Also: Rabbi Speaks Well of Moose Hunting Alaskan

The stock market is crazy. Half of America still hasn’t seen through Obama yet. And gas still costs almost four dollars a gallon. Sometimes it seems like life is hopeless, and that our country is headed straight down the toilet of godless socialism.

But some things are getting better. Important things. Here’s one: the relationship between American Christians and Jews who actually care about Israel is firming up nicely.

I was all excited when Moxie pointed this out to me: recovering liberal David Zucker recently said:

I know that liberal Jews regard evangelical Christians as persecutors, but they’re actually the best friends Jews have. They are loyal supporters of Israel, along with wanting lower taxes, smaller government and a strong defense. To me, they are my best allies.

Zucker is Jewish. And he’s a well-known film producer, known for Airplane! and Leslie Nielsen’s Naked Gun films. At some point, he realized liberalism was not going to preserve Jewry or Israel, and he came over to the dark side. You probably know about his next movie, An American Carol. It’s a satirical look at post-911 America, where liberals believe terrorists get a bad rap, but a working mother who shoots an occasional moose is Satan incarnate. I would kill to write screenplays for this guy. And I’d like to marry Tyra Banks, right after she becomes a Republican. Enough about my unlikely dreams.

He has figured it out. Some Christians support Israel, and it’s counterproductive for Jews to fear them. We don’t do pogroms. We’re increasingly considerate about proselytizing. The biggest threat from us is that we may annoy you. So the smart thing is to partner up with us and take our cash and vote for the candidates we like.

Oh, man. Zucker’s film site links to another site you may like: MooveAlong.org, a fine site where you can learn about all the nuances of liberalism.

Here’s another nice news item. Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein, of the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, just published a piece in which he points out that Sarah Palin may just possibly be a friend of the Jews.

Here’s a piece of his glowing quasi-endorsement:

During last week’s highly-publicized interview with ABC’s Charlie Gibson, Palin also voiced in no uncertain terms her support for Israel. Responding to a question about the proper U.S. reaction to a potential Israeli military strike to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons, Palin said, “First, we are friends of Israel, and I don’t think that we should second guess the measures that Israel has to take to defend themselves, and for their security.”

Are we finally making headway here? Sure seems like it.

By the way, she said that without a teleprompter.

Life is full of problems at the moment, but thankfully, there are little bits of hope embedded in the muck. I hope Zucker manages to spread his open-mindedness.

We Need More War Toys

Over the last week or two, I’ve been having a lot of fun, reading some books I rescued from my grandparents’ house. My grandfather passed in ’94, and my grandmother died in ’03, and when it was over, the daughters and grandchildren were invited to go to the house and take any personal items we wanted, to keep them from being auctioned. Among my finds: several old books by a man named Al Avery. The titles all start with “A Yankee Flier.” I have “A Yankee Flier in North Africa,” “A Yankee Flier in the Far East,” “A Yankee Flier Over Berlin,” and “A Yankee Flier Over Normandy.” They were published between 1942 and 1945, and they were aimed at boys.

Do we still publish books for kids, in which we celebrate our military heroes? I sure hope so. I’m sure the extremists who dominate our educational system would be appalled by a child’s book that contains favorable mention of military service, combat, and weapons. But kids raised on this stuff are bound to be healthier than those brought up on vegetarian propaganda aimed at obliterating traditional sex roles and convincing girls they love math and want to be firemen.

I took the books because I remembered reading them in years past. I enjoyed them tremendously at the time. They’re not great literature. Just fun stories about three pilots trying to save the world from Hitler and the imperialist Japanese. The main character is Stan Wilson, an American who got into the war by joining the RAF. His pals are March Allison, a British pilot, and and Irishman named Bill O’Malley. Wilson and Allison are typical pulp heroes. O’Malley has a wild temper, eats about three pies a day, and calls people he doesn’t like “spalpeens.” I don’t know what a spalpeen is.

You can imagine the kind of adventures they get into. They do all sorts of risky things, violating orders and trying new tactics. Sometimes they get captured, but they always seem to come home okay. Every time they fly, they shoot down several planes. They do things no one else seems to be able to do.

What are kids reading these days? Crap, I’ll bet. I used to read about dinosaurs and the Pony Express. I watched Superman every day. I watched Jungle Jim. I didn’t worry too much about sex roles. I didn’t know what sex was. I thought fighter planes were cool. I was positive (still am) that America was the best country in the universe.

I admit, the Yankee Flier books are not without their problems. They are not overly flattering in their description of the Japanese (although they treat our Chinese allies respectfully). And it’s disturbing that O’Malley began the war as a volunteer for the Luftwaffe. I suppose our horror of Nazism wasn’t very well developed when the books were written. Still, I would not hesitate to recommend them to a kid in need of something to read.

The author seems to know a few things about planes and combat. His descriptions of the technical aspects of the machines is interesting.

I can’t figure out why the books were in that house. My grandfather had four daughters and no sons.

These days, I’m sure the academic disciples of Saul Alinsky are doing what leftists historically do: severing the link between enlightened kids and their stupid, backward parents. I’m sure they’re filling kids with poisonous messages. It’s okay if Daddy has a shotgun; he’s too dumb to know any better. You can take it to the recycling center as soon as you can put him in a home. It’s okay if Mommy goes to church, and you can go too, if you promise not to believe.

The left’s policy of dividing the generations is not only evil; it’s stupid. It may seem smart when you’re a twenty-year-old “community organizer,” and hippie girls are falling in bed with you, but it looks different when you’re an old liberal whose kids have no respect for him, because they have absorbed the notion that old equals useless. We all get old, if we live, and eventually, we have to face the mercy of the kids we raised. That’s a scary thought, if your kids saw you treat your parents badly and dismiss their advice.

The chasm between young and old is one of the great sicknesses of our culture. The generations were not pitted against each other in this way in the past. They associated with each other freely. In modern times, it’s very common to see a concert where almost all of the attendees are under twenty. That’s not how things worked a hundred and fifty years ago. And what do people do at those concerts? Stupid things they would not do, if their parents were watching. They take drugs. They perform sexual acts in public. They drink until they vomit. The way we act when our elders aren’t around should tell us how much we need their presence.

I’m sure there have always been young people who thought they knew more than they actually did. But now the idea that the young are superior is pervasive and unassailable. We even see it in advertisements. Mac, in his mid-twenties, is a genius. PC, at forty, is a moron.

The generations should not be segregated. People learn and improve with age, and that process is painful and involves a lot of bruises. We’re supposed to associate with our elders and learn from them, so we don’t repeat their mistakes. Instead, young people avoid their elders and snigger at them. Barack Obama wants us to believe that John McCain is incapable of doing a good job as President, because he’s not sitting around all day with his thumbs on a Blackberry (an impossibility, due to his war injuries). Obama makes fun of him with a commercial featuring a disco ball. Whatever McCain’s flaws may be, his age is an asset, not a liability. Surely a man who has suffered as he has, and who has worked so long as a legislator, has a few things to teach us. It’s disgusting that there are Americans who even entertained the possibility that the age-based attack was above contempt.

A culture that venerates youth is doomed. Even the Bible says so. Youth-worship is not normal, and it’s not universal. There are segments of society in which age is respected more, and those segments have more strength than society at large.

“Honor thy father and thy mother,” the Bible says. Where does it say, “Children are our teachers?” Nowhere. Only a fool would say that. When you cut yourself off from previous generations, you are like a tree that amputates its own roots. I’ve made my share of errors in this area, and I deplore them.

We are really in trouble, when we start taking guidance from the people who know the least about life.

I’m glad I preserved those books. They remind me of the way we were supposed to be, and the way we may be again, if God is remarkably patient and kind to us.

Before Barack and the AHSA Repeal the Second Amendment

Time to blog my latest range trip.

My rifle rest was bumming me out. It was too low. It was hard to get in position behind it. So I bought a Caldwell swiveling bipod at Bass Pro. It’s taller than a rest. Yesterday I took it to the range:

I put up a 5″ bullseye and a few small black pasters, and I sighted the rifle in on one of the pasters. Then I shot these rounds:

I felt pretty good about that. I shot a few more pasters, but I am too lazy to put them all up. Here are 5 shots that went well:

The impression the gun gives me is that it will stay inside the paster all day, if I shoot it right. I believe the shots that are off the black were wrecked by bad trigger pulls. Still, the results are good. I could hunt rats with this thing at a hundred yards.

Final bullseye:

That’s a whole lot better than I did with my other rifles.

It’s hard to get a consistent grip on the stock of this gun, behind the trigger. That part of the stock is very horizontal, and it’s thin, and the bumps and depressions don’t match up well with my hand. It’s a little frustrating. A target grip would be better, but I would prefer not to go with a stock that isn’t practical for hunting and carrying.

I’m not sure where my left hand is supposed to grab the stock; the only clear area is behind the bipod.

It seems like struggling with a rifle’s trigger pull makes for good pistol shooting. I took out the SW1911 and shot this group of 25 rounds at 7 yards:

I went back to 50 feet, and things kind of went to hell, but I stayed in the black.

I have no problem holding the scope’s crosshairs on the center of the target, so I assume my problems are in the way I pull the trigger. Nonetheless, this is much better than my previous efforts. It’s great to have an accurate rifle I can shoot cheaply, with so little recoil I don’t mind shooting a hundred rounds in a day.

There was a guy to my left, shooting a Savage in a bigger caliber. It seemed like he was putting his shots very nearly through the same hole, over and over. But he had some sort of a sled under his gun, with the stock supported at both ends.

It’s too bad the .17 HMR doesn’t have open sights. I guess if I want to learn to shoot with open sights, I’ll need another Savage.

Tips on consistency will be welcomed.

It’s a bummer, seeing Obama bounce in the polls. He’s a gun-grabber from way back. He thought the DC gun ban was just great, and he is endorsed by a fraudulent organization that supports gun control, yet masquerades as a gun rights outfit. I’m referring to the American Hunters and Shooters Organization (AHSA). If you’ve sent money to these people, and you thought they were going to fight for your rights, you got ripped off. It’s a disgusting and deceptive front for far-left gun-haters. It’s as if the Nazis launched an organization and pretended it was dedicated to the protection of Jews. Don’t fall for it.

I’m enjoying my civil right to firearm ownership now; next year, it may be dismantled. If you’ve been thinking about taking up shooting, but you’re dragging your feet, let the polls be a warning to you. Get a move on.

Still Waiting for Those Huge Checks

Amazingly, I came up with a third idea for a strip:

The grueling pace is getting to me. I may have to take a hiatus for six months.

Knock it Off

Can we all stop repeating the lie about Dan Quayle? He’s not the one who came up with “potatoe.”

Quayle was helping a teacher. She had cards with words written on them. She was the person who filled out the cards. Quayle just held them up. THE TEACHER WROTE “POTATOE” ON THE CARD. Quayle’s only sin was that he failed to correct her on national TV.

Let this be a lesson to you. This is what happens when you miss an opportunity to correct a liberal.

And you KNOW that teacher was liberal. They all are. It’s the law.

Set Phasers on “Wedgie”

I just half-read a recent article, which points out that people who are really good at math tend to be good at ballpark estimates.

No duh.

This is not news. Everyone who goes past second-semester physics knows this. How many piano tuners are there in Chicago (here’s a hint: divide the number of community organizers by ten)?

Here are a couple of things people who are ignorant about math and science don’t realize. First, once you get past your first year of college, all hard science is math. Second, no real scientist cares much about exact figures until it’s time for a real-life application. Scientists estimate all the time.

I say this with some irritation, because I’m a former scientist, and I’m very used to making ballpark estimates, and I get “corrected” a lot by people who don’t know anything about using numbers. For example, when making a practical calculation in real life, I might say, “Let’s say the tread length of a tire is three times the diameter.” And some…helpful person…will pipe up and say, “Actually, it’s more like 3.1428!” Like I have never heard of pi.

I’ve forgotten most of what I know about science and math, but I’m not stupid. I can calculate sines and cosines with a pencil, to any number of decimal places you want. I know what pi is. I know what radians are. I know what a unit circle is. You’re not helping me when you tack 0.1428 onto 3 for me. It’s like offering training wheels to a professional bicycle racer. Okay, a fat retired professional bicycle racer. You get the idea.

In the real world of science, nobody is impressed when you know the value of something to ten decimal places. That’s grunt information. Let the entry-level engineers worry about that; it’s what calculators and computers are for. The highest and best use of the human brain, with its capacity for all sorts of abstract thought, is not calculating silly figures any six-year-old with a ten-dollar calculator can generate. The hard work is in understanding complicated concepts and manipulating them in your mind. Variables are for thinkers. Arabic numerals are for people who work on assembly lines.

If you’re in a room full of scientists, you can round eight hundred and thirty-seven up to a thousand, and nobody will even cough. They understand. When exactitude matters, it matters. The rest of the time, it’s a hindrance and a pain in the butt. If scientists liked getting bogged down in difficult numerical calculations, they would never have invented algebra or the metric system.

This is why, in the movie Rain Man, Dustin Hoffman was not working for NASA. At NASA, nobody cares if you know how many toothpicks are on the floor. They are not going to give you a job just because you can calculate square roots instantly. That stuff is useless. It might have been important in 1944, when we were using clunky IBM machines to do calculations to help us build the atom bomb, but probably not even then. Nobody wants to hear about the trees. What matters is being able to see the forest.

I remember back when liberals were lying about Saddam Hussein’s uranium ore. They claimed it didn’t exist, but there were actually 500 tons of it. Using ballpark figures, I came up with a guess as to how many bombs you could make with that much ore. And I was wrong. But I was so close, it didn’t matter that I was wrong. My point was that it could make somewhere around a hundred bombs, and the actual figure was not far from a hundred. A real nuclear engineer, Ward Brewer, did a more exact calculation, which is how I know I was wrong, and also how I know my answer was useful and sufficient. ONE bomb would have been a lot, to the people in the vicinity when it went off. The most fundamental point was to show that that ore could do a lot of damage, and I’m pretty sure I succeeded.

When my grandfather died, and I was sitting on the runway, getting ready to fly to his funeral in Kentucky, I thought about all the cigarette tobacco he had grown in his life, and in a few minutes I was able to calculate that my family had probably given about ten people lung cancer. I thought about that, because the family was going through a lot of misery, and it seemed as though we were being repaid for something. If I were obsessed with exact figures, I would never have been able to do the calculation. Maybe the real number is five. Maybe it’s twenty. If you want to get philosophical about it, there is no real answer. But ten is a useful estimate.

There are many examples in science where a result that is off by a factor of two is perfectly acceptable. If you’re a smarty-pants who loves correcting people with exact numbers, that will probably depress you. Well, it should. You ought to know whether or not you’re a scientist by now. If you’re not…shut up.

Many of the figures we spout and use with confidence are approximations. The sun isn’t really 93 million miles away. The population of the US isn’t really 300 million. Come on. For crying out loud, pi is an approximation, even if you take it to three thousand decimal places.

Scientists have a word for the numerals in a number, which they consider meaningful. They call them “significant figures.” What does that tell you about the ones they leave out?

I think Star Trek is one reason people get overly excited about highly accurate figures, which are what real scientists and mathematicians call “trivial.” Back in the day, very often, Kirk and Spock would find themselves in a pickle, and Spock would say something ridiculous, like, “Our chances of survival are approximately 1 in 3457,329.02304730979.” And Kirk, who never thought about anything more complicated than scoring with alien babes without revealing his girdle or losing his wig, would buy it. And of course, there was no way Spock could back up that figure, and even if he had, there is no way you could have called it “approximate.” When he said “approximately,” he was just being an ass. Like, “I could give you ten more decimal places, but it would do you no good, because you would still be the descendant of a monkey.”

You have to remember: Star Trek was not written by scientists. It was written by chain-smoking TV writers with big hard livers, liberal arts degrees, and deadlines. Even TNG, which seems to have gotten some occasional input from scientists, had some pretty unscientific dialogue. I remember somebody on the bridge saying the temperature of something was like 7 million Kelvins below zero, or something like that. You can have a positive temperature of 7 million units. In the negative direction, there’s a floor. Off the top of my head, I think 0 Celsius is +273.15 Kelvins. Zero Kelvins is the absolute bottom. You can’t get any colder than that, even in February with the windows open and your hand down Hillary Clinton’s blouse.

You’ll notice I’m not checking the Kelvin thing, any more than I checked to see if the first four digits of pi, past the decimal sign, are .1428. That’s because IT DOESN’T MATTER. The concept is what matters.

So no, I’m not surprised that a good estimator might turn out to be a good mathematician. It’s probably surprising only to the kind of people who write newspaper articles.

Like Having a Private Range

I just got back from the range. Wednesdays RULE. There were like three people there, and I managed steal a pile of .45 brass. I take it right out of the dustpan things they use to sweep it up. They owe it to me. I pay their bills, and I’ve left lots of brass on previous outings.

I am too pooped to edit photos right now. Maybe I’ll write it up tomorrow.

The bipod was a great idea. I’m not in love with the gun’s stock, though. The pistol-grip part of it is too horizontal, so it’s hard to get a consistent position on it. I much prefer the weird PSL grip.

I had the humiliating experience of shooting my SW1911 next to a guy who shot nearly as well at 75 feet as I do at 50. Thank God he left.

Unfortunately, while I was shooting, our financial institutions all disintegrated. That was bad.

Now I Can Miss the Bullseye at a More Convenient Time

I can never figure out what the hours are at the local gun range, because they change them all the time, and they never update their signs or website. You pretty much have to drive out there and hope it’s open.

Today I NAILED them. I called up, and it turns out they open at 9 a.m. on Wednesdays. That’s way better than what I’m used to. I’ve been going on Thursdays, and on that day, they open at 1 p.m.

Guess where I’m going right now? No more Thursdays for me.

“Change” Doesn’t Apply to the Artwork

Because Obamatoon has been such a smash hit, I have decided to do a second strip. Don’t get spoiled.

Please continue trying to find ways to send me all sorts of money.

Like it or Not

Agent Bedhead has discovered the next hot chick who is going to take Hollywood by storm. I think I’m in love!

I do it All for Art

Chris Muir is doing really well over at Day by Day, now that he is running it as a moneymaking enterprise and having cash drives. On the one hand, I think it could not happen to a nicer guy. On the other, I am insanely jealous and wish I was getting all the money instead. I know what the answer is. I need a comic strip.

Okay, I didn’t have much time to work on this, and frankly, I don’t plan to update the artwork regularly. Or ever. But you should still send me money. Welcome to my new online strip, “Obamatoon.”

Oh, man. That’s pretty funny, isn’t it? Ha ha ha. I had a little trouble with the hands. Sorry.

Look, I was in a hurry. Support the arts! Fascists. It probably went over your gun-clinging, Bible-thumper heads.

Send me cash, immediately. I don’t have a Paypal link, but you should still find a way. I’m an artist. I can’t be troubled with mundane details.

If you failed to contribute to Day by Day, the Paypal link is still up. Even though my strip is great, you may prefer to contribute to a strip with characters and story lines. Bastards.

Here you go.

Apologies to Paul Harvey

I have done what I needed to do. I hit Bass Pro and got me a bipod.

I hope I got the right one. They had three that were more or less interchangeable. Two from Shooters Ridge, and one from Caldwell. The Caldwell pivots vertically and horizontally, and the equivalent Shooters Ridge bipod was thirty bucks more, so I took a chance. My other Caldwell stuff is okay, so why not?

I stuck it on the Savage. It was so easy, I had it on the gun before I could bother to look for instructions. You clamp it onto the forward sling stud. There’s another stud on the bipod itself. That’s where you reattach your sling. The legs telescope, and they lock in place with thingamigs that tighten. Looks good.

I set it up on a table and looked through the scope. Man, what a difference. The position is much more natural.

I remain utterly confused by the exceedingly low height of most gun rests. I think you would have to be about five feet tall in order to get behind one comfortably.

Will it be as accurate as the rest? Yes. I’m pretty sure. The rest may be more solid, but that advantage is cancelled by the inevitable shaking you get when you strain to get low enough to put your sights on target.

I extended the legs to their maximum length. Felt fine. I contracted them to their shortest length. Still fine. Apparently anything more than two inches taller than my rest will work. Someone help me understand why gun rests are so short. I raise the little shafty thing as high as it will go. I put the pointy spikes on it, so that raises it another half-inch. Something is screwy. I should fasten it to an inch-thick plywood base and attach the spikes to that.

There is no way I can avoid moving my weekly range trip to Wednesday. I can’t stand the suspense.

Get Out the Home Depot Vote!

GREAT NEWS FOR DEMOCRATS! Republicans in Michigan have been caught falsifying voter registrations!

Oops, I’m wrong. It’s the Democrats again.

Fresh new Ideas in a Can

If Karl Rove were half the man Democrats say he is, wouldn’t he be preparing something like this for the first debate?

It’s a little bit like painting a curved line on a highway, directing Wile E. Coyote into the side of a butte.

You Can Help

As many of you know, Jim from Smoke on the Water lives in the Galveston, area. I mentioned this a while back. He closed on a home recently, and now he has had to deal with hurricane Ike. He and his first mate Iris had to evacuate.

This morning I gave Val Prieto Jim’s cell number, and Val called to check up on him. He says his garage got a nice bath, but that the damage to the house is limited to some minor carpet stuff. Hooray for that. He and Iris will not be able to return to the house full-time for days or weeks. That’s bad. After Andrew, life was rough, but at least they let me sweat and moan in my own home.

Jim has an idea about renting an RV or camper or something. That will probably be hard, in the Houston area right now. If any of you have suggestions, fire away.

As always, prayer is indicated.

Speaking of prayer, here’s a good opportunity for you. Reader Ed knows some missionaries in southern India, in the state of Karnataka. They say persecution is on the rise:

Dear Friends,

We are writing in special request of prayer. Our State of Karnataka has been seeing an alarming rise in persecution in the last several months .Our current State government has declared that they will allow no churches to be built and have requested that police refrain from interfering in any church attacks. In the past two weeks 10 churches have been attacked, burned or vandalized. Three weeks ago one of our staff pastors was forced over on the road and roughed up by a group of radicals. This Sunday in our city, many churches, including ours, were scoped out by groups of men who are strategizing the attacks they hope to carry out in the next month. On Monday, Tim will be going with a group of pastors from our city to Bangalore. They will be meeting with the Minister of Human Rights for India. Please pray for Gods favor and power to be on them. Also pray for supernatural peace and strength for all of our pastors and congregations. Christ is the Rock on which we stand and in Him we put our trust!

I said I’d put the request on my blog. I know a lot of you will be happy to see it, and to lend your efforts in prayer.