Also Wildlife

If this works, tool people will be required to make me their king for life.

I drilled holes in my concrete slug:

Here is my rebar, with my epoxy.

Here is the rebar epoxied into the holes.

Here is the fox, who came out while I was walking to the slug and just stood there.

I did NOT try to pet it. Let the neighbors deal with fox diseases. I couldn’t get a better photo. I had trouble making the camera focus. It’s humid, and the second you go outside with anything made of glass, condensation forms on it. It made it difficult to see whether the fox was in focus. And the silly thing was standing there the second I walked outside.

The epoxy label says it cures in 5 minutes, but the packaging says something about 24 hours for full strength. I think I’ll give it a yank after an hour and a half.

No Slug is Safe

I am apparently the dumbest person who ever lived. But before you start feeling superior, let me point out that all of you are pretty dumb, too. Because I asked your advice about something, and your advice was just as dumb as what I eventually did.

I had several concrete slugs in the yard. I had to get rid of them. I ended up renting a demo hammer and breaking them up so I could pull them out by hand. Boy, was that dumb. I later realized there was a better way. You drill two holes in the slug, attach a loop of rebar with epoxy, attach a chain to the loop, and pull with a hoist or a truck or something. Actually, a real man would twist a loop in the rebar with his vice and 3-foot pipe wrench, so he could attach it to the slug with one hole. I happen to know where I can borrow a 3-foot pipe wrench.

I still have one slug. Today I bought a piece of rebar and some epoxy, plus something every man needs: a tow chain. I was going to make up my own, but Home Depot had premade chains with hooks, and I didn’t want to wait three hours for someone to cut a piece of chain for me.

I just used the chain to rip out a live oak tree I didn’t like. Here, squirrels are sacred, because the local citizenry has no understanding of the evil that abides in the heart of a squirrel. Among their other misdeeds and atrocities (like cutting every single fruit off my mango tree), the squirrels plant invasive weeds and trees everywhere. Eventually there will be nothing here but live oaks, scrub oaks, jasmine vines, and happy, leering squirrels. There was a live oak in a hedge next to the house, thanks to my rodent friends. It got so big, the yard guys thought it was a shrub, and they trimmed it for a couple of years.

I wrapped my new chain around it, attached the chain to my father’s Explorer, and yanked. First one direction, then another. Now the tree resides in the trash heap. And I declare victory. BAH HA HA. Kneel before Zod.

Here’s a new reason to hate leaf blowers: they blow mulch away. I know, because I just spent half an hour replacing it. If you don’t mulch your trees, the Salvadorans go right up to them with their motorized weed whackers, and they girdle them. That may be why one of my papayas just fell over dead.

The papayas sucked anyway.

I decided to mulch my potted peppers to keep the weeds down. I hope mulch doesn’t kill pepper plants.

I have decided I need a second chain hoist. I have one in the garage, but it’s mounted on the overhead trusses, and I don’t feel like taking it down when I need it. And it’s only a half-ton job. I want a slightly bigger one I can attach to heavy objects when I need to pull things for various reasons.

Time to get up. I have steaks to freeze, guns to clean, a hasp to install…the list is pretty nasty.

I may go out and spit on that tree, just for the joy of it.

I am Not a Portion for Foxes

The craziest thing happened today. Last week I found myself thinking about the way wildlife was disappearing around here. I hadn’t seen a coon or a fox in a long time. They used to be all over the place. As I was watering the peppers this morning, I noticed a reddish cat walking away from me on the patio, about ten feet away. Something about it didn’t look right; it was very skinny and had a funny gait. Then I realized it was a fox. I guess it had been lying in the shade. I must have disturbed it. It wasn’t scared at all. It walked across the patio, turned and stared at me for a while, and then went under the deck. I guess it’s still there.

It wasn’t much to look at. Its tail was about as big around as a thick broom handle.

I don’t know why it wasn’t afraid. Usually it’s hard to get close to a fox. Our suburban neighbors may be handfeeding it out of ignorance. Or it may have rabies.

I have good news about Mish Weiss; I asked people to pray for her last night. She has leukemia, and yesterday she started to despair. Her friend Leah Friedman emailed me this morning. Mish has a more positive attitude this morning. They have found a bone marrow donor for her. That’s very good. Prayer works; God listens. The bad: she’s a vegan, and she refuses to eat or drink animal-based products that will help her get strong enough for a transplant.

Leah says she’s trying to get her to drink Ensure, a high-calorie drink for people who need a lot of nutrition without much effort. I guess it has animal products in it; Mish won’t touch it. If I had a cold, I’d gladly eat Bambi to get rid of it.

I remember begging my mother to drink Ensure when she was dying from lung cancer. My mother’s death was hastened by starvation. When she received radiation therapy, they burned her esophagus, and she was never able to eat properly after that. And the cancer made food disgusting to her; it does that to some people. I don’t know if Mish understands how lucky she is that she could make herself drink that stuff if she wanted to. There are many cancer patients out there who wish they could eat, but can’t.

I talked to Aaron about her situation last night. He said that Jewish law would require him to eat pork ribs, if he had to do it to save his life. Require.

Please keep Mish in your prayers. Leah, too. She still has lingering effects from her respiratory arrest.

I’m having an unusually good day. Might as well write about it.

Like most Christians, I have persistent sins I have to fight. Last night, I felt like I was having a big setback. And I prayed for God to turn it into a triumph. A few minutes later, as I prayed about other things, I realized my attitude had completely changed. I had forgotten my frustration and discouragement. I felt full of faith, and I was taking advantage of it by praying for other people. My prayer for a triumph had been answered almost instantly. Sometimes you have to be really alert, or else you won’t notice when God gives you exactly what you asked for.

I had a peculiar but uplifting thought. God gives different people different things to share with others. One example is wealth. You can use it to feed people and educate them and buy medical care and so on. You can finance ministries. You can use your money to help poor Jews fly to Israel. Last night I realized faith is like wealth. God distributes it unevenly. Presumably, people who have a lot of it are obligated to use it to help people who have less. Faith, then, is a kind of wealth. Because I know that, I have a better understanding of Acts 3:6.

I’m generally pretty pleased with the amount of faith I have. But until last night, I never thought of it as a gift I was supposed to share with other people.

Ever since I became aware of that, I have felt different. I feel as though the sun had risen inside me. Very odd, but I’ll take it. It’s a little bit like mania, which I am familiar with, because of the nature of my personality. But somehow it seems cleaner and healthier and more sustainable. I hope it lasts.

I feel energized. I feel like I can get things done. I’m usually pretty upbeat in real life, regardless of how I come across here, but today I have a powerful sensation of looking forward to whatever comes. I want to get up, get out there, and DO things.

Many times, I’ve read about Christians who claim to live in joy. I’ve always hoped I could reach that state. I feel good most of the time, and my faith has made things better, but I have never really reached a state which seemed to match the happiness so many Christians proclaim. Maybe I’m starting to see a piece of it. If it’s real, it would be a wonderful thing to help others achieve. One of the big drawbacks of Christianity is that potential adherents see it as a bunch of sacrifices with no reward until you die. That’s not how it’s supposed to be. A good life is supposed to be a better life.

I have stuff to do. Thanks for listening.

Ask Others to Pray

I have very sad news, via Jeffro. Leah Friedman’s friend Mish Weiss is not doing well, and she claims she wants to be allowed to die. She has acute myeloid leukemia, she has gone from 125 pounds to 90, and she is very depressed.

I you don’t remember Leah, she’s the girl in Jerusalem who went into respiratory arrest a while back. She had a heart condition, and somehow that is the cause of what happened. I asked my readers to pray for her, and so did other bloggers, and she has recovered well, although she still has some paralysis and some lingering mental symptoms.

Mish is in the IDF. She likes to shoot. She’s a vegan, which is probably unfortunate at this moment, when her body needs so much help. But she refuses to sacrifice her principles.

The situation is a little confusing. I don’t know much about this disease. Wikipedia paints a discouraging picture, but a post on Mish’s blog says the treatment she took works about 60% of the time, so cures do occur.

I have gone over her blog. If I understand the situation correctly, chemo didn’t work, so they are treating her with arsenic. That causes a lot of problems; it’s a poison, after all. From what I’ve read, it’s not clear that the treatment isn’t working. It may be that it’s so unpleasant, she no longer cares whether it works, and she simply wants to quit.

It’s not clear who wrote the last post on her blog, but here is how it ends: “All of you who have faithfully followed please pray for strength we certainly need it. And for us to make the right decisions.”

Here is what I ask. Pray that the treatment will work. Pray that she will find the strength to bear it. Pray that her loved ones will find ways to help. And pray that her relationship with her creator is right, at this pivotal time. And if you have a blog, pass the word.

And go to Mish’s blog and leave an encouraging comment! Let her know people are thinking of her, far away in America.

It’s late on Friday; it will be hard to get observant Jews in on this. Christians, pitch in!

Playing Hooky

Today I did something I had absolutely no business doing. I went to the gun range for a SECOND time, in one week.

I could not help myself. I’ve been so lax about shooting lately, I could not fill the need with a single Wednesday outing.

I blame Jim from Smoke on the Water. His house in Galveston nearly got washed away, and he’s living in someone’s spare room, and he felt he had to call…to give me tips on rifle shooting.

He told me about a weird technique. You grasp the pistol grip of the gun lightly, and you put your left fist under the butt of the gun to manage elevation. You don’t touch the foregrip. It rests on your bipod or whatever. I’ve seen people doing this, but I always figured they were insane.

I loaded up the .17 HMR and the K31, and off I went.

I’m sorry to say, the technique doesn’t work too well with the tiny Savage stock. It’s just a matter of geometry. But it still gave me an excuse to shoot.

Before I could start shooting, the guy to my left apologized to me; he had just fired two rounds into my target. I told him to make sure he made me look good. He and his buddy were shooting two very odd-looking rifles. They had composite target stocks and muzzle brakes. They were bolt actions. I had no idea what they were. Every time either of them fired, the shock wave hit me with the force of Michael Moore’s breath. And they were shooting exactly the way Jim told me to shoot.

It worked well for them. The guy who hit my target put 30 .308 rounds into an area smaller than a lemon. He said shooting that gun at 100 yards was boring.

It turned out to be a Remington 700, with some crap added. I may have to get me a Savage .270 with an Accutrigger and see what I can do.

The Savage shot well today. For rifle shooting, I use 5″ Shoot-N-C targets. Each comes with 4 black pasters about 1 1/4″ in diameter. I put the target in the middle of the paper, with the pasters around it. The scope’s zero was a little off for some reason, so I got it sighted in and started shooting.

I find that a typical 5-shot group is smaller than a golf ball. I can’t reliably keep five shots on a paster; it seems impossible to sight the scope in at 100 yards so it reliably hits the point of aim. I settled for shooting slightly low and to the left. I used the pasters to warm up, and then I shot a couple of targets. I did better than last time. The groups were only a little smaller, but there were fewer flyers. The bulk of the shots concentrated in a smaller area. Here’s an example:

Any animal bigger than a tennis ball and small enough to be killed by a .17-caliber round will have a very limited life expectancy within 100 yards of this gun. I consistently shoot a little worse than 2 MOA, and I am still not a great rifle shot.

Here’s a typical paster:

I got out the K31 and my weird Swiss ammunition. I noticed a few things. First of all, it’s much more steady than the Savage. It probably weighs twice as much, and that reduces the movement. That tells me I should look for a heavier stock for the Savage. Or maybe there is some way to weight the existing stock. Second thing: the trigger is crap. It breaks cleanly, but the pull is very heavy compared to the 2-pound factory setting of the Accutrigger. Third, the person who designed the gun’s butt was a sadist. It has two points on it. After a couple of dozen rounds, you get tired of having them jabbed into your shoulder. In all likelihood, it was designed for underfed Europeans with 36-inch chests. Europeans used to be spindly and feeble compared to Americans. My grandfather was about 6’3″ tall, and when my family made a trip to Europe in 1972, he was almost always easy to find in a crowd, because people there were so short. That isn’t true any more. Another thing: I lost my luggage on that trip, and my mother had to buy me pants and a shirt in Luxembourg. The shirtsleeves were so narrow they fit like spandex.

I shot thirty rounds with the K31, and I felt like it just was not as accurate as the Savage. It was easier to aim, and I believe I pulled the trigger well. But the shots covered an area the size of a grapefruit. I don’t think all of that error can be attributed to me. And it’s not acceptable. I want to learn to shoot, and I can’t do it with guns that hide my errors within their own. I know people swear by K31s, but it’s a used rifle, so there is no guarantee that every barrel is good.

I learned something interesting about the K31. I mounted the scope with something called an Accu-mount. It’s machined out of aluminum, and you attach it to the receiver. It has an Allen screw on top, which the literature calls a “recoil stop.” I have no idea what that means. Anyway, I must have overtightened this screw, because a bulge formed under it, projecting down from the mount and against the receiver. This raised the front end of the mount slightly, which raised the scope. I believe this explains why I have had problems getting the rifle sighted in. Today I ground the bump off, and I was able to get the crosshairs more or less over to the point of impact.

I may as well get a new stock for the Savage. I don’t like creepy laminate stocks, but it looks like that’s what’s available. I guess I’ll get a thumbhole model that isn’t so odd you can’t use it for hunting. I need the extra weight, and I need something I can feel in my hands.

The .308 guy said my bipod was too tall, and he was right. My rest is too low for the Savage, and the bipod I bought is a little too high. Guess I better head back to Bass.

I’m glad I got the Savage. In a month or two, I may actually be able to shoot well.

That’s Why she Expects Them to Rape on Command

Yesterday, I asked a fellow blogger if she could think of any more rotten things the left could do to Sarah Palin. I was being sarcastic. My point was that leftists had been so creative and so cruel, it was hard to think of anything new for them to do.

Wow, was I wrong.

They accused her of pretending her daughter’s baby was hers. They said she should have stayed home having babies, instead of governing a state. They compared her to the political-machine stooge (close kin to a community organizer) who had Jesus scourged and delivered Him up for crucifixion. Then they hacked into her email account, and leftist blogs put the emails on display, claiming they were “legitimate news.”

Now we learn that Sanda Bernhard is publicly joking about Governor Palin being gang-raped by Bernhard’s “big black brothers.” And people are paying to hear this crap. Not many; it looks like she’s appearing in one of those clubs that used to be a Pack-n-Ship or a Mrs. Field’s, but still.

What do you say about a “joke” like this? It makes me think of all the over-the-top jokes I’ve made, which makes me want to crawl into a hole. I hope I am not as culpable as Ms. Bernhard.

What is the point of making a joke like this? What merit is there in the joke, that justifies putting that horrible image in our minds, and in the minds of Governor Palin’s kids? What will we joke about next? Raping children? Auschwitz?

What exactly did Sarah Palin do, to deserve the treatment she has received from the left? She accepted an invitation to run for public office. That’s her crime. She didn’t shoot up a day care center. She didn’t bomb the World Trade Center. She didn’t–let me pull an example out of a hat–bomb the Pentagon, publicly confess it, and state that she wished she had done more. She didn’t steal documents from the National Archives. She didn’t commit perjury and get disbarred. She didn’t con the government out of hundreds of thousands of dollars for a bogus land deal in Arkansas. She didn’t encourage Los Angeles residents to riot, shouting “No justice, no peace!” She didn’t hit a security officer on her way into the Capitol. She wasn’t involved in the first and only real “Troopergate.” She didn’t hide $90,000 in bribe money in her freezer. She didn’t steal furniture from the White House, or vandalize it before a new administration moved in. She just answered the call, when her party and her country needed her.

It’s a wonder anyone is willing to run for office as a Republican. Look at the treatment our candidates and politicians get. If the kooks don’t get you, unethical prosecutors will. And the press will turn a blind eye, and sometimes, they’ll aid in the persecution.

What an education her kids are getting. Liberals present themselves as warm and loving people who care about all the trees and bunnies, and who protect the downtrodden from mean old Republicans, who want to return to the feudal system. But there is nothing warm and loving about the way liberals are treating Sarah Palin. It’s no exaggeration to say they display more hatred for her than they do for Osama bin Laden.

Governor Palin’s treatment is an ominous reminder of the way the hard left wishes to treat those who disagree with it. It reminds us that killing fields and gulags can happen here, too. If Bill Ayers were in charge, we would have had those things forty years ago. And it looks like Sandra Bernhard would approve.

What ever happened to perspective? When did Americans decide that the need to win an election justified this kind of vile behavior?

Another question: what does Sandra Bernhard think of black men? It seems pretty obvious. She thinks they gang-rape people for trivial reasons. I’m trying to think of a more depraved example of racism, but I’m drawing a blank. This is a person who feels solidarity with blacks? She cares about them and respects them and empathizes with them, but she thinks she can count on them to rape a visiting governor. Black people should rejoice, having a friend who thinks so highly of them. I wonder what the Obamas thought of her remarks.

I already hoped Sarah Palin would win, because I support her politically. But now I hope she wins because her enemies are so vicious. I don’t want to see them rewarded.

I wonder if we can make it to Monday without a new story about someone sliming or threatening or mistreating Sarah Palin. I hope so, but I wouldn’t bet my lunch money on it.

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.