Weapons Man

The headline and subheds of this Daily Mail story pretty much say it all. A Brit career soldier is in the awkward financial position where his only real asset is the medal rack he earned in his years of service.

Not this LAW….

Early this morning, Homeland Security Investigations was thrown into a tizzy by a rumor that the Special Agent in Charge (SAC) of the agency’s second-largest office, New York, had been walked out. As agents checked in to their offices, dropped off suspects for detention, or took a break from testifying in court, the rumor spread like wildfire. But this just raised more questions:

We were hoping to begin today, as we were hoping to begin Monday, with our concluding post on the early development of antitank guided missiles (ATGMs). This one deals with missiles in the Yom Kippur, or October, or Ramadan War (there are many names for the war, depending on where you are when you take sight of it). After this war, the value of missiles was not in any doubt at all, and all arms-developing nations went all-in for them, while arms-using nations sought them to the extent that they faced combined-arms or armor threats.

Here’s a story from Waukegan, IL, a Chicago ‘burb, where a lady fired a single shot, trying  to make a neighbor’s dog that had jumped her fence let go of her dog. The neighbor was there, but wasn’t helping.

Bad parenting skills. No $#!+?

In 1962, a film starring Jeff Chandler brought a new hero into the American pantheon: Brgadier General (later MG) Frank D. Merrill, leader of the eponymous Merrill’s Marauders. Theater-goers watched Chandler and a cast of TV actors defeat the Japs heroically in the low-budget movie, and then Chandler’s character, beloved by his men, collapses of a heart attack. The movie was a huge success, in part because it was Chandler’s last — the 42-year-old wasn’t faking pain on the set, he was acting with an injured back, and then he had the sour luck to die during what should have been routine back surgery after the film wrapped.

Time for an update, eh?

The Snow

SEE the silent flakes of snow,
Pretty snow!
What a world of misery is here until they go!
How they fall, fall, fall,
From the cold, forbidding sky!
And they cast their chilling pall
On field and forest, lake, stone wall
Forming drifts that overlie;
Falling down, down, down,
On our hibernating town,
To accumulumulation that does miserably grow
   From the snow, snow, snow, snow,
       Snow, snow, snow —
From the frosting and the freezing of the snow.

If we could save lives by banning something deadly, should we? What if we could just save one life? Well, here’s a life that didn’t get saved, because Moms Didn’t Demand Action for Condiment Sense.

If you’ve ever wanted to build an AR in 9mm (maybe using that DEA upper that’s lying around on a pistol?) you may have been deterred by the difficulty in making a 9mm AR run, or the general fiddliness of the conversion, with a magazine-well adapter roll-pinned in place. Well, the guys at Gun Point have thought of you.

In a column about lying four-flusher Brian Williams, the Boston Herald’s Howie Carr remembers another incident with NBC News. Actually, Howie remembers a bunch of incidents. Remember NBC editing the George Zimmerman/Trayvon Martin 911 tape to make Zimmerman sound like a racist? Remember Dateline NBC wiring a GM truck with explosives to suggest that the vehicle was unsafe? Howie did.

As happens all too often, the end of Saturday’s posts have slipped into today. Sometime today we hope to post three incomplete Saturday posts, including the matinee (a fun science-fiction flick with a mix of plausible technology and impossible physics), and the TW3.

Edge of Tomorrow illustrates the bizarre economics of Hollywood by being a $100M grossing… flop. It suffered from, among other things, customer backlash against Tom Cruise, and a marketing effort so feeble (or was it febrile?) that they have gone two ways with the movie’s title, the bland Edge of Tomorrow which signposted the film’s dusty road to box-office death, and Live Die Repeat, which has sold it in DVD and Blu-Ray. We watched it on HBO, where it is presently in rotation, but you can find it at all the usual suspects.

Real men: Neil Armstrong, Mike Collins, Buzz Armstrong, Summer ’69.

We keep receiving solicitations from charities we know are bogus. Usually it’s the Christmas season, and the end of the tax year, that brings the charities out in force with their ads. That’s when their fundraising managers all trying to make their bonuses by year end. And in January, blessed peace on the charity front. But in this new year, the come-ons haven’t let up.

Joe Huffman attended the anti-gunners’ Smart Gun Symposium in Seattle and saw some surprising things, if we read him right. The presenters were a mixed bag of gun-ban seeking activists and technology nerds. And what they were seeking diverged. Most of the nerds focused solely on the unauthorized-child use prevention case, and admitted that their technology was not even potentially useful for the prevention of crime, or protection of a police officer from a criminal who got hold of his or her gun. Only one, by Joe’s recollection, wanted to see this technology mandated (while all the activists do). No critics of the technology were presented. No spokesman for the gun industry or gun rights was put on. This sham symposium (shamposium?) was sponsored by Washington Cease Fire, a group that has historically sought the banning of all guns, and that demonizes gun owners routinely.

Matt G has a remarkable pocket class in how to do arrest warrants. There’s a little on search and combo warrants, too. If you, as a cop, follow his guidelines (which do cramp your play in a couple of ways, for good reasons), then you’re pretty well inoculated against showing up in the local (or, God forbid, national) press as that guy. He notes that he didn’t really master this until he had a good deal of experience himself, but until he did, he wasn’t a finished policeman.

In this case, as Jordanian airmen carry out Operation Martyr Muath in the certain knowledge that to be shot down is, despite the miracle of the ACES II ejection seat, certain death, we may ask, “What can the US do? What should the US do? And what will the US do?”‘