Weapons Man

So, apart from rendering unto other-than-Caesar, today involves a trip to the gym, a long drive, a scholar’s presentation on M1 Garand development, a drive back, and everyone going separate ways by 1800.

Meanwhile, there’s overdue Saturday stuff that didn’t get posted, and Monday stuff that isn’t written yet. Yoiks!

This is a necro-TW3, posted Monday of the week following. And backdated, in that kind of fib that’s available to you when you have Godlike administrator powers.

The links to this week’s will all be live when the post goes live. Enjoy!

Our article count was 23, one of the lowest in recent memory. (Still beat our standing objective of 19 a week, but it was low output). Word count was also low output, 13,000-odd words. Only three posts were over 1,000 words, none of them over 2,000.

The mean and median post sizes were 611 and 598 respectively, suggesting a tendency to short posts. Sure enough, there were three sub-100-word posst, and 7 total sub-500-word posts. As we did not complete a TW3 last week, we don’t have a standard of comparison. We exceeded our desired objective of 19 posts by 4. So far this year we’ve over 300 blog posts, and over 1700 comments.  

Comments are slightly down to 96 as of the dela

When you take a well-loved genre novel with a rabid cult following – in this case Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game – and make a movie out of it, there are two possible outcomes.

Number 1, you make a classic for the ages.

Number 2, you make a turkey.

The actual quality of the movie was somewhat lost in the thunderous pink swish of the gay boycott – apparently the Great Buggernaut is upset that Card has expressed the radically reactionary idea that men and women should marry the opposite sex – so we didn’t see any reviews of the movie at the time it was in the theaters – apparently the reviewers flounced, feather boas and all, into some other screening at the time.

Most of the changes made to the book in the process of film-scripting it made it worse. Certainly it was bent to shape and beaten to fit, with the form being the Save the Cat! Template. E

This mock-1959 instructional film is entertaining, and does indeed walk you through the steps. There’s nothing much about suppressor technology here; it’s just a simple how-to.

Note that the advantages of using an NFA Trust, mentioned in the video, are in the process of being limited by ATF managers.

Fitchburg, Massachusetts, is a crumbling mill town in the northern end of mid-state Worcester County. The two biggest “employers” in the city are probably Fitchburg State College, a former teachers’ college with university aspirations (where, to be sure, a working- or middle-class student can get a functional education at a reasonable price), and welfare. As in every town with a lot of AFDC/SSDI/Section8 scammery going on, the welfare safey net supports a broad and deep criminal underclass, kept numb on drugs sourced through burglary, auto theft, robbery, prostitution, and various other crimes the MA criminal courts don’t take very seriously.

But since this is Massachusetts, the welfare is seen as an unalloyed good, the drugs seen as not very serious, and the violent crime problem (which isn’t really all that bad, and has been declining, except for youth gang activity tied to immigrant gangs) is blamed on the fact that people in other states still have gun rights that Massachusetts citizens have forfeit.

So, in extreme anti-gun Mas

LAPD Firearms Instructors on the Job. 103 shots, 2 hits, on a person that was not a legitimate target. FAIL.

Remember the Chris Dorner case, where one cop going rogue drove just about every other cop in Southern California rogue? Remember the two incidents of terrified cops blazing away at “suspects” who in no wise resembled Dorner, in vehicles that differed from Dorner’s in make, model, body style, and color, as well as plate number? Remember the multiple magdumps (103 rounds total) by LAPD into the Tacoma with two Filipinas (one middle-aged, one older) delivering newspapers?

Yeah, well, while LAPD Chief Charlie Beck said some bad things about those cops, he didn’t think they were bad enough to actually discipline. The 8 cops that burned that truck down in

There are some differences between shooting stances, positions, and actions in flat-range shooting, soi-disant practical shooting and other competitions, and shooting to save your life and the lives of others.

The most important is that the shooting position you take up in a gunfight will likely be instinctive or reflexive. This is why good training includes lots and lots and lots and lots of drills. In combat, you can’t count on rising to the occasion: you might be suddenly roused from REM sleep, tired or exhausted, and you’ll certainly be scared. Your perceptual fields will all narrow; your visual field will close in considerably and your other senses, except usually scent, will take a break until the crisis is over. But with incoming lead, you’ll be slower, clumsier, and less efficient than you are on the flat range — that’s pretty much guaranteed.

So, if you don’t rise to the occasion, what do you do? You collapse back on your training, especially on the drills and the muscle memory they contain. (That’s why it’s a lot better to have one carry gun than three alternative carry guns with different manuals of arms).

Frequently, home defenders and street crime victims fall back beyond their training; rather than drop back into their isoscel

1964 ad for Agent Zero M spy toys

It was a 1964-or-so Mattel Toy Company spy toy line. There was a great flowering of spy stuff in the popular culture in the early sixties. It began, perhaps, with the James Bond books, and specifically, when President Kennedy revealed himself as a fan on Ian Fleming’s then-revolutionary adventures. The media, for whom Kennedy then was the same sort of limerent object that Obama is now, and the pop culture in turn, went nonlinear for “all things spy,” and we had spy shows on the screen and the tube for the next four or so years. These shows were of all kinds: dramas and comedies, aimed at adults and children, brilliant shows (The Man From UNCLE in drama and Get Smart! in comedy) and dreadful ones (most of the rest). Naturally, toys followed. The best toys were the guns, naturally. Can you identify the child actor in this “Agent Zero M” commercial from 1964? He went

Capt. Myles Standish. Modern portrait by Mike Haywood after a 1626 original. Prints available from MayflowerHistory.com

A new literature site, Liberty Island, contains some interesting war stories. One of them tells a story of the Plymouth Colony almost 400 years ago, in which the local knowledge, warrior culture, and fierce courage of the native Indians meets its match in the strength and guile of the English colonists.

“Tarry awhile with me, Captain?”

The governor’s assistant, Isaac Allerton, and the native Hobamock had just unlatched the door and stepped outside, leaving the two leaders to their own counsel.

The governor put a hand on his old friend&#82

From the where-are-they-now file: Shannon Richardson, aka Guess aka Rogers. She was the anti-gun actress who used a fake pro-gun letter from her estranged husband to try to frame the guy for sending ricin — a deadly poison — through the mail to President Obama and then-Mayor Bloomberg. This would have been a really stupid thing for someone who didn’t like Obama to do (if you want to really hurt the President, vote for Senators from the other party), and it was an incredibly stupid thing for someone like Shannon who did like Obama to do — because it took the FBI almost less time than it takes to write this sentence to figure out who really sent the letters. Then they went and talked to Shannon, and she did the rest.

With an ironclad case before her, and looking at life in the slammer, she took the best plea-bargain she could get.

Once the case turned out not to have a mouth-breathing Texas gun nut angle, the US press dropped it so fast that it might have been holy water or someth

We see people misusing cover and concealment all the time. For example, consider this Maine State Police officer, Trooper Scott Duff, as he backs up other troopers and deputies on a man-with-a-gun call Tuesday, March 18th. (The call turned out to be a nothingburger; the guy had a gun tattoo).

What’s wrong with this photo (taken by David Leaming for the news story linked above)?

Which brings us to: Cover and Concealment. Which we’ll take back-to-front, thank you very much.

Concealment is, in three words, protection from observation. Concealment can be natural or man-made. (We used to use a handy canvas canopy to shield the number and identities of personnel we were loading on special operations delivery platforms from unfriendly aerial and space observation modalities).

Concealment is not necessarily just from visual observation, and it’s not necessarily always done by hiding something behind or under

In 1959, the US Air Force was the world’s dominant air arm, with thousands of aircraft in service and thousands more built every year. One of those 1959 models was KC-135A 59-1472, a Boeing tanker/freighter jet on an airframe that was a forerunner of the Boeing 707, the first really successful jetliner. (True, the DeHavilland Comet came earlier, but it wasn’t all that successful until an explosive-decompression problem was solved, by which time it was far behind US types).

59-1472  was polished aluminum with minimal markings, including the tail number 91472 displayed on its vertical fin. It still looked like that about 12 years later, when it was photographed refueling F-4 and F-105 type aircraft in the Vietnam War.

That dramatic picture came from a set of Udorn Royal Thai Air Force Base pictures,

“You went full retard. Never go full retard.”  – Tropical Thunder.

The Naval War College, a hermetically-sealed institution that provides everybody-passes graduate degrees to military officers, hired a guy named John Schindler out of NSA. Schindler has been defending NSA’s current policy of dropping foreign intelligence targets to concentrate on American citizens rather vigorously. His chosen battlefield is Twitter. But he can’t seem to construct an argument; he only falls back on an appeal to authority, namely, his PhD.

He has the chichi IC twitter handle of “20committee,” but he comes across as weak, defensive, and more like “20IQ.” So naturally, some bright spark has collected the very best of Schindler’s Tweets into a tumblr blog. Here’s an example of the mighty PhD’s reasoning and argumentation skills:

Now, you might think that somebody had

Eloi. Clueless, witless, harmless, helpless Eloi. They walk among us. In this case, and entire family got treed by a cat. We’ve covered what we see as police overreaction to dogs with dripping contempt here before, but in this case the police were the only thing between a family’s bold patriarch and ten kilograms of hissing death, to wit, their house cat. Albeit not just any cat, it was the most vicious moggy in all Portlandia a cat with a “known history of violence.”

It’s a cat, for Christ’s sake, not a Hells Angels chapter.

How in the name of Niffelheim does a cat get tagged with “a history of violence,” anyway?

Is dope legal in Oregon, or just really widely used?

A rampaging, 22-pound Oregon house cat with a “history of violence” attacked a baby and trapped a family and their dog in a bedroom at their Portland home before being captured by police, authorities said on Monday.

Th

An abandoned Army barracks — soon to be a more common sight.

The determined pursuit of a “peace dividend” where there is none to be had  is likely to cut Army combat power — as expressed by number of combat brigades — approximately in half in the next five years.

Both active-duty and National Guard brigades face the ax, in order to increase funds available for national priorities: so-called poverty programs, corporate welfare for crony capitalists, and other direct payments to individuals.

Gen. John Campbell, the Army’s vice chief of staff and second highest-ranking member, in an interview with The Hill said the service is already planning to make cuts to its combat brigades, basic Army units of 5,000 soldiers that can be deployed and sustain themselves overseas.

Campbell did not say exactly how few active-duty brigades the Army could afford