Was PETA There Flying Their Drone?

British expat Phil B. emails from Middle Earth about an Easter event most of us could get behind, a 24-hour bunny shoot!

Guess what the Kiwis do for Easter …

Otago is the bottom right hand bit of the south Island.

Otago bunnies grow BIG (about the size of a hare but proportionately stockier) and are considered a pest. Rules are simple – a team of three, 24 hours, shoot as many as you can in the time. No limit on calibre of rifle, shotgun, method or what state the rabbit is in when it is handed in for counting (i.e. flattened by the Ute still counts).

Doesn’t make a blind bit of difference to the numbers but it pisses off the tree huggers and bunny lovers enormously.

It is usually reported on the 6 O’clock news as the highlight of the Easter weekend news with the scores and discussions about how it was better/worse than last year, record etc. Among firearms afficianados, the subject of rifles, calibres and loads for the ammunition are discussed as avidly as the chances of who’ll win the FA cup in Newcastle.

This year was a little disappointing:

Conditions favoured the rabbits this year at the Great Easter Bunny Hunt in Central Otago, with 10,424 bunnies bagged – the lowest tally for six years.

Teams of hunters from all over New Zealand converged on Alexandra for the 24-hour event, organised by the Alexandra Lions Club.

Their haul was displayed in the town’s Pioneer Park yesterday and the top team out of 36 – the Southern Hopper Stoppers – won the contest with 1035 rabbits.

This year’s tally was less than half last year’s total of 22,904 and event convenor Dave Ramsay said the odds were in the rabbits’ favour this year.

And look at the picture!


OMG! THE CHILDREN!

Well, here’s a couple who brought their kids with them:

The Great Easter Bunny Hunt can have a happy ending – just ask Mike and Kate Evans.
Mike proposed to Kate during the event 17 years ago, and now happily married and living in Arrowtown, the couple are back in the hunt this year in a team that includes son Nicholas and daughter Mikayla.

Mikayla (7) and Nicholas (11) would be acting as support crew, as “picker-uppers” and maybe doing some cooking or providing hot drinks for the hunters. The family was looking forward to spending some time together “away from any electronic equipment”, Mrs Evans said.

“You get to see countryside that you would never normally have access to and that’s a real privilege,” Mr Evans added.

“It’s a real good weekend, getting out in the fresh air and getting some exercise; spending time with your family. It’s not really about how many rabbits you get.”

Isn’t that nice?

Shorter John Derbyshire

John Derbyshire has been fired from National Review for writing a completely politically incorrect piece entitled The Talk:  Nonblack Version. Pretty strong stuff.

Short version:

There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery. Then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved.Jesse Jackson

Read this piece by Heather Mac Donald, too.

During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.  —  George Orwell

UPDATE: EXCELLENT discussion of the topic over at RobertaX’s place.

UPDATE II: Eric S. Raymond (and his commenters) have some interesting things to say as well. Take Eric’s quiz. At least one commenter here has failed it.

Principle #7, Mr. Cosby

Well, Bill Cosby has opined on the Trayvon Martin incident:

“We’ve got to get the gun out of the hands of people who are supposed to be on neighborhood watch,” said Mr. Cosby, whose remarks were the first he has made publicly about the case.

“Without a gun, I don’t see Mr. Zimmerman approaching Trayvon by himself,” Mr. Cosby explained. “The power-of-the-gun mentality had him unafraid to confront someone. Even police call for backup in similar situations.

“When you carry a gun, you mean to harm somebody, kill somebody,” he said.

Yes, that’s why the police carry them.

Let me refer once again to Sir Robert Peel’s Nine Principles of Modern Policing – specifically Principle #7:

Police, at all times, should maintain a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and the public are the police; the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.

Mr. Zimmerman was doing his duty as he saw it. And he couldn’t carry an entire cop around with him. IIRC, he did “call for backup.” There’s audio of the call, in fact.

Tam had it exactly correct:

An honest assessment would say that this is what we know:

  1. Zimmerman was out doing his neighborhood watch thing and saw Martin.
  2. He called 911 and followed Martin in his vehicle.
  3. When Martin walked someplace that Zimmerman couldn’t follow in his vehicle, he got out of his vehicle and followed on foot.
  4. ???
  5. In the process of getting his ass beaten, Zimmerman busts a cap in Martin.

The entire case turns on what happened in the ???, but don’t tell that to the media, the folks playing poker with a deck full of race cards, the victim disarmament crowd, or apparently the frickin’ President of the United States of America.

Or Bill Cosby.

UPDATE: On a related note, whom did you mean to harm, to kill, Mr. Cosby?

Slowly, Slowly

Quite a while back in the depths of 2004 the Geekwitha.45 wrote a post about the mechanisms of oppression in which he said:

We, who studied the shape and form of the machines of freedom and oppression, have looked around us, and are utterly dumbfounded by what we see.

We see first that the machinery of freedom and Liberty is badly broken. Parts that are supposed to govern and limit each other no longer do so with any reliability.

We examine the creaking and groaning structure, and note that critical timbers have been moved from one place to another, that some parts are entirely missing, and others are no longer recognizable under the wadded layers of spit and duct tape. Other, entirely new subsystems, foreign to the original design, have been added on, bolted at awkward angles.

We know the tools and mechanisms of oppression when we see them. We’ve studied them in depth, and their existence on our shores, in our times, offends us deeply. We can see the stirrings of malevolence, and we take stock of the damage they’ve caused over so much time.

Others pass by without a second look, with no alarm or hue and cry, as if they are blind, as if they don’t understand what they see before their very eyes. We want to shake them, to grasp their heads and turn their faces, shouting, “LOOK! Do you see what this thing is? Do you see how it might be put to use? Do you know what can happen if this thing becomes fully assembled and activated?”

Bill Whittle expands on this theme:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgrktRgjBXk?rel=0]

As I said in 2009’s Malice vs. Stupidity:

At some point it becomes immaterial whether the laws were due to incompetence or maliciousness. That point is when their implementation is indistinguishable from maliciousness. I submit that we’ve passed that point, and the only thing preventing even more massive public blowback is our general ignorance and our well-established general respect for the Rule of Law.

And I wonder how much longer that blowback will hold off.

Well, THAT Was Interesting

I tell people I spent twenty-one years complaining about consulting/specifying engineers, and then I became one.  And I was right.  After doing the consultant thing for four and a half years, I left my cloth-covered cubicle and went back to the industrial-supplier side.  No more eight-hour meetings, no more bid analysis reports, no more specification writing.  Instead, I get to do application, design, programming, startup.  Field work.  Fun stuff.

Well, I just did an upgrade to a system I installed eleven years ago.  Startup had to wait on the customer, since my upgrade occurred during a plant shutdown.  Startup was to occur Monday morning at about 10:00AM, so I got up at 4AM and pulled out of the driveway at 4:45 to be on site at 7.  They were waiting for me when I arrived.

We tested manual control before 9AM, and just had to wait for plant startup to put it in Auto.  Remember 10:00AM?  Uh, no.  They had some problems.  I went to lunch at 11:30.  They called me a little after Noon and said it looked like it was going to about 7PM.  I went back to the plant and they let me on a computer to do some work, but by 4PM it was obvious that 7PM was not going to happen.  I got a hotel room and waited for a call.  I tried to get some sleep, but failed at that.  I went to dinner about 7.  They called.

Midnight.

So I was on site at midnight.  We finally fired it up about 4:30AM.  I’d been up over 24 hours for the first time in a LONG time, but we weren’t done yet. Due to operations considerations, we still couldn’t put the system in Auto.  That didn’t happen until 7AM.  My hotel room sat empty all night.  I finally hit the sack at 9AM.  Two hours later, I got a call – the unit was working, but it was a little slow.  They told me I could sleep a little more, though.  I tried, but didn’t get much success, maybe another half-hour.  After a shower and shave, I was back on site at 1:30PM.

And they were down again.  We discussed the problem they’d experienced earlier, and I made some adjustments, but they had no idea when they’d be starting up again.  I was pretty confident in my changes, so I went home.  I pulled into my driveway 36 hours (and two and a half hours of sleep) after I’d left the day before. 

Ten hours of sleep later, I was back in my office, preparing for a class I was supposed to teach the next day.  I was also waiting to hear about my system upgrade.  I sent an inquiring email, and got to work on my class prep.  A response came soon:  everyone was very happy with the upgrade.  I didn’t need to go back for more adjustment.  I could continue my class prep.

Then the main office called.  There was a problem on another project.  Could I help?  What about my class prep?  This project was more important, the class could be rescheduled.  I pulled out about 10:30AM and headed for the new site.  Yes,there were problems.  Things did not go well.  I got home at 11PM with plans to head back to site at 5:30AM.   (It’s a 90 minute drive.) 

Back on site at 7AM, we flogged on the problem until late afternoon, but finally figured it out.  I pulled into my driveway this evening at 7:15PM.

I’ve put in 66 hours in four days this week.  I’m taking Friday off.

I left the cushy comfort of consulting engineering to do this for a living again.  I think I made the right choice.  Making stuff work is rewarding in ways that specification writing is not.