Neat stuff, but it’s pretty slow. I’ll probably write some sort of caching tool to ping it once a week and build historical data from it. Here’s Elk
Butte, here’s Moscow Mountain.

Peter Seebach wrote a nice entry about value systems, and what happens when there is an impedance mismatch between two people. Hint: it generates indistinct buzzing noises.

Very short version: weapons laws have been used time and time again to disarm people prior to genocide.

Short version: gun control came to the US after the Civil War. This was a time when white people didn’t want newly freed black people (or Irish people, or Italians) to have guns - they might, uh, exact a little well-deserved revenge. Gun control has been applied primarily to non-white populations in the US since it’s inception.

Well, you say, that’s not genocide, that’s crime control. Consider this: the Gun Control Act of 1968 (following King and Kenndey’s killings). JPFO has published an expose on Senator Thomas Dodd’s source of the text for GCA68 - the Nazi Weapons Laws used to disarm Jews. Here’s a more explicit paper on the roots of US gun control by Clayton Cramer. And, here’s a picture from the first Million
Mom March.

If you support any form of gun control, registration, licensing, or storage regulation, you are a traitor and you are the problem. When you wake up, it will be too late for you. Choose wisely.

A first grader brought what he presumed to be a fake gun to school in San Francisco. I’m not quite sure what Public Defender Jeff Adachi is on about, though:

The two incidents happened a few days before the city public defender’s office is to hold its annual summit on juvenile justice. Public Defender Jeff Adachi said he will highlight results of an informal survey of incarcerated San Francisco youth showing that 28 percent believe it is sometimes or always acceptable to bring a gun to school.

“Unless you shift the culture, a culture that thinks it’s OK to have a gun, it’s going to continue,” Adachi said. “We’ve got to start early. High school is too late.”

It is OK to have a gun. It isn’t OK to bring it to school if you’re going to be raising hell, because raising hell is wrong. The gun and the trouble-making are not connected.

As I pointed out earlier, there was a small cluster of protection orders being violated in King County. The Seattle-PI noticed and wrote a short bit on it. Of course, they walk around the elephant in the room while describing the shadow cast in great detail. So close, yet, so far.

Hippie Killer: death on a French roll, originally uploaded by Ry Jones.

Fun sandwich. The bacon was nice!

Without my mom, I wouldn’t be here blogging. Happy mother’s day!

I re-cut the videos for the toilet detonation; take a look. At 6 megabytes, the new video is lightweight.

Ry Jones wrote
at 6:16pm
I have to disagree - the live event, well, sucked. As a DVD extra, it may have been cool. Paying $20 to sit for two hours of Showtime ads was annoying. Paying $20 to see outtakes - “here is stuff that sucked so bad we wouldn’t use it, so now you get to watch it” - sucked. Chris needs to take a chill pill, or practice being in front of an audience; he was clearly not on his game. Ira, for the most part, did what I think he could with what he was given. The live audience questions were spotty (some not so good, some really good). Too bad Ira ducked the most interesting one; his response about the gay guy in the closet was lame.

The question I sent in, which didn’t get asked, was “why do you hate America so much?”. It would have been very on point, considering the amount of screen time given to a former agent of Saddam’s regime’s propaganda arm. Why did his family lose jobs? Possibly in the de-Baathification push?

Sadly, I’m out of characters.

From TAL’s wall. I still listen to TAL every week, but my question for Ira still stands.

Q: A few nights ago, Seattleite Nate Molsee was driving south on Interstate 5 through Lynnwood just after sundown and came upon an SUV in the lane to his left without its headlights on. Rainy weather and the dusky light made the vehicle practically invisible, he said. He wasn’t sure what to do. “Should I have followed the example of some of the other drivers and flashed my lights, or pulled over and called 911?”

A: State Patrol spokesman Bob Calkins says in a case like that, flash your lights once. If the other vehicle’s lights don’t come on, the driver may be drunk or under the influence of something else, “and it’s probably worth calling 911 from your cellphone.”

In Washington state, it is illegal to flash your lights at someone.