Running Hot and Cold

On the Theo Spark blog, Alan Caruba offers us the prospect of a Mini Ice Age.

So far I am unconvinced that chilly temperatures in March on the Plateau are anything other than weather.  The problem with models and the predictions thereof is that the modeler can only plug in so many parameters -- even if all known factors are included, there are, to riff off Rumsfeld, an unknown number of unknowns remaining.

The weatherman was on last night pointing to a mass of cold air being held up in Canada.  The Border Patrol is still unsure about its passport.  This has not been "drained off", as the man explained, so it is likely that we will continue getting hit with the kitchen sink -- or at least the refrigerator door until some time in April.  Also, there is a big snow-pack up north.  This works somewhat like ice in your cooler.  We normally don't think about that, but not only does this cool the air at the surface, a large area of snow-covered ground is absorbing a lot less solar radiation and reflecting a lot more off into space, causing, perhaps, lunar warming.  If the Moon bursts into flames some night, we'll know why.

I'm a global warming/climate change/mini ice age skeptic.  So far I observe that the northern hemisphere warms in the summer and cools in the winter.  There are variations in this. I am not sure why, and until the local weatherman can beat the Old Farmers' Almanac on a regular basis, I'm pretty sure Science! doesn't know why either.   

Global cooling and a mini-Ice Age would be a lot more disastrous, especially in the short-term, than a Celsius degree increase in the average temperature.  Anyone for famine, war, and political upheaval?  Caruba suggests that is what happened last time.  I'm hardly ready to accept that "[w]orld cooling is locked in ...", as one of the experts quoted by Caruba insists.  But if some the witchdoctors pushing their bogus CO2 models for climate change suffer frostbite, I would think it poetic justice.     

Meanwhile, weather in general is something the prudent should always factor in when making preparations.  Some seasons are not going to be as good as others.  Diversification is your friend in these cases.  During the 1930s, in the face of widespread summer drought here on the Plateau that thwarted all efforts to raise wheat, corn or oats, it still rained enough along toward fall that the hillbillies could raise a crop of turnips (remember that scene from Gone with the Wind?).  Turnips fed both man and beast through the winter.  One wag returned from a doctor's visit to report that his medical issues were a result of his blood being 90% turnip juice. 

Planning to improvise, as someone said, is not a plan, but being flexible and willing to innovate and adapt is a key to human survival and prosperity.  

Cyprus and the Fable of Omar's Woodpile

Who cares about what happens in Cyprus?  The Russians for one -- seems a lot of the oligarchy decided to stash their cash in Cypriot banks.  It must be some sort of traditional Russian thing, because Cyprus has never been a particularly stable country that I can recall. 

The Market Ticker has a whole series of posts about the crisis in Cyprus that are worth reading.  Denninger seems think it is a very big deal and the lead-in to the ultimate crash.

The reason the "big one" has not hit is not because arithmetic is wrong.

One of our most beloved and storied neighbors was a mild-mannered, good-humored man who was handy in a Red Green sort of way.  This was before duct tape became widely used, so Omar made do with whatever was at hand.  He cut some firewood and loaded his old truck -- a two-wheel drive made of various parts and pieces of other trucks.  The ground was frozen when Omar started out that morning, but by late afternoon, things had begun to thaw.  Up on the ridge where he was cutting, it didn't matter, but as he crossed a bottom field with his overloaded rig, he hit a soft spot and sank to the axle.  Omar got out of the truck with his jack, pulled a chunk of wood off the load, place it on the ground, placed the jack on top of it and started cranking.  Of course, the chunk sank and the truck stayed right where it was.  Omar sighed, sat down cross-legged, reversed the jack, pulled another stick off the truck, placed it on top of the sunken one, replaced the jack and started cranking.  Over and over the process was repeated.

Now it is true that Omar did get his truck out because his stack of chunks eventually reached bedrock or at least something solid.  He pulled some more wood off to throw under the sunken wheel.  The combination of traction, support, and a noticeably lighter load resulted in success, at the cost of a great deal of time and energy, as well as wood that would have to be cut again.  Fortunately, the hills around here were and are fairly good at growing oak and ash and hickory. 

As far as time, Omar was a time sheik.  He could spend time like it was going out of style -- not that he lived so long as much as he lived so well.  No one ever had to cut him any slack; he possessed in overflowing abundance.  His extravagances in this regard were most admirable.  I only wish I had the same riches. 

Anyway, our global financial situation is much the same as Omar's stuck wood truck.  Japan has been jacking and stacking for the better part of two decades.  The Japanese had a very big load to start with, but it is starting to look a little lean while their pit seems bottomless.  Europe all piled into one truck, loaded mainly with wood from Germany and the Nordic members.  The truck is already empty but the Germans are ferrying wood down by wheelbarrow to throw in the hole.  China has a big pile of European and especially American wood, but a lot of it is hollow, and some of it is too badly decayed to do much good.  The Chinese, along with the Russians, the Brazilians and the Indians, are still up on the hillside eying the fools stuck in the bottom and wondering how they are going to get home with the road blocked up.

The U.S. had the biggest truck and the biggest load.  Every so often the Chinese drive down and toss us a few more sticks.  We haven't cut wood in quite some time, and our truck is empty.  The Federal Reserve is stuffing paper down the hole, but it doesn't seem to be giving us much lift.  We are also shifting and swapping sticks of the Chinese wood with the Bank of Japan and the European Central Bank when no one is looking so we can continue the fiction that we still have something to keep us warm in the long, long financial winter just ahead.  The bad news is that the woodlot is looking a little thin and the chainsaws are running out of gas.

Doctors, Firearms, and Bad Analogies

A couple of months back, Dr. Pamela Wible decided it would be beneficial to compare the ease of buying an "assault weapon" with the ease of contacting a doctor. 

I'm sure Dr. Wible is a fine physician.  I suppose her point would be that getting a firearm is too easy and getting a doctor is too hard.  Many of the comments are very lucid and appropriate.  I will try not to plow that ground again. 

I went to my local physician a while back and basically had nothing wrong with me.  He asked me how I stay so healthy.  I told him that I tend to stay away from doctors.  Doctors, generally by prescribing medications that have multiple adverse effects, do a great deal of harm to their patients.  The patients usually want this because taking a handful of pills is easier than losing weight or getting off the couch or doing something positive instead of worrying.  But if I want to go see my general practitioner, I don't have any more trouble getting in to see him than I do getting an appointment with a dentist or even a good mechanic. 

Right now there is not an AR-type rifle available anywhere around here in the gunshops.  Perhaps Dr. Wible is happy about that. 

The fact is that firearms are generally much more useful than doctors.  I use my firearms on a fairly regular basis for recreational targeting shooting as well as hunting and pest eradication.  I've never needed to use a firearm in self-defense, but I would suggest pointing a Glock at someone is a lot more likely to stop an attack than pointing a proctologist at them.

One of Dr. Wible's complaints is that the suicide rate is very high in Oregon and doctors are very likely to kill themselves.  She claims that doctors will go buy a gun and kill themselves the same day, with the receipt still being in the bag.  Where I come from we have a word for that:  bullshit.  I am not calling Dr. Wible a liar because I am sure she was told by someone who had a second cousin whose babysitter's pediatrician did exactly that.  Firearms are the preferred method for suicide because they work and are a lot less trouble than some of the other methods.  However, I know of a pastor who was accused of child molestation.  He went out, bought a rope, and hanged himself in his shed.  The receipt for the rope was still in the bag.   

Doctors, of course, don't have easy access to drugs that would be painless and fatal.  They don't know how to tie knots.  They probably don't know how to slice their carotid arteries with a razor-sharp scalpels after numbing the site with a local anesthetic they would not be able to get.  Doctors don't drive cars, and if they do, they are probably not smart enough to figure a way to run the engine and painlessly asphyxiate themselves with carbon monoxide.  So, if guns weren't so darned easy to get, doctors would have to wait around to be killed off by their incompetent peers -- like the thousands of patients who die every year as a result of medical mistakes and malpractice. 

As much as I prefer firearms to physicians, I will admit that doctors come in handy now and then.  As I have said before, I would have been dead more than forty years ago and blind today without the skill and knowledge of good surgeons.  By the way, the surgeon who saved my life used come down and go quail hunting with us.  He had a gun and yet never killed himself.  It was a miracle.
 

Nineteenth Hole: The Pit and the Putter

Yet another man in a sinkhole story.

At least the Creve Coeur golfer survived the fall.

In Soviet Illinois, hole plays you.

Lots of good stuff here:  

Mihal said it was a real downer on what had been a fine outing.  

No kidding.  

Fortunately for Mihal, who damaged his shoulder in the fall, he didn't need a wedge or have to play it where it lay.  He had stepped over to investigate an odd "bathtub-looking indentation".  When he stepped on it, because "[i]t didn't look unstable", he started falling.

Here's a clue, folks, a bathtub-looking indentation would necessarily show some cracking and separation around the edges.  This might indicate some instability.  I mean, it wasn't shaking like lime Jello or spewing molten lava, so I figured it was solid.  Right?  Flash to the apes looking at the monolith.  Might as well step on it.  What's the worst that could happen?

Is it possible alcohol was involved?

His golfing buddies didn't see him vanish into the earth but noticed he wasn't visible, figuring he had tripped and fallen out of sight down a hill. But one of them heard Mihal's moans and went to investigate.

"He just thought it was some crazy magic trick or something," Mihal said.

Because people are always doing crazy magic tricks on the golf course over in Waterloo.  It's a Prairie State tradition.  They say it started with Abe Lincoln.

Fortunately for Mihal, his group included a sweater-clad real-estate agent, who, with the help of a rope, was able to retrieve the one-in-a-hole.

Too bad they didn't have a giant version of that ball-retriever thing golfers use.  It would have come in handy.

Mihal should feel fortunate that he was swallowed by a sinkhole rather than mashed by a meteor.  

Statists Are Above the Law

So, the mighty Jim Hoft tells us that former Shuttle astronaut, husband of shooting victim Gabrielle Giffords, and likely future politician, Mark Kelly decided to pull a cute publicity stunt that did not involve dragging his brain-damaged wife around as a show-and-tell prop.  He went to an Arizona gun dealer and bought an AR-type rifle, which he erroneously calls an assault weapon, with no intention of keeping the rifle.  As anyone who has filled out the ATF form for a firearms purchase knows, one of the questions which the signer must answer is if the firearm is being purchased for oneself. 

To buy a firearm for another person -- whether that person can pass a background check or not -- is defined as "straw-buying".  There are people sitting in jail cells right now who knowingly acted as straw-buyers.  Mark Kelly perjured himself on a federal form, and, were he an evil conservative, he would likely be prosecuted for this.  Of course, it is unlikely that a conservative would ever do anything like this and then be stupid enough to post it on Fakebook and hold a press conference admitting to it.

I don't think, for the record, that Mark Kelly should be prosecuted, but I do think his credibility on this issue should be questioned.  It's one thing to have the "high moral ground" and be all indignant about one's wife being shot in the head -- by a madman with a handgun incidentally.  It is quite another to deliberately break the law to make a point about how easy it is for an upstanding citizen with no past criminal record -- a freaking astronaut -- to buy a perfectly legal firearm.  Justice would argue that Kelly never be allowed to buy another firearm since he would like to deny that right to the rest of us.  Plus, he, unlike the rest of us, committed a federal felony.

While we're on the subject of high moral ground, being a victim does not give one the high ground.  Being moral and doing the right thing, the honest thing, the honorable thing secures the high moral ground.  It doesn't matter whether or not a person belongs to a protected class or the political class or whether a person has suffered some injustice in life.  I would guess that the vast majority of us have gotten the short end of the stick on occasion.  Everybody could claim some form of victim-hood if we were to think about it long enough.  Most of us have better things to do and better sense than to do it. 

I feel great sympathy for Ms. Giffords and her family -- even for her opportunistic husband.  They suffered something no one should have to suffer.  But a lot of people experience what could be called unnecessary tragedies.  A little nine-year-old girl was murdered in that same incident by that same madman.  She is rarely mentioned these days.  She is just one of the six people who died.  Gabrielle Giffords survived.  The description of the incident always makes Giffords the main victim.  She was not, though she may have been the focus of the murderer's evil intent. 

People are killed on the highways by drunk drivers every day in this country.  Children are diagnosed with cancer and other dread diseases.  People are murdered with weapons of all kinds daily on the streets of Chicago and Detroit and East St. Louis.  In a perfect world, none of those things would happen.  Every one of those deaths, every hampered and crippled life is "unfair".  Most of us, though, understand that death and disease, loss and suffering are as much a part of life as health and wholeness.  We live in an imperfect world, but it is a real world, and it is better to be free in it than to trade real liberty for false security. 

When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. (I Corinthians 13:11, ESV)

Space Vikings

H. Beam Piper was not, perhaps, in the same league with science fiction writers like Heinlein and Asimov, but a couple of his books are classics.  Little Fuzzy is probably my favorite Piper book.  Jack Holloway is a great character who would fit right into the Firefly universe.  Another of Piper's works, Space Vikings, is a space opera of considerable scope that takes place within Piper's Terro-Human Future History.

The hero of Space Vikings is Lucas Trask.  When we meet Trask initially he is a feudal landholder on the planet of Gram.  In the aftermath of a great personal tragedy, Trask becomes what is known as a Space Viking, a raider from the civilized Sword Worlds upon the planets of the old Terran Federation that have fallen back into more primitive conditions.  In the course of his adventures, Trask initiates what may be a new empire and civilizing force in the universe.

Piper was something of a libertarian.  He wrote a great deal about guns, firearms still playing an essential role for humanity even in the far future.  Space Vikings is manly science fiction.  Self-reliance, courage, honor, and common sense are the virtues of Piper's heroes.  The characterizations in his work may seem a little too trite and conventional, and the habits and technologies may seem quaint or anachronistic -- everybody smokes tobacco, but for the most part, Piper's better works hold up well.  His world-building is rich and intriguing, allowing readers to overlook what would be weaknesses in lesser writers.  Past a few necessary leaps for the science and technology to work, Piper leaves few holes for critics to exploit.

Anyway, to the point of my post, Piper projects past history into his future history.  The planetary rebellion depicted in Uller Uprising parallels the Sepoy Uprising of British India.  In Space Vikings, the Sword Worlds, with their relatively small planetary populations, have adopted a benevolent form of feudalism, while the old Federation world of Marduk, with a much larger population, is a representative democracy with a parliamentary government and a nominal royal head of state -- very similar to the British system.

One of the princes of Marduk discusses government with Trask.  The Mardukan is shocked that the Sword Worlds use a feudal system but even more shocked by one of the "checks" in the system.  On the Sword Worlds, everybody has weapons.  On Marduk, where people are allowed to access the ballot box and elect their leaders, weapons are held only by the government.  Trask thinks this is tyranny.  The prince from Marduk thinks letting "the people" have weapons is a recipe for civil war and chaos.  Trask points out that a clever demagogue could take control on Marduk, which turns out to be exactly what happens.

I love firearms, but the issue we face today in America goes far beyond having one kind of gun or another.  We have to decide if we are going to live as free individuals or as slaves of the state.  There is really no middle ground despite the smooth, soothing and persuasive words of our own demagogues.  Free men are armed.  Free men pledge their allegiance and support to their government for mutual protection and benefit.  Slaves do what their masters say, and it does not matter one whit that the masters are "duly elected".  What difference did it make to the slaves on a plantation in the Old South that a new person occupied the Big House?  The same overseers swung the same bullwhips to keep them in line.

It might be time to think about the kind of government that works and what has gone wrong with ours.  It might also be wise to consider that the Founders had no problem with a navy (and would likely consider a strategic, defensive air force as a navy in essence), but they were quite wary of maintaining a standing army which could be used against civilian uprisings.  I think they would also be shocked and dismayed at the militarization and centralization of police powers in the United States. 

We are all familiar with the following quote:   

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years.

We really don't know who said it -- but it was almost certainly not Alexander Fraser Tytler to whom it is often attributed.  Perhaps it is understandable that we cannot ascertain the name of the sage for, though it is very true, it is a sad truth, and few of us wish to be remembered for bearing bad news.

Fantasy Weaponry

Thinking about the TSA allowing SAKs on a plane got me to thinking about what I'd carry if there were no rules.  My firearm of choice would doubtless be a very short-barreled shotgun -- and, of course, I could get that if I were willing to pay the ATF for the stamp and register it as an AOW.  I guess I'll get by with 18.5 inches. 

If I knew my wife wouldn't divorce me -- or, more likely, kill me, I'd buy a blackpowder howdah pistol. 

It would be nice to have a BAR.  Again, if my wife would quit spending all my money on new trucks and motorcycles, I'd get a Barrett .50 as a substitute.  I'd have to carry it over to my nephew's place to find a safe place to shoot it where I could appreciate the effect. 

One firearm I might actually pick up would be a lever-action .44 magnum.  I can always use another lever-action.  I saw a Rossi on the rack locally a few days back but didn't have time to check the caliber.  The Mossberg "tactical" lever-actions are also kind of interesting.  They should leverage (sorry about that) their expertise from the 500 and 590 to create a slide-action with a detachable box magazine in various pistol and rifle calibers.  If it took AR-type accessories, that would be very cool.  One of the reasons my dad loved his Remington 7600 was because he loved his Remington 870 -- same motion.  Remington could also "tactify" the 7600 and add the .223.  Don't know if they could get it to accept AR mags, but that would be handy.  Seems like I heard Remington offers the 5.56 in a slide-action Down Under.  

Made, apparently from the infamous unobtainium, a Kel-Tec PMR30 is on my list -- 30 rounds of .22WMR in a polymer, autoloading handgun.  I'm sure readers are not surprised by my cultish choice.  Also, I wish I could justify buying one of their shotguns. 

My gripe about suppressors is similar to my gripe about short-barreled shotguns.  These should be standard, if not required, rather than restricted.

Some of my fantasy choices are not firearms.  If brass knuckles wouldn't get me hard time, I'd rather have a set of those than any other impact weapon short of a quarterstaff or a war-hammer.  I have threatened for years to buy an Indiana Jones-style whip.  The wife again.  But if I can ever figure out a good way to carry it concealed that doesn't involve coiling it around my belly ...

We can get flamethrowers, but genuine Greek fire is what we really need.  I always thought a mortar would be nice to have -- strictly for the fun of playing with the trajectories, of course -- maybe a spud mortar or a modest blackpowder version could be substituted.  
 
What would you like to have?