Gotta pause a bit. Stomach bug. End of school. Other half out of town. Job apps. A bit of writing, rewriting, and editing. I will be back. Don’t worry, I won’t leave it hanging like this for too long. It WILL get done. Just not in the next week.
In the mean time: Continue reading
Let’s all sit around the fire and tell Brad stories.
Kevin
June 15, 2013
Referring to my 22 year old nephew, Brad Huffman, who died sometime during the night between Thursday and Friday.
[Last night Brad’s father, my brother Doug, and Brad’s siblings Amy (with her husband Nate and son Jared), Lisa (with boyfriend Kevin), and I sat around a fire in the woods behind the house and told stories about Brad for a long time.
It helped. Thanks Kevin.—Joe]
Had the federal government prohibited bookstores from selling books to out-of-state residents, no court would hold that impacted readers lack standing to challenge such a law under the First Amendment. Barring access to the national market for books would directly inflict an injury-in-fact upon consumers. Federal courts are empowered to fully redress that injury. None of this is particularly difficult or controversial.
But substituting “handguns” for “books,” and “Second” for “First” Amendment, sometimes yields different results. The lower court held that criminal prohibitions of retail handgun sales do not directly impact frustrated consumers where the prohibitions are directed at sellers. The sellers’ compliance with the law in refusing to complete a prohibited transaction, and the prohibition’s impact on the market, are, as far as the lower court is concerned, merely the intervening voluntary decisions of third parties.
The decision below contradicts not only decades of firmly established precedent upholding consumer standing to challenge governmental interference in the marketplace. It squarely conflicts with recent Fifth and D.C. circuit decisions upholding consumer standing to challenge various applications of the same federal statute.
Left unchecked, the opinion below threatens to shut the courthouse door on a broad range of legitimate Article III cases and controversies. This Court’s review is warranted.
Alan Gura
May 28, 2013
MICHELLE LANE, AMANDA WELLING, MATTHEW WELLING, AND SECOND AMENDMENT FOUNDATION, INC., v. ERIC HOLDER, JR., et al.,
On Petition For A Writ Of Certiorari To The United States Court Of Appeals
For The Fourth Circuit
[Gun laws in this country are really messed up. This is but one of many, many instances where the Second Amendment is treated like a violently abused person of color that most people want to ignore. People know it’s wrong. People know it’s going on. But almost no one wants to do anything about it and many people try to prevent others from doing the right thing.
This has to stop. Alan Gura and SAF are on the leading edge of bringing the bigots, kicking and screaming, into the 21st Century.—Joe]
Yesterday a new Huffman came into the world with the birth of my grandson. I joked on Twitter:
I became a grandfather at 3:13 on June 13, 2013. No name yet. He has two black cats at home so I’m proposing “Lucky”. pic.twitter.com/BseuMzy9AK
— Joe Huffman (@JoeHuffman) June 13, 2013
Happy times. I was going to Idaho to spend time with my Dad for Father’s Day and share pictures, etc.
I got a call from my brother Doug this morning. His son, Brad, died in his sleep last night. He was 22 years old.
Brad Huffman with his nephew Jared.
He didn’t smoke, drink, or do drugs. No known health issues.
This is really messed up. This isn’t the way things are “supposed” to happen. He just finished college. He had a good job. He was considering taking over the farm when Doug and Gary retired.
As Barb L. pointed out when I talked to her about it, “It’s so terrible, one Huffman enters the world and another leaves.”
Happy Friday. Busy, so not much of a write-up.
Alternative country singer Fred Eaglesmith.
Fade in
INT – DAY – Engineering
Stenson and his team look tired, unshaven, and excited.
They have clearly been hard at work a while, and are looking forward to a real test. The readouts are all in the green. Most are steady, some are fluctuating a bit. The sound of the drives is an intense, slightly pulsing hum. Stenson nods in approval at what he sees. Continue reading
Only ridiculous and hysterical people oppose gun registration, so far as I’ve seen.
There has been no sound argument against it presented.
Miss Esther P. Codwalloper
Comment to Gun control groups plan to try, try again
June 11, 2013
[I guess Miss Codwalloper hasn’t read the story of The Belgium Corporal. Or perhaps her case of cranial rectum inversion is so advanced she hasn’t heard how the IRS abused it’s powers. And she had to have totally missed out on the failed Canadian gun registry.
Then there is the little case of U.S. v. Haynes where it was ruled unconstitutional that convicted felons could be required to register their firearms.
I have to conclude Codwalloper has nothing but crap for brains.—Joe]
As everyone knows perfectly well, we must respect all other cultures. Quaint, foreign cultures have a LOT to teach us. Why, you could spend a lifetime studying just one other culture and never learn enough about it. They’re like the Amazon jungle – full of untold treasures, if only we could find a way to open ourselves to them.
Furthermore, and as we all know perfectly well, the idea that people around the world could possibly learn anything beneficial from American culture is not only preposterous in the extreme, it is unbelievably arrogant and bigoted. Why, to even THINK that that WE have anything to offer the world is just sick. It should be illegal.
As we all know perfectly well, we must respect every nation’s sovereignty. It only makes sense. Every nation has the right to self determination, including oppressive, murderous authoritarian slave states. It is their people’s natural right to live under such conditions and it would be pure arrogance and shameless aggression for us to even think of trying to change them. If you say so much as one word to the contrary, you are a disgusting pig.
Furthermore, Americans are arrogant and bigoted if they wish to enforce any semblance of American national sovereignty. What a bunch of heartless pigs we are for even thinking the words “American sovereignty”. There is rightly no such thing. We should be, no, we had damned well better be, ashamed of ourselves. Everyone knows this perfectly well.
Last night Barb L and I were hanging out with a bunch of friends. The woman who, a few months ago, reported breast enlargement after frequent “Dr. Joe’s Cure for Everything” treatments was there. She was telling all her friends, “See! Look at this! I went from an ‘A’ cup to a ‘C’!” “And”, she continued, pointing to her boyfriend, “It’s all because of him!” At first people thought he had paid for a boob job. Nope; It was the continuing application of the treatments advocated by Dr. Joe.
Apparently five minutes of continuous orgasms once a day (she claims, “I didn’t even know that was possible!”) for a few months stimulates enough hormones to dramatically affect breast size. She says she is continuing the treatments and is increasing the frequency of treatments to twice a day. She went on to say, perhaps jokingly, that she anticipates another increase of two cup sizes in a few more months.
Since she gives Dr. Joe partial credit I asked for pictures. This evening I received this picture:
Yeah. Not quite what I was hoping for either.
Entirely by coincidence I stumbled across this blog post yesterday. She references Dressed To Kill: The Link between Breast Cancer and Bras.
She claims:
And of course there are the obvious conclusions that a guy like me would love to endorse but further research on my part turns up this information:
The book’s claim that bras cause breast cancer has been dismissed by the medical and scientific communities; the National Cancer Institute, the American Cancer Society, and the National Institutes of Health have all concluded that there is no link between bra use and breast cancer.
Heavy sigh. I’m probably too honest. I’ve been accused of that before.
If anyone gave a damn about the poor, poor, downtrodden Mexicans, they’d be asking why Mexico is such f^<ked up crap-hole of a country that people are so desperate to get out of it. They’d be asking themselves what might be done to fix it.
If anyone cared about people having a place to escape to, they'd be spending all their time shoring up, teaching and defending the American principles of liberty.
But they don't. Far from it, which proves they're full of shit and couldn't care less about Mexicans, or about oppressed people anywhere.
In all the talk about the latest scandals involving the targeting of political enemies by government, the arming of criminal gangs and Islamist groups, and government spying on American citizens, there is a lot of back and forth about security verses privacy and so on.
All of it misses the main point, the preverbal elephant in the living room– Our government can and currently does consider patriotic, pro constitution citizens a greater threat than practically anything else.
While sheepishly looking away from the Fort Hood shooter’s jihad talk, while twiddling their thumbs regarding the warning signs prior to the Boston bombing, they were crawling up the assholes of tea party groups, and targeting states like Colorado and Texas to reorient the political landscapes there.
If you’re a strong, self sufficient, productive, independent thinker who loves the American ideals, YOU are the enemy of this government. Your country is the enemy of this government. The jihadists provide a convenient excuse to have the power infrastructure in place and to build on it, to help keep constitutional limits to a minimum. To maintain this charade, they actually need the occasional terrorist attack. They need a certain amount of crime, unemployment, border insecurity and inflation.
Without pain, suspicion, fear, frustration, demoralization, anger, miseducation, dependency, hopelessness and chaos, they are nothing. In short; they’re waging a multi-front war against America’s founding principles. Top Down, Bottom Up, Inside Out.
As painful as it may be to face up to it, we must if there is to be any solution. The first step in solving any problem is to admit you have it (or that it has you). We certainly will never solve any problem we’re unwilling to define and address openly.
This has been passed around for a while now, and it’s fascinating.
A certain cyber spook who shall remain nameless at this juncture told me about this sort of data analysis many years ago. It was just one or two little sentences along the lines of, “You would be AMAZED at the sort of things “they” can find out about you.” As I say; that was many years ago, and orders of magnitude in increased capability have been achieved since. As a merchant having done installment sales for more than a decade at that time, I had a database of my own, consisting of thousands of accounts, and immediately could see the power of what on the surface would seem like rather mundane and mostly useless points of information.
BUT, when you ask the right questions, and can sort by multiple data fields, WOW! We used it to make buying decisions, which were extremely important and had to done months in advance of peak selling seasons, and so it involved recent history and long term trends. It was also extremely useful in predicting patterns and indicators of contract violations. If I told you half of that stuff I’d be branded a scumbag, a bigot and a general son of a bitch. Its one and only purpose though was to avoid going bankrupt– You make the wrong decisions and you’re stuck with major inventory you can’t pay for, or you get it out the door and don’t get paid for it, and so you can’t pay for it.
So yes; we profiled in a very big way, you could say. At one time the default rate was so bad that we required a credit check of every prospective customer, but with analysis of a large enough database were able to do far better by asking for only a few simple bits of information.
Learning important things doesn’t need to come from positive data either. That is to say, what isn’t there can be as useful as what is there, when forming the kinds of association tables in the link, or plotting behavior patterns. For example; knowing those times when someone is unaccounted for (enter the Smart Grid, to know when someone is not at home), when compared to certain events, over time, can tell you a whole lot.
So I now wonder what a look at the metadata in the time and place of Jesus (arguably one of the most influential people in human civilization) would show. How about Bedford Falls of “It’s a Wonderful Life” (thoughbeit a fictional town)? In that story, you could say that Clarence showed George Bailey where he fit in the metadata analysis.
The Soviets, using infiltrators, both of the overt and the covert kind, were able to come up with their various arrest and kill lists in much the same manner.
That brings us to another issue, that being the concept of the inception i.e. a planted idea– The tiny seed of an idea that can germinate in the minds of people, multiply and grow into something large. The looks into associations in the link are all very interesting, but being able to predict or pinpoint inception sources is also very interesting.
Reading about the various groups and group associations in the link got me to thinking about the modern version of the 1700s pub. You’re looking at it. Sort of, but it’s much more open to the world.
I was also struck by the modern lack of such clubs and associations. We’re a much more fragmented society. We don’t meet with our neighbors much at all anymore, whereas it used to be common. We often don’t know anything about them.
But your government sure as hell can find out.
And I submit that this is by design. It’s either by the design of mere mindsets, which will reflexively respond in predictable ways, or by some mastermind scheme. I say it’s a combination of both, each nourished by the other.
Call it a leap into Crazyland if you like (I’ll be quick to say I told you so, later) but looking at the data points over my lifetime, things make a lot more sense if one assumes that our government is in a full-on war against the ideals and principles, the foundation of the U.S. and has been for decades. When other people are saying “W. T. F.!???” and getting all exasperated and confused, I’m saying, “Well sure. It fits perfectly don’t you know.”
Try it. Ask yourself what institutions, traditions and associations would be under attack or already under control if our own government were at war against the American founding principles and the American economy. What groups would be funded worldwide, which ones given a pass, and what groups would be targeted for degradation, intimidation or destruction. What industries would be targeted for nationalization? Yup. Gotcha. On all counts.
So accept it. Then you won’t be surprised or confused anymore. The specific organization of this war isn’t so important, not so much as that you realize it’s a war. And we’re losing, mainly because we’ve not been willing to face up to it’s full import. It’s too crazy. Too horrible. We can’t go there. We’re cowards. Look and listen to the pundits. Any of them, no matter how great you think they are. They’re giving you data points that they themselves are unwilling to connect. We’re all afraid and so we’re very easy to distract. Oh look! Gays!
Fade in
INT – NIGHT – Tajemnica Bridge
Quiritis, Helton, Allonia, Bipasha, Kaushik
Kaushik and Helton are in space suits, visors open. Helton at command, Quiritis at helm, Allonia is at sensors, Kaushik weapons, Bipasha at com. Continue reading
Now I want a Windows phone. You’ve done what the marketing department at Microsoft could not.
J
June 12, 2013
[This was in response to my post about “shipping” my exterior ballistics app for Windows Phone.
That’s pretty pleasing because one of the things that weighs heavy on my mind is that, as Barb L., reminded me the night before I submitted the app is that, “This is for people that are really into long range shooting and own a Windows Phone. That’s a pretty small market.”
Totally off topic. I don’t know who ‘J’ is in this context but my first thought was the author of this book. I’m pretty sure the author of that book wouldn’t use this gravatar so I can rule her out.
I remember Larry H. giving me copy of that book when he was finished with it. I was sophomore in high school at the time it opened my eyes about some things. Then my dad found it tucked behind some insulation in the attic and took it away.—Joe]
This interview took place in 1984. He explains his relationships as a KGB officer with the Useful Idiots, and how those Useful Idiots were often “squashed like a cockroach” after their usefulness had played out. Once the shock hit them, at the time of revolution, of what they’d done they could very well become the most staunch anti-communists, and so they were snuffed out before that could happen. “When the military boot hits their flabby butt..” the shock of seeing what they’ve helped create can turn them against the glorious idology of “Social Justice”. In other words, they’re targeted for destruction before they have a chance to wake up and smell the coffee. It’s typical, small scale gang behavior brought to the wholesale level.
But not, 29 years later, it’s much worse. There likely won’t be a military boot in the Useful idiots’ flabby butts, because we’re in such a state of degradation that we’re asking for “normalization” (of communism). We’re not fighting back.
This is about an hour and a half. Grab a cup of coffee or what have you, and listen to the whole thing .
This is a companion to Joe’s QOTD post here.
For further study, here is a domonstration of how it’s done. There is religious language in this one, but if you want to go straight to the mind control part, start at around 8 minutes.
In short, if someone knows how, they can tell you up front exactly what they’re going to do to you, they can then do it right then and there, openly, and some people will still be totally controlled by it, AND they’ll defend the utterly insane things they do as a result of being controlled. THEY are the more aware and YOU are “just too stubborn” to see what is clearly reality.
I just submitted my exterior ballistics app, Field Ballistics, to the Microsoft store for Windows Phone. It will be a few days until it is published. In a day or so I’ll give more details but here is some of what I submitted:
Field Ballistics is a revolutionary exterior ballistics application. Previous ballistics app are little more than glorified pieces of paper with ballistic tables. Field Ballistics uses the phones high tech capabilities to give ballistic solutions for multiple targets.
Place push pins on a map for each target automatically computing the distance from shooter to target, use the camera and accelerometer to measure the incline, use the Internet to automatically get up to date environmental conditions from the closest weather station. Select a target on the map and see the exact scope settings needed and information such as the time of flight and bullet velocity at impact.
When the shooter moves to a new location the ballistic solution for each target is automatically updated. Range and wind direction are automatically corrected using the new shooter location and information from the nearest weather station. You just enter in the new scope settings and take the shot.
Select from any of Federal or BlackHills match ammo or add your own. Input chronograph velocities and Field Ballistics corrects for the distance from the chronograph to the muzzle.
Field Ballistics is more than a glorified piece of paper. It uses the full power of your phone to give you ballistic solutions to multi-target problems.
I started seriously working on this about a year and a half ago. It feels really good to get it out the door.
Update:
In response to this comment from Ray what follows is the exact text of the privacy policy stated in the app:
Requests for map and location information from Bing and other Microsoft services are made by this application and may include the current location of your device. This application uses the Microsoft location service for some actions.
These actions will cause the location of your device to be stored on the device. This information, and all other data for this app, can be deleted by using the ‘reset’ menu item. The use of the location services can be disabled by using the ‘disable use of location services’ menu item.
If ‘Auto’ shooting conditions are used then requests for current weather conditions at the shooters location are made from wunderground.com.
Other than as disclosed above, no information of any type is ever sent by this application to any other device, user, application, or web site for any purpose.
Fade in
INT – DAY – Cargo Bay
Helton is standing next to Quinn, Lag and Kat. Helton is partially clad in space armor, looking like a high-tech cross between a space-suit and medieval head-to-toe articulated plate armor, and it looks like he’s trying to get the rest of it on. It looks both very serviceable and stylish. Quinn is dressed in shorts and a tee-shirt, and a dirty bandage on his thigh is visible below the shorts. Continue reading
This demonstrates the biggest problem with Liberals isn’t KNOWING what the evidence shows. Instead, the problem is that their vested interest in a false vision compels Liberals to discount each and every fact that would destroy that vision.
Brian Cates
June 4, 2013
Why Evidence Doesn’t Matter to Liberals Enchanted by a Vision
[I’ve run into this sort of thing with numerous people. Many people simply cannot be reached with evidence.
I’ve literally had people tell me, “I don’t believe your facts.” That the facts were from the FBI UCR and there was no contrary evidence did not matter. He did not even have an interest is supplying “his facts”. He was just right and I was wrong. This was a college professor. That he was an admitted Marxist teaching in the school of business made me realize we did not have a common basis for communication. I’m pretty sure we don’t even share the same reality.
Some people have unshakable faith in things that are demonstrably false. When these type of people are encountered as individuals it can be a source of amusement, frustration, or make your job miserable. When these people are in positions of governmental power they burden you with stupid regulations, destroy economies, and commit genocide.
The Second Amendment was designed and put in place to protect us from Liberals enchanted by a vision.—Joe]
Fade in
INT – DAY – Cargo bay
The ramp is down, and another cargo truck is backing in. Stenson and Alvarez and another dozen of his trainees are there. The truck slowly lifts and deposits a mid-sized container onto the cargo bay deck with a deep booming sound as it sets down. It is apparently fairly heavy. Continue reading
