Barb decided she wanted to go on a hike for her birthday. She spent a lot of time trying to find just the right hike. Not too short, not too long, not too long of a drive, not too much elevation gain, and absolutely required was “a nice view”.
She settled on Cedar Butte. It was only 30 minutes away from home, 900 feet of elevation gain, and 3.8 miles round trip. It seemed pretty reasonable. But what about the view? I’ll let you decide.
Human beings are morally self-governing individuals that are able to make up their mind about the speech of other people and decide how to respond. No politician or public opinion should have the power through criminalization and bans to hide opinions and speech from us, implying that we are not able to handle it in a reasonable and responsible way. It takes away our dignity because it is based on the assumption that we cannot be trusted to listen to certain kinds of speech. As Lincoln assumed in another context, free men should not be free to choose unfreedom for others.
Flemming Rose
May 25, 2016
Notable & Quotable: The Milton Friedman Prize
From remarks by Danish journalist Flemming Rose upon receiving the Cato Institute’s Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty, in New York City.
[Via email from Paul Koning who points out, “The same reasoning and the same principles apply to the right to arms.”—Joe]
Another one from Stephanie:
I also have almost all the powder and primers to go with those. I have several thousand shell casing which may or may not be enough depending on the percentage I recover from practice and matches.
This probably will be enough to get me through another election year scare and shortage of ammo and components if it looks like Hillary will win the election.
It’s time to start cranking on the Dillion 550B.
When Soechtig and her team plea to federal charges for violating the nation’s commonsense gun laws, we’ll know they’re serious about cutting down on gun crime. Until then, we’ll know they’re just a bunch of ignorant, gun-trafficking profiteers who want to take away our rights while they violate the very laws they demand with absolute impunity.
Sean Davis
June 3, 2016
Katie Couric’s Anti-Gun Producers Repeatedly Violated Federal Gun Laws
[The laws Soechtig and team committed should not stand up to scrutiny by the courts but other people are still going to jail for them. And as long as other people are going to jail over them it should doubly apply to Soechtig and her gang. Since she wants us to go to jail for violation of nonsensical laws then she needs to understand, first hand, the significance of what she demands.
Update: Image supplied, copyright free and no permission required, by Stephanie.—Joe]
See also The Clintons’ War on Women on Google Play and Amazon.
This is a reference to my frequent suggestion that gun owners “come out of the closet”.
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.
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.
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]
“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]
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.
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]
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.
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]
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:
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.