Sunshades

I gave up trying to find sunshades that screwed into objective threads for my two Bushnell scopes, so I bored out a 1.5" ID Delrin tube to make a very tight fit onto the scope on a .308 Winchester bolt action, and a 1.75" ID Delrin tube for a very tight fit on a 40mm scope. I had thought I would need nylon tipped set screws to hold them in place, but unless the recoil is far greater than I have experienced with with either rifle, I do not think that I will need them.  I actually needed to tap the sunshades in place with a little gunsmithing hammer.

Why So-Called President Biden is Not Going to End the Antifa Violence

12/23/20 Willamette Week article by a person who lives in the Red House Eviction Defense Zone.  For some reason I cannot copy text from the article, but essentially this person was having to negotiate leaving his house on foot while Antifa set up fire barricades and prevented him from living his home by car.  If you live in a Blue City, ask yourself why?

 

Are Preparations Under Way?

I dropped by Independence Shooting Range today, which has a 100 yard indoor rifle range upto 50 BMG.  Nope on the door indicated that there were delays on that range because of high demand.  I do not think hunting season is about to start.  I think some people are preparing for Lexington.  If Biden survives the 1/6 congressional meeting, there may be some serious consequences if they decide to pull a Beto.  Be ready.  I hope it does not come to that; a civil war will strengthen America's enemies enormously,  which I am sure Biden does not mind.

What Happened?

From my wife:

Back when my kids were little, about 30 years go, the city I lived in, in northern California, passed an ordinance that prohibited the singing of any carols that mentioned "Jesus" in them.  When one kindergartener asked to sing "Silent Night," the music teacher retorted that it was "illegal."  I am not making this up--I was sitting in my daughter's class that day and watched this woman silence a little girl's request. 

I was born in 1960.  AD, not BC.  I went to school in California, where, at Christmas time, we played with dreidels, sang "Hanukkah, O Hanukkah," had a Christmas tree in the class room, ate Christmas cookies and learned how to sing "Silent Night, Holy Night" in German. 

God was an unseen presence in our country, where going to church was important, not swearing was equally as important and being kind was expected of everyone.  Did everyone follow Christian morality and its values?  Of course not.  But God was still there, looking out for us.  Maybe a kind of divine Policeman, who expected us to be good whenever and wherever we could.

My dad was a virulent racist and one angry hombre.  My mom was an alcoholic.  My brother was a sneaky violent young man, who got involved in drugs at a very young age, so no, we were not the Cleaver family, and Father didn't always know best.  We stopped going to church when we were very young.  But God was still there, in the culture, in the larger picture, even if my parents didn't reflect knowing Him in their daily lives.

When I was little, we celebrated the birth of Jesus and sang Christmas carols about Bethlehem, three kings and a little baby in our home and in our culture.  

Yet over the decades, God has been marginalized a little more every year.  Usually diversity, not favoring any religion or not wanting to offend others has been the reason, and so nativities, monuments and overt references to God have gone the way of the buffalo.  

If Christianity is mentioned now, it's usually in disparaging terms--anti-this or that, or responsible for all societal ills.

So, look at America now, with God having been removed from the culture: Angry protestors take to streets to burn, kill and destroy.  Lawlessness in the new law, and the police are told to stand down.  Respect?  Nah--that's just an old Aretha Franklin song.  Name-calling, false accusations, half-truths and constant bashing of certain groups is an everyday occurrence now.  Now even our election process, our democracy, is in jeopardy.  Wow.

I have watched God be removed from public over the last 50 years, and our society has not improved.  In fact, it's far worse.

Jesus came to bring a light to a dark empire, where blood sports, infanticide, child marriage and homosexuality, infidelity, and slavery were part of the everyday way of doing life.  

Without Jesus and what He brought--a value of loving God, ourselves and our neighbor, darkness would still be our everyday, every decade, every millennium.  

I am watching America return to a pre-Christian place, a kind of new Roman empire. We need Jesus to come and bring His light into our lives even more than ever, into our culture, into our leaders, whether in church or in the public sphere.

 

Making Sunshades for Ancient Riflescopes

 I have a 3x-9x32mm Bushnell SportView that needs a sunshade.  Being lost in the mists of time, there is no sunshade available that screws into the threads at the objective.  So I bought a piece of 1 3/4" OD, 1 1/2" ID Delrin, and bored it 1" deep until it slides tightly on the outside of the scope tube.  I have some nylon tipped 8-32 setscrews on the way to make it a tight enough fit to handle .308 recoil.  The next step is turning down the exterior of the other end to fit the existing scope cover on the sunshade.  The amount of cutting to fit that scope cover on the tube would produce too thin a wall to survive cutting.  I will likely buy the Butler Creek Flip=Open 30250 which is for a 1.800" tube.  I will have to turn the 1.796" tube down slightly to take this cover.  

The time required inclines me to buy a new Redfield scope for the other scope.  Leupold sunshades fit Redfield scopes perfectly (same company).  Unfortunately the Redfield 3-9x40mm Revolution/TAC Riflescope with Tac-MOA Reticle Matte - 118348 seems to be out of stock everywhere.

More careful counting and measuring of threads on the Bushnell BDC 3-9x40mm indicates that it is threaded for M40x0.75.

Time to Make a Comprehensive List

Some years back,  the Skeptical Inquirer would gather famous psychics' predictions for the following year at the end of that year.  Will you be surprised that the psychic predictions were almost never even close to right?

Instapundit has links to several AGW "the sky is falling,  we have only four years left" predictions, all of them major disasters at futurology.  It would be a very useful resource for students being brainwashed about this subject in all grades to have a really large collection of these predictions as well as the "coming Ice Age" stories that were all the rage in the 1970s.  Let's work together to create a list of such stories and I will create a web page littered with keywords to attract both skeptical students and  those who have been led astray. 

 

Someone beat me to it.

Shut Up! the Hospitals Are Full!

12/30/20 Gloucester Live:

A woman filmed the inside of one of those British hospitals which are supposedly out of space because of COVID-19.   Then she posted it.  Police arrested her.  (Hint: hospital was largely empty of patients.)  

I know the problem is real but it is easy to see went there are skeptics out there. 

Here is a project: find data on ICU bed use during the last few winters.  I know that regional ICU crises in winter because of flu are common.  It would be nice to have some unimpeachable data on that.