Here goes...

It's official. I was sworn in to the Patrol today. I leave for Academy on Monday.

And the Lord spoke, saying, "You sure you know what you're getting into?"

Last post, way back in the mists of time, I mentioned the possibility of applying to the US Border Patrol.

Well, I applied.

I leave for the Academy early in November.

The Lord gave me opportunities and grace in getting through the application and vetting process, smoothing out paperwork errors, letting me get through tests and interviews, and helping with my medical records. With all that He has done to get me this far, how could I turn down a position in Deming, NM? I can't, but then I don't want to turn away from this either. This is both thrilling and terrifying, but I'm eagerly anticipating my stay at the Academy, from the first days through graduation. I'm looking forward to Deming, and to 16-hour days, 6 days a week. It's gonna be a hard job, with a hard training to get through, and I'm more juiced about it than I've been for anything in quite a long time. I'm actually looking forward to hard work and sleep deprivation.

The Lord spoke, saying "You sure you know what you're getting into?" And I reply, "No, Lord, but You know, and that's good enough for me."

This blog might get real interesting once I'm out of Academy, assuming I actually find time to post. :-P

Well, I'm ticked.

Last Friday, some teenagers were trespassing in the pool of the vacant house next door. This is hardly the first time punks (and other folks) have been in there, and we're pretty fed up with them fouling up the place with garbage and the like. So, like the last time we caught them, we called the police to have them removed. The teenagers had a previous "acquaintance" with the police, and were charged with criminal trespass.

Well, tonight, I walked outside for a smoke, and saw that my truck's windshield had been smashed sometime this afternoon. I had music playing, and didn't hear it. I'm guessing it's the same punks, trying to "get back" at us for calling the cops on them (twice).

These punks were fortunate I didn't hear them, 'else they'd have found a rather irate redneck with a .45 objecting to their fun. Granted, a truck windshield isn't worth drawing steel over, but a man can put the fear into a punk without ever clearing leather.

Not all irate rednecks are as tolerant as I, and they're -really- fortunate they didn't vandalize some nutcase's truck.

Fortunately for me, they didn't monkey with anything inside the truck; as far as I can tell, all my tools, equipment, and whatnot are still there. Police are estimating about $150 for the windshield; I'll find out for sure what the cost will be in the morning when I have it replaced. If it goes over $150, I'll be calling the station for an addendum to the report, and a copy of the receipt, if necessary.

If these punks are caught, you can be sure I'll press charges AND file for recompense.

As a side-note, I think I'll be putting in an application for the Border Patrol tomorrow as well. If I'm gonna be complaining about crime and such, I might as well try to get into a position to DO something about it, right?

And this is why I carry...

I'm sure by now everyone and their fourth cousins thrice removed has heard of this awful slaughter, so I'll not rehash the details.

What's not being advertised on the airwaves is that this senseless massacre of college students was entirely preventable.

"A bill that would have given college students and employees the right to carry handguns on campus died with nary a shot being fired in the General Assembly.

House Bill 1572 didn't get through the House Committee on Militia, Police and Public Safety. It died Monday in the subcommittee stage, the first of several hurdles bills must overcome before becoming laws.

The bill was proposed by Del. Todd Gilbert, R-Shenandoah County, on behalf of the Virginia Citizens Defense League. Gilbert was unavailable Monday and spokesman Gary Frink would not comment on the bill's defeat other than to say the issue was dead for this General Assembly session.

Virginia Tech spokesman Larry Hincker was happy to hear the bill was defeated. "I'm sure the university community is appreciative of the General Assembly's actions because this will help parents, students, faculty and visitors feel safe on our campus."

Del. Dave Nutter, R-Christiansburg, would not comment Monday because he was not part of the subcommittee that discussed the bill.

Most universities in Virginia require students and employees, other than police, to check their guns with police or campus security upon entering campus. The legislation was designed to prohibit public universities from making "rules or regulations limiting or abridging the ability of a student who possesses a valid concealed handgun permit ... from lawfully carrying a concealed handgun."

The legislation allowed for exceptions for participants in athletic events, storage of guns in residence halls and military training programs.

Last spring a Virginia Tech student was disciplined for bringing a handgun to class, despite having a concealed handgun permit. Some gun owners questioned the university's authority, while the Virginia Association of Chiefs of Police came out against the presence of guns on campus.

In June, Tech's governing board approved a violence prevention policy reiterating its ban on students or employees carrying guns and prohibiting visitors from bringing them into campus facilities."

Didja get that? Duly licensed individuals, checked out and certified by the state, are prohibited from carrying their lawfully-owned weapons on-campus for personal protection. I daresay that, had even one of this nutcase's victims had a weapon, this wanton slaughter of innocents would have ended rather abruptly, with a great many lives saved.

Instead, we have students lined up against a wall and executed, by a lone madman. The prohibition against weapons on campus certainly didn't deter him; rather, if anything, it encouraged him, as he knew that there would not be anyone, not one person, capable of stopping him in his rampage.

This is why I carry, everywhere I can. It is my greatest fear that I will be forced to use my handgun in such a situation. No, strike that. It is my greatest fear that I, like these Virginia Tech students, will need a handgun, and be prohibited by law from having one.

Madmen do not heed the law. Criminals scoff at it. And those of us who do abide by said laws are rendered as defenseless as sheep by that self-same law.

Which is more tyrannical - the madman who wantonly murders many in defiance of the law, or the law itself which demands that the madman's victims be quietly slaughtered, the law that makes criminals out of anyone who DARES to possess the means to their own defense and the defense of others?

Know this: I carry a gun in dreaded anticipation of being placed, forced, into a situation like this. I carry a gun so that, should the unthinkable become reality, I can stop the carnage with one or two well-placed bullets into the brainpan of a predator.

I would have been glad to face the full force of the law, had I been in one of those classrooms in Virginia's halls of learning, for I would not have been unarmed, regardless of the law. If the price of saving thirty or more lives is the loss of my freedom, I will weep for freedom lost, but the cost of protecting my own legal reputation is pennies next to the enormity of lives saved. If the madman kills me as I attempt to protect my own life and the lives of those around me, I will die with honor, knowing that, law or no, I did the right thing.

To quote a tagline I saw on a forum somewhere: "Carry 24/7, or guess right." Virginia Tech's students followed the law, and guessed wrong.

To the bastard who committed this foul act, "Rot in Hell."
To the bastards in Virginia's legislature which allowed the conditions to be ripe for this slaughter, though, there is a special circle of Hell reserved for you and your ilk, a circle lower even than that of the killer, for YOU allowed this to happen.

Your Glowball Warming Story for the Day

Story taken from http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17997788/site/newsweek/
(Bold/Italics in story proper are for emphasis. My comments are in blue)

Why So Gloomy? By Richard S. Lindzen

Newsweek International

April 16, 2007 issue - Judging from the media in recent months, the debate over global warming is now over. There has been a net warming of the earth over the last century and a half, and our greenhouse gas emissions are contributing at some level. Both of these statements are almost certainly true. What of it? Recently many people have said that the earth is facing a crisis requiring urgent action. This statement has nothing to do with science. There is no compelling evidence that the warming trend we've seen will amount to anything close to catastrophe. What most commentators—and many scientists—seem to miss is that the only thing we can say with certainly about climate is that it changes. The earth is always warming or cooling by as much as a few tenths of a degree a year; periods of constant average temperatures are rare. Looking back on the earth's climate history, it's apparent that there's no such thing as an optimal temperature—a climate at which everything is just right.

So to start with, we're not experiencing anything new. If warming has occurred before, who was at fault? Certainly it couldn't have been us, if warming happened before the Industrial Revolution. After all, there were no Evil Polluting SUVs back then, only Environmentally
Friendly Equine Locomotion Devices (horses.)

The current alarm rests on the false assumption not only that we live in a perfect world, temperaturewise, but also that our warming forecasts for the year 2040 are somehow more reliable than the weatherman's forecast for next week.

Good point. Even the best weathermen have made some serious gaffes. This past winter, we had everyone telling us we'd get a nasty winter storm on Monday. Schools closed, shops didn't open, and everyone stayed home. Not a single snowflake. Two days later, the city iced over, on a day that had "light flurries possible" predicted. And don't get me started on the rain forecasts...

A warmer climate could prove to be more beneficial than the one we have now. Much of the alarm over climate change is based on ignorance of what is normal for weather and climate. There is no evidence, for instance, that extreme weather events are increasing in any systematic way, according to scientists at the U.S. National Hurricane Center, the World Meteorological Organization and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (which released the second part of this year's report earlier this month). Indeed, meteorological theory holds that, outside the tropics, weather in a warming world should be less variable, which might be a good thing.

Yes, it WOULD be A Good Thing. Crops don't like the cold. Neither do snowbirds. Everybody wins.

In many other respects, the ill effects of warming are overblown. Sea levels, for example, have been increasing since the end of the last ice age. When you look at recent centuries in perspective, ignoring short-term fluctuations, the rate of sea-level rise has been relatively uniform (less than a couple of millimeters a year). There's even some evidence that the rate was higher in the first half of the twentieth century than in the second half. Overall, the risk of sea-level rise from global warming is less at almost any given location than that from other causes, such as tectonic motions of the earth's surface.

Yet we still have Chicken Littles fretting about Florida falling into the sea from melting icecaps. Maybe they should look to tectonic causes for alterations of the shoreline instead. Those are actually documented, and far more sudden and traumatic.

Many of the most alarming studies rely on long-range predictions using inherently untrustworthy climate models, similar to those that cannot accurately forecast the weather a week from now. Interpretations of these studies rarely consider that the impact of carbon on temperature goes down—not up—the more carbon accumulates in the atmosphere. Even if emissions were the sole cause of the recent temperature rise—a dubious proposition—future increases wouldn't be as steep as the climb in emissions.

Hear that? Maw Nature wants you to drive your SUV more, not less. She's feeling kinda warm and it cools her off.

Indeed, one overlooked mystery is why temperatures are not already higher. Various models predict that a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere will raise the world's average temperature by as little as 1.5 degrees Celsius or as much as 4.5 degrees. The important thing about doubled CO2 (or any other greenhouse gas) is its "forcing"—its contribution to warming. At present, the greenhouse forcing is already about three-quarters of what one would get from a doubling of CO2. But average temperatures rose only about 0.6 degrees since the beginning of the industrial era, and the change hasn't been uniform—warming has largely occurred during the periods from 1919 to 1940 and from 1976 to 1998, with cooling in between. Researchers have been unable to explain this discrepancy.

0.6 Degrees? Is that all? Barely more than half a degree. And what caused the cooling from 1941-1975? Electric fans?

Modelers claim to have simulated the warming and cooling that occurred before 1976 by choosing among various guesses as to what effect poorly observed volcanoes and unmeasured output from the sun have had. These factors, they claim, don't explain the warming of about 0.4 degrees C between 1976 and 1998. Climate modelers assume the cause must be greenhouse-gas emissions because they have no other explanation. This is a poor substitute for evidence, and simulation hardly constitutes explanation.

Occam's Razor doesn't apply when you don't know all the possibilities. It only works for closed-system questions with all variables known. Anything else is guessing, ranging from educated assumptions to wild guesses. Saying, "I can't explain this, so the explanation must be XYZ" is a self-contradicting statement, and falls under the "wild guesses" category.

Ten years ago climate modelers also couldn't account for the warming that occurred from about 1050 to 1300. They tried to expunge the medieval warm period from the observational record—an effort that is now generally discredited. The models have also severely underestimated short-term variability El Niño and the Intraseasonal Oscillation. Such phenomena illustrate the ability of the complex and turbulent climate system to vary significantly with no external cause whatever, and to do so over many years, even centuries.

Hmm... does this mean we need to re-write "Le Morte d'Artur" to include Chevy Suburbans? Or was that evil wizard Merlin building oil refineries?

Is there any point in pretending that CO2 increases will be catastrophic?

Yes, causing panic so that the Chicken Littles can reap monetary and political profit (Algore, call your PR Director).

Or could they be modest and on balance beneficial? India has warmed during the second half of the 20th century, and agricultural output has increased greatly. Infectious diseases like malaria are a matter not so much of temperature as poverty and public-health policies (like eliminating DDT). Exposure to cold is generally found to be both more dangerous and less comfortable.

Who'd have thunk it? People don't do as well in the cold. Weird, huh?

Moreover, actions taken thus far to reduce emissions have already had negative consequences without improving our ability to adapt to climate change. An emphasis on ethanol, for instance, has led to angry protests against corn-price increases in Mexico, and forest clearing and habitat destruction in Southeast Asia. Carbon caps are likely to lead to increased prices, as well as corruption associated with permit trading. (Enron was a leading lobbyist for Kyoto because it had hoped to capitalize on emissions trading.) The alleged solutions have more potential for catastrophe than the putative problem. The conclusion of the late climate scientist Roger Revelle—Al Gore's supposed mentor—is worth pondering: the evidence for global warming thus far doesn't warrant any action unless it is justifiable on grounds that have nothing to do with climate.

So, our bumbling attempts to correct a problem we didn't cause and might not exist are themselves causing unrest in third-world nations and promoting scams and corruption at the same time. Not only that, but any action taken "to prevent climate change" is pretty much unjustifiable. Greenpeace and Enron, buddies forever at the Kyoto Conference. Stick THAT in your craw, you liberal weenies.

Lindzen is the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research has always been funded exclusively by the U.S. government. He receives no funding from any energy companies.

© 2007 Newsweek, Inc.

What the heck?

Okay, what's this? Blogger is promoting Algore's "carbon neutral" BS?

I got news for you, Blogger. Algore is a fraud. Carbon is a naturally occurring element, and a basic building block for all the nice, nifty little enzymes and other chemicals that make up your cellular structure.

CO2, or Carbon Dioxide, which all you greenie freaks are going gonzo over, is a natural part of the photosynthesis reaction that plants use to survive. It's a little simplistic, but the basic explanation is that CO2 is plants' version of O2, or Oxygen.

CO2 occurs naturally. You produce it every time you exhale. It is a natural byproduct of animal metabolic functions. Every man, woman, and child, every dog, cat, and whale, every zebra, every sparrow, every fish produces CO2.

What's more, CO2 is produced by other natural, non-organic occurrences as well. Lightning strikes and volcanoes are only two of the many non-organic producers of CO2. Do you know how many times lightning strikes each second? It's a bunch. And volcanoes, those prolific polluters of the natural world, expel with a single eruption more CO2 than man can produce in a hundred years.

Did ya get that? Not only does natural production of this basic molecule vastly outstrip man-made production, you are producing CO2 as you read this. It is impossible for you to be "Carbon Neutral," unless you die of asphyxiation.

Ya want a "Carbon Neutral" world? Start talking to Mother Nature. And if she doesn't listen, try holding your breath.

New Template

I've seen some folks claim they're copying Lawdog in their page template.

Well, I'm not gonna make any such claim. I can see why Lawdog chose this template; it's easy on the eyes, fairly simple to navigate, very few things to tweak (and thus, distract), and relatively aesthetically pleasing.

Blogger/Google, I'm somewhat mollified. Changing stuff on this IS easier.

That doesn't mean I've forgiven you for changing it without permission, though.

I hate you, Blogger/Google.

I had a post idea all ready to start typing, but that post shall have to wait until another day. I have a rant instead.

Thanks to the MORONS at Google/Blogger, I had to spend an interminable time fighting with the "New Blogger" system, just to be able to access my account. I didn't want a Google account, I didn't want to switch, and most of all, I didn't want the hassle.

Password resets, screenname discrepancies, and non-intuitive instructions added to the annoyance.

If anyone at Blogger/Google is reading this, know that I despise New Blogger. I don't care how nifty or neato-geewhiz it might be. I don't care what new features it has, how it's different from the old Blogger, how it's different from the new.

I do know that your supposed "optional" upgrade to the New Blogger is now evidently mandatory.

I do know that you did NOT consult me on this, but went ahead and "converted" the blog against my wishes.

I do know that you subjected me to hassle, annoyance, and frustration with your danged switchover, and provided ABSOLUTELY ZERO assistence with your stupid "help screens".

Yes, I know Blogger is hosted on your servers. But a landlord in an apartment complex doesn't arbitrarily rearrange his tenants' living rooms; he either allows them to live there, or evicts them.

I'd advise you to learn to do the same.

People did not WANT "New Blogger." It was a solution looking for a problem. Most of us were puttering along, quietly content with the old way. The hassle I just went through because of your stupid frivolity and capriciousness is representative of the hassle a great many people went through.

Just think about it. That much annoyance, frustration, and anger. All directed at you.

Hey, Google. When you acquired Blogger, did it ever occur to you guys to just let a good thing be? Did it ever occur to you that you didn't need to put your monkey-fingerprints all over it? Did the idea ever pop into your miniscule, two-cell brains that, just maybe, people liked Blogger the way it was? That Blogger had set it up that way deliberately?

Or was all this a ploy to get us to acquire Google accounts? If so, then for what purpose? To get us to give you our email addresses? Lord knows my spam filters are working hard as it is. Or is that giving you too much credit for intellingence? I'm inclined to think so, as I can come up with no earthly idea why you would do this, outside of spamming my inbox.


As I sit here right now, I don't see anything much different about this "New Blogger" - except for the fact that my introduction to it is as rude as the introduction to the class bully. While technically harmless, you folks at Blogger/Google have essentially stuck a saliva-coated finger in my ear, all the whilst giving me a wedgie. It's aggravating, annoying, and does absolutely nothing to endear me to you.

Jerks. Just better hope I never get the chance to blow a spitwad at the teacher and blame it on you.