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I want to consider the two separate incidents in Christchurch, and consider how gun control might have influenced those events.

In the first mosque, those people were just screwed. No one was armed, no one seemed to have any warning. Dude came on like gangbusters, firing in through the door, advancing, and shooting at anything that moved. The people inside had very, VERY little opportunity to respond in any meaningful way - they were pretty much herded into two different killing zones, and they were trapped there. There may have been the slightest opportunity for an armed person to respond meaningfully, if only someone had a weapon. Sometimes, that's how things go - no matter how prepared you think you are, you can be caught by surprise.

In that second mosque? Apparently, there were no armed persons there either. But, there was one ballsy man who stepped up, and said "NO!" Or, to steal back the phrase appropriated by Tarrant, "I will NOT go gentle into that good night!"

Abdul Aziz faced off with the gunman as he advanced towards the mosque, yelling at him to "Come here!" and leading him outside.

EDIT: one of many sources for the quote - https://www.businessinsider.com/abdul-aziz-christchurch-new-zealand-mosque-shooting-2019-3

Abdul had no weapon. There isn't even any mention that he had a knife, however large or small. No firearms. He grabbed the first thing at hand - a stupid CREDIT CARD MACHINE, and advanced on the gun man. The thing was no better than a rock, but apparently there were no rocks at hand. With this near worthless poor excuse for a hefty rock, Abdul advanced, calling for the gunman to "COME HERE!"

You've all heard variations on the phrase, "Fortune favors the bold." In this case, Fortune did indeed favor the bold.

Somehow, in the confusion, the shooter ran out of ammo, apparently dropped the empty weapon, and ran back to his car to get another weapon. Although the details aren't clear, it seems that maybe Abdul threw his sorry excuse for a weapon at the shooter, who ducked into his car. Abdul then picked up the EMPTY weapon that had been dropped, and smashed the (already damaged) windshield, trying to get at the shooter.

About the time that the window was smashed out, the shooter lost his nerve, and drove away, cursing and screaming - and crazy-ass Abdul chased the car down the street!

Fortuna audentes juvat, or, fortune favors the bold

That fact has been observed since even before there was a Rome.

I think that puts paid to the several ideas proposed by hoplophobes that there is nothing a single person can do in these situations. Or, that an individual fighting back only endangers the people around him. All the excuses offered for ensuring that no one CAN fight back. True, the assailant has the initiative, but there is nothing to say that he is calm, cool, collected, and STABLE. If you watch the video of the killings at the first mosque, there are signs that he is falling apart, and losing his nerve. Here, at the second mosque, there is no - I hesitate to use the word "rational" - but there is no rational reason for him to run from an unarmed man. But, the shooter has lost it, in the face of one determined man who maybe has more balls than brains. He tucks his tail, and runs away!

But, we knew this people. Many of us have learned this fact from combat veterans, from police officers, and from anecdotes in real life emergencies. Many of us have seen this in our own lives. And, in fact, there have been some studies on the issue.

What good can an armed teacher do in a shool shooting situation? I invite you to peruse one study: https://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/2013/01/foghorn/ttag-simulated-school-shooting-experiment-results-and-analysis/

Some teachers are pretty ineffective, others are more effective, and others are extremely effective in neutralizing an assailant.

Conclusion

This experiment was a preliminary test, providing a proving ground for the methodology and scenarios selected for testing before being implemented in a large scale test at a later date.

Based on the limited data collected from this experiment it appears that an armed teacher would save lives in an active shooter scenario. The caveat: the teacher’s effectiveness depends on their level of training. Maximum effectiveness of an armed teacher of any skill level is achieved with advanced warning of the approaching shooter and implementation of a classroom “lockdown.”

If you prefer the full report, rather than the story linked above, PDF here: https://86262a2d5a8678610839-0d14e49ee6aa00b4013e3b6293913ee7.ssl.cf1.rackcdn.com/SchoolShootingSimFINALREPORT.pdf

Executive Summary
At the King 33 facility in Connecticut, 11 volunteers along with 5 staff members enacted a series
of simulated shooting scenarios with the intent of determining whether an armed teacher or
armed guard at a school such as Sandy Hook Elementary would have been able to successfully
confront and interdict an active shooter.
When designing the scenarios for this experiment, care was taken to identify moments during
the progression of a “typical” active shooter case where armed intervention would have been
effective in interdicting the shooter. Three such moments were identified, specifically the
moment the shooter entered the school building, the moment they entered a classroom, and
the moment an armed response arrived on scene. One of these scenarios (when the shooter
entered the classroom) was enacted both without any advanced warning that the shooter was
coming, and with sufficient time for the teacher to enact a standard “lockdown” procedure as
implemented at Sandy Hook Elementary.
For scenarios where no advanced notice was given, unarmed participants were instructed to
leave and re-enter the area being defended at random in order to simulate normal traffic and
keep the defender from being able to react to an event such as the door opening instead of the
first sight of a gun or the sound of a gunshot, as would be the case during a real shooting.

Do you want to be safe, people? Put an end to gun control. Allow individuals to protect themselves, their loved ones, their friends and associates, as well as random strangers in the vicinity. Put gun safety courses in the junior high schools, and encourage kids to learn how to handle weapons. Put advanced courses in the high schools, and form gun clubs in those schools. Familiarize everyone with weapons, and end the fear of weapons.

An inanimate object cannot decide to kill you. A PERSON has to make that decision. A PERSON with the tools for the job can protect you from the nut case.

In this case, a PERSON, even without any tools for the job at hand, managed to protect a building full of people. Imagine, if he had a real weapon at hand. Imagine if someone at the first mosque had a weapon at hand. At the sound of the first gunshots, he might have armed himself, and put an end to the massacre.

Ask yourself a question: If you should ever be caught in a kill-or-be-killed situation, would you rather be armed, or unarmed? Yeah, you know the cops will respond to the situation - sometime. Would you rather be the survivor who drops his weapon, and surrenders to the police, or would you rather be the sheep, bleeding out on the ground?

The weapon is NOT what you should fear. Fear the bastard holding the weapon!

Tarrant feared Abdul, even though he had no weapon!

EDIT: link to the video, supplied by an anonymous coward, earlier today. via bittorrent, magnet:?xt=urn:btih:52b278c6769eb2edb9773ff6fe0923598ff42fea&dn=Christchurch-Mosque-Shooting-New-Zealand-FULL-VIDEO.mp4&tr=udp://tracker.leechers-paradise.org:6969&tr=udp://tracker.openbittorrent.com:80&tr=udp://open.demonii.com:1337&tr=udp://tracker.coppersurfer.tk:6969&tr=udp://exodus.desync.com:6969

In his book Asimov On Numbers there is an essay titled “A Piece of Pi”, explaining what pi is, its history, and workings. It’s an excellent book, as are all of his books. Carl Sagan called him “the greatest explainer of the age”. He had books in nine of the ten Dewey decimal categories and is one of my favorite authors.
        The atheist Asimov takes a poke at his parents’ religion in that chapter, correctly pointing out that the ancient Hebrews weren't very good at math or building, and needed the Phoenicians to build the Temple of Solomon for them. Their plans, Chronicled in Chronicles 2:4, states that the diameter must be thirty cubits and the radius ten cubits. He correctly points out that this would result not in a circle, but a hexagon.
        But Dr. Asimov was thinking like a mathematician, not an engineer or architect. There is no such thing as a circle; a circle is a two dimensional construct, and no physical object exists in only two dimensions... not in this universe, anyway. The vat had an inside diameter of 30 cubits and an outside diameter of 31.4 cubits, So the walls of the vat would be .7 cubits thick.
        The good doctor mentions that the Hebrews held certain numbers, like the number three, in holy respect. In fact, seven is also one of those numbers, and the Star of David has six points. Draw straight lines from the star’s points and you have... a hexagon!
        So even not understanding math, they got it right. Now, how could they have possibly done that?

A man is on his way home from work. Traffic comes to a complete halt.

"Wow this traffic is worse than usual. Nothing is moving."

Soon he observes a police officer moving back and forth among cars getting closer and closer.
He rolls down his window and asks "Officer, what's the delay?"
The officer replies...

"Trump is so depressed about not always getting his way, that he stopped his limo in the middle of traffic and is now threatening to douse himself in gasoline and set himself on fire. He says everyone hates him. He can't just quit because the Fake News would laugh at him. And he doesn't have, and never has had, enough money for REAL lawyers to defend himself from all the criminal prosecutions that would follow."

"So I've been taking up a collection.", the officer says.

"Oh, really, how much have you collected so far?"

"So far about 26 gallons, but many folks are still siphoning."

_{adapted from a "Canadian prime minister" joke}

Something I've been thinking about a bit lately is the ability to communicate your message well. I'm not the best at it but it's not difficult to spot those who really are. Their number sure as fuck doesn't include Jordan Peterson. Or most any intellectual, especially with an academia background, for that matter.

You know who the best are? Really good standup comedians. They have to be. If you need to explain a joke, it's no longer funny. If you're consistently not funny, you have to get a dreaded day job.

If you want to take up public speaking in any sort of persuasive capacity, you could do a lot worse than to learn from them.

It's important to know what power actually is if you want to take the power back, fight the power, feel the power of love, or just to know when you've got the power and if it's OVER 9000. It's recently come to my attention that some folks don't, so I thought about it a bit and I'll lay the most basic fundamentals out for you all.

Power in the human context is the ability to exert your will on a situation. Nothing more, nothing less.

Direct, personal power (your ability to do something relevant and influential) is the only real power. The primary varieties of this are the ability to create and to destroy. Most other varieties are eventually rooted back in one of these if you follow them back far enough, though they may be notable enough to warrant their own name. Yes, complex interplays of multiple power sources are quite common but we're talking fundamentals today.

The most important of these is probably proxied power. You know, like governments wield. Be it power granted them by their citizens or by force of arms, they only hold this power by the consent of those from which it ultimately originates.

Now, that's not to say there aren't force multipliers, like say having a gun. They absolutely exist but they're not power in and of themselves; they require human agency to mean anything.

I'm also not discounting that non-human or even non-living things can exert influence in the world - the sun does this every day - that's just not what we're discussing here.

One last bit before I save this entry. Money is not power. It can rent power. It can buy power. But it is not itself anything but paper, ones and zeroes, or whatever. Why do I say this? Because the person with the direct power, proxied power, or some sort of force multiplier must first be willing to rent or sell it. Granted, this is so often the case that it's an extremely useful thing to have but don't make the mistake confusing what something can be exchanged for and the thing to be exchanged.

There, hope that's cleared up for you now if you hadn't thought it through yourselves yet. Hopefully it'll make getting to the heart of the matter a little easier in discussions down the road.

I doubt there is anyone at Soylent who doesn't purchase anything online. I do, pretty regularly, because I can find things that aren't available in my local area. Things that might be available, I can find for a fraction of the price online. So, I shop online.

Tracking packages is usually pretty straightforward. The vendor sends you a tracking number, which is often a live link to the carrier's tracking site. If it isn't a live link, well, we probably all recognize a USPS, UPS, or Fedex number, so we go to the appropriate tracking site, and copy/paste the number in. Unless the shipper used not-so-Smartpost, we generally know within a day when our package will arrive.

But, overseas shipping? That isn't so very straightforward. Over time, I've learned to recognize some of those numbers, but new ones pop out of nowhere. How do you keep up with all of them?

You no longer have to keep up with all of them. Or, any of them, if you don't want to.

http://parcelsapp.com/en/tracking/SYBAA52472888

Guy named Pavel Tisunov has done all the work, and created a web page, as well as apps for Android and iPhone to track almost everything, it seems. The list of carriers tracked can be found http://parcelsapp.com/en/carriers

Those of you who are multilingual might be interested in his blog - http://parcelsapp.com/blog/

I wish I had found Pavel a couple years ago! It appears that his earliest blog posts were in April 2017. If I could read his entries, I might have a better idea how long he's been around.

Enjoy!

And, thank God for diversity, and for Russians, huh?

There seems to be a major controversy in Maryland right now. The gun grabbers are attempting to - well - to grab guns. I stumbled over the story on this site: https://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/2019/03/daniel-zimmerman/maryland-gun-owners-will-not-comply-gun-grabbers-and-legislators-freak-out/

Admittedly, this is a biased site. I happen to agree with the aims of The Truth, but it is biased. So, I did a search for articles on the subject, "We will not comply". I found one "mainstream" media mention of it: https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/politics/ac-cn-wicomico-not-comply-20190226-story.html

I've scrolled three pages into my search results, and have not found another mainstream media story. I've found infowars, callmegav, conservativefiringline, rallyforourrights, a related story at investmentwatchblog, dcclothesline, unclesamsmisguidedchildren - in short, hit after hit after hit, page after page of hits. But, mainstream media isn't covering the story at all.

Let me change search terms, and see if MSM is even covering the vote on the bill - - -

Search term used, "Maryland HOUSE BILL 786" Results for MSM stories after scanning two pages of hits = ZERO Are they trying to pass this bill without any publicity at all? Keeping it hidden from voters? WTF?

Several small time news sources located inside of Maryland carry stories. I thought I found a hit at the Washington Post - but that was a false hit, on an entirely different subject.

Odd - if all the rest of MSM is refusing to cover a story, we might expect Fox to carry it. I don't even see a Foxnews hit.

Go ahead, do your own searches. If you can find liberal media stories on the house bill in general, let us know what search terms you used.

If you can find liberal media stories on the We Will Not Comply opposition to HOUSE BILL 786, please, PLEASE let us know how you found them.

It's this sort of apparent coverup that lends credence to the likes of infowars.

And so I found a decent Debian Stretch build (from here), and it seems to be much more suitable for my purposes than Ubuntu Bionic. For one thing Debian seems to be actually maintaining an ARM build of Transmission 2.94 even if it is in Sid, something which the Ubuntu Transmission PPA doesn't have, much to my irritation. NextCloud proved fairly easy to install, but I found some irritations with setting up MariaDB as its database backend. The mysql_secure_installation script that is the minimum that one needs to do to secure MariaDB/MySQL is broken. Though it says that it will change the MariaDB root password, after prompting you for a new one, IT DOES NOT ACTUALLY DO THAT. MariaDB still uses a blank root password even after that rigmarole. You have to do this bit of black magic in order to actually change the root password:

use mysql;
update user set password=PASSWORD("mynewpassword") where User='root';
update user set plugin="mysql_native_password";

Then restart MariaDB. I then had to check whether the script even actually did all the other stuff that it said it did. That shit's beyond idiotic.

Moving the old LetsEncrypt certificates I got for the dynamic domain I have with afraid.org from the Odroid to the ROCKPro64 was relatively trivial, as was the dynamic DNS update script I've been using, so now I can get some access from the outside to the NAS.

NextCloud was relatively easy to install after that, but there's some weirdness involving php-imagick and libgomp in Apache ("cannot allocate memory in static TLS block") that I was never able to satisfactorily fix. I've begun uploading pictures from my phone to it with the NextCloud Android app but I noticed that it's dog slow doing that, and it might actually be faster to use the web interface to do bulk uploading of that kind. The app has all sorts of missing in it, as you can't tag pictures with it for one (you have to use the web app to do that for now), and I've been thinking of using tags to organise the rather sizeable collection of pictures Mrs. Wyrm and I have been accumulating. But I suppose it's a start, and I can install it on Mrs. Wyrm's phone and have it automatically upload the pictures on her phone to the NAS whenever she's at home. I'd rather keep such things there than continue to entrust them to Google as we've been doing.

Now, it's off to building Kodi. This is proving to be as big a challenge as I've expected it to be, given the way the current LibreElec builds are described as alpha-quality. Looks like I'm going to have to Use The Source, and the information on doing that is sparse to say the least. This is complicated by the fact that no one seems to have built a working X on the RockChips and so Kodi needs to run on framebuffer. I found one reference that seems like it might be a good start, but there's scads of dependencies that need to be installed before Kodi will even build. And so I'm partying in Dependency Hell like it's 1999... More updates on this as I make progress. If I get really pissed at this I'm going to stick to Kodi on the Odroid with my movies and TV shows on an NFS or other distributed file system mount from the RP64. I want to later repurpose the Odroid as a secure auth server for my home machines once I've gotten Kodi working on the RP64, but if this is not feasible I'll have to buy some other smaller SBC to do that.

Opened my mail, and found "Dissenter is a Gamer Changer". Hmmm - from Gab. New member or something? Sorry, not much interested . . . scan on down through the list of emails. Slide the mouse toward the top of the page to select another tab, and I notice "Dissenter is a browser extension".

Alright, curiosity piqued.

GAB

Earlier this week we launched our new sister app, Dissenter. Dissenter is a browser extension and website that allows you to comment on any URL online and also see what others have commented. This includes Wikipedia articles, Amazon products, Tweets, YouTube videos, CNN articles, and more.

Many people are saying that Dissenter.com is a “game changer” for the internet. It empowers the voice of The People and makes surfing the web fun again. At a time when most websites have removed or heavily censored their comment sections, Dissenter brings back the wild west of internet comments.

We fundamentally believe that Dissenter is going to be revolutionary for free speech online, but don’t take our word for it:

Dave Cullen says Dissenter is “incredibly innovative and important.

Styx says “I believe Dissenter has the capability of becoming the next big thing in tech.”

The Financial Times says “There is a clear demand for this sort of freedom. Some argue the concept is therefore a billion dollar idea with the potential to completely disrupt conventional media's control of its comment real estate.”

Discover what the entire internet is talking about, literally. Visit Dissenter.com and download the Dissenter browser extension today.

Alright, didn't we do this once before? I very specifically remember an extension that permitted people to comment on a page, but those comments didn't show up on the page unless you had that extension installed and enabled. It was kinda cool, but, I dropped it for reasons - probably security related reasons.

Alright then - let's look at this reincarnated potential security disaster that will lead the NSA right straight to my front door . . . I think maybe I'll test it with Chrome, keep it away from my Fox family . . .

Youtube "tutorial" on the extension here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYsdpKfe0w4

Hmmm - to comment you have to create an account. That isn't looking really great. If I wanted to leave anonymous comments, I'm kinda screwed. I usually sign my name to stuff anyway, but, I may just feel like visiting the White House to tell Donald Duck how damned STUPID he is for - oh, I don't know - appointing Ajit Pai? I can tell him nicely, and sign my name, or I can tell him rudely, and remain anonymous, except I can't do so with this extension.

Hmmm again. Can't seem to sign up and/or log in with the fork of Chromium that I installed to. I can read comments, but can't make comments, sign up, or log in. It *appears* that a Gab login credential might work to sign in - which is not good. Signing in to use the extension should be separate from any site's log in credentials.

Let me try this on another browser . . .

Ahhhhhh - Browser extension installed on Iron browser, and it works much better. I attempt to log in, it rejects my first login attempt, so I sort through some of my logins. Naturally, since I'm already suspicious that my Gab credentials will work on the extension, I try one of those credentials first. And, I'm in.

I'm presented with a popup:

Dissenter | Comment On Any URL Online. is requesting permission to access your account.

This application will be able to:

Read access to your profile and feeds
Send new posts
You can revoke this app's access later under Settings / Authorized Apps.

Nahhhh - I'm mildly impressed with Gab, and I agree with their stated purpose in life - but I don't trust them with the ability to track me around the internet any more than I trust FaceFuck. Cancel. Errr, wait. Maybe I'm being hasty. I don't USE Iron for anything. In fact, it doesn't have a single login saved. This login to Gab is the first and only login it has.

Nuts. "Authorize". See what I see, I guess.

Hmmmmm - still broken. I have "signed in" repeatedly, but still can't make a comment. Does Dissenter rely on something that my forks of browsers have ripped out of the browsers?

Ehhh, time to uninstall, and purge the browser's cache history. I've devoted more than enough time to this thing already.