The Joplin-Independent notes that the NRA event in St. Louis this year is expected to break records. It’s certainly possible, since the current record holding event was the last time NRA was in St. Louis. It’s good to be heading back there for an election year event. Part of all the hoopla surrounding the NRA Annual Meeting is a flexing of NRA’s grassroots political power, in demonstrating to elected leaders that NRA can get 60 to 70 thousand people to drive or fly hundreds and thousands of miles to attend. Our opponents can’t even get that many people not to go to Starbucks for a day.
Year: 2012
Time for the Popcorn
The presidential race may soon be a source of entertainment worthy of a bucket of buttery popcorn.
Roseanne Barr said Thursday she’s running for the Green Party’s presidential nomination — and it’s no joke.
Some of the first live political blogging I ever did was when Jello Biafra was trying to get the nomination at the Green Party convention in 2000. That was funny.
Safe Storage as a Proxy for Making Self-Defense With a Gun Illegal
Clayton Cramer details how the Canadian authorities are currently charging an Ontario man who used a licensed pistol in self-defense. The way this works in most countries where self-defense with a firearm is still technically legal, is to charge the defender with violating the safe storage laws.
Fortunately for us here in the Untied States, Heller should put the kibosh on the worst excesses of our opponents, who have, in other countries, successfully outlawed self-defense with a firearm through strategic use of safe storage initiatives. If you used the gun for self-defense, then you couldn’t have been storing it safely, now could you?
On Staying Home
This is an excellent post, overall, on advice for those backing their favorite anti-Mitt candidate, but this is the most profound piece of advice in the post:
I hear those among you who say you’ll sit this election out.  â€If the party loses because they didn’t go conservative enough for me, it’ll teach them a lessonâ€.  That’s not only groaningly solipsistic – it’s not, after all, all about you – it’s also just not the way political parties and organizations work.  I’ve said it a few times in the past few weeks, and I’m going to keep saying it until y’all get it right; Political parties don’t “learn lessons†– they reflect the will of those who show up.  And if conservatives – and all you libertarian Ron Paul supporters – don’t show up, then the “establishment wins.
This is more true than many realize. I am most decidedly not a fan of how the GOP operates in both my county, and also the state, but the fact of the matter is you have to show up if you want to be have your voice heard. That requires, to some degree, knowing when to stick to your principles, and when to be willing to remain a part of a larger coalition. Too many make the mistake of believing that politics is about principles. It’s about no such thing. Politics is a beauty contest for ugly people. Principles provide you with goals; they tell you where you want to try to bring things in four years.
The rest of that game is all playing your cards well. But you have to be in the game if you want to have a possibility of winning. The big problem with libertarians is they make the mistake of believing politics is a philosophical debate, rather than a card game. It’s a lot more the latter than the former. You have to play the cards your dealt, and the only thing that is going to save our asses in this hand is the fact that our opponents have to play a worse one.
Anti-Gun Movement Leaders Turn Against Breast Cancer Fundraising
I’m going to join Weer’d and Thirdpower in calling out the anti-gun folks for denouncing more money for breast cancer research because a dealer is agreed to donate a portion of his sales to the Komen Foundation. It’s hard for me to imagine any product I’m so disgusted by, that I’d lambast a disease research and awareness foundation for using it to raise money. If it’s a product people want, it’s legal, and they can use that to raise funds, I don’t think most ordinary people would complain.
I’m literally aghast by how awful the leaders of the gun control movement really are, to the point I don’t really understand how they can look in the mirror each morning. They’ve become so blinded by rage against guns and gun owners, they’re completely detached from the reality that most normal people understand.
There’s nothing unusual or out of the ordinary about the firearm that is being sold to raise funds for the Komen Foundation. It is an ordinary .22 caliber target pistol. It takes a ten round magazine. It is a gun that is legal in all 50 states. It meant for sport, something the gun control movement claims to be fine with. So what’s the beef here? I think I’m pretty sure I know who the extremists are here, and it’s not Second Amendment advocates.
MAIG Mayors Paid to Represent NYC
Did you know that political interests of New York City were absolutely vital to Durham, NC voters in 2011? You didn’t? Well, the voters of Durham probably didn’t know that either.
[Mayor Bill] Bell’s year-end campaign-finance report to the county Board of Elections showed that he banked $4,000 – nearly a third of the $12,550 he raised in 2011 – from one source. …
No one from around here, as it happens: The $4,000 check came from New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. …
A Bloomberg aide, Amanda Konstam, on Tuesday said her boss gave to Bell’s campaign because the Durham mayor “is a longtime supporter†of Mayors Against Illegal Guns. …
Bloomberg is a strong proponent of gun control. He offered the donation to Bell because he “supports those who support New York,†Konstam said.
Emphasis added for those of you Durham-area folks who are wondering just why Bloomberg’s spokeswoman believes that supporting New York City is on your city’s political agenda at all.
This is not the first time that Bloomberg has bankrolled his little minion mayors who “support New York” in their states hundreds and thousands of miles away from the Big Apple. His goal is to invest in these guys and hope they run for higher office.
Some “Working At Home” Impressions
So with the new job, I work from home 3 days a week, and am in the office Thursday and Friday. This is the first job I’ve had that’s done work from home, but it’s a necessity for me because of how far away corporate HQ is for the company I work, and am part owner of. So how’s working from home working out? I’m a fan. Here are some impressions:
- I recover a lot of time not having to commute. With my old job it was an hour and twenty minutes a day lost to the commute, on a good day. I can wake up at 8:30 and be downstairs at my workstation sooner than I would normally be at work. It feels like a lot of recovered time.
- After a few days you realize there’s no reason to do your typical day 9-6 day of eight hours straight with an hour lunch break. I’m not much of a 9-5 person anyway, and I’m often most productive at night. When you work from home, you can run errands during the day that at night would take longer, and do the night owl thing with your work.
- I do get a little feeling of being cooped up in my office for as long as I’m down there. It’s different than being at work, because you don’t change venues for several days straight. I used to work evenings from home previously, but at least you changed offices in the evening.
- Fast, speedy internet is a must. For me, I don’t really notice much of a difference here or there, since FiOS is really nice.
- Forget about the stereotype of working in your underwear or pajamas. I’ve found it’s best psychologically to follow a normal morning routine, and head downstairs to the office. Otherwise it feels like the weekend, and it’s hard to get started with the day.
So what am I doing? Experimenting with high-availibility Linux. I’ve managed to convince myself I know what components I’m going to use, so now it’s on to automating the builds with kickstarts and scripts. All I will say about my mission is that we will be building a high-availibility, lights-out data center. I will follow the Google philosophy of “let the computers run everything” with humans only having to get involved with hardware failure, or failures the machines can’t figure out and deal with. Part of that is automated builds; leave no room for errors introduced by feeble humans. I’m also a big white box proponent. We will not be buying expensive SAN equipment from EMC, nor paying the big bucks for Cisco networking equipment, because quite honestly, it’s not necessary to accomplish our goals. My current company shares my philosophy of hiring fewer, skilled administrators, rather than an army of lesser skilled ones that have to stick to the few tools they know. Our philosophy is to figure out what you want the machines to do, and find the right tools to do it, not to work from the tools, and to let that limit your capability. When you adopt that philosophy, you’ll often find that you can save a lot of money using open source solutions that might be harder to setup, but do the same job as an expensive package or device. At my previous job, I had a 384-core HPC Linux cluster, about a dozen or so corporate systems, and a dozen or so workstations, a dozen or so lab instruments, and about 50 desktops. Our IT software licensing costs were, most years, zero, and with the exception of my aging Exchange server, highly available. Â The cost in personnel to maintain all this was the cost of my salary, and a two-day a week part time help desk person to deal with end user non-scientific support (I did scientific support directly). High availability doesn’t have to cost a ton of money, in people or equipment.
Chainsaw Ripping Through the Door
I read about this wrong house raid incident last night, and I have to agree with SayUncle on this one:
Using a chainsaw seems to me to be unnecessarily dangerous and doesn’t lend itself to stealth. Also, if I were sitting around my house and I saw and heard a chainsaw coming through the door, my first thought will not be it’s the police and I should cooperate.
Yeah, I would not think someone chainsawing my door is the cops. Then again, it would have to be an awfully stupid prowler too, considering how much noise that makes.
Winning, Part 254
Susan Komen Foundation teaming up a gun promotional:
Discount Gun Sales is proud to team up with the Susan B. Koman Foundation to offer the Walther P-22 Hope Edition in recognition of Breast Cancer Awareness Month. A portion of each P-22 Hope Edition will be donated to the Seattle Branch of the Susan G. Komen Foundation.
CSGV and their mouth foaming followers are already throwing a hissy fit about it, though apparently they can’t tell the difference between a .22LR Caliber Walther and a Glock. Must suck to be irrelevant.
Proof that F&F Was a Plot to Bring About Gun Control
Dave Hardy links to the smoking gun at the Arizona star. Essentially F&F was concocted by the same people behind the Assault Weapons Ban in the 1990s. The smoking quote:
In an April 2010 e-mail to a colleague, Burke predicted that the operation would have a huge public impact: “It’s going to bring a lot of attention to straw purchasers of assault weapons,” he wrote. “Some of these weapons bought by these clowns in Arizona have been directly traced to murders of elected officials in Mexico by the cartels, so Katie-bar-the-door when we unveil this baby.”
So the response was to traffic more guns, and rack up more dead bodies, then hopefully the American people would wake up and ban these dangerous guns? This guy needs to go to jail.