It bugs me every time I hear it or see it in print, but I haven't been able to articulate it.  I will try anyway:

I do not want (nor could I ever believe it would be possible) for someone in government to "keep me  safe".  I feel all icky whenever a politician, or anyone else, but especially a politician, tries  to assure us that they're working hard to "keep us safe".  I liked Joe's title to a post on June 24th ("Help Kill Terrorists") because it more clearly and directly addresses the job at hand.

When our president, blowhard senator du jour, or DC culture kool-aid drinker talks about "public  safety" I feel a lot like I did after a middle-aged man approached me at a Spokane, WA city park  when I was around 7 years old.  He asked me if I wanted to earn five dollars.  "OK" I said,  whereupon he led me to the restrooms and asked to see my underwear.  I dashed right out of there of  course, and never forgot the lesson: Someone you should be able to trust can turn out to be a predatory scumbag who sees you as nothing more than a means to his self gratification.

So here's the deal.  I DO NOT want to be kept "safe" by my government.  Letting them try is far too dangerous.  I want my kids to feel reasonably safe, sure, and aware of their surroundings at the same time, but that is my responsibility and mine alone.  It is not the government's job to make us "safe".  It is the government's job to be there to retaliate when someone violates our rights, and to make it known that the retaliation will be sure and swift.  To value human rights is to demonstrate intolerance for human rights violations.

In the best of circumstances you are going to be exposed to many risks (some of the richest lives are full of risks) and guess what; you are still going to die.  Its what we DO WITH OUR LIVES that matters, and for that we need maximum Liberty.  Living in a padded room in solitary confinement might be considered "safe" but somehow I doubt that is what the Founders of this Republic had in mind when they wrote the Bill of Rights.

When it comes to terrorism I want one thing and one thing only--  I want the Jihadi sons of bitches to die.  That is all.  I want them, and anyone who supports them, hunted down, shot (or bombed, etc.) and left to die in the dirt.  Let their countrymen clean up the mess, too-- that's not our job.  That killing the jihadis might make a few of us more "safe" is a side benefit.  Liberty and Justice are the aim here, and they're not the same thing as safety.  They are very different, though slightly overlapping, concepts that should never be confused.

Meanwhile, I will not be trying to delude myself into believing that I am ever safe, either from the jihadi idiots, or from politicians trying to chip away at my rights for their self gratification.

I want to live in a civilized, polite society.  I do NOT want to live in a society with barriers, checkpoints, restrictions, surveillance, or some dipshit walking up to me and demanding, "papers please" no matter how "safe" a few deluded individuals might feel, and no matter how important it makes a politician or a woman in uniform feel.

So, Mister politician, lay off the talk about "safety" and start talking Liberty.  You couldn't take the danger out of life even if you genuinely tried.  I want to you to protect our Liberty, and though there may be some overlap with safety, Liberty is a very different and far more precious thing.  It is the American way, and as much as you might like to forget it, you are sworn to it.

I think the slogan for the web site, American Snipers, then, should read: "Help real snipers get the real gear they need to kill more terrorists more efficiently."  I like that.

I think people have the right to bear arms at a hunting reserve. But you're not hunting deer with semi-automatic weapons. We're going to keep protesting until America becomes more conscious of the domestic terrorism allowed by guns.

Rev. Jesse Jackson
Arrest motivates Jackson to fight for gun control
[Interesting. I've read the 2^nd Amendment many times, as well as several state constitutions. It's only been in recent years, and in just a few states, that I've seen any mention of a right to hunt. Jackson must be living in some other reality. But I suppose it could depend on his definition of "hunting reserve". If you define "hunting reserve" as all 50 states with no bag limits on government employees then he is in line with the true meaning of the 2^nd Amendment.--Joe]

I think they should be charged with 18 USC 241 as well, but at least it is a start:

The Rev. Jesse Jackson was arrested over the weekend at a demonstration at a Chicago area gun shop, while calling for stricter gun laws. Jackson was charged with criminal trespass to property.

Ry has been telling me about the equipment deficiencies of our snipers in the sandbox and I had been meaning to blog about this for while. Kevin's post reminded me. American Snipers appears to be a very efficient way of getting needed equipment and supplies directly to the people that will, as their home page says, "Help real snipers get the real gear they need to help keep us safe."

If you want to help deliver a 168 grain message to terrrorists this (or this) seems to be one of the easiest and most efficient ways to do it.

What the left does not get about the 2nd Amendment is that it is not about the National Guard, or sporting firearms or gun collections. It does not guarantee the government an army, nor does it guarantee civilians the right to hunt and shoot skeet. It's about the right of the people to maintain some portion of the ultimate power of government -- violence -- to themselves.

Mac Johnson
Court Rediscovers 2nd Amendment, Liberals Fear Other 'Rights' May Soon be Found
March 15, 2007

Caren sent me a link to this article about a summer camp where teenagers learn to use explosives. At first I was so disappointed that I didn't have something like that available to me when I was a teenager. Then I realized that I was working with explosives before I was a teenager and I was making my own explosives when I was 16. Okay, so maybe I wasn't so deprived after all. But I would have liked the opportunity anyway.

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 (99x2 + 1x1)/100 => 1.99. The true mean number of partners for the women is (99x1 + 1x100)/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.

If you read far enough into Schneier's essay I quoted yesterday you would have found this:

Subjects were divided into two groups. One group was given the choice of these two alternatives:

• Alternative A: A sure gain of $500.
• Alternative B: A 50% chance of gaining $1,000.

The other group was given the choice of:

• Alternative C: A sure loss of $500.
• Alternative D: A 50% chance of losing $1,000.

These two trade-offs aren't the same, but they're very similar. And traditional economics predicts that the difference doesn't make a difference.

...

But experimental results contradict this. When faced with a gain, most people (84%) chose Alternative A (the sure gain) of $500 over Alternative B (the risky gain). But when faced with a loss, most people (70%) chose Alternative D (the risky loss) over Alternative C (the sure loss).

Interesting. But even before I read the results I felt myself drawn to alternatives A and D even though I knew it was illogical. And today I got real world confirmation of this phenomena in a very similar "test" of the felons at Battelle/PNNL when I got a look at their response to our second interrogatory. They had a choice. They could answer our questions which almost for certain would result in their losing the case and perhaps ultimately leading to felony convictions or they could refuse to answer the question and risk discovery abuse as well as losing the case and risking the felony convictions. But by refusing answer the questions they have a chance of escaping entirely. I don't think they will escape and actually I'm pleased they made the choice they did. It increases the total penalties that I may be able to inflict upon them and removes all guilt I might have for making things difficult on the innocents at the lab. But I have to hand it to them, they have a lot of chutzpah.

One of the requests we made was for an email the proves one of the projects I briefly mentioned on my blog only had a very small portion (which I did not mention) of data that was restricted. The rest of the project was completely open and this email said it was acceptable that I publish papers on it as well as file for a patent and license the technology to a university. This blog posting of mine was used as evidence against me when they were discussing my possible termination. The email would have proved there was nothing wrong with me posting that information on my blog. In response to our request for that email they responded with:

Object: This request is beyond the scope of permissible discovery and not calculated to lead to the discovery of admissible evidence.

Another request of ours was "Please produce a copy of the email containing a link to the web page http://www.joehuffman.org/Freedom/ScreeningFails.htm which was clicked on by Una Carriera on Friday May 6, 2005 at 18:34:07 GMT." We believe this email (and others we requested) would show they were interested in my gun rights activism.

Their response:

Object: This request is beyond the scope of permissible discovery and not calculated to lead to the discovery of admissible evidence. Furthermore, this request requests information that is unduly burdensome to produce.

This type of answer was a favorite of theirs and they used it for almost every response. They refused to give us "comparators" for how they did or did not discipline others that had "adult content" on their computers or people who let non employees use a company laptop (the one thing I did do wrong) for a few hours.

Basically I only obtained two new pieces of evidence out of 16 new interrogatory questions and 12 new requests for production. Those bits of information were SPEEDY was Marty Peterson and PUCK (the main investigator of the websites) was Cullen Tollbom.

I felt no qualms whatsoever when I clicked the button that yielded this:

And I didn't feel any qualms when I did that repeatedly. I was hoping to avoid causing certain innocent people to do extra work. But they have had over two years to find new jobs or push out the felons from the inside. I now regard them as part of the problem. This quote comes to mind:

The only thing needed for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.

Edmond Burke

I'm doing something. The people inside the lab could be doing something too but to the best of my knowledge they have not and are not. You can do something as well. Make a donation to my legal fund by clicking on the button near the top of this page.

Then why are we going?

Xenia Huffman-Scott
June 23, 2007
When informed that our vacation location did not have cell phone service or an Internet connection.

The reality of security is mathematical, based on the probability of different risks and the effectiveness of different countermeasures. We can calculate how secure your home is from burglary, based on such factors as the crime rate in the neighborhood you live in and your door-locking habits. We can calculate how likely it is for you to be murdered, either on the streets by a stranger or in your home by a family member. Or how likely you are to be the victim of identity theft. Given a large enough set of statistics on criminal acts, it's not even hard; insurance companies do it all the time.

We can also calculate how much more secure a burglar alarm will make your home, or how well a credit freeze will protect you from identity theft. Again, given enough data, it's easy.

But security is also a feeling, based not on probabilities and mathematical calculations, but on your psychological reactions to both risks and countermeasures. You might feel terribly afraid of terrorism, or you might feel like it's not something worth worrying about. You might feel safer when you see people taking their shoes off at airport metal detectors, or you might not. You might feel that you're at high risk of burglary, medium risk of murder, and low risk of identity theft. And your neighbor, in the exact same situation, might feel that he's at high risk of identity theft, medium risk of burglary, and low risk of murder.

Or, more generally, you can be secure even though you don't feel secure. And you can feel secure even though you're not. The feeling and reality of security are certainly related to each other, but they're just as certainly not the same as each other. We'd probably be better off if we had two different words for them.

Bruce Schneier
February 28, 2007
The Psychology of Security
[In a large part this is the battle gun rights activists are fighting. The probabilities are on our side and to a large extent the anti-gun bigots have a lock on the feelings. As you read the essay you realize why it's so important to make guns familar and common. Part of Boomershoot is making the public comfortable with guns and thus help people reduce their negative feelings towards firearms. Do your part and come out of the closet as a gun owner.--Joe]

There are people that want to ban sex toys in India:

Saying that the sale of sex toys in India would have "severe consequences in society", a Madhya Pradesh minister has urged Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to convene an all-party meeting to discuss the issue.

Even as a condom with a vibrating ring continues to stir controversy in the state, Public Works Department (PWD) Minister Kailash Vijayvargiya urged in a letter to Manmohan Singh that the import and sale of products like sex toys be banned.

"The Madhya Pradesh government stresses yoga shiksha (yoga education) instead of the centre's yon shiksha (sex education). There is an urgent need to rise above party lines in this matter," Vijayvargiya said.

About six months ago, HLL started to sell Crezendo - a three-condom pack with a vibrating ring - at a price of Rs.125. The Madhya Pradesh government is contemplating a ban on its sale in the state if Crezendo is proved to be a sex toy.

...

"The sale of such toys will lead to severe consequences in society. And they should be banned. But the union government is turning a Nelson's eye despite such sale taking place openly in the national capital," according to Vijayvargiya.

And it was from India we have one of the oldest books written on sex--the Kama Sutra.

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.

Still more bigots that fire people with guns. Via Uncle.

After getting the suggestion from Ry I have been exploring the possibility of doing a 1000 yard Boomershoot.

I did a few calculations with Modern Ballistics last night to see what would happen if people just overshot the target area. My cousin's house is a mile away and pretty close to directly behind the proposed target area. The house is out of sight and I suspected the shots would over shoot the house and land in the fields behind his house. It turns out the answer depends on the caliber being shot:

• A 7.62 x 39 (yeah right!) bullet would land in the field several hundred yards in front of the house.
• A .50 BMG bullet would overshoot the house by a few feet.
• A .300 Win Mag shooting Blackhills Match ammo with a 15 MPH wind from the West would put a bullet through his living room window.

I haven't checked with my cousin yet but I suspect the safety margins are not acceptable.

It is very unlikely there be 1000 yard shooting at Boomershoot 2008. I need to find a different location before that becomes a reality.

I've always liked the kind of guys who'll get me shot.

Marilyn the Patriot Matchmaker
Originally from http://www.westword.com/1996/112896/news1.html as of January 22, 1999
Currently this link is valid: http://www.hcn.org/servlets/hcn.PrintableArticle?article_id=2988

Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient. The objections which have been brought against a standing army, and they are many and weighty, and deserve to prevail, may also at last be brought against a standing government.

Henry David Thoreau
(1817-62), U.S. philosopher, author, naturalist.
Letter, 31 July 1849, to Ellen Emerson (then 10 years old), eldest child of Ralph Waldo Emerson (published in The Correspondence of Henry David Thoreau, 1958).

This is one of the best short essays I've seen.  Apparently its been reposted under other names, but Marko is the author.  Here's a sample:

A mugger, even an armed one, can only make a successful living in a society where the state has granted him a force monopoly.

Hat tip to Say Uncle for bringing to my attention.

Democracy is a form of government that substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.

G. B. Shaw

Unfortunately, an almost perfect inverse correlation exists between those who are affected by gun laws, particularly bans, and those whom enforcement should affect. Those easiest to disarm are the responsible and law abiding citizens whose guns represent no meaningful social problem. Irresponsible and criminal owners, whose gun possession creates or exacerbates so many social ills, are the ones most difficult to disarm.

Don Kates
GUNS AND PUBLIC HEALTH: EPIDEMIC OF VIOLENCE OR PANDEMIC OF PROPAGANDA?

This weekend was pretty much consumed with prep for Boomershoot 2008 (and beyond). As an aside, it's nearly 90% full now. Those last eight empty positions could disappear in a single day so sign up soon or wait until 2009.

Friday morning I received two and a half tons of ammonium nitrate (BTW, Sebastian says Xenia is "smoking hot" in that picture). Saturday I took the first two loads out to the Taj Mahal. Here is the start of what it looked like as I packed the shed higher and tighter than it has ever been with chemicals:

Xenia came along on with me with the second load and repackaged some of the old stuff so I could store it more compactly. I needed every cubic foot of space I could get. My calculations indicated it should fit if I played this game of Tetris just right.

Saturday I also tried "drilling" (auguring actually) a well near the Taj. I want a plentiful water supply for cleaning up the mixing equipment, first-aid, and the first line of defense against a small fire. The second line of defense against a small fire and the first line of defense against a medium or larger fire is RUN!!!

The ground is already so dry that even in going down three feet in the bottom of the creek bed near the Taj yielded a dry hole. Here you see me working on what ended up being a five foot deep dry hole before I ran into a hard-pan that essentially halted my progress. I'm not sure what my next effort along these lines will be. I know there will be water there at Boomershoot time but if I could get water this time of year by going down 15 feet with a backhoe I would do that. I'll have to think about it some more.

Today I went back with load three of the ammonium nitrate and confirmed that I have just enough room for all of it.

I also worked on the Internet connection at the Taj and reworked some electrical stuff. The Boomershoot2 WiFi site would take many minutes to connect with Boomershoot1 and then would drop off frequently. I raised the antenna about four or five feet and now it connects in less than a minute and appears to stay connected. I connected the grounding wire to the metal shed and improved the ground connection to the 120 VAC system and the WiFi antenna.

I started work on getting a proper power supply to the WiFi "Range Extender" but discovered the gadget I bought at Fry's in Renton, 350 miles away, was broken. It only worked if I pushed on a slide switch really hard. It took a while to discover what was wrong and still more effort to figure out how to jury-rig it to work temporarily (a tie-wrap cinched down really tight did the job). I ran out of time so I'll have to finish that last little wiring job the next time I go out there.

Sandy Froman delivers part 2 of the history of gun control.

Our nation and much of the developed world, thanks to digital technologies, is moving quickly toward a universal background database. Eventually, experts say, you'll need your thumbprint (or similar) to ride an elevator, board transit, buy groceries (or anything), open accounts, get fuel or use your computer online. The most free places on earth will be the most primitive, like Africa, where human activity will remain largely untrackable.

Alan Korwin
New Gun Control Law to Monitor Entire Population in Central Database
[It's very interesting to me that the people that scream the loudest, "Bush is Hitler", overlook the dark side of the gun control laws they endorse. Korwin has great insight down this dim corridor.--Joe]