That's a lotta people...

A hundred and nineteen million people is, like, a third of the entire population of the USA. That's a lot of people for twenty-two million fentanyl-laced pills to kill.

Apparently these fentanyl-laced pills were so potent that they caused anyone who ingested one to explode, killing the four people standing closest to them, I guess?

Tab Clearing...

• Jim Grey put another roll through the Nikon 35Ti.


• It looks like UPS is set to lay off 20,000 workers and close 73 facilities.


• AI chatbots on Instagram will straight-up lie to you about being licensed therapists.

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Special Edition Midweek Memes...

Yeah, yeah, the Navy jet that went into the drink the other day was a Super Hornet, not an F-35, but the Truman was busy conducting evasive maneuvers at the time, so weren't nobody standing around snapping pictures. They were too busy trying not to go into the drink with the bird and the tug.

Still...

Your Car as a Service

Modern electric cars are essentially self-propelled computers, receiving software updates just like your desktop machine.

What happens when the company that made the car goes out of business? Spare parts are one thing, but where do you go for spare code? Fisker Ocean owners are guinea pigs for this automotive frontier right now.

This can be an annoyance when Google decides to stop supporting your thermostat, and it can be an outright tragedy when the company that made your bionic retinas goes toes up. The Fisker Ocean Extreme had a rep for finickiness already, and I can't imagine it'll be any more fun now that your service support requests return a 404 error.

Fortunately my cars have all the software updates they'll ever need.

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Sauce for the Gander...

From yesterday's batch of Executive Orders:

Sec. 4. Using National Security Assets for Law and Order. (a) Within 90 days of the date of this order, the Attorney General and the Secretary of Defense, in consultation with the Secretary of Homeland Security and the heads of agencies as appropriate, shall increase the provision of excess military and national security assets in local jurisdictions to assist State and local law enforcement.

(b) Within 90 days of the date of this order, the Secretary of Defense, in coordination with the Attorney General, shall determine how military and national security assets, training, non-lethal capabilities, and personnel can most effectively be utilized to prevent crime.

If a Democratic president had issued this, people would be howling, and don't pretend otherwise.

Internet Ads...

Internet advertising has had interesting side effects in meatspace. For instance, first Craigslist and then Facebook Marketplace have basically kneecapped local newspapers, who relied on classified ads for a big slice of their revenue.

Second, the amount of feedback available causes marketing people to overdose on feedback. Unlike billboards, magazine ads, or television commercials, which are all the advertising equivalent of casting your bread upon the water, the internet ad can give a tremendous amount of information on who is clicking it and what else they click.

This, of course, makes marketing types get completely obsessed with clicks.

If companies treated other forms of advertising the way they do internet ads, Red Bull would drop their racing team if you didn’t visit their website when Verstappen drove past on every lap.

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Meme Dump…

Angry Bees

Between Ruger slashing the manufacturer's suggested retail price on their Ruger-5.7 to a hair under five and a half bills (which means street prices will be under five hundo) and KelTec's PR57 going for under four, this brings pricing on 5.7x28mm handguns well into the "everyman" tier.

Add new loadings from Speer, FN USA, and Fiocchi, and price-per-round dropping down to fifty cents, and it could possibly lead to increased popularity, which will lead to increased production and further cost-per-round reductions.

Given how this is a low recoil round, it could have a future for the people who worry about "Does it kick?" as a primary purchase consideration.

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Automotif DLXXI...

The Porsche 914 was initially intended to be sold as a VW, at least in its 4-cylinder variants, with only the 914/6 badged as a Porsche. As it stood, Porsche was afraid that having them sold as VW's in the U.S. market would hurt Porsche's brand image and so convinced Volkswagen to let them sell the 4-banger cars as Porsches over here, too.

This is a straight-out-of-camera JPEG taken using an Olympus E-510 DSLR and a Zuiko Digital 12-60mm f/2.8-4 zoom lens.

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Monday Morning Meme Dump…

Writing Elsewhere...

• Pistols with chassis systems...


• A six-four Impala...

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Spicy little blaster…

Only a few range trips left before I wrap up my initial review of the KelTec PR-57. I’ve got a lot of thoughts, and a lot of mixed feels. This is gonna be a complex writeup.

Sunday Morning Memes...

Meme Dump...

Tab Clearing...

• I thought we were mad at the Sociology and Women's Studies departments, not the STEM fields?


• If vaccination rates maintain their current trajectory, measles... which had been declared eliminated in the US in 2000 ...will become endemic here once again by 2050. Good job everybody.


• A second day of shooting along the Indian-Pakistani border.

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Meme Dump…

Thanks, I hate it...

On the one hand, the sort of people who would buy this thing are basically announcing that they have too little common sense and too much money and it is morally wrong to allow them to keep it.

On the other hand, not even suckers deserve to be swindled like this.

Hot Fresh Memes...

Confidently Wrong...

If you feed a fake aphorism into your Google search box and ask its meaning, Google's AI will bullshit you like a sophomore taking a pop quiz who hasn't read the material.

There's a reason for that...

You'll notice a lack of threaded barrels on pistols chambered in 5.7x28mm. Some manufacturers are daring enough to try, but there's a good reason not to.

See, there are lots of suppressors out there that are constructed largely of aluminum and intended for use with .22LR ammunition. While classic deuce-deuce operates at higher pressures than most people realize, it's still a very small case capacity and doesn't produce a lot of gas. An out-of-battery discharge with a .22LR rifle is startling, but not the sort of thing that wrecks guns and removes digits*.

5.7x28mm operates at double the chamber pressures and also has better than double the powder charge of the classic rimfire round. That's a lot more gas to handle and it can make a little alloy rimfire can look like the exploding cigar from a Bugs Bunny cartoon.

*Incidentally, this is the reason for the dearth of straight blowback semiautomatic rifles chambered in .22WMR. It operates at similar pressures to .22LR but has better than double the powder charge, so an out of battery discharge is a much bigger deal. People tend to be pretty lackadaisical about cleaning rimfire rifles and fond of doing mag dumps with them and, well...

Hump Day Meme Dump...

Diagnosing your busted Vatican…

Remember, black smoke from the Vatican means the mixture’s too rich and white smoke from the Vatican means it’s burning oil.

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Meme Dump…

Big Bada Boom...

Handguns chambered in 5.7x28mm tend to be noisy, and up to now every one I've fired... FN Five-SeveN, M&P 5.7, Ruger-5.7...has had a barrel five inches long or thereabouts.

The PR-57 from Kel-Tec has a four inch tube and the increase in muzzle blast and flash is noticeable.

There's a code in my indoor range pictures. If you see the orange TQ on the PHLster Flatpack tourniquet carrier, there are other patrons using the indoor range. If not, I've got the bay to myself.

Yesterday the range was crowded and I was using lane 11 in the rifle bay. It was hard to distinguish between the muzzle blast of the PR-57 and the dude shooting a 5.56 AR in lane 12.

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Monday Meme Day...

Tab Clearing...

• Apparently seasteading is in the news again.


• Are em dashes a sign of ChatGPT-generated content, or just a literate and very correct writer? (I tend to be extremely casual about typography and layout here at VFTP, while Bobbi is a stickler for correct formatting at her blog.)


• "If you have nothing to hide, citizen, you have nothing to fear!": More antics from the party of small government and personal freedom. A bunch of script kiddies amalgamating a bunch of previously siloed federal databases into a single point of failure is a breathtakingly bad idea and an irresistible target for future abuse.

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Gratuitous Gun Pr0n #255...

Coming soon to the pages of Shooting Illustrated, a full review of the Ruger RXM, seen here sporting a Trijicon SRO with the 2.5 MOA dot.

Between the true swappable chassis system, the shape and texture of the gripframe, and the optic mounting system, this thing's a legitimately Product Improved Gen3 Glock 19.

I don't want to spoiler it here, but... well, I'm probably buying the test gun and may tote it for six months to a year and run it in classes and some matches.

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The Meme Also Rises...

Tab Clearing...

• Why you'll never see me type "Remember to mash that Like button and subscribe!"


• If I had a bajillion dollars and built a custom home, it sure wouldn't look like a suburban municipal library circa 1998.


• It's that time of year again.

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Meme Dump…

It’s a Good Friday for Memes…