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I've said before that idle hands and spare parts are the devils gunsmithy.
So is leaving a rifle here unmentioned for years.
I got Willard's modern AR-10 running again and we promptly forgot it in my closet.
My parts bin is full of modern AR furniture.
Since the BRN-10 has supplanted the retro goal of this AR, and since changing the furniture is 100% reversible; I'm dropping an OD green Magpul bomb on his AR-10!
Just for photos.
Just need to find that rifle length handguard I've misplaced.
Company builds a house on the wrong lot and somehow the owner of the lot is responsible?
This shit would stop dead in its tracks if it resulted in a "thanks for the free house," if the homeowner wanted it.
"Restore the lot to its condition before you broke ground, at the developer and builder's expense," being another way to end this stupidity.
The idea that the property owner has the fewest rights of anyone on the land is abhorrent.
What we should be aiming at is "nobody gets fucked" if they abide by the rules and contracts and fucking the people breaking the rules and contracts with a dildo dipped in resin and rolled in ground glass; regardless of if they're the property owner, tenant or trespasser.
And building a house on the wrong plot is definitely trespassing.
Another one for the, "I didn't think I needed to explain this, but here we go..." file.
"Nothing is a war crime the first time."
It's a pithy statement describing how the rules of war are changed as wars are fought and everyone afterwards decides, "nope we're not doing that again."
All laws are such, actually.
You don't need to pass a law saying something is wrong until someone goes off and does something that you had not considered anyone would do.
Looking ahead and deciding, "nope, that thing nobody has ever done before, is wrong," is built on a foundation of hindsight from being blindsided. You can talk yourself into passively submitting to evil because you're not willing to do what needs done to stop it because what you will need to do is "wrong".
Canada has made noteworthy contributions to the Geneva Checklist.
There's a few things on that checklist that were SOP until the technology of the time changed the scale of the action and made it horrifying.
Two atomic bombs that did less damage each than firebombing Dresden or Tokyo isn't a war crime.
Realizing that two nations who're not fond of each other possess enough nukes to make the entire world uninhabitable and will use them against the other if even one is uncorked is a difference in scale that makes using them evil.
It's not the actual use of the nuke, and it's effects on the target, that are the problem.
It's the use one, start MAD that's the problem.
An important hint is the revolutionary system Rome used on the people in places it conquered involving letting them live. Ask yourself what happened to such folks BEFORE this revolutionary system was implemented.
Genocide, though the word had not yet been coined. The lucky ones were enslaved, but their culture was wiped clean.
The song is about you if you think I am describing you.
Even if I wasn't talking about you.
If you find the shoe is fitting, go ahead and wear it.
You will find a full refund of the money you spent on your subscription in the mail. Hold you breath, it will make it come faster.
I have said it before, I will doubtlessly say it again, I would be batting at the bare bulb if nobody was reading.
That means the only expectations I need to meet are my own.
This blog isn't FOR the readers. It's for the author.
You might note that the title isn't "McThag's Debating Society".
Stefan, this is for you:
There was a sentence in my original post you apparently ignored.
"There's no compelling evidence that Japan was going to surrender any time soon before we dropped those two weapons."
You go on to attempt to use the non-compelling evidence to convince me that the US is evil and should have... I stopped reading.
I recognized your debating style and I know how it goes, so I skipped to the end. You're not going to convince me with "evidence" I'm already aware of on a position of morality that I don't share with you.
I've met lots of historians of your ilk and it's constant proof that only the highly educated can be that stupid.
It's been decently proven, using just the facts, that dropping Fat Man and Little Boy was a net positive for everyone involved.
And for fucks sake, when I keep bringing up an asshole like Curtis LeMay, it'd do you some good to read up on him. He's one asshole I'm not spoon feeding the readers.
But here we are, trying to apply modern liberal sensibilities to an historical event and not even trying to see it from the perspective of the people making the decision.
But let's accept, as a given, that the Japanese were going to surrender on their own on August 7, 1945.
I would still have dropped Little Boy without hesitation.
Why?
To quote Dr Strangelove, "Why didn't you tell the world!?!?"
That's the key thing about the "they were about to surrender" fantasy that its proponents always forget.
Japan was not communicating anything but "fight to the last man" outside its own councils, there'd be records if true from non-Japanese sources.
The fantasy originates from post-war anti-war Japanese activists who were both trying to sanitize Japan's evils and stain the US's reputation.
No, Stefan, I am not going to debate this until you're satisfied. You will never be satisfied, it's not a Sealion's nature to be. What you want is for me to admit you're right and I (and Beans, a more thorough historian than I) are wrong. We really wanna go at this, I'll summon The Fleetwood. He's a better historian AND smarter than us (fucker).
But there's no point.
You think war is wrong. I don't think you realize that you do, but you do.
I think war is an evil that must sometimes be done to save what one holds dear. The only reason to use restraint or have compassion is if it saves your people's lives and shortens the duration. Otherwise, turn your key to the left to launch on my count...
The quality of the commenters has taken a dive of late.
In near 19 years of this, I might even be running out of things to say.
It's damn clear that the new commenters haven't bothered reading more than the post they are commenting on.
It's a lot like firing up the last episode of a long running TV series without watching any of what came before and not knowing what's going on.
Then demanding that the writers, directors, and cast explain what was going on and change everything to your liking now that YOU are here.
Not that they'd ever risk writing, directing or acting themselves, mind you.
Cowards.
It's interesting that I can insult someone and say directly that they are engaged in inbreeding and all that matters to them is if I have a job.
Well, if they could read (and they've shown no ability to do so) they've have long since noticed that my job is to be a husband and father.
We're a single income family, as was traditional for decades.
Where we break tradition is Harvey is the breadwinner.
If they could read, they'd find that we are servicing our student loans.
We don't think it's fair that we're being burdened with them because our situation resembles being a victim of fraud far more than the typical mooch depicted in student loan forgiveness.
The school we attended was dissolved for committing fraud.
My degree (bachelors in business admin) became useless the moment that happened. Harvey got lucky that she'd gotten some experience before the gavel fell, but her MBA is not worth as much as it should have been.
The people who committed the fraud went around the country buying up small, for profit, schools with good reputations. They then changed the accreditation the schools were using so that students wouldn't be able to transfer their credits to a different school, or even use their undergraduate degree to enter graduate studies, without extreme difficulty.
The schools were consolidated into ever larger companies and accreditation was changed at each consolidation.
Many of us were quite close to graduating when the investigations began.
Many of us graduated before they were concluded.
Few of us noticed that the solid college we'd entered had been so devalued until the job search began.
Complicit in this fraud is the US Department of Education. You know, the people who are supposed to regulate the education system?
They approved every sale, every merger, every consolidation, every accrediting body.
Thanks for nothing, guys!
We think we're allowed to be unhappy with the situation. It's not the bill of goods we're paying for.
Former Hiroshima Mayor Takashi Hiraoka said, “From Hiroshima’s standpoint, the horror of nuclear weapons was not sufficiently depicted,” per a Japanese media outlet. “The film was made in a way to validate the conclusion that the atomic bomb was used to save the lives of Americans.”
The atomic bombs were used to save the lives of Americans. You are correct.
Curtis LeMay, again, had the right of it.
Paraphrased, "War is killing and if you kill enough of them, they stop fighting."
It should probably be pointed out that they fucking worked.
The war was over within days of dropping them.
That had a secondary, unintended, effect of saving Japanese lives too.
There's no compelling evidence that Japan was going to surrender any time soon before we dropped those two weapons.
It takes your sister fucking ass several moments to type a response that you think is getting under my skin.
It takes two clicks to delete it as I giggle.
Your repeated statements prove that you didn't read the linked posts.
I am not a Greek poet, even if one links here.
Have someone read this to you.
Teledyne offered a light tank in the early 80's which lost to what would become the M8 Buford.
The turret lived on to be mounted on the Stryker MGS.
Interestingly, they offered the turret for retrofit into the M60 and Centurion.
The M60 and M48 share a turret ring.
For Twilight: 2000, the M48A6 is an M48A5 with the Teledyne turret.
Takes a lot of weight off the vehicle and lowers the silhouette significantly.
The Lovely Harvey got me this fun gun case.
While not airline approved, it does lock.
Inside is a weekend fun kit!
I'm very amused!
Do you have a Canon Eos M50?
Did you know that if you stab the INFO button when its in image review, it will change what's displayed with the reviewed image?
I did not.
But I'd accidentally hit the button somehow and got a LOT of information I didn't want.
This is not mentioned in the manual at all, as far as I can tell.
It tells you that you can change the information on the shooting screen, but not the review screen.
I hope this helps you.
I gotta admit, it was a good Friday.
I'm not Catholic, so it's just another Friday to me.
Easter, likewise.
Though, the film Risen is well worth a watch.
Louis Gossett Jr has shuffled off.
87 years old.
I am at a loss to think of a role he played that was poorly done.
He clearly wasn't afraid to take on challenges.
Normally you wouldn't see an actor from something like Enemy Mine in something like An Officer and a Gentleman.
If you have to pass a law, issue an edict or create a regulation to make people purchase a good or service:
THERE IS NO REAL DEMAND FOR THAT GOOD OR SERVICE!
I say again: When the market decides that it needs something, someone will provide it.
This is the invisible hand.
Government mandating that something be purchased isn't the market.
It disrupts the market and causes problems that radiate out like the tsunami from a volcanic explosion.
Back when, I was talking about punching the belly of a National Socialist (never forget they were socialists!) panzer with .50 BMG ammo and I couldn't find the reference for belt composition.
I was watching a YouTube vid talking about what Masters of the Air gets right and what they get wrong and they show a table with the ammo loadouts!
USAAF fighters early on carried 4 AP, 1 Tracer. That mix was changed to 2 AP, 2 API, 1 tracer (also called 2-n-1) until October 1943. From then to the end of the war it was 100% API.
Something I'm a bit sick of is how many rights issues become suicide pacts if taken to a lawyer's logical conclusion but are glaringly not that way from most normal people's perspective.
It's by far most common with libertarians than liberals, though there are plenty there too.
The inherent rights argument and illegal aliens is something that's got a lot of national and societal suicide built into it.
If anyone who manages to claw their way over the imaginary line that's our border has all the same rights as a naturally born citizen; then what distinguishes the citizen from anyone else?
Since these rights are inherent...
Somehow, I don't think that's what the founders were meaning, but they didn't leave us much in the way of notes.
On one hand, the US has survived mass, unchecked, immigrations more than once.
On the other hand, those immigrants were treated brutally, one might even say in a racist manner, until they assimilated into American culture.
On the gripping hand, they WANTED to be Americans. While they loved their mother countries, they also saw that it was better here.
The melting pot is a crucible.
E Pluribus Unum is an apt motto.
Coming here to become an American is good, you can totally keep your motherland's customs and stuff as long as they're secondary to being American.
Italians did it.
Irish did it (TWICE!).
Cubans do it. There's some VERY American Cubans living just a couple miles away from me, in fact.
Chinese did it.
Not insubstantial numbers of Indians are doing it.
Former slaves had done it, until it was undone by Mr Great Society.
It's not complicated.
But they have to want to, and there needs to be some pressure to cause those who don't to not want to remain.
One of my relatives has posted a bunch of home movies to YouTube.
It's very strange to see my mom as a young women.
I never knew her as this woman because she was Mom.
I just learned about the Tollense Valley Battle.
What's interesting to me is the evidence of bronze and flint weapons at the battle.
Right at the cusp betwixt TL0 and TL1.
Been watching lawyers debate whether illegal aliens have rights.
The obvious answer is, yes they do.
The more subtle answer is, until they broke the law.
Even more subtle is the question of if we can just start shooting them without regard to whatever rights they might have had before they broke the law without convicting them of it?
That whole innocent until proven guilty thing makes me think that we accord anyone we suspect of being here illegally all of the rights a citizen or legal alien has right up until they're convicted.
After all, if they're innocent of being an illegal alien, they've never broken the law and therefore didn't surrender their rights when they crossed the frontier.
Something I do want to see more of from the government is sending the convicts back to where they came from even if the crime of being here is merely a misdemeanor.
The problem would solve itself if a couple of, small, things were done.
First: Make proving your legal status a prerequisite for receiving any and all government aid. I had to provide such proof to get Real ID to keep my driver's license and carry permit. To demand less of non-citizens seems unequal protection under the law.
Second: Tax remittances at an extortionate rate. They've no real rights, and it's nothing that citizens are doing... Bonus, this will also discourage things like H1B visa seekers form hitting our shores and displacing citizens for the same job.
That's really it. Stop crime from paying and criminals tend to stop. It's an age old solution.
Putting a fine on businesses who have employees who cannot prove they are here legally also works. We will then find out if there really are jobs Americans won't do or if they're just unwelcome to apply as long as there's a supply of illegals to do them.
If you're a stupid enough fuck on Facebook to call me ignorant, then read all of these posts.
Then cut your dick off with a pencil so it hurts more and you stop contaminating the world with your, sure to be, just as stupid fuck progeny.
Leave your balls. That way you still get horny, but won't be able to do anything about it.
Too harsh?
Well, I am sick of the sanctimonious bullshit from people who wouldn't walk an inch in my shoes, let alone a mile.
When you're done lecturing me on student loans, be sure to tell me about what a lucky deal I got from the VA.
Watching the old BBC show "Danger UXB" from 1979.
It holds up very well.
I am once again reminded about booby traps and gaming.
Any sort of trap, really.
The Type 17 fuse on the Luftwaffe bombs is a great example.
It's a time delay fuse and the Germans used several anti-tamper devices to make sure it was difficult to disarm once it was dropped.
If I let the clock run out while the player's character is next to it, I'll get accused of not giving them a chance.
Same for if they pull the fuse and the anti-tamper goes off.
Especially since there's no way to tell, from the outside, if the clock is close to running out or to see the anti-tamper device.
An SC250 does 6dx35[6dx3] cr ex. No bueno for standing next to when it goes all angry like.
I'm reading about the massive negative effects of having a single port closed in the US will have on the economy and it makes me wonder why.
The obvious answer is that all US ports operate at 100% capacity all the time and there's no slack to allow for traffic from a closure to be rerouted.
If that's the answer, then I want to know why more capacity hasn't been added.
For some ports, like Tampa, there's infrastructure preventing the entrance of the large ships. I'd love to see Skyway III built so that the really big ships could get in.
But lots of other places the reason is lack of political will to spend the money to expand capacity.
There's gobs of blame to spread around, but it's the usual suspects when it comes down to it.
Our national transportation infrastructure should not be so brittle that losing a single node causes collapse. Inconvenience, sure, but not collapse.
It's especially galling in that I know we had plans for several of our ports to be hit with nukes and to be back into shipping armies and materiel to Europe mere days after the attack.
What the fuck happened?
Sadly, "the usual suspects" is the answer, yet again.
Rebuilding the Francis Scott Key bridge...
Living here in Florida we forget about government that doesn't just roll up its sleeves and get to work.
That there's places where the reality is what the press estimates for how long it will take to rebuild, if it ever happens at all.
Florida had a similar bridge disaster in 1980.
The current Sunshine Skyway bridge was built from 1983 to 1987 and the undamaged half of the old Skyway bridge was demolished in 1990.
Shipping traffic was restored before the end of 1980.
I am reminded about the estimates to restore a single tiny bridge after Hurricane Ian being in the ten year range.
That bridge had traffic on it in a couple of months. What's keeping things from being fixed down there, now, is endless delays from insurance companies trying to avoid paying out.
I contrast that to Katrina... It's my understanding there's still places around NOLA that are untouched since that day and unlikely to ever be fixed.
Sad.
Back to the FSK Bridge.
Did you know it was supposed to be a tunnel?
Did you know that this exact disaster was predicted before it was built?
Did you know, after the Skyway collapse, studies were done about putting in protective measures to prevent such a collapse?
Let's see what they do.
There's a part of me that thinks that America is still great and mere engineering problems are not problems to our indomitable spirit; get out of our way for a moment and watch us do grand things!
There's another part that just knows that getting in the way of American exceptionalism is the fucking goal of too many people.
To use the entire can of soup, I made a double batch.
1 can of cream of (favorite)
1 can & 2 cups of water
Both flavor packets from two packs of Ramen
Boil
Add noodles, boil for three minutes.
Add a fistful of cheese.
NOM!
Back in 2012 I'd found that my little blog was banned in Iran.
Today I noticed, in addition to lots of hits from Hong Kong, I have 2 unique visitors from Iran.
Makes me wonder whom in Iran is reading the blog.
Hopefully someone without nefarious intent who is learning the finer points of Traveller and GURPS.
After the 1980 disaster of the Skyway bridge down here, I'd kind of assumed that everyone would add the underwater protections that were added to the new bridge to prevent a ship from hitting the pylon and collapsing the bridge.
You know what they say about assumptions...
The Francis Scott Key bridge clearly lacked the dolphins and barriers the Skyway has.
The new bridge will almost certainly have them, hindsight being damnedly clear.
Today is National Medal of Honor Day and National Whiskey Day.
So you can have a shot of whisky and toast those who earned that itty bitty ribbon.
I forgot Earth Hour.
Normally I have all the cars idling and every light on.
Sadly, I was just tooling around in my V-8 powered Beast while Harvey was home with just MOST of the lights on.
I will do better next year.
The Tuskegee Airmen have been the subject of several movies.
The 1995 version is one of the better ones.
I don't think they needed to be shoehorned into a movie about the 8th Air Force and 100th Bomb Group.
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My 2012 Caprice PPV, as a former police car, has a distinct lack of tracking and remote cut-offs.
God's forbid the King's Men be subjected to tracking via OnStar or XM Radio.
The gubmint is going to have to track me the old fashioned way! By tracking my smart phone.
Customizable!
4" wide, 3" long, 3" deep.
A momentary/off/momentary switch is available which would be dandy for the tap-up/tap-down command.
It's just appallingly expensive for a two-switch panel, but it's cool as all get-out.
The $300 shift box and cupholder is just $100 if you skip the cupholders.
You get an on-off switch and two momentary switches.
If you had the 9C3 RPO, you wouldn't need this box because the shifter has it from the factory.
To the right of 'D' is a detent you can move the shifter into and that puts the trans in "sport mode". Pushing the shifter forwards and back manually shifts the trans up and down...
No. Not quite.
Pushing the shifter forward and back sends a request to the Body Control Module (BCM) to send a command to the Transmission Control Module (TCM) to shift up or down.
One pin from the BCM sends 12v up to the shifter and another receives a voltage signal back to a different pin.
13 to 11v and the TCM runs the transmission automatically.
3.1 to 2.7v and it's in sport/manual mode.
2.3 to 1.9v is a tap-up signal.
1.56 to 1.15v is a tap-down signal.
We've seen this paradigm of doing things before in how the cruise control operates. Steering wheel controls as well.
Pushing the switch routes the current through a resistor and the voltage drop tells the controller what you asked for.
Marv's calculating the resistance values the box is probably using.
I would not be shocked to find that GM uses the same values on all of its cars.
The shift box taps into the 12v wire that's already on my BCM and adds a wire to an empty pin; plus a separate ground that's not present in the factory diagram. The factory circuit grounds through a resistor in the BCM on the same pin the shift box is adding a wire to.
Because Harvey wants cupholders, we're going to end up with the $300 box. But we're going to be measuring resistances and voltage drops when it gets here!
Whenever a bigot stops in and gets their comment wiped, I have a huge uptick in traffic from Aesop's place.
Because I don't recall Aesop being a bigot.
A tiresome jerk in my comment section, but not a bigot.
Update:
I've checked Aesop's place to see what might be driving traffic. It's nothing he's said about me.
I suspect that he's got some anti-Semitic bigots lurking there reading who can't stand the thought that Israel might win for real for a change.
I've got one for you.
Palestinians already control Israel.
I'm reading about the Mandate of Palestine and the partitioning plans.
"Palestinian Jew," and, "Palestinian Arab," keeps coming up.
Distinct from groups like Beersheba Bedouin, by the way.
Some Arab populations are called out separately; everyone else is called some kind of "Palestinian."
No side in this fight can claim the moral high ground from about 1937 on.
Not the Jews, not the Arabs, not Muslims, not The British Empire, and most especially not The UN.
Except for the several small Arab populations mentioned as distinct from Palestinian Arabs everyone involved wanted everyone else's land.
When partition started to look like a real thing, they started a civil war over it.
England, who had been saddled with the place since the Ottomans left wanted out and didn't particularly care how they left it once bombs and bullets started flying.
The outcome of that civil war is the establishment of Israel, just in case you're not following, by 1/3 of the Palestinian population which had won the right by force of arms.
All that follows is the refusal of the losers of that fight to accept the loss and the neighbors being upset about it because the new state has the wrong religion.
One can choose to nurse a grievance for generations, or accept things have changed.
There's a not insignificant Arab population in Israel that accepted it and are now citizens, with rights and everything.
Dear bigots:
You don't get to comment here.
Most especially you don't get to regurgitate propaganda as if it was historical fact.
Links to gab or X are not sources.
I am not against immigration, per se.
What I am against is being colonized.
America is a pretty cool place and has a culture.
A culture assembled from the parts and spare bits of the peoples who immigrated here over a couple hundred years; but a culture nonetheless!
What we're courting is being colonized by Mexico and South America because most of these immigrants come here and remain Mexican/South American. They don't want to be US of Americans, they just want the benefits of being here without becoming part of us. That includes a job they cannot get at home.
If we were forcing them to become Americans, there wouldn't be an objection from me.
The reason I don't want them to remain their nationality is, well, where they came from.
I don't want to live where they came from.
I don't want where I live to become where they're fleeing.
We're a couple of bad court decisions away from them being able vote for making here like there.
I object to that!
And this is independent from the non-zero number of people who are coming here to do direct harm to the nation...
The Latin-Americans coming here for work and opportunity don't worry me near so much as the military age middle easterners we're encountering here and there.
Again, if they were coming here to become Americans, it wouldn't be a problem.
The problem is they're not.
The number of reasons I want a time machine keeps growing.
I want to drag someone from 1816 to 1824 here to testify about the benefits of global warming.
1816 is also known as "The Year Without A Summer."
These years are definitely included in the "global warming" calculus, but the medieval warm period isn't.
If you're going to talk about climate you have to use all the data, not just the cherries.
