True Fact of the day

In 1915, President Wilson directed the Secretary of the Treasury to have the Secret Service investigate espionage in the United States.

Guam is screwed

Now we've done it:

Washington (CNN) -- Roughly half the U.S. Marines on Okinawa will be transferred under an agreement announced Thursday that will reduce the military footprint in Japan, easing local resentments over the amount of land being used by American forces.

Some 9,000 Marines along with their family members will be transferred under the agreement, with about 5,000 being sent to Guam as part of a military buildup on the U.S. territory in the Pacific, according to a joint statement released by the U.S.-Japan Security Consultative Committee.

Does nobody listen to Hank Johnson?

A Famous Historian

So anyway, as I mentioned before, there was no way in hell I was going to win the distinguished thesis award. And I didn't, though I did have one of the finalists.  Instead I won first place in the Research Colloquium*, which is just as cool, I suppose. Now other than some very temporary changes***, the thesis is done, and once I turn in a paper tomorrow night titled "The Lord is my Jailor," the degree will be complete. My advisatrix pulled me aside today and asked if I was quite serious about publishing it myself on Amazon. When I told her I was, she begged me not to until I spoke to an editor she knows at the KSHS - they just might be interested in publishing this sort of thing...

Next on the list: gunsmithy. Then maybe one of these days I'll start a blog.  It would be nice to get that off the bucket list anyway.

* Oral Presentation division.  There was another division where you make posters that illustrate your research.  I'm rather with Dr. Tank Command** on that one: posters are for kindergarteners.
** The military historian who nominated my thesis and simultaneously broke the news to me that it wouldn't win.
*** The grad office wants me to make the introduction into Chapter 1, so the first chapter will now be an explanation of all the following chapters.  It's temporary because the first thing I'm doing after I give them copies is change it back.

Handgun Frustration

So anyway, I've got a Ruger Standard, ca. 1954. I broke it down, cleaned it, re-assembled it, and it all checked out. However, when I try to break it down again, the lever comes about 20% out (clearing the latch, as you can see on the bottom of the pic) and will move no more. Can't push it back, can't pull it out. The bolt pulls 80% so long as the safety is off. I don't want to force the lever because I don't want to bend the pin, but I'm at something of a loss. Any ideas?

UPDATE: Blogger's new editing layout utterly sucks.  If I was a serious blogger, I would switch to another host immediately.  I'm not, so I'll whine instead.

UPDATE II: Got it. I'm not sure what I did. I managed to force the lever toward the bolt and in that way got it back into its closed position.  Then when I unlatched it again, it worked perfectly, so I have broken it down and re-assembled it, and will keep doing so until I can do it in my sleep. Carry on.

Wear a hoodie day

If by 'controversial' you mean 'stupid'

His followers were dummies

then we have a controversial new theory:

As [Thomas] de Wesselow is quick to admit, this idea is only a hypothesis. No one has tested whether a decomposing body could leave an imprint on shroud-style cloth like the one seen on the [Shroud of Turin]...

It's likely, he says, that Jesus' female followers returned to his tomb to finish anointing his body for burial three days after his death. When they lifted the shroud to complete their work, they would have seen the outline of the body and interpreted it as a sign of Jesus' spiritual revival.

So that's the theory. Mary, Mary, Mary, and Mary went to the tomb on Easter morning, saw the marks on Jesus' shroud and, ignoring the stinking, decomposing corpse they had come to prepare, instead posited the cloth "as a sign of Jesus' spiritual revival."  All of that stuff about, "They have taken away the Lord out of the sepulchre, and we know not where they have laid him" is just to be ignored.

But it fits the pattern. As is often the case (see: Jesus walked on the ice), whenever someone comes up with a naturalistic theory to explain a miracle,* that theory posits theoretical but unknown natural forces that gullible people interpret as a miracle. And it does so while ignoring everything those people said about it, or puts words in their mouth they never spoke. We therefore are supposed to ignore the testimony Jesus' disciples gave, the fact that no Christians ever returned to Jesus' tomb even though they knew he was there, and the fact that they never mentioned this 'miracle cloth.' We must do this in order to account for how a natural process that no one has seen or tested really explains why Jesus' idiot disciples ran all over the Middle East and Europe claiming that he had risen from the dead.

This, I guess, is what is called science.

* as I may have mentioned before, I neither know nor care if the shroud is "genuine," by which I mean it is really the burial cloth of Christ.  If it is, it's pretty cool. If it's not, that's fine, too.  But there can be little doubt that de Wesselow's argument is designed to get around a potential miracle.

Behold the Man

Pilate took Jesus and scourged him. His soldiers platted a crown of thorns and put it on Jesus's head. They also dressed him in a purple robe. And the soldiers said, "Hail, King of the Jews!" and struck him with their fists.

Then Pilate went out again and said to the crowd, "Look, I bring him to you so that you might know that I find no fault in him." Then Jesus came forward wearing the crown of thorns and the purple robe. And Pilate said to the crowd, "Behold the man!"
John 19:1-5