Author Archives: Joe

In Boston, of course

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Of course it was in Boston where the cops all went bonkers because someone was carrying around some wires and LEDs (via Bruce):

Star Simpson was charged with possessing a hoax device today at Logan International Airport for wearing a sweatshirt that had a circuit board affixed to the front with green LED lights and wires running to a 9-volt battery.

This is not a bomb:

And furthermore, being the nit-picky engineer that I am, it’s a breadboard, not a circuit board.

If someone wanted to carry a bomb around at the airport they would almost for certain put it in a suitcase instead of wearing it in the open on their sweatshirt. And since it was in the open you can easily see there is no detonator and no explosives attached. But this is Boston. And so:

Outside the terminal, Simpson was surrounded by police holding machine guns.

“She was immediately told to stop, to raise her hands, and not make any movement so we could observe all her movements to see if she was trying to trip any type of device,” Pare said at a press conference at Logan. “There was obviously a concern that had she not followed the protocol … we may have used deadly force.”

Simpson was arrested…

Bruce says Refuse to be Terrorized. I say Boston was just exercising their authority as a police state. And the police probably hadn’t gotten to play with the sub-guns in weeks. They had to justify having their toys by actually pointing them as someone occasionally.

I do agree with Bruce that the true terrorists are probably laughing at us.

Complete Heinlein archives online

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Wow. It’s ALL here.

Too bad everything costs money to view.

Quote of the day–H. L. Mencken

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Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.

H. L. Mencken
[I keep thinking there has got to be a better system. The competing political systems of today are a minimum of 100 years old. Our communication technology, mass media, and perhaps other technology surely make some sort of new freedom based political system viable rather than enhancing a police state. But what is it?–Joe]

Bigoted Moscow Idaho Mayor is told by AG to back off

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Just today I received a copy of the letter the Idaho Attorney General sent to the Moscow City Attorney.

If you recall our Mayor wanted to ban guns in public places. The AG told her in legalize via the Moscow City Attorney to not even try going there.

I wish he had warned she was dangerously close to committing a felony but that is expecting too much even for Idaho in today’s political climate. We need to work on that for a few more years first.

Robyn Ringler stopped by again

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Domain Name   verizon.net ? (Network)
IP Address   68.236.146.# (Verizon)
ISP   Verizon Internet Services
Location  
Continent  :  North America
Country  :  United States  (Facts)
State  :  New York
City  :  Rexford
Lat/Long  :  42.843, -73.8583 (Map)
Distance  :  2,105 miles
Language   English (U.S.)
en-us
Operating System   Microsoft WinME
Browser   Internet Explorer 5.5
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98; Win 9x 4.90)
Javascript   version 1.3
Monitor  

Resolution  :  800 x 600
Color Depth  :  16 bits

Time of Visit   Sep 20 2007 5:57:21 pm
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Visit Number   193,023

 Previous visits were documented here.

Interesting use for them

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Men have a source of potentially life-saving stem cells between their legs:

A team of American researchers has found a way to easily identify stem cells in the testicles of adult mice that can be coaxed to turn into brain cells, muscle cells, heart cells, blood cells and even blood vessels.

One day, they say, male patients may be able to turn to their own testicles as a source of stem cells to repair an ailing heart or kidney or to fix the brain damage caused by Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s disease.

The procedure would involve removing a small piece of testicle – about the same amount used for a biopsy.

The first question that comes to my mind is, “Can you repair the damage you did to my testicle?” They don’t answer that question in the article. I presume the answer is yes, but I’d want to make sure before I authorized a major overhaul of my other body parts. I’d hate to have the rest of my body in full working order and then find they had scrapped out my testicles in the process.

I guess that’s one way to waste £200million

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From the U.K. we find (via Bruce):

A comparison of the number of cameras in each London borough with the proportion of crimes solved there found that police are no more likely to catch offenders in areas with hundreds of cameras than in those with hardly any.

In fact, four out of five of the boroughs with the most cameras have a record of solving crime that is below average.

[…]

We have estimated that CCTV cameras have cost the taxpayer in the region of £200million in the last 10 years but it’s not entirely clear if some of that money would not have been better spent on police officers.

Not entirely clear? What could be more clear? It appears that the rate of crime resolution is inversely proportional to the number of cameras present.

But they are apparently so accustom to Big Brother being there they are afraid to consider his absence. But don’t expect them to remove the cameras and spend the money on something better like more police and/or better enforcement. You should expect them to conclude they don’t have enough cameras and to increase proselytization. It’s just one of those things about human nature that is hard to accept.

Quote of the day–Cam Edwards

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This is an anti-gun report bought and paid for by an anti-gun foundation, assembled by anti-gunners from the Joyce Foundation, Harvard, and the Violence Policy Center. I’ve seen more serious studies written by Carrot Top and Larry the Cable Guy.

[…]

They’re officially parodies of themselves.

Cam Edwards
September 19, 2007
What A Tangled Web They Weave
[Yup. See also what Uncle has to say about it.–Joe]

Another example of TSA’s uselessness

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Box Cutter Sails Through Airport Security

At least TSA put on a little bit of a show for their Security Theater. They make him pour out his coffee.

Funny

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Old “fake but accurate” Dan Rather is suing CBS:

The lawsuit, first reported by The New York Times, alleges that CBS violated Rather’s contract by giving him insufficient airtime on 60 Minutes after he was ousted from the anchor seat at the CBS Evening News in March of 2005. It also claims that the company commissioned a biased investigation into the Texas National Guard controversy, resulting in a flawed report that “seriously damaged his reputation.”

[…]

The suit says the public apology Rather offered to viewers and to Bush on his newscast on Sept. 20, 2004 was written by a CBS corporate publicist, and that he delivered it “despite his own personal feelings that no public apology from him was warranted.”

It’s amazing isn’t it? It was conclusively proven the memo he reported on was a fake but no apology was warranted. Had he been getting away with that sort of crap for so long that he thought it was acceptable? If so then how much damage did he do before he finally got caught? His betrayal of the public trust should have required of him something much more substantial than a public apology. It should have been an exceedingly stiff fine and perhaps some jail time.

Gun porn

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Son James and I watch DVDs of some Science Fiction TV series together nearly every Monday evening. Until we got all caught up with the releases we were watching four episodes of Stargate SG-1 each get together.

About three weeks ago Sean and I checked out a gun store that he had never been to and I had only been to once about 18 months ago. The wall looked like this:

James has been saying he needs to buy a gun. And right there, in plain sight, was a suppressed PS-90 TR (Triple Rail, semi-auto version of the P-90 used by SG-1 as they battle evil aliens from all over the galaxy). I tried to get James to buy it with his bonus money but he was too smart for that. It’s space-a-roma (I think that was the word Sean used) appeal is very high but neither James nor I have a use for one.

A good sign

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I’ve been corresponding with a 13 year-old kid that started out saying he wanted to make bombs but there was enough information that indicated he had no intention of hurting anyone or their property. He was just using the wrong word for his desired activities. Rather than ignore him or turn him in to the police in his area I politely declined to help and suggested he attend Boomershoot 2008 since he lives in Idaho. Tonight, after six emails from him in 36 hours, he asked:

Can you give me the URL for the website of pain full pics of pipe bomb retards?

I recently told a friend of mine i made small explosives for recreational uses, and he said “oh yeah i should come to your house and we can make a pipe bomb”

I told him he was being stupid and, before he made explosives needed to do his homework. I told him id try to find the page i saw and show him how dumb his idea really was.

Cool. Maybe he will make it to adulthood.

This (WARNING! Extremely graphic!) is the link.

And speaking of bombs–if you are a suicide bomber intent on taking out some of our boys in the sandbox with itchy fingers on their “.50 caliber sniper rifles” keep (more extremely graphic material!) this in mind.

Quote of the day–Ronald Reagan

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The best minds are not in government. If any were, business would steal them away.

Ronald Reagan
[The difference I saw between working on government contracts as a “Senior Research Scientist II” at PNNL (I was once told I would be considered a “god” if I had a PhD) and working at Microsoft as a Software Development Engineer was like teaching high school Freshman versus earning my MSEE. But you don’t need to be an engineer to see the truth of Reagan’s statement. Just look an some of our government agencies, like the TSA. This is just part of the reason why government should be limited; they are too stupid to spend our money wisely.–Joe]

Place your bets

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IBM put 35 programmers on a free OpenOffice offering that will compete with Microsoft Office. I don’t know how many programmers Microsoft has working on Office but I know they take up most, if not all, of buildings 16, 17, and 18. Each of those buildings are large three-story buildings.

IBM versus Microsoft. Free versus expensive. 35 versus hundreds (include our son James).

Hmmmm…. place your bets with your broker. I put all my chips on Microsoft.

Unobscuring Kip Hawley

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TSA head Kip Hawley (http://www.kiphawleyisanidiot.com/) attempts to explain the reason for the three ounce limit on liquids and why the rule is reasonable. He is deliberately obscure in places:

“This is something we thought a lot about. There’s a whole classified section to the answer, but in the unclassified part we are limited to discussing, with 3-1-1, the major focus was first, to stop assembled bombs,” he said.

“The nature of liquid explosives is that they are very volatile, unlike military-grade explosives that react predictably. With homemade explosives, while the benefit is that they are made of easy-to-get ingredients, the downside is that you get widely different results for the same quote-unquote recipe.

“If you’re going to use these explosives in the aviation context, you have to be very precise in the mixing because, as we found in the testing, minor variations in formula have a very dramatic effect on whether or not the explosives are successful.

“So 3-1-1- eliminates the ability to assemble the ingredients in a laboratory, using expert people to provide a finished bomb for somebody to use on a suicide mission on an airplane,” he said.

On a plane, mixing up a bomb in a suitable container “isn’t like mixing a beverage,” he said, adding: “This stuff is very volatile; it is very obvious; you can smell it a long way away. It’s very corrosive.”

The volatile stuff he’s talking about would be the acetone used to make acetone peroxide. And yes acetone is very smelly. I have never made acetone peroxide and have no plans to. It’s called “Mother of Satan” for a reason.

The “very corrosive” stuff would be nitric and sulfuric acids used to make nitroglycerin; probably the most well known of all liquid explosives.

Yup. Mixing up either of those explosives without being noticed would be difficult on a plane. The acetone in particular is very noticeable. Finger polish remover is frequently acetone. So if someone starts working on removing their fingernail polish don’t be surprised if you see the flight crew getting a little excited about finding the source of the smell.

The problem with the whole explosives testing thing is that there are lots of things made out of stuff they don’t, and essentially can’t, test for that make the whole exercise just A Security Theater. That money would be far better spent on finding the bad guys before they ever got to the airport. But don’t expect Hawley to tell you that. It’s not his job to tell you his job is a sham. His job is to make you feel safer. Do you feel safe yet?

Quote of the day–Mac Johnson

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The Founding Fathers systematically democratized the powers of society through the Constitution and Bill of Rights. They democratized the power of law through the right to vote. They democratized the power of wealth through the right to private property (since repealed by environmentalists and courts). They democratized the power of ideas through the right to free speech (since repealed by McCain/Feingold). And they democratized the power of violence (or the capability to commit it) through the right to bear arms (since repealed by “gun control”).

The four great powers of man: law, money, thought and violence were thus divided among the people and not reserved exclusively to the connected, the rich, the approved, and the enlisted. That’s the basis of our Republic. That’s America. And that is, apparently, a total surprise to liberals. 

Mac Johnson
Court Rediscovers 2nd Amendment, Liberals Fear Other ‘Rights’ May Soon be Found
March 15, 2007
[Liberals just got pwn’d in this very case. The D.C. lawyers messed up and the lawyers for the good guys just nailed their scrotums to the wall.–Joe]

A nice pointer from the Gun Guys

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For once I can actually thank the Gun Guys for doing something useful. They pointed me at this video. Nice. Thanks Gun Guys.

Of course they call it ridiculous. But hey, what do you expect from him?

I still have the sneaking suspicion this guy is working for our side and collecting money from the bad guys. Nice gig if you can get it and aren’t encumbered by little things like morals and principles.

Bumper stickers for gunnies

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Reader Rob pointed these out to me.

Setting aside the ones that appeal to my sick sense of humor and the one that would piss off my vegetarian daughter I think the pro-choice one is my favorite.

Quote of the day–Ginny Burdick

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It’s just ludicrous to allow guns in schools under any circumstances. There are regular common-sense gun owners who overwhelmingly want the local school board to at least be able to make their own decision on this at the local level. Most of the parents I talked to had no idea, and they were horrified when they found out it was possible to bring a gun to school. . . . Johnny’s parents don’t want his first-grade teachers packing heat.

Ginny Burdick
Oregon State Senator
D-Portland
September 11, 2007
Teacher demands to carry gun in school
[Oh really? ANY circumstances? How about when some nut case or (redundancy alert) religious fanatic is shooting up the school? Should the cops leave their guns at the station when they come out to put a stop to it? If no, then why shouldn’t the teachers put a stop to it even sooner? And how about this teacher who has a nut case ex-husband? If she is a teacher then she doesn’t deserve to be able to defend herself? And it’s particularly noteworthy that she appeals to “common-sense”–because there is no factual data to support her conclusions. If she lived in the deep south 40 years ago she would be appealing to the “common-sense” laws prohibiting blacks to use the same water fountain with whites. It’s typical that she claims she is an advocate for “gun safety legislation”. I’ll bet she has never taught or even attended a gun safety class yet wants to legislate on the issue. In conclusion, not everyone is a bigot or has mental problems like Ms. Burdick. Some people want teachers to be able to protect themselves and their students. That is the real “common-sense” which should be adhered to.–Joe]

The French are trying to grow a spine

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People need to start talking about it in the open and France is actually doing it. Good for them.