Month: October 2011

Dayton Wants to Give Money to the Needy Millionaires

It’s a good thing Mark Dayton was voted in as the governor. If we would have had a Republican governor he would have ensures the rich would benefit from taxpayer money while the poor received nothing, but the Democrats always ensure that won’t happen… wait a minute, this doesn’t fit the narrative:

Convinced the Minnesota Vikings could leave the state if they don’t get a new stadium, Gov. Mark Dayton is determined to keep them here.

On Wednesday, he convened a series of rapid-fire, closed-door meetings with Ramsey County officials, team owners and even a group that wants to build a downtown Minneapolis casino that could help pay for the new stadium.

“The ball’s in our court,” Dayton said after the meetings, vowing to prepare his own stadium proposal by Nov. 7.

His recommendations will include such details as where the new stadium should be, who should run it and how the state should pay for its $300 million share. Dayton and his top staffers and commissioners have been racing to see what could work and what won’t in a final stadium deal.

Huh, it’s almost as if both parties act exactly the same and ensure their big millionaire buddies are treated right with taxpayer money. Perhaps there’s corruption afoot? Could it be?

Seriously why the fuck should taxpayers have to foot any part of the Viking stadium bill? They haven’t even done anything to warrant keeping them in the state. I don’t follow sports at all but even I know the Vikings suck ass. If they want to go I say let them go, hell let’s kick them out for being whiny bitches who are demanding the people of this state give them more than millions of dollars every year in merchandise and ticket sales. When we toss them out let’s send Mark Dayton with them, we don’t need a prick raising taxes during an economic recession to further enrich millionaires. This quote is also golden:

The Vikings owner emerged from the closed-door meeting with Dayton and briskly walked away from reporters. Wilf answered just one question: Are you happy with the progress?

So Dayton is having closed door meetings with the owner of the Vikings but won’t stand around and take a few questions from us mere peasants? At the very least you would think the people of Minnesota would get a chance to vote on the matter.

They’re Probably in Mexico

Snowflakes in Hell Shall Not Be Questioned reports that the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) are missing 30 submachine guns:

Los Angeles police officials searched on Monday for a stolen cache of submachine guns and semi-automatic handguns that disappeared from a SWAT training facility, and said they were embarrassed by the loss.

More than 30 Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine guns and M1911 pistols that had been stored at the training facility were stolen, Los Angeles Police Department spokeswoman Karen Rayner said.

The weapons had been altered to fire blanks, and it would be “difficult” — although not impossible — to convert them back to full use, she said.

Have they searched in Mexico? Maybe the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) stole them to arm the Mexican drug cartels.

Californians Push Back

The California legislature recent passed a law that prohibits denizens of the state from openly carry unloaded handguns. It’s nice to see some people with spines still exist in California and are pushing back:

Fremont, CA – October 22, 2011 – In response to the governor’s recent signing of AB 144, a bill to ban the Open Carry of handguns, the Responsible Citizens of California (RCC) is organizing twin meet-up events from Noon-1PM on Saturday, October 22, 2011 at the corner of Hesperian Blvd. & Bayfair Drive in San Leandro and the corner of Felspar and Ocean Front Walk on Pacific Beach in San Diego. These will be the first kick-off events of Unloaded Open Carry of Long Guns (rifles and shotguns) held simultaneously in both Northern and Southern California.

Let me just say from the bottom of my heart that those participating in this event are awesome. When the government pushes us we need to push back. Nothing like a little friendly protest to keep those bureaucrats aware that we are actually paying attention to what they’re doing.

A tip of the old hat goes to Uncle for this story.

Police Officer Removed from Obama Visit Because Guns are Apparently Scary

Before I make any comment on this story let me first point out a big of fear mongering performed by the article’s author:

THE US Secret Service removed a woman with a gun from the audience minutes before President Barack Obama was due to speak to a crowd at Greensville County High School in Virginia yesterday.

Oh my god! A woman with a gun near the President? Obviously she must have been a crazy tea party participant! It’s a good thing the Secret Service moved in to stop this obviously violent individual… wait what:

The woman was not considered a personal threat to the US President – she was a uniformed African-American police officer from the local Greensville County Sheriff’s office.

False alarm everybody, the woman was a cop and they’re good enough to carry a gun and not be scary. The reason she was removed makes no sense whatsoever:

But her presence as an audience member standing with friends close to the stage where Mr Obama would soon speak about his jobs plan was a serious security lapse following supposedly thorough crowd screening.

The risk for the Secret Service, which is responsible for protecting the President, was that another person could have grabbed the pistol from her belt holster.

Right… because a person couldn’t grab a gun from one of the Secret Service members? What they really meant to say is that they removed the woman from the audience because the Secret Service like to feel big and tough by claiming they’re the only ones qualified to protect the President. A simpleton police officer is obviously only good enough to protect the peasantry.

It’s good to see actors of the state are completely assholes to one another and not just us.

Checking for Bullet Setback

Because defensive ammunition is expensive I find myself seldom shooting it at the range. Due to this I end up cycling my carry ammunition through my gun with notable frequency. When you cycle the same round through a gun with any frequency you can cause a problem called bullet setback; this is when the bullet gets pushed back into the casing by slamming against the feed ramp numerous times. After a while the bullet can get setback in the case enough to cause a dangerous buildup of pressure when you finally fire the cartridge.

Knowing this I periodically take a micrometer and compare the overall length of the cartridges in my carry gun with factory ammunition of the same time that hasn’t been chambered. If the cartridges in my carry gun start becoming shorter then it’s time to switch out ammunition. Since I did my ritual of ammunition check and cleaning last night I though I’d post a reminder that those of you carrying pistols should do the same once in a while.

I would also like to present a tip for alleviating bullet setback. Instead of chambering the same two rounds all the time (the top two in the magazine) place the previously chambered round at the bottom of the magazine. This takes a bit of time but it ensures all of your ammunition has been chambered roughly the same number of times and reduces the number of times each bullet has been chambered.

Perhaps It’s Time to Up My Capacity

It seems the media’s version of flash mobs are becoming more common. A Pedal Pub in Minneapolis was attacked by at least 25 people:

A flash mob of 25 to 30 youths on Saturday night attacked the Pedal Pub, a four-wheeled bicycle and bar powered by up to a dozen people, as it rolled down Nicollet Mall near S. 6th Street.

None of the 12 people riding the Pedal Pub was injured, but the passengers were shaken by the sudden attack, said Scott Ranney, who had rented it with friends.

The kids jumped on the Pub, shook it and grabbed at purses and belongings, Ranney said. A BlackBerry was the only thing stolen, and the attack ended just as suddenly as it began, with the kids running away.

“They could have done anything they wanted,” Ranney said.

In this case the victims were lucky, the attackers stopped without hurting anybody. The outcome could have been much different had the attackers decided they wanted to bring physical harm to those on the Pedal Pub. The last line in the quote is very accurate, the attacks could have done anything they wanted considering how outmatched the riders on the Pedal Pub were.

While I do not advocate combining alcohol and firearms in any form, the drivers of the Pedal Pub is required to remain sober so if I were in that position I would certainly be carrying. Hell with the increase in these so-called flash mobs I’m starting to think my subcompact .45’s 10+1 rounds may be a liability. Even though I always have a spare magazine on me, which gives me an additional 10 rounds, it requires time to grab the spare magazine from my pocket and reload the firearm. I’m starting to think it’s not unwise to have a gun in .40 or 9mm just for the additional capacity. After all good self-defense ammunition exists for all three calibers which makes them very effective relative to one another.

Verizon to Collect Personal Data for Marketing Purposes

If you’re a Verizon customer take note that the company is making changes to its privacy policy so they can collect your personal information for marketing purposes:

For the last month, Verizon Wireless has been notifying customers through email of a major change to its default privacy setting: it will begin collecting your Web browsing history, cell phone location and app usage, for third-party marketing purposes.

You can opt out of such surveillance, although Verizon has promised not to share any identifiable information with these third-party companies.

It wouldn’t be so bad if this change was an opt-in instead of opt-out program. For example if Verizon told customers they could receive a $5.00 monthly discount on their Internet bill if they chose to allow their anonymized personal information to be shared with third-parties there would be little to complain about. Sadly whenever a telecommunications company decides to make sweeping changes to their privacy polices they always make them opt-out ordeals.

I would also like to point out that anonymizing data leaves little comfort these days. Data mining techniques are becomes ever more sophisticated, which allows companies to take mounds of anonymized data and tie that data to specific persons with a high degree of accuracy. Personally I would prefer third-parties not have access to information such as my location or web browsing history.

Bitcoin is Collapsing

Ars Technica has a nice writeup regarding the steady fall of Bitcoin’s value:

Unfortunately, the currency’s value hasn’t proven stable in practice. Several waves of media coverage between April and June pushed the currency’s value up from less than $1 to more than $30. Soon after it reached a peak, the currency had a series of PR disasters. One Bitcoin user claimed that a half-million dollars worth of Bitcoins were stolen from his PC; he may have fallen victim to Bitcoin-stealing malware. A few days later, the most popular Bitcoin exchange was hacked, forcing a multiday suspension of trading and generating another wave of bad press.

Trading resumed in late June at around $17, and the currency’s value has been steadily declining ever since. In August, one of the most popular Bitcoin “banks” claimed it had been hacked, and had lost hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of Bitcoins, triggering a fall in value to under $7. Bitcoin fell below $5 in September, and it is now worth less than $3.

So is Bitcoin doomed? The value of Bitcoins is (like any fiat currency) ultimately driven by supply and demand. With dollars, the supply is controlled by the Federal Reserve, and the demand is driven by the size of the US economy. The supply of Bitcoins grows automatically, asymptotically approaching 21 million, and the demand for Bitcoins is driven by the volume of Bitcoin-denominated transactions.

Many people in the libertarian movement have been excited about Bitcoin. I know some people who have invested quite heavily in the electronic currency and thus far have no real value to show for it. The surge of Bitcoin supporters in the libertarian movement confused me as most libertarians are proponents of commodity backed currencies. We support commodity backed currencies because it means there is real value tied to our money in the form of the commodity. For example silver is used in numerous industrial processes which makes it valuable. If you have silver you can easily state that it has value because it’s used to produce other things. Even if it isn’t chosen as money it can be traded to those who utilize it just as gold, gasoline, and food can be.

Bitcoin is backed by nothing, which makes it yet another fiat currency. The United States dollar is a fiat currency that enjoys commons use because other countries have chosen to back their fiat currency with dollars and because the federal government requiers you pay all taxes, fines, and payments to them in dollars. If you don’t have dollars you can literally go to prison come tax season. In essence the dollar has value because a gun is put to your head saying it does. Bitcoin doesn’t enjoy this benefit either so it’s really only worth what people are willing to pay for it.

As it sits now there is a chicken and egg problem with Bitcoin. Bitcoin can only be valuable if people accept it in payment for actual goods and services but nobody wants to go through the hassle of accepting it until enough customers want to pay for their goods and services in Bitcoins. There is no intrinsic value in Bitcoins as they are nothing more than bits on harddrives and networks so the system doesn’t enjoy the benefits of commodity backed currencies.

I believed from the beginning that Bitcoin was an interesting experiment that could, eventually, lead to greater things but will likely peter out in its current form. Part of the reason I predict doom and gloom for Bitcoin isn’t just the fact that it’s a fiat currency but also because the government has a knack for shutting down any potential competition for the Federal Reserve dollar. Reading the news of Bitcoin’s downward value slide it appears as though the government won’t need to resort to legislation to put Bitcoin down.

A Quick History on Why the Second Amendment is Necessary

While there are many reasons I’m a proponent of the right to keep and bear arms one of the biggest reasons is because that right allows one to defend themselves against an otherwise superior opponent. If you’re being attacked by two armed men your chances of survival are very low if you’re unarmed. The tables can be turned completely around though if you give that would-be victim a firearm and some basic knowledge on how to use it. Throughout history oppressed people have been able to defend themselves because they were able to arm themselves. A great writeup form the days of yore I ran across deals with minorities using firearms to defend themselves against the Klan:

In the early 1960s, I taught at Tougaloo College — a black school in Mississippi. My wife, Eldri, and I were extremely active in the civil rights movement and, among other things, I was chairman of the strategy committee of the Jackson Movement during the historic demonstrations in the spring and summer of 1963.

I was beaten and arrested many times and hospitalized twice. This happened to many, many people in the movement. No one knows what kind of massive racist retaliation would have been directed against grassroots black people had the black community not had a healthy measure of firearms within it.

When the campus of Tougaloo College was fired on by KKK-type racial night-riders, my home was shot up and a bullet missed my infant daughter by inches. We received no help from the Justice Department and we guarded our campus — faculty and students together — on that and subsequent occasions. We let this be known. The racist attacks slackened considerably. Night-riders are cowardly people — in any time and place — and they take advantage of fear and weakness.

Later, I worked for years in the Deep South as a full-time civil rights organizer. Like a martyred friend of mine, NAACP staffer Medgar W. Evers, I, too, was on many Klan death lists and I, too, traveled armed: a .38 special Smith and Wesson revolver and a 44/40 Winchester carbine.

The knowledge that I had these weapons and was willing to use them kept enemies at bay. Years later, in a changed Mississippi, this was confirmed by a former prominent leader of the White Knights of the KKK when we had an interesting dinner together at Jackson.

The Klan were cowardly assholes back in the day (and the few remaining Klan members today are still cowardly assholes) and relied on groups of riders who came into a town at night to terrorize minority families and businesses. At this time the government wasn’t too willing to help with the problem so those in minority groups had to fend for themselves. If you’re alone or with a small group and a bunch of jackasses come into town on horses meaning you harm you’re going to be heavily outmatched unless you and/of members of your small group are armed. The nice thing about firearms is that they allow you to engage an attacker at range and also allow you to easily engage multiple assailants.

In more recent times groups of attackers (which the media has dubbed flash mobs without realize that term means something entirely different) have been known to attack individual targets without cause. If you find yourself the unfortunate target of such a group you’re best chances of walking away unscathed is to have a firearm on your person. Being attacked by 10 people is a frightening endeavor no matter how you look at it, but if you’re armed with a pistol that holds 10 rounds and keep a spare magazine in your pocket you’re chances of walking away alive are greatly increased.

Anti-gunners like to claim that we should depend on the police to protect our lives. They should have a conversation with somebody who was active in the civil rights movement and targeted by the Klan sometime so they can learn how unreliable police “protection” really is.

A Complete Lack of Government Transparency

Our government has a wonderful knack for keeping secrets while claiming to be a government “by the people, for the people.” It’s rather hard to keep tabs on the government that’s supposedly working for you when you haven’t a clue what they’re up to. People complained that the Bush administration unnecessarily increased the amount of information deemed classified by our government and when Obama was campaigning he promised to reverse this trend and unleash an era of unprecedented government transparency. Surprising only to his supporters Obama didn’t deliver on that promise and we are still living under a government that’s keep absolutely ridiculous stuff classified:

In 2009, President Obama famously promised “an unprecedented level of openness” in his administration, and a lynchpin in his open government plan was an overhaul of the government’s bloated secrecy system.

[…]

Unfortunately, besides the most peripheral and cosmetic changes, government secrecy has only increased since Obama took office. Last year, as part of their Washington Post series and subsequent book Top Secret America, Dana Priest and William Arkin reported, “An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.” Yet incredibly, when the government released its official count as part of an intelligence community report to Congress two months ago, the number of people holding the Top Secret clearance had ballooned to 1,419,051. And the same report noted that 4.2 million people hold some level of security clearances for access to classified information.

I guess we can sweep this hole mess under the old hope and change rug. Whenever I bring up the government’s abuse of classification I inevitably get told by somebody that these practices are absolutely essential for national security. What those people must not realize is that the government classified plenty of documents that have nothing to do with the realm of national security:

Document classification, already at record highs under the Bush Administration, has continued to explode as well. The government classified a staggering 77 million documents in 2010, a 40% increase over the previous year.

Overclassification causes a myriad of problems. It can open the government up to ridicule, like when the CIA recently refused to release a single passage from its study on global warming, claiming it would harm national security. It can stifle public debate, like two months ago when the CIA tried to censor the memoir critical of its post-9/11 tactics (despite the fact that much of the information that had already been revealed in Congressional testimony). It can encourage waste and incompetence, as it has at the Department of Homeland Security, where even the budget and number of employees is classified. And most critically, it can be used as a veil to hide illegal conduct, such as the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program.

I’m sure the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) study on global warming holds significant concerns regarding this country’s security. The government is even using their power of classification to remove any threat of being held responsible for killing an American citizen without due process:

Nowhere was this absurdity starker than when the media reported on the death of Yemen’s alleged al-Qaeda leader Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen, at the hands of a (classified) C.I.A. drone. The evidence against him, the panel of U.S officials who decided he was to be put on a “kill list,” and the legal memo “authorizing” his killing were all “Top Secret,” despite the extraordinary constitutional implications of extrajudicially killing an American citizen.

While our government says we should simply trust them to judge which American citizens should live and which should die they’re not willing to present the evidence they used to come to their decisions. We have no clue what evidence existed that nominated al-Awlaki for the kill list.

In a free country where the people are supposed to keep an eye on their government nothing can be accomplished if those very people are kept in the dark on what their government is doing. We are left to speculate on every little action they take and most people know that those concealing their intentions are usually up to no good.