Fun Show Again

There was a gun and fishing show down in the next county south of us, so since the combination of shooting and fishing covers most of our recreational plans, Mrs. Graybeard and I took the 45 minute drive down to check things out.  These shows seem to get bigger every time I go down there, and today didn't disappoint.  No guns, but I did buy a graphite fishing rod.  Mrs. Graybeard bought a Cold Steel knife like my EDC. 

I know I've talked about this before, but I find it ... interesting... how folks crowd around the handguns but only one or two are looking at the shotguns.  I maintain that for an all around gun, but not one you'd want to conceal, it's hard to beat the value of a 12 gauge shotgun.  Whether it's for putting some food on the table or social work, it will be the go-to tool.  I still see Mossbergs available brand new, with two barrels (self defense and hunting lengths) for $300-ish.  A while back, Guffaw in AZ quoted the old saying, "stopping power begins at 12 gauge" and I think these images say it all.

First, while advocates may argue calibers, I think everyone would concede that 45ACP, 230 grain, JHPs are effective.  I mercilessly ripped this image from Brassfetcher.

Four large, nasty looking rounds, expanded from .45" to around .70", penetrating 12" into a ballistic gelatin block.  I don't know of anyone that would like to take the place of that block.

Now compare it to a single 12 gauge "tactical" (hollowpoint) slug.

Notice that the slug is still visible toward the left - 14" of penetration.  It expanded to 1" diameter.  Now look at the damage that the entry end of the block sustained.  More subtle is that the original entry point was on the left, like the 45ACP test, and the 6x6x16" block of gelatin flipped 1.5 feet into the air and off of the test stand

Penetration?  Let's put a layer or two of heavy denim between the shotgun and the gel.

That didn't make much difference.  As they used to say on those dopey anti-drug commercials, "any questions?"  - Oh, and if you're a smaller person, or sensitive to heavy recoil for some reason, the only difference stepping "down" to a 20 gauge will make is for the coroner trying to find the pellets.
Edit 11-6 0940 EST to make the bottom picture display better on a mobile device

This Weekend's Must Read/Must Watch

There is nothing I can post that is more important than this weekend's must-read posting.  There's well over a half hour of embedded video that's worth watching, too.

The story is at GardenSERF's Plot: "How to Train the Neighbors to Hate and Kill"

As the already-underway Endarkenment proceeds, there will be those strive to control us more, to gather more power, to set neighbor against neighbor so that they can divide and conquer.  From the president's frequently quoted, "tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires", to "we are the 99%" and "Top 1% Y U NO PAY TAXES?!", these are only the beginning.  Next comes: "take it" and "get 'em!!"

Bad Science, Fraudulent Science

I've had a train of thought running for a few days prompted by some articles I've come across.  Leave it to Borepatch to find the definitive article to get this thought flowing.  Borepatch's article is called "The Wages of Pseudoscience" and links to this piece,  Scientific Heresy, on Bishop Hill blog.  The piece is the text of a speech, the Angus Millar lecture at the RSA (Royal Scottish Academy) in Edinburgh.  RTWT - it is excellent.  He points out that all major advances in science are considered heresies:

Like antisepsis, many scientific truths began as heresies and fought long battles for acceptance against entrenched establishment wisdom that now appears irrational: continental drift, for example. Barry Marshall* was not just ignored but vilified when he first argued that stomach ulcers are caused by a particular bacterium. Antacid drugs were very profitable for the drug industry. Eventually he won the Nobel prize.

Just this month Daniel Shechtman* won the Nobel prize for quasi crystals, having spent much of his career being vilified and exiled as a crank. “I was thrown out of my research group. They said I brought shame on them with what I was saying.”

It is said that the virtue of science is that it is self-correcting, that peer review assures that only good science gets published and the bad science is weeded out.  Sort of a Darwinian gradualism.  But Thomas Kuhn in "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" (perhaps the most quoted book in science) paints a different picture, more like the punctuated equilibrium theory that some evolutionary biologists hold.  Science is relatively static; new ideas are accepted in infrequent revolutions when old ways of envisioning and approaching problems fall to new ones.  This happens largely when the old scientists who hold those views die off.  Gary Taubes, perhaps my favorite science writer, explains it like this (in a thoroughly unrelated blog post):

..the people who invariably do manage to shift scientific paradigms are “either very young or very new to the field whose paradigm they change… for obviously these are the men [or women, of course] who, being little committed by prior practice to the traditional rules of normal science, are particularly likely to see that those rules no longer define a playable game and to conceive another set that can replace them.”

So when a shift does happen, it’s almost invariably the case that an outsider or a newcomer, at least, is going to be the one who pulls it off. This is one thing that makes this endeavor of figuring out who’s right or what’s right such a tricky one. Insiders are highly unlikely to shift a paradigm and history tells us they won’t do it. And if outsiders or newcomers take on the task, they not only suffer from the charge that they lack credentials and so credibility, but their work de facto implies that they know something that the insiders don’t...

he goes on

A good rule of thumb is that outsiders challenging establishment science are invariably wrong. And we don’t want our experts and authorities wasting their time vetting every last crackpot theory that arrives over the transom.  [written in] Crayon or not. We have better uses for their time.

And here’s the challenge to both the scientist working in the field and the lay observer following along: how do we tell the difference between the one in a million times, say, that an outsider comes along and gets it right, and the other 999,999 quack-driven attempts? The numbers alone tell us that the best idea is always to bet against the outsider, that we’re always best served by ignoring him or her and getting back to science as usual (what Kuhn called “normal science”). The odds are enormously in our favor if we do so. But, still, when a paradigm is shifted, it’s going to be an outsider who does it, so keeping an open mind is a reasonably good idea, particularly when the evidence suggests such a shift is in order (see aforementioned obesity epidemic).

The low hanging fruit here is Global Warming, um Climate Change or Chaos or whatever they call it this week.  I will ignore this one and talk about water bottles and meat eaters, because the pressure to get published causes the balloon to bubble in different places. 

Water bottles?  I imagine you've heard of BPA (Bisphenol A), the plastic hardener that's the current scare among the very, very nervous?   Outdoors magazines and others are recommending we only use plastic water bottles once or twice, to protect ourselves from it.  Columnist Derek Hunter summarizes the situation in "Doomsday Cultists in Science", quoting from this article in Forbes.  The scientist behind the work against BPA is Frederick vom Saal, from the University of Missouri.

His theory depends first on BPA detaching from products made with it and second, it has to enter the body’s blood system. Every scientist not affiliated with vom Saal who tries this finds it detaches in miniscule amounts and that it – to put it bluntly – all comes out in our urine. Even the EPA has given up on this one; a study funded by the agency earlier this year showed that no BPA could be detected in the blood of the overwhelming majority of people fed a diet rich in BPA.

as Henry Miller from Forbes says,

I won’t pretend that there is no debate within the scientific community on this issue.  Whether or not this debate is warranted is another question.  (I believe it’s not).

Hunter, as is his style, is a little more direct:

It turns out there may well be, as Steve Martin said in The Jerk, a profit thing.

According to one conflict of interest statement, vom Saal “consulted for an attorney involved in civil litigation regarding the health effects of BPA.” Another conflict of interest statement from 2008 showed that vom Saal had been, “serving as a consultant for in-preparation litigation regarding BPA; serving as chief executive officer of XenoAnalytical LLC, which uses a variety of analytical techniques to measure estrogenic activity and BPA in tissues and leachates from products.”

Keeping the press attacks up on BPA is sure to create more profit for vom Saal.  The fraud, unfortunately, is going to alarm many who are unable to filter the experiments well enough to make sense of them.  Young mothers unnecessarily worried about baby bottles.

I found earlier this week that a Dutch social psychologist admitted to extreme fraud in studies that stated "Meat Eaters are Selfish and Less Social".  Researcher Diederik Stapel was first suspended under suspicion in September, and by the end of October, investigators ...

...concluded that Stapel fabricated information in at least 30 publications and many other articles are still being poured over. They are quoted by DutchNews describing this as “considerable and shocking.”

Unfortunately, this doesn’t just have an impact on him but also many of his former students whose names were associated with many research papers that have now been called into question. They found that 14 of the 21 doctoral dissertations he supervised were fake as well. He even made up the existence of one student who supposedly collected and organized the data.

That the discredited doctor and his coauthor were both vegetarians might have led to a little confirmation bias, a little tendency to miss things in the data is not unexpected.  This seems to go past that to outright agenda-driven bias.  Not "mistakes" as he said in his apology, but fraud.  

So how's that peer review process working out for you?   If the Climategate emails taught us anything, they should have taught us that old, senior scientists manage the process, squashing anything that challenges their approach, whether it's denying papers or getting editors fired.  It's a case study in corruption in science.  We shouldn't be surprised, because scientists are human and humans have proven corruptible. The peer review process, which is supposed to save us from this, is clearly broken.  It's time we either try to come up with a replacement or just acknowledge that peer review means essentially nothing. 

It may seem like a stretch to link obvious fraud, like the vegetarian psychologists, and probable fraud, like vom Saal/BPA, to the establishment science that stifles peer review, silences critics and sucks up billions of dollars in funding, but it seems a difference of degree, not kind.  Doesn't it seem the anti-meat social psychologist would do the exact same things to a carnivorous psychologist's paper that the Climate Research gurus do those they don't agree with?    

My argument is that like religion, science as an institution is and always has been plagued by the temptations of confirmation bias. With alarming ease it morphs into pseudoscience even – perhaps especially – in the hands of elite experts and especially when predicting the future and when there’s lavish funding at stake. It needs heretics.

  (Diogenes, looking for an honest man)

The Zombie Shoe is on the Other Foot - Whut?

Halloween was a strange day at work: I was in the building less than 2 minutes and saw my first zombie, a skeletal-thin older woman (which is to say, about my age) in white makeup with sunken black eyes and stage blood.  As the day progressed, I came across about a dozen other co-workers, all of whom chose to dress as zombies.  Ordinarily, there's a handful of different ideas.  On the way home, I glanced into my rear view mirror while sitting at a light, and saw another zombie.

And this all just a few days after several of us were saying the zombie fad has jumped the shark.

To top it off, I came home Monday night to hear Glenn Beck talking about this story:

This week, following a number of similar political efforts, there’s a new, graphic video that shows zombie Republicans being killed by “machine guns, grenades, garden shears, and chainsaws.”

In September, there was the “Tea Party Zombies Must Die” video game that allowed players to gun down Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann, among others...

This new video, produced by RepublicanZombieDefense.com, is apparently intended to be comedic, although it is quite graphic. 

You can watch it at that link.  From their press release:

“We are gay activists giving zombies makeovers with chainsaws and grenades,” said Luke Montgomery, founder of RepublicanZombieDefense.com. “The metaphor of Republicans as zombies is unfortunately very appropriate because their heartless opposition to gay marriage, healthcare, and climate change science is a political infection that if not fought back, will be deadly to the lives of millions of Americans. It is unbelievable that we live in an age when millions of Americans continue to be denied the right to marry, based on their sexual orientation. Progress is being made to eliminate this archaic way of thinking, but allowing Republicans to take the White House in 2012 will deal a huge setback to marriage equality.”

It's an interesting comparison that this group has no misgivings about portraying white republicans as zombies that need to be killed, while over the weekend in Virginia, a "Halloween themed graphic featuring a zombie President Barack Obama with a bullet hole in his forehead... was roundly rebuked by high-ranking conservatives including Virginia's governor."  Conservatives immediately condemned the zombie image of Obama. 

Just between us, I doubt the part about them being gay activists.  Aren't gays supposed to be artistic and creative?  Whoever dredged up this idea and made this video is neither of those.  And remember: it might well be better to be despised by the despicable than admired by the admirable. 

I'm In That Awkward Phase

Mrs. Graybeard and I have a regular joke between us that centers on being caught in between - the most recent version has been "we're at the awkward age between kids and grandkids";  it has also been "I'm at that awkward phase where I understand the beginning books, but not the advanced ones".  Same format works for a variety of jokes.  Especially if they don't have to be all that funny.

In this case it goes I'm not rich enough to be in the 1% that Occupy What Ever is protesting, but I sure as hell don't want to associate myself with the pigs protesting as the 99%.  To begin with, I strongly believe individual rights and freedoms; they are collectivists.  PJ Media has put together an official list of the supporters of Occupy Everything - they have sources for all of these claims.  They include:

Communist Party USA
American Nazi Party
Ayatollah Khamenei, Supreme Leader of Iran
North Korea
Louis Farrakhan, Nation of Islam
Revolutionary Communist Party
David Duke
Hugo Chavez
Revolutionary Guards of Iran
Black Panthers (original)
Socialist Party USA
CAIR
Communist Party of China
Hezbollah
9/11Truth.org
Anonymous
International Socialist Organization
PressTV (Iranian government outlet)
Marxist Student Union
Freedom Road Socialist Organization
ANSWER
Party for Socialism and Liberation

to name just about half of their list.  You've also seen, I'm sure, that Obama, Biden, Pelosi, and a legion of evil party bigwigs support them, too.   Remember what Mamma said about being known by the company you keep?

I have nothing in common with any of those groups, and my default is that unless I really study the heck out of things, anything they're for I'm likely to be opposed to.  Any friend of the Revolutionary Guards of Iran, or the American Nazi Party, is not at all likely to be a friend of mine. 

Case in point: the media has not widely reported the ongoing problems with rapes and other assaults going on in the camps.  It is widespread, with reports from Cleveland, Baltimore, New York, and others - (even Scotland!).  But it's worse than that.  The organizers are trying to keep the rape victims from going to the police, saying the Occupy Whatever folks will take care of it - by arranging counseling for the rapist!  I assume they give them the dreaded down twinkles of disapproval.  Personally, I think such people need to be introduced to Messrs. Smith and Weston, or John Moses Browning - if it was my wife, daughter or other loved one.  But in their effort to protect the socialist cause, women have been threatened with additional violence or death for reporting their assault! Judging by things women have said on tape, they're at least as afraid of their organizers as they are the rapists.

She said that weeks earlier another woman was raped.  “We don’t tell anyone,” she said. “We handle it internally. I said too much already.”

 BigGovernment.com has an updated rap sheet; just search it for rape or assault. 

If you happen to feel that your life, or the life of your wife/daughter/girlfriend/friend, is worth more than their glorious protest, you might find yourself getting the classic communist treatment - which is to say "killed".  Virtually a third of those polled in New York say they'd approve of violence to achieve their ends.

No, in every way I can think of, I'm much more like these folks. If you haven't seen that place, read for a while.  Good stories from good people.

Happy Halloween

Kelly at Townhall.com

(When junior graybeard was a pup of about 8, he dressed up as an IRS agent - saying it was the most likely to frighten adults.  Thought of it himself. We were proud.)

"This is Was the Week European Democracy Died"

I think everyone is familiar with the line, "So this is how liberty dies.  With thunderous applause." - spoken by Queen Amidala (portrayed by Natalie Portman) in Star Wars III - Revenge of the Sith, as she watched Emperor Palpatine tell a cheering Senate that he had taken all power away from them to form a Galactic Empire.  By all accounts, that line was written as a slam on George W. Bush and the Patriot Act, but it fits the EU situation well. 

Janet Daley of the Telegraph (UK) writes this was the week that European Democracy died.

Democracy went down in a blaze of glory last week. Both the German Bundestag and our own House of Commons put up one hell of a fight against the dying of the light. Maybe history will record that fact in an elegy on the demise of the great 18th-century experiment in government by the people: they were eloquent to the end. Because at the end, eloquence was all they had.

Her subject is the European's latest financial rescue plan, which destroys the sovereignty of all the nations of Europe.  Quoting Ms. Daley again,

So this is where we are. The agreed EU “stability union” triumphantly paraded before the media in Brussels will have the power to approve or disapprove budgets of countries in the eurozone – that is, to vet and police them – before they are submitted to the elected parliaments of those countries. (emphasis added: GB)

Read that again. No nation is allowed to control its own budget.  Unelected bureaucrats in Brussels will rule on how much tax every one in every Eurozone nation pays: who works, who retires young, and who pays for it.   It's the end of representative government; the end of personal liberty in the EU.

But it's not going to work.  They're not going to rescue Greece, Italy, Portugal, or the rest.  They're not going to save the EU.  They are going to crash and burn.  So says economic writer Liam Halligan in the Telegraph's, "Why the Latest Eurozone Bailout is Destined to Fail Within Weeks".  There was the almost-obligatory rally in the markets at first.  Until the bond buyers and financial analysts got a look at the package:

By late Thursday, though, and certainly on Friday, the warning signs were there. Global bond markets, by character more sober and smarter than the excitable equity guys, were voting against the deal. This is alarming. For it is only by selling more bonds that the eurozone's deeply indebted governments can roll-over their enormous liabilities and keep the show on the road.

he continues:

Some say Western governments shouldn't "accept" what the market says. "Who do these trading people think they are," I hear from the lips of the educated but financially-illiterate political elite. Let's be clear – if global bond markets stop lending to a number of large Western economies, we are in the realms of unpaid state wages and pensions, transport chaos and closures of schools and hospitals – sparking the prospect of serious civil unrest. Forgive my intemperate tone, but these are the dangers we face. And I'm afraid the only rational response to Thursday's announcement is that the probability of such undesirable outcomes has just been increased. (emphasis added, again)

Halligan gives the whole mess two weeks before it falls apart.  Maybe for good. George Soros agrees, saying,

"It will bring relief partly because the markets were so obsessed by the lack of leadership. The mere fact that something was achieved was a major relief and it will be good for any time from one day to three months."

(Say... does this remind anyone of how Dr. Evil crashed the British pound and other currencies: by shorting them and then saying he's lost faith in them?  Could it be...?)  In other words, the Telegraph economics writer thinks it will collapse within a couple of weeks, and Soros says "one day to three months".  What needs to happen is an orderly default of Greece and the rest of the PIIGS; have them leave the EU, let the banks declare their losses and get over it, let everyone take their lumps and get on with recovery.

In other words, we're freakin' doomed. 

A late hat tip to Bayou Renaissance Man for the links - and an excellent summary of the European mess.  I recommend a lot of reading: both Telegraph articles, Bayou Renaissance Man's background piece, if you want.

Lost and Profound Dept.

Don't remember where I found it the first time, but I stumbled across it doing some drive maintenance. 

That is all.  For now. 

The Basic Steps are Very Similar - 2

The last piece on this topic covered rough cutting.  The next step is ordinarily some form of shaping operation, whether cutting to a refined, final size or cutting other features.  In woodworking this can be done with a variety of cutting tools, perhaps dado or rabbet planes or a router (which seems to be everyone's favorite tool).  Shaping wood with a router is sometimes called millwork, and the analogy to a milling machine for metal is good in many ways. In many ways, a milling machine is like an upside down router table, but with precise control of moving the work. 

If you're getting started and wonder whether you should get a mill or lathe, there's overlap between what they can do.  The distinction is subtle: in a lathe, the stock is rotated while a fixed tool is moved against it, peeling off chips of metal.  In a mill the tool is rotated while a fixed workpiece is moved against the tool to have chips peeled off it.  A mill can do anything a lathe can do with enough fixturing, and a lathe can do some of the tasks a mill can do.  Confusing?  In professional machine shops, they ordinarily have both, and let each one do what it's best at.

Lathes are usually specified by two numbers; the diameter and the length of the work area. The most popular small lathes are around 7 x 12 in the US/UK - or able to turn pieces up to about 7” diameter and a few inches under that 12" long. These are sold by the discount tool importers under a variety of brand names. Whole online communities have evolved to support users of these tools. The miniature model makers favor the smaller lathes; for example, like Sherline, who has 3.5 x 8 or 17 inch lathes, or Taig, with their 4.5 x 9.75". (3.5 x 18 pictured)

Mills are specified the same way as lathes, except with three numbers that give the size of their X-Y table and Z-axis height.  They're also sometimes described by the numbers of axes of motion they allow, such as a three-axis mill, or as a four to eight-axis mill.  Saying "fourth axis" usually means a rotary axis, a very handy thing for gear cutting and more.  A knee mill is one where the table can be raised and lowered while the motor and tools are fixed. The same tool importers that sell the import lathes sell a variety of mills, and the model maker mills are again represented by Sherline and Taig. The stock modelmaker’s mills will handle a part around 4” x 8” x 3” thick.  The most respected name in full size manufacturing mills has historically been Bridgeport, and many metalworkers look long and hard to find a used Bridgeport they can give a home to.  With the decrease in the number of machine shops around, they aren't that hard to find.

It is often said that the best machine for a beginner is used American "heavy metal" like a Bridgeport or Atlas lathe.  Atlas sold lathes under the Sears Craftsman name; other good names include Hardinge and the British Myford lathes. They are certainly good machines, but the small American light metal, the Sherline, is accurate out of the box to levels that the Chinese 7x lathes won't reach without spending a lot of blood, sweat and tears. 

(Grizzly heavy metal: a 9x49 knee mill: over a ton with 3 phase, 220V 1500W motor)

A Sherline-sized mill may seem like it's too small for much practical work - and  you sure won't make big parts on it for a steady living - but the step up from a small Sherline or Taig to something like a Bridgeport brings a mess of complications.  The mill's weight goes from easily one man portable to over a thousand pounds, and the power goes up from a normal 120V outlet to three-phase, 220 or 440 V systems.  Likewise, the stepping up from the Sherline and 7x12 scale lathes, the relatively small 9 x 20" weighs around 300 pounds. A gunsmith's lathe like this one from Grizzly (their smallest) weighs over half a ton and takes up seven to eight feet of linear floor space.

Everyone feels this gap - it's an old quip that no matter what size machine you have you inevitably need one about an inch bigger.  As a work around, Sherline sells spacer blocks to increase their cutting diameter, and there's a small industry that works on upgrades to these tools.  A2Z CNC produces and sells upgrades to increase the capacity of your mill and have gone into production on a Monster Mill "Sherline" (the only thing Sherline about it is the motor and headstock).  I have their extended X and Y axes with some other upgrades I'll talk about later.  They're good stuff.  Anything like this that increases the stresses your cutting produces on the frame means you should take light cuts.  Many, light, repetitive cuts are a perfect reason for computer numerical control, although CNC does bring its own complications.

The cutting tools that are used on lathes and mills are a subject of their own. You may be surprised to know that while a fine cabinetmaker usually insists on carbide tooling, home machinists often prefer “high speed steel” (HSS) tools instead. These lathe tools can be sharpened on a bench grinder, or shaped to a custom cutting profile. The major tool suppliers offer free catalogs that carry a wealth of these tools. Lathe cutting tools are available in carbide or HSS.  Mills are single or double-ended, so that you can reverse them in their holder and get a longer life out of them, in HSS, carbide or Titanium Nitride coated. The most commonly used cutters are end mills: square ended spiral cutters that look like stubby drill bits.  These are available in differing numbers of cutting flutes, end cutting or not, and a variety of coatings.  End cutting mills drill better than flat end mills, although neither is a good drill; they're intended to cut along their sides.  The next most common shape is a ball end mill, which cuts a radius.  There’s almost a tool for every possible cut, so a few hours studying the tool suppliers’ catalogs can teach you much.

The last tool in the well stocked machine shop is a drill press.  The drill press gives you added accuracy in drilling a straight, vertical hole; or a hole at an angle other than 90 degrees to the work. Low cost drill presses have an adjustable table that will tilt with respect to the line of the drill bit, but radial drills will allow the head of the drill press to rotate with respect to the work. They also allow the drill to move along a rail or set of rails, like a radial arm saw does, giving more flexibility in the placement of holes on a piece of work. Drill presses are usually specified by the size of a piece they’ll cut to the center of. That means an 8” drill press, for example, will drill to the center of an 8” piece – 4”, or 4” in from the edge of a bigger piece.

In machine tools of this size, the fastest way to hollow out a block of metal is to use a drill.  Mark off the area you want to empty out and drill lots of holes.  Eventually, you'll clean it up and create the final dimensions with the end mill cutting out the scraps of metal remaining.  It's how I removed the bulk of the metal in my AR's fire control group. 

While fixturing is important in woodworking, it is paramount in metal work.  You can't achieve high accuracy without paying a lot of attention to work holding.  For example, the simple act of turning a metal rod down to a smaller diameter can't be done accurately if the rod protrudes more than about 1.5 times its diameter from the chuck.  The pressure of the tool on the work piece will bend it away from the tool by a measurable amount and taper the rod.  You need a moving rest or steady rest to turn long pieces to diameter.  If you are turning a rod down, and flip it end for end in the chuck, you will virtually always get a visible, if not feelable, line where the two worked areas meet.  You simply can't depend on the chuck to center the piece to the accuracy you need to not have that line - not for the price we'd be willing to pay for a chuck (although a collet might work well enough).  On a mill, if you clamp a part with too much force, you may bow it, so that after you mill it completely flat, it goes concave after you remove the clamping force.  For most work, once you know what to expect, it isn't more complicated than using a router table or dovetail jig, but forget about ever fixing the mill's head and pushing a block of metal under the bit, like you do with a router table. You need to clamp the work to a table of some kind. 

Not Coyote Ugly - Donkey Ugly!

From Glenn Foden on Townhall.com

Couple of Interesting Polls

Gallup published a few interesting polls this week.  Let's start out with "Self-Reported Gun Ownership in US is Highest Since 1993"

PRINCETON, NJ -- Forty-seven percent of American adults currently report that they have a gun in their home or elsewhere on their property. This is up from 41% a year ago and is the highest Gallup has recorded since 1993, albeit marginally above the 44% and 45% highs seen during that period.

The article has some interesting data and plots, including one showing that the increase in self-identified democrats exceeds self-identified republicans.

My big doubt here is that everyone knows that 2009 and 2010 were enormously big years for gun sales, yet the first chart shows a small decrease year over year in that period. "A record 14.033,824 NICS Instant Background checks were performed in 2009" for one, and while I can't find a similar one-link summary, it looks like 2010 was up over 2009 (sample data here).  It seems that if the number of checks was all time record high in those two years, either a lot of people who already own guns were buying more guns, or they didn't tell the Gallup pollster that they had a gun.

Nationwide, attitudes continue to swing in our favor.  The other cool story up on Gallup is, Record-Low 26% in U.S. Favor Handgun Ban".  The lead is:

PRINCETON, NJ -- A record-low 26% of Americans favor a legal ban on the possession of handguns in the United States other than by police and other authorized people. When Gallup first asked Americans this question in 1959, 60% favored banning handguns. But since 1975, the majority of Americans have opposed such a measure, with opposition around 70% in recent years.

As a certain extremely overpaid cretin observed recently, "BOOM!  Winning!"

I think we all know what's going on here: since around September or October 2008, when people realized "Firearms Salesman of the Century" Barack Obama was going to be president, more and more folks have realized he is not interested in or capable of saving the country and are investing in self-preservation.  I don't think it's fear of a zombie apocalypse. (and, seriously, am I the only one who thinks this whole zombie thing has jumped the shark?  I mean, c'mon, Hornady?)

Occupy Wall Street Child Abuse

Around O-Town, a nearby Florida blogger, links to this video on Winds of Jihad..  He asks "is this child abuse?"

Yeah.  I think so.  Filling her head with all that communist crap is certainly abusive.  Trying to put her in a communist or socialist society is abusive.  Sorta goes with this one (NSFW), where twits at OWS praise the glories of North Korea.  North Korea, the darkest black hole on planet Earth!  Where mothers eat their children to survive.  (h/t Babalu) 

This is the paradise they want to install here. 

The Basic Steps Are Very Similar

... things to concentrate on while waiting for the latest "last chance" to save the Euro...

That's what happened in the U.S. The Fed's strategy of printing trillions of dollars and forcing interest rates to near zero has eliminated any and all market pressures on Congress to solve the budget fiasco. As a consequence, Congress is sitting contentedly on a situation where the U.S. borrows 38% of every dollar it spends. In about two years, gross national debt will approach 120% of GDP, the unenviable spot where Italy is today.

And Italy is in deep trouble. To bail it out, experts are already examining how the leveraged EFSF could buy massive amounts of Italian debt on the secondary market (Spiegel). This, despite provisions in the European Union treaty that specifically prohibit such bailouts. But these experts are now looking for a way around the law. The same has already occurred at the ECB, which has been buying the debt of countries like Italy, though by law, it cannot do so.

I've lost count: is this the sixth "last chance" for the Euro?  The twenty-eighth?  

In overview, metal working and wood working have the same basic steps: cut to size, shape as needed, fasten or join, perhaps drilling holes for screws, and finish.  The tools and the techniques vary because of the wildly different materials, but the concepts are pretty similar.  You cut wood to shape with a bandsaw; you can do the same with metal.  You can shape wood on a lathe or you can shape metal on a lathe.  You can cut grooves and contour wood with a router, then take that router bit, put it in a milling machine and do the same things to metal.  You can join wood with glue or pegs, but most people use glue and screws.  The screws for metal are finer threads.  About the only thing I can't think of a similarity for between wood and metal is welding. 

With few exceptions, wood is just not processed to the same accuracies as metal for a very simple reason: wood isn't dimensionally stable enough to hold those accuracies.  A cut to 1/32 inch (.032") accuracy is generally fine in woodworking; in metalworking, you might have need to cut to within 2/10,000 inch (.0002") and even a beginner is expected to be able to finish to within five thousandths, .005".  You can cut metal pieces on a table saw or miter saw, fasten them and use the finished assembly.  With metal, you generally rough cut to size with a saw but do critical cuts on a more accurate machine.  For much work, you can cut steel with a torch - and you're sure not cutting to .001" with a flame.  Today, you can get blades like the Metal Devil blades to cut steel on the same saws you use for woodworking.  

For casual sheet metal work, a pair of tin snips (shears) are fine for cutting to size (draw layout lines on the sheet with a sharpie and straight edge) and a vise is an adequate way to do right angle bends.  To join sheet metal pieces, if screws and nuts are too big, consider getting a "Pop rivet" tool by Emhart. “The 'POP®' Open type blind rivet is a hollow rivet pre-assembled on to a headed pin or mandrel. Rivet bodies are available in a range of materials for complete work piece compatibility”.  POP rivets require a special tool to pull the pin and set them, but it's a tool you only buy once.

Many companies make a miter saw like this little one from Makita.  With the right blades it either cuts wood or metal. 

The Coming Greater Crash - part 2

Concerned American, over at Western Rifle Shooters Association has a saying you may have heard before, "there's going to be a fight; let's win".  I want to echo that sentiment and say "there's going to be an economic collapse; let's survive and rebuild".  Let's not just survive like bugs under a rock; let's thrive.

While we can't really predict how bad it will be here in the states after the collapse, we have insights from around the world from people who have been through SHTF events.  In the last couple of days, Survivalblog had a link to a Bosnian doctor's posts on the SurvivalistBoards.com.  They are excellent, sobering reading about surviving through the Bosnian civil war.  Of course, I have referred to Ferfal's Surviving in Argentina blog many times, for his reports on life after an economic collapse. 

What both of these guys have in common is the experience that trade will exist, and in addition to preparing in the normal sense (food, water, ammo, etc.: the four B's or Robert Kiyosaki's five G's) we should specifically include items that are likely to be useful for trade: whiskey, cigarettes, and even chocolates.  Selco (the Bosnian survivor) says get some even if you don't smoke or drink and don't worry about the brand.  Someone desperate for a cigarette or a drink will always trade for it. He also said he would prefer ammo and Bic lighters (to trade) over more toilet paper because TP takes a lot of room.  He also said you can shoot a pigeon, but you can't shoot a bottle of hand sanitizer.   

It's easy to overlook the trade value of skills; you can trade your ability to fix something for your neighbor in exchange for food or other essentials.  If you don't know how to fix most of what can go wrong with your house and your stuff, especially your guns, this is the time to rush into learning as much as you can.  If you don't have woodworking and basic metalworking tools, but you have the 5 G's covered, now is the time.  I'm not going to blow smoke up your ass - it can be expensive to get quality tools and start from nothing.  I think it might be more expensive to not have those skills, because then you are really going to need to get out of your safe place and trade. 

In my view, the things to prepare for include fixing just about anything made of (probably) cheap steels or aluminum, or fabricating replacement parts from raw metal stock.  I doubt you'll encounter titanium or exotic alloys.  The most common non-ferrous metals you'll work with are probably aluminum alloys and brass; the most common iron alloys would be mild steels or cast iron.  Cast iron is rough on cutting tools because it's common to find sand from the casting molds embedded in the metal.

In the coming days (or more - depending on events), I want to address some of the tools and things I believe are worth considering. 

The ubiquitous 4"x 6" bandsaw, available from many sellers (this one from Grizzly).  With a good blade, these will rough cut anything from plastics to titanium. 

A High Maintenance Kind of Day

I wrote last Sunday about having problems with this computer, and didn't think I'd take a chance on working on it again until this weekend.  Today.  That said, I also needed to wash and wax the cars - it has been since July, I think - they really needed it. 

After a lot of annoyance and fighting, I finally removed all traces of Ubuntu from this box, and it's completely Windoze 7.  Along the way I had problems with my external backup drive and had to spend way too much time working on it (no way I was going to mess with disk partitions without backing up everything after last Sunday).  Western Digital, in case you're interested.  Third party software (Handy Backup) finally replaced the software on the drive and backed up everything.  I've been working at this since about 2 PM - it's 11 now, minus a few hours while the backup processed and the cars got waxed, dinner, etc..  The box finally works properly. 

So, for now, a couple of odds and ends I wanted to share; I believe the term is Tab Clearing.  From Glenn McCoy on Townhall.com. 

I don't remember where I got this demotivational poster on ammo micro-encoding.  If  it's yours, or you know the credit, I'd be happy to credit correctly. 

One of the clues to understanding the differences between Benjamin Netanyahu and Barack Obama is to look at them both when they were in their 20s, a period when their world views were being refined:  

Finally, a trump card for when you're involved in a discussion with someone who just doesn't seem to understand anything (same disclaimer about crediting it):

The Coming Greater Crash

For the last three years, the entire western world has been reeling in the after-effects of the crash of 2008.  Millions of words have been written about it, the causes analyzed and regulations have even been attempted.  It is widely recognized that CDOs - Collateralized Debt Obligations - and other derivatives, with the insane amounts of leverage generated were the cause.  Less frequently cited is the role of governments; largely the US government, but not exclusively.  Investopedia, a generally non-political source, has done a good investigatory piece on the crash, here, and conclude the real cause was largely government.

Unfortunately, the real problems were not addressed by the new regulations, such as the pointless Dodd-Frank law.  Nothing was done about these derivatives, and the problem is not only still there, it is getting bigger.  Much bigger.  How big?  The great financial blog Seeking Alpha says,

If you add up the value of every stock on the planet, the entire market capitalization would be about $36 trillion. If you do the same process for bonds, you’d get a market capitalization of roughly $72 trillion.

The notional value of the derivative market is roughly $1.4 QUADRILLION.

I realize that number sounds like something out of Looney tunes, so I’ll try to put it into perspective.  $1.4 Quadrillion is roughly:

•  40 TIMES THE WORLD’S STOCK MARKET.
•  10 TIMES the value of EVERY STOCK & EVERY BOND ON THE PLANET
•  23 TIMES WORLD GDP.

It's hard to wrap your head around how big a number $1.4 quadrillion, or $1400 trillion, is.  You may have seen things going around that said if you had counted out a dollar per second since Christ was born you would not have reached a trillion dollars; it's not even close because at $1/sec, it would take 31,546 years to count out a trillion dollars.  At the same rate, 1400 trillion takes you back 31.5 million years.  Half the time since the last dinosaurs.

The Economic Collapse Blog picks up the story in the cheerily titled, "The Coming Derivatives Crisis That Could Destroy The Entire Global Financial System" and reports of scary things going on, if not in secrecy, then just not being reported.  (source within a source)

On the third Wednesday of every month, the nine members of an elite Wall Street society gather in Midtown Manhattan.
The men share a common goal: to protect the interests of big banks in the vast market for derivatives, one of the most profitable — and controversial — fields in finance. They also share a common secret: The details of their meetings, even their identities, have been strictly confidential. 

Who are these guys?  Where are they from?  Only the "too big to fail" banks that our taxes bailed out before:  JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America and Citigroup.  As The American Dream reports, these groups are already trying to buy the 2012 election.  

3 of the top 7 donors to Obama's campaign were big Wall Street banks (Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup).  Now Wall Street is doing it again.  The big Wall Street banks are already trying to buy the 2012 election. 

To my surprise, each bank has contributed the most to .. Mitt Romney!  (For the record, I'm one of the people who thinks Romney would be no big improvement for us and might even be worse)  While it's true I think the need for money in politics is not as great as most people think, clearly they don't agree with me, and furthermore, they have the record that if a candidate gets far and away more money than their competitor, the one with the biggest treasury ordinarily wins.  So long, Herman Cain!

The problem with these schemes, and our whole fiat, "debt = money" system, is that it can't keep expanding.  It will collapse some time, quite possibly some time very soon. Going back to quoting Economic Collapse:

It is inevitable that the same thing is going to happen again.  Except next time it may be on a much grander scale.

When "the house" goes "bust", everybody loses.  The governments of the world could step in and try to bail everyone out, but the reality is that when the derivatives market comes totally crashing down there won't be any government on earth with enough money to put it back together again.

A horrible derivatives crisis is coming.

It is only a matter of time.

Stay alert for any mention of the word "derivatives" or the term "derivatives crisis" in the news.  When the derivatives crisis arrives, things will start falling apart very rapidly.

(source)

Self Portrait by a Giant Triassic Octopus?

Bouncing from link to link, I first saw this at Tam's place (top one) as a link to Atomic Nerds.  The zeitgeist is to make references to Cthulhu.  For example, Tam said,

Apparently mankind has a Cthulhu-shaped hole in its heart, for if Cthulhu didn't exist, it would be necessary to invent him.

I think it's way cooler without invoking pulp-fiction mythology.

Pictured above is a fossil  bed in Nevada.  The round structures are the vertebrae of ichthyosaurs of the species Shonisaurus popularis. But vertebrae don't lie around like that. In a single animal, they're (obviously) pretty much in a line.  And if two animals died and piled on top of each other, it doesn't seem likely the vertebrae would be aligned so nicely, fairly well matched by size.  So how did they get there?

First of all, the different degrees of etching on the bones suggested that the shonisaurs were not all killed and buried at the same time. It also looked like the bones had been purposefully rearranged. That it got him thinking about a particular modern predator that is known for just this sort of intelligent manipulation of bones.

"Modern octopus will do this," McMenamin said. What if there was an ancient, very large sort of octopus, like the kraken of mythology. "I think that these things were captured by the kraken and taken to the midden and the cephalopod would take them apart."

In the fossil bed, some of the shonisaur vertebral disks are arranged in curious linear patterns with almost geometric regularity, McMenamin explained.The proposed Triassic kraken, which could have been the most intelligent invertebrate ever, arranged the vertebral discs in double line patterns, with individual pieces nesting in a fitted fashion as if they were part of a puzzle.

Even more creepy: The arranged vertebrae resemble the pattern of sucker discs on a cephalopod tentacle, with each vertebra strongly resembling a coleoid sucker. In other words, the vertebral disc "pavement" seen at the state park may represent the earliest known self portrait.

The thought that there was a giant prehistoric octopus, big enough to take down a dinosaur the size of a bus, and that this octopus was intelligent enough to arrange the bones of its ex-dinner into a pattern that looked like itself - a self-portrait of sorts - is so cool it fills me with awe.  Reality is way cooler than comparing it to a mythical creature. 

By the way, since Tam has linked to me a few times in the last few months, this is a squid pro quo.

I'm Sure It's Just an Isolated Incident

I mean, just because you find five French-Moroccan muslims breaking into a courthouse at 2 in morning, and they had photographs of infrastructure, malls, water systems and public buildings in their RV, that's no reason to be concerned is it?  No, I'm sure it's just an isolated incident.

Five men in their twenties, described as French-Moroccan Muslims, are being questioned by the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force and by officials of the Department of Homeland Security after they were arrested inside the 120 year old Bexar County Courthouse in downtown San Antonio shortly before 2 this morning, 1200 WOAI news reports.
......
"They got travel documents, parking passes, they have been all over the country," one law enforcement officials who asked not to be identified told 1200 WOAI's Michael Board on the scene. "A lot of photographic equipment, a lot of documentation equipment inside their vehicle."

And I'm sure just because a "middle-Eastern looking" guy named Ali Reza Shahsavari runs down the aisle in a plane shouting

“You’re all going to die,” a man dressed in black screamed at passengers Tuesday afternoon. “You’re all going to hell. Allahu Akbar,” .... 

there's no reason to think something suspicious is going on there.  No, siree.  Big Sis Janet Incompetano is on the job. 

What do both of these stories have in common?  In both cases, the authorities made sure to let us know terrorism was not suspected.

Terror Link Downplayed in Courthouse Break-In

and 

FBI Special Agent Mark White, based in Dallas, said the event did not appear to be an act of terrorism. He described Shahsavari as a U.S. citizen who might have experienced an episode of mental illness. (note:  "an episode" of mental illness?  not a life of mental illness?? - GB)

I'll leave it to you to determine how it affects your training and other preparations. 

What's All This "Eat The Rich Stuff", Anyhow?

There's been a recurring theme in all this "occupy whatever street" going on: "eat the rich".  Sure, the comment isn't exactly original, and I have no idea where it originally came from, but it keeps coming up.  From Occupy Denver this past weekend (source):

This dude's looking like it might not be all metaphorical.  And...

(Confidentially, sweetheart, if you eat the rich, you'll be lucky to get one meal.  Then you'll have to start eating your fellow protesters.)

I'm sure everyone has seen the two fingered peace sign of the late 60s/early 70s; almost as big a cliche then as now.  Chances are you don't know that the Weather Underground (Bill Ayers, wife Bernadine Dohrn and other felons) used the three finger fork sign as a non-verbal recognition. 

Dohrn's love of violence reached a level bordering on madness. Speaking to a Weather Underground "war council" in Michigan in 1969, Dohrn gave a three-fingered "fork salute" to mass murderer Charles Manson. Calling Manson's victims the "Tate Eight," Dohrn gloated over the fact that actress Sharon Tate, who was pregnant at the time, had been stabbed with a fork in her womb. "Dig it. First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, they even shoved a fork into a victim's stomach! Wild!"

So do these leftist/communist/statist prick protesters and Dohrn really want cannibalism? 

The problem is very simple: "it's the spending, stupid", not how much "the rich" have.  If these twits got their way and the government took every single penny from every billionaire, and not just the every penny from the top 1%, but from every single person with an income of over $250,000, the money would be gone in under 200 days.  It wouldn't pay for the current spending programs for a year, let alone add all the programs they want.  For a refresher, watch Bill Whittle's excellent video.

Spread This One Around

I'm doing my part.  Via Kevin, from "OccupyAJob" on Facebook. 

and while we're at it (same source)