Silliness

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Well I guess it’s official, with that PSA during some big sports game or other over the weekend, Clint Eastwood has joined the Occupy movement.  What I don’t understand is the surprise expressed out there.  I never figured Eastwood for a tea partier.  Far from it.

The Catholic Church seems to be standing up to some small part of ObamaCare.  Odd.  As near as I could tell these last several decades, they’ve been on board with most Progressive ideas.  Oops.  I guess they didn’t think it through.  Oh well.  May the backpedaling be strong and long lived.  So if they get a waiver for their religious beliefs, you know what comes next.  That’s right–  Millions of brand new “Jack Catholics”.  “Yeah, Mr. Bureaucrat Doofus, I converted, like three seconds ago, as soon as I learned that I could get a waiver.”  So I guess the next step would be a requirement for some sort of official certification of membership from the church, etc., etc.  Measures, countermeasures.  As always in any statist system, we have, officially, different sets of “rights” for different classes of citizens.

If you want to get Gay Married, forget the lobbying, the sign carrying, the stupid politicians and the dog and pony shows and come to Moscow, Idaho.  I’ll marry the two of you.  My fee is fifty dollars.  Of course I’ll require that each of you sign a legal document, transferring all your future earnings and assets to the other, and likewise with power of attorney.  No double standards here.  If you ever want a divorce, you’ll need a team of lawyers to decide who gets the house, the cars, the fashion design show, the various bank accounts, etc.  You want equality, you can have it.  But that was never what you really wanted, was it?  Right now you have the best of all worlds– you can shack up with no legal or financial consequences, and split up easily and relatively pain free.  With marriage it’s a whole different ball game, kids, and with marriage comes common law marriage too.  But I guess it’s about the money either way you look at it.  Spousal benefits are nice, but there’s always another side to it.  You sure you’ve thought this through?  Depending on what state you live in, how many of your past relationships could have resulted in a separation that would involve lawyers and splitting up of the financial and other assets?  Really?  You want this?  No.  You don’t, but you’ve been led to believe that you do.  Suckers.  Anyway; my offer still stands, if you think you have the guts.  I have no legal authority of course, but it’s about the commitment anyway.  Until death do you part, and we can combine your assets through simple, easy legal means.  If I had my druthers, I’d get the government sanctioning nonsense OUT of my marriage.  My personal life is not their business.  Leave me alone.  I just can’t identify with people who are dying to get the government IN to their private lives.

Boomerite testing

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I’m very pleased to report that after running a sample of our existing stock of potassium chlorate through a blender the problems appear to be solved:

Barron has his own report of our tests.

Also of interest is that I talked to our supplier on Friday and discovered that we can order whatever grade and class of potassium chlorate we want. That probably means we won’t have this problem again and can use our existing stock for private parties and miscellaneous testing when we have the more time to run it through a blender.

Quote of the day—Adam Hall

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A gun is psychologically a penis-substitute and a symbol of power: the age-range of toy-shop clientele begins at about six or seven, rises sharply just before puberty and declines soon after the discovery of the phallus and its promise of power. From then on, guns are for kids and for the effete freaks and misfits who must seek psycho-orgasmic relief by shooting pheasants.

Adam Hall
The Quiller Memorandum, page 101 (hardcover version).
[It’s another Markley’s Law Monday!—Joe]

Quote of the day—Marc Rubin

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There is not a shadow of doubt, none whatsoever, that the 2nd amendment as written and as intended by the Founders has nothing to do with an individual right to own a gun. That is absolute and not open to the slightest interpretation.

Marc Rubin
August 2, 2010
Supreme Court Ruling on 2nd Amendment Proves Conservative Hypocrisy and Dishonesty
[I wonder if Rubin thinks Alan Dershowitz are Laurence Tribe are conservatives and lesser constitutional scholars than he?

My hypothesis is that Rubin has crap for brains.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Wallace Carroll

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Can’t we Americans here at home do something to lift the gun terror from our schools, playgrounds, parking lots, malls, post offices, housing projects, highways and the grim reaches of our cities where the police must risk their lives to uphold the law?

Of course we can. What we have to do now is to free ourselves from one of the great hoaxes of the 20th century.

This mighty country stands paralyzed in the face of an ever-spreading plague of guns. This national calamity we owe to the leaders of the National Rifle Association in Washington. With a tenacity and ferocity worthy of a better cause, they have fought every proposal, however moderate, to bring the menace under control.

In this endeavor, their principal weapon has been the Second Amendment to the Constitution — or, rather, their version of the Second Amendment.

That amendment, they have insisted, gives everyone an absolute constitutional right to have every kind of firearm. Brandishing that “right,” spending millions in lobbying and legal maneuvers and threatening doom to politicians who would oppose them, they have killed or stalled gun control initiatives in Congress, state legislatures and city governments.

At last, however, the nation is on the move.

…

Now the great Second Amendment hoax can be nailed once and for all if the rank-and-file of the NRA and other responsible citizens will master one simple truth: The Second Amendment means what the courts say it means. It does not mean what the NRA leaders have been telling the nation all these years.

Wallace Carroll
July 4, 1993
To End the Gun Terror, End the Second Amendment Hoax
[Those were the dark days of gun rights activism. That was the attitude nearly everywhere in the media and many of the politicians. Guns were a terror, a plague, a menace, and a national calamity. The standard view of the Second Amendment was a hoax, a lie, and a fraud.

I agree with one thing he said. The Second Amendment means what the courts say it means.

The problem for Mr. Carroll is that he was, probably deliberately, misreading the Miller decision and ignoring the Cruikshank decision. The Heller decision made things much more difficult for people like Carroll to distort. The question is now that the courts have agreed with the NRA on the meaning of the Second Amendment does Carroll still insist that the meaning of the Second Amendment is what the courts say it is? Or does he now insist that the Supreme Court has perpetuated a fraud on the American people as well?

Or does Carroll now admit it was he that was the hoaxer or at least the one that fell for a fraud?—Joe]

Problem with Open Carry

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Someone I know carries a Vz. 52 pistol OWB.  It hangs out in the open almost all of the time.  After several days of wet weather, the pistol was rusted.  Oops.  It looked horrific (sorry – no pictures).  Rust on the barrel, between the recoil spring and barrel especially, and rust on the outside where it contacted the holster.  Even some of the cartridges had rust on them from the magazines.  After taking it down, almost to the last pin and the last screw, it cleaned up very well.  Nothing serious this time. I’m sure the piece would have functioned, though metal oxides can be extremely abrasive.  It could get really bad if left in the holster for a longer time.

Be careful out there if you OC.  My pistol is almost always covered at least by a shirt and I’ve never seen signs of rust on it, so I’ve never thought much about it.  I have left a Winchester carbine in the vehicle for weeks at a time, and in very cold weather condensation can get between the metal and the gun case interior, causing rust at all the contact points.  So you have to take extra care.  The Parkerizing on the Colt seems to handle it much better, and the annodizing of course is already a hard metal oxide, but you want to be checking these things.

Terminator building blocks

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Implementation of SkyNet and the Terminator are a little behind the original schedule but progress is still being made:

“The team actually started out by building a retina and they came to me and said: ‘Look, it responds to these optical illusions the same way a human does. They put another layer of cells behind that it started to find features, They put another layer, it started to find corners or oriented lines or something, another layer, it started to find patterns,” Jacobs said.

“Today it tracks objects. It’s actually not programmed, it’s taught.”

Jacobs laughed at the silence in the room, conceding he evokes images of “The Terminator.”

SkyNet building blocks are falling into place as well:

The long term future belongs to optical interconnects, low power processors and new kinds of memory architectures, said Prith Banerjee, director of HP Labs in a DesignCon keynote here.

Banerjee described the path to a terabyte/second optical bus as one step toward its vision of future systems architectures. Engineers need to embrace the new technologies to deal with the coming flood of digital data, he said.

“By 2020 your end customer will be living in a world where people access 50 zettabytes of data from 30 billion cellphones and 1.3 trillion sensors–and all that data will have to be analyzed by computer architectures you have to design,” he told a packed audience here.

Quote of the day—Sean

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If you haven’t thought anything wrong, you have nothing to hide.

Sean
February 2, 2012
Comment to Unreasonable searches.
[Since it is from Sean you know it was sarcasm.

You also know it’s coming.—Joe]

School Shooting Season

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This time of year our school shooting team gets together, I bring several guns into our local school and teach the kids how best to participate in school shootings.  This year I had 15 boys and girls in class – a pretty good percentage of the total enrollment in our small town high school.

As part of the class, which consists in large part of excerpts from the NRA Basic Home Firearm Safety course, I ask them to state some of the various reasons one might own firearms.  One of the girls chimed in with, “Space alien invasion?!”

I like these kids.  I didn’t bother to point out that their puny, crude, chemically powered kinetic energy weapons would be no match for the phase modulated space-time disrupters of the enemy.

Earlier, I had asked my daughter if she planned to join the trap shooting team this year, but she declined.  After last night’s class, she asked me how it went, and now I get the impression that she is having second thoughts;  “But I can’t shoot well enough.”
“Well, you know I can teach you, and you’ll be as good as most of the others after one day…”
“But now it’s too late.”  Which it is– they need to have already passed their hunter safety class.

So next year I figure she’ll be right in there.  We’ll see.  Several of her friends are already avid participants in mass school shootings (some of the meets involve well over a hundred shooters, from several school districts).  I bet you don’t see those trap meets covered in your local news station sports reports, do you?

ETA; The kids seemed to respond well to the variation; “Keep your booger hook off the bang switch”.  I associate it with Uncle, but I don’t know for sure where it originated.

Tell me if you already heard this one

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Numerous individuals, known as straw buyers, were recruited to buy AK-47 like semi-automatic firearms. These firearms were then sent to Mexico for use by a drug cartel.

One of the firearms in the hands of the cartel was used in a shooting which resulted in the death of a U.S. law enforcement official.

Sound familiar?

Okay. Well this is probably something you haven’t heard. The perpetrator, Manuel Gomez Barba, of Baytown, Texas, has been sentenced to 100 months for the exportation of the 44 firearms.

The ATF illegally exported something on the order of 2000 firearms to Mexican drug cartels. Does that mean those criminals will receive 2000/44 x 100 months (~380 years) in prison for their crimes?

I don’t think so. Tar and feathers might also be considered appropriate but also have a near zero chance of coming to pass.

I claim retirement at full pay with bonuses will be the most likely outcome.

Quote of the day—Jim Geraghty

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The administration that took military action in Libya without any authorization from force from Congress, that appointed czars with policymaking authority without Congressional confirmation, and that made ‘recess’ appointments while Congress was not in recess is invoking executive privilege to cover how the Department of Justice reacted when Congress began asking about a gun-trafficking operation that got U.S. law enforcement officers murdered by Mexican drug cartels.

All from a president who railed against a runaway imperial presidency when George W. Bush sat in the office he currently occupies.

Jim Geraghty
February 2, 2012
Eric Holder Should Become a Campaign Issue Today
[H/T to Say Uncle.

I’ve had admitted Marxist’s tell me, “We just need to have the right people in charge.” The problem is that power always attracts the people that can least be trusted with that power.

The only option is to not give anyone that much power. I don’t understand why this lesson has to be taught again and again. People have understood this since at least 1776.—Joe]

Unreasonable searches

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I could see the day when the government attempts to get a search warrant for your thoughts:

A group of neuroscientists at the University of California, Berkeley, reported they may have come up with a scientific way to read people’s minds.

They can already demand blood samples so why not connect you up to a machine to see if you have anti-government thoughts or knowledge of a crime?

Quote of the day—Robert Mahler

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Didn’t they fall to the ground?

Robert Mahler
Assistant Crown attorney in Ontario, Canada
January 31, 2012
Court adjourns homeowner’s self-defence trial to clarify confusing gun control law
This was referring to the shell casing from a .38 caliber revolver. Mahler was prosecuting a man for firing three shots to scare off masked men who were throwing “firebombs” (Molotov Cocktails) at his house.
[Not only is the prosecutor so ignorant of firearms that he believed revolvers automatically eject spent shell casings but the government initially attempted to prosecute him for defending himself and his home. The video of the three guys calmly walking around throwing the “firebombs” apparently was going to hinder the case of the prosecution so they dropped that charge. They then charged the victim with “careless storage of a firearm”.

I am of the opinion the prosecutor should be charged with crimes against humanity. Everyone knows you have a right to defend yourself against a violent attack. For the prosecutor to use the force of government to intimidate people who exercise such an obvious natural right warrants an extremely harsh response. And for the prosecutor to base a significant portion of his case on the belief that a revolver automatically ejects it’s shell casings qualifies him for a “Crap for Brains” mention.—Joe]

Laser Guided Bullets

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We had radar proximity fuses in use in AAA rounds during W.W. II, and they of course used vacuum tube technology.  One of the members of our local ham radio club worked on that project in the ’40s.  One of the challenges for his team was developing tubes that could withstand the 10s of thousands of Gs at launch.  Ouch.

Now we have this, via an e-mail from my nephew.  I find it fascinating, funny, and a little disturbing all at the same time.  Ordinary rifles spin a bullet at 2K RPM?  They missed that one by an order of magnitude or two.  A rifle chambered for the 5.56 NATO round for example rotates the bullet at around 300,000 RPM, more or less depending on barrel length, rifling twist and bullet weight.  But as I often say; what’s an order of magnitude (or two) between friends?

It is very telling, if not entirely predictable, how they smear the general public in the article– government = good, whereas regular citizens = dangerous or at least troubling.  They of course have it entirely upside down and backwards in that department.

Damning evidence

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David Hardy has the story on virulently anti-gun lawyer, Dennis Burke, who has been working on anti-gun projects since at least 1989. He was a driving force behind the “assault weapon” ban of 1994. Operation Fast and Furious was secretly launched just one month after his appointment as U.S. attorney was confirmed by the U.S. Senate.

Burke predicted, “It’s going to bring a lot of attention to straw purchasers of assault weapons. Some of these weapons bought by these clowns in Arizona have been directly traced to murders of elected officials in Mexico by the cartels, so Katie-bar-the-door when we unveil this baby.”

I say we should try him for treason and every single illegal gun purchase. When we are done with him extradite him to Mexico and let them try him for all the violations of Mexico laws he is implicated in.

A hint

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Drones may be a significant threat:

It allows truly scalable global coercion:  the automation of comply or die. 
 
Call up the target on his/her personal cell (it could even be automated as a robo-call to get real scalability — wouldn’t that suck, to get killed completely through bot based automation).
 
Ask the person on the other end to do something or to stop doing something.

…

All the money is on cyber intel (to generate targets based on “signatures”) and drones to kill them.  When domestic unrest occurs in the US due to economic decline, these systems will be ready for domestic application.

Drones also need to be built, communicate with people on the ground, refueled and rearmed. And if they are using your cell phone for tracking and terminal guidance that phone doesn’t need to remain in your possession. It might just be that a vehicle supplying the drone base could use an old cell phone for a few days.

Quote of the day—Scott Z.

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I too dream of that utopian future when we all get along, I really and truly do.

Until then, I’ll be stocking my gun cabinet.

Scott Z.
January 30, 2012
[From the guns discussion list at work.

The thing is there are some people that advocate unilateral disarmament. That too is a utopian fantasy. Unless there is some semblance of power equality very few relationships are stable. That is true at nearly every level from individual to international.

A good example of  this at the international level is Switzerland. The Swiss have not been in a state of war  internationally since 1815 yet they are well armed and have used those arms upon occasion to keep their neutrality and freedom.

At the individual level you only have to look how the smallest kid in grade school gets picked on unless he receives protection from the adults.

The Gun is Civilization and has been called a Peacemaker for a very long time with good reason.—Joe]

Standard Deviation = 1

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Never heard of it, though mnaybe y’all are getting it all the time and haven’t told me.  The first time I thought is was a fluke.  20 shots from a G20 pistol with SD of one foot per second.  During the string I thought something was wrong with the chrono, because shot after shot it displayed the same number.  Then there’s the saying; if you test your velocity once, you’ll know it.  If you test it a second time, you’ll never be sure again.  Though I never got any error readings, I discarded the data.

So I went out a second time on Saturday with the same load.  The CED chrono was unwilling to get any readings from the 30-30 loads I really wanted to test.  It’s like that sometimes, even with the IR LED screens.  But it took readings from the slower, bigger 10 mm bullets just fine.  I only measured ten shots this time, so a SD is of little meaning, but the extreme spread was 6.  It might correlate to a SD of 1.  I don’t know about anyone else, and the ammo manufacturers rarely say anything about it, but I’ve thought I was doing pretty well in the past if the SD was 12 or so.

This is a light load for the ten, getting barely under 1100 fps.  More like a 40 S&W.  It’s 9.6 gr. Blue Dot (checked against a check weight) with new Starline cases, 180 XTPs and a CCI 300, just going by the dimensions in the Hornady manual.  Nothing special.  This was my starting load, but it may end up a keeper.  We’ll see.  At the moment it’s my carry load, with 43 rounds on board.

I know – handloaded ammo for self defense, blah blah.  Don’t care.  I can practice a lot more with this stuff because I can afford a lot of it, and practicing with the same load you carry makes sense.  That’s what I’ll tell the lawyers– I can shoot this load more accurately and therefore more safely, etc., because it’s exactly what I use for practice.  I tried some of the hot Double Tap 200 grain FMJ stuff.  It’s affordable for practice, and while I’m sure it’s fine ammo for some guns, my Glock did something with it that it’s never done before.  The fired case would stick in the chamber (that’s what you call a pressure sign, right there) the extractor would strip off over the case head, and a fresh round would feed into the back of the fired case.  Yikes that’s some hot stuff, but no thanks.  Two stoppages or so per magazine is more than a deal killer.  If your 10 mm can cycle it properly, it would make a good deep penetrator though.

The crimp has to be a touch under the case diameter just below the crimp though, whereas I went with “about equal”.  A couple of these XTP handloads (2 of about 150) did fail to lock up all the way – something else that’s never happened with this gun.  I’m sure it’s the crimp, and maybe that I need a new slide spring as this one is the original from the early 1990s and has been cycled umpteen thousand times.  A gentle “forward assist” on the back of the slide was all it took.  Yes; more crimp.

Quote of the day—1justguy

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Wearing them in public is like a 10 year old walking around wearing his cowboy hat and six-shooter. It invites trouble as you are daring anyone to pick a fight with you which a lot of people do. If you want/need to carry a weapon/gun on you get a CWP and then you don’t have the need to show that yours are bigger than anyone else’s and you still have your “protection”.

1justguy
Comment to Starbucks’ “Pro-Gun” Policy Prompts Gun Victims’ Advocate Group to Launch Nationwide Boycott on Valentine’s Day 2012
[It’s another Markley’s Law Monday!

John Hardin unintentionally lead me to this guy.

Also worthy of note is that technically 1justguy’s claim of people picking a fight with people who are open carrying is factually unsupported. But my hypothesis is that he is not only incorrect but he has the wrong sign on the correlation coefficient.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Mark Glaze

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For our mayors, the tired debate about gun control is over and beside the point. Now that we know the answer, we can sort of put aside the tired debate at the extremes and focus on how you respect the Second Amendment and the rights of law-abiding owners and keep the guns out of hands of people who shouldn’t have it.

The sweet spot is letting law-abiding citizens buy the guns they want. While tightening the background check system to make sure the next Jared Loughner, the next Virginia Tech massacre doesn’t happen.

Mark Glaze
January 22, 2012
TN gun laws, or lack thereof, under attack
[As Glenn Reynolds said about the first sentence above, “What he means by that is, they lost.”

Yes, they lost but that doesn’t mean they aren’t still trying. Background checks are teetering on the edge of firearm and/or owner registration which is totally unacceptable. The ability with which a background check system could be turned into a registration system is scary easy. And since there is no evidence background check improve public safety I am of the opinion the system should be scrapped.

But what I find most interesting about this quote is that Glaze is willing to concede “letting law-abiding citizens buy the guns they want.”

Other anti-gun people and groups need to have that pounded into them in public debate. No “assault weapon” bans and stop the whining about “.50 caliber sniper rifles”.

Removing restrictions on suppressors are next and full-auto firearms are just over the horizon.—Joe]