The Third World's Right Arm

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

What would Dagny Taggart do?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Regarding Middlechild

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

We owe this woman big-time.

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

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

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

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

But.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Toad-induced sleep

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



Toad has a powerful sleep-inducing effect on people.

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

This is the work of a kindergartner:



Namely one Middlechild.

Not just multiplication, but the beginning of grasping exponents.

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

Kill it, kill it, kill it

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

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

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

S.1805 must die.

Redneck MP3 player

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

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

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

Help send a promising lad to CCW Instructor School

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

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

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

Unimportant and immaterial

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

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

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

Repeat after me: "reasonable articulable suspicion"

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

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

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

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

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

One Dudley Hiibel is too many.

Remember Amendment XVIII?

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

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

It's called Prohibition.

Strange New Respect Award

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

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

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

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

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

Meet Dudley Hiibel

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

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

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

Trendwatch---Vermont-style CCW?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In that spirit, we propose the following Colorado law:

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

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

The projectile is the weapon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RMBR

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

We were sniffed today, and about damned time

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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