Weapons Man

Our favorite OCR programs, Adobe’s Acrobat and Nuance’s PDF Converter for Mac, choke on the “Fraktur” or Old German type script that was widely used pre-1945. (Indeed, even though early-20th-Century German typographers were among the pioneers of clean, highly readable sans serif Roman fonts, the Third Reich’s national nostalgia jag seemed to spawn a resurgence of this medieval-looking stuff).

Once the idea to commit homicide is formed in the ultimate weapon, the human mind, that practically anything that falls to hand becomes a weapon. Even things you’d never expect.

USS Tunny, SSG-282, launches a Regulus in January, 1958.

Safely in Indiana farm country with three friends, three of their kids, one elderly Jack Russell (whose old age has tuned him down to a delightfully serene level — for a Jack), and, at last count, eight cats, of which several used me for a warm bed last night.

This incredible photo essay at the Telegraph has an image with the equipment a British soldier war at a significant battle at various historical inflection points — as they put it, from Hastings to Helmand. You absolutely, positively should Read The Whole Thing™, and also go through the photo essay.

In the process of setting up a few safes (separate ones for guns and documents, thank you very much), we ran across some old Destruction Priority tags and stickers from some old community work. Checking the regs in hopes of finding out which was which taught us that, as something standardized, they are apparently now long since deprecated, especially with the English labels these had, like “Destruction Priority: Charlie” and so forth. Apparently, if you don’t work through your destruction priorities, you have just handed the Adverse Party his exploitation priorities. D’oh.

The font of weapons expertise and otherwise inexpert opinion is enroute West at oh-dark-thirty to help a friend pick up a car in Indiana. (Hey, free car from his brother). This is the kind of friend who bails a guy out of jail and even though that one’s been repaid in kind, a wise man hangs on to friends like that.

One more for the “nothing good happens at 0235″ file, although, in a certain Darwinian way, some good comes of it: think of it as evolution in action.

German Communists nostalgic for the days of Stasi surveillance and torture have failed in an attempt to have a gigantic “socialist realism” statue of Russian dictator Lenin exhumed for display.

Layoffs are in the news this week, with skilled workers getting the boot for reasons of both politics and business.

American journalist Jim Foley was murdered on camera by the slugs of the cult of the moon god and his murderous, pedophile prophet. The US’s passivity on the murder, hell, the US’s passivity on the advance of the soi-disant Caliphate in Syria and Iraq (and the advance of completely unrelated Shia extremists in Yemen, which also caught the “policy establishment” napping golfing), has become such a domestic political problem, that the Administration, as sensitive to domestic press as they are blind to American interests overseas, felt compelled to do something.

This is a Michigan story that hasn’t gone national, but it probably should. An insular, highly political National Guard unit had become so corrupt that mass sackings of leadership and full-timers were required to get it back under control. The Detroit Free Press reported that the investigation found, “widespread theft, moonlighting, destruction of government property and nepotism” at the lakeside Maneuver and Training Equipment Site (MATES) at Camp Grayling (in the north of the state’s lower peninsula). 

Ah, let us taste the sweet nectar of Schadenfreude.

In a law created on a whim by a single judge, the European Union demands the right to make search results for people vanish, if that’s what they want. They call it the “right to be forgotten” and the judge argues that ordinary people ought to be able to make their search results go blank if they so desire.

If the native of the seaside city of Guayaqil is an Ecuadoran, does that make the inhabitant of seaside Baltimore a Baltimoron? It does, we think, if he has the experience this Baltimoron had, and doesn’t relocate, forthwith.

We’ve discussed physical security a lot here, and have also discussed gun safes at some length. In the course of normal operations, things other than guns may come to lodge in your gun safe. This is, in general, not a good idea, unless the safe is a commercial safe, professionally installed, and therefore very difficult to brute-force open.

For a while there, it didn’t look like they’d make it, but our cousins to the north celebrate in August 2014 the centennial of the Canadian Submarine Force (which has had different names over the years; but what all the organizations and reorganizations have in common is Canadian crews and subsurface combat vessels). During the period Canadian naval officers call the “Decade of Darkness,” when political hostility to the sub force (and the Navy, really) combined with the budgetary realities of a nation of small population and vast coastlines, it really looked like there would be an end date to set against August, 1914. An ambitious plan to buy SSNs — nuclear boats, giving Canadians a sub-ice capability their Navy has never had — was torpedoed by budgetary realities and political opposition, either of which, alone, might have sunk it. The elderly Oberon-class subs would have been the end of the line, with submarines joining bombers, aircraft carriers, and cruisers as weapons systems the Canadian armed forces used to operate.

That’s one major take-away from a November, 1964 Springfield Armory classified report on a Chinese Type 56 AK variant, which the Armory received in late 1963 with a request that it be examined and compared to a Soviet-made AK already in their possession for “for similar and dissimilar features of design, fabrication, workmanship and construction.” We found this document in the archives of Small Arms of the World; for subscribers to that most excellent website, it’s available at this link. If you’re not a subscriber, this would be a good time.

Reanimated M67 training or dummy grenades recovered in Mexico.

After the accident, Felipe was determined to make it back to cruise night. Fortunately, Medicare bought him a powered wheelchair.