Keep Austin weird

here for bidness this week. Ironworks Barbecue two or three times already.

On the minus side, while I'm on foot in Waterfront/Warehouse/Convention Center area, I'm being hit up for "something to eat."

Once, in fact, by a fellow with a sandwich in his hand. "Can you help a guy find something to eat?"

"You've got something to eat. Right there in your hand."

He stopped for a moment as I walked past him, then called out, "'preciate it."

neener neener neener

Six years ago, my blood showed triglycerides over 200. My weight was in the low 180s. I was counseled to give up the red meat and cheese. I did not. Only a daily fibrate brought the trigs below 200.

Yesterday I mentioned in passing to my team's PA that I am following an Atkins program. He responded harshly and insisted on a fast and labwork. It seems that he has seen some people who either stay in induction far too long, or who yo-yo in and out of induction, rather than following the program and finding a maintainable carb level.

After 8 weeks of Atkins, the trigs are below 45, so low that LDLs cannot be reliably measured. Weight went from 185 to 165. No adverse numbers of liver function. Urine pH of 6.0, trace proteins, no ketones.

My PA took a look at the numbers and flipped me the bird.

All you really need to hear about DC v Heller in a nutshell

The word "hunting" made only four appearances.

blasting bleg

What is the maximum .308" bullet weight one could safely handload for a plain-jane M1 Garand?

For elk, if you have to know. And yes, the McCann gas system modification is an option.

The most chilling thing I've read all week

And it's only Monday:

Assuming the gender gap is real ... , China is facing a sizable and growing population of young men who have no prospect of marrying and settling down, a situation conducive to crime and political unrest—which, as far as the Chinese government is concerned, are one and the same. In August China Daily quoted Chinese officials and academics who blamed “an increasing crime rate, growing demand for pornography, and illegal [forced] marriage” on the disproportionate number of young, single men.

"Thank Deng Xiaoping for Little Girls," Reason, December 07.

If this dynamic takes the same form as that found in the Middle East---a disproportionate number of young single men frustrated by the prospect of always being single and frustrated, in this world at least---China will be only too happy to export that unrest rather than deal with it domestically; in fact the unrest will export itself. We have enough of that 8@7sh17 already in the Arabic 72-virgins flavor.

Ordinarily, I'd take reassurance from Thomas P M Barnett about the relative threat posed by China compared to other US national security threats. The generational aspect shown here, though, makes me reconsider.

"Blessed are the cheesemakers?" "Well, my dear, that can be taken to mean any makers of dairy products"

A post at Volokh Conspiracy seeks to employ evolutionary psychology to explain the infidelity of New York's disgraced resigning Governor. Wayyyy too much work.

Lithuanian 7.62x51mm Ammunition: Range and Bench Test

Hey, folks, it's The Cabinet Man. After a long hiatus, I'm back again, stealing space on Fuze's blog for my own purposes.

Today I want to post about some Lithuanian 7.62x51mm ammo I recently purchased from Ammoman. There didn't seem to be a lot of info on the 'net about this stuff so I figger'ed I'd Give Something Back.

Let's get started.

The ammo arrived in a nicely-constructed, well-marked 60 lb wooden case:



Inside the case are five 200-round battlepacks. The plastic material appears to be very strong, much like the South African battlepacks. Unlike the So-African battlepack, though, it lacks a "pull tab" to aid in opening the package. Each battlepack contains ten 20-round boxes:



The ammo is very clean: brass cases with copper FMJ bullets. Neither the bullets nor the cases attract a magnet:



In homage to Carteach0, let's de-construct this ammo; I sacrificed 5 rounds to this test. [sniff...] The powder is "semi-fine spherical" (with grains of varying sizes) reminiscent of H335 but with slightly larger grains:



The charges measured as follows:

Cartridge	Charge (grains)
#1	44.9
#2	44.9
#3	44.8
#4	44.8
#5	44.9

That's pretty consistent charging!!

The bullets are FMJ with exposed lead on the bases:



There is a black, tar-like sealant on the bullets that's not visible until the bullets are pulled. When I dumped the powder onto the scale, a few grains adhered to the sealant that still remained within the case.

The bullets measured as follows:

Bullet	Weight (grains)	Length	Diameter
#1	146.9	1.10"	.3080"
#2	147.0	1.11"	.3080"
#3	146.9	1.10"	.3075"
#4	146.9	1.10"	.3080"
#5	146.9	1.11"	.3080"

The cases are boxer primed and, thus, reloadable. There is thin primer sealant. I'm not 100% sure if the primers are crimped or not.



The cases measured as follows:

Case	Weight (grains)	Length	Neck Diameter	Base Diameter
#1	184.7	2.00"	.3120"	.4700"
#2	184.0	2.00"	.3125"	.4695"
#3	184.4	2.00"	.3115"	.4700"
#4	184.6	2.00"	.3115"	.4700"
#5	184.1	2.00"	.3115"	.4695"

Well, that's all fine-and-dandy but how did it shoot??

OK, here's the backgrounder:

Rifle: DS Arms STG-58A FAL, 21" barrel
Scope: IOR M2 w/ Dragunov reticle
Range: 100 yards from a bench, 10 rounds



As a comparison, I also shot some other ammo at the same time: Australian mil-surp, Black Hills Match (168-grn HPBT), and South African mil-surp. All the conditions were the same and the firing was done in a circular fashion: 5 rounds of Lithuanian, 5 So-African, 5 Aussie, 5 BHM, then back around again. Here are the other groups.

Aussie (my long-time, personal favorite!!):



Black Hills Match:



South African:



For some reason, the BH Match only groups really well in my bolt guns. None of my MBRs seem to appreciate it. Needless to say, I don't feed them the prime rib!! And I've never really had good results in any of my rifles with my one batch of So-African and I'm somewhat glad I didn't stock up on it.

One of the web-sites I frequently lurk upon had a question about the weight of the Lithuanian brass and how it compares to other mil-surp brass. So I fished a couple of spent Aussie and So-African cases from the recycle bucket and here's what I found:

South African (marked B81):

Case	Weight (grains)
#1	181.3
#2	181.2
#3	182.4

Aussie (marked AFF '89', or '68' -- I can't tell which...):

Case	Weight (grains)
#1	183.4
#2	183.4
#3	181.7

Now mind you, these are fired cases and the Lithuanian cases I weighed are unfired. In all honesty, I'm not sure what difference it would make but it might make some.

Well, that's enough for now. I'm tired of typing and fighting with Blogger's table formatting. I hope this helps anyone who's trying to make up their mind about Lithuanian 7.62x51mm ammo. Good luck!!

TCM

"But I thought it was Federal law"

I had business in a local grocer's today, and there at the entrance was a gentleman offering either the Denver Post or the Rocky. I took the moment to say that I will never buy either newspaper, because their parent organization, the Denver News Agency, refuses classified ads to sell firearms among private parties.

He said that DNA did so only to obey Federal law.

Hmph. I took the time to explain to him that there is no such Federal law. Depending on the State, private citizens can sell directly to one another, and that certainly was the case in Colorado at the time I left it for blessed Wyoming. Federal law does not prohibit advertisement of privately owned firearms for sale.

Some of the answers he was offering sounded like he was deliberately uninformed, or deliberately uninforming. He was, however, aware the DNA accepted no private classified ads for guns.

Either way, it was proved to me again that a lie can march around the world before the truth can pull on its boots. Especially if it is the lie's march is abetted by an ordinary Joe selling newspapers.

Agreeing Israeli-style

A sighting in the wild of an expression that I use fairly often:

" . . . that essential, Israeli trait: the ability to argue with ANYBODY, including one’s doctor, even if the doctor is a neurosurgeon who might be called upon later to do very delicate surgery on one’s face."

ChicagoBoyz.

This is my keyboard. There are many others like it but this one is mine.

Staff meeting on Monday: we're sending too many emails to all of the Soldiers, instead of distributing some kinds of information down through the chain of command. OKfine. We'll start sending some information directly to section leads and platoon sergeants, and counting on them to get it downward to the Soldiers, and to funnel their questions back up through those same middlemanagers.

Wednesday: one of our Soldiers is home from the hospital, doing fine, won't be on duty again for rest of week. First Sergeant grabs me, tells me to send an email to all the troops to let them know.

"Top, we were briefed to start using the chain to distribute more kinds of information."

"Just send an email."

"Top, this is getting out of hand. Do you have a typing profile?"

"OK, we'll involve the chain of command. The Commander told me to tell you to send an email to all our Soldiers, telling them that Munoz is out of the hospital."

"You mean the same Commander who has a Blackberry on his hip? That commander, who can send email while he's on the shitter?"

"Get out of my office and send the email."

Friday: "You forgot to say he'll be back on duty next week."

"Correct, Top, but I did say he was off duty for the rest of this week."

She will be named

My Grendel will take the name of the wife of a good friend of mine.

Bobbie-Jo.

QFTD, New Hampshire Primary edition

[Fred Thompson]’s flailing because he is running his campaign the way people say they want to see a campaign run, not the way they actually do. (In-depth policy positions, not sound-bite politics). The American people are like the chick that says she wants a nice guy but invariably runs off with the womanizing prick.

Yu-Ain commenting at Jeff Soyer's place.

Not an original observation, necessarily, but succinctly and balefully put.

a feature, not a bug

John Fund:

The caucuses are run by the state parties, and unlike primary or general elections aren't regulated by the government. They were designed as an insiders' game to attract party activists, donors and political junkies and give them a disproportionate influence in the process.

He makes it sound like a bad thing.

We nutcase Libertarians thought we were doing the rest of the world a favor by holding a nominating convention instead of primaries. We spared the gummint the expense of helping us select our candidates. We suffered the divisions and defections that come with nominating a controversial candidate. And to the extent possible we aired our dirty laundry among ourselves.

Despite it all, we kept nominating people we thought had their heads in the right place.

Some disadvantages we suffered, or could have, such as a well-financed but philosophically crippled candidate who flooded the convention with his people (the annoying example of Howard Stern in NY). Mitt Romney is doing little different, but through a government-sanctioned primary process that culminates before the convention. Not much left to do in Minneapolis but get hammered and make the back rooms smoky.

Attracting party activists and donors and giving them a disproportionate influence was a feature, not a bug. If it mattered enough to you to send yourself and bring money, you had a place and a voice. People who tacitly disagree with you from the comfort of home need not be counted, rational ignorance keeps some people out of the caucus or convention, and some people to whom it genuinely matters still won't make a showing for whatever reason.

Libertarians do not consider money an 'evil' but a badge of accomplishment, so donors didn't automatically evoke images of hook-nosed financiers chomping cigars.

I'll concede that weird rules of conduct of the caucuses, such as standing in a corner to be counted, seem to be skewed to make their outcome favorable to party hacks. But every human institution, large or small, seeks to manipulate the processes toward a given result chosen by insiders.

It comes with the territory, it is a flaw inherent in all public dealings. State Libertarian parties tend to be too small and too poor, and probably too quarrelsome, for such a thing as "party insiders" to emerge and take power over them. Lucky us.

I'd rather see fewer primaries and more quirky local processes wholly in the hands of parties, than the spectacle of States trying to preempt one another by moving primaries earlier.

If anyone criticizes the Iowa caucuses, do so over who's running them and how, stressing the importance of ground rules to the perceived fairness and efficacy of the process, and perhaps shaming their party officers into adjusting them. Don't criticize them for failing to have a primary---though it carries the imprimatur and regulation of the government, it is just as fallible.

One piece at a time

An AR15 flattop upper is being assembled around an Alexander Arms 6.5mm Grendel 16" barrel. I lack the muzzle device, gotta work that yet. Acquired like Johnny Cash's automobile, one piece at a time.

TCM is pushing me toward a 1.5x long-eye-relief optic and I have one picked out.

We're callin' out the Cabinet Man . . .

TCM and I have exchanged a few hairy eyeballs over the last few weeks. He's a Paulist, I'm For Fred. TCM has seen the sights a girl can see from Brooklyn Heights, what a crazy pair!

I'm hoping he'll go back over the last few emails and assemble them into a manifesto, and we can bat this topic back and forth in this space.

Looks like only my devoted other five regular readers can draw him out. I keep pointing him to this and that criticism or commentary on Ron Paul's pursuit of the GOP nomination.

What'll it be, and why: Dr No With The Veto, or the Frederalist?

Note that my commenting system still sucks. If anybody can tell me how to scoop up all my comments from enetation and transfer them to the commenting engine here at Blogger, I'm all ears.

Maybe it was for The Children

Hooooweeeeee!!! The very green United States Air Force chose to recycle their spent fifty-cal brass:

The 1st Special Operations Wing at Hurlburt Field, Fla., has found an innovative way to turn spent brass into cash for the wing’s quality of life programs.

By destroying it.

The wing just set up an “ordnance deformer machine” that will recycle about 240,000 pounds of spent ammunition casings each year. Then the base can sell the scrap for about $70,000.

The cases go for about $.20 each to recreational shooters, with no processing. Ammo prices are up recently, due to cost of materials, so $.20 might be ridiculously low.

The empty cartridge case of the .50 Browning Machine Gun weighs about 900 grains give or take, yielding 7 3/4 cases to the pound (corrections? please email).

I am presuming that Gummint-contract .50 BMG brass is indeed brass, rather than steel or aluminum, meaning it can be reassembled a couple more times before it's worn out and has no value over the material of which it's made. I am also presuming that when Uncle Sugar buys new .50 BMG ammo, he pays about the same for that new case by the trainload as a private citizen does for once-fired in boxes of 100. If I'm off, it's not by far.

The Air Force got snookered, which isn't surprising, or didn't want that brass to find its way to the market for reloading by private fifty-cal citizens, which isn't surprising either. Whether this brass would be sent back to Uncle Sugar's mills to become new .50 BMG or jobbed out to the market, USAF still screwed themselves, and You, Mr and Mrs Taxpayer, out of about $300k per year at just one base.

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?