ANZAC Day, 2018

Fer Pete's Sake

So, Tamara has this song she wrote, a pastiche on "A Few Of My Favorite Things" from The Sound of Music. Tamara's is commonly referred to as "The Fun Show Song", and it's about the joys of going to gun shows.

Ambulance Driver and Squeaky made a music video of it as a Christmas Present for Tamara, which she posted here.

The notorious plagiarists at a certain site noteworthy for their unintentionally ironic use of the word "truth" in the title posted it without attribution; Bobbi has some details at Stop, Thief!. Be it noted that I have no idea about the whole Dead Hooker magazine thing, but since Tamara makes a living as a writer, and a writer owns copyright on the words she puts into certain order, and Dan Zimmerman and that website have infringed copyright before, I think we can certainly state that Dan Zimmerman is an intellectual property thief.

Look, it's all too easy to embed an image or video without attribution. When the copyright holder says "Hey, I own that" you should either replace the embedded code with a link, or (at least) add the proper attribution.

Linoge has a history of the infringements at the truth about the truth about guns and robert farago | walls of the city.

QOTD, 08/01/2015

I actually saw this yesterday, but I already had a QOTD for yesterday, so it got deferred to today.

At what Tamara likes to refer to as "An away game", and while discussing the Cecil The Lion "scandal", which in the way of these things devolved into a free range discussion of hunting, and what was Right And Proper and Pure, and What Was Evil and Wrong And Bad, David S. observed

How is it that so many of us in the gun community, who distrust the "liberal media," are so willing to accept this story at face value?

I've never been on an African "Safari"¹. If I had the money for same, I'd probably invest half and spend the rest on an Alaska hunt instead.

So here's what I know from talking about it with people who have been on Shikar²:

• You pays your money, you hires the Professional Hunter and his staff.
• The PH takes you around, and tells you when and where and which animal to shoot.
• That makes you the sport, not the, or a, "hunter."
• You have the option of paying "trophy fees" and getting a mount of the head.
• The meat is distributed among local communities.
• Hunting is controversial, especially among those whose knowledge of actual ecology ended at viewing Bambi at a young age.
• Hunting different from the way you/I do it is also controversial. 
• Mid-Westerners who "stalk"with a rifle or shotgun are liable to view those who hunt from a stand as some kind of barbarian, regardless of whether hunting from the ground there is practical, or even legal.
• People who have a scope on their shootin' 'arn feel the same about those without, and vice versa, ditto regarding legality.
• (EDITED TO ADD:) That goes double for weird styles of hunting involving strings and pointy sticks, guns that load from the front, or guns that look... icky.
• Also, some idiots are so much more concerned about the fate of a wild (well, semi-wild) animal than the facts that the "sport" in this case has received death threats, and the enlightened government of Zimbabwe (!) is demanding that said "sport" be extradited.
• Cecil was 13 years old. 
• The Average Life Span Of A Lion in the wild is 10-14 years.

Clearly, it's time to move to a cave in the mountains with a pile of "dead tree" books and give up on the human race.

***

1. Safari: A long overland trip, usually for diplomatic or trading purposes.
2. Shikar: Hunt, hunting.
This pretty much exhausts my knowledge of Swahili.

Looks like we got us a movement here...

Man with AR-15 stands guard at Va. military recruiting offices - DC News FOX 5 DC WTTG

The local recruiting offices are right across the street from the Friendly Local Gun  Store and Indoor Range, so...

h//t Insty

Good! And also... Ridiculous!

Hiram residents hold watch at recruitment center - Atlanta News, Weather, Traffic, and Sports | FOX 5


To paraphrase a comment seen on Pistol Forum, a neighborhood watch of volunteer security guards are guarding offices that recruit Embassy Guards.

And Paratroopers.

And Military Police, for that matter.

Et cetera.

About that... OPM Data Breach Edition

Insty has a link to an ABC report: Instapundit » Blog Archive » MASSIVE OPM HACK EVEN WORSE THAN THOUGHT: OPM Hack Far Deeper Than Publicly Acknowledged, Went Undetected For More Than A Year, Sources Say...

The massive hack into federal systems announced last week was far deeper and potentially more problematic than publicly acknowledged, with hackers believed to be from China moving through government databases undetected for more than a year, sources briefed on the matter told ABC News.

"If [only] they knew the full extent of it," one U.S. official said about those affected by the intrusion into the Office of Personnel Management's information systems.

It all started with an initial intrusion into OPM's systems more than a year ago, and after gaining that initial access the hackers were able to work their way through four different "segments" of OPM's systems, according to sources.

By some accounts, the data exposed goes back 20 or 30 years.

And may have been stored unencrypted.

It inspired this: Rick Wilson's rant on OPM breach (with tweets) · faceattack · Storify

Which came out BEFORE this: Daily Pundit: OPM Got Hacked Because It Handed Root to the People’s Republic of China Three Years Ago
Quoting Ars Technica:

A consultant who did some work with a company contracted by OPM to manage personnel records for a number of agencies told Ars that he found the Unix systems administrator for the project “was in Argentina and his co-worker was physically located in the [People’s Republic of China]. Both had direct access to every row of data in every database: they were root. (!!!) Another team that worked with these databases had at its head two team members with PRC passports. I know that because I challenged them personally and revoked their privileges. From my perspective, OPM compromised this information more than three years ago and my take on the current breach is ‘so what’s new?'”

(Emphasis added)

But good news! Now it will get traction: Instapundit » Blog Archive » A DEBACLE OF THE FIRST ORDER: OPM tells lawmakers their information was likely stolen….

From the "Duh" file...

Failures in management led to ObamaCare website woes, investigation finds | Fox News


If I had more time to troll er, peruse news sites, I'd do a "Daily Duh."

A National Disgrace

Daddy Bear has A Modest Proposal for how to fix the Veterans Administration.

 I've been holding off on posting on the various and sundry scandals that make up the VA today, because I am far from an impartial observer. My father in law did not like my criticism of the VA, because he never reported any issues with them. (He was a veteran from the era when "free health care for life" was actually written into the contract.)

That's nice.

government bureaucracy + military bureaucracy + medical arrogance = Nationalized (AKA "Single payer") medicine = fiasco, approaching mass murder.

Every jackwagon who thinks government health care is a Good Idea deserves to have their health care provided by a VA clinic.