If you had to choose between saving The Lying Bastard of Pennsylvania Avenue from drowning in a vat of steaming bubbling pig shit and taking a Pulitzer Prize winning photograph…
…what f-stop would you use?
Inquiring minds want to know
Ward Dorrity
Friday, December 04, 1998 2:49 PM
SOC Constitutional Infringement Issues
Microsoft Public Folder
[Check the date.–Joe]
A attorney who in specializes in self-defense told me that of the 300 clients who said something to the police before talking to him, only two managed to NOT hurt their case. Those two didn’t help their case, they just didn’t hurt it any. If you are involved in a shooting, call the police, physically cooperate with them, but don’t say anything except you want to call your attorney.
Greg Hamilton
Self Defense Instructor
Nov. 19, 1995
If the vote was 44,000 to 38,000 would you say the voters were “evenly divided” on the issue? How about 44 to 38? I haven’t done the statisical tests on the significance of a sample size of 82 but my gut feel is you can’t justifiably call that “evenly divided”. Yet that is what this newspaper article does:
The issue of handgun control is a controversial one, with many people saying curbs on sales of handguns will reduce crime, while others feel it’s important to protect Americans’ constitutional right to own firearms.
Visitors to the Star Courier’s Web site were evenly divided on the question last week.
The online poll asked whether people favored tougher restrictions on buying handguns in Illinois.
Of the 82 who voted, 44, or 54 percent, said “no” and 38 said “yes.”
I think I see some spin being placed on the outcome. Either that or the Star Couier Staff need to retake 1st and 2nd grade math.
I had the most vivid dream this morning. It was the most detailed dream I can ever recall having. The conversation with my dad as we walked alone the fence was detailed and I could “hear” the tone in my fathers voice and the heavier breathing as we walked through the deep snow. The trail in the snow had footprints that were both fresh and old. The sounds of our feet on the cold, dry snow was accurate. The dog we found caught in the barbed wire gate that had fallen down was whimpering and scared. It did a realistic “happy dance” running in circles and licking me after I freed it. Then I noticed the reason the gate had fallen down. The ground had bulged up and hot water was pouring out of the cracks in the earth. The bulge had tipped the gate post over enough the gate fell to the ground. A river of hot steaming water washed across the road north of the old blacksmith shop and down through woods toward the old well. The little meadow in the woods that always had less snow that other areas now was green with growing grass even though it was the middle of winter and other areas had five to six feet of snow. The smell was like that of the hot springs Barb and I visited at Yellowstone National Park this summer. We had a geothermal vent a couple hundred feet from my brother’s back door.
I woke up as I realized the impact this could have on the farm. Best case was my brothers and parents had a source of cheap heat for the shop and their homes. But if this was a precursor to a Mt. St. Helen’s scale eruption the entire farm would be gone. Orofino could be at the bottom of a lake formed by the backed up river just two miles from the farm. Lewiston and Clarkston, 35 miles down river, could be scoured clean from the valley floor as the ash and earthen formed natural dam gave way and a wall of water rushed down the narrow valley.
I’ll be visiting my parents for Thanksgiving. I’ll need to walk down through the pasture to dispel the images from my mind.
… we may indicate three minimum requirements that must be fulfilled before any belief can claim the status of knowledge: (a) a belief must be based on evidence; (b) a belief must be internally consistent (i.e. not self-contradictory); (c) a belief cannot contradict previously validated knowledge with which it is to be integrated. If a belief fails to meet any or all of these criteria, it cannot properly be designated as knowledge.
George H. Smith
From: Atheism: the Case Against God
[Gun control advocates, socialists, and other anti-freedom advocates would do well to understand the difference between belief and knowledge as outlined by Smith above.–Joe]
I wonder if Monica and Bill have heard the news:
US researchers studying the effects of human papilloma virus (HPV), a leading cause of cervical cancer in women, have found a connection between the virus and instances of mouth tumours.
Researchers at Johns Hopkins University compared 1,670 patients who had oral cancers to 1,732 healthy people and HPV was found in a small number of the cancer patients. Those infected carried HPV16, the most common strain of the virus, which in Britain is estimated to infect one fifth of women between 18 and 25.
The study showed that people with mouth tumours containing the HPV16 strain were three times more likely to have had oral sex than those whose tumours did not contain the virus.
Raphael Viscidi, a virologist at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine said that the study is very decisive. “This is a major study in terms of its size,” he says. “I think this will convince people.”
While the US researchers said there was no need for people to alter their behaviour, this was not the line taken by the head of a similar study in Sweden.
Dentist and researcher Kerstin Rosenquist headed a smaller study conducted at the Malmoe University Faculty of Odontology in southern Sweden that showed the same connection between HPV and oral sex. Rosenquist found that 36% of the cancer patients were carriers of HPV while only 1% of the control group had the virus.
She said, “You should avoid having oral sex.”
“In recent years (oral cancer) has been on the rise among young individuals and we don’t know why. But one could speculate that this virus (HPV) is one of the factors,” Rosenquist said.
There is a very promising vaccine that should soon reduce the risk some.
Sean sent me this link early this morning. We then chatted about where to find an old washing machine (he has an old one but isn’t ready for it to be deconstructed yet) and a place to try a similar experiment of our own. I suggested a dump–we might find the desired object(s) and wouldn’t have to clean up afterward. Sean said it was a good idea and maybe we would get lucky and ignite the methane escaping from the rotting organic matter in the dump. That was when I realized it wasn’t such a good idea. It would be impossible to determine the minimum safe distance from which to view the deconstruction of the home appliance(s). If the entire landfill went up in one fireball…. well… it would be thrilling until it came back down on top of us.
The economic egalitarianism of the liberal ideology implies … the reduction of Westerners to hunger and poverty.
James Burnham
Suicide of the West
1964
Gun Guys claim Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito is:
Known consortion with practically criminal organizations, including the NRA.
When the truth is that it is the people in groups like the VPC and Gun Guys actually are criminals.
If it were only true that Alito has a NRA membership.
If you stop to think, men should be the ones riding sidesaddle.
You have all the characteristics of a popular politician: a horrible voice, bad breeding, and a vulgar manner.
Aristophanes
[When reading this I immediately thought of the two Senators from New York.–Joe]
It has been said that if you build a better mouse trap the world will beat a path to your door. I’m not so sure that is true but no matter. The more sexually aware of you will know the Sybian has been around for several years and gets a lot of praise. I’ve talked with several women that have tried it. Awesome reviews. It would be more than a little intimating if you thought the primary reason your woman hung around was for the orgasms. But then you knew that already.
But what I’ll bet you didn’t know is that in Moscow, Idaho there is a guy building prototypes of a better machine. Cheaper and more natural in action. Same great results. I know three woman that have tested one or more of the prototypes and gave them very positive, if somewhat incoherent (oh, oh, oh, oh my god…), reviews. I haven’t checked with him on his machines for a year or more not and should do that. It’s not exactly a mouse trap, in fact it is sort of the opposite of a mouse trap. But I wish him luck in his endeavor. I just wish I could help out in his research. Surely he needs some good photographs taken or something…
Q: What should you do if a pit bull is humping your leg?
A: Fake an orgasm.
This so reminds me of the government trying to “help”. You certainly don’t want to resist their “help”. That will only make things worse.
Ry sent me an instant message today with a link. The plans to take the UK another step closer to a police state have been leaked to the press:
A “24×7 national vehicle movement database” that logs everything on the UK’s roads and retains the data for at least two years is now being built, according to an Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) strategy document leaked to the Sunday Times. The system, which will use Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR), and will be overseen from a control centre in Hendon, London, is a sort of ‘Gatso 2’ network, extending. enhancing and linking existing CCTV, ANPR and speedcam systems and databases.
Which possibly explains why the sorcerer’s apprentices in ACPO’s tech section don’t seem to have needed any kind of Parliamentary approval to begin the deployment of what promises to be one the most pervasive surveillance systems on earth.
The control centre is intended to go live in April of next year, and is intended to be processing 50 million number plates a day by year end. ACPO national ANPR co-ordinator John Dean told the Sunday Times that fixed ANPR cameras already exist “at strategic points” on every motorway in the UK, and that the intention was to have “good nationwide coverage within the next 12 months.” According to ACPO roads policing head Meredydd Hughes, ANPR systems are planned every 400 yards along motorways, and a trial on the M42 near Birmingham will first be used to enforce variable speed limits, then to ‘tackle more serious crime.’
My new friend who wants to put the chips in everyone’s head would do well to watch this and see where it leads. A lot of us will be watching. There are lots of changes going on in the U.K. This is a scary time to have friends or family there.
Steve at random thoughts is from England and has some questions about why we have such an intense interest on being able to carry concealed. In one link (I don’t have time for this until tonight) this is my answer.
Be gentle. He is a friend of mine.
Update: Steve and I had lunch together today. After chatting about “old times” and catching each other up on the people we both knew, the beauty of Montana, traveling with kids, how he met his wife, and a few other odds and ends he asked what I thought of his post. “No”, I told him, “You didn’t sound a like a liberal gun hater. You were thoughtful and asked a good question.” Then I went about trying to answer his questions. I explained that with all the studies that have been done they are unable to show any benefit from gun control. There are between 1.5 and 3 million defensive uses of guns each year with only about 10 thousand crimes committed with guns. Criminals, who violate the laws against murder, rape, and assault, will be less affected by any gun control efforts than the “good guys” that will be deprived of the tools to defend themselves. And putting the onus on the gun controller I ask them my One Question.
Steve listened careful, understood what I was saying, but didn’t commit himself one way or the other. That’s fine with me. I enjoyed the time with him and that’s what was important.
To walk into the lobby of a hotel, to see a wedding procession and to take your spouse with you into that wedding and blow yourself up — these people are insane.
King Abdullah of Jordan
November 13, 2005
From http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,251-1871428_1,00.html
[Or they are showing their dedication–their willingness to die for their cause. This atrocity reminds me there is some symmetry in this conflict.–Joe]
Now that Analog Kid has posted the results I’ll explain how I was going to “game” the October postal rifle match Analog Kid called “The Black Death”. Because you can shoot the target as many times as you want what I was going to do was put up ten targets at 200 yards. Then:
So…with 25 shots I have an 85% chance of creating a clean target at 200 yards. With 50 shots I have a 98% chance of doing it.
Unfortunately I procrastinated too much and didn’t make time to get out to the range until it was raining and almost dark.
Lots of little things went wrong but it went fairly well overall.
I got through big stack of paperwork in orientation without a hitch and arrived at the work-site one minute early. The guy that walked in the door just ahead of me used to run the Tuesday night handgun league at one of the shooting ranges. We probably haven’t seen each other in five years or so. I chatted a bit with him as he picked up a temporary badge and I checked in with the receptionist.
The guy I was supposed to report to didn’t answer the phone and the receptionist sent him an email. About 20 minutes later another guy I used to work with at Chromium Communications and one of my firearms students showed up to have a meeting with people at my new employer. We chatted for about five minutes and the receptionist made attempts to find someone else to come out and greet me. The guy I was supposed to meet finally showed up about 30 minutes late with the excuse that his phone was turned off or something. Whatever… it doesn’t matter. Just lead me to my office and computer. Oh, the computer that has been on order for me for two weeks still isn’t here. We had to scrounge for one.
I had a domain account and password but when I tried to set up my email the Outlook Exchange server said the account didn’t exist. Checking with other people revealed some servers recognized me and others didn’t. It probably will just take some time for the email alias to propagate to all the servers. It still hadn’t made it to my server by 17:30 when I left for the day.
As various programs were installing I started reading up on C# and wrote my first “Hello world!” program in it. That will be the dominate language in this new job. It’s past time I learned it and it’s great they are paying me to do so.
Probably the most amazing thing to me is that just a few months ago both Ry and I were living in Moscow 300 miles from where we now work and now we are working so close to each other that we can easily walk to lunch together. And there was no “intervention” by him to get me my job or vice versus.
Gun Guys put up this post about a lawsuit that may be dismissed because of the recent law passed by Congress on frivolous anti-gun legal actions. I’ve read the post three times now and still can’t make sense of it. The facts are that a lawsuit was in the works blaming the manufacture, the dealer, a gun show operator, and “others” for the shooting of one Daniel Williams. The gun used by the “mutant” shooter was illegally purchased at the gun show by one James Nigel Bostic. The Gun Guys say:
James Nigel Bostic is a criminal, and his criminal negligence costed Williams and many other victims of violence many things, physically and financially. Williams was a star high school basketball player, and lost a scholarship because of the shooting. Because of Bostic’s criminal actions (Buffalo News documented his straw purchases in a previous article), Daniel Williams’ life is forever changed.
And yet, because of the gun immunity bill (now the gun immunity law, passed by Congress under the gun industry’s lobbying), James Nigel Bostic will likely never see a day in court with Daniel Williams.
…
Because of this law, hundreds if not thousands of illegal dealers like Bostic will never see their day in court.
What they don’t mention is that in the source article for their posting is that Bostic is in prison because of his illegal purchases.
So Bostic broke the law, went to jail for it and Gun Guys are whining that he won’t have a day in court for his crime?
I guess the post doesn’t have to make sense to their audience–it just has to arrive at the conclusion that makes them feel good.