Category: random

Nevada’s Governor Brian Sandoval recently signed a law named after Reno murder victim Brianna Dennison which will take effect January 1^st, 2014. According to the new law, if you’re found innocent, not guilty or the charges are dropped, your DNA is expunged from the system.

Now the U.S. Supreme Court says law enforcement can legally take your DNA without a warrant from those arrested in hopes of using it to solve old cases. This comes after a court in Maryland court said it was illegal for the state to take Alonzo King’s DNA without approval from a judge.

But the Supremes issued a 5-4 ruling saying taking DNA samples from people before their guilt or innocence is proven does not violate the U.S. Constitution. It was Justice Anthony Kennedy who called DNA cheek swabs “a legitimate police booking procedure” like fingerprinting or photographing.

Have you ever tried and get your fingerprints expunged? It can’t be done.

“But I thought Da Vinci invented the gun,” I protested as I studied my assignment.

“That’s what most people think,” Colonel Jones responded, “But that’s just the product of a poor education system.”

Sighing, I returned to my piece of paper, which read, “Hugo Borchardt, 1844-1923.” Since being selected for this operation, I was pretty much lost and everything a puzzle, with bits and pieces being fed to me in a hop-scotch manor.

“They’ll let me in on the secret when the time’s right,” I kept telling myself.

Borchardt, I soon learned is credited with developing the automatic loading handgun, know know as an automatic pistol. Why I was memorizing all this information was soon made clear when Jones introduced me to Mr. Smith.

“It’s simple,” Smith said, “The Novikov Principal.”

“The what?” I asked.

“Simply stated, time travel to the past,” he answered.

“No way!” I responded.

Smith explained that many scientists believed backwards time travel could never be done. He added that any theory allowing such time travel would introduce any number of problems.

“The classic example is of course the “grandfather paradox,” he continued, “It asks: what if you were to go back in time and kill your own grandfather before your father was conceived?”

“I wouldn’t exist,” I answered.

“You’d think that,” he said, “but the Novikov Principle gets around that.”

Smith explained the principle says that if an event happens that could “change” the past, then the probability of that event is zero, meaning it is impossible to create such a time paradox.

My mind hung on the word, “if.” I knew it could mean the difference between failure and success.

That’s when the other shoe dropped. I had all the puzzle pieces and suddenly fit into one large mosaic: I was going to travel back in time to meet Borchardt.

Well almost. I wasn’t to meet him, I was to kill him.

“But why?” I asked.

“Surely you understand?” Smith puzzled.

“No, I’m missing it,” I returned.

“How many men, women and children have been killed since the gun was invented?” Smith asked.

He knew I had no way of knowing the answer to that.

“How many wars in the last quarter-century, Captain?” he quizzed.

“Perhaps twenty,” I answered.

So that was my mission, as far-fetched as it sounded, to return to the past and kill the inventor of the semi-automatic pistol. The thought left me dumb-struck as I let it sink in.

“Now that the cats out of the bag, let’s get on with it,” Jones said

The Colonel led the way to the end of the build to a large open room. It was the size of an airplane hanger and in the center of it was a machine, unlike anything I’d ever seen before or since.

There was also a doctor, who gave me a quick examination and another man who assisted me in dressing in a period costume that would help me blend in once I got to where I was going. Concealed under my heavy wool vest was a small, two-shot 25-caliber pistol, which I was to use on Borchardt.

“Have a seat,” Jones directed.

I sat down amid the wires, tubes and diodes.

“I’ll make it simple,” he announced, “You have one-hour to complete your mission.”

“Yes, sir,” I returned.

Smith pushed a button and the machine hummed to life, flashing and whirring. It was hypnotic and I felt myself grow increasingly dizzy, until I felt like I was falling through the sky.

Without warning, I found myself outside, seated on the ground.  I felt as if I were in a dream and floating as I looked around , realizing I was just outside of Trenton, Massachusetts.

It took me a few minutes to not only gather my strength but my bearings as well. After about ten-minutes, it was time to find the Pioneer Breech-Loading Arms Company and the 24-year-old Borchardt.

Though still a bit dizzy and feeling somewhat sick to my stomach, finding the gun makers wasn’t as difficult as I’d thought it would be. The company was more like a shop, a simple two-story building with a large sign over the entrance.

I felt for my pistol, suddenly realizing the irony that I was about to execute the man with the same technology he designed and I was ordered to stop.

“Can I help you?” a man with a heavy German accent asked as I stepped through the door.

“I am looking for a Hugo Borchardt,” answered.

“That is me,” he responded .

That’s when I drew my pistol from my vest and aimed it at him. At first he looked frightened, but then his fright turned to curiosity and he stepped forward to get a better look at it.

“Beautiful!” he exclaimed as he reached out and touched it with a childlike inquisitiveness.The young man seemed bedazzled, unaware of his impending death

I felt my hand begin to shake as I held the pistol in front of his face.

Then without warning, I felt that still-unfamiliar hypnotic, dizzying sensation as the small room began to tilt left-to-right. Suddenly, I grabbed my head as a sharp, hot pain stabbed it’s way through my brain.

When I woke up, I discovered myself back in the large room from where my strange journey began. Both Jones and Smith were standing over me as I had been moved from the machine to a nearby gurney.

“Well?” they asked in unison.

“I – I – I…” my voice cracked as I cleared my throat, “Didn’t get him. Back too soon. One more minute.”

“Where’s your pistol, Captain?” the Colonel shouted.

“D – d – dropped it,” I answered as I faded into unconsciousness.

My wife ordered a two-pound bag of black licorice taffy from Vermont to send to her brother in San Diego. A few minutes after placing the order, she received a phone call from a clerk informing her they couldn’t ship her order because of California’s Proposition 65.

Say what?

Officially known as the Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act of 1986, it’s supposed to protect Californians from chemicals known to cause cancer and birth defects. The official website has 22 pages of so-called harmful chemicals.

Well, I wanted to know what chemical this candy contained making it so dangerous the third largest state in the nation has banned it. So I called the number listed on the website.

After nearly half-an-hour of research by the person on the other end of the line, she said she couldn’t tell me which chemicals were in the candy or why it’s banned.  I could tell she was a baffled as me.

No wonder California’s economy is in the tank.

My wife ended up ordering the candy anyway. She plans to mail it to her brother personally, thus bypassing all the governmental red-tape.

Call me a conspiracy nut — but I couldn’t help connect the dots as I wrote these different radio-news reports over the last eight days…

May 23: Nevada lawmakers endorsed NV Energy’s plan to retire its coal-fired plants and pave the way for the state’s biggest electrical utility to transition to more renewable sources. After several revisions, SB 123 was approved  Wednesday by the Senate and now goes to the Assembly.  Under the bill, NV Energy will close Reid-Gardner in southern Nevada by 2017 and divest 800 megawatts of coal by 2019. The bill has the support of Governor Sandoval and Senator Harry Reid.

May 24: The findings of a new Nevada Public Research Institute study of Senate Bill 123 says the proposal imposes big, new hidden cost on energy users. It shows NV Energy’s proposed “NVision” plan, will increase the cost of electricity, doesn’t cap rate hikes caused by increases in natural gas prices and forces ratepayers to pay NV Energy for stockpiles of coal it no longer wants to use.

May 28: NV Energy wants to get rid of its coal power plants and build a 350 megawatt plant using renewable energy sources. After passing the Senate, SB 123 received its first hearing in the Assembly Monday. However the Nevada Public Research Institute says the plan will increase energy costs between 11 and 50 percent over the next decade.

May 30: NV Energy and Mid American Energy Holdings Co. says a company headed by billionaire Warren Buffett has agreed to buy NV Energy for about $10 billion, including stocks and other holding. NV Energy CEO Michael Yackira says the power company will continue to operate in Nevada. The sale of NV Energy will need state and federal approval.

May 31: The news that NV Energy is being sold is being greeted with mixed reactions. Senator Harry Reid says the sale will be good for the state and the company. But the proposed sale is raising concerns with consumer groups, lawmakers and Nevada’s Public Utilities Commission who think it may mean higher rates for customers. The company’s stock jumped 23-percent Thursday following news of the impending sale.

Finally, as a foot-note, I also reported: Reid does not intend on leaving Washington any time soon. He says he plans to run again in 2016. Reid was first elected to congress in 1986.

Illegal aliens are eligible to get a driver’s license in Nevada. Earlier the year President Obama signed an executive order earlier this year barring deportations and granted a pathway to citizenship for children brought to America illegally by their parents, but who have since graduated high school, stayed out of legal trouble and gotten a job or joined the military.

Now, Nevada officials said those same individuals, numbering as many as 20,000 people in Nevada alone, can legally drive. Governor Brian Sandoval, a Republican and the state’s first Hispanic Governor, said he supports the measure.

The other morning, Jose asked me when the Reno Rodeo was coming to town.

“June 20^th,” I answered, then asking, “So do you like the rodeo?”

“Oh, yeah,” he answered, “Very much!.”

“I like the bareback riding events, myself” I said before he could answer.

Jose smiled mischievously, “I like the cowgirls.”

It’s kind of scary to realize the Internal Revenue Service will be handling our medical records starting in 2014 as part of the Affordable Care Act, better known a Obamacare. The agency has already shown how it disregards rights when it comes to whom we support in presidential elections, so think how secure you and I’ll be knowing our health secrets are available to people who see us only as numbers or even the ‘enemy.’

It’s made worse if you realize these are the same dues paying folks of the “National Treasury Employees Union,” who spent a ton of cash on President Obama’s re-election and whose employees are now accused of investigating individuals and group opposed to their candidate. Furthermore, the federal government is planning to hire 16,000 more IRS agents in the next year jus’ to handle these records.

“Hello, IRS? Oh, good. I need to make a doctors appointment.”

Recently, a six-year-old boy brought a toy gun jus’ a little larger than a quarter onto a school bus in Palmer, Massachusetts and immediately found himself in trouble for violating the districts zero-gun policy. The school sent a letter home  saying he must to write an apology and attend detention and was facing bus suspension.

In 1967, when I was seven-years-old, I took a pair of pearl-handed, silver six-shooter cap guns to Margaret Keating School in Klamath, and wore them most of the day in my genuine plastic, brown cowboy holsters. The only time my second-grade teacher, Mrs. Lennie Newquist took them away from me was because I kept playing with them when I should have been doing my school work.

Fortunately, the six-year-old wasn’t punished. This came after school officials took the time to review the bus’ surveillance footage and concluded none of the children or even the bus driver were distressed over seeing the toy gun.

I grew up in a much better time.

The U.S. had jus’ fired a missile into Iraq that evening as a preëmptive strike and now the nation was at war on two fronts, Afghanistan was the other. As Jeff and I sat in the lunchroom of our workplace we discussed the implication and ramifications of a drawn out conflict in the Middle East.

Somehow we came down to bumper sticker slogans and he said “God Bless America.”

I repeated it — thinking I couldn’t do better.

Then he stopped me and said, “God Bless America.”

“I don’t get where you’re headed with this,” I told him.

He pulled out a pen and scribble three words on a napkin and pushed towards me. I read it and realized what he was saying and I knew then he had taken a slogan many might consider old and worn out and revitalized.

Jeff had written, “God, Bless America.”

We had jus’ been told we were heading into combat, a first for many of us. We were whooping it up, yelling things like, “Let’s go kill us some commie bastards.”

As the day grew longer and our departure delayed time and again, we grew restless. But our bravado never wavered as we continued to wait, gear packed and ready to be stowed.

“What the hell’s the hold up, Gunny?” one Jarhead called out.

“We’re waitin’ for that pallet over there to be loaded!” the older Marine called back.

Puzzled, someone else asked, “What the fuck’s so important about a pallet?”

Without missing a beat, the Gunny answered, “Those are body bags, Gomer Pyle.”

Silence.