Category Archives: Quote of the Day

Quote of the day—Dr. Tim Ball

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There are several misconceptions about CO2, most created because proponents tried to prove the hypothesis rather than the normal scientific practice of disproof.

Dr. Tim Ball
November 9, 2011
Whether It Is Warming or Climate Change, It Cannot be the CO2.
[There is lots of other interesting data in this post. As Ry summarized when telling me about this, “North America and Europe are net absorbers of CO2. South America and Africa are net producers. And it’s all due to natural causes. Human CO2 production is in the noise of measurement error of the natural sources.”

Beyond the point the CO2/global-warming/climate-change fraud I wanted to point out that the “normal scientific practice of disproof” is what has been tripping up the anti-gun people. Their hypothesis that gun control will decrease crime is so easy to disprove that they expose themselves as a religious faith. Their deeply held beliefs persist in the absence of and in despite of evidence. I have no problem with them exercising their First Amendment rights to exercise the the religion of their choice but they do not have the right, nor should they have the power, to force others to worship the same god(s) they do.

If you only need a couple of talking point so to put them in their place point out that since the gun ban in Washington D.C. was thrown out the number of murders (the murder rate would be lower still) has dropped to the lowest in 46 years. Since the gun ban in Chicago was overthrown the number of murders is the lowest in at least 20 years. The gun bans reduce crime hypothesis cannot survive exposure to the normal scientific practice of disproof. This has been well known since at least the mid-1980s when Rossi and Wright published their book.

The Brady Campaign, The Violence Policy Center, and the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence are nothing more than fading religious cults whose beliefs have killed tens of thousands of people and put millions of lives at risk. They are no more credible and should be given no more political voice than a cult advocating castration to reach an alien spacecraft.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Jeffery D. Sachs

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The new progressive era will need a fresh and gutsy generation of candidates to seek election victories not through wealthy campaign financiers but through free social media. A new generation of politicians will prove that they can win on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and blog sites, rather than with corporate-financed TV ads. By lowering the cost of political campaigning, the free social media can liberate Washington from the current state of endemic corruption.

…

Those who think that the cold weather will end the protests should think again. A new generation of leaders is just getting started. The new progressive age has begun.

Jeffery D. Sachs
Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University
November 13, 2011
The New Progressive Movement
[As SebastianSH said, “This is a lot of crap.” First off, our current economic situation is not due to insufficient “progressive politics” (actually Marxism is very old and hence regressive, Libertarianism would better be called “progressive” and/or “liberal” but left-speak requires that words be redefined to suit their purposes). It is the result of progressive politics.

Second, “social media” and the Internet in general tends shine the light of truth and the progressive rats and sidewalk scum wither in that light.

Third, the corruption in Washington is because Washington has the power to pick winners and losers. As long as the power exists there will be people and companies who find it necessary to see that power is exercised in their favor or at least not used against them. It will only be by the elimination of that power, as the Constitution was intended and written, that the corruption will fade.

What Jeffery D. Sachs advocates will only make the problems worse. Just read New Deal or Raw Deal?: How FDR’s Economic Legacy Has Damaged America to get a clue. But even if given motivation with a clue-by-four Sachs will probably always remain clueless.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Jeff Knox

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The emperor truly has no clothes in the gun control debate and the more that is pointed out, the more people will see the truth.

Jeff Knox
July-August 2011, Volume 8, Issue 4 The Hard Corps Knox Report
[I think this was a critical item in turning the tide in the mid and late 1990’s. The Internet made getting the point out about the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the anti-gun movement easier and overcame the MSM bias. It’s like that famous Hunter S. Thompson quote, “With the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark – that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”—Joe]

Quote of the day—Andrew Rosenthal

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I want to be clear: the New York Times editorial board does not oppose gun ownership. We believe the Second Amendment confers a communal right on Americans to own guns – not an individual one. But that’s actually a smaller point than you might think. All we really want are sensible restrictions based on public safety and common sense. I wrote about our position in April, 2009 on our website. You can read it there, but I’ll summarize it here.

Go ahead, buy a gun. Use it to hunt, for target practice, in a collection, or in case you need to defend your home. Just register it and submit to a background check. If you live in a city, then your political leaders have the right to restrict ownership of handguns. In cities, they tend to be used to kill people.

Andrew Rosenthal
November 8, 2011
The Gun Lobby and Military Suicides
[This is so full fail that I could write thousands of words about it. But I don’t have the time and the people in the comments did a pretty fair job and raking him over the coals.

I’ll just give an overview.

Since all nine U.S. Supreme Court Justices disagree with the individual right issue what Rosenthal and the NYT editorial board thinks only has political implications and very few legal implications.

The very words he uses demonstrates he is essentially living in a different universe. We don’t have “political leaders”. We have public servants. Our servants do not have “rights” to regulate anything. They have delegated powers given to them by the people via the U.S., and state constitutions. When our servants start demanding we give up firearms and beg permission from them to own what is a specific enumerated right it is quite clear to me they have either forgotten they are servants or that they intend to change the relationship.

Yes. Handguns are sometimes used to kill people. Sometimes deadly force needs to be legally exercised and sometimes people get killed. Get over it.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Richard Feldman

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This book is dedicated to Harlon B. Carter, the man responsible for saving the Second Amendment freedoms for generations of Americans during a time in our country when gun ownership was on the road to extermination as a cherished and fundamental right. Equally important are the tens of thousands of local activists who make the “gun lobby” the true grassroots dynamo that it is. Money doesn’t vote, people vote, or as we said in the sixties, “Power to the people” and, I should add, “away from the elites, wherever they dwell.” I think Thomas Jefferson would have approved.

Richard Feldman
2008
Dedication to Ricochet: Confessions of a Gun Lobbyist
[This is a very nice start to the book.

Think about the “Power to the people” phrase. And remember what Chairman Mao said, “Every Communist must grasp the truth: Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” Private ownership of firearms is the ultimate power in the hands of the people. Yet nearly all communists and socialists who advocate “power to the people” in the U.S. today are opposed to private gun ownership. Why is that?

Could it be they don’t really want power in the hands of “the people”? I think what they really want is power in the hands of their people and want to remove power from those that oppose them.

Communism and socialism is not about “power to the people”. Those political systems are about government having a huge power advantage over the individual. “Power to the people”? No. Not at all. That isn’t what they really want. But no one has ever accused the political left of being consistent.

Thank you Richard for sending me an autographed copy. More later when I finish it. Not all of my review is going to be positive though. I’ve already got notes that are “not happy thoughts”.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Barbara Scott

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I want to go back to bed and pull the covers over my head. Entropy sucks.

Barbara Scott
November 9, 2011
[This was after she asked me, “Why do things always have to happen?” This was in regards to some potential changes in her job that were going to require extra work on her part to at least adapt and has the potential to put pressure on us to sell our house in Idaho.

I explained that one of the laws of physics is that things always go to a more lower energy, more random, state and that energy input is required to maintain things in a high energy ordered state. This law of physics applies to life in general and not just physics.

She did not dispute my answer but she wasn’t pleased with it either.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Phil Tagami

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They took a few steps forward and I racked the shotgun and they left. It’s sort of the universal ‘Don’t come any farther’ sign.

Phil Tagami
November 3, 2011
Oakland developer Phil Tagami keeps protesters at bay — with a shotgun
Background:

About eight men and women dressed in black, faces covered in bandannas and armed with hammers, sticks and poles had just barged down the doors of Oakland’s landmark Rotunda Building — with another dozen behind them — when they were turned back by a tenant with a shotgun and an attitude.

…

Tagami said he phoned the mayor’s office and began communicating with senior staff around 10:45 p.m. voicing his concerns. Yet police were nowhere in sight, he said.

At around 11 p.m., a group of protesters began forcing the glass front doors back and forth before they opened partially. Before they could move much further, Tagami lifted his shotgun. He insists he did not point the gun at anyone, just positioned it in front of him and cocked it.

After the group cleared out, Tagami continued checking in with the mayor’s office and at 12:14 a.m., the assistant city manager phoned to tell him the police were moving in.

[Via email from Rob.

Also worthy of note is that they did 100’s of thousands of dollars in damage to the exterior of the building.

Also applicable are the following observations:

I do have to give the police some benefit of the doubt. A single patrol car and officer could have easily been taken out by a mob of that size and nature. It probably calls for a large group of police or else sniper fire from a few blocks away. Approval for sniper fire isn’t going to be given by that mayor at this time and assembling and deploying the riot police is going to take some time. 90 minutes may not have been out of line.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Pam Neely

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I am a very strong supporter of the second amendment, but there must be some common sense applied here. I can think of nothing worse than people attending an athletic event, living in a dorm, or sitting beside someone in a science class with a firearm strapped to their side or worse, concealed on their person.

Pam Neely
Prosecuting Attorney Berkeley County
County Prosecutor Wants Gun Law
October 25, 2011
[Really? Ms. Neely is smart enough to get through law school and get a job as a Prosecuting Attorney yet she “can think of nothing worse” that someone exercising a specific enumerated right to keep and bear arms? Has she never heard of the Virginia Tech massacre? That is something far worse that happens when people are forbidden from defending themselves.

And simultaneously she claims she is “a very strong supporter of the second amendment”?

Either Neely has crap for brains or she thinks we do.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Glen Utzman

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Your employer doesn’t know the answer. If he knew the answer he wouldn’t need you.

Glen Utzman
Professor at the University of Idaho Accounting Department
[This is an excellent observation for almost any professional job.

Utzman is daughter Kimberly’s professor this semester and she provided me with this quote.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Douglas Howard Ginsburg

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The basic requirement to register a handgun is longstanding in American law, accepted for a century in diverse states and cities and now applicable to more than one fourth of the Nation by population. Therefore, we presume the District’s basic registration requirement, D.C. Code § 7-2502.01(a), including the submission of certain information, § 7-2502.03(b), does not impinge upon the right protected by the Second Amendment.

Douglas Howard Ginsburg
United States Court of Appeals
Dick Anthouny Heller, Et. Al. v. District of Columbia, Et. Al. October 4, 2011
[Slavery, segregated restaurants, laws against interracial marriage, and the death penalty for homosexuals was accepted for more than a century in this country. That didn’t make them constitutional. Rights do not become privileges subject to denial because they are repressed in some portion of the nation for some set period of time.

Three fourths of the nation by population do not have their firearms registered and those areas had as low or lower crime rates than the areas that did have their firearms registered. Therefore one must conclude that firearm registration serves little or no benefit to the people. No question would be given to legitimacy of registration for First Amendment rights hence registration to exercise Second Amendment rights must be constitutionally suspect.  Thus registration of firearms fails to pass any level of scrutiny.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Sebastian

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I’m getting bored with gun control advocates these days.

Sebastian
November 2, 2011
The Straw Men Builders
[I understand and empathize some. But this isn’t a game to get tired of and move on to something else more interesting when you get bored. This is a fight for the preservation of a specific enumerated right. We get bored with them because we keep refuting the same tired positions they put forward. That doesn’t mean we should stop.

I propose that we can slack off when at least half of the top 10 search engine results for their names are web pages mocking or explaining how these people are ignorant, evil, or liars we are not done with them. They need to be, figuratively speaking, pounded into the ground.

Here are some stats on our current situation on my proposed goal:

We are getting close on Sugarmann but have a lot of work to do on the others.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Chief Justice Warren E. Burger

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A sense of confidence in the courts is essential to maintain the fabric of ordered liberty for a free people and three things could destroy that confidence and do incalculable damage to society: that people come to believe that inefficiency and delay will drain even a just judgment of its value; that people who have long been exploited in the smaller transactions of daily life come to believe that courts cannot vindicate their legal rights from fraud and over-reaching; that people come to believe the law – in the larger sense – cannot fulfill its primary function to protect them and their families in their homes, at their work, and on the public streets.

Chief Justice Warren E. Burger
Courts: The Chief Justice Speaks Out
U.S. News & World Report (vol. 69, No. 8, Aug. 24, 1970) 68, 71
Address to ABA meeting, Aug. 10, 1970.
[I am of the opinion that the first two conditions have already been met.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Linoge

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This is the Twenty-First Century, where you can track your gorramed pizza from dough to delivery, and you are telling me that the Great and Almighty Federal Government cannot dig its head out of its own ass long enough to develop something similar for a “product” that costs at least ten times as much as your average pizza order?

Linoge
November 1, 2011
good to know my tax dollars are being wasted
[Linoge is correct as far as he goes. A lot more could be said as well. Linoge hints at it but doesn’t quite come out and say what really should be said. Here are some of the things that come to mind:

—Joe]

Quote of the day—Sean D Sorrentino

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I felt a great disturbance in the Anti-Gun force, as if 10, maybe 15 voices suddenly cried out in terror and were basically ignored.

Suddenly I have a desire to visit cheesehead central.

Sean D Sorrentino
November 1, 2011
What a difference a day makes
[H/T to Robb.

I was tempted to say that now Wisconsin recognizes the “bear” part of “keep and bear arms” the streets will be run full with tears instead of blood but Sean is correct. 10 or maybe 15 people just don’t provide that many tears and don’t matter.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Henry C. Wright

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The moment a man claims a right to control the will of a fellow being by physical force, he is at heart a slaveholder.

Henry C. Wright
April 7, 1837
The Liberator
[Irony alert.

I found this on The Virginia Center for Public Safety (an anti-gun group) web site. Apparently they don’t research or think through the content of their web site any more than they do their policies.

When they advocate for restrictions on firearms ownership they themselves are advocating to “control the will of a fellow being by physical force” via the government.

Furthermore Henry C. Write claimed:

That it is the right and duty of the slaves to resist their masters, and the right and duty of the people of the North to incite them to resistance, and to aid them in it.

Isn’t it better for the people to posses arms and never be slaves than to become slaves and require arms from others to free yourself?

There is a reason no one ever accuses anti-gun people of being too consistent or too smart for their own good.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Mike Vanderboegh

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First and foremost you must quit looking at and treating the law-abiding armed citizenry of the United States as the enemy. For if you don’t, we certainly will be.

Convince us by your actions that you are no better than the gangs who commit crimes without uniforms and we will treat you similarly. And there ain’t nearly enough of you to shove us around in a real national emergency.

Mike Vanderboegh
February 17, 2010
“Choose this day whom you will serve.”: An Open Letter to American Law Enforcement.
[Note that this was written before the details of Fast and Furious had become public.

It may be becoming time for law enforcement to chose which side they are on. The failure of the Occupy Wall Street “movement” to achieve anything close to critical mass should be a sufficient hint that the socialists are not the clear winners if we have an economic collapse.

The left has seriously overplayed their hand; Polls show them in extreme distress, “under the radar” gun control is failing and the Tea Party has demonstrated itself far more numerous and smart than the OWS/Flea-Party. So what happens next? They have two choices. They can retreat and regroup or they can “go for broke”. I think OWS was the left to testing the waters of the go for broke option.

The question now is; Will the socialists in power swallow their pride and do the wise thing or will they let their narcissism go into full bloom? I know far too many people invested in copper, lead, and brass who would like a return on that investment for the “full boom” option to end well but I’m not sure the narcissists really understand reality and it will be American law enforcement that has to make some very tough decisions.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Cliff Schecter

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If you are looking for the literal embodiment of dysfunction in US political culture and the institutions that serve it, look no further than the National Rifle Association (NRA), and the deadly and divisive role it plays in shaping the political agenda. Specifically, the radically and reliably dishonest, dangerous and deranged legislation they foist upon the American people day in and day out through their purchase of most Republican and many Blue-Dog Democratic officeholders.

…

We’re talking here about people who shouldn’t be allowed to make their own beds, much less public policy.

Cliff Schecter
October 29, 2011
They have the right to remain silent
[I find it appropriate that someone who says this sort of thing about a civil rights group protecting a specific enumerated right used Al Jazeera as his vehicle for hate. And that he is a weekly columnist for them is no surprise.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Glen McGregor

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I find the destruction of any kind of government data utterly abhorent (sic) and contrary to the concept of open government.

In response, I’m posting publicly a copy of the gun registry database I received via the Access to Information Act in 2007.

Glen McGregor
October 26, 2011
You can have my gun registry data when you pry it from my cold, dead hands
This is regarding the Canadian long gun registry.
[“Any kind of government data”, really? What if it was a registry of one of the following:

  • Undercover police officers.
  • Confidential informants.
  • People who are racially “impure” (the “heroes” of The Turner Diaries would have found this useful).
  • People who are HIV positive.
  • Homosexuals and all their known lovers.
  • Women who had used an abused women shelters.
  • People who are Jewish/black/Christian/Islamic.
  • People who had voted Conservative/Liberal/Whatever.
  • People who subscribed to GayCalgary and Edmonton Magazine.
  • People who have written letters to the editor opposing/supporting Health Canada.

What McGregor apparently doesn’t understand is that this registry is something that should have never been allowed to exist in the first place. There are some datasets which only use is abuse or the risk of such abuse is much greater than any benefits that might be gained. When a list is a set of people who are in the minority and who historically have been victims of oppression then extreme scrutiny must be given to the existence of such a list let alone the publication of such a list.

I will give McGregor a little bit of slack that some of his commenters don’t in that he claims his copy of the list does not have any names or addresses in it beyond the first two characters of the postal code. This helps some. But an oppressor (think of the Belgium Corporal story) could use this data to confiscate all the firearm in a particular postal code area by going door to door demanding to know who owns, for example, the Remington 700 chambered in 30.06 with serial number XXXX.

The right to keep and bear arms is a fundamental natural right and for any government to keep records on the exercise of such a right is to put the right in jeopardy of infringement.

Your “cold, dead hands” McGregor? I don’t think it will go that far. I believe the threat of a prison sentence will be more than sufficient to get the data destroyed. But if not then I don’t have a problem with him dying in prison over it.—Joe]

Quote of the day–pete x tp

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The main hindrance to rational regulation of firearms is almost entirely driven by frightened idiots who, apparently, know deep in their hearts that they wouldn’t meet the standard.

pete x tp
Comment to The Media’s Narrow Definition Of “Gun Control”
October 26, 2011
[Either this “Einstein” has never heard of the 2nd Amendment or doesn’t consider the Bill of Rights an obstacle to his agenda.

H/T to Sebastian.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Ken Lewenza

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The introduction of Bill C-19 today in the House of Commons, and its possible coming into force, will set Canada’s gun control efforts back decades.

Ken Lewenza
Canadian Auto Workers National President
October 25, 2011
Harper’s Gun Bill Sets Canada Back Decades, CAW says
[I find that hard to believe since the act being repealed was passed in 1995. But it does set them back a good bit. Now if they can just be pushed into extinction.

And why is the Canadian Auto Workers getting into a debate about gun control?

Which cars sold in the U.S. are made in Canada? I want to make sure I don’t buy any.—Joe]