Author Archives: Joe

Quote of the day—charles hugh smith

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Everything centralized, from the Federal Reserve to the Too Big To Fail Banks to Medicare to the National Security State depends on the Federal government being a Savior State that must ceaselessly expand its share of the national income and its raw power lest it implode. All Savior States have one, and only one trajectory– they must ceaselessly expand and concentrate wealth and power or they will fail.

They are like the shark, which dies once it stops moving forward: the Savior State must push forward on its trajectory of expansion or it expires.

Stasis is not possible, nor is contraction; the promises made to the citizenry cannot be withdrawn without political instability, but the promises cannot be kept without fatally disrupting the neofeudal financialized debtocracy.

charles hugh smith
July 4, 2013
The Next American Revolution (Emphasis in the original)
[His main point is that the next revolution will be much different than any in the past. It will be one where the existing bureaucracy is bypassed and ignored rather than being forcibly removed from power. It will be, he claims, a place where, “wages are no longer an adequate model for distributing the surplus generated by the economy.”

I agree with his characterization that the government is on a path where it must constantly expand or implode. I can believe his is right that the next revolution will be different than any ever seen before. But I am far from convinced that he has it right on the nature of the next revolution.

It seems to me that the nature of the majority of people is that they want/desire/require a central leader or authority. Either they either want to be ruled or they want to be a ruler. The concept of just leaving people alone to freely associate with others is inconceivable to most people. Even in a relatively free state they think in terms of freedom being forced upon them by some authority.

It is my expectation that from the ashes of our current government there will rise some new form of claimed authority to rule over the people and the vast majority of people will have not learned the lessons of history and will welcome it.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Background N015e

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@acallipo @barronbarnett @smrzle @toddkincannon “It looked so long and hard, but then he emptied his clip soooo fast…..*sigh*… oh well.

Background N015e (@backgroundN015e)
Tweeted February 6, 2013
[It’s another Markley’s Law Monday!

H/T to Barron.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Plato

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One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.

Plato
From here.
[I have nothing to add.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Golem XIV

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There is a New Cold War but it is not like the old one. It is not country against country. It is the shadow state in every nation against its own people, with the collusion of an inner core within the regular State.

Golem XIV
July 3, 2013
NSA/GCHQ – The New Praetorians and the New Cold War
[He makes some good points.

I just wish someone had some solutions.—Joe]

Foolish liberals

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Inspired by:

Foolish liberals who are trying to read the Second Amendment out of the Constitution by claiming it’s not an individual right or that it’s too much of safety hazard don’t see the danger of the big picture.  They’re courting disaster by encouraging others to use the same means to eliminate portions of the Constitution they don’t like.

Alan Dershowitz
Quoted in Dan Gifford
The Conceptual Foundations of Anglo-American Jurisprudence in Religion and Reason
62 TENN. L. REV. 759 (1995)

We can elaborate by saying:

  • The number of people murdered by those attempting to implement communism is sufficient justification to ignore the 1st Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech for books such as “The Communist Manifesto”.
  • The number of people murdered by attempting to force their religion on others is sufficient justification to ignore the 1st Amendment guarantee of freedom of religion.
  • The number of people killed and injured in riots is sufficient justification to ignore the 1st Amendment guarantee of freedom of assembly.
  • The number of people who get away with their crimes because the police did not have probable cause to search them or their property is sufficient justification to ignore the 4th Amendment guarantee from freedom of unreasonable search and seizure.
  • The number of people who get away with their crimes because the police were not allowed to question them without a lawyer present or force them to testify against themselves is sufficient justification to ignore the 5th Amendment guarantees.
  • The illiteracy and incarceration rates of people of color is sufficient justification to ignore the 13th Amendment and implement slavery.
  • The inefficiency of the legislative process in “making progress” is sufficient justification to ignore the constitutionally mandated separation of powers and allow the President to rule via Executive Order or delegate congressional powers to government agencies.

Foolish people who legislate, make a case in public opinion, or create case law for the restriction or extermination of any of specific enumerated right enable the extermination of not just the Bill of Rights but the entire constitutional principle of government.

Quote of the day—Say Uncle

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A day to celebrate freedom by going across state or county lines to buy fireworks because they’re illegal where you live.

Say Uncle
July 4, 2013
Happy Independence Day
[You shouldn’t really have to say more than that convince people that we are no longer free. You shouldn’t have to tell them the size of soft drinks in NYC is restricted. You shouldn’t have to explain Obama Care. You shouldn’t have to tell them about the New York SAFE act. You shouldn’t have to tell them our government is collecting data about every phone call and every letter mailed. You shouldn’t have to tell them that if you carry a cell phone the government can obtain your location with a few clicks on a website.You shouldn’t have to tell them the government says it has the legal authority and resolve to use unmanned drones to kill U.S. citizens on U.S. soil without trial or warning.

The scary thing is even if you tell people all of that they will do little more than shrug and turn back to finish watching the latest episode of American Idol, take another swig of beer, or another toke on their joint. They should be getting signatures for the recall petitions, spoofing encrypted email from government officials to overseas terrorists, and getting small arms training.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Bill

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All you Bambi killers out there that want to tote around your rifles in your truck gun racks should grow up. Guns are for killing and killing for sport is immoral. If you have to hunt to eat fine buy a gun but if you aren’t native or Inuit or live in outer nowheresville stick to paying darts or bingo. Guns and the people that love them are dangerously stupid.

Bill
1:54 PM, June 27, 2013
Comment to Quebec court decision moves Ottawa closer to fully scrapping long-gun registry
[Every sentence of this rant could be the target of a blog post explaining in great detail why the commenter is either willfully ignorant or stupid himself. I don’t have the time or the interest to do that so I’ll just point out that it is good to know what he thinks of gun owners. He wants to control people and confine us to “playing darts or bingo” and he must dehumanize us to do that. He believes he is a “superior moral authority” and that should give him the authority to do with us as he commands with the government doing the dirty work of implementing his policies.

Mr. Bill should attempt to do his own dirty work.—Joe]

And you still use Android?

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Via a Tweet from Ry we have still more info on the security issues with Android (emphasis in the original):

The Bluebox Security research team – Bluebox Labs – recently discovered a vulnerability in Android’s security model that allows a hacker to modify APK code without breaking an application’s cryptographic signature, to turn any legitimate application into a malicious Trojan, completely unnoticed by the app store, the phone, or the end user. The implications are huge! This vulnerability, around at least since the release of Android 1.6 (codename: “Donut” ), could affect any Android phone released in the last 4 years1 – or nearly 900 million devices2– and depending on the type of application, a hacker can exploit the vulnerability for anything from data theft to creation of a mobile botnet.

While the risk to the individual and the enterprise is great (a malicious app can access individual data, or gain entry into an enterprise), this risk is compounded when you consider applications developed by the device manufacturers (e.g. HTC, Samsung, Motorola, LG) or third-parties that work in cooperation with the device manufacturer (e.g. Cisco with AnyConnect VPN) – that are granted special elevated privileges within Android – specifically System UID access.

Installation of a Trojan application from the device manufacturer can grant the application full access to Android system and all applications (and their data) currently installed. The application then not only has the ability to read arbitrary application data on the device (email, SMS messages, documents, etc.), retrieve all stored account & service passwords, it can essentially take over the normal functioning of the phone and control any function thereof (make arbitrary phone calls, send arbitrary SMS messages, turn on the camera, and record calls). Finally, and most unsettling, is the potential for a hacker to take advantage of the always-on, always-connected, and always-moving (therefore hard-to-detect) nature of these “zombie” mobile devices to create a botnet.

I’ve known there were lots of security issues with Android but this is much bigger than I imagined. If you were concerned about various three letter agencies sucking up data about you (or even your snail mail) then you should be even more concerned that just about anyone that is technologically competent can take complete control of your Android phone.

A little over two years ago I purchased a Android phone with thought of developing apps for it. I never got around to it and after releasing Field Ballistics for Windows Phone I gave it further consideration. I decided not do pursue Android as an alternate platform. I’m glad I made that decision. Would you want everyone and their brother looking at the map on your phone showing your location and the location of your next target? At Boomershoot that would be an invitation to have “your” target poached.

Quote of the day—WeaponsMan

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What convictions? Guy’s a politician, but he hasn’t been convicted of anything. Yet. And that’s the only kind of conviction you can expect from a politician.

WeaponsMan
June 29, 2013
Beretta: Not expanding in MD, or to WV or RI
[I hadn’t thought of this before but one could say politicians attempt to avoid convictions but if they stay in the business long enough sometimes the law catches up with them.—Joe]

What’s the best caliber?

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It happened again. Someone asked me what I thought the best caliber is. Granted they didn’t ask it quite that ambiguous. But it did raise the “insufficient information hackles” when I got the email.

The actual question was:

Tell me which caliber you think is best and why:  9mm, 40 S&W, or 45 ACP.

Had the question been, “Which caliber has the best stopping power?” I would have replied, “It’s tough to beat something chambered in 200 mm XM422 with the 40 kiloton yield option”.

The question isn’t quite that unbounded but still it’s insufficiently bounded to give an answer that is credible for even a fraction of the possible values of the unconstrained variables. One must really have more information about the use cases of the firearm before you can give an answer that someone couldn’t drive a Euclid truck through.

When someone asks a question like this what you really need to do is get the person asking the question to answer it for themselves. For all intents and purposes they already know the answer they just don’t know the proper questions to ask themselves. You can help them with this.

The top level question is, “What are you going to use this gun for? Recreation, self-defense, competition, all of the above?” One could drill down to a depth of three or more in the specifics for any of the answers given but here are few of the possibilities:

  • What is your ammo budget?
  • Self-defense against two legged varmints or four?
  • What is the body mass of the varmint you need to defend against?
  • One attacker or a mob?
  • Which sport?

Everything is a tradeoff. The smaller calibers tend toward higher capacities, higher velocities, lower costs, and, obviously, smaller holes. With the larger calibers the opposite is true. Once you figure out your application then the caliber question should pretty much answer itself.

If you are interested in self-defense “stopping power” then I answered that question nearly 15 years ago and I don’t see any reason to update the conclusion where I agree with Greg Hamilton who says:

The entire discussion of “stopping power” is both stupid and irrelevant.   Statistics cannot be applied to individuals. People that need to be shot need to be shot soon and often. They need to be shot until they run out of fluid, brains, or balls.

If during the time you were reading the latest “stopping power” article you were instead practicing to save your life you would be far, far ahead.

Greg Hamilton
May 08, 1998

Of potential interest is what caliber gun(s) do I own and use and why.

I have guns in all three of the calibers in question. I almost never use the 9mm or the .45. The reason has nothing to do with the caliber themselves. It is because a .40 with 17 or 18 round magazines is the best choice for Limited class USPSA matches which I compete in. I can compete in USPSA and Steel Challenge with it and I can carry it for self-defense. I figure the odds of me using it in self-defense are pretty low but the probability of me using it in competition are near 1.0. And even supposing that some other caliber/gun would be better for self-defense the fact that I am going to be practicing with the competition gun is probably going to make up for the (questionable) fact that I wasn’t shooting the optimal caliber.

Quote of the day—Don B. Kates

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Senator Schumer, America’s leading anti-gun legislator has just confessed that there are not enough votes to pass his universal background check bill. But what if there were? How futile is a proposal to have background check on all NEW guns sales for a nation which already has an estimated backlog of 319 million? Well, if  that were adopted today, and Senator Schumer lived to be 400 years old there would still be upwards of 300 million guns for which there were no background checks.

Don B. Kates
June 11, 2013
Futile, Stupid Gun Control Proposals
[Background checks are just a first step. Schumer and everyone of any intelligence on both sides of the gun control debate know this. And most everyone knows background checks are pointless. Registration and, ultimately, confiscation are the real goals.—Joe]

We defend our…

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Via email from Joey D.

WithGuns

But of course it is irrational to expect people to be rational.

And for those that are unwilling or unable to behave rationally we defend our guns with guns.

Quote of the day—Lalo Alcaraz

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How about a gun buyback program where instead of money, you get a penis enlargement? #NRA

Lalo Alcaraz (@laloalcaraz)
Tweeted on January 30, 2013

[It’s another Markley’s Law Monday!—Joe]

Random thought of the day

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In my hand I have a computer with nearly the human computational power of an entire planet of people. It has proximity, light, sound, acceleration, magnetic field, and location sensors. It is in near constant contact with a network of hundreds of millions of other computers most of which are far more powerful than it. You can buy one for about a day’s pay.

With all that power, data, and sensor input available what appears one of the easiest paths to fame and fortune with it is to program it to make fart sounds*.

Both Marvin and I have good cause to be depressed.

*Ry pointed this out to me last week. “Thank you” Ry.

Quote of the day—Dennis A. Henigan

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If an ‘armed citizenry’ is a constitutionally protected ‘deterrent’ to abuse by federal officials, this would imply that the greatest protection should be given citizens who are arming themselves against the threat of such abuse.

Dennis A. Henigan
(Former) Vice president for law and policy at the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence
January 28, 2008
DANCES WITH GUNS
[Yes. That is absolutely correct.

He also said he doesn’t argue that higher rates of gun ownership cause higher rates of crime.

Henigan “gets” it. He doesn’t like it, but he gets it.

Perhaps this is part of the reason he quit the gun control industry.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Gregory Morris

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I played with it some… took me a minute to figure out how to position the shooter/target spots on the map… but then I found the elevation tool, and… whoa, totally cool.

Top notch stuff here.

Gregory Morris
June 28, 2013
Comment to the blog post Field Ballistic about my app for Windows Phone.
[I have nothing to add.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Ralph Fascitelli

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The overwhelming research shows that buybacks generally don’t work well and are a waste of resources and are mocked by the NRA.

Ralph Fascitelli
Washington CeaseFire President
January 2013
McGinn’s office ignored leading gun control group in buyback effort
[There you have it. A gun control group admits what we have been saying for years. Gun “buybacks” are a waste. And “overwhelming research” supports this conclusion.

H/T to Ry.—Joe]

Brad Huffman autopsy

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Since I see people searching for this information and brother Doug posted it on Facebook last week (June 19th) I’m posting it here for better visibility:

The autopsy on our son Brad was performed in Pullman today. The preliminary results showed nothing. The coroner told me they did a very detailed autopsy, organ by organ and found no aneurysms, no blood clots, and no abnormalities that could explain his sudden death.

They are sending vials of body fluids to a lab for a wide range of toxicology tests, but he said nearly all toxins will leave some type of physical symptom that is noticeable in an autopsy (and they found no such tell tale signs). They have removed the electrical conduction paths from his heart and if the toxicology report comes back negative, they will examine the heart tissue with a scanning electron microscope and they might possibly find a defect in that.

Julie’s father had a defect in the routing of the nerves controlling his heart muscle. It caused him problems most of his life, but he died in his mid 70s of lung cancer. The coroner said Brad did NOT have that defect.

It will take about two weeks to get the results of the toxicology report.

Daffodils, Boomershoot, and the super moon

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Last Saturday Barb L. and I were at the Boomershoot site to “go on a daffodil rescue mission”. As I mentioned a few weeks ago there are some daffodils near the shooting line that get abused pretty badly by the fireballs.

We figured it would only take an hour or two of our time and we’d be done with the project. We dug up about a half dozen clumps of the wilted daffodils and got a five gallon bucket full of bulbs.

WP_20130622_005WP_20130622_006WP_20130622_007

To get so many bulbs from so few flowers was surprising to us. Then we started digging holes in the front of the shooting berm. After we had dug about 10 holes we knew this was going to take a LOT longer than an hour or two. After about three hours we started on “Plan B” which was to just dig a ditch in front of the shooting berm to dump the bulbs into so they survive another year and we could move them again when we feel up to it. We made the length of the ditch match the width of the berm we put daffodils in. This was about 60 feet which is only about one third of the width of the berm.

After about 4.5 hours we had all the bulbs back in the ground, fertilized, and watered.

We then went to look at some luxury accommodations my brother Doug offered us for the night:

 WP_20130622_009

We declined this time. It was too upscale for our tastes.

We went back to Boomershoot Mecca and made our bed under the stars and the super moon without a tent so we could see the sky better:

IMG_7232

To the northwest we could see a beautiful sunset (at 9:38 PM) (see also this sunset picture taken a few minutes earlier from a different location):

IMG_7237

To the southeast we could see the super moon:

IMG_7240

The glowing sphere in the field is just a friendly UFO* which was visiting.

I got better pictures of the super moon earlier in the evening when we visited the Big Eddy Marina on Dworshak Lake:

IMG_7212 IMG_7213

The next morning what I believe to be a Western Meadow Lark sang several songs to us. I recorded some of them and will probably make a post about that someday.

*Actually it was an internal reflection in the camera lens.

Field Ballistics is “Top Paid”

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I found this surprising*. Very pleasing, but surprising:

WindowsPhoneTopPaidSports

Field Ballistics on Windows Phone is in the list of “Top paid” sports apps after being out for only a week.

See my announcement here. Purchase it (or get a free trial version) here.

*Assuming no inflation, sales remain constant, and I saved and invested every penny then in another 1000 years I might be able to retire on the proceeds.