COVID19 in Iran

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From a reliable source, we have some plausibly good data and some speculation:

A coworker is an Iranian immigrant. She says her siblings are in the medical field back home in Iran, and the situation there is vastly worse than is being officially reported. The leaders didn’t want to disrupt the anniversary of the revolution, so they pretended there was no problem, causing it to be spread rapidly across the nation during the mass gatherings and official celebrations, where close (face-proximity-to-face) greetings are common, and it spread like wildfire. Her sibling’s estimate is over a million are infected just in Iran. (Considering the viral video of the imam “blessing” water bottles by spitting in them, and other personal hygiene practices that are epidemic-friendly, it’s not an impossible number).

Assuming the fatality rate of~2% is correct, that’s 20k dead just in Iran…. so far. Considering it hits the elderly and infirm the hardest, it might be the “magic bullet” that takes out the entire leadership group so they can be replaced, which would likely be a good thing. But on a human tragedy scale of things, if it hits a nation with a failing healthcare system harder than two percent, it’s a major tragic event.

We live in interesting times.

Quote of the day—Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

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To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good, or else that it’s a well-considered act in conformity with natural law. Fortunately, it is in the nature of the human being to seek a justification for his actions

…

Ideology – that is what gives the evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination.

Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation (Volume One) page 174.
[Via Extreme Retribution Punishment Orders: ‘Red flag’ laws are the death of due process and the Constitution.

We have some extremely evil ideologies in the world whos followers believe they are the good guys.

Nearly 170 years ago Thoreau put it more succulently.—Joe]

New shooter becomes new gun owner

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Six weeks ago I took a new shooter to the range. Today we went to the range again for her to try out numerous guns in preparation to buy a gun and take a class.

I brought:

  • Suppressed .22 Ruger 10/22
  • Ruger P89 (9mm with lightly loaded 147 grain bullets)
  • STI Edge (.40 S&W with lightly loaded 180 grain bullets)
  • The Gun Blog 45 (.45 Auto with lightly loaded 230 grain bullets)

I had to correct her stance and give her some hints on the grip but after that she did really well. There were a few flyers but most were good solid A-Zone hits.

The rifle:

20200301_101647

The stock was too long and she ended up putting it on top of her shoulder to get the proper eye relief and get it close enough she could hold it up. Still, she had great hits.

20200301_102620(0)I had her shoot the Ruger P89 only in single action mode. My goal was to see how she handled the 9mm recoil in a fairly heavy gun. If that worked out okay I would have guided her to Glock or S&W M&P style gun.

Great hits (smaller holes are from the .22 rifle):

image

Then the STI Edge in .40 S&W:

20200301_103308

There was one flyer:

image

She said she liked that gun the best so far.

On to the Gun Blog 45. Even though these were light loads with a MV of just under 775 fps (PF of about 178) she fired one shot and said that was enough.

I rented a Sig 238 (.380 Auto) and she liked it before she even touched it. We did a little dry firing, then actual shooting. She really liked it. She had great hits and after shooting about a half dozen magazines said she was done. She really liked the .380.

20200301_105734

She had three flyers. But she shot a lot more good solid hits.

image

We put away the guns, washed up, and went to the store where her husband ordered and paid for a Sig Sauer 238 and two extra magazines.

I will probably do some more coaching to prepare them for the May General Defensive Handgun class from Insights.

Quote of the day—Rolf

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The other side doesn’t care about facts. They care about power. The normies don’t get that. My approach now is to push the appropriate buttons.

I know why the cavalry wanted the disarm the Indians. I know why the Soviets wanted to disarm the Kulaks. I know why the KKK wanted to disarm the blacks. I know why the Nazi wanted to disarm the Jews and Gypsies. They all did it in the name of ‘public safety.’ Why do YOU want to disarm people so only the cops to have guns? You sound like a rapist telling his victim ‘don’t make a scene and come along quietly.’

Rolf
February 29, 2020
Comment to Quote of the day—Tamara K. @TamSlick
[Nice!

I’ve been formulating my question strategy for the next Townhall meeting.

I’m thinking something along the lines of:

  • What will it take to get to the point where we can ban all private gun ownership and confiscate all of them? And are you working to get us there?
  • What are you doing behind the scenes to further gun safety?

This, in conjunction with posting the video of the answers online, should be useful in the next election as well as their trials.—Joe]

Taking orders for lentils and wheat

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I’ll probably be going to the farm in the next two or three weeks. If anyone in the Seattle area would like some lentils or soft white wheat I’ll bring it back with me. Quantities are limited.

Let me know how many pounds you would like. I get them in 50 pound bags but frequently break them out into three to five pound Ziploc bags. You would pick them up in the Bellevue area.

Wheat is $0.20/pound and lentils are $0.30/pound.

Send me an email if you are interested: blog@joehuffman.org.

Update: All the wheat has been asked for. There are still some lentils left. There will be more wheat available in November or perhaps October.

I also have a few pea and lentil cookbooks I purchased from the USA Dry Pea & Lentil Council in bulk. List price is $24.95. I sell them for $10.00. You can sometimes get them used from Amazon for less.

King County conronavirus death confirmed

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Via KOMO News:

KING COUNTY, Wash. — A man in King County has died from the coronavirus, the Washington state Department of Health said Saturday in a media advisory.

No other details were given about the death as of Saturday morning.

Officials plan to hold a press conference at 1 p.m. with more details. KOMO will livestream the press conference.

Just as my source told me last night.

Quote of the day—Tamara K. @TamSlick

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Party politics today is a race to the boxcars; first team there gets to make the other team ride.

Tamara K. @TamSlick
Tweeted on February 21, 2020
[There is a certain amount of ominous truth to that.—Joe]

First Covid19 death tonight, in King County

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Via email:

I work in the fire department as a medic and our medical service officer just informed us of that info.

And that’s literally all we know.

Choose safe, be ready.

King County is the county surrounding Seattle and east to basically to the top of the Cascades.

I don’t recognize the email alias and have no basis upon which to judge the accuracy of the information.

Quote of the day—Adam Baldwin @AdamBaldwin

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The 2020 Bumper Sticker battle –

Trump: “Keep America Great!”
vs.
Dems: “Beat Trump!”

Adam Baldwin @AdamBaldwin
Tweeted on February 22, 2020
[I had my phone Twitter app email this to me the next morning. Last night I got around to looking at it and preparing to make it my QOTD for today. I found this tweet no longer exists. I reviewed Baldwin’s tweets. He only has 114. What?!! That’s not right. But yet that is what I see. The first tweet was on June 19, 2019. Then there is a retweet of something from November 29, 2015. Then a tweet from February 24, 2020.

What’s even more “interesting” is that neither Bing nor Google can even find the exact phrase “The 2020 Bumper Sticker battle” anywhere on the Internet.

One must conclude that I emailed it to myself from an alternate universe and/or timeline. The alternatives are just too farfetched to be believable.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Mark Judson For Congress @Judson4Congress

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In 2021, after Trump is gone, we will be able to tell who 90% of his supporters are via Social Media records.

Should we fire all of them from any Federal Jobs, to include the military, in order to protect the Nation?

Mark Judson For Congress @Judson4Congress
Tweeted on February 23, 2020
[This reminds what Nazi did when they came to power. No more Jews in government jobs.

Perhaps someone already pointed this out to him because the Tweet no longer exists.

Too bad the Internet is forever.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Molly Carter

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What has the 20th Century shown us about gun control? That an unarmed country is not a safe country. That when citizens don’t have the right to bear arms, governments can and do grow too large and become a threat to their people. That in the 20th Century, governments murdered four times as many people as those that were killed in all the world’s wars during that same time period. That millions more people were killed by their own governments than by criminals.

Molly Carter
American Gun Ownership: The Positive Impacts of Law-Abiding Citizens Owning Firearms
[The first publication of this essay is unclear to me. It was sometime in 2019 or earlier. I found it on many sites with the most recent being Zero Hedge (via email from Tony P.).

Reading it I was struck by so many references to materials from the 1990s that I suspected it was over 20 years old. Even the quote above appears it may have been derived from an article written by the late Mike Vanderboegh in June of 1999. This, however, does not detract from the substance. The truth is still the truth.—Joe]

Overheard at work

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Chris: We thought we bought a stool. We’ve been sold one leg of a stool. Now they are trying to sell us the other two legs of a stool and I think I’ve got a stick up my ass. What do you think?

Devin: I think I would rather not sit down.

Quote of the day—Scott Adams @ScottAdamsSays

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I have no intention of being objective about Bloomberg’s presidential run. If I can be a small part of helping you imagine him less as a president, and more like a desiccated turd in a punch bowl, wearing a tiny suit, I have served karma.

Scott Adams @ScottAdamsSays
Tweeted on February 24, 2020
[Sounds fair to me.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Micah Uetricht and Meagan Day

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Eventually, after the Left has won significant gains at the ballot box and in civil society, the capitalist class will take the gloves off against socialists and do whatever it takes to destroy our movement. We’ll need to fight back. The democratic road to socialism seeks not to elide this confrontation, but to make it possible.

Micah Uetricht and Meagan Day
February 22, 2020
Why Bernie Sanders is just the beginning of an American turn to the left
[Via email from Chet.

Remember when I said the other day that these crazy laws have to be deliberate attempts to destroy society?

Take appropriate action.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Tana Senn

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I’ve never thought about it.

Tana Senn
Washington State Representative, 41st District
February 22, 2020
This was in response to the question, “What sort of gun law do you think would violate the Washington State constitution?”
[The Washington State constitution says:

SECTION 24 RIGHT TO BEAR ARMS. The right of the individual citizen to bear arms in defense of himself, or the state, shall not be impaired, but nothing in this section shall be construed as authorizing individuals or corporations to organize, maintain or employ an armed body of men.

My guess is that she has never read it. Another guy at the town hall meeting asked a related question and she went off with something about the militia. Which, of course, might have been relevant if we didn’t have the Washington State constitution protection for the right to keep and bear arms clause and the Heller decision. The Heller decision, of course, making it very clear the militia clause does not limit the right to keep and bear arms to the militia.

I got the last question of the meeting and I decided to directly ask her to address the Washington State constitution clause. The QOTD above was the beginning of her response.

The rest of her response was about hunters, she has “no problem” with hunters—as long as they don’t use “military type guns” which are only for hunting humans. She was a bit more hesitant but also said she didn’t have a problem with people who wanted to have a gun to defend themselves.

But, of course, the Washington State constitution does not give lawmakers a “military type gun” loophole to write laws restricting individual possession and use of firearms.

I find her response very telling.

If she has never concerned herself with the limits to the power she has under the constitution this isn’t going to stop. Whatever restriction she and her type can get passed this year or next, or the year after is just another step toward the practical, if not literal, elimination of the right.

I was telling someone else about what Senn said and I got a surprising response:

Crazy must run in the family.

It turns out that Senn is is a first cousin, once-removed of former Washington state Insurance Commissioner Deborah Senn. Deborah Senn had a reputation such that many people suspected she was a sociopath and perhaps had other psychology issues.

My live tweeting of the meeting:

This should be good evidence. I hope she enjoys her trial.—Joe]

Quote of the day—UBY: @ZubyMusic

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Nazism was attempted once. It killed 6 MILLION+ people and the ideology was abandoned. Those who promote it are rightly shunned.

Communism has been attempted multiple times, in multiple nations. It has killed 100 MILLION+ people. Yet many still think it’s a ‘good idea’.

UBY: @ZubyMusic
Tweeted on February 20, 2020
[It’s amazing the price people are willing to pay for “free” stuff.

It would appear to me that the only way to avoid repeating the many lessons in the history of communism and socialism is to increase the cost on those who attempt to implement it rather than on those it is implemented on.

Never give up your guns.—Joe]

It’s back….

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Two days ago I reported the good news that an oppressive gun control bill severely restricting magazines with capacity more than 15 rounds was defeated.

In the comments John Hardin suggested:

they could just convert it into an Appropriations bill, which has a longer deadline

This is exactly what they did:

A proposal to ban the sale of high-capacity gun magazines in Washington died after not receiving a vote by a key deadline Wednesday evening, but gun-control advocates quickly reloaded with a new proposal.

House Democrats failed to put a bill up for debate that would have banned magazines holding more than 15 rounds. It needed to pass the House by Wednesday to continue being considered in the 2020 session.

The bill was pulled from consideration by the full House after Republicans filed 120 amendments to be debated before a final vote on the bill could be taken, Speaker Laurie Jinkins, D-Tacoma said.

…

Later Thursday a new bill calling for a ban on the sale of magazines holding more than 15 rounds was filed in the House with a provision that would allow it to ignore the deadline.

Along with the policy that limits the number of rounds, it also calls for a buyback program that would compensate gun owners who turn in as many as five high-capacity magazines to the Washington State Patrol between this July 1 and June 30, 2021. To pay for the program, it proposes repealing the tax exemption for the sale of precious metals or bullion.

Bills that require the state to spend money or levy new taxes aren’t subject to Wednesdays if they are included in the General Fund budget. The House and Senate will release their supplemental budget proposals Monday.

I find it “interesting” they plan to tax sales of precious metals to pay for the confiscation of our magazines.

My representative and Senator have a townhall meeting tomorrow:

10:00 – 11:30 AM
Saturday, February 22
Bellevue College
Room N201
3000 Landderholm Circle SE
Bellevue

. I plan to attend. I already submitted questions via a webpage they provided.

Quote of the day—Lyle

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The underlying message in such talk of “gun violence” and “felons with guns” etc. is that violence, per se, is not the problem. If violence were the problem then the particular weapons being used wouldn’t be the central focus as they are now. They wouldn’t even be an issue.

Turning the populace into cattle, for the benefit of the “common good” (the rulers’ good) is the issue, and that means there must be disarmament.

So of course this is not, and has never been, about crime or violence or “public safety”. In the minds of the power-mad, common criminals are not the problem. Rather, YOU are the problem which needs to be “solved”; the more principled, peaceful, law-abiding and productive citizen patriot. The truth is a threat. You are the threat.

Lyle
February 20, 2020
Comment to Quote of the day—ReelFun.
[I have nothing to add.—Joe]

Quote of the day—ReelFun

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the shooters in seattle a week ago have over 60 felonies between them and several each with firearm convictions. Why are they out of jail and on the street with more guns after those convictions? anyone with more than one conviction with firearm should be in jail for decades, not on the street after 30 days. Start there and there is all the data you need. put in jail felons with firearms period.

ReelFun
February 19, 2020
Comment to Pass bills to reduce firearm violence through research, limiting magazine capacity
[Truth. But, almost for certain, it will never happen in Seattle.

One of the reason this suggestion is almost never heeded by the progressives is because such criminals are their demographic. Remember, felons in prison who identify as Democrats outnumber all other political affiliations combined by a factor of two to one. Another reason is that firearm restrictions are not about reducing violent crime. It’s about making the average citizen more dependent upon the state and giving power and control to the government.—Joe]

Good news

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A couple days ago I urged Washington State residents to contact their representatives about HB 2240 which would restrict firearm magazine capacities.

That bill and a bill requiring concealed carry permit holders to have mandatory training, among other things, was defeated.

Whew!