Month: September 2009

Former Honduras Leader Creates Bad Situation, Then Cries

Seriously exiled former president of Honduras Mr. Zelaya sure is playing the whiny bitch card. He tries to illegally extend his term a president, gets exiled from the country and told he can never return, then comes back. Now that he’s back the Honduras government is none too happy and cut off all supplies to the Brazilian embassy where he’s holed up. Well Mr. Zelaya is not whining about the treatment he’s receiving. Apparently the Brazilians didn’t think to stock up on food and supplies at their embassy before pulling this stunt and now they are paying for it:

“We have survived a few days eating biscuits, a very irregular diet,” he told the BBC’s Brazilian service, adding that the group had their first proper meal on Thursday.
“I wouldn’t say that we are starving, but the situation is extremely precarious.”

Of course this whole situation wouldn’t have been a situation had Mr. Zelaya not violated the constitution he was supposed to uphold. Furthermore this situation wouldn’t have escalated had he not returned to the country. Now the situation can be ended quickly if he surrenders to receive trial. The bottom line is his play for power has failed hard.

The Ultimate No Shit Statement of the Day

OK everybody who is reading this have a seat and take a deep breath. Prepare yourself for the ultimate surprise of surprises. The BBC is reporting that Iran has a secret uranium enrichment facility that they have been concealing from the United Nations. I know shocking isn’t it? Who would have guessed that Iran would defy the orders of the non-proliferation act. It’s almost like a treaty written on a piece of paper isn’t work anything.

Of course the typical people are calling for heads to role. The typical people would be the United States, United Kingdoms, and France. Apparently nobody is happy that the genie still hasn’t been shoved back into it’s bottle. You know now that I think about it calling the facility a secret one really doesn’t work:

“This installation is not a secret one, which is why we announced its existence to the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency],” Ali Akbar Saleri, head of Iran’s nuclear agency, told the AFP news agency.

Yeah once you tell somebody about it I don’t think you can call it a secret.

Connection Established Between Bloomberg’s Posse and the Brady Bunch

Wow Sebastian and Bitter from Snowflakes in Hell do amazing work. They have been taking the war to Mayors Against Illegal Guns faster than anybody else I know of. A great post there made by Bitter establishes the connection between Mayors Against Illegal Guns and the Brady Campaign. This is a big deal since Bloomberg is trying to make it appear as though his posse isn’t an anti-gun organization but a group only against illegal guns. Of course we know that’s not true.

Keep up the good work you two.

Al Franken Apparently Understand the Fourth Amendment

I’ll admit after voting against the Thune amendment my opinion of Al Franken went from bad to worse. Well Says Uncle pointed to a piece that has bumped up my opinion of Senator Franken. Apparently the man understands at least on piece of the constitution, amendment four. His words on the subject:

Noting that he received a copy of the Constitution when he was sworn in as a senator, he proceeded to read it to Kris, emphasizing this part: “no Warrants shall issue but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

“That’s pretty explicit language,” noted Franken, asking Kris how the “roving wiretap” provision of the Patriot Act can meet that requirement if it doesn’t require the government to name its target.

Good on him. It’s a small hope but there is at least some hope that he’ll gain an similar understandings to the rest of the constitution. Either way I won’t vote for the man until he understands the second amendment, but I’m certainly going to give him kudos where they are due.

My Truth About Guns Podcast is Live

Set the way back machine to roughly a month ago. I mentioned I was working on a gun rights project that I was going to unveil shortly after I mentioned it. Well it’s been delayed a bit but it is now live. Truth About Guns is live and episode one is up and running.

The podcast is where I take anti-gun articles and use published facts to disprove the lies, half-truths, and statistical abuses. Each episode will have the citations I used posted on the website. Anyways more information is available on the podcast page so take a jump and have a listen.

In New York Dictators have More Right than You

Welcome to Mayor Bloomberg’s home, New York. Here the only people allowed to carry guns are the police, criminals, and foreign dictators. The latest episode of No Agenda started out with Adam Curry talking about the gun toting body cards of Libya’s own dictator. It seems Moammar Khadafy travels with an entourage of 40 to 50 armed women. Furthermore they will be in Manhattan for the United Nations General Assembly.

I hope you feel good about New York now because you, as a regular citizen, have less rights in that city than foreign dictators.

It’s Official Obama is a Communist

What makes it official? Well Fidel Castro himself complemented Obama on a job well done. OK I purposely titled the article something facetious. Honestly Castro just went on record complementing Obama on his speed dealing with Al Gore’s money making scheme global warming.

I just wanted to be the first to say Obama is a communist because Castro complemented him. Seriously it’s going to happen all over Fox news, I’ll be you money on it (well not real money but I’ll bet made up monopoly money).

Quantum Computers Aren’t Magic Either

Let me it shown that “super intelligent” talk does occur on gun forums. And by “super intelligent” I mean buzz word laden talk about theoretical topics that really have no bearing on modern society yet. In the computer science world quantum computers are the big next thing buzz word. They are based on a technology few have any understanding of (quantum theory) and therefore are perfect devices to make insane claims. One of these insane claims is that quantum computers will instantly destroy all modern cryptography methods and instantly make the entire security structure of the universe collapse causing the world to end.

Case in point Secure Socket Layer (SSL) is a security scheme used by most finical institutes to prevent prying eyes from seeing what you’re doing while on your banks web site. More or less it just sends normal Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) data through an encrypted tunnel which should be impossible for an outside person to see. In actuality this isn’t the case and there are functional attacks against SSL but they involve vulnerabilities in the protocol itself not the encryption being used. The perviously mentioned end of the world claims would be direct attacks again the encryption itself.

Well like most over the top fear mongering done about poorly understood theoretical technology, the fear that quantum computers will make modern encryption scheme useless is far from factual. An article I found via Bruce Scheier’s blog does the math for us and shows that quantum computers aren’t anything to fear.

Quantum computers could in fact speed up the time it takes to decrypt modern encryption schemes but there are two major things to note. First of all quantum computers are in their pre-infancy, meaning they are still in the extremely experimental stages. The post I liked to in Scheier’s blog is about how they were able to finally factor the number 15 using a quantum computer. Note the number 15 was chosen because it is a special case and can be represented by a specific form (discussed in the Emergent Chaos article I linked to). Factoring the primes of any number is not currently feasible with quantum computers.

The second thing to note about quantum computers is that they will start out slow and have to build up speed so to speak. The first quantum computers will be extraordinary slow at performing the tasks given to them just like modern semi-conductor computers once were. They will have to be developed over time and make them faster and better suited to perform the tasks put before them.

Currently RSA keys of 4096-bits in length are the largest supported by most software programs. According to the linked Emergent Chaos article if everything advanced as quickly in the quantum computer field as it has in the semi-conductor field 4096-bit RSA keys wouldn’t be broken until 2053. Assuming quantum computers advanced much quick these keys would still be viable for 25 years.

Likewise with current computing technology 4096-bit RSA keys are calculated to be safe until 2060. That means if quantum computers advance as quickly as current computers they would be able to break 4096-bit RSA keys only 7 years ahead of modern computers. This demonstrated that getting our knickers all in a bunch over emerging technologies is once again premature at best. Computers are not magical machines capable of any feat put before them, they are machines based on the reality they have been built in meaning they can only do tasks in the realm of their capabilities. The sooner people realize this the better.

The Only Ones Hard at Work

Another story showing how the police force are the only citizens responsible enough to be the bastions of society. During a drug raid several police officers decided that they would play on a Wii while their comrade did the actual work of arresting, searching, and collecting evidence.

Why do I bring this up? Is it because of have a beef with police officers? No not at all. I respect police officers and the job they perform. But when somebody fucks up they should be called out on it. Police, like everybody else, are citizens and are no more enabled than the rest of society. Yet some people feel that we should give police the sole responsibility to protect the lives of the citizenry of the United States. They justify their feeling by saying police go through rigorous training and therefore are more responsible and less prone to fucking up than the rest of us. Videos like this prove otherwise.