Snowflakes in Hell

Looks like US Citizen of Traction Control is in my neck of the woods looking for some full auto fun. It’s not often that we get bloggers in the area, since not too many people are eager to partake in W.C. Fields Second Prize. The first prize was one week in Philadelphia. The Second Prize was two.

Decided to spring for a small UPS unit for the server here. Mostly so I can keep my Internet up during brief power outages. It’s a Cyberpower CP1500 1500VA/900W UPS, and it’ll run at current load, which is about 6-10%, for about an hour with no power. This should make the blog a lot more reliable too. I’ll be pulling the plug out later tonight and seeing how things hold  up. For now I’m configuring the daemon in the Linux server to shut it down gracefully if the battery runs too low.

UPDATE: Running off UPS power as this is updated. Have a few glitches still to work out with making sure it e-mails me to tell me power is out.

UPDATE: Worked out all the glitches. Seems to be working nicely now. You can tell it’s a cheap UPS since any power supply if feeds while on battery hums like a large flying insect. I don’t have an oscilloscope to look at the output from the inverter, but I’m betting it’s ugly.

Looks like it’s going to become the Firing Pin Journal.

Sorry about the outage folks, but we were without power for 14 hours due to the blizzard yesterday. As soon as the wind kicked up, it was pretty much over. I had to get creative to keep the house and pipes from freezing up overnight:

Fortunately I have a backup sump pump that’s powered by a car battery, so I hooked that up to an old inverter I had laying about and punched its output into the junction box for the furnace. The furnace is gas, so you really only need power for the controller, the circulator pump, the flu check, zone valves, and gas valve. Fortunately all those seemed to come in under the 125W rating of the inverter.

Of course, we did manage to keep the most important piece of equipment in the house functioning as well:

Fortunately for me this piece of critical equipment requires only a CO2 bottle to operate. Sadly I can’t keep the blog going through a 14 hour power outage, so I apologize for the downtime. All this is making me think about a generator, but I know if I get one we won’t lose power for more than 20 minutes for the next 5 years.

Snowpocalypse II is hitting us as we speak, and we’ve had freezing rain for a bit here, and it’s starting to build up on power lines, and the FiOS lines. If the blog goes out for a bit, you’ll know why.

In the name of Johann Sebastian Bach, from which I derived my pseudonym, will people please learn the correct spelling of my name. I don’t know if Sebastion is a proper spelling in any language. I can at least accept Sebastard and maybe even Sebasturd (two insults combined into one, what’s not to like?), if you want to go there. But please, for the love of the Brandenburg Concertos, there’s no o in Sebastian!

I don’t know if anyone else has noticed, but there’s not a whole lot going on in the gun rights world right now. We don’t really have any major legislation advancing, either pro-or-anti, at least in my areas of focus. The media is too busy talking about other things to editorialize on guns, and I think the Brady folks might be busy polishing up their resumes, after the Obama failing grade story got, as best I can tell, fairly minimal press coverage, and not a peep from the White house. I’ve heard nary a peep out of Brady, despite a few opportunities for them to push their issue. On the pro side, Congress is tied up on other issues, we’re all waiting for the next big things to happen in the McDonald case, and other than that, not much else.

I should be pretty happy it’s quiet, considering I’m busy as hell with work and putting in 70 hour weeks in an attempt to take our company in a new direction, and hopefully give it a new lease on life. But it’s deeply unsatisfying to know that blog quality suffers through lack of things to talk about. Generally speaking, the way I blog is to take stories I get through Google alerts, tips, or through reading other blogs, and aggregate them in open tabs in a browser. I keep them sorted according to how interesting they are. When I have time, bang out a bunch of posts, either published immediately or timed for publishing, depending on the time sensitivity. Often times my second or third tier material is stale by the time I get around to it. Lately, I’ve been going through even those, and still not much else out there. So it’s a good time, if you have anything that might be interesting, to send it along.

I noticed that InAlienable is due for release tomorrow, so I immediately added it to our queue and bumped it up to the top. We have a disc they will receive tomorrow, so it would work out perfectly…

Except there must be a lot of Volokh Conspiracy readers on Netflix. That’s got to be why InAlienable went from available tomorrow to “Short Wait.” :)

Snowflakes in Hell just got an Internet upgrade. It’s been about four years since I signed up for FiOS Internet, and my connection was 15 megabits down and 2 megabits up. I noticed when I posted pics of my Webley Mark IV, it was getting pretty pokey when enough folks were downloading. I also noticed Verizon didn’t even sell my package anymore, so I quickly realized I might be able to get an upgrade without paying anything. Typically you have to ask, as Verizon will be happy to sell you slow service for yesterday’s price.

Calls to Verizon are aways rough, because I have an unusual account. When you call, they ask for a telephone number to cross reference account info. I have Verizon FiOS for Small Business, because I need a static IP so you all know where to find me. My phone number is a standard residential POTS line. Invariably they ask for your phone number to determine your account, which always sends me to residential service, who quickly realize they only have a phone account for me, and transfer me to business support, who then look at my phone number and say “Oh, this is residential service, let me transfer you back.”  A back and forth twice, finally being able to say “No, no.. it’s a residential phone line, but I do have a Small Business FiOS account!” Finally I get to talk to someone, but someone who ends up being very nice and helpful.

Turns out I can upgrade to 20 megabits down and 5 up for the same price, but for ten dollars more a month I can do a whopping 25 megabits down and 15 up. Hell yeah, I’ll take that. Apparently I can also save money bundling my phone and TV service with my Small Business Account, which I couldn’t do before. I’m going to look into doing that. To make a long story short, Snowflakes in Hell now has over 7 times the upload bandwidth it used to, and I’m hardly paying any extra for it.

Since there aren’t too many bloggers that cover New Jersey politics from a Second Amendment angle, I decided it was high time I added a category specifically for New Jersey. Nothing happens in this issue in a vacuum, and we’ve had more than a few examples of New Jersey based activists crossing the river to push for gun control in Pennsylvania. Bitter and I keep a close eye on what happens in New Jersey, and are in regular communication with leaders in the issue over there. I feel confident we can provide good coverage for New Jersey gun owners.

Since I’ve been reading briefs, I haven’t completed my normal rounds of blog visits today. So it was a bit of a startle to get an email trackback from Wyatt titled Requiem for a Friend. I immediately knew.

As Wyatt mentions, we met the Prof only once, but it was a good few hours of conversation & cheesesteaks. He was a great guy, and he will be missed.

Man, has it really been 3 years? Though, it seems like a long way from where I started out. I wouldn’t have remembered if it wasn’t for the notice that my domain was about to expire. That was even before I met Bitter. I think my motivations for blogging back then were different, and I think this blog has certainly evolved a lot since the beginning.

In the beginning I started to blog just because I had something to say, and Bitter (who I had just started talking to) said I’d be good at it. So I figured I’d try to impress her. Originally I wasn’t much concerned with having my own voice, or writing style, if you will. I wasn’t much concerned with how my blog would fit in with the community. I was interested in attracting the attention of the larger blogs, and getting them to help me grow an audience with links, and I owe a tremendous amount of my success as a gun blog to SayUncle, Instapundit, Tam, Dave Hardy and Bitter (back when she was gun blogging over there instead of here).

After blogging for a while, you kind of get a sense where you fit in to the community, and what your strengths and weaknesses are as a blogger. I think I’ve developed Snowflakes In Hell to the point where it’s a reasonable source of political and legal analysis focused specifically on firearms policy and law, with a bit of a local focus on Pennsylvania issues in particular. This has brought me deeper into this issue than I ever really wanted, or imagined I’d be starting out.

But I also think I’ve made some mistakes in the past three years. A scrappy, confrontational style of debate probably helped me get noticed as an upstart blog, but I don’t think it’s always been an asset as a more established blog. I know I’ve rubbed more than a few people the wrong way when that was not really my intention. I’m also frustrated by how difficult it is to use blogs and forums to coordinate and promote local, targeted, grassroots activism. There are people out there who use new media effectively for this purpose, and it’s something we’ve been experimenting with, and trying to learn what works and what doesn’t. Despite my skepticism of Open Carry as a public relations tool, those guys have a winning formula when it comes to recruiting, keeping and mobilizing a dedicated core set of volunteers. While I’ve often been critical of their methods, I greatly admire what they’ve been able to accomplish in creating an issue identity, and building dedication to it. The Tea Party movement is another phenomena that’s cropped up, which is a great example of a core set of activists being able to mobilize large numbers of people. Something I’ll be thinking in year four of Snowflakes in Hell is how to take the strengths of these movements, and apply them in other contexts. See what works, and what doesn’t. 2010 will be a telling year for freedom advocates, and for gun rights. Let’s hope we’re celebrating after November.

I decided to do a little year-end review of things here at Snowflakes in Hell to see what people liked and who you people are. I don’t know if Sebastian cares or not, but I figured I’d compile the data and let the facts speak for themselves.

First, you guys love a story on crappy history teachers who can’t keep basic facts straight – like who wrote the Bill of Rights (Washington?). It’s the number one post of 2009, followed by the rest of the top 10:

1. Look Who’s Teaching
2. Bloomberg’s Blueprint
3. Ruger SR-556
4. Holder Calls for New Assault Weapons Ban
5. An Interview from Matt at Kel-Tec on the RFB
6. MAIG in PA Just Lost 16 More Mayors
7. The Real Tea Party Protest
8. Setting Political Sights on Bloomberg’s Anti-Gun Mayors, Part I
9. World Turned Upside Down
10. Hypocrisy Much?

Now as to who you people are, well, you’re a mixed bunch from all over. The top 10 states sending visitors to this site:

1. Pennsylvania
2. Texas
3. California
4. Virginia
5. New York
6. Florida
7. Illinois
8. Ohio
9. Arizona
10. New Jersey

Other quick facts:

• The browser you are most likely to be viewing this site in is Firefox, followed by Internet Explorer.
• You spend an average of just over two minutes viewing the posts during any one visi
• The overwhelming majority of you come here through links or directly. Less than 21% arrive via search engines.
• If you’re reading from abroad, you’re mostly likely from Canada followed by the UK.
• The only countries where we have not had hits in 2009 are: Turkmenistan, Serbia, Montenegro, Eritrea, Somolia, Botswana, Angola, Gabon, Congo, Central African Republic, Chad, Togo, Benin, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea, Western Sahara, Mauritania, French Guiana, and North Korea.
• Folks from Iran were looking for information about porn, boobs, and machine guns.

With that, I’d like to say thanks to all of Sebastian’s readers and the few who have stuck around to read my pathetic attempts at humor and analysis. I think we can all agree it’s been an interesting 2009, and we’re looking forward to 2010.

Looks like it started in October. He’s one of us on the gun rights issues as well. Welcome.

Pennsylvania Firearms Owners Association (PAFOA) is looking for volunteers to help run its blog.

Seems lots of bloggers these days are writing books. The latest is from Sensibly Progressive.

Looks like Ted Nugent’s people agreed to settle the copyright dispute with Marko over the unattributed essay that appeared in Nugent’s book.

Looking up some information on various types of Internet Trolls, I think I found this one to be the most useful. Namely the first two posts in this. I’ve seen most of these types out there. This is probably the one most likely to be seen around these parts though:

The Contrarian Troll. A sophisticated breed, Contrarian Trolls frequent boards whose predominant opinions are contrary to their own. A forum dominated by those who support firearms and knife rights, for example, will invariably be visited by Contrarian Trolls espousing their beliefs in the benefits of gun control. It is important to distinguish between dissenters and actual Contrarian Trolls, however; the Contrarian is not categorized as a troll because of his or her dissenting opinions, but due to the manner in which he or she behaves:

• Contrarian Warning Sign Number One: The most important indicator of a poster’s Contrarian Troll status is his constant use of subtle and not-so-subtle insults, a technique intended to make people angry. Contrarians will resist the urge to be insulting at first, but as their post count increases, they become more and more abusive of those with whom they disagree. Most often they initiate the insults in the course of what has been a civil, if heated, debate to that point.
• Contrarian Warning Sign Number Two: Constant references to the forum membership as monolithic. “You guys are all just [descriptor].” “You’re a lynch mob.” “You all just want to ridicule anyone who disagrees with you.”
• Contrarian Warning Sign Number Three: Intellectual dishonesty. This is only a mild indicator that is not limited to trolls, but Contrarians display it to a high degree. They will lie about things they’ve said, pull posts out of context in a manner that changes their meanings significantly, and generally ignore any points for which they have no ready answers.
• Contrarian Warning Sign Number Four: Accusing the accusers. When confronted with their trolling, trolls immediately respond that it is the accusers who are trolls (see Natural Predators below). Often the Contrarian will single out his most vocal opponent and claim that while he can respect his other opponents, this one in particular is beneath his notice.
• Contrarian Warning Sign Number Five: Attempts to condescend. The Contrarian will seek refuge in condescending remarks that repeatedly scorn his or her critics as beneath notice – all the while continuing to respond to them.
• Contrarian Warning Sign Number Six: One distinctive mark ofContrarian Trolls is that every thread in which they dissent quickly devolves into a debate about who is trolling whom. In the course of such a debate the Contrarian will display many of the other Warning Signs mentioned above.

Sounds familiar, I think. Of course, so does this one:

The Mutt. Alternatively known as Dogs or Yapping Dogs. Mutts are pack animals characterized by their loud barking – vociferous, repetitive, usually ignorant and irrational criticism of anything and anyone they do not like. Mutts frequently become obsessed with a few or even a single poster with whom they disagree, often for purely personal reasons. Like a dog gnawing at a bone, the Mutt will attack the object of its ire over and over again, making a fool of itself in the eyes of those who understand such childish behavior for what it is. Often one Mutt in a group of Yapping Dogs will act as the alpha of the pack, while the others chime in to voice their mindless (but loud) support for their leader’s opinions.

These two as well in our issue, and not just on the internets:

The Honorable Nitwit. Honorable Nitwits absolutely love to speak about honor. This breed invokes the concepts of honor, integrity, humility, and other traits straight from the Boy Scout Oath more often than a Klingon warrior on anti-depressants. Honorable nitwits are convinced that everyone around them suffers from a lack of honor – an idea they thoroughly fail to understand in attempting to use its lack to smear others.

The Old Warrior. The Old Warrior has been there and done that. He has little time to spare for those who have not been there and done that. The Old Warrior has been there and done that to such an extent, in fact, that he is always right. Anyone who disagrees with him, therefore, is wrong by definition and should shut the hell up. Old Warriors place a very high premium on one’s credentials relevant to the subject matter discussed – failing to understand the logical fallacy of appeals to authority.

And who does this sound like?

The Pretend-novice: Has an agenda to push but pretends to not to understand arguments against said agenda in order to push the agenda further. By appearing to be a new user, she can get away with combativeness without appearing aggressive or hostile and can always excuse any poor arguments as ignorance or genuine inquiry. (credit: ays)

There are certainly more types, but I found these to be the most humorous, and the types we seem to mostly normally come across.

I noticed that the NRA Blog is being highlighted over at Ammoland.com, which includes a short interview. I’ll be honest, I’m not really sure what I think about Ammoland.com, but I checked them out when they first got on my radar. It seems to be operated by an Internet marketing and e-commerce company known as Sure Solutions Inc, located in Manasquan, New Jersey.

I’m not against people making a buck, or people commercializing their blogs, by any stretch. But I’m not sure what to think about someone’s who’s primary motivate would seem to be profit. I’m not against profit, we have a lot of folks out there who make a living in the issue, like Jim Shepherd of the Outdoor Wire whose online network includes Rich Grassi at  Tactical Wire, and Tammy Sapp with Women’s Outdoor Wire. Also J.R. Absher of the Outdoor Pressroom, or Michael Bane of Downrange TV. While these are folks who are in the business and making a living, they are also well known within the outdoor and gun rights community, and have long participated in the culture. I know when the Indians come to attack the wagon train, they’ll be fighting right there along side me.

I would not go so far as to say we shouldn’t welcome Ammoland.com into our community, but I question what their interest is in our issue besides making a buck. Our community has been under continuous attack for decades, and when it comes time to circle the wagons, can we depend on people who are just in it for the money?

Fellow blogger Rightwingprof has lung cancer. Thoughts and prayers for him. It’s not an easy thing, but he is a man of strong Catholic faith, so I sincerely hope he pulls through.

Dave Kopel has an interesting piece in the Denver University Law Review on using blogs to bring law to the masses. Law is not a subject I knew much about until I started reading legal blogs, and then once I got into Second Amendment law, I devoured as much on the subject as I could read.

I think law is something that comes rather easily to engineers, since it’s basically just boolean logic system, but written in plain English. If (A || B || C) && !D && !E is true, you’re violating the statute. There is a system to it, and legal structures are less complicated than even simple microprocessors. Law also has obscure exceptions to generally given rules, which is something you also come across a lot in computer engineering. Computer engineers deal with bugs, just as judges must deal with poorly drafted legislation that yields absurd, clearly unintended results.

To a thought process that’s heavily oriented towards systems and logical structure, law provides, in many ways, much more interesting puzzles and conundrums. Unlike with circuits, where there’s just a right way and a wrong way to do things, law provides much more opportunity for philosophical exploration.

Overlawyered has a good summary of exactly how the new FTC regulations are going to affect bloggers, but in his comments, we get an idea of what an FTC action looks like. I have done a bit of research, which seems to confirm this:

Let’s also understand the process by which the FTC will enforce its rules. FTC regional offices will be spending their days combing the Internet looking for “violators”. Blog operators will then get a “demand letter” from the regional office demanding they either post certain disclaimers or remove offending posts. These letters will include a “consent order” admitting guilt without any sort of due process, as well as a lengthy financial disclosure form that provides the FTC with a complete picture of your personal and business finances.

The FTC doesn’t negotiate. You can’t call them up to straighten things out. Once the demand letter is issued, you have already been judged guilty. If you want to contest the charges, you’ll be hauled before an FTC administrative law judge, not a regular federal court. Even if you convince the ALJ to side with you, the FTC commissioners hear any appeals — and the FTC has a 100% reversal rate when the ALJs rule against FTC staff.

You can appeal from the FTC commission to the US Court of Appeals, then to the Supreme Court, but that much lawyering isn’t exactly cheap. This is chilling. I’d like to blame Obama for this, but the rule change was started under Bush. Congress should eliminate the Federal Trade Commission and replace it with an agency it retains more control over. The FTC, under our system of Government, is a pseudo-legislative, pseudo-judicial body that should not be constitutional. It is a relic of the New Deal, and needs to go.

Wyatt has been diagnosed with skin cancer. Fortunately, it’s a treatable variety. We wish him a speedy recovery.

From Tam:

Bobbi’s comment this morning was “So you see an upside to five hundred channels and nothing on?”

“Sure,” I replied, “instead of ninety percent of America listening to three guys telling them what to think every night, now we’ve got seventy percent of America listening to five hundred guys telling them what to think, twenty percent playing video games or watching DVDs, and ten percent chatting about what they think on internet forums. You can’t get a good pre-genocide Nürnberg pep rally going if half your audience is listening to shortwave rants about flouride in the water, cheering for the opposition, or playing World of Warcraft.“

Reviewed the Federal Trade Commission’s new rules regulating blog content, and unfortunately, they look to be far worse than I originally imagined. Jeff Jarvis points out some of the problems with the new rules here, but let me go into how they will affect gun bloggers specifically, since more than a few of us have gotten free stuff from companies, and not always because we were bloggers, or because we were given something with an expectation we’d write about it.  But it turns out that largely doesn’t matter.

As Sigivald initially thought, most of the reports indicate that only bloggers who are paid by companies or marketing agents are at risk of prosecution by the FTC. However, the FTC is clear that payment need not be in the form of cash, and even merely providing a review copy of a product itself may be considered compensation. But, just to keep things interesting, review copies may not always be compensation. The bureaucrats admit to being intentionally vague because they may or may not consider the value of the product as evidence against bloggers in the decision to prosecute.

For example, a blogger could receive merchandise from a marketer with a request to review it, but with no compensation paid other than the value of the product itself. In this situation, whether or not any positive statement the blogger posts would be deemed an “endorsement” within the meaning of the Guides would depend on, among other things, the value of that product, and on whether the blogger routinely receives such requests.

Confused yet? Well, that depends on how often you get offers to review. There’s no minimum standard for which you must begin reporting such “compensation.” And the mere presence of “offers” may possibly be enough to trigger an investigation even if you turn most review offers down. If that’s not bad enough, there’s liability on the part of companies who choose to work with blogs as well.

Marketers or sponsors would be obliged to monitor all the content of the blogs they have ever worked with. If a blogger gets a key fact or claim about the product wrong, marketer or sponsor would be liable.

The Commission recognizes that because the advertiser does not disseminate the endorsements made using these new consumer-generated media, it does not have complete control over the contents of those statements. Nonetheless, if the advertiser initiated the process that led to these endorsements being made – e.g., by providing products to well-known bloggers or to endorsers enrolled in word of mouth marketing programs – it potentially is liable for misleading statements made by those consumers.

Imposing liability in these circumstances hinges on the determination that the advertiser chose to sponsor the consumer-generated content such that it has established an endorser-sponsor relationship. It is foreseeable that an endorser may exaggerate the benefits of a free product or fail to disclose a material relationship where one exists. In employing this means of marketing, the advertiser has assumed the risk that an endorser may fail to disclose a material connection or misrepresent a product, and the potential liability that accompanies that risk. The Commission, however, in the exercise of its prosecutorial discretion, would consider the advertiser’s efforts to advise these endorsers of their responsibilities and to monitor their online behavior in determining what action, if any, would be warranted.

Bloggers and sponsors could all be facing potential fines of up to 11,000 for a failure to disclose. The practical impact is that a wise lawyer would advise companies to avoid pitching anything to bloggers unless a blogger can bring a profit greater than $11,000 to the company. Very few of us are capable of doing that.

And the liability does not just exist for mistakes in product claims, but also for disclosure itself. If S&W wants to give Caleb another hat after December 1, and he posts about it or any S&W product again in a way that may be interpreted in perceived as positive, they are liable if he forgets to add a note that they are compensating him in some way. It doesn’t matter if they didn’t even email him about that specific product, it’s a potential violation. It’s worth noting that traditional media won’t have to live up to the same standards as blogs:

The Commission acknowledges that bloggers may be subject to different disclosure requirements than reviewers in traditional media. In general, under usual circumstances, the Commission does not consider reviews published in traditional media (i.e., where a newspaper, magazine, or television or radio station with independent editorial responsibility assigns an employee to review various products or services as part of his or her official duties, and then publishes those reviews) to be sponsored advertising messages. Accordingly, such reviews are not “endorsements” within the meaning of the Guides. Under these circumstances, the Commission believes, knowing whether the media entity that published the review paid for the item in question would not affect the weight consumers give to the reviewer’s statements. Of course, this view could be different if the reviewer were receiving a benefit directly from the manufacturer (or its agent). In contrast, if a blogger’s statement on his personal blog or elsewhere (e.g., the site of an online retailer of electronic products) qualifies as an “endorsement” – i.e., as a sponsored message – due to the blogger’s relationship with the advertiser or the value of the merchandise he has received and has been asked to review by that advertiser, knowing these facts might affect the weight consumers give to his review.

The free speech implications of this are serious. but I think there’s even some free press implications. Why should bloggers not enjoy the same rights the regular media does? Does it matter that my press is Apache and PHP, rather than some huge, expensive offset printer? I don’t think so.

Because the rules are not clear, a blogger or marketer can have no idea whether his writing about a particular product will trigger an investigation, or worse, bring about civil penalties. The safe move will be for bloggers to not mention products or companies in a positive light, and for advertisers to stay away from blogs altogether. This will have a chilling effect on speech and free expression, so it’s difficult for me to believe that the FTC’s new guidelines are not a violation of the First Amendment. Hopefully the courts will agree.