Just like ‘no coloreds allowed’

The Utah Supreme court:

In the decision, the court ruled a University of Utah policy prohibiting students, faculty and staff from carrying weapons on campus violated Utah’s Uniform Firearms Act. The law, enacted in 2004, prevents any state entity from creating a rule which in “any way inhibits or restricts the possession or use of firearms on either public or private property,” according to the ruling.

So what are the schools doing?

Paul Murphy, spokesperson for the attorney general’s office, said the policies at both Weber State and USU raise legal concerns in light of the court’s recent ruling.

“Right now, the law is very clear that only the legislature can make laws concerning firearms,” Murphy said. “And if they [state schools] are out of sync with that, they will have to make changes.”

So far, however, USU and Weber State have no plans to permanently change their gun policies.

“I haven’t heard anything on our campus about making a change to this policy [prohibiting firearms],” said Travis Hampshire, a human resources generalist at Weber State. “I imagine if this was brought up to the president, they would look into it.”

“Look into it”? Yeah, right. They are going to do their best to ignore it and if necessary fight it every inch of the way. It’s just like 50 years ago with signs that said “no colored people allowed”. These bigots are defying the law, denying people their inalienable rights, and should be prosecuted, fined, and jailed under 18 USC 242.

Quad-core processors

When the Intel 386 came out tech pundits joked about the computers could then wait faster for the next keystroke while running your word processing program. But Bill Gates told the world that no matter how fast the computers were that Microsoft would be able to write software that would bring them to their knees. He wasn’t joking but I’m pretty sure it didn’t come out quite like he intended it.

The 386 ran at something like 15 to 25 MHz and required a separate math co-processor in order to compute the sum of two floating point numbers in anything less than dozens of clock cycles. Trig functions, square roots, or logarithms were hundreds of clock cycles without the co-processor.

Now Intel has announced quad-core processors with more cores on the way:

Intel will deliver the company’s first quad-core processors for high-performance PCs and servers in November, getting the jump on rival AMD in providing the next generation of chips designed to deliver the power needed to handle high-definition video, cutting-edge games, and math-intensive number-crunching.

…

Intel officials already have indicated that chips with dozens of cores might be possible by the end of this decade. The company hinted that, 10 years down the line, chips with hundreds of cores might be possible.

Mark Margevicius, a research director at Gartner, said that the move from single- to dual-core processors broke the barrier to such developments. “We’re now in a multicore world,” he said in a recent interview. “There’s no looking back.”

One of these quad-core processors can do more hard core (pardon the pun) math computing in a second than my first 386 could in five hours. Now I just have to write applications than can put that processing power to useful work.

Quote of the day–Ross Perot

Action is greater than writing. A good man is a nobler object of contemplation than a great author. There are but two things worth living for: to do what is worthy of being written; and to write what is worthy of being read.

Ross Perot
[I was thinking of Jeff Cooper when I selected this quote. He did both.–Joe]

British sex archives

At first glance at the newspaper version I was only surprised by one statistic; “one in five men had homosexual experiences”. That seems a little bit high but it would depend on the exact question asked. Other bits of information include:

“Materials in our archive range from holiday makers enjoying themselves on the beach at Blackpool to the experiences of the Second World War when many people, fearing they may not survive the war, were more sexually active,” she said.

Despite the taboos of the time, the 1949 sex survey, originally meant for national newspapers but never published due to its content, found one in five men had homosexual experiences and a quarter admitted to having sex with prostitutes. One in five women confessed to extra-marital affairs.

Alan Crosby, a historian at Liverpool University, said the archives also show how attitudes to sex crimes have changed.

“Sexual offences in the past were recognized as serious crimes, just as they are today,” he said, but the punishment system was very different.

Documents detail how a man convicted of a sex crime in northern English town in 1630 was punished by being paraded through the streets and humiliated in front of fellow citizens.

Posted in Sex

I wonder what they thought of that

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is a government laboratory managed by Battelle for the Department Of Energy.

I just (as in about seven minutes ago) got a hit from the DOE on my PNNL site. It turns out that their search terms on Google resulted in my site being listed number 1.

Cool.

Shaped charges

When I casually think of an explosion I think of a rapidly expanding sphere of gases. It turns out this is rarely the case. An explosion propagates from the point of detonation along a (typically expanding) “front”. Because the pressure at the front is much greater than both ahead and behind it the gases produced, which are behind the front, expand in a direction away from the front. This video from Ry demonstrates that. The exploding targets are 7″ x 7″ x 1.375″. The gases expand into the axis parallel to the 1.375″ dimension. Until this video we did not realize this.

Whatever shape of the explosive and whereever the point(s) of detonation are affects the directions of the explosion. This is used to great effect in the Rocket Propelled Grenade (RPG) which can, with a rather small amount of explosives, penetrate over 30 inches of renenforced concrete, or a foot of steel.

Quote of the day–Richard Armour

Politics, it seems to me, for years, or all too long, has been concerned with right or left instead of right or wrong.

Richard Armour
[At no time in my memory has this been more clear than since September 11, 2001.–Joe]

Boomershoot reminiscing

Ry gives us video from one of our tests for Boomershoot 2003–Project Fireball. And contrary to what Ry says at the end of the video it did tell us what we wanted to know. I just hadn’t told Ry the entirety of my test plan prior to pulling the trigger. It went like this:

The first target used diesel instead of gasoline for the fireball fuel. It’s safer to work with and has more energy per unit volume. We thought maybe it would work. It didn’t ignite. The second target used “farm gas” which no road tax had been paid. It was cheaper than the gas we got at the Moscow gas station and was the second choice for a fuel. It worked and hence it was what we used. The third and I think fourth targets were both the 10% ethanol gas that we had purchased from the Moscow gas station and had done all our previous development with. We didn’t know if the 10% ethanol was a critical component of our success and needed to know so dozens of shooters wouldn’t be disappointed (they weren’t).

What Ry was concerned about was that once a successful ignition occurred all the following ones were guaranteed. True, but once one of them ignited that was the one we were going to use. Had I shot them in a different order then it would have invalidated the tests and Ry would have been correct. 

The U.S. Attorney General’s homework

For those of you who think Second Amendment cases can’t be won in court don’t forget that the U.S. Attorney Generals office has commented on the Second Amendment. They concluded:

For the foregoing reasons, we conclude that the Second Amendment secures an individual right to keep and to bear arms. Current case law leaves open and unsettled the question of whose right is secured by the Amendment. Although we do not address the scope of the right, our examination of the original meaning of the Amendment provides extensive reasons to conclude that the Second Amendment secures an individual right, and no persuasive basis for either the collective-right or quasi-collective-right views. The text of the Amendment’s operative clause, setting out a “right of the people to keep and bear Arms,” is clear and is reinforced by the Constitution’s structure. The Amendment’s prefatory clause, properly understood, is fully consistent with this interpretation. The broader history of the Anglo-American right of individuals to have and use arms, from England’s Revolution of 1688-1689 to the ratification of the Second Amendment a hundred years later, leads to the same conclusion. Finally, the first hundred years of interpretations of the Amendment, and especially the commentaries and case law in the pre-Civil War period closest to the Amendment’s ratification, confirm what the text and history of the Second Amendment require.

Of course we can’t “take this to bank” but in the right circumstances it can be very useful to help “cash in” on the overconfidence of the anti-gun bigots. Look around for an appropriate application.

It’s time to push back

Kevin and Say Uncle pointed out this Fifty Caliber Institute alert. Some people are pointing out the Unintended Consequences aspects and are euphemistically talking about law enforcement becoming more risky but there is a better way.

Federal prosecutors need to start enforcing 18 USC 242 (and 241). There are some legal and political obstacles before that becomes a viable option but I may have a way to remove some of the legal obstacles. Mr. Completely has agreed to give me a few minutes to speak at the Gun Blogger Rendezvous in a few days and I plan to elaborate on how I hope to make that happen. You are going to be there, right?

Another friend headed to the Mideast

At the steel match yesterday one of the better handgun shooters I know told me he has been hired by Blackwater USA and will be going to the Mideast soon as the team leader of an emergency response team. Compared to what he currently earns the pay is nearly irresistable. It’s a one-year contract with a two week vacation after six months. The first thing Barb asked when I told her about it was, “What about his wife and kids?” Well… his wife isn’t too keen on it but the pay makes it very attractive. Barb is glad I’m only as far away as Seattle and only fighting software bugs rather than halfway around the world being shot at and trying to avoid IEDs.

A year ago I was seriously considering how I could get such a contract but with my current pay the delta isn’t enough to make it that attractive and they still aren’t scrapping the bottom of the barrel hard enough to take me without prior military or law enforcement experience. I wished my friend luck and asked him to return in one piece. I hope it turns out well for him.

Straight out of the training videos

I attended a seminar that discussed some of the video tapes found in Afghanistan. According to the tapes using a motorcycle in an assassination was one of the things taught in the training camps. A leading woman’s rights leader was killed using this technique:

Safia Amajan, head of the province’s women’s department, was leaving her home for work when a gunman on a motorcycle opened fire, police said.

She may have been targeted by Taleban militants because of their opposition to women taking part in politics and education, the BBC’s Dan Isaacs says.

Other techniques found in the tapes included taking and killing of hostages in office buildings and schools, ambushes of law enforcement, drive up kidnapping on streets, and residential assassinations. It’s what Israel deals with every day and it’s what in store for us here if we withdraw our military from the Mideast and we continue to ignore their calls for us to convert to Islam.

MSM talks about airport security

If you don’t believe me do you believe it if you read it in the Boston Globe?

For example, Schneier blasts almost all airport screening measures as meaningless “security theater” that makes people incorrectly believe they are safer. After all, who says the next terrorist attack will involve the methods used last time? Who says it even has to involve airplanes?

“The game of having all these tactics is one we can’t win, because terrorists get to see it in advance,” he says.

“By definition you’re going to pick a plot we’re not going to catch. It’s a game we can’t win. Let’s stop playing it.”

Instead, Schneier says the game ought to be about stopping bad people, mainly through better intelligence and police work.

That money would be much better spent, he says, than making sure that security screeners confiscate corkscrews or any other particular item from passengers.

Existing airplane “security” is about making some people feel better not making anyone more secure.

Quote of the day–Adolf Hitler

The size of the lie is a definite factor in causing it to be believed, for the vast masses of the nation are in the depths of their hearts more easily deceived than they are consciously and intentionally bad.  The primitive simplicity of their minds renders them a more easy prey to a big lie than a small one, for they themselves often tell little lies but would be ashamed to tell a big one.

Adolf Hitler
[I was reminded of this by the weekend spectacle of Mr. “I did not have sex with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.”–Joe]

A nice butt

I’ve had numerous women tell me I have a nice butt and once had a strange woman give it a squeeze but today was the first time I had a man tell me that. It was more that just a little bit odd. Especially since I obviously had a loaded gun (I was about to shoot a stage in a steel match) and he didn’t.

Don, thanks (I think), for the compliment but we are not going on any camping trips together.

Disposing of OBL remains

There’s rumors of his death but there’s also lots of reason to be skeptical. Lack of confirmation of his death and physical possession of his body shouldn’t stop us from planning appropriate disposal of his carcass. Here are my suggestions:

  1. Attitude adjustment. Shove a large dildo “where the sun don’t shine”, freeze him and ship the display to Club Gitmo. Keep him on ice and use him as a motivational tool in interrogations (“You could have a place beside your great and wonderful leader.”)

  2. Warning to others. His carcass fed to the hogs and the video of both the entrance and exit from the alimentary canal put on YouTube.
  3. Grim reminder. His head mounted on a 10 foot pole, be the highest point of anything within ten miles, and be perpetually illuminated with a soft green glow from the glass covering Mecca.

Quote of the day–Clayton Cramer

Professor Cornell is visiting us from a parallel universe, where Whig political thought never developed, and no one in the Revolutionary and early Republic periods ever feared governmental oppression.

Clayton Cramer
Saul Cornell Is Suddenly No Longer a Partisan on Gun Control
September 22, 2006
[Clayton fisks this editorial about Cornell’s new book.–Joe]

Mandating gun ownership

Two different people (Dave and Stephanie) have sent me this link so I really should post about it. The gist of the article is the following:

All Americans have the right to bear arms.  Some towns have even gone as far as to require each household to have a gun.   Now a small Idaho town is contemplating a similar idea– it’s called the Civil Emergencies Ordinance. And although gun ownership is just one piece of this ordinance, it’s the part that’s getting the most attention.

“We’ve blessed to be a fairly rural area of the state, so we don’t have a lot of crime and I think we’d like to keep it that way,” said Lee Belt, Greenleaf city clerk.

Drive about 10 minutes west of Caldwell and you’ll run into Greenleaf, Idaho, population 860.  If city council member Steve Jett has his way, each head of household that can legally own a gun, will.  Along with that they’re encouraged to have ammunition and appropriate training.

Aside from hunting I sort of think of guns as flush toilets. They aren’t something that is particularly appealing on their own merits but they do a good job of disposing of human waste. I think every home should have at least one. It should be keep clean and functional. Everyone in the house should know how to use it or if they are too small to use it they should be keep away from it so they don’t get hurt.

For the city to mandate, with certain exceptions, gun ownership is sort of like mandating flush toilets. Are people so stupid that they don’t recognize the benefits of flush toilets? No. And people aren’t so stupid they don’t recognize the benefits of gun ownership either. The problem is the anti-gun bigots of the world make it socially uncomfortable in some circles to own guns. What needs to be done is to make those bigots social outcasts. It may be that this proposed ordinance will help make those bigots more obvious and hence it could be that it is a “good thing”. But in general it makes me just a little bit uncomfortable that government is getting involved in something like this.

I first saw this article at Saysuncle and Alphecca.

Quote of the day–Reuters

They estimate the possibility of accidentally destroying the planet as extremely low.

Reuters