They have their own funny salute, too

HT Instapundit, Ricketyclick notes that if the Second Amendment speaks only to "members of a well-regulated militia" then it is incumbent on us to get ourselves well-regulated.

He hits the nail on the head, even down to the prized amateur radio license.

Too bad this idea is, what, a century old? It's called Scouting.

Though I imagine the Boy Scouts of America have allowed some creep into their mission and let marksmanship fall from favor; if this is so, it is also reversible with concerted effort.

Merry Christmas 2007

Was rattling through my dad's papers once again, and came upon this:

Ignore the date on the print, even in those days we hillbillies didn't leave our Christmas decorations up all year. Somebody just didn't get around to unloading the Brownie and getting the pictures developed right away.

I'm far right. The bookish fellow on the left is a regular commenter at DailyPundit, I hear.

Merry Christmas to you.

What we're really up to

Apologies to Warner Brothers.

Bleg

I don't normally do this. Forgive.

My status as a US servicemember prohibits me from contributing to a Presidential candidate.

So somebody drop Fred Thompson a couple of bucks, willya? If you come through Cheyenne, I'll cook you dinner.

Hmmm, is that legal?

Watershed!

If this is the political position that the heart of the anti-abortion movement is willing to endorse, WUTT! is calling today a watershed moment. There is hope for Federalism if religious conservatives will embrace it, and that means more than wishful thinking for the Presidential campaign of Fred Dalton Thompson:

"On abortion, Fred is pro-life. Period. He does not, however, support a Human Life Amendment to the Constitution. His proposal is:

1. Overturn Roe vs. Wade and return the issue of abortion regulation to the states (where it was adequately handled for 200 years before Roe).

2. Allow each state to ban or place restrictions on the performance of abortion in its jurisdiction as it sees fit.

3. Begin the process of convincing the citizens of those states that would still permit abortion that the procedure is wrong and should be banned.

May I point out that, despite Bob Novak’s protestations to the contrary, the Director of the National Right to Life Committee has NO PROBLEM with Fred’s position (please see this article)."

I note that item (3) should be undertaken by true believers only, of their own initiative and resources, not with the power or voice of the Federal government, if (1) and (2) come to pass.

Lest you think Fred pandered to NRLC to get that endorsement, uhhh, I don't think so. He's arguing from a Federalist position, which is almost the inverse of pandering. He is also not hindered by any apparent 180-degree changes in direction from a prior voting record. What's to pander?

This echoes the way out of America's abortion mess that I first saw treated seriously in this book review. Didn't notice it at the time but it stands out now: fave Radley Balko wrote that review.

Light reading

Finished last week: Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond.

Finished this morning: The Conscience of a Conservative, Barry Goldwater

Starting: Extreme Islam, Adam Parfrey

Three girls, no bearskin rug

As promised, let me present to you the three Kalashnikovs I've built in the last year or so.

From top to bottom, Nadia, Jadwiga, and Franciszka.

Both Nadia and Jadwiga were rebuilt. Both are now jamfree and seat their magazines happily.

didn't need the jack, just the iron

Stumbled upon this in eBay: replacement DC jack for my Averatec notebook. Hundreds of them, in fact.

I fixed mine with just some soldering on the existing jack. Replaced nothing.

Review: Ratatouille

We took all the offspring units to the matinee, after Barbaloot heard good things about Pixar's latest, Ratatouille.

I found myself liking it, in spite of my general disdain for all things Mickey.

Three things leapt out at me from this picture, each of which earns the price of admission:

• animation of hair and fiber. A lightning bolt hits Remy and his brother, singeing their hair. You can see the tiny balls of randomly-fused keratin at the ends of each hair in their coats. In another scene, an army of rats are bathed in a restaurant dishwasher. The wet, clean fur is modeled perfectly.

• the food critic's writeup. Jaw-dropping in clarity, humility, and wit. Totally unexpected. Go here and find "the work of a critic is easy" in the page. I think a line is missing: "sometimes, the New needs friends."

• the soundtrack. Stay in the theater after the rest of the crowd has bailed, and listen to the score while the credits roll to the very end. It's rich, layered. It's this guy's work, and it brought tears welling in my eyes and a lump in my throat, just like his score for The Incredibles. Yeah, I do get that way.

Sorry, I don't do stars or thumbs-up.

The chilling effect of state-provided medicine

Rush Limbaugh's program last week, regarding Bush's veto of the SCHIP
program, and his program today covering Lt Gen Sanchez's remarks about
Iraq war reporting, prompt me to observe how the two topics may intersect.

SCHIP is for damn sure a "gateway drug" that could nationalize the entire US
medical industry.  Apart from the disaster it would cause to the medical industry
itself (I eschew the term "health care"), what would be the potential
consequences to other institutions, or to seemingly-unrelated civil rights?

Imagine that HillaryCare is implemented across the United States;  military
retirees (such as Gen Sanchez) are migrated from TriCare to HillaryCare.  It
would be a surprise if such a migration is not being contemplated by single-payer
proponents, or else they couldn't call it "single payer," could they?

There's long-standing precedent that if the Federal Government pays for
something, they can exert great (if not total) control over it.  Hell, it isn't just
precedent anymore, it's a governing philosophy among the Left.  They count on
getting that control, otherwise they wouldn't bother trying to get the funding
for it, whatever "it" may be.

Then let's say that Gen Sanchez develops a medical problem of some kind---all
manner of manageable-if-treated conditions come with retirement age.  These
are now, under HillaryCare, under the control of government payers, auditors,
physicians, review boards, information technology (remember standardized
universal recordkeeping?) etc.

People in these careers will stake their advancement on drinking the single-payer
KoolAid, either because they are true believers in single-payer, or because they
owe their jobs to its existence.

Regardless, a person employed by that system, or responsible for making it work,
might want a critic to shut up.  Consciously or subconsciously, they have the
means to do so.

"Hmmm, there's no record of a scheduled bypass surgery here, sir, I'm sorry," or
"There's an error in the database about your medications, sir," or worse yet,
"I'm very sorry, Ma'am, there was an error with the medications prescribed for
your husband, and these two medications combined are very dangerous.  They
should never have been prescribed together."

Then a few days later: "No, ma'am, the Medical Cost Containment Amendment
of 2010 prohibits you from suing Federally-funded caregivers for your husband's
death, without permission.  You have to apply for permission from the Program
to sue it."  The application process will keep the Trial Lawyers well fed, even if
the lawsuits themselves do not.  Gotta throw them a bone.

No doubt there are some on the Left who wish this outcome for their critics (but
will never concede that it could happen in a program run by the Left's "our
people"), so as presented, it wouldn't appeal to them.  To sell this angle to the
Left, it will have to be cross-dressed a bit.

Since they insist on vilifying President Bush, ask them how much they'd like
their health care---top to bottom, stubbed toe to rehab to final bill, womb to
the tomb---directed by a Bush appointee instead of "our people"?

Forget tax audits:  they're chump change compared to arbitrary bureaucratic
power over life and death.

Fair warning: this will get crass. Don't blame me.
The medical is the personal, and the Left wants
to make the medical political---the polar opposite
of "personal." It can't help but become crass.
End of fair warning.

How safe would Cindy Sheehan feel in openly criticizing the Administration if
her next PAP smear literally depended on it?

Time to send Wayne some more help

I'm writing another check for Wayne Fincher's legal defense fund.

Please help with his legal costs, he's taking one for the rest of us.

Hollis Wayne Fincher Defense Fund
PO Box 215
Elkins AR 72727

Please don't Tase me! Please! I haven't done anything!

I need recommendations for a left-hand small-of-back holster for a Glock 23.

Really. Somebody. All I found so far is Galco.

Suitably stable

Our migration to Tiger seems to be running well, in spite of having to upgrade the OS in place rather than a clean install.

One hitch, not directly related to Tiger: can't figure out how to migrate an email account from Netscape 7.1 over to Thunderbird. Still prompts as if it's a brand new account that never existed before instead of importing folders.

At least they know a good design when they see it

At Barnes and Noble, Coronado Center, ABQ last week, this cover art jumped out at me:

It's a magazine that appears to have the production values and artistic sense of Wired, but concentrates on "doing good." Have a look for yourself, by all means.

From the article:

The problem is that “good design” didn’t look much beyond the object itself. An AK-47 rifle, for example, makes use of sound and appropriate materials and it demonstrates other criteria of good design, such as solid workmanship, efficiency, and suitability of purpose . . . the AK-47 is a classic in the annals of good design (it also happens to be most popular firearm in the world). But the question then is: good for what and for whom?

Well dammit, design shouldn't look beyond the object itself. The object serves a purpose. People give purposes to things.

People give purpose to themselves, or they glide through life without purpose at all. Which is the more destructive? This includes the devout, who no doubt will claim that a purpose was given them by the Savior---for purposes of this post, I consider them to have sought and chosen their purposes.

The Kalashnikov rifle is designed to do a given thing, and its design must be evaluated in terms of how well it does that thing. Good's writers understand and agree that it did indeed fulfill its purpose well. They merely disagree with that purpose.

From the X-ray, I can't tell whether they have an AK-47 or an AKM. I don't see rivets, I don't see the outline or the meat of the rear trunnion for the under folder. No cleaning rod running through the forearm, where an X-ray would show it starkly in contrast to the wood or polymer forearm, and the steel insert in the forearm's barrel channel. The pistol grip shows as much density as the thin walls of the receiver or the solid chunk of the front trunnion.

I'd put a Starbucks venti on the notion that this art isn't an X-ray photograph at all, but an artist's rendering of an AK from a field-stripped parts diagram, massaged to look like an X-ray, to suggest that they've really looked at how an AK is put together. "See inside! Ewwwww!"

Appreciation of good design doesn't stop at how well the device serves its application, but delves into how it is made, the meta-design if you will: this machine was made to be made cheaply.

Humble beginnings

A letter arrived today from Thrift Savings Program, which is the pretax savings plan for Uncle Sugar's military. I needed to sit down after reading:

We will no longer use your Social Security number as your primary identifier . . .

Humble beginnings. It's not without its bugs, of course:

. . . if you talk to our call center representatives, they may ask you for your Social Security number as added protection.

They'll still rely on the SSN as a password---verification of identification---but not as identification itself. It's not what I was hoping for, not what servicemen (and all taxpayers) deserve, but for the FedGov this is a huge step.

More of this, please, and more boldly.

Rev Horton Heat would be dismayed

The State of New Mexico has some inexplicable animus against the martini.

Their highway signs warning against DUI use the distinctive silhouette of the martini glass as the universal symbol for abuse of alcohol. It's unmistakable.

I'd venture to say that the Land of Enchantment has arrested more DUIs suffering impairment from lagers than from martinis of all kinds.

Gone

My brother passed away quietly, in his home, with family near him. I was able to see him and speak to him before that, though I could not bring Toad to meet him. His wife and children move on, with dignity and peace.

We just completed the trek down to Phoenix for his memorial and back, offspring units and all, by passenger car and reward points by Marriott.

This brother was the presence of my father while my father worked away, by the week, during my adolescent and teen years. This brother taught me chemistry in the short hours of summer nights. This brother, when heading out for the service academy appointment he fought for, rued leaving me behind with quarreling parents and a house rotting beneath me. I will always be aware of the long shadow he cast.

This is the brother who exercised the most, lived the "cleanest" if you will, and surprised the rest of us the most by suffering and losing an uneven fight with cancer while the returns on his investments in life were just beginning to roll in.

He died the day that the en banc ruling against Abigail Alliance came down. He could have benefited from the medicines that this case sought to make available. He probably could have benefited also from medical practice disconnected from one's employment; he lost valuable time shuttling from appointment to referral to appointment, until the only service of use to him was hospice.

If I were to have only one, or two, or . .

If I were to have only one rifle, I would consider myself a poor sorry son of a bitch.

In spite of the revered Colonel Cooper's teachings, I would not be satisfied with a Scout. Even JC wasn't happy with a single Scout rifle, even after he had a Steyr built to his specs. My Scouts and/or Pseudoscouts don't cover all of the bases either.

So neither Cabinet Man nor I have only a single rifle, and we seem to keep acquiring them, he at his customary rate and I at mine, with various purposes or roles attached to each.

But the question lingers. So flesh it with some assumptions:

TEOTWAWKI. Your stock of ammunition is what you have around you, possibly supplemented by what neighbors can spare or trade away.

Hits count. Fred gave you the Rifleman patch at a recent Appleseed clinic and you're confident to hit what you can see out to 400, maybe 600 meters. The rifle shoots better than you do.

Fixed, defensible homestead. What you've acquired through the years is still under or around you, and one purpose of the rifle is to keep it.

Partially organized but State-less attackers. Looters, vagabonds, rabble who were created in a city they find no longer habitable. Some may be trained as soldiers. They have no supply chain.

If any US troops show up, your mayor and sheriff stride out to meet them, say everything is fine, offer them breakfast and ask "who's the President?"

Golly. Any of the .30/7.62mm's cited in Boston's Gun Bible would do.

Change assumptions, then. Instead of equipping your own self and maybe some neighbors for Post-Housing-Bubble, let's say you're fielding an army of a few thousand, and you have a small country's treasury at your disposal while the copper and yellowcake mines are still producing.

That's easy. An AR15, converted to piston operation instead of direct impingement, internally dehorned, possibly carbon fiber instead of aluminum, chambered in 6.5mm x39 Grendel. There may be no full- or burst-auto. Every soldier starts out on a 16" barreled carbine and everybody qualifies with between 600 and 1000 rounds per year.

Your Brit expat DIs and Devil Dog marksmanship instructors find the better of them and graduate them to 20 or 22" barreled designated marksman rifles.

The crew-served weapon is the American contender to replace the M249, still firing 6.5 G on disintegrating links.

Any other set of assumptions probably lies somewhere in the middle of these two extremes.

"VOID IF TAMPERED" be damned

My treasured little 4.5-lb Averatec subnotebook has given me a couple of fits. This February, its video began to flicker erratically. I shut her down at once, then carefully found the screws that covered its video card. A phillips screwdriver bit punched through the VOID IF TAMPERED seals covering them. I blew a can or so of air through the copper heatsink and put it all back together. No more video flickering. I should go back in and apply a drop of heatsink paste on the chip, but . . .

Now the power cord has been overheating. Where the plug wart enters the case of the computer, there have been baked-plastic smells, and incredible amounts of heat, so much that my valued iGo Power power supply's jack got so hot that its insulation started to melt. I've been jiggling the jack so the charge indicator lights. But on my latest trip, even jiggling doesn't get the computer to charge from the wall.

Being a consumer product, the Averatec is built to frustrate shade-tree computer mechanics such as your humble narrator. However, I strove to get to the eentsy printed-circuit board where the plug wart attaches, and slipped it out.

Cold solder joint, oh very yes. I combed through my brother's garage for solder and iron. Found two rotary tools that wouldn't start, they would have been handy to clean the joint prior to soldering, but too bad. I touched the joint up, reinserted, had no continuity (couldn't find a multimeter in brother's garage either, bummer), took the board back out, cleaned the cold joint with a pencil eraser, resoldered.

Bingo. Now she charges and runs without jiggling. No overheating to the point of etching my fingerprints into the plastic of the jack.

How many people would sh17-can an $800 notebook computer rather than sleuth a power supply problem? Should I put out a shingle for fixing stuff like this?

Test to recover comments

Ain't too happy with my commenting code recently. As usual, can't tell whether this is user error, change in code that I didn't stay current with, or flat-out broken code or bankruptcy on the part of the commenting system provider.

So the purpose of this post is to force Blogger to republish WUTT, and lefthandedly to apologize to all 4 of my regular readers for the gacked-up commenting.

Update: four minutes later, I think enetation has been hacked. Instead of "comments" appearing at the link to comments, the word "poseurs" appears. Don't like that. Comments work if I'm logged into enetation. Took the changes back out. Stumped. OK, gonna turn Blogger's comments on as well.

'Nuther update: my account at enetation maybe. Changed templates and reviewed settings. Lessee.

Yet 'nother update: had to rerun the counter. New settings, new template. Yippee.