Global Warming

Right Wing News has an excerpt of an article highly critical of global warming.
Go here, and see a summary of an article in Physics and Society, a learned journal of the 10,000-strong American Physical Society, containing what is described as mathematical proof that the underlying theory behind AGW is baloney.
Bottom line; AGW is bunk. Imagine my surprise.
I wonder if the candidates will consider waffling a bit on their positions regarding taxing and regulating us out of this non-problem.

Squirrel Gun

I am become Shiva, destroyer of squirrels.

OK that's probably a bit melodramatic, but you've got to get your victories where you can.
Monday as I'm playing with the dog, I notice that my incipient bumper crop of peaches has been reduced to rather pedestrian pickins. The Squirrels sit in my peach tree and eat the small, hard, green peaches down to the pits, and drop the pits on the lawn in a pile.
I set up the pipe-and-bucket trap last night, and this afternoon I have not one but TWO of the peach-eating little varmints in the bucket. Bag and tag and trash day is Friday morning. I'm impressed with how fast this works.
Wifey-poo says she'll never be able to use that bucket again.
Large, delicious peaches later this year.

Sarkozy to Irish:

"All you dumb Micks get back in the booth, and this time pull the YES lever."

Irish to Sarkozy: "(redacted)"

Me: If the Irish keep this up, my health may suffer from all the toasts I need to drink.

Up the Irish! Saving Europe once a fortnight.

Gun Control Works

Except in Chicago, home of some of the most draconian gun control outside of D.C. where Gov Blagojevich thinks he may need to call in the National Guard to try to slow down the murder rate.

"Blagojevich said there's been a child shot nearly every day since June 26"

Keeping in mind that any gangsta under the age of 21 is a child for statistical purposes.

So how's that Gun control working out again, Rod?

I=phones

Over at Right Side of the Rainbow, which I visit regularly, they're celebrating the opening the box of the new I-phone with the kind of speechless adoration usually reserved for the ceremonial undressing of your prom date.
After all the pomp, stomp, and pictures, I was disappointed to find the thing didn't even come with 2 spare magazines.

CZ-82

Galen and I trotted the CZ 82s out to the range today to try out some reloads. We are using Meister Bullets 93gr RNL bullets, and Hodgdon Titegroup powder. I use Titegroup in my .357 and get good results and economy from it.

There is no specific load data for this bullet for Titegroup powder, although they list data for similar weight jacketed bullets. Available info says that the softer bullets seat better in the elliptically rifled barrel of the CZ, and will generate higher pressures and velocities than jacketed bullets. Other peoples test data bears this out. Hodgdon publishes load data for the 9x18 that calls for generally more powder than we used, but with jacketed bullets, that delivered velocities ranging from 828 to 1053 fps.

We started with a set of bullets loaded to 3.2, 3.4, and 3.6g as well as 2 boxes of S&Bs to use as a baseline. Results as follows:

S&B 95gr JRN Gun #1 Av Vel = 957 Hi=985 Lo 925

S&B 95gr JRN Gun #2 Av Vel= 1017 Hi 1053 Lo=998

Rel#1 93g RNL 3.2g Titegroup Av Vel 1082 Hi=1110 Lo=1065

Rel#2 93g RNL 3.4g Titegroup Av Vel 1177 Hi=1204 Lo=1141

The S&Bs came from 2 different boxes, and were fired in 2 different guns, which may explain the modest discrepancy. The reloads were fired from both guns with one gun consistently delivering 10-30fps greater than the other with the RNL bullets. The figures above are combined averages.

We decided to forgo the 3.6gr rounds, as we had reached our target of 1100 fps with 3.2g of powder. The 3.4 loadings are relegated into the “+P” category, and are not recommended by us. Maybe CZ will have something to say on the topic. Our position is that the 93gr bullets perform quite well at 3.2 g and maybe up to 3.3, but without some kind of official sanction, that’s about it. You could probably load these bullets as low as 2.8 gr, but that’s a test for another day.

The bullets, as expected, leave a bit of lead residue in the barrel, and down the magazine well as well as being noticeably smokier than the jacketed S&Bs. Even so, this is not very much smoke. Experience suggests that half or more of this is the blue grease the bullets come with.

Groupings were consistently at 6” at 30 ft, but I would ascribe this to the shooters rather than the guns, as I’ve seen both of us do 2” groups at that range.

This is what we got today at the range. This disclaimer applies. Not only does it apply, it is not even the half of it.

Global Warming

The actual plan for today is to go to the range and try out the loads we worked up for the CZ 82. I'll have a report on that later. Meantime, as one of my old girlfriends remarked, "The best planned lays of mice and men gang aft agley."

It'll work out, but in the meantime, here's some musical tributes to global warming from a group called M4GW. That's Minnesotans for Global Warming. Very well done parodies from Bare Naked Ladies and John Lennon.

Humor Down Under

Bayou Renaissance Man has a post up about an Aussie TV contest between advertising agencies. The challenge was to produce an ad to sell something unsellable, in this case, the military conquest of New Zealand. Go look, they're great.

The Kiwis reaction ranged from indignant to amused and some proposed an equal time response. For myself, after viewing the first ad, the obvious answer is to begin promoting Kiwi breweries as part of the national defense. If the beaches were lined with cases of beer, the Australian army would be stopped in its tracks at the shoreline, and would probably be abjectly apologetic when brought before local magistrates the next morning on misdemeanor charges of drunk and disorderly, public urination, and the like.

War.
Huh!
What is it good for?
Taking Monday off! Yeah!

Squirrel Gun

I've now gotten 2 of the tree rats with the Squirrel gun I described earlier, just not quite the way I had in mind.

It turns out that if you lean the 4 in barrel against the fence, with peanut butter dabbed in the inside, the rodents will go to such extremes to get it that they will fall down the barrel, and be unable to escape. At this point, you may do with them what you will: Transport them to Siberia, cook them and eat them*, or whatever.
If you put the bottom of the pipe into a 5-gallon bucket of water, you just need to dispose of the bodies. Fitting them with little concrete overshoes and tossing them into the municipal park pond where they can "sleep with the crawdads" is probably more dramatic than is really necessary.

*I bagged an urban squirrel once, and in my familys best hilbilly tradition, cooked it. That old saw about "you are what you eat" is truer than you think. Woods squirrels are a tasty treat. Urban squirrels that feed in the trash cans, taste like it.

CZ-82

The continuing saga. The bullets arrived today. All 35 pounds of them. Wifey-poo even managed to drag the box indoors, wasn't that sweet?
Sometime this weekend, the 4 of us who purchased the CZs will gather in the basement where we will load up some ammo. Topics to be covered will include conversion of 9x19 Luger casings to 9x18 Makarov casings, and exactly how much powder to use. I have some data already, so we're not groping in the dark on that one.
The bullets are round nose lead, and unplated, so we'll see how big a mess they leave in the guns.

Don't worry, Mon

Be happy, mon, have a drink and get back to enjoying life. Booze is Gods way of telling us he wants us to be happy. Just be careful not to OD on the stuff, even if you are an Orthodox Viking.

What’s an Orthodox Viking you ask?

We believe that everything is OK as long as you do it to excess.

Anything worth doing is worth over-doing.

Anything worth shooting once is worth shooting again. And again. And maybe again.

Stuff like that.

The Last Mosque

Dr. Vernon Chong, Major General, USAF, Retired

Has an article on the GWOT, which I got via a newsletter today. Alas, no link to the article itself. The topic is a treatise on how real the war is, and how seriously we should all take it. Here’s a short excerpt:

Muslim terrorists and the U.S.A. :

A different spin on the war in Iraq : This WAR is REAL

To get out of a difficulty, one usually must go through it. Our country is now facing the most serious threat to its existence, as we know it, that we have faced in your lifetime and mine (which includes WWII).

The deadly seriousness is greatly compounded by the fact that there are very few of us who think we can possibly lose this war and even fewer who realize what losing really means.

First, let's examine a few basics:

1 When did the threat to us start?

Many will say September 11, 2001. The answer, as far as the United States is concerned, is 1979, 22 years prior to September 2001, with the following attacks on us:

Wrong!

America’s war with Islam started shortly after we became an independent nation. Up to that point, the Bey of Algiers had been extorting the jizra* from England, France, and several other countries that you would have thought were powerful enough not to have to put up with this kind of blackmail.

When we became independent, England informed the Bey that we were no longer included in the protection payment, and his merry men began taking American ships and cargoes and selling the crews into slavery. Our Secretary of State met with their Ambassador in London to ask why, and was told that the Koran demanded that the infidel be forced to either convert, pay the jizra, or die.

This sparked the "Millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute" speech in congress, and the building of the Constitution and Constellation. To the horror of the Euroweenies, we sailed over there and settled the Beys hash, at not inconsiderable cost to ourselves. We have been at war with Islamists from the beginning, and ever since, on and off.

The rest of the world has been at war with Islam since the 7th century, on and off.

We can hope for an Islamic reformation, of which there are some tentative signs, but being rather cynical, my take is that this will not end until the last mosque is converted into a McDonalds.

* Nice country you got here. Be a shame if anything happened to it.

Blow Up The World

Pictures were taken, and can be viewed here.
The heavy-looking rifle being fired from the tall stand is a 2-ga. 1.312" dia, 1/2 lb of lead per shot.
Regarding my mortar:






Here it is, and it works really well. Here's some info:
1. I built it from a solid billet. Wall thickness is approx equal to bore diameter. Overall diameter is 7".
2. Barrel length is 14 inches. It's as big as I could get on my little lathe.
3. There is a powder pocket in the bottom of the bore. This makes ignition more reliable. It's about 1" deep x 1" dia.
4. Here's a print of a barrel someone else is making. Note the 1" barrel wall thickness.
5. I use a film can (35mm still camera! about 500 gr.) full of ffg powder, with a pop can full of cement. This weighs about 1.5 lb. Works well in a short barrel.
6. This gun, coincidentally, also fits a tennis ball nicely, with no wadding. A tennis ball filled with lead weighs about 6 lb. The recoil from this will break a 1" oak axle.
I build a cannon once from the injection tube from an injection molding machine. It was 4130 or something like it, and hardened. 6' long with a wall of 1.5 inch, as I remember. Worked well, but remember that this was NOT pipe in any sense of the word. More like hydraulic cylinder.
Using modern steels, you want to try to keep the wall thickness to at least half the bore diameter, and keep the loadings modest. These things are for fun, not actual warfare.
Mine uses #11 percussion caps. Yes, they will reach that far.

Obama Throws Self Under Bus

" This is not the Barrack (*) Obama I once knew." he said.

Traffic Report

Here’s a Tam-a-Lanche:

As Sharp as a Marble said; If I could only keep them. I mean, geez, they followed me home.

The hoops I had to jump through to get that chart up there, you'd think a computer would make it easier.