It has been suggested (by Barron and Janelle) that I change the name of this blog from “The View From North Central Idaho” to “The View From The Clock Tower”.
While I got a chuckle out of this it is just a bit too over the top for me.
Besides, in addition to being afraid of heights should things go sufficiently “pear shaped” that a clock tower view might be of interest I think I would prefer a view from a R/C vehicle (air, land, or water) loaded with Boomerite.
This morning marks the beginning of a very busy schedule for me.
Today I “work from home” (actually I’m at Barron and Janelle’s home in Colton Washington). Tonight Barron, Janelle, and I go to Lewiston Idaho to have dinner with daughter Kimberly and Jacob. Then Barron and I go to Boomershoot Mecca to spend the night camping out under the stars and the trees. 3000 pounds of Ammonium Nitrate will be delivered at 0700 tomorrow. Barron and I then take off for Reno and Gun Blogger Rendezvous. Gun Blogger Rendezvous means sleep is optional until Saturday night when we will have to get a little shut eye before we drive back to the Seattle area.
Will we be seeing you at the Rendezvous?
The Democrats’ approach to gun control is far too timid and needs a boost of courage to be effective.
Mike Lillis
September 2, 2012
Dem platform calls for gun control, but advocates pan language as timid
[H/T Say Uncle.
Bring it on.
Apparently Lillis doesn’t realize it we have been engaged in a fifth generation war against anti-gun people for over 40 years and we won. We are in the middle of mopping up spots of resistance. It’s helpful when they self identify so we can target them for political extinction.—Joe]
Last weekend daughter Kim and Jacob came to visit so as something new my friend Maggie (and here and here) took us sailing. We brought along Audrey, the former Navy EOD expert. It was a fantastically beautiful day. The wind could have been a little better but we had a nice time. Again four out of five of us were carrying.
There are many more rights under far more pressure than any gun rights, yet you focus on these phallic symbols.
Schwann Caomhanach
Tweeted August 26, 2012.
[It’s another Markley’s Law Monday!—Joe]
The theory behind representative government is that superior men—or at all events, men not inferior to the average in ability and integrity—are chosen to manage the public business, and that they carry on this work with reasonable intelligence and honesty. There is little support for that theory in the known facts…
H. L. Mencken
From Minority Report, H. L. Mencken’s Notebooks, Knopf, 1956.
[And, sadly, representative government is better than all other forms attempted.—Joe]
My Doctor’s an idiot. A few years ago, he started expressing concerns about my weight, pointing at this chart supposedly showing how much a man of my height should weigh. One glance at his stupid chart and it was clear to me that he had completely misdiagnosed my condition. There was nothing wrong with my weight, I just wasn’t tall enough. Clearly I needed to grow my way out of this. So I went home and googled “how to stimulate growth.” Once I got past the all the baldness cures and penis pumps (it’s not my bag, baby), I found hundreds of papers so incredibly boring I knew they had to be true. In no time, I was able to design and implement my own stimulus plan based on the irrefutable scientificky principles of Nobel prize winners and other people so smart they never had to do an honest day’s work in their lives. Despite the difficulty climbing stairs, I was feeling pretty good about things until my last check-up….
“Hi, Doc.”
“Hi,” he said, examining my file. He looked up, “You’ve put on twenty pounds since the last time I saw you”
“Thanks for noticing,” I beamed.
He frowned. “I remember now. You’re the guy on the diet designed to make you grow. What’s that called again?”
“The Keynesian Plan.”
Mark McHugh
August 31, 2012
Gold Is A Barbeque Relish
[Read the whole thing.—Joe]
Although it doesn’t show up on balance sheets I’m sure there is intellectual capital that is headed for Gault’s Gulch as well as the financial capital:
Spain saw close to a 40 percent rise in capital outflow in June, Bank of Spain data showed on Friday, as investor confidence in a country struggling to balance its public accounts eroded further.
The central bank reported that net capital outflow, not including central bank operations, was 56.6 billion euros ($71 billion) in June, after an outflow of 41.3 billion euros in May.
A total of 315.6 billion euros of capital has left the country in the year to end-June, equivalent to nearly one-third of the country’s economic output. In the first half of 2012 capital outflow was 220 billion euros.
Emphasis added.
This is one of the Achilles Heels of the “tax the rich” schemes. Those that demand “tax the rich, feed the poor, until there are rich no more” can succeed, but the success is achieved in an unintended manner. The rich, in essence, evaporate. They either leave the country and take both their intellectual and financial wealth with them or they say, “It’s not worth it” and just stop producing wealth. In either case the looters run out of places to loot. The end result is that everyone is worse off than if the looters had produced wealth on their own rather than demanded they be given the wealth of others.
Socialism is like a herd of hogs turned loose in a corn field. They feed extraordinarily well for a few days but destroy the crop that should have lasted through the winter and provided seed for the following year.
I took a new shooter to the range yesterday.
The usual happened. Big smiles and almost uncontrolled glee:
Yes Kim, that is your bullet hole nearly dead center in the bull.
It’s nice to enable someone to accomplish something that gives them great happiness.
Can the Brady Campaign enable individual accomplishments that will provide a lifetime of pleasure? Despite their stated best of intentions the achievement of their goals would actually block such pleasures as well as the defense of innocent life and enable violent crime that will cause sorrow to the end of your days.
Take a non-shooter to the range, make Sarah and Jim Brady cry, and make the world a better place.
Something tells me if a random 1/2 dozen “friends of Tam” decided to go the full clock tower, the government reaction/solution would (eventually) be “call off the swat team, if there are any still moving, & call in the artillery”.
If y’all got cornered, that is.
Anonymous
August 30, 2012
Comment to I don’t get it….
[While being on the receiving end of artillery is certain to reduce the chances of a long and healthy retirement it’s the air support that I would worry about the most. Those bunker busters are a real bitch to defend against.—Joe]
I have been asked what tools I used to design USPSA stages. I use something I downloaded years ago from some place I don’t remember. I was unsure of the copyright issues and went looking again. I found essentially the same tool plus a better prop and target selection and a 3-D design tool here.
Enjoy.
We are not your citizens. The actual relationship is that you are our elected official. You answer to us. Apparently, you’ve lost a little perspective. The reason the founders included the 2nd amendment was so that, if necessary, we could remove politicians that lost perspective. Regardless of your personal delusions, Mr. Pawlowski, Allentown is not your little kingdom where you can wave a scepter and institute what you want, when you want.
In America, Mr. Pawlowski, the people and the Constitution are in charge.
Stu Ronaldson
August 28, 2012
The Left’s New Gun-Control Strategy
[I’ve said essentially the same thing before but in a more general sense. It probably is beneficial to be a little more direct to an individual politician that is getting a little too uppity. Good job Stu.—Joe]
Hollow points are evil because they’re made to inflict maximum damage upon soft flesh. Jacketed rounds are evil because they’re designed for military use, and penetrate armor. Lead rounds are evil because they poison our beloved vultures. Non-lead rounds are evil because they start fires and/or penetrate armor.
In response to concerns over the innate evilness of so much of their product line, in January of this year ammunition manufacturer ATK/Teksystems began investigating the possibility of crafting bullets exclusively from puppy love and rainbows, to be dubbed their new PLRB line of politically sensitive ammunition.
NYC Mayor Bloomberg has already moved proactively against this effort, expending a portion of his personal fortune to found a new PAC “Mayors Against Illegal Puppy Love And Rainbows”, however Mr. Bloomberg’s initiative has seen a rocky start, drawing harsh criticism from PETA after 5 of his PAC’s 11 founding members were convicted on charges ranging from cruelty to animals to felony sexual assault on a puppy, while the remainder of the fledgling lobbying group continues to be haunted by rumors of colluding with senior DOJ officials to operate a puppy porn ring.
The White House Press Secretary ended speculation on the President’s long silence on the controversy when he told reporters on Friday that “the President believes puppies and rainbows belong in the hands of soldiers”, and also asserted that although allegations of DOJ involvement in organized puppy abuse were absolutely untrue and unfounded, the alleged policy of puppy abuse was actually formulated under the Bush administration.
Brennan Bailey
August 28, 2012 11:13 AM
[Via the gun email list at work.
I have nothing to add.—Joe]
All we have to do is stop selling guns to people who are potentially violent or totally whacky. Then our gun troubles would be over — only the sane and sensible would be armed to the teeth, ready to shoot only when it was sane and sensible to do so, whenever that might be.
People get training for all sorts of things, from muscles to job skills, so training must be the key to success. Gun show salesmen, gun shop owners and anyone else who sells weapons that shoot would be trained to recognize the dangerous and the demented and be authorized to “just say no” when such folks ask for guns or ammunition.
If we’d instituted these bans years ago, we would have avoided James Brady, Simon’s Rock, Columbine High, Aurora. And we would have saved any number of wives, husbands and state troopers. The no-gun people could be registered, just like sex offenders.
Ruth Bass
August 27, 2012
Gun control must mesh with the times
[At first I thought it was sarcasm or someone mocking the anti-gun position. But by the second paragraph I realized it wasn’t that at all. I felt I.Q. points being sucked into the vacuum by the third paragraph and last night after reading the entire article I barely stumbled into bed before falling into a coma.
There should be barricades in place a light-millisecond in all directions around that vortex of stupidity to prevent people with poor constitutions from having their brains sucked dry beyond any hope of recovery.—Joe]
Sebastian gives us a report on Twitter fake followers so I used the tool to check out the followers of my Twitter feed.
The result were decent: 3% fake, 12% inactive, and 85% good.
Thanks guys!
If it wasn’t for sexual inadequacy the National Rifle Association would go broke!
Boris Yellnikoff
A character in the Woody Allen movie Whatever Works (2009).
Via a tweet from Linoge in response to a tweet from David Ali.
[It’s another Markley’s Law Monday!
You would think that if the “intellectuals” of this country wanted to have a discussion about the role of guns in society they could do better than this.—Joe]
We don’t know the details of the discussion but we can say one or both parties didn’t know what they were doing:
Police said Fleming was in a dispute with her 55-year-old boyfriend after discovering that he had brought his loaded 12 gauge shotgun into their shared home. They were discussing gun safety, including the proper handling of a loaded firearm.
It’s unclear the other details of the argument, but police said Fleming at one point intentionally opened fire from a close range from an upstairs room and blew out a hole about the size of a softball.
Instead of arguing they should have just taken an NRA gun safety class together.
Sometimes a picture is worth a 1000 words.
Brady Campaign president Dan Gross wrote:
From the moment I started to get involved in the gun violence issue, I found the disproportionate attention given to our story also made me feel uncomfortable.
People seemed to care more because my brother was a white, upper-middle-class, young musician, shot at a famous landmark. A common theme began to emerge: “that kind of tragedy isn’t supposed to happen in places like that, to people like your brother.”
Over the years now, I have seen this same theme repeated. We seem to care more about certain tragedies, like suburban school shootings or psychotic shooting sprees in office buildings or malls or famous victims. Certain deaths seem to matter more.
“Certain deaths seem to matter more.”? Absolutely true. For example, self defense deaths are far more acceptable (sometimes even praiseworthy) than murders. Doesn’t Gross understand that?
The irony is that the Gross and his ilk are one of the worst in regards to “certain deaths seem to matter more”. I have long been critical of the Brady Campaign and anti-gun activists in general when they complain about “gun deaths” as if they were somehow more important that “fists and feet deaths” or “knife deaths”. And he complains “certain deaths seem to matter more” to the population at large? Wipe some of the soot off your face pal.
Gross goes on to say:
As a result, there is far too little focus on a shockingly common problem, that poses a far greater threat to all of us than most realize, and we fail to examine surprisingly simple and accessible opportunities to prevent it.
Absolutely true. And that is why we are working to get rid of all those gun laws that create victim disarmament zones. People have a right to defend themselves whether it is in their home, at work, or on the streets. Disarming potential victims is just wrong and just allowing people to use the best tools available for self defense will improve the odds for everyone. We agree there are “surprising simple and accessible opportunities” to prevent and stop criminal violence. Why does the Brady Campaign fight us on this? We are better than this.
If immediately after police officers accidently shoot nine innocent people while shooting just one bad guy is it “dancing in the blood of the victims” if private citizen gun owners point out the following?
A nationwide study by Kates, the constitutional lawyer and criminologist, found that only 2 percent of civilian shootings involved an innocent person mistakenly identified as a criminal. The “error rate” for the police, however, was 11 percent, over five times as high.
The study cited above isn’t exactly fair to the cops in the Empire State Building shooting. They correctly identified the bad guy. They had a bad situation with a lot of innocent people in the background. From the latest reports I have read at most ten shots out of 16 hit the bad guy. That is actually an above average hit rate for a self-defense shooting.
I think I could do better in those same circumstances but until you are actually staring down the barrel of someone else’s gun you don’t really know how well all your faculties are going to work when the rest of your life might be measured in milliseconds.