Mish-Mash

Random thoughts are rattling around my head, so you all get treated to the resulting mess.

First off, I am now back in Chicago until mid-August. While I am happy to be home, the curtailment of liberty already has me annoyed, most notably in the fact that both of my EDC knives now qualify me as 'armed with a deadly weapon' which, while not technically illegal, is enough to cause more trouble than I'd care to get into.

There's been one minor change to my personal armory.  Previously I was the owner of a Savage BTVS, which is their bull-barrel stainless .22.  I got into shooting through target shooting through iron sights. While the BTVS was capable of accepting iron sights, it would involve not insignificant work, and it became more cost effective to buy a new rifle that comes with target irons and let dad have the scoped Savage (he puts far more stock in glass than I do.)  As such, I now have a Savage MKIIFVT which is in fact not a random string of roman numerals but essentially the same rifle as the BTVS in blued steel with peep rear and aperture front sights and an unfortunate synthetic stock.

I must confess to a small amount of Shadetree Gunsmithing, as the proper laminate thumbhole stock was not designed to accomodate the rear-sight side-mount.  One meeting with a screwdriver and dremel later, and the new rifle was complete.

Took it out today to wring it out and do basic sighting and function check, while dad brought along his new HBAR15.  That rifle is more accurate than me by a long shot (no pun intended,) at least for now.  Next week we're taking a trip up to a range in Wisconsin to do some proper shooting.

On the topic of dad's AR, both he and I rather like the thing.  It's the first EBR to make an appearance in the armory (because the Henry Survival AR7 doesn't count.)  The 20" bull barrel makes for interesting balance and changes the recoil some, but is entirely manageable.  We've had some issues with the glass, but hopefully that can be fixed in due course.

Trayvon Martin isn't a case anymore.  Unless there's some bizarre unforseen smoking gun, there is so much evidence in favor of Zimmerman's story as to make the case fairly cut-and-dried.  Zimmerman wasn't smart in his actions, but he was legally justified.

Ambulance Driver has spawned something of a 'holier than though' kerfuffle over his forcible transport of a man who threatened suicide.  My take on this is pretty simple.  In my mind, the right to life includes the right to throw it away.  If you are inclined to off yourself, you have every right to do so. But as soon as you involve other people, you give that up. Threatening murder (including your own) is a crime, and you are going to have to deal with that.

The particularly irate response of some of the more extreme people in the community got me thinking about why libertarians so frequently get bogged down in these self-aggrandizing "purer libertarian than you" discussions.  Libertarian ideals focus on the individual, which lends itself to a certain degree of egotism.  The same principles of competition that run the worlds markets also mean that libertarians will compete, even at the expense of the cohesiveness of the movement.  The funny thing is that while it makes us less effective, I'm not sure how much of a problem I have with it.

Building a containment system for 12g threadless CO2 cartridges out of materials available at Home Depot is interesting, difficult, and entertaining. Engineering projects are good fun.

Differential Equations are not good fun.  The only reason I did well in that class is that for the final I just gave up on trying to understand the formulae and just tried to be able to apply them.  This is something of a mental block with me.  I generally have a hard time with this.  I am usually pretty good at figuring these things out, but differential equations didn't work for me.

I am going to have a kitchen next year.  This is going to be fun.  I promise this won't turn into a cooking blog though.

Jo Nesbø has a remarkable ability to write soul-crushing books.  Both The Snowman and The Leopard were excellent, and well worth a read if you're into mysteries, but neither of them are what I would call happy books.

I think that's everything rattling around that is fit for general consumption.