Weapons Man

Take a look at this field-improvised 120mm mortar. Bubba is in Da House! With the Syrian rebels:

In the coming week, it’s off to Florida to do battle with the gators and mosquitoes, then a measured drive up I-95 with stops in Fayetteville, NC for work and possibly in DC (yecch), Annapolis and Frederick, MD. There may be fewer posts than usual, and slower than usual response in the comments.

Today should be the Sabbath, a day of rest and reflection. Instead, it’s a day of frantic project-completion and travel prep, as Plaintiff II and Kid are going someplace completely different and need a drive to the airport. Naturally she did not pick any of the means of local departure, but rather an airport a long distance away in the middle of a state-sized Victim Disarmament Zone.

We regret the missing TW3s for the last three weeks, and yesterday’s Saturday Matinee is also indefinietly delayed. (It was just not coming together, and usually we have a couple spares in the can for a time like this, but not right now). It goes back in the queue for later polishing, when time permits.

We do hope to keep to the regular posting schedule this week, but it may not be possible.

Crap performance is not a novel thing to the VA, something new that came in with President Obama and former Secretary Shinseki. According to the Wall Street Journal in an article called The VA’s Bonus Culture (use the google backdoor through the paywall if you’re not a subscriber),  the VA has blown off 18 previous reports of scheduling abuse and bonus fraud:

Omar Khadr is, nominally, Canadian. The committed al-Qaeda terrorist would tell you, if he were not using his nominal Canadian nationality as a shield to escape consequences for his own criminality, that he’s really a citizen of the worldwide ummah and a global Caliphate that doesn’t exist yet. But it will as soon as he and his fellow terrorists just murder, enslave, and intimidate those who are not on board with this experiment in social organization.

We’re suckers for the video of industrial processes, and there’s probably no process in the arms industry more automated, specialized, or cost-sensitive as the production of .22 rimfire ammunition. A crew from the Outdoor Channel spent some time at CCI in Lewiston, ID (which we didn’t know before, is across the river from Clarkston, WA) shooting video of the process from sheet brass and molten lead to a pallet of packed ammo on the loading dock.

Hollywood in a nutshell: Actor who played heroes but was a Stolen Valor case disarms actor who played heroes but was a Vietnam draft dodger.

It gets worse and worse, or, to be strictly accurate, reporting about how bad it is continues to pile up. It appears that it was always this bad.

Watch out for the one with your name on it.

Last week, the word that the President intended for the USA to support Syrian rebels openly — after years of dithering that have seen any pro-Western group decimated, and few but Islamist extremists remaining in the field against Bashar Assad — hit the media. Then, the President followed up by speaking at West Point and telling the grads that thanks to him, they will serve in a smaller peacetime force… and waiting for reaction that didn’t come, to what he had thought was an applause line. (You do hear intermittent applause during the speech, but it’s all from his core fanbase in the press gallery).

Ibragim Todashev, a buddy of Boston Marathon bomber and certified Islamic crazy Tamerlan “Speedbump” Tsarnayev, was shot dead by FBI Agent Aaron McFarlane, 41, in Orlando. The Bureau immediately ruled it a good shooting, then investigated and confirmed their initial decision.

No, not this.

Nope, they keep ignoring them afterward. As a result, the LA County Morgue has dozens of dead vets in its drawers, who have no families to take care of them, but have depended on volunteers for their last services, and the VA for their cemetery plots and headstones.

Whitneyville, CT, and the Eli Whitney Armory on the Mill River, c. 1825, by William Giles Munson, 1827. Source: Eli Whitney Museum.

Now, some are critical of our “insinuation that Speaker DeLeo is somehow involved with the Mafia,” and we’ve taking some abuse for “going there on an Italian-American, which is racist.” To which we counter as follows:

Kimberly Lucas always insisted her family was just like any other family, even if the kids did have two mommies. But when she and her girlfriend broke up, and the girlfriend found a new squeeze and kept the kids, she plotted a vicious revenge. She tried to kill her former “domestic partner’s” two kids, a 10-year-old boy and a 2-year-old girl with some kind of poison pill, and took one or more of the pills herself. When the toddler, Elliana Lucas-Jamason, wouldn’t drink the cup with the poison, the brutal “mommy” violently drowned the child in the bathtub.

When the President steps out of his helicopter on the South Lawn, he’s stepping out of a Nixon- or even LBJ-era helicopter that the Pentagon worries about every day. They would sincerely like to replace it, but, well, they’re the Pentagon, and they can’t buy anything without the whole procurement program turning to feces.

Over the century-plus since its decisive conclusion, the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05 has faded into obscurity, but quite undeservedly so. When it is remembered today, it is either for the brilliant Japanese naval victory at Tsushima Straits, or for President Theodore Roosevelt’s efforts in bringing about a peace treaty, efforts which brought him the Nobel Peace Prize. (In those backward days, this came to pass only after peace had been concluded between the warring parties, not in the modern fashion of participation trophies and forsworn scorekeeping. But we digress).

Massachusetts, the only state in New England wracked by increasing violent crime, is doubling down on its policy of extreme anti-gun laws. The most controversial policy proposed by State House Speaker Robert DeLeo is to add the state’s “May Issue” standard for handgun licenses, which is a de facto “No Issue” in many jurisdictions, to the requirements for the Firearms ID Card. The FID Card is required for long guns, air guns, and such non-firearms as pepper spray and model rocket engines.

In this case, he did have garden shears, but they availed him not, as he apparently used them to attack a policeman in a case of suicide by cop. He’d been called in for a home invasion, and fled, with the cops in pursuit in what can only be described as a slow-speed foot chase.