There are hundreds of millions of gun owners in this country, and not one of them will have an accident today. The only misuse of guns comes in environments where there are drugs, alcohol, bad parents, and undisciplined children. Period.

Ted Nugent

I think I probably am spoiled. But that is okay.

Xenia Huffman-Scott
September 27, 2007
[Her sister Kim further noted that Xenia is in fact spoiled rotten--two cavities were discovered today when her teeth were cleaned.--Joe]

Firecracker Films have changed their contact person for the "Gun Families" documentary they are making. I've updated my post to reflect the changes.

They are still actively looking for people. If you have kids under 12 that are reasonably knowledgeable shooters please consider getting involved in this.

For a while I've been saying that this whole national ID debate will be irrelevant soon. In the future you won't have to show ID; they'll already know who you are.

Bruce Schneier
September 26, 2007
The Technology of Homeland Security
[It was this article that inspired the above comment. My comment to Schneier's article was:

I used to specialize in biometrics and was underwhelmed at the actual capabilities compared to the marketing hype. And that was with people that weren’t even actively engaged in trying to defeat the technology. If someone really wants to defeat it the odds of success are very close to 100%.

“Novelty” contact lens easily defeat iris scans. Remote fingerprint scanning can be defeated with Band-Aids (or just the sticky tape part of it). More sophisticated/determined people will use contact lens with someone else’s iris pattern and be wearing someone else’s fingerprints.

The bottom line is that for the average person they might be able to know who you are and where you have been. Great information to use against your political opponents and for stalkers with access to the databases but useless for stopping smart and determined criminals.--Joe]

I probably will get in trouble, as I have before, for using the word "porn" in the same post with one of my daughters. But I'm 300 miles away at the moment and figure everyone will have enough time to cool off before I get home.

Anyway, on Saturday I took some pictures of our daughter Kim as she checked out a Saiga-12 with a 10-round detachable magazine:

Caleb, my son-in-law, says he always listens to Kim and does what she tells him to. I think she was telling him to do something when I took that last picture above...

Speaking of propaganda... I received an email at work yesterday saying something to the effect that the Halo 3 release will be the biggest release event in entertainment history. At least that is what I remember it saying. I don't pay that much attention to games or publicity events.

What struck me was the number of copies they have ordered for employees. At the Redmond company store alone they brought in 25,000 copies. There will be additional shuttles from all over the main campus to the company store to help alleviate the parking issues that would result if people tried to drive themselves.

I asked James when he was going to pick up his copy. He told me that he pre-ordered his a year ago at some retail outlet so he could get some special edition version. Wow...

I stopped off at the company store yesterday at lunch time to pick up some software for Caleb. He told me no big hurry but I just know the store will be a madhouse the rest of this week. I saw a big empty space in the middle of the store where I expect the product will be stacked when it opens later this morning.

I also saw some Halo 3 hats on the shelf:

Instead of addressing the deficiencies or giving it up as a bad idea they are hiring "public relations" consultants to convince the people a national ID card is a good thing. Why don't they be honest about it and go for the tattoo on the forearm or the RFID chip under the skin? Of course they probably would need Joseph Goebbels reincarnated to get that "PR" campaign off the ground.

Details are here:

As controversy rages over forthcoming federal Real ID requirements, state officials should be plotting public relations strategies to counteract the well-publicized rebellion, past and present state motor vehicle administrators advised their colleagues Monday.

Civil liberties and privacy groups, as well as organizations like the National Governors Association, have attacked the 2005 law as insufficiently protective of privacy and too costly to implement. But that's exactly the sort of message motor vehicle departments need to offset with their own materials trumpeting the plan's perceived benefits, suggested Lucinda Babers, interim director of the District of Columbia DMV, and Betty Serian, a retired Pennsylvania Department of Transportation official who now runs a private consulting firm.

"I think it's a classical textbook case of good communications planning, knowing who your audience is, and working that into your implementation plan for Real ID," Serian said during a panel discussion on the first day of the Government ID Technology Summit here. About 100 state and federal officials and representatives from technology vendors were in attendance.

The Department of Homeland Security plans to issue final rules in the fall, but draft rules say that starting on May 11, 2008, Americans will need a federally approved, "machine readable" ID card to travel on an airplane, open a bank account, collect Social Security payments or take advantage of nearly any government service. (States that agree in advance to abide by the rules have until 2013 to comply.)

[...]

But even those states that fall into the anti-Real ID category should be thinking about how to make their residents feel happier about the requirements, the conference speakers said.

Sample messages could include, according to Serian: "It's an improvement to your existing process, it's a way to do the right things for the right reason, it will help prevent identity theft."

They admit they have to make their residents feel happier. I've heard "arbeit macht frei" too. Do you feel happier now?

That propaganda is good which leads to success, and that is bad which fails to achieve the desired result. It is not propaganda’s task to be intelligent, its task is to lead to success.

Joseph Goebbels
Fest, The Face of the Third Reich, 90
[Does this remind you of any politicians and/or media outlets in the present day?--Joe]

I suppose its to be expected. You can't get more government contracts if you were to tell them the problem cannot be solved as long as they are headed in that direction. But what you can do is sell them millions and millions of dollars of technology that can be defeated with a few dollars worth of mu-metal and/or a Faraday Shield. I guess it doesn't matter. It's just government money. They have to spend it on something anyway, right?

Here are the details:

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has a comforting prospect for the million or so daily passengers on U.S. airlines. Los Alamos National Laboratory is working on an alternative to the "sandwich bag" solution for carry-on liquids.

Passengers' ability to carry liquids with them during boarding has improved since the original total ban installed after a plot involving liquid explosives on transatlantic flights was busted in London in August 2006.

A total ban has given way to a partial ban because current X-ray machines can detect liquids, but they don't know the difference between Gatorade and a liquid explosive.

But the so-called "3-1-1" plan for placing smaller-than-3-ounce liquid containers into one separately scanned, quart-size plastic bag per passenger remains an annoyance for many airport travelers, a fact that has not been lost on the department.

Within a month after the London scheme was foiled, said Michelle Espy, LANL's co-principal investigator on the project, the laboratory had sketched out a "proof of concept" for a liquid-sensing instrument that has come to be called SENSIT.

In May this year, Brian Tait, a program manager in the Homeland Security Advanced Research Project Agency made a presentation on LANL's demonstration for using magnetic resonance technology to perform non-invasive "liquid and solid explosive detection at ultra-low field without radiation."

Espy said the technology is a variation on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), a very low-field approach that the lab has been using for studying the brain in a technique known as magneto-encephalography, which is a way of reading signals emanating from the brain.

The sensor or magnetometer used in both the brain study and the bottle analyzer is known as a SQUID, an acronym that stands for Superconducting Quantum Interfering Device.

Comforting? I suppose you could say that. It will give some people a false sense of comfort. But then that's what TSA is all about anyway. A Security Theater that makes some people feel good.

We spent this weekend out camping in an Idaho mountain meadow, in an "open range" area (where cattle wander free, and are branded for later roundup).  Aside from being stunningly beautiful, with the fall colors coming on and the abundant wildlife resulting from recent logging operations (you did know that logging results in copious new foliage for the grazing of deer and elk, and cover for small game, didn't you?) there are quite a lot of cow pies.

Grass and water go in one end of the bovine, you see, and cow pies are what come out of the other end.  The name applies whether the bovine in question is male or female.  That saves you the trouble of determining whether a given pie is a cow pie, a bull pie, or a heifer pie, etc..

I'd been doing some shooting out there with several firearms, and asked my 10 year-old daughter to get out her .22 rifle.  She wasn't much interested until I pointed out that she could try shooting at small pieces of wood floating in a pond.  She quickly discovered that if you place a bullet just under the floating stick it will jump 15 feet into the air.  That got her attention, and she was soon asking for more ammo.  She's a fairly new shooter, so her hit rate wasn't very good, and she lost interest until she discovered that a fresh cow pie will explode if hit with a .22 Long Rifle hollowpoint.

In other words, her shooting may not be minute-of-angle accurate (one M.O.A. equals one sixtieth of a degree) but she can shoot "Minute Of Cow pie" (M.O.C.) which allows her to enjoy a 100% hit rate on these impromptu, reactive targets.

She spent the rest of the afternoon shooting cow pies with a big grin on her face (and me laughing to myself, thinking how wonderfully stereotypical, North-Idaho-redneck an activity that was).

For further study, I picked up some beer cans (probably discarded by some pale, leftist San Franciscans who thought getting drunk and littering in Idaho would be a hoot) filled them with water and shot them with various calibers.  It happens that a .223 Remington cartridge, pushing a 55 grain, hard-jacketed spitzer at around 3,000 feet per second will cause the water-filled aluminum can to burst out in all directions, yet still hold together in one piece, whereas a soft lead sphere of .495" diameter (50 caliber patched round ball - the patched ball is an American innovation that was used with deadly effect against King George's officers during the Revolution) traveling at about half that velocity will blow the can into several pieces, scattering them up and out about 15 yards, leaving the base of the can still holding water where it stood (I picked up the pieces and took them home if you must know, leaving the meadow cleaner than we found it).

I also discovered that you can hit gallon jug-sized targets at 200 yards (you do travel with a rangefinder, don't you?) with a little youth model .22 rifle, zeroed at 20 yards, if you aim about 5 1/2 feet high.  You have enough time to bring the rifle down and listen/watch for the impact at that distance.

Ain't freedom grand?

Nice of them to stop by.

Domain Name		e-nt.net ? (Network)
IP Address		66.7.41.# (Violence Policy Center)
ISP		eLink Communications
Location		Continent  :  North America Country  :  United States  (Facts) State  :  District of Columbia City  :  Washington Lat/Long  :  38.9068, -77.0427 (Map) Distance  :  2,071 miles
Language		English (U.S.) en-us
Operating System		Microsoft WinXP
Browser		Internet Explorer 7.0 Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)
Javascript		version 1.3
Monitor		Resolution  :  1024 x 768 Color Depth  :  32 bits
Time of Visit		Sep 24 2007 2:34:51 pm
Last Page View		Sep 24 2007 2:41:17 pm
Visit Length		6 minutes 26 seconds
Page Views		3
Referring URL		http://blogsearch.go... Center%22&scoring=d
Search Engine		blogsearch.google.com
Search Words		"violence policy center"
Visit Entry Page		http://blog.joehuffman.org/2007/09/20/QuoteOfTheDayCamEdwards.aspx
Visit Exit Page		http://blog.joehuffman.org/default,month,2006-10.aspx
Out Click		What A Tangled Web They Weave http://www.camedwards.com/2007/09/19/what-a-tangled-web-they-weave/
Time Zone		UTC-5:00
Visitor's Time		Sep 24 2007 5:34:51 pm
Visit Number		194,160

Since I now that I know their IP address I also went looking through old log files for them. They visited in March after doing a blog search for "Josh Sugarman". Then they were here a couple times in August looking for stuff about Larry Craig. For more details see: VPCVisits.xls (28 KB)

People have been having problems with the anti-spam feature in comments. I've disabled the Captcha and enable some other things in an attempt to mitigate the resultant spam. I need to dig into the source code and fix the Captcha and other problems but I just haven't gotten around to it.

If you have been frustrated by the comment issues please try again. I really like getting comments and don't want you to give up on it.

Joe (a different Joe) ROs Don as he blasts through a stage. Yes, Joe's shirt says "INFIDEL" on the back (and the front).

That's Adam with the "air gun" practicing for the next stage.

 
As I mentioned in the QOD yesterday Xenia's boyfriend John went with me to the match.

 
Michelle and Adam as he ROs while she shoots a few rounds.

We also had an anthropology grad student, Michelle, from Washington State University show up. I asked if she knew "Joan", an anthropologist from WSU who has studied the gun culture. She claims to not know Joan Burbick (and here and here). Michelle has only been in town for a few weeks having just arrived from Iowa. She also said she is a Evolutionary Anthropologist while Joan is probably a Cultural Anthropologist which means they wouldn't be as likely to meet each other. Since I was wrong about Joan being an anthropologist it's quite believable.

We managed to talk her into shooting a little bit. She also claims to have only fired one gun on one occasion. Had it not been for her poor posture while shooting I, and probably everyone else, would not have believed her. In her first six shots I think she only had one miss. She did amazingly well for a completely new shooter. She emptied two magazines out of two different guns and didn't develop a flinch which is quite common with new shooters with a fairly large caliber handgun.

I spent several minutes talking to her and answering questions. The questions had some anti-gun bias and I finally asked what her sort of opinion she had on guns. She said as anthropological observer she was not allowed to have an opinion.

People in a society find ways to avoid conflict, and instead they find substitutes for it. I think the gun has become one of those substitutes.

Instead of addressing the root causes of the inequalities in our society, such as the limits of access to education, jobs, housing, the legal system etc., we invent or come up with crime scenarios. The gun becomes the substitute way to solve conflict in the United States, and the biggest conflict of all is crime.

So that’s how I view it as a political fetish -- that it’s a substitution. This is a moment in the United States when access to political power is, I think, limited to a class of professional politicians and lobbyists. And the act of buying a gun can mimic political action. It makes people feel as if they are engaging in politics of political protest.

I’ll give an example of how I think guns have political meaning. One of my old friends who is an ex-Vietnam vet, a Navy pilot, said to me one night, “Whenever I get mad at the government, I go out and buy a gun.” And to me, that’s a form of mimicking political action. One is left only with a gun in one’s closet. One has not changed or affected the government at all. In that way, I see it as a fetish, a substitute.

Joan Burbick
October 16, 2006
Joan Burbick's 'Gun Show Nation' Explains How the "Gun Rights" Movement is a White Male Political Power Play
[Just so you know what they think of you.--Joe]

Every time I hear or read something about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad coming to the U.S. to address Columbia University I keep thinking this is going to go down in history the same as if Adolf Hitler had come to the U.S. to address some university in September of 1937.

If fact the whole culture of certain units is competition. They shoot "matches" quals, standards, stages, etc all the time. In that world everything is graded and the results posted for all to see.

These guys could be very good competition shooters, instead they are very good at killing our enemies.

Greg Hamilton
September 18, 2007 8:34 PM
[Greg teaches military, law enforcement, and private citizens how to shoot. He is very, very good. Not just at shooting but at teaching, thinking, understanding what he is doing, and explaining it.

On a related note--Xenia's boyfriend just came back from "playing in the sandbox". He went to a steel match with me today. His shooting has improved considerably since the last time we went to the range together. I still did better than he did, but he did make me proud. I should have some pictures up soon.--Joe]

The jerks at PNNL I used to work for report back to Battelle headquarters in Columbus Ohio. It appears I just had a visit from them:

Domain Name		rr.com ? (Commercial)
IP Address		65.24.154.# (Road Runner)
ISP		Road Runner
Location		Continent  :  North America Country  :  United States  (Facts) State  :  Ohio City  :  Columbus Lat/Long  :  39.9968, -82.9882 (Map) Distance  :  1,755 miles
Language		English (U.S.) en-us
Operating System		Microsoft WinNT
Browser		Internet Explorer 7.0 Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0; WOW64; SLCC1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.04506; Media Center PC 5.0)
Javascript		version 1.3
Monitor		Resolution  :  1280 x 800 Color Depth  :  16 bits
Time of Visit		Sep 22 2007 12:53:04 pm
Last Page View		Sep 22 2007 1:10:13 pm
Visit Length		17 minutes 9 seconds
Page Views		9
Referring URL		http://search.live.c...uffman.org&FORM=USNO
Search Engine		search.live.com
Search Words		blog.joehuffman.org
Visit Entry Page		http://cc.msnscache....lang=en-US&FORM=CVRE
Visit Exit Page		http://blog.joehuffm...w,category,PNNL.aspx
Out Click		a story which was published today http://www.tri-cityh...58717p-9075291c.html
Time Zone		UTC-5:00
Visitor's Time		Sep 22 2007 3:53:04 pm
Visit Number		193,489

I never was one who was interested in fast or flashy cars. Vehicles, to me, are a means to transport people and things from point A to point B. I once had a long series of conversations with this guy named Walter about cars and women. He figured that a nice car was essential to finding a nice woman. He drove a Mercedes when I first met him. Then it was some sort of flashy looking muscle car. I forget the make and model. I just don't pay attention to that sort of thing. Then after he hit it big he bought a brand new, bright red, Ferrari. Within a day or so after buying it he came over to my place to show it off. "That's nice Walter." I just wasn't interested. And when we went for a ride I couldn't sit up straight. It was extremely uncomfortable for me. I just can't see the point. The only way I could see getting something that "over the top" is if it were REALLY over the top. If it could spread wings and fly at 300 MPH then I could see the appeal. But to be merely 50% faster than an ordinary car just seems pointless to me.

I feel the same way about machine guns. I just don't get the appeal. I've shot them a few times. And sure, they put a lot of lead down range in a short period of time but so what? I can put more pieces of lead on target with a semi-auto in any realistic situation that I can imagine myself being in. There isn't even someone like Walter who could plausibly argue that machine guns will attract the babes--so what is the appeal? I really don't get it.

That said, I just saw the analog in the machine gun world of the car that can spread wings and fly at 300 MPH.

I told Barb this is what I want for Christmas:

Video: VIP Protection Tool

P.S. After a decade of faster and faster, flasher and flasher cars Walter eventually did find a woman that would marry him. Barb and I always figured it would be a gold-digger that took him for a ride since that seemed to be what he was advertising for. But the reports I got back (he is on my "every time I see his face I involuntarily start to draw my gun" list now) is that she appeared to be an alcoholic instead.

We have to realize that people who run the government can and do change.  Our society and laws must assume that bad people - criminals even - will run the government, at least part of the time.

John Gilmore
A transcript of remarks given at the First Conference on Computers, Freedom, and Privacy, March 28,1991
[Gilmore's primary concern is privacy. He is a big name in the opposition to a national ID card, unreasonable search and seizure, etc. But the justification for that concern, as stated above, is also applicable to being opposed to restrictions on firearms.--Joe]

Of course it was in Boston where the cops all went bonkers because someone was carrying around some wires and LEDs (via Bruce):

Star Simpson was charged with possessing a hoax device today at Logan International Airport for wearing a sweatshirt that had a circuit board affixed to the front with green LED lights and wires running to a 9-volt battery.

This is not a bomb:

And furthermore, being the nit-picky engineer that I am, it's a breadboard, not a circuit board.

If someone wanted to carry a bomb around at the airport they would almost for certain put it in a suitcase instead of wearing it in the open on their sweatshirt. And since it was in the open you can easily see there is no detonator and no explosives attached. But this is Boston. And so:

Outside the terminal, Simpson was surrounded by police holding machine guns.

"She was immediately told to stop, to raise her hands, and not make any movement so we could observe all her movements to see if she was trying to trip any type of device," Pare said at a press conference at Logan. "There was obviously a concern that had she not followed the protocol ... we may have used deadly force."

Simpson was arrested...

Bruce says Refuse to be Terrorized. I say Boston was just exercising their authority as a police state. And the police probably hadn't gotten to play with the sub-guns in weeks. They had to justify having their toys by actually pointing them as someone occasionally.

I do agree with Bruce that the true terrorists are probably laughing at us.

Wow. It's ALL here.

Too bad everything costs money to view.

Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.

H. L. Mencken
[I keep thinking there has got to be a better system. The competing political systems of today are a minimum of 100 years old. Our communication technology, mass media, and perhaps other technology surely make some sort of new freedom based political system viable rather than enhancing a police state. But what is it?--Joe]

Just today I received a copy of the letter the Idaho Attorney General sent to the Moscow City Attorney.

If you recall our Mayor wanted to ban guns in public places. The AG told her in legalize via the Moscow City Attorney to not even try going there.

I wish he had warned she was dangerously close to committing a felony but that is expecting too much even for Idaho in today's political climate. We need to work on that for a few more years first.

Men have a source of potentially life-saving stem cells between their legs:

A team of American researchers has found a way to easily identify stem cells in the testicles of adult mice that can be coaxed to turn into brain cells, muscle cells, heart cells, blood cells and even blood vessels.

One day, they say, male patients may be able to turn to their own testicles as a source of stem cells to repair an ailing heart or kidney or to fix the brain damage caused by Alzheimer's or Parkinson's disease.

The procedure would involve removing a small piece of testicle - about the same amount used for a biopsy.

The first question that comes to my mind is, "Can you repair the damage you did to my testicle?" They don't answer that question in the article. I presume the answer is yes, but I'd want to make sure before I authorized a major overhaul of my other body parts. I'd hate to have the rest of my body in full working order and then find they had scrapped out my testicles in the process.

From the U.K. we find (via Bruce):

A comparison of the number of cameras in each London borough with the proportion of crimes solved there found that police are no more likely to catch offenders in areas with hundreds of cameras than in those with hardly any.

In fact, four out of five of the boroughs with the most cameras have a record of solving crime that is below average.

[...]

We have estimated that CCTV cameras have cost the taxpayer in the region of £200million in the last 10 years but it's not entirely clear if some of that money would not have been better spent on police officers.

Not entirely clear? What could be more clear? It appears that the rate of crime resolution is inversely proportional to the number of cameras present.

But they are apparently so accustom to Big Brother being there they are afraid to consider his absence. But don't expect them to remove the cameras and spend the money on something better like more police and/or better enforcement. You should expect them to conclude they don't have enough cameras and to increase proselytization. It's just one of those things about human nature that is hard to accept.

...regarding the police chiefs out there (who, we are told, have come out against the Second Amendment): Every law enforcement officer is required to take an Oath, affirming said officer's commitment to the Constitution of the United States.  Here is one example taken at random.  I'm sure you can find many others:

“I swear (or affirm) that I will support the Constitution of the United States, and that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to the State of Maryland and support the Constitution and laws thereof; and that I will, to the best of my skill and judgment diligently and faithfully, without partiality or prejudice, execute the office of police officer according to the Constitution and laws of this State.”

Notice the first clause-- support for the U.S. Constitution.  Taking an Oath not only suggests or recommends, but it requires individual judgment and individual commitment to the U.S. Constitution when deciding to follow a particular order or enforce a particular law.  It requires, in this case, that the sworn individual understand the Constitutionality of an action before taking that action.  Why else take the damned Oath?

The Nuremburg defense doesn't cut it here.

On the matter of law enforcement officers who have taken the Oath, and who then actively lobby against our Constitutionally protected civil liberties:  Words fail me at the moment, but I'm envisioning a physician who takes the Hippocratic Oath and sets out thereafter to murder his patients.

To you chiefs of police out there who are on the fence:  Be reminded that some of us actually take our civil liberties seriously.  Just sayin'.

Update 09/21/07:  Another reminder for our friends in law enforcement (and to law makers as well).  I use this example only because it is so well known, though there are plenty of other examples: In early 1942 there were a whole lot of German officers and government agents who were as cock-sure of themselves as anyone could be.  Their degree of swagger was quite an impressive sight to behold.  Only a few years later however, many of them were fugitives from justice, while others were swinging from ropes (things can change in short order, and being on the right side of Liberty is good insurance).  As Joe points out in comments, there is this little thingy we call 18 USC 242.  Not that it would be needed as the Constitution already spells out the law in plain English, but here we have teeth, out in front of the brain, as it were.

This is an anti-gun report bought and paid for by an anti-gun foundation, assembled by anti-gunners from the Joyce Foundation, Harvard, and the Violence Policy Center. I’ve seen more serious studies written by Carrot Top and Larry the Cable Guy.

[...]

They’re officially parodies of themselves.

Cam Edwards
September 19, 2007
What A Tangled Web They Weave
[Yup. See also what Uncle has to say about it.--Joe]

Box Cutter Sails Through Airport Security

At least TSA put on a little bit of a show for their Security Theater. They make him pour out his coffee.

Old "fake but accurate" Dan Rather is suing CBS:

The lawsuit, first reported by The New York Times, alleges that CBS violated Rather's contract by giving him insufficient airtime on 60 Minutes after he was ousted from the anchor seat at the CBS Evening News in March of 2005. It also claims that the company commissioned a biased investigation into the Texas National Guard controversy, resulting in a flawed report that "seriously damaged his reputation."

[...]

The suit says the public apology Rather offered to viewers and to Bush on his newscast on Sept. 20, 2004 was written by a CBS corporate publicist, and that he delivered it "despite his own personal feelings that no public apology from him was warranted."

It's amazing isn't it? It was conclusively proven the memo he reported on was a fake but no apology was warranted. Had he been getting away with that sort of crap for so long that he thought it was acceptable? If so then how much damage did he do before he finally got caught? His betrayal of the public trust should have required of him something much more substantial than a public apology. It should have been an exceedingly stiff fine and perhaps some jail time.

Son James and I watch DVDs of some Science Fiction TV series together nearly every Monday evening. Until we got all caught up with the releases we were watching four episodes of Stargate SG-1 each get together.

About three weeks ago Sean and I checked out a gun store that he had never been to and I had only been to once about 18 months ago. The wall looked like this:

James has been saying he needs to buy a gun. And right there, in plain sight, was a suppressed PS-90 TR (Triple Rail, semi-auto version of the P-90 used by SG-1 as they battle evil aliens from all over the galaxy). I tried to get James to buy it with his bonus money but he was too smart for that. It's space-a-roma (I think that was the word Sean used) appeal is very high but neither James nor I have a use for one.

I've been corresponding with a 13 year-old kid that started out saying he wanted to make bombs but there was enough information that indicated he had no intention of hurting anyone or their property. He was just using the wrong word for his desired activities. Rather than ignore him or turn him in to the police in his area I politely declined to help and suggested he attend Boomershoot 2008 since he lives in Idaho. Tonight, after six emails from him in 36 hours, he asked:

Can you give me the URL for the website of pain full pics of pipe bomb retards?

I recently told a friend of mine i made small explosives for recreational uses, and he said "oh yeah i should come to your house and we can make a pipe bomb"

I told him he was being stupid and, before he made explosives needed to do his homework. I told him id try to find the page i saw and show him how dumb his idea really was.

Cool. Maybe he will make it to adulthood.

This (WARNING! Extremely graphic!) is the link.

And speaking of bombs--if you are a suicide bomber intent on taking out some of our boys in the sandbox with itchy fingers on their ".50 caliber sniper rifles" keep (more extremely graphic material!) this in mind.

The best minds are not in government. If any were, business would steal them away.

Ronald Reagan
[The difference I saw between working on government contracts as a "Senior Research Scientist II" at PNNL (I was once told I would be considered a "god" if I had a PhD) and working at Microsoft as a Software Development Engineer was like teaching high school Freshman versus earning my MSEE. But you don't need to be an engineer to see the truth of Reagan's statement. Just look an some of our government agencies, like the TSA. This is just part of the reason why government should be limited; they are too stupid to spend our money wisely.--Joe]

IBM put 35 programmers on a free OpenOffice offering that will compete with Microsoft Office. I don't know how many programmers Microsoft has working on Office but I know they take up most, if not all, of buildings 16, 17, and 18. Each of those buildings are large three-story buildings.

IBM versus Microsoft. Free versus expensive. 35 versus hundreds (include our son James).

Hmmmm.... place your bets with your broker. I put all my chips on Microsoft.