The View From North Central Idaho

As Say Uncle points out:

Admitting you have a problem is the first step.

Kevin and Zendo Deb contribute their thoughts on this article too.

I've been pushing the similarities between the gay rights movement and the gun rights movement for some time now and trying to get some cross pollination (so to speak). I even have gotten some attention from the press for my efforts:

Gays take up self defense; Organization teaches safety, protection with handguns (Lewiston Morning Tribune)
Pink Pistols chapter begun in Moscow to protect gays (AP version of the above story)
Pistol-packing proponents of gun-owner tolerance (Seattle Times editorial)

I believe putting guns into the hands of lesbian, gays, bisexuals, transsexuals, etc. (LGBTs) is a very powerful meme. In addition to helping save lives that tend to be at higher risk (from "gay-bashing") here's what it does for us:

• It helps fracture the alliance between anti-gun bigots and the Democrats (or between the LGBTs and the Democrats--whichever way you want to look at it)
• It gets guns in the hands of more voters (and the LGBT community tends to be more politically active than the straight population) who are motivated to keep them and carry them
• It helps fracture the stereotype of gun owners as being rednecked, racist, gay hating, KKK types

We need to encourage this alliance as much as possible. And the alliance we have now is a fragile one. It only takes one jerk to undo a lot of work and we need to police our own to maintain this alliance. 

The anti-gun bigot that runs the so-called Freedom State Alliance website paid my blog a visit today:

Host name: adsl-75-34-22-226.dsl.chcgil.sbcglobal.net
Date: 1/31/2007
Time (UTC): 20:32:29
IP Address: 75.34.22.226
Page: /2006/10/26/Imitation+Is+The+Sincerest+Form+Of+Flattery.aspx
Referral: http://www.freedomstatesalliance.com/wordpress/wp-admin/
User agent: Mozilla/5.0+(Windows;+U;+Windows+NT+5.1;+en-US;+rv:1.8.1.1)+Gecko/20061204+Firefox/2.0.0.1

It's nice to know he stops by every once in a while.

Our daughter Kim called me today. She was having a really rough day. She and her fiancée were having problem with the bank and problems with their van which caused cascading failures in other aspects her life. I could hear it in her voice before the first word was out of her mouth. I asked what was wrong and as she started explaining she started crying. A few seconds later I closed the door to my office and started crying with her.

She is 20 years old and hundreds of miles away and although I was able to help solve some of her problems more than anything I wanted to hold her on my lap and rock her just like she was two years old and had skinned a knee or had some other minor injury. I suppose those feelings will still be there when she is 40 and I'm in my 70's.

"Mission"

Translation: To stay alive when "scumbags" threaten your life.

From the Greg Hamilton to English Dictionary by Meredith Robinson
[As a private citizen your job is not to capture, punish, wound, or execute the scumbag. Your job is to make sure you and any innocent life you have taken responsibility for come out of the encounter in the best possible condition. Keep in mind the encounter is not just the few seconds or minutes in which you are face to face with the scumbag but can extend for years into the future including future encounters with the same scumbag (it is an ex-boyfriend that wants you dead?) with civil as well as criminal trials--which may have you as the defendant. When you are in "the situation" you will likely only have fractions of seconds to think about your decisions so you will need to think about what sort conditions will warrant what sort of actions. It's going to be a rare case that you will want to restrain from pulling the trigger when the scumbag is at contact distance with a knife in hand and rare that you will want to pull the trigger when he is 20 feet away and running away. But there are exceptions and the time to think about those exceptions is long before you get into that situation.

When you are in a situation where there is no applicable ready made plan you need to keep your decision logic extremely simple. Hamilton, a professional self-defense instructor, captures the essence of that decision logic here. Concentrate on the mission and do only what is required to accomplish that mission. With days and weeks to think about it afterward you and others may come up with better things you could have done. If you do only those things that are relevant to that mission the results may not be optimal but they probably won't be that far off.--Joe]

Once I had all the log files organized and added the new ones I received from my web host I did a little more looking just for the fun of it. And right off the bat I found something that gave me the giggles. The main website investigator (probably Michael Sutherland) for PNNL used the machine "puck.pnl.gov" as he or she committed their felony. My search in a friend's 2005 log files resulted in this little gem:

Machine name: puck.pnl.gov 
Date: 6/22/2005 
Time (UTC): 20:18:50 
IP Address: 130.20.128.81  
Referral URL: http://www.mywebsearch.com/jsp/GGcres.jsp?id=IBdHb4UNDrsJ&su=http%3A//www.mywebsearch.com/jsp/GGweb.jsp%3Ffr%3D20%26searchfor%3Djoe+huffman+sorry%26ptnrS%3DZSzeb001%26st%3Dbar%26nsa%3D0&u=http%3A//www.kennedysailor.com/faq.htm&searchfor=joe+huffman+sorry

This visit took place early on the afternoon of June 22, 2005 about two and half weeks after I was fired. The funny part is the search string they used: "joe huffman sorry".

It's a little bit ambiguous what they were looking for. Were they to see if I said something about being sorry for my contribution to what had happened? Or were they sending me a subtle message that they were sorry?

I was never sorry for anything I did. I wasn't the one committing a felony. And if they were "sorry" that was a pretty sorry attempt at apologizing and it doesn't cut it. I'll believe they are sorry after they have spent a few months being rented out by the quarter hour to fellow inmates to the guy with the most cigarettes.

This book, even though I hate the title, addresses one of my hot buttons:

One of the great myths of alternative medicine and the health food industry is that natural things are better than artificial or synthetic things because natural is natural and Mother Nature wouldn't want to hurt us. Wouldn't she just? Plants and animals have had many millions of years to evolve ways of protecting themselves against predators and competitors for resources. Humans have had about 100,000 years of hunting and gathering to evolve natural resistance and about 10,000 years of agriculture to breed out the nastiness, and these times are just not long enough to make much difference. We are surrounded by plants and animals which can do us great harm if we are not careful about what we eat, and also by a myriad of fungi which delight in making safe foods unsafe.

People, with great pride, will say something to effect of "It's all natural" as if that proves the goodness of something. To date my best response to this sort of idiot talk is, "Botulism is all natural too." But, being idiots, they will insist that even natural poisons are good too because that is how you control insect pests or some such thing. They just don't get it. If "all natural" poisons exist as well as "all natural" food/drink/shampoo/whatever then there must be a continuum. Hence by saying some food is "all natural" does give us any information about it's fitness for consumption.

I would like to suggest they have a nice meal of raw mad-cow brains, marinated in a salmonella broth, with rhubarb greens on the side, and washed down with oleander tea. But I'd be afraid they would actually do it and the police would arrest me on some charge like "engaging in a battle of wits with an unarmed person".

Every once in a while I read a dead tree newspaper.  Someone wrote a letter to the editors of the Moscow/Pullman Daily News this last weekend that could not go unanswered.  I wont bore you with its contents, but you'll get a good idea of it by reading my response, submitted today to the same newspaper:

Dear Editors,

Regarding Mark Winstein's letter entitled "Lets Not be a Big Box Town" printed in last weekend's edition:  I will point out to your good and thoughtful readers that in Mr. Winstein's opinion, the last people who should be making decisions about land use are the actual land owners, the last people who should decide what is and what is not a "sustainable approach to the economy" are those who have their own capital at risk in a given venture, and by rights, the very last people on Earth who should decide where to shop are the shoppers themselves.

Apparently, there is a new field of study at the U of I, known as "Helping Make the Economy More Reflective of Ecological Values".  I might like to meet one of the Doctorate Professors in this new Helping Make the Economy More Reflective of Ecological Values Department.  However, between taking care of my family and minding my own business instead of advocating the use of force in minding other people's business, it would be hard for me to justify the time.

Now I want to propose an entirely new concept-- one that Winstein may not have ever considered:  Maybe we could advocate the protection of other people's rights (even if we dislike them).  It might be interesting if people could make their own decisions in what I will call a "Free Society" (I might enjoy entertaining the Dean of a "Free Market Solutions to World Problems" College).  I understand that this is a new and terrifying proposal (for some) but it may be worth considering, given that if our neighbors have the Right to Choose, perchance it would follow that we too would be afforded the same right at some stage.

For anyone who's been held captive in a North Korean prison camp for the last ten years:  "Big Box" means Wall Mart.

I'm going to be using the term, "Free Market Solutions" more often in the future, most especially because no one ever seems to think in those terms.  The Left, naturally, always views a free market as the problem rather than any sort of solution to anything, and naturally, they couldn't be more wrong if they tried.

Vi Ry and Reason. A 80 year old man was shot and killed by undercover police after he told them to leave his property. He brandished a gun and they shot and killed him. Witnesses say the officers never told him they were undercover. What would the law do if it had been real drug dealers that had shot and killed him? Would they be prosecuted? Almost for certain. Assuming the witnesses are correct, what law says the police are held to a different and lower standard? Will they be held to the same standard as any other person that did the same thing?

Don't count on it. The police are out of control and a good portion of the reason is because of the war on some recreational drugs. It's time the legislature declared victory and gave it up.

Update: More info on the case (thanks to Steph for the link):

Police are now conceding that Singletary was completely innocent. The Jacksonville sheriff describes him in this article as an "honest citizen trying to do good."

Which means that two undercover officers trespassed onto Singletary's property. They then invited criminals onto his property to engage in criminal activity with them. Mr. Singletary, recognizing the trespassers as drug dealers, then properly demanded they leave. He brought a gun along to defend himself, not an unreasonable action, given the circumstances. For this, he was shot to death.

These police officers should be treated exactly the same as any other private citizen who shot to death a private citizen under similar circumstances. I.e. trespassing while engaging in a transaction involving illegal drugs. "The kings men" do not have special, unwritten privileges that places them above the law--both legal and moral law.

This guy is totally incomprehensible to me:

Progressives can close this gun gap and make significant inroads with gun owners by staking out an aggressive position on guns that reflects both the majority view of gun owners and non-gun owners, and responsible policy positions to keep America safe.

This moderate view supports the Second Amendment, new laws like those designed to close the gun show loophole, and the strenuous enforcement of existing gun laws.

...

• By a margin of 92-7%, voters support improving the background check system to make instant checks faster and more accurate (90-9% among gun owners). 
• By a margin of 90-9%, voters support closing the gun show loophole (85-13% among gun owners, and 83-16% among those who have attended gun shows!).
• By a margin of 77-21%, voters support renewing the assault weapons ban (66- 32% among gun owners).

Moreover, for every one of these proposed laws, voters overwhelmingly believe that a progressive can support each measure and still be a strong supporter of the Second Amendment.

If this is "strong support" for the 2nd Amendment I'd hate to see what opposition to the 2nd Amendment would be. Of course he doesn't say actually say they are supporters of the 2nd Amendment. He just says voters will believe it.

It reminds me of the first "User Friendly" software came out in the late 80's. The software vendors had a bunch of labels made up that said, "User Friendly!" and slapped them on all the boxes in the warehouses. The great majority of the people weren't fooled then and we shouldn't be fooled by this shyster either.

Update: I've been asked where the survey data is. What survey showed such numbers? I don't know anything more about this particular survey that what is on the website I linked to. What I do know is that almost for certain the questions asked were carefully chosen to give the desired results. For more details on how this is done please see the, very technical and scientific, article Sorry, Wrong Number; Why Media Polls on Gun Control are so Often Unreliable (scroll down or do a search on the page).

The headline reads (from Canada so don't get excited about this being in the U.S.), "Conservatives still looking at lifetime gun licence Despite college shooting". You never read a headline or even something in the text along the order of "Socialists and facists still pushing gun control despite it's failure to reduce crime every time it has been tried." Just One Question you bigots. Just answer my one question and then tell me again why you want to take our guns.

Every thing secret degenerates, even the administration of justice; nothing is safe that does not show how it can bear discussion and publicity.

Lord Acton
[PNNL has a problem with this. They have defied every Freedom of Information Act request I have made--in some cases blatantly lying say, "No such document exists." when I created the documents and knew they must still exist. Someday someone will punish them for their illegal acts. When that happens I, and many others, will be there helping to make sure that punishment makes up for all the times they got away with it.--Joe] 

Free speech is not to be regulated like diseased cattle and impure butter. The audience that hissed yesterday may applaud today, even for the same performance.

William O. Douglas
[A similar thing can be said of guns. The type of gun that was used for a terrible crime yesterday may be used to save many lives the next. The government that protects you one day may next year send you to the gulags--unless you and your kind own and know how to use guns.--Joe]

Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them...

Thomas Jefferson
1816
Letter to Van der Kemp
[Although Jefferson wasn't referring to gun control it certainly applies. Keep that in mind when people in high crime rate areas with oppressive gun laws insist others in low crime rate areas enact more gun control with the claim such gun control will reduce the crime rates in the area of the first person. I'm thinking of a certain set of mayors here that should be laughed all the way back to some tiny closet in their respective offices ashamed to show their faces until they have been booted from office, dragged out to the street, and given a swift boot to send them on their way to the dustbin of history.--Joe]

...each Federal employee has a responsibility to the United States Government and its citizens to place loyalty to the Constitution, laws, and ethical principles above private gain. The public deserves and should expect no less.

U.S. Department of Justice
Departmental Ethics Office
Justice Management Division
[If they are required to have a loyalty to the Constitution then how do they get away with working for agencies such as the ATF that are enforcing blatantly unconstitutional laws? Oh, that's right, the constitution and law doesn't apply to them unless they want it to.--Joe]

Via Say Uncle we get this bit of ATF humor. Here is a teaser:

It has come to our attention that an opposable thumb commonly located on a person’s hand can be used in conjunction with a semi-automatic firearm, when placed in a belt loop, can cause said semi-automatic firearm to fire at a higher rate of fire than we originally intended for it to be allowed to fire at.

What happened here was that once machine guns were heavily restricted the ATF had to define what a machine gun was. Human creative being what it is the freedom loving "gun nuts" kept coming up with inventions that bypassed the definitions the ATF came up with. Just recently the ATF went almost absurd in their definition and some smart-ass took it to the logical conclusion. I actually have some sympathy for the ATF in this case. They didn't write the law they are just trying to make sense of it and give us definitions they can enforce to. It's the bigoted politicians that are at fault. Even if all the existing ATF people people did the right thing (most of them should find legitimate jobs) there would be others more than willing to take their place. We need to destroy them at their root--the politicians that encourage them by giving them laws, money, and guns.

It's fairly easy to define a crime when there is a victim. It can be done in terms of the actual injury. Was there more than $1000 of property stolen? Was the victim permanently injured? But try and define an "assault weapon" or a machine gun, prostitution, or recreational drugs (enumeration is possible but creative chemists come up with things not on the list) and they run into problems.

Laughter and humiliation may be the best weapon we have against these anti-gun bigoted politicians and their hired thugs. Let 'em have it with both barrels.

I’m not procrastinating, I still have 25 minutes.

Xenia Huffman-Scott
[Xenia was working on a Government worksheet before school that she thought was due the next period that had a question about Microsoft lawsuits. A friend of mine testified in one of the lawsuits and she was hoping I could give her a quick brain dump and she'd be, essentially, done. She was wrong. She had all of winter break to work on it and I told her to go do her own research as best she could with the available time. It turned out the assignment wasn't due until the next day but it would have served her right if had been just 25 minutes and she wasted two of those minutes talking to me.--Joe]

There is one very well known guaranteed cure for smoking--death. However another one has just been discovered--brain injury:

Scientists studying stroke patients are reporting that an injury to a specific part of the brain, near the ear, can instantly and permanently break a smoking habit, effectively erasing the most stubborn of addictions. People with the injury who stopped smoking found that their bodies, as one man put it, “forgot the urge to smoke.”

This is great news. We may be able to find or create a drug or other means to "flip the switch" and help people from implementing the "universal cure".

I find this very ironic--I always figured you must have had a dysfunctional brain to start smoking in the first place.

Search engines are a wonderful thing. I'm sure the felons at PNNL thought they were great and wonderful as they went searching for information on me (see for example the use of Google on this day).

But search engines are double edged swords. For example doing a Google search for Battelle fraud (Battelle is the contractor that manages Pacific Northwest National Laboratory--PNNL) yielded these pages (E835 and E836) in the Congressional Record:

• Dr. Laul is a nuclear chemist and a nuclear engineer, with a Ph.D. from Purdue University. He spent 15 years at Hanford working on nuclear waste and environmental cleanup problems, analyzing whether that site was suitable for permanent storage of high-level nuclear waste.

• Dr. Laul is also a whistleblower, and a friend of the taxpayers, who put his career on the line when he blew the whistle on fraud and mismanagement by Batelle, Inc., a DOE contractor. Five days after disclosing that Batelle inappropriately and illegally used equipment paid for by the Government, Batelle fired Dr. Laul, saying he had improperly disposed of a hazardous waste--a violation DOE later said Batelle used as an excuse to lay him off and silence him.

• After losing his job, Dr. Laul brought a False Claims Act suit against Batelle and won, resulting in Batelle reimbursing DOE $330,000. Today I submit for the Record an article describing the case and reporting on Dr. Laul's vindication, and thank him for the important and honest work he did on behalf of this country. Dr. Laul lost his job because he had the nerve to stand up for what was right.

You might say that's all well and good for the taxpayers. But if you read further you might have cause to change your mind about that:

U.S. government investigators agreed that scientist Jagdish C. Laul was fired for turning in his managers for fraud.

A federal appeals court agreed Laul could sue the Hanford contractor for whom he worked for wrongful termination.

The government made the contractor, Battelle's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory pay back $330,000 for double-billing lab equipment--and even recommended Battelle managers be criminally prosecuted for fraud.

But who picked up the $750,000 tab for defending Battelle against Laul's lawsuit?

U.S. taxpayers.

Laul's case is the most recent example of a system that allows private nuclear contractors to rack up huge legal bills fighting whistleblowers--even when the contractor's in the wrong.

Battelle settled with Laul in January to head off a federal jury trial in Spokane.

The cost of his case to taxpayers includes the $250,000 settlement paid to Laul; $400,000 in legal fees to Battelle's outside law firm, Davis Wright Tremaine of Seattle; and about $100,000 in legal work and other Battelle costs to fight Laul.

If Laul had won at trial, taxpayers would have paid that bill, too. That's because of a Cold War agreement in which the U.S. government promised to pay all legal costs of its nuclear weapons contractors when they agreed to run the government's weapons plants.

The agreement, called indemnification, is still in effect today. It applies to Battelle, which works on Hanford cleanup and other government nuclear programs.

Isn't that nice? Battelle paid $330,000 for the fraud which sounds like was the amount they had illegally charged the government to begin with. And the Federal government has to pay all the legal costs of Battelle's defense. So... assuming Battelle decides to engage in some illegal activity to increase their bottom line the worst case scenario is that Battelle comes out even in the end because the Feds are required to pay the legal bills. Best case is they get away with it.

In my case the Feds will, assuming I win, pay Battelle's legal bill and any settlement I get from them. Battelle is held financially harmless by the Federal government. Just so you know. Perhaps your congress critters would like to know that as well.

Continuing the search engine exploration... So what happens if we do a search for Battelle whistleblower? That was interesting... We end up with this story which with a little more searching results in this and digging a little deeper yielded this (UT-B means the partnership between the University of Tennessee and Battelle that manages Oak Ridge National Laboratory [ORNL]):

In my settlement, I made sure that DOE and UT-B explicitly agreed that I had won the case. There were two reasons for this. One was that I did not want UT-B to be able to claim that I "dropped the case" or any such thing. But the other was that back in 1995 at PNNL, following a settlement in which Battelle paid their fired former employee J. C. Laul a sizeable amount for a whistleblower case that Laul was very likely to win if it had played out to the last act (legally speaking), PNNL head and later ORNL head Madia characterized the payout as "a straightforward business decision with the best interest of the US taxpayer in mind". But as a Government Accountability Project lawyer pointed out, Battelle spent over $400,000 of taxpayer money defending against Laul's whistleblower action, plus the $330,000 it had to return to the government for the fraudulent action that Laul (accurately) reported. Madia stated that the message of the settlement was "Don't sue us [Battelle]", but of course the true message was "We will get away with whatever we can".

So what our search engines report for us with just a little looking is that Battelle has a history of making stuff up and firing people. I was telling Barb this new information and she said, "You would think they would learn." Well yes, but there wasn't much to learn and it's a different lesson than the one we want them to learn. They have learned they can commit criminal acts and the worst that will happen is they come out even in the end--guaranteed by the contract they have with the Federal government. There are more amazingly great terms in their contract that I'll save for another day. I wouldn't want you to burst a vessel from a blood pressure spike.

Here are some of the lessons being taught to Battelle. This is right after being dinged for the first fraud case I mentioned above:

Battelle is expecting to receive an "outstanding" rating for fiscal year 1999 from the Department of Energy for its performance in operating Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland.

The rating is to become final and be announced in late December.

Last year, Battelle also received an outstanding rating. Even though its 1998 score fell just barely shy of the number needed for the top rating, DOE awarded the outstanding rating because of Battelle's strong efforts in key areas.

This year, Battelle expects to be well above the minimum score needed for an outstanding rating, based in part on the lab's self-assessment, outgoing lab Director Bill Madia said Wednesday during a meeting with the Tri-City Herald editorial board.

The real problem here is that Battelle/PNNL has no incentive to be responsible for their actions. It's like a child that gets in trouble at school and the parents intervene in such a way the child is totally protected from any punishment. There is no downside for their misbehavior--there is only upside. That's one of the ways criminals are created. After sufficient criminal activity they eventually get caught and then they go to prison. Which is has been my end goal from the beginning in then case. The PNNL felons need to spend some time being rented out by the quarter hour to fellow inmates bidding the most cigarettes for a few years and perhaps then the behavior of their previous co-workers will improve.

The above is just the tip of the iceberg. Battelle has other "skeletons in it's closet" that are most likely to come tumbling out soon. I don't have enough details to really be comfortable in talking about it even if I was at liberty to discuss it. I have been assured that I will be among the first to know when the details become public.

I'll keep you posted.

Update: A reader pointed out one of my links was broken. That is fixed now.

Also worthy of update is another source that is more readable and has the potential to be less biased is the actual ruling of the DOE in Westbrook's case:

There is evidence in the record that suggests that the RIF sheets, which contained the objective information on which the termination selections were to be made, were not given serious attention, and were drawn up to favor a pre-selected individual. I have reviewed the criteria set out on the RIF sheets and find troubling inaccuracies and manipulation.

...

In my view, the Company’s use of this criterion [transferability of skills] to assess whether an employee is flexible enough to “satisfy” or “get along with” customers is so strained that it suggests a manipulation of the system to reach a predetermined result. .... That leads me to believe its use was an afterthought, one designed to downgrade Westbrook and target her for termination. As such, it detracts from Battelle’s position that the RIF was performed impartially with respect to Westbrook.

I received an email from my lawyer today about my lawsuit against Pacific Northwest National Laboratory:

We do have service on Battelle. It was served on 1/22/07.

Whoo hooo!! Full speed ahead!

Of course that is in "legal time" rather than in "Internet time" like what I'm used to.

I also received a phone call yesterday from someone that heard about my case. They had lots of interesting information about other illegal activities Battelle has been involved with. He is sufficiently upset about it that he is taking it up with some government officials. I shared what I could with him. I'm not sure his information will be that useful to me but I hope to soon be posting some of it here or on my PNNL.info website. He claims some pretty egregious and illegal stuff.

It's not too surprising I guess. I did have a guy at the lab tell me and another fairly new employee, "See this badge? This means the law doesn't apply to us." That same "fairly new employee" recently sent me email saying, "I can definitely atest to a pattern of illegal and unethical activities at the lab" and "I do think it is my obligation as a citizen to see justice prevail."

The guy I received a phone call from had first called over two weeks ago. I put him in touch with "fairly new employee" and that contributed to the update yesterday about his plans to talk to the GAO, Congressional oversight committees, and the DOJ in the near future.

I have some hints that my previous plans to avoid getting former co-workers involved may not be possible. Now might be a good time for some of my friends that still work there to get new jobs (hint, hint). Things will be much more comfortable for them if they don't have to worry about getting fired for reporting information that is embarrassing to Battelle after being deposed. Also I've been hearing rumors of business being a little tight for them right now. If certain government agencies become displeased with all the illegal activities Battelle has been engaged in then business could get much worse soon.

I've been working for several days on the log files requested in the interrogatories for the PNNL lawsuit (no, I'm not converting them to EBCDIC although I gave it a few seconds of thought just for the amusement value). I only had a subset of the logs they wanted in a reasonably well organized manner. They wanted more than what I had organized, some of which I didn't have, lots of logs weren't in my preferred organization, many of the websites were hosted simultaneously on two different servers at the same time for a while, and the logs came from at least four different servers. It's been a lot of work but I'm nearly done with that part of it.

I obtained more log files from my old web-hosting provider last night and although there will be a few tweaks to the numbers the following is pretty close:

• Websites: ~30
• Directories: ~170
• Files: ~170,000
• Size: ~6 Gbytes

I realize they asked for this mostly to cause me pain, almost for certain they won't bother to do their own analysis, their own internal email and testimony will make this irrelevant, but I have been wanting to organize this stuff for several years anyway. I want to finish my web log analysis program (NoDooce) and this data set will be very useful for both development and testing. And besides, being the Aspergers type, I actually enjoy this type of work. I hope they find some expert witness to look at everything, pay him outrageous amounts of money, and he has as much fun as I have had with the data.

This is just the log files. There are also hundreds of pages of notes, documents I have obtained, and emails. I can't wait to start digging into the stuff they have to supply to me.

It's a little large to put it in your pocket or hip holster but you could mount it on your starship or even your Humvee:

MOODY AIR FORCE BASE, GA. — The military calls its new weapon an "active denial system," but that's an understatement. It's a ray gun that shoots a beam that makes people feel as if they are about to catch fire.

The technology is supposed to be harmless — a nonlethal way to get enemies to drop their weapons. Military officials say it could save the lives of civilians and service members in places such as Iraq and Afghanistan.

The weapon is not expected to go into production until at least 2010, but all branches of the military have expressed interest in it, officials said.

During the first media demonstration of the weapon Wednesday, airmen fired beams from a large dish antenna mounted atop a Humvee at people pretending to be rioters and acting out other scenarios that U.S. troops might encounter in war zones.

The device's two-man crew located their targets through powerful lenses and fired beams from more than 500 yards away. That is nearly 17 times the range of existing nonlethal weapons, such as rubber bullets. Anyone hit by the beam immediately jumped out of its path because of the blast of heat. Though the 130-degree heat wasn't painful, it was intense enough to make participants think their clothes were about to ignite.

...

The system uses electromagnetic millimeter waves, which can penetrate only 1/64 of an inch of skin, just enough to cause discomfort. By comparison, microwaves used in the common kitchen appliance penetrate several inches of flesh. The millimeter waves cannot go through walls, but they can penetrate most clothing, officials said. They refused to comment on whether the waves can go through glass.

Early in my career as an electrical engineer I worked with millimeter waves some. I'm sure it will go through most glass although it is possible to make glass it won't penetrate. It is also trivial to make clothes that block it. That doesn't mean it's useless but it will cause adversaries to spend time and money to acquire and utilize the necessary protective equipment.

As it is currently shown it's vulnerable to a well placed bullet. My advice is to armored that spot a little bit better before going to production with it. Otherwise a single agitator could disable it and enable a crowd to riot (whatever).

I'm attempting to just make just one pass before moving on. We'll see. In any case I wanted the three erroneous assumptions in a place I could find them easily in the future.

Someone in the U.K. commented to a post by Kevin and Kevin engaged him in an email debate. I responded with my own email:

From: Joe Huffman
Sent: Thursday, January 25, 2007 7:39 AM
To: nhpud AT[NOSPAM] hotmail.com
Cc: gunrights AT[NOSPAM] comcast.net (Kevin Baker @ The Smallest Minority)
Subject: You comment at The Smallest Minority.

You wrote:

It is unbelievable that there are people like you lot who can defend guns as 'harmless fun' or seriously state that 'guns make you safer'. If you weren't so dangerous the absurdity of it all would be hilarious.

I love how the topic quickly moves from your gun fantasies to your racial genocide fantasies in one swift paragraph.

I particularly like the idiocy of these comments.

"if you're not a young black male living in an inner city, your likelihood of dying by homicide (regardless of weapon) is about equal to that of someone living in Europe."

"if you remove the crimes committed by blacks and latinos, the U.S. violent crime rate is almost identical to that of Canada."

Like duh!! What a surprise eh? So if I remove the most deprived higher crime areas and people from the US figures and then compare it with the average in Europe (that includes all their deprived higher crime areas and population) it is 'roughly similar. Is there no amount of distortion of statistics you lot will go to to justify your idiocy? Let alone your thinly disguised prejudice against black people. Deny black people opportunities so the majority end up in poverty stricken neighbourhoods with little or no prospects and then when they act all dysfunctional, use this to justify your superiority and racial fantasies. I despair for humanity when there are dumb f***s like you walking the planet.

Boy am I glad I don't live next door to you guys.

PS Gun deaths have dropped from 368 a year to 163 since we banned handguns in the UK. You might want to follow our example and save 15,000 US lives a year by halving your gun deaths as well.

I have Just One Question for you:

Can you demonstrate one time or place, throughout all history, where the average person was made safer by restricting access to handheld weapons?

Basically your error is due to three unstated assumption:

1. Crimes committed with guns are independent of those committed with other weapons or merely greater physical strength. They are not. Just because a criminal does not have easy access to a gun doesn't mean they won't use some other weapon such as a knife, rock, club, feet, or fists.
2. All deaths or injuries inflicted with a firearm are bad. They are not. Many homicides and injuries committed with a firearm are legally justified and some are even praiseworthy. These incidences must be subtracted from the "bad" category and added to the "beneficial" category.
3. Restrictions on firearms will reduce the detrimental uses of firearms more than the beneficial uses of firearms. Typically anti-gun people either ignore or severely misrepresent the number of innocent lives protected by firearms. When they do try to pretend to take beneficial uses it into account they only count killings of a criminal and ignore the cases where the mere brandishing of a firearm halted an attack.

I look forward to your answer to my question.

-joe-

At some point you have to decide whether you're going to be a politician or an engineer. You cannot be both. To be a politician is to champion perception over reality. To be an engineer is to make perception subservient to reality. They are opposites. You can't do both simultaneously.

H. W. Kenton
[Substitute "scientist" for "engineer", I am both, and "An Inconvenient Truth" (the phrase as well as the movie) just screams at me when I read this quote. Thanks to my son James for bringing this quote to my attention.--Joe]

Sounds sort of like cleaning up campaign finance to me. Different people but with the same world view--people cannot be trusted with freedom:

Chinese Communist Party chief Hu Jintao has vowed to "purify" the internet, state media reported on Wednesday, describing a top-level meeting that discussed ways to master the country's sprawling, unruly online population.

...

Hu, a straitlaced communist with little sympathy for cultural relaxation, did not directly mention censorship.

But he made it clear that the Communist Party was looking to ensure it keeps control of China's internet users, often more interested in salacious pictures, bloodthirsty games and political scandal than Marxist lessons.

In the process of organizing my log files and complying with the Interrogatories I came across what appears to be the home IP address of one of the PNNL investigators or someone they reported the results of the investigation from the previous day (see also the first day of investigation).

Tracing it through various websites reveals more evidence the whole thing was about guns. Among the evidence is they had a lot of interest in a picture of me with a holstered gun on my hip and interest in Boomershoot.

One has to wonder if it's because they care about what we think of them or if it's just because they want to add people to "the list".

Someone at the US Senate did a Technorati search for Schumer and came up with my QOD from Kevin Imel.

Domain Name		senate.gov ? (United States Government)
IP Address		156.33.63.# (U.S. Senate Sergeant at Arms)
ISP		U.S. Senate Sergeant at Arms
Location		Continent  :  North America Country  :  United States  (Facts) State  :  District of Columbia City  :  Washington Lat/Long  :  38.8933, -77.0146 (Map) Distance  :  2,072 miles
Language		English (United States) en-us
Operating System		Microsoft WinXP
Browser		Firefox Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050225 Firefox/1.0.1
Javascript		version 1.5
Monitor		Resolution  :  1024 x 768 Color Depth  :  32 bits
Time of Visit		Jan 24 2007 6:56:31 am
Last Page View		Jan 24 2007 6:56:31 am
Visit Length		0 seconds
Page Views		1
Referring URL		http://www.technorati.com/search/schumer?language=en&start=0
Visit Entry Page		http://blog.joehuffm...e DayKevin Imel.aspx
Visit Exit Page		http://blog.joehuffm...e DayKevin Imel.aspx
Out Click
Time Zone		UTC-5:00
Visitor's Time		Jan 24 2007 9:56:31 am
Visit Number		129,171

I object to the term "born" for any of those slimeballs.  "Hatched" is probably closer although most are turds so would more appropriately have been "shat".

Kevin Imel
Tuesday, January 23, 2007 2:47 PM
In an email to: LewistonPistol@googlegroups.com
[In response to an urban legend kind of email that mistakenly claimed the birth month and year for the following politicians were all the same:

Albert Arnold Gore
Jr., Hillary Rodham
John F. Kerry
William Jefferson Clinton
Howard Dean
Nancy Pelosi
Dianne Feinstein
Charles E. Schumer
Barbara Boxer
--Joe]

In this sense strict anarchy may be the highest conceivable grade of perfection of social existence; for, if all men spontaneously did justice and loved mercy, it is plain that all swords might advantageously be turned into plowshares, and that the occupation of judges and police would be gone.

Thomas H. Huxley

If I've heard it once I've heard it a thousand times:  We have a "consumer based" society and as such, the more we spend, the better the economy, yak, yak, yak.  One of our recent presidents (I forget which one-- it doesn't matter as it could have been any one of them) was convinced of this well enough that he made a public statement asking Americans to go out and buy something, so as to help the economy.

No, Grasshopper.

A capitalist society (that is to say, a free socisty) gets its wealth from one source and one source only-- People who dream of new things, get excited about them, figure them out, and put them into practice and/or production.  Simply put, wealth is a product of a winning combination: The creative human mind in concert with hard work and determination.  I will herein go so far as to call it love.

"Hah! you idealist fool" you say, "oil and gold are not produced by humans, and THAT's wealth."  I say, tell that to a frog.  To a frog, petroleum is a dangerous, smelly goo that is to be avoided, and gold is just harmless and worthless.  The human mind on the other hand, has dreamed up, invented and created ways to locate, extract, refine and, more importantly, make use of, oil and gold-- they were not resources before the creativity of the human mind made them so.  

Other than a base, stone-age existence then (actually, remove the stones from that scenario, because humans invented stone tools) real wealth can only come from imagination, creativity, invention and productivity.

What the aforementioned U.S. President should have said (if he'd had a smidgeon of a clue) was, "Dream, Oh People.  Imagine something, create something, find a better way and then build a business around it.  Either that or throw your support behind someone who is doing it or has already done it.  In so doing you will be helping yourself while serving Mankind."  To my admitedly limited recollection, the only politician I've actually heard speak that way was, of all people, Condi Rice.

The next time you hear someone decrying the distastefulness of our "Consumerism" you can correct the major error in their thinking by stating this obvious fact:  Production is a prerequisite to consumption.

Therefore what we have, to the degree that ours is more successful than others, is a society built on "Producerism".

I find it more than a little telling that the word "consumerism" is in the dictionary, but the word "producerism" is not.

Socialist societies get their wealth from consuming (consuming other people's property) by plunder-- extorting from their own (all for very good reasons of course) and from conquest and enslavement.  Socialists are unhappy, defective, paranoid, upside-down individuals-- they have no imagination, which makes them unable to see or comprehend anything other than extortion and fraud as the primary means of getting things done.  This would certainly explain their hatred (even self-hatred) for the wealthy.

Update:  I forgot blind luck.  In addition to extortion and fraud, a socialist sees blind luck as the other means of enrichment, as in "Winners of Life's Lottery", etc..

The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others.  But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God.  It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.

Thomas Jefferson
[A concept that has served us well for over 200 years but the Muslims still have not learned. It appears they are slow learners. But then if you look at our recreational drug laws and gun laws we still have a lot to learn as well.--Joe]

I updated my personal website. It's pretty badass right now.

Xenia Joy Huffman-Scott
Updated Website
January 21, 2007
[Yup. It's very pretty.--Dad]

Acknowledging the existence of evil - not just evil people but evil itself - is a prerequisite to understanding and controlling it. Denying that evil exists, and that it is a proper metaphor for the worst kind of behavior, ensures that evil will prosper.

Cal Thomas
4/24/95
Column

I found it posted on Michelle Malkin's blog:

Trust me-- you'll want to read the whole thing.  You might also want to print it and hang it on your wall, framed, next to the Bill of Rights (you do have a copy, don't you?).  Though the term is over-used, I will say that this man was in fact a "Real American".  The kind of American that made America in the first place.

This man was more articulate at the age of 23 than I am at 48.  His parents, teachers, and home-town folk must be some pretty great people.  Now excuse me, I can't type anymore.

At $750 this is less than half of list price. Quantity 3 in XL for:

Threat Level IIIA Front & rear soft panels 

Front Plate - The 10x12-inch Model TK, K-47CL+ front plate is designed to stop 7.62x51 150 gr., 5.56 SS-109 62 gr., 7.62x39 all, inc API.

The only thing I know of that I lost is one Moody Blues CD I had ripped. I have it at home and when I get around to it I'll recover it also. I got off really lucky with no data permanently lost and only two evenings of my time gone.

Email is up and working again too.

A real backup plan must be implemented...

My former supervisor, the felon Bryan McMillan, at PNNL has a lawyer who requested a "huge number" (my lawyer's phrase) of items in their response to my lawsuit. The conclusion we may be able to draw from this is they don't plan to challenge the point of law about it being a wrongful termination to firing someone because they are a gun owner. The have chosen to go the route to try and make it cost me as much money as possible. Pursuant to that tactic they have requested a lot of financial data from me. With this data they can better judge what my ability is to sustain the legal battle. What they will find out is that our house mortgage payment is lower than most people's rent, we have no other debt, and Barb and I have very high paying jobs. In essence we can, with minor life style changes, sustain the battle until we retire ten or fifteen years from now. And that doesn't include all the donations I have received (click on the Make a Donation button here).

Assuming I win I'm paying everyone back with interest but we can't count on that so you should assume it's a donation. With a big thanks to some people from the Gun Club at Microsoft donations have covered about half of the legal expenses so far with promises of more as the bills come in. So for other side to try and make it too expensive for me to fight is going to be a losing tactic. All they can do is maybe slow down the inevitable and it actually improves the possibility for me to reach the desired end goal. I don't have the time right now to explain why that is but the basics are that as long as I win this particular legal battle the more money it costs both sides during the process the better chance I have of seeing the felons actually getting convicted.

Anyway... To prove the point that their game plan is to just drive up the costs, which ironically help me achieve my final goal, here is the list of requests (complete with typos) from the other side:

INTERROGATORY 1:  State your age, birth date, birth place, height, weight, sex, and Social Security Number. 

INTERROGATORY 2:  Have you gone under any other name or different spelling of said name?  If so, what name or different spelling?

INTERROGATORY 3:  List the addresses, with the dates, where you have resided during the past ten (10) years.

INTERROGATORY 4:  State the month and year you last attended any school, the highest grade or year completed, and the name and location of said school.

INTERROGATORY 5:  If you are married, please state your spouse's name and the date and place of your marriage.  If have been married more than once, state the names and addresses of previous spouse or spouses, if living, and the date and place of their death or your divorce.

INTERROGATORY 6:  State the names, addresses, and ages of your children, if any.

INTERROGATORY 7:  Set forth the amount of your earnings during each of the past five (5) years and your earnings to date during the current year. 

INTERROGATORY 8:  Are you claiming damages for lost earning capacity, lost wages or benefits?  If so, please state, with specificity:

a. The total amount of claimed damages;
b. How you calculated your damages;
c. All employers relevant to your claim and their addresses and phone numbers; and
d. All dates on which you were unemployed.

INTERROGATORY 9: If you have ever been self-employed, state each period of self-employment and the net monthly earnings of said periods.

INTERROGATORY 10:  Have you ever filed for bankruptcy?  If so, please state:

a. The dates and places at which any bankruptcies were filed; and
b. Whether the bankruptcy proceedings are still pending or whether they have been resolved.  If they have been resolved, please state the date of the dismissal, or discharge, if any.

INTERROGATORY 11:  State where you filed your last income tax return, and the year. 

INTERROGATORY 12:  Have you ever been previously involved in a lawsuit?  If so, please state when, where, the nature of the action, the disposition of the case, and the name of the attorney who represented you.

INTERROGATORY 13:  Please advise if you have in your possession or if you have access to statements made by any party or witness to this action.  (For purposes of this interrogatory, a statement is a written statement signed or otherwise adopted or approved by the person making it or a stenographic, mechanical, electrical, or other recording or transcription thereof which is a substantially verbatim recital of an oral statement by the person making it and reasonably contemporaneously recorded.)  If you do, please identify the name of the person making it, the time and place of its taking, the names and addresses of all persons then present and the name and address of the present custodian therefor.

INTERROGATORY 14:  Have you ever been admitted to a facility or hospital for the treatment of a psychiatric or psychological problem or condition?  If so, state:

a. The name and location of said hospital or facility;
b. Whether said treatment was in-patient or out-patient;
c. The dates of said treatment inclusive;
d. The names and addresses of both treating and admitting physicians, psychologists or care givers; and
e. The type and nature of the treatment received.

INTERROGATORY 15:  Give the names, addresses and telephone numbers of any persons known to you or your attorneys having knowledge of facts pertaining to this lawsuit.   This interrogatory is intended to include all witnesses known to you or your attorney or agents.

INTERROGATORY 16:  Have you ever pled guilty to or been convicted of a crime?  If so, state the nature of the crime, the date, and the ultimate disposition of the matter.

INTERROGATORY 17: Have you and/or your spouse/former spouse ever sought marriage counseling?  If yes, please state:

a. The name and location of where counseling was provided or sought;
b. The dates of said counseling inclusive;
c. The names and addresses of persons who provided counseling; and
d. The type of nature of the counseling received.

INTERROGATORY 18: Please state the date you were Adischarged@ from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory/Batelle?

INTERROGATORY 19: Please describe in detail the reasons given to you for your discharge, who gave them, and when these reasons were explained to you.

INTERROGATORY 20: Please state the name, address, and phone number of all places at which you have applied for employment since the date of the subject discharge.

INTERROGATORY 21: Please provide details of your current employment including job title, length employed, specifics regarding compensation, duties and if you have a written contract.

INTERROGATORY 22: Since the date of the subject discharge, please state approximately how many days or months you were unemployed.

INTERROGATORY 23: If the answer to the previous Interrogatory was in the affirmative, please state whether you have received any unemployment compensation.  If yes, please state the dates you received such compensation and the amount of each payment.

INTERROGATORY 24: During your employment at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory/Batelle, were you ever disciplined or educated as a result of what your supervisor determined to be improper conduct or deviation from the company=s policies or procedures?  If yes, please state the dates of such disciplines or educations, persons involved, and the nature and reason for the disciplines or education, persons involved, and the nature and reason for the discipline or education.

INTERROGATORY 25: For all employment held since your discharge from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory/Batelle, please state:

a. The names and addresses of each employer;
b. The name of your position and a brief job description for each position held;
c. The dates of employment with each employer;
d. Your salary or hourly wage for each position held.

INTERROGATORY 26: In addition the preceding Interrogatory, please list all income, of any type, which you have received since the date of your discharge from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory/Batelle.  State the source of the income, and the total income received from each source, including but not limited to, worker=s compensation benefits, unemployment benefits, Social Security benefits, income from jobs, and all income from any other source whatsoever.  If you received unemployment or worker=s compensation benefits which are the responsibility of more than one employer, state which employer is responsible for each amount of the benefit. 

INTERROGATORY 27:  Please identify by name and address each person consulted by you as an expert and whom you expect to call as an expert witness at the time of trial.  Additionally, as to such individuals so identified, state the subject matter on which the expert is expected to testify and state the substance of the facts and opinions to which the expert is expected to testify, giving a summary of the grounds for each opinion.

INTERROGATORY 28:  State whether or not you have received any reports of any kind concerning any aspect of your case.  If your answer is in the affirmative, state:

(a) What is the general subject of the report?
(b) The name, title or specialty, address and phone number of the person or expert or experts who made said report or reports.
(c) Who has custody of such report or reports?

INTERROGATORY 29:  Please describe and list each website maintained by you during the time of your employment at PNNL/Batelle and thereafter, including but not limited to the name of each website, its general subject matter, its URL, and the dates when such website was established.

INTERROGATORY 30:  Other than the websites described in your answer to Interrogatory 30, please describe and list each website where you have posted content of any kind or nature that could be viewed by other users of such website during your employment at PNNL/Batelle and thereafter, including the dates that such posts were made and the names and URLs of websites where such posts were made.

INTERROGATORY 31:  Of the websites listed in your answer to Interrogatory 31, please list specifically which websites you posted content referencing your employment at or information about PNNL/Batelle, including the dates of such posts and the name and URL of such websites.

INTERROGATORY 32:  For each post described in your answer to Interrogatory 32, please describe in detail the content of such post.

INTERROGATORY 33: While employed at PNNL/Batelle did you ever access the internet at work for a non-work related purpose?  If yes, please state the approximate dates of such access, the website you visited, its URL, and the purpose of accessing this website.

INTERROGATORY 34:  Please provide all facts to support the allegation in your Complaint that you were Acertified as a firearms instructor,@ including but not limited to the date of your certification and what agency or group granted you certification.

INTERROGATORY 35:  Please provide all facts to support that PNNL/Batelle knew that you were Acertified as a firearms instructor@ during your employment and/or that this influenced the decision to terminate you.

INTERROGATORY 36:  Please list the names of all the people present in May 17, 2005 meeting alleged in your Complaint, and describe what each person told you at this meeting, including the name and URL of the website(s) where it was asserted that you Areleased business and customer-sensitive information.@

INTERROGATORY 37:  Please list the dates and times that APNNL Investigators@ visited your Agun-related websites@ as alleged in your Complaint.

INTERROGATORY 38:  Please state the name of the AHuman Resources Specialist@ referenced in paragraph 3.9 of your Complaint, as well as the names of any others present at this meeting.

INTERROGATORY 39: Did you ever allow others to access the internet through PNNL/ Batelle owned computers?  If yes, please list the dates and times that you allowed others to access PNNL/Batelle owned computers and the name of such persons.

INTERROGATORY 40:  Please state the name of the manager referenced in paragraph 3.10 of your Complaint.

INTERROGATORY 41:  Please provide all facts to support your allegation that Afollowing [your] suspension, neither Plaintiff nor any of his co-workers, project managers, or program managers were asked any questions.@

INTERROGATORY 42:  Please describe in detail what was told to you regarding how you inappropriately and without authorization used PNNL computing resources, failed to comply with company standards, disclosed or used proprietary or confidential information without authorization, and were dishonest as stated in your Complaint at paragraph 3.14.

INTERROGATORY 43:  State the names of any others who were present at your meeting with Bryan McMillan described in paragraph 3.14 of your Complaint.

INTERROGATORY 44:  Please provide all factual support for your allegation that Athe proffered reasons for Plaintiff=s discharge are false and pretextual,@ as alleged in your complaint.

REQUEST FOR PRODUCTION 1:  Please provide legible copies of your income tax returns for the last five (5) years.

REQUEST FOR PRODUCTION 2:  Please provide legible copies of all transcripts or statements of any party or witness to this action.

REQUEST FOR PRODUCTION 3:  Please provide legible copies of all diaries, notes, memoranda, photographs, records, letters, or documents of any kind pertaining to the liability or damage claims of plaintiff.  This request for production is not meant to include materials prepared in anticipation of litigation, attorney work product, or confidential attorney-client communications. 

REQUEST FOR PRODUCTION 4:  Please provide true and accurate copies of all job applications you have filled out and submitted since the time of the subject discharge.

REQUEST FOR PRODUCTION 5:  Please provide legible copies of all resume or curriculum vitae which you have sent to an employer since the time of the subject discharge.

REQUEST FOR PRODUCTION 6:  Please provide legible copies of every record or document in your possession which is connected to, relates to, or is otherwise associated with your employment with defendant.  This request for production includes, but is not limited to, correspondence from or to defendant, written reprimands, performance evaluations, and any other documents received by you which relate to your employment with defendant. 

REQUEST FOR PRODUCTION 7:  Please provide legible copies of all reports, of any kind, including but not limited to reports of your experts, concerning any aspect of your case. 

REQUEST FOR PRODUCTION NO. 8:  For the websites listed in your answer to Interrogatory 30, please provide a hard copy of the log history of each website, from the date you began employment at PNNL/Batelle to date, showing who logged onto each website, at what time, and for how long. Please indicate on the log history, if it is not readily apparent, which entries you believe represent APNNL investigators@ and which represent you.

REQUEST FOR PRODUCTION NO. 9: For the websites listed in your answers to Interrogatory 30-32, please provide a hard copy of each posting made by you, from the date you began employment at PNNL/Batelle to date.  This request is intended to include posts in their original form as initially posted as well as any modifications, deletions, or additions made thereafter.  The hard copy may be from the website, from a back-up copy of the posting made by whomever maintains the server, or from any other means available to you.

What has happened and continues to happen in Monroe, N.C., illustrates an old truth: that words used in common by all men do not always have a meaning common to all men. Men have engaged in life-or-death struggles because of differences of meaning in a commonly-used word. The white racist believes in "freedom," he believes in "fair trial," he believes in "justice." He sincerely believes in those words and can use them with great emotion because to the white racist they mean his freedom to deprive Negroes of their basic human rights and his courts where a "fair trial" is that procedure and "justice" that decision which upholds the racist's mad ideal of white supremacy. On many desperate occasions when our constitutional rights were denied and our lives were in danger, we called on the Justice Department and the FBI to investigate the Monroe situation, to protect our lives and to restore our constitutional rights--in other words, to administer justice. And they always refused our request.

Robert F. Williams
Page 54; Negroes With Guns
[I'm really enjoying this book. Compare the above with the case where Second Amendment arguments in a gun manufacturing and possession case were not allowed. The Second Amendment does not mean the same to most of you and me that it does to the anti-gun bigots.--Joe]

Yesterday I received the interrogatories from the lawyer of my felonious former supervisor Bryan McMillan at PNNL. Among the list of things requested (according to my lawyer the 44 interrogatories and seven "requests for production" is a "huge number") was a HARD COPY of all my website log files from the day I started work at PNNL until the present. As I was organizing the log files (several Gigabytes of stuff) my hard disk died. I had back ups of all the log files up until a month or two after the termination (June 2005) but not for the last 18 months or so. I only had one copy of most of them. My email hadn't been backed up for several months either. I was up until 3:00 AM before giving up for the night.

Today I was able to recover nearly everything from the old drive with the only thing still potentially at risk was stuff I could recreate such as my website content (still up on my ISPs server). I haven't verified my email file yet but it seemed to copy just fine. Ry, his son, and I went to Fry's and bought a new hard disk and I'm now in the process of copying all my files to the new hard disk.

I'm glad I was able to recover the data. It would have been exceedingly difficult to explain a hard disk crash occurring only a few hours after getting a request for the contents.

And it's not like I don't want to comply either. It would be lots of fun actually. They want a hard copy of all the log files. I did a rough estimate and came up with over one million pages required using a normal sized font. Printed single sided that's a pile of paper over 300 feet high. And since when they lose the case they will have to pay all my legal expenses and hence will ultimately get stuck with the bill for all the paper and printing costs. And you know what would be even more funny? Driving a truck full of boxes of paper up to the door of the lawyer's office and telling them to unload it. And of course imagining them trying to find data of any use in a million pieces of paper would keep me laughing for a few weeks as well.

Unfortunately my lawyer said to just give them the data on a DVD and let them print it out if they wanted it that way. It seems my lawyer wants to spoil nearly all my fun.

Mayor Nagin, Chief Riley and the city’s attorney have repeatedly failed to communicate with our legal counsel, even for the most trivial of matters related to this lawsuit.

...

There comes a time when patience runs out and people need to be held accountable for what amounts to an arrogant disregard for the seriousness of this lawsuit and the rights of New Orleans gun owners.

...

The city’s behavior in this matter, and particularly that of Mayor Nagin and Chief Riley, has been deplorable, and it is time for them to behave like adults. Since the day the city began seizing firearms, Nagin and Riley have acted as though they are above the law. It is time they learned otherwise.

Alan Gottlieb
January 17, 2007
SAF FILES MOTION TO HOLD NAGIN, RILEY IN CONTEMPT

It would be the greatest mistake, certainly, to think that concessions mean peace.  Nothing of the kind.  Concessions are nothing but a new form of war.

V. I. Lenin
[Originally this reminded me of of Israel and giving up land for peace but it also applies to the Muslim extremists everywhere and conceding things to anti-gun bigot and all the socialists and communists in our government.--Joe]

Allah has created the woman, even if she gets a PhD, deficient. She may be suffering from hormones that will make her emotional. It takes two witnesses of a woman to equal the one witness of the man.

Green Lane Mosque Internet broadcast
Via Michelle Malkin's Hot Air
[This is "small potatoes" compared to some of the other stuff I have read in other places. Girls as young as nine are young enough to be married to much older men. A woman who accuses someone of rape must have four Muslim witnesses who witness penetration of the vagina by the head of the penis. If he admits she had sex with someone who is not her husband and cannot prove rape can be punished, by death, as an adulteress. Read Islam Unveiled for far more information than most people want to know.

I had lunch with someone from India today. He said his wife believes their grandchildren will all be Muslim.--Joe]

After the July 7, 2005 bombing in London there was a second wave of bombing on July 21. A bit off topic but a reminder of who we are dealing with; Islam prohibits the killing of innocent in war but the extremist Muslims have declared there are no innocents in Israel and there were no innocents in the World Trade Center. Apparently, according to these animals, there were none in the London Tubes either:

One of the men, Ramzi Mohammed, even turned his homemade device to face a mother and child as he detonated it on a subway train, the prosecutor said.

However, my main point is the information about how they built the bombs. From the same article we find:

The bombs didn't cause widespread death and destruction because they didn't contain a high enough concentration of peroxide to explode properly, Sweeney said.

...

Sweeney told a jury of nine women and three men that the defendants had constructed the explosives out of hydrogen peroxide, chapatti flour and detonators in a ``bomb factory'' in a north London apartment. Each device was designed to carry a main charge of as much as 6 kilograms (13 pounds), sealed in a 6.2- liter plastic tub and encased in screws and nuts to ``maximize the possibility of injury,'' he said.

Hydrogen peroxide is easy to buy (and make) and if someone doesn't know how to find or (make flour) then they probably are so stupid they need to be reminded to drop their pants before defecating. Hence if people can make bombs out of these common materials then we need to defend against criminal bombers by means other than placing restrictions on bomb making materials. Just like gun control, recreation drug control, and alcohol control, bomb control at the manufacturing level is an exercise in futility.

The struggles of the Freedom Riders and the Sit-In Movements have concentrated on a single goal: the right to eat at a lunch counter, the right to sit anywhere on a bus. These are important rights because their denial is a direct personal assault on a Negro's dignity. It is important for the racists to to maintain these peripheral forms of segregation. They establish an atmosphere that supports a system. By debasing and demoralizing the black man in small personal matters, the system eats away the sense of dignity and pride which are necessary to challenge a racist system.

Robert F. Williams
Page 38; Negroes With Guns
[Compare this to the rights of gun owners and the indignities of having to be fingerprinted and licensed to exercise a fundamental, Constitutionally guaranteed right. Or the restrictions on us within 1000 feet of a school. Or the abuse we have to deal with if caught with a gun while driving through New Jersey, Washington D.C. or Chicago, even though we are theoretically protected by the Gun Owners Protection Act of 1986. Even that we if are allowed to exercise our right we must keep it concealed if we are to do it in public. What we are fighting for shares some remarkable parallels with the civil rights battles others have fought. I think there is a lot to be learned from them.--Joe]

I got an email earlier today asking for permission to post a copy of Just One Question on a website along with a link back to my original post. I said "go for it" and it has appeared here as well as on the front page of their website (which I suspect is temporary).

Nice.

Everyone in Germany is a National Socialist - the few outside the party are either lunatics or idiots.

Adolf Hitler
[This reminds me of how the Democrats treat anyone outside their party. But I guess that shouldn't be surprising since they share socialism as a base ideology.--Joe]

Expect perennial gun haters like Paul Helmke to ramp up the rhetoric against sensible concealed carry laws that are proving their effectiveness in some 40 states. With violent crime on the upswing, and experts predicting it will keep rising, this is no time to advocate victim disarmament laws. May as well put wolves in the sheep pasture and bid them "bon appetit!"

Alan Gottlieb
January 12, 2007
Another view: Violent crime rise proves need for personal protection capability
Gottlieb is founder of the Second Amendment Foundation and chairman of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms in Bellevue, Wash.
Paul Helmke is president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Ownership Violence.

I received this email today:

From: alexander [mailto:ali-blink@XXXXX]
Sent: Friday, January 12, 2007 12:45 PM
To: joeh@boomershoot.org
Subject: BIG BANG!!

hi,

i was wondering if u could e-mail me on how to make a kiff bomb just to have some fun with friends i live in cape town (south africa)..
i want it a bout the size of your fist and you must be able to ignite it wid an electric fuse..
as in you put it down and run away and i hav a remote and blow it up...
and i want it power ful enuf to make a hole in a standard wooden door..

from alex

Yeah right, just some fun with friends--with enough power to make a hole in a standard wooden door.

But what is a "kiff bomb"? I suspect some sort of slang but haven't been able to track it down yet.

To preserve liberty it is essential that the whole body of the people always possess arms and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them.

Richard Henry Lee
[Read that sentence carefully and try to resolve that with the claim by the anti-gun bigots that the 2nd Amendment is about the States being able to maintain a militia/national-guard. And note that Lee wasn't just some rabble rouser. He was the sixth President of the United States in Congress assembled under the Articles of Confederation.--Joe]

My previous post resulted in some serious topic drift in my mind so I decided to make a separate post of it.

You may have noticed that I have a subtitle on this blog of "Ramblings of a red-necked, knuckle-dragging, Neanderthal". There are two reasons for that.

One reason is if you call yourself something worse than what your enemies can come up with you take a lot of their power away. This was pointed out to me by firearms/self-defense instructor Greg Hamilton who I am quite fond of quoting. He said when someone calls him some derogatory name in a potentially hazardous situation (as in someone trying to pick a fight) he corrects them by saying, "Nope, I'm a goat f****er." What are they going to do after that? It's tough to say anything worse than that about you and they don't have real means of escalating the situation without getting physical with you. And how can they justify that in their minds? It's pretty much "game over" unless they planned on going the physical route to begin with anyway--in which case you aren't any worse off than you were to begin with.

The second reason I do that is because it encourages my enemies to underestimate me. When they then apply their stereotypes to me and engage with their already half-empty brains in a haphazard way they are in for a rude awakening. I think this is part of what happened with PNNL. I suspect they believed I would never know the real reason they went looking for a pretense to fire me or that I would find out for certain they didn't actually have sufficient grounds to do so. On some level they believed I was stupid. Never mind that my official title there was "Senior Research Scientist II" or that I have a masters degree in Electrical Engineering. I was just a uppity gun nut who needed to be put in his place. Never mind that they put a pile of papers in front of me, told me they were printouts from from my websites, that I needed to "fix things", but then refused, multiple times, to let me see them. What did they think I was going to do? I wanted, nay needed, to see what it was they were talking about. I was a researcher in "Cyber Security". Did they think I wouldn't figure it out or wouldn't at least give it a try? They seriously underestimated me.

Of course allowing and even encouraging your enemies to underestimate you has it hazards. Had the bigots at PNNL not underestimated me they might left me alone rather than commit a felony against me. Or they could have just been smarter about things and made in nearly impossible for me to gather up the facts. One never knows how things might have been different but two thing are certain:

1. They were found out and in a big way. Not only the initial hard evidence I found in the website log files but confirmation from the inside that is overwhelming. The points of fact in this lawsuit will never be in question. This was about guns (and a little bit of explosives) and me being an advocate for gun rights.
2. Because in the general case it is so hard to prove discrimination when you do have the proof you must make the punishment much more extreme than if it were trivial to detect this sort of discrimination. It all boils down to, depending on which method of modeling is more comfortable for you, economics or risk analysis. Because of this I have an obligation to punish these bigots to the maximum extent I can. What I really want is to see them be financially ruined and go to prison. But despite talking to several lawyers none of them believe I can obtain that sort of relief from the courts. I'm not so sure, I still think it is possible, but I won't be revealing those plans, until some future date when our enemies have less opportunity to evade my goals.

I'd like to explain this second point because it's may not be obvious to everyone. Suppose, as a child, you really liked cookies and your parents rationed them out at the rate of one per day. Further suppose you could conduct one raid per day on the cookie jar, score one cookie, and get away with it nine times out of ten. If you were caught the punishment was you had to do without your cookie ration for two days. You, knowing your math well enough to compute your total cookie consumption over a ten day period with and without the raids would conclude you should continue raiding the cookie jar.

Supposing it was impractical to make it more difficult for you to conduct a successful raid your parents would have two choices to get you to obey the rules. They could either increase the probability of detecting a cookie jar raid or they could increase the cost when they did detect a raid. If you were to get away with a raid only one out of ten times the cost of conducting the raids would exceed the benefits and you would likely stop the raids. Alternatively they could raise the punishment to be ten days without your cookie ration and you again would conclude you would be better off without conducting the raids.

The same sort of thing applies to big time criminal activity. Except for certain cases like "crimes of passion" and insanity there is a weighing (perhaps at an unconscious level) of the risks and rewards. In most cases of employment discrimination against gun owners the bigots will probably go undetected. When they do get caught the chances of punishment are very near to zero. In fact, to the best of our knowledge there has never been a legal case of anti-gun owner bigotry resulting in the punishment of the bigots. That will likely be my toughest problem to solve in my battle. Because it is so rare to be detected and even when detected it is unheard of to be legally punished I really don't have a choice if I want to make a difference for anyone but me. I must go for the largest punishment I can possibly achieve. This is because in the future I cannot allow them, or others, to weigh the risks and conclude committing the crime is worth the risk.

There are certain thresholds that must not be crossed without punishment being severe and perhaps out of proportion to the crime. And yes, I agree that life, perhaps death, in prison is too harsh a punishment for the crime of anti-gun owner employment discrimination--provided the crime could be detected and punished with some regularity when it happens. That's currently not the case so we have to "make an example of them". And the example I want to make of them is, literally, to have them spend the rest of their lives in prison. This is my Biggest, Hairiest, most Audacious, Goal (BHAG) in this case. I know it's possible, just unlikely. But I want them to be aware that is what they are facing. I want them to know that is possible. And even if I can't achieve it in this case I may be able to enable others to get closer in the next case. And the closer we get to achieving that sort of BHAG the less likely the bigots are to take that kind of risk in the future. Given their conclusions about "benefits" of gun control I have serious doubts about many of these bigots being able do enough math to solve even the cookie problem above. But if we make the price of their overt bigotry a significant chance at being rented out by the quarter hour to the person with the most cigarettes they won't have to know much math to conclude they don't want to go there.

Hence by giving myself the title of "a red-necked, knuckle-dragging, Neanderthal" I lured the bigots into attacking me. I didn't intentionally do that but now that they have and I've had an opportunity to regroup I realize I'm in a much better position than anyone I know, or have even heard of, to do what needs to be done. Not that I consider myself on par with him but this reminds me of a Winston Churchill quote, "I was not the lion, but it fell to me to give the lion's roar." Just as Hitler underestimated his enemies so have the anti-gun bigots in this case. And just as the only acceptable conclusion of Hitler's war was his unconditional surrender I see no reason to accept anything different in my war with the bigots at PNNL.

Update: Minor changes were made upon the advice of an attorney.

Kevin pointed out a story. I probably read about half of it before I became so concerned about popping a blood vessel in my brain that I just stopped reading. I'd need blood pressure meds or a Valium to complete the reading. But in truth I read all I needed in the first two paragraphs. He didn't even try to hide it. Here's a sample of the blatant bigotry:

Welcome to the South! Put On a Kevlar Vest and Sit a Spell!

...

Speaking of backwoods detritus, it appeared several hollers had vomited their inhabitants into the room I occupied. Men who had never heard the term “mullet” used derisively milled about comparing guns. They wore camouflage jackets to better avoid detection by animals and bright, obscenely orange caps to hopefully avoid being accidentally shot by one of their drunken cohorts. They wore Levi’s with tapered legs that ended over work, cowboy or hiking boots. Dirty, bushy beards abounded. Full sets of teeth were scarce.

...

And yet, here I was, in close proximity to 25 of America’s more than 200 million firearms, not to mention the 25 people who didn’t look a bit distressed at the notion that they were the killers and not their guns. I kept shifting around to check out the strange characters that shared this trashy little space with me.

I may call myself a red-necked, knuckle-dragging, Neanderthal but that's so bigots, like the one who wrote this article, will underestimate me. This bigot apparently thought gun owners are so stupid and back-woodsy they wouldn't notice his posting of bigotry on the web. He was wrong and gets taken to task in a very big way in the comments.

I prefer a small government which may permit some evil to a large government that promotes evil at my expense.

Michael Lee
[This basic point is lost on most people--evil exists and will always exist. It's just a matter of limiting it such a way that the least damage is done. And the history of the 20th centry reveals that evil governments unjustly kill more of the citizens than all other sources of evil combined.--Joe]

As pointed out by Say Uncle we have the media and a prosecutor demonizing an ordinary revolver as an "assault handgun":

Maryland Assistant Attorney General Clarence E. Goetz had recommended Vaisman serve five years in the Maryland Division of Correction.

...

Seized from Vaisman's residence were a broad range of weapons including assault handguns. Among the weapons were at least one Colt Cobra and at least one Colt Diamondback.

Don't think for a single nanosecond that the bigots will stop with "Saturday Night Specials", "Assault Weapons", or "50 caliber Sniper rifles". They didn't stop with short barreled shotguns or machine guns. The didn't stop when convicted felons were prohibited from firearms possession. They didn't stop when they prohibited mail order of firearms. They didn't stop with the Brady Act or the assault weapon ban.

They won't stop until WE stop them. They must be politically exterminated. The way we do that is to have the proper state of mind when we advocate for gun owner rights. We have to make membership in organizations like the VPC, the Brady Bunch, and The Gun Guys look like membership in the KKK--because it is.

Via Wayne LaPierre:

Montana's Castle Doctrine bill also contains a provision stating that if companies forbid employees from legally and lawfully carrying a firearm, and an employee is a victim of a crime, then the employee can sue his or her employer for failing to protect him (or refusing to allow him to protect himself).

This is wonderful! We need more of this.

One of my first firearms students was a lawyer and suggested something I have never had the courage to try. His suggestion was that employees who are otherwise legally able to carry a concealed firearm but are prohibited by company policy should have their lawyer send the employer a letter. This letter would state the employee would obey the company policy. But should a situation arise where the lawful possession and use of a firearm in the work environment could have saved the life or prevented serious injury to the employee or others that the company was on notice that it would be held liable because of the company policy.

If I was ever in a position where the job just didn't matter that much I might try that as a means to change company policy. But in most situations I figure it would just result in the company putting you at the top of the list to get rid of should there be a real or imagined downturn in business.

In my list of BHAGs with the PNNL lawsuit is to make it such that having a "no guns" policy is direct evidence of an anti-gun bias. Hence if a gun owner gets fired the no guns policy lends credence to the claim it was his gun ownership that was the real reason. Just as separate bathrooms or drinking fountains for blacks would be evidence that a company had a bias against non-whites. We need to make the cost of anti-gun bigotry as high as we can and I am going to do my best to enable others to inflict a cost on other bigots.

Yesterday I was chatting with friend Sean, discussing this situation in regards to PNNL. I told him PNNL is probably trying to find the source of the leak. Sean, almost never at a loss for just the right thing to say said, "I, personally, would lay it all at the feet of Wen Ho Lee."

I would like to remind my PNNL visitors that there are laws against retaliation against whistle blowers and that I will gladly discuss my sources with law enforcement officials investigating the crimes of PNNL employees. But PNNL efforts to use me to retaliate against people who cooperate with me and/or law enforcement will be vigorously opposed.

Women in the Seattle area, you could probably do a lot of good for the gun rights movement in Washington State by attending this meeting tonight:

Directions and parking information is here.

Men in camouflage or "Vote from the rooftop" t-shirts with beer bellies would not be productive.

I received a couple more hits from PNNL yesterday. Both were direct hits on Funny Stuff. This was the post where I told about two different people who just recently gave me exceedingly useful information about PNNL. Not that I didn't already have direct evidence of felonies by PNNL people, but this was further evidence of their crimes and other crimes as yet unreported. One has to wonder how the DOE is going to view it when these criminals, most of whom have security clearances, are not reported to law enforcement and dealt with appropriately.

From the nature of the hits it appears they are either typing in the URL directly or clicking on a link in email--whatever.

I laughed so hard my stomach hurt.

2007 is getting off to a great start:

Domain Name		pnl.gov ? (United States Government)
IP Address		130.20.181.# (Battele Pacific Northwest Laboratory)
ISP		Battele Pacific Northwest Laboratory
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Domain Name		pnl.gov ? (United States Government)
IP Address		130.20.96.# (Battele Pacific Northwest Laboratory)
ISP		Battele Pacific Northwest Laboratory
Location		Continent  :  North America Country  :  United States  (Facts) State  :  Washington City  :  Kennewick Lat/Long  :  46.2131, -119.1682 (Map) Distance  :  109 miles
Language		English (United States) en-us
Operating System		Microsoft WinXP
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But the problem is that you don’t want anyone carrying concealed weapons around. Even in the hands of retired police officers, firearms are a threat.

Gun Guys
Ocean City, MD Reluctantly Changes Concealed Weapons Law
January 5, 2006
[Just so you realize how warped these bigots are. The very existence of firearms are threats, apparently not just to predatory criminals, but to all life.--Joe]

I hate guns. In today's society there is no need for the average citizen to own or carry a gun except to protect yourself from those who do carry guns and intend to use them in a crime. Oh, wait! I just contradicted myself. No. I just pointed out the vicious circle created by gun advocates. They say, "Guns don't kill, people kill." I'd say you're correct. But the government and law enforcement have done a lousy job of keeping guns out of the hands of those who kill, and longer jail sentences are not the answer because that occurs after a crime has been committed.

Tighter gun control? I'll go so far as to say ban guns. That's the only way.

Carol Solnom
There's no need for most to carry a gun
January 9, 2007
The Enquirer
[<sarcasm> Putting prostitutes in jail after they commit the crime is not the answer. We need to put chastity belts on all women except when under strict police supervision. </sarcasm>

At least Ms. Solnom admits her hate. Such an admission is the first step to recovery.

Banning guns didn't make people in the U.K., Canada, or Australia safer. It didn't make people in Washington D.C. or Chicago safer. I have Just One Question for Ms. Solnom.--Joe]

It's possible we won't have to liberate the U.K. after all. They may be in the process of liberating themselves if this report via Kevin is true and the trend continues.

Socialism is for the good of the people, right? It's not right for the rich industrialists to own the means to production. So the enlightened thing to do is for the people to own it. At least that is the way I understand it is supposed to work. So now we get this from Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez who is nationalizing the oil, banking, communications, and electricity:

In his speech, he said he will ask the Venezuelan congress to allow him to rule by decree, a power he enjoyed for a year in 2000-2001. Last month, the 52-year-old president said he would seek to change the constitution to end presidential term limits.

So in this case it's for the good of Chavez instead of "the people".

Socialism--The Road to Serfdom. In this case they are becoming the serfs of Hugo Chavez.

I had contact with a couple people yesterday about certain "legal problems" Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has. The first person told me they had in their possession a message that, in part, said, "I hope they don't subpoena this."

The other person told me:

I can definitely atest to a pattern of illegal and unethical activities at the lab. It's my firm belief that their practices are also detrimental to national security.

There are so many illegal things happening, I'm not sure where to start.

...

I do think it is my obligation as a citizen to see justice prevail.

This is so funny to me. It's going to be fun fighting this battle. I'm reminded of a Winston Churchill quote:

I like a man who grins when he fights.

I wonder if the PNNL felons and their lawyers will like me as I grin during this fight.

This demonstration today shows that the Negro in the South cannot expect justice in the courts. He must convict his attackers on the spot. He must meet violence with violence, lynching with lynching.

Robert F. Williams
Page 26; Negros With Guns
[There is some amazing stuff in this book. The city of Monroe North Carolina refused to allow blacks to use the swimming pool. The black leaders asked for one day a week hence bypassing the issue of whites and blacks being in the pool at the same time. The city said it would be too expensive because they would have to drain and clean the pool after the blacks had used it (page 15).

The above quote occurred after a white rapist went to the home of a black woman who was eight months pregnant, drove her from her house, and then beat her. He caught her while she was trying to escape down the main highway and knocked her to the ground. Her six-year-old boy was running along the side and when the white rapist beat his mother the boy picked up a stick and started hitting the man over the head with it while his mother escaped. A white neighbor testified in court she saw the incident and that the mother came to her for help with her clothes torn from her. The white man was found not guilty (page 25).

When the blacks armed themselves, and without firing a shot, defended themselves an old white man in the crowd that was previously chanting, "Kill the niggers!" started screaming and crying like a baby (page 10). He then said, "God damn, God damn, what is this God damn country coming to that the niggers have got guns, the niggers are armed and the police can't even arrest them!"--Joe]

On Friday the Seattle PI whined about new gun control laws were unlikely in Washington State anytime soon. Today they added more to the drumbeat for their bigoted agenda with this article and picture:

He was much larger than me and had a beefy football-player build and short dark hair -- the bouncer type. He was going to get physical if I objected. He was ready to push as we walked quickly past the long row of tables covered with guns and ammunition, past the woman collecting money for admission. Talk to him, I said to myself. Talk to him. I kept telling him I didn't work for the newspapers as he herded me to the exit.

"No pictures," he kept repeating.

"No pictures," he insisted one last time as he opened the heavy door and gently pushed me out. Then he closed the door and left me standing outside with my camera dangling from my hand. A hand-lettered sign appeared outside the entrance: NO CAMERAS ALLOWED.

Thirty minutes earlier I had walked into the public fairgrounds to attend a local gun show in Moscow, Idaho.

...

Wives were threats. Girlfriends were threats. They are the new scourges of secular life, hunting down unsuspecting men to get bucks and tear out their hearts. Women who talked too much were threats. And women who held public office and wouldn't shut up were the scourge of the land. I also have picked up bumper stickers at gun shows that said: "I just got a gun for my wife. It's the best trade I ever made." Or handouts detailing the "Top 10 Reasons Handguns Are Better than Women," ending with the No. 1 reason, "You can buy a silencer for a handgun." I also had seen some pretty vicious materials on Hillary Clinton and Janet Reno. A new fear floated above some of the gun exhibits: judges, lawyers and voters were giving women too much power, and the women were using that power to take guns away from their husbands, their boyfriends and their constituents. A gun-grabber lurked in the heart of the liberated woman.

Please explain to me the difference between this sort of propaganda and the bigoted material that implies black men like to rape white women.

Several months ago Say Uncle (I think it was him, if it was someone else and I got them mixed up my apologies for not giving the right person credit) suggested I see how the Southern Law Poverty Center was able to take private action against people that deprived others of their rights without going through Federal prosecutors. In my case against PNNL even though I have very strong evidence some people committed felonies against me the prosecutors aren't interested in even investigating the case. Say Uncle pointed out that in what appears on the surface to be an analogous situation the SLPC took the bigots to court and got large settlements. Great point! How did they do that? Well, I found out. They utilized a different law. I had been looking at 18 USC § 241. SLPC used 42 U.S.C. § 1985(3) which says:

If two or more persons in any State or Territory conspire or go in disguise on the highway or on the premises of another, for the purpose of depriving, either directly or indirectly, any person or class of persons of the equal protection of the laws, or of equal privileges and immunities under the laws; or for the purpose of preventing or hindering the constituted authorities of any State or Territory from giving or securing to all persons within such State or Territory the equal protection of the laws; or if two or more persons conspire to prevent by force, intimidation, or threat, any citizen who is lawfully entitled to vote, from giving his support or advocacy in a legal manner, toward or in favor of the election of any lawfully qualified person as an elector for President or Vice President, or as a Member of Congress of the United States; or to injure any citizen in person or property on account of such support or advocacy; in any case of conspiracy set forth in this section, if one or more persons engaged therein do, or cause to be done, any act in furtherance of the object of such conspiracy, whereby another is injured in his person or property, or deprived of having and exercising any right or privilege of a citizen of the United States, the party so injured or deprived may have an action for the recovery of damages occasioned by such injury or deprivation, against any one or more of the conspirators.

The lead-in to today’s Seattle P-I story about the future of proposed gun control laws in Olympia sounds good for gun rights advocates. But is it?

The true intent of the P-I is to build pressure on legislators to pass gun control legislation during the upcoming session DESPITE the fact that none of the proposals would have prevents Wednesday’s shooting at Foss High School or earlier high visibility shootings in King and Pierce counties.

We can expect to see more news articles and editorials in the coming weeks calling for passage of Seattle Mayor Nickels’ "reasonable gun control" agenda, an agenda that was first announced last May and was broadcast again the same day of the Foss HS shooting. Of course the interesting this is that while the mayor’s four point program has nothing to do with recent shooting incidents, it is identical to Washington Ceasefire’s gun control agenda.

Joe Waldron
GOAL Alert 1-2007 5 January 2007
[Mayor Nickels is aligning himself with the equivalent of the KKK and should be held accountable for this.--Joe]

Have you ever noticed that in winter driving conditions there appears to be a disproportionate number of four wheel drive vehicles in the ditch?

I'm pretty sure there's a lesson there.

Now there's a technical issue that I never considered until I got a 4WD pickup and experienced it myself.  When the old-fashioned 4WD is engaged, the front and rear drive lines are locked together-- they cannot rotate at different rates.  That's pretty much common knowledge (you can't turn a corner without one or more tires slipping) but it has another implication:  When you hit the brakes it is impossible for only one wheel to lock up.  Since the two drivelines cannot rotate differently, you either lock up one wheel on each axle or you lock up all four, i.e. your braking ability on ice is better with 4WD than it is with 2WD and no ABS.

And remember, where you have a concentration of power in a few hands, all too frequently men with the mentality of gangsters get control. History has proven that. All power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Lord Acton
Letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton
1887

Say Uncle has an interesting suggestion:

I think I’m going to start mailing highlighted copies of the fourth amendment to addresses in Tehran.

At GRPC 2000 I hinted at an alternative to this general idea in terms of email instead of snail mail. Now I present this idea with a little more detail.

You can send 1000 encrypted emails a day for less money than one letter to Tehran per week. And you probably don't need to send it to Tehran to get the attention of the spooks. Just sending encrypted email to Europe with interesting subject lines would probably be sufficient. From your own home here in the states you can set up a computer account in Europe pretty easily. You install program on that computer which automatically accepts email messages and replies back a few random minutes later with another encrypted email. You do the same with a few computers at home and the homes of your friends (or perhaps your enemies). Basically you have a bunch of bots talking about "interesting subjects" to each other with the contents encrypted.

There are some twists on this such as doing it in such a way you can find out if the snoops were successful in decrypting the mail and reading it. Another twist is to make it impossible for them to read it. Yes, there are unbreakable encryption methods--in general you have a terrible key distribution problem but in this case you don't have to actually open the email on the receiving side. Your bot just replies with another unbreakable email message with an interesting subject line. Hence the decryption key doesn't have to actually be delivered to the bot that receives it.

Of course this might result in you becoming acquainted with your local FBI agents on a first name basis no matter how innocuous the decrypted messages and no matter how much effort you put into hiding your identity. It just depends on the number of hours of laughter required to compensate you for the hours of laying naked on a concrete floor in the dark with buckets of cold water being thrown at you every few minutes.

Say Uncle says:

That said, the NRA should use the internet more effectively. It’s good to see that Wayne LaPierre has a blog. There is a very active gun-blogging community and the NRA should openly support those folks. Link to good blog articles from your news page, mention us in your magazine articles, offer discounted membership in NRA through our websites, and other things. Hell, I’ll even give you guys free ads.

I'm up for the free ads too. And not just for the NRA and NRA-ILA. I'll give free ads to the CCRKA, Firearms Coalition, GOA, JPFO, Mothers Arms, SAF, Second Amendment Sisters, and probably several others I forgot about or didn't know about.

Click on "Advertise here" to create the ad and then send me an email to get a code that will give you the free ad.

From our friend in Israel:

Friends:
The terrorists have begun killing each other.  The U.S. is racing to infuse millions of dollars into the Fatah terrorist group.  So whats new?
 
Have a good weekend.
Howard

The U.S. has been supporting Jihadist organizations in the name of "Middle East Peace" for decades, as has Israel, by the way.  Can there be any doubt as to why this problem goes on and on, with no end in sight?  What would have been the result if the Allies had adopted this same policy toward the Nazis, or the Imperial Japs?  Does anyone doubt what needs to be done to secure peace over there, or are we still trying as hard as we can to convince ourselves that the Jihadists just want to get along?

You must ambush, mine, raid and (carry out) martyrdom campaigns so that you can wipe them out. As happened in Iraq and Afghanistan, when the world’s strongest power was defeated by the campaigns of the mujahideen, troops going to heaven, so its slaves shall be defeated on the Muslim lands of Somalia.

Ayman al-Zawahiri
Osama bin Laden's deputy in Al Qaeda
Islamists dig in by the sea as Somalia requests world's help
January 5, 2006
[The Muslim consider any land which they have ever controlled to be "their" land. Even if they took it from someone else. For example they believe Spain and at least a large share of India is rightfully theirs as well as Somalia. Now these Islamic extremists have been pushed up against the sea by Ethiopian troops. American warships are patrolling the coastline preventing them from escaping via the water. I hope they start dropping artillery shells on them. Let them carry out their martyrdom campaigns against incoming high explosives.--Joe]

Every time we seize an illegal gun, we reduce the probability that someone will be killed, injured or unfortunately robbed at gunpoint.

Mayor Richard Daley
Daley: Democratic control could lead to stricter gun laws
January 4, 2007
Northwest Herald
[I am nearly certain Mayor Daley doesn't have a clue about probability or statistics. If he did then he would know his statement is false and that would make him a liar. Of course being a politician is frequently synonymous with being a liar so I have to acknowledge the possibility that Daley does know something about probability and/or statistics. Furthermore he can't even make sense in a prepared sound-bite. The guns he and his goons are seizing aren't illegal. It's the possession of those guns by certain classes of people that is illegal under Chicago law. Never mind those particular Chicago laws are illegal. The article in which he was quoted was about Daley's desire to make possession of even more guns illegal. His statistical basis for this objective was not addressed and for a good reason--it would not support his desires. Because of this one has to wonder what his real objective is. Daley needs to answer Just One Question.--Joe]

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) came about because of Hanford--the nuclear facility where we got the nuclear components for the worlds first atomic bombs. Those scientists and engineers at Hanford were gradually put to work on other projects. The scope increased to where today there is virtually no scientific or engineering task that is off limits for the people there. Although when I was there I worked, literally, a stone's throw from the Hanford reservation I wasn't part of Hanford. The name Hanford still persists in the vocabulary of the people as a synonym for more that what is, technically, not Hanford.

With that as background I now present you with Hanford News where the top story of today (and probably for several days but I just noticed it today) is the story of my lawsuit against Battelle who has the contract to manage the laboratory.

What is just as interesting to me is how I happen to run across the story. It was all because someone at another national laboratory, Los Alamos, happen to come visiting:

Domain Name		lanl.gov ? (United States Government)
IP Address		128.165.116.# (Los Alamos National Laboratory)
ISP		Los Alamos National Laboratory
Location		Continent  :  North America Country  :  United States  (Facts) State  :  New Mexico City  :  Los Alamos Lat/Long  :  35.8639, -106.2953 (Map) Distance  :  931 miles
Language		English (United States) en-us
Operating System		Macintosh MacOSX
Browser		Firefox 2.0 Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8.1.1) Gecko/20061204 Firefox/2.0.0.1
Javascript		version 1.5
Monitor		Resolution  :  1680 x 1050 Color Depth  :  32 bits
Time of Visit		Jan 3 2007 2:12:13 pm
Last Page View		Jan 3 2007 2:12:13 pm
Visit Length		0 seconds
Page Views		1
Referring URL		http://www.pnnl.info/
Visit Entry Page		http://blog.joehuffm...Their Attention.aspx
Visit Exit Page		http://blog.joehuffm...Their Attention.aspx
Out Click
Time Zone		UTC-7:00
Visitor's Time		Jan 3 2007 3:12:13 pm
Visit Number		124,413

They came from my PNNL.INFO site. That's interesting! So I looked at the log files form that site and I watched, in real time, as five different people (well, five different computers anyway) from Los Alamos poked around. They found my site via a Google search (http://www.google.com/search?q=pnnl+wrongful+termination ). I did the same search and found the Hanford New story. One person did the search and the other four soon started hitting my site directly and some of them eventually visited my blog. How interesting.

I was chatting on line with my friend Sean (Sean, I told you 10 different IP addresses but there was a bug in the script that I used to count them) as I watched in real time as one person looked at my performance reviews at PNNL. Sean suggested, "Maybe he's a hiring manager." What a kick! I took Sean out to dinner after that.

What bugs me though is that the web browsing security at Los Alamos is no better than at PNNL. I was able to determine the exact computer name of each of the participants in their visit to my website. I can't do that with visits from any other company that I notice visiting me. Microsoft, for example, has proxies in place that prevent that. Even visits from private homes, such as from my family in Moscow, Idaho are impossible to resolve to a specific computer name. What is it with these, supposedly, high security facilities that they have such gaping holes in their security?

Beating Lyle to the punch line: They are government facilities. Do you expect competence?

When I grow up, I want to be an honest lawyer so things like that can't happen.

Richard Nixon
As a boy (on the Teapot Dome scandal)
[Last respects were given to Gerald Ford today. Ford, of course, gave Nixon a pardon for one of the biggest American political scandals of the last 100 years. Politicians... you can't live with them and you can't shoot them.--Joe]

On the suggestion of "Al" I have updated Just One Question. It's now:

Can you demonstrate just one time, one place, throughout all of human history, where the average person was made safer by restricting their access to handheld weapons?

The previous wording was awkward and a bit ambiguous. This is much better. I did tweak it just slightly from Al's suggestion but still he deserves the credit for recognizing the poor wording and the appropriate correction. Thank you.

Update: Ry, in the comments, suggested even further improvements. I removed still another word after taking his suggestion. It's now:

Can you demonstrate one time or place, throughout all history, where the average person was made safer by restricting access to handheld weapons?

Someone from PNNL came visiting again a few minutes ago. But not for the usual reason. Check out the "Search Words":

Domain Name		pnl.gov ? (United States Government)
IP Address		130.20.105.# (Battele Pacific Northwest Laboratory)
ISP		Battele Pacific Northwest Laboratory
Location		Continent  :  North America Country  :  United States  (Facts) State  :  Washington City  :  Richland Lat/Long  :  46.3282, -119.3222 (Map) Distance  :  114 miles
Language		English (United States) en-us
Operating System		Microsoft WinXP
Browser		Firefox Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.9) Gecko/20061206 Firefox/1.5.0.9
Javascript		version 1.5
Monitor		Resolution  :  1920 x 1200 Color Depth  :  32 bits
Time of Visit		Jan 2 2007 6:11:03 pm
Last Page View		Jan 2 2007 6:11:03 pm
Visit Length		0 seconds
Page Views		1
Referring URL		http://www.google.co...shington&btnG=Search
Search Engine		google.com
Search Words		kennewick brazilian wax washington
Visit Entry Page		http://blog.joehuffman.org/
Visit Exit Page		http://blog.joehuffman.org/
Out Click
Time Zone		UTC-8:00
Visitor's Time		Jan 2 2007 6:11:03 pm
Visit Number		124,192

Apparently Google gave them a hit on this post of mine.

This is so funny. Their computer security is so lax it's pathetic. If I still had someone, anyone, there that was willing to talk to me without fear of getting fired I could find out whose computer (I already know the computer name) it was that being used to look for a Brazilian wax job in Kennewick (just to the south across the river from Richland). I'll bet she (or he) would be embarrassed to have that info posted on the Internet. If it were one of the felons at the lab I'd post the computer name. But almost for certain it's not.

The Washington State Constitution provides that individual citizens of the state have the right to bear arms to defend themselves or the state, Article I, § 24.

The Washington State Constitution further establishes that citizens have the right to freedom of speech, Article I, § 5.

The Washington State Supreme Court has recognized the tort of wrongful discharge in violation of public policy. Gardner v. Loomis Armoured, Inc., 128 Wn.2d 931 (1996); Roberts v. Dudley. 140 Wn.2d 58 (2000).

The Washington State Constitution is a primary source to determine the public policy of the state of Washington. Roberts v. Dudley, Justices Alexander and Talmadge, concurring separately.

In advocating for the responsible use of firearms, Plaintiff engaged in conduct protected by both Article I, §24 and § 5 and in furtherance of the public good.

Upon information and belief, Plaintiff was terminated for exercising his rights guaranteed to him by the Washington State Constitution, in violation of the public policy of the State of Washington.

Matthew Bean
in Joe Huffman vs. Battelle Memorial Institute
Filed October 30, 2006
Benton County Superior Court
[I would like to say "Hi" to all the people from PNNL that have been visiting my blog and my PNNL.info website recently. Nice to have you stop by. I'm sure I'll be talking to some of you in person and while you are under oath sometime in the future. Have a nice day--while you still can. To my friends still there and scared about being called to testify--I think I can avoid that in almost all cases. In one case I might have to have one person testify about something embarrassing (to them) but I'll do my best to avoid it and then make it as bearable as possible if it's a necessity. To my enemies in this encounter, wherever you are, I have a BHAG post coming up that addresses my plans for you in greater detail.--Joe]

Well... sort of. There's only one outlet that actually ran it that I know of. I like their headline: Fired PNNL worker claims gun discrimination in lawsuit.

I just wish they had linked to my website that proves the case rather than just saying I "say" or "claim" something happened.

Oh well. It's not the public that matters that much. It's the judge and jury. And I got a 600% increase in traffic on that website from the newspaper story anyway.

Kevin has an update for his The Other Side posting. The doctor that inspired him to write the post to begin with responded. Well sort of responded. He just said:

Kevin, thanks for writing. I am all for individual rights but life is sacred. Too many guns end up in the wrong hands. Whatever reason, the youth of North Philly too easily obtain firearms which are designed to seriously wound. Furthermore, the folks who wrote the constitution also owned slaves. Times do change and we have not demonstrated that the masses, unlike you, can responsibly control firearms. Peace, JK

"Too many guns" "Wrong hands" "Too easily"

That's the problem with getting into debates with these people. They don't respond to any of your logic or the facts. They just chant slogans. Our side does something like what Kevin did, tearing the guys entire position to shreds, and he just chants his slogans again.

In the update Kevin tears him to pieces, again, but it's not going to do much good in the doctors case. It can do good for our side in that observers can see the emptiness of the "argument" the bigot presents and I am not going to discourage anyone from doing that. But for me, I'm tired of investing that much time into something that will just be dismissed with couple of sentences. This is why I came up Just One Question. Kevin actually used it in his original post and, of course, the doctor ignored it.

Oh, for your reading enjoyment, here's another good exercise in logic and facts.

Do not follow where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
[This has also been attributed to Harold R. McAlindon. I am unable to find any dates for the life of McAlindon and I've never heard of him before today so I'm inclined to believe Emerson was probably first. Regardless, this is my plan in the New Year for dealing with the anti-gun bigots. There is no path in the legal world where I'm headed with PNNL. I hope to leave a trail of (figuratively) bloody bodies that others will follow in our fight to reclaim our freedom against the anti-gun bigots.--Joe]