I called the authorized Kimber dealers within 50 miles of my house (all four of them) and not one of them has Ultra Carry handguns in stock. I actually visited the one closest to my house, and the only 1911s they have are SDS Imports, Rock Island Armory, etc. They said that they can’t order any, they get what they get when they get them. The only two options they offered were buying something on Gunbroker, and having them do the transfer, or they would put my name on a waiting list. That option would be approximately a 14 month list.
The Kimber dealer about 25 miles away said the only Kimbers they had in stock were .380 ACP and 9mm.
It was a similar story with the .44 Revolver. The Smith and Wesson dealer said that the only thing they are reliably getting are M&P tactical Tupperware in 9mm. It seems that dealers are having trouble with parts supply keep up with demand, so they are concentrating on the most popular models.
Who knew that the most realistic and fastest items on the wish list would be the Ed Brown or the NFA weapons? That brings to mind a question: Is everyone or anyone else seeing the same sort of thing where you are? If so, is it a demand thing, a supply problem, or something else?
It’s just that simple. I don’t care if a man wants to have sex with other men. I don’t care if a man wants to dress as a woman. I don’t care if a man thinks that he is a woman. Whatever. You do you. What I care about is that you don’t force me to play along, and I especially want you to stay away from kids.
So when I see a man who thinks that he is a woman and dresses like a cat in order to give shows to children, especially when he openly states that he is “delivering children-focused programming with the goal of helping children develop positive relationships with themselves and others,” I have a problem with it. This mother should be investigated:
South Philly resident Mishana Klein has been taking her 7-year-old daughter to the story time since it first started five years ago. When her daughter first attended she “used to be really self-conscious … and now she’s so confident when she struts along with Maria Topcatt,”
Meanwhile, they are using public schools to indoctrinate children in the first grade. At least here in Florida, it’s illegal for them to use your tax dollars to groom first grade children for being molested by men who think that they are women and are dressed like cats in order to lure children.
Meanwhile, the Columbus, Ohio police department hears about a drag queen story hour for kids, and VOLUNTEERS to provide security, even though they were expressly told by the groomer freaks that they weren’t needed or wanted.
I don’t understand why the cops want to support the very people who want to defund them. Seeing that there have been violent political protests and that police are actively providing support and security for the leftists, I am forced to move Columbus from Zone 1 to Zone 3.
Don’t forget that Zone 3 is a zone where violence has has taken place with little to no attempt at mitigating response from local authorities. Additionally, police and/or prosecutors are likely to bring the full weight of the law down upon those who attempt to defend themselves from these actors, or those who speak out against them.
Athletes are more prone to sudden cardiac death and arrhythmias than nonathletes. Sudden cardiac death in athletes is rare in the absence of heart disease, with the exception of commotio cordis. It is common enough amongst athletes that commotio cordis should be suspected if an athlete collapses suddenly after a chest impact and is unresponsive. So what is commotio cordis?
The heart is driven by the movement of electrolytes across the cardiac cell membranes. That movement is controlled in part by electrical signals, in part by pressure differences, and in part by small channels in the cell membranes that open and close, called ion channels. This complex dance can be measured by watching the electrical impulses that are caused by the movement of those electrolytes. That organized movement of charges causes organized muscle contraction, causing the heart to pump blood. It looks like this:
In the above diagram, note that each peak is labeled, and each of the small squares in the horizontal plane represents 40 milliseconds. You will note that the normal cardiac cycle lasts about 360 milliseconds in our example.
An impact to the area of the chest that includes the cardiac silhouette during the 10 to 30 milliseconds before the highest peak of the T wave that causes a pressure wave to wash over the heart, if that pressure wave is between 4.8 and 9.6 psi, can stretch some of those ion channels to the point where some will open when they are not supposed to. (Mostly the K+atp channels) That in turn causes some electrolytes to move, creating random movement of electrical charges. It changes a heart rhythm from the organized one we are all familiar with to the one below:
In order for this to happen, the impact has to occur within a narrow timeframe (20 ms wide out of 360 ms total) and within a narrow pressure range. Too low, and nothing happens, too high and you get a cardiac contusion and tissue damage.
With these rather strict parameters, the phenomenon still manages to happen about 20 times per year in the US, usually with fatal results. It’s mechanism is well documented and mostly understood. More than 90 percent of the time, the victims are men. More than 85% of the time, the victims are between the ages of 13 and 20. This is mostly because the vast majority of people who participate in contact sports are males between 13 and 20 years old.
There is a genetic correlation. People with known long QT syndrome in their family history are known to be more susceptible to this- for example, Brugada syndrome. We all have heard of athletes periodically dropping dead during and after practice. It’s one of the reasons why high school and college athletic facilities are equipped with AEDs and why some states require that athletes be screened for long QT before they can compete in school sports.
Look, the vax is certainly causing some unexplained deaths. If you want to be convincing, you have to be able to tell the difference between what is a sudden death and what is normal background. You aren’t going to convince people if you are sounding like an ill informed moron with a political axe to grind. Think of how the anti-gunners look when they start talking about “shoulder things that go up.”
Be informed. Don’t come across like a paranoid moron.
Not every person who died in 2020 died of COVID. That was ridiculous, and the claims of COVID deaths made those claiming them look stupid. Similarly, not every sudden death happening now is because of the COVID vax.
Yet I have seen many on the right this morning claiming that the collapse of Damar Hamlin was due to the jab. No, it likely wasn’t. For those who aren’t aware, an NFL football player took a hit to the chest in a game last night before collapsing in cardiac arrest.
What likely happened was a phenomenon called commotio cordis. This condition is caused by an athlete taking a blow to the chest while the heart is in its relative refractory period. The heart enters an arrythmia called “ventricular fibrillation” and the person has no pulse. The condition is usually fatal without immediate CPR, followed by immediate access to defibrillation and Advanced Cardiac Life Support. (ACLS)
A similar thing happened in the NHL to Chris Pronger, who collapsed during a 1998 hockey game after taking a blow to the chest from a hockey puck. He went into cardiac arrest. You can see a video of it here (I would embed it, but YouTube doesn’t allow this video to be embedded). Events like this are more common than you would think.
I have been watching tons of conservatives on social media being just as dogmatic as the left was about COVID on this topic. Don’t make yourself look stupid by trying to pontificate on things that you have no knowledge of, simply so you can make a political point. It weakens your argument and makes you look like a tool.
So many people are trying to use this event to springboard their agendas. I saw an NFL player on TV saying that this is why they make millions, because they are putting their lives on the line to play football and this is why the salary cap for the NFL should be raised. He is saying that most players don’t get many years to play, and the risk is high. Keep in mind that the league minimum salary is $705,000 a year, the average player salary is $2.7 million a year, and the highest paid player makes $31 million a year. When you say things like that, you make yourself look stupid.
So many bloggers did a 2022 in review post that it was boring. That’s why I didn’t do one. Instead, I thought it would be more fun to do a 2023 prospectus post. List what I would like to accomplish this year.
My wife doesn’t like SCUBA diving, my son no longer dives with me, and I haven’t heard from my other dive buddy in years. As a result, I can count the number of times I have been diving in the past 5 years on one hand. I have about $10k in SCUBA gear that sits unused in storage. The vast majority of my fun money goes into shooting now, and that is a huge change from ten years ago. I think shooting is where most of my wish list is going to go.
I have enough guns that the wife complains and says I have so many that I don’t shoot most of them now. I will grant her that. I have a few favorites, and aside from project guns like the skirmish rifle, I only shoot my favorites. Still, it’s fun to buy something new or at least different. My in-laws think I am nuts for owning as many as I do. Compared to my gun shooting friends, I don’t think I have all that many guns. Owning a lot of guns is a relative term.
Starting in 2020, I began making my own guns from 80 percent lowers. That’s been taken from me as a hobby. If I am going to be a manufacturer, I might as well pay the SOT and start making machine guns. I would do that, but I don’t want my house getting inspected and raided by the assholes from ATF.
I own pump actions, semi-autos, break opens, lever actions, and revolvers. Shotguns, rifles, PDWs, rifle caliber handguns, and all sorts of other handguns. I don’t want any more long guns for the time being, simply because it’s more of a pain in the ass to shoot them than it is a handgun.
So a handgun it is. I currently have, or have had, handguns from Beretta, Glock, Smith and Wesson, Sig, Taurus, Ruger, and more. Been there, done that. There are two noticeable holes in my current collection: I would like to own a .44 caliber revolver. I have been thinking of buying a Smith and Wesson Model 629 in .44 Magnum. I already own a 629 686 in .357 Magnum, and it’s fun to shoot. Having one in .44 Magnum would also allow me to shoot .44 Special. So there is that.
The other thing I have been thinking about is a gun I already owned four examples of, and found them wanting. The 1911 didn’t work well for me when I had them before, but I confess that I am drawn to the 1911, purely because I find them to be aesthetically pleasing. They are just beautiful guns.
I want to give the 1911 platform another chance. Perhaps I just need a really good one. I am thinking that it would be cool to have a custom Ed Brown Kobra Carry. Sure, it’s a $3,700 handgun and I know that I was against buying them in the past, but I have every other handgun I want (except that .44). It’s a beautiful handgun, and Ed Brown has a stellar reputation. It’s just a hefty price tag.
The problem is that I don’t want to put down that kind of scratch until I can get a reliable 1911 for less and make sure that I am not wasting my money. So perhaps I can start with another Kimber. If so, I would try a Kimber Ultra CDP. They “only” cost around $1200 and would let me try out another 1911 without laying down two weeks’ pay to get it.
COMSEC is a type of INFOSEC. Your information needs to be secure from disclosure, and I have been doing quite a bit of research on that over the past few days.
A few days ago, I posted about INFOSEC and using a password wallet. Some interesting ideas were shared, good questions asked, and so I thought I would share some thoughts on the concept of passwords and password managers.
The basic theory behind passwords is simple: a password is two people attempting to ensure that one of them is the person that is authorized to access the files or other electronic resources that the second person is the custodian of. The process is called authentication, and the use of a user name/password combination is the first, simplest, and most common method of user authentication. It’s also one of the most insecure, for reasons we will explore.
The things that make username/password authentication insecure are rooted in a couple of things, one of them being the users themselves. All of them. A user can be phished, hacked, or otherwise compromised. There are ways to mitigate most of the risks. What are the risks?
The simple brute force attack is the most basic of all brute force attacks. The bad actor tries to guess the user’s password without the employment of software tools. The attacker relies on trying out commonly used, weak passwords such as 123456, qwerty, password, and password123. Unfortunately, the simple brute force attack can be pretty effective, because many people continue to use weak and otherwise poor passwords to secure their online accounts.
Computer programs used for brute force attacks can check anywhere from 10,000 to 1 billion passwords per second. If your password is random, it will take an average of 8,000 years to guess a 12 character password with even the fastest computers. One type of computerized brute force attack relies on words found in the dictionary. This sort of brute force attack is called a dictionary attack and uses a vast number of common words and their variations. To do that, hackers use software that can make thousands of guesses every second using dictionary databases.
Then there is a hybrid attack. A hybrid attack combines a dictionary attack with a simple brute force attack for a better chance of success. Often a hybrid attack is utilized once the attacker already knows the username of its victim. You see this one when a data breach has released user names and email addresses of a company.
Choose a complex password. It should be made of upper and lower case letters, numbers, and symbols. Doing that means you start with a base of 52 letters, 10 numbers, and up to 33 symbols, for a total base of 95.
Choose a password of at least 12 characters. Doing it this way means you are raising the base (95) to the power of the number of characters. So a 12 character password means that there are 540,360,090,000,000,000,000,000 possible combinations of passwords- that’s 540 sextillion possible combinations (5.4×10^23).
You should avoid the use of common words and common passwords. This will mitigate the risk of dictionary, hybrid, and simple brute force attacks.
The suggestion was made of using a 6 word password generated using diceware. The thing that I laughed at from the diceware website was “Do not use a computer program or electronic dice generator. There is no easy way to be sure they are random enough.” That one statement was enough to tell me that the website’s author doesn’t know what they are talking about. They are worried that a random number generator isn’t random enough, while at the same time ignoring the fact that their word list is public and uses words from the dictionary. This means it will not be as secure as using random characters, no matter how random your word selection is, the use of dictionary words compromises the randomness of the password. If they know you made your password from this word list, you are screwed. If they don’t, then the randomness with which you picked the words from the list doesn’t matter.
The last type of attack is called a rainbow table attack. Websites or apps don’t store passwords in plaintext. What they do is encrypt user passwords with hashes. Once the password is used for logging in, it is immediately converted to a hash. The next time the user logs in using their passwords, the server checks whether the password matches the previously created hash. If the two hashes match, the user is then authenticated. The tables used to store password hashes are known as rainbow tables.
In most instances, the hacker launching a rainbow table attack would need to have the rainbow table at their disposal. Often these can be bought on the dark web or stolen in a data breach. During the attack, bad actors use the table to decrypt the password hashes and so gain access to a plaintext password. The big risk here is not only the access to that account, but the other accounts of those who reuse passwords from one site to another are now at risk.
The security of the password is restricted to the security of the custodian of the information that the password is securing. If you have an account with Home Depot, then they get hacked because they have shitty security, the bad guys now have your credentials. Having a secure password means nothing if the company you are doing business with doesn’t take security seriously.
Choosing a good password is just the first step in securing your online data. Now you have to store that password in a format that makes it easy to retrieve your password, while simultaneously making it secure from disclosure to unauthorized parties. That will be a future post.
Southwest airlines cancelled flights over the Christmas holiday. The passengers in Nashville who were stranded at the gate by these cancelled flights were standing at the counter, wanting solutions. What they got was a cop threatening to arrest them. What happened was this:
The flight was cancelled. The ticket agent didn’t want to deal with irate customers, and instructed police to have the people removed. The theory that the cop is using is: The flight was cancelled, therefore your ticket has also been cancelled. Since you can’t be in the sterile area without a ticket, you are now trespassing.
WOW: Nashville airport cop threatens to arrest stranded passengers who are standing in line at a Southwest counter to rebook their cancelled flights (1/2) pic.twitter.com/UARLErYdSZ
— Brad Batt for TN State Sanity ✊🏼✊🏽✊🏾 (@bradbatt) December 28, 2022
The only problem is that this is a bullshit argument. The ticket represents a contract between the passenger and the airline. There was an offer, an acceptance of that offer, and valuable consideration changed hands. The fact that one party (the airline) failed to perform under the terms of that contract doesn’t mean that the contract no longer exists, nor does it mean that the person who is the victim of this nonperformance is a criminal. What is happening here is the cop is inserting himself into a civil matter to the benefit of the party that has breached the contract.
That ticket is still a valid contract. The fact that the airline has chosen not to perform (no matter if that is a good reason or not) doesn’t cause the ticket to cease to be a contract. A person who is merely standing in line and inquiring as to what the other party is going to do to remedy the situation is not a crime, nor is it evidence of a crime.
Why do airlines get special police protection? Can I call the cops if McDonald’s fails to include the fries in my combo meal? Can McDonald’s call the cops if I pay for food that they can’t deliver, but I am still standing there with a valid receipt, waiting for my food or at least a refund?
For years, airlines have overbooked, oversold, and failed to honor the terms of their contracts. It is long past time that people demand a change to these practices. What other industry would get away with selling more of a product than they are capable of delivering? Can a car dealer sell more cars than they have or can reasonably provide?
This cop is an asshole, but then again most of them are. The Nashville airport has issued an apology, but that doesn’t change the fact that police officers have no business inserting themselves into a contract dispute. Honestly, it is stuff like this that makes me think perhaps we WOULD be better off if the police were defunded.
If you own a rental property in Florida, today is the day that a new law goes into effect. Owners of rental property consisting of 5 or more units (including hotels) will have to conduct background checks of all employees, and will have to keep a log of everyone who is given a key to rental units and requires that the key be returned once the work in that unit is complete.
This law is a response to a 19 year old woman that was murdered by the maintenance man of her apartment complex. Even if this law had been in place then, it would have prevented nothing. The maintenance man had no criminal history.
Also, nothing in the law prevents a person with murderous intent from making a copy of the key and then using that copy six months later.
Of course, he didn’t cut ALL of the gun violence out, because then even fewer people would have watched his movie. After all, he made millions from ‘gun violence’ when he directed, produced, co-wrote, or otherwise was involved in movies like Dark Angel, True Lies, Titanic (which had gunplay), the Aliens series of movies, The Abyss, Point Break, Alita: Battle Angel, and the 33 movies, TV shows, video games, and other stories of The Terminator series.
No, he left plenty of gun play in Avatar 2, even though he claims to hate guns so much that he moved from North America to New Zealand because “they just banned all assault rifles two weeks after that horrific mosque shooting a couple of years ago” but doesn’t hate the fact that he is making millions of dollars off of movies with gunplay in them.
Look, I would still respect Mr. Cameron even as I disagreed with him over this issue, if he took a principled stance and refused to use any firearms at all. That isn’t what he does. He uses enough scenes involving firearms to make money, then claims to be “sick to his stomach” about “gun violence” even as he becomes wealthy by using them.
