Weapons Man

Know your enemy. A single virion of variola major.

So, how bad is the VA? Shinseki and Baghdad Rob say there’s nothing to see here. (Click to embiggen to the point of legibility. Source: the American Legion).

Everybody has their favorite websites. Caleb at Gun Nuts Media posted two interesting posts this week. The first was, “The 5 Worst Places online to get firearms advice,” and the second was: “The 5 gun websites I read every day.”

When a soldier goes through many Army schools, he has to write a paper of some kind. These papers range from a few pages to the book-length theses of the War College, and exhaustive Area Studies done at the Special Forces Operations & Intelligence Course. They vary widely in quality, too: some of the Sergeant Majors Academy papers are an ordeal to read.

As it happened, the NYPD officers arresting him didn’t. Alec Baldwin is an actor their parents know, but now he’s just some middle-aged has-been in commercials. Baldwin was riding his bicycle against traffic when New York cops stopped him, and he quickly escalted what might have been a gentle rules of the road discussion into an arrest for disorderly conduct.

Of all the nations in the world, none have taken to bureaucracy like the Germans. They might have been laggards at the time of Ariovistus, but it was true by the time Bismarck organized the unification of most of the German-speaking principalities. Bismarck’s own revolutionary ideas about the civil service created great growth in the paper-pushing class, and Germany today remains wrapped in the world’s densest windings of red tape, despite inroads made by increasingly bureaucratizing BRIC nations.

The VA scandal isn’t a scandal, as far as the powers that be in Washington are concerned. Sure, a whole bunch of vets have died due to their treatments and appointments being cut off so that Secretary Rick Shinseki and his managers could warm themselves by the light of glowing (but fake) numbers. We don’t know how many vets we’re talking about: at least 40 in Phoenix, plus another 63 in other places that the Department has taken a look at, plus all the unknown unknowns in all the dark corners no one has shined a light into yet.

Steven Arkell, RIP

Stabbed and strangled. This was a belt-and-suspenders kind of murderer.

Walter Walsh was a gunfighting legend. He was an FBI agent when that meant going toe-to-toe with Baby Face Nelson (whom Walsh found, dead, after other officers mortally wounded him) and Ma Barker’s gang. He passed away in April at 106; this picture, from the American Rifleman, shows him at 90. He was still instructing!

“Correlation is not causation.” This is something you hear in the first week of a statistics course (first day, often) but journalists, of course, would sooner actually work for a living than drop their mystical shield of innumeracy, so most of them have never taken a statistics course.

Here’s a video for all you fans of women in the infantry. Female combatives! Alas, we can’t tell which one is Sage Santangelo. But that’s just our cismale gendernormative cryptofascism coming out, wise young people (like the ones in the video) tell us.

Should probably give you a pair of warnings: (1), foul language; and (2), overweening stupidity.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rniCtyDoRrs

Sorry about the video being eight plus minutes of full retard, but that’s what it is.

The only surprise is that one of these two young, er, “ladies,” thinks to use a weapon. (When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have shovels!) It’s no surprise that the other one survives a shovel upside the head — it’s not clear that neither the duellists, nor the seconds, nor the Pajama Boy who’s method-acting the Gay Friend role, has anything in a head that can be damaged. Except maybe hair follicles.

Have we mentioned this particular mode of criminality before? As it happens, we have:

Barnsley, Yorkshire was once the seat of the Spencer and Spencer-Stanhope family, and outside the town at Cannon Hall is the Regimental Museum of the 13/18 Hussars (the British DD Tank unit at Gold and Sword beaches) and the Light Dragoons, a still-serving successor unit to the 13/18 and 15/19 Kings Royal Hussars as the ever-shrinking British Army winds itself ever downward. (Fun fact about the Light Dragoons: their current honorary colonel is HM King Abdullah of Jordan, who was a platoon leader in the 13/18. He is also a graduate of the Special Forces Qualification Course). The units now celebrated in this museum are legendary in British history, in part, because they took on such enemies of the crown as the Deutsche Wehrmacht. Guys like this (well, these are reenactors, which we’ll get to in a minute):

Some people think that ATF and its agents really want to be a “violent crime bureau,” not partisan political police enforcing a ban on guns. Then, the ATF agents speak:

Even for you Marines, who hear “mother” and begin groping for the missing half of the word…

Hope that those of us who still have our moms do something thoughtful for them today, and those of us who do not, bide a moment and warm yourself with a kind thought or a golden memory, and share it, perhaps, with your living family members.

A day late, a dollar short, again, this is the Week 19 TW3, backdated. Later today we should be backfilling the last two.

This movie was highly promising. There are some good pros in the cast, whose performances and parts we’ll get to. The director, Renny Harlin from Finland, is an ace at making low-budget actioners, and not bad at high-budget ones like Die Hard 2 and Cliffhanger – movies that aren’t especially believable, for any longer than it takes to exit the theater, but are pure joy whilst inside. Moreover, as a movie about real events — the 2008 Russian invasion of Georgia, with ethnic cleansing carried out under Russian guns by nominally-independent ethnic militias — it’s potentially applicable to current events in Ukraine, where nominally-independent ethnic militias operate under Russian direction and command, with a view to similar ethnic cleansing.

Watch out for the one with your name on it.

You call it JDAM, we call it Special Mission Improved Technical Equipment. Heh.