#muzzle velocity

[retrocgads]

USA 1997

[attactica]

Understanding Muzzle Velocity

[aegisprecisionkinetics]

When it comes to precision shooting, the weight of your bullet plays a crucial role in both accuracy and overall performance. Different bullet weights impact how ammunition behaves in flight, influencing factors such as trajectory, recoil, and even wind resistance. As an ammunition manufacturer in Las Vegas, Nevada, understanding these dynamics can be key to achieving the best results whether you’re target shooting or hunting.

[nerfgunattachments]

The Dart of WAR! Are the new Game Face Pro Darts Any Good?

[trump-leaves-countdown]

A calming assessment of the chaos of the past 2 weeks. We're seeing manic grabs for power because Trump isn't smart enough or popular enough to do anything strategic.

Staying focused gives us the upper hand.

[yesornopolls]

The article is under the cut because paywalls suck

This is an edited transcript of an audio essay on “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing to the show on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.

If you want to understand the first few weeks of the second Trump administration, you should listen to what Steve Bannon told PBS’s “Frontline” in 2019:

Steve Bannon: The opposition party is the media. And the media can only, because they’re dumb and they’re lazy, they can only focus on one thing at a time. … All we have to do is flood the zone. Every day we hit them with three things. They’ll bite on one, and we’ll get all of our stuff done. Bang, bang, bang. These guys will never — will never be able to recover. But we’ve got to start with muzzle velocity. So it’s got to start, and it’s got to hammer, and it’s got to — Michael Kirk: What was the word? Bannon: Muzzle velocity.

Muzzle velocity. Bannon’s insight here is real. Focus is the fundamental substance of democracy. It is particularly the substance of opposition. People largely learn of what the government is doing through the media — be it mainstream media or social media. If you overwhelm the media — if you give it too many places it needs to look, all at once, if you keep it moving from one thing to the next — no coherent opposition can emerge. It is hard to even think coherently.

Donald Trump’s first two weeks in the White House have followed Bannon’s strategy like a script. The flood is the point. The overwhelm is the point. The message wasn’t in any one executive order or announcement. It was in the cumulative effect of all of them. The sense that this is Trump’s country now. This is his government now. It follows his will. It does what he wants. If Trump tells the state to stop spending money, the money stops. If he says that birthright citizenship is over, it’s over.

Or so he wants you to think. In Trump’s first term, we were told: Don’t normalize him. In his second, the task is different: Don’t believe him.

Trump knows the power of marketing. If you make people believe something is true, you make it likelier that it becomes true. Trump clawed his way back to great wealth by playing a fearsome billionaire on TV; he remade himself as a winner by refusing to admit he had ever lost. The American presidency is a limited office. But Trump has never wanted to be president, at least not as defined in Article II of the U.S. Constitution. He has always wanted to be king. His plan this time is to first play king on TV. If we believe he is already king, we will be likelier to let him govern as a king.

Don’t believe him. Trump has real powers — but they are the powers of the presidency. The pardon power is vast and unrestricted, and so he could pardon the Jan. 6 rioters. Federal security protection is under the discretion of the executive branch, and so he could remove it from Anthony Fauci and Mike Pompeo and John Bolton and Mark Milley and even Brian Hook, a largely unknown former State Department official under threat from Iran who donated time to Trump’s transition team. It was an act of astonishing cruelty and callousness from a man who nearly died by an assassin’s bullet — as much as anything ever has been, this, to me, was an X-ray of the smallness of Trump’s soul — but it was an act that was within his power.

But the president cannot rewrite the Constitution. Within days, the birthright citizenship order was frozen by a judge — a Reagan appointee — who told Trump’s lawyers, “I have difficulty understanding how a member of the bar would state unequivocally that this is a constitutional order. It just boggles my mind.” A judge froze the spending freeze before it was even scheduled to go into effect, and shortly thereafter, the Trump administration rescinded the order, in part to avoid the court case.

What Bannon wanted — what the Trump administration wants — is to keep everything moving fast. Muzzle velocity, remember. If you’re always consumed by the next outrage, you can’t look closely at the last one. The impression of Trump’s power remains; the fact that he keeps stepping on rakes is missed. The projection of strength obscures the reality of weakness. Don’t believe him.

You could see this a few ways: Is Trump playing a part, making a bet or triggering a crisis? Those are the options. I am not certain he knows the answer. Trump has always been an improviser. But if you take it as calculated, here is the calculation: Perhaps this Supreme Court, stocked with his appointees, gives him powers no peacetime president has ever possessed. Perhaps all of this becomes legal now that he has asserted its legality. It is not impossible to imagine that bet paying off.

But Trump’s odds are bad. So what if the bet fails and his arrogations of power are soundly rejected by the courts? Then comes the question of constitutional crisis: Does he ignore the court’s ruling? To do that would be to attempt a coup. I wonder if they have the stomach for it. The withdrawal of the Office of Management and Budget’s order to freeze spending suggests they don’t. Bravado aside, Trump’s political capital is thin. Both in his first and second terms, he has entered office with approval ratings below that of any president in the modern era. Gallup has Trump’s approval rating at 47 percent — about 10 points beneath Joe Biden’s in January 2021.

There is a reason Trump is doing all of this through executive orders rather than submitting these same directives as legislation to pass through Congress. A more powerful executive could persuade Congress to eliminate the spending he opposes or reform the civil service to give himself the powers of hiring and firing that he seeks. To write these changes into legislation would make them more durable and allow him to argue their merits in a more strategic way. Even if Trump’s aim is to bring the civil service to heel — to rid it of his opponents and turn it to his own ends — he would be better off arguing that he is simply trying to bring the high-performance management culture of Silicon Valley to the federal government. You never want a power grab to look like a power grab.

But Republicans have a three-seat edge in the House and a 53-seat majority in the Senate. Trump has done nothing to reach out to Democrats. If Trump tried to pass this agenda as legislation, it would most likely fail in the House, and it would certainly die before the filibuster in the Senate. And that would make Trump look weak. Trump does not want to look weak. He remembers John McCain humiliating him in his first term by casting the deciding vote against Obamacare repeal.

That is the tension at the heart of Trump’s whole strategy: Trump is acting like a king because he is too weak to govern like a president. He is trying to substitute perception for reality. He is hoping that perception then becomes reality. That can only happen if we believe him.

The flurry of activity is meant to suggest the existence of a plan. The Trump team wants it known that they’re ready this time. They will control events rather than be controlled by them. The closer you look, the less true that seems. They are scrambling and flailing already. They are leaking against one another already. We’ve learned, already, that the O.M.B. directive was drafted, reportedly, without the input or oversight of key Trump officials — “it didn’t go through the proper approval process,” an administration official told The Washington Post. For this to be the process and product of a signature initiative in the second week of a president’s second term is embarrassing.

But it’s not just the O.M.B. directive. The Trump administration is waging an immediate war on the bureaucracy, trying to replace the “deep state” it believes hampered it in the first term. A big part of this project seems to have been outsourced to Elon Musk, who is bringing the tactics he used at Twitter to the federal government. He has longtime aides at the Office of Personnel Management, and the email sent to nearly all federal employees even reused the subject line of the email he sent to Twitter employees: “Fork in the Road.” Musk wants you to know it was him.

The email offers millions of civil servants a backdoor buyout: Agree to resign and in theory, at least, you can collect your paycheck and benefits until the end of September without doing any work. The Department of Government Efficiency account on X described it this way: “Take the vacation you always wanted, or just watch movies and chill, while receiving your full government pay and benefits.” The Washington Post reported that the email “blindsided” many in the Trump administration who would normally have consulted on a notice like that.

I suspect Musk thinks of the federal work force as a huge mass of woke ideologues. But most federal workers have very little to do with politics. About 16 percent of the federal work force is in health care. These are, for instance, nurses and doctors who work for the Veterans Affairs department. How many of them does Musk want to lose? What plans does the V.A. have for attracting and training their replacements? How quickly can he do it?

The Social Security Administration has more than 59,000 employees. Does Musk know which ones are essential to operations and unusually difficult to replace? One likely outcome of this scheme is that a lot of talented people who work in nonpolitical jobs and could make more elsewhere take the lengthy vacation and leave government services in tatters. Twitter worked poorly after Musk’s takeover, with more frequent outages and bugs, but its outages are not a national scandal. When V.A. health care degrades, it is. To have sprung this attack on the civil service so loudly and publicly and brazenly is to be assured of the blame if anything goes wrong.

What Trump wants you to see in all this activity is command. What is really in all this activity is chaos. They do not have some secret reservoir of focus and attention the rest of us do not. They have convinced themselves that speed and force is a strategy unto itself — that it is, in a sense, a replacement for a real strategy. Don’t believe them.

I had a conversation a couple months ago with someone who knows how the federal government works about as well as anyone alive. I asked him what would worry him most if he saw Trump doing it. What he told me is that he would worry most if Trump went slowly. If he began his term by doing things that made him more popular and made his opposition weaker and more confused. If he tried to build strength for the midterms while slowly expanding his powers and chipping away at the deep state where it was weakest.

But he didn’t. And so the opposition to Trump, which seemed so listless after the election, is beginning to rouse itself.

There is a subreddit for federal employees where one of the top posts reads: “This non ‘buyout’ really seems to have backfired. I’ll be honest, before that email went out, I was looking for any way to get out of this fresh hell. But now I am fired up to make these goons as frustrated as possible.” As I write this, it’s been upvoted more than 39,000 times and civil servant after civil servant is echoing the initial sentiment.

In Iowa this week, Democrats flipped a State Senate seat in a district that Trump won easily in 2024. The attempted spending freeze gave Democrats their voice back, as they zeroed in on the popular programs Trump had imperiled. Trump isn’t building support; he’s losing it. Trump isn’t fracturing his opposition; he’s uniting it.

This is the weakness of the strategy that Bannon proposed and Trump is following. It is a strategy that forces you into overreach. To keep the zone flooded, you have to keep acting, keep moving, keep creating new cycles of outrage or fear. You overwhelm yourself. And there’s only so much you can do through executive orders. Soon enough, you have to go beyond what you can actually do. And when you do that, you either trigger a constitutional crisis or you reveal your own weakness.

Trump may not see his own fork in the road coming. He may believe he has the power he is claiming. That would be a mistake on his part — a self-deception that could doom his presidency. But the real threat is if he persuades the rest of us to believe he has power he does not have.

The first two weeks of Trump’s presidency have not shown his strength. He is trying to overwhelm you. He is trying to keep you off-balance. He is trying to persuade you of something that isn’t true. Don’t believe him.

You can listen to this conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.

[literaryvein-reblogs]

Hi, sorry to bother and sorry if this is too much, but I was wondering if you had anything to help write a character dying of an infected gunshot wound? Love ur acc btw 💓

Writing Notes: Infected Gunshot Wound

It will take some time for a gunshot wound to heal.

The length of time depends on the person's health and how serious the wound is.

The bullet may have broken a bone or caused a lot of damage to muscles, organs, or nerves.

The bullet may also have been left in the body because getting it out would have caused the person more harm.

Some signs of infection:

Redness or swelling around the wound

A lot of blood or pus coming from the wound

Foul odor

Fever of 100.4°F (38°C) or higher, or as directed by provider

It's normal to feel some stress and anxiety after a traumatic event like a gunshot wound. You may write about your character feeling anxious, angry, or depressed or having trouble sleeping or focusing. The following may also occur.

Wound continues to bleed even after putting direct pressure on it

For chest, back, or abdomen wounds:

Shortness of breath

Painful breathing

Back or abdomen pain that gets worse

Weakness

Dizziness or fainting

Redness, swelling, or fluid leaking from your wound that gets worse

Pain that gets worse

Symptoms that don’t get better, or get worse

New symptoms

Signs of Wound Infection

Pus: Medical professionals manage healthy drainage with regular dressings. But cloudy, yellowish drainage or purulent discharge with a pungent or foul odor accompanied with swelling and elevated pain is a sign of an infected wound.

Pimple: When a pimple-like crust forms on an injury, it indicates an infection. This pimple increases in size over time.

Soft Scab: While it is normal to have slightly pink or reddish skin around the injury, a scab that constantly increases in size over time could indicate an infection.

Red Area: In the initial stages, wounds appear red due to the natural healing process. But if the red area around the injured site continues to increase even after 4-5 days of an injury, it is a telltale sign of an infected wound.

Red Streak: If a red streak starts forming from the injured site towards the heart, it could be lymphangitis (inflammation of the lymphatic system). This underlying infection requires immediate medical attention.

More Pain: Normally, the pain subsides a few days after an injury or wound. Long-lasting or elevated pain even after a few days is a symptom of an infected site.

More Swelling: Similar to redness around the wound, swelling in the affected area indicates that the body’s immune system is working. But if the swelling continues even after 3-5 days, with no signs of it reducing, it indicates an infection.

Swollen Node: Generally, swollen lymph nodes indicate that a body’s immune system is fighting an illness. But the formation of a large and tender node near the injured site could be a sign of an infected wound.

Fever: After an injury or surgery, it is normal for a patient to run a low-grade fever. However, persistent high-grade fever coupled with decreased appetite and body ache is a sign of infection.

An intermediate velocity (muzzle velocity 350-650 meters per second or 1,200-2,000 feet per second) and a high velocity (muzzle velocity >600 meters per second or >2,000 feet per second) gun shot wounds are more likely to have a high risk of infection.

It has been found that gunshot wounds to the abdomen with associated colonic injuries had a worse outcome with an increased risk of developing wound infections.

Necrotizing Soft Tissue Infection. A serious, life-threatening condition. It needs treatment right away to keep it from destroying skin, muscle, and other soft tissues.

The word necrotizing comes from the Greek word "nekros."

It means "corpse" or "dead."

A necrotizing infection causes patches of tissue to die.

These infections are the result of bacteria invading the skin or the tissues under the skin. If untreated, they can cause death in hours.

Fortunately, such infections are very rare. They can quickly spread from the original infection site. So it's important to know the symptoms.

The most common symptoms of a necrotizing soft tissue infection:

Pain that hurts more than you think it should, based on the size of the wound or sore

A wound with a fever (higher than 100.4°F or 38°C) and a rapid heartbeat. This is usually more than 100 beats a minute.

Pain that extends past the edge of the wound or visible infection

Pain, warmth, skin redness, or swelling at a wound, especially if the redness is spreading rapidly and if areas are turning bluish or black

Skin blisters, sometimes with a "crackling" sensation under the skin

Pain from a skin wound that also has signs of a more severe infection, such as chills and fever

Grayish, smelly liquid draining from the wound

A small sore or pus-filled bump that is unusually painful to the touch

An area around the sore that is hot to the touch

A hard time thinking clearly, especially along with one of the other symptoms noted

A lot of sweating, especially with one of the other symptoms noted

Areas of skin at or near a wound that feel numb

A sore that is getting worse quickly, especially if you:

Are obese

Have diabetes

Have a weak immune system from using a steroid regularly

Are on chemotherapy for cancer

Are on dialysis

Have peripheral artery disease

Drink a lot of alcohol

Have poorly controlled HIV/AIDS

People with some of these symptoms are surprised to learn that they have a necrotizing soft tissue infection.

That's because it may not seem to be very severe at first.

But these infections can get worse quickly if they are not aggressively treated.

Sources: 1 2 3 4 5 ⚜ More: References ⚜ Writing Resources PDFs

Here's another reference that includes some mechanisms at work with gunshots. And more information on wounds.

Thanks for this request, this was quite interesting for me to look up—no apologies needed! And thank you for your lovely words, hope this helps with your writing <3

[sellyourshadownotyoursoul]

DP x DC WIP: Magical Sugar Daddy

The world exists in shades of green. Everywhere Jason looks he sees sickness and death and the perverted unfairness of it all.

There's blood on his boots, accompanied by the pleasant ache of tired muscles. His hand is still buzzing from the recoil of his gun - the breath in his lungs is tinged with cigarette smoke, dry and acidic.

There's been a presence behind him for a while now, trailing after him no matter what he does to lose the tail. It's like a prickle of static in the air, faint enough to dismiss for anyone less paranoid.

Jason's body is a spring wound too tight, the metal screeching in protest as the feeling of being watched intensifies.

A week and change since he's had a moment of peace.

When he hears the scuffle of a shoe on the quiet rooftop it's no wonder he explodes into action.

The trigger is pulled before he's even turned his head, a roar of thunder in his ears. The butt of his gun misses its target by a hair's breadth as he brings it down in an arc followed up by a kick that finally earns him a reaction. The figure grunts in pain and surprise, but the step it takes backwards isn't one of staggered retreat. It's a pivot on a heel and a coil of muscle before Jason's stalker is vaulting over the smokestack at their side, launching them back into the fight proper.

Jason growls low in his throat, like his lungs do not exchange oxygen for carbon dioxide but what he exhales is instead a heady mix of hunger and rage. There's an answering sound, a hiss pitched high at the end as the two of them clash once more.

Jason blocks a punch and pushes the muzzle of his gun against an unguarded shoulder, point blank. His target flinches hard enough that the shot only clips them but that gives Jason the opportunity for a follow-up punch to the jaw.

The hood of his stalker falls to their shoulders and Jason answers the grin on their face with a baring of teeth hidden behind his mask.

Jason gets a kick to the ribs while he reloads the gun and subsequently opts to just holster the thing so he can have both hands free. The other asshole isn't much bigger than Jason and their guard is sloppy.

He won't need weapons for this.

A misstep from his opponent has Jason surging forward to fling them over the edge of the roof before a flip that would make Dickie proud reverses their positions. It forces Jason to roll under a kick so he isn't the one meeting the pavement at lethal velocity.

His attacker appears male, age unclear but certainly out of their twenties. Jason grabs the snowy white braid that flows behind them and feels a rush at the gasp that pulls from the guy, even as the retaliation gets him an uppercut that makes his vision swim.

Jason twists the hair around his fist, forcing the head it's attached to into the pavement at their feet.

He slams it down once, twice, before a leg around his own has him lose his balance. He lands on his elbow and curses at the pain shooting through it even as he gets back up and rounds on his opponent. He blocks a punch by diverting it outwards, stepping back and to the side so the fight stays in the center of the roof.

There's blood running freely down the other man's front from a nose that Jason bets is broken, the liquid looks jet black in Jason's monochromatic world of sickly lazarus green.

The eyes watching him are wide and alert, a manic edge to them from the bared fangs and the tense posture. They both surge forward, trading blows and kicks until they're breathing heavy and Jason can tell his opponent is flagging.

The way they move makes it clear they're not a fighter, at least not one with a preference for hand-to-hand. They keep up with Jason just barely, but it's already clear who the winner is going to be, even as Jason lets it drag out until there's sweat running down his back.

A kick from Jason's steel toed boot against an unarmored shin is what finally ends it. His opponent falls to the ground with a curse and they don't get back up even as Jason looms over them. Their eyes are half-lidded, hands sprawled out limply above their head in defeat, but there's a smile on their face that really tests Jason's ability to suppress the urge to tear out their throat. He places a boot on the guy's sternum and puts enough weight on it to show he's serious.

A low sound, a mix of a grunt and a laugh, precedes a weak attempt to buck Jason off but he doesn't budge.

“Talk,” Jason rasps.

A dark tongue swipes through the drying blood on his assailant’s lips and they cough wetly before responding.

“Nice to meet you,” is what he says, strained from the pressure on his lungs, “fuck, you're good.”

“Who sent you?” Jason's demand is curious but dripping with derision. Who would send a fucking prodigy of stealth just to have them suck at actually taking out the target?

Jason hadn't been able to lose this stalker for over a week, had gotten litterally zero intel on who this fucker is despite having Oracle and half his own men on high alert.

And then the guy just walks up and scuffs his shoe against the pavement?

Suicide by Red Hood much?

“Technically Clockwork, but I'm not really-” the guy coughs again, trying to breathe, “not really someone people can send.”

Jason prompts him to continue with an addition of pressure to his ribs. He doesn't feel any sort of armor under the neutral hoodie, nor do the cargo pants look like they're in any way reinforced. They're clean though and clearly not the kind of worn Jason expects for someone trying to blend in this side of town. No camouflage tech unless it's nano-sized.

The man wrinkles his nose, eyes flicking down to the boot and back up to Jason's face.

“Okay, look I know I'm late, but I'm here to apologize,” he says with another little grunt and a wiggle. Jason keeps him pinned.

“I didn't actually know you were mine until a year ago-”

“Yours?” Jason scoffs, something sour rising in his gut.

“Yeah?”

“I don't fucking belong to you,” Jason states darkly, one hand unholstering his gun.

There isn't any immediate reaction to the escalation, but Jason can feel a strange charge in the air. The body underneath him certainly doesn't relax.

“Fuck, okay sure, yeah, no ownership,” the guy huffs but the voice is not nearly as afraid as it should be, “that's kind of, ah, what I wanted to talk about.”

“And if I tell you to fuck off?”

“Then I'll fuck off.”

Jason pauses, tilting his head in consideration.

“Who are you?” Jason's question is wary and curt, a final offer to change his mind before he cocks his gun. The guy under him watches with bright, intense eyes, seemingly unperturbed by the monster looming above.

“I'm the reason you're still alive, Jason.”

Jason laughs coldly at the boldness of that statement.

“Bullshit,” he spits.

The eyes continue to watch him, appearing to glow in the faint light. The guy's face is set in a grimace, but it's one of mild inconvenience rather than pain. He should have a concussion at least, not to mention a fracture or two, so he's either trained to withstand pain or some kind of meta. Maybe he's hopped up on some new drug that's got him unaware of the damage. A byproduct of whatever made him so difficult to track.

Neither of them are panting anymore.

“Last chance,” Jason drawls as he takes aim at a damp forehead, already feeling the anticipatory rush that comes with taking a life.

He is admittedly not intending to let this little stalker live no matter what comes out of his mouth. Not when he knows Jason's name, not when there might not be another chance to tie up the loose end.

The guy seems aware of it too, eyes flickering over Jason's mask as if trying to find the right combination of words to buy just a little more time.

He opens his mouth, closes it again.

He sighs through his nose, a wet sound when it displaces the coagulating blood, and lets his head fall back against the concrete rooftop. The message seems clear in the resigned set of his shoulders and Jason feels an irrational indignance at being denied the struggle.

Nevertheless he pulls the trigger.

BANG

The sound echoes into the distance until it blends into every other incriminating noise Gotham makes at night. Jason frowns down at the would-be corpse.

He couldn't have missed, not with the muzzle barely a foot from its target - but there's no bullet hole marring the face at his feet. The eyes remain alive and aware as they watch Jason's growing confusion.

“What the fuck,” he mutters.

That earns him a stuffy snort. The man's hands flare out as if to say ‘ta-dah’ and only flinch minutely when Jason sends another bullet into him.

“Rude,” the guy comments, in the cadence of someone annoyed rather than relieved.

“What are you,” Jason demands in response, forcefully holstering his gun now that it has proven to be worthless. Looks like fists are going to be the way forward.

“Loaded question,” the guy groans unhelpfully, pushing at Jason's leg with little success.

Jason makes a point of momentarily increasing the pressure, staring the fucker down through the whiteouts of his mask.

“You survived a lazarus pit,” stalker offers, the words a sucker punch to an unhealed wound that Jason refuses to acknowledge, “which means you accepted the price that comes with it, whether you knew about it or not.”

“And that explains what, exactly?”

“You asked what I am,” the guy shrugs.

“And you still haven't answered.”

There's a moment where stalker-guy gazes up into the cloudy, dark sky, hands settling from their attempts to remove Jason's boot to instead tap idly against the leather. The fingers are long and thin, the kind an author might describe as suited for playing the piano, the nails neither bitten to the quick nor so long as to appear unkempt. Jason feels a sudden urge to break those fingers one by one just to see if that might yield a more satisfying reaction. Or some answers. His eyes catch on a sleek black band on the ring-finger of the guy's left hand and wonders momentarily if his shadow’s got someone waiting for him. He pities them.

“Price,” Jason prompts, “explain.”

“Right, yeah I can do that-do you mind stepping off? The bullets are digging into my back-”

“Maybe if you give me a reason to,” Jason retorts with a sneer, feeling the absolute furthest from any notion of ‘charitable’.

Stalker-guy sighs.

“Got it, okay, so, I'm basically your magical sugar-daddy-”

“My fucking what-” Jason chokes, feeling distinctly like the gravity of the situation is doing loop-de-loops.

“Your patron. Your new one, anyway,” the guy shrugs again, as if that's a concept that's common knowledge.

Jason forces air into his lungs. The world flickers.

“You paid your soul to my predecessor and he gave you back your memories.”

Jason's insides are made of cracked glass and every syllable pushes further up against it. Isn't the pit rage enough of a price?

“I came to introduce myself,” Jason's apparent ‘magical sugar-daddy’ continues conversationally, “which I guess I still haven't, technically.”

Jason's hands are white-knuckled fists, his vision is green and tunneling. From the moment he had him pinned every word out of his stalker's mouth has done nothing but add more fuel to the anger sitting low in Jason’s gut. The need for this piece of shit to at least have the decency to be afraid.

Talking about Jason's fucking soul - about paying the price and book-ending it with a term as crass as ‘sugar-daddy’ is so discordant it is almost physically painful. Mentioning the pits and claiming to have saved Jason's life in such a blasé manner has him writhing with indignation. The condescension drips from him and his every action, too similar to-

Jason's spiraling is interrupted by a change to his balance. His foot on the guy's chest hits the concrete underneath, the sight of his calf sticking out of what should have been a living, breathing body causing a momentary stutter in Jason's reality.

Then the guy is on his feet, reaching out a hand as if they weren't at each other's throats a moment ago. As if the bullets lodged in the concrete weren't intended for one of their heads. As if he cannot sense the raw malice pouring out of Jason.

“I'm Danny, sorry for the wait.”

[eugenedebs1920]

The unhinged inauguration speech, the sieg hail solute at the inauguration celebration, the pardoning or EVERYTHING SINGLE Jan 6th seditionist, the unconstitutional attempt to end birthright citizenship, the immigration crackdowns with clowns like doctor Phil, and dog killer cosplay cowboy Krist Noem, the wholly unqualified animated, absurd nominations and the circus at the capital of confirmation, the tariffs….

What’s the one thing they didn’t want getting headlines? Which event is Elon musk threatening to sue over? Which one required state marshals to intervene? The Treasury Department hack.

There’s not much I agree with, would have in common with, or would condone that Trump engages in. There’s not much I can promote regarding his behavior, his policies, or his ethics. What I will say he’s good at, is marketing.

He went from bankruptcy, owing millions to various banks, to playing the role of a successful businessman on TV, to accidentally winning the presidency. He has sold his brand better than most, in par with the best.

Trump exudes arrogance, ignorance, sleaziness, incompetence, inexperience, stupidity, and a complete lack of grace or manners, just to name a few. He has marketed his brand as something that doesn’t resemble a cheap Chinese knockoff, which it most certainly is. People buy it! You gotta give him credit for that.

In this Ezra Klein piece there’s an interview with Steve Bannon, he talks about “flooding the zone” with chaos. He called it “muzzle velocity” This is the distraction from the actual crimes.

To quote the video, “Trump is acting like a king, because he’s too weak to govern like a president.” The so called mandate, didn’t crack 50% of the vote. The margin in the house is the slimmest since the Great Depression. The senate is 47-53. Per the norm it’s costume jewelry, its playtime getups, its dress up in the Oval Office. It’s cosplay.

Don’t give him the power he doesn’t have. There is a system in place in this representative democratic constitutional republic that has held for 249 years! A system that survived a civil war, two world wars, a great depression, a monumental civil right movement, an anti-war coalition that worked. One man. One tyrant can not just simple walk into the White House and proclaim he doesn’t have to abide by this governance that is the law.

Just because he’s a criminal doesn’t mean it’s not illegal when he does it.

As many federal employees have been unifying under when asked to resign or be terminated, ‘Hold the line.” He is not a king, he is not the ruler, he just plays one on TV.

Resist. Hold the line. Don’t obey in advance. Never submit. Don’t believe him.

🇺🇸

[retrocgads]

USA 1997

[markwateneymemorialcrater]

So one of my favourite sci-fi weapons is simply just extremely overpowered kinetic weaponry.

Think rail guns and that sort of thing that simply accelerate a projectile to incredible velocities. Of course the velocities of non-existent fictional weaponry are up to the author writing them. But for the sake of analogy, let’s say you have a weapon that can accelerate a 1kg projectile to 2997925m/s. This is 1% the speed of light in a vacuum.

Now to help put this insane speed into perspective. Let’s imagine we have our cannon at earth at are firing it at the moon. It would take this projectile just over 2 minutes to get to the moon. That is 384,400km traveled in 2 mins and 8 seconds.

For added context, the largest artillery cannon ever made, The Paris gun, could fire a projectile over 130km with a muzzle velocity of 1640m/s. It still took the projectile over 3 minutes to reach its target.

Now back to our 1kg projectile traveling at 1% the speed of light. When it impacts the moon. It will deliver 0.45x10^13 Joules of kinetic energy.

The Hiroshima nuclear bomb delivered approximately 1.8x10^13 joules of energy

This means that our 1kg projectile hits with the punch of 1/4 of a city destroying nuclear bomb.

It’s truly incredible how much energy you can store in something just by making it go really fast. Which coincidently, is also really helpful when you are wanting to deliver that energy to a target in as short a period as possible.

[historyofguns]

In the article from The Armory Life titled "9mm vs. 40 – Is the .40 Caliber a Better Handgun Cartridge?", Scott Wagner, a retired law enforcement officer, examines the longstanding debate between the 9x19mm Parabellum and .40 caliber cartridges. Highlighting significant events like the 1986 FBI Miami Shootout, which led to the FBI's subsequent switch to the 10mm Auto and the eventual development of the .40 caliber, Wagner discusses the pros and cons of each round in terms of stopping power and recoil. Through testing with Springfield Armory handguns and comparing the performance of both rounds using wet clay blocks, he concludes that while the .40 caliber offers more power due to its larger diameter and heavier bullet, advancements in 9mm ammunition have narrowed the gap in terminal performance, making the choice between the two a personal preference balancing power, recoil, and handling in defensive situations.

[aegisprecisionkinetics]

When shopping for ammo, the details on labels can often feel overwhelming. Understanding these specs is crucial for choosing the right hunting ammunition, whether you’re browsing an online ammo store or visiting a licensed ammo shop in Nevada. Let’s break down the key components to help you make informed decisions.

[valkayrieactual]

if you got a weapons array installed, what would it feature?

this took me fucking ages to answer in a way I actually felt happy with, anywhos...

internal:

* electroshock knuckles for hand to hand, output amperage ranges from light tickle to heart stopping, can be used as a defibrillator or jump start combustion engines in a pinch

* popup forearm mount for ferromagnetic collapsible blade, hilt contains a self assembling blade core that aligns metal dust into a mono molecular edge, can be deployed in its forearm mount on either side of my arm or eject the hilt into my hand for more traditional swordplay

* ammo feed/reloader for magazine loaded projectile weapons, contains multiple spare mags for favored projectile pistol and rifle, able to reload magazines automatically in internal compartment

* direct connection and induction pads in palms capable of powering as well as siphoning power from energy weapons

* embedded magnetic mounts for firearms in each thigh and behind each shoulder

external:

* 9mm pistol with integrated muzzle brake

* helical railgun based rifle with data link for in eye HUD muzzle velocity control, targeting, status, diagnostics, and sensors

[seat-safety-switch]

Imperator Butterpants, my charge for the weekend, had treed a squirrel in the park. Normally, I would help out the dog - that’s what is humans are for - but there’s a complication. A nearby toddler birthday party would be ruined by the sight of my aunt’s Pomeranian ripping a domestic rodent in half for fun. That’s the tragedy of the commons, right there. Exactly what Plato was talking about.

As a result, I squat gently and prepare myself to pick up the dog in a caring embrace. This feels natural, comforting. I am communing with my ancestors who tamed his ancestors, and in a moment I will have experienced the sensation of another living thing obeying my demands. Nothing doing. Butterpants turns around, snaps at my face, and dislodges my 3M Tekk P100 respiratory-particulate-protection bayonet fitting mask slightly. We are going home, I declare to a dog that does not understand English.

Luckily for me, I have prepared a vessel for transporting the dog. It is a sidecar consisting of an old bumper car, hastily welded with leftover Home Depot fence strapping (don't worry, I ground off most of the galvanization) to the side of a Razor Pocket Mod child's electric scooter. Well, I say "child's," but we both know that's some bullshit that I trot out to make the cop think it's impossible that I break the speed limit on this pink piece of plastic. In actuality, I know that there is no way that the officer is tuned-in enough to electronic engineering to realize that the several hundred pounds of lithium ion phosphate pouch batteries ziptied together under the seat is easily enough stored energy to launch this thing into low earth orbit should I decide to whack the throttle bare open. Plus, it means I can ride in the bike lane, which is good. Have you seen what kind of maniacs drive cars?

Despite what I just told you, I pin the throttle nonetheless, knowing that the aggregate resistance of the battery cables momentarily turning to a liquid will act as a sort of dynamic throttle control. We are off, both figuratively and literally. You might have encountered in the past a dog wearing "doggles," which is a portmanteau of the word "dog" and "goggles." Eye protection for dogs is absolutely critical at these kinds of velocities, and it is for that reason that I have placed a welding mask on the muzzle of my aunt's dog, protecting him from impacts with bugs, gravel, and other multi-use-pathway users.

We get home in quite a hurry, so much so that I have to use my neighbour's garden hose to extinguish the foam-rubber tires bonded to the rear hub motor. Imperator Butterpants is dazed initially, having reached a land speed formerly only attempted by dogs named Laika, but soon recovers. And, hey! We got that squirrel after all, although I'm pretty sure I'll have to peel it off of the welding mask and run it through a strainer before I can put it in with his Ol' Roy.

[tuitsutherland]

I need to know. If I shot a dragon with a modern gun would I kill them? Probably yes, seeing as modern assault rifles have muzzle velocities of up to 900 metres per second. While the Ballistas in book 7 have a muzzle velocity of only about 90 metres per second, which is 10 times less.

Also explosive or fragmentation rounds would absolutely fucking shred through a dragons wing, and then you realise that modern gun AA systems shoot like 100s of these HE/Frag rounds per second.

no, and why asking this???