There And Back Again

This last weekend Milady and I will be journeying to Snowmass to help run the Highland Games, formerly the Highlands Ranch Highland Games. The Highlands Ranch subdivision having priced us out of their market, they now get to use the park for something else.

We will be working on Saturday and Sunday which means we need to be up there on Thursday for some reason, and can't come back until Monday. Preparations are running like a WWII submarine dive drill orchestrated by Chuck Jones and the 3 Stooges. Departure will be late in the morning to allow for Facebook updates, last minute changes to the volunteer rosters, which Milady is in charge of, and other fol-de-rol. This may even include mowing the lawn although at this late date the grass has pretty much stopped growing for the summer.

E-Postal

I now have 13 entries to this months e-postal and since I'll be out of town this weekend, you all have until Monday to get this shot.

Score carefully and remember there is no such thing as a non-scoring hole in the paper.

You Can't Miss!

IRS Scandal

The Republicans on the investigating committee are getting tired of the runaround Director Koskinian is giving them. They ask the President to can him for:
(1) failing to comply with a congressional subpoena,
 (2) failing to testify truthfully, and
(3) failing to preserve and produce up to 24,000 emails relevant to the investigation.

It won't happen of course. That's what the president hired him to do and he's doing a fine job of it.

If you own the cop, you won't get arrested. If you own the judge, you won't get convicted. It's how it works.

 

Global Warming

Turn over your watch, wallet, car, thermostat and lifestyle and nobody (but you) will get hurt.


Or not.

Missing The Story

Fox has a piece trumpeting the way Trump is leading the pack with
Trump at 18%
Walker at 15% and
Bush at 14%

To hear Fox tell it Trump is as inevitable as Hillary.

Was it not less than 2 weeks ago the Donald was dragging down something in the twenties and Walker was in the single digits? It seems to me that Bush was right about where he is now. There's a story here if someone wants to run with it but as long as Trump is more fun to cover than anyone else, I guess this is what we get.

Relaxing Bike Ride

Cruise up the Platte River Trail and notice that the river has fallen several feet revealing no less that 4 vehicles parked near mid-stream. A Jeep, a Celica, a pickup, and a Chrysler mini-van in the space of no more than a mile or so.

Been an interesting year this year.

Spend the Day With IDPA

Nice day at the range with a very under attended match at which I finished halfway down. I'm getting more used to the Glock and my scores have been improving if you ignore the dismal showing I put in 2 weeks ago at CCCSC. Big brain fart on the Texas Star will do that.

In my defense, I finished second in the shotgun side match.

IRS Scandal

It has long since been established that the IRS systematically targeted conservative organizations seeking the same tax-exempt statue as the Sierra Club or the SEIU . In the process of doing this foot-dragging the IRS would ask for information totally unrelated to the doings of the organization including asking for copies of the membership lists. Several of the targeted groups simply stopped their requests rather than comply, having some suspicion of the integrity of the IRS.

Turns out the suspicions were well founded.

The difference between the Chinese government and the IRS is that the Chinese at least won't make you suffer through an audit before they steal your identity, and they are not (yet) in a position to jail you for supporting the wrong candidate.

You may wonder at this point why no one has at least been arrested, or even fired. Remember the Chicago Rules; If you own the cop, you won't get arrested, if you own the judge, you won't get convicted.

Colorado Politics

I went to a townhall last weekend at which the featured speaker was Steve House, Chairman of the Colorado GOP. Many interesting tidbits emerged.

Anyone who watches the political game here has an idea that Sen Bennett is is some reelective trouble. How much? I hear you ask. Enough that if the election were held today and the Republicans had a candidate who could refrain from coming out in favor of squashing baby ducks with a hammer, he would lose. Not to say the Republicans couldn't find such a candidate, they certainly have in the past but it would require a bit more effort than they usually expend. It's also possible that Sen Bennett could top off a stump speech by walking across City Park Lake without dampening anything but the soles of his shoes. Until a leading candidate emerges, let's put the odds of picking up that seat at say 51%.

About spending tax monies: Colorados state budget is running about 25 Billion dollars. Yes, billion. But piffle. You probably know, but are not terribly aware that there are other taxing entities below the state level. County, Municipal, funding districts, etc. etc. The aggregate take for these otherwise invisible tax collectors runs $50 Billion/year or about twice what the state gets. For this you get the lawns mowed in the city parks, maybe a municipal golf course, bronze statuary, a new city hall, a squad of fully stealthy police cars, schools kept open and maybe some potholes filled.

Don't like that? Consider running for city council or one of the boards who get to spend the money. It isn't easy or cheap and once you become a candidate you quickly find out that the others looking for that seat have the mindset of first graders playing "king of the castle" in the school sandbox. The incumbents tend to be Democrats whose passion in life is to micromanage other peoples lives.

Go to the Secretary of State website. Go to voter registration. Fill in your information and behold: In my case I'm in 20 different districts, each of which has its own panjandrums with authority to spend my money. Feel free to run for a position on any of these agencies and if you win, you can spend your tenure offering resolutions to disband the agency and give its budget back to the taxpayers. Or just vote against spending any money.

I was also informed that there are currently in excess of 400 declared candidates for the presidency. Most of these will not make the ballot of course, Feel free to write me in for whatever opening you think needs the help. If elected president, I promise to show I can reach across the aisle by re opening FDR's old camps and populating them with any Democrat who has served more than one term in office without learning that Socialism Does Not Work.

Have a happy election year.

Rollin' With The Times

From todays Mallard Fillmore:

No sweat bubba. Here at Billlls catering we will provide Steak and Jack for the one from Texas, Mutton and fruit juice for the one from Syria, Lentils and Evian for the one from California, and a fresh bale of hay for the one from the pasture.

The State Of Jihad

Two days ago I ran across someones post describing the jihadi attacks on the U.S. military here in the U.S. From Ft Hood to Chattanooga, the Islamowhackos (IW) had killed some 54 soldiers and support people at a loss of about 9 of their own, some of whom were currently in jail awaiting the administrations next prisoner swap.

It occured to me, and I'm sure the IW leadership, that this is probably the most cost-effective method of making war on the Great Satan they've discovered yet. Imagine; There are some 234,000 Marines in the entire corps. With a kill ratio of 5 unarmed Marines to 1 jihadi here in the U.S. it would take some 46,800 devout souls to completely wipe out the corps. O.K. after the first couple such attacks military bases would suddenly become MUCH harder targets.

Does that sound like a lot? There are about 5,000,000 Muslims in the U.S. but not to worry as only about 10% of them or 500,000 are willing to go jihadi on us. And only 10% of those would be required.

Concealed Carry Study

Here's a pdf paper by John Lott et.al. covering the current state of concealed carry in the U.S. It contains all sorts of stats, charts and graphs which suggest that among other things a 1 point increase in permit holders is coinciding with a 24% overall drop in the national murder rate.

Correlation is not causality but there it is. Also as Mr. Lott admits, collecting stats from the various states is a dicey business at best as few states collect exhaustive stats on their permits, and of course there are now 10 that don't require one at all.

Red Light Cameras

Our legislature just passed 2 bills, one an outright ban on the things, and the other requiring an approval vote of the denizens of the area in which such cameras might be placed. Both were vetoed by the governor who never saw a revenue source he didn't like. He denounced the bills as "too extreme".

So here's a legislator State Rep. Steve Lebsock, D-Thornton preparing a camera "limitation" bill that he says would meet the governors approval.

The governor encouraged lawmakers to enact legislation that limits the technology to specific traffic areas: school zones, construction and roadway work zones, and “areas with disproportionately high traffic and pedestrian accidents, injuries and fatalities.”

In other words, anywhere they like including within 1/2 mile of a traffic cone. Prohibited areas seem to include areas with little traffic which don't make the cities any money anyway.

One Ragged Hole Sights

I bought a replacement aperture rear sight for my Ruger Mk 1 some years ago and frankly this thing as done more for my accuracy than anything except Billlls Pistol Stabilization Fluid*. People have asked me about it and I send them off searching for the maker, oneraggedhole, who at this point seems to be not only out of business, but also deceased.

What I'm finding is that when he died, he was supplying these sights to a couple of retailers as well as selling them himself and his survivors apparently unsuccessfully tried to carry on. The sights are now unavailable anywhere and the website is "available" from someone.

The sight was a very simple piece, a slip-in flat piece of metal with an aperture hole in it, either 7/64 or 9/64" diameter. Rear sight attachments being very much unique to each brand, this item didn't fit everywhere but was available for brands that allowed the flat part to either slip in or screw on. A quick patent search revealed nothing although my experience is that patent trolls are a clever lot and the inventor's family may even have the patent under some obscure filing name. The originals were made from very soft steel which would bend if the gun was stored in a soft case upside down. They would be very easy to make in mass quantities from better steel if there were any interest.

Anyone have any more information?

* Decaffinated coffee.

Modern Medicine

Back in the old country under the benevolent gaze of Papa Joe Stalin, everyone understood that Communism was perfect and you'd have to be crazy to criticize it. Thus, if you criticized it, you were carted off to an asylum where you were treated until you saw things correctly. Not everyone survived the treatment, but what the heck, there's more where they came from.

Fortunately for us, that sort of thing could never happen here.

The judge noted the psychologists “chart indicates Mr. D’Souza tends to deny problems, that he lacks insight into his own behavior, that he is arrogant and intolerant of the feelings of others, while projecting an overly positive image of himself.”

The judge was appointed by Bill Clinton.

The Iran Deal

Working out just about like I had expected.

“Because of this deal,” Barack Obama said this morning from the White House, “we have stopped the spread of nuclear weapons in this region.”

And you can keep your doctor, I'm sure.

Weather

Normally There are only 2 kinds of weather for me, that being over and under 30% chance of rain. This time of year I take the motorcycle if the number is 30% or less. Tomorrow is one of those marginal days of 30%. Still you wonder when the weather page for the local TV has something like this:

Only a marginal chance for large hail/damaging wind in a small part of CO. #9WX #cowx #9news

Gives you a warm fuzzy feeling about going out on two wheels with only a marginal feeling of wondering which part of CO they're talking about.

I think I'll toss the rain gear into the saddle bags tomorrow.

Colorado Politics and Gun Laws

Via Colorado Peak Politics, comes the story of the rumors that Joe "Pop-Pop*" Salazar won't be running for reelection next year. Holding down a seat considered safe enough to get him a position on the House "kill committee", he famously came down solidly on the side of the rapists and stalkers guild during the gun law debates of 2013.

More recently he seemed to be offering a compromise to the gunnies in the last session when the Senate passed a repeal of the 15 round magazine limit and Mr. Salazar hinted that he might support a 30 round limit. His willingness to compromise was likely helped along by his own 221 vote win in the last election. With Dems holding their majority in the house thanks to several very slim victories, this measure might have picked up enough Dem support to pass the House but Salazar would have had to carry the bill himself as the Republicans were in no mood to compromise on this.

This was probably one of the better moves the Republicans made even though most of the gunnies I know would have been happy to see the new limit. The problem is that once a limit is on the books, it's easy to change the number to whatever you like and there are several Dems who would like to change that to zero. The other drawback would be that it would let the vulnerable Dems claim to be pro-gun even though they had voted the law in in the first place.

Never let a Democrat whitewash his own record.

*Salazar famously suggested that women on college campuses shouldn't be allowed to carry guns as he was afraid that an armed co-ed might turn around and pop-pop some otherwise innocent person who happened to be walking behind her.

Pin Drill

I discovered that a bit of practice can improve your showing on bowling pin matches. Here's what to do: First print this target:

Put up 3 of them at 3-1/2 yards. Have your shooting buddy do the same if you like. Put 2 of them upright, and put the third horizontal just below the uprights. Start from low ready, and on a signal, shoot 5 rounds, alternating left-right, left-right, and finally the horizontal pin below. Practice until you get all five shots inside the circles. As a supplement, shoot the first two shots at the upright pins, and the last 3 at the horizontal one. To my observation this is where most people fall down consistently shooting low into the table.

I mentioned this drill last month and Shooting Buddy and self have been practicing with this. It does help.

Recreational Shooting In Boulder County

Here's a PSA shamelessly cribbed from an e-mail a friend sent me:
--------------------------------------

Boulder County is hosting two open houses to discuss possible designated shooting areas in the County.   This is part of a recreational shooting strategy that is under consideration by the Northern Front Range Recreational Sports Shooting Management Partnership (Partnership). The Partnership was formed by the US Forest Service to work across the boundaries of the Arapahoe-Roosevelt National Forests and four counties to provide safe, responsible, and accessible recreational sport shooting opportunities.

The two open houses are as follows:

Monday, July 20 from 6:00 to 7:30 p.m.

Nederland Community Center

750 Highway 72 North

Nederland

Tuesday, July 21 from 6:00 to 7:30 p.m.

Boulder County Clerk & Recorder’s Office

1750 33^rd St.

Boulder

The meetings will be open house-style with multiple stations set up for attendees to obtain information and provide comments. There will be no scheduled presentations and people are welcome to come and go as they please.  

---------------------------------------------
Walk in, leave a comment and leave. If you're looking for a place to shoot in Boulder County, here's your chance to be heard. Drop in and leave a comment, however brief. You know the antis will be there, probably multiple times a day.

Researchers Interconnect Brains

Gives you hope, doesn't it? If two half-wits are interconnected, does that add up to a complete intelligence? Perusing the article, the big experiment involved using monkeys to control a robotic arm using brain sourced signals. This has already been done for humans, reference the "Iron Man" prosthetic arm that kid got. What they did was to give each of three monkeys control over one axis of an arm and see how long it took them to figure out how to cooperate to grab the treat.

Answer: Not very long. In a harder experiment, 4 rats were wired together and taught that synchronizing their brain activity would get them a treat. What sort of activity wasn't mentioned, maybe synchronized whisker twitching.

High hopes are being raised for this on the premise that massively parallel computing techniques can be applied to the human brain. I wouldn't get my hopes up on this one. To my observation, while intelligence is additive, stupidity is exponential. Connecting together say the two half-wits in the white house will NOT give us the god-like light bringer we were promised. More likely we'll get a half-wit working twice as fast.

Tax Law

Ari Armstrong has a piece on the Colorado use tax which law-abiding citizens are supposed to pay on anything they buy on line from out of state like books from Amazon or ammo from Lucky Gunner. In practice pretty much nobody bothers to pay this as doing it correctly would involve keeping the receipts from everything that arrives on your doorstep, not losing any of them, and figuring out what the tax rate is on all of it.

Failure to do this is a class 5 felony.

So if you ever bought anything on line and failed to kick back 4% to the state come tax time, you are a felon and thus ineligible to buy or own a gun. Think of it as a gun control law of convenience, enforceable when and where the government pleases.

Of course if we made violation of this law a disqualifier for holding public office or employment with the government, state or local, we could fairly quickly empty out all those big government offices and save the state a ton of money on operating costs alone not to mention the boost businesses would get from no longer being harassed by pettifogging bureaucrats.

Gun Stats - Wrong Again

Calling June "another record" for gun sales with lines like

Last month the FBI conducted nearly 1.53 million background checks, which are required for all in-store purchases, but not for sales at gun shows or between individuals. That's the highest volume of checks in June since 1999, when the FBI started keeping track.

Gun sales follow a pretty predictable track month to month. They vary a bit year on year. So far total annual sales are projected to show a very slight decrease from 21.09M in 2013, to 20.96M in 2014 to a projected 20.93M for 2015.

I take this as a positive sign that the administrations bleats for further gun control are no longer being taken very seriously. This is not to say we can let up. Any pol who utters the slightest peep in support of more gun control needs to be ruthlessly primaried and banished to the political hinterlands.

A Rudimentary Understanding Of Economics

Should be a prerequisite for holding public office. This is evidence of a disqualifying lack of understanding:

Yesterday Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf vetoed a bill that would have privatized the sale of wine and liquor while liberalizing the rules for selling beer in the Keystone State. Wolf counterintutively argues that replacing the state monopoly with private businesses would be bad for consumers. "During consideration of this legislation," he says, "it became abundantly clear that this plan would result in higher prices for consumers." He also worries that letting private businesses sell beer and wine would result in "less selection for consumers."

 It sure is a good thing we don't have anyone that stupid holding high political office here in Colorado, right?

Bike Rides

I like bike rides, I get to see more scenery than walking. Today I saw someone's car mostly submerged in the Platte River. This is unusual as normally you could probably drive a Camry across that river without getting the carpet wet.

A bit further up I found a large chunk of the Sanderson Gulch trail pretty much missing. Must have been entertaining to watch from a safe distance.

I'm now over 200 miles for the summer.

CCW

Finally broke down and finished the process of applying for my permit. Visited the Arapahoe County Sherriff this morning at quarter to nine to find the doors unlocked and everyone in place in spite of their official opening time of 9 AM. I got assigned docket "A" for the day. Every one was upbeat and friendly as though they were happy to see me. My papers were inspected and copied and my signature was witnessed. I gave them papers, money, fingerprints and a photograph and didn't even have to hold the little title board up or turn to the left.

New state rules: All state ID must use a blue background, and if you wear glasses, you must take them off. Next year it might be different.

The whole process took only about 1/2 hour, a notable part of that included fiddling with the electronic fingerprint machine which was proving to be quite fussy this morning.

All that's left is to cool my heels for 15-90 days while all the "instant" checks are performed. Some counties will add a CCW persons name to the police "persons of interest" list which causes the patrolman's computer to flag you when a cop runs your license plate. Some don't. I forgot to ask. Maybe I'll remember to ask when I go to pick the card up since they won't mail it.