Category Archives: Freedom

Quote of the day—Joseph Stalin

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Ideas are far more powerful than guns. We don’t let our people have guns. Why should we let them have ideas?

Joseph Stalin
[It seems obvious (because “common sense”!) that our anti-gun political opponents must have an even greater distrust of people with “the wrong ideas” than people with guns. And with a little bit of conjecture one might even say the ultimate goal is the destruction of the First Amendment.

Most of us celebrated this SCOTUS decision which contains this paragraph:

Like most rights, the Second Amendment right is not unlimited.
It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose: For example, concealed weapons prohibitions have been upheld under the Amendment or state analogues. The Court’s opinion should not be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms. Miller’s holding that the sorts of weapons protected are those “in common use at the time” finds support in the historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of dangerous and unusual weapons.

If ideas really are far more powerful than guns then wouldn’t it be just “common sense” to have a SCOTUS decision which said:

Like most rights, the First Amendment right is not unlimited. It is not a right to keep and read any book or religion or engage in any speech whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose: For example, child pornography and religions with human sacrifice, or riot inciting speech  prohibitions have been upheld under the Amendment or state analogues. The Court’s opinion should not be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of books or practice of religion by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the advocating of religion in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of books. Previous holding that the sorts of books and religion protected are those “in common use at the time” finds support in the historical tradition of prohibiting the practicing of dangerous and unusual religions and owning or reading dangerous and unusual or speech which is dangerous or unusual books.

The political campaign donation “reforms” they are so fond of advocating are just the tip of the iceberg.

Because they want to ban your guns you are reasonable to suspect they want to ban your speech as well.—Joe]

Atlas Shrugged: Who is John Galt? Trailer

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Yet another trailer is out for the last in the Atlas Shrugged series.

As is the case for many others I’m disappointed they again changed the cast. And the main characters are played by people too young for the parts.

I’m still going to watch it. September 12, 2014.

Update: Find a theater near you.

Quote of the day—Femitheist Divine (Krista)

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It is a proposed global initiative for population reduction which will, in a few decades, lead to a worldwide male population of roughly one to ten percent… This population reduction is the only logical long term solution.

Our plan is one of pacification and submission and many of these short term solutions are already underway in the western world so we are confident in our ambitions.

…

You can’t stop us, and you will not define us, so don’t even waste your time.

Femitheist Divine (Krista)
October 7, 2012
[H/T to Glenn Reynolds.

It has to be a joke, right? Maybe it started out that way. But I don’t think she is joking anymore.

Evil does not come in the packages presented to you by Hollywood. Evil isn’t required to have a long black mustache to be twirled by the villain. Evil doesn’t have to wear jackboots and use a swastika as their symbol. Evil doesn’t always wear a mask and have Jack Nicolson’s animated eyebrows.

Although it is frequently implemented from the muzzle of a gun evil doesn’t arise from it. Evil arises from the ideas of people. Freedom of speech and thought are far more risky to society than the right to keep and bear arms.

“Pacification and submission”? I think that is what ISIS say they are doing in Iraq right now.

This is the risk you take when you cede power to a central authority. Their master plan is one that benefits the masters. It may not be packaged and sold that way but that is the way to bet it will turn out.

What if someone proposed a similar plan to reduce the worldwide Jew/black/female/whatever population by a factor of 5 to 50 of the present values? Why is there no outrage similar to what would happen in those cases? Would anyone even hire someone like that for anything more than manual labor?

And some people think there is a war on women.—Joe]

Random thought of the day

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Considering the downside of the The Communist Manifesto, Mein Kampf, and various religious based genocides it is extremely clear the risks associated with the First Amendment far outweigh the risks of the Second Amendment.

If anyone wants repeal the Second Amendment because we are “more civilized than that” or some such utopian fantasy point them at the genocide and beheadings going in Iraq right now and suggest we need to repeal the First Amendment as well because freedom of religion obviously leads to barbarism.

If they then wanted to repeal both the First and the Second Amendment and you gave them a swirly in response I would vote not guilty if it made it to trial and I was one of the jurors.

I-594 questions

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Text of I-594 here.

Video of testimony here.

I’ve been going over it a bit. I’ve got a few questions that might be good to ask its supporters.

A person wants to take an adult friend to do some casual training and firearms familiarization, planning on loaning her a variety of guns and ammo during the afternoon. They want to go to a nearby parcel of public land that has been legally and safely used for recreational shooting for decades. What specific section or subsection of 594 would exempt them from having to run a background check every time they handed a gun back and forth? Considering a vast amount of training is done this way, it seem important.

A friend discovers her violent ex-husband just got released from jail, and she calls you at 10 PM Saturday night, fearing he might show up at her door any time. She’s a decent shooter, but due to finances she doesn’t already own a gun. What specific section or subsection of 594 would exempt you from having to run a background check to loan her a gun for a month until she can get the money together to buy one?

Sec 3(4)(f) states that [requiring background checks] shall not apply to a list of specific activities, such as”: The temporary transfer of a firearm (i) between spouses or domestic partners;
Why are no other family members included?

(ii) if the temporary transfer occurs, and the firearm is kept at all times, at an established shooting range authorized by the governing body of the jurisdiction in which such range is located;
Why is there no section listing such shooting ranges, or providing for how an existing range can become authorized?

(iii) if the temporary transfer occurs and the transferee’s possession of the firearm is exclusively at a lawful organized competition involving the use of a firearm, or while participating in or practicing for a performance by an organized group that uses firearms as a part of the performance;
Why isn’t training for self defense, hunting, or recreation included?

(iv) to a person who is under eighteen years of age for lawful hunting, sporting, or educational purposes while under the direct supervision and control of a responsible adult who is not prohibited from possessing firearms;
Why only minor children, not other family members or adult children?

or (v) while hunting if the hunting is legal in all places where the person to whom the firearm is transferred possesses the firearm and the person to whom the firearm is transferred has completed all training and holds all licenses or permits required for such hunting, provided that any temporary transfer allowed by this subsection is permitted only if the person to whom the firearm is transferred is not prohibited from possessing firearms under state or federal law;
Can you clarify exactly when it would, or would not, be legal to borrow a gun to hunt with?

More generally, what section allows for temporary transfers for training for recreation, self defense, or hunting with privately owned guns without requiring a background check every time a gun changes hands?

Overheard in the kitchen at work

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Joe: Where are you originally from?
Inga: The Soviet Union.
Joe: Oh! I’m reading The Gulag Archipelago right now.
Inga: It’s well written but it is a bit difficult for me to read. My grandfather and great grandfather were executed, at separate times, by the government.

We had an interesting, but somewhat depressing, conversation after that.

Quote of the day—Doug Huffman

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We were horrified, and rightly so, at Adolf Hitler’s solution to the problem. But we haven’t got a solution to the problem either.

Doug Huffman
August 16, 2014
[No. No any sort of mythical “Jewish problem.” The problem Doug was talking about was what to do with those people that are “unfit” to support themselves because they are too stupid, crazy, or lazy. In our society we are on track for an Idiocracy type “solution”.

Doug and I talked late into the night on this and other somewhat related topics.

The problem as I see it is that our ethics are appropriate for a tribe but they don’t scale to a population of a million people let along a population of 300+ million. When we see someone, children in particular, hungry or in need of care we help them even if they will never be able (or choose) to support themselves.

In a tribe of a 100 to 200 people everyone know everyone else and the peer pressure significantly reduces the freeloader problem. As soon as there is anonymity freeloaders become an essentially unsolvable problem. And with large numbers of people combined with a society in possession of advanced technology in the essentials of life it now becomes possible to support those that cannot support themselves as well as those who chose not support themselves.

And with that support of those who cannot and choose not to support themselves we end up, literally, breeding more of them. We are scared, perhaps even justifiably horrified, of the risks of the government assuming the power to mandate some people not be allowed to reproduce or to raise their children the way they see fit.

I see horrific outcomes in either of the two “solutions”.

There is at least one other potential solution. It is, as I see it, the least unpleasant of the available alternatives and as you might expect, the least likely path for our society to take.

That potential solution is for our Federal government to stay within it Constitutional bounds. If the individual states or counties or cities wanted to experiment with government welfare or “free healthcare” then those experiments could have run their course over the last 200+ years.

What I expect would have happened is with enough of these type of experiments being run that people would realize there are some people that we just have to let “nature take its course” with. We would have a lot fewer freeloaders. We would have a constant, but small, set of tragic cases of people that could not support themselves and could not convince family and/or friends to support them.

There would be heart wrenching cases and people would organize charities (Shriners, Elks Club, Eagles Club, Salvation Army, etc.). to help those for whom help was appropriate. The decision to help or “let nature take its course” would be done in more of a “tribe environment” for which our ethics were “designed” for.

I don’t see how our society can get from where we are now to the “least bad of the available options” without a lot of pain, suffering, and death. It’s like trying to solve a global optimization problem when the slopes of the sides of current local optimum are steep and high.

Nature is “going to take it’s course” with us. All of us. I’m certain many, perhaps even a large percentage of, people will survive the big “challenges” ahead. But I cannot predict if those challenges will send our descendants to the stone ages  or to a Star Trek universe. But one way or another this ethical problem will “resolve” itself if we don’t resolve it.

Nature is testing it’s own “solutions” right now. Ebola, economic instability, and even the immigration issue are in beta test now. They may not be released soon or even ever if people do the right thing. But if we don’t then full production of something awful is coming soon.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Bob Owens

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Media Matters and their leftist allies view this trend towards gun ownership in demographics that they once “owned” as a “gateway drug” towards classical liberalism, libertarian beliefs, or conservatism. They are fearful that if young liberals start following their peers into social shooting events at the new “guntry clubs” popping up around the nation, then the political shift towards anti-gun Marxism and socialism will not only be arrested, but reversed.

They know that firearm ownership is a gateway towards thinking as an individual and thinking more about individual rights, and this terrifies the anti-gun, collectivist left.

For them, fighting against the “new NRA” is more than fighting against gun ownership. It’s a fight for the very survival of a belief system that is starting to collapse under its own ponderous weight.

Bob Owens
August 6, 2014
Why the “New NRA” Terrifies the Political Left
[H/T to Sebastian.

While I believe it is true that gun ownership is a “gateway drug” toward classical liberalism I’m not sure the collectivist left is able to articulate their hatred that succinctly. I think it is more like, “Must hate because GUNS!”—Joe]

Symbolism

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I came across an interesting article at the Blaze about a conversation with a former gang member. It was from an excerpt from the book “The Future of the Gun.” It looked at guns as symbols, specifically symbols of power in inner cities neighborhoods, and how the youngsters saw people in light of the laws, guns, and power/strength, in a way that makes a lot of sense, but a perspective articulated in a way I’d never heard before.

Let me show you what’s going on here: Over there you see some stores that are open — there are shop owners there. They should be the pillars of this society. They should be the leaders…everyone should look up to them. But they don’t. They’ve been neutered, their guns have been taken away. They have to call 911, and hope [someone comes to rescue them] if something happens. So they’re victims waiting to happen.

Conversely:

Now look around more: There’s a cop. Unfortunately, too often the youth…they don’t look up to police officers, and there’s all sorts of deep reasons for that…Now look around more, what else do you see? What you see are…gang leaders.

The end result in this former gang member’s view is that for the young kid:

he looks around the neighborhood, and he looks for the power…He looks to the gang member who has a gun tucked away in his shorts. He’s the power in that neighborhood. Whereas the average person who has been disarmed, the average store owner who has been disarmed are neutered, they don’t.

He’s right. People, especially young men, want power, to feel empowered. Welfare laws what they are, there are few good fathers to be role models in a lot of inner city “families.” Boys and young men look for “strong”  men to emulate, and they see gang-bangers above shop-keepers in the social hierarchy. The anti-gun laws have created the inner city gang problem, and here is the underlying mechanism. Gun laws are not only unconstitutional, they are anti-human, they are anti-black, anti-business, anti-woman, and anti-equality. As people are wont to say, “read the whole thing.” It’s not long.

Test everything

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The picture below is from a computer backup I was doing over the network.

TransferRate

This was with the existing file on the target drive being overwritten. For new files the transfer rate is nearly constant and a little above the peak shown here.

I suspect the algorithm used by either the driver or the controller for the hard disk for update an existing file results in a large number of seeks of the head. The file copy program (Robocopy in this case) could work around the problem by deleting existing files before doing the copy. But the designers of the program may not have been aware of the problem with this particular hard drive.

In my situation I don’t care a lot because it can just run as a background task and it doesn’t much matter if it takes 10 minutes or 300 minutes (yes, the transfer rate is over 30x slower). But for some people it might.

As always, thoroughly testing your products, processes, and assumptions is important and either this one wasn’t fully tested or management marked the bug as “Won’t Fix” and shipped it anyway.

Having presided over numerous Boomerite failures I know how easy it is to say, “This change shouldn’t matter” or “This has to make it better, no need to test it.” There is a reason many companies have a test team that is independent of the development team and may even have a reporting chain independent of engineering.

This, almost, paranoia about testing can be generalized to a lot of things in your life. Have you ever changed a tire on your current vehicle? I bought a used vehicles a few years ago and discovered a day or so after I bought it that it didn’t have a jack in it.

You have a gun to defend your home and loved ones? Have you ever pied the corners of your home with that shotgun? Have you looked at possible choke points for stopping a home invasion? How about looked at what happens to misses or shoot-throughs from likely shooting positions? How do those speed reloads you practice for USPA matches work out for you when you are at the top of the stairs in your birthday suit?

Progressives want the government to have more power to implement “social justice”. Ask the tens of millions of people that went into the Gulags of the USSR how that worked out for them. Oh, that’s right, most of them that weren’t shot after their forced confessions were worked and starved to death. We don’t need to run that test again. 100+ million people have already been killed during the testing done by various progressives regimes in the 20th century.

Anti-gun people want to register guns. Ask Canada how that worked out for them.

Does your bug-out kit included canned goods but you forgot to include a can opener?

You’ll discover many such things when you test.

This won’t end well

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Sometimes a few pictures are worth more than thousands of words.

20130905_nixon1

20130905_nixon2

debtchartfw2

If it’s not true it should be

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Dan here at UltiMAK told me recently that the word “understand” comes from building, or dwelling construction, long ago. If you were going to add a floor atop an existing structure, you would need to “understand” the structure so as to prevent catastrophic failure (that is to say; support with additional stands underneath). If your building collapsed, you failed to “understand”.

That would make our current usage another of the many euphemisms that we no longer know to be euphemisms (at least I never knew – maybe you all heard it before, or maybe it’s not true). It would also add a layer of perception to the word. If you fail to “understand” you failed to acquire, or to take the time to construct, the requisite foundation and lower level structure to support what you just saw or heard, and so it collapses in on you.

Random thought of the day

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Peaceful gun owners should no more be punished for the acts of violent criminals than should present day progressives be punished for the acts of those that ran the gulags in the USSR. People who do not abuse theirs rights shall not have their rights infringed. That is the system of government we have.

Progressives advocate for collective rights and punishments. They should be careful what they ask for. Should they get their way they might not be happy paying the price for the tens of millions murdered in the pursuit of “progress” by their political brethren.

Quote of the day—Anthony S.

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Socialized healthcare is affordable – it’s called soylent green.

Anthony S.
July 31, 2014
From the gun email list at work.
[If this doesn’t make any sense to you then watch the movie.—Joe]

What limits?

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From Computerworld:

In a decision that could have broad privacy implications, a federal court in New York Thursday ordered Microsoft to comply with a U.S. government demand for a customer’s emails stored on a company server in Dublin, Ireland. The decision upholds an earlier magistrate court decision.

In an oral ruling, District Court Judge Loretta Preska rejected Microsoft’s argument that a U.S search warrant does not extend beyond the country’s borders.

“The production of that information is not an intrusion on the foreign sovereign,” Courthouse News reported Judge Preska as saying. “It is incidental at best,” Preska noted, adding that the magistrate court order was not an extra territorial application of U.S. law.

I liked this response in the comments:

So does this ruling mean that the Syrian government, for example, could force U.S. companies to turn over the email records of human rights activists in the United States, even if their messages are stored on servers located in the U.S.?

What about the Chinese government forcing Google to turn over the records of U.S. companies, even if these records are located on servers within the United States?

This ruling, if allowed to stand, opens a Pandora’s box of allowing foreign governments access to U.S. business’ and individual’s records, even if this data is stored in the U.S. After all, what is good for the goose is good for the gander.

Another thing I wonder about is what about the case of a company that doesn’t have a physical presence in the U.S. Suppose it was a U.K. company with a Hotmail type service and a U.S. customer. Would the U.S. government claim it had jurisdiction to force the U.K. company to turn over the email? The U.S. government has “twisted arms” such that Switzerland and other countries with strong banking privacy polices have submitted to U.S. demands for the banking records of U.S. citizens. I suspect the U.S. will or is doing similar things in the case of email.

Our government is way out of control.

I’m glad Microsoft is the one fighting this rather than some small business that can’t afford to spend millions on lawyers to fight it.

Gun cartoon of the day

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Deranged

When has the NRA or even an NRA member caused harm to anyone in our schools? Sure there probably has been someone, somewhere, who abused his or her spouse or kids, but the correlation of the NRA with violence of any type anywhere is almost for certain to be near zero or even negative. Get me a citation and then we can talk about it. But violence in the schools? Only in their dreams. Such a correlation would be their favorite wet-dream come true.

What if they had drawn the 2nd Amendment or the Bill of Rights at the door trying to get in? That would have been more accurate portrayal of their true concerns but their ill intent would have been more obvious.

These people are the enemies of freedom and want to knock down all barriers to unlimited government power. Private ownership of firearms is one of those barriers.

Atlas Shrugged 3: Who is John Galt? Trailer 2

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I posted the first one a while back. Here is a second one:

Interesting Mideast development

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From CNN:

“Israel’s ongoing battle against Hamas is part of a wider regional war on the Muslim Brotherhood,” says the Soufan Group, which tracks global security. “Most Arab states share Israel’s determination to finish the movement off once and for all, but they are unlikely to be successful.”

“From the perspective of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the UAE and some other Arab states, what the Israeli Prime Minister is doing is fighting this war against Hamas on their behalf so they can finish the last stronghold of the Muslim Brotherhood,” Younes says.

“Arab governments and official Arab media have all but adopted the Israeli view of who is a terrorist and who is not. Egyptian and Saudi-owned media are liberal in labeling the Muslim Brotherhood as ‘terrorists’ and describing Hamas as a ‘terrorist organization.’ It’s a complete turnabout from the past, when Arab states fought Israel and the U.S. in the international organizations on the definition of terrorism, and who is a terrorist or a ‘freedom fighter.'”

So most Arabs states would regard the people I took pictures of the other day as on the same side as terrorists? That gives me some comfort. Or at least not as much discomfort.

Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood are threats to nearly all peaceful societies. I’m all for Israeli finishing the job this time and if the other Arab states contribute to the extermination of their culture of terror then more power to them.

Quote of the day—Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

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Owning a pistol meant an obligatory conviction for terrorism.

Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation (Volume One) Page 196.
[Does this sound familiar to those of you who read what the anti-gun people have written occasionally?—Joe]

I cannot comprehend these people

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Here is some of what I saw at Westlake Park in downtown Seattle today:

WP_20140728_003WP_20140728_002

What are these people thinking? Where were they for the last several years as the Hamas fired hundreds, if not thousands, of rockets into Israel?

How could they not get the message that Israel has been trying to resolve this as humanely as possible and the Hamas continues to attack?

IdfCeaseFires

This is not an attempt by Israel to commit genocide. This is an attempt by Israel to defend against genocide. I find it hard to believe these people are that ignorant and that stupid or even that evil. What can they possible be thinking? They are incomprehensible to me.

This really, really irritates me. I have my gripes about Israel but on this issue I just want them to finish the job with Hamas. Show us how it’s done because it won’t be that much longer before we will have to do something similar to defend against scum like this.