Consistency

I've discovered what separates the good shooters from the mediocre shooters. (Or the really good from the pretty good, if you prefer.) It's not the ability to shoot well, 'cause you have to shoot well to shoot, say, a 350 on a light rifle target, the dividing line between marksman and sharpshooter. And it's not just the ability to shoot 10's. For example, last night during my club's light rifle competition, I managed to shoot two 10's on the last bull on a target. On each of those, I fully intended to make the shot a 10 because I needed to make those two 10's. I needed to pull what was looking to be a miserable 83-85 target up to a barely-acceptable 87.

Of course, what frustrates me is that, if I can pull out those 10's when I really need to, why can't I do it every time? Why am I not shooting 100's on every target? Why did I have to work so hard to pull that target up to an 87? And this brings me to the difference between the good and the mediocre: consistency. The good shooters can pull off those 10's far more consistently than I can. They're not dropping the occasional shot down into the 7 ring.

This statement becomes obvious at the extreme end of the scale. For a 400 target, every shot is a 10. The mean is 10, the median is 10, and the standard deviation is 0. This is perfect consistency.

But consider a score that's below perfection but still a very good score, a 380. Each target scores on average a 95, each bull a 19. For each 9 you shoot, you have to be able to pull out a 10 to stay on track. Dropping a shot into the 7 ring means that you need to shoot six 10's to bring yourself back up to where you need to be.[1] And given that you have ten shots on target, the dropped shot only leaves you nine shots from which to pull those six 10's.

Now go farther down to a 360. Each target scores, on average, a 90. For a shooter who otherwise shoots 9's, every 10 gives him leeway to shoot an 8. Two 10's can afford him to drop a shot into the 7 ring without harm. This shooter can likely shoot a 6 and still pull out a 360.

So all I need to do now to pull myself up from a 360 (my latest official score from our light rifle competition) to a 400 is learn how to shoot consistently.



1. Put another way, you'd need to bring three of your succeeding 9's up to 10's. But you already needed three 10's to match those 9's, which makes six. And that's assuming you dropped a 10 to a 7. If you'd dropped a 9 to a 7, that would mean two 9's to 10's.

Mothers-in-law and hoplophobia

So, my wife informs me that my mother-in-law now refuses to enter our house. She has yet to have the discussion with my wife that she's threatening to have, but that will come at some point.

I'm curious to know why she refuses to enter the house. The obvious assumption is that it's a safety issue, but I don't think that's it. I think it's purely a moral issue, that guns are bad. The irony here is that my mother-in-law is Jewish and very pro-Israel. (I'm not Jewish, but my wife is, and, by implicit agreement from long before we were ever married, so are my kids.) She has relatives living in Israel who, no doubt, have guns in their homes. She's visited them, and I assume that she was aware that there were guns there. But that's no doubt a different situation.

Even though she won't enter the house, she will still come to pick up the kids to take them for an overnight. I'm tempted to refuse to let my kids enter her house. As compared to a house that contains guns locked up in a safe, her house is a death trap. The stairs to the second floor alone are excessively dangerous: they're very steep, and I've slipped and fallen on them. Some grandchild of hers is likely to fall and break something on them at some point, if not worse.

But that would simply be escalation and unlikely to ameliorate the situation. I certainly wouldn't be doing anything to win her over to reason with that approach.

Unfortunately, she's unlikely to ever have a reasonable attitude with respect to guns. She's well-known for always being right, no matter what anyone else says. She has an absolute inability to see things from a different point of view.

Oh, well, I'm sure this isn't the end of things. I'm not ruling out cutting her off from the grand-kids. Moving elsewhere would probably be the most effective way to achieve that. Especially if it's someplace like Texas. Mmmmmmm, Texas.

Amazing shooting

Okay, so maybe it's not that amazing for other people, but this was pretty significant for me.

I went this afternoon to practice for my club's light rifle competition. I shot a 368, consisting of a 94, 93, 93, and an 88. I was disappointed that I dropped so low on the last target, 'cause after the third target I had visions of shooting a 370. I would have been astounded had I done so, but I'm still pretty excited that I managed to shoot a 368.

(As some measure of what this means, 368 is the lower limit for the Expert classification for light rifle standing. Given that I'm currently shooting Marksman, that would mean skipping Sharpshooter altogether. Assuming, of course, that I could shoot 368 or better consistently in competition, which I haven't done yet. But it is nice to see that I'm making significant progress.)

Tuesday night shooting

I shot pretty well in last night's light rifle match. Unofficially a 357 (88, 88, 89, 92.) I was a bit disappointed that I didn't break 360, but this is still the best I've done so far. And I'm convinced it was the cheap ammo I was using that was holding me back (last week I shot a 332 with the cheap stuff. I can't imagine I've changed 25 points' worth in a week, so it's got to be something else.)

Mothers-in-law and guns

Mother-in-law has discovered that I own guns. We've tried to keep this
from her, and we've been remarkably successful. But I think this was
mostly because the guns were kept in their cases (locked) up in my
office, and she never goes into that corner of the house. But she
happened to walk through the garage on Saturday morning and saw the
recently-installed gun safe.

As some background, my mother-in-law has very definite opinions about
certain things, mostly concerned with what people do and don't do. Or,
to be more specific, what decent people do and don't do. These
opinions are simply prejudices based on her experience growing up
in a middle-class neighborhood in Philadelphia surrounded by decent people.

As additional background, she doesn't always handle things in the most
mature of manners. For example, when a boy of the wrong religious
affiliation called my wife at home when she was in high school, her
mother sulked about it for weeks. As another example, when my
father-in-law bought a pool table some years ago, she was unhappy.
(Decent people don't even play pool, much less have a table in their
house.) She made him put it in a very cramped corner of the basement
where it was impossible to make a decent shot. She then proceeded to
move a freezer right next to the pool table, making it even harder to
use.

So I now wait to see what my punishment will be for having guns in the
same house as her grandchildren. This should be an interesting
experience, as I've not yet really been in the doghouse with her (even
after 10 years, and even though I don't have the correct religious affiliation.)

OTOH, this could be a good thing. I wouldn't mind moving somewhere
with better gun laws and lower taxes. This could open up my options.

Good shooting

Woohoo! I actually shot a 360 this afternoon. That currently stands as my best score on the light rifle target.

So, how'd I get there? Yesterday, I was shooting with my fairly-stock 10/22. (It's had some minor part replacements, but I've not replaced the barrel.) My shooting was pretty abysmal, low 80's and high 70's. I decided to try my heavy-barreled 10/22 this afternoon. I still didn't shoot well, a 332. Benchrest showed a larger grouping than that barrel should produce, so I tried some Eley Target ammo I'd gotten recently (rather than the el-cheapo ammo I'd been using.) That made a significant difference. I shot a 91, 90, 88, and 91 for that 360.

It remains to be seen if I can reproduce that, but I'm looking forward to finding out.

Reading

When I started this blog, I wasn't sure that I'd be able to write enough to justify it. Then I surprised myself by writing on average more than once a day for a couple of months. I slowed down a bit due to taking a couple of weeks of vacation (during one of which I had the kids to myself), but the other major impact is that I've been reading a lot lately.

I just finished Friedrich Hayek's Road to Serfdom. This is one of those classics that everyone should read. He makes the case that any type of state that attempts to plan some part of our lives must necessarily[1] end up planning all parts of our lives. Furthermore, he argues that a state of this nature must necessarily attract the worst kind of people to its leadership (thugs, essentially.) There's obviously more to the book, and it's definitely worth a read.

I'm also on the verge of finishing Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism. It was fairly interesting reading these two books at the same time. He covers a lot of early 20th century American history that I'd been unaware of (or possibly managed to forget since high school.) He argues that, rather than conservatives being Fascists, as every protester of the last 8 years would have us believe, it's actually liberals that have far more in common with the Italian Fascists and the Nazis.

Next on the list: Thomas Sowell's A Conflict of Visions.

[1] Modulo his comments about the inevitability of planning.

Self-defense dream

I had my first (or at least first that I remember) self-defense dream last night. Details aside, when it came down to pulling the trigger, I couldn't do it. Not in a moral sense, my finger just wouldn't pull the trigger.

It's probably purely coincidental that I shot really poorly during my club's light rifle competition last night. I just never could get the trigger to break when I wanted it to. My final target was a 78, a good 10 points below where I want to be (and where I've been shooting, so it's not an unreasonable expectation.) Pbbbbbt!

Rapid fire better than slow fire

Well, okay, it's a bit premature to say that, and it probably wouldn't hold up if I were to do a serious long-term comparison of the two. But it was an interesting experience.

I was shooting Sunday afternoon, practicing for my club's Light Rifle competition. I'd done reasonably well on the first set of targets (a 344.) I did reasonably well on the first two targets of the second set, an 86 and an 89. Then I shot a 79 on the third target. This was probably a result of still being tired from the 10-hour snowy drive of the day before, but I just couldn't make any decent shots. I got frustrated (again, probably from being tired), and I shot the last target in rapid-fire mode, just firing as fast as I could while keeping the target in my sights. I probably fired all 10 rounds in a minute, maybe less.

And I shot an 86.

Snow

There's nothing quite like driving 150 miles on the PA Turnpike in the dark while it's pouring down snow. Unless you've already spent hours driving through the same on mountains in Virginia and West Virginia.

Mustang

I drove to West Virginia today to celebrate my uncle's 91st birthday. My wife and I have only one car (since I commute to work by train, and the train station is less than ten minutes by foot from our house), and I couldn't leave my wife without a car for two days, so I rented a car.

Instead of renting some generic small or mid-size car, I decided to rent a Mustang. I've never had the chance to drive an American muscle car for any extended period of time (five minutes once doesn't really count), so I figured I'd make use of this opportunity.

Thursday evening, I went to pick up the car. Did all the paperwork, got a parking spot number, and walked out to find it. It wasn't hard to find. It was the BRIGHT BLUE Mustang sitting there in the parking lot. Not some generic shade of gray, not black, not white, BRIGHT BLUE.

On the way out of the lot, the attendant commented on it. "Nice car. And nice color, too."

I got home and told me wife to go look at the car. "No, I'm cooking, and the kids are leaving me alone. I'll look at it later." "No, really, go look at it." So she went to the window and looked. The laugh that came out was a purely unintentional, caught-by-surprise laugh. The laugh came out of her before she even thought to make fun of me for it.

It's been getting a similar reaction from assorted family members of various degree here, too.

But you know what? It drives like any other Mustang out there, so I don't really care that much.

91 years old

Tomorrow, I'll be going to the a birthday party for my uncle, who's turning 91. I would have seen him at my parents' over Thanksgiving, but he'd gone hunting and bagged a turkey, and his neighbor offered to cook that for him, so he stayed home.

He's quite a character. He's obviously still pretty mobile, and he's definitely still pretty sharp. And, at 91, he probably has a stronger grip than I do.

He served as a pilot in the war (WWII, that is.) He was shot down over Germany and spent the rest of the war in a POW camp.

I don't know how much longer he'll be around, so when I heard they were throwing this shindig for him, I figured I'd do what I could to be there.

The power of bureaucrats

I spent Thanksgiving at my parents, during which time I got to see my brother and his family. Some fifteen years ago, my brother's wife started a day care center that she's been running since then. She's now essentially been forced to give it up because some petty little bureaucrat got a bug up her butt.

Apparently, a couple of years ago, the day care center was assigned a new bureaucrat from the county to do their evaluations. The first visit from said bureaucrat went swimmingly -- she was delighted with how the center was run. Unfortunately, her boss didn't like her findings and came back for another visit with said bureaucrat. Things didn't go well this time, and evaluations went poorly every time thereafter. The one time that my sister-in-law commented on how well the visit was going because the evaluator hadn't found anything wrong, the response was, "And I'm not leaving until I do."

So, finally, after a two-year campaign to shut down this day care center, the bureaucrat has won. And now all of those parents have to find other places for their children, and the employees have to find other jobs. You just gotta love the power that these people hold.

Fortunately, this was an isolated incident, and nobody need fear treatment like this once our new health care system has been put in place.

Tuesday night's Light Rifle

So, this last weekend, I shot a 352 and a 354. I didn't do quite as well in the Tuesday night match. I shot (unofficially) a 343. To keep perspective, though, it's still where I want, which is to be shooting consistently in the 340's.

One of the guys I was shooting with (a Master-class shooter) shot a 98 on one of his targets. That's some impressive shooting. But he is human, though -- his final two shots on his last target were 7's, both pretty much accidental shots.

Compassionate conservatives

I read this article over at the Volokh Conspiracy. This anecdote jumped out at me:

Senior year of college, I took a political economy class from a very left-wing, but very fair-minded, Sociology professor. One of the books he assigned was David Stockman’s The Triumph of Politics. Stockman was a libertarian Republican who served as Reagan’s first budget director. At the beginning of the book, he provided a concise summary of why he thought limited government was beneficial to the American people. When the class discussed the book, one of my fellow seniors exclaimed, “This was very interesting to me! He seems like a good guy... I didn’t know that any conservatives actually cared about people!.” Kudos to this professor for enlightening my classmate, but how does someone get to her senior year of college without being exposed to the radical idea that not all conservatives are innately evil?

While I'm certainly not shocked that someone in her senior year of college would have led so sheltered a life, I do consider it a failure of that university (and most universities) that there should be so little diversity of thought that this should happen.

One of my friends, who earned Ph.D.'s in both economics and political science, once told me about visiting an older uncle of his who'd never been to college. My friend told me of some of the opinions his uncle had offered and how they demonstrated that he'd never really had anyone seriously challenge him on them. Unfortunately, it appears that going to college wouldn't necessarily prevent that nowadays.

(As an aside, this reminds me of a conversation I once had with my sister-in-law. She's a typical northeast liberal who went to Columbia, quite possibly the most liberal of the liberal northeastern universities. She actually said to me, and I kid you not, "Republicans ... oh, I hate them so much!" The last time I'd heard a line like that was in some bad Saturday morning cartoon. And she was obviously assuming that I shared her political opinions. But then, why shouldn't she? She'd probably never met someone who didn't.)

I am the child who says, "Nu!"

This was a fairly perfect setup: On Thursday, at my parents with other cousins there, my 5-year-old son was walking in circles in the den saying, "Nu!" Mind you, he's never seen Monty Python and the Holy Grail, so he didn't get the joke when I corrected him to say, "Ni!"

And by amazing coincidence, my high-school-aged nephew actually had the DVD in his laptop at the time, so my son got to see it. He was a bit bored during the credits, but enjoyed the movie afterwards. Now he keeps asking to see that movie "with the knights dancing on the table."

Post-Thanksgiving shooting

We fot back early this morning from our Thanksgiving trip to see my parents. We aimed to arrive at 3AM, and we pulled in around 2:56. Not too shabby. (This target time was intended to minimize the amount of time we had to spend in the car while the kids were awake while also maximizing the amount of time they'd sleep once we got home.)

I went shooting this afternoon after my wife got up from her nap. Again, not too shabby. I started out pretty poor with an 82, but then shot an 89, 91, and 90-1x to end up with a 352-1X. On the second relay, I shot an 86, 89, 88-1X and 91 for a 354-1X. I'm definitely improving.

Of these 80 shots, 9 were outside the black (6's or 7's), 5 in the first relay and 4 in the second. Had I been able to bring those into the black, I would have shot a 357 and a 358. I'm obviously making progress at bringing those in, but it's frustrating to keep seeing them.

The Pilgrims and private property

Ilya Somin over at the Volokh Conspiracy points out how private property saved the Pilgrims. I'd read this years ago in Tom Bethell's book The Noblest Triumph: Property and Prosperity Through the Ages. It's too bad that people aren't being taught this fact in school.

Tonight's shooting

Tonight's light rifle competition wasn't as good as I'd hoped, but it was on par with how I've been doing.

Last week's shooting was excellent. My official score was a 352-1X, the first time I've broken 350 in competition. My previous best had been a 341. And this was with iron sights. I've since put a scope on this rifle, and, even though I've had more than the usual opportunity to shoot in the last week, I'm still a bit new to shooting scoped. I need a bit more practice to get comfortable with it.

Since I shot an earlier relay than usual, I had the chance to stick around to get my official score -- a 334. Not inconsistent with my performance so far, but I'm still trying to get consistently in the 340's.

History

I'm reading Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism right now. It's a pretty interesting book, and not quite the "right wing nuttery" that I'd expected of it. No offenses to Mr. Goldberg, but a book whose cover consists of a smiley face with a Hitleresque moustache might be assumed to be not quite as academic as it's turning out to be. While it's by no means (and by the author's own admission) an academic tome, it's a bit more academic than expected.

But this isn't meant to be a review of the book. One of the themes of the book is that "progressives" tend to ignore their own history and have rewritten history so that Mussolini, Hitler, et al., are seen as being right-wing when most of their policies were progressive, i.e., left-wing, policies.

This theme reminded me of a quote from my father-in-law: If you can destroy the history of a people, you can destroy that people. He was referring to the Jews and the Middle East conflict (specifically with respect to certain countries who won't allow archaeological research into Biblical places.) This quote reminds me of this segment by Bill Whittle, in which he discusses (a bit indirectly) the attack on American history in an attempt to destroy it and, as a result, the American way of life. (I would argue that there is not an American people in the same way that there is a Jewish people. This country was founded on a philosophy, and I'd argue that anyone who buys into that philosophy is essentially American. Thus "way of life" rather than "people".)

This also ties into the books I've been reading by E.D. Hirsch, Jr., about how progressive educational ideals have been slowly weakening this country by removing content (such as American history) from primary education. I've seen some overlap in the names mentioned in both books (like John Dewey.) It's also a bit depressing to see Columbia University mentioned in Hirsch's books (specifically Columbia Teacher's College) and Whittle's commentary (as the temporary home of the Institute for Marxism, er, the Institute for Social Research, aka the Frankfurt School.) But then, I should hardly be surprised that a liberal northeastern university has played such a large part in the progressive movement.

This week's shooting

Wednesday morning, I had the chance to try out the new barrel on my 10/22. I'd like to say that it's a tack driver, but that would imply that I can shoot well enough to determine that. I shot the light rifle course of fire benchrest with it and shot a 384/400. Note that this was with a 4x scope, so it's entirely feasible I could have done better with a better scope. OTOH, it could just be me. (For comparison, the Master's-level shooters are shooting in the 380's in our club's light rifle competition. Standing.)

I did give it a try standing, and I shot an 89 and a 91. I didn't have time to shoot the whole course of fire, but I was pleased. (Again, for comparison, I've shot 91 a couple of times with my other 10/22 and its stock barrel.)

This week, I decided to replace the Tech Sights on my other 10/22 with a scope. So I'll be shooting that one scoped from now on.

I shot pretty well yesterday morning. I was under a time constraint, so I rushed my last few shots. Specifically, my last three shots were 7's. While it's certainly conceivable that those would have been 7's, anyway, it did lower my score to a 344. I was a bit disappointed that I could have shot anywhere from a 347 to a 350 if I hadn't dropped those three, but I'm still reasonably happy with the 344.

This morning's shooting went well, too. I shot the light rifle course twice, shooting a 342 the first time and a 346 the second time. I'm pretty pleased with how I'm doing, specifically that I'm consistently shooting in the 340's.

Light rifle -- woohoo!

I just got back from this week's light rifle match at my club. Woohoo! Best shooting I've done so far. I shot an 87 and an 83 on the first two targets, which would have had me shooting a 340. We swapped targets, and then I proceeded to shoot 89 on the remaining two targets, which puts me at 348. I scored on the conservative side, so it's entirely possible I scored as high as 350. I'll find out next week.

In any case, I'm pretty psyched. It's nice to see improvement.

SSAFU

Shooting schedule -- all fouled up.

I didn't get to go shooting this weekend. My wife's flight left late Saturday evening, so I would certainly have had time to go Saturday morning, but Friday evening, she had an accident that required some emergency dental work first thing Saturday morning.

I did get to go this morning, though, while my son was in school and my mother-in-law had the twins. Nothing to write home about (although apparently worth blogging ;-). A 329 and a 340-2x. The 340 actually could have been a bit better. I was on my way to shooting a high 80's or possibly a 90 on my first target. I was sitting at 80 after 9 shots, and my tenth shot went high. Non-scoring high. Guh. I lost focus from having shot so well on that target up to that point.

After I got home and ate lunch, a package arrived. I'd ordered a Butler Creek target barrel/stock combo for my other 10/22. The leaves needed raking, though, and then kids needed attention, so I didn't have the chance to play with things until after bedtime. The stock was a bit of a tight fit, but everything's assembled now. With luck, I'll be able to try it out Wednesday morning.

Home alone

Well, not actually home alone. Home alone for a week with the kids while my wife is visiting her sister far away.

Wish me luck.

Last night's shooting

It occurs to me that I'm not terribly creative when it comes to titles for my blog entries. This isn't the first one titled, "Last night's shooting."

Last night was Tuesday night, which means that it was my clubs weekly Light Rifle competition. I got two weeks' worth of results (I missed a week and shot a make-up.) A 339 and a 341-1X. I'm certainly doing better, up from my initial scores in the low 330's.

Last night's score was somewhere in the high 330's. I started off exceptionally well, with 87 or 88 on the first two targets (depending on how the official scoring goes.) I then hit a slump on the third target, somewhere around 80-81, and came back up a bit on the fourth target. We'll see how the official scoring goes.

The highlight of the night was the one target I shot two almost-perfect 10's on. The sight picture was perfect, the trigger pull was perfect, and I managed to do that twice consecutively. Now if only I could do that on every shot, I'd be a happy camper. I'd even settle for a 9 here and there.

Weekend shooting -- iron sights vs scope

I had a little extra time this morning, so I took along my scoped 10/22 (a 4X scope) to see how I could shoot with it vs. with iron sights. I'd previously commented on how I felt more comfortable with iron sights, but I hadn't really put it to a significant test before this morning. I shot the light rifle course twice on each.

I shot the scoped rifle first. I shot a few sighting rounds benchrest to zero the scope, but the first shots I fired offhand were for the record. My first target was a 79 -- about what I'd expected, thinking that I was going to be worse with a scope. I got better as I went, though, as I followed that up with an 83, an 89-1X and an 89-2X, for a 340-3x. The second course I shot scoped was an 81-1X, 85-2X, 90-2X and 90-1x, for a 346-6x. Certainly towards the top end of how I've been shooting lately.

Then I picked up old faithful, my iron-sighted 10/22. My first course was a 78, 91-1X, 80 and 83, for a 332-1X. The second course was a 82, 83-1X, 80-1X and 85, for a 330-2X.

So, this morning, I shot better with a scope than with iron sights. Even though this isn't enough data to say that I'm better with a scope than with iron sights, it's certainly enough to say that I can shoot at least as well with a scope. Perfectly logical, of course -- everything else is equal, I just need to adjust to a different sight picture.

Aperture sights

I've decided to give front aperture sights a try on my 10/22. Specifically this Lyman globe front target sight. I'm currently using a Tech-Sights TSR-200, which is an aperture rear sight combined with a post front sight. While I certainly don't expect to suddenly start shooting 400-40x's with these sights, at least it will be an interesting experience.

Gun safe

Gun safe's a-comin'. Back before the Great Gun Hiatus, I got by without a safe because I was single and lucky. Now that I'm a responsible homeowner with kids, and now that my post-Hiatus collection is getting big enough to warrant it, I've decided to get a safe. (A Liberty safe, if anyone's curious.)

I've ordered a model that holds up to 30 long guns. I can't imagine that I'll end up owning more than 30 long guns anytime soon. Of course, having said that, I'll probably be wishing soon that I'd gotten a bigger safe. I'd be hard-pressed to buy more than one a month, so it should last me for at least another couple of years.

Last night's shooting

So, last night was our weekly Light Rifle competition. I shot reasonably well, at least a 333, maybe as much as a 336, depending on how the official scoring goes. (I tend to score myself conservatively, so there's usually a 3-5 point between my self-scoring and the official version.) I'm still not breaking 340 in competition yet, but at least I'm being very consistent.

There were four of us on the line last night. I don't know what everyone else was shooting, but I think they were all shooting standard velocity fare. I was shooting CCI Mini-Mags, and I could definitely tell a difference in the sound. Compared to the polite from the guy beside me, mine was verging on a .

Can you hear me now?

Hey, all of you Democrats in Congress who want to shove socialized health care down our throats: the Republicans took Virginia and New Jersey last night. Are you sure you want to go into next year's elections having voted for something that people don't want?

Give them spoons

I heard this anecdote many years ago, and it's stuck with me since then:

An economist was visiting China, and he saw a large number of men digging with shovels to build a dam. His host was very excited and remarked on how many men they were employing. The economist pointed out that a smaller number of men could more efficiently build the dam with the right equipment. "But then we wouldn't be employing the other men," his host replied. "Well, in that case, why not give them all spoons?"

I've seen this anecdote attributed to Milton Friedman, which certainly seems plausible.

Efficiency

Sometimes I'll notice a theme popping up in my life. One of the themes I've noticed recently is efficiency.

For example, I've been talking about how to exercise with my friend Mike the Mad Russian, specifically with respect to goals. I mentioned to him that I'd done 500 pushups one Saturday, and he said that it's pointless to do that, as you're just making your muscles more efficient at doing pushups. Evidently, you want to keep changing the exercises you do so that your muscles never get too efficient at doing what they do. Of course, that assumes that the goal of exercise is to burn calories, in which case you want to be doing things as inefficiently as possible. If you actually use your muscles (say if you're in the military or a professional athlete), you actually want your muscles to operate as efficiently as possible.

Another place I've seen the word used frequently is in Economics in One Lesson, which I've recently read. The word is used to describe the failings of protectionist trade policies or job creation programs. Most (if not all) government intervention in the economy leads to inefficient use of resources. Actually, the most "successful" job creation programs necessarily involve the least efficient use of resources, i.e., workers.

I've also been thinking a lot about efficiency with respect to education. It seems to me that one of the purposes of education is simply to increase the efficiency of the students' thought processes. Repetition and memorization in education serves the same purpose as the thousands of layups, free throws, fadeaway jumpers, etc., serves for the professional basketball player -- to become efficient at doing these things. (And note that I'm not saying that education should consist of nothing but repetition and memorization, any more than I would suggest that a basketball game should consist of nothing layups, free throws, and fadeaway jumpers. But they do server a purpose.)

And just to make sure this can still be considered a gun blog, I'll toss this in: And that's why I go shooting every weekend, so that I can become efficient at all of those little things that go into making a shot -- acquiring the sight picture, maintaining the sight picture, controlling my breathing, putting the minimal effort necessary into pulling the trigger, etc.

Watching the earth rotate

This morning, standing on the platform waiting for the train, I watched the earth rotate. The nearly-full moon was sitting on top of an electrical wire when I looked up and noticed it, and then I stood staring at it, watching the wire slowly creep up until it was bisecting the moon. The entire process took about 30 seconds or less.

(Okay, geek that I am, I need to give a better estimate of how long it took. The moon subtends an angle of about half a degree. It takes 12 hours to traverse 180 degrees (less than 12 hours at this time of year, but also less than 180 degrees. And anyway, that traversal rate is going to be constant, I think, so we can safely use those numbers. And if I'm wrong, it's close enough.) So that's four minutes to traverse one degree. I watched the wire go from touching to bisecting the moon, so that's a quarter of a degree, so about one minute. A little longer than I'd estimated.)

Voting

I went to vote a little after 6AM, just after the polls opened. I commute to New York by train, so I voted early in order to still make a decent train. I also have my weekly light rifle competition tonight, so I didn't want to worry about timing in the evening.

As it turns out, I was voter number 6 in my district.

Cows and sheeps and pigs, oh my!

I ran across this blog entry today about schoolkids from Harlem being taken to a farm to get an exposure to rural life, including looking at sheep, cows, and other farm animals. What's interesting is that the New York Times reporter spins it as an attempt to raise test scores. Here's a quote:

New York State’s English and math exams include several questions each year about livestock, crops and the other staples of the rural experience that some educators say flummox city children, whose knowledge of nature might begin and end at Central Park. On the state English test this year, for instance, third graders were asked questions relating to chickens and eggs. In math, they had to count sheep and horses.

As the blog points out, this is all well and good if it's part of a commitment to broadening students' horizons, but as a one-day gimmick, it's probably fairly pointless.

To go slightly off-track, this reminds me of something I ran across many years ago that I just didn't understand. The nickname other cyclists had given to Bernard Hinault was "the badger" because of his exceeding competitiveness. I didn't really get it. Couldn't they have nicknamed him after a more suitable animal? I only learned later that badgers are pretty vicious little animals that you wouldn't want to get in a fight with. My lack of cultural education was getting in my way.

Airplane reading

I managed to finish two books (and start a third) on the plane to and from Germany. (While I was a pretty voracious reader when I was younger, I've been finding it a bit hard to find the time to read in the last few years. Well, read books that is. I read plenty of stuff online.)

(Note for the FTC: I bought the damn books myself. Now stay out of my f*cking business.)

The first was Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt. While this is a classic text, I'd have to say the title is a bit misleading. It's a series of discussions on different public policies and how they really don't have the effect that people would like them to have. I'd definitely suggest this book for anyone who wants insight into why pretty much all of the economic policies of our current (and most of our past) administrations is, at best, misguided. (I also have Thomas Sowell's Basic Economics: A Citizen's Guide to the Economy on my bookshelf waiting to be read. I'm a bit embarassed to discover (thank you Amazon for telling me this) that I ordered this book on February 28, 2002. Apparently there's a 3rd edition of the book out already. I had no idea there was even a 2nd.)

The second book I finished was The Making of Americans: Democracy and Our Schools by E. D. Hirsch, Jr., the author of Cultural Literacy. Again, another book I'd strongly recommend.

Hirsch is an educational reformer who's been pushing content-based schooling for many years, i.e., let's teach kids history, geography, etc., from an early age rather than simply guiding them in discovering the world on their own. He discusses some of the history of schooling in America, the philosophies of the founders of this country with respect to education, how education has changed in the 20th century and how that change has had an adverse effect on the performance of American students. He discusses the methods used to teach in our current "progressive" educational system and how these methods are actually harmful. (He does so with data, not just anecdotes, which the current educational establishment can't actually provide to support their argument. Apparently, even though they've been working at it for seventy-some years, all the failure has been because nobody has yet been able to correctly implement the necessary methods. Reminds me of the arguments about socialism -- it hasn't worked yet because nobody's gone far enough in implementing socialism yet. As if the hundred million or so dead hasn't been going far enough. But I digress.)

He's a strong believer in equal opportunity, and he believes that giving every child the necessary tools to succeed, or at least to have a chance of succeeding, is an essential part of that opportunity. One of the arguments he makes is that the social equality gap has been growing because of all of these progressive educational methods. Essentially, children in middle-class-and-above families are getting the content they need to do well at home, but children lower-economic-class homes are missing out on that enrichment. Schools aren't providing that content, so the former group manages to do okay while the latter group falls farther behind.

What's interesting is that Hirch is a liberal, but his ideas have mostly been accepted by conservatives (and subsequently earned him scorn from liberals because of the association.) It's an interesting paradox that I'd argue isn't a paradox at all. But maybe I'll save that thought for later.

Weekend shooting

This weekend's shooting wasn't the most rewarding. Not horrible, but certainly not the best I've done recently.

Saturday morning I shot a 340-3X and a 338-5X. Certainly respectable, and better than I've been doing in real competition so far. Not to mention that that 5X is impressive, given that I didn't break 340. But the 5X also hints at how poorly I performed on the other 35 shots. (Actually 33 shots, 'cause I had 2 10's that weren't X's.) 8 of those 33 were 7's, and one was a 6, for a total of 77.5% in the black. Had I managed to get those 9 shots in the black, I would have scored a 348-5X and been spectacularly happy.

(And to be complete, I shot 7 7's on the 340, for an 82.5%.)

This morning's shooting was pretty abysmal, a 318 and a 335. I'd like to be able to blame it on the ammo (I'd forgotten to throw in another box of "good" ammo after yesterday's shooting, so I shot the first string using some "not-so-good" ammo that I happened to have with me), but I know the ammo wasn't the problem. In fact, I know exactly what word was in my head when I pulled the trigger on the shot I dropped -- "cluster". I wasn't focused, and my score shows it.

There's at least some good news from my visit to the club. The guy running our club's Light Rifle match had posted the running score sheet, and I appear to be at the head of the group of people ranked as Marksman. I'm in no danger of being pushed into Sharpshooter anytime soon with these scores (I'd need to be consistently shooting above 350), but it's nice to see I'm doing well.

Dresden

I was in Dresden, Germany, this past week. One evening we went on a walking tour of historical Dresden. For those who don't know, Dresden was subject to some heavy bombing towards the end of the war. I'd been vaguely aware of this historical fact (the phrase "firebombing of Dresden" was familiar before going there), but I was unaware of (or had forgotten) the details.

One of the details that was mentioned was that parts of Dresden reached 1500 degrees Celsius or so during the resulting firestorm. Being more familiar with the Fahrenheit system, I started to do the conversion, 9/5 C + 32. As soon as that formula popped into my head, I started laughing to myself about the absurdity of adding 32. At 2700 degrees Fahrenheit, that extra 32 degrees just won't make a big difference.

Blog backlog

A couple of days without a decent Internet connection and the blog reading sure does pile up. Well over 200 things to read in the blogs I regularly read, plus another 500 or so in blogs I have in my RSS list but don't actively read.

German food

Dinner last night here in Germany: breaded pork cutlet wrapped around ham and cheese. Now if only they'd wrapped it in bacon, I would have been in heaven.

Heading to Germany

In a few hours, I'll be on a plane to Germany to attend a small conference there. This will likely be a light blogging week, although you can never really predict these things in advance. There could be drastic seismic shifts in the political landscape that require my particular insight while I'm gone. Similarly, the week could see the release of some viral video including cute kittens. In either case, I'll do my best to meet my responsibilities as a blogger.

Sunday morning shooting

This morning's shooting wasn't quite as good as yesterday's. I shot a 339-3X and a 337-3X. A little bit disappointing, but not unreasonably poor. It's still better than I've shot for the record so far, and it's not significantly worse than I shot yesterday. My in-the-black percentage was 85%.

I was sitting and scoring my targets after I got home, and my son wanted to know what I was doing. He's five years old, and my wife isn't quite ready to let him in on the specifics of my hobby. (Remember, this is New Jersey, not some place reasonable.) So I told him I was scoring. I did explain to him how you count up the points, and I pointed out which holes counted as X's. He said he wanted to play that game, so I drew him a target on a piece of paper with the rings marked 10 down to 6. He took a pen and dropped it on the paper, scoring the marks where the pen hit.

I was more than a little pleased when he came running in to the other room in a few minutes saying, "Dad, Dad, I got a 6X!"

It occurs to me, though, that my wife's reticence about exposing our kids to the shooting sports might actually play in my favor. I'd been counting on making the activity something special to do with dad and hoping to hook the kids that way. But given that my wife's turned it into something mysterious, they might be more interested in it than they otherwise would have been. I knew someone a few years ago who loves going to museums based mostly on the fact that, when she was younger, her parents had made trips to museums without the kids because it was something that adults do. Maybe my wife can unintentionally work that same magic with my kids and shooting.

Morning shooting

This morning's shooting went very well. Actually, it went a little bit too well, 'cause I started getting cocky and stopped focusing so hard, and my later scores showed it.

My first few shots seemed effortless. I had a perfect sight picture, and I hit a string of 9's with a few 10's mixed in. My first target was an 89-1X, and my second target was a 91-1X. (The first time I've broken 90.) This is where I started getting cocky, 'cause my next two targets were an 84 and an 85. Still, my total was 349-2x, which is the best I've shot so far.

I didn't do quite as well on the second string -- 88, 85-1X, 88-1X, and 85-1X, for a total of 346-3X. Still, it's the second best I've shot so far, which demonstrates that I can be reasonably consistent. And it gives me reason to believe that I can be consistently shooting in the 350's in a few months.

I wonder if I need to start using better ammo. I've been shooting Armscor stuff, and I've been happy with it. But I did notice a couple of my "dropped" shots (6's and 7's) seemed to correspond to a crack that didn't sound quite the same as the others -- more a thump than a crack. It's possible the powder charge in those two wasn't quite up to snuff.

Oh, and my stats: 3/40 outside the black in the first string and 9/40 outside the black in the second. So I'm up to an 88.75% in-the-black hit rate (from an 82.5% last time.) Still shooting for 100%, but doing better.

Straining at gnats

Over at Clayton Cramer's blog, there's a link to an article about a Hebrew University paper (how's that for indirection?) that concluded that "the lack of organized military rape [of Palestinian women by the IDF] is an alternate way of realizing [particular] political goals."

Surely it can't be because the Israeli soldiers are basically decent, moral people, could it? Surely not.

Bah.

Have they read the Constitution?

I ran across this today (h/t to Robb Allen):

CNSNews.com: “Madam Speaker, where specifically does the Constitution grant Congress the authority to enact an individual health insurance mandate?”

Pelosi: “Are you serious? Are you serious?”

CNSNews.com: “Yes, yes I am.”

Pelosi then shook her head before taking a question from another reporter.

Maybe she didn't want to answer the question because she couldn't. Which made me wonder if she's ever actually read the Constitution. Which made me wonder how many sitting senators or representatives have read it. I know that Steny Hoyer has been spouting the "general welfare" crap, but I wouldn't be surprised if someone on his staff told him he needed at least some answer to the Constitution question. And, as James Madison indicated, that's not the correct answer.

I wonder if we need an entrance exam for the U.S. Congress to guarantee that the members understand the Constitution and the oath they're taking to uphold it.

The current state of education

Even if I didn't currently have small children whose proper education is one of my main concerns, reading this would just depress the hell out of me.

Given my current state, it scares the bejeezus out of me.

That's one

I remember hearing this joke many years ago:

Once upon a time, an older farmer took a young woman as his bride. On the way home from the courthouse, the mule pulling their cart stopped and sat down. The farmer said, "That's one", got out of the cart and smacked the mule enough that the mule started moving again. A second time, the mule stopped. The farmer said, "That's two", got down from the cart and got the mule moving again. The mule stopped a third time. The farmer said, "That's three", got his shotgun and shot the mule.

The farmer's young bride asked him, "Was it really necessary to shoot the mule?" The farmer said, "That's one."

The couple has a long and peaceful life together.

For some reason this joke came to mind while I was reading this today about the White House's war on Fox News.

(H/T to Robert Langham.)

So there!

Wow, and I thought my children were pretty childish. Democrats have actually locked their Republican colleagues out of the main House Oversight and Government Reform committee chamber.

(H/T to Bruce.)

Growing up, I had this illusion that adults acted like adults, that children eventually outgrew their childishness and started behaving reasonably. This is just the last in a long string of illusion-shattering incidents.

Why I'm writing this blog

The impetus for starting this blog was because I'd snapped. I'd had enough of my liberal friends on Facebook posting stupid health care reform memes. I wanted to add another voice to the chorus of people calling for reason in our government, calling for our elected officials to actually respect the oath they took to uphold the Constitution.

I also wanted to create another gun-centric (hoplocentric?) blog. This rational falls under my desire to promote responsible gun ownership, as much the ownership part as the responsible part. I wanted to be yet another perfectly normal person who owns guns. Even though this wasn't what I was thinking originally, I want to portray my participation in shooting competition as something every bit as normal as my neighbor's golfing or bowling.

I'm not quite the gun nut that, say, Caleb or Jay G. are. I would certainly tend that way, but I've got too much other stuff on my plate to really devote myself to it. I'd imagined that I would write more about guns, but maybe it's actually a good thing that I don't. Maybe just portraying myself as a normal person who happens to have guns as his hobby is good for the blogosphere. (Although I do have my own version of the how-do-you-know-you're-a-gun-nut joke: you find yourself maintaining perfect trigger discipline ... on that bottle of Windex.)

I'd also imagined myself being a bit more political, but I'm more interested in political philosophy than the day-to-day political sniping. So aside from the occasional post rehashing something that someone else has probably done a better job of expressing elsewhere, there hasn't been as much of that as I'd imagined.

What has surprised me, though, is that I've managed to keep this up for some 80-some posts now. I'd thought that I would surely peter out before now. Not that I won't eventually run out of things to say, but I haven't hit that wall yet.

Tonight's shooting

Tonight was our club's weekly light rifle match. I got back last week's scored targets. 331, exactly the same as the week before. I'd thought it was a 315, but that was my rough estimate based on a misunderstanding of scoring. And actually, it wasn't exactly the same as the previous week. This one was a 331/1X. Marginally better.

Tonight's shooting was ... well, there were no dropped shots like last week. I didn't write down my scores, but I'm guessing somewhere between 320 and 330. I'll be really surprised if I break 330. I kept most of them in the black, and I even had a couple of 10's, but I had a few too many 7's. Oh, well, we'll see what the official score is next week. Well, in two weeks, since I'll be in Germany this time next week.

Bill Whittle and the PATRIOT Act

I'm a big fan of Bill Whittle. I love watching his Afterburner segments on PJTV. Every time I listen to him, I feel like following him into battle. Or at least voting for him.

He recently posted some thoughts on the PATRIOT act on his blog. I've discovered that I don't agree with him on everything.

Actually, there are things in this blog entry that I do agree with. I think he gets the analysis of the conflicting sets of irreducible core beliefs right. Compromise with Muslim extremists is impossible because there are certain core beliefs on which we disagree. We believe in liberty, and on that point there is (or should be) no compromise. They don't, and on that point, they are unwilling to compromise.

OTOH, he argues that the PATRIOT act is a good thing. He makes two points in defense of this argument: that use of those powers has prevented several attacks similar to the 9/11 bombing; and that, to date, the rights of no US citizen have been infringed by use of these powers. I have no ability to confirm the first, but that's not the argument I take issue with.

The problem I have with the PATRIOT Act is that it is open to abuse. That no rights have yet been infringed relies solely on the intent of those men using these powers. There is nothing about these powers that would prevent them from being used against US citizens. We need only have in office a president who worries about reaction to his policies from certain "fringe elements" before we start seeing abuses of this power.

In this country, we're ruled by laws, not by men. Unfortunately, it's men who execute the laws of our nation, and this is a law that relies too much on the goodness of men.

Fairness

Sometime last year, my wife asked me how I would handle a certain situation when it came up with our kids. I don't remember the exact situation, but my response was that I'd try to handle it as fairly as possible. She asked me why, given that I'd often said that nothing in life is fair. I couldn't really think of an answer at the time. The best I could come up with in my own mind was wanting my kids not to resent me for appearing to favor one of them.

Another good reason occurred to me today. I want my kids growing up with a sense of fairness so that they'll object to unfairness when they see it later in life. (Note that I'm not talking about fairness in the equality-of-outcome sense or even the equality-of-opportunity sense. I'm talking about fairness in the I-got-less-than-I-earned/he-got-more-than-he-earned sense. Or, even better, the I-got-more-than-I-earned/he-got-less-than-he-earned sense.)

Weekend shooting

The shooting this weekend wasn't too bad. Instead of shooting the A-17 target, as I've been doing for a while, I shot the A-32 target to practice for our club's light rifle competition. The course of fire is 40 shots, 10 each on 4 targets, for a possible 400 points. My score for the first week was 331. My goal is to be consistently above 360.

Saturday morning was my best shooting. I shot 3x87 and an 81, for a total of 342. Certainly an improvement. I didn't shoot quite as well this morning. I shot the course of fire twice for a 326 and a 322. The low score on each of those reflects the one dropped shot for each. (Well, I should probably say "misses". I'm starting to think of 7's as dropped shots.) Had each of those been hits in the 6 ring, I would have a 342 and a 338. As it is, I had 13 10's out of those 80 shots this morning. Certainly not world class, but my focus is definitely getting better.

Because it occurred to me to think of it, and because I made the comment above about considering 7's as dropped shots, I counted my shots that hit outside the black: 7/40 Saturday morning, 14/80 Sunday morning. Consistent, at least. I'm hitting 82.5% in the black.

Prescience

I read this entry ("Repeating the Mistakes of the Mortgage Crisis") yesterday on the Volokh Conspiracy. It included this sentence:

Wallison also presciently warned of the possible dangers [of government subsidization of risky mortgages for people who were unlikely to be able to pay them back if real estate prices fell] back in 2005.

What's interesting is that I recently read something similarly[1] prescient:

Government-guaranteed home mortgages, especially when a negligible down payment or no down payment whatever is required, inevitably mean more bad loans than otherwise. They force the general taxpayer to subsidize the bad risks and to defray the losses. They encourage people to "buy" houses that they cannot really afford.

The quote is from Economics in One Lesson, by Henry Hazlitt, originally published in 1946.


[1] Note that I'm not saying that they say or address exactly the same thing, just that they're both prescient.

Feminism

I was just reading the bio over at Politics, Guns, and Beer, which contains this statement:

I’m now exercising real feminism by choosing to stay home with my daughter.

This reminded me of the absolute disgust I have for feminism. Not the feminism mentioned above, but the type of feminism that states that a woman has no value in society unless she has a career.

My wife worked before we had our kids. She had a very successful career, the most tangible measure of which was the fact that they doubled her salary over the five years she worked that job. She stopped working shortly before we had our first kid. We planned on having two kids, and she was going to stay home with them, at least in the early years. We had twins on our second go 'round, so she's ended up staying home longer than expected.

My wife has done an excellent job raising our kids. She frequently gets comments from strangers on how well-behaved our kids are in public (even though we know what sort of hellions they are at home.) The extended trips we've had them on have gone much better than expected -- no embarassing meltdowns, no bratty behavior, etc. They're behaving well in pre-school and kindergarten.

Despite all of this, she feels like she's wasting her time. She doesn't think she's actually accomplishing anything unless she's employed somewhere. She's been so fully indoctrinated with this pseudo-feminist bullcrap that she'll just never be happy being "just" a homemaker.

Bacon

A couple of years ago, I worked for a London-based financial firm with an office in New York. One of the people I worked fairly closely with was British, even though she was working here in New York.

One day a group of us were eating lunch at a diner that served breakfast all day. Someone ordered pancakes and sausage, which prompted a conversation about that particular combination of savory and sweet. She hadn't grown up eating sausage with something slathered in Syrup, and she'd never really gotten used to the idea.

I asked her, "Well, if you didn't eat sausage with pancakes, what did you eat sausage with?"

"Bacon!"

Had I not been married, I might have dropped on one knee at that instant.

Woohoo!

I hit a milestone tonight -- ten consecutive pull-ups. I'd previously gotten up to nine, but I just couldn't get that tenth one out. I'd dropped down to doing sets of three with a minimal (five second or so) rest between sets, and I'd been able to get up to five of those and then another group (superset?) of five of those after a couple of minutes, so it's not as if I couldn't squeeze out 30 or so in a single workout. It's just getting up to the magical ten that was elusive.

(Okay, so that's pretty pathetic for those people who are serious about working out, but I'm trying to fit just some basic strength exercises into my schedule.)

This week's (and last week's) light rifle

I just got back from this week's light rifle competition. I got last week's targets back. I shot a 331/400. Not absolutely abysmal for a beginner. Not exactly where I want to be, which is above 360.

And this week's shooting isn't getting me any nearer. I shot 89 on my last target, which is close to where I want to be. Unfortunately, that was the best of the lot, and the shot I dropped on one target really hurts. My (unofficial) total was 315. I need lots more practice.

One of the guys shooting made comments as to how he was really struggling on his first two targets. Of course, for him "really struggling" meant that he had to work really hard to get the 96 and 97 on those two targets.

Tax refunds and 401k's

Marko has a blog entry today with the title, "i’m not holding my breath for tax refund checks." I saw the title and was expecting something a little bit different from what I read.

Given that some states deferred tax refunds last year, I'm a bit nervous. Even though I know it's not an optimal use of my money to give the government an interest-free loan, I've always been one to over-withhold taxes and get back a refund. I prefer that to playing the game of trying to come out perfectly even at the end of the year. Having already paid taxes all year long, I feel a bit resentful writing yet another check in April.

I wonder at what point the federal government is going to decide they can just not pay out these refunds because they need the money. Certainly, it's a short-sighted strategy, as people would immediately adjust by changing their withholding. And most likely, people would go a bit overboard in these adjustments, which could have a bit of an impact on federal revenues.

So it's far more likely they would simply delay the refunds. The question is, how long would they delay them? I guess we'll just have to wait and see, assuming they go this route at all.

These thoughts remind me of something that occurred to me some years ago when I started my first job and first started thinking about starting a 401k. At the time I wondered how long it would be before the federal government decided to nationalize 401k's. Of course, that would probably led to some pretty serious riots, so it's pretty unlikely. (Not that other states haven't done the same.)

How much would they stand to gain if they decided to do so, however? There were about $2.7 trillion in 401k assets in 2007, so it's not an inconsiderable sum. It would certainly be an attractive target.

Columbus on trial

I know this isn't the first time this has happened, but I find it a bit sickening:

In McDonald, Pa., 30 miles southwest of Pittsburgh, fourth-grade students at Fort Cherry Elementary put Columbus on trial this year — charging him with misrepresenting the Spanish crown and thievery. They found him guilty and sentenced him to life in prison.

"In their own verbiage, he was a bad guy," teacher Laurie Crawford said.

I find this sort of nihilistic behavior disgusting. Sure, Columbus was no saint. But this behavior seems to serve no other purpose than to tear down historical figures in order to rewrite history to match socialist ideals. It all feels so 1984-like, right down to the "freedom is slavery"-style confusion of ideas:

"Heroism and villainy are just two sides of the same coin."

Feh. All the more reason to homeschool my kids.

Huh?

The law was introduced after a third-grade girl was expelled for a year because her grandmother had sent a birthday cake to school, along with a knife to cut it. The teacher called the principal — but not before using the knife to cut and serve the cake.

Zero-tolerance laws are just stupid. But the above is just -- well, I can't even think of the appropriate word. I mean, my God, if the knife is an evil object, then it's an evil object. Cutting the cake with it and then punishing the little girl? "Why, thank you for defending me against that rapist, sir, but now I'm going to have to call the police to report that you've been waving a gun around."

(Hat tip to Dave Hardy.)

Migraines

I don't get migraines frequently, but I do get them. I'd put the frequency at about one every two years. Of course, I don't really give a rat's ass about the frequency when I have one. Like I do right now.

Guh.

Weekend shooting

This weekend's shooting wasn't that great. Well, okay, it sucked outright.

After picking up some tips earlier this week, I was excited to spend more time trying them out. I tried them out last night and this morning, with disastrous results.

To be honest, though, I'm comparing my performance to my expectations. Given that I was trying out new techniques, I should have expected my performance to be worse initially. It was, and I managed to get better as I shot more.

I was also shooting the A-17 target, which has a smaller scoring circle than the A-32 target used in light rifle competition. I threw up an A-32 and shot an 89, better than I did in competition last week, so that was a nice confidence booster. I'd been hoping to shoot in the 70's, though, on the A-17, and the best I did was a 65.

Oh, well, at least I know what I need to work on. Trigger control seems to be my bane right now.

Schooling and opportunity cost

Economics in One Lesson has been on the list of books I want to read for a few years, but I've only recently started reading it. I don't think I've seen the phrase "opportunity cost" yet, but the idea is coming up frequently. For example, when the merchant has to spend money to replace his broken window, he may have been planning on using that money to buy a new suit. Instead of ending up with an unbroken window and a new suit, and being out $250, the merchant ends up with an unbroken window, out $250, and lacking a new suit. The new suit is the opportunity cost. (Although I may be technically incorrect in that, given that the strict definition of opportunity cost probably involves a choice being made. In the broken window fallacy, there is no choice -- the merchant must replace the broken window.)

In any case, my wife and I were discussing schooling the other night, and it occurred to me to do a partial opportunity-cost analysis of the situation (to put it in high-falutin' terms.) Basically, the thought I had was this: if the school is spending time indoctrinating my kid, that's time the school isn't spending teaching my kid something useful. So there the opportunity cost is the useful material that my kid isn't learning at school.

But it gets worse. Consider the case in which I feel that the school isn't fully educating my child and that I can supplement his education with informal homeschooling. If the school is spending time indoctrinating my child, I have to spend time fixing that indoctrination. Thus I'm forced to make the decision as to how to spend my time -- fixing the indoctrination or providing additional education. In this case, it's likely that the supplemental education would be the opportunity cost. And in this case, the opportunity cost is twice as big as in the case above: there's useful education he's not getting at school, and there's useful supplemental education he's not getting at home.

Guh.

Schooling

I have three small children. The oldest has just started kindergarten. My wife and I are both fairly libertarian, and we're concerned about the type of indoctrination we expect our children to receive in public schools. I've actually already seen that he's getting some indoctrination. Apparently my son saw a puppet show based on the Wizard of Oz in which the bad witch was throwing garbage everywhere. This isn't necessarily indoctrination I disagree with, but it is indoctrination.

We're also a little bit concerned about what our kids will be learning in school. I'm a firm believer in the three R's. I also think that memorization is an excellent intellectual exercise for children, a good way to develop mental discipline. We live in a good school district, so we shouldn't really have to worry about the academic side. It is awfully friggin' expensive, though.

So we have a few options. We can leave them in public schools and supplement their education in the areas we feel they're lacking. We would also have to spend a fair amount of time correcting the indoctrination they'd be getting through the schools. Alternately, we could find a private school we like and pay for them to go there. This option is less feasible, 'cause it's also pretty friggin' expensive, especially on top of the property taxes we currently pay. It would almost certainly involve moving somewhere cheaper (while somehow miraculously maintaining my current income.) The third option is homeschooling of some sort.

Homeschooling appeals to me. The kids would be getting indoctrination, but at least it would be our indoctrination. I'm more than willing to admit that that is one of the appeals. My libertarian philosophy is morally superior to socialist (or any type of statist) philosophy, and that's the philosophy I want my kids to have.

There's also the appeal that my kids would be learning at their own pace and wouldn't be held back by other kids. (Conversely, my kids wouldn't be holding anybody else back, if that turns out to be the case.)

Of course, homeschooling has its costs. My wife is currently staying home with the kids, but she wants to go back to work at some point. She certainly doesn't want to be the one to stay home and teach the kids. Theoretically, I could get some job where I'm able to work odd hours from home, and I could spend daytime schooling the kids and evening/night-time hours working. That would be a pretty extreme lifestyle, though, and I'd probably get burnt out pretty quickly.

Guh. The realistic option is putting the kids in public school.

Paul Revere Hospital

I just went looking, and I didn't get any hits on Google for hospitals named after Paul Revere.

It's not surprising, though. If you were a hospital, would you want to be associated with the phrase, "Hardly a man is now alive"?

(Thank you! I'll be here all week. Don't forget to tip your waitress.)

Interesting hypothetical

I can't remember the circumstances under which I had this thought, but at some point in the last year or so, I posed myself this question: If I could have the privilege to own any gun I wanted, including any NFA firearm, but everyone else had t put up with New Jersey-style restrictions on gun ownership, would I be interested? I'm happy to say that my reaction was an instant and visceral, "Hell, no!"

My first thought was for the single mother living in a bad neighborhood who wouldn't have access to reasonable means of self-defense. (And I have to admit to having a streak of bleeding heart in me, but fortunately I've wrapped it up in lots of libertarian philosophy.) I wouldn't want to have this right that others couldn't also have.

Thinking about it further, I realized the rational basis for my rejection of the scenario: Privileges are just that, and they can be taken away as easily as they are given. Rights are inherent (or inalienable, if you will), thus they can't be taken away. (Although that's certainly more ideal than practical.) The only way to guarantee my ability to have a gun is to guarantee that gun ownership is viewed as a right.

And as I was thinking about this tonight, the converse occurred to me: If I could guarantee that everyone else could have reasonable access to guns (Texas reasonable, not New Jersey reasonable), would I be willing to forego that right for myself? Hmm. While it might be nice to think that I'd be that altruistic given the opportunity, I don't know that I'm that good. It would really depend on the alternative -- whether it were the status quo or the other extreme.

But even still,

Shattered illusions

It's funny how things take on a different significance when you're a kid. I remember thinking of some things as being really big deals. The Guinness Book of World Records, for example. I remember thinking that setting a world record meant that you had done something of significance. Later, of course, I discovered that you could pretty much declare your own category, and as long as you could convince Guinness it was worth putting in the book, it was a valid category.

It was the same thing with the Olympics. They were a pretty big deal when I was a kid, or at least it seemed that they were. But given that the Olympic committee recognizes ballroom dancing as a competitive sport, it's lost a bit of its luster. (Note that it's not an Olympic sport yet, but apparently the application hasn't yet been rejected, if Wikipedia is to be believed.

And the same with the Nobel prizes. I remember thinking that these were a really big deal. But I think they've jumped the shark. I mean, Jimmy Carter was bad enough, and appeared to be as much a dig at Bush as anything else. But at least the committee had something to point to with the whole Israel-Egypt peace thingy. (Even though his work to get North Korea to give up their nuclear ambitions came to naught.) This current recipient has done absolutely nothing that would merit a peace prize.

Thinking about it a bit more, though, I shouldn't really say that they've jumped the shark. They did that years ago. I thought they made a good choice with Muhammad Yunus. He was actually doing useful work for peace by improving the economic situation for the poor with microloans. But they jumped the shark long ago. I mean, my God, Yasser Arafat won the Noble peace prize? Not only a terrorist, but a corrupt terrorist who was funneling billions into his own accounts from aid meant for the people he was supposed to be helping.

Feh.

Jaw-dropping WTF

I'm not normally one for profanity, at least not in a public forum, but WHAT THE FUCK? The first news item I see is this one. You've just got to be fucking kidding me. And for "creating a new climate in international politics"? We haven't even seen the fallout yet from this new climate he's created.

I think I'll go be sick now.

Doctors under socialized medicine

I work with a guy whom I shall call Mike the Mad Russian. Mike grew up under the Soviet Union (until high-school age), so he has some insight into how things worked there.

We were discussing socialized medicine the other day. I made the comment that fewer people would want to be doctors if the US moves to socialized medicine. He replied that that wasn't true, that enough people still wanted to be a doctor in the Soviet Union that there was a lot of competition for those educational slots. Stumped I was, until it occurred to me what the flaw in his counterexample was.

In the Soviet Union, every job was socialized. Being a doctor probably brought with it certain liberties that other jobs didn't, even though there were higher-paying jobs. In the US, if medicine is socialized, there will still be other jobs open that won't be socialized. There will still be incentives for people who might otherwise have been doctors to go off and do other things.

(Of course, someone is about to come along and point out the flaw in my counterargument. But, hel, if you never make mistakes, you never learn anything.)

Credit card debt

Back in the mid-90's, I was finishing up my master's degree and got a full-time position at the University. I wasn't planning on being there long, as I had plans to go on to work on my Ph.D. elsewhere. I had a sizeable amount of credit card debt (well over $10,000), the result of a few years of fiscal imprudence. It occurred to me one day that I'd be a lot better off in grad school if I were debt-free, so I started paying it off. Luckily, I hadn't yet adjusted to the significant jump in my income, so I started sending over half my take-home to the banks every month to pay off my debt. After about a year or so of this, I was debt-free.

So, let's see, my debt was a fraction of my income. A significant fraction, but a fraction less than 1. And I spent a frugal year paying it off. Over at The Smallest Minority, Kevin gives some facts (hidden a bit in the article, as it's not the main point) about the size of the national debt (over $14 trillion) and the size of the federal income (about $2.5 trillion.) The debt is six times the take of the federal government.

So, let's see, if my debt-to-income ratio had been the same as the federal government's, I would have owed well over $200,000 rather than a "measly" $10,000. All else being equal, it would have taken me 20 years to pay off that debt. Except, of course, that all else wouldn't have been equal. A significant portion of what I was paying every month went to pay down the principal. At $200,000, I would mostly have been paying interest. (I haven't done the math, but I'd be interested to figure out if my payments would even have covered the interest. At current mortgage rates, it would have, but I was paying credit card rates.)

All this debt is pretty friggin' frightening.

The times they done changed

Last night, the guy shooting next to me had some sort of Mossberg bolt-action .22. Before we got started, he mentioned that he'd gotten it when he was a kid using S&H green stamps[1]. He walked into the store, gave them his book of green stamps, and walked out with a rifle. No background check, no concern that he was a minor, nothing.

This reminded me of the Andy Griffith Show episode where Opie tries to win something at the carnival using his shooting prowess. Here's a 10-year-old-or-so kid being handed a gun with lots of other people walking around, shooting targets, and handing the gun back to the adult. Nowadays, a 10-year-old with a gun on TV is fodder for after-school-special-quality morality plays about the evils of firearms.

[1] Boy, that took me back. I remember being a kid going to the grocery store with my mother and getting the sheets of green stamps and then later licking them and pasting them into the little booklets. I have no idea what we ever got with them, but I remember having them.

The Great Gun Hiatus

I've mentioned before that I owned no guns from 1998-2008. The reason I got rid of everything is because I was going to grad school in New Jersey. I knew enough about New Jersey to know that I didn't want to go through the hassle of proving that I was worthy of owning guns, and I decided to just do without. (Not to mention that, as a grad student, I wasn't going to have a lot of time to go shooting even if I could find someplace to shoot.)

I hadn't planned on sticking around New Jersey after grad school, but I was also planning on actually finishing my Ph.D., and we see how well that worked out. In retrospect, it was frighteningly easy to get out of the lifestyle. And this is what the gun control folks (or statists in general) rely on. They're essentially sniping the people who don't want to put up with the hassle, and as they thin out the herd, they change popular culture. People stop viewing guns as everyday objects and start seeing them as things that only police, military, and homegrown terrorists have.

At my local gun club, they open every monthly meeting by welcoming any guests and asking them to introduce themselves and say a little bit about what brought them there. At the first meeting I attended, I expressed my reason for coming thusly: "I'm here because I'm looking for someplace to shoot. I also believe it's part of my civic duty to promote responsible gun ownership." What's unfortunate about summing things up in that latter sentence is that one might naturally assume that the emphasis is on "responsible". The emphasis was actually on the "gun ownership" part. I want more people to own guns, or at least know reasonable people who own guns and don't see anything peculiar in it. I can't go head-to-head with Michael Bloomberg, but I can do my small part.

First competition

So I just got back from my first light rifle competition, which was my first real competition of any kind. My wife could tell I had fun by the smile on my face when I came home. It was something very similar to that new-shooter smile you see on people.

I certainly didn't shoot spectacularly, but I'm guessing it was a good first-time score. For four targets, I shot something like a 79/100, an 83, an 85, and an 86. No dropped shots, and a couple of 10's.

What probably had me most excited was the tips I received on stance before shooting. I could feel the difference the changes in my stance made. I'd also looked up the Appleseed-suggested six steps of firing a shot (based on a suggestion in a comment on one of my blog entries), and I was trying some of those steps, specifically the two trigger-centric steps.

Unfortunately, I was doing what you're not supposed to do, trying out new things in competition. But I think what gave me the big grin was seeing how well it had worked and looking forward to practicing these things come this weekend.

Trains

I have to admit being a fan of commuting by train, although I need to qualify that. I live in New Jersey and work in New York, so the train is the least unpleasant of my options. (The most pleasant of my options would be to have a job where I could work from home and get the hell out of Jersey.)

A train commute offers some conveniences, like the ability to work on a laptop or read a book. But though I like the conveniences, you occasionally get days like today. Commuter trains tend to work reasonably well when they're on time, but things go go hell when there are problems. My scheduled 7:03 didn't arrive at the scheduled 7:03. Around 7:08, there was an announcement that that train was cancelled due to mechanical problems, although they were going to stop that train at my station to discharge its current passengers.

That meant my chances of making it on the 7:12 were close to zero. For the 7:28, they were 50% at best, which left me a 50% chance of getting to work around 9:30, having left the house before 7:00. I decided to bag it and work from home. Which only works because I have the freedom to do so.

Repealing the 17th amendment

Interesting op-ed on filling vacant seats, but really about the 17th amendment. (Note that the text I've written here is really similar to Todd Zywicki's blog entry on the Volokh Conspiracy. They're both short texts, and I'm linking to the original, so hopefully nobody's going to accuse me of plagiarism. ;-)

My thoughts on the matter can be summed up by this comment on the thread:

The Constitution established a federal–not a national–government. The states were understood as sovereign entities that had ceded only specific powers to the feds. Having senators chosen by state legislatures was part of the system of checks and balances. Senators would have much more of an interest in defending the powers of their state government from federal encroachment.

There's actually more to that comment that I also agree with, but this is the crux of the argument.

Potential

I can't remember where I saw the comment, else I'd link to it. It was most likely a comment on The Smallest Minority, but I can't find it in the limited amount of searching I've done. The comment was related to the Castle Doctrine, and it went something like this: "In Australia, we place a higher premium on human potential, so we don't see defense of a television set as being something worth shooting someone over."

The comment got me thinking about high school physics. I remember that Eureka moment when I got it: the potential energy the brick has 100 meters above the ground equals the kinetic energy the brick has when it hits the ground. You just set the two formulas equal and solve for the mass of the brick or its velocity when it hits the ground.

The corollary to this is that, at any point in the brick's descent, the sum of its remaining potential energy and the kinetic energy it has gained so far is also equal to the potential energy it started with. You can calculate its velocity after it's fallen 50 meters based on this or do other nifty things.

So what do bricks have to do with the above-referenced Australian? Well, human potential is analogous to the potential energy that brick has. (The fact that both phrases include the word "potential" is a good hint here.) At birth, a person has potential, and at death, he has expended that potential. The sum total of his life is a measure of the achievement of that potential.[1]

And this is where I have problems with the Australian's comment. Property represents the achievement of human potential in the same way that kinetic energy represents the achievement of potential energy. At some point, some person had the potential to work a number of hours necessary to generate the income necessary to pay for that television set. Its theft is not merely the theft of some petty little thing, it's the theft of the achievement of one human's potential. This equates to the theft of that human's potential.

[1] Okay, the analogy falls apart a bit. The brick cannot fail to achieve its full potential, but humans can certainly do so.

This weekend's shooting

As I'd mentioned before, I took my wife shooting Friday night. That was actually the first time I'd shot pistol in a few months. Given my fairly tight schedule and current obsession with working on my rifle marksmanship skills, I've been completely ignoring the pistol. I'd like to participate in some of my club's pistol competitions. But then again, my commitment to see my kids as many evenings as possible makes that a bit difficult. I'm already committing to one night a week for the light rifle competition, and my monthly club meeting and monthly technical group meeting eat up some other nights during the week. As the kids get a little bit older (and my wife frees up from her 24/7-minus-whatever-relief-I-give-her daycare schedule), I'll probably feel more comfortable with doing more of these competitions.

But I meant to talk about shooting. Saturday morning's shooting wasn't too bad. Of five strings, I shot above 70 on two and would have shot above 70 on the other three if not for the one dropped shot per string. For the moment, I'm just concentrating on getting each shot in the black, which will, statistically speaking, essentially guarantee me a 70. I'm making progress, as I was shooting mid-50's a few weeks ago. I think 80's are certainly within my reach, but I'll likely need some help to do better than that. (Yeah, some people consider an 8 to be a dropped shot, but they've been doing this a lot longer than the few months I've been at it.)

This morning's shooting was abysmal. I replaced the hammer and sear in my primary 10/22 last night. I also installed an extended bolt handle. I want to think I dry-fired it at least once after installing it, but this morning, when I pulled the trigger, nothing. Not the it-went-click-instead-of-boom kind of nothing, just plain nothing. No release whatsoever. I made a quick trip home to grab a couple of brass punches and a screwdriver, disassembled and reassembled, and things started working. However, on my ninth shot, I got a failure-to-eject. The case was halfway out of the chamber, but instead of locking the bolt back and manually ejecting, I figured I'd let the rifle's ejector do the work. Close bolt, pull it back, and now the case is firmly seated in the chamber, with no possibility of manually ejecting it. Of course, I didn't have a cleaning rod on me, so that put an end to my morning's shooting. Guh.

Fortunately, my wife has offered to put the kids down, so I'm going to give it another try this evening. I'll be taking a cleaning rod, and for pure paranoia's sake, I'm taking the trigger group from my secondary 10/22, as well as the tools to install it. The first evening of my club's light rifle competition is Tuesday, so I want to make sure I have a working rifle.

A Bug's Life

I watched A Bug's Life with the kids today. (For those who haven't seen it, it's basically a retelling of The Seven Samurai using the fable of the ant and the grasshopper as a basis.) It's interesting watching this through the eyes of a gun nut/libertarian, especially in light of the recent socialized medicine brouhaha.

First off, given that that the ants outnumber the grasshoppers 100-to-1, if they weren't such a friggin' pacifist society, if any one of them actually owned a reasonable weapon, the whole grasshopper problem could have been nipped in the bud pretty quickly.

But this quote also struck me as being especially relevant: "It's not about the food, it's about keeping the ants in line." Yeah, it's not really about providing health care to every last person in the country, it's about taking control of 1/6th of our economy.

Shooting with the wife

I used to go shooting with my wife (well, at the time, she was my girlfriend) back before the Great Gun Hiatus (1998-2008.) She didn't go shooting with me every time I went, but she probably came with me once or twice a month. And she certainly wasn't the gun nut I was, but she definitely enjoyed it.

She'd arranged to have a babysitter tonight so we could go out to dinner, but forgot about it until the sitter showed up just as we were finishing eating. So instead of going out for dinner, we went shooting. It was the first time for her in over ten years, and she did pretty well. We were shooting a .22 pistol, so there wasn't that much recoil or noise, but she wasn't flinching at all. Her consistency was pretty good -- she was shooting very consistently in the lower left quadrant of the target.

She's looking forward to going more often.

Chicago at the bat

Oh, somewhere in this favored land the sun is shining bright,
The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light,
And somewhere men are laughing, and little children shout;
But there is no joy in Chicago -- mighty Daley has struck out.

Annoying

Guh. There's nothing quite so annoying as having the alarm set for 6:45 and being woken up by your three-year-old at 5:45. Damn kids. (Okay, damn kids that I love dearly, even at 5:45 AM.)

Speaking of sleep, I have twins. What do the two have in common? Well, in the first few months after the twins were born, the two appeared to be mutually exclusive. If you want to know what stress is, try feeding one twin while the other is crying to be fed when you're a few weeks' short of sleep and trying to keep everyone quiet so your wife can get a few hours of sleep in the other room.

My wife had stopped working when we had kids, so I was the one who had to get up in the morning to go to work. She tried for a week or so to handle the night shift on her own, but that simply resulted in her not getting any sleep for a week or so. After that, I started getting up at 3AM so she could maybe get a couple of hours of uninterrupted sleep before I left for work. This made things a little better, but after about a month of this, we broke down and got someone to come in to do the night shift. It was really frigging expensive, but we were pretty desperate at that point.

As an example of how desperate we were: my wife is quintessential mama bear, very protective of her children. Under normal circumstances, she would have needed a lot of time to develop the trust in someone necessary to leave her children in their care. The first night we had a night nurse, my wife was in bed about five minutes after the doorbell rang.