Ry and I went to range today. We had some problems with some CCI Mini-Mag ammo. Ry has pictures.
He also told me of going to a party last night. The most memorable things he said were, “Drunk artists have poor muzzle control” and that he had to sign a waiver before being allowed in the door. Pictures from last night are here.
Alan Korwin was smart enough and fast enough to turn the tables on “an authorized journalist” during a recent encounter with a group of them:
The AP writer told of an assignment she got from the New York office, formerly the core of AP, and now restructured as one of four regional hubs. It seems the nation was bursting with hope and optimism right after Mr. Obama’s inauguration, and now, one year later, everyone was disappointed and dejected.
“But wait,” pointed out The Uninvited Ombudsman, the emcee for the evening event, “for half the nation’s people, there was hopeless disappointment and dejection right after the election, and now, a year later, there is finally a ray of hope and light at the end of the tunnel. Doesn’t your story neglect that half of the picture?”
All four AP staffers, who had nodded approvingly during the anecdote, stared like deer caught in headlights.
Nice.
Guns in bars. No background checks at gun shows. No permits to carry required. No restrictions on how many guns a person may buy (in some cases now it’s one per month).
What Americans don’t seem to understand is how crazy they look to most of the rest of the world. The reason they don’t understand is because of their one-thought tyranny.
Americans are tyrannized by 1776, The Second Amendment, The Bill of Rights, The Constitution and other colonial-era artifacts. They have been brainwashed into believing that those are the only thoughts there are. This is not freedom. Freedom means having a choice. If they could accept that there are other ways of thinking then they would have a choice! That’s what freedom is about and what many, if not most, Americans don’t understand.
Daniel Johnson
February 24, 2010
The Tyranny of the American Mind
[Tyrannized by The Bill of Rights? At first glance I thought it had to be satire. But no. I don’t think it is. I think it more closely represents something from Nineteen Eighty-Four:
WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, and IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.
It appears “Reasoned Discourse” has broken out in the comments.
(graphic stolen from Robb Allen)
Numerous comments have been deleted. Ah, yes. Canadian “freedom” where they have official and unofficial censors.
Oh, and if you are interested in that sort of thing there is a picture of a tricked out SKS being held by a women in a bikini in Johnson’s article.
H/T to jonjayray.–Joe]
This was a nice couple in their 50’s, fairly conservative, into classic cars, and in the market for a .38 for home protection. They were not loony-tune lefties by any means. They also mentioned a good friend who owns many guns and reloads. The conversation rolled along smoothly until the topic of “Uzi’s and machineguns” came up. As you can imagine, it wasn’t me talking about “Uzi’s and machineguns.”
I explained that there is little difference between an Uzi and any 9mm handgun or carbine and that legal machineguns are virtually never used in crime. That so called “assault weapons” are also rarely used In crime and that millions and millions of them are owned and used every day without hurting anyone. That the Second Amendment isn’t about duck or deer hunting, it is about being able to defend yourself, your family, your community, your state, and your country.
That is when the woman said something really chilling. She said that those crazy people who want all of those military weapons and think they have a right to that kind of capability just infuriate her and scare her to death and even though she doesn’t think people should have machineguns, those crazy people make her wish she had a machinegun to just shoot them all.
What on earth do you do with something like that?
Jeff Knox
February 18, 2010
A Lot of Work to Do
[We sometimes don’t realize just how disconnected we are from the mindset of a lot of other people.
I’m probably not the best person to answer Jeff’s question. I think they way I would handle it would be to ask if she felt the same way about blacks, Jews, or homosexuals.
Long term what we have to do is “come out of the closet”. We have to get people to see us as normal or even better, as human with sheepdog tendencies. Take people to the range, get your shooting events mentioned in the mainstream media, and make it possible for people to think of you as little different than someone who goes to a different church than most of the people in the neighborhood.–Joe]
It’s nice to see stuff like this:
An unnamed accused serial rapist demanded tougher gun control laws from his hospital bed in suburban Philadelphia earlier today, just hours after being admitted by police for a gun shot wound incurred while attempting to assault a local woman. Lawyers for the alleged rapist charged their client was “the real victim of this assault,” and warned that easy access to legal firearms was “[Making] committing a rape or other violent crime nearly impossible in many suburban areas.”
“She shot me in the privates,” bemoaned the wounded accused. “I was just trying to hold her down so I could have my way with her without her consent, and she just shoots me in the privates! How and I ever going to commit a rape again?”
In addition to a complete ban on private gun ownership, the accused lawyers demanded an investigation into hate crimes allegations against the shooter who, allegedly, uttered disparaging comments toward her attacker of a racially insensitive nature, and unfairly questioned his sexual orientation during the attempted assault. “Some guy’s trying to rape her, and she attacks his sexual orientation? What more proof do you need that she’s dangerous and insane,” asked the lawyer.
There is quite a bit more. The writer pokes fun at the police and anti-gun activists too.
I just got back from work after 17 hours.
Crystal is finishing up a new test and things were dying in inconsistent and strange ways in the middle of the test. It looked like it might be my problem.
I certainly held a good share of the responsibility. There were a couple of big memory leaks which I was responsible for. I fixed those and the test now sometimes runs to completion. Hiep will be surprised in the morning to find several new bugs on his plate. He had more, but smaller, memory leaks than I did.
It’s a good thing we are investing so much in automated tests. These bugs only showed up with a cross country trip. Crystal started us out in Redmond and we died somewhere in the Great Plains a few minutes later. We now sometimes make it to New York City.
I did get some laughter relief during the middle of the day. We were trying to recreate the problem and she asked me, “Do you ever use Depends?”
Ahh…. No.
From the context I knew she was talking about a software tool that probably checked for dependencies but I didn’t know of the tool she was referring to and decided to tease her about the inadvertent insult she just made. I frowned at her and told her, “I’m not that old!”
We both started laughing and my officemate then wanted to know what she had missed. Being an India native Depend had to be explained to her. More laughter then ensued.
The warning message we sent the Russians was a calculated ambiguity that would be clearly understood.
Alexander Haig
December 2, 1924 – February 20, 2010
[I should have posted this a few days ago but I forgot that I had it in my collection.–Joe]
You don’t have to think about this very long before you get a chill up your spine:
Three Google executives were convicted of violating Italian privacy laws on Wednesday, the first case to hold the company’s executives criminally responsible for the content posted on its system.
The content was a YouTube video posted by some random person. Google took the video down within two hours of being notified that it was in violation of Italian law. Still, some Google executives are now convicted criminals in Italy.
I keep waiting for the day that someone gets convicted in some restrictive country for daring to post a picture of a woman with her face and/or ankles exposed on their website. Or perhaps for providing firearms training videos on the Internet in China.
And don’t forget similar things have happened in this country even before the Internet.
Somewhere there is one or more governments which would send you to prison for something you do as a normal everyday activity–freedom is a never ending battle.
I find this very odd. The subtitle is, “The Brady Campaign is doing all it can to ensure the safety of restaurant patrons.” But the text of the article says things I could have written:
If Peet’s Coffee & Tea and California Pizza Kitchen can deny us service for expressing our Second Amendment rights, where does it end? Will they deny us service based on our nationality or sexual preference?
I got a call from Oleg yesterday. He plans to attend Boomershoot this year.
Of course he wants some pretty girls to take pictures of. It just so happens I know of two who will be there. So we talked about daughters Kim and Xenia.
He will be shooting with Lyle @ UltiMAK in position #74.
I’m sorry, Cupertino, but Microsoft has nailed it. Windows Phone 7 feels like an iPhone from the future. The UI has the simplicity and elegance of Apple’s industrial design, while the iPhone’s UI still feels like a colorized Palm Pilot.
Jesus Diaz
February 15, 2010
Windows Phone 7 Interface: Microsoft Has Out-Appled Apple
[And to make sure those coffin nails for Apple stay tight I’ve been at work for nearly 15 hours straight now.
I’m running tests after fixing bugs that would only show up as somewhat excessive battery drain if multiple failures in the entire system (including network connectivity and/or servers temporarily being missing some data) occurred.–Joe]
Democracy is the only system that persists in asking the powers that be whether they are the powers that ought to be.
Sydney J. Harris
[And there is a whole lot of asking going on around here now.–Joe]
One could get snarky with this one and revive the joke about the anti-gun people thinking guns are living things that kill on their own. Apparently some people think guns have their own DNA:
As a countermeasure, Magnus has proposed a plan to trace every weapon recovered on the street using DNA technology available through state and federal agencies. The county’s crime lab does not possess the technology needed for such testing, he said.
Or snark about science hasn’t yet sequenced even one Fe based lifeform yet so it will be a great many more years before the crime lab possesses the technology.
But probably it was just a lazy and/or stupid reporter than didn’t bother to get the story straight. The ones that could have figured it out were probably fired long ago for “holding on to the notion there is an objective reality”.
Sometimes you just have to wonder about their brain functionality. Sure, they are Canadian, but this is really over the top:
While rates of spousal violence and spousal homicide against women have dropped by 15 per cent over the past decade, the report slams the government’s determination to scrap the long gun registry, which it credits as “one of the most significant factors” in reducing violence against women.
Registration of long guns reduced the rate of violence against women? Do they actually believe someone that is going to seriously injury or kill their spouse is going to obey the law about registering their rifle?
From my Windows Series Seven phone Windows Phone 7 Series.
Update: Yeah, yeah. I was in a meeting and didn’t want to spend the time looking for the proper name. I got the words correct. Just not in the right order.
As a software developer deeply involved in providing location information to applications running on cell phones I have some advice if this concerns you:
Amid all the furor over the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program a few years ago, a mini-revolt was brewing over another type of federal snooping that was getting no public attention at all. Federal prosecutors were seeking what seemed to be unusually sensitive records: internal data from telecommunications companies that showed the locations of their customers’ cell phones—sometimes in real time, sometimes after the fact.
…
Prosecutors “were using the cell phone as a surreptitious tracking device,” said Stephen W. Smith, a federal magistrate in Houston. “And I started asking the U.S. Attorney’s Office, ‘What is the legal authority for this? What is the legal standard for getting this information?’ “
Those questions are now at the core of a constitutional clash between President Obama’s Justice Department and civil libertarians alarmed by what they see as the government’s relentless intrusion into the private lives of citizens. There are numerous other fronts in the privacy wars—about the content of e-mails, for instance, and access to bank records and credit-card transactions. The Feds now can quietly get all that information. But cell-phone tracking is among the more unsettling forms of government surveillance, conjuring up Orwellian images of Big Brother secretly following your movements through the small device in your pocket.
…
The tracking is possible because either the phones have tiny GPS units inside or each phone call is routed through towers that can be used to pinpoint a phone’s location to areas as small as a city block. This capability to trace ever more precise cell-phone locations has been spurred by a Federal Communications Commission rule designed to help police and other emergency officers during 911 calls. But the FBI and other law-enforcement outfits have been obtaining more and more records of cell-phone locations—without notifying the targets or getting judicial warrants establishing “probable cause,” according to law-enforcement officials, court records, and telecommunication executives. (The Justice Department draws a distinction between cell-tower data and GPS information, according to a spokeswoman, and will often get warrants for the latter.)
…
Al Gidari, a telecommunications lawyer who represents several wireless providers, tells NEWSWEEK that the companies are now getting “thousands of these requests per month,” and the amount has grown “exponentially” over the past few years.
Of course this is a two edged sword. If they can use your cell phone as evidence you were at a given location then you can use it to show you were not at some location. Leave your phone at work/home or in a friends car if you need to take supplies to your Jewish friends in the attic.
My advice is that no matter how careful you are with the applications you install or “disabling” the GPS or location services that isn’t good enough. The cell phone company will still know where your phone is within a few hundred yards anytime it is turned on. And with some phones it’s possible for you to think it is turned off when it actually is still functional at a level sufficient for your cell phone service provider to get location information.
As a friend of mine in the cell phone manufacturing business once told me, “I don’t know exactly what’s in the phone software. But I do know the phone only has one battery.”
Daughter Kim already has her Concealed Weapons License for Idaho. Yesterday she called me to verify how to get her State of Washington License to Carry Concealed Pistol.
She called back after applying and told me of their new electronic fingerprint scanner.
She should be legal to carry in Washington within 30 days.
In tough economic times you frequently see mergers of the less healthy organizations with the more healthy. There are other reasons for mergers but when times are tough it’s a pretty good bet that one or both of the organizations is about to collapse.
It is with this observation as background I’m pleased see the misnamed Freedom State Alliance (one of the most anti-freedom organizations short of the Democratic party I know of) is merging with States United To Prevent Gun Violence.
In real terms what this means is that Scott Vogel is saving some money by not renewing the domain name for FSA.
Corruption, extortion, child molestation, assault on officers, embezzling from the poor. That’s just the job description. After hours, it gets nasty.
Gun Owners Against Illegal Mayors
From http://www.stopillegalmayors.com/ as of February 23, 2010.
[Via Dave Hardy. Say Uncle also has a post about them. Linoge does some math comparing them to concealed carry permit holders.–Joe]
In South Africa you must apply for a license to own a gun:
…one must pass a written “competency test.” The South African constitution recognizes 11 official languages, but the test is only given in two of them, Afrikaans and English. Imagine if your gun ownership rights depended on passing a written test in a language you could not read!
And people wonder why we resist such things in this country.
It gets worse:
Applicants are not issued licenses if they are deemed to be at risk of becoming violent. As enforced in South Africa, this could simply mean that a person was divorced, separated or fired within the past two years.
Processing of applications is very slow. For example, of the applications submitted in 2006, only about a quarter have been fully processed.
Licenses are valid for two, five or 10 years, depending on the legal category of the license, so keeping a gun can mean staying on a near-constant treadmill of paperwork, fees and uncertainty. The majority of the 2005 applicants, who are supposed to renew in 2010, are still waiting for a decision on their 2005 applications.
Women are particularly hard hit (pun intended):
Married women who want guns for protection are told that their husbands will protect them—as if South African woman should behave like Taliban wives, and never leave the home except with their husbands. People who live in high crime areas are told that the police will protect them—except that the police obviously don’t, as South Africa is one of the most crime-ridden countries in the world.
Of course such high restrictions has created a black market with the attendant crime and corruption. It’s no different than the prohibitions in this country against recreational drugs and alcohol in the last century.
Once we have our rights well secured in this country we should start putting pressure on other countries to recognize the natural right to keep and bear arms.