Know those Swiss machinegun cleaning kits?

Used to be common?  I have a couple, and had an idea: since they use a metric thread, make an adapter so I can use standard brushes and jags with it.

Recently son helped me find a tailstock chuck for that old Sears lathe, so used a piece of 1/4" brass rod to make these

Metric thread to fit the rod, 8x32 for the jags and brushes.  And a lot easier to make with the lathe.

I very much hope there'll be a new sheriff in town

since the current one showed himself such an asshole.  And I wonder how much the county can get for that MRAP?

If nothing else, consider the Sheriff calling the deputies and saying "We're going to raid this place, get your gear on" and these asshats can't bother to put on their uniforms?

There are people for whom a public flogging

followed by a trip to the gallows would be very appropriate.

If you needed further proof that 'identity politics' idiots really are idiots,

look no  further.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) are not taking the coronavirus epidemic seriously, to judge from their funding priorities. On April 20, those two agencies announced the availability of grants to increase the “diversity” of biomedical research labs. Academic virologists working on respiratory failure, say, could receive hundreds of thousands more taxpayer dollars if they could find a “diverse” student to add to the project. No scientific justification for the new diversity hire is needed; indeed, high school students are eligible, despite the virtual certainty that they will contribute nothing of value. To the contrary, such new hires will be a drag on any medical advance, since the scientists must pledge to mentor the students, taking time and attention away from their scientific research. Those mentees will be chosen not because of their science skills—they need present none—but because of their group’s underrepresentation in STEM.
"We're not actually accomplishing shit, but look at how diverse we are!"

Makes you wonder how many people have died, and how many suffered long-term or permanent harm

because idiot politicians decided their medical needs could wait.

"We didn't intend this"  Yeah, that's great, and the road to hell etc.

Well, yeah. But that doesn't panic people

and give politicians reason to increase control.
“I think we underestimated very early on the number of asymptomatic cases,” Dr. Birx said. “And I think we’re really beginning to understand there are people that get infected that those symptoms are so low-grade that they don’t even know that they’re infected.”

Throw in this
And according to Levitt, coronavirus data show that sweeping lockdown measures were an overreaction that may actually backfire.

Levitt has been analyzing the COVID-19 outbreak from a statistical perspective since January and has been remarkably accurate in his predications. The data show that the outbreak never actually grew exponentially, suggesting harsh lockdown measures, which have drastically impacted the world economy, were probably unnecessary. 

A probable factor in the hysteria that I had not thought of

But the young and frankly stunted — not all of the young, obviously, hence the qualification — don’t understand that. They’d never confronted their own mortality, and therefore now run in fear, because a virus can KILL them, oh the horror.

Well, cupcake, it always could. You just didn’t have a media dedicated 24-7 to telling you about it with enhanced doom porn.
Which would fit with something I've talked to people about before: an awful lot of people in their twenties and teens- hell, some in their 30's and 40's- seem to have no damned idea how well they've had it.  They've always had antibiotics and vaccines and so forth, and have no understanding of what life was like for most of human history.

This is their wake-up call, and they really don't want to answer it.

There are a LOT of people, politicians and journalists and medical professionals,

who need a serious ass kicking over all the bullshit involved in the Wuflu mess.
But now, it turns out that information was wrong. The Robert Koch Institute (RKI), the German government’s public health agency, has written a letter to NEJM to set the record straight, even though it was not involved in the paper.
...
But the researchers didn’t actually speak to the woman before they published the paper. The last author, Michael Hoelscher of the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich Medical Center, says the paper relied on information from the four other patients: “They told us that the patient from China did not appear to have any symptoms.” Afterward, however, RKI and the Health and Food Safety Authority of the state of Bavaria did talk to the Shanghai patient on the phone, and it turned out she did have symptoms while in Germany. According to people familiar with the call, she felt tired, suffered from muscle pain, and took paracetamol, a fever-lowering medication. (An RKI spokesperson would only confirm to Science that the woman had symptoms.)
That sounds like some first-class screwing up to me.

If someone brought these in deliberately,

severe punishment is indicated.

And flamethrowers for the nests.

Saturday night has arrived,

and it's nice outside.  But you can't be out there forever, so,

Dating myself horribly,

at my old job I worked on some of these for a year or so before they finally got a terminal in.  That's 'one', and it kind of sucked.  But within a year we had some decent ones that sped things up considerably.

Trust the Professional Journalists? Why,

since we know their record?
According to one account Thursday, the “news” networks spent 2,284 minutes over the years promoting the Russian collusion hoax from start to finish.

But here’s the amount of airtime they’ve devoted to these latest revelations about the FBI’s pervasive top-to-bottom corruption in promoting the hoax:
CNN, ABC and CBS: a combined zero mentions. MSNBC: one mention, at 5:14 a.m., NBC: one mention, at 3:41 a.m.

The New York Times, which handed itself a Pulitzer Prize for years of “reporting” Russian collusion that didn’t exist, now argues that President Trump wants prosecutions of the crooked FBI agents so he can “weaponize” their criminal behavior for the campaign.

So it was totally OK for the feds to try to frame Trump and everyone around him, but to want someone brought to justice for it is just politics — weaponizing and seizing and pouncing on those wonderful Democrats in the FBI and the CIA?
The Major Media has done to itself what the EffingBI, CIA and Do'J' have: made sure that, barring major and public housecleaning(which should involve firings and prosecutions in the case of those three) they won't be trusted by a huge number of people for- at least- the foreseeable future.

Friday night

Data's in

Those asshat who think the PRC has the right idea on allowing speech?

Here are the authors:

Jack Goldsmith Harvard Law School professor

Andrew Keane Woods Professor of law at the University of Arizona College of Law

Harvard Law School is currently the No. 2 ranked law school in the country.  The University of Arizona College of Law is ranked as No. 47.
Miguel may have the right idea: maybe not all lawyers, but most of the law professors as tree decorations.

Get rid of qualified immunity entirely

If not entirely, then it needs to be VERY narrowly restricted.  Cops and prosecutors who violate the law and people's rights start having to pay personally for damages, a lot of this crap will stop.  Fast.

Well said

Daughter made a point of asking why I referred to the Wuhan Flu as, well, the Wuhan Flu - are you trying to make a point?

Yes, that it’s the Wuhan Flu, and that’s what everyone called it until there was a general agreement amongst our chattering betters that we should call it COVID-19, as if we’d always used technical scientific terms instead of colloquial names based on origin, right or wrong. I used the term because it horrified people who seem to think that the term will make dumb-bubbas go cruisin’ around lookin’ for Asian people to beat up. I use the term because China would prefer that I not to. Want more?

Speaking of Governors who need a reminder that they're not an emperor,

the clown in Washington really needs a reminder that he's not royalty, he's an employee.
“I don’t know any other way to characterize it, when we have an order from governors, both Republicans and Democrats, that basically are designed to protect people’s health, literally their lives, to have a president of the United States basically encourage insubordination, to encourage illegal activity.
Insubordination, 'Insubordinate implies failure or refusal to submit to the authority of a superior:' ...  See what I mean about 'thinks he owns us'?

More:
“To have an American president to encourage people to violate the law, I can’t remember any time during my time in America where we have seen such a thing,” Inslee continued.
You made orders, that does not make them law, far as I know.  So screw you, Inslee.

Governor Blackface McKlanhood needs to take a long walk

off a short dock.  Soros is really getting his money's worth from that bastard.

At least there are some judges who'll tell him to piss off.

This is the dickhead who started the "Millions Will Die!" crap,

and he's done it before.
In 2009, Ferguson and his Imperial team predicted that swine flu had a case fatality rate 0.3 per cent to 1.5 per cent. His most likely estimate was that the mortality rate was 0.4 per cent. A government estimate, based on Ferguson’s advice, said a ‘reasonable worst-case scenario’ was that the disease would lead to 65,000 UK deaths. 
...
 In 2001 the Imperial team produced modelling on foot and mouth disease that suggested that animals in neighbouring farms should be culled, even if there was no evidence of infection. This influenced government policy and led to the total culling of more than six million cattle, sheep and pigs – with a cost to the UK economy estimated at £10 billion.
It has been claimed by experts such as Michael Thrusfield, professor of veterinary epidemiology at Edinburgh University, that Ferguson’s modelling on foot and mouth was ‘severely flawed’ and made a ‘serious error’ by ‘ignoring the species composition of farms,’ and the fact that the disease spread faster between different species.
So why the hell is he still in that position, and why is anyone listening to him?

Don't you just love it when some idiot who depends on the 1st Amendment

wants it taken apart?