MatthewMaynard.net

Well, I finished it – NaBloPoMo October 2010 is done.

31 days of at least one post per day. They’re doing it next month too, but there’s no theme (not that that part matters much to me). I will be starting NaNoWriMo tomorrow, 50,000 words in 30 days – 1,667 words per day. The goal is a novel in one month.

My story involves all sorts of stuff, but if you don’t see anything here, don’t be surprised. I have plans to turn this into a real, published novel, but that means lots of work over the next month.

So back to work. Back to writing.

Why is it that whenever I have time to go hunting, I never see any deer, but when I don’t have time, or it is out of season, the deer make my backyard their resort area?

Today is day 1 of muzzleloading season, which goes for 2 more weeks. Between muzzleloading season and regular firearms season, I have through January 1st to take up to 6 deer (3 male & 3 female). There are two antler rub spots on trees within sight of my stand. I can get within 10 yards or so when it is out of season, but in season? Forget it.

Oh well, it may be for the best. We have no freezer room at present, and the shot would probably bring the attention of the local upstart Home Owners Association (not that I would object to fighting for my rights, just to the necessity of doing so). But I’m still looking for an explanation as to why deer apparently know when hunting season starts.

I was reminded today of why we are file-system-checked^*as a country, financially speaking. The Republicans came out with their plan to save us from our monetary woes. Like all false saviors, this one is full of false claims and bears so little difference from the nominal devil, one wonders if the two aren’t in cahoots.

Republican Pledge to Cut $100 Billion May Hit Education, Cancer Research. Hide the women and children, those damned Republicans are out to kill ‘em off again.

U.S. House Republicans’ pledge to cut $100 billion from the federal budget next year would slash spending for education, cancer research and aid to local police and firefighters.

Not only will your family die off from lack of skoolin and cancer, your house will burn down while you get mugged. Pundit Bingo players with a “fearmongering” square, fill that card in!

But let’s examine that number – $100 billion. Saying it as “$100 thousand million” puts it in perpective, no? Think of it as all the savings of 100,000 millionaires. Now let’s pull some numbers from the President’s proposed budget.

“The total deficit for fiscal year 2009 was $1.42 trillion … The deficit is forecast to decline to $1.17 trillion in 2010 …”

Adds some more perspective, doesn’t it? What the Republicans are proposing is a cut of 7% off the deficit, leaving 93% OF IT UNTOUCHED. They aren’t serious about the deficit. If they were, they would eliminate all stimulus spending. All of it. For starters. Then, they would go after Social Security and Medicare, making those discretionary spending items. But they don’t. They’re too afraid to tell the American people “No, you may not steal from your neighbor to make up for your poor retirement and medical planning. You’ll have to turn to your families and churches and ASK (not demand) help.”

Instead of spending $1.17 million million above and beyond what we have, they propose to spend only $1.07 million million above and beyond what we have. And they propose it come out of the pig troff of police and firefighters and teachers and doctors. No wonder they get called mean names by the Democrats. But there’s no real difference between the two, not when the scale of your budget makes a change of $100 thousand million insignificant.

There is one good thing they want, though.

Still, Republicans argue that spending cuts trump tax increases as the best way to start balancing the budget in the wake of the worst recession since the Great Depression.

Understandable, since tax rate increases reduce tax revenues, given where we are on the Laffer curve. But in the end they propose to increase the need for tax revenues (to pay off debt) by increasing the total debt. They are not serious about cutting the federal budget, but they are serious about getting into power.

Beware of such people.

I haven’t mentioned ebooks in a while, so I suppose that’s as good a post topic as any, especially since the nablopomo topic of the month is Play. It fits, at least for those who read for fun.

Anyway, Jennifer has a Sony ereader that she loves. For those devices there’s the Sony ebookstore, with free content provided by Google Books.

There’s also Amazon’s Kindle, which has books available in their format in lots of places, including the format-neutral archive.org.

The University of Virginia also boasts a large online library here, with many of the texts available in Microsoft’s Reader format.

For Sci-Fi, there’s the Baen online library, which has been around forever (or at least since the beginning of the century).

… Visual Basic uses the same punctuation marks to indicate array references and function calls? This is the ambiguity programming languages are supposed to avoid, not implement.

(Sorry, I’ve got nothing today, the well’s dry.)

I got into a heated Facebook discussion with an old high school acquaintance today. It started on the health care bill and ranged back and forth, I accusing him of not adhering to the Constitution, he saying it didn’t matter and accusing me of not caring for the poor. Details at the bottom of the post, if you want to read the whole thing. It would be useful if you did, as everything after the jump is based on that.
Read more…

(First in a series)

Over the past year I’ve been asked that question by several people. Usually they learn that I’m an RWVA Instructor, and after a short story of how fun it is to shoot and teach people how to do so, they express an interest in getting a gun, but they never know what kind. There’s generally confusion of caliber, feel, operation, price, and use. Ever helpful, here is the first in a series on firearms basics.

1. What is the purpose of this tool?
Firearms, no matter the type, are tools. Each tool has its own purpose; there is no need to use a screwdriver to pound a nail, nor is there a need to use the claw of a hammer to divide a wooden board. First, determine your purpose, then determine your gun. Will this be a self-defense weapon? A hunting tool? One for learning firearms basics? Militia use?

Generally, the best tool for a beginner will be a .22 rimfire rifle or pistol. This is used as a starting point to learn how firearms operate and how to hit the target. Two standouts in this area are the Ruger 10/22 and Marlin Model 795. Both are 10-shot semiautomatics (10 shots available in the detachable magazine, and designed to automatically fire the bullet, extract the shell, and load the next cartridge exactly once each time you pull the trigger).

If you are buying a defensive pistol, you have two decisions to make: will it be a semiautomatic or revolver, and what will the caliber be? Revolvers are the original point and click interface with five or six shots, while semiautomatics allow you to load on Sunday and shoot all week, but you have to do some stuff before it can fire and can be prone to malfunctions. As far as caliber goes, revolvers come in lots of calibers but the two popular ones are .38 Special and .357 Magnum. Semiautos likewise come in several calibers but the popular ones are 9 millimeter, .40 Smith & Wesson, and .45 Auto. The breadth of options deserves its own post, but these are the basic options.

Once you know what gun to get, the second question is …

2. Do you care if the government knows you own the gun?
There are two options when it comes to getting a firearm. Either you can get a government approved and traced firearm at a firearms dealer, or you can get a privately owned firearm in a state that has not yet restricted your ability to conduct commerce.

[blank stares]

If you buy a gun at a dealer’s shop, you have to pass a background check, and the form for that lets the government know that you have a firearm, and they know all about the firearm. If you buy at a gun show from a private individual, you don’t have to fill out any forms (as long as you don’t live in New England, Illinois, or California).

Everybody has their own reasons for buying from either, and there are good reasons to buy in either situation. A good way to start is to buy from a dealer, then familiarize yourself with firearms, then find a private sale of the same type of firearm. This is probably the best of both worlds for a beginner, as it lets you utilize the experience of a dealer and the privacy of a private sale. If you buy a gun online across state lines, it has to be transferred to you via a firearms dealer (commonly called a Federal Firearms Licensee, or FFL). If you buy online from a private seller within your state, and they are willing to ship to you, you can do that without the forms.

Deciding which path to go is left to the reader to sort out in their own circumstances.

I played paintball for the first time today. I feel like I acquitted myself relatively well, as I was able to run the last game without getting hit. We did a few rounds of capture the flag, defend the flag, and team hunt-kill twice. It was on the last round of hunt-kill where I managed to escape unscathed. Pretty good, given I had never handled a paintball gun before today and have had minimal exercise in the art of tactical movement.

But man do those things sting.

Anyway, the paintball hits were not the worst of it. At some point, I pulled something in my back and had to retire while others played on. Fortunately, our host is a chiropractor, and he pulled out his spare adjustment bench and did some wonderful work. Look him up if you ever need an adjustment in Charlottesville, his name is Chad.

• Commute to work read: The Road to Serfdom (audiobook)
  – A bit dry, but it communicates the relation between freedom, politics, and economics pretty well. A good work to start with after you get oriented in the different types of political and economic systems.
• Commute from work read: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (audiobook) – the best Heinlein work I’ve read, though it was a tough call with Starship Troopers. He gets weird in his later works, but this one is great. Second (third?) time through it.
• Bedtime read: To Shake Their Guns in the Tyrant’s Face – the militia story you never heard, because the media was too busy assuming they were going to kill everyone.

My “representative”, Eric Cantor, has added NPR to his list of government funded programs to cut when Republicans take over in November.

Uh-huh.

Cantor introduced You Cut in May. A weekly poll of sorts, participants choose from among five items that House Republicans will offer on the floor for an up-or-down vote.

So in other words, a career politician lets you choose from among a predetermined set of options what should be eliminated, without letting you add to or subtract from the list. This can be called the Illusion of Democracy; that is, the appearance of a democratic form of government without the actual form or power of the same.

Don’t get me wrong, democracies are not all that great. Given the option between a democracy and a credentialed-but-not-qualified set of mostly-permanent rulers, I’m not sure which is worse. But when they start asking you for opinions on what to cut, without including the budget items that constitute the fastest growing and largest percentage of the federal budget, they are creating the illusion of letting you have power without actually giving you any. Remember: in the eyes of the founders, democracies were as bad as monarch-organized tyrannies, the only difference being the size of the group trampling your rights. Their idea of a government limited by a respect for natural rights only works if the government members respect natural rights in the first place and abide by a static moral code, not one that changes over time.

All Eric Cantor’s posturing assumes that the Republicans will take complete control of Congress this Fall anyway, which is unlikely. Only one of several options is possible:

• Republicans take the House but not the Senate
• Republicans take the Senate but not the House
• Republicans take neither the Senate nor the House
• Republicans take the Senate and the House

If any of the first three happen, no Republican legislation will be passed in the Congress to be presented to the President. If anything does pass the Congress, the President will likely veto it. Since this is the case, the best we can hope for is a complete gridlock in Washington for the remainder of BO’s term in office. In the above possibilities, I consider a “take” as a majority large enough to cut off debate and bring a bill to a vote. This means 60 votes in the Senate, if they keep the old rules of debate, which the Republicans will likely be stupid enough to assent to and the Democrats insist upon.

Eric Cantor will not get my vote this year. He is too wedded to the current Republican leadership, which I find too counter-Constitutional for my support. I have decided to raise the bar for my voting support; a candidate must now have more than just a pulse and an R after his name. Call it an abandonment of shoddy voting standards, analogous to shoddy lending standards that we’ve seen in the housing market. A candidate must now earn my vote, a standard Samuel Adams would have set, and as I should have set from the very beginning:

Let each citizen remember at the moment he is offering his vote that he is not making a present or a compliment to please an individual — or at least that he ought not so to do; but that he is executing one of the most solemn trusts in human society for which he is accountable to God and his country.

I’ve got to explain myself at a later date, after all – what would my offspring say if I had to tell them that I helped elect an official who passed a bill that sold them into economic slavery by burdening them with debt – then did it again with a different bill that had the same effect? Hell, forget what they would say – what would God say?