The old cliche says “a picture is worth 1000 words“. Or more if you are a terrorist group trying to sway public opinion to your side.

Faked Palestinian firefights with the Israelis (over at Jawa Report), the so called ‘Jenin massacre‘, the venerable old New York times staging pictures, staged pictures from Ramadi, fake pictures from the war in Afghanastan and Iraq and now the distinct possibility that the Qana collapse and deaths were faked.

It would be no surprise if the same people who launch indiscriminate rocket attacks on innocent civilians picked up some dis-information tips from their Palestinian neighbors. We have to understand that the forces opposed to us are not stupid; they recognize the power of the press, something that many of us seem to have forgotten. It is thanks to the internet and the blogging community that these tricks have been exposed. You aren’t going to see coverage like this or like this on the nightly news anytime soon.

[tags]war, middle-east, faked photos[/tags]

The June 2006 issue of Guns & Ammo has a review of the new Para .45 GAP Carry micro 1911 gun. Its a good review, and you should go read it. This gun looks like a .45 GAP version of their PXT LDA Single Stack Carry .45 ACP, which is fine. Except that I don’t see any but minor difference between the guns.

According to the G&A review the GAP version will weigh 29oz. compared to the .45 ACP version’s 30oz. And it will be 6.4″ long instead of 6.5″ for the .45 ACP. Both will hold 6+1 rounds, have 3 dot sights, etc. Minor differences like these don’t make me want to run out any buy one. If can can have the gool old .45 ACP in the same sized gun I’m going to pick it every time.

And on a technical note, I would have had a pretty picture of it over ther on your left, except that Para is playing pixel games and is blocking download of images of their guns. You would have thought they would have liked some free publicity.

[tags].45 of the Week, guns, firearms, .45, 2nd Amendment, LibertyNews[/tags]

Remember how we warned you that the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) was just a foot in the door? They the big brother types in government wouldn’t stop until they had their ears glued to all your doors and windows? We were right. The EFF has taken a look at proposed changes to the law and come up with this chilling analysis:

By itself, this expansion of CALEA is bad enough for your privacy. But the bill gets even worse — the law’s existing privacy protective provisions are “clarified” so that they do not “override [the carrier's] … primary duty” to help law enforcement spy on you. Furthermore, carriers will be forced to temporarily store your data stream and allow law enforcement agencies to analyze it on their own time. In other words, we are supposed to trust the government with all of our online interaction and hope that they only isolate the right packets.

Its time to give Phil Zimmermann’s new project, Zphone, a try if you are a VoIP user. Switching to secure IM and chat programs would also be recommended. We went through this fight with email and PGP and won. We can do it again.

Hat Tip: Bruce Schneier

[tags]security, encryption, big brother, eavesdropping, voip, eff, privacy, security[/tags]

The cover gun for the August 2006 issue of American Rifleman is the Taurus PT1911. At first it looks like just another customized black M1911 clone. But this one is a little different — It is from Taurus, that prodigious Brazilian gun maker, and it has a price tag of $600.

For 6 bills you would expect a basic military-style 1911. The PT1911 exceeds these expectations, with more features than a Kimber. A beaver tail grip safty, lightened hammer and trigger, frontstrap checkering, a slightly beveled magazine well and Heinie sights are just a short list of the features packed into this 1911. And these features add up to a well performing gun. In the AR bench tests its best group was 1.28″ and worst was 2.75″ (5 shot groups at 25 yards from a Ransom Rest). That’s darn nice shooting!

[tags]guns,2nd amendment,reviews,firearms,.45 of the Week[/tags]

Only someone who was sick could take pleasure in melting down guns or burning books. A gun is a beautiful thing, created by talented craftsmen and engineers, it is the perfect synergy of form and function. Its purpose is to serve its master: to defend when called upon, to provide food for the table when needed. Just as with book burning meltdown/buy-back programs are a ‘feel good’ activity with no grounds in reality.

Cops who make claims like “If we get one gun that’s one less gun possibly used in a crime” do their constituents a disservice and have no business beings cops. They know damn well that the statistics show that it is more likely that the gun they just melted down would have been used to defend an innocent life than take one. Criminals are going to acquire their tools of trade despite the anti-gun efforts to get all the guns ‘off the streets’.

Memphis Tennessee Sgt. Vince Higgins is one of these cops. He happily accepts guns from citizens so that they can be melted down to protect them from criminals. Little old ladies who didn’t like their husband’s gun collection are now turning them in to be melted, instead of passing down a valuable family heirloom or selling it to a collector. They don’t realize that by having that gun colleciton their husband was doing his part to deterr crime and protect his family.

Hat tip to Random Nuclear Strikes

I came across an entry in the Tacoma News Tribune blog section with an example of an irate voicemail they received:

“99% of what you print is full of %$#!. But, this opinion on firearms is totally stupid and ignorant. The statistics are ^%#!. The CDC is a socialist and communist organization – just like you guys. You can shove it up your *#%@. I’m not giving you my guns now or any time!”

Apparently the incoherent caller was upset by this editorial on gun lock legislation. I wonder why they picked this specific call to hilight the issue? I would imagine that they have quite a collection of colorful comments on a wide variety of subjects that they could have picked from. It is too bad that this called has fulfilled their view of gun owners so I will do my best to counter-balance his hysterics.

The TNT editorial claims that the gun lock legislation will do something to prevent the firearm related deaths of children from 5 to 14 years old. While their claim that 10% of the deaths are from firearms is close, it doesn’t give us an accurate picture. The CDC has a nice website where you can query the mortality statistics based on various criteria. It ends up that in 2003 there were 3249 deaths of children from 5 to 14 and 324 of those were firearm related. This gives us 9.9% firearm related deaths.

But why didn’t they include 0-4 year olds? Once a kid can walk they get into everything, so I see no reason to exclude them. The numbers for 0-14 are 6,734 deaths, of which 380 are firearms related; giving us a rate of 5.6%. Now which number sounds more dire? Which one do you pick when writing an editorial to further your agenda? It is tragic when a child dies, for any reason, but 5.9% isn’t too bad when you look at how many guns we have in the United States, and how guns have been demonized by the anti-gun groups. If you believed everything spewed out by Handgun Control and the Brady Bunch you would think that all 6734 of those kids had been killed by ‘gun violence’. These numbers have been declining over the years without the ‘help’ of gun lock laws. Why waste time on something that won’t do any good? Because it makes them ‘feel good’.

Gun laws don’t stop accidents, or crime. It has been shown repeatedly that they have little or no measurable effect and yet they keep coming back, trying for more. The ‘assault weapon ban’ expired and nothing happened. 48 states now have the right to carry concealed weapons and the predicted bloodbath has yet to happen. Even the CDC has discovered this.

Gun lock laws are just another ‘feel good’ time-wasting effort by congress. Gun manufacturers have been shipping locks with their guns for years so their efforts are not going to change reality in the least How many laws do they waste their time and our money on with similar results? Too many.

Instead of emotional Knee-Jerking from Washington DC why don’t we apply a couple of very good tests for laws like these. The first is the Jews in the Attic Test which asks the simple question – “Will this law make it difficult or impossible to protect innocent life from a government intent on their imprisonment or death?” While legislating gun locks may not seem like a good application for this question I ask you this. How long does it take you to get your gun, your key, unlock the lock, load and be ready?

The second is another from Joe Huffman, ‘Just One Question‘ which asks “Can you demonstrate just one time, one place, throughout all of human history, where restricting the access of handheld weapons to the average person made them safer?“.

CNN recap of the World Trade Center attacks on September 11, 2001

CNN coverage of the collapse of the 2nd tower from the ground on September 11, 2001

Home video of Flight 175 hitting the south tower of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001

Euronews coverage of Flight 175 hitting the south tower of the World Trade Center on 9/11/2001

I have posted the videos from the World Trade Center image archive to Google Video. Here is Fox News coverage of President Bush’s speech on 9/11/2001

On August 5, 2005, at 6:15 a.m., a SWAT team converged around the Sunrise, Florida, home of Anthony Diotaiuto. [...] By 7 a.m. the raid was over. Police had broken down Diotaiuto’s front door, and turned his home upside down looking for drugs, weapons, and drug paraphernalia. Diotaiuto
lay dead in a bedroom closet. He had 10 bullet holes in his head, chest, torso, and limbs.

Cato Institute policy analyst Radley Balko has written a paper examining the increased usage of SWAT teams against innocent or non-violent suspects. It paints a bleak picture for our civil liberties at the hands of an increasingly militarized police force, and to clearly illustrate this point the author also created an intractive map of all the incidents that he found in his research. You can order a hard copy of the paper, or read it in PDF format from the Cato Institute website.

Thanks to Kim du Toit for the tip.

I came across this Horror Film Commercial on the default google homepage today. This is how horror films ought to turn out!

This week marks the return of the ‘.45 of the Week’. This time we are going to look at the Para Warthog, this compact little pistol manages to cram 10+1 rounds of .45 into a pistol that is 6.5″ long and 4.5″ tall!

The Kimber Pro Carry II is 7.7″ x 5.25″ and carries 8+1 using Chip McCormick Shooting Star magazines.

Its beaver-tail grip safety and extended magazine should make it a nice handling gun, even for its size and the price tag of around $650 makes it an affordable addition to everyone’s .45 collection. You do have a .45 collection don’t you?

Sounds like some kind of weird casting technique, doesn’t it? Actually it is, in the realm of scammers trying to access your bank accounts. Phishing involves the scammer sending the target an email that looks like it came from your bank. It links to a fake copy of the bank’s website and records the details that people enter. Ususally it will display an error and forward the user to the real site.

Now, according to this report, they are getting more sophisticated. Some banks are now requiring 2-factor authentication; instead of only a username and password you also need a secure token that changes every minute. Many use the RSA SecureID system to generate the tokens every 60 seconds. Instead of storing the target’s information for later use the scammer now has only 1 minute to use the information to access the account. So they make a connection to the bank and report success or failure to the user in realtime. This is commonly called a Man in the Middle attack, where the target is actually communicating with his bank, but there is someone in the middle listening in, or passing the messages in each direction.

Be paranoid, its a nasty world out there.

An appeals judge ruled that companies like CleanFlicks, who edit movies to remove offensive language and scenes, are breaking copyright laws by providing this service to their customers. It appears that in this case Justice really is blind, since every one I know with kids has said at one time or another — “its a really great movie when they show it on network TV, why can’t I buy that version in the store?” This ruling is being noticed and ridiculed all around the world, including this excellent post from a blogger in Australia.

For example, take the move My Cousin Vinnie. This is one of my favorite movies, its ‘falling off the couch’ funny when you watch it on network TV. But watch the DVD and the foul language will turn your ears red! I’m no prude, but language and sex have thier place and many of the movies that Hollyweird produces are actually better without most of it.

This is another example of judges legislating from the bench. A single judge can destroy an industry that is obviously needed and appreciated and that is just plain wrong. The studios are making their money from these sales, they are not pirated movies, and any claims to artistic integrity can be refuted by the prevalence of ‘director’s cut’ releases, network TV cuts or edited versions for airplane viewers.

Here in Washington State we have been ‘blessed’ with a very warm summer so far. In addition to the heat this week has been extra busy around the my1911 compound with the early arrival of Jesse Gunnar, who was expected around the end of the month. Instead he put in his appearance on July 3rd. Today the rest of the family was off to the previously scheduled baby shower so I took advantage of the absence of inquisitive little fingers to clean my guns and watch some not so family friendly movies (ok, I started off with some honey-do projects first).

There just seems to be something right about watching The Patriot and cleaning your guns, especially less than a week after Independence Day. I finished off with a salmon dinner while watching Black Hawk Down.

These are the kinds of movies that the movie industry should be making, not this continuous stream of remakes of old films targeted towards baby boomers suffering a mid-life crisis. They remind us of the sacrifices that are needed in order for us to maintian our Liberty. We have a duty to those who have fallen not to forget their sacrifices and to continue to resist efforts to enslave the free.

Bruce Schneier recently wrote about the discovery that the firewall system being used by China could be circumvented by both ends of the connection ignoring the TCP reset sequence. The paper was presented at the 6th Workshop on Privacy Enhancing Technologies, which sounds like an interesting gathering. It’s refreshing to see people working towards more privacy in a world where minature cameras and tracking devices abound.

The discovery is interesting, but in my opinion not very practical since you need to get both ends of the connection to ignore resets. A better method would be to tunnel the traffic over ssh to a server outside China using techniques like those described on this blog — you setup a ssh tunnel to a system you have access to and forward a local port across the connection. You then direct your web browser, Firefox of course, to use the local side as a SOCKS proxy and presto! Your packets are encrypted up to the point where they leave the ssh system. It is a little easier to do under Linux, but using putty you can set it up under Windows as well.

The White House has a good Independence day page, and a Declaration of Independence page that also lists all 56 signers.

Notice that the page is called independenceday, not july4th.

WHEN in the Course of human Events,
it becomes necessary for one People to dissolve the Political Bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the Earth, the separate and equal Station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the Separation.

On a hot, stormy July night a group of men met in Philadelphia to debate what would become one of the most important documents in human history. Thunder crashed outside as the moderates argued that they were not ready for independence. Then John Adams spoke “with a power of thought and expression that moved us from our seats”, according to Thomas Jefferson. No record exists of what was said that night, but we have the results. Initially 9 of the 13 colonies voted for independence, with New York in support but waiting for instructions from their constituents, Delaware was split and Pennsylvania and South Carolina voted no. After a day and night of debate and negotiations the vote for independence was 12 with New York still waiting for word from home.

On July 4th the delegates approved the final version and John Hancock’s famous signature was the first of 56 to be placed on the Declaration of Independence. As he signed the document Hancock reportedly said, “We must be unanimous; there will be no pulling different ways; we must all hang together”. To which Benjamin Franklin replied, “We must all hang together. Or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.”

These steps were not taken lightly, and their success was not certain. At the time of the signing the invasion of Canada had failed, the British were sending 2000 troops to attack Charleston, South Carolina and 150 ships had been sighted off of New York [1].

WE, therefore, the Representatives of the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, in GENERAL CONGRESS, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the World for the Rectitude of our Intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly Publish and Declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be, FREE AND INDEPENDENT STATES; that they are absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political Connection between them and the State of Great-Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as FREE AND INDEPENDENT STATES, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which INDEPENDENT STATES may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm Reliance on the Protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.

These were not men of little means. When they signed and pledged their Lives, Fortunes and sacred Honor they had much to lose. Rush H. Limbaugh, Jr.’s essay Americans Who Risked Everything recounts what happened to the 56 signers:

Even before the list was published, the British marked down every member of Congress suspected of having put his name to treason. All of them became the objects of vicious manhunts. Some were taken. Some, like Jefferson, had narrow escapes. All who had property or families near British strongholds suffered.

July 4th is the day we celebrate, but Independence is what we are celebrating. It seems to me that all of the advertisers have forgotten the reasons behind all the parades and fireworks. The meaning is further obscured by the “Happy 4th of July” greeting, which to me is just as insidious as “Happy Holidays” replacing “Merry Christmas”. Instead why don’t you respond with “Happy Independence Day”, reminding yourself and others just what it is that we are celebrating. Remember that this isn’t just another day of the month, day off from work or paid holiday. This is the foundation of freedom that we are celebrating today.

Is there any doubt that without the United States of America we would have lost two world wars and millions of people would still be under the oppressive control of communist and fascist dictators? Is there any doubt that the world, that humankind, that you as an individual are better off because those brave men stood up and declared to the world – “Give Me Liberty, or Give Me Death!”

So go out there and have a happy Independence Day. Remember those who fought, died and lost everything so that we may live in the freest nation that this world has seen. And while you’re at it, go out there make some noise of your own.

References: [1] Liberty! : The American Revolution