07:59 – Well, Obama couldn’t get congress to ban AR-pattern rifles, so now he’s trying to ban ammunition for them by executive order on the basis that 5.56/.223 ball ammunition can be fired from pistols and therefore qualifies as banned “armor piercing” pistol ammunition. The issue is that while nearly any rifle-caliber round can penetrate the soft body armor used by cops, very few pistol-caliber rounds can do so. Obama’s position is that since there are pistols that can fire 5.56/.223 rounds, that ammunition can be banned. And there are in fact pistols that can fire that round. In the late 60’s, I fired a Remington XP-100 bolt-action single-shot pistol that was later available in 5.56/.223, and in the early 70’s I shot .223 in a break-action single-shot Thompson-Center Contender. So what? Both of those pistols and others like them are clearly 100% sporting pistols. I’d be willing to bet that no cop has ever been shot with any of them. By Obama’s definition, almost every sporting rifle caliber can be banned because nearly all of them short of elephant-gun rounds are available in one or another pistol model. Anyway, the 2nd Amendment protects the right of the people to keep and bear armor-piercing pistol bullets, or indeed any other weapon.
Work on the prepping book continues. I’m still working in section I (the first month), on chapter I-9 on security and defense.
11:33 – Amazon really understands customer service. On December 18th, I ordered this humidifier, mainly because Consumer Reports recommended it highly. It had about a thousand customer reviews on Amazon, about half of which were five-star. What concerned me was that about a quarter of the reviews were one-star, and most of them mentioned that it had died after a few days’ to a few months use. Those one-star reviews worried me, but for $30 I decided to take a chance. That’s about what it costs to replace the filter set in our large roll-around humidifier, so I figured if this little one lasted an entire season it’d be worth it.
It worked great until Wednesday evening, when it died after only a couple months’ use. Yesterday, I went to the order page on Amazon for this item and clicked the icon to return it. Amazon asked if I wanted a refund or a replacement. I told them I wanted a refund, which they issued immediately to my credit card. The next page gave me return options, all of them free. I could print a label and drop the box off at a UPS store, print a different label and UPS would come and pick it up at my house, or return it myself and be issued an $8.24 credit for return shipping. I chose UPS picking it up from my house and clicked on the Print Label icon. As it turns out, I don’t even have to print a label. UPS will come to pick up the box in the next few days, and they’ll have the label with them. Other companies should take lessons from Amazon to learn how to do customer service right.
Obuttwad has never read the constitution or if he did he failed to understand the contents.
He claims to have been a constitutional specialist in his law “career,” though. But that’s irrelevant and immaterial anyway, as lawyers might say…
…He’s evidently been told to inflict as much damage and pain as he can on us before his time runs out, thus the illegal immigrants, the anti-gun attacks, and the foreign policy adventuring in Syria, Iran, Ukraine, North Korea, etc., that is likely to touch off a powder keg somewhere.
This will be an interesting test case: let’s see how successful he is with his “executive order” again and what the reaction will be from manufacturers and AR owners, of whom there are many, many millions here.
I’m in the process of evaluating various AR-15 and AR-10 platforms so will be following this caper closely.
Sun and blue skies continued today, 10 degrees, no wind, and minus zero tonight again. But it’s gonna rocket up into the 20s and maybe even 30 over the weekend and early next week. Nude Lost Wages showgirls can’t wait to strut their stuff on the bay shore here! MrAtoz sez he’ll fly them out for me.
He claims to have been a constitutional specialist in his law “career,” though.
Sort of like the VA chief that was a special forces operative.
Yup.
That VA chief was with me on some mighty hairy spec ops in Cambodia with MrAtoz at the Stealth Chopper controls; we linked up with Brian Williams and Vinegar John Kerry on the Delta and recovered the Ring for Frodo.
“Anyway, the 2nd Amendment protects the right of the people to keep and bear armor-piercing pistol bullets, or indeed any other weapon.”
If enough stay-at-homes in 2008 or 2012 had voted Republican the above would be moot.
Goodbye Spock.
Goodbye Spock.
Of all of the souls I have encountered in the universe…. his was the most…. human.
He has been beamed to the final frontier.
Goodbye Spock
Live long and prosper. Remember, he has come back once already.
IIRC, there is not one person who was in Obola’s classes at Columbia that can remember seeing him in class. Kind of like the “no-show jobs” that Chicago is famous for. Show me the transcripts! I bet all the transcript says is “present”.
You know damn well the Pres understands the constitution perfectly. However that’s not a fit with his libtude socialist views. He’s thumbing his nose at congress as well as the majority of voters and is forcing fundamental change just like he said he would.
LLAP Mr. Nimoy.
MrAtoz at the Stealth Chopper controls
lol Our whole gummint are a bunch of lying weasels. All of them. Can’t wait for HILLARY! to be President. At least we know she is a fucking liar. “What difference, at this point, does it make” “It’s a right wing conspiracy that BJ is a serial abuser” “Benghazi, what Benghazi?” “We were taking sniper fire coming in” “Foreign donations to the BJ Klinton foundation while I was SoS, you got me” Geez.
Back from my day after LASIK followup. Far vision is 20/20, near about 20/40. A little hazy which is expected to clear up in a day or two and acuity will come up, also. I can see my ‘puter screen, but need to “blow up” the view a little to read clearly. My 1.50 readers make it CAFB. It will take a while for the “mono vision” to work better. For my electronics hobby, I usually wear readers anyway.
One of the docs put tear duct plugs on one duct on each side. Just to help prevent any dry eye. They’ll stay in for 1-3 months or permanently if needed.
The procedure to do both eyes was about 10 minutes, with less than a minute under the laser for each eye. My right eye has a contact until Monday due to a little swelling. The doc wants to be sure the flap heals. If it looks good Monday, out it comes. My plan has free followups and LASIK touchups for a year.
I’ve been listening to Clancy and his co-writer’s latest book, “Full Force and Effect”, which is effectively about North Korea’s attempt to build an ICBM with a two ton payload that can reach California:
http://www.amazon.com/Clancy-Full-Force-Effect-Novel/dp/0399173358/
I did not realize that North Korea (DPRK) is a multiple generation personality cult. Just the concept of a 60 year old personality cult with 25 million participants is unnerving. Clancy claims that many worship the Kims as gods on this earth and pray to them daily.
Kool-Aid, anyone?
_One Second After_ by William R. Forstchen
http://www.amazon.com/One-Second-After-William-Forstchen/dp/0765356864/
A free standing novel with no known sequels.
Wow! Wow! You want apocalyptic novels, I’ve got your book right here. Wow! I stayed up until 3 am reading this last night. Fits right in with my rule, if I have to stay up all night to finish the book then it is a five star book.
The author starts the story with somebody exploding a large nuclear weapon 25 miles above Kansas in the USA, causing a large EMP event in the continental USA. There is another weapon exploded above Moscow and another above Tokyo. Basically all electronic devices and electrical equipment are destroyed. Then, the author explores what can go wrong in the next twelve months. Actually, it is more like what does not go wrong in the next twelve months.
I am not going to go into the number of problems experienced in the USA but there are many. Life becomes cheap, very cheap. Food is scarce after sixty days. Food is below subsistence level after 90 days.
About 1/3rd of the way in the book, I noted that the main character had two golden retrievers. “Oh no”, I said to myself, “they are food on four legs”. I am not going to spoil that but tough, very tough decisions have to be made.
Great character development that make you feel very empathetic to their issues and needs.
I have no idea if we could actually protect the USA against an EMP first strike. The cost for a rogue state to commit the act is actually very low. The USA military is mostly hardened against EMP but they are few and far between. There is no way that they could ramp up for food production, distribution and area protection in a short time period. More like years or more to recivilize the nation.
My rating: 6 out of 5 stars
Amazon rating: 4.4 out of 5 stars (4,291 reviews)
Note: I purchased and read this book at Bob’s recommendation.
“If enough stay-at-homes in 2008 or 2012 had voted Republican the above would be moot.”
Wrong again, Grasshopper.
If you lived here for enough years you’d know why.
Repubs haven’t helped us much, if at all, on the gun front over the past thirty years. They do the same chit as the Dems while lying to us and promising us all kinds of rubbish. It’s almost better to have the straight-up liars like HILLARY! in charge ’cause we know what we’re getting, than some slimy weasel RINO or Pee Party bozo.
So voting for one of them wouldn’t have helped us then and certainly won’t help us now. Hey, you’re retired; come and live here for just six months and watch the circus; it’ll be a real eye-opener, apparently. I’ll go and live in Oz for the same six months and see what the State hath wrought there for gun control/civilian disarmament firsthand. Or O Kanada. Or the U.K., home of my cousins and ancestors, yea, unto the ages. (we’ve got the paternal side back as far as the 1300’s).
Aside from national-level problems with the Republican half of the Boodle-and-Tyranny Party, I live in New York. New York politicians have been corrupt not only longer than Australia has been independent, not only longer than there has been a United States of America, not only longer than there was a New York colony, but almost as far back as Australia’s discovery by Europeans. (1942 (or 1901), 1776 (or 1775, 1774, or 1783), 1664, and 1606, respectively.) Look into the history of how New Netherlands became New York, with emphasis on redirection of public funds into unintended pockets, and realize that nothing has improved in almost 400 years. The New York political machines (both halves of the Boodle-and-Tyranny Party) decide who will be allowed on the ballot in the November general elections, crossing out candidates as needed regardless of petition and election results, laws are passed without regard for constitutionality, and spending continues despite unambiguous results from referendum votes.
It’s much the same at the national level. With specific attention to Republican politicians, hailed as the saviors of us all, look at what Congress and the President did from 2003 through 2006, four years when Republicans controlled both houses of Congress and the Presidency. Reduce the federal budget? No. Reduce the rate of growth of the federal budget? No. Reduce the number of federal laws? No. Reduce the number of federal regulations? No. Protect the borders and eject illegal aliens? No.
What good are the Republicans? More accurately, how is the Republican Party and its minions less evil or less useless than the Democrat Party and its minions?
Vote? Why bother?
Of the four boxes of liberty, the soap box is heavily monitored and restricted to permitted Free Speech Zones. The ballot box is useless above the local level, and probably even there. The jury box is heavily constrained by corrupt police, ambitious DAs, and power-mad judges — jurors who attempt to exercise their common law right of jury nullification are often thrown off the jury, threatened with arrest, or actually arrested. That leaves the ammo box, or submitting to the jackboots.
And once again Mr. SteveF has summarized the Current Situation politically speaking here in the wunnerful Murkan country better than I could; I just don’t have the patience anymore to keep explaining it. Things are DIFFERENT here than they are in the former British Commonwealth countries and Europe and pretty much everywhere else on the planet. Voting at the state and national levels, and in most large cities, is a total exercise in futility with no possible gain or benefit to us regular schmuck citizens whatsoever.
I just dunno how between Mr. SteveF, Dr. Bob and me, any of us could explain it any better. If that does not suffice, well, then, thus mote it be.
I’ve been listening to Clancy and his co-writer’s latest book, “Full Force and Effect”, which is effectively about North Korea’s attempt to build an ICBM with a two ton payload that can reach California
Um. Clancy stopped writing quite a while before he passed away. That said, his early books were pretty good, but as he became a brand the publishers seemingly stopped editing him and his books were longer than they needed to be. I stopped reading them about the time of Rainbow Six, as I found the plot a little loose and sf aspects laughable.
Seriously. I stopped reading Clancy well before you did. I don’t much care for novels anyway, and excessively bloated novels are doubly not cared for.
I’ve edited for a few aspiring authors whom I’ve advised to cut way back, like “tighten this scene up by half” or “I suggest cutting this scene entirely because it doesn’t connect to any other scene and doesn’t advance the plot or character development”. I’m polite when making such suggestions (difficult as it may be to comprehend the notion of me being polite) but the typical first-time novelist who goes on and on is highly unwelcoming of any criticism, no matter how polite or constructive or professionally based. These authors also tend to “fire” me and refuse to pay for any unpaid work I’ve done so far. (In theory I could sue under the contract; in practice it’s not worth it. I don’t do more than a chapter on spec.)
Another problem with Clancy was his amazingly cooperative access to DOD assistance and intel in his writing projects. So eventually they ended up being merely ads for the military’s latest toyz and techniques and patriotard flag-waving b.s.
I’m not finding much out there in this genre worth my time, quite frankly, not anymore.
Actual history and current events are stranger and more interesting.
You have a more liberal take than most on what constitutes a favorable review. What I actually wrote about this book was:
“I finally got around to reading One Second After, the 2009 TEOTWAWKI novel that put EMP on most preppers’ radar. It’s basically a mediocre writer’s attempt to rewrite Pournelle’s and Niven’s Lucifer’s Hammer, relocating it from the California mountains to the North Carolina mountains and recasting the threat to an EMP attack from an asteroid impact. The book could have used a decent editor. Or perhaps I should say “could of used”. By about the 20th time the author used “of” rather than “have” I was ready to scream; by the 100th time I was ready to track down and strangle the author. Despite nearly 3,900 Amazon reviews averaging 4.4 stars and despite being on the NYT bestseller list for three months and despite the foreward by Newt Gingrich, this is a bad book. Bad science, bad plotting, bad dialog, and to say the characters are cardboard is an insult to cardboard. Apparently there is a sequel in the works. I won’t bother to read it.”
LOL.
I never buy books based on peoples’ bad reviews of them.
I have. I boughtThe Bell Curve based on slams by idiots, before I ever saw a knowledgeable review by someone who’d actually read the entire book and understood the math.
Over the couple years after publication there were several thoughtful refutations of various points of the book’s data or methods*, but that wasn’t the case in 1996-7. Then, the bad reviews were all sheer hate of the conclusions, or more accurately the conclusion of one chapter, that on race-based differences.
* In fact, I’d argue that Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel was meant as a refutation of The Bell Curve, attributing differential success of societies to location — “luck” — rather than to genetics. I’m not convinced, but Diamond did make several good points.
Point taken; sure, I’ve bought and read books that were panned by The Usual Suspects. Coulter’s, for instance. And mainly because of the virulent hate and loathing directed at her by the aforesaid Usual Suspects.
Whether The Bell Curve was right ot wrong, I found it an excellent cure for insomnia.
I could observe that anyone who has difficulty following the reasoning or the mathematics is self-identifying as being on the left-hand side of the curve. But I won’t, because that’s what kind of nice guy I am.
I don’t recall the prose being dry, but that could be a matter of taste. For material like this, impeccably researched and reasoned (whether or not it’s correct is not relevant at this point) I want it to be regularly laid out with a straight path from data to reasoning to conclusion. Attempts to make the work “interesting” or “popular” damage the results or the presentation. If that makes it dry or boring, so be it.
Um. Clancy stopped writing quite a while before he passed away.
Yes, I gathered that Clancy fought lung cancer the last ten or so years of his life. He did try out several “ghost” writers and settled on Mark Greaney (or his family did). Mark Greaney has written five Jack Ryan Jr. books now and I quite like them. “Rainbox Six” was definitely bloated up but the collaborations with Greaney have been very quick flowing. Here are Greaney’s books:
http://www.amazon.com/Mark-Greaney/e/B002KGVOMU/
You have a more liberal take than most on what constitutes a favorable review.
Oops, I would have sworn that you recommended it in another place. Basically, I liked the book because anything that could go wrong did go wrong. I figured that I would die about 2.5 months in from his talking about medicines and sick people. I cannot fault his writing very much at all at the 90% population die off over twelve months.
Another problem with Clancy was his amazingly cooperative access to DOD assistance and intel in his writing projects. So eventually they ended up being merely ads for the military’s latest toyz and techniques and patriotard flag-waving b.s.
All of the Jack Ryan Jr. / Campus books are about spooks and have very little military story.
“I could observe that anyone who has difficulty following the reasoning or the mathematics is self-identifying as being on the left-hand side of the curve. But I won’t, because that’s what kind of nice guy I am.”
I didn’t have any trouble following the maths, I just found it tedious in the extreme.