Obama Subterfuge Works Better Than Papal Candor

Shmuel Rabinovitch, rabbi of the Western Wall, says the Pope can’t wear a cross when he visits.

That’s up to him. He’s the boss; he writes the dress code. The wall is Jewish property.

But where was he when Obama showed up at the wall carrying his famous Hindu monkey idol in his pocket? Also, a cynical person might say Obama himself, being the self-anointed false messiah, is a religious symbol.

I suppose you can argue that the monkey idol was not visible, whereas the Pope’s cross is. Does that mean the Pope can please the rabbi by putting the cross in his pocket right before he approaches the wall?

My guess is that the rabbi has no idea Obama carries a Hindu idol around, or that he accepted a huge gold-plated version sent from India. It’s probably in our White House right now, since it’s Obama’s property. This is the kind of “diversity” Solomon favored. Sadly, God felt differently.

Interesting quote from the rabbi:

“I feel the same way about a Jew putting on a tallit and phylacteries and going into a church.”

He may feel that way, but I very much doubt the Pope does. I can’t imagine any Christian, even in a weak mainstream church, telling a Jew to keep his Jewish paraphernalia out of the sanctuary. These days, even Orthodox rabbis sometimes speak in churches, and they don’t have to scrap their yarmulkes.

I don’t think the rabbi feels it would be disrespectful to Christians to wear these things in a church. I know of no basis for such a feeling. The overwhelming likelihood is that he feels it would be disrespectful to Judaism, but he’s trying to convey a different impression, which is pretty disingenuous. On the other hand, maybe he just misunderstands us. Very badly. To a degree which is not really credible.

The Pope should cancel his visit to the wall. Asking a Pope to take off his cross is like asking the rabbi to take off his yarmulke or work on Saturday. It would be a tacit yet undeniable and unambiguous denial of faith. Part of the Pope’s job is to profess and symbolize belief in Jesus. If he took off the cross, he would be letting down every Christian in the world. He would be telling us it’s okay to hide your faith in order to avoid trivial social awkwardness.

He can have a nice visit and mend fences without going to the wall. He showed respect by asking to go; that’s good enough.

The world is not ready for Papal visits to the wall. That’s the bottom line.

Saddest Thing Ever: Stealing Business Plan From Pajamas Media

FAIL FAIL FAIL

Has anyone EVER had a subscription news site that made money? I mean, regular news like you get in a newspaper?

This is why PJTV will fail. In fact, I would say the notion was “pre-failed” before it ever started.

Humorous Errors Logged for Posterity

I managed to use up the last of my Laser-Cast .45 bullets today. By that I mean I managed to make them into ammunition. I must have had every conceivable type of ammunition press malfunction by now. And not all are inevitable problems caused by the nature of the press. I made up a good number of completely new and unnecessary glitches.

The first die a casing hits in a Hornady Lock-N-Load AP has a pin in it that pushes the old primer out. The primer falls into a tube and goes out of the press. If the pin doesn’t push it far enough, it sticks halfway out. This locks up the press. It can’t turn because the primer obstructs it. Lots of fun.

The safeguard is to adjust the pin correctly and tighten it so it can’t slip back into the die. I do this, but you really have to crank down on it, and I’m reluctant to put too much pressure on the parts. So once in a while, the pin manages to work its way into the die, and a casing gets stuck.

My genius response? No, I didn’t throw away a two-cent .45 casing, of which I have piles. I put the casing on top of the shell plate and ran it up into the die, figuring the pin would poke the primer out. Here’s the problem with this idea. The same die has a sizing part in it that squeezes the casing back into shape, and when a casing goes into it, it gets wedged in very tightly. What pulls it out? The shell plate. IF the casing is situated so the rim is under the plate. If you do what I did, the plate pushes the casing in, but it can’t pull it out. So you have to find a way to pull the casing out, and then you have to readjust the pin. In case you’re wondering, Vise Grips don’t work too well, but a flat screwdriver does.

I also ran several rounds through the machine, with the part that loads primers sitting on the bench beside it. One of the irritating things about this press is that it’s easy to screw up the primer apparatus; there are several things that can keep primers from seating. When I started getting rounds with no primers, I figured it was time to diagnose a problem and fix it. In a sense, that was true. I looked at the part sitting on the bench next to the press, and I instantly diagnosed the problem: epic operator FAIL.

At one point I managed to do something really original. I somehow got a bullet stuck in the die that seats bullets in cases. I found this out when the stuck bullet mashed the next round halfway into a casing. I had to take the die out, put it in a vise, and drill out the stuck bullet. This may have been caused by an indexing problem. When the indexing gets messed up, you can have a situation where you can only push casings partially into the dies. In a situation like that, you could easily push a bullet halfway into a casing and then pull it back off, leaving it stuck in the seating die. If you didn’t catch it, you’d end up with the problem I had.

Other than my own interesting screwups, the press works as well as it ever did. The pawls were easy to adjust, but they crept out of adjustment while I made ammunition, ruining two primed cases and necessitating use of a hex wrench. I think this thing could use some Loctite to keep the pawl screws from creeping in and out. The little slide that moves fresh primers into the press got stuck once. As far as I know, this is normal. It has happened ever since I got the press. You can clean it and dry-lube it all you want. It’s going to happen once in a while. If powder spills on it and you don’t clean up every trace, it happens a LOT. Finally, the ejection wire caught one round, obstructing the press. Ho hum. I can deal with that. You just pull the round out.

On the whole, it’s a good thing. Five-dollar boxes are better than fifteen-dollar boxes, and it’s nice to know a little bit about ammunition, instead of just going to the store and pointing at the box I want.

I still have 1400 rounds of Hornady hollow points that I got as part of a sales promotion. I guess I should look up a recipe and start using them. I have read that they’re not optimal for self-defense, because they don’t always open up. I don’t know whether it’s true, but they’re fine for the range. Even if they’re not the best, this caliber does the job pretty well even with ordinary ammunition, so it would be comforting to have a few hundred rounds of hollow points in the closet.

With any luck, I’ll be shooting the Vz 58 at the range on Thursday. I bought .38 Super brass, so maybe I’ll take both 1911s and have a real session.

Buy a Gun Day Approaches

What are you buying for Buy a Gun Day?

I went to my local gun shop and asked for a surplus ICBM, but apparently the bedwetting liberals have managed to make it impossible to buy them.

Still Waffling

Mish Weiss’s blood cell counts are showing some improvement, but she has another cold and a very high fever. Here’s what a faithful prayer warrior has to say in her comments:

Of course, we will pray. Thanks for the specific info so we know exactly how to pray. I believe G_d answers our specific prayers. So we will pray that Mish’s counts continue to go up and the fever goes down the the cold goes away.

I’m joining in these prayers, and I hope you will do the same. Posting for Mish, Marc says “I know that I don’t even have to ask for prayer, thank you in advance.” What a day we live in, when Christians and Jews cooperate like this and see each other as allies. Many denominations, especially mainstream churches, display disturbing hostility to Jews and Israel, but there are at least 800 million Christians who have been taught that the Jews are the apple of God’s eye, and that we are to help them whenever we can.

In other news, I’m dithering on the lathe issue. A certain sum will buy me one of these three items: a Grizzly G4003G with a stand and a warranty, a used Clausing 5914 that came from a prison, and a South Bend 13 x 36. Og says the Chinese stuff is as good as ours now. If that’s true, the Grizzly is a good move. It will have a warranty and great customer support, and presumably, it will work right out of the crate. Still, I’ve read about little quality issues where the old US stuff is much better, and it’s possible that I might be better off with an old lathe.

I should point out that the G4003G is a gunsmith’s lathe. It’s a G4003 with better bearings and a few gewgaws. It should be considerably better than most non-Taiwan Grizzly offerings.

I’ve decided I’m not comfortable buying a used local machine unless I can be completely sure it will perform as well as a new Chinese job. The risk is too big, unless the machine is so cheap I can’t justify not trying it. A person of limited skills can’t really restore an old lathe, unless it has damage limited to certain areas. The Clausing and South Bend come from a dealer with a great reputation; I’d rather pay him a fair price than buy an iffy lathe really cheap.

Complicating the issue, I keep thinking the smart move might be to drop a few hundred on a Harbor Freight job and learn about machining. If I did that, presumably in a few months I’d be knowledgeable enough about lathes to evaluate used tools.

I hope my next round of Smartflix DVDs arrives today.

Friction Gone

More info for Hornady Lock-N-Load AP owners.

A while back I wrote about the problems I had with my Lock-N-Load. I want to emphasize something: this machine may have been completely perfect when I got it. It is possible that I screwed it up while learning how to use it. But I don’t think so, because it appears that the fundamental problem is excess friction, and that’s a design and/or manufacturing tolerance issue.

I had problems with indexing from the time I got the press. The ball detent things under the shell plate are of limited value; they don’t give enough resistance to prevent the plate from indexing incorrectly. You have to have the pawls set perfectly. These are little spring doodads that push the index wheel that turns the plate. They must be aligned with extreme precision; one quarter of a turn of an adjusting screw can mess things up.

The pawls move the plate by pushing the index wheel with their upper edges, which are very thin and somewhat fragile. The index wheel is hardened steel, and it will eat the pawls quickly if they have to work too hard. If it takes a lot of torque to turn the wheel, the pawls aren’t going to last. I think Hornady dropped the ball here. It seems to me that if you’re going to use a thin, delicate metal edge to push something, you should reduce the required force as much as possible. It would have been just as easy to make machines that turned with less resistance. Change two specs: the diameter of the drive hub, and the diameter of the drive shaft.

I figured I was having a problem with friction, so I took the driveshaft out, mounted it in a drill, and spun it inside a sheet of emery paper until it was shiny. When I stuck the shaft back in the machine, the decrease in friction was obvious. But I couldn’t test the press because while I was fooling with it I snapped a little key off the drive hub, and I put a lot of wear on the pawls. I ordered new pawls and a new hub, and they arrived a couple of days ago.

I put the hub on the shaft, mounted it in the drill, and gave it the emery-paper treatment. I cleaned out the inside of the sub plate (the hub rotates inside it), and I greased everything and put the machine together. When all was said and done, it turned considerably more freely than in the past, and it indexed perfectly.

One interesting side note: I had a hell of a time getting it to index when I first put it back together. Finally, I looked at the index wheel. It appeared to me that it was impossible for the pawls to push it as far as it needed to go, because of the shape of the wheel’s arms. They seemed to be curved in the opposite direction from the way they needed to go. And of course, they were. I had put the wheel on upside-down. This is probably why I couldn’t get the machine to index the last time I worked on it, after I ground the worn parts off the pawls. In all likelihood, I bought new pawls I didn’t need. Oh well. I’ll need them eventually.

I also have a habit of reassembling coaxial parts in the wrong order, so whatever I’m working on has to be taken apart several times before I’m done. I only did that about three times tonight.

The machine works great now. Slick as snot on a doorknob. And I understand it, finally. I suspect that every LNL owner needs to do what I did. Unless some units have less friction than others.

Hornady redesigned the shell ejection system. You have to buy a $30 replacement sub plate and pay $10 each to get your shell plates converted to work with it. I don’t know if I’ll bother. The old system relies on a stiff wire that pushes shells out of the plate. It’s very clearly at an angle which is suboptimal for the job. That’s not the whole problem; when the wire pushes on the side of the case to eject it, the rim rotates up against the bottom of the shell plate and creates resistance to ejection. But I think that if I bent the wire a bit, it would be reliable enough to keep using. I have two or three spares, so I don’t really care if I ruin one.

It feels great to get something fixed. So often now, when I have a problem, I’m able to go out in the garage and fix it. I can’t explain how wonderful that feels. I am finally getting something I’ve wanted all my life. It’s like coming up for air after a long swim under water.

My tool journey has been much more than a frivolous waste of money or a passing interest. I has been a genuine voyage of self-actualization. Christians don’t use that term much, but we should, because self-actualization is something the Psalms promise us. “Delight thyself also in the Lord, and he shall give thee the desires of thine heart.” “The steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord, and he delighteth in his way.” God knows us before we are born, and he designs each of us for a purpose. So it’s only natural that faith and obedience lead to a life in which you find yourself doing the very things that fill your innermost needs.

It’s funny. Non-Christians talk about the importance of “finding yourself.” That’s exactly what’s happening to me. So often, we spend our lives trying to find the things we know we need, when we should be living by faith and letting God bring us those things. You don’t need to find yourself. God already knows where you are, and he can show you.

I am starting to wrap up my lathe search. I have a couple of candidates. The prices are merely fair, but I can live with that, if it means not having the headache of coping with disappointing tools from shady dealers. Sometimes you have to pay for things. That’s just how it is.

I’m thinking I’ll get a 12″ by 36″ lathe and possibly a Millrite. I would prefer a Bridgeport, because there is a good chance I’ll eventually want to upgrade from a Millrite, but space is an issue, and a Bridgeport is about half again as big as a Millrite, in linear terms. The Millrite I found locally appears to be very nice, and I can get it at an okay price, with a shipping charge much lower than what I’d pay to drag one in from out of state. Once I have a mill and a lathe, I’ll be pretty well set for major tools.

Just don’t talk to me about Bobcats.

There’s Some Lovely Filth Down Here!

This is going to be a weird day.

It already started out weird. I got a comment from a guy claiming to work for King Arthur Flour. Apparently they have a very limited sense of humor about their marketing approach. They sent me a junk email advertising a recipe for “doughnuts without frying,” and I wrote a short post saying what a disgraceful and disturbing idea that was. The comment I received was sincerely defensive. I think maybe somebody needs a little time away from the mill.

It’s a bad sign when an executive runs around defending his company in blog comments. Especially when he defends the company from humor instead of serious criticism.

To [probably] misquote Steve Martin in My Blue Heaven, “Everybody thinks they have a sense of humor, but they don’t, really.” A person who laughs when he sees other people fall down thinks he has a sense of humor. But if he can’t take or even detect a joke, he really doesn’t. A person who has a sense of humor laughs when he, himself, falls down.

It’s a wonderful thing. Humor takes the most miserable moments in life and turns them into causes for celebration. It’s bizarre, if you think about it. Think about all those home videos of ruined weddings. The cake falls over. A bird poops on the bride. Whatever. If the people in the video have a sense of humor, they break up. It’s the greatest thing they’ve ever seen. They all want a copy of the video. If they have no sense of humor, it’s a horror that will be relived for 50 years. And as long as she lives, the bride will use it to make life hell for those around her. It will form the basis for her permanent vendetta against fate. It will be her excuse for distributing misery like a runaway manure spreader. A lot of women would give anything for an excuse like that.

For what it’s worth, I use King Arthur flour. If I didn’t think they made good products, I would not be on their junk email list. They make a strange pizza blend which is pretty good, but it’s unavailable except at mail-order prices, so I only bought one bag. It’s long gone. I don’t know if their bread flour is any better than anyone else’s. I have made tons of pizzas for test purposes, and I have not noticed a difference I could put my finger on, but I got in the habit of buying King Arthur for the reputation, so I still have it in the kitchen. I made Texas toast with it last week, and Mike says he’s still in withdrawal. My favorite pizza flour, however, is all-purpose biscuit flour from Gold Medal or Pillsbury. Whatever is cheapest. Anything low in protein, with no leavening. I bought 00 flour, but I used it so rarely, the bugs got it.

Baked doughnuts are an abomination, like soy milk. I stand by that. A baked doughnut is a cupcake with a hole. Okay, sure, I have probably eaten baked doughnuts. I’m pretty sure Entenmann’s faux-chocolate doughnuts are baked. I’ve eaten them, but I have no illusions about what I’m getting. Frying rocks. Especially when you use a particularly tasty fat, like coconut oil.

And–this will make the King Arthur people even madder–the best doughnuts are full of potato starch, which cuts way down on the flour content. Oh well.

The concept of baking things like doughnuts in order to make them healthier is fairly ludicrous. The fat is the least harmful thing in a doughnut. The huge pile of refined carbs that shoot into your bloodstream as glucose ten minutes after you eat…that’s the problem. That and the calorie load. If I had to choose between giving up refined carbs and giving up healthy, versatile, delicious saturated fats, I’d drop the carbs in a heartbeat. Out of fear, more than anything else. You can’t jam yourself full of flour, rice, potatoes, and sugar all the time and expect to be healthy. If you take those things out of your diet, the fats pretty much cease to be harmful. Look up homocysteine.

That reminds me; I have to get to McDonald’s soon so I can get my weekly McBiscuit, dripping with salty grease.

The other weird thing about today is that I have to run down to the warehouse, put a new padlock on it, and figure out what to do with all the junk. If I’m going to have a Craigslist sale, I have to find out what I have and make a list. And I need to make sure that sweet Genie Superlift is safe.

I should take more photos. What do you do with a light globe two feet across? Surely someone will want it. It would be a great planter.

What am I going to do with a ten-foot-long workbench? Even if I get it out of the warehouse, it’s not the kind of thing you can just throw out. Maybe I can bust it up with a crowbar.

Dang, the deadline is drawing near. I better hit the drive-through.

Oh the Wrongness of It

Tonight I got the dumbest junk email. It came from King Arthur Flour. The subject was “Doughnuts without frying? Here’s the secret.”

Why on God’s green earth would I want doughnuts without frying?

FAIL FAIL FAIL

DELETE DELETE DELETE

Free Stuff!

I got some comments touting the reliability of pump-action shotguns and implying that the Saiga I got is a product that lacks the pump’s long history of trouble-free use. I have no reason to doubt that pumps are reliable. I don’t know much about them. But I think I should point something out, if only to keep people from inadvertently making themselves look silly. The shotgun I bought is made by Izhmash, and the brand name is Saiga, but what it is, is a KALASHNIKOV. It’s an AK-47 shotgun. So maybe it’s best not to call it “untried.” That is my thinking, anyway.

I have had an interesting day. I got two new tools. Are you ready for this? One is a huge GENIE LIFT.

I know what you’re thinking. I have a giant Gomez-Addams-style vault under the floor, so I don’t care what I spend. No. Sadly. I got this thing for nothing. It’s really incredible.

My father owns some warehouses. The economy is bad. People are going out of business. He lost a tenant. The tenant was in construction. He told me the warehouse was full of “junk” up to the ceiling. He could not get the tenant to remove it. They called Habitat for Humanity, and they wouldn’t take any of it. It has been abandoned. He said there were “two big machines” in there, and he invited me to go look.

We drove out there today and opened the place up, and lo and behold, there was a Genie Lift in the back. And I don’t mean a little one. This thing looks like the suit Sigourney Weaver wore to fight the alien queen. It has the outrigger deals and everything. You could lower a 600-pound tool from the back of a truck with this machine. I have no idea what I’m going to do with it , but I know one thing. It’s coming home with me.

Can you believe that? On the way out there, I kept thinking how great it would be if one of the machines were a mill or a Genie Lift. I guess a Genie Lift is better, because I am willing to pay for a mill, but I would never have sprung for a Genie Lift.

It’s beat-up, but who cares? It’s in working condition.

The other machine, I could not figure out. It had two big tires on the bottom and a big flex shaft about eight or nine feet long, running from a Baldor motor to what looked like a platform for lifting drywall into place. I looked it up when I got home. It’s a ceiling grinder.

I would guess that even among my bizarre readers, there are few people who would recognize this thing. Here’s how it works. You make a concrete garage. It has cruddy excess material at the seams on the ceiling. So you go in with the ceiling grinder and grind them down. It works with wheels that look just like 10″ cutoff wheels. Google it. Very odd.

It’s in excellent shape. Unfortunately, I can think of no earthly use for it. So I plan to Craigslist it.

I plan to Craigslist a lot of stuff. My father wants no part of this mess. He just wants it out. He made me a key, and he told me it was my problem. I guess I’ll have to go out there and catalog and photograph it. Here is some of the junk I found.

1. A huge Ridgid brand driveshaft. For what? I don’t know. It’s brand new, still in the box. It’s around six feet long.

2. Boxes and boxes of grey PVC fittings. Lots of “end bells.”

3. Nuts for electrical conduit. Many boxes. I’d say most are 3″ across. Maybe 2″.

4. At least four stainless in-wall restroom towel dispensers.

5. Five sheets of 3/4″ sheathing plywood, plus other scraps.

6. A ten-foot-long formica workbench.

7. Three air cleaners. These are huge box fans that take air filters. Very heavy. One is still in the box.

8. Miles of rigid and EMT conduit. I will never lack for scrap again, if I can just find a place to put it.

9. All sorts of leftover steel from a modular mezzanine put in by a previous tenant. Beautiful for welding.

10. About 30 sheets of painted 3/16″ steel, in one-foot squares. These are panels intended for some specific purpose, but to me, they are some of the most gorgeous welding scrap imaginable.

11. Lots of electrical boxes, including some about two feet high and two feet wide. Full of tasty salvageable breakers begging to be ripped out and stored for later use.

12. Gigantic commercial lighting fixtures, including at least one street lamp about two feet across.

13. Miles of Romex and Cat-6 wire.

14. A steel desk with a very sturdy plastic top. Looks like a solid sheet of nylon or polyethylene. It would make a pretty sweet workbench.

15. A big Ridgid tool stand with no tool on it.

What a mess. I guess I should catalog it, find out the retail prices, list it for 50% off, and see who buys.

Express Yourself

Today I got an email which sort of suggested it was silly to want a shotgun that holds more than five rounds.

I realize that the pump-gun people are almost a cult, like the .45 ACP people and the revolver people. I don’t think it’s possible to convince a real pump fan that there is anything better than a pump. It would be like trying to make me like soy. But I’ll ask anyway. Do you think there is a good reason–I mean a good reason, not some ridiculous BS like “three more ounces of weight will make it impossible to carry the weapon”–why you would not want to have lots of shotgun shells at your disposal in a gunfight?

Back in the days when the cops were slowly realizing revolvers were obsolete for law enforcement (because they were being killed by criminals with Glocks), the notion that more ammunition was better did not seem controversial. Even the TV news heads got it. They would say, “The standard service revolver holds six bullets. The WICKED SEMI-AUTOMATIC INVISIBLE-TO-X-RAYS GLOCK holds sixteen. The police are now outgunned.” And they were right. Is there some reason why that logic does not apply to long guns?

Liberals seem to believe it, although I know that’s a sorry authority to cite. They wet their drawers constantly over “high capacity” magazines, because they realize an armed man who can shoot fifteen times without reloading is a bigger threat than a man who has to fumble with a ridiculous speedloader after five or six shots.

I read an FBI document the other day. I’ll bet many of you have seen it. The authors pointed out a sad fact. I’m assuming the document is legitimate and the “fact” is really a fact. They said that most shots fired by LEOs miss.

Again, I am probably using a bad example. If you’ve seen the police shoot, you, like me, may have been tempted to turn to a life of crime simply because of the astronomically low odds that a cop with a gun can hit you. They are really bad most of the time. It must be ego; anyone who is willing to listen can learn to shoot. If you show up at the range in ludicrous black pants with 92 pockets, plus a SWAT T-shirt, plus insulated black boots, in the summer heat, you probably are not the kind of person who thinks other people can teach him anything. Also, I suppose many cops are primarily quiet, mature civil servants just hoping to get benefits and pensions, so they’re not all that gung-ho about marksmanship. They miss most of the time, but maybe that has more to do with their skills than the stress of the gunfight.

Anyway, most law enforcement bullets miss completely. To me, that suggests that more ammunition can only be helpful. The more you shoot, the more likely you are to hit something, and you can at least lay down suppressing fire a little longer.

I have seen at least one good argument for fewer rounds. I wanted to get 12-round magazines for my shotgun, but the Saiga nuts say the 8-round jobs are more reliable. So much so that you can actually buy a part so you can saw up a perfectly good 12-round magazine and convert it. Still, I think the people who do this plan to make up for it by carrying more magazines. That would be my guess.

You can’t hope that a shotgun’s spread will make up for a lack of ammunition. At self-defense range, a load of buckshot isn’t significantly wider than a bullet. It might be an inch and a half across, instead of .45 inches. That means you still have to aim. The advantage in short-range accuracy comes from a shotgun’s sight radius and the fact that you shoulder it, not from the width of the pattern. You shouldn’t think you can get away with a few shells just because you’re shooting a “scattergun.” You should think of it the same way you think of a rifle. I have a rifle that holds six rounds, and I wouldn’t even think of using it for home defense.

These things seem self-evident, but I am well aware that there is a difference between armchair experts like myself and people who actually fight criminals. So if there is some reason why I should stick with the tiny 5-round magazines that came with the Saiga, tell me what it is.

Clinton Damage Curable

I’ve been sitting here working on turning my Hillarized Saiga 12 into a functioning shotgun. It’s incredibly frustrating.

I don’t really know if the Clintons are the only ones who caused the problem. Feel free to comment.

It’s impossible to find a gunsmith whom I can trust to take off the gun-ban garbage, within an acceptable time frame. I am trying to get on a wait list, but that will cost me four months, minimum. Therefore I am doing what most Saiga 12 owners do. I am buying parts, and I am going to install them myself. I’ve confirmed that it’s not a major job. The only thing I have to be careful of is marring the gun so the pro I eventually send it to will have to repair the damage.

Here’s how it works. You have to get rid of the insane fire control group that has been put on the gun to move the trigger back and convince idiot bureaucrats that it’s a sporting weapon. That means buying a new fire control group and trigger guard. If you don’t do this, you might as well not even buy the gun. This is the keystone of a Saiga 12 conversion.

You have to remove four pins from the receiver, I believe. Plus a spot weld. Without gouging anything. Then you throw out half the gun’s guts and put the new FCG in. Then you put the new trigger guard on, with screws. And you add a pistol grip. The FCG move allows you to change the stock, which is an abomination straight from hell. You take off the stock, saw the tang off the rear of the receiver, and install something to bolt the new stock to. You can get someone to TIG-weld a back plate on, or you can get an adaptor that attaches to the receiver. The nicer ones go inside. The less-nice ones go outside.

Once you’ve done all that, you can bolt a stock to the rear of the gun. If you want it to fold, you have to add a foldy thing first. Folding is very good, not because you would ever shoot a 12 gauge from the hip, but because a folded gun is easier to store and move.

At this point, a real man would blast the gun with aluminum oxide (NOT sand or glass beads) and add a tough bake-on coating.

When all these things have been done, you have a relatively healthy AK-47 that shoots buckshot. You can add bigger magazines and various doodads.

It’s a giant pain. I wish I knew someone in Miami who could be trusted to TIG-weld the receiver when I’m done, but Miami has a very tiny skilled-labor pool. Oh, if you want something done, you can have it, but 98% of the people who eagerly volunteer won’t know what they’re doing. The conversion will leave several holes in the receiver, and you need a precision welder to fix them. And it’s better to weld on a trigger guard. But you can’t get it done here.

I figure I’ll do what other people do. I’ll put the gun together, and I’ll stick nylon plugs in the holes, and I’ll blue the bits of the gun where bare metal can be seen. Then I’ll take my time looking for a far-off gunsmith who will fix the holes and refinish the weapon. Then I’ll send it to him. It’s hard to find a Saiga rebuilder who has time to do anything, but it’s easy to find a gunsmith who can put the finishing touches on a gun you’ve already converted.

Interesting info: you can get 12-round stick magazines, but for various reasons I don’t completely understand, the 8-round jobs are better. If you’re truly nuts, you can get a drum that holds, I think, 20. There are two competing companies that make these, and they hate each other. They put up feuding videos on Youtube, trashing each other’s products. It seems like MD Arms has, far and away, the better reputation. In case you want to skip all that.

I’m pooped, and I didn’t even do anything yet.

I decided to go with 00 buck for defense purposes. I found a wonderful round that is relatively cheap and outperforms everything else. It will do great things at surprisingly long distances. I don’t care about shooting through walls. Don’t start with me. Houses in Miami are built from concrete blocks. To hit my neighbors, I’d have to go through four thicknesses of concrete.

Now I sit back and wait for UPS. Hope I can pull this off.

Auntie Entity for President

Ob*ma continues working his magic on the stock market. As I write, the Dow is down about 30 points.

I’m not sure why I keep citing the Dow. It’s a somewhat narrow index. The S&P contains a bigger number of companies, so it is presumably more reflective of the state of the economy. I guess citing the S&P on a blog is a waste of time, though, because most people don’t know what it is.

Someone or other has put out a list of troubled companies. I’ll cut and paste part of the article.

A lot of big, well-known companies are in danger. On the list: Advanced Micro Devices; AirTran; AMR (parent of American Airlines); Chrysler; Duane Reade; Eastman-Kodak; Ford; General Motors; JetBlue; Krispy Kreme; Palm; R.H. Donnelly; Reader’s Digest Association; Rite-Aid; UAL (parent of United Airlines); Unisys; and US Airways.

That doesn’t disturb me too much.

1. AMD makes silicon chips. I don’t think we’re in any danger of running out of those.

2. Airtran, AMR, Jetblue, UAL, and US Airways don’t bother me, because airlines go broke all the time. The industry is crowded, and people keep getting into it anyway, thinking they can still make a profit. I’m not sure why they do this, but it is a fact of life.

3. Chrysler, Ford, and GM overpay for labor, they are badly managed, and they make boring products, so they need to fail. One of the important functions of the free market is to get rid of dead wood so better companies can move in.

4. Duane Reade and Rite Aid operate drugstores. I would guess that they are getting hammered because of the presence of better companies like CVS and Walgreen’s. The drugstores are still here. They just have different signs out front, the service is better, and the prices are lower.

5. Krispy Kreme makes grade B- doughnuts, and for some reason, people got the crazy idea that this was an important and unique product line. A retreat to sanity was inevitable.

6. Eastman-Kodak? They still exist? Do they even have a purpose now that every electronics firm in the universe is making digital cameras?

7. The problems at R.H. Donnelly do not upset me, because I have never heard of R.H. Donnelly. I hope they don’t supply something really important, like oxygen.

8. Reader’s Digest. Replaced by the Internet. Like your daily newspaper.

9. Unisys. That’s a tech, isn’t it? Techs fail. No news there.

I suppose all sorts of bad companies are going to get spanked before Obama is finished working his economic miracle, in which he will bring North Vietnam-style prosperity to the misguided capitalists of the United States. The streets may one day be filled with panhandling Pointy-Haired Bosses.

Too bad Obama won’t be among them.

If you’re still in a Geithnerian dither about buying a gun, you better snap out of it. Life may be very weird in the depression. Stuff you can afford to have stolen now may be more important in 2011. It may be possible for Obama to outlaw the sale of all truly useful guns. He’s already trying. But outlawing possession is much harder. It’s good to have what you need before the bans go into effect.

The other day it occurred to me that wealth may be redefined over the next year or two. For example, right now, a Manhattan condo is a concentrated bit of wealth. A lousy little apartment two hundred yards from a violent ghetto may be worth seven figures. Will that be true when Americans start using their yards to grow vegetables? Maybe five acres of farmland will be more desirable. I think people in suburbs and cities will envy everyone else. The best situation, probably, is rural land twenty or so miles from a city. Close enough for trade. Far enough away for security and a relative degree of freedom.

Some people say gold has no intrinsic value, and that it may be worthless in the future. I understand the argument, but I think they’re wrong. Gold only becomes worthless in very strange situations, like those involving lifeboats and concentration camps. Paper money represents promises, and promises are only as good as the institutions that make them. But gold is gold is gold. We will always need currency; it’s stupid to think an economy can run on barter. Imagine trying to run a store, where everyone barters. It would take five years for ten people to check out at the groceries. “I need these corn flakes. Here is a cord of firewood.” “We don’t need firewood.” “Okay, here are fifteen pairs of shoes.” “Sorry, we don’t take Crocs.” “How about this small block Chevy?” “I guess that will do. How do you want your change?” “Chainsaws and diesel, please.”

That’s barter. It does not work on the kind of scale you need to keep an economy running. You’d have to take a forklift with you every time you went to the mall. No, you’ll have to have currency, and if paper money loses its power, currency will mean coins, and coins will mean precious metals only. And there are only two of those that matter. Gold and silver. I very much doubt we’ll have platinum coins. It’s hard to melt, for one thing.

Stones will lose their value. They already have. The value of precious stones is artificially maintained. Those stupid diamonds women insist on receiving are not rare at all; when a man is forced to spend $20,000 on a rock, the vast majority of the money buys nothing except a fiction maintained by a greedy cartel. It’s the single dumbest buy most people make in a lifetime. Well, after an expensive wedding. You have to love the way people celebrate their devotion by starting their lives with five figures’ worth of new debt. Idiocy.

I think if I got married, I’d suggest a modest ring and some bullion. Romance is romance, but flushing huge sums of money down the toilet is only romantic to the stupid.

Here’s another thing: you can’t melt stones down into standardized coins.

Useful possessions will have increased value, but that doesn’t mean gold won’t.

I think a lot of things that are valuable now will be relatively worthless in a couple of years. Antiques. Luxury vehicles, including cars, motorcycles, aircraft, and yachts. Art. Most collectibles. I expect Las Vegas to have very hard times; who will want to fly to a far-off city to lose money, when people are standing in line to get free soup? I think this is a scary time for cruise ship operators and people who run resorts.

It’s an interesting time to be alive, and it’s fun to try to make predictions. It’s fun now, I mean, because things haven’t gotten really bad yet. Later it won’t be fun at all.

Baby Pictures

The newest baby in the nursery arrived unexpectedly today. Here she is:

That’s a Saiga 12 with a 19″ barrel. Pardon all the post-Clinton crap, such as the misplaced trigger and silly buttstock. Consider it afterbirth. It will be removed.

Closer shot:

Here’s the Bulldog bag that came with it as a freebie. This bag was not the reason I bought the gun, but it’s very nice. It’s better than my other gun bags, which were not free. Note the extra magazine.

I ordered this from Classicarms.us. They still have the offer up.

I’m hoping to ship this to a smith and have it restored to a Kalashnikov configuration, with the trigger farther forward and a folding buttstock for storage and easier carry. I found a first-rate smith who is not as backed up as Tromix.

The finish on this thing is pretty bad. But it’s considerably better than the Romanian bluing on my Romak. The parts all seem to fit well, and it strips and reassembles without too much trouble. I was afraid it would be bathed in cosmoline, but fortunately, it was not.

It’s possible to reconfigure one of these things on your own, using a drill and a Dremel and a vise. But I’ve seen video of the job, and it leaves the gun marred up, and you end up with holes that have to be plugged with nylon inserts. That’s not for me. I want the holes welded over, and then I want the gun blasted and refinished. It’s not that expensive.

It’s considerably heavier than my Browning Sweet Sixteen, which is surprising, since the Browning is milled and has wooden furniture and a longer barrel. The Browning swings and aims effortlessly. This thing is shorter and more maneuverable, though, and I would guess that it’s a lot tougher, given its lineage.

If I had a shorter barrel for it, I could see using the Browning for home defense. I have some buckshot for that purpose. I don’t know how I’d go about getting an 18″ Browning Sweet Sixteen barrel. It would almost amount to perversion.

While the FFL was doing the transfer paperwork, I asked him if he was getting a lot of Obama business. He said most of it was coming from cops who did not want to take a chance on getting caught in an Obama gun ban. He said he’d get me a price on a Glock in .45 ACP, so I’ll have a quote ready if the friend who wants my .40 ever takes delivery.

He had a 9x19mm Kimber he was trying to unload. Why would Kimber bother making a thing like that? You have a 1911 frame. It will hold .45 ACP, .38 Super, and 9x23mm. Help me understand. Who would want nine rounds of 9mm in a gun with that much potential?

I hear bad things about Kimbers anyway.

Wish me luck with the Saiga. FINALLY I have a defensive long gun to add to my hamster shooters, heirloom, and milsurps. When the Vz 58 arrives, I’ll have two, and I’ll feel fairly well prepared to defend my home.

Although a Benelli would sure be nice.

Forget I said that.

Bird Guts as Reliable as Pundits

This morning I watched the Dow-Jones Average, as it sort of almost went positive. I wish I had copied the little headlines I saw. I don’t recall the exact words, but the basic message was something like “Dow Breaks Out as Rally Continues! Obama to Appear at Press Conference, Turn Evian into Wine!”

Can I tell you something about financial gurus? Almost none of them know anything. They make money when the market is strong, and they lose money when it’s weak. Listen, anyone can swim downstream. If you want to know who has a brain, find out who can make money in a prolonged bear market. I don’t know of anyone who fits that description. They exist, but I can’t think of any, offhand. A lot of people have gotten very wealthy by buying blue chips and forgetting they owned them, but I don’t think that makes them experts.

Here’s another fact for you. Many of the talking heads you see on cable have a gigantic interest in seeing the market do well. Many of the heads live off commissions and fees, and when people think the market is dead, they stop trading, and the heads don’t make as much money. So generally, you should weight their predictions heavily toward the negative. They usually overestimate the strength of the market, and they do it because confident investors and traders make them money. Want to find out how the housing market is doing? Ask a mortgage broker. “THERE HAS NEVER BEEN A BETTER TIME TO BUY! Excuse me while I sell some more blood so I can get some McNuggets.” Same thing.

Back when I was in law school, I traded. I don’t really know anything about finance, but I know what momentum looks like, so I made money easily. I went an entire year with only one negative trade, and it was a small one. People don’t believe me when I say that, but it’s the gospel truth. I remember the stock. Microsoft. I lost about $600. I also sold out before the tech crash, with a juicy profit that paid a big chunk of my law school tuition (all three years’ worth). People don’t believe that, either. Because it makes them feel stupid. Sorry; some people avoid getting burned in tulip-bulb crazes. That’s just how it is. The fact that I was one of them in 1998 or whatever the year was doesn’t make me a bad person. If you thought Dell was going to 5,000, maybe you need to go back and retake third-grade math.

I knew a law student who said he was going to start a fund. He may have done it. I can’t remember. He was making money hand over fist. He had a Quotrek with him all the time. He had investors who wanted to let him handle their money. Guess what he’s doing now? Practicing law. The tech crash separated the wheat from the chaff, and he was chaff.

When stocks went bad, I didn’t know what to do, so I didn’t invest. Maybe that will make you feel better, if you think I’m claiming I’m a financial genius. I was smart enough to know when it was easy to make money, but when it got hard, I was as lost as anyone.

The investment gurus are the same way, to a much greater extent than you would think possible. There are professional fund managers who end years with net losses. How is that possible, for someone who claims to be a guru? It shouldn’t be. If they actually knew half of what we think they know, they should make money every year. There are people who do, even if they’re not famous.

It appears that Bernie Madoff was so inept, he couldn’t make money in a bull market. That’s incredible. Things went well prior to the 2007 bust, yet Madoff was not able to make money. He decided a Ponzi scheme was the way to go. And he was one of the most respected investors in history. He would literally have been better off putting the money in CDs.

Tim Geithner. He was supposed to be the savior. Or rather, the undersavior. Didn’t pay his taxes, but that was okay, because he was somebody’s Wonder Boy. He claimed he was too dumb to understand the tax code–that is actually the excuse he gave Congress–but we just KNEW he was smart enough to fix the economy. Never had a private sector job. Never proved that he knew anything, except how to steer a government desk. Was in charge of New York’s Federal Reserve Bank while Wall Street (which is in New York, hello?) imploded, and did nothing about it. But he looked smart sitting around at hearings, and his name sounded sort of Jewish, so presumably, he knew all about money! I really believe that was what people thought a couple of months ago. People are just that crazy. After all, they buy BMWs because they think the Nazis were smart. That is absolutely true.

Geithner has turned out to be the biggest disappointment since Ishtar. No one seems to understand how he suddenly got so stupid. The better question is, why did we think he was a brain in the first place? If he was smart, wouldn’t he have done something helpful while he was running the New York Fed? Why didn’t we try to hire Jack Welch or Warren Buffett? How about Jim Rogers? Don’t tell me we couldn’t afford them. Look what Geithner has cost us. A salary of a billion a year would have been a bargain.

If you ever expect to make money in stocks, you have to learn how to pick stocks for yourself, and you have to have a set of buying and selling rules, and you have to follow them. For example, when your stock drops 8%, you sell. That’s Peter Lynch’s rule. You don’t wait around, pretending the money is still in there somewhere, compressed like a spring, waiting to bounce back to its correct size. It’s gone, baby. It no longer exists. Your stock’s past value has no relationship whatsoever to its future value. Find another stock which is more likely to do well. Don’t sit on a stock that has dropped 50% because you still have faith in the story that caused you to buy it. Make a set of target buy and sell prices, and stick to them. Otherwise, you’re just playing the ponies.

Don’t pay attention to the crowing Cramers and the tendentious Wall Street bookies who depend on account churning to keep them in Ferraris. Use your common sense. If you don’t have common sense, don’t play the market. Get a savings account. Buy a house you really intend to live in, so you can ride out the hard times. Winning is a good thing, but not losing is much more important.

Geithner knows absolutely nothing. Obama is hopelessly incompetent. We have not found our deus ex machina yet, and anyone who says things are shaping up is making a wild guess that goes against all the evidence.

HA! I see the market went positive again while I typed this. Guess what it means when the market seems weak part of the day and strong the other part of the day? It usually means it’s WEAK.

Squirrels Must Pay

First off, please keep praying for Mish Weiss. She is having some problems because she tried to get off IV painkillers.

Now back to my exciting life.

I am suffering serious frustration here.

A couple of weeks back, I decided to take the plunge and get a Vz 58 rifle, to discourage people from walking on my grass. Okay, I got it for home defense. But a man’s grass is sacred. We need legislation to account for that.

The gun is still not here. The dealer had some kind of problem contacting the local FFL who is supposed to take delivery. And dealers are so busy, you can’t really get on their backs and push them to get things done. Thanks, Obama, for saving the American firearms industry. After the Obama gun panic is finished, it will be perfectly okay to outlaw the sale of guns, because everyone will already have five or six.

Meanwhile, I have learned that Obama has made it extremely difficult to get a Saiga 12 shotgun modified. By passing laws against it? No, by inducing a surge in sales that has resulted in a gigantic gunsmithing backlog. The best-known source of modified Saiga 12s is Tromix, and they (“he,” actually) are so busy, they would probably lay down suppressing fire if you tried to enter their property and place an order.

The stock Saiga 12 is very silly. They took a Kalashnikov and added parts to make it look like a deer gun. I don’t know why liberals are too dumb to realize that hunting guns are just as deadly as self-defense guns. I don’t know why it’s so easy to mollify them by talking about hunting and target shooting. But that’s how it is. They love to pretend the Second Amendment has something to do with sports, which it does not. And the gun industry has to play along.

The Second Amendment is about having the power to kill human beings, so they will refrain from oppressing you and committing crimes against you. It has nothing to do with shooting rabbits or quail. Still, we have nutty laws that result in the sale of odd-looking Frankenweapons that need to be modified in order to perform their actual purpose well.

If the Founding Fathers had cared about protecting our right to engage in sporting activities, they would have done something really useful and written an amendment forcing home builders to construct houses in such a manner that every one had room for a full-size pool table. They could have called it Frank Costanza’s Law.

There are a few other people out there who do a good job modifying shotguns. They have backlogs, but not like the Tromix backlog. Maybe the Obama panic will subside to the point where it’s possible to get a gun fixed up without losing the use of it for three months.

I think it would be great to get a tax stamp and have a shotgun with a 14″ barrel. Very nice for turning quickly in hallways and small rooms. Chris Byrne says the answer is to learn the technique for maneuvering a longer gun. I assume the technique consists mainly of pointing the barrel up. Up and not down, because you can’t hit your toes if you shoot the ceiling.

The defensive ammunition I ordered for my .38 Super arrived. It does not seem inclined to cycle well. Maybe this is the time to get serious and have the gun worked on. The .38 would be a marvelous carry piece for formal occasions, but not if the bullets won’t cycle. I guess the ramp needs to be worked on. And I never did get the defective rollmark fixed.

I think I have pretty well covered my survival needs, as regards food. I mentioned the possibility of shooting squirrels, and I said I needed a BB gun. Someone said I should use the .17 HMR. I think that in a national crisis, the local cops would have no problem with a BB gun, but they would be highly disturbed, to the point where they couldn’t digest their doughnuts and pastelitos, if they saw me wandering around with a rifle.

I’m pretty sure a simple Crosman pump would do the job. They do a number on birds, and the accuracy is more than adequate. The smartest thing, really, would be a trap. Let the squirrels come to me. A reader told me how to build a very efficient squirrel-drowning machine from a bucket and a piece of pipe.

I figure I’ll buy some dried beans and some oatmeal and be done with it. It will be easy to stay alive for a month. If things get so bad people need more supplies than that, it probably means there is no point in prolonging the misery.

The funniest suggestion I’ve heard is this: buy cartons of generic cigarettes and vacuum-seal them in bags. If the nicotine supply dries up, smokers will gladly give you their food, their jewelry, their kidneys, and their children in exchange for cigarettes. You could buy tobacco seed, for that matter. Grow your own cheroots. You could have a home staffed by groveling nicotine-addict zombies.

It won’t work with booze, because sugar plus water plus time equals alcohol. You can’t take away the supply. And real alcoholics will drink absolutely anything that gives them a buzz. Mashed raisins in toilet-tank water will do just fine.

I’m kind of stalled on the machine tool issue. I continue to believe machine tools are going to flood the market shortly, due to the effervescence of the amazing Obama/Geithner economy. I think businesses are going to disappear, and their machine tools will have to go somewhere. Also, a guy I want to buy a lathe from is in the hospital.

Man, I want a lathe. Just once in my life, I want to knurl something. Can you relate to that?

Anyhow, stay away from my oatmeal, and keep off my lawn. Let the piles of squirrel skeletons be a warning to you.