I warned your asses. I warned you!

Rewind to my archive, about here:

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, now scroll back to the present. The FEC is indeed now contemplating regulations, and the mechanisms to enforce them, against bloggers who participate in the national discussion of elections. HT to FreedomSight.

I propose a countermeasure.

Wish me luck

I wasn't joking in my description over there to the right, where I said "it's time to move to Wyoming."

The application package is going in. Cross your fingers for me. Salt over the shoulder. Blow me a kiss, if you're into that kind of thing.

And double your best wishes for my buddy Doug.

Martha is free

She should not have gone to jail in the first place, and I wish her well in her appeal.

I also agree with VC that she is turning her sentence and release into a public relations coup. It has softened her earlier image as a harsh, driven, er . . . capitalist. Not that it needed any softening to me, but I'm not her target market.

What could she do next? My guess: a program in her company to encourage hiring and training for women ex-cons.

Presidents' Day

The snow kept us from driving up Devil's Head Mountain, so we sneaked over to Roxborough State Park instead.





It's like Garden of the Gods, but a helluva lot closer and strictly on foot. We'll be going back.

Oh, by the way, it's posted against firearms, which I safely assume means CCW is unwelcome. Not a smart idea if there are hunting cats around.

Getting closer to a notebook killer

I remarked in this post about how there's a market for a hybrid PDA/computer, using a stripped Palm-type operating system to access what's stored on it, but shifting to a full desktop OS when docked to appropriate hardware.

It's still not here yet, but we can see approximations toward it. The most recent case in point is the Tungsten T5, a Palm (is it unfashionable to say "Palm pilot"?) with a USB flash memory drive aboard it. The Palm accesses this 256MB flash memory, leaving 160MB of it available as a plain USB flash drive. Some of it, only 55MB, is used by the Palm.

If it had an eentsy HD (20GB would do) instead of flash, it would be the killer. A few more grams for the extra power to spin it could be justified.

There's still plenty of life left in my m500, and all the room I need for spanking the Palm, but someday I'll want to abandon the 256MB flash drive that holds all my AF pdfs. When I do, I'll need more than 160MB. And I'll not pay $400 for it. Nor do I want a phone integrated in it.

As it is, the Clandestine Mobile Media Access Platform has been put out to pasture. I went about 2 months without it, then upgraded to this little girl, the 3250H1 model. At 4.5 lbs, she impresses me that notebooks will be the first notebook killers, not PDAs.

Quote for the day

Pithy, and served cold:

I've seen this type of thing before; this type of "empowered attitude" with nothing to back it up.

Publicola on the reaction of the Unprotected class to the capture of an alleged serial rapist.

So how come . . .

. . . microwave ovens do not have a "Chinese food" setting?

things that piss me off

Children's computer games that must be run as a sysadmin.

Officially beginning to worry

Anybody know of Coyote's whereabouts?

Old graphite mare ain't what she used to be

The current mission-critical computer at chez Fûz is now 5 years old, a Sawtooth Mac G4 that originally shipped with OS 9.0.

We've added memory, installed a second hard drive and loaded OS 10.2/ 9.2, upgraded to 10.2.8, repaired a noisy fan on the video card, upgraded the CPU from 350MHz to 1GHz.

But I think that's all I'm going to do to prolong this machine's service life---and normally I'm willing to do a lot incrementally rather than all at once. The Mac prior to this one? a Umax clone running a 603 at 180. Before that, a Performa 475.

I've read up on upgrading video cards, and I don't like the idea of either paying Apple prices for a new card on the one hand, or having to flash the ROM of an OEM card on the other. The original ATI Rage Pro 128 will have to carry us a bit further, and America's Army will have to be played on a different box and OS.

I'm not even sure I want to go to 10.3 either. What else has to get upgraded to come along with Panther? Quicken? Nutscrape? Do I need 10.3 to run iWork?

I'm open to subjective advice. Moratorium on any more Mac goodies for 18-24 months and bring home a G6?

It's not the fifties they're after

Brother gunblogger Triggerfinger (HT: FreedomSight) brings us news of CNN running a story that demonstrates how easy it is to buy a fifty-cal rifle and move it across State lines. To make the story, they had to break a Federal law.

My first impression is that no news organization should be breaking laws just to show how easy lawbreaking can be. Publicola and I agree that the law in question should not be a law in the first place, and that fifty-caliber rifles in private hands are no threat to public order. A first-and-a-half-th impression is that such laws serve only to make everyone just a little guilty, so anyone can have his arm twisted just a little bit by the Man. It's a Randian "consent of the victim" thing.

My second impression is that CNN and its reporters stand absolutely zero chance of having to defend themselves against charges of violating that law. Laws are for the little people.

My third impression is that CNN's reporters and/or producers and/or editors know, subconsciously perhaps, that fifty-caliber rifles are not the real story. The real story, and the activism motivating the fifty-caliber story, is terror and anguish over the fact that a seller of a gun and a buyer of a gun can find each other and arrange to meet face-to-face and make their transaction without the engagement of a licensed dealer. Sensationalize this, spice it up by adding today's Most Dreaded type of gun, and cue the anti-gun lobbyists.

Compared to the fifty-caliber, the antis would get more traction over the SKS (more bodies) except it has one letter or syllable too many. Ayyy-Kayy. Uuuu-zi. Fiff-tee. Mack-tenn. Ess-kay-ess takes just too long to say in a sound bite.

They're not after fifties, they are after private sales.

No Sosh Scurty crisis? (updated)

The chief counterargument to privatization of the Social Security system seems to be that "there is no crisis."

All well and good, one might conclude, funds are forecast to be plentiful in that lockbox-thingy until, uh, about the year that I might be retiring. Until then, there is no crisis, no reason to be discomfited, no reason to act. Heck, I even think the GOP is floating this idea not to save Sosh Scurty, but to shut it down.

OK, well how about this scenario?

A dummy corporation, in fact a network of dummy corporations, obtains credentials to do business with a major credit reporting agency (HT, Rick Stanley), thus getting access to the vast databases maintained on every person who has or at one time had a loan, credit card, bankruptcy, judgment, or bank account anywhere in the United States in the last 50 years or served in her armed forces since the 1970s. This much has happened.

This part has not happened, for all I know: the dummy corporations meticulously sift through these dossiers and then use dummy individuals to file false unemployment and disability claims against the Social Security "accounts" it has siphoned away numbers for, then wrecking their credit ratings. A company could sell stolen SSN's to third-parties willing to drift from place to place filing claims under multiple identities; the company could make its buck and disappear fast while the marketed identities are bled dry.

The amount of money to be stolen is far less than what could be scored by opening fraudulent credit cards or draining real bank accounts, but this lesser booty is easier to get away with. For anyone looking for it, fraudulent credit activity is easy to spot, by contacting the same credit bureaus in the first place. But how would you find out that someone has filed an unemployment claim as you? How would you know that this "account" you've created for yourself is being depleted, and when? And if you do find out, can you challenge the Social Security Administration so your own legitimate unemployment or disability claim will be honored? What will stop a third-party from holding on to a stolen identity for re-use a few years down the road?

Can't happen, right?

Then convince me there will be no crisis---that millions of retirees-to-be won't insist that Social Security accounts be privatized, one way or another, so an accountable private firm will be responsible for paying out, with stronger protections against fraud than what Social Security provides today. The crisis could be big enough to crater Social Security, if one out of, say, four people expecting SS benefits loses even a part of them because of fraud. That's probably enough for the House to draw the line, deny responsibility, and refuse to appropriate funds to repair the mess. Now who has reduced Grandma to eating dog food and living in a fridge box?

As far as I know, SS isn't even obligated to give you a new account number after an identity theft. Only if you are a victim of domestic abuse and you need to change numbers to hide from your ex. Hey, wait a minute . . . If the Social Security Administration admits that you might need to change your SSAN the better to hide yourself and kids from an abusive domestic partner, aren't they admitting that minor criminals commonly misuse the SSAN? Not to say that domestic abuse is a minor crime, but that it doesn't take Dr Evil's or the Russian mafia's vast worldwide criminal enterprises to exploit the weaknesses of the SSAN; all one needs is a bad temper and a private investigator.

But would he accept? (updated)

I recently posted on the topic of nominating somebody to the National Rifle Association Board of Directors who has his head on straight about gun rights and political strategies the NRA should pursue to secure them. The idea was floated of drafting someone from among the gun bloggers.

While reviewing the NRA BOD candidates' nominations, it occurs to me that I missed mentioning one candidate who carries respectable credentials.

NRA Life Member. Citizen-soldier for 24 years, Operation Enduring Freedom veteran, currently serving the US Air Force in active reserve capacity as an emergency preparedness specialist. Shooting enthusiast, web logger, commentator about the Right to be Left Alone. Second-degree black belt in Taekwon Do. Father of four, homebrewer, reloader, hunter, avid owner and defender of several evil-looking black guns that are not for hunting at all but were purchased expressly to practice shooting bipeds.

Well, nobody else from our crowd is bowling the rest of us over to seek the nomination (are they?). And my offer to serve as Director of TSA on the Lucas ticket just didn't garner enough enthusiasm for me to pursue it any further.

Fer Chrissakes, if bloggers can take down a CNN executive (actually, he took himself down but bloggers held the knife steady for him) or depose a Senator from a key leadership position (he took himself down too, but you get what I mean by now), can't we put a fin on the NRA BOD?

Update: It only took two comments equating me with the fraudulent Libertarian Girl for me to realize that I can't have both pseudonymity as a blogger, and public responsibility as either a United States Senator, or as a Director on the NRA Board. I'm staying pseudonymous for reasons I've made clear elsewhere, and those reasons are incompatible with either of those lofty public goals. I'm not abandoning those goals, merely deferring them until the day I become Fuz N. Pundit, USAF Retired and hang up the uniform for the last time.

Until then, I will ruminate on these pages about what I'd do in that hazy scotch-soaked future, but will not tease or coyly suggest my candidacy. That doesn't stop me from suggesting a draft of blogger or bloggers who proudly go public.

Giving Uncle 3 more years

I reupped some time ago, neglected to post anything about it, until Barbaloot discovered the photo, taken before the memorial wall at our Wing.

If only the Donks would . . .

Bill Bennett mentioned yesterday that he would try his hand at a Twenty-First Century manifesto for the Democrat party. I think Hugh Hewitt would try the same. Doubtless other bloggers and commentators have suggested it too.

"The Democrats could be a resurgent political force in the United States if only they would," [fill in the blank with your favorite killer policy prescription].

If only the Donkeys would embrace genuine tax reform and win back the small businessmen and the widows'n'orphans and the IRS victims. If only they'd pick up and run with Second Amendment rights, and recover their union rank-and-file base. If only they'd drop the pretense at Drug Warrior and stop incarcerating whole generations of black males. If only they'd give up their current infatuation with coastal elites and academics, and return to their roots among blue-collars and farmers.

If only. If only.

Every WUTT! reader has his favorite, the one sure thing that would turn the Donks' fortunes around. And I have mine.

It's not much.

Eminent domain abuse.

How better to reach out to Maw and Paw Heartland than to say "We Donkeys are really really upset, deeply livid in fact, that Big Corporations are suborning local governments into kicking ordinary people out of their houses to make way for condos, shopping malls, parking garages, and so forth. It's nothing but Corporate Welfare, and we Donks don't stand for it."

SayUncle is all over this, and so is the Institute for Justice.

None of the if-only policy proposals I've heard so far is utterly impossible for the Democrats, even an eminent-domain reform platform that runs afoul of the enviros, or a pro-gun platform that would hospitalize Chuck Schumer. Some Party leaders would be alienated, of course, but they'd come around, as they just might in '06 when Tom Daschle makes the rounds like a macabre breathing Marley's ghost and gets them thinking right about the fundamental problem, the only problem really, that of Staying In Office.

My greatest concern from all of this is that with such an opposition, the GOP can make a serious mistake and fail to realize it until it's too late. Like in the Colorado legislature this year, for example. From the point of view of individual rights and the free market, the GOP may be second-rate firemen, but the Donks are first-rate arsonists.





How about a little fire, Scarecrow?

So how come . . .

Bifocal spectacles have the lower portion of the lenses cut to a higher magnification, so someone with weaker muscles in the eye can focus more easily on fine print that is close to the eyes.

All well and good, I suppose, as long as the reader holds his head upright and trains himself to look downward. Then a good portion of his visual field is magnified, even though only the reading material that needs magnification is only a small sub-portion of that portion of the visual field. For other visual tasks at greater distances, the added magnification is useless and even gets in the way.

Bifocals could be made less awkward by limiting them to the field of view that a reader is likely to need. To wit, if the magnification is needed only for materials that are closer, then put the magnification in the area of the lenses that both eyes will be looking through when they are focused on closer objects. Eyes converge---point inward---on nearer material. So move the magnification areas closer to the nose, a little higher, and a lot smaller. They'll be where the eyes need them when reading, and out of the way for distant vision or for tracking moving objects.

If I get time I'll sketch what I mean.

Dr Freud, your slip is showing

A colleague snorted after a news story about another wedding for the British Royals, "I wonder what color of dress she'll wear."

I blurted out off-white colors that indicate less than the expected premarital purity, "Cream? Bone?"

This is virtually a concession

Also seen at VC:

Both opinions [in the DC handgun ban case] acknowledge that the Second Amendment challenge raises an arguable constitutional question

I see this as a major concession of legitimacy by the antigun crowd, tantamount to "You might have a point there." It's that niggling word "arguable" that Eugene used. English 1 students will recognize that adjective. Up to this point, antigunners would not allow that term to be used, meaning that a literal understanding of the Second Amendment would not be allowed on the table.

From here it's a matter of continued pressure. Be of good cheer and unrelenting energy.

Whew

From Volokh Conspiracy:

The New Jersey Appellate Division has just held ... that a federal statute - 47 U.S.C. sec. 230 - makes Web site operators immune from defamation liability based on items posted by users, even when the operator keeps some messages and deletes others, changes some messages, sets ground rules for the discussion, and so on. This would also mean that bloggers are immune from liability based on comments posted by others on their blogs.

This doesn't mean anything for me directly, but it should spare other blogs of any trouble from comments I might post there. I wouldn't want that on my conscience.

It's gonna be a good season, Mama. Look at the whiskers on them cats

At my age, and in my current occupation, one quickly understands that one's wisdom is grounded in knowing what one does not know.

By that standard, today is a good day, because not only do I know what I don't know, but I seem to not know less that I thought I didn't.

Should I let anyone else know this?

A new favorite

I'm sure that President Bush would not nominate him, but Andrew Napolitano deserves an appointment to the Federal bench somewhere.

Read his interview in Reason's February issue (not yet online).

So how come . . .

. . . anthropomorphised female dog characters in Disney animations (well, just about anybody's animations, but Disney is in the sights at the moment) don't have six teats?

I'd image a still here but something tells me that would elicit threats of lawsuits.

I've ignored this beast for too long

It's well reviewed by anyone who picks one up or fires it, in spite of its looks and its all-plastic construction.

It's damned light, a minimalist approach to a utility carbine.

It's got the wrong caliber but maybe that can be corrected. Either Grendelization or conversion to a TCU caliber could get me interested.

It's no service rifle but wasn't meant to be. In the Charlie model, the SU-16 looks like a contender.

Alternatives to PayPal?

Who's using what? Who's got critical mass? Is critical mass even necessary for web-transacted minipayments? Is it safe to keep accounts at more than one of them? What features are better than others? I'm leery about having one directly access my bank account, less leery about credit card access. I guess it's a discussion of what I want it for, isn't it? Ease, anonymity, disconnection from credit card, disconnection from social security number, disconnection spender from earner?

Kurt's Kustom Firearms is using YowCow. Never heard of them until looking up alternatives to the AR-15's direct-impingement gas system---Kurt offers one, BTW.

And this, in a nutshell, is why I want something other than PayPal---it's none of their business what I buy using their service. If they want to restrict what I can buy, I won't use them. I still get their emails, and my emailed complaints about that policy go unanswered.

BitPass looks good, eGold looks even better but it's not really meant for micropayments. For cryptanarcholibertarians, eGold must be the shizzle.

Time again for BOD ballots

The ballots arrived again this year for NRA Board of Directors, and this year because of Neal Knox's untimely passing away, we have to evaluate the nominees without his advice.

So I'd like your help in setting criteria for who should receive gunbloggers' votes for the NRA BOD. This is especially so for fellow gunbloggers who have been disappointed (outraged?) with the NRA lately. They aren't the only game in town or even the best, but they still have pull and it's worth it to try to influence them in this new bloggy era of openness and instant communication.

• Should we eschew police officers as members, and support elected sheriffs?
  
• Should current or past elected office matter?
  
• Should Hollywood celebrity matter? John Milius and Tom Selleck are both nominees.
  
• Should nomination by NRA's nominating committee be a plus, a minus, or irrelevant?
  
• I'm embarrassed to even ask this one: do we know or can we get access to the past voting records of existing Directors up for reelection? I don't know that answer and I ought to. No finding it on NRA's website, I can't even find the friggin' bylaws there. So much for blognost.
  
• Should political party matter? Would you rather have a blue-dog Democrat trying to soften the irrational Dem gun control stance, or a lukewarm GOPer? That's an entire other policy debate but its ripples propagate to this issue.
  

Though it's way too late to seriously consider it for this year, it might be time to write-in nominate an überblogger or two to the BOD. I'd be really cool with Glenn Reynolds or Eugene Volokh. Not so cool with Hugh Hewitt.

Update: After some consideration, I think I want Glenn and Eugene right where they are, free to reason and to blog without any appearance of influence over them. Besides, we'd need different skillsets in an NRA director. What are those skillsets?

We've already been here

Strategy Page's Attrition column observes:

The Department of Defense wants a change in the regulations that govern how often reservists can be called when the nation is at war, and war has not officially been declared. Why not just declare war? There are political and practical problems with that. For one thing, there's no country to declare war against.

(Link is not permanent;  scroll if necessary to 19 January 05)

I might be reading a different US Constitution than this person, but mine does not stipulate that only a nation-state may be the recipient of US warmaking. I just don't see this as a problem. Declare it and get on with it.

Quote for the day

Shannon Love at ChicagoBoyz:

Too many people believe that revolutions can and do occur without somebody making a decision to use force if necessary.

Bring out your dead

Arnold Kling at TechCentralStation discusses some policy implications of American health-care quality and the underestimation of American longevity.
I hold up one cautionary finger and intone: all of that will be thrown into the bucket, temporarily, by one strong influenza epidemic. For which we are overdue.

Quick hits

The in-laws made it back to Western New York safely, in spite of heavy snow the day they left.

Toad is now free to eat solid food, put things in his mouth, and otherwise return to normal infant-ness. The palate repair seems to be a success.

Anduril now wears three Millett quick-disconnect sling swivel bases and two matching loops in the Carlos Weidemann 3-point configuration. Now for a sling? Then Cabinet Man and I will see if it can hit anything.

Se permite en Tejas

Colorado and Texas announce CCW reciprocity today. No link, heard on KNUS 710 radio.

Tribute to Barbaloot's Dad

While Barbaloot's folks are staying with us, her Dad gets bored easily. When we mentioned that we wanted to wreck out the carpet in the dining room and replace it with laminate flooring, he offered his experience and his patience. He even brought some tools.

The floor went down in a day and a half, interrupted regularly with having to chase Toad back downstairs and keep Mlle Sklodovska from falling down the cold-air return register.



He is talented at "cutting in," be it paint, roofing, linoleum or tile. The plank at the kitchen door was tricky, but when he had it just as he wanted it, it slipped in like a Garand bolt. Angle it like so, twist it a bit this way, that end first, easy eeeeeeeeaaaasssssyyy, pop.

When my vacation was over and I returned to work, he kept going with the moulding to cover the expansion gap at the edges of the new floor. I tell him how I appreciate and respect his work, and he just looks at me.

Did I mention he knows how to thread blackpipe?

If a woman answers honestly, size does not matter

But horsepower and durability matter very much. Barbaloot mentioned in passing how she admires her sister's premium stand mixer, and how it accepts all manner of powered accessories. She would not go for a hand-operated pasta roller---gotta be Powered, man.

I took her at her word.



My God, this thing should not come with a plug, just white, black and green 12-gauge tails for its own circuit breaker.

At top, the big shield with the knob on its side is an accessory power takeoff worthy of John Deere. Hello, pasta roller.

Merry Christmas, Barbaloot.

Quote for the day

This phenomenon -- legal victory that leads to cultural and political defeat -- has a long history. In the 1850s, slaveholders collected some huge legal prizes: the Fugitive Slave Act, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Dred Scott decision. Those victories produced an anti-slavery movement powerful enough to elect Lincoln and win the Civil War. Sixty years later, the temperance movement won its long battle for national Prohibition. Within a decade, the culture was turning against temperance; Repeal came soon after. In America's culture wars, the side with the law's weaponry often manages only to wound themselves.

Could we be seeing this phenomenon at play in Britain, with respect to gun control? Is it long in coming to America? Or are we already seeing it in motion, say, in state CCW laws and reciprocity agreements, and the sunset of the AWB?

William J. Stuntz at TechCentralStation, The Academic Left and the Christian Right, Part II.

Idea number 507

The TIS-1 man-portable military laser is an interesting concept: a reservoir of helium, heated by radioactive decay, releases its helium through a vortex tube into a resonant cavity. The vortex created by the flow of helium causes a population inversion among the helium atoms, which in turn stimulates the release of photons of a common wavelength. With enough helium atoms flowing, you get enough energy resonating in the cavity to emit through one end and damage something.

When the helium flow peters out, the laser shuts down. You have to cool and recompress the helium, then reheat it, to get another blast.

It has its limitations, in that your soldiers will be humping the ruck with compressed gas tanks full of dangerous alpha emitters, and sizeable radiators that will disclose their locations to thermal imagers. There might also be a tactically intolerable delay before a discharged weapon recharges for another blast.

Regular readers of WUTT! will recall that all things weapon-y are appreciated as Things of Beauty here, but sometimes we must consider gathering stones together instead of casting them away.

We also assert that our future is in space, and we have to develop economically feasible ways to explore, exploit, and populate it. Getting out of the atmosphere is one problem to solve, moving about efficiently among the planets is another. With capitalist solutions to the first problem within our grasp, let us turn our attention to the second. We need flight times to Mars and the Asteroid belt on the order of weeks rather than months. I am told the principal means to do that is to separate the problems of power production on the one hand, and generation of thrust on the other. You'll need less thrust if you use only enough to propel your payload, rather than propel your payload plus the power plant itself. Offload the power production and achieve economies of scale with it. Send that power to ships that need only enough to push the payload.

Take that same TIS-1 weapon to the Moon and beat it into a plowshare. Use ammonia or CO₂ as the working gas instead of helium. Heat the working gas in solar collectors instead of using fissionable material; we'll need that stuff for future platforms farther away from sunlight.

Make the vortex tube very big, and make a few hundred of them. Mount them on pan-tilt heads slaved to an aiming system. Connect their exhausts to a large radiator to eliminate the remaining heat. The radiators could be located at the Moon's poles or mounted at the bottom of deep narrow trenches to minimize sunlight striking them.

Build the ships to be propelled not by the impingement of photons upon their sails, but by ion motors. The sails will carry large arrays of antennas to collect the microwaves from these lasers and convert them to electricity to power the ion motors.

With a large enough reservoir of masing gas, and a large enough network of radiators and compressors, it may be possible to aim multiple masers continuously at a flight of ships, providing them with constant thrust for days or even weeks, until they are out of range. It will also be possible to beam power to ships that are approaching, to help them decelerate as they reach their destination instead of relying on the nerve-wracking technique of aerobraking. The power to create the thrust will be completely unrelated to the direction of the thrust.

There are always details to be worked out. Will the ion propulsion exhaust reflect or diffract the incoming microwave beam to the extent that range or power is impaired? Will the flow of hundreds of tons of gas through the gasdynamic maser system set up vibrations that make aiming impossible, either for a Lunar platform or a Martian-orbiting one? Will the vortex tube or the cavity wear out? How much of this system can be built from Lunar materials, or will it all have to be boosted to orbit? Can this system be used to loft an X-prize type vehicle the rest of the way to orbit, or will even that thin upper atmosphere attenuate and spread the beam too much?

Update: The massive gasdynamic maser will also come in handy for dealing with these pesky Earth-crossing roids.

We can neither confirm nor deny . . .

. . . that we may now or in the future have received our Colorado CCW, in accordance with Colorado's Revised Statutes section 18-12-201 et seq.

If we have or are about to, it will have been or will be among the low three-hundreds of those issued this year in Douglas County. That puts the per-capita of CCWs for Douglas County rather low, a totally wild-assed guess of .4 percent of total population, as Blog O'Stuff has observed (Hat tip to Renaissance man James Rummel).

The duration of such a CCW permit is five years from date of issue. The application-to-approval process can have taken 60-plus days. The permit itself is prepared on the day that that the application is submitted, and the fingerprints and photograph taken, thus it is technically "issued" on that day, but the you the applicant cannot take possession of it until the approval grinds around and you get your phone call from the Sheriff's office inviting you to come pick it up.

So the useful "life" of the permit is five years minus about 60 days. I couldn't find anything about that in the relevant CRS so I won't cry foul. Note also that the hours when applications are accepted are rather circumscribed. But overall, DCSO does not screw with applicants.

Why the LP should abandon Presidential campaigns

The Quilt.

Hat tip to Jed at FreedomSight.

Toad repair

Toad, Barbaloot and I are holed up in Children's Hospital, getting Toad his palatoplasty and two tympanotomies. All went well, though Toad looks like he went through a round with Tyson, then a tequila hangover.



Much catching up to do. I have Days Off so it's worthwhile for all seven of my regular readers to start checking in again.

Tanned, rested and ready for Senate campaign?

New post on Social Security privatization over here.

Fish. Barrel. Bang.

Hip-hop is too target-rich an environment for Weird Al.

Quote for the day

Roughly $822 million was spent in support of President Bush in 2004, compared to $925 million spent on behalf of Sen. John Kerry.

So much for two of the fundamental lies behind campaign-finance reform. One, that McCain-Feingold, or any other piece of legislation, can "get money out of politics." Two, that "money rules." It turns out that sometimes, strangely enough, elections are decided by voters weighing the issues and making up their minds based on the candidates' positions.

Ryan Sager at Tech Central Station.
We at WUTT! have asserted the latter point for some time. Nice to be proved right in a big race that counts.

Though it certainly helps, money can't buy an election. It's necessary but not sufficient.

Addition to Wish List

One more thing I want to add to my Beggars-Would-Ride wishlist, of things that are achievable but not available for immediate purchase:

I want somebody to offer to recycle old, intermittent, half-lighting strings of Christmas lights. There's too much valuable copper in there for this sh1t to just get shlepped off to a landfill. We're about to ditch a few hundred feet of them because half of the light and they are virtually immune to troubleshooting.

The bulbs can be ground and melted into glass cullet to fill out concrete park benches. The plastic, well, it's probably as valuable as the copper, kilo for kilo, and it could make nice Tyvek envelopes for FedEx someday if it were recovered. The problem, as usual, is identifying what kind of plastic it is so it can be recycled effectively, even if in some cases recycling translates into removal of halogens prior to conversion to Number 2 Diesel fuel.

Here's your bumper sticker:

My Huge SUV burns otherwise-unusable recycled plastics

My new email signature block will read:

"This email message is certified free of slogans, quotes, special backgrounds, special stationeries, digital images, and unusual fonts, in accordance with Air Force Instruction 33-119, Air Force Messaging."

Somebody in the headshed must have objected when he saw a subordinate's email signature was neater-looking than his, and put his Corfam down hard.

Another proud tradition done in just like nose art. Bummer.

A guarantee to deploy

I can't leave this a draft forever. Rather than hack at it further, I release it to the wild.

When I enlisted in the Air National Guard in 1981, I was viewing it as a way to avoid the brewing Central Asian mess. President Carter had pulled the US out of the Olympics in protest of the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan. I didn't want to go to war. Stupid long-haired me.

Since joining, I settled myself down and matured real fast, and reread the contract. I stayed in the Guard because I felt good about what I was doing, to the point that I wanted to deploy so I could prove my worth.

The first invasion of Iraq came and went, and I was not deployed. I completed 20 years of service and received my letter, allowing me to retire. I had time left on my contract, but small children in the house. I seriously contemplated retirement, but I was also unemployed as a civilian, and not dealing well with that fact. The Guard was the only income I had.

When the WTC and the Pentagon were attacked, that desire to deploy became more urgent, and was finally fulfilled. Just days after accepting a new position with a civilian employer, the phone call came---on my cell, as I was headed to Logan Airport from the job site. I was at Cheyenne the following morning, with bags packed.

* * * *

Phil Carter prompts me to post this as I read his post, "Not your Father's National Guard."

My father served in the Army Reserve during the early 1960s as a way to pay for college; it was then, and is now, an honorable way to serve. But you can't compare service then in the Guard with service now, because of the policy changes adopted by the military which made the National Guard an integral part of America's warfighting force.

The Total Force policy was fully in place when I enlisted. The unit that recruited me was a small truck-mobile radar unit that was Checkered-Flagged to Germany, later to Turkey. After Desert Storm, the whole concept of designating a deployment location in advance was scrapped and the Air Expeditionary Force concept took its place. I can be sent anywhere, and am more likely to go as a unit-type code---small teams to perform specific functions, such as fire-fighting, earthmoving, or in my case NBC defense. I'd deploy only with the swinging d1cks to my immediate left and right, as a team, flight or squadron, not as an entire wing.

Parted out like a junked car. One of the Air Guard's strengths, in my opinion, is that we have less churn, less turnover of personnel than our active duty counterparts. We know each other better, have trained together longer, and have turned that to our advantage. AEFs undermined that advantage by splitting us up and mixing us with other forces whose level of training is different. My criticism of AEF has softened somewhat, now that I've gone through it, because it achieves what it sought to do, to even the deployment burden across a career field.
On the Army side, the "parting out" is not as feasible. This means that entire units, built and equipped for a specific Army function such as air-defense artillery, would be repurposed for another function that was needed downrange more urgently, such as military police. I'm glad I didn't have to go through that.

But the AEF concept did make it more likely to deploy if one had a specialty that was needed down range, or that was in short supply in the first place. The more urgent the need, the more likely and frequent the deployment. The tradeoff is shorter and more fixed deployment durations: 90 days, now grown to 120, with a "hard" wall of 179 days at station at any one time without SECAF waiver. In contrast, Army rotations, Guard or active, start at 180 days.

I nearly ended up going to Afghanistan anyway, though 20 years later. I was within a few hundred km of it. And I will almost certainly deploy again.

F'ing disney world

F'ing disney world blogging wl be light

tech support question for Mac OS X geeks

My iRiver H120 no longer mounts on our G4 running Mac OS X 10.2.8. When I connect it to the Mac's USB, it beachballs for a while, then warns that the drive is unrecognizable and unable to mount, and would I like to format it?

Apple's support site mentions that a command might be missing from the hostconfig file, disabling it from automatically mounting removable drives. Yes, this command was missing (how did it get lost in the first place?), and now that's fixed and the player still doesn't mount.

In fact, I get that same "unrecognizable volume" warning days later, when I log back in. It's as if something is still asserting the presence of the player after it's been removed from the USB port. Even power-cycling doesn't remove the "ghost" player.

iRiver hasn't gotten back to me. Apple's vast support site has only one article on unrecognizable volumes and I've already doen what it advises. I now have to use Win2k to load up my player and frankly that sucks.

Any ideas? Zapping parameter RAM?

The ZSU23-4 had a partner

I don't think I mentioned the other vehicle that was parked beside the ZSU23-4.

It is amphibious (there were propeller housings and thrust diverters on the rear), it has six pneumatic tires, and a radar or two or more on top. It looked like the kind of vehicle that would travel with a pack of ZSU23-4's, to provide search radar and direct the fire of all of those 23mm cannon.

Here's a look at the front, with buddy Doug. I had to crank the brightness and contrast to compensate for bad hangar lighting.



Starboard side:


Can anybody put a name to this unit?

Test msg to wutt fm

Test msg to wutt fm mobile phone

G T squared

Boy is now bringing home the same kinds of notes that marked the beginning of Middlechild's saga.

After a brief consult with the teacher, we think he's also Gifted. He'll be harder to handle than Middlechild, though, because he's big and fast and immune to pain.

God have mercy on us all. At least we're catching this one early.

This should erase all doubt

All right, Gun Lobby, listen carefully. Libertarians have been explaining for years now that there are unmistakable similarities between the War on Drugs and the War on Guns. You discounted us as dope-smoking libertines.

And you drug law reformers, you didn't listen very well either to our pleas to find common cause with the gun lobby. You dismissed us as bigoted rednecks.

Publicola pointed me to Says Uncle, who links to this petition by the Justice Department to reverse a Ninth Circuit ruling regarding home assembly of a full-auto firearm.

The petition says, in effect, that if the Federal government can legislate against private ownership of a home-made full-auto, they can legislate against simple possession of marijuana. The Federal government's lawyers are claiming that it is irrelevant that either the parts of the gun, or the seeds of the marijuana, were not transferred through interstate commerce---they have the power to pass and enforce legislation against it. The petition mentions a medicinal marijuana case and asks the Supreme Court to make a connection between their firearm case and the marijuana case:

"A holding that Section 922(o) is unconstitutional as applied to the possession of “homemade” machineguns raises an important issue that may ultimately warrant review by this Court. Plenary review in this case, however,
would be premature at this time. On June 28, 2004, the Court granted certiorari in Ashcroft v. Raich,
No. 03-1454 (to be argued Nov. 29, 2004), which involves an analogous as-applied constitutional challenge
to the Controlled Substances Act, 21 U.S.C. 801 et seq. Accordingly, the petition should be held pending this
Court’s decision in Raich and then disposed of as appropriate in light of that decision."

The Department of Justice agrees with us kooky libertarians that there is (at least one) limit to Federal power, that this one limit pertains equally to Federal firearm laws as well as to drug laws, and oh, by the way, they want to remove that limit.

I can see some relevance to the Betamax decision as well; more on that later.

They understand that these two issues are intertwined, that a Federal win on one will give them the framework for a win on the other.

Do you?

How's he on the Second?

Anybody have a feel for how Gonzales has ruled on RKBA issues? He served on the Texas Supreme Court, so he should have some sort of track record that indicates how he'd behave in this respect.

I admit that in some respects I was hopeful for Ashcroft, strictly on RKBA issues. He showed promise but didn't follow through.

I'd like to know whether Gonzales has similar inclinations on this topic. Being a friend of W doesn't bode well. But Napolitano on Fox seems to like him.

Cabinet reshuffle?

President Bush is considering adjustments to his cabinet?

Great! Start with booting Mineta.

Offline

Am offline for a while, but had a moment to post, with this question:

Who out here is good at identifying Soviet armored vehicles? I swear to God I was standing next to a ZSU23-4.

Update: Here are two frames.



Looks like mounts for 4 23mm cannon, with case ejection chutes and coolant lines, on the front of the rectangular turret.






Six roadwheels, evenly spaced except for the frontmost, no return rollers. Two reloading hatches on the side of the hull. See again the rectangular turret.

Yup. A ZSU23-4. Compare with photos and (French language) description here.

Quote for the day

For most of us, America wasn't our first choice as much as it was
our last chance.

Varifrank. HT to James Rummel.

Red-headed stepson of RMBR

For your enjoyment, a sampler of some of the best weblogging the Front Range has to offer. Please pardon any typos I failed to catch: I'm typing with 8-month-old Toad in my lap.

As to be expected, election season figures prominently among the submissions by Rocky Mountain bloggers in this Roundup:

• White Dog draws our attention to Bill Whittle's two-part essay on the value of rhetorical skill vice the message, with respect to the Presidential election. Shall one vote for style, or for substance, given that between the two major-party candidates one cannot have both? Choose well.
  
  
• Dave disputes Josh Claybourn, arguing that the Republic is healthier when more people vote, rather than fewer, more-informed people vote.
  
  
• RMBR founder Walter In Denver argues from experience that the validity of our elections is at greater risk from inaccuracy than from fraud.
  
  
• BigSkyDave challenges the good Senator Kerry on who constitutes a threat to US security. Or world peace. Whatever.

Elsewhere:

• The Speculist offers a meta-roundup, headquartered in the Front Range but collecting contributions from faraway corners of the Republic. Raptors, privately-operated space flight, wickedfast computers, improved popcorn, and cancer-sniffing dogs.
  
  
• Jed at FreedomSight reminisces about the quintessential banned-able book. I got my copy. I don't need it---I have it merely to remind myself that I can have it.
  
  
• Publicola fisks an essay defending the Empire, even if it did make the trains run on time, long ago, in a galaxy far, far away.
  
  
• Your host offers his proposal to deploy high-speed internet service everywhere. We'll have to destroy the internet to save it. Always a downside.

Stop the Presses! A late entrant petitions to be included. We are fair and evenhanded to a fault.

• Bob at We The Free waxes Lettermanlike with Top Ten debating points. Though I dispute Bob's use of the term liberal . . .
   

I really don't deserve her

My wife lets me spend most of the day converting antelope into sausage or corned antelope, with the enthusiastic assistance of The Cabinet Man (thanks, TCM).

She and I discuss What Not To Wear as it would apply to her, in the abstract. She really is the kind of woman to whom I could say, "that makes you look fat," and live to not regret it.

Then I discover that she's a closet Farscape fan. I ask her to watch the library for Babylon 5 DVDs. She says "OK."

I am not worthy of her. I'll keep her just the same.

For the Children!

Little Green Footballs asks: Were there plans in the works for a Beslan-like massacre in San Diego?

It doesn't matter whether plans actually existed, or whether a threat was truly posed---they didn't, as the article to which LGF links clearly states. It does not matter. The mere discovery of materials discussing public school security, in the abstract, in the possession of a person engaged in armed conflict against Coalition forces in the Middle East, is enough to contemplate for the moment. It crossed their minds.

Incidentally, a few weeks ago I posted a prediction on this sort of thing happening at StrategyPage's prediction market, though I thought Europe a more likely place for it to occur.

I'm not a particularly bright or well-spoken or uniquely malicious person, and it crossed my mind.

Now take a deep breath and one looong step backward to see the bigger picture.

Public schools are not the only vulnerable public spaces in America. They represent a tiny fraction of them all. Add day care centers, nursing homes, and churches. Then add shopping malls. Then keep on adding.

We can't put armed guards and concertina wire around them all. We can't put automatically locked doors and ID card swipers at all the entrances to them.

My day job is on a military base. I know what it's like to work in facilities that protect themselves like that, 24/7. It is incredibly expensive, incredibly slow, and it brings out the worst in people who think they are smarter than you. I can work like that but I will not live like that, and I won't ask my neighbors or teach my kids to live like that either. Our economy cannot survive it and our national character will not tolerate it.

Still, the threat exists to my neighbors and my kids, even though the most evidence for that threat is a CD-ROM found in Iraq, burnt with a pdf pulled from an open web page. What measures we take to counter that threat must be consistent with the national character we have chosen for ourselves, and otherwise be within our reach.

My Googling skills are failing me in seeking one politician's exhortations that we must not change the way we live, but to change the way the other bastards live. We are indeed doing the latter, at great expense and sacrifice, but it will not be enough. In some way we will have to change how we live, but it will not be in the direction of C-wire and ID badges. These measures simply wrap defensive layers around what remains a vulnerability.

I would rather deny any adversary his ultimate goal, by erasing that vulnerability and giving up some or all of the layers of defense surrounding it. This will have to be a change in attitudes first, then laws second, but little or no money need be spent publicly to bring it about.

I assert this without apology. We will remain vulnerable as long as it is not commonplace for people in public to be armed, able to protect themselves and the innocent among them.

As I have argued in other spaces, the present conflict will not be over until our servicemen begin to bring home Persian wives. That represents the "change how the other bastards live" aspect of the solution.

But it is only half of the solution. The other half will be signaled by, for instance:

• being able to buy targets at Target, and a brick of .22LR while you're at it;
  
• turning on TLC to see Paige Davis or Bob Vila advise a young couple on renovating a rifle on This Old Mauser;
  
• the high school yearbook photos show a larger trap shooting team than basketball team;
  
• an adult showing anxiety around firearms will earn the same contempt we express today for a man who beats his wife, or the same pity we express to one who lacks the capacity to wipe one's own bottom.
  

Deny our philosophical enemies their ultimate goal by encouraging their victims to fight back. Celebrate the armed virtue.

The objection will be raised that we would be changing how we live. I concede that. But we would be changing toward a lifestyle of fewer fences and alarms and locked doors, fewer face-commparing cameras and identity badges, more economic prosperity, more confidence in oneself. We would be transferring our uncertainties to those who have taken advantage of our uncertainty.

Those who view human life through the lens of class should welcome the erasure of boundaries between the protected, protecting, and unprotected classes. Increasingly, this is the only stratification that matters, if we are to regard one another as equals before the law.

I do not present this as a complete solution, for no solution can be complete. It does not speak to concerns that jihadis will obtain a nuclear explosive, or smallpox, for example. But those contingencies are best addressed by military force over the course of weeks, months, and years.

The seizure of a school or a church by jihadis, on our own soil, which surely has been contemplated by our enemies, can be thwarted only in seconds, by the spontaneous and violent reaction of the people who were in that school or church at the moment it occurs.

Roundup!

Walter has graciously agreed to let me host the latest Rocky Mountain Blog Roundup.

Please send me a link to your best recent post---sorry, only one post per blogger---with a brief description of it and yourself. Deadline forthcoming.

Deadline 1700 hours Mountain, 10 October for publication on Columbus Day.

Quote for the day

The U.S. military---particularly at the level of NCOs, who are the guardians of its culture and traditions---is a world of beer, cigarettes, instant coffee, and chewing tobacco. It is composed of people who hunt, drive pickups, use profanity as an element of ordinary speech and yet have a simple, sure, demonstrative belief in the Almighty.


Robert Kaplan in Atlantic Monthly. Hat Tip to Lexington Green at ChicagoBoyz.

New stuff at Ditchweed

A new Wise Turkey story, with an opossum this time.

Time to overhaul all of it, then

United Airlines has told the bankruptcy court that the "likely result" will be a decision to terminate all of its pension plans. ... That would precipitate the biggest pension default in history ... The move is expected to
destabilize the already struggling airline industry, prompting other old-line carriers like Delta to eventually follow suit ... It would also put additional pressure on the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC,) the federal agency that insures traditional pensions in case companies go belly
up.

Why not allow all pension plans to convert to defined-contribution plans? Then dissolve the PBGC.

I gots ambition

If I learn enough Linux to be dangerous, I'll make my mark, and secure my retirement, by selling an intelligible, hotlinked replacement for the MAN pages.

The New Orleans of the Atlantic

The Real Sam Johnson Show reminds me: Savannah, Georgia impresses me as the New Orleans of the Atlantic. And how the Atlantic needs one.

I'll be going there again soon.

The Fusilier Pundit Plan to Deploy Ubiquitous High-Speed Internet Bandwidth

Executive Summary: outlaw the Internet.

Abstract: the fastest way to ensure that high-speed wireless Internet connectivity is deployed to every possible inhabited place in the United States is to chase it into the shadows through the power of US law. The author draws parallels between the the War on Drugs, the War on Guns, and alcohol Prohibition on the one hand, and the availability of high-speed wireless Internet connections on the other.

Making alcohol, abuse drugs, and certain types of firearms illegal encouraged criminal entrepreneurs to ramp up supply to meet suppressed demand. In fact, milieus presumably under total control by government, such as prisons, are incapable of eradicating such "contraband."

A comparable approach, resulting from heavy lobbying by industries who perceive threats to their business model from digital reproducibility of their content, would incentivize a cottage industry of hackers and geeks to circumvent these legal controls, thereby making bandwidth more available, more reliable, more anonymous, and more resilient to malicious code attacks.

The fundamental problem facing developers an underground ubiquitous IP infrastructure are political and economic, not technical. To date there has been no incentive to develop or deploy such an infrastructure because there has been no pressure to do so.

However, if the entertainment industry succeeds in enacting laws that will mandate the inclusion of digital rights management in the existing IP network, for example, there will be ample incentive for industries or activities to move their IP-dependent applications to a network that does not obey those laws. The technology exists, or the precursors to that technology exist, and only await the incentive to be assembled and applied. The demand, today legitimate and above board, will be forced underground. An active community of politicized engineers and technologists already exists to serve them.

The greatest technological obstacle would be replacement of the long-haul high-speed connections provided by such carriers as Level3, Qwest, and Worldcom.

For more, beg and plead for it in Comments.

Not quite there yet

I'm waiting for the market to roll out a PDA/computer hybrid:

• It would operate as a PDA when it's pulled from its cradle and jammed into my pocket,
  
• It can connect to WiFi hotspots and provide a full-featured browser on a low-res monitor in the PDA mode;
  
• When it's resting in its cradle, it does not sync with another computer, it reboots as one, and simply interfaces with input devices, peripherals, a high-speed IP connection, etc through the cradle.
  

For respectable desktop performance, it would farm out the functions of full-power CPU, graphics processor, and vast amounts of memory to the cradle, and run from on-board equivalents only when portable. Separate OSs?

It seems that all of the components are there, only waiting for integration.

At least one company is pursuing it, I don't recall the name (OXO?), but they are, of course, basing theirs on Windows.

Who else is close? One of the reasons I went for the iRiver MP3 player is that it could be the progenitor of such a desktop/PDA killer. It is principally, by weight at least, a hard drive. The desktop/PDA killer will be, mostly, a hard drive, with enough application hardware and an OS wrapped around it to support PDA functions, using information written to that drive. Putting a Palm front-end on this drive will do that, if Palm can be made to access hard drives. The whole Palm front-end can go inert when the device is docked.

When the killer is booted in its cradle, the CPU there strokes the hard drive and accesses everything that the Palm OS has put there.

Other devices will be coming towards the killer from other directions. For example, Tapwave's Zodiac is a game console. Put a HD in it?

WTF for the day

At the Commissary, right up front near the entrance, there was a rack of the current generation of MREs for sale. For about $7, IIRC, marked down from the usual $9.

There's nothing wrong with them, I've lived on them and was able to transition back to real food successfully afterward. Some of them I even like---the pork rib, for example, and the clam chowder.

But I wouldn't actually buy them. Through the normal course of my service, I accumulate enough of them for my other needs, like the car trunk and the occasional hunting trip, even the overnight bag if I'm on a weird commercial airline flight. But somebody out there thinks they're great long-term survival food and they want to buy and hold them against Doomsday? Not at seven bucks a meal.

The real punchline, though: they're for sale, to any qualified Commissary customer, though every package is marked in Uncle Sugar's standard all-caps boldface,

COMMERCIAL RESALE IS UNLAWFUL

Hey, I just work here.

More speedgoat

At 1320 hours Mountain, I felled a pronghorn on Foote Creek Rim, west of McFadden, Wyoming.



This is what leave is for.

Update: The buck fell at 13TDS0365819982. Range was 207 meters, through a light crosswind, with the same 139-grain .284" pointed-soft-point thrown by 50 grains of IMR4350 from the same 7x57mm Ruger as last year. He fell instantly, then after about twenty seconds he got back up. Then he fell again for good.

He was struck through the sternum. The projo was not recovered.

Next time:

• a laser rangefinder is on order, using miles left over from an old credit card, not enough for a ticket but plenty for this gadget.
  
• need to carry a safety-orange object just to mark the place where I took the shot. Having nothing this time, I just stacked some rocks. Not easy to find after dressing the animal.

No on Amendment 36

That's it. Just no.

Make way for another poster

Barbaloot amazes me. She texted me last week: "I want you to help me set up my own blog."

She's been listening to Dennis Prager, some Hugh Hewitt, some Glenn Beck. Her dander is up, dogs. She's gonna do something rash unless she gets to post.

FWIW, she's been following the story of how Dan Rather is imploding, and she now "gets" what web logs can do. She looks at my blogs differently now; she no longer regards the time I spend at them the same way she views playing Harry Potter or Diablo. Blogs have crossed the line from interesting geeky diversion to, well, something deeper, more important, engaged with the world. Those who dismiss arguments that blogging has had its watershed in Ra^therGate should interview Barbaloot about it.

We discussed it some, and she chose to post here for a while, taking the pseudonym I have always used for her. If she wants, we'll launch her on her own blog later.

I'm hunting antelope this weekend, and plan to have her set up before I go, so watch this space.

Did I mention that she's the best thing that ever happened to me, and that I don't deserve her? And that if she finds out I got that MP3 player she'll kick my ass?

Buy only the amount of electronics you must have to survive to your next paycheck

Consumer electronics prices continue a weird downward spiral. I posted recently about my beloved iRiver iHP120. I scored an open-box special from BestBuy at just under $300---new ones went for $339. When I was choosing a new LeapPad book for Boy's birthday, I glanced at the MP3 players again and got one of the nastiest buyer's remorses of my life.

They had put their existing stocks of iHP120's on clearance for $269. Making room for the 40GB model? Maybe. Or maybe they're making way for a player with a screen that shows JPEGs and BMPs too. Same MSRP as the audio-only player.

That remorseful incident was last Friday. Today, browsing at a CompUSA, I saw they still had their iHP120's at $329.

Toad tries to stand

He's cutting a tooth, and he wants to stand like his brother and sisters do.

Roxaaaannne

More men than women have failed to reproduce in each generation.

This item from FuturePundit is not news, it's merely repeatable objective proof of something geeky men have always known:

"There are men around who aren't able to have children, because they are being outcompeted by more successful males."

Any bearer of a Y chromosome who's seen Roxanne can tell you this, though in less charitable terms: "You wanted it all. All the romance and emotion, all wrapped up in a cute little nose and a cute little ass!"

[FuturePundit's] guess is that the legalization and increasing use of divorce has increased the gap between what percentage of women and what percentage of men manage to reproduce in each generation.

Think of the thousand Princes in Sa'udi Arabia, and how they came to be. Then think of the millions of poor schmucks in such countries, who will never get laid in their lives, let alone sire children, because of a paternal religious/political system that treats women as property and allows men to hoard them under polygamy. Liberalized divorce simply means shifting the balance of power over procreation from man toward woman. Clearly, having all of the power rest with the man has not been beneficial there.

A shortage of females will very likely select for genes carried by males who become more successful.

Check out the quote from Roxanne above. Shifting the balance completely over to the woman will result in attractive, hunky guys who know how to talk women out of their clothes. Is that how brutal Mother Nature would define success?

I don't deserve her

Barbaloot and I celebrated eleven years of marriage this weekend. I chose Moroccan, and suggested to her to invite Firstborn. Like a shot Firstborn agreed.

I am lucky to have this woman. I don't deserve her, but she's mine.

Wow

Tasteful, but some are not safe for work. A picture a day of Wanda. HT Instapundit.

Add one more industry, Laila

We would also like WUTT! to be recognized for our opinions on Film and Television. To wit:

Which supporting actor do you think most deserves a lead role in a major Hollywood motion picture?
It's time for the Baldwins, Travolta, Cruise and the others to step aside and let some sunlight reach through the canopy of this knotted forest. These people deserve Star Vehicles.

Winner: !

Runner-up: !!

Actress: !

Please offer yours in Comments.

Ownership society

If a company finds that a particular property has become a liability to the point it affects the company's stock price, it can spin the property off.

Chaz reminds me of a grassroots plan to buy a major anti-gun broadcast network and assign proxy to the fire-breathing gun lobbyist Neal Knox. He'd take the network in a new editorial direction.

The plan looks more feasible today than it did when it was floated years ago. The network? CBS.

I advise holding out a while longer. If VIA goes below 30?

Yes we do, but . . .

Orin Kerr asks at VC, regarding Ra^therGate: C'mon, folks: don't we have more important things to blog about?

Remember why we Americans in general and bloggers in particular are obsessed with media dishonesty and inaccuracy. That election over which Orin expresses concern cannot be expected to conclude fairly or peacefully if a major media outlet is carelessly reporting a fraud passed to them. The power of the media in political affairs is a given. The responsibility that
the media have in these affairs is unenforceable.

As far as I am concerned there is prima facie that the memos are frauds. Consequently the network that relies on these memos should answer challenges to their validity, and challenges to their fairness in other reporting about the memos' subject as well.

If true, their errors need to be detected and corrected, and I'd rather have bloggers doing it than Congress or the courts.

If false---if the influence of the network media is diminshing, and that of decentralized media is increasing---media consumers are making it so, and should articulate why.

Either way, I don't see this as a matter distracting the body politic from the truly salient issues of a presidential election. I see this as a message to the body politic to be aware of the curvature of the lens through which they view the election, and to either correct that lens or discard it if they feel it cannot be trusted.

The only way to do that, within Constitutional constraints, is to point out the distortions, in painful detail, over and over and over, right now. It will not interfere with discussion of genuine campaign issues, it can only help.

Haven't seen any yet

I was hoping to see some Kalashnikovs in the streets---Sarah Brady said so---but none have surfaced just yet. At least on my usual route along Mississippi, Chambers, and Parker Road, and if there are any in Aurora or Parker, that's where the little bastards would be. Right on the sidewalks. Were they supposed to be falling from the sky?

To anybody reading, if you do see one and don't really want it for yourself, hold it for me, would you?

Maybe I have to wait until after midnight tonight. Tomorrow's another day.

Time for some nomenclature, OK class?

Alphecca rates the Manchester Union-Leader highly in its politically balanced approach to reporting on firearms issues. However, their editor needs some schooling:

About the only material difference New Hampshire gun enthusiasts are likely to see after the federal assault weapons ban expires tomorrow are lower prices for high-capacity gun cartridges that hold more than 10 bullets, gun owners and dealers said.

The thingy that that is projected from the gun, travels to the target and hits it is a bullet. In shotguns, specially built to throw multiple projectiles in a single discharge, the many projectiles are called pellets of shot.

The device that contains the projectile along with a measured quantity of propellant is the cartridge. A shotgun cartridge is called a shotshell.

In a self-loading firearm, such as that class of self-loaders that is now legal to manufacture and market with military cosmetic features, the device that holds and feeds cartridges into the firearm is a magazine. A common misnomer for magazine is clip, which actually refers to a device used to stack cartridges together for insertion into the magazine.

So what the sentence should have said is:

About the only material difference New Hampshire gun enthusiasts are likely to see after the federal assault weapons ban expires tomorrow are lower prices for high-capacity gun magazinesthat hold more than 10 cartridges , gun owners and dealers said.

The editor surely did not mean to refer to the Salvo project, which sought to fit multiple bullets in a single cartridge. This was not a shotgun, in that the cartridge contained a number of simple spherical pellets of lead that are thrown from a smooth barrel in a spreading pattern, but an axial stack of bullets, each fitting the bore of a rifled barrel and taking spin from it.

But I digress. If the press wants to be taken seriously, they need to get even the simplest facts straight, even if didactodorks like me can still figure out what they are trying to say.

"There will be a next move. Count on it."

In reference to the forged Bush TXANG memos, Sandy at comments at ChicagoBoyz that "we're going to see attempts to bring the blogosphere/net under gov't. control."

Could gigital rights management could be applied to this task somehow?

Oh and remind me again how the current McCain-Feingold-reformed situation is better, wherein Big News has a free hand to report on candidates, but certain other entities have legal limits imposed on their political speech within X days of the election.

Red sails in the sunset . . . .

I like Geek's postcard to DiFi.

Ding, dong, the witch is dead. The 1994 AWB sunsets.

Oddly enough, as I've shopped for these dreaded weapons during these ten years, prices spiked on the pre-ban weapons early, but the free(er) market reacted. Rule-beating weapons (no flash hider or bayonet lug, some domestic parts) otherwise identical to the banned weapons appeared promptly and prices quickly settled down, even to levels below those for the pre-bans.

Without realizing it, the proponents of the AWB energized a domestic industry in weapons that used to be strictly imports. Of course they didn't anticipate this unintended consequence. Will they learn from it?

So what will happen to prices? Up, or down? Supply increased during the ban, as companies set themselves up to manufacture domestically what the AWB would not allow them to import, and that capacity isn't going away. It was more affordable for me to get an FAL during the ban than before it. With the AWB sunsetting, some products will be legitimate to import again, so overall supply increases.

On the other side of the price curve, will demand increase simply because a law changes?

My prognostication: many people who get their news from the major press have assumed that these weapons have been unavailable for the last ten years, and now that the ban is over, they'll buy. Prices will spike, but this time the domestic manufacturing capacity will ramp up to absorb it faster than when the ban was imposed (easier to add a shift to machines already tooled up, than to set the tooling up in the first place). Prices won't spike as high and will fall sooner for end items.

Meanwhile, owners of post-ban guns will want to refit theirs with post-post-ban features. Many of these are bolt-on, such as stocks and bayonets. That capacity is there, in fact the products themselves are, since they were removed from complete weapons or parts kits to make post-ban weapons in the first place, as well as third-party firms making domestic parts for rule-beaters.

What separates the clueless con-man from the professional

Note to those who aspire to professional con-man status:

If you're going to hack together a smoking-gun memo backdated before about 1990, use the Courier font. It probably monospaces and it does not kern or ligate.

Ligate, you ask? Quick and dirty: typesetting allows the joining of an "f" and an "i" for example. Another thing typewriters can't do. I don't have the time to scan all of the subject forgeries for ligatures (I have a day job, dammit) but it's another thing to look for, y'all.

Further: Hugh Hewitt's drive-time show last Friday night reminded me of what the cost was, to Michael Gartner, when the NBC fraud of exploding gas tanks in pickup trucks was discovered. Mr Gartner had to find a new job---not in internet time, of course, but the internet didn't move as fast then as it does now. The 48-hour estimate from Instapundit reader John Steele sounds sluggish in comparison.

What we celebrate defines us

In my mailbox this morning:

CES is tasked with 5 personnel for
Saturday's Patriot Day Observance.

Somebody has taken to calling 11 September Patriot Day. This is wrong, folks. "Patriot Day" or "Patriot's Day" is taken. It's 19 April.

Y'know, shot heard 'round the world and all that? Battle of Lexington and Concord, Paul Revere's midnight ride? Or maybe that has become politically incorrect, and now we are directed to celebrate victimhood, to commemorate the times we get struck, instead of celebrating a moment when we fought back.

Quick hits

I'm not done exercising, by a long way. Next week will be hell, but I'll sleep in my own bed. I can see the cardboard sign: "Will do ATP-45(b) plots and VLSTRACK 3.1 fans for food."

Toad has a date for surgery, to knit the roof of his mouth together. He can propel himself toward the cat food bowl.

Mlle Sklodovska is making progress with physical therapy to improve her balance and posture. But she's not getting what she needs in the G&T department. Barbaloot checked out some books on how we need to handle her, and I'm reading the best she found.

Boy is calming down a bit, but Mlle Sklodovska's occupational therapist suggests we'll be sending him to her too.

Firstborn is, as Professor Henry Jones puts it, "becoming interesting."

Several friends from my days in the cable industry have surfaced again, wondering what I've been up to. I tell them I'm staying out. This is probably permanent. The package is going in for 179 days for next fiscal year, and Prairie AFB is asking me to transfer to AF Reserve and serve them as an Individual Mobilization Augmentee. As long as it remains more of a challenge than drudgery.

I'm in love I'm in love I'm in love with a . . .

The market is way ahead of me, or perhaps I'm waaay behind it. Since I no longer subscribe to Shotgun News, I wouldn't have known that a domestic manufacturer is assembling Galil clones. TCM and I took a road trip to an out-of-the-way dealer who had a V73-110 in the rack. Love at first sight, but love that must remain unfulfilled until I win either the race for the US Senate, or the Powerball.

Vulcan must chamber one in 6.5mm Grendel.

Things they need to add to MREs

Single-serving packets of Nutella.

Instead of the pitiful little index-card-sized alcohol towelette, how about a full-sized baby wipe?

Please add your own.

Quote for the day

Richard Posner guesting at Lessig Blog:

And of course once we decide that the way to prevent terrorism is to change our way of life, we create new incentives for people who want us to change our way of life to resort to terrorism.

I used to think, like many Libertarians, that if America behaved differently in the rest of the world, we would inspire no animus against us.

I thought that, in one version or another, with one or more qualifications, right up until shortly after I began this weblog.

No more.

Blogging will be light

Another TDY, this one to 17TWG territory on MGRS grid. Back next week.

Quote for the day

. . . in my mind, there was no failure, OK? I knew exactly upon 9/11 that there would be smoking memoranda found within weeks and that there would be somebody within the intelligence community who had been screaming their head off in the days and weeks and months up to that point.

Thomas P.M. Barnett, in interview by Brian Lamb of C-SPAN, airdate 30 May 2004. Transcript here.

I'll bite

At the request of Backcountry Conservative:

Fûz, Pennsylvania Air National Guard, 1981 to 1999; Wyoming Air National Guard 1999 to 2001; US Air Force October 2001 to present. Non-commissioned officer, NBC Defense.

Quote for the day

Can the people who destroyed the Alien franchise be trusted with the [Alien versus Predator] concept?

In a word: no.

Pool of Thought

I'm tired from wearing MOPP gear for the last two days, I've been drinking, I'm on a 33k6 connection, and I'm tired, but this fact shines through: this guy is good.

Product review as it were

Uncle Sugar owed me a few $$$ since my last TDY and I've been lusting in my heart for a hard-drive based MP3 player for some time. It was fate---kismet . . . .

The iRiver IHP120 was available at a nearby Best Buy (Aurora at Mississippi and Abilene), and the good Geek behind the counter saw me salivating over the display model and discreetly told me of an open-box special. The previous owner had graciously charged it up for me and left me with a few audio files of him muttering "hudda budda" into the microphone for many seconds, and depreciated ten percent from their list price. Done deal.

Now that I've figured out how to get this device to shuffle-play among multiple albums, I can fall asleep to more than one artist. The device has both line-in and microphone inputs (microphone included) so I can import files or record in analog from all of the valuable vinyl albums I still have. I would have bought the iPod but the iRiver has encoding on-board and supports all audio formats I know of so far.

The drawbacks arise from the user interface. I have used only the Rio R30S before this so I am not the conclusive expert on MP3 player user interfaces, but maybe the clumsy user interface is the reason the previous owner turned this thing back in and I got the open-box discount.

So badly Palm needs to license their OS and interface to these devices.

Overall 3 out of five stars, 4-plus of 5 for value for the money, 1 of 5 for user interface, 4 of 5 for feature-to-weight ratio. It's scarcely more discommodating than the 64MB Rio.

For a ride on a C-130, you need noise-cancelling headphones. I'll be using the IHP120 as a USB hard drive too, loading it up with NIMA map files (CADRG, DTED, ArcView).

Warning: read the fscking manual on how to load it with music and navigate the drive. Before you plug it in, I mean.

somebody bought me 2 martinis

so I'll be somewhat stream-of-consciousness. It's definitely autumn in southern Wisconsin, I smell of tobacco, and, well, there were those Tanqueray martinis.

Am preparing a product review of the iRiver IHP120 MP3 player-aka-20GB USB hard drive. Meanwhile, a good friend of mine, with whom I've been out of contact, has been on my mind because his last contact with me was one of those questions about "what is in your CD player RIGHT NOW?" and the answer is, well, a bit of everything I've loaded into the new gizmodified MP3 player so far.

That would be Reverend Horton Heat's Space Heater, two NIN's, two Devo's, an Acoustic Alchemy, a Billy Idol, a Fountains of Wayne, and so forth.

The good friend was my Best Man at my wedding. Since then, his marriage has gone south and he's not sure what to do. Please send him love.

I'm embarking on a change, though one not as heavy with consequence as his. I'm saying goodbye to a Wing full of people I've served well and proudly for five years plus; he's losing a wife. No comparison.

So answer me these questions three:

• what music are you hearing now?
  
• choose the name of the best friend you have now, excepting people you've married or people of your own blood. What is that person's first name?
  
• who's the last person you've said "goodbye" to?
  
• is that "goodbye" for the better or for the worse?
  

Post 'em in the comments. It's a Friday night. Or a Saturday morning. Whatever.

OPSEC observed here

I've been observing OPSEC at WUTT! since before the beginning. I think I've adhered to the rules as set down here, and continue to do so, because I might yet go back downrange.

Tip of the K-pot to Lt Smash:

1. Don't violate OPSEC. Never name your unit, be vague about your location and mission, and don't use anyone's real name.

2. Be careful what you say about your seniors. Don't write anything about a superior in your blog that you wouldn't want that person to read back to you.

which would it be?

If you could instantly acquire skill in one but only one musical instrument,
which would it be?

Forgive me Father . . .

. . . for it has been months without number since I've plugged the Carnival of the Vanities. Hosted at Smallest Minority. Please visit.

Another quote for the day

there is no evidence that plentiful networked information can replace killing power and inherent survivability, especially in close combat. Timely and useful information is critical, but it cannot substitute for firepower, mobility and armored protection.

Colonel Douglas Macgregor, PhD, USA (ret.), testifying before the House Armed Services Committee on July 15, 2004. Hat tip: LANDPOWERTRANSFORMATION@yahoogroups.com, August 2004

Quote for the day

Having the the FCC and Congress as foster-parents is at best like being a child-star and at worst like being raised by alcoholics. Either way, stunted growth is a likely outcome.

Tim Wu regarding the regulation of VoIP in its infancy. HT: BoingBoing

Just one more flavor of Kool-Aid to drink

WUTT! today officially endorses the FairTax.

We have in the past proposed many schemes that amount to tinkering with the income tax code. Guilty as charged---with half my tongue firmly in cheek and the other half counting on the building popular exasperation with the complexity and the social engineering aspects of the tax code, which
would eventually spill over into support of some other method of taxation.

From time to time I have doubted that the exasperation would build to the point that the taxed masses would seek redress or revolt, indeed that it was building at all. Such doubts are more pertinent in time of armed conflict.

We will still (flippantly at times) propose income-tax tinkering in these pages, if only to point out how divisive our current system can be, and how serious I am about throwing it aside.

Drink the Kool-Aid, noble Readers.

XM8 on FoxNews

FoxNews Channel just showed off the XM8 and a glimpse of the M307.

Is this the beginning of a press build for seeking funding?

AWB sunset countdown continues

"It's an uphill battle," Sarah Brady, one of the nation's leading gun-
control advocates, said in a telephone interview last week. "Our
streets are going to be filled with AK-47s and Uzis" unless Congress
extends the ban, she said.

So if I see a Bulgarian AK just laying there in the street on the 14th, I can just keep it?

Cool. I'll pass on the Uzi.