Best Michelada

Use Destihl's Dill Pickle Sour for your beer.

Deliberately Misunderstanding

Pink seems to have been able to procure a supply of books despite their being banned.

Missing the fact that the books were never actually banned.

If he were still alive, I'm sure that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn might be able to inform her what REAL book banning looked like.

I'm also pretty certain that Ms Moore will not be jailed for distributing these books at her concert.

Nor are the publishers or authors of the tomes being punished.

The "ban," for those who don't know, isn't a ban.  It's simply removing the books from public school libraries where children who are too young to understand the material.

Worst ban evah!

Both Sided

Do you have a KE Arms KP-15 and are frustrated that the QD socket they sell can only be mounted on one side?

Are we no better than rutting cavemen?

Worry no more!

What you're going to need:

1x Magpul MAG-333 Sling Mount Kit Type 1

1x Magpul MAG-332 Sling Mount Kit Type 2

6x #8 Washers.

Use the 5/8" long screw from the Type 1 kit.

It's the second shortest one in the pack.

Burn off the locking compound or you're never going to be able to get the screw all the way in with the tiny amount of QD socket you'll have to grab onto!  Use good old Loctite Blue instead.

Put the screw through the QD socket from the Type 1 kit and then place three washer on the screw.

Shove it into the hole in the stock, it doesn't matter which side.  I used the 1/8" allen key to guide the screw to make it easier to hit the hole.

Place the other three washers on the screw from the other side.

Now screw on the QD socket from the Type 2 kit.

Et viola!

The hole in the stock is too deep for a Magpul QD socket, so you need the washers for two reasons.  First to get the mouth of the socket out far enough that the sling swivel will lock in.  Second to eat up the length of the screw so it doesn't keep the swivel from locking in.

America's Paper Of Record

Starbuck's offers special recognition to their Jewish customers.

While I Hope She Gets It...

The neighbor across the way is trying to sell her house.

She's been a raving loon for weeks because of it.

Clearly she's not from around here because October and November are usually when it finally gets cool enough for home improvement work to start.

Shit like replacing the facing on my front porch.

I've got it all torn apart and am awaiting the professionals we hired to come do the actual repair.

She's, loud enough to hear two houses down, proclaimed how bad it looks and how this is affecting her chances of selling the place.  She's also insinuated that we're breaking the law for not having a permit displayed.

I've kept my trap shut, but I want to go over and say, "neighbors who fix things are good neighbors for property values."

Oh, and we don't need a permit for this kind of repair.  We checked because this stuff affects our wind mitigation survey and you want a permit if it's required when the insurance company sends their drone.

Wait I DID Know Who He Was

I'd seen Douglas Murray in this interview before.

He strikes me as someone who's seeing things as they are rather than as we would wish them to be.

Worth The Watch

No idea who Douglas Murray is, but he's compelling.

THE BUSH TOOB: Rhodesian FN Auto 5

Veteran's Day

Today, in the USA, it's Veteran's Day.

A day set aside for those who went in and came out.

It seems odd to have to say it, but today is not for the fallen in the USA; that's Memorial Day.

It isn't for those whom are still serving; that's Armed Forces Day.

If you know a vet, buy them a beer, take them out to dinner, get them laid.

Remind them of all the freebies available!

When you hit the places giving out freebies, be gracious and buy something that's got big margins (like a beer) because it wasn't so long ago that nobody but us and the post office remembered Veteran's Day at all.

Plus!  Tip the wait staff like you'd paid for the meal, not on just the cost of the beer.

Also, let the stolen valor people go.  This is the only validation they're getting in their pathetic lives, can you think of a harsher punishment than letting be what they are?  Don't save them!

A Day Late

Happy Birthday Lex!

For STRENGTH!

 For COURAGE!

We miss you, and remember you.

Happy 248th

Happy Birthday Jarheads!

We won't mention that your current iteration was born on July 11, 1798...

Oh wait, I just did.

Well, have a crayon and a smile!

Gone Shootin'

Harvey got her new glasses, so we went shooting to test them out.

She's shooting much better now that she can see the front sight without pointing her head straight up to use the reading portion of her glasses.  New glasses are readers so she can look straight ahead.

It's even more impressive when you consider that Captain Vulnerable doesn't give you a nice, distinct, aiming point like the target I have pictured below!

I took the M&P 9 out and did some more "dynamic" shooting.

Fast I could, two rounds per circle, write a big T.

ReLoad is talking about doing a bowling pin shoot soon, I want to get back into that too.  Getting on the clock is a good skill builder, I think.  And I'm too crippled for 2-gun.

Socialized Medicine In Action

There's this story.

I feel for the family.

This child is almost certainly doomed.

The British National Health Service has decided that they won't continue to treat her.

That'd be a bummer in and of itself, but they've also decided to forbid anyone else from trying.

Even worse is they appear to have made the decision to stop care based on the costs and likely outcomes and then refused to let others take the case and pay for it themselves.

This is what you get with socialized care.

Well, anything the government decides is theirs.

Once upon a time the cops were just the people paid to enforce the peace.  A professional auxiliary to the people with no more power or authority.

Now they hold a monopoly over that power, without even a formal abdication from the people.

Medicine will go the same route.

UGH

OMFG Air Force!

The T-7A Red Hawk is just entering service and we're already screwing up the designations...

They wanna make a fighter version.

They're bound and determined to call it F-7.

There's precedent for changing the T to the new role...  The T-37 Tweet became the A-37 Dragonfly, after all.

But F-7 is taken.

The XF2Y Sea Dart was redesignated F-7A in 1962.

Is Protesting Good Or Bad

As was mentioned in the comments, whether a protest is good or bad is a matter of perspective and personal politics.

But I says that's not all of it.

People illegally blocking off a road when I just wanna get home aren't going to arouse my sympathies to their cause.  They're going to make me angry.

Angry at THEM.  For blocking the road.

Not for their political position, but because they're fucking with me when I have no power or authority to give them what they want or to take it from them.

I'm not researching their position.

I'm not making logical arguments for or against their position.

I WANT TO GET WHERE I AM GOING.

What Happened To B-3 through B-20?

Why have a designation system if you're not going to use it?

To be honest, the Air Force hasn't used it since MacNamara made their system mandatory service-wide.

F-111 and F-117 prove that.  Those should be A designation aircraft.

Then there's F-35.  Should have been F-24.

Now we have B-21 which should be B-3.

48 Years

And the hull broke open and they all drowned like rats, as their lungs filled with water...

-Alternate lyrics.

48 years ago today the Edmund Fitzgerald went down with all hands.

Global warming and SUVs to blame.

Bush administration slow to respond.

It's Starting To Happen

People are getting sick of protestors fucking with their everyday lives and no longer thinking about the consequences.

Not here, yet, but...

Miltary Accessory

An odd thing to call a military accessory is a sling.

But I just noticed that most old "Fudd" guns rarely came with provisions for a sling.

EVERY military long arm does.

How did the antis miss that one?

LS Lecture!

The only 5.7 liter LS engines are the LS1 and LS6 from Corvettes and F-bodies.

I've seen it come up before.

There's confusion in the truck world because the old small-block 350's were still available as the LS engines became available.

The L31 lasted until 2002.  If you have a V-8 from 2003 onward in a non-Caddy GM you have an LS based engine.

Odds are, if you have a '99 onward truck, you have an LS based engine.  4.8 and 5.3 liter are most common with a scattering of 6.0 engines.

The Bigot Test

How can you tell if something you're reading is written by a bigot?

Simply reverse the race/gender/LGBT status and see if it would suddenly be considered offensive when it was OK before.

A case in point is the manifesto of the Nashville shooter.

Change the races and the specific slurs...

Look!  A bigot!

Also it's proof that bigotry isn't limited to racists who hate a different race.

There's plenty of self-hating bigots too.

There's some Jews marching in support of Hamas.

Calling In The Pros

I started to take apart the facing on the front porch.

The structural parts are in great shape!

The sub structure that holds up the decorative flashing...  Not so much.

I removed most of the rotted wood today to see how bad it was.

I think I could get it repaired, I don't think I can make it look good.

So we've called a local handyman to come look at it.

Fingers crossed.

Hate

There are a lot of hate groups in America.

More than are "tracked" by the Southern Poverty Law Center because a lot of them are sanctioned by the media to hate all they want.

Yes, there are neo-Nazis, but not very many.

There are KKK and racial separatists, but not very many.

The non-Nazi hate of Jews has, recently, been shown to be very large and mostly of a single party.

There's substantial hatred of straight white men out there.

You can hate on Christians all you like.

Essentially, if you're the right kind of bigot, you can hate openly.

There's a veneer of shame over it, because they're still using synonyms when describing their hate.

Trust me, the targets of the hate are aware of it.

The equilibrium is not quite to the critical mass for a punctuation to happen, but it's getting close.

One sided enforcement is prolly going to push it over the edge as large group realizes they've nothing to lose hating back and noticing they outnumber the haters.

It will be a bad time to be wearing a badge, by the way.  It's people wearing those badges doing the selective enforcement, after all.

I Hesitate To Point It Out

Pramila Jayapal doesn't understand.

Let's address the elephant in the room.

The anti-semitism the Democrats are displaying is the main reason they're having problems with the polls at the moment.

So, embracing a block of voters who hate Jews right now would be a stunningly stupid move for them.

Especially when they're such a tiny block of voters compared to the people who despise anti-semitism.

Besides, Pramila, where are they going to go?

The Republicans don't want them.  This block hates too many of them to extend a welcome mat.

Keeping them risks losing the twice as large Jewish voting block, who are more than welcome with the Republicans.

When the LGBT crowd, fifteen times as large, figures out what Islam has in store for them, they might stay home rather than support Democrats.  Many are surprised that they're welcome with Conservatives when they find out it's pedophilia and child mutilation the Republicans, as a whole, oppose and not boys kissing boys.

But that would mean talking to someone outside the group-think of Democrat media outlets.

Economy

GM Displacement on Demand motors are, apparently, a ticking time-bomb.

What fails is the lifters on the four cylinders that allow the cylinder deactivation.

They are $43.79 each and I'd need eight if I was to replace them as preventative maintenance.

The stuff I need to replace as part of the job of gaining access is another $214.79.

For a total of: $565.11.

Lore says that this fix is good for 50 to 90 thousand miles.

OR

I can delete the DoD and perk up the motor with a slightly hotter cam.

Kits seem to start at about $1,000.  Plus $100 to deactivate the DOD electronics.  Perhaps more to tune the motor to perfectly match the cam, but there are several choices the PCM's stock programming handles just fine.

Going with a milder cam and keeping up with maintenance means I can prolly get...  Lots of miles from the DOD delete.

The thing is...  There are documented pick-up engines with 300k miles on them with the original lifters still running fine.

I am far more nervous about the cheap ass needle bearings in the rocker arm trunnions than the springy lifters.

Lurning

Today I found out that the main bearing caps on an LS engine are directional.

They have little wings on the outside edge that show their orientation.

The front four have the wings facing aft and the last one the wings face forward.

I found this out from a picture on Facebook where someone had put #4 in backwards.

Bet They Assumed I Wouldn't Check

Reading this.

Rep Cory Booker references a 2019 Quinnipiac poll.

So I went to Quinnipiac's web page.

Found the poll.

Found the question. 

"50. Do you support or oppose requiring individuals to obtain a license before being able to purchase a gun?"

Yup.  That's what Quinnipiac says, alright.

Why don't I believe them?

Something about this is very suspicious.

I found the problem.

They called land lines.

So they found just over 1,000 people who would answer their land line to give their poll and got those results. 

That's a small group of a small and shrinking group.

Between 30 and 40 percent of the USA had a landline in 2019.

In 2023 it's 28.7% have a land line.

53% of them are older than 65.

People in the Northeast are more likely to have a landline.  42.9% of landlines are here.  23.7% are in the south, 26.6% are in the west, 28.3% are in the midwest.

So, the people reached by this poll are most likely retirees living the the northeast.

I doubt this is a representative sample of America.  I think they know it.

You Had One Job

It's great they rebuilt Monte Cassino and all; but why did they rotate the entire site 90° to do it?

I Can't Be The Only One

I remember when Ronald Reagan announced the Strategic Defense Initiative.

The press mocked it, calling it Star Wars.

I cannot help but notice that we're actually doing stuff mentioned in the SDI plans.

Stuff like intercepting ballistic missiles outside the atmo.

Bled White

It looks like KE Arms is coming to the end of their legal battle with GWACS.

It also looks like they're going to win.

But the punishment is the process here and they've been bled white by the process.

I hate that.

I'd feel better if one of their more prominent employees wasn't walking hand in hand with antisemitic organizations.

I think I've made my position clear about antisemitism.

I made my mind up about that at Dachau.

More than thirty years ago.

Will Russel be let go or will KE Arms be counted amongst such luminaries as Illinois Nazis?

Choosing Evil

I note that it wasn't Jews celebrating on September 11, 2001.

It was not Jews flying hijacked airliners into packed skyscrapers, killing thousands.

If Hamas and Palestinians are "good" then I choose evil.

My "don't care who kills you, as long as someone does," meter was pegged that day watching you cocksuckers celebrating the deaths of thousands of my countrymen.

You want my sympathy, you need to be sympathetic to my injuries.

But you celebrated that I was hurt that day.

I celebrate that you will suffer at the hands of those you recently wronged.

Your celebration nullified my cares that you might have been wronged in the past.

You decided which side I would be on.

We Didn't Break It

A comment that didn't get published because they didn't sign it... said, to the effect of:

It's western Europe that is at fault for the middle east being all fucked up.

They even mentioned things like the Sykes-Picot Agreement.

While it didn't make things better for the Middle East, it didn't actually break the place.

The Ottoman Turks make a hobby of fracturing the place and keeping it messed up in a manner that JB Tito made a ghostly emulation of.

Notice the relative ease that TE Lawrence had in convincing the Arabs to rise up against the Ottomans in WW1.

But it needs be noted that the Ottomans were able to keep them at each others throats and bounce them off each other because they were, and are, still tribal and not national.  They came pre-fragmented and ready for conquering.

For example:

They are not Middle Easterners.  They are not Arabians.  They are Bakr, Hawazin, Tamin, etc.

After WW1 France and England did draw borders without regard to the tribal identities of the occupants of the land.

Kurdistan is the classic example that was erased by the Turks and remains erased to this very day.

Nothing Western Civ has done in the region addresses this core issue with the people living there, except perhaps, favoring one tribe over another to the point of the favored tribe being able to take and hold power because they were friendly to the favoring.

They get kinda bitter when they get replaced for forgetting to be grateful.  <-Sarcasm alert!

Unfavored tribes get kinda bitter for being unfavored and being supplanted or replaced by the favorites of the day.

The fastest way to settle it would be to pump in weapons to every side until the shooting stops, then murder the winners and take over.

Did I say fastest?

That might be the only way for it to get settled.

As a people they get vendetta at a level only seen in Sicily.

And I Thought Their Shipping Was Slow

I am in the process of returning an item to Midway USA.

Postal Innovations is slower with an RMA label than when you make the initial order.

I'd have been happy to pay for something faster that would probably have been cheaper, but they don't do that for returns.

How a Steam Locomotive Works (Union Pacific "Big Boy")

 

I knew much of this, but didn't know how the mechanisms worked.

These computer models make visualizing things so much easier.

Horizon

Something occurs to me about how things are going to look out the bridge windows of a Traveller ship doing a fuel skim on a gas giant:

The horizon is going to go flat a long time before you're low enough to really see details at the same resolution as the same horizon here on our little rock.

This will definitely become a "trust your instruments" item during flight instruction.

All of your visual cues will be wrong.

Well They Do Look Cool

My experience with bullpup rifles is limited.

I got to do a demo-fire of am H&K G.11 prototype when cross training with the West Germans.

I got to handle an FAMAS and an L85A1 when we went to the field with the French and Brits. 

I got to handle an FN FS2000 at a Rottfest.

FuzzyGeff once owned a Bushmaster M17S.

That's the limit of my real-world experience with the things.

There's almost no reason to choose or avoid one in gaming.

I made a couple of British characters in T2K who had an L85.

FuzzyGeff once made a T2K character with a G.11.

On the whole, I don't get the allure.

The length of pull is always a bit too long.  The balance is odd.  The manual of arms is different.

Something that is for certain is the idea is polarizing.

If you like them, you like them.

If you don't...  well...

What I have noticed is damn few armies have replaced their bullpup with another one.

Interestingly, two that have are using variations of the same bullpup, the Steyr AUG.  Austria and Australia.  And here I thought they were sick of people getting them confused.

The AUG is the first bullpup to get wide adoption, way back in 1977 as the Austrian StG.77.

What Caliber For Hamas?

Willard asked, and I think that 340mm is the correct answer if we're stupid enough to get into the shooting side of this conflict.

Right or wrong, I am sick of half measures with the fucking middle east.

I'm also sick of ignoring the true culprits.

No more nation building.

Don't care about hearts and minds.

I really don't care about the moral high ground anymore either.

I want peace and perfectly willing to use the Curtis LeMay methodology, "I'll tell you what war is about, you've got to kill people, and when you've killed enough they stop fighting," and, "There are no innocent civilians. It is their government and you are fighting a people, you are not trying to fight an armed force anymore. So it doesn't bother me so much to be killing the so-called innocent bystanders"

That second quote is because the people we'd be killing in this case have no compunctions about killing innocent civilians themselves.

BUT!

I've long held we need to have fewer than more foreign entanglements.

AND

It should be safer to eat white arsenic than hurt an American.

I could be persuaded to stop giving any support or trade with any nation which isn't a democracy.

And de facto democracy, not de jure.

And if we must be involved in foreign entanglements, then put our own interests ahead of all others.

Detent

Dente?

Détente!

By reversing where Shadow scampers and Beeper sleeps...

We have managed to get both of them to relax and for Beeper to stop attacking Shadow.

Irony

The place that was tasked with repairing the dent caused by forgetting the fasteners on a car...

Forgot the two fasteners on my car.

A buddy spotted that two M6-1.0x30 screws were missing from the headlight capsule.

Lowe's carried a suitable replacement.

Shadow Boxing

 

Little Shadow is fierce!