More guns less crime

No.  This is not via John Lott.  From NSSF via their June 5th news release–Gun Sales Rise as Crime and Accident Rates Fall:

NEWTOWN, Conn.–New statistics show that firearm and ammunition sales are on the rise, coinciding with steady downward trends in gun crime, suicide and accident rates, in the U.S.

According to figures from government and independent sources, firearm crimes, suicides and accidental fatalities, including accidents among youth, are all trending downward.

“Reductions in gun crimes and accidental fatalities have been documented for many years, even as gun sales and ownership in our country continue to rise,” said Doug Painter, president of NSSF. “However, today’s anti-gun organizations rake in lots of cash by perpetuating the myth that more guns equals more bad news. Clearly, there is no relationship between gun ownership and firearm misuse.”

Quote of the day–Ann Coulter

Cybercast News Service: What do liberal environmentalists have against toilets that use water?

Ann Coulter: They admire the living situation of the earthworm and believe humans should emulate it.

This is why they adore primitive societies where people crap in holes behind their mud huts. They pray that these primitives never leave the mud huts — unless it’s to come clean their designer spa bathrooms “off the books.”

Cybercast News Service: Do you think any of them has ever used the type of dry toilet that they advocate?

Ann Coulter: Well, that would certainly explain why they’re so cranky all the time. Dry toilets are worthless. You can’t even use them to destroy a copy of the Koran. And believe me, I’ve tried.

Ann Coulter
June 6, 2006
CNSNew.com
[There are a lot of things I disagree with Coulter about but she does have a wicked sense of humor and a complete lack of mercy for her victims.  I admire both of those traits.–Joe]

Canadian Muslims are real sweethearts

The Muslim extremists in Canada probably figure people should trust them too.  They only planned to do a few bombings and beheadings:

RAMPTON, Canada — Some of the 17 men and youths arrested in a suspected terrorism plot had planned to storm the nation’s Parliament, take politicians hostage and behead Prime Minister Stephen Harper unless their demands for a withdrawal of Canadian troops from Afghanistan and the release of Muslim prisoners were met, prosecutors said Tuesday.

In his comments before the judge, Batasar said the prosecution was contending the defendants planned to invade the Parliament building in Ottawa and take hostages to demand that Canadian forces leave Afghanistan; about 2,300 serve under international mandate with the Kabul government’s consent. The defendants, according to prosecutors, planned to demand the release of unspecified Muslim prisoners and to bomb the Parliament building and decapitate Harper and other political leaders if their demands were rejected.

They say Islam is the religion of peace and if you don’t agree with them they will kill you.

Terror attack planned for London was sarin

The two Muslims the Brits captured the other day were probably intending to use sarin in a train carriage:

Terrorists were planning a chemical attack in London similar to that on the Tokyo subway, police and the security services said.

MI5 agents suspect that al-Qaeda sympathisers intended to produce a nerve agent – probably sarin – and release it in a confined space, such as a train carriage, to maximise the number of casualties.

Just in case you don’t know about sarin:

Initial symptoms following exposure to sarin (and other nerve agents) are a runny nose, tightness in the chest and contraction of the pupils. Soon after, the victim has difficulty breathing and experiences nausea and drooling. As the victim continues to lose control of bodily functions, he vomits, defecates and urinates. This phase is followed by twitching and jerking. Ultimately, the victim becomes comatose and suffocates in a series of convulsive spasms.

Sarin is a highly volatile liquid. Inhalation and absorption through the skin pose a great threat. Even vapour concentrations immediately penetrate the skin. People who absorb a nonlethal dose but do not receive immediate appropriate medical treatment may suffer permanent neurological damage.

Even at very low concentrations, sarin can be fatal. Death may follow in one minute after direct ingestion of about 0.01 milligram per kilogram of body weight if antidotes, typically atropine and pralidoxime, are not quickly administered. Atropine, an acetylcholine inhibitor, is given to treat the physiological symptoms of poisoning. Pralidoxime can regenerate cholinesterases if administered within approximately five hours.

It is estimated that sarin is more than 500 times as toxic as cyanide.

Death from 10 micro-grams per kilogram of body weight.  A 110 pound person (women and children would likely be on the train carriage) would have to ingest less than 1/2 of a milligram.  A baby aspirin is 81 milligrams–over 160 times as massive as a lethal dose of sarin.

And the Muslims want the British people to trust them?  When they start turning in people planning atrocities such as these then the trust can be slowly restored.

It’s on video tape but O.J. didn’t do it

I wonder if he was wearing a glove?  And if he was, did it fit?  O.J. sex video:

LIFE STYLE EXTRA (UK) – A sex tape allegedly starring O.J. Simpson has been leaked onto the internet.

The home movie features a man with more than a passing resemblance to the star and two women.

However, Simpson’s lawyer, Yale Galanter, has branded the tape fake.

He told America’s New York Daily News newspaper “While my client may appear fully clothed in portions of the tape, the man having sex is an impostor.

“This tape is garbage and we can prove it. O.J. wouldn’t do anything like this.”

The man selling the film, David Hans Schmidt, stands by the claim that it is the sporting legend in the movie.

He said: “O.J. is welcome to say that’s not him on the tape, just like he said he didn’t murder Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman but there’s no question in my mind the real O.J. is having sex on this tape.

Posted in Sex

Are they afraid of their own shadow too?

England afraid to fly its own flag:

Following warnings by extremist Islamic group al-Muhajiroun, in which the group said that the red cross in the England flag symbolizes the ‘blood thirsty crusaders’ and the occupation of Muslims, some of the largest companies in England have ordered their workers not to wave the flags.

The flag has recently appeared in England on everything from bikinis to cars, and sold in endless versions in stores.

But the Islamic protest forced some corporations, such as cable companies NTL, and even the Drivers and Vehicles Licensing Agency to ban the flag in every form due to fears from reactions of Muslims.

The Sun tabloid newspaper has in recent days launched a campaign to bring back the flag, and has published a blacklist of companies preventing their workers from expressing their patriotism at work.

The Sun said that a large pub network has banned drinkers from entering with symbols of the national team.

The hero of the day is a two year-old toddler, who was thrown out with his parents from Leicester, because he wore the England team’s uniform.

Blood thirsty?  I keep thinking of the  British aid worker Marget Hassan, director of CARE international who was killed by Muslim extremists in Iraq.  I keep thinking of the slaughter houses they found where the Muslim extremists made videos as they beheaded people.  Muslims have no high moral ground when it comes to “blood thirst”. 

The people of England need to grow a spine.

More evidence of mental defect

We have long known they have mental problems. Bloomberg is just insisting everyone be aware of his mental defects:

..a ban on the use and sale of gun coloration kits, which are used to paint guns in “toy-like” colors, and the introduction of a one handgun every-three-month purchase limit.

I would have never guessed they would come up with a ban on paint as a means of gun control.  But then I keep making the mistake of thinking they are rational.

Update: The Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms has something to say about Bloomberg too:

“Maybe somebody stole Mikey’s crayons when he was young,” Gottlieb suggested. “Or perhaps he was overcome by paint fumes as a youth. What else could explain this new phobia over firearms that just makes him purple with rage?

“Singing the blues about pastel pistols,” he concluded, “is nothing but a political red herring.”

Quote of the day–Muhammad Abdul Bari

The danger is the trust between the community and the police may be broken. The community feels very vulnerable.

Muhammad Abdul Bari
Muslim Council of Britain leader
Terror raid could ‘damage trust’ 
BBC News–June 6, 2006
[And I thought that trust was broken July 7, 2005 when Muslim extremists blew up trains in The Tube and a bus.  Trust, but verify.  That’s my advice.–Joe]

Quote of the day–Dr. Larry Piaget

There’s a power struggle going on over control of the human consciousness.  We are a cell of health surrounded by plague.  It’s not men’s minds that are at stake, but their consciousness, their awareness.  This isn’t a struggle over a market area.  Make no mistake about it.  This is a struggle over what’s to judged valuable in our universe.

Dr. Larry Piaget
A character in The Santaroga Barrier by Frank Herbert
[There is great subtleness in this book.  There is vast room for interpretation as to who the “good guys” and who are the “bad guys”.  Some call Herbert a prophet in this book.  I can see why.–Joe]

Quote of the day–Greg Hamilton

Verbal Target Indicator: Yelling without reason in a fight or when someone says something stupid like, “Hey, my gun is not loaded!” in a fight.

From the Greg Hamilton to English Dictionary by Meredith Robinson

I wonder

There are a couple things that come to mind when I read this:

TORONTO (Reuters) – A group of Canadian residents arrested for “terrorism related offenses” were inspired by al Qaeda, had amassed enough explosives to build huge bombs and were planning to blow up targets in densely populated Ontario, police said on Saturday.

Mike McDonell, assistant commissioner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, said the group had acquired three metric tons of ammonium nitrate — or three times the amount used in the 1995 bombing in Oklahoma City — as they sought to “create explosive devices.”

The first thing I wonder about is will this cause people to walk up any?  Or will they just figure, “Oh, it’s our fault for being in the mid-east, if we weren’t there it would have happened.”  People can’t seem to realize that the Islamic extremists have been trying to convert the world to Islam by force for several hundred years now.  It’s not going to stop anytime soon.

The second thing I wonder about is ammonium nitrate readily available in Canada?  If so I wonder if I can pick myself up a 1000 pounds or so for Boomershoot 2010 or whenever it is that I will exhaust my current supply.

Alien life

There is a jar of red rain water in India that some are speculating may contain alien life:

As bizarre as it may seem, the sample jars brimming with cloudy, reddish rainwater in Godfrey Louis’s laboratory in southern India may hold, well, aliens. In April, Louis, a solid-state physicist at Mahatma Gandhi University, published a paper in the prestigious peer-reviewed journal Astrophysics and Space Science in which he hypothesizes that the samples—water taken from the mysterious blood-colored showers that fell sporadically across Louis’s home state of Kerala in the summer of 2001—contain microbes from outer space.

Specifically, Louis has isolated strange, thick-walled, red-tinted cell-like structures about 10 microns in size. Stranger still, dozens of his experiments suggest that the particles may lack DNA yet still reproduce plentifully, even in water superheated to nearly 600˚F. (The known upper limit for life in water is about 250˚F.) So how to explain them? Louis speculates that the particles could be extraterrestrial bacteria adapted to the harsh conditions of space and that the microbes hitched a ride on a comet or meteorite that later broke apart in the upper atmosphere and mixed with rain clouds above India. If his theory proves correct, the cells would be the first confirmed evidence of alien life and, as such, could yield tantalizing new clues to the origins of life on Earth.


500x magnification

A few years ago I read a book in which the author(s) claimed to prove that intelligent alien life had an extremely small chance of existing.  They went through all kinds of different conditions that were “essential” for intelligent life or life of any sort for that matter.  A good friend of mine had recommended it to support his view that the Milky-way Galaxy and perhaps the entire universe was just waiting for humans to claim–no need to conquer it. 

I eagerly read the book but was extremely annoyed.  They made all these claims like “the temperature must be between X and Y degrees”, and the radiation level must be below such and such a level.  Just because life as we know it requires these conditions doesn’t mean all life has to require similar conditions.  In fact, why couldn’t life have evolved that required high levels of radiation?  Why not life that used radiation as an energy source?  Why not life that thrived in boiling water?  In fact there is life that thrives in “boiling” water.  There are certain organisms that live near geothermal vents on the ocean floor at temperatures above the normal 212 F temperature of boiling water.  The water isn’t boiling because of the great pressure but the temperature isn’t killing them.  And there are microbes, which evolved rather rapidly by the way, that eat stuff that is toxic to nearly all other life.  So why not alien life that thrives in environments that are impossible all life forms we know of?  No need to just “push the envelope” some in a direction or two.  Life, given enough time, could have evolved that is completely outside our realm of experience.

Think of it this way–We are immersed in an environment with rather tight constraints on it.  The temperature ranges from about -70F to about 120F.  Water is present at least in small quantities nearly everywhere.  Ionizing radiation is rare.  Sunlight of a particular spectral content and intensity is common.  How much experience do we have with conditions outside that realm?  It would be difficult for a water based creature, such as a dolphin or whale, to imagine how life could function on dry land.  They just don’t have the experience with it.  Or as one wag put it, “We don’t know who discovered water but we know it wasn’t a fish.”  The same with us and other, totally out of the box, environments.

This jar of red rain water may be enough to break a few boxes.

Quote of the day–George Galloway

Mr Blair has murdered more than 100,000 people in Iraq and the Iraqi people are an occupied people, illegally invaded. They have the moral and legal right to resist that occupation.

Why would that right be restricted to the poor, bloody infantry that Mr Blair sent into the streets of Iraq?

If the Iraqis have the right, as they do under international law and under any moral philosophy, to resist foreign invaders of their country (then) that must include the man who is giving the orders.

George Galloway
Friday May 26, 2006
The Guardian
Speaking from Cuba, where he earlier in the week shared a TV stage with President Fidel Castro.
[The irony of it all…happy with Castro while advocating the murder of a leader that helped save so many people from a murderous tyrant.–Joe]

Quote of the day–The Gun Guys

Putting guns back on the street after they’ve seen the police station is just asking for more trouble.  Every single gun seized by the police should find its end in a furnace.  Anything less is nothing more than a contribution to the gun violence our nation is currently suffering from.

The Gun Guys
Your Gun Guys Daily Update (daily email)
June 1, 2006
[I understand now. He is in favor of the death penality on the first offense–for the gun instead of the criminal. The “Gun Guys” have mental problems.–Joe]

Tactics that work

From Alan Korwin–tactics that work in the fight to defend the right to keep and bear arms.  As he says, “Easy, fun, and it helps save the planet by golly!”

Ante up

I kept forgetting to post this.  A couple weeks ago Ry told us about a some changes announced at a company meeting at Microsoft.  One of the things he didn’t mention that struck me the most was the reason Bill Gates didn’t attend the meeting.  Bill had just finished up a CEO summit meeting he had hosted and he and his good friend Warren Buffet were going to play poker that afternoon. 

OMG. 

I wonder what the ante for one of those games is. Would it be $100K, $1M, or a penny?  What would it mean to the future of the world if both of them pushed all their chips into the center of the table?

Reality is sinking in

Canada is resisting the identity card system required by U.S. law to enter our country:

Canada will not embark on an untested identity card system to meet U.S. border concerns, Prime Minister Stephen Harper said yesterday.

His government has told the Americans it prefers not to create such a card and wouldn’t do so until the American government has convinced itself it is effective, Harper told reporters.

ID cards are not effective in solving the problems they are claimed to address.  Mandatory ID cards are a bad idea.

Give it up

New Orleans is sinking.  Anyone who looked at the problem and had more than two brain cells to rub together knew that.  What wasn’t known was that parts of the city are sinking at a rate of over one inch per year.

Add in the inability to get pumps installed in a timely matter (it’s a tough problem, the Corp of Engineer’s has my sympathy) and my advice is they should spend their money on abandoning the city.

Following Dr. Joe’s prescription

Dr. Joe’s cure for everything is more sex.  It also works as preventative medicine.  Jamie Fox uses it to prevent obesity:

Jamie Foxx has sex every day for 30 minutes to keep in shape.

The ‘Ray’ star revealed that daily love making is the best way to stay slim.

He said: “We should all do something for 30 minutes every day to get the heart pumping. I make love to stay in shape.”

Halle Berry likes to kick up a little storm too.

Posted in Sex

Quote of the day–Ragnar Benson

The discovery of sugar powder was a landmark event in the history of the Benson family.  In total significance, it ranked right up there with Pearl Harbor and catching our first mink.  For my brother and I, it certainly was the moral equivalent of our first piece of ass.

Ragnar Benson
Chapter 7, page 85
Ragnar’s Guide to Home and Recreational Use of High Explosives
[Sugar powder is a substitute for black powder made from household sugar and potassium chlorate.–Joe]