Weapons Man

Aviation Week is celebrating its 100th Anniversary over the next couple of years, and reprinting or blogging classic articles from prior years, and even from its various predecessor publications. This week they hit upon one that examines, and in part, reverse engineers, an ingenious weapons system we have mentioned before: the Japanese Type Zero Carrier Fighter.

Around 1970, Heckler & Koch was doing well, but their restless engineers were thinking: what’s next? One thing we learn from history is that no weapons system lasts forever, and there was maybe one more go-around in the company’s present line of roller-locked weapons, trading some militaries’ 7.62 NATO weapons for 5.56 NATO ones. But what could offer stingy weapons procurers enough reason to stop sitting on their wallets?

This isn’t exactly a shock to anyone with brain stem function, but Dzhokar “Flashbang” Tsarnaev was found guilty on the charges that he faced in connection with his mass murder at the Boston Marathon in . There were 17 counts that carry the death penalty. Of those, Flashbang was found guilty of 17. There were 13 counts that do not. Of those, Flashbang was found guilty of 13.

How can an unpaid electric bill kill you? Bear with us for just a minute. The logic goes like this:

Insurgencies seldom break out overnight, but when they come, they lay their burdens first on the civilians associated with the hated government or occupying power. No less was that true in the early stages of the American Revolution, when life for Loyalists (or Tories, in the vernacular of the day) and the families of officials became first unpleasant, then difficult, and finally positively hazardous.

The pseudonymous commenter Haxo Angmark, formerly Wise Cave Owl, formerly Stuka Pilot, is banned here, for the third and final time. We haven’t deleted his old posts but we’ve deleted all the ones he’s attempted since midnight.

So, let’s take a look back at something we’ve been discussing recently: reverse engineering. The term is a relatively new one, but the practice is older than engineering itself. When you get right down to it it’s just “copying.” And manufacturers have been doing that since… Well, since sometime very soon after they first started manufacturing!

Tom’s novella Big Boys Don’t Cry received a nomination — indeed, was the category-leading nomination — for a Hugo award, which is apparently a very big frog in the Science Fiction fandom award pond. Tom, a retired Army officer who writes science fiction with plausible near-future military themes, is a sometime reader and commenter here, and his nominated work is a read that may be of interest to many of you.

How many times have we had ax murders in this feature position? Five? Ten? Lets search…

Ah, les pauvres petits! This story is one of those unintentionally funny ones. It apparently began at the New York Times, which thinks it’s a big deal that female CIA officers find that they are depicted all wrong on television. Must be because they’re women, right, because Hollywood is so well known for taking pains to get everybody else’s profession right.

There are two points of view on J Edgar Hoover. Viewpoint One goes like this: he was the greatest American ever, the scourge of organized crime and hostile espionage, defender of the Constitution, and the model of the incorruptible servant leader; in short, a brilliant and upright stalwart who was a bulwark of society.

This memorial once stood in a town square in the small town of Sömmerda, Germany, a river town near the armory city of Erfurt. It was this man’s imagination and efforts that turned Sömmerda into a gunmaking and, later, manufacturing center.

Not the lame Bill Gates kind. No, this is the other Blue Screen of Death. Every death is a tragedy, a loss of a world; and this one is still under investigation. Accident? Alcohol-related? Suicide attempt, successful? Those are among the kinds of incidents that delight would-be gun banners so, because it gives them the bloody shirt to wave. But homo sapiens is a fragile animal, compared to our cousins. A gun is totally unnecessary; a little bit of gravity can do it.

In basic training, we sat through our first EO Lecture® and quickly were mystified. The presenter, a guy with an Afro and Fu well beyond regulation (hey, it was the seventies) and delivered the lecture in an urban patois that would later become known as, “Ebonics.” He told us that everything about white people and black people was different, everything, even their handshakes, and he demonstrated a 30-movement, intensively-choreographed handshake he called a “dap.” It was the duty of all white people to cut all black people slack in everything, because we couldn’t hope to understand each other, even the handshakes.

The other day, we should you sabotage ammunition that was used apparently by Britain in World War II. We’re also aware of German, Soviet, and American ammunition like this. Back i 2012, CJ Chivers from the New York Times has a story calling “Spiked Ammo” “Dirty tricks in the Syrian war.”

One of the joys of spring around these parts, not that spring is really here, is the first bug of the season. Which, having infected everyone in the house except Small Dog, now turns its attention to Your Humble Blog Host.

The worst part is the coughing. And the runny nose. 

Wait, the worst two parts are the coughing, and the runny nose. And the postnasal drip.

The worst THREE parts are… Well, you get the idea.

Did not go to church on this Easter. It seems a remarkably un-Christian thing to do, to infect a very large room full of one’s fellow votaries with one of God’s more inexplicable creations.

The virus, of course, has its place in creation. Some scientists have theorized that viral modifications to protohuman DNA led to the evolution of such things as speech and higher cognitive function. Perhaps colds and flu are simply an artifact of that?

It’s a chilling scene, the way this newspaper story describes it:

The RAND corporation is a Federally Funded Research and Development Corporation (FFRDC), a nonprofit originally sponsored by the Air Force to do big-forebrain thinking about strategic warfare. It was the original “think tank” and the prototype of many FFRDCs that have materially advanced US defense policy. The Army, not wanting to be neglected, sponsored a RAND sub-center called the Arroyo Center, which does the same kind of think-tanking, but on ground forces issues.

Pressure cooker (and containing bag) remains of the bomb planted by Tamerlan Tsarnayev. FBI.

A Swiss museum (Fortress Museum Heldsberg) recently required a collection of roughly a thousand cartridges, including many rare and exotic specimens, many of which have been sectioned for display. Among them is this unique 7.92 Mauser round that was reportedly dropped from British aircraft in cunningly copied German packaging. Thinking it was misplaced ammunition, some unfortunate Landser would pick it up, and kB! ensued.