The Daily Brief

I mean, pow.

I spent eight years in the Marines, disassembled my M16A2 I don’t know how many times.  Call it a bunch.

See that ring just aft of the handguards?  To remove the handguards, you slide it back, then sort of pry the guards out.  The problem is if your rifle is new or new-ish or even middle-aged the spring is super-duper tight and it’s a bitch to yank that thing back far enough.

Well science has marched to the rescue.  And once I saw this I smacked my forehead: duh.

Insert the bendy bit into the magazine well, clamp the straight bits around the ring and lever that sum’bitch down.

So obvious.  And it would have saved my paws wear and tear over the years.  I’d like to go back and smack myself for not even thinking about this.

Cross posted to Space For Commerce.

I don’t know how long they’ve had the Cedarburg (Wisconsin) visit planned but we heard about it last week. Work obligations kept me close to home but I would have liked to have gone. Over 1,000 people showed up to see Senator McCain and Governor Palin …

What? Oh. Owen reports the actual headcount was 12,500, registered as they entered the door.  The state troops estimated 20 – 30,000 – TMJ4 on Youtube.

Twelve or twenty thousand – not a bad turnout.

I’m sure declining newspaper circulation has nothing to do with sloppy reporting like that.  Completely unrelated.

Cross posted to Space For Commerce.

A former McCain supporter steps forward to voice his displeasure with the pick of Sarah Palin for Vice President ..

Cross posted to Space For Commerce.

Yes, I wrote ‘classical music’ in the title.  No, don’t look at me like that.  Shut up and watch this:

Benjamin Zander: Classical music with shining eyes. (YouTube)

Or go to www.choralnet.org, then click on Music & Passion with Benjamin Zander.

H/T Billy Ockham
Cross posted to Space For Commerce.

Mr. Obama wants to cut us all a check for a thousand bucks, flensing the oil companies for the dough.

I’m against stuff like this in principle, but if Uncle Sugar wants to send a few bucks my way .. well I’m not going to send the check back, now am I?

I hear this is a supply and demand problem – but I’ll leave that for the guys that attended college.  But you know what?  The numbers in this just don’t seem right.

There are 209 million of us eligible for this money.  Not counting overhead that is $209 billion dollars worth of checks being sent around.

According to some smart guys at ISRIA profits for the oil industry in 2007 were $155 billion [1].  I see a shortfall of $54 billion.

Hell, I’m not even sure some of the companies in the report are even American.  BP – in’t that British Petroleum?  Royal Dutch Shell – hell, I didn’t even know the Dutch still had a monarchy, let alone a big friggin’ oil company.  You learn something new everyday.

So … yeah.  I dunno where it’s all going to come from – maybe ExxonMobil can take out a payday loan or something from the Cash Store.

[1] HTML version of the PDF, here.

Hat tip Boots & Sabers

Cross posted to Space For Commerce.

Why am I still up at 05:30? I neglected my Kipling …

They do not preach that their God will rouse them a
    little before the nuts work loose.

You cannot half-ass complicated stuff like Oracle Application Server. Woe.

Now, where’s the coffee?

Cross posted to Space For Commerce.

Well, that and this pic from here …

Hours after I read that I am still chuckling.  Yes, I am easily amused.

Via.

Cross posted to Space For Commerce.

A passel of Cliff Clavens: A group of individuals delivering a meaningless trivia of suspect value or veracity.

What we have here is ‘Cultural Context’.

Usage:
The members of the school board are a passel of Cliff Clavens.

The X Studies department at UW? A passel of Cliff Clavens.

Add it to your vocabulary, make John Ratzenberger a happy man.

First known use of the phrase, here, by ElamBend.

Cross posted to Space For Commerce.

Shines the name of Rodger Young …

“Come back here!”  The Lieutenant shouted.  “It’s suicide.”  The young private ignored the lieutenant’s concern.  If someone didn’t knock out that enemy gun, the entire patrol would probably die.  “Come back Private Young….THAT’S an ORDER!”  The lieutenant shouted again.

For a moment the young private paused, turned to look back at his lieutenant….and smiled.  “I’m sorry sir,” he said.  Then he smiled again.  “You know sir, I don’t hear very well.”  And then Rodger Young turned away from his lieutenant to continue crawling forward.

Rodger Wilton Young – wikipedia.

Young, Rodger W. – Medal of Honor citation.

Cross posted to Space For Commerce.

You know you live in a small town when the lead item on ‘Channel 5 News at 10‘ is a live broadcast from the Fourth of July [1] fireworks show.

“And the fireworks keep getting bigger and better as the show goes on!  Now back to you, Jim.”

Why yes, yes they do.  In other news, the longer you stand in the rain, the wetter you get. [3]

Cross posted to Space For Commerce.

[1] Only in the big city of Appleton would they do the Fourth of July show on the 3rd.  On a Thursday.  In the smaller [2] cities of Menasha and Neenah we’re doing our show on the 4th, as God and George Washington intended.

[3] On the other hand, it sure beats hearing about a triple-murder drive-by shooting, or the shenanigans of our Elected Officials.

He (Patton) rammed a submachine gun into the belly of a soldier collapsed from exhaustion on a North African beach, waking him suddenly to his explanation.

I know you’re tired. We’re all tired. That makes no difference. The next beach you land on will be defended by Germans. I don’t want one of them coming up behind you and hitting you over the head with a sockful of shit.

That “sockful of shit” brought reality home more certainly than any other weapon he could have mentioned.

From ‘The American Tradition‘ by John Greenway

From the always interesting Military Motivators.

District of Columbia v. Heller (pdf) is providing moments of hilarity: Dumbass journalist on why rifles are good and handguns bad.

A handgun can be concealed easily, and it can be tossed down a sewer drain without attracting much notice. The barrel can be used to break a snitch’s jaw. (There’s no such thing as “rifle whipping.”)

A butt stroke is part of bayonet drill.

1. You run up to the bad guy while screaming your ass off (presumably so the bad guy will think you are nuts) and carrying your rifle with, “fixed bayonet,” in front of you at a forty-five degree angle (the “on guard” position).

2. When you reach the bad guy, you swing your right foot towards him while simultaneously thrusting the butt of the rifle upward into the bottom of his chin (the goal being to knock his head off).

3. With the rifle now shoulder high (and if the bad guy is still standing), you cross your left leg in front of your right leg while thrusting the butt of the rifle horizontally and forward aiming at the bad guy’s face (this should definitely knock the bad guy down).

4. You now bring your right forward while slashing the bad guy with the bayonet aiming to cut a line from the right side of his throat to his left groin (by now, the bad guy had better be on his back).

5. You now bring your left leg forward while simultaneously thrusting the bayonet into the bad guy’s chest.

It’s a heckuva cardio workout.  I wonder if the folks at my gym would consider a class on Saturday involving bayonet dummies and M16s . . .

Dumbass then publishes a correction revealing he’s tone deaf with respect to his own sense of humor.

Update, 4 p.m. EDT: At the request of several readers, I should clarify that while there’s no such term as “rifle-whipping,” it’s fairly common to use rifle butts as a club. The term of art is the misleadingly pornographic phrase “butt stroking,” the butt in this instance referring to the flat end of a rifle.  It would be far preferable to call this activity “rifle-whipping,” but that term has virtually no currency.

Because ‘whip‘ has absolutely no sexual overtones whatsoever.  Nope, and you’re a perv if you think so.

Calling it ‘art’ is lame: smashing the butt end of a seven pound rifle into a fellow’s jaw and face is a violent act; the goal is to kill the guy.  Done right he’s on the ground with a fucking knife in his gut.  Done slightly wrong he’s got the knife stuck in his ribs. Then the attacker has to wiggle it around to get it out, which makes things really gross.  By this time the guy on the ground is also doing a lot of screaming and bleeding and so forth, which would add a really disturbing tone to the proceedings.

My instructor said it would be easier at that point to discharge a round in his chest.  Which would, yes, free the rifle.  It would also make an incredible mess.

Yes, we all wondered why, if we had a round in the chamber, we were screwing around with a bayonet.  I don’t recall that he had a good answer for that.

Where were we?  Oh yes – Energy Dome!

Also – Whip It!

Cross posted to Space For Commerce.

Via.

About the Irish no vote to the Lisbon Treaty …

“The fight for Europe is not over, Europe has powerful enemies with deep pockets, as we have seen during the Irish referendum. They come not from Europe, but from the other side of the Atlantic.”

“The role of the American neo-conservatives in the Irish referendum was very important,” he went on, to applause.

That pesky ‘one man, one vote’ thing is really chaffing Monsieur Jouyet, it seems.

Via.
Cross posted to Space For Commerce.

So … we’ve got this guy.

He’s a Colonel in the Air Force. He’s the CO of an Air Force base. More than 2,000 hours in the F-15E and F-111D. He’s been The Man at a fighter squadron. Spent a year at the Naval War College. Been on a staff position for Southern Watch, Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom. And so on.

No one can know the mind of another. However, this is the biography of a man who has his stuff wired together. He’s about the last guy you’d expect to call – on a Sunday, no less – a guy who bosses a middlin’ important peace organization.

And if he’d call, you’d hardly expect him to launch into a Strangelovian Fit.

I tried explaining to him that I have a lifetime of experience listening to people in the military say that we should ramp up Pentagon spending. He was not in a mood to listen.

Instead the Colonel’s voice escalated, similar to his desire to see the military budget take ascendancy over social progress in America. “I can see that you are not one who should be involved in deciding on our nation’s priorities,” he yelled at me. Then he hung up.

“Damn peacenik Hippies ….”

Sounds like a bunch of horse apples to me. It’s so pat, so perfect, so exactly what a stereotypical war fighter is in all those cheesy Hollywood films. I suspect …

• Colonel Suminsby has lost his mind – he’s probably mumbling about bodily essences in his office.
• Bruce is making shit up.
• Bruce has been prank called and doesn’t realize it.

That’s just my opinion. I could be wrong.

Cross posted to Space For Commerce.

Like Owen, I didn’t know a snowmobile could do that.

A 31-year-old Grafton man is angry about receiving $1,000 in fines for using his snowmobile like a Jet-Ski, speeding across the flooded Milwaukee River.

No video? Darn it.

A police incident report says Jay A. Seaver acknowledged speeding, saying he had to go about 75 mph to get across the river without sinking.

So he was really moving along.  I looked at Flickr and lo and behold .. pictures!

The combination of ‘snow mobile’ ‘open water’ and ‘crash helmet’ is a big hunk of awesome.

Via.

Cross posted to Space For Commerce.

“What’s the point of sending that to Mars, it’s a waste of money. We should give that money to the poor.”

Krep. Nothing pushes my buttons like reading stuff like that. [1]

I’ve got nothing against charity. We all need a hand sometimes. But let’s put this in perspective.

This article says there are 37 million poor in the United States. Go with that figure. [2]

Government figures are hard to nail down – Nasawatch claims $420 million for the Phoenix lander.


briandunbar_natasha_~:irb
>> 420000000/37000000
=> 11


If we smeared the cost of the Phoenix Lander into a thin paste and divided it up even-steven we could buy all the poor people in the US a nice lunch at Applebees.

In the meantime we’ve lost whatever science data the mission will yield. We don’t know the economic benefit of this but in the past such returns have been huge – the way of life that enables me to type and you to read comes from unexpected riches derived from scientific research.

If we buy every poor schmo in America a single meal at a cheap restaurant .. jobs have been lost because we’re not paying tens of thousands of people to build the rocket, the probe, to monitor and direct the mission. They’re not all rocket scientists – no small percentage of the people involved with the mission – NASA, JPL, contractors, sub-contractors – are just people. Some of them are officially poor persons who sweep floors and clean out toilets.

Now they’re really poor because they don’t have a job.

They have lunch, so that’s something. If they’re canny they’ll save back part of their meal for take-home so they can eat it for dinner.

[1] Outlanders disrespecting the Green Machine, will do it as well.
[2] We can ignore the snide ‘holier than thou’ tone of the article.

Men,

If you want to maintain a healthy marital relationship, do not regale your beloved over lunch about the good times you had before you were married.

Specifically don’t talk about liberty in Okinawa, the red light district outside Kadena and bar girls. More specifically don’t say anything like the following: Boy, I could have married that girl – mmm hmm.

Because that would be what is referred to as a mistake.

Cross posted to Space For Commerce.

Not everyone has issues after a tour of duty in a hot spot.  But if you do … don’t be a hero.  Get help.  Learn from this man: Skippy comes clean on his PTSD issues.

Cross posted to Space For Commerce.

I had a nice tidy blog post all ready to go. [1]

It wasn’t a masterpiece of snark or derision. It wasn’t a world changing essay. It was geeky: I managed to talk about Boomer, Athena, Caprica Six and Solaris Zones.

Just a projection – it wasn’t really there.

But, the heck with it. It’s not nearly as good as something that has Grace Park and unix in the same post should be.

Solaris is a marketing term, but SunOS is clunky.

Instead, an article by a bint who gets all worked up that the nearly 10,000 Marines and sailors at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base have access to a beach, post exchange, a Wal-Mart and your standard gift shop selling t-shirts.

fear, mortal terror, etc.

Enjoy.

Cross posted to Space For Commerce.

[1] Originally it was not going to be posted here, but since it veered off into a link to a bitchy news article editorial about Guantanamo Bay, it – sort of – belongs here.

Rachel Lucas knows how to increase her blog traffic.

1. Profess to be a not-right-winger. She’s for woman’s choice and not religious. And she owns guns.
2. Dress up her dogs and take pictures.

Then, when she has a solid audience of right wingers, dog lovers and gun geeks …

3. Post about Battlestar Galactica. Twice.

Well played, Miss Lucas. Well played.

Cross posted to Space For Commerce.

‘That Wonderful Offhand Position‘ by Kris Battles

Offhand – bleh. I was privileged to watch a master shoot in this position, once.

A Corporal in the next relay is shooting the 200 sitting.

Bang. Maggie’s drawers. Bang. High and right. Bang. Low and left.

Some grumbling heard; the rifle is messed up. Got to be.

The range OIC, a Warrant Officer 4, strolls up.

Lemme see that weapon, son.

WO 4 tips the sign to the tower. All targets down to half but his. He slips his own magazine into the weapon, tosses it to his shoulder and rips off twenty rounds, offhand – just that quick.

His target goes down and comes back up with a single spot, middle of the bull.

“Aint’ the weapon, boy, it’s the shooter.”

See more artwork at http://www.krisbattles.com/

Cross posted to Space For Commerce.

In a better – or more interesting world – this couplet would be as well known as ‘hark what light through yonder window ..’

Speak ‘What’ again! Thou cur, cry ‘What’ again!
I dare thee utter ‘What’ again but once!
I dare thee twice and spit upon thy name!
Now, paint for me a portraiture in words,
If thou hast any in thy head but ‘What’,
Of Marsellus Wallace!

From ‘Pulp Fiction, as performed by the King’s Men’

Via.

Cross posted to Space For Commerce.

But .. more and more it may resemble an outake of Monty Python.

ON THE HIGH SEAS ABOARD HMS PINAFORE
Lookout: Captain! Look!
THE CAPTAIN HURRIES TO THE BRIDGE. THERE IS A SCRUFFY LOOKING VESSEL ON THE HORIZON.
Captain: Ahoy the vessel!
Pirate: ‘Allo. Whoo is eet?
Captain: I am Captain Upstanding-Forthwright, Royal Navy. Whose vessel is this?
Pirate: This is the vessel of the Dread Pirate Smeeth.
Captain: Tell your captain to stand by to be boarded.
Pirate: I don’t think he’ll be very keen – you see we don’ need to be boarded today.
Lookout: He says they don’t want to be boarded.
THEY ARE STUNNED
Captain: Are … are you sure?
Pirate: Oh yes, we’re doing fine, thanks. Nice day isn’t it?
Captain: Well, we’d really like to come aboard. Pretty please.
Pirate: Of course not. You are English pigs.
Captain: What are you then?
Pirate: We’re pirates. Why do you think I have this outrageous accent, you silly sailor fop.
Captain: What are you doing on the high seas, with machine guns and cannon?
Pirate: Mind your own business.
Captain: If you will not allow us to board we shall take your vessel by force.
Pirate: You don’t frighten us English pig-dog. Go and bite your bottom son of a silly person. I blow my nose on you so-called sailor Captain, you and all your silly English k…..niggets
Captain: Prepare the boarding party, guns, one round from the forward five-inch mount, prepare to fire ..
XO: Ur, Captain. The latest directive from Foreign Office.
Captain: … on my comman .. oh. Yes. Human rights.
Pirate: HE PUTS HIS HAND TO HIS EARS AND BLOWS A RASPBERRY.

With apologies to the Pythons.

Cross posted to Space For Commerce.

Things in Zimbabwe are bad.

How bad are they?

Things are so bad in Zimbabwe that the ruling party can’t even rig an election.

Cross posted to Space For Commerce.

Except .. they weren’t turkeys. They were eggs. Plastic easter eggs. Dropped from a helicopter.

The idea behind the Cartersville EggDrop was to replace the old boring egg-hunt thing with a helicopter dropping 10k Easter eggs onto a small section of a football field. After the event a neighbor said to me after the egg hunt, this had to be an Easter egg hunt engineered by men with no women involved. I added that it was most likely ex-military men.

He’s got a point.

The first sign of a plan gone wild revealed itself as we approached a fenced-in football field that already held about 5.000 crammed-in people. My first instinct was to turn and run, but I doubt that I could have explained my flight to the 5-year-old with a vice grip on his Easter basket . EggDrop ground zero was the 50 yard line, and it was surrounded by yellow event tape at a radius of about 20 yards. When the helicopter made its first pass, that yellow event tape was no match for the thousands of screaming kids who burst through to catch the falling plastic eggs. The real problem, though, was that the organizers had not expected that the first drop of around 700 eggs would pelt moms, dads, and unsuspecting eight-year-olds.

I would never … never … have expected that result.

At one point, I ran over to M-I [3]

They had a helicopter and a tank? That is all kinds of awesome. God Bless the South. [1]

and tried to explain to him that no parent is going to leave the field without the right wounded children, myself included. I further pleaded with him to radio the helicopter and ask them to hold off dropping any eggs until things could be sorted out. He informed me that he did not have radio contact with the helicopter.

Say ‘hello’ to my good buddy, Murphy!

As I pushed my way to the 48 yard line, I saw my two boys sitting on the ground crying. Meanwhile, goofy old Ray Liotta [2] in the helicopter was circling with another drop of about 700 more plastic eggs, which cascaded onto the field amidst rippling pops as the egg shells bouncing off every man, woman, and child.

It ended well – in that John escaped with his kids. I did some due diligence via Google and, sure ’nuff, there was a helicopter drop of eggs and there was a fair amount of chaos, confusion and general hurly-burly.

[1] I mean this sincerely.
[2] Not really Ray Liotta – but that would have been a nice touch. John bypassed the obvious ‘Turkeys Away‘ reference and compared the situation to ‘Operation Dumbo Drop‘
[3] On further review this isn’t really a tank – I have no idea what he’s talking about. But a tank would have been cool.

Cross posted to Space For Commerce.