Most people can’t do simple math. If they could they would have immediately seen something wrong with these results:

A new federal survey about sex and drug use in the United States reveals that an average American man has sex with seven women during his lifetime, compared with four male sexual partners for the average woman.

The latest survey, which claims to have used the high-tech methods to solicit candid answers on sexual activity and illegal drug use, found that approximately 29 percent of men reported having 15 or more female sexual partners in a lifetime, while just over 9 percent of women reported having sex with 15 or more men.

Every time a man has sex with a new partner that woman has sex with a new partner. The writer of this story should have clarified they are not using the usual definition of “average” (the “mean”). If they were then the average for both men and women must be the same. This article clarifies they are using a measure less frequently used by (excuse the pun) lay people, called the “median”.

I don’t have the time to go looking for it in my sex archives but this anomaly in survey results has been known for a long time and it was about five or six years ago they figured it out what was going on.

It turns out prostitutes are under represented in nearly all surveys. Most surveys were done with phone calls during the evening hours. The evening is during the working hours of the “ladies of the night” and hence they are under represented. A simple example will demonstrate why the numbers above, interpreted as a mean, must be bogus and the prostitute answer explains how it could happen.

Suppose there are 100 men and 100 women in a given closed population. Each of the men pair up with one women. But one woman, wanting a little something extra, has sex with not only her partner but the other 99 men as well. The true mean number of partners for the men is (99×2 + 1×1)/100 => 1.99. The true mean number of partners for the women is (99×1 + 1×100)/100 => 1.99. Yet if you did a sample of 20 men and women with a bias against surveying women who were likely to have large numbers of partners then you would probably end up with numbers of 2.0 and 1.0. In any example of heterosexual sex pairings you can come up with in this population the mean number of different partners for men must equal the mean number of partners for the women.

I got some email from the “Gun Guy” today. I guess this bigot has never heard of the concept of prior restraint. But of course that isn’t surprising since he apparently hasn’t gotten the word the Second Amendment as well as most state constitutions guarantee the people the right to keep and bear arms.

Here is the scary stuff:

Many of our current gun laws have loopholes and vary from state to state. So, even if we locked up all the criminals, all we’d end up with is… more criminals. Most criminals don’t commit crimes based on some inner, unavoidable evil inside of them. They commit crimes when given the opportunity to do so. Get rid of that opportunity, and you get rid of the crime completely.

So enforcement alone won’t do it. But prevention will. Prevention in the form of comprehensive and effective gun laws — laws that keep guns from ever reaching the hands of criminals in the first place — will make a difference. Laws that keep weapons that do not belong in civilian hands, such as high powered rifles, will make a difference. And, laws that keep firearms out of the places they shouldn’t be, and that stop crime even before it starts, will also make a difference.

That’s how you stop crime. What the NRA misses when it asks for enforcement only is that enforcing the law doesn’t actually prevent it. You can’t arrest someone until after they’ve committed a crime, so if all you do is arrest criminals, you’re still seeing the crimes happen.

We need to remove opportunities for crime? Yeah, right. Does that mean to prevent rape we should castrate all the men? How about sewing all vagina shut so women can’t engage in prostitution? Or removing eyes so people can’t engage in voyeurism? And to prove I’m not stuck on sex crimes, we can prevent fights by shackling the hands and feet of everyone. We can prevent drunk driving and public drunkenness by banning alcohol. Slander can be prevented by removing people’s vocal cords. Libel can be prevented by banning publication of, well, everything. And while we are at it we can prevent theft by abolishing private property.

This isn’t the first time this anti-freedom bigot has pushed this particular hot-button of mine.

The bottom line is you cannot prevent crime without going down a very dangerous path.

One of our employees found this gem a few years ago at the local food co-op– a place where they charge high prices for food that’s “non-corporate” and where they promote anti-capitalist politics and ideals.

It reveals much of the driving force behind the institution of Socialism– pure, unadulterated, white-hot hatred for Mankind, marketed to us as “compassion”.  This rare glimpse into the mind of a Leftist is what I call the “Hate Dollar”.

I believe I can speak with some authority in this area, having been one of “them” myself, growing up as I did among people of similar attitudes and beliefs.  Let me know if you want any part of this work explained:

Check out the high resolution version and you’ll see the exquisite detail and the care with which the artist spills out hatred for America, for Liberty, and for most anything that smacks of human achievement and advancement.  Note also that President Clinton was far too Right Wing for them, having been something of an open-trade president.

Incidentally, I can find nothing in the hate dollar that would be at odds with what the current crop of jihadis has been saying– The overlap of the two ideologies is worthy of note.

Ry wrote about commitment the other day. Here is another example.

Both examples cause a severe cringing reaction in me.

I kept forgetting to post this.  A couple weeks ago Ry told us about a some changes announced at a company meeting at Microsoft.  One of the things he didn’t mention that struck me the most was the reason Bill Gates didn’t attend the meeting.  Bill had just finished up a CEO summit meeting he had hosted and he and his good friend Warren Buffet were going to play poker that afternoon. 

OMG. 

I wonder what the ante for one of those games is. Would it be $100K, $1M, or a penny?  What would it mean to the future of the world if both of them pushed all their chips into the center of the table?

I suppose it depends on how you define “successful”.  From New York Daily News:

The National Summit on Illegal Guns will take place next Tuesday. The event will begin with a symposium outlining successful gun control policies from cities across the country.

If they mean using legal restrictions on weapons to reduce crime then it will be a very short symposium.  If they mean disarming the victims and enabling murder and other violent crime to increase then they could probably spend months on the topic.  My prediction is they will measure success in terms of gun destroyed, not lives destroyed, by their illegal actions.

I have Just One Question for these nut cases.

Sorry for the lack of postings lately.  Here is what I have been doing for the last couple of days that has kept me away from the computer.

Most of the day Thursday I was looking at apartments and roommate situations after having lunch with some friends at Dixie’s Barbeque in Bellevue.  It was good to see Mike in good spirits and apparently healthy after his bicyle wreck which resulted in seven broken bones, a punctured lung, and other injuries.

Probably the most interesting potential roommate was the room in the basement of the owner of a house in Bellevue.  This is her business.  A professional matchmaker–who is single.  Another was a travel agent who was having some difficulties because of the hurricane that wiped out a Cancan resort where a big group of his had made reservations for late November.  His comment was “You know not to make reservations during hurricane season, but who would have thought the resort would be closed for two months after the end of the season?”  Then there was the potential roommate that said, “You can hunt all the coyotes you want from the backyard.”  I would have had to watch out for:

…one llama, 2 alpaca, 3 angora goats, 1 jacob sheep, 9 indian runner ducks, 2 Cayuga ducks, 1 leonberger dog (who rarely comes inside, his job is guarding the flock/herd) and a personable, ancient cat that lives in the garage.

And those were just the animals outside the house.  I was tempted.  I grew up on a farm and it would have had some similarities to “home”.  However the commute to work was a little farther than I really wanted and I turned them down.  I have one more potential roommate to check out on Tuesday when I arrive back in the area.

I finished the visit with the last potential roommate and left the Seattle area for the long drive home at 22:00.  I got into bed with Barb at 02:38.  Barb had Friday off and after she took Xenia to school we celebrated my new job by staying in bed all day.  No time for the computer except for the reaching over the side of the bed for the laptop long enough to post the Quote of the Day while Barb was getting us something to eat from the kitchen.

Yesterday after continuing our celebration in bed until mid morning Barb and I went to Lewiston for a walk along the levees and a visit to Costco.  Barb has been reading a book on Alford Hitchcock and we watched one of his early movies before going to bed early.  Which explains why I woke up early this morning.

One of my tasks for today is to create a blog for Jason’s parents and other friends visiting him in Walter Reed to post information in.  That will be easier for them than making lots of phone calls and keeping lists of all the people than need to be on the To: line of the email.  Once I get that set up I’ll post a link here too.

I’ve got lots of other things to do too.  Lots of stuff to take care of before I head back over for my new job.  I’ll try to get in a gun related post soon.  The deadline for the latest postal rifle match is coming up soon and I still need to shoot it.  I’m thinking of going hunting, shooting the postal match, and working an the Taj Mahal tomorrow.  The Taj is in good shape now but I need to do inventory, check the battery charging system, and empty all the jugs of water (used for cleaning) before it freezes.  And if I have enough time I’ll test some targets using the .223 at long range.

Barb and I are going on vacation for a while starting Friday afternoon.  Friday is her last day of work and she has two weeks before she starts her new job. 

Barb, Xenia, and I went shopping for new camping gear yesterday. 

Our old tent had a bad zipper and we had to use duct tape to hold the door shut the last time we went camping.  So we bought a new five-man tent and a Queen size inflatable (comes with a built-in 12V pump that inflates it in 110 seconds) air-bed.  We also bought a three-man tent for Xenia to stay in.

As before the Huffman-Scott “compound” will be guarded while we are gone by the dogs, an adult child of ours trained on both rifle and pistol and access to my “arsenal”.

The old stuff had tremdous problems with spam and was no longer
supported.  The plan is to move all the old posts over to this
blog in the near future.  I’m still working on getting a theme I
like and there are lots of other things I’m trying to figure out. 
Please remain patient while I work on things.

The historical data for this site is online here. I will be importing the old entries and comments soon.
Ry

This posting at The Beagle Express about some activities at the TSA included this quote:

The federal agency in charge of aviation security collected extensive personal information about airline passengers even though Congress forbade it and officials said they wouldn’t do it, . . .

So what else is new?  The FBI used ‘Brady’ records that were supposed to have been destroyed for tracking down ‘suspected terrorists’ who had purchased guns until Ashcroft put a stop to it.  And of course there were politicians and anti-gun bigots that screamed ‘bloody-murder’ at Ashcroft’s action.

And on a more personal note I remember a conversation I had with a couple people where one person was pretty clearly breaking a law (a stupid law, but nevertheless a Federal law) as part of doing his job for a government contract.  He was concerned about doing this.  Before writing up a report where it might get noticed by someone that cared he wanted a company lawyer to review things to make sure he wasn’t going to get in trouble or that the company would take the fall rather than him personally.  A co-worker got more than a little bit annoyed at this position eventually saying, “See this badge?  This means the law doesn’t apply to us.  The people that enforce these laws are the same people that want this work done.”  I was fairly balanced in the discussion prior to that.  Both people had valid points and I helped explore those positions but when “…the law doesn’t apply to us.” came up the issue was settled as far as I was concerned.  Unless there was an exemption in the law for our activities I was the opinion my co-worker needed to be absolutely certain he would not be personally at risk if it ever became an issue.  The co-worker at risk left the company not too long after that and I never found out what happened with his project.

The point is government cannot be trusted to follow it’s own laws and regulations.  Typically there is no penalty for them if they fail to abide by the rules.  And if there is a penalty who is going to enforce the penalty?  If it’s against the rules but there aren’t any ‘teeth’ in the law people will generally ignore it.  That is why we have, as a last resort, the Second Amendment.  As George Washington (I’ll make this the quote of the day tomorrow) said:

Guns rank second in importance only to the Constitution itself.  They are our Liberty Teeth.

From the Philadelphia Daily News.  And still the reports are that airport security hasn’t improved (see also this):

SHE STARTED out very innocently, feeling the small of my back, and then ran her palms over my shoulder blades and neck, then journeyed down my spine, making small talk about the hot weather and the uniqueness of my watch.

Telling me to remove my shoes and belt, her fingers methodically worked over my lower lumbar region, cupping the cheeks of my rump and slowly tracing my thighs and knees. The back of my knees is the most ticklish part of my body, and I bit my lip and swung my arm at her to stop, due to a full bladder.

She quickly ordered me to stare ahead and keep my hands at my side as she signaled that she did not need further restraints on me. I felt her wrists taunt my inner leg and calves and prayed she wouldn’t feel my cardinal sin: not shaving my legs.

She grabbed my waist, and with her palms, traveled around my torso and pressed against my stomach. She traced the circumference of my breasts and squeezed one so hard that if I did have silicone or a baggie of cocaine stashed in there, it surely would have popped. She then ran her hands down my sides so tight she knew I had $1.74 in change in one pocket and a stick of Double Mint in the other.

No, I was not getting a really risque massage, nor was I trying out for the Ellen DeGeneres/Rosie O’Donnell team, I was the lucky recipient of being randomly screened at Philadelphia International Airport.

But the Transportation Security agent went places on me that I believe only my husband will go on our wedding night (me being a devout good Catholic girl, wink, wink) or my gynecologist. After this heavy petting session, all in the name of national security, I felt like I needed a cigarette, but they confiscated all lighters.

So after getting to third base with me, the agent hit a home run with the friend I was traveling with because she was wearing a dress. She got lucky with the security wand that poked and prodded under the dress. My friend was even told to stand with her legs apart and do lunges as the security wand got a bird’s-eye view of the female reproductive system.

Even ignoring the 4th Amendment issues it’s time to rethink the problem.

Some Democrats in eastern Oregon want a pro-gun platform for the state party.

Saying they’re tired of the gun control issue costing them defections to the GOP, Baker County Democrats voted last week to approve a platform resolution in support of gun ownership that they hope the state party will add to its platform.

The adoption came after a spirited debate over the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which reads: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

Chuck Butcher of Baker City, who crafted the county party’s resolution, said he will personally deliver it to the state party platform committee when it meets June 25 at West Linn. 

The local resolution states, in part, “The Democratic Party of Oregon resolves as follows: To recognize and support the right to keep and bear arms in Section 207 of the Oregon State Constitution and the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution as an individual right not granted by the government but rather guaranteed by the government.

“In recognition of the tremendous personal responsibility engendered by the right to keep and bear arms, the Democratic Party of Oregon further advocates severe penalties and their enforcement for criminal use or misuse of this right.”

Butcher said he wanted to submit “a clear resolution without a lot of hedging, and frame it in language that could pass overwhelmingly, if the argument is presented correctly.”

They got the part about it being a right recognized rather than granted.  I give them extra credit for that!  But I suspect their chances of getting that, as written, adopted at the state level is asymptotically close to zero.  It’s just not going to happen.  If they weasel word it a WHOLE bunch then maybe 50-50.

Thanks for trying guys.  I know you are on our side and you have to fight the battle but you are going to lose at least the first few rounds.  Keep at it.

I had no idea such a thing existed but there is a Truth Laid Bear community of Gun Bloggers–and I’m listed!  Cool.  But why is Kim du Toit almost at the bottom?  That seems really odd.

Schneier calls it surreal.  I say it’s typical of government regulations:

the FAA regulation that requires soldiers — all of whom were armed with an arsenal of assault rifles, shotguns and pistols — to surrender pocket knives, nose hair scissors and cigarette lighters.

My quote of the day for tomorrow will be applicable.

Update: The applicable quote of the day.

Saturday Barb and I drove Xenia and “Snow White” out past Elk River to the “largest tree in North America east of the Sierra-Cascade divide“ (according to the sign beside the tree).  There Xenia did a photo shoot for a photography contest.  I like #8, duplicated below, the best.

Apparently someone at work printed out and posted this blog posting from TriggerFinger on my old office door.

Anne Applebaum almost gets it right.  Right up to the very end when she should be concluding the obvious (“security screening” probably cannot ever be made to work successfully and should be abandoned) she wimps out and doesn’t face the facts she herself put forward.  But it’s close enough to get people thinking.  Here’s a taste of the good stuff:

…outside inspectors have found, over and over again, that federal screeners perform no better than the private screeners they replaced. Since they inspect only passengers and baggage, not the airport and its perimeter, they haven’t eliminated the need for other forms of law enforcement either. And even when they are doing their rather narrow job correctly, their impact is dubious.

…this mass ceremonial sacrifice of toenail clippers on the altar of security comes at an extraordinarily high price. The annual budget of the federal Transportation Security Administration hovers around $5.5 billion — just about the same price as the entire FBI — a figure that doesn’t include the cost of wasted time. De Rugy reckons that if 624 million passengers each spend two hours every year waiting in line, the annual loss to the economy comes to $32 billion.

…

But, then, this isn’t a country that has ever been good at risk analysis. If it were, we would never have invented the TSA at all. Instead, we would have taken that $5.5 billion, doubled the FBI’s budget, and set up a questioning system that identifies potentially suspicious passengers, as the Israelis do.

BINGO!!!

…

I conclude that we don’t actually want value for money. No, we want every passenger to have the chance to recite that I-packed-these-bags-myself mantra to a uniformed official before boarding an airplane. Magic words, it seems, are what make Americans feel really safe.

Yup.  You got that right.

See also my web pages on this topic.

From Schneier’s blog I found a link to a lock for your pint of Ben & Jerry’s.  Interesting enough for a blog posting all on it’s own.  But what I found even more interesting/amusing at the site was this sketch:

I’m shocked!  Is freedom making a comeback in Canada?  Does this mean we might not have to liberate them after we get done with the Mid-East?  I know–I’m getting way ahead of things here.  They still officially have their gun registration scheme and they haven’t actually reversed their downward spiral into the abyss of the most failed political system of all time, but they did have an important court ruling that may cause some serious ripples in the fabric of the ‘reality’ of socialists in both Canada and this country.  The socialists know it and even say it out loud.  Here’s the story:

In the decision of Chaoulli v. Quebec (Attorney General) that was handed down on Thursday by the Supreme Court of Canada, the court found that Quebec laws that prohibit the purchase of insurance to cover private medical treatment violated the Quebec Charter and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

The majority of the court found that waiting times in the public system violated the Quebec Charter of Rights. While it was not necessary to decide, three of the justices found that the Quebec law violates section 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights that guarantees the right to life, liberty and security of the person. The court held that delays in the public health system led to prolonged pain and suffering, deteriorating medical conditions and in some cases, death. In coming to this conclusion in what will inevitably be to the dismay of those on the political left, the Supreme Court followed its 1998 decision in R. v. Morgentaler that held that delays encountered by women seeking abortions breached section 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

The interesting aspect of the Chaoulli decision, and the one that most deviated from what politicians of all political parties have been spewing for years was the finding that this breach of a charter right was not reasonable. The court found that while the preservation of a publicly funded health care system was a substantive and legitimate government objective, the outright ban on private health care insurance had no rational connection to saving the public system and went further than was necessary to meet that objective. In the majority’s opinion, the government of Quebec failed to show that allowing Quebeckers to purchase insurance for private health care would destroy Canada’s public health care system. In reaching this conclusion the court examined other countries in the OECD such as Sweden and the U.K. that have strong public health care systems despite allowing private parallel health care services.

This finding is at odds with what the politicians have been saying for years; that not only will allowing private medical services destroy our health care system; it will destroy Canada as we know it. The entire fabric of our society will disappear. We are constantly being told that our health care system is what defines us as a country. Allow someone to actually pay for what is now a public service and we will be no different than the United States.