Some of You Were in California When Roberti-Roos Assault Weapons Act Paased the Moron's Chambers

I have a recollection that some of the guns named were not actual guns, and some were not semiautos.  Remember which?

What's The Problem With Transgender Restrooms?

LGBT activists are trying to include this in "add the words" but there's already a big problem in places that have gone all LGBT friendly.  This list was pretty disturbing:

Cross-dressing man allegedly videotaped women in restroom
The L.A. County Sheriff's Department says suspect Jason Pomares, 33, dressed up like a woman to spy on women in a Macy's bathroom at the Antelope Valley Mall. Investigators say he had a concealed camera in a paper bag with a hole in it. "He was secretly and covertly videotaping women while they were using the restroom," said Sheriff's Sgt. Brian Hudson. "It appears he had been in the restroom for about two hours before he was noticed. Over a span of two hours, we've got video of several women entering and exiting the restroom. The way the camera was positioned, it was positioned where it could record what was taking place in one of the bathroom stalls, and on a baby-changing table that is located in the restroom."
http://abclocal.go.com/story?section=news/local/los_angeles&id=9102790
http://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/Secret-Recording-Store-Mall-Antelope-Valley-Palmdale-Restroom-207541101.html

Police: Sex offender posed as woman, went into women's locker room
A registered sex offender dressed up like a woman, went into a women's locker room at a pool and talked with several children before being chased down by a good Samaritan, according to the Clackamas County Sheriff's Office.
http://www.komonews.com/news/local/125111914.html
http://www.katu.com/news/local/132679743.html
Police: Man in bra and wig found in women's bathroom - admitted to other offense where he showered in the girls' locker room for sexual gratification
A man wearing a bra and wig was arrested Friday after he was spotted in a women's bathroom at Everett Community College, police said.  The man, later identified as Taylor J. Buehler, 18, of Lake Stevens, was placed under arrest. He admitted to officers that he was the suspect in an earlier voyeurism incident at Everett Community College on Monday, police said. In the earlier incident, he said he took a shower in the girls' locker room for sexual gratification, according to the police report.
http://www.komonews.com/news/local/Police-Man-spotted-in-womens-bathroom-wearing-bra-wig-142987265.html
Cross-dressing Peeper Infiltrates
Cal Women's Locker Room On Monday, October 4, 2010 at 9:20 p.m. and again on Wednesday, October 6, 2010 at 4:30 p.m. a male disguised as a female was discovered in the Recreational Sports Facility women’s locker room. On both occasions the suspect fled the scene when confronted by staff members. In one of the instances the suspect was seen using a cell phone to photograph women inside the locker room. After each occurrence UCPD searched the area but was unable to locate the suspect. No one was physically contacted during these encounters.
http://www.eastbayexpress.com/92510/archives/2010/10/12/cross-dressing-peeper-infiltrates-cal-womens-locker-room

Man dressed as woman tried to take pictures in dorm, police say
Sheriff's officials said their investigation revealed Petersen dressed as a woman and went to other "female-only facilities" in Rancho Cucamonga and Yucaipa, where he allegedly tried to take pictures with a cellphone hidden in his purse.
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-man-allegedly-dressed-woman-20130624-story.htmlhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/25/rodney-kenneth-petersen_n_3496651.html

Purdue police investigate report of man taking photographs in women's restroom
Purdue University police are investigating a reported incident in which a man dressed as a woman was seen taking photographs under the wall of a women's bathroom stall in Yue-Kong Pao Hall of Visual and Performing Arts. According to a police report, a woman was in a bathroom stall on the third floor of the building and saw a hand holding a blue flip-phone camera beneath the door. She left the restroom and then returned to confront the person. At that point, she realized the person was a man dressed as a woman.
https://news.uns.purdue.edu/x/2008a/080331PoliceVPA.html
Transgender Student in Women’s Locker Room Raises Uproar - Exposes Self to Underage Girls
The decision to allow a transgender 45-year-old college student who identifies as a woman but has male genitalia to use the women’s locker room has raised a fracas among  parents and faith-based organizations, who say children as young as 6 years old use the locker room. The locker room at Evergreen College in Olympia, Wash., is shared with  the Capital High School swim club and a children’s swim academy, along with the students at Evergreen. “The college has to follow state law,”  Evergreen spokesman Jason Wettstein told ABC News affiliate KOMO. “The college cannot discriminate based on the basis of gender identity. Gender identity is one of the protected things in discrimination law in this state.” But according to parents, the fact that the student has exposed her male genitalia, in one instance in the sauna, is cause for concern. “[A mother] reported her daughter was upset because she observed a person at the women’s locker room naked and displaying male genitalia,” said a police report filed in September by a mother on behalf of her 17-year-old daughter.
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2012/11/transgender-student-in-womens-locker-room-raises-uproar/
http://radio.foxnews.com/toddstarnes/top-stories/college-allows-transgender-man-to-expose-himself-to-young-girls.html

• The above example is a case where a transgender person is following the law and nothing is reported that indicates they are intending harm to any individual.  However parents of the young girls in this locker room are still concerned about a person with male genitalia being allowed to disrobe and enter a previously protected are for women & children.

Cross-dressing man arrested for exposure at Walmart
A 51-year-old man wearing women's clothing was arrested for allegedly undressing in front of children at Wal-mart. Police say Norwood Smith Burnes, 51, of Rome, has a long record of indecent exposure and was on probation for public indecency when the latest incident occurred in the women's bathroom at Wal-mart in Calhoun, the Rome News-Tribune reported. Burnes was in "stages of undress while on the stone floor and would do this in the presence of several young children," witnesses told police. When police arrived, they found Burnes wearing a short skirt and jacket, black leather coat, high heels, red nail polish, green eye shadow and jewelry.
http://www.ajc.com/news/news/local/cross-dressing-man-arrested-for-exposure-at-walmar/nQddG/http://www.wsbtv.com/news/news/police-man-undresses-in-front-of-children-in-walma/nJckr/

• This is the one example on this page where the acts of a sexual predator was done in a city / county / state that did not have a non-discrimination ordinance.  However an ordinance like Chapter 119 or Ord. 5781 would give this and other sexual predators access to a women's bathroom, changing room, or locker room. It would be hard or impossible to prosecute him for indecent exposure because he could claim he was a transgender.

Nothing Scarier Than A Nerd With New Software

I am starting to put together videos to increase ScopeRoller sales and this shows ease of installation.  Also here.

Scotland Is Registering Air Guns

From The National:

AIRGUN owners have been given six months to get a licence for their weapons before strict new laws come into force at the end of the year.

The Scottish Government pledged to introduce the licensing scheme following the death of Glasgow toddler Andrew Morton, who was killed by an airgun in 2005.

The two-year-old died after being hit on the head with an airgun pellet near his home in the Easterhouse area of the city on March 2.

It is estimated that there are about 500,000 unlicensed air weapons in Scotland.

It will be a criminal offence to have an air weapon without a licence or permit from December 31, 2016.

Some Product Ideas Are Best Left In Your Dreams

Talk about weapons control law bait.  2/26/16 WMMT:

A Michigan company is peddling personal flamethrowers over the Internet.

And as we found, there's absolutely no regulation at this time.

The XM-42 is being sold as "the world's first fully handheld, grab and go flamethrower."

Depending on your point of view, it's either a fiery nightmare, or a flaming success for a tiny Michigan start up company.

"Most of our customers are way out in the country, and have property and they see a use for it. What I designed it for is just novelty, and then throughout development, throughout contact with fire departments, and customers, and potential customers that were interested in the product, they just described all kinds of different uses they would have for it, and gave us ideas on how to optimize the system for that," said designer Chris Byars.

Because these are not considered weapons, you can order a flamethrower in any state, except California and Ohio, where you need permits, and Maryland, where they're banned.

They are shipped with no background check, no questions asked.

So are these Second Amendment arms?  Or a bad idea?  Or both.  What was it George Carlin had to say about flamethrowers?  What sort of person says, "I want to set that person over THERE on fire."

KKK Rally: Should Be A Chance to Show Their Hate-Filled Rhetoric is Nonsense

But as increasingly is the case, the nasty stereotypes that the KKK promotes of racial minorities as emotional and out of control always seem to get demonstrated.  From 2/27/16 Los Angeles Times:

Kobe Sato, 18, of Anaheim said a crowd swarmed the KKK members when they arrived at the park and began to display Confederate flags.

Brian Levin, director of CSU San Bernardino's Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, said he was standing next to the man in the Grand Dragon shirt when a crowd of protesters carrying weapons swarmed the Klansmen.

A brawl broke out and one of the Klansmen was knocked to the ground and kicked. Levin said he later saw the man's arm bleeding.

Not an effective way to prove them wrong.   Imagine if a male chauvinist group held a rally claiming women were too emotional to vote, and women showed up and started crying in response.

Snarky Humor Time

2/26/16 BBC:

Germany reports disappearance of 130,000 asylum seekers

I don't know, the last we saw of them, they were getting into cattle cars, headed East.

More Totalitarianism From Progressive Faculrty

2/26/15 Daily Signal:

Student protesters swarmed California State University, Los Angeles to barricade the entrances of a theater where conservative commentator Ben Shapiro was set to deliver a speech about censorship and diversity on college campuses.

Led primarily by the school’s Black Student Union and Black Lives Matter chapter, the hundreds of demonstrators, including some professors, poured into the Student Union building Thursday afternoon to block other students from attending the event. 

Many in the dense crowd of protesters shoved and shouted at attendees who tried slipping through the doors.

It sounds like the progressives did a better job of presenting evidsence about "censorship and diversity on college campuse," than Shapiro could have.

Books, Films

Just read 13 Hours: The Inside Account of What Really Happened in Benghazi by Mitchell Zuckoff.  If you want an attack on Clinton and Obama's honesty, wrong book.  There are bits and pieces that demolish their claims about why and how this happened, but mostly this is an adventure story of courage under fire, and quite gripping.   For those who fantasize about the coming civil war in this country, here's some reality to encourage you to try and clean up our mess through ballots, not bullets, if still possible.

The Railway Man (2013) stars Colin Firth and Nicole Kidman in a film about torture, war crimes, forgiveness and oral redemption.  Powerful. Film.

Book:


Just started Andrew Nagorski's Hitlerland:American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power.  
 No, not an amusement park for Europeans who miss the good old days.  Quite interesting so far.

Marvelously Entertaining

From the email that sent me to this video:

This is only done in France. 

     They don't tour because it costs too much to transport such large, highly trained animals. It takes about 2 years to train a Giraffe to swim comfortably in warm water, and then about 3 or 4 years to get them to dive.
 
     Giraffes are trained using only the reward system, unlike other animal exhibits that use harsh techniques.

Also elephant on trampoline.

Proof some people are stupid with no sense of humor:

The Effectiveness of Restraining Orders

Gun control, advocates argue that women can't use guns to defend themselves from stalkers/estranged husbands/rapists and should rely on the power of restraining orders.  Another success story from 2/26/16 New York Times:

NEWTON, Kan. — A gunman who killed three people and injured more than a dozen at a Kansas manufacturing plant worked at that factory, and had been served with a restraining order just 90 minutes before he began his shooting spree, the county sheriff said Friday.

Sheriff T. Walton of Harvey County said at a news conference that the protection from abuse order, usually intended to keep perpetrators of domestic violence away from their victims, might have set off the rampage on Thursday. He identified the gunman as Cedric Larry Ford, 38, who died inside the plant in shootout with a police officer.

Mr. Ford barged into Excel Industries in Hesston after 5 p.m. and opened fire with an assault rifle, apparently not targeting anyone in particular or speaking to anyone, the sheriff said.

“He was randomly shooting people,” he said. The death toll could have been much higher, the sheriff said, if not for the Hesston Police Department officer who confronted and killed Mr. Ford. The officer’s name is being withheld pending further investigation.

How did he get the guns since he would not have passed a background check?  I heard a federal prosecutor explain that nearly all strawman purchases start out as love stories, and this is one of them:

Investigators said Friday that the gunman who opened fire at a Kansas factory where he worked received a court order 90 minutes before the rampage and obtained the two weapons used in the attack from a friend.

Sarah Hopkins, 28, of Newton, Kan., is charged with one count of knowingly transferring a firearm to a convicted felon. Prosecutors allege Hopkins, a friend of Cedric Ford, knew about his criminal history before giving him the semi-automatic rifle and handgun he used in the rampage that left 3 dead and 14 others wounded.

The Wichita Eagle reported Hopkins is the mother of Ford's two children. She moved out of her home with Ford in July and retrieved the guns from the house less than a month later with the help of police, the Eagle reported, citing an affidavit in the case. Shortly thereafter, Hopkins gave the guns back to Ford "because Ford had threatened her," the paper reported.

Is My Speech Clear Enough?

I have been invited to speak at a Texas Bar Association event in September, and I still sound drunk to myself.  How do I sound?

Promises, Promises

From HuffPost:

WASHINGTON -- The Rev. Al Sharpton still hasn't endorsed a candidate in the presidential election. But on Thursday, he was very clear whom he doesn't want sitting in the White House next year.

"If Donald Trump is the nominee ... I'm also reserving my ticket to get out of here if he wins. Only because he’d probably have me deported anyhow," Sharpton said to laughs and applause at a Center for American Progress Action Fund event.

If Trump was smart he would be running ads with this in them.

I am a bit confused.  UI've heard Trump talk about deporting illegal aliens, but not about deporting conmen who fleece the black community.  Is Sharpton identifying himself as an illegal?

ScopeRoller Busy

I have been working on adding a new product to the casters line for Dobsonian telescopes.  These are not mounted on tripods.

There is a groundboatd at the base, to which I need to attach my new design without any permanent changes to the customer's product.  I think I have a solution that doesn't way too much and I think I have it.  But I have to mill a slot so that bolts can pass through to a threaded hole.  Millie is not back from hospital yet, but I could simulate a mill by putting an end mill in the drill press, drilling the first hole, raising the end mill, moving it over a fraction of an inch and down again.  Repeat several times.  (You can't move the workpiece while the mill is turning; drill presses will not tolerate the side load like a vertical mill.)

Anyway, I had two orders come in today, so that takes precedence over new development.  One of the orders was for the tripod that originally caused me to order Millie.  Although I ended up coming up with a sleeve design for that tripod, I ended up writing code to pilot all the holes in the sleeves.  At the time I was enjoying myself too much, and had Millie drill about eight sets of three.  So I was able to grab three mostly complete sleeves out, and tap eight holes on each, file the rough edges and I am most of the way there.  Nicely, the precision of the pilot holes positioning made the tapping process astonishingly quick.  Push each part up to the edge of the mill vise on the drill press, down with the tap, and everything was in exactly the right position; no minor adjustments for positioning.

UPDATE: Trying to cut a slot by using an endmill really did not produce attractive results.  The  drill press vise kept moving, producing irregular holes.

Somewhere, There is a Very Confused Mouse

Part of the frustration of being IT for my wife's PC is that no matter which laptop goes in her office, the Internet is deathly slow.  I thought Windows 7 was an issue because Windows 10 runs faster.  But that wasn't the real issue.  When we had the house built in 2005, I had 100Mb/s Ethernet run from my office to hers in the far end of the house.  I now believe that sometime in the last 10 years, some mouse under the house found himself saying,  "Wow!  That not only did not taste good, but left a buzz in my gums."  I moved the TP_LINK unit from the garage to her office, and suddenly, Ethernet is working great!

Nice to See Blacks Leaving the Plantation

From MSN:

Williams, who is from Charlotte, North Carolina, said she was motivated to protest because policies during President Bill Clinton's administration led to an increase in mass incarceration that mostly struck black communities. She pointed to the three-strike federal laws, the elimination of rehabilitative programs and an emphasis on prison construction that were part of the Clinton legacy on crime.

Clinton has distanced herself from these policies and recently issued a detailed agenda on racial justice. But Williams wants more. 

“Hillary Clinton has a pattern of throwing the Black community under the bus when it serves her politically," Williams said in a statement before the event. "She called our boys ‘super-predators’ in ’96, then she race-baited when running against Obama in ‘08, now she’s a lifelong civil rights activist. I just want to know which Hillary is running for President, the one from ’96, ’08, or the new Hillary?”

Lunatics Who Support Smuggling of Machine Guns and Bribing Legislators

No, not NRA but one of the gun control group favorites.  From 2/25/16 Washington Post:

On the surface, the story of Leland Yee looks like a precipitous fall from grace.

The 67-year-old had risen steadily in the ranks of Bay Area politics since the late 80s, when he was elected to the San Francisco School Board. He then went on to sit on the city’s Board of Supervisors and in the state Assembly. The latter role saw him become the first Asian American speaker pro tem in 2004, making him the second-highest ranking Democrat in the California assembly at the time.
From 2006 onwards, Yee served as a state senator and was plotting a secretary of state campaign when his political visions were curtailed by a federal indictment in March 2014....

“It must be that the public has trust in the integrity of the institution, and Mr. Yee, you abused that trust,” Breyer said, according to the Times. He called Yee’s actions “vile” and the arms dealings particularly “hypocritical” given the politician’s history of gun control advocacy....

Yee told CBS two years before he was arrested: “It is extremely important that individuals in the state of California do not own assault weapons. I mean that is just so crystal clear — there is no debate, no discussion.”

As a legislator, Yee supported strict gun control laws and was named to the Brady Campaign’s Gun Violence Prevention Honor Roll.

Yup, full auto AK-47s and RPGs bought from an Islamic terror group.  Gun controol nuts are generally out of control and assume that others are as well.  Typical progressivism: severe projection.
He received a slightly longer sentence than a Californian who unlawfully possessed a semiauto rifle would get.

What Shall Isseue Concealed Carry Laws Have Done

From U.S. v. Robinson (4th Cir. 2016).  The essential question in these related cases is does a tip that a black man has a gun justify a police frisk absent other evidence of criminal behavior?  Essentially the court ruled that where permit issuance is tightly controlled, the tip is enough.  But where black people actually can and do get permits, no, not enough reason.

Robinson was a convicted felon, but the frisk was still illegal.

Discovery Allowed in Clinton Email Crimes

2/23/16 Washington Post says that a federal judge is allowing discovery on this:

A federal judge on Tuesday ruled that State Department officials and top aides to Hillary Clinton should be questioned under oath about whether they intentionally thwarted federal open records laws by using or allowing the use of a private email server throughout Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state from 2009 to 2013.

The decision by U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan of Washington came in a lawsuit over public records brought by Judicial Watch, a conservative legal watchdog group, regarding its May 2013 request for information about the employment arrangement of Huma Abedin, a longtime Clinton aide.

Officials with the State and Justice departments said that they were aware of the order but declined to comment further, citing the ongoing litigation. Discovery orders are not readily appealable. An attorney for Abedin declined to comment.

What is discovery?  From what I have read, this is a uniquely American addition to English law that allows attorneys to go fishing through files and documents fishing for evidence of wrong-doing, or at least something you can twist into that.  I have long regarded the enormous costs it imposes to be a form of economic torture which encourages settlement even when the defendant did nothing wrong.  But I can't think of a more deserving bunch than the Hildabeast and friends.  It might even make the left start to wonder if their favorite tool needs to be reined in.

Always Nice to See

Dear Clayton E. Cramer:

Your paper, "ONE GUN A MONTH LAWS: DO THEY REDUCE MURDER RATES?", was recently listed on SSRN's Top Ten download list for: PSN: Policy Analysis (Topic).

Revising Mao: "Power Comes From An Oil Barrel"

2/22/16 Bloomberg:

The Trickle of U.S. Oil Exports Is Already Shifting Global Power

The sea stretched toward the horizon last New Year’s Eve as the Theo T, a red-and-white tug at her side, slipped quietly beneath the Corpus Christi Harbor Bridge in Texas. Few Americans knew she was sailing into history.

Inside the Panamax oil tanker was a cargo that some on Capitol Hill had dubbed “Liquid American Freedom” -- the first U.S. crude bound for overseas markets after Congress lifted the 40-year export ban.

It was a landmark moment for the beleaguered energy industry and one heavy with both symbolism and economic implications. The Theo T was ushering in a new era as it left the U.S. Gulf Coast bound for France.

If the Europeans and Chinese are going to be dependent on oil, why not American oil, instead of Saudi, Iranian, or Russian.  Which is why environmentalists have been so hostile to North American oil production.

Perhaps We Won't Get to General Elections

Some of my survivalist friends are getting rather concerned about this:

Asteroid with ‘uncertain’ trajectory to graze earth on Mar. 7 — ‘It’s going to be close, real close’

Scientist predict trajectory from between 19,000 miles and 10 million miles with uncertainty

There is a lot of news coverage of this, all pretty confident that this might be a near miss or perhaps a far one.  Still, a 30 meter rock is pretty serious.  I am sure if there was any realistic possibility of a hit, Obama would be invoking emergency measures to disarm everyone to discourage idiots trying to shoot it down.  A 10 meter asteroid is Hiroshima sized energy release.  Something 30 meters is 27 times the mass (volume and mass go up with third power of diameter), so about .5 megaton.

Not An Encouraging Statement About the Daily Mail

2/23/16 Daily Mail:

Conspiracy theorists claim to have spotted an 'interstellar mother ship' near Jupiter's moon Europa

• Video sent to SecureTeam by Louis Read From City of Bristol, UK
• Martian researchers believe it is an alien structure approaching Europa
• Taken by Canon 650D camera with a 7D-300mm telescopic lends 
• Europa believe to have an icy underground ocean that could harbour life  

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3460903/Conspiracy-theorists-claim-spotted-interstellar-mother-ship-near-Jupiter-s-moon-Europa.html#ixzz416nMd3HX
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook

A 7D-300mm telescopic "lends"?  Might that have been a "70-300mm telescopic lens"?

Throw Away Your Antiquated Bronze Age Religion!

I saw this on infowars.com, which I generally ignore as whacko.  But when I went to the source and had it translated from Swedish, it seems to be accurate.

The Swedish Liberal party’s youth wing proposed legalizing necrophilia and incest Sunday during the group’s annual meeting in Stockholm.

According to the motion filed, two consenting siblings 15 years of age and older should be allowed to engage in sexual intercourse while sex with a human corpse should also be legalized so long as the deceased gave written permission prior to passing.
Speaking with Swedish news site Aftonbladet, Liberal Youth leader Cecilia Johnsson painted the move as a progressive step forward for the Scandinavian country.

Is Someone Putting Something in the Water at Slate

An article titled "This Is What Gun Ownership Looks Like in America" with a bunch of perfectly normal Americans several female, one black and female.

Twitter Is Beginning to Shut Down Accounts of Prominent Conservatives

Read about it here.

Non-Citizen Voting Goes to Court

Hans A. von Spakovsky describes the bizzarre court hearing where the left is trying to block

Kansas, Georgia, Alabama, and Arizona from requiring proof of citizenship for voter registration.  The U.S. Election Assistance Commission has approved their attempt at preventing non-citizens from voting, but the Department of Justice refused to defend this federal agency's decision:

This morning, as I predicted would happen in an article on Sunday, the U.S. Justice Department took a dive and filed a pleading in which it not only failed to defend the actions of the EAC, but agreed with the plaintiffs and consented to both a TRO and a PI. Judge Leon called the pleading “unprecedented” and “extraordinary.” He said he had never seen such a document in his entire experience as a lawyer or a judge. He was obviously astonished that the Justice Department was not defending the agency, and it was soon clear he was not going to allow DOJ to just roll over.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/431752/noncitizen-voting-case-doj-rebuked

 It was clear that Judge Leon was shocked at what DOJ had done. While he gave the plaintiffs 20 minutes to argue their case, he gave the lawyer from the Federal Programs Branch of DOJ only five minutes because he said that DOJ was obviously on the same side as the plaintiffs. He also said almost immediately that he would not grant a PI without a complete briefing and arguments on the case — despite DOJ wanting to consent to the PI. Judge Leon made clear that there was “no chance at all — zero” that he would do what the plaintiffs and the Justice Department wanted him to do on that issue. When the DOJ lawyer got up, he was asked very tough questions about DOJ’s actions in this case by Judge Leon, including the potential conflict of interest that I discussed in my Sunday article and which Commissioner McCormick referred to in her letter to the judge. The DOJ lawyer denied that there was a conflict and gave rambling, vague answers that clearly did not satisfy the judge. Leon was obviously annoyed at the lawyer’s inability to answer some of his questions, saying “I gave you the weekend to get ready for this — what have you been doing?” Judge Leon talked about all of the cases in which the Federal Programs Branch has been involved in his courtroom, and said he had never seen the type of incomplete brief that DOJ had filed in this case. He said that those briefs “usually cover the waterfront” in terms of raising every legal argument to defend an agency. Leon was very dismissive of the DOJ’s position, its behavior, and its failure to mount a defense consistent with its usual practice.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/431752/noncitizen-voting-case-doj-rebuked

The Obama Administration thinks that refusing to allow non-citizens to register to vote is a civil rights violation.  When will so,meone take their duties seriously?

Even better:

He waved the EAC opinion at issue in the air and said “this is what Nazis do behind closed doors!” You know a lawyer is desperate when he tries to equate a dispute over an election administration issue to Nazi Germany.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/431752/noncitizen-voting-case-doj-rebuked

Digitizing VHS

A few days ago I mentioned that I could now digitize analog video. Someone commented that they had to send stuff out of state for this and needed some more done. I accidentally deleted that comment. If you are still out there, let me know.

Learn Something New Every Day

Several readers noticed that my wife's otherwise pretty good narration on the background checks video had some room noise.  So re-record with better mike?  No. This video shows how to use Audacity's noise reduction effect to clean up the track.  You select a silent part of the track, and Noise Reduction uses that room noise to subtract from the rest of the track.  Very clever.  I will put up the noise reduced form shortly.

The Seas Are Rising! Panic!

2/22/16 Washington Post:

A group of scientists says it has now reconstructed the history of the planet’s sea levels arcing back over some 3,000 years — leading it to conclude that the rate of increase experienced in the 20th century was “extremely likely” to have been faster than during nearly the entire period.

“We can say with 95 percent probability that the 20th-century rise was faster than any of the previous 27 centuries,” said Bob Kopp, a climate scientist at Rutgers University who led the research with nine colleagues from several U.S. and global universities. Kopp said it’s not that seas rose faster before that – they probably didn’t – but merely that the ability to say as much with the same level of confidence declines.

The study was published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Seas rose about 14 centimeters (5.5 inches) from 1900 to 2000, the new study suggests, for a rate of 1.4 millimeters per year. The current rate, according to NASA, is 3.4 millimeters per year, suggesting that sea level rise is still accelerating.

Of course, for the True Believers, this is bad news.  But as the Weather Underground site points out:

Well over seventy percent of our planet is covered by water. This was not always the case. During the last ice age, massive ice sheets covered portions of the northern and southern hemispheres (Figure 1). When the massive ice sheets melted, they released the water locked inside them – enough to make the seas rise by about 120m (390 ft) (Waelbroeck et al., 2002; Schneider von Deimling, et al., 2006; Rahmstorf, 2007).

 A very interesting discussion of the different causes of rise.   As the 3/28/2009 Daily Telegraph points out:

But if there is one scientist who knows more about sea levels than anyone else in the world it is the Swedish geologist and physicist Nils-Axel Mörner, formerly chairman of the INQUA International Commission on Sea Level Change. And the uncompromising verdict of Dr Mörner, who for 35 years has been using every known scientific method to study sea levels all over the globe, is that all this talk about the sea rising is nothing but a colossal scare story.

Despite fluctuations down as well as up, "the sea is not rising," he says. "It hasn't risen in 50 years." If there is any rise this century it will "not be more than 10cm (four inches), with an uncertainty of plus or minus 10cm". And quite apart from examining the hard evidence, he says, the elementary laws of physics (latent heat needed to melt ice) tell us that the apocalypse conjured up by Al Gore and Co could not possibly come about.

The reason why Dr Mörner, formerly a Stockholm professor, is so certain that these claims about sea level rise are 100 per cent wrong is that they are all based on computer model predictions, whereas his findings are based on "going into the field to observe what is actually happening in the real world". \

When running the International Commission on Sea Level Change, he launched a special project on the Maldives, whose leaders have for 20 years been calling for vast sums of international aid to stave off disaster. Six times he and his expert team visited the islands, to confirm that the sea has not risen for half a century. Before announcing his findings, he offered to show the inhabitants a film explaining why they had nothing to worry about. The government refused to let it be shown.

Similarly in Tuvalu, where local leaders have been calling for the inhabitants to be evacuated for 20 years, the sea has if anything dropped in recent decades. The only evidence the scaremongers can cite is based on the fact that extracting groundwater for pineapple growing has allowed seawater to seep in to replace it. Meanwhile, Venice has been sinking rather than the Adriatic rising, says Dr Mörner.

One of his most shocking discoveries was why the IPCC has been able to show sea levels rising by 2.3mm a year. Until 2003, even its own satellite-based evidence showed no upward trend. But suddenly the graph tilted upwards because the IPCC's favoured experts had drawn on the finding of a single tide-gauge in Hong Kong harbour showing a 2.3mm rise. The entire global sea-level projection was then adjusted upwards by a "corrective factor" of 2.3mm, because, as the IPCC scientists admitted, they "needed to show a trend".

Another Strong Argument For Cultural Imperialism

2/22/16 Stars and Stripes:

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon’s Inspector General has launched an investigation into the response by American troops to allegations that Afghan military and police officials were involved in the sexual abuse of children.

The investigation will seek to determine what role American servicemembers should serve in curtailing the sexual abuse of children and whether they properly responded to such allegations, Deputy Inspector General Kenneth Moorefield wrote in a memorandum to senior defense leaders dated Feb. 19.

“We have been conducting a research project related to these issues since Oct. 28, 2015,” he wrote. “This announcement is to inform you that we are now conducting a full assessment addressing these issues.” Among the questions that the investigation seeks to answer, Moorefield wrote, are whether troops were instructed — either officially or through unofficial channels — to ignore sexual abuse, how many cases of child sexual abuse had been reported to the U.S. military and whether those reports had been forwarded to the Afghan government, and whether American troops have been trained properly to deal with the issue.

The investigation also seeks to determine what legal authorities American troops have on bases in Afghanistan to intervene or to use force if they witness or are informed of sexual abuse of a child, Moorefield wrote.

Sexual abuse of children, especially young boys — commonly called “bacha bazi” or “boy play’ — has long been an open secret in Afghanistan and documented in film and videos as the subject of “dancing boys.” Last summer, the issue was propelled into American headlines when Army Sgt. 1st Class Charles Martland, an American green beret, told lawmakers that he was being discharged after he beat an Afghan police commander who admitted he raped a boy.

After Martland came forward, several other U.S. troops publicly claimed there was an unofficial policy to ignore the abuse.

Saw This Quiote, So I checked to See If Real

“We are socialists, we are enemies of today’s capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are all determined to destroy this system under all conditions” Adolf Hitler speech May 1, 1927

Also in John Toland's biography of Hitler.

Another Victory For the Obama/Clinton Approach to Foreign Policy

2/18/16 CNN:

Washington (CNN)Marines are prepositioning battle tanks, artillery and logistics equipment inside Norwegian caves as the U.S. pushes to station equipment near the NATO-Russia frontier.

"Any gear that is forward-deployed both reduces cost and speeds up our ability to support operations in crisis, so we're able to fall in on gear that is ready-to-go and respond to whatever that crisis may be," Col. William Bentley, operations officer for the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade, said in a statement Friday on the Norwegian deployment that called the caves classified.

The deployment of new equipment to the Cold War-era caves comes amid renewed tensions between NATO and Russia. Russia shares a 121.6-mile long border with Norway. The border was heavily militarized during the Cold War, and the Russian navy's Northern Fleet is in Murmansk, about 100 miles from the border.

In October, Norway's Chief of Defense, Adm. Haakon Bruun-Hanssen, told reporters that Russia has "shown that they are willing to use military force to achieve political ambitions."

 Must have seen the Norwegian TV series Occupied.

2/21/16 Stars & Stripes:

STUTTGART, Germany — More than 5,000 tons of U.S. Army Europe ammunition has arrived at a depot in Germany — the largest Europe-bound ammo shipment in 10 years, according to the Army.

The massive delivery comes as USAREUR is ramping up missions on the Continent, particularly along NATO’s eastern flank, in response to concerns about a more aggressive Russia.

Like A Mish-Mosh of Hot Stories to Upset Progressives

From 2/22/16 St. Louis Dispatch:

KALAMAZOO, Mich. • The Uber driver suspected in a series of three random shootings in Michigan admitted carrying out the seemingly random attacks that killed six people, a prosecutor said Monday.

Jason Dalton waived his right against self-incrimination before making the statement to authorities, Kalamazoo County prosecutor Jeff Getting said....

Meanwhile, an Uber passenger said he called police to report that Dalton was driving erratically more than an hour before the shooting rampage began.

Matt Mellen told Kalamazoo television station WWMT that he hailed a ride around 4:30 p.m. Saturday. He said driver Jason Dalton introduced himself as "Me-Me" and had a dog in the backseat.

Mellen sat in front. About a mile into the trip, Dalton got a phone call, and when he hung up, he began driving erratically, blowing through stop signs and sideswiping cars, Mellen said.

 Worst calls in history!

Putting Together a YouTube Video About Mandatory Firearms Background Checks

Should have it up soon.

Share with your friends in Nevada; they have one of Billionaire Bloomberg's initiatives coming up. Fixed the audio to remove room noise.

ScopeRoller Expanding Product Line

To include the Universal Astronomics tripods.

Right to Try

A neighbor forwarded me some information from a friend of his who is dying from ALS, and would like to try some experimental treatments.  FDA of course is blocking it.  So I dug around a bit:

The book begins with a description of Ted Harada, a young father diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s Disease (ALS). ALS is a death sentence; it has a 100% death rate, and the only question is whether death will come in five years or two. But Harada had an experimental stem cell surgery at Emory University that reversed his symptoms completely – until the FDA stepped in to stop him from having further surgeries. Harada’s surgery is also unavailable to the approximately 24,000 people who have died since Emory’s clinical trial began.

In some circles, there is a belief that Big Pharma is trying to kill us, or at least profit from our misery, hoping we stay sick.  That's paranoid.  In this case, the FDA is actively blocking experimental procedures for people who are terminal.  What's the worst that can happen?  They die?  Idaho's legislature is considering following 24 other states:

BOISE, Idaho (AP) - An Idaho House panel has introduced a bill that would allow terminally-ill patients to access drugs that are still being researched.

Democratic Rep. Melissa Wintrow of Boise says the legislation permits patients to use pharmaceuticals that have already passed safety tests by the Federal Drug Administration....

Wintrow argues that the measure would dramatically alleviate the wait time and paperwork for patients suffering from diseases like Lou Gehrig’s Disease. Patients would assume all liability and responsibility for using the drug, but they would be required to be under the care and supervision of a doctor.

Count on the FDA to stand in the way. Not surprisingly progressives are siding with FDA and against hope for the terminaaly ill.  California's Gov. Brown vetoed such a bill, and the Boston Globe editorializes in favor of protecting the terminally ill from lifesaving treatments.

The laws threaten to unravel decades of patient protections, since the FDA is precluded from providing its traditional oversight. And in some states, the laws could even make it more difficult to obtain experimental drugs because of requirements not found in the existing federal program. In some states, for instance, more than one physician diagnosis is needed for drug access. Certain state laws also demand that written consent forms carry added stipulations that may need legal reviews. Insurers, meanwhile, are not required to pay for treatment, yet most of the states failed to create funding to help patients cover medical expenses. Plus, there are unanswered legal questions about whether state laws trump federal regulations.

HB 481 is supposed to have a hearing Feb. 23 before House Health & Welfare committee.

This Would Be Easy To Misportray

The FBI wants to break into the iPhone of the San Bernadino terrorists and Apple is refusing a court order to help.  I can understand Apple's reluctance to provide carte blanche to open up all iPhones.  But it is hard to believe that they can't do this one phone.  The owner is dead, and was engaged in an act of terrorism.

Trump vs. Clinton

I am less than thrilled with Trump's ignorance of recent history (still trumpeting the leftist lie that Bush lied about WMDs in Iraq), but it increasingly looks like Trump will be taking on the Hildebeast in the general election. Sanders is apparently far behind Clinton and is going to get further behind.  Trump is rapidly cleaning up.
 
The GOP establishment is getting its nose rubbed in what it has done the last few years.  It is hard to be surprised; the business establishment wants those cheap, easily terrified illegals to drive wages down to $2/hour, and the the Department of Justice is actively trying to prevent states from requiring proof of citizenship to vote.  The political consultants who run GOPe spend too much time trying to make the GOP into Democrat Lite, presumably to keep up the supply of young girls and boys willing to submit.

Can Trump win the general election?  Sure.  Clinton has such a thin list of qualifications and such an imposing list of scandals. Can Trump be an effective President?  Not sure.  But until GOPe figures out that the masses aren't the ignorant knuckledraggers that they think we are, Trump and perhaps Cruz are the only choices.

Don't You Just Hate It When Gunowners Are Irresponsible With Their Weapons?

2/20/16 Fox News:

SAN FRANCISCO –  San Francisco police are searching for the gun of a federal agent who lost the weapon after he left it on top of his car and drove off.

KGO-TV reports the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent's loaded service weapon was reported lost in the Ingleside neighborhood Friday morning. Police say it's an H&K P200sk .40 caliber handgun.

In the last eight months, handguns stolen from federal agents were used in the high-profile slayings of Kate Steinle in San Francisco in July and muralist Antonio Ramos in Oakland in September.

Last month, three handguns were stolen from an FBI vehicle parked in a residential neighborhood in Benicia.

 Obviously, California needs stricter gun control laws.

Animating Line Charts

I would like to make my recent research more appealing to the low information voters who don't read, but need everything presented through YouTube.  I would like to have a plot of lines in a graph where the data moves across the screen as years progress.  You've seen examples, I know.  Any idea how to do this?  I thought PowerPoint's Animation might do this. but no.

Digitizing Video

I have the technology.  Is there any significant population that wants their analog video tapes converted to DVD?  Any reasons why this would not be a good sideline business.  Obviously, nothing copyrighted gets digitized.

Found A Cool Opern Souce HTML Editor Called Bluefish

But it has now disappeared from my program list, and the last download fails during install because GTK+ has a DNS resolution issue.

How to Reset Thunderbird

It is hopeless.  Is there some to reset the open in message window options?  It no longer works the way it used to, and reinstalling doesn't change it.  I found Thunderbird 38.5.1 and it works.

Gadgets

I have an ancient Sony camcorder (Hi-8).  It works well, and doesn't have the automatic 20 minute cutoff that many HD consumer video cameras now have to prevent movie theater piracy, so I am reluctant to give it up.  But the only analog to digital converter I had was obsolete.  (No up to date drivers.)  So I bought this, for $18.99.  It works pretty well.  Plugs in to USB 2.0 port and captures well.  Two gotchas: the software that does capture, ShowBiz, requires lense number to install, which I could not find.  It was on the back of the CD sleeve and the end of the box told someone more observant than me where to find it.  Other minor nuisance is that it did not capture video, but audio was fine.  Problem was that one of the settings specifies format and it defaults to PAL not NTSC.  Fixed that and it works.  Next step is to see if it can import into VideoStudio.

Yes, VideoStudio 9 captures directly from the device.

"Ask and It Will Be Given to You"

Matthew 7:7 is talking about eternal life, but it applies to other things as well.  My wife and I were given a Rival crockpot when we married in 1980, and the plastic lid had cracked and generally become marginally useful.  I contacted Rival to see if I could order a replacement.  The answer was, "No.  Can we give you a new crockpot instead?"  And they did.

Latest Automatic Update of Thunderbird Does Not Work

Turn off automatic updating.  And I cannot find a download of 38.05, which worked.  Microsoft gets more and more attractive.

Curious.  It started working now back to this odd behavior.  Click on a folder (like Inbox) and nothing appears.  Right click the folder and Open in  New Tab, and everything appears there.

How Ignorant Do the Progressives Think the People Are?

DC is about to start running streetcars (a flashback to the 1930s) and they felt it necessary to put out a PSA (Public Service Announcement) on how to ride a streetcar.  Obviously a very hard thing to do without instruction.

Is IRS Hot to Collect Penalties for Failure to File 1099s?

I need to file a Form 1099 for a contractor for ScopeRoller for last year.  Why can't I fill in this form either online, or at least fill in the blanks and print it for mailing?  They provide a form which can be filled in with Acrobat, but you can't print that form or transfer it to one you can print.  Who still has a typewriter?

Fun & Games With the Planer

Sharp tools, I always say.  The planer has become increasingly clumsy when planing acetal. (I wish that I could afford a planer for aluminum.) It is on thr original blades, 5 years on.  I tried to turn the blades over today.  (They are double edged.)  One of them no problem.  The second doesn't want to go back in.  The tool rental guy at Home Depot offered to fight with it for me.  Hope to get it back in morning.  If the mill was still with me and working I could use it instead, but that's a slow although very price way to do it.

Eagles of Death Metal

Remember them?  They were performing when the terrorists went on a rampage in Paris.  Their singer has some choice remarks about the ineffectiveness of gun control.

Becoming a Fan of Norwegian TV

The Heavy Water War is about the various efforts to prevent Norway's deuterium refinement facility from shipping heavy water to Germany for Werner Heisenberg's fortunately unsuccessful nuclear weapons program.  It's got action, human drama, and you may even learn a bit about the nuclear power program of the time.

Justice Scalia's Death

"We discovered the judge in bed, a pillow over his head. His bed clothes were unwrinkled," said Poindexter.

Sure sounds like natural causes to me.  I guess Ginsburg didn't take the hint to retire so Obama could make a new appointment.

New Paper Being Circulated

One Gun A Month Laws: Do They Reduce Murder Rates?

Clayton E. Cramer

Abstract: A number of states have passed laws to limit gun sales to one gun a month in an attempt to reduce unlawful gun trafficking.  Some states have subsequently repealed such laws.  Do these laws reduce murder rates?  This paper examines evidence that changes in murder rates associated with these laws are more plausibly explained by reductions in other measurable symptoms of social disorder.

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Available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2732735