Thursday, October 21, 2010

New Cats for the Army


Krauss-Maffei Wegmann (KMW) has handed over the first of 20 Leopard 2A4M CAN modernised battle tanks to the Canadian armed forces yesterday, October 7th 2010. The roll-out took place in the presence of the Canadian military representative, Vice Admiral Denis Rouleau, the deputy armed forces inspector, lieutenant-general Bruno Kasdorf, and numerous other representatives of the Canadian and German army on training area at Bergen near Hannover (Germany). The next deployment location for the Canadian Leopards will be Afghanistan.


The new (actually rebuilt) tanks based on the Leopard 2A4 models we bought from the Netherlands are now called Leo2A4 Ops and have incorporated a lot of the lessons learned in Afghanistan. These include better belly mine protection, better all round protection and the ability to attach pioneer equipment (ie mine plows, rollers, etc). Some of these tanks will be going to Afghanistan to replace the most worn out of the 20 leopard 2A6M’s that we leased and the older C2’s that we still used because they were equipped with the pioneer equipment, which the Leo 2A6M was not equipped for.


Heatballs!!


Human ingenuity will always outwit silly laws.

Siegfried Rotthaeuser and his brother-in-law have come up with a legal way of importing and distributing 75 and 100 watt light bulbs -- by producing them in China, importing them as "small heating devices" and selling them as "heatballs."

Judge and Jury


Picture courtesy of Vancouver Sun


Hmm seems the old adage “Be careful of what you wish for, because you may get it” still has meaning today. The Police Union here in BC has declared that the new tough laws on drinking and driving are causing their members to spend to much time dealing with people that have had only 1 or 2 drinks and not dealing with chronic offenders. Seems the police are not enjoying being the judge and jury and taking the flak for their decisions.
This is what happens when you have laws driven by special interests groups using emotions as a guiding force.
For a law to be effective and focused, you need facts, hardcore facts with unbiased research to back them up. This takes time and politicians hate taking time to get all of the facts. Harder yet with a sobbing mothers telling you that you are a heartless beast for not enacting this law right away. But to have good law it must be well thought out, with a clear and achievable objective, able to withstand the hard cold light of logic and reviewed without emotion. Another aspect is the law of diminishing returns. At some point the cost of enforcement and suppression of civil rights outweighs the gain to society brought by the law. The reality here is no amount of law is going to completely stop people from driving drunk and people getting killed. We can reduce it, but never stop it. Humans just have to many variables for such absolutes.
The politicians have themselves, the police and ourselves in a pickle. Any attempt to reduce the law will cause a backlash with the special interest groups, while the media will enjoy splashing sensational headlines on front pages, which are great for selling papers but not great for solving our issues. As a firearm owners we have been warning about these types of laws and law making, now that it is beginning to effect the rest of the population all we can say is “We told you so”.

Update thy BIOS



Seems all of my computer problems were caused by out of date BIOS software. Lesson learned is keep the BIOS updated. The problem of course is updating the BIOS is not easy and is one of the few things in modern computers where you can really screwup. Thankfully as I mentioned in this post, BIOS will be replaced in 2011.