An explosion may be defined as a loud noise accompanied by the sudden going away of things from the places where they were before.

Joseph Needham
Science and Civilization in China

His alternator did something odd while he was delivering the Tannerite.  It probably had something to do with the Duke's of Hazard type driving across the creek or out through the scab patch to the Taj Mahal.  Anyway, about 1:30 AM this morning he made it back to Redmond and posted a summary of his lazy Sunday.

The tank, the B-52, the fighter-bomber, the state-controlled police and military are the weapons of dictatorship. The rifle is the weapon of democracy. If guns are outlawed, only the government will have guns. Only the police, the secret police, the military. The hired servants of our rulers. Only the government -- and a few outlaws. I intend to be among the outlaws.

Edward Abbey
The Right to Arms
[New York, 1979]

Kim didn't show up on time and was some place other than her house because of some dispute with her roommate or her roommate's boyfriend or the seven cats or some such thing.  We couldn't even find her.  She left her cell phone in our living room so we couldn't call her.  This was very much unlike Kim and I was worried about her.  James has spent the night and of course Xenia was her so the three of us picked up Sara and left nearly 40 minutes later than we planned.  I asked Barb to keep calling people and asking about Kim.  Kim called about 12 minutes later.  She was very apologetic. Someone had borrowed the cell phone she had borrowed to use an alarm.  It was in another room and no one heard it go off or had turned it off.  I told her to just meet us there.  We arrived on site and found the ground wet and very soft.  I nearly got stuck going through the wrong part of the creek on the way to the Taj Mahal. The creek was completely dry five weeks ago.  We starting setting up.  Xenia and Sara pounded the stakes in the ground.  James and I setting up to make explosives.  Kim showed up still in her pajamas.  She hadn't even gone to the bathroom yet this morning and she had her toothbrush and toothpaste with her.  She and I went to my parents place to get ten gallons of gasoline for the fireballs and we both used the bathroom.  Dad wanted to show me the new tractor and so I lost another five minutes there.  We got back to the Taj Mahal and still had more setup to do.  It probably took another 30 minutes before we actually started making targets.  We are at least an hour behind what I had planned.  Kim forgot to take her medicine and had to walk back to her car and walk back out again, we were probably 20 minutes without her.  Once she came back however she really cranked out the targets.  If it hadn't been for her we would have been very, very late getting the targets done.  As it was we were about 20 minutes later than what I had told Dave.

I did the shooters meeting while Kim took Xenia and Sara to my parents place then came back to blow the air horn for the ceasefires.  Xenia and Sara had homework to do and had their jobs completed.  Dave and ten others set up and started shooting.  After ten or fifteen shots a boomer detonated.  It wasn't as powerful as I expected.  People started saying they were hitting them without getting a detonation.  I was worried.  Something wasn't right.  We called a ceasefire and James, Kim, and I examined the targets.  There was a problem.  They were getting solid hits without detonations.  A closer examination showed why.  We took apart each target, while crouched in the mud, fixed the problem and remounted the box on the stakes.  The wasn't something Kim or James had done wrong while packaging the material.  They did it exactly as I had told them.  It was one of those things you never would have thought of until you did the tests.  Moving the targets 300 yards and a few hours in the space time continuum had screwed us.  I'm so incredibly glad we did this real world test three weeks before the big event. We only had 50 targets we needed to rework while 11 people were waiting on us rather than 600+.targets while there was 100 people waiting.  The boomers started going boom.  Frequently there would be 'smoke' (water vapor actually and powdered lime) from multiple boomers in the air at once.  They eventually stopped shooting about 15:30.  They said all the targets were gone.  James, Kim, and I started setting up the fireball targets.  There were still several targets left.  Some completely untouched. This is tyipcal.  It's tough to see everything from 375 yards away.  Dave and his gang drove across the bridge and walked out to the target line. They lined up about 25 yards from the berm and I ignited 11 flares behind the 11 gallons of gas behind the 11 reactive targets.  If you look closely in this picture (click on the picture to get a hires version) you can see the flares.  In this next picture the hot spots have grown some:

The second guy from the right is dodging some material that came back his way.  Kim said she got hit with some dirt.  Everytime we have shot stuff up close she gets hit with something.  Always before it was a prill of ammonium nitrate.  No AN prill this time but at least she has her 100% hit record intact.  There were lots of big grins on the people's faces when they left.  A couple of them signed up for the event on May 1.

The complete photo album of the adventure is here.  Click on the pictures to get a larger version.

Ry showed up as we were almost comletely done with clean up.  He was delivered some Tannerite.  We did some very quicky tests and found it was no more senstive to impact than our mix and couldn't really tell it apart in terms of power.  It's far, far more expensive however.  It's a binary explosive and can be shipped via UPS so it's a great product for a lot of people but it's not a market I want to get into with our mix which has four ingredients.  Ry's alternator light came on just as we were about to leave at 18:00 and he still had 8 hours of driving ahead of him as he has to go back to Redmond and Microsoft tonight.  He figured he could make it to Moscow on his battery and figure out things there.  I brought the kids back to a nice meal Barb had prepared for us.

I'm tired and it's been a long day.  Enjoy the pictures and start planning a Boomershoot for your future.

The weather forecast (Orofino which is a little warmer) is fantastic. 

High 64° F
Maximum RealFeel® 73° F
RealFeel Shade® 65° F
Winds SE at 1 mph
Wind Gusts 2 mph
Maximum UV 5
Thunderstorm Probability 0%
Amount of Precipitation 0.00 in
Amount of Rain 0.00 in
Amount of Snow 0 in
Hours of Precipitation 0
Hours of Rain 0

Gusts of 2 MPH.  There have been boomershoots where the wind never went below 10 MPH.

The van is packed, I'm ready to go.  Pictures and report sometime after we get back.

I feel the earth move under my feet
I feel the sky tumbling down
I feel my heart start to trembling
...

Carole King
I Feel The Earth Move
From the album Tapestry
[Today is a Boomershoot Adventure day]

You will never succeed in getting at the truth if you think you know, ahead of time, what the truth ought to be.

Marchette Chute

Those of you already signed up for Boomershoot 2005 should have the email about this, but for those that haven't signed up I'll mention it here and when I get around to it put it on the Boomershoot 2005 web page too.  Stephanie has arranged for a group dinner on Saturday night, April 30th.  The plan is that this year we will have all the targets made earlier and we be able to sit down and have a nice dinner with everyone the evening before we crater the field and shake up houses for miles.  Of course if it's anything like most years I'll be back on site building targets again later than night. I'm also going to give a little speech titled Past, Present, Future: Boomershoot and Freedom.  I don't have much more than the title so far but I figure I can start work on it “real soon now”.  I'll put the details of the dinner up on the web site soon so spectators (we have spectators drive as far as 350 miles some years) can RSVP and attend as well.

I haven't posted it on the web site yet but another three shooting positions have been taken.  The reduces it to 13 shooting positoins still available.  I'm receiving about one call or email each day asking if there are positions still available so I expect there will be less than ten by next weekend.

Florida's bill, soon to become law, which explicitly says you may use deadly force to defend yourself from serious injury or death is being called a “right to murder” bill by the anti-freedom people:

"It's literally mind-boggling in its audacity," said Arthur Hayhoe of Wesley Chapel, president of the Florida Coalition to Stop Gun Violence. "If I make a mistake, all I have to do is repeat the NRA's magic words: "I feel threatened.' " I call this the "right-to-murder' bill."

I suspect the real problem is that Mr. Hayhoe is feeling threatened.  After this law has been in effect for a couple of years and the crime statistics come in he will loose all traction with the population at large.  He will be like the crazy guy predicting the end of the world on the street corner.  No one will pay him any attention and that will be a very uncomfortable position to be in.  And of course after making these crazy predictions of the end of the world and being proved wrong he will make even more predictions and push his crazy, disproven viewpoint even more.  It must really suck to be an anti-freedom fighter these days.

First thing this morning I made contact with someone willing to provide hundreds of live bodies for “human subject testing” at minimal cost for one of my research projects.  That's very encouraging.  Then a few minutes ago I got a call from the repair shop--the cost of the van repair is under $2000 including tax.  Still painful but will be able to expand my diet beyond the lentils and potatoes from the farm I was envisioning.

And finally the weather forecast for Sunday, and the Boomershoot Adventure is good.

Talk about slavery! It is not the peculiar institution of the South.  It exists wherever men are bought and sold, wherever a man allows himself to be made a mere thing or a tool, and surrenders his inalienable rights of reason and conscience. Indeed, this slavery is more complete than that which enslaves the body alone. . . . I never yet met with, or heard of, a judge who was not a slave of this kind, and so the finest and most unfailing weapon of injustice. He fetches a slightly higher price than the black men only because he is a more valuable slave.

Henry David Thoreau
(1817-62)
U.S. philosopher, author, naturalist.
Journals (1906), entry for 4 Dec. 1860.

I worked late to get in a few extra hours and when I left work at 20:00, I could only count seven cars in the entire parking lot (probably 500 or so workers use the lot each day).  I was thinking how different “government work“ is from when I worked at Microsoft.  There I would see the lot a quarter full at midnight and probably 10% full at 2:00 AM.  When I got in the rental car (the van is at the repair shop) I discovered the power locks didn't work.  Odd... maybe I need to have the key on.  Nope.  The engine needs to be started?  The engine won't start--the battery was dead.  Stupid me.  I had left the headlights on.  What are my chances of finding one of those seven car owners someplace in the 500 offices and has jumper cables?  Not good.  Probably some of those cars were left there overnight with the owners on travel or otherwise not within miles of the parking lot.  I called Jason's cell phone.  Jason lives about 15 minutes away.  It immediately went to voice mail.  I checked for his home phone number and realize I don't have it on my cell phone.  I go back to my office and look it up.  Jason was far more cheerful than I have any right to deserve.  It's probably a good thing Jason answered rather than his wife Jennifer.  Jennifer is home all day with four small kids and I'm sure she values adult company and Jason's help with the kids.  I'm stealing him away from her.

Jason showed up, gave my rental car a jump, and I drove back to the house.  I should just go to bed before something else goes wrong today.

When I arrived at work in Richland this morning my computer had rebooted.  Bad news since I had a job running that takes about a week to complete with no ability to restart at an intermediate point.  It was a little over half done when the power went out for several hours.  Even if I had a cheap UPS on it I would have been screwed.

I took the van in to have some work done on it.  The brake fluid was low and I figured they needed new pads in front and lining in the rear-maybe the rotors needed to be turned too.  The throttle was sticking some and the temperature never went above 155F.  When I dropped it off they said approximately $250.  Not bad.

I got a call a little while ago.  Bad news.  In addition to the things I already knew about I have some leaky seals and hoses that need to be replaces, the transmission needs to be flushed, and the rear brake cylinders need to be replaced.  Total damage estimate is $2400.  Plus, they can't get all the work done today and which means I can't go home until tomorrow night instead of tonight as planned.

The good news is that when I called Barb to tell her the news she told me Hewlett Packard is taking James out for dinner tonight.  He's interviewing for a summer intern job.  He has had a number of disappointments with rejections from Microsoft, Google, and others.  He is a junior with a 4.0 grade average in computer science and you would think he shouldn't have a problem getting a good summer job--but things are a little bit tighter that expected.

Email and a followup call result in a “date” to go to the range near where I will be staying in Albuquerque.  It goes out to 600 meters so I'll take my boomershoot rifle.  I am told to expect it to be hot, dry, dusty, and lots of sand.  I'll need to pack my sunscreen.

In business, your ego is the first hostage you need to shoot.

Chris Phillips
President
Chromium Communications
Sometime in 2000
[Comment by Joe: This was said regarding the need to remove your emotions from the making of good decisions. It applies to politics, science, and home life as much or more as business.]

The Florida legislature passed a bill that basically says you can use deadly force when confronted with deadly force.  Previously the law said you must first try to retreat before you can use deadly force to defend yourself.  The way new reports put a spin on this is interesting.  First is from Agence France-Presse worldwide agency via Yahoo:

Florida eyes allowing residents to open fire whenever they see threat

MIAMI (AFP) - Florida's legislature has approved a bill that would give residents the right to open fire against anyone they perceive as a threat in public, instead of having to try to avoid a conflict as under prevailing law. 

Outraged opponents say the law will encourage Floridians to open fire first and ask questions later, fostering a sort of statewide Wild West shootout mentality. Supporters argue that criminals will think twice if they believe they are likely to be promptly shot when they assault someone.

Republican Governor Jeb Bush, who has said he plans to sign the bill, says it is "a good, commonsense, anti-crime issue."

Current state law allows residents to "shoot to kill if their property, such as their home or car, is invaded by an unknown assailant."

But it also states that if a resident is confronted or threatened in a public place, he or she must first try to avoid the confrontation or flee before taking any violent step in self defense against an assailant.

The bill, supported by the influential National Rifle Association, was approved by both houses of the Republican-run legislature on Tuesday.

Compare that to The Tallahassee Democrat:

House passes self-defense bill

Measure heads to Bush, who says he'll sign

By Bill Cotterell

DEMOCRAT POLITICAL EDITOR

The House voted overwhelmingly Tuesday for a self-defense bill aimed at letting armed citizens "stop violent crime in its tracks," removing the legal presumption that people should back away from deadly confrontations if they can.

Gov. Jeb Bush said he will sign the measure (SB 436) when it reaches his desk. He said some early concerns among state attorneys and law-enforcement agencies had been worked out in the legislative process.

Some urban Democrats offered a series of ill-fated amendments on the House floor, trying to limit the bill to people in their homes and cars. Rep. Dan Gelber, D-Miami Beach, futilely argued that allowing deadly force in a barroom brawl or street confrontation would result in innocent bystanders getting killed or maimed.

"For a House that talks about the culture of life, it is ironic that we are devaluing life as we are in this bill," Gelber said. "It legalizes dueling. It legalizes fighting to the point of death, without anybody having a duty to retreat."

But Rep. Dennis Baxley, R-Ocala, said the bill would allow people only to use "appropriate" force.

"You can only do what somebody does to you," Baxley said. "What this does is allow law-abiding citizens to stop violent crime in its tracks."

The bill's protection would not apply to robbers, drug dealers or anyone else who might claim self defense while using a gun to defend a criminal activity. Shooting at police who properly identify themselves while entering a home or removing a driver from a car would also not be protected under the bill.

Passage was never in doubt. Overwhelming majorities in both chambers co-sponsored the bill, and the proposal cleared the Senate unanimously last week. The House voted 94-20 on it, with Reps. Loranne Ausley, D-Tallahassee, Curtis Richardson, D-Tallahassee, and Will Kendrick, D-Carrabelle, all voting for it.

Baxley said members of the Florida Cabinet, the Florida Sheriffs Association, Police Chiefs Association and Florida Police Benevolent Association supported the bill. To speed the measure to Bush, the House substituted the Senate-passed version by Sen. Durrell Peaden, R-Crestview, for Baxley's identical House bill.

Rep. Irv Slosberg, D-Boca Raton, warned that the bill "will possibly turn the state of Florida into the O.K. Corral." Rep. Joyce Cusack, D-DeLand, asked members to "think of the message that we are sending our children - that if you feel threatened, you can kill someone."

But supporters of the bill said the same arguments were heard in the late 1980s, when Florida adopted a law allowing law-abiding residents to get concealed-weapon permits. Despite predictions that crime would increase, backers of the new bill said the law has not resulted in wild shootouts.

"I think this bill values life," said Rep. Don Brown, R-Defuniak Springs. "It values my life when some criminal tries to impose his will on me."

Rep. Bill Galvano, R-Bradenton, said police and prosecutors could still apprehend people who use unreasonable force. "What is being removed is the duty to retreat," he said.

Bush said "we vetted the bill" and he was satisfied that it would not make Florida a dangerous place to live.

"I'm comfortable that the bill is a bill that relates to self-defense," Bush said. "It's a good common-sense, anti-crime issue."

Interesting, huh? The French press tries it's best to present the (soon to be) law as shoot first and don't worry about answering questions ever. It's not that at all. It reflects the reality of violent confrontations. They are fast as well as violent. You don't have time to think or look around for a means of retreat. The aggressor chooses the time and place of the attack they are not going to give you realistic options to submission--unless you bring those options, such as a handgun, to the encounter unbeknownst to them.

Of course this reminds me of a joke about the French military:

Q: Do you know the most common injury in the French military?
A: Sunburned armpits.

I'll be attending a class Thursday and Friday.  I'll be staying near the airport but will have a car.  Anyone want to get together sometime and “chew the fat”?  Thursday night is taken but I arrive about 15:00 on Wednesday with nothing to do until Thursday morning.  Friday evening is also available.

There is something about invading a person's cranial vault that takes the fight out of them.

Greg Hamilton
Self Defense Instructor
Oct 26, 1996

The Second Amendment Foundation just released the results of a Zogby poll.

Asked whether they agreed or disagreed that banning guns would reduce the threat from terrorists, respondents to the poll disagreed by a margin of 75 percent. Only one in five respondents supported the notion, and five percent were not sure. Zogby polled 1,009 likely voters chosen at random nationwide with a margin error of plus/minus 3.2 percent. Polling occurred between March 30 and April 1.

...

“It’s been pretty clear for a long time,” Gottlieb observed, “that gun grabbers don’t have a clue. All they want to do is take guns away from people, any guns, all guns, and they don’t care how much blood they dance through or how much false hysteria they spread to get the job done.

...

“America,” he said, “has finally awakened to what is essentially a one-note campaign being waged against their gun rights. Present anti-gunners with a problem and their only solution is to take guns away from law-abiding citizens. Well, that’s not a solution, it’s a sham. Whatever else terrorists happen to be, they are criminals, and you do not stop criminals by disarming their intended victims. Average Americans have figured this out, and we can only wonder why the gun control crowd hasn’t.”

Ry came across this awsome picture.  From the status of the earthwork and the ground cover I'm thinking it was taken in the spring of 2004 sometime after the first week of May (when we cut down a tree that isn't visible in the picture).

I do believe that where there is a choice only between cowardice and violence, I would advise violence.  Thus when my eldest son asked me what he should have done had he been present when I was almost fatally assaulted in 1908, whether he should have used his physical force which could and wanted to use, and defend me, I told him it was his duty to defend me even by using violence.

Mohandas K. Gandhi
Young India
Aug. 11, 1920
quoted in Louis Fischer(editor) The Essential Gandhi
pp. 156-57