Author Archives: Joe

Not planned for Boomershoot any time soon

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Via Mad Rocket Scientist I found some pictures of much more awesome fireballs than what we do at Boomershoot.

Although we have no plans for anything like that in the immediate future I really haven’t looked into it that much. There are certain regulatory hurdles that appear to be sufficiently high that it makes compliance unlikely in the near future.

We would need to use a different range and I suspect the entry fee would have to be prohibitively high too. All and all it just doesn’t seem like its going to happen any time soon no matter how cool it would be.

Quote of the day—Paxton Quigley

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I once went to Paulden, Arizona, where you can “open carry.” You could go to the market, or gas up, wearing your holster. It felt like the good old Wild West. It was kind of a neat feeling.

Paxton Quigley
September 2010
Do Girls Need Guns?
[Link via Say Uncle.

I remember the first time I openly carried in a restaurant. It was a neat feeling. Kind of like the first time I went skinny dipping. A very free and natural feeling.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Thomas Jefferson

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Perhaps an editor might begin a reformation in some such way as this. Divide his paper into four chapters, heading the 1st, Truths. 2d, Probabilities. 3d Possibilities. 4th, Lies. The first chapter would be very short.

Thomas Jefferson
June 11, 1807
To John Norvell.
From The Great Thoughts (link is to the 2nd Edition, mine is the 1st Edition–1985)
[In regards to the truthfulness of the mass media not a lot has changed in the last 200 years. But what has changed is the ability of people to easily invalidate such news sources and render them far less powerful than what they once were.—Joe]

Brady Campaign intern duties

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I have more information on the duties of the intern the Brady Campaign would like to have work for them for free:

Description of Internship
Interns with the Research Department choose a specific research project to complete during the course of the internship in addition to pitching in on administrative tasks related to research, public affairs, or fundraising.
The following are examples of research projects currently on our docket, and new research projects come up all the time:
Short reports (2-3 pages) that are part of our “Gun Laws Work” series, e. g. explaining the success of gun control laws in California, New York City, Australia, the United Kingdom, and Canada.
Fact sheet summarizing the research on the lethality of guns relative to other weapons and suicide methods
Fact sheet summarizing the research on the offensive vs. defensive use of guns
Updating and expanding the data for our God Bless America poster comparing gun homicide counts and rates for the U. S. and other countries.

Since I know people from the Brady Campaign frequently read my blog I would like to suggest they also have the intern explain why gun and ammunition sales are way, WAY up, gun bans are being struck down, more people are carrying guns in public and yet the crime rate keeps dropping.

If that task is too tough perhaps they could do a little warm up exercise by defining the universe and give three examples and defend the claim that double entry bookkeeping is a bad idea.

Back when I was a boy growing up on the farm

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Via an email from Ry I just watched a video made up of clips from a farm on the Palouse (this particular farm was near Colton Washington) in the late 1940s.

I grew up about 40 miles directly east of there. Many of the pieces of equipment were very similar to what we had on the farm about 10 years later. We still have the old pull type combine parked behind the barn. Ours was a John-Deere model 35 instead of the one with the red paint on it. I still remember riding on it. And the D-4 Caterpillar tractor we used to pull it is still in use today. It was nearly identical to the one shown in the video at the time of the pull combine days. It the mid 1960s Dad put on a bigger fuel tank, a wider seat, and the dozer blade. We still use it several times a year even though it is coming up on 70 years old. I use it to move dirt for the Boomershoot site and my brothers use it for other things as well such as clearing snow out of the driveway during the winter. During harvest the tracks would become so clean and polished by the grain stubble that you could barely look at them if the sun was shining.

We even had an old Willy’s Jeep similar to the one in the video.

Mom and Dad have some old video of some of their farming too. We used to watch the videos once or twice a year when we were growing up. I should get that digitized before it falls apart.

Quote of the day—wheresjack

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There are only two reasons to own a hand gun, one is to shoot at a target and the other is to shoot at a person. The Liberal Party is committed to banning hand guns in Canada and I will make sure they stick to that commitment. For the target shooters that are serious about owning a hand gun, I will ask for legislation that permits ownership under strict guidelines and keeps the guns under lock and key at the accredited range of their choice. Transporting the gun would require a security service to take it from one approved location to another.

wheresjack
September 14, 2010
Where’s Jack on Gun Control?
[Wrong! Those aren’t the only reasons. And even if it were true what’s the problem? Sometimes some people need to be shot. That is the reason the police carry their guns. I carry a gun with me because I can’t carry a policeman.

The right to keep and bear arms is a basic human right. Any person, any political party, or any government opposed to such a basic human right cannot be trusted in a position of power and should be forever banned from positions of public trust if not jailed. We need to put pressure on these admitted violators of human rights in other countries.—Joe]

Another bigotry example

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Suppose the law said companies were not allowed discriminate in their hiring or firing based on the prospective employee being in an interracial marriage. But then fires someone because, while on company business, gives their spouse of a different race a quick hug. The company claims they are not violating the law because the law doesn’t cover public displays of interracial affection while on company business. The public outcry would be, and justifiably so, huge.

There should be a similar public outcry in this case as well:

A metro Atlanta woman is asking a judge to strike down a Gwinnett County company’s gun policy.

Jamie Lunsford said the company violated her rights by firing her after they discovered she had a gun in her car while on business. Lunsford said the company violated her right to carry a permitted, concealed weapon in her car.

Her employer was a subsidiary of Iron Mountain, Inc. They are based in Boston Massachusetts. That might explain their anti-gun bigotry. Just as if the rules 70 years ago of a company based in Jackson Mississippi would reflect on their attitudes toward interracial marriage.

I understand the property rights argument and the right of the employer to set the terms of employment. You will notice I didn’t say the courts should force her former employer to rehire her. But I do think the public should let them know they don’t care for their bigotry and address this injustice via complaints and boycotts. Bigotry should not go unnoticed or tolerated even if it is, and should be, legal.

Yellow cake uranium from Iraq

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This isn’t current news in any way shape or form. I just want it documented for my easy reference. I thought I had but I can’t find it.

I keep running into people that claim “there were no WMD found in Iraq”. Well, maybe in some strict sense that is true. The chemical weapons had already been used on his own people with the remainder smuggled to Syria prior to the 2003 invasion. And the yellow cake uranium was already known from the U.N. inspectors before the invasion.

Yellow cake uranium? Isn’t that what everyone said Bush lied about? There couldn’t have been any of that found or it would have been big news that all those people that said Bush lied would have been wrong!

But yes, there was yellow cake uranium found in Iraq. Some news media did report on it but it didn’t get wide circulation. It made the news when Canada bought it and it was all safely out of Iraq in July of 2008.

Here are some details from the AP:

The last major remnant of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear program — a huge stockpile of concentrated natural uranium — reached a Canadian port Saturday to complete a secret U.S. operation that included a two-week airlift from Baghdad and a ship voyage crossing two oceans.

The removal of 550 metric tons of “yellowcake” — the seed material for higher-grade nuclear enrichment — was a significant step toward closing the books on Saddam’s nuclear legacy.

550 metric tons isn’t just some samples for experiments at your local nuclear physics classes. It’s many, many nuclear bombs worth of material.

From the New York Sun:

Here’s a story you may have missed over the long holiday weekend: 550 metric tons of yellowcake uranium worth tens of millions of dollars were shipped out of Iraq to Canada. The material was transported in 37 military flights in 3,500 secure barrels, according to the Associated Press.

There hasn’t been much of a fuss about this material because it had been discovered already by United Nations inspectors after the first Gulf War. But it took a second American war in Iraq to move the material out of the Middle East. For all the talk about America’s failure to discover Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, this is a big deal. We’ve reported on claims by top Israeli officials speaking on the record that Iraq smuggled its chemical weapons to Syria before America invaded in 2003.

The uranium issue is not a trivial one, because Iraq, sitting on vast oil reserves, has no peaceful need for nuclear power. Saddam Hussein had already invaded Kuwait, launched missiles into Israeli cities, and harbored a terrorist group, the PKK, hostile to America’s NATO ally, Turkey. To leave this nuclear material sitting around the Middle East in the hands of Saddam and the same corrupt United Nations that failed to stop the genocide in Darfur and was guilty of the oil-for-food scandal would have been too big a risk.

From CNN:

The United States secretly shipped out of Iraq more than 500 tons of low-grade uranium dating back to the Saddam Hussein era, the Pentagon said Monday.

The U.S. military spent $70 million ensuring the safe transportation of 550 metric tons of the uranium from Iraq to Canada, said Pentagon spokesman Brian Whitman.

The shipment, which until recently was kept secret, involved a U.S. truck convoy, 37 cargo flights out of Baghdad to a transitional location, and then a transoceanic voyage on board a U.S.-government-owned ship designed to carry troops to a war zone, he said.

Think about that the next time someone says, “What WMDs?” Or they say, “What media bias?”

We win because they screw up

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Sebastian pointed me to this article by Brian Doherty who quotes Alan Gottlieb:

The invalidation of handgun bans throughout the country, accomplished in the space of two years, was sudden and surprising even to those who have spent decades laying the groundwork. Take Alan Gottlieb, founder and president of the Second Amendment Foundation, which began backing Gura’s various gun lawsuits after Heller. Since founding the SAF in 1974, Gottlieb has been hosting academic conferences, supporting legal scholars and historians, and filing carefully targeted lawsuits in defense of gun rights. Still, he says, “six years ago if you had said [the gun rights community would] see two cases get to the Supreme Court and two victories, I would have said, ‘Not in my lifetime. Maybe in someone else’s.’ ”

Gottlieb attributes the rapid turnaround in part to the brazen overconfidence of gun controllers. If Washington, D.C., had not challenged the March 2007 appeals court decision overturning its highly restrictive gun ban, the Supreme Court would not have had the opportunity to declare in Heller that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual right to arms. If Chicago had not insisted on maintaining its gun ban after the Heller decision, there would have been no McDonald, and the question of whether the Second Amendment binds states and cities would have remained unsettled. “We needed a little luck, and the other side gave us that luck,” says Gottlieb. “Our opponents are our biggest supporters.”

I had a long talk with Alan last November where he said essentially the same thing. My notes on that part of the conversation are:

We win because the other side screws up. All the big wins such as the 1997 I-676 in Washington state, Heller in D.C, and McDonald in Chicago could have been avoided if the other side “had been smart”. As soon as D.C. lost at the appeals court level they could have made a minor tweak in the law and we would have had to start over at ground zero and it would have decades, if ever because the court would have been stacked differently, before we could get it to the SC. Same thing in Chicago. I asked, “Do you really think they are stupid? If not then why are they screwing up?” “No. They aren’t really stupid”, he said. They have “true believers” who see things in black and white. He didn’t say it but I immediately thought of GOA on our side. “Politics is the art of the possible. Not the perfect”, he said. They haven’t been playing the game that way and they have been losing because of it. I didn’t ask but have been thinking that perhaps there is some way we can encourage them to keep screwing up.

Think about that.

They screw up and we win.

There are two lessons there. One is we need to encourage them to keep screwing up. And the other lesson is that we can screw up and lose. We can have too much overconfidence. We can be too aggressive. We can go for it all and they can win.

It’s sarcasm, right?

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It has to be sarcasm:

If you teabaggers don’t like the president, you can always leave

America voted for socialism and if you hate big government, you hate America. Teaching kids about homosexuality, taxing the rich, abortion and gun control are American values now, if you don’t like it, fuck off. Redneck scum that you are.

At least Marxism and Nazism were beautiful.

Sure, lots of people think that. But they wouldn’t come out and say it. Would they?

Quote of the day—Beverly Ackerman

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So that’s my response to the Dawson killings: No more guns. It’s as simple as that. Because no one can accurately predict who among us will become unhinged enough to explode in bloody slaughter, I believe that guns should be unavailable to the public.

Beverly Ackerman
September 13, 2010
The solution is simple: Canada needs MORE gun controls
[Using the same logic we can also demand guns be unavailable to the government. And of course pointy sticks and rocks should be unavailable to all as well. After all, no matter how much ammo you can carry you still run out of ammo eventually. But your pointy stick and rock never need to be reloaded. Think of them as infinite capacity assault weapons and you’ll understand just how dangerous they really are.—Joe]

Job opening for zero pay

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The Brady Campaign has some job openings. In this bad economy more jobs is a good thing—except they don’t have any money to pay you:

The Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence and its legislative and grassroots affiliate, the Brady Campaign and its dedicated network of Million Mom March Chapters, is the nation’s largest, non-partisan, grassroots organization leading the fight to prevent gun violence. We are devoted to creating an America free from gun violence, where all Americans are safe at home, at school, at work, and in our communities. We have several unpaid summer internship opportunities available:
…

  • Career Level:

    Student (Undergraduate/Graduate)

  • Pay Range:

    Unpaid

  • Job Function:

    Marketing

  • Job Status:

    Not Listed

  • Industry:

    Nonprofit / Charitable, Advertising / Marketing / PR

Didn’t Obama suggest mandatory “volunteer” work for everyone? Maybe the Brady Campaign is just getting with the program a little early.

I suppose it is fitting. The KKK probably doesn’t pay a lot these days either. You take a job like that because you believe in tearing down others more than enriching yourself.

Quote of the day—Neal Knox

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Handgun Control Inc. has long said that the NRA leadership was out of step with the NRA membership. And HCI was right—but in exactly the opposite way from what HCI wanted to believe. For the second straight year the NRA membership has overwhelmingly elected Directors sponsored and promoted by Second Amendment Action, of which I am chairman. Last year, the members elected 11 of our 16 candidates.

This time,  in the results reported to NRA Directors today, Second Amendment Action swept every one of its 17 nominees into the 26 vacant seats on the NRA Board.

The house-cleaning assures that NRA will be taking a tougher stance in the legislative arenas.

Read the NRA election results and weep, Handgun Control, Inc. You’ve got a fight on your hands.

Neal Knox
April 13, 1992
Hardliners Sweep NRA Elections, from The Gun Rights War, pages 351 and 352.
[I love this book.

Nearly 20 years ago HCI had “long said the NRA leadership was out of step” with members. HCI was renamed “The Brady Campaign” in 2001 but they haven’t changed their rhetoric. They still claim the NRA is an extremist organization that does not represent its members. But if you read the blogs and the forums you will find far, far, more people critical of the NRA for not being aggressive enough than you will find those that say the NRA is too aggressive.

HCI or Brady Campaign–it doesn’t matter. They are out of touch with reality and have been for well over 20 years.—Joe]

My Country My Ass

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I tend toward the rational rather than emotional way of thinking. However I realize that isn’t the case for everyone. And I realize music is means by which people express their emotions and influence others to feel similar emotions. The peace songs of the 1960’s were very influential in changing the attitudes and  politics of that era.


I received an email from a musician about his song:



I’ll keep this short. I have a project, the goal of which is to use mass media and popular culture to change the psychology of the whole country. Participation is free and easy, but I need to get the word out. Here is the website with all the information
http://mycountrymyass.com


I don’t usually care for country music but I do really like this one. You can listen to it here. The lyrics are:



Now tell me again how this country is the land of the free and the home of the brave
You can’t really believe that what you see now is the reason so many brave men gave
Teacher used to say we had the Bill of Rights
I think they took our rights and sent us the bill
Well I don’t know about you my friend but I think I’ve had my fill
They been walking on me for my whole life I think it’s finally time to draw the line
You can tell old John Cougar Mellencamp he can stick his song where the sun don’t shine
My country my ass- This is not the land I learned about in class
My country my ass- That freedom justice stuff is all in the past
Got a checkpoint up the road ahead better pull out your ID
And your taxes just went up again gotta cough up some more money
Be careful what you’re saying when you’re on the phone you never know who might be listening in
They got cameras watching everywhere you go so they know just where you been
You know you better think about the books you read or your name might go on a list
Don’t take too many pictures now, or they’ll think you’re a terrorist
They’re watching you every time you turn around and they don’t like what they see
You gotta be f*** ing kidding me if you think this country’s free
My country my ass- This is not the land I learned about in class
My country my ass- That freedom justice stuff is all in the past
Well the banks messed up so they took money from us and gave a zillion dollar bonus
And they didn’t give a damn what we had to say I swear to God they think they own us
But when they say “bend over” and you say “yes sir” and then you vote for them again
If you’re the kind of people who fought our wars tell me how’d we ever win?
They been walking on us for far too long and don’t you think it’s time to draw the line?
Why don’t you tell those jerks in Washington to stick their laws where the sun don’t shine
My country my ass- This is not the land I learned about in class
My country my ass- That freedom justice stuff is all in the past
They say America love it or leave it
Well I loved it, and it left me


It’s available on the Zune Marketplace.

Where we could be

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Had we lost the war against our specific enumerated right to keep and bear arms we could be facing this:

GetALifeBinThatKnife

Via email from Ben who simply said, “Fucking brits.” and gave me this URL.

Quote of the day—Handgun Control Inc.

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Commonsense, and the growing number of intentional and unintentional shootings involving licensees, dictate that more guns on the street put everyone at risk. But the gun lobby consistently advocates for CCW systems that do not require safety training and do not allow for local law enforcement to evaluate CCW license applicants. Time and time again we hear about a tense situation that becomes deadly with the introduction of a gun. If citizens are to be allowed to carry concealed firearms, every community deserves the best laws to protect public safety. Anything less is potentially a deadly mistake.

Handgun Control Inc.
December 18, 1997
Year-End Report on U.S. Concealed Weapons Laws
[And yet, as they lost more and more battles over concealed carry laws the crime rate didn’t go up in those states. I guess their “commonsense” must have been broken. Because the commonsense of the gun owners, the NRA, the SAF, and all the other pro-gun rights organizations said crime rates wouldn’t go up. And they were right.

HCI renamed itself to be “The Brady Campaign” in 2001. Was that to hide from their legacy of errors?

Odd how that worked out–increasing freedom did no harm. Let’s make it trend in all areas of our lives.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Steve Ballmer

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I kiss the ground you walk on.


Steve Ballmer
September 10, 2010
Windows Phone 7 Ship Party
IMG_2845Web2010IMG_2848Web2010IMG_2852Web2010
[Click the pictures to see a higher resolution version.


He also said his trademark, “I love this company.” at the top of his lungs:


IMG_2833Web2010


He also talked about how important Window Phone 7 is to the company and how much he appreciated all the hard work and how much he really loves his Windows Phone 7 phone.


It is a really nice phone. I took three of them to the Boomershoot site this weekend and did some tests. With one of them I was able to pick up a Wi-Fi signal from an ordinary Linksys router from 1090 meters away. The other two were picking up signal from over 600 meters away. Try that with your iPhone.—Joe]

We didn’t lose everything therefore we are winners!

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It must really suck to be on the Brady Campaign team. I didn’t read it word for word but from my quick scan of the Brady Campaign’s 2009 Annual Report it appears they want their supporters to believe that if they didn’t lose every battle they fought in that they are winners.


They can just keep thinking that way all the way into oblivion.

Quote of the day–Xenia

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I can’t count. I am an artist.

Daughter Xenia
September 5, 2010
[That explains a lot! Not just about Xenia, but about Hollywood, New York City, and the even the world in general.

Son James also reported, from the same time frame as the above quote, that, “Xenia is a funny drunk.”

The Xenia quote came to me via an text message from daughter Kim who definitely can count. Kim is getting nearly straight A’s while obtaining her accounting degree.—Joe]

A little extreme

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Via email from Ben we have this guy wanting to fire the police and rely on the Second Amendment for our protection from criminals.

I understand the sentiment and it would eliminate the problem of people being prosecuted for victimless “crimes”. But I want an option other than going in “guns blazing” when an employee embezzles money or someone writes a bad check or runs a stop sign.