The old black is the new gray

From The Daily Telegraph:

US researchers say they have made the darkest material on Earth, a substance so black it absorbs more than 99.9 per cent of light.

Made from tiny tubes of carbon standing on end, this material is almost 30 times darker than a carbon substance used by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology as the current benchmark of blackness.

And the material is close to the long-sought ideal black, which could absorb all colours of light and reflect none.

"All the light that goes in is basically absorbed," said Pulickel Ajayan, who led the research team at Rice University in Houston.

"It is almost pushing the limit of how much light can be absorbed into one material."

The substance has a total reflective index of 0.045 per cent - which is more than three times darker than the nickel-phosphorous alloy that now holds the record as the world's darkest material.

Basic black paint, by comparison, has a reflective index of 5 per cent to 10 per cent.

That about sums it up

Joe's Crabby Shack nails his statement to the door with an Open letter to Mike Duncan.

Yeah.

But I passed this point a long time ago.

problems

I'm having some ISP problems this morning. Can't get my email, although I have web access, except for my ISP's website, so I can't check email that way, either.

Another strike against McCain

For those who are still feverishly clinging to the theory that getting McCain into the Whitehouse will someone ensure that we get rights-friendly supreme court nominees and other rights-friendly appointments: I just don't get it. McCain has already proven himself as no friend of fundamental rights.

The Buckeye Firearms Association points out that a certain Mike DeWine could become U.S. Attorney General. And...

DeWine, an anti-gun candidate sporting a Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence (formerly Handgun Control Inc.) endorsement, proved himself out-of-touch with Ohio voters on the Second Amendment, was drummed out of office just over 1 year ago. Comments about his fantasies of a political future in Ohio, and his support for John McCain's presidential candidacy prove he didn't learn a thing from his defeat.

In Ohio alone, approximately 1/2 million people have hunting and/ or concealed handgun licenses. And according to the Minneapolis StarTribune's Dennis Anderson, Ohio gun owners made up 27 percent of the total vote in Ohio in the year 2000.

Yet as a member of the House, DeWine supported the Brady Bill, which required a waiting period and criminal background check before a gun could be sold. When he ran for the Senate in 1994, he backed the Clinton Gun Ban. In 2006, Human Events Online named DeWine among the Top 10 anti-gun U.S. Senators. And shortly before his defeat, DeWine took a position in opposition to legislation which barred gun manufacturers, distributors, dealers or importers from frivolous lawsuits designed to put them out of business.

Mike DeWine consistently cast his votes on the side of the most rabid anti-gun Democrats in the Senate. And now he wants you to cast your vote for Senator John McCain. And we all know the wisdom that one should judge a man by the company he keeps. John McCain likes to claim he is pro-gun. But as Dr. John Lott wrote in an op-ed for National Review Online, "this was true a decade ago, but since then, on issues such as regulating gun shows, banning less expensive guns and so-called assault weapons, and requiring gunlocks, McCain has supported central portions of the gun-control agenda. Indeed, in a couple cases, McCain authored the proposed legislation himself."

As usual, read the whole thing.

GOA Alert on the Bush DOJ amicus brief

Wednesday, January 23, 2008

Rep. Virgil Goode (R-VA) has sent the following letter to the White
House asking them to undo the huge harm they have caused the Second
Amendment with the brief they filed in the DC gun ban case.

-------------------------------------

January 22, 2008
President George W. Bush
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington DC 20500

Dear President Bush:

Your Solicitor General has just filed a brief with the U.S. Supreme
Court in the D.C. v. Heller case arguing that categorical gun bans of
virtually all self-defense firearms are constitutional if a court
determines they are "reasonable" -- the lowest standard of
constitutional review.

If this view prevails, a national ban on all firearms -- including
hunting rifles -- could be constitutional, even if the court decides
-- on ample historical evidence -- that the Founders intended the
Second Amendment as an individual right.

I would ask that you direct the Justice Department to withdraw this
unfortunate brief and to replace it with an opinion which reflects
the right of law-abiding Americans to keep and bear arms.

Thank you for your consideration.

Sincerely yours,

Virgil Goode

-------------------------------------

Rep. Goode is following up his action by circulating the letter among
his colleagues. He is asking other members of Congress to add their
signatures in anticipation of sending President Bush another copy of
the letter.

Your help is needed immediately to convince your Representative to
join with Rep. Goode.

Please go to the Gun Owners Legislative Action Center at
http://www.gunowners.org/activism.htm to send a pre-written message
urging your Rep. to be a part of this important initiative.

As usual, I don't have much hope of my so-called representative doing anything, because he doesn't actually represent me. But I sent it anyway.

Which one of these is not like the others?

I recently posted a vintage ad for a Kaywoodie 7-Day Matched Set. And now one turns up on eBay with a starting bid of only $49.99. I'm glad the seller said he doesn't know much about pipes, otherwise I could only assume he's trying to rip someone off.

Well, even if all these pipes were part of the original set, it wouldn't be worth much because they have been so heavily used. But if you have a sharp eye, you should be able to see carving or rustication on the topmost pipe. There's no way a 7-pipe matched set would have one with a rusticated finish and six with smooth finishes. Also the cutouts in the case don't seem to match up to all the pipes.

On the other hand, this is a fantastic old pipe, and must be running near 80 years old by now. Even more worth mentioning because of the excellent photos showing this clear example of the original KBB-inside-a-cloverleaf logo of the original company that later became Kaywoodie. I'll have to watch this one just to see how much it sells for.

Giuliani, the bully

According to the chicken entrails that I scattered on the pentagram in my back yard last night, Giuliani won't make it past the primary. But, as long as he's in the race, I'll keep ragging on him.

Here's one from the New York Times (of all places):

As mayor, he picked fights with a notable lack of discrimination, challenging the city and state comptrollers, a few corporations and the odd council member. But the mayor’s fist also fell on the less powerful. In mid-May 1994, newspapers revealed that Mr. Giuliani’s youth commissioner, the Rev. John E. Brandon, suffered tax problems; more troubling revelations seemed in the offing.

At 7 p.m. on May 17, Mr. Giuliani’s press secretary dialed reporters and served up a hotter story: A former youth commissioner under Mr. Dinkins, Richard L. Murphy, had ladled millions of dollars to supporters of the former mayor. And someone had destroyed Department of Youth Services records and hard drives and stolen computers in an apparent effort to obscure what had happened to that money.

“My immediate goal is to get rid of the stealing, to get rid of the corruption,” Mr. Giuliani told The Daily News.

None of it was true. In 1995, the Department of Investigation found no politically motivated contracts and no theft by senior officials. But Mr. Murphy’s professional life was wrecked.

“I was soiled merchandise — the taint just lingers,” Mr. Murphy said in a recent interview.

Long article. There's more--much more.

There are many kinds of people I simply won't tolerate, but right up there at the top of the list is the bully.

via The Agitator

Naked bigotry at Facebook

From Forbes.com:

Last week Ignatius Piazza submitted pay-per-click ads on Facebook, one of the nation's largest online communities, offering a Front Sight 4 Day Handgun Training course, plus 1 Day 30 State Concealed Weapon Permit Course for pennies-on-the-dollar and capped off the offer with a free Springfield Armory XD Handgun in 9mm, .40SW, or .45 ACP for the first 5,000 who respond -- thus making a commitment of over $3 million dollars in free handguns.

Piazza was stunned when Facebook rejected his ad stating, it violated Point 6 of Facebook's advertising guidelines which reads, "Provocative images will not be accepted. Ads may not contain, facilitate or promote adult content, including nudity, sexual terms and/or images of people in positions or activities that are excessively suggestive or sexual. Ads may not contain, facilitate or promote offensive, profane, vulgar, obscene, or inappropriate language. Ads may not contain, facilitate or promote defamatory, libelous, slanderous and/or unlawful content."

I love it when the enemy makes it so clear where they stand.

via Conservative Scalawag

That settles that

Another man done gone. That makes the primary easy.

Why the Mars Rovers keep going

Interesting article at thunderbolts.info. "Unexplained" Forces Keep Mars Rovers Moving:

The rovers have provided continuous surprises since the outset. When their missions began, their solar cells were providing 900 watt-hours of electricity per day. Over the months that followed Spirit's output dropped to 400 watt-hours daily, while Opportunity dropped to about 500 watt-hours. A primary reason for the drop was the accumulation of dust on the panels. But then, to the amazement of mission scientists, Opportunity's power began to INCREASE, and kept on increasing until the power peaked at just over 900 watt-hours.

As reported by Newscientist.com, the Mars rover Opportunity "stumbled into something akin to a carwash," which somehow 'cleaned' its solar panels. Jim Erickson of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory admitted that the cause of this surprise 'cleaning' could not be explained. 'These exciting and unexplained cleaning events have kept Opportunity in really great shape,' Erickson said."

The remarkable cleaning occurred in spurts during the Martian night. The team managing the rover reported that on at least four occasions over a six-month period, the rover's power output suddenly increased by up to 5% in a single night. Some suggested that the Martian winds might have swept the dust off the panels. Others wondered if frost could have caused the dust to clump, exposing more of the panels. And some even suggested that the tilting of the rover while climbing hills might have caused a portion of the dust to drop off. Such "explanations" only add to the exasperation of those who understand very well what has occurred. Does dust fall off the top of your car when you drive uphill? Does the speed of your car on the highway clean the dust off? Is your car cleaner after a windy day?

While the rovers' cleanings and endurance is unexplained by NASA, a clue to the puzzle is provided by the agency's own news release dated July 14, 2005: "When humans visit Mars, they'll have to watch out for towering electrified dust devils." With these words, NASA gave official sanction to an idea that had already been percolating from separately funded research projects in recent years. This research has explored the electrical component to dust devils in the Arizona desert -- investigators were surprised to find that these vortices are electrically charged. According to the recent news item "Electric Sand Findings Could Lead to Better Climate Models," one investigator speculates that "electric fields get so large on the Red Planet they produce ground-level sparks."

But since it is verboten within official science to speak of planets as charged bodies, the investigators can only envision the electric fields associated with dust devils as an effect of particles bouncing and rubbing against each other -- ignoring the larger electrical condition required to generate the vortex in the first place. NASA suggests, "Dust devils get their charge from grains of sand and dust rubbing together in the whirlwind. When certain pairs of unlike materials rub together, one material gives up some of its electrons (negative charges) to the other material. Smaller dust particles tend to charge negative, taking away electrons from the larger sand grains." In this view, the rising central column of hot air that powers the dust devil carries the negatively charged dust upward and leaves the heavier positively charged sand swirling near the base. In this way, the charges get separated, creating an electric field.

[...]

But regardless of what causes the electric fields associated with Martian "dust devils" and dust storms, NASA still seems unwilling to consider their relevance to the rovers anomalies. From the electrical perspective, the robots' seemingly unfathomable endurance is easily explained as an effect of repeated electrostatic cleanings. On Mars, because of the atmosphere's thinness, dust particles charge more easily and will thus stick more "stubbornly" to a surface. Thus, the notion of repeated cleanings absent the electric force becomes all the more preposterous.

A simple, logical, scientific explanation rejected by pre-existing scientific dogma. But wait, there's more:

Ironically, a number of researchers have posited that the best cleaning method for removal of dust from power-systems on Mars will involve electrostatic applications. At the 2002 Photovoltaic Specialists Conference, G.A. Landis and P.P Jenkins stated in their paper "Dust mitigation for Mars solar arrays": "The environment of Mars is expected to be an ideal one for use of electrostatic dust-removal techniques."

Heh.

To say "fisk" is an understatement

A must read for anyone following the Ron Paul alleged racism story. Justin Raimondo of Taki's Top Drawer utterly destroys the original article and shows the quotes in their proper context: Why the Beltway Libertarians Are Trying to Smear Ron Paul. I've been reading everything I can about this. In my opinion, you cannot have an informed opinion on this matter until you read this article. I'm not going to post a money quote like I usually do, because this article is too long and detailed and must be read in its entirety. And it's absolutely devastating.

via Karen De Coster

Just another pointless blog post

Just placed an order for more sandpaper, stains and tripoli buffing compound from PIMO (I still have a hunk of carnuba). I'm going to try and get back into pipe refurbishing. I still have some in-progress pipes from back when I got bored with it a few years ago, but some of my recent posts have sort of kicked the old Kaywoodie collecting bug back into action again. Who knows? Maybe I'll even go get a set of wood files and finally work on that ebauchon that's been sitting on my pipe shelf since 2005.

An ebauchon is what you call a hunk of briar that's been roughly shaped into the pipe it will eventually become. Mine has also been pre-drilled and bored so all I have to do is decide on it's final shape. I don't have to worry about lining up the bowl cavity and the air passage through the shank. It's for a simple straight pipe, but whether it becomes a billiard, apple, poker or anything else is up to me. I'm thinking about trying something simple for the first pipe, and if I don't destroy it, perhaps create a hexagonal or octagonal sitter (a sitter being a pipe with a flat enough bottom that it can sit all by itself).

Here, in my opinion, is a bad way to run an auction. The seller has taken a single picture of five pipes, but is selling only one of the pipes in the photo. Of course you can't tell this by the auction title, and the only reason I looked at it was because of that big bent billiard on the left. The other thing wrong with this auction is that he has a starting bid of $9.99 for a battered old pipe that doesn't even have a bit anymore. Good luck with that one, dude. Also, the aluminum-stemmed Kaywoodies don't interest me at all. Someone else can collect those.

This afternoon's totally randomized first ten mp3 list:
Boston -- Feelin' Satisfied
Screaming Blue Messiahs -- Watusi Wedding
Todd Rundgren -- Can We Still Be Friends
Euphoria -- Little Gem
Norman Blake -- Man of Constant Sorrow (instrumental)
Warren Zevon -- Mutineer
Kurt Elling -- Say Goodbye
Nena -- Unnerkannt Durch's Marchenland
Enya -- Diereadh an Tuath
Shriekback -- Sticky Jazz

A pipe maker (stationed) in Iraq

CPT David Palmieri:

Thought I'd send you some pictures of the pipes that I made over here in Iraq the last 6 months. I'm presently assigned as Medical Officer for the 2-27 Infantry Battalion.

[...]

If you notice, the brass pieces I used are the butt end of a .50 caliber round. The bone for the one tamper is carved from a lamb bone that I found on a mission. It has the Battalion mascot, a wolfhound carved on it. I've also used part of a wool Army blanket for the pipe and tamper gloves.

Sweet.

She's dead, Jim

Bullseye satire from the writer known as drugtestallpoliticians at TheSpoof.com. America Dead - Drowned in a Sea of Laws:

Washington - The United States was declared dead today by the Federal Morgue. The cause of death was listed as drowning.

The drowning of America took place in the vast and endless Sea of Laws. There are 75,000 pages of laws governing American citizens. There are so many laws that it is impossible to step out of your house without breaking some laws and staying home is just as dangerous.

It has been reported that one reason that there are so many laws is because it is much easier to get a job as a Congressman or Representative at the state and federal level than it is to get a real job flipping hamburgers, mopping floors, or any other form of physically productive employment.

[...]

Sadly, for the average member of the public unfortunate enough to get caught up in the jaws of the "justice" system it is not enough to be in mere possession of the truth in order to be found innocent of charges leveled against puny citizens by the omnipotent forces of the government for breaking one of its endless supply of laws. All a prosecutor has to do is to merely prove a theory based on conjecture that a citizen has committed some act against the "people". Through a selective process in the picking of jurors the government can stack the jury against the accused and thus insure that the insatiable appetite of the prison-industrial complex is constantly satisfied.

But then, when satire is actually true, I guess it's not satire anymore.

Oh, and, by the way, I am kind of cynical, now that you come to mention it

A compelling and probably accurate article at Lew Rockell. Why a Primary Vote for John McCain is a General Election Vote for Hillary by John Keller.

After four terms as Senator from Arizona, John McCain has written or co-sponsored enough legislation to give us a good idea of what he believes the proper role of government to be without explicitly asking. Even if we did ask, actions are what matters. Below is an analysis of McCain’s electability based on bills he’s sponsored, most of it in the last 8 years, and various speeches and op-ed pieces. I’ll spare you the suspense, and give you the summary up front; read the rest for supporting details. McCain sees the federal government as the solution to nearly every problem, and advocates creating new bureaucracies and federal databases to track and monitor the "solutions." His bills are laden with the veneer of free market controls, tracking databases, and public-private information exchange and R&D so popular when alleged Republicans expand government; at the end of the day, he is expanding government in nearly every conceivable way. He is a committed Clintonian interventionist, often the lone Republican supporting Bill Clinton’s interventions of choice in Sudan, Somalia, Kosovo, and Bosnia.

McCain considers himself capable of getting things done in Washington because many of his bills are bipartisan efforts. The results however, leave conservatives shaking their heads: Free Speech Control, Gun Control, Unlimited Immigration, Support for a Greenhouse Gas Tax, and Woodrow Wilson–Style International Gun-Barrel Democracy. McCain was the Democrats’ useful conservative idiot in each of these cases. He was the lead sponsor of multiple bills no Democrat could have pushed through Congress, but given that almost all the co-sponsors of these bills are hard-core leftists we can see by his actions this Senator is a big government Republican on matters domestic, fiscal, and foreign.

As usual, read the whole thing. I've only quoted the introduction. The details go far beyond that.

---

I had drafted this post earlier for posting tomorrow, but I'll go ahead and post it now along with some additional comments. Most other bloggers who I read made it clear who they would be voting for. I didn't, because I knew it would be pointless.

The herds who graze the vast American plains will only vote for who they are told to vote for. Thompson never had a chance. He ran for prez not because he had a great ambition, but because a lot of people wanted him to--a lot, but not nearly enough. The media never recognized him as a legitimate candidate and did their best to portray him negatively to make sure the livestock didn't consider him legitimate, either. Thompson was closest to a real conservative of the currently surviving candidates. Paul was closest to a real libertarian (and look how the media treated him). They were the only two I ever considered voting for, and neither of them ever had the slightest chance of getting the media's permission to run.

No, as of this post they have not dropped out of the race, but I still refer to their candidacies in past tense because they are already history.

I knew from the beginning that I would never get a chance to vote for either of them in the general election. If you think that there's any real difference in any of the other Redemopublicrats, you are still fooling yourself. The only difference we should worry about now is which one will be the most competent at screwing us, and prepare for things to get a lot worse.

One last update: my prediction. It's going to be McCain and Clinton. Beyond that, the chicken entrails are murky and I can't say what will happen, except that it's going to be so nasty that it will make 2000 look like an April picnic in the park.

Sorry, I don't have what you're looking for

Suspiciously normal

From Florida's Local6.com:

"This killer is one of us," Daytona Beach Police Chief Mike Chitwood said. "He is our next-door neighbor. He is somebody we go to church with. It is somebody who is a respectable, decent human being on the outside. But on the inside, they are out there preying on women. He is dehumanizing women."

[...]

In fact, Chitwood asked women involved with someone with qualities likened to the serial killer to contact the police immediately. He said they may be in danger themselves.

Nice guys in Florida are now being cautioned to wear dark sunglasses and leer a lot, just to be safe.

via The Agitator

Sunday Vintage Pipe Ad (1937): Kaywoodie 7-Day Matched Set

click to enlarge

The "seven-day matched set" is, I think, the absolute pinnacle of pipe collecting. It is very difficult to create, and therefore much more expensive than simply the cost of all the pipes added together.

The briar must be carefully selected for matching grain, color and texture. As always, in the process of carving a pipe, some flaws will be found that necessitates discarding the burl and starting over again with yet another carefully-selected burl that matches all the other burls.

The "seven-day set" concept came from the idea of having a set of matching pipes, with one for each day of the week, so you could smoke one per day and be able to give it an entire week to rest before smoking it again. In reality, seven-day sets are far too rare and valuable to smoke. Unless you really want to completely destroy any collectible value, of course.

This set sold for $100 in 1937. Adjusted for inflation, that's more than $1,400 today. Of course Kaywoodie was not the only one to create seven-day sets. Other pipe makers who are known for more expensive pipes have created sets that sold for much more than that.

Shapes, from top: acorn, Liverpool, Dublin, apple, bulldog (with a saddle bit), another Dublin, and lastly a simple bent billiard. You may dispute me on the names of the top two. The first one looks more acorn-ish than apple-ish to me. Number two looks to me like it has a round shank, which would make it a Liverpool instead of a Canadian.

Yes, I did make chili today

It was devoured by the entire family.

There were no leftovers. Which is too bad, because chili is always better the second day.

A reminder...

From Whose Paranoid.


Today is Confederate Hero's Day.

"I believe that the world never produced a body of men superior in courage, patriotism and endurance to the private soldiers of the Confederate Armies. I have repeatedly seen these soldiers submit with cheerfulness to privations and hardships which would appear to be almost incredible; and the wild cheers of our brave men (which was so different from the studied huzzahs of the Yankees) when their lines sent back opposing hosts of Federal troops, staggering, reeling and flying, have often thrilled every fiber of my heart. I have seen with my own eyes ragged, barefooted and hungry Confederate soldiers perform deed which if performed in days of yore by mailed warriors in glittering armor, would have inspired the harp of the minstrel and the pen of the poet."

--Lt. Gen. Jubal Anderson Early

Read more at Whose Paranoid.

Nobody puts ketchup on hot dogs

Borrowed this DVD from my dad a couple of weeks ago, and this morning while my wife and the kids went and did some running around, I got a chance to watch it without anyone around to bug me.

And I finally had an excuse to use a program that came bundled on this machine: InterVideo WinDVD. It has a very handy screen capture function.

I noticed one serious continuity error. The dog Meathead is obviously a male during all but one scene, in which "he" is obviously a female. I mean, it's like someone made the switch as a joke or something. I know they often use multiple animals that look mostly the same, but this one was so different it was just weird.

Also every time something gets shot, the surface sprays back toward the shooter like a little explosive charge went off where the bullet allegedly hit. And the remark about the "300 grain cartridge" was painfully incorrect. But it's still one of my favorite movies.

And speaking of hoaxes...

German newspaper says hoaxed by pro-smoking crusader:

A Hamburg newspaper that reported last week on a computer company manager who said he fired three non-smokers because they had threatened disruptions after asking for a smoke-free environment said on Monday the story was a hoax.

Stephanie Lamprecht, a journalist at the Hamburger Morgenpost, said Thomas Joschko first told her he had fired the three from his 10-person staff because they were causing a disruption with their non-smoking but later admitted it was a hoax.

via Museum of Hoaxes

Update on the "married twins" story

Which I previously mentioned with What are the odds? I quoted the entire article because stories like this have a habit of disappearing and I didn't want to lose any of it.

Now it appears to have been fiction. Perhaps an urban legend, or perhaps a deliberate hoax to to create support for a British Lord's agenda. From Cabinet of Wonders:

The Guardian article seems largely based on the digging done by Heresy Corner who have been looking into this and tracking the story. They were initially sceptical, due to the lack complete lack of hard facts and Lord Alton's gullibility. Further monitoring of the story left them even more disillusioned with the story but intrigued by the "mythic quality" of the story (as seen in the story of Siegmund and Sieglinde and if you check the GSA Wikipedia page the bulk of it is examples of this theme in popular culture). They then watched how the various tabloids managed to flesh out the very few facts in the case into a full-fledged story with plenty of believable "details" none of which have any basis in fact (or reality). So, in the end this may be the importance of this story: seeing an urban myth condense out of word-of-mouth and hearsay, bulked up with plausible sounding background until like some abomination stitched together by Doctor Moreau it staggers out blinking into the world where it takes on a life of it's own raising it's ugly head from time-to-time when this issue crops up in idle conversation (as well as appearing in pieces written by idle journos who don't do any digging).

Responses to the Dayton Daily News editorial

This being the anti-gun editorial I blogged about last week.

Larry S. Moore says:

Re "Gun control must be packaged well," Jan. 12: The Dayton Daily News played loose and liberal with the selective quotes taken from an article on the Buckeye Firearms Web site by Jeff Riley. In fact, by selecting and editing the right combination of quotes, the DDN was able to take a pro-gun piece and make it appear very anti-gun.

From Jeff Riley:

The basic premise in the Jan. 12 editorial "Gun control needs to be packaged well" is wrong. The problem with the anti-gun side isn't packaging; the problem is the product. You can put lipstick and a dress on a pig and, at the end of the day, you still have, well, just a pig.

Gun control is a political loser, and those opposed to individual rights know it is a losing battle if framed that way. Using horrific events like the Virginia Tech massacre to promote that agenda is morally repugnant. It truly is "dancing in the blood of innocents."

Both Moore and Riley are members of the Buckeye Firearms Association. And if you don't have BFA on your blogroll, add it now. They really stay on top of things when it comes to RKBA.

via The War On Guns

Saturday Vintage Gun Ad (1960s): Ithaca X-15 Rifle

click to enlarge

One of the things I enjoy most about collection these old ads is that I learn things that I never would have thought to ask about. It used to be that if someone said Ithaca, I thought: shotguns. But as this ad shows, they used to make some rifles as well.

Friday night ramdom 10

I'm in the mood for something deep and spacey tonight, so I restricted my playlist to the folder I've named "New Age, Ambient, Meditative." Next up:

1. Wavestar -- Moonwind
2. Cybertribe -- Mystic Peaks
3. Andreas Vollenweider -- Water Moon
4. Shadowfax -- Shadowdance
5. Eagle Dance Song (Hmmm...this one didn't tag right. I didn't get the artist. But it's "native American" flute music).
6. Prefade Listening -- Jazzy Jim
7. Enigma -- Principles of Lust
8. deep-dive-corp. -- Bassic
9. Janis Mattox -- Song from the Center of the Earth
10. Trio Mediaeval -- Stella Maris

National Delurking Week 2008

UPDATE: Thanks to all who said hello, and thanks for making this blog on of your more-or-less-regular hangouts. I'll unstick this post now.

--

I haven't been able to discover the origin of this, and the dates seem to be somewhat in dispute, but this is either the first or last day of Delurking Week. As far as I can tell, in the past two years this has fallen on the second full week of January, which means it would begin today. Some blogs were celebrating it last week, which was only the first full week.

Anyway, this post is an invitation for all those who read this blog regularly (or semi-regularly) but who never comment to leave a comment. No topic necessary, just a simple how-do-you-do will suffice.

This post will remain sticky all week. Scroll down for new posts.

Another search hit that bears mentioning

The search was: "walther p-22 for concealed carry."

I suppose you could. It's small, light, thin, and should be very easy to conceal. But it's a .22.

The only reason I would carry a .22 for self defense is if all my other guns were stolen and I was on my way to the gun store to buy a new .357 magnum.

Also, I have a question. Is there a good reason to remove a magazine disconnect? Because I got a search hit for that too, regarding the Ruger SR9. This seems to me to be something that shouldn't be done, but maybe I'm wrong.

"Nuts"

First, politicians and bureaucrats both believe you can tell average voters anything you please and they’ll forget it before you come back up for reelection.

Second, gun owners are not “average voters.” Gun owners have memories like an elephant’s and carry great big chips on their shoulders from the other “fibs” you’ve told them in the past.

Third, and maybe most importantly, you can say you are whatever you want, but what you do will eventually show you for what you really are.

This wasn’t a sellout by the Bush administration.

The Bush administration is already history.

So says Jim Shepherd, and I agree with him. Read the whole thing today, because the articles aren't archived.

As cold as a witch's thorax

That's what a school friend of mine used to say many years ago. It wasn't so bad as long as I was out of the wind, but man, some of those streets were like wind tunnels. Until about 9:00 this morning I was down-right uncomfortable.

So I'm not going to stay up reading blogs today, and forget about me trying to post something worth-while. I'm going to bed and read for a while, or possibly watch a movie.

Last night I noticed a book on the shelves that I hadn't read in a long time. It was Raymond Chandler: Four Complete Philip Marlowe Novels. The first time I read this book, I read only the first three novels. I was reluctant to read the last one, because I knew that once I read it, it wouldn't be new to me anymore. After several more months passed, I finally read it. This will now be my third trip through this book.

I'm going to have to hunt down more stuff by Chandler, and probably branch off into some other writers of the "hard-boiled detective fiction" genre like Dashiell Hammett. Oh yeah, this is also why I recently added Hardboiled Cthulhu to my Amazon wish list. I like the wish list idea. It makes it easy for me to remember what I want to buy. I know this collection will not be up to the same quality as Chandler, but it should be fun.

Chandler was a master of the descriptive phrase. Maybe I'll post some Chandlerisms now and then just for fun.

Hear the wanderlust calls of the whispering hills...

I get CDs from yourmusic.com. I have a pretty big queue. Every now and then I'll add another CD or two to it, but mostly I forget about it so every time my monthly disc comes it's always a surprise as to what it is, because I don't remember everything I've added or what the order is.

Today brought The Sons of the Pioneers: The Ultimate Collection. I had a cassette called The Best of the Sons of the Pioneers when I was a kid, and kept it for many years until I finally wore it out. Ultimate is a pretty good collection. It has most of my favorites of theirs, but it is not really "ultimate."

There's no "Everlasting Hills of Oklahoma." How it could be "ultimate" and be missing that song?

Essential (in my opinion) songs that it does include are "Tumbling Tumbleweeds," "Cool Water," "Riders in the Sky" and "Chant of the Wanderer." It has twenty-one songs in all.

Oh well. I'll be cranking this one up on the drive home from work tomorrow.

Everyone else is quoting it...

(Religious mini-rant ahead. You were warned).

This just makes my skin crawl:

"[Some of my opponents] do not want to change the Constitution, but I believe it's a lot easier to change the constitution than it would be to change the word of the living God, and that's what we need to do is to amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards rather than try to change God's standards," Huckabee said, referring to the need for a constitutional human life amendment and an amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman.

In case anyone was wondering, I am against any amendment that would prohibit gay marriage. I am firmly convinced that the Constitution should never be used to restrict any freedoms, and that's what this amendment would do. I was once asked about this, and my answer was, "I don't see any way that gays getting married would infringe on any of my fundamental rights, so I don't care." Anyone who disagrees, please feel free to convince me that I'm wrong.

Huckabee has fallen into the same trap that many have. It doesn't matter that he calls himself a Christian. It doesn't matter that he's referred to as a "pastor" (he isn't)*. He has fallen into the trap of seeing the government as savior, and it isn't. There's only one Savior, and the government has nothing to do with Him.

As a Christian, it is not my job, nor is it Huckabee's job--even if he were President (God forbid), to brute-force "morality" by the bludgeon of legislation. It is only my job to live by example and to try and "let the glory of Jesus be seen in me." I fail at this, a lot. But then of course I'm not perfect.

I'm sure I've failed to adequately state my position with perfect clarity, so please feel free to misconstrue something I've said. I know someone out there will.

I've said it before: The more I hear about Huckabee, the more I dislike him.

*"Pastor" means "shepherd." The church has only one Shepherd: Jesus Christ. Any human who uses that term to refer to him- or herself is misusing the term.

P.S. Anyone who reads this and uses comments to make bigoted anti-Christian slurs: your comments will be deleted. It's my blog and I'm not in the mood.

The Waco Rules

More from Mike Vanderboegh at The War On Guns. Who Shall Guard the Guards?

What you should be certain of is this: We are now going back, if we ever left it, to the time of Waco Rules. You remember what they are, surely? "We are the avenging angels of the ATF, representing the god-on-earth Imperial Federal Government. If you resist us, we will crush you. If you shoot back at us, we and our big brothers of the FBI will kill you -- we will burn down your house, your church, your family and all you hold dear, AND WE WILL NOT BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE." Those my friends, are Waco Rules. They can do anything you can't stop them from doing.

Read about another case of the ATF persecuting an innocent man because his rifle malfunctioned.

Food stuff

Last Saturday I smoked a turkey. This was only my second time. I am one of those purists who believes that "sauce" is just something you use to cover poorly-smoked meat. I put nothing on the turkey. I told some people at work about this. They kept asking me, "But wasn't it dry?" Nope. "You didn't baste it at all?" Nope. "And it wasn't dry?" Nope.

I gave it a pure diet of mesquite wood, holding the temperature steady between 230-250 for five hours. It was succulent.

The guy who I whipped up some venison jerky for really liked it, so he gave me a deer ham to make some traditional jerky with. So I sliced it up and I've got it marinating right now. I haven't made "real" jerky like this in a long time, but I think it will be okay. As a result of a stroke, this man has lost most of his sense of taste (so I was told--I didn't know a stroke could affect your taste). So he requested habanero, and "make it as hot as possible." I don't know if I got it "as hot as possible," but it's going to be pretty hot. I was mixing up some new sauce and got a little more "spike" in the sauce that I usually do. I sampled a little straight and it made my scalp sweat, so it's just about right.

As payment, he's going to give me some venison to keep for myself instead of paying me money. That was actually my suggestion.

Since the weather is supposed to turn a little colder and nastier than usual this coming weekend, I plan on Saturday being homemade chili day! I haven't made chili in a while, and I'm really looking forward to it.

Thompson beats Paul to the punch...

In regards to the infamous amicus brief.

Actually he beat everyone. The Paul campaign should have been all over this, but no. Good for Fred Thompson.

News here.

via Fred File and Free Constitution

I'm not making these up, honest...

Got a search hit for "pit bulls AND poetry AND Texas."

Texan pit bull poetry. I never would have thought of that.

The case of Ezra Levant

I spent some time this weekend reading all the entries at Ezra Levant's eponymous blog.

In February of 2006, the Western Standard magazine, of which I was publisher, reprinted the Danish cartoons of Mohammed. We were immediately hit with two "human rights complaints". These are a strange species of lawsuit, inimicable to Western liberal traditions of rule of law and freedom of speech. A real court would have thrown these complaints out as baseless, but Alberta's human rights commission has proceeded. Friday was the day of my interrogation. I videotaped it.

I recommend Levant's site. His battle for freedom of expression is an example for us all.

It is obvious that Alberta's "human rights commission" is another of those governmental agencies that makes up the rules as it goes along.

His site is also video-heavy, and since I'm on dial-up I haven't been able to view the videos. But from what I've read, it looks like he is amassing a damning body of evidence about this "commission" whose behavior (it seems to me) is in violation of the Canadian constitution. I'm surprised he's been allowed to videotape the proceedings.

Check it out.

German "grave wax"

Bodies buried in German graveyards are not rotting properly:

A high moisture content in the subsoil combined with low temperatures and a lack of oxygen are the main culprits. These conditions transform the soft tissue of many bodies not into humus, but rather "a gray-white, paste-like, soft mass," says soil expert Rainer Horn from the Christian Albrecht University in Kiel, Germany.

As time passes, the remains of the departed coagulate to form "a hard, durable substance." When knocked with a spade, the wax-like bodies sound hollow.

This "grave wax" buildup has disturbed the natural cycle of decay -- and created a horror scenario for burial authorities. When bodies don't decompose, their graves can't be reused -- a common practice in Germany. Contrary to many other countries, where final resting places are traditionally maintained in perpetuity, Germany recycles cemetery plots after a period of 15 to 25 years. Experience has shown that the earthly remains of the deceased rot away almost entirely in this amount of time, but only under favorable soil conditions.

Many German cemeteries today have far from ideal conditions. To make matters worse, the problem appears to be a homemade one: "Huge blunders committed over the past few decades" are to blame, says engineer Heinrich Kettler, who specializes in reconditioning soils that have become unsuitable for decomposition.

The bathtub test

(My sister emailed me this).

During a visit to the mental asylum, a visitor asked the Director how do you determine whether or not a patient should be institutionalized.

"Well," said the Director, "we fill up a bathtub, then we offer a teaspoon, a teacup and a bucket to the patient and ask him or her to empty the bathtub."

"Oh, I understand," said the visitor. "A normal person would use the bucket because it's bigger than the spoon or the teacup."

"No." said the Director, "A normal person would pull the plug. Do you want a bed near the window?"

One possible explanation...

At TheSpoof.com. Global Warming Blamed for Huckabee Surge:

Dr. Ray Cathode, professor of biology and expert on vote-greenhousetheria at USC explains: "When one drives around in an SUV and uses gasoline, they unwittingly ingest an agent we've called 'idiocene', a mix between coal and carbon dioxide that forces one to support fake sentimentality and big government. The effects of which go unnoticed by anyone until primary season."

Precautions have been put in place in Michigan and South Carolina. At each voting station, there will be volunteers stationed to say this statement to each and every voter: "Mike comes from a place called Hope, Arkansas. He hopes that you will give them another chance." If the intending voter laughs, they are immediately escorted to the hospital.

What are the odds?

Totally strange. British twins separated at birth married without knowing of kinship.

London - A pair of twins in Britain who were separated at birth and adopted by different families married each other without realizing they were brother and sister and have now had their union annulled by a court, it was revealed Friday. The extraordinary case, brought to public attention by David Alton, a liberal member of Britain's House of Lords, prompted calls Friday for legislation enshrining a child's right to know who her or his biological parents are.

The twins, whose marriage was recently annulled by a High Court judge because "it never validly existed," had felt an "inevitable attraction" to each other, Lord Alton said Friday.

Details of the identities of the twins involved have been kept secret, but Lord Alton said the pair did not realize they were related until after their marriage.

"They were never told that they were twins," Alton told the House of Lords. "They met later in life and felt an inevitable attraction, and the judge had to deal with the consequences of the marriage that they entered into and all the issues of their separation."

According to Alton, the case raises the wider issue of the importance of strengthening the rights of children to know the identities of their biological parents.

"If you start trying to conceal someone's identity, sooner or later the truth will out," he said.

"The right for children to know the identity of their parents is a human right," said Alton.

Pam Hodgkins, of the charity Adults Affected by Adoption, said there had been previous cases of separated siblings being attracted to each other.

"We have a resistance, a very strong incest taboo where we are aware that someone is a biological relative," she said. "But when we are unaware of that relationship, we are naturally drawn to people who are quite similar to ourselves."

An utterly sickening, disgusting editorial

Thanks to the Dayton Daily News. Gun control must be packaged well:

At a minimum, it seems these conditions must be in place:

• Pitiful as it is to say, horrifically violent events that can be directly attributed to lax gun laws can force change. Those opportunities have to be used — to protect other innocent people.

• Proposed reforms can't be called "gun control" — even though that plainly is what they are. Better to spin them as "law enforcement."

• It helps when pro-gun advocates say dumb things that make even the moderates roll their eyes, such as when geriatric rocker Ted Nugent told CNN: "Spineless gun control advocates are squawking like chickens with their tiny-brained heads chopped off, making political hay over this most recent, devastating Virginia Tech massacre, when, in fact, it is their own forced gun-free zone policy that enabled the unchallenged methodical murder of 32 people."

• Some gun-safety advocates need to oppose the proposed reforms, such as in this case when a few groups said the legislation had been "hijacked" by the gun lobby. In fact, the bill does throw some crumbs to the NRA — such as requiring a process be established that allows convicts and mentally disabled people to at least argue that they should have their gun rights restored.

A member of Buckeye Firearms Association, an Ohio-based gun rights group, has caught on to this strategy. He recently posted on the group's Web site:

What "anti-gun groups, legislators and prosecutors can't accomplish by passing more anti-gun laws (realizing it's virtual political suicide), they are quietly pursuing ... through the back door by increasing the pool of prohibited persons. After all, who could be against keeping guns away from criminals?"

Exactly.

The only thing that surprises me about this is that they are so open about it.

I have never believed that gun-grabbers are simply trying to reduce crime, and are mistaken or misled in their methods. I have always believed it to be about domination and oppression, and nothing else. If you can read this article and still believe that the gun banners are simply good-hearted but mistaken, check with your doctor. Your brain isn't getting enough oxygen.

UPDATE: David Codrea writes an open letter.

UPDATE 2: And gets a typical cover-my-*ss non-answer.

Bush Department of Justice files amicus against the Constitution

News at Of Arms and the Law. This quote is especially egregious, and telling.

When, as here, a law directly limits the private possession of “Arms” in a way that has no grounding in Framing-era practice, the Second Amendment requires that the law be subject to heightened scrutiny that considers (a) the practical impact of the challenged restrictions on the plaintiff’s ability to possess firearms for lawful purposes (which depends in turn on the nature and functional adequacy of available alternatives), and (b) the strength of the government’s interest in enforcement of the relevant restriction.

That's right. The law in question must consider the strength of the government's interest in disarming its citizenry. Since when has an over-reaching government not had an interest in disarming its citizens?

Related: The War On Guns has an alert for Ron Paul supporters. I already sent my email.

Saturday Vintage Gun Ad (probably 1960s): Marlin Bolt-Action .22

Probably from the 60s, but I'm not certain. You could take one home for a down payment of $4.00.

What do these five cryptids have in common?

1. Arkansas' White River Monster.
2. Champ (the lake monster of New England's Lake Champlain).
3. Bigfoot.
4. Migoi (a Yeti-like creature of Bhutan).
5. The Loch Ness Monster.

If you said "they're all creatures for which no evidence exists" you're only half right.

The other half of the answer is: they all get government protection.

Ouch

I had a very easy route today, one I hadn't done in a while, near NW Military and Wurzbach Pkwy.

So I'm flying along at maximum walking speed, when I failed to notice a fissure in the sidewalk. I caught my right foot on a 3-inch tall slab of broken sidewalk and went down.

It actually felt like someone first hit my foot with a bat, and then like the earth itself became vertical and slammed into me. I hit so hard it knocked my hat off. Of course I dropped everything, but those handhelds are built tough so it wasn't damaged.

The brunt of it went into my right knee, but I also have bruises and aches in my right hand, right elbow, and right shoulder. My knee is swollen a little, my wrist and shoulder are stiff. I'm gonna be hurting tomorrow.

In my previous job, which was much worse*, I had to actually try and train newbies to do what I did. Since I believe in being brutally honest, I often told them something like this:

Be very careful. Be so careful you think you're becoming paranoid. It won't matter. Being careful to the point of paranoia can delay you getting hurt, but eventually, you are going to get hurt. All you can do is put it off as long as possible and stay alert so that maybe you can minimize it when it happens. But there's no "if." There is only "when."

Today I was in a nice neighborhood, where the people said "good morning" instead of just scowling at you. Where the streets and sidewalks were (mostly) clean, and the meters weren't buried under garbage. I relaxed and didn't notice a broken sidewalk in front of me. I momentarily forgot that there is no "if." There is only a "when."

*Previous job: I had to actually go into people's back yards. If you don't think back yards are death traps, try going into about 400 back yards in one day which you have never been into before.

The make-your-album meme

Jed of Freedom Sight tagged me for this one, which I must admit kind of surprised me, like not being chosen last for touch football during junior high P.E.

To be honest, this one is my second attempt, because I neglected to save the links for the sources of the first one. But I'll post it below too, what the hey. This is actually kind of fun. So the official one is...


The name of the group is from the Battle of Dalrigh. The album title is from this quote by Og Mandino. The original photo is here.

I'm not a photoshopper wiz, but what I did was...First, the photo was already cropped roughly at the right ratio for an album cover, so I didn't crop it. Oh yeah, I use GIMP. I tweaked up a GFlare superimposed on the light that was already in the photo, then I motion blurred the whole thing just a little because I thought it looked better that way. The "cool metal" extension created the 3-D appearing band name and a basic text circle made the album name.

I never tag anyone, but if you want to play, here are the rules.

Go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
- The first article title on the page is the name of your band.
Click http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
- The last four words of the very last quote is the title of your album.
Visit http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/
- The third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover. Use your graphics program of choice to throw them together, and post the result.

So like I said, here is my first attempt which I failed to save the links for. Also I didn't think to crop it correctly before I started on it.


If you decide to play along, leave a comment and I'll add your link to this post.

UPDATE: Fighting for Liberty has one.

We all stood still

A new theory to compete with the dark energy theory: time is slowing down and will eventually stop.

Scientists previously have measured the light from distant exploding stars to show that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. They assumed that these supernovae are spreading apart faster as the universe ages. Physicists also assumed that a kind of anti-gravitational force must be driving the galaxies apart, and started to call this unidentified force "dark energy".

However, to this day no one actually knows what dark energy is, or where it comes from. Professor Jose Senovilla, and his colleagues at the University of the Basque Country in Bilbao, Spain, have proposed a mind-bending alternative. They propose that there is no such thing as dark energy at all, and we’re looking at things backwards. Senovilla proposes that we have been fooled into thinking the expansion of the universe is accelerating, when in reality, time itself is slowing down. At an everyday level, the change would not be perceptible. However, it would be obvious from cosmic scale measurements tracking the course of the universe over billions of years. The change would be infinitesimally slow from a human perspective, but in terms of the vast perspective of cosmology, the study of ancient light from suns that shone billions of years ago, it could easily be measured.

The team's proposal, which will be published in the journal Physical Review D, dismisses dark energy as fiction. Instead, Prof Senovilla says, the appearance of acceleration is caused by time itself gradually slowing down, like a clock with a run-down battery.

“We do not say that the expansion of the universe itself is an illusion," he explains. "What we say it may be an illusion is the acceleration of this expansion - that is, the possibility that the expansion is, and has been, increasing its rate."

If time gradually slows "but we naively kept using our equations to derive the changes of the expansion with respect of 'a standard flow of time', then the simple models that we have constructed in our paper show that an "effective accelerated rate of the expansion" takes place."

As fascinating as all this is, I can't help bu think that some researchers would be better off focusing on things that can actually make a difference, instead of stuff like this that ultimately is entirely irrelevant.

911 Nightmare

Fortunately, no one was hurt. Unfortunately, that includes the would-be burglars.

I Wish The Police Had Caught The Man Who Came to My House Today at Gun Owners Against Violence:

I want to know whether it was 5 minutes or 6 minutes or 3 minutes that passed between the moment when I was asking the operator to please send the squad car back because the guy was just now running along the side of the house ... and the length of time that this operator was taking to explain to me that she was not the dispatcher and how they functioned there and that it was like email (?!) ... and the amount of time, following that, when she was telling me that she had still not yet contacted the dispatcher ... and the passage of time that was allowing my expletive-enunciating doorbell-ringing certainly-running possible-would-be-burglar to what? Calmly choose a direction in which to amble and mingle with the off-to-work crowd? Nod amiably to a passerby while leisurely getting into his car? Take a bus? Choose another house?

Six things about the 2nd Amendment

An analysis by JPFO: Six Things About the 2nd Amendment.

This is exactly like one of my fantasies

At xkcd.

How to lose your rights in one easy step

When they took the guns away from unlicensed orchids sellers, I said nothing because I do not sell orchids.

When they took the guns away from sellers of untagged oysters, I said nothing because I do not sell oysters.

When they took the guns away from those who shipped lobsters and lobster tails in opaque plastic bags instead of paper bags, I said nothing because I do not ship lobsters.

When they took the guns away from those who teach bears to wrestle, I said nothing because I don't teach bears anything.

When they took the guns away from spammers, I said nothing because I do not spam.

This egregious expansion of what constitutes a "felony" is just another assault on the fundamental right to keep and bear arms.

Thanks to Buckeye Firearms Association, who quotes Glenn Reynolds in the linked article:

"If you haven't been convicted of some felony or other, it's probably because no prosecutor has tried to put you away, not because you haven't committed one, whether you realized it at the time or not."

And if anyone wanders across this post who doesn't care because you think that guns should be taken away anyway, remember this: All of the above "felonies" will also result in your being legally prohibited from voting for the rest of your life.

Drawing the line

Ted Bronson draws the line with I am no longer a child:

Did things go wrong when someone decided that little Johnny (who still can’t read) deserved a trophy just like the MVP of his little league team? Doesn’t that kind of negate the purpose of trophies if EVERYONE gets them?

Did things change when the Fed decided it knew best how to protect us and make seatbelts mandatory for everyone? I used to ride on the shelf in the back of our Chrysler New Yorker. The car would drive up a forty-five degree hill just by putting it in gear and never touching the gas. She was a tank, as evidenced by the beating she took at the hands of my older brother when he inherited it. Even after her final undignified crash, seatbelts were optional…no one in the Boat got hurt even though she was never the same afterwards.

At what point did the politically correct crowd decide to nanny us?

An excellent statement from a new blog that's going right into my blogroll.

via Samizdata

The venison jerky experiment

Someone gave me a pound of chili-ground venison to try and make jerky with.

Well, I don't think it will turn out as good as the beef stuff. Maybe if it had been a finer grind it would work, but it was pretty tough squeezing it through the jerky shooter. Also I'm afraid it might have spent too long in his freezer and got a little burned.

At least the raw meat smelled right after I finished mixing in the ingredients.

I put it on the dehydrator about 20 minutes ago. I'll know before the night is over.

UPDATE: It's good! Just hard to work with.

The Bill that no one will talk about

From the Hartford Advocate:

Full disclosure: according to a staff member from the office of Hartford’s own Congressman John Larson, this article is “not a good story.” It wasn’t worth our time to write it, nor the Congressman’s time to discuss it, and probably not worth your time to read it either. Nothing to see here, people. Move along. Worthwhile or not, the story’s about a bill that recently passed the House of Representatives and looks on track to pass the Senate and be signed into law. Over 98 percent of Congressmen, including all five from Connecticut, voted in favor of it (the final count was 404 to 6), and when a bill passes with such a high majority it’s usually easy to find among that 98 percent a few Congressmen willing to go on the record to say “I voted for this incredibly important bill because blah blah blah.”

Not this time. No one who voted for the bill wants to talk about it. And when we called Larson’s D.C. office hoping to chat, staff member Emily Barocas said: “I used to be a journalist — I was on NPR — so I know where you’re coming from. I know what it’s like to want to get that big scoop, but this isn’t it … I know a good story from a bad story. This isn’t a good story.”

[...]

What is this Bill of Mystery, that Congresspeople will vote for yet not discuss? It’s called the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act, also known as HR 1955, and one of the first things it says is that “Congress finds … The Internet has aided in facilitating violent radicalization, ideologically based violence, and the homegrown terrorism process in the United States by providing access to ... terrorist-related propaganda to United States citizens.”

Four hundred and four Congressthugs voted for it, and yet this newspaper can't get any of them to say why they voted for it. The only answer they can get is, trust us, it's not really that important anyway.

“Violent radicalization,” one of the threats the bill seeks to curb, is defined there as “the process of adopting or promoting an extremist belief system for the purpose of facilitating ideologically-based violence to advance political, religious or social change.”

Extremist views such these, for example:

Gun Control is a conspiracy to enslave us starting with the removal of our ability to either defend ourselves or forcefully change our government.

All judicial authority resides with the people. The jury, not the Judge, directs trials and can nullify laws they do not approve of.

U.S. sovereignty is being surrendered to the U.N., World Court, and World Bank, with the U.S. becoming an economic region of this New World Order.

And as Kucinich said in the article, acts of violence are already illegal. This is nothing but the criminalization of thought.

And if this is mere paranoia, then why won't those who voted for it explain why and how it is not criminalization of thought, instead of just saying, trust us, it's really no big deal.

Besides, we're way past slippery slope time. Just ask this Constitutionalist.

The sheriff said the decision to use SWAT team force was justified because the father was a "self-proclaimed constitutionalist" and had made threats and "comments" over the years.

UPDATE: Here's another source for that last linked story, via Say Uncle.

via Bill of Right Defense Committee and The War On Guns

Sleep shifts

Interesting article in the NYT (nothing political, of course):

More surprising still, Ekirch reports that for many centuries, and perhaps back to Homer, Western society slept in two shifts. People went to sleep, got up in the middle of the night for an hour or so, and then went to sleep again. Thus night — divided into a “first sleep” and “second sleep” — also included a curious intermission. “There was an extraordinary level of activity,” Ekirch told me. People got up and tended to their animals or did housekeeping. Others had sex or just lay in bed thinking, smoking a pipe, or gossiping with bedfellows. Benjamin Franklin took “cold-air baths,” reading naked in a chair.

Our conception of sleep as an unbroken block is so innate that it can seem inconceivable that people only two centuries ago should have experienced it so differently. Yet in an experiment at the National Institutes of Health a decade ago, men kept on a schedule of 10 hours of light and 14 hours of darkness — mimicking the duration of day and night during winter — fell into the same, segmented pattern. They began sleeping in two distinct, roughly four-hour stretches, with one to three hours of somnolence — just calmly lying there — in between. Some sleep disorders, namely waking up in the middle of the night and not being able to fall asleep again, “may simply be this traditional pattern, this normal pattern, reasserting itself,” Ekirch told me. “It’s the seamless sleep that we aspire to that’s the anomaly, the creation of the modern world.”

This does not surprise me at all. I spend nights like this quite often, but it is problematic because of the time compression caused by keeping to the schedules of the outside world.

By the way, I would caution against smoking a pipe while reading naked in a chair. Have one tiny red-hot tobacco leaf fall into your lap and you'll know why this is a bad idea.

via Improbable Research

In the black

Privacy International has a handy color-coded world map of leading surveillance societies in 2007. Also at the link are details on how they calculated the rankings.

via Samizdata

Cthulhu Cultist Hunting Permit

From Dagon Industries, in keeping with my sort-of-resolution of keeping the "serious" posts for weekdays unless it's something of absolute paramount importance.

No limit!

Saturday Vintage Gun Ad (1958): Lyman Ammunition Maker Kit

click to enlarge

Roll your own for $24.95.

"Bell weather"

Apparently, Time (in partnership with CNN) are now hiring mature-looking junior high-schoolers to blog on the presidential campaign.

If the New Hampshire Democratic Party’s 100 Club dinner is any bell weather – Barack Obama will handily win here. When Obama, the dinner’s last speaker, took the stage the crowd surged forward chanting “O-bam-a” and “Fired Up, Ready to Go!” So many people pressed toward the stage that an announcer asked people to “please take their seats for safety concerns.”

As one commenter said, "...aren't words supposed to be your profession?"

Very big sigh.

"Wether" is the correct term for a male castrated goat. Like most other male animals that have been neutered, it becomes more tame and easier to handle, since it's no longer interested in girl goats and mainly just wants to eat and sleep. Rattle the feed bucket, and it comes running, since it can't get distracted by the girls.

If you put a bell on the wether's neck, it wil jingle jangle loudly when the wether runs for the food. Eventually all the other goats, who may still be making the sign of the four-legged wildebeast somewhere out there in the pasture, will learn that when they hear that loud bell jingling, it's food time.

You train your tame wether to follow you. All the other goats are tricked into following the sound of the bell.

Bellwether.

via Shooting the Messenger

Total Messiah Mode Priestesses

I got nothing today. Just too worn out and tired to try, I guess. And I have to work tomorrow (Saturday). Bummer.

So here's a Lovecraftian Name Generator. On this page load, Oguggothu came up, which is actually a pretty good one. Sounds like it could be a forgotten Dreamworld god or something.

Also on the same site is this amusing Anime Title Generator. Also useful for coming up with eye-catching and completely nonsensical blog post titles.

Odd...

Traffic at the old Eponym blog has really tanked in the last few days. It's dropping down to even less than this one. I don't know what's going on. Not that it really matters to me, it's just something that seems strange and I can't figure out the reason why.

Fish smokes a pipe

More art by Phillip Blackman, much of it macabre and some of it even Cthulhuesque.

via Under Vhoorl's Shadow

Ssshhh...

Deafening silence.
I can hear the laptop's fan.
Kids are at grandpa's.

Journalists doing research

Here's an interesting search hit, apparently from some media company. I hope they found what they were looking for.

9x18 Makarov is nothing "American." It's just 9x18 Makarov.

The "9" is roughly the diameter of the bullet in millimeters. The "18" is the length of cartridge case in millimeters. It is intermediate in power between the .380 ACP (also known as 9x17) and the 9mm Parabellum (also known as 9x19).

Sometimes I wish they would just send an email and ask. I would be happy to supply any information I could.

Texas' first concealed handgun self defense of 2008

I can't find any cite for this today, but I heard it on the news this morning, thanks to the local public radio station.

Texas has already recorded its first self-defensive handgun use of 2008. A case of road rage, apparently. When the vehicles stopped, one man attacked the other man with a baseball bat. The man being attacked shot and killed the bat-guy.

The man with the gun has a CHL, if that makes a big difference to you.

Final word: "Police determined it was self defense. No charges will be filed."

UPDATE: JR found the link.

In case you're unaware of all the fun going on...

Yuri has a summary and a bunch of links to bloggers providing information on the bigots and whacknuts holding positions at the anti-self-defense organization known as CeaseFire PA.

Check it out at Beam me up Scotty!

Top 10 Economic Myths

I'm no economist, for sure, but I did find this interesting. The Business & Media Institute has compiled their list of The Media’s Top 10 Economic Myths of 2007.

Here's a snippet on housing foreclosures:

The foreclosure figures most stories used came from RealtyTrac, a source that counts each filing in the foreclosure process. One house has to go through several steps in the process, so counting each one as a separate foreclosure is inaccurate. Rick Sharga, the organization’s president, said it is misleading to call the number total foreclosures – which is what the media kept doing.

I go into many "developing areas" as part of my job, and so far I haven't seen any indication that the house-builders are slowing down anywhere around here.

via The Liberty Papers

It's a dirty job, but I guess somebody's gotta do it...

Study Reveals Why Monkeys Shout During Sex:

To investigate the purpose behind these calls, scientists at the German Primate Center in Göttingen focused on Barbary macaques for two years in a nature reserve in Gibraltar.

The researchers found that females yelled during 86 percent of all sexual encounters. When females shouted, males ejaculated 59 percent of the time. However, when females did not holler, males ejaculated less than 2 percent of the time.

To see if yelling resulted from how vigorous the sex was, the scientists counted the number of pelvic thrusts males gave and timed when they happened. They found when shouting occurred, thrusting increased. In other words, hollering led to more vigorous sex.

Counting monkey pelvic thrusts is admittedly "quite weird, but it's science," researcher Dana Pfefferle, a behavioral scientist and primatologist at the German Primate Center, told LiveScience. "You get used to it."

I suppose the next step will be to try and figure out when they're faking.

Yikes

I gave my wife some jerky samples to take to her work and see if anyone there wanted to actually buy some. I did actually put some on eBay today but it looks like I'll have to hold off on any further auctions because the demand locally is already more than I can handle. I have only three pounds of meat left, I guess I better get busy.

Any of you S.A. locals know of an H.E.B. located somewhere in the southeast? I tried going to that one on W.W. White north of Rigsby but that parking lot there makes my Spidey-sense go totally haywire. Although I must admit they have the most varied selection of MD 20/20 I've ever seen.

I got lucky yesterday and was working in the Great Northwest, so I stopped by the one at Culebra and 1604 to get some meat before I reported in (took an extra ice chest with me just to keep it cold). I guess I could always try the one on Nogalitos.

Letting kids play with toys

Today I broke out my antique Fort Apache playset because my son wanted to play with it. He just came walking over to me with one of the little blue men and one of the "accessories."

"Daddy," he said, "You know why this guy was the only one to survive in his village?"

"No. Why?"

"Because he had the cannon."

Lesson pretty well learned, I'd say.

Fred or Ron?

Good article at Samizdata:

Fred Thompson or Ron Paul? Like Perry and some others, I would rather see a big government Democrat elected than a big government Republican. At least that would bring back some opposition. Republicans in Congress have a much better record of reining in the Democrats' presidents than their own. And as I explain later, I think that one of these two is the only Republican candidate capable of winning the national election.

Ron Paul answering the What programs? question by naming three cabinet level departments ... Wow. Good answer. If there was no rest-of-the-world, he would possibly have my vote.

"Possibly?!" Yes. Possibly. Why? Because good intentions are not enough. Many people have the right ideas. Even if elected, he needs to maneuver his ideas through both the Washington players and the great ambivalent middle of the electorate. He needs to explain and convince massive numbers of mainstream people that what he will bring is better for them personally. How many think Ron Paul is up to that job? I don't.

If you've already made up your mind either way, don't bother. If you're still pondering, read it all.

And now...

Some humor to start the year, after that evil end-of-year post last night.

This article at TheSpoof.com really cracked me up: Parents urged to read to children - advice clarified.

"What made this crime more heinous was that the couple did not bother to read an English translation but read from the original Russian language version."

The final paragraph, especially, made me laugh out loud.

2000-year-old superglue

The Romans had it. At Discovery News:

Willer found traces of the superglue while examining a helmet unearthed in 1986 near the German town of Xanten, on what was once the bed of the Rhine.

"The helmet, which dates from the 1st century B.C., was given to the museum for restoration. I discovered the glue accidentally, while removing a tiny sample of metal from the helmet with a fine saw. The heat from the tool caused the silver laurel leaves on the helmet to peel off, leaving thread-like traces of the glue behind," Willer said.

Willer was amazed to discover that despite such a long exposure to water, time and air, the superglue did not lose its bonding properties.

Hmmm... I saved this as a note a few weeks ago, but forgot to record where I originally read it. Anyhow, I thought it was interesting.