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.