I find this very odd. The subtitle is, “The Brady Campaign is doing all it can to ensure the safety of restaurant patrons.” But the text of the article says things I could have written:
If Peet’s Coffee & Tea and California Pizza Kitchen can deny us service for expressing our Second Amendment rights, where does it end? Will they deny us service based on our nationality or sexual preference?
I got a call from Oleg yesterday. He plans to attend Boomershoot this year.
Of course he wants some pretty girls to take pictures of. It just so happens I know of two who will be there. So we talked about daughters Kim and Xenia.
He will be shooting with Lyle @ UltiMAK in position #74.
I’m sorry, Cupertino, but Microsoft has nailed it. Windows Phone 7 feels like an iPhone from the future. The UI has the simplicity and elegance of Apple’s industrial design, while the iPhone’s UI still feels like a colorized Palm Pilot.
Jesus Diaz
February 15, 2010
Windows Phone 7 Interface: Microsoft Has Out-Appled Apple
[And to make sure those coffin nails for Apple stay tight I’ve been at work for nearly 15 hours straight now.
I’m running tests after fixing bugs that would only show up as somewhat excessive battery drain if multiple failures in the entire system (including network connectivity and/or servers temporarily being missing some data) occurred.–Joe]
Democracy is the only system that persists in asking the powers that be whether they are the powers that ought to be.
Sydney J. Harris
[And there is a whole lot of asking going on around here now.–Joe]
One could get snarky with this one and revive the joke about the anti-gun people thinking guns are living things that kill on their own. Apparently some people think guns have their own DNA:
As a countermeasure, Magnus has proposed a plan to trace every weapon recovered on the street using DNA technology available through state and federal agencies. The county’s crime lab does not possess the technology needed for such testing, he said.
Or snark about science hasn’t yet sequenced even one Fe based lifeform yet so it will be a great many more years before the crime lab possesses the technology.
But probably it was just a lazy and/or stupid reporter than didn’t bother to get the story straight. The ones that could have figured it out were probably fired long ago for “holding on to the notion there is an objective reality”.
Sometimes you just have to wonder about their brain functionality. Sure, they are Canadian, but this is really over the top:
While rates of spousal violence and spousal homicide against women have dropped by 15 per cent over the past decade, the report slams the government’s determination to scrap the long gun registry, which it credits as “one of the most significant factors” in reducing violence against women.
Registration of long guns reduced the rate of violence against women? Do they actually believe someone that is going to seriously injury or kill their spouse is going to obey the law about registering their rifle?
From my Windows Series Seven phone Windows Phone 7 Series.
Update: Yeah, yeah. I was in a meeting and didn’t want to spend the time looking for the proper name. I got the words correct. Just not in the right order.
As a software developer deeply involved in providing location information to applications running on cell phones I have some advice if this concerns you:
Amid all the furor over the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program a few years ago, a mini-revolt was brewing over another type of federal snooping that was getting no public attention at all. Federal prosecutors were seeking what seemed to be unusually sensitive records: internal data from telecommunications companies that showed the locations of their customers’ cell phones—sometimes in real time, sometimes after the fact.
…
Prosecutors “were using the cell phone as a surreptitious tracking device,” said Stephen W. Smith, a federal magistrate in Houston. “And I started asking the U.S. Attorney’s Office, ‘What is the legal authority for this? What is the legal standard for getting this information?’ “
Those questions are now at the core of a constitutional clash between President Obama’s Justice Department and civil libertarians alarmed by what they see as the government’s relentless intrusion into the private lives of citizens. There are numerous other fronts in the privacy wars—about the content of e-mails, for instance, and access to bank records and credit-card transactions. The Feds now can quietly get all that information. But cell-phone tracking is among the more unsettling forms of government surveillance, conjuring up Orwellian images of Big Brother secretly following your movements through the small device in your pocket.
…
The tracking is possible because either the phones have tiny GPS units inside or each phone call is routed through towers that can be used to pinpoint a phone’s location to areas as small as a city block. This capability to trace ever more precise cell-phone locations has been spurred by a Federal Communications Commission rule designed to help police and other emergency officers during 911 calls. But the FBI and other law-enforcement outfits have been obtaining more and more records of cell-phone locations—without notifying the targets or getting judicial warrants establishing “probable cause,” according to law-enforcement officials, court records, and telecommunication executives. (The Justice Department draws a distinction between cell-tower data and GPS information, according to a spokeswoman, and will often get warrants for the latter.)
…
Al Gidari, a telecommunications lawyer who represents several wireless providers, tells NEWSWEEK that the companies are now getting “thousands of these requests per month,” and the amount has grown “exponentially” over the past few years.
Of course this is a two edged sword. If they can use your cell phone as evidence you were at a given location then you can use it to show you were not at some location. Leave your phone at work/home or in a friends car if you need to take supplies to your Jewish friends in the attic.
My advice is that no matter how careful you are with the applications you install or “disabling” the GPS or location services that isn’t good enough. The cell phone company will still know where your phone is within a few hundred yards anytime it is turned on. And with some phones it’s possible for you to think it is turned off when it actually is still functional at a level sufficient for your cell phone service provider to get location information.
As a friend of mine in the cell phone manufacturing business once told me, “I don’t know exactly what’s in the phone software. But I do know the phone only has one battery.”
Daughter Kim already has her Concealed Weapons License for Idaho. Yesterday she called me to verify how to get her State of Washington License to Carry Concealed Pistol.
She called back after applying and told me of their new electronic fingerprint scanner.
She should be legal to carry in Washington within 30 days.
In tough economic times you frequently see mergers of the less healthy organizations with the more healthy. There are other reasons for mergers but when times are tough it’s a pretty good bet that one or both of the organizations is about to collapse.
It is with this observation as background I’m pleased see the misnamed Freedom State Alliance (one of the most anti-freedom organizations short of the Democratic party I know of) is merging with States United To Prevent Gun Violence.
In real terms what this means is that Scott Vogel is saving some money by not renewing the domain name for FSA.
Corruption, extortion, child molestation, assault on officers, embezzling from the poor. That’s just the job description. After hours, it gets nasty.
Gun Owners Against Illegal Mayors
From http://www.stopillegalmayors.com/ as of February 23, 2010.
[Via Dave Hardy. Say Uncle also has a post about them. Linoge does some math comparing them to concealed carry permit holders.–Joe]
In South Africa you must apply for a license to own a gun:
…one must pass a written “competency test.” The South African constitution recognizes 11 official languages, but the test is only given in two of them, Afrikaans and English. Imagine if your gun ownership rights depended on passing a written test in a language you could not read!
And people wonder why we resist such things in this country.
It gets worse:
Applicants are not issued licenses if they are deemed to be at risk of becoming violent. As enforced in South Africa, this could simply mean that a person was divorced, separated or fired within the past two years.
Processing of applications is very slow. For example, of the applications submitted in 2006, only about a quarter have been fully processed.
Licenses are valid for two, five or 10 years, depending on the legal category of the license, so keeping a gun can mean staying on a near-constant treadmill of paperwork, fees and uncertainty. The majority of the 2005 applicants, who are supposed to renew in 2010, are still waiting for a decision on their 2005 applications.
Women are particularly hard hit (pun intended):
Married women who want guns for protection are told that their husbands will protect them—as if South African woman should behave like Taliban wives, and never leave the home except with their husbands. People who live in high crime areas are told that the police will protect them—except that the police obviously don’t, as South Africa is one of the most crime-ridden countries in the world.
Of course such high restrictions has created a black market with the attendant crime and corruption. It’s no different than the prohibitions in this country against recreational drugs and alcohol in the last century.
Once we have our rights well secured in this country we should start putting pressure on other countries to recognize the natural right to keep and bear arms.
If you do a search of blogs for “Brady Campaign” you get progun posts. Nice!
One of my posts is number one with Bing. Say Uncle has a post with the top honors via Google.
No wonder the Bradys think they are fighting the NRA when it’s really reduced to fighting a bunch of guys in their pajamas. Actually, I don’t have any pajamas. I’m wearing a robe at the moment.
Very few persons qualify for the permit issued by a police chief. The only ones who qualify are persons who carry valuables. We refuse all we can.
William B. Hershner
Lancaster Pennsylvania Police Chief
Feb. 23, 1960
Flashback Lancaster
[A woman that carries cash from her shop to the bank may qualify because of the cash. But the woman with a stalking ex-boyfriend doesn’t qualify. I guess human life doesn’t qualify as “valuable”.
Sort of like 50 years ago when there were literacy tests for voting and blacks were ask to read a newspaper aloud then given newspapers written in Chinese. Things are different now. The literacy tests were abolished but the “May Issue” concealed carry laws with nearly impossible to meet requirements to exercise the specific enumerated right to keep and bear arms still exist and are abused by small minded law enforcement officers. We’ve made progress but there is still a lot more to be done. And we have people in D.C. working on securing the right to carry being recognized as inalienable (H/T to Jeff). We will get there. It is just taking us a little longer than it did for “people of color”.–Joe]
Open Carry, which last year invited its members to holster up outside President Obama’s speaking sites, said it would not be deterred. Unfortunately, more than two dozen states also have allowed themselves to be bullied by the gun lobby into adopting similarly dangerous law.
New York Times
February 19, 2010
Who Can Relax This Way?
[The ignorance of these bigots is showing. Or else they consider the Founding Fathers of the nation and the individual states to be “the gun lobby” who bullied the states. Open carry has been legal in most states since before there was a United States. And there is good reason to believe the U.S. Supreme court will someday soon find that the right to carry a gun in public is a specific enumerated right protected by the Second Amendment.
Today is Starbucks Appreciation Day. Have a cup of joe with Joe.
If you are like me and don’t like coffee have a cup of hot chocolate and a pastry or buy a gift card for someone else who does like their products.–Joe]
Opponents of gun control spend an inordinate amount of time and energy in pursuit of the “smoking gun” evidence that advocates of gun restrictions really want to ban all guns, or at least all handguns. With respect to handguns, some gun control organizations are quite open about their goal of ending the sale of handguns to the civilian market entirely.
For the gun control advocate seeking to overcome the slippery slope argument, these groups present a problem. They can be effectively cited as evidence that the ultimate goal of gun restrictions is to ban all guns. But the size and influence of these groups pales in comparison to the largest organization advocating stricter guns laws–the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, and, before that, as the National Council to Control Handguns. The Brady Campaign does not support banning all guns, or even all handguns, and says so publicly every time it is asked and often when not asked. I know because I have worked in the Brady organization for most of my professional career. Our position on gun banning was explained to me on my first day on the job, and it has remained the same ever since.
Dennis A. Henigan
Lethal Logic, pages 79 and 80.
[We spend too much time search for the “smoking gun”? And they do not support banning handguns? And their position on gun banning has not changed since his first day on the job (in 1989)?
Okay. We can put an end to that right now. Either Henigan forgot about the brief he signed in support of the D.C. ban in D.C. v. Heller or he doesn’t think the brief is public. And he forgot about this document still on the Brady website where it says on page 57:
The Brady Center is supporting the District of Columbia in defending its longstanding handgun ban…
Or as a final alternative, I suppose it’s possible, Henigan is lying.–Joe]
This and this is very good to see.
Not only from the standpoint of being proud to have contributed to the project but this sort of press might positively affect my bonus and salary.
Update: Second link fixed. See also this collection.
Via daughter Xenia.
TSA is really A Security Theater so its just common sense that a four year old on his way to Disney World would get treated like this:
SECURITY officers at a US airport have come under fire for forcing a disabled boy to remove his leg braces and walk through a checkpoint.
Four-year-old Ryan Thomas was flying from Philadelphia to Disney World in Orlando with his parents Bob and Leona when the incident occurred.
At the time Ryan, born 16 weeks prematurely with malformed ankles and low muscle tone in his legs, had only just begun to walk.
His parents wheeled his stroller to the security checkpoint then broke it down and put it on the conveyor belt.
They then walked Ryan through the metal detector. The alarm went off and the screener told them to take off the boy’s braces.
“I told them he can’t walk without them on his own,” Bob Thomas told the Philadelphia News.
“I said this is overkill. He’s 4 years old. I don’t think he’s a terrorist.”
Security also demanded Ryan walk through on his own.
I guess this shows the terrorists how determined we are… or something.
Chet sent me an email to this article about swabbing peoples hands for explosives. They decline to say what sort of explosives they are looking for but I’d be willing to bet they don’t pick up on wheat flour or powdered sugar (which could make great dust explosions on an airplane) so the benefit from this is asymptotically close to zero.
Chet also notes that even the ID requirement is false security since you don’t really need ID to get on the plane.
The Second Amendment right to bear arms applies to the states through the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Justice Richard B. Sanders
Supreme Court of the State of Washington
State of Washington v. Christopher William Sieyes
February 18, 2010
[This probably should be the quote of the year. But I’ll I expect similar words will be used in the Chicago gun case.
Still nothing from the Brady Campaign. They must be off in a corner someplace sobbing, drinking Tequila or contemplating that bottle of whiskey and sleeping pills. I’ll give them another slap by adding another chapter to my review of Lethal Logic tomorrow.–Joe]
To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentation of the women.
Original version here.