Weapons Man

That’s the way the AP, no doubt retyping a press release as is their usual wont, reports it:

This report is from 27 June or so, so it’s a few days late, but still deserves comment. The sort of “human rights advocates” were always ready to impose an obligation on the civilized West, and always ready to make excuses for the barbarous East, have long been agitating for the elimination of land mines. You may remember it was a favorite cause of that well-born but empty-headed blonde twit, Princess Diana, the Paris Hilton of her day, famous for being famous, and well informed about nothing whatsoever.

When the police didn’t soon solve a storage-unit burglary in Phoenix in 1985, the owners of two stolen guns — an engraved Colt Python and a GI 1911A1 — resigned themselves to the fact that they’d never see them again.

Indra Nooyi hates America, the military, and you. But she sure loves your money.

This is the offending magazine.

A post at Extrano’s Alley reminds us that we’ve been remiss in following up the issues with a Georgia SWAT wrong-house raid that left a child hovering near death for days. The Stranger quotes a gut-wrenching paragraph from an article by the kid’s mother, in Salon:

Over the weekend, the press published many stories about the new Secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs. Most of them were like this story at the New York Daily News, phoned-in pack journalism that prints the narrative (i.e., the Va is, “an agency beset by treatment delays and struggling to deal with an influx of new veterans returning from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.” When the real workload is aging WWII, Korean and Vietnam-era vets). But they did at least get the guy’s name right: Robert A. McDonald.

And they found it has a “corrosive culture.” Gee, ya think? Basically, the report written by the President’s designated fix-it guy, not a manager but a political operative, says all the same stuff about the VA that veterans have been saying for years, while the White House and VA management have been singing, “La la la la la we can’t heeeear you!”

We have two incredible safety stories that both end with no one dead, but largely because of the fortuitous intervention of plain dumb luck (or celestial Powers, take your pick).

His last words were, “It is nothing.” But he was terribly wrong.

Here’s a true piece of submachine gun history: a German MP.18–1 submachine gun, a very early, first-generation, Bergmann-built Hugo Schmeisser design.

You know that old Simon and Garfunkel song that starts off, “Slow down, you move too fast”? Our objective for today is to make sure that nobody has any cause that song to us. We’re going to move slow. Were going to do very, very little. We’re gonna get honked at by snails and turtles (and we would, by the US Mail, if it were running… er, ambulating… today), as if we were the Winnebago on the hilly road of life.

We’re going to recover from the fly-in yesterday and all the other stuff we did yesterday, like resurrect a dead car and finish a product for a government client.

We have no further ambitions than maybe posting yesterday’s missed Saturday Matinee and cooking something for dinner. We’re not even going to the range.

Tomorrow starts the crazy anew.  That’s soon enough.

Robert Jesse, MD, too hip to have a flag in his official photo.

That’s what a bunch of New Hampshire National Guard soldiers did to try to keep the comradeship alive after a stint in Iraq in 2004-05. They took up the little-known (in America) Irish team sport of hurling, which if nothing else is great high-intensity PT.

Part 1:

Part 2:

It’s nice to have a military story to report that isn’t about Secretary Hagel establishing quotas for pedophiles, Congress zeroing out the ammo budget, or the President deploying guys because some 26-year-old speechwriter thinks it’s a good idea, and then leaving them hanging.

Hat tip, an Irish friend who’s been trying to explain hurling to us for about a year. Oddly enough, we think we served in SF with a relative of the officer in the video (who goes from CPT to LTC thanks to the magic of editing eight years of film down to a half hour.

This is good news, and a long time coming, from lawyer David M. Goldman:

Not hard to figure out who’s the villain here, as little actor Vern Troyer, best known for his role in the Austin Powers films, gets the blue-gloves-where-the-sun-don’t-shine treatment from the fine folks at the TSA:

For crying out loud, he’s just an actor who played an evil guy. (He’s probably a perfectly nice fellow in person). Does this mean they’re waterboarding Sacha Baron Cohen for the secrets of the nuclear WMD programs of Wadiya?

Well, it is the TSA. No one good, decent, honest, competent, moral or ethical has ever been employed at TSA in any capacity whatsoever.

Cause there’s always got to be hammers, it seems. In any event, you can kind of sympathize with the murderer here, if her story is true.

In our review of Gentle Propositions by JS Economos, we mentioned in passing that one of the myriad details Economos got right was, “why not many medics ran recon.” This stirred a little discussion in the comments, with Medic 09 (a former IDF medic) asking:

Alexandria, Egypt, is a bustling, modern third-world city with few visible reminders of its past. But many archeological treasures in Alex have been spared the assault of the bulldozer and cement mixer — because they’re under water. This includes anything from Alexander’s time, later sculptures and other artefacts from the Ptolemaic dynasty of Hellenized Alexandria, and then, some reminders of later colonizers from the 19th and 20th Centuries.

You have to admit, they didn’t just go Nanny, they went Full Nanny. Among the things banned in the People’s Republic of Massachusetts are those deadly weapons, fireworks. Firecrackers, roman candles, even sparklers: the state’s authorities live in dread that some Bay State bairn might grow up without irrational fear of these, and so they enforce a ban with a heavy hand.