She said: ‘I want everyone to know how badly some people [aboard the sinking cruise liner Costa Concordia] behaved. It was a nightmare. I lost my daughter and my grandchildren in the chaos.

I was standing by the lifeboats and men, big men, were banging into me and knocking the girls. It was awful. There was a total lack of organisation. There was no one telling people where to go.

And when we finally got into a lifeboat, people, grown men, were trying to jump into the boat. I thought, if they land in here we are going to capsize.

[...]

‘We fled with only the clothes we were standing in and my poor wife lost her shoes. We’ve lost our passports, £500 cash and my credit cards, which were all in the ship’s safe.’ Mr Rodford said the officers were no help. ‘The people who served us our dinner were the people who helped us get on the lifeboats and were manning the lifeboats. I didn’t see captains’ jackets and things like that. It was the staff who had served us dinner.

Given my Navy history, I could probably annihilate thousands of innocent bytes explaining just how the spineless scum masquerading as "officers" onboard that particular cruise ship completely and totally failed their crew and passengers (and said failure started long before the puddle of piss sporting captain’s bars pulled the "Screw y’all, I’m outta’ here" maneuver), but to save my keyboard from "death by pounding", I am going to go a different direction today. However, do keep in mind that no one I am quoting is trying to excuse, mitigate, or rationalize that failure of the captain and his crew, and neither am I.

On the one hand, consider this:

This was not so much predictable as predicted. Women have methodically attacked the concept of male duty and honor through every possible means for the past ninety years, and now they are whining that they don’t get special treatment simply because a ship happens to be sinking. Why, exactly, should any man "prioritise women, expectant mothers and children"? On what grounds can they be reasonably expected to do so, those outdated traditional grounds that the schools teach is hateful, sexist, and bigoted?

Those big, burly crewmen shoving aside women as they prioritized their own escape should have been wearing t-shirts that said "this is what a feminist looks like". Enjoy the crash.

"Feminists" have been demanding "equality" for decades now, and imposing it by governmental, bureaucratic, or policy fiat wherever and whenever they can. In a world where "equality" reigns supreme, "women and children first" is a completely meaningless, semantically null concept, at least when it comes to the women. Whoops. (I, personally, make something of an exception for children, given their marked inequality with adults, but, then, I would be pushing women into a lifeboat before me anywise.)

And just to tie this back to being a gunblog, this is the world the "gun control" extremists would force upon us – one where the larger and stronger gets what the larger and stronger wants because they are larger and stronger, while the smaller and weaker are lucky to survive… if they survive at all. On the other hand, by allowing a 120-pound-soaking-wet woman to authoritatively and finally decline the undesired proposal of sexual activities offered by a 300-pound ex-convict, a firearm ensures the thin veneer of ‘civilization’ remains intact and prevents the creation of another victim.

On the other hand, consider this:

And I mean that. For two generations, Europeans have been coddled by their governments – asked to do ever less (other than support their Ruling Elite) while the Governments do ever more. We saw the result of that, in the icy waters of the Mediterranean, as society went feral and it was sauve qui peut.

Again, from my Naval background, and my generally inquisitive nature, I know how to deploy most forms of lifeboats – do you? Would you learn how to before/after boarding a vessel? Would you even know where the boats/rafts were located? Think more generally… do you know how to handle alfa, bravo, or charlie fires? What about deltas? Do you know what those are? Think even more broadly… how long could you and your family deal with a loss of power in your house without outside assistance? Water? Internet?

Odds are, most of my readers are probably capable of handling those kinds of scenarios… but what about your neighbors? What about the "average" American, much less the average human?

We have successfully created an entire population of people who are entirely dependent upon other people for pretty much everything, up to and including direction in their lives. When faced with an emergency situation, do you think they will immediately spring into action with a well-formulated plan in hand, or do you think they will stand around, waiting for directions, and blaming someone else for not "saving them"? Yeah. Me too.

And on the gripping hand, I will leave you with this: your life is your responsibility, and your responsibility alone, unless another of-age adult voluntarily accepts responsibility for it. The captain of a ship does exactly that – accepts responsibility for his crew and any passengers onboard – every time he orders his sailors to cast off, and the captain and officers of this cruise liner disastrously failed in their responsibilities, orders, and obligations. However, that failure does not absolve you of your eternal responsibility for your own life, and the cold reality that when the chips are down, the odds are very good that no one is going to save you but you.

Me, I am going to take the steps I see as necessary to improve my chances at success. How about you?

Surprisingly, they are not the only folks to come up with such an ironclad scheme. 

Some time ago, I got an offer to join the GunUp network, with the following promise: 

GunUp.com is sending 10 of its Gun Blog Network members to next years SHOT show. Basically, you just put the badge on your site, and then they link you, and feature your posts from time to time. It has been great for my traffic.

(Emphasis added.) 

Unfortunately, Mr. Completely (who is an awesome individual, and is the driving force behind the Gunblogger Rendezvous) reports it was not quite that simple: 

Much earlier this year one of my sponsors said they were going to send some gun bloggers to the SHOT Show. I was told that I’d be one of the ones to go, for sure. Unfortunately, that sponsor wasn’t able to afford to send any bloggers to the show after all.

Huh.  No one saw that coming. 

Well, it is good to see that Mr. Timberlake is also an outstanding human being:

I’m writing this out to all of you after attending an event that turned out to be one of the most moving evenings I’ve ever had…

I had the honor and privilege last night of attending The Basic School Instructor Battalion 236th Marine Corps Birthday Ball at the Greater Richmond Convention Center with Corporal Kelsey DeSantis…

I knew I would have an evening that I wouldn’t forget… Something I could tell my friends about. What I didn’t know was how moved I would be by the whole experience.

Please, take the five minutes of your time to go over and read the article – as far as I can determine, Justin wrote it himself, and seemed to mean every single last word of it.

Personally, I have never bought into the hero-worship we bestow upon people who are really, really good at repeating words someone else wrote in just the “right” way – like any other person tremendously skilled in their respective trade, they deserve some degree of recognition, to be certain, but the whole paparazzi / know everything about them / hang off their every word craze? Give me a break. However, it is an undeniable fact that actors’ time is worth money – lots of money, in Justin’s case – and he certainly did not have to donate his time and effort to show up to the Marine Corps Ball and then write about it. Furthermore, he did not have to encourage his fans, followers, and borderline-worshipers to take note of the real heroes quietly serving in our midst and overseas.

But he did. And, in my books, that makes him awesome. Thanks for taking that time to support our Armed Forces, Justin; I certainly appreciate it.

Oh, and Corporal Kelsey DeSantis? Bravo Zulu on a successful operation.

(Courtesy of Everyday, No Days Off.)

So the experience? We were talking about my short time serving in the US Navy, and, to a man, enlisted and officer alike, retired and separated alike, every single one of them agreed that getting out when I did was the correct course of action. Even with the economy as bad as it is, even with the side benefits of being employed by Uncle Sam, even with “Navy” effectively being their lives, both in uniform and out, they agreed that “four years and out” was the right way to go.

At the time, I was fairly stunned that these men, who have collectively served more years in uniform than my father has been alive, and possibly even my mother too, would say such a thing… but today I read this, and I am not so surprised:

You could practically set a clock by it. Navy and Marine Corps overseas deployments lasted six months.

But 9/11 changed all that — as did the greater flexibility called for in the 2003 Fleet Response Plan and a 2007 policy change that set the maximum deployment length at seven months for units with a single deployment within an FRP cycle.

A total of 10 carrier strike groups or amphibious ready groups have exceeded seven months over the past five years. The latest is the amphibious assault ship Bataan, the amphibious transport dock ship Mesa Verde and the dock landing ship Whidbey Island, which will have been gone 10½ months when their ARG returns to Norfolk in February, officials have confirmed.

My first deployment was something of an exception – we went out for four months, came back for a month of solid in-port time, and then went out for another three. I cannot recall exactly why this was the case (I believe it was due to repairs), but we were on a “counter-narco-terrorism” deployment (do not even get me started on the lessons I learned from that), so it was something of a special case to start with.

My second deployment ran from 05NOV07 to 03JUN08 – seven months exactly. It was officially, originally scheduled for five months before we left port, but, as we all expected, within a week of getting underway, we were informed that our return to homeport date had not actually been set, and would be pending “mission requirements”. Then came the two week extension. Then the month. Then the extra two weeks for the fun of it. Some of it had to do with picking up the Marine Force Recon boys we dropped off on the way to the Gulf, but most of it was just the Navy being too light in ships that could get underway to send us home.

In both cases, I was informed by long-timers and other sailors on the waterfront that our deployment length was long compared to stuff a decade+ ago, but short compared to recent developments. And this does not even count workups (you can count on being “haze grey and underway” up to two months, in three-fourteen day stretches, before a deployment), hurricane sorties (the bane of my first ship, which resulted in me being underway more than at home for my first assignment, if I recall), or the standard “meeting the needs of the Navy” underway periods (two weeks for Fleet Week in Seattle, weeks for various Operations and Exercises and whatnot, two-week Afloat Terrorist Training Group visits, the nightmare that is INSURV, shakedowns after repair periods, etc. etc. etc.).

Is it any wonder why divorce rates for the military jumped from 2.6% in 2001 to 3.6% in 2010 (the national average is 3.4%)? And is it wonder why people who spent almost as long in the Navy as I have been alive were telling me that bailing was probably a good thing?

These days, I fear I would honestly be hard-pressed to recommend a career in the military to up-and-graduating high school students, and on some level that saddens me. There are no limits to the respect I have for those people who still do choose that path, and I support them fully, but the decisions made by those at the helm make me wonder where their priorities lie.

That is a sentence which – in various phrasings and rewordings – I have repeated at least twice a year for the past three years in my Graphics Matter series of posts. But, really, for the non-mathematicians amongst us (including myself), what does that actually mean?

Well, by way of the inimitable genius behind Dilbert, we have this example:

And today, by way of Bloomberg Businessweek, we have this representation:

Proving causality is, to put it very simply, a pain in the ass, and does not simply consist of "X happened, then Y happened, which means X caused Y". This is exactly why I do not claim any causality in my Graphics Matter series, and exactly why disproving the hypotheses of "guns cause deaths" and "guns cause crime" is so easy.

Remember that the lie may not be in explicitly what they say, but rather their underlying reasons for saying so – on the surface, the hypothesis that Dilbert was sending the link seemed valid, but the boss’ reasoning was fundamentally flawed. In his case, it was not a lie simply because he did not know any better, but in the case of those who would forcibly deprive us of our Constitutionally-protected individual rights, the same cannot be said.

(Dilbert strip brought to my attention by Barron Barnett – guess I need to read my "Funnies" RSS feeds before I read my serious ones… Second graphic courtesy of Say Uncle.)

Congratulations, Iain, and welcome home! I would say "welcome to the land of the free", but, these days, it seems I need to put a "more" modifier in there somewhere…

(On a related note, the perverse side of me cannot help but to notice how hard we make it for people like him to become citizens, but how easy we make it for illegal aliens to cross our borders and stay here on the government public dime…)

Instead, this particular will-o’-the-wisp was a pretty usual example of its supernatural species, but "cold, slimy, and squishy" never got attractive no matter the creature involved.

"Crap on a crutch, J.A., would ya look at the trail of slime that bastard’s leaving behind it?" Charles Dent always did have a way with words, but putting warheads on foreheads did not exactly require a certain tact.

Stretching from being cramped in the same position for the past night, James would have left it at nothing more than a nod, but then he remembered that Charles was another hundred yards down the shoreline, and keyed his mic, "Yeah, but that trail is pointing right at the killbox."

On account of their being scant more than a few steps up the evolutionary ladder from a supersized amoeba, will-o’-wisps were annoyingly difficult to kill – even the .308 rounds James’ M1A threw out, complete with their silver payload, barely would get the attention of the almost-amorphous blob shambling across the field; its body would just seal up over the new hole, and its vital organs were more distributed than the internet.

"Ayup, and then the fun starts!" James could see the childish grin plastered across Charles’ face even without actually being able to lay eyes on the man. You really could not work for MHI without being entertained by, or at least having a healthy respect for, high explosives.

And that form of back-country entertainment was about the only way to adequately take care of will-o’-wisps. Since their bodies were so uncaring about small, high-velocity shards of metal, one had to change tactics, and just go for massive explosive compression, coupled with a dose of gratuitous incendiaries, just to be sure. James and his team had been staking out the old, "abandoned" community of Calderwood, TN for the past week, getting a lay of the land and watching the hunting habits of their current target enough to know where it set up shop every morning. This time around, it would be greeted with a small flotilla of flashbangs strategically floating on concealed milk jugs out on Chilhowee Lake, a few more gasoline-laden milk jugs with strapped-on detonators, an overkillishly-large number of shaped C4 charges sitting on the shoreline, and, just in case, James’ favorite – two claymore mines. "Kill it with fire," has been a long-standing tradition at MHI.

Speaking with the only clearly-understood voice of the party, Amy McMillan piped up with, "Now, boys, don’t you go getting ahead of yourselves… My mother’s going to kill me when I tell her I lost her cast iron cooking set as it is, I don’t want it to be a complete waste."

"Real" shaped or directional charges required specially-crafted, specifically-engineered metal domes, cylinders, and whatnot else to put the maximum amount of hurt on the smallest amount of area. "Budget" shaped charges took cast iron cookware, an even stronger constitution, and more than a little creativity, the latter two of which Amy had in abundance. Her mother unknowingly provided the former.

"Yah, yah, yah, we know. ‘No boom ’til the blob is in the box.’ J.A. only went over that… how many times now?"

Charles’ voice was just as staticky and muffled as James knew his was over the communications net, no thanks to the breather masks and goggles they had to wear this morning. Will-o’-wisps were almost pathetically ungainly creatures, so to get their prey to their overly large and massively-toothed mouths, they had to get evolutionarily creative – the "mist" one always sees in their haunts is instead an aerosolized, mildly psychedelic compound that has much the same reaction on mammalian nervous systems as date-rape drugs. Likewise, those mystical, randomly floating "lights" are actually phosphorescent tentacles/appendages that the wisps seemed to keep aloft by some careful combination of blisters of methane gas coupled with some form of natural, low-level magic. The end result is that creatures great and small get fixated on the pretty lights and follow them to their toothy demise, with the solution being this ungainly facemask that, when coupled with night vision headset, makes the wearer resemble Sand People from Tatooine.

"And speaking of the box, it looks like our guest is about there. At least if that blob is the same blob I was watching a few seconds ago… Bloody natural camouflage…"

Really, Tennessee is so far outside of the natural haunts of will-o’-wisps that James initially had a hard time convincing the Monster Control Bureau to give up the appropriate PUFF payment, but this particular infestation comes courtesy of the Patron State of Shooting Stuff’s sordid governmental and corporate history. Typically wisps stick to marshes and swamps where their drugged mists blend in with the natural environments and do not spook their intended dinners, but courtesy of the Aluminum Company of America’s and Tennessee Valley Authority’s aggressive dam-building over the past half-century, all of the lakes in the state are remarkably calm, and brew up a storm of fog every morning… Which leads to three wet, bedraggled, and smelly adults skulking around the forest like kids playing "army".

"Uh, boss, we’ve got a problem." James knew from experience that "problems" for monster hunters ranged from "oh, look, a spider" to "oh, look, my leg isn’t attached", but Amy’s voice was remarkably calm, "It looks like we might have a few uninvited guests showing up for the party. Fishing boat, inbound, about a mile out. Three or four occupants."

One of the other side effects of dropping so many dams all over the state was that boating and fishing rapidly turned into the state’s primary form of recreation. James was hoping that the steady drizzle would convince people to stay warm in their homes, but he was all-too-familiar with the damned-near religious fervor that surrounded drowning worms in a lake, and Chilhowee Lake was one of the favorite holes.

Charles was not one to pass up on the chance to blow up something, but he knew the dangers of getting civilians involved. "Ya still wanna do this, James? We know where th’ bastard sleeps, and we can sort this later…"

The problem was that the town of Calderwood was not so much "abandoned" as "evacuated". No one knows how the first wisp got into the Little Tennessee River, but once there, they propagated like rabbits, preying on deer, ducks, fish, and the occasional, unfortunate ALCOA worker. The situation was mostly balanced with the wisps occasionally picking off a lone dam worker, and the Alcoa engineers responding by the careful application of dynamite (for "expansion work on the dams", of course), until about 1962, when there was an absolutely unprecedented "bloom" in the will-o’-wisp population, to the point where they started overrunning the small towns and settlements that had sprung up around the dams. The death toll started getting attention from local governments, the local Monster Hunter International branch was called in, the settlements, including Calderwood, were evacuated, and now James and his team, in addition to their responsibilities in the Smoky Mountains and certain glow-in-the-dark towns, have a standing contract with ALCOA to exterminate any wisp that comes near any of the dams on the lakes and rivers. The PUFF bounty is just icing on the cake.

"No, we take this slimer now – I sure as hell do not want some fishermen calling up the MCB because we goofed, or, worse, turning into this thing’s next snack." Ignoring Amy’s muttered comment of, "You sure you got that priority scale set right?" James waited until the will-o’-wisp made it past the first marker tuft of grass, checked the area to make sure no bystanders had wandered in, made a silent prayer to the gods of high explosives, and pushed the first clacker in front of him. The explosions were not that large, but the billowing ball of fire over them, and the half-circle sprays of burning gasoline was more than enough to elicit a respectful, "Oooh," out of Charles… Of course, the shrieking emanating from that light show pretty much drowned out his commentary.

The good news is that apparently human ears were not engineered to catch the full vocal range of will-o’-wisps. The bad news was that what they could pick up would put "nails on a chalkboard" to shame. All of the wisp’s tentacles – five, indicating it had been here a while – were out and flailing about (and periodically exploding as the methane blisters caught fire) while the creature sprinted… well… shambled towards the waterline in a desperate attempt to extinguish the flames that had all-but consumed it. James was not a particularly vicious individual, but he knew that if it made the water it would probably survive, so right before the wisp could place a flaccid appendage in the cool lake, he triggered the line of flashbangs.

On slightly more solid organisms, the general effect of stun grenades detonated in close proximity is blindness, short-term deafness, and disorientation. On the other hand, will-o’-wisps kind of react like the fluid in your ears does – SQUISH. Bits of floppy, flaming, fantastical flesh went flying all over the shoreline as the supernatural creature, finally inarticulate with pain, collapsed backwards away from the new hell it was presented with. Checking one more time that the range was clear, James pushed the final, and oldest-looking, clacker laying in front of him… about at the same time as the boaters cruised around the bend about half a mile away.

While they probably did not appreciate it at the time, the sight of some hundreds of 1/8 inch diameter steel balls impacting a flaming, phosphorescent creature at over half-a-mile-a-second was something that would probably remain with the fishermen for the rest of their lives. Most of the mines’ steel matrix missed the will-o’-wisp and burned themselves out into the lake, but those that struck home splattered the creature all over the grassy field, shoreline, and water, extinguishing its murderous existence. In an amusingly karmic turn of events, though, ending the will-o’-wisps life now threatened to catch that patch of Calderweood on fire. Calmly – but fluently – swearing as only an Appalachian can do, Charles slung his KRISS, grabbed the fire extinguisher James had forced him to lug around this little exercise, and took off for the killbox while his team boss removed his facemask and goggles to greet the unfortunate witnesses before heading down to render assistance.

James arrived, Charles got the fires out, and the wide-eyed onlookers disembarked about 50 feet down the beach in a jumbled mass all at about the same time, so putting on his best "shake the babies and kiss the hands" face, James gave them a hearty wave and yelled over, "Nothin’ to see folks, just tending to some errant wildlife." Of course, saying that while standing in a puddle of still phosphorescing, smoldering will-o’-wisp splatter was not as effective as he had liked… And the smell…

"You folks alright?!" shouted the older of the fishermen as they headed towards the slaughter… and then stopped once the growing glow of the day made the hardware James and Charles had slung across the backs and chests a little more obvious. The youngest occupant of the boat – no more than a teenager – grew some pretty wide eyes at that point.

Dent looked like he was about to hack up a lung, and James had to agree the odor was a bit much, but the answer was obvious, "Oh, yes sir, we’re fine, but y’all probably shouldn’t come any closer… Cleaning up a bit of a mess here."

Eyeing up the spray of faintly-luminous monster bits around the field, the middle fisherman looked more and more like he wanted to dive back into the boat. "No kidding… That stuff’s glowing. It radioactive?"

"Oh for the love of…" Working in Eastern Tennessee, you always got that question when it came to monsters, and with the area’s 60+ years of being a nuclear weapon and power test and construction facility, it is hardly surprising. Even after over a hundred years of monster hunting, MHI has yet to find one that has a Godzilla-like radioactive-birth history, but that did not stop James from ad libbing, from frustration alone. "You know what, yes, yes it is radioactive, and that’s why you should stay away. In fact, you probably shouldn’t mention this, to anyone, or someone is going to have to take you in for observation and Lord knows what else." Knowing the Monster Control Bureau’s track record, that part was not as much of a lie as James might have liked. "Y’all just head on down the lake, and forget this ever happened."

A whole herd of will-o’-wisps could not have kept the younger two fishermen from their boat as they broke personal speed records towards it, but the old-timer stuck around with a funny look in his eyes. "You sure you know what you’re doin’, son?"

James walked over to him, and, holding out a business card with a circular logo, a very private phone number, and the motto, "In God we trust, all others we nuke," emblazoned upon it, he said, "It’s what we do, sir."

A few hours later, after scraping together enough still-steaming pieces to qualify for a PUFF bounty and dumping the rest in the lake, the team was heading up to the nearby ALCOA service buildings to settle up accounts and Amy quipped, "Well, that wasn’t so bad, boss. With all those stories out of Ireland and whatever we had to read back in ‘Bama, I kinda expected more out of these ‘wisp’ things. It’s not like they’re dragons or anything…"

Casting a wry eye up to their road out of here – the inimitable US Route 129 – James had a funny smile on his face. "Let me tell you a story…"

This pathetic attempt at a "fanfic" takes place in the universe conceived by Larry Correia and described in Monster Hunter International, Monster Hunter Vendetta, and Monster Hunter Alpha. All appropriate copyrights remain his, and no infringement is intended.

Likewise, this post was originally intended to be put up before the end of the Monster Hunter International Patch Contest II, but I was accurately informed of its … substandard … quality, and back-burnered it. However, Miguel’s post about my E TN MHI patches prompted me to take it out of cryogenic storage. Your loss.

Speaking of patches, though, out of the original batch of 50, I am down to somewhere around 20 unclaimed – if you want one, you need to email me at "linoge (at) wallsofthecity (dot) net" in the very near future. By way of encouragement, they seem to be being received remarkably well, with folks saying such things as, "It’s more awesome in person,", "Look great and are bigger than I thought they’d be," and "Look great, definitely going on my range bag." (They are 3" in diameter, by the by.)

(Image borrowed from Tail of the Dragon.)

And now I give her credit for saying that which we all know, but none of us are willing to admit:

The reason for my decision to pull the plug was excruciatingly simple: I could no longer tell my clients that their monies and positions were safe in the futures and options markets – because they are not. And this goes not just for my clients, but for every futures and options account in the United States. The entire system has been utterly destroyed by the MF Global collapse. Given this sad reality, I could not in good conscience take one more step as a commodity broker, soliciting trades that I knew were unsafe or holding funds that I knew to be in jeopardy.

(Emphasis in the original.)

Go ahead and read the whole thing – it is depressing as hell, it will not at all give you a warm fuzzy, but you really need to read it all the same.

Thanks to no shortage of reasons, our current economic situation is simply unsustainable – at this point, the question is not “if” the system will fail, but “when” and “how”. Thanks to our employer deciding to cancel 401k-matching for all employees in the name of “cutting costs”, Better Half and I are faced with trying to find somewhere else to put that money, and given the markets, we are at a complete loss. “Bullets, beans, and band-aids” are one answer, but they may not necessarily be the right answer, and even my admittedly-short dabbling with precious metals has not convinced me of their large-scale, long-term functionality as an “investment”. Real estate is always an option, but it is not like that market is particularly stable either at the moment. I wish we could pull chocks and drop out of the world for a few years, but it is not like that is particularly viable either.

No wonder the Chinese considered “may you live in interesting times” to be a curse.

(Courtesy of Traction Control.)

Want one?  Drop me an email at “linoge (at) wallsofthecity (dot) net” or leave a comment here with an email address I can reach you at. 

December is for Trans-Siberian Orchestra.

No substitutions will be accepted.

That is all.

I have to admit, it is kind of cool to see an idea come to fruition. 

As a reminder, go here and vote for the above patch by leaving a comment including either the words “Eastern Tennessee Monster Hunters” or “In God we trust, all others we nuke”; if you do, and you are interested, we will work out how to hook you up with an example or two of the above awesomeness*. 

Also, if you have not read any of Larry Correia’s awesome Monster Hunter International books, get to it! 

(* – ‘Course, if you just want one, we can probably work something out too…)

Yup, I went and submitted it again.

Go forth and make your votes here (though I am fair certain the winner is already a given) – the patch that emerges victorious gets included in Larry Correia’s next Monster Hunter International book.

If it will help your decision process any, I should have a few of these in the coming few weeks/months:

Just sayin’.

Strongly DISrecommended: M&A Parts, Inc. I would wholeheartedly advise against purchasing any product actually manufactured by this company – if they are reselling it, that is probably fine, but if their name is on it, please steer away. Over two years ago, I was trying to finish my AR-15 build in the height of the "evil black rifle" rush, and I had to settle for purchasing one of their AR-15 lower parts kits through Brownells. In that time, I am somewhat ashamed to admit that I have only put somewhere between 500 and 1000 rounds downrange through that rifle. Last week, while visiting my parents, the disconnector from that kit failed in a predictable fashion, and rendered the firearm effectively inoperable and unsafe. Al was able to go in there and get it back to a functioning state, but he mentioned that he started the process with the cheapest (softest) of his files, and even that was able to do all the work he needed to, indicating that the metal M&A used for their disconnectors was substandard at best.

This is all after M&A’s pivot pin detent and spring were incorrectly sized and nearly completely incompatible with my COTS DPMS lower. (I did contact them regarding this problem, and while I cannot find their actual response, it basically boiled down to, "We do not care.")

Spend a bit more money and buy AR-15 parts from a known, reputable source.

Speaking of, does anyone have any recommendations for AR-15 triggers? It seems as though I might as well go ahead and upgrade the whole system, since pretty much every damned other part is suspect at this point…

Strongly Recommended: Brownells. I think I am just going to quote from their site:

If you aren’t completely, 100% satisfied with any purchase you receive from Brownells, for any reason, at any time, return it for a full refund or exchange. No hassle, no problem. And, we won’t bog you down in endless paperwork. Your complete satisfaction with each and every product we sell is what’s most important to us.

… and then expand on it by saying that you do not even need to send back the entire purchase. Some of my readers may not be aware of this, but lower parts kits more-or-less "become one" with AR-15 lowers once you install them – oh, sure, the parts are all still individual parts in there, but digging out all of the various detents, springs, and whatnot else can be a… non-trivial task for us non-gunsmith types. So I called up Brownells and asked how I would go about making the return if I could only send them some of the parts. Their response? "Fill out the paperwork, provide an explanation, and send us what you can."

You cannot pay for service like that any more.

(It is worth noting that Brownells no longer carries M&A Parts’ lower parts kit. Not "out of stock", not "back ordered", just not listed at all on their site. This is my surprised face.)

Strongly Recommended: Mountain Home Lodge. It is a bit pricey (at least for us, but, impressively, not all that expensive compared to the Best Western in "downtown" Leavenworth), and it is not exactly on the beaten path, but if you get out there and can afford it, it is totally worth it. As my parents (who have been there six times now) say, it is a bit difficult to describe the experience, but between the setting, the staff, and the food (you should try to eat there at least once if you are staying), it is well worth trying to figure out how to explain it yourself.

Recommended: The Hat Shop of Leavenworth. While their stock understandably tends towards the comedic, gag-ish, and costume-y, they also happened to have a positively outstanding bowler that apparently fits me quite well and is well on its way to becoming part of my daily attire (despite not being terribly cunning.).

Recommended: Pasek Cellars and Willow Crest Winery. My parents are really into wine, and, unsurprisingly, the Leavenworth area of Washington is pretty much the primary "wine country" of that otherwise wet and dreary state. Over the course of our long weekend spent there, we hit up somewhere in the neighborhood of six or seven different wineries, and these are the only two that Better Half and I were willing to consider trying to mail-order from; though, unfortunately, it appears as though Tennessee’s only slightly-less idiotic alcohol shipment laws have convinced them to steer clear of our market for the time being (and with a $300 upfront license with $150 yearly renewals, I can hardly blame them). If you are in one of the areas they service, though, do look them up – their price-to-quality point is pretty much awesome.

Recommended: It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere Distillery. Unfortunately, this place will likely never be able to ship to my door, but, wow, he makes some good stuff. "Craft" distilleries are something relatively new to the American market given the arcane and byzantine laws surrounding them (yay for the government artificially limiting jobs and businesses in this time of depression recession!), but this man obviously loves that craft, and those laws are only matched by his enthusiasm. His moonshine was actually drinkable straight (which is not something I can say about even Tennessee ‘shine), and I have to admit (grudgingly) that even his Rhubarb Liquor was surprisingly tasty.

Answer: You get a $36,000 2012 white Jeep Wrangler Limited with three white fenders… and one black one.

It’s one thing to overlook mismatched fenders on a Jeep Wrangler when one side has unpainted plastic black and the other is glossy painted black. But how do you explain one with three white fenders and one black plastic one? Jeez. Did we really pay good government money for this company?

Yes, yes you did, along with every other tax-paying American citizen.

At any rate, this is me, sitting here, speechless at the reality that somewhere along the line between that vehicle leaving the factory floor and being listed on eBay, no one noticed that one of its larger pieces is not like the other three. Sure, maybe it did not happen at the factory. Maybe it was not that way when the dealership accepted it. But, seriously people, what kind of half-witted idiots are running "Hondru Dodge Chrysler/Jeep"? And assuming it did come from the factory in this multi-toned fashion, what kind of idiots are working there, and what else did they screw up?

I have long since decided that if I were to ever purchase another vehicle new-off-the-lot, the only American car manufacturer in the running would be Ford, but if these two Jeeps are indicative of the quality being produced by Chrysler and all of its various subsidiaries, I think I might just be safer buying an Yugo sight-unseen and trying to drive it home across the country.

Also, Jeep Wranglers come with cruise control now? WTF, mate?

But you already know that. 

I think the best comments for today came by way of Tam: 

Ten years after Pearl Harbor, we had reduced Japan to a glowing pile of radioactive cinders and then rebuilt it and were buying cheap Japanese consumer goods by the shipload. Ten years after New York City was attacked by foreign enemies, all I see as evidence around Indy are a maudlin memorial being erected downtown, TSA probulators and porn-O-scans at the airport, and the occasional young man with an empty sleeve or trouser leg.

Dude, where’s my country?

Honestly, I have no idea. 

(And if you do not like this post, you are more than welcome to browse my previous years’ posts on this day.) 

With that opinion expressed, it should come as no surprise that I will no longer be doing business with GameStop:

Video game retailer GameStop is under fire for opening boxes of the just-released PC game Deus Ex: Human Revolution and removing a coupon from the publisher that would have given buyers a free copy of the game’s online version.

[...]

But on Wednesday, the blog GameSpy posted a story saying it had received complaints from consumers claiming their new DXHR boxes were opened and the OnLive codes were missing.

The article also included a photo of an e-mail sent by GameStop management instructing employees to "immediately remove and discard" the coupon. GameStop — which also sells its own digital version of DXHR — views OnLive as a rival.

Look, I can kind of understand GameStop being pissy about Square Enix including a coupon to a competitor in a product they are selling – that does seem a bit odd, and I see no reason why a company should Trojan Horse itself. However, that dispute should have been settled by GameStop returning the still-unopened game cases to Square and requesting new ones that did not have the coupon bundled into them, not stealing from their customers.

And make no mistake – this was theft. Square Enix effectively included two games in that case, and GameStop, as directed by an apparently official memo, removed one of those games from the case without the knowledge or consent of their customers. Additionally, they sold an opened case as "new", but I see that as somewhat incidental to the whole "theft" thing.

So here is what I would do – given that this promotion was announced by Square Enix on Tuesday that all buyers of DXHR would be getting a code to OnLive’s version of the game, the "as advertised" product would include that code. If you purchased your copy from GameStop and it did not come with the code, try to return it and purchase it from a source that does not steal from you. If they do not accept the return (which they probably will not… GameStop’s return policy requires unopened packaging), call up your credit card company and dispute the charge, on the basis that the vendor sold you a product saying it was one thing, it turns out to be another thing, and they will not make the situation right. Be completely honest and explain that you expected the code to be in the packaging, and since it was not, you tried to return it, but they would not take it, yadda yadda yadda. Alternatively, put a hold on your check if you paid that way, though I am not sure how that works in the long run. If you paid by cash, you are pretty much screwed.

And if you are feeling really ballsy/gutsy, call the police – after all, the store stole from you, and they would call the cops on you if you walked out with a $50 game you did not pay for.

I do not buy new video games any more (cuts too much into the ammunition budget), but if you do, I would strongly recommend Amazon.com – at least they do not have a known history of breaking open game cases and stealing from their customers. If you live in the Knoxville area and buy used games, I would hit up Game Haven or McKay Used Books.

And, finally, my buying habits are nowhere near enough to make an impact on any company’s bottom lines, so feel free to spread this around if you are so inclined.

Criticize Our Glorious President, and you are obviously "racist".

Point out that our government is heading down a fiscally unviable path, and you will be labeled a "terrorist".

What do all of those examples have in common? People are attempting to silence you by means of social ostracization. Why? Because they disagree with what you have to say, and have no better argument to bring to bear against you than calling you names. Make sure you understand that point – you have a difference of opinion with some people, and rather than rationally consider the positions and present a reasoned argument, those people would rather force you into silence through societal pressure.

Force. Granted, force that is purely based on your willingness to accept the titles of "hate speech" or "racist" or "terrorist" and all of the social baggage that come with them, but force nonetheless.

And that blatant use of naked force makes those people exactly the same as the kinds of folks Michael Z. Williamson is talking about here:

Those particular Muslims need to get over it. This is the 21st Century, not the Dark Ages, and they need to accept that large numbers of us have no interest in or outright distaste for their god and prophet (may bees pee on him). People DO have the right to burn the US Flag, crap on their holy book (or any other holy book), call them names and otherwise express positions that are valid, invalid, well-considered or off the cuff.

So regardless of what anyone thinks of West’s statements, I believe they are necessary, and I endorse their presence, without comment on their content.

You have every right to be offended at whatever your little heart desires. Anything. Everything. Whatever. I do not care. I do not, however, have the right, nor should you have the ability, to force me to do anything on the basis of your irrational, emotional response to something I have said. You may not like what I have to say. You may not agree. You may not even listen. But you have no right to stop me from saying it (unless I am doing so on your property, or various other analogues). And I would not have it any other way.

This concept is probably why anti-rights cultists fear and hate us so much… Not only do we have the unmitigated gall to disagree with their authoritarian pipe-dreams, but we also have the willpower and the hardware necessary to keep them from forcibly silencing us. Which, when you get right down to it, was one of the primary reasons the Second Amendment was added to the United States Constitution.

Tonight, I get the impression we will be discussing, or at least touching on, the general-purpose notion of, "Don’t be a dick"*, and I likewise get the impression that my name was offered up for the sacrifice honor of participating due to my being the target of some of the dickery. Shiny. The bad news, at least for you, is that I have always been better at venting in writing than verbally – why do you think I do it so much here?

The good news is that we are going to have a lot to talk about. It would seem as though some self-absorbed egotists in the weblogging community would rather blame some great-and-nebulous "conspiracy" for their lack of traffic and inbound links, rather than admit to the plain truth – they suck, because they are dicks. *shrug* Much though I hate to admit it, weblogging is, for the most part, a popularity contest – you can be as "right" as anyone could ever possibly be, but if you come across as a jackass, no one is going to care. I know I suffer from that exact problem, and regularly at that – I am acerbic, sarcastic, stand-offish, blunt, honest, and way too direct for my own good… but, for the most part, I try not to be outright rude or aggressive unless I know the person I am addressing deserves it.

On the other hand, some people go out of their way to be dicks to everyone, and, surprisingly enough, societies have a tendency to shun those individuals. Wierd how that works.

Anywise, if you want to hear me stumble over my own tongue live on the cortex, log in to Gunblogger Conspiracy and tune in to VC at 2100… and bring lots of booze. I know I will.

Oh, and because it is so damned appropriate to the situation:

(And just for the sheer technogasm of it, I will be participating in an online radio broadcast by way of my desktop PC wirelessly connected to a bluetooth headset. In many ways, the future is today. But I still want my flying car.)

(* – Every time I hear that phrase, I cannot help but to think of this scene:

Indeed.)