Quote of the day—Emily Miller

The only way a mandatory check would work would be if the government could track every one of the 300 million firearms in the United States. And then the criminals would ask permission before buying them.

Emily Miller
Emily Gets Her Gun: …But Obama Wants to Take Yours
[300 million guns? We have computers that could do that, right? They built a computer system that signed people up for Obamacare so they should be able to do that for gun owners, right?*

These would be necessary, but not sufficient, conditions for “universal background check to work”.

They would also have to shut off the smugglers. You should assume this would work about as well as the War on Drugs has worked.

They would also have to prevent all the 3-D printers from making new guns. You should assume this would work about as well as the peeing into the wind.—Joe]


*In fact the Canadian gun registry (disbanded after costing 2 billion rather than 2 million) was built by the same people that wrote the Obamacare website.

There’s some truth in it

BlondeObamacare

Via email from JoeyD.

Let’s look to the UK for healthcare

The UK has government run health care. That’s been working out well hasn’t it?

Oh! Maybe not:

A plan to create the world’s largest single civilian computer system linking all parts of the National Health Service is to be abandoned by the Government after running up billions of pounds in bills. Ministers are expected to announce next month that they are scrapping a central part of the much-delayed and hugely controversial 10-year National Programme for IT.

“The department has been unable to demonstrate what benefits have been delivered from the £2.7bn spent on the project so far,” Margaret Hodge, chair of the PAC, said. “It should now urgently review whether it is worth continuing with the remaining elements of the care-records system. The £4.3bn which the department expects to spend might be better used to buy systems that are proven to work, that are good value for money and which deliver demonstrable benefits to the NHS.” A further £4.4bn was expected to be spent on other areas of the vast IT project.

H/T to Adam Baldwin.

What I don’t think most people realize is that software doesn’t scale in a linear fashion from small projects to large. I can write, debug, a deliver a program to you that prints out, “Hello world!” in a minute or two. I can easily do it in five lines of code. That figures out to about 1200 lines per day* if I were to spend the entire day coding at that rate.

Yet when you look at the number of lines of code delivered on real projects it’s about 10 lines per day per developer. On a project as large as an operating system like Windows it’s much lower.

The problem is that planning, complexity, documentation, testing effort, and difficulty goes up much faster than the number of lines of code increase. You can pump out the code at a fast rate but it’s not something that is going to work well. It will be very fragile. You can find test cases where it will work correctly but as soon as you do something a little unusual or the system is under load and the timing on something changes you can end up extremely difficult to find bugs.

As the size of the project goes up communication between teams become a problem. With a poor design a small change in one part of the system affects many other parts. Communicating and coordinating this occupies increasing amounts of time and care. A change occurred “somewhere” in the system and your code stopped working. It can take an hour or a week to find the problem and get it fixed so you can continue to add features. Even worse are “build breaks”. This is when someone changed something and you can’t even build the software into something that runs so it can be tested. This can mean every single programmer on the entire project is at a standstill. As you might imagine these are very high priority events and you can have people baying for your blood. People take them very seriously and the consequences are high but they still happen.

A former roommate working on Windows NT back in about ‘99 told me she had a bug fix ready for check-in but wasn’t allowed to for months because of concerns that it was a change that could affect other people.

How many lines of code are in the Obamacare system? I don’t know for certain but there are reports that it contains 500 million lines needs to have 5 million lines rewritten. Do the arithmetic to arrive at your estimate of how many people working for how many days is required before it will be “fixed”. My best guess is that the politicians had the U.K. model in mind and that’s what they will get (see above).

Everything I see about the Obamacare web site indicates it was thrown together by someone who didn’t know what they were doing. There are very few companies that have been able to write very large complex systems successfully. Microsoft and Google come to mind. The contractor for Obamacare isn’t on anyone’s list of successfully large scale system developers.

They claim it will be working by the end of November? Did they say which November?


* Yes. Lines of code per day is a poor way of measuring productivity. For example one can be very productive while reducing the number of lines of code in a program. Yet, it is good enough for many uses and can illustrate valid points with serious error.

It’s for your own good

Sometimes people just don’t get it unless you can present the information to them in the proper format for their brains to grasp it.

Does the following help?

From @State_Control:

CapitalistsSocialists

What if it were a business that told you to buy their product or they would send men with guns to collect the money anyway? It’s for your own good they tell you. What would you do?

Why should it be any different if it is Obama doing the same thing?

Quote of the day—Robert J. Avrech

We return to Stalin’s omelet. Over and over, Democrats calmly and cruelly explain that only five percent of Americans will be booted off their insurance plans. And those insurance plans were substandard anyway.

First of all, five percent translates into roughly 16 million Americans. Each person whose insurance is terminated because Obama does not like his or her choice is a story of fear and panic and possible financial ruin. Further, does anyone even believe the Democrat apologists’ quote of five percent? That number will grow and grow as ObamaCare tightens its death grip.

The “only five percent” line of reasoning tells us a great deal about the utopian vision of Democrats. The individual does not count. Democrats claim to see the larger picture. But they see only a collective, a manageable herd. And once again, they know better. Forget that millions of Americans voluntarily entered into contracts they deemed right for themselves and their families. This counts for nothing to the Democrat political class. They are experts. They attended Ivy League schools. This makes the professional political class — overeducated, inbred elitists — better qualified to make decisions for us, the American people, that are truly about matters of life and death.

The core of American values is liberty, not government.

Robert J. Avrech
October 30, 2013
The Democrat-ObamaCare Purges
[You should never forget that “only five percent” line. Communists have used identical reasoning in their purges. The good of the whole is more important than the good of the individual. And if they have to “break a few eggs” they really don’t see what the problem is.

The differences between us cannot be resolved with a compromise. If they liquidate 1% or 10% it does not matter to me. They would still be committed mass evil and deserve whatever the “Nuremburg Courts” rule.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Roberta X

Lining up armed men in uniform to say “Verboten!” to members of the public wanting to pay their respects at a revered monument (one made of hard, hard rock and solidly anchored) is utterly necessary to the continued functioning of our great republic.

Okay, then.  But they’re gonna need taller, shiner boots.

Roberta X
October 6, 2013
Fed.Gov Has Shut Down The Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall?
[I think I will start stealing that last line even though it’s not the shiny boots that make the difference. It’s the guns that back them up.

What they don’t seem to understand is that we have guns too. Not only guns but numbers. Numbers of people and numbers of guns that outnumber their guns and numbers. Please stop pushing because demonstrating the guns or the numbers will be very unpleasant for all involved.—Joe]

Chilling effect

New York City recently had its “stop and frisk” policy struck down as violating the Fourth Amendment. The city has not implemented a “monitor” of the program as the court ordered. Now New York City senior attorney Celeste Koeleveld says Judge Scheindlin’s order has had a “chilling effect” on police officers.

And her point is? Does she have a concern about the “chilling effect” of the Fifth Amendment not allowing police officers to torture suspects for confessions? How about the “chilling effect” of the Eight Amendment on Judges because of the prohibition against cruel and unusual punishments in the Eighth Amendment?

The entire intent of the Bill of Rights was and is to have a “chilling effect” on the power of government. In U.S. law the phrase “chilling effect” refers to the stifling effect that vague or excessively broad laws may have on legitimate … activity. A “chilling effect” only exists when government passes laws that private citizens have to obey. Not when government is overstepping bounds that have been in place for hundreds of years. It appears Koeleveld either does not understand government is a servant of the people or she wishes to change the relationship.

One big happy family

This ought to make you feel all warm and fuzzy.

The same company that made the healthcare.gov website (on a no-bid contract, naturally) is the same one that created the Canadian gun registry that cost roughly twenty times the original estimate and got scrapped a decade later after being found to be both useless and seriously defective.

But they want us to just trust their good intentions, ’cause they are so smart and transparent. Yeah, riiiight.

If a tree falls in the forest

Yesterday, in reference to spying on U.S. citizens, U.S. Congressional Representative Mike Rogers and Intelligence Committee Chair insisted:

You can’t have your privacy violated if you don’t know your privacy is violated.

I can only conclude he would also insist that he hadn’t actually stolen cash from your wallet if you didn’t know it had been taken. Or that a teenage girl hadn’t been raped if she had been drugged and didn’t know what happened.

Someone should tell him that must also mean his privacy wasn’t violated if someone made of video of him having sex with a sheep and didn’t tell anyone.

Quote of the day—Daniel Greenfield

Liberal supersessionists claim to be worried about conservative secessionists when they should be far more worried about conservative supersessionists. The consensus we all live by is a fragile thing. It is being torn apart by the radical left and once it is destroyed, it will not bind the right, in the same way that it no longer binds the left.

And then the true conflict will begin.

Daniel Greenfield
The Supersessionists of the Liberal Confederacy
October 20, 2013
[H/T Kevin Baker.

Every paragraph in this awesome post could qualify as a quote of the day or week or even month. It is very, very good.—Joe]

The government lies and people die

FACT: Nothing in #Obamacare forces people out of their health plans. No change is required unless insurance companies change existing plans.

— Valerie Jarrett* (@vj44) October 29, 2013

I asked a friend who is in the health insurance business if the above was true. I knew the answer but thought maybe there was some narrow definition of the word “is” or maybe “in” that would make it something other than a false statement.

The response was a laugh and, “No. That’s what I have been doing for the last several weeks. We have been preparing notification letters for individuals telling them their insurance plans are no longer available. Plans they were perfectly happy with and could afford cannot be offered anymore because of ACA.”

I was a bit surprised by the laugh and the almost cheerful mood. They explained, “It’s what we deal with everyday. They constantly say things that are not true and it has gotten to the point where we joke and laugh about it.”

I shouldn’t have been surprised, it’s obvious in hindsight, but they also told me, “We can’t say anything about it though. If we do we will be audited and harassed by the regulators. It’s just not worth it. You don’t say anything bad about the regulators.”

They also told me, “It’s going to be sad. Due to “health care reform” a lot of people that used to have insurance will no longer be covered.

I could say a lot, lot more…if it weren’t for the fear of the government taking revenge upon someone for exposing their lies.

A single person losing their health insurance is a tragedy. 16 million is a statistic. https://t.co/0hgOrYnSEZ

— Mark Hemingway (@Heminator) October 29, 2013

If you don’t recognize the form of the quote above; it’s from Stalin who probably actually said, “’When one man dies it is a tragedy, when thousands die it’s statistics’”.

It’s appropriate to bring Stalin into the discussion for more than just this one reason. Read this book: How Do You Kill 11 Million People?: Why the Truth Matters More Than You Think. It’s a very quick read. There is one thing that government have proved, again and again, that they are very, very good at. It’s killing people. Particularly their own people. One of the crucial links in accomplishing this is lying to their victims and to those who carry out the orders to arrest, transport, and jail them. The lie could be a black as “Arbeit macht frei” or telling the friends and relatives of those executed in the basements of the local police station in the USSR that the ‘counter-revolutionaries and traitors’ had been sent to labor and reeducation camps. It could be the lie that the crowded rail cars were carrying everyone to a place where they would have good homes, schools, and jobs. Or it could be what many would consider a white lie of a campaign promise to provide universal health care. Never mind the “health care panels” administrating the “care” would decide who were treated and who were euthanized.

Obamacare is now being recognized for the disaster so many people knew it would be. What comes next is that the failure will and is being blamed on political obstructionists. This is a lie. The system, as I explained in my previous post, cannot work because of the principles involved. But some are calling for Republicans and the Tea Party to be tried for treason.

What happens next? There is a good chance that the democrats will lose seats in the next election because of it. But that isn’t the only possible outcome. Stalin and the Khmer Rouge regimes handled the failures and criticism of their policies in a different manner without giving up control. And many in the U.S. media approved with rationalizations such as (H/T to Alan Gura):

The new government of Cambodia may have to resort to strong measures against a few to gain democratic socialism for all Cambodians. And we support the United Front in the pursuit of its presently stated goals.

The current administration has consistently lied about gun control, operation Fast and Furious, the massive spying, stopping the wars, closing Guantanamo Bay, Benghazi, jobs creation, and health care reform. But the really scary stuff is what they have told the truth about. They said they would be willing to use drones to kill U.S. citizens on American soil.

Lying is what comes naturally to them. They tell lies the people want to believe. But once you have told enough lies your brain changes and you have trouble telling or even knowing the truth.

History has some very brutal examples of what happens when government policy is to lie. We must not let that happen here.


* Valerie Jarrett (@vj44) is an official Whitehouse twitter account.

Quote of the day—Mike Konczal

It’s important we get more sophisticated analysis of what has gone wrong with the ACA rollout to better appreciate how utilizing “the market” can be far more cumbersome and inefficient than the government just doing things itself.

Mike Konczal
October 23, 2013
What Kind of Problem is the ACA Rollout for Liberalism?
[In other words, “Our government program is such a disaster that we need a new and expanded government program to fix it.”

Monopolies are almost always a bad thing. The lack of choice creates a situation where inferior and expensive products do not get improved or replaced. Konczcal and hard-core liberals want government monopolies. The soft-core liberals want to regulate the market.

What Konczal doesn’t understand is that he, politicians, and government in general, do not have the domain knowledge to solve most problems. This includes regulating the solution providers. When I read the instruction manual for my car and it says to use a particular grade of gasoline and change the oil every 5000 miles I follow their recommendations. They know their car far better than I do. Even though I am a software engineer when a software package says it requires X megabytes of RAM Y megabytes of disk space I follow their recommendations because they know their software far better than I do.

The advocate for more government might say, “We will bring in experts and/or we will become experts.” This doesn’t work. I worked in a government lab for three years. I remember sitting in a meeting discussing how to get more research contracts. One guy said, “What we have is the ability to become experts on anything within a couple of weeks.” He was serious. I felt the blood drain out of my face. I had been working with him for over two years and I had not yet discovered anything that I considered him an expert on. They spent several years and millions of dollars coming up with a software testing and quality program for the software being developed at the lab. What they came up with was something that the industry had left behind a decade or two previously (the “waterfall model”).

The reason government cannot acquire the expertise is because they are a monopoly and expertise is like a product. It must constantly be improved and updated to remain relevant. And without the marketplace pressure it will stagnant and become obsolete.

Because of this lack of domain knowledge and the inherent inferiority of monopoly products government “doing it itself” will always be the wrong answer to a problem that doesn’t involve the use of force.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Larry Correia

The Tea Party is made up of people who can do math.

Larry  Correia
October 17, 2013
The scientific Tea Party
[Citation here.

Of course they can do math! The Tea Party was a response to Obama Care and the massive government spending. And you probably didn’t even need to “do math” to figure that out. Mere arithmetic should be more than adequate for the task. But those on the left had to think of the Tea Party as inferiors in order to justify the condescending attacks. Apparently those on the left can’t handle or don’t want to be bothered with the arithmetic.

I don’t remember where I saw it but I remember reading many years ago something to the effect that politics was much too important to be subject to the impersonal rigors of mere numbers. Whoever said seemed to believe they had expressed some great truth. My thought was, and is, that numbers are a measure of reality. If you can’t express something in numbers then it’s just opinion. There is, of course, no guarantee that any given set of numbers reflect reality but if you can’t or won’t express something in number then it’s a pretty sure bet that it’s an opinion without basis in reality. And if your opinions don’t have any basis in reality you have no, zero, nada, zilch, business being involved in politics.

But that’s not the political system works. Unfortunately reality can only be ignored for so long. If reality could be ignored then something like this would make sense (H/T to ubu52 who said, “It’s total Fail to look at this as a math problem”). Where ‘this’ is the deficit. I was tempted to respond but I’m not sure the intended recipient would (or could) understand. If the deficit isn’t a math (or arithmetic) problem and the amount of spending being greater than revenue isn’t a valid concern then why not just print enough money that everyone in the country (or heck, why not the entire world?) receives $100 an hour for 40 hours per week “following their dreams” or whatever? Everyone could retire and live happily ever after. We could forget the debate over Obamacare because everyone could afford to pay for their own health care or buy the insurance of their choice, right? Everyone could afford to pay for their own education or not bother with it, right?

Numbers matter. If you can’t do arithmetic then you are going have some serious problems with math. And math is what bonds us to reality. If you can’t do math you don’t really understand reality. And that Tea Party members understand math and science better than those that can’t do simple arithmetic is no surprise.

What the Yale Professor who “discovered” what was blindly obvious to me and I would have thought most people didn’t conclude, which is also obvious to me, is that those who denigrate the Tea Party are those who truly deserve the condescending insults, jeers, and casual dismissal. And we have the numbers to back that up.—Joe]

No More!

I got this circular from some GOP Senate twerp;

“Lyle,

In 8 days, we’ll hit an important fundraising deadline. How much we raise will have a big impact on whether or not our candidates are set up to succeed, so every dollar counts. I’m so committed to helping us reach our goal that I’ll match 3 times your donation.

As the last few weeks have made crystal clear, our country desperately needs new leadership in the Senate. It’s plain to see that Harry Reid just isn’t up to the job. Under his tenure, the Senate has become a dysfunctional disaster — plagued by political games, partisan stalemate, and constant finger pointing. We can break the mold, but we’ll need your help to do it.

With 7 seats up in states Mitt Romney won, combined with the Democrats’ failure to recruit competitive candidates, the political map shows we can win in 2014. Now we’re counting on you to help us make it happen.

Harry Reid and his left-wing special-interest groups are already raising millions to protect their majority. They’re desperately doing everything they can to out raise us. We simply can’t allow that to happen.

Will you please contribute $100, $50, $25, or whatever you can afford today and help us take back the Senate?

Again, donate before the deadline and I’ll personally make sure your donation is triple matched.

Thanks,

Senator Roy Blunt”

To which I replied;

“Roy,

This plea of yours reads like a joke. In fact, the GOP has become a dysfunctional disaster — plagued by political games, ideological hypocrisy, and constant finger pointing. I’ve been saying for years that we must first defeat the GOP before we can defeat the Progressive movement and the Democrats, that the GOP has been a major obstacle standing in our way.

That fact is, right now, more blatantly obvious than ever. I will be working to convince as many people as possible that it is time to defund the GOP, and stop being fooled by the pseudo conservative pap that is being fed to us as a ruse. I’m sick and tired, and I am DONE having my own money used against the principles I hold dear by the very people who have pledged to uphold them!

After the despicable performance of the Republican senate leadership these last weeks, I am insulted by your request for money. You apparently take your voter base for gibbering fools, but to some extent I can understand your confusion being that against our better judgment we have supported you so much in the past. Well, Sir; No More!

Lyle”

I don’t know Roy Blunt from Adam, and I don’t care to know him or any other GOP hack.

If you want to throw money at the problem, don;t send it to the GOP and don;t send it to any candidate– some of that money always goes to the Party even if you gave it to a candidate. Send it to Freedom Works or some other group you know for a fact doesn’t play games. At this stage I think it’s better to send no money rather than risk one dime going to game-players, “the wizards of smart” and Progressives.

Besides; money is far from being that which defines victory. There may even be an inverse relationship. If the GOP dorks want to win, all they really have to do is stand up for the principles we elect them to stand up for. In that case they wouldn’t need any money. We’d be able to see them as people we want representing us, just by their actions. It’s free.

Don’t fall for the crap anymore. We’ve tried it too many times and seen it thrown back in our faces already. The enemy (The Bloods) of my enemy (The Crips) is NOT my friend! Same goes for the Dems and Reps. I think we have yet to learn this lesson properly.

Update, 10/23/13; My reply to Senator Twerp at the NRSC was bounced, so they want your money but they don’t want to be bothered hearing from you. It seems to me I’ve gotten replies through to them in the past. I’ll look for his own e-mail address and get this to him that way.

Quote of the day—Jon Gabriel

Math doesn’t care about fairness or good intentions. Spending vastly more than you have isn’t good when done by a Republican or a Democrat. Two plus two doesn’t equal 33.2317 after you factor in a secret “Social Justice” multiplier.

debtchartfw2

Jon Gabriel
October 21, 2013
The Reality of America’s Finances
[H/T to son James for showing me this.

Sometimes I think that part of the problem is that people think that math, even arithmetic, is subject to opinion. People will just proclaim, “I don’t agree with that”, and they believe they have refuted your numbers.

In many ways politics is faith based. The democrats have a tendency towards being economic tyrants and the republicans have a tendency towards being moral tyrants. Neither really understand principles. Or if they do their principles are to destroy the principles they can and ignore the rest.

With their policies having no principles it should come as no surprise they also believe that numbers are subject to whatever whim they have this election cycle. Numbers are just something you use to make your opinion appear valid. And everyone’s opinion is just as good as anyone else’s so that must mean that everyone’s numbers are just as good as anyone else’s.

Principles? They don’t even understand the concept of a principle.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Sarah Brady

The House passage of our bill is a victory for this country! Common sense wins out. I’m just so thrilled and excited. The sale of guns must stop. Halfway measures are not enough.

Sarah Brady
July 1, 1988
[The Brady Campaign has been using the phrase “common sense” for a long time. It’s good of her to confirm what we all suspected they meant by that.—Joe]

Why Republicans are not cowards

You must have principles before you can fail to stand up for them.

Quote of the day—Carl Stevenson

We should have a very long memory of whom in power abuses us and who followed the order to do the abuse.

Perhaps if tyrants’ heads (and also their enablers) were still routinely mounted on sticks alongside the highway, for both a punishment and a reminder of their misdeeds, we wouldn’t have to endure such foolish people as them and the evil they set upon us.

Carl Stevenson
October 11, 2013
Comment to Park Service Milgram Failure.
[It would take a rather long and difficult research project to verify but my hypothesis is that the tyrants have mounted more heads along the roads “for both a punishment and a reminder” than the oppressed have mounted of the tyrants, their underlings, and their enablers.

Regardless of the truth or falsity of my hypothesis I don’t know if this is a good thing or a bad thing. If the tyrants mounted most of the heads then that would remind people of the hazards of letting tyrants gain power. If the victims mounted the most heads then that remind tyrants the hazards of their occupation.

I have been thinking about this sort of thing recently. The outrage of the victims that comes from extended oppression can lead to excessive killing and even genocide. Oppressors everywhere should be aware of this before they chose such a career path.

Think of the French Revolution or the genocide in Rwanda. To a certain extent “they had it coming” but I think society is better served when killing, even of evil tyrants, is done parsimoniously in a deliberate and carefully reasoned manner rather than en masse.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Frederick Douglas

The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all absorbing, and for the time being putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.

This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. In the light of these ideas, Negroes will be hunted at the North, and held and flogged at the South so long as they submit to those devilish outrages, and make no resistance, either moral or physical. Men may not get all they pay for in this world; but they must certainly pay for all they get. If we ever get free from the oppressions and wrongs heaped upon us, we must pay for their removal. We must do this by labor, by suffering, by sacrifice, and if needs be, by our lives and the lives of others.

Frederick Douglas
From here.
[In Great Thoughts by George Seldes a portion of this quote was attributed to a March 30, 1849 letter to Gerrit Smith. But I found that letter in the papers of Douglass and it says nothing even related. I have been unable to find the original date and context of this quote even though portions of it are widely quoted.

I especially like the sentence “Men may not get all they pay for in this world; but they must certainly pay for all they get.” One could make the claim that the entire basis for the Second Amendment is to increase the cost for oppression. It may be that it cannot fully prevent it but it can dramatically increase the cost. And those that would oppress us, even if they may be able to succeed, must be forced to pay a cost. If they do not pay then there is no limit to the oppression they will inflict.

The Colorado Senators who lost their seats in the recall elections because of their oppressive gun control laws and arrogance is a lesson to those who believe oppression is cost free. If they win a battle then make them pay a heavy price.

H/T to Carl Stevenson for his comment which included part of this quote.—Joe]

Hunting with suppressors?

Perusing the WA  hunting regs, I see nothing at all about using suppressors. In the part about Prohibited Hunting Methods it talks about caliber, crossbows, shooting across roads, etc. But nary a word can I see about suppressors. Is it legal? Anyone know for sure?