sans Toto
Northwestern Kansas is much like Southwestern Nebraska, or Eastern Colorado, or the Oklahoma Panhandle.

At night, while driving along whatever Interstate Highway that President Eisenhower has provided through that country, one can see the next town about 30 klicks out. One has a stunning view of a meteor should one enter the atmosphere. For the record, it burned out into tiny orange splinters directly south of me at mile marker 44 on I-70.

And at 0530, one can see both Venus and Mercury.

But no witches, no ruby slippers, no wizards behind the curtain. If I am lucky, no tornadoes either.

I prefer "breasteses"
I laud the idea of bloggers baring their breasts for charity and cancer awareness. Sainted Wyff would agree that I am what would be called a "breast man." However, just as Andrea Harris despises the usage "coming with?" or "going with?", I despise the word "booby" when used for a woman's breast.

Tits, please. Or hoots. Or a rack. Boobies sounds, umm, undignified.

Back in bidness
Good thing I keep a copy of everything, so I could see what was wrong with the comment tags. Sorry, I obliterated two comments from regular readers in the process (yes, MommaBear, the blog title must be made orange). But all else should be restored and working.

Update: but now my archives have disappeared.

Straightforward . . . yeah, right, straightforward my a**
It wasn't just the bloody image tags. When I edited them with the actual image locations, then saved changes and republished, they got un-changed.

I moved everything into a new template, then brought over BlogHop, Enetation, and SiteMeter. Now how to make the blogtitle orange again?

Flatulating for Columbine
Rachel Lucas takes apart Michael Moore's grape-juice fart attack on Chuck Heston. The comments were so good I had to chip in. Do visit.

well, right there's your problem
A peek at my template shows that all of the source arguments are missing from the image tags in my rightmost column. That should be straightforward enough. Sorry for the eyesore for all this time. It will have to wait for tomorrow night.

the island of misfit toys
After two weeks back at work, I realize I work for a very dysfunctional firm. Everyone who has been there more than a year has something wrong with him or her, such as a personality disorder, a criminal record (not unusual for the cable TV industry), or just general low self-esteem, to the point that he or she doesn't believe another, more enjoyable job is out there to be had. For me, it's a port in the storm.

During a call with my manager yesterday, I said without even a hitch in my voice, that if the owner of the company objected in a particular way to how I was running my project, I would just as soon be unemployed. That is not like me. Not at all. Especially considering the job market in this area and this industry. It just came out.

But the project will teach me a lot of valuable things, and I am glad to have a crack at it. But it is keeping me from maintaining my blog, which appears to have suffered from the hacking earlier this week. BlogHop and Enetation buttons are all hosed up. Maybe this weekend I can clean these things up, and loft a goodly post on the pending attack on Iraq.

I could have sworn . . .
. . . that I heard one of Phil Hendrie's voices calling in to Glenn Beck's show today.

Twenty-seven days until Ammo Day
Would it count if I bought the components for 100 rounds instead?

Reminds me, I need a new primer follower for the RL550B press.

My attorney's phone number is . . .
One more reason comes to mind about why many gunbloggers are reluctant to speculate about the I-95 shootings.

We don't want to attract the attention of agencies investigating the shootings, like that paid to poodle-shooter owners in the area. They are being treated rather poorly, if what I hear is true. I'm rehearsing, "all attorneys advise their clients never to consent to a search, so I won't. Either give me your consent to record this conversation, or this conversation is over" and similar phrases in case I get a call like they've gotten.

Back in the yoke
I have returned to my civilian job, finally, after more than a year's absence. It was sad, and weird. My manager didn't remember my skills and could not find my resume. I had two handshakes and one literal "thanks for your service" from the whole office.

Of course I should be grateful that I still had a job to which to return. The industry is in the chumbucket and I could easily have been laid off, so I'm grateful to be drawing a salary. Still, I am disappointed. More on this topic later.

No dead pool here
With a tip of the hat to James Rummel over at Hell in a Handbasket, your humble blogger will speculate a bit further on the Beltway shootings.

There is a shooter and a driver: two people. The shooter does most of the shooting, the driver does most of the driving. Changing roles may be responsible for the muffs that have occurred so far.

Whether the shooter-and-driver team are al-Qaeda-connected is not relevant. If they are, we've a full-blown nightmare. If they aren't, they are still establishing the feasibility of such attacks to the world. Look for similar attacks to appear elsewhere. They will continue against lone targets of opportunity, where they are exposed and alone, not in groups or within places of cover.

There have been discussions in the shooting community about the rules of engagement that would apply should an armed citizen be in position to challenge such an attack, just as the anti-defense community has editorialized that armed citizens are "powerless against such attacks." Powerless, hell. Folks, the solutions are being developed by people who know what they are talking about, away from the media glare. The solutions simply haven't been tried, and those who hold themselves responsible for Our Safety would rather eat ground glass than promote them.

It is not necessary for an armed citizen to wound or kill the shooter or driver to help bring these shootings to an end. A motor vehicle with a punctured radiator, shattered windshield, or body with non-factory ventilation will be easier to find than one that has not been challenged. Find the vehicle and we're that much closer to finding the perpetrators.

The most urgent point is that the armed citizen must call the police at once, within seconds of ceasing fire, to warn them of location, direction, markings, and what things he or she shot out of the vehicle, so the police can assemble their cordon immediately and tightly.

I won't try to argue that our police, through the media, should be briefing citizens of our imperial capitol and nearby provinces about the pertinent law. When to shoot, when not to, what to aim for, whom to call and when. Which arms and ammunition would be best for the application. What would happen to the armed citizen who did not follow these instructions carefully.

For those citizens who aren't taking the armed option, what to carry instead, such as a camera with a date-time imprint, on a lanyard around the left wrist at all times between car and building. The mobile phones with integral cameras come to mind. A voice-activated digital recorder might also be useful, in the hands of a person trained to stream consciousness into it if shooting starts.

Surely a Fox affiliate could summarize these instructions so pithily, after in-depth interviews with the experts, that motorists at the Seb'me Leb'm would be reciting them unconsciously under their breath while stroking their ATM cards in the gas pumps.

Naah. Never happen.

The heretofore-unknown aphrodisiac
The most powerful aphrodisiac for a married woman is, strangely enough, a trusted babysitter, or family of babysitters, that will look after the children for a whole weekend. Then leave town for, say, Laramie.
Add two Bombay martinis and a digital camera, and shake. The erotic effects may last well into the following week if you cook dinner and get the kids to bed on time.

The migratory pattern of the Netscape profile
The problem of migrating user profiles from Netscape 4.7 to 7.0 has been figgered out. As usual with my skills and equipment, a kluge was involved.

The Profile Migration tool included with 7.0 gave me nothing but blank stares because it did not prompt for a location of profiles, insisting that it was smart enought to look for them itself. Not finding any on its present drive, it had nothing to migrate and plopped me at Netscape's home page to read today's news.

The profiles were, of course, on the original drive, not the new drive upon which OS X, OS 9.2 and Netscape 7.0 were installed "clean." I first copied them over to a folder on the new drive and ran the Profile Migration tool. No dice, still blank stares, here are today's headlines. So I restarted with OS 9.2 on the new drive, ran Netscape 4.7 on the new drive, and used its Profile Manager to port over the profiles from the older drive. Then restarted with OS X, and ran the Profile Migration tool again. The tool now saw a previous version of Netscape on its present drive, and recognized the profiles, and migrated them.

Would it have been unreasonable to expect a paragraph in a readme to explain this?

Keep it clean around here . . .
A man of the cloth now visits from time to time. Please welcome Donald Sensing of One Hand Clapping. Owing to his military service, he is listed among Bloggers in Force.

The Sidearm and the Militia-Utility Test
Instapundit pointed me to this post, where Mark Kleiman argues that there is Constitutional protection for a long gun, owing to what I would call a militia utility test. If one can demonstrate what the militia is for, and how it should be armed, the Constitution protects the right to own that kind of arm---but none other. He then turns that argument to sidearms.

"A side-arm is not a weapon of war, because it lacks the range to strike the enemy. No private soldier carries one. Side-arms are for officers, to threaten, or if need be to shoot, disobedient subordinates. The rank-and-file carry long guns."

This is true for the Russian model, and others, but not for the present American one.

Sidearms are indispensable for searches of or working in such places as buildings, tunnels, and vessels, for driving vehicles, or for those carrying specialized equipment where weight of one's kit is at a premium. All of these are conceivable roles for members of various teams in a well-regulated militia.

I carried a sidearm, as a mid-level enlisted man, just last year in Central Asia. It was there in those cases when I could not carry a rifle; each time, I had an escort with a rifle nearby. I was issued both pistol and rifle, and I was free to choose which to bear according to the situation.

Anyone who carries a crew-served weapon, such as an MG, rocket launcher, in fact anything other than the standard service rifle, carries a sidearm as the backup in case the primary arm fails or its ammunition is exhausted. Private soldiers tend to acquire sidearms whenever they can; if they are not issued sidearms at the outset it is more likely a budgetary or training decision rather than one of philosophy of how men should be armed.

This also:

"A militia member fights as a soldier, with whatever arms are conventional at the time . . . "

Even soldiers fight less like soldiers today, as there are fewer and fewer of them, and more specialists in support and services fields, enhancing the effectiveness of the fewer but better-equipped and better-supported infantrymen. The tooth-to-tail ratio of the modern army is diminishing (whether this is sound theory, or effective in practice, is outside our scope here); we can expect the same for the militia if they are to be easily assimilated into the army, especially in a culture that prizes diverse experience, advanced education, initiative, and individualism. If our militia reflects our society and its values, we will not be forming waves of conscripts prodded forward by pistol-waving officers.

Organizationally, they'll look more like investment clubs, HAM radio clubs, and fantasy-football leagues. (I expect ridicule out of this last point, and perhaps I deserve it. So horse-laugh now and get it over with.)

Historically, the sidearm was developed for cavalry, because the service rifle (or its equivalent of that period) was too cumbersome for operation from horseback. The Confederate Colonel John Singleton Mosby was the first cavalry officer to order all of his troops to abandon the saber completely and standardize on the revolver among his troops.

The M1 Carbine of World War II was conceived, among other reasons, as a means to eliminate the several other classes of small arm, including the sidearm, so that the US would need to supply only the Carbine and the M1 service rifle. Obviously the sidearm continues to this day, because there was, and is, still a valid and fairly common need for it. Uncle doesn't issue M1 Carbines any more.

So I disagree that the sidearm would not enjoy strict Constitutional protection under the militia-utility standard. It is neither an officers-only nor a specialist's weapon. It is a tool designed for certain applications, and a militia could be called upon to carry out those applications. The same can be said for the shotgun and the SMG; Jeff Cooper's essay "The Role of the Five" explains this, and if I can find it online I will link it here later. They have their uses in a militia organization, especially one formed as American values and character would have it. The full-dress service rifle should be considered its principal arm, necessary but not sufficient.

More on the Warthog
Toren at The Safety Valve and Kathy on the Third Hand praise the A-10.
Let the Army have them, because the Air Force won't fly them, or will shoehorn them into "observation" roles. It will require a change in Federal law to make it possible, but that's what we have a Congress for, right?

These nutjobs have to be stopped
They will be stopped with forensic ballistics, not by vigilant cops catching the sniper in the act. What ballistic facts have been released are sketchy, and have been (characteristically for the press) poorly reported.

The bullets recovered may indeed be consistent with those used in the .223 Remington cartridge. But that does not mean that they were fired from a .223 Remington, also known as 5.56 x 45mm or 5.56mm NATO. The same diameter bullet, even the same bullet models themselves, are used in dozens of other, more powerful hunting cartridges. The graphic descriptions I have read so far of the wounds and placement suggest this, rather than .223 in the urban carbine. Any shooting enthusiast can rattle off the names of such cartridges. Update: Kim du Toit rattles some of them here.

Handguns can be had in these cartridges too, though these will be single-shot handguns with a bolt action or a "cannon lock" to contain high pressures. These handguns do not lend themselves to concealment inside the waistband. But they are capable of the accuracy and range exhibited here.

The police reports confirming the .223 caliber---the diameter of the bullet, actually dot two two four inches---can also be smoke. How much of the bullet's material has been recovered?

Bullet manufacturers routinely brag on "high weight retention," how much of the bullet is left, as a percentage of original weight---some is expected to be lost. Hunting bullets get mushroomed, flattened, and fragmented, such that the original dimensions of the bullet may be difficult to determine. They are built to expand, to bring the animal down immediately, nothing inhumane about it. In contrast, military bullets are more likely to be recovered intact, and less likely to do such spectacular damage, because they are constructed not to expand, in accordance with the Geneva Conventions, and they are driven with less energy so the rifles firing them have a longer useful life.

So the bits of lead and gilding metal that were recovered could be from a .243", a .25", maybe even a .264". Blogs4God has conjectured a caliber of .308" though I don't buy that either. They could have been fired from your granddad's Savage 99 in .22-250, or a Swedish Mauser '96 in 6.5x55 (the model numbers are abbreviated years of introduction, beginning in Eighteen, not Nineteen). The rifle could be older than everyone investigating the crime today.

Of course, if I were investigating these crimes, I would not release more of the ballistics I've discovered than I absolutely must to satisfy the baying press. Nor would I be above minor disinformation to protect the progress of the investigation.

So I'm not sold yet on the notion that the sniping is being done with off-the-shelf .223 Remington ammunition and/or with an AR.

Keep it outside the squadron, kids
Donald Sensing posted something a few weeks back, about some military force (not the US, likely) instructing its members not to sleep with each other, because it harms morale. Unfortunately, the link in his post did not lead me to the article he cited. But weigh in on the topic, I will.

If you haven't figured it out already, I just came back from a year of active duty in the War on Terrorism. I started this blog while deployed overseas for that duty. I observed a few things that will be described, in due time, in this space, as I figure out what safely to say about it and what not to. This is the first.

Trying to keep young men and women working and living together, and sharing hardship, from knocking boots is like keeping them from getting tattoos. I spent nearly six months at one location, a logistics center, where the split was nearly 60-40 men to women. There was ample evidence that sexual congress was occurring, and clear communication that Uncle Sugar disapproved of it. It is the first instance I've seen of the term "fraternization" applied to anything other than that (properly) harshly forbidden between officers and enlisted folks.

As Donald quoted in his post:

. . . sleeping with fellow soldiers of either sex, or indeed their partners, would be bad for morale, threatening "mutual trust and soldiers' willingness to help each other."

I agree. It can't be stopped, but it should be limited. Soldiers will accept the limits, if the reasons for such limits can be articulated. And the reason is right there in the quote. Mutual trust, morale, unit cohesion are undermined if sex or even courting is taking place among people who work that closely together, even if they are of the same rank. It can be as damaging as O-on-E fraternization.

Keep it outside the squadron. Don't even date within the squadron. Look after the people in your own unit like brothers and sisters. SPs, you can pursue the Loggies. Fire dogs, hit on the babe in the command post. And so forth. But not inside your immediate unit---not anyone who has the same first shirt as you. It's like incest.

I realize that many military marriages started out this way, and it verges on hypocrisy for me to weigh in against it, because my wife and I met through work. Still, the reason for such a prohibition is not hard to argue, nor hard to understand.

Please see my lone comment at Donald's post also.

Amtrak with Boeings
Writer, raconteur and grouch Kim du Toit invites airline executives to pound sand since they have hit economic hard times and are seeking a bailout from Uncle Sugar. Says he:

"F*** 'em.  Let 'em go out of business.  Let new airlines arise from the ashes of these burnt-out, bloated conglomerates, let these new airlines heed the lessons from these failed and extinct dinosaurs, and maybe everyone will be better off."

It's too late for the free market to punish these businesses and reward newcomers. Air travel has already been effectively nationalized. In what meaningful ways can an airline distinguish itself from the dinosaurs and capture business from them? Between local government ownership of the airports and Fed responsibility for security at all points in the air travel experience, there is little left to the airline itself to improve service without diminishing its profits further, or either changing or violating a law.

Air travel won't be profitable as a business again, nor tolerable for Kim or for me, until the present airline security approach is removed, so airlines can begin treating their passengers as paying customers instead of felons. With what to replace it?



Give me back my Gerber E-Z Out.

I've advocated allowing pilots to arm themselves with firearms, and that actually might happen. I've also advocated allowing flight attendants to carry firearms, but that is unlikely and has even been dissed here in the Blogosphere.

Allowing passengers to carry firearms is even less likely. But a few stout folding knives would have been very useful to the brave passengers of United 93, or the folks who restrained the shoe bomber.