See Emily Play

A: Finding someone else’s blog post that you agree with and can link to.

viz.

http://voxday.blogspot.com/2012/01/police-are-problem.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+blogspot%2Fvoxpopoli+%28Vox+Popoli%29

According to Wikipedia, 100 years ago today the Smellie, the SMLE (Rifle No1, MkIII) was adopted for service.

h/t/ Jeffersonian!

Edit: It was 1907, not 1911. One of these days I’ll figure out this reading stuff.

Normally, my musings on language or history (or whatever) is based on the Say Uncle blogging model: “I do this for me, not for you”. For once, I’m going to provide y’all with some geekiness with real-world application. Don’t expect this to be a regular feature, especially as I’ve been sitting on a Way Cool article/video by Chris Stringer on his current thoughts regarding the Out Of Africa theory of early hominid diffusion.

So, here:

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/01/20/big-cme-headed-toward-earth/

The CME will first get here about 1300 hrs (EST) tomorrow (Sunday 22Jan) and will be strongest Monday, 23Jan. It’s supposed to be a near-miss, going over the North Pole, but you might want to unplug your computer and other delicate electronics before you go to bed Sunday night.

And by “disconnect” I mean remove any and all long wires from whatever: power leads, ethernet cables, antenna leads, USB cables, any length of wire that attaches to something you’d prefer not to have to replace on Tuesday.

The only thing I plan on leaving hooked up is my cable box. It’s six years old and is slated for replacement in February anyway for a digital box.

http://arcticpatriot.blogspot.com/2012/01/having-courage-to-look-in-mirror.html

Yep. He pretty much covers it.

In case you’re being a bit dense, let me emphasize this part in my own words:

You (however you define that term) create/continue a pattern of behavior that I find objectionable. You dismiss and/or ridicule that objection. You think that you’ve “dealt with” or “managed” that objection. You are wrong about that, but I digress. You keep on keeping on, as the kids are wont to say. So do I (one cannot repeal the Law of Unintended Consequences, Sparky).

What do You do? You escalate.

At one time, I got called a member of the “Right-wing Militia”. I found that a bit confusing, because I support such things as legalizing marijuana, gay marriage, and sundry other things that are anethema to the Right. Plus I’m not a “joiner”, so my involvement with the Militia is simply due to the fact that I’m both an American and alive.

Then I got tarred with the tag team of “Nazi” and “Raaacist”. I simply laughed at that one. I mean, srsly d00d, is that the best You could come up with?

Now I’m a “domestic extremist”. Y’all should take a look at my house. “Domestic” only applies if one of the definitions of that word includes “barely contained chaos”. And “extremist”? Expecting you to abide by the rules you swore an oath to when you took office is “extreme”? I have to wonder what language or idiom you spoke when You were growing up, because I’m certain it wasn’t North American Colloquial English, which is how we communicated when I was a kid.

Let me now refine something that AP said.

One of Humanity’s quirks is our egocentrism. Yeah, selfishness is part of that, but that’s not what I’m getting at. What I’m pointing out is that each of us divides history into ‘stuff I’ve seen/experienced’ and ‘stuff that happened before I got here’. For me, born in 1957, despite living with men who were there, despite seeng and handling artifacts of that time, World War Two for me is History. Vietnam, on the other hand, is part of my life experience, and is real to me in a way that no number of WW2 surplus rifles (etc) can ever hope to overcome.

So I have a certain perspective that you kids don’t, and part of that was living in the pre-Internet world, and back then there was the “1500 Rule”. Simply defined, that meant that for every letter that someone in DC got, there were 1500 people who agreed with that letter, but didn’t write.

So, that’s it. Instead of “For every one of me, there are a hundred, or a thousand, more who are silent, but share my disgust with where you are steering our nation.”, it should read “For every one of me, there are 1500 more who are silent, but share my disgust with where you are steering our nation.”

Good job, AP. You knocked it out of the park. I thank you for writing what you did. Keep it up.

This:

http://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2012/01/19/gsg-stg44-rifle/

In .22LR…

I wonder how much the mags will co$t.

Thanks to “Free North Carolina” (http://freenorthcarolina.blogspot.com/, I was directed to this very useful site:

http://publicintelligence.net/fusion-centers/

Remember, boys and girls: the internet and the information it contains is a sword that cuts in two directions. Yes, you and I are on some list somewhere because we dare to criticize/complain about those who presume to rule us, but so are they.

You plan on fighting back. Good.

You try to ensure your survival of that assault. Even better.

Then what? It’s not as though you can simply collect their weapons and comm gear, walk back into the house, fire up a frozen pizza and then see what’s on the History Channel. For starters, if all you’re prepared to do is to fight defensively, they’re eventually gonna kill you all ushy and real dead. You’re letting them dictate the battlespace, see? 99% of what they’re trained to do is to assault a fixed position, so don’t give them a fixed position to assault. Look up “OODA Loop” if you don’t already know what it is.

When your door shatters open, or you hear someone demanding your surrender over a loudspeaker, your life as you knew it is over, forever. You’re going to end up dead. Don’t engage in any sort of fantasy that contains you being alive afterwards. You. Are. Going. To. Die. Your OPPLAN needs to focus on killing as many of them before they get you. And they will.

http://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/so-why-read-anymore/?singlepage=true

My reading consists of four things (mostly):

1) History
2) Archaeology/Paleoanthropology
3) Current Events, to include the blogosphere
4) Science Fiction

With these sorts of reading habits, I can safely make some assertions:

1) Humans have been, well, human for the last 140,000 years, give or take a few thousand. Yes, I’m well aware that Homo Sapiens is at least 50,000 years older than that, but actual human-like behavior, such as deliberate burial, burial rituals, and art (making pretty stuff for its’ own sake as well as decorating useful stuff) dates from 140 kya.

2) Literacy has been the springboard to our Civilization. See, back in the preliterate days the only way to pass down something you’ve learned was to grab a youngster and pound it into his/her thick skull. This was useful within one’s own tribe/group but people beyond one’s horizon either had to figure it out for themselves or do without. Agriculture is a great example. We’re taught that our form of agriculture was ‘invented’ in Anatolia (Western Turkey) and diffused from there, with short shrift given to the Indus Valley (India/Pakistan nowadays) and to the Yangtze valley. Current archaeological work in the area of the First Cataract (Egyptian/Sudanese border region) suggests that the folks over there were at least experimenting with growing their own food a lot earlier than that. My point is that in preliterate times it takes several strokes of genius for a new technology to spread and become well known. Untold thousands of our ancestors died not because they couldn’t figure out how to do something, but because they didn’t even concieve that something was possible.

Compare us bipeds with housecats. Those of you who have raised kittens (and if you haven’t, why the hell not?) know that each cat has to figure out How To Be A Cat And Then How To Operate The Human individually. Granted, literate housecats would be only slightly less dangerous than them developing opposable thumbs, but you get my point.

My family (and later on my ex) made fun of my efforts to learn Old English, Francien (Middle French), post-Classical/Vulgate Latin, and some Greek. Some things can only be learned by reading the actual words of the people who were there, so bite me. I admit there’s more than a bit of compulsive behavior going on here, which is why (despite having collected nearly a dozen ebooks on the subject) I’m actively resisting learning hieroglyphics. Cuneiform is right out, so perhaps there’s some hope for me, heh.

Just as those who beat their swords into ploughshares will end up plowing for those who don’t, those who disdain reading will end up working for those of us who do not.

I was doing my usual daily peregrination through teh w3b and did my usual stop at Uncle’s. Did some clicky stuff and ended up here:

http://seriousgunblog.com/

Since I’d never heard of the place I started reading and found this:

http://seriousgunblog.com/faragosis-for-the-win/

By way of my Enfield Addict Message Board, I was put in touch with a fella who has, um, had a pile of old R-P nickel plated .303 ‘brass’.

For the first time since Hillary Clinton was a possible Presidential candidate, I have more empties than loaded .303 cartridges. Time for moar powder and bullets…

I don’t claim the expertise of the SnarkMistress (that would be Tam – link to the right), but I have my days, heh.

http://www.wallsofthecity.net/2012/01/quote-of-the-day-peter.html