Mr. Browning, we salute you

and the works you created.
The man was John Moses Browning. Eighty-five years ago today he died. Eighty-five years after his death, the most elite counterterrorist groups in the U.S.A. are still using his pistols, and the most advanced main battle tank in the world still has a machinegun he designed over ninety years ago mounted above the commander's hatch.

It would not be an exaggeration to divide the world of metallic cartridge firearms to the periods "Before Browning" and "After Browning". This is the guy who invented the slide on the automatic pistol.

I guess 'Queers for Palistine' was sufficiently stupid and progressive

that someone wanted to get more, ah, 'exclusively' into the act:
Schulman, it should be said, is making something of a hobby of being a leading member of what has to be the rather small club of “Jewish lesbians for Palestine.”
That level of stupid SHOULD hurt. The gentleman made her an offer:
Professor Schulman, if you happen to read this, I have an offer for you: I will pay for your ticket to Israel and accommodations, if you will agree to live among your “progressive” allies as an openly gay Jewish woman in Gaza for one month. But my offer is a bit disingenuous, because it’s very unlikely that I would need to pay out for more than a one-way ticket, and a few days of accommodations.


Speaking of things touching on the Religion of Submission,
A Muslim Brotherhood rally in Cairo's most prominent mosque Friday turned into a venomous anti-Israel protest, with attendants vowing to "one day kill all Jews."

Some 5,000 people joined the rally, called to promote the "battle against Jerusalem's Judaization." The event coincided with the anniversary of the United Nations' partition plan in 1947, which called for the establishment of a Jewish state.
Yeah. Because Jews had nothing to do with Jerusalem before 1947...
And I notice they didn't restrict themselves to 'all Jews in the Mideast' or something, they said ALL Jews.


I'd call the War on Drugs a total failure solely because of crap like this:
Several NYPD officers have alleged that in some precincts, police officers are asked to meet quotas for drug arrests. Former NYPD narcotics detective Stephen Anderson recently testified in court that it's common for cops in the department to plant drugs on innocent people to meet those quotas -- a practice for which Anderson himself was then on trial.
...
Asset forfeiture not only encourages police agencies to use resources and manpower on drug crimes at the expense of violent crimes, it also provides an incentive for police agencies to actually wait until drugs are on the streets before making a bust. In a 1994 study reported in Justice Quarterly, criminologists J. Mitchell Miller and Lance H. Selva watched several police agencies delay busts of suspected drug dealers in order to maximize the cash the department could seize. A stash of illegal drugs isn't of much value to a police department. Letting the dealers sell the drugs first is more lucrative.

Earlier this year, Nashville's News 5 ran a report on how police in Tennessee are pulling over suspected drug dealers and seizing their cash along I-40, often without bothering to make an arrest. The station combed through police reports showing that officers spent 10 times as long policing the side of the interstate where a drug runner would be leaving after he sold his supply -- and thus would be flush with sizable amounts of cash -- than on the side where he was likely to be flush with drugs. The police were letting the drugs be sold in order to get their hands on the cash.
This is just as much corruption as if the cops were getting cash from dealers to look the other way. Worse, because in that case the harm is more restricted; the WoD shit is hurting everyone.


When new rules refer to people as 'units' rather than patients, we're on a VERY bad path.




So what’s Conaway’s side of things, as a committed anti-gunner and as a beneficiary of being well-connected—aside from denial?
From his lawyer:

"When you have a situation where you have a Jewish victim and an African-American male, you have things happen differently than if it happened to be a regular case," he said. He suggested that "perhaps because of their commonality in their religion," State's Attorney Gregg L. Bernstein was handling the Conaway investigation differently

If I were the SA, I'd be jumping on this with both feet, and demanding the state bar nail the guy: accusing the SA of favorable treatment of one side seems a rather nasty thing.


And last, some thoughts on the Newly Released Climaquiddick: Part II e-mails, including

Yes, they’ve given us all the top-level conspiratorial correspondence between the likes of Jones, Trenberth, Hansen, Mann et al but these are the very people who simply must have been communicating upwards to senior political figures or at least their most trusted advisers. Think about it for a moment, do you seriously think the latter plough their way through huge turgid IPCC reports and then hammer out policy and approach from them? No, of course not. These missing emails are the real dynamite at the secret heart of this release of climategate. We do not have a single one of those high-level political emails but they must of course exist.

I strongly suspect we now have them in our possession.

From the viewpoint of the political establishment, the original climategate was probably viewed as a squabble about the details of a branch of science and it was strictly confined to the blogosphere, since it was never reported on by the mainstream media. It looked like a one-off, so there was no ongoing political liability to worry about. Release 2 changes things, both for the whistleblower and the parties involved in the political emails. I’ve no doubt that at the time of the first release, the “scientists” assured the politicians that no significant political emails had been compromised and after two years of complete silence, it looked to be so.

With release 2, all bets are off. The release of explicit emails between scientists and senior political figures conspiring to deceive the electorate would not only be politically terminal but would also have to be reported on in the mainstream media. There’d be no way of ignoring them.
...

The leaker’s solution to this problem, and I have to say it’s rather neat, is to release all the remaining material now. Release 2 contains the political emails and all it needs is the magic pass phrase to unmask them. It could be uttered at some phony trial on trumped-up charges, it could be uttered to a fellow prisoner, it could be disclosed to their lawyer. It could be left with a few trusted friends with instructions as to who to send it to if anything untoward should happen to them. Allowing for the very worst, it could even be in their last will and testament.

Not only will the pass phrase unlock all the encoded emails but it’ll confirm beyond any shadow of a doubt, that the person who knew it is the climategate leaker, even if they are sitting in a jail cell somewhere. In the parlance of cryptography, the pass phrase authenticates them.

Sort of a dead-man switch: 'Something happens to me, the password goes out and then..."

A comment on the Sci-Fi- excuse me 'SyFy' channel

Due to circumstances, watched parts of two 'made for!!' movies, and I've come to a conclusion:
To actually enjoy one of them, it helps if you're a scientific illiterate.

"The radiation increased in strength by 40 angstroms!" for Bleep's sake.

You should listen to this, Mr. Romney:

I often compare the relative intelligence of politicians to hemlock stumps. The stumps almost always come out ahead by a comfortable margin. At least when a stump takes a position, it maintains it.

From Gerry, in comments

I can't help it: not only is this a good cause on its own,

but it probably pisses off all the right people that this is out there.

People like Spann... this is like Soldier's Angels, if you can spare a bit, it's a good place to donate.

A cause to give to...

I'll throw in, there was something on the news the other night talking about all the businesses in/around downtown OKC that're taking big financial hits due to this: no game, lots of people don't come downtown and spend money. Considering the economy, it's business they really miss.

I have just eaten some of the best turkey I've ever cooked

I'd picked up a breast last week, figuring to cook it Thursday morning and have it and whatever else came to mind before work. Well, friends invited me to their house, which turned out to be a good thing, as the breast was still half-frozen. So I stuck it in the brine before heading to work and cooked it this afternoon.

The brine recipe is here, daughter strongly recommended it. I cut the amounts in half since didn't have a whole bird. Then, in the spirit of "Can't hurt" I sliced up a red bell pepper, crushed two big garlic cloves and found two more sprigs of rosemary and stuck them inside just before put it in the oven at 325.

Damn. Tender, not in the least dry, wonderful flavor. I'm going to do this again some time.

Jack Daniel's, I salute you

This is really cool

More on PATCON, and the OKC Bombing

over at SSI. I don't have time to really think about it right now(added to an achy head) so just the link for now.

Grant County District Attorney Lisa Riniker: a pustule on the ass

of humanity, and one of the reasons people hate lawyers:
A 6-year-old Grant County boy has been accused of first-degree sexual assault after playing “doctor” with two 5-year-old friends. Now, a federal lawsuit has been filed against the prosecutor, who attorneys said is trying to force the boy to admit guilt.
...
In justification for the charge, Riniker is quoted in the lawsuit saying “the Legislature could have put an age restriction in the statute … the legislature did no such thing.”
So... just like federal prosecutors shouldn't be held responsible for violating the law unless a judge SPECIFICALLY orders them to obey it, the legislature can't expect prosecutors like Riniker to use whatever brain they have in some intelligent manner.

About those new Climaquiddick e-mails,

which I've been assured by someone will be just like the last ones and 'prove AGW', etc.:
From David Palmer to Phil Jones, regarding my FOI request, email #1184, April 2007 (emphasis mine):

Gents,

My head is beginning to spin here but I read this as meaning that he wants the raw station data; we don’t know which data belongs to which station, correct? Our letter stated:

“We can, however, send a list of all stations used, but without sources. This would include locations, names and lengths of record, although the latter are no guide as to the completeness of the series.”

Can we put this on the web? Perhaps I am being really thick here but I’m not sure if putting this on the web will actually satisfy Mr. Eschenbach - we’ve said we don’t have data sources, he says the external websites don’t have them, so who does? Are we back to the NMS’s? [National Meteorological Services -w.] I am happy to give this one more go, stating exactly what we are putting on the web and seeing if that suffices. Should Mr. Eschenbach still insist that we actually possess the information in the form he requests, I can then only give the file to Kitty Inglis for review and then we move on formally….

Cheers, Dave

Dave is right, there’s yer problem. “We don’t know which data belongs to which station, correct?”. That’s staggering, it’s gotta be in the running for some kind of truth in advertising award. Shame he wasn’t that honest with me. Instead, he worked hard to obscure that fact.

One of the things that's bothered me- a LOT- about this crap is the number of people I know who're willing to dismiss things like this because "AGW is REAL, and Things Must Be Done!" They'll overlook severe violations of scientific method and ethics, they're quite happy to see people smeared for simply asking inconvenient questions. Disturbing, at the least.

And they're apparently not bothered in the least by these clowns treating data from publicly-funded research as personal property:
<2440> Jones: I’ve been told that IPCC is above national FOI Acts. One way to cover yourself and all those working in AR5 would be to delete all emails at the end of the process
Isn't THAT a wonderful thing to read from a scientist?

And Happy Thanksgiving to you all!

That I know people who'd probably make excuses for this

is really disturbing.
A father accused of killing his three teenage daughters and his first wife was recorded voicing his disgust with his "treacherous" daughters and saying he would kill them again even if they came back to life a hundred times. The wiretap evidence was played at the trial of Mohammad Shafia, who is being tried along with his second wife and their 20-year-old son for the four murders, the Daily Mail reports. The victims and suspects, recent immigrants to Canada from Afghanistan, all lived together in a polygamous household.

And Holder and Obama and Napolitano and Mueller armed them...

Five illegal immigrants armed with at least two AK-47 semi-automatic assault rifles were hunting for U.S. Border Patrol agents near a desert watering hole known as Mesquite Seep just north of the Arizona-Mexico border when a firefight erupted and one U.S. agent was killed, records show.

A now-sealed federal grand jury indictment in the death of Border Patrol agent Brian A. Terry says the Mexican nationals were “patrolling” the rugged desert area of Peck Canyon at about 11:15 p.m. on Dec. 14 with the intent to “intentionally and forcibly assault” Border Patrol agents.
Yeah, not wanting this to get out might explain why this was suddenly sealed, maybe?

On the subject of Gunwalker,
Mr. Moran said he understood the “rationale of working things up the food chain,” as suggested in the Fast and Furious probe, but had no idea how ATF planned to arrest cartel members who ultimately purchased the weapons since the agency lacks jurisdiction south of the border and never advised Mexican authorities about the operation.

“It was a ridiculous idea from the beginning, and it baffles us on how it was ever approved,” he said.
Mr. Moran, you're not considering something: it's only ridiculous if you think it was actually intended as a 'catch bad guys' law-enforcement operation: if you look at it as a 'get guns illegally to Mexico so we can push for more gun laws' it was working great. Until some agents with some integrity and a conscience blew the whistle.

I don't remember reading what arms the team Terry was on were carrying, which is what makes this catch my attention:
Mr. Moran also challenged the use of less-than-lethal s in the shooting incident, saying field agents have been “strong-armed” by the agency’s leadership to use nonlethal weapons. He said they were not appropriate for the incident in which Terry was killed.

“That was no place for beanbag rounds,” he said, noting that the encounter was at least 12 miles inside the U.S. and was carried out by armed men looking specifically to target Border Patrol agents.

CBP has said Terry and the agents with him carried fully loaded sidearms, along with two additional magazines, and were not under orders to use nonlethal ammunition first.
So they only had shotguns- loaded with fucking beanbags- and sidearms? No rifles? In that area? And whose bright God-damned idea was that?
Several of the incursions occurred in the same area where Terry was killed, including a 2005 incident in which two agents were shot and wounded by assailants dressed in black commando-type clothing in what law-enforcement authorities said was a planned ambush. More than 50 rounds were fired at the agents after they spotted the suspected gunmen.

At this point I'm getting so damned mad at the fucking idiots running the Border Patrol it's hard to think straight about this. So the teams are being sent into known dangerous areas with orders to use beanbags first- against people with rifles- and no rifles of their own?
And the miserable little shits who thought up Fast & Furious, and the bastard little order-followers like Newell who ran it day-to-day, helped put arms in the hands of the bad guys.

We need a damned gallows for these people.

I read some lines in a Pratchett book, and for some reason

I tend to think of Congress
"But it's immoral earnings!" said Polly, and then felt a complete fool for saying it.

"No," said Jackrum. "It WAS immoral earnings, NOW it's the proceeds of common theft. Life's a lot easier when you learns to think straight."

So someone dumped a whole bunch of new Climategate e-mails

and they're being gone through; to borrow
Climategate 2.0 emails – They’re real and they’re spectacular!
I'm only going to excerpt one thing:
UPDATE 12: 9:30 PM PST We’ve known for some time that Al Gore made up a bunch of claims in his AIT movie that simply weren’t true. Now this revelation in the new email batch shows that in the case of Kilimanjaro’s disappearing snows, even Phil Jones and Dr. Lonnie Thompson don’t believe global warming is the cause, even though Thompson put out a press release nearly a year ago saying just that. Told ya so. Pants on fire and all that. Anything for “the cause” right?

And now, it having become a fine, sunny day, I'm going out to do some stuff that involves being in the sun a bit.

Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) does her "It's BUSH'S FAULT!" duty

to try to protect Holder & Obama.


Few years back I read a piece on the subject of "Women are finding that being independent and full-time workers has drawbacks", various quotes from news a women's magazine articles on the subject. His response was "So, after these years of striving, you've discovered what a lot of us told you a long time ago: for the most part, for most people, the working world kind of sucks. Deal with it." Which brings me to this piece that Insty pointed to. Points:
NOBODY 'has it all' in fact(there may be an occasional exception, damned rare), everything is some level of compromise, work and personal life and trying to get by; what clowns told these women otherwise? And I wonder if they'll ever be held to account for it?
“College is nothing more than a baby-sitting service. These students are totally unprepared for the real world..." Really? And who helped set THAT up? And why?
Also, while earlier generations may have opted out of the workforce through marriage or motherhood, these paths aren’t viable for these self-sufficient women, who either are still single or unwilling to be fully supported by men. A: Ever get tired of hearing motherhood described as if it's an Elysian life of joy? Damned hard work, but for some reason a lot of people have spent a lot of time degrading it. B: I'd bet, if you could hear the truth, a lot of these 'still single' women are because they've had so many people telling them, for years, that getting married is letting the feminist side down and all that crap; so they figured either they couldn't, or couldn't do it 'till they were 'successful' on their own. Except spending all that time on 'success' meant they couldn't meet someone, or did and they didn't measure up to the list of "The Kind Of Male A Successful Feminist Should Marry(If She Must)". C: "unwilling to be fully supported by men." Ignore all the possible things that could be done at home businesswise; ignore that starting a family is one hell of a lot easier if she CAN stay at home with the kids, and so forth. Yeah, that "You CAN have it ALL!!!" is really working out, isn't it?
And, just to throw in, remember all the bitching about husbands who 'Spends all his time at work! He's not here for 'X'!" and so forth? Guess what ladies? You're now living the reasons WHY he wasn't at home as much as he'd have liked to be; how does it feel?


Speaking of Insty, some stuff on toys that kids actually do things with. A very good thing. So is "Let's fix the lawnmower. Don't worry, the grease washes off." It does, and learning something about using your hands to fix things is always useful.

Speaking of 'using your hands', couple of years back I did a post on daughter getting a job in part because she could use a screwdriver and such; comments in that were mostly positive, with a very vocal few saying things like "If you're a surgeon or lawyer your time is better spent doing your job, not fixing little crap!" As if that negated the whole idea. This mess came to mind the other day, and that strawman argument still pisses me off. Learning to do things yourself, even little things, lets you take care of small stuff yourself instead of having to call, and pay, someone else to; knowing something about, say how the car works can also make it harder for someone to cheat you on work. Seem to be some people who just don't like the thought of people seeing 'Do it yourself, if you can' as a good thing.


In case you haven't heard, there's been a second bunch of Climategate e-mails released; it appears they're genuine, and really interesting. Separate post on this in a bit.


Son has used the M2 Heavy; he loved the heavy bastard, and gave him further reason not to think me nuts for my respect for that old designer. Ace pointed to this article on why it's still around, which includes
...The M2 has proved so effective, that it's become too good to replace.

Three years ago, the U.S. Army gave up on getting a replacement for the nearly century old M2 machine-gun, at least not anytime soon. However, many of the current ones were wearing out, so the army began replacing over 80 percent of its 36,600 M2 machine-guns, a process expected to take five years, with new M2s. Numerous efforts to develop a replacement for the M2 have failed so far.
I'll admit to liking shiny new stuff, but when you've got something this solid, that works this well, the didn't want to build new ones just doesn't make sense to me.
Mr. Browning did things right; so use them.


Those who can do. Those who can’t form a supercommittee. Those who can’t produce a majority vote in a supercommittee sequester. Those who can’t even sequester are telling the world something profound about American inertia.

As Veronique points out below, the “automatic” sequestration cuts would over the course of ten years reduce US public debt by only $153 billion. Which boils down to about a month’s worth of the current federal deficit.

Yet even slashing a pimple’s worth of borrowing out of the great oozing mountain of pustules will prove too much for Washington.
And on the current crop of people running for the Stupid Party nomination:
Forget the Supercommittee; the timidity of the GOP frontrunners is far more disturbing. In a sane polity, they would be competing over the abolition of departments, the rollback of regulatory tyranny, the shrinking of entitlements – not to mention flying commercial and making do with a mere 20-car motorcade. This close to the abyss, public discourse is nowhere near where it ought to be.


Just to lift a bit from the Barnhardt article the other day:
Everything changed just a few short weeks ago. A firm, led by a crony of the Obama regime, stole all of the non-margined cash held by customers of his firm. Let’s not sugar-coat this or make this crime seem “complex” and “abstract” by drowning ourselves in six-dollar words and uber-technical jargon. Jon Corzine STOLE the customer cash at MF Global. … What was a surprise was the reaction of the exchanges and regulators. … Specifically, they froze customers out of their accounts WHILE THE MARKETS CONTINUED TO TRADE, refusing to even allow them to liquidate. This is unfathomable. The risk exposure precedent that has been set is completely intolerable and has destroyed the entire industry paradigm. No informed person can continue to engage these markets, and no moral person can continue to broker or facilitate customer engagement in what is now a massive game of Russian Roulette.
And Corzine, Thief Extraordinaire, is the guy Biden says is wonderful, and 'the first one they talked to'. Tells you a lot, doesn't it?


What was that about cartels not wanting to have things stirred up on this side of the border?
Instead, things spun out of control. Shortly before the marijuana delivery was to be made Monday, three SUVs carrying alleged Zetas Cartel gunmen seemingly came out of nowhere and cut off the tanker truck as it rumbled through northwestern Harris County, sources told the Houston Chronicle. They sprayed the cab with bullets, killing the civilian driver, who was secretly working with the government. ... Four suspects, all believed to be citizens of Mexico, were arrested and charged Monday with capital murder in connection with the shooting.
I used to think just that: they didn't want to stir things up, so the cartels kept the worst of activities out of the US. Two things changed that for me:
1. Things have been escalating; slowly, but growing. And I've wondered how many really nasty things have been hushed up.
2. Somebody had an article the other day basically saying "These aren't military units closely following orders, they're a bunch of criminals generally taking directions from the boss. So the only thing keeping us from finding more heads in streets and such is they haven't gotten around to it. Or haven't been drunk/stoned enough while killing someone." Probably correct.


And yeah, sounds like something that would come from these people:

If you're going to claim to represent 99% of the people,

it might help your image if you kept your comrades from crapping in the church.


As to the Mexican Gun Lie, there's some truth to it; it's just that it's not gun shows or shops that supply the firearms.
From 2003-2009, over 150,000 Mexican soldiers deserted from their ranks. Drug cartels became so confident in their recruitment of military personnel that they posted help wanted ads for hit men, traffickers, and guards. When these soldiers desert, their US-supplied weapons (grenades, sniper rifles, assault weapons, etc.) often accompany them over to the cartels. In 2008 and 2009, 13,792 and 20,530 small arms were exported to Mexico from the US. Over 92% of these arms were civilian legal semi-automatic or non-automatic firearms, a number eerily similar to the debunked 90% number echoed by the ATF. A 2008 State Department memo to then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi shows a $1,000,000 shipment of select fire M4A2 assault rifles to the Mexican Federal Police Force, (AKA Federales) one of the most corrupt Mexican government agencies.
...
From 2008 to 2009, when President Obama entered office, Defense Department expenditures to Mexico have increased from $12 million to $34,000,000 and State Department expenditures increased from $7.2 million to $356 million. While 2010 data is currently unavailable, it appears our foreign aid to Mexico has continued to increase for 2011. These statistics imply the State and Defense Departments may very well be the top suppliers of small arms to Mexico’s drug cartels and not civilians. Only the information obtained from ATF Firearms Traces will tell. However, those records are not public. After the DOJ and the White House knowingly pursued attempts at new gun control legislation, we are left to ask the question; is this just another case of government stupidity or is this something more premeditated?



One of the reasons I've read that we should support Romney is because 'he's a good debater, he's good with words, he can defeat Obama'. Well, Bill Clinton was very good with words, too; do we really want a RINO version of Slick Willie in the Oval Office?

And on the subject of Romney and Clinton,
I think -- you know, we can't be so fixated on our desire to preserve the rights of ordinary Americans to legitimately own handguns and rifles...
Bill Clinton
March 1, 1993

And we should -- then every community in the country could then start doing major weapon sweeps and then destroying the weapons, not selling them.
Bill Clinton
October 1, 1993
Now think of the anti-gun-ownership laws Romney was so happy to sign as Governor of PROM, and said would be so good for the rest of the country; just how much difference is there between his and Clinton's positions? I still want someone at one of these interviews to ask "You pushed for a bragged about some of the worst anti-gun-ownership laws in the country as Governor; how can we trust you not to push for the same things nationally if you're elected President?"


Speaking of DoJ and such agencies,
As I reported here exclusively at PJ Media last April, the Department of Justice intervened and scuttled the planned prosecution of CAIR co-founder Omar Ahmad as a follow-up to the Holy Land trial, which prompted several congressional inquiries. And as a follow-up to that article, I reported an interview with a high-ranking DOJ official who told me that FBI General Counsel Valerie Caproni continued to meet with CAIR officials despite the FBI’s official ban on contacts with the Hamas front.

This new law will also curtail relations with the administration’s favorite “outreach” partner, ISNA, which, despite being named unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land trial, was last month included in a top-level meeting with the Department of Justice where Muslim groups demanded a formal declaration by the DOJ that any criticism of Islam constituted religious and racial discrimination. ISNA’s president, Mohamed Magid, is also a regular at White House functions and has been appointed to several government positions, including advising the Department of Homeland Security.

Bleagh. Not much enthusiasm today, so I'm stopping here.

Why should we trust the Justice Department when

the investigator, Henry F. Schuelke, recommends that none of the Justice Department officials involved in the case be prosecuted for criminal contempt of court because the judge who presided over the trial, Emmet G. Sullivan, of Federal District Court in Washington, did not issue an order specifically instructing prosecutors to obey the law by turning over any exculpatory evidence.
There's no polite way to put this:
Fuck you all, from Investigator Schuelke to the miserable little criminals formally known as 'prosecutors' in the case. And in any other cases which they've been involved in.
We're supposed to trust you bastards? You knowingly break the law you're sworn to uphold and then you shouldn't be prosecuted because THE JUDGE DIDN'T SPECIFCALLY ORDER YOU TO OBEY THE FRIGGIN' LAW? We're supposed to trust these bastards, or the Justice Department they still work at, on ANYTHING?

This I'd not have thought of

Tactical Baby Strollers

I've seen a rack built to sit on a little red wagon- guns in the rack, ammo in the wagon- but the stroller idea... very nice

Unrelated to suturing chickens and .22 ammo,

Insty pointed to this article on 'things girls are afraid to do in front of a boyfriend'. I'll leave the rest, but this part deserves commentary:
Work out
The gym is a great place for us to lose weight, stay in shape, and compare ourselves to fatter women. However, unless we’re only taking power yoga classes, it’s not a great place to run into someone we like. We’re worried that you’ll be completely focused on our sweaty headbands, red faces, and our manly gym attire. A great way to make us feel better if you run into us at the gym is to focus on the work-out. Instead of noticing our gym attire, try saying something nice like “wow you’ve lost more weight than the office could have ever imagined.”
A: Yeah, guys just hate a woman who's warmed up and sweaty and breathing hard.
B: What the hell are you wearing? 'Manly gym attire'?
C: And if a guy says something like that about the girlfriends weight, he'll be dealing with the upset for a week.

If he's lucky.

A question for you on old .22 firearms

Let's say you have a S&W .22 revolver from the 1920's or 30's. Would you worry about a higher wear rate on the bore from using copper- or brass-plated bullet ammo as opposed to plain lubricated lead?

I'd not think it would be a problem; the plating is very thin and both metals are softer than steel, but I have been wrong before. Any information out there on this?

Well, isn't this just wonderful? Apparent Gunwalking in Texas

Newly released documents indicate federal agents may have lost track of weapons sold to Mexican drug operatives in Texas.

Documents obtained by the Houston Chronicle noted that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives had evidence implicating the alleged purchaser of a high-powered pistol but did not act in time to prevent its use in the shootings of two U.S. Customs agents in Mexico.

But fear not,
"This case has nothing to do with Fast and Furious," said AT spokesman Thomas Crowley. "There hasn't been any gun-walking in the Dallas division of ATF."
Oh, of COURSE not...

If Fast & Furious is a nasty, literally bloody mess, then PATCON

may well be even worse, if the information proves correct. And it would appear that Newsweek sold itself out; with the price of silver being what it is, I wonder what each of the 30 pieces weighs?
A long excerpt from the SSI post for those who can't go there:
Going into this weekend, I knew these three things to be certain.

1. Newsweek had a story about a paid confidential informant enlisted under PATCON, an FBI program that spanned many years, including the years that Ruby Ridge, Waco and the Oklahoma City Bombing happened. PATCON is shorthand for "Patriot Conspiracy."

2. I also knew from sources, living and dead, that PATCON was the worst scandal that the FBI ever perpetrated. PATCON could sink the FBI, perhaps permanently, and along with the Gunwalker Scandal, totally discredit the teflon coating that the Bureau has excreted around its corrupt core and thoroughly debunk the myth that the FBI is anything but an agency of arsonists posing as firemen.

3. Finally, I knew that Newsweek would run the story tomorrow. I have been hinting about this story for weeks, and now it was about to happen.

The only thing was, I heard yesterday, that there was a better than even chance that as a result of intervention by Tina Brown, Newsweek's editor, there might not even be any mention of PATCON, Waco or Oklahoma City -- no mention, in fact, of a lot of things.

Of course I also knew that it didn't mean that the PATCON story would end there. It won't. It will come out whether Tina Brown's troubled and cash-strapped magazine benefits from it or not. (Interesting, isn't it, how corrupt politics trumps fiduciary responsibility to the owners of Newsweek, Jane Harmon and the stockholders of IAC, and the public's right to know?
...
For you see, you may scan this article, you may study it, you may even read it backwards, but you will find no mention of PATCON. Nor will you find any mention of how PATCON touched upon, shaped the lives of and ultimately decided the fate of the dead at Ruby Ridge, Waco and Oklahoma City. For PATCON has been excised by the editorship of Tina Brown and sent down the memory hole as if it never existed.

Sources in advance of the story said that FBI was very afraid of this article. "They don't want PATCON mentioned," said one source. "Not ever, by anybody. Because it leads to OKBOMB (the FBI name for the Oklahoma City bombing case), Elohim City (Oklahoma, a Christian Identity community), (German undercover agent Andreas Carl) Strassmeier, the McVeigh-Strassmeier connection, the Aryan Republican Army, the whole shebang." A source out west told me that when he mentioned the name to a retired FBI agent, he was told to "stay away from that shit" for "PATCON will get you killed -- it's national security."

There are many rumors and individual bits of fact that have drifted out about PATCON over the years -- Stories of FBI informants and undercover assets giving taxpayer-funded operational assistance -- including weapons, explosives and money -- to neoNazi and racist terrorists to cement their relationships with the criminals; Reports that an operation that began with real concerns about racist terrorist groups like The Order was expanded to include mere political opponents of the Clinton administration and the defensive-oriented constitutional militias; Reports of a similar operation called VAAPCON, "Violence Against Abortion Providers," using the same tactics; Reports that the Southern Poverty Law Center was hip-deep as a partner to the FBI in PATCON; Reports of FBI penetration of the news media, religious institutions and the ranks of politicians of both parties, who very usefully expanded the FBI's power and reach and who provided political cover when the curtain slipped. Oklahoma lawyer and journalist J.D. Cash once told me that "there isn't a neoNazi or racist group in the country that isn't operationally controlled by the FBI." Did that include the Aryan Republican Army and the Oklahoma City bombing? I asked. "Certainly," he replied. So, the prospect of a story in a major news magazine about PATCON must have given the FBI a severe case of the old rectal looseness.

Now, however, "the Fibbies in the Hoover Building, (Eric) Holder and (Janet) Napolitano must feel like dancing" said another source. "They got what they wanted out of Newsweek. Jesse Trentadue must feel like puking."

I have not interviewed Mr. Trentadue for this article, but I rather suspect the source is right. For this was an article crafted out of documents, now part of the public record, that Trentadue -- a Salt Lake City lawyer who has been trying for 17 years to find out the true circumstances of the murder of his brother Kenney at the hands of government agents in an isolation cell at the federal lockup in El Reno Oklahoma a few months after the OKC bombing -- provided Newsweek. He even led them to the former PATCON confidential informant, John Matthews.

And what did Trentadue get for all his troubles, for putting his faith in Newsweek, for literally giving them the story on platter?

Here's what he got:

Trentadue believed that the FBI had confused Kenney for a member of a gang of white supremacist bank robbers called the Aryan Republican Army; though for years the FBI has claimed that McVeigh largely acted alone, Trentadue has uncovered evidence allegedly linking him to the ARA and the group to the bombing.

You will note that there is no mention of PATCON and so many modifiers that it merely makes Trentadue look like a conspiracy theorist loon.

Nice.
...
And, just to really stir things up,
Future articles here at Sipsey Street will explore the details of the murder of Kenney Trentadue and Eric Holder's role in covering them up. It will also deal with the tale of how a U.S. Attorney in Arizona made the proffer to McVeigh associate Michael Fortier in order to flesh out the "lone bomber theory" and divert attention away from Elohim City, the Aryan Republican Army and federal undercover informant Andreas Carl Strassmeier.

The name of that United States Attorney was Janet Napolitano.

And, over at Examiner, there's this on PATCON.

I've said I want to see an erupting volcano;

this might be a bit closer to some of the sights than I'd like to be

First off, Dutch windmills. Electric ones.

They suck. Out of the customers pockets.
The 36 turbines -- each one the height of a 30-storey building -- produce enough electricity to meet the needs of more than 100,000 households each year.

But five years later the green future looks a long way off. Faced with the need to cut its budget deficit, the Dutch government says offshore wind power is too expensive and that it cannot afford to subsidize the entire cost of 18 cents per kilowatt hour -- some 4.5 billion euros last year.

The government now plans to transfer the financial burden to households and industrial consumers in order to secure the funds for wind power and try to attract private sector investment.
...
But the new billing system will reap only a third of what was previously available to the industry in subsidies -- the government forecasts 1.5 billion euros every year -- while the pricing scale of the investment plan makes it more likely that interested parties will choose less expensive technologies than wind.
I would point out that the consumers of this boutique electricity were already paying extra for it in their taxes; what the government used to subsidize this mess. Now, since I doubt their taxes will go down, their rates are going up so they'll be paying TWICE for the same boutique power: more on their actual electric bill, and still paying the taxes used to subsidize it before. Wonderful, isn't it?



Second, odd things sometimes turn up when you dig:
Construction workers near Rostock made an unusual discovery Thursday, when they unearthed half of a Soviet World War II-era tank with skeletal remains inside. Experts believe the other half of the tank is buried across the street.
...
Inside the rusted tank, a bomb disposal team identified shells, hand grenades and rifle ammunition, said Fred Tribanek, a team member. Tribanek said the ammo was live but would not be dangerous if it remained within the tank.
An AP shell of some kind that blew the turret off? No telling for now, maybe not ever depending on how bad the weathering is.


Third, What caliber for snoopy drones?


To borrow from Insty: I might start believing AGW is both real and a threat when the bastards wanting to use it to take over our lives start acting like THEY believe it's both real and a threat.


I did not know that: you can get surgical instruments(All instruments are stainless steel. Not Sterile & NOT FOR MEDICAL USE.) and suture sets at Amazon; just on the general preparedness idea, I need to get someone to give me a people-sewing lesson. Also, they have some of the Best Reviews Ever, including
I have chased my pets for hours to get to test this suture kit but their having nothing to do with it. I don't have any younger siblings to test it on because they have all moved away, possibly for safety reasons. Finally I can't get my hands to stop shaking so I can make a deep enough laceration (Ten dollar word for CUT) that will require suturing (STITCHES). So, I'll have to get back to you after the Trick-or-treaters start bugging me.


Done for now, folks; after the last couple of days I'm beat. Enough that this has been sitting here for about two hours 'cause I forgot to hit 'publish'. Good night

Obviously, I need to get out more

And here's one of the ladies from a local school called Aalim, with her hubby on the drum

Another example of "He was a choirboy and loved his family,

they shouldn't have shot him just because he was stabbing them!"

I would love to see some actual reporters start asking such family and friends "Since he had already stabbed one and was trying to cut on the others, exactly what do you suggest? And would you like to demonstrate since it's apparently so easy?"

A metalworking idea that panned out, or

How to work on a screw with somewhat less cursing.

A: You may well have noticed that small parts like some screws have an ability to fall and vanish into the aether; this starts the process.
B: A screw with a small, fine-thread shank with a wide head that needs a bit of reshaping is a problem*: how to hold the shank without damaging the threads. You can wrap a couple of turns of tape around it, but if you use a drill or something to spin it you can still wind up with enough pressure to ding the threads.
C: The Idea: get out the dremel**. It uses collets to hold the different bits, and the collets are made of aluminum. Use a collet the shank will just fit into and snug it down; it'll hold tight and keep things centered without danger to the threads, and using low speed and a fine file and suitable grit wet/dry paper you can either shine up or profile the head and then polish it very nicely.

Yes, I did manage to drop the screw once taking it out of the collet; language practice was performed.

*Ok, a couple of problems, but let's focus on the big one right now.
**Yes, I know Dremel™ is a trademarked name and you're supposed to say 'rotary tool' unless it's theirs; hell with that, I've always called them 'dremel tools'. If Dremel™ wants to bitch at me about it, well, if that's the worst problem I have...