There's Another Ratio To Consider

She makes some excellent points here.

She forgot something that's important if you're going to have a war.

Who are your sociopaths?

The right has a much larger share of those than the left.

Functional sociopaths are an awesome tool to have if there's a war going on.

They're better planners than psychopaths.  They're better organized.

They're easier to put back in their boxes when the war is over.

Just give 'em some rules and structure and they go right back to being functional within a peaceful paradigm.

Just sayin'. 

From Hel's Heart

One of the county commissioners is running unopposed.

She was responsible for the irresponsible wave of construction without supporting infrastructure; like enough road to get all those people to and from their new residences.

So I wrote in Bill Gerber.

Yes, I know he's dead, but he's still more qualified for the position than Kathryn Starkey.

Yes, I know he was never a resident of Pasco County.  That's not always a problem for our commissioners...  Yeah, I know.

So, Gerber for Pasco County Commission!

Yes You Were

Just had a spat on Fecesbook.

Someone got accused of virtue signalling about the difference between crating a dog and abusively caging a dog.

The post they replied to was about how if you're going abuse your dog with that kind of caging, perhaps you'd be better served with a stuffed animal.

He indicated what a great person he was because he knew the difference between crate training and abusive caging.

A couple of people thanked him for his virtue signal and missing the point of the original post.

He then denied that he'd virtue signaled.

I tried to explain that he had.

He then proceeded to virtue signal harder to prove that he had not.

I pointed it out.

He deleted his responses and blocked me.

I call that a win.

Ackshually Mr Kendi

Mr Kendi, you might not think it, but we do agree.

Nobody should be enslaved.

Where we disagree is that gun owners are trying to put you into the same chains worn by your ancestors.

I'm definitely not.

One thing I think you missed, because you've never talked to someone like me, is we're advocating that tyranny cannot be perpetrated against a well armed populace.

Slavery is a form of tyranny.

So I think that Mr Kendi should get himself a gun and teach his daughter to shoot as well.

I think that his advocacy of disarmament will do more to put him in servitude than anything I could do with a gun.

Disarmed populations are the ones fucked over by armed populations.

Mr Kendi would be well served to note that gun control in America begins with laws to disarm blacks.  It goes on to disarm other minorities as well, but the focus was always on blacks.  It's a centerpiece of Jim Crow.

Sancho! Another Lance!

I have to admire his optimism, given the current party mix in The House.

HR 5289.

It would remove SBR's from the NFA.

In light of how many "pistols" are out there using braces as stocks, it's kind of already happened to them, they just need to make it all legal.

Otherwise we could see a bumpstock situation where the ATF issues a "we changed our mind!" letter and makes instant criminals of lots of people.

Technomad Speaks

I'm not terribly friendly or sympathetic to gays as a group.   I remember, all too well, the years when AIDS first appeared, and how it was the gays who marched in the streets and fought like scalded cats to keep their damn bath houses open...even though those places were known and obvious vectors for the disease.  This doesn't strike me as well-thought-out, to put it very mildly.  And their "pride" parades seem designed to honk off straights in a lot of ways.

If all the gays wanted was to be left alone, I'd have to support them.  But I notice that a lot of them seem to want, not just quiet acceptance, but outright applause...and that a lot of their shenanigans seem designed mainly to piss off the straights.  This business with "He won't BAKE MY WEDDING CAKE!" is a perfect example.   In the first place, about any urban area (where most gays are) has lots of bakeries and other such places---why not go down the street to the next one?  In the second place, if you've got to have a cake from THAT bakery, what's so hard about buying a standard-issue wedding cake, replacing the figure on the top with a "two brides" or "two grooms" figure, and going with that?  I can buy those dead cheap on Amazon, and I doubt that gays are less net-savvy than I am.  In the third place---would YOU want to eat food made by someone who was more-or-less cooking it at gunpoint?  I am not too trusting and wouldn't go near it, myself.

I also notice that for all their howling about individual rights, I've never, not ONCE, seen "Big Gay" roll out the infantry, cavalry and artillery for anybody but themselves.  Advocates of the decriminalization of prostitution have noticed that "Big Gay" is utterly silent on the subject, even though a lot of sex workers are, themselves, gay, and gay sex workers are generally treated even more harshly than straights by the pigs.  With the honorable exception of the Pink Pistols, I also haven't seen gay groups rallying to the Second Amendment.  I may be wrong, or misinformed, but my overall impression is that they're dominated by urban liberals who're convinced that guns are icky and the sole preserve of toothless rednecks.  

Their current leadership seems to be caught up in a mental place where, having got the rights they said they wanted, they're out on a crusade to get back at everybody who opposed them...as well as payback on Mommy and Daddy, the preacher, and everybody else who wasn't too pleased about them coming out as gay  This strikes me as highly unwise, and as begging for a backlash against them that might just wipe out their gains. 

They could have had everything they wanted from marriage if they'd been willing to compromise on the word "marriage," calling it "civil union" or some such.  But a lot of their leaders wouldn't have it so, because that way they couldn't go out of their way to find venues and businesses that didn't want to be part of things, so they could sue and sue and sue and whip up Twitter mobs.  And I note that they got their damn ol' "Gay" "Marriage" via the courts.  What the Supremes gave, the Supremes can take away, blessed be the name of the Supremes. 

I frankly think they're heading for a real nasty backlash against them, and I won't feel one little bit sorry for them.   As Victor Suvorov comments, in what I think is a Russian proverb: "Greed ruined the priest."

The marriage vs civil union thing reminded me of something else happening in LGBTland.

What pronoun?  When is someone a woman?

Both sides are fucking this up from different directions.

The conservative / religious side is demanding that the chromosomes define sex and therefore gender.

The liberal / LGBT side is demanding that the external or apparent gender define gender.

Both sides want the defined gender to determine how the person is treated and its the definitions which are the sticking point.

The problem is gender and sex aren't the same thing, no matter how blurred both sides have made it by shoving the definition of one to coincide with the other.

That chromosome is what decides the sex.  Traditionally, in Western society, your gender follows your sex.

Traditionally.

What we have ended up with is people talking past each other very angrily because the terms are the same, but the definitions are different.

It's not helped that both sides have advocates who've chosen to be as big a prick about it as they possibly can be.

Not A You Situation

Something that rankles about the entire "our bodies, our choice" line of thinking is it takes two to tango.

Once you're having sex the decisions are we and our decisions not my decisions.

Pregnancy is always a possible outcome to doing the deed.

At present the deck is stacked against men, regardless of what the feminist propaganda says.

Sex between two consenting adults with no intention of anything more than the pleasure of the act have sex.

This will be the last choice the man gets to make without the woman's consent.

If the sex results in an unplanned pregnancy gives men what rights and powers?

None.

The woman, alone, decides if the fetus will be aborted.

The woman, alone, decides if a child will be born.

The woman, alone, can decide if the father will be part of the child's life; despite the fact that she can also force him to financially support the child.

One side having all the power is a bad situation.

I would not support a reversal of the rights.

We need, as a culture, wake up about sex and what it can lead to and have a solid plan about "what if".

That's going to mean educating children when they reach sexual maturity even if they're years from legal adulthood.  Biology does not give a fuck about legal lines in the sand concerning age.  Biology demands that we do our damnedest to get our freak on and make babies, even if our brains don't really want the results.

Giving our brains the tools they need to avoid making a baby before they're ready to have a baby is a far better loss of innocence than discovering you're going to be a parent because nobody taught you how to avoid it.

Choice

There's nothing I can find in Roe v Wade that says that someone who has religious or moral objections to abortions should be forced to pay for them.

Despite my generally pro-choice nature; I feel we should eliminate Federal subsidy of abortion clinics and institutions like Planned Parenthood.

Taking our taxes and turning around and applying them to places which perform abortions is forcing people with religious and moral objections to pay for a practice they find abhorrent.

I also think that the celebrities who're talking about sex strikes have enough money to completely replace Federal funding.  That is, if this really matters to them.

I think you will find that once it's no longer someone else paying for it, they will stop supporting it.

A-B-O-R-TION In The Summer Sun

Michael Z Williamson says, on Facebook:

Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973), was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in which the Court ruled that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution provides a fundamental "right to privacy" that protects a pregnant woman's liberty to choose whether or not to have an abortion. However, it ruled that this right is not absolute, and must be balanced against the government's interests in protecting women's health and protecting prenatal life. The Court resolved this balancing test by tying state regulation of abortion to the three trimesters of pregnancy: the Court ruled that during the first trimester, governments could not prohibit abortions at all; during the second trimester, governments could require reasonable health regulations; during the third trimester, abortions could be prohibited entirely so long as the laws contained exceptions for cases when abortion was necessary to save the life of the mother. Because the Court classified the right to choose to have an abortion as "fundamental", the decision required courts to evaluate challenged abortion laws under the "strict scrutiny" standard, the highest level of judicial review in the United States.

Which, in a nutshell, says that the recent abortion laws in Alabama and such are going to get struck down and it's VERY unlikely that cert will be granted should it make it to the Supreme Court.

To strike down Roe, the pro-life side will need to prove that there is no fundamental right to privacy derived from due process and the 14th Amendment.

This is the same 14th Amendment we gun owners want to be stronger and more widely applied, by the way, because that increases our chances to get the 2nd applied to the states in the way that suits us best.

If I lived in one of the states that just banned first trimester abortions, I'd be pissed that my elected officials just committed to wasting my tax money in a sure defeat in court.

If I was liberal, I'd start worrying, hard, about the timing of these laws.  The states which recently passed these 1st trimester bans have had Republican majorities and governors for years... why now?

Because New York legalized FOURTH trimester abortion.  (Note: there's no fourth trimester).

It's a reaction to New York and, I think, an attempt to get a ruling that if a fetus can be a human, then it is a human; in other words a national third trimester prohibition.  These state laws might just be a tactic to force the issue.

PS: The pro-choice side of this has been couched in "if you don't have a uterus then you shouldn't be allowed an opinion" language in several places I've been reading about it.

Dear women:

For millennia your only value to society was to punch out children, preferably boys.

This was wrong, but it is also true.

Somewhere along the line, the fact that it was wrong was realized and men conceded to the concept that women had more value than as incubators and were, in fact, people.

Men voluntarily gave up the power they held over women.  The vast majority of us are on your side here and are sick of being treated like the enemy.

Feminists are using language that in any other context would be called sexist and bigoted.

Stop it!  If you treat me like an enemy long enough you will find I've become your enemy.

Me And The NRA

Until I knuckled down and subscribed to get a lifetime membership, I was an on-again/off-again member of the NRA since 1994.

A couple times I kept it up long enough to get voting rights.

I grew to loathe the ring of the phone because twice a week it was the NRA/ILA asking for money.

Considering I let my membership lapse several times from lack of money, I didn't have anything to spare for the ILA.

It hardened my heart against donating to them because I clearly told them that being a member was all I could afford and they'd know my finances had changed when I mailed them a check.  And I would!

When they didn't get the message I changed my position.

When Brady is repealed, I will consider donating.

Remember, Wayne, you promised.  I remember.

I read about other promises too.  I read about accepting the bitter pill of no new MG's to get the rest of FOPA passed.  That's never been addressed.

AWB was going to be repealed just as soon as we voted for and elected a list of Republican candidates.  They were elected and...  AWB expired ten years and five elections later, it was never repealed.

Near as I can tell, if there's been a repeal for Brady or AWB submitted, it didn't get far or many co-sponsors.

It became apparent to me that the NRA's true value was to suck up fire from the anti-gunners while other groups worked for gun rights from a lower profile.

But that value is undermined when they fight against us at the state level here in Florida.  Just hit the "Marion" tag for some examples of their spokescatperson either selling us out or leaving us high and dry.

I cannot help but think that if they'd spent the money trying to get me to join a wine bottle club on lobbying we'd be further along.

I cannot help but think that if Unified Sportsmen of Florida was an actual organization rather than Marion's front for the NRA to buy cat food we'd have an organized grass-roots presence in Tallahassee rather than just the occasional visit from Marion.

I am unhappy about how the organization is run and I have wanted it to change for a long time.

Sadly, the changes that are coming are from outside forces who wish to destroy it (and cannot be ignored) than from within (who have systematically been ignored and disenfranchised) who wish to save it.

Motherfucking Computers

JT stopped by to attack the mystery.

With much diagnosis skill and drive swapping...

It has been determined that the 160gb drive that came with the machine when I got it has something wrong on it and I faithfully copied it to the SSD when I cloned it.

This same flaw is likely what caused the install on the 750gb drive to stop accepting updates from MS.

A different manifestation of the same error since the 750 was once cloned from this same 160 drive four years ago.

He has determined that it's not worth trying to figure out where it went wrong considering that a fresh install on the SSD is so much easier and I don't keep any data on the laptop that isn't backed up on the Drobo.

Fucking Computers

I bought an SSD drive for my laptop.

SSD drives are supposed to be faster than spinning disk hard drives.

The 750gb drive that was in the machine had an uncorrectable error from a crash during an update to Windows, but the 160gb drive that came with it originally was still OK.

So I yanked the 750 and installed the 160 then ran all the updates.

Five hours later...  I waited another four hours for Marv to get home to use his copy of Acronis True Image and cables.

Attached the 1tb SSD to the cables and began to clone away.

When it said it was done, tried to install the SSD into the laptop, Crispy.

No drive.

WTF!

After much wiggling discover that since the SSD is thinner than the HDD, it can flop down and lose connection.

Shimming one end keeps the drive in contact with the mobo and we're in business!

No sound card, or rather no audio hardware detected.

No video, sound and game controllers section in the device manager.

Finally locate the three things that have, for some reason, been disabled and reactivate their drivers.

We have sound!

Put the old 750gb into the Ultrabay HDD Caddy.  Move my files.

Try to play a movie with VLC, works great!

Try to play any video with iTunes.  Stutterwarp activated.  Resolution doesn't matter, file size doesn't matter.  Video is now unwatchable.  There were some little skips before, now it's like a '20's film.  BUT only if it's on the hard drive!  If I play off the cloud, it's fine.  Fuck you Apple!

No apparent cure and no care from Apple.  Lots of complaints.

Music still works, so there's that.

Boot times are WAY faster.

Yes, Helen, I Know

“There is nothing like sitting in the cinema.” Dame Helen Mirrin.

I am aware of this, that's why I simply don't go.

The last new release I saw in a cinema was Moana.  I saw it on a weekday matinee when The Boy and I had the run of the theater.

I have walked out of movies I'd paid for because my fellow patrons were simple insufferable.

Super-tolerant Marv has followed me on occasion.  It's not just that I'm more sensitive because of my misophonia.

Going to the movies can be fun.

I saw Blazing Saddles at The Tampa Theater last year and it was great fun.  But the audience wasn't the normal crowd.

There's a bar in Safety Harbor that has a teeny dinner-theater setting that's great fun.  Die Hard on Christmas Eve rocked!

But go to the theater for a new release?

No.

Last time I tried was Ghost In The Shell and the affrontery of assigned seating, followed by the asshole bringing the entire snack bar with him...  With assigned seats you can't just move.

I left before I got so angry I couldn't drive.  Marv gutted it out to the end, but expressed a great deal of anger at the amount of noise coming from him.

The cinema experience has been intolerable to me for a long time, so I love the fact that I can get a TV that's the same angular size as a movie screen in my living room.

In my living room where I can eat anything I'd like, drink whatever I want, pause it for potty breaks and rewind if I missed something (or just want to see it again).  Where I can say, "Marv, can you be quieter?" and know that he'll at least try to make less noise and not assault me for it.

On Getting Sucked In

There's a couple topics, like abortion, I do try to avoid because there's just no answer that's satisfactory for everyone.

They're also topics where people have strong opinions and want to bring you to understand and agree with them.

Oft times these people are folks you don't want to just say, "FUCK OFF!" as your rebuttal because they're not really being dicks.  Hell, they were being polite in expressing their position.

They're simply disagreeing.  There's room for disagreement and debate.

Really.

I just don't want to debate it.

My reasons for my position are personal.  They're also subjective.

My reasoning is flawed because it's not a reasoned opinion.  I'm bruised and bloody from trying apply reason to so many things.  My response is often a feral attack on the person who, upon seeing I've expressed an opinion, informs me of theirs.

That's a bit unfair, no?

Somewhere I Have...

Those three words are my bane.

Somewhere I have the testing data from WW2 about what guns penetrated what and how far.

The reason I want this data instead of using wikipedia is the 75mm L/40 M3 gun on the Sherman would cause massive spalling on the face-hardened armor (FHA) the Germans were using.

It technically did not penetrate, which is the only metric that matters to people arguing on forums, but that is of small solace to the crew behind that FHA plate.

The problem with spalling, in fact, is why the Army insisted on cast hulls and turrets early on.  Cast armor with face hardening was more resistant to it than plate.

Organic

What should your first 3-gun or 2-gun set up be?

Guns you already own.

Why?

Because you've no idea if you're going to have one iota of fun participating until you signed up for and shot a match.

Because if you don't have fun, then it didn't cost you anything but time, ammo and the entry fees.

Don't go in thinking you've got the wrong gun either.

I shot trap and field at the local Isaac Walton League in Ames with a rifle sighted Rem 870 and placed consistently in the top four.

This very gun, in fact!

If you'd asked a gunwriter what shotgun to bring to trap and field, you would not see a picture of my gun in the article.

Sometimes wildly inappropriate guns are MORE fun!

Don't forget the used market when you're shopping for your stuff.  There's a ton of people who didn't have fun or got frustrated with the sport and are looking to unload their gear on the cheap.  There's also people who love the sport and are upgrading their stuff and willing to help someone else get started for less than they paid, just to spread the joy of the sport.


Forget all that!  Actually, the best way to start shooting 2-gun is to borrow a friend's guns.  Then see if you like it.  You probably will.

How Can You Tell They're A Professional Writer

Because the "budget" build is more than most people's mortgage payment and everything is brand name.

Not just brand name, but paying advertiser's brand names.

Not just brand name advertisers, but brand new, in production items at full retail price.

It's tiresome and it's obvious to nearly all of the people who might read it.

Sancho! Another Lance!

Some windmills I tilt at from time to time:

Finding the missing M numbers.  There's lots of them.

Ever notice how the US Service rifles go from M1 to M14 to M16?  Pistols start at M9?  There must be a list someplace, but I've yet to find it.

Finding the missing T numbers, even more than M they're missing.

Locating a pre-Rev M PMAG for a history series.  This one should be simpler than it's turning out to be, but both the original PMAG and the revised Rev M version use the same SKU and UPC and are both referred to as "Gen 1"...  So you can't really sort them out from the shitty pictures on GunBroker.

People don't bother taking pics of the markings for these old things so you're left with guessing.

I Will Tell You What

I am sick of being in pain and having nobody giving a fuck.

If it weren't for phantom limb, I'd have chopped off the offending appendages by now...

Taking A Big Bite

Perhaps a bite too big to chew.

The Boy returned from another "evaluation" at the Mental Health Facility Local.

These trips are really just a day-spa adventure for him and don't do bleeding thing to get his behaviors under control.

What they have revealed is that he can remain calm in such an environment and he can turn it on or off as he wants.

Knowing that he's in control of whether he's going to have an episode and can stop at will means we can be conventional in dealing with the tantrums.

And that means telling him 'no' even when we know it's going to set him off.  It means denying him fun stuff when he hasn't done the gotta-do's.

It means kicking The Lovely Harvey out of the house so that he thinks she's off having fun without him.

It means planting my ass at home and weathering the storm from both The Boy, who wants to remain in control and for the no-consequences-he-cares-about situation to return; and from Harvey who just wants to have some damn peace when she gets home and hates to see me, in effect, setting him off to make my point to him.

Before, we were operating under the idea that he had no control over his outbursts and enduring was all can do.  Now that we know he's in control and being controlling, we've got to do something different.

This is gonna be tough!  Send prayers!