Government Waste

As a libertarian I’m for shrinking the size of government in general where ever we can. I’m not so hard-line that I think there is no need for ANY public projects or agencies, still stories like this really show me that all of them can stand to have their budget’s slashed so they can behave like any public entity and not spend money like budding rappers in strip clubs.

Story #1:

The National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) recently tried to mail a drone from an Air Force base in Florida to one of its own animal sanctuaries in Massachusetts. A fairly simple procedure, you might assume, but also one that involves some pretty clear oversight since the remote-controlled device in question is worth upward of $400,000.

Somehow, one of the boxes of parts was delivered to the wrong address.

“I wasn’t expecting a freaking drone,” explained the lucky guy who received a free Puma All Environment Unmanned Aircraft yesterday along with some weight-lifting equipment he ordered from Amazon. He goes by the alias “Seventy_Seven” on Reddit, and there isn’t much known about him besides the fact he’s a college student nowhere near Massachusetts and has no time for aquatic wildlife monitoring equipment since he’s busy getting ripped on his new bench set.

Now the misstep could be a simple error. I’ve gotten wrong packages from companies that have their affairs in order, and I’ve had items vanish into the aether. Still something tells me, as somebody who used to work closely with NOAA this could very well be rank incompetence.

Story #2.

A senior official at the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Inspector General testified Wednesday that a career EPA official stored thousands of pornographic files on his government computer, and has admitted to watching porn a lot while at work, sometimes for most of his day.

“When an OIG special agent arrived at this employee’s work space to conduct an interview, the special agent witnessed the employee actively viewing pornography on his government-issued computer,” Allan Williams, deputy assistant inspector general for Investigations told the House Oversight & Government Reform Committee.

“Subsequently, the employee confessed to spending, on average, between two and six hours per day viewing pornography while at work.”

…Chaffetz asked how long the porn viewing has been going on, and Perciasepe said he didn’t know. Chaffetz indicated his understanding was that it has been happening since 2010, and fired at Perciasepe, “How can I know and you don’t?”

Chaffetz then asked why the official hasn’t been fired. “Fire him! What’s the question?”

Perciasepe said he was waiting for the OIG’s final report on the employee. Chaffetz then asked what Perciasepe is doing about the situation now, to which Perciasepe said he was doing nothing.

Now first I’ll note that agency owned property belongs to the agency, not the employee using it. They can have whatever policy they want about it. If the agency doesn’t have a policy against pornographic images, games, ect, I don’t know if I’d have a cow about that. I assume if he has a laptop it’s because he travels with it, if the company allows him to use it however he wants when he’s off the clock there is no problem.

Still we’re talking about the BULK of his work day is looking at porn!!! First up who does this? I wouldn’t dare GLANCE at porn while one the job, at the root just because while I’m working in my office that’s the LAST thing of interest I’d want to do. Further who the hell needs more than 10-20 minuets of porn time to accomplish the task it’s used for?

Weather he was doing “one small load of laundry by hand” or playing World of Warcraft or Solitare, the times admitted to (and that’s what he’ll admit to), he’s NOT doing whatever the job he’s supposed to do. Either his job is so superfluous that his lack of effort isn’t noticed, or his management is so incompetent they aren’t noticing one of their workers isn’t pulling the wagon.

And they’re doing NOTHING about this? Of course not, it’s not like it’s THEIR money! Hey, they can always ask for more! And with the Church of Global Warming running the government right now, NOAA and the EPA are probably getting blank checks at this time.

Disgusting!

Posted in Politics | 2 Comments

Quality Spam Control!

Arizona Rifleman hipped me to this Conditional CAPTCHA plugin.

Once I make this post I’m going to log out as me, and troll my own blog just to see how it looks for you guys, but the config panel generates some fake confirmation screens that are CONSIDERABLY easier to decode IMHO than the standard noisy and distorted text CAPTCHA I was using.

Let me know how it works for you, seems to be working OK as we’re still getting comments. If for some odd reason your comment doesn’t appear it probably got trashed, so try re-submitting, as I likely won’t need to moderate comments that trip Akismet anymore.

Strange comments below are me, and you should be able to figure that out.

Posted in Blogging | 7 Comments

“Gun Death” Exploding Basketball

No death, but WOW!

Rosemary Ferrand was at the North Texas theme park in Arlington on Easter Sunday and was carrying a bright purple and yellow basketball that her son, Brandon Green, won at the amusement park.

“It was so loud I thought it was a bomb,” Ferrand told WFAA Monday. “I wasn’t sure what was wrong, I felt a burning sensation all over me.”

Ferrand said she was left with bruising all under her arm and through the side of her chest. The ball is now just a scrap of rubber and cloth.

Six Flags Over Texas said paramedics were on hand to help and Ferrand was taken to a hospital. WFAA reports she was taken to the ER by ambulance.

“We take all incidents seriously, the safety of our guests is our utmost priority,” said park spokesperson Sharon Parker, who confirmed all other prize basketballs have been checked out and cleared as safe.

WTF???

H/T Whipped Cream Difficulties

Posted in Gun Death? | 1 Comment

Neat Way to Cook Eggs

For those who don’t know, Alton Brown just launched a Youtube Channel!

Here’s a neat video on how to cook a large batch of hard-boiled eggs in the oven!

Personally I put my eggs in a large stock pot and cover them with cold water, then turn on high heat and watch for the water to boil (yes you can watch the pot and it’ll still boil, and that’s necessary for this application!) once the water comes to a full rolling boil I remove the heat, cover the pot and set my timer for 15 minuets. Once the timer goes off, I dump the hot water and add cold water (you can add ice like Alton does, but I really don’t feel the need…I will sometimes cover them with cold water, give them a minuet to heat the water, then pour it off again and add more cold water).

This produces eggs of the perfect quality like Alton’s in about the same amount of time. Note that the yolk still has some translucent qualities but is still 100% solid, that’s perfect.

We’ll see if I bother with this, as it doesn’t seem like much of a time saver, and you still get a big stock pot dirty. Why do I cook so many eggs?

Pickled Eggs, of course!

Posted in Food | 4 Comments

Anti-Rights Magical Thinking

I was going to skip this one from the BLNN but Unc got my wheels spinning

Hillary Rodham Clinton said Tuesday the nation’s gun culture has gotten “way out of balance” and the U.S. needs to rein in the notion that “anybody can have a gun, anywhere, anytime.”

Mostly I suspect because gun owners won’t vote for her, and those people need to be defenseless!

“I think again we’re way out of balance. I think that we’ve got to rein in what has become an almost article of faith that anybody can have a gun anywhere, anytime,” Clinton said. “And I don’t believe that is in the best interest of the vast majority of people. And I think you can say that and still support the right of people to own guns.”

First up, here’s one magical thinking of anti-rights cultists. No anybody CAN’T get a gun…well at least legally. We’ll get into that part in a bit. But legally there are prohibited people, and underage people, and people who simply can’t afford one. Still it strikes me as a huge logical disconnect, she supports the right people to own guns…but wants less people to own guns. Yeah, we call that lying! It’s really nothing more than a joke these days when somebody saying “I support the Second Amendment but….”

The next bit of magic has no quote. There is NOTHING to quote. How does Hillary plan on fixing this? Yeah, I’ll instead quote Joe Huffman who said it better than I could:

I find it very telling that if they enumerate what they think are “common-sense solutions” they don’t make them easy to find on their web site. I couldn’t find them. If they really had solutions don’t you think they would announce them all to the world? What this means to me is they are running an emotional appeal, as they have already admitted, and will push whatever restrictive law they believe has a chance of passing. Facts and logic aren’t their tools in trade.

If you have a plan, why not share it? A Devil’s advocate statement could be that they DON’T have a plan, which means they’re worthless spammers, but the reality is they DO have a plan, but they don’t dare speak it, or are willing to lie about it. See above “Supporting the 2nd Amendment” but wanting to ignore it, or various gun banners saying they don’t want to ban guns, or aren’t coming for your guns. L I E! Pants on FIRE!

Still the biggest one is this:

Clinton told attendees at the mental health conference that “at the rate we’re going, we’re going to have so many people with guns everywhere, fully licensed, fully validated” in settings like movie theaters where shootings have arisen over seemingly mundane things like loud gum chewing or cellphone use.

“That’s what happens in the countries I’ve visited where there is no rule of law and no self-control and that is something that we cannot just let go without paying attention,” she said.

Well we covered the movie theater shooting she’s likely referencing here. Curtis Reeves shot a man for texting on his cellphone during a movie, and is now facing murder charges that I suspect he won’t be able to beat. He’s in Jail right now, and will likely never breath free air ever again.

So what’s with this comment comparing this event to countries that have no effective legal system?

Simple the anti-rights cult is promising something that will never happen. They promise that if we make something illegal that thing will no longer happen….you know like murder. See also the use of illegal drugs.

There is a reason why the anti-rights people when talking about US “Gun Death” they exclude huge numbers of countries. #1. Those countries have really strict gun laws AND high “Gun Death” rates, which is counter-productive to their argument and political goals. #2. Because of the weak legal system in these countries people are likely to get away with murder and other violent crime because police simply don’t exist, or can be bought for a price.

Does that sound like here?

At the basis of all anti-gun arguments are A) Worthless malum prohibitum laws that really have nothing to do with the price of tea in China. Stuff like if your gun has a “protruding pistol grip” or if you can buy your ammo online, or Numbers game where adding just one more round to a magazine becomes a serious crime, or adding a fraction of an inch to a bullet diameter, or shaving a fraction of an inch off a long-gun barrel. Also while the Magazine ban in Massachusetts makes it a felony for me to own an M&P9c Magazine that holds 12 rather than the restricted 10, or buying a new 20 round FAL magazine, they talk about 30 round Pistol magazines and 100 round rifle magazines! Their goal is to incite emotions when they’re not really targeting a 100 AR Beta mag, but your standard 30 or 20 round P-Mag! Or B) Laws that don’t actually target violent or anti-social behavior but promise to reduce or eliminate already illegal behavior. Take “Universal Background Checks”, this isn’t a law designed to combat the rampant problems with lending your buddy a hunting rifle for the weekend, or selling a weapon from your private collection face-to-face, instead people arguing these laws talk about criminals acquiring guns. Except a convicted felon cannot OWN a gun no matter how they acquire it! They talk about repealing Stand Your Ground law because some people have murdered other people and attempted (or in most cases didn’t attempt, but why let facts get in the way) to invoke the law to protect themselves. Only this doesn’t work! Murder is illegal! Stand Your Ground or Castle Doctrine does NOT make murder legal, and if you murder somebody you are just as much of a criminal in Florida as you are in New York.

So what do these laws ACTUALLY do? They simply make otherwise lawful and upstanding citizens criminals.

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Posted in Freedom, Guns, Politics, Safety, Self Defense | 3 Comments

Fluid-Bonded Blogging

So after numerous complaints I have taken off the Captcha codes. For those who felt your complaints fell on deaf ears, they didn’t. I just personally am not terribly bothered by them in other blogs, and like the idea that robots can’t play at my blog.

Still I still have Akismet running so after several hours with the Captcha codes off friendly comments are still flowing, but the spam-trap was simply brimming with random crap. That wasn’t an issue as I just dumped the whole thing.

Let me know if you find your comments disappearing by shooting me an email at WEERDBEARD at GMAIL (you know the rest). I’ll probably ask you to submit one more comment then go look for it in the spam trap to tell Akismet you’re cool.

Posted in Blogging | 5 Comments

“Gun Death” Face Tattoos

Ok the Tats didn’t do the killing…still:

A man with several face tattoos is now jailed without bond after a seemingly random and bizarre attack on a child playing at a Houston playground, reports say.

Officers tell KTRK and KPRC that a 3-year-old boy was playing with other children at an apartment complex’s playground on Tuesday when REDACTED, 21, stabbed the child in the neck for no apparent reason.

The tattoos didn’t spawn the attack, but somebody that would do that to their face is NOT in their right mind and should be avoided.

H/t Whipped Cream Difficulties

Posted in Gun Death? | 1 Comment

More Joys of Police Raids

This is TERRIBLE!

A New York woman has sued the city police department, claiming that officers have raided her home four times in the past year trying to arrest her long-dead husband.

The raids continued even after the woman, Karen Fennell, posted a death certificate over her front door showing that her husband, James Jordan, died in March 2006, according to papers filed in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn.

It gets worse:

James Jordan Jr. was arrested during a raid on the apartment last summer and was charged with fourth-degree weapons possession when police found a pocket knife in the home, Uzoh said.

Officers interrogated him about drug and gun activity in his Brooklyn neighborhood, the lawsuit contends. The charges against Jordan were dismissed, the suit said.

They pulled on their jackboots for a raid, they had to do SOMETHING! Obviously she didn’t have a dog for them to shoot…

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Posted in Freedom, Safety | 1 Comment

Dad Jokes

Since I am now a Dad, I need to brush up on these!

They are Terrible, but she is worth it!

Posted in Family and Friends | 4 Comments

I May Have to Get a Pair of These

Jay has a review of them on his site. Now This video:

Man the prices are cool and despite my crazy love for Double Diamond Grips, they LOOK cool too. Check them out, and I’ll probably end up buying one for my 5″ Stainless gun.

Now the question is, what light would I get to mount on this for a bedside gun?

Posted in Guns, Self Defense | 2 Comments