The Ultimate Answer to Kings

ISIS Appreciates the NRA’s Work

In the United States, you can buy semi-automatic weapon without submitting yourself to a background check, so long as you make your purchase at a gun show. Roughly 90 percent of Americans object to this policy. But the National Rifle Association (NRA) — and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) — like it a lot.

The NRA likes the “gun-show loophole” because the organization is funded by firearms manufacturers who would like to continue making money selling weapons to criminals. (A large majority of the NRA’s members support universal background checks, even as the organization does everything in its power to prevent their enactment.)

Holy crap. We could play Count the Lies, but what’s the point? Every word in it is a lie, with the exception of an occasional “the” and an “a” that ran right out of the first sentence, no doubt from a refusal to be part of the crime against its language. Note the conflation between NRA and ISIS, like we could have expected to see a big ISIS table buy at the NRA annual meeting.

These are moldy old tropes, exposed as lies over and over, repeated here with a little quiver of conviction. You get the idea the writer has actually convinced himself it’s all true, right down to the hapless 90% of Americans at the nonexistent mercy of the evil criminal-arming firearms manufacturers enabled by the foul, never-sufficiently-damned NRA. (shudder)

But now the NRA has gone too far. Why, it has practically joined in partnership with ISIS, which is almost as evil as itself. The shame.

“America is absolutely awash with easily obtainable firearms,” an Al Qaeda spokesman told fellow militants in a video obtained by CNN in 2013. “You can go down to a gun show at the local convention center and come away with a fully automatic assault rifle, without a background check, and most likely without having to show an identification card. So what are you waiting for?”

I’d start by waiting for any of that to be true. When it becomes true, I’ll be interested in going to a lot more gun shows than I do now. But every transparent falsehood present is repeated here completely uncritically. You’d think a writer who’s so passionately devoted to tightening up “America’s lax gun regulations” would have educated himself about them. At least a little. But as in politics, where lawmakers ban gun parts they can’t even define, logical expectations mean no more than truth or fairness in journalism.

I’ve asked it before and I’ll ask it again: If you’re so sure about your position on this, why do you have to lie so outrageously?

Yesterday I spent only a few hours working myself into a pain-wracked mess. Quit before I had to spend a week recovering. Received my reward for that this morning when I finished the woodshed floor in a single non-painful hour.

A really conscientious person would get right to work stacking firewood, and if I run into one I’ll tell him so. But that’s a good way to finish the job of wrecking myself, so I’m gonna take a day. I’m thinking Star Wars film festival.

Remember when Bill Nye was an inoffensive childrens’ actor? Now it seems he is the arbiter of what is Science^tm.

‘Bill Nye’ Episode on Netflix Omits Segment Saying Chromosomes Determine Gender

In the original episode [of Bill Nye the Science Guy], titled “Probability,” a young woman told viewers, “I’m a girl. Could have just as easily been a boy, though, because the probability of becoming a girl is always 1 in 2.”

“See, inside each of our cells are these things called chromosomes, and they control whether we become a boy or a girl, ” the young woman continued. “See, there are only two possibilities: XX, a girl, or XY, a boy.”

But in the version of the episode uploaded to Netflix, the segment has been cut entirely. While noncontroversial at the time, the 1996 segment appears to contradict Netflix’s new series “Bill Nye Saves the World.”

The new show endorses a socially liberal understanding of gender, under which gender is defined by self-identification rather than genetics and there are more than just the two traditional genders.

I’m pretty sure he got it more nearly right the first time, but what do I know? I’m just an old mechanic. Bill Nye has a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering, in the course of acquiring which I’m sure he learned loads about genetics and social constructs and shit like that.

What he seems to have forgotten after all these years, though, is that he’s not actually a scientist. He never even played one on TV very convincingly.

That old saw about how it’s the fuel that warms you twice? Bullshit. It’s making me sweat over and over. I hate each and every little rectangular bastard on that pile.

The problem with shale? It’s made of rock.

And the only available bits have calved off eroded ridges – which tend to appear high on the – rather steep – slope.

Have I mentioned that I’m an old stiff one-legged guy? Because I really am. Especially this morning.

Then you lug it out of the gully, pile it into the wheelbarrow…

…and go get more.

I need a minivan full of Mexicans. And a beer. It’s only 9:30 in the morning, I’m only about a third of the way through the new woodshed floor – which is not going to be a masterpiece of masonry art – and I need an old man nap in the shade.

ETA: Okay, yeah, I didn’t make it. I’m only a foot or two from the entrance but I’m out of steam. And shale. Back and stump singing Dixie. Can’t face going back into that gully right now. This was harder than I anticipated, and I’m gonna rack myself up if I keep going. I’m going to have a bite of lunch and then declare it baking day. Finish mañana.

…it’s time to go home. Yeah, he’s looking at you, Hillary.

Hey! Remember Gersh Kuntzman? Poor ol’ traumatized Gersh has apparently shaken off his AR15-induced PTSD long enough to notice that there was a presidential election and his girl (woman? person? cisgender person of harridan extraction [1/16 Wicked Witch of the West] who identifies as female?) lost. And so did the DNC, all the MSM, the entire Obama administration, 50% of the supreme court, and roughly 75% of the officially sanctified commentariat. But mostly Hillary.

And Gersh is mad about that. Mad as heck. He may stomp his foot.

Hey, Hillary Clinton, shut the f— up and go away already.

I dunno, it just seemed weird to be reading a Kuntzman article containing a few words here and there with which I don’t entirely disagree. That is all. Carry on.

I got everything done I wanted to, and after three days the new permanent woodshed is complete except for the floor.

There’s a good source of shale on a slope not far from the cabin. There’ll be a lot of back and forth and bitching about the state of my back, but other than that rock for the floor won’t be a problem.

Since I can’t use a circular saw at the Lair, all the cutting had to be done with cordless tools and the sawzall didn’t give me any of the problems it did when I first got it. I got through that whole thing without needing to charge a battery.

The ladies even went 13-for-13 on egg production.

And then I got home to find an email from some guy at Alien Gear, wanting me to T&E one of their holsters. I wrote a return message filled with thanks and goodwill, but mentioning TUAK’s relative shortage of IWB holsters.

That’s a good day in a string of good days. Early May, and getting things done! That’s the way we like it.

And now Uncle Joel is kinda funky. Bath time at the kitchen sink.

That, basically right there, is the new woodshed. Rats are just naturally attracted to piles of things: There’s no way to keep a pile of firewood rat-free that wouldn’t be more hassle than the rats. But I’m thinking if I can keep them only able to enter from the front, then the front is where they’ll nest and we won’t get these reeking multi-generation rat condo/tombs that really ruin firewood. That’s the theory.

Hence the seemingly sense-free trouble I’ve gone to, essentially making a basket-bottom of the woodshed, when in fact the building will have no door and rats can simply stroll in and out. I want to keep them from being able to enter from the rear; they can do whatever they want at the front.

Even found a spot where I rounded the wire at a corner: That would have actually made the whole thing more attractive. All the layers are tied together, the wire wraps clear around the bottom so tunneling will do no good.

My theory may be all wet, in which case I’ve wasted a couple hours’ work and some free hardware cloth. But I’ve torn down four temporary woodsheds now, and the really destructive nests were always at the rear.

Now I’ll go ahead and put hardware cloth over the upper vents – not sure why, just because that’s the easy part – and then we’re going on a shale-hunting expedition. Tomorrow morning while it’s still cool I’ll bring up the sand I need to set the stones. Then later, probably much later when I paint the new addition, paint it green.

…and somehow it’s the talking point du jour because even though it’s based on a 30-year-old novel it happens to be so timely! Because it’s exactly like what Trump is doing to America, because Christians.

It happens I have a copy of the original Handmaid’s Tale and wasn’t able to sustain interest for more than about ten pages, so I don’t have a lot of opinion about the book and none at all about the TV show. And I’m even a little fuzzy about the buzz, because I haven’t been internetting much this past week. But I did get a distinct whiff of conflation between Christianity and the Trump administration: Fear of.

As I understand it, The Handmaid’s Tale is set in a dystopian theocracy where women have the right to be submissive, obedient and demure and no other rights at all, and where the hopefully still-fertile ones are assigned as sex slaves to well-placed men. I won’t say that’s not a Trumpian fantasy because I don’t know and don’t want to know what goes on inside that man’s head, but it doesn’t seem to match anything he came out and said. And he said a lot.

Except for the submissive and obedient part (and – clears throat nervously – no offense but has that ever happened? Ever?) it’s not remotely anything Christians would put up with in their doctrine, and people, I’ve known some of the wackier Christians. Uh uh.

In fact if we’re coming up with scary misogyny scenarios based on out-of-control religions, there is this one religion that…um…oh, but that’s the religion of peace and tolerance. We must embrace and accept that religion, or we’re evil. Intolerant. Dare I say Trumpian.

So…I guess I don’t get what all the quacking is about, is all I’m saying.

Okay, I laid on all the roofing from the front of the shed to the rear, and when I got to the rearmost sheet the problem was plain as day; the SW pole was a couple of inches out of square. Everything else was okay. So I unfastened everything at that corner and cinched in the top of the pole with a rope until it was where I needed it, then I screwed everything down, cut off the excess, and fastened the roofing.

Good! Hopefully that was the hard part. Now tomorrow I’ll put up the wall panels and rodent-seal the whole shed except the front entrance with hardware cloth. Maybe I can finish that tomorrow. Then I need to scrounge about 40 square feet of relatively flat shale, haul in some sand, do the floor, and then I can finally get that big pile of firewood out of my yard.

I don’t even know why. After four solid hours in the sun (and my first sunburned neck of the season, yay,) this is as far as I’ve gotten.

I only need to finish the roof today. That was the – I thought rather modest – goal I set for myself. But by noon I was staggering around, mismeasuring stuff, teetering on the ladder…

And I managed to put the poles in just wrong enough to really complicate the roofing situation. Eight feet long, no problem. Eight feet two inches long, major problem. So now I have to finagle everything. It was supposed to be so simple.

Lunch. The old man needs lunch.

That’s the four corners of my new permanent woodshed, which I need to finish so I can move the big pile of firewood that didn’t get burned on schedule this winter, which I need to move so I can begin work on the cabin addition. I need to let the cement cure, and then the rest will go up quickly. Never got the blocks I wanted for flooring, but I think I’m going to use native slate instead. That way I can keep moving.

I have found that when I’m lying in bed in the morning thinking through a procedure about two steps ahead of where I am, the project is going well. When I lay there and wonder how I’m ever going to accomplish the next thing I need to do, it’s going badly. By that standard, things are going well. But the season will get away from me if I don’t establish some momentum. I want the bedroom enclosed and painted before Monsoon.

So I overslept this morning, this first glorious summerlike morning when I really seriously have things to do, things I spent yesterday clearing the decks for. I want to – at a minimum – get the poles up for the new woodshed today. No cold, no rain, no wind.

But first LB needs a walky, very seriously, because Daddy overslept. I got him on his long lead, looked out the window – the one I’ll be removing, which is why I want another matching window on the new bedroom wall – and saw a herdlet of cattle heading up the driveway.

Bother. I rummaged around in the desk drawer for the Mak, checked the magazine, went outside yelling and shooting into the ground to turn them around and send them back into the brush. Yeah, they have to move east/west but they don’t have to do it through my yard. There’s plenty of room north of me.

That’s all good clean fun but there’s a new element of risk in the past week, since Carson released the bulls. Cattle with calves will run when you wave your arms and yell; the gunfire is just to get their attention. Bulls are unimpressed by any of those things, and they can get hostile. You don’t want to be on your feet in the open with a hostile bull. Even if you win the fight to the death, your legal troubles have only begun. So while of course I’m armed with a .44 Magnum whenever I take LB for his walks, that’s not good enough. If I’m shooting at a bull I’m already in major trouble. Existential, legal, and financial trouble. Leave the state fast trouble. You wonder why I resent all these damned cattle? I’m not the aggressor here.

It worked last summer, maybe it’ll work this summer…

They’re not impressed by guns. They’re not usually impressed by gunfire noise. But they understand a big stick. I presume they’re familiar with cattle prods – I don’t have a cattle prod, so my approach is somewhat more Paleolithic. But it still works.

Like, all the available services…

That, fair readers, is the meat cooler of the only food market in the little town nearest where I live. I’ve been counting, and in the past ten years this cooler has broken down approximately 1,439,784 times. I may have missed a few since I only hit town every week or so.

The next closest town is 35 miles away, and it’s got a Safeway. After a few years around here a Safeway begins to look like an absurd Palace of Food in which the coolers never seem to break down. Local store management actually has the gall to complain that people who should be shopping locally are undercutting hometown retailers by driving to the Safeway.

He really said that to me once. I just pointed out that both his onions were sprouting.

Here’s one of those headlines I laughed at without ever even glancing at the actual article, and I swear I’m not making it up:

Democrats say they now know exactly why Clinton lost

Hint: Although I’m quite sure the article doesn’t admit it, this is why…

Further data might be found in the sound of the voice. The night before the election results were announced, when I was resigned to a Hillary presidency, I wondered how I would ever get through four years of hearing that voice day in and day out. Wondered if it were really possible to bore out your own eardrums.

Oh – and then there’s all that “progressivism,” and her plans for throwing gun owners into gulags guarded by sea bass with really cranky attitudes. That was off-putting, too.

So yeah – non-democrats know exactly why Clinton lost. It’s not that complicated. Having gotten that off my chest, I may go read the article and learn what the democrats’ new excuses are.

Just this morning I was bitching about how my summer-weight desert boots froze my foot during the cold snap, right?

So I went over to S&L’s after morning chicken chores, and damned if L wasn’t planning to send these to the thrift store…

S&L are from rural Minnesota, so they’re not likely to be fooled by ersatz winter boots. These are Sorels, which I never heard of.

Not new but hardly worn at all, and the right one fits the meat foot perfectly! Alas the other one won’t go on the prosthetic foot at all because of a tightly-gussetted tongue, but that doesn’t matter; with specialized footwear of this sort I only need the right one anyway. It’s like I kept wearing out socks on my prosthetic foot for years after I moved here, long after it stopped making sense to wear socks on that foot at all, because everybody knows you wear socks in pairs. So it’s not like I have to worry about my left foot getting cold, right? And these boots are heavy. So why struggle and stretch to hang one on the end of my prosthesis, which won’t in any way appreciate the extra weight? It’s not as though people will make fun of me.

Alas, here’s another piece of winter gear I need to find a summer place for.

…and he missed his.

He gets enough success from his Sumo toy to keep him interested, and perpetually finds it frustrating enough to keep me entertained. He seems to understand now that if he rolls it around enough, treats come out the big end. He never has grasped that if he only picks it up by the small end all the treats will come out.

LB is living proof that dogs consider humans labor-saving devices.

Today’s supposed to be substantially warmer than the past two days, and then the coming week is supposed to be quite nice. But right now I’m really wishing I hadn’t put my winter socks in storage. And that new Carhartt coat; that would come out of its bag – again – if this blast of winter weren’t supposed to taper off today.

Never got around to bagging up those nice flannel shirts, fortunately, and of course there’s the long underwear. But my one meat foot is explaining how I really oughtn’t to have cleaned out the sock drawer just yet – and what’s with the desert boots, huh? What’s with that? You want cold feet? Because this is how you get cold feet.

Well, foot.

Stupid late-April-almost-May.

Sure happy I kept that tarp on the firewood despite the wind, though. Almost – but not quite – makes up for how idiotically I destroyed my cool digital indoor/outdoor thermometer. Parenthetically, I don’t know what the temperature is outside but the heavy frost and the block of ice in the chicken waterer says it’s cold.

ETA: That’s a major impetus for this summer’s big project – The winter clothing situation has improved remarkably over the past couple of seasons, but it has created another secondary issue. I really need a closet. I’ve got winter clothing stored in three different places, and one day there’s going to be a rat-related calamity Zelda will never let me live down.

Yale Grad Students Go on ‘Symbolic’ Hunger Strike Where They’re Allowed to Eat

They’re already getting paid to be college students – at a rate roughly fifteen times what I made last year – full health bennies and paid-up tuition. They want better…I dunno, I didn’t really read the article. Apparently Yale told them – in a safe, tolerant and non-confrontational way, I’m sure – to pound sand. So the perpetual students decided to crank up the volume with a hunger strike.

Uh huh. Just one little problem. These aren’t exactly Cambodian monks we’re talking about here.

As it turns out, the hunger strike might not put anyone’s health in peril. According to a pamphlet posted on Twitter by a former Yale student, the hunger strike is “symbolic” and protesters can leave and get food when they can no longer go on.

Good luck with that, snowflakes.

h/t to JDZ

Yesterday morning the TUAK pageview counter started smoking its bearings – very briefly.

Somebody at Free Republic linked to the latest Mountain House taste test, and half the conservasphere came to look. But I guess new threads pile up fast there, and within an hour I’d been forgotten. Abandoned. Thrown to the curb. I’m so fifteen seconds ago.

It was a very minor repeat of what happened last year when Milo Something-Greek-and-Fabulous tweeted about something I said about him. All hell broke loose in the dedicated underground TUAK server room – for a very short time. And then I happily went back to being a nobody.

So…was that a Freepalanche?

Come get it or I’m going to have it picked up and euthanized.

It’s April 29, and this is officially the latest date on which I’ve ever seen it snow here. Not very much snow and it’ll go away, but at the moment it’s on top of a whole bunch of ice and I’m a little afraid of my front steps. If LB can cross his legs for a couple hours we’ll be fine but I really ought to go scrape off the solar panels.

Through a cascade of stupid mistakes, I seem to have lost my outdoor thermometer right when I really want to know how cold it is.

It was screwed to that tree trunk I cut down a few days ago – first mistake, really, because this time of year it caught the morning sun and wasn’t accurate. I didn’t immediately find a new place for it – second mistake. I left it on the front ledge of the cabin and forgot all about it, face-down – third mistake. Then it rained all day, the water got in and shorted something. Spent all yesterday afternoon trying to dry it out, even put it in the warm oven for several hours and gave it new batteries. The status light says it works, but the read-out on the wall says it doesn’t exist. So…dammit. I’ll have to send for a new one, too, looks like. I got this one at the local hardware but they no longer seem to carry this type of wireless indoor-outdoor. Bother.

Glad I was diligent about keeping the tarp on the firewood, though, because it’s supposed to stay a good deal colder than it got yesterday. At least partly sunny, so it’s not all bad. My batteries did great. Tonight will be colder than last night, if the forecast holds true, but then after that things brighten and warm up again.