Dancing in blood is, well, what They do

Matthew Vadum reports in WashTimes:

Shocked staffers at the Nation report that the publication’s website has been flooded with angry comments, expletives and unprintable threats against Ms. Piven's person.

Of course there is a suggestion that these threats come from Tea Partiers or other friends of Liberty. Rubbish.

From what we have seen of the attempt on Representative Giffords's life, Piven's movement---not ours---is ready and willing to take advantage of martyrs.

Why would we wish to give one to them? Let The Nation look among its own for the source of threats against her.

I, for one, truly wish Frances Fox Piven a long, long life wherein she sees her philosophy abandoned, her beliefs discredited, and her health preserved by doctors taking their payment in cash.

goings on in the Middle East

. . . prompt talk of an 'internet revolution.' Apparently an internet revolution won't work, or hasn't yet worked in Egypt, because the internet can be seized by the thugs who'd be displaced by the revolution.

So maybe there needs to be development of a revolutionary internet. Hinted at here.

Small, low power, short-range digital radios that relay a short packet one to another. Make them small enough, and cheap enough, that they can be stuck quietly to motor vehicles, even those of the thugs, so they circulate. Each radio repeats a message until another radio gets it.

If enough of them are in close proximity, they can either speed up bandwidth to relay files (photos, for example), or dice up transmission timeslots smaller so more stations can participate. Or both.

Allowing a huge number of hops is acceptable.

The thugs would spend valuable time finding or jamming enough radios to impair the network, while you're deploying more.

For those of us outside the isolated country, we can smuggle or airdrop more of them in. Hell, fasten them to migratory waterfowl. This is something we could already have done for our liberty-minded friends in Egypt.

It's not the internet you grew up with. It won't be internet protocol at all, in fact. But it beats being deaf and blind.

recreational Facebooking, and more

We do maintain a Facebook account, connected to our real-world identity. Recently, it has provided me some amusement in the form of interacting with the metrosexual people I knew in my teen years.

They spasm at the very mention of Sarah Palin. So I defend her often, by linking to or 'liking' the articles that refute her post-Loughner accusers.

It makes them only more deranged. I giggle.

But then I remember it isn't funny. An innocent person is accused of fomenting hatred and inciting violence. A mentally-ill man is ignored by his local elected peace officer, and his sworn deputies, who could have initiated court proceedings against him. He could have received treatment; at the very least, he could have been kept away from firearms.

No, it isn't funny. And it isn't about a former governor of Alaska either. Nor about talk radio.

I take some comfort from the observations that the psychotic's target, a legislator, lives and struggles to recover; the sheriff, whose badge clots with the blood of the psychotic's victims, may answer for his failures by facing a recall; the nation seems to reject idiotic calls to punish the weapon. Some comfort, not much.

I also think of the torture that the shooter must have felt, years ago, as he sensed that his grasp of the world was failing. The greater torture of realizing that people around him notice that he has changed, but have done little or nothing to help him. What of the abandonment, the isolation, as friends, classmates, employers, even family gave up on him?

Bacchus nails

When you catch me doing journalist-like things, it’s because the lazy fuckers who claim to be journalists aren’t doing their fucking jobs.

Over here.

My National Ammo Day Haul

Fuze asks and Fuze gets.



200 rnds 9mm, 115-grn FMJ
50 rnds 22 Mag, 40-grn HP
50 rnds 38 Special +P, 125-grn HPs

(The latter are for Barbaloot to test in a couple of .357 Ruger revolvers real soon like...)

All of it picked up from Sportsman's Warehouse on the way home from work. I'd forgotten about NAD until I read Fuze's post.

So mark me down for 300 rounds. I did my part!!

TCM

And it's still National Ammo Day!

And it's still National Ammo Day

MidwayUSA ships Rainier 200gr .45 plated flat point. Ordered to arrive today.

C'mon, let's see everybody's Ammo Day hauls.

It's National Ammo Day!

used HP Photosmart 2575, cheap

Amusing email from Hewlett Packard:

The third lawsuit (Blennis) claims that HP designed certain inkjet printers and cartridges to shut down on an undisclosed expiration date, and that at this point consumers are prevented from using any ink remaining in the expired cartridge and from using all of the printer's functions until the expired cartridge is replaced. HP denies all these claims. . . . the parties agreed to a Proposed Settlement in order to avoid the expense and risks of continuing the lawsuit.

Having just kicked my last HP printer to the curb, I could care less about getting as settlement an e-credit from HP toward the purchase of another.

And as much as I dislike the practice of litigating every wrong everywhere every time, I'd almost like to see the attorneys open this can of worms and spill it on the table. I was responsible for feeding an HP all-in-one in a TOC, artificially setting its date to 5 years in the past so we could keep using expired inkjet carts. I'm also still trying to remove the last auto-updating HP bloatwares from several computers.

Two-cat night

Two-cat night

TCM stares down a troll...

...in comments over at The Truth About Guns.

Probably not my best effort, but it'll do.

Edit:

Apparently, I (shamelessly?) read the TTAG posts chronologically, thereby missing this response. It never ceases to amaze me how quickly the anti-gunners revert to ad hominem attacks. Reasoned discourse, my ass.

TCM

Hie thee off to Alphecca

Republicans are contorted in the pantaloons over NRA endorsements?

Please leave something in the tip jar for Jeff.

I suddenly find myself wondering

I suddenly find myself wondering why i need to tell a bartender what "neat" means

Add Nebraska

. . . to the list of States where I have lawfully carried concealed.

OK, I'll play!!

The Cabinet Man here...

Below is my "on the body" carry rig:



That's a Springfield Armory XDm in 45 ACP. It rides in a Blade-Tech IWB holster with pull-the-dot loops. The spare mag and a Surefire Z2 Combatlight ride in a Blade-Tech combo pouch. All of that gets strapped on with a Wilderness Tactical 1-1/2" polymer-lined Frequent Flyer belt. The rig conceals pretty well as long as I'm wearing baggy shirts or a vest/jacket. It's surprisingly comfortable, too!

TCM

Carry rigs

SaysUncle asks, "what's your carry rig?"

Milt Sparks Summer Special above, Dillon kinda Yaqui slide below.

Biter the stainless Commander is comfy in either. She rode in the Sparks all day today.

El Paso Saddlery two-mag carrier (from CheaperThanDirt) not shown.

And visible in the upper edge of the pic is the steel cable for the Center-of-Mass in-car safe, which is indispensable.

No irreversible damage

The cheap milsurp plastic grips on Beater the utility blaster cracked, right across the panel, through the upper screw hole. Both panels.

A cast-aside 6' slab of 1/4" Lexan was looking at me from the corner of the garage, like the Cheetos cheetah: "you know you want to do it."

I hacked out two pieces about the size of M1911 grip panels, and started rasping away anything that looked like it didn't belong there.

The WECSOG grip panels aren't done. They are fitted to the frame, with the countersinking and the relief for the detent plunger doodad, and the outline. But the contouring is only begun.



When it is to the desired contour, it will be stippled for texture.

Bleg: .22 top end for Glock 23

Who has the best .22LR conversion for Glock 23?

It's not a 4th-generation. Aside from that, all I can tell you is the serial number.

Flinch needs to be programmed out of the spousal unit.

QFTD

In comments on Reason.tv's coverage of Glenn Beck's Restoring Honor event, M. said:

Jefferson and Washington would never [have] confused the public sphere with the machinery of government.

Pop quiz: which would our Founders have thought the smaller of the two entities?

'nother: how much smaller would it have been, say as a measure of how many persons were employed by, or paid by, one entity versus the other. Or say as a measure of how much spending is done by one versus the other.

I caught some of Beck's radio program last week, as he and his staff were discussing Brian Williams's appearance on Letterman. Letterman was asking Williams, as if asking Beck and the Tea Partiers through him: "taking our country back from whom?"

At the time I couldn't answer concisely, and in a way that wouldn't spawn countless challenges. Maybe the answer is concisely right there.

It just occurred to me . . .

. . . that Hannibal Lecter cut his hand off needlessly at the end of Hannibal.

Note that he cut his hand off to escape the handcuff that Clarice slapped on him in the scene right after Hannibal fed Ray Liotta's character part of his own brain.

But didn't Hannibal free himself from handcuffs in the Silence of the Lambs, in seconds, while the deputies were bringing him dinner? And he did so under spartan conditions, where he had to find or smuggle an improvised handcuff key.

So back to Clarice's kitchen. If Clarice had a frigging meat cleaver suitable for severing a man's hand at the wrist, she probably had many other items lying around, as in within three steps of the cleaver, that would have gerry-rigged a handcuff key as easily as the ballpoint pen tube that he used in Silence.

Clarice was heavily doped and not likely to put up much of a fight to this improvisation---the handcuffing was all she could pull off without passing out.

I must conclude that the cleaving of his hand was a dramatic flourish, not a true necessity for a fiend as clever as Hannibal Lecter. I haven't read the book, so I don't know whether that even happened in the book, and the book controls.

Discuss. Submit your coursework in the Comments, in APA 6th edition format.

An exposure to 60Co

Still catching up on back issues of Liberty, which yields another QFTD, May '07 in fact:

. . . only about 1% of our meat and produce is irradiated. The FDA has dragged its feet, considering irradiation some kind of food additive. They allow irradiation of meat, but with a warning label about possible risks! No such label is required for untreated meat that is laden with microbes . . if Public Citizen, food activists, and the FDA had been around in Pasteur's time, we wouldn't have pasteurization today.

Gary Jason in Bug Out, Reflections

Jason's post was inspired by discovery of salmonella contaminating peanut butter.

Would irradiation have worked on eggs?

Contaminated food scares seem to be more common now than when I was a kid. I don't know whether it's true or just more noticeable. It it's true, I'd like to know whether it's because food processors (or regulators) are just more careless, or we're just producing so much more, or exchanging foods more widely across the planet, or perhaps the contaminating organisms are just tougher now and breaking through the formerly adequate measures that processors have deployed against them.

Regardless, a few more scares like this one and maybe more Americans will be open to a broad use of irradiation, and vigorous tracking of which foods, and handling methods, yield better safety.