Probably No Blogging Until Tuesday

I know I said regular updates would return today but last night I received the unfortunate news that my grand father had died. The Funeral is on Monday and much has to be done before then. Likewise there is about a day of tasks for Tuesday set forth as well. Because of this updates on this site are going to most likely be completely stalled until Wednesday.

This is How it Should Be

Well my work trip has almost concluded. I’m sitting in Detroit for two hours awaiting my flight back to my secure bunker in Minnesota. My two co-workers, being experienced flyers, were able to get transferred to an earlier flight and are now gone leaving me here alone. Sounds like a rough first experience for flying huh? Well no. To make up for the fact they couldn’t get me on the earlier flight one of my co-workers handed me a pass to the Delta Sky Club lounge.

I’m sitting here enjoying free and unlimited wine, whiskey, food, and coffee. The seats are amazing and the place is unpopulated enough where I have a section to myself to do as I please. I must say if I could experience this every time I flew I’d fly a lot.

Anyways blogging should return to normal tomorrow. Now if you’ll excuse me my glass of Jim Beam is looking mighty low.

London’s Cameras not Working so Well

A the United Kingdom land of the oppressed and observed. There isn’t really anywhere you can go without being on some CCTV camera, especially in London. Their government is always spouting how critical all these camera are to the security of it’s citizens. So how critical are they? The metric I believe would be the number of crimes solved using these camera. In thatt case they are a miserable failure. From Bruce Schneier’s blog comes a story about how effective those cameras are. Well the rate isn’t so hot.

The cameras in London are responsible for helping solve one crime for every 1,000 cameras. Of course that means the cost to solve each crime is astronomical, in fact it’s about £20,000 per crime.

At that price you can almost hire one new constable for each camera. With the added benefit of each constable being a mobile unit that can respond to a crime, as opposed to a camera which can only passively watch, you also increase the number of jobs which will help unemployment numbers.

London really needs to look at their cost to benefit ratio on these cameras and come up with a better solution than spying on it’s citizens 24 hours a day every day.

Why Would You Need a Gun

Well if you’re living in Alaska the answer may be huge fucking bears. Via The Firearm Blog I found a good article from Alaska. Greg Bush took his dog for a walk one day. That day a bear whom appeared to be starving to death charged Mr. Bush and his dog. Well Mr. Bush had his Ruger Redhawk in .454 Casull and put the poor beast out of it’s misery and saving his dog and his own life.

Be it two legged predators or four legged you never know when you’ll be attacked. This is why I’m a proponent of always carrying a gun with you. Must like wearing a seat belt you don’t carry a gun only when you expect to have trouble you carry it so if there should be trouble you’ll have a fighting chance to walk away with your life.

It also shows you should bring the right tool for the job. Although here in Minnesota my .45 ACP is enough for almost any threat it’s not going to stop a brown bear unless I’m lucky. If you live in an area, like Alaska, with very large bears you want to bring something with a ton of power like a .454 Casull. You must know your threat before you can effectively defend against it.

Swine Flu Must be Killing Everybody

Another good story from the excellent No Agenda podcast. Remember how swine flu was the epidemic that was going to wipe out all life on Earth and possibly other planets? Due help people cope with this the United Kingdom setup swine flu call centers. People who have symptoms can call this hotline and be diagnosed over the phone. Should you have swine flu they will dispatch a “swine flu buddy” to pick up Tamiflu for you. Of course due to the extreme epidemic level of this disease they opened a ton of call centers.

Well apparently either swine flu has killed everybody or nobody is really getting it. See two call centers are being shut down since the employees are playing Monopoly and Trivial Pursuit due to lack of incoming calls. This is what hysteria gets you ladies and gentleman, overreaction to a non-issue.

Movement to Get Britain to Apologize for Persecution of Turing

If you’re in the computer science circle you will know the name Alan Turing. Mr. Turing is considered by many to be the father of computer science. His claims to fame are laying the ground work for computing in general, helping defeat the Nazi enigma cipher scheme, and coming up with a scientific method to determine if machines can think (call the Turing test).

But he was gay and back in the era of World War II that wasn’t considered acceptable. After helping win World War II this is how he was treated:

In 1952 Turing was prosecuted under the gross indecency act after admitting to a sexual relationship with a man. Two years later he killed himself.

Of course when there is prosecution there is punishment:

Alan Turing was given experimental chemical castration as a “treatment” and his security privileges were removed, meaning he could not continue work for the UK Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ).

Well there is now a movement to get the British government to apologize for their persecution. I don’t know if it will go through but I’d like to see those British royals have to apologize for treating a war hero this way.

And yes I call him a war hero even though he didn’t fight on the front lines. He was paramount in breaking the Nazi communication cipher scheme. Breaking this scheme ultimately helped us win the war since we were able to decipher and read their communications. An apology by the British government for persecuting somebody who helped saved their little island is the least they could bestow upon Mr. Turin.

Some People Are Pricks

I know I usually don’t post on the weekend but I thought I’d do it just this once (and probably again). I got back from four and a half amazing hours at the range. Several groups came and went with all but the last one letting me keep their spent brass. Needless to say I came home with a ton of 9mm and .40 brass.

But there was one older couple who showed up. This is where I got irritated. I was irritated because the husband was being a prick to his wife. See when talking to them they said they just got into shooting. The hearing protection my amazing girlfriend bought me have microphones, which means I could hear their conversation clear as day.

Well the conversation was more the husband belittling the wife because she didn’t know what to do with the firearms. I’m sorry but I get pissed when somebody belittles another just because that person being belittled is inexperienced. Well they had a Ruger MK. III that the extractor broke on. It broke while the wife was shooting it and the husband was having a hissy fit and getting mad at her for breaking it. Now she didn’t break it, it just broke. My guess being it was a new gun is that the extractor was faulty to start with. Then he belittled her for not hitting the target with their other pistol.

This kind of shit needs to stop. Not just in the shooting community but everywhere. But being this is a gun blog I’m going to say it needs to stop in the shooting community because new shooters aren’t going to enjoy a sport when they are getting tore into all the time. I did my part by walking over there and giving them some advice, but I didn’t tell the guy to knock it off because I didn’t want him to know my headset had a microphone and I could hear them. After showing the woman how to shoot she started doing better than the man there. That really upset him and that’s about the time they left.

Needless to say that guy was a total prick and I really wish he wasn’t at my range. Shooting should be enjoyable for all, not some reason to make your wife feel bad.

Another Bloomberg Posse Member Bites the Dust

Man good news abound today. From the NRA ILA I see Seattle’s anti-gun mayor Greg Nickels has lost in the primaries. That’s another Mayors Against Illegal Guns crony out of the picture. I have to say Bloomberg certainly picked a deceptive enough name for his organization but apparently common sense is winning out and gun abolishment isn’t a popular idea in this country.

Veteran Affairs Hospital Puts up to 11,000 Veterans at Risk of Contracting HIV

Wow this is a world class fuck up of massive proportions. And apparently nobody is reporting on it. Found via the excellent No Agenda podcast. Granted I looked for a more “credible” news source than the one they posted because if I didn’t people would scream bullshit. So here it is via the Washington Post (not at all credible but many think it is).

What happened is one of the hospitals wasn’t properly sterilizing anal probes colonoscopy scopes after use. Instead they only sterilized them at the end of each day and more or less rinsed them off between uses. So far the damage is as follows:

As of Aug. 3, eight of those patients have tested positive for HIV, 12 for hepatitis B and 37 for hepatitis C, according to VA.

A veteran of the Army, Juan Rivera, is rightfully suing after being tested positive for HIV. He was prompted to get tested when his father found out that the hospital wasn’t properly sterilizing the scopes. This sums up the problem:

“This is just a question of neglect and sloppiness,” Leesfield said. “They just run people through like a mill.”

This better end up being a case of criminal neglect as well on the part of the doctors (the ones trained on the equipment and hence were the ones told the scopes must be sterilized after each use) performing the tests. Seriously you’re sticking a probe up a person’s ass. At what point do you think it’s OK not to sterilize it after every use? Shit isn’t sterile like urine, in fact it’s the exact opposite.

Our soldiers put their lives on the line to defend this country. They survived their tours of services only to end up being exposed to diseases that there are no cures for and are always fatal. Further the fact this story isn’t on the front page of every news site is rather alarming. I guess we have bigger stories involving dead people.