Cold night. Data.

You take care of the rest

Brian Williams is worried about fake news.

At least, he's worried about fake news he didn't fake.


You might have heard about various state AGs, who tried to use their position to push Globular Warmering crap by attacking Exxon Mobil, being ordered to appear in a Texas court.  Some of them are basically saying "I'm busy, talk to my secretary and make an appointment", and that's not going over well.
Judge Ed Kinkeade did not explain his reasoning, other than to say in a brief response filed today in Northern District Texas court that “after careful consideration” he was denying “all requested relief.”
...
Exxon Mobil has accused her of moving on the probe for political reasons, and Healey, who has vowed to fight the order, filed a petition with the Fifth Circuit appellate court asking it to intervene and toss out Kinkeade’s demands for her to appear — which she’s slammed as an “abuse of discretion.”
Short version: "How dare you interfere with my schedule and question my actions!  I'm being abused!"

This is the same Healey who decided to rewrite state law on 'assault weapons' all on her own. 


Wonder how much students are paying to attend this dump site for idiots?


Hey, principal, you don't decide what's public space.  Deal with it, you clown.


Short version: "How dare she criticize us!  You need to shut her up!"

You want to make a bunch of people happy, Mr. President-elect? Dump the TSA,

and prosecute every one of the molesters, abusers and thieves who used to work there.

A forty-two-year-old mom with breast cancer said she felt ‘violated’ after TSA agents attempted a body cavity search in public at the Los Angeles airport. Her crime? She informed agents she was traveling with a medical cream in her bag, like she had done numerous times before without issue. In order to continue traveling with the cream, she had to suffer a pat down ‘with pressure’, said the agents.

Denise Albert notified TSA of her chemo port in advance. They made her remove her shoes (treatment caused sores on her feet) even though she’s a PreCheck flyer, she removed her wig so they wouldn’t ruin it, and blue-gloved agents insisted on feeling up her port to “clear the area”.

These miserable bastards don't even follow their OWN RULES when they do this crap.

She said as a TSA PreCheck passenger, she was not required to remove her shoes and agents were supposed to ask whether there were any tender areas they should avoid.

Later, when they went through her bags, they joked about finding her fake eyelashes, and Albert told her she had lost all her hair as a result of the cancer treatment.

A supervisor finally intervened and gave Albert a ‘regular soft pat down’ inside a private room.

She said she had ‘never been so humiliated or felt more violated in my life’.

Go read the whole thing.  Breakables alert in effect.

Winter nights are a good time for study,

so here's the latest data

"Ok, so we'll raise those ships, repair them, and use them the destroy you"

After a surprise attack that left Americans across the country reeling, the heroes of Pearl Harbor had no time to sit around and take in what happen.

Instead, they got to work repairing the dozens of boats that were sitting ducks for the Japanese air fleet.

The biggest targets for the Japanese were the U.S. Navy's nine battleships. While three of the battleships were considered a complete lost (the USS Oklahoma, USS Utah and USS Arizona - which still lays at the bottom of the harbor) the rest were resurrected and put to work winning the war.

Scroll down to see the 13 ships that were repaired after the attack on Pearl Harbor and how they contributed to the war effort after their resurrection.
Picking one,
USS West Virginia, battleship 
Damage during Pearl Harbor: Seven Japanese torpedos to the port side, hit by two bombs, caught fire from the burning USS Arizona and sank to the sea floor   
Repairs: Pumped free of water and patched up so that it could be sent to Washington's Puget Sound Naval Yard for full repairs  
Returned to service:July 1944    
WWII service: The USS West Virginia took part in the Battles of Iwo Jima and Okinama and was present in Tokyo Bay when the Japanese surrendered after the second atom bomb was dropped on Nagasaki

Overt racism, but it's politically-correct racism,

so he won't catch any crap from the 'anti-racists' about it.


Reed College, by the way charges, $50,000 a year for tuition. The opportunity to scream insults at a queer film director whose perspective is mildly different from today's leftist students is certainly an expensive privilege.


This is interesting.  And spooky.

The findings showed that the evolution of the smallpox virus happened more recently than previously believed and that the ancestor of all available smallpox viral strains were no older than 1580 albeit it is not yet clear what animal is the true reservoir of the pathogen and when the virus first jumped from animals to humans.

The researchers, who published their findings in the journal Current Biology on Dec. 8, also found that the evolution of the pathogen into two circulating strains, the variola major and minor, occurred after 1796, after scientist Edward Jenner came up with a vaccine.

Let's put it bluntly: a sizeable part of the left

is too fucking stupid to live.  Which would be fine, except they want to get the rest of us killed along with them.
The OSU Coalition for Black Liberation is a campus protest group on OSU’s main campus in Columbus. The group held a rally Wednesday to protest the death of young black men at the hands of police, and read off a list of non-white men who had been killed by police in the last two months. Among the names read off was that of Abdul Razak Ali Artan.

Artan, of course, is the man who attempted to kill his classmates last week by attacking them with his car and then going on a stabbing spree. He was gunned down by OSU policeman Alan Horujko, who arrived on the scene just minutes after the rampage began and swiftly neutralized Artan.

Organizers of the protest said that Artan’s particular actions were irrelevant.
I repeat: too fucking stupid to live.  The people who are the reason I have a label 'PC At Any Cost'.

Get this:
“In some cases, the deceased may have committed acts of violence against others before they were killed,” gender studies student Maryam Abidi said at the event, according to The Lantern. “Perhaps they were domestic abusers, perhaps they threatened or killed others. This possibility is not something to shy away from. The protest against police brutality extends to the innocent and the guilty alike, because we know that no matter the crime, justice and due process don’t come from a cop’s bullet.”
Got news for you idiot: when someone is actively trying to murder people, a bullet- from a cop or private citizen- may be only thing saving THEIR lives; that you seem to consider theirs less worthy of concern than that of the murderer because of the skin color, tells us just what kind of racist you are.  And how stupid.

“Even compassion has been politicized, as we saw with the diversity officer who’s being attacked for daring to say let’s show compassion towards a fellow Buckeye who made tragic, tragic mistakes,” Jani told The Lantern.
He deliberately planned and carried out an attempt to murder as many people as possible, and this moron labels it a 'tragic, tragic mistake'.  Wonder if he understands, at all, that the only think the asshole would consider a mistake is that he didn't manage to kill all of them?

The craps table is NOT where you leave the dog

while you gamble.  I stand corrected.

So, who's Jill Stein actually working for?
Jill Stein didn’t get the recount she wanted in Michigan, but she did get the state to take vote-integrity issues seriously. Meeting in its lame-duck session, the state House of Representatives passed a tough voter-ID bill that includes $3 million for funding of free state identification and birth certificates after over 18,000 voters cast ballots without identification in the presidential election:


I once read a piece by a lawyer who said he didn't understand why more people didn't demand another opinion on evidence by a independent lab, because there were so many times that he did that and their opinion indicated the testimony was either incorrect or plain crap.  This indicates he was REALLY right.

Two from Joe Huffman

Seen in this light, Obama’s greatest regret is one of freedom’s clearest victories. The Second Amendment survived his presidency.

and

They are not for “gun safety”, else they’d recognize that the NRA has the only truly comprehensive, child-friendly gun safety education program around. They are not against “gun violence”, else they’d be marching in places like Chicago and Baltimore, where the “gun death” rate is orders of magnitude higher than the rest of the nation. They are not against criminals getting guns, else they’d be demanding the Fed.gov prosecute every current straw purchase and NICS denial to the fullest extent of the law. They are not against guns being carried in public (open or concealed), else they’d advocate disarming police and federal agents in the course of their duties as well as average citizens.

None of these describe their real position. If they were honest, they’d just come out and say it: “We’re not against guns, we’re just against you having guns.” That’s a much more accurate description of where they’re coming from.

Because, to Gizmodo, bureaucrats losing some power over our lives would be bad.

Somehow.
The bill of indictment against this dangerous madman, who they find "pretty freaking terrifying"?

he has advocated for the FDA to give up on vetting the efficacy of new drugs before they come to market. O'Neill, in other words, would like the FDA to stop performing one of its primary functions and let all of us act as lab mice. Such a move might allow drug makers to rake in tons of cash on untested medical treatments that might not ever work.

"We should reform [the] FDA so there is approving drugs after their sponsors have demonstrated safety—and let people start using them, at their own risk," O'Neill said in a 2014 speech at the conference Rejuvenation Biotechnology. "Let's prove efficacy after they've been legalized."

Those "insane" ideas that relate to the FDA may seem familiar to readers of Reason as they have been defended at length and intelligently here by our science correspondent Ronald Bailey, at most detail in this 2012 article.

In it Bailey presents some facts and analysis Gizmodo might not be aware of, or maybe not care about. (Gizmodo does not make the slightest attempt to actually explain why O'Neill's ideas are allegedly insane or bad for America.)
Short version of Gizmodo: "This man wants a government agency to lose power!  And has these strange ideas!  It's HORRIBLE!"

"To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize."

is the line.  And it holds up very well.
However, OSU students and staff have trouble calling the knife attack that took place on their campus “terrorism.” 

Faith Goldy, a Rebel Media reporter, traveled to Ohio State University's campus last week to speak to students and discuss the recent attack — and she got some very interesting responses.



So, does this count as 'Hope!' or 'Change!' ?
For the first time in more than two decades, life expectancy for Americans declined last year — a troubling development linked to a panoply of worsening health problems in the United States.

December 7, 1941

Couple of things from GFZ, starting with Journalism!

Sentence has been passed by Judge Rick! The shooter is at fault! Damn the NRA! Right? But by now we know that the first batch of news might not be quite complete or even truthful.


The idiots have traveled to Ohio to wave their sex toys:
Gun rights activist: “We were quiet right afterwards, but a week after a terrorist attack on our campus, we’re asking for the right to be able to defend ourselves if this happens again.”

Cocks Not Glocks: “You horrible people, here’s a big rubber penis to prove how wrong and insensitive you are.”

Does NBC have a rule that they have to write garbage when guns are involved?

The start, which tells you all you need to know:

The NBC2 Investigators have uncovered a flaw in Florida's gun checks system.

300,000 people legally bought guns in Florida in the last four months. Only 100,000 people got their licenses to carry in the same time frame.

What does that mean for the other 200,000 people? Do they already have their licenses? Are they illegally carrying?

Hey, NBC2 'investigators', has it ever occurred to you that people buy firearms for reasons OTHER than ccw?  Like, maybe, hunting or target shooting?  Having around the house?

What the hell is wrong with you people?

Who is it that's supposed to be 'anti-science', again?

Much to my surprise, I showed up in the WikiLeaks releases before the election. In a 2014 email, a staffer at the Center for American Progress, founded by John Podesta in 2003, took credit for a campaign to have me eliminated as a writer for Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight website. In the email, the editor of the think tank's climate blog bragged to one of its billionaire donors, Tom Steyer: "I think it's fair [to] say that, without Climate Progress, Pielke would still be writing on climate change for 538."

The only acceptable narrative for the activists over at the Center for American Progress is that climate is making the weather worse resulting in ever more property damage and anyone questioning the politically correct story must be drummed out of polite society.

So what did wikileaks reveal? Among other things, an email from ThinkProgress chief editor Judd Legum to major Democratic donor (and climate warrior) Tom Steyer bragging about how he had successfully trolled FiveThirtyEight statistical analysis website proprietor Nate Silver into getting rid of Pielke. Why go after Pielke? Because he had published an article at 538 based on his research daring to point out that so far climate change had not boosted "normalized" property damage. Normalized basically means taking into account the fact that as a result of economic and population growth there is more property and lives at risk from bad weather.


Oh, gee, whatever could go wrong with this?
Web giants YouTube , Facebook , Twitter and Microsoft will step up efforts to remove extremist content from their websites by creating a common database.

The companies will share 'hashes' - unique digital fingerprints they automatically assign to videos or photos - of extremist content they have removed from their websites to enable their peers to identify the same content on their platforms.

"We hope this collaboration will lead to greater efficiency as we continue to enforce our policies to help curb the pressing global issue of terrorist content online," the companies said in a statement on Tuesday.

Standard question: who defines 'extremist'?  Based on what criteria?  If the idea of Zuckerbitch and his minions, and their fellow travelers, doing it makes your skin crawl, join the club.


And now I shall brave the cold and wind, as there are supplies I'm short on.

I would love to hit the range with some rifle loads.

However, it's cold, the wind's whistling out of the north, and I don't care "It's good training!", Not doing it. 

Also, sourdough biscuits fresh out of the oven are a lot more inviting right now.

Speaking of which, here's the recipe I found:
1 cup all-purpose unbleached flour
2 ts baking powder
3/4 ts salt
1/4 cup butter*
1 cup sourdough starter, right out of the fridge
Enough water or milk to get it mixed to dough

Mix the dry ingredients, cut in the butter, add in the starter.  You may not need to add liquid, in either case mix to a dough.  Cut out, put on parchment(wonderful stuff), bake at 425 until done; roughly 20 minutes.

The original recipe used 1/2 cup of butter; way too much for me, 1/4 cup seems about right.


*BUTTER, you heathen, not margarine or fake butter.  Do not profane the biscuits with that crap.

Snork... hehehehehe,.. and you thought the left was freaking about Mattis before...

“The first time we blow an enemy nation completely off the map will not be an insignificant event,” Mattis said. “The survivors of the globe will write about what we do for the next 10,000 years.”

There has been unprecedented bipartisan support for “Mad Dog” Mattis’ nomination, as many lawmakers are fearful of receiving a vigorous ass kicking from the retired Marine general.

“He testified on Capitol Hill once, pushed me on the ground, and then took my lunch money,” said Democratic Rep. Tammy Duckworth of Illinois. “I’m all about him being SecDef if he stops calling me girl’s names.”

About the 15-22,

I found the target I'd saved from when the OOB happened.  The first shot hit exactly where aimed, the OOB bullet actually made it to the target, and hit 8" lower than the aimed one. 

Oh, I'll bet they'd love that

The U.S. government and the City of San Francisco are asking Kate Steinle’s family to dismiss the wrongful death lawsuit in a hearing on Friday.

Kate Steinle was shot and killed in July of 2015 on Pier 14 along San Francisco’s waterfront. Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, an undocumented immigrant, has been charged in the murder.
Lopez-Sanchez was released from the San Francisco City Jail in Apil.
They really hated that so many people found out what they do with this 'sanctuary city' garbage.  And that it drew attention to all the crimes committed by illegals in and around these cities.  And they REALLY must hate the idea of this trial not only bringing it all back up, but anything new they can throw into the news.


This is interesting: teacher in Canada talking about the dangers of PC speech and 'hate-crime' laws, especially those involving language.  Some bits:
There have been lots of cases where free speech has come under attack, why did you choose this particular issue?
This is very compelled speech. The Supreme Court in the United States has held that compelled speech is unacceptable for two reasons. One is to protect the rights of the speaker, the other is to protect the rights of the listener. The listener has the right to be informed and instructed without being unduly influenced by hidden sources. If your speech is compelled, it isn’t YOU who is talking, it’s some other entity that’s compelling your speech. So I actually think that Bill C-16 is unconstitutional. I’m using American case law, but the principles apply. It just hasn’t been pushed to our Supreme Court yet.
...
I was also quite profoundly influenced by [Alexsandr] Solzhenitsyn’s book The Gulag Archipelago. People say that real Marxism has never been tried – not in the Soviet Union, in China, in Cambodia, in Korea, that wasn’t real Marxism. I find that argument specious, appalling, ignorant, and maybe also malevolent all at the same time. Specious because Solzhenitsyn demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that the horrors [of the Soviet system] were a logical consequence of the doctrines embedded within Marxist thinking. I think Dostoyevsky saw what was coming and Nietzsche wrote about it extensively in the 1880s, laying out the propositions that are encapsulated in Marxist doctrine, and warning that millions of people would die in the 20th century because of it.
...
Do you believe that society should draw the line at all when it comes to limitations on hate speech?
No. Hate speech laws are wrong. The question – not a question, but THE question – is ‘who gets to define hate?” That’s not to say there’s no such thing as hate speech – clearly there is. Hate speech laws repress, and I mean that in the psycho-analytical sense. They drive [hate speech] underground. It’s not a good idea, because things get ugly when you drive them underground. They don’t disappear, they just fester, and they’re not subject to correction. I made these videos, and they have been subject to a tremendous amount of correction over the last six weeks. I don’t just mean from my public response, but also partly from the university’s response, partly from a group of friends who have been reviewing my videos and criticizing them to death. This is why free speech is so important. You can struggle to formulate some argument, but when you throw it out into the public, there’s a collective attempt to modify and improve that. So with the hate speech issue – say someone’s a Holocaust denier, because that’s the standard routine – we want those people out there in the public so you can tell them why they’re historically ignorant, and why their views are unfounded and dangerous. If you drive them underground, it’s not like they stop talking to each other, they just don’t talk to anyone who disagrees with them. That’s a really bad idea and that’s what’s happening in the United States right now. Half of the country doesn’t talk to the other half. Do you know what you call people you don’t talk to? Enemies.

Why, if you have a .223 and a .300 Blackout, you'd better make sure

you don't get the wrong rifle & cartridge together

Some students who made false rape reports being prosecuted.

Good.  Every time some idiot does this it both takes LE resources away from real crime reports, and can destroy the life of the falsely accused.


Oh, this is wonderful, they couldn't even make sure the jeep for the FUNERAL would keep running?


Well, 'liberals' are cheering the fires in Tennessee, so I guess they'll say the old lady deserved being hit with a chair, because Trump! or something.


Government-run health care...
Four staff members have resigned from a southeastern Oklahoma veterans facility rather than face the possibility of getting fired, after a resident was found to have maggots in a wound.

Oklahoma Department of Veterans Affairs executive director Myles Deering said the maggots were discovered while the patient was alive at the facility in Talahina, about 130 miles southeast of Tulsa. Deering said the maggots were not the cause of his death.
...
The agency said a physician's assistant and three nurses, including the director of nursing, resigned after an investigation was conducted. Spokesman Shane Faulkner said all four chose to resign before the termination process began.
I refuse to comment on this, as my language is deteriorating into cursing before I even start typing.

Stolen from a guy on Bookface:

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a brick when it stops working." - Arthur C Clarke, while kicking his computer.

More just because

Getting back to one of the original reasons I started this, "Does different brass make a difference?"

In ammo.  Short answer: yes.  Does it always matter?  No.

In more depth:
If you're just loading general practice ammo, especially for handguns, long as the cases will fit and cycle properly, use whatever.  If you're going for real accuracy, you have to get picky.

Not always real picky.  Some rifles seem to shoot just about equally well with most brands, but most will have some they do and do not work as well with.  Example:
First rifle I ever really worked on was a 8mm Turkish Mauser, the long infantry rifle(29" barrel).  I did a bunch of mods to it, found a load it liked and then decided to see what difference cartridge cases from different makers might make.  The load, as I recall, was a 150-grain Hornady soft-point over 46.0 grains of IMR4064, ignited by a CCI Large Rifle primer.  Five rounds were loaded with Federal, five with Remington, and five with Winchester cases.

Test day, target at 100 yards.  The Federal set all went into a group right at 1" across, and I was happy.
The Remington set, same size group but centered almost exactly 1" higher.  Still happy.
The Winchester set, group was more than 3" across and both higher and to the right.  Shocked.
That's a fairly dramatic difference, but the kind of thing you can run into.  It's not that Winchester brass is crap, it's good-quality stuff; it's just that this rifle didn't much care for it.

So as little change as 'who made the cases' can make a huge difference, especially at longer ranges.  From what I've read, the serious benchrest types will by cases in lots of 1000(or more) and make sure it all comes from the same manufacturing lot; same for the bullets and primers, and for at least enough powder to fill all those cases.  Trying to keep as many variables as small as possible.  Size all the cases the same, trim to the exact same length, and so forth.  Worth it?  Oh yeah, it helps produce groups like this, and these.

So for general shooting, whatever is handy may work just fine, but for better accuracy, let alone serious accuracy, you'll need to find out which brand cases work best in yours.