Sigh.

There's no sport in mocking Mark Morford. It's like beating up the 60-lb. asthmatic kid with the coke-bottle glasses or hunting dairy cattle with a scoped big game rifle; he's the bunny slope of snark targets. Still, sometimes one has to at least go through the motions for form's sake.

Here, everybody's favorite shrieking hysteric is describing me, or thinks he is, as he confidently puts out a BOLO for the American Gun Owner:

"You’re a scared white person, almost certainly male. You do not live in a major city, or near a university or intellectual hub of any note, nor have you ever traveled very far from your home town, much less out of state or anywhere further than, say, Mexico. Once. And that was enough.

You do not read complicated books. You do not like new or weird things. You watch lots of TV, mostly Fox News, which rejoices in showing you endless images of angry foreigners and minorities in pain: tear gas explosions, fights in the streets, looting, this time involving sad, small-town black people in Ferguson, all of them protesting the acquittal of that murderous white cop."

Let's see... Wrong-ish, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong, and wrong.

Wow, Mark, that was nearly wrong in every particular! It bordered on fractally wrong, in that every little piece, taken by itself, was as wrong as the whole. The only thing you got right is that I am, in fact, a cracker. This is fast becoming the Left's replacement for Original Sin; a thing for which one frantically spends time in atonement, lest one's conviction be doubted.

Now, I ask you, isn't there a word you Progressive sorts use for ignorant yahoos who are frightened of strawman caricatures of their opponents?

Bigotry.

Bigotry.

Incisive, nuanced political commentary.

Remember, kids! It's not _______ when we do it!
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Gratuitous Gun Pr0n #117...

Smith & Wesson Model 21-4 Thunder Ranch Special. Bought new back in '04 or '05 when they first hit the market. I have the wood-and-glass display case, too. At least, I think that's what's in the cardboard box that came with the gun; I've never opened it to find out.

I cannot believe that some marketing genius at Smith took what was an ideal formula for a big-bore carry revolver, a round-butt taper-barrel N-frame M&P, and fruited it up with that gold leaf logo and a "display case". Mine got shoved into a kydex holster the day it came out of the box.

Around SoBro...

Getting late in the year for him to be without his scarf and earmuffs.

Someone buy the AP a clue.

"Exchange student's death tests 'stand your ground'" trumpets the AP headline, except I looked all through the story and there was nobody standing any ground anyplace. While the defendant is claiming "Stand Your Ground" as his defense, his case seems weak in regards to the "He's Coming Right For Us" prerequisite.

The version of the events alleged in both the news story* and the charges being brought against the shooter is that Homeowner Dude, tired of a string of burglaries and petty thefts from his garage, put a purse in the garage, left the door partially open, and gunned down the little miscreant that came along and grabbed it.

Wyoming Montana law is pretty clear about a homeowner having the right to use lethal force to defend him- or herself from an intruder, but this is a tough case to paint in a self-defense light, especially when the prosecution claims that "(d)ays before, Kaarma had told a woman that his house had been burglarized twice and he had been waiting up nights to shoot an intruder." Wyoming won't even let you do that to deer unless you're legally blind, in a wheelchair, or have a special license as enumerated in W.S. § 23-3-304(d)(iv). Montana won't even let you do what he did to a deer:

Baiting
• It is illegal for anyone to hunt or attempt to hunt by the aid of or with the use of any bait, salt lick, trap, snare or set gun.
• Baiting shall mean the placing, exposing, depositing, distributing, or scattering of food sources or salt so as to constitute a lure or attraction.

So far, this case is shaping up to illustrate a couple of important points:

• Your property is not a free-fire zone, Stand Your Castle or whatever to the contrary. You're going to be buying whatever that bullet hits, so you'd better make sure it's something you can afford to shoot.


• If you run around telling everybody how eager you are to shoot those so-and-sos, you can't get all butthurt when a prosecutor is standing there telling a jury that you're a bloodthirsty kook who was just itching to shoot those so-and-sos.

[EDIT: I have no idea where the Wyoming stuff came from when this case took place in Missoula, MT. Sorry. Total brain fart on my part.)

*For the purposes of this editorial commentary, we'll pretend they bear at least a tangential relationship to the facts.

Bunker Clearing...

Well, my throat is no longer sore and I no longer feel like I've been kicked in the soft palate by a mule. Temp's gone, joints and muscles aren't sore, cervical lymph nodes no longer tender...

On the other hand, the remaining germs in my head seemed to make a fighting retreat from my immune system and dig in for a last stand in my nasal passages. About the middle of the afternoon yesterday, I became one of the world's leading exporters of mucus. It's tapered off greatly this morning and is no longer coming out in festive colors, so everything should be good and copacetic by nightfall, but that was really unpleasant.
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It's 1968 All Over Again...

...with noisy protestors and NASA projects vying for air time.

Despite the protests in New York being dangerously close to the flagpole, NBC cut away from the Today show to live coverage of the Delta IV Heavy lift off from Cape Canaveral, lofting NASA's Orion spacecraft on its maiden voyage. This is the first step of a proposed Mars mission.


I was torn. On the one hand, I was happy to see spaceflight getting some attention from the hairspray-'n'-teleprompter crowd, even if their awed cooing sometimes seemed disturbingly like the monkeys circling the monolith at the beginning of '01.

On the other hand, this is launching a rocket to orbit: Dammit, by now this was supposed to be as routine and uneventful as pulling the family car out of the garage. I should have been watching this video from a Hilton on the moon.
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Run out of town by the fail.

Mayors pardoning tofurkey, a ban on plastic grocery bags and a tax on paper ones, awful parking, inadequate police response to independent urban wealth reallocation assessors: Gay Cynic has decided to stop worrying about downtown Seattle and learn to love the 'burbs...
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Things I Didn't Know I Needed...

Ehrmagerd! I accidentally stumbled across this site the other night, searching for I have no idea what, frankly, and I'm just gobsmacked with the cool stuff. It's almost a certainty that Roseholme Cottage will, at some point, wind up with an Australopithecus or H. habilis skull on a bookshelf.

Unfortunately, there's no room for the short-faced bear skeleton anywhere in the house, which is good because it costs, like, nineteen grand.

rawr.

(Forget mammoths; we need to bring back the short-faced bear. Get some positive pressure on the old H. sap. genome again, or at least keep kids healthy and in shape by running around to avoid these things at the school bus stop.)
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QotD: Dude, Seek Help Edition

"One of us has an unhealthy obsession with guns. It isn't me."

Mike Williamson disassembles the hysterical (in pretty much any sense of the word you care to use it) antigun screed from the op-ed page of the Tallahassee Democrat. With an axe.
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Remember, it's not __________ when we do it!

Spend any time on the left half of the internet, and you will soon learn that all evil in the world is caused by corporatedollars, and corporatedollars come from this hideous binary entity called "Koch Brothers" which is like a cross between Emperor Palpatine and the pale dudes with the dreadlocks from the hypothetical Matrix sequel.

What the Koch Brothers does is drop money all over the place, in jurisdictions where it doesn't even live, and thwart honest progressive causes by using that money to support Neocon Teabagger causes like fighting minimum wage laws, supporting lower taxes, promoting gay marriage, and approving dope legalization.

All the above makes it extra funny to see the way Progressives are practically decorating their cupcakes over the effect of outside money on the I-594 outcome in Washington. Apparently Oppressor Cishet White Male Billionaires acting like they're entitled to squirt their corporatedollars wherever they want is only bad if they're in the wrong political party. Your guys buy votes; our guys engage in philanthropy.
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*blink, blink*

@TamSlick Then find a different dictionary. I test a dictionary before buying by looking for words not usually found in one.
— Bruce Hammond (@BruceHammond6) December 3, 2014

Either this guy has a sense of humor drier than Hawkeye Pierce's ideal martini, or my soul hurts.
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Stop trying to chase the facts off our side.

I like being on Team Right* as long as I don't have to cross-enroll on Team Stupid, so I cringe when folks ostensibly on my side grab some obviously badly 'shopped straw man infographic bogusly attributed to MomsDemand or whoever and spread it about the TweetBooks as though it were legit.

And when you call them on it, they reply with, "Well, it seems like something they'd say!"

No, Ace. No it does not. Congratulations, you just failed the Ideological Turing Test. And besides, as Miguel put it:

"And please, stop making excuses as why you decided to be intellectually lazy and rather than make sure the meme is unadulterated BS, decided it would be more fun just to pass it along. The “it articulates their position accurately” or any half-bit sophomoric/pseudo Jesuitical argument: Lies are lies dear Bubba and using the “Mommy, but Timmy does it too.” is not a proper response for an adult defending an obvious lie."

Look, pretend you would actually know bad graphic design if it bit you on the ass and ask yourself : "Would the side that has a virtually unlimited ad budget and a statistical majority of the artsy-fartsy types on its team turn out something that looks like it was done in MS Paint during the commercial breaks of a WWF match?" Did you know that there's no entry for "credulous" in the dictionary?



*...and I'm using "right" as the synonym for "correct" here, as opposed to the current political use which is as a synonym for "lies awake at night obsessing about gay marriage".

The little things...

When Stanley Kubrick was working on the set design of 2001: A Space Odyssey, one of his driving concerns was that the film not look "dated" to audiences in only ten or twenty years. Hence, by way of flat panes of frosted glass carefully rear-projected with custom graphics slides, all the "computers" on the space station and the Discovery appear as flat-screen color monitors, a technology which did not even exist at the time the movie was filmed and which didn't become common until about the turn of the millennium (fittingly). By contrast, the star-spanning Empire that can build world-destroying artificial moonlets is stuck with dinky monochrome CRTs...
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Tab Clearing...

• Airplane pictures!


• Shooting Illustrated sweepstakes. Grand prize is an Aimpoint Micro T2.


• Via NJT, a .50 BMG Bushhamster kaBOOM! The blood spatters all over the scope are a nicely sphincter-clenching touch.

Point Counterpoint

Lights and lasers? I'm a fan.

Kevin at Misfires And Light Strikes had a counterpoint to the harshing that I and others were doing on the Taurus Curve. I think he's got some valid points; I mean, I'm a big fan of having a laser and light on my carry gun and have been using both for years now. I look forward to a time when more guns are designed to implement them right out of the box and I really believe that to be a trend of the future.

However, especially with a pocket-size .380 like the Curve, a handgun is essentially a reactive weapon, frequently only drawn after the user has realized that things have gone wrong. In order to be useful in a situation like that, any doohickeys on the pistol need to be activated merely by grabbing the gun; a button out on the frame in front of the trigger guard might as well be in a lockbox in some village in Azerbaijan for all the odds that you'll remember to hit it between the first and second syllables of "OH$#!+"
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Mini Gun

Once upon a time, the only way to get a compact gun in a service caliber was to buy a full-size pistol and send it off to a gunsmith to get it cut down into something smaller. Charlie Kelsey's Devel customs based on Smith & Wesson autos were some of the most famous examples of the breed.

Purely by coincidence, both are examples from the first year of production of their respective models: 1999 for the CS9 and 1983 for the 469.

In 1983, Smith went factory with the concept, releasing the Model 469, a shorter version of their full-size alloy-framed 459 service pistol. It was a 12-shot 9mm in as small a package as you could find at the time.

12+1 shots on the left, 7+1 shots on the right: The downside of Hogue rubber grips. Also note the difference in the safeties on the left-hand side of the slide.

Aping the ASPs and Devels, it even featured a spur and checkering on the front of the trigger guard. It used a slimmer safety and slide release to keep the width down, as well as flat, 3-piece Delrin grips to keep the width as narrow as possible, as can be seen in the comparison with the much-newer Chiefs Special 9. (Also visible in the comparison photo is how much S&W had simplified the machining on the slide in a desperate, failed attempt to keep their traditional metal-framed autos cost-competitive at the turn of the Millennium. All those flat planes require a lot fewer machining steps than the rounded surfaces of the gun produced sixteen years earlier.)

Tall Tale...

So, Bobbi has this little collection of Magnetic Personalities finger puppets on the refrigerator that she picked up from lord only knows where: Albert Einstein, the Less Bad Roosevelt, and that favorite son of the Circle City, Kurt Vonnegut.

This morning I was getting a tasty beverage from the fridge when I noticed the absence of Theodore Roosevelt from his usual spot in the lineup. Somehow, TR had gotten jostled and slid from his position at the top right corner of the fridge all the way down to the bottom left corner*. And out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a large yellow tomcat noticing the 26th President and heading right for him! I quickly returned the little finger puppet to its proper place on the fridge.

And that's how I saved Teddy Roosevelt from a tiger.


*Coincidentally, a metaphor for my feelings about Teddy the more I studied the historical record.
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Shark not included.

Crimson Trace is having a Cyber Monday sale on their lasers and stuff; $20-$50 off and free ground shipping. If you want to attach the laser to a shark, you're on your own for the shark.
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Great...

Sore throat, achy joints, fever... I think it's readily apparent that I erred in not having already got a flu shot this year. Hopefully Bobbi's vaccination is good for this strain.

This is so uncool. I've got stuff I have to do.
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Tab Clearing...

• Hopkins & Allen, Forehand & Wadsworth, Merwin Hulbert...


• Yes, this is the closest Walmart.


• Got TQ?