Sebastian – Page 342 – Shall Not Be Questioned

Some Maintenance

UPDATE: The upgrade is complete. There should only be some minor issues I need to work through now that shouldn’t disrupt the blog much, if at all.

We’re going to need to do some maintenance to our Firewall/Router/Access Point. I need to to upgrade the firmware due to some issue unrelated to the blog. We may be down for a brief period of time. I am becoming less convinced that dd-wrt is robust and bug free enough for critical work. It’s certainly good for a consumer unit, but I think it’s rather appalling that I have to reset the whole unit to default settings in order to do a flash upgrade, and then be forced to manually re-enter everything. I’m thinking of ordering one of theseÂ and putting a MiniPCI WiFi card in it. I’ve always been really impressed by pfSense. As open source solutions go, quite capable andÂ reliable. Like any project, they have hiccups and downsides, but generally speaking, it’s gotten the job done for me when it’s come to firewalls for years. But for home I went cheap. The Buffalo WiFi unit I own is pretty high end, but it’s still a consumer unit.

I’ll probably get started as soon as I’m finished dinner. It’ll probably only take me about 10-15 minutes from start to get the blog back online once the flash upgrade is completed, but I may need to reboot from time to time while I work on my other issue. That is, assuming, Murphy isn’t lurking, as he sometimes is.

An Act of Kindness

Robb Birthday is coming up in a few days, and he’s asking as a present for some kindness for your fellow man. If it were up to me, and I had godlike powers, I’d make it so Robb doesn’t have to turn 40, and hope that maybe that kindness will be returned when it’s my turn in, err… a year and a half (that soon? Ugh).

Telling Evidence from the Clinton Years

Dave Hardy has been browsing around the Clinton Presidential Library online, and finding some interesting gun control items.

Taxing a Right

This would seem to be the latest scheme of Illinois Democrats, in Cook County. If you can’t ban it, tax it. Unfortunately for them, taxing a right for the purpose of discouraging its exercise is unconstitutional. Even taxing a right for the purpose of raising revenue is probably unconstitutional, which could end up being a problem for Pittman-Robertson funding. There are other contexts where taxation of a right is completely impermissible, such as in free speech, per the case Arkansas Writers Project, Inc v. Ragland, or in the case of marriage, the Illinois Supreme Court already rejected a 10 dollar fee on licenses to fund services for victims domestic violenceÂ (ironically also implemented by Cook, “We’ll Blame the Law Abiding,” County). (Source: Implementing the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, Volokh, Page 1542).

So Cook County is skating on very thin ice here. Thirdpower notes:

It’s funny that while the Democrats are screaming about voter ID laws ‘disproportionately effect poor and minorities”, their leadership are pushing laws that disproportionately effect poor and minorities.

That’s because they don’t really care about rights as a concept, and nor do they care about the poor or minorities. They are rhetorical bats with which to beat one’s opponents over the head with. The reality is pure power politics, where we revere and uphold rights which we find pleasing, and abridge and trash rights that we find unpleasant. The GOP and many on the right are just as guilty too, especially in and near Chicago, where power seems to be wielded for power’s sake a lot more than in other places in this country.

NRA Ads

Jacob doesn’t think too highly of this particular NRA Ad:

While I am sympathetic to the fact that 15 second spots are cheap, and that’s not much time to get the message through, what is the message here, other than our Second Amendment rights are under attack? And we don’t get to that until we cover a bunch of things that have nothing to do with the Second Amendment.

And why is NRA having such a difficult time this election talking about the real issue, which is who Obama will put on the federal bench, particularly the Supreme Court? Do focus groups show no one cares about the Second Amendment this election? Even among people who supposedly care about the Second Amendment? Do they show that no one understands or cares about the courts? I’ve heard Court arguments coming from Chris Cox, the head of ILA, but I don’t hear it coming from anywhere else in NRA. It’s like we’re “All In” this election, but only that Obama is bad. And why? Well, you’ll just have to take our word for it. It wouldn’t convince me if I wasn’t already convinced.

UPDATE: Here’s the 30 second spot:

Most Effective Ad of This Season

I’m not sure I’ve seen the equal of this ad during the 2012 election season:

Saw it appear over at Barron’s first, who has been there, and then at Instapundit. Having gone through it myself with just us, I can’t imagine how stressful it would be with kids to support.

Tab Clearing

For the first time in a while, I have a lot of tabs worth sharing. If I forget a hat tip here, my apologies. I’ve had some of these open for a while, and might have forgotten where I got them from:

Why Polariod was the Apple of its Time.

Aircraft Carriers in Space. What Science fiction gets wrong and right about combat in space.

Local story. School board member brings gun to school. Prosecutors decline to prosecute. Other school board members in hysterics that another member might have a gun at school board meeting. Preemption violation suggested. I would have said “I have a license to carry, deal with it,” which is why I couldn’t hold on to any public office.

The Swiss are undergoing military exercises. What could they possibly be worried about? Oh yeah.

Some people’s deaths are worth celebrating. (Hat tip Instapundit.)

We’re worried about lead ammunition killing a few birds …

… and meanwhile, we’re letting murder cats roam free.

Military and Personal Arms for Soldiers

A few years ago there were military commanders that were hostile to the idea of their soldiers having private arms, and tried to do everything in their power to discourage their soldiers from keeping their private arms, or outright forbade it in some circumstances. NRA got language inserted into a budget bill to prevent army commanders from maintaining records of private arms, or asking about them. That also prevented Â commanders from inquiring about firearms ownership for soldiers that were suicidal. There’s a move to alter the language to allow military commanders to inquire about private arms for cases where they have reasonable grounds that a person is high risk for suicide, provided there is no power to confiscate said private arms. Extrano’s Alley thinks all this fuss is to miss the point that the high suicide rate among members of the military is due to low morale. I tend to agree, but I don’t frankly have a problem if military personnel ask about personal firearms in the context of suicide risk, provided they can’t order confiscation of them.

New York Times Covers 3D Printing for Guns

I was surprised to see something like this in the paper of making up the record, but I have to admit, the publicity Cody Wilson has generated with the WikiWeapon has been stellar. The Times overstates what the technology is currently capable of, but it’s getting better and cheaper. I think it will be some time before you can print a barrel. But the Times basically admits this technology will be impossible to control, though stop short of suggesting gun control is obsolete. As I mentioned, Wilson does run into the issue of the Undetectable Firearms Act, when it comes to making a firearm solely from plastic, or even mostly from plastic. But criminals will not be so encumbered, and the technology will continue to progress regardless of what the American government has outlawed.