Author Archives: Joe

Quote of the day—Larry Elder

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This battle for ‘common-sense’ gun control laws pits emotion and passion against logic and reason. All too often in such a contest, logic loses. So, expect more meaningless, if not harmful, ‘gun control‘ legislation. Good news – if you’re a crook.

Larry Elder
From Thinkexist.com.
[I have been unable to determine when he said this. While true 15 years ago expecting more gun control legislation is less and less a good bet. I’m skeptical it is because logic and reason suddenly are winning contests against emotion and passion. I expect it is because we are accumulating more emotion and passion on our side.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Erma Bombeck

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What we’re really talking about is a wonderful day set aside on the fourth Thursday of November when no one diets. I mean, why else would they call it Thanksgiving?

Erma Bombeck
From Quote DB.
[I hope everyone had a nice turkey day. I spent it with son James, his wife Kelsey, my parents, brothers, Uncle Darrell, Aunt Alice, and brother Doug’s children Amy (and Nate and Jared), Lisa (and Kevin) and Brad.

We had way too much really good food and stuffed ourselves.—Joe]

Quote of the day—tdiinva

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Since nanny Bloomberg has chosen to limit his citizens self defense option his failure to call in the Guard is failure to live up to his obligations as their nanny.

tdiinva
November 19, 2012
Comment to Bloomberg F-Bombs Request for National Guard Aid.
[Via a link from Sebastian.

It’s a fundamental problem of being a nanny with a scope larger than a few children. Just because a nanny is an appropriate solution in some situations does not mean is is possible to scale it up and make it work at a much larger scale. If it did work we would see both biological and manmade systems organized much differently than we do. Both evolution and the free marketplace would have created systems with central control to dominate over those systems that pushed the decision making to the lower levels rather than pushing it up. Your brain doesn’t control the details of cell metabolism and your web browser doesn’t control how the mouse determines if it has been moved.

I’m channeling Thomas Sowell as best I can with the following.

The problem is one of information. You, a fully functional adult, know more than anyone else about your situation and what is best for you. You know a lot more about your family than people not in your family. You know more about how to do your job than people that don’t do your job. You know more about your community than people outside your community. And you know a lot more about your situation than does the mayor of your city, the governor of your state, and the president of the country. Central planning fails because the people with the most information about the situation are not making the decisions.

Even if it were possible for all the information needed for making optimal decisions were to be communicated to the central planners they cannot process the information nor come up with innovative alternatives that the individuals and small groups closer to the problem can.

One might be tempted to say that central planning failed in the past because of this fundamental problem but we have much better communication and processing power than we did even a decade or two ago. Central planning can work now that we have computers. Those people are wrong.

Even ignoring the obvious SkyNet dystopian scenarios look at the way engineers solve control problems in complex systems now. Heinlein was a visionary in many ways but “Mike” the computer in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress will never be implemented as Heinlein envisioned it—handling payroll, air flow, mass launchers, communications, and a thousand other things.

Whether it is a large software program, a cell phone network, or a sewage treatment plant the far cheaper, better performing, and feasible solution is to delegate “authority” to very small subsystems to solve the issues that are local. The video driver in your computer is given a command to set the background to a color and output text at certain coordinates on the display. The video driver “knows” how to control the chips of the graphics board to change the color of the display and what address in memory corresponds to the coordinates of the screen. The local cell tower “knows” signal strength of your phone, the number of other cell phones it is handling, and communicates with nearby cell towers to enable a clean handoff such that you don’t have a service interruption as you move from location to location. The components of the sewage system control air and water flow rates, agitation, and chemical balances without knowledge of the price of electricity or the growth rate of the town it serves.

At each subsystem level the information and the resources are available such that they can do the right thing to operate their area of responsibility in a manner that is a tradeoff of performance, time to implement, initial cost, and operating cost.

Bloomberg and other central planners do not and cannot have the information to even approximate optimal decisions and they deny resources to those that do have the information. The result is a dystopian world that has the potential to be just as catastrophic as one where “SkyNet” has all the information and resources to create Elysium but instead makes the decision to destroy humanity.—Joe]

Symbiotic Relationship of Metabolic Heat Generation Differences of Sexes

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The following text has been in one or more obscure and seldom visited directories of my computers for many years. The timestamp on the file is January 18, 1995 but most likely I put it on one of my computers shortly after it was posted in the UseNet newsgroup misc.kids. My kids were young then and I read the newsgroup regularly. Hence, this probably has been on my computers for over 20 years.

I’m posting it here because every once in a while I want to share it and I have difficulty finding it. I think this will be an easier place to find it and more likely to be permanent.

From: berkery@emsun1.crd.ge.com Wed Oct 17 05:33:39 1990
Newsgroups: misc.kids
Subject: Cold Feet
Organization: General Electric Corporate R&D Center

A few people have asked me to elaborate on that last statement in my previous posting. You know, the one about women and cold feet. So, ok, here’s yet another note from Jack’s compendium of little known scientific theories.
—————————————————————————
“Symbiotic Relationship of Metabolic Heat Generation Differences of Sexes.”
by Berke Jackery

Darwin and his successors have tried to explain physiological traits in animal species as the result of adaptation to environmental effects. There is one such proof for a certain trait in the human species which is obvious to even the most casual observer. That no one has heretofore published this fact is quite amazing since it is so immediately obvious. I’m talking about COLD FEET in females of the species homo sapiens.

It is a fact that women’s metabolism levels are not sufficient to generate enough heat to keep all their extremities warm. Over the millennia they have found that the agony of de feet can be alleviated by finding a suitable male who’s heat generation capacity can satisfy their needs. Males of the same species have metabolic rates which produce an overabundance of energy in the form of radiated heat. (Often their bodies produce excesses which are not converted to energy but are expressed as large quantities of methane gas.) This uneven heat generative difference between the sexes has evolved a symbiotic relationship where those who require it will attempt to attract the services of those who can produce it. The result is that when the two get between the sheets, the female will contrive to move her icy toes (some have been measured at temperatures close to absolute zero) toward and even under some part of the male’s anatomy thereby stealing his heat.

The male however, seldom even notices this stealthy behavior since whenever any portion of the female anatomy rubs up against any portion of his, his temperature immediately rises several hundred degrees to balance the process. The procreation process of the species is likewise related to this need to exchange heat. When the female feels the need for some whole-body heat rather than a simple toe-job, or when the male on the other hand has such an excess of heat that he must have a receptive heat-sink to take it from him, the relationship requires that far more body parts be rubbed together. The symbiosis is then complete and the male – female bonding remains intact solely because of this need for an interchange of body heat.

The alternative would have been to evolve a system similar to many insects where the female gets some hapless male to satisfy her needs then summarily bites his head off thereby severing the relationship altogether. Luckily for human males, their mate still has that all-consuming need for warmth whether or not he has ever fully satisfied her. So he is kept around as long as he continues to provide some convenient spot to warm her toes.

That, at any rate is the theory, but I think it’s a very solid one. How else can you explain why women would want to sleep next to a large hairy beast that sweats and snores and farts and grinds its teeth all night. Let’s face it guys, we’re really nothing more than giant heating pads for these females. But, well, when one considers the payment for services rendered, I can live with that. I’ve got lots of excess body heat to spare.
—————————————————————————
Jack Berkery, Computer Scientist, GE Research, Schenectady NY

Because cowering like rabbits under the desk works so well

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Paul C. Duffy has the strangest thoughts. And then he shares them with a letter to the editor:

I was disheartened beyond words to read about a program that offers would-be victims of school shootings alternatives to the traditional lock-down reaction to such crimes.

…

Canton police Detective Chip Yeaton, who sounds like a caring citizen and father, spoke in support of the proposed school program, called ALICE, which stands for alert, lockdown, inform, counter, evacuate. Yeaton said that “school shootings continue to happen, and young people are dying. We need to change the philosophy.”

Yeaton is right, but his focus is wrong. Our philosophy does indeed need to change: We need to find the real and moral courage to stand down the gun lobbies — the National Rifle Association and other Second Amendment zealots — whose reckless defense of gun rights has led to a society where almost anyone can acquire a Glock 9mm and the ammunition needed to ruin lives and communities in seconds.

What Duffy totally ignores or does not comprehend is that people can acquire a 9mm Glock and the ammunition to defend lives. I realized I’m biased as I have a handgun on my hip as I type this but handguns are designed for and used millions of times each year to defend innocent life. Duffy’s brain is stuck in “prey” mode.

Read Columbine by Dave Cullen. When violent predators attack students at a school cowering under the desk this behavior gives the predator feelings of even greater power and control. They feel justified in killing those who cower beneath them. One of the prime motivators of the Columbine predators was that they believed people were so stupid they didn’t deserve to live. We don’t know what their thoughts were the last couple of hours but it would seem to me their opinions of human intelligence could not have improved as they saw people “hiding” underneath desks and tables and they strolled from person to person and shot them.

I kept wondering if the Boston Globe got the letter writers name wrong. Maybe it was actually “Fluffy” instead of “Duffy”. And the ‘C’ stands for Cottontail.

Duffy advocates being a coward in the face of a single criminal predator but “courage” while advocating people “stand down the gun lobbies”. He should think this through. Suppose he does “stand down the gun lobbies”. Then what? Is he going to start confiscating firearms from people? I would like to point out that Fluffy Duffy should be happy he has the gun lobby. They are what separate him from the 80 million gun owners in this country. Rabbits are no match for hunters.

Update: Sebastian also comments with Oh Noes! Freedom!

Quote of the day—Rivrdog

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Isn’t looking for real or literary meaning in a Tweet the modern equivalent of mining for diamonds in a goat’s ass?

Rivrdog
November 19, 2012
Comment to Quote of the day—DarthWeiner75.
[He’s got a point there.—Joe]

Quote of the day—DarthWeiner75

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I guess since you can’t walk around with your dick hanging out #opencarry is the next best thing. #juvenile

DarthWeiner75
Tweeted on November 17, 2012.
[It’s another Markley’s Law Monday! Via a Tweet from Linoge.

It’s “interesting” that someone would consider the exercise of a constitutionally protected right “juvenile”. Would he consider exercise of your right to not incriminate yourself “being a sissy”? Or maybe “freedom of speech is for crybabies”.—Joe]

I found a new use for a KitchenAid mixer

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For several years I have been using KitchenAid mixers for Boomershoot. We have made several tons of explosives with them. They work great.

Today I bought another mixer and brought it home to my clock tower. It turns out they can be used for other things as well as explosives:

WP_000379

I made a big batch of lentil chocolate chip cookies this afternoon with it. It’s not Boomerite but it still did a great job.

If they were roses I would understand

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Thursday morning I found this on the stairway to my clock tower:

WP_000358

Those are six taco shells carefully placed on six steps. I have no idea what the story on those were. Had they been roses I kinda sorta would have guessed what they meant. But since they look like burnt taco shells I’m baffled.

Quote of the day—Henry Louis Mencken

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Of all the classes of men, I dislike most those who make their livings by talking—actors, clergymen, politicians, pedagogues, and so on. All of them participate in the shallow false pretenses of the actor who is their archetype. It is almost impossible to imagine a talker who sticks to the facts. Carried away by the sound of his own voice and the applause of the groundlings, he makes inevitably the jump from logic to mere rhetoric.

Henry Louis Mencken
From Minority Report, H. L. Mencken’s Notebooks, Knopf, 1956.
[It would seem to me that the appreciation of the applause is an important item. If the talker causes the listener to think and contemplate it would seem to me that you have an entirely different species than if the talker stirs the emotions with the intent to generate applause.

Still, I understand his point. I get particularly annoyed at actors and politicians that know how to “work a crowd” but know next to nothing about the topic they are pontificating on.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Simon Black

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Increasing taxes won’t increase their total tax revenue. Politicians have tried this for decades. It doesn’t work. The only way to increase tax revenue is for the economy to grow… and higher tax rates do not pave this path to prosperity.

Ron Paul was spot on. Economic ignorance abounds. And all the Talking Heads in the mainstream media blathering away about the Fiscal Cliff are only reinforcing his premise.

Bottom line– the Fiscal Cliff doesn’t matter. The US passed the point of no return a long time ago.

Simon Black
Guess what they’re NOT cutting in the Fiscal Cliff…
November 15, 2012
[H/T Tyler Durden.

I’m headed for a cabin in the woods this weekend. What are you doing?—Joe]

Interesting times

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Observe Greece to see what our future looks like… Greek Brothel To Sponsor Broke Elementary School:

This is what complete social collapse looks like. First, the local Neo Nazi party has soared in the polls and is now the third most popular Greek party. Then, in lieu of other sources of capital, a local brothel became the head sponsor of a minor-league soccer club from Larissa. Now, the same brothel which appears to have seen a substantial return on its advertising spend, has decided to branch out… straight into a local elementary school. That’s right: a whorehouse is advertising its “services” to children in an elementary school. In exchange for what? Money to purchase a Xerox machine and a library.

Quote of the day—jack burton

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Guns owners are disrespectful of authority. A failure to rely on authorities is an invariable sign of improper and overly independent attitudes. The mere fact that they gather together to talk about guns at gun shops, gun shows, shooting ranges, and on the internet means that they have some plot going against us normal people. A gun owner has no right to associate with another gun owner.

Therefore, to help ensure our right to happiness and safety we must ban and seize all guns from private hands, and forbid NRA-based criticism towards people who are only trying to help. Searching the homes of all NRA members for any guns and pro-gun literature will go a long way towards reducing crime.

jack burton
November 14, 2012
Comment to Columnist: Gun control doesn’t control enough.
[I’m pretty sure this was sarcasm. But I don’t know for sure.

Regardless, ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ!—Joe]

Quote of the day—Rachel Elmalawany

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For people like myself who are not satisfied with the justifications for carrying dangerous weapons, it sometimes seems that your viewpoint isn’t important when it’s a right guaranteed by the Constitution. Keep in mind, the Constitution has been changed before and can change again as long as you’re willing to put your efforts in the right place in Washington to get laws changed.

Rachel Elmalawany
November 14, 2012
Columnist: Gun control doesn’t control enough
[Keep in mind, Ms. Elmalawany, the constitution can’t be changed “in Washington”. It takes quite a bit more than that.

Keep in mind, Ms. Elmalawany, the entire Bill of Rights was a qualifier for agreeing to the constitution to begin with. If one of those items are nulled out the agreement to form a union is nulled.

Keep in mind, Ms. Elmalawany, that if you were to successful in repealing the 13th Amendment you would encounter, and rightly so, “stiff resistance” in the implementation. There are probably just as many people that would resist the implementation of a 2nd Amendment repeal as there are that would resist a 13th Amendment repeal implementation.

Keep in mind, Ms. Elmalawany, there are about 220 million people in the U.S. that don’t own guns. There are about 80 million people who do and who consume about 10 billion rounds of ammo each year. That’s what we do for practice. Please don’t attempt to verify our level of resolve or the quality of our practice.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Eric J. Friday

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While there is a lot of public pressure to repeal the no duty to retreat and the self-defense immunity provisions, this task force should not bow to the uninformed opinions and allegations being made.

Instead, it should recommend that the Legislature take action to correct the deficiencies in the law and to make clear once and for all that law abiding Floridians and visitors to our state should never be forced to turn their back on a violent criminal attacker and should not have to fear that they will lose their livelihood, their freedom, or their financial future and become a victim twice.

Eric J. Friday
October 16, 2012
10/16/12 Task Force on Citizen Safety and Protection
[H/T Robb Allen.

Public pressure frequently has little to do with the facts. Public pressure is often a lot more like a mob. Rumors, inflammatory rhetoric, and high emotions substitute for data and logic.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Sebastian

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Sorry, my current handgun is black, but if I’m going to murder my wife, it just has to be stainless. She deserves nothing less!

Sebastian
November 13, 2012
Attitudes on Gun Rights
[Yes, of course it’s sarcasm.

One could also turn that around a bit and say something similar about substituting an evil black rifle for a wood-stocked Mini-14.

Mocking the enemies of freedom is good thing.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Mike Lubrecht

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[I]t’s widely known that anyone carrying a Glock has mental issues. In fact, I’m surprised that potential Glock owner’s aren’t disqualified by default when filling out the 4473 form!

Mike Lubrecht
November 1, 2012
WA-CCW email list.
[I find this funny even if I disagree with it.

Let the flame war begin.—Joe]

I thought I took care of that

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Roberta, Sebastian, and Tam report on the nanny’s in Indiana getting their panties twist over Tannerite.

A few years ago almost exactly the same thing happened. A T.V. station (WSBTV) made a video whining about, as Roberta said, “Scary–Go-BOOM!” They got a politician to talk about how terrible it was and how he was “going to do something” about it.

I sent them an email and within 24 hours the video was taken down and we didn’t hear anything more about it. Not even from the politician.

This is a little different case in that they didn’t use any of my video for their whine piece but the same principles apply. Here is a starting point for your letter to the T.V. station. Modify it a bit and you have one for your legislator:

You recently produced a video about a legal product used by thousands of people every year and found people willing to say it scared them and you. For you to engage in a such a biased and even bigoted attack on a legal product used in a legal manner is exceedingly offensive to me and thousands of other people.

I can’t imagine what you were thinking. Would you show video of people using guns to legally hunt, shoot tin cans, or put holes in paper targets and then contact the opportunist politicians because you were worried someone might use their guns to commit a terrorist act? Or how about showing someone having a glass of wine with dinner or drinking a beer in their backyard? Would you demand the government do something about this because of your concerns about drunk driving?

When I was growing up my family was able to, and did, buy dynamite, blasting caps, at the local hardware store with no special license or transportation requirements. We paid for it, picked it up out back, put in it in the trunk of the car and drove home with it. That the average person can still acquire explosives easily, legally, and safely is a testament to what a great country we have. It shows that not only the government is subservient to its citizens but that its citizens are responsible and can be trusted.

If you had demonstrated these explosives were used in thousands of crimes each year I might think you had reason to be concerned. But you did not do this. You could have used that same product and those same video to show what a great country we have. You could have shown what unique freedoms we have and how those freedoms are not being abused. Seattle King 5 Evening Magazine did that with this video: http://www.boomershoot.org/2005/KING5.wmv. But you didn’t do that. You merely demonstrated you are a Puritan–afraid that someone, someplace, is having fun.

Winning the culture wars

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A few days ago one of the women I met online in my nine dates with six women in nine days adventure sent me an email asking information about a local gun range and instructor for a female friend of hers.

Yesterday I had my semi-annual eye exam (yes, my eyesight is quite good). I wore an Insights Training sweatshirt. As I walked in the door a female patient looked at me and said, “Insights! Are you an instructor?” “No”, I told her, “I’m just a student of theirs.”

It turns out she had worked at Weapons Safety Inc. (a gun shop and range) when Insights did a lot of their classes there and hence was quite familiar with Insights. The female optometrist asked the other patient a little about what it was like to work there and then it was back to business.

As I was waiting the female receptionist was talking to still another female patient about LASIK and told her that her ex had bad eyes and wore very thick glasses. He then had LASIK and the next year was able to win a rifle competition he had no chance of winning with his previous eyes. The woman she was talking to didn’t seem the least bit fazed.

This was all in the Seattle area. Historically Seattle is very anti-gun.

We have essentially won the culture war on guns. We need to keep taking new people to the range (I had another one scheduled for 2:00 PM today but she became ill and we are rescheduling) but short of a major screw up the worst case in the next decade or so is that progress toward our end goal is halted.

But there is another culture war that looks every bit as bad as things did for gun rights advocates 15 years ago.

We have long known something was very wrong with our country. The gun issue was/is just one symptom. TSA is a big deal. The war on drugs is a big deal. The government involvement in health care is a big deal. The welfare state is a big deal. The government involvement in education is a big deal. The national debt is a huge deal.

Looking at the bigger picture there are just so many things wrong that it is easy to want to just run away, create Galt’s Gulch, or encourage secession. 15 years ago the gun rights situation looked hopeless too. As Tam said if you arrived as a time traveler at a gun store in 1995 and told them the future of gun ownership in 2012 they would have found the time travel part the most believable part of your story.

I’m not saying “everything is going to be okay”. In fact in at least one way we have essentially a mathematical proof that it’s game over and we are just watching the clock run out. But the question is, what do we do about it?

Some people are buying gold and silver. Lots of people are buying guns and ammo. But you can’t eat gold or silver. You can eat a bullet, but one is your lifetime limit and few people consider the Smith and Wesson retirement plan the best they can do. Stockpiling food and water in the city, at best, will only get you by as long as your supplies last. And even if you join up with a like minded tribe deep in the woods it’s going to be at best a couple of generations until the latest fashion debate is about how to arrange which type of bird feather on your fur coat and there is talk of an “assault weapon ban” on crossbows with the real agenda of getting rid of all bows and arrows and maybe spears too.

I think there may be a better way. I have the big vision but I haven’t yet been able to figure out how to implement it. It’s sort of like I know I need a bridge across this dangerous ravine. I know a fair amount about different types of bridges but none of them seem to be feasible. I suppose it’s possible the “ravine” is actually the “Grand Canyon” and we simply don’t have the “technology”, money, and/or time to build such a bridge in the time we have left. But if you consider 1995 the darkest days in the gun wars and a win being clearly visible by 2003 (most people predicted the AWB probably wasn’t going to be renewed) then that only took eight years.

One way to look at that is those eight years is that they were essentially a politically delaying action until we got our culture war game on. I claim a similar situation exists today. I’m sure freedom has not yet reached it’s nadir but there is a fair amount of political action that will slow the descent. If we can get our culture game going for freedom then we might be able pull out a win before the clock runs out.

The problem is I don’t see how to win the culture war. I don’t see that we have effective weapons in this culture war. I don’t even see how to fight the culture war. People are certainly trying but we are rapidly losing.

With guns we could take people to the range and the anti-gun people didn’t have anti-gun ranges to compete with us. The anti-freedom people have “free stuff” and “security” to offer. It’s all a lie in the long, or even intermediate, term but that doesn’t really matter. What matters is here and now. The media shows the sick getting treatment, the hungry being fed, and the TSA proclaiming the world is a safer place when they find eight ounces of toothpaste in grandmas carryon luggage. The hidden costs and the cancerous belief that more government is the solution to every problem are difficult to see and in the “distant” future of a few years from now.

What are the freedom games that would be the equivalent of USPSA, IDPA, Steel Challenge, and Boomershoot? Something that quickly engages people and gives almost immediate feedback would be ideal. It is a video game? But maybe the definition of “immediate” can be stretched a bit. Perhaps it is an experimental city with no taxes on income, capital gains, or sales. Or maybe it is teaching philosophy in our schools.

The way I see it we can win the culture war in the next few years or we can say George Orwell was off by two generations.

Quote of the day—George Orwell

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If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.

George Orwell
Nineteen Eighty-Four, Part 3, Chapter 3.
[A good case can be made for this claim.

Prove him wrong.—Joe]