Free Republic

Open carry would dramatically increase the odds that some random evil-doer might single me out as the guy he needs to address first since me being obviously armed identifies me as someone who potentially could intervene to interrupt his mischief.

Remaining the "Grey Man," OTOH, will tend to preserve my options, particularly as regards freedom of maneuver. If I don't pose any obvious threat, he's more likely to ignore me while I make my escape. Or slip behind him so I can back-shoot him, as the case may be.

But if your intent is to make a political statement, open carry of a firearm can put an exclamation point on your message.

It is good to be king.

This is the weekend for the Grand Prix de Monaco Historique and Adrian Newey was there, racing his Lotus 49B. The 49B was the original Cosworth DFV car, using the engine block as a stressed member of the chassis. The cockpit was bolted to one end and the differential and rear suspension bolted to the other.

How apropos, Newey tear-assing around the streets of Monaco in a car designed and built by Colin Chapman hisself. Video here. The proverbial 'kid in a candy store.'

I haven't been able to get a good look to tell what it is now but Newey definitely has ditched the RBR livery on his racing helmet.

The "business" of the Monaco Historique weekend is the Sotheby's auction, and this year's marquee attraction is from the collection of Jody Schechter. The Ferrari 312 T4 he won the 1979 WDC in is expected to bring north of €5 mil.

If I had my 'druthers, I'd 'druther have the other car on offer Scheckter won the odd race in, the Tyrell P34. And it's only expected to go for paltry 1/10th what they're asking for the Ferrari.

You're not going to beat a 6-wheel Tyrrel for "interesting" but there were other cars on offer that jingled my berries. Like a Lancia Stratos, a 1949 Alfa Romeo Passo Corto (straight-6), a Ferrari 365 Daytona Spider, and the last Porsche 917K built.

Yeah, Newey gets to own the candy shop and the best I can hope for is to press my nose against the front window.

https://rmsothebys.com/auctions/mc24/lots/

It is unlikely that there is a semi-automatic firearm in existence that Franklin Armory can’t create a binary trigger for, and the binary trigger gives the attached weapon an effective cycling rate in the same range as typical SMGs.

And as yet, no one has yet devised a method of making binary triggers either controlled or illegal.

"...We're Back to Where We Were Before..."

No, we're not.

We're worse off because we've taught them every move we have in our playbook. We've given them opportunity to learn our entire set of KSAs (knowledge, skills & abilities). And we've given them the space and the time they needed to develop new strategies to use against the West.

It's like taking antibiotics. If you don't take the full course, if you don't continue taking them until ALL the bad bacteria is dead Dead DEAD, the surviving bacteria will recover and mutate into a more resistant strain that you might not have anything for.

Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius.

Which led to the OPEC oil embargo.

Which caused crude oil prices to almost triple.

Which led to the “Energy Crisis” (and the 55 mph national speed limit, among other horse puckey).

Which led to America ‘discovering’ Japanese cars. Before that, it was un-patriotic to not buy American.

Which led to a crisis in Detroit that forced them to “raise their game” and build cars that got better gas mileage and lasted longer.

In 1972, a car was decent if it lasted 100,000 miles.
IN 1978, a car was crap if it didn’t last 200,000.

"In Oregon the biker probably ran the stopsign too."

In Oregon it's legal for a bicyclist to run a stop sign, provided there's no conflicting traffic.

Oregon law allows cyclists to treat a stop sign like a yield sign and a stop light like a stop sign. So there is no strict requirement for a cyclist to stop at a stop sign.

When they enacted that law, the incidence of bicyclists being struck by cagers (motorists) while negotiating an intersection dropped by 18%.

No, Unions Aren't Having a Resurgence—and That's Good for Workers

No, Unions Aren't Having a Resurgence—and That's Good for Workers the economy

No, Unions Aren't Having a Resurgence—and That's Good for Workers democracy

No, Unions Aren't Having a Resurgence—and That's Good for Workers liberty

No, Unions Aren't Having a Resurgence—and That's Good for Workers the nation

No, Unions Aren't Having a Resurgence—and That's Good Bad for Workers Organized Crime

No, Unions Aren't Having a Resurgence—and That's Good Bad for Workers Socialism

No, Unions Aren't Having a Resurgence—and That's Good Bad for Workers the demoncrat party

Fixed it for them.

It’s highly unlikely the images were destroyed if they were stored on magnetic storage media unless the media itself was physically damaged or destroyed. If the images were just erased, it’s a virtual certainty they’re recoverable.

The Glock Switches already are illegal (& non-transferable) under the 1986 Hughes Amendment. Possessing one is a felony.

In the 21st Century, air power wins naval battles, and the US has been running 24-hour all-weather carrier ops longer than anyone else on the planet.

In comparison, China has had “blue water” carriers, what, 15 minutes?

"A Red Heifer Sacrifice Is Coming, But The Discovery Of The Ark Of The Covenant Will Be Even More Important"

This headline will be the new definition of non sequitur.

I guarantee it had a nose gear when it took off. Why didn’t it have one when it landed?

Of course if it had a nose gear but it failed to deploy, that’s a horse of another color, but that’s not what the headline claims.

The correct terminology is “nose gear.”

"Has Israel followed the law in its war in Gaza?..."

That Law of Abraham? Without a doubt.

"Stormy Daniels, porn actor video prostitute central to Trump’s hush money trial, takes the stand"

Fixed it for them.

The entertaining bit is the anti-evolutionists are still wanting Darwin exhumed so he can be crucified when another observational scientist, Lord Alfred Russel Wallace, studying a completely different branch of the animal kingdom in another part of the world just a few years after Darwin’s field research, and who had never been privy to the bulk of Darwin’s work, came to the EXACT SAME CONCLUSIONS.

Darwin had a famously sour stomach and as he aged he grew highly averse to stress. He intended not to have On the Origin of Species published in his lifetime because he didn’t want to be at the eye of the sh1tstorm he knew it would cause among the fixed and rigid fundamentalists. But when Lord Wallace consulted with him about publishing his own work on the same subject, Darwin knew he’d have to publish right away, else Wallace would “scoop” him.

If that had happened, today Darwin would be little more than a footnote in Lord Wallace’s magnum opus and it would be Wallace the fixed and rigid fundamentalists would be clamoring to have resurrected so they could kill him.

It was Erasmus Darwin, Charles’ grandfather, who coined the expression, “survival of the fittest.” One of the reasons Darwin took the position on the voyage of the Beagle was that he believed in the immutability of species, and he hoped his research would prove Grandpa wrong.

Everyone focuses on Darwin’s work with finches in the Galapagos, but the voyage of the Beagle lasted nearly five years, and they were only in the Galapagos for three weeks. The majority of what he saw that served as inspiration for On the Origin of species he observed elsewhere. In fact, he’d begin doubting the “immutable creations of God” dogma long before they’d ever reached the southern tip of South America.

In Brazil he found parasitic wasps that laid their eggs on other arthropods and those eggs eventually hatched and devoured their host. This was such a cruel and grotesque process for the host that Darwin could not make himself believe that a kind and loving god would have created them (or their tormentor, the parasitic wasp) specifically so they could suffer this fate. So if it was not God’s handiwork, there must have been some other ‘natural’ mechanism at work. The parasitic wasp was “priming the pump,” to coin a phrase, for the revelations of the Galapagos finches, tortoises, and cactuses.

The thing I find most astonishing about Darwin’s insights into how the process must have worked is that when he wrote OTOOS, not a single hominid fossil had ever been identified. One or maybe two had been found in his old age and before he died, but I doubt he felt vindicated because it would be years before the theory that these fossils were of human ancestors be accepted in the scientific community. Forget about gene theory, forget about DNA, forget about alelles and background radiation, he wrote OTOOS before it was even discovered that the remains of any of our ancestors had survived to the modern era, much less whether they showed any proto-human physical traits.

And all this vitriol over Darwin seems a bit farcical because the evolutionary science hasn’t been about Darwin for well more than a century. And we’d still have the exact same science, even if Darwin had never been born, because other scientists, most notably Lord Alfred Russel Wallace, have independently come to the same conclusions.

And the check is in the mail, yadda, yadda, yadda ....

It's not if, it's when.

Wait, don’t vegans all live forever?

There's never a Napoleon around when you need one.

Bony once dispelled rioters on the streets of Paris with "a wiff of grapeshot" from French cannon.

His nephew, Emperor (or President, depending on the day of the week) Napoleon III had a third of Paris torn down and the streets rebuilt wider specifically to give his cannoneers wider fields of fire, should the need arise.