RIFLEMAN'S JOURNAL - FEBRUARY 2010
I HAVE RETURNED.
Upon which I will now expound, and you may read between the lines as you wish.
I'm a recovering comicoholic. There are $tores I don't dare go into. But, during the blackout, I passed some unemployed time reading some borrowed material, Dark Horse Comics' Conan series and spinoffs. At the end of each issue was a short strip, "The Adventures of Two-Gun Bob: True Stories From the Life of Robert E. Howard." I found two of them particularly resonant:
"Life -- it's full of things that punish you fiercely and that you can't come to grips with. Punishment isn't so bad if you're handing it out at the same time. The other fellow may be strangling the life out of you, or ripping your ear off with his teeth, but if you're driving your knee into his groin, sinking your fists in his belly or have your thumb in his eye, you can stand the punishment. The hell of it comes when you're up against a battler you can't hit, or are licked and down in the muck with the other fellow stamping your guts out or grinding your face in with his hob-nails. That's life -- fighting shadows, taking lickings that you can't return."
REH letter to H. P. Lovecraft, ca. December 1930 - Robert E. Howard, Selected Letters, 1923-1930, Necronomicon Press, 1989
San Antonio, Texas, March 1931
"There's been a run of gangster pictures here. The pipple may be meek and law-abiding, but they sure whoop with glee every time a rod-man bumps off a copper on the screen. I think it's an unconscious vent to their resentment against the cops who herd them about in their every-day life."
REH letter to Tevis Clyde Smith, Jr., circa March 14, 1931 - unpublished
(Speaking of comics, heard on the 9 February edition of the Glenn Beck Program, yet another cultural icon subverted and inverted. Where's that Limbaugh quote... here. If they're going that way - which they are, with Spidey fist-bumping the Usurper and joining the UN - my comicoholism will be a lot easier to fight.)
Years ago I collected the paperbacks from local bookstores and read the original stories, and a few of the franchise follow-ons; I'm now reminded that one of my favorites was Poul Anderson's Conan the Rebel, in which the Cimmerian spoke to the effect of: "I have been in many civilized lands, and it is true they have much to offer; but always the price was having a state, and always that price was too high."
Me, I mind my own business. All I want is to be left alone. Would that others, self-soiling bigots groveling before the pagan altar of the Almighty State, were capable of this ancient and extinct courtesy.
The game is rigged. Can't win, can't break even. I'm getting out. I've been moaning of it for years, escaping to Wyoming or similarly less-oppressive lands. I'm motivated now more than ever. Thanks to the humbling generosity of my family and you my readers, I'm again attempting to set money aside for relocation, but harsh economic realities - not least an infestation of narcissist psychopaths in halls of power, national, state and local, methodically demolishing all that has made America function and prosper for a quarter-millenium - continue to delay my departure.
While waiting I also continued reading the 'blogsphere. Years ago my sister suggested that space exploration should be turned over to a Vegas developer. We'd have hotel-casinos in Luna City in two years. Great minds think alike. As for Tam's complaint, I've said, right here, some time ago, that the only way to save our future in space is to kill NASA and get government the hell out of the way. (I recommend Pournelle/Niven/Flynn's Fallen Angels. "Jenny's Song", an anti-government filkrant doubtless by Leslie Fish herself, appears in the last chapter - and remember Ms. Fish performed at Oleg Volk's birthday party with an L-frame on her hip; higher gunfolk cred there ain't. See also Flynn's Firestar series, including a distant fifth volume.)
Also re-watched Firefly/Serenity. First episode, 32:35: "That's what governments are for - get in a man's way." This nation was CREATED by anti-government extremists. No one seems to remember that.... It occurs to me that writing a Constitution is a lot like writing computer code: IF-THEN, GOTO, etc. Seriously folks, take a look. My latest adjustment was to yank the "general welfare" clauses and heap more restrictions on the list of Enumerated Powers. I think the Commerce Clause still needs work, or simple removal - lots of room there for damnfoolery. And the Necessary and Proper clause, and all the rest of that section. Government must be restrained.
New GREs, Pittsburgh and Tucson. Click here for links to all.
Quote o' the New Year: "We're not the Nazis, dipwad. We're the people hiding the Jews."
RKBA is not just for Americans.
From the second hour of the 7 February edition of Gun Talk, Quote o' the Month from Doug Ritter: "One of the things you'll often hear is, 'Ignorance of the law is no excuse.' Well it generally works for them." And that's not a new complaint.
I can't believe I hadn't yet linked VCDL from my front page. The spirits of Jefferson and Washington are not yet extinct.
Began volume 3 of Poul Anderson's Technic Civilization saga, Rise of the Terran Empire - his is different from mine. (Can't go wrong with Poul.) One can't be a writer without reading. -Tidbit, from Nicholas van Rijn in the novel Mirkheim, 1977, meshing with River Tam's condemnation of meddlers in the opening scenes of Serenity and my own too-personal experience: "The troublemakers, they are those what are not contented with God's gifts of good food, drink, music, women, profit. No, they bring on misery because they must play at being God themselves, they will be our Saviors with a capital ass." All we want is to be left alone. Crotalus rattles and no one bloody listens. Near the end of the same novel: "Autocrats, plutocrats, timocrats, bureaucrats, technocrats, democrats, they all tell everybody else at gunpoint what to do. We is bound into an age of crats." And: "It is not private outfits what fights wars and operates concentration camps, it is governments, because governments is those organizations what claims the right to kill whoever will not do what they say...."
2439 - Wednesday, 17 February 2010: My sleep cycle is way off so I'm up late watching DVDs and flipping pages of Poul and polishing more years-old segments of my own story. Here is the latest. There might be more.
This is the modern definition of "Protect and Serve". Here you have a tax-paid public "servant" advocating the premeditated murder of peaceable citizens. ...All these recent ambushes of cops; it's just the beginning. So far it's only the real crooks doing it, my people haven't joined the game yet. But those lying, theiving, raping, murdering thugs with badges are giving us cause. Police are on the wrong side. Police are the wrong side.
2440 - Thursday, 18 February 2010: The money hasn't run out yet. And there's head-noise, you can imagine, a lingering, ringing fury from which I must constantly distract myself. It's somewhat like being raped.
Email is behind of course. Speaking of head-noise, let me publicly thank all those who sent donations or messages of support. If I don't send you a personal message it's because you got lost in the static. You know who you are.
Spending too much time too close to the monitor, getting eye fatigue.
I let my club membership lapse during the situation and I'm probably not going to renew it - BoD politics and meddling were becoming offensive anyway. I do hope to attend matches there in future but I've had my fill of running one. Every month for three years (except one was snowed out).
I have seen this classic television program on library disc. People understood things back then. (Oleg still does of course.) What changed? Something like this I reckon.
Speaking of Only Ones, JPFO poll. See also.
WYOMING MOVES TOWARD "ALASKA CARRY". Not the first time they've leaned in this direction and another reason I didn't want to come back.
Public "servants" must be put back in their place. Hypocrisy seems too weak a term. And these scum think we're the ones who can't be trusted.
About this Journal... I type things up in a certain way, expecting my readers to Get It. But here are a couple web-browsing tips, for those who might not. On most modern computers with most modern web browsers (MSIE8, FF3.5, Opera10), if you hover the mouse over a link, the link itself will appear in the browser's status bar, usually near the top or bottom of the program's window, so you can often get some clue to what the link is about before clicking and spending bandwidth. Also, in those same browsers, with most modern mice, if you click with the scroll wheel, as a third button, it will open the link in a new tab without switching to it, so you can pop open several interesting-looking links for later viewing without interrupting your reading of the one they came from. Clicking on an open tab with the same scroll wheel will usually close that tab. (I'll often have dozens of tabs open in Opera for my daily trawl of 'blogs and webcomics.) I expect most of my readers to heave a mighty DUH over this but I have the nagging notion some weren't aware.
2441 - Friday, 19 February 2010: I guess I'll start pestering the temp service again Monday.
Actually it's not clear who that quote was from.
I never did much like Bill O'Reilly.
All we want is to be left alone.
2442 - Saturday, 20 February 2010: Trying to reset my sleep cycle.
In the stack is Ringo's latest, Live Free or Die - a book with that title, by that author, pretty much has to be something Our Kind would enjoy. Also it's described as a prequel to the universe of one of my favorite webcomics.
Science fiction... is often used to describe utopias, few of which would work in a real universe. Jerry Pournelle has been writing science fiction for a long time, and has been an actual rocket scientist besides - and he can make a more credible claim to the invention of the internet than a certain demagogue. His word has weight. Not long ago he pointed out, "Low cost energy and freedom builds economies." By happy coincidence, doubtless influenced over decades by Dr. Pournelle himself and his many colleagues, I have just that in my own story - all you need to run the family minivan (which happens to have a ceiling of 3,000 meters and a cruising speed of .5 Mach, unless you're in the middle class, in which case you can afford one of the new SSTO SUVs), or every electrical appliance in your home and then some, is sunlight and water - solar power to electrolyze hydrogen for a fuel cell or fusion pack, keep the oxygen for life support and/or as oxidizer for rocket thrust when applicable. (Does anyone not know that the Space Shuttle Main Engines run on disassembled water?) Solar is crawling, glacier-like, toward this level - prices are dropping at least - but alas fusion has been twenty years away for the last thirty years.... My point is, when ANYONE, for a relatively trivial capital investment (Mr. Fusion Home Energy Processor! SRSLY!), can completely remove themselves from the power grid - when a whole society doesn't need a power grid - when the energy required to run factories and machines and vehicles is dirt-cheap and nigh-inexhaustible - everything, from Valiant class strike cruisers and the occasional O'Neill cylinder down to the household ReCycLoMat and the 17THz handputer on your wrist, is cheaper and easier to build. Once you crack the cheap energy barrier everything changes. -Look at previous ages. We've gone from horse-and-buggy to practical household solar energy and instantaneous global communication in little more than a single human lifespan. When our grandparents were children they could not have imagined a fraction of the technologies, and resultant luxuries, we take for granted; they watched them come into being, one after another. The next hundred years, or even the next twenty, may see truly awesome advances...
...if government gets out of the cursed way.
Kurt Hoffman pointedly asks, "Do these people listen to themselves?" No. No they really don't.
2443 - Sunday, 21 February 2010: Yesterday's technorant explicitly mentions Flying Cars, and does include, by implication, Robot Butlers.
-I'm not so young; I remember when pocket calculators and digital watches were New and Wonderful and Cursed Expensive. Now anyone can get them at dollar stores. Today there's nary a household in the nation what doesn't have indoor plumbing, electric lights and appliances, telephone service, and probably a color TV.
Why? How do we get the greatest standard of living in all human history? Because someone was trying to make a buck off every one of those inventions. And because we had little enough government so they could. Then someone came along with a better way, faster, cheaper, easier to mass-produce - competition ensued, technologies advanced, the standard of living rose, again and again. And government stayed out of the way. That's how the system used to work, how it's supposed to work. And it worked well.
So when you find yourself well into the 21st Century and wonder, "Where's my flying car and robot butler?" - they're probably in a forgotten file in a locked cabinet in some government patent office, having been rejected for threatening the natural habitat of a stinging, disease-carrying insect, which no one cared about protecting until some union boss, whose particular applecart would have been upset by whatever invention, mentioned the problem to a congressional staffer over a four-figure five-martini tax-funded luncheon. That's how the system works now.
More on Montana and that Tenth Amendment Thingy.
2444 - Monday, 22 February 2010: Still trying to reset my sleep cycle. The money is good through March and possibly April if I'm careful. One advantage to living in a slum: low rent.
Lies, hysteria, hypocrisy and demagoguery on National Parks rule change. Codrea conveniently rounds up the relevant GREs.
TJ Quote: "Whensoever the General Government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force." That's how it's supposed to work. But before you go calling Old Tom naïve, remember he covered his bases.
Pournelle on education. Which is a big part of how we got into this mess.
System's broke. Mainly because it exists.
Deconstructing a mall-ninja. Just one aspect, full-auto, or rapid high-capacity semi: Looks like a lot of fun, but in peacetime is horribly expensive and during a Collapse is inexcusably wasteful. Were I to have an AR, I would have a stack of 30-round magazines - but I'd be aiming-and-squeezing, as I've learned in four Appleseeds and dozens of matches, not spraying-and-praying. "Load on Sunday and shoot all week month." I'm good with a rifle and I know it. I know I can hit stuff, far away, on purpose. Being poor makes one a better shot....
Speaking of being a better shot: "In the Mumbai terrorist attack aftermath, the Mumbai police blamed their poor performance on being out gunned by the terrorists who were using MP5s while they were using Lee-Enfield rifles." A rifle, nearly any rifle, in the hands of a rifleman, outguns any subliterate jihadi with a chopper. I know a SMLE fan on the other end of the continent who's probably looking up some Hindi cuss-words right now.... BTW there's a rapid-fire trick you can do with the SMLE: Hold the bolt handle with index finger and thumb and work the trigger with the middle finger. I've done it with dummy rounds, before I had to liquidate my Ishapores. Tommies learned this in WW1, much to the dismay of the Kaiser's men. And you can still aim. (Remember also that few repeating rifles require you to remove the butt from your shoulder when cycling. That's one of many important lessons in Cooper's The Art of the Rifle.)
Last night I watched the eighth Bond film, Live and Let Die. Set on a fictional Caribbean island, it featured third-world badgethugs as a wholly-owned subsidiary of the local heroin kingpin/tinpot dictator. The reason I mention this is, via WoG as usual, this recent tidbit from the unfortunately nonfictional tinpot dictatorship of New Jersey: "Sheriff Larkin is of course a mere piker compared to a Third World thug-with-a-badge, but he's clearly trying hard to catch up." "Few bad apples"? I don't think so. Between domestic badgethugs, and the aforementioned jihadis, there's less difference every day.
2445 - Tuesday, 23 February 2010: SMLE fan rants. Especially valid if the SMLEs in question were #4s, with the heavier barrel, aperture rear sight, and maximum sight radius. (The 7.62mm Ishapores, honestly, based on the #1MkIII with lighter barrels and 19th Century sights, were not the best rifles I've ever owned. Especially next to the Queen.)
St. Louis GRE illuminates blatant bigotry and racism.
Little bit of good news, Codrea & co. count as New Media.
Some of you will have heard that Cavalry Arms has been BATFU'd. Codrea is on the ball.
Olympics? I got that covered. And remember I first wrote that years ago.
2446 - Wednesday, 24 February 2010: The other day a reader commented on his own AR builds, noting that his 20" A2 was a big heavy beast with few advantages over a Real Battle Rifle. This got me thinking about 16" carbines after all, since the 5.56x45mm isn't a True Battle Rifle Cartridge anyway. One of the problems with the StubbyLittleCarbine is, the front sight (gas block) is set so far back from the muzzle, standard bayonets flop around on the lug (and the sight radius, too short already, is shortened further). But at the same time, there's a thread ("Kit advice") on the AR15-L list about building ARs. The consensus there is to buy from Del-Ton, and on their site I found their mid-length 16" kit, which addresses this problem by moving the gas block forward so the distance to the muzzle matches the 20" - thus one can mount a standard bayonet and get a couple more inches of sight radius. Hmm. But, in the neighborhood of $500, that's not happening soon, and then there's the question of the lower (and the buttstock - for some reason I don't like the standard telescoping type, though I have no experience with them; more moving parts, more things to go wrong - and no place to pack the cleaning kit and spare parts).
...Now when will someone offer a gas block way out on the end for maximum sight radius, and a bayonet lug the appropriate distance aft? This would cost one the ability to launch NATO-standard 22mm rifle grenades though. Or is there a pressure/timing issue and the port has to be a certain distance aft of the muzzle? Fine, put a cut-down block with lug the correct distance aft of the flash hider and a front sight as far out as it will go.
(To quote myself: "A rifle without a bayonet is like a cat without claws. It just ain't natural.")
"The state tends to expand in proportion to its means of existence and to live beyond its means, and these are, in the last analysis, nothing but the substance of the people. Woe to the people that cannot limit the sphere of action of the state! Freedom, private enterprise, wealth, happiness, independence, personal dignity, all vanish." - French economist Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850)
(See also: "He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.")
"People unfit for freedom -- who cannot do much with it -- are hungry for power. The desire for freedom is an attribute of a 'have' type of self. It says: leave me alone and I shall grow, learn, and realize my capacities. The desire for power is basically an attribute of a 'have not' type of self." - writer and philosopher Eric Hoffer (1902-1983)
All we want is to be left alone. Government must be restrained.
Brady's own numbers say, More Guns, Less Crime. [pointing] Hah-hah! See also Seattle GRE.
Stossel 'blogs. Have I linked that before?
Pro-RKBA editorial from Washington Times.
"When seconds count, cops are only minutes away." Now watch the citizen get jailed for assault and roughed up by the Only Ones on principle.
The birth certificate question still isn't going away.
Codrea points out the never-ending stream of show-biz hypocrisy.
Reason on Cuba, and the decline of a magazine which was once worth actually reading.
Lasers... I've never used one, but I've seen some folks try to in competition, specifically the steel plate match. It slows them down. While they're gyrating their pistol about, hunting for the dot, the guy in the other lane has finished his run, safed & cased his weapon, and the next shooter is walking up to the line. And what do you do when the battery dies and you don't know how to use those sight-thingies?
Via WoG, you may recall Steve Lee, the Aussie musician who was less clear than he should have been about his position on RKBA. He's been chewed up and spat out.
Fourth Amendment repealed? (Read it....) "There is no advantage in cooperating with the Japanese police. A man obeys all the Japanese laws government decrees. When he's taken at random and shot, his next-door neighbor will think, 'It does a man no good to obey.' He might as well die fighting."
2447 - Thursday, 25 February 2010: GOOD COP. Astonishing for his rarity. Do click through for the local editorial and poll.
Census workers will be violating your privacy any week now. Here is an interesting video (5m, 18Mb) suggesting what to do about it.
Right above where it says "Latest Headlines" you'll see a three-color icon. It's greyed out when there's nothing to download. When it lights up, there will be a pulldown with the little black triangle to the right. Here you can choose the plain filename.flv, or if available, YouTube high-res versions marked [HQ18], [HQ22], [HQ35], etc. (Some of these will save as .MP4 instead of .FLV, but VLC will play them all.) You'll also notice another such icon right below the YouTube logo but I don't bother with that, it seems to not offer the high-res options. The nice bit is: ONCE THE DOWNLOAD HAS BEGUN, it continues in it's own window and you can close the Firefox tab, or the entire browser, without interrupting the download. So, rather than using the old dialup start-and-pause trick, or staring at the screen waiting for something to happen, I start the download and go do something else. If you have enough bandwidth you can get several downloads going at once, though you have to configure Download Helper to allow that as opposed to one at a time - to do that, just right-click on the three-color icon and choose Preferences.
Download Helper works with most internet video sources, not just YouTube. Usually, if the video doesn't start playing in the browser automatically, you'll have to tell it to play to get the DH icon to light up - then you can start the download and close the original tab.
Catchy new phrase, "law pollution".
There have been whiffs of something not right at FrontSight. I dunno about that, but Charlotte GRE Paul Valone has been there.
From Denver GRE, more on a teacher who actually cares about his students. Like cops who don't break their oaths, a vanishing breed.
And cops say we're the ones who can't be trusted. >:-[
With some trepidation, I watched the film United 93. One can never know what really happened in the passenger cabin, but one cannot miss the lesson: Terrorists Prefer Unarmed Victims. We know how to solve the problem.
2448 - Friday, 26 February 2010: And the solution does not involve herds of bigoted, strutting, brutal, inevitably-corrupt cops. More on New Orleans, and lying murderous cops, from Seattle GRE, St. Louis GRE, Codrea's National GRE with more on O'Reilly, and Xavier Thoughts. Never trust a cop of any kind.
Not least because they're criminally incompetent. How do these doofi manage to pull on their own jackboots every morning?
How they see us. Read carefully, especially the end. Such bigots cannot be reasoned with. Their minds don't work right.
Confirmation of three CMP Garand matches at the club-I'm-no-longer-a-member-of this year, first 29 May, all the longer four-stage Course B with a 20-shot slow-prone stage. I see, with the settling of other's statistics, I'm now #89 in the nation, out of roughly 5,500. I'm expecting one more CMP JCG match at Lone Oak sometime this year as well but no word on that yet. In the other hand, three IPSC shoots at Wolverton, first 25 April. I'm going to need more ammunition.
2449 - Saturday, 27 February 2010: It's an unholy hour of the morning (my sleep cycle has been really screwed the past six weeks) and I simply must transcribe a bit of John Ringo's Live Free or Die:
"Getting [an ordinary Earth commodity of surprising value to certain aliens] is hard and the people that collect it... don't respond well to threats. That's what I'll tell your corporate people. What they then do about that is up to them. But if the Horvath think we're just going to cough it up.... They're wrong."
"They'll bomb your cities if you don't," Wathaet pointed out.
"Don't care for cities, neither," Mr. Haselbauer said. "Where do you think Revenuers come from?"
Republitarian curmudgeons will like this book.
Codrea spells it out.
There are so many crooked, lawbreaking, oathbreaking, perverted, and/or simply incompetent cops, Codrea's having to report them in batches.
If I lived in Arizona I'd vote for this man.
2450 - Sunday, 28 February 2010: Celebrate the 57th anniversary of Stalin's death!
Finished LFoD, starting Virginia DeMarce's 1635: The Tangled Web, latest in Flint & everybody's 1632 Saga.
Media bias, chapter CMXXXII.
In Kansas City, MO, cops enable a serial rapist. -Based on fistfuls of reports of rapist cops (just click on yesterday's "batches", and tune in to WoG every day for more than you can stomach), and bushels of reports of cops's crimes being swept under the rug, I'd say there's a real chance it's one of their own and they know it.
Via GR4U, Vin Suprynowicz on the tax kamikaze. Hmm.
Dr. Pournelle has studied many things, including psychology. What I take from his latest post is yet another of the many dangers of not separating medicine and state. The Soviets, the National Socialists, and most other oppressive regimes in history used dictated diagnoses from lapdogs, or simply whipped dogs, to destroy individuals and entire classes, and to consolidate their power. It can happen here.
I have got to get out of this filthy city because people like these do not exist here in meaningful numbers. Most are sheep who would cheerfully help each other into the cattle cars.
(I'm still ticked at Herman Wouk's character Aaron Jastrow....)
And that's not counting the ones I already have in the library hold queue, such as:
Most of these are from Baen of course.
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