Monthly Archives: May 2013

Quote of the day—Barry Snell

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To my fellow citizens who are anti-gun I say: So long as you deny our humanity, so long as you malign our dignity, intelligence and wisdom, so long as you seek to shade us under a cloud of evil that we do not partake in or support, so long as you tell us that because we own guns we are terrible people, you will prove yourselves absolutely right in that we won’t come to the table to talk with you.

And there will be no hope for resolution but through victory by force initiated by one side or the other, God help us, for we will not plow for those who didn’t beat their swords into plowshares.

Barry Snell
May 3, 2013
Snell: Waking the dragon — How Feinstein fiddled while America burned
[Via son James.

Nearly every paragraph of this editorial could be a QOTD. It’s very good.

Kevin has more here and here.—Joe]

Only 12% of those surveyed had a clue…

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…that gun homicides are down. Way down. Via theBlaze.

The majority of Americans apparently believe that “gun violence” is on the rise. This is because there are people in high places who want us to believe things that aren’t true.

But as Tam put it, and I paraphrase;
“Even if every other gun owner on the planet tried to murder someone last night, I didn’t. So leave me alone.”

The right to keep and bear arms is not conditional. It is based on sound, moral principles, which do not change with the weather or with any other circumstances as some would have us think.

Either way (that is to say; using their own false logic or using moral principle) the anti-rights forces lose the argument when people pay attention. The other takeaway here is that lies, even big, transparent lies, do seem to work somewhat, at least for a while.

My alternate quote of the day – Me

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In comments here;

“The bottom line is; we have authoritarians and anti-authoritarians living in the same society. Each is attempting to foster its separate, incompatible doctrine. Neither can afford to tolerate the other.”

It’s more like we’re living as separate societies in the same country, and that we have incompatible world views rather than “doctrines”. Neither world view can tolerate the other, because one example is often capable of poisoning, or infecting, a whole lot of people.

The authoritarian’s fantasy of a glorious regime can be highly threatened by one “upstart” who simply will not be intimidated or fall in line. The ideal of liberty in the minds of anti-authoritarians can be poisoned by the emergence of gangs as they infiltrate the political and media infrastructures.

So far in this post I’ve treated authoritarians and anti-authoritarians as separate but equal, but there is of course a major difference– The anti-authoritarian (libertarian) can best further his goals by being straight forward and honest, while the authoritarian must use deception, fear, anger and doubt.

One is honest and motivated by love while the other is a lying sack of shit motivated by hate trying to appear good and reasonable only as a means of getting its greedy way. One is honest with himself to the greatest extent possible while the other must avoid reality or be exposed and discredited. One builds and provides while the other is a deadly parasite, and yet one can be seen as mocking the other for its selfish goals.

Which are you? Most people are confused on the matter, believing themselves to be one when they are the other. Further; you can at times actually be doing the right things for the wrong reasons. Feints within feints within feints. What a tangled web we weave.

You can dress the conflict up in millions of words, appealing to various motivations and emotions, but it is still that simple, age-old conflict between love and hate, or liberty and tyranny.

Each sees itself as a liberator, too, and again it is because the mere existence of the other is a threat to its own existence. One is poison to the other and so it longs to be free of that poison.

How many ways can we say the same things? Millions and millions and millions. We fool ourselves into playing the same deadly game over and over.

The Stars came Back -072- Situation

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Fade in

INT – DAY – Kat’s office in BLDG 1701

She sits at her desk, Lag on her computer screen.

Kat: Nothing yet. They said they lost a bunch of surveillance assets about (glances at the clock) fifteen minutes ago. No good real-time in the area right now, but they are moving what they can – soonest is a couple of hours. Wait or risk it?
Continue reading →

Quote of the day—Sen. Richard Blumenthal

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There is nothing celebratory about the fact that two brothers suspected of planting bombs at the finish line of the Boston Marathon a few weeks ago were able to get a gun without a proper permit. This gun was used to kill a police officer.

Despite these morbid realities, the NRA is still celebrating this weekend in the Lone Star State, slowly but surely consigning itself to irrelevance as Americans continue to pressure Congress to do something about gun violence weeks after the Senate’s failure to pass the gun violence prevention bill.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal
May 3, 2013
There’s Nothing To Celebrate: NRA’s Celebratory Atmosphere At National Conference Is Disgusting
[Proper permit? Perhaps legislation should be passed that requires “a proper permit” before high school students can purchase recreation drugs like beer and cigarettes. Blumenthal is a blooming idiot if he does not understand the realities of economics and black markets in a quasi-free society. Or alternatively he is desirous of implementing a tyrannical police state. I can see no other alternatives. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and declare him an idiot.

Would it be disgusting if the NAACP and ADL celebrated defeating legislation that would required background checks before their members could get permits to be on public streets after dark? Surely it’s just “common sense” that we don’t want people like that “on the streets” unless they have permission from the government. Right?

Wrong. We are talking about specific enumerated rights. Requiring government permission to exercise a right is to deny that it is a right. And the thing that is disgusting is that we had to even have a debate, let alone a fight, about recognizing that right.

It’s Senator Blumenthal and the anti-freedom people he supports that are consigning themselves to irrelevance. Over 86,000 people showed up at the NRA annual meeting and the NRA has a membership of over 5,000,000. How many show up at the gun control annual meetings? About 50 to 100 for the nations largest anti-gun group. The entire email list of the Brady Campaign is only about 50,000. The Brady Campaign doesn’t even have “members” in the sense that the NRA does.

No matter how you look at what Blumenthal has to say it’s clear he is unfit to hold public office. Instead he should be on the street corner handing out free copies of CPUSA newsletters. It would be more philosophically in alignment with his politics than being a member of the U.S. Senate.—Joe]

Still more on communications

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I got an e-mail today off our web site, complaining that we’re too hard to contact. He went on and on about it. He wants to spend money. He was asking several questions that are answered on the web site. His message did not include his phone number or address, just the e-mail.

My e-mail reply was bounced back to me by his mail server.

This reminds me of the woman who always hooks up with scum-of-the-Earth men, who abuse her, and she then ends up hating men, the Progressive who advocates massive restrictions on commerce and then complains about businesses colluding with politicians, and the gun control advocate who points to Chicago’s crime rate as a reason why we need more gun restrictions.

Methinks thy complaints be self fulfilling.

I can smell the hay

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Brother Doug was going through old photo albums and other stuff and came across this picture:

BlowingHay

He sent it to me and asked what tractor was used to power the hay blower and whether it was the ‘51 or the ‘53 truck in the picture above. The two people in the picture are our dad (in the truck) and me (on the ground).

I gave him my best answers. “I’m pretty sure that is the ‘51 truck” and “I think we might have borrowed a tractor to power the hay blower” (see the large, flat, belt leading off to the left of the picture?). Doug was able to confirm it was the ‘51 and found another picture of Uncle Alden’s tractor with a flat belt attached to it near the barn.

What is more interesting to me is that while I remembered putting up hay like this for several years the picture brought back surprisingly vivid memories. I can almost smell the hay, feel the rock salt in my hand from the rusty bucket at my feet (we added salt to dry out the hay and reduce the risk of spontaneous heating and fire), and hear the sounds the hay blower made as it pushed the hay up the pipe into the barn. It’s very, very vivid. It’s very close to real even though it was probably 45 years ago.

The next time I go back to Idaho with Barb L. I should take her on a tour of the barn in the picture. The hay blower is still inside.

Who will they punish now?

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Remember when the control freaks announced they wanted background checks for the sale of explosive powders after the Boston Bombing? This, of course, was aimed at gun owners. Not real terrorists because real terrorist could easily find substitutes. Gun owners could not.

We now know the explosive powder the villains used:

BostonBombersPowderSource

Yup. That’s right. They disassembled fireworks and put that powder in the pressure cookers.

So now I wonder… Who will the control freaks seek to punish now? Will they want background checks on anyone that buys fireworks?

Never mind. Those were rhetorical questions. The Boston Bombers (WeaponsMan calls them “Speed Bump” and “Flashbang”—I like!) were just an excuse. Gun owners are the real targets and it will still be the gun owners they seek to control.

Quote of the day—Josh Horwitz

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They espouse an insurrectionist, anti-democratic philosophy, and they have a lot of people on their board that, to put it lightly, you wouldn’t want in polite company.

Josh Horwitz
Director of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence
May 3, 2013
NRA gathering proves a big draw amid gun-control debate
[I would like to suggest that Mr. Horwitz read the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution. The Second Amendment is specifically for insurrection in the case of tyranny and we do not have a democratic government. We have a republic.

And as far as polite company is concerned I would not spend time with the likes of Horwitz. I’ve spent time with several different board members of the NRA and I found them very pleasant.

At every opportunity Horwitz attempts to infringe up on my specific enumerated right to keep and bear arms. I’ve spent nearly 20 years as a gun rights advocate and I am no more inclined to exchange pleasantries with him than I would if I were civil rights advocate in a mixed race marriage and he were the head of the KKK.—Joe]

Boomershoot 2013

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By most accounts Boomershoot 2013 was good. Two people even came up to me afterward and told me, “This was the best one ever.”

From and staff/organizational standpoint that was certainly true. Everything occurred on time or perhaps only a few minutes late. The targets were produced in record time. The targets were deployed in record time. The clean up on Sunday night was completed in record time. The Saturday dinner and raffle went exceptionally smooth as well.

I give credit to all the staff who showed up early or on time, knew what to do, and worked long hours.

There were some disappointments from the participant side.

The targets for the high intensity events had a very low detonation rate. My guess is that fewer than half detonated. The air should have been filled with so much water vapor that people would have difficulty seeing the targets.

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The detonation rate for the main event was better but still below what we have come to expect.

The low detonation rate was at least 90% responsible for the disappointing fireball this year.

We have more tests to do but the best hypothesis so far is that the heat guns used to do the shrink wrapping of the targets overheated the ethylene glycol in the Boomerite and evaporated a significant portion of it. Our tests were done in the winter and a lot of our target production was done when it was very warm in the shipping container.

The weather wasn’t bad. It could have been better though. On Sunday the winds were high enough that some people reported 10+ feet of windage was required for .223 calibers at the tree line 380 yards away. It’s crazy to expect to get hits on a 4” square target when you put on that much windage.

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On the good side, at noon we moved about 150 or 200 7” targets from the distant hillside to the tree line. The original targets at the tree line were 3” and 4” square. The addition of 7” square targets was very popular with the shooters and there was a great deal of excitement as the targets detonated in rapid succession. The difference between hitting 2 MOA and 1 MOA targets is huge.

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As usual there were interesting people and equipment at Boomershoot:

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Most of the staff left about 5:45 PM. Daughter Kim and Jacob left sometime after 6:00 PM. I puttered around Mecca putting things away, taking down the tent, and packing stuff into my vehicle for the return trip to the Seattle area the next day. I left via the tree line at the Boomershoot site and spread the remaining coals from the trash fires to cool. I left at almost exactly 8:00 PM. It was still light out which was a first. There have been times, like last year, when I did not leave until after 11:00 PM.

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Snoqualmie Falls

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Barb L. and I went for a short drive and a hike today. The main attraction was Snoqualmie Falls:

The weather was warm and with snow still in the mountains the water flow was on the high side of normal.

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And when we went on our hike I open carried. No one noticed or if they did they did not seem to care.

Quote of the day–John Lott

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By the end of 2010, prosecutors had only 32 convictions or pleas agreements, and only 13 of those involved falsified information when buying a gun or illegal possession of a gun, that translates into just 0.018% of the 71,010 initial denials.
…
These numbers are just one of the reason that no study by criminologists or economists has found that the Federal Brady Law has reduced national crime rates.

Of course, being falsely labeled as being ineligible to own a gun isn’t the only cost imposed on law-abiding Americans. Even those who aren’t prevented from buying a gun face delays in getting approved.

John Lott
June 13, 2011
The Problem with Brady Background Checks: Virtually all of those denied purchasing a gun are false positives
[Via David Hardy.

When advocates of background checks crow about the Brady checks stopping millions of gun sales realize they are celebrating the delay and/or denial of a specific enumerated right.–Joe]

Static dynamics

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We call it “static” electricity, but it can sure cause havoc when it moves. My office carpet charges me up when I walk across it, and if I am dumb enough to touch a USB port on my computer it causes problems from disabling every USB device to shutting down the computer. “Whack”. If I’m thinking, I touch the cabinet first, to discharge the static harmlessly. The USB port is a vulnerable point in the system.

I was awoke in the middle of the night years ago during a snow storm, by the noise. “POP!….snick…..POP!….Snick…” with perfect regularity, over and over. That’s something that’ll get your attention in a deep sleep in the middle of the night. I had a 40 meter “inverted vee” dipole antenna atop my trailer, but it was a crude experimental set-up with no grounding switch. For equipment protection I simply unscrewed the antenna connector when not in use. Static was building up on the wire outside, then jumping to a metal desk lamp nearby– “POP!” A second later it jumped onto a ground cable next to the lamp– “Snick”. I guess it took a second for the charge to migrate to the pointy piece of the lamp where it discharged. It was dark, so I could see the sparks. They were impressive. Stupidly, I grabbed hold of the cable to screw it into a grounded jack I had set up. Yow! That’ll wake ya right up. It’s amazing how much voltage can be pulled out of a snow storm in just a few seconds.

When we were kids, we had to wait at the Spokane airport for a long time one day. We found that the carpet there would build up an impressive charge on you, and when you touched a doorknob or something you’d get a pretty good jolt. So naturally we played a trick on our little sister. We told her to touch her finger to someone else’s finger. “Ouch!”
“Try it with someone else.”
“Ouch!”
“There must be something wrong with you. Here; try it on me.”
“Ouch!” After several rounds of this we had her convinced that it was all her– Something was wrong with her, and after facing the prospect of a lifetime of never being able to touch another person without causing pain, she started crying. Then of course we had to console her and explain the joke, feeling guilty about it.

One winter night while driving home at night in sub freezing weather I watched a lightning storm. It was a little, single, isolated thunderhead off in the distance. Normally a thunder storm is driven by warm, humid air condensing as it rises, releasing its heat energy thus causing more rising and more condensation, etc. Vapor to liquid– There’s a lot of energy involved in changes of state, but in this particular case it was quite cold outside. Compared to the more familiar springtime or summer thunderstorms, this one was very low energy. One strike only every several minutes. Could this thunder storm have been the result of a liquid to sold change-of-state system? Never heard of such a thing. I’ve seen winter lightening only twice in my life, and the other time it was just one strike.

Gun Song – Tchaikovsky – 1812 Overture (with cannons)

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No “gun” in the title, but anything that is actually performed with real cannons certainly qualifies as a gun song. The exciting part is near the end, for those not familiar with it. It’s a famously rousing piece, at least the ending. The rest has a narrower appeal.


Tchaikovsky is one of the big names in classical music. He was Russian, born in 1840. If you like classical music, you likely know about him, or at least OF him, and if you don’t, nothing I say will change your mind, most likely. But an interesting factoid was that he made an appearance at the inauguration of  Carnegie Hall.