Since saying "Getting old sucks" would make me feel worse,

I'll just say I don't recover as fast as I used to.

If I hadn't decided before this fair to tell the director this was my last one, the way I feel now would make me call her. All I did yesterday was unload and put stuff away, but my hands are still aching. Combine the touch of arthritis with hammering & tonging and cold and high winds... damn.

You know, stop doing something because you're tired of it, you're done, whatever, is one thing; having to stop because the body doesn't handle the stress well anymore, well, that just sucks.

Yes, I am bitching and whining about it.

I'm going to keep doing some smithing, as time & conditions allow, but the heavy stuff is either going to be few & far between, or only if I can get someone to use the sledge to help out; which means no more damascus, unless it's little billets.

Back to the weather, it was a hard freeze last night. I think I've lost one pepper and maybe two tomatoes over the last week or so; one of the tomatoes may not be dead, I'll give it a couple of days to see. It warmed up into the low 60's today, and is supposed to be warmer the next couple of days; no more freezes in sight according to the weather weenies. And today some visitors showed up in numbers:
The hollies were flat alive with them. Last year didn't see many, but they seem to be back. Which is nice, since they seem to have a home somewhere that does not involve my house. In a hive out back, sure, but not in the wall or something.

I cleaned and oiled the leather yesterday, and wiped all the blades with Eezox, so I need to put all that stuff up. Amuse yourselves while I'm gone.

Under the heading of "Law Enforcement-

Sorry Excuse For" Tam points out a slight problem with the "Trust the cops to save you! YOU don't need a gun!" attitude: that the cops sometimes get there in time, but don't do the damned job. And points to some words by Steyn on the subject.

One receptionist was killed, while the other, shot in the abdomen, pretended to be dead and then crawled under a desk and called 911, he said.

Police said they arrived within two minutes...

Police heard no gunfire after they arrived but waited for about an hour before entering the building to make sure it was safe for officers.

'Safe for officers'. The ones with the guns we're supposed to trust to save us. Like the tactical teams at Columbine, armed with everything short of RPGs, standing around making plans until all the dying was over.

As Tam notes, if you don't want me to be able to shoot the bad guy, but you're not going to do it either, why the hell are we paying you? If we want spectators to a gory sight, the media does that for free.

By the way, if Al Gore shows his fat hypocritical ass around here,

I’ll light him up.

Global warming my ass. Usually, between about mid-March to mid-April we’ll have one or two real freezes to contend with; the hard freeze warning for tonight makes about six in this period this year. Despite being covered I lost some tomatoes and peppers in the garden, and I may lose the others tonight since they’re talking about mid-twenties in this area.

This keeps up, we’ll have to render him down for oil to keep the lamps burning.

Yes, that IS a dirk in my kilt

but I am glad to see you. (some of you, anyway)

Fair’s over. Yesterday being cold and windy enough to make me glad. Even for Oklahoma, the winds the last while have been downright nasty; I’m going to have to do some work on my carport when things calm down a bit(assuming they do; there’s a scary thought).

Some guy from Los Angeles, here for the first time, was setting up Thursday and went by the fair office to ask when the wind would die down; the look on his face when they told him “It may ease off some, but they’re predicting they’ll be like this through most of the weekend” was startling. We’re used to this crap coming around at times, but the last thing he said as he went back to finish setup was “And people talk about earthquakes in LA…”

The whole weekend, one of the big requests for every blacksmith out there was tent stakes, big ones. Problems multiplied because a lot of people had the pop-up tents/sunshades for their shop; nice when it’s mild but not rigid enough to stand up to bad winds. Stake them down well enough to not blow away and they just might pop rivets through the aluminum, or buckle and collapse. Not fun at all.

Most people made it through the weekend ok, but some did give up, either would not/could not keep set up without a tent or- on Sunday when it had turned cold- unable/unwilling to deal with the combination of 30’s & 40’s combined with strong winds gusting into the high 30’s—low 40’s. And be it said that was downright nasty, the winds strong and gusting enough that I didn’t even light the forge. And enough dust and grass in the air to screw with everybody’s sinuses and mess up the place.

I told the fair director Friday that this was my last Med-Fair as demonstrating smith; my hands are bothering me enough to make heavy or long hammering a problem, so it’s time. She, and the other people who make the thing run, have been very good to work with over the years, and I’ll miss doing this. I’ve flat loved it; having someone, patron or vendor, come by and say “Can you make/fix this?”, and turning to the forge and making or repairing or modifying it. Tent stakes, display stands and poles, small tools, a belt buckle, and other stuff someone needs.

Not too many pictures this time. I wrote a few months ago about Fenris having died; his people brought out one of his descendants, Mordred, to see how he’d like the place.
Pretty well as it turned out. Especially the introduction to Scotch eggs.

Rachel Lucas would like the place, because there's dog abuse

Some of the cultural exhibits are always nice

And the interesting contrasts: “Arrh, I be a fierce pirate
with a little bitty dog.”
So this year’s done. May be one of the volunteers next year, helping people set up and such. We’ll see.

Long couple of days,

and tomorrow's the last of the fair. Windy and cool Friday, windy and warm today, supposed to be windy and chilly to cold tomorrow. But dry; it does make a big difference.

My story for the day:
Was heading to check with a friend on something when saw one lady digging in another ladies' pocket; not an easy task as tight as the shorts were. Pulled out a phone as I walked up and said "Here now, what's going on here?"

"I was getting her phone!"

"A likely story!"

She put an arm around her friend's shoulder and said "Well, you know, I can't control myself at times."

I leaned over and said "Guess what?" and put an arm around her.

"What?"

"I don't have any pockets."

I think I may have permanently lost some of my remaining upper register.

Not much blogging for the next couple of days,

busy with Med-Fair stuff. Report and- hopefully- pictures later on.

I have to make note of Mrs. Lucas' post on the

Obamas Greeting The Queen mess. First, in comments I'd pointed out that if there'd been any question about proper protocol, there's a bunch of people in the .gov who do nothing but keep track of such things. Shortly thereafter a gent called Subotai said
First, I will agree with Firehand; there is a State Department Office of Protocol in the White House itself. They have been handling the whole gift and receptions thing for two hundred years. They know what they are doing, and the only way that the ongoing fiascos have been occurring is because Hussein Pasha has been deliberately over-ruling them. This is a series of deliberate slights, which can be compared with the grovelling he has been doing to our enemies. Make whatever assumptions you want to make about our future with that information.
Snort. Snorkle. HAHASHAHAH, Hussein Pasha. I'm going to have to remember that.

But back to business: today she has this post as followup, and it includes this from a link:
According to a person close to the situation, Obama hasn’t yet appointed a chief of protocol and his staffers, still unpacking, didn’t realize that the State Department has an entire office dedicated to foreign visits.
People, I'm a dumbass in Oklahoma with an electronic soapbox to say this from, and I KNEW THAT. This clown and his minions have been in politics for years, including a few days in the U.S. Senate, and none of them were aware of this?

It boggles the mind, truly it does.

The Mexican Gun Lie is finally being talked about as such

in a major media outlet.
There's just one problem with the 90 percent "statistic" and it's a big one:

It's just not true.

In fact, it's not even close. The fact is, only 17 percent of guns found at Mexican crime scenes have been traced to the U.S.

What's true, an ATF spokeswoman told FOXNews.com, in a clarification of the statistic used by her own agency's assistant director, "is that over 90 percent of the traced firearms originate from the U.S."
...
But a large percentage of the guns recovered in Mexico do not get sent back to the U.S. for tracing, because it is obvious from their markings that they do not come from the U.S.

"Not every weapon seized in Mexico has a serial number on it that would make it traceable, and the U.S. effort to trace weapons really only extends to weapons that have been in the U.S. market," Matt Allen, special agent of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), told FOX News.
...
Ed Head, a firearms instructor in Arizona who spent 24 years with the U.S. Border Patrol, recently displayed an array of weapons considered "assault rifles" that are similar to those recovered in Mexico, but are unavailable for sale in the U.S.

"These kinds of guns -- the auto versions of these guns -- they are not coming from El Paso," he said. "They are coming from other sources. They are brought in from Guatemala. They are brought in from places like China. They are being diverted from the military. But you don't get these guns from the U.S."

Some guns, he said, "are legitimately shipped to the government of Mexico, by Colt, for example, in the United States. They are approved by the U.S. government for use by the Mexican military service. The guns end up in Mexico that way -- the fully auto versions -- they are not smuggled in across the river."

Many of the fully automatic weapons that have been seized in Mexico cannot be found in the U.S., but they are not uncommon in the Third World.
...
The exaggeration of United States "responsibility" for the lawlessness in Mexico extends even beyond the "90-percent" falsehood -- and some Second Amendment activists believe it's designed to promote more restrictive gun-control laws in the U.S.

In a remarkable claim, Auturo Sarukhan, the Mexican ambassador to the U.S., said Mexico seizes 2,000 guns a day from the United States -- 730,000 a year. That's a far cry from the official statistic from the Mexican attorney general's office, which says Mexico seized 29,000 weapons in all of 2007 and 2008.

Chris Cox, spokesman for the National Rifle Association, blames the media and anti-gun politicians in the U.S. for misrepresenting where Mexican weapons come from.

"Reporter after politician after news anchor just disregards the truth on this," Cox said. "The numbers are intentionally used to weaken the Second Amendment."

"The predominant source of guns in Mexico is Central and South America. You also have Russian, Chinese and Israeli guns. It's estimated that over 100,000 soldiers deserted the army to work for the drug cartels, and that ignores all the police. How many of them took their weapons with them?"

But, of course, the VPC and other gun ban groups have an answer:
But Tom Diaz, senior policy analyst at the Violence Policy Center, called the "90 percent" issue a red herring and said that it should not detract from the effort to stop gun trafficking into Mexico.

"Let's do what we can with what we know," he said. "We know that one hell of a lot of firearms come from the United States because our gun market is wide open."
Ok, so a 'wide open' market is one covered by thousands of federal, state and local laws? And, even though guns from the US are not the problem, we should still screw the 2nd Amendment so we can say "We're Doing Something!!!"? And please note the bullcrap statement "We know that one hell of a lot of firearms come from the United States"; ignore the ones legally exported to the Mexican government and blame 'gun shops along the border; utter garbage, but he'll repeat it endlessly. Because it helps his position, even though it's a lie.

Hell with tar & feathers, the Obama Youth Bill

calls for breaking out the ropes. And dragging people to lampposts. This piece of crap is called the Generations Invigorating Volunteerism and Education Act, which by itself sounds like something that came out of Castro's Cuba or Mao's China.

Is this the change you really voted for? President Obama has only been in office for two months. Now we have HR 1388. The Bill was sponsored by Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D-NY) with 37 others. The Bill was introduced to the floor of the House of Representatives where both Republicans and Democrats voted 321-105 in favor. Next it goes to the Senate for a vote and then on to President Obama.
...
Here is part of the HR1388 Bill’s wording:

SEC. 1304. PROHIBITED ACTIVITIES AND INELIGIBLE ORGANIZATIONS.

Section 125 (42 U.S.C. 12575) is amended to read as follows:

SEC. 125. PROHIBITED ACTIVITIES AND INELIGIBLE ORGANIZATIONS.

(a) Prohibited Activities- A participant in an approved national service position under this subtitle may not engage in the following activities:

(1) Attempting to influence legislation.

(2) Organizing or engaging in protests, petitions, boycotts, or strikes.
…

(7) Engaging in religious instruction, conducting worship services, providing instruction as part of a program that includes mandatory religious instruction or worship, constructing or operating facilities devoted to religious instruction or worship, maintaining facilities primarily or inherently devoted to religious instruction or worship, or engaging in any form of religious proselytization.

Get the lead sponsor: McCarthy, the "Ban all guns for the CHILDRENNN!" leader in the house. Please note, miserable excuses for Americans in both parties voted for this unconstitutional garbage, and should be held responsible for it.

Xavier pointed out a piece on 'Cop Attackers &

Their Weapons', well worth reading. Couple of excerpts:
Among other things, the data reveal that most would-be cop killers:

• show signs of being armed that officers miss;
• have more experience using deadly force in “street combat” than their intended victims;
• practice with firearms more often and shoot more accurately;
• have no hesitation whatsoever about pulling the trigger. "If you hesitate," one told the study’s researchers, "you’re dead. You have the instinct or you don’t. If you don’t, you’re in trouble on the street..."...

...
Several of the offenders began regularly to carry weapons when they were 9 to 12 years old, although the average age was 17 when they first started packing "most of the time." Gang members especially started young.

Nearly 40% of the offenders had some type of formal firearms training, primarily from the military. More than 80% "regularly practiced with handguns, averaging 23 practice sessions a year," the study reports, usually in informal settings like trash dumps, rural woods, back yards and "street corners in known drug-trafficking areas."

One spoke of being motivated to improve his gun skills by his belief that officers "go to the range two, three times a week [and] practice arms so they can hit anything."

In reality, victim officers in the study averaged just 14 hours of sidearm training and 2.5 qualifications per year. Only 6 of the 50 officers reported practicing regularly with handguns apart from what their department required, and that was mostly in competitive shooting. Overall, the offenders practiced more often than the officers they assaulted, and this "may have helped increase [their] marksmanship skills," the study says.
And, as if it weren't known already,
Predominately handguns were used in the assaults on officers and all but one were obtained illegally, usually in street transactions or in thefts. In contrast to media myth, none of the firearms in the study was obtained from gun shows. What was available "was the overriding factor in weapon choice," the report says. Only 1 offender hand-picked a particular gun "because he felt it would do the most damage to a human being."

Researcher Davis, in a presentation and discussion for the International Assn. of Chiefs of Police, noted that none of the attackers interviewed was "hindered by any law--federal, state or local--that has ever been established to prevent gun ownership. They just laughed at gun laws."

Thanks to Xavier for pointing to this.

Let's be plain and call it the 'Mexican Gun Lie', as this post

Sondra points to makes even futher note of:
Gents, thanks for a fine article. However, with regard to weaponry coming from the US, please be advised that Rocket Propelled Grenades (RPGs) used by the Cartels are made in the PRC and former Combloc countries and not in the USA.

Also the grenades found in the US coming from Mexico are of Chinese or Combloc origin. many of the small arms, like fully automatic AK-47s are illegal in the USA and come from China or former Combloc nations. They should not be confused with the semi-auto look-alike weapons made and sold in the USA which are of no use to the Cartels as they are not machine guns. They are merely ugly like their military ancestors but are no different in action than a semi-auto hunting rifle sold at Big-5 or Oshman's and of far less power.

Fully automatic M16s, while made in the USA (or abroad under license) are military weapons sold to approved by State Dept. military units and governments abroad, then stolen and smuggled in to Mexico and elsewhere. Automatic weapons are not available in the USA over the counter and require paperwork, background checks, huge fees and approval and subsequent regular inspections of the privately-owned arm by BATF. BATF has not reported thefts or loss of personally owned Class III (Full auto selective fire). BATF should be able to provide you back-trace information proving that the weapons seized in Mexico, while made here or abroad under license, were stolen from the end-user, illegally acquired and smuggled in to Mexico by the Cartels from elsewhere than the US.
Which last would require the Mexican government to give us the serial numbers of the stuff they claim were legally bought in the US and smuggled to Mexico, and for some reason they don't want to do that...

Two pieces on the Mexican Gun Canard

First, from Salon of all places:

And yet, let's take a closer look at those guns...

On night patrol in Reynosa in November, soldiers came upon some suspicious men, who led them to a house that was packed with armaments for the drug cartels -- 540 rifles, 165 grenades, 500,000 rounds of ammunition and 14 sticks of dynamite. [...]

The war analogy is not a stretch for parts of Mexico. Soldiers, more than 40,000 of them, are confronting heavily armed paramilitary groups on city streets. The military-grade weapons being used, antitank rockets and armor-piercing munitions, for example, are the same ones found on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Are these being bought at gun shows in the U.S.? Unlikely.
...
Bill Conroy at NarcoNews has done excellent reporting on the drug war and gets to the bottom of this in Legal U.S. Arms Exports May Be Source of Narco Syndicates' Rising Firepower

The Obama administration is now sending hundreds of additional federal agents to the border in an effort to interdict this illegal arms smuggling to reassure an agitated middle-America that Uncle Sam will get these bad guys. The cascade of headlines from mainstream media outlets printing drug-war pornography assures us in paragraphs inserted between the titillation that the ATF's Operation Gunrunner and other similar get-tough on gun-seller programs will save America from the banditos of Mexico.

But in reality, while the main weapons are getting to the cartels from the U.S., they're not being smuggled into Mexico, and so no interdiction efforts will help.

The deadliest of the weapons now in the hands of criminal groups in Mexico, particularly along the U.S. border, by any reasonable standard of an analysis of the facts, appear to be getting into that nation through perfectly legal private-sector arms exports, measured in the billions of dollars, and sanctioned by our own State Department. These deadly trade commodities -- grenade launchers, explosives and "assault" weapons --are then, in quantities that can fill warehouses, being corruptly transferred to drug trafficking organizations via their reach into the Mexican military and law enforcement agencies, the evidence indicates.

That's right, the ultimate source of the guns used by the cartels in Mexico? The U.S. government.
And remember the word about serial numbers?
Conroy follows the trail of the shipments of legal guns to Mexico, noting that while these weapons could be traced...

But that assumes the Mexican government, and our own government, really want to trace those weapons. A November 2008 report in the San Antonio Express News, which includes details of the major weapons seizure in Reynosa, Mexico, that same month involving the Zetas, reveals the following:

Another example of coordination problems occurred this month. Mexican authorities in Reynosa across the border from McAllen, seized the country's single largest stash of cartel weapons -- nearly 300 assault rifles, shoulder-fired grenade launchers and a half million rounds of ammunition.

But weeks later, Mexican authorities still have not allowed the ATF access to serial numbers that would help them track down the buyers and traffickers on the U.S. side.

[...] A former DEA agent, who also asked not to be named, says the shipment of military-grade weapons to the Mexican government under the DCS program, given the extent of corruption within that government, is essentially like "shipping weapons to a crime syndicate."

Add to that all the stuff mentioned in the LA Times article on smuggling across Mexico's southern border and on the coasts... As the Armed Schooleacher puts it,
This newest gambit is basically the same idea wrapped in a tortilla. It only sounds scary until you think it through; if you were a leader in a Mexican cartel with access to rifles, ammunition, grenades and RPG's from Mexican military arsenals, M16 rifles and ammunition from scavengers all over South America who have old American military exports to sell on the cheap, and a dozen other sources . . . would you be sending people to gun shows in Tucson and Albuqurque to find someone with a clean background check to buy a few semi-automatic rifles and then try to smuggle them south? When it fails, it'll end up the same way as The Terrorist CanardTM did--forgotten once it's no longer useful as a club to bea gun owners over the head.

Thanks to Uncle for the links.