Free Republic

“Here is the problem. ANYTHING, and I mean ANYTHING, these people touch has that virus on it.”

A lot of Americans have assumed this for about a decade now which is why antiseptic wipes and lotions are so common these days. It cuts down on the regular flu and colds and I imagine it would attenuate the current bug as well.

So I looked it up as I don’t know the metric system in this regard and since no one else mentioned it: 940 hp is 27.76 “ Hg! That makes me realize I never tried twisting an altimeter setting knob as far as I could before. The article mentioned that an hp setting which converts to 28.00” being the lowest setting.

Like some other posters mentioned: In ground attack, a gun is usually the easiest way to take out a target (not including big items like bridges or tough bunkers), and this is still true even in the era of guided bombs being universal on U.S. aircraft, and probably somewhat common with Russian planes. The A-10’s cannon has about 2-3X the rate of fire, 44% more muzzle energy, and holds about 5X the ammo. The A-10s straight wing is also easier to fly and more efficient at the lower speeds of ground attack. So the SU-25 and other swept-wing jets can do the job, it’s just harder to pick out objects in the ground when you are flying faster and can’t simply point your nose at the target and hose it down with the world’s largest Gatling gun. So the A-10 is more efficient at the job.

“When my brother and I were boys, we used to bring the cow to milk in the pig pen. Pigs are actually fairly neat creatures, contrary to popular opinion, and poop in one corner of the pen. So the corner we milked the cow in was poop free. She would usually leave a couple of pies, which the pigs promptly ate up.
Not that I’m recommending it, but pigs are smart enough to know there is evidently a lot of nutrition in cow pies.”

My Golden Retriever eats cow pies all the time. Never hurt him none.

This article and comments leave me somewhat stunned. As a kid in the mid-80s, some of my fondest memories are birthday parties Chuck E. Cheese’s. I never saw anything like what is described here. The biggest problem was the kids pulling on the tail of the guy in the mouse costume. It used to dangle down and back, but I think kids pulling on it was so common that later costumes had the tail bent up and to the right such that it was basically pointing at the head of the costume’s wearer. This way a kid couldn’t pull it while the mouse’s back was turned.

What all these editorials from antis ignore (I’m not sure if this is willful or not) is that this decision doesn’t make it legal for convicted felons to buy guns. The criminals will keep getting their guns from the places they’ve always got them—burglaries.

I thought Brazil was the country that developed sugarcane ethanol several decades ago so it wouldn’t need gasoline anymore.

“Britain may begin experimenting with programs under which households would pay a “garbage bill,” similar to an electricity or water bill”

So in England, they don’t have to pay for garbage service? Seems that from the comments in this thread, many of the posters don’t have to pay one either—that seems strange. A private company comes to take away your garbage, so why would you not have to pay them for it?

I once worked for the local gov’t recycling agency here in the S.F. Bay Area. The idea that we were running out of landfill space and that we had to recycle 50% of our garbage was assumed to be a given, with no justification even attempted. A good portion of the people working there were dogmatic environmentalists who left little room in their thought for practicality. They were jealous of any municipalties that could fine people for not recycling. They all drove to work too, despite the fact that they claimed to be environmentalists and public transportation wasn’t overly far away (about a 15 minute walk from the communter train station). This was 2000 and global warming wasn’t as hyped as it is now, but I’m sure they were all aware of it. Their environmental convictions were enough to make them want to fine other people for not following them, but not enough to make my co-workers do anything to inconvenience themselves.

“I understand that most Americans want to soothe their guilt by rationalizing your exact point. Isn’t a Toyota made in the US better than a Chev made in Mexico ?”

I am not trying to soothe guilt, because I don’t feel guilty at all for driving a better-made vehicle with a foreign label. I pointed out the notion that an American label on your vehicle means little.

“Hardly. Do your research. When the board of directors for Toyota meets, where do you think they’re “getting together”......? Michigan ? or Japan ? And where do you think they reinvest their earnings ? Here or at home ?”

Where the board gets together means little. Certainly less than the fact that the gas used to fuel any car is mostly imported. The company puts its earnings all over the globe. I work for a ginormous multi-national (not a car-related company), and it’s headquarters location, based in a foreign country is likewise nearly meaningless.

“Therefore it’s plain nonsense to claim that climate models cannot be trusted because there is so much uncertainty in weather forecasts”

Predicting an entire winter stands in the category of climate model, not weather forecast.

This isn’t the first time NOAA has been wrong on an entire season, either. A few years back it was something like 95% confidence on a nasty hurricane season for one that turned out extraordinarily calm.

The line that the very long-term models are easier to predict, so we should ignore the frequent less long-term model failures (especially when NOAA claims such certainty in them), is not one that inspires any confidence from me. Or the fact that the cause(s) of the Little Ice Age are still being debated 150 years after it ended.

“Harper has maneuvered the Grits into going along with a two year extension after their leader had proclaimed that he was prepared to fight an election on his position that the mission NOT be extended.

Look to your own liberals if you want to see something “pathetic”, one of whom is about to win your presidency.”

It is good to hear the conservatives in Canada are fighting to stay in Afghanistan until the job is done. And while our liberals are indeed pathetic, none of the leading Dem candidates is advocating abandoning that country.

Nein! In Deutschland, Air Traffik Kontrol kommand, and zee pilot obey!!!

When I went to ground school for my isntrument rating, the class joke was that whenever we were asked a question about what to do in a certain situation but we didn’t know the answer, everyone would shout “7700”!, the transponder code for emergency, because when a pilot declares an emergency, he can break whatever rules he feels necessary.

I met a German chick there who had interviewed for Lufthansa but was rejected. I never flew with her, but she had more hours in gliders alone by age 19 than most of the twenty-something instructors had in total. She told me Lufthansa prefers to hire pilots with no expereince whatsoever, because it is easier to train them their own way.

That’s right, AHSA is a false-flag organization that was started about 2-3 years ago by antis. It gets unquestioning legitamacy from liberal mainstream media. It gets its money from the usual anti-gun funding sources. Someone pointed out that that their membership was so low (they claim something like a few hundred) that their annual dues couldn’t even pay the annual salary of its president, and the AHSA replied that large donations provide most of their money.

Mass having the second lowest gun death rate sounds unlikely—does anyone know how to check that?

Adding something like the terror watchlist for the criminal check system would be a total boondoggle. Names are added to that list as a CYA measure for various security agencies, and a huge number of Americans would lose a basic civil right over that.

Most of the guns at gunshows are sold by licensed dealers who run the criminal checks anyway.

The thing that bothers me the most about running criminal checks on all private party sales is you can’t even sell a gun to your neighbor without driving to a gun store first and paying 50 bucks or so.

Buying a firearm at a gun show where I live in California (where we have to do the check) sounds like more of a hassle than its worth, so I have never even attempted it. I would just buy a gun off the Internet anyway if my local gun store didn’t have one, and those have to be shipped to a gun store, which runs you through the criminal check system.

I recent fed DOJ study showed that criminals almost never buy their guns at a gunshow anyway. They get them from robberies, then trade tham on the black market.

Canada wants to drop out of a defensive alliance with us because they suffered a 0.5% KIA rate? Pathetic. Are the rest of our NATIO allies that weak?

I never saw that episode of Mythbusters, but I have shot compressed gas tanks before, and their power is impressive. I shot a half-empty butane can (the small kind for backpacking stoves) at 50 yards with a 223, and it flew 35 yards (measured with a laser rangefinder) from the force of the compressed gas exiting. There was no explosion. I shot another one and it spun in circles on the ground at a fairly dizzying rate.

And a few notes on pressure (I got these from analyses of nuclear weapon effects):

1 PSI overpressure will break windows
20 PSI overpressure will knock down most buildings

Would you want a 4000 PSI tank sheared in half by another vehicle, so that all the force is released at once?

I knew a girl like this whom I went to school with from elementary through high school, and who went to college at Harvard after graduation.

The girl I knew was very smart, but that was about the only positive thing I could say about her. She was tall and blonde and looked like the girl here, except not at all pretty, not fat but not curvy. The fact that she was smarter than almost everyone else seemed to make her disdainful of others (though I never heard her say anything as snobbish and elitist as the author of this article). She often looked slightly unhappy or bored. She wasn’t nasty but wasn’t outwardly friendly either. She wasn’t repulsive, but simply did not look attractive or have the kind of personality that was enjoyable to be around, even if you were a smart, educated guy. Not a bad person. Maybe she was quite nice once you got to know her. But she just was not the kind of thing guys look for in a date.

“Thousands of Republican voters in San Diego and as far north as Los Angeles showed up to vote on Tuesday only to be told that they were registered “Non-Partisan”.”

That wasn’t just SoCal. It happened in the Bay Area too. It happened to me, but not the other two people who live at my address. Brian Sussman on KSFO was talking about it, since it happened to so many people up here.

“Imagine a guy predicting that if you roled dice for 500 times the average value on the dice would be 3.5.

Would you trust him with that although he is bad at predicting what number comes up next time you throw the dice ?”

If he were stupid enough to claim to be able to predict what the next dice throw is, then, yes. And the whole point of the debate is we don’t know if the average is 3.5 or not, and whether we should trust people who claim they can predict the next throw to predict even further and more complicated models down the road.

“Yep, it’s been 70 years since the Supreme Court has directly ruled on the meaning of the 2nd amendment.”

And the last time they did it, there wasn’t even an opposing lawyer, and the case appeared to be fast-tracked to the Supremes for the purpose of validating the Gun National Firearms Act of 1934.

And the Supremes actually partially validated the 2nd Amendment by saying that a short-barrelled shotgun was not protected by the 2nd Amendment, _only_ because it wasn’t militarily useful, and not used by military/police at the time. Thus, they indirectly ruled that militarily useful firearms were protected.

Another interesting fact of the ‘34 NFA is that the Feds tried to claim it was not a gun control act at all, but rather a revenue mesure, since it did not actually ban anything, and instead imposed a tax on these items. The NFA is in the Internet Revenue Code.

It wasn’t until the ‘68 Gun Control Act that the Feds abandoned the pretense that they weren’t trying to regulate guns.

I made a few typos in my post above (I haven’t done much posting here—anyone know how to edit your post)

First link: http://volokh.com/posts/1173746455.shtml
Second link: http://www.guncite.com/gc2ndpur.html

Last sentence should read: The militia phrase is a declaration of general intent, but is not restrictive in any way.