…….

Today’s tune is brought to you by the Blue Haired Faerie. She of the M3 grease gun.

We are being invaded by squirrels. They are eating the bird food. Wife has declared war on the damn things.

I have four scopes. They range in age from 30 years old to “who the heck knows?” One came on the M1. It is a fixed four power. It is currently dismounted. The scope on the Rem. 700 is a beautiful Nikon scope, but that is not moving. The “varmint” scope that I picked up to go on a flat top AR-15 from the 1990s is a cheap one. There was another scope which I pulled off a donated .22.

I started with the donated scope. It was OK, but I did not like it. I switched to the varmint scope. That sort of worked. I had to put a 20MOA base under it and then managed to foobar things.

As I’ve said, I normally use iron sights. I’ve got red dots which are all co-registered with the backup up iron sights. And I have that Rem. 700 that was sighted in 30 years ago at 100 yards and just works.

What I ended up doing is messing things up badly. When the target is at the exact correct distance, then the varmint scope put round after round through the same hole exactly where I was aiming.

On the other hand, if the distance was anything other than that “correct” distance, the point of aim and point of impact were way off. All of this is because the scope is 2 inches above the bore.

Now, this scope has a very delicate and precise point of aim. It is a small, very small, dot in the center held there by two very fine crosshairs. The crosshairs are so fine it is difficult to see them. The center dot is very small too. And there is a muddiness to the image that bothers me.

I bought a cheap scope. Vortex Optics Crossfire II Second Focal Plane, 1-inch Tube Rifle scope.

First, it is much shorter than the other scopes. Second, the objective is 40 mm vs something smaller on the varmint scope. Third, it is freaking clear. It is only a 3-9×40, while the varmint was 8-32. I had the varmint at 8x, while I’m running the Vortex at 5x.

I purchased the “Dead-Hold BDC” This gives me hash marks on the crosshairs. This allows me to easily figure out my hold based on distance.

The turrets are cleaner and feel nicer to the touch.

And for those that suggested that bore sighting with that cheap-ass laser wouldn’t work well, the first rounds were on paper, 0.5 inches right of point of aim. The elevation was spot on. I made the adjustment for windage and then proceeded to put 10 rounds through a dime size hole.

The other big thing I noticed is the speed of target accusation. With the old scope, I would spot my target, shoulder the rifle, then spend time searching for the target.

With this new scope, I shoulder the rifle and everything just lines up. The target is in the center of the crosshairs.

If you have been considering a low-cost rifle scope, check the Vortex out. Make sure you get the right reticle for you.

My great-grandfather was a railroad man and a union organizer. He and his family were always moving because the railroad didn’t like him organizing, but didn’t want to let go of him because he was good at his job. I know this history because my grandfather wrote his autobiography.

My great-great-grandfather, his son, and his son’s son (my grandfather) were all railroad men who either belonged to the union or were organizing for the union.

I’ve worked in “right to work states” and in states where joining the union was a requirement for being employed.

The unions did remarkable things when they started. I agree with many of those actions. The child labor laws, why created to protect jobs, were good things. Safety regulations which were about safety were a good thing. Even some of the wage work was good.

Today, I find that most Unions are greedy sinkholes. What they are there to do is protect the income of the higher ups in the union. They do not seem to act in balanced ways.

My wife is a teacher, when the local union rep was recruiting, in a mandatory staff meeting called for the union to recruit, my wife asked the question I gave her “Who was the last Republican the union endorsed?” The rep could not give an answer.

According to my wife, there was a bit of quiet sniggering.

Because I follow the Supreme Court, I’ve noticed some good opinions coming out of the court recently.

[xCite item=”R97SAX3Q” pos=0 pos=0] was the case that returned the question of abortion back to the state. [xCite item=”75DAVPP7″ pos=1 pos=1] told the state that the Second Amendment wasn’t a second class amendment that could be balanced away. [xCite item=”N39XI4CJ” pos=2] told the state that the executive branch had to actually have congress create laws, not just make a rule.

These were three powerful opinions. They returned power to the state and the people. Of course, those that want government control were very upset.

All of this brings us to a leftist meltdown: Americans want to join unions. The supreme court doesn’t like that[xCite item=”JDWDY7HS” pos=3] I’m not sure where she got that the Supreme Court doesn’t like people joining unions. Maybe there is something else going on?
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In honor of the Republicans caving and giving Biden everything his handlers wanted.

Hagar has a post up this morning. I’ve got an article in progress, but I need to finish out some work related things before I can finish my GFZ post.

On the mostly good news, I was able to track down my citeserver issue(s).

Here’s an example citation: [[xCite item=”LPGQXCDT” para=7 pos=2]]. This says to add a citation to that particular item with a locator a ¶7. All well and good.

The problem is that the form that I get my data isn’t quite right. It is a little bit off. I was working on fixing it when I found tools that would do it for me. Of course, they didn’t work. I fixed them.

From there I was finally getting citations. One of the big reasons for this is to allow me to use Id. and short forms easily. That part wasn’t working.

Back to the supplied code. After three days, the debug output showed me that I was getting the correct answers. Just like the documentation told me to expect.

And while looking at the provided code… They are throwing away all the excess results. Even though my code was producing the correct results, their code was throwing it away.

That’s been fixed. I have citations doing most of the correct things. What’s left for me to do is to fix up the actual citation description to work correctly for GFZ. I’m getting there.

The amount of work I’ve invested in this might seem out of keeping for the return, but it is a pain trying to do all the correct copy paste. This just works.

You had one job…

This showed up in my inbox from WK. Thank you.

The transit system said Fullard didn’t properly deescalate the situation and was not allowed to bring a gun to work.

The transit system says that the drive is now “off the job”.

The bus driver was doing his job when Omarri Tobias decided that he wanted special treatment. That is, he wanted to get off the bus between stops.

When the driver didn’t comply with his wishes, he pulled a gun.

At this point, it is a self-defense situation.

According to ABC News, Tobias “appeared” to point a gun at the driver. Hmm, I don’t care if you are pointing a gun near me or at me. You have drawn your gun as a threat to me. I’m going to shoot you until you are no longer a threat.

Both people were injured. The driver suffered a wound to the arm. The thug took at least one round to the abdomen.

Unfortunately, the driver will get the full legal treatment, as he continued to shoot as Tobias crawled and ran off the bus.

The Charlotte Area Transit CEO, Interim, says We don’t want anyone possessing weapons on our vehicles. As always, the guy sitting in the office with security at the front door wants you to be disarmed. Hoping that if you give up your dignity, your money, or just comply, the evil thug won’t kill you just for laughs.

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Earlier this week, my wife reported a “sulfur smell” in parts of the house. I was busy, so I didn’t do much more than check in the basement to see if there was anything obvious.

It smelled bad, nothing obvious.

Yesterday, the smell was gone. It seemed like it had gotten better as the rain stopped.

I’m at my desk working, trying to get stdObj’s to do the right thing in the right places, when I expect arrays, and I am getting something else. A frustrating day of digging through my code, trying to finish things up so that everything gets easier.

In perspective, as a programmer, there are things that I know that computers do better than me. I also know that teaching them how to do those things is sometimes painful and time-consuming. When I started doing the legal analysis articles, I would use the <quote> element. But that was designed for something else, and it made everything bold and italic.

This made it hard to read and almost impossible to indicate proper references to cases. I started adding “inline CSS” to each paragraph in a quote to make it look “ok”. It wasn’t great, still it was better.

After a while, I got tired of having to type a long line of stuff each time I wanted to use a quote. I figured out the WordPress methodology for handling site wide CSS. So now I use <div class=”quote”> to get my quotes. I reworked the CSS for the <aside> tag and added a <div class=”aside”>. This has made it much faster to do my articles.

Back to the frustration, I’m writing a plugin for WordPress that does the things I want it to well. Lots of good code to work from, documentation is acceptable. But a new framework for me.

It is frustrating but ok.

Back to the smell, I’m deep in thought, trying to make things work when a pump comes on. That’s to be expected, we have the sump and the pooper shooter (sewage ejector). The pooper shooter is only a couple of years old. We paid a couple of grand to have it replaced a few years ago. It should be just fine.

It isn’t. Normally, it fires off, you hear it. And less than 15 seconds later, it stops.

For those that don’t understand, shit flows down hill. It doesn’t like to go up hill. There are specifications to make sure that the people who install the pipes in your home have all the sewage pipes pointing down hill.

If there isn’t enough slope, things will get stuck in the pipes. Not fun.

The sewage connection point for our house is in the southeast corner. Nice flow from the master bathroom and where the old kitchen used to be. The new kitchen is in the middle of the house, about 50ft from that connection. The slope is a little weak, but it gets the water out of the house.

The “new” bathroom is further west of the kitchen. It is also down three steps from the kitchen. There is no way for the shit to flow down hill from that bathroom to the other side of the house.

The fix for this is a sewage ejector. These are also used if your basement is below grade for the city sewage.

Regardless, this is a plastic/rubber tub, about 40 gallons in size. Poop flows into this. When the tub fills to about the 1/3 or 1/2 level, a pump comes on. It eats whatever solids are in there and shoves it up a 3 in PVC pipe to the floor joists. There it can flow down hill to the other side of the house and out.

The damn thing stopped ejecting.

This means that it filled up.

It filled up with yucky stuff.

When its pump fired off, I had to rush downstairs to figure things out.

It sounded bad. I turned it off and realized that the smell was coming from the fact that the damn thing had overflowed. Not horribly, but enough.

So, this afternoon and evening I was down in the basement with my son trying to get things to work. It is just so much joy when you know that pulling a pipe apart is going to release gross water. It is a dark gray. Not only that, but it has plenty of suspended solids. It stinks. And it splashes.

My son and I did get splashed. It is gross. We tried to pull the check valve. That failed because they did not leave enough space to remove it when they installed it. None of the pipes from the ejector outward are stopped up. It is inside that nasty tub.

Oh, did you notice this is Memorial Day weekend? I can get a plumber out here tomorrow on an emergency call out. Those start at around $300.

For the moment, we’ve put half the house off limit for water usage. Tuesday we’ll get the plumber out here and see what they can do.

The good news is that the stink will go away. The bad news… Yeah, it still smells, and we are washing dishes manually to make sure nothing goes down that pipe.

Hopefully, I’ll get some success today.

In Oregon Firearms Federation, Inc. v. Brown I wrote:

As CS pointed out to me, I got it wrong.

They are correct. I did get it wrong. I’m sorry, all of these bills and cases are starting to run together in my head. Furthermore, I don’t have my tags set correctly on the different cases yet, either.

Measure 114 was a ballot initiative. The anti-gun people in Oregon had been working on multiple infringements within the legislative body. They did not get the votes. Most politicians realize that gun control is often times the third rail of politics.

The anti-gunners don’t like loosing. They went and started the Ballot Initiative. This is the method that the people of Oregon use to get laws passed via direct democracy. Mob rule.

I remember reading that there were a number of things wrong with the process that was used, and there were a number of questions about the legitimacy of the initiative.

According to Ballotpedia, they needed 112,020 valid signatures to get the measure on the ballot. Bay June 23, 2022, they only had around 90,000. This was not enough. By July 9, 2022, they had 159,000. This was barely in time to get the measure on the ballot.

Please note, I’m working from a very fuzzy memory, Oregon wasn’t my state, and it wasn’t of major interest to me, at the time.

All the Country is grist for the mill now. I thank all the readers that have sent us links and announcements about the interesting 2A things happening in their parts of the country.

The measure was written before Bruen being decided. The state should have looked at the Measure and declared it unconstitutional and made them go back and re-write it, and get another set of signatures. That didn’t happen.

Here are the links to prior articles I’ve written regarding Measure 114. I think my writing has gotten better, but not so much that I should go rewrite these articles.

• Reader Prompt: Oregon Measure 114 lawsuit
• Oregon gets some help v. Measure 114
• Oregon Measure 114
• Measure 114 Small Update
• Measure 114
• Measure 114 gets “Fixed”

JP is a comedian who has been making spoof videos for a number of years. His earlier videos were hard to watch because of his level of shilling. He is/was unusual because he came at things from a conservative point of view.