Spaz Angle: Dark Elf Army

The Greatest Power for Evil

I referenced this short film in an earlier post, but as the owner of a chaos dwarf army, I may have underestimated what I am up against.

Spaz Angle: Taser Update

"and a small Taser"

... because a five-round Taser shotgun just might not be enough.

Spaz Angle: Unofficial Cop Tasering Guidelines

Demeanor of individual –> recommended action

1. An imminent threat to himself or others = tase

2. Liable to turn violent = tase

3. Obviously whacked-out-of-his-mind on something = tase

4. Getting verbally abusive = tase

5. Not complying with orders = tase

6. Moving slowly and suspiciously = tase

7. Saying unintelligible things = tase

8. Being kind of a dick = tase

9. Givin’ ya the evil eye for past 30 seconds = tase

10. Not really sure what creepy thing he’s doing = tase

11. Did not seem to respond to first tasering = tase again

12. Still no? = tase again or ask buddy to tase also

13. Obviously going to commit suicide = tase

14. Walking dog improperly = tase

15. Running around outside naked = tase

16. Other cop who did that thing last month = tase

17. Dude says he’s got heart condition/pacemaker = tase (he’s lyin’)

18. Appears to be older than age six = tase

19. “Uppity” 86 year-old disabled grandmother = tase

20. Garlic Festival volunteer = brandish taser menacingly

21. Has his own taser = shoot

Officer Pleads Not Guilty To Weapon Charge

STAFF REPORTS, January 10, 2003

A Delray Beach police officer accused of improperly aiming his Taser weapon at a Garlic Festival volunteer has filed a plea of not guilty. Matthew Weiner, 25, was charged last month with one misdemeanor count of improper exhibition of a dangerous weapon stemming from an incident in November in which the officer was accused of pointing his department-issued Taser weapon at a volunteer. Weiner's attorney, Scott Richardson, filed a written plea of not guilty on Wednesday, waiving the officer's appearance in court for an arraignment Thursday.

Police review policy after Tasers used on kids...

November 15, 2004

Miami-Dade County Police are reviewing their policy on using Tasers after officers stunned two children with the weapons in the past few weeks.

Miami-Dade police planned to hold a news conference Monday to discuss the incidents and possible disciplinary action stemming from them. The names of both children were being withheld by CNN.

The Taser temporarily immobilizes someone from as far away as 21 feet with 50,000 volts of electricity.

The more recent of the two incidents occurred November 5, when a 12-year-old girl who was skipping school was found drinking and smoking in a swimming pool, Miami-Dade police officer William Nelson stated in an incident report. He said he responded to an anonymous call about the activities.

He said he told the girl he was taking her to school. As they walked to the police car, she ran away.

"I advised her to stop several times," he said in the report. She "continued running even to the point of starting to run into lanes of traffic."

Nelson said he used the Taser for his and the girl's safety, striking her in the base of the neck and lower right back.

The girl was released into her mother's custody and taken to a doctor.

"I couldn't breathe, and I was, like, nervous, and I was scared at the same time," the girl told CNN.

About two weeks earlier, a first-grader was shot with a Taser at school when he threatened to cut his leg with a piece of broken glass, authorities said. The boy's family said he vomited after the jolt.

"If there's three officers, it's nothing to tell a 6-year-old holding a glass, if you feel threatened, 'Hey, here's a piece of candy, hey, here's a toy. Let the glass go,'" the boy's mother told CNN.

[Note: Multiple accounts of cop-on-cop tasering in 2010. Here is one sample:]

Florida cop Tasers female colleague

April 16, 2010 07:00 PM

By nonnie mouse

In December of last year, a Florida county deputy was caught on CCTV after shocking a colleague with a Taser at the Collier County jail in an incident meant to be a joke. A female deputy showed a message on her iPod to Corporal Wilmer A. Arencibia, who then chased the woman and shocked her on the behind with his Taser. The woman, Arencibia, and other colleagues who witnessed the event were shown on the recording as laughing.

Investigators found the incident rather less amusing. Arencibia admitted during an internal investigation that his actions were ‘a spur of the moment thing’ and acknowledged his behaviour was improper. He was reprimanded and given a final warning. Aside from any questions of sexual harassment, is it any wonder so many Taser incidents in the States end up in tragedies when cops are treating Tasers as toys?

Police Said to Taze Grandmother

Thursday, June 24, 2010

By TIM HULL

(CN) - Police Tasered an 86-year-old disabled grandma in her bed and stepped on her oxygen hose until she couldn't breathe, after her grandson called 911 seeking medical assistance, the woman and her grandson claim in Oklahoma City Federal Court. Though the grandson said, "Don't Taze my granny!" an El Reno police officer told another cop to "Taser her!" and wrote in his police report that he did so because the old woman "took a more aggressive posture in her bed," according to the complaint.
Lonnie Tinsley claims that he called 911 after he went to check on his grandmother, whom he found in her bed, "connected to a portable oxygen concentrator with a long hose." She is "in marginal health, [and] takes several prescribed medications daily," and "was unable to tell him exactly when she had taken her meds," so, Tinsley says, he called 911 "to ask for an emergency medical technician to come to her apartment to evaluate her."
In response, "as many as ten El Reno police" officers "pushed their way through the door," according to the complaint.
The grandma, Lona Varner, "told them to get out of her apartment."
The remarkable complaint continues: "Instead, the apparent leader of the police [defendant Thomas Duran] instructed another policeman to 'Taser her!' He stated in his report that the 86 year-old plaintiff 'took a more aggressive posture in her bed,' and that he was fearful for his safety and the safety of others.
"Lonnie Tinsley told them, 'Don't taze my Granny!' to which they responded that they would Taser him; instead, they pulled him out of her apartment, took him down to the floor, handcuffed him and placed him in the back of a police car.
"The police then proceeded to approach Ms. Varner in her bed and stepped on her oxygen hose until she began to suffer oxygen deprivation.
"The police then fired a Taser at her and only one wire struck her, in the left arm; the police then fired a second Taser, striking her to the right and left of the midline of her upper chest and applied high voltage, causing burns to her chest, extreme pain and to pass out.
"The police then grabbed Ms. Varner by her forearms and jerked hands together, causing her soft flesh to tear and bleed on her bed; they then handcuffed her.
"The police freed Lonnie Tinsley from his incarceration in the back of the police car and permitted him to accompany the ambulance with his grandmother."
Tinsley says the cops capped it all off by having his grandmother "placed in the psychiatric ward at the direction of the El Reno police; she was held there for six days and released."
"As a result of the wrongful arrest and detention, the plaintiff Lona M. Varner suffered the unlawful restraint of her freedom, bodily injury, assault, battery, the trashing of her apartment, humiliation, loss of personal dignity, infliction of emotional distress and medical bills."
They seek punitive damages for constitutional violations, from the City of El Reno, Duran, Officers Frank Tinga and Joseph Sandberg, and 10 Officers Does.
They are represented by Brian Dell of Oklahoma City.

Witnesses: Dog-walker tased by park ranger in Montara

Posted: Monday, January 30, 2012 1:00 pm | Updated: 9:48 pm, Mon Jan 30, 2012.

By Mark Noack

A National Parks ranger subdued a Montara resident with a Taser Sunday afternoon, arresting the man after an argument unfolded about walking his dog without a leash at the Rancho Corral de Tierra open space.

The incident occurred around 4:45 p.m. when the man was walking two dogs near the southern edge of McNee Ranch State Park. A ranger working for the Golden Gate National Recreation Area stopped the man for having one of his dogs off-leash, which is restricted in certain areas of the Rancho Corral property.

An escalating argument ensued, according to John Barlett, a nearby resident who was walking in the area. The dog-walker was "defiant," Barlett said, daring the ranger as he began walking away, "Are you going to arrest me?"

That's when the ranger pulled out her Taser, according to Barlett.

"Next thing I heard was what I thought was a pistol shot," Barlett said. "He let out a cry of agony as he fell on his back."

The man collapsed on the ground, and the ranger began shouting at him to turn over face down so she could handcuff him. It took "several" minutes before he could move, Barlett said.

By this time, a few witnesses had gathered around to watch. The man began shouting out his home address so that someone could take his dogs back there.

San Mateo County Sheriff's deputies and paramedics were called out to the scene, and the man was ultimately delivered to jail on unspecified charges.

Making Contact

In Twelve Years or Less

Just for a moment, imagine that all along the SETI researchers and astronomers were right. For years, signals of extra-terrestrial origin have been streaming through space, just waiting for us to discover them. The ET’s version of I Love Lucy has really been out there all along. Then, finally, after constructing an improved listening array, the SETI team at last proved its skeptics wrong, and the world now stands in awe of of perhaps the greatest discovery of all time: that we are not alone.

According to SETI lead astronomer Seth Shostak, we are likely on the verge of just such a moment. SETI has in fact been constructing a vastly imporved radio telescope, called the Allen Array (largely funded by Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen.) The project is located in Hat Creek, California, 290 miles northeast of San Francisco, and is in the early stages of operation.

Thanks to the Allen Array, along with the unrelenting pace of development in computer processing power, SETI believes it is now embarking on an entirely new phase of its mission.

“I will bet all of you a cup of Starbucks that we will discover ET within ten to twelve years,” Shostak boldly proclaimed during a recent lecture at the Rochester Planetarium and Science Center.

Until now, the search has largely relied on data gathered at the Arecibo Observatory, the giant dish collector familiar to SETI@home users. Operated by Cornell University, in cooperation with the National Science Foundation, the observatory was designed as a general science instrument, not an alien detector, and SETI has only been able to “borrow” it when it isn’t being used for other studies. In recent years, the observatory has struggled to secure sufficient funding to remain operational.

Funding is always an issue for a project like SETI, which receives no government support. There is an argument to be made that Shostak’s “twelve years or less” claim is really an attention ploy meant to garner funding for the new listening array — but the presentation he makes to back up this claim is persuasive.

Shostak likens the task of finding ET to searching for a particular grain of sand hidden somewhere amongst all the grains of sand contained in all the beaches on Earth. Now imagine trying to carry out that task using a tool that was never designed for that purpose – say, a special sand shovel – but the shovel is getting old, there isn’t money to repair it, and you have to share it with other groups who are mainly focused on tasks unrelated to yours.

That time is over, Shostak believes, and the new tools at SETI’s disposal now move the project into a vastly different phase of it operation. “It’s really quite remarkable that only one hundred years after the development of radio we can do an experiment like this. And it is an experiment. Up till now we haven’t found anything. We haven’t found pond scum.”

And Shostak points out that another extraordinary instrument is coming on line to aid in the search, namely the Kepler Observatory. Kepler is a spacecraft specifically designed by NASA to find small planets (Earth-sized worlds, for example, rather than Jupiter-sized ones) which up until recently had been a virtually impossible task.

During his lecture, Shostak rightly predicted that NASA would soon be making an announcement about Kepler's discovery of any number of small planets over the coming months.

To date, Kepler has in fact recorded the discovery of 1,235 planets, 54 of which may be in "habitable zone" of their star systems. It is a tantalizing prospect that just one of those 54 could be a life-bearing world.

Sometime within the next decade or so, just maybe one of these new discoveries will be giving us all something to listen to.

Aliens Monitoring Our Nukes

While We’re Busy Playing Castle Age

It’s probably already too late. We had our chance, but now we’re hosed. While you were busy on Facebook creating holy plate armor for your dark elf army, you may have missed out on a little piece of information.

Aliens can now turn off our nukes.

Having nukes is actually a very handy thing if you are being harassed by technologically superior visitors from outside the solar system. This may not matter to you. But it matters very much to them. Intelligent beings all over space don’t like being nuked. They don’t even like the threat of being nuked. So having lots of nukes available was probably one of the best things we could have done if we wanted to avoid all the hassles that generally come with the arrival of nosey alien visitors.

Not anymore. Consider this recent headline:

“Aliens are Monitoring our Nukes, Worry Ex-Air Force Officers”

The upshot of all this, basically, is that aliens can turn off our nukes whenever they want to. Now, the three per cent of you not currently playing a social game on Facebook may want to ask a question. And that question would be, “Why would they want to have the ability to turn of our nukes?”

Possible responses to this question may be significant. To those with a military mindset, this is an obvious duh: The Easiest Conquered are Those Who Cannot Fight Back.

But other possible explanations abound. Some recent explanations sampled from the datasphere:

This act was the result of time travelers from Earth’s distant future who are concerned we will mess up their timeline by nuking everything, including their direct ancestors.

Our own R&D produced these results. It was probably us. The Air Force is always the last to know.

Static electric discharge. (see fig. below)

Greys want to keep equilibrium in the galaxy. They want to make sure they can shut down our nukes just like they have done with all the other intelligent Milky Way civilizations. They know we keep making our nukes bigger, better, and more accurate. Maintaining their general hold on the galaxy requires them to be able to shut down everyone’s atomic weapons.

The nukes were turned off, yes, but not by aliens. Rather, they were turned off by angels. There has never and will never be anything living that arrives from space but angels, because angels are all around us all the time and often in disguise. Angels protect us and help us to be our better selves. READ KING JAMES gen 3:20 AND FORGET ABOUT WHAT PEOPLE THINK THEY SAW. (Submitter's favorite comment, by the way.)

And finally there is, like, this tiny, tiny chance that aliens are here monitoring our nukes to keep us from using them on ourselves. Believing this involves also believing in a number of assumptions, the foremost of these being something called The Life is Rare Scenario.

The Life is Rare Scenario posits that life exists in the universe, but only in a very few places. Since life is so rare, the few intelligent races that exist work very hard to preserve it. (Of course, this is yet another assumption.)

If these assumptions work for you, than it isn’t much a stretch to also imagine otherworldly visitors floating around up there in a kindly, observing way, muttering and nodding to themselves benignly, “No, no, of course we won’t let those moronic upright apes glass their planet.”

On the other hand, it isn’t much of a stretch to image a group of aliens hanging out up there debating something very different, for instance whether or not they ought to just exterminate the moronic upright apes – to the benefit of all the other living species on the planet.

I leave you with a couple of entirely unverified and uncorroborated comments to ponder:

“I was in the Strategic Air Command during the 1970's and believe me, there were many incidents with UFOs that were covered up by SAC and the Air Force. SAC was deathly afraid of any UFO incident and they were completely aware of the nature of these craft.”

“I'm actually kind of pissed that this is being covered by a news source that absolutely cannot be taken seriously -- because this event actually did happen, as stated. My dad worked on said minutemen and corroborated the story to me when I inquired about the veracity of the 1967 Malmstrom AFB incident.

In fact, the Malmstrom AFB incident was the ONLY UFO related story my dad ever took seriously because he himself witnessed a lot of top brass with their panties all knotted up over this incident.”