Don’t be evil Google

I had an technical issue with Google Wallet and contacted support. They helped me (and pissed me in the process—but that is a different story) and then asked for feedback on both the service and the product. This is the feedback I gave them on their product:

I generally like the technical aspects of the product and the low fees. However I do not like the terms of use forbidding the sale of firearms, firearm accessories, and ammunition. The right to keep and bear arms is a specific enumerated right. It’s no different than the terms of use not allowing the sale of books, movies, anything associated with religion, or abortions. These are all rights protected from infringement by our government. Restricting access to rights such as these is what tyrannical, evil, governments do. Don’t be evil Google.

Random election thought

The Dem election machine has been touting a massive database of voter information, allowing them to micro-target voters.  The early version was used by the Obama-bots in 2008, then a more refined version in 2012. It has incredibly detailed info on each voter.

Google and Facebook are operated by well-known lefties.

Speculation/question: How much of the incredibly huge and detailed amount of data that these two organizations collect on individuals could be / is funneled into a politically-driven marketing database that would help the Dems figure out the exact right email to send to get them to the pols?

Scary thought.

What are the more libertarian / conservative sources for similar purposes?

Just say “no” to liberal-owned data-mining companies.

Quote of the day—Star-Ledger Editorial Board

The biggest problem with this approach, though, is that it tiptoes around the one reform that could really make a difference… Mandatory gun buybacks.

Do all the voluntary gun buybacks you want. But until they are mandatory, and our society can see past its hysteria over “gun confiscation,” don’t expect it to make much difference.

Star-Ledger Editorial Board
September 19, 2014
What N.J. really needs is mandatory gun buybacks
[H/T to Sebastian.

Don’t ever let anyone get away with telling you no one wants to take your guns.

“Mandatory gun buyback.” What a way with words they have. It’s amazing how much deception they can pack into three words.

It isn’t a “buyback” if the buyer didn’t own the property at some previous point in time.

It isn’t a “buy” of any type if it is mandatory. It’s compensation for confiscation.

How is what they are proposing any different than a “mandatory First Amendment buyback”? I’d be interested to see their reaction to being told they were being compensated, say $10K, for their First Amendment “privileges” and then informed they were being hysterical when they complained. On their way to prison, of course, for violating the ban on free speech.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Rama Lakshmi

India’s $72 million Mars orbiter is the cheapest interplanetary mission ever. Modi said that India’s Mars mission cost less than what it took to make the famous Hollywood space movie “Gravity.”

Rama Lakshmi
September 24, 2014
India becomes first Asian nation to reach Mars orbit, joins elite global space club
[If India had a more gun friendly political atmosphere I might consider moving there. They still have a lot of messed up political ideas, corruption in government, and religious/class/caste issues but as the United States crumbles it is on my short list of refuges if things get really bad.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Nicolas Maduro

We are building peace from within, and for that, you need disarmament.

Let us chase after the dream, after the utopia, the utopia of a Venezuela in peace.

Nicolas Maduro
September 23, 2014
Venezuela’s Maduro launches $47M plan to disarm civilians
[How’s that dream chasing working out for the Marxists?

Private gun ownership in Venezuela was banned in 2012. Yet the country has the second highest murder rate in the world.

Venezuela is also nearing default on its debt, the economy is a disaster, people can’t get toilet paper and many other basic goods, and now they want to spend tens of millions of dollars to “build dozens of new disarmament centers for civilians to surrender their weapons”.

I can’t imagine people who failed to disarm two years ago are going to voluntarily show up at a “disarmament center” to “surrender their weapons”. The government is going to “build peace” by sending armed men out to round up those people who registered their guns.

Marxism never ends up in a peaceful utopia. But it is one of the most certain paths to a police state and massive human suffering.—Joe]

Male Dog Senator

I get a lot of spam. First thing in the morning, and right before I shut down in the evening, I empty the spam bucket. I also empty it during the work day, so this evening I only had three messages in the bucket. I’ve gotten so I can filter out the rare legitimate message amongst all the chaff pretty efficiently. This time I did a quick glance at the first word of each title;
Male
Dog
Senator

Harmonic convergence. There are two kinds of dog senators. The attack dog Democrats, and the Republican dogs that only know how to heel, sit, stay, roll over and beg. Mostly beg. Republicans seem to think that they need my money to win elections, which is bizarre because in reality all they have to do is stand up for a few basic, simple principles. Doing that, they’d get so much attention from the hysterical media and the community organizers (but I repeat myself) that they’d never need to spend another dime on campaigning. We’d just see who’s getting attacked the most for starving children, making children fat, kicking old people out into the streets with no food or medicine, making war for oil, creating bad weather, handing free assault rifles out to kids in school playgrounds, destroying everything the left has worked for in the last hundred years and so on, and vote for them. Totally free advertizing, 24/7/365 on 100 TV channels, all the sports networks, and all radio channels at once. All the money in the world could scarcely buy that kind of promotion.

And for you in the NRSC; you’re pathetic. I can spot your ridiculous attempts to appear chummy, with your e-mail titles, in under 6.5 milliseconds, which means I can ignore a thousand of your pleas-for-money in six and a half seconds or less.

Quote of the day—Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

The bourgeoisie is many times stronger than we. To give it the weapon of freedom of the press is to ease the enemy’s cause, to help the class enemy. We do not desire to end in suicide, so we will not do this.

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
[I haven’t found a convincing source for this so if someone has it or has reasonable proof it is false let me know.

Regardless of its source it does seem that the mainstream media is sufficiently on the side of the oppressors to be mindful of the apparent truth of this quote and does attempt to suppress our point of view.—Joe]

Ghost gun in production

Someone on the gun email list at work sent this out last week:

GhostGun

It’s a real live ghost gun. Apparently there was a limited run of these to mock the anti-gun people upset about people being “allowed” to make their own guns.

Mocking the anti-gun people. It’s what we do. It’s for the children.

Interest in gun control

From Google Trends:

GunControlTrends

 

Other than the obvious peak we see stemming from the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting tragedy we can make some more inferences.

I find it odd there are so many Texas cities (follow the link and scroll down for Austin and Houston) in the top ten for interest in gun control. I have no speculation for that result. Anyone?

We are winning. Look at the level of interest in 2004 to early 2005 range. The lowest level then was greater than anything we have had in the last few months. And the interest from 2004 until December 2012 was steadily declining. We appear to be getting back on track to that decline.

You can see why the anti-gun people dance in the blood of the victims. Their message becomes far more important when there is a mass shooting.

Do you see the decline starting in April 2014 (point A)?

That coincides with Bloomberg’s $50 million push for gun control. Bloomberg may be our enemy. But as enemies go he is one of the easiest to demonize.

Idaho Enhanced Concealed Carry license

I recently got my Idaho Enhanced Concealed Carry license. Due to an error by the person taking my picture I ended up getting both the standard license and the enhanced license. Here is what they look like:

WP_20140921_019Cropped

As you can see the only difference is the title of the card.

I like the Idaho cards much better than the Washington State cards which are nothing but a piece of thick paper which is easily damaged. Also, the paper is slightly larger than a credit card or drivers license and when you laminate it it doesn’t fit into your wallet very well.

Even so, I still think of the license as the near equivalent of the Yellow Badge or the Pink Triangle. Being required to get a license to exercise a specific enumerated right is just wrong.

Defense Distributed October surprise

I received an email from Defense Distributed (they made the first 3D printed gun) last night. It’s contents were:

Respectfully requesting your attendance for an October Surprise.
September 30, 2014.

Anything more would be total speculation on my part.

Quote of the day—Full Fathom Five (@FullFathomFive1)

[It’s another Markley’s Law Monday! Via One Of Them (‏@tazcat2011).

No data, no logical argument, just insults. It’s the best they have to offer.—Joe]

Dorks

ChiefJayBob sent Barb and I matching shirts.

Barb’s came with instructions. There was something in the instructions about wearing or not wearing them at the same time and being dorks. I don’t read so good and couldn’t really understand it that well.

Anyway, we appreciate receiving them and put them on this morning.

Here are the pictures:

WP_20140921_001WP_20140921_003WP_20140921_009

Update: In the comments ChiefJayBob said something about not in public and the rules that came with the shirt. Barb and I studied the comment for a bit and if we understood things correctly we needed a picture in public. So we went to the local grocery store and took another picture:

WP_20140921_016Adjusted

Barb also studied one of his other comments about the shirts. He said something about wearing it when going to bars. I don’t really drink so going to bars isn’t something I have an interest in doing. But Barb said having a “Fire and Rescue” shirt is awesome for picking up chicks in a bar and says she will totally wear it when she goes to the bars. I don’t really understand this. Maybe people help you catch them if they think you are going to rescue them.

And I’m not sure I understand why there would be chicks at a bar. Sure, some bars serve chicken-wings but I’ve never heard of chicks in a bar. Are they attracted to leftover malted barley or something? I don’t really think there is a place to raise them at her house anyway. And chickens are very messy animals to have around. I wouldn’t really want them if I had to take care of them. She just going to have to demonstrate what she wants to do with these chicks she is going to pick up.

Quote of the day—Gary Kleck

By definition, it is logically impossible to commit a firearm homicide or firearm suicide without using a firearm. Even if the availability of guns had no bearing on whether they were used in homicides, you’d expect a significant positive association between guns per capita and rates of gun-related deaths.

Gary Kleck
University of Florida Criminologist
September 18, 2014
Do guns make us safer?
[This is why gun owner rights advocates talk about violent crime instead of “gun deaths”. We are concerned with violent crime and how to make people safer.

And this is why the anti-rights people insist on talking about only about deaths that involve guns. And that is why they include suicide and justifiable homicide. It is only by coming up with misleading statistics that they can arrive at numbers that seem to justify their anti-rights agenda.—Joe]

Elderberry fiend

When I was in Idaho last weekend my SIL Julie was making elderberry juice with the juice extractor I bought her last Christmas. I wanted some and brother Doug picked some more berries (as did I since I didn’t know he was doing it) and I ended with a full gallon of juice to bring back home.

Barb had said she would help me preserve any fruits I brought back but she was thinking apples, pears, and prunes. She didn’t know anything about elderberries. I happily informed her that you make jelly out of them. For some reason her enthusiasm did not match mine. Obviously she had been culturally deprived for all these years and once I informed her of this she would have the enthusiasm to match mine. For some reason that didn’t work out quite like I planned. She remained skeptical but looked up a recipe and yesterday she purchased the supplies.

Today we made elderberry jelly, cranberry jelly (from 100%, no water or sugar added, cranberry juice I bought in an Idaho store after daughter Kim told me about it), and 50/50 elderberry/cranberry jelly.

Here is the result:

WP_20140920_006Adjusted

Barb, after I insisted that it was really good, tasted some of the cooled foam that we scooped off prior to putting the jelly it in the jars.

She became an elderberry fiend. As soon as we finished with the jelly she made elderberry syrup, elderberry liquor, and some sort of mix of vodka and elderberries. If there are still elderberries on the trees when we next go to Idaho she wants more.

I think I have been forgiven for bringing home the elderberry juice.

Quote of the day—Alan Gura

In America, the police don’t determine what rights we have good reason to enjoy. You don’t need a good reason to speak, to worship, to vote or to carry a gun for self-defense.

Alan Gura
September 17, 2014
Lawmakers grudgingly draft bill to authorize concealed carry of guns in D.C.
[But guns are different than speech or religion! No one is harmed by speech!

Wrong.

Ideas are more powerful than weapons. How many innocent people have been murdered on the basis of books like Mein Kampf, The Communist Manifesto, The Bible, and The Qur’an? Compare those numbers to the number of individual criminal uses of firearms and then get back to me.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Ronald Reagan

It’s a nasty truth, but those who seek to inflict harm are not fazed by gun-control laws. I happen to know this from personal experience.

Ronald Reagan
May 6, 1983
Speech at the Annual Members Banquet of the National Rifle Association. Phoenix, AZ.
[From Proclaiming Liberty: What Patriots and Heroes Really Said About the Right to Keep and Bear Arms by Philip Mulivor.

Reagan was shot March 30, 1981. James Brady, the other victim on that day, just recently died. Their shooter still lives and although he spent a lot of time in a psych ward he never went to prison.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Vincent Gray

Guns are not the answer, ladies and gentlemen. Guns would not have saved the victims of the Navy Yard.

Vincent Gray
Mayor of Washington D.C.
September 17, 2014
Gray Calls For ‘Real Gun Control’ At Navy Yard Ceremony, Says D.C.’s Laws May Be ‘Relaxed’
[Then what was the purpose of the guns in the hands of the responding police officers? And why do many of the politicians in his jurisdiction have armed guards?

This guy has crap for brains. Or else he thinks you do.—Joe]

Boomershoot 2015 registration

Registration opens for Boomershoot 2014 participants this Saturday, September 20th at 10:00:00 AM Pacific Time.

Registration opens for everyone next Wednesday September 23rd at 7:00:00 PM Pacific Time.

Sign up here.

Quote of the day—Aaron Peori

No handguns.

No automatics of any kind.

Single action long arms will fulfill all the needs of home defense, hunting and sport.

Aaron Peori
September 11, 2014
Forum post in Your Ideal Gun Control Method
[It’s a Bill of Rights, not a Bill of Needs. And the Supreme Court of the United States says the Bill of Rights protects the type of guns this idiot would have other people take away from you.

Don’t ever let anyone get away with telling you that no one wants to take your guns.—Joe]