Gun Free Victim Zone AGAIN?

Bearing Arms reports that the bowling alley the Maine shooter shot up was marked as a gun-free zone.

Character MG

I was going to make a couple of characters with a GPMG or LMG when I realized...

I'm probably going to be the GM, so the character would be an NPC, thus negating the entire point of making a PC with an MG.

Remember The SIG XM5?

The XM5 is now the XM7.

Something about not wanting to step on a Colt model name.

Which brings me back a familiar rant...

If you're not going to use a designation system, why have one?

Oh Noes

Supporting Israel vs Gaza could cost Democrats the Muslim vote, says Representative Pramila Jayapal (D-Wa-7).

Oh no!

Whatever will they do without 1.1% of the total population of America?

Well, supporting that 1.1% means alienating 2.2% of the population which is Jewish and traditionally Democrat in support.

Or has the recent rhetoric already driven them away?

As Beans pointed out, there's a lot of Americans who're fed up with this 1.1% demographic.  Can the Dems afford to lose them too just to keep the Muslim vote?

Doesn't seem like a good plan.

Halloween Is Our Christmas

 

Harvey and I got matching tats to express our love for Halloween.

Kim DuToit most affected.

She Just Won't Relax

 

The other cats are still figuring out the pecking order with the new addition, so we're keeping her sequestered in a carrier and only letting her out with close supervision.

E0

I've put three tanks of Wa Wa 89 octane ethanol free gas through The Beast now.

Last night I went for a drive to Bradenton.

About 200 miles.  Religiously at the speed limit.

Average fuel economy was 25 miles per gallon.

I'm happy with that because it beats the EPA highway number by a whole mile per gallon!  It's also close to what The Precious would do.

Skip To The End

If you're sitting there with your gun and contemplating murdering a bunch of people...

Then killing yourself.

Skip to the end.

Take a camera to where you were going to shoot everyone, and shoot their picture!

Post to the internet those pics with your suicide note with verbiage to the effect of, "I could have killed all these folks, but I was really mad at myself, so I only killed me."

I will gladly post your name and praise your decision.

Crazy Cat People Limit

We are now back to three cats.

A neighborhood stray kitten was getting increasingly bold and plaintive.

We started by leaving out some food and seeing if it came back.

The food and water disappeared.

This went on a couple of days without seeing it.

But then, while we were watching Hockey on the back patio she (for we got a good look) came back and complained about the service.

I went outside with a bowl of food and she would come to eat within arms reach.  She'd scamper away if I tried to reach for her, but she stayed on the back patio.

No sign of her Friday because we weren't out there.

But tonight she came back and was being playful when I tried to pet her.

Plus she was walking up, almost to petting range then scampering away.

She WANTED to trust us.

Eventually I got a pet in.

She decided she liked it and shortly submitted to being picked up.

And she'd let me pick her up again after being put down.

Shortly, we had her on the back porch and she fell asleep in the crook of my arm.

We now have her in a carrier so the other two can get used to the idea, though they'd exchanged words through the screen several times already.

Things appear to be going well, so far.

Keine Nazi?

As the extent of antisemitism within and among the Democrats and liberals is revealed; I am almost surprised.

The reason I am not really surprised is I remember which party has consistently done things to suppress minorities.

They're old hands at it.

Abraham Lincoln wasn't Democrat.

It wasn't a Republican administration that turned MS St Louis away from our shores.

It wasn't a Republican administration that built concentration internment camps.

It wasn't a Republican administration that savagely broke having strong nuclear families for blacks.

It wasn't Republicans what promulgated the red line/green line scheme to keep blacks concentrated in ever smaller, more urban areas while their family structure was being gutted.

It's not conservatives who are going for speech codes, silencing and cancelling people who don't march lock-step with them.

It's not conservatives who fervently try to ban firearms.

On the whole, I can see which side of the political divide is willing to let me be and which one wants to meddle.

Let's Go Poachin' Now

Everybody's learnin' how

C'mon and kill deer with me!

Will it GURPS?

The American Whitetail Hoofrat has 10 HP and no DR with a HT of 12.

.22LR from a rifle does 1d+2 pi-.

.22 Long from a rifle does 1d+1 pi-

.22 WMR from a rifle does 3d-1 pi-; but you'd use hollow points to get 3d-1(0.5) pi.

Aiming for the skull:

.22 LR will do 3-8 points of raw damage, 2 DR for the bone, 1-6 penetrates x4 for the brain hit: 4-24 points of damage.  The average roll will see 3 penetrate for 12 points of damage.  So a roll of 5 or 6 has a chance to kill it right there.

.22 Long will do 2-7 points of raw damage, 2 DR, 0-5 penetrates and 0-20 points of damage.  Average roll sees 2 penetrate for 8 points of damage.  You need to roll a 6 for a chance to kill.

.22 WMR will do 2-17 points of raw damage, double DR because hollow points, 0-13 penetrates for 0-52 points of damage.  The average roll of 10 will see 6 penetrate and do 24 points of damage.  Any roll of 9 or higher has a chance to kill.

Aiming for vitals.

.22 LR, same 3-8 raw damage, no DR, 3-8 penetrates x3 for the vitals hit: 9-24 points of damage.  Average roll will be 5 for 15 delivered.  Any roll of 7 or higher has a chance to kill.

.22 Long, same 2-7 raw damage, no DR, 2-7 penetrates, 6-21 points of damage.  Average roll will be 4 for 12 delivered.  Again, you need to roll max damage to get a chance of killing it.

.22 WMR, same 2-17 raw damage, 1-16 penetrates because no DR is 1 DR for hollow points, 3-48 points of damage.  Average will have 9 penetrate for 27 damage.  Any roll of 8 or higher has a chance to kill.

Aiming for the body:

.22 LR will get 3-8 points to penetrate, but small piercing is halved for 1-4 points of damage.

.22 Long will get 2-7 points to penetrate and get it halved to 1-3 points of damage.

.22 WMR will get 1-16 to penetrate for 1-16 points of damage.

Aiming for the eyes:

.22 LR will get 3-8 to penetrate because no skull DR on an eye hit for 12-32 points of damage.

.22 Long will get 2-7 to penetrate for 8-28 points of damage.

.22 WMR will get 1-16 to penetrate for 4-64 points of damage.

If the deer is wearing a bullet proof vest, no rimfire .22 can hurt it.

It could happen.

Why else do we need AR-15s for?

But a good shot and some luck with the damage shows that you can shoot a deer with a rimfire 22 and make it venison.

Boom Head Shot

Bella Twin used a .22 Long from a single shot Cooey Ace 1 to kill a record big grizzly bear.

That should be a 1d+1 pi- shot to the skull of the bear.

Grizzlies have 19 hit points.

This is not an easy shot.

The story says that she used her expert knowledge of the bear's anatomy to hit it where its skull was thinnest.

I don't have official rules for this, but I'd allow a roll against an appropriate skill to know of a place on an animal that bypasses the extra skull DR.

I'd also give it a penalty to hit similar to hitting the eye.

Max damage of 7 to the skull will become 20 damage done. 

That's enough to knock the bear unconscious, just barely, if it rolls poorly, and Bella Twin put another six in basically the same spot once it was down to make sure it stayed down.

This shoot will GURPS.

What Happened To The Red Flag Law

The alleged shooter has a history of mental illness.

Maine has a red flag law.

I was assured that such laws would keep this from happening.

Was I lied to again?

The Beast VS...

 Way back when...

The Beast has 112 cubic feet of passenger compartment and 17.4 cubic feet of trunk space. 

It's just a little less roomy than the 91-96 B-Body, but it's arranged better.

For one, the spare tire is completely below the trunk, where the B-Body had the spare occupying much of the available space.

Via Min Max

When you do historically based gaming, you start looking for trends to get better weapons.

Here's something I noticed:

For more than a century in the US, the trend was for higher capacity, faster shooting firearms.

The revolver is a development to increase the rate of fire when the state of the art was a single shot muzzle loader.

Wait.  We have to go farther back.

A pepper box was the actual development to increase the rate of fire.  The revolver was to make it handier.

Metallic cartridges come about to increase the rate of fire by making it faster to reload.

Break open and swing out cylinders in revolvers are to increase the rate of fire.

Semi-automatics and box magazines exist to increase the rate of fire.

AND THIS IS JUST HANDGUNS!

Rifles got a significant increase in capacity and rate of fire with tube magazines.

Later box magazines and stripper clips speed the reload time when combined with the developed-for-the-military bolt action becomes dominant.

The semi-automatic Garand increases the rate of fire.

Notice we haven't even mentioned a machine gun yet?

Yeah.

Holy Shit It's Not A Leftist In A Deep Blue Gun Free Zone

Apparently some fuck nut has gone nuts in Maine.

It's noteworthy because the person they've named isn't your typical far left nutcase and Maine has what most of us would consider good gun laws.

This is a first!

I guess it had to happen eventually.

Bet the media will be making hay on this one, because they sure couldn't do so with the last... um... every mass shooting.

Simulation Fail

A lot of the "will it GURPS" style posts are checking to see how realistic, or not, stuff is in the game.

That you can kill someone with a .22 in GURPS puts it above a lot of TTRPGs.

Even so, it's not very realistic.

Rather, it's realistic not real.

Cinematic is a good way to put it.

The wounding system is broken by design to make the game more entertaining and playable.

Getting injured is not entertaining.

Some examples of GURPS failing the reality test:

Skull hits do 4x damage once you get past the DR.  This is a hit to your CPU.

Even a bb can be lethal instantly here in the real world.

Any hit that does enough to do a point (4 in this case) is not going to heal up on its own and leave the victim unaffected.

The vitals do 3x damage.  This is central nervous system, heart and large blood vessels in the torso.

In the game, it does damage when the injury occurs and...  generally speaking if you take no new injuries, you're not going die from blood loss.

In the real world, poking holes in this stuff means you're going to bleed to death if the hole is not repaired.

GURPS has nothing for a severed radial or femoral artery.  The bleeding rules don't work fast enough to simulate it.

.22 LR

Another "Will It GURPS" adventure!

A rifle does 1d+2 pi- with 80/1,400 for range.

Pistols do 1d+1 pi- with 70/1,400 for range.

Because .22LR is light and cheap, I envisioned a character who used guns in this caliber in a post-apocalypse scenario.

Shot placement is what you're going to need with this round.

That means dropping some serious points into your Guns/TL Pistol and Rifle skill.

Since the skull is DR 2, a hit to the brain is handicapped from the get-go.

The rifle will get 1-6 penetrating and that gets 4-24 points of damage.  The pistol gets 0-5 penetrating and 0-20 points of damage.

Pretty much have to roll max damage to get a death roll.

On average you're getting 12 with the rifle and 8 with the pistol.  Don't count on the one-shot-stop.

Vitals doesn't have inherent DR...  plus they're +4 easier to hit!

The rifle will get 3-8 penetrating for 9 to 24 points of damage, with an average of 15.  Again, don't count on the one shot stop.

A pistol does 2-7 penetrating for 6-21 points and an average of 12.

Easy to get the target to start rolling to stay awake, but unlikely to get them dead right there.

But I thought that .22 WMR for the rifle might do better.

The ammo you can actually buy does 3d-1(0.5) pi.

To the skull that will do 0-13 penetrating for 0-52 damage (averaging 22).  Vitals will do 1-16 penetrating for 3-48 damage (averaging 25).

Far better.

Perhaps pack a 9mm handgun because it's common.

Wher-A-Boo

I think every gamer has been there.

There's a lot of WW2 German kit that informed modern kit.

That means you can get modern capabilities at an earlier TL point than modern...

ON PAPER the FG.42 is amazing stuff.

The MKb/MP/StG guns are just like AK's!

Well...

The FG.42, especially in the first widely issued version, is just barely handling the load of firing the 7.92x57mm round.  They're also kinda fragile.

The 10 lb. Garand will sling full power .30-06 all day long with a reliability that rivals Maxim guns.

The later versions are more robust, but still not as great as they appear on paper.  They're also thirteen pounds loaded.  The modern gun it most closely resembled is the FAL, which is a "mere" eleven pounds.

The FAL has far better ergonomics.  Especially with the location of the magazine.

That DOES matter.

What about the Sturmgewher?

7.92x33mm and 7.92x39mm are very close in performance.

But an AKM is 8.7 lb. and the StG.44 is 13.2 lb.!  Even the original, milled, AK-47 is lighter at 11.3 lb.

The semi-auto G.43 was never as good as the Garand.

But what about tanks?

Everyone mentions tanks!

The gigantic advantage the M4 Sherman has over the Tiger and Panther isn't numbers.

It starts every time.  It runs all day.

The crew just has to do their part and do the PMCS.

Tiger and Panther will break even if the crew is proactive about PMCS.

They do have epically good guns and excellent aiming systems.

But:  That aiming system only works if the tank commander can talk the gunner into getting the sight's soda-straw field of view on the, likely moving, target.

The Sherman's gunner has a panoramic view through a periscope in the roof of the turret.  You can even use it to aim the gun, but it's coarse.  What this gets you is you can put the crosshair on the target, then change to the main sight alongside the gun.  This has more magnification and finer aiming.

It means the TC can say, get that tank to the left and the gunner can do most of the work of getting the gun aligned himself.  That frees the TC to maintain situational awareness.

THAT is why a Sherman could kill a Panther or a Tiger, despite the better guns of the German tanks. 

Plus, never discount the advantage of being able to recover knocked out vehicles.  When the Germans lost a tank, it was gone forever because the Allies owned the ground.  Any Shermans knocked out in the same battle could be taken to depot and fixed (or scavenged for parts).

Jamming Your Blaster

Traveller has something called a "nuclear damper".  It's a beam that enhances the strong nuclear force to prevent nukes from going off.

A throw-away line in an episode of Farscape, "they're jamming pulse weapons, so grab a spear!" got me wondering.

Will there be a field of electronic warfare aimed at disabling energy weapons?

Defying The Rules As Written

Douglas Cole has noted that the 1/2D range in GURPS might be wrong for some cartridges before.

He finds that .22LR should have more than three times the 70 yards given in the rules.

If that holds for .25 ACP, then the shot that Paw Paw was talking about will GURPS again!

All it needs to work, aside from a miraculous series of rolls on the part of Dindu's player, is for the 1/2D number to be 125 yards or longer.

It's 90 in the rules as written, so not too much of a stretch where .22 is 1/3 of its calculated distance.

Mr Cole did the math for us.

I've Met Them

Getting caught up in Islamophobia is pretty easy when there's savages murdering people and claiming Islam as their justification for doing so.

The urge to cry, "kill them all and let God know his own!" is pretty compelling.

There's a bit of an issue.

Islam is not a monolithic thing.

There are moderate Muslims.

There are very secular Muslims.

More than a few live here in the USA to escape the more radical, savage, interpretation of their religion.

Many branches of Islam still advocate death to heretics and apostates and in their native lands, they do kill those whom wish to trod a more moderate path.

The problem, here in the US, is determining one from the other when deciding if we're going to let them move here.

Worse, while they might be fine; too often their children prove vulnerable to being radicalized.

No, I don't have a solution, just making an observation.

Too often Islam is not compatible with the norms of Western Civilization, but it's a friction point that could be lubricated; but it requires something of a reformation from Islam and making the moderate and more secular version to become the mainstream.

That will be intolerable to the radical versions, it's literally an affront to God to depart from their interpretation of their scriptures.

Another wrinkle is Islam being the state religion of several nations.  That means there will be a State sanctioned version of the Holy Text and other versions will be illegal.

This has hampered research and archaeology.  Just like the Bible and Torah, there have been finds of different versions of the Quran.  Some of these have just disappeared and scientists expelled or censored.

A huge thing that the more radical versions of Islam in America need to get is we're serious about religious freedom.  A huge thing about that is there's no punishment from The State for deciding you don't want to be a member of any given religion anymore and that some religions punishment for doing so is illegal.  Your kid decides they want to be an atheist, you can disown them, but you can't kill them.

Knowing that there are Muslims who handle this just fine is great.  It means there's hope that the murdering might stop without one side being completely scoured from the earth.

Sadly, the nature of terrorism means that a small number of people can do vast damage.

Does It GURPS

Paw Paw shares a charming story of love and .25 ACP.

125 yard head shot.  Dead right there.

A Raven does 1d pi- and has 90/950 for range.

That's past the 1/2d distance and will be a -11 to hit.

Apparently, Dindu's player made some amazing die rolls.

Pretty much has to be a critical success to hit at all with the typical exhibited skill of the average Dindu.

Then he rolled another 3 to hit the skull.

Then he rolled an 18 to get, "The blow does triple damage."

Then he rolled a 6 for damage which gets halved to 3 and 1 penetrates that does 12x damage.

We'll be charitable and assume that Gonorea has a 10 HT and 10 HP.

12 points of damage is just barely enough to get a consciousness roll, so...

If they rolled a 3 on the critical head blow table, then no DR from the skull and all 3 penetrate.  That becomes 12 as well...

No, this shoot does not GURPS.

If it were slightly closer, the 6 damage would be 4 penetrated and 48 damage.  That'll do it. 

This is why we don't use GURPS to do real world planning about what guns really work.

Best Case

Watching Christine and I realized that it's pretty much the best case scenario for owning an old MOPAR.

This Could Get Interesting

Puty Baby appears to have had a heart attack.

Is there a clear successor?

Skating Dangerously Close To The Line

Anti-Semitism is hewing close to the line where hostis humani generis lives on the other side.

Western civ has done this to a select group of people who wouldn't be civilized unless you started just killing them on sight.

Come to think of it...  "The shores of Tripoli" refers to one of the most recent times such a declaration was made and to the same stripe of folks currently involved.

Of course, we're going to have to have another Operation Eagle Claw level disaster and a change of presidents before we can really enforce such a decree.

Something that needs mentioned is that most Americans really dislike anti-Semitism.

There's a core of people who learned about The Holocaust and think that "never again" meant NEVER and don't care for someone having another go and such attempts puts them on the hostis humani generis side of the line.

Just For The Record

I did not get my Colt Gov't Model in .38 Super because of its competition lineage.

I got it because I was researching the Prohibition Era and I like 1911's!

I think this explains why.

Not In Second Edition

My pseudo-dragon might have been ageless in AD&D, but he wouldn't have been in AD&D 2e.

It specifically states in the Monstrous Manual they average 15 years before succumbing to old age.

AD&D 4e, like OG AD&D doesn't specify a lifespan.

OG edition had a Dragon article that said they aged liked dragons, who don't die from old age.

The GURPS 4e conversion I made:

Pseudo Dragon (AD&D Monster Manual p.79)

124 Points

Attribute Modifiers: ST-8 [-80]; DX+4 (No Fine Manipulators -40%) [48]; HT+4 [40].

Secondary Characteristic Modifiers: SM-4.

Advantages: Affliction 1 (Magic Resistance 4, no hindrance +20%; Melee Attack -30%; Aura +80%) [17]; DR 6 (Cannot Wear Armor, -40%) [18]; Enhanced Move 1 (Air Speed 28) [20]; Innate Attack (Fatigue) 2d (Cyclic, 1 hour, 10 cycles, resistible, +90%; Follow-Up, Tail Striker, +0%; Resistible, HT-2, -20%) [34]; Flight (Winged, -25%) [30]; Impaling Striker (Tail) [8]; Invisibility (Mana Sensitive -10%) [36]; Magic Resistance 4 [8]; Mind Reading (Mana Sensitive -10%, Universal +50%, Telecommunication -20%) [36]; Nictitating Membrane 1 [1]; Reduced Consumption 2 [4]; See Invisible (Magical; Mana Sensitive -10%) [14]; Sharp Teeth [1]; Telesend (Mana Sensitive -10%, Sensory +20%, Universal +50%) [48]; Unaging [15].

Disadvantages: Cannot Speak [-15]; Dependency (Mana, Very Common, Constant) [-25]; Quadruped [-35] Social Stigma (Wild Animal) [-10].

Features:

Racial Skills: Brawling (E) DX [1]-14; Stealth (A) DX [2]-14; Tracking (A) Per+1 [4]-11.

I included unaging.  So there!

I love how the ability to give your companion the magic resistance is an affliction...

If you want to conform to the AD&D 2e stats change the Unaging [15] to 2 levels of Short Lifespan [-20] and the point total to 89 points.

PS: They have four legs and two wings.  Like all correctly depicted dragons.

It's Actually Constitutional This Time (Well Some Of It)

Larry Vickers has this indictment.

He's plead guilty to some other charges as well, notably:

Vickers also pleaded guilty to a conspiracy to violate U.S. sanctions against a foreign firearms manufacturer between July 2014 and March 2021, in the Southern District of Florida.

The firearms charges, prolly unconstitutional.

Sanctions violations?  Import sanctions are constitutional.

Even sanctions on gun parts or laser printer cartridges.

The roe at Arfcom over this keeps missing that point.

But some of the details that thread are revealing...

For someone who did what he did in the military for so long, you'd think he'd have internalized some fucking OPSEC and COMSEC.

There's emails between him and the sheriff's where they're talking about how they're doing an end-run on the laws openly.

At a time when ATF has been cracking down on this not-really-a-loophole in the FOPA restriction on new MG manufacture and transfers.

Yes, if you're the right kind of FFL/SOT, you can get brand new machineguns imported with an LEO letter.

Yes, if you're the right kind of FFL/SOT, you can make brand new machineguns with an LEO letter.

Yes, if you're the right kind of FFL/SOT, once they are done doing their testing and evaluation, you can keep the test article and play with it like you owned it.

But it's all about intent.

The agency writing the letter has to intend to test and evaluate the gun in question.

The FFL/SOT has to acquire the gun in question with the sole intention of providing it to the LEO agency for their testing and evaluation.

So when you write your buddy, the sheriff, and say, "write me a letter for a c.2022 Gigablaster, because I want one," and the sheriff does and you buy one with the intention of getting it to play with like you owned it and with no intention from you or the LEO to test or evaluate it for the LEO...

You broke the law.

An unconstitutional law, in my opinion, but it's still on the books and being actively enforced.

And you openly discussed it on an unsecure channel!

That was stupid.

Scratch Out

It's OK to write your logins and passwords down.

Just make sure your little pad of logins is secure.

But if you change your login and password, make a note in your book that you've done so!

We spent an hour with my mother in law's computer and google fighting three password changes and recoveries before we figured out the correct password...

Because Google told us we couldn't change the password to the current one.

Ugh.

Wanna Try Something?

We just tried this recipe!

I substituted a jar of Tostito's Chili con Queso for the Cheez Whiz, but the effect is the same. 

 The cheese flavor is not up front, it's in the back and subtle.

Pairs well with chili!

Hoard

A character I once had in one of Standing Bear's D&D worlds was a pseudo-dragon.

He was rather liberal with letting us run monsters as characters, and my pseudo-dragon was classed as a fighter-thief.

He was not very powerful.

But one day, that all changed.

The big-dogs of the campaign decided they needed to "run off" some time.

Us small fry didn't have the votes to prevent it, so everyone got 100 years older and got to submit a "what did you do during the break?" homework.

They'd secured their immortality, so it was no big deal to run off that long.  Pseudo-dragons are ageless, like real dragons.

Most everyone else was making a new character.

I asked about the local baron's vault.

It turns out it was not rat proof.  If a rat can get in, so can a pseudo-dragon.

Remember me being classed as a thief?

In Bear's world a thief got one experience point per gold piece stolen.

So I stole one per day from the vault.  For one hundred years.

Admittedly, this only moved me from 3rd level to 7th level; but my HP was based on that level now, instead of the racial hit dice!

I was a tough-ass pseudo-dragon!

The theft was small enough that no real investigation was conducted, though I remember an exchequer or two were hanged for their accounting failures...

When I later acquired a ring of teleportation and a ring of regeneration, coupled with the natural chameleon abilities...  I was an essential part of the group.

Plus, I never voted against running off time, the big boys appreciated that.

Respect

Twitter X Link.

This is Shlomo Ron. When Hamas terrorists invaded his home in Kibbutz Nahal Oz, this 85-year-old frail man had a plan. He left his wife, daughters and grandson in the shelter, and went to sit in his living room, waiting for his death. He figured that when terrorists break in they will see him, execute the lonely old man, and move on. He was right. He’s a hero who sacrificed himself for the people he loves. May be rest in peace.

 

It's Not 2005

I remember when Katrina rolled over NOLA and cops were imported from all over the country to "maintain the peace."

Which they did by confiscating guns from law abiding people who'd survived the storm and were prepared to sit tight until services were restored.

Many people never saw their guns again because the burden of proof was put on the owner to show they owned it, rather than on the police to keep track of where the gun had come from and return it.

Most states subject to hurricanes now have laws forbidding such confiscations, now.

But this shit comes up again with red flag laws.

You've got to prove it's your gun, despite the cops taking it straight from you.

This is on top of being required to come to where they have your gun stored, rather than them bringing it back.

I think it's high time that the burden be put where it belongs:  On government.

If they seize something that needs to be returned, it should be returned to the owner.

Ownership should not be in question.  The police know where the item came from and whom they took it from.  All you should need show is that you're the person in question.

Not provide a receipt or bill of sale.

I think I will suggest this to my normally useless state legislators on Monday.

Another Convert

Changed the Mother in Law's Lenovo T420 from Win7 to Ubuntu 22 today.

Harvey checked to make sure all her Facebook games still worked and we got her bookmarks restored.

Should be all-good now!

It's astonishing how much faster the machine runs on Linux than Windows.

Fingers crossed she's happy with the change, there will be something of a learning curve because things are different shaped and in different places.

Also...

C&Rsenal is on Playeur too.

Their 2 factor authorization pisses me off on so many levels.

I just want to login and watch vids.

Not open the page, hit the login button, go to a different tab, login to my email, get the code, go back to the first page and enter a code...

Every single time I open the site.

They can't remember me?

C&Rsenal Most Affected

Well, YouTube has given me a three video countdown to blocking me from viewing unless I accept their odious level of advertising.

Othias, May, if I can't watch, I'm afraid I will have to end my Subscribestar contribution too.

I'd been blocking ads to send a message to Google that if they didn't monetize channels, I would not let their ads reach me.

YouTube is fucking the creators, again, not the viewers.

We'll find something else to do with the time.

Old Skinny And Fast

 Old NFO touches on the Government Model.

You don't have to accept slow and fat.

.38 Super works just fine.

If you want fat, but don't want slow, you can always get a 10mm ACP version.  You can.  I can't.  Those things are NOT in the budget at La Casa de McThag.

I reiterate something I've long said about the "1911" and that there's nothing wrong with the M1911.

There's lots wrong with the clones of the M1911 that have tarnished the reputation of this revolutionary design.

I've talked about that too.

Many clones are trying to make the design something it was not intended to be.

The M1911 is a combat pistol, it's a sidearm.

It is not a target pistol.

But too many clones are making target pistols and that compromises the design.

Then people get surprised when it doesn't run right.

Yet they'd understand that while both things are cars, you don't use a Formula 1 car for a road trip and you don't enter a minivan at Monaco.

Gun writers have failed to educate their readers expectations.

Dealers

A hint to the UAW that they don't have the power they think they do:

The dealerships are not screaming for the strike to end.

The average dealer has too much inventory and this strike has meant they don't have to accept new inventory they are having trouble moving.

The threat of shutting down plants that make parts and that affecting warranty servicing is being answered with, "we're still waiting on transmission solenoids from before the strike, how is this different?"

Dorman doesn't use union labor and their solenoids appear to be working where the union made OEM part is failing under warranty...  To the point that Ford approved the use of Dorman for warranty repairs before the strike.

The average person never hears these stories.

If you're wrenching on your own car, you do.

You Are Not The Only Workers

Back when I was a drafter for a company that designed and made vending machines...

(If you've ever seen a "LIVE BAIT" machine outside a Wal Mart, that's one of mine)

Our production plants were UAW.

When contract time would roll around they'd start making strike noises and demanding "their share" of the profits.

It was always them and management they referred to.

I always found that odd.

I was not a UAW worker.

I was not management.

But if the company needed to lay someone off because they couldn't lay-off the union workers...  Guess who got shown the door!

They were constantly fucking the people who worked in design, engineering, testing, and sales.

The contracts never account for bad years; so everyone but them have to tighten their belts.

Their raises are astronomical, and I suspect, the reason that everybody else's wages have been so stagnant is the drag that union shops put on the economy.  I strongly suspect that they are the only ones whom are getting raises that keep up with their favorite party's effect on inflation.

But they got theirs, fuck the rest of us.

Except I can't afford a new car.  Where will you be when the labor costs of a new car drive it up so far that only UAW workers can buy one?  You're simply not a large enough market to support the manufacturing rate.

Don't expect sympathy when it happens to you.

You've done it to me more than once.