Nom de plume: Rivrdog

Comment FUBAR - UPDATED

Comments are F.U.B.A.R.

I just beat down a spam-comment attack of several dozen spam comments.

I can't determine if Six Apart, the blogging parent of Typepad, has let down their spam-shields, or whether somehow it's connected to Yahoo!, which seems to have turned up it's toes just now.

My only recourse at this point is to do maximum anti-spam actions, which include the dreaded "Captcha" system again, and comment moderation.

I hope that this will be temporary, so if Typepad gets it's act together and blocks most of the spams again, I can relax these restrictions, but if not, they'll have to stay. Having to sit here for long periods deleting dozens of spam comments is not my idea of the fun that blogging is supposed to be.

If prospective commenters really don't want to mess with Captcha, just email me at perspacatyahoodotcom and I will publish your comment directly from my computer, smartphone or tablet, I always have one of those nearby. Unless I get REALLY distracted, I will publish moderated comments no less than three times per day, and likely more. When emailing, please give the permalink of the post you want the comment to go to. Just click on "permalink", right next to where you clicked on "comment".

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UPDATE: 110212 PDT: Okay, no further spam, one of the two measures, either the Captcha or the moderation is keeping it out, and since I haven't had any spam accumulating in my email box, I will remove moderation and see if the Captcha will keep the spammers at bay. BTW, Six Apart admitted that they were overwhelmed, it wasn't just me, so there's a new spam-bot out there that's getting by their initial shields.

Election Prediction, Second Edition

"...maybe the only edition." Naaaaaaah, you didn't really believe that, did you? 

"The Pundit runs strong in you, Old Rivrdog".

Next prediction:

Mitt has no coat-tails.

The Senate stays on the "D" side, even as Mitt sweeps the Prexy race and buries Obama in the history books.

The House stays on the "R" side.

With no majority in the Senate, Mitt doesn't get to repeal ObamaCare, so we'd best learn how to live with that monster. We won't have to learn how to live with no Second Amendment, though, since the UN's Treaty on Small Arms might be ratified by the (D) Senate (but maybe not, as they think about the 2014 elections), but President Mittens won't sign it, so it dies next week, as it should (unless spite brings it up in the Lame Duck Session, but see above about 2014).

Will there be an "Un-Do" of all things Obama? I doubt it. Some of the most sweeping of Obama's Executive Orders might go away, but remember that Mitt is a Big Gummint Guy himself, and I'm sure that Big Gummint Bling will have appeal to him, too.

Your blogger voted early (as is the law here in Oregon, we vote for everything by mail-ballot). I voted for Mitt, but following this doctrine, I voted for mostly (D)s for State offices. Gotta eat to live, ya know, and gotta still pay that largish mortgage, too. If I had to walk away from Schloss Rivrdog and live up in the hills in a rental double-wide, I could handle that change, but the gudwife couldn't.

The next four years are going to be a balancing act for Mitt Romney. How well he pulls that off will determine if he gets Four More when his turn comes to re-up.

Election Prediction, first edition, UPDATED

...maybe the only edition.

Obama will lose the election. He will lose because of the same reason he was elected:

White Guilt

White Guilt put Obama into the Presidency in '08. This Nation really wanted to believe that integration had worked so well that a man of color could actually do the hardest job in the USA. I think they still want that. The "guilt" part came in because a lot of white folks (the vast majority of US voters are of the white race) felt bad that it took 145 years since the Emancipation Proclamation for a man of color to rise to the position where he could win the election and run the Nation. Despite knowing virtually nothing about Barack Obama, these guilt-laden whites projected competency onto him and voted for him in droves (herd behavior?), giving him the keys to drive the juggernaut that is America.

Four years later, the record is clear that Obama hasn't lived up to any of the expectations of those White Guilt voters who put him in office. There is a strong undercurrent of failed expectations here, and that undercurrent will pull Obama down, and put Mitt Romney in the office to replace him.

White Guilt gives, and White Guilt takes away if there is no fulfillment of the promises.

Prediction: Mitt wins in a landslide, with well over a 5% popular vote advantage, and well over 300 Electoral votes.

H/T to PawPaw for the VodkaPundit link.

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UPDATE: 110112 0935 PDT: You want a wonk's look at my prediction? Here it is. Very wonkish, but the author simply says that unless whites refuse to turn out in large numbers, Obama loses, and will likely lose badly. I love the author's football analogy: he says that if a bad matchup has a football game at 35-0 at the end of the first quarter, will you ever see a 140-0 result when the final whistle blows? You never do, but that is what it would take in this election to negate Obama's problem of whites voting their disgust at his performance, whereas they voted their hope for him in '08.

Actually, there are a lot of wonks making my prediction, when you read their wonkish details. None of them, Dick Morris included, have the brass ones to actually say it's the back side of '08 White Guilt that will do Obama in. They won't say that, because their literary higher-ups all subscribe to the PeeCee Style Book, which forbids any racial discussion involving the Won's politics.

Dancing in the flood - Earl Blumenauer, whatta Maroon!

You've heard of Dancing in the Blood, of course, if you've read this blog for long. That particularly nasty terpsichore is done whenever there's some sort of mass-murder with firearms, and the anti-Civil Rights groups immediately use the event to try to further their un-Constitutional agenda to kill the Second Amendment to the Bill of Rights of the US Constitution. That's Dancing in the Blood.

The envirowhackos have their own version of this danse macabre, which I will call "dancing in the flood". The "science" behind the discredited theory of man-made global climate change has been discredited sixteen ways to Sunday, but the adherents of that strange religion remain unconvinced by the debunking of their phony "science". Not only do they remain unconvinced, they grab at straws in the wind, hence the Dancing in the Flood whenever a major adverse-weather event happens. Hurricane Sandy was just such a Weather event.

So it goes with our Greenie-Weenie, Earl "the Pearl" Blumenauer, Democrat representing the 3rd District of Oregon in Congress. He's just Danced in the Flood of Hurricane Sandy. He danced earlier this year in the big Heat Wave. The flood that time was in the tears of farmers and ranchers ruined by the drought, a continuing Weather event.

Earl, you dolt, there's Weather and there's Climate, and they are NOT the same, in fact, they share few connections in science. Climate is the continuing record of Weather events, and that's as close as it gets. Weather isn't even discussed in real Climate-science circles unless it's discussed as as a long, continuing record, the longer, the better, and it's specifically NEVER discussed in relation to a single Weather event.

Let this be a lesson to the Climate-scare Socialists* who have un-Constitutionally established their earth-religion as science-fact in US law: Weather is NOT Climate, never was, never can be.

But, these pearls of wisdom are lost on Earl, because, as my Momma done told me, you should never cast Pearls before Swine.

Representative Earl Blumenauer, (D) 3rd District, OR, you are the Maroon of the Month!

Your blogger may or may not be the Punster of the Month. You decide.

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* My forever challenge: the Climate-Scare religion is purely a function of Socialism. This blog challenges all readers to try to find proponents of that religion who are NOT Socialists.

The Tuesday before THE Tuesday

Yep, we're down to a week before nos populi get to be The Deciders.

Nope, I have no confidence that Nos Populi will decide correctly, or even in their best interest, if best interest means what's good for them over their lifetimes.

Yep, Nos Populi will likely decide on who runs a program which gives them the best advantage over a short term. The gimme-gimmes will win.

Guess what, Dear Readers?

I'm about to join them. Yep, I'm about to join the gimme-gimme voters and vote my pocketbook.

A little history here. History is instructive, and in MY case, it's completely explanatory. I am retired. Over my working life, I worked at two careers, the first being the military, from which which I am retired with a Reserve Retired Pay totalling 4,875 Points (you do the math if you want to, I retired as O-4 in 1995). That money is not enough to live on, but I could live on it with my Social Security. I elected to draw early Social Security at age 62 (with full-time employment of 47 years before that), so I get about 20-25% less than I would have, had I waited to draw it, but I read the tables and it was to my advantage to draw it early. My Social Security retirement is less than my military, by about 10%. In my second career of work, I was a Deputy Sheriff. Mostly I worked Patrol, and I worked a lot of it. I retired under a defined-benefit public pension plan, which gave me 2% per year in retirement. I worked 25 years in that career, so I draw, as a base, 50% of a Deputy's wages (from when I retired, they are much higher now). That pension benefit was increased by a percentage of the overtime pay I earned by working extra hours, and I worked thousands of extra hours over those 25 years. The result of all that is that I draw, in retirement, 88% of the base wage I was making the day I retired.

"Hog at the trough," You shout at the top of your lungs.

Yep, that's me. Now do YOU feel better for having shouted out your bile? I hope so, it's really all about YOU feeling better, isn't it? It's really all about the fact that YOU didn't/won't retire as well as I did, isn't it?

Sorry about that.

No, I am NOT sorry that I DELIBERATELY chose public employment careers, which at the time had decent defined-benefit retirement plans.

What I am sorry about is that YOU didn't avail yourself of such choices, because now I have to listen to you whine and bitch about MY better choices, as a product of your envy.

Yep, envy is the great catch-all emotion, isn't it? Envy gives you excuses for not making choices to work harder or dirtier in the present so that you might live better later on. Envy is all about venting off your personal disgust at yourself for not making better choices, all while you hide your envy in shouts of:

"Hogs at the Trough!"

Envy is all about trying to deny ME the promises which were solemly made to me by YOUR representatives, starting in 1967. Oh, you weren't born then? Oh, you don't feel that promises made so long ago have to be kept? Too farging bad, boneheads, the Supreme Court says that the promises DO have to be kept.

But you will try to break them anyway. You will try at the Federal level to bust my Social Security and my military Retirement Pay, and you will try to bust my Oregon State retirement pension (and you will try very hard, it promises to be one of the biggest topics for this Legislature). On the Oregon level, you will try so hard that you will overlook the one way you could get out from under your promises to me, and that's by NEGOTIATION. Yep, I would agree to negotiation to reduce my State pension amount, and take in lieu of the dollars an interest in State properties via a REIT. Your envy of my pension money will prevent you from seeing this way out of your present cash shortfall, though, so you will not negotiate. You will just sit there and rail at me, and others like me, for being such a Hog at the Trough.

You will vote for your conservative candidates who want to renege on your promises to me.

Guess what, boneheads? I won't vote for your choices, even though I am as conservative as you, and maybe a long chalk MORE conservative. I actually BELIEVE in my Constitution(s), and I BELIEVE their courts when they say I have a RIGHT to be paid my pension, with all the benefits I was due at the time of my retirements. You evidently don't, and think that Constitutional promises are made to be broken.

I'm going to add my voice to the voices of the gimme-gimmes, and vote for those who refuse to break those promises to the retired public employees. They are all Liberal Democrats, it turns out. How ironic. How stupid of the Stupid Party to believe that they can cut slices out of MY hide and I am not going to swing MY sword at them. How stupid of the GOP to renege on the Constitution and try to bust my retirement pensions.

Yep, in the State and local races, I will be voting for Liberals. I'm not the only one, either. There are better than 300,000 retired public employees in this state, and many of us would have voted GOP, had the GOP not decided to make we retirees into scapegoats for bad State fiscal management and poor choices. In this State, 30,000 votes swings almost any statewide election, and that's only one-tenth of the public-employment retirees, who normally stay in the background because in their working lives, they had to be out front with you boneheads and smile while you were cursing at us. We'll all be voting for our personal financial security, first and foremost. YOU, my conservative bretheren, will just have to be satisfied to watch the returns a week from now and never see that winner's checkmark next to your favorite GOP candidates whom you are counting on to rape our pensions.

Yep, YOU vote your pension-envy, but my vote cancels any one of yours, and my fellow-retirees' votes cancel all your conservative friends' votes, too.

Next time, keep the promises you made, and I might vote with you, not against you. Oh, and next time, get your nose out of Ayn Rand, and read your Constitution. If you don't have and can't find one, email me with your name and address and I'll send you a pocket copy.

Waking up from dreams...

When I wake up from dreams, sometimes the dream is mostly forgotton even before I look at the clock to see what time of the night it is.

Sometimes, I remember every detail.

Last night, I had an "every detail remembered" dream. I awoke from it at 0334.

The dream's starting details went like this: In the future, but not far, as most of the details were current. Probably next Spring, since the weather was warm again. Obama had won his Second Term, and I was on the run. I have no idea of WHY I was on the run, but I had a memory, in the dream, of just how I did it: External events had crossed a bright line (unknown which events), and I had loaded light SHTF gear out, and was on the run. I had evidently ditched my personal vehicle and bought a beater to replace it. I had visited a few people I knew, and asked them not to report my visit even if it meant being in conflict with the authorities, which were decidedly hostile. In the background of this dream, it seemed to have been something I had written on this blog which generated a friendly visit from a local cop, who was friendly enough to tell me that the Eff Bee Eye had asked the locals to stop by and have a chat with me. I had told the cop I had nothing to talk about that concerned either his PD or the Eff Bee Eye, he had left without incident, and I was out of the house 5 minutes later. I drove by a pre-determined route to a perdetermined location at a friend's house, from where I used a landline phone to arrange the purchase of a car off of Craigslist, then that friend drove me over to pick it up. I was driving the new undercover ride to meet aanother friend who I had been told was also on the run when I woke up from the dream. It seemed that like-minded folks were all on the run.

What reality! The car was a dark red late-90's Nissan Altima, and it had been a Washington car for the illegal alien who had owned it, and still had the Washington plates in the trunk in addition to it's Oregon plates. My gear consisted of a couple changes of work clothing (Carhartts) and my work boots. I had a couple days food, my Vorgrimmler battle rifle which now sported an original scope (I don't have one of those right yet), and a Glock pistol, and I had a sleeping bag. Nothing in the dream indicated any further plans.

So, what do I take from that dream? I take that there was some sort of crackdown on political dissent in Obama's second term. I take that I should equip my Vorgrimmler rifle with one of it's original scopes (those were made by Zeiss, and are hard to find). I take that I had evidently thought enough of the danger to myself from the gummint to make plans to evade arrest, and those plans had worked for the short time I had put them into effect. I guess I should think about that sort of planning now.

At the point where I awoke, I suppose the dream could have taken almost any turn afterward, but the significant thing to take from it was that there was a definable threat to my freedom, I had recognized that threat, prepared for that threat, and had acted on that threat when it was revealed to be real.

Pretty much what any thinking person would do, right?

The 2A - Some food for thought, Part One

I've had plenty of food for thought about the 2A lately, an election between a 2A-supporting candidate and a wannabe 2A-killing candidate will do that to a person.

So, what I have here is some ingredients, and what I'm going to do is assemble the ingredients to make a tasty stew.

Ingredient: The 2A itself: "A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed" It should go without saying, but doesn't, that the Second Amendment protects the most basic Human Right, the right to exist. 

Ingredient: The Socialist experience with keeping and bearing: in Socialist States, there is little freedom to keep and usually NONE to bear arms. The Keeping is usually in some sort of government-approved club, or if you are allowed to Keep at home, the firearms must be locked up. Their use for hunting and competitions may be allowed, but their use for personal defense is usually proscribed. Most Socialist States have "duty to flee" laws that do not allow use of firearms for self-defense, and having imposed those laws, other weapons get added to the list of tools you may not use to defend yourself with.

Ingredient: Protection for our Second Amendment. Protecting the Second Amendment has become much more organized within the past decade. There are more organizations dedicated to protecting the Second, and some of them are even cooperating with others to improve the outlook for the Second Amendment. This blog wishes they could ALL coalesce into a super-org which would divide the job up amongst the various sub-orgs, but we're still a few years away from that Nirvana.

Ingredient: Organizations which undermine the Second Amendment. Primarily, the biggest anti-2A org is the Democratic Party. Depending on it's political mood, the (D)s will actively support subverting the most important Amendment in our Bill of Rights, or they will just bide their time and do nothing overt. Right now, they are in the "biding their time" mode, because in an Election year, they can't afford to lose the votes they would be guaranteed to lose if they were actively supporting a weaker 2A. They leave the work of undermining the 2A to outfits like the Violence Policy Center or the Brady Campaign to Prevent Civil Rights Gun Violence (no links to the enemy!). The Joyce Foundation bankrolls most of the anti-2A outfits, and George Soros, a Socialist billionaire investment capitalist, bankrolls the Joyce Foundation.

Ingredient: Gun Blogs. With the rise of the Information Age and the extension of it's advantages to the public via the Internet, the hobby of "blogging", or writing Internet-published diaries (web-logs), took hold. Aside from the cost to connect to the Internet, and perhaps a small fee to maintain a blog (I pay for this one, but I could publish it for free if I wanted to), blogging is a cheap hobby. Since most of us will pay for Internet connectivity anyway, blogging is very inexpensive, it's chief cost being the time to do it. Gun blogs have taken up the cudgels for the support of the 2A. Without gun blogs, the ability to stay ahead of gun-banning moves by the Civil Rights Deniers would be much more difficult, with the gun blogs, effective protection of the 2A is a routine matter.

Ingredient: The final ingredient(s) are the tools of the 2A itself: the guns and their ammunition. Self-explanatory, but since guns ARE tools, we have different tools for different purposes, so an appreciation of different firearms is important to preserving the 2A. That appreciation is served up to us via the gun-blogs.

Okay then, we have all the Ingredients for our little stew. As every Chef knows, Ingredients don't assemble themselves into food, they have to BE assembled, prepared, cooked, etc. This calls for a Recipe. The Recipe is used according to the Cooking Method to arrive at the final food.

In my next installment of 2A Food for Thought, we'll put up the recipe and describe the Method.

Anti-materiel guns and ammunition

Ooooohh! 'Dawg, you can't talk about anti-materiel gunnery, that's NOT "sporting purpose" stuff...

Ummmm, did you READ the Second Amendment lately? Where in the Second Amendment, from which we derive the Civil Right to Keep and Bear Arms, is there any discussion of "sporting purpose"? OTOH, there IS that eeeeevilll word "Militia" in there, isn't there?

So, Festus, what DO "militias" do?

Answer, they are a less-formal military force for warfare and peace-keeping purposes, a force used when, for whatever reason, a more formal force can't take the field and perform the duty.

Okay then, where does "anti-materiel" fit in?

This is simple. Unlike your local rozzers, a militia may be tasked with  the military task of area denial. In area denial, the objective is to deny the enemy forces the use of land which you, the militia, either already control or are about to control. In performing area denial, the militia must be able to project force (fires) at targets other than the usual humans (or, for you "sporting purpose" fans, animals). Those targets might be buildings, vehicles, equipment, or other non-animated things. The objective in firing upon non-animated things is to deny cover to the human enemy or deny mobility or other use.

The basic anti-material job that needs to be done is to disable vehicles. Rifle fire, especially from a 5.56 NATO weapon, may or may not disable a vehicle and end it's ability to move. To do that, you have to kill the engine in the vehicle. If you get lucky with a 5.56, you can kill an engine, and if you hit it with an entire magazine of 20 or 30 rounds in the engine compartment, you probably WILL kill it, but it's better to be able to do that with one shot, or maybe a couple of shots.

To use fewer rounds, you have to go up in caliber so that the first round hitting the engine has a disabling effect. The 50BMG round will do that nicely, even with Ball loading, better with API (armor piercing incendiary) rounds which we are not supposed to possess. We used to be able to possess steel-core 30-caliber rounds, but they haven't been available in a while.

These rounds are available, and they are large enough caliber, too. That is a VERY good price for them in bulk, a price that will allow you to practice some. Now, the 12-ga is a close-range weapon. It takes having rifle sights on one to get decent shot placement out to their effective range of 110 yards, but here is what they will do when they get there.

Think about it: your 12-ga shotgun can stop almost any un-armored vehicle. So could a Barrett 50, but you could outfit about 30 militia members with rifle-sighted 12-ga pump guns and the Dduplex ammo before you'd equip ONE rifleman with a Barrett 50. Yes, the guy with the Barrett can stand off a bunch more and get the job done, but chances are, your crew is going to want to be closer to that action anyway, so the range advantage is not a sure thing.

Think about what your weapon might have to do in a SHTF dust-up. When you do, you might just park that AR and ride with a 12-ga.

Does our military make you feel safe?

Consider this comment, posted on a major milblog. If you don't feel that the commenter's posted attributes of military leadership and deployment take our military MOST of the way towards filling the role of muscling-up a dictatorship right here in these younighty-states, please tell me in comments why you think we're not closer to that nightmare than we were just ten years ago.

For you progressives: since most of these changes in military leadership and deployment-thinking have occurred during Obama's first term, any thoughts on what would change if he loses the election? If you say "nothing would change", I tend to agree with you, but please amplify.

Friday FUBARs

First FUBAR: Why we win: they can't speak our language, and with our public ed-ju-kay-shun system we aren't about to learn Mandarin, either. Example, the gudwife buys a cheese slicer to replace one which we'd used for years, but it broke. On the bottom is an instruction on how to re-adjust the cutting-wire: "When the wire was not properly placed at the recess of the marble, you would unscrew the handle and adjust the wire slightly and then the function goes well." WTF, over? What's wrong with "If the cheese doesn't slice evenly, unscrew the handle a quarter-turn, re-adjust the position of the cutting wire so that it falls into the groove in the marble, then re-tighten the handle, finger-tight."

Second FUBAR: Why we win: They can't write our language, either. See above reason. This editorial letter, "Voluntarily Vanished,"  was penned by John S. Painter, a retired City Desk reporter for the Oregonian newspaper, going back to the time when the Oregonian made a difference in the lives of people in this State. He put in 40 years with the paper, and I consider him to have had an impact at least as important as any ex-Governor. This goes to the question, "Where's the style book?", and, "When you find it in the crapper, don't pick it up, it will have been used for a foul purpose."

Third FUBAR: Heaven help me, I'm starting to scream even at righty election blather on the telly. I've reached my limit of it, and there are still 11 days to go...The worst part of this is going to be the immediate post-election swing into the Christmas Season with Christmas adverts... 

Fourth FUBAR: Italian Government-sponsored science. Doesn't exist. Those boneheads actually put scientists on trial and convicted them of manslaughter because they failed to predict an earthquake that shook down a town and killed some people. Okay, couple of things here: first, the science of studying the earth's crust is not so good that it can predict earthquakes yet, and secondly, doesn't the dot gov dot ey-tea have some liability here for permitting those old stone dwellings to remain inhabited in a known earthquake zone? Really, jailing scientists makes it all better? Really? Methinks that the Flat Earth Society is alive and well-constituted within the Italian legal system. On a related note, scientists are quitting their government jobs over there at a good clip. Oh, well, at least they made the trains run on time...

FUBAR the last: This FUBAR is for YOU, dear readers, to sort out. Read the story, then comment. This is really a "WTF" turned "FUBAR". I'm guessing that there are two factors involved here, one being strict parenting and the other being a whacko religion, and there's a high liklihood of both. Definite food for thought, though, if enough facts can be accumulated.