Snowflakes in Hell

Walls of the City writes Laura Washington, informing her about our embracing the term People of the Gun, and gets a response.  From the point of view of an outsider looking in, you have to wonder what she has to be thinking.  Within a few days of her putting “People of the Gun” to paper, we have our own web site and merchandising.

Hell, even I can hardly believe it.   These Internets are surely a wondrous thing.   Thanks Al Gore!

The geek reports The Supreme Court may have taken Heller based on this article from MS-NBC.  I’m not sure MS-NBC knows what they are talking about here.  I can’t find any other source for this, including the one run by the attorneys in the case.

I’m pretty sure this is a case of sloppy reporting.

UPDATE: Looks like it is:

The headline “SCOTUS takes HELLER!” is hereby demoted. I got suckered by sucky reporting @ MSNBC…aparently, deciding whether to take the case counts as “consider”.

This from the docket site.

We’ll just have to wait and see.

I was almost ready to have a beer in honor.  I guess I’ll just have to have a beer because… I want to have a beer instead.

Bitter is on her way home now. This weekend wasn’t terribly exiting. There’s a lot of stuff I need to get done between now and the Gun Blogger Rendezvous. This weekend was spent replacing the hot-water baseboard heating units in my guest bedroom. Now that’s it’s over, I’m pleased with the results, but as with anything regarding this house, it was a fight.

For one, the new baseboards were a little higher, which meant I had to use a street elbow and sleeve to get the fitting to reach down a little farther. That was fine for the one site, but the other side needed a vent, so that required a little more fitting trickery. On the one side, the pipe was a little far from the wall than it needed to be, which necessitated bending the fins (which I hated doing) to put the cover on. The original installation had removed the fins in that area, which I didn’t understand. Now I do; they were covering a mistake. Par for the course in this house. I figured bent fins were better than no fins, so I just bent them and muscled the cover on.

We also had a little complication with the soldering. I tried to do one set of pipes, but the solder didn’t suck in like I would expect a well cleaned and fluxed joint to do. I had to break it up and redo it, at the cost of a copper coupling. My mistake may have been not getting the copper hot enough. It’s a struggle working in a tight area like that, and my dad’s torch is hot. Keep it one place too long and you’ll have a fire, or will bubble the paint on the new baseboard unit, and make it look like crap. Neither option was attractive. But we got it done.

Next weekend I have to replace the master bedroom baseboard units. Fun! All this needs to be done before it gets cold, and I need to turn on the heat. I have a few more weeks, at most, and one of those weekends is GBR, which I also have to get some stuff for, like, right now, after I submit this post.

Definitely not going to be able to get Ahab’s e-postal in, which I feel bad about, because I like that one. With shortened days, it’s getting harder to get range time. I’m way out of practice right now.

Dave Hardy links to an ATF internal related document outlining the problems at the agency:

Field agents have attempted to challenge the un-ethical, and illegal actions of field managers through various means in recent years only to meet with retaliation so destructive it almost inevitably results in the challenges or allegations being withdrawn.Fear of ATF leadership has replaced transparency. Lack of trust and the absence of good faith in trying to resolve these issues have caused a growing number of Agents to rely upon legal means to invoke the protections and seek redress. Record numbers of EEOC, OIG, OSC, whistleblower and internal grievances face the new management team. Requests for congressional intervention by Agents across the country…

Read the whole thing. Dave’s experiences with the federal buearaucracy seem to mirror a lot of this. That’s why I’ve said that ATF reform or even abolishment aren’t going to fix the problem, because they will be temporary at best, or will shift into another agency. The only thing that will work is altering or abolishing federal gun laws, to give whatever agency is enforcing them less leeway, and fewer laws to enforce.

This is from the comments, but I thought it warranted highlighting in a separate post.

Thankfully, Philly Chefs for Choice are striking back against the crazed bunch of zealots who would love nothing more than to take away more and more of our choices. In an event called “Philly Foie For Five,” about 20 Philly restaurants will offer foie gras dishes for just $5. The event goes from October 1st to October 7th. (More info at www.artisanfarmers.org )

The event is designed to expose more people to foie gras. If no one speaks against the minority activists, we will lose the right to eat foie gras. And the slope is slippery. Veal may go next. Then chicken. These activists aren’t going to stop until they have us all eating legumes and liking it. The final strike, if it were up to these activists, truly would be an end to meat-eating.

There are only three foie gras farms in the United States. We aren’t talking about “agri-business” here. We’re talking about small farms producing a small amount of product. But this is why foie gras has become an easy target for the minority zealots in Philadelphia, Chicago, Austin, and many states. In many situations, property owners have been targeted with vandalism and threats have been made against the lives of their families. Protesting is one thing, terrorism is quite another.

Ultimately, business owners are punished by these people for running their businesses legally, in the way they see fit. They lose customers to the screaming hordes (who wants to walk through a screaming band of zealots for lunch?) and lose more when they are forced to give in and take foie gras off the menu. Business owners lose thousands of dollars just fighting these people off. Commerce suffers in cities where these activists attack.

Those who talk about the cruelty of the foie gras process are sadly misinformed. They are putting humans in the place of the animals. By this logic, we should be horrified that the poor things stand around in the winter without shoes and socks.

That is the basic misconception exploited by animal rights organizations, that ducks are like people. Yes, a tube in the throat is not comfortable for humans. Neither is swallowing whole, spiny wriggling fish, which many species of ducks delight in.

In the same way, an enlarged liver in water fowl is a normal process, not a disease process. In fact, most birds have the same mechanism. Have you ever seen fat hummingbirds? Yet they sure take on a lot of sugar water before they migrate. The extra energy is stored in an enlarged liver.

For the activists and others not well-informed on the issue, foie gras production has been carefully examined by animal welfare advocates who have determined it to be humane. Unfortunately, these activists (or terrorists, if you will) are uneducated and ignorant of the truth. They may even know the facts but chose to ignore them out of zealotry for their cause.

Those who wish to know more about foie gras production, there are two articles at the bottom of the first page of www.artisanfarmers.org that discuss the animal welfare aspects of it. For some additional perspective, see: http://www.avma.org/onlnews/javma/sep05/050901q.asp

Actually, even for people it’s not all that uncomfortable to have a tube down your throat.  Endoscopes are typically done while the patient is awake, sometimes with drugs to suppress the gag reflex.  Birds don’t have gag reflexes, and many young are fed through regurgitation by the parent its young’s mouth.