• I am reminded of the image showing a US soldier on a hillside with civilians hiding behind him. The caption reads, “The difference is that we ourselves between them and the enemy, they put them between themselves and their enemies.”

    It was, and is, such a powerful message of the differences between the animals and the civilized nations.

    One of the more disgusting things I’ve seen out of Gaza was a video of Hamas placing the shattered body of a child into a bomb crater, to be found with a great deal of anguish on the faces of the actors.

    The child was already dead. His skull was hanging open. It was disgusting.

    I support Israel. I hope they root out every last terrorist bastard and send them to get their 72 raisins.

            
  • Cover of The Clay Table, showing a clay pot over hot coals.My newest cookbook is now available!
    From the back cover:

    Clay pots are probably the oldest cookware known to humans. Since not long after we harnessed fire, we’ve been learning new and improved ways to make cooking vessels, and clay was an obvious early choice. When fired, it’s hard, heat resistant, and heat retaining. It holds liquids and solids equally well. And best, clay can be pressed into any shape. This small cookbook covers five recipes from each of five different time periods: Anglo-Saxon, Viking, Medieval, 18th Century American, and modern day. Each uses a clay cooking vessel, be it pot, pipkin, tagine, or pan. They are tasty additions to any modern menu, while still touching on the history of early human cooking. M. Allyson Szabo is the author of The Re-Enactor’s Cookbook, and Cook Small, Live Large! Her interest in all things historical and kitchen oriented has served her well, and she produces cookbooks that enlighten and educate with a conversational flair. Readers at all levels of cooking can enjoy her books!

    So I don’t usually toot my own horn here on the blog, but I did want to post this up because it lends itself well to prepping and how to cook during an emergency. While the recipes in the book are a bit fancier than you’re likely to make during a major emergency, the methods you’ll learn will be useful.

    If you can find clay, you can make pots. Once you have pots, you can cook. You can boil water to make sure it’s safe to drink. You can wash, shave, do dishes. The book doesn’t go into how one makes pots, but there are tons of amazing YouTube videos and articles on the subject that you can tap into.

            

  • The suspicion of an attack on Route 4 is growing: a fatally wounded person at one scene and a moderately wounded person at a second scene Amit Segal on Telegram, Google AI translation

    Five injured Amit Segal

    One of them died of his wounds Amit Segal

    Ben Gvir: The person who killed the terrorists was a citizen who received a weapon thanks to my reform. Amit Segal

    Ben-Gvir has advocated for increased private gun ownership, significantly relaxing the country’s traditionally stringent gun control laws and easing the rules of engagement for police officers. Last August, Ben-Gvir publicly commended an Israeli settler for fatally shooting a Palestinian teenager during a clash near the West Bank town of Burqa. After Oct. 7, Ben-Gvir called for a national campaign to give weapons to Israelis. His former cover photo on X, formerly Twitter, said in Hebrew, “Israel is arming!”
    —Israel’s Newly Lax Gun Laws Have Dangerous Consequences, (last visited Oct. 19, 2024)

    The title on the web page is now “Israeli Civilians Are Taking Up Arms”.

    The article is another anti-gun screed by the normal people, decrying the number of deaths “caused” by guns.

    One of the things that Ben-Gvir’s new regulations have accomplished is that Israeli citizens are no longer disarmed after a self-defense shooting.

    While we in the US have backup guns for our backup guns, many people that own firearms in foreign countries consider themselves to be lucky to have just one. … the practice of requiring citizens involved in an attack to hand over their personal weapons for extended examination and investigation.—id.

    It seems like they are starting to come around to “it is a good idea for people to be armed”.

    To put this in some sort of perspective, Israel is smaller in area than New Hampshire. It is a little longer north-south and about the same east-west. There isn’t a place in New Hampshire that you can’t reach from the border within an hour of driving.

    The enemies of Israel surround it. There is no place more than an hour from the border with hostiles.

            

  • There are lots of different types of shelter that we have access to. As with most things “prepper” related, everyone has a couple of opinions, and many of them clash. Basically, the idea is that you should have access to some kind of shelter in the first three hours of an emergency. It’s a good target to aim for, but it requires a lot of forethought and/or skill to pull it off.

    The first kind of shelter that most of us have is our home. If you can stay at home, you probably should. Your home has all your food, your beds, your comfort items, and you know it. If you’re the type of person who’s been prepping a while, you probably have a plan in place for how to keep your home safe from raiders or marauders, and so that makes it one of the safest places you can be. A roof with four walls and a stout door really does trump most other types of shelter.

    What if your home isn’t available, though? Whether it’s because you’ve been caught out when the emergency occurred, or a flash flood has washed away your home, or a tornado has ripped it into shreds, or any other reason, home is no longer safe. Your next easiest (and possibly safest, in many cases) form of shelter is your vehicle. You can cover the windows for privacy, you can lock the doors, and it’s mobile so you can move it to a safer place if things get hairy wherever you are. Your car also has the ability to hump more goods than you can by yourself. Again, it’s a fairly warm place (at least in comparison with outside), the doors lock, and it’s yours. You can formulate a plan around your vehicle long before you ever need it.

    With your home and vehicle out of the picture, what else can you do? Well, that depends a lot on your strength, ingenuity, where you are, the time of year/weather/temperature, and lots of other things.

    (more…)

            

  • Indicators

    We took my daughter’s care up to have work done on it. The auto shop is a local business doing great work. While there, we got into a discussion with a young lady.

    She made the statement that she might be trading in her car sooner if the economy improves after the election. I.e., if Trump wins.

    We got to talking politics. She asked if we are seeing more Trump signs this election.

    This made me think about it. There are Trump signs in all the public places. As expected. There are a few more yard signs around, but still not many. It is as if people were worried about expressing their support for Trump. Go figure.

    What I have noticed is that there are fewer Kamala/Walz signs. About half as many as I would expect.

    Is this an indicator of how the election will go? I’m always unhappy when my state is shown as deep blue for the coming election. We were a red state. Then purple. Now dark blue.

    The Interview

    Ok, I didn’t watch it. I can’t stand to watch her talking, much less listen to her. X has been blowing up with just how badly she performed.

    What was mind-boggling was the number of posts claiming she did well. Now if only the media would take off the kid gloves and interview Trump as aggressively as they did Kamala.

    The ratio is beautiful. The question I had was, “why?” Why would they post something so ridiculous? Anybody who has half a brain knows that Trump is out there doing interviews, sometimes multiple interviews per day.

    We have all seen just how biased the media is against him. It was on full display during the presidential debate.

    The answer? In my opinion, the posts/tweets are not directed at The People. It is directed at the base.

    The democrat base has been conditioned to treat anything that comes from the right as lies. Even though Fox has never been a “Right” media source, they were much more balanced than the other media sources. Thus, the left considers everything that Fox does as tainted, lies, misinformation.

    That base is never going to watch the Fox interview of Kamala. What they will do is read these posts, have it confirmed by the rest of their bubble friends, and know that Kamala did a fantastic job in a hostile interview that got testy.

    Document Library

    I have copies of all of Gun Free Zone’s library. I will start putting them up. I’m also going to reach out to some of the other sites that have libraries to make copies to host here.

    I have a fairly complete set of FMs that I downloaded from someplace. They will go up as well.

    Technical Package

    According to Ian, Gun Jesus, one of the reasons it is difficult to manufacture modern versions of older firearms is that we have lost the technical package.

    If I understand it correctly, the Technical Package is the documents that give the directions on how to convert blueprints into actual objects.

    As an example, it can be faster to drill a series of holes and then mill out the metal between the holes than to just mill a pocket. Those decisions are important.

    Another example is documenting the order of operations. When machining an item, we need to determine the sequence that will be performed on the item. First op might be all the roughing operations. Second op would be the finishing operations. Third op would be the heat treat, and fourth op would be grinding to dimension.

    Here is a different, simple instruction. The drawing for the AR15 lower receiver calls for a 0.376 +/- 0.001 hole for the selector switch. The easiest method to do this is to drill a 23/64 (0.3593) hole and then ream it to 0.376.

    I do not believe I have ever seen a technical package for a firearm. I’d love to get one for the AR15/M4.

    Homeowner Laments

    Our house is one that “just grewed.” It was likely built as a summer cottage in the 40s. From there it was extended. Multiple times.

    I’ve been able to piece out some of that growth. My office was likely a porch at some point, or mud room for people coming into the house. The reloading room, off the office and dining room, used to be a kitchen or bathroom. It still has a small sink in it.

    The entrance to the basement was in the reloading room. At sometime in the past it was covered over. The stairs are still in the basement, leading up to a solid floor. Currently, the entrance to the basement is from the outside.

    After expansion, the house had one full bath, between the master bedroom and a secondary bedroom. That is properly positioned for the water supply to the house and the sewage connection. The “new” kitchen is at the other end of the “old” part of the house. It was a separate extension.

    The water from the kitchen sink used to go into a copper pipe that slanted across the width of the house and then down the length of the house to tie into the sewer line.

    When they extended the house the last time, they added a second bathroom. This was at the opposite end of the house from the sewer connection. There was no way to get the waste from the second bathroom to the sewer connection by gravity alone.

    This is not a problem. You use a sewage sump/ejector. This is a sealed tub that collects waste until the float valve turns on the ejector pump. The ejector pump then shoots the waste up the exhaust pipe to the ceiling of the basement where it can then travel, via gravity, to the sewer connection. All good.

    We had an issue where the pooper shooter stopped shooting poop. This required my son and I to go through each clean out to make sure that nothing was stopping up the flow.

    Nasty, yucky work. Finally, it required the plumber to come fix the pooper shooter proper. The issue? Grease from the kitchen sink had formed a dam at the bottom of the pooper shooter, keeping the pump from working.

    So why is this an issue? Ever since that fix, we’ve had an off and on problem with horrible smells.

    Today, I think I located the source.

    One of those clean out plugs isn’t fully sealing. My fun for the weekend is to make sure that nobody flushes while I take the plug out, clean the threads, then replace the plug with sealer to keep the smell in the pipes.

    Every so often, I wish I were a renter, again.

    Question For You

    If you were forced to travel in a hurry, to escape the zombie’s (democrat city dwellers) and were limited to one handgun and one rifle, what calibers would you choose?

    I would love to have a carbine in .45 ACP. I don’t, so that puts the PC 9 and Glock right up there. On the other hand, I might take the Winchester Model ’94 in 30-30 with a 1911. Good stopping power without the scare factor.

    The CETME in 7.62×51 sounds nice, but I’m not sure. M1 in 30-06?

    Please let us know in the comments.

            

  • I started my computer career with the command line, or as it is known today, the CLI.

    Almost everything I do is done via CLI.

    I’ve had clients that had hosts in China, Ukraine, and London. They all look the same to me because they are just another window next to the other windows on my desktop.

    When programming, my hands seldom leave the keyboard. I don’t need to use the mouse to program. It is mostly done with control key sequences.

    When I need to configure something, I use a text editor and edit the configuration file. If the configuration file is JSON, I use JSON CLI tools to manipulate the file. Everything is done via the command line.

    Even this post is done from “the command line.” I am typing raw HTML into a simple text editor. So an aside is written as:

    <div class="aside">This is the aside</div>

    Which renders as

    This is the aside

    The editor also has a visual editor. What we call a “What You See Is What You Get” or WYSIWYG.

    In the WYSIWYG, you type, and it is formatted close to what it will look like when presented in a web browser.

    You have likely used a word processor like Microsoft Word, Apple’s old Mac Write, or the modern LibreOffice. If you’ve used Google Docs, you have used the online version of LibreOffice.

    The idea is that you can look at what you type in these WYSIWYG editors and that is what it will look like when printed.

    We have another term for Graphical User Interfaces, WYSIAYG, or What You See Is All You Get.

    What do I mean by that? Well, if you have a GUI that performs configuration options, then only the options that are implemented in the GUI are available to you through the GUI.

    The new level 3 managed switch has a web GUI. It is rather nice. You can see the status of each port. There are pleasant drop-downs to give you choices.

    One of the issues I needed to deal with was to get DHCP running on it, rather than the old DHCP server.

    After fumble fingering my way through the interface, I had a working configuration.

    The other day, I wanted to set up network booting. I am installing Linux on so many machines, both virtual and bare-metal, that I wanted a simple method to use. Network booting seemed like the answer.

    This requires setting the “next-server” and “bootfile” options in the DHCP configuration file.

    There is NO place in the web GUI to do so. It is available through the CLI. Undocumented, of course.

    WYSIAYG. I muddled through, I got it working. I can now do a network install anytime I want. And I can provide multiple options.

    Which leads me to the root cause of this rant.

    They are now building CLI tools that require CLI tools to configure them. And the CLI tools that do the configuration are not well documented because you should use the CLI management tool!

    I needed to install incus on a system to configure a working OVN network! I am so frustrated right now that I could scream.

            

  • So there I was, happily standing slightly left of middle, when people around me started doing weird stuff. First, it was making statements that bothered me. Stuff like calling me a TERF (trans exclusionary radical feminist), which is so far from the mark as to be almost funny. I was told that I don’t understand what it’s like to be LGBTetc. I just can’t possibly get it because I’m so normal.

    Folks, these things were coming from people who’ve known me in real life, face to face, for about a decade. They know I’m pansexual (ie bisexual but really I don’t care what you stash in your slacks). They know I’m pagan. They know I’m poly. They know I’m kinky. They know I’ve had lovers of many types (men, women, and people who don’t really fit comfortably into either of the first two categories). They know I come from Hungarian stock (ie Magyar, a group who were and sometimes still are persecuted) on one side, and Scottish (a group historically persecuted) on the other. If you want to get down to brass tacks, I’m a charter member of some of those alphabet soup groups. I’m old enough that I remember when the kink community was still ruled largely by the gay men and their families.

    I’m also apparently sexist, homophobic, and racist.

    All of this is said of me because I decided to comment (sometimes face to face, and sometimes online) about things going on in the world. Stuff like how I don’t think you should force the word “cis” on someone, just like you (that particular group) don’t want various pronouns forced on you. Somehow, it’s always “just not the same.” And so I’m a traitor to my race, to my gender, to my country.

    What? (more…)

            

  • On desktops, the right side panel has a new item, navigation links. The first link is to the M4A1 design documents. These are the blueprints for the M4A1. As far as I can tell, they are a complete package.

    These do not include tooling or how to documents, they are just the blueprints.

    These prints are to pretty modern standards, but easy enough to read.

    One fun thing I noticed was that they will often call out positions based on changing datum. A common datum is to consider the center of the front takedown pin to be 0,0. They do seem to use that as a starting point, but the trigger, selector and auto-seer holes are relative to the hammer pin hole.

    This is because the relationship between those holes is critical, while their placement relative to the take-down bin is not.

    For those on small screens, where the right-hand column is missing, scroll to the bottom of the page, you will find the link there.

    M4A1 Design Documents

            

  • I know not everyone on here does TikTok, for a variety of reasons, and I respect that. However, I’m trying to widen the readership of our blog, and TikTok is fairly “happening” these days. Also, I like it.

    So… if you want to see me talking, and get a feel for who I actually am, feel free to follow along.

     

    @vine.of.liberty Welcome to the Vine of Liberty vlog! Here, you’ll get a weekly Wednesday overview of the blog, and occasional videos about news and topics of interest. Come visit us at vineofliberty.com #vineofliberty #politics ♬ original sound – The Vine of Liberty

            

  • And the original, which I like better. I’m the guy that can listen to the same singer singing the same song and hear that they are different. And it drives me bonkers. So the original is the only version that I actually like.

    This is part of my SSS series.

    And for our friends in the Carolina’s