May 31, 2013

Dutch gun porn alert

If you're passing through northwest Iowa Sunday and have a few hours to spare, you can swing by Rembrandt for a largish gun auction.

I won't be there because I consider the auctioneer a jerk.  Besides, there's nothing on the bill that interests me. I note the event simply for the record.

The burg is, in fact, full of Dutch people, but it's not named for the painter. That honor belongs to the two Rembrandt brothers, early settlers who perfected the art of creating copper wire while fighting over a penny.

It's also quite a righteous place where preachers still rail against their  lascivious countryman.























May 30, 2013

Ben Bernanke and the Magic of WD40

Your morning lecture today comes courtesy of our old friend Ben Bernanke, the power of applied mythology, and a big broken belt on a John Deere 318 hydrostatic lawn tractor.

The belt broke in mid-mowing yesterday morning, leaving the Camp Jiggleview parade grounds half beautifully clipped and half ugly, looking like an overgrown weed field in which Mary Poppins lurks, ever ready to burst forth singing schmaltz. (It has been wet, and mowing opportunities are infrequent.)

The result was determination to scrap all other plans, immediately replace the belt, and finish the job.  Thirteen miles away, the nearest Deere outlet sadly  reported no belt in stock. Thirteen miles and three auto parts stores further away, I found one at a marginal farm store, not an OEM product but usable.

While there, I decided to pick up a can of WD40. It was available and on sale! at $6.99 for 12 ounces, at which point I decided not to pick up a can of WD40, even though I like the stuff because (a) the spray can is handy and (b) colorful enough not to get lost in my shop clutter. Those perceived advantages fade at $74 per gallon, even if it really does contain fish oil you spray on a worm to outwit a six-pound bass. Even if has magic molecules to make your date amorous.

The magical stuff is magic because television and the teacher unions have combined to created a population which believes in mysterious potions since chemistry is even harder than math.

WD40 is about half "Stoddard Solvent" which is a geeky way to say "paint thinner." About 15 per cent of it is mineral oil and the rest is inert stuff and CO2 to get it out of the can.

(The figures do not add up to 100 per cent because, just in case I've missed something, one needs to leave a little room for the possible magic molecule which, theoretically, could make fish bite and Julie Andrews hot for your body.)

So, for so long as the miracle elixer goes for eighteen times the price of gasoline, I'll be concocting my own. Fill a pump spray bottle about two-thirds full of diesel. Top it off with SAE 10. The results mimic the magic of the bright blue and yellow can, and the savings can be applied to gray-market .22 ammo.

---

So what's Bernanke got to do with this? Think, Man, think. He's the witch doctor who creates a money-like  substance out of thin air, making sure enough of it floats around to persuade Americans that paying $6.99 for about 50 cents worth of goop is a perfectly reasonable transaction. It stimulates the economy.









May 28, 2013

Making the Underclass Rowdy

While I'm enduring the fourth straight day of rain, fog, and other symptoms of  a world that needs to change its underwear, I'm occupying my time with electronical media.

It's mostly the internet where a little luck on the broker's site will help recoup the cost of those two recent loopholes.  So far this morning, the realized Federal Reserve Cartoons compensate for just under 1 per cent of the Colt/Garand outlay, meaning about 120 straight days of such wild speculation will bring me back to even, FRC-wise, assuming Chairman Bernanke doesn't add  more afterburners over at the Bureauof Printing and Engraving.

But with the other eye I'm occasionally glancing at C-Span where Brooks Brothers   boxers are getting all knotted about the internet "radicalizing" (exclamation points and OMGs) people.

I am sure it does to one degree or another, just like every other mass-communication  enhancer  in history, going back to the papyrus megaphone.  One of the better examples is our own penny press, born in the middle 19th Century (and haven't things gone to Hell since then?).

The internet mimics every other endeavor which makes it easier and easier to prate to  more and more people. In other words, like television and public schools, it arms stupid people with information.*

Even Wiki agrees. The penny papers cost about one-fifth the price of the  established rags and, to boot, offered a powerful selling point:

Simple vocabulary and diction allowed for lower-class and less educated readers to easily understand.

Now, if this way of thinking appeals to the C-Span hand wringers this morning, the logical debate must consider which to outlaw first, the National Enguirer or the Travis McGee Reader and its ilk. Those lower classes are downright dangerous when they learn about stuff happening over in the next block.

---

*Or words and pictures that seem like information. That's important, but it's a subject for another essay.



May 26, 2013

1,2,3,4 What are we fighitng for?

A little for Flag and Mom's apple pie, but mostly for the girl back home.  Ask Sgt. York.



Joan Agnes Theresa Sadie Brodel of Detroit.

May 24, 2013

Grand Opening...



...although he has been returning classics from the dead for quite a while. (This is the man you've seen me refer to as "Genius Jeff," and there is not much hyperbole in that.)

So she ain't quite perfect.

Heck, neither am I. 



May 23, 2013

Non sequiter of the day

An I-5 bridge collapsed in Washington state. Reuters was on the story. Its  final paragraph:

The cause of the collapse was not immediately known. It was not raining in the area, Francis said.




MegaThoughts

Oh my! So much going on in the world. It's more than a fellow can examine in detail, so he is impelled to take the easier path of pronouncing cosmic truths:

1. Stockholm and London are under attack by revolutionary forces. The lesson is that an advanced society does not benefit from providing free candy to lure in tribes not all that far from the Stone Age. Excluding the Irish, of course.

2 Of course we've all wondered, "Why does the Inner Party kill its citizens by remote control and use the tax authority of the state to browbeat and destroy those whose speech appears to be Crimethink?"  Why, because it can, and because it makes governing ever so much more convenient if every bipedal drone in the country knows it. And fears it.


May 22, 2013

Dear Television,

Thank you. I get it. Everyone in Moore, Oklahoma, is brave and stalwart.  Cops and firemen and ambulance drivers and so forth are braver and stalwarter than average.  Politicians fighting their way through the rubble, deperately seeking a television camera, are bravest and stalwartest of all.

So it is unnecessary for you to keeping telling me. Shoot me an email when you have milked the last emo goop from the tragedy and developed some perspective  on this story's place in the whole wide world of news.

(For instance, Ben Bernanke goes public today with all the reasons he should keep devaluing our currency because President Obama needs lots more Federal Reserve Cartoons to keep the recovery going. Gas at four FRCs and bacon at five is just minor collateral damage which we should ignore.)

---

An aside: Gretchen has her thighs covered this morning, so there's no reason to flip to Fox, no matter what they claim to be reporting about.


May 21, 2013

The hayseed gun market

No theme ran through the small collection auctioned off in a little Iowa town last night. Just an assortment owned by a fellow who, in a casual way,  liked guns. This is what the crowd decided weapons are worth:



--Mossberg 16 ga. bolt action, okay condition .... $110

--Carcano 38 (7.35 cal.) heavily bubbaed .... $110

--Spanish copy of Browning "vest pocket"  .25ACP  rough, no mag. .... $90

--Rossi .38 Spc. revolver (Pythonish) as NIB -- $200

--First series Colt Match Target  .22  (1940 mfg.) VG-Exc but no mag .... $530 (!)*

--Star Elbar, SS Colt Commander copy, VG ....  $375

--Spectra HC 9mm semi-auto, as NIB with several hi-cap mags ... $725**

--Winchester 101ish Pigeon Grade XTR (12 ga OU)  in presentation case .... $725

-0-

*Only a fool would have left without owning her at that price.

**An assaultish looking pistoloid which I've seen, if ever, only fired sideways in movin' picture shows about ninjas still subject to acne attacks










Officer Friendly Gets Your Gun

Clive's Finest found out you don't  have to pay even a pittance at gun turn-ins. . A few zippitydoodahs get fuzzy just giving their weapons to the cops. For the children, I would guess.

This one netted 51 "weapons" if you count the BB guns and broken pellet rifles along with assemblies of rusted parts which weren't worth bringing home when new.

However, I imagine gleam in some acquisitive cops' eyes.

After determining if they were stolen, police will send the guns to the state crime lab for testing. Those weapons that are not found to be linked to a crime will be destroyed.

Uh huh. "Chief, I'll just take this here Ruger home and hang it up with the other guns I'm planning to destroy." 

The bunk-junk photos reveal a few that we'd all be pleased to own and possibly a classic or two. Give me some slack for working with lower resolution images, but I notice:

A possible Black Hawk with McGiverned trigger guard, splotchy but savable ... A decent Ruger Standard ... A probable Hi-Standard Sentinel ... another HI-Standard-like semi on the order of the HD ... and something that looks at least a little like the Savage experiment with pocket autos.

But never mind. Clive is a safer burb these days. The Only One's press release says so.


May 19, 2013

Reloading .30-06 military brass

For reasons I hinted at last evening, I've developed an even stronger hunger for .30-06, and a rainy Sunday is devoted to loading some of the case stash, mostly military.

Grrrrrr.

The primer pocket crimp we all curse is only part of the problem. Some of the pockets are just too tight to take a fresh one.

I de-crimp everything with a countersink chucked in a drill, and for some that quick  operation is all it takes. My Autoprime loves 1950s cases from Lake City, particularly LC 54.

It hates everything from Denver, especially  D 42, and I just toss those.

Winchester and Frankford head stamps are between those extremes, and after crushing too many primers I've decided to set them aside until I get around to creating either a  power reamer or a press-mountable swage.

---

At the command of the TMR Legal Review Section, I remind newbies that any time you remove brass from a case you weaken it, maybe significantly, maybe not. I reserve anything I've cut into for conservative loads.



Otherwise at the gun show:

This was a middlin'-size loophole, somewhere around a couple hundred tables. At the usual busiest time, mid-day Saturday, traffic was brisk but not jammed to the extent we've been seeing since November. You could get to the tables and coon finger the stuff. Observations:

--I've rarely seen so much U.S. military webbing and other field gear from the WW2/Korea era. The market hasn't  decided on values.  For instance, similar  .45 magazine pouches carried askings from $10 to $25.  One entrenching tool was offered at $15, a near twin at $50. And so forth.

--Everyday M1 Carbines seem to have settled to an arguing range centered on $800. (I saw only Inlands.)

--Plenty of 5.56x45 (.223 McNamara Stalemate) was on the tables at $.80-$-1 per round. Heavier popular rifle calibers were at $1 and higher.

--Components continued scarce and expensive. I saw no powder. Primers were tagged at $5 and $6 per hundred. I did see what I considered a bargain by recent standards, .223MS brass polished, sized, and primed at 20 cents.

--Everyone wanted .22LR. Only a little offered, but I saw nothing sell at the prevailing asks of  $60 to $90.

--The dealers I know well enough to chat with reported gun sales slow to non-existent.





May 18, 2013

Is there a .govbot in the house?

Three patriots understood that one can not make America a better place to live by hanging around a tea party. Even personal debt reduction must yield to to the need for action now.

Thus they sortied to a loophole, that is, a gun show, at 0804 this date, all in search of enhanced firepower. One of them was particularly enthusiastic about bringing a battlefield weapon to the mean streets of Smugleye-on-Lake.





Designed in part to resist enemy assaults, the (semi) automatic rifle with quick-change detachable bullet clips, was also intended to permit American freedom fighters, both professional and militia, to participate in  assaults.




This one came from a federally licensed dealer, so the armed American exploited  the gun show loophole by providing identification, a state permit in lieu of an NICS check, and filling out what has become a four-page form 4473.

---

She's been rebarrelled (sharp, shiny rifling) but otherwise appears about original. The condition is somewhere near the high end of average, and I expect her to shoot rather well for a dowager born on the high river bluff of Springfield in March, 1943.

Even if she doesn't, I'm glad she's here, especially for a bride price well below the usual 1,000 FRC asking.

I did remark to a loophole companion that the M1 was not especially fun to shoot and that I never found it handy.

 "So why did you buy it?"

Because an American should own a Garand.

.


'

May 17, 2013

Topic of Crapicorn

Even a dedicated wookie can easily take his eye off the ball. It is simply too much fun to watch the details of the government in power getting a wedgie.

For instance, Miller -- the career "civil servant" who bossed Americans through his control of the IRS --  is sickly entertaining. He been questioned all morning by the House Ways and Means Committee. Two things stand out. His attack of Alzheimer's, and his sweat. The latter makes a person think of a Golden Gloves welterweight after eight rounds with Sonny Liston.  ('course, like the Arias legal team, Miller doesn't have much of a case to work with.)

Then there is the congressional committee in charge of Obama polishing. They continue to assert that the real outrage must be reserved for two interns sharing the smallest cubicle in the Cincinnati office of their Inner Party's finance branch.

Such details are vastly entertaining, but if I'm to deserve my fur I need to lift my eyes to the big idea. The crime rests on questions of huge tax-free money to influence a huge government.

Everyone from the Koch Brothers to the Farm Bureau to Acorn is willing to spend billions of dollars to buy political favor for one reason. One. The payoff is hundred of billions of dishonest dollars, money extorted from you and delivered into the hands of whatever lobby happens at the moment to be most successful.

If American people continue to vote for big bloat, they continue to vote for big crime. That's how government is.

May 13, 2013

Even before there was a 3D printer...
























3D printer gun, the short version

The latest Oh My Gawd and Gee Whiz! panic  -- the plastic gun from your 3D printer --  is this year's version of Y2K when the zombies leaped from your computer and chewed up your brains.

The hand wringers hope above hope that no one will Bing "zip gun" and notice the 63,700,000 references. Piece of pipe, Gorilla tape, couple of springs (rubber bands can work), hunk of steel, nail. If you want to get fancy you can add a handful of machine screws and a tap and die set from Home Depot.

Look, I'm only a tinkerer, but if I can't make a better pistol out of stuff found in half the home workshops of America, I'll kiss your Cloraxed arse on the front porch of 505 27th Street in Ogden, Utah, and let you hire the Tabernacle Choir for a warm-up act.




Tax-targeting patriots, the short version

Any tax functionary has the power to destroy your life for reasons he or she may  keep secret.

At this point in American history, the death-by-tax-harassment penalty is primarily reserved for citizens exercising their First Amendment rights by uttering words unpleasant to politicians in power, that is, conservatives, "patriots", and those who question the purity of politicians' motives.

Four decades ago, the same horror was aimed at the reverse slope of prevailing orthodoxy, liberals, doves, and everyone else who believed the sitting president's mindset was well illustrated by his decision to dress his personal guards like Paraguay's admirals.

The current president, speaking Friday through a hapless mouthpiece named Jay,  explains that the tax agency is independent, above politics.  Therefore he, personally, like Nixon before him, is pure and worthy of your infinite trust.




Benghazi, the short version

Four Americans died, unprotected by the American government they served. The Central Intelligence Agency reported, somewhat accurately, the killers were organized Islamic terrorists executing a plan.

This posed problems for Barack Obama, running for president in 2012 and for Hillary Clinton, running for president in 2016. Therefore they ordered the reports soaked in lye, sudsed, and bleached white, all to the conclusion that Mr.Obama and Ms. Clinton were blameless and, in fact, strong leaders. And wise.

Now, eight months later, as lies are publicly aired. Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton have issued the new talking points: "Republicans are politicizing Benghazi."

May 9, 2013

Die, Tourist Scum

Let me tell you about dock law. I mean the kind of dock you fish from, and swim.

I have one across the road on the canal. It's a modest little thing. For the privilege I pay the village of Smugleye-on-Lake $100 per annum plus a little to my insurance company for an SOL-required $1 million liability policy.

To get it I had to run a nearly year-long political uprising against the SOL village council which a few years earlier decided "no new docks adjoining city right-of-way." For reasons you would find boring, this was a piece of statist, intrusive, purposeless nonsense.

We won the point. I paid the city extortion, bought the dock sections, and in two days of heavy grunt labor in cold water, installed them.  Since then I've raised and lowered the deck three or four times to maintain a convenient height above the fluctuating lake levels. Each shift eats up about a half a day.

The Iowa DNR is not to be denied, either. Until a couple of years ago, little docks like mine were called "Class 1." While you had to endure a bit of senseless paperwork to get the state permit, they were free. Then came a gleam in the collective politico-bureaucrat eye. "Hey, Sidney, if we start calling all the Class 1 docks Class 3 docks we can squeeze a $125 registration fee out of all those rich bassards by the lake." Done. Absolutely nothing in the real, physical world changed except a noticeable reduction in this rich bassard's bank account and a concomitant increase in cash for DNR drones to piss away.

One  more thing before I get to the red meat. It isn't my dock. Because it abuts a piece of property which belongs to the village (it shouldn't), every goddam fisher-couple and their six low-average kids from Humboldt,  spewing used Pampers and Lil Debbie cake wrappers in their wake,  have exactly as much right to it as I do. Yep, I clean up after them Monday mornings.

---

Now I note your sarcastic remark that this doesn't sound like cause to go full-Mencken.  In fact, I agree. No throat-slitting is justified, but in a just world I would be permitted, nay encouraged, to hide in the bushes and snipe at their too-tightly- jeaned fat asses with my Daisy Red Ryder just because the slobs are fouling my usufruct.

Because this morning I went down to collect the makings of my first crappie breakfast of the season.  I dressed the yellow lead-head jig with a piece of worm, tossed it in, and moved the rod butt toward my handy rod holder, attached to a dock stanchion.

Gone.

What sort of snake-belly SOB goes to a bit of trouble to steal a 50-cent semi-rusty piece of iron? From a usually  harmless old guy who, as detailed above, rather heavily inconvenienced himself to enhance your weekend away from the trailer park? Jayzuss. Aren't their any garage sales in your declining neighborhood?

I will dream tonight of catching this spawn of the social cesspool and beating him  severely about his nether regions before the grand finale, to wit:  Strip and spread-eagle his Bud-Lighted carcass, pour four ounces of high-test gasoline over his pubic hair and light it off while humming the Campfire Girls' arrangement of This  Little Light of Mine.

What could be fairer?

---

Otherwise rather pleasant, since you're kind enough to ask. I caught many, but only four were big enough to kill. As God is my witness, God made no better breakfast than eight small crappie filets less than an hour from their spring frolic in 45-degree water to the hot cast-iron. (You fry them in about an inch of butter, just so they don't stick to the pan.)










May 7, 2013

Official announcement

The following have been called to the attention of your author who, as authorized by the High Committee of The Internet,  officially declares them boring.

--Chris Christie's lap band surgery. (For those of you without Wiki, Dr. Skilsaw cuts you open and fastens a radiator hose clamp around your upper gut system. It is supposed to make you eat less and look  more leanly presidential.)

--Lindsay Lohan, boobs and all, due to her continuing teevee interviews explaining that she really not all that much of a drug-addled nincompoop.

--The crisis of finding 12 square feet of disposal space for one of the amateur terrorists of Boston.

-- Mika Brzezinski, especially her book about the difficulty of being a bony Polish ice princess in a world of Twinkies and Ding Dongs.

-- Jodi Arias, boobs and all. (N.B.  This subject will be briefly removed from the ennui list if and when Miss Arias is found guilty and sentenced to death.  Discussion will be permitted on two narrow fronts.The first is whether any actual harm to society will be done if her existence is terminated. The second is the morality of ritualized death at the hands of the state.)

May 3, 2013

Whatcha been doin', Jim?

Most lately, processing a worn-out, red, cotton flannel shirt.

You probably remember that Travis McGee occasionally remarked on one of his "treasured old (garments)." I'm like that, but when this one came out of the washer last night I noticed that both elbows were out, so I decided not to treasure it anymore.

Fact: An XL Tall shirt will yield a half-dozen gun rags about the size of a handkerchief plus a quart zip-lock bag stuffed with cleaning patches.

It sounds tedious, but it really isn't if you do it during your early morning hour of disgust in front of the cable news channels. I found myself making most of the patches during the content periods and looking more carefully at the screen during the commercials, which are somewhat more coherent.

As a matter of social responsibility, repurposing the flannel is about a wash. I earn carbon credits for reducing the load on my local landfill, but, on the other hand, there is the guilt of unstimulating the economy.  The Obama-Bernanke policy holds that I should  do my part to alleviate unemployment; that is, take some Federal Reserve Cartoons to the store and purchase rags and patches to maintain my lethal weapons.

--

Then there are K and D, man and woman, traditionally married. They paid a visit yesterday, bearing gifts. D brought her incomparable caramel rolls untouched by shrink wrap. K provided the show and tell, a handful of scrap steel lathed into a complete and, IMO, elegant, system for sizing cast bullets in .355 and .356 for another friend's Helwan. Somewhere in America laid-off machinists and commercial bakers continue to starve.

---

Earlier in the week, just before global warming abated, a lady celebrated her birthday with a fine outdoor party. I didn't know many of the other guests well, so there was the possibility of striving to make conversation. That annoyance did not occur. About half of the men gather downwind from the tables (cigars were involved) and came to a consensus that firearms, archery, the ammunition drought, the deluge of white-tail deer, and the idiocy of politicians were all worthy of serious comment.

---

Besides, the summer machinery is up and running. Both chain saws, both little tractors. Not to mention that the dock is fixed. Holy Moly Mary Marvel. Don't know how much better life can get.

Well, maybe a little.







But I'm probably dreaming, eh? Back to Robert Ardrey so that someday maybe I can write usefully about applying his views on biological imperatives to the current disorder.






 




May 2, 2013

Once there was a draft...

From my friend John via email.

The view that it is  field-expedient modification for the next McNamara 100,000 is my own.