all seem to fall for the farmers' long-perpetuated myths. They had the accomplice dog, a small and equally sweet-natured mongrel on dog death row for 48 hours.

So, when we say no guns, what we mean is that the police can have them (despite a track record of shooting the innocent and each other, Google 'Keystone silent movie' for their training videos), and their mates the bully-boy farmers can have them, and anyone they see fit to give the okay to can have them. That's why I prefer the American way. I don't like hybrid systems. If there's a ban, make it a blanket ban. Outside of the military, and properly trained police screened for the capacity to actually shoot the villains and avoid blasting the innocent and each other (this may go against the “but you're discriminating against me just because I have zilch ability in that area” people, but, hey, how many shortarses do you see in the NBA?), make owning firearms illegal. Anything short of that is not equitable.

ID cards and the DNA register

I have refused to have my fingerprints taken in the past. On the basis that they were not strictly needed in an elimination process, and I don't want them on the record. The same goes for ID cards, DNA registers and everything else. When, and only when, every off-the-radar new age caravan dweller, when everyone but everyone is on the register, then I'll join the happy throng. Otherwise, if I should ever do something I need to get away with (and anyone who thinks they could never be in that situation belong in the insane asylum along with the people who think they could never end up homeless clutching a bottle of sherry, or in an insane asylum) I want to have as much chance of getting away with it as I can. I see the question simply as why should I move my goalposts out wider making it easier for the opposition to score?

We gotta get a set of those...

…Big Bash stumps. The Aussie T20 tournament, their version of the IPL, does not feature all the world's best twenty twenty cricketers, but it has got stumps, and bails, that light up when they're hit. That's a fantastic idea. We need some of those.

Miles Davis...

...and the complete In A Silent Way Sessions. Listening to these cds now. Not content with the paradigm shifting, biggest jazz album ever in Kind of Blue, no pipe, slippers and recycling the same old same old for fun and profit (see Williams, Madonna, et al, recycling what wasn't original when they started for profit alone), next up was stripped bare modal jazz. The line up on these albums says all there is to say: Miles, Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea, Joe Zawinul, Dave Holland, Ron Carter, Tony Williams, Joe Chambers, and the mighty Wayne Shorter, oh, and John McLaughlin. That's a real who's who right there. That's Weather Report, The Mahavishnu Orchestra, that's the Headhunters every house had a copy album, that's Return to Forever, that's the future of jazz and jazz fusion assembled in one studio, by one rare genius.