Scientific Progress! Bacon Now Healthier

At least a bit healthier, and for the moment, only in England. I had to look up the word rasher which means one strip or maybe 2 strips of bacon or ham. Thin sliced.

Sorry, still not Kosher or Halal.

Cannon in D

Here's some music suitable for Christmas from Latvia. Gotta be hibrow here today and thanks to Grouchy Old Cripple for finding this.

Californian Of The Year

The Independence Institute is having a popularity contest of a sort, to select the Californian Of The Year in Colorado. This is intended for the person, who is doing the most to try to make Colorado into Eastern California, complete with all the things that make California what it is today, namely North Venezuela. Currently we have 5 candidates:

Christine Berg wants to ban the mention of sugary drinks for kids on restaurant menus.
Jared Polis wants to be Governor and make Colo. 100% dependent on "renewable" energy sources.
Brandon Rothheimer wants everyone to add several tons of dirt to their roofs so as to plant grass without regard to the design limits to installed roofs based on expected snow loads.
Jerry Sonnenberg wants to repeal TABOR, the constitutional amendment that prevents slows down runaway spending by the state government.
Aidan Cook wants to ban the popular rodeo sport of mutton busting wherein 5-year-olds under 50 lbs ride sheep.

This is fairly easy. Christine's influence is pretty much limited to Broomfield so if she want's kids ordering soft drinks off the adult menu instead of the kids lists, fine.

Brandons idea will be on a ballot initiative next election and would add some $25-$35/sq ft to the cost of building anything in Denver. Not to mention rewriting the municipal building codes. If an older house or building needed a new roof, the whole thing may need to be torn down in order to build a structure capable of supporting the heavier loads.

Jerry, who is a state Senator, is backed a measure to tax hospital stays and get around the requirement that tax increases be put to a popular vote by calling it a fee. As I recall, the tax fee is about $300/night.

Aidan Cook is the local rep of an English woman who is frightened by the violence that takes place at farm shows.

Jared is a local billionaire who wants to reduce Colorado to mud huts and burning cow chips by mandating 100% renewable energy in the near future. One supposes that he plans to have several Tesla autos in the garage of his solar panel topped mansion that will supply him with power 24/7 while the bothersome peasants freeze in the dark. Nice gig if you can get it, and here, he's got my vote.

The voting is currently agreeing with me.

Christine Berg – outlawing kid’s soda

8 Votes (3.46%)

Jared Polis – 100% renewable energy dream

106 Votes (45.89%)

Brandon Rietheimer – plants on roofs

21 Votes (9.09%)

Jerry Sonnenberg – destroying TABOR

77 Votes (33.33%)

Aidan Cook – mutton busting buster

19 Votes (8.23%)

Job Qualifications

A few days ago I had my last remaining app requiring Windows XP die aparetnly an irrevocable death. That being the case, I no longer had a reason to keep my old XP box on the desk. Except for a bunch of personal files and pictures and whatnot that I've been meaning to find and move over to the Win7 machine. Looking for an easy solution, I removed the hard drive from the XP box and installed it in the new one. As it happened, the connections were new enough that it looked like a plug and play operation with the big obstacle being the mechanical installation.

The L-shaped socket in the data cable matches the L shaped protrusion in the receptacle and

The Power cable neatly fits the larger receptacle. What could go wrong?

Got that done, plugged it all in with only having to replace one cable for a longer one, and pushed the GO button. The power supply breaker popped as soon as my finger lifted from the button. Unplug the drive and the machine starts right up. I didn't see anything wrong with the way I'd plugged everything in so I query my friends who are more computer oriented than I am. Got lots of advice, including an offer from Jed of the loan of a device that allows one to connect pretty much any hard drive to any computer regardless of connection requirements.

 He came over with the esoteric tool to connect stray drives to working computers, I showed him what I'd done, he thought it looked OK, I hooked it back up and turned it on and Voila! it works. Nothing changed except Jeds presence. 

So Jed is now a certified faith healer. I think it has something to do with the length of ones beard. The price of gold has historically followed the average length of men's beards, and whenever the media want an economist to pontificate on something they find some fellow with a beard. Economists without beards are simply non credible. As the beard gets longer, the area of expertise gets more esoteric and the job titles tend toward spiritual healer, high holy man, and wizard.

Keep in mind, before you toss your razor, that these are tricky lines of work and difficult to get in to like the NBA. There are a few successful religious leaders, mostly with titles like Ayatollah or Mufti, and a lot of less successful philosophers, many of whom adorn the busiest street corners with cardboard signs. Some of them are probably failed economists as well. I will note here that the current Pope is clean shaven. I will also note that, in my humble opinion, he isn't one of the better popes to come down the line, and he certainly knows nothing about economics. Next time, maybe one with a beard?

Election Shenanigans

After reading this, I got to thinking. Ever see a Democrat lose a recount? Since Al Gore anyway.

Our Robot Overlords

The humane society in San Fran is located in a somewhat seedy part of town and has a problem with excessive numbers of street people harassing potential animal adopters. So they hired a security guard to shoo the beggars away. Provided by Knightscope, the 400 lb robot patrols the storefront of the establishment and encourages the bums to move along.

Seems it's not very imposing as the bums have smeared it with barbecue sauce and feces and tipped it over in protest. Even the city has gotten into the act, apparently seeing the bums as more reliable voters than the employees at the shelter, and threatened the shelter with draconian fines unless they remove the robot immediately.

Rolling out my l33t engineering skills, I propose a solution:
1. Paint the robot black.
2. Equip the robot with some sort of unpleasant but non-lethal armament, say a cattle prod.
3. Have the robot approach non moving human forms and inform them that they need to either move on,  pay the robot, cash or credit, a minimum of $1, or be moved by application of the prod.

Anyone paying the robot will have his or her face recorded in the bots memory, and will be left alone for the next 2 encounters. Yes, the bums will squeal to the city council, who will send threatening letters to the shelter who can then respond that the council is anti black, anti animal, and oppressive to the culture of the criminal community. I'm sure there are other accusations that can be ginned up. This should work, and the accusations can be rolled out anew for the next council election.

Note to Knightscope: Your machines command respect in proportion to the amount of coercion they can inflict.

Now this:

Gun Fun - Murphy

The only bad round in a box of 100 will somehow find its way into your magazine for the Limited Vickers string.

That's it, 4th row back, 5th from the left.

For the benefit of any non shooters, in IDPA one normally fires two shots at a threat target, then moves on. If the shooter feels he might have missed and wants to make up the miss, extra shots are permitted. Only the 2 best hits are scored. One has to balance the extra time required for the extra shots against the points lost for a miss. Most of the time it's not worth it. If you get a misfire, just eject the offending round, and resume shooting.

Limited Vickers  means that you will be presented with targets, and you will be limited to say 2 rounds per target. If you miss, tough. For a 3 target string and a 6 round limit, if you get some 1 point down hits, that's not so bad. If you miss the target completely, that's 5 points down. If one of your bullets fails to fire, that's the same as a complete miss. Points down are added to your elapsed time at 1 second per point down.

The red color is from the Dykem machinists ink I use to mark my brass in an effort to get some of it back.

Gun Stuff - Fun With Headlines

From Town Hall, this:

Cuomo Condemns NYC Attacker and His 'Amateur Level Explosive Device'

Presumably Cuomo wanted the bomber to take some time, buy the Semtex, and make a real bomb. After all if they don't have at least 5 or 6 dead, it's that much more difficult to begin crying for more gun laws.

He also calls New York a resilient city that I guess has come to terms with regular terrorist attacks on defenseless citizens. 

Gun Sales - The Hillary Effect

Gun sales in November were still a bit lower than November of last year suggesting that the prospect of President Clinton strikes more fear into the hearts of Americans than the possibility of any serious crime or terrorist attack.

A "Trump effect" may boost gun sales in December as early reduced demand results in lower prices, and increased employment results in more disposable income. Whatever. 2017 gun sales have topped 2016 only twice, and both times by only 3.7%. For only being a factor in one year, you have to think that Hillary is probably a better gun salesman than O'Bungler.

Now if only Paul Ryan weren't so anti gun.

Gun Law - CCR - The Senate

HR38, the Concealed Carry Reciprocity and Fix NICS bill has now been sent to the Senate, where legislation goes to die.

HR 38 being "ordinary" legislation, it will need 60 votes to get through the Senate which means prying off 9 Donks which I don't see happening. What we might see is the Donks peeling off the CCR part of the bill and offering to pass just the Fix NICS part so they get the Feinstein-Schumer bill they wanted, and we get nothing as usual.

Tell your Senators it's either the whole deal or no deal, period.


An offer like that would pretty much guarantee that nobody gets anything and I hate to sound like Dudly, but there it is. All I can think of that might get this bill passes would be an amendment granting a one-time amnesty to philandering Congressmen.

This might open us up to charges of supporting dubious behavior by our elected officials and Lord knows there's plenty of that to go around already. There is of course the remote chance that the Donks want Fix NICS bad enough to accept CCR but frankly I doubt it.

Email your Senators, even the Donks since we need 9 of them, and urge them to support the whole bill as currently written.

DNC - Gott Mit Uns - The Mask Slips Just A Bit

As Nancy Pelosi  assures illegal immigrants that the DNC will take care of them if it's at all possible by invoking an old leftist slogan. One can just imagine what the DNC logo will look like in 2018:

Just superimpose the D over the swastika, and voila! the party is ready for 2018.

Trumps Tax Bill - POV

Is it good? Is is bad? Depends on your point of View. EX:

Trucking fleets ordered 32,900 Class 8 trucks, the kind used on long-haul routes, in November, according to ACT Research, which compiles industry statistics. That was up about 70% from a year earlier. - WSJ today

OTOH:

Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) hammered the Republicans’ tax-code overhaul Monday evening as a culture-shaking economic “armageddon” that would haunt the working class for years to come.

Flanked by other top Democrats in the Capitol, the minority leader blasted Republicans for championing a tax proposal she equated to “the end of the world.” - The Hill

So it's either the end of the world or it isn't. I suppose if your constituents are beggars looking for handouts, and some fellow comes along and offers them all jobs, you'd have to be alarmed. Advice to Congress on entitlement spending:

Dear Congressman:
Look guys and girls, we all know that entitlement spending is out of control and it's mostly your fault for not putting any limits on it to begin with. We also know that if you don't act to fix this, the country's headed for bankruptcy, possibly on YOUR watch. Additionally we understand that there are so many votes tied to getting free money from Washington that if you do anything, however ineffective, you'll lose your seat in your next election and that's if you're lucky enough to not lose your head in the riots, so here's a solution:

Enact Congressional term limits, effective immediately. 12 years in the house and/or 12 in the Senate, then either up or out. Just don't forget to include the golden parachute clause that continues your salary until you croak, tax free. Now you can pass the entitlement reform, save the country, and leave town with lots of money before anyone can connect you to a lamp post. Sound like a plan?

Your helpful constituent
Billll

Of course this probably won't fly with the party leadership who had envisioned their stern but paternal or maternal visages on portraits 20-30 feet square, hanging prominently from the Washington monument, staring at the capitol building to remind the survivors that they all have suicide notes on file in the White House.

Gun Law - CCR

HR38, the concealed carry reciprocity law is/was being debated in the House today to see what the bill will look like in its final form. I've been to hearings like this before and while I could be watching the presentations live on YouTube, there is actually little point. Barring someone committing a major gaffe in a presentation or on the part of a committee member, every ones mind is already made up.

The drill is to let petitioners drone on for their allotted 2 minutes or so, then move to the next one. At the end of the hearings (beginning of happy hour) the committee members will check with their staff to see if the constituent mail is running any different from the day before, then vote the party line.

As of last check, HR 4437, the Fix NICS bill which would allow the municipal dogcatcher to opine on your qualification to keep and bear arms, has been added to HR38, the original bill. There are proposed amendments to take 4477 off, and take the original text of 38 off so we could see either of the bills or both in one package. There is one amendment that would expand the class of our betters, sitting congressmen, to allow them to carry anywhere they like, no restrictions.

Ensures that Members of Congress are afforded the greatest latitude regarding interstate concealed carry, commensurate with that of Federal Judges under this legislation.

A complete rundown of proposed amendments appears at No Lawyers.

I suppose we'll hear what we got tomorrow. As of today, most of the bad amendments have been voted down with a few left to consider.

Nasty Flinch You Got There

This story purports to reveal additional details of a police-involved shooting in my county back in March. Seems a suspect was having some bad inter reactions between painkillers, muscle relaxants, and alcohol when she called the cops and began making strange threats. So she got pulled over with maximum caution based on the threats where she became even less rational, one of the cops who shouldn't have had a finger on the trigger just yet fired a shot, and everyone joined in to the tune of 55 rounds fired. One officer, evidently using his car for cover, managed to put 28 rounds into the roof of his own car before the shootout ended, I'm thinking from a bad flinch causing the muzzle to depress.

The report says that additional training was ordered for all parties involved. The woman being shot at was completely unharmed.

CCR - How The Game Is Played

As mentioned here earlier, HR 38 - Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act of 2017 has been sent to the House floor. It has been amended to add the Fix NICS bill which would greatly increase the numbers of prohibited persons in the NICS system. Hope your name doesn't match that of some person in an anti-gun state that has too many overdue library books or you will never get another gun or if you do, straightening the false alarm from NICS will take about 6 months per check.

More details at No Lawyers, but the plan is to dump CCR completely and pass only the anti-gun Fix NICS part. Contact your congress critters and protest this bit of back stabbing mightily. Demand a clean CCR bill.

Winter Interdependency

I like to build stuff. Often this happens in the garage where all the tools are. Lathe, mill, hacksaw, grinders, welders, etc, etc. The garage is insulated, but not heated. The problem is solved when the wife goes out on errands, or more accurately, when she comes back. If she remembers to close the garage door quickly, her car will warm the garage enough to comfortably work in for several hours.

The problem is to get her out of the house to run some errand. When it's cold out of course she wants to stay in and the garage never gets warmed up. Which is why I get so little done in the winter.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Having Fun

Pedals and Pints is a really nice meetup group that specializes in semi-organized bike rides around beginning at a craft brewery, and usually ending there after visiting 2 or 3 others. Today we started at Breckenridge brewery with an Agave Wheat, rode to Dead Hippie Brew Co for a brown ale, and thence to Boggy Draw Brewery fora Stuck Truck Dunkelweiser.

Your beer may vary, but that's what I had. Not bad for an 11 mile ride up and down the Platte trail. Actually there were 2 more brewery's on that route we didn't stop at, but we'll get to them next time.

Great bunch of people and a great time.

Questions About The Norks

Li'l Fat Kim has just tested a missile roughly equivalent to a Titan II only with a mobile launcher similar to, but much bigger than the one proposed for our Midgetman ICBM. Having worked on this sort of stuff myself, I can assure you that the design and building of them is non trivial and quite expensive. Seeing all this technological advancement from a country that is probably the economic equivalent of Detroit makes me wonder.

The story on the launchers is that they were provided to the Norks by the Chinese (surprise, surprise) ostensibly to be used to transport logs with their timbering industry. Nice story. The launchers are big, heavy, and relatively inflexible thus requiring some pretty good roads to operate on. Yes, they can run on dirt roads, but the dirt needs to be deep hard packed gravel and not the sort of thing that turns to mud every spring, and winds tightly up the sides of mountains.

The Norks have also had a great run of good luck with the missiles in test with only a few failures before running like they had been extensively tested already, like in China for example.

Found this pic at Theo Spark. I'm thinking that it's missing the hand of Chinese God-King* Xi stuck up Kims butt. Also Chinese missile and troop movements to the North of China and along the NK border make it look like Xi is trying to goad Trump into attacking Kim so the Chinese can intervene on behalf of their brothers like they did the last time. It would be unlike the Chinese to toss a useful ally/stooge like Kim summarily under the bus although for the right price...

There are currently 3 U.S. Carrier groups hovering around N.K. In the event of hostilities, I would be trivially easy for Kim to launch 3 of his smaller missiles in a nuclear ballistic attack against them. To the best of my knowledge, the carriers have only limited defenses against such an attack although the missile frigates accompanying them might well surprise us. With the "unfortunate loss" of the carriers, the Chinese buildup in the South China Sea goes on pretty much unchallenged and the Norks take the fall.

Or maybe my blood sugar is a bit low this morning.

UPDATE: Others have noticed as well.

*It is an Emperors prerogative of course to call himself anything he wants. The Chinese have already published a New Revised Koran and made possession of old ones illegal. Additionally the Chinese Government has taken it upon itself to appoint the senior leadership of the Catholic Church in China, and is encouraging all Christians to replace aging images of Jesus with similar images of Xi.

The Robots Move Closer

Found this on IOTW: The latest minimalist robot, sort of an Alexis with a moveable face named Fur Hat. The first place I can see for "Furrie" is reporting the news, sports, and weather. Use a face appropriate to the job, and voila! you get to fire 3 highly overpaid talking heads. Think of it: A 50 something white man for the news, a 40 something black man for the sports, and a 20 something female for the weather. Just change wigs during the commercial breaks.

Watch the video at the link and think about the evening news.

Fun Shooting

My local club IDPA was today and the stages had carbine written all over them, so I used the carbine.
Here's stage 2 called Turkey Shoot, 2 targets, first one shot from 15 yards, seated at a table:

 Here's a closeup of the target.

Look carefully, there are 4 threats and 2 no-shoots on this and the threats are all at least 50% armored. Under the new rules, the no-shoots will cost you 5 points per hit on them so if you're going for head shots on that lower middle one, aim carefully.

Having fired 8 shots, 2 per threat with no misses I presume, the shooter moves up to the left side of the barrels, some 7 yards from target set #2

 and staying on the right side of the fault line, fires on the 5(!) threats while not hitting the no-shoot.

Again the threats are all at least 50% armored. I do not remember what the scenario story behind this was, but since the Rules state that all stages must have a story, I will obligingly make one up:

As a highly paid and highly alert security guard in the Phinias T. Phogbound Congressional office building, you are seated at your desk with your gun and all loading devices on the table in front of you when a scream from down the hallway alerts you to trouble. Looking up you see a congressional rules making committee attempting to grope 2 congressional aides. Without getting up, you engage the gropers without injuring the gropees. Hearing further commotion from around the corner, you scoop up your magazines and move to the corner conference room where you find even worse, 5 congressmen attacking a single aide. Again defend the aide.

There, see? Literature worthy of Larry Correia. Except that he would develop the personalities of every one involved, the gropers would be taken from the AD&D guide book, and he would have received a six figure advance before hitting a single keystroke.

Hmmmm. IDPA stages as basis for action adventure novels? Hmmmm...

You don't often see targets like these two in IDPA matches, but we're rather limited for space. The whole bay is 42 ft wide and 26 yards deep so each stage needs to fit a 21 foot wide area. It kinda cramps your style and places a premium on creativity.

Brain Implants To Cure Mental Illness

No fear! You will enjoy!

QOTD - Insults

Found this quote at Ace of Spades:

“When someone calls you a racist, sexist, bigot, homophobe because you happen to disagree with them about tax policy or same-sex marriage or abortion, that’s bullying. When someone slanders you because you happen to disagree with them about global warming or the government shutdown, that’s bullying. When someone labels you a bad human being because they disagree with you, they are bullying you. They are attacking your character without justification. That’s nasty. In fact, it makes them nasty.”
― Ben Shapiro

What Shapiro left off is the ending: Following an accusation of this sort, one should gracefully and politely acknowledge the accusers tacit admission of defeat.

TEOTWAWKI - EPA Funding

I just got an email from a lefty group announcing the impending end of at least part of their world.

Well you’re not going to like this: Funding for the entire government expires December 8. Donald Trump, Scott Pruitt, and fossil fuel cronies in Congress want to use an emergency bill funding the government to slash the Environmental Protection Agency’s budget by 31%!

Only 31%? Fiddling small pocket change! As I suggested earlier, the swamp draining project is much bigger than we are being led to believe and the best way to approach it is the classic old car solution: Jack up the radiator cap and drive a new car under it. The analogy being that the Trump appointee to head the agency in question, in this case Mr. Pruitt, is the already new radiator cap. The solution is to reduce the agency's budget to whatever is required to pay the rent on its buildings, let everyone but the custodial staff go, and allow the new head to start over from scratch, making his own decisions as to what actually needs to be done in line with what the fed.gov is actually allowed to do.

Mr Pruitts budget might even include funding to add to the custodial staff enough extra floor sweepers to make up the committee to work up next years budget request.

Wildlife Update

With the weather cooling off it seems the local wildlife is moving in to the neighborhood.

Yep 'ol Wile E. has been spotted multiple times, and has eaten one cat and severely injured another and a small dog, all within a block of my house. My neighbor across the street tells me he has seen him emerging from between my house and my neighbors place presumably after checking out the chickens the fellow over the back fence keeps. All this during daylight hours so he's not impressed with anything or anyone yet.

These things are quite smart and quickly learn when trash day is in a neighborhood and will watch you from concealment across the street to get your garage door code for use later to get in and eat your Schnauzer while you're at work. If they haven't, it's only because they have trouble pushing the keypad buttons accurately with their noses.

It now seems prudent to accompany my dog when I let her out back to do her business, and D'wife is suggesting a noisemaker to help impress the coyote. Fine. I have both small and medium caliber noisemakers. It's illegal to discharge a firearm inside the city limits, but there are exceptions to this and Wile E. is one of them. Just have to be careful of the background. Now that I think about it, this may well be the situation for which a weapon-mounted flashlight is called for.

The Gun Crime Blame Game

England is noting a big increase in gun crime for some reason, as is Australia. In both cases, confiscation is the rule of the day which suggests to me that the approach not only doesn't work, it's counter productive. In the lands of the disarmed it seems, the man with the one-shot popgun is king.

Perhaps the next time a mass shooting occurs, or even a minor affray with only 1-3 bodies to stack, perhaps we should be just as quick to blame not the shooter or the gun, but those who made the situation not only possible, but attractive to the perp. Let's face it; people are neither predictable nor are they particularly rational, at least not often enough. As a result, we sometimes get "muckers" out to run up a new high score and more often we get criminals who favor armed threats to part people from their valuables. Guns are not difficult to obtain. The mugger probably knows a burglar who found some on one of his adventures. The mucker has only to ask around to be introduced to someone who needs money more than a gun and doesn't care what the purchaser plans to do with it. In most cases, the purchaser seems pleasant and normal to the seller anyway. They are also not all that hard to make from scratch.

In any case the reason mass shooters run up such high scores is not so much because of the rate of fire of their guns, but  that they 1) pick a high density target rich environment, and 2) pick one where they face a minimum likelihood of armed resistance. Mass shooters seldom seem to operate longer than 5-10 minutes, and when confronted, politely off themselves, thus minimizing the risk to the responder.

Next time a newsworthy gun crime happens, let's immediately place the blame where it belongs, on the enablers. Those who stand firmly on the side of the mugger, the rapist, the mass shooter and their ilk by demanding that their victims be completely unable to defend themselves. Around here that would include Joe Salazar, currently working on running for Governor. He famously came out opposed to allowing campus co-eds to go armed for fear that the flighty little darlings might get nervous at someone walking behind them and simply shoot them as a precaution.

Most gun laws are state level issues, and the enablers work in state legislatures, but there are several who work at the Federal level who can be legitimately blamed as enablers of mass shooters. Let's make it abundantly clear that what runs up the body count is not that someone has a gun, but that only one person seems to have a gun.

Sound like a plan?

Solving Colorado's Transit Problems

For probably only 2-3 times the cost of making I-25 and I-70 both 12 lanes wide over their full lengths, we can have a car-carrying hyper loop system which will make it so much easier for the tax paying public to flee the state before the full bill comes due.

Winter Shooting

IDPA shooting can get to be somewhat more of a challenge than usual in the winter at some of the ranges. The Clear Creek County Sportsmans Club is located in Clear Creek Canyon and nestled right up against the steep slope of the south side of the gulch. The individual berms are perpendicular to the canyon so as to use the mountain side as a back stop. Nice back stop. I rather doubt that most pistols could put a round over the top of it.

The bad news is that this time of year, the sun only barely clears the ridge line and if there's been any snow recently, it only melts back as far as the shadow of the mountain. Last weekend this meant that most start positions were right at the beginning of a sheet of packed snow about 1" deep. Also the sun doesn't actually become visible until about 9:30. Officially the temp was about 35 deg but standing on the frozen ground in the shade made it seem colder. One of my fellow shooters, bless his heart, gave me a couple of hand warming packets which kept my fingers from falling off as long as I kept them in my pockets.

Unfortunately we had a shortage of safety officers so I would up being scorekeeper for most of the match which meant handling the clipboard and noting the scores. By stage 2 the sun had poked over the mountain and things got a bit more reasonable. The next problem was that since most of the shooting was being done in the unmelted portion of the berms, keeping your footing was a big consideration. No one fell so I suppose the speeds were a bit slower than usual. The other thing was the brass picking. All the brass was landing in the packed snow where it promptly sank nearly out of sight and was frozen tightly into place. This resulted in a much lower than normal percentage of recovered brass for everyone. If I got 50% of mine back. I'll be amazed. My partner told me he didn't get any back at all.

I had brought my carbine for the side match, but the much reduced speed made it look like it would be rather late getting going, and the sun had already "set" on the berm to be used by 12:30. I figured I was cold and tired enough for one day so I flaked out.

Got the results. I finished just above halfway down which is doing well for me so I'm happy. Cold? Sure. Considering that it's at 7900 ft altitude and it's early November, I guess you can't be too surprised. A few miles further up the road and the ski resorts are open.

Texas Shooting QOTD

Found at Joe Huffmans:

STOP THE SHOOTINGS. STOP REPUBLICANS
Saurus
November 5, 2017
Comment to At least 26 dead in South Texas church shooting, officials say

I am reminded of a comic (Wizard of Id) in which the King asks a kid what he wants to be when he grows up. The kid answers "I want to be a brave knight like Sir Rodney."
The King answers "Make up your mind kid, you can't have it both ways."

PSA - Time Change

From a tweet on Kurt Schlichter:

Daylight Savings ends tonight. Don't forget to set your Glocks back.

Gun Sales - Feeling Safer?

As of October, gun sales seem to be in a bit of a doldrum, at least compared to last year when President Hillary was looking inevitable:

One might almost think that Hill has usurped O'Bummer's crown as gun salesman of the century although her influence only lasted one year and cannot, of course, be compared to his 2-term cumulative numbers.

November-December is usually busy at the gun show and I'll be there tomorrow so I guess I'll see. I had been noticing the place being rather under attended for some time though.

Selling Us Out Slowly

The Hearing Protection Act is currently languishing in a House committee with 164 co-sponsors and no vote in spite of house rules demanding one. The bill has been swept in its entirety into the SHARE act, which is languishing on Paul Ryans desk as he won't bring it to a floor vote.

Rep Jeff Duncan is the sponsor of the HPA and is proposing yet another mashup to try and get some movement for this suggesting that the HPA might be scrapped if National Reciprocity is added to SHARE. NR has less chance of passing the Senate than the HPA so either approach is legislatively pointless although forcing floor votes in both houses would provide advertising fodder for Republicans in the upcoming elections.

Duncan being the sponsor of both bills is trying to get some movement on SHARE this year.

According to Duncan, there are several options including dropping the silencer provision altogether and replacing it with other gun language. He said one idea could add language that would ban or require more stringent licensing for buying bump stocks, a plastic attachment added to semiautomatic weapons that allows them to fire far more rapidly.

Since the "bump stock" relies on 2 phenomena common to all semi-auto firearms, namely recoil and self-loading, any attempt to limit bump stockery would either be completely ineffectual or end up completely banning semi-auto firearms with a trigger pull weight equal to or less than the recoil force. Just what you wanted eh? A varmint rifle with a 12 lb trigger?

Paul Ryan is solidly in line with the Dems on this so if you want to see any movement, he would be the one to write or call weather you live in his district or not.

Hillary Wins Halloween

On Halloween, we're supposed to dress up as the scariest thing we can think of and go out and try to frighten people. Hill said she planned to dress up as "President of the United States".

O.K. Hill, you win, hands down. That's about the scariest thing I could imagine.

Practice, Practice, Practice

It is, after all, how you get to Carnegie Hall. Joe Huffman has a picture in a post describing equipment use in WWII. Included is 41.5 Bn rounds of ammunition. Joe points out that we go through, collectively, 10-12 Bn rounds of ammo per year currently, just practicing.

Interesting to think that we are currently going through ammo at about the same rate we did fighting a two-front war. Probably a large percentage of what  we currently shoot is .22 rimfire, but skills learned with a .22 are transferable to other calibers.

UPDATE: Fixed spelling error. A Wookie mistake I'm sure.

Happy Birthday

Remembering this Tweet:

No reason for her to give up. There are some 150-odd other countries she can try in, several of which do not have extradition agreements with the U.S.

Medical Advice

Patient: It hurts when I do this.
Doctor: Don't do that.

See? Some problems are easily dealt with. Now for your viewing enjoyment, here are some nice Fall colors:

Note that most of the color here is summer green. 10 point bonus if you can recognize the yellow stuff. It's one of my favorites in the Spring.

84 degrees today. Over the next 36 hours, it's expected to get down to 25 deg with some rain and maybe a bit of snow. Sounds delightful.

Gun Control or Crime Control?

Seems you can't fool all the people all the time, eventually they get wise to your scam. Seems support for gun control, even after a very large atrocity is a rather short lived phenomenon. Of course it didn't help that even the loudest voices for new gun laws quickly admitted that none of their proposals would have made any difference at all to the outcome of the Las Vegas shooting. I find it encouraging that journalists are now thinking to ask that sort of question at all instead of just taking the press releases and running with them.

Along those lines, I mentioned some years back, seeing a large wall-sized map of north-east Denver and NW Aurora, famous for places you don't want to visit, behind a high ranking cop who was giving a presser on one topic or another. The map had push pins in it, arranged into tight clusters about a mile apart. It mad me think that if the PD had air support, they could drop 250 lb bombs onto a handful of carefully selected addresses, and drop the municipal crime rate to near zero overnight with minimal collateral damage. Here's an article suggesting I was right.

I suppose that if you become a professional perpetrator, you quickly enough find yourself on a first name basis with the local cops, the DA, and the judges who would all quickly tire of seeing tour face. To avoid long term incarceration and keep your job as a perp, you would need to cultivate others to do your perpetrating for you, being careful of course to assure them that turning states witness, while it might keep them out of jail, would not guarantee them a long and happy life.

Colorado Gun Laws And Candidates

This year we elect the lesser known candidates, those running for City Councils and such, usually as non partisan races which means that they all say they're fighting for you while steadfastly toeing the party line. This sort of false flag candidacy should be illegal. The Socialists should be required to publicly admit it.

Next year the governors race is open as the current Marxist is term limited out and is currently campaigning for a position as trade minister in India. Already it's getting close to easier to list the names of those NOT in the running for Governor, but here's an article from the Denver Post describing 9 wannabe governors by their positions on guns. In general, there are no real surprises here with the Dems coming down firmly on the side of the criminal class and the R's more generally supporting the citizens right to self defense of their lives, liberty, and property.

Tucked into the article is a handy chart breaking down 6 of the candidates by position on different issues:

At this point, it's a no-brainer, with Mr Brauchler walking away with my vote. There are, of course, other issues, and I'm eagerly anticipating candidate positions on fixing the roads vs throwing more money down the light rail rat hole, and possibly declaring the Peoples Republic of Boulder County to be an autonomous area, tearing up the roads into it and building a "great" wall around it until they come to their senses.

The Virtue Of Joining The Mob

Article here questions the virtue of joining an angry mob. It's at WSJ so may be behind a paywall.

So Weinstein turns out to be everything the media was hoping Don Trump might be. His problem was not what he did, but that he got outed by the part of the press that is somehow still practicing journalism. Worse, it turns out that enough people follow that part of the media that the other half was forced to acknowledge it. A perfect example of the Alinsky rule about demanding the other side live up to their stated doctrines.


Is there no virtue in joining an angry mob? In theory, miscreants are dealt with by the justice system which investigates, arrests, tries, and punishes wrongdoers. As everyone knows however, sometimes the system gets corrupted. Blind eyes are turned, friends are let off with a warning, trials end with wrist slaps or dropped charges, and business resumes as usual.  At some point though, that part of the public who are not members of the good 'ol boys club, see an injustice as being beyond what reasonable people should be expected to tolerate and someone winds up decorating a lamp post. This is frequently enough to cause the rest of the chain to get to a reasonable degree, more in step with the community mores.

Is this virtuous behavior? Maybe. Maybe not. But sometimes it's necessary.

Disaster Relief

It seems the recent weather in Florida and Texas is impacting my lifestyle all the way up here in Colorado! I like to make my breakfast pancakes with some Hominy added to the batter. It improves the flavor and the protein content. Just the other day, I used the last of the supply here. Today D'wife tells me that King Soopers is out of the stuff on account of the suppliers down south being temporarily shut down due to weather.

Outrageous! Where's FEMA when you need them?

Oh well, I hear things are getting back to normal or what passes for that in Dixie, so I expect to see my favorite pancake stuffing back on the shelves shortly.

Endorsement

Things you learn as you go along:

If you take an ordinary car and fit it with headers and a less restrictive exhaust system, like the previous owner did to my Camaro, the sensors in that system will report slightly different data to the computer, which causes the computer to panic and demand that you take the car in for therapy. Turns out this is a well known problem and the solution is a professional mental adjustment to the computer. Resist the temptation to do this yourself with a ball pien hammer, and take your car to a reputable speed shop.

I took mine to J&S Performance and Tuning and the folks there knew exactly what to do. Download the software in the ECU, revise a couple of numbers, and load it back in. The car now runs smooth as glass and the dashboard remains free of "service engine soon" lights. For a significantly larger fee they could also get me about 10% more horsepower, but considering where I'm starting from we both agreed it probably wasn't worth it. OTOH, if you drive a GM car and are frustrated that it's producing less than a respectable 450 hp, these folks can help. I looked over some of the cars in their shop and believe me, 450 hp is strictly for the economy cars.

Gun Control - What We Do Instead Of Something

3 years in to Colorado's strict new gun control laws and the crime rate hasn't moved much at all except pretty much in concert with the national averages.

Another election coming up. What do you bet the refrain will be that "We'll make it work THIS time!"

Reloading Tool

I shoot a .40 Glock. This used to mean that the brass it ejected showed a bit of a bulge near the base. It also meant that the decapping/sizing die didn't always resize the brass completely, leaving a bit of the bulge behind. I have replaced my barrel with one from Lone Wolf, which works a treat. I recommend them. Go buy a barrel. Their barrels are made to somewhat more exacting specs than the factory barrels, which means that the cases must be sized all the way down to seat smoothly. Brass shot from the LW barrel is better supported, and doesn't show the bulge but other peoples brass, found at the range frequently needs a bit of help.

The method is to push the brass completely through the final sizing/crimp die before anything else. The problem is that some of those cases DO NOT want to go through that die, so I give them some help. First decap and preliminary size. Then drop the case into a final sizing die, mounted in a centrifugal press:

The die slides to the left for loading. The rubber band pulls it into position, and the pusher above, pushes it through. The pusher is connected to a crankshaft which is engaged to a flywheel when the trigger is pressed.

It's quiet, running on a 1/10 hp motor, and the now properly sized brass is ejected out the bottom into the paper box. This press is rated at 1 ton so it's not working very hard here. The flywheel is turning at about 150 rpm when it's running.

Maker Faire

Went to the Maker Faire
The builders and bots were there
We filled the room and made things go boom
you really shoulda been there.

The above essay should remove any doubts anyone has as to my abilities as a poet. Still, it was a fun event. One group had a B-25 front fuselage, made by their students complete with a honkin big sound system that simulated the sound of the engines and the firing of the machine guns. The rest of us could have done with less of the sound effects.

 The turret on top swiveled. I explained that if I were in charge, this would be the coachwork on a nice pickup frame so I could drive it around town from the cockpit.

An outfit with steampunk lighting fixtures was there. St Vrain Metal Works makes fixtures from plumbing pipe and polished brass, most come with a dimmer disguised as a water valve. This one featured an artificial horizon and propeller.

The bulbs are from another outfit that makes them especially for the Steampunk market.
Lots of 3-D printers making various stuff:

Transportation issues were displayed with this Chinese electric 3-wheeler

I have no idea what the badge says.
Jeffco Open School, where I sometimes help had several of their robots including Chad Pi

looking very jaunty in my sunglasses. He runs on a Rasberry Pi processor, and has several motions including jaw and eyeball movement, nodding head, motion, and a set of snappy lines he delivers at random. Next year he should be able to repeat back text which would be cut-and-paste entered. I figure all he needs then would be a dignified wig with a bit of gray on the temples and the local news reader will be out of a job. Change to an Afro or a long blonde wig during commercial breaks and the entire news, weather, and sports staff is out of work. The stations will save a fortune.

There were autonomous vehicle races outdoors which I managed to miss while I was manning the table inside.

These things are fun, even more so if you bring the kids. I brought the golf caddy trike (scroll down, it's on here somewhere.) and let the kids take it for a spin. It's entertaining to watch a kid get on the thing, get focused on the throttle knob, and drive into a wall after forgetting what I told them about how to stop. First turn the throttle OFF!, then use the front brake lever. The rear brake lever DOES NOT WORK! In one ear and out the other.

Things I Learned Today

1. To remove and replace the plastic front bumper cover on an '02 Camaro requires the removal and replacement of 37 fasteners. Nearly all of them are accessed while lying on your back.

2. Air passing through the grille on this car serves no useful purpose. Cooling air and intake air is drawn from under the nose.

Gun Law - Slip Of The Tongue

Sen Chris Murphy, in an interview with CNN, seems to have let a bit more of the cat out of the bag than he probably intended. He came right out and said that universal background checks were the next big thing for the Democrat party, then ran this line through:

What we know is that states that have tougher gun laws, that keep criminals from getting guns that keep those dangerous weapons like ar-15s out of the hands of civilians have dramatically lower rates of gun violence.

So it's not out of the hands of Democrats Muslims people who shouldn't have them, it's out of the hands of civilians entirely.  Someone should ask him if he had in mind all semi-auto center fire weapons.

The Camels Nose

Our old buddy Diane Feinstein has introduced S 1916, the Automatic gunfire prevention act. It currently shows 38 cosponsors, is as poorly written as you'd expect and includes this gem:

(v)(1) Except as provided in paragraph (2), on and after the date that is 180 days after the date of enactment of this subsection, it shall be unlawful for any person to import, sell, manufacture, transfer, or possess, in or affecting interstate or foreign commerce, a trigger crank, a bump-fire device, or any part, combination of parts, component, device, attachment, or accessory that is designed or functions to accelerate the rate of fire of a semi- automatic rifle but not convert the semiautomatic rifle into a machinegun.

This covers everything from your finger to your shoelaces and belt loops. In theory at least you could be arrested and charged for wearing lace-up shoes. I don't expect this to get much traction, but with the NRA suggesting its willingness to sell us out in exchange for a promise to consider other legislation next Tuesday*, I would suggest you let your representatives know that this steaming pile of legislative legerdemain is NOT ACCEPTABLE.

To that end, the AzCDL has a site that will send a letter, partly written by them but with a big section you can personalize, to both of your Senators and your representative, regardless of where you live. I just used it, took out a big chunk of the personalized section and added a line about why no one really needs a Prius as they have a lifetime carbon footprint larger than a Hummer, and support slave labor in the Chinese Lithium mines. Feel free to edit that section to your own taste.

And don't forget to ask that the ATF be abolished.

*Reference to a request for funds to buy a hamburger.

Seasonal Entertainment - Punkin Chunkin

Season change here is when Mother Nature grabs the switch from Summer to Winter and bangs it up and down several times just to keep everyone on their toes. Last night the first snow hit, projected to be 2-5 inches of heavy wet stuff that melts on contact with the streets and sticks to all the foliage. Since none of the trees here have lost any leaves yet, I'd say that the next week or two will be a busy one for the tree people or anyone with a chainsaw. The power just came back on, so here's a post.

Last weekend was the official Punkin Chunkin contest as the Delaware site remains tied up in a lawsuit. I've been helping the Jefferson County Open School with their entry, the Dead Ent Resurrection as they hoped to better last years toss of 430 feet and second place in their class.

Here they are, putting some between shot repair work in. Seems the improvements put a bit more strain on the arm and some of the structure. Their practice of taking the machine apart and stacking it outdoors uncovered probably didn't help either, but they made 493 feet this year and reportedly took first place in their division, so yay us!

Other friends of mine included the local SCA chapter with a historically correct machine

 Complete with decorative young ladies and armored knights
Also there was a centrifugal machine, Inertia II, which had some issues with its release timing

In this pic the tapered arm is spinning at a pretty good clip. the whistle of the air is impressive. Motive power is from a 454 cu in Chevy engine. In the foreground is Sonic Pumpkin, a compressed air gun.

Big 10 Inch is a perennial contender. The air guns were able to consistently get out beyond 4000 feet although I did not hear of any reaching the elusive goal of 5280 ft this year. The Kamikazi is the redecorated effort of Mike B who added 22 ft of barrel to get into the 4000+ club this year.

Looks like the condensate might be building up in his tank. Building these things is always a problem as most of us live in the 'burbs and no matter how friendly the neighborhood, there's always some curmudgeon complaining about artistic endeavors like these, especially if it's being done out where it can be seen.

In the foreground is a linear catapult of the sort the Navy favors for launching planes. The big one behind it features a huge collection of garage door springs and is called "Not In My Driveway" which was named by the builders wife.

The red and white machine is called Pluto and features 2 articulated arms plus a sling. This one has broken into the 2000 ft club and was built just down the road from me. I think there's more cement in its counterweight than in my driveway.

Art Of The Deal - Bump Stocks

Swapping bump stocks for reciprocity or anything else may not be as easy as all that. If the stocks suddenly become illegal or heavily regulated, what do we do about the zillion or so already out there? A six month amnesty is about all I can think of and I'm also guessing that the compliance rate won't be any too high.

If fitting a bump stock makes an otherwise legal gun an illegal machine gun, again, what do we do about the ones already out there. Does turning in a bump stock provide proof of ownership of an illegal machine gun? If so does the 5th amendment excuse anyone from turning one in?

The bump stock was originally approved as an aid to the handicapped to assist them in shooting.* Banning the stocks would then be a violation of the Americans With Disabilities act. Now what?

*Whoever suggested this deserves the Brass Balls Award for extreme chutzpah. Whoever bought off on that argument needs professional looking after. I understand it went down in the O'Bummer administration.

Live By The Pen And The Phone...

...Die by the pen and the phone .

The Clean Power Plan would have had us dependent on windmills, solar panels, dried cow chips, and unicorn farts to power the entire U.S. economy. In return for this, the overall average global temperature would rise .02 deg C less than it would if we lived like Americans.

Gun Law - The Art Of The Deal

You offer to trade something you have no particular use for for something you actually want. Case in point is the NRA weighing in on the post-Vegas panic and offering to not object if the ATF puts a ban on bump stocks if the congress will get off its collective dead ass and give us CCW reciprocity.

A nice trade if we can get it.

The problem here is that the ATF can polish their apple with nothing but a rule-making memo, but the congress can't agree on the color of the sky given only 6 months to debate it.

New Word For The Dictionary - Twitzkrieg

Ex: “the months-long twitzkrieg between North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and Donald Trump.”

Found in a Post by Eugene Volokh

What They Think Of You

"They" being the general public, and "you" being you, a representative of the general public.

Here's a graphic from a Cato institute survey of peoples attitudes on the topic of financial regulation.

The message here is that the left has no faith in their fellow man, but an overwhelming urge to help him out. To my observation, the lack of faith is abundantly justified, I just find my sympathy quotient dropping rapidly in proportion to the degree to which my fellow mans problems are self-inflicted.

The article is well worth reading and I note that a lot of mistaken ideas are laid at the feet of inadequate economic education. With a minimal exposure to the basics of economics, a lot of the "crises" would be eliminated before they even had a chance to get started. OTOH, the education system, being primarily controlled by Marxists, would be in a position to fail us horribly by teaching  that when properly run, socialism works.

Good Government

Yeah, I know it's kind of an oxymoron. Sometimes though you have to envy the tinpot dictator who, upon identifying a problem, can call in his head of internal security and hand him a short list of names, maybe only one or two, and send him off knowing that the problem children on the list will not be bothering him tomorrow. Next item will be sending out notifications to a couple of trustworthy and competent underlings of their promotions, effective tomorrow.

The IRS, for example, seems to be in need of some shaking up. I mean, would you select Equifax to manage taxpayer IDs? Just be careful next year when you're doing your taxes. The real addresses to which you send the checks have not changed. Do not send anything to an IRS collection center in Nigeria, Indonesia, or North Korea.

Pundit Proposes Jim Crow Gun Control

Steven Miller, writing (where else) at the Wa Po is calling for more gun control in the form of an approval process last seen in the late 1800's in the deep south. He even imagines strong support for this among Republicans:

Since 1972, a majority of Republicans have supported a law that would require a police permit for a gun purchase.

The original version of this required police permission to acquire a pistol with qualifications including "good reason" and "good character." These laws lingered on the books into the 1960s and were widely understood to mean that people of color would NOT get any kind of permit at all, as they were commonly thought to be lacking in the character department, and their idea of good cause would result in creating a hostile work environment for the boys in the white sheets.

 My favorite charts are the ones showing "Simulated probability of support" against political orientation. It is widely known that a good Power Point presentation with lots of charts and graphs is the definition of irrefutable evidence so I guess that's settled, at least in the WaPo building.

As an afterthought, I'm hearing that the Vegas shooter also owned 2 airplanes. Think what he could have done by putting a couple of small bombs in the back seats of a Cessna 172 and crashing it into the crowd.

Las Vegas - Can't Catch A Break

Looks like the left can't catch a break even when things look like they're finally going their way. Big mass shooting? Check. Shooter a white guy (finally)? Check. Shooter used a fully automatic weapon? Check.

Now things start to fall apart. ISIS is claiming he's a Muslim, but no confirmation yet. If he is, the story begins to fall apart since you can't criticize a Muslim for practicing his religion. Ban automatic weapons? Mostly already done what with Federally required paperwork and extensive background checks required. He either got the gun legally, which means the system flatly doesn't work, or he got it illegally, which means the same thing.

The concert venue was a gun-free zone, but with the shooter several hundred yards away, that would be of no import.

Hillary is screaming that a silencer would have covered the gunshots completely but the video I saw featured the crack of supersonic bullets echoing off the surrounding buildings which would have been clearly audible anyway.

Nothing known about the shooter yet, but historically the way to bet is that he's some sort of lefty.

QOTD - Puerto Rico

From Raconteur Report w/ H/T to Peter Grant:

Calling it an island of lazy dumbasses run by a Democrat kleptocracy isn't racial profiling, it's predictive modeling based on decades of experience.

The main thing Puerto Rico brings to the table is the ability to make the District of Columbia, or Venezuela, look like well-run entities by contrast.

Click the links and read the articles.

Future Of Transportation - Smart

Ashes to ashes, and recycled pop bottles to body panels:

Several lawyers are attempting to represent the squirrel.

Mad Science

The "Buzzed Brainstorming" program at the Denver Startup week was fun and generally well received, featuring Dr. Jim Gunderson, founder of Gamma 2 robotics, John Morse, owner of DuBach Tool, Gerald Bohmer, retired, and myself. Being on stage playing a Mad Scientist with someone who holds a doctorate in a scientific field is a great way to make you feel like the kid in grade school whose lunch consisted of paint chip sandwiches, but oh well.

Suggested solutions to various problems included using the cooling pads in an evaporative cooler as root matrix for either tomato plants or coffee trees, a modification of Elon Musk's Hyperlink as a transport system from every house in town to the town landfill, and a proposal for a completely self-contained office cube that recycled everything and produced unlimited coffee for the occupant.

As advertised: Half-baked answers to half-baked questions. My only complaint was that we were scheduled as the very last presentation of the week and most of the attendees had already begun heading out. The official farewell social event is on Thursday night so anything on Friday tends to be rather an afterthought.

Oh well, as we say: "Bwahaha! Fools! I'll destroy you all!"

Denver Startup Week

The convention this week for entrepreneurial types is quite the shindig:

DENVER STARTUP WEEK BREAKS ATTENDANCE RECORD!

More than 17,500 people have registered to attend Denver Startup Week this year continuing to solidify our standing as the largest - and best - free entrepreneurial event of its kind in North America!

I've been to a couple of the presentations so far and found them quite informative. Go here for the event schedule and select the day you want. Better yet, scroll down through the remaining days and see if there isn't something that interests you.

Headquarters is at the Champa Commons building, and the events are held in meeting rooms, cafes, and corporate cafeterias all over downtown. Large parts of downtown are under construction, and parking is pricey so the best approach is to use the public transport to get as close as you can to your event and walk from there. I'm observing large numbers of scooters chained to the bicycle racks and after hoofing it 6 or 8 blocks, this looks like the way to go. The drizzle we've been having is not normal, and even then, it's only light drizzle. Bringing a bicycle would also work although I recommend a super sized lock that encompasses BOTH wheels and the frame. Bring your seat with you when you go in if it's any better than average. The beggars there have very light fingers.

Also on Friday:

Buzzed Brainstorming with Tipsy Technologists from The Denver Mad Scientists

Popular

Friday 9/29

4:00pm — 5:30pm

174 attending

Propose your hair brained idea and witness the making of an original design sketch by a real, live, Mad Scientist. The Denver Mad Scientists are an underground club of Makers who have appeared on Mythbusters in addition to Maker Faires, Makezine, and Mile High Con while also involved in general shenanigans throughout the Denver area. Join us to see if you can 'Stump the Chump' with your idea, however whimsical or practical, and walk away with a head full of ideas and possibly a new way of thinking.

This is my event, with 2 or 3 other "Mad Scientists" we will be offering possibly humorous solutions to your problems. Be there or be square.