Gun Nuts Media

Some people are wine aficionados, some people are beer connoisseurs, some people juggle geese.  I am a lover of coffee, and I quite seriously brew the best of coffee that you haven’t had.

Now, here’s the deal.  I have for all my life been drinking coffee using a system called “cold-brewing”.  My dad did it, and when I got my own place, I started doing it.  Cold brewing removes the bulk of the acidic, bitter taste from your beans, allowing you to actually experience the flavor of your coffee.   Got a nice french vanilla blend, and you’d like to taste the vanilla?  Try cold-brewing.

In the interest of full disclosure,  I will say this.  If you click on the link I’m going to embed in this post, and end up buying something, I get paid.  But at the same time, I wouldn’t recommend that you buy something that sucked.  Every single person I’ve ever given a cup of my cold-brewed coffee to has told me it’s the best coffee they’ve ever had.  Straight up the best.

The system works like this.  I take 1 pound of beans, and grind them using a medium coarse grind.  I then take the pound of beans, and put it in the Big White Thingy (there is a name for it, but I don’t care) which has the special thickass filter at the bottom.  I then add 8 or 9 cups of water and let that sucker sit for 12-16 hours.  After the time, I drain the resulting liquid into a decanter, which goes into the fridge.  The liquid is the Toddy Concentrate, which is the heart of cold brewed coffee.  When I want a cup of joe, I just heat up some water, and add my hot water to 1 or 2 oz (1 or 2 shots) of the concentrate, and BAMF, best coffee ever.

You can go to Toddy Cafe’s website by clicking that link.  They’re “the guys” for cold brewed coffee.  If you don’t want to buy the whole system, but want to try the coffee itself, you can get packs of the concentrate from their site.

I realize that this entire post sounds like an infomercial, but I really do love cold-brewed coffee.  I haven’t sold out – the only adds you’ll see on the site are for Toddy Coffee.

Shockingly, the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Ownership likes to delete those pesky parts of the Constitution they don’t like.

I’m not surprised.

That’s all this “I don’t get hunting” editorial is, an appeal to emotion.

Without sounding like a wimp, I simply wish we would care about those creatures we are displacing and not make sport of their plight.

Oh the poor deer!  Whatever will we do about them!  The “plight” of the cloven-hoofed rat, aka white-tailed deer isn’t one of those things that I’m overly concerned about.  I don’t even hunt deer and I think that for all her protestations, this woman ends up sounding like a wimp.

Seriously, the part where says that she doesn’t understand how people can be happy after killing poor Bambi makes her sound like a wimp.   I guess it goes part and parcel with this whole crusade to “respect animals” or something.  Forgetting for the moment that hunters do help control deer populations, and that deer are responsible for more animal related fatalities than any other animal in North America; I still can’t feel sorry for deer.  They’re almost a pest animal in some areas.

I’ll update during commercials and more Thursday morning.

Thoughts so far: Huckabee is looking pretty sharp. His answers to questions should seem really appealing to the conservative Christian base that makes up a lot of the Republican party.

Romney keeps losing points with me for not offering definitive answers.

Still don’t like Rudy.

9:43pm Update

The candidates have just finished covering a broad array of topics from Rudy’s qualifications to the powers of the VP.

I actually really liked Rudy’s answer to the question of whether or not he was using 9/11 to catapult himself into office. His appeal to voters to consider his entire record seemed to be well thought out and prepared.

The “Waterboarding question” was fun. Watching Mitt Romney and John McCain go back and forth was great. For the record, I agree with McCain that allowing our people to torture prisoners pretty much flies in the face of everything that makes America a great country.

My favorite question of this round was the “Get out/stay in Iraq” question. Ron Paul (crazy bastard that he is) was basically blaming our military presence for 9/11 and Islamic terrorism. Tancredo had a good point in that people who believe that if we pull our troops out it will solve our problems are believing in a fairy tale. Fred and Rudy both had good points on this issue as well.

Thursday Morning Summary thoughts

I’m going to break it down by candidate because that’s how I took notes during the debate.

• Tom Tancredo: I didn’t get much from The Tanc, actually. The questions/answers that I did see from him were pretty flat, and he just seemed like he was phoning it in.
• Duncan Hunter: Same as Tancredo, actually. Didn’t get a lot of good answers in, and honestly, the debate focused more on the other candidates than it did on these two. After watching the debate, Tancredo and Hunter are basically out of the running for me personally, and I think they’re completely marginalized as well.
• John McCain: His best moments were when he was talking about our policy on torture, and when he was addressing the question from The Gay General. My problem with McCain is that I only like him when he talks about military stuff and foreign policy, everything else he talks about I want him to shut up. But I do give him credit, on the foreign policy issues and questions, he appeared to be the most squared away of the candidates.
• Ron Paul: His new campaign slogan should be “Ron Paul ’08, still nuts.” Seriously, when he talks about anything other than civil liberties, he comes off like an uneducated boob.
• Fred Thompson: I liked Fred on the Second Amendment section, but he seemed to kind of flounder around during the rest of the debate. I did like his sense of humor after the Cheney cartoon, but being affable isn’t going to win elections.
• Mitt Romney: I really don’t like Mitt now. After last night, I like him even less than I like Rudy. He just waffled back and forth on issues, and never actually had an opinion on anything. Some of the pundits thought that he controlled the debate – I don’t think those guys were watching the same debate I was watching.
• Rudy Giuliani: You know, he seemed very composed. It was funny when he got booed by the crowd during the 2nd Amendment question, but overall I think Rudy did a pretty solid job. He never seemed to flounder, and was able to reasonably address most of the questions that came his way. I’m still not voting for him in the primary though.
• Mike Huckabee: I think Huck actually had the best performance during the debate. Even when I disagreed with him on something he said, he was respectful and well spoken. I really enjoyed his answer to the question of whether or not he believes “every word of the Bible”, as well as his answer to whether or not he’d accept the support the Log Cabin Republicans.

At the end of it, I think that Huck’s campaign will actually receive the biggest boost from this debate. He really did perform well, and for the first time you could see the qualities that helped him get elected as governor of Arkansas.

Update: You can read Uncle’s thoughts here.   Bitter has a ridiculous amount of coverage at her place, including the youtube videos from each candidate, as well as the youtube questions.  I also agree that Fred’s “save his generation from my generation” comment should have gotten way more applause.

Double update: It seems that some of the questions were plants.  I’d say that I’m surprised, but I’m not.

I have two issues of Guns & Ammo left on my subscription, and after some thought, I’m not going to renew.  It’s a combination of several reasons, which because I’m a blogger, I’m going to share with you.

1. Decline in quality: I fee like I’ve been reading the same article about the latest UltraBeltedMagnum/Custom 1911/tacticool accessory for the last two years.
2. Lack of timeliness: I have gotten tired of reading things in G&A that I read two months ago on the blogs; that includes gun reviews.
3. Boredom: Honestly, since Jeff Cooper passed, I don’t have nearly as much incentive to read G&A any longer.  The magazine (to me) has lost a piece of whatever so endeared it to me.

I guess what frustrates me is that I used to read G&A for technical information, and they’ve really cut that portion of the magazine down.  I still read my American Rifleman from the NRA, but I just sort of flip through G&A.  I do confess that I will sometimes read American Handgunner, but that’s because it makes me laugh due to a lack of quality.

And yet I can’t seem to bring myself to care that 1 in 3 US children have been “cyberbullied”.  To me, this seems like it’s a symptom of the knee-pad-helmet-overprotective parenting that is so common these days.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is trying to draw attention to how U.S. adolescents are affected by e-mail, instant messaging, text messaging, blog postings and other electronic communications.

I do not get what the big fat hairy deal is.  Kids are going to get bullied, whether it’s over the internet or in the real world, kids are going to be vicious little animals to one another a lot of the time.  Sure, the comforting anonymity of the internet makes it easier to call someone names; but bullying is bullying.

Kids are going to be mean to each, and they’re going to exclude one another.  It is what kids do.  Instead of having the gubbmit worry about “cyber bullies”, maybe someone ought to worry about the parents that are letting their kids run around unsupervised on the internet.

The mayor of Seattle and the chief of Seattle PD are planning on holding a conference to waste taxpayer dollars pour money down a black hole discuss the problem of “gun crime” in the Seattle Metro area.  Of course, when they say “gun crime” what they’re really talking about is more gun control.  Just look at a list of some of the guest speakers:

• Garen Wintemute, the author of the “study” about straw purchases at gun shows
• Police Chief Scott Knight – head of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, which is bought and paid for with anti-gun dollars
• The meeting is funded by grant money from the Joyce Foundation.

Methinks that they’re not actually going to be talking about how to reduce gun crime, but rather methods to reduce legal gun ownership in my old state.  The history bears me out, as both Mayor Nickels and Chief Kerlikowske have asked the state legislature for more restrictive controls on gun show purchases, one gun a month laws, and the usual slate of stupid firearms laws.

Now, while the Joyce Foundation has “funded” the summit – Seattle residents should remember that your tax dollars are paying the salaries of the Chief of Police and the Mayor, and that they’re using their time (and thusly your money) to scheme ways to deprive citizens of their rights.

Today’s specific instruction is on Rule #4: Be sure of your target and what is behind it. The impetus for this comes from Stearns County, Minnesota where a young girl found a bullet hole in her pillow around noon on Sunday.

From reading the article, it sounds like someone with a muzzleloader took a shot that missed its intended target, and it flew for a bit and went through this kid’s bedroom wall and into her pillow.

This is really the sort of thing that really emphasizes to me how important it is to be 100% sure of your target, especially when you’re hunting.  I have seen velocities from a modern inline muzzleloader anywhere from 1500 to 2000 fps, and have heard that some go up to 3000 fps; which is plenty fast enough to go a long way if you miss your mark.

I understand that sometimes you’re going to miss. It’s a fact of hunting that you don’t always make the shot. That’s why it’s extremely important to be sure of your target, and what is behind your target. Just because you think you’re Steven Sniper doesn’t mean that you can’t jerk the trigger and miss that trophy buck.

In related news, Sebastian links to a story from the Washington Times that shows that shotgun hunting isn’t really appreciable safer than rifle hunting. Indiana is a perfect example of this foolishness, actually. You’re not allowed to hunt with a centerfire rifle, but you can use a pistol chambered for a rifle cartridge. So your 12 gauge shotgun, or you TC/Encore .308 pistol are both okay, but not your Remington 30’06.