Seattle and surrounding areas in the Puget Sound are now getting heavy snow. Visibility is only a few blocks as I look out the window of our building here in Redmond.

I'm fairly certain Al Gore would agree with me, and I know Phil does. It's all because of man caused global warming climate change.

Update: The storm forecast for the Boomershoot site:

OROFINO/GRANGEVILLE REGION-LOWER HELLS CANYON/SALMON RIVER REGION-

132 PM PDT FRI MAR 28 2008

...SNOW ADVISORY IN EFFECT FROM 5 PM THIS AFTERNOON TO 5 AM PDT SATURDAY...

THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE IN MISSOULA HAS ISSUED A SNOW ADVISORY...WHICH IS IN EFFECT FROM 5 PM THIS AFTERNOON TO 5 AM PDT SATURDAY.

2 TO 5 INCHES OF SNOW ARE EXPECTED FROM LATE THIS AFTERNOON THROUGH SATURDAY MORNING AS A COLD FRONT PASSES THROUGH THE AREA TONIGHT. QUICK BURSTS OF MODERATE TO HEAVY SNOWFALL WILL BE ASSOCIATED WITH THE FRONTAL PASSAGE.

The problem, it seems to me, is this. People are pack animals and they want -- need -- approval from the herd. So, forcing this one-size-fits-not-nearly-everyone way of life down everyone's throat is detrimental to everyone. Living a life that doesn't fit is miserable and that misery plays out in unhappy ways in people's lives.

Jenny Block
March 27, 2008
Open Relationships: What the World Already Has
[The pack animal observation applies to so many things that bug me about people. It is a huge component of the attacks on freedom. From gay rights and gun control to religious intolerance you will find this urge to conform and to enforce conformity playing a big part.--Joe]

I am not amused.

Xenia Huffman-Scott
March 27, 2008
Not amused
[Check out the picture she posted. There are two inches of new snow in Moscow, Idaho this morning. The Boomershoot site, already deeper in snow than I care for this close to the event, is at a higher altitude and probably got even more snow. This could be the year where Boomershooters get to practice long range shooting in "real world conditions" of mud and/or snow. For years Ry has been urging me to make the event more challenging by making people shoot prone from a mud pit mixed with ice and gravel while we hose them down with water. This year might be Ry's fantasy, without the gravel, come true with the help of Mother Nature. I'll bring Ry gravel for his shooting position.--Joe]

Sebastian alerts us to this bigot. Comments are open and appropriate measures have been taken.

H/T to Uncle.

Mangan is reading the Brady script to CNN this time (previous posts about Mangan):

ATF special agent Tom Mangan says the .50-caliber rifle has become one of the "guns of choice" for the drug cartels. The weapon fires palm-sized .50-caliber rounds that can cut through just about anything.

Mangan showed CNN the power of the rifle on a gun range near Phoenix, Arizona. The weapon, a Barrett, was seized in an ATF raid. A round fired from 100 yards away tore through a car door and both sides of a bulletproof vest like those used by Mexican police.

"There's nothing that's going to stop this round," Mangan says.

The rifle was intercepted as it was being smuggled into Mexico. Mangan says investigators believe four others already had passed through the border.

Watch the video to see and hear the emotional appeal these bigots invoke. What they don't seem to realize is all this is caused by the banning of recreational drugs. In other words, governments cause crime.

On Saturday Caleb and I visited the Boomershoot site to do some maintenance, explosive experiments, and to inspect the site.

The maintenance went fairly well. I discovered why one of the WiFi access points wasn't working. It will take another trip out there to verify my fix but I'm pretty confident it will work. The new inverter I had installed last fall didn't want to start up until after we fiddled with it for quite a while and I don't trust it. I'm going to get another one. And finally we installed a petcock on the pipe for our "well" so we could easily drain the water out of it.

The explosive experiments went well enough. We mixed up two batches of Boomerite. One was made with the old fertilizer grade ammonium nitrate. The other batch used the new explosive grade ammonium nitrate I purchased last June. We did a quick test with the new stuff last September and suspected it was not as sensitive as the older material. Our tests on Saturday confirmed those suspicions.

Using CCI Stinger .22LR ammo from about 65 yards the old would detonate reliable but the new would only detonate about one out of three hits.

Using American Eagle .22LR ammo at 12 yards the old would detonate about one out of three hits but the new would not detonate even one out of five or six hits. At 10 yards the old would detonate every time and the new only about one out three hits.

Our conclusion is to get the same probability of detonation the new material requires about another 10 fps of velocity. This is measurable but not a big enough deal to spend the effort to try and improve the mix.

The biggest issue I have concerns about is the condition of the site. It was five weeks from the big day (April 27^th) and there are still drifts well over knee deep in places.

View of most of the target area and part of the .50 Caliber Ghetto.

This is the road leading into the parking area and a neighbor's car.

This is The Berm shooters use for prone shooting. That snow drift is probably two to three feet deep.

This is the hillside shooting area where targets in the 500 to 700 range are placed. There are some big drifts out there.

I'm really glad we paved the target construction area with concrete blocks last fall. This will keep us out of the mud.

This is the 375 yard target area. It is very, very wet and muddy.

Caleb next to one of the snow piles at my parents and brothers farm.

I spent some time talking to my brother about the ground conditions.

My brother Doug and I talked for a while about the weather. He is of the opinion it would take about three weeks of good weather to dry up to the point where they could start farming. If they can be in the fields we would have excellent conditions for Boomershoot. However, the weather forecast for the next ten days is for rain and cloudy weather. Therefore my best guess is that Boomershoot 2008 will be on the damp side. I'll visit the site again at two weeks and one week prior to the event and have better information. Attendees should have contingency plans for muddy ground unless I give a better report just before the event.

Caleb spotted ten wild turkeys as we were headed home.

To hear some men talk of the government, you would suppose that Congress was the law of gravitation, and kept the planets in their places.

Wendell Phillips
[I was reminded of this one by BillH's Hillary Is Delusional post.--Joe]

Every once in a while I try posting a comment to Bryan Miller's blog. About two thirds of the time the comment does not appear. The following are my last two failed attempts.

This was in response to The Supremes and the 2nd Amendment:

It's also very instructive the Bryan does not answer any questions or engage the people that comment here. He merely makes his pronouncements and ignores the refutations of his claims. If he were to engage what I have found most useful in dealing with his type is to insist they answer Just One Question: "Can you demonstrate one time or place, throughout all history, where the average person was made safer by restricting access to handheld weapons?" I've been pushing this question for years without anyone being able to give a coherent answer they have been able to defend.

This was in response to Pennsylvania's murderous burden on New Jersey:

Or maybe the criminologist and sociologists who study criminals. Claims that restrictions on firearms make people safer are without a factual basis. If they did you would expect to see some benefit from Washington D.C.'s ban. But you don't. Even broader studies of less severe restrictions have been unable to find benefits.

So with so many "experiments" done with firearms restrictions with, at best, nothing to show for it in terms of public safety, what is your real reason for advocating such restrictions?

JadeGold, I'm not rotund, don't own a LaZBoy or similar type chair, haven't had a Cheeto^TM in months, and have never seen Red Dawn. Perhaps you were engaging in some projection.

The JadeGold comment I was responding to appears to have been deleted.

Update: The first comment above did ultimately appear. I had refreshed the page several times without seeing but I went back after seeing the comment from Rob (below) and it now shows up. Also, I updated my comment to make it coherent. [blush]

Their website just went live today: FOS Ammunition.

They have .45 ACP, .40 S&W, and .223. They are IPSC shooters and are targeting other IPSC shooters with their offerings.

These are a couple of my shooting buddies so don't expect me to give them unbiased reviews.

I sent out a couple emails using some "back channels" after I posted this. I wonder if it got someone stirred up:

Domain Name		usdoj.gov ? (U.S. Government)
IP Address		149.101.1.# (US Dept of Justice)
ISP		US Dept of Justice
Location		Continent  :  North America Country  :  United States  (Facts) State  :  District of Columbia City  :  Washington Lat/Long  :  38.9097, -77.0231 (Map) Distance  :  2,071 miles
Language		English (U.S.) en-us
Operating System		Microsoft WinXP
Browser		Internet Explorer 6.0 Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; DOJ3jx7bf; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; InfoPath.1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727)
Javascript		version 1.3
Monitor		Resolution  :  1024 x 768 Color Depth  :  32 bits
Time of Visit		Mar 25 2008 8:42:16 am
Last Page View		Mar 25 2008 8:43:03 am
Visit Length		47 seconds
Page Views		3
Referring URL		http://search.yahoo....args=0&pstart=1&b=31
Search Engine		search.yahoo.com
Search Words		atf forfeiture blog
Visit Entry Page		http://blog.joehuffm...ThinkForfeiture.aspx
Visit Exit Page		http://blog.joehuffm...ThinkForfeiture.aspx
Out Click
Time Zone		UTC-4:00
Visitor's Time		Mar 25 2008 12:42:16 pm
Visit Number		273,824

They are looking pretty deep because my blog was number 39 on the list of hits.

I just wonder if they will find it cause to demote or to promote.

Dr. Joe's cure for everything for over 30 years is getting more attention. The details are here, but the overview is:

1. Sex Relieves Stress
2. Sex Boosts Immunity
3. Sex Burns Calories
4. Sex Improves Cardiovascular Health
5. Sex Boosts Self-Esteem
6. Sex Improves Intimacy
7. Sex Reduces Pain
8. Sex Reduces Prostate Cancer Risk
9. Sex Strengthens Pelvic Floor Muscles
10. Sex Helps You Sleep Better

Now, I think this goes to the heart of the matter, because the gun-control advocates--it isn't so much that they are against guns; they're just against the idea of killing. Guns kill people. And there is simply no way the two sides are ever going to be able to come to terms. But I think the idea of gun control is going to die with this decision.

Dan Henninger
Wall Street Journal columnist and deputy editor
March 24, 2008
The Journal Editorial Report
[He was referring to the Heller case. He betrays his bias with the "Guns kill people" line and his belief that gun controllers are against killing. If they were just against killing they would recognize the fact that guns are used to protect innocent life far more frequently than they are used to take innocent life. But he gets it right that there is no coming to terms between the two sides and that there is a good chance that gun control is going die or at least have some serious health problems if this decision goes down like we think it will.--Joe]

I've written about this several times over the years, but it takes a true scholar to do a superior job of it.  A while back, Jonah Goldberg did just that, and Thomas Sowell did a review on Goldgerg's book:

Fascism, initially recognized as a kindred ideology of the left, has since come down to us defined as being on "the right" — indeed, as representing the farthest right, supposedly further extensions of conservatism.

The next time you hear Leftists throwing the word "Fascist" about like a general epithet, and then hanging it around the necks of capitalists or Jeffersonian liberals, you can correct their rather silly (and I have to think willfully ignorant) error.

I've never had a big problem with automated traffic law enforcement as long as it was used only for enforcement of moving violations and not for general surveillance.

Now you can add another objection to my list of objections. From Dallas:

Citywide statistics obtained by NBC affiliate KXAS-TV found that red light cameras do reduce accidents. That is a good thing.

But they do it by reducing red light violations, by as much as 29 percent from month to month at particularly busy Dallas intersections. On the face of it, that, too, is a good thing — but not, necessarily, if you rely on traffic fines to make up a healthy chunk of your budget.

Dallas lawmakers originally estimated gross revenue of $15 million from their 62 cameras this fiscal year, which ends June 30. But City Manager Mary Suhm estimated last week that the city would fall short by more than $4 million.

So Friday, the city turned off about a quarter of the least profitable cameras, saying it couldn’t justify the cost of running them.

Yeah, I'm naive, I take things at face value. I actually believed traffic law enforcement was to reduce personal injury and property damage, not just a source of revenue. I don't recall ever believing in Santa Claus and having the myth shattered, but this must be what it feels like.

I remember this sad woman that lived in the same condominium complex as Barb and I who each weekend seemed to have a different guy leaving her place in the early morning. She never seemed happy and we always figured it was self esteem problem and the pond scum she brought home didn't make the situation any better. Now some researchers have some data on women, depression, and sex. I wonder if the researchers investigated the self-esteem issue and if the "self medication" aspects of using sex for treating their depression benefited them in the long term. And of course they should also explore which, if any, was cause and which was effect. Or was it just correlation?

Just go to Boomershoot. Don't set off dynamite on the sundeck of the hotel you are staying in. Not only do we do it legally and cheaper (considering all the damage they did, let alone the cost of the lawyers), we will detonate about 1000 times more explosives.

[H/T to Sean, Ry, and Glenn Reynolds.]

The level of intensity in that courtroom defies description. The brain power those nine people brought to bear, on top of the months of prep from the litigants, was exhausting. Any more time than we spent would have been overwhelming. It’s a good thing it’s kept to an hour (and this case ran 38 minutes long, quite rare). You just fit everything in, then declare an ending.

Alan Korwin
March 20, 2008
D.C. v. Heller Eyewitness Report -- Analysis 1
[I wasn't there but the intensity comes through loud and clear from all the reports I've read and listened to. I was surprised at the extent of understanding of the issue. From English common law to the problems with trigger locks the justices were prepped as well or better than anyone I have ever met. To stand in front of the and defend a position would be very, very intense.--Joe]

Christmas is the time when kids tell Santa what they want and adults pay for it. Deficits are when adults tell government what they want and their kids pay for it.

Richard Lamm
[This quote reminds me of a book I just finished listening to: The Coming Economic Collapse: How You Can Thrive When Oil Costs $200 a Barrel by Stephen Leeb and Glen Strathy. It has some interesting stuff in it. He claims we are headed for some very bad times, "Unless government does something." Of course this annoys me a great deal unless he means that government should stop meddling in the free market. Published in 2006 he correctly predicted $100/barrel oil when it was $60 and the DOE was predicting it would return to the $35 to $45 range. He said gold would skyrocket. He is saying that we could even see the collapse of civilization because of the shortage of energy and our large debt.--Joe]

If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there'd be a shortage of sand.

Milton Friedman

I met Alan Korwin at the Gun Rights Policy Conference in 1999 and 2000. I was very impressed both times.

Read what more on what he has to say about the Heller case.

Blogging will be light for a few days while I work on Boomershoot 2008 tasks. I give you Xenia as a substitute...

It's becoming a tradition. During Xenia's spring break we go to Portland, visit Powell's, I buy books on explosives, and we get Voodoo Donuts.

And, again, Xenia captures it in pictures.

A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away.

Barry Goldwater

Grrrrr... Even if the ATF and police didn't actually get the lawyer-client conversation tapes (I don't trust them to tell us the truth about this), that they admit to getting a list of the times and duration of the calls is unacceptable to me. Even if I don't have access to the actual content of your phone calls and email if I have all the other information the traffic analysis alone can reveal far more about you than you might want known.

Throughout the Heller case I think most hard core gun rights activists have been thinking "Will this help or hurt machine guns? Even if the Supreme Court slaps D.C. down on handguns, rifles, and shotguns will they create a rule or test that slams the door on machine guns becoming commonly available?"

I've been, behind the scenes, asking people not to even talk about machine guns in the context of Heller. My thought was that if machine guns are ignored in the Heller decision, then if we do things right after a Heller win we can get some machine gun relief eventually. Obviously it came up in a big way during the oral arguments. Some people have been critical of Gura for "throwing machine guns under the bus" during the oral arguments. I am not one of them. I viewed it as unfortunate collateral damage. We needed to bomb the crap out of D.C. and they were holding machine guns as hostages. It was more important to destroy D.C. now than to try and figure out a way to get the machine guns to safety. We might still be able to resurrect machine guns, they aren't really dead, just on life support.

Now, via Uncle, I find Gura responds. I agree with him.

The following is from a reader regarding my post Slaves are about to be freed. He reveals that he and his family are so far unarmed but strongly support the RKBA. He lives in the California which puts a severe chilling effect on actually possessing firearms.

From: Rob 
Sent: Wednesday, March 19, 2008 2:42 PM
To: Joe Huffman
Subject: Re: Your post: "Slaves are about to be freed "

 

Joe,

 

I was waiting for the other shoe to drop.

 

“I think we should start preparing to use a new weapon that we might well have in our arsenal by July. As with all new weapons we need to train with it and plan how to use it before we can use it to maximum effectiveness.”

 

I thought you were going to write about a newly informed populace and moreover, new shooters. 

 

The biggest thing we can have/build is numbers.  Politicians can read polls.  If we have the majority of folks behind us (as I think we do) we tend to win.  If we have repeated instances of the Kim du Toit happy dance for new shooters, then we have motivated people behind us. 

 

Numbers are what the Brady Bunch worked on for a long time, but they are in trouble because they are selling a negative – the momentum has shifted. 

 

The intermediate victory is that we have begun to sell gun ownership and carrying as a positive.  A place not to let up is the “Gun Free Zone” nonsense.  We need to make darned sure that private defensive use of firearms in such situations is responsible and underscored in the media as such.  The Brady Bunch has no answer for this.

 

People are the new weapon.  The most potent weapon is people who understand RKBA truth and wield it well - freed slaves, empowered private citizens.

 

I see the training as literal, for new shooters. (My little family - for example - will someday, God willing, be new shooters.  We are pro-gun and pointedly so, but not –yet- armed.)  The gun community needs to train train train,  Now is not a time for a blossoming of gun accidents because people do not know and strictly follow Cooper’s four rules.

 

When we add to our numbers (who this we unarmed white man?) we win.

 

When even those who do not choose to arm themselves are happy to allow us to do so, we triumph.

 

I think I hear the sound of triumph approaching just over the next hill.

 

Rob

All good points. I'm sure there are others that can be made. I just threw things together off the top of my head to get people started thinking. Please keep thinking and if you want it to have more visibility than a comment email it to me and I'll probably post it.

I have heard the bullets whistle; and believe me, there is something charming in the sound.

George Washington
After returning from a battle during the Revolutionary War.
[For a general he was quite the bad-ass. He had horses shot out from under him. His coat had numerous bullet holes in it. His accomplishments as a young officer were rather daring as well. To say that Washington was "highly regarded" by his men and country would be a huge understatement. My school history books did not do him justice.--Joe]

I already told you what TSA really means.

Now Jed spills the beans on what ATF really means and the U.S. Government backs him up on it.

Scary stuff.

H/T to Rob who sent me the link and made at least a tenuous connection to my previous efforts.

Jonathan Rauch. Does that name sound familiar to you? And if so what did he do for gun owners?

Okay, so maybe one out of 50 or 100 gun rights people will recognize it. You would have to be pretty hard core (potential pun material) to recognize his name and make the connection to gun rights.

So, Rauch just published an article in Reason: The Right Kind of Gun Rights--Why the D.C. case is about self defense. Before I tell you the first article he wrote which got my attention and ultimately nearly all gun rights activists here's the final clue--from todays article:

Yesterday, unbeknownst to itself, the Supreme Court heard arguments in a gay-rights case. To most people, admittedly, District of Columbia v. Heller is a gun-rights case. In fact, it's the most important gun-rights case in decades, one that may cast a shadow for decades to come. But to gay Americans, and other minorities often targeted with violence, Heller is about civil rights, not shooting clubs.

To put it all together, this is from the main page on the Pink Pistols website:

"Thirty-one states allow all qualified citizens to carry concealed weapons. In those states, homosexuals should embark on organized efforts to become comfortable with guns, learn to use them safely and carry them. They should set up Pink Pistols task forces, sponsor shooting courses and help homosexuals get licensed to carry. And they should do it in a way that gets as much publicity as possible."

--Jonathan Rauch, Salon Magazine, March 13, 2000

Yeah, now you should remember. Jonathan Rauch wrote an article and the Pink Pistols spontaneously burst up out of nothingness and gives the gun hating liberals severe indigestion to this day.

Cool, you say. But so what?

What's interesting to me is that some other people and I had been trying for a year or two before Rauch wrote his article to get something going (see the Lewiston Morning Tribune and the Seattle Times) using the same concept. We didn't get much traction. Perhaps it was the wider distribution of his article. Or maybe it was just an idea whose time had finally come. Perhaps it was just the right person got the message and had better organization skills than we did. Or maybe Rauch puts his words together in some magic way. No matter. Rauch wrote a single article and did massive damage to those that would take our freedoms away from us.

Sometimes the pen is mightier than the sword and Rauch demonstrated that in a big way.

I had seen the graphics below before but just shook my head and went on. Reader Rob sent them to me today and pointed out it's self-parodying. They are from the main page of the Brady Campaign website.

In the first graphic they actually say guns murdered people. It seems to me if that is the case all those biologists trying to create and/or modify life in a "test tube" should be redirected to study common metals, charcoal forges, hammers, and drills. Apparently the secret to life was discovered with the invention of the first firearms four or five hundred years ago.

Okay, so maybe I was taking them a little too literally. But my point is they twist the meanings of words to achieve their goals. It is only by telling half-truths and sometimes outright lies that they can achieve political traction. We need to rub their noses in it in a very public manner.

In the second graphic they try to take advantage of a negative stereotype of the gun owner as a vandal who shoots up a sign. They also imply that disallowing guns makes a workplace safer. To test that hypothesis answer this question, "Which is a safer workplace, a maximum security prison or a police station?" Nearly no one has a gun in the prison (including the guards who are in contact with the prisoners) and almost everyone has a gun in the police station. Of course the police station is safer--because the people there are much more likely to be trustworthy people. It's the people, not the guns, that make the difference.

In the world view of the Brady bunch the concept of there being more than one variable that contributes to personal safety is too difficult of a concept. Guns have no will of their own and are tools that can be used for good or evil but making the intellectual leap from the gun to the person pulling the trigger is just asking too much of their feeble brains.

Either that or they have mental problems.

Last night I wrote a simple encryption program. Basically it's "Encryption for Dummies". You can use it to encrypt text message such as email or even instant messages.

Here is the zip file: CryptLight_1_0_0_1.zip (225.56 KB)

Download it. Unzip it, read the ReadMe.htm file and you should know all you need to know about it. If it sounds like something you could use run Setup.exe and have fun.

As a test message use this with the passphrase of "Password" (without the quotes):

gmPtGYutvQCrqXMT++rFLwcN53qTuDpieDL/Z3svuIz4RnHNTCeJ+8aGC4Z2orZ9Zsen/rg7
8JG/Rm/cQ33D5bqSWqTXU4ctDCabZAKw2po=

Update: I forgot to mention, because of my exceedingly Microsoft centric view of the universe, this only works on Windows. I tested it on XP and 32 and 64-bit versions of Vista.

Update2: If you enter in corrupted cipher text and try to decrypt the program will crash. I have fixed it but haven't released new version yet. I'll wait for a few more days to get feedback and bug reports. Consider what you have as an Alpha release.