MSgt B is reaching out for anyone that might can help his best friends in Indiana find the killers of their son.
Go read HERE, and get the word out.
Some of our readers might be able to help…
Thanks in advance,
Old NFO
So I’m sitting at a stop light in San Diego yesterday and a rattletrap old Toyota Land Cruiser pulls up beside me…
I look over and think somebody had way too much time on their hands, and were playing with those fake bullet holes; then I look again and they are REAL bullet holes!
Seven rounds down the left side of the truck, including one that went through the front door right about where the driver would be sitting, then arcing up and to the rear…
Now I’m wondering WTF, so I let him pull off first, sure enough, Mexican plate on the truck. Now I’m wondering if he’s the 2nd, 3rd or Xth owner… Don’t think he’s the first owner based on that bullet placement…
And I’m in a meeting when a very nice looking lady walks in and sits behind me with a rather interesting lanyard holding her badge…
I glance around and swear that looks like AR patterned rifle on that lanyard…
So she gets up and gives her presentation, turns out she’s a practicing nuclear physicist!!!
On the break, I ‘casually’ slide over and ask her about the lanyard, and yep it DOES have AR pattern rifles on it! She says, “Oh I got this when I was doing some work down at SOCOM.”
Of course I ask if she shoots, and she does!!!
And proceeds to bemoan the fact that her previous boss retired, since he was a shooter and they used to take a ‘variety’ of weapons on tests out west and shoot 3-4000 (thousand) rounds during down time on tests!!!
I asked how they got away with that, and she kinda laughed, saying something to the effect that nobody wanted to check ANY of their equipment, much less be around when they were testing! 🙂
Sigh… must be nice! And she’s a really nice lady too!!!
But a damn good one, if you’re into history and Zepplins…
It’s an hour long special on the German Zepplins in WWI and the Brits counter to them.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/military/zeppelin-terror-attack.html
I don’t care WHICH side you were on, those were iron men!!! Thankfully the Brits managed to stop the Zeps, but as they said, it was the start of unrestricted warfare…
h/t JP
Currently reading Reach for the Sky by Paul Brickhill, a bio of Douglas Bader. He was a British aviator, best known for losing both legs before, and coming back to be an ace. Definitely a guy with the right stuff!!!
A chilling article from Business Insider…
One of the guests, an influential Chinese professional, talked about the simmering conflict between China and Japan over a group of tiny islands in the Pacific.
Read the whole article HERE.
This mirrors what the ‘real’ intel folks are saying, and the administration is blithely ignoring them…
As the cuts to the military continue, the US military is truly becoming a hollow force, and nobody seems to care. I can’t help but remember a statement back in 2003/4 to the effect that America was at war, and Americans were at the mall.
There has been really NO impact on John Q. Public by the 10 years of fighting, other than the losses the families of the dead have experienced and the traumatic injuries experienced by those who’ve served. And since BO was elected, this has pretty much been ignored by both this administration and the MSM…
I believe what this administration has NOT done in response to the Chinese aggression in the Senkaku incident has given China a tacit hint they will not be opposed…
However, we DO have a joint defense treaty with Japan, which mandates we respond if the Japanese respond to any ‘incursions’…
If it comes down to it, words will not work, only actions… And we are sadly outnumbered…
And then there is this…
“We would trade away size for high-end capability,” Hagel said July 31. “This would … reduce the number of carrier strike groups from 11 to eight or nine.”
Read the whole article HERE.
I sat through the SOTU speech, and not a word one was said about the cuts to the military that are ongoing… NOT A @#$% WORD… But he’s going to sign an EO giving all federal contractors a ‘living’ minimum wage of $10.10 an hour. Reality is all of the government contractors ‘I’ know make a lot more that $10.10 an hour…
But he was ALL about ‘diplomacy’… Give diplomacy a chance… And he wants to build trust???
Yeah, right…
Sigh…
Marco Kloos new book is out now!
You can get it HERE! Marco also has a re-release of Terms of Enlistment out there too. Good guy, great writer and also a long time blogger, so please go support him!
Marco does an outstanding job of ‘humanizing’ the vagaries of the military, and his novels are a good read! I’ll be reading this one on the airplane home Thursday!!!
This LINK goes to Life Magazine and a photo series from 1956 on guns in schools…
This note attached really sets my teeth on edge…
[NOTE: LIFE.com is aware that encountering images of guns and children in a classroom might be distressing to some readers — even if those images were made decades ago and depict an adult instructing schoolkids in a rural community in the proper and safe use of firearms. Our intention is not to incite, but to add context and nuance to the national dialog around guns, gun violence and gun safety in the United States.]
Personally I believe we need MORE of this not less. Eddie Eagle from the NRA is a classic example of a GOOD training program. By demonizing guns, rather than the shooters, we are creating an entire set of generational prejudices that will come back to haunt us.
Guns are tools, NOT demons… And as long as these generations refuse to realize that, gun control WILL happen, and that will be the end of the USA as we know it. There will be no way to defend ourselves…
But the criminals will continue to get guns the same way they always have…
Sigh…
Appears there is lots of ‘negative’ feedback from the left over the movie Lone Survivor…
Here’s a clip from Judge Jeannie and Chris Heben (former SEAL).
It’s a pretty good fisking of the left’s whole argument…
It IS an outstanding movie, doesn’t sugarcoat what happened, and tells it like it was from Luttrell’s POV. There is some ‘Hollyweird’ action surrounding the village stuff that didn’t happen, but all in all it’s not a bad portrayal.
In other news…
The President, the Commander in Chief, has made the Rules of Engagement (ROE) so difficult, that our troops are often killed before they can even get permission to fight.
Nothing has been done to stop our troops from being murdered by the Afghanis they are training, either.
Now, the President wants the US to sign on to the UNs International Criminal Court (ICC), which would allow the UNs ICC to arrest and try US troops for War Crimes, without the legal protections guaranteed under US Law, and from which there is no appeal.
The President, with his Democratic control of the Senate, has nearly all the power. If the non-establishment can take back the Senate in 2014, our troops can once again be protected from unnecessary danger.
Please consider this, and send it on to your mailing lists. Thank You and Semper Fi.
Interestingly enough, when GWB was president you heard about the the military deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan almost daily. With Obama in the White House, the mainstream media has been strangely quiet.
More than 1,000 American soldiers have lost their lives in Afghanistan in the last 27 months. This is more than the combined total of the nine years before. Thirty have died in August. During the last month, over 50 additional NATO and US servicemen have been murdered, inside jobs by those who are hired to be a force for good in Afghanistan.
The commander in chief is AWOL. Not a peep, although he ordered the White House flag flown at half-staff for the Sikhs that were killed. There is a deep disgust, a fury, growing in the ranks of the military against the indifferent and total incompetence of this president.
It has taken on a dangerous tone. No one knows what to do about him, but the anger runs deep as the deaths continue with no strategic end in sight to the idiocy of this war. Obama has had 4 years to end this futile insanity, during which time he has vacationed, golfed, campaigned, and generally ignored the plight of our men and women in uniform {and so much more}.
But, there is now a movement afoot in the armed services to launch a massive get out the vote drive against this president. Not just current active duty types, but the National Guard, Reserves, the retired, and all other prior service members. This is no small special interest group, but many millions of veterans who can have an enormous impact on the outcome of the November election if they all respond.
The million military retirees in Florida alone could mean an overwhelming victory in that state if they all show up at the polls. It might not keep another one hundred U.S. troops from dying between now and November, but a turn out to vote by the military against this heart breaking lack of leadership can make a powerful statement that hastens a change to the indifference of this shallow little man who just lets our soldiers die.
Veterans: Please do participate and forward this to your fellow veterans & friends.
h/t JP
All these are airport related… 🙂
In the line of the old saw about one man’s junk…
Everything but the seat…
And more bike remnants and a what the hell…
A mechanical ‘roo…
And a crab because he could…
and it was ‘painted airplane day’… Out of Adelaide…
And out of LAX… The original Continental paint job on a new 737…
And home for a whole ONE night, then back on the road today…
Just shoot me now…
And got my ass totally lost…
Simple (supposedly) directions to a good restaurant that was ‘only’ a few minutes walk…
But one does see some ‘interesting’ things…
This was actually the ‘right’ alley I was supposed to walk through…
A better pic, nice work, but not where most people would ever see it…
OBTW, that was the ONLY correct alley out of four…
I did finally get there, and was only 15 minutes late, the cop I asked for directions DID get a laugh out of it though, when he turned me around and pointed across the street to the place I was asking directions to… Sigh…
And this was the plaque for the artwork at the hotel…
And the panorama shot of the artwork…
The maintenance guy I was chatting with said it was all done by ‘local’ aboriginal artists and took about a year to complete it… Each of the panels AND the raised areas has a meaning, but it started raining and I didn’t get the complete data dump on it.
To those ‘little’ provisions slipped into the Defense Appropriations Bill…
It’s not enough that they are taking pay from retirees (that they promised to fix)…
NOW they are trying to slip Commissary closures in too…
The budget proposal would reduce the Defense Commissary Agency’s annual budget from $1.4 billion annually to $400 million by 2017, forcing the agency to make major changes — including possible widespread store closures, sources told Military.com. The plan will potentially be included in the Defense Department’s 2015 budget request expected to be released next month.
Full article HERE from Military.com.
It’s like they’re judging the response to the pay cut, going hmmm, not much reaction and it got knocked off the front page pretty quick; okay, lets do THIS next… It’s only food, and it’s not like they save that much. They can make up that 30% by shopping at Walmart…
If this isn’t a declared war on the military and retirees I don’t know what is… This administration has succeeded in turning the military into a social experiment; run senior leadership that didn’t kow tow to the administration out, loosened rules for everyone except Christians, and are now reducing pay both for active and retirees (BO did a 1.0% raise vice the 1.8% that was recommended). Their goal IMHO is to make the military so unappealing everyone will avoid service. And now they are talking about ANOTHER reduction in manning levels, possibly bringing the Army down to 500,000 active…