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Out Of Your Element

Hunting

Whenever someone asks me what it’s like to hunt in Africa, I’m kind of at a loss for words.

The African bushveldt, you see, is pretty difficult to hunt.  Here’s a representative sample:

It’s pretty dense — not tropical jungle, though as much densely covered, and visibility is often measured in feet rather than in yards.

To give you an idea of what this means:  from a standing start, a lion can cover 100 yards in about 3.5 seconds.  Typical visibility in lion country:  about 100 feet, as above.  (Do the math.)

And death is everywhere, the minute you leave the relative safety of your Land Rover or hunting camp.  It could be a mamba, a scorpion, a Cape buffalo, or any number of things with teeth and claws, for whom a human is kinda like a marshmallow:  can’t run that fast, no tough hide, no horns or whatever to protect itself, and laughably slow reflexes and crap hearing by comparison to the typical prey animal.

Like this leopard:

Now you know.

Gratuitous Gun Pic: Brno Mod 22F (8x57mm)

Gratuitous Gun Pics

Long Time Readers will know of my fondness for full-stocked rifles like the SMLE.  Try this beauty on for size, at Steve Barnett’s Very Very Bad Place:

Okay, it looks beautiful, and the chambering is of course excellent — the 8mm Mauser cartridge is adequate for almost any purpose, like its Murkin .30-06 counterpart — but I have a couple of reservations about the Mannlicher flat or “butter-knife” bolt handle.

You see, it’s lovely to look at and of course it works very well;  but after more than half a dozen shots, that sharp edge starts to hurt your hand.  Granted, in the hunting activity, you seldom have to shoot more than a couple of times in a row — unless things are going very, very wrong — but I must say I prefer a regular rounded bolt handle like this one to the butterknife above:

But would I shy away from the Brno (later named CZ) if offered?  Hell, no.

And this little short-barreled carbine would be extremely handy in the field.

My Favorite President

Good Stuff, Patriotism

Who else but Calvin Coolidge?  Watch this video, and realize two things:

Our current problems are neither new nor exclusive.  Immigration, taxation rates, federal spending, employment, whatever:  they existed in the 1920s, and Coolidge addressed them all, and properly.

Character matters.  Character, public character, matters.  Compare and contrast that of Coolidge with any modern president (i.e after Eisenhower), and realize how rare it is to find someone who can govern on principle — principle based on the Constitution and not on some other basis.

At the end of the above video, one of the commentators says, “He is exactly what we need at this point in time.”

I beg to differ.  We need such a man all the time, every time, to be our President.

I want all our future presidents to be more like Coolidge.  So does Amity Shlaes.

End of story.