Weapons Man

Protagonist Lieutenant Kuznetsov (Boris Tokarev). Man against tank, with not much chance of living.

We guess this is not the usual story — despite the Mother of the Year candidate’s neglect and abuse of her children, they’re not dead. Doesn’t appear to be from lack of trying on her part.

You may recall that the Army is in the process of hanging from a stout oak tree throwing out into the Dreaded Private Sector one SFC Charles Martland, a guy who is at cross purposes with his pedo-friendly chain of command because he just couldn’t take the Afghan bacha bazi, or system of violent child buggery, any more.

Today, we’re gonna shoot fish in a barrel. Nathaniel F at TFB has got a challenge for us:

We’ll cover the usual subjects: Guns, Usage and Employment, Cops ‘n’ Crims, Unconventional (and current) Warfare, and Lord Love a Duck!

(The following is based on reporting by Our Traveling Reporter, who’s been too busy to attend more shooting schools, as a student, anyway; but he has gotten some sightseeing in and deluged us with photos. We’ll be using the categories Fortifications and Historical Places to collect these stories in the weeks and months ahead. This is only the first of several photo-intensive posts on the Castillo de San Marcos — Ed.).

That’s all it took to kill a kid left in a car in the teachers’ parking lot at the Deltona, FL, Middle School last month. Just the sun and a forgetful caretaker.

Nobody checked on the kid for eight or nine hours. At the end of the day, when someone did, it was too late.

[A] baby boy died after being inadvertently left in a vehicle at a middle school by a teacher who was supposed to be caring for the child.

Volusia County Sheriff’s Office detectives say the 6-month-old boy died Friday after being left in the backseat of the SUV parked at Deltona Middle School for most of the day.

via Baby dies after being left in vehicle at Fla. school – NY Daily News.

Oddly enough Moms don’t Demand Action about this kind of thing. But then, there’s no billionaire paying them to, so why should they?

Of course, in today’s hypersensitive, PC-obsessed, backstabbing Army of Whiners the heads are our own guys.

Steel-Aluminum alloy? Any metallurgist would tag you as a n00b for bringing it up. “Can’t do it. Incompatible. It’s the metallurgical equivalent of dogs and cats lying down together. Winds up with crystallized, embrittled aluminum weakening the steel.” Three Korean scientists, all stereotypically named Kim, from the Pohang University of Science and Technology have almost managed to pull it off — after many years of theory, trial, and error, and standing on the shoulders of previous researchers, as always. The lead investigator is Hansoo Kim.

This week, our tale of computer content-filter woe whilst preparing for the 2002 World  (OK, Afghan Tour, although we did scatter guys across Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and occasionally Pakistan)  struck a chord. We got picked up by Ace of Spades HQ, Hogewash, and (far from least) Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.com. Since we’ve been reading them from five or so years (Hoge) to sometime before 9/11 (Instapundit and Ace), this is humbling. It also has concrete effects, as the graph below subtly hints:

When the blog was young in 2012, one of the regular features was Travis Thursday, in which we tracked the recovery of 82nd paratrooper Travis Mills from a pretty tough IED injury: quadruple amputation. At the time he was one of four survivors of such trauma in American military history (since then there has been one more). In time, as Travis healed, the updates got sparser and finally we just stopped keeping up. He had it all under control, it was all good, right?

Jewel Shuping always “identified” as blind. Except, damn it, she wasn’t.

Say whaaat? To US Army ears, that rings false. But according to retired officer and author Alfred H. Paddock Jr., that is very nearly what the first SF unit was called.

1907, the year this pistol was made, was a hell of a year, perhaps not in the sense of 1861 or 1945, but a lot of things were happening. Theodore Roosevelt, the action-guy version of a polymath, was six years into his Presidency, and appointed an obscure colonel named George Washington Goethals to get the Panama Canal project rocking.

Going down? Geronimo!

A horde of “migrants” or “refugees” — it is interesting to see that European press style is increasingly favoring the former over the latter — has been swarming across Europe, trying to leave various Islamic paradises and dwell amongst the infidels, or at least, leech off the infidel’s overly generous welfare state. A relatively small percentage of them are from Syria or Iraq; tey are the no-hopers of every whistlestop, or what would be whistlestops if the trains had kept running after the hated colonizers left, in the Middle East and Africa.

CSS Pee Dee (or Pedee) in a period illustration.

Where this grainy photo appeared in Daily Mail recently, in support of a story on grave-robbery in the East,  the caption was: Arms: The items being gathered by collectors often include rifles similar to these being carried by these German troops running on the Eastern Front in 1941. But have a look at this picture.

This magnificent cat is Oz, and, as his expression suggests, he would just as soon eat you as look at you. We’d say, “Just ask Samantha Kundeweh,” but she’s not answering right now. And deep in the rumbling of his stomach, Oz knows why.

Bombers have a perfect accuracy record with bombs, or at least, one good enough for the USAF: Every single one has hit the planet; we haven’t left a single one up there yet!