I fixed a minor bug in Field Ballistics. The new version is 1.1.1.0. It is available on the Windows Phone store now.
The bug was that under certain situations you could delete the last target. Other places in the app required that at least one target exist at all times. After deleting the last target the app would immediately crash.
As a side note: I submitted the changed version Sunday evening. It made it through Microsoft certification in less than three days.
Liberal supersessionists claim to be worried about conservative secessionists when they should be far more worried about conservative supersessionists. The consensus we all live by is a fragile thing. It is being torn apart by the radical left and once it is destroyed, it will not bind the right, in the same way that it no longer binds the left.
And then the true conflict will begin.
Daniel Greenfield
The Supersessionists of the Liberal Confederacy
October 20, 2013
[H/T Kevin Baker.
Every paragraph in this awesome post could qualify as a quote of the day or week or even month. It is very, very good.—Joe]
With as many crazy people as there are it’s surprising the world isn’t more messed up than it actually is.
@fulyRelyonGod also, rocks and knives are tools, they have other functions besides murder. Guns do nothing but murder, it is their only use
— Jon (@mornhammer) October 29, 2013
And of course with a psychotic belief like that they have no reservations whatsoever about destroying your guns and you.
I tweeted back the following:
@mornhammer @fulyRelyonGod I’ve fired over 100K rounds and no one murdered yet. Are my guns defective? Should I seek a refund?
— Joe Huffman (@JoeHuffman) October 29, 2013
But trying to reason with the mentally ill is hopeless. I know, I’ve tried it before.
FACT: Nothing in #Obamacare forces people out of their health plans. No change is required unless insurance companies change existing plans.
— Valerie Jarrett* (@vj44) October 29, 2013
I asked a friend who is in the health insurance business if the above was true. I knew the answer but thought maybe there was some narrow definition of the word “is” or maybe “in” that would make it something other than a false statement.
The response was a laugh and, “No. That’s what I have been doing for the last several weeks. We have been preparing notification letters for individuals telling them their insurance plans are no longer available. Plans they were perfectly happy with and could afford cannot be offered anymore because of ACA.”
I was a bit surprised by the laugh and the almost cheerful mood. They explained, “It’s what we deal with everyday. They constantly say things that are not true and it has gotten to the point where we joke and laugh about it.”
I shouldn’t have been surprised, it’s obvious in hindsight, but they also told me, “We can’t say anything about it though. If we do we will be audited and harassed by the regulators. It’s just not worth it. You don’t say anything bad about the regulators.”
They also told me, “It’s going to be sad. Due to “health care reform” a lot of people that used to have insurance will no longer be covered.
I could say a lot, lot more…if it weren’t for the fear of the government taking revenge upon someone for exposing their lies.
A single person losing their health insurance is a tragedy. 16 million is a statistic. https://t.co/0hgOrYnSEZ
— Mark Hemingway (@Heminator) October 29, 2013
If you don’t recognize the form of the quote above; it’s from Stalin who probably actually said, “’When one man dies it is a tragedy, when thousands die it’s statistics’”.
It’s appropriate to bring Stalin into the discussion for more than just this one reason. Read this book: How Do You Kill 11 Million People?: Why the Truth Matters More Than You Think. It’s a very quick read. There is one thing that government have proved, again and again, that they are very, very good at. It’s killing people. Particularly their own people. One of the crucial links in accomplishing this is lying to their victims and to those who carry out the orders to arrest, transport, and jail them. The lie could be a black as “Arbeit macht frei” or telling the friends and relatives of those executed in the basements of the local police station in the USSR that the ‘counter-revolutionaries and traitors’ had been sent to labor and reeducation camps. It could be the lie that the crowded rail cars were carrying everyone to a place where they would have good homes, schools, and jobs. Or it could be what many would consider a white lie of a campaign promise to provide universal health care. Never mind the “health care panels” administrating the “care” would decide who were treated and who were euthanized.
Obamacare is now being recognized for the disaster so many people knew it would be. What comes next is that the failure will and is being blamed on political obstructionists. This is a lie. The system, as I explained in my previous post, cannot work because of the principles involved. But some are calling for Republicans and the Tea Party to be tried for treason.
What happens next? There is a good chance that the democrats will lose seats in the next election because of it. But that isn’t the only possible outcome. Stalin and the Khmer Rouge regimes handled the failures and criticism of their policies in a different manner without giving up control. And many in the U.S. media approved with rationalizations such as (H/T to Alan Gura):
The new government of Cambodia may have to resort to strong measures against a few to gain democratic socialism for all Cambodians. And we support the United Front in the pursuit of its presently stated goals.
The current administration has consistently lied about gun control, operation Fast and Furious, the massive spying, stopping the wars, closing Guantanamo Bay, Benghazi, jobs creation, and health care reform. But the really scary stuff is what they have told the truth about. They said they would be willing to use drones to kill U.S. citizens on American soil.
Lying is what comes naturally to them. They tell lies the people want to believe. But once you have told enough lies your brain changes and you have trouble telling or even knowing the truth.
History has some very brutal examples of what happens when government policy is to lie. We must not let that happen here.
* Valerie Jarrett (@vj44) is an official Whitehouse twitter account.
It’s important we get more sophisticated analysis of what has gone wrong with the ACA rollout to better appreciate how utilizing “the market” can be far more cumbersome and inefficient than the government just doing things itself.
Mike Konczal
October 23, 2013
What Kind of Problem is the ACA Rollout for Liberalism?
[In other words, “Our government program is such a disaster that we need a new and expanded government program to fix it.”
Monopolies are almost always a bad thing. The lack of choice creates a situation where inferior and expensive products do not get improved or replaced. Konczcal and hard-core liberals want government monopolies. The soft-core liberals want to regulate the market.
What Konczal doesn’t understand is that he, politicians, and government in general, do not have the domain knowledge to solve most problems. This includes regulating the solution providers. When I read the instruction manual for my car and it says to use a particular grade of gasoline and change the oil every 5000 miles I follow their recommendations. They know their car far better than I do. Even though I am a software engineer when a software package says it requires X megabytes of RAM Y megabytes of disk space I follow their recommendations because they know their software far better than I do.
The advocate for more government might say, “We will bring in experts and/or we will become experts.” This doesn’t work. I worked in a government lab for three years. I remember sitting in a meeting discussing how to get more research contracts. One guy said, “What we have is the ability to become experts on anything within a couple of weeks.” He was serious. I felt the blood drain out of my face. I had been working with him for over two years and I had not yet discovered anything that I considered him an expert on. They spent several years and millions of dollars coming up with a software testing and quality program for the software being developed at the lab. What they came up with was something that the industry had left behind a decade or two previously (the “waterfall model”).
The reason government cannot acquire the expertise is because they are a monopoly and expertise is like a product. It must constantly be improved and updated to remain relevant. And without the marketplace pressure it will stagnant and become obsolete.
Because of this lack of domain knowledge and the inherent inferiority of monopoly products government “doing it itself” will always be the wrong answer to a problem that doesn’t involve the use of force.—Joe]
I find it odd that many of the people who believe they are wise enough to know the world would be a better place if the second article in the Bill of Rights were eliminated choose the people they wish to associate with according to what they believe is a proxy for penis size.
Optics Planet is giving away a free trip to Las Vegas plus a bunch of knives and a meeting with “The Gunny”. The knives include:
The odds of winning depend on how many people enter so please don’t enter as it decreases my odds.
@linoge_wotc @rickygervais Couldn’t agree more. @NRA members need guns to prove their men. #PenisEnvy #GunControl
Jeff Fyke
Tweeted on May 6, 2013
[It’s another Markley’s Law Monday! Via still another Tweet from Linoge.—Joe]
I like the following but it’s a little “too close to home” to actually get a laugh out of me.
Via email from Pat A.
The Tea Party is made up of people who can do math.
Larry Correia
October 17, 2013
The scientific Tea Party
[Citation here.
Of course they can do math! The Tea Party was a response to Obama Care and the massive government spending. And you probably didn’t even need to “do math” to figure that out. Mere arithmetic should be more than adequate for the task. But those on the left had to think of the Tea Party as inferiors in order to justify the condescending attacks. Apparently those on the left can’t handle or don’t want to be bothered with the arithmetic.
I don’t remember where I saw it but I remember reading many years ago something to the effect that politics was much too important to be subject to the impersonal rigors of mere numbers. Whoever said seemed to believe they had expressed some great truth. My thought was, and is, that numbers are a measure of reality. If you can’t express something in numbers then it’s just opinion. There is, of course, no guarantee that any given set of numbers reflect reality but if you can’t or won’t express something in number then it’s a pretty sure bet that it’s an opinion without basis in reality. And if your opinions don’t have any basis in reality you have no, zero, nada, zilch, business being involved in politics.
But that’s not the political system works. Unfortunately reality can only be ignored for so long. If reality could be ignored then something like this would make sense (H/T to ubu52 who said, “It’s total Fail to look at this as a math problem”). Where ‘this’ is the deficit. I was tempted to respond but I’m not sure the intended recipient would (or could) understand. If the deficit isn’t a math (or arithmetic) problem and the amount of spending being greater than revenue isn’t a valid concern then why not just print enough money that everyone in the country (or heck, why not the entire world?) receives $100 an hour for 40 hours per week “following their dreams” or whatever? Everyone could retire and live happily ever after. We could forget the debate over Obamacare because everyone could afford to pay for their own health care or buy the insurance of their choice, right? Everyone could afford to pay for their own education or not bother with it, right?
Numbers matter. If you can’t do arithmetic then you are going have some serious problems with math. And math is what bonds us to reality. If you can’t do math you don’t really understand reality. And that Tea Party members understand math and science better than those that can’t do simple arithmetic is no surprise.
What the Yale Professor who “discovered” what was blindly obvious to me and I would have thought most people didn’t conclude, which is also obvious to me, is that those who denigrate the Tea Party are those who truly deserve the condescending insults, jeers, and casual dismissal. And we have the numbers to back that up.—Joe]
The authors are candidly blunt about fatal gun deaths being their measurement criteria. Using this criterion amuses working criminologists who, knowing criminals on a deeply personal level, tend instead to use violent crime as the standard of measure. They do so especially when discussing gun control, because their research shows that guns are used to deter criminal activity (usually without a gun death), upwards of six times more often than to commit crimes (with or without a gun death). A woman pointing her pink-gripped revolver at a rapist with his clothesline noose will instantly prevent a fatal crime of violence that did not involve a gun.
Chuck Michel
October 21, 2013
New Math, Old Buncombe
[I cannot recall an anti-gun person ever using violent crime rates as a measurement of the (in)effectiveness of gun control. And frequently they will be so bold as to quote the denial of firearm sales as proof of effectiveness. It’s hard to get any more transparent about their true motives as when they brag about the millions of people that have been denied their right to keep and bear arms.—Joe]
A fair number of people previously expressed some concern about Barb counting my shirts. As I said in an update to the post and in the comments I don’t really think there is anything to be worried about. A few days ago she gave me two coats, two sweaters, and a pair of pants for my birthday.
The only way I can resolve the present data in an adverse manner is if Barb is trying to get my closet rod to break due to excessive loading then suggest it was my fault for having so many clothes. That would be far too subtle and complicated for her personality. She is very direct.
I use paper only infrequently and when I do it is almost always with a pencil so pens are of very little interest to me. But having a pen with obvious rifle cartridge components does make a good statement. And I’m sure there are people for whom it would make a good gift so I give you this:
A drone from PETA? Think of it as another trap shooting opportunity.
Jeff Soyer
October 24, 2013
PETA Now Using Drones to Spy on Hunters
[I wonder what the legality of shooting down a drone is. Shooting it down over the owner of the drones property almost for certain is illegal. Shooting it down over public property probably is is illegal. But shooting it down over your own property or the property of someone who gave you permission? That might be legal.
To do this right I think you should do it in one of two ways, neither of which is that suggested by Jeff:
I’d give you bonus points if instead of the clay pigeon you launch a milk jug filled with gasoline in combination with the explosives such that the detonation of the explosives disperses the gasoline and ignites it. It would sort of be like using a tactical nuke to remove a stump in the back 40 or an artillery shell loaded with sarin gas to take out the wasp nest. It would be more expensive than necessary but with PETA “making a statement” and “sending a message” is probably more important than the loss of the drone.—Joe]
The Fourth Circuit has shown that it isn’t interested in proof. This runs a dangerous risk of changing the rational basis test into a “Get out of the Constitution free” card.
Timothy Sandefur
October 23, 2013
Fourth Circuit: don’t bother us with the facts
[Not only do the courts not want to be bothered with the facts they will ignore facts presented and even refuse to rule on something.
A long time ago when I was much younger and even more naïve than I am now I believed the courts could and would straighten out a lot of the constitution issues with all the repressive gun laws.
I have reluctantly concluded that my friend Eric E. was correct when he told me over 10 years ago in regards to class action suit that I was involuntarily a part of and thought was totally wrong (paraphrasing), “Going to court is just rolling the dice. If you reject the settlement then you are giving up money that you should have collected some other time when you should have won but lost because the dice came up snake-eyes.” I cashed a check for something like $18,000.
As an engineer I am accustomed to the physical world being rational and predictable. The people world is, at best, a very thin veneer of rationality over seemingly random emotions. The result is a great deal of frustration with most people.—Joe]
How do you protect soft targets? That’s really the challenge. You can’t have armed police forces everywhere.
…
Societies have to think about how they’re going to approach the problem. One is to say we want an armed citizenry; you can see the reason for that. Another is to say the enclaves are so secure that in order to get into the soft target you’re going to have to pass through extraordinary security.
Ronald Noble
Interpol Secretary General
October 21, 2013
Exclusive: After Westgate, Interpol Chief Ponders ‘Armed Citizenry’
[Other people have things to say as well:
As Tam said, “I feel all through the looking glass, here.”—Joe]
Math doesn’t care about fairness or good intentions. Spending vastly more than you have isn’t good when done by a Republican or a Democrat. Two plus two doesn’t equal 33.2317 after you factor in a secret “Social Justice” multiplier.
Jon Gabriel
October 21, 2013
The Reality of America’s Finances
[H/T to son James for showing me this.
Sometimes I think that part of the problem is that people think that math, even arithmetic, is subject to opinion. People will just proclaim, “I don’t agree with that”, and they believe they have refuted your numbers.
In many ways politics is faith based. The democrats have a tendency towards being economic tyrants and the republicans have a tendency towards being moral tyrants. Neither really understand principles. Or if they do their principles are to destroy the principles they can and ignore the rest.
With their policies having no principles it should come as no surprise they also believe that numbers are subject to whatever whim they have this election cycle. Numbers are just something you use to make your opinion appear valid. And everyone’s opinion is just as good as anyone else’s so that must mean that everyone’s numbers are just as good as anyone else’s.
Principles? They don’t even understand the concept of a principle.—Joe]
@linoge_wotc @rickygervais Exactly. It’s a fetish. @NRA members love fondling those shiny surrogates for actual manhood. #Pathetic
Jeff Fyke
Tweeted on May 6, 2013
[It’s another Markley’s Law Monday! Via still another Tweet from Linoge.—Joe]
There are people who have never fired a shot in their life who do not hesitate to declare how many bullets should be the limit to put into a firearm’s clip or magazine. Some say ten bullets but New York state’s recent gun control law specifies seven.
Virtually all gun control advocates say that 30 bullets in a magazine is far too many for self-defense or hunting — even if they have never gone hunting and never had to defend themselves with a gun. This uninformed and self-righteous dogmatism is what makes the gun control debate so futile and so polarizing.
Thomas Sowell
January 22, 2013
Do Gun Control Laws Control Guns?
[While this is true a case can be made that the ignorance of gun control advocates does not matter. Their ignorance is irrelevant both to them and to us. The only important fact to them is that control is lacking. Independence and freedom, no matter the form, are what they are fighting.
Their single minded goal makes our mission all the more clear. Efforts on our part to remedy their ignorance are wasted. Our only goal is to defeat them.—Joe]
The House passage of our bill is a victory for this country! Common sense wins out. I’m just so thrilled and excited. The sale of guns must stop. Halfway measures are not enough.
Sarah Brady
July 1, 1988
[The Brady Campaign has been using the phrase “common sense” for a long time. It’s good of her to confirm what we all suspected they meant by that.—Joe]