Don't rip off my head and crap down my neck. Private Joker is that idiot over there.

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 04:55 PM | Comments (75)
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Via Mare at the Splitters comes this heartwarming tale of solidarity among the very small population of manufacturers of rifles chambered for .50 BMG.

XXXX,

Yes, I got the message and tried to return the call but got no answer. I appreciate your interest in our BFG-50A; IÂ’m sure it would be an excellent addition to your departmentÂ’s arsenal. Unfortunately, we have a policy of selling to state law enforcement agencies only what is allowed to be sold to private citizens in that state. Since the passage of the NY SAFE act, the BFG-50A is considered an assault weapon and as such is no longer available to private citizens in the state of New York. Therefore we have to respectfully decline to supply your department with BFG-50A rifles.

Regards,
Mark Serbu

Of course, Ronnie Barrett won't sell to them either.

The reverse-boycott continues apace. Well done, Mr. Serbu.

Also continuing apace ... the Ace-a-Thon. Hobo disposal is expensive, you know.

Posted by: andy at 03:45 PM | Comments (236)
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So far. As in, I'm so far down in this hole I cannot possibly dig out of it.

A smart person said once, "you bracket don't mean a thing until you call an upset".

Correct picks. Points. Possible points.

1 laceyunderalls's Legit Bracket laceyunderalls 30 of 41 37 167
1 NJRob's Championship Bracket NJRob 30 of 41 37 167
1 Nodakdrunkhobos Joe Sharpe 31 of 41 37 155
4 bp Bill Pohlmeier 30 of 41 36 166
4 From Sixteen ThePoet 29 of 41 36 162
4 The Viilage Idiot John 30 of 41 36 170
4 CDR M's Squidtastic Bracket CDR M 29 of 41 36 170
4 jonjo54 Jon Gurr 29 of 41 36 142
4 Danno's Bracket Dan 29 of 41 36

updated: my bad, my bad

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 11:24 AM | Comments (348)
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Full text here, its about 500 pages of spendy, spendy, spendy

I wasn't but to page 16 or so and was shaking my head in disbelief over the shit we're spending BIG CASH on. Page 11 for example - Dept Ag can spend over $1B buying up more land. WTF? If you're strapped, the last thing you need to do is be blowing money on more land, which removes it from the local tax base by the way.

It goes on and on...

We're not even trying to trim a little around the edges. The Sequester is a complete fraud.

Posted by: Open Blogger at 10:23 AM | Comments (312)
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Good morning morons and moronettes and welcome to the Sunday Morning Book Thread here at the award-winning AoSHQ.

This is anniversary number one of this book thread, would you believe it? On March 25th of last year, I put up a simple "this is a book thread" post. I was surprised by how many of you spoke up publicly that you liked the book thread and wanted it to continue. So here we are.

More Retro Ace

OK, so Maetenloch's "retro ace" ONT of a few nights ago got me thinking about when it was that I first showed up here making a nuisance of myself. Using Google's advanced search, I found this comment from June 2005 and this even earlier one from April of that year. Wow. I mean, think about it. That was nearly EIGHT years ago. And the funny thing is, I don't even remember where or how I came upon this site. I don't remember ever hearing anyone say, "hey, you should check out ace and his smart military blog" or anything like that. I probably just clicked on a link on another conservative site. It very well could have been in a post over on Allahpundit, as that was back in the day when he had his own blog worth reading, which I checked frequently.
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Posted by: Open Blogger at 07:15 AM | Comments (123)
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A Reminder of What We're Up Against

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past. ~ George Orwell, 1984

As a callback to that stupid "Earth Hour" thing last night, please allow me to veer from the topic of guns for a brief second to talk about sticks ... particularly, Michael Mann & Co.'s "Hockey Stick" graph. Everyone always focuses on the blade of the graph, where the temperature is shown going up, Up, UP, but the real magic of this particular piece of fraud is in the handle. That's where Mann erased the medieval warm period and the little ice age to make it look like current temperatures are out of line with historical norms.

About the same time time Mann was concocting this fiction, an "historian" named Michael Bellesiles was engaged in a similar effort with firearms. Bellesiles sought to make today's level of gun ownership look unprecedented by erasing the record of America's historical level of gun ownership using methods that were farcical when they weren't outright fraud (see the explanation by Ross McKitrick, co-breaker of the Hockey Stick, beginning on page 23 of this PDF for a brief but devastating explanation). This passage is among my favorite things ever:

Bellesiles claimed to have examined hundreds of San Francisco probate records from the 1850s. When confronted with the fact that all the San Francisco probate records had been destroyed in the 1906 earthquake, Bellesiles claimed that he obtained them from the Contra Costa County Historical Society. But the Society stated that it did not possess the requisite records. Bellesiles soon resorted to ad hominem, claiming that the amateur critics could not be trusted because they lack credentials.

Maybe Michael Bellesiles is Michael Mann?

Unlike Mann, whose work is worshipped and protected by the Gaia cult, Bellesiles' fraud was uncovered, and his study was tossed in the wastebin. But human beings' capacity for self-delusion is a powerful thing, it seems.

I've been wanting to talk about Bellesiles in a gun thread for a while, and in doing the research, I almost fell out of my chair when I ran across this piece in the notorious right-wing publication Inside Higher Ed.

It may be the most striking and provocative bit of prose concerning a scholarly book to have circulated in some while. The passage in question runs to one paragraph appearing about two-thirds of the way down the page of a note accompanying the page proofs for 1877: AmericaÂ’s Year of Living Violently by Michael A. Bellesiles, to be published by the New Press in August. Here it is:

A major new work of popular history, 1877 is also notable as the comeback book for a celebrated U.S. historian. Michael Bellesiles is perhaps most famous as the target of an infamous ‘swiftboating’ campaign by the National Rifle Association, following the publication of his Bancroft Prize-winning book Arming America (Knopf, 2000) -- ‘the best kind of non-fiction,’ according to the Chicago Tribune -- which made daring claims about gun ownership in early America. In what became the history profession’s most talked-about and notorious case of the past generation, Arming America was eventually discredited after an unprecedented and controversial review called into question its sources, charges which Bellesiles and his many prominent supporters have always rejected.

These sentences have absorbed and rewarded my attention for days on end. They are a masterpiece of evasion. The paragraph is, in its way, quite impressive. Every word of it is misleading, including “and” and “the.”

Read the whole thing. Even though the author clearly is on the opposite side of this issue than I am, he at least doesn't resort to the machinations that Bellesiles did to get there. And read that McKitrick piece, too. Then consider that people (like the publisher interviewed in the IHE piece) defend Bellesiles to this day. Like modern environmentalism, hating guns and, by extension, gun owners and the NRA is a matter of faith on the left.

Gun Of The Week

(answer below)

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Posted by: andy at 06:12 AM | Comments (283)
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When I was a boy, my mother would tell me the same thing every morning as I woke up. She'd say, "Ben, don't ever hire a prostitute from Floirda as there is a 50/50 chance they'll bite your genitals."

I'll always miss my old mother. Not enough to visit her, but still.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:29 AM | Comments (246)
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Light 'em up morons, it's Earf Hour (just ended here on the East Coast but you other time zone folks can play). Turn on all your lights, piss off your crunchy granola libtard neighbor and help prevent the next ice age or something. Of course, turning off the lights really achieves nothing. more...

Posted by: CDR M at 05:42 PM | Comments (849)
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A lot worse.

According to people involved with both campaigns, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich came close to running on a unity ticket in the primaries.

As Mitt Romney struggled in the weeks leading up to the Michigan primary, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum nearly agreed to form a joint “Unity Ticket” to consolidate conservative support and topple Romney. “We were close,” former Representative Bob Walker, a Gingrich ally, says. “Everybody thought there was an opportunity.” “It would have sent shock waves through the establishment and the Romney campaign,” says John Brabender, Santorum’s chief strategist.

If you haven't totally suppressed your memory of the 2012 primaries, you'll recall that Mitt and Rick split Iowa, Mitt took New Hampshire, and Newt won big in South Carolina. Newt looked to solidify himself as the one and only viable not-Mitt candidate in the race. But, an awful debate performance and a Mitt Romney attack ad barrage sealed Newt's fate in the great state of Florida.

The Santorum campaign, seeing its chance to be the next not-Mitt candidate, decided to approach the Gingrich campaign with an idea. An idea so crazy it just might work would have never worked and was microcosm of the idiotic nature of the Santorum campaign.

Brabender(w/ the Santorum campaign) wasn’t short on moxie: He wanted Gingrich to declare in the middle of a nationally televised debate that he was dropping out and endorsing Santorum. “I couldn’t write an ad to match the political theater that would have created,” he says.

Obviously team Gingrich couldn't accept that offer, so Gingrich countered with an equally sane and grounded offer offer that was equally stupid.

He proposed that both men join forces but remain in the race, each concentrating on the states where he matched up best against Romney. Gingrich thought he could carry Georgia, Delaware, Washington, and Wisconsin (from which his wife, Callista, hails). Santorum would focus on other states in the South and the upper Midwest. But there was a catch. “The appeal of a Unity Ticket was strength in numbers,” says Kellyanne Conway, Gingrich’s pollster.

That's right. A unity ticket. How would it have worked in practice? Who knows. It doesn't look like the Santorum or Gingrich campaign really thought it out that far.

Can any of you guess why the unity ticket never came about?

But the negotiations collapsed in acrimony because Gingrich and Santorum could not agree on who would get to be president.

Of course you guessed that, we all did.

It's a shame to look back and think we had the opportunity to lose to Obama by 10% and passed it up.

You're welcome to follow me on twitter.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:10 PM | Comments (324)
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To make up for the missing thread last week, we are here today to give you DOUBLE THE COSPLAY!! And there is gaming also but whatevs

Gaming below..... more...

Posted by: Gang of Gaming Morons! at 08:20 AM | Comments (146)
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