Good timing...

Looks like Bobbi and I got the leaves up and bagged just in time.

Record lows and record snows for the date and the month here in flyover country.
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Contact.

I just got an email from instagram letting me know I have unread messages.

Of course I have unread messages. I'm only on instagram a couple times a week to post a picture of my lunch or a gun I'm shooting. I don't use the messages on Instagram. Similarly, I have no idea how many "DM's", or whatever they're called, I have unread on Twitter. And my blog's FB page? I don't check the messages there, either. I keep meaning to turn them off, because Facebook nags you if you don't immediately respond to every message sent to your page.

I have a phone number and an email address, both of which are perfectly cromulent ways to get in touch with me. If we're "friends" (god, I hate that Zuckerberg used that word to describe total strangers you barely interact with) on Facebook, Instant Messaging will get noticed, but if we're not, it won't. Instant Messages from people with whom you are not "friends" are hidden behind a tab I never go check.

Every goofy little social media platform tries to add its own little way of private one-on-one communication and it's annoying as dammit.
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Equality of Misery

The data speaks for itself: #Socialism destroys wealth pic.twitter.com/uiVjgUK0sL

— Prof. Steve Hanke (@steve_hanke) November 10, 2019

Beejesus...

I just wanted to use the internet gun nerd double pun in the post title, that's all.

Also, vz.61's are fun as dammit. I highly recommend one as a range toy, and not just because I'm goofy for anything .32 caliber. The semiauto ones are a little steep right now, but deals can be had if you shop around. I wonder how hard it would be to SBR mine?
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Tab Clearing...

• National Archive photos from Operation Urgent Fury.


• Interesting article on listening to people with whom you don't agree.


• The results of an auto hitting a horse-drawn buggy.

Wow.

Sweet zombie Jesus, I’ve said it before, but if there’s anything that will make you long for the raw technical competence of r/guns, /k/, or Arfcom gen disc, it’s the raging idiocy of anything gun-related on a general interest conservative blog.

Man, if that holster isn’t like a million-candlepower “DERP AHEAD” beacon, I don’t know what is.

Across the Milky Way, through the years...

I have always been interested in galactic archaeology, but I don't think this is what they meant.

Did you know that dinosaurs lived on the other side of the Galaxy? pic.twitter.com/ngGCAu0fYU

— Dr. Jessie Christiansen (@aussiastronomer) August 28, 2019

Another day, another...

It's trite to say that "Depression lies."

In my experience, depression doesn't lie, it's just that the truth is depressing.

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) November 8, 2019

Remix...

How fortunate that "Clinton" and "Warren" are both bisyllabic. This cover of my 2007 original still works!

Now look at that Warren, that's the way you do it
You play the class war on the ol' tv
That ain't campaignin', that's the way you do it
Health care for nothin' and your docs for free
Now that ain't campaignin', that's the way you do it
Lemme tell ya that gal ain't dumb
Maybe look righteous waggin' a finger
Sure to get a vote from some bum.

We gotta worry 'bout Middle East countries
Immigration and trade treaties
We gotta balance the fed'ral budget
And that don't play on soundbite tv.

See the little Warren with the earrings and the makeup
Yeah buddy that ain't her own dough
Givin' away other people's money
Always makes for a real good show.

We gotta worry 'bout Middle East countries
Immigration and trade treaties
We gotta balance the fed'ral budget
And that don't play on soundbite tv.

I shoulda learned to play th' Class War
I shoulda learned to court them bums
Look at that mama, she gonna promise free insurance
Votes? That's gonna get some.
And she's up there, what's that? Socialist noises?
Bangin' on the wealthy like Noam Chomsky
That ain't campaignin', that's the way you do it
Health care for nothin' and your docs for free.

We gotta worry 'bout Middle East countries
Immigration and trade treaties
We gotta balance the fed'ral budget
And that don't play on soundbite tv.

Now that ain't campaignin', that's the way you do it
You play the class war on the ol' tv
That ain't campaignin', that's the way you do it
Health care for nothin' and your docs for free
Health care for nothin' and docs for free.

Found on the internet...

...and before anybody gets assmad about it, yes, I've carried striker-fired pistols without manual safeties in the past and likely will again in the future. Heck, the decock-only Langdon Beretta I'm carrying doesn't have a manual safety. But anybody who gets cavalier about that is asking to be in the bottom half of that meme.
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Risk Management

At gun school, at night, shooting manufacturer-supplied striker-fired pistols from concealment had me really longing for a Gadget striker control device...or a DA trigger and a hammer.

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) November 7, 2019

Unless a low-light class outdoors is a standalone event that starts after sundown and you siesta your way through the day to prepare for it, it often comes after a day or half-day on the range.

It becomes super important to slow down and pay attention to your holstering when you are doing it repeatedly and you maybe can't visually confirm the absence of obstructions around your holster mouth. Is that shirt coming untucked? Tail of the cover garment snagged on something? Do you have toggles or drawstrings on a jacket you've pulled on when the night turned chilly? (Trick question on that last one, because you're not dumb and you cut that stuff off for safety. I've cut drawstrings off Kitanica and De'dbird jackets before, and the jackets still work fine.)

This is where the failsafe of something like a Gadget, DA hammer gun, or a manual safety is a big reassurance. Otherwise, you're left with "Just don't screw up" as Plan A, Plan B, and Plans C through Z inclusive.

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Rental

Put in about 300 miles on a Nissan Sentra rental the last couple days. On the one hand, it was a depressing little shitbox compared to my usual rides. On the other, it was remarkably fully featured (even if all the features felt cheap) and by seat of the pants feel probably featured a 0-60 under the ten second mark by maybe as much as a second or two, meaning that if you’re willing to boot it, you’ll not likely need to be worried about passing or merging.

I got home in the early evening and had to run a quick errand, so I grabbed the keys to the Mustang. Ambient temp was exactly fifty degrees, so I could have taken my chances dropping the top on the Zed Drei, but rolling the windows down on the 5.0 was an auditory treat.

The drive in the Mustang reminded me of the differences between normal cars and the cars I like: With the rental Sentra, if you booted the throttle hard, you'd generally be in front of normal traffic across an intersection. With the Mustang, if you boot the throttle hard in first or second gears, you're going to get tire smoke and the rear end wagging like the tail of a puppy happy to see you home.

Whupped.

Tired from gun school today.

On the upside, I got some time running a MRDS-equipped pistol with a light from concealment in low light conditions. We knocked off at about 9PM, and that makes a long range day,
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Sad.

I've been making an effort to get out of the house daily to try and take my mind off of depressing things for a bit. I made a point of dusting off the Ricoh GXR and its Leica M-mount A12 module this week. With the Voigtländer 40mm f/1.4 mounted, I get asked if it's a film camera a lot. (Then again, people ask that about the Hasselblad Lunar, which looks practically nothing like any film camera I've seen.)

Ricoh's cameras have an interface that is camera nerd friendly, almost as much so as the offerings from Fujifilm. I usually don't have to change much on the fly, though. I have the "Fn1" button set to toggle between color and monochrome, and I just power up the camera, give Fn1 a poke, and off I go...

Here, have something to smile about.

Dude's got moves.
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Brand Mishandling?

The real deal will be revealed on Nov. 17. https://t.co/XxnftKSoqh

— The Drive (@thedrive) October 25, 2019

There are two automotive nameplates in Detroit that don't owe their position in the automotive landscape to normal, rational marketing rules: Corvette and Mustang. They have unbroken lines going back to the early Fifties and mid Sixties, respectively, and seem to operate on a weird mixture of nostalgia, brand loyalty, mythos, and 'lifestyle branding' more akin to Harley-Davidson than anything else with four wheels.

Corvette has just made the transition to mid-engine, but that looks to have been handled deftly. Besides, they've been threatening a mid-engine 'Vette since the days of Duntov.

Ford's proposal to broaden the "Mustang" name to also include an electric SUV, though, has a chance of damaging the original pony car more than helping the new crossover. This is the goofiest thing Ford's done since inexplicably (and briefly) reviving the "500" model designator to replace the by then well-established Taurus moniker.

The closest they've come to this with the Mustang in the past was when they were planning on moving the fourth generation Mustang to a Mazda-sourced front wheel drive platform, the one that eventually hit the market as the Probe, and were only dissuaded by sacks of hate mail.
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Another one falters...

Kamala Harris, who was another media darling in the early innings of the campaign, seems to have peaked too soon. She's closing offices and laying off campaign staff in New Hampshire, supposedly to focus on a floundering Iowa campaign. I don't know how relieved to be about this. Her policies are among the more extreme, and a lot of people may have voted for her just so they could say they did...but she also carries a lot of baggage.

As things stand, the only Democratic candidates polling in double digits are three septuagenarians and Pete Buttigieg.
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*sad trombone*

I guess #Beto will have plenty of free time to come get my guns now, huh?

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) November 1, 2019

The Babylon Bee is in with the funniest hot take, as usual:

Beto Drops Out Of Race To Spend More Time Taking Guns From His Familyhttps://t.co/pL3zOuK9RS

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) November 1, 2019

How appropriative...

"At around the same time, in July 2017, complaints about how “absolutely…white” Anglo-Saxon scholarship was specifically alleged to be began to surface in radical-medievalist blogs. Adam Miyashiro, now an assistant professor of English at Stockton University in New Jersey and a self-described “product of the multiethnic mix of Asian and Polynesian peoples” in Hawaii, fretted online that the ISAS’s annual meeting in Honolulu that year featured papers mostly delivered by white (plus a few East Asian) scholars on specialist topics dealing with features of Old English philology and the strategic significance of battles against the Vikings. Miyashiro seemed particularly incensed that ISAS had rejected a paper of his own titled “Beowulf and its Others: Sovereignty, Race, and Medieval Settler-Colonialism.” According to Miyashiro’s proposed paper, Grendel, the monster that the hero Beowulf defeats in the poem, was actually “an indigenous person with a specific biopolitics.” Miyashiro’s paper “linked a non-European reading of Beowulf to the contemporary issues of white supremacy that plague Anglo-Saxon studies, and medieval studies more broadly.” In turning down his paper, Miyashiro argued, the ISAS had committed “erasure of the native.”"

Is this where I'm supposed to jump up and down and yell about cultural appropriation?
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Class Warfare...

Friend Staghounds sent me a link to this wide-ranging interview with Angelo Codevilla last Friday, and I've had it open in a tab ever since, trying to figure out an angle for a blog post. In the end, I'm going to avoid excerpting or editorializing, and instead suggest you read it in its entirety. It's pretty chewy.
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