The Ultimate Answer to Kings

This morning I gave up on what I had thought would be a promising location for the game camera, only to learn upon reviewing the mem card that somebody had in fact briefly wandered through. Continue reading →

It’s simple! It’s fun! It’s gear-intensive!

It’s the one place Chuck and Nancy will never look.

I swear I did not make this up.

The Constitution Gives Gun Owners Greater Rights Than Women

Here’s a disturbing fact to consider in 2018, the year women supposedly began to topple the patriarchy: Gun owners in the United States, a majority of whom are men, have better constitutional rights than women.

Gun owners have the Second Amendment, in place since the 18th century. The U.S. is one of only three countries that offer constitutional protection to gun owners.

Women, meanwhile, have been fighting for an equal rights amendment for decades.
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This injustice burns all the more now, in the wake of the Parkland, Florida, shooting, in which a 19-year-old man used an AR-15 to murder 17 people, including 14 high school students.
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Of course, the Second Amendment applies to all Americans. But is there really any doubt that guns are unabashedly, toxically masculine?
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To grown men, guns are marketed as the ultimate safety device, allowing them to protect themselves and, this is crucial, their families ― wives and children ― from danger.

But we know the truth: Women are in greater danger when their partner has a gun.

Et cetera. Guns are bad, men are worse. M’kay?

Probably in all history, given the ways governments have found to use technology to kill their own people.

Could it possibly be, “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun?” And the speaker would be Mao Tse Tung, the smiling psychopath who ruled China for so very long and who, at least in terms of total body count, was the only man alive capable of making Joseph Stalin look like Jimmy Carter by comparison.

Even so it’s about the only Mao quotation I still remember with which I completely agree. Which is why this is so delightfully ironic…

America Should Ban Civilian Guns to Protect Human Rights, Chinese Communist Dictatorship Says Through State-Run Media

“The US has no other choice but to adopt gun control,” [the Chinese propaganda organ] said. “The right of life is the most fundamental human rights. The right to bear arms cannot overpower the individual’s right to live.”

And the Chinese government must know a very great deal about the individual’s right to live, having taken that right from so many tens of millions of unarmed individuals.

This guy brings (what I would certainly hope would prove to be) quietus to that lame bumper sticker sentiment…

Does that mean that this brilliant liberal wants…

– women to be banned from entering school and college campuses?

– women to be banned from any establishment selling alcohol?

– women to be banned from polling places on election days

– women to be banned from any official government group meetings?

– all women to be banned from all airports?

– you have to pay a fee to the state before you can have a woman with you?

– some women to be banned outright simply because they look too scary?

– all women to be locked up at all times that they are not in use?

So…she dreams of being Muslim? Actually I think that’s allowed, if she really wants it. I just don’t understand why she would want it.

You know what a one-legged man looks forward to? Yeah – his other leg going lame on him.

Sweartagod it’s true. Day before yesterday my right knee – which is no virgin, it’s had two surgeries and a bad accident involving a big stainless steel pin – just started hurting really bad whenever I bent it. Didn’t hurt to walk on, particularly. Everything was fine when the leg was straight. But getting up and down stairs and in and out of chairs was a bother. And it kept getting worse until by last night I could barely bend it at all. Which made just taking my boot off an exercise in teeth-gritting pain. No obvious swelling or redness or damage, just pain.

Then this morning it’s much better. Not all better by any means, but better. Arthritis? Gout? I don’t know. Maybe I need to think about that ramp after all.

In eerily coincidental mobility news, I got some bad news yesterday about what’s left of the other leg. In the last care package a friend of the blog enclosed a $100 check with the note, “Buy something you want, not something you need.” I’m sorry not to follow that instruction to the letter but my needs and wants tend to blur together.

I don’t really have a way to process a paper check, which is why the Secret Lair has a financial manager – to whom I handed the check, with the request that it be turned into cash and two suggestions as to how the cash should be spent.

One of those suggestions has been followed, and I’m told the Lair is richer by ten pounds of frozen lean pork. My friend attempted to follow the second suggestion, but came back with an irritated text…

OMG They won’t let me buy them (stump socks). “He needs a referral from his doctor and he has to come in and be evaluated and measured for us to order them.” FOR SOCKS. Jesus, how f’ing ridiculous.

Then after some back and forth concerning work-arounds…

I found a store that sells the stump gel socks online. No problem at all, I’m just … infuriated. “Hey, this guy’s missing a leg, so let’s make his life harder. Because bureaucracy.”

Just in case you thought I’d really found a way to be completely free of it…

Moved the game camera nearer the wash two days ago, in a spot where I still see mule deer.

Turns out nothing much is happening there at present, though…

We’re supposed to be in a warming period now but at present it’s bloody freezing. At least the wind settled down. March is the meanest month. I’m thoroughly sick of winter, have projects I want to get going on, but life is all about huddling indoors avoiding the weather.

…I like to think a friend would think enough of me to tell me to shut up and sit down while an ounce of dignity remains.

By that standard, I must conclude that Shannon Watts has no friends.

The Ruger 8400 is a .22 rimfire bolt action rifle, mechanically identical* to the one I learned to shoot with in my early teens. But this one has a pistol grip and a barrel shroud and a shoulder thing that looks suspiciously like it might go up (it doesn’t) and therefore it is EEEEVIL. Also it’s black, and Shannon, that’s racist as hell.

I recall when people with loud opinions on subjects about which they’re completely ignorant were objects of ridicule. I was often that person growing up, and got laughed at a lot. I deserved to be. But Michael Bloomberg pays Watts large amounts to publicly display her ignorant bigotry, and so her views on what should be banned are totally to be taken seriously.

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*ETA for full disclosure: not identical. The old Cooey didn’t have a magazine.

I spent most of yesterday huddling inside, waiting out a windstorm. When I passed the driveway signs this morning I found the Dog sign lying full-length on the ground. I think the wind just finished knocking it down after an itchy cow dislodged it a couple of weeks ago.

Nighttime temps are still well below freezing so there’s not much point in worrying about it right now but I’ll make a note to bring home a sack of posthole cement next time I’m in town.

Stupid cattle. It’s always something.

I have a philosophy of sorts, but I’m not a philosopher. I suppose the world needs them, though it’s hard to see why: Philosophers tend to be either deadly dull pedants or – if a government sees an advantage in enforcing their views – downright deadly. See “Marx.”

But I, like I suspect most people who actually have a philosophical position, wish I could brew my views down to a single label. Trouble is, labels don’t stand still and history often gets in my way. For example I think of myself as an anarchist but never use the label out loud because at no time in its history did it mean what I wish it to mean. The first people to use the label were naive socialists at best, bomb-throwing nihilists at worst. The many painful ironies committed in its name in this generation make me steer well clear of it but in my own imagining it’s the perfect label for what I do. I don’t want the world to burn, I just want to live without rulers.

Another word I used when I was young, even though by that time it had another practical meaning than the one I assigned it, was “Liberal.” To me it meant leaving others to do as they will, not throwing arbitrary restrictions on people as long as they’re not doing active harm – and even then keeping the restrictions as minimal as possible. Of course the word hasn’t really meant that in my lifetime if it ever did. But it would be a great, simple label.

This comes to mind this morning, as on my second cup I read this piece called Reclaiming “Liberal”:

… though there were people calling themselves liberals for most of the 20th century, they were actually progressives still clinging to a few liberal points (but willing to compromise on even those in order to establish their social engineering schemes and/or “beat” their so-called “conservative” opponents). Then, less than a generation ago, the term “liberal” was unceremoniously dumped as the progressives finally embraced being just a different flavor of authoritarian, one committed to licking the boots of “experts” while their opponents preferred to lick those of preachers (and both loudly proclaim their love for cops and caging people by the millions).

Well, if they’re not going to use a proud old term (whose memory they insulted by misusing it for a century anyway), I’m going to.

A lovely thought, with which I have a lot of sympathy. But it won’t work well for her. As with us wistful anarchists, she’s going to get tired of having to explain herself every time she opens her mouth.

h/t to Claire.

Since Spring 2015, when a new bunch of cattlemen decided to refurbish the old cattle watering station in my part of the desert and run a bunch of cattle here, I’ve occasionally had to choke down thoughts about the expressive uses Howard Roark found for dynamite.

There was a well already on site, but due to some sort of geological anomaly it’s very shallow – little more than 50 feet – and the water would not normally be considered potable. This cattle operation, for reasons of its own, decided to spend the money to have a deep well drilled on higher ground and installed a solar-powered pump they clearly intended to run at all sunlit hours.

Having spent that money, they then tried to nickel-and-dime things. First they tried to patch the existing concrete tank, which wasn’t made very well to begin with and had been quietly returning to the earth for I don’t know how many decades. That really comically didn’t work.

Then they brought in a big plastic tank, but didn’t want to go to the trouble of connecting it electrically to the well pump. So they just ran a pipe from the overflow to the extremely leaky concrete tank. Which ran its water out over the ground day after day for three summers, wasting I don’t know how many thousands of gallons of water to say nothing of the incredible muddy mess it made of the watering station.

That last part was none of my business but I really resented a bunch of outsiders coming here and pumping the damned aquifer dry just out of penny-pinching laziness. At least they had the decency to switch off the pump during the winter months when they don’t free-range cattle.

The cattle returned last month, and I’ve been waiting to see when they’d turn that damned pump back on. Happened a couple of days ago, but they made a small modification to their overflow pipe…

They connected an extension to the end of the pipe that used to pour into the concrete tank…

…and routed it into the old well casing. So they’re pumping water out of the aquifer and into the shallow well. I’m not a geologist but I imagine in the fullness of time most of that water will find its way back into the aquifer. So I guess that’s better than pumping it out onto the ground to make a mess and evaporate.

Last summer the kid who’d been managing the cattle in this area – whom I had truly grown to loathe – quit amid ironic complaints about how deplorable the desert dwellers were. Actually he quit in the face of outright death threats he had more than earned – not everybody out here is as, um, civilized as I am. His replacement has so far shown himself a lot more mature and easier to get along with. Hence the pipe extension, I suppose.

🙂

Google tried censoring ‘gun’ shopping searches. It backfired

Early Tuesday morning, Internet shoppers started noticing and documenting the digital gaffes. Users received error notices when they searched for glue guns and water guns, toy guns and airsoft guns, nail guns and nerf guns. The algorithm is apparently so strict that even the color “burgundy” triggered an error…

This set off something of a parlor game on social media. Turns out, adults don’t like it when faceless bureaucrats try enforcing arbitrary restrictions — federal, corporate, or otherwise.

Casey “Stable Genius” Smith found that Google now censors “Laguna Beach.”

So a few days ago I asked a question about something called an Amazon Dash button…

…do these things do what I think they do? Do you buy these for $5 each, one for every regularly expended commodity, and then when you want more you just push this button and AMAZON AUTOMATICALLY SENDS YOU MORE???

I raised the subject of possible complications arising from unauthorized button-pushing, and Tam – who it seems does have a few of the things – agreed that there can indeed be issues…

I was in the kitchen one evening a couple months ago, right before the cats’ feeding time, when Bobbi called out from the office. “I think Huck just ordered some Cascade pods!”

See, one of Huck’s attention-seeking behaviors in the ramp-up to dinner time (especially during these four months of the year when dinner is an hour late) is to knock shit off desks near the humans…

🙂 It seems cats actually can order things from Amazon, if gifted with sufficient enabling technology.

I don’t do slogan t-shirts. But I did when I was younger, and wouldn’t have been ashamed to be seen in this one…

The Pink AK had its very brief moment in the sun a long time ago. Ian and I painted one up and presented it to Landlady as a joke…

…and she hated it. It has spent the intervening years in the farthest, darkest corner of the most ignominious closet she could find. Recently, given the news that I was looking for a wooden AK buttstock, she handed it to me and suggested I do something not-pink with it. Anything at all, as long as she never had to gaze upon it again. I was given to understand that large hammers would not be considered out of reason.

Well, it wasn’t the rifle’s fault. So as soon as the weather moderated a bit I made plans to just make the pink go away.

The original plan involved Landlady’s barn, but it takes a long time for it to warm up this time of year and the morning dawned without wind. So I screwed a couple of cuphooks into the woodshed’s lintel and got to work.

I immediately made two mistakes.

Even though I sprayed carefully the cheap-ass primer from the local hardware store sagged and dripped like a sonovabitch.

Plus I forgot how all-pervasive that pink was. We shot the pink paint on the rifle as soon as the parts kit hit the receiver, before it even had a firing group. Without stripping off the wooden furniture I was never going to get rid of it all. This was not going to be a quicky “let’s paint it camo.”

So this could take a while. But the Pink AK is pink no more.

Tomorrow’s supposed to be gorgeous. Today I’ll settle for much milder than yesterday.

Mid-fifties in the shade makes it shirtsleeve weather in the sun, of which today there’s lots.

Wanted to work on filling in the sewer pipe trench. I’m attempting to use the old pipe as a poor man’s culvert, allowing me to cover the pipe where it crosses the gully draining ditch. Taping together the three sections of pipe and sliding them all under the pipe didn’t work – it would have required me to dig the whole thing 2′ deeper than it already is. I may regret not doing so come the next heavy monsoon, but the consequences will be mild. I ended up just using two sections, and now the ditch is filled in. Fixed the bridge and put it back in place anyway, to remove any stress that foot traffic would otherwise put on the very shallowly-buried pipe.

Meanwhile, I worked on the first and simplest phase of the Great AK Repainting Project.

Because that’s just not what an AK is supposed to look like. Tomorrow the Pink AK gets its first all-over primer coat.

The forecast (the same one that promised no snow yesterday, as the snowstorm began to taper off) says our cold snap should be ending today. Just in time for that new thermostat to fix my one complaint about the bedroom’s space heater.

The thermostat will now not only maintain a temperature – the old one would do that – but you can even select which temperature to maintain! I love technology.

And now winter will end. 🙂 Hey, timing never was my strong suit.

Sometimes I think song is the key to memory.

Presented for your consideration…

I swear I don’t even understand why this song was ever a hit. In fact Guess Who only had one song I still consider worth listening to, and this wasn’t it. But it happens that this song’s ubiquity on the radio coincided with an event in my life that stuck in my memory. Almost the one thing when I was growing up that wasn’t a hand-me-down, as irony would have it.

When this song was a hit, I was happily crushing my scuba certification classes. And it was no picnic arranging for transport and tank recharges, I can tell you. I was just a 16-year-old redneck kid in love with breathing underwater.

You ever try to get over that? That sensation of taking your first deep breath after the water has long since closed over your head? Sweartagod you’ll remember the song that was last on the radio at the time…

A machine gun magazine is a terrible thing to massacre, and I’m against it. BTW, CNN considers it polite to practice reading your lines until you can speak them as if not reading.

On a more serious note is “comprehensive background checks” new antigunspeak, or am I just behind the times again? Sounds like the old “universal background checks” the dems were selling a few years ago, which would outlaw practices I definitely don’t plan to stop, er, practicing.