Wasabi Grilled Cheese Sandwich

AKA "Tojo's Revenge"

I'd give it a try although I don't remember seeing any wasabi cheese at the supermarket.I'm sure if it existed the wife would have brought some home by now.

This and other gustatory delights here.

More Gun Stuff

Government agencies are arming themselves at a great rate. The BATFEIEIO has ordered a bazillion rounds which I'm hoping will wind up on the surplus market after the agency is dissolved under president Romney.

The latest agency to arm themselves is the National Weather Service, which suggests to me that the survivalist meme has gotten well out of hand. How much ammo does a person need to shoot the breeze after all.

Of course they could be just a bunch of gun fanciers who've figured out how to get some trigger time in at the taxpayers expense.

Appleseed

I attended an Appleseed event last weekend, and frankly was a bit overwhelmed by it. This organization supports basic training in riflery mixed with a generous dollop of American history from the early days of the revolution, going into some detail as to what motivated rthe rebellious colonists and at the same time demoralized the British army.

It was a 2-day event that specialized in, but was not limited to .22 rimfire rifles and how to get the most from them. I was not a participant. My sometime student was the official attendee. Both of us learned a lot.

For myself, I listened to the lectures on history and the mechanics of shooting and refilled magazines. Paula did all the shooting. The shooting tips covered everything everyone had ever taught me from the Boy Scouts to the present.What I noticed most was that I did a lot of things so automatically that the thought that anyone would ever do anything else doesn't cross my mind. This does not help when you're trying to teach someone, so I'm glad Paula got the breadth of exposure she did.

Which is not to say it couldn't have been better. Paula had gotten enthusiastic about this a couple months ago, and finally bought her own rifle for the event 2 weeks before.She has shot my rifle and a couple of loaners, but not this one. For the record, she got a Savage model 62F from Wal-Mart. This is a magazine-fed semi-auto. Her first shots through it were the day of the event when we tried it out to check the sights. For me it put 3 holes in the target that could be covered with a dime about 1" high and 1" to the right at 25 yards.This with the very basic iron sights the gun comes with and my mediocre eyesight.. For her, not so much. For the record, I like this gun. It's light, easy to handle, and shoots quite accurately.

Notes:
1. The Savage company is unaware that anyone would ever want to put a magazine into their rifle without turning the gun over and pulling the release out of the way first. The mags fit with the precision of a Swiss watch, and need to be installed with watchmakers tools.
2. The gun doesn't like ammo with large hollow points and squarish nose profiles. The pointy stuff works much better. We figured this out on day 2.
3. Throwing ammo into a plastic snap-cover food container really speeds up the loading and ammo handling process. Probably not such a good idea to mix ammo from 3 different sources into one container though. Makes it hard to notice which ones don't feed right.
4. Paula is right handed and left-eye dominant. On day 2 she switched to left handed shooting and the groups got noticeably smaller. Loading the close-fitting magazines however.... This is going to take some practice.
5. The trigger on the brand-new gun is a bit scratchy. O.K. it's a bit more than a bit scratchy. This may smooth out later, or it may smooth out after I've had a chance to polish some of the mating parts therein.
6. Being under a time constraint on some of the stages, when coupled with trying to remember a long set of brand new instructions, plus otherwise minor malfunctions makes for a frustrating time. The sequence is:
a. Start from standing with 2 magazines, one with 2 rounds, one with 8.
b. drop to sitting, kneeling or prone, depending on the stage.
c. Load the 2-round magazine. Try again. Turn gun over and load magazine. Turn gun back over and assume the proper position.
d. Sight target and gently squeeze trigger.
e. Reach over gun with left hand and jack a round.
f. Sight target and gently squeeze trigger.
g. reach over gun with left hand and release the safety.
h. Sight target and gently squeeze trigger. Hear satisfying bang.
i. Forget that at this point you're supposed to change mags, repeat step h.
j. Repeat step f. Note no bang.
k. Remove magazine and replace with 8-round mag, see step c.
l. See steps d, e, and h.
m. Repeat step h until pulling the trigger gets you a quiet click. Unless you get a blunt-nosed hollow point. Savage mags are as tight inside as they are outside. Clearing a round jammed into the feed ramp is not easy. By the time you get it cleared, your time is up.

At the end of step 6, the ladylike demeanor is pretty much gone.

Still, by the end of day 2, all the BNHP ammo had been quarantined and her qualifying score had nearly doubled. She's going back. The qualifying target has a potential best score of 250. If you get 210 or more you get the coveted rifleman patch. This is harder than you'd think. Paula thinks it will take 2-3 more Appleseeds to get her Rifleman patch, but she will get it. Instilling enthusiasm. I love it.

Early on I made a concerted effort to quit trying to give advice. After all that's what the organizers are there for. This is also harder than you'd think.

I will have to formally attend one of these myself.

Energy Policy

Townhall Finance has a piece suggesting that the president would like to make more of our energy dependent on foreign sources:

During a recent trip to Washington DC, I heard that “by the end of his second term, President Obama wants 40% of our natural resources to be imported.” Like Harry Reid’s “Bain Capital investor,” my source is reliable: a Capitol Hill staffer. While I do not have a secret White House memo to validate the premise, it explains a lot..

 Myself, I'm not buying this. I'm convinced he simply wants to cut our available energy by 40% period. The paragraphs in the article mention land grabs in the form of new wilderness areas, which some research will disclose include known deposits of Uranium, clean coal, rare earth metals, and oil and gas, recoverable by fracking. The loss of these resources is of course "for the children".

Presidential Debates

The schedule has been released and the moderators have been picked and no doubt as you read this, the questions are being formulated over at the Obama campaign headquarters.

The formula is tobe a re-run of last election with shills for the DNC asking the questions and setting them up to make the Republicans look as bad as possible.

Mr. Lehrer: Mr Romney, to address foreign policy, can you name the current president of East Doublecrossia?

Mr. Romney: If that actually becomes necessary, I'm sure my State secretary will have briefed me on the situation there...

Mr. Lehrer: So you don't know and would rely on briefings. O.K., Mr Obama, in that same line, boxers or briefs?

Mr. Obama: Someone like me who has the big brass ones to kill Osama Bin Ladin with his bare hands, wears boxers, of course.

The annoying thing is that the RNC will probably not object to the format or the questioners, further confirming the reputation of the Stupid Party.

The Future Of Transportation - Fuel

In the face of drought, rising food prices, lower fuel economy and easily recovered domestic oul, the EPA will be requiring gas stations to begin vending E15 soon. In addition to all the above reasons not to burn ethanol as a fuel in the first place, there is the potential for damage to older engines, and the added feature of the ethanol suddenly falling out of solution when condensate water gets mixed into the fuel.

That last bit doesn't happen around here where 30% humidity is considered oppressively muggy, but I'm told it regularly reaches higher levels in other parts of the country.

The EPA's clever solution is to set a minimum sale of 4 gallons of E10 from pumps where the hose is common to multiple grades of fuel.

Most people I know fill a 15 gallon tank when it gets down to 1/4 full, so this shouldn't be much of a problem. I already deal with this when I fill my motorcycle, which prefers premium. I wait until the 6-gallon tank is down to 1-2 gallons, then top off. Figuring the fuel line at the pump runs from the bottom of the pump, where the grade is switched, to the top, then back down the hose, this is about 5 yards of 1" ID hose containing about .6 gallons of whatever the fellow before me used, probably sub-grade rotgut regular. I figure my 4-gallons of premium is 85% good stuff and 15% swill.

Happy motoring tip: Fill up in the better neighborhoods. Check out the clientele at the pumps when you pull up. Get in behind the fellow filling his 7xx BMW and wait for him to finish. You get better gas that way.

Of course if you don't have an upscale neighborhood handy, just remember, the hose only holds .6 gallon. You can pump this out on the pavement first then top off your tank with 100% good stuff. If the station owner or the other customers object, tell them the EPA made you do it.

No Drivers Licenses For Illegals

An initiative to allow drivers licenses to illegal aliens will not appear on the ballot here this fall due to lack of petition signatures.

Since we have a Motor Voter project that registers new drivers to vote, this may affect the outcome of the upcoming elections.

Polls

Two polls recently released show Colorado going strongly in both directions. The CBS / Quinnipac poll showed Romney winning 50/45, but take heart libs, the PPP poll rather unsurprisingly shows the Bamster walking away at 49/43.

An 11 point difference? Someone is either cooking the books or screwing the pooch big time.

I was unable to immediately locate either polls methodology, but it's probably safe to assume that PPP thinks Colorado will vote in '12 just like it did in '08 as though '10 didn't exist. The CBS poll probably took the '10 elections as its base when the GOP took the house and nearly the Senate.

Interesting to note from the PPP poll was the question asked of all the people polled as to how they saw themselves:

Would you describe yourself as very liberal,
somewhat liberal, moderate, somewhat
conservative, or very conservative?
Very liberal ...................................................... 14%
Somewhat liberal ............................................ 16%
Moderate......................................................... 27%
Somewhat conservative.................................. 21%
Very conservative ........................................... 22%

Ignore the center. Everybody is a moderate, just ask them. As the pastime of conjugating adjectives goes: I am a moderate. You are partisan. He, she, or it is an extremist.

Even so, note the big bias toward the conservative side. If the phone numbers were randomly dialed, this is not a good omen for the left.

Gun Control

The Brady Bunch is proposing, in the wake of the two recent mass shootings, that greater effort be put into "preventing dangerous people from buying guns on their own".

They're pretty nebulous as to who exactly shouldn't be allowed to buy a gun since including everybody right up front gets you laughed at. The suggestions they do make include people who are already prohibited, so no gain there.

The DHS has a list of qualifiers that includes military vets, constitutionalists, Tea Partiers and the like, but the list lacks provenience. What is needed here is a study of the political beliefs of all the mass shooters since 1950 to see what really should be looked at. Most of the ones that I remember who actually had any expressed political beliefs were leftists. Oswald, Fromme, etc. Based on this, we should probably prohibit registered Democrats and anyone expressing political beliefs to the left of the party platform from owning guns. Given the very modest amount of light between Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and Joseph Stalin, this should inconvenience the smallest number of people.

Of course the quickest way to eliminate gun violence would be to make violent crime illegal. In the ensuing pax judicus* guns would have no use and therefore be peacefully abandoned, right?



*I don't care what my friends say, when I was younger, Latin was NOT the language of the army, and it was not necessary to learn it. That was from my fathers time.

Concealed Carry Info

Someone asked me the other day if a Colorado permit was good in Nebraska.



For the answer to this and a ton of other useful information, such as how to get a permit in your state, if you can, and a reciprocity index, go here.

Gun Show Report

Interesting changes as the show was booked to the walls and the cafeteria had to be moved moved to another room. Business seemed good all around.

One of our CSSA members dropped off the remains of a box of Aquila 12 ga mini-slugs. They seemed like a good idea at the time, but they're too short to feed properly in a pump action. Cutest little micro shotgun shells you ever saw.


Testing suggests that an elevator plug will solve the feeding problem if you think you need to up your guns capacity from 6 to 12 rounds, at the expense of some muzzle velocity and long-range accuracy. OTOH, they look like they'd work fine in a double.

Interesting Quote

Not quite QOTD material, but thought-provoking anyway:

Carrying a gun, which is a Second Amendment right, also cannot legally lead to a finding that the individual is likely to murder someone; if it could, half or even more of the people in some of our states would qualify as likely murderers.

This from Judge Reinhardt of the 9th circuit. The case wasn't about gun rights but rather about extended responsibility for a killing that occurred in conjunction with another crime.  It makes for some interesting implications to the Miller and MacDonald cases, no?

Cali is currently working overtime to prohibit the carry of any weapons at all by anyone for any reason. This kind of thinking could elevate shall-issue  to a constitutional right.

Unemployment

The official number is now 8.3% which the Obama administration is quick to note is actually 8.256% with the rounding removed. Now we all know that the unemployment numbers bear little enough resemblance to reality normally, but Zero Hedge is calling BS on this one big time. Found here at Wizbang, is the suggestion that the BLS simply added some 377,000 jobs because it felt like it, and came up with the 163,000 jobs allegedly created. This kept the unemployment (U3) down to non-panic levels.

Actual unemployment, as you and I would experience it is somewhere between 16 and 20%, (U6).

Welcome to the third annual Summer Of Recovery. This year, at the rate the numbers are being fudged, by the November elections we will all have two jobs and the borders will have to be opened to thousands of guest voters workers to ease the strain on the American workforce.

More Guns, Less Massacres

Here's an interesting study done by someone with more interest in the math than the guns. The conclusion:

The average number of people killed in mass shootings when stopped by police is 14.3
The average number of people killed in a mass shooting when stopped by a civilian is 2.3.

Not only is it better to have one and not need it than to need one and not have it, it could save up to 12 lives.

More Gun Regulation

Gun regulation is a popular sport among liberals, especially following the Supreme court decicions stating that the second amendment means pretty much exactly what it says. The position that no one should be allowed to own a gun is pretty much untenable now, and the battle is over where it all ends.

The most popular position is that the individual should be allowed anything an infantry soldier would normally carry, which would include grenade launchers, squad automatic weapons, grenades and the like, but wait! There's more!

That pesky constitution includes in the part that describes the duties of the congress:

[Congress shall have Power...] To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;

Letters of Marque and Reprisal are issued to private citizens to allow them to prosecute a war in support of the government. In order to do this with any credibility, the private citizen would need something resembling a warship, or at least a heavily armed merchantman. Since both land and water are cited, one supposes that a tank or artillery piece might also not be out of order. Want a tank? There's a place right down the road from me that sells them.

There is also a supply of used warships rusting in San Francisco Bay. Wouldn't an old destroyer make just the rig for trolling for Somali pirates? Sure you'd have to be Bill Gates to buy one, refurbish it and fuel it for a trip essentially around the world, but we can dream, no?