Not only are you stripping the right of the local municipalities to protect safety but you’re also asking them to adhere to gun laws at the state level that don’t even exist.
I suppose it’s possible the reporter had the crap for brains and messed up the quote but I doubt it because the quotes from the other people in the article weren’t just word salads. It could have been deliberate maliciousness by the reporter but usually the bias is against gun owners.
It’s true that we are sometimes our worst enemy but it may be more so for our opponents. We don’t always act as a team and give conflicting messages to the public and the politicians. We have people that sometimes say things that which, while true, can be exploited by our opponents. They have crap for brains and it shows.—Joe]
Please accept this letter in lieu of completing an ATF Form 4473 for the purchase of four (4) CAI, Model Draco, 7.62×39 mm pistols, by Special Agent John Dodson. These aforementioned pistols will be used by Special Agent Dodson in furtherance of the performance of his official duties. In addition, Special Agent Dodson has not been convicted of a misdemeanor crime of domestic violence. If you have any questions, you may contact me at telephone number 602-605-6501.
David Voth ATF Group Supervisor June 1, 2010 Letter implicates ATF in committing straw purchases for Gunwalker [These guns, purchased with U.S. taxpayer cash without a 4473 so as to be off the books, were given directly to the drug trafficking organizations by an ATF agent. There was no straw buyer.
I’m a pretty creative guy but I’m at a loss at finding a reason why someone would think this was a good idea unless their sole objective was to create justification for more strict firearm laws. I consider this to be on the same ethical plane as someone committing crimes in face paint such that they appeared to have black skin in order to justify laws against blacks.
The people responsible for these misdeeds need to be brought to justice. They probably wouldn’t pass muster in a constitutional challenge because of the prohibition of “cruel and unusual punishment” but I have some very creative potential sentences running through my mind right now. —Joe]
I take exception with Ry saying, “Joe tried to drive the cat through the uphill side of the container, missing only by a few inches”. It was under complete control when I was within a few inches. I was out of control sliding sidewise for a few feet a minute or so earlier but it stopped before I got within five or six feet but everything else is correct.
Barron has some pictures and I will get some pictures, video, and stories (three different types of fuels failed me with the bulldozer, there was a flat tire on my vehicle, and it was HOT out there), of my own up within a few days.
On the bright side; Mecca is going to be awesome!
Oh, and those guys who stayed in bed until after 10:00 AM or 2:00 PM today are wimps. My muscles were a little sore from moving over 1300 pounds of ammonium nitrate and other stuff but I was out at the range today by 9:00 AM and shot in the Steel Challenge Pistol match with only minor complaints. I guess it must suck when you get to be as old as those other guys who didn’t make it to match. [wink]
Thanks again Ry, Barron, and son-in-law Caleb, for all the help. I couldn’t have done it without you.
I’m determined because there’s too much at stake. The alternative I think is an approach to government that would fundamentally cripple America in meeting the challenges of the 21st Century and that’s not the kind of society that I want to bequeath to Malia and Sasha, and your children and your grandchildren.
President Obama What President Obama saying to his donors September 25, 2011 [What President Obama isn’t directly saying is that the U.S. Constitution is crippling his vision of a utopian society.
And while I say that’s a good thing the battle has mostly been lost. I fear the majority of people in this country will have to learn the lessons of socialism and perhaps even communism for themselves.
I’m willing to bleed in order to own a world record.
Ry Jones September 23, 2011 [It turns out there is a relatively easy path to make it into the Guinness Book of World Records. I questioned the wisdom of Ry’s method, which involved explosives at close ranges, and the quote above was him assured me he did not share my concern.—Joe]
It leaves me somewhat dumbfounded in a way, and yet it’s thoroughly normal and predictable. What leaves me dumbfounded is that fact that it is so normal and predictable.
“Where’s Waldo” was one title that occurred to me, but there is no Waldo.
I have a challenge for you. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to find one thing that Rick Perry actually said in this ad;
Just one meaningful statement– one example of what he’s done to further some goal or other in the past, one guiding principle, one thing that would suggest what he actually wants to do as president. Anything. I only watched it twice, but I don’t think you can do it. Right now as far as I can tell, this ad is recycled from an old Obama ad. As I said in comments over on Uncle’s blog, it was probably produced by the same people, who did Bush’s and Clinton’s ads.
And yet there are people who really love this ad, and that is the rub. Are we as a society capable of thinking critically anymore, or is it simply over and done for us?
We need to able to watch something like this, looking, probing, asking ourselves; “Where’s the meaning. Where’s the substance? What’s actually being said here? Anything?” It should be automatic – you’re waiting for something to be said.
Now I don’t want to hear about Perry. For all I know he’s the greatest defender of liberty the world has ever seen, but if so he would tell us in his very own words. However, there is nothing here that would tell us one way or the other, and the fact that he can’t actually say something in his own ad already tells me he’s not my man. Don’t defend him. If he were the leader we need, he would never allow an ad like this to be produced in his name. If he comes out tomorrow and tells us it was done against his wishes, and that those responsible for it have been fired, I might change my mind, but not before. When ads like this one are soundly ridiculed in the public arena, by all sides, that’s when I’ll know we’ve made progress, yet we are nowhere near that now.
He did say that the greatest deeds are reserved for future generations, but like all the other statements, that one has no substance. No indication of what he thinks is a great deed, but the strangest part about that statement is that it makes no reference to current generations. What about us? Why can’t we be doing any of the greatest deeds? Why are they reserved for someone else, and who is in charge of reserving deeds these days, and why? Who appointed this new “Deed Tsar”? See; you can go crazy trying to infer meaning where there is none.
All things being equal, the English [and British] population have not been particularly gun-oriented, compared to the Americans and we like to think we can solve everything by negotiation, relying on the friendly bobby on the beat to take care of the occasional naughty person. “Allo, allo, what’s all this then?”
It occurs to me that the liberals in our society have a strong tendency in the same direction. Many liberal politicians insist we should “talk out our differences” rather than utilizing force on both a personal as well as international scale.
While I agree it is much preferable to have a verbal exchange before exchanging blows, bullets, or ballistic missiles the verbal exchange is doomed to failure unless both parties are in positions of some power. That power does not necessarily need to be a physical threat. It doesn’t even need to be a physical action. It could be something as nebulous as “I won’t like you anymore” or something like the shame of violating someone’s trust.
The less power you have during the negotiation the less favorable your outcome. If you are much weaker physically and unable to bring additional forces to the “negotiation” the psychopath wanting to rob or rape you isn’t going to spend a lot of time “talking out the differences” in your two positions.
In tribes of up to a few hundred people physical force isn’t even needed. The community bonds and dependency are so strong and important that violating the rules of your tribe is very rare. Only in intertribal conflict is force a necessary component in conflicts. Crime in societies where individuals and small groups can be anonymous and autonomous is much much higher. The victims have much less power in the “negotiations”.
Many people apparently do not understand, are unaware, or are unconvinced of this fact. It’s easy to hypothesis why they don’t. Humans and proto-humans spent millions of years in small tribes and only a few thousand years in the much larger groups and only a few hundred years in cities with more than a few hundred thousand people. Many of the people advocating individuals give up their arms are feeling the impulses of very primitive urges that evolved millions of years ago. It feels like the right thing to do because the instincts were correct until the last few thousand years. The phrase “it takes a village” is appealing because of this instinct.
Things have changed. It’s time people realized it. This is Why the Gun is Civilization. It brings equilibrium to the negotiations.
If the other side really wants to understand why they continuously lose, they have to understand this: their side can’t get mojo without buying off sympathetic people on the left to shill for their cause. I would not let NRA, or any other gun rights group I believed in, buy words from me. Every penny they spent on that would be money that isn’t going to keep lobbyists on my elected representatives like a pitbull on a poodle. If the gun control extremists want to understand why they can’t get any traction, they need to look no further than the fact that they even need to throw money at people to have a voice at all.
I’m all for shared sacrifice. But I think it should be shared sacrifice of those responsible for this mess in the first place. So instead of punishing the super rich, who didn’t spend us into oblivion, let’s have shared sacrifice among those responsible for this mess.
I propose this:
Collect the name of every member of Congress—Republican or Democrat—who ever voted for a federal budget that included a deficit.
Determine which of these members are still living.
Add the names of all living presidents.
Increase THEIR taxes.
I propose that we tax all former members of Congress at a 50% flat tax rate. Former presidents would be taxed at a flat 75% of annual income. Finally, current members of Congress and the current president would be taxes at 100% of their annual income. Any other Americans who would like to can volunteer to join either of these groups (time to walk the walk, Warren!). These tax rates will stay in effect until the debt is erased and we have a balanced budget.
How about we stop coddling those who caused this problem in the first place?
Mike Jensen August 30, 2011 Coddling [Yup. Those responsible should be the ones to pay the price for fixing the problem.
And if insufficient progress has been made by the time their term in office is over consideration could be given to auctioning off their body parts.—Joe]
Individual rights will have to take a back seat to the collective.
Harvey Ruvin Vice Chairman, ICLEI. The Wildlands Project [I wish I could find the original document which contains this. I can find lots of references to it but without the actual document and context I’m hesitant to speculate nearly as much as others have.
In any case, it’s not paranoia if they really are out to get you.—Joe]
…and then denying it. Pete Sessions, NRCC Chairman, sends out regular e-mail alerts. Every single one of them can be interpreted as “Look at those dirty rotten Democrats! Give us money!”
Today’s e-mail alert title was “Threatening is Not Governing”. Even though it’s completely wrong of course, I might be tempted to see that title as a sign of some positive development in Mr. Sessions’ understanding in that it touches upon an important point, but I know him too well.
What he referred to as “threatening” was Obama’s “threat” to “…veto any plan aimed at fixing our budget crisis that does not include his demand for a new $1.5 trillion tax increase.” That contains so many layers of idiocy that I won’t even get into it. Forget the president and that it’s fully within his job description to “threaten” to veto anything Congress pukes out.
The point is that any and all governing is threatening. Every law, rule, ordinance, every tax or restriction, every subsidy– they’re all backed by threats, and all government threats include a group of people with guns who are ready, willing, and I dare say eager to make good on those threats.
I’d say I’m hopeful that even Pete Sessions has stumbled upon an important truth, but he of all people will never admit to understanding it. Maybe, since he has broached the subject, more of us can expand on it.
Mr. Sessions; I see your accusations in much the same way I’d see a drunk sitting at a bar with a martini in his hands accusing the drunk next to him of being a drunk. Only worse– the typical drunk probably isn’t going to work every day to find new ways to formulate threats against the whole of The People.
The evil use the intellectually challenged and the ignorant to further their agenda but fortunately there are not that many evil people currently in positions of power and/or they are keeping a low profile. They have not been a significant threat in recent battles. There probably is no cure for evil except to recognize it and to remove them from positions of power.
The ignorant are less able to remain ignorant with the Internet. They are very quickly informed once they publically show their support for gun control. That they vote without becoming visible or becoming informed is probably the biggest threat they pose to us. Probably our best weapon against these people is for us to come out of the closet and to take these people to the range.
The intellectually challenged can be transformed into gifts to our cause. Every time they say something stupid we can (and do) broadcast it for others to see and point out the stupidity. Who wants to be on the same side as people who say such stupid stuff? So, yes, we are blessed to have opponents such as these!—Joe]
Fortunately, physicians no longer believe that bleeding the sick will make them healthy. Unfortunately, many of the makers of economic policy still do.
Paul Krugman September 19, 2011 Decline in manufacturing capacity is probably only the beginning of the bad new: Paul Krugman [He is apparently oblivious to the irony as he goes on to say, even though the U.S. Government is broke, “For the time being we need more, not less, government spending, supported by aggressively expansionary policies from the Federal Reserve and its counterparts abroad.”
Krugman believes that budget austerity is the equivalent of “bleeding the patient” when sane people would recognize it as reducing the hemorrhaging. One has to wonder if Krugman is practicing doublethink, doublespeak, or both. In any case he has crap for brains if he thinks the majority of the people will believe him.—Joe]
Given the credible estimate that we’ve spent $1 trillion on anti-terrorism security (this does not include our many foreign wars), that’s $62.5 billion per life lost. Is there any other risk that we are even remotely as crazy about?
I was going through my projects folder on my computer and saw a number of projects I didn’t recognize. Looking at the code they were clearly my coding and comment style but I still didn’t remember many of them. Most were junk projects that appeared to be something that solved, or would have solved had they been finished, some simple problem.
There were projects like “NetConnect” which apparently was intended to pop up a dialog box of the machines visible on the network and handle assigning a drive letter to their public shares. Another project was “Wait” which wouldn’t compile because the requested version of Windows was so old. “SurveyProcess” appears to be for processing the Boomershoot participant survey results from 2006.
But the oddest project I found was “UniDecrypt”. I appears to be something to test the feasibility of a “universal decryption algorithm”. It is junk code. Something very “quick and dirty” that I apparently started working on at about midnight in late November of 2006. The time stamps of the various files continue through a little after 8:00 AM and then the last timestamp being about 1:30 AM the following day. This project probably was something that woke me up in the middle of the night and I couldn’t go back to sleep after thinking about it. That happens every once in a while. I once woke up in the wee hours of the morning and had to go find my “Modern Physics” text book (is it still considered “Modern Physics” if I took the class in 1976?) to look up why it was I had not thought up a way to travel faster than light.
This is very pretty. I could use a functional 1911 pattern gun in .45. I could shoot “Single Stack” as well as “Limited” class in USPSA but the current bid of $2075 is more than I want to pay. My birthday is coming up…
One of the sponsors of the Gun Blogger Rendezvous was Woolrich. They are a long time clothing manufacturer that has recognized concealed carry clothing as a worthy marketing niche. They donated a “Elite for a Year” package to the Gun Blogger Rendezvous prize table. Ry won the raffle for that prize but you don’t have to be left out. I received an email announcing:
Woolrich Elite Series wants to give readers of Rendezvous bloggers a chance to help out Soldiers’ Angels – Project VALOUR-IT.
Through a partnership with one of their dealers, Woolrich Elite has created a private shopping page where fans can purchase the latest Woolrich Elite Series gear. Woolrich Elite will then donate 2% of the total sales back to Project VALOUR-IT!
“From the beginning, Woolrich has supported American servicemen and women. We’re proud to support the outstanding work of Soldiers’ Angels and their Project VALOUR-IT,” said Jerry Rinder, Woolrich Elite Series vice president.
We are a modern civilized community, and we should work on peaceful solutions to end criminal behavior.
Charlie Beck Los Angeles Police Chief September 16, 2011 Gun control bill in Gov. Brown’s hands [Since the people that work for him are on the front lines of the criminal behavior modification efforts Beck should be consistent. He should order all of his police officers to not carry firearms in public.
Other advice for Beck might include having his police officers hold hands with the criminals and sing Kumbaya.
While he is evaluating how that turns out the rest of the country will be packing heat and questioning his sanity.—Joe]
I just found out another one of my former co-workers at Microsoft is leaving because of our insane boss. Sometime next week is his last day.
That will make three out of five people on our team who have quit the company because of him. The three most senior people.
It’s rough on those of us leaving but perhaps the message will eventually sink in to his boss that we all tried to tell that this guy was virtually impossible to work for.
When I had my last conversation with my skip level manager about my boss he asked me, “What do you really feel about him? Do you think you can work with him?” I told him, “I feel complete contempt for him. I cannot and will not work for him any longer than I have to.” His response was, “It’s good to have clarity.”
That sealed it for me. Both of those guys should have been given jobs scrubbing toilets at minimum wage.
