Guns for Newbies

Been a lotta talk going around about this, up to and including Joe Biden  (he likes shotguns).  Long post on one of my favorite blogs, all about various calibers, stopping power, full of recommendations by name of obscure guns I barely even heard of.  The kind of jargon that goes well in gun magazines.  So, here are my recommendations for the total newbie (doesn't own a gun, hasn't fired and gun, doesn't watch many action adventure movies). 
   Get one that you can shoot well.  A .22 caliber hit beats a .44 caliber miss.  The bigger guns are more more likely to kill your target, if you can hit said target.  Bigger means heavier, harder to hold steady, kicks harder and has a louder report, all of which add up to harder to shoot.  Compromise on something you can shoot well, rather than a Dirty Harry style hand cannon. 
   Handguns are convenient, fit nicely into a drawer, a purse or a glove compartment.  It is also VERY difficult to hit anything with a handgun, even at very short range.  Long guns are much easier to aim and get hits with.  They are also more powerful than handguns, a hit with a rifle or a shotgun is much more likely to kill your opponent than a hit with a handgun.
    To do any good, you have to figure on doing some practice shooting.  You need to practice long enough to keep all your shots inside a 10 inch circle.  (At 25 yards with a handgun, at 100 yards with a rifle).  Always wear ear defenders when shooting, they will improve your accuracy.  The report of a gun is so loud it scares most of us, and the scare makes us jerk the trigger when we should be gently squeezing it.  Shooters call this condition "flinching".  Once a flinch is learned, it's hard to overcome.  Ear defenders muffle the report enough to prevent a flinch from developing in the first place.
  The fit of a hand gun to your hand is very important.  The right fit prevents the grip from twisting or sliding in your hand as the gun is fired, which makes the second shot more likely to go where you want it to go.  A regular sized handgun is easier to shoot.  The little snub nose jobs are harder to aim (and grasp).  You really have to shoot a handgun to know if you are going to like it.
   Revolvers are more dependable than automatic pistols.  Revolvers have no safeties to forget, need little lubrication and have no springs under compression waiting to break.  Just pull the trigger and a revolver goes bang.  Automatics not so good.  American Rifleman magazine did a comparison shopping piece on small automatic pistols not long ago.  For each gun reviewed, they listed the number of times it jammed while shooting it.  Stick with a revolver.

How to revise our military procurment

According to Aviation Week that is.  Everyone knows that US military procurement is a mess.  It takes too long, puts on too much gold plate, and costs too much.  Aviation Week has been around a long time and knows the ins and outs of procurement and where the bodies are buried.  They have five recommendations for improvement.

1.  Permit the few remaining prime contractors to merge.  There aren't many left, (Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, and Northrup-Grumman?).  They would all merge together in a heartbeat if the government would let them.  Downside for us taxpayers, no more competitive bids, there would be only one qualified bidder on all jobs.  The industry would love that.

2. Drop the 8(a) goals for small and disadvantaged defense contractors.  This is the first time I heard of this one.  Sounds like crony capitalism at work for favored contractors.

3.  Drop the 50-50 rule requiring half of military maintainance to go thru the military depots.  Good idea.  Air Force depots were huge, slow, and did terrible work.  Plenty of stuff shipped to us from depot was defective on arrival.  Repair work ought to be done on a competitive bid basis. Low bidder gets the job.  If the depot can bid low  fine, if not (the likely case) private industry gets the work.

4.  Publish an official list of critical future technologies, cyber warfare, UAV's, reconnaisance, etc.  Not sure if this is so critical.  Sounds like a plea for the government to convince industry suits to back certain projects. Not sure if that's such a good idea.  A government list is no more likely to be right than an industry list. 

5. Make the loser pay in contract award disputes.  It takes for every to get a project going, 'cause no matter what the contract awarding agency does, figure that the loser will sue just on general principles.  That's gotta add a couple of years delay on every job.  If the loser had to pay court costs, he would be less willing to sue, or at least only sue when he had a strong case. 

Well, I can go alone with numbers 2,3, and 5.  I am against  number1.  Number 4 doesn't strike me as terribly important.

Cannon Mt Ski Weather

Good.  Very Good.  We got 2-3 inches last night, and 2-3 inches the night before.  Today the sun is out and the temperature in mid to upper 20's.  Perfect for skiing.  Trails are all in good shape.  More snow is forecast for the weekend. 

Lithium Batteries

New Aviation Week came in, and it has stories about the 787 and its battery.  So far it looks like the battery is the culprit, not the charger or 787 wiring.  Boeing is floating the idea of adding a fireproof battery box to contain the fire when the battery decides to burn up.  Silence from FAA and airlines.  I cannot imagine either of them being happy about that solution.  Boeing is wringing its hands over the idea of changing back to ordinary batteries, say nickel cadmium or nickel metal hydride.  The paperwork burden looks awful, it would add a couple of hundred pounds to the empty weight and Boeing is still hoping some magic discovery about the battery will yield a non flammable lithium battery.   The Japanese battery maker has not been heard from. 
   Personally, I think Boeing ought to bite the bullet and get rid of the lithium and get the plane flying again.  They can appeal to their Congressmen to expedite the paperwork thru FAA.  It will cost, but having $200 million airliners piling up around the factory costs too.

Apple Got Hacked

Yesterday Apple announced that a "small number" of employee's Mac's were infected by visiting a software development site.  Wow, a Mac attack after all that Appletalk about how only Windows gets infected by virii.  A "small number" presumably means something less than all the computers at Apple.  And, hard working Apple employees were infected at a software development site, not those nasty porn sites.  Apple workers never watch porn on the job.  Right.
  Since the infection occurred by just visiting a website, that means the browser did it.  The Apple browser got stupid and ran a program off that website, something it should never do, but all commercial browsers are doing today. 
  What the world needs is a secure browser that never ever executes programs from anywhere.  You would think such a browser would sell fairly well.  Maybe some of the flashier websites would look less flashy, but I'll take secure over flashy anyday.

Cannon Mt Ski Weather

We got four inches of decent snow last night.  It's down below freezing again.

What's the State of War, today?

The chattering classes are all worked up about the War on Terror killing American citizens.  Not mentioned much is that Obama doesn't do War on Terror.  He calls it something else, I forget what.  No matter what Obama calls it, he's been doing some really warlike things.  That raid on Bin Ladin, and all those drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen certainly aren't regular Constitutional law enforcement.  They are acts of war. 
   In actual fact we have been treating Al Quada like an enemy nation-state ever since 9-11.  We have been waging war against them, and the laws of war permit damn near everything.  Under the laws of war we can bomb cities, torpedo ships, shoot enemy soldiers, execute enemy spies, shoot down enemy admirals in mid air, herd civilians into concentration camps, and bombard towns.  About the only things the laws of war forbid are poison gas and maltreatment of prisoners.  That leaves a whole range of hurt that can lawfully be applied to the enemy. 
   Once someone determines that so and so is enemy,  the hurt locker is opened, and his ass is grass.  "Someone" is not well defined.  Most of the original inmates of Guantanamo were fingered by Afghani's and turned over the the Americans, who flew 'em out of the country to a warm tropical clink.  Many of those drone strikes in Pakistan are flown based on intelligence from the Pakistani Inter Service Intelligence (ISI) agency.  Which is pure as the driven snow and would never ask the Americans to snuff a personal enemy.
   In real life, "someone" is probably a kill committee of Lt. Colonels and CIA middle management types.  Once these guys declare you to be an enemy, you are in a world of hurt.  Obama may boast that he reviews the kill list personally, but that's pure bragging, he just initials a list that is presented to him.
    And the kill committee right now doesn't seem to care if the target is an American citizen or not.  Which is not as much of a problem as their total liberty to add targets to the snuff list pretty much at will.  I'm thinking we need to regularize the proceeding of the kill committee.  As long as their decisions to add targets are reasonable,  I have no problem with adding US born targets, just so long as they have done enough bad stuff to justify snuffing them and we have decent evidence that they really did what we accuse them of doing.
   In short, we need to make the rules of engagement for the kill committee as tight as the rules of engagement that hinder USMC and Army infantry.