Weapons Man

In case you’re wondering why 19th-Century (and 18th-Century) cavalry  feared a British square, here’s a look at a reenactor version:

Another sad story, of which there are no shortage. Accident? Suicide? Homicide? Insufficient information.

One of the “one time only” admittees from Class 6-15 in April, taking her PT test. Most of the women passed the PT test that day (we dunno about this gal, but her pushup form looks OK). It was downhill from there, and now we’re seeing pressure to lower standards.

“In war, the moral is to the physical as ten is to one.”  – Napoleon Bonaparte.

Sunday here is characterized by softly falling rain, which announced itself at 0100 as crashing, pouring rain. Snug in our home, we can consider the benefits to the grounds, but the incoming rainstorm seriously disrupted our weekend plans for etching and priming the next batch of airplane parts. Due to the mild toxicity of the etchant and primer, we do that outdoors, under one of those 10′ x 10′ canopies you can buy at garden stores. We hang the parts from hooks created from sacrificed coat hangers, and have at them with a Graco-Croix CX9 turbine sprayer.

As regular readers know, we have some regular (?) features that appear on a Did we get to it this week? basis. Those include the Wednesday Weapons Website of the Week, the Friday Tour d’Horizon, the Saturday Matinee movie review (which we frequently find ourselves doing on Sunday and backdating), and this weekly wrapup, which takes some work and therefore is the first thing ordered over the side of the lifeboat. We also do (or don’t) an SF or other military phony once a month, on the 15th, as the Assclown of the Ides.

The Pentagon, 1942. Staff officer William O. Darby, a West Point grad from Arkansas, is gratified that his idea for an American version of the British Commandos has been accepted by important generals. But there’s a problem: they’ve shortlisted a few men for command, not including him. So — in the movie, at least — Darby’s first battle is to win command of his brainchild.

The face adjacent to this text is what former restaurant hostess and current (but suspended, pending dismissal) Oakwood Village, OH police officer Marcia M. Masters looks like with no make-up on. So she’s going to be looking like that for a while, as she’s on her way to Club Fed for a two-year engagement. By request, as it were.

From 1953 to 1968, 10th Special Forces Group was headquartered and stationed at Flint Kaserne in Bad Tölz, Germany, a lovely resort town on the Jsar River (as the locals spell “Isar”) in the Bavarian Alps. The Kaserne was a former SS Junkerschule or officers’ school; it had been the West Point-equivalent for the black-suited officers who became known, some as leaders of elite combat units — and many more as rebarbative war criminals.

The California (where else?) State Teachers’ Retirement System, CalSTRS, has long wanted to be free of the position it holds in icky-poo gunmaker Remington Outdoor, thanks to an investment in the Cerberus hedge fund that holds Remington.

We haven’t done one of these in a while, but it’s time to slay a few browser tabs.

Buddhist monks? Buddhist freakin’ monks?

Ever heard of Bataillon Ebbinghaus? They really were a thing — briefly.

(The following is an article from our traveling reporter. He is a former Special Forces Weapons Sergeant and Operations Sergeant. He is currently employed with a law enforcement agency. He recently attended a two day Northern Red Pistol/Rifle Course. -Ed.)

As we may have mentioned, there have been some glitches in the whole airplane thing.

Murders seldom makes sense to the non-murderous among us, but this one is particularly jarring. Matricide over school grades surely sounds like the misbegotten revenge of a teenage punk, but it actually was the revenge of an adult man; the grades in question were college grades.

Exuding a spirit of entitlement, overpaid, incompetent and unaccountable bureaucrats sat reluctantly before Congress and refused to step down. They met a request to apologize with truculent refusal, as one quarter-million-dollar-wasted-salary after another did everything but spit and hiss at the Government Oversight Committee of the House of Representatives.

One of the key components in the proper functioning of any repeating weapon — not just automatic and semi-automatic ones — is the feed system. The feed system comprises ammunition storage and all mechanisms that control the feed of a cartridge from that storage (named a magazine after the centuries-old military name for a storage place for powder and shot) to the firing chamber. Many, probably most, unreliable weapons are unreliable because of faults in the design or maintenance of their feed systems, and weapons that are known for high reliability, like AK rifles or Glock pistols, have had a great deal of attention to the feed system.

It isn’t directly a weapons site, but it relates to one of our other major interests — intelligence and unconventional warfare. If you’re interested in intelligence at all, former intellience officer John Schindler’s The XX Committee (at the less-roman “20committee.com” address) has several posts a month on espionage and counterespionage.

Three things have pretty much killed toy guns: