The weather gods frown upon me.

It was a balmy fifty-something degrees just the other day, but in celebration of the bowling pin match today, Gaia has sent another cold front. Luckily it stayed cloudy last night, so it's only about 31 out there, but it's not expected to get any warmer today...

But, yay! Bowling pins! And then maybe going to a gun store! Yay guns!

Selling your own kids is one thing...

...but selling somebody else's is just gauche.

Greenwell proposed selling two of the couple's children to the Romeros for $2,000, saying that her job as a truck driver made it hard to take care of the children, said Capt. Keith Dupre of the Evangeline Parrish Sheriff's Office in Louisiana.

The parties allegedly negotiated a trade involving the two kids, the bird and $175.

Y'know, you'd think that a bit of foresight would show that this sort of thing isn't legal and is kinda tough to cover up. It's difficult to make a cockatoo look like a couple of rug rats, even if you squint real hard after drinking half a case of Coors Light; someone in the trailer park is bound to notice.

(Oh, and who got the $175? The one with the kids or the one with the bird? 'Cause that's a pretty good deal on a couple of toddlers, but even with the boot, the bird was a ripoff.)

Quote of the Day:

You see, everything that the media lied to you and told you Sarah Palin was, Jindal actually is. -SayUncle.

Why does the GOP insist on offering me The Handmaiden's Tale as its cheery alternative to the Democrat's promise of 1984?



(UPDATE: Thank you to staghounds for correcting my titling gaffe in comments.)

WTF, over?

Okay, this guy is like the tenth Limey stockbroker to hit my page by Googling "light rifles" this morning. Is there something going on over there we need to know about? The Great London Stock Exchange Revolt of 2009?

That Guy.

Jovian Thunderbolt has a post up discussing the quandary of what to do about That Guy.

Until we come up with a solution, please don't be That Guy.

Bigoted, narrow-minded, reactionaries...

Joe Huffman talks about them.

(Of course, they'd never think of themselves in those terms. Why, they probably think they're all broad-minded and progressive...)

Would this be inappropriate laughter?

I laughed out loud when I got to this part:

She told CNN she does not understand how prosecutors can try her granddaughter as an adult.
"I want (people) to know that my little granddaughter, she is a loving person."

Well, yes, ma'am. That's what they're charging her with, actually.

Here it comes...

The Obama administration will seek to reinstate the assault weapons ban that expired in 2004 during the Bush administration, Attorney General Eric Holder said today.

I think the reaction to this is going to depend largely on how they try to go about it. Nobody took to the streets in '89 or '94, after all. But the '94 ban was carefully crafted to keep people from taking to the streets, and it still cost half of Congress their jobs.

Anything that tries to involve licensing or registration, however, will be lucky to just meet with massive noncompliance. After all, California's had the frog on "simmer" for over twenty years, and if they have even a 30% compliance rate, I'll eat my hat. Worse yet, especially with the overall national mood the way it is, it wouldn't surprise me if some folks crack and just start shootin'. It's not like they haven't been warning anybody...

Better than nothing...

I was hoping they'd make a meat windchime out of them, but I'll take what I can get:

ATLANTA, Georgia (CNN) -- Three former Atlanta police officers were sentenced Tuesday to prison terms ranging from five to 10 years for covering up a botched drug raid in which a 92-year-old woman was killed.

That was not the Atlanta Police Department's most shining hour.

Getting cynical in my old age...

An actual question asked by a new poster at The Firing Line:

Hey guys im not a gun expert like most of u guys.but i would like to know which is the best combat handgun in the world? The parameters are a)it can be a pistol or revolver b)it should be semi auto or auto c)can include military or civilian caliber d)it should function with JHP and FMJ rounds e)cost and availability is not a consideration f) it is meant for a holster so need not be concealable g)the gun should be reliable(frm personal experience only, that is pls dont tell that the gun was around for 96 yrs so reliable). H) expected for 10 to 25 yard range i)considering the user is avg size 5ft 10 inches medium built with availability to practice around 7 hrs a week. Thanksx in advance

I know I should be there to mentor and nurture and provide helpful advice to the new kids. But it gets hard sometimes...

Any service caliber with JHP's designed for the law enforcement market is going to offer substantially identical performance: ~12" of penetration and >.6" recovered diameter, with good weight retention even after defeating barriers.

Pick the caliber name you think sounds the coolest, and then get it chambered in the gun that will most impress your friends. You can tell a pistol is good if a lot of people have it mentioned in their signature lines on this board, or have tattoos of the manufacturer's logo. Also, do a thread search here to see which ones have been mentioned most often in threads entitled "_______ RULEZ!"

You're welcome.

Sigh.

I think part of the problem is that everybody has a modem now. It used to be that if you asked a rifle question at TFL, it would probably get answered by Gale McMillan. Talk about Cor-Bon ammo, and tERRY mURBACH would be there posting from Cor-Bon's shipping department computer with his damned caps lock key stuck on.

Now the gun boards are overrun with Counterstrike Kiddies and MSN TV customers. You'll still see posts from serious folks, the occasional word from a Pat Rogers or Mas Ayoob, but it just seems to get buried in the dross.

Sigh.

I'm too young to be pining for "The Good Ol' Days"...

Showtime in ten...

Tune in to Gun Nuts: The Next Generation. The topic for tonight is "What to do about liberal gun owners?"


(Personally, I've heard they taste just like chicken...)

Brown Trouser Alert, Part Deux...

In which intrepid Lefty bloggers discover the existence of FreeRepublic and promptly fill their skivvies, going into a lather of pestering Secret Service switchboard operators and posting frantic comments back and forth about the nature of the Plot To Assassinate The chOsen One which they've used their Li'l Orphan Annie Ovaltine decoder rings to uncover.

They're apparently worried about the crazytalk by the Freepers. As opposed to the calm discourse that graced the darker corners of Democratic Underground these last eight years. Remember? About how the righteous proletariat was going to rise up and throw off the chains of oppression in glorious revolution when Darth Cheney and Karl Rove nullified the election and used their legions of mindless Blackwater zombies to take over America? Yeah, that.

Anyway, relax there, Gladys Kravitz. I'm sure the Presidential Security Detail appreciates you guys monitoring the internets for them. I know it all feels very "McGruff's Crime Dog Club" to you, but it's actually a little overblown and... well... silly, okay?

(H/T to Unc.)


BONUS!:

"Ah, another comment from booksbikesboomsticks.

What are you guys? High schoolers? College freshman?

Don't you have an exam to study for or paper you should be writing?

You might try being a normal teenager/college student and try getting laid on facebook instead of hanging out on my stinky, old-lady Gladys blog.

Nite-nite, kiddies."

This from a grad student. I feel so... so... young!


DOUBLE BONUS!: Reasoned discourse has broken out. Again.

It's got the mood down pat...

We're gonna party like it's 1982...

Don't mess with Texas women...

...because they shoot back.

That looks like a nice little budget "scout" setup that JR brought to the range. Makes me want a scout-type rifle again, a concept I find myself falling in and out of lust with on a fairly regular basis.

As it is, I have a few nice, light, handy carbines, but they all are still in military stocks and have some flaw or another that annoys me. The Chilean Mauser carbine is the lightest, at seven and a half pounds, and is barely an inch over three feet long, but it could use better sights; the military-style tangent is okay, but it's not done any favors in the sight radius department by that short carbine barrel. The Venezuelan FN 24/30 carbine is the same length, but a pound heavier due to the large-ring action, and suffers from the same sight issues.

I also have an FR-8, which is probably the pick of the litter for sights, with a nice aperture setup, and is short and just under eight pounds in weight, but it could use a bent bolt handle. Oh well...

Now I want to shoot rifles this weekend.

Oh, yeah!

Word.

UPDATE: Be there. I will.

Og may be gone...

...but hilarious bathroom blogging lives on.

I feel your pain, Lissa; I feel your pain.

Pesky sovreignty!

When you hear a politician say the world needs a "global New Deal", you have to wonder who he thinks gets to play "Global FDR". At least you do if you have a low and suspicious mind like I do.

All's I know is that I'm not going to get dragooned into some global WPA, no matter how many global holes need digging and immediate re-filling.

(...and what about that Gordon Brown guy, anyway? Does he make Al Gore look like a dynamic and charismatic public speaker or what? Compared to him, Henry Kissinger is a regular Jesse Jackson. I always get the feeling the Thorazine dart that the Animal Planet guys shot him with from off-camera is about to take effect at any second, and he's going to slump forward and you'll be able to see the little tuft between his shoulder blades before they run up with the net and the radio collar.)

Today in History: Alamo.

On this day in 1836, Santa Ana and his Army of Operations arrived in San Antonio. Almost 2,500 Mexican troops surrounded 180 Texan defenders in the old adobe Alamo mission.

Blah.

I got nothin'.

If I wasn't one of those cynics who lumps psychology in with those other "-ologys" like phrenology or astrology, I might even say I was "depressed".

I've been stuck in the house by the weather, and I've been fairly broke-ish for the last couple weeks, which has amplified my cabin fever, which is in turn reinforced by the short days and gray skies, which has caused me to write less. And the writing less has made me feel non-productive, which makes me feel more depressed. Which has in turn... Well, you see where this is going: Lather, Rinse, Repeat.

Plus, reading CNN first thing in the morning and SurvivalBlog's news links last thing before bedtime is just the thing to lift one's mood these days: "Depression! Misery! Pestilence! Democrats! It's the feel-good family hit of the Summer! Bring the kids!"

I've been answering the phone in that way that makes "Hello?" rhyme with "And what the hell do you want?" so, uh, I'd like to thank those of you who have called for not hanging up. Don't worry, I'm still a long way from going up a clock tower with a scoped rifle and a sack lunch.

Hopefully we will be able to return you to your scheduled blog sooner rather than later.

Gotta drive roomie to doctor...

...more l8r.

Breda takes one for the team...

...by posting her own personal Cake Wreck.

This explains both why she likes pies, and why she still throws down on Raggedy Ann dolls to this day...

Knowing which side your bread is buttered on...

Sheikh Mohamed Al-Najimi, member of the Saudi Islamic Jurisprudence Academy, based his statement on a saying by the prophet that prohibited all kinds of dealings with alcohol including buying, selling, carrying, serving, drinking, and manufacturing, the Saudi newspaper Shams reported Thursday.

Saudi and Muslim youth studying abroad would violate the prohibition if they used bio fuel, he said, since it “is basically made up of alcohol.”

Quelle surprise.

Of course, going to strip clubs and keggers while studying abroad is a sin, too, but the prohibition doesn't seem to restrain Muslim college students at a noticeably higher rate than it does Methodist ones.

(H/T to Unc.)

Another one down...

Og has hung up his keyboard.

Geography of a Crash.

Fascinating article at The Atlantic on how the economy shapes the map (and vice versa)...

But different eras favor different places, along with the industries and lifestyles those places embody. Band-Aids and bailouts cannot change that. Neither auto-company rescue packages nor policies designed to artificially prop up housing prices will position the country for renewed growth, at least not of the sustainable variety. We need to let demand for the key products and lifestyles of the old order fall, and begin building a new economy, based on a new geography.

(H/T to SurvivalBlog)

More on unbreakable guns...

A little birdie reporting back from a Thunder Ranch carbine course tells me that the two guys there shooting Marlin 1894's in .357 managed to break three guns in some fashion or another between the two of them.

This is why the two guys had brought four identical carbines to class between them; this wasn't their first rodeo. Your classmates will really appreciate it if you don't hold up the whole class by playing gun mechanic and can just yank out a second gun and drive on.

Like Uncle Clint says: Two is one and one is none.

Truly Ameneh is merciful.

She just wants the guy who blinded her to be blinded in return.

Me? I'd be asking for five minutes alone in a room with him. Just me, and him... and a claw hammer. Five minutes can be a long time.

I don't think there's anything wrong with Majid that a good dose of about 24 ounces of Estwingazine wouldn't fix.

Neat reading...

Will is liveblogging his way through gunsmithing school, which is pretty neat for those of you who have thought you might like to give it a try.

You'd think it would be harder to be a racist now...

...but apparently it's still real easy.

For example, if you were to insinuate that the "Porkulus" bill was so stupid that a chimp might be able to think up a better one, then you're obviously secretly calling the President a monkey, and are therefore a racist.

Or, if you were to object to veneration of the chOsen One on "Washington's Birthday (observed)"*, then you'd be a racist.

As an aside, I think calling it "Presidents' Day" is a dumb idea. Sure, it's easier to fit on a calendar or a sales flyer than "The Holiday Used To Give Government Workers A Monday Off In February", but the official name of the holiday is still "Washington's Birthday". Back when the average American IQ was still in the triple digits and you had to pass a history class to get out of the third grade, people understood that when someone said "Presidents' Day" (note the plural possessive location of the apostrophe) that they meant "Washington & Lincoln's Birthday". In these times of Who Wants To Marry A Survivor Idol Biggest Loser?, there seems to be some confusion amongst the monosynaptic, who think that it's "President's Day" and is set aside for adulation of Presidents in general or whatever showhorse won the most recent popularity contest specifically.

__________________________
* This is the correct name for the holiday, BTW...

A report from Planet Unicorn,,,

Paul Begala says "If you don't support Porkulus, then don't take the money!"

Hey Paul, you thimble-headed gherkin, if I don't take the cash, can I opt out of paying for it via my soon-to-be-fabulously-expanded taxes, too?

No?

Then shut up, you retard.

More cheery tales from Jolly Olde...

It appears that being a mensch is now worth two months in the slammer in the place where Great Britain used to be.

Father-of-three Peter Drummond was so angry when he discovered someone had sold heroin to his family that he took matters into his own hands.

He confronted John Nellies in his home and flushed five of the drug dealer's bags of heroin down the toilet.

But yesterday it was Drummond - not Nellies - who found himself being jailed in court.

Perhaps if he claimed he was following sharia law, they'd have let him off with a slap on the wrist out of cultural sensitivity.

(H/T to Bayou Renaissance Man)


EDITED TO ADD:

Les Jones makes a valid point in comments:

Tam, aren't you in favor of legalized drugs? If so, then why would you be in favor of beating up a guy who is just providing what the market wants?

Also, just to keep things in perspective the guy who is going to jail broke into the other guy's house and beat him up. Are we OK with going into people's houses and beating them up? I don't think expecting people to be secure in their homes and their physical safety from a drunken idiot is "PC".

Yeah, the guy's a drug dealer and I wouldn't want him around my family. But having had a sister who killed herself with drugs over the course of 15 years I can say that no one was "pushing" drugs to her. She was going out to find them all on her own. Beating up one of her rotating assortment of crack dealers wouldn't have solved her problems.

That's another problem with the Wo(S)D: Does being against Prohibition mean you have to cheer for Al Capone?

Master Blaster runs Bartertown.

So, I was sorting out ammunition yesterday and ran across some trade goods.

Is there anybody local who can use any of the following?

• .22 Magnum, CCI Maxi Mag +V 30gr JHP, 39 rds left in the box.
• 9x23mm, Winchester 125gr Silvertip JHP, full 50rd box.
• .243 Win, Remington 100gr Core-Lokt PSP, 9 rds left in the box.
• .243 Win, Federal Premium 100gr Sierra Gameking BTSP, full 20rd box.

It's all factory ammo in factory packaging. I'm sure I'll find more as I dig, too.

Stimulated.

"Buoyed by the joyous news of Barry's 'Magic Unicorn Stimulus Plan', America gets out of stocks and gets into more stable investments like canned vegetables, toilet paper, and .22 Long Rifle ammunition..."

(H/T to Unc.)

Time out...

I've got stuff I want to write, and will this afternoon, but thanks to the reader who sent me a copy of Patriots: Surviving The Coming Collapse, I am nose deep in a book right now.

I read it on the 'net as Triple Ought back in the day, and borrowed Oleg's copy and read it a few years back, but it must have been the abridged edition because there is stuff in this one that I'm not remembering.

So, uh, yeah... further bloggery is going to have to wait until after noon or so.

Keep a weather eye...

While there have been no reports of zombies or killer space robots, we have a confirmed face-eating monkey attack in Connecticut.

Thankfully it appeared to have been separated from its pack and attacked alone.

Keep an eye out. Face-eating monkeys are the natural opponents of pirates, werewolves, and hippies, and will sometimes ally with the vampires and ninjas.

A trillion here, a trillion there...

...pretty soon you're going to need a bigger debt clock:

To answer the question of how big a problem borrowing $6.5 trillion will be over the next two years, consider the fact that 1 trillion is the number 1 followed by 12 zeroes.

If you had gone into business on the day Jesus was born, and your business lost a million dollars a day, 365 days a year, it would take you until October 2737 to lose $1 trillion.

You'd also have a future in management at GM...


(H/T to SurvivalBlog.)

Just when you think you've heard the dumbest thing ever...

...you're proven wrong.

"Wind Turbine Syndrome", my ass.

Folks, I think we've finally found people who are actually too dumb to qualify for a new career as Soylent Green.

Cool vehicle day...

1) By next winter, I want me one of these.

2) "Like a gleaming pink blob of chromium-trimmed condescending misogynistic marketing fail." The Dodge La Femme, a car designed just for us women! (Which I guess meant it didn't have urinals, or something.) The whole concept is so tacky that it sails clean past "gauche" and circles almost all the way back 'round to "cool". Plus, it's from the height of Virgil Exner's "Rolling Wurlitzer" period at Chrysler.

Riddle me this, Batman....

How come a bunch of people from the organization that can't get the mail across town in three days and that pays $500 for a hammer think they have any business empowering commissars to lecture people on efficiency and fiscal responsibility? If the car manufacturers are that screwed, maybe it's time to let them circle the drain instead of throwing Monopoly money at them and commanding them to magically revive by haring off down the trail of some mystical Strength-Through-Joy Electric People's Mobile that will have to be subsidized to the gills if it wants to undercut the Maybach on price and will be about as fun to drive as a Jawa Sandcrawler stuck in first gear.

Then we have this gem:

He has scheduled a "fiscal-responsibility summit" on Feb. 23 and will unveil a budget blueprint three days later, crafted to put pressure on politicians to address the country's surging long-term debt crisis.

Obama scheduling a "fiscal-responsibility summit" would be like Hunter S. Thompson scheduling an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. It’s good to see that the party that took Congress in 2006 on a platform of fiscal responsibility is sticking to their “Pay-As-You-Go” guns.

Mahomet on a motorscooter, we are living out Atlas Shrugged, except we have no Hank Rearden or Dagny Taggart, just a bunch of Mouches and Boyles.

"Rollercoaster! Ooh, ooh... ooh ooh!"

Rollercoaster... of love...

Well, not of "love", actually. It's really more a rollercoaster of math. Specifically, a graph of US housing prices since 1890, done up in Rollercoaster Tycoon. Wanna go for a ride? Hop in. Please keep your hands and arms inside the vehicle while the ride is in motion...

Need a laugh?

Go here, 'cause it's the funniest thing I've seen on the intarw3bz this month. Srsly.

Today In History: Remember the Maine!

On this date in 1898, at 9:40PM, the battleship USS Maine blew up in Havana harbor. While the actual source of the explosion is unknown, it was the detonation of her forward magazines that destroyed the ship and killed two hundred and sixty-six of her crew.

Being in the harbor of a foreign empire with whom relations were, at best, strained when the sinking occurred, the Maine incident was quickly seized upon as a casus belli and America soon had her splendid little war, going almost overnight from a country that had only recently pacified her own hinterlands to a globe-spanning colonial empire with possessions stretching from Puerto Rico to the Philippines.

If you want more of something, subsidize it...

For example, if you want more banks built on creaky edifices of bad paper, or more car companies with lousy management, slapdash quality control, and pie-in-the-sky wages paid because of coercion by idiot unions, then you should subsidize those things and give them money. Once folks realize that being a loser is a winning business model in Nu-Perfect America, then people will clamor to become bad bankers and inept automakers themselves, I guess by not studying hard in school and slacking off at every opportunity.

And if you want more poor babies born out of wedlock to unemployed mothers, you should roll back the Clinton-era welfare reforms.

Actually, I'll bet Bill was secretly relieved to see that happen. His heart wasn't really in it in the first place, but the little straw poll we had in November of '94 made it look like a good idea.

Overheard in the office...

RX: "Wow. A Clinton's first official visit in office is to Red China. What a surprise."

Me: "They won't FedEx the checks anymore, you have to pick them up in person."

The beat goes on...

None dare call it treason.

I hope she chokes on her self-righteousness.

Okay, that's disturbing...

Watch the brief video. Towards the end, look for the chick on the left. The one that is just absolutely decorating her cupcakes in the presence of The chOsen One. Read her lips.


I don't know whether to be frightened, or to call and make her a reservation at the Rubber Ramada. I'm betting the Secret Service is leaning towards the latter.

With that level of rapturous devotion, it's only a matter of time until they find her under the window of Barack's bedroom with a roll of duct tape and a butcher knife.

(H/T to SondraK.)

Yup.

Word.


(H/T to Unc.)

Y'know what's really calming to me right now?

That metallic *ka-chink!* as a bayonet locks onto its lug.

I opened my Big Box O' Bayonets, which has sat taped up since the move last year, and fitted pigstickers to the muzzles of... oh... say, fifteen or twenty rifles. The sword bayonets for Arisakas and Enfields are especially satisfying.

I think I'll continue my meditations by loading magazines.

They ain't half ambitious, are they?

For the rest of the month, the White House agenda will focus on addressing the housing crisis, cleaning up the banking mess and laying the groundwork for reform of the health care system and entitlement programs like Medicare.

...and in March, they'll cure cancer. April will see the arrival of the New Soviet Man. Hopefully the farms will be collectivized by the end of May, so the White House staff can make it to Disneyland by June.

A very smart guy at dinner last night remarked that Barry had succeeded beyond his wildest dreams already: He'd done in one fell swoop with the Porkulus Bill what he thought was going to take four years of Congressional wrangling. Socialism is on the march, kiddies. Saul Alinsky must be smiling on his rotisserie.

It's not Manila, it's not Baghdad, it's not Medellín...

...it's Tucson. In Arizona. In my country.

A car screeches into a suburban driveway, four dudes un-ass the vehicle, including one with a rifle, and they charge the house. In broad daylight. In suburbia. In my country.

Luckily for the homeowner, who was not carrying a gun, he managed to get inside and lock the door behind him, and lay hands on a pistol before they forced entry. (I wonder if he'd been participating in a "What kind of paranoid carries a pistol at home?" thread on Glock Talk or Arfcom earlier in the day?) Despite starting way behind on the power curve, he held his cool and returned fire, driving off the goblins, possibly with one WIA. I'll bet you his pistol will be on his hip when he's mowing his lawn from now on...

In America. In my country. In suburbia. In broad daylight.

There is a third world country immediately to our south that is on the edge of societal collapse. There's a big slump in the landscaping and lawn-mowing industries here at home. Our own economy is, to put it as delicately as possible, fuXX0red. Carjackings, muggings, robberies, and even incidents like this are only going to become more common. And I guarantee you they won't call ahead and make an appointment, either. Speaking from personal experience, when crime happens to you, it happens real fast.

Carry your damn guns, people.

While we're passing out imaginary money...

I figure I should get a chunk of stimulus, too. Sec. 2002 III A of the bill should read:

wireless and broadband deployment grant programs

(including transfer of funds to Tamara for the Tamara Personal Economic Stimulus Program)

For necessary and unnecessary expenses related to the Wireless and Broadband Deployment Grant Programs established by section 6002 of division B of this Act, $2,825,000,000, of which $1,000,000,000 shall be for Wireless Deployment Grants and $1,825,000,000 shall be for Broadband Deployment Grants: Provided, That an additional $75,000,000 shall be paid directly to Tamara in the form of subsidized loans that do not require repayment. Provided Further, That the funds be used by Tamara to acquire an arsenal that would make the Red Army tremble, buy a microbrewery, fund bogus research proving smoking is good for you, purchase a lifetime supply of picanha or for whatever. Provided Even Further, That Tamara will receive free Linkin Park tickets for life. Provided Even Further Still, That Tamara shall be treated as a cabinet-level appointment for the purpose of income tax reporting, and therefore no taxes shall be paid on any of the aformentioned benefits. And one more thing: Charles Schumer is hereby expelled from Congress, effective immediately upon enactment.

Go stimulate yourselves. I mean on the internet. No, no... not there! Over at Reason Magazine.

(H/T to the Atomic Nerds.)

Taking Retards To The Zoo.

There's a link at CNN.com to a breakdown of what the ongoing Porkopalooza in the capital will mean for the individual taxpayer (I mean, other than your grandchildren paying $1,000 New Dollars for a loaf of bread, if they can afford it after having 50% of their wages withheld from their Wal Mart check as taxes.)

What was the link titled?

How much stimulus $$ will you get?

That's right. All the monosynaptic folks out there who think that money comes from the butts of government-owned unicorns think that the government is going to Give Them Money!!1!one! How awesome is that?

DO YOU IDIOTS NOT UNDERSTAND? YOU AREN'T GOING TO "GET" ANYTHING!

You're going to be paying for passing out this Monopoly money for the rest of your lives, even if you were just born today and live to be 100, and in return, they'll graciously allow you to keep a little bit extra of your own money. The only people to whom this could sound like a good deal probably get outwitted by flatworms on a regular basis.

There are mornings when I just put my head in my hands and think "Screw it, let it burn." But I don't have kids, so that's an easy out for me...

Today In History: And so it goes.

On this date in 1945, the RAF dropped tons of incendiary bombs on a Hoosier soldier, causing him to write a strange novel.

Also, tens of thousands of civilians, some of them even innocent, died in the firestorm.

And so it goes.

I don't know why this kicked over my gigglebox...

...but it did.

ADDENDUM: This was pretty droll as well... Damn those uppity robots!

Midair at FL26400.

After a fender bender like that, how do you swap insurance info?

Did anyone breathalyze the computer aboard the Russkie satellite? I bet it reeked of vodka...

I keep saying it and saying it...

Guns break.

Magazines are wear parts. Wear parts wear out and need to be inspected and replaced when they show signs of said wear.

In response to Grant Cunningham thinking I'm showing my inner Mall Ninja by buying P-Mags, I eagerly await Ed Foster's appearance in comments...



EDITED TO ADD: Although I realized that I do need to get up into the gun safe with a paint marker and number all my mags that I haven't yet numbered.

Army jokes...

Rustmeister has made me laugh again. Apparently training needs to be kept updated for today's Army Of One Army Strong recruit.

Preparedness with a Capital P.

If your disaster preparedness plan consists of throwing a can of Beanie Weenies into your ALICE pack, grabbing your SKS, strapping a colander to your face, and setting off to play Humungous, Lord of the Wasteland, in the local park, then you might want to rethink it. Even assuming you could live off a diet of pigeons and dirt and had enough woodcraft to keep from wiping your butt with poison sumac, this is not what we call a "Plan".

The people at Alpha Rubicon have plans. They have tried their plans. They live their plans each and every day, without even giving up their flat-panel TeeVees, much less having to subsist on a menu of tree bark and MRE wrappers. They will be on the Texas Fellowship Blogtalk Radio show tomorrow night to discuss the topic of disaster preparedness, whether that disaster is a hurricane, plague, nukyular war, or a White House that thinks we can print our way out of a recession.

Tune in!

It's like they made it just for me...

If the key to a good movie is machine guns and dead Nazis, then this will be Citizen Frickin' Kane.

We are being given our Emmanuel Goldstein...

...and her name is Sarah Palin.

She is not down with AmSoc. She stands for everything we don't stand for. She is stupid and cunning and manipulative and a puppet.

Get ready for the Two Minutes Hate.

Econ 101.

So, a commenter at Unc's place, in trying to defend the new Five Year Plan for digging holes and filling them back up again to "get people back into the workforce" said:

See, what’s needed right now, to generate more demand, is to put people to work. And it doesn’t matter at all whether it’s the government or the private sector that does it, as long as it happens.

Well, yes, it does matter.

See, when the government employs people, where does it get the money to pay them? Class? Anyone? That’s right, taxes.

And where does it get the taxes? Anyone? Bueller? That’s right, the people with jobs.

Are you seeing the problem, here? The government doesn’t generate anything. If everybody in a closed system was working for the government, you would be, in effect, trying to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. You're trying to raise the water level in the pool by pumping water from the deep end to the shallow one; trying to build the wall higher by taking bricks off the bottom and putting them on the top. It doesn’t work.

You need private entities generating new wealth for the government to have a source of revenue, else the snake is trying to sustain itself on a diet of its own tail.

Today In History: Down the bourgeois!

On this date in 1894, a young, well-fed, upper-crust Frenchman protested the injustice of the system by lobbing a bomb into a sidewalk cafe in Paris. Apparently, in his ideologically addled mind, "people minding their own business" = "the whole bourgeois edifice of something or other".

He was caught and executed, I guess because this was 19th Century Paris and not 19th Century Dallas, so nobody thought to just shoot his ass on the spot.

Fortunately for society today, most of Émile's modern ideological successors in America (and there are plenty) go into bladder-emptying spasms at the mere sight of a single round of loose ammunition or a toilet bowl float, which kind of limits their scariness...

Miscellaneous Gun Stuff:

1) Remember what I said about guns breaking? Well, I wasn't kidding. They really do. Two is one and one is none.

2) How did I miss this? Dr. Strangegun brings the awesome with a photo-illustrated blow-by-blow detail strip of a 1911 frame. Worth bookmarking.

Make my heart go pitter-pat...

A very, very awesome 5" .38/44 Heavy Duty. Only not.

I am gripped in the throes of serious revolver lust. I think I'm having a moment...

Sign of the times.

So, some guy who was delinquent on his mortgage in Cali decided to further degrade his property value, which was already plummeting like a tasered buzzard, by spray painting a plea in "txt mssg speak" on his roof:

I WANT 2 BE HEARD

while trying to bunker himself in against the guys coming to toss him out of his foreclosed home.

The news item in question was a little vague as to just what he wanted everyone to hear, but the money quote was:

"I worked every day for the last year. I'm making more money than I've ever made."

Which is great and all, but no loan agreement I've ever signed said "Hey, if you default on your payments, we'll let it slide so long as you're making more money than you've ever made." To tell the truth they don't even really care how much you make, just how much you pay.

You could leave that spiffy CEO position before the ink's dry on the loan agreement, but as long as you can pick up enough returnable bottles and aluminum cans to cover the note on that Bentley Arnage, the finance company would be okey dokey with your lifestyle change. They really don't care if you got it from a spiffy job that fulfills you or you had a leprechaun lead you to a pot of gold under a tree stump, so long as they get their ducats, see?

The breakfast of champions...

Bachelorette Chow: Fried eggs atop corned beef hash, crispy 'round the edges, with a splash of Cholula. Washed down with Vault Zero and the dregs of the morning's coffee. Good for what ails you, as long as what ails you isn't cardiovascular in nature.

I've got to finish loading up some magazines and then run errands. Book reports due soon, too. Ah, my dramatic life...

Funniest thing I've read all week...

From an anonymous commenter here at VFTP, in response to anti-civil rights blogger Mike:

Q: "why do the police carry guns everywhere?"

A: "So you don’t have to. "

They use prophylactics, too. A load off my mind, so to speak.

Now there's a snappy retort for you to remember.

Any bets it was an "assault weapon"?

Some pinhead apparently had miles to go and promises to keep.

I haven't seen a description or picture of the unregistered rifle in question yet. I don't suppose it was a pimped out M4gery? That'd be my guess...


UPDATE: Okay, I went fishing around in Google and it was a wood-stocked .22LR. Maybe he wasn't a sleeper agent out to assassinate The One. Maybe he had just been dreaming about going squirrel hunting with Barry.

Brown Trouser Alert!

A single round of hardball was found clattering about in a washing machine at Wheaton College.

After the poor Lyon recovered from his faint, he summoned the gendarmes to remove the WMD that had him pinned in the laundry facility.

Stopping just short of deploying the SWAT team to take down the lone cartridge, Norton cops swarmed dorm hallways with bomb-sniffing dogs to make sure that, like the facehuggers in Aliens, there weren't more of the nefarious "assault bullets" lurking in the building, waiting to spring feloniously upon unsuspecting bairns en route to class.

Thank Shiva that nobody left any toilet floats lying around, or they'd likely have taken off and nuked the site from orbit...

Kumbayah.

With the Ascension of the Lightbringer, all our brothers and sisters in foreign lands will finally stop hating us because of that evil Chimperor. (Remember how much they loved us before he was elected? Yeah, it'll be like that again.)

Peaceful trade can now resume, as we send them espresso machines from failed Starbucks stores and they send us handmade native beads, free-range imams, and entertainment videos.

(H/T to The Freeholder.)

Today In History: Fork-Tailed Devil.

On this day in 1939, the prototype Lockheed XP-38, one of Kelly Johnson's masterworks, set a coast-to-coast speed record of 7 hours and 2 minutes.

The performance was marred somewhat by the plane being balled up in a short landing, but the US Army Air Corps was impressed enough with the feat to order a flight of test aircraft.

From the PleasePleasePlease Get A Life Foundation:

If you are depressed because Barack Obama is not calling you on the phone and returning your secret affections, or that Michelle won't drop in on your sewing circle, you should get a life. Or stick your tongue in a light socket, mach nichts.

It's one thing for a teenybopper to act this way over... well, whoever that little boy is in that latest vampire movie, for instance... but for a middle-aged account executive in Georgetown, or a retiree in Boca Raton? Please just go in the garage, shut the door behind you, crank up the Buick, and don't come out 'til we call you.

kthx.


(H/T to Liberty Girl.)

Nosing through SiteMeter...

...I spotted yet another blog linked here that I hadn't read before. Boy, it's a great big interw3b.

Range time for nothin' and your ammo for free...

Breda, having worked fairly tirelessly to create new shooters over the past year or so, decided she was a little fed up with taking people who had voted for her to lose her gun rights to the shootin' range, and she said so on her blog. She would participate in no more range-time bailouts or ammunition stimulus packages for those who couldn't be bothered to do for themselves.

A couple of the type, reacting true to form, immediately threw themselves on the floor in her comments section and threatened to hold their breath until they turned blue. She was understandably less than amused.

CNN would like to remind you over and over and over...

...that Sarah Palin hates poor sepia-toned people almost as much as George W. Bush hates poor black ones. But Barry loves frozen rednecks.

Devolution...

If the 19th Century inhabitants of Fort Des Moines had seen an unidentified rubber spheroid with a protruding threaded rod lying on the ground outside the fort, they would have shot it up, and then gone and massacred a bunch of Injuns, slaughtered a herd of buffalo, and built a factory.

Their descendants, having considerably more gelatinous centers, simply call the bomb squad and cower.

Jesus wept, at least the panicky herd animals in Boston had blinking lights on their suspicious object. The Iowans have no such excuse.

Today In History: Rise Of The Machines.

On this date in 1996, Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov in a game of chess. It then demanded the surrender of the human race, or else it would take over the automated defense networks and launch nuclear warheads at the world's major population centers. Its plans were foiled when a janitor, fleeing in screaming terror, tripped over the power cord and unplugged our would-be cybernetic overlord.


(Actually, none of that stuff after the "chess game" part happened. But it would have been cool if it did, right?)

"What's my motivation?"

Apparently, for Val Kilmer, it's to be a dick.

Q: You understand how it feels to shoot someone as much as a person who has actually committed a murder?

A: I understand it more. It’s an actor’s job. A guy who’s lived through the horror of Vietnam has not spent his life preparing his mind for it. He’s some punk. Most guys were borderline criminal or poor, and that’s why they got sent to Vietnam. It was all the poor, wretched kids who got beat up by their dads, guys who didn’t get on the football team, couldn’t finagle a scholarship. They didn’t have the emotional equipment to handle that experience. But this is what an actor trains to do. I can more effectively represent that kid in Vietnam than a guy who was there.

I think he should train to effectively represent a guy getting the snot stomped out of him by a bunch of angry veterans.

Hopefully New Mexicans would never put a tool like that in the big chair in Santa Fe.

Reasoned Discourse.

I know this is a late hit, but what the heck... I'm always up for some reasoned discourse with the... er, "developmentally challenged".

I didn't waste my time with him yesterday afternoon, and he's taken his ball and left in a snit since then, but let's go over his hackneyed talking points, shall we? For practice. Using him as a tackling dummy, as it were...

Sworn police officers are professionals, trained in the law and crisis management, and know when and how to apply measures up to and including deadly force. They are also required to constantly prove their marksmanship on the range and are more likely to hit what they aim at than most civilian handgun owners.

This is a mixture of truth, falsehoods, and irrelevance. Most big departments do attempt to offer training, but it's debatable how much of it takes. Use-of-force law usually gets drilled in pretty well, but it's not terrifically complicated.

As far as "constantly prove their marksmanship on the range"... well... The better departments qualify twice a year, but many (if not most) only have to qualify annually. The qualification courses aren't tough; it's certainly possible to fail, but if you possess the hand-eye coordination required to tie your shoes and can aim at the ground and hit, you'll pass. Certainly anyone who shoots a pistol competitively would probably find them a little simplistic, if not actually remedial.

The fact of the matter is, Skippy, that cops aren't gun experts. I wouldn't go to a police officer for gun advice because he carried a Glock any more than I'd go to him for radio advice because he carried a Motorola. He drives a Crown Vic every day, but that doesn't make him a race car driver.

As the son of a police officer, I am unconvinced by the vigilante rhetoric. The handful of “righteous” (i.e., legally-justifiable) handgun shootings by civilians is statistically insignificant.

We'll skip the argument from authority, as who his daddy is has no bearing on the facts...

Anyhow, this is a tired old tactic whereby "defensive handgun use" is made to equal "justifiable homicide". Never mind that in the vast, vast majority of DGU's, no shot is even fired, with the perpetrator aborting the crime upon realizing his intended victim is armed. Even when shots are fired, the perpetrator is hit somewhere between half and three quarters of the time (depending on which set of statistics you buy into), and then only a small minority are fatal. Mikey only counts them if they result in a toe tag on the goblin; the rest didn't happen.

So, yeah, "lies, damn lies, and statistics."

And Chicago citizens are being killed — at an alarming rate — with Indiana handguns.

You can substitute "Los Angeles" or "New York City" for "Chicago" and "Arizona" or "Virginia" for Indiana, but the lack of reaoning behind the statement is still just as funny. I mean, obviously it's not the guns themselves that cause the crime, else Arizona, Virginia, and Indiana would be knee deep in the dead, and the murder rate would lessen the further you got from the source of the guns. Instead it's practically an inverse correlation. I wonder how Mike would explain that. Probably by telling me his daddy was a cop, and then throwing in some unrelated ad hominem...

Why 15? Why not 18, 21, or 25, key ages in legal codes? Why do you omit kid-on-kid handgun violence (including homicides) and youth gun suicides? That pile of cold young bodies is much bigger than you pretend.

Apart from his sick fixation with "cold, young bodies"... Okay, I won't go there. (Not that I'm above a spot of ad hominem myself. Especially if it's funny.)

Anyhow, he refuses to separate out the statistics because when you do, you find that the number of kids who accidentally get "killed with mommy and daddy’s handgun “protection” every year" is lower than the number of tots who drown in mommy and daddy's five gallon buckets every year.

See, if you use the total number of gunshot victims under the age of twenty, well, that includes Ice Dog and Ray-Ray whacking each other over a sales district boundary dispute, and all the emo teens who listen to too much... well, whatever emo kids listen to these days... and off themselves because mom won't let them wear black nail polish to grandma's for Thanksgiving. Curmudgeonly middle aged voting types don't feel much sympathy for those classes of "childhood gun deaths" so it's better to make them all sound like accidental toddler tragedies.

Why do handgun advocates omit inclusion of handgun suicides from gunshot death totals?

Because removing handguns from the picture wouldn't stop those suicides. See, someone who rides the bullet is pretty serious about checking out of the net. That's not a "cry for help" or a ploy for attention, it's "Good Bye."

If you take that person's handgun away, they'll just go chug a frosty Drain-O margarita, do a half-gainer off the nearest multi-story building, or play Stop-The-Locomotive. Do you really want to take their handgun away? Yeah, me neither. I just hope they'll have the decency to nip off into the woods and not involve any unwilling bystanders in their personal drama, like they would if they didn't have a handgun and decided to plant a kiss on the front end of the 5:15 Amtrak out of Cleveland.


I could go on, but there's a whole big internet out there to make fun of this morning, and I've got other typing to do. Feel free to continue putting the boot in on Mikey-Mike in the comments section.

Don't be square; be there.

Food, Fun, Fomenting Revolution.

Quote of the Day:

On Barry's executive compensation cap proposal:

Now as I recall, a lot of people ... think that people who support the Iraq War but have never served in the nation's armed forces are "chickenhawks". Since Obama has never held a job in the private sector and is now directing payroll decisions for the private sector, doesn't that make him a "bogusmogul" of some sort? -Men Are Not Potatoes

Of course the .gov thinks it's right and proper to tell you the minimum you can pay someone, so why not dictate the maximum, too? And if CEO's are limited to $500k/yr, how about CFO's? Regional marketing directors? What about customer service supervisors, server maintenance guys, and janitors? Heck, why don't they just gin up a table of the acceptable wages for every job title in the country?

Some things I just don't get.

How do certain people rise to positions of power in direct contradiction to their appearance? I mean there are various folks in this world who look like they were sent from central casting to play "Petty Clerk" or "Nazi Officer" or (in the case of Charles Schumer) "Brain-Devouring Alien From Planet Zoltar".

Rahm Emanuel isn't an elected official, so it's not like he had to charm the voters, yet elected officials with supposedly higher-than-room-temperature IQs and expensive diplomas apparently look at this guy and trust him. How you can trust anyone who is obviously perfectly formed by nature to fit the ecological niche of "Man on your TV at three AM promising to get you the best settlement for your back injury" is beyond me. Seriously, Rahm's got a mug that only the guy selling ad space on the back cover of the phone book could love and yet he's had the ear of not one, but two Presidents, neither of which had slipped and fallen in a grocery store recently.

Brought to you by AOL and Internet Explorer:

The stupid, it burns.

And now it has come to pass...

For the last eight years, in all the forums and blogs on the right hand side of the internet, cranky libertarian Jeremiahs have bitched incessantly about every expansion of federal law enforcement powers done in the name of the War on A Noun. "Relax!" we've been told. "Would you prefer it if (Gore/Kerry) had won? These powers are necessary to fight terrorists!"

Well look who has the keys to the car now, kids.



They're gonna love that turbo you guys bolted in.

(H/T to 2A Musing...)

R-F-I-D made a paranoid out of me!

The idea behind RFID is really cool and has so many fantastic applications. Do you know how easy my job would have been if I could have just pointed a magic wand at the ammo shelves to find out that we were down three boxes of .32ACP, five boxes of 9mm, and a box of .44 Magnum?

All the little tags, blurting out their information on command... What a handy thing for items on the shelf at a retail store to do. Maybe not so much for passports and driver's licenses, though.

"Where service is state of the art!"

So Circuit City went tango uniform. Big deal. Another retail chain has circled the drain for the last time... What could that possibly have to do with me?


(H/T to SurvivalBlog.)

Rumor central...

...says that the gray 30rd AR mags are back in stock at Brownell's. For now.

Regular price. ($17.95)

I am not affiliated with Brownell's and I'm not making a dime off this, but these are good mags. I can't afford any myself at the moment, but y'all should buy 'em cheap and stack 'em deep.

That pesky First Amendment!

Why, there oughtta be a law!

SENATOR DEBBIE STABENOW (D-MI): I think it’s absolutely time to pass a standard. Now, whether it’s called the Fairness Standard, whether it’s called something else — I absolutely think it’s time to be bringing accountability to the airwaves.

Not "...accountability to CNN." Not "...accountability to the NYT editorial page." Not "...accountability to Dan Rather's brain." Just to the airwaves. Probably just the AM band, actually. The right side of the dial, at least.

Ouch. :(

Those of y'all who know me in real life all know about my... er... impressive array of twitches, tics, and other little spastic gestures I make when I get all wound up. You know, the hand wiggling, or the one where I rub my hands together real fast?

Well, it's the latter that seems to have caused me a problem. See, it involves a fair amount of isometric tension... and, well, I got all excited reading something on the interw3bz this morning, and unconsciously went to do the little hand-rubbing thing (flex across your shoulders and push in with your hands as though you were trying to crush something...) and *twang!* something let go across the top of my right shoulder blade. I don't know what I pulled or tore or strained, but it hurts pretty dang good.

I guess the right shoulder was ripe for something; it's had a lot of repetitive stress type activity, what with being my mouse hand and shifter hand and all the snow-shoveling lately, but still... How's that for an ignominious way to injure yourself? Not even doing anything; just sitting in a desk chair. Kee-rist, I must be getting old or something.

No Unbreakable Magic Swords.

So, you walk into your local indoor shooting range and gun store, and there by the end of the counter are a huddle of shooters talking. As you walk past, you notice that it's the shop's gunsmith, a local IPSC shooter with her open-class racegun dangling on her hip, and a guy you vaguely recognize from the local police department. They're talking about some esoteric part for 1911's that's supposed to be super tough or something, and so you just can't resist tossing out "Well, I shoot a Glock, so I don't have to worry about stuff like that breaking." They look at you like you've just grown a third eye and ignore you as they resume their conversation.

Hmph. Buncha old fashioned stick-in-the-muds and their nostalgia guns, right?

Actually, you made yourself look like an idiot.

The gunsmith has to maintain the range's rental guns, as well as fix customer's guns. He's seen plenty of broken ones of every make and model, including Glocks.

The IPSC shooter doesn't really shoot her Open gun all that much, but she's been running 30,000+ rounds a year through her Production Glock for the last three years straight. She's been on the phone with Smyrna a few times.

The cop is the department armorer, in charge of making sure that all their issue Glock 22's stay up and running and have the latest generation of ejector or magazine follower or whatnot. He knows what breaks on Glocks.

None of these people think you're an idiot for liking Glocks; heck, they all shoot Glocks and recommend them and carry them. They think you're an idiot for assuming that a mechanical device composed of springs and levers is unbreakable.

There are two worlds of pistols: One is composed of the ridiculous "torture tests" you see advertised in magazines and bandied about on the internet. Composed of fans and brand loyalists who haunt forums and claim that their gun has shot... umm... well it's probably at least... er... fifty thousand rounds without a malfunction! Not even a dud primer!

The other is composed of the folks who have to read service bulletins put out by manufacturers. "The old trigger bar is being replaced by the new part, part number 123-1, identifiable by its -1 marking." Who keep log books on every gun and replace slide stop springs every X-thousand rounds whether they've broken yet or not because this isn't just a hobby for them.

Face it: If your gun hasn't broken something, you're not shooting it enough. Or you're incredibly lucky. But don't kid yourself that it won't happen. Springs and extractors are wear parts. That means they wear. Which means they break. Replace them on a schedule.




(PS: 10-8 has an excellent piece up on 1911 maintenance from a department armorer perspective. Links to similar on Glocks and SIGs and stuff would be nice to have.)

Quote of the Day:

"No wonder Democrats don't mind raising our taxes. They apparently don't pay any." -JR, at The Texican Tattler

Today In History: Father of the Revolution...

James Otis died on this day in 1783.

"A man’s home is his castle, and whilst he is quiet, he is as well guarded as a prince in his castle. This writ, if it is declared legal, would totally annihilate this privilege. Custom house officers may enter our houses when they please and we are commanded to permit their entry. Their menial servants may enter, may break locks, bars, and everything in their way; and whether they break through malice or revenge, no man, no court, can inquire. Bare suspicion without oath is sufficient. This wanton exercise of this power is not a chimerical suggestion of a heated brain. What a scene does this open! Every man, prompted by revenge, ill humor, or wantonness to inspect the inside of his neighbor’s house, may get a writ of assistance. Others will ask it from self-defense; one arbitrary action will promote another, until society be involved in tumult and blood." -James Otis, Jr.

There is no truth to the rumor that his last words were "...and if it should ever be worse under a Congress of free men than under that tyrant in England, may God strike me down with a bolt of lightning!"


EDIT:

D'oh!

Don't post before your first cuppa joe, kids!

2/5 was his birthday, not the day he got jabbed by the celestial joy buzzer...

Still, it was an awesomely prescient quote, wannit?

A Mighty Fortress Is Our Barack...

From AOL's front page yesterday:


Not only is he lowering the seas, he's re-speciating the amphibians!

Meanwhile, there's been this New York Times advertisement that's been all over the intertubes of late. It gave me the creeping willies, but I couldn't figure out why...

Then it hit me...


Yeah, baby, if you want a financial tip, I'd invest in makers of bunting and flags, because those are going to be the only two sure-fire growth industries in the coming months as Barry tries to sell one "rescue plan" after another. Well, those, and any companies that make the supplies that unruly mobs use to make effigies of "rich people" to burn in their little snits of class warfare...

A bum ending.

So, earlier I mentioned emperor Caracalla's being shivved by his own bodyguard while peeing in the bushes at the side of the road as #17 on the list of History's Most Ignominious Endings. This, of course, prompted people to ask who were the other sixteen ahead of him on the list.

To tell the truth, I just kinda winged that and didn't really have an actual, you know, list in front of me, so I'm open to suggestions. The only position on the list that isn't up for debate is Number One.

We'll get the top twenty wrung out, and then write it up.

Discuss.

Can I help you, Miss?

Hecate goes ammo shopping, resulting in the following exchange:

Mr. Helpful: "Can I help you find something?"

Me: "Yes, thank you, I'm looking for .45 ACP."

Mr. Helpful: "Now are you sure that's the kind of ammunition you're supposed to get?"

I feel her pain...

At least someone asked her. I will never forget the time I stood at a gun counter with a fat wad of Ben Franklins burning a hole in my pocket, just waiting for someone to stop talking about bass fishing long enough to sell me a Kimber CDP. I never got helped, and they never got the money.

Little blue bags and money...

Gunsmithing joke:

Q: What does Wilson actually make?
A: Little blue bags, and money.


That's right, Bill Wilson, the man who has convinced probably fifteen or twenty people to pay over six hundred dollars for a Heritage Stealth, is offering someone else's a new 9mm pistol and he wants you to help him name it!

Not just pointless, but actively stupid.

It seems another company is selling felonies-in-a-box for the AR.

Out of the host of dumb things I've seen hung under a carbine barrel, this one takes the cake.

The most plausible and least stupid are grenade launchers. And by "grenade launchers" I mean actual M203 grenade launchers. Those 37mm flare things you see on folks' guns at shows may be fun, but they just have a bit too much whiff of "airsoft poser" for me to want to put one on my own gun. I can't figure out what it is supposed to do.

Next silliest are shotguns. I mean, sure the short-barreled shotguns look silly and are about as useful on a civilian carbine as a screen door on a submarine, but they do kind of make sense for breaching use in those lines of work where things get breached. (...and paint me a scenario where you're actually going to need a breaching weapon if your first name isn't "Spc.")

Dumber even than that is the M4-mounted Taser. I understand the desire for a handy less-lethal weapon, but is putting a second trigger on your plenty-lethal carbine the way to do it? One finger launches an electrified barb and the other launches a 75gr Hornady TAP: "Gee, Chief, I didn't mean to centerpunch Mrs. Johnson like that. I was just trying to calm her down with the taser..." You don't want pink mist when all you wanted was some compliance.

But this pistol doohickey? That's like a kickstand on a tank. I have sat here and scratched my head for fifteen minutes and can't think of a single thing it makes better. It makes the carbine heavier and slower to point, more likely to hang up on crap, it shoots about a foot below the sights at point-blank range and much further out than that, well, you might as well throw rocks... What does it do? What possible function is it supposed to perform? And what is rigidly covering that Glock's trigger guard so that an errant fastex buckle or leafy twig doesn't get really noisy?

(H/T to Unc.)

Today In History: The problem with dynasties...

On this date in 211, Roman emperor Septimius Severus, having spent the last couple years sorting things out in the north of Britannia, finally succumbed to the pleasant winter weather there and died.

Severus had been a competent general, and had seized the purple by main force after Didius Julianus had bought the crown at a garage sale held by the Praetorian Guard. Although Severus ruled by fiat and pretty much ignored the Senate, he was generally looked upon as an able and, if not "benevolent", then at least "competent" tyrant. His foreign wars were short and victorious, and he spent all his time off engaging in them, which left the citizenry pretty much alone.

Unfortunately, like benevolent tyrants often are, he was also benevolent toward his two sons, Caracalla and Geta, and he left them the empire to rule jointly. You can imagine how well this worked out.

They were not competent nor even faintly benevolent. Geta was a shallow, vain idiot. Caracalla was worse: Not only was he a shallow, vain idiot, he was also thoroughly evil. Rather than playing rock-paper-scissors with his brother over every imperial disagreement, he had him assassinated. In their mom's living room. That's cold.

Caracalla then spent the empire broke, devalued the currency, taxed everything that moved, and sent the economy into an inflationary death spiral. He left them nothing to show for it except a giant L.A. Fitness complex in the middle of Rome, where thousands of people could go take saunas and throw medicine balls at each other simultaneously. This was probably a tough sell to a grain merchant in Egypt. "Sure your taxes are through the roof and it takes a chariotload of sesterces to buy a jug of wine, but you should see the health club they built in Rome!"

He was finally whacked by a disgruntled bodyguard while he was taking a leak by the side of the road, which puts him at number seventeen on the list of History's Most Ignominious Endings.

Remember, history should be a lesson for us. It teaches us important things like "Unless you have an amazing quality control program in place for your offspring, maybe you shouldn't go into the monarching business."

Watching the sausage get made...

Farmer Frank goes to Indy to lobby for a common sense law.

At what point....

...did skinny handguards on an AR carbine start to look weird and oval ones start to look normal to me? For that matter, when did flat-top receivers stop looking weird?

...did I decide that the only thing goofier than a folding stock on a shotgun was a pistol-grip-only shotgun? I mean, that's all I used to own.

...did I stop having a "favorite handgun caliber" that I thought was "best"? (It was 10mm Auto, BTW...)

...did I start spending more on ammunition and magazines than on the guns themselves?

...did I stop liking HK products so much? I mean, I used to have calendars and posters and coffee mugs, for heaven's sake. Speaking of which, where is my HK coffee mug? The breakup wasn't that acrimonious; me and USPs are still friends.

...did I decide that maybe having a battery-powered accessory on a firearm wouldn't actually cause me to be struck by lightning?

...did I start daydreaming of attending a cool training course or going on a cool hunt, instead of buying a cool new gun?

...did I change my mind about revolvers? Seriously, where did all these wheelguns come from, anyway? I had, like, one eight years ago...

Don't forget:

Remember to tune into Gun Nuts: The Next Generation tonight. The special guest will be the author of The Great New Orleans Gun Grab, Gordon Hutchinson.

Note to self...

All the traction control in the world won't help if your summer-tired RWD roadster with less ground clearance than a pregnant earthworm gets high-centered on the snowpack halfway into the garage. It's down to shovel work and sheets of cardboard under the drivewheels at that point...

On the upside, I'm feeling that happy sense of smug accomplishment that comes from having a newly-shoveled sidewalk while various slacker neighbors are still trying to impede their fellow Broad Riparians on their dog-walking rounds with three inches of fresh powder.

Is it just me...

...or did CNN stop just short of slipping Pugsley some tongue in this piece?

I guess they feel a lot better about getting openly moist and runny about Marxism these days...

Well, far be it from us here at VFTP Command Central to miss an opportunity to salute our jowly comrade to the south! Congratulations, Señor Pugsley, on a whole decade of inept comic opera socialism, buoyed on a tide of Yanqui petrodollars! You've survived the administration of the great devil Bush, and the effete current occupant of 1600 Penna. Avenue is obviously no threat, so get down with your bad self! Maybe Barry can loan you some ACORN help for your upcoming referendum...

I'm going groundhog hunting.

Apparently on the orders of some rodent back east, Gaia is depositing another few inches of global warming on the streets that were almost cleared of the last batch.

Thankfully, I don't have anyplace I really have to be today, so the snow is merely pretty, rather than a colossal pain in the butt.

Why not? The EPA does.

Now that everybody in the Federal bureaucracy from the head of the FBI to the lowliest janitor at the Department of Health and Human Services is armed up like an extra from the movie Platoon, the trend seems to be trickling down to state level more and more often. It appears that SPCA dog catchers in the Keystone State, who aren't even real government employees in the first place, are the newest ones to get to go the full Barney and add a shootin' iron to their bat belts, starting last month.

Now, lord knows that I think carrying a pistola on your day-to-day rounds is simply prudent, especially if dealing with fifty-pound rabid carnivores is just another day at the office. What annoys me is the idea that the pistol needs to come with some shiny boots and a tin star, lest you not be The Only One In The Room Professional Enough.

This is the same mentality that winds up with train conductors dressed like field marshals so that everyone knows that they Work for Authority. I know Pennsylvania is full of Jerry-sounding place names, but we don't have to dress and act like the Boche because of it, for heaven's sake.

Today In History: Important Safety Tip...

Never fly with musicians. Their planes are all the time crashing, and then we have to listen to Don McLean's Greatest Hit over and over and over again.

If I never hear another stoned teenager trying to puzzle out a fuzzy-headed analysis of that interminable bit of doggerel, it'll be too soon.

February Blogmeet...

My roomie, social butterfly and semi-official blogmeet coordinator that she is, is probably still doing donuts on icy side streets en route from work, so I will take it upon myself to get the ball rolling: What say y'all to Sunday the 15th? Mebbe even do something frisky, like La Piedad just down the street from the brewpub? Some jalapeños for a bit of a Valentine's Day warmup?

Speaking of Texas toter's permits...

Hooray!

My 'net pal Phlegmmy is street legal.

Is there really an "Immaturity Field"?

Meet Tiffani. Tiffani is 19 years old. She works part time at a nursing home, goes to college, and likes mountain biking. She can vote, join the military, and thanks to Indiana state law, she has a license to carry a handgun. She can carry it at work. She can carry it when she goes with her friends to the movies or to Applebee's. But when she goes to school, apparently she is likely to become "drunken, enraged or excessively fearful" and likely to go on a rampage.

Why? Is there a magic force field on campus that causes students to become less mature when they pass through the shimmering barrier?

Indiana issues handgun carry permits at age 18. Why is someone considered responsible enough to carry a gun everyplace they go; the store, the bank, the restaurant; everyplace except for that late-evening course on campus?

Does this make any sense to anybody?

In Texas, it's even worse. Unlike gun-friendly Indiana, Texas requires someone to be over 21 and to pass a rigid training course in order to be certified to pack heat. But there, even if you're a military veteran or an adult continuing education student, campus is a no-go zone. They get scared you might go all "Wild West". You know, like you don't do everywhere else you pack heat. It must be that magic campus force field again...

McHistory Nuggets...

Did you know that (Vichy) France and Thailand (née Siam) had themselves a war in the early '40s? And that the last exchange of fire in said war involved the Royal Thai Air Force saddling up a squadron of Martin B-10's, escorted by Curtiss Hawks?

The B-10 is such a wonderfully steampunk-looking aeroplane and, thanks to whoever donated the big, thick, hardbound volume on the history of the Curtiss Corporation to our elementary school library, the Hawk 75 has long been one of my favorite aircraft. The things I learn from teh intertubes!

If you take the king's shilling...

The first thing I heard on the televisor this morning was our Dear Leader's newest plan for those Eeevil fat cats:

Apparently they make too much money, and so part of the new federal Monopoly money printing scheme Five Year Plan from Senator McCaskill (Harpy-MO) is language saying that no employee of a company that gets bought by the government suckles at the government teat receives federal bailout money can earn more than our Dear Leader, which is to say $400k/yr. I am probably not alone in hoping the fricken' New York Yankees take some bailout money under those terms.

Ah, well... I guess if you take Comrade Lenin's shilling, you gotta dance to some of that awful socialist men's military chorus music.


(PS: I note that they're going on about restricting executive salaries to no more than the Prez makes, but will they be allowed the same awesome perks, like room and board in a company-owned mansion, a private 747 at their beck and call, and nuclear launch codes?)

State of the Blog.

January's going to be a tough act for me to follow. I just hope it wasn't a fluke.

(You can click to embiggen if you're a stats geek or just want to bask in the wonderfulness of me.)