Funny

http://www.kentuckyhunting.net/forums/showthread.php?t=49649

Who let the dang dog in the house again?

She looks right at home don't she. That's because she gets in the house a lot more than she should. (I'm alergic) It is a shame that you don't get enough years with a dog as good as her.

The trouble with libertarianism

I have heard it argued, I forget by who (maybe Vox, maybe Nate), that freedom means each person should be able to own whatever weapon they wish or can afford. This is true. If you are not permitted to own a nuke your freedom has been restricted. The obvious problem with this is the events of Omaha. If that pathetic loser had been permitted to own a nuke, his decision to go out in style could have been much more devastating.

There is the problem. On one side, you have tyrannical forms of government, that allow no liberty, and on the other, you have libertarianism, which has no restraints. The problem is with abuse. On one side, you have abuses of the government, because it has too much power, and on the other you have abuses of freedom, the reason we need government in the first place. Men are sinful creatures, give them too much power, or too much freedom, and they will abuse it.

The trick is to find the correct balance. I say lean towards freedom. But you can't go too far. You can't give someone the power to wipe out huge blocks of the population. Mutually Assured Destruction doesn't work on the individual level. Self destruction is too often becoming the goal.

MIL

Mother in law's heart started working, so they decided she didn't need the permanent pacemaker. So they sent her home. She was home four days, then she started having chest pains. We had spent the day at their house watching the Vikings beat the Bears, so we were surprised to get the phone call telling us she was in the emergency room.

So my mother in law had a second heart attack. They flew her in a plane to the heart hospital 100 miles away. Did some more rooting around, put some stents in. She came home today. Apparently the vessels used to do the bypass filled with clots. She is OK, but scared to come home, she feels safer in the hospital. She has a problem with her blood, either it clots too little or too much. Hopefully the doctors get to the bottom of it.

I have to go eat some heart healthy food with my dad at McDonald's, then I am going bowling. See ya.

Not out of the woods yet

It seems that complications arose for my Mother in law today, out of the blue. She has a temporary pacemaker, that is all that is keeping her alive. Her bypass surgery screwed up the electrical function of her heart. She will have surgery on Monday to have a permanent pacemaker put in.

She also has a partially collapsed lung, her kidneys quit for a while, and is in danger of blood clots and pneumonia from the inactivity.

Prayers would be appreciated.

A short list

Been kinda busy lately, and nothing to blog about anyway. Here is why:

1. My Mother in Law had a heart attack, and triple bypass surgery in the last two weeks. She is now recovering and things are looking good. She is 100 miles from home in the heart hospital and I have been there providing moral support to Mrs. Girraffe. I have a bit of catching up to do. Looks like she will make a full recovery with no damage to her heart. I didn't know she even had one.

2. Hunting season has opened, I will be spending much time chasing various critters till Christmas at least.

I saw a curious thing today. Today I noticed a rack of jackets with the brand name "Free Country". I had to look. As you should have guessed, the tag said "Made in China". Unbelievable.

I should be bringing in my trail cameras again soon.

Trailcam 3.0

I don't have any deer pictures of huge deer from my camera to share, but if I did this is what they would look like. These pictures where taken less than ten miles from my house:









My cousin will be hunting this deer. There is also at least one other large deer there, but this is the most impressive. A deer this large is pretty rare here.

Trailcam 2.0

I got a bunch more trail cam pics. Here is another buck.


I got a closer picture of him later on the other camera.




My cousin has gotten a couple of bruisers on his camera. This is probably 6 miles away from where these pictures are taken. If I can get a copy of those pics, I'll put them up.

My next strategy will be to get some feed to put out. It is time to spray the food plot and replant it. The feed should attract more deer than I have been seeing and hold them until the food plot gets going.

Regret

Or, a story of my formerly being a band geek.

A long time ago, way back in high school, I did something kinda mean. It wasn't meant to be mean, it just turned out that way. Our high school band, as I reckon many are, had too many of the more popular instruments, and not very many of the less popular ones. I played the trombone, which is nowhere near as cool as you might be thinking. If you were thinking that.

We had too many flutes, and too many clarinets. As a result, some of the lesser talents were strongly encouraged to switch to other less popular instruments. One poor girl had to take up the french horn. She was the only french horn player we had. For some reason, the band director chose an arrangement where the french horn played a prominent part. He seemed to do that occasionally, that is, feature an instrument that we as a band were not strong in talent or numbers. Kinda weird.

Anyway, we had a very good band, despite having lopsided instrument ratios. So, when the french horn player was featured in a very good band playing an important part, a part she was just not able to handle, I was a little upset. During a concert, as she stumbled through her part, I whispered to the guy next to me, "Man she sucks!"

I must have been too loud; she heard me. The sequence of events that followed stands out in my mind.

The horn made a sound not unlike it would make if she had tried to swallow it, and was choking on it. (It was a pretty funny sound). I remember the band director looking up at her trying to see what was going on. She recovered after a few seconds, and played the rest of the part in humiliation. The guy next to me was snickering, trying not to be seen by the band director, with a look on his face that said, "that was really funny, but you are a jerk man."

She quit the band after that year, probably in part due to my careless cruelty. I had made up my mind that I should apologize to her. I never got the opportunity, and if I had, I doubt I would have had the guts to do it, to tell the truth.

It is not that big a deal in the scheme of life, she may not even remember it now. It is not like it is some obsession of mine, every once in a great while I think about it. I've never told anyone about it. Just one of those times were I was less of a person than I would like to have been.

I don't even remember her name.

Trailcam pix

Best buck so far, nothing great. He's got a little time to grow yet. Forgot to set the date on the camera.



Some babies with their mama, munchin' in the remnants of an old food plot I planted. Awwww cute.

Humbug?

In clicking around the 'nieghborhood today, I see several posts pooh poohing the holiday dedicated to celebrating our nation's declaration of independence. I can only assume that all the whining must be due to the fact that they don't live in South Dakota.

I, on the other hand, spent my holiday the way it should be spent, eating at a picnic and playing football in the lake. You haven't celebrated the 4th unless you have acquired a good sunburn. Afterward, we watched the fireworks display of the local municipality.

Speaking of acquisitions, a rather old dilemma has been resolved. I am much pleased.

I admit it

I guessed a few times.

You know the Bible 100%!

Wow! You are awesome! You are a true Biblical scholar, not just a hearer but a personal reader! The books, the characters, the events, the verses - you know it all! You are fantastic!

Ultimate Bible Quiz
Create MySpace Quizzes

Via El Borak

Hangtime

Car meets deer.

My brother sent me this:

Pablo type musings.

Seems I need to pay more attention to my haloscan account. I have been getting commenters and missing them. Sorry. I am not used to having readers.

It is hard to find a good deal on used cars. Found two nearly identical cars, one with a local dealer, and one about a hundred miles away. The one a hundred miles away was half the price. Mrs. Giraffe went into aggressive car buying mode so we went to the local dealer. I think her intent was to take the printouts and demand that they give us the local car for the same price. Found out today that the other car has a slapping piston and needs a new engine. The dealer wasn't playing ball anyway. So now they have all our information. They sat us down and pulled out a little pink card. Wrote all of our info down. While we were sitting there I looked around at all the other salesmen. They all had a stack of pink cards and a phone to their ear. There will be phone calls.

Didn't get elk tags. Sent back in for leftover cow tags. Since I got all the deer tags last year, I won't have preference points for this year. I will be lucky to get any rifle tags to have a chance at a buck.

Need to get my trailcam up. The whitetails are growing new antlers and I think it would be nice to get some pics of them. They corn is growing fast and when it gets much taller the deer will go into the cornfields and won't be seen much till harvest. I will post some pics if I get any.

We didn't get the flash flooding here that they forecasted. Some other areas did. It is starting to shape up as a very wet year.

An 8 billion dollar oil refinery is considering locating in our state. It doesn't matter to me if they build it here or somewhere else, just so they build it. A pipeline coming down from Canada will supply the crude.

Friday

I have to get Res's beau off of the top of the page, so time for some random musin's.

Nate bashed Augustine on his blog. I would guess rightfully so. I got off into the deep woods on that discussion talking about good and evil. I claim no infallibility on this, but I suggested that evil doesn't really exist as a thing on its own. To use a word picture, darkness doesn't exist, it is merely the absence of light. Darkness is not a different kind of energy, it is the lack of light energy. Evil is the absence of good. Scripture says God is light.

If evil exists, then it was created by God. To use another word picture, if good is a green light, and evil is a red light, then whoever is responsible for shining the red light is responsible for evil. Thus we come to free will. Some say that we have no free will, and everything is directed by God. He is shining the red light. If this is the case then Augustine would have been right. Nate is wrong then in this case because nobody can accuse God of being evil, because whatever He does is good. This is because He defines good. I believe we have free will, so God is not responsible for the bad things we do, we are.

Now, if evil is simply the absence of good, then you can't blame God when evil happens (not that you can blame Him anyway). Yet another analogy: A fire that kills a dozen people is evil, in that it is not good. But the firemen are not evil, if they were not called to put it out. A passerby is not evil if he doesn't put it out, as he has no responsibility to do so. In order for God to be guilty of evil in this case, He must be shown to have a responsiblity to stop evil. Does He? I don't think He does, as He is sovereign we have no right to require it from Him. Heaven let your light shine down!


Then there is Difster. Difster doesn't think that a miracle is a violation of physics. He says instead it is an event we can't explain. When Jesus walked on the water, he wasn't violating any laws of physics. Well, why not? Why can't the One who created the forces of nature manipulate them as He pleases?

Take your average dead person. I have never seen one come back to life. It just doesn't happen. Jesus brought a Lazarus back to life after he was dead 4 days. Now, If Jesus didn't manipulate the laws of physics, then Lazarus came back to life spontaneously. You can't give Jesus any credit for this miracle if He took no active role in it.

Take another example. If someone fires a armor piercing bullet at me, and I see it come to a stop in front of me, and then accelerate away from me, this would be a miracle wouldn't it? The bullet cannot violate the laws of physics. An object in motion stays in motion unless acted on by an outside force. So that bullet should have hit me. But then we find out that Difster has placed a very powerful Wile Coyote magnet along the bullets path. The magnet applies a force to the steel core of the bullet and stops it, and then pulls it back away. So the bullet was obeying the laws of physics all along. And it wasn't a miracle. That is the important part. If a miracle is only something that can't be explained, as soon as you explain it, it is no longer a miracle.

A miracle by definition is a supernatural event, an event that cannot be explained. If you explain it, it is not a miracle.



So, now just how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?

A BAAAADD Girl.

For Res, 'cause he's from Wyoming, and Heidi, 'cause she likes shoes.

And everyone else 'cause its funny.

A brave young man

Every so often, we have a Sunday at church where the pastor doesn't preach. Instead it is a time for an 'open mike', where members of the church get up and tell about what God is doing in their life. I usually don't like this service as it is very emotionally charged with crying women and sometimes crying men. Emotions suck. This time I felt different. There was one woman who stood up to tell about her brain scans, the doctors told her that stroke damage was visible. After the church had prayed for her for a short time she got a second scan that showed her brain was clear.

One young man and his young girlfriend had quite an effect. He stood up in front of the church and said that he had a confession and a prayer request. That was something I hadn't seen before. He said that some months ago they had made a bad decision and now they were going to have a baby. He asked for forgiveness, and for people to pray for them. I think that was a very brave thing to do. I can't imagine the shame they felt. I don't know what motivated them to stand up in front of several hundred and admit what they had done. Even though everyone was going to find out anyway. I'm afraid I would not have done the same thing if I were in his shoes. I might have just avoided the church altogether. It is a lot easier to stand up and tell about a way that God has blessed you, instead of telling about how you've disappointed him. At any rate, it struck me that I was in no position to look down on him, and that many times I've done things that disappointed God. I suppose I'll still have to give an accounting for those things, but I thank God for his mercy and grace.

I hope that God will take the consequences of this young couples sin and transform it into a blessing for their new family. I don't know her name, but if you want to, say a prayer for Ricky.

Farah

A Joseph Farah on wingnut daily put in his latest article."

"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years. Great nations rise and fall. The people go from bondage to spiritual truth, to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency, from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependence, from dependence back again to bondage."

The education of Pale Horse

Equus Pallidus asked my why a compound bow of a given draw weight shoots a faster arrow than a traditional bow of the same weight. The pulleys provide mechanical advantage making it easier to pull, but you should be losing energy due to friction, he says. And there is where you went wrong, EP.

A compound does lose energy due to friction in the wheels. But, the cables and pulleys on a compound bow aren't there to provide mechanical advantage. The pulleys are actually eccentric wheels. Picture a wheelbarrow with an oval shaped wheel. The resistance is hard, easy, hard, easy, hard, easy, when you push it. It is the same with a compound bow. The draw starts easy, hits a peak draw weight and then begins the let-off. Let off is a measure of the percentage of the draw weight at full draw compared to the peak weight. I have a 70 pound bow with 65% letoff. At full draw I only hold back 35% of the peak, or about 25 lbs. Equus Pallidus thinks that this is the great attraction to compound bows. You can hold the bow back for a longer time, due to the let off. It is a nice feature, but the main attraction is greater arrow speed.

The key to the greater speed of the compound is the draw force curve. Area under the curve is the energy stored by the bow. A compound is less efficient than a traditional bow. It just stores more energy, providing more energy to accelerate the arrow to a higher speed. A traditional bow typically uses wood arrows. I was told never to shoot wood arrows in a compound bow because it would blow them apart with the acceleration.

So what do you say EP?

The gun law that we need.

John T. Casteen of Slate, proposed a gun law that will supposedly "make a difference" I am doubtful. He proposes that background checks should be done for gun sales between individuals.

The law we need doesn't address a narrow class of guns, and it relies on the principles of a law we already have: the Brady Law. Brady mandates a federal background check before the sale of a gun by any seller who holds a federal firearms license. It applies to Internet gun deals, gun-shop purchases, and sales by FFL sellers at gun shows. It does not apply, however, to the estimated 40 percent of gun transfers that take place between individuals: non-FFL sellers at those same gun shows, and person-to-person sales made through personal contacts or Internet and print classified ads. That's a far larger volume of guns and gun sales than HR 1022 would affect. As our law stands now, anyone may sell a gun to anyone else; the FFL is required only of those who do so as a commercial venture. Sellers without an FFL may not buy and sell new guns for retail, but may trade in used guns—without background checks—to their heart's content. The bill we need would address that large loophole by requiring that every transfer of ownership be preceded by a Brady background check.

Would this have prevented the VTU shootings? No, he bought the gun legally, presumably passed the background check.

Would this have prevented the Columbine shootings? No, they obtained those guns illegally.

Criminals, by definition, don't follow the law. The Brady law is at best just a nuisance for law abiding citizens. At worst, the records are being illegally kept for a future confiscation effort.

I was happy to see the results of this poll.