Tab Clearing...

• A peace officer talks accountability: Acting like the good guys should...


• Recovering undersea fiber optic cable for recycling is a fascinating process.


• A fascinating blog post on the evolution of the English language: How far back in time can you understand English?

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Kicking Off the Week With Memes!

Meme Dump!

Rivalries

Got a pretty great advertisement out of the Winter Olympics this time around.

Meme Dump!

Realistic Objectives

Greg Ellifritz makes a good point here about why to keep a lock on the gate to your backyard privacy fence.

You're not trying to duplicate the security level of Fort Knox, here. Like keeping the doors on your house locked and your windows secured, you're just trying to make breaking into your place a hassle. Most casual daytime burglars don't want to deal with that level of work. If they did, they'd have jobs.

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If you could see to these memes before the weekend, that'd be great...

Meme Dump!

Like a Commie Mobile Home in Space

After Skylab and Salyut, but before the ISS and Tiangong, there was Mir, which is Russian for "Peace" but might as well have meant "Hot Mess"...

That's probably being a little harsh, but a lot of what makes the ISS possible was learned via trial and error on Mir.

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Tab Clearing...

• The Arrestee Formerly Known as Prince


• Someone better alert the Board of Peace


• There is no such thing as grand strategy

The last time we surged this much airpower to the region was in the run-up to OIF in '03 

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Midweek Meme!

Like suddenly running over an alligator in Nebraska.

Of all the days to not have a camera with me, it had to be the one when I bumped into this beauty. If I'm reading my decoder wheel right, this C1 'Vette is a 1960 model in Honduras Maroon.

I took a couple of regular snaps with my iPhone and then backed up far enough to use the "telephoto" lens for this shot, which is probably the best cell phone photo I've ever taken of a car.

You don't often see cars like this out on the road in the winter months north of the Ohio, but it was a freakishly warm and sunny February Monday and there'd been some rain to wash the salt off the road, so I understand the urge to get some wind in your hair.

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Meme Dump!

Better Days

After that brutal cold snap, this warm spell is welcome.

The average high here in Indianapolis on a mid-February day is 41℉ and here it is already 38 degrees and the sun's not even up yet. They're calling for a high of 58, some overnight rain, and then nearly seventy degrees and sunny tomorrow.

Outdoor range time!

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So it goes...

Apparently Jesse Jackson passed away yesterday.

I immediately thought of P.J. O'Rourke's comment from Parliament of Whores...

He may have, in P.J.'s words, had political ideas that sounded like Fidel Castro's Jiminy Cricket, but he sure could speechify.

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Memes for a Warmer Monday!

"Defense" Pact

In addition to artillery shells and rockets, North Korea has sent a large number of troops to fight for Russia in its invasion of Ukraine. Things haven't been going so well for them.

"Under a mutual defence pact with Russia, in 2024 North Korea sent about 14,000 soldiers to fight alongside Russian troops in Ukraine, where more than 6,000 of them were killed, according to South Korean, Ukrainian and western sources."

"Mutual defense pact" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that paragraph, since as I recollect it, Putin's trying to defend his fist from an unprovoked attack by Ukraine's face.

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Meme Dump!

Meme Dump!

Automotif DCXII...

A 1971 Ford F-250 Custom Styleside in Grabber Blue with aftermarket decals and partly blacked-out grille. Photographed using a Nikon 1 V3 and 1 Nikkor 10-100mm f/4.5-5.6 VR zoom lens.

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Tab Clearing...

• I had somehow made it this far in life without ever stumbling across the etymology of "dungarees".


• Gallup organization ends nine decades of monthly presidential approval rating polling.


• Ring's expensive Super Bowl ad inadvertently woke a lot of Americans up to the realization that they'd paid to build an Orwellian surveillance network to spy on themselves.

Everybody's Meme-ing for the Weekend!

Shoot Gooder

There's a neat training opportunity in Texas at the end of the month. The class is called "Near and Far: The Complete Handgun Fight", co-taught by Greg Ellifritz and Jeff Gonzales.

Greg describes it thusly:

"The course combines a day of my extreme close range gunfighting concepts with a day of Jeff teaching the long range handgun curriculum he developed for a federal law enforcement agency in the context of active killer/counter-terrorism engagement."

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Death Ray Spray-and-Pray

Apparently the valiant men and women of the United States Customs and Border Protection agency were using borrowed Army anti drone lasers to protect us from the scourge of children's mylar party balloons (or, since I suppose they could have drifted north from Ciudad Juarez across the Rio Grande, los globos).

A Pentagon plan to use a high-energy, counter-drone laser without having coordinated with the Federal Aviation Administration about potential risks to civilian flights prompted Wednesday’s unprecedented airspace shutdown over El Paso, Texas, multiple sources told CNN.

Two people familiar with the matter said later Wednesday that Customs and Border Protection, not the US military, was in control of the laser technology when it was used this week around El Paso to shoot down balloons.

I'm having flashbacks to that time they shut down the entire city of Boston for a guerilla Aqua Teen Hunger Force ad campaign featuring Lite Brites.

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Meme Dump!

Revolver mods and what they're good for...

I wrote a piece enumerating the various modifications that one can perform to a carry revolver to make it more useful, and which ones may cause more trouble than they're worth.

Memes to Get You Over the Hump!

Incompetence or Malice?

In today's episode of "Government: Incompetent or Malicious?", the FAA announced late yesterday that it would be shutting down El Paso airport and the surrounding airspace below 18,000 feet for ten days due to unspecified national security reasons.

There was no advance warning, nobody seems to know why (as of this writing), and even Biggs Army Airfield at Fort Bliss is affected.

The restriction encompasses a 10-mile area around El Paso, and includes the neighboring community of Santa Teresa, N.M., but does not apply to aircraft flying above 18,000 feet, the F.A.A. notices said. They did not detail the security reasons that prompted the restriction.

The airport issued a travel advisory on social media saying that all flights to and from the airport had been grounded, including commercial, cargo and general aviation. It told travelers to contact their airlines for the latest flight information.

Of course everybody's engaged in wild speculation on social media, but anyone who claims they know anything for sure at this point is talking out their ass.

The only thing I do know for sure that it means is that the airlines are going to be burning cubic yards of money with ELP idled for over a week, and a lot of execs for Fortune 500 companies with offices in El Paso, the 22nd most populous city in the United States, are going to be scrambling to rebook flights via Albuquerque*.

Amazon’s probably not happy either, nor will any manufacturing companies located there who use just-in-time supply chains.

UPDATE: Santa Teresa, NM airport, too. Also, gosh, I hope nobody needs to get airlifted to University Medical Center in El Paso, which is the only Level 1 trauma center in the region, in the next ten days.

UPDATE 2: And now the FAA has lifted the closure.

*I mean, ABQ is a pleasant little airport, but you literally have to traverse the Jornada del Muerto to get there from El Paso.

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Meme Dump!