"It's time to start running!"

Oh, Jesus, this isn't some fin de siècle dystopian SF movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger... This is really happening.

I thought "Clouseau" was a French name?

"The assailant, armed with a knife and an ax, was identified as a 17-year-old Afghan man living in Ochsenfurt, Bavaria, according to Bavarian Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann.
...
The attacker's motive is not yet known, Hench said."

I've got a guess or two, Mister Detective.
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Overheard on Bicycles...

Shootin' Buddy: "Wow, this neighborhood's really gentrified. You know how I can tell we're in a Green Zone? All the hair salons."

Me: "And a lack of check cashing joints. As a matter of fact, we seem to be in a payroll advance desert."

SB: "Quick! We need a federal program!"

...minute later, pulling into the coffee house parking lot...

Me: "Given how trendy the neighborhood is, I'm surprised at how few bike racks they have. It's like a bike rack desert!"

SB: "Quick! We need a federal program!"

QotD: About That Life Edition

"Every truck stop bathroom is a dojo if you try hard enough." -Jack Clemons

A Good Day

Shootin' Buddy arrived at 0900. We'll say our story starts at the intersection of 54th Street & the Monon Trail, since that's about where it started. From there we pedaled the mile-and-change north to Broad Ripple proper, to get breakfast at Public Greens.

I had the chilaquiles with a fried egg and smoked pulled pork, washed down with a couple glasses of water and a cup of coffee to fortify me for the day ahead.

About six miles south on the Monon and then a jog right on 10th Street puts you on the Cultural Trail, pedaling down Massachusetts Avenue.

The Cultural Trail wends right past Henry's Coffee Bistro, where we stopped for a breather. Shootin' Buddy had a cup of joe, but I got my SWPL on with an iced mocha latte.

Then it was back on the bikes to wend our way through downtown, circling around to a new spot at College Avenue and Georgia Street...

Metazoa Brewing Company. They weren't technically open yet, but the guy behind the bar took pity on us and pulled a couple pints. We looked like we'd been riding a ways, I guess.

Just north up College Avenue a half mile or so is St. Joseph's Brewery & Public House, where we pulled in for a half pint of their Seraphim Sour Ale before pedaling northwards in earnest.

At 25th Street, we took a detour west, pedaling a few blocks off the Monon to The Koelschip, located next to Goose the Market at 25th & Delaware. Since I'm stuck on sour beers for the nonce, I went with Artisan Tears, from Central State Brewing.

 I mentioned it was next to Goose the Market, right?

And then it was back on the bikes for the long uphill pull past Broad Ripple, and into Nora up on 86th Street, to try out another new-to-us place...

 Big Lug Canteen. This was where we had lunch...

I ordered a pint of their Bruce Lopez, a salted lime pale ale, and a charcuterie plate that came with a healthy scoop of the best bacon jam I have ever had in my life. Seriously, I'm going to go back and see what I can do to order just a fist-sized dollop of that bacon jam and a pile of crostini to smear it on.

And then it was back south to 54th & the Monon.

And I didn't have to use my AK.
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TRUCK KILLS!

"Truck kills dozens in latest French attack." -politico.com

Look at the headlines:

• "Scene of Devastation After Truck Kills Revelers" -NBC News


• "Bastille Day attack: truck kills at least 80 people in Nice" -The Guardian


• "Truck kills dozens in Nice, France" -USA TODAY

Gosh, if you went by the headlines, you'd be excused for thinking that things had gone all Steven King out there, what with trucks just up and killing people...

It's telling...

...that when you plug "Reichstag" into the Google News search, the first entries all involve Turkey and not the German parliament.

"Whether there was a conspiracy at play or not, Recep Tayyip Erdogan is shaping up to emerge victorious from the upheaval, which has reportedly led to swift reprisals, including the removal of 2745 judges from office and a purge of the country's armed forces.
Describing the unrest as "a gift from God," Erdogan is reported to have vowed that the "members of the gang" involved would "pay a heavy price for their treason" – and seems to have already set about backing up his words."

Goobernatorial.

When Reagan's two terms were up, George Bush ran one of the easiest presidential campaigns of all time, in effect saying "If you liked Reagan, voting for his Veep would basically be asking for a second helping of the same." Of course, it didn't turn out like that and my memories of the Elder Bush administration mostly involve feeling a vague sense of disappointment.

Similarly, the previous Republican governor of Indiana, Mitch Daniels, was the sort of dull Cincinnatus too rare in public office these days, and the GOP replacement was offered up on a platform of "Hey, if you liked the last Republican governor, why not vote for this guy and get more of the same?"

And for the last four years I've had a vague feeling of disappointment. Now the guy has been offered a bucket of warm piss by Trump and accepted. On a forum, someone asked what I thought about our governor...

Pence? Not a bad governor. A little more of a Social Conservative than I'd like, but it's not like it didn't say so right on the package. Solid on guns and fiscal matters. A+ NRA rating and actually followed through on campaign promises to lower taxes. Too eager to spend time rearranging the Gays-'N'-'Bortion deck chairs on the S.S. GOPtanic, but that's endemic.
B+: Would have a beer with him and his wife; they seem like nice people.

(ETA: The selection of Pence...indeed, none of the three VP finalists...does nothing to dispel the notion that Trump is only in this for the yuks and wants to throw it to Hils. After RFRA and a recent abortion bill, Pence's approval ratings here in Indiana are at ~40% and he was facing a tough election against a sad-sack Democratic candidate who should have been a walkover. Neither Pence, Christie, nor Gingrich could reliably deliver the electoral votes of their respective home states, which is considered kind of a key job of the VP pick.)

So, he's got the homo-hatin' and 'bortion-banning chops that the Trump candidacy lacked and I guess is on the ticket to keep the hardcore SoCons from staying home in disgust on election day. We'll see.
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...Continued From Last Time.

Like I said, the Lone Wolf steel guide rod got bent like a banana somehow. The gun kept running without it, but required a hammer to disassemble. Now in place is the White Sound Defense non-captive guide rod, still with the 20# ISMI flat wire recoil spring. (Replacing the factory 18# unit.)

This was also a heads up for me to order a small handful of factory G19/23/32/38 recoil spring assemblies from Lone Wolf.

This called for a range trip to Indy Arms Co. on Friday morning to function check the gun with the guide rod. Also to use up the last of my Remington 125gr FMJ .357SIG ammunition. While I was there, I put a box of fifty Silver Bear 115gr FMJ rounds through the Gen2 Robar G17. I just ordered five hundred of the things and wanted to make sure they work.

Just dirt-shooting really, to run up the round count. The Silver Bear worked fine in the 17. I need to get some real sights and a stippling job on that 32.

The Glock 32 went through the complete cycle of operation every time. 

This makes it 1,729 total rounds fired since the Glock 32 was last cleaned or lubricated, with five failures to go completely into battery (#63, #78, #126, #748, #1,503*), five failures to feed (#221, #224, #282, #734, #1,529*), one failure to eject (#1,033), and one broken (aftermarket) part. 271 rounds left to go.
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From elsewhere...

"US support of populist democracy in that part of the world over the last eight years has helped contribute to a giant "failed state" from the Pillars of Hercules to Antioch, with an island of quasi-stability in Israel. When our current president was sworn in, you could drive from Marrakesh to Istanbul with no bigger worries than the occasional border shakedown. Now it's one vast Mad Max wasteland with god-bothering wogs chopping various bits off people who pray wrong.

I heartily hope the U.S. sits this one out, but I'm sure Barry is already drafting speeches in favor of Erdogan and democrazy."

Interesting Times

Turkey coup: military attempt to seize power from Erdogan as low flying jets and gunfire heard in Ankara and bridges across Bosphorus in Istanbul closed 

Link to live coverage at telegraph.co.uk

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Work, work, work...

Still working on the USCCA article on high end CCW 1911s, which meant more shooting with the Wilson yesterday morning at Indy Arms Co.

Another hundred rounds of Winchester 124gr NATO FMJ (Q4318) without a bobble brings the total fired to 800 without a malfunction of any sort. Everybody who's tried it had been impressed. Hopefully I'll get it to the range for some chrono work and some benched 25yd groups on Monday or Tuesday.
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Scraping the bottom of the barrel.

While it's fairly common to use the "boneyard" of Davis-Monthan for spare parts, it's a little less common to use it to source entire aircraft, as the USMC is doing in order to get enough airframes to keep a modicum of readiness while the F-35 procurement drama drags on.

""Today, there are not enough flyable aircraft -- our 'ready bench' -- if our nation were subjected to a crisis," Davis said. "Today, I could fly 43% (443 of the 1,040) of the aircraft I should have on my flight lines."

A lack of spare parts and maintenance personnel trained to repair damaged aircraft are two of the main factors contributing to the lack of operational aircraft, according to military brass."

It's got that whole Carter Years vibe about it, doesn't it?
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Speedbump...

So, I'm sitting on two semi-snakebit pistol tests right now.

First is the Steyr C9-A1. Okay, there's a known extractor issue with the pistols, and Steyr has released an upgraded extractor to solve it. But I don't know if my pistol already has this parts fix or not. I'll contact them for the part, but... The fact that I talked to one of their service guys in Louisville in May and got told the "Well, now, it's a precision European pistol and you don't want to feed it junk ammo," was disheartening. Especially since the weaksauce Blazer Brass 115gr stuff that gave the Steyr such fits was devoured happily by a certain other Austrian pistol that's every bit as European.

Euro-manufactured ammo is less likely to suffer from being underpowered, but tends to have harder milspec primers, which give the Steyr's striker-fired ignition setup fits. (And at a much higher rate than noticed with the similarly striker-fired Glock 19 or Sig P320.) If I'm going to try and gallop this thing across the finish line, I'm going to need to source myself a case of Fiocchi 124gr or similar and cross my fingers.

Meanwhile, you might have noticed that you haven't heard much about my Glock 32 lately...

Well, Tuesday last week I took it and a hundred rounds of ammo to Indy Arms Co. for the typical morning range session. Fired the hundred rounds without any malfunctions. At the end of the trip, I decided to pull the gun apart and LocTite the guide rod. The slide needed to be beaten off the pistol with a rubber mallet again, and the guide rod turned out to be bent like a banana.

100rds at 10yds. Yes, I know the sights are off.

On the advice of a couple of pretty Glock-savvy friends, I went ahead and ordered a White Sound Defense non-captive guide rod to avoid this problem in the future. I would have dropped the factory recoil spring assembly back in there to keep shooting the gun in the meantime, but it seems to have gone air-soluble. (Note To Self: Order a small handful of factory Gen 3 19/23/32/38 RSAs.)

This makes it 1629 total rounds fired since the firearm was last cleaned or lubricated, with five failures to go completely into battery (#63, #78, #126, #748, #1,503*), five failures to feed (#221, #224, #282, #734, #1,529*), and one failure to eject (#1,033). 371 rounds left to go.
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Tell us what you really think.

Jesse Benn, last seen discussing the moral necessity of rioting when a political party picks a candidate you don't like, dropped this gem in a recent column:

"Naturally, bootlickers across the globe are unquestioningly celebrating the slain officers as heroes, innocents, and protectors. But what if one of those dead cops was a white supremacist—is he still a hero? And I don’t mean a white supremacist in the sense that all cops are enforcers of a classist white supremacist order, which they are."

Boy, putting that in your opening paragraph just screams "unbiased journalism ahead", doesn't it?
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Well...

Today was pretty much a complete write-off.
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Be strong, Tam!

It's Amazon's big sale day (Prime Day!) today. I am sure that all kinds of fabulous stuff I don't need will be dangled in front of my nose at prices too good to pass up...
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I do this for a living, Max.

My Vocabulary Size is about: 【30500】! What about you? https://t.co/Ld5uE99Mtn #NLN

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) July 12, 2016

Presented Without Context...

Interlocutor: "Something I heard once was something to the effect of 'If you ever read about an ancient war and one side uses elephants, that's the side that loses.'"

Me: "Rome's biggest success was in emulating Alexander by sending intelligence operatives posing as war elephant salesmen to plague the procurement bureaus of their foes."

From Facebook at 0400...

"I have *got* to bust caps tomor^h^h^h^h^htoday, and do laundry, and write...something? Blog...thing maybe? Column? Check notes...
But Roomie worked the bizarro shift and I power-chugged a bunch of Mello Yello Zero to make sure I could stay awake until 0mygod30 to walk her out to her car in the alley...and now I can't sleep. This is wack. I was nodding off at the keyboard at 8:00PM and now I'm wide-goddam-awake and the cat-feeding buzzer goes off in barely over two hours.
I'd start laundry now to get a jump on that but, sure as God made little green apples, I would nod off and find a washer full of mildewing clothes at lunchtime tomorrow..."

So, I stayed up and ran two loads through the washer (yay!) and got to bed about 0630. *yawn/stretch* Anything blow up while I was sleeping?
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It's easy to forget...

...that, like whitetail deer, alligators were once pretty much extinct over much of their natural range.

When Disney World opened, the alligator was on the Endangered Species list. When I was little, it was still kind of a big deal to see a whitetail deer in the wild. Forty years later, driving the I-64 corridor from St. Louis across Illinois and Indiana to Louisville, the shoulders of the highway looked like a Bambi abattoir in places.
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Artiste.

So, I'm browsing CNN.com and I find this video of a little 4BR fixer-upper for sale in Manhattan. The fixer-upper in question happens to be the 16th-floor penthouse apartment at 1185 Park Avenue and it was apparently put on the market at a price of $1,000,000/floor-of-elevation.

That's right: A $16m apartment in need of complete renovation. At least it's in Manhattan, so you wouldn't have to worry about where to put your gun safe.

Anyway, the hook to the video is they've got this creative designer type wandering about, sharing his visions of how things should look. This guy is obviously trying to cultivate a personal zen of being intensely laid back, and so when the camera pulls out, I have to chuckle. I've never before seen anyone wearing tailored suitcoat and weskit (but with coat unbuttoned and tie raffishly loosened) and...casually torn-up blue jeans.

I am almost willing to bet that there is a company that sells very expensive used jeans that they have paid people to tear up in actual use, because jeans that have been deliberately shredded would be inauthentic. These would be artisanally distressed.
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Gimme Shelter

Gimme Shelter from mike Sabbagh on Vimeo.

I'm sorry.

I was up way late last night.

I've been trying to think of something to type.

Nada.

I'm going to the range.
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The march of CCW...

Fascinating post on the inexorable (thus far) march of the Right to Carry movement in America over at Weaponsman, complete with charts and graphs and color 8x10 glossies with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back...

1. For the first time since our 1986 data horizon, May Issue declined, but it was because May Issue states are increasingly adopting unrestricted Constitutional carry.


2. No state has gone from Shall Issue to one of the two more restrictive categories in these 31 years.


3. The only state that went from Ban to May Issue (Tennessee) proceeded to Shall Issue within 5 years.


4. At least three states (Mississippi, Alaska and Arizona) went from outright ban to Permitless carry in two stages, first going Shall Issue.

Things I Don't Get: #what the hell ever number we're on now...

So, there you are, confronted by a couple cops all up in your grille for (at least by your lights) not doing anything wrong. The downside is that you know you're rolling dirty; if they find the gun in your pocket, you're in deep s#!t.

How do you think this situation is going to play out any better if you physically don't comply? Is there some point where you think the cops are going to just shrug their shoulders and walk away? Say "Oh, hey, you wrestle good. You can go home"?

By the time you've gotten to the "Yeah, buddy, actually you are being detained" portion of the conversation, you ain't winnin' anything there by the side of the road. It's going to take a lawyer and a judge for you to have any hope of coming out of that situation on top. So what is the possible potential upside of wrestlin' with the po-po there in the parking lot?

I just do not get that.
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Neat-o!

Mesmerizing gun video...
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At least he's honest about it.

"If you think it’s important to avoid “condescending” to white working-class voters in order to persuade them to vote for Hillary Clinton, you are living in a time when Democrats were afraid to say the words “gun control” or “minimum wage.” Those days are over. The voters you romanticize are not persuadable, and they haven’t been for a very long time. The Democrats don’t need them, they shouldn’t want them and they should once and for all stop coddling them."

Actor, writer, and sometime Progressive pundit Peter Birkenhead basically comes out and says that non-college-educated white folk* are automatically racist and the Democratic Party should just not bother worrying about their vote. Apparently only a thorough rubdown with a liberal arts sheepskin will get the taint of racism off your cracker hide and get you thinking (and voting) right.


*By which he apparently means white dudes. Of course, looking at his biographical info, I can see why he'd be nursing a bit of a rageboner against white dudes. I'm not saying that there are daddy issues here, but wow...
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Sunday pics...

Shootin' Buddy showed up at 9:00 on Sunday morning and we drove through drizzle into Broad Ripple proper for a tasty breakfast at Public Greens. I had the pork hash: smoked pulled pork, sweet potatoes and caramelized onions all fried together, with toast and eggs. Then it was back into the truck and over to Indy Arms Company for some pew pew pew.

I wasn't planning on a long range session; just some blasting before going to the movies. I had the Wilson Tactical Carry Professional and the Nighthawk Kestrel with me, along with a box of ammunition for each.

Shootin' Buddy put a magazine through each. He carries a Les Baer Thunder Ranch Special every day, and he preferred the Nighthawk.

The remaining 82 rounds were just blasted away by me for the fun of it. Winchester 124gr NATO through the Wilson and Federal 230gr RTP ball ammo through the Nighthawk. Incidentally, the Wilson has now fired 450 rounds without a bobble since being taken out of the box.

After the range trip we met up with Shootin' Buddy's dad to go see The Free State of Jones, best described as "The Wookie-Suiter's Civil War Movie" by a blog reader.

We were the first ones in the theater for the Sunday matinee showing and, as the place started to fill up, I couldn't resist leaning over and whispering "Was there a coupon in this month's AARP magazine?" to Shootin' Buddy, who replied "Stand up and say 'Does anyone have pictures of their grandkids?' I dare you."

Let's see how this works.

While there was no clear evidence of intent to speed, officer, I handled the task of observing my speedometer with extreme carelessness.

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) July 5, 2016

Tab Clearing...

Four wiki tabs open at the moment, some I can't even remember why...

• Isle Royale


• Jewish diaspora


• Panthera leo spelaea


• Gentrification

Snakebit

I put another Glock 32 range trip in this past Friday. Another hundred rounds of Remington 125gr .357SIG was scheduled to go downrange.

Long about round number seventy or so, the slide travel started to feel funny. Rough. Kinda...graunchy? On round #73, the slide didn't go all the way into battery and so I locked it to the rear to take a look at what might be the problem. The aftermarket Lone Wolf recoil spring guide rod seemed to be missing.

I looked downrange, thinking it would be out there someplace and I'd have to see if they could call the range cold, but it wasn't there. I looked at the floor between my feet, and there it was.

The Lone Wolf rod has a threaded cap on either end, and the rearmost one had backed out, allowing the rod to fall out. Note that, until that one failure to return to battery, the gun had fired most of a magazine with no guide rod in it.

I borrowed a rubber mallet and knocked the slide off, then enlisted the much appreciated help of one of my former coworkers to thread the head back on the guide rod while I held the spring compressed with both hands.

Then I went out to fire off the last couple magazines.

On round #99 of the day, the quality control of Remington's .357SIG FMJ ammo reared its ugly head again. This is the second sideways primer I've seen in five hundred rounds of the stuff. Also, this round failed to feed; I don't know as I can hold that against Remington, though...
 

Should read "99 rds" instead of "50 rds".

For the cherry on the icing of the cake of my day, the guy on lane five managed to put a bullet through my target.

This makes it 1529 total rounds fired since the firearm was last cleaned or lubricated, with five failures to go completely into battery (#63, #78, #126, #748, #1,503*), five failures to feed (#221, #224, #282, #734, #1,529), and one failure to eject (#1,033). 471 rounds left to go.
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Gratuitous Gun Pr0n #146...

Gen2 Glock 17 customized by Robar.

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Free State of Jones capsule review...

Happy You're Not the Boss of Me Day!

We did our grilling on Saturday because it's been raining like a Ray Bradbury short story here since yesterday morning.

I told Bobbi I'd pick up some steaks from the Fresh Market, and when I got there, they had the special aged prime filets out next to the regular ones. They were 'spensive, but they were so beautifully marbled and, well, America doesn't turn 240 every day...
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We get letters...

From an email reply to a reader this AM who wondered why I "shoot left with Glocks" and am knocking the factory sights on Glocks when he does okay with  the sights on his 26...

"Dear Reader,

If you look at the picture, the Glock 32 group is left-of-center, while the Glock 17 group, despite being shot at .3-.5 split pace, is pretty well centered. If you go back and look at all the Glock 37 pics, they're all nicely centered, too. Of course, it has real sights on it as well.

The factory Glock sights (which, in addition to being flimsy, have that ridiculously busy "dot-and-U" setup where the white markings don't actually correlate to the physical alignment of the sights*) on the 32 are misaligned. Since I do not carry the gun and am eventually going to put some real sights on it, I am not bothering to drift them. I hold a consistent sight picture and the bullets impact a consistent area and that's all I need.
-T.

*If you line the top of the dot up with the top of the vertical arms of the "U", which is what the eye wants to do at speed, the top of the front sight blade will actually be proud of the notch and shots will go high. If you alight[sic] the top of the front blade with the top of the rear blade in a correct "equal height, equal light" sight picture, the bottom of the dot on the front blade is actually below the bottom edge of the notch in the rear blade. It's a lousy sight setup, but Glock refuses to change it because Perfection. Personally, I think that the tendency of the sights to shoot high at speed is built in to counteract the fact that most people can't shoot and are going to start cranking them low and left any time the pace picks up faster than a slow crawl."

Since that's a jillion keystrokes I'll never get back, I might as well recycle them here.

(I can't believe I typed "alight" instead of "align". Once I became a jackleg touch-typist, my fingers were free to commit all kinds of odd errors, since they were no longer under visual supervision and my brain is usually several words ahead of them.)
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Thursday morning...

Drove out to MCF&G Thursday morning to get some shooting done. Mostly just dirt-shooting to build the round count on the Glock 32, but also some work I wanted to put in with the Robar'ed Gen2 Glock 17 and its Fulcrum/Zev connector/NY1 trigger setup...

The targets were close enough to ten yards as to make no nevermind. (That's an RCS Eidolon holster I'll be writing up soon.)

GPS mag caddy is handier than a pocket on a shirt.

A hundred rounds of Remington 125gr FMJ .380 Ultra Mag from the Glock 32 at the target on the right, and fifty of 115gr CCI Blazer Brass at the target on the left. Same sight picture for both targets. The .357SIG on the right-hand target was done at a roughly 1rd/sec cadence.

The left-hand target with the Glock 17 (with vastly better aftermarket sights and trigger) was done in an attempt to continue to develop a "rolling cadence" with the trigger, to further shed myself of the awful habit of pinning the trigger and trying to "ride the reset". I basically tried to keep the trigger in motion constantly, letting it reset in recoil and prepping it as the sights settled, breaking the shot as soon as I had a decent sight picture. About the pace I'd use on the 3x5 card in a FAST. I'm getting better, but still dropped too many shots outside the circle.

Both Glocks went through the complete cycle of operation each time.

For the Glock 32: This makes it 1430 total rounds fired since the firearm was last cleaned or lubricated, with four failures to go completely into battery (#63, #78, #126, #748), four failures to feed (#221, #224, #282, #734), and one failure to eject (#1,033). 570 rounds left to go.
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"Hollywood's run out of ideas!"

That meme annoys me.

There have been six film or TV adaptations of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, with a seventh slated to drop next year. Ten of The Jungle Book, with an eleventh coming in 2018.

Nobody goes to the theater and says "Oh, Christ, not Romeo & Juliet again! They've run out of ideas for plays!" Good stuff gets added to our cultural repertoire and enjoyable stories get told over and over again, re-imagined, set to music, or recast in different times and places...

There are only a handful of basic plotlines, when you get down to the nitty gritty, and they're all probably recorded on baked clay tablets someplace.
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Overheard in the Office...

Before the internet, how would arguments have been settled at Roseholme Cottage? (And, as illustrated above, you can find anything on the internet.)
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Odd cat is odd.

Rannie has latched onto one particular mouse baby and spent most of yesterday carrying it back and forth between the bed in Bobbi's room and the futon in the living room, singing the mouse baby song the whole time.

She's brought it into the office twice this morning.

Usually she doesn't fixate on any one particular toy, but she seems to have taken a shine to this one. Two days is practically a long-term relationship in Rannie terms.

One hundred years ago today...

At 7:30 AM on this morning in 1916, the fire of over fifteen hundred British artillery pieces shifted from the targets they had been pounding for eight days straight. Eleven entire British divisions clambered out of their trenches and, following orders not to run or become disorganized, started walking forward across No Man's Land. Huddled in their bunkers where they had been pounded with almost two million artillery shells for over a week, the German troops knew exactly what that silence meant. They dragged their heavy machine guns up stairways and ladders to firing embrasures, and for the next several hours a thirteen-mile stretch of French countryside became a scene more grotesque than anything Heironymus Bosch had ever painted.

"We were surprised to see them walking, we had never seen that before. The officers went in front. I noticed one of them walking calmly, carrying a walking stick. When we started to fire, we just had to load and reload. They went down in their hundreds. We didn't have to aim, we just fired into them." -A German machine gunner

In minutes, Haig's planned "Big Push" blew apart in a torrent of Maxim bullets. Barbed wire entanglements had not been cut by the bombardment as expected. A British mine that had been dug under the German trenches detonated late, killing British troops that had already advanced that far. The methodical pace and four rank attack, deemed necessary by Haig and his staff due to their professional skepticism regarding the soldiering qualities of the new "Kitchener's Army", turned the mud in front of the German positions into an abattoir. The British 8th Division, attacking near Ovillers, started with 300 officers and 8,500 other ranks. After two hours, it had been reduced to 82 officers and only 3,226 enlisted. The slaughter was similar all up and down the front. The only gains were made in sectors where subordinates had ignored the plan, either by having their units lie belly-down in No Man's Land before the attack, or ordering them to charge at a run rather than stroll at trenches that were supposedly devoid of life due to the bombardment.

When the sun set on that first day of what history remembers as the Battle of The Somme, the British army had suffered almost sixty thousand casualties, 21,392 of which were dead or missing. A French artillery observer, watching the attack, turned and commented to his British liaison, echoing the same words spoken in the Crimea half a century earlier: "C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre."

Gratuitous Gun Pr0n #145...

Wilson Combat Tactical Carry Professional 9mm, black/burnt bronze

The Grind...

Took the Gen 3 Glock 32 to Indy Arms Company on Wednesday along with a hundred rounds of Remington 125gr .357SIG. (Lucky Gunner had had a special on 500rd cases for $199, which is about as cheap as domestic .357SIG gets these days, so I ordered one.)

The first fifty were slow-fire in the upper group, and then the other box was fired at the lower zone (which is a little high to be ideal; I was going for "a line between the armpits") as briskly as I thought I could do it without getting in trouble.

It wasn't until after I took the picture that I noticed that the aftermarket guide rod was protruding from the front of the gun. More on that later.

The gun went through the complete cycle of operation each time.

This makes it 1330 total rounds fired since the firearm was last cleaned or lubricated, with four failures to go completely into battery (#63, #78, #126, #748), four failures to feed (#221, #224, #282, #734), and one failure to eject (#1,033). 670 rounds left to go.
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Everybody take another step back...

In the wake of the Istanbul bombings, the people in charge of wrapping the world in foam padding are trying to figure out more ways to make us perfectly safe. Apparently this will put a security checkpoint at the edge of the airport grounds to screen you before you get to the security checkpoint inside which will screen you to get on the plane. It's screeners all the way down!

As Larry Correia noted on the Book of Face:

"[T]o keep terrorists from getting onto a plane with a bunch of sitting ducks, you added the TSA bottleneck, where now you have a giant group of sitting ducks packed into a different, even more easily reached place. Duh.

So instead of blowing up the passengers on one flight, they can instead blow up the passengers waiting for twenty flights at the same time. Brussels and Istanbul proved it worked, so it will be coming soon to an airport near you."

...and if they move screening back to the airport access road, they set off a truck bomb in the traffic jam rather than a backpack bomb in the terminal.

The reductio ad absurdum of this, of course, is to avoid creating the security bottlenecks that make such target-rich environments by putting a TSA checkpoint outside every front door in America.

There's just no practical way to nerf the world.
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Damaged Goods?

A local TV station ran a piece warning people about veterans and fireworks...

"I've had veterans tell me firecrackers sound like a .22 and larger fireworks sound like a Howitzer," said Herman.
Heading into this weekend, Herman also has advice for vets who may be struggling.
"If you hear anything, if you smell anything, remind yourself, 'It's 2016. I'm in Indianapolis. I am safe.  I'm not back there'," he said.
Ellis knows what it's like to remind himself of that, too, and accepts even if it does get better, there may always be some kind of struggle.

For some reason, I found this vaguely insulting to veterans, but I can't put my finger on exactly why.

I was five when US involvement in Vietnam ended and seven when Saigon fell. Growing up, "veteran" meant "Vietnam veteran" unless we were talking about our grandparents. I thought the media stereotype of Vietnam veterans was pretty derogatory, but at least there wasn't this pityingly condescending note about it. Nobody was on the news telling us to not set off firecrackers out of concern for grandpa's memories of Bastogne or dad's flashbacks to the Ia Drang, at least not that I remember.
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Gratuitous Gun Pr0n #144...

Nighthawk Kestrel .45ACP, black w/stainless controls

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The Specialest Snowflake...

*spit take*

Well, the impending Trumpocalypse in Cleveland is having interesting repercussions. George Will, a knee forever in search of something to bend at, has announced he's taking his ball and going home, which has mostly drawn a "'Bye, Felicia" from the GOP punditocracy.

Meanwhile guess which magazine this is from:

"Once again American politics is threatening to become a competition between rival factions of statists, eager to use the government to reward themselves and punish their enemies, with “enemy” defined as anyone who doesn’t agree with them."

If you said Reason, you could be forgiven the assumption, but no, that's Jonah Goldberg trying on a wookie suit at National Review Online. While reading it, I had to keep glancing up at my browser's address bar to convince myself I was really reading Metrocon Fortnightly and not Wookie Suiter Monthly. It's a disgruntled twelve-paragraph ode to Mencken and Nock that stops just short of Goldberg unbuttoning his oxford to reveal a Rand Paul t-shirt.

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Based on the pattern of recent events...

...I'm waiting for the U.S. government to denounce this Turkophobic, Islamophobic hate crime.

At least none of the hate crime bombers worked at the airport so far as we know, or we'd be getting more finger-wagging about workplace violence, too.
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Automotif CXXX...

197...we'll arbitrarily call it a '77...Oldsmobile Starfire. Olds's badge-engineered version of Chevy's Monza 2+2, these were marketed as sporty-ish compacts, intended to compete with Ford's Mustang II.

Initially, the base engine for the Starfire was the Buick 231cid V-6, and it could be had with a four-speed manual. Given the dearth of performance in the mid-'70s doldrums, a 110bhp 3.8-liter six in a 2800lb car was considered kind of sporty.

Later model years could be had with small-block V-8s but in factory form, those things got whatever you call hip dysplasia when it happens to the front suspension of small GM autos. Oh, and understeer for days. (For those of you who are not car nuts, understeer is when your car loses traction and plows into the outside guard rail nose-first, while oversteer is when you hit the outside guard rail ass-end-first.)
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Tab Clearing...

• AIWB Definitions, Part I


• It may have the ergonomics of a railroad tie, but at least it malfunctions a lot!


• EU-centric defense policy? Please say "Yankee go home!"

Al-Qaeda HR Dept.: "Knock it off with the EEOC compliance!"

"To prevent future acts of jihad from being misinterpreted as hate crimes, all affiliates, associates, and franchisees of The Base are asked to focus their mass casualty attacks and other acts of jihad on majority Anglo Saxon targets, preferably heterosexual ones."

So, I guess stay alert at the State Fair this year? Probably want to keep on your toes at any NPR-sponsored events, too.

That's got to be frustrating for Johnny Jihad: You tell everybody why you're doing something and they just condescendingly pat you on your little brown head and patronizingly inform you why you're really doing it. I thought Progressives were opposed to silencing the narratives of oppressed minorities and all about the self-identification? I guess it's okay to self-identify as anything but an Islamic terrorist.
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This never fails to crack me up.

Two things are guaranteed to get Joe Sixpack riled up worse than fluoride in the drinking water:

1. Changing anything about the money.


2. The sight of military vehicles on public roads.

"American military vehicles on American highways! Holy cow! We must have been invaded by America!"

You'd think the government would build special high-speed roadways to move troops around on in a hurry... Oh, wait, they did. We just happen to use them to drive on, too.

You can try to reason with them about this. You can try to reason with a brick wall, too, for all the good it'll do you.
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"Like a brick... house..."

"To the left is an SL2 MOT with Motor and 35 mm Summicron that fell 25,000 foot (7600 m) from a Phantom II fighter jet. Battered but in one piece, and deemed repairable by Leica."

I don't intend to drop mine out of any planes just to see how tough it is...

Leicaflex SL with Vario-Elmar-R 28-70/3.5-4.5. #camera #leicaflex #35mm #filmcamera

A photo posted by Tamara Keel (@tamarakeel) on Jun 22, 2016 at 11:27am PDT

Assorted Whining

Woke up with just crazy amounts of lower back pain this morning.

And the weatherman had promised a break in the heat and humidity, but they seem to have rolled that back to tomorrow. Blech.

That, and I overslept and then totally forgot what I was going to write about this morning.

It's looking pretty Monday out there today.
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A Few Good Stormtroopers

From elsewhere:

"Princess, we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with blasters. Who's gonna do it? You? You, Senator Organa? I have a greater responsibility than you could possibly fathom. You weep for Alderaan, and you curse the Imperial fleet. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know. That Alderaan's destruction, while tragic, probably saved lives. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives. You don't want the truth because deep down in places you don't talk about at parties, you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall. We use words like honor, code, loyalty. We use these words as the backbone of a life spent defending something. You use them as a punchline. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a woman who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide, and then questions the manner in which I provide it. I would rather you just said thank you, and went on your way, Otherwise, I suggest you pick up a weapon, and stand a post. Either way, I don't give a damn what you think you are entitled to."

BOOM!

Although my experience with S&B's .357SIG ammo was less than encouraging, I decided to give some other Euro ammo a try and ordered a couple boxes of Prvi Partizan. C.I.P. standards for the cartridge have a 10% higher maximum pressure than SAAMI and this frequently leads to pretty exciting shooting from the compact Glock...

The PPU was no exception. Well, actually, it was like shooting Remington bulk .22 ammo, with the amount of recoil, muzzle flash, and blast varying wildly from shot to shot. I need to order more to chrono, but it would not at all shock me to see a hundred foot-per-second variation over a ten round string of fire.

I warmed up shooting at the upper A zone close in (five yards) and then rolled it back out to seven yards and shot at the lower A zone as fast as I thought I could get away with on the indoor range. Might have come close to picking up a flinch from some of the more blasty-ish rounds. Pushed one clean out of the A zone; saw it happening and cursed as the sights lifted.

The pistol went through the complete cycle of operation every time. The eleven coil magazine springs seem to have really helped. They still pretty much require an UpLULA to get the twelfth and thirteenth rounds in, tough, at least for my weak thumbs.

This makes it 1230 total rounds fired since the firearm was last cleaned or lubricated, with four failures to go completely into battery (#63, #78, #126, #748), four failures to feed (#221, #224, #282, #734), and one failure to eject (#1,033). 770 rounds left to go.
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From Elsewhere...

Presented without context:
"PTSD from Endor's Moon. Every time I walk past a Build-A-Bear in the mall I have horrible flashbacks."

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) June 25, 2016

iSaga

So, I've made casual references to having the iPhone/Apple Watch combo recently, but never really explained how that came to be.

Both Marko and Mike Grasso had Apple Watches and I thought they were pretty cool, but not enough to run out and change phones. My several-year-old Virgin Mobile Galaxy SII burner phone, with its grandfathered data plan and wifi hot spot, was just fine for me, even if I was about to buy its third battery.

I joked that Virgin Mobile's coverage was spotty, but the only places it really affected me were when I was at Blogorado and visiting Castle Frostbite; two times of the year that I really didn't mind being incommunicado for a bit. (Seriously, heading out from Nerd Ranch, my cell phone signal would cut off abruptly north of Española and I wouldn't hear a peep from my phone until returning; it was like the signal that Vacation had Officially Begun.)

This February I was house-sitting up in New Hamster and, it being an unseasonably warm winter, there was a nasty spot of freezing rain that turned the front lawn and driveway of Castle Frostbite into something like a skating rink with a 25° slope. I was wrestling the rolling trash bin down through the lawn, which offered marginally more traction than the driveway, thinking I needed to put on some crampons before coming back for the recycling bin when it hit me... I was way hell and gone in the middle of nowhere, out past where Jesus left his sandals, and if I fell and broke a leg badly or something, it was going to be days before anyone came looking.

Suddenly not having a cell phone signal wasn't as cool.

So on my trip up in April, I asked Marko which carrier he and Robin used, and while we were at the mall up there, I picked up an iPhone 6 and, thinking "What the hell, why not?" an Apple watch while I was at it.

And the watch has been useful. The way the phone transmits driving instructions to it is neat. Being able to receive and reply to texts without taking your phone out of your pocket is cool. In fact, lots of things that normally involve taking the phone out of the pocket, like seeing who's calling and whether you need to answer in the first place, can be accomplished with a glance at the wrist. That's handy.

For the first couple months I used the various analog faces and enjoyed tinkering with the selection and arrangement of the complications. But when I was hanging out on the range with Mike last Friday, I noticed the face he was using on his and, being a copycat, copied it.

It was a revelation.

I have never been the most organized person in the world, so the idea of making to-do lists is something that is not second nature to me. Besides, I'd lose the lists.

But what if I could make the notes and the to-do lists on my phone or iPad and my watch would automatically display the next thing on my schedule, strapped to my wrist, and tap me on the wrist thirty minutes (or whenever) before it was time to do the thing?

Wow, this is how you organized people must feel all the time! This is great! It's like a cybernetic aid for the disorganized.

"...Imma let you finish, but America had the best Brexit of all time."

Hipster George Washington...

Love it pic.twitter.com/6DyGIFHdDH

— Robb Allen (@ItsRobbAllen) June 25, 2016

Seen elsewhere on the 'net yesterday, and I can't remember where, but "After 240 years, they finally get that whole 'taxation without representation' thing." I LOL'ed.
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Apparently the Brits needed superdelegates.

Shorter @davidaxelrod: "When we said 'will of the people', we meant 'will of the right *kind* of people'." #Brexit https://t.co/iBgf2p4HEd

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) June 24, 2016

TIL...

Up until yesterday it was very progressive to support the self determination of people in democratic elections. I guess that stuff is only for the Libyans and Sudanese, not crackers.
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