Friday Tour d’Horizon Week 35

We’ll cover the usual subjects: Guns, Usage and Employment, Cops ‘n’ Crims, Unconventional (and current) Warfare, and Lord Love a Duck! And maybe some other stuff, because whatever the hobgoblin of our little mind is, we can pretty much rule out consistency.

Guns

We really wanted to write more about these gun stories. So many guns, so few fingers….

Good Stuff at Forgotten Weapons

Ian has been mining the upcoming RIA premier auction for interesting stuff. Here’s a Russian FN 1903 shoulder-stocked pistol, for example, or a 1960s retro-futuristic GyroJet Rocket Carbine.

Like Ian, we’ve always found stocked pistols cool, and fun to shoot.

The Continuing Adventures of Bubba the Gunsmith

No comment.

Really, no comment.

State Department’s 1st Amendment Revocation Headed to Court of Appeals

The State Department’s attempt to put firearms technical information under a complete lockdown won the preliminary injunction stage at Federal district court, so the next step is a trip to the 5th Circuit. A report on the case by Scott J. Gruenwald, who appears to be suffering a degree of cognitive dissonance between his pro-liberty and anti-gun preferences, ran in 3DPrint.com. Nothing is filed yet and the DD v. US page has not been updated as of press time, but the filing will likely go there when it is delivered to the Court.

Bubba Again? There’s Gotta Be an Easier Way to Make a Bicycle

Found on Teh Interwebz:

Actually, this is the level of handcraftsmanship that the Bubbas at Century aspire to.

Is that mag catch going to snag a rider’s shoelaces, or what?

Apparently no one ever told this cat that you can buy a bicycle for $50 at Walmart, $10 on Craigslist, %0 on Freecycle, or just do like a Black Lives Matter poster child and steal one.

Printed? Casted? Just celebrate diversity!

That’s probably not what the President means when he’s talking about “Diversity.” But printed? Casted? Red, green, yellow, black or white? (That’s +1 on the races of the world right there).

Not the President’s diversity? Just goes to show, with all due respect for the man and the office, he’s wrong.

Colt is Hiring, Sort Of

Colt has a few positions open, while it still negotiates the bankruptcy produced by a rapacious management. Meanwhile, the managers who seek to hang onto the company while expropriating bondholders of $350M have demanded millions of dollars in bonuses from the courts. The open positions are all management/exempt positions. Given the politics of Connecticut courts, they don’t dare address any part of their cost issues that relates to staying in high-cost Connecticut, or maintaining a high-cost, low-quality UAW labor force.

If the Court approves the bankruptcy as proposed, Colt’s failure is not solved, but the day of reckoning is kicked further along the road, and more to the point from the managers’ viewpoint,  they get to keep pocketing other people’s millions, which is why they became hedge fund managers in the first place.

New Flamethrower Threatened With New Ban

We recently covered the new Ion Productions flamethrower, which is made in Warren, Michigan, a decaying industrial suburb of Detroit. The Mayor of Warren, one Jim Fouts, is so alarmed that people may be buying something inflammable from his town, other than Pintos, and so determined to keep the people on welfare where he can be their Supreme Personality of Godhead, that he’s trying to bull a ban through the City Council.

“I support Second Amendment rights,” the mayor, a national socialist, says…. do any of you care to get the next word after his comma?

Yes, that would be the “abnegatory ‘but’”, the conjunction that cancels out the first clause of the sentence. Fouts doesn’t support the Second Amendment. He probably looks really spiffy in a black Hugo Boss uniform. After all, you can’t spell “Boss” without the last two letters!

Usage and Employment

The hardware takes you only half way.

Exercise with Guns?

We don’t wear form-fitting stuff (at this age, the form is rotund anyway) and simply carry a pocket pistol in a pocket, if the event doesn’t work with a holster. But NRA has a simple one-pager of suggestions for staying gunned-up when you’re working out. It’s mostly common sense, but you’d be surprised how uncommon that is.

Defoor’s on De Toor

OK, we’ll cop to the terrible pun, but Our Traveling Reporter tells us that Kyle Defoor has his 2016 schedule up (albeit incomplete, as he’s still placing dates on the calendar)…

….and they’re already filling up. (Not surprising as he’s very reasonably priced for that level of instructional skill). We confirmed this with a visit to his page, during which a Connecticut pistol class closed out (and Connecticut is a lousy place to take a class, as it’s a ban state with a 10-round mag limit, and the state’s staggering taxes make food and lodging in CT a poor value).

We mentioned that our handgun skills were somewhat atrophied and we were back in the Crawl stage of the famous military Crawl, Walk, Run cycle. This brought a sharp response from OTR: “Do not go to Defoor unless you’re at Run!” What he means by that is that you’ll get the most out of it if you’re already at a decent level. Here’s how Kyle explains typical prerequisites:

The 2-Day Pistol course is recommended for those that have attended shooting courses before or who have a thorough understanding of pistol and carbine basics and already have safe gun handling skills.

If your pistol, precision rifle or carbine skills meet basic professional standards and you want to take them up a level in a single weekend, he’s a great instructor. (Mike Pannone is another, and Mike’s an SF guy. Defoor is one of those frogman creatures. NTTAWWT).

Cops ‘n’ Crims

Cops bein’ cops, crims bein’ crims. The endless Tom and Jerry show of crime and (sometimes instantaneous) punishment.

New Jersey Cops bag another Concealed Carrier

Cops in New Jersey don’t pursue criminals. You could get hurt doing that! Instead, they make a regular practice out of rolling up unwary residents from other states who don’t realize that Christiestan is a rights-free zone. They just bagged another, Brian Fletcher, who had come in from North Carolina because New Jersey’s native population of hedge fund clerks and welfare recipients need to call out of state to fix their cell towers.

How Crims Get Guns in CA: From Cops

Dateline, Oakland, August

The theft of the semi-automatic pistol and other items belonging to the officer was reported about 9:59 a.m. Wednesday [26 Aug.] in the 3000 block of East Ninth Street near a Starbuck’s coffee shop in the Fruitvale Station shopping center.

Dateline, Richmond Point, August

Last Friday [21 Aug.] a loaded gun, badge, and other items were stolen from an unmarked SUV belonging to UC Berkeley Police Chief Margo Bennett, who had parked the vehicle at Richmond’s Point Isabel Regional Shoreline while she jogged before work.

In another incident in July, a gun stolen in San Francisco from the car of a federal Bureau of Land Management agent was reportedly used to kill Kathryn Steinle on Pier 14 in the city.

Neither of the August thefts has turned up. The July stolen gun was recovered after a criminal alien used it in the murder. While California laws about gun storage are strict, being a cop means never having to say you’re sorry. In California, none of the reckless cops who left weapons unattended have been charged or disciplined at all — and none of them has said they’re sorry, the heartless, soulless BLM agent particularly maintaining a position of contemptuous, haughty and lawyered-up silence to his victim, Kate Steinle.

The CA Attorney General says this about firearms storage and responsibility:

You may be guilty of a misdemeanor or a felony if you keep a loaded firearm within any premises that are under your custody or control and a child under 18 years of age obtains and uses it, resulting in injury or death, or carries it to a public place, unless you stored the firearm in a locked container or locked the firearm with a locking device to temporarily keep it from functioning.

Unless you’re a cop. Then you have the Thin Blue Patent of Nobility.

Australian Cops Step Up Confiscation

In Western Australia (one of the States into which OZ is organized) the police have been confiscating rifles. Not semi-autos, and not pumps — they already got all those, and they’ve been making noises about lever-actions. But the Target for Today is bolt-action rifles that look, in the inexperienced eye of any one Bronze at any given time, like they might be military.

The actual stocks used in our M24s? They’re OK. Some of the chassis stocks made for the civilian market, and heavy-as-the-Great-Barrier-Reef stocks made for benchrest competitors? Nope, some guy says they’re military, so to the smelter they go.

Elmer Fudd thinks the tiger isn’t going to eat him if he throws the collectors and self-defense shooters in its path. It’s just going to eat him later. 

Unconventional (and current) Warfare

What goes on in the battlezones of the world — and preparation of the future battlefields

Irish Democracy meets Red-light Revenue Cameras

Here are three stories of a guy who got jammed up for knocking red-light cameras out of line and crimping crooked cop/bureaucrats’ free flow of lucre: The Federalist, Sachem Patch, and Stephen Ruth’s own Facebook Page. Most of the money from these schemes go to the politically connected, crony crapitalist companies that fun this for-profit venture.

The Train Attack — It Can’t Happen Here

Because Amtrak is a gun-free zone… just like the Thalys express train in Europe. How did that work out. Katie Pavlich writes in The Hill:

Since moving to Washington, D.C., years ago, I’ve become what is known as a Northeast Corridor Acela passenger. I often travel to New York City for work, and the train goes straight to Penn Station in the heart of Manhattan. It’s convenient, but the majority of the time I don’t feel safe. I can’t imagine I’m the only one.

Three years ago I was on the Acela headed north, on Sept. 11, when the train stopped between D.C. and Baltimore. The Amtrak engineer came over the loudspeaker to explain that there were wires down in front of the train on the tracks and wires down behind us, and that we wouldn’t be going anywhere for a while. “A while” turned into 10 hours of sitting on the tracks, with no option of getting off.

While we were waiting — and as I often do when there’s a delay — I thought about how we were helpless, defenseless, sitting ducks. We couldn’t get off the train, the train couldn’t move and it would be easy for someone on the train to carry out an attack or for someone outside of the train to make their way aboard.

Fortunately, if terrorists wiped out the habitués of the Acela Express, the country would survive. Yes, even the loss of the flower of Wall Street, congressional staffs, and big-J Journalism. Survive, hell, it’d probably benefit.

Veterans’ Issues

They can get ’em to join, in a major initiative to bring vets into the Federal government, but they can’t get ’em to hang around.

The bad news is that once veterans get into government, they don’t stay long. They’re more likely to leave their jobs within two years than non-veterans, the Office of Personnel Management reported.

The Small Business Administration had the most trouble keeping veterans in fiscal 2014, with just 62 percent staying two years or more, compared to 88 percent of non-veterans. Former service members left the Commerce Department at similar rates, with 68 percent staying two years or more compared to 82 percent for non-veterans.

Even the Department of Veterans Affairs, traditionally a draw for former troops, lost a little more than a quarter of its veterans within two years, compared to 20 percent of its non-veterans.

The initiative has fueled tensions in federal offices, though, as longtime civil servants and former troops on the other side of the cubicle question each other’s competence and qualifications.

So why don’t the vets stay? Maybe cause working for the .fed has all the embuggerments of serving in the military, without any of the rewards?

Lord Love a Duck!

The weird and wonderful (or creepy) that we didn’t otherwise get to.

Here’s a Congressman with a Clue:

Is yours like this, or is he the other kind?

Hat tip, Aaron Spuler at Weapon-Blog.com. (This guy is Aaron’s Congressman).

You can’t keep a good technology down

Goodyear’s blimps are being retired, and will be replaced by a new generation of semi-rigid airships. After the US (Akron and Macon), UK (R100-R101) and Germany (who can forget the Hindenburg) had some bad experiences, the only airships left for decades were nonrigid, frameless blimps. But in recent years Zeppelin NT and others have shown that modern materials and other technologies make a framed or partially-framed airship a machine of great potential.

A more serious threat to the airships is the US blowing out Government helium stocks, which are mostly being wasted because of the subsidized low price, and the price shock coming when the ancient US reserve bottoms out.

Buy My Degree for 1/4 Of What I Wasted On it!

That’s the pitch from a woman who got a degree in the jobstopper field of Theatre from Florida State University. Hot tip kid: schools that are known for their football program are not where Broadway is looking for its next generation of talent

Stephanie Ritter, a 26-year-old Florida State University alum, has listed her diploma on eBay for the staggering sum to cover the ‘actual cost’ of attending the school.

Now $40,000 in debt and living in Southern California, Stephanie is fed up with being unable to find a job in her field, despite having a Bachelor’s degree – so she’s come up with a drastic solution to pay off her loans and ‘validate my use of time between 2007-2011’.

It’s only a solution if someone thinks an FSU Theatre degree is worth $50k, which seems unlikely. She has a Plan B and Plan C though:

Though Stephanie seems to recognize the unlikelihood that someone will actually purchase her very expensive piece of paper, she hasn’t given up all hope of achieving financial stability, and told BuzzFeed that she dreams that ‘a very rich family would adult Daddy Warbucks me.’

And if that doesn’t work out either, she has a back-up plan.

‘If that falls through, honestly, [I will] just do that thing where I pay the minimum for 25 years and then the government feels so bad for you that they wipe it clean,’ she said.

Anybody wonder why our generation thinks a large slice of her generation comprises a bunch of sniveling, spoilt, entitled wastes of skin?

A Theatre degree signals to employers: drama queen. It’s not the worst degrees, those are any kind of Grievance Studies.

Off Topic but Fascinating: Mormon and Orthodox Jewish Dating Demographics

This article at the usually worthless Time magazine is an excerpt from a book that examines, among other things, the sex imbalance in dating in certain closed communities (meaning they don’t seek a match outside their group), like Orthodox Jews and Mormons.

In both cases, a surplus of young women is facing too few men, and the reasons are demographic but different: among Mormons, young men are more likely to drop out of LDS than young women, leaving a lot of potential perfect wives unclaimed. Orthodox Jews have a very low religious drop-out rate, so the cause there is different. The demographic growth of Orthodox Jewry (thanks to their preference for large families) means that each year the cohort is larger, so a 2-3 year age difference (male over female) means there will always be more younger women for the men who are a couple years older to choose from. And unusually, among the flavors of Orthodox Jews, Hasidic Jews do not have a marriage imbalance, because their marriage practice is for husband and wife to be of equal age.

Funny, the difference between two couples, one 21 year olds and the other a 19 and 23 year old  might carry within it the demographic seed of many “extra” women who can’t find husbands. (Meanwhile, in China and other Asian patriarchal societies, the advent of ultrasound and abortion has ensured that the “extras” will be men, which has different societal problems). You can’t really match the Chinese men with the “extra” Mormon and Jewish women, not when this is all driven by culture, religion, and identity.