NYPD Hiring!

Mark A R Kleiman is concerned that valuable infantrymen are being recruited away from US armed services, after having been trained to be valuable infantrymen at public expense.

Well then, what of this?

NYPD Hiring! Take Free Exam at Camp Lejeune, Wed., April 7th

You’ve protected THE WORLD’S GREATEST NATION. Now,
protect THE WORLD’S GREATEST CITY. Don’t miss the
opportunity to take our FREE EXAM at Camp Lejeune,
Wed, April 7 - 1800 hours, Marston Pavilion, 730
Seth William Blvd, Camp Lejeune, NC. Call:
1-800-550-3836. Please bring military I.D. The NYPD
is continuously hiring and test scores for all
active military will be kept indefinitely. If unable
to attend apply online at:
http://tracking.military.com/cgi-bin/outlog.cgi?url=http://www.nypd2.org/html/recruit/policeofficer.html
by April 16 for the New York City exam. Or call 212-RECRUIT.

Granted, Mark's concern was voiced in the context of the Blackwater employees (former military men) murdered in Fallujah.

Should this be stopped? I see little difference between this and non-compete clauses that were common when cable TV applications engineers were a hot commodity. What makes me valuable to one employer will to another employer, and I'm free to change employers if I can find one whose overall package is better.

Bringing the discussion back to territory that is familiar to me, I see a parallel between this issue and broad civilian gun ownership. Uncle Sugar trains hundreds of thousands of people to use lethal force responsibly. Immediately, Uncle does so for his own specific purposes, namely to field a competent army. But the training, if done well and kept up, becomes available to the civilian sector through the men and women who seek employment as sworn peace officers, commercial security guards, and armed citizens.

People who have not received this training, people who do not own firearms, and people who have not sought and received permission to CCW benefit from those who do. In fact, people who would never dream of receiving such training, people who object to widespread gun ownership, and people who want to outlaw all forms of concealed carry (except for agents of the government) derive a benefit.

Providing the training, even to personnel who will return that investment directly to Uncle Sugar for only another year or two then pursue richer opportunities, should not be counted as a net loss to Uncle, but as a net gain to all of us.

Our lives, fortunes, and sacred bandwidth, updated

Donald Sensing despairs over the Republic now that freedom of political speech is in peril from campaign finance reform. Agreed. So WUTT!'s proposal?

Maybe enough bloggers will, on or before 2 September, publish something that might violate the law if it were posted on 3 September. Then in posts from 3 Sep onward, keep referring to each others' 2 Sep posts.

Throw in a few citations of the Officially Sanctioned Media's post-3 Sep reporting as well.

Point out inaccuracies therein, e.g. "No, Kerry voted FOR it in October then spoke AGAINST it in May," to keep citing voting records up over and over again, but carefully couching our posts as responses or corrections to, or criticisms of, each others' posts, not examinations of the officeholders themselves.

Then call the Federal Election Commission, and turn each other in. Insist upon an investigation of every possible meta-reporting offense.

Update: Geekwitha45's comments and email to me disclose my embarrassing ignorance of BCRA. It does not regulate private activities, including bloggers, so my proposal does not incur the FEC's wrath.
OK. So we bloggers can still participate. I paid NRA a handsome sum to be one of their Lifers. I expect a return on my investment. Political research on the issues of our common interest, and publication of that research, is part of what I paid for. They're still allowed to collect the voting records, but they can't take out ads to present them. They can give the records to me and a few thousand other bloggers, and we can post them. Nothing illegal there.

Further, we can sell them steeply discounted ad space on our blogs to present their research there. Then they're breaking the law, and perhaps so would we be.

I use NRA as an example here, other incorporated outfits would fit the space just as well.

If anyone is actually prosecuted, we then discuss the prosecution itself, and the evidence presented. Then complain to the FEC about each others' meta-meta-reporting during the blackout period.

Distributed denial of service attack, but via analog voice, upon Bad Law.

Yeeeehawwww!

Free WiFi in the hotel room in Cheyenne!

Which reminds me: I have been reading the lessons learned reports from OIF, and one of the concerns is that the increased use of UAVs is congesting all of the satellites, to the point that DoD cannot deploy many more UAVs without hitting the capacity limit. Combine this with the desire to expand the use of Blue Force Tracker and Iridium satellite phones, and we'll be at or past the limit of available secure bandwidth in that theater.

The demand for bandwidth right down to the individual rifleman, loggie, firedog, or dirtboy is growing, so the congestion will only get worse.

We're going to have to move more of our wireless comms off the satellites, but to what? Well, how about developing a concentrator on a UAV, so it can be piloted in an orbit tastefully stood-off from a headquarters area, and let it route the calls either back to the ground or up to the bird? An unmanned airborne cell tower. Embed the security into the clients---the phones, pagers, PDAs---so the UAV is not a gigantic classified COMSEC item that must be recovered if it crashes or is shot down.

Late-breaking:

After follow-up interviews with Ms Seiler, Madison Police have released an updated sketch of her alleged abductor:





Anyone who has seen a person answering this description is urged to contact the Madison Police Department.

You must choose

We appreciate the carefully constructed point here:

. . . those who do not speak against, are in danger of being assumed to agree with the perpetrators of the next jihadist atrocity.

That's Sgt Mom, with WUTT!'s Quote for the Day.

If she were ten pounds heavier, I'd be dead

Meet Recluse:


She's our oldest cat, we took her and her littermate The First Otis in when we closed on our first house, in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, in 1993. Our litter training skills were such that Recluse had to be chased and caught from time to time, to be moved to the litter box. On one such occasion, she snagged one of her front claws in the carpet, and as she fled, the claw held and she flipped herself over.

She has not forgiven me. She never will. She spends her entire day under our bed, with occasional forays to water, litter, or food. Whenever I enter the room, she bolts.

If she had just a few more pounds on her, she'd tear my throat out in my sleep.

Hey, I work for a living!

Posting has been light recently. We posted a sudden upsurge last Thursday and Friday because, well, Fûz took some leave as his orders were about to end, and he was waiting for indication of whether he'd be kept on orders. Thursday and Friday were to be devoted to a leaking automatic transmission in the Fûzboat, learning how to operate a sewing machine, and getting in line with the Milfwagens to drop off and pick up Daughter Units at school.

Fûz's orders were renewed for another 90 days, so Thursday was spent downloading and running the AF's replacement for The Execrable FormFlow so he could submit new leave paperwork. Friday was spent getting his orders amended, and having a new DoD ID card prepared. Without further gory detail, Thu and Fri were shot in the temple.

Upside, Fûz continues to draw salary for another three months. And we made it to the Knights' fish fry.

Update: On 1 April, we received the auth for 360 days. And the transmission still leaks after installing a new pan gasket.

Fûz can blog from work, in a limited fashion, in between feeding Toad and chasing Boy and stretching Middlechild and reading to Firstborn, and letting Barbaloot nap. But he gets to go to Undisclosed Combat Readiness Training Center and work with Cadre again for a few weeks.

Rocky Mountain Blogger Roundup

Walter hosts the Rocky Mountain Roundup. Please go there.

Quote for the day

Allah, as Muslims view him, is omnipotent, above logic and reason, unrestrained by natural law. He can decree at any moment that evil is good and two and two make five. People are subject to his arbitrary and tyrannical rule and can do little more than plead for mercy. Nations who worship such a God, it turns out, are themselves governable only by a tyrannical ruler.

Tom Bethell, American Spectator, March 2004, "The Living Hell of Bill Moyers" (sorry, no URL directly to issue or the article).

But tomorrow, Madame, I will be sober

We despaired in a recent post that carbines of the AR15 family can get a new lease on service with Uncle Sugar if only the cartridge were changed to something that delivers lethality at greater range. One new cartridge is under serious consideration by our esteemed Uncle, another has been proposed, both fitting neatly within the physical constraints of the existing carbine and magazine, needing little more than a new barrel, bolt, and magazine follower to lose the "poodle shooter" pejorative.

Either the 6.5mm Grendel (the preferred solution here at WUTT!) or the 6.8mm Remington SPC (the likely successor) would be a major step forward.

But as the borrowed Churchill quip implies, we can change the caliber but the carbine will still be an AR15. It taps propellant gas from the barrel, and ducts it half the length of the weapon back to a chamber inside the bolt carrier to operate the action. This reduces the weight and parts count of the weapon, but dumps propellant gas inside the action where it can foul it and cause malfunctions.

The AR15 also uses a cocking handle that rides inside the top of the upper receiver. It is difficult to use this cocking handle with the non-firing hand while the firing hand keeps a consistent grip. The movement of this control also interferes with placement of a cheekrest. Aftermarket upper receivers are available with cocking handles on the left side of the receiver, like the FAL's, instead of on top at the rear.

Rather than replace the AR15 family carbines already in Uncle's arsenal, we propose instead to refit them, both to change the cartridge to a non-poodle shooter, and to remove these two design details. Mr and Mrs Taxpayer may thank WUTT! for the tens of millions of dollars saved.

The existing upper receiver can be retained, if has the rails for the removable carry handle.

Everything from the upper receiver forward goes away. The new barrel bears a block, in place of the front sight, that offers short Picatinny rails at 12, 3, 6, and 9 o'clock around the barrel's circumference. A gas piston inside the block taps the propellant gas and points it rearward. The rails offer ample space to mount sights, lights, designators, even a recoil- or muzzle-operated digital camera.

Instead of the loooooong gas tube sprouting from the gas block, an operating rod with a cylinder in its front end mates to the piston at the front, and passes into the upper receiver at the rear. The rear fits inside the bolt carrier key. Heckler and Koch have already designed this part and offer it as a retrofit for M4 carbines.

A replacement upper handguard has room for the operating rod, and includes a folding cocking handle. This handle can swing either to right or to left, to grab the operating rod and cycle it. The handle does not reciprocate with the operating rod.

A rear block surrounds the barrel immediately in front of the gland nut that tightens the barrel to the upper receiver. It has a short Picatinny rail at 12 o'clock, and a channel under that to take the operating rod and guide it, and retain the upper handguard. At 6 o'clock, it has hardpoints that lock bipod legs in place.

The lower handguard looks just like a lower handguard, but it is split into quarters, right and left. These are extensible legs of a bipod. The legs hinge where they attach to the front sight block.

A vertical foregrip, a GL, or a shotgun can be installed in place of the lower handguard, of course.

Important: the Picatinny rails do not surround the barrel along most of its length like on the current M4A1. The rails, and the handguards fastened to them, trap too much heat on the barrel. In prolonged action, the barrel gets hot enough to ignite a cartridge as soon as it's chambered, known as a cook-off.

The receiver-mounted cocking handle is removed, and a plastic plug installs in its place. Ears from the plug reach around to the rear of the sight rail on the upper receiver, to fasten tightly there. The plug provides a press-fit between upper and lower receivers when they are closed, and could be fashioned as a flip-up reserve rear sight, calibrated for the new caliber.

Name those guns

Airborne Combat Engineer shows a few photos and asks readers to name them.

The first is named in a comment to the post.

The other photo is of a Spanish CETME Model 58, precursor to the HK G3. CETME parts kits are being imported and assembled on domestic receivers as semi-auto rule beaters. They're OK as long as they don't have the dummy muzzle brake welded on the muzzle. The welding hoses up the tempering and warps the barrel. And the original rear sight sucks.

What do we get if we have won? Addition to the blogroll?

Update on 1 April: We did not win. But we are Priority 3 on ACE's blogroll. We reciprocate.

Idea number 229: reason for a mini iPod

We heard today that cardiovascular exercise and music, combined, improve cognitive skills. If this is true, it's a genuine practical reason for Fûz to get a mini iPod.

We have little use for downloaded music, at least within the Denver metro area, because AM and FM serve our needs just fine, Fûz listens to talk much more than music, and we're too damn stingy to buy CDs that have only one or two good tracks on them (there are a few exceptions). So it's hard to justify a dedicated MP3 player unless a killer app can be found, say, something that can help Fûz learn a NATO- or CENTAF- interest foreign language.

Are language study programs available in MP3 or Ogg Vorbis format? Yes, they are. The apps might not be "there" yet, they're oriented towards desktop study or they're just MP3 files of spoken language. The respect that the iPod is getting these days suggests that it has the processing power to be much more than just a music player.

Developers, and geeks at the service academies, listen up: somebody with deep pockets is ready to buy this in volume. Never mind the phraselators that will do the translating for you, there is no substitute for an instructed human brain. In the end, economies of scale can make instructing the human brain cheaper. Make a gadget that you can attach to the soldiers so they drill on language while they PT, and you'll know that the training will take. Better still, the soldiers will be able to summon that skill during periods of stress and exertion (when it's needed) because that's when it was learned. If Uncle Sugar provides the application and support, the GIs will probably provide their own iPods---we are Early Adopters.

Mere playback of spoken language will not be enough. It would need interactivity, for example it asks a question in the language of study and the student thumbs through a menu of spoken answers and chooses the right one; the app tracks the right and wrong answers. When it docks, it uploads the exam results, and downloads new lessons. The exam results can be channeled back to a wetware language instructor, who can guide the student with whatever intensity the student can handle and will pay for.

In release 2, increase the processing power and add a microphone, so the student speaks the answer and the app/device can improve pronunciation, either through its own intelligence or piped back to the instructor. Randomly speed up, garble, shout, or heavily inflect the speech and see if the student can keep up. You get the idea.

Is this starting to sound like it needs a high-end Palm instead?

The Rocket eBook is a dead letter at this point, too damn heavy to take on a run, not enough capacity, no apps. Anybody desperate for one?

He's a nine-pounder!

Toad now tips the scales at 4 kilos even.



This is a bigger thing than it sounds. We've had our Gattaca moment with Toad---he has a little cleft in his soft palate. It wasn't discovered until about two hours after he was born, there was no outward sign of it at all. But it means he can't nurse, he can't generate the suction. Good lawd we tried, and after a few weeks, he was well below birth weight instead of gaining.

We now use a device called a Haberman bottle to feed him, and Barbaloot expresses milk every few hours to load into the Haberman. He's gone from 60 to 100 ml a feeding in about 3 weeks of diligence.

About Christmastime, if he keeps gaining weight, he will withstand the general anaesthesia to undergo surgery to join the muscles in the back of his throat, and mend the cleft.

Further on the low-drag pipedream

The 6.5mm Grendel AR15 uppers are available. A little pricey perhaps, but available. We at WUTT! prefer the metric convention to the SAE, BTW, but showed deference to the developers. Since it seems everyone else has taken up the metric name, so shall we.

Though we'd be pleased as peas if a plainjane fluted heavy barrel were offered. We have the punches and wrenches to fit it to our existing upper. Otherwise, we're just changing the caliber on something that will still be an AR15 tomorrow morning. The same charging handle in the wrong location, the same gas system. Maybe they could borrow HK's op-rod driven gas system for the M4? And work the charging handle into the upper handguard?

Grendel links found through 6.5mm Grendel fan site, found through Airborne Combat Engineer, found through Murdoch, found through Hellinahandbasket.

I've finally found one

I've found someone else making the point that the campaign for homosexual marriage is in part a campaign to extract benefits from employers. A commenter at ChicagoBoyz:

the current debate on gay marriage is at least partially fueled by the intertwining of health care and employee/family coverage. The controversial issue is portrayed as who should have access to the benefits as currently structured when the unspoken question is/could be whether the current arrangement itself is flawed.

We'll have more to post soon about health care, but read I owe my health to the Company Store in the meantime.

Another blog mirror

Anybody notice that a number of blogs are mirrored on "[yourblogurlhere[dot]ass[dot]otron[dot]org"? These mirrors will not load directly, but if you Google your own blog, links to the mirrors will turn up.

The Third World's Right Arm

Feces Flinging Monkey shows you the barest essentials of the Kalashnikov rifle. He offers a very good reason for us to know this. And if, God forbid, that reason is realized, the Kalashnikov and its variants will be the most likely piece you'd encounter.

What would Dagny Taggart do?

We are no particular fan of nor apologist for Martha Stewart. But the little we have learned about her (from hack sput CNN) tells me she's a genuine self-made woman with singleminded determination to succeed in a man's world, even choosing to pursue it over keeping her marriage.

Think about how a woman like that probably views herself. Mutual blogroller/rollee Feces Flinging Monkey opines that his compassion for Martha Stewart slipped a notch or two upon discovering that she turned down a plea deal that she could have afforded without wincing. Now she and her employees suffer needlessly.

Would Dagny Taggart cop a 200k/community service/parole plea to make the bloodsucking Feds go away? I don't think so. You can call it arrogance, if you like, or you could call it "give the fsckers an inch and they'll . . . " No delusions of heroism, nor angular faces, nor the swooning glowing-coals-of-cigarettes-in-the-darkness-like-the-flame-of-the-human-intellect required to visualize Dagny telling the Committee to shove their Certificate up their asses.

We submit that many of the abuses we suffer today, from

• physicians leaving practice because the malpractice insurance is unaffordable,
• to the class-action lawsuit invitations we receive from time to time because, for example, a 17-inch computer monitor did not measure exactly 17 inches,
  
• to the myriad nonsense warnings on consumer products,
  

is because somebody not so long ago ran the numbers and found that copping the plea, choosing not to fight the unfair charge, was cheaper. What does this have to do with Martha and the Feds? The commonality of tactics. Threaten, then offer a settlement. Make an example of the first guy and the rest of the herd goes quietly.

The first transaction may have been cheaper. But now, thanks to the first few guys to cave, the overall costs have been transferred to the rest of us.

Update: Ilana Mercer's column frames our concerns well. Also Jonathan Gewirtz at ChicagoBoyz.

Update the second: And we borrow a page from Kipling, courtesy of Eugene Volokh.

Another idea of mine stolen---before I even had it

We proposed a new service carbine cartridge here, based on the 5.45x39.5mm cartridge case (rather, a 6mm PPC case) opened up to take a 6.5mm bullet with a high ballistic coefficient, yielding a finished cartridge that will still fit in the AR-15 magazine and action but deliver lethality far beyond the 5.56's practical range. Aside from the new barrel, the AR-15 would need to switch to the breechbolt compatible with the 7.62x39mm case, and take a retuned recoil spring and buffer.

Am still way behind on my reading: it was on the API list four months ago. Alexander Arms has rolled one out, along with an AR-15 upper to shoot it. They call it the .26 Grendel. They use a Lapua match bullet with a BC going North of .53. Check the video at this last URL, where an Alexander Arms spokesman describes its performance.

Here's a discussion of the 6.5 versus 6.8mm Remington SPC. Because the SPC appears to rely far less on barrel length, and SOF operators will prefer short-n-handy and reach for a different weapon if the range goes beyond 400 meters, 6.8mm will be the new US service rifle cartridge if the 5.56mm is to be replaced. But a .26 Grendel upper, which was once Fûz's pipedream, now has become a commercial off-the-shelf item.

The US Army consideration of replacing of the AR-15 is also proceeding apace, and apparently the teams are talking to each other, because a 6.8mm XM-8 is in testing (scroll to post dated 9 March 04).

Regarding Middlechild

We've mentioned our Middlechild's idiosyncrasies, and how we've investigated them to discover that she suffers from sensory integration disorder.

We now take her for weekly appointments with an occupational therapist, who has tested her in various ways to identify exactly which senses are not integrating. She has an unusual posture, which makes her easy to topple and causes her to hang on people instead of standing beside them (very trying at Mass, for example, and a pain in the neck to her classmates).

There are some vestibular problems, which compound her problems with balance. We learned that getting dizzy because one has been spun around is a compensatory mechanism that prevents even more serious problems, and Middlechild's compensatory mechanism is faulty on one side. Spin her one way on an office chair, for example, for a few seconds and stop her, then time how long her eyes retrace side to side. If they don't retrace, or if there's a significant difference in how long the eyes retrace after clockwise versus counterclockwise rotation, there's a problem. Her eyes didn't retrace at all when she was spun in one direction versus the other.

It's all treatable, thank God, without meds or surgery, just exercise. The weekly appointments seem to be succeeding, though slowly. Riding a skateboard into a crash wall was suggested, so we saved up egg cartons and filled them with expanding foam to make a crash wall that will endure more than one crash. It will even bear Middlechild's weight, in fact, if any other SID parents are tuning in---email for the recipe. A WalMart skateboard was found for about five bucks.



Core muscle tone, endurance, and proprioception are also a problem, so I have broken out our old taekwon-do notes and now lead Middlechild and Firstborn through some stretches to loosen the posture and give her a feel of where her body parts are.

We regularly ask her what her "engine level" is, to make her alert to her activity and how it affects her attention. She bends close to her work, letting her hair fall around her face, just to block out distractions around her. She can't look me directly in the eyes for more than a glance, unless our noses are touching and my eyes converge into one "bigeye" to her.

The testing is also where we got our first unbiased suggestion that Middlechild is bright. Out of sync, but bright.

We started the testing on our own, without the assistance of her school, because we were warned by other parents that, being a government entity, the school will be slow to respond. We were also warned that such entities are predisposed to not act---their obligation to act, and the funding to support such action, is warranted only if there is "scholastic impact." Luckily, Middlechild's kindergarten teacher, who first flagged us to the seriousness of this condition, understood that predisposition and couched her observations accordingly.

We owe this woman big-time.

Middlechild has gone through SIPT testing and three months of occupational therapy while the school was forming their team and getting it into action. They reviewed their findings with us this week, and I'm still getting my head around it.

Her teacher, a social worker, a nurse, the district's occupational therapist, and the district's psychologist all participated in the meeting. Nothing surprising, most of it already determined by our occupational therapist, though they used different testing instruments. But they were almost giddy in describing how they enjoyed examining Middlechild and comparing notes on her. They discussed their findings in a prearranged order to put the psychologist last.

For a reason. The crescendo, the climax, the point of the buildup in suspense: the psychologist determined that her instruments are in fine working order and do not lie. Middlechild is not just bright, she has an IQ in the ninety-ninth-plus percentile. She has few friends, and has apparent difficulty making friends, because other 5-year-old kids don't grok her. Some of her other behaviors can be explained as easily by her IQ as by SID.

My first reaction was ambivalence. She's a blessing. She's gifted. It wasn't obvious but now makes sense. I'm proud of her. I feel closer to her.

But.

But GT kids can be as difficult to raise as learning-disabled kids. They can be moody, demanding, depressed. Their intellect outraces their emotional development. School, even Montessori, may not be challenging enough for her. A few visits to message boards confirm this.

I don't want to happen to her what happened to me. I was a gifted child too, and grew up to think The World Owed Me Something.
The catastrophes that ensued when I found out that the world's debt to me would forever go unpaid were staggering. My siblings had similar gifts and dealt with them in various ways, heavily influenced IMO by their birth order.

I don't want Middlechild to know she's gifted, at least until Barbaloot (gifted also) and I figure out how to explain it to her. But she already knows, inarticulately, something's going on, and so does Firstborn. Friction has already resulted, though Firstborn is no slouch either.

So on one hand, we are excited and thankful. On the other, I am privately worried, and shared this concern with Barbaloot. Her reply: "May you live in interesting times."

One downside of the meeting is that the school has built their case that they need make no special intervention for Middlechild; obviously, there is no impairment in her scholastic progress, though she can make her classmates uncomfortable as hell. The upsides, her teacher sees improvement in her behavior, cooperates in strategies suggested by her OT, and can influence which teacher will be responsible for Middlechild when she enters first grade. But otherwise, the district perceives no cause for action. That chaps me a bit, and we'll revisit that when we have more information.

What little advice we can offer today, cum grano salis:

• We've long suspected that ADD/ADHD is as much a growth industry as a valid medical diagnosis. Close friends confirm that when it's a valid diagnosis, it needs genuine medical treatment and that treatment offers dramatic results. But desperate parents and litigation-averse doctors may err toward ADD/ADHD when it may be sensory integration disorder, high IQ, or both, or yet some other disorder. Take the time, spend the money, hire the therapists, and run the damned tests.
  
  • How many Hinckleys, Klebolds and Harrises, Kinkels, and so forth are the results of similar misdiagnoses? One hosed-up teenager can do a lot of damage, and my experiences as described here further dispose me towards holding the parents responsible, even if a district attorney might not.
    
  • One gifted kid usually means others, whether it's by nature or nurture. Boy was hanging out in the room during the meeting, and a few comments were directed his way.
    
• This experience confirms my high regard for Montessori education and charter schools. Middlechild probably would have fallen through the cracks, or gone much longer and gotten much worse before being identified, had she attended a conventional public school.
  
• Every one of us would benefit from some testing by occupational or physical therapists. Facial tics, unusual postures, stumbles on ice or up stairs, short term memory problems, listening difficulties, restless limbs during a meeting: all of these have become more noticeable in the people around me. How many of them struggled to a miserable adulthood with the baggage of undiagnosed SID?
  
  • If I were on the Senate Armed Services Committee, I'd find funding to administer SIPT to every accessing military member. Not to throw people out, but the better to keep talented people in. Few other professions demand competence with one's entire body. It's justifiable.
    
  • If we remain wedded to the notion of The State running schools, the money that government-run schools blow on academic standards testing (to defend their franchise, we suppose) would be better spent searching for treatable physical barriers to learning, such as SID, before those barriers spawn behavioral problems or academic consequences.
  
  

In the coming years, we will use this space to share our experiences of raising Middlechild, in the hope that other parents will find useful advice, or offer it, among Fûz's usual rants about limited government, RKBA, homebrewing, and national defense.

We've been coaxing Barbaloot to offer her thoughts here too, but don't hold your breath. Toad's schedule needs to settle down before she can read what I've written, let alone write her own. At the present rate, Middlechild will post her thoughts here first.

Toad-induced sleep

It happens that we have never to date posted a picture of Barbaloot. You get another view of Toad, and one of the cats, in the bargain:



Toad has a powerful sleep-inducing effect on people.

Lest anyone doubt the combined power of Montessori and charter schools:

This is the work of a kindergartner:



Namely one Middlechild.

Not just multiplication, but the beginning of grasping exponents.

Fight for charter schools, if you don't have them where you live, even if you don't have kids, even if you never plan to, or cannot have, kids.

Kill it, kill it, kill it

I just called both of Colorado's Senators, urging them to kill S.1805, the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act. Amendments have been added to it, both to reenact the assault weapon ban (renewal is a euphemism) and mandate Brady background checks on private sales at gunshows.

Don't trust the House conference to strip these provisions when the Senate and House versions are reconciled. Don't trust the NRA to hound the conference to do so. Let's see how many NRA A- or B-rated Senators actually voted for the amendments, or will vote for the full S.1805 as amended.

We can do without the lawsuit immunity if the present court track record continues, and more states enact immunity laws on their own. Rather than take a medium win with two huge losses inside it, let's take a medium loss on immunity and deny the banners their two wins.

S.1805 must die.

Redneck MP3 player

My wife and in-laws presented me with a gift lo three birthdays ago, a Rocket eBook model 1100. A nifty device about the size of a paperback, that would download, store, and display eBooks. I already had been spanking the Palm for two or three years, and was reluctant to begin traveling with yet another gizmo, its case, charger, and associated cables, so it went mostly unused. The choice of materials to read on it was underwhelming too, compared to AvantGo material I was already downloading to the Palm.

Years have gone by, and I'm thinking about an MP3 player, but too stubborn or stingy to buy one. The eBook has audio capabilities aboard, and a slot for SmartMedia storage, and it's otherwise unoccupied and in good working order.

Anybody ever hack into these devices and repurpose one into an MP3 player?

Help send a promising lad to CCW Instructor School

The usual Catch-22 that attends any liberalization of concealed-carry laws it that to get the CCW license, one must train under a certified instructor. But the State who will issue such licenses has not provided for the instructors themselves to be trained or certified. Any tactic they can use to delay the issue of the first license is justifiable, and the instructorship delay is the easiest.

Ohio is case in point. Good friend James Rummel has already trained hundreds of Ohioans, at his own expense, and is eager to earn his certification and serve his fellow citizens in that expanded capacity. He estimates he'll need $500 bucks.

Let's get it to him ASAP. I'm in for $20 if he tells me where to send it.

Unimportant and immaterial

If you find that the difference between voluntarily donating a cable lock, and being compelled by Federal law to give one away with every handgun purchase, is "unimporant and immaterial" you do not appreciate the danger posed by the people you are dealing with.

It is comparable to the difference between donating your time to a church, and being compelled to sweep the floors there.

Next the Feds may require you to donate forty hours of safety training, for example, then require you to collect the records of completion of that training, then certify the safety instructors, and so forth.

Repeat after me: "reasonable articulable suspicion"

Somebody makes the circuit among several Massachusetts Wendy's restaurants, takes notes on identifying characteristics of the hard-working taxpayers behind the counters, then calls the manager at each one. He impersonates a cop, instructing the managers to select one employee against the descriptions he has taken, and strip-search that employee under the suspicion of theft. A Bart Simpson-level prank, two or three evolutionary steps above demanding that Prince Albert be let out of his can.

But the managers actually did it. "Later, however, each manager became suspicious, and reported the call and the incident to local police." To their credit, we presume.

Here's the straw: "The managers who were duped are law-abiding citizens. They thought they were responding to direct orders by the police."

When did a 'direct order by the police' carry any obligation to do anything other than stop long enough for the cop to figure you out? It's bad enough that Dudley Hiibel needed to know the Magic Words ("Am I being detained, Officer?" "Am I free to go?" "What or who are you looking for, Officer?" "I do not consent to any search.") and got the snot kicked out of him because he didn't. He at least had a sense, an unarticulable notion of what a cop's boundaries are, and thought he was well within his own. These restaurant managers hadn't a clue. To say they were 'duped' is far too generous.

So we assert that, henceforth, no American shall consider himself or herself educated without having read and studied The Outlaw's Bible, which explains those boundaries in detail. It doesn't matter whether you're an outlaw yourself---if you homeschool your kids, for example, you'll want to teach them and yourself how to talk to cops or social workers if your state's Department of Education decides to sport wood for homeschoolers.

One Dudley Hiibel is too many.

Remember Amendment XVIII?

Rosie O'Donnell is mistaken that a proposed Constitutional amendment banning homosexual marriage, or denying full faith and credit of one State's homosexual marriages by other States, would be the first Constitutional amendment to restrict individuals' rights rather than guarantee or expand them.

It was already done, it already failed, and it was already repealed.

It's called Prohibition.

Strange New Respect Award

With apologies to American Spectator, we borrow the term they use for public figures who present an unexpected, possibly even radical, turn of opinion.

"'I'VE NEVER HEARD HOWARD STERN. BUT WHEN THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT GETS INVOLVED IN THIS, I GET A LITTLE FRIGHTENED. . . . I AM IN THE FREE SPEECH BUSINESS. ITS ONE THING FOR A COMPANY TO DETERMINE IF THEY ARE GOING TO BE PARTY TO IT. ITS ANOTHER THING FOR THE GOVERNMENT TO DO IT."

That's Rush Limbaugh, via Drudge.
His opinion on this matter did not surprise me. How he couched it didn't surprise me either. But it surely will surprise a lot of people who think he's a neocon first and a broadcast personality second.

What is more boring than a roomful of LtCols making amendments to a PowerPoint presentation?

Watching them make amendments to checklists in MSWord. But not by much.

Meet Dudley Hiibel

We do not continue to serve in America's armed forces to make this kind of abusive shit possible:

One balmy May evening back in 2000, Dudley was standing around minding his own business when all of a sudden, a policeman pulled-up and demanded that Dudley produce his ID. Dudley, having done nothing wrong, declined. He was arrested and charged with "failure to cooperate" for refusing to show ID on demand. And it's all on video.

A Terry stop gone very wrong. Into the blogroll with it. A tip of the hat to the Scout Rifles list on Yahoo.

Trendwatch---Vermont-style CCW?

In spite of failure to pass an unlicensed-concealed carry law here in Colorado, other States are trying. Alaska succeeded last year, as Publicola notes. Now it's New Hampshire's attempt. Is this a trend?

The choice of people to testify is somewhat narrowed, unfortunately:

"You don't have a lot of victims of violent crime come and testify on bills like this, because most victims of violent crimes are dead," [State Rep. Packy] Campbell said.

Rep. Cambpell testified because he still has pills inside him, shot into him while he was waiting for a CCW permit to come through. Let's get him out here to testify when Colorado gun owners try Vermont-style again.

Update: The Manchester Union Leader weighs in on the right side. Live free or die, baby.

Legislative Proposal: Civil Immunity for Hosts of Armed Citizens Act of 2004

Colorado law provides for businesses, churches, and other such entities to exclude concealed-carry from their premises. We are ambivalent about the law granting such rights very broadly, in spite of the private-property aspect that these rights imply.

Businesses in Colorado are posting, or considering posting against CCW, more so now that the CCW law has been changed to shall-issue. They aren’t all doing so because they have any particular animus towards armed citizens (surely some do but all do not); they’re doing it because of the threat of liability. They are worried, reasonably, that they will be sued if a lawfully-carrying citizen has to draw and fire on their premises. Given the urban legends of frivolous lawsuits, we can understand but we cannot sympathize with businesses who are posting to protect themselves from such liability. We gun owners are responsible people and we insist that responsibility be not laid at innocent feet.

In that spirit, we propose the following Colorado law:

No enterprise engaged in lawful commerce or other entity hosting a peaceable assembly on premises located in the State of Colorado shall be found liable, jointly or severally, in civil proceedings for pain, suffering, injury, or death inflicted upon any person on, entering, or leaving said premises by a person armed in accordance with the laws of the State of Colorado.

We are not lawyers so we may have missed some term of art or exactitude. We will not accept any hits for run-on sentences. Note that we don't want to rule out Vermont-style carry should that ever be attempted again (ohhhh, it will).

The projectile is the weapon

so we start our description of Fûz's Thumper with caliber and cartridge.

Jeff Cooper originally recommended .44 Auto Mag, made by cutting down, blowing out straight and reaming a 7.62mm (.308 Winch) cartridge case to acccept a .429" bullet. This was back in the day when AutoMags were big, all-stainless, custom rotating-bolt pistols of a unique design. Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry had an AutoMag as a SHTF gun in Sudden Impact. We can recall no other movies featuring this rare pistol.

You can form your own cases and load your own ammo---in fact you have to. Reportedly the guns themselves were finicky and would feed reliably with only a few loadings. A 180-grain bullet at almost 1800 fps from the muzzle would be devastating.

The AutoMag is now a collector's item, but the .45 Winchester Magnum seems to be around to stay. A firm briefly offered an M1 Carbine rebarreled and otherwise modified to fire this cartridge, but we don't hear from them anymore.

That cartridge would suffice, we suppose, but we add some criteria:

• we'd rather have a shoulder to headspace against
  
• we want a hard crimp to make the chamber pressure more consistent from round to round, and make the ammunition more tolerant of the recoil banging it around as it climbs the magazine towards the chamber.
  

We want a case with a shoulder. It doesn't have to be much. We'll give a little on bullet diameter to get one.

So we propose a case of 33mm length, just like the .44 AutoMag, with a tiny shoulder and outside neck turned if needed so it takes the .410" bullet. Load the same weight to the same velocity, with a jacketed truncated cone bullet. This is no new invention, it's the .41 Jurras Magnum Pistol cartridge, for which we can find no URLable load data.

This cartridge, if OAL is managed, will fit in the M1 Carbine's magazines.

Not enough, you say? Put the same treatment to the .45 Win Mag case instead. Then you have the .41 Avenger. It will have greater propellant capacity, and tolerate higher chamber pressures, but it will be more expensive to manufacture and supply because it relies on a less-commonly available component. Fûz's Thumper will not require special feeding if we can avoid it.

RMBR

Another Rocky Mountain Blog Roundup, this time at Matthew Edgar's place. Please go read what the Rockies have to offer.

We were sniffed today, and about damned time

As we pointed our urban assault vehicle on to the I-25 today, a big van was parked on the shoulder with traffic cones around it. The driver was dismounted, fiddling with a tripod upon which a little aluminum box was mounted, pointed at tailgate level of the cars descending the ramp. Right where cars would naturally be stepping on it to merge with three lanes of traffic climbing a hill with a legal limit of 75 mph.

The van's markings identified it as an automotive emissions remote testing system. About damned time.

Your humble blogger published the following lettitor in the Centre Daily Times in September of 1994:

Imagine a device about the size of a piece of luggage. It can sense pollution in automobile exhaust by the way light passes through it. The device can be placed along a busy roadway, and will flag the one car out of one hundred that pollutes too much. The device senses real exhaust in the real world, in any weather, in real driving conditions, maybe even at night.

The other 99 cars, and their drivers, pass by without inconvenience; their engines are in tune and their drivers keep them that way. Drivers from other parts pass through, and if they pollute, the device catches them. If they don’t, they go about their business.

Imagine that this device costs about as much as a car. Almost every county in Pennsylvania could afford one.

Now for the hard part: this device exists. It was field tested in California (notorious for clean air standards) two years ago. It could be a regular production item this year if enough states ordered them.

Unfortunately, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is committed to a system of centralized, stationary auto emissions testing centers. Blair and Centre county cars must be tested. Cars from neighboring counties, where emissions aren’t tested, may pollute here. Our cars may not.

Regardless of how well you maintain your car, the emissions testing center requires you to make an appointment, maybe even take off work, to submit your car to testing. You pay for the test.

The testing center also tries very hard to simulate real-world driving conditions, and doesn’t quite cut it. All that simulation isn’t cheap either. This emissions testing center costs a lot more than a car; it costs more like what a small bridge costs. Something’s wrong with this system.

Ask yourself which you’d rather have. Then call our Governor and ask him: why not "passive remote" auto emissions testing?

It shouldn't have taken them ten years to prove me right. I'm beginning to suspect that they don't want to.

Gratuitous baby pic

Toad at 4 days, belly full, taking it all in.

He had me until I read this line (some edits)

If one party collapses altogether, as is possible for the Democrats, will the other fission into two in order to fit our two-party paradigm?

Emphasis mine. Frederick Turner's Tech Central Station column neatly summarizes the intersections of several axes of political thought but this line, the next to last sentence, does not ring true to the editorial star chamber at WUTT!

Pardon us, especially you happy few conservative readers of this here blog, but the Democrat party is in very little risk of collapse.

The kind of people who hold power in the Democrat party (not necessarily the rank-and-file, mind you) have learned one lesson very well in the last few decades: they can get what they want, or what their narrowly-defined constituencies demand, if they remain loyal to each other. Their party has no unifying principles, only people dedicated to reelecting themselves and each other while offering lip-service to the Hard-Working Middle-Class American Taxpayer^TM (and increasingly, Our Brave Men And Women In Uniform^TM).

A political party with at first nine people seeking its nomination for the Presidency does not appear to be a party in decline. The qualities and origins of those people is another matter. They will openly bicker, but about the details of what it will cost in political capital for one candidate to drop out and lend his support to another. Like the aphorism about the propositioned woman who recoils in disgust, "not for a million dollars!" the propositioner is encouraged because now it is just a matter of negotiating a price. (Re)electable Democrats accept that everyone has his price, the difficulty is finding it without embarrassment and being able to pay the quid to get the quo.

The GOP, on the other hand, is in serious risk of splintering, on the matter of principle, rather, President Bush's apparent lack of loyalty to GOP principles. For example, some Republicans are choosing to support Kerry, motivated by anger at the guest-worker proposal, hoping that a Democrat President will gridlock against a GOP Congress and no serious public policy damage would result. He lost some faithful with the steel tariff, some because of his support for renewing the assault weapon ban, a lot to the Medicare prescription drug expasion.

"Principled" conservatives, as Turner observes, will put public policy issues above price, or as he put it, "separate and insulate higher values from the marketplace." Instead of replying "not for a million dollars," they'd say "never," and mean it.

George W Bush, the natural delegator, is clearly less loyal to principles, and more loyal to people---the people he installed on his Cabinet, the dream team probably handpicked for him. For delegation to work, he has to be loyal to them, and demand the same loyalty from them, regardless of whether they adhere to traditional GOP positions.

In case you haven't noticed in other endeavors, a team assembled from "best-of-breed" members who otherwise have little to do with each other, doesn't work together very well or for very long.

Holding such teams together requires extra effort in the loyalty-to-people department, with heavy helpings of PR, market research, running interference, talking points, ass-chewings and -coverings, and at worst "choosing to spend more time with his family." Among the GOP, maintaining a cohesive team in a real breathing government looks like managing a team of high-performance salesmen---competitive, self-made, ambitious, internally disciplined, externally polished, publicly cordial to each other and happy to golf together, but each one barely concealing a weird streak, and bound to privately get on at least two other salesmen's nerves.

In contrast, the Democrats' bickering is out in the open, blatant, pandering, counting feathers and coups. The behavior on display in the primaries is not enough to disgust and alienate their base, because that base is deeply in hock to the Democrat party for their livelihoods. They'll find a way to prevaricate, circumlocute, metadiscuss, change the subject, and so on because they are, well, loyal to their next meal.

The GOP leans on a pretense of holding together by common principles. Those principles are not internally consistent enough, and the rift is growing, as Virginia Postrel observes and Frederick Turner agrees. Without this hobgoblin of little minds, the GOP instead relies on personal loyalty just to keep itself together and retain power. Absent Lee Atwater's Big Tent, valuing loyalty over principle does not work for the GOP except in tight circles formed in:

• industry (outsiders hold these with suspicion---Cheney blah blah blah Halliburton!),
  
• a prior administration,
  
• professional or academic associations, either innocuous or underground (Kurt Vonnegut was a Rotarian!) or
  
• multiple terms of horsetrading in Congress (conditions not favorable for developing or selecting men of principle).

The only other substitute for well-policed common principles is patience---take half a loaf now, let the other half rise while the ideological direction of the Supreme Court is altered by a few key appointments, for example, and tolerate some of the morally objectionable consequences of the last few decades until public opinion comes around (note Turner's observation of libertarianism, "in the end fairness will emerge"). Moralists, versus pragmatists (another libertarian writer uses the term "consequentialists"), are not, in our experience, patient.

The Libertarian Party suffers more from an overrepresentation of moralists, and a resulting internal lack of patience, than from a lack of adherence to principle among its members. They insist perhaps too much on principle to succeed at electing anyone, indeed they can be each others' worst enemies (who was it that warned, "Libertarians: do not drink Libertarian blood!"?). Some loyalty to people would benefit them, which is not natural for the G-d-damned independent types whom the LP normally attracts.

Despite President Bush's very good performance in the armed conflict, the GOP will collapse first. Sorry. That doesn't mean that John F-ing Kerry will be the next President, rather, Bush's party will be bruised and shaken in reelecting him, and have a difficult time choosing his successor and electing him or her. The Democrat party is much better at absorbing the shock of such internal struggles, in fact they endure it every four years. Nader was chump change as a spoiler for the left, compared to Perot and Buchanan on the right.

Tadpole becomes Toad

At 10:27hrs Mountain today, Tadpole drew his first breath and became Toad. Three dot two kilos. Say hello.



Barbaloot spent about twelve hours with unproductive contractions, and as they became painful, she opted for the epidural. Toad squeezed out shortly thereafter.

Coming soon

Fûz's proposal for a Thumper.

Design goals, over and beyond the Thumper specification:

• Ambidextrous. Tough to do when it's a bullpup, but a bullpup it will be.
  
• "Glass rod" trigger. Even tougher to do in a bullpup.
  
• No alpha emitters. Tip of the hat to Feces Flinging Monkey.
  

When we were writing tech manuals for a living, we learned that smart firms (not my own, of course) wrote the manual first, as a vehicle to define the product before serious pen-to-paper design ("pen"? "paper"? yes, a long time ago) could begin. In that spirit, the operator manual is about half-way done and will be published first right here.

Countdown begins

We check into the hospital tomorrow evening to induce Tadpole into becoming Toad.

It. must. breathe. Air.

Quote of the day

The API list keeps offering up gems, and we can only find time to post them here as we find them, rather than compose our own thoughts. In this case Raven Charles Riggs, with his permission, regarding the confusion of pacifism with cowardice among the faithful:

Churches must confront the reality of evil in the world, not be governed by the hope that they won't encounter it in their lives. And they must believe that they're teaching their members how to deal with evil when they encounter it, in whatever form and in whatever place.

How many times does the word sword appear in the Bible?

Quote for Today

comes from Raven Steve Cooper, who contributed this to the API list, in a discussion about many frontier lawmen who happened to come from the wrong side of the law, and their victims:

I bet there's many a nameless cowboy buried as a bad guy who was really just fighting for his rights.

With permission.

It's "Feeeooooooz" dammit

James Lileks guest-hosted Hugh Hewitt's radio program last night, and was riffing on the topic of what TRB stands for, in the case of The New Republic's weblog.

I called in with Tap, Rack, Bang, a malfunction drill for a weapon that goes click instead of bang. The producer couldn't get his head around my pseudonym, and James pronounced it "Fuzz."

Some disappointment. And I didn't even get to plug WUTT! on the air.

But damn, Lileks has a voice for radio.

Quote from two years ago

Found on the API list, back in October of 2001:

"We need to make Americans out of American children, not multiculturalists who accept the fiction that all systems and all beliefs are equally good."

Cal Thomas

We are raising our own kids this way, and we're vigilant for any sign of indoctrination from the government-run schools that will run counter to it. That said, I oppose (mildly) Colorado's law that my children recite the Pledge of Allegiance at school. Rarely will anyone younger than 12 or so understand what he or she is pledging himself or herself to.

Where's the Any key?

Ex-president Bill Clinton writes in longhand rather than compose his thoughts in MSWürd. Senator Hillary had to learn how to use e-mail to communicate with their daughter in college.

Can I have my Universal Service charge back?

I've found my coyote, alright

Swen offers the Cherry Creek Country Club as a good opportunity to take a coyote. A heartfelt thanks!

However, I've got one practically out the front door where I work. Four times in the last thirty days I've spotted a strapping lad who works his way from the prairie of Buckley AFB, over to the flightline to thin down the rabbits and prairie dogs among Colorado ANG's F-16 sheds.

He usually shows up at dusk, when the only lawful dynamic human-wildlife interface in that area, Fuji ASA 400 in a Canon T50 with an f/3.8 150mm lens, will barely reach him. He also understands very well that photography is prohibited on the flightline, so I have to catch him in the open before he crosses into it.

I've got about 8 exposures of him so far, and if exercises and Distinguished Visitors weren't getting in the way, I might have resorted to camping out in the upstairs latrine at Building 909 with a tripod and the doubler on the lens.

Update: I heard a pack of them yipping after midnight chow last night. Reminded me of the song "Me just a Worthless Coyote" from the Hank the Cowdog children's books. And e-Claire has had her own encounter with 'yotes.
Update 2: The photos are in. The dusk photos were badly underexposed. However, I caught one as he appeared at high noon near where they were singing a few nights before.

Another class of migrant worker

We've been searching for an analogy to the Bush guest-worker proposal, the better to test the proposal and find where people's objections to it truly originate. So how about this?

Imagine that a class of foreigners seeks to enter the United States because they see opportunities for themselves that do not exist in their home countries. Brokerages arise to match the foreigners to such positions. The positions are plentiful but the cost of the transaction, increased artificially by US immigration controls and delays, makes recruitment unaffordable for most US firms who would otherwise offer these positions: pent-up demand.

Comparably-qualified native US citizens are not filling all of these positions because the compensation and perks are widely variable. The lowest compensated positions are going vacant and even many middle-level ones if the perks aren't quite right. They are satisfied with the tight immigration controls that keep foreign candidates out and artificially increase the aggregate price of the positions they do take.

Like it or not, this is an Econ 101 question graphing supply against demand.

Are we discussing peach pickers on the Western Slope? Framers and landscapers on the Front Range? Meatpackers in Fort Morgan? Pakistani software engineers on H1Bs?

No. Mail-order brides.

Bonus points if you can draw a parallel with the Bush proposals to "promote healthy marriages."

Discuss until I get back. Will be below radar until after some exercises and the birthing of one Tadpole; posting will remain light.

It's rather small, really

If my friend Joe convinces me to run for the US Senate, I'd rather be interviewed by Howard Stern than Connie Chung.

Found via Buzzmachine, via Instapundit.

"It's too scary"

Firstborn is now watching the DVD of Frodo and the Fellowship slogging through the mines of Moria. She has to turn away and cover her ears from time to time, such as when the Nazgul stabbed Frodo at the watchtower of Amon Sul.

We warned her.

We just finished reading The Hobbit to her and Middlechild so she had an inkling of what she'd be getting into.

What's amazing is what she already knows about the story, from her buds at school, who have already watched the DVDs or seen the movies in theater. In a way, this father feels a little jealous, that she's learning these things from her friends instead of from me.

What scares me, then, is that there are a few topics that we'll have to accelerate a bit so she definitely does learn them from us instead of her friends.

Political plug---Arapahoe County

Travis Nicks seeks to be elected to the office of Clerk and Recorder for Arapahoe County, Colorado. Please go read up.

It isn't the rifle, it's the cartridge

StrategyPage notes that Uncle Sugar is going to give the Heckler und Koch G36 a go (no permalink, look under 14 January 04), under the designation XM8.

Civilians in the less afflicted provinces can sample a functionally identical rifle in the XL8T.

It's all very interesting, Uncle, but the new platform sends the same booolet at the same velocity---or if even shorter barrels than that of the M4 carbine are considered, even less velocity.

Clearly the light and short weapon is needed, for mounted troops, rear-area troops who need to be armed but are not constantly engaged in fighting, and so forth. But there's no need to stay wedded to the weaker cartridge that comes along with today's carbines.

The proposed 6.8mm Remington SPC cartridge is headed in the right direction, using a case that is slightly larger in diameter than the 5.56mm, giving it slightly more propellant capacity, to push a .270" bullet.

This .270" bullet must be short and squat to fit the entire cartridge within the 5.56mm envelope around which modern carbines are built. This short, squat bullet has a poorer ballistic coefficient than it needs to have, so it will lose velocity faster and drop more as it travels.

So a counter-proposal: take the 5.45x39.5mm cartridge case of the AK-74. It has the same case head dimensions of the 7.62x39mm AK-47 round, in fact is is mostly the same case, but the Soviets "Ackleyed" it by forming the case walls straighter, eliminating the case's body taper to increase the propellant capacity.

Just don't neck it down to 5.45mm, stop at 6.5 or so.

The resulting cartridge case will be about 6mm shorter than the 5.56mm original, but have the same or better propellant capacity because it's fatter. Use the shorter case with a longer, higher-ballistic-coefficient bullet, seated out in the case. The resulting cartridge will fit within the 5.56's overall length. Drive a bullet of smaller caliber but higher BC and figure it will retain its velocity better than the 6.8mm.

Instead of 115 grains at 2800 fps, try 140 grains at 2300, assuming the case propellant capacities are identical, and a given mass of propellant delivers the same weight-velocity product whether it's in a longer, narrower space versus a shorter, wider space, which of course it doesn't.

Update: Hornady's Fourth Edition of their Handbook of Cartridge Reloading consists of two volumes, one of load data for various cartridges, and the other of ballistics tables. Lessee: their 6.5mm 140-grain spire point bullet has a ballistic coefficient of .465. When thrown at 2300 fps, it will hold on to 1513 of them at 500 meters. With a rifle zeroed at 200 meters, it will fall almost 71 inches at 500. A 129-grainer (BC=.445) at 2500 fps retains 1633 fps at 500 yards and drops almost 60 inches from a 200-yard zero.

Hornady did not even catalog a 115 grain bullet for .270 in their Fourth Edition handbook. The lightest they go is 130, with a spire point whose BC is .408. Sierra lists a 110-gr spitzer with a BC of .375. With muzzle velocity at 2800 fps, it still has 1717 fps at 500 yards and will drop 76 inches.

I just have a thing for long, narrow bullets with high ballistic coefficients.

I am going to proselytize an E-9 tomorrow (shop talk)

I already proselytized an O-6 yesterday, so might as well go for the trifecta and get the base civil engineer too. I'll either get fired or get my tour extended to end of FY.

Get this through your heads: in the USAF C-CW CONOPS, the unit has a lot of work to do, to integrate itself into the chain of command. This is traditionally where NBC exercises have fallen down---the gulf of nescience that ebbs and flows between the endlessly drilled airman, and the thoroughly indoctrinated wing commander. The links in the chain of command connecting the two is only now getting hard, legible, usable guidance on how to operate an airbase under NBC conditions.

When you have an operational readiness inspection due at your doorstep in 30 days, your first reaction should not be to suddenly shift to 6 days at 12 hours each, to hone individual skills for said inspection. Individual war skills are about as good as you will ever get them in 30 days.

Your reaction should be to get your flight chiefs and the unit control center staff together to mesh the UCC checklists against the SRC's expectations. Then trickle the findings down to your workcenter supervisors and make sure their actions and timelines are congruent with the UCC's checklists. Have a long look at your functional area's TTP section in Appendix 4 of AFMAN 10-2602. The essentials are all there.

Then you practice several Alarm Reds, a few post-attack reconnaissance runs, and several gear-shifts from Green to Yellow to Red to Green.

Simulate shifting from MOPP Four to MOPP Four Mask Only, or to MOPP Two. Find out where your comms break down.

Rehearse managing an asset under the Ten Foot Rule.

This is a martial art, folks. Anyone who has studied a martial art understands that mastery comes only after assiduous, repetitive drilling, punctuated by examination of purpose and intent of each step of the drill, sample applications of the drill under time pressure, role reversals to teach the anticipation of counters, free sparring to see if the student can apply the drill against an opponent, then more repetitive drilling. Your CE Readiness Flight handles the repetitive drilling part, like upper-belt students at a dojo. Squadron leaders---the masters of the school---teach the rest.

A knife-hand is a knife-hand is a knife-hand. It's a fundamental. Now look at which targets are vulnerable a knife-hand, which stances can deliver it, when it will work and when it won't.

The ORI is coming and it's too late to drill your Expeditionary Airmen in how to make a knife-hand strike. You'll just burn them out.

Now they need to learn what to hit with it. You will see the lights turn on. Trust me.

Should guest workers pay into Social Security?

"Paying into" it implies that in the future one will be "withdrawing from" it. And there's the rub. Michelle Malkin panics that guest workers will be drawing funds out of our treasured nest egg of Social Security, rapidly depleting it. Aside from the fraudulent conditions under which these workers have been paying already, which should be punished, we can only reply, Well dammit, if guest workers are being FICA-d at the same rate as I am, they ought to be able to get out of it what they put in.

. . . beginning the day they're legitimized, of course. Losing all of the contributions they've made prior to that day is ample penalty for working here illegally. Let our laws change to let them re-enter the United States to work as guests, and from that day onward, we can be explicit that they get ownership in the new contributions.

Without any mechanism to return these monies (but no more) to the people who earned them, Michelle is conceding that Social Security is and ought to be income redistribution, not a safety net or a pension.

Imagine the outrage if we concede that we need the forced contributions of foreign workers just to keep our own system afloat, or to forestall the day it ultimately sinks. We gringos will take their money and keep it. In any language other than Democrat, that is represented by the noun "theft". The "forced" aspect of Social Security will be harder for Americans to ignore, hastening the day we have serious discussions about making it fair or eliminating it.

Look at the political implications of not compelling guest workers to contribute. All other things being equal, guest workers' labor will be about 12 percent cheaper than that of native US citizens. If we agree to design a guest-worker system at all, and we want to structure it so that it does not displace native US labor, this 12-percent disparity must not stand. We would have to collect the same FICA tax from them that we require of native workers.

Then it will be easy to persuade native workers to demand rights to FICA distributions in relationship to their own FICA contributions----the "wetbacks" are putting in their 12 percent and they'll get that 12 percent back at the other end of their working lives (if they live that long, and the typical Mexican or Guatemalan probably does not, which is another matter).

I didn't even have to complete this thought to a friend of mine. He saw where I was headed with it and completed it for himself: "I'll be damned if I can't get my twelve percent back too!"

If Uncle Sugar remits these FICA funds to the guest worker's government, instead of directly to the guest worker himself, that foreign government is bound to piss that money away before a significant amount of it gets to the workers who earned it. In the short term this is a good thing, because it will either incite them to revolt against the corrupt government, or cool their interest in guest working. Still, WUTT! proposes that the remittances be made directly to the worker, deposited into an account of the worker's choosing in their home country and currency, or even made toward the purchase of an annuity that will be worth more if they leave it untouched---exactly the kind of annuity that our own workers ought to be paying forward. It will be their property, it will be part of the estate if the worker croaks early, and the worker can borrow against it, none of which Social Security allows today.

We'd have to structure a guest worker system to collect Social Security taxes from them just to get the legislation through Congress and past the labor unions. In karmic return, the guest workers will be able to claim a right to the monies collected from them. Once they claim such a right, native workers will too.

This could spell the doom of Social Security, at least as an income redistribution mechanism.

At that point, privatization will be an easy sell too. Joe Sixpack, over your life you put $125,775 into Social Security. Here it is back, to the penny, minus some adminstrative charge you didn't have a choice not to incur. Had this money been invested in mutual funds over the years you worked and contributed this $125,775, today it would have been worth four times that. It's your money, it should have been making more money, and more jobs (for gringos or immigrants, doesn't matter) while you were waiting to get it back.

In short, I'll entertain Bush's guest-worker program, even if it is a cynical attempt to buy the Latino vote as Laura Ingraham asserts, if it can be a lever with which to wreck out Social Security. I'd like the program even better if it followed Citizen Smash's blueprint.

FLASH PRECEDENCE---DHMO USE CONFIRMED---PACIFIC NORTHWEST

Courtesy of Dogtolusba, an Observer's Initial Report of terrorist use of dihydrogen monoxide has been confirmed in the Seattle area. This ruthless attack represents First Use in Theater, and has been reported by Flash precedence to the National Command Authority.

NBCREP Two to follow . . .

Finally found the term I was looking for

In a Liberty magazine review of Christopher Hitchens's biography of George Orwell, a paragraph seemed dissonant to me. The term "working class" and the term "middle class" appeared in the same sentences, several sentences in sequence, as the reviewer compared them. (Sorry, Liberty has no web presence so I can't offer a link.)

Perhaps my lack of a formal university education has allowed some misuse of terminology to enter, perhaps not. But to me, the middle class is the working class: people who get out of bed each weekday, pull on clothes that serve to identify a worker's purpose as well as to facilitate that purpose, report for work that is only nominally physically exerting, and come home with only nominal concern that their expenses are being met or they'll be mugged as they enter their homes. They work, at jobs that allow them to live within their means.

So who was the reviewer, or Hitchens, talking about in the term "working class"? To me, most of these people don't work, or many of them don't, because they are recipients of various forms of government charity. Of course there is a class of people who work their tails off, and seem to be slipping backwards into deeper poverty---our Church has connected a few of us with such a family, whom we sponsor, and that's what I've gathered about them. They're "working poor" and they are one doctor bill or uninsured car accident away from not being able to work any more.

What shall we call these people?

The term is "client-class," discovered among the comments to Armed Liberal's post on the Democrat Party's war stance. I'm not using the term here as the commenter, Trent Telenko, did, but who's the master, me or the word?

Complaints that your wea^pon is to.o small? (updated)

Not your 'nads, mate, but the US Military.

No, it isn't too small. WUTT! disagrees that we haven't enough men. We have just about enough to do the work, if we can deploy them all. For starters, the ratio of officers to enlisted is out of whack.

We're kicking some good enlisted men out because they've been at a particular grade for too long instead of getting promoted. There's nothing wrong with a Staff Sergeant remaining a Staff Sergeant for ten years, if he's a good Staff Sergeant. He may make a lousy Master Sergeant, but we'll always need some number of Staffs, and if this one's mission-capable and bought-and-paid-for, keep him. The same is happening, in tragic proportions, with stiffer formality, and at loss of a greater investment, among the commissioned ranks. Up or out at O-5.

The massive Guard and Reserve call-ups to support OEF, OIF, and upcoming O-star-Fs, are being cited as reason to add heads to the active military branches. Y'all have got that wrong. So many military skills such as public affairs, inflight refueling, military police, and theater airlift were given to Guard and Reserve elements on purpose, to make sure the public noticed, painfully (employers, stock markets, banks, churches), if a large-scale US military campaign ever launched.

. . . the reserve components connect thousands of communities to the active duty military forces. If the reserve components don't go to war, the American people will not "go to war."

Guess what: the public noticed. They looked long and hard at the justification for and cost of this war, and they chose to support it. Those who didn't support it found themselves in the minority, and public support ebbed away from them.

Transferring these missions back to the active branches undermines that balance, and muddles the signal of popular support, up or down, that a war needs. Note well, I say this at personal expense. Transferring these skills back to the actives would make it less likely I'd ever have to deploy again. My family would be happy with it. But I'm against it, for big-picture public-policy reasons.

WUTT!s editorial board are also not interested in a return of the draft. Ask any of our fine folks downrange today whether they would be comfortable showing the ropes or trusting their backs to young enlistees who didn't seek to be in uniform.

What we do need, however, is better training, in marksmanship to name one area, and more thorough exercises to galvanize that training, and more money to convoy or airlilft our forces to the RTSs, CRTCs, CTCs and so forth where the exercises can be conducted. Here is where we find out who deserves to be promoted from Staff to Tech to Master, who deserves to be kept as a Major, and who needs to get the hell out of Uncle Sugar's service. This is also where we find out where we can or must transition to specific COTS items, such as GPS receivers, boots, and other individual equipment.

(Added) Taking one step further back, let's have a real foreign-policy dialog about using our military as Meals-on-Wheels. Deployments to the republics that used to comprise Yugoslavia have arguably trained us for the pacification of Mesopotamia, but the optempo required to keep it manned at the same time as Southern and Northern Watches has driven many good servicemen out.

So no, we're confident that size is not the problem right now. Anyone with experience will assure you it's how you use what you've got, that counts.

New Year's Eve haircut, need it or not

Boy's hair was getting a bit shaggy, and I needed some Daddy time, so I took him the whole way to Buckley's barbershop to get all of our ears lowered.

I hardly ever put a good photo of him here, it's time you get a good look. He's the one on your right. Ignore the ugly fellow with him.

Rocky Mountain Blog Roundup Eye-Eye

Please visit RMBR II at Andrew Olmsted's place. My blogrollee Walterindenver started it.

Why an almanac as a terrorist indicator?

��It's not as ��������risible as NPR finds it to be.

1. an almanac would serve well as a key for a book code. For a good example of a book code in use, read Thomas Harris's Red Dragon. Hannibal Lecter and the darkroom serial killer communicated by citing a specific paperback edition of The Joy of Cooking. That's the catch, though: both users must have copies of exactly the same key. DHS didn't mention a specific edition of a specific almanac, nor do we think they'd be so stupid that they would release that information to the public.
   
   
2. Islam keeps the lunar calendar. For widespread underground cells to limit their communication, it would be advisable to coordinate their actions or their infrequent communications in advance with a calendar that they understood more intimately than their intended victims do. A genuine almanac offers a lunar calendar, among many other useful data.
   
   
3. a mathematical construct of both Item (1) and Item (2). Base your cipher on a table of tides or phases of the moon, or know which cipher to use on which date. The exact same edition or even brand of almanac would not be required for the cipher to work.
   

So all you folks who don't understand why DHS is interested in suspicious persons using almanacs, now you do, so you can now stop your tittering and pay serious attention.

My regular readers, all five of them, will tell you I'm no regular defender of nor apologist for DHS. However, their concern about almanacs, and their willingness to mention them in the clear, appear to me to be signs that they are in earnest search for something very specific.

BTW, the word almanac is a cognate from Arabic, isn't it?

Update: OK, perhaps it isn't an Arabic cognate. Of the three definitions cited by dictionary.com, one's etymology led to Greek and possibly further back to Coptic, one said "unknown" and a third offered no etymology at all. So I say "perhaps," and refuse to blink.

I can visualize what would prompt my father to have done this

He regularly complained that steel tape measures were too easy to damage by retracting them at full speed. This steel tape measure must have been the proverbial straw; we found it when we went through his belongings after he died. I can see him cursing, then reaching for the tools.

He bent some brazing rod into a crank, drilled a hole, removed the broken spring and replaced it with the crank. It would have taken him as much time and forethought as it would for you or me to de-staple a document and feed it into a copier.

We propose airships again

DenPost's lettitors once again discuss the problem of threading heavy recreational traffic from Front Range cities through a narrow mountain pass to the ski resorts.

There's not enough room through the passes for extra lanes, and one writer rightly concludes that if you build them, the traffic will increase to absorb the added capacity. Sinkholes in those stretches can close I-70 for days at a time. And at the times when the supply of snow is best, the road conditions can be at their worst.

A monorail will not be the answer either, especially if it's operated by the Denver public transit monopoly. The monorail will take up some of the space that extra road lanes would need. Sinkholes would still imperil a monorail, though snow probably would not.

The towns delicately perched along the route would also suffer if the highway is widened or a monorail is added to it.

All economic problems are put in terms of scarcity and how to manage or circumvent it. What is scarce in this case are surface routes from Front Range communities to the resorts.

We submit, then, a mode of transportation that doesn't need passes or tunnels through the mountains, and that does not need to strand huge costs (compared to rejiggering an Interstate highway) before it carries its first passenger.

This mode of transportation would generate some of its lift with a conventional wing, making it capable of payloads on the scale of seventy-five tons; it would offer the choice of transporting the passenger only, or the passenger with his or her vehicle and gear to further explore Colorado once they're on the other side of Route 9.

The extreme Green folks would love it because it burns less fuel per ton-knot than the privately-owned vehicles that are driven through that stretch today, it will be quieter and less disruptive than the surface autos, and it needs no large, wasteful asphalt runway---it can operate vertically. It could dock on Dillon Reservoir, whether it's full or empty, watery or frozen. At the other end, plenty of soccer complexes could accommodate the airship itself, the parking and the traffic.

The moderate Green folks would ride it just for the view on the observation deck.

Boeing and LockMart would love it because it's a new market for aircraft.

We'd like it because it offers somebody an opportunity to solve the problem without a government mucking it up. The people who are creating the traffic---the ski resorts---can solve the traffic problem and make themselves some money besides. Who loses?

Get some former Broncos in as financiers, along with the ski resorts, and they can operate sports bars and nightclubs aboard to entertain the passengers on their way up and back. They'd be cramped and noisy, but that's their purpose. Joining the Mile High Club will get a hell of a lot easier.

The only serious impediment to such a venture is not economic or technical, but political. The Transportation Security Administration will insist upon Dominating, Intimidating, and Controlling the ships, crews, passengers, ports, and cargo.

Earlier post, related topic, here.

Blogging responds to even a modest increase in bandwidth

It's those little things that you see in the corner of your eye that distract you. Like this one:

[T]he average user", he says, "has little to hide, and so hides little". The other side of this equation is the effort demanded of the average user in order to use encryption properly. Even the simplest of the good encryption programs have a real learning curve.
...
PGP represents the other end of the spectrum. It's free, and quite secure, but you'll need to take the time to read the manual and understand it. You'll also need to convince others to take that time, too, or else you won't have anyone to send encrypted messages to.

It was just this evening that a married couple, good friends of ours and partners in The Cause, took dinner with us, as the airbreathing offspring units fell asleep to the Rocky and Bullwinkle DVD, while I explained how Pretty Good Privacy made their lives better, and made the life of a keynote speaker at an upcoming LP state convention tolerable.

It's not the hardware, it's the people using the hardware whom you must choose to trust. PGP's manual is explicit on this point, as it describes a Web of Trust.