Glen Caroline and Ashley Varner are here and we having a great dialog even if the wheelbarrows of cash didn't show up.

So far the best message coming our direction is they vigorously welcome our input. Pick up the phone, send an email, etc. They don't have enough ears to pick up and filter all the useful information "out there".

There is a lot of talk about internal bickering in the gun community. We need to improve things and there are some good ideas on how to deal with it better.

Update @ 15:35: We are now discussing the NRA support/non-support in the Parker/Heller case.

Update @ 15:41: NRA says, "How do we address the perception problem?" This is regarding the NRA being perceived as pro hunter and abandoning the black rifle crowd. Not to mention the NFA people. In other words the "NRA is Zumbo organization."

Update @ 16:10: Ashley says she likes my blog and loved the pictures from Montana. She agrees the "Gun Porn" with Kim wasn't a problem. The woman that was disturbed by it was disturbed before she saw it. Uncle suggested the NRA get the CMP program funded again and stop destroying the military surplus ammo.

Update @ 16:25: Glen talked about translating talk into action. We need to put links on our sites to congress critter contact information and NRA-ILA newsletters/action alerts.

False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often endure long; but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for everyone takes a salutory pleasure in proving their falseness; and when this is done, one path towards error is closed and the path to truth is often at the same time opened.

Charles Darwin
[Think of how much mileage the bigots get with the erronous studies about a firearm being 43 times more likely to blah, blah, blah... versus some opinion piece in a newpaper.--Joe]

I'm ready to go. Barb and I are leaving on a jet plane for Reno and the Gun Blogger Rendezvous this evening. That's assuming the TSA will allow me, my guns, and ammo on the plane. Alaska Airlines will only allow me to take 50 pounds of ammo [heavy sigh]. That would have been enough for what I want to do except that with all the other stuff I'm taking (Boomershoot give aways, knives, spotting scope, tripod, range bag, magazines, holsters, guns, shot timer, eye and ear protection, laser range finder, binoculars, spare batteries, gun cleaning gear, walkie-talkie, altimeter, wind gauge, thermometer, exterior ballistics calculator, targets, and a clean pair of socks) I started running up against a different weight limit without bringing all the ammo I wanted.

I have enough match rifle ammo and if I decide I want some more pistol ammo I'll buy it in Reno sometime tomorrow.

Update: We made it through security without incident. We are now sitting at our gate waiting to board. Pretty amazing considering all the electronics and cables I had in my computer bag. The holster in the computer bag apparently didn't raise an eyebrow either. And the empty water bottle... I thought for sure they would want to open my backpack to make sure it was actually empty. They were cool with me wearing a shirt with the picture of a gun on it and the Boomershoot coat too. All nice to know. Maybe they are happy with just infringing on one constitutionally guaranteed right at a time.

So far the flight is on time. You can track it in near real time here.

James and I loved the first two seasons of Andromeda. Great characters, stimulating story line, it was wonderful writing and execution.

We got the first DVD of season three and episode after episode we looked at each other in confusion. What the heck was that? The actors were doing their job but the story sucked. We watched five or six episodes and gave up on Monday. It's on to something else.

James read a synopsis of the remaining episodes declared they were all crap and made up his own ending, "Tyr takes over the ship, then conquers and rules the entire universe." Works for me. It's also entirely within character for Tyr. Some quotes to illustrate:

Tyr Anasazi: What would you like, Jaguar?
Charlemagne Bolivar: The usual. Hundreds of grandchildren, utter domination of known space and the pleasure of hearing that all of my enemies have died in terrible, highly improbable accidents that cannot be connected to me. And you?
Tyr Anasazi: [Laughs] The usual.

Tyr Anasazi: I have faith in nothing but this - when the universe collapses and dies. There will be three survivors - Tyr Anasazi, the cockroaches, and Dylan Hunt trying to save the cockroaches.

We also need real control of identification. We need the right to be anonymous while exercising all other rights. So that even with our photos, our fingerprints and our DNA profile, they can't link our communication and trade and financial activities to our person.

Now I'm not talking about lack of accountability here, at all. We must be accountable to the people we communicate with. We must be accountable to the people we trade with. And the technology must be built to enforce that. But we must not be accountable to THE PUBLIC for who we talk to, or who we buy and sell from.

John Gilmore
A transcript of remarks given at the First Conference on Computers, Freedom, and Privacy, March 28,1991
[Another way of saying this is that government control of financial and communication identification fails my Jews in the Attic Test.--Joe]

Over the years I've had numerous queries about bringing a rifle to Boomershoot that shoots the .50 BMG cartridge. I've always told them it wasn't a problem but they had to set up some distance from "normal people" so they wouldn't hurt their neighbors with the muzzle blast. I put these shooters off to one end and it quickly got named "The Ghetto". After I started running out of shooting spaces I explicitly set aside positions with extra wide spacing for the .50 caliber shooters and I called the area by the name given to it by shooters years before, the ".50 Cal Ghetto":

Now via Tam I find there are "affordable" guns that shoot the manly 20mm cartridge. See the bottom of this page for a picture of the 20mm compared to the wimpy .50 BMG cartridge.

I haven't had any requests to bring 20mm rifles to Boomershoot but they are welcome to come. They will be thrown into the same ghetto as the .50 cal guys who will have to just suck it up when they get embarrassed by the size of their tools compared to the newcomers.

I had planned to leave the Seattle area at about 9:00 AM on Thursday and mistakenly made our airplane reservations for 9:00 PM. Hence Barb and I won't be arriving at GBR until nearly midnight. Oh well, I'm sure people will manage to get by without us for a few extra hours.

Kevin will be on his way to GBR in just a few hours.

Apparently having been refuted on the concept that my children grew up in "an awful environment" they have now changed the subject to anonymously attack me on another front (By NephriteAU, 10-10-07).

Whatever.

For reasons that must be confidential for the moment I have now posted a privacy policy for the Boomershoot.org and JoeHuffman.org domains.

Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.

Albert Einstein

Most anti-gun bigots have a strong tendency toward socialism and the concept of selfishness as a virtue is beyond the mental grasp of socialists. Hence it should not come as a surprise that the "Gun Guys" should think that if you wish to defend yourself that you are being selfish in a negative fashion. What I am surprised at is that he admits it:

Katz's demands represent the height of selfishness.

Katz is the Oregon teacher with a concealed carry permit that wants to be able to defend herself against her ex-spouse.

This started out to be a comment in response to Lyle then it got a little out of scope. The short background story is that Lyle says gun control advocates are vacuous loons and that if we had our act together would have politically crushed them decades ago.

Lyle, It's a little more complicated than what we would like. Read what Dar Korra'ti has to say to get a feel for just one of the issues involved. Another is, as I like to say, it is irrational to expect people to be rational. For example, people have a very strong tendency to believe what they want to believe regardless of the facts.

Also, many would like to believe that it's possible to create a perfect world--if only someone was given sufficient power/control/money to do it. They don't understand that trade-offs are a part of any engineering task whether it is an automobile, a plane, a computer, or a society you are trying to engineer. Most people accept a certain number of automobile, plane, and computer crashes while realizing, at some level, that with the money, time, and other constraints things are working pretty good and certainly they wouldn't be able to do any better themselves.

But when attempting to engineer a society nearly everyone believes themselves to be an expert and that anything short of perfection is reason to throw some baling wire and duct tape at the perceived deficiency. Then with nothing more than opinion they forge ahead. The rare few that bother to try to put numbers on things and pretend to do an actual engineering analysis almost always only look at one side of the equation. They only look at the potential good that might occur from their changes. They fail to look at the actual and/or potential damage their proposed changes will cause.

Are they "vacuous loons"? Well, yes. But I'm of the opinion that is the present state of the average person and there isn't much we can do about that. And that a form of society/government in which the loons are unable to participate is likely to have serious deficiencies of its own.

Deadly face is no substitute for due process.

Jayne Lyn Stahl
Another Poster Child for the NRA
October 7, 2007 at 22:34:36
[Yeah, it was a typo. But even correcting that it's still a pathetic attempt at rational thought. She gets her facts wrong, she has no idea what the rules and laws are for the use of deadly force, and she reaches irrational conclusions. As Uncle said, "I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much stupid in one place."--Joe]

Via Thumper.

I'll bet that was a real rush. But when someone prone on a few roller skate wheels passes a motorcycle you know it's got to be a case of insufficient mylenation (another example can be found in the third paragraph here). Notice how he bleeds off speed by swerving side-to-side when coming up behind the motorcycle? I'll bet he doesn't have real brakes. It's still awesome:

Rollersuit in the Swiss Alps

Update: A friend of mine owns a roller skating rink. I asked him if he had ever done anything like this. He replied:

Joe, Back in the "GOOD'OL" days when all my knees worked I skated down 3 of the then MAJOR hills in Lewiston which were Fifth St. Grade, Eighth St. Grade and Twenty-first St. Grade, in Clarkston the biggie was Beachview Park Grade, the trouble with it was it ended in a parking lot with curbs a strip of grass, and the Snake River. It's a bitch to swim with roller skates on...............!  I passed a car on the Eighth ST. Grade deal he was doing 25 or 30 and he said I was still accelerating, but  I sure the first thing he did was let off so it seemed faster then he thought. We did clock the Twenty-first St deal and top was about 42 MPH-.......,use REALLY good Bearings

IIRC the way his knees stopped working was when he and his motorcycle parted company while they were both traveling at about 50 MPH. He tried running to avoid getting a road rash. His knees got messed up in addition to receiving numerous other injuries you might expect from a separation of man and machine of this type.

Someone apparently believes they can read my mind from reading part of my blog. And she thinks I have problems:

By Sheryl, 10-07-07
I checked that guys site out, very disturbing. I found the home life thread especially very disturbing. Any grown man that likes to brag about intimate relations with his wife on a public blog has some real personal problems. Using sexual terms to generate more search engine hits in conjunction with posts about his children saddens me. What an awful environment they must have grown up in. It frankly disturbs me even more that such a person has access to assault weapons and explosives.

Such a dark world we live in.

I left the following comment but was told "Akismet thinks your comment is spam, so it will be moderated first."

Sheryl, I regret to inform you that you are unable to read my mind or my motives. The only thing truthful about your comment is that which you shared about yourself--you are disturbed.

Update: Interesting... someone else's comment, again very negative, showed up but my comment and that of Miss C don't. Does the moderator have an agenda?

Put this helmet on and get a connection to your god(s).

There is something very different about this one. It was a police office that went nuts:

A sheriff's deputy shot and killed six young people in the northern Wisconsin town of Crandon before being killed himself after a manhunt, according to media reports on Sunday, quoting police and witnesses.

The Forest County Sheriff's Department said seven people were dead, including the shooter, Tyler Peterson, 20, according to media reports.

Five of the victims ranged in age from 14 to 20, and the age was not available on a sixth, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported on its Web site.

Another victim was in critical condition, the newspaper reported.

Peterson, who was accused of storming into his ex-girlfriend's house, was shot by the Crandon SWAT team, the newspaper said. Peterson's former long-time girlfriend was among the dead, it said.

If we are not allowed to have guns then how are we to protect ourselves from the cops with guns that go nuts?

That's mostly snark on my part.

It's a terrible tragedy and it makes me sad to hear of it. It's a small town of about 2000 people. Everyone in that town will know at least one of the victims. Barb and I went to high school in a town of about 3000 (Orofino Idaho). The degree of separation between any two people in a town that small is at most one or two. That whole town will morn.

You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.

Mohandas Gandhi
[I thought of this after reading of the tragic shooting of all the people in Wisconsin yesterday. Just because one cop goes nuts and starts shooting innocent people doesn't mean all cops should have their guns taken away from them.--Joe]

I noticed it was a little cold when I came home Friday night and the furnace wasn't putting out warm air even after I turned up the thermostat. In fact there wasn't much air at all coming out even though we have the fan on continuously. Great. Another chore to do this weekend. Scratch the IPSC match on Sunday because Saturday was committed to visiting my parents and doing some construction and the final fall prep for the Taj Mahal.

Last night, hoping I could get the furnace going and have time for other things today I pulled the dirty air filter out, washed it, and put it back in and got decent air flow but there was still no heat.

So today I verified the pilot light (gas furnace) was on and the thermostat was set to "heat" rather than "cool" and the thermostat setting was for several degrees warmer than the room temperature. Still no flames in the burner. I then used a couple of small screw drivers to short across the terminal block for the thermostat, to simulate a thermostat closure, directly on the furnace controller. After a few seconds it was "flame on" with a puff of flame that came back out of the furnace--toward my hands:

Photo by Xenia

My back of my right hand now has stubble on it (the hair on my palm is just fine).

[Side note: Xenia thought it was gross and it took me a while to convince her to take a picture. I don't understand her concept of "gross". She intentionally got a hole punched in her face and a little singed hair is too gross to take a picture of?]

I removed the thermostat from the wall and did a similar trick from there and also got the furnace burner to start working. It must be the thermostat or the connection. I finally examined the batteries to the thermostat and discovered on of them had leaked and corroded the battery contacts. I removed the old batteries, cleaned the contacts, put in fresh batteries, and now the furnace works again. Now I can head back to the Seattle area tonight, then to Reno on Thursday and not worry too much about the Huffman-Scott compound (guarded by Caleb, Kim, and Xenia) freezing while I'm out of town.

Grumble... There are just too many things getting in the way of the things I want to do.

Kim, Caleb, and I went to the Boomershoot site yesterday. We put in a simple stairway from the water pump to the shed where we make and store the explosives for the reactive targets.

When we got back home Xenia asked what we did and I told her we made a stairway. "To where?", she asked. And I told her, "A stairway to heaven."

This captures a couple of different concepts in addition to the song with that title. I always worry some about blowing up myself and others when we are working on the explosives. Hence a literal use of the word heaven if you believe in such things. And also it's a very happy, pleasant place for me--gun, explosives, and the serenity of being out in the middle of the farm with no people or their sounds nearby.

It turns out that for an out-of-hospital "witnessed cardiac arrest" you probably shouldn't do the mouth-to-mouth portion of CPR.

Uncle says see-through frogs are creepy. I say you better get used to it. People are now creating completely new species. Future Shock is here and now.

I read Future Shock in about '75 and my opinion hasn't changed with 30+ years of evidence--Toffler just likes to blather about things no one can or has any need to measure.

Do you think we can gain any traction with the environmentalists who whine about the loss of species if we started creating new species faster than we made old ones extinct? No? I didn't think so either. There's just no making some people happy.

Advertisement: The most truthful part of a newspaper.

Thomas Jefferson
[Apparently problems with the mainstream media are nothing new. One might conclude that the problem will never be solved. Perhaps the best that can be done is to provide alternate outlets exposing the problems. The great thing about the Internet is that the barrier to entry is so low.--Joe]

Update: What Kevin said.

A loaded handgun was found in an airport men's room. 

[Yawn.]

No big surprise. It's an impossible "problem" to solve.

This weekend I'll be doing Boomershoot 2008 prep and other chores but some people will be here (San Francisco--of course):

The latest adult industry "'pr0nnovations" will be on display in San Francisco this weekend at Arse Elektronika, a three-day expo featuring sex machines, brainy talks and weird performances (including the Electric Orifice Orchestra, in which "extravagantly dressed performers use live biofeedback from muscular interior walls of their bodies to create a multimedia interactive show").

De inimico non loquaris sed cogites

Do not wish ill for your enemy ... plan it.

Jack L. Patterson
Baltimore, MD
June 20, 2007
[There are others that have used this as their .sig line but Patterson has used it more than any other that I can find. I have been unable to find the originator. 

I'm thinking of the anti-gun bigots at the moment...--Joe]

I said it would make them squirm. And both the Gun Guys and Josh Sugarman are doing just that.

Kim's last name isn't Huffman but I'll send an email to get that fixed. Check out our pictures with the other People of the Gun.

Ry has four Halo 3 video ads posted. Microsoft puts an amazing amount of money into marketing (and nearly everything they do).

What good would it have been to know the names of Timothy McVeigh, the Unabomber, or the DC snipers before they were arrested? Palestinian suicide bombers generally have no history of terrorism. The goal is here is to know someone's intentions, and their identity has very little to do with that.

And there are security benefits in having a variety of different ID documents. A single national ID is an exceedingly valuable document, and accordingly there's greater incentive to forge it. There is more security in alert guards paying attention to subtle social cues than bored minimum-wage guards blindly checking IDs.

That's why, when someone asks me to rate the security of a national ID card on a scale of one to 10, I can't give an answer. It doesn't even belong on a scale.

Bruce Schneier
April 1, 2004
A National ID Card Wouldn't Make Us Safer
[See also my web pages on National ID Card Flaws.--Joe]