Sen. Kerry makes push for tighter gun control

Senator Kerry is pushing for tighter gun control and he states he had been shocked to see killings and beheadings "just a stone's throw across the Rio Grande from where we're sitting this morning."


Once they get the gun control they so desperately want is he also going to push for tighter control of kitchen utensils? Afterall you could cut someones head off with a good quality knife from a butcher block.
 
If Mexico is holding the US responsible for weapons violations, why are we not holding Mexico responsible for drug smuggling.
 
If there is such a large problem with automatic weapons smuggling from the US, how will banning LEGAL weapons stop the smuggling of illegal weapons, obviously the people smuggling those weapons do not care about the laws anyway? Also I have read where Clinton has blamed explosive devices, namely grenades used in Mexico on US based gun runners, get caught with a grenade in the US and see what happens to you. If the problem is real here, what is stopping the flow of weapons from South America, where the Soviets were passing out AK-47s like candy to any country willing to say anything negative about the US. I would be willing to bet those stockpiles of weapons are not nearly as well controlled as they are here in the US.
 
If Mexico would tighten their borders and work more closely with US based immigrations and DEA officials the majority of the smuggling could probably be dramatically reduced. They would do well to look at the model used in Colombia.

The Case is Building

Hillary Clinton is building a case for tighter gun control, which I am sure that is fueled from Pelosi's refusal to cooperate with the administration call for a new Gun Ban a few weeks ago. This statement absolutely amazes me, since the violence problems that the Obama administration talked about earlier was from hand grenades and automatic weapons. The last time I checked both are illegal here anyway.

When meeting with the Mexican government her statement was as follows.

"Our insatiable demand for illegal drugs fuels the drug trade," she said, using unusually blunt language. "Our inability to prevent weapons from being illegally smuggled across the border to arm these criminals causes the deaths of police officers, soldiers and civilians." ... For instance, Mrs. Clinton said, the United States will help supply Mexican law enforcement officers with helicopters and night-vision goggles and other equipment to take on the cartels, which are armed to the teeth.
"We've got to figure out how to stop these bad guys," she said. "These criminals are outgunning the law enforcement officials."

Should we not be blaming the Mexican government for not controlling its own borders and blame them for our drug supply. They are blaming us for their weapons problem, even though the problem is coming from items that are illegal here anyway. I believe what we should do is worry about preventing the drug dealers from crossing the border in this direction, if they do that it would illiminate the supposed gun running from the US to Mexico. I believe Hillary and Obama was against tighter border control anyway. She needs to be quiet and smoke some of her husbands Lewinsky dipped cigars.

Dog Lookout

For those of you who do not know I live in the middle of nowhere surrounded by woods in every direction. I have a great german shepard dog who believes it is his duty to keep watch on our property and ensure that nothing comes near, especially the evil herds of deer. Tonight I let him out so he could do his guard duty, he sits on the front deck giving him a good visible perimeter; all night long he scans the woods (every hour or so he will walk around the house to make sure every thing is safe). Well tonight I looked out the window on the front deck and he was doing his stand, I then walked to the back of the house and looked out, there were 12 deer that I could see and it appeared that the herd even had a lookout that was focused on the area where the dog would come from, it was really comical. Oh well, it is the simple things in life I enjoy.

From Brutus

And It Has Begun

The first of the measures against our freedom as American Citizens have started.

First it was reported by the Washington Times that the Obama administration have secretly begun to revoke the right of pilots to carry a sidearm in the cockpit if a plane after applying for a permit and taking a safety course. Now the second blow to our rights.

On Thursday, March 19, a federal district court in Washington, D.C. granted anti-gun plaintiffs a preliminary injunction against implementation of the new rule allowing law-abiding citizens to defend themselves by carrying a concealed firearm in national parks and wildlife refuges.


In Thursday's ruling, Federal District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly issued the preliminary injunction against the Department of the Interior rule that took effect on January 9, 2009. The revised rule allowed individuals to carry concealed firearms for self-defense in national parks and national wildlife refuges located in states that allow the carrying of concealed firearms.

Consulting World is a Small One

I am in LA doing some work and I got a text from a buddy in Hawaii wondering what I was up to. He was headed to Atlanta and was wanting to hang out at some point while he is down. Turns out he has a 12 hour layover in LA tomorrow, so we will hook up then. It is strange how things turn out some times. I know no one really cares about this, but since this is sort of my online journal to myself I am recording it anyway.

BTW: this is my view from my hotel room

From LA Trip

President's Plan to Charge Wounded Heroes for Treatment

President's Plan to Charge Wounded Heroes for Treatment I really hope this is not true, if so, this is the most disgusting thing he has proposed so far.

Importance of multiple forms of ID when flying

Yesterday I was trying to catch a flight from Chicago to Columbus, GA, I handed my drivers license and credit card to the ticket agent at the Delta counter and in the rush to catch the plane I failed to notice he didn't give my license back to me, just my credit card. Imagine my horror when I went to hand my ID to the security checkpoint and I could not find my Drivers License. I quickly assesed my options and remembered I had my Concealed Carry Permit for my pistol; I thought what the hell it has my picture on it and it is issued by a government agency, I'll try it.

The agent who spoke a very accented English, looked at me like I was crazy while he was trying to figure out what it was. I told him that was all I had, because my license was lost. I couldn't believe it when he asked if I had something else like a SAM's or a COSCO card. I handed him my SAM's card. In the meantime the supervisor noticed that something was wrong and came over to investigate. When the supervisor saw the Concealed Carry Permit, he told the original agent, to let me go, he told the guy that the Concealed Carry Permit was much better than a drivers license since there was actually a background check done prior to issuing it, and if he saw another one let it go by as well.

After arriving in Atlanta I was paged to the Delta counter for a phone call. I was pleasantly surprised when the phone call was from a Delta agent in Chicago who told me she had found my license and I could pick up my license at the Columbus airport the next day.

Pelosi throws cold water on weapons ban

Pelosi throws cold water on weapons ban  unbelievably, the notoriously liberal speaker of the house, came to the aid of law abiding gun owners across the country. Earlier this week Attorney General Eric Holder raised the prospect that the administration would push to bring back the so called "Assault Weapons" ban. A ban that outlawed the selling of many semi-automatic rifles, that are extremely popular today with law abiding gun owners. The ban did nothing to stop illegally obtained automatic weapons that cause so much havoc around the world.

Eric Holder used recent violence in Mexico with automatic weapons and grenades (both of which are illegal in the US) as a reason to bring back the old ban.  But Pelosi (D-Calif.) indicated on Thursday that he never talked to her. The Speaker gave a flat “no” when asked if she had talked to administration officials about the ban. “On that score, I think we need to enforce the laws we have right now,” Pelosi said at her weekly news conference.

Syslog

Recently I was studying the syslog protocol and ran across this statement in the RFC for syslog and I thought it was interesting.

"Since the beginning, life has relied upon the transmission of messages. For the self-aware organic unit, these messages can relay many different things. The messages may signal danger, the presence of food or the other necessities of life, and many other things. In many cases, these messages are informative to other units and require no acknowledgment. As people interacted and created processes, this same principle was applied to societal communications. As an example, severe weather warnings may be delivered through any number of channels - a siren blowing, warnings delivered over television and radio stations, and even through the use of flags on ships. The expectation is that people hearing or seeing these warnings would realize their significance and take appropriate action. In most cases, no responding acknowledgment of receipt of the warning is required or even desired."

                              RFC 3164 The BSD Syslog Protocol.

Communitarian Network

In January, speaking at a meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, former president Bill Clinton praised the Brady Campaign for continuing to lobby Congress for a new gun ban, and suggested that the mood in Washington might be more favorable toward a ban now than it had been during the last eight years. Further in his speech he made the contradicting statement that no one wants to revoke the Second Amendment, but later in his speech made another statement contradicting what he said earlier about not revoking the Second Amendment.

"[W]e're now in a position to begin again," he said. "It's not a leftward movement. It's a forward, communitarian movement."

The Communitarian Network or "Movement" is a relatively new political philosophy that started in the 90's, their slogan is "For Individual Rights and Social Responsibility". This sounds really good. While stating that there are not supporting communism or socialism they also publish the following in their Public Platform.

"Neither human existence nor individual liberty can be sustained for long outside the interdependent and overlapping communities to which all of us belong. Nor can any community long survive unless its members dedicate some of their attention, energy, and resources to shared projects. The exclusive pursuit of private interest erodes the network of social environments on which we all depend"

 Sounds like Utopia, but also a little like Communism or Socialism. If you don't believe it read this paragraph:

"At the heart of the communitarian understanding of social justice is the idea of reciprocity: each member of the community owes something to all the rest, and the community owes something to each of its members. Justice requires responsible individuals in a responsive community  .... Beyond self-support, individuals have a responsibility for the material and moral well-being of others....Beyond self-support, individuals have a responsibility for the material and moral well-being of others."

While stating individual rights as a goal of the movement; they contradict themselves with the statement about the Bill of Rights, in which the United States is based on:

"There is little sense in gun registration. What we need to significantly enhance public safety is domestic disarmament  ...... We join with those who read the Second Amendment the way it was written, as a communitarian clause, calling for community militias, not individual gun slingers."

Mr. Clinton supposedly wants to protect our "2nd Amendment Rights" with the Communitarian Movement. How can this be considering the above direct quote from their platform? On the "Movements" website they state:

"Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled, for over a hundred years, that it does not prevent laws that bar guns."

 Obviously they have not read the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee Report on the subject or many of the Supreme Court rulings that the 2nd Amendment's reference to "The People" is the exact same as the references to "The People" in the 1st and 4th Amendments. They state that it is an individual's right not the right of an organized (state or community run) militia.

The "Movement" likes to quote values of the ancient Greeks like the following.

"The ancient Greeks understood this well: A person who is completely private is lost to civic life. The exclusive pursuit of one's self-interest is not even a good prescription for conduct in the marketplace; for no social, political, economic, or moral order can survive that way."

The "Movement" obviously prescribe to the teachings of Greek philosopher Plato. In Plato's ideal state, the one-man rule of a tyrant is replaced by the one-man rule of a philosopher-king. The king uses a professional military/police class — the Guardians — to keep everyone else in line. Like the people of the former Soviet Union, the common people of Plato's ideal state would be trained periodically (once a month) in use of arms, but would have no right to arms, and arms would be centrally stored in state armories (Plato, Laws).
 

Because it does not fall in the "Movement's" ideals they totally ignore the wisdom of Aristotle. Like Plato, Aristotle considered arms a fundamental source of political power, but unlike Plato, Aristotle wanted ordinary people to possess this power. So it would seem they want to ignore the writings of Aristotle, who authored the Athenian Constitution this is a little odd since the Encyclopedia Britannica states, "Aristotle, more than any other thinker, determined the orientation and the content of Western intellectual history." 
In Aristotle's book, Politics, he argues that each citizen should work to earn his own living, should participate in political or legislative affairs, and should bear arms. 

Arms are essential to any good government: "Let us then enumerate the functions of a state, and we shall easily elicit what we want. . . . thirdly, there must be arms, for the members of a community have need of them, and in their own hands, too, in order to maintain authority both against disobedient subjects and against external assailants" (Book 7, ch. VIII). It was hardly surprising that dictators always disarmed their subjects: "As of oligarchy so of tyranny . . . Both mistrust the people, and therefore deprive them of their arms" (Book 5, ch X).

Aristotle considered the possession of arms synonymous with possession of political power: "when the citizens at large administer the state for the common interest, the government is called by the generic name — a constitution . . . in a constitutional government the fighting-men have the supreme power, and those who possess arms are the citizens" (Book 3, ch VII).

In the Athenian Constitution Aristotle even makes his position on the right to bear arms by explaining that throughout Greek history disarmament of the public was the first step to Tyrannical Rule and in every respect showed a great advance in cruelty and crime.

I compiled the above information from many different sources including but not limited to:
The Communitarian Network
The George Washington University
Communitarianism - Wikipedia
The Second Amendment - Wikipedia
Aristotle vs. Pluto
Arms and the Greeks
The missing guns of Bombay