It's only a clue, but it's a start:

The federal agency in charge of aviation security is considering major changes in how it screens airline passengers, including proposals that an official said would lift the ban on carrying razorblades and small knives as well as limit patdown searches.

The Transportation Security Administration will meet later this month to discuss the plan, which is designed to reduce checkpoint hassles for the nation's 2 million passengers. It comes after TSA's new head, Edmund S. "Kip" Hawley, called for a broad review in hopes of making airline screening more passenger-friendly.

Someone should do some serious research into the alternatives.  It won't be the TSA, of course, because they might find out they are irrelevant or even counter productive.

Call for a cop, call for an ambulance, and call for a pizza. See who shows up first.

Jeffrey R. Snyder
A Nation of Cowards
Published in the Fall, '93 issue of The Public Interest, a quarterly journal of opinion published by National Affairs, Inc.

I failed in my primary objective last weekend.  I wanted to get hoods over the locks and hasps to comply with the ATF.  Originally they said the locks and hasps I was using were fine but now I need to put the hoods on them.  Not that big of a deal except I needed a welder out in the middle of the field.  The welder I would have used was in use since it was on the back of a service truck being used in harvest.  Harvest will be over in a couple weeks and I'll go back and finish up that task. 

What I did get done was fixing some electrical problems and properly storing more of the thousands of pounds of Ammonium Nitrate I bought.  I had stored about 1200 pounds in six garbage cans under a tarp.  I rearranged things inside the metal shed and got that down to about 600 pounds stored under the tarp.  I destroyed several yellowjacket nests inside the shed.  Put out more mice and rat poison.  And finally--I don't know how many times I have bumped my head on the overhead flourescent light.  I moved it so I can stand upright even while wearing a hat.  More pictures here.

Gun owners compromised in England and now look at things.  The anti-gun owner bigots in England can't be happy with a total ban on handguns!  Now they are going after imitation guns:

Steve Walker of GCN said "...our position is clear. If it looks like a gun it should not be allowed."

Gill Marshall-Andrews, GCN's chair, said: "No one needs a realistic imitation gun - except perhaps a re-enactment society."

GCN is Gun Control Network.  Check out their objectives.  This is what you can expect if you attempt to compromise with them.  Who could imagine that two or more people outside of a mental hospital would insist there be a "Ban on the sale, manufacture and import of imitation guns and their possession in a public place."?  Why does the newpaper consider the rantings of lunatics newsworthy?

Any fool can make a rule
And every fool will mind it.

Henry David Thoreau
(1817-62), U.S. philosopher, author, naturalist.
Journals (1906), entry for 3 Feb. 1860.

Bruce Schneier reports on a new method of airport security:

Photograph from What-the-Hack.

My thoughts on airport security.

The results from the ISPC match I shot last Sunday are in.  I'll get them posted on the Lewiston Pistol Club website soon.  I came in 4th out of 10 which is in the top half.  I'm pretty pleased considering the lack of practice.  I did best in the clasifier (DVC: Vis = Power) and came in second--four Pepper Poppers and two IPSC targets at 10 (?) yards.  I shot all the steel and got all "A's" on the paper (eight shots total) in 5.37 seconds for a hit factor of 7.4488.

People and companies in Idaho do a lot of logging and mining.  That means we probably have more than our share of ecoterrorists.  I always questioned the sanity of these people operating in the forests of Idaho.  True, your chances of getting caught out in the woods a hundred miles from the nearest police station and dozens of miles from the nearest house are pretty slim.  But that also means a vigilante has little chance of getting caught.  Particularly since they have heavy earthmoving equipment on-site.  This viewpoint was reinforced recently when I heard a rumor.  Law enforcement had been spending thousands of man hours trying to catch someone.  The ecoterrorist claims he wants to kill some cops--specifically naming a couple of them that had been assigned to his case.  The ecoterrorist uses a rifle in some of his activities against the business interest. Hence the ecoterrorist has the means and intent to kill cops.  The cops are not happy with this.  If they find him and he shows even the slightest amount of aggression they will be justified in using deadly force against him.  But he is living in the woods and it's quite likely the ecoterrorist will see them coming and be able to get off the first shot or two before being seen--if he is seen at all.  Most body armor won't stop a rifle bullet.  This far from the nearest hospital a solid hunting rifle hit to an arm or leg will probably result in death.  And it would certainly cause permanent loss of function.  The cops are not at all happy about this.  The local law enforcement officer (LEO) is rumored to have had a conversation with the target of the ecoterrorist that went something like this:

LEO: If that guy disappears and there's no evidence I have to investigate it wouldn't bother me any.
TARGET: That's what we figured.  We already got the hole dug.

Note to ecoterrorists planning to operate in Idaho forests:  Get your sanity checked.

As most readers will already know the NRA has called for a boycott on ConocoPhillips regarding their filing of Federal lawsuit against a state law prohibiting companies from firing employees who keep guns in their locked cars on company property.  In many circles this creates some mixed feelings.  Shouldn't property owners (the company/stockholders/whoever) have the right to ditictate the conditions for the use of their property?  Good question.  An Yahoo groups email list I subscribe to (WA-CCW) had this posting from a lawyer which shed some new light on the topic:

From: wa-ccw@yahoogroups.com On Behalf Of Glenn Slate
Sent: Friday, August 12, 2005 5:53 PM
Subject: Re: [wa-ccw] Has the NRA gone too far?

So here is my not so professional thought about your questions of
competing rights.  I admit it is a little unusual and unpopular right
now, but I think we all will recognize the correctness of the following
position in time.

The biggest difference here is not property rights vs. RKBA, but human
rights versus corporate rights.  Corporations are formed by the state,
they are given almost all the rights of a person, but they are not a
person.  In a competing rights situation, the corporations rights should
usually loose, as they are granted, rather than guaranteed.

A corporation is formed by an action of the state, in WA that is an act
of the Secretary of State.  WA has a state level preemption, so the
Secretary of State cannot ban CCW.  So how can the secretary of State’s
office create an entity and grant it right that the SoS office does not
itself possess?  That is to say if the Secretary is forbidden by state
law from restricting CCW in WA, how could it create a corporation and
then empower that corporation restrict CCW?

The problem with this issue becomes even more clear when you realize
that corporations need not be owned by individuals.  There is typically
no restriction on a state agency’s owning corporate stock.  So if we
allow corporation to ban CCW, couldn’t the city of Seattle for a
corporation to say  mange all it’s parks and lease the parks to that
corporation.  If they did so, could that corporation ban CCW in parks
under a private property argument?  How about to manage leased  bridges,
roads, parks, sidewalks etc.  Of course 100% of the stock would be owned
by the city, but all action would be taken by the corporation.

So the most basic (and socially disturbing) question is where did the
corporation get it’s personal property rights from?

They were granted by the state.  If the state agency could not restrict
your CCW rights, then it should not be able to grant that authority to a
corporation it formed.
Of course all this is up in the air if that state has no preemption, or
if it has a stature allowing the formation of a corporations with all
the rights of a natural person.  There will be lots of variation state
to state.

This is an entirely untested (and totally unpopular )theory, as our
culture seems to want to build corporations rather than restrict them.
  SO I strongly advice none of you to be a test case using this theory
(or any other is you can help it).

Remember I am a lawyer, but I am not your lawyer and this is most
definitely not legal advice.

--
Glenn Slate  |  mail to:gslate@emarket-group.com  | 503-445-8030
Corporate Counsel / Vice President of Client Development
eMarket Group, Ltd.  <http://www.emarket-group.com/>
eMerchandise <http://www.emerchandise.com/>

I was the first or second tank in the column that liberated a major concentration camp, Magdeburg.... There was a horror beyond the horror of all the dying I had seen. I learned a lesson that day. There are worse events than battle. When they come to take you off to the camp, fight. And people who tell you that you will be better off in the camps than resisting are not your friends.

Arthur T. Hadley
The Straw Giant, 1971

The strength of the Constitution lies entirely in the Determination of each citizen to defend it.  Only if every single citizen feels duty bound to do his share in this defense are constitutional rights secure.

Albert Einstein

I just ran across this headline as I was scanning the news:  Leading doctor says free NHS is unsustainable.

LONDON (Reuters) - The National Health Service is unsustainable and needs to be reformed, one of the country's most senior doctors said on Saturday.

In an interview with the Daily Telegraph, Bernie Ribeiro, the new president of the Royal College of Surgeons, said healthcare should be paid for through a social insurance system.

"If we're going to have a health care system suited to the future, we've got to be prepared to invest in it," he said. "I don't personally believe that can be done out of pure taxation."

Ribeiro suggested a means-tested system where the poorest would pay nothing at all and other patients would take out insurance to cover a proportion of their costs.

"We're not a poor country, the working population is reasonably well paid, we could afford our workers to make an identifiable contribution towards health care -- not one hidden in national insurance and taxation.

"We seriously need to look at this again."

The Labour party vowed during the May election to continue free care for all through the NHS, which it created in 1948.

Britons tend to be very protective and proud of the health service which employs 1.3 million workers and spends over 76 billion pounds a year.

But an independent report in June 2005 said the service faced serious financial problems through poor management and doctors and patients have repeatedly complained of long waiting lists and over crowding on many hospital wards.

Socialism--The Road to Serfdom (which was written in 1944 and intended for the British audience).  And socialized medicine is just one of the steps down that path.  At least a few people are getting a clue after nearly 50 years.  The question is, is it too late to reverse the slide into the abyss?

I'm spending today and tomorrow doing a bunch of work on my explosives magazine and possibly some tests on my explosives mixture.  I need to get things taken care of earlier this year.

Neal Boortz (the link www.vicioussob.com works too) has some Muslim jokes on his web site.  They are here and here.  Some are pretty good.  My favorites are:

From the Muslim standup comic Goffaq Yussef:

• How many Palestinians does it take to change a light bulb. None! They sit in the dark forever and blame the Jews for it!
• A Palestinian suspect was being grilled by Israeli police. "Honest, I'm not a suicide bomber," he said. "I didn't say I wanted to blow myself up so I could sleep with 72 virgins. All I said was I'm dying to get laid!"
• A Palestinian girl says to her mommy, "After Abdul blows up, can I have his room?"

Bumper stickers:

• If you don't like the way I drive, stay out of the World Trade Center
• Driver carries only $20 worth of C4
• My kid and YOUR money go to Gitomo Bay.
• My 12-year-old can blow up your honor student

If it ever becomes time to shoot someone, shoot early and shoot often.

Greg Hamilton
Self Defense Instructor
Nov. 19, 1995

Gun shows hold a particular appeal for the pro-gun fringe... While McVeigh and Koresh may be two of the best known gun show customers, they are other lesser known but equally discomforting attendees. According to the January 23, 1995 issue of National Review, convicted serial killer Thomas Dillon began his murderous career by killing more than 500 dogs and cats, then moved on to humans allegedly killing at least five men. In 1989 he announced to a friend that he had quit killing animals and began inviting the friend to attend gun shows with him.

From the July 1996 Violence Policy Center study Gun Shows in America:
Tupperware® Parties for Criminals.
See: http://www.vpc.org/fact_sht/gunshow.htm
[Bigots spouting off--Joe]

I meant to post this story the night (two days ago) it happened but I got distracted and then forgot.  I sometimes give Xenia a bad time about being a klutz, which she isn't really.  But there have been a couple of incidents with milk and then the time she walked into a support post in the grocery store that might lead one to think otherwise.  She tells the milk stories.  This last time I ended up taking a quick shower and changing all my clothes--from my socks to my shirt.  Everyone else at the table escaped every drop.

I subscribe to the Gun Guys email list and get rants about how terrible guns are on a regular basis.  Most of the time it's just pathetic, bigoted, ignorant blather.  However todays rant includes part of a recent CCRKBA news release.   Even when it's spelled out for them these clowns just don't get it:

Howdy Partners,

We told you on Tuesday about the police chiefs of Wisconsin standing up with the Wisconsin Anti-Violence Effort against the proposed concealed weapons bill there.  Great cops like Oregon Police Chief Doug Pettit have been telling America what most of us already know: that allowing concealed weapons on the streets is dangerous for both cops and citizens.

It's all the more disheartening, then, when out of the woodwork comes a group like the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms attempting to undercut the police chiefs' message.  In a press release on a conservative site MichNews.com, CCRKBA's executive director, Joe Waldron, tries to infer that Wisconsin's police chiefs don't know what they're talking about:

"Wisconsin residents," Waldron said, "certainly deserve to be on equal footing with armed criminals, because police can't be everywhere. Glibly arguing that only police should have guns ignores the fact that criminals prefer victims who can't fight back... Gun owners will tell you that a place where only police have guns is a police state. Wisconsin is still part of the United States."

"Police state" hyperbole aside, Waldron hints that the Wisconsin chiefs are attempting to ban guns from citizens' hands.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  What police chiefs have been saying all week, throughout Wisconsin, is that they're against concealed weapons on the streets.  The gun lobby is currently pushing for a bill to "outsource" public safety by taking the concealed weapon permit process away from law enforcement and putting it into the hands of private companies.  They want to allow concealed weapons in hospitals, places that serve alcohol, and even children's sporting events!  That's what the police chiefs in Wisconsin are urging lawmakers against.  They, like many citizens, are concerned about the safety of both police and residents, and know that concealed weapons will only make matters worse.

Instead of listening to the experience of these knowledgeable officers, however, Waldron chooses to attack their judgement and suggest that the opposite of what they're telling us is true.  Thanks, CCRKBA, but no thanks.

The worst that can be said from a scientific analysis of the data is that citizens carrying concealed weapons doesn't improve citizen safety and most studies show improvement in safety when the potential victims are allowed the tools most effective in defending themselves.  The clueless don't care about scientific data.  They are only interested in a small subset of opinions--the opinions that match their bigoted viewpoint of the world.

First off, does anyone have an email address or website for him?  I can't seem to find one. 

Second, while searching for an email address I found this speech by him.  It was from this speech I pulled todays quote.  I have often commented about anti-gun owner bigots and have praised others that use that term against the anti-freedom crowd.  Kates, in his speech, spells it out for us better than anyone else I have come across.  A sample:

... the gun control debate is not really about criminology but rather about bigotry and the effort of an influence group to force its morality on everyone by having it adopted as state and federal law. To see this it is necessary only to review some unfamiliar facts: the average gun owner is better educated and has a better job than non-owners; attitude surveys find gun owners neither racist nor sexist; liberals are only somewhat less likely than others to own firearms; liberals who do are no less willing to use them to defend their families; the only violence gun owners endorse is willingness to come to the aid of crime victims. Gun owners do not approve of police brutality, violence against dissenters, etc. Also, good Samaritans who actually come to the aid of crime victims are twice as likely to be gun owners as the general populace.

Though these facts have been uniformly established by numerous sociological studies, they will doubtless surprise you almost as much as they would the anti-gun movement and the media. After all the former (which is actually a gun BAN movement), with the enthusiastic aid of the media, have succeeded in stereotyping gun owners as violence-oriented yahoos -- educationally, intellectually and morally retarded.

There is a word for people who inaccurately, unjustly ascribe negative characteristics to a whole group of others they dislike: that word is BIGOT.

You may not realize it but the language we use in our fight for freedom has a huge impact.  As Kevin at The Smallest Minority posted a couple days ago the mindset and world view are dependent upon the language we use.  If we let our opponents define the terms (think "assault weapons", "sniper rifles", "gun safety regulations", etc.) we will lose.  We must define ourselves and our opponents.  Our opponents are bigots.  It's demonstrably true.  Don't let them or anyone else forget it.

The gun control debate is not really about criminology but rather about bigotry.

Don Kates
Constitutional lawyer and criminologist
July 2, 1994
http://www.hoboes.com/pub/Firearms/Essays/Don%20Kates/Don%20Kates%20at%20Sacramento%20Rally

My son James and I have been eagerly awaiting the release of Serenity--now scheduled for September 30th.  There is a new trailer out.

In the meantime we have been watching Stargate SG-1 on DVD.  We finished up season one a couple days ago and just finished something like episode 10 on season two.  I saw Stargate in the theater years ago and wasn't all that impressed.  It just didn't deliver on the potential for some reason.  When James brought home the series I was skeptical but the first couple of episodes got things straightened out pretty good and other than the one glaring problem of everyone speaking English throughout the universe it's pretty good.  We are enjoying it.

The other night Barb and I were coming back from a walk and just as the sun was going down we saw some amazing clouds in the sky.  I called Xenia, told her to grab her camera, go outside, and look to the west.  Here is her story.  Here is one of the pictures:

I spent about 20 minutes on the phone with a newspaper reporter this morning.  He is getting background information for the PNNL story. 

There is lots of other related stuff going on as well which I can't really talk about it at this time.  I will say this though, I recently got an email from someone at PNNL who said in part, "Stay the course. There's a lot of people behind you."

If anybody is an authority on lethal car crashes it would be Ted Kennedy.

Alan Gottlieb
Second Amendment Foundation
Referring to a report from MSNBC that "more officers are being killed in traffic accidents" than by guns and Kennedy's desire for more gun control to protect the police.
http://www.saf.org/viewpr.asp?id=157

When I went to work for Microsoft, on contract, back in '95 I wrote video drivers for Direct X.  My friend Eric Engstrom did the hiring but it was for a position where I reported to Craig Eisler.  As I posted yesterday Eric just sold his most recent company, Wildseed, to AOL.  I didn't know it, but one of the people involved in the sale at AOL was--Craig Eisler.  Details here but the interesting portion to me is this:

Even before the deal, the ties between Wildseed and AOL were clear. AOL, based in Dulles, Va., recently appointed Craig Eisler to the position of AOL Wireless general manager and senior vice president.

And if you want to know even more about these characters read the book Renegades of the Empire.  It's a fascinating book, but then I was there for it and saw things from the inside looking out.  And the stories in the book that you might think were too wild be to true have actually been distorted in such a way to make them more tame than they really were.  In reality there were far more wild stories to be told such as when I reported a serious bug I had found to Craig and he kicked a hole in the wall.  Or the motorcycle peeling out in the hallway--melting a hole in the carpet.  Or the "less than legal" fireworks display on the Microsoft campus  (I had NOTHING to do with that!  This is readily determined from the fact there were no windows broken, no craters, and no mushroom shaped clouds).  Or one morning about 2:00 AM hearing, in the next hallway over, cursing, pounding, and what sounded like the tinkling of shattered glass (it was the falling keys from the keyboard Craig was pounding against desk).  Or when the "man with a gun" showed up to visit his ex-girlfriend in a different building Craig decided my office was a good place to visit--never mind that it was against the rules for anyone to have a gun on campus and there was little I could have done to protect anyone from someone with a gun.

I even have a Craig Eisler quote in my quote database:

NO!  END OF DISCUSSION!  SHUT THE FUCK UP!!!!

Craig Eisler
Microsoft Software Development Lead
August 1995
(Yelling at a contract programmer who wanted to add hundreds of lines of new code to a project after a code freeze and wouldn't take "no" for an answer).

And no, I wasn't the programmer he was yelling at.

And another quote from that same era:

I would have gone postal... but I didn't have enough ammo.

Josh Baker
August 26, 1996
Explaining why he decided to take a two week vacation in Greece.

He said that in a manner which could have been taken as a joke, but it also could have been taken as something other than a joke.  I had been to the range with Josh and his shooting skills were not particularly good but they don't need to be if you are just going to be blasting away at "fish in a barrel".  About two weeks after Josh returned from vacation he was fired--I was at a state of high alert for a month or so until I knew he had found another job. 

Yes, there was a lot of stress there in those days but I thrive on stress and my first few years at Microsoft were among the happiest and most exciting of my time in corporate America.

I've often wondered about and even done some research into why the targets of the Nazi genocide didn't put up more resistance.  I forget the exact numbers and my book (I think the title is Hitlers Willing Executioners) that has it is still packed away with my other stuff from PNNL but one group of about 500 "policemen" went through Eastern Europe rounding up Jews, forcing them to dig trenches, strip, and then shooting them.  They murdered something like 16,000 Jews in six months before suffering their first two casualties.  And those were from non-Jewish Polish partisans!  What in the world was going on in the minds of the victims?  Couldn't they find any type of weapon?  Okay, access to firearms was difficult, we learned a lesson there and it won't happen here, but weren't there any axes, pitchforks, gasoline, matches, or table legs?  These thugs killed every Jew in the next town over, they were going to kill every Jew in this and the next 20 towns.  So why didn't they at least slow them down, make them find replacements, and increase the resource costs to implement their evil?  Even if the kill ratio was 1:100 thousands of lives would have been saved.

This article give the best explanation I have come across.  There was some violent resistance and the article examines what the necessary conditions were such that resistance occurred:

For a Jew caught up in the Holocaust, there were many factors to consider when deciding on a course of action. For an individual considering armed, violent resistance, these included:

• Concern for family members and dependants: all those close to a fighter would be put at risk by his (or her) actions.
• Access to arms­: how is one to fight the Germans? Some sort of weapon is necessary, and would have to be acquired.
• Hope for an easy solution: many believed that their situation would be resolved by itself, and thus to risks one’s life fighting was needless.
• Respected leadership: ­from both a practical and psychological view, fighting back required leaders to organize and encourage individuals.
• Motivation: be it survival, revenge, or informing the world of the Nazi actions, a goal was essential for a would-be fighter.

By investigating the relative importance of these factors in several instances of armed Jewish resistance, it should become clearer what was required for the average victim to resort to violence.

The article does a good job of briefly exploring these factors and gives examples of Jewish resistance I was previoiusly unaware of (one example I was aware of isn't mentioned but the conditions there were somewhat unique).

Another factor, which a reader emailed me years ago and I can't find right now, was that the mindset of people in Germany and Europe in general is much different than that in American and extremely different from that of the gun owners here.  "Authority" was (and probably still is) respected far, far more there than it is here.  If someone in a uniform, carrying a gun or not, gives you an order then you obey.  The concept of an illegal order was out of intellectual and cultural reach.

The article concludes with content which, to me, seems incomprehensible that it needs to be said.  But for someone with a totally alien mindset from mine I suppose it needs to be articulated:

The Holocaust provides several compelling examples of such salvation through violence. The death camp of Belzec operated without significant hindrance until it was closed for a lack of victims to burn after engulfing an estimated 600,000 victims.  After its final trainload of deportees was gassed and cremated, the Jewish staff laborers were shot dead.  To this day, only a handful of prisoners are known to have escaped Belzec alive. One significant difference between Belzec and its sister death camp, Treblinka, is that the killing at Treblinka ceased long before it ran out of victims. The prisoners of Treblinka rose up with arms and were able to escape and burn most of the camp to the ground. Not only were several score of prisoners able to survive to fight on as partisans and bear witness of their tribulations, but they ended the murders at Treblinka. The camp was never rebuilt in the wake of their revolt. The same is true for the extermination camp of Sobibor after the prisoners broke out of the camp, it was shut down. The revolts of the prisoners in both camps were the direct cause of their closure. It is clear that without these rebellions, Jews, Gypsies, and other German "undesirables" would have continued to be executed for weeks to come in these places.

...

A final, and oft overlooked outcome of the revolts was the reclamation of simple human dignity by the fighters. The individuals incarcerated in the camps of the German extermination system died deliberately starved, beaten, helpless and dehumanized. They were subjected to the most brutal of tortures and the most degrading of conditions. No human being deserves to die in such a state. To fight back gave them the opportunity to have a hand in their fate; it gave them back the dignity that is the essence of being human.

See also my posting "Why Boomershoot?"

This is the second posting with a Jewish theme in as many days.  Some of it is coincidence but also I'm reading Harry Turtledove's book In the Presence of Mine Enemies.  This is an alternate history where the Nazis won WW II and exterminated all but a few Jews who are "hiding" in plain sight.  The book is a bit slow and there are too many bridge games but because this has been a long term topic of interest for me I am enjoying the book.

Yeah.  I know.  My blog and nearly all my websites went down a little after 7:00 PDT.  It was the connection my ISP has with Sprint.  I'm on the same side of the break as my websites so I can update as desired but only about half the people in Moscow Idaho can view them.  Heavy sigh... at least my income (my wife just went off to her second day of work at her new job) isn't dependent on having connectivity like some people.

Update: From my ISP:

9:42 update.  A fiber optic cable is cut between here and Potlatch. 

We came back online about 11:15.

A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight.

Henry David Thoreau
(1817-62), U.S. philosopher, author, naturalist.
On the Duty of Civil Disobedience (1849).

I didn't know this, in part because I'm oblivious to many things like this, but the NRA President is Jewish.  No, I'm not so oblivious to have not noticed that she is also a woman.