It’s THAT time of year again…
The damn lawnmower started, and so did the weed eater… sigh…
And now my back is ‘talking’ to me! 1.2 miles to walk and mow/weedeat the yard, so I’m gonna get my exercise whether I want it or not!!!
YMMV, depending on yard size and whether you’re lazy (riding), or getting exercise. 🙂
Ammo to Go has just wrapped up a pretty big study of self-defense ammo. In all, fired 109 loads according to FBI protocol across four calibers into ballistic gelatin. Pretty interesting to look at, and a good data set for reference.
You can see the results for each caliber at the following pages:
9mm: https://www.
45 ACP: https://www.
40 S&W: https://www.
380 ACP: https://www.
The way they’ve set it up, you can also hit the link and go to the ammo of choice, either for bulk or single box purchases. They obviously put a lot of work into this.
I’m NOT going to get into the argument of it’s not realistic because no bones, clothing, etc. so don’t start…
h/t Ammo to Go
Now a judge in California wants COFFEE to have a cancer warning label…
Really???
Article, HERE at AP
And even worse, he’s put it on the defense to ‘prove’ there isn’t an issue…
To whit, less that 1 in 100,000 chance of getting cancer from coffee. Soooo…
Going back to my days doing testing, you need at least 100 samples to be considered ‘statistically significant’. So, 100,000×100=10,000,000 people in the sample space, all of whom have to drink coffee at a measured rate/day. And you have to hope and pray there are less than 100 cases of cancer out of those people. The CMFM in this? There is not really a way to ‘specify’ what one gets cancer from…
Sigh…
Guess we’ll be seeing cancer labels on coffee…
Of course, if anyone goes to California routinely, damn near everything out there has some kind of cancer warning on it, especially the hotels and restaurants… One can only wonder if they will now have warning labels on coffee cups???
He is risen!
May you and yours have a Happy Easter!
Off to do some volunteering for the week…
Go read the folks on the sidebar. I’ll get a post up if/when I can.
TGM- Twilight continues to trickle out the door, and the reviews are appreciated! Half way to that magic 50 reviews!!!
But it’s reviews like this that I truly appreciate…
As a retired law enforcement officer, I really liked this book. It shows there is no replacement for experience in the job.
If I can get reviews like this, it means I did a good job with the ‘vagaries’ of law enforcement, and the alpha and beta readers caught my mistakes BEFORE the readers did! 🙂
Random shots from over the years…
Cubi Point- 1974
Kuwait City- 2005ish…
The Tree of Life– Bahrain 2008ish
The infamous blog meet gun pic… Yes, this IS the original picture!
Favorite little Italian Restaurant in Motta, IT
Big airplane, little airplane… Little airplane has a wider wingspan than the P-3! 😀
Former SCOTUS judge John Paul Stevens published an ‘interesting’ OPED in the NY Times yesterday…
He wants the Second Amendment to be repealed in response to the kids protesting…
His OPED is HERE.
He makes some interesting statements, including the fact that he believes Heller was wrong, thinks 2A is a ‘relic’ of the 18th century, and supports banning semi-automatic ‘weapons’.
While I truly doubt that the 2nd Amendment could actually be repealed, the policy does exist in the form of Article 5 of the Constitution-
The Congress, whenever two thirds of both houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose amendments to this Constitution, or, on the application of the legislatures of two thirds of the several states, shall call a convention for proposing amendments, which, in either case, shall be valid to all intents and purposes, as part of this Constitution, when ratified by the legislatures of three fourths of the several states, or by conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other mode of ratification may be proposed by the Congress; provided that no amendment which may be made prior to the year one thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any manner affect the first and fourth clauses in the ninth section of the first article; and that no state, without its consent, shall be deprived of its equal suffrage in the Senate.
So, it would take 75 Senators, and 327 Representatives to start the process, or 33 states to call a Constitutional Convention. Then 38 state legislatures or 38 STATE Constitutional Conventions would have to ratify said voting. While some say there are ‘other’ ways to repeal an amendment, I doubt they would stand the test of SCOTUS. The procedure would be run by the Archivist, as stated in 1 US Code, 106b.
There has been one Amendment repealed, and that one was Prohibition, the 18th Amendment, which went into effect in 1920 after 16 years of trying. It was repealed by the 21st Amendment in 1933.
You can go HERE, and see some of the proposals and proposed Amendments that have never been ratified…
What do I think will happen? I think the left/Dems/Libs will try to ban AR-15s through congressional action. And I believe that if they do so, the compliance will be as low as it is currently in NY and CT. My personal opinion is that their ultimate goal is to turn law abiding gun owners into criminals…
Am I wrong, or going down a rathole here??? Your thoughts?
Sooo… There is much ado about the Trump campaign PAYING for data from Facebook. It’s trying to be blown up into a major scandal, right? We’re seeing that plastered across the MSM almost daily.
But…
It appears Facebook violated Federal Election Laws in 2012 with the Obama campaign!
According to Carol Davidsen, the former media director for Obama for America, Facebook gave the 2012 Obama campaign direct access to the personal data of Facebook users in violation of its internal rules, making a special exception for the campaign. The Daily Mail, a British newspaper, reported that Davidsen said on Twitter March 18 that Facebook employees came to the campaign office and “were very candid that they allowed us to do things they wouldn’t have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side.”
Full article, HERE. Of course the MSM isn’t covering it, and supposedly, ‘the statute of limitations’ has run out…
And in another oopsie, March for Our Lives ‘overestimated’ their crowd…
The March for Our Lives was big, just not nearly as big as organizers said it was.
The problem is that two separate expert analyses, using aerial imaging and photographs, put the march crowd in the 200,000 range, or about a quarter of the widely touted 850,000 figure.
Full article, HERE at the Washington Times.
Interestingly, this follows a pattern, if you will, of the left/socialist/MSM of grossly overestimating the crowds that attend various functions…
I remember the Everymom protest that was supposedly held AT the NRA in Louisville, that was actually in a totally different part of town, and they claimed ‘multiple hundreds’ of protesters. While actual wide shots of the protest showed maybe 100 protesters total. Of course the ‘explanation’ was that it was taken after the protest had ended, but I remember there was still a speaker at the podium when the picture was taken…
And a potential oopsie to come… The upcoming NFL season…
After two years of kneeling players and plummeting ratings, NFL owners are expected next week to put the finishing touches on an $89 million social justice package intended to defuse the sideline protest problem that began with Colin Kaepernick in 2016 and put the focus back on what happens on the field.
Full article, HERE, again from the Washington Times. But nothing about the players standing for the anthem… If they don’t, I personally don’t think the fans will put up with it, and even more will leave.
From Gizmodo…
Bold/Italic mine.
In the hopes of deterring violence, schools are turning to big data analytics to examine social media posts for the earliest signs of violence—depression, resentment, and isolation. Shawsheen Valley Technical High School in Massachusetts has turned to Social Sentinel, a data analytics company that says it can use the type of threat detection police agencies use to identify students at risk. But experts worry student social media mining, even with the best intentions, is a slippery slope to treating students the way we treat suspects.
Are ‘we’ next? If you’re a 2A proponent, or a collector, or curio and relic person, or a military history buff, what are the odds that we wouldn’t trip their threat detector? And I find this quote rather interesting…
“We are not a surveillance tool; we are not a monitoring tool; we’re not an investigative tool,” Margulis said.
Full article, HERE.
Looks to me like they ARE both a surveillance and monitoring tool! They claim 450,000 ‘threat indicators’, and approved ‘access’ to over 1 billion social posts a day. If they’re not ‘surveilling and monitoring’ those posts, what ARE they doing with them???
Website, HERE.
After the debacle with Cambridge Analytics, this is enough to make one wonder…
From reader Charles- Some good points…
I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do. I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.
Robert A. Heinlein
The more laws, the less justice.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
An armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life.
Robert A. Heinlein
I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.
Barry Goldwater
Your thoughts?
I spent the morning watching the March for Our Lives gun control rally coverage on various networks. CNN and MSNBC were fawning, to put it mildly. Fox was at least balanced. The WAPO was all about the march, again fawning over the ‘poor children’. This was an interesting statement in the article in the Washington Times-
Before the speeches began, people bundled up against the cold, sipping coffee and dusting off sugar from powdered donuts donated by DC Vote. Several toddlers were seen running through the park holding the nonprofit’s statehood protest signs. The city’s Board of Elections also set up a table to register voters, including 16-year-olds who will be eligible to vote in the 2020 election. Organizers set up a giant homemade clock with the city names of mass shootings instead of numbers, and an AR-15 instead of a hand.
Full article, HERE.
My takeaways-
Anti-gun, anti-NRA, anti-Republican. No mention of the Broward County Sheriff’s failures, the FBI’s failure, the failure to have the shooter committed… Nope, ALL anti-gun, all the time… They want ‘comprehensive gun legislation’ (not specified), a nationwide ban on AR rifles, erroneously calling them assault rifles. They also want to ban ‘high capacity’ magazines, whatever that is…
Those kids had some professional speech writers, and they must have rehearsed a LOT!!! And it’s becoming easier to see the puppet strings being pulled… And, IMHO, the kids are now pawns in a bigger game.
They brought people out of the woodwork from previous shootings, even from 9/11 to get up and spout their ‘agenda’.
$3.5 million ‘committed’ by various ‘organizations’ to ‘help’ with the marches, e.g. the puppet masters…
The anti-gunners have stolen a march on us with this one, astroturfing the hell out of the gun lobby. And congress approved the Fix-NICS act as part of the omnibus bull, er bill.
AND they want people to register to vote, since they want the power to make those decisions others ‘won’t make’- Like banning guns and shutting down the NRA. The underlying message, at least to me, was vote democrat and vote often. At school, at home, etc.
Sadly, there was no discussion, at least that I heard, of the mental health issues, hardening the schools, etc. The teachers interviewed were ALL against arming teachers, saying it wasn’t their jobs. No counter interviews were on any network.
And these folks aren’t even being covered by the MSM…
So much for a real ‘discussion’ of the issues… Sigh…