Problem Fixed

Sabrina's flash-hider was askew.

The crush washer I was using was not deforming evenly, so it was not parallel or concentric with the bore. I replaced it with my last spare.

Suddenly I understand why suppressor manufacturers require the use of peel-washers.

It's odd how I went from having spares to being out of them. I used two on The Lovely Harvey's carbines. I've used two on Sabrina now. I used one on Kaylee when I ditched the slip-over. They are cheap parts, but shipping is almost always more than the parts so you wait until you have an order for something else.

Something You're Going To Have To Get Used To

I've read some condemnations of the shooting of those 4 police because they were cops.

What the hell do you think the Threepers are talking about when they talk about their tripwires?

Shooting the neighbors?

If it comes to armed insurrection here in the USA, the police will be wearing the uniform of the enemy. Now, before it starts, is when a policeman should be deciding to take it off or begin vocally opposing the laws that are triggering the anger that the congresses are asking him to enforce.

Police organizations should be talking about constitutional issues and discussing strategies publicly for methods to not bother enforcing unconstitutional laws.

They need to establish themselves on our side of the line before the shooting starts, or be counted as part of the government we'd be trying to overthrow.

Just an example. Everyone's most hated police organization, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, is really just a police organization. They are just doing what Congress has told them they want them to do. It's a bit of a chicken and egg conundrum, but Congress could fix BATFE tomorrow. ATF has no real power over congress.

AR Stuff That Baffles Me

There is a camp of people who are dedicated to the 1:7 twist in the AR.

This was actually the second choice for the twist in the 5.56x45mm NATO development, the original being 1:9.

1:9 did not stabilize the NATO tracer round when tested in "arctic" conditions. Winter, in Alaska.

If your argument for 1:7 is that you can shoot surplus NATO ammo, will you be shooting tracers in the winter in Alaska? If not, 1:9 is actually optimal for NATO ball ammo.

What Makes It Science...

Is publishing your data and methodology so that anyone, ANYONE, can duplicate your experiment.

If they know enough about the field, then their repetition of the experiment will either confirm or contradict the original findings.

If it contradicts, then real scientists sit down and say, "That's odd, what did we do different from each other that yielded these differing results?" Real scientists want to find out why the results varied.

This cycle repeats until nobody bothers doing the experiment anymore because EVERYONE is getting the same results. The reason there is no debate about what happens when I apply flame to hydrogen gas in Earth's atmosphere is that ANYONE can do the experiment and it ALWAYS comes out the same. To replicate some of these experiments, one needs a lot more education than I have, but those people do exist and they are trying to replicate the experiments.

What you do not do, if you are a scientist, is censure the work of those who have come up with results that differ from yours. You do not hide the data. You do not hide your methodology. You do not manipulate the editorial board of the magazines that publish the peer-reviews in your field. If you do all of that you are no longer a scientist, you are an ideologue. This is the tactic of religion, not science.

If two scientists working with the same data and methodology get different results, then something is not accounted for. In the recent CRU scandal, what was not accounted for was the original researchers were lying. They literally made up the data and adjusted the methodology to fit their conclusion; one should not be shocked when honest researchers took what the CRU SAID was their data and methods and got different results. The key change here is HONEST.

It turns out that I was overestimating (link down the memory hole) the scientific integrity of the East Anglia Climate "Research" Unit. And I say that having already compared them, unfavorably I remind you, to the hoaxers behind Piltdown Man.
As the linked article demonstrates, the CRU is simply unable to respond to requests for their raw data. Because that data no longer exists. How could such a thing be possible, you may ask. Suddenly obsolete file formats? Fire in the archives? An idiot with an electromagnet? No, nothing so innocent. The real reason is that they deliberately threw it in the garbage, sometime in the 1980s.

FuzzyGeff

I think that this is the article in question:

By The Way...

If I am supposed to give Mr Obama a pass because he is black; that's racist. Real racist, not the crap the media screams is racism whenever they get half a chance.

So That's It Then

To the President, Congress and Supreme Court of the United States, their subsidiary offices and directories:

Charging those SEALs with assault will result in no more captures.

They are not stupid men, they will notice very quickly that a corpse cannot complain about a split lip and start shooting them instead of capturing them.

Try to charge them for that and they can, justly, hide behind the Geneva Convention and its treatment of combatants who refuse to wear uniforms. Before you say, "No they cannot!" remember that we did not bring a single Nazi up on charges for how they dealt with partizans in the Balkans. Not failed to convict, but refused to charge.

Make the attempt to change the military around that point and you will rapidly discover you don't have much of a military left. Do it just right and you may find more and more soldiers looking really hard at the "and domestic" portion of their service oaths. They swore to defend the nation and the constitution, not the sitting government.

Spread The Word

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/11/24/the_fix_is_in_99280.html

Notable quote: "Peer review is the practice of subjecting scientific papers to review by other scientists with relevant expertise before they can be published in professional journals. The idea is to weed out research with obvious flaws or weak arguments, but there is a clear danger that such a process will simply reinforce groupthink. If it is corrupted, peer review can be a mechanism for an entrenched establishment to exclude legitimate challenges by simply refusing to give critics a hearing."

FuzzyGeff commented at 1325 26NOV09:

Smoking gun? Try mushroom cloud.

This incident shows such shameless violations of basic scientific ethics that some people have started referring to the conspirator Michael Mann as "Piltdown" Mann. I must protest that unfair characterization: the Piltdown Man hoaxers never tried to suppress dissent by threatening journal editors.

File Under "Shit I Had No Idea I NEEDED"

http://www.brownells.com/.aspx/pid=27504/Product/M1_GARAND_EN_BLOC_CLIP_POUCHES?mc_ID=4031

A grab and go bag for a Garand. How have I owned a Garand for months and not known about this?

Christmas is just around the corner for you employed folks wondering what poor McThag needs.

Wow!

Wings Over Vietnam (Strike Fighters 2) looks absolutely fabulous in 1920x1200!

The Mac Pro has enough smoke to run it under unlimited details too.

We are glad.

UPDATE: Some screen shots below the fold.

Bootcamp!

I have installed Windows XP Professional on my spare drive on my Mac Pro.

The same copy of Windows XP Professional also runs using Parallels Desktop.

Microsoft took the activation and registration painlessly.

Tomorrow we do the drivers for the joysticks.

If I get brave, I will install Microsoft Flight Simulator X Gold Edition and/or IL2. I am hoping that my install of IL2 and Wings Over Vietnam can be simply moved off the old C: drive from the old computer.

I will not install anything but my games over there. I have the OSX 10.5.8 on the Mac side of things for all other computer needs.

Someone Needs To Say It

I think that Og and Roberta X were talking past each other in their little spat. I hate when that happens.

She's right, we cannot sacrifice the bill of rights because we don't like the teachings of a religion.

He's right, we cannot allow a religion to attempt to take over the nation. The bill of rights is not just a prohibition of the Government declaring a state religion, but a prohibition of a religion BECOMING the state religion.

The thing that the radical Moslems are not getting is, here in America, what power the rules and laws your religion has over a member is entirely up to the member and if they wish to leave, you must let them go. Full stop. We do not accept that you get to kill them for leaving because your "good book" says so.

We don't allow human sacrifice either.

Something a lot of people do not want to admit when we talk about the Islam "problem" is that we are at war with Islam.

"No we're not," I keep hearing. Yes we are. Islam is most certainly at war with Western Civilization and it's an existential war. By refusing to acknowledge the fight and refusing to fight back, we are letting them win; but we are not "not at war" because we are refusing to accept the declaration from the other side.

The rounding up of Japanese-Americans in WW2 gets cited a lot as doing it wrong. It was wrong. I have yet to hear a rational call to round up the Moslems. Since we are at war, I suggest we stop letting new people from those nations controlled by Islam come here for the duration of the war.

I am also of the opinion that we don't allow anyone who's not actively trying to become a citizen to stay longer than 90 days a year for any reason. And if they fail to become one in the proscribed time, back home they go, forever.

Fun With Cameras Timers And Tripods

...or, "Git off my lawn!"

With Marv's super duper flash you can see up the barrel and look at the bolt face! And see that we do not have a round chambered.

3-2-1 Awwwwwwwww

It Has To Work For Everyone Or No One

Roberta X is in the center of quite the raging debate about Islam, its intent, what we should do about it, what we can do about it and whether what we can and should do about it is contraindicated by the 1st Amendment.

Neanderpundit has weighed in on it as well.

Lemme see if I can add a bit of clarity.

Moslems are setting up little enclaves where non-moslems are not welcome to live, and sometimes not even visit or shop. They have their own legal code (Sharia) they apply and don't use the local laws. From these enclaves, they expand by moving into adjacent areas and do more of the same.

For purposes of debate we shall say that the above is OK and protected by the 1st Amendment's Religious Freedom Clause.

There's a BUT here.

Whites are setting up little enclaves where non-whites are not welcome to live, and sometimes not even visit or shop. They have their own legal code they apply and don't use the local laws. From these enclaves, they expand by moving into adjacent areas and do more of the same.

Is this protected?

Gun-owners are setting up little enclaves where non-gun-owners are not welcome to live, and sometimes not even visit or shop. They have their own legal code (The Constitution) they apply and don't use the local laws. From these enclaves, they expand by moving into adjacent areas and do more of the same.

How about that?

Blacks are setting up little enclaves where non-blacks are not welcome to live, and sometimes not even visit or shop. They have their own legal code they apply and don't use the local laws. From these enclaves, they expand by moving into adjacent areas and do more of the same.

Or this?

I cannot use religious reasons to make an all white neighborhood. I cannot use religious reasons to not hire women. I cannot use religious reasons to not hire homosexuals.

But I can use religious reasons to create all Moslem neighborhoods with businesses that don't hire women or homosexuals?

Either I can exclude anyone on the basis of religion and those equality laws are invalid; or the laws are valid and religious freedom, like all rights, is tempered with responsibility. If the 1st Amendment is a catch-all that lets me ignore the local legal system at my whim because God says; then Gawd says I must have a Machinegun and it is a sin to pay $200 to register it and I must kill anyone who tries to take it away from me.

How much you wanna bet that I would be left alone and allowed to keep my MG on religious grounds? Me neither.

Who Reminds Him To Breathe

“Unfortunately, America loves Guns. We love guns to a point where that uh we see devastation on a daily basis. You don’t blame a group.”

Richard M Daley, Mayor of Chicago; said while blaming a group: gunowners.

It's That Time Again

And the hull broke open and they all drowned like rats as their lung filled with...WAH TUHR!

Air Superiority

One reason the UAVs like the Predator and Reaper are so effective (read able to operate at all) is total air superiority.

They are not stealthy, they are not fast, they are not maneuverable. They ARE unopposed, at present.

If we fight a war where the airspace is contested, and we skimp on things like fighters we are not going to be able to fly UAVs with the impunity we currently employ.

Cutting funding for F-22A and clipping the orders for F-35 by 50% is exactly skimping on fighters.

By the way, if you are going to use the argument that the A-10C and F-15E are "good enough" so we don't need so many of the new two, then you are going to have to start buying the older designs as well because they are wearing out.

This doesn't even really address the whole picture. The Navy and Marines need planes too and the way they use them wears them out faster.

Thanks!

I got the maquette on the left in the mail today.

It's Shelly Wahnee from the webcomic, Wapsi Square. The one on the right is Monica Villarreal from the same comic. I bought Monica. Shelly just showed up.

Who was generous? There was no note.

Be Prepared

http://www.astro.ufl.edu/~jybarra/zombieplan.pdf