Weapons Man

Last night, musing over a possible technical post for this morning, we opened Allsop and Toomey’s Small Arms: General Design to see how what they wrote on barrel heating compares with our recent translation of the Rheinmetall Handbook. And there was the same damned diagram.

Maine was a win for gun freedom and personal liberty, and a loss for criminals.

Now, do women really want to go to Ranger School, or are women like this one just fixated on the Rogers’s Rangers Standing Order that ends, “Jump out and finish him off with your hatchet”? It probably could go either way.

Future Feds of America are identified at an early age, based on their performance and character.

The Civilian Marksmanship Program is the neither-fish-nor-fowl hybrid that emerged from a 1990s attempt by anti-gunners in Congress to destroy the Army’s Director of Civilian Marksmanship. Billed as a way to provide trained riflemen in the event of wartime expansion, DCM was always a little more about providing guns and ammo to target shooters from vast World War I and later World War II stocks. CMP continues that tradition today, selling a dwindling stock of surplus and returned military-aid M1 Garand rifles from their website, and  occasional M1 carbines and other rarities at their auction site.

SGT Bryan Wolfinger, a US airborne infantryman. And, says the press, “mall gunman.”

“Objects?” Yes, that’s what the story says: the victim was beaten to death “with an object.” (Whether it was a direct or an indirect object was unclear). Then he was thrown into a pit, buried under stones, and a new patio was poured over him.

A short distance from Hog Manor, US Highway 1, the amazing belt of tacky neon signs that glows along the seaside from Maine to Key West, bears the name: “Lafayette Road.” That is because the Marquis de Lafayette, a French nobleman turned hero of the American Revolution, traveled this road during his triumphal 1824 return. He barely survived the bloodletting of the French Revolution, and perhaps only did because he sank into obscurity in his native land, but he was never forgotten in the land he helped free from the clutches of George III. As a result, practically every New England city and town, and many a one in the mid-Atlantic states, has a Lafayette Road. (Indeed, we lived on Lafayette Road in Salem, MA in the 1970s; that stretch, too, had seen the famous Frenchman’s procession).

You see the darndest things at a gun turn-in. Dean Weingarten at Gun Watch spotted this:

Which was a good thing for him. Because he never would’ve passed a background check. Because he was a convicted felon. In fact, he was out on parole, for armed robbery; he had the arrest record of a hardened prestoopnik, and he was all of 19 years old.

The article starts off innocently enough:

Prepared for you by the Congress Committee on Homeland Security, here’s a graphic that forms the first page of an 8-page report, in USA Today infographic style, on the ISIL/ISIS threat to the USA. It’s something to look at while John Fragile Kerry is in Switzerland negotiating a surrender to a nuclear Iran!

Fireworks freedom, of course. Banned in the liberal-fascist 1930s, they’ve been creeping back in state laws, one state after the next, for the next 80 years. As with gun freedom, the trend is positive, the trend is accelerating, and it’s coming on as the nannies and scolds are falling back in disarray. Of course, there are still some holdouts — the usual enemies of freedom in all forms. The Christian Science Monitor (a hotbed of nannyism in the liberal-fascist capital of Boston):

This is where one is expected to write something clever, but it’s not happening. We still owe you Saturday’s TW3 and we’ll get to it when we get to it, as well as something new for this week… maybe more wisdom from Rheinmetall.

Plaintiff II is blasting loud radio, which is irritating. Weird as it came on with music we normally find enjoyable (Five for Fighting, dunno the song but recognize the voice) but it’s making the office untenable. It’s probably the fear of what comes next — distilled, homogenized corporate pop music.

Still in the office (searching online for a replacement slow cooker part). The station is playing Hendrix back-to-back. Apart from the fact he always made us want to use guitars as kindling due to relative lack of talent, we have always enjoyed this fellow paratrooper’s stuff.

OK, imagine you’re Jack Warner, Hollywood potentate. The year is 1970 or 71, the height of social unrest over Vietnam and Hollywood loathing for Nixon, which hadn’t yet degenerated into today’s Hollywood loathing for America. And a guy comes pitching you a movie: a musical about the drafting of the Declaration of Independence. With the song lyrics and libretto drawn, in part, from the actual writings of the men of the 2nd Continental Congress. Verbatim.

Squashed like a bug — what a way to go.

Completely off topic, but here’s what’s up for din-din.

The main dish is going to be Hawaiian slow-cooked pork tenderloin, which will be seasoned with some leftover pork (with a Korean BBQ sauce) from a dinner this week that canc’d. The sauces come from Campbell pouches, but get added to.

So, the pork will go in the slow-cooker about 1100, old pork and all sauces first; it will simmer away all day; about 1700 we’ll add some pineapple slices for flavor. (This should be posted some time in the middle of all that).

Side dish: we’re kitbashing something from jasmine rice, wild rice, a lot of butter, a cup of chicken rice soup for flavor, and maybe some other spices depending on how it all tastes.

Veggies: There will be celery and carrots in with the pork. They go in at about H-3 hours. We’ll probably have green beans and maybe asparagus or broccoli (it seems like no two people of the eight attending have the same tastes in food.

And, oh yeah, gotta relocate the 3D Printer from the dining room table we’ve been working from for the last two weeks. Which means… ugh… cleaning the office so that there’s room on the credenza. Can we get an ugh?

This is either going to be a huge success or a spectacular failure.

No pressure.

It”s hard to remember now, but there was a time when Britain, England really, was a world leader in aeronautics. Once, they were manufacturing not one, but three state-of-the-art nuclear bombers, the Vickers Valiant, the Handley-Page Victor, and the last flying example, the Avro Vulcan. The Valiant was a stop-gap, in case the Victor or Vulcan, which included much risky technology like the Vulcan’s delta wing and the Victor’s scimitar planform, failed. The Victor flew for decades as a tanker, and the Vulcan was the last dedicated long-range pure bomber — nuclear and conventional — of the RAF.

(Yes, this was supposed to hit on Wednesday. We’re playing catch-up this weekend. -Ed.)

And this is the original Declaration, showing the ravages of time. But this is the document with the original signatures, not the copies most have come to know. And yeah, it embiggens. (NARA).