Always Remember

So where were you 4 years ago?

I was at a Composite Materials conference at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia. I had driven there the day before and after breakfast I returned to my hotel room to see the news. I sat in shock. I went down to the conference center lobby. Crowds of people were staring at cable news feeds.

I had to give a presentation on Vacuum Assisted Resin Transfer Molding later that day. I gave it. It was bad, partly because no one was really interested and partly because I spent all my preparation time staring at cable news feeds.

Still, it is nice to know that I'll never have a public speaking experience worse than that one.

UPDATE: Joe Cathey is a bit more specific about what he was doing than I am.

J.E.F.F.

Via H.U.B.E.

Shooting Basics: Zeroing Your Rifle

I was talking with a coworker about shooting this past weekend and zeroing my rifle. Because he didn't understand very well I though I would write a little piece about it.

First go to a good shooting center. Some place with a nice stable shooting bench and seats. These are important because you can sit down, put your arm on the bench, and shoot from a well-supported position that is much more innately accurate than shooting offhand. Ommelanden in Newcastle has these facilites, but my last range did not. It removes lot of bad technique (mine) from the equation and leaves only the gun's inherent accuracy behind.

The problem now is an academic one: What range should I zero the gun for? Well this depends on the gun and the job doesn't it? If I were smart I would zero my M1 at 25 meters.

How do I know that 25 meters is a good range? I did my research. You can start with some of the stock tables on ammunition manufacturers websites like Winchester or Remington. Just look up your ammo and they will give you trajectory for bullet rise and fall. Remington also offers some free software that is very useful.

Now some of you may be noticing that I said rise and fall for the bullet. Bullets only fall right? Gravity and such. Well that would be true if the barrel was fired horizontal to the ground, but most guns are sighted so that the barrel actually points upwards ever so slightly. Why? Well here is a picture:


Bullets travel in a parabolic arc (if you neglect wind resistance). So if the barrel is horizontal, where you point the gun is the yellow line and where the bullet strikes is the blue line. They only coincide at one point, the muzzle. After that it just gets worse and worse. You have a gun that is only useful at point blank range. No thank you, I want to be able to reach out and touch someone.

Now if you zero the gun so that the gun and sights are at a slight angle things become more useful. Now the bullet travels the pink path. The gun shoots exactly where you aim at two ranges and for most of its useful flight path it is less than an inch off the mark. An inch doesn't really matter much for most practical purposes.

So I zeroed my gun at 25m and it also happens to be zeroed at 100 yards too. If I wanted to zero it farther out, say 200 yards, I could. Then my bullets would be farther off the point of aim for some parts of the trajectory. That might be the price you have to bear if you are planning to shoot longer distances. I'm not planning to shoot long distances, I have crappy eyesight and the .30 carbine doesn't have the oomph for it anyway.

Losing a Friend

Reverend Ed has lost a friend.

A little over an hour ago, I found out that I had lost a friend. It wasn't a big argument that finished our friendship. It was a heart attack. Frankly, I'm still in shock. I'm typing this as some kind of catharsis -- a way to process all this -- because this really rips at me.

Rev, My prayers go out to you and Kenny's family.

Katrina Logistics

I mentioned them a few days ago, but Jason at Countercolumn has specifics.

How are you going to get troops into the flooded areas? ... Well, last I checked, light infantry doesn't have any boats or rafts in the inventory. In fact, nobody does, except for a few selected engineer units, such as MRBCs. I know of one such company that served in Iraq with us. Great group of soldiers. Except they're in Wisconsin. These boats would have to be trucked in, and would take days to get there at best. (Their prime movers couldn't go much over 50 mph, and even then that's pushing it with a heavy load.)

Go. Be enlightened. Via King of Fools.

Motorcycle Safety

Are they not safe enough for you? What if we add an airbag? Of course we are talking about the Honda Goldwing, a vehicle so stuffed with features it practically rides itself.

Helping Out

Joan lives in Alabama, a lot closer to the disaster area than I do. Reading about what she is doing to help, with everything she is already going through, is humbling to me. I need to do more.

Yesterday I received unexpected money in the mail. It seems paying off my car loan early means the insurance companies owed me some money. I was initially going to use this to buy a new gun. Perhaps I should put it to better getting my tithe at church up to date and paying for reconstruction down South.

Reconstruction. I bet this is the first time someone from Alabama or Mississippi likes the sound of that word.

Be Prepared

Not all of us are good little Boy Scouts, but all of us should take precautions to make sure that we are safe if bad things happen. Joe Cathey has some suggestions that might be a little overboard, but are still a good place to start.

Basic principles go like this:

1. Be self-reliant. The government will likely come to help, but it may take a while and technically they don't have to. The Supreme Court even made this official a while back. So you need to plan to have what you need.
2. Plan. A lot. Sun Tsu got this one right, advanced planning gives you an advantage. When bad things happen it is a lot better to have thought about things for hours beforehand than to try to throw something together in minutes on the spot.
3. Figure out what you need. Double it for safety. Double it again for pure paranoia. Good things to have are food, water (and means to purify it), blankets/sleeping bags/camping gear, a first aid kit, a crank operated short-wave radio, matches/lighters, a good knife, a defensive weapon with ammo, a supply of any prescription drugs you are taking, and something to carry all this crap in if you have to move. If you have a multi-member household, you should have enough of this stuff for everyone. Also when you spread the load across your household, make sure someone doesn't end up with all of something (within reason). Don't give one person both first aid kits or all the lighters.
4. Have more than you "need". You probably only "need" enough of the above supplies for about a week and you don't "need" more than you can carry. But stuff will break. Food will spoil. The only road into town will get knocked out by the storm. Have extra.
5. If other people know you are prepared, they will come to take advantage of you. There are several options to handle this. The first is don't tell people of your preparations, then they won't come. The second is to get good at saying "No" and have the ability to back it up (this is what that gun is for). The third is to plan for it and have excess so that you can afford to help others without hurting yourself and your family.

Some people may think that enforcing a "No" with lethal force is a bit extreme. People are not trees, we can't snack on sunlight. We need food, water, clothing, and shelter. In an emergency situation, if anyone tries to take these from you, they are not just stealing property. They are trying to kill you. Act accordingly.

Political Preachers on TV

Kevin at Short Attention Span is taking note of a Cal Thomas column. Here is an especially choice section:

Few would pay attention to political preachers if these ministers did not have access to television and radio. And they would not have TV programs if people did not send them money which, in addition to buying TV time, is used to set most of them up in lifestyles that resemble the “rich young ruler.” Jesus told the ruler to “sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven” (Luke 18:22), but many TV preachers seem to expect you to sell what you have and give to them.

Ouch, but right on.

Labor Day Weekend

The Summary

This weekend was a busy one. I went gun shopping and shooting with Amybear (her second time) and my brother. Then we went to my parents for dinner with cousins that were visiting. Sunday morning, Amybear's parent picked us for a family wedding on Long Island. The trip back Monday was fine once we had transitted out of the New York metropolitan area. Traffic was unusually light for a holiday weekend, but this may have been a function of gas prices.

The Details

Shooting with my brother and Amy was nice. My brother hasn't gone shooting since he broke his leg this Spring. He brought his rifles: a .308 Ishapore Enfield and a .32 special Winchester 1894 that was my grandfathers. He shot both, but he concentrated on getting his Enfield dialed in.

Amybear stuck to my Buckmark. She did very well although she didn't realize it at the time. The last time we went out, she shot at five yards. This time we moved back to eight. I offered her my M1 carbine, but it was too intimidating for her.

I put a few rounds through my buckmark as well, then we moved the target back to 25 yards for fun with Sunshine, my M1. I had a hard time getting it to group, then I realized it was because my scope rings were loose. Oops. A trip to the car for a torx driver later and it is grouping quite reliably. Then I dialed the scope in and had some fun.

We went home, picked up my suit for the wedding, washed the blowback out of our hair, changed clothes, and drove to my parents near Philly. We had a nice cook out and I played a bit with my cousins cute kids. Then we played games because that is what my family does when the family gets together.

Sunday was fun. Amy's parents got to see my apartment for the first time. If Amy get the job in Newark, she'll be moving into a place in my complex until we get married. Then we'll both shift to a two-bedroom.

The drive up was dull, Amy slept and I read Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator. When I finished it, I read Roald Dahl's advice on writing in the epilogue. It's good advice.

The wedding was good. It was my first Jewish wedding (Amy has accompanied me to several Christian ceremonies). The bride was beautiful and the ceremony was quick. The synagogue itself seemed to be set up to hold events of this type, they had a bar and a dining room with dance floor on the premises. I suppose with all the bar/bat mitzvahs and weddings it pays to be set up for a party. It was still a culture shock compared to my church and compared to the more laid back nature of my immediate family.

I got to meet most of Amy's father's side of the family, including her great aunt's and uncles. They're good folks and they seemed to approve of Amy adding a Goyim to the family. Amy's uncle Robert doesn't approve, but in the words of Great Uncle Mendi "eh, screw Robert."

Monday we headed home and the dreaded traffic we would have to face never really materialized. We almost killed some people on Long Island, but the LIE is like that. So home again home again.

Job Training

We had mandatory ethics training this morning. Five minutes before the appointed time everyone showed up at the theatre on post. The line for signing in stretched out the door and down the block. At this point the Army could have saved itself a lot of money and time by just watching who cut in line and who walked to the end. The people who wait are ethical, the people who cut are not. Respond accordingly and forget the damn training.

Google Maps Katrina

If you want to see some of the devastation wrought by Katrina for yourself, Google Maps has satellite imagery available. Simple load google maps, type in New Orleans in the search box, and press the red "Katrina" button. You can switch back and forth between Katrina and Satellite modes for before and after shots.

Marvel Movie Superheros

Amybear noticed that Captain America is one of the new movies coming out of the Marvel universe. As many as ten new movies are being made. I'd say lets hope there are more movies like Spiderman and less like the Punisher, but one of the films is Punisher II.

I have some Cap books at home, along with a few years of Iron Man from my youth. Both are capable of being great characters, but neither one has been written particularly well in the past few years. I bought a year of the Marvel Knights Captain America trade paperbacks. They were very well drawn but mediocrely written. Chuck Austen even co-wrote some of them. Shudder.

I think there is a good story to be told with Cap, especially if they do it right and make the first movie a WWII film that ends with him getting frozen. They could start the Avengers movie with him being thawed out by Iron Man and the rest.

What Happened?

Messy Christian is looking at what has happened in New Orleans and is asking the question: "Is it bad governance or human nature?"

My answer? Yes.

New Orleans is not a city of a high moral reputation. Historically, Storyville may have been America's first Red Light district. In more recent times, being the home of Mardi Gras and Bourbon Street has left New Orleans with a large substance-abusing population. Most of these people are hooked on alcohol as their substance of choice, but a few others are into harder drugs. Normally this isn't too much of a problem, but when supply lines are cut and the addicts go cold turkey, things go from bad to worse very quickly. Junkies start shooting up hospitals because it is the only place they can find a fix, etc.

So much of what is going on in New Orleans is human nature at its worst. Screw you, I'm in it for me and mine. The strong feeding on the weak. This is unbridled and unchecked human nature and it should scare us because it is within all of us. Geek with a .45 noted that being a decent human being isn't intellectually demanding. It does require a certain amount of restraint and moral fortitude. Some people just don't have that and honestly our society doesn't place a priority on instilling it anymore.

As for the governance, that was a shambles too. The first boots on the ground should have been police and emergency workers from New Orleans itself, they should have taken a strong stand against looting and violence. As Feeble Knees points out, they didn't. Many deserted their posts and others joined into the violence. The best laid plans amount to nothing when you don't have anyone willing to carry them out.

On the upper levels, calling something poor governance is tougher. The group most responsible for reacting to this crisis is the state of Louisiana and they have done a poor poor job. As QandO noted, once this scale of damage is done, getting anything in is a nightmare.

Civil authorities really can't. Transportation systems are shut down. The roads are out, the rivers and waterways are dangerous, the airports are under water. The distribution system needed to get fuel to all this stuff was knocked out by the storm. Even if you could get the boats and whatever else to New Orleans, if you don't have gas to run it, so what? So we need the military, who have the capabilities to overcome all this and still get the job done.

But even they need time, the military can respond to anything anywhere on the planet in four days. The flipside is that they really can't respond to something on the other side of the country in less than three. Most of their deployment time is getting things organized on the ground, so the transport mileage really doesn't matter. And to deploy like that they still need things like airfields, which are in short supply.

So yes it is human nature, it is bad governance, but above all it is just a bad situation. The best laid plans of mice and men are humbled by the laws of physics.

DARPA's Walrus

While the military budget details in this Gizmag article are completely wrong, the actual meat of the article is still very interesting.

One of the oldest axioms in warfare is that the military travels on its stomach. Logistics wins wars. In order to deal with supplying far off lands with large loads of men and materiel, the Army is looking into heavy lifting airships. We are talking about airborne freighters hauling as much as a lift wing of C-130 Hercules. And they can land anywhere there is sufficient room for them to touch down.

My thoughts are mixed. For military purposes, these aircraft will be big and slow and fragile. This is a horrible mix if someone might shoot at you. However, if we need to move lots of equipment somewhere that doesn't have applicable transportation infrastructure, it is a great idea. That place could be Afghanistan or a logging camp in the Pacific Northwest or water-logged New Orleans.

SHTF Guns

If you want a gun in case social order breaks down, Geek with a .45 is suggesting the Keltec 2000. This is one of the pistol caliber carbines I mentioned in passing here. It costs around $300 and models are made that accept various pistol calibers and magazines. It also folds up for easy storage.

UPDATE: In other SHTF preparation news, Instapundit is linking to this University of Wisconsin water storage advice PDF. One of the important points is that old milk jugs are bad places to store water. Two liter soda bottles are much better. This is because milk jugs almost always contain bacteria that can't be removed from simple household cleaning. Soda bottles don't have this problem.

I can say that this is true from personal experience. As some readers know, one of my weirder hobbies is swordsmanship. One of the most common targets used for cutting practice is old soda and milk bottles filled with water. I built up quite a stash of these over the colder months when you don't want to be outside swinging a sword.

When the weather warmed up, I started using them. The soda bottles were all fine. The milk bottles were not. They were completely disgusting. These were empty bottles that had been rinsed clean, screwed shut, and stored together in the corner of my apartment. It may take a while for the milk jugs to get nasty, but they will. Don't store water you intend to use for hygenic purposes in them. If you need water to keep the toilet flushing, so be it.

Doin' What We Can

My small group was last night. Concerns about hurricane damage was on everyone's lips. We all felt so frustrated, like we wished we could do something, but what was there we could do other than write checks?

We've been doing a short bible study series on prayer. Considering the events of the last few weeks, we opted to skip out of the study and just concentrate on the application. So we prayed for each other and then spent a long time in prayer for the people of New Orleans and the gulf coast. We felt it was important not just to pray for the deliverance of those people, but also to thank the Lord for everyone who was able to evacuate.

We know God has a plan in motion here. Perhaps he is seeking to humble us as we look at the awesome power of nature. Perhaps he is seeking to demonstrate the baser nature of humanity we also need deliverance from. I don't know, but I pray that all of this will not be in vain.

Eat Steak, Eat Steak...

Amybear and I hit Boston Market for dinner last night. I had my usual dark meat chicken and Amy went for the 5 oz. sirloin featured in their current series of advertisements. My chicken was good but her steak was badly cooked. It was very greasy and parts of it were just plain rare. She wasn't happy. So use your discretion, but avoiding the sirloin might be a good idea.

First Guns

John posted this:

I need to buy a gun and to learn how to use it.

Anarchy is a heartbeat away from civilization.

Yup. For gun nuts like me this is not a surprise. Go on any firearms forum and you will see discussions about what happens when shit hits the fan (SHTF). To some extent these sorts of things are just paranoid navel contemplation, however the LA Riots or post-Katrina New Orleans show that they can happen.

If you are worried and want a gun in your house here are my suggestions:

• Don't buy a handgun.
• Don't buy a hunting rifle.
• Pump shotguns are good choices.
• Intermediate caliber rifles are also good choices.
• Pistol calibers carbines are great.

But Jeff, don't you own handguns? Sure I do, but I also train with them on a regular basis. Do you plan on doing that?

In many ways, handguns are the crappiest guns ever. They require complex motor skills that must be regularly refreshed through training. If you don't shoot regularly you will be a horrible shot. (This explains why cops can't shoot very well, they only train once a year.) They are also the weakest weapons in the world o' firepower. A handgun is what you use to shoot your way to something better. Their only advantage is portability. Practice ammo tends to be cheap, but you should load more expensive hollowpoints (and test them for reliability) when you intend to stop people instead of paper. But yes, pistols are better than throwing rocks.

Hunting rifles have lots of power right? Yes, but in some ways too much. With these you are generally talking about more power than you need with less capacity than you want. Typical hunting rifles are bolt guns in larger rifle rounds like .30-06, .270, or .308. Bolt actions tend to be slow although accurate and powerful at range. But are you really going to be shooting people at over a hundred yards? Not likely. Lever guns are faster with shorter range and are probably a better choice than bolts. Some hunting calibers, like .30-30, are also ridiculously expensive because the typical hunter only fires a few rounds a year. You want a reasonable supply of ammo, at least a hundred rounds, so cheaper is better.

Pump shotguns are cheap, but not in the "shoddy" sense. Shotguns require some training, mostly because you need to learn to handle the recoil. The training itself can be pretty fun. Go skeet or trap shooting. Trust me, you'll love it. Get a model with a long barrel for hunting and fun, and a short riot barrel for menacing two-legged animals alone or in groups. Make sure the short barrel is not rifled for slugs, that will ruin its pattern with shot. Buckshot and Slugs (the people stoppers) can be expensive but a little goes a long way. My Mossberg 590 fits this bill. The Maverick 88 is the bargain model made by the same company if money is tight.

Intermediate rifles could be expensive like the AR, cheaper like the AK47, or very inexpensive like the SKS. The AR-15 is one of the best guns in this class and widely available, but it is also expensive. Those on a budget can purchase a surplus SKS for between $100 and $200. It takes 7.62x39mm, which is the same round as the AK47 and the ammo is insanely cheap because the Russians export tons of it. The SKS is reliable and somewhat modifiable. They require a little training, but not that much. The only disadvantage for this class of weapons is that some states like California won't let you have them.

In WWII, the Army realized that pistols suck and big rifles are unnecessary for most jobs. Does that sound familiar to my advice? It should. Their answer was the M1 carbine. I own one of these too. Similar pistol caliber carbines have also been made by Ruger, Marlin, Keltec, and others. Marlin, Winchester, and Rossi also make pistol caliber lever actions which will fit the bill at lower cost. None of these guns are evil or black, but this means they also aren't heavily regulated. They have very little recoil, point naturally, and pack a bigger punch than a standard pistol because they have longer barrels. Their ammunition (and even their magazines) may be interchangeable with your pistols.

So there you go. Buy a good shotgun or a good little rifle and learn to shoot it. Keep an emergency supply of ammo at the house. Lock the thing up properly so your kids can't get at it. If you want to spend more money buy another good shotgun or a good little rifle for your wife. Be careful these these things get addictive.

Gasoline Budgets

I was overhearing conversation about how people are reworking their finances as gas prices have increased. Now I've made the point that prices aren't too bad. In historical terms, gas prices are about normal compared to how depressed they were in the 1990s.

Still, prices have gone up sharply as a result of Katrina and will keep going up until the refineries and oil platforms along the gulf coast are brought back online. So we aren't talking about normal oil prices in the short run, we are dealing with an artificial scarcity.

Since I work with a bunch of analysts this got us talking over lunch. At what point does the increase in gas prices really hit home for us? Well this is my story.

My regular commute to work, including driving to lunch, costs me about 3 gallons of gas. Probably less, but lets be worst case. I work a compressed schedule so I work approximately 19.5 days in an average month. This means I burn 58.5 gallons of gas a month just getting to work. In all my driving it's around 75 gallons/month. At $2.50/gallon, this means I'm spending $187.50/month on gas. I am fine with that. That is $40 more than my monthly car insurance bill (as a single white male who pays the Fast and Furious tax). It is significantly less than my monthly car payment was (which I had accelerated to the tune of $400/month). I fortuitously paid my car off last month.

Thank you Lord for leading me towards wise fiscal planning.

Now gas prices are going up. I'm now paying $9/day for my commuter gas instead of $7.50/day. That's $225/month or ~$37.50 more. I can still live with it, especially now that I don't have a car payment. I wouldn't be at all surprised if gas topped $4/gallon before the gulf coast gets back on track, then we're looking at $300/month.

The problem is that while these prices are high, they aren't killing me. They aren't even costing me enough money to open up new modes of transportation yet. $9/day or $12/day isn't enough make a commuter train ticket the low cost option. Not where I am. Every 10 cent increase in gas prices costs me $7.50/month and $90/year. That is a goodly chunk of change, but it isn't enough to insure an additional lower cost vehicle (like a motorcycle). Even if we hit $4 gas, $900/year isn't enough to force me to buy a new car.

What I may do is start a carpool with coworkers from Newark. That will drop my gas usage to work which is my major cause of gas consumption. When I buy my next car, I'll look for even more fuel efficiency than I already get. Other than that, I'm sticking with what I'm already doing. I can afford it.