This is a reference to my frequent suggestion that gun owners “come out of the closet”.
Just one question
Image from an anonymous donor referencing my just one question post.
Update: Bill suggested I put this on a shirt. So I did. Get your shirt here.
#OrangeYouGlad Susan Sarandon #WearOrange
#OrangeYouGlad Kim Kardashian #WearOrange
#OrangeYouGlad Amy Schumer #WearOrange
#OrangeYouGlad Boston Mayor Marty Walsh #WearOrange
I received some images from an anonymous source to share with the suggestion to start a “#OrangeYouGlad” campaign. Here is the first one. Share widely and freely.
Quote of the day—Michael Sainato
If Democratic voters and party leaders are serious about winning the general election, they need to abandon Ms. Clinton’s sinking ship. The fiercely negative publicity Ms. Clinton is likely to elicit will diminish all chances the Democrats have to recoup majorities in both houses of Congress. Allowing the Republican party to win the presidency would be disastrous for Democrats—a fate that will be sealed with Ms. Clinton as the nominee.
Michael Sainato
May 31, 2016
Fellow Democrats Turn on Clinton
[I’m nearly certain all of the above is true. And I’m thrilled that someone as evil as Clinton is almost for certain going to fail in her attempt to become the most powerful person in the world.
But what I find most interesting is that nearly all people think in terms of what is good/bad for the political parties involved. They do not express concern for our country, our economic situation, or human rights in terms other than what it means to their political party/tribe.
In those, more appropriate, terms there are no good outcomes.
I’m going to keep preparing for the worst and stocking up on popcorn. My “tribe” is composed of less than a couple dozen people. Democrats and Republicans are “The Others” to me.—Joe]
Quote of the day—Daniel Payne
“Gun control that works” continues, as always, to not actually work. Like Sasquatch, it’s always out there somewhere—but you never find it.
Daniel Payne
June 1, 2016
No, We Haven’t Discovered ‘Gun Control That Actually Works’
A national gun registry would be just as stupid and ineffective as Washington DC’s gun registry.
[Sasquatch. I like that. Unicorns, leprechauns, and the Great Pumpkin would also be appropriate.
The anti-gun people keep trying to ignore inalienable rights in favor of “security”, or “safety”. But, as I have been saying for years they can’t get traction in that direction either. So the motivation for gun control must be ignorance, irrational, or evil intent.—Joe]
Biometrical identity verification via your brake pedal
Via Bruce Schneier we find there is still another means of biometric identity verification:
“With very limited amounts of driving data we can enable very powerful and accurate inferences about the driver’s identity,” says Miro Enev, a former University of Washington researcher who worked on the study before taking a job as a machine-learning engineer at Belkin. And the researchers argue that ability to pinpoint could have unexpected privacy implications: Everything from letting insurance companies punish drivers who loan their cars to their teenage kids, to confirming the identity of a driver who violated traffic laws or caused a collision.
…
In the end, the researchers found that they didn’t even need the longest portion of the driving test to reliably identify each of the 15 drivers. Using the full collection of the car’s sensors—including how the driver braked, accelerated and angled the steering wheel—the researchers found that their algorithm could distinguish each of the drivers, with 100 percent accuracy, based on only 15 minutes of the driving data. Even with data from the brake pedal alone, they found that they could guess at the correct driver with 87 percent accuracy.
Keep in mind this is result on identify verification. They are not determining identity with this information. Still, this very interesting. Not all the implications are obvious at first glance. But it might be claimed that regular collection of this data violates my Jews In the Attic Test.
Quote of the day—Henry Hazlitt
One simple truth that could be endlessly reiterated, and effectively applied to nine-tenths of the statist proposals now being put forward or enacted in such profusion, is that the government has nothing to give to anybody that it doesn’t first take from somebody else. In other words, all its relief and subsidy schemes are merely ways of robbing Peter to support Paul.
Henry Hazlitt
May 27, 2016
The Task Confronting Libertarians
[Originally published in the March 1968 issue of The Freeman. Excerpted from The Wisdom of Henry Hazlitt]
[While I can see this has potential I can also see that many people feel completely justified in robbing Peter. Still it is worth trying and probably puts the advocate for the statist on weaker ground and will sway some to a more principled position.—Joe]
Rounds in the last month
I did a fair amount of shooting and reloading this last month. I have a big backlog of match reports to do. Not sure if I will get around to all of them but the reloading report is quick and easy.
Lifetime totals:
223.log: 2027 rounds.
3006.log: 467 rounds.
300WIN.log: 1351 rounds.
40SW.log: 48448 rounds.
45.log: 0 rounds.
9MM.log: 21695 rounds.
Total: 73988 rounds.
I only reloaded .40 S&W. Last month my total .40 reloads were 46549 rounds. So I reloaded 1899 rounds. There was one primer that got mangled otherwise it would have been an even 1900 rounds. 1099 of those rounds were with The Blue Bullets for steel matches. The other 800 rounds were with 180 grain Montana Gold JHPs for practice at indoor ranges. Montana Bullet has a, “Mix And Match Promo” on cases of bullets going on right now if you are interested.
Quote of the day—Thomas Sowell
Politics has sometimes been called “the art of the possible”. But that implies a level of constraint that simply does not exist in democratic politics.
As a noted economist has pointed out, “No voting system could prevent the California electorate from simultaneously demanding low electricity prices and no new generating plants while using ever increasing amounts of electricity.”
This is just one of many ways the impossible can win elections. Beliefs can trump facts in politics. And have repeatedly trumped facts throughout history.
Thomas Sowell
2008
Applied Economics, 2nd Edition
[Everything of Sowell’s which I have read is awesome. This book is no exception. I have three more QOTDs to pull from this book.—Joe]
Dawes Glacier
On Monday, May 16th, aboard the Celebrity Solstice Barb and I got up early, 4:24 AM, to get good indoor seats for our possible visit to a glacier.
The first glacier we attempted to visit, at the end of Tracy Arm, was blocked by small icebergs. So we turned around and went for plan B. This was Dawes Glacier.
The video below was this second attempt. When we were about a mile away Barb expressed her opinion, multiple times, that it was time to turn around. We continued. We got within about a half mile of the glacier then did a 270 degree turn before leaving.
The scale of the glacier was hard to comprehend. It is so big it seemed much closer than it actually was. We got to within about a half mile of the face. The face was several hundred feet above the surface of the ocean and a half mile across.
The ship is 1041 feet long and 121 feet wide. I created the image below from a screen shot of Google Maps with the Celebrity Solstice represented by a rectangle approximately to scale at the point of closest approach:
One of the possible excursion was to depart the ship and get on a tour boat which went into shallower and narrower waters to get a look at things much closer than what the Solstice could. Barb and I did not do this but others did. If you were to go on a cruise like this don’t count on getting so close to a glacier from the main ship. The cruise director told us that in doing this for 11 years he can count on one hand the number of times the ship has gotten this close to a glacier.
Here is the tour boat as seen from an upper deck of the ship:
Here some of the many chunks of ice we saw in the fiord. They are incredibly blue. This is because the ice is so thick. The ice absorbs all colors other than blue. Blue light is transmitted and scattered. Because sunlight has all colors present some of the blue light comes back out to give the ice a blue color.
This was the high point of the cruise for us.
Some of the other events of our Alaska cruise were:
- Departing Seattle
- Whale watching and sunset
- Quote of the day—Chelsea Karthauser (hike to see a glacier near Juneau)
- Saxman Totem Park
- Quote of the day—Barb L.
- Float plane to Misty Fjords National Monument
No surprise to me
While it’s possible my data set has an unusual bias this is of no surprise to me:
…in long-term relationships—typically defined as longer than three years—men are equally as likely as women to be the partner with low sexual desire. A June 2015, article in the journal “Current Sexual Health Reports” reviewed 31 research studies on sexual desire and sexual discrepancy and found no gender differences in which partner had the higher sex drive.
“The assumption that women are going to be the lower-desire partner needs to be thrown out,” says Kristen Mark, author of the article and director of the sexual health promotion laboratory at the University of Kentucky.
Cell phone signals extends rats lives
When I worked at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory I talked to a researcher who told me he did a study on satellite phones and cancer in rats. They wanted to make sure the specific signals used by these phones were safe because their have been concerns that the relatively high powered transmitters next to a persons head might cause cancer. We didn’t really have a plausible hypothesis for this since it was non-ionizing electromagnetic radiation, but doing the tests on rats was due diligence in making sure the concerns were unwarranted.
He told me that the rats exposed to cell phone signals had fewer cancers than the control group! People didn’t really believe the results and even he was skeptical. He redid the study. Same result. I just sort of filed it away in my mind and would occasionally tell the story to people when something related came up in a conversation. I wasn’t really sure I believe the result either. I just know the researcher was convinced he did the testing correctly had much greater than chance data to support the conclusion.
I don’t remember his name and the only thing that might be associated with that study I could find in a quick search on the Internet was this. But today I ran across this:
Another result of the study is even more head-scratching: the groups of rats exposed to cell signals lived longer than those not exposed. That doesn’t mean that cell phone radiation will extend your lifespan. But, Carroll writes, it could mean the exposed group simply developed cancer as an inevitable part of aging, while the non-exposed group died before tumors could develop.
Wow! This is a much more recent and independent study. Yet it hints at the same result as the PNNL researcher found over a decade ago.
If true, what could the mechanism possibly be?
Clintons have the Lolita lovers vote locked up
For several weeks I have been reading of Bill Clinton going on multiple trips onboard convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein’s “Lolita Express”. He would ditch the Secret Service and hop on board Epstein’s 727. Flight logs show he has taken at least 26 trips aboard the plane which:
…earned its Nabakov-inspired nickname because it was reportedly outfitted with a bed where passengers had group sex with young girls.
At first I sort of dismissed it as a wild conspiracy theory type of thing. But I keep seeing more and more about it. Now I see, supposedly:
“At least one woman on the compound was there unwillingly” and was an actual sex slave, according to the Daily Mail.
The woman was allegedly forced to have sex with “politicians, businessmen, royalty, [and] academicians” at the retreat and was just one of “more than 40 women” that have come forth with claims against Epstein, showing the vast scale of the man’s dark operations, which aren’t limited only to ‘Orgy Island.’
Moreover Epstein was invited to Chelsea Clinton’s wedding in 2010, amongst 400 other guests, demonstrating his close friendship with the Clinton family.
And yet Hillary remains married to Bill rather than pulling a Lorena Bobbitt to protect other women and divorcing him. It must be to lock in the Lolita lovers vote.
Quote of the day—Superunknown @TheCatholicBoat
@HarryThetech76 @RuncibleSpoun my hypothesis is that you’re a confederate sister fucker with a small dick, who overcompensates with guns.
Superunknown @TheCatholicBoat
Tweeted on December 16, 2015
[It’s another Markley’s Law Monday!
Via a tweet from Linoge.
We have SCOTUS decisions, facts, and rational arguments. They have childish insults.—Joe]
Ray Carter
I was reading my RSS feed this morning and Tam informed me Ray Carter died. Last Monday I had read Ray’s Facebook post saying he was in the early stages of liver failure and had at best three to four weeks left. It was the cancer that was discovered in, I think, 2013. He had said Boomershoot was on his list of things he always wanted to do so Ry and I made it happen in 2014. By that time the cancer was in remission and I hoped Ray would attend more Boomershoots but that didn’t happen. Ray was working for the Second Amendment Foundation at the time and I asked if he would be the dinner speaker and he readily agreed.
Oleg Volk attended Boomershoot that year, had a photo session with Ray, and shared his raw images with me. Here are a few of them:
I’ve written about Ray numerous times as has the more well known Seattle Times. Once we were even in the same Seattle Times editorial.
As I explained here I first met Ray when working with Cease Fear which lead to my creation of the Jews In The Attic Test. It was Ray who came up with the name Cease Fear as a play on the name of the main anti-gun group in the state, Washington Cease Fire. You should have seen the looks on their faces when we showed up in Olympia with our signs and shirts to counter their lobbying efforts. It was wonderful.
I still have the shirt someplace. Here is a picture of me wearing it (click on it for a larger version):
Ray did a lot of work to further gun rights. And being gay he could say things and converse with authority to both gun and LGBT people on how we could work together for mutual benefit. He was a huge benefit to the gun rights movement in Seattle, Washington State, and the nation.
His more visible work in the last decade involved a number of fronts. In 2008 Ray went to work for The Second Amendment Foundation. In 2009 Ray was a plaintiff in a successful lawsuit against the city of Seattle for banning guns in city parks. He was also active in the leadership of the Washington Arms Collectors.
I featured him once for my quote of the day:
The police (and paramedics) are dandy when they arrive. But in the immediate moment of attempted felonious or otherwise violent action being committed upon ones self, persons one is responsible for or the imminent threat thereof a more immediate tool is both appropriate and desirable even in this day and age. It is my observation that a .45acp JHP placed center of mass at approximately 900fps will, more often than not, bring such unpleasantry to a swift halt, though on occasion repeated application of the lesson is required.
Ray Carter
November 21, 2014
He will be greatly missed.
Quote of the day—Jeff Cooper
Indian Country, 1994
Goblin shows up late at hamburger dispensary behaving obnoxiously. Management calls the cops. Cop shows up and challenges goblin, who begins shooting at him. Cop sustains several hits before returning fire and goes down with a broken femur. Goblin runs dry and, bleeding from three wounds, commences to reload. Two Navajos are trying to get their car started on the parking lot. Analyzing the situation, they move in on the goblin and pound him into the pavement, leaving him for dead. They then go back to the car and continue fiddling with it. All manner of cop cars show up, complete with flashing lights. County deputy attorney, who arrives with the cops, approaches the two Navajos and asks if they can use any help. The answer is, “Well, yes. You got a flashlight?” Cops furnish flashlight.
Moral: Always carry a flashlight in Indian country.
Jeff Cooper
Jeff Cooper’s Commentaries
Vol. 2, No. 3, 1 March 1994
[I miss Cooper.—Joe]
Quote of the day—Bob Livingston
Yes, there are winners and losers in capitalism. The winners are those who are honest, industrious, thoughtful, prudent, frugal, responsible, disciplined, and efficient. The losers are those who are shiftless, lazy, imprudent, extravagant, negligent, impractical, and inefficient.
Bob Livingston
May 9, 2016
Socialism is an immoral system
[There are also cases in capitalism where people just get lucky (both bad and good luck). These bad luck situations are what the critics of capitalism typically focus on but bad luck happens in any system. And the “bad luck” examples of socialism are far worse (see Venezuela) than the capitalist examples.
A system with free markets and free minds (capitalism) is not only the most moral system but also has the best overall results. Even with the evidence on display from the last 7+ years of a socialist president that we have openly and thinly veiled socialist candidates for public office let alone serious candidates for U.S. President is mindboggling to me.
I’ve been stockpiling food and precious metals (steel, copper, and lead) in preparation for the end game which I have done all I could to avoid. I’m pretty much all set as best I can now. I think I just need to add some popcorn to my food stores.—Joe]