Author Archives: Joe

The creation of Maxwell’s Demon?

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Initial reports are a little ambiguous but if the Wikipedia entry is to be believed I don’t have reason to faint as I was initially inclined (violation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics is a very big deal in my world view).

Still, it is perhaps as big a deal as electronics. And since Maxwell’s Demon is very much like the very first electronic device, the diode, the analogy works pretty well. If the analogy holds, as things scale, then the analog of the integrated circuit will be mind boggling let alone the analog of the multi-core, multi-CPU, desktop computer.

Taking orders for Kalashnikitty

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It’s not something I would wear. But if either of my daughters (or “adopted daughter” Sara) or my wife would wear it I’d be glad to buy one or more for them.

Quote of the day–Jacques Chirac

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I would say that what is dangerous about this situation is not the fact of having a nuclear bomb. Having one, or perhaps a second bomb a little later, well, that’s not very dangerous.

Where will it drop it, this bomb? On Israel?

It would not have gone 200 metres into the atmosphere before Teheran would be razed.

French President Jacques Chirac
In an interview on January 31, 2007 with Le Nouvel Observateur, The New York Times, and the International Herald Tribune.
[If the device could only be delivered by air and all the probable recipients of said device were 99+% sure it wouldn’t arrive intact then I might actually welcome Iran launching such a device for the very reason that it would give Israel (and others) a immediate reason to get into the glass making business. But that’s not how it would work out. If Iran builds or acquires one or more bombs they will make sure the odds of successful delivery are relatively good. It could arrive by land, air, or sea. And it will be Jews, Christians, and “The Great Satan” who will have to first deal with a great excess of glass. Therefore, logically, Iran must not be allowed to build such a device. Our country doesn’t have the political will (until after the first one or two glass making exercises occur) to ensure that so I hope Israel does have the political will. My expectation however is that Iran will get to throw the first punch and we will then throw the next 20 or so. As usual, by failing to act early more lives will be lost on both sides.–Joe]

Freedom isn’t free

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You’ve heard that freedom isn’t free in the context of our military defending our freedom but there are other instances where this is also true. Zendo Deb points this out in her post Deacons for Defense and Justice:

The Deacons for Defense and Justice did not plead to be given their rights. They did not beg to be taken seriously. They made sure they were taken seriously. They took action and fought for their rights, and they defended themselves, their families and their communities from oppression and violence.

This ties in well with the book I just finished reading, Negros with Guns which Ry (I borrowed the book from him) suggested be required reading in school. I agree.

The basics of the lesson to be learned is that thugs and tyrants don’t give up power and thuggery just because you ask nicely or because the legislature or the United Nations says they should. They do it because of the threat, or in worst case the actual use, of force. I’ve said this before but it’s worth saying again:

Inalienable rights are not asked or pleaded for.  They are demanded and taken, by force if necessary.

Quote of the day–Michael S. Brown

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Washingtonians are not stupid. We are aware that gun laws have failed miserably wherever they have been tried. Anyone who knows how to visit the FBI Web site can tell you that the most dangerous places in the United States often are the places with the strictest gun laws. Gun laws overseas have been no more successful. Asking the Legislature to give us more is a colossal waste of time and an insult to our intelligence.

Michael S. Brown, O.D.
Brown, of Vancouver Washington is a member of Doctors for Sensible Gun Laws; www.dsgl.org.
February 1, 2007
Evidence says gun laws don’t work
Seattle Post Intelligencer

The first step is admitting you have a problem

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As Say Uncle points out:

Admitting you have a problem is the first step.

Kevin and Zendo Deb contribute their thoughts on this article too.

I’ve been pushing the similarities between the gay rights movement and the gun rights movement for some time now and trying to get some cross pollination (so to speak). I even have gotten some attention from the press for my efforts:

Gays take up self defense; Organization teaches safety, protection with handguns (Lewiston Morning Tribune)
Pink Pistols chapter begun in Moscow to protect gays (AP version of the above story)
Pistol-packing proponents of gun-owner tolerance (Seattle Times editorial)

I believe putting guns into the hands of lesbian, gays, bisexuals, transsexuals, etc. (LGBTs) is a very powerful meme. In addition to helping save lives that tend to be at higher risk (from “gay-bashing”) here’s what it does for us:

  • It helps fracture the alliance between anti-gun bigots and the Democrats (or between the LGBTs and the Democrats–whichever way you want to look at it)
  • It gets guns in the hands of more voters (and the LGBT community tends to be more politically active than the straight population) who are motivated to keep them and carry them
  • It helps fracture the stereotype of gun owners as being rednecked, racist, gay hating, KKK types

We need to encourage this alliance as much as possible. And the alliance we have now is a fragile one. It only takes one jerk to undo a lot of work and we need to police our own to maintain this alliance.

It’s nice to know I got his attention

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The anti-gun bigot that runs the so-called Freedom State Alliance website paid my blog a visit today:

Host name: adsl-75-34-22-226.dsl.chcgil.sbcglobal.net
Date: 1/31/2007
Time (UTC): 20:32:29
IP Address: 75.34.22.226
Page: /2006/10/26/Imitation+Is+The+Sincerest+Form+Of+Flattery.aspx
Referral: http://www.freedomstatesalliance.com/wordpress/wp-admin/
User agent: Mozilla/5.0+(Windows;+U;+Windows+NT+5.1;+en-US;+rv:1.8.1.1)+Gecko/20061204+Firefox/2.0.0.1

It’s nice to know he stops by every once in a while.

All grown up but still my baby

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Our daughter Kim called me today. She was having a really rough day. She and her fiancée were having problem with the bank and problems with their van which caused cascading failures in other aspects her life. I could hear it in her voice before the first word was out of her mouth. I asked what was wrong and as she started explaining she started crying. A few seconds later I closed the door to my office and started crying with her.

She is 20 years old and hundreds of miles away and although I was able to help solve some of her problems more than anything I wanted to hold her on my lap and rock her just like she was two years old and had skinned a knee or had some other minor injury. I suppose those feelings will still be there when she is 40 and I’m in my 70’s.

Quote of the day–Greg Hamilton

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“Mission”

Translation: To stay alive when “scumbags” threaten your life.

From the Greg Hamilton to English Dictionary by Meredith Robinson
[As a private citizen your job is not to capture, punish, wound, or execute the scumbag. Your job is to make sure you and any innocent life you have taken responsibility for come out of the encounter in the best possible condition. Keep in mind the encounter is not just the few seconds or minutes in which you are face to face with the scumbag but can extend for years into the future including future encounters with the same scumbag (it is an ex-boyfriend that wants you dead?) with civil as well as criminal trials–which may have you as the defendant. When you are in “the situation” you will likely only have fractions of seconds to think about your decisions so you will need to think about what sort conditions will warrant what sort of actions. It’s going to be a rare case that you will want to restrain from pulling the trigger when the scumbag is at contact distance with a knife in hand and rare that you will want to pull the trigger when he is 20 feet away and running away. But there are exceptions and the time to think about those exceptions is long before you get into that situation.

When you are in a situation where there is no applicable ready made plan you need to keep your decision logic extremely simple. Hamilton, a professional self-defense instructor, captures the essence of that decision logic here. Concentrate on the mission and do only what is required to accomplish that mission. With days and weeks to think about it afterward you and others may come up with better things you could have done. If you do only those things that are relevant to that mission the results may not be optimal but they probably won’t be that far off.–Joe]

I wonder who is sorry

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Once I had all the log files organized and added the new ones I received from my web host I did a little more looking just for the fun of it. And right off the bat I found something that gave me the giggles. The main website investigator (probably Michael Sutherland) for PNNL used the machine “puck.pnl.gov” as he or she committed their felony. My search in a friend’s 2005 log files resulted in this little gem:

Machine name: puck.pnl.gov 
Date: 6/22/2005 
Time (UTC): 20:18:50 
IP Address: 130.20.128.81  
Referral URL: http://www.mywebsearch.com/jsp/GGcres.jsp?id=IBdHb4UNDrsJ&su=http%3A//www.mywebsearch.com/jsp/GGweb.jsp%3Ffr%3D20%26searchfor%3Djoe+huffman+sorry%26ptnrS%3DZSzeb001%26st%3Dbar%26nsa%3D0&u=http%3A//www.kennedysailor.com/faq.htm&searchfor=joe+huffman+sorry

This visit took place early on the afternoon of June 22, 2005 about two and half weeks after I was fired. The funny part is the search string they used: “joe huffman sorry”.

It’s a little bit ambiguous what they were looking for. Were they to see if I said something about being sorry for my contribution to what had happened? Or were they sending me a subtle message that they were sorry?

I was never sorry for anything I did. I wasn’t the one committing a felony. And if they were “sorry” that was a pretty sorry attempt at apologizing and it doesn’t cut it. I’ll believe they are sorry after they have spent a few months being rented out by the quarter hour to fellow inmates to the guy with the most cigarettes.

If it’s natural it’s got to be better

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This book, even though I hate the title, addresses one of my hot buttons:

One of the great myths of alternative medicine and the health food industry is that natural things are better than artificial or synthetic things because natural is natural and Mother Nature wouldn’t want to hurt us. Wouldn’t she just? Plants and animals have had many millions of years to evolve ways of protecting themselves against predators and competitors for resources. Humans have had about 100,000 years of hunting and gathering to evolve natural resistance and about 10,000 years of agriculture to breed out the nastiness, and these times are just not long enough to make much difference. We are surrounded by plants and animals which can do us great harm if we are not careful about what we eat, and also by a myriad of fungi which delight in making safe foods unsafe.

People, with great pride, will say something to effect of “It’s all natural” as if that proves the goodness of something. To date my best response to this sort of idiot talk is, “Botulism is all natural too.” But, being idiots, they will insist that even natural poisons are good too because that is how you control insect pests or some such thing. They just don’t get it. If “all natural” poisons exist as well as “all natural” food/drink/shampoo/whatever then there must be a continuum. Hence by saying some food is “all natural” does give us any information about it’s fitness for consumption.

I would like to suggest they have a nice meal of raw mad-cow brains, marinated in a salmonella broth, with rhubarb greens on the side, and washed down with oleander tea. But I’d be afraid they would actually do it and the police would arrest me on some charge like “engaging in a battle of wits with an unarmed person”.

Does the law apply?

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Vi Ry and Reason. A 80 year old man was shot and killed by undercover police after he told them to leave his property. He brandished a gun and they shot and killed him. Witnesses say the officers never told him they were undercover. What would the law do if it had been real drug dealers that had shot and killed him? Would they be prosecuted? Almost for certain. Assuming the witnesses are correct, what law says the police are held to a different and lower standard? Will they be held to the same standard as any other person that did the same thing?

Don’t count on it. The police are out of control and a good portion of the reason is because of the war on some recreational drugs. It’s time the legislature declared victory and gave it up.

Update: More info on the case (thanks to Steph for the link):

Police are now conceding that Singletary was completely innocent. The Jacksonville sheriff describes him in this article as an “honest citizen trying to do good.”

Which means that two undercover officers trespassed onto Singletary’s property. They then invited criminals onto his property to engage in criminal activity with them. Mr. Singletary, recognizing the trespassers as drug dealers, then properly demanded they leave. He brought a gun along to defend himself, not an unreasonable action, given the circumstances. For this, he was shot to death.

These police officers should be treated exactly the same as any other private citizen who shot to death a private citizen under similar circumstances. I.e. trespassing while engaging in a transaction involving illegal drugs. “The kings men” do not have special, unwritten privileges that places them above the law–both legal and moral law.

They make my head spin

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This guy is totally incomprehensible to me:

Progressives can close this gun gap and make significant inroads with gun owners by staking out an aggressive position on guns that reflects both the majority view of gun owners and non-gun owners, and responsible policy positions to keep America safe.

This moderate view supports the Second Amendment, new laws like those designed to close the gun show loophole, and the strenuous enforcement of existing gun laws.

…

  • By a margin of 92-7%, voters support improving the background check system to make instant checks faster and more accurate (90-9% among gun owners). 
  • By a margin of 90-9%, voters support closing the gun show loophole (85-13% among gun owners, and 83-16% among those who have attended gun shows!).
  • By a margin of 77-21%, voters support renewing the assault weapons ban (66- 32% among gun owners).

Moreover, for every one of these proposed laws, voters overwhelmingly believe that a progressive can support each measure and still be a strong supporter of the Second Amendment.

If this is “strong support” for the 2nd Amendment I’d hate to see what opposition to the 2nd Amendment would be. Of course he doesn’t say actually say they are supporters of the 2nd Amendment. He just says voters will believe it.

It reminds me of the first “User Friendly” software came out in the late 80’s. The software vendors had a bunch of labels made up that said, “User Friendly!” and slapped them on all the boxes in the warehouses. The great majority of the people weren’t fooled then and we shouldn’t be fooled by this shyster either.

Update: I’ve been asked where the survey data is. What survey showed such numbers? I don’t know anything more about this particular survey that what is on the website I linked to. What I do know is that almost for certain the questions asked were carefully chosen to give the desired results. For more details on how this is done please see the, very technical and scientific, article Sorry, Wrong Number; Why Media Polls on Gun Control are so Often Unreliable (scroll down or do a search on the page).

Media spin on guns

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The headline reads (from Canada so don’t get excited about this being in the U.S.), “Conservatives still looking at lifetime gun licence Despite college shooting”. You never read a headline or even something in the text along the order of “Socialists and facists still pushing gun control despite it’s failure to reduce crime every time it has been tried.” Just One Question you bigots. Just answer my one question and then tell me again why you want to take our guns.

Quote of the day–Lord Acton

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Every thing secret degenerates, even the administration of justice; nothing is safe that does not show how it can bear discussion and publicity.

Lord Acton
[PNNL has a problem with this. They have defied every Freedom of Information Act request I have made–in some cases blatantly lying say, “No such document exists.” when I created the documents and knew they must still exist. Someday someone will punish them for their illegal acts. When that happens I, and many others, will be there helping to make sure that punishment makes up for all the times they got away with it.–Joe] 

Quote of the day–William O. Douglas

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Free speech is not to be regulated like diseased cattle and impure butter. The audience that hissed yesterday may applaud today, even for the same performance.

William O. Douglas
[A similar thing can be said of guns. The type of gun that was used for a terrible crime yesterday may be used to save many lives the next. The government that protects you one day may next year send you to the gulags–unless you and your kind own and know how to use guns.–Joe]

Quote of the day–Thomas Jefferson

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Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them…

Thomas Jefferson
1816
Letter to Van der Kemp
[Although Jefferson wasn’t referring to gun control it certainly applies. Keep that in mind when people in high crime rate areas with oppressive gun laws insist others in low crime rate areas enact more gun control with the claim such gun control will reduce the crime rates in the area of the first person. I’m thinking of a certain set of mayors here that should be laughed all the way back to some tiny closet in their respective offices ashamed to show their faces until they have been booted from office, dragged out to the street, and given a swift boot to send them on their way to the dustbin of history.–Joe]

Quote of the day–U.S. Department of Justice

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…each Federal employee has a responsibility to the United States Government and its citizens to place loyalty to the Constitution, laws, and ethical principles above private gain. The public deserves and should expect no less.

U.S. Department of Justice
Departmental Ethics Office
Justice Management Division
[If they are required to have a loyalty to the Constitution then how do they get away with working for agencies such as the ATF that are enforcing blatantly unconstitutional laws? Oh, that’s right, the constitution and law doesn’t apply to them unless they want it to.–Joe]

This is what happens with victimless crimes

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Via Say Uncle we get this bit of ATF humor. Here is a teaser:

It has come to our attention that an opposable thumb commonly located on a person’s hand can be used in conjunction with a semi-automatic firearm, when placed in a belt loop, can cause said semi-automatic firearm to fire at a higher rate of fire than we originally intended for it to be allowed to fire at.

What happened here was that once machine guns were heavily restricted the ATF had to define what a machine gun was. Human creative being what it is the freedom loving “gun nuts” kept coming up with inventions that bypassed the definitions the ATF came up with. Just recently the ATF went almost absurd in their definition and some smart-ass took it to the logical conclusion. I actually have some sympathy for the ATF in this case. They didn’t write the law they are just trying to make sense of it and give us definitions they can enforce to. It’s the bigoted politicians that are at fault. Even if all the existing ATF people people did the right thing (most of them should find legitimate jobs) there would be others more than willing to take their place. We need to destroy them at their root–the politicians that encourage them by giving them laws, money, and guns.

It’s fairly easy to define a crime when there is a victim. It can be done in terms of the actual injury. Was there more than $1000 of property stolen? Was the victim permanently injured? But try and define an “assault weapon” or a machine gun, prostitution, or recreational drugs (enumeration is possible but creative chemists come up with things not on the list) and they run into problems.

Laughter and humiliation may be the best weapon we have against these anti-gun bigoted politicians and their hired thugs. Let ’em have it with both barrels.

Quote of the day–Xenia Huffman-Scott

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I’m not procrastinating, I still have 25 minutes.

Xenia Huffman-Scott
[Xenia was working on a Government worksheet before school that she thought was due the next period that had a question about Microsoft lawsuits. A friend of mine testified in one of the lawsuits and she was hoping I could give her a quick brain dump and she’d be, essentially, done. She was wrong. She had all of winter break to work on it and I told her to go do her own research as best she could with the available time. It turned out the assignment wasn’t due until the next day but it would have served her right if had been just 25 minutes and she wasted two of those minutes talking to me.–Joe]