Civil Disobedience

It seems that New York passed a law following the Sandy Hook massacre, and there are reports that as many as a million residents are refusing to comply with the law.  Courtesy of Instapundit.

New York gun owners shrug off tough new rules: What happens now?“The SAFE Act, passed in New York last year, had an April 15 deadline for owners of assault-style weapons to register their guns with the state. Some 1 million residents have refused to abide.”

From the linked article:

 For now, gun rights experts say, the outcome in New York is uncertain. Will the state take the initiative to seize unregistered weapons? If it doesn’t, will the new gun controls be exposed as toothless, even meaningless?

But others are clamoring for confiscation.

 “No guns are being taken away unless you fail to register your military-style assault weapon, if you happen to own one,” Leah Gunn Barrett, executive director of New Yorkers Against Gun Violence, told The Buffalo News. “If you register it, you can keep it.”

It looks like New York is standing on that slippery slope.  Register your guns or lose them.  Perhaps registration (or the lack thereof) does lead to confiscation. 

Fun Facts

According to the CNS News site, there are 86 million private sector workers today in the United States.  Those 86 million support the government and 148 million benefit takers.

The 147,802,000 non-veteran benefit takers outnumbered the 86,429,000 full-time private sector workers 1.7 to 1.

Lots more analysis at the link, but basically if you're working in the private sector, you're carrying the load for 1.7 people who aren't.  Milady and I are making good money, and our tax bracket is about 25%, so we're supporting with our taxes, a family of four somewhere.  It amazes me that in my autumn years I'm paying more in federal income tax than I made for lots of years as a young adult.

If someone asks me whether I'm paying my fair share, the answer is yes.  And I'm paying the share of someone else, too.  That's something to think about as we wrap up the traditional end of the tax season.

Heresy!

Surfing around today, I stumbled upon a news article that says my beloved sport, baseball, has adopted some heresy called an instant replay system.  What abomination is this?  It seems that league gurus are sitting in a room with various monitors, prepared to over-rule the officials on the field in the event that they make a bad call.

This whole idea is a bad call.  Baseball is bigger than technology.  It's a game played on a summer field, a ballet of players and sunshine and officials.  It's bad calls, and good calls, and strategy.  It's the roar of the crowd and the heckler in the box seat behind home plate  It's foul balls, or fair, but it decidedly is not a far-away league commissioner deciding whether the guy on second base is safe or out.

It's bad enough that baseball has adopted the designated hitter, but we should leave the game as pristine as possible.  Let tennis balls have boundary sensors, but leave baseball to the officials on the field.  This game isn't a technological marvel, this game is America's past-time.

If anyone from Major League Baseball reads this post, I'm ag'in it.

Remington 700 Recall

I found this at the GunBlogBlacklist, but couldn't read the notice so I googled around and found it on a Remington site.

Remington Arms Company, LLC (“Remington”) is voluntarily recalling Remington Model 700™ and Model Seven™ rifles which were manufactured from May 1, 2006 through April 9, 2014 and which have an X-Mark Pro® (“XMP®”) trigger. All product manufactured after April 9, 2014 is not subject to recall.

If you go to the Remington link, you'll find a block to enter your serial number to see if it's subject to the recall.  If you're shooting a Remington 700 manufactured in the past eight years, you might want to click on the link and take care of this problem.

That is all.

Pre-Easter Cool Snap

It's a truism in Louisiana that we always have a pre-Easter cool snap, and even when Easter is late, that seems to hold true   Accuweather tells us that we'll see a cooling trend this week, so don't put youir jacket away just yet.

Those basking in the warmth across the eastern half of the nation this weekend should not bury their jackets deep in the closet with dramatically colder air, and even snow for some, set to make a comeback.

I dount that we'll see snow, but there's a reason I still have a jacket hanging in the car.

 Spring will be here soon enough, and summer will be hot on its heels.  In another month, we'll be reminscing about cool weather.

Falcon Nesting in Tree

Very few people have seen a falcon.  While eagles have made a comeback since the '60s and the alleged  DDT problems with raptor eggs (I said alleged, okay?), falcons are still relatively rare, where early in the 1960s they were very common.  So, when my mother sent me a picture of a falcon nesting in a tree, I was immediately interested and clicked the link.

Mom said "I’ve received many remarkable nature photographs over the years but this photo of a nesting Falcon is perhaps the most remarkable Nature shot that I’ve ever seen. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. Nature is truly breath-taking!
I've sent this to most of my older friends. The younger ones probably have never seen a falcon and wouldn't recognize it.

Yeah, that's a Falcon in a tree.  I drove a car just like that (mine was red) during high school and the fist year of college.  Thanks, Mom.  Ya got me.

Standoff in Nevada

I've been watching the standoff in Nevada at the Bundy Ranch.  Ostensibly, Bundy runs cattle on BLM land.  Bundy and the BLM have been in a pissing contest for several years, and the BLM was trying to evict his cattle, based on an endangered desert tortoise.  For a better rundown, Powerline has the goods, and Alex Jones Inforwars has been following the crisis since it began.  (Yeah, I know, it's Infowars, but even a blind hog finds an acorn once in a while.  Get over it.)  However, just recently, there has been speculation (and a little fire under the smoke) that Harry Reid, the esteemed senator from Nevada had a deal working to make a bit of money from the land that Bundy was using to graze cattle.

The new head of the BLM, Neil Kornze, worked for Harry Reid as a policy adviser from 2003 to 2011. It is reasonable to assume that Reid got him the BLM job, and I would hazard a guess that Reid saw the situation turning into a public relations disaster–Nevada’s Governor and Senator Dean Heller, both Republicans, were more or less siding with Bundy–and told Kornze to give it up.
It still isn’t clear what the crisis was all about. Rumor has it that Reid wants the land for a giant solar farm that would be supplied by a Chinese company and, presumably, subsidized by the federal government. Reid’s son is apparently a participant in the deal. Whether that is true, I haven’t yet tried to figure out. One thing I will say with some certainty, however, is that tortoises had little or nothing to do with it.

Of course, the BLM over-reacted, and there were armed officers there, and plenty of good opportunities for outrage.  It seems that the BLM set up a "First Amendment Area" that outraged everyone.

 Which prompted this map for our officials to use when trying to decide where the 1st Amendment can be defended.

Yeah, I'd say that sums it up.  The Government doesn't get to say where we can exercise our 1st Amendment rights.

It seems that this weekend, the BLM decided to pack up and go home.  Someone with a brain in his bead decided that this thing was becoming a public relations nightmare.  What's interesting, though, is to understand that this is Harry Reid's state, and if there is money to be made, you can be sure that Harry has his hand in the pie.

Harry Reid is a despicable little man.  He's spent his entire life in public service and has amassed quite a fortune for himself and his family.  The very idea that Harry's son represents a Chinese firm that wants to use government land in Nevada for a green-energy project tells me everything I know about this drummed-up crisis.  If you think that this little debacle had anything to do with cattle, or with tortoises, you've been reading the wrong newspapers.

Sunday Morning Dawg

The Sunday Dawg is late this morning, but everything at this house is late this morning.  Milady and I slept in.  Overslept (as it were), and it was the dog who finally awakened us.  One of two things, he either needed to go outside, or he thought that perhaps we had died and wouldn't be available to feed him.  He's not comfortable with us being abed after daylight.

So, with morning coffee, I snapped this pic.

It's an overcast morning here and the paper is calling for rain this evening.  Seems like a perfect day to stay home and rest for the afternoon.  Tomorrow is Monday, and we all know what that means.

Mary Lies

On of my favorite blogs, Boned Jello, has a meme that it uses sometimes. 

"If you're trying to change minds and influence people it's probably not a good idea to say that virtually all elected Democrats are liars, but what the hell."

Our Senator, "Katrina" Mary Landrieu, is an elected Democrat, and she's been caught in a whopper of a lie by the Washington Post, who awarded her Four Pinnochios for a recent ad.

Turns, out, she's blasting those evil Koch brothers, the favorite target of the unhinged left, while failing to mention that she's taken over $50.000 from them.  As TownHall reports:

According to a recent Politico investigation into the Koch brothers and how they spend their money, it appears that the Kochs don’t just give to Republicans, like so many people believe, and in fact have given money to Senator Mary Landrieu. They found that since 2000, Ms. Landrieu has accepted $55,000 from the KochPAC.

So, it seems that in addition to be a lying politico, Mary bites the hand that feeds her.  Just one more reason to vote for anybody but Landrieu in the upcoming election.

Doin' Taxes

I'm normally not this late, but for some reason, life got in the way of taxes this year.  I normally have them done mid-February.

I'll be done later tonight and blogging will continue.  It looks like I owe the Feds money again this year.  Not much, but some.  Just dammit.  The Federal Government loves people who make good money and don't have kids.