Saturday, October 31, 2015

Halloween Fun In An Election Run-Up

Found this at Rick McKee's page:
See? Carving the candidates isn't as hard as you thought.

Thursday, October 29, 2015

Guns And Journalists

Go here for some analysis of the journalists approach to guns.
Best of show:
Clip—Any ammunition-retention system, including magazines, speed loaders, belts, bandoleers and TSA screeners.  
 Thanks to Joe Huffman for the lead on this one.

Political Insanity

Even Reince Priebus is beginning to notice that 3 times in a row the Republican debates have featured moderators who seem to work for the DNC and the candidates are not getting their ideas out.

Ted Cruz is suggesting the next debate be moderated by Sean Hannity, Mark Levin and Rush Limbaugh which would be a refreshing change. He also suggested in today's WSJ that the tax system be revised to a flat 10% for individuals and 16% for corporations. This is getting close to the Irish model that turned Ireland from an economic basket case into the fastest growing economy in the EU.

Of course policy-based questions would favor policy wonks which would put some of the current front runners at a disadvantage. Of course you need to remember that some of the front runners are there because the DNC based debate system favors them. One also needs to remember that the DNC does NOT want any of the GOP candidates to win the upcoming election and thus favors the weakest candidates.

This could backfire on all of us as I'm seeing the viewership numbers for the debates as an indication that even the liberals are looking for an alternative to sitting around unemployed hoping that all this will change somehow. Be interesting if their efforts to get the Republicans to run their weakest candidate results in that one getting elected.

Wednesday, October 28, 2015

Harassing Scientists

When someone on the right publishes a paper on say guns and crime, they publish the paper, their data sources, and their methodology as they should. A scientific paper should be subject to peer review, a checking of the relevance of the data and the analytical methods used.

When someone on the left publishes a paper on say climate, the underlying data, its sources, and the mathematical analyses are a closely guarded secret and asking to see any of it is regarded as an overt attempt to steal the invention and the writers girlfriend. This stems mostly from the ridicule heaped on people who take otherwise good data and "adjust" it until the correct result appears when they're caught at it.  Experience has shown that climate predictions need to be made about events far enough in the future that your favorite candidates endorsement of them won't be used to show him a fool in the next election.

Here's a collection of end-of-the-world climate predictions that unfortunately didn't work out. Some of them were from Pope Al whom some in the Democratic party are calling for to run for president this year and save the party from Hillary.

Tuesday, October 27, 2015

Health Tip - Drinking

Taking a months respite from over drinking improves your health. Who would have thought it. Some alcohol is good for you they say and at least one fellow at the Daily Mail says it will help stave off dementia although I didn't read the article to see what his suggested dose was.

Monday, October 26, 2015

The Invasion Of Europe

In 1683 the Grand Vizier Merzifonlu Kara Mustafa Pasha arrived at Vienna with 100,000 armed men and was defeated by 45,000 Poles.
So where are the Poles?

The Napoleonic Conquest - Again

With millions of young men in the 18-45 age demographic currently invading Europe under the guise of being refugees, we are now seeing a replay of Napoleon's invasion of Russia. The little general, you recall, marched his army into Russia expecting to arrive in Moscow in time for Thanksgiving only to find himself caught outdoors in the Russian winter which defeated his army more thoroughly than anyone in Europe could have.

Today we have a rerun of the Caliph's invasion of Europe with an even bigger army, now being caught in the European winter without their winter gear. Predictably some European leaders have noticed this and are calling for the Europeans to provide the invading army with the gear they forgot to bring. As though the Czar would have provided Napoleon with shelter.

Sunday, October 25, 2015

Gun Control Hero Arrested

A South Carolina man whose mission in life seemed to be to keep dangerous guns out of the hands of the irresponsible has been arrested by county police stooges of the NRA who will be putting those hunting rifles powerful sniper rifles and sporting shotguns wide-ranging "street sweeper" killing machines back into circulation. Mr. Nicholson's collection of 7-10,000 firearms will eventually be returned to their original owners whom Mr. Nicholson's associates seem to have forgotten to compensate for the loss.

Barely mentioned here but nonetheless noteworthy is the near complete absence of handguns from this amazing stash. I wonder why that was?

Burning The Food Supply - Biofuels

Biofuels are inefficient, costly, and contribute to the rapid rise in food prices. Anyone could have predicted this and several did only to be told that we had lots of acres of farmland that could be profitably be turned to producing corn for fuel. Never mind the increased demand for water, fertilizer, and infrastructure that goes along with this making a gallon of ethanol harder on the environment than a gallon of petroleum-based fuel.

Just remember, there is no environmental problem that can't be solved with a big tax increase, the loss of jobs, and an expansion of government regulation.

Saturday, October 24, 2015

End Of Scandal

The IRS scandal is now officially over now that the King has ordered the judges to not prosecute anyone.

The IRS now officially joins the ranks of government agencies that are only front groups for the DNC.

Update: Ed Driscoll suggests that this might backfire on the Dems if a Republican should get elected and try to use it. Sorry Ed, but it's already been tried. Nixon asked the IRS for help and discovered that it was chock full of Democrats who wouldn't give him the time of day. Before this could be used by Republicans, the entirety of departmental upper management would have to be replaced and a whole new corporate mindset installed down into the lower ranks.

Best idea would be to figure out some way to completely eliminate the offending Departments. For most of them this would be easy: Think Dept of Energy, Commerce, Education, Interior, and probably several others. Heads is even, tails is odd. Toss a coin and tell everyone in the affected department that if their SSN ends with the selected number, they're fired. Halve their budgets and tell the remaining directorship to allocate the remaining resources appropriately.

Colorado Pot - Unintended Consequences

Or fun with headlines.

Englewood testing waters for pot consumption clubs 

Or just let the clubs test their own water. I already suspect that the fish in the Platte River downstream of Denver hit on Cheese Doodles and Doritos preferentially over the more traditional flies and bait.

Tuesday, October 20, 2015

Science Fiction!

...double feature.
Dr. X
builds a creature...

Milehicon is this weekend featuring some of my favorite things beginning with the Yacht Regatta, for which you, yes you, are expected to build a small boat from a 2-quart milk box and race it across the hotel pool. No electricity and no changing the pool chemistry. Kids play? The standing record is 1.5 seconds for a traverse although I believe that craft has been banned.

Next up is the Critter Crunch, the grandfather of all fighting robot contests featuring 2 lb and 20 lb dreadnoughts doing battle with one another for fame, glory, and some rather spiffy trophies.

Also included will be a Mad Scientists Study Group at which Mad Science will be discussed. As befits such a scholarly endeavor, it will be held in the hotel bar. This is a White Lab Coat event. Ties? Sure, if you're in need of restraint, that can be arranged too.

Click the link and click once again on events.

The Global Warming Front

Seems the biggest solar plant in the country runs primarily on natural gas.

Cut off the gas supply and you shut down the plant.

That ethanol mandate still isn't working out all that well either. So tell me again what the benefits of burning our food supply are?

Sunday, October 18, 2015

4-Gun Match - Lessons Learned

The Arvada Rifle & Pistol Club just held their annual club 4-gun match and I finally got to participate. A 4-gun match here means air pistol, air rifle, .22 pistol, and .22 rifle. In this case, "rapid fire" means 10 shots in 10 minutes, including sighters in the air gun rounds. It was a low-key fun match and I learned 2 valuable lessons.

1. When the announcement says that the .22 pistol part will be held at 50 ft, get up to the range the day before and get the sights dialed in. A gun that works well on e-postal matches at 25 ft will shoot a bit over an inch high at 50 and they don't allow sighter shots with the .22's. Doubly embarrassing as the club is made up of primarily bullseye shooters for whom a "flyer" is a hit in the 9-ring.

2. At breakfast prior to the match, stick with Billlls Pistol Stabilization Fluid* and wait till lunch to go back on the regular coffee. While one cup of coffee won't cause your hands to shake very much, none at all by IDPA standards, see the above definition of a "flyer" and think about it.

Nevertheless, when I left, I was in a tie for third in my division. In this group, that's pretty good. I'll probably find out that the rest of the old farts (my division) showed up after I left and I finished tied for 25th place but so far, so good.

Next year will be better.

Since I didn't have an air pistol of my own, the club graciously made one available:
The Styr-Manlicher model L-10. I found one used for $1200. Not bad for a BB pistol. No I'm not buying one. Shoots very nice though.


*Decaffeinated coffee.

Friday, October 16, 2015

Trump Negotiates With CNN And Wins

Trump et.al., well mostly Trump, has demanded that CNN limit the next debate to 2 hours and give everybody a shot at an opening and closing statement to keep the DNC operatives who run the show from dealing anyone out. O.K. let's see: 10 candidates with say 5 minutes each at both ends is 100 minutes of 120. This leaves 20 minutes for inane questions from the moderator and commercial breaks. This might not be all that bad as I'd get to hear each candidate talk briefly on his or her favorite issues. This probably won't work for CNN as they need to sell more than 20 minutes of commercials.

How about 3 minutes/candidate at each end? That's 1 hour for the candidates and 1 hour for CNN and the DNC. This also sounds fair. I can watch the first half hour and the last while ignoring the blather in the middle.

The shortened format also works for the commies outside the building as if they can get a few people in, their 5 minutes of disruption will be that much more valuable. Could be worse. If the debate were being held in Berkley, the demonstrators would probably try to firebomb the building.

Thursday, October 15, 2015

Gun Law

First off here's the 7th circuit saying that criminals have second amendment rights. Specifically, illegal aliens. The fourth, fifth and eighth courts disagree, so the Supreme court will need to step in and straighten someone out.

Just from curiosity, is illegal immigration a felony or a misdemeanor?

Here are two studies, one from Harvard and one from Walls Of The City, suggesting that the premise that more guns = less crime is true. The Harvard study is interesting in that not only does it come from such a bastion of liberal thought, but that it brings up the influence of cold war Russkie propaganda on the debate.

Seems that back then the Soviets were so anxious to portray the USSR as a near-utopia that they claimed the U.S. had the highest violent crime rates of any industrialized country. Since no one was able to independently check the numbers on East Bloc states, the claim went unchallenged. Today it seems the claim was complete bunk, but the source has been forgotten and the left still trumpet it.

I agree With Bernie Sanders

I've certainly heard enough about Hillary's e-mails. I think she should be given a fair trial and tossed in the Federal joint for 30 years or so. That would eliminate all the headlines about her e-mails. Besides, Nelson Mandela did 27 years in jail before being elected president.

Tuesday, October 13, 2015

Climate Change Betting

Place your bets now, and unlike the climate scientists you'll find out over the next 6 or 7 months weather you got it right. What will this winter be like? Long or short? Mild or bitterly cold? Wet or dry? The NWS is predicting the first snowfalls southeast of the great lakes this weekend, so get out those D-20's and give it a guesss.

Me I'm going for long, cold, and wet. This is based on a lack of sunspots and the presence of a big El Nino in the Pacific. That and the entrails patterns of selected road kill. Get the prediction right and you get to add the title of "Nationally acclaimed climate scientist" to your name at least until you fail to predict the next rainstorm.

Is The Stupid Party Getting Smarter?

You could make that argument. The GOP is planning to hold their next debate at the University of Colorado in Boulder (Peoples Republic of Boulder). Predictably the Evil Party is mobilizing the readily available masses to try to suppress the exercise in free speech.

Still, it could be worse, at least they didn't schedule the event at U.C. Berkley.

Sunday, October 11, 2015

October E-Postal

Dave at Truebluesam has been carrying this event for about 3 months now and here's another one to give you something to do at the range.
Click the link to get the target which also includes the rules. Ten shots, Five points per hit on ghosts, ten points for bats, twenty points for an eye, fifty points for connecting the eyes.

I hung mine up at an angle so the ghosts appeared upright, appealing to my engineering sense of order.

QOTD - White Privilege

Up at CSU, Megan Burnett takes up the topic of "white privilege", pointing out that outcomes are usually based on individual effort more often than anything inherited.  At the same time, over at Theo Spark, there's this observation:

Sort of follows Robert Heinlein's description of "bad luck".

Of course rejecting a technology (Capitalism) because it was invented by white men seems rather silly to me but what do I know? Replacing it with another technology (Socialism) which was also invented by white men and comparing the results, it seems that not only do we white men have the solution to world poverty, we also hold the patents on the cause of most of it.

Saturday, October 10, 2015

Transportation

Sometimes there is just a divine indication that what you should be doing is staying home, preferably in bed. Yesterday was a good day for a bike ride so off I went. Made it about 2 miles and th chain broke. Fortunately I was near my favorite bike shop, Pedal, in Littleton. They had a master link for under $5 and helped me install it for free. Nice folks. Got me through the next 35 miles although my legs were registering formal protest.

Today we are supposed to go up to CCCSC for an IDPA match. Made it about 1/4 of the way and a radiator hose popped off. By the time we got it fixed, it was too late for the match, so we revised the plans to visit the Arvada Rifle & Pistol club.

Coming back, 6th ave was marked that an exit I don't use would be closed. As I got closer, the overhead sign was warning that the right lane was closed. Traffic began piling up early as someone had bent a fender and the accident was blocking the right lane from about 1 mile before the official closure. I get to my exit and discover that the right lane closure includes the exits for 4 major arteries including mine. There was a detour. The warehouse district is truly scenic in the morning.

Hose fixed and engine watered, let's see if I can get all the way to Arvada without a mishap.

Thursday, October 8, 2015

The Australian Model

The president recently praised the Australian model of gun control which outright banned self-loading rifles and shotguns. I seem to recall they also banned several types of hand guns as well. The net result, since 1996 when they did this has been an 18% reduction in the national murder rate.

In the U.S. since 1996, we have seen the expiry of the Clinton assault weapon ban, and a surge in the number of states becoming "shall issue" for CCW. The result here has been a 50% reduction in the national murder rate.

Details here at Powerline blog.

QOTD, Hillary & Guns

Hillary is attempting to demonize the NRA by comparing them to Iranians and communists with whom she says she had to deal with as Secretary of State.

James Taranto of the WSJ offers this observation:
If the NRA is like “the Iranians or the communists,” does she recommend the same negotiating strategy the administration has employed with them—i.e., make concession after concession, then declare a diplomatic triumph?
Somehow I suspect Hillary sees Putin as more of a role model than an adversary.

Wednesday, October 7, 2015

How Non-Citizens Vote

They do it indirectly, without ever having to visit a polling place or pull a lever. It seems that our Representatives are apportions according to the total population of the country, currently divided by 435, which says that each representative represents about 720,800 people. Note that we're talking people here, NOT citizens. Now in the electoral college, votes are apportioned out one per Senator, or two per state regardless of population, and one per representative. If your state has a bunch of non-citizens in it at the time of the census, you get extra representatives, for example, California gets 5 extra.

I did some looking and some math. 315M people divided by 435 reps is the above mentioned 720,800 people/rep. According to the Kaiser Foundation, some 7% of those are non-citizens or 22.5M. By current estimates, about half of them are illegal. Dividing the 22.5M by 720.8K tells me that non citizens have 30 representatives and 30 electoral votes to their credit. Given their propensity to vote Democratic, that puts the Republicans at a distinct disadvantage right out of the blocks. Toss in a bit of creative gerrymandering and you can use imported non-citizens to push voting citizens out of a close district.

They don't have to vote. They get representation for free.

Sunday, October 4, 2015

Political Ignorance

Ilya Somin, distinguished law professor attributes Trumps rise to the political ignorance of the electorate. Big deal. Low Information Voters are found across the political spectrum and are responsible for the rise, fall, election, and re-election of large numbers of otherwise unqualified dunces.

Interesting to note that only the right seems to see this as a bug and not a feature of the process.

National CCW

Well not exactly, but H.R. 986 does require all states that issue permits to recognize a permit from any other state:
2/13/2015--Introduced.
Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act of 2015

Amends the federal criminal code to authorize a person who is not prohibited from possessing, transporting, shipping, or receiving a firearm under federal law, and who is carrying a valid, government-issued identification document containing that person's photograph and a valid permit issued by any state to carry a concealed firearm, to possess or carry a concealed handgun (other than a machine gun or destructive device) in any other state that permits residents to carry a concealed firearm, in accordance with the restrictions of that state. Makes presentation of facially valid documents prima facie evidence that the individual has a license or permit as required.
It certainly won't get you anywhere in New Jersey, and if your state doesn't require a FOID card then your permit probably won't be recognized in Illinois. Still, it's a start. Sponsored by Rep. Hudson of N.C. it has attracted some 181 co-sponsors so far including Scott Tipton of CO so good for him.

The session is coming to an end so I don't expect much action on this but what the heck, you needed an excuse to write your rep anyway right? 40 more co-sponsors and it should have enough support to get it out of committee.

And don't forget to include the final paragraph (line) demanding that the ATF be abolished. Apparently enough people are doing this that several congressmen have commented on the proposition, mostly favorably.

Saturday, October 3, 2015

Obama Attempts To Sell More Guns

You have to admit, the man has probably indirectly sold more guns than any individual in the history of the earth. Yesterday he got in front of a camera and called for the Oregon shooting to be politicized, which is a dog whistle to the citizenry to go out and buy another gun.

It may be a bit early to be drawing conclusions, but I'm thinking that he may have actually saturated the market.

Swedish Utopia

The left loves to cite Sweden as the shining example of socialism working smoothly and flawlessly.

So here it is.

Coming soon to a neighborhood near you.

Friday, October 2, 2015

Gun Law

In the case of someone v Lucky Gunner, the courts ruled that Lucky gunner could not possibly have known that its customer would use the ammunition to shoot all those people in the theater in Aurora, and the courts subsequently ruled that the plaintiffs should have known that their suit was frivolous and vexatious and ordered them to pay Lucky Gunners legal costs which are running to about $250K.

One of Bloomberg's minion groups egged the family into filing the suit but of course when the whole thing went south, they disappeared.

So here's another similar suit, Various people v Bushmaster in which Bushmaster, a subsidiary of Remington, is being told that they should have known that Mrs. Lanza's son would steal the rifle and shoot his mother and everybody else at Newtown. A federal judge with a rather colorful reputation has kicked the case back to the state level where it is thought the plaintiffs will have a better chance of succeeding.

This is short term thinking. A good trial lawyer can give an after dinner talk at a club meeting, and in 10 minuted will have everyone in the room in tears over the injustice and abuse suffered by the chickens they just ate. On appeal, however, they do not get to try the same tactic in front of a superior court judge but rather are required to defend the fine points of the law. The 2005 Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act is pretty solid defense against charges of not being clairvoyant, and the plaintiffs attorneys must know this.

So what's to keep them from also being held liable for Bushmasters legal costs in this case?