Anyone who uses the word “profit” as a dirty word should be watched very, very carefully. If they hate the idea of gain through free trade it can only mean that they’re looking to get it through robbery.
Lyle
May 27, 2014
Comment to Quote of the day—reality
[I’ve often had similar thoughts but hadn’t put them into words as well as Lyle did.—Joe]
The NRA is primarily in it for money and profit, and have demonstrated that they don’t give a SH about you and your family. They are not protecting your gun rights to have a gun (because no one is trying to ban all guns) – they are protecting THEIR PROFITS. Keep being ignorant and voting with them, and see how far it gets you . . .
reality
May 26, 2014
Comment to Shooter’s rage at women too familiar in America
[“reality” appears to be living in an alternate reality because in my universe the NRA is a nonprofit organization, does a lot to protect our right to keep and bear arms, and there are a lot of people who want to ban all guns.
I wonder what color the sky is in their world.—Joe]
Off and on for a couple years and then starting in during the week between last Christmas and New Years I have spent a LOT of time trying to get a good Internet connection to my brother Doug. I have a good connection at Boomershoot Mecca but Doug and his family are blocked by the woods behind their house from Teakean Butte which is the source of my connection. They have a satellite connection that cost a lot of money, is unreliable, has HORRIBLE ping times, and poor transfer rates.
Mecca is 1.6 miles from our Dad’s house and is blocked by a small hill. Doug’s house is about 75 yards further still. And Dad’s house, a machine shed, and the hill block their view of the Boomershoot site. So we had to find a way around the hill just get it to Dad’s place. From Dad’s place it is a pretty easy hop around the machine shed. But first we needed to get to Dad’s place.
The obvious answer is to put a repeater on the hill between Mecca and Dad’s place. But we don’t own the hill. The nickname we have for the owner is “Wicked Witch of the Boomershoot”. So you can imagine how well such a request might be greeted with. I wouldn’t be surprised if she complained about us transmitting electromagnetic waves over her property—if she knew about it.
Anyway the best we could come up with was putting a repeater on a hill I own 1.7 miles from Dad’s house. Yup. We go further way to get a better signal to Dad’s place.
The ordinary Nanostation2s should work for several miles under ideal conditions. But this isn’t an ideal situation. We are probably actually just out of line of sight. In December I couldn’t get things to quite work unless I chose a different hill which belongs to cousin Alan. We probably could have gotten permission from him but at that location we needed to have two Nanostation2s, one pointed toward Mecca and the other toward Dad’s house.
I ordered a parabolic reflector hi-gain external antenna and came back the end of February. And found to my delight that I had good signal strength with just the Nanostation2s, completely different results that when I had done my tests in December. I still wasn’t able to get a high bandwidth connection but I was pretty sure it was a configuration issue on my part. Doug purchased the equipment he would need to get solar power on my hill to power the Nanostation2 and I planned to come back in a few weeks and do my part with the configuration of the Nanostation2s.
I went back in April and again tried to get a connection. Now the Nanostation2s alone didn’t work. The signal strength was back to what I had in December which was too low to be usable. What is going on? I suspect some differences in the ground conductivity or something. I just don’t know for certain. Again I gave up for the moment.
This weekend with the help of daughter Kim, Jacob, and Jeff I did some Boomershoot cleanup, mounted more solar panels on Boomershoot Mecca, and took down a solar panel that Doug was going to use for the repeater. I then proceeded to do some more signal strength testing.
I put up a twelve dBi antenna (a Nanostation2 has a 10 dBi internal antenna) on my hill attached to a Ubiquiti BulletM2 (the same one I used at Boomershoot with great success) and with the parabolic (24 dBi) antenna on a Nanostation2 at Dad’s place was able to get good signal strength. But for some reason the bandwidth sucked. Probably a configuration issue I guessed.
Doug wanted to avoid mounting anything on the outside of Dad’s house so I moved the parabolic antenna to the BulletM2 on my hill and used the internal 10 dBi antenna on a Nanostation2 at Dad’s place. It should only be a 2 dB loss compared to the 12 dBi antenna we were testing with before.
Signal strength was good but the bandwidth was in the toilet. I’m talking throughput to the Internet on the order of 60 kbs download and 10 kbs upload. It has to be a configuration issue. I spent hours trying all kinds of things with no success.
I finally decided the BulletM2 on my hill had to be the problem. So Monday afternoon I put in a Nanostation2 in place of the BulletM2 driving the parabolic antenna:
It worked. Just this minute I have 2.11 Mbps download and 0.68 Mbps upload from my computer through a WiFi access point in their house, a switch, five Nanostations (remember I needed to hop around the machine shed), the router at Mecca (two miles away via the Nanostation path), and to the outside world.
Tomorrow I bring my Verizon Network Extender to test out in their house. I’ll finally have them connected to the rest of the world in a civilized manner.
Update: Early (6:19) in the morning the connection to the rest of the world was less busy and I got this result:
Yeah. I’m all thrilled about something that is considered poor service by anybody in a major city but this is out in an area where it’s tough to even get cell service. Only Verizon and Inland Cellular even have a hint of service here. And then it is very spotty and intermittent. You have to travel at 20 miles, as the crow flies, to get service from AT&T or T-Mobile.
Their satellite ISP has an advertised (but never realized) download rate of 1.5 Mbs and upload of 256 kps plus a download data limit of 17 Gbytes per month. Ping times are in the 1.25 second range. If you watch a few movies and do a bit of web browsing you exceed that data limit. This is so much better and they will have a solid Verizon connection in their house in a few hours.
It seems the hot shots of Come and Take It Austin took umbrage to a SXSW panel about social media and gun control. With toddlers in tow, they marched down Sixth Street last Saturday waving flags and revolvers.
…
Still, those of you who were actually invited to our city’s annual party should know that this isn’t exactly everyday behavior. It is true that Texans do enjoy firepower. It is de rigueur for GOP politicians to be photographed at firing ranges, and even our bright liberal beacon Sen. Wendy Davis supports open-carry laws. But in Austin, most of us are content to keep our phallic symbols in our pants.
Without wading into the larger gun-control debate, these kinds of protests are not about the concept of “liberty” that Infowars slings around like a short-order cook. They are about display and braggadocio.
Brandon Watson
March 12, 2014
No, Armed Protests Are Not Normal in Austin
[It’s another Markley’s Law Monday!
H/T to TriggerFinger for the email.—Joe]
The type of gun control we have now doesn’t work. We need to outright repeal the 2nd Amendment.
The_One_Pc
May 24, 2014
Comment to Sheriff: Gunman killed 3 people at home before going on rampage
[If laws aren’t working then those laws need to be repealed. You don’t double down on something you admit isn’t working.
The drug control laws aren’t working either. What does he advise to remedy that problem?
Or how about the laws against people under 21 drinking alcohol? What does he recommend for that?
Even though the guy has crap for brains, don’t let anyone tell you no one wants to take your guns.—Joe]
Our Constitution is a resilient force, and our Bill of Rights has survived countless modifications and restrictions without the erosion of fundamental freedoms. Our Second Amendment right is no different: It can survive modification and restriction without the fear that it will vanish altogether.
Mark O’Mara
May 2, 2014
I’m a gun owner and I want gun control
[“…without fear that it will vanish altogether”! That’s his criteria for the preservation of a specific enumerated right? So as long as you get permission from the government to checkout your single shot .22 rifle once a month at the gun range and use it under close supervision before checking it back your right to keep and bear arms hasn’t been infringed, right?
Let’s test this concept with some other rights:
I would like to suggest that O’Mara review the concept of “strict scrutiny” in regards to constitutionally protected rights. But I fear his ability to think rationally has vanished altogether.—Joe]
No law abiding citizen needs 15-round magazines.
In mass shootings, the shooter is overwhelmed at the point he has to re-load. That provides the rest of us opportunities to stop the carnage.
Bryan Miller
Executive director of the anti-violence group Heeding God’s Call.
May 23, 2014
New Jersey gun control bill passes Assembly, heads to governor’s desk
[First off, it’s a Bill of Rights. Not a Bill of Needs.
Second, magazines of 15, 20, and 30 rounds are “in common use” and hence protected under the Heller decisions.
Third, in mass shootings the shooter should be overwhelmed by incoming lead by about the second or third shot, not the 10th.
Fourth, think about trying to overwhelm this old fart during magazine changes or even during the malfunction clearance:
It’s not going to go well for anyone that tries. The only thing that is stopping someone with even a moderate amount of training is a good guy with a gun or the exhaustion of his ammo supply.
This law is only useful for handicapping those who obey it. Those will overwhelmingly be people protecting innocent lives.
I look forward to the eventual prosecution of Miller and all those who voted for this law which will do nothing but protect criminals.—Joe]
He served combat tours. He was in San Diego for PTSD treatment, took a wrong turn, found himself across the border, and has now been held in a Mexican prison for several weeks.
Sign the whitehouse.gov petition.
We bitch a lot about what’s wrong. Now take a few minutes to help set something right.
You have to be really, really good to get to the targets at the top of the hill if you start at the bottom. You see, the really good folks tend to start at the top…
TriggerFinger
May 18, 2014
Boomershoot math
[I have nothing to add but my laughter.—Joe]
When I started dating again after separating from my ex-wife I jokingly put the following in my online dating profile:
I’ve thought that I would like a harem of super models with a mean IQ of 150 and a minimum of 130. But I’m pretty certain drawing a square circle using a unicorn horn is more likely. Also, taking care of more than one woman is probably beyond my ability so, upon further reflection, I have decided I’ll just have a more conventional relationship.
Barb L. liked my profile and, in fact, after being on Match.com for a month, I was the only person she was interested in meeting and she let it expire without meeting anyone else. I have been the only person she dated after kicking her ex-husband out of the house.
After meeting her I was quite smitten. I stopped looking and concentrated my attention on Barb. It’s worked out well.
What I didn’t know was that while I was joking about the harem of super models in my profile was that Barb actually turned down a modeling career. She is very smart and probably would have been bored with it as well as having much better long term prospects in her chosen career.
A few months ago she told me about the modeling stuff and showed me some pictures she had stored in the garage. You can see damage to some of the pictures but you can also see that even when joking you might get something of what you were asking for:
This says her height is 5’ 11”. It might have been then but she is now nearly 6’ 1”.
She says she used to call this one “Barb on the rocks.”
There is no longer any defensible argument for a constitutional right to own a firearm, if there ever was.
Zack Beauchamp
February 20, 2014
Ban the Second Amendment: Imagine the Second Amendment didn’t exist, and try arguing for a constitutional right to gun ownership. You will fail.
[H/T to Kurt Hofmann.
Self defense, one of the easiest ways to argue it to most people is dismissed with:
The second argument in favor of untrammeled gun ownership, a right to self-defense, is equally incoherent. For starters, there’s no reason that, in a civil society, the right to defend yourself implies the right to defend yourself however you’d like. A basic part of government’s job is to limit our ability to hurt others; assuming the absolute right to self-defense constitutes, in Alan Jacobs’ evocative phrasing, “the absolute abandonment of civil society.”
Here you can see some of his incredibly scary mindset. “A basic part of government’s job is to limit our ability to hurt others”. Wow!
It’s that same old prevention instead of punishment argument. In my mind one of the characteristics of a free society is that you are free to make mistake, or be evil, it’s just that you will suffer the consequences of your actions if you do. Except in extreme outlier cases, such as true weapons of mass destruction, the government should not ever be granted the power to prevent ordinary people from doing whatever it is they want to do. In terms of citizen/citizen interaction government power is only granted to punish those that infringe upon the rights of others.
Beauchamp’s mindset is that of one who yearns for an all powerful, all seeing, all protective government. A government with widespread informants which interrogates and tortures people in response to anonymous or torture induced testimony. That is the only way you can even hope to approach a preventive model for citizens hurting others.
Beauchamp should study history rather than yearn for an utopia who’s quest has resulted in the murder of 10’s of millions by their own government in the 20th Century.—Joe]
I had a interesting face to face discussion with an anti-gun person yesterday. The details aren’t particularly important but it set me to thinking—a lot. They were very new to the topic, had zero factual basis, and yet thought up quasi-rational arguments on the fly. They were entirely novel and amazingly good for having been formulated in the previous few seconds.
I have been doing this for 20 years and they only spent about 30 seconds working themselves up before attempting to tear into me. The outcome was as one-sided as you might expect it to be.
It took me a long time to go to sleep last night and I spent a lot of time thinking about our debate. Going over it caused me to come up with a new approach to anti-gun people or people that haven’t given much thought to the topic.
We have frequently talked about offering to put “This home is gun free” signs up for our opponents. But I think this is too subtle for most people. The implications just aren’t obvious enough.
If someone is going to advocate for no guns or restricted access then they should be willing to carry a sign, take pledges, etc. that says, “If attacked I won’t resist”. When they drop their kids off to play at a friends place they will ask them to renew their pledges to not actively resist if some animal (either two or four legged) tries to attack their child.
The absurdity of the idea is now apparent. They will protest. And you are now in a much stronger position to point out that restricting access to the best self-defense tools available is also absurd. It’s only matter of degree.
This is what happens when the government tries to do something. It is in part because it’s “someone else’s money”:
Employees at an ObamaCare processing center in Missouri with a contract worth $1.2 billion are reportedly getting paid to do nothing but sit at their computers.
“Their goals are set to process two applications per month and some people are not even able to do that,” a whistleblower told KMOV-TV, referring to employees hired to process paper applications for ObamaCare enrollees.
The facility in Wentzville is operated by Serco, a company owned by a British firm that was awarded $1.2 billion in part to hire 1,500 workers to handle paper applications for coverage under the law, according to The Washington Post.
The whistleblower employee told the station that weeks can pass without data entry workers receiving even a single application to process. Employees reportedly spend their days staring at their computers, according to a KMOX-TV report.
“They’re told to sit at their computers and hit the refresh button every 10 minutes, no more than every 10 minutes,” the employee said. “They’re monitored, to hopefully look for an application.”
Obamacare will make healthcare more affordable. All the government has to do is pass a law declaring something to be true and that is what will happen.
That is what the suckers believe. Historic data to the contrary is always ignored. Present results are ignored. They believe intentions are more valid than results. These people do not operate in a world of facts. They operate in a world of good intentions. Most of them anyway. Some are truly evil and take advantage of this flaw in the nature of many people.
Daniel Webster and Henry David Thoreau both had it nailed over 150 years ago.
It’s time people put their brains to work and stop relying on their “hearts”. If we don’t the consequences may be extremely severe. Their ideology puts millions of people at extreme risk.
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.
Macbeth’s self-justifications were feeble—and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology.
Ideology—that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others’ eyes, so that he won’t hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors. That was how the agents of the Inquisition fortified their wills: by invoking Christianity; the conquerors of foreign lands, by extolling the grandeur of their Motherland; the colonizers, by civilizations; the Nazis, by race; and the Jacobins (early and late), by equality, brotherhood, and the happiness of future generations.
Thanks to ideology, the twentieth century was fated to experience evildoing on a scale calculated in the millions.
Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation (Volume One) pages 173 and 174.
[Those that believe in the power of the state to do good have and will use the state to enforce their ideology upon the unbelievers. They believe “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.” The twentieth century saw 60 to 100 million people murdered by their governments to make the world a better place. Governments which believed the welfare of the nation took precedence over that of individuals. That is what their ideology enabled. The ideology of the U.S. Constitution is that government has a very limited role, must be given only a small set of enumerated powers, and must respect the rights of the individual. That is why the right to keep and bear arms is an individual right. The oppressed individuals in the great massacres of the 20th Century always vastly outnumbered their active oppressors. This is why the ideologies of those who believe in the power of the state always include the disarming of the individual. The armed individual is too dangerous to their ideology.
Let’s not let the 21st Century ideologies that succeed be those that enable the murder of 10s or 100s of millions.—Joe]
Clearing out my spam folder just now, I spied one from Senate Republicans out of the corner of my eye, way down the list. My first thought was that it said “Why we lose”, which would have been an excellent and highly relevant topic. In fact it said “Lyle, we are close.”
Actually, we are not close. “We” are not even on the right path and so we’ll never be close until we change paths. Since it was titled with a falsehood, and since they’re not going to address the all-important question of why we lose, there was no point in reading it.
That is of course assuming that “We” means “we Republicans” which in my case is big stretch. Since TR, over 100 years ago, “Republican” has meant “Progressive who must pander to conservatives and libertarians for votes, and who therefore hates his job”.
@JayCaruso no, out of touch with the avg maryland voter, who isnt some gun nut compensating for something missing. @JeffQuinton
Oliver Willis
Tweeted on March 23, 2014
[It’s another Markley’s Law Monday!
H/T to Jay Caruso in his post The Liberal Mindset As It Relates To Guns And The Second Amendment—Joe]
Weer’d made a comment in this post that kind of bugged me:
Still I’ve noticed that the more homogenous a population is in an area the more revolting the racism can be. I knew a ton of people in Maine who would drop the N-Bomb frequently, and would make horrible cracks about blacks….but I always wondered if they had even SEEN one.
It’s a LOT harder to make such cracks when you know people of a minority or other groups.
Where I grew up there were virtually no “people of color”. Technically the family farm was (and is) on an Indian reservation but most of the land had been purchased by whites over the years and no Indians have lived there since before I was born. 20 miles away, in Lapwai, the entire town was (and probably still is) essentially Nez Perce. But we only saw them when our schools competed. They were serious competitors just like the kids from Grangeville and Kamiah who also had few, if any, non-whites. Their athletic ability was everything. The only pigmentation that mattered was that of their uniform. The inferiority of that pigmentation did not extrapolate to an inferiority in the pigmentation of their skin.
I stumbled across “Cracks in the NRA armor?” recently:
For more than 30 years, the NRA and its lobbyists have controlled the debate on gun reform with both money and media. Since the Sandy Hook massacre on Dec. 14, 2012, that has changed. That event woke Americans to the hold that the gun manufacturers and the NRA had on our country.
…
The NRA is no longer your “Grandfather’s Association” for hunters and sports shooters, but a more militaristic organization spreading fear of government tyranny.
We learned that we will not rest until our families and communities are safe from gun violence.
Yes. She is delusional if she thinks the NRA has “controlled the debate on gun reform with both money and media”. And there are a lot of other signs of her delusions there as well.
While in general a delusional opponent is probably less of a threat that a reality based one they are still an opponent. And when allowed to have power they can be an extremely deadly threat. Do not dismiss them. Keep them from the levers of power.
Think Stalin, Mussolini, and Michael Bloomberg.
The welfare of the nation takes precedence over the selfishness of the individuals … was the fundamental principle of Nazi economic management. But as people are too dull and too vicious to comply with this rule, it is the task of government to enforce it.
Ludwig von Mises
1949
Human Action: A Treatise on Economics (4 Volume Set)
[For more context see here.
“Dull and vicious.” That is what they think of you if you do not place the welfare of the nation above that of your own. When people tell you this today inform them there have been a lot of people in agreement with them. It was the fundamental principle of Nazi economic management.—Joe]
We have a slave class in this country.
There is a segment of the population that lives solely off the toil of others without making their own contribution. Their grandparents, parents, and children insist they are entitled to being supported by their slaves. They deserve to be supported and appear to have no remorse, see anything wrong with the situation, and fully expect they and their offspring to be able to continue to live off the back of others forever.
We have the slave overseers who punish the slaves who do not “contribute their fair share”. And actively seek the favors of their master who give them their power. They promise more and more benefits if only they will vote for them in the next election.
As Ayn Rand said, socialism is the enslavement of people by vote. And we have made great “progress” in becoming a socialist society.
Yes. I know. Comparing modern-day wage earners to slaves trivializes true slavery. But Marxists have been doing this for a long time and I’m not going to accept criticism for using the same tactic they use against us.
Footnote 1
From here: “It can be persuasively argued,” noted one concerned philosopher, “that the conception of the worker’s labour as a commodity confirms Marx’s stigmatization of the wage system of private capitalism as ‘wage-slavery;’ that is, as an instrument of the capitalist’s for reducing the worker’s condition to that of a slave, if not below it.”[249]
Footnote 2
While doing a bit of poking around in the process of writing this blog post I ran across this fascinating tidbit:
A black man named Anthony Johnson of Virginia first introduced permanent black slavery in the 1650s by becoming the first holder in America of permanent black slaves.[116]
And this:
Some of President Obama’s ancestors were slave owners.[263]