Grendel continued

This is a KT lower that I got before ATF shut KT down. I'm applying the serial number by pasting a print of the number on the side. Then I'll electropencil over it.

Asimov saw this

"That was and is our job – to manipulate you (the electorate) and the media (we already had them months ago). Our goal is to create chaos with the other side, not hope. I’ve come to the realization (as the campaign already has) that if this comes to the issues, Barack Obama doesn’t have a chance. His only chance is to foster disorganization, chaos, despair, and a sense of inevitability among the Republicans. It has worked up until now."

The Mule?

Weird conspiratorial quote HT DailyPundit.

this one was not in the corner of my eye

because he clearly would not fit. He needed nearly the whole damned eye.



We met today at about 15R UN 3688 3270.

He was not pleased to be in salt water. I got as close as I dared without obviously annoying him further. After a few photos I was on my way.

out of the corner of my eye

this guy was watching me from about 30 paces.


This was at about 15R VP 16 13.

Wish me luck

I may be on my way into Ike's wastes. I want to go, and right badly. We all do.

If bandwidth is available, I'll post.

Update: I'm here in East Texas. The Home Depot parking lot has about one tree in three torn out. Hotels are still cleaning up to open, many restaurants have reopened, and there are car insurance claims tents sprung up all over.

Definitely not

Definitely not an instant winner.

Put me down for one, maybe

One of my lingering unrequited loves is for a VW bus, 1969 or so. I actually owned the shell of one, with all the parts and no small amount of rust, just waiting for me to build an engine for it. It was mine for the hauling away. Never got around to it, and my father buried it to be rid of it after I moved away.

VW of America hints at the breadbox's return, albeit on a sedan chassis.



Sorry, it isn't the same unless the front wheel is directly beneath the driver's ass. But if it's priced like their other models and wears a TDI badge, I could get insanely excited about it.

Almost Kelmark GT hard-on excited. I had a Ghia body pan waiting for (the 7,500 circa 1979 dollars needed to buy) one of those too.

but this is the most valuable donkey schwag of it all

Son of Donkey Schwag

It was being passed out by the boxload.

Donkey schwag

Donkey schwag

consider the cat belled

Several more Blackberries have been added to my organization, including one assigned to Yours Truly.

I appreciate its power, and the expense to give this power to me. However, I don't cherish being the office boy at this outfit. Becoming a 24-hour office boy I like even less, and that is what this device portends. It enhances reaction, which means it will inhibit proaction.

It even sucks as a plain telephone. What I really wanted, and dared to ask for, was a service plan and cable to run EVDO over the existing plain-jane mobile phone. Ohhhh no, we have to get you a Blackberry, cheaper in the long run.

'nuther Quote for the Day

"You cannot have a smoothly functioning animal kingdom without the predators."

DailyPundit

Quote for the day

"I very much doubt that the highest and best use of ALMOST EVERY American for a year of his or her life is to spend it in a government program."

Jim Lindgren at VC

What is meant by this? My CCW good?

Update: James Rummel says 'no.' This is the same as Texas's law allowing businesses to post against CCW on their premises if they so desire.

End of Iowa

Visiting

Even without Heller this should be interesting

and not in the sense of, "may you live in interesting times."

Once again we prepare for the Eastward hajj to worship at the shrines of our ancestors.

The pilgrimage takes us through various states whose legislative attitudes towards the right protected in DC v Heller vary from "please bring your girlfriend" to "you better be just passing through, Son."

Some places Wyff and I will be tempted to open-carry. Shall we document with digifoto?

Heller thoughts

Glad I've been kicking a few dollars to IJ all of these years. Though Heller wasn't strictly Institute for Justice's case, several of Heller's lawyers are from IJ. IJ deserves some credit. And if Kelo v New London gets under your skin, send IJ some dollars. That fight isn't over either.

I have to disagree with many bloggers who see the glass as half empty. In spite of my lack of a sports chromosome, I will reach for a sports analogy. This is the second point we've scored since halftime, and the game has been running since about 1934.

I think everything is there for us to enjoy a genuine strict-scrutiny individual right. But only if we keep blocking and tackling. That will require patience and a positive attitude. It is too much to ask for one case to yield one ruling that restores that right in all of the aspects.

There is a visible path to 14th amendment incorporation. There's a visible path to eliminating the Hughes amendment. But it takes time and determination and money.

K-VAR puts it right in their email ads celebrating the DC v Heller win: "restoring the individual rights" to KBA. The rights are on track to be restored, because for most purposes those rights had been lost. We had a disastrous first half. But the game is not over.

It exists!!!

Nutella in single servings!

Would be groovy in MREs.

Gone and done it

Had to pull the plug on the old template. Enetation stayed awake last week long enough for me to download all of the comments from day One.

There was too much legacy junk in WUTT!'s template to allow a new commenting service to offer a place for them to go.

I'll roll the other features of the template into this new one as time allows. There may be some color changes and such also.

Meanwhile, I sat on the flight deck of a C-17 for a landing along the Columbia River yesterday. Very nice. Any readers in Benton or Franklin Counties in Wash state?

Stimulus, part two

Reloading dies for 6.5mm Grendel.

just the anime

Barbaloot and I catch SciFi network mostly for the anime, though I'd like to get her into BSG. We'd have to start at the very beginning too, cuz I've probably seen fewer whole episodes than I own 10mm pistols. She sees BSG ads and thinks it's just soap opera.

But as we watch SciFi and see what non-anime programs it offers, it reminds me of Aaron Magruder's observations of Black Entertainment Television. Few blacks, very little entertainment. BSG looks like the only real SF that SciFi has to offer. They'll need a hell of a lot more SF to offset the ghost hunting and crossing over and yeti junk they carry.

Recluse RIP

We regret to note the passing of our oldest cat, Feathers. Renal failure, over the last few months. Only last week was it visible in her behavior. We euthanized her before any indications of pain or suffering.

What we've done with the stimulus rebate, part one

Since Uncle Sugar has borrowed money for all of us bitter God-fearing masses to piss away:


6.5mm Grendel, Wolf Gold, 123gr soft points, 20 rds per carton, 25 cartons. Exactly fifty cents per round delivered. This is about all the money that will go for anything manufactured outside the US.

IJ will be getting some help, as well as some legal funds for folks trying to get or stay out of jail because of ATF abuses.

If a red giant bursts in gamma rays, and there's no sentient life to observe it, is it a Great Filter event?

Instapundit points to an article whose author hopes, almost wishes, that there's no intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. If there were, it would somehow mean to him that a cataclysmic event, of sufficient scale to eradicate humanity, hasn't happened yet, which for him is a cause for concern.

I apologize for failing to follow the logic. It seems that a man holding the directorship of something called the Future of Humanity Institute should be more optimistic about humanity and its future, but this fellow is a downer:

For example, it might be that any sufficiently advanced civilization discovers some tech­nology--perhaps some very powerful weapons tech­nology--that causes its extinction.

The Universe abounds with so-called Great Filter events that have utterly nothing to do with the inevitable self-destruction of sentience, fashionable though that assertion may be. Gamma-ray bursting stars, asteroid impacts, ice ages for crissakes, any of which would roll back the calendar on our species if not obliterate it outright.

It isn't a Great Filter, it's thousands of calamities, randomly scattered across space and time, and we haven't been whacked by one yet but we still can be. Only microseconds ago in geologic time have we become aware of the potential for these calamities. It will take real geologic time for us to move a significant number of ourselves sufficiently far away to be spared the greatest of these calamities.

It may be that there are hundreds or even thousands of other spacefaring civilizations out there, dead before they got out of reach of the nearest GRB. For each of them, there are millions of other extinct civilizations buried under kilometers of ice, then ground to silt when the glaciers retreated, through a hundred cycles of glaciation and thaw.

I'd be surprised to find there are more than 3 interstellar races anywhere in the Universe at any one time, but then I haven't done the math.

Arguing that we're doomed for, or safely past, some single inevitable culminating point in the development of sentience is itself a form of observation selection effect.

drycleaning gets the smoke smell off the blazer

There's this:

" . . . the whole game is idiotic. Parties are supposed to pick their own nominees, and the idea ought to be for the guys on the inside who know what they're doing to come up with whoever they think has the best chance of winning the general election . . . "

Is this so far from what I wrote here?

Though he and I use "activist" somewhat differently.

I'd vote for a black man

it just has to be a black man who identifies himself by his belief in the content of one's character, rather than an accident of birth. Say, Ward Connerly, or Thomas Sowell. Shelby Steele.

Ironic that the charge of bigotry so easily erupts from the mouth of people who cherish the diversity of appearance but insist upon uniformity in, even blind obedience to, dogma.

greetings, visitors from Snake River Brewpub

Yup, I was just there.

The ribs were a bit too clove-y but overall quite good.

kick the FMG-9 up a notch

All the hullaballoo over a folding machine pistol in 9mm, we just don't get it. 9mm seems to be the caliber of choice for weird guns you can't find a mission for.

Now if MagPul chose to crank these out with a 7.62x25mm chambering and 8 inches of barrel, I'll dutifully lust for one.

Getting warm but not quite there

"We are very proud of our heritage, we are proud of who we are. We are not frustrated. We are not bitter. We turn to our faith because we believe, and we hunt and fish because it is part of our culture and we enjoy it."

We own all of the terrible implements of the Soldier that we can lay our hands on, because our Republic's founders had to. They did so because their erstwhile legitimate government had taken such arms up against them.

If that makes me a rube, a hayshaker, a gaptoothed hillbilly in some circles, so be it.

it gets better

Lunch was possible at Stubb's on my final day in Austin, thanks to broad frigging daylight. It was good but still not as good as Ironworks.

The courtesy driver at my hotel agrees.

After dark, a burger at Hut's.

Austin can stay weird just fine on its own

At Brother Scott's suggestion, I tried Stubb's. Rather, tried to try it.

Couldn't get in because Sister Inoxidable was with me (a charming photo of her on the right, "From My Cold Dead Fingers"), and Stubb's doors were plastered with the big red "51%." Too bad their website, extensive and informative as it is, doesn't mention that, or we wouldn't have walked the whole way to 8th from this shabby little hotel on the river.

So we ambled back, eyeing all the front doors to every joint from there back to Cesar Chavez, until I gave the hell up and went once more to Ironworks.

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?

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.

Nadia is reborn

Sorry, no pictures yet, the digital camera is in the shop and I won't annoy you with grainies from the camera in my phone.

But Nadia was reverently dismantled and rebuilt over the last week or so, using a spare Tapco flat but the superb rails scavenged from an AK-Builder flat that I, ummm, ruined.

Brownell's Teflon-Moly oven-cure once again covers the receiver, all else remains the scruffy, beaten "battlefield pickup" finish of the original kit.

Snapcaps cycle through this action fine, gotta see how live rounds do. And this time, all of my mags, including polymer Pro-Mags, seat, lock, and feed.

One problem, that has plagued every build of mine so far: the receiver walls at the trigger pin are just far enough apart that the pin can back out of the hole on the starboard side, allowing the trigger and disconnector to cant inside the receiver.

There's still a visible gap between the inside wall of the receiver and the circlip of the trigger pin. When that gap is closed, the far end of the pin flops out of the hole. Will my caliper tell me that the trigger pin hole dimples in the receiver have flattened? Or that I am not bending the flat square enough? Or is my tempering technique warping the receiver right there (and will stress-relieving prior to tempering solve that)? Kinda stumped.

On Franciszka, I fixed this with a dab of J-B Weld surrounding the hole on the starboard side. For Jadwiga, I'm improvising a fixture that will press "Y" dimples around the starboard hole.

Photos won't be up for a while, possibly a long while. Sorry.

Too bad they discourage gays in the military

Right about now I could use somebody who would know how to put a smoke detector in my rectum. That way I can tell when smoke is being blown up my ass.

Hell yes, I'm with Fred

The interview with Fred Thompson in the May 07 American Spectator clinched it for me.

He didn't so much as repudiate the campaign finance reforms that he championed in the past, but he did concede that they aren't having the success he had expected of them. He can be forgiven if he is willing to work to repeal them for laws that encourage campaign finance transparency and Internet-era accessibility.

Now where is he on the FairTax?

Just made the roll, and it doesn't look very different

. . . between Mac OS X 10.2.8 and 10.4.6. The key applications seem to work: Nutscrape, PGP and Quicken. Though I'll upgrade or replace all of them as I get to them. The very same applications that, a few weeks ago, ceased to appear in the Dock and seem not to want to be put back there.

Thunderbird for Netscape 7, BTW.

It was an Upgrade install. Normally I whack the HD drive and do a Clean install upon it, but I wimped out and didn't want to backup and restore 20GB of my sh17.

Teach your children well

It's another of those mornings where I am restless, pacing around the house while the family sleeps, but I cannot. If you don't believe me, look at the timestamp.

After running multiple over-analytical scenarios of house-modding, I notice that two layers of paper are taped to the picture window facing Lincolnway. One layer is a photocopy of a page from a How-to-draw-manga book I found at a bargain table years ago in the Mall of the Americas; the layer above it shows my daughter's attempts to trace manga upon the photocopy.

I carefully peeled the two layers from the window. They belong to one of my daughters, not sure which, but they do not belong on the window.

The trace looks very close to the original. In one way, that is good; daughter-unit sees and copies what she sees. In another way, not as good, in that she has copied what another creative mind has given to her, rather than creating her own vision.

In one way, good because she saw and was inspired; in another way, she did not complete the assignment. Some lines end before the idea behind them.

This is the torture and promise of rearing children. Finish what you start, or you pass the torture and promise together to them.

Oh I do so want a pair

. . . of Bionic Boots.

Wondering: if one gets reasonably stable standing in a pair of these, could one deliver a half-decent off-hand rifle shot from them? Imagine a platoon of riflemen running through a MOUT course with these things. Gives a new spin to "shoot. scoot and salute."

Today's burning Green question

A good friend of mine, formerly in the office supply business but nowadays a Dragon Soldier, tells me that when I replace an exhausted inkjet cartridge from my HP Photosmart 2500-series all-in-one printer and ship it back to HP Planet Partners in Tennessee, they do not refill it and ship it out to another grateful HP user.

Triangular contorted RECYCLED arrows to the contrary. He says they just throw 'em out. The postage-paid return envelope gives them Green cred and reduces the likelihood of customers refilling the little bastards and denying HP the repeat business.

I will probably never attempt refilling inkjet cartridges. It looks like something best left to companies that know how to manufacture them in the first place, or at least companies that can offer warranties on the performance of the refilled product.

Now, "throw them out" can also include offering the plastic package to the recycling gods, to be washed of all traces of ink, harvested of the little printed-circuit ribbon, and ground up, prior to reincarnation as Old Navy Performance Fleece. That qualifies as recycling in my book, but to many other Boomers it means an empty Rolling Rock bottle will be refilled with more Rolling Rock. Shame on us for unrealistic expectations.

But if my friend is right, I'm paying for the spent cartridge to be shipped to a distant place for proper disposal, not just in bucks but in the ethereal new coinage, marginal carbon footprint. I'd rather pay less and have it shlepped to the other side of town (versus other side of the Continent) for hashing back into its component molecules.

What's the business case here? Spending $.90 (postage and envelope) to gather up a plastic cartridge that cost $.10 to make and will be worth $.0005 as cullet polymer? Meanwhile releasing about a quarter of its mass as CO2 in the process to move it, strip it, and grind it? Raw deal, I think. What say you?

If I could only have one.

Rifle that is.

The Cabinet Man here. Long time, no post. I hope Fuze's offer to guest-post on occasion still stands. We'll know soon enough, I guess.

Fuze and I have more than once had a discussion that starts with the question: "If you could have only one rifle, what would it be?" [ed note: Can of Worms alert!!] Fuze is enamored with the AK platform and he has the nicely-done home-builts to show for it. But my impression of him is that he's an FAL guy at the core. He may choose to chime-in at a later time and prove me wrong. But I'm not here to speak for this blog's owner.

I too have strong affections for the AK and, for the no-notice, "Molotov cocktail hoodlums in the front yard at 2:00 AM" scenario, the milled Bulgarian SLR-101 tactically positioned at the front of the gun safe is my go-to gremlin repellent. I took that sweet piece of post-commie legacy to Gunsite and for five days held my own against all manner of Gene Stoner's Finest. Not once did the little carbine fail me and every pop-up hit out to 200 yards fell solidly with one round. The trigger is no work of art and, in its current form, it lacks any means of a bolt hold-open. But for the purposes of clearing my little 1/6-acre urban homestead of gang-bangers, Neo-Cons, zombies, Socialists, and other foaming undesirables, I'd rather have that Bulgy in my hands than any AR-15 I own. Not to mention that it's fun to shoot!!

I also have a soft spot for another Bolshevik import: the Mosin-Nagant. I have a number of these lying around, half of which are the superior Finnish-captured M39 variants. They are simply and soundly built and, when properly fed, reliable to a fault. The upgraded Finn sights are no small improvement over the Russian originals, though I went one step further and dressed-up a couple of the Finns with Mojo ghost rings. The 7.62x54R cartridge hits hard - and I mean 30-06 hard!! - and can be found in a good range of bullet weights. With Wolf Match Extra, one of my scout-scoped M39s shoots 1 MOA. Which means if it's acting hostile, using two legs for mobility, and under 750 yards distant, I own it. 'Nuff said.

But I digress. Sorta...

The reason for that little train of thought derailment was to highlight the fact that certain rifles do certain things very well. Equipped with a Surefire light and an Aimpoint red-dot, the Bulgy SLR is a hella' CQB weapon. When my eyesight is up to the task, the M39s can really reach out and touch someone. (Only onerous malcontents, of course...) But I wouldn't want to clear the house with the Mosin nor perform counter-sniper chores with the AK. We're talking compromise here, not perfection.

If I could have only one rifle...

...it'd be a Yugoslavian 59/66 SKS. The wretched commies win again!!

As with most things for which I have strong affections, there are a few SKSs lying around the house. Most are Yugo 59/66s but there's also a lone angry Russian. (I recently sold-off an odd-ball Albanian. Curious to look at but I never grew attached.) The SKS is by no means glamorous. It's a bit on the heavy side and when compared only to the compact form factor of the AK/AR, it borders on unwieldy. But it's commie-simple, as dependable as gravity, and actually looks like a rifle. There's wood and metal and leather: the three basic elements of the universe. The AK-47 was designed for rough use by largely uneducated and wholly unmotivated conscript soldiers. On the other hand, the SKS gives its operator some credit for understanding his role in the man/rifle pairing and, thusly, I suppose it's a truer proletarian weapon. For example, the SKS is considerate enough to lock back its bolt after the last round, signaling the rifleman through a subtle change in its recoil that renewed attention must be paid to its on-board ammo supply. And that's a good thing. There's no detachable magazine to misplace - nor extras to carry - and nothing to grind in the dirt while shooting from prone. The stripper clips, while imperfect, perform well and with adequate practice, can be employed as quickly as detach-mags. While a step or two more involved to field strip than an AK, the SKS requires no additional tools. Some folks don't like the look of the 59/66's grenade launcher gear and choose to remove it, replacing it with a muzzle break, flash hider, or other such Bubba-junk. Nossir. As is, the rifle has plenty of character so I leave that stuff alone. I don't ask my women to get boob jobs, either.

One of my 59/66s in particular has proven itself especially endearing. Its trigger doesn't completely suck, its stock is perfectly clean with no carvings or pock-marks, and its bore gleams as if it had been newly minted just yesterday. Fully de-cosmo'ed, it has never jammed nor slam-fired. It sports a Williams ghost ring rear sight and an OEM front post. On most days, even from a half-assed shooting position, I can put ten rounds in groups of ~5" at 100 yards. Certainly no medals will be awarded. But that's OK because it's not a target rifle and no amount of aftermarket froo-froo is going to make it one. And it doesn't seem to care much about its diet. It shoots Wolf as well as it shoots Winchester or Cheetah. (Yes, I still have some stores of Robert Mugabe's best 7.62x39 Cheetah ammo. Envy me.)

"But TCM, why the 59/66 for The Only One?"

Let's do the math, Grasshopper.

The middleweight 7.62 round is not ideal, but it's not the total slouch the AR banner-wavers would have you believe. From a 16" AK, the stubby 125-grain x39 bullet is - at best - a reliable man-stopper out to, say..., 250 yards, which is right about where its energy drops below 750 foot*pounds. But the 59/66 has a 22" barrel. That extra six inches is good for an additional 135 feet/second at the muzzle. (I have chronograph-sourced empirical data to support that claim, so don't argue with me.) That means the little commie caliber can still hit Plenty Hard Enough To Stop out to 300 yards, maybe 350 with a tail wind and a lot of holdover. Those ranges are no big deal to the Mosin, but we might wanna' clear the house, too, remember??

Now I know the 7.62x51 guys are already smugly asking how I'm going to engage the infamous 600-yard target. Well, folks, I'm not. We're talking your basic (mid-40s) visual range, hombre-a-hombre self-defense situations here. The evangelists of "The 600-yard Hit" are primarily concerned with (semi- or non-) organized civilian groups encountering organized, hostile forces armed with 5.56 NATO weapons. That's all well and good and I completely understand that way of thinking. For that kind of situation, nothing beats a true MBR: an M1A, an FAL, an HK-91, or a Garand. You'll get zero argument from me on that. But one of the criteria of this scenario is that I'm down to only one rifle, which means things have truly gone to hell. It's safe to assume that my problem is not 600 yards away with a crypto radio and mortars at the ready. I'm more concerned about the classic Zombie Biker threat. Maybe they're well armed, but probably not. Maybe they're well trained, but probably not. Maybe they're well organized, but probably not. So at 300 yards, I'm feeling pretty confident with ten rounds in the SKS and a clear exit strategy.

"Then why not stick with one of your Mosins?"

So, we're back to that, huh?? OK. Five-shot mil-surp bolt-action rifles are wonderful things. They're gifts from God and I can't own enough of them. But how about our Zombie Biker threat?? Or the group of agitated, trigger-happy squatters that won't move along?? Or the pack of wolves or a rapidly approaching bear?? I have to assume that I'll be facing these challenges by myself - I always assume that - and the process of engaging multiple, close-range targets with a bolt-action Mosin (or Mauser or K31 or 1903A3) is no minor problem. For that kind of work, I'd love to have my Bulgy AK. But we are talking one gun, aren't we??

Gimme' the SKS already!! I get ten shots as fast as I can aim, all while keeping both hands on the stock. I can quickly reload ten more rounds in a few smooth motions. I'm throwing out mid-power 30-caliber whoop-ass without 8mm or x54R recoil knocking me about the four corners of Central County. And I can still hit reasonably hard at 300 yards if need be. For additional assistance with that 300-yard target, the sight radius on the 59/66 is about 2½ inches longer than an AK's. I'll concede that that's not much but it is an improvement.

"Ha!! You're gonna' kill a bear with an SKS??"

A charging bear will get as many rounds as he needs to be dissuaded. All ten if that's what it takes. (The same goes for two-legged goblins.) And I'm likely to do a better job of changing the bruin's mind with 7.62x39 rounds than with 5.56 NATO. That said, I'm not going to hunt bear with a x39 chambered rifle. But given that little extra "oomph" afforded me by the longer barreled 59/66, at moderate ranges I could safely hunt deer, antelope, and wild hogs - assuming there are any left after the SHTF - and maybe even drop an opportunistic elk target that's up-close and personal. Predators such as coyotes, wolves, mountain lions, and feral dogs are no match for the 7.62 middleweight champ. Excepting alligators and the infrequent moose, that about sums up the four-legged critter issue for the Lower 48.

Let's not forget a couple of easy-to-overlook features. Assuming Bubba didn't remove it, the SKS has a permanently attached, collapsible bayonet. Don't underestimate its utility. How would you feel if at what appeared to be the final moments of a good brawl, your opponent initiated a bayonet attack?? Not scared, huh?? Ask a WWII Pacific Theater front-line combat vet what he thinks of desperate Japanese suicide charges. I'll bet he won't be laughing when he tells his story. And, as a last resort, the heft of an SKS would make it a formidable club. The AR - and maybe even an AK - could sustain terminal damage after a heart-racing bout of head bashing. The SKS loves that kinda' stuff!!

And lastly, there's the issue of cost. What are essentially unissued 59/66s can still be had for $200 and change. For that price, forget about a spare parts kit. Just get two rifles. Or three. And while 7.62x39 ammo availability was a big problem the last couple of years, that's no longer true. It's available in quantity today. It's not priced at $90/1000 like it was in 2003/2004 but it is affordable. And the prices are tolerable enough to justify a little stockpiling for the next drought. While the 7.62x51 folks are forking over 50¢ or more per round for their bit of the rarified supply of mil-surp x51 fodder, you're at the range getting in good practice time for 15¢ a pop. Few of the Average Joes can afford (the Pure Joy of) a $2000 Fulton Armory or LRB M14, a $250 Sadlak scope mount, a $1000 Valdada BDC scope, $800 worth of USGI 20-round magazines, and enough ammo to practice with 150 rounds every other weekend. As the saying goes, it's better to have $2000 worth of training and a $200 rifle than to have a $2000 rifle and only $200 worth of training.

So that's my take on the problem of Just One Gun. Gimme' an SKS, a Yugo 59/66 to be more specific. YMMV...

TCM

After the SHTF, please find me a good dentist

Swen reminds me of a post I've been brewing; I heard in real-time Rush's famous chiming-in on the "men afraid of using tools" kerfluffle.

Not over here, boss.

I've made with my hands: an air-cooled Volkswagen engine, assembled a couple thousand rounds of ammunition for pistol and rifle, brewed more than a few gallons of ales, butchered a few antelope, ground up a bit of it into sausage. I've built 3 Kalashnikov rifles, and am working on a few other blasters.

This weekend I replaced the shock absorbers on my truck. A couple months ago I replaced the gear oil in its transmission. I'll replace the oil in the front and rear differentials next.

The next large game animals I harvest will have their hides tanned, some brain and some vegetable.

Though even I don't get this part: I usually hire the oil changes out to someone else.

Met Fred, got the T-shirt

. . . but did not make "Rifleman" at the Worland Appleseed Shoot. And dammit, I drove the whole way to Worland and didn't shake Swen's hand.

Mortality sucks

I recently received news that my brother, 4 years my senior, suffers from a tumor surrounding his brainstem. His prognosis is poor, his wife tells me, but he is in the best care available.

I should plan to visit him soon, and bring my youngest, my Toad, with me because he is the only offspring unit of mine who has not met this uncle. This may be his only chance.

It also reminds me to draw these offspring units a bit closer. I took Boy out to Vedauwoo so he could handle a 10/22 and Jadwiga. He liked the Kalashnikov far better, because he hasn't figured out optics and he's still too short for a cheekweld on the 10/22. With Jadwiga's stock folded, he could rip out 3 rounds and hit a grocery bag at 20 yards.

Steal this television program

TCM laments in comments below that we'll be stuck forever with the cliffhanger at the season-ending of Jericho because the b@57ards at CBS cancelled the program.

Perhaps, but then perhaps not. If there is a burgeoning cottage industry of fan-production for Star Trek (think of the dollars they sink into props and costume) there has to be a way for fans to step in and keep a show like Jericho alive without CBS.

All you need is a run-down little town, a few police cars, a school bus, an amateur radio . . . nothing you can't already find in some deserted plains town a stone's throw from the Front Range.

BTW, I watched the second episode the other night, and still no fat women. But suspense of my disbelief was much further impaired by the tatted convicts impersonating cops. They picked up the blonde along the road and they were desperate for . . . gasoline?

And they kept the real deputies in the trunk? Alive? What for? And the deputies' uniforms fit the convicts? Gimme a frigging break. Sorry, I probably would have dropped this series by Ep 3 or 4 anyway, at this rate.

Which only supports my point. I'd wager that those implausible devices were inserted into the plot at the insistence of the Beeeg Teevee Netvoohhrk executives because that's what TV execs have always done.

If fans pick this show up and keep it alive, they won't have tin-eared empty suits telling them what to do to the script. The fans won't have any advertisers to please.

Debating season over there, Boss

My lackluster Senate campaign gets a kick in the yarbles with a good showing at the debates.

Ride like the wind, Bullseye!

Of all the lame derivatives Disney has made of their properties, they are missing a goldmine:

Woody's Roundup.

Sic

I just cracked open a case of Uncle Sugar's finest Caliber .30 Springfield Model of 1906 Ball Ammunition, recently delivered from the Civilian Marksmanship Program.

Some functionary of CMP decided that a liability statement of some kind must appear on the package to clarify that the ammo was delinked from milsurp machinegun belts and wasn't fresh new milspec.

This is really embarrassing. There must be tens of thousands of these cartons in circulation with the word "strickly" in all-caps.

Don't forget Wayne

Please send a few dollars to Wayne Fincher's defense. I did recently, and his wife sent a brief note of thanks and good spirits in reply.

The Wayne Fincher Defense Fund
c/o Mr. Don Bright
2225 No. Mockingbird Ln,
Fayetteville, AR 72703

Does it always have to be about football?

Senator Brownback's misapplication of metaphor is a more grave insult to the language than his failure to invoke Wisconsin's athlete named Faahhrv.

It also takes down a peg or two my consideration of Sen. Brownback for the position of chief executive of the Republic. He's technologically illiterate.

"Blocking and tackling" does not refer to defensive techniques in the game of American football--or if it does, that is a recent misappropriation of the term by linguistic thugs, cutpurses, and pitchmen. It is far older than that, a reference to the use of ropes and pulleys ("a block and tackle") to lift heavy objects. In modern times, it is used to signify drudgery, the repetitive tasks that do not demand raw strength so much as perseverance along a simple plan, one pull on the rope after another after another. It connotes slow progress. Blocking and tackling does not leave one exhausted so much as it leaves one sore, having traveled through several times more in length of rope than has the weight that was lifted.

In comparison, the blocking and tackling of football are glamorous, instantaneous, bruising spectacle. An angle of attack gone wrong, a misplanted foot, and an athlete's career can end.

It's a geek-vs-jock thing, and as jocks would have it, the world turns around jocks. Another term for "jock" is ambitious.

In Kansas, of all places

I just watched the first episode of Jericho. Only one observation of the show that sticks with me as improbable: no fat women.

There was a deaf girl. There was a school teacher on the bus with some likely internal injury---that didn't kill her after being stranded on that bus for hours and hours---she was kinda hot. The ex-girlfriend who drove over the crow corpses, she was hot. Heck, at my age the mayor's wife and protagonist's mom, she's passable. Any of them could fit down the aisle of a commuter aircraft without spilling someone's coffee.

Not one diamond-shaped quarter-tonner. Not a single one. I don't recall a fat guy, either.

And I didn't notice a Kansas accent.

Kinda hard for me to suspend my disbelief for the rest of the show, y'all.

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