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.
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:
ATF St. Paul: Federal Jury Convicts Coon Rapids Man of Shipping Firearms to Liberia go.usa.gov/4e2H
— ATF HQ (@ATFHQ) February 15, 2013
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?
Continue reading
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
Quote of the day—Michael Williamson
Who do I have to hate to be considered tolerant?
Michael Williamson
February 13, 2013
Comment to The Closet of Self-Censorship
[Liberals consider themselves tolerant but many hate people on the right and gun owners in particular with a burning passion that includes a desire for our deaths.—Joe]
Freedom shall be infringed
As Lyle has pointed out many times before the left has their “shall not be infringed” issue with abortion. Michael Z. Williamson has an elaborated version of that which I cannot find fault with.
Read the whole thing but the “punch line” is this:
First they came for the blacks, and I spoke up because it was wrong, even though I’m not black.
Then they came for the gays, and I spoke up, even though I’m not gay.
Then they came for the Muslims, and I spoke up, because it was wrong, even though I’m an atheist.
When they came for illegal aliens, I spoke up, even though I’m a legal immigrant.
Then they came for the pornographers, rebels and dissenters and their speech and flag burning, and I spoke up, because rights are not only for the establishment.
Then they came for the gun owners, and you liberal shitbags threw me under the bus, even though I’d done nothing wrong. So when they come to put you on the train, you can fucking choke and die.
~~~
Or you can commit seppuku with a chainsaw. I really don’t care anymore. This is the end of my support for any liberal cause, because liberals have become anything but.
My morning adrenaline rush
As I was riding the bus into downtown Seattle to go to work this morning we stopped at Yale and Stewart for a traffic light. Initially I thought there were gunshots close by. Then as I did a “playback” in my mind and observed the subsequent sights and sounds more carefully I realized the flashes were white. Muzzle flashes are red/orange. Multiple explosions? But the flashes from explosives I am familiar with are reddish too. I was on the far side of the bus from the source but I ultimately located the origin.
A NW bound truck on Yale had tangled with a power line, and broken a power pole holding three transformers. The sounds were the breaking power pole, arcing of the power lines, and the exploding transformers. The truck stopped for a bit then left. Our bus remained stopped at the intersection and most of the passengers exited out the rear door and walked around the intersection. Some stupid and/or ignorant people walked OVER the downed power lines. At least one person turned around and took a different route after I yelled not to walk over the wires.
The bus in the picture above is the one I was on.
I was late for a meeting at work.
Update: Ry sent me an email with this link to the news story.
The Stars Came Back -008- Apology
Lag returns to his table and sits. Looking around at them, he nods and smiles cheerily.
Lag: I think they will be quieting down soon. They did well, and deserve a good celebration, but I think they understand things now.
Continue reading
Quote of the day—Brian Schuetz
Olympic Arms will no longer be doing business with the State of New York or any governmental entity or employee of such governmental entity within the State of New York – henceforth and until such legislation is repealed, and an apology made to the good people of the State of New York and the American people.
Brian Schuetz
President
Olympic Arms, Inc.
February 12, 2013
This was in response to oppressive and clearly unconstitutional legislation by the state of New York.
[This is the same as the boycotting of countries that fail to recognize basic human rights. The right to keep and bear arms is a basic human right and governments that infringe upon the right need to be sent a strong message. This is one part of that message.—Joe]