Nom de guerre: Rivrdog

Finagle's Law

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UPDATE: 030108 1122 PST: It's I-Hour for the trip, and I'm still dis-enterric.

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Yep, two days from the epic Road Trip and I get the gut-flu. Perfect example of Finagle's Law. This one is about a 10-stepper (can't be more than 10 steps from the crapper), so I will have to wait it out. Don't think it's a recurrence of the dreaded colon infection, for which I've had surgery already to repair a blow-out, but I can't take any chances. The start of the trip will have to be postponed until this is cleared up. Time and the B.R.A.T. diet will save me.

Also, this blog-station is 17 steps from the crapper, so I better strike this tent and improve my position...

Range Report - Colt Anaconda & Marlin 1894

Forty-Four Day arrived with sunshine and mild temperatures, and best of all, a DRY RANGE!

At Douglas Ridge Rifle Club, Easy Ed and your blogger had the place to ourselves until the usual benchrest crowd showed up about 10am to shoot their 3/8" groups.

We both brought .44 Magnums: my new Colt Anaconda and Marlin 1894, both in the manly HEROIC .44 Remington Magnum caliber, and Easy Ed brought a venerable Ruger Super Blackhawk, in the same heroic caliber.

I proceeded to sight in the 1894. It has enough felt recoil to make sure you mount it to the shoulder properly. It also has cheapo buckhorn open sights, which were off enough to require a few taps for windage adjustment, and running the sight down to the barrel for elevation, and then it STILL shot 6" high at 25 yards and 20" high at 100. Here's the 100-yard target:

First, the carbine shoots high, REALLY high. The nice head shot group was achieved by sighting on the x-ring! There were two in the white to the left that I jerked. Hmmmm. Disregard the center-of mass grouping for now.

Now, consider this 25-yard target. It is the 9-and better from this same silhouette target, traced on butcher paper (for about a dime a sheet!):

OK, I had just fired up the Anaconda, and was trying to get my head involved in mastering the VERY SHARP recoil and huge flash from full-house Remington 180-gr JSP. I also had to set the sights (very easy, they are click adjustable). So, I booted a couple on the left side, plus the 10-o'clocker at 2", but noted with satisfaction that the elevation was right on. I over-corrected windage and put on the two most right-hand rounds and the 12:30 at 5", then adjusted again, and got the 11:30 hits (keyhole!). Then I got cocky, and left the sitting rested position and took a standing Weaver stance, got the center-dot X, the two more in the 2" red paster out at 9, and the keyhole pair 2" at 11 o'clock. That felt pretty good, but my wrist was feeling abused, so I put on a long-gantlet glove and taped my wrist over the glove. I decided to try it at 100 yards. OPEN SIGHTS ON THIS REVOLVER, MR. C:

Refer back to the first photo. I had 8 rounds left in the box, and went back to the rested position, concentrating on sight picture and breath control, single action (did I mention that the single action on this revolver is the crispest thing I have let off since my college days with an Anschutz target rifle?). Easy Ed was spotting, and he called an eight at 8, then a 10 at 6, then a dead-X! He looked at me kinda strange, but I kept shooting, spoiled it with the two in the white off the right shoulder, then concentrated, and got the nine at 7:30, the eight at 6 and the 10 at 12:00. Then we reminisced about the year (when were were Deputies) that the brass hats decided it would be good to try to shoot with our revolvers at 100 yards. I demonstrated proficiency then, but few others did (Easy Ed did).

I asked Easy Ed if he thought he could do as well with his Blackhawk, and he looked like he had his doubts, but bent to the challenge (Oregon State University Varsity Rifle Team). The target below has unpasted holes. They are his. I'd say he won the match, on group size, but I would have won it scoring. That dead-X is mine, the paster fell off.

Coupla diabetic old geezers who surprised each other. I am delighted with the Anaconda results (considering it's a 4"), but I think I need something better to sight with on the Marlin. I have XS Ghost-Ring sights with a white-post front on my other Marlin 1894, a .357 ("Snuffy"). I will try to find someone with a set of Williams Fire Sights to try out their carbine, but I know I'll do OK with the XS.

OTOH, maybe it's time for a reflex, but DAMN, I could still see to shoot over the iron today!

McCain blows it

Maybe we can just leave off the "it" in the title.

Incident: Local conservative radio show host Bill Cunningham is warming up a McCain rally crowd yesterday in Cincinnati, OH. He referred to Barak Hussein Obama by his full name, as I have just done, and he referred to him as a "hack politician from the Dailey Machine" or some similar barb. Some in the crowd cheered loudly, but some just stood silent, holding their campaign signs.

Enter McCain into the hall.

A LibPress reporter sticks a mike in his face and tells him that Cunningham has been working up the crowd with conservative bombast. Reporter then gives McCain a pre-answered question: "Is it OK to use Senator Obama's middle name?"

McCain: "No, that's never appropriate. I don't do that in this campaign." (or similar).

McCain then went on to repudiate and apologize for (!!!!!) Cunningham's remarks.

McCain could have just won some respect back from conservatives by telling the reporter that "Barak Hussein Obama" is on the man's birth certificate, and is therefore his legal name, and he could have agreed with the Dailey Machine remarks, which are true. Obama is completely a product of the Dailey Machine, his political career starting there in Chicago when Dailey got him on the ballot for State Senator (virtually unopposed), and continuing today.

So, instead of taking this opportunity to re-inforce his creds with conservatives, McCain has now drawn farther away from them.

Best thing about an Obama presidency: it will unite us like we've not been united since 1994, maybe since Ike.

Sorry, Mr. DuToit, I can't accept this man McCain, and would rather see a President Barack Hussein Obama take his best shot at wrecking this Nation and it's Constitution.

As a nation, we're resilient enough to survive it, and as individuals, we're tough enough to give back all the trash the Socialists throw at us.

My personal combat style is to face the fire, and not have to worry about being shot in the back.

Dictionary addition

Og, the Neanderpundit opens a thread, and Kapitan Zur Zee Jim of Smoke on the Water aces a comment with a new descriptive word: "congrasshole". For my liberl Oregon friends, don't try to understand this, it be a Tejan thang.

Yep, file it between "concubine" and "conjugal".

That is all.

Alaska roads question

No, the Road Trip is not going to include driving to AK this time, but I was interested because it seems that the residents of Cordova, AK could use a whole fleet of Waaaaahmbulances to carry them off from their 19-year pity party they've had since the Exxon Valdiz oil spill.

If you ate too much for lunch, and need to throw it up, read this.

I used to think Alaskans were strong and resourceful. Since reading in that article that 33,000 different groups and individuals sued Exxon, I may have to change that opinion.

Mission Prep

After fits and starts and not getting it done, lo these 5 years since I retired, I am going on a real, By God Road Trip. This is one of those "bucket list" things (to do list before kicking the bucket). I have alloted most of the month of March for this trip. I will be alone, this is time for ME ONLY.

The Little Black Truck (Mazda B2500) is, at about 100,000 miles, as reliable as it's going to be, has decent tires, and it will be my steed. I was considering taking my 1968 VW Bug, but it needs work, and is an adventure to drive (I hate slammed cars, but that's what what my dau. wanted when I bought it for her 14 years ago, so that's how it is).

My winter survival gear is always packed in the Winter Box, and I don't have to do a thing there. Packing clothes might take some contemplation, since the terrain will range from the High Sierra (near record snow there this winter) to the Gulf Coast. Musher suit to surfing baggies, and every thing in between.

Then, there's the matter of weaponry. I've been kicking this around for weeks in my head, but I think I will just go simple, and take Shorty and Snuffy (Ruger SP101 in .357 and Marlin 1894 in the same caliber), plus maybe the trusty little Kel-Tec P3AT for when I have summer clothes on. I would love to tote a battle rifle just in case I manage to visit two or five ranges enroute, but the logistics of loading and unloading rifles, as well as the suspicion factor when it's not hunting season, combined with the damnable security cameras everywhere, will cause me to leave them behind. And, I may just hit the occasional gun store or gun show enroute, too, and could conceivably come back better armed than when I left.

I will traverse Kalifornica as quickly as I can, with my first objective of Phoenix, AZ. If I do it right, I'll meet up with a SASS buddy (Sage Rat), who will be competing at the big winter SASS matches there. Then it's off to TX, where I am going to visit a few folks I know, then probably LA, maybe FL, then back west via KS, NE, SD and MT, where I have many friends, and have only visited a few of them.

Actually, it's going to be difficult to get this all into four weeks.

Of course, I'll be scribbling a "Travels with Rivrdog" series raht heah.

The USDA beef recall.

File this one under "yet another Communist in the Bush Government is heard from".

President Bush (#43) is well-known now for his inability to direct his administration according to his conservative principles, and the Westland Packing Company beef recall of '08 is just another example.

In this instance, he caused enough ground beef to be recalled to feed (in 1/4# patties) the entire population of the country two full meals. Yep, that beef (143 million pounds) would have made up 572 million 1/4 pound patties. Fortunately, the idiotic communistic government was late with the recall, and maybe 80% of that beef has already been consumed (with no reported problems, make a note of that).

If you read any of the breathless MSM reports of this recall, accompanied by a clandestine video purporting to be made at a slaughterhouse, you might have been convinced that our brave government just saved us from horrible disease, and their action kept the meat supply pure.

You would be mistaken.

There are rules pertaining to how a slaughtering operation is conducted. One of those rules says that the cattle must walk, under their own stamina, to the slaughtering floor. The reason for this is that it tends to eliminate sick animals from the slaughter line, thereby improving the quality of the nation's meat supply.

OK, fair and good. Actually we didn't invent these rules, some form of them has been around at least as long as Western Civ, and maybe longer. The meat company in question (no link to them will be provided) obviously broke the rules, and several animals which could not walk to slaughter were seen being prodded and/or physically pushed into the slaughter room. That's wrong.

Two wrongs don't make a right.

The Federal Government has no business taking the terrorist group PETA's (the Humane Society of the US fronted for PETA this time) word for anything, and especially condemning years of a company's product because of one or two instances of rule violation. This is approximately the same as permanently revoking your vehicle registrations and driver license because you parked overtime at a parking meter.

The PETA video, assuming it wasn't doctored, and I won't make that assumption since the group is evil and has evil intent towards producers of meat, offers no proof that the animals involved were a danger to the meat supply. You have to take it at it's face value only (if it's true): sick or injured animals are being driven to slaughter. It is a fact that there have been exactly two beeves found in the whole nation with Mad Cow Disease in recent years, and the baterium e. coli is present on ALL animals, simply because orders of animals lower than our own species have not been trained to use toilet facilities and wash themselves after voiding their bowels.

That is all, not "animals whose flesh it would be dangerous to eat are being driven to slaughter" as the MSM all gravely intoned when they broadcast this pack of misinformation. Not "eating beef exposes you to high risk of Mad Cow Disease and/or the bacterium e.coli" as PETA wants you to believe.

PETA, knowing their vegan ways are not acceptable to most Americans, resorts to terror tactics to try to scare us into accepting their lies as fact. PETA operates exactly like Hamas used to operate. There is a "charitable wing" and a terror wing. The "charitable wing" enlists various celebrities, most of them from the entertainment industry, but the terror wing has as it's objective the forced elimination of animal flesh from the diets of all Americans. That's right, they want us all to be vegans. Not vegetarians, vegans. That is the ultimate goal of all of PETA, and now, because George W. Bush decided to be a "nice guy" and not get rid of the second and lower echelon liberals-and-worse from Federal employment, we now periodically get various liberal initiatives being encoded as Federal policy.

So, now the PETA way is the American way, thanks to GW Bush.

If you are a patriot, you will take every opportunity presented to oppose PETA and the sham and terror they stand for. You can now add the Humane Society of the US to your list as well. The next time they ask for a donation to keep an animal shelter open, inform them that this cave-in to PETA just cost them your support.

No Oscar talk here

Since Hollywood is the largest single identifiable enemy of our culture, there will be no discussion of it's smarmy self-congratulatory awards night here.

Go somewhere else for that.

Sir Richard Branson, kiss my ass

Richard Branson may kiss my rosy red arse. This idiot idea isn’t going to save the planet. If the aircraft had actually been carrying a payload, then all this relative data might be useful to determine how much more CO2 is released with conventional fuels vs. the biofuel mix he used in his engines.

He carried no passengers, so the CO2 added during entire flight added un-necessary greenhouse gas to the atmosphere, by his own definitions of what causes "global warming", and he also just wasted a large chunk of his stockholders' capital, which he doesn't have the right to do in the capitalist society which he pretends to be a member of.

Branson’s engineers didn’t need to do this, either. All this information can be obtained in a laboratory setting, so actually fueling up the plane with the gook and flying it proves nothing that was or could have been proven already.

It has been adequately demonstrated that obtaining these biofuel materials from the third world has zero positive effect on the atmosphere, and in fact damages multiple ecosystems. First, the third-worlders use old technologies to produce the material the oils are made from, and those technologies are horribly polluting to the atmosphere and damaging to the ecosystems (think: burning rain forests to plant biofuel crops). Then, there is the not-inconsequential matter of the balkanization of those supplies, necessitating a huge, inefficient logistics system to get them to where the fuel can be blended. Finally, I have to see the figures of just how much lest CO2 this fuel mix is going to produce in a turbine engine not designed for it, and Branson is NOT forthcoming with that information.

Now that I have shot down Branson’s attempt, let’s consider also that it was all totally unnecessary. The planet is NOT dying of excess CO2, and in fact, is probably entering a cooling period during which we will be happy to have every kilogram of “greenhouse gas" that can be stuffed into the atmosphere, just to keep our asses from freezing solid over the next few centuries.

Branson is just another hypocrite, toying with “saving the planet” while his attempts to do so violate his own ecological principles, six ways to Sunday. Does this rich clown really think that anything he’s doing will actually have finite results? I’d like to see his measured predictions of the results of his own actions. That is the true measure of success, and he’s not offering it. He just offers us feel-good, but so do all others of his ilk. With the new and accumulating evidence out there that planetary warmth is driven primarily by insolation, or the amount of the sun’s energy striking the earth, and with the proven data that said insolation has been reduced of late, Branson and all the other global warming cultists are behind the times. The so-called “science” they sling at us like so much feces is exactly that, crap, and it has been proven to be crap. All political derivatives of this crap are also still crap.

If you want to make a conscious choice to live in a world of crap, you make that choice for yourself only, please.

Richard Branson, Meet Pope Algore. I'm sure the two of you can sell each other another cockamamie idea on saving the planet, but keep the ideas to yourselves, we have more important things to do, such as saving the planet from Islam.

Rotten luck

If you're a motor officer on a city PD, you ride escort quite a bit. Escort duty is tough, and demands the best from you and your bike. Escorts have to keep the intersections clear just before the motorcade gets there, while it is passing, then play catch up and do it all again.

This means "busting intersections", or riding at full acceleration through intersections, alongside the motorcade, pass the motorcade then rapidly decelerate to close off an intersection before the motorcade gets there.

The officers with the Big Brass Ones do this leapfrog, but there are other duties, such as riding tail guard.

This unfortunate officer was doing that. Tail guard involves protecting the rear of the motorcade from bonehead citizens (or those out to perpetrate mayhem), and it calls for the ability to maneuver quickly, solve an issue (usually with a direct block), then catch back up to the tail of the motorcade.

The officer took a Jersey Barrier at speed.

Riding your motor down when you've lost it for one reason or another bites, but smacking something unyielding bites worse.

Worst of all, is plowing into something deadly and dying while protecting Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Ouch!

If any of you Texicans want to send me a link to who might know of a memorial fund to help educate the officer's kids, please do so.

Motors are where it's at in patrol work. Frankly, I never had the nerve for that work, so I never applied (maybe being in a near-fatal scooter crash when I was 20 took the desire to yank throttle out of me). I have nothing but the highest respect for motor officers, though, and this officer's family deserves support from EVERYWHERE.