Weapons Man

In the case of Goran Olsen, a Norwegian hiking in Haukeli, on the border of Telemark and Hordaland, an outdoorsman’s paradise in a country that has plenty of them, what was under the rocks was this sword.

Stingray I (numbered retrospectively) and Stingray II warrantless surveillance devices, forerunners of Hailstorm.

Some Naval Academy grads has a sad because they didn’t choose, or get chosen for, the path to CAG. (The old acronym for Commander of the Air Group, still used for a Carrier Air Wing commnder). They want the path opened to them.

Cue the theme from Hawaii-Five-Oh.

You totally knew about that, right?

What’s that road that’s paved with good intentions again?

Many people believe the world would be a safer place if more people carried pistols, and a subset of those people believe that carriers should carry them openly. There are several reasons they give for this, but the one we see most often suggests that open carry normalizes the exercise of this right — it has an effect of moving the Overton Window of what’s acceptable in discourse and of what’s acceptable in public life.

They say football players are among the most intelligent athletes. Naturally, someone has to be the exception that proves the rule. It’s probably this guy:

In the 1970s, the military was still led, at the top levels, by men that had led, and on any strategic level, failed, in Vietnam. New ideas and new ways of thinking boiled up from the young warriors who had been, as it were, mining at the coal face while the guys back in the Pentagon were adjusting their sets with a 10,000 mile screwdriver. Army academics like Gabriel and Savage took the officer corps to task in books; Army leaders like Ed “Shy” Meyer and Norman “Bear” Schwarzkopf, very different men with different leadership styles and, even, different views of what had gone wrong in Southeast Asia, were advancing into important leadership positions.

Here’s some good Class 3 stuff from a single dealer on GunBroker. It feels like a single collection of Colt weapons being liquidated, but in any event five of the six firearms he’s offering are rare Colt machine guns. (The sixth is an ordinary Sig M400 AR).

Ever wonder what the flying career of a cargo bundle dropped from a C-130 is like?

Hey, who knew there were so many uses for RTV tub ‘n’ tile sealer, fix-a-flat, or GP boat caulk from West Marine? We’re using it to make the static ports of the RV-12 airtight, but you can also, it turns out, use it to get a bigger butt. If a large rubbery gluteus is among your fondest desires.

Josh Lederman of the Associated Press, an Administration supporter, writes:

It’s not a secret that we’re fans of one of the least popular cartridges in production today: John Browning’s .25 ACP. It’s not the cartridge itself — its detractors are right about its lack of velocity, energy, penetration, and energy transfer — but the many fascinating firearms that were chambered for it, especially in Europe.

Not weapons related, perhaps, but if you can’t navigate, you’ll never get to the place you can employ the weapons. (You’ll certainly never get to SF). From the Appalachian Mountain Club’s Matt Heid we learn about availability of historic as well as current topographical maps of the Continental US — digitally, and for free. It’s helpful to Read The Whole Thing™ before going to the USGS’s website, but here’s the intro.

There can be no law enforcement officer in the United States like Ross Mirkarimi, the Sheriff of San Francisco. In the first place, for most of his career as an elected sheriff, he hasn’t carried a gun. You see, he can’t carry a gun.

It’s a tragic “accident,” of the sort that’s entirely predictable.

Some SF skills and modes of thinking don’t translate all that well to civilian life and conventional military operations. But one that does can be summed up as “always think PACE” and it has its roots in SF commo (which in turn is dual-rooted in the clandestine communications of the OSS and subsequent espionage and sabotage operations, and in the greater world of Army signals). SF guys are used to working at the far end of a long, unstable communications link. It’s one of the reasons that we have that vaunted independence of mind that Big Green finds so useful — and so maddening.

The answer isn’t surprising when you think about it. It comes in several parts: