Quote of the day—Anonymous Conservative

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The real engine which powers this hidden force is actually our world’s reality, so the force is almost useless to Leftists. Until reality can be replaced with fantasy in the real world, Leftists can do no more to stop our wielding of this weapon than they can do to stop gravity. They are helpless before us, and ply their political strategies only with our willing acquiescence to their evil and our passive acceptance of their fantasy.

The day major Conservative strategists grasp the force at work in the graph above, from the macro-level effects down to the effect on dopamine receptor gene transcription within neurons, is the day our battle ends, and our species begins a stratospheric ascent to levels of technological and societal advancement that we can only dream of.

Anonymous Conservative
January 16, 2014
The Forces Exerted By r and K-Selection Effects Mold the Ideological Inclinations of Societies – How Resource Availability Determines Destiny
[It’s a pleasant thought but I’m not convinced of this conclusion even though I’m mostly convinced of many of the less specific conclusions made in his other blog posts and his book. I have a lot more to read in his book but what I have read resonates well with me.—Joe]

Update: I asked a question in the comments to his post:

If resource depletion causes a strong shift to K-selected behavioral traits then why doesn’t this always happen in other countries? It appears to me that they frequently turn communist.

Two days after my question he came back with a 2200 word response.

Wow!

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I just watch the video Uncle put up on January 1:

It’s an hour long which is why I just now got around to watching it. I suspect that only about 10%, at best, of software developers will understand all of it. Non software security people will grasp only 10% of the material.

I had to look up several terms and I stopped it many, many times to more closely examine the classified documents. I am very impressed with the technology the NSA has implemented. That is amazing stuff.

They have tools that can, literally, fly over your home or city from up to eight miles and away infect computers with spyware. That’s just one of hundreds of tools they have.

There was some very serious bad-ass stuff in there that I knew was possible, and actually implemented prototypes of, years ago. They have it perfected and massively deployed. Seeing that they have it deployed explains some things that always bothered me about some of the projects I worked on or was sort of associated with. It all makes a whole lot more sense now.

The NSA people should congratulated on the awesome technology they have developed and deployed and then they should be sent to the gulags.

Another quote of the day – Thomas Jefferson

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“Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add ‘within the limits of the law’, because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.”

“No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal rights of another, and this is all from which the laws ought to restrain him.” [Thomas Jefferson to Francis Gilmer, 1816]

There have been volumes written about it, but that’s all that needs to said on the subject of liberty. Truth requires few words.

I’ve heard all of the “Yeah but…” arguments, so don’t bother. Those all come from people who see themselves as would-be social engineers (obstructionists).

Quote of the day—Emily Miller

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There is no reason for the government to prevent, much less prosecute, a former member of law enforcement from buying a gun for his law-abiding uncle. The Supreme Court should overturn the appeals court, but more importantly, make clear that the government has no right to intervene in private gun transfers between honest American citizens.

The ultimate purpose of the Second Amendment, the prevention of tyranny, depends on the government not having a registry or knowing who is armed.

Emily Miller
January 22, 2014
MILLER: Supreme Court ruling on Abramski could limit Obama’s radical, gun-control aims
[The only thing I would change about the above quote is that it should have been, “the government has no power to intervene”.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Will Burns

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I think the law can be rewritten to allow residents to determine whether they want these businesses in their neighborhoods.

Will Burns
Member of the Chicago Board of Alderman
January 22, 2014
Chicago Officials Say New Gun Control Law Can Be Crafted
[And do they also think they can also write a law that allows residents to determine whether they want a Jewish/Muslim/Christian place of worship in their neighborhood? These officials need to be interviewed by the police instead of the media. Then they should be prosecuted.—Joe]

What happened to Colin Goddard?

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Colin Goddard, the Brady Campaign expert at getting shot, used to get a lot of media attention. But not anymore. I couldn’t find any connection between Goddard and the Brady Campaign since April 2013.

In fact it appears the Brady Campaign has had a complete regime change. These are all new faces to me since Dan Gross took the job as president.

They don’t have a very large staff and to replace that many people in that short of time means that, essentially, they flushed all their institutional memory. Which I suppose makes sense. It’s a good idea to change a losing strategy. But it’s a better idea to shut down an obsolete business rather than to continue dumping money into it.

A million dollar gun control contest

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When I read this I was really annoyed:

Smart Tech Foundation, a new San Francisco gun violence prevention organization backed by tech investor Ron Conway, will start taking applications on Jan. 28 for a $1 million contest to identify devices for preventing gun-related injuries and deaths.

In particular, Smart Tech is focused on access control technologies that can reliably prevent unauthorized use of guns and ammunition.

…

Smart Tech was founded in 2013 in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre of children and teachers the prior year in Newtown, Conn.

Why didn’t he offer $1 million for ideas to make our children safer? By limiting his acceptable solution set to only those things that place limits on firearms he is showing his prejudice. It rules out things like firearms instruction for teachers and building designs that inhibit mass shootings.

After reading a part of his website I’m slightly less annoyed. It’s not quite as bad as I thought it was, but it still has lots of room for improvement:

SmartTechFoundation

On the gun side of things the solutions being suggested will never be retrofitted on hundreds of millions of existing firearms even if they are found to be feasible in new production guns. And I have my doubts that any biometric solution will be practical, ever. The hurdles to a biometric solution are very high and numerous. And they are all bypassed with 3-D printers and/or someone with access to hand tools in their garage.

On the brain health side of things short of mandatory examinations of a large segment of the population it’s not going to work no matter how accurate your examination is. And that gets into some troubling civil rights territory.

It will be interesting to watch and see what comes out of this. My guess is nothing anywhere nearly worth $1,000,000.

Always learning new things

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Doing things in Real Life ™ is educational. Frustrating, tiring, confusing, and risky, but educational. Case in point: after writing a book comes the part you have much less control over, and a learning curve that you can’t postpone. (Or should have researched better, earlier). Continue reading →

Quote of the day—Chris W. Cox

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The louder Bloomberg shouts his nonsensical rhetoric, the fewer remain willing to listen.

Chris W. Cox
December 2013
Bloomberg’s Anti-Gun Bus Tour Travels a Road To Nowhere
[Bloomberg’s slogans are moderately effective but his objectives and his illegal mayors cannot stand up to examination. It’s time to prosecute them.—Joe]

Random thought of the day

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Almost everyone knows that leaving the refrigerator door open in the summer doesn’t, on the whole, make your house cooler. But did you know that in the winter you could use your freezer to make ice, store it in the ice-house for summer use, and make more ice you would be using the refrigerator as a heat pump and warm the house? This would make more efficient use of the electricity for heating than if you used that same electricity to heat your home directly with an electric furnace or baseboard electric heat. Part of the heat comes from the electricity used to run the freezer and the rest of the heat comes from the water you put in the freezer. You remove heat from the water, causing it to freeze, put the heat into the air, which raises the temperature of the air.

Plus, when you use the ice you stored in the winter the next summer you save on your summer electric bill as well.

Yeah, I know. What a geek. That what you get when read the blog of someone who thought their thermodynamics class was fun.

Gumming up the works

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In reference to Obamacare President Obama said:

A lot of Republicans seem to believe that if they can gum up the works and make this law fail, they’ll somehow be sticking it to me.

What advocates for Obamacare and statists in general don’t seem to understand is that you cannot expect anything but people attempting to “gum up the works” under these situations. Anytime there exists a desired product or service and willing buyers those products and services will naturally, without any coercion, be exchanged for money or barter from the buyers.

Government is coercion. It is applying force. The “force of law” is a common phrase for a reason. Laws and government in some circumstances can help. It’s difficult to argue that using the force of government to enforce contracts entered into by willing parties is anything other than “a good thing”.

But on the other end of the spectrum when the force of government is used to require people purchase a product they did not want, supply a product below cost, outlaw products desired by the market, or sell only products wanted by only a few then things are different. In these instances, all present with Obamacare, government itself created obstacles to the free exchange of product and money. No one should expect the majority of people to embrace it. If it was something people wanted then they would have willingly done it before being forced to by the government. If the force of government is required before something will happen then government is “gumming up the works” of what people naturally want to do. And one should not be surprised when people expend effort in attempting to avoid or eliminate the obstacles placed in their path by government.

For Obama to complain that people opposing Obamacare are “gumming up the works” should be a defining example of the classic meaning of chutzpah.

Quote of the day—Don Lemon

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Well, first let’s remove the politics and truthfully talk about gun laws, about gun violence.  After the Newtown shooting President Obama commissioned the Center for Disease Control to research gun violence and offer solutions.  And the study was completed this summer and it just might make you rethink your stance, your view, on the issue.  It did for me.

Don Lemon
September 19, 2013
REALITY CHECK: Let’s Talk About Guns
[You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.*—Joe]

*John 8:32

Gun cartoon of the day

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H/T to Weer’d Beard for the email pointing me to the image here.

ComeAndTakeIt

First, there are a lot of people that want to take our guns. Haven’t they ever heard the phrase “assault weapon ban”? Or how about New York’s SAFE act?

Second, invoking Markley’s Law is an automatic fail in the “discussion”.

Third, advocating for background checks to exercise a specific enumerated right is crazy talk.

Cut lead bar verses round ball

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I’d not heard of cut lead bar being used in lieu of ball. The use of “findings” in a fowling piece or a blunderbuss, sure, but not this. Interesting.

If you can melt lead or a similar metal or alloy (and who can’t?) and pour it into a slot between some boards, you have buckshot for your scattergun, or bullets for your “smooth rifle”.

I wouldn’t try it on the line at Boomershoot though. Well OK I might, but I wouldn’t expect any detonations, much less hits, from 400 yards.

Only a gun

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Does Lorraine Devon Wilke live on planet Nerf where the bats can break Nerf desks and Nerf windows but not a head?

The student in Roswell might have picked up a bat and smashed a few desks, knocked over some chairs or even broken a few bones. He might have trashed a locker, broken a window or spewed graffiti across a wall. But leaving a child critically wounded with a shot to the face? Only a gun can inflict that result.

Only a gun? Wow!

Wilke goes on to say:

It appears we care more about owning guns than saving ourselves from them. We care more about being able to carry them, defend them, shoot them, and justify the damage caused by them. We care so much about all that, wrapped in arguments of outdated constitutional amendments, that we’ve basically agreed, tacitly or otherwise, that we will live in a society where an irate moviegoer can kill someone for texting, an angry child can destroy a classmate out of anger, and a distraught father can end his life out of despair.

I do not want to live in that kind of society. Do you?

“Outdated constitutional amendments”? She has to have the 2nd Amendment as one of those. I wonder what other specific enumerated rights she thinks is outdated? The rights that would inhibit the confiscation of all firearms in the hands of private citizens?

Ms Wilke, if you don’t want to live in a society that respects our preexisting, specific, enumerated, rights then I suggest you to move to a different society. You won’t be taking my guns and my rights from me during my lifetime in this society.

I have to conclude these type of people have crap for brains.

New Product

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It’s the UltiMAK model M15 optic mount for the Yugo/Serbian M92 (A.K.A. PAP) AK pistol.

There have been a lot of requests for this. The first batch went into anodizing today and should be shipping by next week.

As always; yes it’s slightly shorter than the original piston tube. Yes, it’s supposed to be that way. No, that won’t have any effect on carrier cycling whatsoever. Yes, it’s the very best place for a dot sight on your AK. It’s also the right place to mount a pistol scope. No, it doesn’t need to be removed for cleaning.

I won’t get into the issue of the utility of an AK pistol. Several of the guns I own don’t have much real utility in the strict, modern sense (the reproduction 1861 Colt Navy percussion revolver comes to mind). Then again, some people are SBRing the AK pistols, providing a sub-gun-sized, shouldered shooter with a lot more power (and muzzle blast) than a 9 mm or a 45, plus ammo and magazine compatibility with a regular AK carbine.

1939 LA County sheriff’s revolver club

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From an e-mail.

The PC police would of course disapprove of the cigarettes and cigar. OK they’d disapprove of everything.

Also they handle lead with their bare hands at the range, shoot stuff out of other people’s mouths and ears which our litigious society now largely prevents, and they still for some reason thought the human heart was all in the left side of the chest. It appears that the price of their cast lead bullet reloads was a penny per round (presumably with the deposit of your spent brass).

They had someone else to clean your gun for you. That I do not approve– It’s not only elitist, but dumb from the standpoint of being able to understand and monitor the condition your own hardware. You should clean your own gun as an integral part of the craft.

They did have rotary, progressive loading machines.

I understand the desire for efficiency at a range, and of having some kind of standards for evaluating the skills of your deputies, but the highly controlled (and therefore highly limited) nature of the training/practice experience at such a range leaves me somewhat cold. I suppose it makes me something of an outlier, but I think you should to get out and simply “play” at it now and then, making up your own scenarios, picking non-standard targets at un-measured distances and so on. I’ll call this “messin’ around shooting”.

I once had a retired LA cop (which means he should very well know better from more than a little personal experience) tell me that his 45 ACP could “shoot through an engine block”. When I got back into shooting after being a hippie for a while, one of the first things I did, of course, was to try various calibers on an old chainsaw at a friend’s house. A 9 mm Para would break the aluminum fins off the cylinder, a 10 mm would strip the fins down clean, and a 7.62 x 39 would punch through the light aluminum and severely dent or tear the steel parts. There’s no way your 45 is going to “shoot through an engine block”. The messin’ around shooter already knows this from direct experience.

So while the gelatin testers, the organized range shooters and the gun magazine readers are talking about the performance of this or that bullet or load, the hunter who does his own butchering, and the messin’ around shooter, are often scratching their heads laughing at them.

I know people who are far more concerned about keeping the grass at the range looking nice than having year-round access for shooters, and they hate people like me. If it’s your own private club and your dime, fine.

Man; I got a little distracted there, huh?

Quote of the day—Morpho

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I don’t care so much about banning assault rifles as I do about the clip sizes and background checks. These weapons really aren’t the problem. If people want to waste money on these toys, go ahead. They’re fun to shoot for about 1 clip, then boooooooring. They’re a pain to clean and maintain, and the ammo isn’t exactly cheap. But they sure make your wiener feel enhanced, right big boy?

Morpho
February 4, 2013
Comment to Assault Weapons Ban Likely To Die So That Broader Gun Policy Legislation Can Live
[It’s another Markley’s Law Monday!—Joe]

Quote of the day—J. D. Longstreet

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Mr. Obama, through his words, deeds, and declarations has made it clear that he finds our constitution abhorrent.  It is Obama’s propensity for shrugging off the will of the people and the bonds of the constitution on government that have made him the gun salesman of the year.

J. D. Longstreet
January 17, 2014
Beware the Phrase “Sensible Gun Control Laws,” or Why Obama is The Best Gun Salesman In History
[I have nothing to add.—Joe]

Moving up

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Just an FY:

The Stars Came Back is now at:

#18 15 in  Books > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Science Fiction > Military

#26 22 21 Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Science Fiction > Military

#42 35 34 Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Action & Adventure > Science Fiction

Which at the moment translates into 164 183 209 units sold, 4 borrowed.

Whoo-hoo!

UPDATE: now at #1918 in Amazon paid Kindle store.