Friday, October 30, 2020

No Need To Vote

 We are reliably informed, by no less an authority than Nancy Pelosi that we don't need to vote in the election as the outcome has already been determined.

Thursday, October 29, 2020

New Biden Slogan?

 Biden is now campaigning on the premise that he can unite the country. His speech seems to follow his theme of "borrowing" from others in that he is now calling for  "One Nation, One People, One President."

Hey! It worked before.

Wednesday, October 28, 2020

Reading the Auguries

 Noting that the Dow has lost 2000 points in the last 2 weeks, thousands of "migrants" are beginning to move toward our southern border, and that the Chicoms are moving troops down near Taiwan. I'm wondering if this is happening in anticipation of a Biden win. It's a rather depressing outlook.

Monday, October 26, 2020

Daily Grind

 So it's 18 degrees out with 2" of snow on the ground and my trusty snow blower has decided it doesn't want to start. I'm supposed to go get a Covid test today so the doctors can laser my colon Friday so I need to get out. OK no big deal. Just would have been nicer with the blower working.

I got a High Tower Armory bullpup stock for the Hi Point back in January and installed it. From reading the reviews, I seem to be the only person in the country having troubles with it so there's that. Andy Wentzel at HTA has been very helpful to me on this.  I made some minor tweaks to it this month which seem to have fixed the problems, and took it to a club IDPA match. 

Everything worked fine. The only problems were from me needing to adjust to the new balance and functions. Safety and mag release are in new places, the mag release needs to be padded to protect my amputated finger or I need to learn to use a different finger. Either way the process is smoother. Having learned to point shoot the stock Hi Point I now find that the same muscle memory puts the point of impact significantly higher with the bullpup. Need to work on that.

Gun shoots fine, left hand or right, but the red dot is a bit lower on the bullpup so getting on target takes a bit longer. 

Daughter got married Saturday and now I'm a step-grandpa in a vastly expanded family.

The Next Plague?

 O.K. who had this?

Escaped self-cloning mutant crayfish created in experimental breeding programmes have invaded a Belgian cemetery.

The good news is that they're tasty. I can't seem to get a decent link to the story but I found it on Yahoo news.

Link to story here.

Sunday, October 25, 2020

QOTD - Gaffe?

 A Gaffe is described as when a politician accidentally speaks the truth. Joe Biden, and for that matter, John Hickenlooper, are both campaigning as though they have enough ballots ready to be dumped into the boxes to overcome any shortfall that might reault from lack of enthusiasm ao the part of their followers.

Secondly, we’re in a situation where we have put together — and you’d [sic] guys, did it for our, the president Obama’s administration, before this — we have put together, I think, the most extensive and and inclusive voter fraud organization in the history of American politics.    Joe Biden

In this case I believe him. Possibly for the first time ever, but sooner or later you knew he would speak the truth about something. 

Monday, October 19, 2020

Covid Death Rate

Scott Adams asked for this information on his periscope and I thought it was a valid question, so here is the ongoing death rate for the population at large. This is done from 7 day moving average data by dividing the revised number of  deaths by the revised number of cases. That is, the data is presented as a continuously cumulative number, so I took each new update and subtracted the previous total to get the unit change. 


It's hard to read accurately, but you can see that the disease initially was quite deadly as the first victims were probably the weakest, and of course, no one had any idea what to do about it. Early on HCQ became known as a pretty good treatment to at least slow the progress and later other drugs made their appearance. The low spots are .006 (.6%) on 6/28, and .066 (.66%) on 10/12. The initial onslaught killed a lot of people while we tried to manufacture millions of ventilators which turned out to be counter productive, and the second wave, much ballyhooed by the press as a major administration failure, looks to have been dealt with fairly well with the advent of Remdesivir, extracted antibodies, and a couple of other treatments. 

You can copy the data at the link, and paste it into your own spreadsheet and massage it to suit yourself. Is the total number of cases going up? Yes, of course, it gets higher with each new case, but so what? If the fatality rate is dropping faster than the infection rate, we'll soon reach the point where very few people are left who haven't caught it and very few of those will die of it. 

About those deaths. Whose fault are they? The media will tell you Orange Man Bad, but unless they can prove that Trump was operating a bio warfare lab in Wuhan, China, I'm not inclined to assign any blame to the administration. Address your complaints to Emperor Xi.

Saturday, October 17, 2020

Fun With Headlines - Thankgiving

 Dr Fauchi says:

Dr. Fauci Tells Americans to 'Bite the Bullet and Sacrifice' Thanksgiving

 Given the price of bullets, I think I'll stick with biting the Turkey

Tuesday, October 13, 2020

Fun With Headlines - Biden Endorses Trump

 First there's this quote from Sleepy Joe himself:

Joe Biden Tells 56% of Americans Who Say They Are Better Off Under Trump: “Maybe You Shouldn’t Vote for Me”

 When a candidate acknowledges that a significant majority feel his opponent is doing a better job than his group did when they were in power, you have to wonder why he's even still running. The honorable thing to do would be to admit you're wrong and just drop out.

Why The Left Considers Everyone Else A Nazi

 I'm thinking this stems from political nearsightedness. First consider this view of the U.S. from the POV of a Manhattenite:


Note the uniformity of everything West of the Hudson river. There is no difference between Jersey and California. O.K. there actually isn't that much today, politically, but let's not get wrapped up in that. Socially, they see no real difference.

Now consider the political landscape. On the left end, there's the Communists, exemplified by Joe Stalin. Moving to the right we next find the Socialists exemplified by Hitler and Mussolini, followed by centrists, then conservatives. Stalin complained about "right wing Nazis/Fascists", and his followers, not being able to see beyond Hitler, concluded that there really wasn't anything of consequence to the right of Der Furher. Hence all Capitalists have become Fascists somehow, and are thus to be eliminated, the sooner the better.

Rather near-sighted of them, don't you think?

Thursday, October 8, 2020

The Ongoing Coup

 Speaker Pelosi has introduced a bill to set up a commission to look into the Presidents capacity to carry out his duties. This would be a “kinder, gentler coup d’etat”. Doesn’t sound like the move of someone confidant in an upcoming election victory.

Since this presumably has to also pass the Senate, it thus qualifies as election-year showboating. 

Of course Trump could conceivably declare the effort to be treasonous in light of his obvious health and sanity, and demand that everyone voting for this be arrested for treason and removed from office until the outcome of their trials.

We live in interesting times.

Friday, October 2, 2020

NICS Checks - Creeping Toward Normal?

 As of September, the curve is at least headed back toward levels where we would expect it to be but gee, nothing like a violent "idea" out there burning large areas of town down with the tacit approval of city governments to give people the idea that perhaps they are their own first responder and that there is popular support for the idea.


Still looks like a record year for gun sales and probably CCW permits where they're allowed. Those Democrats sure know how to sell guns. Hopefully this dropoff in sales will get some components and ammo back on the shelves.

Reloading Press

 A friend of mine had 2 of these things in his shop when he moved but had never seen them used, nor any idea what they were for. He figured they had to be good for something and guessed that I might think of something so he gave me one. 


It's all pneumatic and came with no tooling at all. It indexes through 8 stations and can be made to stop accurately so I thought I might try automating my reloading press. So far I've made 8 shell holders, the ring which will hold the tooling, and a frame to hold it all together. Shells are loaded at the 5 o'clock position, decapped at 6 o'clock where the tall tower is mounted, primed at 7, inspected for primer at 9, etc. 



This is proving to be a non-trivial project so don't hold your breath waiting for video of shells falling like rain at the 3 O'clock position. The primer inspection will be just a poke with a wire which will trigger a light if it goes too far up so that should be easy. All else is done from the top and might be done by mounting the tools on ball screws. I'm thinking it will be run from an Arduino controller so I can include emergency stops if one of the inspections fails or whatever

As I've warned you before, prepare for retirement by starting an unending project so you'll have a reason to get out of bed in the morning, and your immortality is virtually assured. If you don't, you'll be dead in 6 months.