Neanderpundit

Major range day.

Nephew and I loaded up the truck with such a bucketload of shit, it’s amazing we got it all in the truck.

Pistols:
Uberti Colt Cattleman
Ruger Mark II

Rifles:
Ma Bell (Interarms Mark X in 30-06)
Remington 241 Speedmaster
Winchester 94 in 30-30 wcf
K31
Cugir

Scatterguns
Springfield armory 12 gauge
LeFever Nitro Special 20 gauge

We went through all the ammo I brought, which was hundreds and hundreds of rounds.

The gem of the day was, of course,the K31. I shot twenty rounds through Ma Bell, which used to be my favorite, and which, frankly, was usually able to get me single ragged hole groups.These days, I can’t seem to get better than a couple inches across.

On the other hand, the K31, I was able to keep everything in six inches. At 100 yarde. With Iron sights.

If I had to give up every rifle I owned, and keep but one, this would be the one. It comes to the shoulder unaided, it springs to life beneath my grip. THe warmth of it’s barrel comforts me and the weight of it makes me wish I had purchased it earlier. I grow ever more satisfied with this fine rifle, and I intend to restore it’s stock and get it back to as-new condition as soon as I can.

We ran out of 30-30. We ran out of 30-06. We ran out of 7.5 swiss. We went through more than 500 rounds of 22 long rifle.
We shot and shot and shot, until we wore grins so large our faces hurt.

THen came the clays. Now i’ll readily admit to sucking with sporting clays, and today was no exception- but I remembered what it took to GET good. Practice.

Now, I’ve done a lot of things that I never got any good at- I tried to learn the guitar about three hundred times, and I go from nothing to sucking in a couple days, where I plateau at sucking for about ever. No matter what I do, I rarely if ever get beyond sucking.

Clays, of course, I do improve. I went, during the course of a couple hundred clays, from sucking to hitting about every one. I did have some issues getting the old LeFever to run well- it;s a little old and cantankerous and I suspect I will have to do some work to it to get it to be more reliable- and in any event, it was never a trap gun. The Springfield Armory is really only a hyped up Savage, and it shoots well, but again, it’s not a trap gun, not mean tto shoot all day long. I had better luck with the 20 than with the 12, but that’s because of familiarity. At any rate, 20 straight was my best hit, and I’m, looking forward to a lot more.

All in all? damn, i feel good. And a bottle of cheap sauternes at the end of the day is gonna make it a good dall all told. Now I must go nap. Happy fourth!

I’m off to the range. Report to follow.

Just in case there is any one still stupid enough to believe anything Al Gore says

Today I heard Dr Dean Edell say on the radio “There’s no question the earth is warming, and that humans are probably responsible for this warming”.

Ok, first of all, you might want to think twice before you take medical advice from this man.

Here’s a little chart which may illustrate the absurdity of this.

Now, I know this is a little hard to read, so let me explain it a bit.

The blue line on the bottom, is the formation of the earth. Unless you’re a fundamentalist who believe God made it from whole cloth 6000 years ago, in which case you might want to stop reading now. Anyway, from our best estimates, we can guess that the earth formed four point four billion years ago. We don’t know what the temp was then, but we can assume it must have been a little warm.

Next, the burgundy colored bar, marks the time life first appeared on earth, 2.8 billion years ago. Again: granted, these times are estimates, but it was clearly a long damned time. When we get to the yellow bar, we’re looking at the arrival of higher life forms, around 570 million years ago. Of course, they lived in the sea; we don’t see land based life forms until around around 280 million years ago, the cyan bar. Dinosaurs first appeard, as far as we can tell, about 225 million years ago,m the purple line.

The salmon colored line marks the peak of the Dinosaur’s success, 136 million years ago, and their decline and eventual disappearance occur 65 million years ago, the navy blue line.

From here it gets harder to see, because the timelines are so infinitely small it’s difficult to even see them.

At five million years ago, the primates who were probably our earliest human ancestors appeared, and at around 300,000 years ago, neanderthal, my own specific evolutionary dead end, lived and died.

The most recent major ice age ended around 11,000 years ago.There were mini-ice ages since, remember the story of Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates? try to find a frozen canal in Holland today. That was a mini ice age.

Anyway, back to the timeline: the pyramids were built 3500 years ago, and we can reasonably assume that Egypt of the time was similar to the Egypt of today.

Around about 514 years ago, Columbus set foot on the North American continent. And about 100 years later, in 1592, Gallileo invented the first crude thermometer.

The last mark on the chart? yeah, twenty years ago, the same scientists that are yelling about global warming were bitching about the upcoming ice age.

Those among you with more than seven brain cells to rub together might be able to see where this is going. The available sample of data is so small as to be well within the margin for error. Additionally, the data colllected has never been collected over any of the earth’s oceans, which cover 70% of the earth’s surface.

So in other words, a tiny amount of data has been collected in only a tiny area. There is NO WAY THAT THAT DATA CAN BE INTERPRETED to describe ANY MEANINGFUL TRENDS. We don’t know what the mean temperature was for MOST of human history, let alone the history of the planet. “But they can tell from ice cores” Bullshit. Nobody has any fucking idea, and it’s all conjecture.

Should we continue to pollute the earth as if there were no problem? absolutely not. Should we huband our resources and try to improve the way we do everything, from energy consumption to trash disposal? absolutely. Are we all gonna die? eventually.

but not because of global warming, because it doesn’t exist.