Quote of the day–Adolf Hitler

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The size of the lie is a definite factor in causing it to be believed, for the vast masses of the nation are in the depths of their hearts more easily deceived than they are consciously and intentionally bad.  The primitive simplicity of their minds renders them a more easy prey to a big lie than a small one, for they themselves often tell little lies but would be ashamed to tell a big one.

Adolf Hitler
[I was reminded of this by the weekend spectacle of Mr. “I did not have sex with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.”–Joe]

A nice butt

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I’ve had numerous women tell me I have a nice butt and once had a strange woman give it a squeeze but today was the first time I had a man tell me that. It was more that just a little bit odd. Especially since I obviously had a loaded gun (I was about to shoot a stage in a steel match) and he didn’t.

Don, thanks (I think), for the compliment but we are not going on any camping trips together.

Disposing of OBL remains

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There’s rumors of his death but there’s also lots of reason to be skeptical. Lack of confirmation of his death and physical possession of his body shouldn’t stop us from planning appropriate disposal of his carcass. Here are my suggestions:

  1. Attitude adjustment. Shove a large dildo “where the sun don’t shine”, freeze him and ship the display to Club Gitmo. Keep him on ice and use him as a motivational tool in interrogations (“You could have a place beside your great and wonderful leader.”)

  2. Warning to others. His carcass fed to the hogs and the video of both the entrance and exit from the alimentary canal put on YouTube.
  3. Grim reminder. His head mounted on a 10 foot pole, be the highest point of anything within ten miles, and be perpetually illuminated with a soft green glow from the glass covering Mecca.

Quote of the day–Clayton Cramer

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Professor Cornell is visiting us from a parallel universe, where Whig political thought never developed, and no one in the Revolutionary and early Republic periods ever feared governmental oppression.

Clayton Cramer
Saul Cornell Is Suddenly No Longer a Partisan on Gun Control
September 22, 2006
[Clayton fisks this editorial about Cornell’s new book.–Joe]

Mandating gun ownership

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Two different people (Dave and Stephanie) have sent me this link so I really should post about it. The gist of the article is the following:

All Americans have the right to bear arms.  Some towns have even gone as far as to require each household to have a gun.   Now a small Idaho town is contemplating a similar idea– it’s called the Civil Emergencies Ordinance. And although gun ownership is just one piece of this ordinance, it’s the part that’s getting the most attention.

“We’ve blessed to be a fairly rural area of the state, so we don’t have a lot of crime and I think we’d like to keep it that way,” said Lee Belt, Greenleaf city clerk.

Drive about 10 minutes west of Caldwell and you’ll run into Greenleaf, Idaho, population 860.  If city council member Steve Jett has his way, each head of household that can legally own a gun, will.  Along with that they’re encouraged to have ammunition and appropriate training.

Aside from hunting I sort of think of guns as flush toilets. They aren’t something that is particularly appealing on their own merits but they do a good job of disposing of human waste. I think every home should have at least one. It should be keep clean and functional. Everyone in the house should know how to use it or if they are too small to use it they should be keep away from it so they don’t get hurt.

For the city to mandate, with certain exceptions, gun ownership is sort of like mandating flush toilets. Are people so stupid that they don’t recognize the benefits of flush toilets? No. And people aren’t so stupid they don’t recognize the benefits of gun ownership either. The problem is the anti-gun bigots of the world make it socially uncomfortable in some circles to own guns. What needs to be done is to make those bigots social outcasts. It may be that this proposed ordinance will help make those bigots more obvious and hence it could be that it is a “good thing”. But in general it makes me just a little bit uncomfortable that government is getting involved in something like this.

I first saw this article at Saysuncle and Alphecca.

Quote of the day–Reuters

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They estimate the possibility of accidentally destroying the planet as extremely low.

Reuters

Guns on college campuses

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More bad news for the anti-gun bigots. It turns out Utah isn’t the first place to allow guns on campus. Here is a report of where fully automatic assault rifles as well as pistols are carried either openly or concealed with no problems:

I studied for six years at Tel Aviv University, Israel, and although gun control is tighter in Israel than it is in the United States, I was accustomed to seeing students and staff carrying firearms to classes on an almost everyday basis.

One may see students in their 20s carrying fully automatic assault rifles while on furlough from army duty and others who carry pistols, either openly or concealed, with the blessing of the university’s security staff and administration.

We are winning. Keep up the pressure on these bigots and felons. We need to make it just as un-PC to talk about restrictions on guns as it is to talk about segregated drinking fountains, bathrooms, and seating areas on buses. We can drop back into “maintenance mode” when the only law on the Federal books that directly refers to firearms is the 2nd Amendment and 18 USC 241 and 242 are vigorously enforced against all who violate a person’s inalienable rights.

Firefox modification arrives too late to help PNNL felons

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Jeff reports on new modification to Firefox but it comes out too late to help the felons at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. They got caught because of their sloppy browsing habits.

Long before they committed their crimes I tried to tell them they had a security leak in their browsing. But in a supreme irony they didn’t listen and when they committed their crime they left behind more than enough information for me to catch them.

I’ll have more news on this front soon.

Bringing images to mind

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Dooce said this:

One of the many, many, endless and uncountable downsides is Leta’s breath which used to be the color of fairy wings and was so sweet it could cure broken hearts. Now it is a visible black smoke that curls into forked tongues and seethes with the voices of screaming demons. I cannot withhold kisses or hugs from her like I can from Jon because she’s just an innocent pawn in all of this, and a true test of parenthood has been willing myself to endure the pain of having my eyebrows roasted off my forehead when, after stuffing her mouth full of licorice, she crawls up into my lap and says HEEEEEEELLLLLOOOOOOO. I just pick up the flesh that melts off my face and stick it back on, pretending that it happens all the time.

Which reminded me of this image (click on the image to get the original 260 Kbyte image):

Quote of the day–Lyle Keeney

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The UltiMAK school of charm. Its a one-day course. Students downrange. Attitude adjustment comes really fast.

Lyle Keeney
September 21, 2006
3:44:00 PM
[In a comment regarding Islamic extremists needing to attend a charm school before being ready to introduce to polite society.–Joe]

Federally mandated $11 Billion boondoggle

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From Newsweek:

COLUMBUS, Ohio – New federal security rules for issuing driver’s licenses could cost $11 billion to implement, raising concerns among states about paying for the changes, according to a national survey of states released Thursday.

“There’s no question that state legislators believe driver’s licenses should be as secure as is possible,” said William Pound, executive director of the National Conference of State Legislatures which helped conduct the survey. “The $11 billion question is, ‘Who’s going to pay for it?”’

Actually that’s not the question. The question is, “What will you get from spending $11 billion dollars?” The answer is, “Nothing of value.”

Here’s why:

The law requires states to incorporate common security features to prevent tampering or counterfeiting, such as using standard materials in every state to print the cards. States will have to verify the legitimacy of documents used to obtain a license and buy equipment to digitally store those documents.

The problem is that with a document that is common to 300 million people (coordination with Canada is supposed to be occurring too), and highly regarded/valued the efforts put into forging the document will be quite high. What they erroneously believe is that with the biometric identifier used on the document is that they can catch (nearly) all efforts of creating a duplicate identity for someone. There are only two biometrics that have a chance of this kind of quality. They are DNA and fingerprints. A duplicate iris scan shows up about once for every 200,000 people and that particular biometric has other issues as well (think specialty contact lenses for example). Voice and facial recognition biometrics don’t even come close to meeting the bar.

DNA testing as a biometric used on this wide of scale “isn’t ready for prime time” and may never be.  No matter how many times you watch Gattaca it’s still just a movie. Sometimes legislators have a difficult time distinguishing Hollywood from reality and I suspect this is one of those times. And even if were “ready for prime time” the character played by Ethan Hawke in Gattaca shows us how it is defeated it.

Fingerprints have been on California drivers licenses for something like 20 years (I wish I still had the notes from my biometrics class, but the people at PNNL didn’t return those to me after they committed their felony and wrongfully terminated me). Of those fingerprints on all those licenses only about 40% are actually usable. They were obtained at the DMV by people that were inadequately trained and motivated to get good fingerprints. Even if they were properly trained and motivated there will have to be thousands of people with authorization to enter and edit data in the system. With that large of an attack surface (read this to understand attack surfaces) and with the value of the document so high there will be lots of opportunity and motivation for obtaining an authentic, but fraudulent, document. See also my thoughts on an universal biometric ID which this is “a good first step” toward.

Since the terrorists, which this document is aimed at defeating, only need to find one hole in the system to “win” that particular battle we will have spent $11,000,000,000 on virtually nothing and it could have been invested in real security.

I’m thinking the UltiMAK school of charm would be a good place for some of those dollars.

Interesting viewpoints

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From Britain:

A LARGE number of Britons would be prepared to give up sex if it meant they would live to be 100, according to a survey published today.

The Mori research found that 40 per cent would pass on the passion for longevity, although far more women (48 per cent) were willing to make the sacrifice than men (31 per cent).

Not that anyone is saying one could successfully make such a trade. They were just asking to see how important life is to people.

One friend of mine wrote an essay complaining about all the people that want to live a long time. His view is that these people are getting in the way of evolution and therefore life extending activities were immoral.

Still another friend told me, “I’ll know I’m dead when my dick stops working.”

Dr. Joe is most in agreement with this last viewpoint.

Posted in Sex

Sticking it to Wendy Cukier

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A guy after my own heart:

Wendy Cukier, head of the anti-gun lobby in Canada, opines that the Dawson College shootings are “evidence that we can do better”. Wrong.

These latest shootings – make that every shooting since the passage of the Firearms Act – are evidence of the complete and utter failure and futility of all such so-called gun control laws.

If Kimveer Gill obtained his firearms legally, it is evidence that such laws don’t work. If he obtained them illegally, it is evidence that such laws don’t work.

Now if he would ask Just One Question.

Clash of Civilizations

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This is my listening material for my trip to and from home (and then some) this weekend. Read a quote from it here:

“It is Islam, a different civilisation whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power. The problem for Islam is not the CIA or the US Department of Defence. It is the West, a different civilisation whose people are convinced of the universality of their culture and believe that their superior, if declining, power imposes on them the obligation to extend that culture throughout the world. These are the basic ingredients that fuel conflict between Islam and the West”.

The Amazon reviews are just as intriguing:

This is the eminent Professor Huntinton’s magnum opus, and it deserves to be read. No one can profess an understanding of modern global politics without studying this masterful work which was written in 1996. It remains a treasury of prophetic insights for our present day.

Of particular interest are the following: Chapter II, Part 5, “The Islamic Resurgence, Chapter IV Part 9, “Islam and the West” and Part 10 “Islam’s Bloody Borders.”

Huntington’s immense learning does not leave him optimistic. On the final page he writes: “On a worldwide basis Civilization seems in many respects to be yielding to barbarism, generating the image of an unprecedented phenomenon, a global Dark Ages, possibly descending on humanity.”

Keep in mind that this book was published in 1998 (and supposedly written in 1996)–years before 9-11!

Quote of the day–Pat Kelley

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Gun confiscation won’t happen in my lifetime.

Pat Kelley
IPSC Grandmaster
Wily Coyote Three Gun Shoot
Whitebird, Idaho
August 1998
[No further explanation was offered. Nor was it needed.–Joe]

Shotgunning: 12 shots in 1.73 seconds

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Very impressive video from Berreta (the link is broken, but it might have been this video):

Not just the speed (0.144 seconds per shot) but the accuracy at that speed. I have always been super impressed with Pat Kelley and it appears this guy is on par with Pat. Here is a quote from Pat when I saw him shooting at a match:

Damn Benelli!  As soon as you try to do a point one three split the hammer follows the bolt down.  It’ll do a point one four, but you get yourself in trouble as soon as you try a point one three.

Pat Kelley
IPSC Grandmaster
Wily Coyote Three Gun Shoot
Whitebird, Idaho
August 2, 1998, 11:45 AM
Referring to his shotgun that malfunctioned when he tried to shoot it faster than it was capable of shooting.

This reminds me that I have another quote from Pat that I’ll use for tomorrows QOD.

Quote of the day–John Ross

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One of the biggest mistakes that freedom advocates make is we often fail to take the moral high ground on freedom issues, and we let our enemies define the terms. This is a huge mistake. Never forget: We are in the right on this issue. We are on the side of the Founding Fathers. They are on the side of Hitler, Stalin, Mao Tse-Tung, Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein, and every other leader of an oppressive, totalitarian regime.

John Ross
Mistakes We Make in the Gun Culture or How to Be a More Effective Advocate for Freedom
From Ross in Range September 14, 2005
[I’m working on a “high moral ground” piece. Here Ross is more succinct than me. The major point to be made is that we need to put them on the defensive. If we are defending we are losing. If you are defending any compromise is a loss. They need to be defending their alignment with tyrants.–Joe]

Not quite ready for a polite society

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If you didn’t already figure it out from the Danish cartoon incident and about 100 other examples the incident with the Pope should give you some more guidance. Here is another article:

A hardline cleric linked to Somalia’s powerful Islamist movement to call for Muslims to “hunt down” and kill the pope, while an armed Iraqi group threatened to carry out attacks against Rome and the Vatican.

…

Gunmen shot and killed an elderly Italian nun Sunday at a children’s hospital in the Islamist-controlled Somali capital of Mogadishu, in what Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi denounced as a “horrible act.

And a third day of attacks on Christian places of worship in the Palestinain territories saw unknown assailants throw Molotov cocktails and a burning tire at two Catholic churches in the northern West Bank.

I especially love this observation:

…the former “moderate” Iranian president criticized the Pope, stating that it is strange to observe how ignorant Benedict is about Islam, a faith of tolerance and humanity.

I think their tolerance and humanity needs a bit more work before they are ready to introduce to polite society. Is there a charm school that would accept them?

Hillbillys blow up a microwave oven

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From Dave at Ozark Pyrotechnics:

It was just over 2 pounds of HE, that was heard over 12 miles away at a lake party, and neighbors 3 miles away came up wondering what in the hell I had blown up this time, as it shook their windows. I’ve set off as much as 10 pounds before that did not get this response. If I keep doing this I will need a seismograph and a deciblemeter.

The video is here.

He was testing a new mixture. He was pretty pleased with the results as he didn’t use any chlorates. Chlorates are considered rather hazardous and something we do use at Boomershoot which makes his experiments all the more interesting to me. Unfortunately when I asked for the recipe and an approximation of the cost per pound he told me:

I have no idea how sensitive the formula is, or really what I actually did. It was at 150 yards with a 20″ barrel Mini-14, with that cheap Russian Wolf 55 grain JHP steel case ammo. You know better than I how fast that bullet was going at that distance. Let me know what you do think the bullet was traveling at that distance.

I estimate between 2200 and 2300 fps.

I was just throwing stuff in thinking that the AN was of no value…

…I measured nothing, but did guess by volumes I’ve used before. The base was 400 mesh AL, with 200 mesh MG, 100-200 mesh MG/AL, the smallest Ti that I have (I’ll have to look up the size), powdered Graphite, and Antimony Trioxide 200 mesh? If I had Zr, I would have thrown that in too.

The AN was so bad that it was nothing but a mush that left your hand wet holding it. The only thing I can think of is that it still had great oxidizer properties and allowed a more complete mixture. The mixture was dry when finished, but was so completely mixed that it is was more like pouring silver colored garlic granules while cooking.

From the fireball (see the picture below) it’s obvious he had an excess of fuel. But that makes for a more interesting display for the participants.

More videos are here.

Anyway, Dave plans to put on another explosives shoot in October. Check with him before finalizing your travel plans I don’t think the date has been pinned down yet.

Boomershoot 2007 will be April 29th

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I have set the dates to be be the last weekend in April but the survey showed that enough people were interested in reserved positions that I want to implement that before accepting the entries.

The price will remain the same as last year. There were only a few in the survey that disagreed with the statement that the price was reasonable and one that strongly disagreed with the statement. But this last guy said he thought the price should be $4000/person so it sort of balances out.

The Precision Rifle Clinic will be April 27th and 28th.

The hotel package option isn’t going to happen this year. Too much work for me to do at this time. Maybe next year. The survey did show some interest in that. So you can go ahead and make your hotel reservations if you want. Suggestions are here.