Don't Like Guns? Stop Encouraging Sales

From Sep. 5, 2015 USA Today:

WASHINGTON — Renewed calls for more restrictive gun laws, following a succession of fatal shootings in the United States, immediately appear to be generating a boost for the gun industry.

Newly released August records show that the FBI posted 1.7 million background checks required of gun purchasers at federally licensed dealers, the highest number recorded in any August since gun checks began in 1998. The numbers follow new monthly highs for June (1.5 million) and July (1.6 million), a period which spans a series of deadly gun attacks — from Charleston to Roanoke — and proposals for additional firearm legislation....

Dan Gross, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, said there is risk during periods of increased sales when all purchases are not covered by background checks.

"When gun sales rise, more and more weapons find a set of dangerous hands to call home,'' Gross said. "There are people in this country, people like felons, fugitives, and domestic abusers who we all agree simply should not have guns.''

So stop encouraging sales by pushing for bans.

Striking Down State Laws in Defense of A Constitutional Right

Another article I could not sell:

The Supreme Court makes a controversial decision: they rule that state laws are denying a Constitutional right.  The decision satisfies a small but rich and powerful constituency concentrated in a small number of states allied with the Democratic Party, infuriating a faction of the Republican Party that a federal judge characterized as “semi-religious.. almost invariably characterized by intolerance and bigotry.”

Are you thinking of the recent gay marriage decision?  No, it’s U.S. Supreme Court decision Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857).  Huh?  

In the period before the Civil War, many Northern states expressed their disapproval of slavery and the federal Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 and 1850 by passing state “personal liberty laws,” for the purpose of guaranteeing that persons accused of being runaway slaves would enjoy protection of due process. Dred Scott federally overturned these state laws, guaranteeing citizens the right to own slaves across the nation, regardless of regional preference.  This effectively destroyed the right of citizens to make their own laws. 

Why the fugitive slave laws, when most states did not allow slavery?  Because the Constitution explicitly provided for such laws to which the slaveowners could point without any judicial creativity  The other reason is that a small minority of wealthy people – slaveowners – demanded these fugitive slave laws to maintain control over their slaves.  They were called by abolitionists the “slaveocracy.”  In 1856, the Democratic National Committee ridiculed the notion that the slaveocracy existed or was a problem., but clearly, they were a powerful part of the Democratic Party.

The slaveowners asserted that blacks were naturally not suited to freedom; freedom was a “curse” to them.  Their status was something they were born to, and they could not change.  This is quite similar to the current belief that homosexuality is inborn and immutable, even though the evidence strongly suggests that homosexuality and its associated dysfunctions (suicide, depression, substance abuse and obesity), at least for some, is a symptom of childhood sexual abuse.  

Nineteenth century scientific thought had largely adopted the view that racial differences reflected fundamental differences caused by different origins of the races.  Reginald Horsman’s Race and Manifest Destiny examines how 19^th century scientific thinking promoted the ideas of slavery, imperialism, and colonialism.  Inborn and immutable racial differences mattered more than culture or chioice.

Of course, it was not just scientists back then promoting these views.  Christianity largely split along regional lines before the Civil War as many religious leaders decided that slavery was pragmatically good and Biblically based.  Others, largely in the North, decided otherwise.  As John Patrick Daly’s When Slavery Was Called Freedom observes, these splits over slavery were at their core splits over theology.  Slavery was only a proxy for a split built around the emerging Northern evangelical emphasis on morality and the Southern churches’ desire to embrace to the culture of slavery, power, and money.  This is much like the way many Christian churches today are selectively reading the Bible to satisfy a popular media driven need to see homosexuality as Biblical, and to be seen as tolerant by the larger society.

So where will the recent decision lead us?  Dred Scott led to increasing polarization, as Americans who abhorred slavery saw their states lose the authority to pass laws on the subject.  The election of Lincoln in 1860 led to the Civil War as the slaveocrats feared Lincoln might block expansion of slavery in the Western territories.  This time, it is more likely that the election of a pro-gay President (likely Democrat but perhaps Republican) dedicated to crushing out the right of conscience could lead to the split.  The Texas Attorney-GeneraL has already encourage county clerks to ignore the Court’s “lawless ruling.”  If this ignoring Supreme Court decisions seems dangerous, the Obama Administration has already decided to ignore a Supreme Court ruling they don’t like.  Clearly, they can’t have a moral objection to ignoring the Court.

Lines are being drawn.

Trump Pulling Out Ahead

I know many Republicas are not haoppy abouty Trump, because they believe the illegal immigrant/gay marriage/ legal pot constituency is very important to winning elections, but this survey suggests that if you want to beat the Democrats, you need Trump:

Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump leads Democrat Hillary Clinton head-to-head, according to a new poll released Friday.

 

The poll by SurveyUSA finds that matched up directly, Trump garners 45 percent to Clinton’s 40 percent.

 

In other head-to-head matchups, Trump beats out Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) by 44 percent to 40 percent; Vice President Joe Biden by 44 percent to 42 percent; and former Vice President Al Gore by 44 percent to 41 percent.

I know, you won't bwe one of the cool kids if you back Trump, but if you want to defeat the Democrats, you might have to lose your cool kid card.

Production Underway

I am finally running the mill to produce the parts I need for customers.  Here you can see it advancing across at 5 in/min, cutting .003" of aluminum on each pass:

Here you can see when it finishes a cutting pass comes back at 100 in/min, drops down another .003", and starts over.  You can also see how bright the material is after milling:

The stripes on the surface are not rough.  The surface is smooth as glass.

Optimizing My Gcode Generators

I had originally written several programs intended to produce gCode for the different sides of this part: bottom, sides, slot, and I was going to have to write a top program as well, and I suddenly realized that rezeroing the axes was not that big a task, and bottom, top, and sides were really the same program, excavate a rectangle with different depths and widths, so I have replaced bottom, top, and sides with excavate, and  different command line arguments.  This is not only simpler for this part, but makes it easy to produce other parts in the future.

Blue Lives Matter Too

From Sept. 3, 2015 WISC:

The officer stopped in the area of Prairie Road and Jacobs Way around 6:20 p.m. after spotting a large number of people in the street. He said that as he approached he saw a woman punch a man in the face, and he could see that the woman had a can of pepper spray.

The officer said that as he went to arrest the woman he was surrounded by a crowd that was voicing anti-police sentiments, including "We need to start killing these officers."

Police said the woman’s daughter was grabbing the officer while trying to free her mother. The officer said he tried to diffuse the situation by explaining to the crowd that the woman had just punched someone and was armed with pepper spray. Police said his words were ignored, and the struggle with the two people continued.

The older woman punched the officer in the face and grabbed him by the throat, according to the release.

The officer said he could see many in the crowd were recording the incident on their cellphones while some accused him of misconduct and using excessive force.

I guess police should stop enforcing laws in the black community and allow criminals to do as they wish to other blacks.

And why can't reporters figure out that diffuse is not defuse?  I keep seeing this mistake everywhere by journalists.

LGBT Activists Reveal Their True Nature

It is an article of faith among liberals that gay people are just like the rest of us except for who they love.  But then, how to explain this?  From September 3, 2015 New York Post:

Branding the raid a “digital Stonewall,” roughly 70 LGBT activists blasted Brooklyn federal prosecutors Thursday for busting up popular online escort site rentboy.com last week.
Holding signs and chanting, the raucous group gathered in front of the Brooklyn federal courthouse to demand that all charges against employees at the multimillion-dollar enterprise be dropped immediately.

The activists — including current sex workers who advertised their services on the site — argued that the feds should not be allocating resources to policing consensual sex.

Shouting “Bl–jobs, not no jobs” and “Sex work is real work,” the protesters suggested that the operation was aimed at gays and transgender sex workers.

I guess there are no other jobs available except prostitution.

Several attendees cited graphic sexual descriptions in the complaint against the rentboy.com staffers as peculiarly prurient and unnecessary.

The website — which has since gone dark because of the bust — helped to protect sex workers who would otherwise risk harm on unpredictable streets or operate through less reputable online outlets like Craigslist or Backpage.com, several protesters said.

“It is taking away from the safety of the people who are doing this work,” said organizer Bill Dobbs.