HWFO Reading List, February 2025

And a discussion about self-spiking

I write a lot more than I post. One of the reasons I don’t post a huge amount to the HWFO publication is I don’t want mediocre stuff on the blog. I spike my own articles quite a bit, so I thought it would be fun to talk about one of the spiked ones and why I spiked it.

I have a great rant I roll out in online gun arguments whenever a pro-gun conservative gets his panties in a twist about liberals buying guns.

Lacking a better writing prompt this week, I decided to take that quip to its logical and creative apex, and rewrote line by line Martin Luther King Jr.’s I Have a Dream speech, substituting gun owners for black folks, California for Alabama, and Samuel Colt for God. I would not call the undertaking Herculean, as it pretty much wrote itself, although I did burn a few hours on getting the language right. The highlight of the piece was towards the end.

I have a dream that one day in the glacial valleys of Illinois, the sons of former gang bangers and the sons of former cops will be able to share time at indoor ranges with each other in solidarity and brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of New York, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will stop throwing black males ages sixteen to twenty-four up against brick walls looking for handguns that they have just as much a right to carry as white stockbrokers one block over.

I have a dream that my two children will one day live in a nation where they can own a belt fed Gatling gun. I have a dream today.

I have a dream that one day in California with its vacuous liberals, with its governor threatening a second constitutional convention, with its handgun roster and feature bans and mag size limits and ten day waiting periods, one day right in California Blacks, Whites, Mexicans, Gays, Christians, Libertarians, Communists, Rednecks and Nazis will all share the same fox hole, passing loaded mags between each other while they resist the swarm of weaponized quadrotor drones sent by Jeff Bezos to make us take mandatory vaccine shots and eat bugs.

It was fun but I spiked it.

My quip, and the drive behind it, flows from a personal conviction of mine that guns will soon be a social force that brings people together, instead of pulling them apart. But while that particular section of the I Have A Dream speech is about coming together, the rest of the speech truthfully isn’t. It’s about a deep and legitimate grievance that black folks had during the Civil Rights movement, that MLK spelled out explicitly, and that gun owners simply cannot currently match. While I side with gun owners on that culture war, really the only culture war battlefront pick a side on, guns have mostly won.

And while the antigunners and 60s racists both act on deep personal prejudices, the actions of the antigunners are mostly confined to law and are much less personally egregious. The bit of the piece quoted above works great, but the rest of the piece ended up being a hollow, marginally offensive equivocation not worthy of publication.

But the subscribers on the HWFO Slack forum all got to read it and give their opinions, so if you’re interested in reading that or other spiked articles, consider upgrading your free subscription to “paid.” The juiciest spike was probably the Israel-Gaza one my readers told me not I could not under any circumstances publish, although the one calculating assassination odds for Biden and Trump was also pretty nuts.

Reading List

Science Ed

Construction Physics is an amazing Substack, very well researched, and this is one of his better articles:

Energy Cheat Sheet

And another:

Inside the Interconnection Queue

Parallel construction physics media not by the “Construction Physics” Substack brings me something on which I must completely reverse my opinion. I always thought this was due to bedrock, and instead it’s due to real estate fuckery.

This documentary on linotype is the sort of thing I wish they still had on PBS.

Science About The Science of Ed

This is a fascinating look at the historical practice of Keju, a Chinese civil service exam that predates the Ming Dynasty, and how it influences China today.

Which segues nicely into this.

Science about Why Science Sucks

This article (paywall breaker link) talks about a group of psychologists who have formed to fight P-hacking, possibly through arson.

Culture War

FdB opines on why mental illness is a catchall freebie for bad behavior among the left unless it’s Kanye ranting about Jews.

Guns

Mark your calendar. If Facebook finally stops being assholes about guns, you first heard why here.

Friend of HWFO Kostas Moros put together a very clean X “article” on competing definitions of “mass shooting,” similar to several HWFO pieces but formatted differently and probably with better reach.

At SHOT Show, Rob Romano trolled Everytown on Twitter:

And then Everytown, who follows Rob, trolled him back by literally writing that article, verbatim.

And then acknowledged him at the end.

Spicy.

Slime Mold

I’m probably behind the times with some of my readers, but I’m increasingly liking the material by Slime Mold Time Mold. The material there ranges from abstract:

..to extremely concrete:

Estoterica

Don’t eat the spicy mouse tape. Or perhaps do.

I Tasted Honda's Spicy Rodent-Repelling Tape

We’ve all heard the horror stories of a white lady giving birth and her horrified white husband watches a black baby pop out. Apparently that happened to a couple in my state of Georgia, except the problem was the result of an IVF clinic mix up. And then the real parents took the baby back, so she’s suing. For what it’s worth, she appears to live in or near Savannah, and the baby’s parents live in “another state,” so it’s possible that this whole thing is the most convoluted “Florida Man” story ever told.

A Miami Jew mag dumped his pistol on a public street into a couple of randos because he thought they were Palestinian. Turns out they were Israelis, who in turn thought that they had been attacked by a Palestinian.

Also spicy.