Category Archives: Don’t be THAT guy

When Defense Contractors Hire Losers

USS Cowpens arrives in San Diego, April 2013. The captain would be relieved a little over a year later. This is the ship that had one of the bogus bomb threats last year.

When defense contractors hire losers, hilarity ensues. Briefly. It’s not very funny when it all finally shakes out. Two laborers on Navy contracts in San Diego just got indicted for separate incidents of bomb threats.

Why bomb threats? They weren’t terrorists, or trolls. They just were lazy, and wanted paid time off work while the Navy chased its tail over bogus threats. It’s all a grand lark until the grim guy in the suit is talking about plea bargains and Federal prison — and he’s your lawyer.

Two men who have worked as Navy contractors face potential prison time and fines for making bogus bomb threats that resulted in mass evacuations of naval ships moored on San Diego Bay in recent months.

Joshua Rice, 26, and Roberto Rubio, 22, were arrested and arraigned in federal court Wednesday. The two San Diego residents each face up to five years behind bars and a $250,000 fine if convicted of issuing hoax threats.

Rice is charged in a grand jury indictment with reporting to Navy security personnel that he saw the word “bomb” scrawled inside of a portable toilet near three vessels docked at Naval Base San Diego on the morning of May 17, knowing there was no true threat.

At the time, Rice was working for American Marine, a ship repair and rehabilitation company.

Rubio is charged separately with writing “9-24-16 400 bomb” on an interior wall aboard the USS Cowpens, a guided-missile cruiser, on Sept. 24 and reporting the phony threat to another contractor. Rubio was then employed as a welder for Navy contractor BAE Systems.

via 2 Contract Workers Charged in Series of Bomb Threats at Navy Base – Times of San Diego.

The USS Cowpens is a Ticonderoga-class cruiser that bears the name of a Revolutionary War victory — and a WWII light carrier. But it didn’t really need any more bad publicity, after a romantic entanglement with one of his subordinate officers led the Navy to sack the captain (and his girlfriend) a couple of years ago.

It could have been worse. A few years ago, a high-functioning autistic guy hired to do some painting in the Portsmouth Navy Yard started a fire on the boat he was working on, USS Miami. The fire essentially destroyed the billion-dollar boat, and the loser got more time off than he was counting on — about 17 years in Club Fed.

Now, you might ask why defense contractors hire such losers in the first place? We can explain, and it only takes one word: money. From a Beltway contractor point of view, every dollar “wasted” on the people that actually provide the service you are selling in the contract, is a dollar that can’t be “invested” in the sort of inside-Beltway drones that secure the contract in the first place. So most DOD contractors are incentivized to provide the lowest quality workforce for the highest per-hour cost (to the Government; 90% of it stays in-Beltway). And so you have incidents like this, not just in 2016 like these current defendants, but every couple of years.

Where Treason is A-OK, and Criticism of it is Forbidden

We’re referring (and this is unlikely to shock you) to the People’s Republic of California, and specifically to the Senate of that failing State.

Legislative éminence grise Tom Hayden, perhaps best known to the general public as the former Mrs. Jane Fonda, expired in October (or, as practitioners of one of the few faiths still alive in San Francisco put it, “Satan called him home.”) And naturally his peers — we use the term advisedly — in the Senate have spent from then till now engaged in hosannas to the pulchritude and luminosity of the former violent radical turned typical grifting, grasping, greedy politician.

State Senator Janet Nguyen, who on her election was (and as far as we know, still is) the first ethnic Vietnamese state senator in any American state, was not having any of that, and she prepared a powerful statement. Here are the highlights:

I and the children of the former South Vietnam soldiers will never forget the support of former Senator Tom Hayden for the Communist government of Vietnam and the oppression by the Communist Government of Vietnam for the people of Vietnam.

After 40 years, the efforts by people like him have hurt the people of Vietnam and have worked to stop the Vietnamese refugees from coming to the United States, a free country. We will always continue to fight for freedom and human rights for the people of Vietnam.

Members, I recognize today in memory of the million of Vietnamese and the hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese refugees who died seeking freedom and democracy. … I would like to offer another historical perspective.

… I want to share what Senator Hayden meant to me and to the over 500,000 Vietnamese Americans who call California their home, as well as to the over 1 million Vietnamese Americans across the United States.

As you may be aware, Tom Hayden chose to work directly with the Communist North Vietnamese Government to oppose the efforts of United States forces in South Vietnam.

Mr. Hayden sided with a communist government that enslaved and/or killed millions of Vietnamese, including members of my own family. Mr. Hayden’s actions are viewed by many as harmful to democratic values and hateful towards those who sought the very freedoms on which this nation is founded.

…. In contrast to the great many people who fought to defend freedom and democracy, Mr. Hayden supported a Communist agenda ….

In sum: bad cess to him. Naturally, his friends and allies would not let Nguyen make that statement, but you can read it here (she got away with the introduction, in Vietnamese, before Kevin de Leon called the Senate Bouncers to give her the bum’s rush).

Hayden is especially beloved in institutional and academic Californistan — the environment that produced his modern cognate, Sulayman al-Faris, aka Abu Sulayman al-Irlandi, aka John Walker Lindh — for his “opposition to the Vietnam war.” This opposition included gathering information for the People’s Republic of Vietnam and harassing American families of prisoners of war. He first came to the public’s attention of one of the organizers of the Alinskyite attack by hippies armed with sticks, bricks and molotov cocktails on the police at the Democratic Party Convention in Chicago in 1968. Hayden himself, a physical coward, was far from the “cannon fodder” he sent in, for his objective was to provoke the police into “overreaction.”

The media, safe behind the cops, and in on Hayden’s plan, produced thousands of these images, making it look like the Chicago PD made an unprovoked attack on “protesters,” and that’s how they reported it. (It wasn’t a complete loss. A lot of deserving skulls got cracked, and a beginning news fabricator named Dan Rather got punched in his glass jaw. What’s the frequency, Kenneth?)

Hayden went on to win a mistrial as one of the Chicago Eight clown show defendants, and continued to serve the interests of Communism and foreign powers for the rest of his miserable life.

After trying to make a statement about the late Tom Hayden and his opposition to the Vietnam War, Sen. Janet Nguyen (R-Garden Grove) was removed from the floor of the state Senate on Thursday, a tense scene that ended in a slew of angry accusations…

Nguyen, who was brought to the United States as a Vietnamese refugee when she was a child, said she wanted to offer “a different historical perspective” on what Hayden and his opposition to the war had meant to her and other refugees.

Hayden, the former state legislator who died last October, was remembered in a Senate ceremony Tuesday. ….

“I’m very sad because the very people who elected me to represent them and be their voice on the Senate floor, I wasn’t allowed to speak on their behalf,” Nguyen said later in an interview with The Times. “I was told I cannot speak on the issue at all,” she said.

The LA Times, being the LA Times, can’t even describe the sanguinary efforts of Hayden honestly. (Apart from all he did directly in Chicago and Vietnam, he also was a founder of the SDS, the “overt” political branch of the murderous Weather Underground terrorist movement).

Hayden was an outspoken critic of the Vietnam War and made celebrated trips to North Vietnam and Cambodia, offering to help broker a peaceful end.

via A state senator is removed from the chamber for her comments about Tom Hayden and Vietnam – LA Times.

“Broker a peaceful end,” that is probably the most dishonest phrase ever written, and it took two LA Times hacks, John Myers and Melanie Mason, to generate a lie that big. (That’s like saying the Wannsee Conference met to “broker a peaceful end” to the “Jewish Question.” It’s always peaceful if you just get on the boxcars yourself, which was always Hayden’s goal for the free people of Vietnam).

Let’s reconsider what Hayden actually did during his period of Vietnam “protest.”

On visits to Vietnam, he not only performed propaganda for his Communist masters, but worked to help Communist organs recruit propaganda mouthpieces and spies among disaffected, tortured prisoners:

Tom Hayden’s anti-war efforts included recruitment efforts of military personnel, and propaganda from release of American POWs. Whether or not Hayden and Fonda were in bed together on this one (literally and figuratively) is not clear.

His efforts (among other traitors’) were an inspiration to Vo Nguyen Giap, the military leader of North Vietnam, and extended the war, leading to over 50,000 more Americans killed. (Same page as last quote).

General Giap and the NVA viewed the Tet 1968 offensive as a failure, they were on their knees and had prepared to negotiate a surrender.

At that time, there were fewer than 10,000 U.S. casualties, the Vietnam War was about to end, as the NVA was prepared to accept their defeat.

Then, they heard Walter Cronkite (former CBS News anchor and correspondent) on TV proclaiming the success of the Tet 1968 offensive by the communist NVA. They were completely and totally amazed at hearing that the US Embassy had been overrun. In reality, The NVA had not gained access to the Embassy–there were some VC who had been killed on the grassy lawn, but they hadn’t gained access. Further reports indicated the riots and protesting on the streets of America.

According to Giap, these distorted reports were inspirational to the NVA. They changed their plans from a negotiated surrender and decided instead, they only needed to persevere….

Today, there are 58,229 names on the Vietnam Wall Memorial.

We know where we stand on this. We stand with State Senator Nguyen. Her powerful statement is available on her State Senate web page, at least for now. Who knows how long that will stand, before the Cult of Hayden burns it down?

When Force-on-Force Training Goes Wrong

Mary Knowlton died due to a series of negligent mistakes.

The evolution was a force-on-force demonstration in a public relations exercise that’s coming to a city near you, if it hasn’t already: “Citizens’ Police Academy,” where the cops teach ordinary citizens things about a cop’s job that your ordinary engaged citizen doesn’t know, unless he knows a lot of cops.

Citizen Mary Knowlton of Punta Gorda, FL, a retired librarian, was playing “cop” in an exercise designed to show how little time a cop has to make the shoot/no-shoot decision. Officer Lee Coel was playing felon, and he got the drop on Knowlton, firing several shots (some stories have suggested six) from his training/simulator pistol.

Except, it wasn’t his training pistol. It was his service pistol, as everyone in the room immediately realized, in shock. (With the apparent exception of Coel, or he’d have stopped at one shot).

On Aug. 9, Mary Knowlton, a 73-year-old retired librarian, was participating in a police night hosted by the Punta Gorda Chamber of Commerce when Punta Gorda police officer Lee Coel, 28, shot and killed her with a weapon meant for training.

Knowlton was acting as a victim in a “shoot/don’t shoot” scenario, and Coel — who was playing the “bad guy” — shot her several times.

Knowlton was rushed to the hospital, where, to make an inverted paraphrase of Bones McCoy, she needed a miracle worker, not a doctor. She died there.

With no conceivable justification for such a simply prevented fatal screwup, the town fathers fell over themselves in haste to settle the civil case.

Punta Gorda city council members approved a $2.06 million settlement with the Knowlton family in November, nearly three months after the shooting.

Lee Coel does the perp walk. He could get 30 years’ prison.

The criminal case has been taking longer, but that’s the nature of criminal cases, especially against cops.

The Florida Department of Law Enforcement conducted an investigation into the officer-involved shooting and submitted its findings to the state attorney’s office.

Punta Gorda Police Chief Tom Lewis and officer Lee Coel will both face charges in the shooting death of Mary Knowlton, who was accidentally killed during a citizen’s police academy demonstration in August.

Coel has been charged with felony manslaughter and Lewis with culpable negligence, a misdemeanor. Coel has been placed under arrest. Lewis will not be arrested but was given a summons to appear in court.

Coel could get up to 30 years in prison and a $10,000 fine, Steven Russell, state attorney for the 20th Judicial Circuit, said. The chief could receive up to 60 days in jail.

via 2 cops charged in Florida woman’s accidental shooting death.

We’re not sure of why they’re keelhauling the chief, but we can’t argue with the charges against the cop. This kind of gross and consequential negligence is one reason why that felony manslaughter charge is in the statute book.

If you’re not paranoid about a training gun that looks and feels like your service firearm, if you’re not constantly checking and double-checking, and if you’re not still observing the three most fundamental rules even when you know the training aid can’t possibly hurt anybody, well, then the difference between your situation and the much less enviable one in which Lee Coel finds himself is not dependent on anything but happenstance, chance, fortune… luck.

Complacency and disrespect for training aids are always freighted with the possibility of a bad shoot like this. Be alert for those hazardous attitudes.

Is Welfare “Defense” Spending?

Jean-Claude Juncker, the Man Who Would Be Caesar™ (except, by legal chicanery rather than by conquest), is apparently outwaged that the coarse Americans (who are so backward that they have had only one republic in the last couple of centuries) and les sales rosbifs (that’s Brits, for all y’all that don’t parlez Continental), think that the Continent ought to spend a whopping 2% of GDP on defense.

He thinks that money spent on social-welfare handouts to the kleptocracies south of the Med and East of Suez ought to count, too.

Reuters reports that Jean-Claude Drunker, former PM of Luxembourg (defense spending approx 0/year) and current EU Commission President, is upset at Gen Mattis’ pointing out of the paucity of European defense spending:

European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said on Thursday that Europe must not cave in to U.S demands to raise military spending, arguing that development and humanitarian aid could also count as security.

…

“I don’t like our American friends narrowing down this concept of security to the military,” he said, arguing it would be sensible to look at a “modern stability policy” made up of several components.

“If you look at what Europe is doing in defense, plus development aid, plus humanitarian aid, the comparison with the United States looks rather different. Modern politics cannot just be about raising defense spending,” he said.

Right if you compare spending on apples, oranges and pineapples in the EU with spending on apples in the USA you discover that the EU spends more. Oddly enough it seems unclear how spending on “development aid, plus humanitarian aid” helps deter or stop determined invaders. Indeed a cynic might suggest it just serves as a hint that “there’s rich people to mooch off there” to the hordes of migrants now entering Europe.

That’s actually just an update to an interesting post on the mechanics and disputed terms of EU vs. Brexit called You and whose army? at the blog L’Ombre de l’Olivier, and you ought to Read The Whole Thing™. But we’re not engaging with Olivier’s main point in the post, but rather his belittling of the idea that “development aid and humanitarian aid” are meaningful means of power projection.

He is, in fact, right on.

Non-military aid is only of use in power projection when it is used that way. Now, everyone who thinks that the EU either as an institution, or as individual nation-states (an unclean concept, in Juncker’s post-Christian faith without faith), actually uses it that way, is invited to step this way to see the famous Egress. The idea is, you give the wogs stuff, they like the stuff, they like you, and you are more likely to get what you want from them, and be able to jaw them out of all their primordial hatreds for the tribe next door (or that used to be next door beyond the round-up). Not to mention their primordial hatred for you.

Primordial hatreds, by the way, exist everywhere and between everybody, just waiting for the right demagogue to drum them up. The Serbs had quite forgotten how horrible all the other southern Slavs were until Slobodan Milosevič went on the stump at Kosovo Polje in 1989. Three years later they were ineptly implementing a kind of Children’s Crusade version of the Endlösung.

One problem with use of humanitarian aid for security purposes is this: those that you aid are probably not the ones that threaten you. The Northern Hemisphere in general has spent untold trillions in the sinkhole that is Haiti. Yet Haiti is no threat to anyone; the Haitian government has, since its formation in 1805, harmed no one except the former French colonists, and practically all Haitians. As a government, it’s incapable of organizing a beer run, let alone an invasion. It’s rather amazing that they were able to massacre the French plantation owners, but perhaps every nation has one shining hour when they rise above their native ability and do something decisive, and that was theirs. Haitian émigrés in the USA prove no more capable than they were at home; most wind up as wards of the state, either on welfare or in jail.

There is probably no nation that has a greater reputation for aid and humanitarian generosity than Canada. It may be a case of a very high level of aid and low level of defense spending. Canada, of course, faces relatively few concrete military problems, apart from the ones its alliances get it into. (For which, we note, the Canadian Forces always show up with their game face on). But the big, catastrophic defense cases? That’s why Ottawa has alliances. Getting along with everybody is nice; having the US and UK as big brothers acts as a social lubricant.

But there is a constant temptation to redefine defense, either as Juncker has done to include unrelated activities, or to include the cause du jour and to pack the DOD budget (or its equivalents overseas) with unrelated expenses.

One US-ian example of this has been insistence on the sophomoric idea that global warming, or, climate change, is a military or defense problem. Hey, then all the warmists and “Results First, Experiment Later” Red Queens of science, like the Jerry Sandusky of Climate Science® himself, can tap into that sweet DOD cash… and units on the deployment docket don’t know why their ammo budget evaporated and they’re saying “bang, bang” like kids playing Army, during predeployment training.

Hey, global warming evaporated your ammo. Is there nothing it can’t do?

We see the military used for things it’s good at, and things it’s not. It’s great at disaster response, even though that’s not its job. Why? Well, it’s good at traveling, setting up, and organizing. Every unit has a staff that is a perfect building block set for organizing anything — you have your functional Legos: S-1, -2, -3, -4, are the basics: personnel, information, operations, logistics. (One of the open secrets of Special Forces’ adaptability is that every member of every team is trained on and has experience in being, essentially, a staff action officer for any one of those functions. Give a team a mission and in ten minutes there is a staff established to plan and organize it).

The problems with defining humanitarian stuff as military stuff go deeper than the hollowing-out of budgets, at which the European continental powers excel and for which they need no excuse. The French armed forces today, for example, are about 5% the size in personnel of the force that defeated the Germans in 1940… oh, wait. It’s actually about 2/3 of the size of the small force that resisted (in France’s sole success) Italian invasion along the côte d’azur. And it’s about half the size of the army of twenty years ago. And France’s is by far the most powerful defense establishment of the post-Brexit EU nations. The forces are professional, but they’re expeditionary, and unable to actually defend France, should it ever come to that.

Jean-Claude Juncker doesn’t mind being emperor of an empire armed like that, because he’s still in the grip of the idea that history has ended in Europe, and the continent will nevermore host a battlefield.

He believed that before the collapse of Yugoslavia, too.

In Which We Fisk the Worst Article on the M17 Selection

Somebody had to write the worst article on the M17 Modular Handgun System program. And this guy did it, at Strategy Page. He knew just enough not to sign it, whoever he was, so he may not be a complete dullard. But almost every fact that’s in the story is wrong, demonstrably wrong, I-was-too-lazy-to-Google wrong, I-was-too-dumb-to-ask-anybody wrong.

We used to say in the Army “as wrong as two boys kissin’,” or maybe a slightly stronger version of that, but we can’t say that any more. But that’s how wrong this article is.

Let’s hit some of the high points:

First, the title: “The Low Bidder And The M9 Tragedy.” Er, what tragedy?

The U.S. Department of Defense has finally, after a ten year search, decided on a new standard pistol, to replace the much hated Beretta M9.

“Much hated”? Meh. Lots of guys prefer another pistol. We could always work with the M9. A pistol is too inconsequential to waste hatred on, and any professional just takes the pistol he is issued and works with it. That’s how the game is played, by the people for whom “game” is only a metaphor, not something executed on a colorful board, with cardboard counters and a polyhedral die.

The new pistol is a variant of the SIG Sauer P320, which lost out to the Baretta in 1985 because the Baretta 9mm was a little cheaper.

One brief declarative sentence, multiple factual errors:

It is a P320, not a “variant” except in that it has the safety and anti-tampering options SIG has offered to “fleet buyers” all along.
The P320 did not lose out to anything in 1985 as it was decades from being designed. Indeed, its forerunner the ~~P230~~ P250 (which has little in common with the P226) was decades from being designed, and the ~~230~~ 250 was on the market for a long time before the 320 design began.
Beretta is not spelled Baretta. They’ve been spelling it with that first “e” since fourteen-hundred-and-something. Repeating the misspelling doesn’t make it correct. (But wait, he’ll misspell it twice more, but misspell it differently, down the page).
The trials in which SIG and Beretta were both judged as suitable took place in 1984. And yes, the Beretta was less expensive. (Significantly, not “a little.” Especially when you’re buying hundreds of thousands of the things). Beretta won a previous trial outright (JSSAP), but SIG did not participate. Cost is a real-world part of every weapons buy, whether it’s a billion-dollar ship or a buck-fifty bayonet sheath.
Some units had been using Berettas earlier than official adoption, and that may have given Beretta an edge, back then.
The pistol that SIG entered was a P226. This is exactly like a P320, except that its frame is made of different material and designed differently, it was designed from the bones out for modularity, it has a completely different trigger system and controls and manual of arms that the 226, and has exactly zero parts that interchange with its SIG stablemate.
For the innumerate, study this arithmetic: 226 ≠ 320. There will be a test.

We note that most of the errors this guy made seem to come from the Wikipedia page on the M9, which is almost as messed up as the Strategy Page article… but not as messed up, because copying guy didn’t understand what he was copying. One of Strategy Page’s 400-lb aspie wargamers?

Whew, that was the first sentence. Hey, are you guys ready to move on and try another? Because this whole fisking is around 4,400 words (Holy Wall O Text Batman!), we’ll continue it after the jump.

Continue reading →

He Didn’t Know it was Loaded!

From the land of chocolate, cuckoo clocks, and lots of guns, comes a heartbreaking gun mishap story. At first glance at the headline, it looked like a new story. But, reading it, we had a sinking feeling: it’s just new people having the same old stupid accident.

The facts are simple: On 2 August 2015, a 23-year-old man was goofing around with a friend who was visiting from Brazil. The 23-year-old’s roommate was a qualified soldier, recently returned from basic training, who had hung his service rifle on the wall. The 23-year-old pointed the gun at his visiting friend’s chest and pulled the trigger.

The gun did what guns do.

“I didn’t know it was loaded!”

That’s what the accused told the court, and expressed his deepest regret “for using the weapon as a toy.” It was too late for the friend, who was mortally wounded and died in minutes.

Both the shooter and the gun owner were found guilty of negligent homicide and sentenced to “conditional imprisonment,” a peculiarly Swiss penalty for major misdemeanors and minor felonies, that allows the convict to pay a fine in lieu of incarceration. (The fine is adjusted to the individual’s finances and the nature of the crime). The shooter’s “conditional” sentence was 18 months and the gun owner’s 360 days; if you don’t pay the fine, as we understand it, you do do the time.

Somewhat more ominously for Swiss in general, the prosecuting and defense attorneys in this case have found something to agree on: they are trying to end the century-plus-old practice of Swiss soldiers keeping their weapons at home. Accidents and crimes with these guys are very rare, but their consequences and rarity give them tremendous resonance in the Swiss media. Being neither Swiss nor resident there, we can’t gauge the likelihood of such an initiative succeeding in the Alpine nation.

What are all guns, always, people?

Story in The Awful German Language (mandatory Mark Twain reference). Story in the Even More Awful Google translation. Thanks to the tipster in this case, who prefers to remain anonymous.

Remember Cop-Killer Markeith Loyd?

Sure you do! Who could forget that face? We could have run his mugshot again like we did last Friday, but for some inexplicable reason we find the image of him on the right more satisfying.

Maybe it’s because he’s a cop-killer, who shot down police officer Debra Clayton, and whose flight led indirectly to the death of another police officer, who crashed pursuing him.

He had already killed a former domestic partner, and is also charged in the death of her unborn child.

He was aided to escape by his friends, relatives and “The Community,” if you know what we mean, and we think you do. Well, as we wrote last week:

When the cops finally caught up with him, he ducked inside the home where he was being hidden — and came out in body armor and with two guns.

Despite that, the cops took him alive to face justice. In the process, Markeith got tuned up a little.

C’est dommage, as they say in France. Here are his two guns:

The reporters, whose angle on the story has generally been how the bad, bad, baaaad white cops (because all cops are honorary whites, when a lily-white newsroom has anything to say about it) set Markeith up the ~~bomb~~ beatin’, also found another angle, thanks to an uninformed police bureaucrat: he had a 100-round drum magazine of death and doom!

As you might expect, this sent the newshounds and their straphangers into a feeding frenzy that might require the rest of us to get a bigger boat:

John Cohen, an ABC News contributor who is a former U.S. counterterrorism official, said the massive magazine Loyd allegedly had can hold an “extraordinary amount of bullets.” Cohen said a weapon like the one Loyd was alleged to be carrying “only has one purpose — to allow the shooter to fire continuously without having to reload.”

You’ve probably never heard of the Obama Administration’s John Cohen, but you’ve heard of his major initiative while he was TITLE — recasting DHS counterterrorism efforts as “Countering Violent Extremism” and outsourcing the definition of Violent Extremism to the liberal Southern Poverty Law Center, which is most opposed to poverty for its founder and de facto owner, Morris Dees. Dees has made tens of millions personally from fundraising campaigns that mostly scare nice old Jewish people with the news that the black curtain of fasicism is drawing down on a benighted land, in the person of some unlikely Klansman Mike Mitt Romney. (In the SPLC’s future, everyone will be famous for being in the Klan for 15 minutes).

The point of Cohen’s Countering Violent Extremism campaign, of course, was to lift and shift the fires of the Department of Homeland Security and also Justice from the terrorists that really existed, but that didn’t really bother the last administration, namely Islamic terrorists, and focus it on a phantom threat that let Cohen and company target their real enemies, like veterans and anybody who actually carries a copy of the Constitution around.

So Cohen is a partisan hack. But he just exposed himself, also, as a fool.

Cohen said these drum magazines — which are readily available online — pose a real challenge for law enforcement because violent criminals can use them to carry out attacks or to defend themselves while they’re being sought.

Cohen said the high-capacity magazine — in addition to the fact that Loyd was wearing body armor — shows Loyd was “prepared to take on the police” who came to arrest him.

But, he actually didn’t use the gun, apparently; he dropped it. He was “prepared to take on the police,” until he had a whole bunch of police and not just one woman. And the logical leap that Cohen takes from this: all you people who haven’t ever even thought about harming a cop? Cohen demands you be disarmed.

“In the hands of a violent criminal, this type of high capacity magazine could be extraordinarily dangerous, and result in the death of people including police officers,” Cohen said.

“In the hands of a violent criminal” freaking anything is extraordinarily dangerous, not because of weapon, but because of criminal. They don’t teach that wherever Cohen went — probably Harvard. You can’t get that dumb without Harvard, can you?

We realize that there’s no ~~math~~ arithmetic (let’s not make it too hard for the dears) requirement in J-School, or in whatever ticket punch makes a cop into a ~~politician~~ police chief, but when we went to real grad school, you couldn’t get away with 50=100. Note that this is the exact same magazine, but it seems to have lost half its capacity in the hands of the numerate:

Layers and Layers of Editors. Or is it liars and liars of editors? If you hear the story about Markeith Loyd and two dead cops and your eyes well up with tears for Markeith, You Just Might Be A Journalist.

When Guns are Outlawed, Only Outlaws will have Teeth

True, with only teeth, he didn’t kill the guy.

He just bit his ear off.

Who does he think he is, Mike Tyson?

Both men are from Mexico, Pittsburgh’s Action 4 News reported. According to the victim, the accused attacker was in a rage over “what could be coming for him” under President Donald Trump. Salatiel Marcos Ortiz suffered through a very traumatic ordeal. “He want to kill me. He going crazy,” he said.

Ortiz told Pittsburgh’s Action News 4 that his roommate — whose name has not been released by police — was drunk, angry over repeatedly losing money on the lottery and worried about what Trump will do as president.

Someone wiser than us once said that a lottery is a tax on stupidity. Anyone whose plan for advancement involves a game of chance with astronomical odds needs to direct most of his efforts to polishing Plan B.

Ortiz said that he and his roommate are from Mexico, and that the roommate feared Trump would force him and other immigrants out of the United States.

“He is paying his money on lottery, and now Donald Trump say, anybody got to go,” Ortiz said.

Ortiz said the roommate broke his finger, pushed him down a flight of stairs and chomped off a chunk of his ear at their Amber Street apartment.

“He take my ear and he bite it,” Ortiz said.

When the roommate went for a knife, Ortiz was able to run to a nearby gas station and seek help, he said.

“He tell me, ‘Don’t move, because I gonna kill you,'” Ortiz said. “When he goes, like, (to) take (the) knife is when I knew the chance and run away.”

Yeah, that’s basically the left-edge-of-the-bell-curve version of the part where the evil mastermind painstakingly explains his plan, then leaves the hero right underneath the air duct grate.

You can watch the video here.

via Enraged About Trump, Man Bites off Ear of Roommate.

Unfortunately, it’s not a video of these two chuckleheads re-enacting the Holyfield-Tyson bite, we mean, fight. It’s just a typical TV news video of stand-up patter and a short clip of one chewed-up Mexican complaining about his hermano’s cannibalistic tendencies, as quoted above.

We watch these things so that you don’t have to.

It gives a whole new spice to the term, “Mexican Food.” Like Soylent Green, it’s people.

The name (or alias, probably) of the ear-eater is being withheld by Pittsburgh police, as it is a sanctuary city, and he was only eating the ear Americans wouldn’t eat. He was getting a knife and coming back for the heart, Your Honor, but he was just being true to his Aztec culture.

Police are looking for him, and so are scouts for the Cincinnati Bengals.

No, the Army Will Not Make a Man out of You

That’s an old myth: the Army makes men out of boys, or the Navy, or the Marines. It’s an enduring myth, that’s even cemented in recruiting posters.

What the services do is help a youth find his inner man, his adult that has been suppressed by our society’s smothering, mothering tendency that produces such miserable neoteny in our youth. (Note that we’re saying, “man,” but there’s a lot of young women who are a no-go at the growing-up station, too).

What it does, more, is give one a chance to be a man among men — an adult among adults, to accommodate our many excellent service women, or xjies among xjies for those of you who can’t fit into one bin or the other because your genderfluid is a quart low.

Just as David the Good can teach you how to make seeds and cuttings grow, but you can’t do it without the seeds or cuttings in the first place, the Army can’t develop your character if your character is hollow to start with. We’ve all known a few guys in the service who were just not right, and it’s usually the case that their problems pre-dated their service, and will continue long after they get the last check on their outprocessing sheet.

Manning in Basic — note, facing the wrong way. Huweiler has the story. Jay Huwieler photo.

Case in point, failed soldier and successful traitor, Bradley Manning. A guy named Jay Huwieler was also some kind of MI weenie who went to Basic with Manning (Huwieler, a product of millennial political correctness, refers to the skunk by female names and pronouns. If he wants to write about Your Humble Blogger, tell him we identify as Aton the Sun Disk).

Here’s what Huwieler has to say about his experience:

Manning and I enlisted in the U.S. Army during the Surge in the fall of 2007 and attended the same U.S. Army Basic Combat Training (BCT) at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri. As new recruits, we were assigned to Charlie Company, 82d Chemical Battalion, 3d Chemical Brigade. Training began 12 OCT and for me, it ended 14 DEC. For Manning, however, graduation from Charlie Company never came. Her problems began the moment she arrived on station.

Manning actually was a no-go at basic training, an evolution that is almost impossible to fail. He managed it. The basic problem was that he was a quitter, unwilling even to try:

For the trainees of Charlie 82d, the sound of Manning’s voice may forever elicit the two words so commonly overheard from her during her six weeks: “I can’t.” In our comparison of memories over the years, fellow recruits in C Co. have confirmed for me: when the going got tough, [Manning] said, “I can’t.” ….Selfish acts which caused others to suffer were dealt with swiftly within the platoons.

Huwieler has much more detail on Manning, including incidents of lying and malingering (faking illness, in this case, choking). The drill sergeants were not impressed. (Pro tip for future malingerers: if you can say, “I’m choking,” then you’re not choking. You can’t talk without air).

Do Read The Whole Thing™, but here’s one of Huweiler’s main points:

What is not accurate is the false and felonious image of the U.S. military on which the defense of her conduct has been, at its root, predicated: that somehow everyone in her formative years in the military was practically part of a tribe of 6’2”, overly-aggressive Alpha males pumping testosterone out their pores who ganged up on the smallest in the group and tore her apart out of hyper-machismo intolerance; that War is so brutish and nasty, that Warriors too must be. That is simply not accurate. Chelsea Manning wasn’t being picked on at the Shark Attack when the Drill Sergeants said she had to lift her own bag like everyone else, and she said she couldn’t. She wasn’t being picked on when those Soldiers tried to help motivate her to lift the Jerry Can over her head and even picked up their own and did the exercise again, with her, out of solidarity. And when she faked a choking fit in the middle of the Dining Facility, it wasn’t because someone else was tormenting her – she was tormenting herself.

In other words, the service admitted a youth with severe mental problems, gave that person a security clearance, and reaped a somewhat predictable (but unspeakable in today’s PC enviroment) whirlwind.

Plenty of people who are small and physically weak join the Army. “Small” is less a handicap than you might think (many military tasks demand endurance and agility, and the short and wiry excel). For young people, “weak” is usually a lack of training, not potential; the service can fix that. The freshly-minted private or seaman who has to discard his or her pre-service wardrobe that no longer fits is a story told in practically every military family. But the Army, or any other service, can’t build your character except on a foundation of character.

We can fix your ignorance, we can grow and shape your body, we can bring out the team player that rested heretofore unsuspected inside you. But restoring your soul is not in the portfolio that is Rendered Unto Caesar.

You Can Always Trust the FBI

Fidelity… Bravery… and we forget what the “I” is, but it sure as hell isn’t “Inventory Control.”

An HK MP5 in 10mm has been lost by a southern California special agent. According to the agent, the submachine gun, the mag and ammo, and a protective vest were stolen from his or her car (the agent remains unidentified… when they screw up, FBI Special Agents are secret agents).

That was January 8th, in Lafayette. Or maybe it was January 9th, in Concord. Wait, it was the 8th or the 9th, in Concord, Lafayette or maybe Orinda. But, whatever, it’s missing now.

Have you seen this lost puppy? Dial 1-800-FBI-CLUE (OK, that’s a joke, call the number in the actual post).

The Bureau snuck the press release out at the witching hour of all Washington embarrassments, Friday night, so there have been only brief stories in the San Francisco Chronicle (warning, autoplay video) at about 11 PM Friday, and Fox News even later, on Saturday.

Meanwhile, if you’re a SoCal WeaponsMan reader, and happen to stumble across the missing MP5-10, the Bureau requests you to call them at (415) 553-7400 or online at http://tips.fbi.gov. They certainly don’t want you to, say, take a picture of it for the media, and call the media after calling it in to your local Law Enforcement, who can get the pleasure of making whichever SA or manager snubbed them last, beg for its return.

Heard at the range: “Ah, he probably got tired of not having 10mm ammo and tossed it in San Diego Bay so they’d give him one in a caliber they could give him ammo for.”

The news stories linked above both reference a California law meant to address the epidemic of police carelessness with firearms, but CA has no authority over Federal LE. And, after all, they are the Only Ones dependable enough to be trusted with the careless storage of such terrible firepower. Because the FBI agent has always been a model of integrity.

If the agent was a local cop, a soldier, or God help him a citizen, he’d be getting the third degree right now. But he won’t. Because the FBI agent has always been a model of integrity, his word stands without question.