Sign me up

Well, you don't have to bother, because I signed myself and #2 Son up for the June 9-10 Project Appleseed in Waco, GA.  I heard that all the Cool Kids would be there.  The 'Patch is going for his patch, so to speak.

I have new military sights for the 10/22 from Tech Sights, and a new web sling for the thing, too.  Need to pick up some more 10 round magazines, but that should be pretty easy.

#2 Son wants to try out for the JROTC rifle squad next year, and so this will be a good foundation for him.  Me, I'd like to shoot "expert" like Dad did in Basic - he was quite proud of that - but he had 20 year old eyes back then and mine are (ahem) a little older.  Still, if you don't have a goal, you'll never reach it.

Next step: join the Garand Collector's Association.  Then it's a trip to Anniston, AL in mid-June.  For a change, I'll be quite happy driving west on I-20.

Needless to say, I'm quite psyched about the whole thing.

Sole Survivor

A week or so back, there was a post over at Ace Of Spades about the new P-40 that was discovered in the North African desert, and how this had happened before with the B-24 "Lady Be Good".  That bomber - and the remains of its crew - were discovered by an oil exploration team in the 1950s.  A TV Movie, Sole Survivor was made in the late 1960s, staring (among others), William Shatner.

I remember watching it when it aired.  I was 12 at the time, and it fascinated me and creeped me out at the same time.  It was very Twilight Zone.  This is how they made military dramas back when only two decades had passed from when every family had someone in uniform.  Hollywood couldn't conceive anything like this today.

Well, someone has uploaded it to Youtube.  Recommended, more than I can say.



















Remember the crew of Lady Be Good, especially the one they couldn't find.

I believe that it's pronounced "an 'omicide" ...

But then, I don't speak the Queen's English.

Powerpoint® Pro Tip

Your bullets should say something different.  You're welcome.

Dads with shotguns

It's what made this country great.

The Mrs. watched Glee last night, which means that I watched Glee last night.  It's a very good thing indeed that I don't have a pretty 17 year old daughter singing Paradise By he Dashboard Light.

It would not have ended well.  Just sayin'.

Defensive Upgrade in progress

We are upgrading the Camp Borepatch main gate, which is coming along well (I'll post pictures on Friday, by which time the concertina wire and claymores* should be installed).  But the process reminded me that defensive works are only as good as the personnel manning them.  For example, a soldier who doesn't let a Sergeant Major scale his fence for a "surprise inspection," instead holding him at gunpoint because they're not on the Access List:

"Sergeant Major, First Sergeant, if you would like to return in the morning or return with authorization from the site commander, I would be more than happy to let you pass, but you're not on my list. If you're not on the list you can't come in. Plain and simple, I've got my orders and I ain't violating them, because I don't know you." As soon as my hand touched my pistol Dan radioed me, "Spoon what's the word? Who are these guys?" I tucked the clipboard under my left arm and fumbled with the mic, never taking my hand off the pistol.

"DeGarr, ECP, I have a situation here. I got a Sergeant Major and a First Sergeant, not on the list, say they want to come in. Over." Sergeant DeGarr was our squad leader and in the time honored military tradition I was attempting to shovel the responsibility of this fiasco on to him. Tallman and Shorty could hear my radio conversation and they glared at me while I waited for a response.

"ECP, DeGarr. No list, no access. Tell them to talk to the CO. Over."

"I already told them that, they aren...shit!" They had heard DeGarr's response and apparently didn't like it. The Sergeant Major had mounted the fence and was clearly attempting to climb over it. The gate was the one section that didn't have concertina at the top as it would have interfered with operation of the gate. I guess the Sergeant Major believed he could scale the fence and tell me in person how much he didn't like our policies.

In one swift, long practiced motion I dropped my clipboard, and pulled the loaded magazine from my left cargo pocket while pulling the pistol from its holster. I stripped the asinine tape from the magazine and slammed it up the well, chambering the first round before Tallman had reached the top of the fence. Shorty hit the dirt and my radio burst into sound. "ECP! DeGarr! Status report!"

"DeGarr, Overwatch. One of 'ems trying to climb the fence. You better get your ass down here Sergeant, I think Spoon's gonna shoot one of them!"

Oooh rah, soldier!  What's astonishing about this story is that a couple months later, some other Sergeant tried to run him down with a HMMWV, and got held at gunpoint for his trouble:

He either hadn't heard the story about Sergeant Major Fredricks, or didn't care. Either way, he was pushing the same buttons. "I'm a fucking Sergeant, now open that fucking gate Specialist!"

The clipboard was down and the first round was chambered before Sergeant Tannin could blink. I lined up the posts with his eyebrow and told him how it was as I walked toward the drivers door. "Turn off the fucking engine and get your ass out of the vehicle!" His eyes were wide and his lips were twitching like he wanted to talk but couldn't (why do they always do that?), but he turned off the engine and opened his door as I heard my radio squawk.

"DeGarr, Overwatch. I think Spoon's gonna shoot somebody again."

OOOH RAH, Soldier!

Note to visitors to Camp Borepatch: if your name is not on the Access List, please have patience as your authorization goes through channels.  Do not, repeat do not attempt to run down the guard with your POV.  Srlsy.

* Man, I wonder if the installers have even worked with these before.  They're not bi-directional.  Do I have to do everything?

Repeal Washington D.C. home rule

Congress should strip DC of all governing power and take direct control.  This is all you need to see to come to that conclusion:

After being injured on his second tour of duty in Afghanistan, Lt. Augustine Kim spent the night in a D.C. jail for possessing unregistered guns. 

Mr. Kim was transporting his firearms from his parents’ house in New Jersey to South Carolina when he stopped at Walter Reed in Washington for a medical appointment in the summer of 2010.

After being pulled over, handcuffed, arrested, thrown in jail overnight, his guns were confiscated by the city.

I have a better idea: fire the Washington D.C. police force and replace them all. Think this is excessive?  Well, here's your Washington D.C. police in action:

The veteran spent a “few hours in the drunk tank,” then was moved to the central jail. It was cold on the steel slab, so he asked the police guard for a blanket. “He was surly with me and sarcastic. He said, ‘Oh you want blankets? Well they’re back ordered,’” Mr. Kim recalled. “I remember thinking, we treated detainees in Afghanistan better than this.

Washington D.C. is purely a creature of the Federal government: literally, it would not exist but as the Republic's capital.  Arresting a veteran who was engaged in inter state travel because he had been injured fighting a foreign war and had stopped at the military hospital for medical care?  This is so clearly disproportional that the D.C. Government should be stripped of its power.  Dissolved.

Quite frankly, Democrats, this is why we question your patriotism.

Environmentalism as a signalling device

It can't be realistic policy - that requires a suspension of disbelief of epic proportions - and so the new World Wildlife Fund report can only be posturing among environmentalists.  Certainly no western government can even begin to implement its proposals:

Analysis Extremist green campaigning group WWF - endorsed by no less a body than the European Space Agency - has stated that economic growth should be abandoned, that citizens of the world's wealthy nations should prepare for poverty and that all the human race's energy should be produced as renewable electricity within 38 years from now.

...

But then we get onto the big stuff. First up, there must be an "immediate focus" on "drastically shrinking the ecological footprint of high income populations".

That means you, Reg reader: you are to accept a massively lower standard of living, in order to reduce your "footprint" to match your nation's "biocapacity". Then you'll have to take another cut, because your nation - being rich - has more "biocapacity" than a poor country does (despite their claim that planetary resources are finite, WWF acknowledges that new "biocapacity" can be created in the form of cropland, forests etc), but this should be shared with the poorer lands under "equitable resource governance".

That means less heating when it's cold - no cooling at all, probably, when it's hot. It means sharply limited hot water: so dirtier clothes, dirtier bedding and a dirtier you - which will be nice as you will also have to live in a smaller home and travel almost exclusively on crowded buses or trains along with similar smelly fellow eco-citizens. Food will be scarcer and realistically much less nutritious (milk for kids will be a luxury, let alone meat, fruit, coffee, that sort of stuff. Get ready to eat a lot of turnips, if you're a Brit.)

Want proof that these policy proposals cannot be implemented?  OK, here you go:

Yet incoming socialist president François Hollande claimed after his victory over Nicolas Sarkozy that he would bring an end to this mythical austerity: “We will bring back Europe on a track for jobs, growth and the future… We’re no longer doomed to austerity.”

This is just a willful, purposeful distortion. What the heck is he talking about? Certainly not France.

If not France, then where?

In Italy and Spain, which have been dependent on tens of billions of cash infusions from the European Central Bank (ECB) to refinance their debts, cuts are hardly anywhere to be found either. In Spain, spending was cut by just €11 billion in 2011, a mere 2.3 percent reduction. In Italy, spending actually increased by €4.3 billion.
Both countries borrowed an additional €117 billion last year alone, raising their combined debts to €1.939 trillion. So, no austerity there. Just debt slaves.

It's dumbfounding to watch the environmental movement in action, as they become increasingly divorced from reality.  It's like nobles in the ancien régime, knowing that something was different but never talking to anyone who might know just why.  Bloody commoners - glad nobody invites them to our parties.  And so, the collapse.

The media echo chamber seems very damaging to the entire environmental movement here, as does the (so far very successful) fundraising strategy of dialing the fear up to eleventy.  While that brings in perhaps a Billion dollars a year to the WWF machine, it's divorced from reality.

The whole spectacle is rather sad, really.  A once noble cause has become the crazy guy in the intersection, shouting about the end of the world.

I haz a tired

Blog later.

Romney 296, Obama 242

I'm getting specific in my prediction.  The following can be taken as a best case projection for the Democrats.

States voting for Romney (296 Electoral Votes): Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine (split: 1 EV), Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia, Wyoming

States voting for Obama (242 Electoral Votes): California, Connecticut, Delaware, Dist. of Columbia, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Maine (split: 3 EV), Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington, Wisconsin

The rationale is that Obama is already visibly weakening, as the economy weakens.  Signs of weakness are everywhere - softness in support from women, that sort of thing.    His campaign is about class warfare, distractions ("War on Women", "Ann Romney never worked a day in her life", gay marriage, etc).  Quite frankly, that dog won't hunt.  It's the economy, stupid.


My calculus is to look at the current state-by-state projections, and weaken Obama one level in each state: "Solid Obama" becomes "Strong Obama", "Strong Obama" becomes "Weak Obama", "Weak Obama" becomes "Weak Romney".  Nothing will be shifting from the Romney column to the Obama column between now and November.

So there's the line up.  It could be worse: the states I have listed as "Weak Obama" have 85 Electoral votes: Iowa, Michigan, New Jersey, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Washington, Wisconsin

Quite frankly, some of those very well might break for Romney if the current weak economy and ineffectual thrashing by the Obama campaign continues.  The Romney camp has been impressively disciplined, and so it's far more likely that a damaging gaffe will come from the Democrats this season.  If all of those 85 votes break for Romney, you have to go back to Reagan's victory in 1984 to find a worse drubbing.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but there is no upside for Obama at this point, only minimizing the loss.  A 297 to 241 loss might preserve his chances to run again; a 382 to 156 loss will leave him washed up.  But there really isn't any path to victory for him - after all, Mussolini could beat him this year.

So you have a specific prediction here, with a range of result.  Note that I think that this is very likely a bad thing for the Republic, but facts are facts, and this is how I see them. Your mileage may vary, void where prohibited, do not remove tag under penalty of law.

What happened to the climate in 1977?

This is very strange.  The temperature databases say that we've warmed around half a degree (Celsius) in the last 50 years.  But 46 out of 47 of those years show no statistically significant warming.  The typical chart you see has an upward sloping line - lower left in the 1960s to upper right today.  It seems that this doesn't really match the data.  Instead, the temperature is a step function, with two more or less flat lines joined by a big jump in 1977:

Both temperature databases show this same artifact, which may not be entirely surprising since both databases rely on the same station data.

So what happened in 1977?  I must confess to being a little mystified here.  However, this would certainly seem to complicate the link between Carbon Dioxide and temperature - CO2 has been increasing pretty steadily over this same time, so the graphs look very different.  In other words, the correlation seems poor.  Greenhouse theory is all well and good, but theory is empty if the data doesn't back it.

So what does all this mean?  Beats me.  All I can say is that if the Science were actually settled, we wouldn't keep running into mysteries like this.

Cufflinks, eh?

I had to use cufflinks yesterday.  By my self.

Being used to button cuffs, let me say that again:  by my self.

This clearly cannot be done by one man, alone.  Clearly, I need my own Gentleman's Gentleman:



If you haven't watched the Hugh Laurie (OBE) and Stephen Frye Jeeves and Wooster, then get you hence with all speed.  You can thank me later.

What does expensive SWPL Light Rail attract to the metropolitan area?

Thieves:

Thieves stole 70,000 pounds of copper cable from Sound Transit's Link light rail line between Tukwila and Sea-Tac Airport, the agency reported Friday.

Thieves ripped the wire from inside an elevated guideway that supports the tracks, probably over the last several months. From end-to-end, about four miles of cable was stolen, Sound Transit spokesman Bruce Gray said.

"This isn't something that would have been done overnight," Gray said. "Whoever did this knew what they were going after and had some sophisticated knowledge of how to get in."

So the hideously expensive SWPL prestige rail project not only fails to reduce congestion, or get people out of their cars, or reduce carbon emissions, or save energy transporting people to work.  It also attracts thieves that steal part of the infrastructure making it unsafe.

Oh yeah, it's also so expensive that bus service to poor neighborhoods has to be cut back.  Other than being terrible for the environment, poor people, and working families, it's awesome.  After all, the Right Sort Of People® get to boast about their new Light Rail system at all the Right Parties™

Man, I sure am glad that all the SWPL Lefties are ever so clever and everything.  Otherwise people might think that Light Rail was a freaking disaster or something.

Atlanta Gunblog Meet and Greet

Blog friend and fellow gun blogger Sean Sorrentino will be in Atlanta a week from today - Monday, May 21.  I plan on meeting up with him in the Perimeter Mall area around 7:00-ish.

I know that traffic is a mess, but anyone who is able to join is welcome.  Leave a comment or shoot me an email - we should be somewhat flexible in location.

Bwana! Talking drums say ...

... Network Unreachable, reason code 0xFE, Xylophone player is on coffee break:

Vint Cerf once wore a shirt that read "IP on Everything," a wry comment on the versatility of the Internet Protocol he helped invent, a protocol that underlies all Internet communication. Now a University of California Berkeley researcher has put Cerf's maxim to the test, running an IP network over a set of xylophones, played by human participants.

...

As an LED lights up, the human participant strikes the corresponding key on the xylophone. Piezo sensors are attached to each xylophone, so that they are able to sense when a note is played on the other xylophone. The Arduino for the receiving computer senses the note and then converts it back into hexadecimal code. And when the second computer sends a return packet, the order of operations is reversed.

Characters are issued one every second, giving the network a throughput of one baud. Geiger used a simple pre-broadband legacy protocol called Slip to serialize the data with minimal overhead. Typically, it takes about 15 minutes to transmit a single packet at this rate -- if the volunteer is patient enough to complete a whole packet, and doesn't hit any wrong notes in the process.

There's a long history of joke specifications released on April Fool's Day (my favorite was IP over carrier pigeon), but it looks like someone went to the trouble of actually implementing one.  This is entirely useless, but made me smile anyway. 

Pranking the Media

My brother pwned the New York Times, Time Magazine, and the San Francisco Examiner.  Srlsy:

It's not the Cacophony's fault that the public sometimes misses the joke.
Such was the case in 1991 when the group organized a protest of the
movie "Fantasia."

One set of protesters, calling itself Sensitive Parents Against Scary
Movies - or SPASM - decried the film for being frightening to small
children.  "Calorically challenged" people blasted the use of dancing
hippos.  And the Bay Area Drought Relief Assistance Program - BAD RAP -
criticized Mickey Mouse for wasting water during his sorcerer's
apprentice scene.

Time magazine took it seriously.  It cited the protest in an essay about
America becoming a nation of whiners and complainers.  Examiner columnist
Rob Morse also got taken in, calling the protesters a "fringe pressure group."

They came out at a news conference on April Fool's day, saying that they'd all sat around and tried to come up with something so extreme that the media would have rejected it.  SPASM?  Dancing Hippos?  BAD RAP?  My brother went by the nom de guerre of "Duane Neutron".

And the media ate it up.  What will they do next in San Francisco? was a story too good to check.  I have video footage of Younger Brother on Entertainment Tonight saying how they simply couldn't believe that they could sucker the New York Times.  And that was in 1991.  Fast forward to today, and you still find the media are easy to sucker:

A story too good to check, at least for Andy Sullivan.  You know, there was a really good blogger who used to go by that handle, too.  Whatever happened to him?

The 100 worst cars of all time

Quite a list.

Some of these are expected, like the Edsel or the Yugo.  Some are perhaps more marketing FAIL than automotive fail (the Porche 914 wasn't a terrible car, it was a terrible Porche).  It also has surprises (to me):

70. 1953 Chevrolet Corvette: A fiberglass body atop an archaic chassis powered by a lame 155-hp six. And the transmission was a two-speed automatic. The first Corvette was crap.

Bleeding automotive turkeys, offered for your consideration.  Happy Monday.

Heh

I would love an episode where they have off-road 4x4s with machine guns.

Happy Mother's Day

To all Moms out there, I hope the day was taken in the spirit offered, if not the literal terms ...

Thinking about not thinking

Specifically, I'm thinking about the Left, and how all their cleverness seems so entirely, well, dumb.

Consider the Obama campaign and their "Julia" narrative, of how a woman doesn't need to marry because the State will be there for her every day of her life (not saying this is true, of course, just that they're saying it).

And so consider: the Left's narrative is saying that if women support the Leftist State, that the State will provide for them.  Essentially, they're going back to the Bad Old days of the Patriarchy and saying that women must submit to their husbands.  And yes it is a Patriarchy because the Obama Administration in particular is a boy's club and yes it is submit because this Administration is quite clear about who they think are enemies.

The irony of the whole situation is more delicious than my morning cup of coffee (which, I must hasten to add, is particularly delicious).  The fact that all these super smart Lefties are positively innocent of any grasp of the irony is even more deliciousness on top.