Category Archives: Crap For Brains

People and especially governments do some incredibly stupid stuff. This is about those stupid actions.

Failure of reading comprehension

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It’s fairly frequent that some anti-gun bigot will read something I or someone else wrote and completely misunderstand what is being said. From the words of the Second Amendment to advertisements (fingerprint resistance is about rust prevention, not criminal use) they either deliberately or through lack of reading comprehension skills arrive at completely basely conclusions. Anytime they claim some scientific paper supports their conclusions I know I have to get my hands on the actual paper before I’ll have a clue as to what was actually written.


Even give the above I was still surprised at this post by Gun Control Canada. It is nothing but a complete copy of this opinion piece in The Star Phoenix which is totally pro-gun.


Yes. Apparently the anti-gun blog Gun Control Canada misread the (admittedly poorly worded) headline and copied the entire thing without reading and/or comprehending the editorial. Microsoft Office informs me the Flesch Reading Ease is 45.6 and the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level is 12.0 which I have to conclude is too difficult for the bigots at Gun Control Canada. Just for comparison this post has near equal scores of 47.2 and 11.8.


I am aware that there are those at and near the top of the food chain in the gun control hierarchy who are smart and are deliberate in their falsehoods and half-truths. But I’m convinced the vast majority of their followers have crap for brains. They are useful idiots as the communists used to refer to Soviet sympathizers in the west.

Quote of the day–Wendy Cukier

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Myths surrounding the discussion around gun control tend to focus on the problems of urban violence, gangs, and handguns. This however ignores the fact that most firearm deaths in Canada are suicides and the guns most often used are rifles and shotguns. In addition, referring to harmless “duck guns” masks the truth: if this law passes, police will no longer be able to trace non-restricted firearms including the powerful semi-automatic Ruger Mini 14 used in the Montreal Massacre and sniper rifles such as the L115A3 and the Steyr-Mannlicher HS50 which can pierce Kevlar vests and fire bullets over 2 km with great accuracy.


Wendy Cukier
President of Coalition for Gun Control
May 25, 2010
Coalition for Gun Control Takes Aim at Myths About the Firearms Registry
[It may be that Cukier didn’t say those exact words. The news release is unclear about who actually wrote them. But the odds are very good she would not object to them being attributed to her.


Some of the myths she doesn’t address are those that she propagates. In just this one paragraph she does the following:



  1. Hints that suicide rates could be reduced if rifles and shotguns were registered. I don’t know of any data that suggests complete bans on firearms reduces suicide rates. Driving your vehicle into a concrete abutment, washing down an overdose of sleeping pills with alcohol, and using a razor blade to get an inside view of their veins always seem to be readily available substitutes for people lacking an interest in tomorrow.
  2. Hints there is a benefit in police tracing guns. The last time I had data on the topic (the Gun Rights Policy Conference in 2000) Canada had only solved two crimes with gun registration data after decades of handgun registration. If gun registration doesn’t help solve crimes then what is the point?
  3. The Ruger Mini 14 is not “powerful” compared to almost any other rifle. It shoots the intermediate (at best) .223 Remington cartridge.
  4. The L115A3 and Steyr-Mannlicher HS .50 are considered very powerful rifles and capable of long range accuracy but 2 km is a big stretch and can only be done when conditions are extremely favorable.
  5. To the best of my knowledge there have been zero crimes committed with these long range rifles let alone a preponderance of their use being criminal in nature. Without such evidence there is no rational justification for restrictions on them. Cukier is propagating a myth that there is some benefit to such restrictions.
  6. By saying the L115A3 and HS .50 can pierce Kevlar vests implies most other firearms cannot. This is not true. Nearly any center-fire rifle will pierce a Kevlar vest at ranges less than 200 meters and most will pierce a vest at 500 meters. Body armor for day-to-day use is intended for, and does a good job, of stopping pistol rounds. It is not intended for nor is it technologically feasible to make rifle resistant body armor that is appropriate for use in environments in anything other than battlefield environments.

Cukier apparently lives in a fairy tale land of her own making. I wouldn’t be surprised if she still believes in Santa Claus, The Easter Bunny, and The Great Pumpkin too.–Joe]

Quote of the day–Winski

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Hey, everyone has the right to go blast a few rounds anywhere they want, right?? At Wal-Mart, the gas station, at a family picnic area, at all bass-boat launch sites, any bar when you stop in for a quick shot-and-a-beer… it goes on and on….


What could possibly go wrong in texas?? BUT, texans will need an open carry law soon.. When we give them back to mexico for being more trouble than they’re worth!


Winski
May 23, 2010
Comment to Some Texas advocates pushing for an open carry gun law.
[Is there anything in this comment that isn’t bigoted or flat out factually wrong?–Joe]

Quote of the day–Mayor Richard M. Daley

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Next will be hand grenades, right? We’ll say that hand grenades are OK. I mean, how far can you go in regards to mass weapons? To me, any gun taken off saves thousands of lives in America. I really believe that, I don’t care what people tell me. You have to thank the police officers for seizing all these weapons. We lead the country in seizing weapons. This is unbelievable.


Mayor Richard M. Daley
May 20, 2010
Mayor Daley Threatens to Shoot the Messenger—Namely, Me
[H/T to Rob who sent me an email.


“Any gun taken off saves thousands of lives”? Really? Yup, he says, “I really believe that.” There are approximately 200,000,000 guns in private hands in the U.S. If all of them were seized would there be 200 billion lives saved?


I think he says all we need know about what goes on in his mind when he says, “I don’t care what people tell me”. I never would have guessed.–Joe]

Quote of the day–Ry Jones

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Shoot at kids for not taking you seriously; the cops, once they arrive, will take you seriously.


Ry Jones
May 20, 2010
How to be taken seriously
[Uhhh… yes. That will work but it is highly discouraged.–Joe]

Different

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A long time ago I concluded The Brady Campaign and others in the anti-gun camp had a different set of base assumptions. Sometimes it has been obvious they had different definitions for some words.


I think it may be both are true in this case. “Enjoy” just doesn’t map into what I am feeling when I look at that picture.

Changing Colors

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Ah, Spring!  It’s a time when the land turns green, the trees are budding, the flowers are blooming, and the Republicans begin to change their spots, pretending to be conservative in preparation for the upcoming election season.  It’s the never-ending cycle of life.

Kevin asks why, I have the answer

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Kevin points out that the other side lies, extensively, even when actual numbers are easy to come by and their lies are easily exposed.

He asks why do they do that. That is actually an easy question to answer.

As I have demonstrated before they are incapable of determining truth from falsity. They cannot distinguish their fantasy world from reality. This is part of the reason they can be so convincing with their lies. They actually believe them. The other reason they can be very convincing is that many of their audience want to believe them. They want to believe there are solutions as simple as congress flipping a switch and making the Boogie Monster under the bed go away.

They are frequently pathetic creatures for whom the light switch on the wall is, in a very real sense, magical. They have no concept of how things actually work. How else do you explain their belief that some collection of people could write down set of rules on a piece of paper and evil people, who fail to obey existing rules against violence crime, will suddenly obey still another rule to turn in or destroy their tools which enable them to pursue their chosen evil ways?

Of course do not underestimate our opponents. As Sean likes to point out, not all of them are so simple minded.

Cold Call

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I just got off the phone with a rep who called us from one of the big optics companies.  He started the conversation by asking if we sold gun accessories.


Need I say more?


OK; any half-baked salesman would spend at least one whole minute researching the company he’s calling, you know, before making the call.  I point out this failure because it’s rare, but it keeps happening.  Along with failure “a” usually comes failure “b”; salesman wants to do all the talking and no listening.  He’s going down a list of phone numbers and reading a canned presentation.  That might result in some sales, but that’s not a salesman.


We knew a musical instrument salesman from the American affiliate of Big International Music, Inc. and he was the best in the business.  Here in the Northwest, the sales reps were generally given larger commissions due to the vast expanses they had to cover to make the same sales volume one of the big city reps could make within 20 square miles.  This guy did so well that he started to make “too much money” at the higher, Northwest commission rates.  Big International Music didn’t like that, so they cut his commission.  Mind you; no one had ever sold so much in the Northwest as this guy in all the history of the company.  THAT was the “problem” that was eating away at them, and they solved it alright.  When they cut his commission the guy quit and went to work for the competition, who suddenly started doing quite well for themselves.


That’s a salesman.  He knew about your business before he contacted you, for one thing.  This was before the internet, when it took more than a minute or two.  He’d talk to local professors and musicians– people most likely to know about you.  He’d go in with actual knowledge, and he’d talk WITH you rather than AT you.  Always looking for a deal, he’d also check all the local classified ad papers.  On one visit he left with a ’50s Oldsmobile he found here in town, figuring he could turn a profit on it.  I believe they’re more born (or bred) than trained in a month.  It’s a personality type.

Quote of the day–Beekeeper’s Apprentice

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How DARE the NRA CHARGE for a program to teach children to never touch a firearm, when they have lobbied hard and long and pushed and prodded and screeched “constitution” and tossed money around to lawmakers incapable to turning down a freaking dollar to save their own putrefied souls and the NRA is a huge part of the problem of children dying in firearm accidents in the first place?


Beekeeper’s Apprentice
Apr 21, 2010
Question of the Week: How do Republicans Think?
[I think there is some sort of disconnect with reality here. Does he think teachers should teach for free? And where is the evidence that the NRA is “a huge part of the problem of children dying in firearm accidents”? And if you know anything about the NRA’s Eddy Eagle program and you read the whole thing you will discover he doesn’t know anything about the Eddy Eagle program. What he thinks he knows about it he learned from the Violence Policy Center. This is like learning about homosexuality from Fred Phelps.–Joe]

A threat to safety and democratic rights

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An email from the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence:



Today, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer announced that the District of Columbia Voting Rights Act would be pulled from consideration in the U.S. House of Representatives because of the chamber’s inability to stop a National Rifle Association (NRA) amendment that would have effectively gutted the city’s gun laws. “The price was way too high,” said Hoyer, who indicated he made the decision along with D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton.


The Coalition to Stop Gun Violence (CSGV) applauds Majority Leader Hoyer and Delegate Norton for making this hard decision and for acknowledging that the bill was a threat to D.C. residents’ safety and democratic rights. It is a tragedy that a bill that would have extended voting representation in Congress to American citizens who richly deserve it was undermined by the NRA’s insidious agenda.


A recent decision by a federal judge upheld the District of Columbia’s new gun laws as constitutional and torpedoed the NRA’s claims that these regulations are arbitrary and tyrannical. Nonetheless, the NRA pressed ahead and put their petty, partisan agenda ahead of the civil rights of 600,000 patriotic Americans. Their goal was to drive a wedge between D.C. residents, but in the end we emerged unified and more determined than ever.


CSGV has been committed to obtaining full democracy for the District for 40 years. Our president, Mike Beard, was the first executive director of Self-Determination for D.C., a national coalition that was instrumental in passing the Home Rule Act in 1973. In recent years, we have been proud to advocate for voting representation and political autonomy for District residents.


We would like to thank the many individuals and organizations who stepped forward to protect the principle of self-determination in the District. Among them were the 13 members of the D.C. Council, ROOT (Reaching Out to Others Together), the League of Women Voters, DC for Democracy, the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, the D.C. Democratic Party, and—most importantly—family members who lost loved ones in the March 30 mass shooting in Southeast Washington.


I find it very telling CSGV calls the repeal of the oppressive D.C. gun laws “a threat to … democratic rights”. I didn’t know we had “democratic rights”. We have civil rights. We have voting rights. But “democratic rights” is something new to me. A quick Bing search indicates it is not a common U.S. phrase. My suspicion is that CSGV knew use of the more common “civil rights” would have yielded laughter and claims of ignorance and/or bigotry. And of course in the next paragraph they overlook the fact that the NRA is very concerned with civil rights. But despite all nine Supreme Court justices agreeing with the NRA that the right to keep and bear arms is a constitutionally protected individual right CSGV is willing to push for the clearly unconstitutionally representative for D.C. in the U.S. Congress. Apparently the U.S. Constitution is irrelevant to their agenda as is safety. If they were concerned with resident safety they would recognize that violence crime is much lower just across the political boundaries on all sides of D.C. where gun laws are more relaxed and that in the last year after D.C.’s fun laws were found unconstitutional violent crime reduced rather than increased as the anti-gun people predicted.


It would seem to me that a rational person would observe that the correlation between restrictive gun laws and high crime is positive in D.C. and that the relaxing of gun laws coincided with reduced violent crime. A rational person would be willing to relax the gun laws even more yet at every turn they fight for more restrictive laws. I can only conclude CSGV does not have rational people or they are not concerned with resident safety as they claim.


I have to smile at them anyway because as they whine about people being allowed restricted access to firearms I’m preparing for over 100 ordinary people to play with guns and explosives for four days. My accomplishments in the next few days will be on television (and has been before and the show was even nominated for an Emmy) and reach thousands of times more people than their pathetic news release.

Quote of the day–Driftglass

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Its leaders fought for the right to : to work them like animals and kill them at will.

Its leaders fought for the right to enforce the institution of slavery with state-sanctioned terror and murder.

Its leaders were known as “Confederates”.

To preserve and defend their monstrous institution, Confederates spent centuries constructing massive social, economic, religious and cultural fortifications around it.

Like hemophilia, Confederates passed that comprehensive social, economic, religious and cultural worldview down generation after generation.

Like syphilis, to this day Confederates continue to spread that social, economic, religious and cultural worldview everywhere they go.

About 40 years ago, the Confederates changed their name.

Now they are known as “Republicans”.


Driftglass
April 7, 2010
Just In Case
[Some might say it is because of the state of our educational system. Others might say it was a simple error. But I’m inclined to think of it as a mental defect.


How can they live in such a fact free environment? No wonder they want government assistance for everything. They couldn’t find their way to their food without help from someone.


I left the following comment on their post:



You got a couple things mixed up. The anti-slavery people were Republicans and the pro-slavery people (including the racist bigots with their Jim Crow laws up through the 1960s) were all Democrats.

Other than that minor error I think you are pretty close.


I wonder if this is going to be another instance of “Reasoned Discourse“.–Joe]

Spot the moron

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As Ben said in email, “Spot the moron”:



From here.

Coolidge Almost Got It Right

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In response to the QOTD;


Ah, but Mr. Coolidge, and the Republican Party leadership, apparently never understood the game.  The assertion that building up the weak is the Left’s goal is one thing.  Taking that assertion at face value is another.  It’s the Big Mistake of the 20th century, and has resulted in perpetual confusion (to say nothing of the stagnation, decay and destruction around the world).  The preponderance of the evidence regarding the Left’s goals points elsewhere.  Their objective is statism for its own sake, and the tactic, stated openly in some circles time after time, is to bring down “The System” so it can be remade– “Redistributive Change” in Obama’s own words, and it’s been said in other ways throughout the generations.


Republicans, as they occupy themselves trying to understand and argue the details, the costs and so on, of the “healthcare” bills, are demonstrating their utter cluelessness (or is it their complicity?).  “Why, this could end up funding abortions with taxpayer dollars, and that would be bad, and I’m not so sure we can afford this other bit over here…”


That’s not the point, Skippy.  The point is, the whole thing is a massive power grab.  What more do you need to know, for crying out loud?


Weigh down the economy with debt, entitlements and restrictions, then blame what remains of the private sector.  Take advantage of the chaos and the public demands for an altogether new approach that they hope will ensue.  They’re telling us every day; “Never let a crisis go to waste” is only part of it.  The other part is their understanding that they can manufacture the crises.  Chip, chip, chip, chip, and sooner or later even the hardest stone will crumble, after which (they believe) they can swoop in and take it all.


So far as I can tell, the Republicans have been playing along for decades.  “Oh, but you’re crazy, Lyle.  Look at the differences between Republicans and Democrats!  Are you willfully blind, or what?  Surely you must be mad!  Look!  Just look!  LOOOOOOOOOK, MAN!”


Uh huh, and there’s a world of difference between that “good cop” and that “bad cop” too.  The bad cop is a real, dangerously scary, out-of-control sonofabitch, but that good cop– why, he’s a sweetheart!  Look at him!  Just look!  He brings you coffee and food and he talks nice.  He doesn’t like that bad ol’, meany mean bad cop at all, either.  No Sir, not at all.  Such a nice fellow, and he really cares.  He listens.  He understands.  He’s my advocate in this time of uncertainty.  I want to work with him, by golly gosh oh gee.  Yessiree.  No doubt about it.  Without him, that bad cop would have beat the living shit out of me by now, for sure.  Man, am I lucky to have Good Cop!  Wow!  Thank God!  This must be an angel sent from Heaven to deliver me from despair!


Right.  Both cops are working to take you to the same place after they’re finished with your sorry, dumb ass.


OK; got that out of the system.  Now I’m all ears.

You got that right

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From Canada:



She says she doesn’t want to think about the consequences if the gun registry disappears.


I see no evidence that she did any thinking up until now so I think the risk of her starting now is pretty low.

Methinks the poster doth protest too much

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Sometimes the responses write themselves. The response to this is a case in point:



Guns are useless, especially handguns. But I’m not that ignorant: I know that gun control is a lot like health care–everyone knows it’s a good idea, but we really don’t want it to cost anyone their “freedom” (or worse, their money!).


Apparently he is that ignorant.


I would like to suggest he ask the next police officer why he or she is carrying a useless handgun and then read up on what “everyone knows”.

Unclear on the concepts

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My previous post was a link to the most clear presentation of McDonald v. Chicago that I have read. This one is the most unclear I have read. It appears they know all the words but don’t know how to use them in a complete sentence.

DNA sequencing Fe based life forms

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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”.

One of the most significant factors

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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?

No Internet connection

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Just a FYI.

My hidden, hardened, underground bunker lost it’s Internet connection yesterday afternoon and I haven’t bother to use alternate methods of checking my email. I did check the comments and add one here on the blog but generally don’t expect anything from me until I restablish normal communcations. This is expected to be sometime this evening after I get off work.

If something urgent comes up give me a call on my cell phone: 208-301-4254.

Update: After wasting about two hours of my life I have an Internet connection at my bunker again. I wish I could bill Comcast for my time.

Kelsey says, “Comcast is a Dick!” James had a longer explaination which is not worth repeating here.

And a word of advice to $@#!%^& people at Comcast from security professional…

Do not insist I turn off my firewall and connect my computer directly to the cable modem!

My inclination after doing this is to wipe the hard disk and reinstall the O/S.