Access to power must be confined to those who are not in love with it.

Plato
[This concept, more fully expressed in the U.S. Constitution, has been around for a very long time. It's sad this fundamental truth is ignored by the majority of people.--Joe]

Jews tend to think if terrible things happened to their ancestors in 15th century Spain and 19th century Russia and 20th century Nazi Germany, it can and will happen here. It’s a form of paranoia. But it’s a very strange form. For as we all know, this is a nation of 300 million. So, wouldn’t you think a minority numbering a mere five million, and in constant fear of pogroms, would spend as much time as possible on the firing range?

Burt Prelutsky
May 4, 2007
What is it with Jews and guns?

Popularity isn't the basis for war. The struggle for human freedom is. War is ugly by design, and instigated by tyrants, oppressors, fascists, religious fanatics bent on world domination, and other enemies of freedom.

Alan Korwin
April 2, 2007
Genocidal Peace Supporters

Now here are some people who know how to have fun.

Tired of the usual chicken dinners, the Manchester Republican Committee is planning to arm supporters next month with Uzis, M-16 rifles and other automatic weapons for a day of target practice at a Pelham firing range.

"The thought just struck me one day: a machine gun shoot. What the heck?" said Jerry Thibodeau, the committee chairman.

We can expect the usual hysterics from the anti-freedom crowd, which of course adds to the fun.  They're actually talking about firing sub guns and assault rifles at the fund raiser, but the term "machine gun" sounds more interesting I guess.  For myself, I'd like to fire a nice M2 at some old trucks and a few of Joe's boomers.  Ma Duce is big, well-made, heavy, powerful, and loud as hell.  What's not to like?

I find it encouraging that politicians on both sides of the turd feel the need to appeal to American gun owners.  We'll see whose appeals are honest (or should I say the least disingenuous).

I received a request for help making a bomb this morning:

-----Original Message-----
From: [someone] @hotmail.co.uk
Sent: Wednesday, July 25, 2007 7:21 AM
To: joeh@boomershoot.org
Subject: Bomb making

Hi I have recently saw your website regarding bomb making.
I was pretty confused by it to say the least lol, so i thought i would send
you an e-mail.

I would like to know how to make a bomb, where the chemicals are easy to
obtain.

I saw a section where the people where not specifying the force of the bomb.
One which would maybe break or even crack a brick wall would be good.

Thanks.

My response, which was also Bcc'd to Scotland yard (the originating IP address resolves to a cable customer in Cardiff, Wales) with the email header:

-----Original Message-----
From: Joe Huffman
Sent: Wednesday, July 25, 2007 8:50 AM
Subject: RE: Bomb making

That you were confused indicates you don't have enough brain power for me to trust you with that sort of information.

The only people I would help build a bomb are the U.S. Military and our allies.


-joe-

Someone released a For Official Use Only (FOUO) document from the TSA and MSNBC posted it online. The basics are:

A surge in recent suspicious incidents at U.S. airports may indicate terrorists are conducting pre-attack security probes and "dry runs" similar to dress rehearsals. Past terrorist attacks and plots show that such testing generally indicates attacks will soon follow, according to a joint FBI and Homeland Security assessment.

It's mildly interesting in that it seems to confirm people are probing our airport security system. My view is that airport security as it's currently implemented is a lost cause (see also this posting from David Mackett, the president of the Airline Pilots Security Alliance). Those resources would be far better spent on finding the bad guys before they ever arrive at the airport and implementing something else for on board security.

Update: Via Bruce--at least one of the reports was bogus:

The TSA bulletin said the ice packs were covered in duct tape and had clay inside of them.

Sanfilippo said they weren't covered in duct tape and didn't have clay inside of them. “It is a little bit off,” he said of the bulletin.

The chief said a Harbor Police officer found what appeared to be hardened old gel that had seeped out of the ice packs and dried, leaving a clay-like substance around the outside edge of the pack.

I wonder if it was incompetence or if the TSA was trying to justify their existence. Both are plausible.

The “nothing to hide” argument speaks to some problems, but not to others. It represents a singular and narrow way of conceiving of privacy, and it wins by excluding consideration of the other problems often raised in government surveillance and data mining programs. When engaged with directly, the “nothing to hide” argument can ensnare, for it forces the debate to focus on its narrow understanding of privacy. But when confronted with the plurality of privacy problems implicated by government data collection and use beyond surveillance and disclosure, the “nothing to hide” argument, in the end, has nothing to say.

Daniel J. Solove
“I’VE GOT NOTHING TO HIDE” AND OTHER MISUNDERSTANDINGS OF PRIVACY
George Washington University Law School
[A rather "dry" intellectual essay. Some of the better points are that government survelance changes the power balance between the individual and the politically powerful and data can be used for purposes beyond what it was orginally intended for. For example (my example, not the authors) 4473's are intended to enable finding the user of a gun associated with a crime but can also be used to confisicate firearms from everyone. But if you want a snappy answer for someone who claims they don't have anything to hide tell them to drop all their clothes, you want a picture. Then you want to know all their sex partners and from this point forward you want a live video feed of all their sexual encounters.--Joe]

Get your golf ball launcher here. Teaser material from the site:

Each launcher fits ANY NATO standard 22mm flash suppressor or grenade launcher.—M-16/AR-15, Yugo SKS, FAL, CETME/G-3, PTR-91, Galil, MAS 49/56, FR-7, FR-8 and many more.

Lot of other interesting stuff on the site too. You can find videos of "reactive target" shooting also and what a one or two pound charge of explosives will do to a car.

I sent an email to the reporter I had talked to a few times about my difficulties with PNNL with a link to my post saying I was dropping my lawsuit against the lab. He wrote a story which was published today.

Even with that post as a written reference the paper still managed to get a few things wrong.

• The paper says, "Rather than argue about excessive personal use of lab computers, he chose to back down." Apparently the reporter doesn't understand that if the lab did an investigation that concluded I had 13 gazillion terabytes of child porn on my work computer (they did not, but they did claim this picture was "adult content") and my computer was actually squeaky clean I would not have a case unless the motive for the false report was for something like me being of the wrong race, religion, etc. They could be as incompetent as a retarded monkey taking a calculus exam (pretty good analogy to what actually happened) and I would not have had a case. No law or court demands they be competent in their investigation.
• The paper says, "A former cyber security analyst...". My actual title was "Senior Research Scientist II".

Oh well. What do you expect?

The 1928 Law on Firearms and Ammunition accelerated the Nazis' achievement of an iron grip on Germany:

• registration lists enabled the Nazis quickly to revoke firearms permits from anyone they deemed unreliable;
• Permitting procedures under this "gun control" law doubtless had deterred many "reliable" persons from making the application.

Moreover, as the Nazis' political clout grew - and as their violence grew - some of those who might have wanted to get a firearm may not have been able to do so. Those who felt threatened by the Nazis were the ones least likely to be deemed "reliable" by a police chief sensitive to the Nazis' growing power.

Lethal Laws--"Gun Control" is the Key to Genocide
Page 153
By: Jay Simkin, Aaron Zelman, and Alan M. Rice

Ry turned in his notice today.

I received a call on my way to work this morning. It was Ry's new employer doing a reference check. By the time I checked with Ry about 15:00 he had received and accepted their offer.

Ry works just around the corner and down the hall from me. In two weeks he will be working in downtown Seattle instead of Redmond.

Heavy sigh.

PSR believes that the only way to reduce the number of women killed by guns, is to educate people on the true relationship between females and firearms. Physicians must work to educate people that guns do not offer protection, but actually put them at greater risk of injury or death.

Physicians for Social Responsibility
From: http://www.psr.org/women.htm (as of 02/19/99)
[PSR seems to have backed down some from this anti-gun position. At least they aren't quite as up front about it as they were. We are making progress.--Joe]

Washington, DC's ban on handguns in the home has long protected DC's residents as measured by the District of Columbia's firearm suicide and overall suicide rate. The District’s handgun ban provides compelling evidence of how strict gun laws save lives by keeping handguns out of homes. The District of Columbia ranks 51st (last) in the country for firearms suicide for 2004, the most recent year for which statistics are available. The District also ranks last for overall suicide. Maintaining the ban will ensure the health and safety of DC residents.

Violence Policy Center
July 16, 2007
Threat of Handgun Ban Repeal Puts Lives of DC Residents in Supreme Court Balance
[Apparently, according to the VPC, guns cause suicide. It's telling they don't compare the District violent crime, including murder, rate to states that honor our inalienable right to defend ourselves. See also this QOTD.--Joe]

In the fight between you and the world, back the world.

Franz Kafk

My sister-in-law got hers this spring. I had mine two months ago. Ry had his today. President Bush is having his on Saturday.

We must prepare for a long hard battle. So much of what we have worked for in the past and everything we're currently working on could be destroyed by the heinous decision of right-wing activist judges who chose to ignore more than 60 years of precedent in order to help the gun lobby accomplish in the courts what it has been unable to accomplish in Congress.

Sarah Brady
Email, July 20, 2007
Chair
Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence
[That is such music to my ears.--Joe]

I've been sending email around to people I knew wouldn't really wait to know what happened with PNNL yesterday.  Here's the basics of what happened. I'll do the complete time-line with documentation later...

They finally gave us enough evidence that we could reasonably conclude they were incompetent rather than bigoted. It took a motion to compel before they finally gave us some of the information and then doing depositions on some people. I don't understand why they didn't turn this information over when we asked for it in our first interrogatory. It would have saved everyone a lot of time and money.

Some of the most basic unchallenged facts I had believed were false. I was told by Gina, on two different occasions, that both she and no one she knew on our team knew anything at all about the investigation. If this was true then the truth or falsity of my claim that I had not posted sensitive information was irrelevant to the investigators and the decision makers. It turns out that Newton, Wayne, and she had actually started the investigation. That Gina and Wayne knew anything at all about it was news to me yesterday. I didn't know Newton had anything to do with it until my deposition in April of 2007. They should have told us all of this in their first response as we requested. I don’t know why they hid it and required us to go to the judge with a motion to compel to turn it over. Legally they had absolutely nothing to fear from releasing the information--it invalidated my theory of the case.

My lawyer said I could possibly still win the case--but for the wrong reason. Witnesses, Newton in particular, were extremely evasive (for example, refusing to agree, even in principle, to answer yes or no questions with a yes or no rather than a nod of the head and always quibbling about words such as “that depends on what your definition of ‘complain’ is”). Newton and others even gave testimony under oath that I had hard proof was false--all stuff that would look bad to the judge and jury. And Newton even had his own personal file he kept on me which sounds extremely suspicious. The court recorder thought we were joking we told her to pack up because we were done. She thought things were going very well for us. But the bottom line is that all the strange stuff, once we had the truthful critical information, didn’t matter in the big picture so I dropped it. Even if I would have pushed on, which my lawyer almost for certain would not have done had I be so inclined, and won simply because Newton appeared to be hiding information on nearly every response it would have been a hollow victory. Battelle/PNNL would have been screwed because Newton doesn't know how or perhaps is even unable to be candid and believable. I believed him on the parts that were most important to me because I knew Newton was paranoid even when there wasn't anything to be paranoid about. And the critical information he provided fit in with other information that that until that point didn't make any sense.

We are pretty sure this is what happened:

Newton thought maybe I had posted classified (national security type) information on my blog. He talked to Wayne about it--what do we say to Joe? How do we approach him about this? But if it was classified they couldn't just handle it in private--it would have to be reported. They asked Greg about it. He didn't know so they went to Chris. Chris, Wayne and Newton debated it and decided just to be safe they should report it and the investigation expanded. It turned out it was not classified, as I knew--but they never asked me. Newton and Wayne were essentially out of the picture now. The bigger investigation which, only initially required Gina's input, turned up things that looked suspicious and everyone assumed the worst and the process continued to snowball. Finally they fired me without ever asking me except in the most vague terms to which I responded in a somewhat defiant manner. They didn’t even ask people that would have known the truth about the suspicious things they found. They just assumed, perhaps willfully, if it looked bad it was bad. Just three examples:

1. I was accused of “excessive personal Internet use” because I averaged about 2600 firewall transactions a month to things they believed were not work related – no one bothered to compare it to what other people did. It turned out company average was about 8000 non-work related transactions per month.
2. They assumed anything gun or explosives related web browsing was not work—which was false. I was bringing my expertise from my hobbies to my work and the investigators didn’t know this.
3. They found a complete copy of my website, JoeHuffman.org, on the government laptop computer and assumed I was hosting the site from there. Wrong and it doesn't even make sense--the website would go down when I was traveling with the laptop if that were the case. What really happened was I hosted, at the request of Wayne, a bunch of PNNL project material on my own personal website, JoeHuffman.org for a few days when some material need to go on-line on such short notice that we didn't have time to go through the usual paperwork to get it on the corporate site. I integrated the PNNL material with my website on the government laptop computer to make sure the cascading style sheets didn't interfere with each other (I didn't really understand CSS very well and needed to make sure things were working right together). I had lots of free disk space on the laptop and didn't bother to delete it afterward.

These and lots of other cascading failures occurred during their investigation process and were completely out of my control and knowledge until the lawsuit and some the information only showed up yesterday. I was "walking on the fence" with my blogging and knew it. They couldn't quite figure out if I had crossed over or not and Bryan McMillan, my supervisor, "built a new fence" and told me not to cross over that one... so I started "walking on his new fence" with my blogging instead of being submissive. That almost for certain pissed him and others off. That doesn't really make sense to me with my world view. When I would tell one of our kids to clean their room and when they announced it was clean and I went to inspect found the room clean but the hallway three feet deep in their dirty clothes I couldn't hold back my smirk--and I would require they help me put their dirty clothes in the laundry room. Then the next time I told them to clean their room I would make sure the requirement included getting all the dirty clothes all the way to the laundry room. I would be pleased that I had such a clever child, but then I'm not normal...

McMillan, Hevland, and others may have in fact "walked on the fence" in terms of Battelle policy during the termination procedure but unless that was due to an actionable item such as a race, gender, age, etc. and possibly gun ownership issue of some sort it just doesn't matter in a legal sense. They could get away with it.

In regards to all the evidence from my web logs--such as indications they weren’t looking for information I blogged about work but instead about my political activism and that I was a firearms instructor--we explored that. All indications appear the investigation started for other reasons, invalid (some other day with the data to back it up--Newton was "walking a fence" in his testimony) but not legally actionable. The people that may have had a bias against my activism and gun activities apparently didn’t pass that bias on to the decision makers.

PNNL screwed up by not doing a good investigation and I got screwed, in part because I was in essence mocking them, but them being incompetent investigators isn’t actionable in a legal sense so I dropped the case.

Another way to look at it that is probably fair was this statement by someone familiar with nearly all the details but wishes to remain anonymous, "Joe, I see why they fired you now. You are so in control you are out of control. Until people get to know you scare them. They thought you were a loose cannon and were a risk."

It took me a lot of time to understand what "You are so in control you are out of control" really meant. It means I parsed the rules very carefully. It was all very clear to me--simplifying some, there were four types of information, Classified, Official Use Only, Business Sensitive, and everything else which was Open. The first three were carefully defined which made Open well defined. Open stuff is subject to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests--which means anyone can get access if they ask for it. I was very much in control of what I said and chose my words carefully. But I said things in ways that made them more "interesting" than Battelle/PNNL was comfortable with. I was in control but appeared out of control.

There was, in essence, an unstated policy that they did not wish to honor FOIA. FOIA was a problem for them because it was so much easier to work on things that were in the open that they, and their customers preferred that operating environment. But even though it was technically open they preferred it remain "in the dark". I honored the spirit of that but unless it were truly "not Open" I didn't keep it as in the dark as "not Open" material were required to be kept. I think this pissed them off too--I was "Walking the Fence" again by not keeping FOIA-able material as dark as OUO material.

As I said here when I first found out about the investigation, my Push the Envelope Policy has it's hazards.

As I talked to people about the results from yesterday I had one person tell me they couldn't be like me but they were glad there were people like me out there. Extremists are usually right because they care about the issue and understand it. The moderates don't care because they don't know the issue. And if you are going to push the envelope you have to accept the risk and know that sometimes you are going to have to pay a price. You paid a heavy price. I hope it was worth it for you. I wouldn't have been willing to pay that price."

I don't know the answer...I'm still thinking on it.

"[T]his radical ruling will inevitably mean more people killed and wounded as keeping guns out of the city becomes harder," the Post continued, sagely foreseeing a day in the near future when the district might not be the safe gunfree enclave of sanity that it now is. One wonders if D.C. might someday even become the murder capital of the United States without its protective cloak of gun control disarming its law-abiding citizens.

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