History Threatens to Repeat Itself

Why didn't we get HillaryCare in 1994? According to Robert Reich, it was because Fed Chairman Greenspan let the administration know that he wouldn't go along with it. Fast forward 16 years and Bush appointee Ben Bernanke is saying the same thing to the Obama administration.

J&G Sales Offers Argentines

My standard sidearm is a 9mm hipower made by FN. When I bought it FN was blowing them out through CDNN for $400. Since then the price for a hipower has skyrocketed to around $800. In retrospect I should have bought two. Since then several of the manufacturers of hipower clones, like Hungarian firm FEG, have also gone out of business. You can't get a cheap clone anymore either. The good news is that J&G is now offering Argentine M90 hipowers for around $330.

These aren't as slick as FN made guns and they don't have the modern extended manual safeties or firing pin safety. I think that makes them around a MKII in FN nomenclature. But they are made under license to FN and parts should still interchange (unlike say the Inglis slide and frame kits from Numrich). That's good news if you want to drop in Cylinder and Slide parts kits.

I may still pick one up as a potential build gun.

Tracers Work Both Ways

As two recent photo sets from Oleg Volk demonstrate, the same goes for green laser sights.

Frank Lautenberg

Pundits are speculating that he may be the next Democrat to announce their retirement because of his recent health issues. Lautenberg is 86 and recently injured himself in a fall after which physicians discovered a bleeding ulcer. I still doubt he'll retire, not because it would be a bad idea, but because he's already retired in 2000. When Lautenberg was tapped to take over for the disgraced Bob Torricelli in 2002, he publicly expressed deep regret for ever retiring and did so again in 2008.

The MiddleMan Episode 13

The ABC Family show The Middleman was cancelled after 12 episodes. The cast did a table read of the unfilmed 13th episode at San Diego ComicCon 2009. I finally got around to tracking down the YouTube footage of it. Quite excellent. There is also a comic book version of the episode as well, but I'm not sure if it is currently in print as Amazon isn't carrying it.

Zombie Dice

Howard Tayler is playing a very twisted dice game. I may have to go looking for this the next time I'm near by Days of Knights or Between Books.

Streetside Engineering

I have an idea I'd like to try out. I current have large piles of snow in front of my house from the recent winter unpleasantness. Because of the surface area to mass ratio, these six foot tall piles are going to take forever to melt. I'd like to speed that up using smarts.

My first thought was to sprinkle them liberally with rock salt. The problem is they're big enough that putting enough salt in place might be troublesome. My second thought is that the biggest piles are on my lawn and any salt will end up on or under my yard. I'd rather not salt my own fields as Rome did to Carthage.

My second thought is to stab some aluminum strips into the heart of the larger piles. Aluminum is an excellent heat conductor and is available in a number of forms at the local hardware store. If I can find some cheap strips (preferably black), I can essentially conduct heat into the heart of the pile. I could put them in in the morning and then pull them when I got home so they wouldn't cool the piles during the night. Not sure if they'd work, but it might be neat to try.

Thoughts from my fellow nerds?

Unexpectedly!

So at what point do we fire the people in charge of predicting job loses and gains?

The Massachusetts Senate Race

This just in... Teddy Kennedy has reportedly voted for Coakley to replace him in the Senate. Twice.

I don't know whether Brown will win this one. Polling says it's close. Several people have pointed out that the margin of victory will unlikely surpass the margin for potential fraud. I think it is great that he's making a race of it though. I also have a wonderful feeling of schadenfreude that this whole situation would be a non-issue if the Massachusetts legislature hadn't been so scared of a Republican Governor appointing a Republican Senator in 2004.

The really interesting thing to me is the Democratic reaction. They seem to be doubling down on the stupid. Hey these policies are so bad we're even having trouble in Massachusetts! Lets do them even harder! I kind of expect this from their party leadership, most of whom are sitting in secure seats. But the rank and file? Not so much, especially the Blue Dogs in the House who are quite likely going to be thrown out on their ear in 10 months.

Orthogonal

The Volokh Conspiracy points out that the Supreme Court likes it's big words. (http://volokh.com/2010/01/11/orthogonal-ooh/) What perpendicular is to 2 dimensional space, orthogonal is to 3 or higher dimensional space.

Sarah Palin

Some new poll of Republican insiders has Sarah Palin running dead last in a proposed 2012 primary field. Which is fine because after shorting her term as Governor of Alaska, I don't think she should run. But Mitt Romney leads the field. You know, the guy who promised Michigan voters whatever he wanted to hear in the 2008 primaries. The guy who passed a horrible failure of a healthcare reform package in his state. He's no a conservative, he's another GOP stands-for-nothing.

If the GOP was smart they wouldn't be asking about whether Palin was going to run in 2012. They would be firing Michael Steele and making her the head of the party in 2010.

Elder Gods Take to the Slopes

This Cthulhu ski mask (http://www.cthulhulives.org/store/store.lasso?1=product&2=33196) is an idea who's time has come. Be the first huge nerd to wear it on your local slopes.

I Don't Get Vertical Foregrips

My understanding of rifle technique is pretty weak, but it largely breaks down to "whenever possible use your muscles as little as possible." This is because your skeleton doesn't expand or contract, but your muscles are always moving whether you like it or not. Therefore you want to support and aim the gun using rigid skeletal members, not by shoving it about using your muscles which are far more variable. This yields better accuracy.

Enter the vertical foregrip which appears to be designed almost solely to allow you to muscle the gun around. I've tried it and except for being a convenient place to hide a bipod, I find that I'll never get proper skeletal support using one. My accuracy drops into the toilet accordingly.

Now I can understand why some people like it. If I had a select fire weapon, the gun is going to be bouncing around anyway. I'm going to have to apply muscle to it to hold it on target so I might as well affix a convenient lever arm to help me out. But like almost all civilians, I don't have a select-fire weapon. That guy isn't me. Accordingly the vertical foregrip looks to me like something civilian shooters adopted from the military without thinking it through.

Now I'm more than willing to admit my shortcomings in this area. Can someone that shoots a rifle/carbine much more than I do help me out?

Climategate!

From the Timesonline via Instapundit:

SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based. It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years.

The issue is not a long-term temperature increase over the last 150 years. 150 years ago was the end of the Little Ice Age, so no one really disputes that temperatures have increased since then. The real issue that has been deliberately obfuscated is (1) how warm the Medieval Warm Period was and (2) whether the divergence of temperature behavior from historical trends over the last 50 years is the result of how the historical data has been subjected to a moving average while recent data has not.

Groan

Six months after putting General McChrystal in charge, the news this morning was that President Obama has finally made a decision about Afghanistan. No idea what that decision was as the White House will not divulge its actual content for another week. Is the man such a lightweight that merely having meetings and deciding something is national news?

What's next? This just in, after intense discussions with the highly trained White House chef corps, the President has opted for Cheddar instead of Swiss on his turkey club. The effects of this change on the Presidential Gastronomy should be known early next week.

Expensive Deer Hunting

And a deductable later...

This Week's Gunblogger Groupthink Is...

The 5.7x28mm round used by the Fort Hood shooter is no more powerful than a .22 rimfire magnum. It's crap. Why? The 40 grain 5.7 is blazing down range at 1750 fps from a pistol. The 40 grain rimfire mag is moving at more like 1200-1300 fps from the same barrel length. The 5.7 has 80% more muzzle energy than the .22 mag. That's a lot people. Now maybe they'll both through and through with similar terminal performance, but you can't just dismiss that level of difference.

Is the 5.7x28 round a copkiller? No. There are no instances of it being used to actually kill cops. For that matter the civilian legal ammo isn't even particularly dangerous to people in common police body armor. At least no more dangerous than 7.62 Tokarev.

New Look

Ever since Blogrolling went down and then came back with crappy popups, I've been looking to rework my layout. I've been running this one for long enough on the test blog (and using the test blog for my regular blogsurfing) that it's time to put it on here. I don't love it, but I've decided it is a 90% solution. Unfortunately that means the demise of haloscan comments for the time being.

Loving Midlength

I think a discussion of AR-15 gas system lengths deserves it's own post and this is it. The big issue here is barrel length and port pressure needed to cycle the gun. As the gas port move closer to the gun's chamber (and away from the muzzle), the port pressure goes up and the gun cycles harder. This is good in that it is more likely to cycle, but bad in that too hard will break things.

Rifle length systems are about 12 inches long. As they are the longest, they are also typically the gentlest of the gas systems. But if the barrel is too short, then they won't cycle properly because the gas port pressure will drop too low after the bullet leaves the barrel. Because of this they are typically used on guns with barrels 20 inches or longer like the M16.

Carbine length systems are about 7 inches long. There are shorter lengths (like the pistols), but for most people this is as short they want to go. These cycle the action quite hard. Hard enough that Colt had to make changes from the M4 to the M16 to beef up some parts, alter the feed ramps, and use a heavier buffer to slow the bolt down. These are typically used on guns in the 14.5 to 16 inch range like the M4 carbine. However civilians can't have barrel lengths below 16 inches without a special tax stamp, so most people with carbine length gas systems have 16" barrels or 14.7" inch barrels with longer pinned flash hiders to meet the 16" legal requirement.

Midlength systems are in the middle and are about 9 inches long. These shoot softer than carbine, but harder than rifle. It's a happy medium and works very well for 16 inch guns. Since I have a 16 inch gun, this is what I bought. The disadvantage is that this is a purely civilian length gas system and has less support than the rifle and carbine lengths in the aftermarket. Until recently only one company made a free float tube for it. About the only accessory my midlength can use that a carbine can't is a standard military bayonet.

And for the record, I think the 14 inch barrels that are pinned to 16 inches are silly. The 5.56 round need all the barrel it can get to tumble and fragment for proper lethality. I also think the stepped barrels on 16" guns are silly. Military carbines have that feature so you can mount M203 grenade launchers on them. Civilians can't own those either.

Shiver Me Timbers

I heard an interesting rumor on the internet. (And with a source like the internet, you know it must be true.) Rumor has it that the US Coast Guard has started reissuing boarding cutlasses for some drug interdiction searches. Evidently a sailor making a standard drug search was attacked and forced to defend himself with a fire axe. You have to wonder what his sidearm was though.