Coincidence and Karma

A couple weeks ago I was driving to the gun store, listening to NPR, like ya do. I'd turned on the car in the middle of an interview on All IN, and it was quickly apparent that the interviewee was a veteran JSOC dude, and it sounded like he was pitching a book.

The interview was interesting enough that I wound up sitting there in the parking lot at Indy Arms for five minutes or so, waiting for the commercial break so I could hear the announcer give the old  "...we have to go to break, but we'll be back with more from..." because I wanted to read this dude's book, whoever he was.

The interviewee turned out to be CSM(R) Tom Satterly, touring to promote his book, All Secure: A Special Operations Soldier's Fight to Survive on the Battlefield and the Homefront. I purchased it the next day on Kindle and finished it in three sittings. Definitely a recommended read.

The coincidence part comes from a Facebook message I got from a friend just a couple days after finishing the book, leading me to this post, and this fundraiser:

Giving Back, LLC is a veteran-founded organization dedicated to providing top quality hunting and outdoor recreational opportunities for our heroes in uniform and their families. I have negotiated a lease for approximately 1000 acres in SW Virginia, however, in the process of getting everything to this point, it has depleted all of my available financial resources. Now it is up to me to provide equipment and management services for the property, and this is where the GoFundMe campaign comes in. I’ve been able to fund everything to date on my own, but this last little hurdle is standing in my way, and one we need to get over in order to make this dream a reality. 

In order for this lease to provide the type of outdoor recreational activities worthwhile for the therapeutic and cognitive rehabilitation we desire to provide, it will require equipment and substantial work to create an atmosphere conducive to supporting such important mental health therapies. These are not simple “feel good” things, or “fun activities” for our heroes, but merely the vessel by which meaningful healing can and does take place. We pride ourselves in being able to accommodate any disability, in conjunction with our partner organizations, in order to include every member of every family participating in an event. 

This property and project will be self-sustaining in terms of funding, if we can get through this next critical phase. This isn’t just a feel good thing to do, but something with real results that we have seen work firsthand, which is why we have partnered with veterans groups and nonprofit organizations to bring all of these resources to our men and women in uniform. After years of dealing with the horrors most of us never have to see, we help our heroes return to a sense of normalcy using proven therapeutic modalities, and by incorporating licensed mental health professionals at every opportunity. 

I am always happy to discuss the details of my plan with donors or potential donors so you understand exactly where each and every penny will be spent. Thank you.

Sean is legit and so is his cause. If you can help a friend, please do.
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Cats and lenses and stability...

Last year, when I was doing some experimenting with older DSLRs, I snapped this picture of Huck perched on his tree in the living room, using a Canon 40D. The only illumination was some sun filtering through cracks in the drapes behind my right-hand shoulder and a 60W-ish incandescent bulb in the floor lamp behind my left shoulder.

It popped up in my Facebook memories yesterday and a friend asked "Ooh, what lens did you use for this? Great subject isolation without doing it in post."

So I dug around and found the EXIF data: EF 50mm f/1.4 USM, shot wide open, 1/30th @ ISO 800.

The 50mm f/1.4 tends to be a little soft when shot wide open, and the lack of image stabilization contributes here, since hand-holding at 50mm lens at 1/30th of a second violates the old rule of thumb about not letting your exposure time be longer than your focal length. This all shows, here. You can't pixel-peep and count the whiskers even on the parts of Huck that are in focus...

But I still like this picture of him. And the f/1.4 aperture made it a picture of just him, and vanished the drapes just a few feet behind him into a smooth blur.
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No, seriously, this timeline is weird...

The war between the No-Fap and Hentai Weeb factions of the internet Right would be impossible to explain to someone in 1989. https://t.co/GarBsRKXkM

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) January 4, 2020

It's complicated...

Paraphrasing from a discussion with a Facebook friend who is nearing retirement yet whose MOS puts him in the likely-to-be-deployed category yesterday, regarding the Soleimani takedown:

Him: "From a moral standpoint I’m dancing a jig, but from a policy and prudence standpoint I’m concerned." 

Me: "Sums up my feelings. The dude was the next thing to a walking, talking Bond villain. But he was also a very senior official in a sovereign state and playing these kind of tit-for-tat games gets dicey. 

Your average social media common-tater (thanks, Claude!) doesn't seem to realize that this is the de facto equivalent of some country deciding we'd messed with them too much and icing our VP. Are we going to sit on our hands and say "Gosh, we're deterred. Sorry!"?"

On the other hand...

All geopolitical considerations aside, the irony of Soleimani getting cratered on Route Irish is worth noting.

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) January 4, 2020

I wonder how far the nearest historical EFP ambush site is from his smoking crater?

Live by the shaped charge, die by the shaped charge?
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This timeline is weird...

Imagine trying to explain this to someone in the Eighties...or the Fifties...

Iranian Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani, who was killed in a U.S. airstrike in Iraq early Friday, wasn’t just an infamous terrorist organizer and one of the regime’s most powerful officials — he was also one of President Trump’s social media antagonists. 

International experts have long known of Soleimani as the leader of Iran’s elite Quds Force and the shadow commander of proxy conflicts across the Middle East, but many Americans first heard of the general in 2018, when he started arguing with Trump via memes on Instagram.

Commander of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (#IRGC) #Quds Force Major General Qassem Soleimani responded to #US President Donald Trump’s announcement that ‘sanctions are coming’ with a Game of Thrones-inspired meme of his ownhttps://t.co/336UFrTL8E pic.twitter.com/5uh1qtQPMB

— Tasnim News Agency (@Tasnimnews_EN) November 3, 2018

Hang Up and Drive

(Also, don't video yourself while getting your crime on.)

I was frankly surprised it wasn't a Mustang or Camaro.

EDIT: LOL. It was an '09 Nissan Versa SL, and he topped it out at a buck oh two, which probably took every one of the little 1.8 liter motor's 122 ponies.

I'm not surprised that it went inverted when he overcooked the offramp. Between the tall and narrow proportions and the skinny tires, it looks like could tip over while standing still in a parking lot.
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Security Theater

The first couple times I flew with guns, I borrowed a Pelican and some locks from Shootin' Buddy, but along about 2012 or so, I got off my butt and dug out my SKB pistol cases and bought a couple of Master Lock padlocks.

I made sure they were bright pink, so you could see them and so the ticket counter folks would know they weren't TSA locks. (You're not supposed to use TSA locks because any rando with a TSA key can get in.)

Then I took that lockpicking class from Uncensored Tactical... I sat up late on New Year's Eve, surfing the net and idly fiddling with my practice locks to keep my hands busy. When I got bored with my practice locks, I went and grabbed the locks I'd been using to secure thousands of dollars of pistols, carbines, and optics while traveling...

I mean, I knew that was going to happen, but I was still dismayed at the ease of it... Your basic Master Lock padlocks are pathetically easy to pick. I single-pin picked them on my first three attempts, totaling barely two minutes.

Now, realistically speaking, getting the locks picked on a case being transported by an airline is winning-the-lotto levels of unlikely. Even if someone was going to try and get into your stuff, they're not going to James Bond it; they're going to brute force their way in with bolt cutters or the like.

Still, I happened to have this set of Master Lock Magnums lying around unused. On the r/lockpicking chart, they're only one step up, difficulty-wise, from the little 136's I was using, but even that's a reassurance. I was able to get one to pop with a few minutes of diligent picking and a couple frustrating false starts; by comparison, I could pick the pink locks almost accidentally.
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SHOT Show on the horizon...

I'm megadosing vitamin C, stocking up on hand sanitizer, and have ordered comfy insoles and some extra memory cards for the cameras. I'm also watching the classic Manny Mansfield video to get in the mood:



Like most trade shows, when you register for a media pass, all the companies and their PR flacks get your email address, which means I've been cleaning the email inbox out with a snow shovel for the past month.

The worst part is that it's not specialized, so I'm getting notices for all kinds of stuff I could care less about. Precision Rifle accessories? Look, not only am I too poor to care about Precision Rifle, even if I had that kind of dough, I suck at math and my attention span is way too short. Also, while I could be talked into going and sitting in a tree stand for a few hours, there is a ton of esoteric Fudd stuff that holds no fascination for me. I dig that some people can get into knock-down drag-out fights over camo patterns and different brands of bottled deer piss, but that ain't my jam.

The weirdest emails are because at least one PR dude is not only in the gun biz but also reps in the music industry, apparently, and I get spammed with those emails, too. This just hit the inbox last night:

"DON McLEAN JOINS STYX, BLUE ÖYSTER CULT, WARRANT, LITA FORD, WALTER TROUT, FRANK MARINO & MAHOGANY RUSH AND MORE FOR ROCK LEGENDS CRUISE IX SAILING FEBRUARY 18–22, 2021"

Sponsored by Geritol!

Man, you know you're on the final glide slope of a career when you're playing the cruise ship circuit with whoever's calling themselves "Styx" these days.
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Tab Clearing...

• Is your brain just making magenta up?


• "Epistemic Crisis": From my hotel room hobby of alternating nights watching Fox News and MSNBC, I agree that it is obvious that Americans don't agree on basic facts any more. It's like watching news reporting from alternate timelines. That's troubling.


• The original DOS version of Accolade's game Test Drive is playable in your browser. That's a lot cheaper than this vintage, unopened copy on eBay, and you don't even need a 5.25" floppy drive to play it!


• Buying guns in London with Bitcoin via Snapchat...


• This is the article on Jane Jacobs that made me want to read her book Dark Age Ahead.

Servants of the Party

Chinese media has been issued a new code of journalistic ethics:

According to the code, journalists must "serve the people wholeheartedly" and be loyal to "the Party, the motherland, and the people." 

Reporters must ensure they have the correct mindset when covering issues relating to domestic affairs, with the code requesting that they "persist in arming the mind with Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era."

For some reason, "arming the mind with Xi Jinping thought" kicks my gigglebox right over.
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It's that time again!

Now is the time for all good pedants to point out that there was no year zero and hence this is the last year of the previous decade and not the first year of a new one.

While this may be technically correct (and for a pedant, that's the best kind of correct) most normal humans refer to decades by the digit in the tens column of the year.

So, here at VFTP Command Central, I'm going to milk that fact for some easy blogfodder for the next few days, in a desultory and intermittent fashion.
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QotD: Smith & Wesson Rules Edition

ZCQOTD: "Actually? The only double-action #Colt revolvers that even kinda interest me have loading gates.#handejector4lyf#yallscylindersturnbackwards#ventribsarewhitewallsandcurbfeelersforrevolvers"
😛#coltpython #meh

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) January 1, 2020

It's like the Jets and the Sharks out here today...
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Overheard in the Office...

ZCQOTD: "All screwdrivers are good for stabbing people if you're enthusiastic enough about it."

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) January 1, 2020

Retrotech...

The 35mm Canon EOS-1N lacks all the charm associated associated with using an MMM ("metal, mechanical, manual") 35mm film camera like my Nikon FM2n, but it has one advantage: It uses all the EF-mount autofocus lenses from my work cameras. As a matter of fact, with the battery grip mounted, it handles and operates exactly like my EOS-1Ds Mark II.

I'm gonna grab some T-Max P3200, and maybe bust a roll or two of Natura 1600 out of the freezer and drag this along to Vegas for SHOT. I would love to shoot some nighttime film on the strip.
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Counsel for Rough Times

"Always keep a grappling hook sewn into your underwear." #lifehacks
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Maranello Drift

Not all heroes wear capes! https://t.co/JroRuThYd1

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) January 1, 2020

The Perils of Social Media Fact-Checking

I don't normally do "guest posts" on VFTP. After all, it's weird letting someone else write in your diary. But my friend Jon Hauptman, HMFIC at PHLster holsters and half of the podcasting team at The Guns Guide to Liberals and one of the smartest dudes I know, wrote a post on Facebook the other day that I asked to copy here.

It was a thoughtful piece on how, in an attempt to mitigate the spread of inflammatory and divisive "fake news" stories, the social media giant's fact checking process was going to have the opposite effect as the one intended, and widen the rifts it was hoped to mend.

He went one better than letting me copypasta the FB post, and went and polished it up & sent it to me via email. Take it away, Jon:

      "I’ve been noticing a new invasive, interrupting, and patronizing feature implemented by the do-gooders over at Facebook which attempts to screen posts and alert users to the potential that they’re viewing content which could be classified as misleading or “Fake News.” The clumsy implementation, at this time of launch, gives me the impression that, at best, this is a superficial attempt to “do something,” while utterly misunderstanding the how’s and why’s of people’s motivation to share and consume content (something which seems like it should be entirely within their comprehension, given their position as a nexus of information sharing and personal data harvesting). Combined with their choice of fact-checking affiliate (Snopes, about which I have no personal opinion, other than being aware that they’re not universally trusted), I’m left with the impression that Facebook’s implementation of this suffers from some amount of monoculture and wishful thinking. 

  This rant is inspired by my first encounter with the new system, in which it identified an entirely innocuous meme related to the Die Hard movie as an attempt to spread false information. 

“Fake news,” at the root, is an information literacy problem, not an information delivery problem. If it’s treated as the latter rather than the former, this kind of ridiculous false positive will be inevitable and rampant. And it’s already causing me to have zero faith in the process behind their information verification (and neither they, nor Snopes, have that kind of credibility to burn in the circles which will inevitably be fact-checked the most). Although, to be entirely fair to Facebook, if they’re under some kind of pressure (self imposed or otherwise) to curb the spread of fake news, the primary tools at their disposal are ones of information delivery, so it’s not that hard for them to kludge this shoddy fix together. However, it’s still myopic and I expect it to be dramatically counterproductive.  

Fact checking, unfortunately, isn’t what we think it is. Despite the superficial appearance, fact checking isn’t a helpful tool for determining the truth and for forming an accurate opinion. Instead, it’s actually an in/out group filter which segregates people by belief and value, while allowing each group to believe they hold the Factual High-Ground, and to claim any subsequent moral position which proceeds from being “factually correct.” 

Facts don’t change people’s minds. If you don’t believe me, just Google, “facts don’t change people’s minds,” and review the plethora of articles and studies about this. I don’t necessarily expect you to change your mind (of course) but at least be prepared to argue against an enormous body of evidence, while performatively proving my point. 

“Fact’s don’t change people’s minds,” is a substantially different assertion than, “Facts don’t matter.” Facts matter to our BELIEFS. Our beliefs are largely constructed around our feelings and values. And then, we seek out the facts which support those beliefs. In the event that a mind is changed by facts, that’s because that mind VALUES a new set of facts over the ones it already has.  

If a set of facts has led someone to negative consequences, they might feel anxious, angry, frustrated, or confused. Those negative feelings result in an evaluation of values, beliefs, and supporting facts. Subsequently, a new set of facts is sought and collected, resulting in positive feelings. People get a dopamine hit when they learn something or recognize a pattern. Most facts gathered by people are taken on board in order to fit the patterns they already have in place. Or, often more accurately, we all have cognitive biases which look for and enjoy facts which fit our patterns. It’s usually a decent coarse reality check which helps keep us motivated on the various paths of progress surrounding our values and beliefs. At worst, it’s a dangerous set of cognitive blinders (but, that’s why information literacy and discipline are important).  

It feels good to be right and it feels bad to be wrong, and being right and wrong (in most of our lives) has to do with recognizing patterns and behaving in ways which generate desired results, more than they have to do with objective correctness. People are literally happy to do things “wrong” for long periods of time, until a time comes when their beliefs and values severely clash with a more “right” way of doing things. People feel, first. Then, they believe. Then, they gather facts to support the beliefs. If you question or deny their facts, that’s a proxy attack on The Self. 
This is why fact checking is counterproductive. 

Confronting people, in a moment of their enthusiasm and dopamine reception, to tell them that this thing they already believe and are excited to share is actually, in fact, false, according to an authority they don’t already recognize, is a Backfire Effect generator. (Google Backfire Effect.) Frankly, I’m concerned that this multibillion dollar company with access to all the data and experts they could possibly want, which sits as a primary communication medium between us and the world, fails to understand and recognize this fundamental human behavior. And that obliviousness makes me very concerned that they simply lack the ability to execute this properly without making the problem of fake news, disintegrating consensus reality, and polarization IMMEDIATELY worse.  

They’re making the mistake of thinking that facts have anything at all to do with what people believe. And that people have any tolerance at all for being told what is true (especially by source they don’t value as an authority). This revelation of the 2016 election is embarrassingly old news and the inability to see the connection between that and efforts to mechanically mitigate the spread of fake news belies an irresponsible obliviousness, regardless of how well intentioned it may be.
Here’s the War Game I think they should have played over at Facebook before implementing this, and what I would have brought up in a meeting, were I unlucky enough to be employed in that kind of monoculture: 

My main concern is doing this wrong, based on how people evaluate information in terms of their pre existing beliefs and biases. There’s no way for this screening strategy to be perfect and unbiased enough to garner the necessary credibility among those who (according to Facebook) need it the most. And every single mistake (or anything which could be interpreted as error or bias) will be viewed as representative of the system and rife in the implementation. This system has to walk an incredible tightrope of being entirely correct and completely unbiased, while appearing as such to the people who are most inclined to view it as the opposite. But, it’s like Facebook somehow has no idea that some significant number of Facebook users aren’t going to extend them the benefit of the doubt and evaluate this imposed fact checking in good faith. To them, both Facebook and any fact checking authority to which they appeal is ALREADY biased, and this imposition is additional proof of their ham-fisted or malevolent social engineering.
Even if there was a 100% perfectly neutral and unbiased fact checking organization. And even if Facebook's system had a perfectly neutral and unbiased filter for selecting content to be fact checked, people would still perceive it as biased. Given the degree to which we’re politically compartmentalized, liberals and conservatives will have far more exposure to their preferred content being subjected to fact checking filters. If you're in a X bubble, you'll see a lot of X content being fact checked and filtered. And even if there was some third party neutral audit which clearly showed equivalent fact checking was taking place, it will do basically nothing to change the perceptions of people who see their content of choice being "censored" constantly. And that's assuming a perfectly unbiased system. 

I’d be on the side of fact checking if facts actually had anything to do with what people believe. Given the relationship between values, beliefs, and facts, “fact checking” is values enforcement, even if it’s accidental. This is going to reveal itself to be a way to “check” people who believe unapproved facts, more than it’s a tool for improving the information diet."

Make up your minds!

Cognitive Dissonance: It's what's for dinner! https://t.co/Ll2t2yXNpS

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) December 31, 2019

Also, Shannon Watts was snarkily pointing out that Texas had just passed a law allowing guns in churches...without mentioning the incident to which that law was passed in response.

With Shannon it's hard to distinguish between actual malice and willful ignorance.

By the way, I had to use a screen shot instead of embedding the actual tweet, because just this morning I discovered that I'd somehow leveled up in Twitter!

I don't recollect any interaction in the past, but maybe she's an obsessive self-googler* and stumbled across this post?


*Self-googling is the first step on the road to being a lolcow, people. Don't do it.

This timeline is weird.

"TradCath Furry Space Weebs" is a phrase I honestly never thought I'd find myself typing before today.

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) December 30, 2019

The internet was a mistake.
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Muppets, the lot of them...

“No Country for Old Men”, Anton Chigurh https://t.co/04W9WmPpdX

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) December 30, 2019