Author: Kevin

Quote(s) of the Day and a Book Review

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Quote(s) of the Day and a Book Review

I’ve finished Neil Strauss’s Emergency: This Book Will Save Your Life. Some more memorable quotes from it:

As I was standing around the fire one evening, cooking fish that an instructor had taught me how to gut, I found myself immersed in a conversation with the marines.

A younger marine, Luke, was speaking. He had close-cropped black hair, thin lips, and small, sparkling brown eyes. “This is going out on a limb, but I think there will be a revolution in America in the next hundred years.”

“Where’s it going to come from?” I asked.

“Me,” he said without smiling. He paused, then explained. “If you ask anyone in the military, they hate the government. They have all these rules that hold us back and put our lives in danger.”

“If we followed the rules of engagement,” an enormous older marine named Dave added, “We’d be dead.”

—

Cogito ergo armatum sum — I think, therefore I am armed.

—

Of course, now that I’m stockpiling, the first thing all my friends will probably do when there’s a disaster is run to my house.

I suppose they’ll make an excellent source of protein.

Why do I keep making these jokes? Is there a half-truth somewhere in there?

I used to fear being the eaten. Now I fear being the eater.

—

On the way to (EMT) class one night, I say a motorcycle lying on the shoulder of the highway with a man slumped next to it. Every car blew past, paying him no attention. I pulled onto the shoulder, called 911, unzipped my bugout bag, grabbed the emergency first-aid kit, and raced to his side. He wasn’t badly hurt, so I pressed a two-by-four-inch piece of gauze against his arm to stop the bleeding, then secured the gauze with a roller bandage while waiting for the paramedics

Something in me was beginning to change. I’d never stopped to help a stranger before. I’d always assumed someone else would do it – and better than I could.

—

Unlike what the survivalists, the PTs, Lord of the Flies and Sigmund Freud had led me to beleive, it seemed that tragedy also had the power to bring out the best in people. Not just the fire-fighters and police officers who worked around the clock. Not just the local businesses that brought truckloads of supplies for neither monetary nor marketing gain. But even the victims themselves tried their best to help one another.

They might have behaved differently if their lives were still in danger, resources were scarce, and they had to compete to survive. But once they were safe, it seemed that people’s first instinct was to look after one another and support their community. Maybe I needed to revise my Fliesian philosophy. If people were animals, then like most animals, they were essentially harmless most of the time – unless they felt threatened. That’s when they became vicious.

Strauss spends the first half of the book learning to be self-sufficient, independent, and above all, safe. But along the way, he learns an important lesson – surviving by yourself is a hell of a lot harder than surviving in a group. In attempting to “network,” he becomes a certified EMT, and joins the California Emergency Mobile Patrol. And he learns something else – something most “survivalists” I think, never do. I won’t quote the last few paragraphs of the book, because – well, just because.

Don’t buy the book expecting it to be a “how-to” manual for budding survivalists. It is not. It is the story of one man’s journey from milquetoast to self-sufficient individual, one not disconnected from the modern world, but enthusiastically a member of it, while still capable of surviving without it.

It was worth the price, and the time.

First Amendment? You Don’t Need No Stinkin’ First Amendment!

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First Amendment? You Don’t Need No Stinkin’ First Amendment!

THIS should give every blogger the warm fuzzies:

Blogger claims police search of home was threat

Police officers accused of drunken driving. A female officer’s alleged promiscuity and infidelity. A commander whose critics labeled his son a child molester.

Jeff Pataky said he uses negative complaints and anonymous tips to fuel his blogging crusade against Phoenix police. A headline on his Web site suggests rewards would be provided for “dirt” on police indiscretions.

Pataky, a former software sales and marketing executive who now focuses his energy shoveling content on www.badphoenixcops.com, said he believes his online criticism of the department – along with past criticisms of police investigations – led officers to serve a search warrant at his home last week.

Police officials said Wednesday that a Phoenix detective prompted the investigation after complaining about harassment, though they declined further comment.

Pataky said he felt the investigation was a response to a lawsuit he filed on Monday in U.S. District Court saying he was maliciously prosecuted by police in 2007 after his ex-wife accused him of harassment, a case later dropped. In his lawsuit he’s asking for an unspecified amount for damages. City officials declined to comment on pending litigation.

Pataky’s blog is known in law-enforcement circles for its off-color language that, according to the blogger, is aimed at Phoenix Police Chief Jack Harris, Maricopa County Andrew Thomas and other public officials.

“Too bad. They need to get over it,” Pataky said. “They are held to a higher accountability.”

Pataky said he edits the blog and works with four or five people who receive tips from a variety of sources, including sworn and retired officers.

Investigators confiscated computer material and other items from Pataky’s north Phoenix home, which he considered a threat to quit writing.

“We have heard internally from our police sources that they purposefully did this to stop me,” Pataky said. “They took my cable modem and wireless router. Anyone worth their salt knows nothing is stored in the cable modem.”

Phoenix Assistant Chief Andy Anderson said the harassment case is unique because of the connection to an unaccredited grassroots Web site. He said the blog is one part of the case, though he did not provide specifics of the ongoing investigation.

“This isn’t about the blog,” Anderson said. “That’s just where the investigation led.”

Police also served a separate search warrant at the home of former homicide Detective David Barnes, one of the investigators on the “Baseline Rapist” case.

Barnes was demoted from the homicide unit to patrol after he went public one year ago with claims of mismanaged evidence at the city’s crime lab.

Mark Spencer, president of the Phoenix Law Enforcement Association, said he was concerned about questionable probable cause to enter Barnes’ house. The union, which claims no affiliation with Pataky’s blog, will represent Barnes through the internal investigation.

More here.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

UPDATE: Say Uncle has links to more details on this incident.

Do it Again, Only HARDER!

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Well, FOX News has had the temerity to expose the “Mexican Canard” for what it is – a lie.

This, of course, makes no difference to The Other Side:

Tom Diaz, senior policy analyst at the Violence Policy Center, called the “90 percent” issue a red herring and said that it should not detract from the effort to stop gun trafficking into Mexico.

“Let’s do what we can with what we know,” he said. “We know that one hell of a lot of firearms come from the United States because our gun market is wide open.”

I don’t know how I missed this before, but the UK’s Guardian newspaper printed a piece last August that I wish I’d seen then. No matter, now’s as good a time as any:

Firearms: cheap, easy to get and on a street near you
From drug dealing to settling playground squabbles, firearms offences are rising

Duncan Campbell
The Guardian, Saturday 30 August 2008


The gun shown here, a Webley, is up for sale in London for £150, one of hundreds of such weapons that are easily and cheaply available on the streets of the UK’s big cities, a Guardian investigation can reveal.

The variety of weapons on offer in Britain is extensive and includes machine guns and shotguns, as well as pistols and converted replicas. A source close to the trade in illegal weapons contacted by the Guardian listed a menu of firearms that are available on the streets of the capital.

“You can get a clean [unused] 9mm automatic for £1,500, a Glock for a couple of grand and you can even make an order for a couple of MAC-10s,” he said. “Or you can get a little sawn-off for £150. They’re easy enough to get hold of. You’ll find one in any poverty area, every estate in London, and it’s even easier in Manchester, where there are areas where the police don’t go.

This, of course, after the British government banned almost all handguns in 1996, and 162,353 were turned in by their legally registered owners.

The illegally possessed ones stayed where they were. You can bet those are the places “the police don’t go” – having ceded them to the criminal class.

“People who use shotguns tend to be lower down the pecking order. There is less use of sawn-off or full length shotguns, and if a criminal wants street cred, he wants a self-loading pistol, a MAC-10 or an Uzi submachine gun.”

Sawed-off shotguns & rifles and fully-automatic weapons were banned in the UK back in 1937.

How’s that working out, fellas?

This week a man who ran a “factory” for converting replica weapons into working guns was jailed for life. Police believe the products of Grant Wilkinson’s workshops were used in more than 50 shootings, including eight murders. His speciality was turning legally purchased MAC-10s into weapons that could fire live rounds, an increasingly common practice.

According to David Dyson, a leading firearms consultant, it is possible to learn through the internet how to make a firearm, given a degree of skill, and converted deactivated weapons also feature in shootings.

Why not? Pakistanis do it without the aid of the Internet.

But it is the arrival of eastern European weapons that, alongside a homegrown industry in converting them, has contributed to the firearms glut.

(My emphasis.) As I have noted previously, the argument you hear most often by The Other Side is that “lax gun laws” in adjacent jurisdictions are the reason that “reasonable gun control” laws don’t, you know, actually work. It’s too easy, they say, for people to just drive across the state, county, or city line and buy what they’re prohibited from having where they live.

The UK is a FREAKING ISLAND, one with uniform, draconian gun laws – gun laws that the Million Mommies said they wanted to implement here, and THEY CAN’T KEEP THE GUNS OUT.

“There has been an influx from eastern Europe and particularly from Poland, and there are also a lot coming in from people who have served in Afghanistan and Iraq,” said the source. “In Liverpool docks, you can put in an order for 10 guns and some grenades and they’ll say OK and two weeks later, they will be there – and they are straight goers.”

Gee, do you think the Mexican cartels are coming across our border to place orders for grenades and antitank rockets? Or do they just go to the docks in Puerta Vallarta or Ensenada, or Guaymas, or . . . Well, you get the picture.

According to Dyson, the latest “weapon of choice” is a Russian 8mm Baikal self-defence pistol, originally used for firing CS gas. “They are legally sold in Germany and won’t fire a bullet but they can be converted by removing the partially blocked barrel, and replacing it with a rifled barrel,” he said. “After other small alterations, it can then fire 9mm bulleted ammunition. The replacement barrel is longer than the original, and is threaded so that it will accept a silencer, which is commonly sold as part of the package.

“There are hundreds of these floating around and hundreds have been seized,” he said. “They look the part as they are based on the Russian military Makarov pistol. If you are a 20-year-old drug dealer and you want a gun, that is what you will get and it will cost about £1,000 to £1,500.”

Which is, what, a day’s income if you’re selling drugs?

“The trends in firearms are driven by the suppliers,” said Dyson. “About two years ago, a supplier brought back hundreds of German-made revolvers, blank-firing pistols which can be bought legally in Germany. They were then converted and new cylinders made. They could then be sold for £700 to £800 when the supplier would have bought them for €60 and spent about £30 on converting them.”

Supply and Demand. Economics 101.

Sad that so many can’t learn it.

Home Office data shows that gun crime is up since last year, despite the recent doubling of sentences for possessing or supplying firearms. There were 9,803 firearms offences in England and Wales in the year to March 2008 with most in London, Manchester and the West Midlands.

Most buyers are involved with drug dealing, the source said. Some are used to rob other dealers in crimes that go unreported, others are used as protection while a deal is under way. “Someone will have a tool and there is always one guy in a posse willing to use it. They will have one guy who doesn’t give a fuck.

“Everyone wants to be a gangster now, mainly the kids. You have five or six in a little crew and one of them will be carrying. They want handguns – shotguns are too big and bulky. The sawn-off doesn’t look so good but use a machine gun and you get known as a heavy guy. They have them just to be a chap on the street, to pose. Some of them walk around all day with a .38. It’s 16-year-olds at it and it’s getting like America, silly as it sounds.”

In terms of nationalities, the influx of eastern European criminals has changed the balance of power. “Who’s using the guns? The [Jamaican] Yardies’ value for life was so minimal that they thought nothing of killing people,” said the source. “We don’t like them, they have no moral code. But it’s the Russians and the Polish and Albanians around now. They are bullies. They want to take over the flesh business. The Russians are cold-hearted fuckers. What they have been doing is following the card boys [who put cards advertising prostitutes in phone booths in central London] and then taking the girls hostage, armed if need be.”

Force a nation into compelled helplessness, and the wolves will come. It’s a certainty. Keep reading.

Detective Chief Inspector Colin Sutton, who has investigated some of London’s most high profile shooting murders, said he believed the age of offenders was getting younger, and sometimes guns seemed to be used for the slightest reason.

“Playground squabbles are now being settled with guns,” he said. “And drug dealers are taking a policy decision to get youngsters to carry guns.”

He said guns could be purchased for a few hundred pounds in many parts of London. “You can hire a gun for a period and, if the gun has already been used for a murder, the going rate comes down.”

While the conviction of Wilkinson was seen as a breakthrough, it is accepted that with the increased traffic between Britain and eastern Europe, stemming the flow of weapons remains an almost impossible task.

Gee, ya think?

“Guns are always available,” said Dyson. “You can go to the former Soviet Union, or countries with less stringent regulations than ours, and although British Customs have their successes, many guns appear to be smuggled into the UK.”

Amnesties for people to hand over weapons are greeted with scepticism by criminals. “The gun amnesties are meaningless,” the source said. “All you get handed in are guns from boys who wanted to be gangsters and then got a job or someone whose mother found it in their bedroom. If I had a gun, I wouldn’t take part because, if I got pulled, what would I say – ‘Oh, I’m just on my way to the amnesty.’ Also if it gets out that you’ve given in your tool, people will think you’re a wrong ‘un.”

Few professional criminals would keep guns on their premises. “Only silly people keep it in their homes. Normally, you have a ‘keeper’ a couple of miles away and some of them have been at it for 20 years. It’s best to have an old fellow with no previous or a woman. You keep the ammunition separate because you’ll get a much heavier sentence if you have them together.”

When guns are moved from place to place, a young woman is often used as the courier because there is less risk of her being stopped and searched.

What is not in dispute is the devastating effect that the casual use of a gun over a minor argument can have on dozens of people. In December 2006, Sean “Stretch” Jenkins, 36, an amiable, 6ft 8in window-cleaner from south London, was shot dead at a party in Carshalton. His killer was a cocaine dealer called Joseph Greenland, a volatile man with a quick temper, who had apparently taken offence at something Jenkins said. The men had earlier been at a boxing night at Caesar’s in Streatham, where there had been some fighting outside the ring. Greenland had left the party, driven home in his Range Rover, picked up a gun and returned to kill Jenkins in front of at least five witnesses, who were warned not to talk.

None of the immediate witnesses gave evidence against Greenland, who had a reputation for threatening to “annihilate” anyone who crossed him, but there were traces of his DNA on a cigarette end and a wine glass at the party and his bragging about the shooting was to be his downfall. His recourse to a gun, for no other reason than some perceived slight, left Jenkins’s six-year-old son without a father and saddened a wide network of friends and family. Greenland was jailed for life last week and will have to serve 30 years before he can be considered for parole.

“We got what we wanted,” said the victim’s mother, Maureen Jenkins, of the verdict and sentence last month. “I went to the cemetery and said, ‘Well, boy, I can put you to rest’.”

The detectives investigating the killing and the prosecution team that secured Greenland’s conviction were “marvellous”, she said. “I shed tears every day and I probably will till the day I die. Why do these people have to kill for nothing? If they want to kill people, why don’t they join the army?

Sweet bleeding jeebus. If there was ever a more textbook example of someone who cannot distinguish “violent and predatory” from “violent but protective, “ I doubt I’ll ever find it.

You don’t ever think a shooting will happen in your life. It’s all down to guns, just guns.”

The Guardian’s source said that guns were becoming a first rather than a last recourse. “A gun used to be used as a mediator; now everything is revolved with a gun. It’s brought the heat on everyone. Before you would get a two [years jail sentence], now it’s a five. It’s getting like the US now, like The Wire. It’s like a prediction of what will happen here. I think they all think they’re playing Grand Theft Auto. It’s madness out there.”

And The Other Side here wants to force us into compelled helplessness, because (they say) it’ll make us safer.

I don’t fucking think so.

Quote(s) of the Day

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On the near-simultaneous reference by Michael Bane and Glenn Reynolds, I ordered a copy of Emergency: This Book Will Save Your Life, by Neil Strauss. I’m about halfway through it at the moment, and I have to say that so far it’s been fascinating, especially since Mr. Strauss is about my polar opposite from a political perspective. His interpretation of the world is, naturally, colored by his worldview, but a lot of what he says is pretty interesting. Here are just a few quotes from the book so far:

Our society, which seems so sturdily built out of concrete and custom, is just a temporary resting place, a hotel our civilization checked into a couple hundred years ago and must one day check out of. It’s an inevitability tourists can’t help but realize when visiting Mayan ruins, Egyptian ruins, Roman ruins. How long will it be before someone is visiting American ruins?

—

One of the most unsettling things about Adolf Hitler is that he wasn’t an imperialist, like Napoleon or William McKinley. He wasn’t just trying to subjugate other countries. His goal was to cleanse them, to wipe out the so-called weak races and speed the evolution of the human species through the propagation of the Aryan race. And for seven years, he got away with it. Few of the most brutal periods in medieval history – from the sack of Rome to the early Inquisition – were as coldly barbaric as what happened in our supposedly enlightened modern Western civilization.

And though I left the (Holocaust) museum with the reassuring message that the world stood up and said “never again” to genocide, it only took a minute of reflection to realize that it happened again – immediately. In the USSR, Stalin continued to deport, starve, and send to work camps millions of minorities. As the bloody years rolled on, genocides occurred in Bangladesh in 1971, Cambodia in 1975, Rwanda in 1994, and in Bosnia in the mid 1990s.

All these genocides occurred in ordinary worlds where ordinary people went about ordinary business. The Jews were integrated into every aspect of the German social and professional strata before the Holocaust. The entire educated class in Cambodia – teachers, doctors, lawyers, anyone who simply wore glasses – was sent to death camps. And as Philip Gourevitch wrote in his book on the Rwandan massacre, “Neighbors hacked neighbors to death in their workplaces. Doctors killed their patients, and schoolteachers killed their pupils.”

—

So what I ultimately learned at the Holocaust Museum was not “never again,” but “again and again and again.”

—

The lesson of Katrina wasn’t that the United States can’t protect its own. It was that no country can protect its own.

No place is safe, and no government can guarantee the well being of its citizens.

—

The fears of Americans change over time. In late 1999, we feared the collapse of our computer system. Then it was terrorist attacks. Then it was our own government. Then it was global warming. Today it’s economic collapse. Fear, it seems, is like fashion. It changes every season. And even though threats like terrorism persist to this day, we eventually grow bored of worrying about them and turn to something new. Ultimately, though, every fear has the same root: anxiety about the things we take for granted going away.

Let me add to the list:

Nuclear holocaust / nuclear winter

Population bomb / world famine

Peak Oil / energy crisis

Etc., etc., etc.

Although a gun can’t do much harm in a locked box in a plane’s cargo hold, I had no idea it was this easy to fly with a firearm. It was the first time since I began this journey that I discovered a freedom I didn’t know I had, rather than a new restriction.

—

Nearby, a group of (Gunsite) students and instructors were making fun of Democrats, gun control laws, and anyone from California. “There’s no constitutional amendment that’s been more crippled and regulated than the Second Amendment,” a competitive shooter was saying about the right to keep and bear arms.

After eavesdropping a while, I began to realize that all my life I’d been a hypocrite. As a journalist I’d always supported the right to free speech, but been opposed to guns. However, by playing favorites with the amendments, it wasn’t the founding father’s vision of America I was fighting for – it was just my personal opinion.

So far it’s been an interesting read. Given the path that Strauss has detailed through the first half, I’m a little concerned as to where he’s eventually headed, but I’ll soldier on to the end and report what I find.

Oh, and given that first excerpt, you might find this interesting: Future Present

Oh, I Hope This Is Real . . .

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Oh, I Hope This Is Real . . .

Received via email from my brother the professional auto mechanic:

Dear Employees & Suppliers,

Congress and the current Administration will soon determine whether to provide immediate support to the domestic auto industry to help it through one of the most difficult economic times in our nation’s history. Your elected officials must hear from all of us now on why this support is critical to our continuing the progress we began prior to the global financial crisis.

As an employee or supplier, you have a lot at stake and continue to be one of our most effective and passionate voices.. I know GM can count on you to have your voice heard.

Thank you for your urgent action and ongoing support.

Troy Clarke
President,
General Motors North America

—-

Response from:

Gregory Knox, Pres.
Knox Machinery Company
Franklin , Ohio

Gentlemen:

In response to your request to contact legislators and ask for a bailout for the Big Three automakers please consider the following, and please pass my thoughts on to Troy Clarke, President of General Motors North America.

Politicians and Management of the Big 3 are both infected with the same entitlement mentality that has spread like cancerous germs in UAW halls for the last countless decades, and whose plague is now sweeping this nation, awaiting our new “messiah,” Pres-elect Obama, to wave his magic wand and make all our problems go away, while at the same time allowing our once great nation to keep “living the dream.” Believe me folks, The dream is over!

This dream where we can ignore the consumer for years while management myopically focuses on its personal rewards packages at the same time that our factories have been filled with the worlds most overpaid, arrogant, ignorant and laziest entitlement minded “laborers” without paying the price for these atrocities. This dream where you still think the masses will line up to buy our products for ever and ever.

Don’t even think about telling me I’m wrong. Don’t accuse me of not knowing of what I speak. I have called on Ford, GM, Chrysler, TRW, Delphi, Kelsey Hayes, American Axle, and countless other automotive OEM’s throughout the Midwest , during the past 30 years and what I’ve seen over those years in these union shops can only be described as disgusting.

Troy Clarke, President of General Motors North America, states: “There is widespread sentiment throughout this country, and our government, and especially via the news media, that the current crisis is completely the result of bad management which it certainly is not.”

You’re right Mr. Clarke, it’s not JUST management. How about the electricians who walk around the plants like lords in feudal times, making people wait on them for countless hours while they drag ass so they can come in on the weekend and make double and triple time for a job they easily could have done within their normal 40 hour work week. How about the line workers who threaten newbies with all kinds of scare tactics for putting out too many parts on a shift and for being too productive.

(We certainly must not expose those lazy bums who have been getting overpaid for decades for their horrific underproduction, must we?!?)

Do you folks really not know about this stuff?!? How about this great sentiment abridged from Mr. Clarke’s sad plea: “over the last few years we have closed the quality and efficiency gaps with our competitors.” What the hell has Detroit been doing for the last 40 years?!? Did we really JUST wake up to the gaps in quality and efficiency between us and them?

The K car vs. the Accord?

The Pinto vs. the Civic?!?

Do I need to go on? What a joke!

We are living through the inevitable outcome of the actions of the United States auto industry for decades.

It’s time to pay for your sins, Detroit.

I attended an economic summit last week where brilliant economist, Alan Beaulieu, from the Institute of Trend Research, surprised the crowd when he said he would not have given the banks a penny of “bailout money.”

“Yes,” he said, “this would cause short term problems, but despite what people like politicians and corporate magnates would have us believe, the sun would in fact rise the next day and the following very important thing would happen. Where there had been greedy and sloppy banks, new efficient ones would pop up. That is how a free market system works. It does work if we would only let it work.”

But for some reason we are now deciding that the rest of the world is right and that capitalism doesn’t work – that we need the government to step in and “save us”. Save us my ass, Hell – we’re nationalizing and unfortunately too many of our once fine nation’s citizens don’t even have a clue that this is what is really happening, but they sure can tell you the stats on their favorite sports teams.

Yeah – THAT’S important!

Does it ever occur to ANYONE that the “competition” has been producing vehicles, EXTREMELY PROFITABLY, for decades in this country? How can that be??? Let’s see: Fuel efficient. Listening to customers. Investing in the proper tooling and automation for the long haul.

Not being too complacent or arrogant to listen to Dr. W. Edwards Deming four decades ago when he taught that by adopting appropriate principles of management, organizations could increase quality and simultaneously reduce costs. Ever increased productivity through quality, lean and six sigma plans. Treating vendors like strategic partners, rather than like “the enemy.” Efficient front and back offices. Non union environment.

Again, I could go on and on, but I really wouldn’t be telling anyone anything they really don’t already know in their hearts.

I have six children, so I am not unfamiliar with the concept of wanting someone to bail you out of a mess that you have gotten yourself into – my children do this on a weekly, if not daily basis, as I did when I was their age. I do for them what my parents did for me (one of their greatest gifts, by the way) – I make them stand on their own two feet and accept the consequences of their actions and work through it.

Radical concept, huh?

Am I there for them in the wings? Of course – but only until such time as they need to be fully on their own as adults.

I don’t want to oversimplify a complex situation, but there certainly are unmistakable parallels here between the proper role of parenting and government. Detroit and the United States need to pay for their sins.

Bad news people, it’s coming whether we like it or not. The newly elected Messiah really doesn’t have a magic wand big enough to “make it all go away.” I laughed as I heard Obama “reeling it back in” almost immediately after the final vote count was tallied. “We really might not do it in a year or in four.” Where the Hell was that kind of talk when he was RUNNING for office?

Stop trying to put off the inevitable.

That house in Florida really isn’t worth $750,000.

People who jump across a border really don’t deserve free health care benefits.

That job driving that forklift for the Big 3 really isn’t worth $85,000 a year.

We really shouldn’t allow Wal-Mart to stock their shelves with products acquired from a country that unfairly manipulates their currency and has the most atrocious human rights infractions on the face of the globe.

As an aside here, I don’t think “allow” is the right word. By all means Wal-Mart should be “allowed” to buy from China. We just shouldn’t be buying the crap from Wal-Mart marked “Made in China”.

“Free Market” and personal responsibility, y’know.

That couple whose combined income is less than $50,000 really shouldn’t be living in that $485,000 home.

Let the market correct itself folks – it will. Yes it will be painful, but it’s gonna be painful either way, and the bright side of my proposal is that on the other side of it all, is a nation that appreciates what it has and doesn’t live beyond its means and gets back to basics and redevelops the patriotic work ethic that made it the greatest nation in the history of the world and probably turns back to God.

Sorry – don’t cut my head off, I’m just the messenger sharing with you the “bad news”. I hope you take it to heart.

Gregory J. Knox, President
Knox Machinery, Inc.
Franklin , Ohio 45005

Snopes says it’s real, though their version differs slightly from the one I received.

Range Report: I’ve Got My Boomershoot Load

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At least for the Remington 700. I’m still working on the Encore.

If you’ve been following the saga, I’ve been trying loads using both the Sierra 175 grain MatchKing bullet that the 700 5R was designed around, and the Lapua 155 grain Scenar bullet that is almost identical in length to the Sierra. I’ve gotten some good groups, but I haven’t really had a chance to sit down and work on an accuracy load until the last couple of weeks. The first thing that I determined was that I could safely push the 155’s a lot faster than the 175’s, and with ballistic coefficients of 0.508 and 0.505 respectively, faster is better – especially since I’ll be shooting at targets 700 yards away.

I’m also a subscriber to Handloader magazine, which just paid for itself. The December, 2008 issue contained an article by one Gary D. Sciunchetti, an apparent obsessive-compulsive who wanted to develop “the most accurate .308 load.”

He went overboard.

Based on his belief that the single most accurate commercial load available (defined as giving the smallest groups in the largest variety of rifles) was the 168 grain MatchKing in the Federal Gold Medal Match loading, he set out to test every possible combination of cartridge case, powder, primer, and bullet in the 165-168 grain range. Very quickly he settled on Varget as the powder of choice. Where it got interesting (for me) was when he came to primers:

There is a rule of thumb that magnum primers are good if you need them, but if you don’t need them, don’t use them. Needing them is generally viewed as using a large volume of slow-burning, deterred ball powder, or extreme cold weather shooting. The .308 Winchester does not meet this requirement, but this research was to include all primers that might be suitable.

What he discovered was that the CCI 250 Large Rifle Magnum primer provided better results with Varget than any of the other eleven primers tested – all else being held the same.

If I hadn’t read the article, I wouldn’t have even considered a magnum primer.

Anyway, my testing started out with similar magazine-length loadings of 155 Scenar and 175 grain SMKs fired at 300 yards, which I reported on back in January. That was when I decided to concentrate on the 155’s. For my next test, I loaded the bullets out just shy of the lands, which made them much too long to fit the magazine, but that’s OK for Boomershoot. I don’t mind single-loading. I loaded twenty rounds each of loads ranging from 45.5 to 47.5 grains, in half-grain increments, ten each with CCI BR2 and ten each with CCI 250 primers, and fired them over my chronograph, getting two five-shot groups at 300 yards for each load. (Use this and any web-based data at your own risk. The Hodgdon web site lists 47.0 grains as a max load for the Sierra 155, but I am seating the Scenar way out there, yielding more space in the case.)

The load that gave the best performance (FOR ME, remember!) was 46.5 grains over the CCI 250. So last week I loaded up another hundred rounds, twenty each at 46.3, 46.4, 46.5, 46.6, and 46.7 grains – ten using BR2’s and ten using 250’s.

Here’s the data for the 46.4 grain load using the BR2 primer:

Shot Velocity
1 2903
2 2883
3 2901
4 2822
5 2837
6 2840
7 2883
8 2897
9 2897
10 2868
Avg 2876
ES 81.92
Sd 28.96

The two groups ran just over 2″ at 200 yards (I’m shooting at a different place, and 200 yards is more convenient there.) Now, here’s the same load using CCI 250 primers:

Shot Velocity
1 2929
2 2895
3 2905
4 2914
5 2911
6 2903
7 2900
8 2910
9 2899
10 2913
Avg 2908
ES 33.64
Sd 9.74

Both groups ran just over 1″ (except for a called flyer). The magnum load picked up 30 fps, and the standard deviation dropped into the single-digits! My shooting partner brought his 7 Mag rifle to practice with. His 168 grain commercial load wasn’t significantly faster than 2900 fps! There’s quite a bark when I touch off this load, but there were no pressure signs of any kind.

This week I’ll assemble 100 rounds of this load and see what I can do with it at 200 and further out. I’ve got powder now, 500 more bullets coming, and about 800 primers left.

I’m In.

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I’m In

Simon-Jester.org:

WHO WE ARE

We are Simon Jester.

We are not anarchists.

We are not Far-Right or Far-Left. We are the seventy percent in the middle.

We are not Capital “L” libertarians, although we do have sympathies with their platform.

We are neither bitter clingers nor conspiracy nuts.

What we are is a group of folks that think we see liberty and freedom eroding in our beloved United States. We see the policies and agendas of the hirelings in Washington D.C. heading toward an abbreviation if not outright abrogation of the Bill of Rights.

We think that the Federal government is grasping to consolidate power using the current crisis, since as Rahm Emmanuel said, it’s a terrible thing to waste. We think the Federal government, not just this administration, is more interested in self-serving personal, political, and party power than it is in actually doing its best to do the least.

This President didn’t make it this way. It has been heading along this path since Woodrow Wilson held political prisoners and FDR held four terms as president; since Johnson’s Great Society and Nixon took us off the gold standard; since Bush Sr. lied about no new taxes, Clinton desecrated the Oval Office, Bush Jr. rammed through the Patriot Act, and Obama wanted every high school kid to ‘volunteer.’

For almost a hundred years, our country has been heading towards becoming a Socialist, centrally planned, Nanny State where the Federal Government tells it citizens how to conduct business, what they could grow in their own gardens or on their own farms, and now even how much a private citizen is allowed to earn before punitive and illegal taxation takes it away.

Now is the time to make it stop.

Can I get an “AMEN!”?

The Constitution of the United States of America tells us how our government is supposed to operate. It tells us what powers they have been lent by its citizens. It even delineates what powers each branch of government is supposed to have. Our Federal Government, all three branches, has over-reached. Continually.

The Declaration of Independence told King George what we felt about the way he was treating the Thirteen Colonies. It also told the world what we as Americans believed were natural truths about how government should work, with the consent of the governed. It amazes us how many of the things the Colonies begged King George to address have raised their ugly heads in the present day. We are taxed without our consent for government programs we don’t want. We are told that our natural resources are not ours to do with what we would. We are even told that our property can be confiscated if the government thinks it can get a bigger tax base from a different owner. Our elections are swayed by huge amounts of dollars and the willing collaboration of the old media giants. More than that, our elections are influenced by unconstitutional law such as McCain-Feingold, communist groups such as ACORN signing up 200,000 illegal voters in Ohio, and terrorist groups like the Black Panthers staking our polling places such as in Philadelphia. And we, the legitimate voters of this country are forced to accept the results.

Our voice has been ignored, even to the point of telling the citizens of a state that a duly enacted and overwhelmingly voter-approved constitutional amendment would not be allowed to stand due to political correctness.

Our representatives have listened to us on occasion however; only to be overturned by a penstroke from the Executive Branch, like when we said we didn’t like the idea of bailing out the auto industry.

Our legislature has pretended to listen to us about our need to protect our country’s borders, but then come back and tried to tell us that they have changed their minds. All the while trying to curry favor to their own districts with pork projects.

We flood D.C. with calls and letters and emails demanding that the administration not burden our grandchildren with huge government debt that will necessitate huge tax increases, but are told that our thoughts on the matter have no bearing because some things are just too big to fail; only to hear the same legislators come back a few months later and demand punitive taxes on those companies it gave money to against our wishes.

The current administration has appointed all of these extra-constitutional “Czars” to oversee what they view as problems in our country and in our world, including an avowed Communist.

This administration, as well as far too many legislators, clings to a philosophy of man-made global warming that is far from settled science and has decided that “Cap and Trade”, regardless of the huge burden that will place on the consumers, is necessary to limit carbon emissions. The fact that it has been tried in Europe and FAILED to limit carbon emissions doesn’t matter because this program will generate huge tax dollars for the government while at the same time penalizing the consumers of energy in the form of higher energy bills.

Another thing that has failed in Europe and elsewhere is the idea of universal health care. Yet still our government is racing headlong towards rationed medical procedures, diagnostics, medicines, and preventive care because it is yet another way to control the population. It is very hard to tell the government “No” when you or your spouse, or your child, depend upon the government owned and run kidney machine, insulin shots, or cancer treatments.

And now our Federal government has asked for more power. It isn’t even trying to hide it anymore. They want the power to regulate to the point of confiscation the administration of every business in the United States, just for our own financial safety or course. They want to regulate our salaries and compensation. They want to bankrupt the coal industry, which provides eighty (80 !!) percent of all the power in this country. They don’t want us to be able to drill for oil or natural gas. But at the same time they don’t want to allow the transmission of power from wind farms or solar farms across the countryside because they say it will affect the natural beauty of the desert or they don’t want their view cluttered out past Martha’s Vineyard. They want control of the means of production, the type of crops we grow, and the structure and location of the buildings in which we live. And, despite their protestation to the contrary, they want to disarm us. Too much has slipped out about that for them to be able to deny it any more.

And yes, we repeat, they now are asking for more power. This isn’t just theft, it is a bloody strong-arm robbery with a knife in your ribs.

Now, here is where Simon Jester comes in.

This whole thing isn’t about the Democrats or the Republicans, because they are both taking us to the same place and they aren’t afraid of us anymore. It is about our Constitutional form of government. The Rights were there before the words were written, for they are inherent in all people. They don’t come from government; government, no matter how hard it tries, cannot dissolve them. Now, here we the people are, having all these Tea Parties, trying to show our government that we, the seventy percent or so of the country who is right smack dab in the middle trying to raise our families and give our children better lives than we had, are tired of this grab for power. These Tea Parties, where no one actually throws anything in the harbor, are getting hardly any coverage from the press. In fact, the TWO counter protestors at the March Tea Party in Orlando got as much or more local coverage than the under-reported thousands who attended the rally. So, short of actually committing acts of vandalism and felonious assault, how are we going to get noticed?

Simon Jester. A symbol, since “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” by Robert A. Heinlein was published in 1966, of dissent against authority. Let the press, and the government, and your neighbors know that you are paying attention to what the Federal government is trying to do. Let someone ask you what that little devil underneath the word “Citizen” across your chest means and then explain it to them. Explain to the one pool reporter who shows up at the next Tea Party that you and Simon have your eyes open and are watching as the government tries to control your life. Explain to your pastor, or your waitress, or your barista at Starbucks, that our government is power hungry and that you and others like you are trying to be heard.

We are Simon Jester. So are they.

And so are you.

Billy Beck advocates mass civil disobedience. I don’t think this is a harbinger of that, but it’s better than nothing.

The Greatest Scientific Discoveries are Not Accompanied by “EUREKA!”

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The Greatest Scientific Discoveries are Not Accompanied by “EUREKA!”

But rather they are most often heralded by a muttered “That’s interesting . . .”

New Cold Fusion Evidence Reignites Hot Debate

By Mark Anderson
First Published March 2009

Telltale neutrons appear, but skepticism remains

25 March 2009—On Monday, scientists at the American Chemical Society (ACS) meeting in Salt Lake City announced a series of experimental results that they argue confirms controversial “cold fusion” claims. 


Chief among the findings was new evidence presented by U.S. Navy researchers of high-energy neutrons in a now-standard cold fusion experimental setup—electrodes connected to a power source, immersed in a solution containing both palladium and “heavy water.” If confirmed, the result would add support to the idea that reactions like the nuclear fire that lights up the sun might somehow be tamed for the tabletop. But even cold fusion’s proponents admit that they have no clear explanation why their nuclear infernos are so weak as to be scarcely noticeable in a beaker. 


The newest experiment, conducted by researchers at the U.S. Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center, in San Diego, required running current through the apparatus for two to three weeks. Beneath the palladium- and deuterium-coated cathode was a piece of plastic—CR-39, the stuff that eyeglasses are typically made from. Physicists use CR-39 as a simple nuclear particle detector. 


After the experiment, the group analyzed the CR-39 and found microscopic blossoms of “triple tracks.” Such tracks happen when a high-energy neutron has struck a carbon atom in the plastic, causing the atom to decay into three helium nuclei (alpha particles). The alpha particles don’t travel more than a few microns, though, before they plow into other atoms in the CR-39. The result is a distinctive three-leaf clover that, to physicists, points to the by-product of a nuclear reaction. 


“Taking all the data together, we have compelling evidence that nuclear reactions [are happening in the experiment],” says physicist Pamela Mosier-Boss of the Navy group.

If you find this sort of thing interesting, by all means read the whole article.

I was aware that DARPA had begun funding Cold Fusion research a while back, but I was not aware, as this month’s WIRED magazine reported, that:

The Navy’s Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center (SPAWAR) has long been known to harbor cold fusion enthusiasts; they’ve often managed to fit in their experiments in down time between other projects, and without official funding.

Wired further reports:

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and it will take more than a few stray neutrons to shift the balance in favor of cold fusion when there is a formidable array of theoretical reasons to doubt that it is possible. Build a laboratory fusion reactor which generates endless free energy and people will sit up and take notice. Until then, the cold fusion club are better off keeping their heads down and avoiding attention.

Darpa may be home to many crazy ideas, but they don’t talk about cold fusion, either. At least not openly. However, a close look at their budget documents under “Alternate Power Sources” reveals that in 2007 they “Completed independent evaluation of recently reported experimental protocol for achieving excess heat conditions in Pd cathodes.”

Excess heat being generated by Palladium (Pd) cathodes is a signature of cold fusion. And in the 2008 research budget we find that Darpa are set to “Determine the correlation between excess heat observations and production of nuclear by-products.”

This sounds suspiciously as though Darpa has been getting involved in the cold fusion club – without mentioning it in a way that might attract undue attention.

Are we close to a breakthrough? I certainly hope so.

Quote of the Day

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Quote of the Day

It is observed that the Statist is dissatisfied with the condition of his own existence. He condemns his fellow man, surroundings, and society itself for denying him the fulfillment, success, and adulation he believes he deserves. He is angry, resentful, petulant, and jealous. He is incapable of honest self-assessment and rejects the honest assessment by others of himself, thereby evading responsibility for his own miserable condition, The Statist searches for significance and even glory in a utopian fiction of his mind’s making, the earthly attainment of which, he believes, is frustrated by those who do not share it. Therefore he must destroy the civil society, piece by piece.

For the Statist, liberty is not a blessing but the enemy. It is not possible to achieve Utopia if individuals are free to go their own way.

Mark Levin, Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto

(h/t: Hamilton, Madison, and Jay)

Edited to add:

I am reminded, once again, of something written a long time ago by “Ironbear” that I’ve quoted here on several occasions:

It would be a mistake to paint the conflict exclusively in terms of “cultural war,” or Democrats vs Republicans, or even Left vs Right. Neither Democrats/Leftists or Republicans shy away from statism… the arguments there are merely over degree of statism, uses to which statism will be put – and over who’ll hold the reins. It’s the thought that they may not be left in a position to hold the reins that drives the Democrat-Left stark raving.

—

This is a conflict of ideologies…

The heart of the conflict is between those to whom personal liberty is important, and those to whom liberty is not only inconsequential, but to whom personal liberty is a deadly threat.