Weapons Man

Today is Black Friday, one of the two most prominent shopping days on the American mercantile calendar (the other? Cyber Monday, coming up in three days). It has become a tradition for merchants to offer their best prices on these days, to stand out from the crowd.

This is a new one on us. It’s a little old — it was turned in during a gun turn in (which they did not, mercifully, refer to as a “buy back”) in Tampa, Florida in February, 2013, making it practically matchlock-era by blog standards, but it’s new to us.

On this, our day of national thanksgiving, we give thanks for many things:

For God and Family.

For freedom and prosperity.

For the loyalty of a dog — who sleeps a foot away from this desk, because two feet is too far — and the warmth of a good house.

For the health to shovel the snow, less than two years after acquiring a cardiologist and a bunch of junk to keep the ticker ticking.

For the cold steel of a sword, the walnut stocks of a gun, the skill to use them, and the incredible blessing of a new generation of warriors that let us sheath the sword, rack the rifle, and retire, secure in the comfort that the ramparts are watched, the enemies are confounded, the frail are protected, and the fallen are avenged.

For the good fortune that lets us cook a turkey when so many in the world may have to skip their daily rice ball.

For the humanity that makes us wish to spread the freedom to all with the will to take it up, and anon, join us in the prosperity. Turkeys for all!

And, for good friends and family, here, far, and connected only by these novelties of electronic communication.

For all these things, we give humble and unworthy thanks.

“While expertise is high and growing in the art of weapons manufacture, the know-how in the production of cartridge [sic] and other ammunition is still lacking.” — Abdel-Fatau Musah, pull quote from the report in the Brown Journal of World Affairs, Spring 2002.

Not altogether sure what to make of this. We do know that for $2200 were not going to be buying it. But this AK, for sale on GunBroker right now, can’t really be called the work of Bubba: It’s far too well done. But it’s what was done that raises our eyebrows… this AK is a little idiosyncratic, shall we say, in its style and features.

Years ago, we chose AR15.com for one of our W4s, and we got some predictable responses, along the lines of: “That’s where all the posers and neckbeards are, and all the real tactical operatory operators are on M4Carbine.net” or the absolutely true and non-exaggerated: “The signal to noise ratio is way better at M4C than at Arfcom.”

Letitia Davis, 36, before she was burned to death for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, by a man the justice system never took seriously.

This rope traverse in Ranger School is a one-time deal, not part of the PT test. One example of the physical demands on the Ranger candidate. The ladies won’t be doing this.

We were reading an FAA safety bulletin that’s completely unrelated to the subjects of this blog — or is it? Because we saw an interesting factoid in a column by the Federal Air Surgeon, James Fraser, MD:

It’s a paradise now, for sport divers, despite being one of the more remote locations in the world. But in World War II, it was pure hell for the Japanese who garrisoned it, and for the Americans who attacked them.

In Part I of this 2-part series, we showed you an article about how journalists at the profession’s allegedly most prestigious school — the Columbia School of Journalism — are taught to lie (although the article’s author, Michael Lewis, says “obfuscate” — and slant their work. Now let’s look at another source of slanted, agenda journalism: shadowy nonprofits.

This AM post is already late, and it will likely be a slow day on posts. That’s because stuff is happening.

This guy just ran afoul of Federal charges in Colorado. Thing is, it seems like he deserved to. He had an entire business guiding big-cat hunts without bothering with, in some cases, hunting licenses. But how he did the hunts was most upsetting. From Guns.com:

Meet Luis Arevelo, an 18-year-old who’s just doing the work Americans won’t do: in his case, raping a five-year-old girl, and bestowing upon her his case of chlamydia. For this, he has been elevated to a status above unemployed American workers, in the hopes he’ll hang around and vote.

Apparently we’re not the only ones dismayed to encounter graduates of journalism schools; even the newspapers have caught on and aren’t hiring them. Writing in 1993 in The New Republic, a key pub for the sort of trust-fund lefties who seek to change the world through their inspired slant on writing, Michael Lewis recounted the low opinions working newsmen have of the grads of J-Schools in general and especially the Columbia School of Journalism (a graduate school), but the real key graf was this one, recounting how the school actually graduates fewer alumni into journalism jobs than it matriculates out of them:

Depending on how you look at it, the NYPD’s rapid release of information was a model of law enforcement transparency, a hasty attempt to forestall community condemnation, or the casting of an ill-trained and ill-supported rookie under the bus. You could make a pretty good case for any one of the three. The New York Times:

The Menace of the Oak Leaves™ continues to spread its evil across the Manor’s grounds, and all the local landscapers’ workers have just quit, because Bernstein/Sondheim (“Everything free in America!”). So we have to gird our loins for battle with the beastly things.

This is the exact moment that the mower, the mechanized maneuver element of our anti-leaf combined-arms task force, chooses to blow blue smoke.

So the task that was looking like a rapid blitzkrieg is now looking more like an exhausting, enervating stalemate.

Will no one rid us of these troublesome leaves?

“You’re a better man that I am, Gunga Din.” That closing line of the Kipling poem became the wrap-up line of this 75-year-old gem, which awkwardly merges the story of the loyal-unto-death bhisti with the comic episodic novel Sergeants Three, and an extra dose of Hollywood formula: the happy bachelors scheming to sink their buddy’s impending marriage. The acting’s sometimes over the top, the historical accuracy minimal and so many scenes and situations from this movie have become setpieces and tropes that you would be excused for thinking that Gunga Din, too, was an imitator rather than the originator of these ideas.