Let's Make It Go Viral

Video from Karl Denninger,



He asked us to make it go viral, and here's my part.  It shouldn't be a surprise, if you read my ramblings.  I've been beating Bernanke like a rented mule since I started this blog - not that he hasn't deserved all of it and more.

Write your congress critters, especially if you have one of those new ones, like I do.  Back the efforts to audit the Fed, and get rid of Bernanke. 

Ready For Assembly

Well, I think it's a lower receiver. At this point, if I was to buy it, I would need to go through an FFL.

As you can see, no engraving, and that's what's left to do before I assemble it.  As I talked about in comments to the earlier posts, Mrs. Graybeard thinks we should name it after our cat Moe and label it "Moe Guns", because who doesn't want Mo Guns?  Also, as I said in the prior posts, it's easier to give it a serial number even though that's really not required unless I sell it.

The milling was straightforward, once I had the limits of the motions programmed.  To get those points, I used the drawings that Colfax Tactical includes with the forging.  I have ported the drawing into my solid design program, Rhino3D, and have both solid models and an updated Autocad drawing.  This morning, I wrote a text file to program the tool paths for the CNC, and fed it into Mach.  An hour or so of babysitting the mill later, the fire control pocket was smoothed out.  I did the more complex end (on the right here) by hand, using immediate control of the mill. 

The drilling was not as trouble free as I'd like to think.  There are marks on the side of fire control pocket from where some drill bits drifted.  I don't believe these will affect performance.  For the non-machinists who read this, no machinist ever considers a hole drilled with a standard drill bit to be a high-precision thing.  They're a rough cut.  The typical result of a drill is neither round, nor straight, nor the right dimension.  I have to assume the folks who put this kit together knew that and put the drill holes where things like this don't matter. 

Here's a shot while I was still working on the lower; you can see the marks from the drill bits on the top of the pocket.  Also, the 5/16" holes that form the trigger slot ended up with one off the centerline, although they both started out on it.   

My goal is for this to be a rifle next weekend.  I have all the parts.

As always, for more info, email me or comment here.



Edited 10/6/10 @ 2250 EDT to add the exclusive CrapCam embedded video.  Forgot I took this. 

Federal Reserve Announces Selective Assassinations

November 5, (c) Roy Ters.  In a stunning move, today Federal Reserve Bank chairman Ben Bernanke announced targeted assassinations in an attempt to revive the moribund US economy.  The plan, called the Criticism Removal and Amelioration Program, will start with bloggers and other critics of the Fed, and then spread to citizens chosen at random.  

The chairman of the Federal Reserve announced the move over growing global disapproval of the recently announced second Quantitative Easing program, QE2, claiming the new program to selectively assassinate up to half of the American Citizens would stimulate the economy.  "People will need to spend money for bulletproof body armor, and evasive technologies", said Bernanke.  "I know this sounds like the 'Broken Windows Fallacy' but this time it will work.  People will have to bury their dead.  Estate tax income to the treasury will soar.  There's a host of economic activity that will come from this".

Support was, predictably, split along party lines.  Senator Harry Reid (D) praised the program as "the right move at the right time", while Senator Chuck Schumer (D) called it, "another brilliant example of the way Dr. Bernanke thinks outside the usual box".  

Newly elected senator Rand Paul (R) of Kentucky said, "The chairman is always trying failed programs and saying 'this time it will work'.  Let's assume for a minute that this works.  Then what?  Once they've killed off half the population, the remaining half won't be large enough to keep spending even at pre-CRAP levels!"    

Chairman Bernanke was unavailable for comment.  

It's Time to Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid.

To update my Halloween piece on how today was going to be the scariest day of the week, it turned out to be worse than I was afraid of.  Helicopter Ben is going to dump an unprecedented amount of cash out of that chopper of his.  First, the straight news:

The Federal Reserve will buy an additional $600 billion of Treasuries through June, expanding record stimulus and risking its credibility in a bid to reduce unemployment and avert deflation.

Sounds pretty tame.  Why should we be afraid?  Denninger points out this gem hidden in the report from the Treasury Borrowing Advisory Committee of the US Department of the Treasury (you will note it is dated yesterday, 10/2, in one place and today in another).

The presenting member stated that the market expects the Federal Reserve to purchase $100 billion per month, as well as $30 billion per month in MBS reinvestments.  This will total $1,560 billion in Treasury purchases over the next year.  The member stated, however, that market participants believe the Fed will leave the status of QE2 open ended, with purchases ultimately dependent on economic conditions.  The presenter also noted that the program should last six months to two years.

$1560 Billion - $1.56 Trillion??? That's the entire fracking annual deficit!!  So it's not "$600 Billion", it's the entire deficit that they're going to create.  This is Zimbabwe stuff, folks, this is going to hurt so bad you won't be able to see straight.  Yesterday, it was reported that the expected $500 billion in QE would reduce the value of your dollars by 20%.  Just read that as your salary, savings, every dollar you own would be cut by 20%   But this report says over three times as much QE; that means your pay just went down by 60%!!  Your IRA?  Down by 60%.  Everything wiped out by the Federal Reserve.  The banks, however, will be fine.  As usual, the Fed will protect the banks by shooting you, the unarmed, non-threatening civilian, striving to take care of yourself and your family.


I don't know how long this will take to percolate through the system.  As I've said before, at least for me, the general direction and effects are easy to see, the timing is difficult.  The reaction of the markets was puzzling to me: metals markets were slightly down and the stock market slightly up.  It seems that the markets have been expecting this and the current prices reflect these expectations.  As they read and understand the releases fully, I expect commodities to rise further.  I don't see how they can do anything else.  


You will hear this being referred to as Keynesian economics, and this part is.  I have heard that John Maynard Keynes himself never said the government should deficit spend in good times, only as an emergency measure.  Especially after news like this, I need a laugh, even if it's just laughing at stupid people.




I don't see much distinction between this group of idiots and the ones at the Fed and Treasury.  To borrow from the wonderful Dr. Thomas Sowell:

Guess who said the following: “We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work.” Was it Sarah Palin? Rush Limbaugh? Karl Rove?

Not even close. It was Henry Morgenthau, secretary of the Treasury under Franklin D. Roosevelt and one of FDR’s closest advisers. He added, “after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started. . . .  And an enormous debt to boot!”

QE2 won't work - it will just hurt you.  And that has been known for over 70 years.  Forget the Wookie suit.  It's getting to be time for a ghillie suit. 

It's Over - For Now

The election cycle is over here in Florida.  Most people think of us as an east coast state, but Florida extends into the central time zone, so our polls close at 8PM eastern. I'm seeing folks winning that I wanted to see win and folks being defeated that I hoped would go down.  (I honestly considered moving to Orlando just to vote against Allan Grayson). 

The really good part is that the slimy ads are gone for now.  Thank God!

But there's something bothering me about this: why are there political ads on TV?  Does anybody really decide their choice for governor or senator or even dog-catcher based on a TV commercial?  I mean, you wouldn't buy a car or any other major purchase without getting independent reviewers' opinions, would you?  If it was a really big purchase, would you buy a Ford because they tell you their car is better than a Chevy, or because a stack of reviewers, test drivers, friends and relatives tell you?

If you wouldn't buy a car based on a couple of TV ads, why would you give someone the power of life and death over you based on TV ads?

Does anyone ever get convinced to vote for someone by posters alongside the road?  Does anyone see the "Melvin Frohike for Congress" on the way to work and decide to go vote for them?  How shallow would you have to be to think that way?  The old saying is, "money is the lifeblood of politics", but have they really thought about what they're buying?  They're raising vast quantities of money to spend on campaigns and yet it looks to me like the expenditures are largely stupid.  Who's paying for all this, anyway? 

It turns out, not surprisingly, you are.  Rachel Alexander on Townhall.com reports that over the last 20 years, two of the three biggest contributors to politics have been unions.  Not just any unions, SEIU and AFSCME, unions of public employees. 

The American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) spent $87.5 million this year to help Democrats. AFSCME is ranked as the third biggest contributor to campaigns cumulatively over the past 20 years, with 98% of its money going to Democrats.

She goes on to list the biggest contributors:

SEIU spent more money than any other organization over the past 20 years on independent expenditures, $69 million. The National Rifle Association came in second, spending $56 million over the past 20 years. AFSCME came in third, spending $52 million. The next biggest spenders in the top 50 were the AFL-CIO with $39 million, the National Association of Realtors with $33 million, and the National Education Association with $30 million. Other far left groups in the top 50 include EMILY’s List, Human Rights Campaign, and the American Association for Justice.

Ignoring the NRA, the other 2/3 of the top three, the SEIU and AFSCME unions are robbing you twice.  Fed.gov workers get higher pay and better benefits than private sector workers, which the private sector pays for, and then we pay for their contributions to Democrats to keep on giving them higher pay and benefits than we get. 


I can hear lefties saying the NRA is a right wing organization, so don't mess with the unions.  If you're a member of the gun culture, though, you're painfully aware that the NRA does not endorse only "right wing" candidates.  My take is that NRA are "inside the beltway players"; they give money to the people who they think are most likely to win, and people they think they can deal with. 


My guess: all of the people who do this for a living really think the money doesn't do much, but they're too scared to not spend lots.  If they spend lots of money and lose, everyone will say, "you can't win 'em all!"; if they have money left over but still lose, they'll never work in a campaign again.

The New Project Continues

This weekend, I removed the bulk of the metal from the forging's fire control pocket, and now I "just" need to clean up the resulting shape with the end mill.  Some of the cleanup has started.  It looked like this when I had to quit last night.

The lighting in this picture is borderline awful, I had to really bring up the mid-range, but you can see that the majority of the pocket is ready to clean out.  You can't see that it's the full depth (1.249") and that I've smoothed out some of the sides already.  The trigger slot is currently two drill holes, but it will be easy to remove the little web of metal between the holes.  The rest of the lower receiver parts (a DPMS kit) might be here by Friday, but UPS hasn't promised, yet. 

I'm finding that my approach is probably slower than just using a manual mill and cranking the handles, but for things like drilling all the holes out, the CNC automatic peck drilling cycle sure is nice.  For the rest of cleaning out the fire control pocket, I need to find the location of the corners where the end mill stops (the radius of the cutter short of the ends in X, and the end points in Y), and a reasonable depth of cut, then just write the tool path in a text editor.  This is hand coding the G-code that runs the mill.  As an alternative, the fixture I bought has a top plate that will allow you to run (the non-cutting portion of) the end mill along the edge of the jigs, like a routing template.  It can be done on a drill press, as this CNC Guns tutorial shows.  A milling machine is not necessary.

More on this as it goes along. 

Boo!!

Happy Halloween folks.  I hope you enjoy whatever your day brings. 

This year, Halloween will be the third scariest day of the week.  Second is Tuesday, election day, and the scariest day will be Wednesday, November 3rd, when the Federal Open Market Committee has its meeting to (probably) decide on whether or not they proceed with Quantitative Easing (QE) or not. 

That the economists…can explain neither prices nor the rate of interest nor even agree what money is reminds us that we are dealing with belief not science.
-James Buchan, Frozen Desire (1997)

(h/t to Seeking Alpha) 

If they decide to do this, it's powerful testimony to the idea that, "our theory didn't work, so let's try it again, only harder!"  This will be the official second round of QE, although it has never really stopped.  Bernanke and the Fed claim that inflation is running under 2% per year (obviously, they have not gone grocery shopping) and they think printing more money out of thin air, thereby devaluing it, will just fix everything right up.   Never mind that our biggest creditor, the PRC, is already warning us not to - and backing it up with the opening rounds of a trade war.  I've commented on the inflation making its way into food and commodity prices already; recent numbers show the following increases this year. 

• Corn: Up 63%
• Wheat: Up 84%
• Soybeans: Up 24%
• Sugar: Up 55%

Since grains (including soy) are animal feed, how can that not cause the prices of poultry, beef and pork to rise? That's not all: there are several indicators that food may be in short supply next year, further increasing prices. 

Peter Schiff of EuroPacific Capital, one of the folks who predicted the mortgage crisis, is saying "QE2 Will Sink Just Like The Titanic". 

If they go ahead with QE2, it will be another attack on savers.  The whole idea is to get you go out spending again, which will just create another bubble that will burst like all the others ever have.   There are many reasons for the economic hole we're in right now, but the biggest reason is the Federal Reserve itself.

Here's the strange part: let's say that the stupid party wins really big on Tuesday.  There's a chance that Ron Paul may get the power to audit the Fed, and get to the bottom of some of the crap that's going on. 

New Project Underway

I've been a little quiet lately because I've been a little busier lately.  I have a new project underway, making an AR-15 from an 80% lower and a pile of parts.  Thanks to the fine folks at Colfax Tactical, I have a lower receiver forging on the CNC mill and I'm in the process of finishing the last 20% that makes the lower receiver functional. 

Why this project?  First off, as someone observed before, "ARs are like potato chips: you can't stop at one".  My main use for my AR has been remote paper punching, and I'd like to have another with a longer barrel (mine is 16").  A second reason is the answer to "why climb that mountain?".  I enjoy doing things in the shop, I have a CNC milling machine, a drill press and everything I need to take on this project, so why not?  Finally, under BATFE rules, the lower receiver is what constitutes a gun, and an 80% lower is not useful enough to be considered a firearm.  It's a paperweight which can be bought without an FFL transfer.  So for a few hours of work in the shop, you can turn a paperweight and a handful of springs and things into something very useful. Once you turn it into a gun, you don't legally need to put a serial number on it; it's probably easier to put a number on it than to explain to the nice officer why your gun doesn't have a serial number!

I elected to buy the optional fixture that Colfax sells, because this is my first one.  Perhaps if there are more in the future, I'll work with the raw castings/forgings.  The first step is to center the drilling guide over the area that will be hollowed out - this is the fire control pocket, where the trigger and safety are located.  This photo shows me marking the hole locations on my drill press.  Once that was done, I moved it to the milling machine.

Once it was on the milling machine, I immediately discovered that the work holding clamps for the mill wouldn't securely grab the fixture, so I had to go back over to the drill press and modify the fixture.  This clamp is holding onto a 1/4-20 machine screw that wasn't there. I had to drill and tap the holes for it to make the fixture usable to me.  There's one on each end. 

The first holes to drill out will become the trigger slot.  These need to have 1/8" guide holes through drilled, followed by a 5/16" drill, all the way through the forging.  All of the rest of  the marks will get 1/8" and then some get 3/8" holes drilled to "hog out" most of the metal.  A drill is pretty much the fastest way to remove metal, especially for a small, low horse power mill like this.  

Finally

Both of these pictures were taken while drilling (specifically, running a CNC G83 "Peck Drill" cycle), but the flash froze the motion.

That's the latest here at Castle Graybeard.  I'll update it as I move along.  For those interested in more info, besides commenting here or email to my blog account, you can find information at the CNC Guns forums, and main web site.  As far as I know, I'm the first person to do this on a Sherline mill.  Well, hybrid Sherline and A2Z CNC mill.

Edit:  10/30 2235   That dastardly typo gremlin edited my post after I put it up.  I swear that little guy gets me all the time. :-D  

The Other Side

Frank, over at IMAO, (a very funny guy and place) embeds a video that we all ought to see.  I'll wait: it's only 2:49 long.  I don't want to embed that here and give the guy more publicity.  The anger in the comments is interesting reading in its own right. 

So his conclusion is that because one guy at a Rand Paul rally over-reacted and pinned someone down at their shoulder, the liberals should lay in arms and ammo for the riots that are to come from the "Rethugnant Ones" (real clever, that).  I have a couple of reactions to this: my first one is that his diatribe is demonstrably full of lies; first off, the guy who pinned the protester down  is being charged ( by the way, the protester, Lauren Valle, is a professional left wing activist who was probably trying to get assaulted to make Paul supporters look bad), and second off, for every right wing attack anyone with a few minutes and a search engine can stack up left wing attacks like firewood. 

My second thought is: you didn't think the coming North American War Games was going to be a merry band of three percenters against the Fed.gov leviathan, did you?  The battle space is much more involved than that.  Guys like this YouTube "Legend in His Own Mind" are the most visible version of the Mutant Zombie Bikers we've read about.  In fact, if you haven't read that link about just how prevalent this attitude is, you should.   

While not a pacifist, I'm not looking to shoot first.  Unless they pull up on my lawn or try to get in my doors; in which case "fortune favors the bold".

News From Glorious People's Automotive Collective Number 1!!

A while back, I riffed about the Chevy Volt, the glorious electric car from People's Automotive Collective Number 1.  My point was that the car is extremely overpriced, and you'd really have to drive extreme amounts to re-coup the cost of buying one in saved gas, compared to a reasonable family car.  That puts it in the category of smug-mobile for the vast majority of people. 

Part of the selling of this car is that it isn't a hybrid.  Oh, no, monkey-boy, this is an All Electric Car.  That gasoline powered engine you see?  That's just in there to top off the battery.  Which is good, because although it is several thousand dollars more than the Nissan Leaf, which is entirely electric, it is around twice the price of a similarly sized hybrid car. 

It turns out, that's not exactly true.  Actually, not even remotely true.  A few of these are out for the reviewers to drive and reports are filtering into the press.  It turns out, the engine is used quite a bit. 

Volt engineers are now admitting that when the vehicle's lithium-ion battery pack runs down and at speeds near or above 70 mph, the Volt's gasoline engine will directly drive the front wheels along with the electric motors. That's not charging the battery — that's driving the car. (emphasis added - GB)

At this point, it's a hybrid.  Remember that talk about it getting the equivalent of 230 miles per gallon?

Popular Mechanics found the Volt to get about 37.5 mpg in city driving, and Motor Trend reports: "Without any plugging in, (a week long trip to Grandma's house) should return fuel economy in the high 30s to low 40s."

The difference between 37.5 mpg and 230 isn't exactly subtle.

Car and Driver reported that "getting on the nearest highway and commuting with the 80-mph flow of traffic — basically the worst-case scenario — yielded 26 miles; a fairly spirited backroad loop netted 31; and a carefully modulated cruise below 60 mph pushed the figure into the upper 30s."

Essentially, all of the reviewers agree that mileage is nowhere near the stated numbers.  So now we find,

...it's a glorified Prius with the price tag of a BMW that seats only four because of a battery that runs down the center of the car.

Or as I said in my original comments, "So while it will work for many commuters (as would an electric golf cart), it still seems to be a $40,000 car with all the room and comfort of a $15,000 car."  Exactly what you get when a big, out of control government, takes over a  big, aging dinosaur of a car company.


The IBD article is worth reading.   Meanwhile, it looks like we have to continue to wait for those magical unicorn farts that will power the world.  Any day now. 

Sometimes The OpFor Shows Their Hands

Turns out the firing of Juan Williams was not just about Juan Williams, and seems to have revealed some of the OpFor plans. 

Tara Servatius at Townhall.com points out that the CEO of NPR, Vivian Schiller, is part of that whole nexus of the FCC, the fraudulently-named Free Press/Joyce Foundation/George Soros, Julius Genachowski plan to take over the "distressed local news providers" and replaced them with NPR. Schiller displayed a little, um, premature congratulations:

Schiller could barely contain her rage at Fox News and at Williams last week, saying he should discuss his fear of boarding a plane with Muslim passengers with “his psychiatrist.” Those who understand what is at stake saw the Williams/Schiller dust up for what it really was – a declaration of war by one of the most powerful women in journalism against for-profit, non-liberal media. If Schiller and her liberal friends have their way, Fox and its viewers will pay the bill for her new government news network.

(The new government news service: Pravda means "Truth" and fits right into the NPR Logo).  The Townhall article is about twice the length of this piece, but worth reading.  Ms. Servatius goes on to say:

A May Free Press report describes NPR’s Public Media Platform as a first step in their plans for a government media takeover. The platform is in the early stages, and its purpose is to attract billions more in government funding. “We are going to strengthen and bolster our representation to Congress and to other entities that can help fund all of us,” Schiller told the NPR board in her 2009 speech about a public media takeover of news reporting.

All of this makes Schiller’s very public drop-kick of Williams far more than a hissy fit that got out of hand. It was a declaration of war against commercial media in general and Fox in particular. Who wins will be determined by what voters do at the ballot box in the coming years.

We should be thankful to Ms. Schiller.  Thanks to her hot tempered screw-up, Ms. Servatius has filled us in on what's going on, and we know to hound our newly elected representatives not just to cutoff funding for NPR, but also the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, PBS, all of it.  If she had kept her head, and kept Juan Williams on staff, the public cry for killing off NPR probably wouldn't have started at all.   

Take A Nerd Shooting

We could all do worse in life than to emulate Antonin Scalia.  In pretty much everything.

In this case, Justice Scalia apparently took newly appointed Justice Elena Kagan shooting.  (hat tip to Babalu).  Bravo. 

The witnesses saw Scalia at the Fairfax Rod and Gun Club, where he is a member, around noon on Wednesday of last week. He was with a woman who was noticeably diminutive in height, like Kagan, who stands at about five feet three inches. The witnesses, who got a very close look at the pair, say that the woman was the newest Supreme Court Justice.

Justice Kagan has a reputation for being rather strongly anti-firearms and I just have to applaud - and thank - Justice Scalia for taking her to the range.  I guess it's a commonly held belief that many anti-firearms hoplophobes are just not familiar with guns or the gun culture; they go through life without meeting or talking to any real people.  How else could something like the "assault weapons" ban happen?  They have to be completely ignorant of the guns and even the principles involved.  Perhaps she'll come to realize that the people who endure the hassles to carry regularly are the safest people to be around. 

I can hope, can't I? 

Economics 101

I was going to write something about Mega-ass-wipe Julian Assange at Wiki-Leaks, but I've been distracted by the disgusting mess that is our election cycle.  

Instead, the three postings at Restore the Constitution (the Sheeple, The Monkeys, and The Bad People)  got me thinking about the problems that come from having a population that doesn't understand the most basic ideas of economics.  Dan also has this story that made the recently-glued and almost-healed pieces of my exploded skull start to bulge again. 

“A new poll by the Public Religion Research Institute found that 67% of the American public not only supports the minimum wage but would like to increase it to $10 an hour.”
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2026515,00.html#ixzz12xhaupNf

The stupid lawyer at Time (but I repeat myself) argues that the minimum wage puts more money in people's pockets.  It does, indeed, and it does them absolutely no good.  I find this whole idea that the minimum wage is a good thing has come up in many of the political races around the country.  People don't understand this basic economics.  I know my readership is more astute than the Sheeple or the Monkeys, but you may some day have to explain this to them.  

So let's say the minimum wage becomes $10 an hour.  What happens?  Every price goes up proportional to the increased cost of labor.  Every worker making between the current and new minimum wage - and plenty of others - costs more.  Some jobs go away, because the company can't afford to bring on a person for that price, other jobs never get created.  After a round of inflation because of the increased costs for everything, the person making minimum wage - if they are still working - is in the same place relative to everyone else as they started out before the wage change.  They have more dollars in their wallet, but everything costs more.

If you can make the minimum wage $10, why stop there?  Why not 20 or $100 an hour?  It's like taking every dollar in your wallet and replacing it with one that has bigger numbers on it, but every price tag in town gets bigger to match. Will we make the people on minimum wage wealthier by increasing the minimum wage?  Of course not.  We won't make anyone's lives better - unless some dopey politician wins a good office because of stupid people.  Minimum wage laws are based on the sloppy thought that says putting bills with different writing on them in your wallet makes you wealthier.  Ask the people in Zimbabwe, where they replaced bills that said one dollar with bills that say one billion dollars, and three eggs cost trillions of dollars.  The economy is not a pie that we divide up by deciding who gets which piece.  What we need to do is bake more pies, and the way to do that is by getting the leviathan's hands off the throats of the businesses.  Besides, at the rate the Fed is going, we're all going to be billionaires soon enough, and not have enough money for a loaf of bread. 

(Pic credit)

(and credit)
(pictures of pies because pictures of Zimbabwe currency are, frankly, not as easy on the eyes.  I'm hungry now)

BTW - the new Savages shoot very nicely.  The sights needed a little tweaking.  These old guy eyes need a scope! 

It's Like Christmas In October ... Or Something

The Silicon Swamp is not a big city.  While it's not really possible to see one from our back porch, on the right kind of night it's possible to see the lights of the big city from the back porch, though.  (Those nights are are marked by a cloud deck over the whole state, typically around the passage of a cold front.)  I say that so you know we don't have a really good gun and sporting goods shop like Bass Pro or Cabelas* here in town.  The nearest Bass Pro is over "in the big city" and is a 2 1/2 hour round trip, not including time in the store.  There's a Gander Mountain another hour farther away, so I've never been there.

Back in August, our local Bass Pro Shops was running a pre-hunting season sale with a few low priced loss leaders.  What struck my eye was a Savage 64F rifle, a semi-automatic, magazine loaded .22 rifle for $110.  The ad had the magic phrases "Limited Quantities" and "One Day Only" to further peak my interest.  As part of our continuing training, Mrs. Graybeard and I are trying to arrange for an Appleseed weekend, so we need a couple of good .22s.  While you can bring any kind of rifle, for the two of us to bring anything bigger than a .22 has a serious cost disadvantage.  We only have one AR (at the moment) and even then, the thought of running through 500 rounds each at 35 or 40 cents per round vs. 4 cents a round makes the .22 that much more attractive.  My limited talks with folks who have done an Appleseed event says that most people bring Ruger 10/22s. 

So we made note of the day this deep discount would be available and waited.  And waited.  We set the alarm for right around dark-thirty so that we could make the hour-and-change drive in time to be there for their opening.  Even made it with 10 minutes to spare.  That's when I made my big, dumb mistake.  Instead of running directly to the hunting department, we stopped at "the facilities" first.  When we got to the counter, it looked like the local grocery store deli on one of the big Bowl Game days, or even Super Bowl Sunday.  I hit the "Take A Number" thingy and got a number for each of us - 83 and 84.  I looked at the deli sign.  It said, "Now Serving 49".  Aw, crap.  It looked like at least an hour wait (it was almost 2 1/2).  I should have gotten the number and then hit the facilities.  

Red Ryder carbine-action, two hundred shot Range Model air rifle with a compass in the stock.  No, wait.  The Savage 64F. 

By the time they called our number, I had read the Hornady Reloading Handbook, (though not cover to cover) and the rifles were long gone.  The girl at the counter was nice enough to offer us rain checks, which really surprised me, then told us we were getting the last two rain checks.  So we waited.  And waited.  The first gun came in the week before my trip out west.  The second one came in this Wednesday.  It's almost like Christmas in October. 

Tomorrow we make the 150 mile (round trip) pilgrimage to pick up our new toys.  Sunday by 9AM we ought to be well into a box. 

Breakfast of Champions

*On our last day in Utah, we stumbled across a Cabelas store in a city called Lehi, 20 minutes south of Salt Lake City.  I could have signed over my paychecks and moved in.  It was way better than our local Bass Pro. There are no Cabelas in the entire southeast. 

The Juan Williams Firing

My regular reading list blogs are strangely quiet on the topic of Juan Williams' dismissal by NPR for exercising his freedom of speech. Michelle Malkin has an article; and I don't see anything in my usual reading.  Glenn Beck's new "news site", The Blaze has a decent coverage.

Let me say that I probably agree with 20% of what I've heard him say over the years.  I heard him talking about a book he wrote ("Enough") that sounds almost Bill Cosby-like in his concern for how black families are being destroyed by the welfare culture.  From time to time I've heard other things I agree with, but not often enough to get any real chance of regular agreement.  There are some left-side pundits who go from reasonable to Joseph Stalin when they get hired for a new campaign.  Kirsten Powers comes to mind as one. Williams always struck me as a guy who was a pretty decent human being, just wrong a lot. 

The point is, unless there was an iron-clad clause in his contract that he is not allowed to have personal opinions or not allowed to talk about them as a condition of employment (and nobody is reporting this) Williams should not have been fired from NPR for what he said in his interview with O'Reilly.  In this country, you are allowed to speak your mind.  The First Amendment's protection of speech is meaningless when everyone is saying the same things; it is precisely when that speech is controversial, or upsetting, that the protection is needed. 

This is yet another shining example of the intolerance of the left.  Or the influence of Dr. Evil, George Soros, and his $1.8 Million gift to NPR. 

The DC Miracle Continues

Since the Heller decision, the rate of violent crime in Washington DC has been on a steady decline.  This is no surprise to members of the gun culture; we all seem to know that "More Guns = Less Crime" as the great Dr. Lott says. 

Dr. Lott has a column today on National Review talking about bias on the part of M.D.s in the New England Journal of Medicine. 

One of the articles, written by Garen Wintemute, Anthony Braga, and David Kennedy, makes the case for extending background checks to the private transfers of guns, arguing that “perhaps the principal reason for the well-documented failure of the Brady Act to lower rates of firearm-related homicide is that its requirements do not apply to private-party gun sales.” But they do so without providing any evidence that these or any other background checks reduce crime.  (emphasis added)

Remember just because it's in a science journal doesn't mean it's true.

Dr. Lott shows on his own page that DC crime rates, notably their terrible murder rate, have continued to improve in the second year since the Heller decision.  The murder rate in DC is down 35.5% from its peak in 2008.  All crimes in this chart are down.  No sane person can possibly make the argument that DC is a worse place now than it was before the gun ban was lifted. 

Inflation to Get a Boost

Last Friday, Chairman Ben Bernanke of the Federal Reserve Bank, made a very important speech.  More so than his typical speech.  It should be clear to anyone that all attempts to stop the current depression have failed.  We have unemployment on the national level of nearly 20%, when all discouraged job-seekers are counted, and the numbers are counted as they historically have been kept.  Shadowstats uses an algorithm like this and argues that the real national unemployment rate is around 22%.  In this plot, the red trace is the one you hear about on the news; the gray plot is the broadest measure of unemployment, and the dark blue is the best guess taking all of the known corrections and omissions out.  In places, this number must exceed 30%.  I'm hesitant to say much higher, but there are tent cities many places in America.  

So since the Fed has been running essentially zero interest rate since 2008, and that has only allowed the well-connected to borrow money for free and speculate with it, what can Helicopter Ben do? 

Well, fire up the helicopter and drop more money.  Ben says inflation is too low.  The official inflation number is close to zero.  Unfortunately, the Consumer Price Index does not include food and energy in it's "core inflation" that's reported.  Howard Ruff reports the following:

For example, Agricultural Raw Materials are up 24%, The Mineral Index is up 25%, The Metals Price Index is up 26%, Coffee is up 45%, Barley is up 32%, Oranges are up 35%, Beef is up 23%, Pork is up 68%, Salmon is up 30%, Sugar is up 24%, Wool is up 30%, Cotton is up 40%, Palm oil is up 26%, Hides is up 25%, Rubber is up 62%, Iron Ore up 103%. Those are prices at the wholesale level.

Remember the AOL Finance article I reported here about two months ago that said:

...(at Walmart) the price of a 32-ounce bottle of Windex household cleaner jumped 50%, a 12-ounce box of Quaker Oats instant grits climbed 65% and a 50-ounce container of Tide detergent rose by more than 50%

Inflation is what we expect from keeping rates low and creating money out of thin air, and we see inflation.  You can expect your grocery bill to be going up in the range of those numbers Ruff gives.  Everything is going to get much more expensive.  You will note that the reports earlier this week that social security was not going to pay a cost of living adjustment because inflation is so low.  How long before we see seniors starving?  How long until grandma and grandpa go dumpster diving? 

Nevertheless, the Fed says we need inflation now, so he's going to devalue the money supply some more.  His idea is to get you to go buy something before your money becomes worthless.   I don't understand why those highly exalted Ph.D.s at the Fed can never see step 2.  OK- so we go spend our savings; then what?  We buy a car or a TV or a refrigerator; then what?  Then we're in worse shape than we are now.  If nothing else, we create a short term bubble and long term price crisis like "Cash for Clunkers" did.  And Helicopter Ben is going to maintain the zero percent interest rates, because if the rates go up, the Federal.budget line item for interest on the debt goes up, and we have to sell more bonds.   Here's the thing.  Everyone knows we're doing this.  Everyone who owns dollars knows they're going to be worth less and less until they're worthless.  So they'll stop buying bonds at the current interest rate.

Over at the Economic Collapse blog, they make a good argument that this is just to bail out the bankers without saying the words "bail out".  They call it The Biggest Bank Robbery In History. 

Friends, I don't see a way out of this.  I've been beating on this drum since I started here.  Do your best to prepare. 

A balloon at the moment it pops (Ted Kinsman photo from here).

Thankfully, It Wasn't That Bad

After a full day with no reappearance, it appears our war with the Security Tool was short-lived.  Mrs. Graybeard discovered you can kill the process while its starting by quickly applying a three-fingered salute as soon as XP showed her desktop, and getting task manager. 

We had been using some of the geek-friendly web sites and found some places to look for trash - sure enough, we found some trash to delete.  The actual executable was called 23397.exe.  I'm pretty sure at every infection it gives itself a random number.  There was a .lnk file we deleted, too.  Then we ran  SuperAntiSpyware, which found four other files hidden in out of the way directories in the "%UserProfile%\Application Data" tree and "%UserProfile%\Start Menu\Programs\Security Tool.lnk".  Once that handful of files was deleted, it was fine and has been so since around 2200 last night. 

This is displayed with the "always on top" property.  It spoofs your desktop, and cripples programs.  If  you try to run a virus scan or update, it blocks the net access so that it only looks like it's working.

Housecleaning

While we're not security professionals like Borepatch, I like to think we run a pretty good place here at Castle Graybeard.  We keep up with the Windoze updates, along with the updates to pretty much everything.  Since we've been working with computers since about 1978, we have been around the block a few times, and watch what we do.  We have and run anti-virus and anti-spyware tools.  Nevertheless, the scumbags have struck and we're tied up in removing a malware infection from Mrs. Graybeard's computer.

Ever heard of the "Security Tool" malware?  It hijacks your system and attempts to get you to go to some site and pay them money to give you your computer back.  I assume it steals credit cards, and so on.  Really nasty hijack.  Apparently spoofs the Windows desktop and intercepts everything you do to it. So far it's scumbags one and good guys nothing.

I've been saying for years that if I were on the jury, malware writers would get the death penalty.  No problems with that decision whatsoever. 

Back to our usual gloom and doom later.

What Financial Armageddon Will Look Like

Like many people who think that financial hard times are coming, I have wondered if I'd recognize it was happening early enough to not be trapped by it.  That has led me to think about what it will look like when it happens.  It's not like the several days worth of warnings we get from the hurricane center, I think.  Will there be warnings, or will it happen all at once?  If you're away from home on a business trip, what are the chances you'll get back?  Is there something in particular to watch for, knowing that if you see it, it's time to get back home, or to lock down the shutters?  If you're planning to bug out to a retreat somewhere, but can't live there full time, how will you know when it's seriously time to get moving?

Let me begin by saying … I don't know for sure.  These are my best guesses based on years of studying this, with feedback and correction from reading others' thoughts. 

What would be the first indication that the poop was entering the fan's cage?  One of the most reliable warning signs would be a crisis in commodity prices.  As I remarked below, in The Economic Collapse is Inevitable - Government Collapse is Optional  the first sign would likely be a spike in the price of gold of 10 or 20% - more than $120 at today's prices.  The likely cause could be the economic minister of handful of places: say, China, the EU, Saudi Arabia, or Japan, coming out and saying they've lost faith in the dollar as the global exchange medium, and are switching to other things.  This has already happened in private.  China has been quietly getting rid of US bonds, using their vast resources of trade-unbalance dollars to buy gold mines, copper mines, aluminum mines and so on.  Brazil, Russia, India and China have started working toward the development of a substitute for the dollar, a "basket of currencies" called the BRIC - an acronym for those countries.

Another possible cause is if someone like Dr. Evil, George Soros, or a neutral but highly regarded investor like Warren Buffet, were to announce he had lost faith in the dollar and was getting out of it (Soros has all but said this already) it could cause a crash in the dollar.  Soros was involved in the collapse of the British currency and could conceivably push ours off the cliff.  Just as he justified being a NAZI collaborator who turned in fellow Jews for money by saying, "if I didn't do it, someone else would have", Soros probably feels someone is going to become incredibly rich by collapsing the dollar, so it might as well be him.  

And it could happen, basically, by accident.  The high speed trading that goes on now results in hundreds to thousands of trades per second.  What if a software bug causes it?  What if an oil tanker runs aground in the Houston channel, where all the American gasoline refineries are, or if the depots in Saudi Arabia are finally successfully attacked by Al Qaeda, causing the price of oil to spike?  Something causes a spike in a commodity, like oil or even copper.  The software that runs all of the trading in the markets today would then start selling other assets to convert to cash and take advantage of the commodity spike.  Treasury bonds get dumped, and since the Fed depends on a constant amount of that debt to fund the US, the Fed will then buy them.

It's important to note that during the minutes to half hour or so that this is going on and spiraling out of control, no human may witness it to intervene and stop it. 

Kitco.com, one of the reliable sellers of precious metals, has an app for the iPhone that can get you the spot price of gold and a handful of other data on demand.  If you're at a desktop computer, you can check their website directly for the metal prices.  I believe they still give away a little app that sits in the Windoze task bar and reports those prices.  I check my iPhone app several times during the normal workday.  If gold spikes sharply, I'm literally going to get sick, so taking off sick won't be a lie. 

So what do you do?  Hopefully, you're prepared to "hunker down" at home or have plans for a getting out of Dodge, and a place to go that's ready for you.  This is the time.  It will be worth your time to hit the ATM and get as much out of your account as you can.  Cash might be handy to have to buy commodities - food, water, anything you need to fill your refrigerator and ammo shelf.  Top off your gas tank, and get food.  At this point, the stores will probably have the normal weekday crowds and there will be no unusual lines because only a very few people will know what's going on. 




How long it will be until real problems, like runs on stores, start?  I think that's harder to know.  It might take days for this to propagate to the rest of the market.  On the other hand, with virtually instantaneous linkage of banks around the world, money can be gone very quickly, and it might only take hours for stores and gas stations to start raising their prices.  Here in Florida, I've heard the law prohibits changing gas prices more than once a day.  Ferfal talks about periods in Argentina where store clerks went through the stores changing prices several times a day.  You read of constant price increases in Weimar Germany.

Prep time is over, the sh*t has just hit the fan. 

(Note while I was thinking about this and preparing the entry, I found this blog entry that has many of the same ideas, including a possible root cause.)