- From the “Wouldn’t Surprise Me” Department – Bradley Manning, who was recently convicted of releasing classified material and sentenced to a few decades of time out to think about what he’s done, has appealed to President Obama for a pardon. The petition claims that when Manning knowingly took thousands of files containing details about ongoing operations, intelligence sources, and the secret recipe to yakisoba in the chow hall and gave them to an organization that then published them on the Internet, he was doing so out of concern for his country and the world. I guess the risk to the people who were providing us with intelligence was mitigated by the benefits the world gained by knowing that if you drive an unmarked van into a firefight, then U.S. forces might convert it into a convertible with a machine gun. I have to admit that my partisan-politics side is showing enough that I believe that President Obama might just do this.
- From the “Good News” Department – The current Congress is on track to be one of the least productive sessions in recent memory. Apparently only 24 of the laws passed so far have been ‘substantive’, meaning that they are more important than resolutions in support of their favorite candidate on “Who Wants to Prove They Never Took A Singing Lesson?”. To this I say to Congress: Keep up the good work! Fewer laws means fewer ways we get hosed. Yes, there are things that Congress should be working on, such as an actual budget instead of continuing resolutions, but if I have to choose between an industrious Congress or one that’s deadlocked, I’ll choose deadlock almost every time.
- From the “Shot in Lodi Again” Department – A SWAT team member in Lodi, California, was recently shot with his own gun after a young child was able to get at the trigger of his handgun and fire it. Luckily, the officer’s injuries were minor. Apparently Deputy Tacticool was wearing a drop-leg holster at a static display for school children. I just have two questions: What brand of holster was he using, so I never buy one, and why does Lodi have a SWAT team?
- From the “Can We Keep It, Mom?” Department – Youths in Russia recently found a World War II vintage artillery shell while swimming and brought it home. After figuring out what they had, they alerted authorities, who destroyed the shell. Luckily, no-one was hurt. This reminds me of the time a trooper in the 4th Infantry Division walked into the S-2 section of the brigade I was working with and plunked down a dud artillery shell that he’d found. Reports are that he asked the first soldier that talked to him if the thing was real and if it was dangerous. I was asleep at the time, but apparently the tent cleared out quite quickly.
- From the “Gun Laws Work So Well” Department – Police in Sierra Vista, Arizona, recently arrested three men after a high-speed chase. Police allege that someone in the vehicle threw a rifle with a suppressor out of the car during the pursuit. Two of the people who were arrested were felons, who should not have had a gun at all, and one of them had drug paraphernalia, meaning that he couldn’t have truthfully passed a background check. My guess is that more charges are going to be filed, since somebody probably broke the NFA with that suppressor. My gut tells me that felons and drug users might find it hard to get a tax stamp from the ATF. How horrible that these criminals found a way to get around all those comprehensive gun control laws. They must be absolute criminal masterminds.
- From the “Facepalm!” Department – The pastor of a Baptist church in North Carolina recently expressed her wish that only white people be used as greeters at the door to her church. Apparently this woman of African descent believed that putting the best face on her church meant putting lilly white window dressing in front of her multi-ethnic congregation. I was going to turn this into a talk about racism, but really, it’s just garden variety stupidity.
- From the “Gray Bar Hotel” Department – Rapist, kidnapper, and all around douchebag Ariel Castro was found hung by his own hand in his jail cell today. This waste of a good bullet was convicted of keeping three women hostage in his house for years, fathering at least one child with them, and repeatedly raping, beating, and starving them. Here’s hoping that he finds justice in the next world, because he cheated it in this one. In unrelated news, Nidal Hasan, the piece of crap wanna-be jihadist who murdered a pregnant soldier while she begged for the life of her unborn child, along with other soldiers and civilians at Fort Hood, was recently shaved by authorities at the military prison he’s been assigned to. Hasan had refused to shave during his trial, but it appears that once you’ve been convicted, your preferences about facial hair amount to precisely diddly over squat. My hope is that they did it with a rusty coffee can lid. Here’s hoping that he lives a very long, very painful life while watching the world go by through concertina wire, and that when they finally execute him, they use the right amount of paralytic, but not enough pain-killer.
News Roundup
Posted by daddybear71 on September 4, 2013
https://daddybearsden.com/2013/09/04/news-roundup-202/
5 Comments
DaddyBear
DaddyBear’s Den 
Old NFO
/ September 4, 2013Re congress, that’s good, the BAD is BOs EOs he keeps signing in the middle of the night…
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Geodkyt
/ September 5, 2013@■From the “Can We Keep It, Mom?” Department
I remember how hard it was to convince the provost duty sergeant to actually take a report on UXO, after I (literally) tripped on a pile of rusty mortar rounds (looked like WWII British 2″ rounds) that were piled up at the edge of a picnic area on Fort Eustis, overlooking river.
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daddybear71
/ September 6, 2013We had a group of Boy Scouts find some WWII era land mines out in a ravine on Fort Huachuca. They must heave been well preserved because they made a big kaboom when the EOD from Davis Monthan AFB blew them up.
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Anon
/ September 6, 2013Safariland. Known issue with a holster that leaves a gap near the base of the trigger guard to accommodate the flashlight.
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daddybear71
/ September 7, 2013Sounds like a design issue. I’m surprised that got past the lawyers.
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