Resistance Is Futile!

Here's what happens when the congress attempts to take back the power is so spinelessly abdicated to the ATF, the FCC, the EPA, etc: Twenty-one House Republicans sent a letter to FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler vowing to push a resolution of disapproval under the Congressional Review Act—which only needs a simple majority in both houses—to nullify the agency's actions and prevent any future reliance on Title II of the Communications Act. The president can still veto such a resolution.

http://www.nationaljournal.com/tech/the-republican-party-is-divided-on-net-neutrality-20150226 

The above link applies to the Net neutrality ruling, but the  circumstance applies to the ATF declaration that M855 ammo is armor piercing or the EPA decision that it's entitled to regulate CO2, or the IRS decision to regulate political dissent.

Once you let your freedom go, it will NOT be willingly given back.

Under The Wire

The congress, in an effort to insure that Republicans are not blamed for the Dems refusal to pass the original bill, has voted to fund the DHS for 1 week while the bickering goes on.

The original bill included language that specifically prohibited the DHS from handing out free work permits to anyone caught here illegally. The permits have been printed up and are ready for distribution so this amendment was a just-in-time item. The Dems have been filibustering the bill with this amendment for the last 3 weeks or so, and the press is gleefully announcing that the DHS would be effectively abolished as a result of Republican partisanship.

The interim bill as passed, gives the administration 1 week to hand out as many work permits as they possibly can which I'm guessing would be a lot. I am visualizing air drops similar to the efforts in Viet-Nam to encourage the VC to surrender by dropping Chieu-Hoi leaflets which guaranteed safe passage to anyone holding one. Word on the ground was that these were used to give tired fighters a 2-week R&R in town after which they would slip back out into the country and resume fighting.

In this case the work permit would be used to avoid deportation, and make getting a drivers license and SS card easier. Voter registration goes along with that thanks to Motor Voter laws. This is the English model which is working so well in Jolly Olde England where Labor imports large numbers of Muslims from north Africa who go on welfare and vote Labor reliably.

Making a point to the public that these low-skilled illegals are taking the jobs that would otherwise go to low-skilled Americans, while it probably would help the Republicans, would be denounced as racist by the media and so won't happen.

Feeding the Scavengers

Drop 1 bird per minute onto the ground would make quite a buffet for scavengers although the methodology would also drop day-flying scavengers like the California Condor. I imagine that if no one cleans the place up, the night-flying birds must make out very well indeed.

Battlespace Preparation

This might be useful to pass along to conservative candidates. If a reporter asks a gotcha question, he or she should always be ready to ask the reporter to "clarify" the Dem position first. This opens the door to the next question.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/414519/some-uncomfortable-questions-democratic-candidates-mona-charen

One should always regard the reporter as an agent of the Dem party with very few exceptions.

IRS Investigation

This looks promising. Investigators have located some 424 more e-mail backup tapes in addition to the 740-some already found after the head of IRS assured congress that all the evidence had been irretrievably destroyed as part of a routine replacement of a damaged computer. And cell phone.And backup server. And backup tape recorder.

Investigators have already scoured 744 backup tapes and gleaned 32,774 unique emails, but just two weeks ago they found an additional 424 tapes that could contain even more Lerner emails, Deputy Inspector General Timothy P. Camus told the House Oversight Committee in a rare late-night hearing meant to look into the status of the investigation.
“There is potential criminal activity,” Mr. Camus said.

"Criminal activity"?

Ya think? Nixon was run out of town for far less than this. Just remember, Chicago rules: If you own the cop (Just-us Dept) you won't get arrested, and if you own the judge (Federal courts) you won't get convicted.

Raising Your Children Right

Sometimes it's difficult to tell if your kids actually learned anything from all the hard-won advice you give them. I suppose it's necessary for everyone to get out there and make their own mistakes and all you can do is hope they don't make any big ones. Sometimes though, evidence surfaces early:

The mall ninja outfit isn't really necessary but some people just have to go the uber-tactical route..

There Are No Radical Muslims

A Sharia lawyer assures us since...

…The second thing is, this is not “extremism,” this is “fundamentalism.” People who believe in [the] Koran understand it and practice it and take it serious.

The fundamentalist wants to cut off your head. The moderates buy him a new knife and tell you not to worry about him.

Government Approved!

In order to save some overworked civil servant a lot of tedious work, reading this blog and looking for anything that might require a visit from black-clad ninjas from the FCC, I hereby certify that this blog contains nothing that might be construed as offensive to anybody for any reason.

My regular readers will back me up on that. Except for the troll who obviously harbors ill will to people who share my taste in beer and can't be trusted.

The Future Of Transportation - Mass

Mass transit we are told is the future of transportation. The problem is that you can only go where it goes. 

Jennine Jeffries did the math a few months ago and was staring at almost $380 a month in bus passes for her and her three children. "Who's got that money?" said the 41-year-old single mother. "I'd rather put that toward insurance and gas. Besides, with a car, it's a 40-minute commute to work rather than two hours."

But never fear, some famous philosopher whose name I can't now recall told us that it's not the destination that matters, but the journey. RTD makes sure you spend more time on the journey than you would at the destination.

Want to avoid winding up in the graveyard as long as possible? Hold your funeral procession on the RTD.

Science

Scientists continue to speculate as to the cause of the flashing reflected light coming from Ceres, the not-quite-a-planet out in the asteroid belt.

Right there in the middle of the crater, you see the sun reflecting off the rear windscreen of the Quixilub spacecraft sent here to conquer and colonize the earth.

Let this be a warning: Never approach an unexplored solar system along the plane of the ecliptic. Make a polar approach, there's fewer rocks.

Guns - History

From a newsletter I get:

Today in History: In 1836, inventor Samuel Colt patented his revolver. 

And everyone became a bit more equal. 

Guns - Less Fun

The outdoor IDPA match scheduled for this Saturday has been cancelled.

Can't imagine why they'd do that.

Oh well if you want to hang out and chew the fat, I'll be at the Tanner Gun Show at the CSSA table Sunday morning. You can tell me how deep the snow is outside. Could be worse. Could be Boston.

Shaving

I don't like to shave which is why I raised a bit of a beard. Then I discovered that to keep the beard looking halfway decent I need to do a certain amount of edge work with the razor. I decided to give the Harrys razor a try as it's reasonably priced and comes with shaving cream, 2 spare blades, and a micro-dollop of after-shave.

The set arrived today and I just now found it tucked discreetly behind the front statuary. The entire package has cooled to the same temperature as the great outdoors (15F) so it will likely be tomorrow before I will actually let any of it touch my face.

Hope the wife remembers my blood type is A-.

Class Will Show

That fine fellow on the left is Scott Walker. Yeah, I should have put him on the right. So sue me.

Murphys Law

We all know the basic tenant known as Murphy's Law which states that anything that can go wrong, will. There are lots of corollaries. For example if something is going to break, it will do so at the most inopportune moment possible. The ABS module in my car has failed twice on me, both times just as the light turned green in the #1 lane of a crowded 55mph parkway during rush hour leaving me with nothing but a fast idle and a lot of irate people behind me.

Likewise after a relatively mild winter, we are now looking at about a foot of snow Global Warming this weekend so my faithful snow blower decides that now is the time to allow the starter rope to break. If this were a lawnmower, repair would be trivially simple. Since it's a blower, the puller is well and truly buried and requires the blower be pretty much reduced to a pile of parts before this part becomes available.

Oh well, it was 15 years old when it was given to me by a fellow who was moving to Florida, and that was about 20 years ago so I guess I'm entitled to a new one. The new one is about 15 years old and features an electric starter. Interestingly someone was thinking when they did this and the starter is 120VAC with a place to insert your extension cord to fire the beast up. Pull the plug and go. Once warmed up it starts on one pull of the rope which should make for an impressively long life on that part. All this and no batteries.

The drawback to this particular arrangement is that it adds to the cost and complexity of the thing. I'm surprised that most gas-powered stuff doesn't come with a port where you insert the rubber-tipped  doohickey on your 3/8" drill and use that to spin up a recalcitrant mower or blower. I suppose it's because someone would stick his finger in there to see if it was still turning after the engine started.

Revisionist History

Addressing Egyptians in Cairo in 2009, the newly-minted president said:

"I also know that Islam has always been a part of America’s story,”

He goes on to extoll the wonderful contributions Muslims have made to America, conveniently stopping before mentioning the 2001 efforts at urban renewal in Manhattan. He also leaves out the early years when George III informed the Muslims in the Barbary States that the protection money England had been paying them would be reduced as it no longer covered the upstarts in the American colonies.

According to a Heritage Foundation paper, shortly after America's founding, the United States "was dragged into the affairs of the Islamic world by an escalating series of unprovoked attacks on Americans by Muslim pirates, the terrorists of the era," who looted American ships and captured American sailors, holding them for ransom or selling them as slaves.

The paper notes that America's struggle with Muslim pirates from the Barbary States (modern-day Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya) began soon after the 13 colonies declared their independence from Britain in 1776 and continued for roughly four decades.

Islam has been at war with the entire world since its founding. It has lasted as long as it has because the world seems to have no stomach for defeating it.

Poly Sci 101

From the #2 person at the state department, world reknown Harf-wit Marie Harf sez:

1. "We can't kill our way out of this war."

  Note to Ms Harf: In the past, this technique has proven to be quite effective. Multiple examples exist of one side killing the other until few or none of their former enemies were left. Recidivism among the survivors has been historically low.

2.“We cannot kill every terrorist around the world, nor should we try,”

   Note: If you kill enough of them, the rest will get the idea that perhaps theirs is an unproductive line of work. Case in point might be the Somali pirates. Heard from them lately?

Update: Sen Tom Cotton agrees with me.

QOTD - Brian Williams

Found in the WSJ Online:

“Execute Brian Williams. The only logical solution to the frenzied reaction to the NBC news anchor’s public admission of a mistake is for him to be tarred, feathered, dragged through the streets of New York to Times Square, and stoned to death.”—Piers Morgan, Daily Mail (London), Feb. 9

Sounds like a winner. Come on back Piers, and we'll make it a twofer.

Carry That Bill,

Raise that bail,
Get a big magazine
and you go to jail.

To paraphrase the old song. It's was bad enough watching Rhonda Fields carry Michael Bloombergs water bill 2 years ago but his latest position just takes the cake.

Bloomberg claimed that 95 percent of murders fall into a specific category: male, minority and between the ages of 15 and 25. Cities need to get guns out of this group’s hands and keep them alive, he said.

Most "gun control" laws passed in this country were aimed pretty specifically at minorities in general and blacks specifically. Keeping a group in untermench status is never easy and it becomes impossible if they're armed.

Fortunately for Mr. Bloomberg, he has a loyal servant in Rhonda Fields.The voters in her district should be asking themselves just who she's working for, them or Ol' Massa?

Speech Codes

Publicola is noting that Rep Rhonda Fields (D-Nowhere) has carried through the House a bill to banish cyber bullying. Think about that for a second. Cyber bullying means saying something electronically that someone, somewhere finds offensive.

Now go read the First Amendment. Better yet, read the free speech clause in our own state constitution.

Publicola mocks Rep Fields by impugning her intellect, her comprehension skills and her sartorial abilities. I've seen her in action. Publicola is being kind. I witnessed this woman carrying the infamous magazine limitations bill in front of the most powerful committee in the Senate and 500+ angry constituents* unable to find or even remember the existence of one paragraph in a bill that at the time ran only 2 pages, double spaced and single sided with $85M/year in Colorado jobs at stake. It was painfully obvious that she hadn't read the thing prior to the hearing and her floundering efforts to find the paragraph in question raised doubts about her actual literacy.

That said, we'll probably both be candidates for interment in the secret underground prison under DIA** if this thing passes. Ping your Senator.

*The actual count of angry constituents present that day was probably closer to 2000 but the Supreme Court Room can only hold so many.

**One of the more elaborate conspiracy theories out there. Google it yourself.

Draw the Prophet

AFDI, Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer are holding a "draw the Prophet" contest with a fairly rich first prize. I thought this was a fine idea and I still do. There are rules to this contest that forbid anything you couldn't publish in a family blog, and demand that all entries be signed by the author. This pretty much eliminates my potential entry which would require any fundamentalist Muslim seeing it to rip out his own eyeballs, after beheading me of course.

Wanting to preserve my life is apparently Islamophobic, so no entry from Billll.

Looking Forward

The Tea Party has asked me what I think the congress should do in its first session post-Obama. I am not qualified to be President, but then again, neither is the guy warming the big chair in Washington right now so here's what I'd look for:

1. Social Security reform/Phaseout. See Chilean model. This amounts to changing the SS account to a universal self-managed 401k which everyone would be required to contribute to just like Social Security. This can be phased in so I don't get accused of tossing Grandma out into the street by making it completely replace SS for the under 30 age group. allowing the 30-50 age group to keep what they have but add the 401 account, and leaving the 50+ group alone.

2. Repeal of Obamacare and NO "replacement". When you have a cancer removed you don't ask the doctor what he's going to replace it with.

3. A secure borders act which would fund better southern border security (fence) and penalize hiring illegal aliens. If it wasn't lucrative to hire them, they wouldn't be getting U.S. citizens jobs. Also no drivers licenses or SS cards for illegals. No papers, no bennies, period. Perhaps the discussion we should be having should revolve around why there seems to be no opportunity in their home country.

4. Reduce the Education department to a standards committee only and let the state and local education bureaucracies figure out how to meet the standards. Standards must get Congressional approval before being released. This job could be handled by a committee of no more than 50 people.

5. Limit the EPA to environmental issues. Flogging the Global Warming hoax is NOT one of them so forbid them from regulating CO2 as it is NOT a pollutant.  Limiting liability of nuclear power plants to the point that some actually get built would help as well.

6. Repeal the GCA 68 in its entirety.

7. Minimum Voter ID standards. This would probably have to be a suggestion as voting standards are set by the individual states.

8. Some sort of economic development act. This would probably involve mostly repealing the last few major regulations. Capitalism makes more people richer faster than anything else that's ever been tried. Prosperity happens when the government takes its foot off the neck of the body politic.

Not much, but it's a start.

Last SOTU

So justice Ginzberg admitted that she had had perhaps just a smidgen too much in preparation for the big event:

I for one certainly won't hold that against her. Next time, just stay home and don't even watch it on TV. It's what I did. No one cares what the blowhard-in-chief has to say anyway.

Gun Law - Proposed

Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) has introduced legislation that would require all states to recognize every other states concealed carry permits, the same as every state recognizes your drivers license.

Understandably this has gotten the more restrictive states in a bit of an uproar. I mean what if someone with a state-issued permit from Vermont* were to visit a more restrictive place like Chicago? Violence might result!

My big worry is that the bill might establish minimum requirements for a CCW permit if it is to be universally recognized and those would be the most restrictive requirements in force. Thus if your Shall Issue permit from anywhere is to be recognized in D.C. you would need to have completed 2 weeks of training or whatever D.C. demands. To be recognized in Cali, you'd have to be a major donor to the campaign of at least one Sheriff.

The bill is a good idea. Write your congress animal and encourage him or her to support this.  Just gotta watch the details.

*Yes, Vermont is a constitutional carry state. They also issue paper permits in case you plan on traveling.

The Future Of Transportation - Mine

Pretentious British Car decided to start throwing codes again out of the clear blue sky it informs me that there is a stability control failure, a problem with the ABS, and the engine has been switched to "Failsafe Mode"

As I had just stepped on the gas from a dead stop the car seemed in no danger of spinning out or rolling over even without "stability control", and the brakes work just fine on the dry pavement. Failsafe mode means the engine runs, but is limited to 1400 rpm and nothing you do with the throttle has any effect at all. This makes for slow travel which is especially annoying when this happens in the #1 lane of a 55mph parkway.

The fix seems to be to remove the ABS electronic module and resolder a couple of connections which the forum assures me can be done in only an hour or two, half of which is waiting for glue to dry. I've looked over the module in question and it's pretty clear to me that the factory never expected it to need working on. Actually a lot of the car is like that.

My other "car" is a Dodge Dakota. 23 years old, 220,000 miles and all original except for the fuel pump. Very unexciting. Turn the key and it starts, put it in gear and it goes. The longer I own a Jag, the more I come to appreciate the Dodge.

Global Warming Forum Cancelled

On account of 73" of snow in the last 17 days.

“Such events are terribly inconvenient for the global warming narrative,” says this article from CFact.org.

Yeah, things are tough all over.

Business

A company which shall remain nameless is expanding overseas. To that end they're building a new building and installing all new equipment there. They're also hiring the locals. Don't worry, the output is destined for overseas.

They had the new plant engineer and manager of Quality here to show them the ropes and give them a chance to polish their English a bit. They learn rapidly although it was necessary to explain that "What up, homie?" is not the proper business formal form of address above a certain level in the corporate food chain.

That having been done, everybody found the effort quite entertaining. It's good to see our foreign colleagues picking up on American culture. They should go far.

Humor Break

Because we all need a break from the humorlessness of daily existance.


Or maybe it's just because we're dealing with the wrong people. Folk like that need to be laughed at more often. It's entertaining to watch them get their knickers in a knot when we do.

Found at Social Justice Warriors.

Examining The Issues

James Willis at the Conservative Underground is producing a series of short articles on the big issues the candidates and the media will be lying about discussing for the next 2 years which bear looking at. So far he has 4 out covering abortion, taxes, amnesty, and gun rights.

These are good articles with firmly stated opinion and no equivocation and so far he's batting .500 with me. On the abortion issue he's pretty much an absolutist where I'm not. It's his tax position where we part company.

I'm right with him in opposing the "progressive" tax system we have now which blatantly punishes success and rewards sloth. When the system can be modified and gamed with little effort to benefit some group favored by the government for whatever reason, you can bet that this feature will be abused to the maximum extent possible. The IRS scandal currently being swept under the rug my the media is a great example but is far from the only abuse being foisted upon us.

If you work for the federal government in D.C., paying taxes is looking to be distinctly optional, and if you get a big government grant to do something favored by the government, and don't forget to include a generous donation to the party in power, you can declare bankruptcy after awarding top management bonuses and golden parachutes that would embarrass Don Trump.

Mr. Willis suggests that the imposition of a "FairTax" would allow the effective abolition of the IRS with all its attendant abuses and make everyone much happier. I doubt that. Whenever you hear the word "fair" from a politician, you should place one hand over your wallet and the other on the butt of your gun because this is not far removed from an armed robbery. If you want an example, just look to Europe where it's called a VAT (Value Added Tax). When something is produced, at each step the value added to the product is taxed at rates varying from 10 to 25%. Except of course if the product is not sold to an end user. Then it's passed on down. The VAT rate varies depending on how the government values the votes of the end users with food being taxed more lightly than say autos.

This adjustability give both elected officials and revenue agents something to do that justifies both the reelection of the pols, and the steady expansion of the bureaucracy.

Even though there is no system of taxation that can't be gamed to the benefit of the political class and their enablers, I personally prefer the flat tax method which has been adopted by several Eastern European countries and has been working out to their benefit noticeably better than the VAT systems in use in Western Europe.

Gun Theater

The way politics works is that when a bill in one house has no chance of passage in the other, opponents of the bill in the first house can support it at no cost.

Case in point is SB 175 which would repeal the standard capacity magazine ban here. A similar bill was put forward in the Dem controlled house, and was promptly shuffled off to he kill committee by the very liberal house speaker. As Republicans control the Senate, the bill will not only pass, it will do so with the support of some Dems who represent uncomfortably purple districts. This is allowed because the Dem senate leadership knows what will happen to the bill once it reaches the House.

Split legislatures allow everybody to pretend to be bipartisan while actually doing nothing.

Who's Afraid

Gun Watch has a piece on the mindset of the anti-gunners. It goes on at some length and for most of us goes over what we already knew or suspected. This bit however:

A second amendment supporter will write: You do not have to fear law abiding citizens.

A disarmist will reply: They are only law abiding because they have not committed a crime yet. 

Rung a bell in the strategy department. Read the two statements above. Now add this one: You are only a law-abiding citizen because the left hasn't yet declared something you're doing now to be illegal.

Elections matter.

Real Freakanomics

If more is better, than too much should be about right, right? Especially when it comes to setting the minimum wage in your fair city. If San Francisco and Seattle can drive bookstores out of business at $15/hr, why stop there. A local radio host is proposing that the minimum wage in Denver be set at $52.80/hr which would really help the average minimum wage slave afford a nice house in a nice neighborhood. I mean what's not to like?

He's talking about crowdsourcing the $20-30K it would take to collect the requisite 7000 signatures to put this on the ballot and I don't see why he should have any trouble at all. If I lived in Denver, I'd be all over that.

Should be an easy sell with an electorate that votes in hard-core lefties at every opportunity.

Bozo Bullets

That's all I can think of when I saw this:

This is a heavy chunk of bulletproof plastic you place over the end of your pistol that traps the bullet and launched Bozo's nose at your assailant.

More details here, but with my lack of sympathy for assailants in general, I think I'll stick to the naked ones.

News Of The World

There's a TV in our company cafeteria that's tuned to CNN. I visit the cafeteria to top up my coffee 2-3 times a day, and peek around the corner at the TV while I'm there. Any more all the TV does is confirm my belief that a large percentage of the worlds population are brain damaged, morons, or both.

Anyway here are 2 items that are available for anyone who cares to look which will confirm your suspicions about information promulgated by the government. First is that the real unemployment rate is significantly higher than the advertised rate of 5.8%.  Second is that the real inflation rate is significantly higher than the advertised rate of .2% with the actual number being somewhere between 6 and 8%.

Anybody who has been paying attention already knows this of course, and the rest don't need to be bothered by information that might affect their voting habits.

Interesting Weekend

Started off with some good news which for the moment must go unreported lest it fall into the wrong hands. Stay tuned.

This was the weekend of the celebration of the birthday of Robert Burns by the St Andrew Society which involves getting dressed up, eating Haggis along with a fancy meal, British beer and copious amounts of rather good whiskey, and a society fundraiser.

The Haggis was better than average being rather more highly spiced than usual. I got to take a generous helping home, and will report that it's also great with an egg for breakfast. The fundraiser was a great success, and the drinks were first rate as well.

NOTE: Modern hearing aids are wonderful, being programmable to amplify the higher frequencies more than the lower ones. You probably don't want to be wearing them while listening to a 20-piece bagpipe and drum band at an indoor venue. Especially if your table is 10 feet from the pipers. At a safe distance, however they sound fine, needing only a couple of heavy metal guitarists to round out the affair.

The weather even cooperated not turning from the predicted trace-to-1/4" to the actual quick, blinding 2" we actually got. Made for a slow drive home.