Any questions?

The old joke goes something like this:

Only government would show up at your door unsolicited, break both your legs, cut down the hardwood tree in your front yard, give it to a buddy to make into crutches, sell them back to you at profit, and then say, "But for me, you couldn't even walk!"

You can, of course, rather easily add extra credit clauses such as:

• send you a bill for the cleanup of the scrap wood and sawdust;
• fine you for felling a tree without a permit;

and the like.  Take your pick;  this is what is known as low-hanging fruit.

Well, "we" do seem to "progress" onward, don't we?  Today's installment, updated, might go like this:

Only government would go to the trouble of actually trying to kill you (with a "less-than-lethal option" for extra irony points) in order to demonstrate that they can not only save your life, but (cue the "Amen" cadence) bring you back from death.

Hey, you laugh.  Sez here that some badged thugs used that super-trendy, we-swear-it's-not-harmful...compliance tool, that Grigg accurately calls a portable electrocution device...upon yet another nonviolent, retreating victim, under what can only with supreme charity be described as questionable circumstances.  Oddly, when confronted with three high-voltage jolts from Officer Operator* McFriendly's Super Spiffy Sparky Stick, the woman went into cardiac arrest and had to be revived.  Hey, at least they did bother to revive her, rather than stuffing her in the backseat of a squad car and letting her expire...she should be thankful!

And of course the results are perfectly predictable.  By all appearances the victim hadn't harmed anyone, no drugs or booze nor anything else that would have even warranted a "traffic stop" in the first place...nothing except being scared by armed enforcers and inelegantly attempting to assert her privacy.  Over on the side of Team Thug, electrocuting a retreating victim is (yet again) officially held to be fully "within department policy", and they'll say no more because it might interfere with their ongoing effort to further prosecute the victim.  They've got a job to do, after all.

Any questions?



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* Somehow, that vile and disgusting term (which so many of the militarization apologists seem to like), suggesting so strongly an automaton in preference to a thinking human being, seems perfectly appropriate here.  SOBs want that term?  Well, they've earned it.