Category Archives: Crap For Brains

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

Rage. Violent, unthinking, rage

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I could only read part of Kevin’s post. After a couple paragraphs I couldn’t think straight. My mind was running wild with rage. Here’s a taste of what I read:

Witnesses to violent street crime should try to ‘distract’ attackers by honking their car horns or even ‘jumping up and down’. That’s according to Labour’s Police Minister.

The extraordinary remarks by Tony McNulty prompted an immediate, angry response from law and order experts, who described him as ‘irresponsible’.

The standard police advice to people who witness violent behaviour is that they should not get involved and immediately call 999.

But in an interview with the BBC’s Jeremy Vine, Mr McNulty said concerned citizens should ‘try some distractive activities’ instead.

This is in the U.K. and it’s unlikely I would be going there and even more unlikely now. But if someone was attacking someone in my family the only jumping up and down I would do would be on top of the attacker. If that wasn’t “distracting” enough I’d disassemble them as rapidly and as violently as I possibly could. Then I would get myself and my loved ones out of the country as quickly as I could before I had to repeat the process on any of the police that tried to arrest me.

I think some people need to read A Nation of Cowards.

Blinking lights and bombs

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Even though I have never built a bomb (ignore all the people that keep asking me for help building one) I know a little about them. Tam gets the sarcasm right and now I’m going to fill in a few technical details for you clueless types:

  • Hollywood does not do reality. Putting the time remaining until detonation in large numbers on a bomb is a Hollywood gimmick to increase tension in the story.
  • Lights do not serve any purpose on a bomb other than to draw attention to it.
  • If someone’s intent is to hurt people or property drawing attention to the bomb is probably counter productive.
  • Conventional explosives can only directly injury and kill via three different mechanism:
    • High speed projectiles, usually metal, that have been accelerated by the explosion
    • Overpressure which ruptures the lungs of the victims. You must be very close and sheltered from the high speed projectiles for this to matter
    • Acceleration of the victim. The various body parts are accelerated at different rates and the victim is torn apart or the victim can be thrown into an object that hasn’t been accelerated; i.e. they are thrown against a concrete wall
  • Bombs can cause indirect injuries such as the structural failure of a bridge, building, dam, dangerous chemical container, or starting fires (non-trivial but possible). Falling glass from the building above you is a big one to be concerned about.
  • Surprisingly small amounts, fractions of a pound, of properly placed explosives can do amazing things to structures without the explosion hurting people just a few feet, even inches, away.
  • Surprisingly large amounts (hundreds of pounds) of improperly placed explosives can do virtually nothing to structures and people who are relatively close by.
  • Hollywood does not do reality. There are no safe ways to disarm bombs in general. Anything you can come up with I (or any other competent electrical engineer) can defeat such that either my bomb will detonate when I want it to or you make a bigger explosion than mine in order to destroy my bomb.
  • Hollywood does not do reality. Fireballs are not an inherent part of explosives. It takes additional effort to create a fireball.  I’ve spent a lot of time figuring out how to make them (see also this page). It takes a lot of fuel to get something very interesting. The picture below used two pounds of explosives and four gallons of gasoline and I was clearly safe less than 50 feet away.

If you see something suspicious there are two things that are important; 1) How large is it? 2) What is it’s placement?

Here are the evacuation distances based on the size of a bomb. Those are worst case distances based in part over the concern of broken glass from the windows between you and the bomb and on the buildings above the sidewalks. A few licorice string sized objects properly placed would be more effective in taking out a bridge than a car fully loaded with explosives driving across the top.

If the placement is very near some important structure such as a bridge or fuel tank one should be more suspicious than if it is in the middle of the Safeway parking lot.

Blinking lights on a flat panel attached to non-interesting structures are either not a bomb or evidence of a very stupid bomber. In either case it’s not something to shut down a city’s transportation about. Stupid bombers, with the exception of suicide bombers which aren’t bombers but bomb delivery vehicles, are very rare because Darwin is very severe in his thinning of that herd. I just wish Darwin would thin the herd of stupid politicians as severely.

Paranoid and PARANOID

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Sometimes people ask me if maybe I’m a little paranoid with all the guns and training and concern about the loss of our constitutional guaranteed freedoms. I point out that the guarantee isn’t worth the paper it’s written on without a means of enforcement. Which is what the guns and training is about–a last ditch enforcement mechanism. I can see where someone could make a case that I’m being paranoid but I think I can make a pretty good case that there are politicians that really are out to, and have, destroy our freedoms.

But no matter how good a case you make against me it doesn’t compare to this type of stuff:

Huffman Aviation, a front for FBI Division 5 and British Intelligence, have hired two known assassins, Robert Cain and Joe Kelso to put together a team that will target outspoken American citizens.

Of course it gets worse. Huffman Aviation is a stooge company with financial links to Keathing 5 bank dick Senator John McCain and Hillary (noted Republican gay-in-the-closet) Clinton Rodenhurst. Cindy McCain has large financial interests in Huffman Aviation.

P.S. Current CIA operative Harvey Hemmett has testified to Congressional investigations that he was part of the government team along with Israeli Mossad who trained Mohamed Atta at the Venice, Florida flight school…

…

Zionist Benjamin Netanyahu, who is not even an official member of the Israeli government, is blackmailing Bushfraud vis a vis using Bush’s homosexual sex and financial fraud, election fraud, criminal fraud, telling Bush either you do this in Iraq and Iran or else.

…

Sandy Berger not only took NATO nuclear codes but he was involved with a Mossad team in Thailand transferring nuclear triggers and other sensitive nuclear information on NATO with the help of Adnan Khashoggi disguising these uranium and nuclear materials as textiles sending through China to Israel. Treason of the highest proportion.

Financing Sandy Berger was Marc Rich, the Bush-Clinton Crime Syndicate fixer.

Attorney General Gonzales is covering all of this up for the Bush-Clinton Crime Syndicate.

It was then Vice President Al Gore, Jr. who tried to have Marc Rich arrested in 1993 and was prevented from doing so by the Israeli Mossad and the Bush-Clinton Crime Syndicate that then dumped Vince Foster in the park that was working with Ambassador Leo Wanta, former FBI Director William Sessions and General Vernon Walters.

Bush plans to use Azerbaijan air bases to attack Iran possibly as early as this Wednesday…

I think someone forgot to take their meds.

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”.

Quote of the day–Andrea Harris

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It’s like dealing with a pack of five-year-olds who are so developmentally stunted that they will never be able to learn anything every day it’s a repeat of the same old simple lessons: wipe your bottom before you pull your underpants up, not after!

Andrea Harris
Uncomfortably numb
November 26th, 2006 at 10:12 pm
Regarding dealing with advocates of “global warming”.
[It could just as well have been said about people in the anti-self-defense movement. Sometimes every single thing they say is wrong and/or can’t possible work. Such as in this case.–Joe]

Quote of the day—Jaime Huffman

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“Just because something is irrational doesn’t mean you don’t have to believe in it.” This single idea has a complete disregard for truth. It doesn’t matter that the world has been proven round, you can still believe it’s flat if you want to. It doesn’t matter if all evidence shows that people have the same genetic code no matter what their skin color is; you can still believe some are inferior if you want to. What this statement means is that you can believe whatever you want, it doesn’t have to be true. There are no right or wrong answers, everyone’s beliefs are equally valid.

Jaime Huffman
Speech for Comm 101
2001
From https://www.joehuffman.org/misc/LifeChange.htm

Mental problems of anti-gun people

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As I mentioned earlier today JPFO has a booklet—Do Gun Prohibitionists Have a Mental Problem?  Here are some of the mental problems mentioned in the booklet:

  1. Projection–A person cannot accept their own feelings because they are bad, wrong, or forbidden so they project them onto others.  A typical anti-gun person that uses this mechanism might have feelings of unconscious rage toward gun owners, project them onto the gun owners, then have a conscious fear of gun owners.
  2. Denial–A person refuses to accept reality because that reality is too emotionally painful.  A typical anti-gun person that uses this mechanism might believe that the police are all anyone really needs to protect them from attack by criminals or that a tyrannical government could never happen here.
  3. Reaction formation–A person turns an unacceptable feeling or desire into its complete opposite.  A typical anti-gun person that uses this mechanism might have a murderous rage toward his fellow humans and then claim to be a pacifist and believe they are “superior” to “less civilized” people who engage in “violent behavior” such as hunting or target shooting.

The booklet goes on say that pointing out the mental problems to the anti-gun person isn’t going to be very productive.  What you need to do is:

  1. Make the person feel safe, then provide experiences and information to help him understand the positive aspects of gun ownership.
  2. Be gentle.  Defense mechanism protect people from feelings they cannot handle.  If you take that protection away, you can cause serious psychological harm.  And because defense mechanisms operate unconsciously, it won’t do any good to point out to the anti-gun person that he or she is using a defense mechanism.
  3. Use the mirror technique.  Feed back what the anti-gun person is telling you, in a neutral inquisitive way.  If someone says that people shouldn’t own guns because they don’t want to be killed if their neighbor had a bad day, you might respond, “So you fear if your neighbors had guns, they would use them to murder you.  What makes you think that?“  It’s important to ask “open-ended“ questions that require an answer other than “yes“ or “no“.  Such questions require he anti-gun person to actually think about what he is saying.
  4. Don’t try to “win“ the argument.  If you are arrogant, hurtful or rude to the anti-gun person, you will only convince him that gun owners are arrogant, hurtful and rude people–who shouldn’t be trusted with guns.
  5. Respond sympathetically to the plight of the anti-gun person.  If they believe they are surrounded by people that want to kill them and their family if only those people had a gun and they could do nothing but wait for the inevitable they lead a terrified life.  Invoke your own compassion for their situation.
  6. Provide corrective experiences.  Corrective experiences are experiences that allow a person to learn that his ideas about gun owners and guns are incorrect in a safe and non-threatening way.

There is a lot more material in booklet.  Many of the JPFO “Gran’pa Jack” booklets are for giving to anti-gun people.  This one probably is better utilized by distributing it to pro-gun people.  Although I haven’t done that with this one I have purchased a few hundred of their booklets and let the local sporting goods store give them away.  I’ve also given them away at Boomershoot events and local IPSC matches.

Update: See also the more complete version here: Raging Against Self Defense.

Update October 22, 2010: See also Peterson Syndrome.

Quote of the day–Albert Einstein

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Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.

Albert Einstein

Quote of the day–Fritz Sands

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I thought the whole idea of “zero-tolerance” was to show that the problem was so serious that intelligence and common sense would not be allowed in the implementation of policy.  This serves to give a valuable lesson to students — when something is really serious, you must make sure not to think.

Fritz Sands
4/15/99 2:36 PM
Microsoft Gun Club Public Folder
Regarding zero tolerance gun policies at schools resulting in suspending kids for tiny toy guns.

Lawmakers in California are afraid of toy guns

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The California Legislature banned toy guns (probably requires that you register) in public. Okay, they sort of have a rational basis for it.  I’m all for letting Darwin take care of the problem but in a Nanny state you can’t expect that. But what really got to me was that some of the legislators reaction to the toys brought into chambers. They were told they were toy guns before they were brought into the chambers but they still were so afraid they moved away.

Before Spitzer began speaking in favor of the measure on the Assembly floor, lawmakers were told he had permission from Democratic and Republican leaders to bring replicas to the chamber. Still, the sight of realistic-looking firearms — an M60 assault weapon and a 9mm handgun replica supplied by the Department of Justice — upset some lawmakers, a few of whom moved away from Spitzer and formally objected.

Is there a way to get these people some psychiatric help? People this sick should be removed from public office.

ATFE agent calls because of puritan complaint

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Yesterday I got a call from Mike, an ATFE agent from Spokane.  AGENT, not inspector.

On December 28th of last year I took my cousin Julia on a Boomershoot Adventure at a local gravel pit.  As we were finishing up somebody that lived nearby showed up to complain about the explosions.  Ry and Lyle tried to talk to him but he wasn’t interested in listening.  He finally took down my license plate number and left.

The agent wanted to know what was going on.  I asked if he knew that I had a license to manufacture explosives.  He said no and I gave him my ATFE type 20 license to manufacture number and told him Sue (an inspector who works on the Spokane office and he knows) is coming down to inspect my new magazine next week and that she could probably give him more background on me if he wanted it.  He wanted to know what type of explosives we had and if anyone else had explosives.  I said a friend, Ry Jones, helped me mix them on site but we didn’t transport anything like that on the road.  He also wanted to know about a “boomer club”.  I told him a rough overview of the Boomershoot and directed him to boomershoot.org.  He said that the guy seemed pretty determined to try and “do something” and that we might want to find another place to set things off.  I suspect the neighbor guy didn’t get any satisfaction from the local sheriff and so he contacted the ATF.

I told him that we talked to the guy but nothing we could say could make him happy.  I also said we had talked to the owner of the pit and he didn’t have problem with it.  He thanked me for answering his questions and I told him to call me anytime something came up because I didn’t want to cause any problems and wanted to avoid stepping on people’s toes.

I decided the neighbor must be a puritan, a guy who is afraid that someone somewhere is having fun.  The ATFE guy seemed nice enough though.  The phone call was nice, much better than a visit from the SWAT team.

State regulated nursing homes

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I got a call from Barb today.  She was pretty upset.  The nursing home where her mother, Joy, lives was audited by the state of Idaho and was told they have too high a percentage of patients that have railing on their bed.  Barb’s mom was one of the residents that would have their railings removed.  Joy has fallen out of bed three times and in one of those falls broke her hip.  A railing seems to be more than just a good idea, but the state has some sort of quota system and Joy was going to pay the price.  Barb called the state inspector and was told, “You are very hostile.  Calm down.”  Barb managed to get some of the anger out of her voice but she still expressed her view of what the inspector should do in regards to the stupid regulations.  The inspector told her that maybe her mother could have her bed on the floor instead of having a railing.  For some reason this helpful suggestion was not received with as much enthusiasm as might have been expected.  Another suggestion was that we take her out of the state licensed nursing home.  This is actually a rather good suggestion if it wasn’t for the fact that the state takes so much of our money in taxes that we cannot afford private care for her.  We could have provided far better care for her if our tax rate was 1/2 of what it currently is.

I explained this is the sort of thing that happens with government “provided” anything.  They take our money from us because they know how to spend it better than we do.  They then spend it according to the whims of the “central committee” and the central committee in their infinite wisdom will come up with rules such as what we are experiencing in this case.  It happens all the time.  It’s not just health care, it’s nearly everything the central committee does.

Vote Liberatarian, the party of principle. 

Philosophy Question for the Fall of ‘97*

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Q: How do you determine right from wrong? Truth from falsity?

Do you read it in books? If so, is it the law and science books? Religious books such as the Bible, Koran, Talmud, and other sacred (to some people) writings? Or from listening to some authority figure such as your parents, teachers, government officials or religious leaders? Do you do a poll and see what the majority think is the truth or moral this week/year/decade? How do you know those sources are correct? Didn’t you have to make a determination about their correctness? And if you verified 80, 90, or 99% of some source as being correct, do you think that makes everything from that source correct? Couldn’t it just a well be the trick of someone evil to give you information that is almost correct, except in some critical item?

If you don’t know how to determine right from wrong or truth from falsity, how can you justify voting? Or rearing children? Or even giving your opinion on something. It seems this is a very critical question. Yet, when I ask this question (the short version) of people face to face, they tell me, “Yeah, I know right from wrong.” But when pressured just a little bit, they fall apart. They are completely at a loss to describe a sure-fire method of determining, what seems to me, something that is incredibly important.

A: Other than to say they read it, no one sent me email answering this question.  The answer seems very clear to me.  George Smith in his book Atheism — the Case Against God said it most succinctly:

… we may indicate three minimum requirements that must be fulfilled before any belief can claim the status of knowledge: (a) a belief must be base on evidence; (b) a belief must be internally consistent (i.e. not self-contradictory); (c) a belief cannot contradict previously validated knowledge with which it is to be integrated. If a belief fails to meet any or all of these criteria, it cannot properly be designated as knowledge.

Question your sources and your authorities on these criteria.  These three criteria will never fail you.  There may be new data which becomes available and invalidates previous conclusions, but that doesn’t mean that until that new data was available the answer you had was the best approximation to the truth that was available at the time.  And you can’t do any better than that.

*This originally appear on a web page of mine. I am moving it here for better visibility and archival.—Joe, November 5, 2010