It’s time to push back

Kevin and Say Uncle pointed out this Fifty Caliber Institute alert. Some people are pointing out the Unintended Consequences aspects and are euphemistically talking about law enforcement becoming more risky but there is a better way.

Federal prosecutors need to start enforcing 18 USC 242 (and 241). There are some legal and political obstacles before that becomes a viable option but I may have a way to remove some of the legal obstacles. Mr. Completely has agreed to give me a few minutes to speak at the Gun Blogger Rendezvous in a few days and I plan to elaborate on how I hope to make that happen. You are going to be there, right?

Another friend headed to the Mideast

At the steel match yesterday one of the better handgun shooters I know told me he has been hired by Blackwater USA and will be going to the Mideast soon as the team leader of an emergency response team. Compared to what he currently earns the pay is nearly irresistable. It’s a one-year contract with a two week vacation after six months. The first thing Barb asked when I told her about it was, “What about his wife and kids?” Well… his wife isn’t too keen on it but the pay makes it very attractive. Barb is glad I’m only as far away as Seattle and only fighting software bugs rather than halfway around the world being shot at and trying to avoid IEDs.

A year ago I was seriously considering how I could get such a contract but with my current pay the delta isn’t enough to make it that attractive and they still aren’t scrapping the bottom of the barrel hard enough to take me without prior military or law enforcement experience. I wished my friend luck and asked him to return in one piece. I hope it turns out well for him.

Straight out of the training videos

I attended a seminar that discussed some of the video tapes found in Afghanistan. According to the tapes using a motorcycle in an assassination was one of the things taught in the training camps. A leading woman’s rights leader was killed using this technique:

Safia Amajan, head of the province’s women’s department, was leaving her home for work when a gunman on a motorcycle opened fire, police said.

She may have been targeted by Taleban militants because of their opposition to women taking part in politics and education, the BBC’s Dan Isaacs says.

Other techniques found in the tapes included taking and killing of hostages in office buildings and schools, ambushes of law enforcement, drive up kidnapping on streets, and residential assassinations. It’s what Israel deals with every day and it’s what in store for us here if we withdraw our military from the Mideast and we continue to ignore their calls for us to convert to Islam.

MSM talks about airport security

If you don’t believe me do you believe it if you read it in the Boston Globe?

For example, Schneier blasts almost all airport screening measures as meaningless “security theater” that makes people incorrectly believe they are safer. After all, who says the next terrorist attack will involve the methods used last time? Who says it even has to involve airplanes?

“The game of having all these tactics is one we can’t win, because terrorists get to see it in advance,” he says.

“By definition you’re going to pick a plot we’re not going to catch. It’s a game we can’t win. Let’s stop playing it.”

Instead, Schneier says the game ought to be about stopping bad people, mainly through better intelligence and police work.

That money would be much better spent, he says, than making sure that security screeners confiscate corkscrews or any other particular item from passengers.

Existing airplane “security” is about making some people feel better not making anyone more secure.

Quote of the day–Adolf Hitler

The size of the lie is a definite factor in causing it to be believed, for the vast masses of the nation are in the depths of their hearts more easily deceived than they are consciously and intentionally bad.  The primitive simplicity of their minds renders them a more easy prey to a big lie than a small one, for they themselves often tell little lies but would be ashamed to tell a big one.

Adolf Hitler
[I was reminded of this by the weekend spectacle of Mr. “I did not have sex with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.”–Joe]

A nice butt

I’ve had numerous women tell me I have a nice butt and once had a strange woman give it a squeeze but today was the first time I had a man tell me that. It was more that just a little bit odd. Especially since I obviously had a loaded gun (I was about to shoot a stage in a steel match) and he didn’t.

Don, thanks (I think), for the compliment but we are not going on any camping trips together.

Disposing of OBL remains

There’s rumors of his death but there’s also lots of reason to be skeptical. Lack of confirmation of his death and physical possession of his body shouldn’t stop us from planning appropriate disposal of his carcass. Here are my suggestions:

  1. Attitude adjustment. Shove a large dildo “where the sun don’t shine”, freeze him and ship the display to Club Gitmo. Keep him on ice and use him as a motivational tool in interrogations (“You could have a place beside your great and wonderful leader.”)

  2. Warning to others. His carcass fed to the hogs and the video of both the entrance and exit from the alimentary canal put on YouTube.
  3. Grim reminder. His head mounted on a 10 foot pole, be the highest point of anything within ten miles, and be perpetually illuminated with a soft green glow from the glass covering Mecca.

Quote of the day–Clayton Cramer

Professor Cornell is visiting us from a parallel universe, where Whig political thought never developed, and no one in the Revolutionary and early Republic periods ever feared governmental oppression.

Clayton Cramer
Saul Cornell Is Suddenly No Longer a Partisan on Gun Control
September 22, 2006
[Clayton fisks this editorial about Cornell’s new book.–Joe]

Mandating gun ownership

Two different people (Dave and Stephanie) have sent me this link so I really should post about it. The gist of the article is the following:

All Americans have the right to bear arms.  Some towns have even gone as far as to require each household to have a gun.   Now a small Idaho town is contemplating a similar idea– it’s called the Civil Emergencies Ordinance. And although gun ownership is just one piece of this ordinance, it’s the part that’s getting the most attention.

“We’ve blessed to be a fairly rural area of the state, so we don’t have a lot of crime and I think we’d like to keep it that way,” said Lee Belt, Greenleaf city clerk.

Drive about 10 minutes west of Caldwell and you’ll run into Greenleaf, Idaho, population 860.  If city council member Steve Jett has his way, each head of household that can legally own a gun, will.  Along with that they’re encouraged to have ammunition and appropriate training.

Aside from hunting I sort of think of guns as flush toilets. They aren’t something that is particularly appealing on their own merits but they do a good job of disposing of human waste. I think every home should have at least one. It should be keep clean and functional. Everyone in the house should know how to use it or if they are too small to use it they should be keep away from it so they don’t get hurt.

For the city to mandate, with certain exceptions, gun ownership is sort of like mandating flush toilets. Are people so stupid that they don’t recognize the benefits of flush toilets? No. And people aren’t so stupid they don’t recognize the benefits of gun ownership either. The problem is the anti-gun bigots of the world make it socially uncomfortable in some circles to own guns. What needs to be done is to make those bigots social outcasts. It may be that this proposed ordinance will help make those bigots more obvious and hence it could be that it is a “good thing”. But in general it makes me just a little bit uncomfortable that government is getting involved in something like this.

I first saw this article at Saysuncle and Alphecca.

Guns on college campuses

More bad news for the anti-gun bigots. It turns out Utah isn’t the first place to allow guns on campus. Here is a report of where fully automatic assault rifles as well as pistols are carried either openly or concealed with no problems:

I studied for six years at Tel Aviv University, Israel, and although gun control is tighter in Israel than it is in the United States, I was accustomed to seeing students and staff carrying firearms to classes on an almost everyday basis.

One may see students in their 20s carrying fully automatic assault rifles while on furlough from army duty and others who carry pistols, either openly or concealed, with the blessing of the university’s security staff and administration.

We are winning. Keep up the pressure on these bigots and felons. We need to make it just as un-PC to talk about restrictions on guns as it is to talk about segregated drinking fountains, bathrooms, and seating areas on buses. We can drop back into “maintenance mode” when the only law on the Federal books that directly refers to firearms is the 2nd Amendment and 18 USC 241 and 242 are vigorously enforced against all who violate a person’s inalienable rights.

Firefox modification arrives too late to help PNNL felons

Jeff reports on new modification to Firefox but it comes out too late to help the felons at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. They got caught because of their sloppy browsing habits.

Long before they committed their crimes I tried to tell them they had a security leak in their browsing. But in a supreme irony they didn’t listen and when they committed their crime they left behind more than enough information for me to catch them.

I’ll have more news on this front soon.

Bringing images to mind

Dooce said this:

One of the many, many, endless and uncountable downsides is Leta’s breath which used to be the color of fairy wings and was so sweet it could cure broken hearts. Now it is a visible black smoke that curls into forked tongues and seethes with the voices of screaming demons. I cannot withhold kisses or hugs from her like I can from Jon because she’s just an innocent pawn in all of this, and a true test of parenthood has been willing myself to endure the pain of having my eyebrows roasted off my forehead when, after stuffing her mouth full of licorice, she crawls up into my lap and says HEEEEEEELLLLLOOOOOOO. I just pick up the flesh that melts off my face and stick it back on, pretending that it happens all the time.

Which reminded me of this image (click on the image to get the original 260 Kbyte image):

Federally mandated $11 Billion boondoggle

From Newsweek:

COLUMBUS, Ohio – New federal security rules for issuing driver’s licenses could cost $11 billion to implement, raising concerns among states about paying for the changes, according to a national survey of states released Thursday.

“There’s no question that state legislators believe driver’s licenses should be as secure as is possible,” said William Pound, executive director of the National Conference of State Legislatures which helped conduct the survey. “The $11 billion question is, ‘Who’s going to pay for it?”’

Actually that’s not the question. The question is, “What will you get from spending $11 billion dollars?” The answer is, “Nothing of value.”

Here’s why:

The law requires states to incorporate common security features to prevent tampering or counterfeiting, such as using standard materials in every state to print the cards. States will have to verify the legitimacy of documents used to obtain a license and buy equipment to digitally store those documents.

The problem is that with a document that is common to 300 million people (coordination with Canada is supposed to be occurring too), and highly regarded/valued the efforts put into forging the document will be quite high. What they erroneously believe is that with the biometric identifier used on the document is that they can catch (nearly) all efforts of creating a duplicate identity for someone. There are only two biometrics that have a chance of this kind of quality. They are DNA and fingerprints. A duplicate iris scan shows up about once for every 200,000 people and that particular biometric has other issues as well (think specialty contact lenses for example). Voice and facial recognition biometrics don’t even come close to meeting the bar.

DNA testing as a biometric used on this wide of scale “isn’t ready for prime time” and may never be.  No matter how many times you watch Gattaca it’s still just a movie. Sometimes legislators have a difficult time distinguishing Hollywood from reality and I suspect this is one of those times. And even if were “ready for prime time” the character played by Ethan Hawke in Gattaca shows us how it is defeated it.

Fingerprints have been on California drivers licenses for something like 20 years (I wish I still had the notes from my biometrics class, but the people at PNNL didn’t return those to me after they committed their felony and wrongfully terminated me). Of those fingerprints on all those licenses only about 40% are actually usable. They were obtained at the DMV by people that were inadequately trained and motivated to get good fingerprints. Even if they were properly trained and motivated there will have to be thousands of people with authorization to enter and edit data in the system. With that large of an attack surface (read this to understand attack surfaces) and with the value of the document so high there will be lots of opportunity and motivation for obtaining an authentic, but fraudulent, document. See also my thoughts on an universal biometric ID which this is “a good first step” toward.

Since the terrorists, which this document is aimed at defeating, only need to find one hole in the system to “win” that particular battle we will have spent $11,000,000,000 on virtually nothing and it could have been invested in real security.

I’m thinking the UltiMAK school of charm would be a good place for some of those dollars.

Interesting viewpoints

From Britain:

A LARGE number of Britons would be prepared to give up sex if it meant they would live to be 100, according to a survey published today.

The Mori research found that 40 per cent would pass on the passion for longevity, although far more women (48 per cent) were willing to make the sacrifice than men (31 per cent).

Not that anyone is saying one could successfully make such a trade. They were just asking to see how important life is to people.

One friend of mine wrote an essay complaining about all the people that want to live a long time. His view is that these people are getting in the way of evolution and therefore life extending activities were immoral.

Still another friend told me, “I’ll know I’m dead when my dick stops working.”

Dr. Joe is most in agreement with this last viewpoint.

Posted in Sex

Sticking it to Wendy Cukier

A guy after my own heart:

Wendy Cukier, head of the anti-gun lobby in Canada, opines that the Dawson College shootings are “evidence that we can do better”. Wrong.

These latest shootings – make that every shooting since the passage of the Firearms Act – are evidence of the complete and utter failure and futility of all such so-called gun control laws.

If Kimveer Gill obtained his firearms legally, it is evidence that such laws don’t work. If he obtained them illegally, it is evidence that such laws don’t work.

Now if he would ask Just One Question.

Clash of Civilizations

This is my listening material for my trip to and from home (and then some) this weekend. Read a quote from it here:

“It is Islam, a different civilisation whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power. The problem for Islam is not the CIA or the US Department of Defence. It is the West, a different civilisation whose people are convinced of the universality of their culture and believe that their superior, if declining, power imposes on them the obligation to extend that culture throughout the world. These are the basic ingredients that fuel conflict between Islam and the West”.

The Amazon reviews are just as intriguing:

This is the eminent Professor Huntinton’s magnum opus, and it deserves to be read. No one can profess an understanding of modern global politics without studying this masterful work which was written in 1996. It remains a treasury of prophetic insights for our present day.

Of particular interest are the following: Chapter II, Part 5, “The Islamic Resurgence, Chapter IV Part 9, “Islam and the West” and Part 10 “Islam’s Bloody Borders.”

Huntington’s immense learning does not leave him optimistic. On the final page he writes: “On a worldwide basis Civilization seems in many respects to be yielding to barbarism, generating the image of an unprecedented phenomenon, a global Dark Ages, possibly descending on humanity.”

Keep in mind that this book was published in 1998 (and supposedly written in 1996)–years before 9-11!

Shotgunning: 12 shots in 1.73 seconds

Very impressive video from Berreta (the link is broken, but it might have been this video):

Not just the speed (0.144 seconds per shot) but the accuracy at that speed. I have always been super impressed with Pat Kelley and it appears this guy is on par with Pat. Here is a quote from Pat when I saw him shooting at a match:

Damn Benelli!  As soon as you try to do a point one three split the hammer follows the bolt down.  It’ll do a point one four, but you get yourself in trouble as soon as you try a point one three.

Pat Kelley
IPSC Grandmaster
Wily Coyote Three Gun Shoot
Whitebird, Idaho
August 2, 1998, 11:45 AM
Referring to his shotgun that malfunctioned when he tried to shoot it faster than it was capable of shooting.

This reminds me that I have another quote from Pat that I’ll use for tomorrows QOD.