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The Devils get a "D".
Yes, Desultory describes the Arizona State Sun Devils perfectly. Aimless, disconnected, they had no answers for the Ducks' potent offense which racked up over 570 yards against them. Decidedly desultory was the result, Ducks 48, Sun Devils 13.
Next up, the damnable Cal Bears at Berkley next Saturday. I might watch some of the game from the sports book in the Circus-Circus in Reno.
National Ammo Day is 6 weeks away, so I don't know if buying ammo now qualifies as an Ammo day purchase, but what with the huge runup in ammo prices this year, it doesn't pay to wait for lower prices which you will probably never see again, anyway.
At Sportsman's Guide, a reputable outfit, they are having their quarterly ammo sale.
Two items jumped off the page at me, one being the case-lot buys on Russian Rifle milsurp ammo, the old 7.62X54R, which gets down to as low as 8 1/2 cents a round (before shipping), and the .40 S&W 105-gr Frangible Ball at 16 cents a round isn't bad either. I've never tried this low-power pistol ammo before, and can't tell you whether it will reliably function an action that normally eats standard to hot loads. The ballistics show a muzzle energy similar to low-power 9mm, so I suspect there might be problems requiring one to have a different recoil spring.
As for the Russkie milsurp, be advised that it is one very short step from black powder, it DOES HAVE corrosive primers, and you MUST clean/rinse your action right after firing it and before putting the weapon away. If you haven't bought one of the Russian bolties yet, how can you go wrong for less than $100, shooting ammo at 8 1/2 cents a round? That's a training budget savior!
Sometimes you fall for a gizmo, and it turns out to far exceed both it's manufacturer's claims and your own expectations.
This particular gizmo is the magazine loader for the 7.62X51 family of NATO battle rifles. If you've ever sat down and hand-loaded, say, 6 20 round magazines, by the time you're done, your fingers have chunks missing from them and are so terminally dirty that you won't get them clean anytime soon. The solution to this problem is the NcStar Co. magazine loader, seen on this page of the company catalog.
Use of the little jewel is simple, if not quite bozo-proof. Lining up the front of the magazine with the front of the loader (it will seat backwards on the magazine), you simply drop a 10-round charger of ammo (pointy end frontwards) into the loader, take the handy-dandy pusher tool, and push down smartly and smoothly on the tool. All ten rounds run smoothly into the magazine. When you withdraw the handy-dandy pusher tool, a magnet imbedded in it grabs the charger and pulls it out of the loader. Set it aside and repeat with another loaded charger. Time, about 10 seconds for your first magazine, you'll speed up to around 5 seconds with a little practice. This means you could load those six magazines and put away all the gear in a minute or so.
Amazing.
Got mine at Gunbroker.com, of course. Auction action.
Worth it's weight in gold.
You will need ten-round chargers to use it, as it doesn't seem to work with the 5-round chargers some milsurp 7.62X51 comes in.
If you have a FN/FAL, a G3, a H&K 91, a CETME, an M-14 or a Springfield M1A, you NEED one of these.
Oooh-Rah!
On today's War Walk, I pondered the playing at tin soldiers that passes for internal security in our nation.
Specifically, I considered the recent reaction to the "liquid Bomb" threat by a British islamist cell.
Although MI-5 will never tell, I suspect that the Brit deal went down like this:
Working against time pressure, the power people in the Brit Intelligence decided to over-react. Now, initially, that's not too bad. We over-reacted on 9-11 by grounding all commercial flights for 4 days, and it cost us plenty, but it was probably the correct thing to do at the time, since we didn't have a clue how big the conspiracy might be.
So, the Brits ban all carry-on luggage, and all liquid or gel items in pockets and purses, too. Not bad, it would have taken then a few days to have a good consensus on what the real threat was. But then, the US Intel and Brit Intell confab, and decide that all liquids and all hair gels, etc are going to have to be taboo in carry-ons for the foreseeable future. The train came right off the rails at this point.
How?
Here's how.
Feasibility. Do-ability. Real-world capability. It isn't there for this type of bomb. Construction of such a bomb is technically possible, but practically, it's way beyond the resources of a jihadi cell to make such explosives and their detonators. To bring down an airliner with an explosion, it either has to be a decent sized bomb, big enough to rip the cabin totally apart by overpressure, or must be a smaller bomb perfectly located near a control nexus. The only time this has been done with a small bomb is the two Aeroflot planes that were bombed by the Black Widows of Chechnya, and they DID manage to get them near the control nexus of those aircraft, by detonating them in a rear washroom. Those were old-style aircraft, not the types flying on the transatlantic routes today.
The usual liquid explosive is not a high-order type, but a flash type not capable of cutting metal or creating much overpressure. In other words, they are usually more fire than explosion. The hydrogen-peroxide bombs mentioned in this particular plot are of that type. Think rocket fuel here. Burns with great vigor, but provides more of a push than a blast.
Now that the ban on liquids and gels has been relaxed (although it has been fashioned into an economic tool for airport gift shops instead of totally eliminated), we can pause to reflect on why it has been relaxed.
*** IT WOULD NOT HAVE BEEN RELAXED IF IT WAS A THREAT. PERIOD. ***
You see, as proper as the initial over-reaction was, the six-week ban was poor policy, since by now it is obvious to everyone with more than a third-grade education that the threat, while theoretically possible, has never been demonstrated to work, and especially by a rag-tag bunch with few resources.
I have another problem with this issue, and this one jumped out at me on my walk.
*** If the government wants to protect us from low-probability terror hazards, why aren't they inspecting ALL the shipping containers coming into this country? ***
And THAT, boys and girls, may be the reason that the ban was relaxed. The same "logic" that drove the ban for six weeks would have had to be applied to all international containerized shipping, and THAT would have kiboshed the economy, so it wasn't done, and the toilet articles ban was relaxed.
Damn the PeeCee, full steam ahead...
Sometime in the last week, hard to tell just when, because I wasn't looking for it, my counter clicked over the 500,000 page view mark.
Cue the Dancing Elephants, Fire a Cannon Salute! No wait, if the cannons scare the elephants, never mind....
No, I'm not a Tall Dog, maybe just a Significant Puppy. Here's what it looks like:
Total number of page views: 507083
Average per day: 527.11
Last 7 days: 11214
Today since midnight GMT: 1134
OK, someone please tell me when I can claim to be a "writer".
Hmmm...Gunblogger Rendezvous (a "writer's" conference) + "writer" status = professional tax deduction, hmmmm?
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UPDATE: 092806 1911 PDT: Upon apprising the gudwife of my blogging milestone, she says, "A half million readers? And you're still alive, that's amazing!" Damn! Gonna need the entire city fire dept to put out these flames.....
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Of course the media are all over the Colorado shooting. I had something to say about it myself, here (bottom of the post).
The media have trotted out various mealy-mouthed bullshooters to answer questions like "what do you think was going through his mind", as if the mind of the pervert school shooter worked in an understandable manner, or, more concisely, AS IF IT MATTERED WHAT THE F**K WENT THROUGH HIS MIND.
My point in the last post is, that the media will never discuss the one strategy that has any potential to work, ALL THE TIME. That is, arming some of the school personnel.
Back during the Vietnam war, a C-141 Starlifter crew was preparing for a mission in theater when a nutso GI stormed aboard with his M-16, took the plane and crew hostage, and demanded to be flown back to the USA. I remember the incident, because afterwards, the military reacted correctly by arming the crews with sidearms. A crew could have up to two revolvers, and they specifically were not to reveal who had them, the weapons were to be carried concealed. Since the large crew of a C-141 (Pilot, Co-Pilot, Navigator, Flight Engineer, Loadmaster or two or three) were all over the large aircraft, a single hijacker would probably not encounter them all, and hopefully, one would get a sneak-shot at the hijacker and end the attempt.
This idea should be in use in schools. Have the local cops or Staters train some of the admin people in the schools to handle sidearms, together with a proper range course on close-range head-shooting (like the Sky Marshals take). The weapons MUST be carried concealed.
I doubt if there will be another school-invasion shooting incident after that, but if there was, it would probably result in a dead invader.
No charge for the consultation.
May we please get back to political drivel on the talking-head BS programs now?
I've spent a goodly amount of my waking moments in the last 16 hours trying to get my hard-line phone service repaired. Here is the story of the running FUBAR to try to fix a simple thing: the Verizon computer shunted all my incoming calls to outer space (or "wherever").
Verizon takes us all for either fools or hackers, one or the other. They don't trust us to be able to unplug a phone jack or power plug, or they are afraid that if they give us this key to one simple instruction in their computer, we will somehow break that computer.
Related subject: another item that is conspicuous by it's absence from either the directories or the website is the list of Star Codes. So I surfed around and found a VERY complete list on a geek blog, here.
Verizon, not quite ready for the 21st century.
No, that is not the French word for "woody"....
Just came in from my morning War Walk. Hard to think of conflict subjects after seeing this.
After dropping off Little Black Truck for repairs, I was walking back home the 2 miles from the Mazda dealerhip in this little burg of Gresham, OR, and came to the major highway, US 26. You don't want to jaywalk across this sucker! It's 200 feet wide, and the traffic from out of town is still slowing down from highway speed, and it's morning rush hour.
I'm waiting on the corner of the safety island for the pedestrian light to change for me, and I look around, noticing what appears to be a huge decorative wall that's just been built on the traffic island I'm standing on. Obviously, it's meant to mark the end of the new, improved (read: now-constricted) Powell Boulevard Beautification Project, wherein the City Fathers took millions of dollars and converted a perfectly good 5-lane, high traffic volume boulevard into a not-quite-four-lane, meander-around-the-obstacles clusterfuck. Big wall. Molded stone (the kind that looks like rough-cut granite blocks), at least 8 feet high and about 25 feet long, with columns on both ends and topped with capstone. When finished, it will probably bear some sort of sign memorializing the city fathers who approved the clusterfuck. OK, so far, so good.
But wait! This particular intersection is very expensively signalled and signed by the State DOT, who evidently haven't gotten the word about the Powell Boulevard Clusterfuck. Note how the wall sort of peeks out from behind all the State DOT signage:
Now, knowing how well different levels of gummint work together in these here Yew-Nighty States, how long do you wager it will be until the State DOT changes/moves those signs so that the bee-yout-ee-fool wall will stand proud?
I'm betting that the State DOT doesn't even know that it was built.
Next item:
Zogby Poll. Going to laugh a little here. Laugh with me.
Fox TeeVee News was ballyhooing a new Zogby Poll, this one about the yute vote. You know, those yutes who turned out (NOT!) in their millions for J. F'in Kerry?
It seems that the yutes are becoming somewhat more pragmatic, and it seems that the subject of terror suppression is still not a (D)onk item: the yutes favor the GOP to be able to handle terror better than the (D)s, by 48% to 38%.
Before all you GOPs say "YAY!", better see the next Zogby result, though.
The same yutes say that they would rather sit down and have a beer with a (D)onk (43%) vice a GOP (35%). Gosh all to heck. I'm so disappointed. What this poll result REALLY means is that these yutes didn't learn much from their Dads. GOPs, you see, are much more likely to PAY for that beer than (D)onks. My prediction: these yutes will stay away from the polls in droves in November, just like they did in '04.
On a more serious note, the Colorado school shooting was perpetrated by a pervert, it seems. I was still in a cop's uniform when Columbine occurred. Right after Columbine, cops pretty much decided that in such attacks, it is wrong for the cops to surround the school and wait for SWAT to get there, get geared up and do their thing. So, we were taught the basic SWAT tactics of taking a building, the strategy being the first five officers on the scene would form a team, and hit the building immediately after the fifth one arrived, hoping to neutralize the shooter before he/they did any damage or any more damage. That doesn't seem to have been done in this case.
What this incident DOES point out is that the ONLY thing that will deter and if necessary, neutralize school shooter threats is armed folk in the building when the shooter comes in. The press will probably howl for more gun control as a result of this incident, but what we need, to protect our schoolchildren, is actually LESS gun control. If some teachers or admin folk were permitted to be trained and armed, the incidence of these school shootings would drop to zero.
Given the political bent of the Educrat Establishment, I give my good idea less than a snowball's chance in hell to even be considered.
...the warning is, the First Mate has decided to attend, after all. Don't worry, she has seen her share of the wild side of life, so she won't be offended by the occasional off-color joke or tipsy reveler.
She WILL be offended if the Hospitality Room is not stocked to the max with hors d'oeuvres and the best booze, with frou-frou supplements like iced lattes, etc. If the Rendezvous budget for this is not sufficient, I'm sure she will use the Captain's budget.
You've been warned.
