They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
Benjamin Franklin
[Yeah, I know. Everyone has heard this one before. That is most of the reason I have never used it directly before. Today is special however. Check out my next post, Runnin’ With the Devil, people compromised with the Devil to gain temporary “safety” and the ink hasn’t dried before they are pushing for the “next step”.–Joe]
I was reminded of this by today’s QOTD.
Banning light bulbs isn’t enough, of course. I heard mention of this today by Jason Lewis on the radio, and via crypton. There is now talk of requiring remotely (web) controlled thermostats in private homes. The idea is that a utility company be able to remotely alter your thermostat setting, overriding your selected setting, to save energy, you know, for your comrades.
It will happen. Also get ready for total use restrictions– a family of four, for example, will not be allowed to exceed a certain KW/h, or therms, etc., monthly usage without paying large fines. When that fails to make us all happy, safe and comfortable, as it surely will, we can expect something more severe.
We asked for this the second we decided it was OK for government to involve itself in the energy (or any other) industry. Anyone warning of this very thing would of course have been put down as an alarmist, and so here we are.
Once the principle (of private property in this case) has been violated, the only debate possible is over the degree of the violation. There is no principled stand to be taken in favor of any particular degree of violation of a human right. But this has all been said before.
Of course you knew PayPal won’t handle transactions for “certain firearms, firearm parts or accessories, ammunition, weapons or knives“, right?
You probably knew Google has issues with guns too.
Here is a story I don’t think I have told here before:
Years ago, when I first created Modern Ballistics, I tried to get a merchant account for processing credit cards. I had one a few years earlier when was selling software to software developers instead of gun owners and I figured it wouldn’t be a problem. I sent in my application and to my surprise they turned me down. At first they wouldn’t tell me why. But after much calling and pestering them they finally told me it was because of my product. I carefully read through all their fine print and couldn’t find where there was anything wrong with my product according to their published rules. I told them I didn’t understand, what is wrong with my product? The most I could get out of them was that I could submit my application again if I wanted but it probably wouldn’t make any difference.
Now via Sebastian and NSSF I find out:
Citi Merchant Services and First Data Corp. are refusing to process any credit card transactions between federally licensed firearms retailers, distributors and manufacturers — a move which will severely limit available inventory of firearms and ammunition to military, law enforcement and law-abiding Americans.
The first company to be affected by this decision appears to be firearms distributor CDNN Sports Inc.
“We were contacted recently by First Data/Citi Merchant Services by a June Rivera-Mantilla stating that we were terminated and funds were being seized for selling firearms in a non-face-to-face transaction,” said Charlie Crawford, president of CDNN Sports Inc. “Although perfectly legal, we were also informed that no transactions would be processed in the future, even for non-firearms. I find this very frightening.”
To voice your concern to Citi Merchant Services and First Data Corp., please contact June Rivera-Mantilla at 631-683-7734 or her supervisor Robert Tenenbaum at 631-683-6570.
Read the letter, they claim a violation of the law but yet apparently don’t bother to turn them into law enforcement. Just like some experiences I have had (above and with PNNL) if they want to get rid of you they will just make stuff up that is at best half true. They don’t need or want to know the truth, they just want to get rid of you. It’s very tough to win against people like that. Just like literacy tests for voting, when tested none of the blacks could read the daily newspaper, hence they failed the state approved test. Never mind the newspaper given to them was printed in Chinese. Technically they can get away with it but it’s still not right.
If they were refusing to do business with people with a certain skin color, sexual orientation, or religion this would be on the front page of all the newspapers. But it isn’t. And its because we are just “gun-ni**ers” and it is socially acceptable to the elites to treat us like this.
Many people want the government to protect the consumer. A much more urgent problem is to protect the consumer from the government.
Milton Friedman
[The U.S. Constitution with its enumerated powers and the Bill of Rights was supposed to do the bulk of the protecting. But of course these days it’s rare that any of the three branches of government even look at the Constitution as a mild suggestion of limits to its reach.–Joe]
The DOJ (the ATF is under the DOJ so it could be them) apparently is interested in what their subjects think about new regulations on AN. My blog posting is number six on Google for their query.
I should have mentioned in my previous post that I have several thousand pounds of ammonium nitrate that I plan to make into explosives. The people at the DOJ need something to get their blood pumping on a Monday, right?
| Domain Name | usdoj.gov ? (U.S. Government) | |||||||||||||||||||
| IP Address | 149.101.1.# (US Dept of Justice) | |||||||||||||||||||
| ISP | US Dept of Justice | |||||||||||||||||||
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| Language | English (U.S.) en-us |
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| Browser | Internet Explorer 6.0 Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; DOJ3jx7bf; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; InfoPath.1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727) |
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| Time of Visit | Jan 7 2008 10:46:36 am | |||||||||||||||||||
| Last Page View | Jan 7 2008 10:46:46 am | |||||||||||||||||||
| Visit Length | 10 seconds | |||||||||||||||||||
| Page Views | 1 | |||||||||||||||||||
| Referring URL | http://www.google.co…ing ammonium nitrate | |||||||||||||||||||
| Search Engine | google.com | |||||||||||||||||||
| Search Words | bush signs law regulating ammonium nitrate | |||||||||||||||||||
| Visit Entry Page | https://blog.joehuffman.org/2007/12/31/new-ammonium-nitrate-regulations/ | |||||||||||||||||||
| Visit Exit Page | https://blog.joehuffman.org/2007/12/31/new-ammonium-nitrate-regulations/ | |||||||||||||||||||
| Out Click | here http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c110:H.R.1680: |
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| Visitor’s Time | Jan 7 2008 1:46:36 pm | |||||||||||||||||||
| Visit Number | 230,817 |
Every step we take towards making the State our Caretaker of our lives, by that much we move toward making the State our Master.
Dwight Eisenhower
[My guess is that this year there are only about two or maybe three presidential candidates, none of which are likely to win, that even have a glimmer of this fundamental truth.–Joe]
I just deleted another unpaid Boomershoot 2008 entry when they didn’t answer his email or voice mail. I then sent out an email to the Boomershoot announcement list that a position was open.
It lasted 12 minutes again. It must the minimum time it takes the Yahoo groups email list server to deliver the open position notification, someone to enter in their data, and push the button.
I just finished some more tools for my web based management of Boomershoot. This time it was some statistics.
These number will probably change a little by the time of the actual 2008 event. But as it currently stands:
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Total |
Average per position |
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Participants |
130 |
1.71 |
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Shooters |
120 |
1.58 |
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Spotters |
10 |
0.13 |
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Cleanup participants |
42 |
0.55 |
This is actually old news but I read it again here and it pissed me off again.
Fifteen states have closed what gun safety advocates call the “gun show loophole.”
[…]
…gun safety advocates using federal statistics showing a significant portion of private gun show sales wind up in criminals’ hands.
“Gun safety advocates”?
Since when are people advocating gun safety concerned with firearm sales at gun shows?
Of course they aren’t “gun safety advocates” they are gun restriction advocates. They are just trying to redefine themselves, with the help of the media, to be something less offensive. Sort of like a KKK member turning in his white sheets and pillow cases for something with a floral pattern.
Maybe it’s just me because I listen to words carefully and take them literally but I hear this sort of thing from salesmen sometimes. They say things that are almost half true and deliberately intended to be misleading. I immediately suspect everything they say and know they cannot be trusted with anything. I resist the urge to punch them out, glare at them, and walk away checking my wallet to make sure they haven’t lifted it. Unfortunately with the anti-gun bigots they are selling their bigotry to lawmakers who will use violence against those of us who are the targets of their irrational hatred.
But these bigots have reached their zenith and we are now winning. We just need to keep them on the run and politically exterminate them. Don’t let them redefine themselves. Just because their sheets are a floral design rather than white doesn’t mean they won’t lynch us if they get the chance.
Americans are so enamored of equality, they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom.
Alexis de Tocqueville
[I find this very odd. It’s certainly true today, but I would have thought it was different in his time (the mid 1800’s).–Joe]
At 15:56 PST I sent out an email that a position had opened up for Boomershoot 2008. At 16:08 PST, just 12 minutes later, the position was filled.
There are two other positions that might be opening up soon. They haven’t paid for them, they haven’t been answering their email, and I just left voice mail that had better be answered soon.
Ignore for the moment that the Federal Government does not have Constitutional permission to engage in socialized medicine. Look only at results where it has been tried. Kevin tells us about how it’s working out in the U.K.
There are lots of other examples but the first implementation appears to have come from Germany and was a failure as well.
One of the basic problems with socialized medicine is who is spending who’s money. As pointed out by Milton and Rose Friedman in Free to Choose there are four different possibilities (from memory):
On average, the first case is going to result in the best return on any given dollar spent. The person will optimize the result for the available money.
On average, the last case is going to result in the worst return on any given dollar spent. The person has little incentive to limit the amount of money spent and to get a good result for the money spent.
Socialized medicine most closely matches the last case and results in the least efficient spending of money.
Tell all the Democrat candidates for President to shove their illegal plans where the sun doesn’t shine then save on their own health care by getting their colonoscopy for removal of the reams of paper done without sedation.
The best defense against usurpatory government is an assertive citizenry.
William F. Buckley
[It’s impossible to be truly assertive unless you have some means to back it. When the government usurps your ability to vote you have very few options in asserting yourself except by the force of arms. This is why respect of the 2nd Amendment is essential for a free society and why any who attempt to infringe it must be vigorously opposed. This applies to all, except Richardson, of the current Democrat candidates for president and some of the Republicans.–Joe]
I just finished listening to Ayaan Hirsi Ali read her book Infidel. All 17 hours and 34 minutes of it. To be listening to her actual voice makes this book all the more powerful and meaningful to me.
The book starts with the following introduction:
One November morning in 2004, Theo van Gogh got up to go to his film production company in Amsterdam. He took out his old black bicycle and headed down a main road. Waiting in a doorway was a Moroccan man with a handgun and two butcher knives. As Theo cycled down the Linnaeusstraat Mohamad Boriar approached. He pulled out his gun and shot Theo several times. Theo fell off his bike and lurched across the road then collapsed. Boriar followed. Theo begged, “Can’t we talk about this?” But Boriar shot him four more times. Then he took out one of his butcher knives and sawed into Theo’s throat. With the other knife he stabbed a five page letter onto Theo’s chest. The letter was addressed to me.
After that powerful opening paragraph she quickly goes back in time to when her grandma was young and works forward in great detail. At times I questioned the purpose of detailing her early and even pre-birth years. What does it matter that her father was imprisoned by a communist dictator in Somalia? Why the details of her mother working as a maid years before Ali was born? Why the stories her grandmother told her? Or the games she played with her sister? But by the time she described, in great detail, what she calls the excision of her sister and her I understood why. Although she doesn’t explicitly say it she was “born of good stock”. She was the least of her siblings academically. But her strength of will, ability to reason, and courage were of such a level that am in awe of her.
And after escaping to the Netherlands she struggled academically while attending University Leiden. But she obtained her political science degree, became an atheist, and a member of the Dutch Parliament. She worked to liberate Muslim women from the beatings and the domination by men.
How did this come about? How did she successfully escape and so many others, including her sister, fail? She is a very strong person but there other things too. Western culture planted the seeds in her mind, those seeds took root and through some good luck enabled her to cast off her destiny of submission and beatings.
The western culture had a profound influence on her included things such as Nancy Drew books and Harlequin romance novels. Through such simple ordinary things we take for granted she and her sister obtained a glimpse of what they thought was only a fantasy world. But when she saw the streets of a German city for the first time it crystallized into reality.
I want to believe there is way other than military domination to win the war against those in the Muslim world who seek our total destruction. Ayaan Hirsi Ali has given us a road map to do just that.
Here is Submission, the 10 minute movie written by Ali and produced by Theo van Gogh. It resulted in van Gogh’s murder, Ali going into hiding for weeks, and the effect to Dutch politics was like a 130 dB klaxon going off next to your bed in the quiet of the night.
Submission Part 1
Submission Part 2
And this is what Fred Thompson has to say about Ali. Go Fred!
Ali is now a Resident Fellow at American Enterprise Institute in Washington D.C. Just today they posted a paper by her, Islam’s Silent Moderates.
I will be reading and listening to all of her works from now on.
I would prefer to see a letter to the Attorney General saying, “Anyone involved in enforcement of laws restricting firearms should be prosecuted under 18 USC 242.” But that is way, way too much to expect at this time. For the time being this is a decent enough start.
Of course I expect that the ATF response, internally at least, be something along the lines of “Who are you to tell us what to do? You are a mere subject. We are the King’s men.”
This message was brought to you via the apex of the Triangle of Death marching orders and a wheelbarrow full of cash.
A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are suffering deeply in spirit, and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public debt…If the game runs sometime against us at home, we must have patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at stake.
Thomas Jefferson
[The results in Iowa reminded me of this.–Joe]
Only those with a vested emotional interest in seeing through on the promise of total gun confiscation continue to hang onto the false hope of gun control. After years of being convinced of the righteousness of their cause they are blinded to reality and have begun to believe their own lies. That is the only way to explain how they can still be pushing their failed agenda.
If it wasn’t such a serious issue the determination of anti-gun proponents would border on the laughable. Since their misguided ways have led to untold numbers of people being left at the mercy of armed thugs, it takes all the humor out of their laughable ways.
Still, their determination has brainwashed them to believe in their cause at all costs. I also proves that they are incapable of creating a conspiracy with the anti-gun establishment media. The sad sorry truth is they actually believe this crap.
Gerard Valentino
Buckeye Firearms Association Central Ohio Chair
January 3, 2008
There is No Leftist Anti-Gun Conspiracy – They Really Believe This Crap
[The conspiracy theory model explains a lot but ends up with more questions than answers. I’m with Valentino, as implausible and counter factual as their belief system is I think they actually believe it.–Joe]
Jason sent me a picture of what his kids left out for Santa and his reindeer:
Yes, some people find it calming to go shooting but that isn’t what this post is about. As Sebastian and Conservative Scalawag point out a replica of Malcolm Reynolds pistol from the movie Serenity is available for $150.
Son James and I are big fans of Serenity and the TV series FireFly which it was based on.
