The Last Vulcan

Posted on August 31, 2015 by Alaska

Dilemma for airshow photog: to extend, or not? With f-stop comparisons. Worth the read.

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If you hear laughter

Posted on August 31, 2015 by Phil Kadath

I mean, like, a lot of laughter, it’s probably coming from across the Atlantic

Germany Wants Other European Nations to Take in More Refugees

Just get used to it. It will likely go on for a while. Then there will be a weird silence. Then you’ll hear gunshots because those nations will likely start shooting at each other. Again.

Posted in The Left is Never Right | 1 Comment

C’mon

Posted on August 28, 2015 by Phil Kadath

California. Get it together.

Drought stricken California is burning and flooding at the same time.

Water is easy to store, transport, and dispense. None of these are new technologies.

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Finally! Honesty.

Posted on August 28, 2015 by Phil Kadath

The HuffPo has given up and decided to tell the truth.

Gun Control Might Not Have Stopped the WDBJ Shooter. That’s Not the Point.

Two of their Senior correspondents drop the lie and just verbally flail about pushing a bad “study” that says “new laws would save lives”.

 

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Gun Rods

Posted on August 26, 2015 by Alaska

Kevin asks if anyone uses them. I do, sort of:

  
That’s in the “target rifle” safe. I’ve got the .22 size and the bigger-than-.22 size, and they work fine. However the way I have the guns set up they save no space. That’s not what I use them for. They really just help me think my guns won’t get scratched in a typical minor 4.0-5.0 earthquake like we have about six times a year. And so far they haven’t moved, even with just a little bit of velcro holding them vertical at the end of the rod — but that works for me!

So for Californians in earthquake country they’re cool, I suppose. I would not use them for their intended purpose as that would violate one of Dave’s Rules of Life, all of which I should write down someday. This particular rule is “Avoid storing a thing so that you must move something else out of the way to access it.”

And, of course, these rods do nothing to help store more of my first firearms loves, revolvers and specialty pistols.


  Yes, the specialty pistols safe violates the above rule. Ah! But I have a plan to remedy that; temporary violations are ok.

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What a party!

Posted on August 26, 2015 by Phil Kadath

Good times were had by none.

Dutch Artists Celebrate George Orwell’s Birthday By Putting Party Hats On Surveillance Cameras

On Tuesday, surveillance cameras in the center of the city of Utrecht were decorated with colorful party hats to celebrate the 110th birthday of George Orwell, Dutch art duo Front404 explained on their website.

“By making these inconspicuous cameras that we ignore in our daily lives catch the eye again we also create awareness of how many cameras really watch us nowadays.”

Big brother refused to blow out the candles. He said the candles did not exist and that you’ve fallen behind in your viewing of your two minutes of hate.

Posted in Order of the imperial upraised middle finger. | 1 Comment

If it sounds like a marxist

Posted on August 25, 2015 by Phil Kadath

And acts like a marxist.

Then it is highly likely that it will commit espionage and treason in order to win a conflict that will force you to live in an marxist oligarchy.

For decades, the stalwarts of the American Left depicted all accused of disloyalty in the so-called “McCarthyite” era as victims of the Cold War and an American “witch-hunt.” One such individual, who until his death made a good living portraying himself in this fashion, was Cedric Belfrage, a British expatriate who lived in the U.S. from the ’40s until 1955.

Belfrage was the founder and editor-in-chief of what was the major fellow-traveling American weekly newspaper, The National Guardian, which was created in 1948 as an adjunct of the presidential campaign of Henry A. Wallace on the Progressive Party ticket. The British subject Belfrage was hauled before both Senator McCarthy’s Senate subcommittee and by HUAC in the 1950s, where he invoked the Fifth Amendment. Eventually, he was arrested and deported back to Britain in 1955.

Belfrage then wrote a few books. Among them was one published by a major American publisher in 1973, The American Inquisition: 1945-1950, in which the author claimed that he too was a victim of vicious false accusations that he was a Soviet agent.

We have known for some years, from both the Venona files and the Vassiliev KGB Notebooks, that in fact Belfrage was working for the KGB. In one of their books, Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes call him a “Betrayer of Two Nations.” Writing in Venona, they describe how KGB defector Elizabeth Bentley told the FBI that, while in the U.S., Belfrage regularly met with Soviet agent Jacob Golos to hand over material — both American and British — which he had obtained from the British Security Coordination Office for which he worked.

I’m not saying that the McCarthyist trials were a good thing, but damn if that broken clock was right more than twice a day.

Posted in Evil walks the earth | 3 Comments

This is what happens

Posted on August 24, 2015 by Phil Kadath

When 44ft of 1.5in x 1.5in x 0.125in angle makes its way into my driveway work area on a Sunday morning.

20150823_185914

I got tired of digging for my tools in a single compartment style toolbox and went and got one with drawers. Sadly, it is not portable and I was having to go back to it every time I needed a tool but was not working in my usual work area.

Seeing as how this cart is a half inch wider than my tool box, I think the problem has been solved.

The bottom two shelves are for stacking parts on the days I’m assigned to make parts. Last week, I was assigned to make 27 of two different sets of parts for a structural canopy. The parts were only around eight pounds each, but there were 54 of them. So ten trips with an armload of 40 pounds and one with 32 pounds were made because I couldn’t get the forklift around a different large project I’m not assigned to that was blocking.

I’ll make those trips in one walk starting today.

The plywood shelves will likely be swapped for some 16 gauge steel when I get back to the school’s supply room and I can get it at their cost. The large pneumatic caster wheels are there because rolling over cables, cords and other shop flotsam that hard wheels won’t roll over.

Oh, and it’s square to within 1/32 on all six sides. Because I can.

Posted in Kewel! | 5 Comments

Not Helping

Posted on August 21, 2015 by Phil Kadath

Why are we stuck with people like these guys?

In giving probation with no jail time to a Milwaukee man charged with 55 counts of buying firearms with fake identification and dealing them without a license, a federal judge delivered a message:

“People kill people,” U.S. District Rudolph Randa said, echoing a common gun rights slogan. “Guns don’t kill people.”

Dontray Mills, 24, purchased a total of 27 firearms, mostly handguns, between December 2012 and April 2014 and pleaded guilty to one of the charges on April 22, 2014, after an ATF investigation. As a result of the conviction, Mills will never again be able to buy firearms legally.

On Wednesday, he was sentenced. As part of the plea bargain, prosecutors agreed with the one year of probation.

Randa said he recognized the seriousness of the offense and acknowledged the problem of guns winding up in the hands of people who use them to commit violence.

55 felonies and he only gets a year probation?

The prosecutors get the win in their column, so they don’t care, the judge quotes a bumper sticker, and a guy who was illegally dealing firearms without a license after buying his wares with a fake ID and lying on the 4473 gets one year probation.

And the leftosphere and the anti-gun media get a headline to use in their propaganda.

And then there’s this asshole.

Posted in Freaks, Mutants, and Morons | Leave a comment

This is an improvement

Posted on August 20, 2015 by Phil Kadath

Not a dramatic improvement, but an improvement nonetheless.

We are excited to announce that Yelp has concluded an agreement with the federal government that will allow federal agencies and offices to claim their Yelp pages, read and respond to reviews, and incorporate that feedback into service improvements.

We encourage Yelpers to review any of the thousands of agency field offices, TSA checkpoints, national parks, Social Security Administration offices, landmarks and other places already listed on Yelp if you have good or bad feedback to share about your experiences. Not only is it helpful to others who are looking for information on these services, but you can actually make an impact by sharing your feedback directly with the source.

It’s clear Washington is eager to engage with people directly through social media. Earlier this year a group of 46 lawmakers called for the creation of a “Yelp for Government” in order to boost transparency and accountability, and Representative Ron Kind reiterated this call in a letter to the General Services Administration (GSA). Luckily for them, there’s no need to create a new platform now that government agencies can engage directly on Yelp.

As this agreement is fully implemented in the weeks and months ahead, we’re excited to help the federal government more directly interact with and respond to the needs of citizens and to further empower the millions of Americans who use Yelp every day.

Ok, most of that is bullshit. The federal government is not excited by this development at all, but they hope it will give the peons a place to vent rather than in the agency offices themselves.

Never will a director of an agency have even so much as a conference call with a field office to talk about their bad Yelp reviews. But it is a bit nice to see that the people have been asking the government to be run more like a business.

Posted in Life in the Atomic Age | Leave a comment