Wednesday, July 29, 2015
Hat Tip
To Double Nickle Farm for the image in the previous post. Because idiot phone won't let me insert that in the post, and laptop doesn't want to communicate with the web.
Sunday, July 26, 2015
Saturday, July 25, 2015
No Bangety. Sigh.
Took the Savage Mark II rifle. Got a scope. Got scope mounted. Ran to the range to try new scope out. Stapled cardboard and target onto frame. Hiked frame down the range. Hiked myself back up. Opened rifle case and... Did I mention that I was painting numbers on my magazines the other night and left them laying out on the hassock downstairs to dry?
Thursday, July 23, 2015
July 23, 1944
That would be the date that the forces of the Soviet Union liberated the Majdanek concentration camp near Lublin, Poland, the first of many that they would enter as Nazi Germany fell. Efforts were made by the Nazis to destroy the evidence of their death camps, but they were forced out so quickly that too much evidence was left behind. And many in the world were horrified. Piles of belongings systematically taken from camp victims. Tons of hair. Piles of dead. Walking, empty-eyed skeletons. Enough evidence that some were hanged after Nuremburg. Enough that some are still being taken to trial and convicted of crimes 70 years later.
The world had been warned - there had been voices crying in the wilderness. But by and large the world had ignored the warnings because it could not believe that such a thing was happening. It could not comprehend the levels of brutality accepted by the Reich and those who, in one way or another, accepted and followed it. This despite that fact that the Allied countries were themselves not far distant from another evil, slavery, that is born out of and sustained by exactly the same core belief that fueled what became known as the Holocaust. The belief that some human beings aren't quite human enough. And if they aren't quite human enough some argument can be made for their disposal, their unwilling disposition.
Recently, videos have revealed that Planned Parenthood not only deals in the body parts of aborted human beings but that they can even offer a "less crunchy" method of dismemberment so as to ensure less damage of the body parts they are providing. Body parts, of course, requiring a fairly advanced level of development. Human body parts, of course, requiring a human. None of this surprises me. Nor would it surprise me if the supporters of Planned Parenthood stopped reading right here. I can guarantee that Planned Parenthood isn't the only one trafficking in the body parts of those they kill. Nor does the cavalier, casual way in which it is discussed between sips of wine and bites of food surprise me. It's to be expected. We've seen this over and over in the history of the world. First, declare someone not quite human. Then do what you will with them. With proper rationalization, of course. See the Wansee Conference for one of many parallels.
Nobody who calls themselves pro-choice can be made uncomfortable by these videos as they are released. In reality, I don't believe they will watch them anyway. To do so might cause discomfort and require serious contemplation and reflection and we are in too much of a mass media, bread and circuses environment for that to happen. The preference for the comfortable will take priority. But also there is the fact that if a human being is not being killed in an abortion then there is no more reason to be bothered by it than there is to be bothered by the package of chicken livers that one picks up at the local grocery store. If it's not a human being and not your household pet then it's just meat, no different from the roast or wings housed in a cooler.
If, on the other hand, it is not just meat, then what is it? No magic happens at some point between conception and birth. The same chromosomes - half from the mother, half from the father - and the same biology exists for 9 months. And for every month after. It's just a matter of development. A unique entity appears at conception, first dependent on and nourished by just the mother, then dependent on and nourished by both mother and father. X and or Y chromosomes combining to form an entity carrying various characteristics of both parents. Nothing about that changes at any point from the moment of conception to the moment of death. There is no person alive or dead who can prove that that changes. The only thing that is proved as time goes on is how amazing a developing human being is.
In order to support abortion under any name, one of two things has to happen. Either "humaness" has to be denied or it has to be accepted that a human being who has never committed a crime and cannot defend itself can be killed. And that is the exact pathology that has allowed slavery, lynchings, the Third Reich, and countless other evils to flourish and grow. It always will. The pro-choice person is no more than the "good German" who, while perhaps not entirely accepting the extremes of the Reich, accepted that Jews were not quite human and possibly were a problem. Those people were otherwise kind and giving. They went to church, they brought a sick neighbor a casserole, they socialized and they looked after one another's children. They lived in the proximity of death camps and maybe even made a little money on the side selling produce from their farms for the commandant's table. They had a vague feeling that if someone was in Dachau they deserved to be there and then they went about their lives. Because doing otherwise was unthinkable. And hard. The pro-choice person is the Yankee who would never consider owning a slave and yet feels that plantation owners have a right to their own property.
Since not a single pro-choice person can verify the instant a human being magically appears, a pro-choice person, no matter what they say, has to accept that no human being exists until birth. That particularly onerous opinion does exist in the pro-choice community and is demonstrated in partial birth abortion. Yet there is zero evidence to support one time or another as far as when a human life begins if it does not begin at conception. Without anything to back it up, it's just a matter of personal opinion. If human life, despite the evidence of biology, only begins at some middle time, then that time is tied to a clock that is tied to exact instant of conception and to a capability for a measurement of time that we don't have. For a pro-choice person, human life isn't tied to any science - it's tied to personal feeling. For human life to be defined at some x along the developmental way, that x has to be defined to the tiniest, most infinitesimal fraction of time. An instant on the wrong side of that time and a human being is dead. In a sane world, this is ludicrous. In the pro-choice world, it is fine. A member of a jury is required to only convict when there is no reasonable doubt. A pro-choice person not only convicts but hands out a death sentence thousands of times a day from deep within the shadows of doubt and personal opinion.
And there lies slavery. There lies the Final Solution. There lies Hutus and Tutsis. There lies the millions dead under Stalin and Mao and Pol Pot. It is exactly the same evil: insidious, comforting for those that accept it, normalized. Promoted as progress and freedom. And funded under the name of the Reich, the Glorious Revolution, Planned Parenthood. All the born of the same idea - some are not human enough to not be expendable.
I don't expect anyone who calls themselves pro-choice to have finished reading this. It will have made them too uncomfortable. Or, if they do get this far their sense of superiority will be outraged and they will call me names, condemn me. They are part of a clique, surrounded by waves of media and persons with whom they feel comfortable, and any challenge to that will make them angry and frustrated. At the very best they will call me divisive. Many will deride opinions such as mine as stupid, ignorant, anti-woman, etc., because they cannot address the core arguments. And those who at minimum call me divisive will continue to congregate where they feel safe. If they contemplate otherwise they run the risk of being themselves called divisive and their comfortable community and the approbation of such as John Stewart are too much to risk for them.
They also have an advantage. They will never in this life have to look into the eyes of the victims whose deaths they supported and justify themselves. It's all very neat and distant and clinically described for the pro-choice community. After the Ohrdruf labor camp was liberated in April of 1945, General Walton Walker began the practice of making local civilians view the death camps, made them face up to what they had allowed and supported. Very very few supporters of abortion will ever have to do that in this life. They will oppose pain capable laws but never, ever interact with a survivor of abortion, despite the fact that there are thousands in this country alone who have survived that horrific, agonizing, and sometimes crippling attempt on their lives. Those who are pro-choice will never look into the eyes of those survivors and tell them why they had to die, why their lives are a mistake. That would require integrity and courage. That would require the admission that the they, those that call themselves pro-choice, are exactly the same as those neatly dressed middle-class citizens who stand looking at a pile of bodies of those who weren't quite human enough. That sort of integrity and honesty doesn't exist in the pro-choice community. It's much too frightening.
The world had been warned - there had been voices crying in the wilderness. But by and large the world had ignored the warnings because it could not believe that such a thing was happening. It could not comprehend the levels of brutality accepted by the Reich and those who, in one way or another, accepted and followed it. This despite that fact that the Allied countries were themselves not far distant from another evil, slavery, that is born out of and sustained by exactly the same core belief that fueled what became known as the Holocaust. The belief that some human beings aren't quite human enough. And if they aren't quite human enough some argument can be made for their disposal, their unwilling disposition.
Recently, videos have revealed that Planned Parenthood not only deals in the body parts of aborted human beings but that they can even offer a "less crunchy" method of dismemberment so as to ensure less damage of the body parts they are providing. Body parts, of course, requiring a fairly advanced level of development. Human body parts, of course, requiring a human. None of this surprises me. Nor would it surprise me if the supporters of Planned Parenthood stopped reading right here. I can guarantee that Planned Parenthood isn't the only one trafficking in the body parts of those they kill. Nor does the cavalier, casual way in which it is discussed between sips of wine and bites of food surprise me. It's to be expected. We've seen this over and over in the history of the world. First, declare someone not quite human. Then do what you will with them. With proper rationalization, of course. See the Wansee Conference for one of many parallels.
Nobody who calls themselves pro-choice can be made uncomfortable by these videos as they are released. In reality, I don't believe they will watch them anyway. To do so might cause discomfort and require serious contemplation and reflection and we are in too much of a mass media, bread and circuses environment for that to happen. The preference for the comfortable will take priority. But also there is the fact that if a human being is not being killed in an abortion then there is no more reason to be bothered by it than there is to be bothered by the package of chicken livers that one picks up at the local grocery store. If it's not a human being and not your household pet then it's just meat, no different from the roast or wings housed in a cooler.
If, on the other hand, it is not just meat, then what is it? No magic happens at some point between conception and birth. The same chromosomes - half from the mother, half from the father - and the same biology exists for 9 months. And for every month after. It's just a matter of development. A unique entity appears at conception, first dependent on and nourished by just the mother, then dependent on and nourished by both mother and father. X and or Y chromosomes combining to form an entity carrying various characteristics of both parents. Nothing about that changes at any point from the moment of conception to the moment of death. There is no person alive or dead who can prove that that changes. The only thing that is proved as time goes on is how amazing a developing human being is.
In order to support abortion under any name, one of two things has to happen. Either "humaness" has to be denied or it has to be accepted that a human being who has never committed a crime and cannot defend itself can be killed. And that is the exact pathology that has allowed slavery, lynchings, the Third Reich, and countless other evils to flourish and grow. It always will. The pro-choice person is no more than the "good German" who, while perhaps not entirely accepting the extremes of the Reich, accepted that Jews were not quite human and possibly were a problem. Those people were otherwise kind and giving. They went to church, they brought a sick neighbor a casserole, they socialized and they looked after one another's children. They lived in the proximity of death camps and maybe even made a little money on the side selling produce from their farms for the commandant's table. They had a vague feeling that if someone was in Dachau they deserved to be there and then they went about their lives. Because doing otherwise was unthinkable. And hard. The pro-choice person is the Yankee who would never consider owning a slave and yet feels that plantation owners have a right to their own property.
Since not a single pro-choice person can verify the instant a human being magically appears, a pro-choice person, no matter what they say, has to accept that no human being exists until birth. That particularly onerous opinion does exist in the pro-choice community and is demonstrated in partial birth abortion. Yet there is zero evidence to support one time or another as far as when a human life begins if it does not begin at conception. Without anything to back it up, it's just a matter of personal opinion. If human life, despite the evidence of biology, only begins at some middle time, then that time is tied to a clock that is tied to exact instant of conception and to a capability for a measurement of time that we don't have. For a pro-choice person, human life isn't tied to any science - it's tied to personal feeling. For human life to be defined at some x along the developmental way, that x has to be defined to the tiniest, most infinitesimal fraction of time. An instant on the wrong side of that time and a human being is dead. In a sane world, this is ludicrous. In the pro-choice world, it is fine. A member of a jury is required to only convict when there is no reasonable doubt. A pro-choice person not only convicts but hands out a death sentence thousands of times a day from deep within the shadows of doubt and personal opinion.
And there lies slavery. There lies the Final Solution. There lies Hutus and Tutsis. There lies the millions dead under Stalin and Mao and Pol Pot. It is exactly the same evil: insidious, comforting for those that accept it, normalized. Promoted as progress and freedom. And funded under the name of the Reich, the Glorious Revolution, Planned Parenthood. All the born of the same idea - some are not human enough to not be expendable.
I don't expect anyone who calls themselves pro-choice to have finished reading this. It will have made them too uncomfortable. Or, if they do get this far their sense of superiority will be outraged and they will call me names, condemn me. They are part of a clique, surrounded by waves of media and persons with whom they feel comfortable, and any challenge to that will make them angry and frustrated. At the very best they will call me divisive. Many will deride opinions such as mine as stupid, ignorant, anti-woman, etc., because they cannot address the core arguments. And those who at minimum call me divisive will continue to congregate where they feel safe. If they contemplate otherwise they run the risk of being themselves called divisive and their comfortable community and the approbation of such as John Stewart are too much to risk for them.
They also have an advantage. They will never in this life have to look into the eyes of the victims whose deaths they supported and justify themselves. It's all very neat and distant and clinically described for the pro-choice community. After the Ohrdruf labor camp was liberated in April of 1945, General Walton Walker began the practice of making local civilians view the death camps, made them face up to what they had allowed and supported. Very very few supporters of abortion will ever have to do that in this life. They will oppose pain capable laws but never, ever interact with a survivor of abortion, despite the fact that there are thousands in this country alone who have survived that horrific, agonizing, and sometimes crippling attempt on their lives. Those who are pro-choice will never look into the eyes of those survivors and tell them why they had to die, why their lives are a mistake. That would require integrity and courage. That would require the admission that the they, those that call themselves pro-choice, are exactly the same as those neatly dressed middle-class citizens who stand looking at a pile of bodies of those who weren't quite human enough. That sort of integrity and honesty doesn't exist in the pro-choice community. It's much too frightening.
Tuesday, July 14, 2015
Swapping Old For New
I've been carrying a Glock 19. I'm not the best shot with it but since I've retired I've been trying to get to the range to practice a lot more. And reloading makes ammo for that practice a whole lot cheaper. There's nothing wrong with the Glock and I like their reputation for taking a beating and for being able to shoot mud if that's what you loaded it with. The problem has been that my hands and it don't fit exactly right. I can't work the magazine or slide release buttons without rotating the gun in my hand. No quick mag changes for me.
So I've been thinking about another carry gun. Actually, I think about a lot of guns, but carry is first priority. I've looked and handled when I've been in a few shops, but nothing felt right until I came across a Kahr CW9 last week while I was wandering around Virginia:
And it felt just right.
So I bought it. And suffered a major disappointment right then. Different state. I couldn't take my new toy home right then. It had to be shipped into this state. Fah.
I was finally able to pick it up today, and I went right to the range with it. Note that I've never bought a new gun before. I've always bought used. So I did not know that they ship dry. Sigh. Jams, failure to feed. I did manage to test the feel of the gun, even with manually ejecting each round. I love it. And I don't have to rotate the gun to hit the release buttons.
The three furthest out on the top and the lowest left one were after my hands were getting tired of working a very stiff slide with sweat pouring off me.
So I switched to the Glock. It's going to become my beside-the-bed gun. The difference between triggers was funny. The Kahr has a longer pull. The Glock went bang before I expected it to. Still not the best shot with it, although I was getting better by the time I ran out of ammo. At least I settled into a consistency that tore a hole in the target towards the end. The hole just isn't quite where I want it. And I did feel better that I improved and pulled more toward the center as time went on.
Thoroughly dehydrated and out of ammo, it was time to go home and clean guns. The new gun being a bit of a mystery to me even though they gave me a demo at the shop when I bought it. So I watched a video and set to it. It was a bit of a challenge at first, but I finally got it stripped, cleaned, and oiled and started the reassembly. Easy peasy. Except for the recoil spring. You probably know this, but the Glock recoil spring and rod looks like this:
A Kahr spring extends half again beyond the end of the rod. And that spring just didn't want to go no how no way. Fight fight fight cuss cuss cuss. Grumbling text sent to Murphy's Law with this picture:
His reply: "You're putting it in backwards." Sigh. He didn't guffaw but he did snicker. And yes, yes, it does go in much easier when you do it in correctly. And then reassembles really quick.
So I'm very happy. Except I want to go right back out and shoot it again. With, you know, oiled parts this time. I tried to end the cleaning session with the troublesome Glock magazines but my hands were tired and sore and as easy as the videos make it look I was having no success in getting the base plates off. Then I did some reading and apparently you often need a third hand to do it. So I'm done right now, watching "Adam 12", and anxiously waiting for the range to open again.
So I've been thinking about another carry gun. Actually, I think about a lot of guns, but carry is first priority. I've looked and handled when I've been in a few shops, but nothing felt right until I came across a Kahr CW9 last week while I was wandering around Virginia:
And it felt just right.
So I bought it. And suffered a major disappointment right then. Different state. I couldn't take my new toy home right then. It had to be shipped into this state. Fah.
I was finally able to pick it up today, and I went right to the range with it. Note that I've never bought a new gun before. I've always bought used. So I did not know that they ship dry. Sigh. Jams, failure to feed. I did manage to test the feel of the gun, even with manually ejecting each round. I love it. And I don't have to rotate the gun to hit the release buttons.
The three furthest out on the top and the lowest left one were after my hands were getting tired of working a very stiff slide with sweat pouring off me.
So I switched to the Glock. It's going to become my beside-the-bed gun. The difference between triggers was funny. The Kahr has a longer pull. The Glock went bang before I expected it to. Still not the best shot with it, although I was getting better by the time I ran out of ammo. At least I settled into a consistency that tore a hole in the target towards the end. The hole just isn't quite where I want it. And I did feel better that I improved and pulled more toward the center as time went on.
Thoroughly dehydrated and out of ammo, it was time to go home and clean guns. The new gun being a bit of a mystery to me even though they gave me a demo at the shop when I bought it. So I watched a video and set to it. It was a bit of a challenge at first, but I finally got it stripped, cleaned, and oiled and started the reassembly. Easy peasy. Except for the recoil spring. You probably know this, but the Glock recoil spring and rod looks like this:
A Kahr spring extends half again beyond the end of the rod. And that spring just didn't want to go no how no way. Fight fight fight cuss cuss cuss. Grumbling text sent to Murphy's Law with this picture:
His reply: "You're putting it in backwards." Sigh. He didn't guffaw but he did snicker. And yes, yes, it does go in much easier when you do it in correctly. And then reassembles really quick.
So I'm very happy. Except I want to go right back out and shoot it again. With, you know, oiled parts this time. I tried to end the cleaning session with the troublesome Glock magazines but my hands were tired and sore and as easy as the videos make it look I was having no success in getting the base plates off. Then I did some reading and apparently you often need a third hand to do it. So I'm done right now, watching "Adam 12", and anxiously waiting for the range to open again.
Friday, July 3, 2015
Ah. Now I Get It.
I'd heard that Michigan has 3 seasons: winter, construction, and fish fly. I've finally experienced all 3.
