Category Archives: Politics

This is true

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I’m unable to determine if this is a true story about someone else or some sort of joke webpage. But as applied to me the conclusions presented are absolutely true:

Presidential bid by Joe Huffman unlikely

Lack of name ID, fundraising hurdles are practically insurmountable for Huffman

The 2016 campaign for President is heating up, but Joe Huffman is likely to spend this race on the sidelines.

Based on the field of would-be Presidential candidates, it appears Huffman is already too far behind to mount a credible campaign, and for that reason would be unlikely to jump into the fray.

“Joe Huffman simply doesn’t have the name identification of Hillary Clinton, Jeb Bush or any of the other top-tier candidates. And can Huffman raise a billion dollars of campaign cash in the next 18-months? Frankly, I’m skeptical. I say this all with due respect for Huffman and their family.”

Joe Huffman’s net worth would need to be competitive with that of Clinton or Bush, or they would need to have many wealthy, generous supporters to finance a credible presidential campaign.

Opposition researchers investigate all candidates’ backgrounds, hoping to find negative potential issues like an arrest, divorce, bankruptcy, affairs, girlfriend / boyfriend, mug shot, etc. If there were such issues for any potential candidate, that would be a challenge to overcome. For example, George W. Bush overcame the disclosure of an arrest for driving while intoxicated (DUI or DWI) in 2000 and was elected President.

While some may discount the possibility of Huffman jumping into the 2016 Presidential race, there remains a path Huffman could follow should they decide to run.

I’m sure there are many people who will be quite relieved. Why? We have to keep our priorities straight. I wouldn’t have time for Boomershoot next year if I were seriously campaigning.

Quote of the day—Ronald Reagan

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The starting point must be the Constitution, because, above all, we are a nation of laws and the foundation for our laws, or lack of same, is the Constitution. It is amazing to me how so many people pay lip service to the Constitution, yet set out to twist and distort it when it stands in the way of things they think ought to be done or laws they believe ought to be passed. It is also amazing to me how often our courts do the same thing.

Ronald Reagan
September 1975
Editorial, Guns & Ammo
[From Proclaiming Liberty: What Patriots and Heroes Really Said About the Right to Keep and Bear Arms by Philip Mulivor.

I was struck by how closely what Ted Cruz said a couple years ago matches what Reagan said decades earlier:

For a long time, a whole bunch of Democrats and unfortunately even some Republicans have been passing laws in this body without even asking where the basis is in the Constitution, and I think the Constitution should be the starting point for everything Congress does.

I agree with the sentiment but the cancer has spread so deep into the fabric of our society that rapidly ripping out the tumors would result in massive hemorrhaging. A slow removal almost certainly result in the tumor metastasizing and changing form to embed itself even deeper and perhaps more threating to the “patient”.

I’m nearly certain there is “too fast” and “too slow”. But what is “just right”?—Joe]

Quote of the day—Hillary Clinton

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I will also work to reinstate the assault weapons ban. We had it during the 1990s.

Hillary Clinton
April 16, 2008
Democratic Debate in Philadelphia
[See also some of the other stuff she has said about your rights.

Don’t ever let anyone get away with telling you that no one wants to take your guns away.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Brad R. Torgersen

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Sarah Hoyt — born in Portugal, naturalized to the U.S. — has seen this kind of thing before. It’s the old Stalinist-Marxist mentality which Sarah got to see up close and personal. It’s the mentality my former boss (who was a refugee from Soviet-era Poland) knew all too well, too. Frankly, any time I talk about the 21st century American fascination with political correctness, refugees from the Marxist countries recognize it instantly: the collective effort to control and dictate what is and is not permissible to say, or to think, or to feel, including who you can and cannot associate with; lest you be hauled before the commissars to be tried for guilt-by-association.

Fear is their weapon.

Brad R. Torgersen
April 12, 2015
Flaming rage nozzles of tolerance
[Solzhenitsyn has written about this too.

This mindset must not be allowed to dominate politics. The body count racked up by this mindset during the 20th century was in the hundreds of millions. We must prevent a repeat performance in the 21st century.

This is why I do Boomershoot.—Joe]

Quote of the day—John Hinderaker

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How can you tell which minorities it is proper to satirize? By whether they are likely to shoot you, apparently. Trudeau spent his career unfairly attacking Republicans, so he never had to worry.

John Hinderaker
April 12, 2015
Punching Down and Shooting Back
[As Glenn Reynolds said, “I keep warning people about this incentive system, and they keep not listening.”—Joe]

Quote of the day—Roberta X

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Don’t kid yourself that you’re in the clear because of your ancestors; it wasn’t just Jews, and the others weren’t all gay or gypsies, either: the politically unpopular got one-way trips, too.  Once a nation starts down that path, each step into evil is easier than the one before.

You don’t have to like politics, but you’ve gotta keep an eye on it.  No matter who you are.

Roberta X
April 15, 2015
Holocaust Remembrance Day
[The German people of the late 1930’s and early 1940’s are best known for their evil behavior but the Russians while Stalin was in power easily eclipsed the German body count. The Chinese killed millions at various times during the 20th Century. The Rwanda genocide wasn’t on the same scale in absolute numbers but may have account for as much as 20% of the population. The examples are incredibly and depressingly numerous.

There is one thing governments, of any type of people, do very well and that is killing people. We have lots of government in this country and it going to require lots of attention until we can get it back down to the originally designed limits. The stakes are incredibly high if it goes totally malignant.

This is Why Boomershoot. It’s next weekend. Be there if you can. You can be part of the solution if things go really bad.—Joe]

Quote of the day—William Kirkland

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Liberals today are wrong to see contemporary issues like gun control and climate change as surfing on an inevitable wave of progress. Rather, these issues are boats piloted by committed activists who steer them forward through a sea of indifference. The Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, with all its triumphs and tragedies, rested on the shoulders of thousands of activists who fought oppression in the streets, in courtrooms and on public buses. It emerged not from the progress of Reconstruction but from the backwardness of Jim Crow.

William Kirkland
April 20, 2015
Kirkland: The progressive lessons of history
[I find it absolutely fascinating that people can advocate gun control and then two sentences later praise the advancement of civil rights. And in this case a civil rights movement which was dramatically assisted by private citizens with guns. And this is by a person who prides himself on his knowledge of history!

How does someone do that? It has to be something like Peterson Syndrome.—Joe]

Your estimated wait time

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My sales tax quarterly filing for Boomershoot stuff is due today. The Idaho State Tax Commission has a new website for E-filing and paying taxes and when I tried to file on Saturday (yes, I procrastinate, it’s where daughter Xenia gets it from, see also here) it wouldn’t let me file. Barb tried calling and got a message saying their hours were Monday through Friday. I tried again this morning and still couldn’t get the button to file like the instructions said would be there.

Six minutes after they opened I called and pressed ‘0’ to speak with someone. The recorded messages said, “Your estimated wait time is four thousand, seven hundred and 60 minutes.”

This is what you get when dealing with monopolies. I can’t wait, but everyone will, for single payer health care.

As I had to take a shower and get to work sometime before midday Thursday I wrote them a letter with my story of woe*, sales numbers, and a check then mailed it on my way to work after I sent them an email saying the check was in the mail.

* It is possible it is my fault. After I had the letter and check sealed up in the envelope I noticed a tiny field on the online form. It was where I expected to have a label saying “ID number” because my tax ID number was just to the right of it. But it said, “Annual”. It’s possible they switched me to filing annually instead of quarterly without me reading carefully enough some letter they sent a few months ago.

But my guess is that the software vendor accidentally converted all the quarterly filing people to annual filing.

 

Quote of the day—Andrew Kohut

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We are at a moment when most Americans believe crime rates are rising and when most believe gun ownership – not gun control – makes people safer.

…

A 2013 Pew Research survey showed that protection is now the top reason gun owners offer for why they choose to own a gun (in 1999, hunting was the top reason). And among the public at large, the latest Gallup survey finds that 63% of Americans now say having a gun in the home makes it a safer place compared with 30% who say it makes a home more dangerous. Fifteen years ago, more said the presence of a gun made a home more dangerous (51%) than safer (35%).

Andrew Kohut
Despite lower crime rates, support for gun rights increases
April 17, 2015
[Principals are important but public opinion is what wins elections and to a great extent judicial rulings. We are now getting nearly everything going our way. We need to politically exterminate the anti-gun people as quickly as we can and make them as socially distasteful as the KKK.

In addition to reasonably hard data like the surveys referenced above I know my workplace has a lot of people quite friendly to gun ownership. And I know one woman who just recently put her profile on Match.com after being “off the market” for several years. She commented to me just last week that many of the men on the site have pictures of themselves with guns. According to her this wasn’t the case even five years ago.

The anti-gun people are headed to the dustbin of history. Help them get there as quickly as we legally can.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Matt Ridley

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The environmental movement has advanced three arguments in recent years for giving up fossil fuels: (1) that we will soon run out of them anyway; (2) that alternative sources of energy will price them out of the marketplace; and (3) that we cannot afford the climate consequences of burning them.

Matt Ridley
March 13, 2015
Fossil Fuels Will Save the World
[There is some really good stuff in the article. If you don’t have a subscription to the Wall Street Journal you can read the article here as well.

There is stuff like:

More than a billion people on the planet have yet to get access to electricity and to experience the leap in living standards that abundant energy brings. This is not just an inconvenience for them: Indoor air pollution from wood fires kills four million people a year. The next time that somebody at a rally against fossil fuels lectures you about her concern for the fate of her grandchildren, show her a picture of an African child dying today from inhaling the dense muck of a smoky fire.

And this point about plants being CO2 starved and grow better with more CO2 which I bring up with nearly everyone that wants to tell me about man caused global warming:

Although the world has certainly warmed since the 19th century, the rate of warming has been slow and erratic. There has been no increase in the frequency or severity of storms or droughts, no acceleration of sea-level rise. Arctic sea ice has decreased, but Antarctic sea ice has increased. At the same time, scientists are agreed that the extra carbon dioxide in the air has contributed to an improvement in crop yields and a roughly 14% increase in the amount of all types of green vegetation on the planet since 1980.

The more sophisticated global-warming/climate-change people want to talk about the positive feedback loops that will create runaway warming. But they give me a blank look when I ask about the negative feedback from the plants consuming more CO2 and more vegetation resulting from the increased CO2.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Hillary Clinton

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I think a total ban, with no exceptions under any circumstances, might be found by the court not to be.

Hillary Clinton
April 16, 2008
Democratic Debate in Philadelphia
[It would appear that Ms. Clinton is of the opinion that as long as there are one or more exceptions under some circumstances then a near total ban on guns would be Constitutional in her view.

This should not be a surprise to anyone. She has explicitly said that people holding the opinion that the have the constitutional to own guns “terrorizes people” and this should not be allowed. She would be the thought police if she could.

She also thinks more people exercising their rights is something to be concerned about.

See also Hillary Clinton on Guns: Not a Big Fan.

Don’t ever let anyone get away with telling you that no one wants to take your guns.

Please don’t let her gain the power to nominate new Supreme Court Justices.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Rosa DeLauro

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There is no reason on earth, other than to kill as many people as possible in as short a time as possible, that anyone needs a gun designed for a battlefield.

Rosa DeLauro
U.S. Representative (D-Conn.)
April 6, 2015
Bill would pay gun owners to hand over assault weapons
[Pictures of Rep. DeLauro from The Hill and the Washington Times:

TheHillDeLauroWashingtonTimesDeLauro

You would think they would get tired of rerunning these same tired arguments. Our standard responses are:

  • It’s a Bill of Rights. Not a Bill of Needs.
  • Since the police have them it must be in their job description to “kill as many people as possible in as short a time as possible”.
  • If you really believe this then you are extremely ignorant and/or lack imagination.

Her ignorance and malice is evident in this part of the article in The Hill:

DeLauro is in favor of stronger guns laws that would completely ban assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition, she emphasized this bill would not force gun owners to turn in their firearms.

“High-capacity ammunition”? And of course she makes it clear this is just step toward her real goal of a complete ban. Don’t ever let anyone get away with telling you that no one wants to take your guns.

Sebastian and most of the commenters over there don’t see a problem for gun owners in this proposed law. Say Uncle just says, “No, thanks.” TriggerFinger doesn’t seem much concerned about it either.

But I would worry about this giving the Feds a list of people that are verified previous owners of “assault weapons”. One might imagine, in her mind, these are the people that need to “dealt with”. The administration has already demonstrated they use the IRS as a weapon. So what better way to get a list of your enemies than pay them a little something to identify themselves to your “weapon”, the IRS?

It’s a variation of the Lenin quote, “The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.”—Joe]

Fail, fail, fail, fail…

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I’m writing this after just getting off the phone with Great Big Gun Accessory Company That Everyone Knows. I’m not pissed, just a little disgusted. I got a 130 dollar tool made by that company, from an Idaho retailer, and the tool is defective.

I called the retailer about it immediately. After some vacillation (first fail) and some obvious back-and-forth amongst the person who took my call and someone else (second fail) they referred me to the manufacturer (third fail).

I then called Great Big Gun Accessory Company That Everyone Knows and got put on hold by a robot. OK; that’s sort of tolerable, as it’s a busy time of day for a busy company in a very busy industry. After only two or three minutes I got a person. I got directly to the point; I had ordered this tool and it has some bad threads.

She actually muttered under her breath at me, as though she’d been robbed few minutes ago and I had just threatened her for her wallet; “Oh, good God…” (fourth fail). She then had to put me on hold (fifth fail) to talk to someone else (sixth fail) after which she went on and on in her Eeyore/Marvin the Paranoid Android tone, (seventh fail) about oh, woe is us; we’re juuust swamped with customer service… (eighth fail) and that she’d take my name and number and someone would call me back, maybe today but probably tomorrow (ninth fail).

There’s a point to all of this, mind you. This isn’t so I can vent my frustration– I’m not frustrated. I got this tool on a lark, because I thought it would be something fun to try. Well, all the fun has been drained right out, but it’s not frustrating in any way because I really have no “need” for this item than can’t be served with tools I already have.

The point is; if you’re in business and you have a customer who has a problem, AND you’re capable of solving said problem, then DO IT, RIGHT NOW. Your customers will absolutely love you for it, and your service will have been so unusually simple and easy that they’ll tell everyone they know about you. That two or three dollars, to fifty or 60 dollars it actually cost you to SOLE THE CUSTOMER’S PROBLEM STRAIGHT AWAY will have been your cheapest and most effective advertizing ever!

The retailer could have solved my problem immediately, without even thinking about it, if they’d simply send me a new part. “No problem, Mister Keeney; we’ll get you another part out to you right now, and you’ll have it tomorrow. Sorry about the inconvenience.”

That is our goal, but we don’t always reach it (for one thing, there is internal disagreement on its merits, if you can believe that). It is an ideal, which will rarely be met in all cases, but it is none the less THE ideal.

This is so very simple, and so very obvious, that practically all businesses fail to consider it. The few who do will rule the retail world. All the rest will have every excuse in the book why they don’t do it, and they’ll all be very reasonable and thoroughly justifiable excuses.

If you HAVE THE ABILITY to solve the customer’s problem RIGHT NOW, that is an OPPORTUNUTY for you and your company. Don’t miss the opportunity.

Meanwhile, after talking to two people, at two companies, each of whom had the ability to solve my problem right then and there, each of whom had to talk to at least one other person who also had the ability to solve my problem right then and there, I’ll be waiting for a phone call (not a replacement part, mind you, not even a promise of a replacement part, but a phone call) that may or may not come in the next 24 hours.

The time it took either one of the two people I spoke with to hum and haw and consult with peers and finally get around to telling me to call somewhere else or to take my name and number for someone else to get back to me, THEY COULD HAVE SOLVED MY PROBLEM RIGHT THEN AND THERE, and so you see, it would be far MORE EFFICIENT just for them, which would free up more customer service representatives to help more customers.

This isn’t rocket surgery.

And then there were…five?

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Kansas Gubnuh signs “constitutional” carry bill.

There’s also talk about lowering the legal age for open carry to eighteen, some citing the fact that eighteen year-olds can fight for their country. Well, yeah. I havent seen any age restrictions in the second amendment, but maybe I didn’t look close enough. That sort of thing (for those under 18) should be up to the parents, and Uncle Sam is not my daddy or my kids’ daddy.

ETA: If we didn’t think she’d be arrested for it, my daughter would be packing right now. Instead we’re forced to decide whether we’re more concerned about her being judged by twelve (actually since she’s under age it would be judged by one) or carried by six.

“I believe we can lower the age to 18 at some point in the future. I think after everybody sees that there are not going to be any of the dire predictions coming true, and they relax a little bit, then we can talk about that.”

OK; why do some people need to be “relaxed” before others can exercise their natural human rights? Where in the constitution does it say that? There must be one hell of a long list of qualifiers that I haven’t seen yet.

I’ve mentioned “control by freakout” before, and this is an excellent example – media get people all hyped up and “un-relaxed” and our rights are violated as a result. I must say it is a brilliant tactic.

Quote of the day—Glenn Reynolds

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If it weren’t for double standards the left would have no standards at all.

Glenn Reynolds
December 24, 2014
CHARLES C.W. COOKE: The Left’s “Climate Of Hate” Hypocrisy.
[There is more than a little truth in this even if it really should be “no principles at all”. But then the humor wouldn’t work.—Joe]

‘Well, you know what I meant!’

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Actually no; quite often I don’t, so why not just come right out and say it clearly and directly?

From Vanderboegh. I like it. It illustrates exactly the sort of ridiculous things I picture in my mind when most people speak, about anything.

I was listening to a caller on a talk show this morning, for example, who went on and on and, so far as I could gather, never said anything. The host caught on right away and after several unsuccessful attempts to prompt the guy into saying something he ended the call. A lot of words were coming out of the caller’s mouth, amounting to nothing.

That little anecdote describes much of my life. Many times I’ve sat through a whole hour of some video someone or other thought I should totally see, searching for one little bit of clear meaning (anything that didn’t require some inference or projection or other) to end up with nothing.

Quote of the day—Eliot Engel

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This legislation is not stopping hunters from continuing to participate in legal sporting activities. What it does is make the rational point that “green tips” are not necessary for those purposes. While some argue that these bullets have not been used to kill cops, I say why should we wait around for that day to come?

Eliot Engel
U.S. Representative
March 27, 2015
View: Deer don’t wear Kevlar
[While some may argue that Engel should be gagged, removed from office, and prosecuted before he says something even more stupid and attempts more criminal acts I say we can only prosecute him for acts committed. The principles our country is based upon say that, yes, we do need to “wait around for that day to come”. To do otherwise is called prior restraint and is, rightfully so, illegal.—Joe]

Quote of the day – me

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“I don’t see it like that. The way I figure, the various anti libertarian government entities are violating my rights three times per day, and more. Don’t tell me I’M the felon, see. That puts the attention in the wrong place.”

Seen over at Uncle’s.

Quote of the day—Robert J. Avrech

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Obama and the EUs policy of appeasement is nothing less than submission to Islam.

Until the West can bring itself to identify Islamism as the enemy, the blood soaked harvest of death will continue.

Robert J. Avrech
January 7, 20154
IslamoNazi Terror in Paris With Obama Flashback That Helps Set The Bloody Scene
[I have nothing to add.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Robert Tracinski

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If the whole focus of your life is on getting everybody else to agree with you on every detail of your politics and adopt your plans for a perfect society, then you’re setting yourself up to be at war with most of the human race most of the time.

Which means an awful lot for the Angry Left to get angry about.

Robert Tracinski
March 26, 2015
Why Is the Angry Left So Angry?
[While this is a good start I think there is more to it than this.

Having spent a lot of years dealing with someone and their family who were angry much of the time I came to realize that anger was the primary means of communication for them. If you didn’t get angry they would not pay attention to what you were saying. I remember an instance where I coolly and calmly told this person, probably a dozen times over the course of a few days, that what they were doing was hazardous. They would agree, say they wouldn’t do it again, then, frequently, within a few seconds do it again.

Eventually I lost my cool. I yelled. They apologized, said they wouldn’t do it again, and they didn’t. Within a year I found myself getting angry with them with almost no provocation. They taught me to get angry to communicate. I finally realized this and starting thinking about what was going on. I then thought back to the first time I met this persons family. I was at the front door and the living room was chaos. Various people yelling at the same time and no one appeared to be listening to anyone else. My friend, happy to see me, walked through the chaos with a big smile. They were oblivious to the yelling and anger of everyone else.

The entire family communicated via emotions. The actual words weren’t that important. There were many times I would see different people in a conversation were talking about entirely different things but didn’t realize the other party to the conversation was “on a different channel”. Other times what they said was self-contradictory. It didn’t even make sense. Pointing this out to them was interesting. They would laugh and say it didn’t matter. I became sort of a joke to them because I couldn’t understand them. They made no sense to me but they were entirely happy with their babbling to each other and didn’t see what why I had a problem with it. “Oh, Joe, we’re just talking.” is an actual quote which came in response to my confusion about something not making sense.

When the topic of discussion was something of significant importance and it involved me I would sometimes insist they pay attention to reality and make sense. This would result in a fight. The claim was that “I had to get my own way.” But it wasn’t my way. It was forcing them to be congruent with reality and the laws of physics.

We see similar things with the left/progressives. They think they have accomplished something by holding a candlelight vigil. They demand a higher minimum wage and higher employment rate no matter how many time it is demonstrated you can’t have both for very long. They demand enhanced background checks because President Regan, Jim Brady, and a bunch of kids were shot—even though the shooters did, or would have, passed the proposed background check.

They use “hash tag diplomacy” and declare victory when bullets are the only viable option to effect change. They throw “reasons” like, “stand your ground”, and “war on women” around because they know our society requires at least some lip service be given to “reasons” even if the facts don’t support their claims. They don’t understand reason and resort to making reasoning noises. They cannot even tell you how to determine truth from falsity.

Emotion is their currency and their reality. If they feel something is true then, for them, it is true. This was driven home to me when I extreme frustration I once demanded, “How do you determine truth from falsity?” They calmly told me, “It depends on how I feel.”

I have been repeatedly told and after many decades of trying everything else I’m beginning to believe the proper approach to these people is to not get emotional. That is their “battle space”. When you get emotional it makes them happy because you become one of them. Then any emotion they care to use is justified because you are already emotional. Insist they be rational. They can’t. They only have emotions. Point out their logical and factual errors and refuse to accept their emotions as currency.

We do not share a common basis for communication or for determining reality. We share the same planet but they are in a different world. So of course they get angry with us. In their minds we are aliens in a turf war with them.—Joe]