Protest, baby!

Actively Disengaged simply rocks.

Obama trolls the gun control crowd

After a month of the Big Guy weeping in a press conference, sending his wing man to hobnob with every anti-gun organization on the planet, and standing on a stage surrounded by school kids to announce a For Teh Childrenz™ program that ZOMGWEHAVETODORIGHTNOW, what do we get?

And the anti gun crowd will love him for the nothing* that he did so publicly.  Well played, Mr. President.  Well played indeed.

* For example, he very well might have been able to ban the importation of all semi-automatic firearms via Executive Order.  He didn't.

All (Gun) politics is local

Riddle me this: why didn't President Obama issue 23 Executive Orders about guns in August of last year, surrounded by the widows and orphans of the Aurora, CO theater shooting?  Simple: he was running for election in a competitive race.

And riddle me this: why won't Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid introduce an "Assault Weapons" ban?  And if he did, why would it be voted down by Senators Mark Begich (D - AK), Mark Pryor (D - AR), Mark Udall (D - CO), Tom Harkin (D - IA), Mary Landrieu (D - LA), Max Baucus (D - MT), Jeanne Shaheen (D - NH), Tom Udall (D - NM), Kay Hagan (D - NC), Tim Johnson (D - SD), Mark Warner (D - VA), and Jay Rockefeller (D - WV)?  Simple: they want to win re-election.

And riddle me this: why did the New York Legislature just ram through a gun control bill that nobody read, and is widely seen as doing nothing to stop shootings?  Simple: they don't see a cost to doing so.

You see, New York is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Democratic Party.  And so there's no perceived downside to them (or Massachusetts, or Connecticut) putting the most stupid restrictions on lawful firearms owners.  And doing things like getting the State Employees pension fund to divest firearms stocks.

Well, OK then.  Maybe we can do something about that.

The following firearms manufacturers are based in New York, providing thousands of jobs to New York citizens.

Kimber.

Remington.

Kahr.

Probably others - clearly my work ethic in researching this topic after a 14 hour day leaves something to be desired.  Feel free to leave more names in the comments.

These companies are behind enemy lines, at the mercy of a Legislature that feels no compunction about screwing over lawful gun owners.  And so we should encourage them to relocate from New York to the United States of America.    I don't think that a boycott qua boycott is necessarily (yet),  but a polite letter to their VP of Marketing expressing bewilderment that they would stay in that environment, paying taxes to an enemy government (as opposed to the governments of Alabama or Oklahoma) might have an impact.  Especially if you mention that you'd like to buy from them but only buy American.

The Political is Personal, and gun politics is local.  And we need to punish the New York Legislature any way we can.

TheOnesday® Number 21

Tam makes the required observation:

Wayne LaPierre goes and says we need to worry about crazy people with guns, fund better school security, and enforce existing laws & prosecute the people who break them, and the Anti-Gun crowd mocks him as a disconnected pro-gun zealot tool of the firearms industry.

Barack Obama commissions a study group headed by the vice president, and then holds a press conference stating that we need to worry about crazy people with guns, fund better school security, and enforce existing laws & prosecute the people who break them, and the Anti-Gun crowd acclaims him as a charismatic visionary taking a bold and sweeping step forward.

The answer is, of course, simple.  While he wasn't born in a humble cabin on Mount Baekdu, he still is a Nobel Laureate. Probably up for another prize, this time in something real like Physics or nano-molecular Community Organizing or something.

Wayne LaPierre, on the other hand, is just some Angry White Man™  Srlsy, what more is there to say?

ANOINT, v.t. To grease a king or other great functionary already sufficiently slippery.

As sovereigns are anointed by the priesthood,
So pigs to lead the populace are greased good.
—Judibras

- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

Remember Alinsky's rules. Mockery is a sharp tool.  As is holding your opponent to his own standards.

So would that New York ban on magazines larger than 7 rounds ...

... make my Lee-Enfield illegal?

Unusual for bolt action rifles, it has a ten round magazine (twice as big as the typical 5 round one).  Also, the magazine is removable, although it was only removed by the British Tommies for cleaning (it was loaded via stripped clips, two clips of five rounds each).  In fact, #2 Son's SKS is the same - a nominally removable 10 round magazine loaded via stripper clip.

But what are the chances that the Solons of the Empire State wrote a law that would not force me to divest myself of these magazines, if I were an inmate of that once great state?  One suspects that the law is like Massachusetts' ban on possession of ammunition or ammunition components if you don't have a FID card - even expended .22 brass that has no other use than for scrap.

To even ask the questions is to provide the answers - the purpose of gun control legislation is to cast a net so wide and so onerous that lawful gun ownership will wither due to the fear of inadvertently running afoul of the court system.  Meanwhile, gun violence will continue unabated. 

Finally - a trustworthy climate sensor network

About damn time, too:

Being a state of the art system, it is well sited, and requires no adjustments and the data is well spatially distributed by design so that it is representative of the CONUS. Here’s the current plot (click to enlarge):



Each (small) number in blue represents one of the NCDC operated U.S. Climate Reference Network stations in the CONUS that we use.

This is huge.  Each station is rural, so there's no Urban Heat Island effect driving the temperature higher.  Each station is automated, so there's no need for adjustments because readings were taken at a different time of day.  All stations use modern, identical equipment so you're not comparing apples and oranges.  Station siting covers the entire Continental USA, so there's no need for "gridding" and "infilling" (translation: "making data up").

In other words, there's no need to adjust the data, ever.  Given the strange warming effect of the adjustments, this is perhaps the most important thing that's happened in Climate Science since the use of Satellite monitoring of the lower troposphere.  And this is ground based measurement, so it will complement the satellite data.

Well done to NOAA for this effort.  Now if they'd use this data in their "State Of The Climate" report rather than the old, bad, adjusted data.

Will the last one out of the Northeast please turn out the lights?

Zercool is leaving for exactly the same reason that I left.

Unlike in New York and Massachusetts, the air here smells of freedom.

If it's Tuesday, it must be time for security patches

Oracle came out with a patch to the Java exploit, but people are saying that it's not nearly enough:

Security experts advise users to not run Java in their web browsers despite a patch from Oracle that mitigates a widely exploited security vulnerability.

The database giant issued an emergency out-of-band patch on Sunday, but despite this the US Department of Homeland Security continues to warn citizens to disable Java plugins.

"Unless it is absolutely necessary to run Java in web browsers, disable it even after updating to [Java 7 update 11]," the US-CERT team said in an update yesterday.

I restarted Firefox and found that it automatically disabled the Java plug in.  Nice, that.  Looked at Chrome and can't for the life of me see where the security configuration settings are.  Not so nice, that.  I guess I'll have to Google it.

And Microsoft has also come out with an emergency, out-of-cycle patch for Internet Explorer.  If you use Internet Explorer, cruise on over there for some chocolaty security goodness.  Yum!

Medal of Honor award

To Staff SGT Clint Romesha:

The White House announced this afternoon that President Obama will on February 11th award the Medal of Honor to Staff Sergeant Clint Romesha, formerly of 3-61 CAV, for his actions on October 3, 2009, when Combat Outpost Keating was attacked.

I know a little bit about Romesha (ROE-muh-shay) and the attack on COP Keating, having written a book about both, and I am so happy for both Ro and his buddies for this well-deserved honor.

There were many heroes that day, many of whom didn’t survive that attack, but Romesha is without question one of the bravest men I’ve ever known.

Click through for the story.  Wow.

(via)

Must read post for Preppers

The world has plenty of food.  It has distribution problems (Stalin's famine in the Ukraine), but it seems that we currently grow enough cereal grains to feed upward of 14 Billion people (just wheat and corn would feed almost 9 Billion).  And new intensified cultivation techniques would let rice alone feed 14 Billion more (!).

Of course, people in all cultures prefer to eat meat, and so the vast majority of all of this goes into animal feed.  What's interesting about this is in scenarios of collapse - wide spread, prolonged drought, for example - there's a huge amount of resiliency in the planetary food production system.  Yes, there would be fewer cattle, pigs, and chickens, but there would still be plenty of food to go around (baring distribution breakdown, when things would get ugly).

There's a very interesting post that describes the cereal grain types, where they grow, and what we do with them.  But the doomsday scenarios of the Population Bomb crowd are entirely wrong:

So this is a pretty happy note. We can feed the world a couple of times over as things stand today. With some modest effort, we can quadruple that. Anyone who is not fully fed is hungry due to the choices of people about what kinds of food they prefer and political decisions about power and greed. We can simply change our choices and feed everyone.

Furthermore, we have in hand plenty of methods to increase productivity for a couple of more doubles of population. All without “meatless days” or any kind of deprivation.

Of more interest to most readers here (and I'd dare say to all Preppers) is the breakdown by cereal variety - what it's good for, where it's good, how people use it.  For example, Rye:

So another cold and crappy soil tolerant crop, being displaced by other crops that pay better or can be made to grow with enough added fertilizers. Yield is about 6 tons / acre, so about 12,000 person-days of grain per acre. 32 people can have subsistence rations for a year off of one acre. An “8 to the acre” small urban home lot would feed 4 people. Yet we plant those lots with ‘rye grass lawns’ and throw away the ‘forage’ we mow…

If you're interested in backyard gardening and maybe putting away some seeds "just in case", then this is a post you should bookmark.  The news is good - great, really: we can feed everyone on the planet, likely as well (or nearly as well) as those of us in the West eat.  But this also gives the production system tremendous resiliency for hard times, and that resiliency scales down to quarter acre plots.

Me, I'd like to put away some Golden Rice seeds for "just in case".  Vitamin A FTW.

RTWT.

This wouldn't work around my house

Via #1 Son.  I have no idea where he got a sense of humor like that.

Kopel and Gura on the Second Amendment

Dave Kopel, three days ago:



Alan Gura, last week:

China's economic growth figures too good to believe

I've been saying for some time now that you have to take Chinese economic data with a huge grain of salt.  It seems that analysts at Goldman-Sachs now are saying the same thing:

But no longer is it just the blogosphere that is openly taking Chinese data to task - as Bloomberg reports, even the major banks: Goldman, UBS and ANZ - are now openly questioning the validity and credibility of the goalseek function resulting from C:\China\central_planning\economic_model.xls.
From Bloomberg:

China’s unexpected surge in exports last month renewed concern from analysts at Goldman Sachs Group Inc., UBS AG and Australia & New Zealand Banking Group Ltd. (ANZ) that statistics from the nation can be unreliable.

The 14.1 percent jump from a year earlier was the biggest positive surprise since March 2011, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The increase didn’t match goods movements through ports and imports by trading partners according to UBS, while Goldman Sachs and Mizuho Securities Asia Ltd. cited a divergence from overseas orders in a manufacturing index.

At the same time that both Europe (the EU adventure) and the US (the Obama adventure) are trying to gather all reins of power to an unaccountable government, there is a massive collapse in governmental moral authority and the trust of the populations concerning their governments.  What's funny is that the Educated Class simply doesn't seem to see this.  That's some impressive display of intellectual horsepower, right there.

We're at the end of the period where politicians could with impunity over promise and under deliver.  Now we're in the era where increasingly desperate governments (hello, California) make increasingly transparent Ponzi-like moves (hello, Greece) to keep things from falling apart for another 3 months.  This simply accelerates the loss of trust in governmental institutions.  Our miserable political class will take us all the way to the scene of the crash.



So which economic figures from the EU and US governments can we trust?  To ask the question is to answer it.

What do you call it when more junk climate studies are published?

Monday:

Analysis Britain's Met Office has come under fire for two pieces of crystal-ball gazing involving global temperature and British rainfall. On Christmas Eve, the Met's temperature prediction for the UK was quietly revised downwards, and only merited a press release this week after physics blog Tallbloke's Talkshop noticed the change.

The Christmas eve change was particularly interesting because they were trying to bury the news that they project that there will have been no warming for 20 years.  Can't have that plastered across the tabloids.

And they also have a new projection that rainy days are getting more frequent in England, and somehow this causes droughts.  Really, you can't make this sort of thing up.

Tagged with the "idiots" label for obvious reasons.

Critical Java security patch

It effects everyone, it's being exploited in the wild.  It's bad enough that Oracle rushed a fix out.

Patches available here.

How I spent my Sunday

I took the dogs to the dog park for puppy chasing and wrestling and then spread mulch on the backyard path that Wolfgang had run into a muddy mess.  Still need to spread more, but this was a good start.  Twenty wheelbarrow loads didn't even put a dent into the hill of mulch.

Then the Missus and I went to the botanical gardens.  With the top down in the convertible, because it was 75° and sunny. You just don't get this in January up in Yankeeland.

I was rather pleased to see how drab the botanical gardens were - it makes my front yard seem less of an eye sore. Then stopping at Whole Foods (or more aptly as a friend calls it, "Whole Paycheck) for wine, cheese, chaucoutrie and good bread.  Expensive, but good and not so expensive as eating out.

Man, I'm tired now.  Crash the Wondercat is curled up next to me, napping.  Not a bad idea he has there.

But why do you need a rocket launcher on your car?

Because f**k you, is why. 



Including I haven't been this bored since I last read a book by Jane Austin.  Heh.  And it's true that you just don't get slatted armor that will detonate Rocket Propelled Grenades on family hatchbacks.  And the tracks on the tank only have as much pressure on the ground as a man on skis.  We could run over Piers Morgen to see if that was true.  Double heh.  And quite frankly, who wouldn't want to shoot a machine gun at a Lexus?  Triple heh.

Top Gear is simply the best TV show, ever.

Why we won the Cold War

The Dirty Commies couldn't make a car that wasn't Charlie Romeo Alpha Papa.



Srlsy.

Christoph Graupner - Magnificat

Christoph Graupner was the chapelmeister/composer at the court of a petty German princeling in Hesse-Darmstadt, composing Baroque music for his Cathedral and court.  The Prince, as was true for so many of the German aristocracy in the early part of the 18th Century came into financial straights, and Graupner found that his paychecks stopped coming.  With a wife a kids to support, he looked around for other musical jobs in other principalities, and was offered a job in Leipzig based on this composition, a Magnificat for the Cathedral there.



Quite frankly, they wanted Telemann, but he got a big pay raise and dropped out of the running.  When the Prince of Hesse-Darmstadt found out that Graupner was about to leave he not only settled in full but game him a big raise to keep him on staff.  This left Graupner in the position of having to decline the offer from Leipzig.

Fortunately, he knew someone who would be a good "Plan C" for the Leipzig post, and wrote a letter of recommendation for his friend who:

is a musician just as strong on the organ as he is expert in church works and capelle pieces ....

His friend?  Johann Sebastian Bach, who was given the position as the Kantor in Leipzig.  The rest, as we would say, is history.

Today is Graupner's birthday, born in 1683.  If you like Baroque music (as I do), it's sad that he's only ever found in Bach's shadow.

O Puppy, My Puppy

When we occupied Camp Borepatch, I installed a moat to enhance the defenses.  A moat cunningly disguised as a pond with a waterfall:

Basically, we modified the local environment, making Camp Borepatch an attractive home for things that like to live in water.  Then I got a puppy.  Wolfgang does not like to live in water, but is exceedingly interested in creatures that do.

Exceedingly. And so what did my horrified gaze reveal?

That black ragged blanket you see in the foreground is the plastic pond liner, fished out of the drink by a nearly 100 pound still "teenage" puppy in pursuit of some inoffensive aquatic creature.  Oh, bother.  And so with apologies to Walt Whitman, a funeral poem for the pond:

O PUPPY! my Puppy! our fearful dig is done;
The spine has weather'd every ache, the prize we sought is won;
The pond is near, the falls I hear, the Missus all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady stream, the water cool and sparkling:
But O heart! heart! heart!
O the ragged shreds of mat,
Where in the yard my fountain lies,
An empty dried up vat.


O Puppy! my Puppy! your muddy soaking paws;
Tell your tale -- you battled long and vanquished with your jaws;
For you cascades and gentle streams had no fascination;
Building feats with water flowing just by gravitation;
Here Puppy! dear Puppy!
This hole beneath my feet;
It is some dream that now the yard,
Is sudden uncomplete.


My Puppy does not answer, his tail 'twixt legs is hid;
My pond does not hold water, not like it one time did;
The critter Wolfie dug out fled, its home is closed and done;
From fearful pup, the digging up, the liner fairly won;
Exult, O shores, and ring, O bells!
But I, with mournful tread,
Walk the yard my Puppy guards,
The pond is cold and dead.

Please no comments from poetry purists that this is just doggerel.