Category: Uncategorized

This is Your Mind On Drugs

KevinLeave a comment

This is Part II. Part I was last year.

Pimp my shooter: The amazing bling guns that belong to Mexico’s drug lords

Mexican soldiers have seized an arsenal of gold-plated and diamond-encrusted weapons believed to belong to the Valencia gang, allies of the powerful Sinaloa drug cartel and, it seems, fans of hip-hip excess.

Showing just how flamboyant gang members spend much of their ill-gotten wealth, pictures show how most of the 31 ‘pimped’ pistols found in a raid on a home in western Mexico had gold or silver-plated grips or were glittered with diamonds.

Three of the assault rifles are almost entirely gold-plated and there was even a silencer plated with gold. One particularly image-conscious gangster has made his pistol unique by adding rows of gaudy red and green jewels and a Ferrari logo.

I won’t fry your retinas with pictures this time. It’s more of the same, though possibly some are even worse.

Hat-tip to Phil B., our intrepid reader from New Zealand. Thanks, Phil. I think.

And Then There Were Forty-Nine

KevinLeave a comment

Shortly after I started TSM I wrote about the American Civil Liberties Union and its position on the Second Amendment in The ACLU Hasn’t Changed Its Tune. President Nadine Strossen was clear on it back in 2003:

The plain language of the Second Amendment in no way, shape, or form, can be construed, I think, as giving an absolute right to unregulated gun ownership. It says, “A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right to bear arms shall not be infringed.” Certainly, when you have the notion of “well-regulated” right in the constitutional language itself, it seems to defy any argument that regulation is inconsistent with the amendment.

Putting all that aside, I don’t want to dwell on constitutional analysis, because our view has never been that civil liberties are necessarily coextensive with constitutional rights. Conversely, I guess the fact that something is mentioned in the Constitution doesn’t necessarily mean that it is a fundamental civil liberty.

Something mentioned in the Constitution? It’s the second item in the BILL OF RIGHTS, Nadine!

And she’s still President.

But now there’s been a break. Via Dave Hardy we learn:

Nevada ACLU supports an individual’s right to bear arms

And, one would hope, to keep them.

Everyone loves guns in Nevada. Ducks Unlimited, the National Rifle Association, Republicans, the American Civil Liberties Union, the …

Wait. The ACLU?

The Nevada ACLU has declared its support for an individual’s right to bear arms, apparently making it the first state affiliate in the nation to buck the national organization’s position on the Second Amendment.

The state board of directors reached the decision this month after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Second Amendment protects the rights of individuals to own handguns.

Said Supreme Court ruling coming in June of 2008. You don’t want to move too fast, ladies and gentlemen. You might suffer whiplash! I take it back. Justin Buist in comments notes that the Nevada ACLU did indeed change their position almost immediately after the Heller decision, and the piece linked is dated July, 2008, not 2010. In other words, this is old news.

New to me (and apparently Dave), but old nonetheless.

Kudos, ladies and gentlemen, for your swift action. Too bad your move apparently wasn’t followed by any of your sister organizations.

“The Nevada ACLU respects the individual’s right to bear arms subject to constitutionally permissible regulations,” a statement on the organization’s Web site said. “The ACLU of Nevada will defend this right as it defends other constitutional rights.”

Will it also defend the right to keep? And does this mean the ACLU will be filing suit against North Las Vegas soon? (Apparently not.)

“This was the consensus,” said Allen Lichtenstein, general counsel for ACLU of Nevada. “There really wasn’t a lot of dissent.”

One more reason for Sarah and Kristin and Josh and Paul to be Sad Pandas. (Can we rub their noses in it?)

But the state affiliate’s position puts it at odds with the national organization.

I’ll say.

There’s more to the story, but it’s interesting to see a split in that organization over this topic at this time.

We’re (still!) winning.

WTF? Seriously, WTFF?!?!?

KevinLeave a comment

Via email, from a reader who says – “I am a gamer, but I was also a boy scout. I had some kind of gut reaction to this story, but no way to describe it. I am desperate to know what you think of it though.”

Video Games

Requirements

Tiger Cubs, Cub Scouts, and Webelos Scouts may complete requirements in a family, den, pack, school, or community environment. Tiger Cubs must work with their parents or adult partners. Parents and partners do not earn loops or pins.

Belt Loop

Complete these three requirements:

1. Explain why it is important to have a rating system for video games. Check your video games to be sure they are right for your age.
2. With an adult, create a schedule for you to do things that includes your chores, homework, and video gaming. Do your best to follow this schedule.
3. Learn to play a new video game that is approved by your parent, guardian, or teacher.

Academics Pin

Earn the Video Games belt loop and complete five of the following requirements:

1. With your parents, create a plan to buy a video game that is right for your age group.
2. Compare two game systems (for example, Microsoft Xbox, Sony PlayStation, Nintendo Wii, and so on). Explain some of the differences between the two. List good reasons to purchase or use a game system.
3. Play a video game with family members in a family tournament.
4. Teach an adult or a friend how to play a video game.
5. List at least five tips that would help someone who was learning how to play your favorite video game.
6. Play an appropriate video game with a friend for one hour.
7. Play a video game that will help you practice your math, spelling, or another skill that helps you in your schoolwork.
8. Choose a game you might like to purchase. Compare the price for this game at three different stores. Decide which store has the best deal. In your decision, be sure to consider things like the store return policy and manufacturer’s warranty.
9. With an adult’s supervision, install a gaming system.

The link my reader sent went to a PC Magazine article that’s apparently not available at the time of this writing, but here’s more coverage of the (not fake!) story.

“Install a gaming system”??? Most kids today can do that in their sleep. I thought Scouting was about getting outside. You know, the resolution and the refresh rate in the real world is, like, totally AWESOME!

(*sigh*)

And I just wrote that nice bit about Tyler Rico, too.

Hope for the Future

KevinLeave a comment

Last night I attended the 2010 annual meeting and banquet for the Arizona State Rifle and Pistol Association, which I joined last year at the annual NRA convention. The keynote speaker was Alan Gottlieb, who gave an interesting speech on the history of the Second Amendment Foundation and their history of fighting for the restoration of the Second Amendment through the courts. The SAF is the group behind the D.C. v Heller victory, and the McDonald v Chicago suit that was filed 15 minutes after the Heller decision was handed down, and was heard in the Supreme Court in March.

At a guess, I’d say about 120 people attended the meeting and dinner, among which were several state and federal politicians. The governor backed out, but among the attendees was J.D. Hayworth who is running for John McCain’s senate seat. I wish him a lot of luck. It’s past time for McCain to go. John McCain, needless to say, wasn’t present.

I sat at the table purchased by the Tucson Rifle Club, where I was introduced to someone special: Tyler Rico. Tyler is, I believe, just sixteen years old. He shot his first High-Power match at the age of eleven. He has won three Junior National High-Power titles, and in February at the Boulder Rifle and Pistol Club in Boulder CO, he beat the entire field with a 791-26X to take the Open class. He shoots for Team Remington and Lapua.

The kid’s been shooting since he was five. He wants to get a degree in aeronautical engineering, and shoot for the Army Marksmanship Unit. After all, he’s already competed against all of them, and beaten them.

It was a very interesting evening, all around.

May Victims of Communism Day

KevinLeave a comment

Today is the second annual Victims of Communism Day, a day to remember the people murdered by their own governments in their quest to achieve a “worker’s paradise” where everyone is equal, where “to each according to his needs, from each according to his abilities” is the beautiful dream lie. R.J. Rummel, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Hawaii, has calculated that the total number of victims of Communism – that is, the domestic victims of their own governments – in the USSR, China, Vietnam, North Korea and Cambodia is 98.4 million people. For all Communist governments during the 20th Century, he puts the estimate at approximately 110 million. And this wasn’t in warfare against other nations, this was what these governments did to their own people – “breaking eggs” to make their utopian omlette.

Six million Jews were murdered during the Holocaust, and another six million people the Nazis decided were “undesirable” went with them. “Never again” is the motto of the modern Jew, and many others just as dedicated. But “again and again and again” seems to be the rebuke of history.

The Communists are hardly alone in these crimes. Rummel estimates that the total number of people murdered by their own governments during the 20th Century is on the close order of 262 million, but the single biggest chunk of that truly frightening number is directly due to one pernicious idea: That we can make people better.

Why do I own guns? For a number of reasons, but one of them is this:

And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? — Alexandr Solzhenitzyn, The Gulag Archipelago

—

The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed – where the government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees. However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once. — Judge Alex Kozinski, dissenting, Silveira v. Lockyer, denial to re-hear en banc, 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, 2003.

Decisions, Decisions . . .

KevinLeave a comment

The Smallest Minority began almost seven years ago – May 14, 2003. I started on Blogspot because, well, it was there, it was free, and it was easy. Shortly afterward, I picked Haloscan to provide comment service because Blogspot didn’t offer one, and the previous service I had selected sucked wind. Again, Haloscan was there, was free, and was easy. Then I picked Imagestation as a photoserver, but that didn’t work out too well, so I eventually switched to Photobucket. Again, at the time Blogspot didn’t offer the service.

As time went on, I elected to pay a small amount annually to improve the comments (longer comments allowed, as some of my readers are nearly as long-winded as I am) and for sufficient bandwidth with Photobucket to support the traffic I was drawing. Overall, I think this blog costs me something like $50 a year, tops.

Over the years, Blogspot has gotten to be more reliable and have more functions. It now offers commenting and has a photoserver – and it’s still free. Photobucket works very well.

But commenting? Not so much.

In December, Haloscan transitioned to Echo. I had very little choice other than to go along, as Haloscan’s archives exported in a format that does not easily transfer to any other system I’ve found, and at the time I had nearly 40,000 comments in the archives.

Trust me, those comments are every bit as valuable to me as the posts they are linked to.

So in December the Great Migration began, and lo, the comments transferred successfully!

But if I export my Echo comments now, A) the export doesn’t work properly, and B) the comments that export now go only back to December, 2009. Further, Echo seems to suck in the extreme. I have had NUMEROUS comments (as noted below) on the general suckitude of Echo, and now one entire comment thread doesn’t work, or at least it only works in Internet Exploder. I, as the owner of the blog, cannot access those comments from Echo’s moderation page. They will not load. And Echo doesn’t really have site support.

So yes, Echo SUCKS.

And also, since January, Blogger now paginates all of its blogs. I used to archive my blog monthly. If you called up say, April 2005, you got every post for that month on one page. Now you get about the last 20 for that month. Want to see what I wrote on April 1? You’re SOL. So I have to switch my archiving to weekly. It seems a minor issue, but I back up my blog on my home computer. Doing it weekly is a PITA.

So here we are. People have been telling me (literally) for years to get off of Blogspot. But there are dozens of blogs out there linking to right here. There are posts I have written still drawing significant traffic from those other blogs. I don’t want those links broken. I very much want my comments to WORK, but also I want them to come along with me if I move. A lot of my posts link to earlier posts of my own, and I want THOSE links to work.

I’m stuck between the proverbial rock and a hard place.

At this point, I don’t have much of a reason to leave Blogger, but every reason to want to dump Echo. Any suggestions? (Assuming Echo will work?)

It’s Official: Echo SUCKS

KevinLeave a comment

I’ve received numerous comments and several emails concerning the general suckitude of the Echo comment system. As one put it, “If you told me I’d be missing Haloscan . . .”

Now one entire comment thread, the one to this post, refuses to load for most people. I am unable to access the “moderation” function to look at and/or modify ANY comments at the present time. I tried to do an export of all comments (it’s supposed to go to an XML file). The system tells me it’s finished with the export, and the file is 12Mb, but when I download it, it’s 48Mb and won’t open.

I really don’t want to go to the hassle of moving to another comment system. There are about 40,000 comments on this blog from the last seven years, and I don’t want to lose them. I’ve saved all of them up to December, 2009 when I was forced to “upgrade” to Echo, but they’re not in a format that is exportable to anything else commercially available.

This SUCKS.

UPDATE:

Now this is fascinating. Under Firefox I can get into Echo’s moderation function, but whole pages of comments will not load. Under IE 8 Echo recognizes me when I log in, but tells me that I don’t manage any sites, nor will it let me add this site to those I manage. As far as Echo’s concerned, under IE 8, TSM doesn’t exist. Yet I can see the comment thread to the education post. I can even click on the “admin” button and log in. It just won’t give me actual, you know, administration privileges. WTF??

Quote of the Day – Law Enforcement Edition

KevinLeave a comment

Polite, efficient and responsive policing is a luxury that can only be afforded by states not drowning in politically motivated entitlement spending. The rest of the world gets by with surly, low paid constables and paper-checkers who exist to serve the needs of the state and not the citizenry, and sooner rather than later, we will find out what that’s like here. – Papa Delta Bravo, What Civil Collapse Looks Like

This is a good place to repost Sir Robert Peel’s Nine Principles of Modern Policing from all the way back in the nineteenth century:

1. The basic mission for which the police exist is to prevent crime and disorder.

2. The ability of the police to perform their duties is dependent upon public approval of police actions.

3. Police must secure the willing co-operation of the public in voluntary observance of the law to be able to secure and maintain the respect of the public.

4. The degree of co-operation of the public that can be secured diminishes proportionately to the necessity of the use of physical force.

5. Police seek and preserve public favour not by catering to public opinion but by constantly demonstrating absolute impartial service to the law.

6. Police use physical force to the extent necessary to secure observance of the law or to restore order only when the exercise of persuasion, advice and warning is found to be insufficient.

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.

8. Police should always direct their action strictly towards their functions and never appear to usurp the powers of the judiciary.

9. The test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with it.

Looks like Philadelphia is failing #9.

And Then There Were Eight

KevinLeave a comment

Josh Sugarmann, Kristin Rand, Petey Hamm, Paul Helmke, Sarah Brady et al. must be especially sad pandas about now. 2010 is barely a third of the way done, and things have only gone from bad to worse for them.

2009 showed record sales for guns and ammunition. Arizona is about to become the third state with no requirement for a permit to legally carry a concealed weapon, and Iowa’s governor has just signed a bill to make that state “Shall Issue” effective January 1, 2011, leaving only eight “may issue” and two “no issue” states in the Union.

Once again, I LOVE this graphic:

Look at the progress that’s been made since 1986, and homicide rates nationwide continue to trend down. Yet in “gun-free” Chicago, the murder capital of Illinois by a large margin, 113 people have been murdered as of two days ago, Chicago lawmakers think that the way to fix things is to bring in the National Guard to stop the violence, and the mayor wants to use the World Court to sue gun manufacturers out of existence.

Mayor Daley said:

This is all about guns, and that’s why the crusade is on.

The evidence is (literally!) all around them that the problem is not guns, but the philosophy CANNOT be WRONG! It just hasn’t been implemented correctly! They must do it again, only HARDER!

And we await the outcome of McDonald v. Chicago . . .