I still Suck at Shooting

Posted on March 30, 2006 by Alaska

My “score,” if you can call 120 a score, on the e-postal match rifle target really bummed me out. I had a lot of flyers, and a couple were so bad they made me laugh in frustration.

I think what I’m discovering is that when either pressed for time (as in, “I gotta shoot 25 shots during this 20-minute firing period”) or under self-imposed pressure of competition — or both, as was the case for this e-postal match — even my very modest shooting abilities go out the window. I’ve never shot competitively in my life except for the Analog Kid’s “Killiards” and this match. Obviously I need to do a lot more.

I sorta confirmed this for myself, after sinking the last flyer into the e-postal target, by concentrating on a blank corner of the main target and shooting a (relatively) respectable group without much trouble. Sigh.

What’s even more frustrating about this is that I now want to go restore my confidence by shooting the tight groups I know I can with my other rifles, but I’m not going to be able to get to the range until this weekend. And even then, because I have to get ready for some significant events coming up later next week, I’m not going to have a lot of range time.

Aaargh!

Posted in Have Gun, Will Travel, Uncategorized | 2 Comments

When work gets in the way of life

Posted on March 30, 2006 by Phil Kadath

I’m sure you’ve noticed that my blogging volume has gone down recently. There are a number of reasons for this that I don’t want to go into here, but one of them is the recent happenings at my place of employ.

My employer is currently in negotiations with the Teamsters Local for their new contract. As most of you know, I am quite the anti-union fella and having to deal with management (whom I am also not a big fan of) while also dealing with the union slugs has become rather droll as of late; the Teamsters try to convince me that crossing their possible picket line would be a bad idea or talk me into voting for union representation in the offices where I do my work.

I tell them that the mullahs will OK pork products before I do either of those, they get that tilted head look that dogs get when you whistle at them and I reiterate my stance with the standards about an acrtic Hades or Porcine Aviation so that I can end the conversation more quickly and get them out of my office and myself back to work.

This has been the last couple hours of my workday for over the past month. Even though I am working fewer hours (my boss cut my hours back to pay for the possible temporary workers who’ll be driving the trucks), my stress and frustration level are way high because my workload increased as my hours went down.

Add to that the recent move and the tightness of the dinero around the new Casa de Analog and all I want to do is eat, sleep and go to the range, which is about all my weekends consist of anymore.

The vote for the strike is tomorrow and depending on whether the union members decide 1. To OK the contract, 2. Vote for further negotiations, or 3. Strike will determine the blogging level in the near future. You’ll want to hope for numbers 1 or 3 as 2 will just extend the pain futher, 1 will lessen it, and 3 will mean I get to stay home, paid, until hostilities cease.

I think you can guess which one I’m hoping for.

Have a good day out there folks.

Posted in Life in the Atomic Age, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Ripped From the Headlines

Posted on March 30, 2006 by Phil Kadath

Gregoire’s first big veto: Beaver relocation permits

Nevermind.

I thought it was about new requirements for marriage licenses.

Posted in Life in the Atomic Age | Leave a comment

The Soundboard: Hippies Rock

Posted on March 30, 2006 by Phil Kadath

Yes, you read that correctly.

Today’s tunage is from a band of neo-hippies whose first disc came out in the early 90’s. It was full of things and ideas that most folks who visit RNS and myself find pretty much insipid; ‘no black and white, only gray’, earth worship, pacifism, all the anti-war cliches you can think of, etc.

I bought the album because of today’s featured tunage and then came to the conclusion that as long as this band kept putting out albums at least as well done as this one, I would have to buy them.

The reason for that decision is that, quite plainly, these guys can rock. If you ignore the sideways leftist thought processes and see through the heavy film of patchoulli, their rhythm section just straight up kicks butt.

So, from their debut album, Mental Jewelry, I give you Live

Operation Spirit (The Tyranny of Tradition) – Live

Upon my relistening of this album, I also rediscovered the answer to a question every 2A person has asked themselves about rabid anti-gun bigots who are also pacifists: What would they do if their lives were threatened and they had the ability to stop the threat?

The answer I find to be pretty honest, at least from Ed Kowalczyk, lead vox and lyricist for the group, is contained within the choruses of Track 4 on this disc, titled “Brothers Unaware”.

1st Chorus

And if I don’t know who to love, I love them all.

And if I don’t know who to trust, I trust them all.

And if I don’t know who to kill, I may kill myself instead.

2nd Chorus

And if I don’t know who to love, I love them all.

And if I don’t know who to trust, I trust them all.

And if I don’t know who to kill, no suicide…I’m already dead.

No wonder gunnies and right wingers are generally happier in life. I’d hate to have to live like that.

Posted in Kewel! | 1 Comment

The Illegal Immigration Debate is a Trap

Posted on March 29, 2006 by Alaska

…set by the Democrats. I’m not talking about the Senate amnesty bill. I’m talking about the House bill that makes undocumented status a Federal felony.

There was a column Monday or Tuesday that discussed the tactics behind passage of the House bill by James Sensenbrenner. I’m trying to go back through the blogs I read over the past couple of days to find it, and when I do, I’ll post the link. (I have a vague recollection that it was a New York Post column.) Update: Still can’t find the column I read, but here’s another by Debra Saunders that says pretty much the same thing.

Apparently, according to the column, the two following facts are true:

a) the Republicans put the make-undocumented-status-a-Federal felony clause in as a bargaining chip and were perfectly willing to toss it aside in favor of reaffirming the status quo, wherein undocumented status is a Federal misdemeanor;

b) the Democrats saw their chance to hoist the Stupid Party by its own petard and prevented the Republicans from removing the clause. The final vote to remove the clause in favor of misdemeanor language failed because almost all the Democrats voted to keep the felony language in. TRAP!

Continue reading →

Posted in Color me confused, The Left is Never Right | 7 Comments

Here They Come (Redux)

Posted on March 29, 2006 by Phil Kadath

As an addendum to yesterday’s post about the weekend murders in Seattle, I wanted to pass on a few links. Some are worth reading for their content and some are for comic relief.

Among the ones worth reading is this post from the Heartless Libertarian where he picks apart with relative ease the bias in the local media reports. He also wonders what drugs or alcohol the killer may have injested prior to his shooting his fellow party-goers.

Great minds think alike, I always say.

Another worth reading is this post from Barb at Righty in a Lefty State. It is an excellent piece on the teens who were killed and their parents, including these very relevant pieces of information,

Suzanne Thorne, 15, gunshot to head. Attended the party with her 18-year-old boyfriend. Her mother, Nancie, told The Seattle Times she did not approve of her daughter going to raves.

Melissa Lynn Moore, 14, shot in the chest and head. Her father said she loved to dance and meet people. He trusted the older friends with whom she attended raves.

One very witless parent and one very stupid parent. But according to the local left, people like myself and Barb are just “blaming the vicitims!”

Because it is much better to place the blame on an inanimate object.

Another piece you really should read is Joe Huffman’s piece on asking advocates of gun control “Just One Question“. He has two updates that pertain to this weekend’s shooting that link to two very ignorant editorials from Seattle editorialists (whose editorials fall directly into the ‘too stupid for publication’ file), including their email addresses by which you too can ask the ‘Just one Question’.

This link to the Tuesday Seattle Times ‘Letters to the Editor’ sort of falls in between “Worthy’ and ‘Comic Relief’.

However, this link to the Times editorial on strengthening Seattle’s Teen Dance Ordinance, is total insanity because, until you put a Lo-Jack on every teenager in the city, they’re going to go to parties like the Zombie Rave.

Especially when you have parents as witless and stupid as the two listed above.

Posted in Armageddon | 1 Comment

Two Wins

Posted on March 29, 2006 by Phil Kadath

While things may look bleak on the environmental front here in Washington State, we did have at least one legal decision Washingtonians could set firmly in the win column  a week and a half ago and another, a decision last week by the State Attorney General to appeal a previously lost court case to the SCOTUS, that we can at least take out of the loss column.

In 1993, Washington voters approved of Citizen’s Initiative 601 that held spending limits to a certain percentage of the state’s income from taxes unless approved by a statewide vote. In order to balance the state budget, state legisltors had to do some creative accounting, creating a stack of new sin taxes and then moving that money around, making it look like they were taking in more money so that they could spend more money.

A county judge made the proper decision, saying that if the state is going to increase taxes in that manner, they first need to be approved by the voters.

I’m all in favor of sin taxes as a way to collect money, I just want my fellow Washingtonians to be in favor of them as well before we have to start paying them.

Of course, that kind of thinking makes me an anti-tax red-meanie to the “Please Tax Us More” left.

As for the now ‘Non-Loss’; a few years back voters approved another Citizen’s Initiative, this one was #134 and it passed with 73% in favor. It held that the Washington Education Association could not spend the union dues collected from employees as political activity without first getting permission from the union members.

Of course, the WEA told the voters to stuff it and did their thing anyway, causing such a furor that then Attourney General, Christine Gregiore, had to bow to public pressure and file a lawsuit against them.

The lawsuit was so craptastic that it failed.

But now that we have a competent Attorney General in Republican Rob McKenna, the suit is being rewritten and filed for appeal to the SCOTUS.

Good on McKenna. And here’s to a ruling in favor of the citizens.

Posted in Life in the Atomic Age, The Left is Never Right | 2 Comments

Here They Come

Posted on March 28, 2006 by Phil Kadath

No, I’m not talking about the Monkees (well, I guess I kind of am), I’m talking about the army of gun control lobbyists that will soon be coming to Washington State.

Over the weekend we had a shooting on Seattle’s Capital Hill, deep in the heart of ‘Progressive’ Seattle. Here is the lowdown as told by police officials:

A group of people got together to go to a rave. After the rave, just under a dozen or so of the rave-goers gathered for an after party at the house where the shooting took place.

One of the people left and came back armed with a shotgun (possibly with a sawed off barrel of illegal length), a semi-automatic handgun of unknown caliber, a reported 300 rounds of ammunition, a machete and a baseball bat. He then re-entered the house with the weapons and started firing at those inside killing all but two of them.

A police officer heard the shots and arrived within a minute of the first shots. As he exited his patrol car, he saw the shooter exiting the house with the shotgun in hand. As he drew his weapon and told the shooter to put the shotgun down, the shooter put the shotgun into his mouth and pulled the trigger.

There are some other details that are necessary for the whole view of this story: There was at least one victim who was under the age of 15 in the house. That victim had gone to the rave with the group. the rave’s theme was “Zombies” and reportedly, everyone attending were dressed as zombies.

The first reaction to this story by local media was not one that screamed for gun control, it was for “Party Control”. For as long as most folks can remember, Seattle has had a “Teen Dance Ordinance” that regulated the clubbing availability and ability of anyone under drinking age. It has been tightened and then relaxed and the tightened again so much over the years that I couldn’t tell you the current restrictions without looking it up, but I would think that it is probably a lot more liberal than when I was underage (just a mere dozen years ago), and back then, even though everyone complained about it, it wasn’t as bad as they made it out to be.

The reaction by the left to the suggestion of tightening up controls of where teens can go was to cry about the civil liberties of persons under the age of 18 because, as we all know, kids are all such responsible individuals at the age of 16 and only choose to hang around people who will be beneficial to their well-being and that they should be allowed to do whatever they want.

So the media quited down about that.

Then, Seattle Police Chief, Gil Kerlikowske, held a press conference where he said the following:

“He was carrying a 12-gauge pistol-grip shotgun. And of course as everyone knows, a pistol-grip shotgun is designed not for hunting purposes, but for hunting people. He also had a semi-automatic handgun, and he fired multiple rounds with both weapons.”

You may remember Kerlikowske as the police chief who, early last year, left his service pistol in his unmarked car, which was subsequently broken into and the pistol stolen.

The Glock 26 has yet to be recovered.

Last Friday, the rabid local anti-gun group, Washington Ceasefire, awarded Kerlikowske for something, though no one is quite sure what for exactly. Then this happens Sunday morning. Then Kerlikowske gives the most anti-gun press conference I have heard live in a good while.

And now the cries for massive gun control have started. Local leftists, Goldy and Carl, or as I like to call him, Loser Carl, both say that more regulation would have stopped the murders, though because the nature of how the shooter ended up with the firearms hasn’t been released, neither of them can offer one bit of proof as to how, just that more regulation is necessary.

One aspect that hasn’t been explored by anyone yet, and for the life of me, I don’t know why, is the drug angle.

Raves are notorious for drug use, yet no toxicology reports have been released for either the shooter or the victims, but I will place $20 down right now that the shooters comes back with one, if not more of the following drugs: Speed, Cocaine, LSD, MDMA (aka Ecstacy).

Any one or any combination of those illegal substances could cause someone whose mental state is already unstable to go over the edge and commit murder without provocation. Imagine that you add those drugs to a person surrounded by “zombies”. When the guy came back to the house with the firearms, he came loaded for bear with supposedly 300 rounds of ammunition and multiple weapons.

But that is of no matter to the media or the left (redundnacy alert), in their minds, it must have been the inanimate tools speaking to his subconscious from miles away.

Washington gun owners, Seattle and King County ones especially, are going to have a rough time of it for a while, I think.

Posted in Armageddon, Too Stupid to Live | 5 Comments

Charlie Don’t Surf

Posted on March 28, 2006 by Phil Kadath

So the Analog Wife comes back from the store yesterday and wanders on into “The Men’s Room” with something in her hand and a curious look on her face.

I’m nearing the end of reassembling a 1911, which was the last gun of the evening to be cleaned (I was already done with the Ruger MKII-10 and the CZ-83). The Men’s Room smells sweetly of Hoppee’s #9 and the cleaning bench is covered in used patches and bore brushes.

I heard her behind me and after I inserted the Sear Pin, I turned to say hello and see if there was something I could help her with (because I am a good husband).

She says that she is looking for an open electrical socket. I ask why and she reveals the object in her hand: a ‘Glade Plug-In’ air freshener.

As I recoil in shock, like a vampire to a cross, I very politely ask her to leave the room and follow her out to the family room. She asks why I don’t want a “Spring Meadow” scented ‘Glade Plug-In’ and I tell her quite plainly that I have finally gotten the room to its odorous standard and that adding the ‘Glade Plug-In’ would do nothing but detract from the wonderfulness.

She said that it stunk like cleaning solvent in the room and that she didn’t think it was right for it to smell like that. I told that when we buy our house, there will be a room that will have a Hoppee’s #9 soaked rag hanging from the celing so that the smell never goes away, that the used patches she currently smelled were just a small sample of what a “Men’s Room” should smell like and that she’s lucky I don’t enjoy the scent of used carburators as much as I used to.

She decided that I was silly and turned away. Then she said that she’ll just put one in there when I go to work one of these days. So I replied “Charlie don’t surf. And my gun room doesn’t need a ‘Glade Plug-In’.”

Posted in Have Gun, Will Travel | 5 Comments

The Question (Participation Requested)

Posted on March 27, 2006 by Phil Kadath

It all started with this post by local hate-monger, Dave Neiwert. I guess that I hadn’t been called a bigot or a fascist in a while and needed some abuse, so I stopped by his place, where there is no shortage of it for those who don’t subscribe to his very narrow point of view or play sycophant to his discussion points.

In the above linked post, Neiwert plays apologist for the racist group, MEChA, in saying that the charges of racism levelled against MEChA by Glenn Reynolds were ‘almost entirely groundless’.

His reasoning for his clearing of the slate for the group seems basically to stem from the fact that they aren’t Anglos. Go ahead and read the post and his links and see if you can glean any further reasoning from it than I. Though, if you start, make sure that you finish the whole as you will need his customized three-plus paragraph definition of racism contained within one of the links to see his reasoning. I’d tell you which link it was, but I’m not going to read through the mental gymnastics Neiwert requires in order for his point to be proven (gymnastics which, btw, change depending on which group he is speaking of) any more than I have to. 

But that isn’t the question I have. It is contained below the fold and a bit of a ways down. If I could have you all think it over and give me your reactions, I’d be most appreciative.

Continue reading →

Posted in Academia and Other Nonsense, Color me confused | 7 Comments