Weapons Man

In Britain, the definition of “witness protection” is a little different from the way it’s done in the USA, even in fictional TV series like The Sopranos or Lillyhammer. We begin with a former private eye who’s done time for phone hacking, looking at another stay in the nick, says the Beeb:

Are we sick of VA stories yet?

OK, usually when we’re axing ya to he’p a brother out, it’s an SF brother. In this case, it’s a gun blogging brother, and the guy that actually inspired us to take up the blog cudgel, for better or for worse, Forgotten Weapons .com’s Ian McCollum. Ian has a dream, and it involves higher-quality videos shot with better video, audio, and production gear — in fact, with fully professional gear.

This rare and out of print set of books just showed up on eBay. We have the set and were a bit shocked at the price, but for a researcher, there’s good stuff in here. For the person interested in action stories or lots of color photography, these may not be the right books. (If you’re going to spend thousands on SOG books, buy the six volumes so far of Jason Hardy’s coffee-table masterpiece, Team History of a Clandestine Army, which are still available — just). But Saal was both a member of the unit and an early historian. The books are a solidly made and well-printed overview of the organization and its operations, and have not been duplicated since.

Their tagline pretty much says it:

So, from the time you’re committed to the VA booby hatch, how long should you have to wait for your psychiatric evaluation? According to the VA, seven or eight years is cool. We are not making that up:

This YouTube playlist documents at excruciating length (the whole playlist is hours long) Canadian Ryan Pahl’s four-year effort to break into F-Class high-power rifle competitive shooting.

Tim Kavanaugh at National Review Online notes:

We’ve got a buddy who has killed people with a mortar. Dozens and dozens of them, in fact, and he was only afraid that he would run out of mortar rounds before he ran out of Taliban. (He might have, but our good friends the numbered Boar callsigns showed up and pitched in). But he didn’t do it with this kind of mortar. He’s probably jealous.

While the title sounds like it ought to be The Great Lost Austen Masterpiece, the book is a masterpiece of a different kind. This is not a full review — we’re not through with the book yet — but at the halfway or so point, it’s so good that we wanted to share it with you.

This three-reentry-vehicle warhead was once standard on Minuteman III missiles. Each warhead could be aimed at a different target. As part of a policy of unilateral disarmament, the MIRVs have been taken out of service.

Most journalists are no-good bums, so it’s hard to suppress one’s rejoicing at any misfortune that befalls them. They’re activists with bylines, with a narrow set of life experiences and a blinkered worldview that makes their ever-front-and-center opinions especially worthless. Unaware of that, in a textbook case of Dunning-Kruger Effect gone high-order, they are confident in their knowledge, expertise, and general superiority.

This sad sack is Daniel Shoffner, and what he did exactly cops don’t know — and won’t know, until either he confesses, or his victim thaws out enough to be autopsied. Yep, he did a “Bernie” and jammed her in a deep freezer.

Let’s take a quick look at some other VA stuff. In this category, we have an audit of the VA’s “wait lists” of neglected and abandoned vets, a guy who’s Not Dead Yet, a key insight into why the Department does so much better by the payroll patriots in its ranks than the vets it ostensibly helps, the curious fact that all VA managers are from Lake Wobegon, and a bitter contrast of the health care provided to criminal aliens to that not provided to honorably discharged vets.

It’s Sunday, and we got nothin’.

Sometime today we will queue up some stuff for this week, when we expect to be buried in work. And we hope to plug in a Saturday Matinee and TW3 that we didn’t get to yesterday.

But other than that, we can’t think of anything to say, let alone anything clever. Maybe tomorrow!

Who is Gilbert? You may be sorry you asked. Gilbert is GLBT: Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgendered. And we just learnt that June is Gilbert Month in the US Army (.pdf), where everyone must attend mandatory Gilbert Indoctrination, display their rainbow flags, and learn of the great contributions of Gilbert Soldiers.

Genghis Khan has fallen into disrepute since John Kerry compared him to Vietnam Veterans, explaining to those who didn’t get the connection that both were axe-murdering, baby-raping, card-cheating nogoodniks prone to cutting in the lift lines at Gstaad, or words to that effect. Remarkably, that kind of insight did not bring the former C-student to his desired station in life, but nowadays as Secretary of State he has an unparalleled record. (Unparalleled… you have to give him that).

We confess, we may have cheated with that headline. Because you might expect that high-tech Japan is a place where research on stealth technology takes place. But it’s the time that’s interesting. You probably didn’t know that stealth technology was a subject of intense research by the Empire of Japan, and they even made some progress.

Champion shooter, pro competitor, instructor and all around good guy Jerry Miculek has his own take on the bizarre phenomenon of attention-whoring “open carry activists” who go ditty-bopping into various unsuspecting businesses with TAPCO’d out ARs and SKSes carried at the ready. He gets the editorial comment out of the way — gently, and with humor — with his appearance in the first few minutes of the video, and then he spends the rest of it discussing when carrying what is appropriate. His advice is thoughtful, practical, polite to the point of courtliness. And certain to be ignored by certain perseverating camera hounds in Texas.