The Stars came Back -013- Harbin

Fade in

EXT – day – near the foot of a long mesa

Helton and Harbin scramble rapidly along at the a narrow flat spot at the foot of a mesa, Helton’s traveler coat flapping in the wind, with a steep side going up on their left, and a deep, even-but-rough, nearly semi-circular valley going down to the right (it’s a cut made by a terraforming machine). They hop from one rock to another, moving smoothly along, a half-dozen paces apart.
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Quote of the day—Rivrdog

Do NOT be deluded into thinking that this push for gun control is about CRIME control. It isn’t, it’s about removing the guns from ALL of the society so as to make way for an uncontested dictatorship.

The only thing we can’t know yet is how benevolent the dictatorship might or might not be. In other words, will our enslavement be easy or harsh.

Also, do not be deluded that we aren’t already in the fight. The line between us being considered as dissidents exercising our rights and the putative dictatorship considering us insurgents is but a line in the sand, and the blowing wind will soon cover that line.

Rivrdog
February 17, 2013
Comment to Quote of the day—Nicholas James Johnson
[I have nothing to add.—Joe]

Incident number 2013-8424

Remember the guy that threatened me with, “If you know whats good you will keep your fucking mouth shut about Obama or you will come up missing on the news.”?

Yeah. Real piece of work. He called me. I was on the phone with daughter Kim at the time but I got a garbled voice mail and I called him back a couple minutes later.

After talking about a minute I hung up on him. It was difficult to even figure out what he was talking about and I couldn’t get a word in edgewise. He called again, and again, and again…

He left a second voice mail which was as follows (reading my blog post for the first part):

  • Any place that I frequent should be considered a known distance gun range.
  • If I can see you then you are within range.
  • My eyesight is quite good.
  • Don’t mess with me.

Yeah. I’m pretty sure those are threats. You looking at some jail time buddy. Have a good day.

He also sent me text messages. Actual time of calls (PST) and text messages were as follows. After the first two calls I did not respond to anything. Typos, punctuation, and grammar errors in the text messages are his:

  • 12:49 (missed call)
  • 12:51 (my outgoing call)
  • 12:55 (ignored call)
  • 12:56 (ignored call)
  • 12:56 (ignored call. Yes, every few seconds)
  • 13:02 (ignored call)
  • 13:02 (ignored call)
  • 13:07 (Text: 206-622-0460 seattle FBI’s number and I also logged a restraining order through the San Diego office next call is to my lawyer to file a suit)
  • 13:11 (Text: I tried to be nice and let you delete it yourself now Im leaving it to the courts. You breaking federal laws Joe not just state.)
  • 13:14 (ignored call)
  • 13:18 (ignored call)
  • 13:18 (ignored call)
  • 13:23 (ignored call)
  • 13:23 (ignored call)
  • 13:23 (Text: and if anything should happen you are held directly responsible. Enjoy the next 4 years of Obama you nazi republican jackoff)
  • 13:25 (ignored call)
  • 13:26 (ignored call)
  • 13:29 (ignored call)
  • 13:29 (ignored call)
  • 13:30 (ignored call)
  • 13:30 (ignored call)
  • 13:31 (ignored call)
  • 13:33 (Text: Thought so you fucking pussy republican asshole. . I KNOW WHERE YOU ARE AND WHAT YOU LOOK LIKE NOW MOTHER FUCKER!! Thanks)
  • 15:26 (Text: I dont even own a single weapon. I dont hide behind a gun or computer screen like some conservative pussy from seattle washington. Sleep tight.)

After the message at 13:33 I went to the Bellevue, Washington Police station. I talked to Officer Dill who gave me the incident number 2013-8424 and gave my new “friend” a call. I only heard one side of the conversation but it sounded a lot like my conversation. Officer Dill couldn’t complete a sentence and sometimes even a word without being interrupted. At the end, after maybe a couple minutes, Officer Dill was almost yelling at him in a vain attempt to get him to call the Bellevue police department with the incident number. But he was unsuccessful and my “friend” hung up on the officer.

Officer Dill told me (paraphrasing some), “Yeah. Same as what you described. He is clearly irrational.”

[Stuff deleted on the advice of a psychologist.]

About 15 minutes after I left the police station the 15:26 text message came in.

Liberals are violent. We are better than this.

Update 2/19/2013: I don’t know that either is related but I received a call from a Brooklyn, NY number at 12:52 AM this morning and one from an Illinois exchange at 8:26 AM. Both calls hung up when I answered.

I would like to add, up front, that I cannot recall saying anything more offensive about Obama than I wasn’t going to vote for him and that I believe he is anti-gun. And furthermore I don’t even consider myself a Republican. This guy threatening me is nuts.

The Stars Came Back -012- The Monk

From between two group of passengers, a frail-looking elderly man in a monk’s habit gets slowly to his feet, then walks creakingly toward them, and they eye him as he approaches. He stops a few yards away and regards them intently. His face is ashen and yellowish, and even the whites of his eyes are yellow, but it’s clear his mind is still all there from his expression.

Monk: What now, my violent young friends?
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Quote of the day—Tom Tatum

Is there a way to substitute a different compensation item instead of guns for insecure young and middle-aged men? #guncontrol #alexjones

Exploding targets in the news

Likely not good news

Claims that Tannerite starts fires. Worth keeping an eye on.

 

The Stars Came Back -011- Waking up in a desert

Fade in

EXT – day – desert valley

Low angle, close up view of Helton’s face, as he lies face down in the sandy dirt, brightly lit by the reddish sun at a low angle. There is a flopping / thudding sound, and puff of dust blows by his face. He twitches, and he blinks his eyes and squints a bit as if he just waking up. Camera pulls back and gets a wider view, and we see that he is lying on the ground, stretched out, with some other people lying in the dirt near him. As he starts to groggily move, some of the others start to make small movements, too. Then, a big brute of a man wearing something vaguely resembling a uniform, SLAVER1 walks into view, dragging two people by their collars. He drops them roughly in the dirt next to Helton, and turns and walks back the way he came. Another man, SLAVER2, also big and rough looking, wearing similar cloths, drags in two more, a child and woman, and drops them like a poorly trained baggage-handler would treat cheap luggage. As the view expands, we see there are about two dozen people, men, women, and a few children, dropped like so many sandbags, scattered about on the dry, dusty ground of a desert basin around the loading ramp of a small anti-grav transport. A couple of them are recognizable from the background of when Helton was at dinner aboard ship.

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Quote of the day—Nicholas James Johnson

Without a commitment to or capacity for eliminating the existing inventory of private guns, the supply-side ideal and regulations based on it cannot be taken seriously. It is best to acknowledge the blocking power of the remainder and adjust our gun control regulations and goals to that reality. Policymakers who continue to press legislation grounded on the supply-side ideal while disclaiming the goal of prohibition are deluded or pandering.

Nicholas James Johnson
Fordham University School of Law
December 1, 2008
Imagining Gun Control in America: Understanding the Remainder Problem
[H/T to eriko in the comment to this post.

Just reading the abstract is scary eye-opening. Here are just a couple sentences:

the temptation is to view Heller as the central obstacle to effective gun control. This is a mistake born of our failure to confront the incoherence of pre-Heller supply-side controls. This article elaborates the supply-side ideal as the foundation of our most ambitious gun control proposals, explains the remainder problem and the defiance impulse as both cultural and physical phenomena that block supply-side rules, and evaluates a series of familiar gun-control proposals in the context of these structural barriers in order to identify which can work and which cannot.

Some of our opponents are far more intelligent than we give them credit for. Not all of them are the almost useful idiots like MikeB302000 and Japete.—Joe]

Alcohol is a carcinogen?

I did not know this:

…when it comes to cancer, there is no safe level of alcohol consumption.

There are other sources that appear to agree with this conclusion.

There have been times in the past when I would have a few ounces of red wine before going to bed on a regular basis. Recently I only occasionally have a sip of wine from the glass of Barb L. Hence my lifetime alcohol consumption is very low and now I can be even more self-righteous about it.

Quote of the day—Kurt Hofmann

If the Obama regime wants to “buy” our guns, it had better be prepared to pay in blood.

Kurt Hofmann
February 14, 2013
NIJ memo shows new gun laws can only ‘work’ with registration, confiscation
[H/T to David Hardy.

The memo referred to, and marked up by, presumably, the NRA is extremely revealing. It is mandatory reading for insight into the Obama administration. They know the laws they propose are and will be ineffective. They aren’t stupid. They aren’t ignorant. They are evil.

Update: This NRA video should have been part of the original post:

—Joe]

The Stars Came Back -010- Transfer Station

Fade in

EXT – night – dimly lit space-station, black of space in background

Several ships are attached to a large transfer-point space station in orbit 4 or 5 AUs from the star, well out to the edge of its gravity well. One liner is approaching, a freighter is leaving. Serene and quite looking, as everything goes according to computer-regulated plan. On one of the docked liners, there is a small (compared to the liner) flash of an explosion, and debris sprays away from it into space. Continue reading

Collective identity

One shouldn’t be surprised, shocked, or indignant that leftists claim “We are all Chris Dorner.”

Taken out of context his claims of injustice sound credible and if the claims were correct I can understand his rage and could even let pass a statement of “We are all Chris Dorner”. But he murdered innocent people who had nothing to do with his complaints against the Los Angeles police department. He, an individual, did this. He did this to innocent individuals.

People on the left have a mindset bordering on and many times crossing well into a personality disorder such that they cannot readily distinguish between themselves and others who share some or most of their beliefs. “Individual” is a term that, in their mind, translates into “not one of mine”. This is why they are confused by and ignore the concepts put forth in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

This is why they speak of a “right to health care”, a “right to a job”, and even “freedom from want“. Individuals, for all intents and purposes, do not or should not exist outside of the collective. Leftists cannot easily distinguish between their “one true collective” and themselves. And the collective should care for itself just as we believe an individual should care for itself and their immediate family. Those outside the collective or belonging to a different collective are to be shunned if they are no consequence. If they impede its objectives they should be reeducated, put in mental institutions, or disposed of.

Dorner did not view “the collective” that supposedly wronged him as individuals. The families of supposedly racist police officers and of his lawyer were just as deserving of punishment as the primary actors who perpetrated the injustices upon him. In his mind all members of a collectives, either his or of another, are equivalent.

The leftist collective identifies Dorner as one of theirs and hence “We are all Chris Dorner” makes perfect sense in their mentally disturbed universe. There are tens of millions of examples in the 20th century where leftists used violence to dispose of “not one of mine.” That leftists identify with him and cheered him on should only be a surprise to those that do not understand the mind of the leftist and/or are ignorant of history.

Wistful thinking

When I first glanced at this tweet on my phone I read it wrong:

I read “Liberia” as “Liberals”.

It was either the old eyes or wistful thinking.

Why are there so few?

Via email from Mike B. (AlphaMike in Idaho, not the other one) I received a link to this episode of Freakonomics: How to think about guns.

It starts out with a different question about mass murders than the media and most politicians, “Why are there so few?” With 300+ million people in the U.S. and a similar number of guns (not to mention many other ways of being able to commit mayhem and murder) why is it so “far out on the tail” that these incidents occur? Think about that. Typically it is about two mass murders (4+ people killed) a year with guns. Out of 300 million people? Only one out of 150 million people per year go nuts enough to kill a bunch of people? That’s pretty amazing if you think about it.

Notable quotes:

  • “Gun buybacks are one of the most ineffectual public policies that have ever been invented in the history of mankind.”
  • I think people are confused with respect to how dangerous a particular gun is. If I’ve done my calculations right, any particular handgun in the United States will kill a person about once every 10,000 years.”
  • “In order to prevent one homicide in a year, you would need to get 10,000 guns brought back in a gun buyback. Okay, but the thing is you don’t get 10,000 guns, and they’re not the guns that are used to kill people. So the typical gun buyback program I would guess saves approximately maybe 0.0001 lives.”
  • “But why is it in the context of guns we don’t think of guns as deterrents, we think about guns as, being this, causing the violence. And the idea here comes out of Canada’s book, Fist, Stick, Knife, Gun, which honestly I’ll say is one of the best books I’ve read in my life, and if it’s still in print I would just encourage people to go find it. It’s fantastically insightful.”
  • “Anyone with any sense looks at the current political climate, thinks about the kinds of proposals that are being made and accepts the fact that none of these proposals are going to have any real impact at all.”

The recommended book is available via Amazon:

It is next in my queue after I finish The Android’s Dream (son James thinks it is awesome and I’m liking it a lot).

Come and take it

Via email from Carl H. on the gun email list at work:

You can listen to the full version of the song here or buy it from Amazon.

Quote of the day—Bernardine Dohrn

There’s no way to be committed to non-violence in one of the most violent societies that history has ever created. I’m not committed to non-violence in any way.

Bernardine Dohrn
In the 2002 documentary film The Weather Underground. Get the movie from Amazon here.
[From the Wikipedia entry:

Dohrn with ten other SDS members associated with the RYM issued, on June 18, 1969, a sixteen-thousand-word manifesto entitled, “You Don’t Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows” in New Left Notes.

The manifesto stated that “the goal [of revolution] is the destruction of US imperialism and the achievement of a classless world: world communism.”

Leftists know their agenda can only be implemented with violence. Government is violence and the threat of violence. They wish to use government to create their utopia. To advocate non-violence and have a leftist philosophy is a contradiction. To allow people not of the government to have the means to resist government is to allow their idyllic future to be denied.

The murdering, anti-gun, pro-leftist, ex-cop, from Los Angeles who was killed this week is just one in a long line of his type.—Joe]

Random thought of the day

The First Amendment guarantees freedom of association. This is an obstacle in enabling “common sense gang laws”. If New York treated the First Amendment like they do the Second Amendment then anti-gang legislation would include the following:

No new social organizations having more than seven members would be legal. Existing organizations of eight to ten members would be still be legal but no more than seven members could be in the same room at any one time. Existing organizations of greater than ten member would have the option of moving out of state or turning themselves into the police for Soylent Green feedstock.

How many times do you have to be fooled by the same tricksters?

Once you get this mental “health” bit into NICS, you will see an exponential increase in the number of people being adjudicated mentally deficient in some way. This is a very, very important move for the Progressives, and all the more dangerous for sounding “reasonable”.

It shocks me that so many people on the “pro second amendment” side seem to think this is OK.

All I can say is; once the S really HTF, we will have deserved it.

The Stars Came Back -009- Who is most important?

Cut back to a view of the table

The people at Lag’s table look between themselves, and at the departing Plataeans, then at Lag.

Senator: (eyebrows raised in surprise) What did you say to them?
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Boomershoot Patches

I’m looking at ordering a bunch of patches for Boomershoot. They will be 4 inches across. I’ve not finalized the order in terms of numbers and text. Here are the current working ideas, and I’m certainly open to suggestion on preferred mods. Let me know how many you might be interested in buying, so that I can get a specific price – the more people want, the less they will be per item. I am not certain the surrounding text is exactly what I want, though I like the bottom text on all of them (with the possible exception of “medieval,” but I couldn’t think of anything better that sounds good with “minion,” which I really like.) If I make the top more generic, they anyone can get any of them; if I make the top text more “rank” oriented (explosive handlers “henchmen”, helpers “crony”, shooters “minion”, supporters “unindicted”) then there are fewer people might want to buy, but it might encourage “working up through the ranks” to earn them.

By the way, they make great presents and commemoratives, and you can buy more than one, even if it’s not a “rank” you have earned yet

Crony

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