Fix F1 Racing

F1 racing has just announced on Motorsport.com yesterday that they were now adding body panels to cars which slow them down in exchange for more advertising space. F1 is a business, but its foremost a competitive racing series. If they're making them worse, why do they expect people to watch? And ticket prices are really high, often one race per country, and the best seat is on TV. I've been following IndyCar and F1 since the 80's, when I was old enough to start having more opinions than "NO!".

F1 has been through a lot. I loved a lot of things about it. They used to have wonderful screaming V12 engines, and stop for a splash and go of fuel and tires every 15-20 laps. Accidents in the pits happened, but it was racing. They had fire extinguishers and ambulances. F1 has gotten a lot safer over the years. A crash at nearly 200 mph lets the driver get out and walk away afterwards. That's great engineering. The problem today is they've made the engines too small and unreliable, and shoved a couple hundred pounds of lithium battery right behind the driver's back, leading to actual burns from the heat according to live driver reports. They have these batteries to give a torque boost so the F1 cars can pass each other under certain circumstances. Its hackneyed. They also force drivers to be starving in order to win races.

They've also removed cylinders from V12 down to V10, then V8. Now they're V6 engines, and severely limited in capacity and RPM and fuel supply. Its not as fun as it used to be. Modern drivers with a simpler V8 or turbo V6 and no hybrid and bring back the variable geometry aerodynamics (moving wings and flaps) would return straight line speed and better cornering, and when the flaps fail, a wreck.

In 2014 after years of good safety, following decades of two deaths per year in F1, a driver died in a freak accident of extremely unusual circumstances. There was a typhoon, the track got flooded, a car slid off the track and the tractor came out to lift it off the course. Under Yellow, a driver going around the corner lost control and hit the tractor in a really awkward angle and died when his head hit the boom in JUST the wrong place. Its a million to one accident, if not worse odds. Ridiculous, really. F1 has responded to this accident and lawsuit by the drivers family by ruining the cars, adding a roll bar to the top of the car. Alternative option is a windshield, which has more drag. Both options are ruining the car. F1 is OPEN TOP racing. Open top, open wheel, no fenders, maximum lightness, minimum safety. Like bullfighting, F1 racing is supposed to be risking your life. It isn't supposed to be safe. I suspect the drivers ghost is pissed at his family for ruining the sport he loved.

If you want to race under a roof, go to Le Mans. Or IMSA, which came back after a couple decades rest. There's even a series based on it, called ALMS (American Le Mans Series). The high end of computer simular racing is the game Forza (versions 3-6) racing. The video game is based on ALMS, and the cars are licensed through the series. Those are fun to drive in a simulator, and the race tracks  are interesting, what you can see of them. IMSA has been around for decades. I used to watch IMSA races with my Dad, and they were fun. Paul Newman raced in IMSA at Sears Point, which is the name of the track near Sonoma, CA. They gave it a bunch of different names since then, but its always been Sears Point, named for the rancher who sold the land at the south end of the Sonoma Mountains. Its a hard track to watch a race because its a road course, and somewhat narrow. IndyCar finishes its series at Sears Point in September/October. I think they'd benefit from a few more races in the series, and more of the tracks getting smoothed so speeds come up. Some of the tracks are pretty bumpy, and that hurts the racing. This is a really good idea, track owners. You can then sell more race day tickets to private car owners who want to see how fast their M6 goes. The Nurburgring isn't the only place to drive really fast. We could do more of that here. Willow Springs has track days.

If F1 is going to become IMSA with smaller engines and international courses where they demand a billion $$ in fees for the right to have the F1 circus race on your track, I just don't see much of a future for the series. It got bought out by Liberty Media but they haven't fixed all its problems. They're keeping the batteries. They're keeping the high ticket prices. They added rollbars and ruined the spirit of the racing series. The haven't even considered returning to refueling and getting back better engines. Its all about the tire compounds and pit delta. Boring!

F1 could save itself if it did the following:

1. No Roll Bars. Death is always a possibility. 
2. Active Aero, not just the rear wing. 
3. Refuelling. 
4. Choices of engine format: V8 normally aspirated or V6 with turbo, and increase to 2 L. Possibly more to get the torque back. 
5. Allow drivers to have healthy body weight. Most are starving. 

In comparison, for open wheel racing in the Americas, we have IndyCar. IndyCar is also a cart racing series, and use bigger enginers than F1, which also means they're faster, despite not looking like it. They have better aero downforce so can pass easier, and go faster on the straights than F1, a fact which is embassing to the World Motor Sport FIA bosses. The problem with IndyCar is their ability to promote themselves isn't as good, and their camerawork isn't as good either. These are fixable problems and will probably continue to improve in time. 

A local boy from the town where I live won the Indy 500 race in his rookie year after a couple years being 3rd fiddle in F1. He convinced Takuma Sato to join him on the Andretti Team (Michael Andretti is the son of legendary F1 world champion Mario Andretti) which runs something like 6 cars. Sato won the Indy 500 last year. 

IndyCar is also a business, and the cars have hilarious sponsors specific to the USA or Canada. In the old days they used to have some races in other countries, if I remember correctly, but most were here in the USA, within reasonable overnight driving distance of most of the population for at least one race. That and all the TV coverage has kept the series alive, even through its problems with Indianapolis Speedway suing the series, and drivers refusing to compete in unsafe cars. Stuff has happened which hurt the series. The current limitation for IndyCar is all of them race on a single-maker chassis, and a choice of maybe 3 engines. Its not as interesting as F1 used to be, back when there were more choices and not so much obvious and boring cheating, though to be fair, F1 has always had cheating. And some teams become dominant and stay there for years. Red Bull used to win all the races. Then it was Ferrari. Now its Mercedes. It isn't fun to watch and the cameras have been ignoring the leaders of the F1 races til the final lap. This is a clue that the interest in F1 is waning. 

IndyCars have largely identical cars, but different drivers. They have a running start rather than a standing start like F1, which is less exciting, but also less likely to cause a crash. Identical cars keeps the cars close together. Winning is based on driver skill and mechanical circumstances like damage or blowing an engine or using too much fuel. Rossi won at Indy 500 because he did an economy run and coasted to a stop just past the finish line, which is what matters. Being first is still being first. There's also tire wear and fuel stop dropping your position, since the stops are relatively long compared to the 2-3 SECONDS in F1, which only swaps tires and sometimes a nose. 

Indycar is a different sort of event from F1. When you watch IndyCar they basically throw a big concert and party first, then you watch the race, then there's another party after. In comparison F1 is almost religious. Before the start it has a model-holding-a-number-sign by each car, and the crews of mysterious mechanic-priests in their identical uniforms scamper around doing mysterious priestly mechanic things. News crews from around the world circulate. There's announcers for the major languages there. This being the USA, we see the English language broadcast, which is mostly English announcers in their booth, and their lad on the ground with a camera crew, chasing down drivers after their car breaks during the race. Then the drivers get in and strap on all the safety harnesses. A mechanic with a battery and spinner rod starts the car, which has been running preheated cooland fluid to warm up the engine and get the parts to unseize, since at room temperature they are locked up. They have to be hot to move. The cars do a parade lap, and the tires previously under heating blankets get cold. That part is important. 

Then they line up the cars in order and some officials certify they're lined up right for the start. Then red lights glow one after another and when the red lights vanish, the race starts. This start is unique to F1. They go from a resting stop to 100 mph by the first corner, sometimes even faster. Their tires try to warm up in that distance so they are sticky enough to grip around the corner, but by the first or second corner, several cars will be wrecked. This is very typical, that first corner wreck. It has to be heart breaking for all those teams having gotten to this point and then the driver either hits or gets hit by some other driver with a similar problem or minding their own race. The course often goes to yellow behind the relatively slow AMG Mercedes pace car. The cars line up behind it, in order. Some pull into the pits to change tires and go to the back of the column and will need to pass cars, who will also eventually pit and lose positions. Then pace car goes off the course when those first wrecks are cleared and then they race again, until the next wreck leaves debris on the track. The debris is sharp, and punctures tires. Race series are LOST on getting a flat tire, or that first corner wreck. At Singapore last year, Vettel and his teammate Raikonnen drove around a slightly slower car and wrecked all three, removing Ferrari from contention in the series for the remaining two dozen races. Hamilton, ahead of them, won. 

This is the crash that prevented Vettel from having a chance to win the world F1 championship. He tried. He got close, but Hamilton won by not being in this wreck. 

Not all car racing series start the above two ways. Le Mans used to have the drivers RUN to their cars from the pit wall, jump in, start the car, and put on their belts as they drive. Le Mans is amazing, and dangerous, and the track has been slowed down but there are American tracks with a similar layout where the cars hit 170 mph for a minute and then slow WAY down to make the turn. Le Mans actually used some farm roads closed for the race day, and the houses it goes past are actual people's homes, not set decorations. Its only two days a year, so why not? Lots of racing series have some city street courses, including F1 and IndyCar. Le Mans is one 24 hour race a year. F1 drivers who are getting mocked in F1 can win at Le Mans and shut down the complaints. Sometimes cars aren't very good. Fernando Alonso has been suffering through Honda's engineering problems with the Hybrid engine. Keep in mind that Honda won F1 with its first car engine because Soichiro Honda liked racing. He also built scooter motors for the SuperCub and the CVCC engine and later 4-cylinder that made his car company famous. But his first engine was for F1, and they won for a long time with variations of it. A great engineer can do that. Not so much today. With Soichiro dead, Honda is full of apologies and excuses and their engines have to be detuned to "slow" or explode. That's not good engineering. Alonso has paid the price, and in non-hybrid Honda engines he's lead laps at 240 mph at Indy 500... at which point the engine exploded. So did another Honda on that same team. Sigh. At least it didn't just stop because it was tired like in F1. When a car stops for no obvious reason during an F1 race the audience jeers and boos. This is another thing F1 organizers should pay more attention to. So far, F1 has been a negative demonstration of hybrid car technology. It has shown it to be unreliable junk most of the time. 

F1 has become about tire wear and pit Delta. They don't refuel. They rarely pass. It isn't interesting enough. Bigger engines and refuelling would restore the fun of the series. Active Aero would help a lot too. Even supercar makers have that now. Why not use it? Its neat, and it works reliably enough. Maybe ALMS will use it first. I hope so. It is interesting. I don't see Liberty Media caring about all the different fans writing to protest the boredom of F1 racing today. It used to be better, more fun, louder, more exciting. It used to be a sport. 

Rational Marksmanship For Grownups

As a marksman I enjoyed owning various caliber bolt action rifles. Experimenting with calibers and loading for accuracy was great fun, and rewarded good concentration. If I had it to do all over again I'd have gotten a 270 Winchester Weatherby rifle made by Howa with the Browning-Enfield action. Its very smooth, with a monte carlo cheek plate stock so it was very natural to point.

That was the rifle I should have bought and focussed all my efforts on, instead of all the calibers I bought and perfected. I feel like I wasted a lot of money, though I did satisfy my curiosity learning to shoot each of them to their best, and now have the confidence to know that adapting to a new caliber is not that hard. People tend to be fussy about this, but the most important thing about a rifle is understanding there's no points for missing, so shoot the caliber which hits what you aim at, and understand its limitations.

MANY people who are otherwise sane and logical insist on buying and shooting (once) a caliber which hurts them, being gruff about it, and never touching it again. This describes MOST people who own a .30-06 or .308 rifle, both of which kick like a mule in a rifle light enough for hunting game. It is possible to learn how to shoot those calibers without getting bruised, but it takes a lot of practice, and a lot of bruising before you learn the trick to it, and few people perservere. Most of them would be better served by an AR rifle in 5.56x45 or .223 (can be shot interchangeably with few exceptions). Most people, and most wives and teenage daughters, are better served by a rifle with minimal recoil so they can aim and hit a target without getting a flinch. Big calibers are special purpose, and the various lighter calibers can do 90% of the big ones with less recoil. Few panicking new survivalist-type mall ninjas have any idea. As with most problems in their life, they do minimal research, throw money at the problem, and never touch it again presuming its easy because dumb people do it.

The shape of a rifle is important. That affects how it is aimed, but how you learn to shoot matters a great deal. Most military shooters I know don't really like proper rifle stocks, since they were trained on the M-16 with its pistol grip. I find pistol grip rifles unnatural because I learned on real rifle stocks. This is a great reason to avoid an AR rifle, at least for me. Soldiers trained on them love them. I didn't care for them much. The spring squeaking in my ear wasn't much fun either. Its distracting.

Most video game players don't hold a stock, but they get some experience on movement. Really experienced 1-Bravo (Infantry) learn to shoot while moving over rough ground and that's a specialized skill compared to the range, where you're holding still and reasonably comfortable. Moving around with a loaded weapon requires a high degree of training, particularly a good working safety that's on most of the time, and training to turn that off when a target is in the sights and not before. Few people who panic-buy a firearm "for safety" think that clearly or have that level of discipline. They are the worst possible owners of a weapon, because they'll end up killing someone or maybe themselves through ignorance and stupidity.

I have read any number of forum posts from people who even say things like "ah nevur clean mah gun cuz it shoots perfect already". Wow. Really? I've also read claims from yahoos who claim their short barrel carbine M4 clone will kill hogs at 500 yards when I know damn well that rifle is incapable of the feat so its just another 12 yo boy lying about his daydreams again. I have no time for those morons. They may live to see the end of puberty, or they may mouth off to someone close enough to slap them down and end up in ditch. Stuff like that happens in the real world. School teachers do nobody any favors letting that kind of behavior get so out of hand. They worry about identity politics instead of whether offending grownups might kill them. The real world has little forgiveness, and idiots I knew back in school like that died for it. Not nice, but it happened. I have no time for those idiots and encourage them to remain in the inner city and continue with their opiate habit since that self-corrects soon enough.

The advantage of shooting only one kind of rifle caliber in light enough recoil to be without a flinch and thus focus on accuracy is you only need to stock that caliber, and can reload for accuracy and find the sweet spot, which is different for each rifle. That's not a joke. Each one will shoot a caliber best through experimentation on reloading with bullet weight, powder type, powder amount, bullet seating depth, and even primer and brass brand. You experiment till you figure out which variation shoots the smallest consistent group, then zero in your scope on that spot and confirm it. After that, load to that spec with your fired brass and shoot once a month, year round, so you remain able to absorb the recoil properly. That's bare minimum, but it works.

Naturally, you get best accuracy from bolt rifles, not auto-rifles like the AR or AK. There's less play in the chamber pressure, which matters a great deal. Also, you tend to shoot less rounds and pay more attention to your aim because you don't have the psychological lie of "I can pull the trigger again if I misss so its not that important to aim well". Not having another round helps with this. Internal box magazines are great. They don't get bent or dropped or lost. Unloading them for crossing fences is slightly more annoying, but most hold less than 10 rounds, and many hold only 5 or even 3 if you have a magnum caliber rifle. And that's fine for most needs since you usually just get the one shot at the elk or antelope or deer and then it runs away if you miss, or drops if you hit properly. Holdover, rise and drop offsets, these are part of accuracy too. And if you can get closer to the target, get closer. Rifles are much more effective within 200 yards. A 500 yard shot is going to miss in most cases, and is unethical to take since a wounded animal at 500 yards is going to suffer a lot while you chase it. If you aren't troubled by ethical questions I really don't want you to own a firearm. Stick to video games. You can PVP there to your heart's content. Leave the wilderness to the adults who respect it.

Pistol Engineering and Advertising Adventures

Much like rifles, pistol manufacturers have a need to sell more. They use more machining and have sometimes complex locking systems to prevent them going off until the right sequence of devices are used. In general, pistols are very safe. There are exceptions, but even a 1911 has a couple safeties on it, plus a another one mostly known to the military called Out Of Battery. As a marksman, I am very much in favor of good safeties, but I'm also not very good with pistols and mostly focus on things with rifle stocks. I don't even like pistol grip stocks. I learned on classic rifles, not military arms.

Way back in the 1840's, the 44 and 45 cap and ball were carried into the gold fields and by pioneers heading west for California or Oregon, to be farmers or miners. The Civil War proved the utility of brass (metallic) cartridges rather than paper ones. They worked in the rain. This was a huge advance, and also made for faster loading revolvers and repeating lever action rifles. They are classics, though not inherently accurate and had a number of flaws which were gradually fixed.

There were all sorts of attempts made to simplify support of the cavalry after the Civil War, which was then fighting indians, who saw pioneers moving onto their lands and killing them off, so the indians started killing settlers or dying of plague (typhoid was common then). It was nasty, and raids tended to be sudden and violent, like most Westerns like to depict. Having lots of rounds to shoot back when attacked is a big part of why Westerners are pro-gun, even today. We know stuff goes wrong, and Eastern gangs and mafia types tend to attack in packs. See Legends Of The Fall for examples. There were also Civil War veterans who became raiders, using what they learned to attack towns, with a massacre in Kansas called the Jayhawk Massacre as a famous example.

Black powder was measured in grains, still the unit of measure today, and you had to limit how many per cartridge. The .30-30 Winchester was a 30 caliber bullet and 30 grains of black powder. This round has killed more wild game than any other, period. It remains popular in woodsy area hunters in the East. Its not that popular here because it has a very limited range. Most folks here hunt with a .30-06, even though it is overkill for our small deer. A .243 is plenty. In any case, that nomenclature of the caliber size and the dash, then the grains of powder, got used in a bunch of rounds. The 38-40, the 38-44, the 40-40 and 40-44, and 45-70 and 45-110 are all rounds that existed. The .44-40 Winchester became a popular official cavalry round which was used in their carbines and pistols, both. It wasn't enough range in a rifle, and a bit much recoil in a revolver, but militaries tend to do things wrong before they get them right, usually after lots of people die. The modern .44-40 is popular with historical recreationists in a type of sport called "Cowboy Action Shooting" which is a multigun shooting sport where competitors shoot targets while being timed and scored on that and accuracy for a combine score to determine the winner. Ham and spam shoots are common for this. Most wear a leather glove on their left hand in order to fan the trigger without burning off their fingers by the side-blast. Some of these revolvers had a cylinder set into the gap of a C-shape, with the barrell down the far side. When more powerful rounds were fitted, these would explode. This was fixed with a top strap, and original hinged versions like the Smith and Wesson Model 3, copied by the english Webley revolver, sort of fixed the issue, until strong rounds were fired, making the thing metal shear off and explode again.

Contrast this with the gunfighter's special, which was a smaller caliber .35 revolver, with better quality workmanship and better accuracy and sights, meaning a gunfighter aimed carefully and shot once, killing their target. .35 caliber is also 9mm, and the Germans made a cartridge in 1880 called the 9x19 Parabellum, still in use today. This round has killed more people than any other. Every military has a gun chambered in this cartridge, even ours, though lots of troops hate it because they want a .45 ACP 1911, despite it being very hard to hit things beyond 30 yards. A beefed up .45 like the 45-70 is too much for a handgun, and rounds in between still suffer at ranges over 60 yards since its big, heavy, and drops a lot being so slow. All rounds drop at the same rate vertically (1 G) but slower rounds drop more noticeably, so anything around the speed of sound is going to have problems. Rifle rounds are typically longer and narrower with more powder so they can go a lot faster and further before the drop is noticed, thus the .223 is magnificent at making nuisances like coyotes explode at 200 yards, and 243 at 350 yards. When you try and combine a pistol cartridge and a rifle cartridge into one or two guns you get all sorts of problems, with the mild utility of exchangeable ammunition and possibly magazines.

You also get lots of muzzle flash in a revolver, so you get one shot then you're night blind. Modern calibers like the 357 Sig is a 9x19mm length cartridge in a wider case with a bottle neck to hold the bullet. This is meant to go faster, but is usually shoved into a short barrel for self defense, utterly defeating the purpose, but adding the problem of severe night blindness.

More extreme bottleneck cartridges attempting to hold onto the power and speed gains of small caliber high velocity carbines result in things like the FN5.7, which is a modified short .223 in a bottleneck case duplicating the power of a .221 Fireball or .22 BOZ, which is a 10mm necked down to .223. A variation of this cartridge is used in the famous P90 Grendel, which is only used by TV shows and Saudi Arabia, much like the Desert Eagle .44 Action Express handgun. And this gets to a side issue of interest.

A pistol caliber in a rifle is called a carbine. A carbine is similar to a rifle, usually having a stock or a folding stock, made popular by paratroopers in WW2, used by both sides of the war. They were usually spray and pray weapons, not known for accuracy. The Nazis had their 9mm submachine guns. The allies had their Sten guns and other similar cheap weapons, and more effective rifles like the Garand. After the War a lot of designs came out with interesting value, like the AK-47, which was based on a captured German concept light rifle called an assault rifle. The Soviet version of that is still being fiddled with and there's been a couple other calibers for it. The Germans and Belgians came up with a roller-lock design for a semi automatic rifle which was picked up and used in big .308 rifles around the world, and shrunk and minified for a 9mm version called the HK-MP5, which we've all seen in those Die Hard movies, especially the first one. The setup is limited by the magazine well, and there's been a lot of variations of it, including the MP40, which is that chambered in a .40 S&W cartridge, commonly used by police. Its too slow for a rifle, but better than 9mm. It is somewhat baffling that nobody seems to make a longer version of this and magazines to support 10mm, .45 ACP, .460 Rowland (like .45 magnum), and various other cartridges to take advantage of the longer barrel and buttstock so you can aim it properly. You'd think there was a market for that, but so many Law enforcement and veterans would rather upgrade to a cheaper AR pattern rifle and avoid the expense of the Short Barrel Rifle single-exception. And the AR lets you shoot a lot more calibers.

Incidentally, the Desert Eagle is a miniature AR system on a pistol frame. No kidding. This is also why they cost $1500 each and weigh in pounds, not ounces. No military arms itself with a Desert Eagle. Its JUST in movies, and IMI enjoys the profits of selling this ridiculous movie prop to rappers and action movie fans. Sorry if that hurts your feelings. Consider a Raging Bull instead. A big ported revolver in 357 is probably as much recoil as you can stand and costs a fraction as much.

When it comes to powerful revolvers, there's a market. The .454 Casull is dangerous junk, due to being based on the .45 Long Colt and having very finicky loading, too much or too little powder or bullet slightly too deep or too shallow and it will explode on your hand like a grenade, taking your fingers with it. I don't recommend this firearm, ever. It is too unsafe. It sometimes kills a Kodiak bear in Alaska when someone is out walking their dog on the island, or fishing. Bears have personality. Bears don't have a trustworthy setting. Sometimes they leave you alone, and other times they eat you. They have a lot of brain parasites, which contributes to this problem. Arming yourself when in bear country is a life-extending move, even if it offends your Vegetarian friends. Be sure you can run faster than them. Quite a few of the above cartridges were used in revolvers against bears. Experts recommend a shotgun with buckshot and slugs if you have to travel in bear country, but a .357 is enough for a black bear, and a .44 magnum will do for a brown or black bear. Just keep in mind that you might have less than 2 seconds to draw and fire, and people with dogs pay for those seconds with the life of their dogs, and are much more likely to survive because of it. However, dogs and bears are enemies so the bear is more likely to attack a dog than a person without one. Just to make things more complicated. And before you laugh about the lack of bears where you live, a tourist in New Jersey filmed the bear that ate him at a park within sight of Manhattan, bears eat pets in Florida. Bears have been spotted swimming in pools in the edges of Los Angeles, and bears run 40 mph, which is much faster than you can sprint, and possibly pedal on flat ground. So don't laugh at bears. They think you are tasty and crunchy, and your kids even moreso.

Surprise! Mama bear with cubs charges cyclist on mountain singletrack trail, no warning, less than 2 seconds to react or die. He reacted and lived. Others try bear spray or the wrong shot placement with a gun and they get badly mauled. Bears have personality. They aren't consistent.

The dangers of the oft-exploding .454 lead to the creation of more safe rounds like the .450 and .460 S&W Magnum, and 475 Linebaugh, or .480 Ruger, all of which kick like a mule in a revolver and are probably safer in a lever action repeater. The .44 magnum is well liked for good reason, because you can load it up or down using combinations of powder and projectile to .45 ACP power (aka .44 Bulldog/Special), or up to full magnum (and hurts your wrist) and anywhere between. The recoil is bad enough but its better than harsh language. The Winchester repeater rifle is available in .357 and .44 magnum for a reasonable sum, though its safety is problematic, and racking the action when a bear is attacking is probably your final action before dying, since they run 40 mph. The shotgun is cheaper and more effective, but a .44 magnum or .357 is much more handy.

Police and deputies swore by the .357 revolver, but they were forced to "upgrade" to 9mm, which was not good enough for bears, and later got to upgrade again to .40 S&W, which they mutter about but admit is "adequate". I think most would prefer a 10mm or to go back to the .357 they all carried for decades and still own as their personal firearm for off-duty. I know deputies used to things here, and they are sensible folks. You don't live to retirement if you aren't sensible, though some of the new guys need to spend more time at the range, practicing.

The 45-70 was an inadequate round on San Juan Hill in Cuba, and Teddy Roosevelt who carried one to great disappointment there, was a big proponent of the .30-06 Springfield, which served this country through two world wars and remains a popular big game hunting round today. The .357 is the pistol equivalent, being effective, popular, hard recoilling but acceptable for most people. It ended up getting fiddled with for size, but longer tends to work better and its a couple or three times more powerful than the old western 45 revolvers. For modern times, the .357 is a peacemaker. If you needed to do this dual-use trick, you'd probably want the full power 10mm. That will drop a target at 150 yards, and maybe at 200, but keep in mind those cartridges are $1 each trigger pull. This is not a hobby for people who care about money. You can buy a nice bottle of wine for 6 rounds of that. Or a quality microbrew 6-pack of bottles for less than a magazine. And when you start comparing the cost of firearms to food, it really does make you ponder your choices. Is it that hard to avoid bears during the time of year when they're most active and dangerous? Give that some thought, before you invest in the perfect calibe for your pistol and rifle.

If you want to do cowboy action shooting, load your own and save. Making ammo with a reloading press is more fun that knitting, and 38-55 or 38-40 have their followings, much like 44-40, and that might be fun. But after I spent lots of time and money experimenting I got it out of my system and took up photography. I can "take a shot" and post it on the internet. And I suspect most people interested in this would probably do well to take up bicycling rather than buy yet another firearm. Its good for your health, and a great motivation to insure the Communists never gain control of your life. They want everybody to bicycle or stay home, like good serfs. Just keep this in mind.

Rifle Engineering and Advertising Adventures

The trouble with running a gun company is that you need work for your staff to do, and most guns, having expensive ammunition, aren't fired often in practice, and rarely if ever in anger, so they tend to see little use and become heirlooms, handed down to kids and grandkids as time passes. Lots of sheepherders and ranchers in the Great Basin and Sierras do this. This cuts down on your sales. There's also military arms, but I think those are mostly collectors items of dubious quality. Hunting arms are better quality most of the time, easier to fit a rifle scope so you can hit something beyond 100 yards (I find most iron sights suck), and this puts them in the position of drumming up interest, and you get fad calibers to sell guns. Some examples?

6.8 SPC (left cartridge). This is a short .277 bullet fitted to a fatter .30 Winchester, necked down (cartridge neck is placed in a die and the brass opening is reduced to a smaller size through mechanical force).
The SPC cartridge was made to deal with the failure of .223 (aka 5.56 NATO) carbines in Afghanistan for the last 16 years. Most soldiers who want to LIVE through Afghanistan pay for a .308 rifle (aka 7.62 NATO), usually M-14 or M1A (semi-auto commercial copy) if they can't get the LE version with some sort of form. The .308 is brutal in a light rifle, btw, so all full power .308 rifles are heavy. The AK-47 is NOT a full power .308 rifle. Its a .310 (7.62x39mm) bullet, very light for caliber in a similar sense to the 6.8, which is also short. This bullet is better than the .223 at range, but still too light for shattering engine blocks or adobe bricks, like a .308 does pretty well and is needed for pretty often. There are heavier rounds for snipers, like 50 BMG and .338 Lapua, but those take VERY heavy rifles, usually require a muzzle brake which makes a big cloud of dust and LOUD noise when fired. It is possible to put a muzzle brake on a lighter .308 rifle, but the noise is deafening, and most soldiers need their hearing to tell when bad guys are approaching beyond their field of view. Good hearing is important.

Another caliber of interest is the 6.5 Grendel (center), which is a x39 case necked down to 6.5 and chambered in an AK or AR rifle with the appropriate bolt face. These vary based on the bottom of the case size, called the Case Head. This was created to be a caliber with similar intent to the 6.8 SPC and competed with it in the military contract. Its a heavier bullet, so retains energy further, but is slightly slower as a result and needs more correction in its arc. The downside is the bullet is seated deeper into the case, and this is inherently dangerous as the round might decide not to move and kaboom instead. That's very bad. Shrapnel in the face, probably horrible or deadly wound resulting.

But lets step away from the STANAG magazine of the AR platform, a huge limitation. Upgrading the rifles to the AR-10 or something similar gets into a bigger magazine which takes .308 length bullets like the 6.5 Creedmoor, famous for accuracy, and 264 USA, which is too long for STANAG and shorter than .308, but also lighter recoil so can be fitted to much lighter rifles without all the noise issues. 6.5mm isn't used much in military rifles recently, but was in the past. The rifle that shot Kennedy was a 6.5mm Carcano, which is a smaller version of the Russian bolt action rifle adopted by the Italians, with a heavy bullet in a low velocity, which meant bullets didn't deform much, ergo "magic bullet" later debunked by simple geometry and examination of the film. There was also the 6.5 Arisaka, which was also too slow and put in a really badly made rifle by the Japanese. The best 6.5 was the 6.5x55 Swede, made by Nobel (yes THAT Nobel peace prize), and beloved of moose hunters in Scandinavia and the USA too. Light enough recoil but full rifle power able to shoot big non-dangerous game like moose and elk. That round was magic, and its the origin of many attempts to duplicate it. The .260 Remington was a .308 case necked down to .264 (bullet actual size) and get the same ballistics. The 6.5x284 was what happens when several stories cross. The .284 was a necked down .300 something, with a rebated rim to fit into a .308 bolthead and length magazine, but having the powder capacity of a .30-06. This was unnecessary and didn't sell. Necked down to 7mm, it became the .284, which was more interesting, since it was a hotter and shorter version of the 280 Winchester, which is what you get when you take a 270 Winchester and open the neck slightly from .277 to .284 for 7mm bullets. Effective, but not enough to justify owning instead of a .270 or .30-06. And by then there was the 7mm Remington Magnum, which was a really fast 7mm with lots of reach and hitting power, and recoil and noise, too. Only time I got a concussion firing a rifle was a 7mm Magnum in a Savage hunting rifle. Thankfully it wasn't mine, but the headache was noticeable. Worse than an '06.

The 6.5x284 was a darling of 1000 yard rifle matches. It was a nice balance in power and reach with heavy bullets (140 grains), and less destructive than the 264 Magnum, famous for melting barrels in less than 1000 firings. That gets expensive. I was quite interested in this one. If you wanted to snipe a villain in Afghanistan this would do the job, but the military has upgraded to 338 Lapua and 50 BMG since anti-material weapons are legal against terrorist since they aren't Geneva Convention signatories.

Another foray into advertising was short magnums (and super short magnums), a magnum power round fitted to a short action rifle, which is cheap to make. The .25 WSM and WSSM were hype and useless. The 270 WSM was apparently much better than a .270 Winchester, faster and more accurate, but not enough to justify rechambering or selling off your family heirloom. There was a .30 WSM, but not a .338 WSM that I can remember. It was created by wild-catters. A wildcat cartridge is one spec'd up and tested by hobbyists. The 6mm Creedmoor is like that. So is the 6x45mm, though its somewhat production in weird places like South Africa. The 6x45 is slightly slow so makes less meat damage and mostly gets used for poaching game. Loaded with a lighter bullet it fits nicely in the AR rifle magazine and holds more energy downrange. It was tested by the Army for use in their FN machineguns but was eventually discarded because of Reasons like caliber confusion and stupid grunts. You don't want too many calibers in the military. They ended up with lots anyway.

The weirdest of the WSMs was 325 WSM, which was an 8mm bullet, not very popular in the USA. There were lots of 8x57 German rifles brought back during the war. Its a fine round, though there's a lot of variation if power thanks to being around for more than a century, and the oldest rifles would explode with new ammo, like the IS or JS loadings in the Small Ring Mausers. They aren't strong enough. Kaboom. I have a VZ-24, able to comfortably fire IS and JS 8x57 ammo. It has a lot of range in ammo you can fire, from 170 grain to 220, able to take a polar bear. I still prefer the .308 for pure accuracy at the same recoil. And I liked the 7mm08 BLR for pointable rifle, even if the Browning action was begging to fail with that LONG pinion gear. The 7mm08 was another wildcat, a .308 necked down to 7mm, duplicating the 7x57mm, the round that the Spanish were using in Cuba against Teddy Roosevelt over a century ago. Those captured rifles were modified into the .30-06 Springfield, and failed to win their court case against Mauser so the USA paid fines to Mauser while we were fighting WW1. There was also a 8mm-06, once upon a time. It was a wildcat but wasn't really needed. A better round is the 338-06, which is a .30-06 case with a .338 bullet mounted, able to duplicate .308 ballistics but hits hard, mostly used for bear defense in .30-06 length rifles, like the BAR (Browning Automatic Rifle) and was chambered in it a few years for Alaskan fishermen. In Alaska you can die while fishing because Kodiak grizzlies also fish, and don't always like competitors. Its common for a fisherman in Alaska to bring a guard with a serious rifle to protect them. A .338 Winchester Magnum is a lot of rifle for most people to deal with, but a .338-06 is less recoil.

In the fantasy world, military rifles are wonderful. In the real world they're often heavy, clunky, with bad safeties, and very difficult to mount a rifle scope. In the real world, sporting rifles are more accurate, lighter, cheaper, more comfortable to handle and point and hit targets at range, and mount any number of good rifle scopes to. The only thing sporting rifles lack is spray and pray and big magazines of bullets. The upside is sporting rifles actually hit things if you do your part to aim and cooly fire. Sporting rifles are in the exact caliber you need for the things you intend to shoot. Here in the West, that means our small blacktail deer and coyotes because they attack cattle and sheep. For our needs, a 243 Winchester is enough, but most people have more. A 6.5 caliber round makes sense for a first time shooter, and bolt action is usually just fine, and much more accurate than an auto-loader. The 260 Remington should have been more popular. The 6.5 Creedmoor is slightly different but largely identical performance. The name is better, and its selling well. There aren't many critters in the lower 48 you can't hunt with this. Canada north is another story, but that's what the .338 is for.

Joy of Cooking

I started learning how to cook when I was four years old. I had to be lifted onto the counter, but I measured the ingredients with spoons I still have four decades later. When you start learning early, you start paying attention to what happens when you vary a recipe. You learn what upping or lowering the temperature does to the food, and whether its a good thing or a bad one. You learn a lot of things which can be described in the C.I.A. cookbook (Culinary Institute of America), but most people never bother reading in Joy of Cooking despite lots of useful information in each section. Nowadays people go online for recipes. Many of these sites also have videos showing what to do. These really help get you started on cooking. You won't master it from a video. You have to pay attention if you want to succeed.

Lots of newbies think cooking is easy. They are wrong. There are easy recipes, but cooking itself is a skill based on lots of experience. Being a good cook is all about that experience, and the willingness to experiment and find the limits of what works, and what improves the recipe in new ways. Most of the recipes online have duplicates. It is often a good idea, when deciding on a new recipe to actually try yourself, to look at all of them, compare the different options and remember that Sunset Magazine always uses exotic ingredients even when they have no flavor, and adding really spicy things to every dish is a great way to get indigestion and wipe out the flavor profile of those fancy ingredients or concentrated flavor caused by slow cooking a dish. Fast food is bad food. Slow food is the way to make food delicious. Restaurants don't do a lot of slow food, they mostly do things that can cook in less than 10 minutes because a 25 minute or 35 minute turnover in tables from group to group makes more money. And restaurants are a money business. At home you have no such restrictions, and slow cooking should always be preferred.

Good example: http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Spiced-Pumpkin-Bread-840
A good one for Fall. In a few months I'll be cooking this. It combines pumpkin, pound cake, and spices. You can also, once you are good at this, add sliced almonds, chopped dried apricot, and chocolate chips. These flavors give you the oil from the nuts and allspice, sour from the apricot, and bitter from the chocolate, which is a drastic improvement to "just pumpkin spice" and pumpkin itself. These tricks also work with banana bread. The result is loaded with calories, enough that a half inch slice = breakfast. Goes down a treat with strong coffee.

This is only one example, and there are endless more where you can cook something, taste it, and if you take the time to develop it further through additional ingredients or cooking method gets you a better result. That's the difference between a home chef and a mere technician.

Gone Fishing

Sometimes the right answer to the crappy politics dividing America is to start with finding places which agree with you and live there. The second step is to ignore all the propaganda coming from New York City and the whining of elected sociopaths in DC. Ignore those people.

Vote when it is time to vote, the rest of the time you can't do anything about them. Go fishing instead. Truck campers exist because men get married, and women go mean every month, so getting out of the house, with a flask of whiskey, a case of beer, and a quiet weekend away from her rage and fury is the right answer to avoid paying a divorce attorney.

If you have a big 1/2 ton or 3/4 ton pickup, or a Superduty duallie, one of these is a great way to get away from the wife during her lunar psychotic episode. These go for $10-14K, and while they're small for more than a couple days of camping, they are ideal for a couple days of camping next to a river or lake or car campground. They also make these to fit smaller pickups, even a Toyota Tundra or Tacoma, and the most modern ones carry a webcam so you can see behind you, acting like a rearview mirror. That's a kit you can install, btw. It doubles as a door security system.

The next thing you need is one of these. Motors are cheap enough, and it will mount an outboard. Or you can just use oars to get to the fishing spot, since most of the lakes around here aren't that big to take very long to reach a particular spot with oars. The sail is for fun, if you aren't into fishing.

I think one of these boats, and one of those truck campers, would be a pretty good place to weekend every month.

The Greater Failure of Education in America

American education used to be good, but it was good because it mandated literacy and basic math. Beyond that, it expanded into more esoteric wastelands of philosophy. And then the teachers union got something called tenure and the very worst teachers could no longer be fired. They became social cancer, demotivating quality and driving the schools into the toilet. Things have gotten bad.

The end product of moden education is the snowflake. That is a lawyer with a child whining on the front of a fishhook as bait. Snowflakes have ruined public life for civil servants like librarians. They reject free speech as offensive, just like Nazi SS-Gestapo. They have temper tantrums wearing black hoodies and ballistic nylon, assaulting people in attempted murder.

They are no longer civilized, and are now insurgents. At this point, anyone calling themselves a "social justice warrior" should be treated as terrorists, but the current Republican administration is unwilling to act on this threat, much like the prior one ignored Muslim terrorists until they became a daily threat at airports and public gatherings around the world.

The bigger problem has expanded past public schools and liberal colleges. These are now training grounds for leftist thugs. UC Berkeley has inadvertantly made its graduates unhireable. Allowing violence on their campus, by their students and professors creates an unreasonable risk for company insurance, so hiring a Berkeley grad puts your insurance rates so high you go out of business. You are better off refusing them without explanation, and those Berkeley grads are going to know this soon enough. Other schools with similar famous snowflakes or riots are also experiencing #blacklist problems. Social Justice Warrior are another kind of ethnomasochist terrorists. Harvard has banned clubs, associations, sororities, fraternities, etc and you can now be kicked out of the school for belonging to anything at all. Harvard is on my hiring #blacklist too. When I have the power to hire, I won't be hiring people from those schools.

Business today is mostly done with overseas cutouts, and other nonsense to avoid paying taxes. What used to be good paying jobs with that college degree now gets you a PT job for minimum wage. Voting to raise minimum wage has resulted in kiosk computers with ATM card readers to replace all those retail jobs. Fewer and fewer people are needed to run industry today. Automation has defunded everything. Without jobs, there's no money to buy stuff. The youngest generation is screwed, and they're pretty much in revolution. They aren't worth hiring, and robots don't complain.

The problem here is since education doesn't make a better paying job, and it doesn't with few exceptions, the point of education is largely lost. Higher education today is actually a negative. Both to time lost, and to your total income because you have to either pay off loans or work for years to catch up to those lost while you were listening to Leftist moron professors lying to you in a classroom.

In the real world, you only get a job when the work you do is both profitable and cheaper than a robot can do the same work. Or software. Maintaining robots that do work is one of the few growth industries, but the pay rate is falling, so whatever you think you'll earn when you start learning that job, it will keep getting worse pay and higher stress the longer you keep at it. Just like IT jobs. Expect to drive long distances to places without A/C in the worst weather, where a stressed out manager full of threats, looking for empty promises to blame you for breaking when the problem they've got is worse than expected because they cheaped out on replacement parts or a bad repair contract or sabotage causes these problems in the first place. You don't need a degree to do that. You may as well get hired on right out of high school.

What this means to librarians, like me, is that communists in our field with dreams of running a public pool or drug treatment program or cafe with Rasberry Pi tinker toys, all those non-librarian jobs, is lots of libraries are going to be closed, entirely. They are killing our public civic institution. The books will be sold off or discarded or given to charities who are still doing those basic jobs like store books for loan, and the public funded librarians are doomed. In places where there is oversight and strict limitation of library work to actual librarian jobs, not all this nonsense which most of my professors wrongly believe to be important. I suspect half the people I know in library science are going to end up serving coffee. Most libraries are going to end up as servers in a closet somewhere.

The other aspect is that colleges are becoming hostile work environments and could very well end up defunded by the Federal government, and lose their accreditation when the lose their libraries. And it won't matter, because colleges are a business, not educators. What they sell is adult babysitting for teenagers, not functional adults like they used to produce in the old days. And even when they create adults from the #SJW-Taliban trash that so many public schools produce today, there are few jobs for adults anymore, and those which exist don't pay enough to buy a house. Thank the Dodd-Frank act for that. Dodd-Frank is the big reason for the boomerang kids. And why I'm so in favor of homes on wheels. It avoids a bunch of the problems in home ownership, especially all the taxes or being trapped in a collapsing economy. You can hitch up and go. And so much of the Western states are really about Boom Towns. They boom and they bust. That's life.