Author Archives: Lyle

If the pro liberty side had courage

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And if we understood how the process of winning works, we wouldn’t be protesting the latest outrages committed by the authoritarians, we wouldn’t be panicked, hoping that the next set of violations will be endurable. We’d be proposing our own “outrages” for the communists to get upset over. They’d be protesting us, you see, because we were so blatant, relaxed, and matter of fact about it.

In that spirit I propose a short, simple bill that would repeal the NFA of 1934, the GCA of 1968, and eliminate (not restructure, re-task or rebrand, but eliminate) the BATFE.

If we feel we have to use statistics to justify it, we have more than enough of those, plus we have personal human interest anecdotes galore, but better yet we have the principles of liberty and the constitution on our side. We have the future of our children on our side.

And to summarize; if the pro liberty side had courage, and resolve, and really understood the principles and how this is played, we’d never have gotten to this stage. But resolve does exist and it is growing I think, watered by the increasingly outrageous and transparent enemy. Isn’t this interesting?

Extenuating circumstances

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When politicians cite crime rates, accidents, or current news events as reasons to infringe on the rights of their fellow citizens, they are in effect claiming extenuating circumstances to explain or justify their violation of the Oath of Office.

The question then becomes whether extenuating circumstances are a legal justification for willfully violating the Bill of Rights, or whether said politicians are guilty of a serious legal offense and punishable (see 18 USC 242 for example). It has to be one or the other.

If statistics were really that important…

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…we’d have gotten something like this;

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the statistical averages which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Statistical Ranges, that among these are Crime Rates, Unemployment Rates and the pursuit of Smaller Relative Income Disparities.–That to secure these statistics, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these statistics, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their desired statistics…

The first ten amendments to the constitution would have been called the Bill of Statistics, and it would lay out the target statistical ranges for various things like crime, accidents, economics, and so on.

Careful with the whole stats argument…thing

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 We like to toss out statistics that bolster the pro second amendment position.  That’s something of an oxymoron, really.  I’ve done my share of it, certainly.

For example, there is the decline in our murder rate as gun ownership has gone up.  That’s nice and all, but I heard the other night that if our medical and response training and technology were that of the 1960s, our murder rate would be three times what it is today.  A person must actually die, you see, before it’s actually murder.  I haven’t looked it up (that’s your job – I’m not your servant) but it certainly sounded plausible.  If it’s true, then it means that there is in fact much more violence, but that yet more lives are being saved.  Gun owners couldn’t very well take credit for that.

I’ve been harping on this stats issue, and probably pissing off some people.  It may seem like a subtle point to some, but if so it is a subtle point of crucial importance.

Like Tam said, and I paraphrase; “Even if every other gun owner on the planet tried to kill someone last night; I didn’t, so leave me alone!”

And that’s really it, isn’t it?  As the story goes, Sodom and Gomorrah would have been spared for just one righteous person.

The concept of a right is a purely moral concept, and if you can find where the Bill of Rights was to be dependent on statistics, I’d like you to show me.

The communists hate the concept of unalienable rights, and will use stats as a way of changing the subject– of completely reframing the conversation.  I call them “tweakers” because all they care about is tweaking this and tweaking that, using the force of government ostensibly to get some predicted result in the statistics.

That’s a communist premise, and it stinks right from the get go.  It puts us into disparate groups, each being ruled according to its status.  Statistical arguments alone, either for or against a “right” imply the non-existence of rights by ignoring them.  Conversely, if rights truly exist, stats have no bearing on them, and the discussion is purely about morals– right verses wrong.

Our premise is, or should be, that justice demands the respect of all human rights, all the time, that rights belong only to individuals, just as criminal prosecutions are of individuals.  If you didn’t violate, or attempt to violate, someone else’s rights, you are to be held harmless in all regards.  If there were only one, that is the American principle.  If that ideal is not upheld, you have no rights and in that case your statistics won’t save you.

The communists know exactly how this works, and you all know that they know it, and of course they hate the very concept of rights.  They will ignore it and fall back on statistics.  It’s a pretty clever, evil trick.  I’ll give them that, but what else have they got, being that they’re on the wrong side?

That is where we (I hope) differ.  Not only is the moral rights concept all we need, it is all that can work in the long run to persuade good people.  If we rely on stats, we’re relying on the weather, essentially, because stats, like the weather, are not only very fickle but are subject to interpretation, while rights are eternal.

Sure; bring out the human interest stories– we probably don’t do near enough of that, all told, but start them, and finish them, with the moral Declaration.  There’s not a Republican alive, and very few in the NRA, who can do this, so it’s up to us.

The problem with experts

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Plenty of research, plenty of information, zero mention of the second amendment or the core principles behind it;

http://johnrlott.blogspot.com/2013/01/with-megyn-kelly-on-fox-news.html#comments

In other words, he didn’t make the case.  Instead he argued purely within The Enemy’s framework, proving who had all the control over the conversation.  Human rights, and the power relations between citizens and government, were apparently not even worth mentioning, yet those are THE points to be made.  Listen to their words very carefully.  Lott and Kelly both took the bait, hook, line and sinker, and ran with it.  It’s sad.  The term, “too clever by half” comes to mind.

In fact, a fundamental human right is being impugned and attacked without being mentioned– as though it didn’t exist– as though infringements on that right aren’t specifically prohibited.  “Machineguns are already highly regulated, and aren’t used in crimes” as if that would matter– as if your rights depend on statistics– as if a certain set of infrigements to your rights is all we’re going to talk about.  It would be like discussing how to cook your mother for dinner, with no mention of the mother’s moral right to life or the legal prohibition against killing her and eating her.  Cannibals are arguing over the cannibal pot, and the audience is to see one chef as the more clever culinary tactician than the other.  No doubt many of us on both sides are cheering along like mindless sports fans at a game.  We are better than this.  It’s not a goddamned game.

Nice one from Tam

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In or out of context, it’s a memorable one;

  “Standin’ by your man ain’t doin’ him no favors when what he needs is a rehab clinic.”

Seen here.

Anyway you look at it, or if you change “man” to “woman” it works great.  Ideally though, standin’ by your man, or woman, would be doing both of you a favor, but how often is that actually the case?

More on prescription drugs and mass shootings

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Hmm;
http://www.infowars.com/fanapt-hoax-hides-real-connection-between-shooters-and-ssri-drugs/
— Lyle

I doubt there would be much difference

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Cheating to “qualify” as a public school teacher.


You could select names randomly from a phone book, hire those people as teachers and administrators without any training and no benefits or retirement program, end up with a very high turnover accordingly, and probably end up with a better school than some of the ones we’re currently forced by law to fund.  Chances are, they wouldn’t all be indoctrinated leftist/authoritarians such as we have now, but then it would depend on the city.  Certainly, some of the teachers I had were far below average in intelligence and functionality.  Plus they hated kids.  The random, first generation immigrant farmer or mill worker from that area would have exceeded their educational abilities, at least for a while until they got bored from not being able to pursue their main interests.  If all they did was nothing, we’d have done better in my high school, as we wouldn’t have had anyone impeding us in the classroom.  We could have read some books, looked into things using the library, brought in people from the community to speak about their specialties, discussed things amongst ourselves, and actually ended up understanding something along the way without getting a bad taste for the “education” process or being treated like pieces of shit for being curious and having independent minds.

The Double Auto Pistol

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The 2011.


They say there have been many double barreled guns in the past, which of course is true, but the purpose has always been to have multiple shots available, either in leiu of a repeater (before there was any such thing as a repeater) or to have a second shot on hand without working an action, usually in a large African caliber or a shotgun.  In this case both barrels fire together.  It’s an interesting novelty.  Maybe you could fiber/epoxy a couple of 1911s together and have a similar experience.  The variations on the jam, or other stoppage, should be interesting as well.  The two barrels are serviced by a common slide.

The First Amendment was supposed to protect…

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…your right to speech, religion, assembly and redress of grievances.  The Second amendment was supposed to protect the First.  Both will be tested in ways you are not expecting.  You will be blindsided.  Expect it.


When someone doesn’t like what you’re saying and tries to do something about it, your Second amendment right says, “I don’t think so, Skippy”.


Uncle’s post here, if you listen to the broadcast, reveal a looming contest.  There is an on-going attempt to marginalize you, through legal, economic, social and bureaucratic pressures.  Pay attention.  Pay attention also to who stands their ground and who caves.  Don’t bother with the rationalizations, but stay focused on principles.

Not Glocking so Glockily down the Glocky trail

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My G20 quit feeding properly last summer, and I identified the problem as an original recoil spring that had gone soft.  A new Wolf spring and steel guide rod took care of that.  Then I wanted to try a new Lone Wolf barrel because I was getting so much case buldge that one use was about all I was comfortable with, and the LW barrels have more case support at the bottom under the case web area.  They also have standard cut rifling, which is supposed to better for cast lead bullets– something I’d like to try at some stage.


My first tryout of the new barrel led to a failure to feed the very first round, but after that it seemed to function normally and I figured all was well.  Not so fast.  Those were previously fired cases.  Last time out, with all new cases, I had several failures to feed, and had to bump the back of the slide to get it into battery.


This morning I tried feeding some rounds from several full magaxines, and here’s what happened;



Above is the slide resting quite securely, with its new, beefier recoil spring, on a jam.


Below, I’ve removed the magazine and locked the slide back.  That round is still wedged in the back of the chamber, and it took some fiinger pressure to dislodge it;



(Below) you see the mark below the case mouth, from the front of the feedramp digging into it;



My theory is that the new, softer cases are getting bitten more deeply than the work-hardened fired cases I tried the first time, resulting in more problems.  The original Glock barrel has much more “throating” or relief at the feed ramp area, which is why the Glock barrel is said to have less case support.  The LW barrel has more support in that area, but for now it doesn’t have enough clearance to feed reliably.  My new StarLine cases are trimmed at the factory to only a few thousandths over the minimum, and about 7 or 8 thousandths under the maximum case length.  The overall cart length is exactly, to within two or three thou extreme spread, what the Hornady manual (and several others) called for.  The rounds plunk right into the LW chamber with the barrel removed, but jam in the chamber when fed from any of several magazines, due to the feed angle and the tighter (actually just longer at the bottom because of less throating) chamber.


A longer bullet ogive might force the front of the cart down as it feeds, but at the moment I don’t know if that would help or hurt.  I might just put the perfectly good old barrel back in and live with super short case life for now.


I spent 30+ years doing custom work on various types of musical instruments, and long ago came up with an axiom I have repeated many, many times to perspective customers and fellow shop workers;  When you divert from the original design, expect a cascading series of unforseen problems.  In other words, expect to pay through the nose as we may have go back to the drawing board a time or two, to find ways to accommodate your custom thingamajig, making it work seamlessly with the rest of the system.


I noticed just yesterday that Brownell’s, I think it was, or maybe it was CTD, had a bunch of LW Glock barrels in a promotion, for all the Glock models except the 20, or those in 10mm.  This kind of sucks, because I was having a ball late in the summer shooting silhouettes at 100 yards.  The original barrel never seemed to give enough accuracy to make that a reasonable proposition.

Take a look

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I’ve said before that if you look, I mean really look, for the meaning in ads, political speeches, or anything else, you often come up short because there isn’t any, or it may be a clever deception, or purely an appeal to emotion.  Often it works so well that people will attribute words to a message that weren’t there, and different people will attribute completely different meanings to the same message.


Look at how much of media (movies, books, music, all of it, even news) is an attempt to arouse emotions, and how little of it is aimed at calm awareness or true interest in a subject.  That statement all by itself might even make you uncomfortable.  Aroused emotions drive out calm awareness, don’t they?  And yet we seek the emotional stimuli, and try to keep them going in other people.  So what are we trying to drive out? 


This post is aimed at reinforcing Rolf’s post below.


I watched a newish movie the other day. It came highly recommended.  “Battleground LA” or something like that, it was called.  There was so much emotional appeal, the story had to take several time-outs just so all the characters could emote at each other, even in the heat of battle with an RPG in midair, they took time out to emote.  Get blown over a wall by that RPG, take more time out to emote, etc.  I’ve complained for years now that every time I look to some program or other for information of interest, it turns out to be another damned, stinking soap opera.  Soap operas with guns, soap operas in a machine shop, soap operas about nature, politics, you name it– emote emote emote.


Our culture has become one of buzzing emotions, looking for more buzz, reinforcing the buzz, getting buzz from others while trying to get a buzz going in someone else.  It happens in our homes, at school, on the job, everywhere.  Police (the little girls) love to emote, both at each other and at their prey, and they get us emoting back at them.  Our local cops got all the kids at school at each other’s throats last week and this.  It happens on both sides of the political divide, too, and it ain’t good.  I don’t need to site any examples, because you can think of dozens without even trying.  You’re probably emoting at your spouse or roommate right now.  Most of us with an agenda spend most of our time preaching to the choir, rousing their emotions, while at the same time rousing the emotions of our opposition against us.  What are we trying drive out of other people with our appeals to emotion?


So we have a problem.  Is a good solution more likely to come from buzzing emotions or calm awareness?  I don’t know; sometimes I have something “all figured out” because I wasn’t able to stop thinking about it, because it was knawing at me, only to find later that I had the much better answer come spontaneously after I’d quit fretting over it.


If your house is on fire, you have an immediate problem that needs an immediate response.  If you’ve ever been in any kind of similar situation, and you ended up doing exactly the right thing against poor odds, and you still have a hard time explaining it, you will remember that what did the trick was focused awareness taking control.  You know of what I speak.  If you ended up handling it very poorly, you will probably remember that an emotional state took control, preventing you from focusing properly on the task at hand.  I’ve gone both ways, so I can speak with some experience.

I didn’t vote on that one

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Washington state had a ballot initiative to “legalize” pot.  Problem is had a whole new bureaucracy attached to it.  It isn’t so much to take pot out of the hands of criminal gangs, as to have the state take over as chief criminal gang, taxing the stuff 25% at each stage (production, wholesale and retail).  It ignores the federal law, and provides no means of keeping feds off one’s back, so getting a license to produce, distribute, or retail pot is tantamount to self incrimination on a federal crime.  Oh goody.


So no– either a “yes” or a “no” vote is insane.  I left that one blank, thank you.  I will not actively participate in that level of stupid.  Though it will be somewhat entertaining if it passes being as it will put the state at odds with the feds, it will still stink as bad as the current mishmash of morbid, deeply pathological and unconstitutional stupidity that is the War on Drugs.  And 25%?  Three times?  That’ll guarantee a continued black market with all the attendant problems, even if the federal law were repealed or the Washington State Millita could keep the feds at bay.  Don’t make me come over there to set you straight, damn you.


ETA: 11/06/12; The law takes up several pages in fine print, which alone is grounds for rejection.  It’s near half the size of the U.S. constitution.  All it would take is one sentence– “All state alcohol and drug laws, and rules and regulations related thereto, are hereby repealed.”  Get that on the ballot and I’m with you.

Moral Issue

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Posit; Your kid is suspected of having knowledge of other kids smoking pot.  Your kid’s school wants your kid to talk to some lying, immoral cops who lie every day as a matter of course and brag about it.  Your wife says No– that we aren’t going to talk to cops like that.  What about talking to some other cop from another jurisdiction?


I say that it is none of any cop’s business whatsoever.  If we’re going to talk morals, a teenager trying pot is no business of anyone on Earth except for the kid and the parents.  Further; the fact that pot was made illegal is in and of itself immoral, and unconstitutional.  The cops’ only possible interest in “talking” with said teenager is so they can harm other people  besides.  There is no victim  except for the “perpetrator” himself, and hence there is no moral obligation whatsoever to talk to cops and possibly thereby to allow them to harm other people.  All the parents in town already know.


Now say that the school threatens to suspend said teenager if said teenager does not talk to some cop or other.  What then?  I say that doing the right thing isn’t always the easy thing.  I say to hell with all of them– let them suspend said teenager.


We had a kid in our community kill himself a while back over this exact sort of thing, and with this recent case there is talk of it again.  There is talk of other kids beating the crap out of one of the kids for “snitching”, and talk of him committing suicide.  All because you nasty, sick, evil, broken, twisted sacks of shit maintaining our drug laws, enabling and enriching violent criminal trafficking networks and torturing innocent kids for being curious, and you in the public schools playing right along with it, going straight to the cops at the drop of a hat.  Shame on you all.


You cops out there; you had better think long and hard about the damage and destruction you’re perpetuating.  Make the right choice– knock it off or get out.  I have no sympathy for you, as you knew you’d have to hurt innocent people as a regular part of the job.  You were set up just as all of us have been set up, but you KNOW IT.  So FIX IT!  You’re as guilty as any drug gang kingpin unless you knock it off right now (they couldn’t exist without you).  The law doesn’t make you right and you know it.  Plus you swore an Oath, remember?  I’ll hold you to it you stupid bastards.  Don’t give me the crap about the thin blue line either– YOU are making the trouble here.  You want to be treated like a damned hero?  Fuck You, then act like one.  Stand up for what’s right even if you pay a price for it.  THAT’S a hero.  Turds.  You really are dispicable.


We’ve already had the talk in our home about how evil laws result in people suspecting each other, fearing each other, hating each other, in violence, in ruined lives, the militarizaion of our law enforcement and all the rest.


Washington state a measure on the ballot.  Best you look into and right now.  I deleted the stuff I wrote about shooting cops in the face.  For now.  Anyway; shooting cops in the face is probably not the best way to get people to understand.  For now.  And so I will speak out against it unless there becomes a time wherein there is no other choice.


ETA, 11-01-12;  The cops, through a round about set of circumstances, including a parent telling the school principle that there’s no way their kid is talking to the cops, have stood down.  They’re leaving the matter in the hands of the school admin.  So I have to hand it to them– for whatever reason, they’ve done the right thing.  For now.

Push / Pull (Remedial Physics)

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There is a theory that gravity is a pushing force.  That is to say that gravity is a property of space and not matter.  I say fine; it’s entirely plausible, but that for all purposes we can understand at the moment it makes no difference, and there is currently no way to prove it one way or the other.


An idea that never seems to die (millions of people believe in it completeyt) is that we can extract electrical power “from gravity”.  I can’t believe I wasted an hour on YouTube on something that sounded interesting, but ended up as another of millions of perpetual motion energy system assertions.  I’m not linking to it.  Stay away.


Again; No, Little Grasshopper.  Gravity is a part of the mechanism by which we might extract energy for our own purposes, but in and of itself it isn’t energy in the sense that we can “extract” power from it”.  Hydroelectric uses gravity, but the energy we’re extracting came from the sun (sun heats ocean water, water evaporates as a result…you know the rest).  It’s like a spring in engineering.  My Victrola phonograph’s turntable isn’t powered by spring energy.  You have to put energy in before you get any out, and there’s loss along the way.  The spring stores energy from the muscles I used to wind it up, my muscles get their energy from the food I eat, and the food I eat gets its energy from the sun through photosynthesis.  The Victrola is powered by trillions of tons of exploding hydrogen nucleii, which I suppose you can call “the energy of the universe” or “God Power” if you like.  But it isn’t spring energy anymore than hydroelectric is gravity energy.


But everyone wants desperately to believe that they’re smarter than all physicists and engineers, past and present, combined, and that they have The Secret to endless, essentially free energy.  Tidal power (extracting some of the energy of the Earth’s rotation), hydro power, solar power (photovoltaic) and all the rest are all perfectly viable but certainly not free and some of them require massive engineering projects.  You are never going to build a “gravity power” machine without some source besides gravity, at least not until we can figure out what gravity is, and exactly how it interacts with matter.  So far it’s a mystery, and I assert that it will remain a mystery for a very long time, or until some “quantum leap” of understanding of the nature of the universe is achieved.


In the same YouTube piece they, again, for the nth time, brought up the suppressed technologies meme– Big Dark Corporation buys up patents for endless free energy machines and locks them away from human eyes forever, so they can continue to make BIG BUCKS POLLUTING THE EARTH.  As if there is no money in selling and maintaining endless free energy machines.  Naw; it’d never sell, and for sure no government or other company could ever find out about it, no matter what.  Ever.  And someone with more power than anyone else snuck into the patent office and erased the patent before anyone, including the patent office workers, ever saw it.  That 100 MPG carburator we heard about back in the 1960s (you just bolt it onto your Chrysler 440 V8 and presto, your 5,000 pound 1966 Town & Country gets 100 MPG) was suppressed by the Big Oil Companies more effectively than any secret in the history of history.  And I am Karl Marx’s uncle. (Hillary Clinton be goin’, “I can’t believe you’re Karl’s uncle because you’ve obviously been bought off by the oil companies!”)


While we’re dismissing silly ideas; that asteroid belt out there is constantly, almost universally, being referred to as “leftovers” and suchlike, from the formation of the solar system.  That’s a misunderstanding or at best a disservice to the students.  Those hard, dense, nickel/iron chunks we keep finding can be only one thing– planet core material.  If the Earth were smashed all to hell, resulting in another asteroid belt for a time, and you somehow managed to survive, would you want the pieces referred to as “leftover flotsam from the formation of the solar system”?  One could argue that the asteroids are “leftover” in the sense that total planet annihiliation is part of solar system formation but the implication has  been they just never ended up as anything and so there they are, still out there.  Maybe I’ll start referring to the asteroid belt as “collateral damage”.  And now that I think about it I’m sure Bush had something to do with it.


Please, because this needs to be said until it is understood;  It is entirely possible to be a towering genius in one field and be a blithering idiot in another.  It happens to me all the time.  So for you blithering idiots out there (you know who you are because you think you’re a towering genius); you just need to get into some other field.

About voting fraud

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Since the left is convinced that you cannot be trusted with a gun, cannot be trusted to educate your own kids, feed your own kids, feed yourself, deal directly with your medical care providers, chose the vehicle you want, run your own business without being told how to do it, hire the right people, chose your own light bulbs, chose the energy sources you want, or keep your own money, et al, why on Earth would it trust you to vote?  Why should it?


If the very future of the planet itself is in jeopardy, as is claimed, well then; the left would be “out of its mind” so to speak, to allow any election to go the wrong way if there were anything that could be done, by any means necessary, to fix it.


If we want to go further with this line of thought, we could make the same case.  If we’re headed for the cliff due to socialist creep, and there is very little time to make a correction, and since the constitution is no longer a functional barrier to socialist creep, since we’re now a de facto pure democracy seemingly bent on self destruction, then what are OUR options?


No; we don’t need election fraud.  The left needs it.  All we need is the truth, the light of day, and to find a way to begin restoring and enforcing the constitution.  We know that the Republican Party as constituted today will not do that, so we’ve refined the context of the question, but not answered it.  What are our options?


As little help as it may be, I can answer that in the negative; One option that we do NOT have is that of trying to make everyone like us.  We’ll have to tell it like it is, with malice toward none (and that’s a challenge, isn’t it?) and let the chips fall where they may.  Pandering and beating around the bush, being afraid of the bare truth, is what got us in this mess, and it is what defines the Republican Party today.

Where is Billy Beck?

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His site has been “suspended”.  Maybe I didn’t get the memo, but I’m instantly worried about him.  He’s not off in Beck’s Gulch is he?

You think you’re a gunsmith?

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THIS is a gunsmith.  Watch all of them.  There are a bunch of vids all in a row detailing the handcrafting of an American longrifle.  They hand hammer a barrel around a mandrel and hammer weld it.  Awesome.  No “machine tools” of any kind.  The closest to a machine tool is the barrel drilling jig, which is hand powered and hand fed, using hand-made cutting tools, and having a wooden spiral jig for determining the rifle twist.


Hat tip; castboolits.gunloads.com


We are extremely pampered today by comparison, having rolled bar and seamless tubing of precise alloy to work with.  I once “restored” (though the word is abused in this case) a hand-made, lavishly hand engraved and gold plated trumpet that was made in the very early 20th century– for its original owner, who was over 80 years old at the time.  He had bought it as a kid and played it the whole time.  All of the tubing was wrapped over mandrels and soldered, including the piston valves– every tubular part had a lengthwise seam therefore, and some of the silver solder had corroded out, resulting in leaks.  I had to re-solder some of them, but others were too far gone and I replaced them with extruded, seamless tubing.  The curved tubing was made back then by filling the straight pieces with lead and bending them  by hand over a bending jig, then hammering out any wrinkles.  Now they are bent using an ice composition and then hydro-formed in molds.  Some curved tubular parts are now built up entirely through electrolysis over investment cores.  And they didn’t use a buffing machine back then, but instead hand-burnished every square millimeter of the instrument prior to plating it– you could still see all the tiny facets on that trumpet– one for each stroke of the burnishing tool.  But that all that was still short of the skills used in rifle making in the 18th and early 19th centuries, and I didn’t do any engraving, carving or inletting in my instrument repair career.


An instrument (or rifle) with that sort of craftsmanship today would cost you well in excess of fifteen thousand dollars (you find fine rifles for well over a hundred thousand) though we can get good ones, made by modern methods, for under one thousand.  But no one makes musical instruments like that anymore, so far as I know.


When I first started in musical instrument work, the most expensive saxophone, the Selmer Mark VI, was under a thousand dollars, or right around a thousand, and it was imported from France, but the much simpler concert flute could be found costing several times that much, made in America.  You know why?


Because a flute can be made by hand in a person’s basement, whereas it takes a rather large shop, with a tons of specialized tooling, to make a saxophone, that’s why.  There were exquisite hand-made flutes, but no hand-made saxophones.  You can’t hand build a large-scale integrated microchip in your basement.  It may cost millions to set up for making them but you can buy one for a dollar.

Social and Political Pandering

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…or “Chum in the Water”


Most of us are familiar with the dangers of pandering to dictators bent on world domination, of the Legacy of Neville Chamberlain, and so on.  It’s very simple.  Show the enemy that you’re a chump, that it can control you, and you get pounced.


I think that Mitt Romney is probably a very nice guy, trying to do the right things.  Doing the right things, and getting people to like you, are however very different, often contradictory, goals.


When he decided he needed to hire him some womens (you know, so people couldn’t accuse him of not hiring enough women, because hiring based on a person’s potential value to the company without regard to sex or race, would be….stupid?  Unfair?  It wouldn’t please the communists?) he apparently failed to understand that he was throwing chum in the water.  Condition white.  Sharks cannot resist a little chum.  When the feeding frenzy erupted last week then, no one has any excuse for not having predicted it.  Sharks have a habit of acting like sharks.


HE HAS BINDERS FULL OF WOMEN!!!!  HE HAS BINDERS FULL OF WOMEN!!!!  (“What kind of pervert is this guy!?” they don’t say).  I wonder if he has (GASP) BINDERS FULL OF BLACK PEOPLE TOO!  Oh, the horror– someone trying to hire black people.  RACIST!!!  He wants to put y’all in BINDERS!


No, Grasshopper; don’t pander to insanity.  That way insanity will have nothing on you.  You pander to it and it gets encouraged.  Evil will try to nudge you into doing stupid things.  You’ll want to do them to make it happy, to get along, to take some weight off your shoulders, but it’s always a trick.


So I’m making fun of the evil-crazy, right back, but the important thing is to be able to see it and watch it.  It can’t stand the light of day.

American Insurgency?

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First, read the original post and the comments over at Oleg’s place.


There are some interesting comments, well worth reading, but they fail to see the bigger picture, I think.  It took me a while to think of it, though it shouldn’t have done.  I now see it as obvious.


Any widespread insurgency in America is really the kick-starter to global chaos, and for some of our enemies that is actually the plan – take advantage of a weakened and distracted America.  Collapse the system into a new system.  Twelfth Imam and all that rot.


So no.


We had best get our own houses in order, and look at our Progressive (incremental communist) neighbors as part of our country, which absolutely MUST hold together.  “Last great hope for liberty” and “with malice toward none” come to mind.  I hope you have your beliefs and your communication skills well-honed.  You’ll need both, and by the way the latter doesn’t exist without the former – you know it.


Compromise with evil will get us nowhere and open warfare amongst us will get us all destroyed.  That leaves us a very narrow, delicate path then, doesn’t it?  Our enemies know it too.  Interestingly, that applies to your personal life as well as your public life and the global situation.