Courtesy of the NRA

(H/T to Rocky Mountain Gun Owners)

House Passes Bill Enhancing Background Checks for Gun Purchases
The House passed legislation today that intends to strengthen gun buyer background checks and is supported by both the National Rifle Association and gun control groups.

Passed by voice vote under suspension of the rules, the measure (HR 2640) would increase the amount of electronic data available to states for checking the criminal and mental health records of people who want to purchase guns.

According to Gun Owners of America:

"[NICS Expansion] could have a significant impact on American servicemen," wrote Gun Owners of America recently, "especially those returning from combat situations and who seek some type of psychiatric care.

Often, veterans who have suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder have been deemed as mentally 'incompetent' and are prohibited from owning guns under 18 U.S.C. 922(g)(4). Records of those instances certainly exist, and, in 1999, the Department of Veterans Administration turned over 90,000 names of veterans to the FBI for inclusion into the NICS background check system."

Cool. More lists. More databases. Less freedom.

Do something. Just don't join the NRA.

(BTW, Blogger now works with Safari 3.0 beta! :^)

So, you don't own a Mac and don't have an iPod...

and don't listen to talk-radio or music streaming through iTunes...

Well, now you can browse with the ease of us Mac-users on your Windows box -- courtesy of Apple's release of its Safari web-browser for Windows!

It's free. It's easy. What more could you want? See what you've been missing!

(Okay, let's be reasonable now... ;^)

Ken Ham's in trouble?

A week after former Queensland science teacher Ken Ham opened the world's first Creation Museum - a $33 million facility in Petersburg, Kentucky - he is being sued by the Australian evangelical organisation he helped to set up and which served as a springboard for his leap into the US evangelical movement two decades ago.

It's a bit short on dirty detals whilst being long on allegations. :^/

(HT to arstechnica again.)

A romp through the Creation Museum...

with the non-Young Earthers of arstechnica.com.

Some odd points:

Presumably to avoid labels of anti-Semitism, the museum takes it easy on Judaism.

...it wasn't considered incest for Adam and Eve's children to marry each other. Apparently there was less sin back then, and therefore fewer mutations in their DNA. Evidently sin, not two copies of the same recessive trait, gives rise to congenital birth defects.

Includes a link to a Flickr.com photo documentary.

Kent Hovind's in jail for tax evasion? Always seemed a little bit slimey to me. :^/

Another silly interpretation of Mohammed's writings:

Temporary marriages. (They may even be a proper interpretation of the "Prophet"'s writings.)

They can last from an hour to 99 years. To discourage prostitution and extra-marital sex.

Hmmm...

Not buying it.

I wasn't going to post this

It's a bit of a downer: "The world's oceans are our plastic dumping grounds."

But then I saw that they were advertising an article on the Bugatti Veyron that I like so well.

Up or down?

A statistical question...

If you understand the conclusion, please help me out. :^)