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Sudden Sick

August 24, 2015, 1:31 pm
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I feel fine.

I feel fine.

OH GODS I'M GONNA DIE!  So cold, so very cold!  101 fever no less.

I feel fine.

What the heck causes spikes like that?
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An Errant Thought

August 24, 2015, 3:10 pm
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Watching the Planned Parenthood thing unfold.

I cannot help but feel that people with religious objections to abortions should not have to pay for them.  But since tax monies are spent supporting Planned Parenthood, there's no way to avoid paying for abortions despite your religious objection if you're paying taxes.

Along these same lines it occurs to me that such end-runs happen with depressing regularity.

I am thinking there's an obvious solution.

The government can stop spending tax money on things where it interferes with people's religion.

Think of how small our government could be under such a plan!

We could lower taxes dramatically and those without religious objections could now spend their own money funding Planned Parenthood to their hearts content!

Won't happen though.  The kind of people who are happiest with the status quo are also the sort that would never spend any of their money directly on the convictions they hold dear, they're more the sort that feels that everyone, especially someone else, should pay for their beliefs.
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It Does Not Matter

August 24, 2015, 4:49 pm
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When someone complains that they've had bad service from a vendor, guess what doesn't matter?

Your flawless experience.

Congratulations that everything went without a hitch for you!

If there's lots of people with a positive experience, then it just means the negative experience is rare, not that it didn't happen.

But thanks for treating it as if it was impossible because YOU didn't have a bad experience.
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Prophylatic

August 24, 2015, 7:03 pm
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Swapped out the old followers in The Lovely Harvey's M&P magazines for the newest design on a "just in case" basis.




Her old one on the left and a new one on the right.

I've heard tales of the older style splitting and jamming the magazine, so an ounce of prevention is applied here.

I also noticed that the baseplate on her older magazines is different from my newer ones.

The list of revisions in the M&P pistol line-up are legion.
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Dammit

August 24, 2015, 10:05 pm
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All you have to do is to keep your damn traps shut and I'll keep clicking on your comic.

Open your trap and I'll have no recourse but to find something else to read.

This is why you shouldn't have a blog at the bottom of your strip.  You're apt to say something that will alienate a reader so they go away and never return.

This is why I am not excited about the return of Bloom County (Although Mr Breathed did it in editorials in the newspapers that carried his strip and not on a blog).  It's why I quit reading a very amusing pro-gun comic, Failure to Fire.  It's why I'm quitting Schlock Mercenary.

Authors are a special kind of dancing monkey, I guess.

In Howard Tayler's case, I'm not going to support anyone who's cheering about the result of this years Hugos.  The entire camp on that side of the debate has nothing they should be celebrating and should feel nothing but shame.  They did nothing admirable and deserve no congratulations for being the bullies Larry Correia predicted and proved they'd be.
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Where The Heck Have I Been

August 25, 2015, 8:33 am
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I guess I am not sexist enough.  I had no idea Andre Norton was a woman.

I just read what books of hers that came to hand and if the first chapter hooked me, kept reading.

This is right up there with learning that Alexandre Dumas was black.  Though with him I watched far more movies based on his books than reading.

You'd think the identity of the authors would matter to me a lot more than it does since I'm trending on the Sad Puppy side as more details reach me, wouldn't you?

Since anyone who leans towards the Sad Puppy side is a misogynist racist homophobe nazi klansman who probably murders a kitten every morning for our bloody marys.
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Wedge Antilles

August 26, 2015, 12:02 am
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He's the only named character in all three of the original Star Wars movies who isn't part of the main cast.

Denis Lawson did such a great job of appearing to be flying his X-Wing and Snowspeeder that it captured my young mind and stuck hard.



I've said it before, he's the only BY GOD fighter pilot in the whole Rebellion.

One thing I've done is to make my Lego X-Wing Wedge's X-wing.  Research materials abound and it's simple.

You extend the stripe on the fuselage past the canopy by changing out the white pieces for maroon.  Then you get his helmet from the two releases ago X-Wing set and his astromech droid from one of two other kits.  Ebay is your friend for not buying whole Lego sets to get small bits like this.

Because parts are coming, so are pics...
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Wal Mart Is Discontinuing AR And Tactical Sales

August 26, 2015, 1:26 pm
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They cite sales being utterly flat.

But everything political nowadays.

But it seems to me that they haven't sold ammo at my Wal Mart for a long time... well it seems like it because they're always out of stock.

The Lovely Harvey bought a 10/22 from Wal Mart years ago and it was the most tedious and painful gun-buying experience we've ever had.

Not even getting NFA was as big a pain in the rear.  Let that sink in.
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Code White

August 26, 2015, 2:29 pm
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I watched the vid the scumbag shooter made with his cell phone.

He had his gun out and pointed at Ms Parker for about three seconds and none of the three people standing there noticed.  He then loitered around a bit before opening fire.

All three of the victims were totally unaware of their surroundings.  Mr Adams, the cameraman, had his sight-line blocked by the camera equipment, but Ms Gardner, the woman being interviewed, should have been able to see it.  Did the denial circuit kick in and not let her perceive what she was seeing until the shooting started?

Just dammit.

Pay attention out there!
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More New Shooter

August 26, 2015, 5:12 pm
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Willard took his granddaughter shooting again.  She's improving!




Ian even gave her some more trigger time with his AR-7.


I took the Star B and confirmed that it once again goes bang.
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Bought My Last E-Book

August 27, 2015, 1:58 am
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Going back to paper exclusively.

Don't publish on paper?  No sale.

Why?

Because not once in nearly 50 years of reading has my paper library been rendered inaccessible from a mandatory update to the software.

There's how old Gutenburg Bibles that still work pretty much as originally published?

In ten years you're not going to have a single book you paid for from Amazon unless you've also dropped on a new computer and taken it in the shorts with whatever OS Apple, Android or Microsoft decide to stuff there.

I'm already keeping this ancient machine running because I don't want to lose the games I've paid good money for, but at least they're properly abandoned by the publisher so there's little chance of an update killing them.
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Gotta Sleep Sometime

August 27, 2015, 4:08 am
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In case I came across wrong...

It is impossible to maintain 100% situational awareness 100% of the time.

As the post title says, you gotta sleep sometime.

There's a myriad of things that can distract you from your greater surroundings long enough to get you killed, and that's just accidents.

Most people when performing a task are involved with it enough to not really be too aware of their surroundings, and what awareness there is gets heavily filtered.

It was once called sense memory.

Sense memory is the shortest term, your senses perceive it, but a filter runs here.  If the filter deems it noteworthy it can bump it up to short term memory, and into your conscious awareness.  You're literally not aware of everything your senses are reporting.

Ever been someplace where something that has been making noise the entire time you're there suddenly shuts down and you suddenly notice the silence rather than the absence of the noise?  That's sense memory talking.

When I was learning this, we dubbed it "the denial circuit".  Because your sense filters aren't very good at discriminating when they've been programmed to ignore things that fit a certain mold.  Your whole brain is not involved in the filtering process.  What this leads to is your senses reporting what they expect to see and not what they're actually seeing.

A person moving around in a public place where you expect people to be moving around can get filtered almost out of existence.  You nearly have to make a conscious effort to notice the background and then you're compromising your ability to perform the tasks you were sent to do.

Catch 22.

This same phenomenon is at work with several eye-witness studies.

You do the best you can.  All we can really hope is these tragedies will make you reprogram your filters to be more aware and perhaps that will save your life.

Me?  Because of the misophonia I spend a lot of time trying to shut my surroundings out.  I'm going to be killed never knowing how if someone decides to off me.
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In GURPS Pi Is Three

August 27, 2015, 12:28 pm
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Thanks to Pirate Fashions I got a crash course in the fine distinctions of the locks between wheel lock and flintlock.

There's lots of different lock styles that use a flint that while they're flint locks they aren't flintlocks.

In vaguely chronological order...

Snaplock
Snaphance
Miquelet or Spanish Lock.
Doglock or English Lock.
Flintlock or True Flintlock or French Lock.

And subtypes and variants.

The distinctions center around the location of the springs, working of the sear, working of the cock, if the pan cover is automatically retracted, if the pan cover is part of the frizzen and if there's a frizzen or just a steel.

In the real world there's some real difference how these operate so that if you're thinking in one system, it can trip you up working another.

In GURPS they're all the same skill, with familiarization.
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Teh Maths

August 28, 2015, 1:02 pm
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And they don't add up.

According to Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) legal policy analyst Jon Feere, who testified before the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Immigration and Border Security in April, between 350,000 and 400,000 children are born annually to an illegal-alien mother residing in the United States — as many as one in ten births nationwide. As of 2010, four out of five children of illegal aliens residing in the U.S. were born here — some 4 million kids. Reporting that finding, the Pew Research Center noted that, while illegal immigrants make up about 4 percent of the adult population, “because they have high birthrates, their children make up a much larger share of both the newborn population (8 percent) and the child population (7 percent) in this country.”
The cost of this is not negligible. Inflation-adjusted figures from the U.S. Department of Agriculture projected that a child born in 2013 would cost his parents $304,480 from birth to his eighteenth birthday. Given that illegal-alien households are normally low-income households (three out of five illegal aliens and their U.S.-born children live at or near the poverty line), one would expect that a significant portion of that cost will fall on the government. And that’s exactly what‘s happening. According to CIS, 71 percent of illegal-alien headed households with children received some sort of welfare in 2009, compared with 39 percent of native-headed houses with children. Illegal immigrants generally access welfare programs through their U.S.-born children, to whom government assistance is guaranteed. Additionally, U.S.-born children of illegal aliens are entitled to American public schools, health care, and more, even though illegal-alien households rarely pay taxes.
Let's keep things simple and max it out.

If 400,000 kids are born to illegal aliens, and they're 1 in 10 of the birth rate, then that's 4,000,000 kids total.

71% of illegal kids get some sort of welfare, or 284,000 kids.
39% of legal kids get some sort of welfare, or 1,404,000 kids.

Five times as many legal families get welfare than illegal.

I know the point they're trying to make, and this doesn't make it.

I also note that nearly half of the children born in the US are on "some sort of welfare" too.
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Erika Approaches

August 28, 2015, 3:10 pm
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Everyone is in freak out mode.

I couldn't put my finger on it because Erika is a very disorganized tropical storm.

Then it occurred to me, this happens every year for the first named storm to hit.

It's just the first one to hit this year is happening so very late.

Even if it's a tropical storm when it hits here, it's not going to be as bad as the last two weeks of July were for rain and wind.

Yes, serial unrelenting thunderstorms from a stalled front are worse than a tropical storm.  But guess which one is national news.
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That Was It?

August 29, 2015, 8:21 am
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Erika went from the first named storm to a soggy beginning of the week overnight.

I'm going to buy a dart board and mark it with storm predictions and start mapping my results and seeing if it's more accurate than NOAA.
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Matter Of Taste

August 29, 2015, 6:31 pm
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From here.

Actually pizza should have all three of pepperoni, sausage and bacon.

Just sayin'.

Sausage and pepperoni at a minimum.

We're not Godless savages here.
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Armored Cars

August 29, 2015, 6:50 pm
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I remember...

I was in units that had Truck, Utility 1/4-Ton, 4x4 M151's (a lineal descendant to the original Willy's Overland Jeep).

I was in units that had Commercial Utility Cargo Vehicles (The Chevy version that was retconned into being the Light Service Support Vehicle).

I was in units that had High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicles.

What do they all have in common?

They're trucks.  Light trucks.  The CUCV is literally a commercial pick-up.

Army units need such vehicles to do all manner of jobs that aren't appropriate for other, heavier, vehicles.  Including other trucks.

My line unit was a tank unit.  We had plenty of armor on hand...  We didn't need armored cars, we needed trucks.

Problem is, when we went to the Warren Tarra we discovered we'd been a little too generous with the second M in HMMWV.

Trucks don't make good front-line combat vehicles.  It should have been obvious, because they never have.

We tried to uparmor them, but that made them overloaded trucks with some armor.  At least in Vietnam we started with a deuce and a half...

What we were wanting was an armored car for these roles.

Apparently, we're going to be obtaining armored cars to replace HMMWV's.

Which is great for jobs that need an armored car (and we do have lots of them), but too fucking spendy for jobs that just need a darn truck!

Unfortunately, none of the auto makers makes a truck that's as simple and rugged as the old Dodge D150 or Chevy C/K anymore, so there's no handy COTS solution to the light truck problem.

Not that any procurement is simple anymore... Sigh.
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Ignurt SOB

August 30, 2015, 2:33 pm
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My first carry method was small of back and it was with a Glock 17 in a floppy-ass Uncle-Mike's nylon holster.

I was ignorant.  I literally didn't know any better and there was nothing to teach me.  Never mind that I was carrying illegally, because may issue Iowa gave a lot of authority to the local sheriff and Story County didn't issue permits to pizza drivers.

It seemed to make sense, it was comfortable, the gun was out of the way, and unless you bent over or sat down, well concealed.  But sitting down... driving for any length of time meant you'd be wanting a chiropractor and it was utterly useless for riding the motorcycle because you'd be open carrying in short order when the wind pulled up the back of your shirt.  Additionally the placement of the gun back there really added to the chances that a car accident would break something you wanted to keep (like your spinal column).

At the time there just wasn't anywhere to turn for better information and the fact that I was committing a misdemeanor didn't make me want to advertise I was packing.

It turned out my most common form of carry was off-body in my gaming bag.  A flight helmet bag has all kind of room and numerous pockets that are perfect for a full-size handgun and a couple of magazines.  It's also an illustration that when you make it illegal for someone to carry at all, they also don't care that you've banned guns from a given location.  I campus carried in that bag too; almost as if the magic gun free zone barriers are completely ineffective.

That was more than 20 years ago too.  Statute of limitations and all that.

Now carry permits are easy to get with shall-issue laws and there's a plethora (ask for El Guapo) of sources to learn what the pluses and minuses of any given gun/holster combination.

Now I buy my clothes with concealment in mind.  I've expanded my arsenal and have guns that are more tailored for concealed carry than a full-sized service pistol.  I have holsters that hold the guns in place and help hide it.

If I need advice, I can just ask because there's nothing untoward going on.
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Maintaining A Record

August 30, 2015, 4:15 pm
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None of the guns in my possession have shot any reporters, cameramen, local business people or cops.

I still resent the implication that because someone has shot a reporter, cameraman, business person or cop that I should be punished for their criminal behavior.

Wasn't me, didn't do it is still a positive defense.

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