I hope to give you a number of stories and videos I found interesting. Not all of the study of warfare is about the current state of drones in the skies.
Patrick Lancaster, an American journalist embedded with Russian troops, films an insane getaway from an armed drone as they take it down with shotguns. pic.twitter.com/HdwaLgZ90Y
I’ve brought this up before and most readers were less than enthusiastic. In fact, my suggestion was pretty much panned. It wasn’t a suggestion that was supposed to fix everything all of the time, just another option.
Well, it would appear that sometimes, that option works.
Although I would have chosen a semiautomatic design, probably something with a long barrel like the Beretta 1301 Comp Pro with a magazine extension.
This is a short video that asks a false hypothetical. There is almost no need to respond, but I’ll do it anyway just in case another stupid “historian” is tempted to raise the same question.
England had no chance of winning the American war of independence. Washington had fought Clinton’s troops to a standstill in the North. The only strategy the English saw forward was to send Cornwallis South to the port of Charleston, take S.C. (where they were told that there were loyalists), co-opt the support of the loyalists, retain the South, and then eventually encircle Washington.
It had no chance at all of working. The battle of Kings Mountain proved that. It was a battle of loyalists versus patriots (the over mountain men). The over mountain men had stupidly been told (by the British) that the British were coming for them. The men were harvesting crops at the time and couldn’t go to meet the British (or loyalist forces), so they sent their sons into battle. The women stood on the sides of the streets and sang hymns as their sons went off to battle. They travelled mostly at night, but virtually continuously. The average age of the fighters sent by the families to fight the loyalists was 14 years old.
They lost very few fighters, but the loyalist forces were dealt a staggering defeat. Thus ended Cornwallis’s plan to use the loyalists. His position in S.C. was no more secure. He couldn’t maintain logistics to far flung outposts because fighters using insurgent tactics were harassing them. A number of battles occurred, but eventually it all came to a head at the battle of Cowpens, where Cornwallis lost a third of his army.
Another third was in the infirmary, sick with heat exhaustion, diseases borne by mosquitos, and wounds inflicted by insurgent fighters. Cornwallis took the remaining healthy third of his army to transport the ailing third from the infirmary and headed into N.C., targeting Yorktown for resupply and reinforcements. His forces were harassed all through N.C. on the way to Yorktown, with fighters shooting from behind trees and then melting into the bush, never to be seen again (until the next skirmish, of course).
The French were there waiting at Yorktown to bombard them from the sea, but they may not have been. In the end it wouldn’t have changed the outcome of the war, just prolonged it.
South Carolina was a foreboding place for the British to be. There are ticks, snakes (rattlesnakes, water moccasins and copperheads), chiggers, mosquitos, leeches, red ants, and vermin of all sorts, the swamp mud and water will eat your feet off without proper protection, and the swamp is the blackest of black at night without a single ray of light. Once dark, you’d better not move. You’ll get bitten by a snake, snapping turtle or crayfish, or step into a fire ant mound or hole where yellow jackets nest.
There is both life springing into the landscape coupled with the smell of rot and decay. The days are brutally hot and humid, and the nights are so humid that you’ll freeze to death in moderate temperatures. There is no relief from the humidity, not even in the winter. It’s a bad place to have an infection while in the bush.
The storms will blow and wash away virtually anything you have planted or built. There are rivers and swamps everywhere impeding your travel, juxtaposed by mountains in the upstate that will exhaust weary travelers and foot soldiers. You can’t drink any of the water you see. The noises coming from the swamps and bush at night are troubling enough to interfere with your sleep. All the while, the British were being fought by boys who grew up in this beautiful hellscape and knew how to navigate and survive it – and disappear into it like a ghost or phantom, apparitions with no form beyond a few seconds before melting into the darkness and sounds of various hundreds of types of animals and insects.
If you’ve ever spent time in the low state of S.C., you know what I mean when I say this. Cornwallis and his troops were doomed from the minute they set foot onto the shores of S.C.
U.S. Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle resigned from her position on Tuesday after her evasive testimony before the House Oversight Committee on Monday, the Associated Press reports.
One comment at the link above: “I cannot believe how very few people (almost nobody) are talking about how the AR15 is laying 15 feet from where the sniper shot the 20 year old kid. That kid did not even have a rifle in his hands when the sniper took out his brain pan. Did he even fire a shot?”
I’m not going to get too far into the theories yet about everything else associated with the ugly event that unfolded a few days ago, but I have always followed some basic rules for thought. Among the most basic is the need for consistency. I don’t believe narratives – I believe data. After all, I’m an engineer.
There is an idiot writing for Slate named Myke Cole who penned a commentary titled “Was Thomas Crooks a Good Shot? He Didn’t Need to be.” I’ll let you go read the article for yourself, but there are a number of false statements such as the lack of recoil of the AR-15 being good for not jolting the rifle out of position. Specifically, he states “My experience shooting my M4 was that it was incredibly stable, aptly counteracting the recoil that throws shots off.”
Recoil doesn’t throw a shot off. Recoil may make it more difficult to regain sight picture, but it doesn’t throw a shot off. The bullet has long left the barrel before the shooter’s shoulder moves backwards from recoil (or before, say, a bolt action gun rotates about the pivot point and the barrel moves up).
Furthermore, thank goodness the shooter was using a crappy AR-15 build rather than a Tikka bolt action hunting rifle in 6.5CM, .308, Winchester .270 or 300 Win Mag. A Tikka is a << MOA rifle, whereas that crappy AR he was shooting was probably a 2-3 MOA gun.
Anyway, the narrative is apparently that this shooter was so bad that he was thrown off the shooting team in school for being dangerous, but so good because of using an AR-15 that he could take a single cold bore shot and come within 1 MOA of killing the president (without him turning his head), but then so bad (and here is the real rub for me) that a man on the very back row of the bleachers to Trump’s very left (looking at the stage) was shot and killed. That poor man was a long, long ways from Trump.
If something is inconsistent, it cannot be true. Remember what I said about having rules for my life? I don’t believe things that are inconsistent. This had bothered me since the shooting. I never accepted that we know the full story, and we may never know the full story. But there is a reason that man on the back row of the bleachers perished that day, and it wasn’t because the shooter was good, or bad, or so good, or so bad, or was using an AR-15.
There is much more to this story, and you know it. We all know it, the FedGov knows that we know it, and they can’t make up lies fast enough to cover this up. Trump’s team never requested more SS protection. But oops, now that we’re being investigated, we regret to inform you that we lied and maybe they really did request more SS assets. So sorry.
The Secret Service, after initially denying turning down requests for additional security, is now acknowledging some may have been rejected.
Now acknowledging means we lied and we want to cover that up as some sort of confusion before the investigation castigates us. But now, on to the things I have concluded thus far that make some sense of the poor man in the last row of the bleachers being shot.
Eleven shots were fired that day. Not 6, not 7, not 8, not 9, not 10, but eleven shots. Eleven shots were fired that day. It would be interesting to have examined the weapon the shooter used, and to recover the bullets he shot if possible, and mostly to have recovered the spent brass from the roof. But as local LEOs pressure washed the roof that very day, we will never know. Someone knows, but not us. Not you and me. I doubt there were eleven spent brass casings on the roof.
Next, the shots were fired at four different and distinct distances that day. Not one, not two, not three, but four different distances. What? They didn’t really think we weren’t going to analyze the audio signatures from that day? I will have to say that while not conclusive, I’m not so sure that the figure on the water tower wasn’t a human. But as of yet we don’t know. After all, while the shooter used a drone, the SS had no assets in the air.
There was an open window in the building adjacent to the roof of the building the shooter was on, and more troubling, the single image I’ve seen of the roof of the building shows the shooter’s rifle being some distance away from the shooter (I estimate 20′).
You can fill in the blanks for what we don’t know, or do know, or suspect, but we already know the things I said above. The narrative they have posited is inconsistent and thus cannot be true. There were eleven shots fired that day. Those shots were fired from at least four different distances.
There was more than one shooter (the would-be assassin) or two shooters (the would-be assassin plus the sniper team who took him out).
She said the Secret Service was aware of the security vulnerabilities presented by the building Crooks took a sniper’s position on to aim at Trump. However, a decision was made not to place any personnel on the roof.
“That building in particular has a sloped roof at its highest point. And so, you know, there’s a safety factor that would be considered there that we wouldn’t want to put somebody up on a sloped roof. And so, you know, the decision was made to secure the building, from inside,” she said.
I’ve never heard anything so ridiculous in my life. First of all, men work on sloped roofs all day, every day, in America. Second, this is the secret service. It’s their jobs. Third, the most insulting thing is that she expects us to swallow this explanation, which is obviously fabricated. No decent SS agent would have objected to this assignment.
Finally, if you really want to be safe on a sloped roof, use a lanyard. I can teach them how to do it, but that isn’t necessary. They already know. So none of that is necessary. They know how to ensconce on sloped roofs. They know how to use lanyards. They aren’t concerned about SS agents falling off of roofs. They didn’t refuse to position agents on that roof because it’s sloped.
There is also this disturbing tidbit.
“I’m being told that the shooter was actually identified as a potential person of suspicion. Units started responding to seek that individual out,” Cheatle told ABC News. “Unfortunately, with the rapid succession of how things unfolded, by the time that individual was eventually located, they were on the rooftop and were able to fire off at the former president.”
“Rapid succession of events.” Again, how insulting that she expects us to swallow this ridiculous explanation.
“Slow down shooter, we can’t respond quickly enough. Give us time, for God’s sake.”
What a mess, but a lot of things learned in the process.
First of all, the SS is utterly incompetent – or intentionally and willfully negiligent.
this BBC interview with a guy outside the security perimeter who claims he saw the shooter before he fired is absolutely wild pic.twitter.com/vJpKZTxSAe
This BBC reporter is blind, and out-reported anyone in the U.S. media on the event. Here is a similar account.
Another eye witness says that he told law officers there was a man on the roof climbing between multiple rooftops and they did absolutely nothing to stop him until it was too late! WTF!
We need an investigation into the Trump assassination attempt immediately!
So it’s obvious that there was adequate indication that something bad was going wrong. But it gets worse.
A local police officer saw the gunman on the rooftop during former President Donald Trump’s Pennsylvania rally on Saturday but was unable to engage him, Butler County Sheriff Michael T. Slupe told CNN’s Pamela Brown on Sunday.
Slupe said that Butler Township officers received calls about a suspicious person outside the perimeter of the rally and went looking to find that person. The initial calls did not indicate the suspicious person had a gun, he said.
During the search for the suspicious person, officers with township police discovered that the gunman was on the roof, and one local officer hoisted another to get up to the ledge. The shooter turned around, saw the officer peering over and pointed his gun at him. The officer let go of the ledge to “take cover” and save his own life.
The title of that report was “Local officer tried to stop gunman on the roof but was unable to engage him.” Of course, that’s a lie. He didn’t try to engage the shooter, he took cover like all cowards do. Why does a man like that even have the job of police officer?
Next up, the SS has said they knew there was a shooter on the roof but couldn’t engage him.
Here’s my reporting on why the Secret Service did not shoot until AFTER the shooter engaged and some context about the House Republicans’ investigation already underway (months before Trump’s assassination attempt) into whether the agency’s DEI policies are affecting its…
For the record, I don’t believe that, but they know that they must do something to answer the obvious question “If the counter sniper was able to engage the shooter so quickly, why wasn’t he able to see the shooter before he started shooting?” And the answer is yes he was able to, and he didn’t, and their excuse is ROE.
Again, I think that’s a lie. I don’t think the SS has to wait on anything at all to protect the president or presidential candidates. Prove me wrong.
UPDATE:
Just now saw a contrary report to the one linked above that said the cop who got to the top of the agricultural building climbed a ladder just like the shooter. If that’s true, there is no excuse for not engaging the shooter.
The SS agents can’t even reholster their weapons.
Absolute humiliation for this gaggle of female Secret Service Agents.
Look at the disorder:
– Can’t holster weapons
– Gear falling to the ground
– Erratic, fearful movements
– No show of force, composure
Finally, I’ll point out that the guys at reddit/Firearms did the ballistics work. The local airport showed wind to be at 8 MPH. At 130 yards, the drift at that distance would have been 1.4 inches. If the shooter had brought a Kestrel and knew how to use it (as well as mounted a relatively cheap optic rather than used iron sights) and used a holdoff of about 1.5 MOA, Trump would be dead now.
This is a failure of epic proportions.
I still want to know what equipment the counter sniper was using. I suspect a nice AR-10 in 6.5CM, Seekins Precision, DD or Barrett, with Night Force, Leupold or US Optics glass, mounted on a tripod.
Not that this matters to any great degree. I’m just interested.
The Secret Service blamed local police for failing to secure the rooftop from which gunman Thomas Matthew Crooks attempted to assassinate former President Donald Trump, insisting it was outside of the perimeter the federal agency was tasked with protecting.
Instead, securing and patrolling the factory grounds of AGR International Inc. — located about 130 yards from the stage where Trump was speaking Saturday — was the responsibility of local Pennsylvania police, Secret Service representative Anthony Gugliemi said, according the New York Times.
The Secret Service was only tasked with covering the grounds where Trump’s rally took place, with local police being recruited to assist with those efforts and secure the area outside of the rally.
But neighbors living near Butler Farm Show Grounds told The Post they were never visited by any law enforcement agencies — local or federal — in the days before or during the rally.
You should fully expect the SS to testify that way before Congress. They will point the finger of blame at the state police, and the state police will point the finger of blame at the SS for failing to communicate rules of engagement sufficient to stop the threat.
I have done some research into Governor Brad Little and he seems to be involved in some shady affairs. I don’t have enough to catalog at the moment, but I’ll say this. There is more to the story than simply that the Twin Falls Canal Company wanted a little more water, or wanted the supply to be more stable.
If that was the end of the story, then you work up some sort of water sharing program and stick to it. Instead, farmers in northern Idaho are being completely shut out by water curtailment regulations forcing them to close wells, and that … permanently.
I will continue my investigation into this, and I invite reader submissions to help me along. But mark my words. Mark … my … words.
This is about a land grab. There is some sort of secret deal between Brad Little and large corporations who want that land for pennies on the dollar. I imagine you can guess who the most likely culprits are: Bayer, Kellog, Monsanto, Archer-Daniels-Midland, or whomever.
But there is something afoul in Idaho, and it comes out of the office of Brad Little.
I’ll have to say that I’m a bit surprised by this move in Idaho. Maybe the so-called “Greater Idaho” movement isn’t so great after all. What’s the deal with this greasy scumbag who did this?
I suspect that it has to do with rewilding, or trying to drive farmers out of business for the purpose of purchasing their land, only to give it to the large corporations (so that would mean a payoff). Or possibly Soros money is behind this.
In any case, there is something foul going on, and the folks in Idaho had better drive the Cretin who did this out of office, as well as the governor who is letting all of this happen.
Corruption is everywhere – even in Idaho. And suffice it to say, this is war conducted by control over water.
1 week, 1 day ago
Idaho is fining Farmers $300 PER ACRE for using water
