An idea of mine stolen yet again
Date Patrol is coming to TLC. I wouldn't have noticed it except that Barbaloot enjoys watching Trading Spaces, hosted by Paige Davis, and, well, she's hot. So I was half-watching Paige---er, Trading Spaces with her, and what did they announce but the continuing theft of another of my ideas.

Anyway, if dating is an acquired skill set clearly some will acquire it better than others, and some will never get it without some formal coaching. TLC Network agrees with me, at least enough to give it a try as oxymoronic "reality television." It will not carry the baggage of a school operated by a distillery or a university.

To the show's producers' credit, it appears they will be examining and finishing "her" skills as well. That will make the show more interesting to us guys. But a pitfall awaits: the date arranged between the two of them is far less likely to fail, and will offer much less educational value to its viewers, because the finishing teachers will be unconsciously guiding him and her together. That does not occur in the real world. Even arranged marriages are put together by people who couldn't give a rat's *ss whether he can strike up any chemistry with her.

A better test will come when the poor yub tries these newly-acquired skills on someone randomly chosen from the same pool that he would have chosen from if the TLC cameras had never shown up. But by then the cameras will be gone, and countless other poor yubs will not have the benefit of learning from his mistakes. And there will be mistakes.

Good luck. It's a jungle out there.

One in the oven

The sonogram below is of our next child, at 17 weeks gestation.



We've withheld announcement until now because we've lost fetuses in the first trimester, even later, several times before; the odds of full delivery on this tadpole are pretty good now. Even though Barbaloot is now 40 years old.

Names have been chosen, both pink and blue, and we prefer to find out which at birth. "Accident" was peremptorily rejected.

Upgrade season
We are dropping our AT&T mobiles, and switching to Verizons. Moving our long-distance calling to the mobiles and saving ten bucks a month in the bargain.
Update: mtpolitics is going farther down this route, contemplating the dropping of land-lines altogther.

We've noticed that the Verizon phone works very poorly on the first floor of our house, but OK upstairs, so going long-distance is still a player; it also works at the church, so Barbaloot will get calls from the sitter (or me) on Thursday night choir practice. I've noticed that mine pukes directly beneath the lone rural tower here in Undisclosed Remote Location. Cadre says, "they all suck here."

We need you to do something
The organization that is coordinating pressure on the TSA to train pilots to be armed is staging simultaneous press conferences at several major airports. I need you to go to their site, and if you live near one of the airports, get your ass over there on the proper date and time. Bring some sammiches for the pilots.

Another blogger and I differ, respectfully, about the wisdom of armed pilots (versus armed passengers). I truly believe that if we can achieve a critical mass of armed pilots, we can turn a corner with public opinion about concealed carry by ordinary citizens, both on the ground and eventually in the air.

I doubt that armed passengers can be a reality before Earthbound citizens can go discreetly armed. And I believe that Earthbound permit-free, or "Vermont-style" concealed carry can spread to most of the US until we penetrate those few holdouts like New York state and California with "shall-issue."

Swen was talking about this one . . .
in a post here, describing it as the Colt IMP.
Bushmaster commercialized it briefly as the ARM Pistol. It is a bullpup design that rotates the whole weapon, minus the grip, about the barrel, so when fired right-handed it ejects to the right; fired left-handed, it ejects to the left, either way, it threw empties away from the shooter's body. It fired the full five-five-six from AR15 magazines. As the photo suggests, it borrowed many other parts as well from the AR15. Not so long ago, Bushmaster's catalog listed some few parts left for it, their website today does not.

When I was ready to get one in the pre-'94 AW Ban days, I had the three-hundred or so dollars that Shotgun News said the distributors wanted, and a dealer ready to order it for me with his nominal cut, but he could find none. I got a 9mm MAC-11 instead, and promptly regretted it.

Because the grip, with its trigger, moves with respect to the rest of the weapon and is also dislocated, so to speak, well forward of where it usually is put, it is difficult to make the trigger crisp. Maybe a solenoid affair can be made. Or hydraulics?

Verse of the day

The hearts of freemen are the tombs of secrets.

Courtesy of The Military Series of the Declaration of Jihad.

Land of a Thousand Pricks?
I drove my partner, Advon, to the MSP airport today. He goes home, I stay at Undisclosed Remote Location to roll up all of the workshop results and insert them into a new scenario for Cadre.

Took a delay en-route to the Mall of the Americas. While trying to merge with traffic to get into the West parking garage, two vehicles, not one but two, would not allow me to merge.

Side note on Mall of the Americas: it would be phenomenal if every store were something different. But there were at least three Victoria's Secret stores, for example, on separate levels. And nowhere for me to buy a bigger HD for the Clandestine Mobile Media Access Platform.

While leaving aforementioned huge repetitive Mall, another prick didn't realize that I was on the on-ramp, accelerating to highway speed, and that he should either accelerate so I could merge behind him, or decelerate so I could enter ahead of him, or change lanes so it would not matter.

I've driven this stretch of I-494 before; I used to report to headquarters of a beeg telecom company in Minnetonka. I just don't recall idiots on the road, though.

Please note, many of my best friends are from Minnesota. But a thousand pricks can go a long long way towards ruining it.

Who's this guy?

This lizard is about 8 cm head to tail. You see him here hiding under the arch of my boot. There are two blue stripes down the sides of his tail.

He escaped unharmed, I was not stepping on him.

Neologism
saudimasochism
Suffering, by a nation's leaders, because of foreign policy that requires one to make nice with the House of Sa'ud.

Guardbumming update
Our present undisclosed remote location is 15TYU20136769; we're here working with Cadre, to debug new USAF doctrine on how to operate an airbase after it has been attacked. Interesting work, with some of the best people in the business.

Well, Mister President, it's the Bees and Spiders again! They stole my food stamps and sol'em to the Rats!
I'm surely not the first blogger to observe this, but: deregulation is being blamed for the capital-w-worst capital-b-blackout in US capital-h-history, or as Scott Chaffin directs, the Great Northeastern Blackout of Ought-Three. At least I'm the first to use a Firesign Theater line as the title for it. I hope it's apropos.

Bush-adorers: watch how he handles this one. Blue-ribbon committee? Thorough inquiry? Donk-apologists: watch how your party's leaders try an En-run around the facts. Is this a tar-brush to apply to the GOP?

FoxNews, to their credit, hosted a talking head from Cato today, explaining that if there's a problem with deregulation behind this blackout, it's one of not having enough deregulation. Without the freedom of prices to reconcile supply with demand, nobody has the incentive to build and maintain generation capacity within his own market, and relies more heavily on drawing power from neighbors (across regulatory boundaries) during peaks. There's too much source-sharing (transmission) among markets.

The technical cause of the blackout will be ascertained quickly, probably before this post is even timestamped. It may indeed be a relay the size of Glenn Reynolds's fist, or a serial cable the diameter of Mr. Untel's urethra. Whatever.

The solution, the measure or set of measures that keeps this from happening again, is not technical but economic and political. It will not be found by any of the parties holding the power necessary to put it in place, because solving it does not deliver benefits to those parties. "Paging, uh . . . the Usual Suspects. Usual Suspects, please meet your party at the Committee Hearing in 2123 Rayburn."

Our Macs and dual-boot Linux/Windows boxes are on UPSes, I have five gallons of bitters to rack, and we're celebrating my wife's 40th birthday tomorrow. Have a wonderful weekend, be back Monday from Undisclosed Remote Location. Relax and have a homebrew.

Quote of the day

There are 135 candidates for Gov[ernor of California]. I'm not sure I want to be governed that badly.

From e-Claire.

I guess they don't like it
The new USAF tiger-stripe utility uniform is thoroughly dissed at Sgt Stryker, and mildly ridiculed there as well.

I admit, changing to new AF-unique camouflage uniforms is sending good money after bad---I need replacements for the Scope Shield radio and PSN-11, for example. If the AF wants a distinctive look in a uniform, go back to khakis, and save the BDUs and DCUs for bases and climates where they make sense. But as other commenters at Stryker have noted, USAF seems to have already decided on a new uniform, and seeks user comments just to cement the decision. So we might as well complain abouttry to add some functionality to the uniform they've already committed themselves to.

Pity if I'm just hip-shooting. I already wear BDUs, and I don't need to wear the tiger-stripes or work next to someone who does, to guess at how they will or won't work, and what should be improved about them. But then I'm a proponent of bringing back warrant officers, having worked for a few of them. So you can take my suggestions with more than the usual dose of salt:

Pin-on rank insignia, in a pattern distinguishable at very short distances from that of officers.
Cargo pockets that will hold an LMR comfortably.
Buttons arranged not to snag on camouflage netting.
A pattern other than Solar-Absorption-Maximized Black (that goes for the T-shirts too).

The TIC awareness of premature death by congestive heart failure . . .

encourages me to run. A good 28 to 32 minutes, four times a week, over a course that gradually expands through my neighborhood.

This course takes me past a backyard fence on which grows a vine with deep green leaves, and large, soft-green conical flowers. Could it be?



Yes. Hop flowers. Charlie Papazian describes them in the Complete Joy of Homebrewing as developing tiny yellow capsules of lupulin at the base of each petal as the flowers ripen, from mid-August into September. Boy and I walked there today and popped a flower off the vine, and found the lupulin. I rubbed the flower between my palms and smelled it. It's the real stuff.

Homebrew: just what I need to reduce my triglycerides.

I am growing old, I am growing old, I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled, continued
Your humble blogging correspondent chose his grandparents poorly.

Earlier this year, I was diagnosed with gastro-esophageal reflux disease, and was prescribed with Aciphex so I no longer felt like an alien was clawing its way out of my chest. Today, the Aciphex was switched for milder and less expensive Zantac.

Between deployments for Operation Enduring Freedom, my cholesterol was found to be high, and triglycerides even higher. This Spring, diet and exercise had reduced them considerably but not brought them down to levels acceptable for my doctor('s insurers). Doc said I drilled down the levels as much as diet and exercise are ever likely to do; the rest is genetics. So we try Gemfibrozil for six weeks, and another blood draw to see if I need to eat it forever.

The WUTT Model for Concealed Carry Laws
A friend of mine is seeking a CCW license in Maryland. I took notes on our discussion of the pros and cons, and invite him to guest-post here about the experience when it's concluded. He is concerned, as many others are, that seeking a license to carry, in a way undermines our collective position that concealed carry is a right.

I'm ambivalent about this, and here's why. For your examination is my model for how, or where, CCW may be a privilege rather than a right. I'm not a Constitutional lawyer any more than I'm a nuclear physicist, but I firmly believe that constitutions, big and little "c", were written to be accessible to the layman, and that Occam's rule applies to their interpretation. Of course, all 18 of my readers are free to email me or comment below that I'm full of shit and ought to shut up.

I have a pdf of Colorado's CCW application on my desktop and have been toying with filling it out and walking it into the Sheriff's office. Colorado's constitution specifically denies that there is a right to concealed carry, which to me means that the legislature has the power regulate it (as long as the US 14th and 2nd are not violated, there's equal protection, etc) but may not outlaw it completely.

The regulation of concealed carry is a legitimate State power when Constitutionally reserved and when impartially carried out, considering that States should have relative freedom in legislating against crime, to find the best results and compare them with those of their neighbors---the "laboratories of democracy" argument.
States' rights don't exist: "As our Constitution is written, governments have 'powers' but no 'rights.'" (see Kozinski's dissent, page 5991, second paragraph in Silveira v Lockyer, and my brief comment on it).

In comparison, Vermont not only doesn't have a CCW permit law, Alphecca (who is not a lawyer either) explains that it can't, by her own Supreme Court's interpretation of her constitution. In Vermont, concealed carry is a right, out of the reach of Vermont's police power. This is how it ought to be with all states, except those whose constitutions explicitly deny a right to CCW, such as my present home Colorado. Last summer it looked like Ohio might end up like Vermont, swinging from one pole, no concealed carry by private citizens, to the other pole, a right to carry concealed simply because their Constitution protects an RKBA and doesn't reserve a power to regulate CCW, and their legislature has failed to pass a CCW law. I'm not following this matter (James, any news?). Alaska legislated both a CCW license system, and unlicensed carry in a very broad range of circumstances (scroll down to "Carry without a permit").

By this model, if a state has reserved the power to regulate but her legislature fails to or chooses not to regulate it, it is still not a right but it can't be prosecuted either. Colorado has a "traveling" exception to the permit requirement (CRS 18-12-105.2(b)).

Lest anyone think Colorado's constitution's CCW clause is unjust and violates the US Constitution's RKBA clause, well, Kentucky's has a CCW clause, and no less of a gun nut than Thomas Jefferson held the KY Constitution up as a model for the rest.

By my reckoning, if a state's constitution does not reserve to that state the power to regulate concealed carry, they can neither require permits nor prosecute those who CCW without them. The state's RKBA amendment or clause rules, statewide; if the state's constitution doesn't have an RKBA amendment or clause, then the Federal one suffices, and it is mute about CCW, unless you want to split hairs about the right to "bear" meaning "in plain view." Then you can run up against rulings that the RKBA does not apply to persons openly bearing arms in terrorem populi. The populi of Denver, Boulder, Colorado Springs, and a few other Front Range cities seem to be easily terroremed, and are frantically passing laws against open carry.

I ask these bozos: which would you rather have, because you have to allow at least one: open carry, or concealed? If both are outlawed, then the "bear" part of the Federal RKBA is violated.

So the foregoing is my model of how CCW ought to be. Of course that's not how it is.

This is one reason I'm toying with the app for Colorado: under their constitution, I see less problem with the new system than with the old (how can discretionary permits be legal under an equal protection clause?).

Take that same law to a state whose constitution doesn't reserve a CCW-regulating power, and does guarantee an express RKBA for the purpose of defending self (Pennsylvania?) and I get heartburn again. The blow was softened somewhat by the low cost, $13.50 for 5 years, and that it was ready in a week (this was 1993, much can have changed since then).

Don't get me started on New York.

So then, EB, don't kick yourself for duplicity in the System Breaking Us Down. Go for your CCW in Maryland and good luck, your constitution does not guarantee an RKBA so you have the Fed guarantee to rely on.

Many thanks to packing.org for concise and well-organized reference material.

Barsoom beckons
Firstborn sneaked out to the back patio with me tonight to look at Mars. She picked it out at once. While she was training my old Sears 7x35 binoculars on it, a Perseid blew in, cutting North to South. It burned up before she could see it.

More on the waycool new USAF uniform
Follow this link or this one. Both have photos.

Question that remains unanswered: are they contemplating pin-on rank insignia? Can't see any on the photos.

He could have used an ought-six but he didn't
In Publicola's thorough follow-up on one Mr Gates in South Carolina, a correspondent asserted that discharging a shotgun at criminal trespassers would endanger Gates's neighbors. Don't buy the argument.

At a moment when lethal force is being exchanged recklessly by criminal trespassers, you would be a fool to use less-than-lethal force to disabuse them of it. You will use lethal force, and you'd better bring enough of it.

Now that you've taken the decision to use lethal rather than less-than-lethal force, you can choose which type, platform, caliber, and so forth to minimize the risk to any innocents nearby.

The shotgun fits this bill better than anything else. Its ratio of P_Kintended to P_Kunintended is very high.

Summary:
Mr Gates was duly diligent in his choice of a shotgun for the application, compared to other firearms he could have chosen.

Erratum: nobody posted in reply to Publicola about the potential of Mr. Gates to endanger any of his neighbors by discharging a shotgun at said trespassers. Of course, homeowners are responsible for where their bullets fall, and the choice and employment of firearms to defend homes must include such calculations.

Reading about this incident and how Mr. Gates was treated by the authorities caused me to remark on those risks and how the shotgun firing shot (versus slugs, or the choice of another firearm) mitigates them. This would be a valid point to make to anyone inclined to second-guess him, especially those who have the power to indict him or seize his property.

It is an indication of the quality of readership that this point was not raised---gunbloggers know better. I apologize for the error, and thank Publicola for bringing it to my attention.

Give them back now
Thanks to Publicola, who forwards Rachel Lucas's post regarding a man whose firearms were seized by police after he shot gunfighting trespassers in his front yard. Police seized all of them, not just the shotgun actually used to quell the affray, though they concede that no crime was committed. Publicola also ably dispels the notion that some forensic evidence could be collected from the shotgun's seizure, or that it would even be worthwhile.

They seized not just the shotgun he used in the shooting, but all of them.

Cut this the hell out. Give them back now, with an apology to him and termination for whoever made the decision to disarm him.

On second thought: whoever moved to disarm the homeowner, it's now your turn to sit on his porch with nothing but a cordless phone and a flashlight for the next 72 hours. No hardshirt either, asshole. If you live through that, then you're fired.

If this happened to me
I would hope to have the kind of balls this guy has. My first action would be, as G Gordon Liddy has advised, don't hand them over to the cops. If the cops insist that I must be separated from my weapons, I'm transferring them to my lawyer for safekeeping. Possible outcomes:

• Worst: I am officially identified as a Bad Person and lose the right to own them. The lawyer sells them and I get the proceeds.
  
• Bad: the lawyer returns them when the bullshit is over.
  
• As if we have an RKBA: the lawyer pushes back hard enough that I don't give them up.
  

What does a lawyer have to say about this?