Confession.

While I was dog-sitting this past week, I was surfing the 'net with my friend Brigid's laptop. It's a fairly recent Wintel machine with reasonable specs, and it made me realize that I'd completely forgotten what web-surfing was supposed to be like.

Back in March, I started what was supposed to be a month-long experiment, doing all my computing on vintage Macs. (Prior to that, I had just been using my Mac laptops and an old iMac as a DVD player.) I hooked up an old G4 tower to use as my main machine and... somehow a month turned into more than half a year.

Don't get me wrong, the Sawtooth is a swell machine, and I love Camino as a browser, but the G4/500 with half a gig of ram was just bog slow when it encountered flash-heavy web pages. Last night I dragged the P4 2.4 back down from the attic. I feel like a quitter, but the Sawtooth just wasn't going to work without more RAM or a faster CPU.

Today In History: Red October.

Which, due to the confusion of using old-fashioned calendars actually happened in November.
November is the traditional month for Commies to take over...

X-Files fans:

I have Season 6 on DVD. What season should I get next? Season 5 has "Bad Blood", "Post-Modern Prometheus", and "Unusual Suspects", but Season 4 has "Musings of a Cigarette-Smoking Man", and Season 3 has "Jose Chung's From Outer Space".

For that matter, what's your favorite episode? (Mine's "The Unnatural".)

Finding amusement where you can.

Josh torments the dim:

I was talking to one of my coworkers today, someone who claims to be moderate. She was smug as all hell about Obama and disappointed that she couldn’t needle me about it since I just can’t make myself get emotionally invested. I was checking the results of our local races and state votes, and expressed dismay about what looks like a Prop 8 win.

To which she replied…”Good.”

Cue the movie villain steepled fingers and slow spin around in my chair until I was looking her face on, much the way you might look at a bug you were about to step on.

“Run that by me again. What does ‘good’ mean?” I asked...

Today in History: Boom!

On this date in 1971, the U.S. tested the Cannikin device under Amchitka island. The purpose of the test was... well, as best as I can tell, to see how cool it would be to set off a really big nuke under an island in the Bering Sea. The test was eminently successful, releasing as much as five megatons of fun, and pissing off hippies to no end. (If you had a crew cut, a slide rule*, and a PhD, this is what you used to do instead of setting off M-80s under your neighbor's trash cans.)

Unfortunate side effects included guaranteed employment for government eco-types through at least 2025, and the formation of Greenpeace, but little of the kind of fallout that makes your kids have three heads.
_______________________________________________
*If you are even a tiny bit geeky, do not go read the Wikipedia entry on slide rules. You will fall down the rabbit hole and not come out for hours. You have been warned.

New dawn fades...

Roberta X with a cheerful reminder of political realities:

For those of you who have bemoaned the so-called "Patriot Act" and incursions on the Constitutionally-protected rights of citizens under the Bush administration, let me remind you that in two years of a Democrat majority in Congress, not a single one of those tools had been taken off the table. Now the Democrats have the Executive Branch as well and it will be interesting to see what they do with them -- and what you have to say about it when they do. I have not been impressed by that aspect of President G. W. Bush's tenure, either -- but I don't think the Opposition will be any better. They may select a slightly different group of targets, is all. Possibly including me. Promise me you'll still be outraged? At least a little?

RTWT.

For those who are hedging bets...

If you are stocking up and are new to the shooting community since the Ban on Guns That Look Kinda Like Assault Rifles made the go-aways back in 9/04, here's some advice:

Those rifles you're snatching up right now? Make sure they take AR, AK, G3, or FAL mags. You don't want to be stuck with some exotic that takes un-importable mags. I had a Beretta AR70 for a while. They were imported in small numbers right before the '89 Bush Ban on Imported Guns That Look Kinda Like Assault Rifles, and magazines weren't common. When you could find them, they went for $150 and more...

Ideally, your pistol should take Beretta 92 mags. Between '94 and '04, every gun shop seemed to have a fairly healthy supply of lightly-used Beretta 92 mags. Especially gun shops located within five or ten miles of the front gates of a military post. If you drill a hole in the right place on a Beretta 92 mag, it works just fine in a Springfield XD-9.

It's not the end of the world, and you can't even see it from here.

More moderate predictions:

Steven Den Beste on the election and the next four years.

Tgirsch offers a view from the other side of the fence.

Quote of the Day: "Katie bar the door..."

Art writes in comments on the "History of the Great Depression" post:

It was not until the 1980s that I started learning the realities of the causes of the Depression. As near as I can tell, anybody who disagreed with the Official Version was treated just like today's scientists who are unconvinced that Homo Sap's CO2 is a major cause of climate change.

We had a similar problem in the late 1970s with the loose money of the LBJ-Jimmy Carter era, but Volcker's efforts at the Fed gave us a short-term but deep correction. After him, though, Greenspan et al put us back on the trail of loose credit and easy money.

It appears to me that Obama and the more liberal Democrats and RINOs have bought into the conventional wisdom as to the causes and solutions for the Depression, as they look at today's debacle. After all, they've already committed some two trillion dollars we don't really have--and more tax dollars to come (or go).

Sometime next spring, look for a resurgence of protectionism, ala Smoot/Hawley. If that happens, it's Katie-bar-the-door for the following half-dozen or ten years.

And I haven't even mentioned our coming problems with electric power and transportation fuels.

Odds are, cities are gonna be seriously bad places to live.

Art

Art's one of the savviest people I know. I hope to Vishnu he's wrong on this one, but I have a bad feeling he may not be. Look up Smoot-Hawley. Google the stalled Doha talks, and the sticking points on agricultural trade barriers...

Investment tips.

Those with any liquid capital might want to look into investing in:

1) AR and AK magazines.
2) Burkha shops in Afghanistan.
3) Companies that publish those Tax Shelters for Dummies books.
4) Iranian aerospace firms.
5) English-to-Chinese business dictionaries.

On the other hand, if you have anything tied up in coal company stocks, domestic drilling operations, or Taiwanese or Israeli real estate, you might want to get out while the gettin' is good.

Even better than a President...

...we appear to have elected a superhero!

Barack a-ah
Savior of the Universe!
Barack a-ah
He'll save every one of us

(Seemingly there is no reason for these extraordinary intergalactical upsets)
(Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha)
(What's happening Barack?)
(Only General Colin Powell, formerly at State Department, has provided any explanation)

Barack a-ah
He's a miracle

(This morning's unprecedented solar eclipse is no cause for alarm)

Barack a-ah
King of the impossible

He's for every one of us
Spread wealth to every one of us
He save with a mighty hand
Every man, every woman
Every child, with a mighty
Barack

(Senator Clinton, Barack Obama approaching.)
(What do you mean Barack Obama approaching? Open fire! All weapons! Dispatch war rocket Ajax to bring back his body)

Barack a-ah
(Obama's alive!)

Barack a-ah
He'll save every one of us

Just a man
With a man's courage
You know he's
Nothing but a man
And he can never fail
No one but the pure at heart
May find the Golden Grail
...Oh..Oh........Oh..Oh ................

(Barack, Barack, I love you, but we only have four years to save the Earth!)

EDITED TO ADD: Wow, reading around the intertubes this morning, I'm actually starting to feel sorry for Barry (even more than I already felt sorry for whoever was going to wind up with a key to the Augean Stables and a garden trowel.) There is a large slice of his constituency that is going to feel betrayed if he doesn't walk to the inauguration across the Reflecting Pool in the Mall.

Remembering the right parts of history.

Wall Street can have a stock market crash all by itself, but it takes ham-handed government intervention to create a Great Depression.

Now that the Lightbringer has Ascended...

...and we're all ready to start taxing our way to prosperity in a few months (If you plan on realizing any capital gains, better do it before the next Congress gets seated!) let's look around the country to see what great strides in freedom and assorted other boneheadery happened at the ballot box...

Voters in Massachusetts voted to decriminalize possession of less than an ounce of marijuana. They may have actually been partaking of the herb in line at the polls, because they also voted against a proposition to first halve, and then eliminate the state's confiscatory income tax.

Voters in Colorado agreed that babies are cute, but blastocysts are invisible, and besides, it's hard to extend Constitutional rights to free speech to something that doesn't even have mouthparts yet. Me? I still think life begins at 40, so you kids stay offa my lawn. I mean it.

Floridians and Arizonans are still worried about who their neighbors might marry.

A state lottery was approved in Arkansas, using the usual selling point that all the funds will be used for education. I'm generally in favor of a voluntary tax, especially one that weighs heavily on optimists and idiots, but if they ever actually do use the money from these things on schools, it must be to buy more dodge balls and not things like, oh, Probability & Statistics textbooks.

Finally, the denizens of the Upper Left Coast voted to allow people to check out with dignity, provided that they are officially diagnosed with less than six months to live. The rest of us will still be stuck knotting half-hitches into bed sheets.

Awesome!

I have apparently been trained at Shadow Army Headquarters!

I was counting the factual errors, but ran out of fingers at about the two-minute mark and couldn't get my 5.11 Tactical boots off in time to catch up.

Ah, well... In Nu-Perfect America, perception is reality, right?

Your tax dollars at work...

...driving the economy. Bribing the voters. Raising the dead.

Overheard in the Hall:

RX: "Caroline Kennedy says this has been the cleanest campaign ever."

Me: "A Kennedy wouldn't know clean politics if they drowned in it."

Indexed.

A dedicated reader apparently put together an alphabetical index to The Arms Room, even sorting the Sunday Smiths by model number. That's awesome!

I need to convert it to html...

"I learned it from watching you, Dad!"

Berkeley Breathed, artist and creator of the increasingly less-focussed comic strip Opus (aka Bloom County III: The Search For Royalties), explains its demise in Sunday's paper as being caused by the mean political tenor of the nation, and... um... "snark":

"Berkeley goes on to discuss how the 24/7 “all snark, all the time” culture of the 24/7 media, coupled by its simultaneous political correctness bothers him immensely."

Ah. And here Bloom County, which was my generation's Doonesbury, had been so above the fray, never mocking or poking fun at political figures or stereotyping various demographics. (This is me, rolling my eyes.)

I'd say "If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen," but it feels weird to say it to a guy standing there with a flamethrower in his mitts.

Weekend earworm...

This is the Coldplay tune I haven't been able to get out of my noggin.

.405 Winchester vs. .45-70 Government

This was an interesting question that popped up in search terms, and I thought it was worth discussion.

The .405 Winchester is a pretty serious big game cartridge, intended for Winchester's Model 1895 lever-action rifle. Designed from the ground up as a smokeless powder round, it is just short of being considered a real dangerous game cartridge by virtue of the fact that all commercial loadings for it use a 300-grain .412" bullet, which is a little lacking in weight and sectional density for stopping the charge of the largest African game (although T.R. laid out lion with the round...) It should be more than adequate for anything that walks, crawls, or flies on the North American continent, although I wonder why a caliber deemed insufficient for dispatching dangerous game in Africa is considered okey-dokey for the minivan-with-fangs that is the Alaskan brown bear...

The .45-70 is hampered by the fact that the first rifle chambered for the loading was the Trapdoor Springfield. As a result, anything you buy from the Big Three (Remington, Winchester, and Federal) is going to be throttled back so as not to turn Paw-paw's floptop into a pipe bomb. The stuff I keep around the house as fodder for my M1873 Springfield offers a 300gr unjacketed bullet meandering out the muzzle at something less than 1400fps, for less muzzle energy than today's most adventurous handgun loadings. In a modern rifle, such as a Marlin 1895, however, truly vigorous ammunition from Buffalo Bore is available, and in a Ruger No.1, you are free to handload items that will kill on one end and maim on the other.

If you have to pick just one of the two to sledge down really big critters, I'd go for the .45-70 and a modern rifle, to take advantage of the really scary stuff available from the boutique ammo companies.

You get a lot more style points for a .405 Winchester, though...