Too clever by half

A meme running around Facebook these days, about violence against women:

While you SCREAM at your woman, there's a guy who wants to whisper in her ear . . .

and so forth.

Two thoughts on that:

• There are surely women who provoke their men into batshit-unhinged anger, and who are not meanwhile stealing smiles from other men. There are women who piss off every man they encounter. I can name names.
  
• "There is a man wishing to make love to her" is not the kind of stuff to be telling a man who is prone to abuse in relationships. Guys who get jealous easily should not be made, err, jealous.

I am not making light of domestic violence. But if eloquent feminists want to draw attention to it and get women and men to post something on their Walls condemning domestic violence, this is not the message.

Isn't it enough to say that men who intimidate the women who are close to them deserve to be beaten nearly to death and abandoned along some Godforsaken logging rut? Hell, isn't it enough to say that anybody who abuses anybody joined to him or her in an intimate relationship needs to cut it out?

Update: on some consideration, this passage is not directed at guys to try to get them to stop abusing women. This message is directed at women. Is it encouraging women to abandon abusive relationships---"c'mon, girl, you can do better"?

Which rules violated? Rather, how many?

Shooters regularly pass opinions on negligent discharges they hear about in the media. Which of Cooper's Four Rules of firearm safety were violated in such-and-such event? This is no Monday-morning quarterbacking, it's a reminder to gun owners of their responsibilities and the risks they face.

Now that Uncle Radley has drawn widespread attention to the militarization of police, and the excessive use of dynamic entries, by the now-famous video, perhaps it's time for these entries to receive similar scrutiny against a set of rules that allow us to judge (yes, judge: to sit in judgment of, to criticize, to pass opinion on) the actions of police officers.

The acts of police must face scrutiny just as the acts of mayors, presidents, senators, or representatives. They act on our behalf. To those who complain that mere civilians cannot presume to judge the actions of SWAT officers because have not walked in their boots, I call bullshit. If we cannot evaluate the actions of those who claim to serve us, we cannot determine whether they are serving us at all, and we cannot determine whether they are breaking laws themselves. The role of servant and served would be reversed.

To judge their actions, we need a standard. It was Say Uncle or James Rummel (I can't remember) who pointed me to Sir Robert Peel's (or Mayne's) principles of policing.

So, gentle readers: which principles of police conduct were violated in the Columbia raid? For the moment let's convene on Peel's version of the principles.

Note: whether the dad was a dope-dealing scumbag is not relevant. Don't address it. The rules aren't about him.

another use for advanced airships

I didn't bother to follow the link on Instapundit this evening about "cellphones for Cuba." My imagination, though, suggested that sending piles of discarded functioning mobile phones to Cuba to encourage freedom wouldn't help the cause if Raoul kept his thumbs tightly on the mobile phone carriers. Florida is a bit too far to give good bars to those phones.

But if Hermanos al Rescate commissioned an airship with cellular equipment aboard, using tight directional antennae---gain---and kept that ship in the air for days at a time, constantly moving but keeping those beams trained on the island, the phones might work in spite of Raoul's jammers.

But I think another country needs internet bandwidth out to the rest of the world a hell of a lot worse than Cuba.

Iran. The airships could run up and down the Iraqi border, and over the Persian Gulf coasts. Sadly the beams would not reach Tehran.

Seems that we should be dropping HF radios into the country so the horror stories can get out and the dissidents can coordinate.

The Car-Free Month

It's The Cabinet Man again. Long time no post.

We gun nuts are so often accused of being mono-topic drolls, incapable of interests outside of rolling naked in piles freshly reloaded ammunition. But just like most folks, we actually enjoy other pursuits at times. For me, well, I'm a bicycle freak. I yoosta be a USCF flunky and had grand aspirations for racing the RAAM. I once competed in the Eagleman (Half-)Ironman Triathlon as the bicycle leg of a team. My greatest bragging rights, though, lie in my completion of the 4400-mile TransAm Trail that runs from Virginia to Oregon. I rode that solo -- and unsupported -- in 1998. While my ambitions are far tamer than they were a decade ago, I still enjoy throwing a leg over the top tube and grinding out the miles.

(And I'm not the only bicycling gun-nut. Tam and Xavier are two more examples...)

So the Missus and I are gonna' try this whole bicycle-to-work (-grocery store, -gun shop, -porn outlet) for a month. In May.

Why?

Fair question. It'd be easy to say that we're tree-hugging Earth First'ers that want to save the planet and be a good example to Gaia-loving bipeds everywhere. Or that we like making Arab oil shieks pissy! But that'd be 180-proof blatherskype. (Well, maybe there's some truth to that last one...)

In all honesty, we just like riding our bicycles. And we have a couple of them:









(Yes, that's a titanium Litespeed you're drooling over, blessings and praises be upon it...)

I recently picked up the TerraTrike Tour (TTT) tadpole recumbent for me:



and a BOB trailer off Craig's List for the Missus:



(I have an old Rev 1.0 BOB for myself. The Missus doesn't wanna' haul all the groceries...)

So with all that, we wanna' ride!

We plan to use this car-free month as a springboard for developing better ride-to-____ habits. Just as importantly, we're hoping the commitment will result in more pedal time and less waistline. I need to shed about three stones and the last time I decisively lost tonnage was when I was riding religiously for 10+ hours a week. (20+ hours, actually, but we gotta' start some where...)

I'll probably split my time between the TTT and my beloved Cannondale T2000, the latter being my trusty TransAm steed. The TTT is a blast to ride and the very definition of comfortable. It's an imperfect solution, though. It's so low to the ground that I get the wiggins in heavy traffic. It climbs a bit slower than my two-wheelers but the Missus likes that since I don't drop her on the hills. She'll be riding her GT mountain bike that we've fitted with road tires. We'll both be towing the BOBs on grocery day.

There will be some exceptions to "riding everywhere". We have obligations to our local gun club that can't be fulfilled by bicycle. Hauling hundreds of pounds of steel plates under human power is entirely out of the question. As is the 240-mile round trip to The Property. The Missus isn't keen on riding to the base of the Manitou Incline for our weekly summiting, so that's probably an exception as well. But everything else is fair game: work, groceries, dentist and Sportsman's Warehouse.

I'll try to keep the posts coming on our progress and failures. At least once a week. Check back early and often!

TCM

No, Mister President,

if you are shopping for a new Supreme Court justice,



Not that Napolitano, but this one.



He's already a judge, if that's important to you. Not particularly important to me, because I believe that already being a judge would disincline one from making waves among other judges. Sorry, that's what the Supreme Court is supposed to do, in a way: point out other judges' errors, even the errors of prior Supreme Court justices. Slaughter Slaughterhouse, anyone?

That's probably why Andrew here so excites as an already-Judge. He's willing to call bullsh on other judges, rather than go along and allow their errors to perpetuate.

Gun pr0n dreamy dreams

First, I always wanted one of these, more than I lusted for a SPAS 12, say.
The High Standard 10B, a bullpup shotgun. I'm borrowing this photo from a Gunbroker auction, sorry if that offends.

If I were a lunatic independently-wealthy tinkering gunsmith, I'd apply the 10B treatment to a newer semi-auto, and extend that tubular magazine right out to the muzzle. Then I'd package the treatment as a kit for the hobbyist to mount on his own. I don't know enough about modern selfloading shotguns to pick the right one. Bleg?

Meanwhile, on the AR front:

With everybody except me offering a gas-piston AR clone design, the criticisms of the gas piston versus direct gas impingement are emerging, and the most cogent I've heard is this: the direct impingement system applies force exactly along the axis of the bore, breechbolt, and bolt carrier. All are in balance.

A piston offsets that force above the bore axis, causing the bolt carrier to tilt and shave away the soft aluminum of the AR's receiver pieces. A full-auto pistonized AR will grind itself to swarf in one firefight. AKs, in comparison, have rails that guide the bolt carrier and bolt in the needed direction; the offset force harms nothing.

If I were a lunatic independently-wealthy tinkering gunsmith, I'd solve that problem by integrating a steel supporting rail in the roof of the upper receiver. It would take the place of the cocking piece, and probably still function as one. The face of the bolt carrier that takes the force of the gas piston (no longer a "key") would be shaped to ride in that rail, and would not come down out of that rail unless the rail itself were extracted from the upper. The rail would have ample room for lubrication and for the accumulation of chum for the happy soldier to clean away. The bolt carrier would then have little or no surface on it to bear against the inside of the upper receiver---the rail handles all of that. No damage to aluminum receiver.

Whether this configuration would continue to use the existing buffer spring, buffer and buffer tube assembly is still undecided. Maybe the bolt carrier can be carved up to make room for recoil springs that fit within the upper receiver, like on the para FAL?

TENUE CORRECTE EXIGEE

A Yank wearing a NASCAR T-shirt, jeans, and a ballcap should not be surprised to receive poor service in a restaurant that caters to Eurotrash.

You're gonna wait so long for your dessert that you'll have to go to the maitre d' to remind the establishment that you ordered it.

Just sayin'.

Oh, socialism, where is thy sting?

To paraphrase Dr Henry Jones, it wasn't until my oldest kid reached the age of 13 that they became interesting.

So over Easter dinner Firstborn, Mlle Sklodovska, Barbaloot and I compared the concepts of nationalism, Nazism (national socialism), and fascism.

There is no sting to equating ObamaCare (probably better called Reid/PelosiCare) with socialism. The word 'socialism' does not invoke the outrage, the indignation, that it once did when I was a boy.

Libertarians: don't bother. It won't get you traction with anyone whose help you'd welcome. You are surrounded by people who hope to start collecting wealth redistribution, via Social Security, sooner than you'll pay off your current car loan. The only outrage they will exhibit is if Sosh Scurty is depleted before they get theirs; by then it will be too late. Cries of 'socialism' today won't motivate them.

Besides, it isn't quite true. ObamaCare (SoetoroCare?) is not socialism, it's fascism.

Something the reader will have to look up. Next up, regulatory capture.

the matriarchy is oppressing me again (some (more) editing)

This in a comment at drhelen's, on a now famous post about how controlling pornography is an attempt to control men's sexuality.

It takes TWO people for a marriage to work. You will only get out whatever effort you put in.

Let me ask, "huh?" If you get out what you put in, regardless of what the other person of the two of you put in, what is the point of having the other person?

If it takes two people for a marriage to work (and assuming a he and a she in it), he will definitely not get out whatever he put in it, he will get out only what she put in. In the long run, she will not invest more than he does, nor he more than she did; but VB didn't say that. Would have been helpful if VB had.

What would it take, from the standpoint of a talented aphorist, to get these two proverbs to work together, in describing the effort to keep a marriage?

FWIW, drhelen and many of her commenters are conjecturing that the author of the article under scrutiny is a feminist harridan who froze her poor hubby out. That has a ring of truth to it, in a way that cuts very close to my own experience from 25 or so years ago.

Dr Anonymous, the article's author, seems to have taken an easy way to dismiss a serious problem, that He was addicted to Porn!, just as easy for drhelen's commenters to reply that Dr Anonymous was Frigid.

The truth is somewhere in between, I would guess, and really hinges on how well Dr Anonymous and Porn Addicted Husband communicated before she took on Frigid properties and he took on porn addict properties. It could have been averted.

Waste of ethics.

'Clause' for the day rather than 'quote' for the day. Sorry, that's the best I can muster.

What exactly would constitute a "waste of ethics"? In that ethics is self-approval in what one does not do, "waste of ethics" represents an exertion, an effort, an application of energy, to avoid doing what one's philosophy tells one not to do because the consequences (if discovered) are, um, existential. If your lapse is discovered, your reputation is forfeit. However, if you apply this effort and gain no return, is the effort wasted?

In short, can one look back on the effort one exerted to be ethical and deem it a failure or loss? Can one waste ethics?

My confusion elicits this post.

I happened upon that clause by following this chain: Bacchus to Susie Bright to a commenter at Susie Bright.

Warning: Joan Jett is involved. Don't tell Berke Breathed.

NRA Board of Directors 2010

This year I followed the recommendations of that there Snowflake guy.

With one exception. I voted for Bob Barr instead of Matt Blunt. In retrospect maybe I should have kept Gov Blunt because he led the reforms that made it lawful for me to CCW on my last trip to his State.

Oh well. I'll make up for that mild error by throwing some money to GOA.

Add Missouri

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

So which is it?

On the one hand, it's going to be terrible, your son will have a violent alcoholic daddy, your wife will no longer recognize her ruined, spent and joyless man. Sackcloth and ashes:

There is unemployment, . . . and there is unemployment—chronic, all-consuming. The former is a necessary lubricant in any engine of economic growth. The latter is a pestilence that slowly eats away at people, families, and, if it spreads widely enough, the fabric of society. Indeed, history suggests that it is perhaps society’s most noxious ill.

On the other hand, we just didn't have enough confidence in what really works, we took our eyes off the ball, and we listened to the hucksters, disbelievers and naysayers, and we need to just buck up and smile:

When equity prices were falling in 2007 or 2008, the first time the market closed 10.0001 percent below its previous high, they were putting brightly colored banner headlines on television announcing the official onset of a bear market. But this didn't happen on the way up.

I'm confused.

Though as I read to the end of the gloomier article, the policy prescriptions therein have the ring of untruth. Gotta finish the cheerier article and come back.

how things have changed

I had to rent a car this week. In the compact lines, the only makes Alamo offered were Hyundai and Kia.

Back in the salad days of salarymanhood, they were always Buicks and Pontiacs. Earlier, they were Hertz Thunderbirds. Those days I stuck with one rental agency all the time, and usually rented mid-size then, but I still don't recall seeing Oriental imports on their lots at all in the late Nineties or early Aughts. Now they have crowded Murcan makes out the lowest rungs of the rental fleets as well as some prized places in luxury classes.

Not that I'm complaining, the compact handles competently if a little stiffly, and my favoritest-ever car was a Golf. Rental agencies surely have access to the numbers about durability, cost of ownership, and (ahem) brand loyalty. They wouldn't be renting Korean cars if it didn't make sense, and there were too many of them for it to be an experiment.

When did this happen, and where was I looking instead?

Actually I like Dan's better

Dan Hurwitz in Liberty, April 2007, p14:

What if Iraq were to model its new government not on the representative democracy of the United States, nor the parliamentary democracy of Great Britain, but rather the direct democracy of Switzerland? ... both are composed of fiercely independent, culturally diverse local communities......

The Swiss system is probably the most democratic on earth. It consists of a federal government and 26 semi-independent cantons (or states). The federal government — more properly called a confederation — provides a political umbrella guaranteeing individual rights, safeguarding property, and overseeing functions that are inherently national in scope, such as defense, public works, freedom of movement, and economic matters.

Your humble narrator, 4 years beforehand:

Don't try to build or rebuild a democratically governed Iraq. We should, instead, partition The Country Formerly Known as Iraq along those ethnic lines again. While the country is still reeling from its violent recovery from Saddam Hussein, we have the opportunity to draw some wide chalk lines on the map, to shove these people back into ethnic/religious cantons.

My submission was a lot weaker on the freedom of movement stuff and a bit more hawkish overall.

Quote from yesterday

In a free society, it is hard for 'good' people to do 'good,' but that is a small price to pay for making it hard for 'evil' people to do 'evil,' especially since one man's good is another's evil.

Milton Friedman

Layers of fact checkers

Boston Globe, in a story about the wardrobe choices of Senator Brown, R-MA:

Correction: Because of a reporting error, a story in today's "g" section about Senator-elect Scott Brown's barn jacket incorrectly implies that author Naomi Wolf advised Al Gore on his clothing choices during his 2000 presidential bid. Wolf consulted on women's policy issues for the Gore campaign.

Jessica Simpson mistakenly complementing the US Secretary of the Interior:

"I was introduced to the Secretary of the Interior, Gale Norton, I said, 'I really like what you've done with the place.' I had no idea that she was a member of the Cabinet, not an interior decorator!"

the junkman prevails

My outfit was spring-cleaning not long ago, and a TrippLite PR40 was destined for the heap.

It's a 40-ampere DC power supply. Well, it was, but it wouldn't supply any DC recently, and it was part of a suite of electronics that had been forklift-upgraded anyway. The proponent of the forklift upgrade didn't ask for it to be turned in.

Your humble narrator chose to snag it instead of letting it go to the heap, because I need a supply for other amateur radio gear that comes along.

This supply had no output voltage at all. I opened it and took the regulated DC off of the final board. Bingo, 22VDC. The crowbar circuit on the final board was shorting the output to ground, as designed.

TrippLite does not offer schematic diagrams for its products. It offered to take this PR40 back and offer me a sweet deal on a refurbished PR40. Total with shipping (this units weighs about 30 pounds) would have been around $200.

I asked around on qrz.com and was told that, likely, there are 4 NPN power transistors in parallel that clamp raw dc down to 13.8VDC, and one of them is smoked. If I wanted to go the incremental route, first change the IC that was applying the bias to those 4 transistors. For comparable power supplies, like an Astron, there's an IC just to do that. The TrippLite does not use that part, but 3 of the 4 opamps on a quad IC instead.

The quad opamp came for about $10 shipped. That didn't do it, replacing the power transistors would come next. I parked this project in the man cave.

The project came back around on the lost-cause rotation, so I sought out a good price on 2N3771 in TO3 cans on eBay. Somebody took my Make An Offer offer, 4 of them plus shipping for under $10.

I put them in tonight. With their outputs still away from the final board, dammit the output voltage was still 22V.

I touched up the joints on the opamp pins and tried again. Still nope. As I started to pack the tools away, it occurred to me that the IC on the final board might not be able to bias the transistors to cut the raw dc down to the desired 13.8V, if the outputs of the transistors are not coupled to the final board.

With the regulator outputs connected to the final board, the output voltage settled at 13.86 or so VDC.

I assembled the supply as far back to factory as possible, and found that I needed a new way to insulate the output post from the cabinet. The original supply used a stack of plastic washers, which disintegrated as I disassembled the supply the first time.

I improvised a pair of insulators from scrap lexan, one inside and one outside the cabinet, with a dab of silicone caulk to keep the red post centered in its hole through the cabinet.

I'll go back inside in a few days and put a rubber O-ring around the red post to better center it in the hole so it doesn't short out.

So now we have a 40A regulated DC supply for about $20. And we also can hook on to the raw DC in this supply for DC of higher voltage than the pickup truck would provide, the next time there's some anodizing to do.

Strip the Supremes of 'their' clerks

Lawprof goodness:

The simplest solution would be to strip the Justices of all their clerks. We think such a step is unnecessarily radical. Instead, we propose that Congress reassign the clerks (perhaps in reduced numbers) to the staff of the Court’s Librarian. The Librarian would choose and supervise the clerks, who would not be permitted to draft legal opinions. . . our intent is not to punish the Court or its members, but to encourage the Court to operate more like a judicial body and less like an academic faculty cum super-legislature.

Guest bloggers at VC.

There's a parallel here with Members of Congress voting on laws they haven't read: judges deciding cases on the bases of research they haven't read, and expressing their decisions through rulings they didn't even write.

We often get our cause and effect reversed

Gallup today:

PRINCETON, NJ -- In the wake of Republican Scott Brown's victory in Tuesday's U.S. Senate election in Massachusetts, the majority of Americans (55%) favor Congress' putting the brakes on its current healthcare reform efforts

No, I think Gallup has it backwards, even exactly backwards. Because Americans disfavor current health care legislation, a Republican running against it won the U.S. Senate election in Massachusetts.

"In the wake of" is a sloppy way to write of cause and effect anyway. It implies sudden displacement rather than the steadily accumulating boilover that actually took place.