Ban handguns! They can and have shot planes out of the sky!
Monthly Archives: November 2012
Quote of the day—Kit Carson
The Left insists the Nazis are a great evil. It is misdirection. They are the same –Totalitarians. We must resist them both, communists and fascists. They will always be with us. We must never relent.
Kit Carson
November 22, 2012
Comment to The “Hollywood Holocaust” and Other Cold War Myths
[H/T to Glenn Reynolds who was going to get QOTD with his post but a lot of other people already quoted him.
Reynolds claim brings up an interesting thought:
Refusing to hire Communists is on the same moral plane as refusing to hire Nazis. Which is to say: It’s a good and admirable thing.
To the best of my knowledge it is not against the law in the U.S. to discriminate in hiring based on the politics of the job candidate. The communists and Nazis both used party membership in hiring to great effect. I wonder how much it is being used by the left now in jobs and if it can be openly used. I know one rabid Obama supporter who changed her name on Facebook because she believed it was making it difficult to get work.
If employers openly hired and purged existing employees based on their politics what would be the result? Could that turn our collapse into socialism around? Or would it inspire laws such that employers could not discriminate or even required discrimination based on loyalty to the socialists in this country?—Joe]
Quote of the day—Jeffrey Singer
Health insurance will soon be extinct. Unlike other members of the species – property and casualty insurance, life insurance, liability insurance, auto insurance – political predators have been steadily killing off health insurance over the years. Soon it will cease to exist, allowing for more intrusive regulation of behavior.
Jeffrey Singer
November 16, 2012
Jeffrey Singer: Health insurance an endangered species
[H/T to Barb L. via email.
I’ve heard it claimed that Obama Care has to have been specifically designed to destroy the health care industry. Singer explains why the health insurance industry will be destroyed.—Joe]
Quote of the day—Larry Elder
This battle for ‘common-sense’ gun control laws pits emotion and passion against logic and reason. All too often in such a contest, logic loses. So, expect more meaningless, if not harmful, ‘gun control‘ legislation. Good news – if you’re a crook.
Larry Elder
From Thinkexist.com.
[I have been unable to determine when he said this. While true 15 years ago expecting more gun control legislation is less and less a good bet. I’m skeptical it is because logic and reason suddenly are winning contests against emotion and passion. I expect it is because we are accumulating more emotion and passion on our side.—Joe]
Putting setbacks into perspective
Whenever I think things are going badly, and I’m bummed about
the prospects on the political scene, I think the barbarians are
winning, and it’s all going to hell in a hand-basket, I take solace in history.
Rome was the most powerful empire the world had ever seen, had built amazing feats
of engineering, and been sustained by astonishing feats of logistics, and had
many stories of unimaginable bravery and personal strength. It has existed
nearly forever, it seemed. Rome Was Eternal.
Until it was sacked. And repeatedly taken over by a
succession of military despots, kings, generals, armies, Senators, and foreigners,
and was sunken into the darkness of barbarism and illiteracy, even as each new replacement
empire claimed the mantel of “Rome’s successor.” Some people fled the invaders,
and hid in the nastiest and most inaccessible of the local swamps and fens,
amidst the islands and channels where cavalry and armies couldn’t go after them.
They fled the easy (but crime- and corruption- and invader-infested) life of the
hills and fertile soil of northern Italy. It was a hard life, with no powerful
protector, difficult farming, lots of places to wreck your boat, fetid water and disease, and no time
for anything as non-essential as high culture or art. They clung to life, remembered the best of Rome, and
did the best they could.
Nearly a thousand years later, the city-state of Venice was
one of the most powerful in the world, and its fleet (with help from Spain and
the Papal States) crushed and halted the fleet of the powerful Imperial Ottoman Turks at Lepanto. Ideas are powerful things, and humans are resilient. We may
not fight our way out of the darkness before we die, nor may our children, but
we pass on the good ideas and knowledge to them, and instill in them a sense of
history, and, one day, it WILL happen. Property rights, individual freedom, limited
government, and free markets work.
They will, eventually, take over, because they are more powerful than the
forces trying to limit them… but it may be a long, long slog, and will most assuredly
NOT be a straight line.
(History geeks, take note: this is the simplified version of
things, where the essence is correct, in the interest of telling a good story
with a powerful idea to put current events in perspective.)
Quote of the day—Erma Bombeck
What we’re really talking about is a wonderful day set aside on the fourth Thursday of November when no one diets. I mean, why else would they call it Thanksgiving?
Erma Bombeck
From Quote DB.
[I hope everyone had a nice turkey day. I spent it with son James, his wife Kelsey, my parents, brothers, Uncle Darrell, Aunt Alice, and brother Doug’s children Amy (and Nate and Jared), Lisa (and Kevin) and Brad.
We had way too much really good food and stuffed ourselves.—Joe]
Quote of the day—tdiinva
Since nanny Bloomberg has chosen to limit his citizens self defense option his failure to call in the Guard is failure to live up to his obligations as their nanny.
tdiinva
November 19, 2012
Comment to Bloomberg F-Bombs Request for National Guard Aid.
[Via a link from Sebastian.
It’s a fundamental problem of being a nanny with a scope larger than a few children. Just because a nanny is an appropriate solution in some situations does not mean is is possible to scale it up and make it work at a much larger scale. If it did work we would see both biological and manmade systems organized much differently than we do. Both evolution and the free marketplace would have created systems with central control to dominate over those systems that pushed the decision making to the lower levels rather than pushing it up. Your brain doesn’t control the details of cell metabolism and your web browser doesn’t control how the mouse determines if it has been moved.
I’m channeling Thomas Sowell as best I can with the following.
The problem is one of information. You, a fully functional adult, know more than anyone else about your situation and what is best for you. You know a lot more about your family than people not in your family. You know more about how to do your job than people that don’t do your job. You know more about your community than people outside your community. And you know a lot more about your situation than does the mayor of your city, the governor of your state, and the president of the country. Central planning fails because the people with the most information about the situation are not making the decisions.
Even if it were possible for all the information needed for making optimal decisions were to be communicated to the central planners they cannot process the information nor come up with innovative alternatives that the individuals and small groups closer to the problem can.
One might be tempted to say that central planning failed in the past because of this fundamental problem but we have much better communication and processing power than we did even a decade or two ago. Central planning can work now that we have computers. Those people are wrong.
Even ignoring the obvious SkyNet dystopian scenarios look at the way engineers solve control problems in complex systems now. Heinlein was a visionary in many ways but “Mike” the computer in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress will never be implemented as Heinlein envisioned it—handling payroll, air flow, mass launchers, communications, and a thousand other things.
Whether it is a large software program, a cell phone network, or a sewage treatment plant the far cheaper, better performing, and feasible solution is to delegate “authority” to very small subsystems to solve the issues that are local. The video driver in your computer is given a command to set the background to a color and output text at certain coordinates on the display. The video driver “knows” how to control the chips of the graphics board to change the color of the display and what address in memory corresponds to the coordinates of the screen. The local cell tower “knows” signal strength of your phone, the number of other cell phones it is handling, and communicates with nearby cell towers to enable a clean handoff such that you don’t have a service interruption as you move from location to location. The components of the sewage system control air and water flow rates, agitation, and chemical balances without knowledge of the price of electricity or the growth rate of the town it serves.
At each subsystem level the information and the resources are available such that they can do the right thing to operate their area of responsibility in a manner that is a tradeoff of performance, time to implement, initial cost, and operating cost.
Bloomberg and other central planners do not and cannot have the information to even approximate optimal decisions and they deny resources to those that do have the information. The result is a dystopian world that has the potential to be just as catastrophic as one where “SkyNet” has all the information and resources to create Elysium but instead makes the decision to destroy humanity.—Joe]
Symbiotic Relationship of Metabolic Heat Generation Differences of Sexes
The following text has been in one or more obscure and seldom visited directories of my computers for many years. The timestamp on the file is January 18, 1995 but most likely I put it on one of my computers shortly after it was posted in the UseNet newsgroup misc.kids. My kids were young then and I read the newsgroup regularly. Hence, this probably has been on my computers for over 20 years.
I’m posting it here because every once in a while I want to share it and I have difficulty finding it. I think this will be an easier place to find it and more likely to be permanent.
From: berkery@emsun1.crd.ge.com Wed Oct 17 05:33:39 1990
Newsgroups: misc.kids
Subject: Cold Feet
Organization: General Electric Corporate R&D CenterA few people have asked me to elaborate on that last statement in my previous posting. You know, the one about women and cold feet. So, ok, here’s yet another note from Jack’s compendium of little known scientific theories.
—————————————————————————
“Symbiotic Relationship of Metabolic Heat Generation Differences of Sexes.”
by Berke JackeryDarwin and his successors have tried to explain physiological traits in animal species as the result of adaptation to environmental effects. There is one such proof for a certain trait in the human species which is obvious to even the most casual observer. That no one has heretofore published this fact is quite amazing since it is so immediately obvious. I’m talking about COLD FEET in females of the species homo sapiens.
It is a fact that women’s metabolism levels are not sufficient to generate enough heat to keep all their extremities warm. Over the millennia they have found that the agony of de feet can be alleviated by finding a suitable male who’s heat generation capacity can satisfy their needs. Males of the same species have metabolic rates which produce an overabundance of energy in the form of radiated heat. (Often their bodies produce excesses which are not converted to energy but are expressed as large quantities of methane gas.) This uneven heat generative difference between the sexes has evolved a symbiotic relationship where those who require it will attempt to attract the services of those who can produce it. The result is that when the two get between the sheets, the female will contrive to move her icy toes (some have been measured at temperatures close to absolute zero) toward and even under some part of the male’s anatomy thereby stealing his heat.
The male however, seldom even notices this stealthy behavior since whenever any portion of the female anatomy rubs up against any portion of his, his temperature immediately rises several hundred degrees to balance the process. The procreation process of the species is likewise related to this need to exchange heat. When the female feels the need for some whole-body heat rather than a simple toe-job, or when the male on the other hand has such an excess of heat that he must have a receptive heat-sink to take it from him, the relationship requires that far more body parts be rubbed together. The symbiosis is then complete and the male – female bonding remains intact solely because of this need for an interchange of body heat.
The alternative would have been to evolve a system similar to many insects where the female gets some hapless male to satisfy her needs then summarily bites his head off thereby severing the relationship altogether. Luckily for human males, their mate still has that all-consuming need for warmth whether or not he has ever fully satisfied her. So he is kept around as long as he continues to provide some convenient spot to warm her toes.
That, at any rate is the theory, but I think it’s a very solid one. How else can you explain why women would want to sleep next to a large hairy beast that sweats and snores and farts and grinds its teeth all night. Let’s face it guys, we’re really nothing more than giant heating pads for these females. But, well, when one considers the payment for services rendered, I can live with that. I’ve got lots of excess body heat to spare.
—————————————————————————
Jack Berkery, Computer Scientist, GE Research, Schenectady NY
Because cowering like rabbits under the desk works so well
Paul C. Duffy has the strangest thoughts. And then he shares them with a letter to the editor:
I was disheartened beyond words to read about a program that offers would-be victims of school shootings alternatives to the traditional lock-down reaction to such crimes.
…
Canton police Detective Chip Yeaton, who sounds like a caring citizen and father, spoke in support of the proposed school program, called ALICE, which stands for alert, lockdown, inform, counter, evacuate. Yeaton said that “school shootings continue to happen, and young people are dying. We need to change the philosophy.”
Yeaton is right, but his focus is wrong. Our philosophy does indeed need to change: We need to find the real and moral courage to stand down the gun lobbies — the National Rifle Association and other Second Amendment zealots — whose reckless defense of gun rights has led to a society where almost anyone can acquire a Glock 9mm and the ammunition needed to ruin lives and communities in seconds.
What Duffy totally ignores or does not comprehend is that people can acquire a 9mm Glock and the ammunition to defend lives. I realized I’m biased as I have a handgun on my hip as I type this but handguns are designed for and used millions of times each year to defend innocent life. Duffy’s brain is stuck in “prey” mode.
Read Columbine by Dave Cullen. When violent predators attack students at a school cowering under the desk this behavior gives the predator feelings of even greater power and control. They feel justified in killing those who cower beneath them. One of the prime motivators of the Columbine predators was that they believed people were so stupid they didn’t deserve to live. We don’t know what their thoughts were the last couple of hours but it would seem to me their opinions of human intelligence could not have improved as they saw people “hiding” underneath desks and tables and they strolled from person to person and shot them.
I kept wondering if the Boston Globe got the letter writers name wrong. Maybe it was actually “Fluffy” instead of “Duffy”. And the ‘C’ stands for Cottontail.
Duffy advocates being a coward in the face of a single criminal predator but “courage” while advocating people “stand down the gun lobbies”. He should think this through. Suppose he does “stand down the gun lobbies”. Then what? Is he going to start confiscating firearms from people? I would like to point out that Fluffy Duffy should be happy he has the gun lobby. They are what separate him from the 80 million gun owners in this country. Rabbits are no match for hunters.
Update: Sebastian also comments with Oh Noes! Freedom!
Quote of the day—Rivrdog
Isn’t looking for real or literary meaning in a Tweet the modern equivalent of mining for diamonds in a goat’s ass?
Rivrdog
November 19, 2012
Comment to Quote of the day—DarthWeiner75.
[He’s got a point there.—Joe]
The First Amendment was supposed to protect…
…your right to speech, religion, assembly and redress of grievances. The Second amendment was supposed to protect the First. Both will be tested in ways you are not expecting. You will be blindsided. Expect it.
When someone doesn’t like what you’re saying and tries to do something about it, your Second amendment right says, “I don’t think so, Skippy”.
Uncle’s post here, if you listen to the broadcast, reveal a looming contest. There is an on-going attempt to marginalize you, through legal, economic, social and bureaucratic pressures. Pay attention. Pay attention also to who stands their ground and who caves. Don’t bother with the rationalizations, but stay focused on principles.
Quote of the day—DarthWeiner75
I guess since you can’t walk around with your dick hanging out #opencarry is the next best thing. #juvenile
DarthWeiner75
Tweeted on November 17, 2012.
[It’s another Markley’s Law Monday! Via a Tweet from Linoge.
It’s “interesting” that someone would consider the exercise of a constitutionally protected right “juvenile”. Would he consider exercise of your right to not incriminate yourself “being a sissy”? Or maybe “freedom of speech is for crybabies”.—Joe]
I found a new use for a KitchenAid mixer
For several years I have been using KitchenAid mixers for Boomershoot. We have made several tons of explosives with them. They work great.
Today I bought another mixer and brought it home to my clock tower. It turns out they can be used for other things as well as explosives:
I made a big batch of lentil chocolate chip cookies this afternoon with it. It’s not Boomerite but it still did a great job.
If they were roses I would understand
Thursday morning I found this on the stairway to my clock tower:
Those are six taco shells carefully placed on six steps. I have no idea what the story on those were. Had they been roses I kinda sorta would have guessed what they meant. But since they look like burnt taco shells I’m baffled.
Quote of the day—Henry Louis Mencken
Of all the classes of men, I dislike most those who make their livings by talking—actors, clergymen, politicians, pedagogues, and so on. All of them participate in the shallow false pretenses of the actor who is their archetype. It is almost impossible to imagine a talker who sticks to the facts. Carried away by the sound of his own voice and the applause of the groundlings, he makes inevitably the jump from logic to mere rhetoric.
Henry Louis Mencken
From Minority Report, H. L. Mencken’s Notebooks, Knopf, 1956.
[It would seem to me that the appreciation of the applause is an important item. If the talker causes the listener to think and contemplate it would seem to me that you have an entirely different species than if the talker stirs the emotions with the intent to generate applause.
Still, I understand his point. I get particularly annoyed at actors and politicians that know how to “work a crowd” but know next to nothing about the topic they are pontificating on.—Joe]
Middle East heating up
My dad asked me what my thoughts on the Israel / Palestine
issue were, and why it could never seem to get a lasting negotiated peace
agreement of some sort. My answer was:
As long as there were people at the top who had a personal
vested interest in keeping it going, it would never stop, and pretty much all
the leaders (both secular and religious) in the surrounding Islamic nations
find having a Jewish state nearby to blame everything on very useful. So, IMHO,
it will never have a negotiated peace
for any significant period of time.
Historically, negotiated peace treaties are worth
less than the paper they are printed on; they are merely used to play for time.
War (on some scale) seems the normal state of most people of the world, and the
only time there was peace was when someone big and strong came through, crushed
all rebellion or dissent utterly, and made it clear that fighting was NOT going
to end well (i.e., heads on pikes, razed cities, leaders hunted down like dogs,
etc). The Mongols, the Huns, Alexander to Great, the Romans, the Persians, the Egyptians,
the Ottoman Turks, the British Empire, Germany and Japan post-WW II. The list
is seemingly endless. Peace of a generation or longer comes not from negotiation
and good will. It never has. Peace comes from having strength and will enough
to make the cost of NOT-PEACE prohibitively high to the leaders that would ask for war. I say let Israel do what it needs
to do to expand and secure its borders, and if that means we can’t count the
dead in the radioactive wastelands of its newly established border-land DMZ
& Nature Preserve, well, so be it.
Quote of the day—Simon Black
Increasing taxes won’t increase their total tax revenue. Politicians have tried this for decades. It doesn’t work. The only way to increase tax revenue is for the economy to grow… and higher tax rates do not pave this path to prosperity.
Ron Paul was spot on. Economic ignorance abounds. And all the Talking Heads in the mainstream media blathering away about the Fiscal Cliff are only reinforcing his premise.
Bottom line– the Fiscal Cliff doesn’t matter. The US passed the point of no return a long time ago.
Simon Black
Guess what they’re NOT cutting in the Fiscal Cliff…
November 15, 2012
[H/T Tyler Durden.
I’m headed for a cabin in the woods this weekend. What are you doing?—Joe]
Interesting times
Observe Greece to see what our future looks like… Greek Brothel To Sponsor Broke Elementary School:
This is what complete social collapse looks like. First, the local Neo Nazi party has soared in the polls and is now the third most popular Greek party. Then, in lieu of other sources of capital, a local brothel became the head sponsor of a minor-league soccer club from Larissa. Now, the same brothel which appears to have seen a substantial return on its advertising spend, has decided to branch out… straight into a local elementary school. That’s right: a whorehouse is advertising its “services” to children in an elementary school. In exchange for what? Money to purchase a Xerox machine and a library.
Quote of the day—jack burton
Guns owners are disrespectful of authority. A failure to rely on authorities is an invariable sign of improper and overly independent attitudes. The mere fact that they gather together to talk about guns at gun shops, gun shows, shooting ranges, and on the internet means that they have some plot going against us normal people. A gun owner has no right to associate with another gun owner.
Therefore, to help ensure our right to happiness and safety we must ban and seize all guns from private hands, and forbid NRA-based criticism towards people who are only trying to help. Searching the homes of all NRA members for any guns and pro-gun literature will go a long way towards reducing crime.
jack burton
November 14, 2012
Comment to Columnist: Gun control doesn’t control enough.
[I’m pretty sure this was sarcasm. But I don’t know for sure.
Regardless, ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ!—Joe]
Not Glocking so Glockily down the Glocky trail
My G20 quit feeding properly last summer, and I identified the problem as an original recoil spring that had gone soft. A new Wolf spring and steel guide rod took care of that. Then I wanted to try a new Lone Wolf barrel because I was getting so much case buldge that one use was about all I was comfortable with, and the LW barrels have more case support at the bottom under the case web area. They also have standard cut rifling, which is supposed to better for cast lead bullets– something I’d like to try at some stage.
My first tryout of the new barrel led to a failure to feed the very first round, but after that it seemed to function normally and I figured all was well. Not so fast. Those were previously fired cases. Last time out, with all new cases, I had several failures to feed, and had to bump the back of the slide to get it into battery.
This morning I tried feeding some rounds from several full magaxines, and here’s what happened;
Above is the slide resting quite securely, with its new, beefier recoil spring, on a jam.
Below, I’ve removed the magazine and locked the slide back. That round is still wedged in the back of the chamber, and it took some fiinger pressure to dislodge it;
(Below) you see the mark below the case mouth, from the front of the feedramp digging into it;
My theory is that the new, softer cases are getting bitten more deeply than the work-hardened fired cases I tried the first time, resulting in more problems. The original Glock barrel has much more “throating” or relief at the feed ramp area, which is why the Glock barrel is said to have less case support. The LW barrel has more support in that area, but for now it doesn’t have enough clearance to feed reliably. My new StarLine cases are trimmed at the factory to only a few thousandths over the minimum, and about 7 or 8 thousandths under the maximum case length. The overall cart length is exactly, to within two or three thou extreme spread, what the Hornady manual (and several others) called for. The rounds plunk right into the LW chamber with the barrel removed, but jam in the chamber when fed from any of several magazines, due to the feed angle and the tighter (actually just longer at the bottom because of less throating) chamber.
A longer bullet ogive might force the front of the cart down as it feeds, but at the moment I don’t know if that would help or hurt. I might just put the perfectly good old barrel back in and live with super short case life for now.
I spent 30+ years doing custom work on various types of musical instruments, and long ago came up with an axiom I have repeated many, many times to perspective customers and fellow shop workers; When you divert from the original design, expect a cascading series of unforseen problems. In other words, expect to pay through the nose as we may have go back to the drawing board a time or two, to find ways to accommodate your custom thingamajig, making it work seamlessly with the rest of the system.
I noticed just yesterday that Brownell’s, I think it was, or maybe it was CTD, had a bunch of LW Glock barrels in a promotion, for all the Glock models except the 20, or those in 10mm. This kind of sucks, because I was having a ball late in the summer shooting silhouettes at 100 yards. The original barrel never seemed to give enough accuracy to make that a reasonable proposition.