Happy birthday Lee-Enfield rifle

On this day in 1907 the Lee-Enfield rifle was accepted into service in the army of His Majesty King Edward VII.  It's still in use today in Commonwealth nations India and Bangladesh, making this the longest serving military rifle in world history.

I can personally attest that it is a sweet shooter and entirely bad ass.  As I wrote in my Range Report:

It was the rifle of Empire, from the days when the sun literally never set on the British Empire.  The Empire's day has passed, and this rifle has passed with it, but for those who appreciate the poetry of rifles (as opposed to the stark utilitarian prose of modern designs), this rifle brings it in imperial gallons.

But since it has a ten round magazine (removable, although that's more in theory than in practice, being loaded via stripper clips) and a bayonet lug, Diane Feinstein wants to ban it.  Because 100 year old rifles totally are used to shoot up schools, or something.  And while it doesn't do so well "spraying bullets from the hip", the action is smooth as silk and very fast:



Oh, and the sights are designed to let you shoot accurately at 1300 yards (!) - if you can.  But why, we hear Senator Feinstein ask, do you need a rifle that will shoot accurately to 1300 yards?  The answer: Senator, why do you want to win re-election?

UPDATE 26 January 2013 22:53: Jon W. emails to point out that Feinstein's bill explicitly excludes bolt action rifles from the ban. 

Why I won't ever use Groupon

Groupon (an online coupon service) has suspended all firearms related activities.  They are a private business (well, publicly traded; work with me here) and so are fully within their rights to do so.  Fill Yer Hands did the leg work I'm too lazy to do and emailed them a Whiskey Tango Foxtrot missive. Surprisingly, they replied:

Please note that we have never sold guns, and this hiatus only applies to firearm-related deals including shooting ranges, clay pigeon shooting, and concealed weapons training classes. We have not made a final determination regarding this category — we are simply taking a break and may reevaluate in the future.

Go ahead and take a hiatus - this tells me everything I need to know, and I won't do business with them, even if they change their minds.  This is a Cold Civil War and they have chosen sides.  I can respect that, although I have chosen the other side.

But respect doesn't mean that I have to ever deal with them.  Let them shrink their market to only what will be supported by the gun control side.

The Cold Civil War means that you don't sleep with the enemy.  Groupon has chosen to make themselves my enemy, at least for my "wallet share".  Hope you enjoy the smaller Total Addressable Market, Groupon!

Be sure to click through to Fill Yer Hands' post, and to spread this to everyone who hasn't heard.  It's now Our Side and Their Side, and we need to support ours and shun theirs.

Good on ya, mates

Happy Australia Day to all our mates down under.  Hoist a coldie (if your esky is full).  I hope it's really going off for you.  And to the Diggers fighting by our side, I'm proud to say we've got your back.  And vice versa.



That cobber can sing, fair dinkum.  I think that Slim Dusty's ghost can be heard as you pass by the billabong.

Aaron Lewis - Country Boy

If you need an anthem for the Cold Civil War, how do you choose it?  There's something to be said for letting your enemy choose it for you.  The Village Voice teed off on Aaron Lewis, in a screed worthy of the Junior High school paper:

Politics aside, what's most impressive about "Country Boy" is the way that this "country" song is little more than a Staind track that's angry at the government instead of a girl/mom/cruel world. It plods! It's lyrically awkward! Lewis' vocal range is about five notes wide! Do a side-by-side contrast of the new track with Staind chestnuts like "It's Been Awhile"-- the only differences here come from the verse supplied by the beautifully cracked voice of George Jones and the contributions of Charlie Daniels, who schmaltzes up "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" on his fiddle and provides the following message-board-worthy rant over his string-playing:

"I love my country. I love my guns. I love my family. I love the way it is now, and anybody that tries to change it has to come through me. That should be all of our attitudes. Cause this is America, and a country boy is good enough for me, son."

Daniels' mic stays on after that; the producer allows him to ramble a little bit more, perhaps for the purposes of making the song feel more "real". At the very least, indulging him spares us from Lewis yowling New Hampshire's state motto over and over.

"Country Boy" is a relatively recent release, so whether or not it'll catch fire among radio programmers is up in the air.

The selection is made, by the class of urban intellectuals who are our adversary.  This is our anthem because it gives the Right Sort® the vapors, in a belly laugh inducing way.  The poverty of imagination on display here is impressive.  The idea that there are people - intellectuals, even - who think as well (or better) as the Intellectual Class simply never occurs to the writer.  Apologies to the people who wrote my Junior High School paper - they did a lot better job than this.  And Village Voice?  This video has had 16 Million views:



Country Boy (Songwriter: Aaron Lewis)

Well I grew up down an old dirt road in a town you wouldn't know
My pops picked the place up for 1500 bucks back in 1964

My grandfather was a drinker back in the day he put em down
But a war is known to change a man and the whiskey is known to change a man

That's not me
I rarely drink from a bottle but I smoke a little weed
I still live in the sticks where you wouldn't go
In a town of 1200 off an old dirt road
And a country boy is all I'll ever be

Now it's been 12 years since I sold my soul to the devil in L.A.
He said sign your name here on the dotted line and your songs they all will play

He set up shop on sunset, he put me up at the marquee
He said you wanna sell a million records boy you better listen to me

He said change your style, whiten your smile, you could lose a couple of pounds
And if you want to live this life, you better lose that wife, do you need your friends around?

I said, no that's not me
Cause the biggest things in life are your friends and family
And I like my jeans and my old t-shirts
And a couple extra pounds never really hurt
Cause a country boy is all I'll ever be

Cause Hank taught me just how to stay alive
You'll never catch me out the house without my 9 or 45

I got a big orange tractor and a diesel truck
And my idea of heaven is chasing whitetail bucks
And as a country boy you know I can survive

Now two flags fly above my land that really sum up how I feel
One is the colors that fly high and proud
The red, the white and blue
The other ones got a rattlesnake with a simple statement made
"Don't tread on me" is what it says and I'll take that to my grave
Because this is me
I'm proud to be an American and strong in my beliefs

And I've said it before but I'll say it again
Cause I've never needed government to hold my hand
And I've said it before but I'll say it again
Cause my family has always fought and died to save this land
And a country boy is all I'll ever be

The Cold Civil War is fair joined now.  For a long while half the Republic has focused on the common threads that bind us while the other half has busily been snipping them in twain.  Well, all right then.  No more compromise, no more common ground, no more accommodation with people who have contempt for us.  No more "meet in the middle" for people unwilling to actually meet in the middle. 

I for one return their contempt with interest.  I reject their assertion that they are smarter or better than I, simply because they have swallowed whole an unexamined dogma of centralized Statist (I should say Fascist) control by an unelected and unaccountable so-called "elite".  At least their position is now in the open, with no more trying to shade the truth with a soft marketing spin.  Their intent is well announced.  Fine.  So is mine.

The lines are drawn.  The good news is that this brings clarity, that we each of us must choose one side or the other.  Me, I like the side that makes The Village Voice want to call this one of the 20 worst songs of the year.  It's the kicked dog that yelps.

Oops. Wrong car

Hat tip: Andrew via email.

Teletubby zombies?

Damn.

I have to confess that I had something to do with La La's demise.  In my own defense, we did way more than double-tap.  But I thought we were free and clear, once we dealt with the Teletubby Spec Ops team.

Heard in the Borepatchmobile

I'm taking #2 Son to school, and out of the blue he blurts out, "Man, you'd have to be an idiot to date Taylor Swift."  Not sure where that came from, but Farce The Music found the tree she carved her love on:

Still don't know where that popped into #2 Son's mind from, but that's about right.

Quote of the Day, Cold Civil War edition

Clarity is a virtue.  The good thing about the Democrat's latest run at guns is that it's all out in the open now, not hidden behind carefully worded platitudes like "common sense gun control".  Now that it's out for everyone to see, people are seeing it:

The issue there was not guns but the use of tax money to pay for teachers of religion. In the paragraph quoted above, [James] Madison went on to say that citizens should object to the requirement of paying even "three pence" to support a religion because a government that extracts even that trifle may go on to coerce religious conformity. The small things are not small. The small things are where the people still have the capacity to fight authoritarian government.

Democrats know this. They are part of this American culture of deeply engrained belief in constitutional rights. What is different to the Democrats is that they don't believe that the right to keep and bear arms is a constitutional right. They think the Supreme Court misinterpreted the Second Amendment when it found a constitutional right. District of Columbia v. Heller was a 5 to 4 decision, and the 5 are the 5 Justices, still on the Court, whom the Democratic Senators would love to have a chance to replace.

The NYT portrays the folks back home in West Virginia as misinformed, troublesome, and hysterical. That’s what we’re dealing with.

We've known this for a long time, but this is from politically middle-of-the-road law professor Ann Althouse.  Clarity is a virtue, the game afoot.  Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of the Cold Civil War.

Bill Clinton, the funniest President ever

Still giving back to the Republic, I see.

Sinnerman

From the incomparable Nina Simone.

The sound of silence

I feel a little bad about closing down anonymous comments, but it's quite a change seeing this every day.  In the week or so since I shut that door, I think I've had one real comment that got mistakenly tagged as spam and no spam comments at all.

What's wrong with this light bulb?

It's inexpensive, provides great light quality, and has been used for a century.  It's also soon to be illegal. Congress, that collection of Solons, has decided in its wisdom that the Republic is at risk not from out of control government debt, but from the energy use of incandescent light bulbs.

Fear not, citizen.  Congress is in session.

And so it's been mandated that you use this.  It's almost ten times as expensive as the incandescent bulb.  It was claimed to last for years and years, but people have discovered that they don't last much longer than the old style bulbs.  They take a lot less electricity, true, but the quality of the light they put out is horrible.

But that isn't the biggest problem with the bulbs.  This is:

Oman Observer reported that more than 140 countries have agreed on the first global treaty to cut mercury pollution through a blacklist of household items and controls on power plants and small scale mines

United Nations said that the legally binding agreement aims to phase out many products that use the toxic liquid metal such as batteries, thermometers and some fluorescent lamps, through banning global import and exports by 2020.

So Congress passes a law that makes us buy replacement bulbs that don't work as well and are ten times and expensive, then then the President gets all International and goes and bans them.  Observe your Philosopher Kings in action.  Why people still give these people credit for being smart when they act in such an unambiguously dumb manner is quite a mystery to me.

IDIOT, n. A member of a large and powerful tribe whose influence in human affairs has always been dominant and controlling. The Idiot's activity is not confined to any special field of thought or action, but "pervades and regulates the whole." He has the last word in everything; his decision is unappealable. He sets the fashions and opinion of taste, dictates the limitations of speech and circumscribes conduct with a dead-line.

- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

Integrity

Via Sebastian and Graybeard, we find a company that puts its money where its mouth is.  I have to confess that I'd never much paid attention to Eastern Sports and Outdoor Show, even with their 200,000+ attendance.  Never made much of an impact in my life.  But Guntag Signature Seasonings was always there because it was a major part of their business life.  No more:

GUTNTAG, LLC WITHDRAWS FROM EASTERN SPORTS SHOW DUE TO BAN OF ASSAULT AND TACTICAL WEAPONS

GUTNTAG, LLC, announces its official withdraw from the 2013 Eastern Sports and Outdoor Show (ESOS).  Recently, Reed Exhibitions, veteran organizer of the ESOS, announced an assault and tactical weapons ban to be implemented at the largest show of its kind in the United States.

We have made the costly decision to withdraw because it is the right thing to do.  We are a young company that relies on this one venue to create our operating capital for the year; however we cannot support uninformed businesses caving to political pressures caused by broadly politicized events.   We proudly support the 2^nd Amendment in the capacity for which it was intended; the right of citizens to keep and bear arms.  Our freedom to do so was not for hunting or competition shooting, but protection for law abiding citizens.

In the words of Thomas Jefferson, “No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms.  The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.”  Friends, if we continue to give in inch-by-inch, we will find ourselves with no protection and a tyrannical government.

 Well said.  These folks are putting their business' existence on the line because they believe what they believe.  What I believe.  That's an integrity that I respect.

I respect it enough to order some of their seasonings.  I like doing business with people I like.  If you do, too, they have a 2nd Amendment Special.  Heh.

The down side: shipping is actually more than their product.  The up side: they make money without supporting those Quislings at the ESOS.  That's worth paying cash money for.  I'll post a review once their rub gets delivered.

Holy cow, I'm tired

This whole month it's been non-stop.  I'm exhausted.



Sure miss Madeline Kahn, too.

Are the wheels coming off of the Global Warming bus?

Despite the prominence of Global Warming in Obama's inauguration address, the wheels look to be coming off.  Germany's Der Spiegal has an 8 part series about the abuses of the Climate Science Establishment aimed at the general reader.  The series is simply devastating to the consensus view of ZOMG Thermageddon!!!  It exposes the shoddy work of the IPCC with examples like this:

The all-clear signal on the hurricane front is another setback for the IPCC. In keeping with lead author Kevin Trenberth's predictions, the IPCC report warned that there would be more hurricanes in a greenhouse climate. One of the graphs in the IPCC report is particularly mysterious. Without specifying a source, the graph suggestively illustrates how damage caused by extreme weather increases with rising average temperatures.

When hurricane expert Roger Pielke, Jr. of the University of Colorado at Boulder saw the graph, he was appalled. "I would like to discover this sort of relationship myself," he says, "but it simply isn't supported by the facts at the moment."

Pielke tried to find out where the graph had come from. He traced it to the chief scientist at a London firm that performs risk calculations for major insurance companies. The insurance scientist claims that the graph was never meant for publication. How the phantom graph found its way into the IPCC report is still a mystery.

It's all here: the hockey stick shenanigans, the poor quality of the temperature data bases, the ignoring of Urban Heat Island effects (cities are warmer than countryside, and growing cities absorb what used to be rural weather stations), the uncertainties that are brushed under the carpet, the over-reliance on computer simulations rather than gathering actual data, the politicization of science.  The opening lays out the indictment:

Plagued by reports of sloppy work, falsifications and exaggerations, climate research is facing a crisis of confidence. How reliable are the predictions about global warming and its consequences? And would it really be the end of the world if temperatures rose by more than the much-quoted limit of two degrees Celsius?

This is astonishingly fair for a mass media publication.  Long time readers here will recognize much of this but the fact that it's published in Germany's equivalent of Time Magazine is nothing short of astonishing.  Anthony Watts speculates that the political climate in German has changed, with Nuclear power generation being replaced en mass by Coal, leading to a political benefit for climate skepticism.  I'm not sure if this is the reason or not, but if even the eco-friendly Germans are in full skeptic mode, this is bad juju for the carbon catastrophists.

Watts also points out that the reliance on "renewable" electricity and the required subsidies to make it viable have resulted in the average German's electricity bills rising over 60% since 2000.  That's also very bad news for Obama's climate agenda.  Donna Laframboise puts this in terms that I've used here, objecting to stupid, useless environmental regulation:

The greens have been very clear. Climate change is due to too much CO2. Therefore energy use, which produces CO2, must be slashed. Therefore prices should rise sharply to discourage people from using energy.

No other serious analysis has been advanced by the big green machine. That’s the basic climate change argument. The problem is that this amounts to a war against the poor.

A "War on the Poor" is worse than stupid and useless regulation, when you think about it.  Here's the sound bite for the Stupid Party to use when Obama announces the details of his climate policy.

M.I.T.'s we site pwned because of Aaron Schwartz

Again:

This morning MIT's website was hacked and defaced, with its nameservers changed. The site credited hacker FBI informant Sabu (LulzSec); the site autoplayed The Star Spangled Banner and stated "R.I.P Aaron Swartz."

This was the second time in a week that they got pwned which brings to mind Oscar Wilde's great line from The Importance Of Being Earnest: To have lost one parent is a misfortune, to have lost two is carelessness.

Boy, I hope that MIT sure thinks that this was all worth it.  After all, third time's a charm!

I'm not against progress

I'm just against stupid and useless "collective" [rolls eyes] governmental action.  We see this in spades with gun control, with "assault weapons bans" that don't actually ban anything, and proposals to limit magazine size - as if you can't change a magazine in 2 seconds.  Stupid and useless.

And proposed by people who want to make themselves feel better by proposing them.  You might be able to stomach it if it were only about guns, but the words "there ought to be a law" come forth from that same upwelling of stupid and useless.  They don't ever think through the consequences of their proposals.

Why don't you kill him?  I have a better idea: I intend to place him in an overly-complex and easily escapable situation and assume that it all goes to plan.



Let's pass a law that mandates high benefit costs for employees who work more than 30 hours a week, and just assume that nobody will reduce employee hours to under 30.  Let's pass a law outlawing certain cosmetic gun features and just assume that nobody will change their designs and sell as many guns as before the law passed.  Let's entirely outlaw some things that people seem to really, really want and just assume that this time it will come out differently than the War On (some) Drugs.  Or Prohibition.

This has actually become my go-to way of dealing with progressives:

I don't oppose gun control, I just oppose stupid and useless laws about guns.

I don't oppose health care, I just oppose stupid and useless laws about health care.

I don't oppose environmental regulation, I just oppose stupid and useless regulations that don't help the environment while they impoverish working class Americans.

And then when they say that their proposals aren't stupid and useless, I open my eyes wide and say Tell me more.

No really - dazzle me.

My experience is that there are two outcomes, either of which is satisfactory.  One is that the person spouting blather will realize it, and their minds will be open to a real discussion on the merits.  For example, you'll be able to talk about guns, gun violence, and self-protection without having to listen to dick jokes.

The second outcome is that the person stops talking to you, which means that you don't have to listen to "smart" ideas about the government doing stupid and useless things.  You're a winner either way.

The trick is to straight up challenge the other person to justify why his proposals are not stupid and useless and then shut the heck up.  If you're as nasty as I am (and don't care about being invited back to the "right" parties) when they finally sputter to a halt - after your increasingly incredulous (but silent) facial expressions - you can turn to a listener, give a knowing wink, and say He really doesn't know, does he?

But you'd never say anything like that because you're not as nasty as I am.  And a good thing, too.

What's in your burger?

Well if you're in the UK, it might be almost one third horse.  That's the bad news.

The good news is that there's no "Mad Horse Disease".

Actually ...

I could so be an Olympian at curling.

Srlsy, hoser.

Java: a sucking chest wound of security fail

Even though there's a new patch out, the consensus in the security community is that the patch isn't very good.  Since exploits are presumed to be coming Real Soon Now, the advice is that you should turn it off in your browser.

How to disable Java in Firefox

How to disable Java in Chrome

I've done both of these, and you should too.  Unfortunately, disabling Java in Internet Explorer is really convoluted and error prone.  I've chosen to leave it enabled, but I only use IE to connect to internet company web sites or equipment that uses Java for the interface.  Since neither of these serve up ads (a delivery channel much beloved by the Bad Guys), I believe that the risk is low.