Saving Mr. Banks

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On New Years Day Barb and I went to see Saving Mr. Banks. It is a Disney movie which IMDB.com describes as:

Author P. L. Travers reflects on her difficult childhood while meeting with filmmaker Walt Disney during production for the adaptation of her novel, Mary Poppins.

That doesn’t begin to do the movie justice.

I never really cared for Mary Poppins. For one thing I almost never like musicals. And Mary Poppins just seemed to be a bunch of pointless skits strung together. But Barb and I saw a trailer for Saving Mr. Banks a few weeks ago and it looked like it might have some promise.

The major plot line of the movie was that Travers needs the money but is exceedingly reluctant to allow Disney to change her vision of the characters and story. She holds back on signing the rights while simultaneously “working” with the screenwriter and music composers. It’s a contentious relationship with Travers pitted against everyone she meets at Disney who do their best to understand her and accommodate her outrageous demands. The demands include changing the grammar of lines in the script which describe a scene and banning of the use of the color red in the entire movie.

Scenes from Travers childhood in Australia are intertwined with scenes from Disney Studios in 1961. As the exceedingly personal and troubling origins of the Mary Poppins characters are revealed Travers becomes more a sympathetic person rather than just a grumpy old lady. I sometimes thought the world would have been a better place if the adult version of Travers had been dropped off in the middle of the Outback and forgotten.

Even though you know how the essence of how the movie has to end it has a tremendous amount of stress as it reaches its climax and then resolves the conflicts.

Barb wasn’t affected nearly as much as I was, so it probably is something about my abnormal empathy for females, but I found it emotionally overwhelming and draining.

That said, it was a very good movie. I liked it much better than Mary Poppins.

Unarmed man goes on shooting rampage

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You can’t make this stuff up.

I suppose the reasoning would go as follows;
Since cops are the Only Ones trained and competent enough, and with good enough judgment, to carry guns, anything they do that causes harm to innocents must therefore be someone else’s fault. QED. Move along. Nothing to see here. Relax and enjoy your shoes.

I’m all for wiping the personnel roster completely clean, right down to the janitor, in some departments, and starting over. It’s the only way to clean out a bad culture. Otherwise the culture perpetuates itself even as the personnel come and go.

In New York City even that may not be near enough, since the whole town is corrupt and its corruption radiates out for miles and miles like a volcano’s ash cloud.

Those who make peaceful revolution impossible

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Just as a governor of an engine maintains the speed of the engine at a particular speed setting, government, in the most general sense, is a means of keeping things consistent and predictable.

Some examples of a consistent and predictable government:

  • You can safely predict that if you drive on your side of the road at or slightly below the speed limit, and follow the other “rules of the road” you can drive down the highway without being stopped by armed men representing the government demanding you pay a fine.
  • You can safely predict that if someone takes or damages your property without your permission, and they are caught, they will be punished for their actions.
  • You can safely predict that if you have a agreed upon contract with another person or corporation that the contract can and will be enforced according to the terms of the contract.
  • You can safely predict the same laws and regulations will be applied to everyone equally.

This consistency and predictability promotes the general welfare to such a great extent that it is probably impossible to accurately forecast and it can only be crudely measured under extraordinary circumstances.

This difficulty in measurement works both ways. Just as it is difficult to know how much benefit there is to consistent and predictable government it is also difficult to know how much disadvantage there is to inconsistent and unpredictable government. Politicians use this to their great advantage by giving favor to special interest groups and individuals.

But regardless of the difficulty of measurement we know, without any doubt, that inconsistent and unpredictability is the exact opposite of government in the most general sense. It is bad government. It does not create “social justice”. It cannot be considered “doing the right thing even if it is unlawful.” It means people do not have a stable environment. It creates uncertainty and risk that ripples through our entire society. It encourages, nay, requires, people to seek special treatment from the political elite to protect themselves and to punish enemies and competitors.

Yet it is happening now. It is happening in our country.

There were contracts and bankruptcy laws that cover the situation where a corporation has expenses and debts that exceed their capacity to pay. Yet these laws were ignored when certain “to big to fail” corporations actually did fail. The U.S. government bailed out GM using money allocated for other uses. This misallocation of money was done under both the Bush and Obama administrations. It was not within their authority to make such changes in the laws.

It is against the law to sell or transfer firearms to people with felony criminal records. Yet the ATF demanded that many gun stores do exactly that in operation “Fast and Furious”. The publically stated reason was to “purposely allowed licensed firearms dealers to sell weapons to illegal straw buyers, hoping to track the guns to Mexican drug cartel leaders.” But they did nothing more than “hope”, if that, on the tracking part of the operation. Many observers concluded the real reason for the operation was to aid in the creation of new, and probably unconstitutional, gun laws in the U.S. It was not within the authority granted to the ATF by Congress to arm violent criminals nor to enable crime for the purposes of creating new laws which violate the rights of innocent people.

We have laws that specifically state that purchases of multiple long guns do not require any special reporting as is required for handguns (18 USC 923(g)(3)(A)). Yet in some states the ATF requires the same special reporting for long guns just as it does for handguns. The ATF is a law enforcement agency. It does not have the authority to make laws. For them to do this is no different than for some local sheriff to create a 9:00 PM curfew for all dark skinned people or a registry of homosexuals. It is not within their authority to make such changes in the laws.

We have a law that says all health insurance plans must conform to certain minimum standards of coverage. Yet President Obama, without changing the law, told insurance companies they could continue selling the banned policies. It is not within his authority to make such changes in the laws.

The IRS was used as a tool to harass political enemies. It is not within their authority to use the tax system to oppress innocent people.

The NSA captures almost all Internet traffic and stores it, apparently indefinitely. This includes all email and your most personal financial and medical information. They do this in direct violation of the Fourth Amendment.

We have laws that specifically forbid the violation of, or even conspiracy to violate, civil rights (18 USC 241 and 18 USC 242). Yet individuals and governments routinely violate these laws without consequence.

We do not have the rule of law in this country. We have the rule of people who imagine themselves philosopher kings with all the corresponding hazards.

This JFK quote keeps running through my head:

Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.

A peaceful “revolution” involves changing the laws and replacing public servants. But nearly all the servants seem to believe they are the masters and laws are ignored with impunity. So, if JFK was correct, doesn’t that mean violent revolution is inevitable? And doesn’t it also mean that those in political power made it so?

Quote of the day—Aristotle

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It is more proper that law should govern than any one of the citizens: upon the same principle, if it is advantageous to place the supreme power in some particular persons, they should be appointed to be only guardians, and the servants of the laws.

Aristotle
From the Wikipedia entry for Rule of Law
[And so it is with the U.S. Constitution. But the current political reality is that we have something much closer to Plato’s idealized philosopher king, who is above the law.

This is exceedingly dangerous territory. This line of thinking gave rise to totalitarianism in the 20th century. Do not think it can’t happen again.

It is happening now.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Stephen Halbrook

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There are parallels between the firearm bans and registration requirements enacted by the Weimar Republic and those proposed by President Obama. Only law-abiding persons obeyed those laws. Weimar authorities warned that the lists of gun owners must not fall into the hands of “radical elements.” The lists fell right into the hands of the Nazis when they assumed power. Gun owner data can be misused by the government today just as it did in the IRS scandal, and it can be hacked for nefarious purposes.

Stephen Halbrook
Gun Control in the Third Reich: Disarming the Jews and “Enemies of the State”
[If were one to use the set of people being spied up by the government as the ‘Enemies of the State’ then it would appear our government has a lot of enemies. That would explain why so many people in government want us disarmed. We are their enemies.

And in addition to that provided in Halbrook’s book there is a substantial quantity of data to support the assertion that we must not allow ourselves to be disarmed.—Joe]

Not sure what happened in 2013

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So rather than try to talk about it; here’s a pickled egg.image

The color comes from beet juice in the pickling solution. The eggs are boiled and peeled, and after a few weeks in the fridge in the solution, the color permeates the white, and you can see that it’s already started into the yoke.

Here’s the beet prep from last October;
image

We use the greens in salad and whatnot all summer. In the fall they get kinda tough, but I keep them, either blanched and frozen, or pickled, as a green for use all winter.

Here’s a 19th century cider mill I rebuilt in the 1970s and again just a few years ago;
image

We make between around 90 and 150 gallons per year all told, using apples I pick at a local orchard. McIntosh and Liberty apples make my favorite sweet (as opposed to hard) cider. The real serious producers will blend juices from different varieties, including crab apples, to get the flavor they want, but straight Mac is usually just right as it is. You can’t find cider like this in stores, but rarely, and then it costs eight or nine dollars a gallon. I don’t get it. But it doesn’t matter if you make your own.

Here’s some square dowel joinery I was doing for another antique cider mill I have in process;
image

I won’t discuss how it’s done because I don’t know how. I just had to improvise using the limited tools on hand at the time.

And last, here’s a tomato from my garden;

image

They call it the “Taxi” for the obvious reason. They’re delicious too, and I suppose any ripe tomato right off the vine is vastly superior to any tomato that’s been picked for shipping. The deer got most of my tomatoes this year, but I got revenge this hunting season. Now I have vegetables and venison in the freezer. Life is good

Quote of the day—Jeffrey Goldberg

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Gun-control advocates, and their friends in Congress and state legislatures, must admit to themselves that the fixes they propose are mainly symbolic. There is a striking timidity to the gun-control movement. America is awash in guns — about 300 million are now in private hands. Mainstream, incremental, gun control measures, if enacted, would not reduce the number of guns in society, and they would only work at the margins of the problem. In other words, laws that would have prohibited the Newtown killer’s mother from acquiring her weapons would have been more helpful.

Jeffrey Goldberg
December 20, 2013
Jeffrey Goldberg: Why Newtown didn’t change America
[If you read his entire post you will discover Goldberg has a good understanding of the gun politics. The only thing he messes up above where he expresses his belief that “laws that would have prohibited the Newtown killer’s mother from acquiring her weapons would have been more helpful”.

He apparently does not understand a couple of things. It’s too bad because that understand is critical to his reaching the correct conclusion. Those items are:

  1. Firearms are used to protect innocent life. Hence any restrictions on firearms must take into account the reduction in benefits as well as the reduction in risks.
  2. Prohibiting firearm ownership to people with no propensity to commit violent illegal acts, such as the Newton killer’s mother, would not be “helpful” in the sense Goldberg might imagine it. In addition to the Constitutional issues flooding the courts there would be significant percentage of existing gun owners that would choose to act outside the law to demonstrate just how “unhelpful” they could be.

I applaud Goldberg’s call to gun control advocates to recognize they are mainly symbolic and do not advocate for practical benefits. But he still needs addition education and, contrary to the gun control advocates, I think he is rational and honest enough to learn.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Mike Weisser

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Advocacy organizations can play an important role in any public debate regardless of their size. But the trick is to figure out who you’re really talking to and whether or not they will listen to what you have to say. If Moms wants to have a real impact on the argument over guns, why don’t they talk to gun owners and stop wasting their energy on convincing people who don’t need to be convinced? And you don’t talk to gun people by throwing up a website or a Facebook page and ‘invite’ them to post a comment or engage in a chat. Maybe that strategy works when you’re selling a product, but it’s rank arrogance to confuse marketing a product with marketing an idea.

Mike Weisser
December 29, 2013
The Confrontational Gun Control Strategy That Just Might Work
[The anti-gun people have an incredible amount of arrogance. And ignorance. And profound disregard for the U.S. Constitution.

Don’t expect them to ever understand why they do and should loose the battle they are fighting. They have mental problems and even as they are swept into the dustbin of history by the legislatures and the courts they will still believe they are right. Their mindset does not, and will never, have a significant difference from that of the KKK of the last century. We are the “gun n***ers” of the 21st Century and they want us “put in our place”.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Paul‏ @hairymodelwanaB

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The only reason men want a gun in their pocket it because their penis doesn’t work, be a man not a weak excuse for one

Paul‏ @hairymodelwanaB
Tweeted on May 17, 2013
[It’s another Markley’s Law Monday!

And what does Paul think the reason a woman would want a gun in their pocket I wonder. Penis envy?

Occam’s Razor would suggest self-defense is the better answer.—Joe]

Soul sucking

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While at Wade’s yesterday Barb overheard someone asking about purchasing a suppressor. After we left I gave her more details about the process.

  • The creation of a trust or sign-off by local law enforcement.
  • The submission of paperwork to the ATF.
  • The nine months to a year wait for the ATF to process the paperwork.
  • The background check for the people on the trust.
  • The $200 tax stamp.
  • The 4473 and background check when you pick up the suppressor.

Her comment was, “That’s a soul sucking experience.”

Yup. You have to have your soul sucked in order to exercise a specific enumerated right. This isn’t the way this country is supposed to be run.

Nicely wrapped, but not a surprise

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Barb and I saw this on the wall at Wade’s yesterday:

WP_20131228_001

Quote of the day—Robert J. Avrech

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Under ObamaCare, private contracts have been dissolved through state intervention. And the very laws that Obama and the Democrats pass are as liquid as mercury. From day to day, just as Big Brother shifted the meanings of law and order, the Obama regime makes laws, revises and sometimes simply ignores the very same laws — all in the name of, ahem, social justice.

If a contract is not a contract, what is it?

If a law is not a law, what is it?

Answer: It is 1984.

Robert J. Avrech
December 16, 2013
Person Of The Year: George Orwell
[It’s usually spelled out as in Nineteen Eighty-Four, but other than that minor quibble I am in complete agreement with Avrech.

We live in scary times.—Joe]

That was a first

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This morning Barb and I did some errands together. One of these was for me to get a dress shirt for a party we are attending tonight. While out I got a call from a friend with a well deserved nickname of “Brazen E.” which went something like the following. It was a real “first” for me.

Joe: Hello E.

E: Hi! What are you doing? Are you with your family in Idaho?

J: No. I got back last night. I’m in a dressing room at J.C. Penney’s. What about you?

E: We had a nice Christmas. I’m in a room with my daughter and can’t say a whole lot but I’m feeling pretty hormonal. I got permission from my husband and you are the first person I thought of.

J: Ahhh… Oh! So you are looking for some “benefits” from a friend?

E: Exactly! So, are you available?

J: Uhhh… [How do you say, “No” to someone who has the courage to ask for, and gets, permission from their husband to come play with you for a few hours?]

I’ll talk to Barb about it but we are pretty busy today and we are going to a party tonight. Maybe you could find someone at the party tonight. Would you like to go with us?

E: No. I don’t think so. Let me know if you change your mind.

J: I’m pretty sure it’s not going to work out. If you have another opportunity you should take it rather than waiting for me to call back.

E: Yeah. I already tried one, but he said he would rather sleep.

J: That was your husband?

E: Yes.

J: I see. Okay. Well good luck finding someone!

As I expected Barb did not think it was a good use of my time this afternoon.

Quote of the day—Archer

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The Brady Campaign meeting is the CSGV meeting is the Moms Demand [something] meeting. Hand the microphone to the next person, and you’ve got the next meeting.

Archer
December 13, 2013
Comment to Small goals from small minds.
[There is a lot of truth to that.—Joe]

A kids gun

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Barb spent soon time in Idaho with me this week. Dad wanted her to see how much better the room in basement was since she was there the last time. After Dad showed off the improvements I saw something in the gun cabinet I wanted to show her.

WP_20131227_002

It was the old Winchester 32-20 that had hung on the wall of my bedroom for many years as I grew up. It had belonged to my grandfather and my Great Uncle Walt (Grandpa Huffman’s brother) had shot his first coyote with it when he was 10 years old.

Under some of the more repressive laws in this country it is banned as being an assault rifle because it has a capacity of greater 10 rounds. But as it was originally used it was a great gun for kids because of it’s light weight, relatively low cost to shoot, and light recoil.

Open source maps on Garmin GPS?

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I got a Garmin GPS for Christmas, a hand-held one ideal for backpacking. Pretty neat. But then I looked closer, and had a “what the hell?” moment. It has no topo maps. Not even regional low-res 100k maps. Nothing. A few political outlines, major roads, major water obstacles like Lake Washington. You have to buy topo maps as extras. I thought the whole point of a GPS was not to point at a spot in a blank area and say “you are here.” Heck, I can get that with pencil and paper, and know general direction with a compass.

So I went to the Garmin site. They want a hundred bucks for a Northwest 24k topo map. Another hundred for a CA/Nevada topo. Another hundred for “mountain west.” Another hundred for Alaska. Another hundred for 100k US. And so-on. Holy COW! If you get around much, you could easily spend far more on maps than on the GPS unit itself. The unit I received had been bought on sale; any two of those are more than the unit cost.

I dug around a little bit online, and there are some references to using open source (USGS, TIGER, or whatever) topo maps, but nothing very specific or detailed that seemed like the right path. Anyone know any good sourses for free open source 24k topo maps and directions for putting them onto Garmin handheld GPS units? If I can get pointed to some that look like they will work, I’ll try it and let readers know how it goes.

Gun Song- Guns by Justin Moore

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Justin Moore is a country singer. This is from his “Outlaws like me” album.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vk4oiUy1LcY

 

Quote of the day—Unarmed Barista (@GunzAreBad)

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@Rivers513 handguns kill more than the assault murder guns. I’m going after them all #GunSense

Unarmed Barista (@GunzAreBad)
Tweeted on December 16, 2013
[Yeah. Tell me again that, “No one wants to take your guns.”

This may be a troll account so this may not be as good as example as I thought it was.—Joe]

Are you part of the problem or part of the solution?

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A human right is a bit like the sun. The sun is essential to life. You can bask in it, or hide from it. You may be able to change people’s attitudes toward it, or even start a religion around it. You may hate it or love it, or be largely indifferent to it, or think anything you want to think about it. If you fail to deal with it properly it can burn or even kill you, but without it you are dead. You could get a group of sun haters together in the street and carry picket signs denouncing the sun, and you might even be able to lobby enough idiots and criminals in Congress to get laws passed denouncing the sun.

But two things will remain true no matter what you think or do. A) your life depends on the sun, and B) neither you, nor any group of people, any committee or government body, no force on Earth, has the power to alter it in any way. You did not create it and you cannot alter or destroy it.

Similarly, human rights can be respected and honored, or they might be despised and violated, but they cannot be created, granted, altered, revoked or destroyed by any force on Earth no matter how popular or powerful that force may be. That’s where we get the term “unalienable” as applied to human rights in the Declaration of Independence.

This in partially in response to McThags post here;

http://mcthag.blogspot.com/2013/12/better.html
“He’s head and shoulders above A&E who may be in violation of the 1964 Civil Rights Act for suspending him. Oh yeah, everyone who’s been saying that A&E had every right to fire him over his remarks forgot the religion clause of that law, didn’t they?”

But it apples to all such discussions. I’d comment over there, but commenting seems to require a google account and I’m not starting a google account.

The “Civil Rights Act” does not create, enhance, or modify any right, any more than a law can create, enhance or otherwise modify a star in some other galaxy or a physical law of the universe, though it certainly may be used as a tool or an excuse to violate some rights. Mostly it’s just some words written by people who don’t understand the meaning of rights, or hope that the rest of us don’t understand.

Quote of the day—“Guest”

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Nothing more disgusting than a female gun nut.

“Guest”
June 2013
Comment to Children and Guns: The Fear and the Reality
[You disgust them and they want to take your means of self defense away. It sounds to me like someone is channeling the KKK.—Joe]