The Danger of Beards

Sent to me by reader Mark, and I got quite the LOL.

This image comes from “Microbiological laboratory hazard of bearded men,” a peer-reviewed research paper concerning the risk bearded scientists who work with bacteria and viruses might pose to their families. Published in 1967, the study tested whether bearded men were more likely to accidentally “carry” microbes home with them.

LOL, thankfully I work with cancer cells, and mostly those that are encapsulated in living rodents, and even then I’m wearing a surgical mask.

Most labs that have such stuff these days use bio safety cabinets, glove boxes and such, and generally have the workers shower in and shower out of the clean areas.

The risks of me brining something dangerous home is quite low, beard or otherwise.

Thanks Mark, for the laugh! 🙂

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Hijack

Check this out!

It won’t be long before the Media Matters Shill-Tag leads to nothing but pro-gun websites. Also looking at the sites that do show the tag it certainly looks like there is money exchanged, maybe not the the author directly, but something is bought, and something is sold.

Oh and:

This post is written as part of the Media Matters Gun Facts fellowship. The purpose of the fellowship is to further Media Matters’ mission to comprehensively monitor, analyze, and correct conservative misinformation in the U.S. media. Some of the worst misinformation occurs around the issue of guns, gun violence, and extremism, the fellowship program is designed to fight this misinformation with facts.

**Update**In attempts to be clever I might have exceeded the capability of “Let Me Google That For you”, so to achieve the same results just paste the above quote into a search bar and watch.

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Shills, Paid or Otherwise

So Sebastian muses about the Joyce Tagline that’s appearing under anti-gun articles and blog posts as of late. It reads as such:

This post is written as part of the Media Matters Gun Facts fellowship. The purpose of the fellowship is to further Media Matters’ mission to comprehensively monitor, analyze, and correct conservative misinformation in the U.S. media. Some of the worst misinformation occurs around the issue of guns, gun violence, and extremism, the fellowship program is designed to fight this misinformation with facts.

Sebastian suspects that it has to do with the allotment of funds. There have been many instances where people placing that tag on a post have been questioned about the transfers of funds. So far all but ONE have been ignored to my knowledge. That response is here insinuated by Thirdpower . The response was this:

Thanks for asking. I am paid nothing, am a board member of the Wisconsin Anti-Violence Effort and have been writing about firearms violence issues for years.

I’m curious about this. Is there no exchange for this tag? If so why is the tag used so intermittently? Go have a look at Joan Peterson’s site. She has intermittent posts with and without tags. ALL of her posts are anti-gun, and the tag appears on her more essay-like posts as well as her aggregation of “Gun Death” and “Gun Crime” posts. So why some and not others?

Note that the above quote says HE is paid nothing, but he does talk about his affiliation with the Joyce foundation. I suspect maybe the astroturf org is being paid, such as WAVE or Protect Minnesota in the case of Joan Peterson.

The fact that the text is IDENTICAL in both text and location on the post that there must be some policy email from the Joyce Foundation or its subordinate Media Matters floating around. If anybody has, or can acquire that email I think everybody would love to read it.

I’ll also note that sadly there is no such entity for the pro-gun side. If I could get paid to do this I’d quit my job today.

**UPDATE**Joan Has a new post up this morning and no tag. There has got to be SOME exchange for this.

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90% Taxes

So I think Ron Howard is an amazing director. Still just because you can shoot A Beautiful Mind doesn’t mean you really have any credibility outside that field.

Now first up I’m curious how much Ronnie knew about the US tax code and paying taxes back in his days on the Andy Griffith Show. I’m not calling bullshit, because when I was his age I was just earning an allowance and the best I knew about “Taxes” was if I wanted to buy a toy at the store listed at $2.99 it was going to cost me north of $3 before I got it out the door.

Now, around the same time Ronnie was playing Opie another Ronnie was making films in that very same Hollywood. Of course when Reagan got to a point where he was paying 60%-70% taxes he realized he was putting in the same amount of hard work, producing the same amount of product for a shitload less money, and really that would be time better spent relaxing with his family at home or on vacation.

Of course if Reagan didn’t do a movie, the hair and makeup people didn’t do a movie, nor did the set builders or the lighting techs et al. Of course those people were making less money and paying less taxes, but now they were looking for work.

Same goes for those “Greedy” big corporations. If they just made 1,000 Units of a product that they sold for 1 Million, but the next 1,000 will sell for only 500K, and then 100K for the next production run, at what point does it just become a pain in the ass to pay your employees?

Of course it can be hard to simply furlough a manufacturing plant for 3 months, so the smarter business plan would be to lay off half the workforce so that the plant works year-round and never starts building goods for the government for free.

Heck Tam has a neat micro-economic example of the same idea.

the customers are now flowing around us like we’re a rock in the stream of retail commerce, and the rebate seeker ahead of me pouts “Well, fifteen dollars is a lot of money!”

Fifteen dollars? We’ve been standing here for nigh on half an hour! Minimum wage is $7.25/hr! Do the math lady! (It was at this point that I fished in my pocket to see if I had any folding money. As God is my witness, if I’d found a twenty at that point, I’d have handed it to her. My back teeth were floating.)

I’ve done the same thing with auto-repair and home improvment work. There are some things I’ll do, but there are many other things that are too dirty, too difficult, too time consuming, or too painful for the monetary savings to be worth it to break a sweat.

Oh and back to Ron Howard and Jayne Lynch, there’s nothing on your tax return that says “Exact Change Only”, you could cut big daddy .gov a nice fat tip if you think you got too much scratch lying around. Furthermore I wonder if these limousine liberals hire accountants to itemize deductions and factor in expenses and loss in their tax returns? If you aren’t paying enough, why burn calories to pay LESS?

Of course the numbers show that tax-hungry “Progressives” aren’t all that interested in paying their own taxes, certainly not MORE taxes.

They attempt to conflate Marxism with Altruism, when really the two couldn’t be any more dissimilar.

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1911 Maintenence

Found this video over at No Lawyers, Only Guns and Money and its really worth your time if you have a M1911 pistol or are thinking of getting one.

I didn’t realize the shorter 1911s fatigued their springs faster. Interesting. Also I changed the springs in both my 1911s early this year and so I had them all apart, I didn’t notice any cracking on the pin retaining plate, but that’s a good thing to note.

Nice little video to keep you out of trouble!

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“Gun Death” Bar Stabbing

We obviously need to ban the carry of knives in places that serve alcohol!

MINNEAPOLIS – Police say a bar fight in south Minneapolis left four people suffering stab wounds over the weekend.

ALCOHOL AND KNIVES DON’T MIX!!!11

Police say all victims were stabbed in the torso but are expected to recover.

Lucky on that.

So far, no arrests have been made.

Not so lucky on that!

No “Gun Death”, but is the tool really that important?

h/t Maddmedic

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Modern Sporting Rifle

Found this video and I thought I’d share.

Jeff Quinn from Gunblast with a very cool AR-15 with a a 4x and 1x Leupold optics (more here) This makes it a VERY cool tactical optic as you can shoot out to range with the 4x optic but engage in close quarters or close range with the 1x.

Jeff points out correctly that this also makes for a quality hunting optic as it can take abuse and deliver rounds on target. Also that AR is in .50 Beowulf and you’ll see at the end some great footage of a VERY clean takedown of a Black Bear!

I’ve heard if you snare or tree a bear, or have to stalk a wounded one the meat gets gamey because of lactic acidosis I don’t know the circumstances of the demise of the bears I’ve eaten, but I wasn’t a fan of the meat.

I’d love to wrap my lips around some burger from this bruin, because that’s a DAMN clean kill.

Honestly .50 Beowulf doesn’t interest me tactically, as you have such a limited magazine capacity, and I don’t see a huge advantage in the cartridge over say 7.62x51mm…but it IS a great hunting round so I’d certainly call an AR-15 in .50 Beowulf of .450 Bushmaster, or .458 SOCOM as a Sporting Rifle.

I’m just sayin’

Posted in Freedom, Guns | Leave a comment

Modern Anti-Gun Websites

So a few years ago I went on a cruise out of Galveston Texas, and one evening I found myself in the little cigar bar off the fantail smoking cuban cigars and drinking scotch and talking with a bunch of guys. All the guys were from various parts of Texas, then it came out that I was from Mass. Quickly the subject turned to Politics (and specifically what an embarrassment Ted Kennedy was) and then the subject came to guns. Now the survey of the room ranged from people who carried and kept guns for home defense, to wish-washy guys who had guns but were luke-warm about guns being used for stuff other than poking holes in pape, ducks and deer. Note that EVERYBODY there had at least one gun. Heck I grew up in an anti-gun home, but Dad’s old boyscout rifle was tucked away in the basement rusting away.

Even Joan Peterson doesn’t shy away from the fact that there are guns in her house. Really with groups like the Brady Campaign and the Joyce foundation scrambling for relevance, and doing all they can to hide their agenda. You can see the days of openly calling to ban handguns and semi-auto rifles, or magazines of various sizes are gone.

Really the future of gun control starts with “I’m a gun owner but…” People calling for universal registration, or banning of private sales are getting laughed out of the room. Now the people who run the biggest threat to our rights are people like Robert Farago and Gun Mart vilifying rifles, or Rob Pincus (or Robert Farago) speaking out against how and where people carry are more willing to get the ear of the curious bystander, or politician drafting a law.

Maybe they’re just timid people, or self-promoting whores, but in their actions they’re no different than a false flag.

So why don’t you join me in giving these people the rightful title of “Modern Anti-Gun Websites”, they aren’t the past, they’re the FUTURE!

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Quoted from Mediamatters

We all know that Media Matters is a constant recipient of Joyce Foundation monies to write hit pieces about the 2nd Amendment and US Gun culture.

But not all shills are paid.

Last week, a gun blogger going by “Eric at the Gunmart Blog” writing at ammoland.com broke with the gun industry trade association National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) over its recently made-up terminology, “modern sporting rifles.”…At the well-read The Truth About Guns, they weren’t buying the NSSF attack, going beyond Eric at Gunmart’s critique, calling NSSF’s terminology “a failed attempt at O[r]wellian language modification”:

We’ve heard about these jerks before. We’ll hear about them again. When your “Pro-gun” message is the lead of the anti-rights talking points, and your words are NOT being twisted out of context I wonder whose side you’re on!

There are enemies of our rights who walk among us claiming to be our friends, but friends they are not. I’m a huge fan of the “Big Tent”, but there are limits to everything.

As far as “Modern Sporting Rifle” goes, I don’t use the term. I don’t have any problem with it, but “Rifle” and “Carbine” are much simpler and straight-forward terms.

Also I’d like to add to those who don’t like those terms. There are a lot of ARs, AKs, and similar firearms out there in private hands. What are they being used for? Seems there are a lot of targets getting shot, a lot of animals being harvested…and not that many assaults. I’m just saying.

But yeah, my FAL? It’s a “Rifle”.

Posted in Guns, Politics | Leave a comment

Warning To Podcast Fans

Let’s say you enjoy podcasts. Let’s say you’re a fan of Chris Hardwick and the Nerdists. Let’s say you see their latest podcast interviewing Tom Green and you think: Tom Green? I remember him! You know I don’t really miss him, he was annoying and not funny at all! Hey but its been a while maybe he’s trying something new.

Nope. I was in the lab, I wanted to turn it off at 8mins, it wasn’t until minute 13 that I was at a point where I could take my gloves off and hit the Delete button on my phone. He’s still stupid, he’s still not funny, he’s still just as obnoxious.

Tom Green raped my ear, and I hate him even more.

Ye been warned!

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