I would have thought that it would have been difficult to do something on my computer at work capable of consuming nearly 50 Terrahertz (50,000 Gigahertz) of CPU processing power. But this was pretty easy:
Or maybe there is a bug in the reporting of the CPU Usage.
I am totally in favor of gun control, of removing guns not only from civilians but also from police.
…
I talked about the fact that my father had guns when I was growing up; our families needed to protect themselves from the Ku Klux Klan.
Angela Davis
May 6, 2014
Angela Y. Davis on what’s radical in the 21st century
[Don’t ever let anyone get away with telling you that no one wants to take away your guns.
After reading the article I breathed a heavy sigh. Barb asked what was wrong. I answered, “I just don’t know what to do with this. How do you respond to this?”
At some level Davis understands why gun ownership is important but she also wants to take guns from all private hands.
I guess it comes with the territory of being so crazy that you advocate for communism.—Joe]
I have had numerous people tell me I look like Patrick Stewart when he played Captain Picard on Star Trek: The Next Generation. Barb strongly suggested I get a Picard costume for the Halloween party last Saturday night. She dressed as “a generic alien woman”. She was correct to make the suggestion:
Photo by “Bettie Page”.
The number of complements and favorable comments I got were uncountable. They ranged from numerous guys merely saying, “Captain” as they walked past and multiple requests to beam us to some other location to, “I just wanted to say you totally rock in the Picard costume.” I even had “Bettie Page” sit on my lap for a while (she also sat on Barb’s lap so it might not have been entirely the costume).
I found this experiment mind blowing (Can Previous Mating Partners Influence The Traits Of Future Offspring?):
Perhaps not surprisingly, DNA paternity analyses confirmed that the most recent male partner had indeed sired the offspring in the vast majority of cases. However, the scientists also found that the size of the offspring was strongly related to the size of the female’s first mating partner. At the same time, offspring size was unrelated to the size of the most recent partner, even in cases where there was definitive evidence that the most recent partner was the father. That’s right—the young flies tended to look more like mom’s first mate than they did their dads.
As mentioned in the article we may have a lot more to learn about how traits are inherited.
You’d think this would be just common sense. Maybe we should make it legal for them to openly carry their penis. It would be safer, but they probably wouldn’t be as proud about it.
horrido
July 2, 2014
Comment to Big Win For Gun Control Groups: Target Bans Guns In Its Stores
[It’s another Markley’s Law Monday!–Joe]
Barb: I’m going down to the kitchen. Would you like some grapes?
Joe: Maybe. I’m kind of hungry but I’m not sure what I want.
Barb: Would you like some cake? That’s a food group.
That’s my kind of woman.
We need more school shootings!!! Vote yes on Initiative 591.
Nick Hanauer
October 24, 2014
Too Soon? Nick Hanauer Posts Sarcastically, ‘We Need More School Shootings!!!
[Via WAC.
In addition to the moral bankruptcy, blood dancing, and exceedingly poor taste Nick Hanauer is a top funder raiser for I-594.
I-594 is the anti-gun initiative in Washington State which would outlaw many common and innocent acts related to gun ownership. One such example is my loaning a gun to Barb for the weekend so she could take a class. If I-594 were law we would have had to seek out a FFL, pay a fee, and fill out a bunch of paperwork for when I “transferred” the gun to her, and then again when she “transferred” it back.
I-591 is the pro-gun initiative which would limit Washington State to background checks to the same criteria as Federal background checks. And, assuming Hanauer is rational, then the only thing that could possibly be what he was referring to with I-591 being a issue in regards to school shootings is the following:
A new section is added to chapter 9.41 RCW to read as follows:
It is unlawful for any government agency to confiscate guns or other firearms from citizens without due process.
So, unless Hanauer thinks unlawful confiscation of guns is in the future, he has crap for brains in making the statement he did.
My conclusions is that with this post he just confirms the relationship between those opposed to our fundamental rights, crap for brains, and inherent evil.—Joe]
Acts of nature are not things that the common man can easily rebel against. People rebel against governments and corrupt despots all the time, but not the plague. If a viral pandemic strikes, nearly everything a government does after the fact, no matter how corrupt or destructive, can be rationalized as necessary for the greater good of the greater number. If anyone does rebel, they will be labeled as pure evil, for they are now disrupting the government’s ability to stop the pandemic from spreading, and thus, are partly responsible for the mass deaths that follow.
During a viral outbreak, government becomes mother, father, nurse and protector. No matter how abusive they are, most people will still look to them for safety and guidance, primarily because they have no knowledge of disease. What they do not understand, they will fear, and fear always drives the ignorant into the arms of tyrants.
Brandon Smith
October 8, 2014
An Ebola Outbreak Would Be Advantageous For Globalists
[While the article has a fair amount of tin foil hat material in it I think the above is probably true.
I was talking to son James the other evening about our government’s response to Ebola and he said the one good thing that is coming out is that it makes it more clear just how incompetent our government is. My counter to that was to many people that will just mean the government needs still more power. To far too many people the answer to every government failure is to give them more power or to put “the right people” in charge.
And if we wanted to venture into the land of the tin foil hat we could hypothesize that Ebola is a crisis our government is not going to let go to waste.—Joe]
Take all guns from the commoners and dole out harsh prison terms, such as life without parole, for possession of any firearm, ammunition, or firearm component. Good governance requires it and President Obama supports it.
BenRothstein (Commander McBragg)
October 24, 2014
Comment to Suspect Among 2 Dead in Washington High School Shooting
[I suspect a troll, but sometimes it’s hard to tell.
In addition to the tragedy of the deaths and injuries this could push a very close election (in process right now) on the gun control initiative I-594 the wrong way. Sometimes it’s tempting to think of these events as Manchurian Candidate conspiracies.—Joe]
From the gun email list at work:
From: Shawn
Sent: Friday, October 24, 2014 8:37 AM
Subject: Weapons on Campus survey….quick and confidentialMy son Kyle is a Senior Cadet (MS-4) in the US Army ROTC at the University of Arizona. He is enrolled in a political science course focused on polling, and has been tasked with creating a survey on a topic of his choice, collecting and analyzing the responses, and writing a report of his findings. His topic is weapons on campus. He has asked his mother and I to help him collect responses by asking as many people as we can to participate in his survey. The survey is very short and completely confidential. If you read through the survey and prefer not to answer the questions, you are not required to submit. You can simply close the tab or browser.
Thanks for your time.
Shawn
Link to survey: https://kyle14.typeform.com/to/CQpZsc
I dislike the wording of question 14. People are not given such a right. But I answered it as “strongly agree” anyway.
The GPU (secret police) exposed von Meck, and he was shot: His objective had been to wear out rails and roadbeds, freight cars and locomotives, so as to leave the Republic without railroads in case of foreign military intervention!
When, not long afterward, the new People’s Commissar of Railroads, Comrade Kaganovich, ordered that average loads should be increased, and even doubled and tripled them (and for this discovery received the Order of Lenin along with others of our leaders) the malicious engineers who protested became know as limiters.
They raised the outcry that this was too much, and would result in the breakdown of the rolling stock, and they were rightly shot for their lack of faith in the possibilities of socialist transport.
Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation (Volume One) page 45.
[I was talking about this with son James last night so I thought I would post it too. Basically the lesson is that progressives have a burning desire to eliminate those that point out reality to them. Some of the most visible battles in our country today are the battle over Obamacare and the right to keep and bear arms. They refuse to recognize the realities of economics and human nature and are willing to have us imprisoned and/or killed when we attempt to explain reality to them.
But it is much more widespread than those. Look at the war against Islamic terrorism. Progressives insisted that we are to blame for our conflict despite the very clear words from the terrorists themselves that they will only be peaceful after all people have submitted to Sharia Law. Or look at how they insisted that stand your ground laws were a factor in the George Zimmerman case. Progressives have beliefs which contradict reality and if they have the power they become very dangerous when reality is forced upon them.
The constant conflict between reality and their beliefs is why the book Nineteen Eighty Four resonates so strongly. It brings to light the inherent conflict of the struggle we are facing. It is a battle between reality and their ever changing beliefs.
They insist that if we would acquiesce to their demands of a complete gun ban or a completely “free” government run health care system the world would be a better place. And they call us obstructionist because we insist what they demand cannot succeed. Today they call us obstructionists instead of limiters. I sometimes wonder if that is deliberate because some of them know the Soviet baggage associated with the word “limiters”.
I don’t wonder what they would do to those that insist upon maintaining a close connection to reality. If only they had the political power to deal with us as they wished our fate would be clear. That path has made countless history books of the most unpleasant nature.—Joe]
The inequality that matters most is not wealth, but power.
…
Power buys wealth infinitely faster than wealth buys power.
Raúl Ilargi Meijer
October 18, 2014
Wealth Inequality Is Not A Problem, It’s A Symptom
[Those that seem to be most concerned with inequality of wealth advocate for giving more power to political elites. Which, of course, makes the symptoms even worse.
I do wish I could escape to Galt’s Gulch.—Joe]
Liberals are not designed to flourish under any conditions but free resource availability, and no danger or exposure to reality. Limit resources or add some dangerous reality, and they will begin to drop like flies.
Anonymous Conservative
October 7, 2014
Ebola, Natural Selection, and Facilitating a K-Shift to Conservatism to Save Lives
[I think this is overlooking that fact that liberals (Progressives) seek and hold on to power. In a time of limited resources or dangerous reality they are likely to use that power to take resources through unlawful means. “The good of the many outweigh the rights of the few”, will be the essence of their justification.
I suspect it will only be in a state of partial or full government collapse that his predictions will become dominant. But the interesting thing is that history has shown us that government collapse can occur remarkably rapid.—Joe]
The AR-15 is an assault rifle and in my mind there is no reason why a civilian needs to own an assault rifle.
Candace Fay
Democratic candidate for Connecticut state representative.
October 16, 2014
Carter, Fay spar over gun control at league debate
[Don’t ever let anyone get away with telling you that no one wants to take your guns.
This is also an excellent example of how people intent on doing evil do not fit the Hollywood vision of an evil doer.—Joe]
Wanting sensible gun laws isn’t anti-liberty to anyone but the small wee wee’d gunsterbators who are terrified to go outside. #GunSense
Dennis (@StillersFanInFL)
July 29, 2014
[It’s another Markley’s Law Monday! Via Mark (@tazcat2011) and Linoge.—Joe]
A week or two ago Ry showed up in my office and said he wanted to do an experiment. He and I have had conflicting information on the contamination of primers by oil. The common word on the Internet and word of mouth is that if you get the tiniest amount of oil on the chemically active portion of a primer then it would go dead.
However Ry had seen Lyle demonstrate this was not true by putting CLP in a shell casing with an active primer then detonating it a minute or two later. I had done similar things myself. I wanted to deprime some cases with live primers and to test the “kill the primer with oil” hypothesis I put a thin oil in the mouth of a shell casing and waited, sometimes a day or more, but they would still fire just fine. Bah! As usual the Internet is wrong. Right?
As we talked about the experiment we realized the Internet story wasn’t quite the same thing as our first hand data. Our first hand data wasn’t of putting oil directly on the primer. It was putting oil in the mouth of a shell casing. We believed the thin oil would make it through the flash hole into the active area of the primer.
But that was an assumption. It was not a proven fact.
So what we decided to do was soak the primers for few minutes in a paper cup and then load them in a shell casing. We would do several primers then test them at various time intervals, like an hour, a day, a week, and a month. We expected the primers would still be fine after a month and the myth would be busted.
Here are the solvents we tested:
We used Winchester small pistol primers:
Here are the primers being soaked prior to inserting on the empty shell casings:
An interesting thing occurred. The primers soaked in Break Free CLP turned the CLP slightly red after a few minutes:
And the primers in the water turned the water slightly yellow:
We also created two control sets. One set had dry primers in a dry shell casing and the other set had dry primers with solvent put in the shell casing.
After we had all the shell casing loaded Ry added more of the solvent to the test shell casings so evaporation would not be a factor in the long term testing.
We then tested both control sets and the test set.
We hand loaded the empty shell casings into a handgun and put the muzzle tight against an air pillow used for padding in Amazon shipments. We then fired the gun. If it failed to fire we would cock the hammer and try a second time. If it failed both times we called it a dead primer. There were no primers which failed on the first attempt and succeeded on the second. If it popped the air pillow it was a “vigorous” detonation. If it failed to puncture the air pillow it was a “mild” detonation:
The dry normally inserted primers would punch a hole through both sides of the air pillow even though there was a significant air gap between the two sides:
We tested two primers for each solvent. The results with solvent only in the shell casing mouth were as follows:
| Solvent | Detonation Result |
| Water | 2 vigorous |
| Break Free CLP | 2 vigorous |
| WD 40 | 2 mild |
| 3-IN-ONE | 1 vigorous, 1 mild |
| Tetra Gun Lubricant | 2 vigorous |
This confirmed the tests Lyle and I had done years ago. The primers were still active after putting oil in the case mouth.
Here are the results of the primers soaked in the paper cups with solvent:
| Solvent | Detonation Result |
| Water | 2 dead |
| Break Free CLP | 1 mild, 1 dead |
| WD 40 | 1 mild, 1 very mild |
| 3-IN-ONE | 2 mild |
| Tetra Gun Lubricant | 2 mild |
We will have updates later after the remaining primers have soaked for longer periods of time but it is clear that the flash hole is a significant barrier to the entry of solvents into the primer compound and the common wisdom of oil damaging primers is true.
| Solvent | Detonation Result |
| Water | 2 dead |
| Break Free CLP | 1 mild, 1 dead |
| WD 40 | 1 very mild, 1 dead |
| 3-IN-ONE | 1 mild, 1 dead |
| Tetra Gun Lubricant | 2 dead |
What the gun signs in effect did was disarm a law abiding citizen, and I didn’t feel comfortable being a part of that. I think this makes us safer. In my opinion removing the signs is the same thing as removing a bullseye.
Rollen “Buddy” Bradshaw
County Mayor
October 14, 2014
Signs banning guns taken down at Loudon County government office building
[It’s a Mayor Against Illegal Laws!—Joe]
ISIS has become the leading supplier of the most potent drug in the world:
Zealotry
Further, Saudi Arabia is almost certainly one of their leading customers and they brought it on themselves.
More than half of Saudi Arabia’s men are under 21 and most of those boys have been given a religious education in a strict literalist tradition. Further, they’ve been kept in time capsule, protected from many of the changes influences the rest of us.
To young men like this, ISIS is pure historical heroin. It’s a jihad in the medieval tradition.
John Robb
October 14, 2014
ISIS is the leading supplier of the most potent drug in the world
[Robb is not some armchair analyst. Read his biography. If his book (Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization) were available from Audible.com I would put it next in my queue.
We live in interesting times.—Joe]
Yesterday a totalitarian want-to-be said:
FBI Director James Comey called Thursday for “a regulatory or legislative fix” for technology companies’ expanding use of encryption to protect user privacy, arguing that without such a fix, “homicide cases could be stalled, suspects could walk free, and child exploitation victims might not be identified or recovered.”
Comey said he understood the “justifiable surprise” many Americans felt after former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden’s disclosures about mass government surveillance, but he contended that recent shifts by companies like Apple and Google to make data stored on cell phones inaccessible to law enforcement went too far.
“Perhaps it’s time to suggest that the post-Snowden pendulum has swung too far in one direction — in a direction of fear and mistrust,” said Comey, speaking at the Brookings Institution in Washington in his first major policy speech since taking over the FBI 13 months ago.
What?!!! The “pendulum has swing too far” in the direction of privacy? I wasn’t aware that the government had backed off even a tiny bit from their insistence that they get access to everything. As near as I can tell Comey wants the “pendulum” welded to the totalitarian wall.
We have one infrastructure. We can’t choose a world where the US gets to spy and the Chinese don’t. We get to choose a world where everyone can spy, or a world where no one can spy. We can be secure from everyone, or vulnerable to anyone. And I’m tired of us choosing surveillance over security.
Bruce Schneier
September 19, 2014
Fake Cell Phone Towers Across the US
[A similar statement can be made about gun ownership.
We don’t get to choose between the everyone has guns and only the good guys have guns. The bad guys will always have guns or at least lethal weapons of some sort. And since they get to choose the time, location, and victim they will frequently succeed in their attacks when the innocent are stripped or discouraged from owning guns.
It’s only when the potential victims have the capability of causing near immediate serious consequences that perpetrators give serious consideration to their life choices. If there are not serious consequences then the case can be made they would be stupid to not to take advantage of those who are vulnerable. If the consequences are significantly delayed, as in a possible jail term a year or two in the future, the perpetrators may not be able to integrate those consequences into the decisions being made in the present.
I’m tired of politicians giving us the false choice of tolerating infringements on our right to keep and bear arms in exchange for imagined security.—Joe]