Crossing the Wilderness III

Crossing the Wilderness III:

Kim du Toit is having the next go-round of the game. We played the last time, thanks to Doc Russia tapping Grim's Hall for knife suggestions. There are a couple of new rules, and Kim picked up my addition from last time of asking for dog breeds:

Yes, it’s that time again.

Enough time has passed since last I posed the question that we can play the game once more. For the benefit of New Readers who weren’t around to play it before, here’s how it works. (Old-timers, note that some things have changed. RTFQ.)

The Challenge:

You have the opportunity to go back in time, arriving on the east coast of North America circa 1650, and your goal is to cross the North American continent, taking as much time as you need. When/if you reach the Pacific coastline, you’ll be transported back to the present day.

Your equipment for this journey will be as follows (taken back in the time capsule with you):

-- enough gold to buy provisions for the first five days’ travel
-- a small backpack containing some clothing essentials
-- a winter coat, raincoat and boots
-- waterproof sleeping bag
-- ONE long gun (but no scope)
-- ONE handgun
-- 1,800 rounds of ammo, divided between guns as desired
-- TWO knives, and (new) a “toolkit” knife
-- an axe
-- a box of 1,000 “strike anywhere” waterproof matches
-- a large-scale topological map book, binoculars and a compass
-- and a large U.S. Army First Aid kit.

Once there, you’ll be given a horse, a mule and a dog—and apart from that, you’re on your own. Remember you’ll be traveling through deep woods, open prairie, desert and mountains. You may encounter hostile Indian tribes and dangerous animals en route, which should be considered when you answer the following questions (and only these):

1. What long gun would you take back in time with you?
2. What handgun?
3. Which knives?
4.—New—What breed of dog?

The Rules:

1. Emails only will be accepted (comments are closed on this post), addressed to kim - at - kimdutoit dot com

2. Subject Line: Crossing The Wilderness. Not “What I’d take”, or “Guns and knives” or anything else: Crossing The Wilderness. Copy & paste the words from this post into your subject line.

3. Feel free to elaborate on your choices, BUT in no more than 100 words per answer. I don’t wanna read an essay on survival skills, nor do I wanna hear about the sixteen finalists you went through before you eventually made your choices. I’m looking for answers like: “Colt SAA in .45 LC, because it works and the .45 LC is a proven stopper.” (That’s 16 words.) Feel free to tell me (if you’ve played the game before) whether your choices have changed since last time, and why. Inside the 100 words.

4.—New Rule—multi-caliber combo guns will not be allowed, nor will barrel sleeves (which allow one to swap calibers), nor multiple barrels for the same receiver (eg. a Browning Citori with 12, 20 and 28ga barrels). You get one gun, one barrel / barrel set (in the case of shotguns or a double rifle, in the same caliber). Obviously, a gun which, unaltered, can fire different cartridges like the .357 Mag/.38 Spec or .45 LC/.410ga will be allowed.

5. Answers to me by next Saturday, April 7th. Results will be posted on April 9th.

Have fun.

To save the readers chasing it down, I said I'd join Doc in choosing a stainless lever-action .45 Long Colt rifle; I'd pick a Ruger New Vaquero in the same caliber; and a good bowie knife plus a skinning/utility knife. What constitutes a "good" bowie knife is personal to your physique: length of arm, strength of grip, and so forth.

I don't see any reason to change those choices.

I don't think I ever got around to answering my own questions: what breed of dog, horse, and mule? So let me do that now.

Dog: A Labrador mixed with something larger and heavier. These dogs are unfailingly brave and reliable, tough and with boundless energy. They are also strong enough to defend you, but have good hunting instincts. I've worked with several over the years, and one in particular, and they're great animals.

Horses: You want a fast horse that has good endurance. I'd suggest one of the gaited breeds, like a Tennessee Walker. They can cover ground fast and without putting strain on you. A non-gaited horse will have to canter (at least) to keep up with them, which will wear out their riders.

Mules: There are several good choices in mules. I'd say a draft cross with a Mammoth Jack donkey; they can carry a ton, and if you have to eat them, you'll have plenty of meat to dry and carry with you.

Blogging Award

Thinking Blogger Awards:

We've been nominated for an award in the Thinking Blogger contest. I'm not sure Grim's Hall has ever been nominated for anything before, so it's nice to know.

Rurik is a longtime reader, and occasional commenter. I appreciate his interest, and the kind words.

VictoryPAC

VictoryPAC:

Armed Liberal of Winds of Change would like you to know about his new venture, VictoryPAC. You've probably seen the video and letter of explanation:

I'm a liberal Democrat (pro-gay marriage, pro-choice, pro-progressive taxation, pro-equal rights, pro-environmental regulation, pro-public schools) who supported and supports the war in Iraq. As I tell my liberal friends "Did I miss the part where it was progressive not to fight medieval religious fascists?"

I've been waiting for four years for the White House to start really explaining the war to the American people, and to do anything sensible at all to maintain the political capital necessary to keep America in the fight - to keep us from withdrawing because the war is too messy, or too long, or just plain makes us feel bad.......

I've given up, and decided that it's up to each of us to start doing more. To that end, I've decided to start a PAC that will offer support to Congressional candidates of either party who support a foreign policy that doesn't involve wishing problems away.

Sounds good to me.

What you may not know is that he's looking for videos like the first one, from Iraq war veterans. If you'd like to make one and don't know how, let me know (well, I don't know how either, but I can find out).

Site Changes

Site Changes:

The contract I signed with Pajamas Media ended on 1 April. Though I elected not to continue as a PJM blog, I'd like it understood that Pajamas Media kept every particular of their contract with me, and I have no complaints with them. I simply wished to part ways, for reasons of my own.

The company of co-bloggers voted, and narrowly chose to enact some other form of ads in the future. I'll be looking into that directly; I'm not entirely sure how it works. In the meanwhile, the site is back to the pre-PJM format.

Violence and Moral Progress - III

Steven Pinker, Decreased Violence, Moral Progress - III

Happily, as Grim has shown, Prof. Pinker's New Republic article is now in the clear. Thus, I am saved the trouble of trying to summarize it. It's good reading.

In comments to this post of Eric's, Grim argued that there is no such thing as "moral progress," and that it hasn't happened. This article, to me, looks like a good counter. Towards the beginning, Prof. Pinker lists some of the commonplace cruelties of the past:

"Cruelty as entertainment, human sacrifice to indulge superstition, slavery as a labor-saving device, conquest as the mission statement of government, genocide as a means of acquiring real estate, torture and mutilation as routine punishment, the death penalty for misdemeanors and differences of opinion, assassination as the mechanism of political succession, rape as the spoils of war, pogroms as outlets for frustration, homicide as the major form of conflict resolution..." (He was talking about violence rather than moral progress in general; that, I believe, is why the subjection of women is not on the list, though in some cases - I cited the Yanomamo before - the two go hand in hand.)

...things that, in our time and place, are not tolerated. That looks like progress to me; and since it's progress in the realm of how we treat our fellowman, what better name for it than "moral progress"? But the main thrust of the article is about decreasing violence. In particular, he is looking at a long-term downward trend in murder rates as documented by Manuel Eisner. He's talking about murder, not justifiable or necessary violence. Again, all over the west, it's been dropping for centuries. We still want to do each other harm, that's clear enough, but we don't act on that desire as often.

On foreign policy, his case is a little weaker; he cites the Human Security Brief a little selectively (war death rates are way down; terrorist death rates are up). But Grim himself has just made a better case for moral progress in the sphere of international violence, with his Blackfive post, particularly Part IV. When the Scots fought each other, Edward I intervened - to increase his own dominion. When the inhabitants of Yugoslavia fought each other, Europe and the US intervened - to try to make peace between them without taking a square inch. A moral improvement? How could it not be? I am honestly at a loss to see how these developments could be called morally neutral.

Movie Review

Movie Review:

From Fox:

The best movie so far of 2007 is one in which Rose McGowan, best known to TV audiences as a kind witch on "Charmed," has her leg chopped off and replaced by a snap-on semi-automatic machine gun.

That sounds great! Except for the part where it's a "semi-automatic machine gun."

@#$@#%#$%@#!!!

Somebody in Hollywood must know something about guns, given that they include them in their movies so often. In The Outlaw Josie Wales, they managed to custom-build cartridge conversions for historic Walker Colts, which (as Guns of the Old West magazine reported not long ago) nobody in the world was tooled up to make in 1976.

So how come they can't explain it to the reporters?

War for Profit

"War for Profit"

I have a new piece up at BlackFive by that title.

More on Self-Defense

Of Self-Defense and Texas

In the comments to my last post, we struck up a conversation about self-defense and the "castle rule." I talked about an nineteenth-century Vermont case that discussed the common law rule as applied over several centuries; I've put the relevant text here.

The subject of Texas also came up. I've been doing just a little reading on the subject and wanted to share it. Justifiable homicide in Texas is covered by Penal Code 9.31 and 9.32(a). Under the current law, of which there is a good, brief discussion here, Texas already has a version of the duty to retreat/castle rule used by Louisiana and Vermont, and as listed in section 9.32(a)(2). You don't have to retreat if a reasonable man would not (because retreating would put you in more danger); but you do have to retreat if a reasonable man would do so (or at least, you lose the mantle of "self defense" if he would and you don't). Subsection (b), which removes the duty to retreat outright if the other is unlawfully entering your home, was added in 1995.

On September 1 of this year, the new version will go into effect. This specifically removes the duty to retreat, provided the person who acts has a right to be where he is. But the old law (section 9.32(b)) specifically provides that the duty to retreat doesn't apply when you're at home and the person you kill is unlawfully entering (otherwise, the fact that you were at home was still a factor in deciding whether retreat was "reasonable"). In other words, Texas didn't just enact the castle rule last week, but has had some version of it for years. The Texas Bar Journal published an article on the subject in 1967 ("Showdown on Art. 1225," 30 Tex. B.J. 339); I don't have the right kind of law library handy to read the article right now. States do differ in their self-defense rules, but the differences aren't as great as some people think.

In comments to the previous post, some have expressed a hope that this will reduce the incidence of lawsuits for wrongful death. Be careful. If you're dealing with a killing by a police officer, as one commenter was, the question of whether he used excessive force is a matter of federal constitutional law (shooting a man is treated as a "seizure" of his person by the state for Fourth Amendment purposes). No statute can change the standards for that. The standard, however, was and is "reasonable under the circumstances." A lot of those cases never see a jury because the undisputed facts simply don't create an issue as to whether the shooting was unreasonable.

Prison

The Evil of Prison:

I've written occasionally about the failures of the prison/rehabilitation system with which we attempt to correct criminals, although I have no personal experience with it. Here is someone who tested it, just to see how bad things could get. How bad? Roughly as bad as Abu Ghraib in just six days, even though the people selected to be guards and the prisoners were rigorously examined and subject to a background check.

Even if you have limited sympathy for convicted felons, consider what being a guard does to these men. Read through the history of the experiment, and then answer me this: if this is what prison does to free men who have always chosen to be good -- guards and prisoners alike in this case -- would it not be better to return to the old method of capital or corporal punishment for serious felonies?

Long prison sentences are a recent invention of modern society, after all. We have only been doing things this way for a couple of hundred years or less; we could stop doing it.

An Ugly Reminder

An Ugly Reminder

This story from Texas illustrates an ugly reality. According to the story, a married woman called her lover while her husband was playing cards. The husband came home early, to find the two having sex in a pickup truck. The wife screamed "Rape!" The lover tried to drive the truck away. The husband shot the lover. A grand jury has indicted the wife for manslaughter, but not the husband.

I will not comment in detail on any criminal case based on press reports alone, especially not this early in the proceedings. But as described in the article, the result is correct. If you're confused about the "manslaughter" you might want to check the definition under Texas law. A person is guilty of manslaughter if he recklessly causes the death of another person. Yelling "rape" under those circumstances certainly has the potential to cause death, even though someone else fires the bullet; and it shows an extreme lack of care for another person's life, yet there is no specific intent to kill as required for a murder conviction. ("Provocation" has nothing to do with this case, as some readers might think; the husband has every reason to think his wife is being kidnapped, and will be taken away and raped or killed, and the story betrays no reason to think he could stop it with lesser force. This has nothing to do with revenge.) Without researching Texas law, I can see a case for calling it "criminal negligence," and I would not be entirely surprised if she received an offer to plead to the lesser offense.

The reporter seems to think this has something to do with "Texas justice" but the basic idea works in any state I know about. It is an ugly fact that, important as the right to bear arms is, it comes with a price. If millions of people are ready and able to shoot, as they should be, sometimes the wrong person will be shot. With open eyes let us accept it. Let us also remember that rape is a horrible thing, and "rape" is a life-or-death word, to be used without hesitation when it really happens, but never at any other time.

Violence / Morality II

Less Violence, II:

Joe promises to return to the subject he brought up last week. In the meanwhile, the Pinker article is now in the clear should anyone wish to read it in preparation for the discussion.

Adventures with bad horses

Adventures with Naughty Horses:

The horse company is down by the Etowah River, which forms a natural fence to one of the fields. At least it seemed to until this morning, when Mabeline the Bucking Queen decided to go for a swim.

We discovered this when a guy on the other side of the river started yelling at the owner's wife (really, she is the main partner in co-ownership). He said that one of her horses had swum the river, and was headed toward the highway. This information was relayed to me, along with a suggested crossing point ("If you go down by the middle field, the river is much less deep there.")

So I ran across the field, took off my boots, rolled up my pants, and began to cross the river. I discovered that it was not in fact very shallow at all once you got about halfway out. Still, I managed the crossing with no difficulty beyond being in to my upper chest. (Later, the lady herself wandered down to see if I had returned to the mare, in company with a young woman. She said, the younger lady reported to me, "Wow, I guess I was wrong. If he crossed here, he got soaked.")

The next piece of bad information turned out to be "toward the highway." The river is crossed by a state highway about two miles north -- it is audible when the big trucks go through. Anyone who had the slightest sense would, therefore, have intended "toward the highway" and "north" to be the same direction.

However, the road this guy lives on departs the highway to the south, then turns west and back north again, but terminates before returning to the highway. It is shaped like the letter J, with the highway making the top line on the J, and this fellow living near the end of the curved line on the side heading back up toward the top of the J. Being the sort of person who buys a house in the country and then apparently never goes outside, he had no sense of direction at all. He meant that the horse was headed in the direction that, if you were going that way on the road in your car, would eventually lead to the highway.

In other words, south.

And the guy was long gone.

It took about fifteen minutes for me to examine the area and determine that there was no evidence of a northbound horse, and very strong evidence that suggested it was unlikely: dogs in the area, fences she would have had to cross, and an older gentleman who reported having not seen any horses. He might have been napping, but he seemed to be busy with a woodworking project.

Moreover, there was no obvious sign of where Mabeline would have emerged from the river. She isn't shod, but she is a big girl. There should have been at least occasional tracks, but nowhere by the crossing point were any such evident.

As she crossed by a point where the Etowah has confluence with a small creek, I determined she must have gone up the creekbed. Unfortunately, as you will doubtless know, creekbeds going away from the river and into the upcountry branch repeatedly. These are stony bottomed creeks, and it's been very dry lately, but there were a few places of soft ground that could be examined for tracks.

I eventually determined her route, but it took more than two hours, and the route led straight into empty country. Calculating how far she could have traveled, I figured I ought to let people know where I was going before I went after her. So, I hiked back to the nearest road (recovering the young lady, who had been dispatched by the owner's wife to search near the road).

Fortunately, someone had thought to notify the sheriff's department, and they had put the word out to local farms. It turned out she'd wandered up on one a good ways south along that route, eventually coming back out into the pasture of another farm down the way on that side of the river. They'd stuck her in a barn until they knew who she belonged to.

So that is how I spent today: crossing rivers and tracking animals, trespassing on all sorts of people's land. I didn't find the horse, but I did find her trail; and also the prints of deer, one young male bear recently in the area, and coyote; saw several live frogs and birds and squirrels; and met a kindly old gentleman at his woodshop. I also ran across a historic still, and a witch's house in the forest (I gather from her license plate, marked "CRONE," and all the Wiccan stuff around the house).

In other words, it was a great day. These horses should get lost in the woods more often.

Com Check

Com Check:

Co-bloggers, drop me an email. There are a couple of things I'd like to discuss with you, and I want to make sure I have everyone's email address so we can do it all at once.

Webb & Gun

Senator Webb and the Gun:

I must admit to serious disappointment in the judgment of Senator Webb's "possee," as the New York Times put it. I'm not so much talking about the question of hanging a trusted friend out to dry.

What I find inexplicable is that one of these two Former Marines selected a 9mm handgun as his defensive weapon. That is a direct violation of Rule 24.

Denial

Denial & Scapegoating:

The Hoover Institute has an excellent writeup on several strains of depature from reality in Western politics. Plus also one real problem that people are running from as fast as they can.

H/t: The Castle.

Welfare Reform

How Not to Reform Welfare:

A cautionary lesson from the Philippines:

A day-care center owner armed with grenades and guns held more than 30 youngsters and teachers hostage on a bus Wednesday, then freed them after a 10-hour standoff that he used to denounce corruption and demand better lives for impoverished children.

We'll be more convinced of your sincere desire to improve the lives of children when you don't threaten them with grenades.

Ducat, a 56-year-old civil engineer who has staged other attention-grabbing stunts in the past, then put the pin back in a grenade, handed it to a provincial governor, Luis "Chavit" Singson, and surrendered as Singson held his arm.

"I accept that I should be jailed because what I did was against the law," Ducat said in an interview with The Associated Press shortly before the standoff ended.

Really, even if this didn't happen to be against the law, I'd still want you jailed.

Readings on Senatorial Perfidy

Readings on Senatorial Perfidy:

The best overall post on the subject is Cassandra's, which demonstrates how cleanly General Petraeus, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Pace, were ignored. General Petraeus in particular said what he would need at his recent confirmation hearings; the Senate voted to confirm him, and then to deny him those same resources.

"We would have 45-day gaps, which would mean that part of a territory would basically be vacated to the enemy and ... you would have to fight your way back in," Pace said.

In other words, your elected representatives are playing political games with the lives of our troops, and they will pay in blood. People will die pacifying Iraqi neighborhoods, then be forced to leave and the insurgents will come back. Then our troops will return and die trying to drive them out again while the Democrats complain that the war is unwinnable. Keep this in mind the next time you hear them talking about how they 'support the troops'. Sure they support us - they support our right to come home in body bags if it helps sweep them into office in 2008.

If they really 'supported the troops' they'd either demand an immediate troop withdrawal now and face the consequences at the ballot box (face it, there is no reason for another American to die if they don't intend us to win this war, and when you read this bill, it becomes quite plain that is the one thing the Democratic Party will not countenance) or honor up and get behind the surge.

Is it fair to call it perfidy (or treachery)? I think it is, for the reason Cassandra cites: not because they are trying to end the war, but because they are leaving people in place to die, knowing full well they will refuse those people the support they need either to win or to hold their ground. We had a long discussion at (former-pro war, now anti-war blogger) the Commissar's place not long ago (co-blogger Eric Blair gets mentioned toward the end).

You can see from what I have said that I am not advocating that Congress may not re-enter the field; I do not argue that the President has authority to wage war forever, and they may not say otherwise.

I have said specifically that they may use their Art. I powers to rescind the authorization and demand an end to the war. That isn’t explicit in the Constitution, but I think it’s a fair reading.

All I have asked is that we not cut off forces in the field from their support. If we aren’t going to support them, we should bring them home. If we aren’t going to bring them home, we should provision them.

You say the political class owes them nothing, but I disagree. They are owed something by every American, and the political class most of all. They are the ones who, when called, answered. They are the ones who left home and family, slept in dust storms, who have bled and died in the service to the will of the political class.

If that debt goes unanswered, there will be a price to be paid by our society. I do not know, in all truth and honesty, how to begin estimating it.

If that debt is not merely unpaid but denied — if people come to believe, as you have suggested, that the debt does not even exist — the price will be higher. The faith of a people in their nation reaps a beautiful interest in every endeavor that nation undertakes. A failure of faith, especially among that class that might be willing to volunteer for service, likewise exacts a usury that our nation will be sorry to pay.

The Senate has chosen to ignore that debt of honor. It intends, instead, to leave men in the field, but cut off their reinforcements. This is a dishonorable act, and a failure of faith. This is not what our fighting men deserve.

"They are men who give service and loyalty to us. I will return their service by serving their interests; and I will return their loyalty with my own, as fiercely as they have given."

Not the slender majority of Honorable Men and Ladies in the United States Senate.

Ribs

On "Texas" Ribs:

Any recipe that calls for a Phillips-head screwdriver can't be all bad.

UPDATE: Six hours later, I can report that the recipe is a good sight better than "not all bad."

This sounds like an interesting book

This Sounds Interesting:

Boomsday, a novel in which younger people refuse to pay Social Security benefits for the Baby Boomers, on the grounds that (a) such payments would be ruinous, and (b) the Baby Boomers were probably, in aggregate, the worst generation in American history. Point (b), at least, is true -- but only in aggregate. Some of the best people I've known in my life have been Boomers, whom I'd hate to see cast into the Outer Dark of age without the help they've relied upon in their budgetary forecasts.

So, here's my own "modest proposal" -- let's individually take care of those Boomers to whom we feel a personal debt, either as parents or teachers or for other good reason. Otherwise, let's end Social Security with the last of the WWII generation. Any Boomers who neglected to serve the next generation well enough to have loyal friends in it can fend for themselves, since it was only themselves they were ever interested in to begin with.

I'd say that was a reasonable compromise.

CMSA

Grim's Been Quiet. What's He Up To?

Why, watching things go bang:



Click on that image and look at the 'tracers.' Those are the fragments of a wax bullet in .45 caliber, loaded into the brass for a .45 Long Colt. That cartridge is special in another way: no powder, but a shotgun primer. The result is an explosion with enough force to spit the wax bullet out and fragment it, but only to drive the fragments for a few feet.

That means you can bust a balloon with it, but it's no threat to anyone more than a few feet away. Just the thing for a bit of Cowboy Mounted Shooting.

If you're familiar with rodeo, this is most like barrel racing or pole bending. The difference is that you've got to unload two single action .45s while you race, with a five-second penalty for each missed shot.

It's a timed event, so riders get a move on:



There are ladies too, like this grinning girl:



The ladies competition is in a different class, but this is one of those sports where men and women can compete fairly closely. The best lady riders I saw ran only a few tenths of a second slower than the best men, but the gun penalties they incurred meant they were rated as having run five or ten seconds slower. Still, if they could manage the guns well enough to get a 'clean run,' they wouldn't have been that far off from the top scores.

Here's a picture of some of the tack for one horse, named for Forsyth County Georgia's own "Junior Samples" of stock car racing and Hee-Haw fame. Note the Yosemite Sam conchos:



Junior is a smart horse, which is why his rider didn't do very well. Roy Roger's horse Trigger was billed as "the smartest horse in the movies," but a smart horse is a danger. The problem is that they think for themselves, and come to conclusions about the proper course of action that are different from their riders'. As a result, they do something other than what you expect, which is a good way to get hurt.

All the same, with some argument, Junior finished his course.

It was an enjoyable weekend. No, I didn't do any such riding -- it was my first encounter with the event, and I have no horses trained for it. You want to be sure your horse is very comfortable with guns going off by his ears before you try to ride him in an event like this, I assure you.

Does seem like fun, though. Rodeo with guns. Not bad.