3-Gun Match: Medium Speed & Drag

What I shot at a three-gun match earlier today:

Top to bottom: Ithaca (SKB) Model 600 in 20 gauge, a M-1 Garand, and a Smith & Wesson Model 19.

The course of five was at 4 swinging steel plates at 25 yards with a handgun, two steel silhouettes at 20 yards with a shotgun and two double-taps on two silhouettes with a rifle at 50 and 75 yards. I thought that I'd speed up my game a little over the last match by taking a semiautomatic rifle.

I didn't do badly, something like 30.5 seconds, including a fifth shot at the handgun plates. The silhouette targets were hard to see; they were black on black backers and there was a lot of sun glare. I did outshoot a fair number of the "high-speed, low drag" boys to come in around the middle of the pack. They mostly all shot .223, 9mm or .22 carbines. One shooter had an AR-15A2, another had a Henry .22 and yet another shot a M-1 carbine.

All fun.

I would have liked to have gone flying, but a front came though bringing strong winds behind it. 20+kt gusts that are blowing directly across the runway are not fun to deal with, especially in a taildragger.

On to gun cleaning and laundry. Jake's litter box is overdue for a scrub-down. At least he is nowhere near as particular about that as was George (peace be upon him).

Your Sunday Morning Jet Noise

The DC-8:

DC-8s were not as famous as the 707s, but they were far more versatile. DC-8s were more easily stretched and they could be reengined and/or fitted with "hush kits" to meet noise regulations. Forty years after they went out of production, you can often still find one in the air, earning its keep.

I Wuz Robbed, I Tells Ya!

Of $8 admission to the local gun show.

The prices that the vendors wanted were unreal. Which is probably why I saw a heck of a lot of people wandering around the hall and hardly anyone forking over any money.

One seller had a nice S&W Model 10-5 in his case, but he wanted $690 for it. I don't think that even Cabela's, which horrendously overprices its "gun library" would ask for that much.

CCI .22 ammo in hundred round boxes? One guy wanted $18 a box. The same 100-round box of Remington .38+P that the local Wal-Mart had on the shelf this week for $38 was $55 at the show.

A generic Mosin-Nagant, still dripping on cosmoline, that was $200. An equally generic SKS was marked at $675.

Maybe 30 or so years ago, gun shows were places where some decent deals could be had. The last few shows that I've been to, I've seen nothing that would be worth opening one's wallet. I hope those vendors have a lot of fun packing their shit back up.

Caturday

Jake is taking his ease on my bed. The sheets are off and in the washer.

I recently washed the white throw that he is lying on. I hadn't done that in months, I haven't needed to. When Gracie was alive, between her hairballing and tendency to sometimes get crap in her ass hairs (George also did that), I was washing that throw almost every week, sometimes more often.

Don't get me wrong, I miss both of them. But one cat is a lot less work than three.

Good Old-Fashioned Religious Bigotry; "Hobby Lobby" Edition

Hobby Lobby, as store that sells the same sort of crafting crap that you can buy everywhere else, opened a store in Marlboro, NJ. That town has a significant population of Jews.

So a local man went into the store and asked if they have Hannukah decorations. The store clerk said they didn't carry any. When asked why, the clerk gave this explanation:

"We don't cater to you people."

So the man called the store manager. In short the explanation was that the owner of the company, a thumper named Steve Green, is a bigoted asswipe who doesn't recognize anyone else's holidays. He called corporate in Oklahoma and was told much the same thing.

So a store that sells holiday decorations opens up in an area with a significant Jewish population and doesn't carry Hannukah kitsch? The only two possible explanations are "bigoted" and "stupid".

I'm going with "bigoted". They are a large chain, they surely do market research before opening new stores. They could not have failed to note the demographics of the town and the surrounding area. For a store of that nature, opening in the New York City metropolitan area and ignoring Jewish holidays is like opening a hardware store in Vermont and not stocking snow shovels- it's an inconceivable mistake.

One of the basic things in retail is to find out what customers want or need and sell it to them. I don't think Hobby Lobby is that stupid. But I do think they may be that bigoted. Good old-fashioned anti-Semitism never seems to go completely out of style in some circles.

There are lots of other stores that sell the same crap and they are happy to cater to Jewish customers.

I'll go there.

Because It's Friday

We'll end the logging miniseries with a Climax:

And from LRod, via e-mail:

A Fable for Today

This story took place about seventy years ago.

There was this young boy of fifteen or so. He was kind of big for his age. He got caught up in all of the patriotic fervor of the time, he joined the Army.

Basic training was nothing like he expected. He was homesick and he got picked on a lot. So he wrote his father and asked for his dad's help in proving his age so he could be discharged for being underage.

His dad sent back a very short reply: "Boy, you got yourself into this. You get yourself out of it."

I'll bet that right about now, John Boehner knows how that kid felt.

NSA Chronicles: Another Day, Another Lie Exposed, and Yet, the Tea Party Doesn't Give a Shit

Only this time, the leaker was Sen. Feinstein, who inadvertently disclosed that the NSA is collecting and keeping cellphone location data.

The NSA has repeatedly denied that they are doing this. But they are. Since it's a pretty safe bet that you have a cellphone, the NSA knows where you are and where you have been.

The NSA is also tracking everyone's use of social media because they want to know your personal relationships and who your friends are. They're collecting your browsing data (why are you still doing online banking).

This needs to be fixed.

Which brings me to the point of this post: How the Tea Party and the conservatives are wrapping themselves around the post on trivialities. They have shut down the Federal government over whether or not people who have not had heath insurance can have access to health insurance and medical care. Providing a national version of Romneycare is, according to them, the clearest and presentist danger to the Republic that has ever existed.*

Yet when clear evidence is presented to them of Federal government intrusion: Tracking what people do online, who they talk to on their phones and what they talk about, what they purchase with their credit/debit cards and where they are, well, all you hear from the Right is silence.

This is the Tea Party calculus:

• Government providing health insurance to millions more people- that's tyranny! Shut down the government!!
• Government actually spying on all Americans- meh. Nothing to worry about.

They are fucking insane. And no, I am not engaging in bombast, they are truly fucking drooling strait-jacket-ready batshit-crazy lunatics.

And they are holding our nation hostage to their delusions.

We are so screwed.

But fuck it, if they're going to try and wreck our country, let them do their worst. Let's have this fight, right here, right now. Let's get it over with.

We beat them in 1865. We can beat them now.

Let's do this thing.
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* Ignoring the British (18th-19th centuries), the German Third Reich, Imperial Japan and the Soviet Union, because they were minor threats.

Executive Summary of Investigation of F-35 Program: "Bow Wow! Woof! Woof"

Lockheed-Martin, the Navy* and the Air Force have been apparently using the F-35 program to conduct a master-level class in how not to run a large weapon system procurement program.**

Poor management, cost overruns, severe quality control issues-- hell, one might conclude they dug up the program managers for the Aardvark and gave them the keys to the F-35 office.

Note the comment in the article that the F-35 may break the Pentagon's budget.

Forty years ago, there was a procurement study that projected that, given the cost growth in aircraft procurement programs since the Second World War, by 2060, the DoD would not be able to afford a new fighter program.

It now seems that the study's authors were grossly optimistic. We may be already there, thanks to the F-35. And LockMart.
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* In this case, "Navy" includes the Marines, who share much much of the responsibility for the dogginess of the F-35.
** As if the Air Force needed the practice.

Shutdown

I haven't blogged about the Federal government shutdown because it seems pointless. The Republicans lost the fight to enact the Affordable Care Act. They lost in the courts. The ACA, aka Obamacare, was a central talking point for Republicans in general and the Romney/Ryan campaign in the 2012 presidential election. They tried over three dozen times to repeal it.

They've failed every time.

So now they are taking the government itself hostage in order to get their way. They say they want the Obama Administration to negotiate with them, but it is clear that their idea of negotiation is "you have to do it our way."

The latest GOP talking point is "Obama can negotiate with the Iranians, but not with us?"

Jon Steward had the best comment on that: "If it turns out that President Barack Obama can make a deal with the most intransigent, hard-line, unreasonable, totalitarian mullahs in the world but not with Republicans, maybe he's not the problem."

PS: They might have to cancel the Navy-AF football game this weekend. Cry me a fucking river.

PPS: