Planes!

Okay for a brief overview this bit on 25 WW2 airplanes is rather nice.

Well if you're looking for US airplanes.

Remember.... after a lethal force encounter your actions will be judged by...

People who were not there and have the luxury of time and hindsight.

And by people who will willfully play an Orwellian two step.

 Instead, the majority ruled that Cornish is responsible for his own death, because according to police, he should have known that they were the police when he attacked them with a sheathed knife, and his act of knowingly attacking the police after they had entered his home supersedes their failure to knock and announce. It is an utterly absurd ruling. Police don’t raid homes at 4:30 a.m, with battering rams in order to let suspects know that they’re the police. They raid homes at 4:30 a.m. with battering rams for the very purpose of disorienting and confusing suspects so that they can take them by surprise. You can’t simultaneously argue that confusing and disorienting a suspect is necessary to protect the safety of police officers, and that the same suspect you’re trying to confuse and disorient should be able to wake from a sleep, process what’s going on around him, immediately discern that the armed men who have just broken into his home are police serving a warrant and not criminals there to do him harm, and that should he make an error in judgment, he alone is responsible for the consequences — whether it’s the end of his own life, or his killing, or the injuring of one of the police officers.

Actually, it may not be logically consistent, but you can make both arguments. The police do it all the time. And the courts back them up.

But it’s even worse than all of that. It’s one thing to say a career criminal or major drug distributor should be aware of the possibility that he might be raided by the police. But if you’re a low-level offender — or an innocent person raided by mistake — there’s even less reason to immediately assume that the armed intruders in your home are cops.

Read the rest of the link for an interesting discussion on the history of warrant service and castle doctrine.  And of course on the Drug War and "Looking tough on crime".

Analog Computers.

Just take a gander at the 1964 PACE TR-48.

Fully transistorized and also mobile! That is if you get a cart to wheel the beast around in.

I remember having some far, far smaller versions that were used for a class I TA'd for back in grad-school.   The lad module had the students using electric analog computers to simulate flows through various pipes and such.

Wow... not only is that a lazy hack job, but it's an angry one.

So someone went to a Honduran city and found it all icky anarchy and used it as a rant against libertarian philosophy.  


Wow... amazing how there's so much bile and anger but so few of it is simply "libertarian"  and more of a poor Central & South American nation.

Also it's interesting to see that frequent obscenity use is in line with  Salon's editorial standards.  But I guess ranting about "libertarian bullshit" was more important than pointing to actual...  laws and policies that are libertarian.

And then there's a lot of teeth gnashing about all the guns and armed guards  when the gun laws in Honduras are...  kinda strict.  Okay they could be a lot worse... but so many of the guns described in the writer's travelogue would be... illegal.

As for the government....  that doesn't sound exactly libertarian.

And as for the city itself... its problems seem to be due to drug gangs.  Is the argument that the municipal government decided to declare the city "open" and stop enforcement of laws?

Because why have the police use pickup trucks with machine guns? But fine, a bunch of illegal arms trade and even more illegal drug trade.  Oh those wacky Libertarians.

Oh but the real sin is see...  the rich can make gated communities with their own private security and walls... which... is really common in South America.  In fact so common that it's been written in multiple scholarly papers.


Huh,  okay...  rampant crime, a sky high murder rate,  crazy gaps between the haves and have nots, and a corrupt government incapable of providing basic services...

So...  by this writer's standards  Venezuela would be an example of Libertarian governance failing.

Or Mexico....

Added: And as a bonus, the person who smugly gave me this link is, himself, very much anti Drug War and would prefer a... libertarian solution to that problem.  But that shouldn't be too surprising as this fellow is also very anti police but is for gun control, including things like May Issue. And for the hat trick he's also against rich people getting special rights... while openly stating that in his Massachusetts town only the connected assholes can get carry permits...

Bloomberg: Support me and I'll campaign against you! and Why I'll never Go back to New Jersey Part CC

From  Sebastian's news links for Today.

Also a bonus of MDA being just plain insane.

Moms Demand Action’s war on women: Against allowing expedited permit processing for women under active threat from a stalker or in an abusive relationship.

Boomberg has been smearing Scott Walker by pointing out he once supported a gun control bill. You know things are bad for the other side when they try to cause problems for politicians for supporting their bills!

Good guy with a gun saves lives in a Philadelphia barber shop. 

New Jersey claims yet another innocent victim with their gun laws. This keeps happening because New Jersey’s gun laws entrap innocent people by design. It’s a way of rigging the law so easy and routine mistakes are felonies, and they can still look down on you smugly for thinking they are after your guns.
 

I mean does MDA even know how that action looks?    I mean they don't have to oppose every gun rights bill that comes up.  They can just be quiet about the ones that are... difficult to go against.

Also great incentives Bloomberg is giving here.  So basically he's saying to Republican candidates "Don't support any gun control ever, or we'll use it against you!"  Huh...

And New Jersey is an awful place.  And really I see that as a more ample definition of Kafkatrapping, than the more colloquial one.

Defamation law: Quick Nuts and Bolts.

Popehat goes into some details on what is and what is not Defamation.

Interesting stuff.  Such as how the "expected audience" is determined or who decides if a statement is intended as opinion or fact.

Spring Cleaning

Welp, it's gotten warm and time to do some work.

I think a lot of it comes from being able to pull up the blinds and open the windows.

All of a suden all this natural light and fresh air comes in.

Still gotta check a sparkplug on my mower.

Craked on police corruption.... easy on the corruption.

So...   Cracked has an article entitled 6 Things I Did as a Cop in a Shockingly Corrupt Small Town
Alternate url title: 6-things-i-learned-broke-police-force-in-lawless-town.html

And what's interesting is that only two of the six are corruption.  And one is really a subset of the other.  Course when you decide to lump everything into #3 You'll Witness a Whole New Level of Corruption...  your quiver is kind of empty.

What's interesting is that ahead of it is an entry that talks about this:

Unemployment in Scott County has always been rampant, meaning that many of the residents there were on some kind of government assistance. So every first and third week of the month, when the welfare checks come in: Happy Domestic Disturbance Day! Families would get into fistfights because dad went out and spent most of the money on heroin and was now refusing to share it (and what example is that for the kids?). The ends of each month were even more brutal. That's when all the money and drugs ran out.

Well...  is this PC because it's southern rural people who are on the dole and causing crimes related to said dole?

And amusingly the list is also light on stuff the officer did himself.   Ah well.


Though the amusing part is that... with one sheriff's election the whole department turned around.  So an easier clean sweep than big municipal departments with very entrenched special interests.

Oh, as a time-capsule bonus there's a joke about waiting periods for gun purchases. How quaint.

Deodands, Poor Statistics, and Gun Running Oh My!

So what happens when a Gun Control Group Opens their own gun shop...  without an FFL...  in New York City....

Thirdpower has the story.

And yes, the antis are insinuating that "every gun has a history" that is all guns will kill.

And also shows that even New York city's handgun laws are not strict enough.  

Well... unless you go for the David Gregory exemption...   Seriously,  that either has to be all staged with fake guns or....  the Joyce foundation did a boatload of felonies...

Wooden bullets!

Okay... technically wood-core aluminum plated bullets.

Also a real neat takedown.

Gutters....

So with spring upon us....   it's time to check your gutters,  especially if any filled with ice over winter and started to leak or pull away from the roof.

Orb!

A neat V22 pic

Kickin up a lot of dust in this one.

Wait... that's *her* defense?

So...  former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's defense of the whole "never use official email and setup my own personal private server" is to admit she's deleted lots of messages  announce that she'll never hand the server over but no worries there's no classified information on it.

I'm not sure what's worse... the idea that the Secretary of State never *once* got classified info electronically...  or that her defense of this was that she could not handle having more than one email address.

And the freaky part was that this was Hillary's own defense from her own mouth.  And we're not even getting into such lazy lies like claiming she can't handle multiple devices when an interview a couple weeks ago talked about her being a pack rat with smart phones and apple stuff.

Ready for Hillary indeed.

But hey, I'm sure with  even more political power she'll be much more transparent and responsible.

Drug war: Yeah.... that's about right...

Cracked talks to a CI (confidential informant, commonly known as a "snitch") about what it's like "busting punks"


It ends with

And ... that's pretty much the most succinct summary of the War on Drugs you'll ever find. The police are tasked with eradicating drug use. So they arrest drug users, use them to bust dealers, and pay the users enough money to continue their addiction, thus helping to fund more drug dealers. The wheels of drug commerce keep turning unabated, everyone getting their cut along the way, no one with any motivation to actually solve the problem. But hey, at least we get a lot of good TV shows out of it.

Course the drug war gets even uglier...

Now that's a different Mauser

Interesting how a lot of early 45 acp pistols were so very large.

Top Ten Jump Jets

Have a list of planes that don't need (much) runway.

I'm actually a bit surprised there's 10 examples of the class....

And the number of German planes.  Though really I shouldn't be surprised at that.

Lorenzoni Repeating Flintlock Pistol

Now that's a neat piece of machinework.

And to belabor the point...  note that it's a 7 shot... flintlock.

Glocks for the USMC?

At least for MARSOC, at least according to Strategypage.

Also an interesting article on the state of the M9.  And the desire for a more "modern" (despite the Glock 19 being a 30 year old design... but it's all relative) handgun design.

Another thing to keep in mind when the article goes on about the weakness of the 9mm versus the 45 is that the US Military doesn't use hollow-points.

Take that away and pistol calibers, already quite weak relative to rifle calibers,  get even less effective...  and in that little-people height contest  45 acp does get further ahead of the 9.

About those Hillary! emails...

Anyone else find it amusing that when faced with a government-provided service Hillary Clinton went with the private option?

Even though said private option (using private email for official business) was actually illegal.  And something Ambassadors have been fired over...

Course we know why she did it, but the interest of avoiding divulging those emails to US citizens, poor security procedures may have made it easier for...  others to get those documents.

But hey, it's not like the official correspondence of the Secretary of State would be a prime target for SIGINT. Especially when said Secretary of State has... ambitions.

Well, hopefully there's nothing incriminating in those emails.

Seriously....

Man the presidential field really is the Island of Misfit Toys.

Mars Pistols

Now that's a weird gun.   That it's long recoil is the start of the strangeness.

It's also evidence that there's nothing new under the sun when it comes to cartridge arms.

Cracked on Caracas

An interesting article written by a resident on how messed up the sky-high crime rate is in that city (and the rest of Venezuela) and the effects it has.

Though as your read it you'll note a couple things that the article leaves out which loom heavily in the reader's mind.  Namely the state (even just competence) of the Venezuelian government and that guns are banned in Venezuela.

But hey, at least the article isn't blaming the country's woes on the US.

I'm particularly amused by how at the end of one page the writer finishes with:

So why in the world does Caracas seem to have more criminals than Gotham City? The answer is complicated, but ...

And then in the next page proceeds to talk about a different subject (Namely that criminals aren't you you expect!), and not actually answer the question.  Which is odd because the writer was the one to bring the issue up...

A neat experiment.

This experiment is setup to simultaneously show light acting as a wave and particle.

Clever and elegant experimental apparatus that.

"Didn't we decide it was a bad idea for you to..."

"... mumble 'I have not choice' while locking yourself in a room with spellbooks?  And now there's weird and arcane lights shining under the door!"

From this Sluggy Freelance comic.   I suppose an alternative title could be "Poor life choices".

I remember reading Sluggy years ago,  and I remember getting bored with its kudzu plot and drifting off in a lack of interest.

Nice to see it can still be funny while having some semblance of character arcs.

And here's another comic from that arc that made me chuckle.