Equipped with a sidearm, Secretary of the Navy Richard Spencer visited Marines and sailors at Camp Shorab, Afghanistan, to wish them a happy holiday season. (Sgt. Lucas Hopkins/Marine Corps) pic.twitter.com/X3TChTv0yz
Reports that I’ve heard form overseas is that the nylon holsters do a better job of protecting guns and flap holsters are becoming popular once again, as the SERPA allows all sorts of dirt, debris, and other shit into the holster and foul the weapon.
Then again, going by the pictures of some of the test firings of the new M17, I guess the assumptions is that any ranking military leader (civilian or otherwise) doesn’t know how to use a handgun anyway, so who cares if they can ever get it out of the holster.
Apparently this officer qualified with a revolver in basic, prior to 1911.
And this one learned to shoot watching old cop movies.
Then again, if they send Mattis over, the holster they give him doesn’t matter. If any Taliban attack the SecDef, he’ll just rip out their beating hearts with his bare hands
I saw this video from my YouTube recommended videos.
Here is my two-cents on topic of investment in tech.
In a way, the success of digital business has ruined investment for non-digital technology.
I, along with my grad adviser and a couple of other people developed a new technology for medical implants. We were working on a patent, and we trying to find investors to get this off the ground.
We tried for two years to get someone interested in backing us. What we were told repeatedly, was that the times frame for medical technology to bear fruit was just too long.
We would meet people who started the conversation with “tell us about your app.”
We didn’t have an app. We had an implant. You can’t fix a shattered hip with an app.
We worked with investment consultants and tech incubators and time and again we heard that there was very little interest in investing in non digital tech.
If you want to come up with the next app or dotcom, there is money available. Figure out how to make your thing into an app and investors will show up.
These investments have a huge return in a short period of time. Capital can be some office space, a domain name, and a server. Six months later you have several million downloads.
If you want to make something, actually start with raw materials and make something, you are shit-out-of-luck. Nobody wants to fund that anymore.
We eventually ran out of money and I got a different job. One that I love but I know I will eventually move on from.
What I’d like to do is start my own company. This is where I know I’m going to run into problems again.
Two startups gaining a lot of traction like that are MVMT and Misen.
The business models for both companies are the same: design a product, have an existing manufacturer over seas make it, sell it internet direct cutting out the middle man and markup, for a lower competitive cost.
Fine. Whatever. That’s a business model good for some.
Not for me.
I don’t want to have other people make stuff for me. Every day I run into vendors who can’t make shit work the first time. We get a lot that is out of spec and it is 12 weeks to six months to get the next lot.
I want control over MY processes. I am a master heat treater. I want the furnace in my shop. I want to watch it run and if something isn’t right, I can fix it that day, not wait weeks for a new batch to arrive. I want to make my stuff in America, not Southeast Asia, because that actually means something to me.
Setting up a shop takes time and money. Returns on investment can’t be actualized in six months.
If companies and investors actually want to drive innovation, they have to look past apps and dotcoms and invest in meatspace technology.
If only the big existing companies invest in that, the rate of growth will be slow.
You can’t eat and app. You can’t cure a disease with a dotcom. You have to do real world, physical science. Spend money there too.
A while back, Miguel wrote a post about the completely fucked Daniel Shaver shooting in Arizona.
I wasn’t about to pick a fight with him on his post, but I thought that shooting was borderline criminal.
I watched that bodycam footage several times. The only one reason I don’t think it was murder was the one clear instruction the officer gave the guy was “don’t touch your pants” which is what the guy did. Other than that, fully sober, I couldn’t’ figure out what the cop wanted the guy to do. Crawl with his legs crossed? Crawl on his belly?
This brings up the question: if a cop is saying “follow my orders or I will shoot you” and then gives confusing or impossible orders, what do you do? To me, that seems like the cop is setting up a justification for a shoot.
“I want you to crawl over to me on your belly, barking like a dog with a thumb in your asshole, or I’ll kill you!”
Sure, it might not be a lawful order, but that only helps your family recover damages because you are already dead.
This may seem absurd, but there have been cases of police giving conflicting or contradictory or confusing orders. This was at the heart of the Philando Castile case.
There was a case (I saw the dash cam footage, but I can’t find it now, if one of my readers knows the case I’m talking about, leave it in the comments) of a traffic stop that ended in a fatal shooting. The passenger (a black man) was given contradictory orders by two cops. One was yelling “don’t move” the other was yelling “get your hands up” and he was shot for not following orders.
That evaluation can become unnecessarily complicated in the aftermath of an incident involving multiple officers and a variety of weapons.
In one incident, a distraught woman wielding a weapon said that she was about to surrender to one officer’s instructions when she was shot and wounded by a second officer for failing to comply with his. Given the sometimes conflicting orders one encounters in the field (“Get your hands up!” or “Keep your hands in your pocket!”), it’s a wonder that such things don’t happen more often.
This is why it’s imperative to leave no ambiguity as to which officer is responsible for verbally engaging a subject.
I bring this up now because of a shooting just recently happened in Wichita, Kansas.
One asshole in LA swatted another gamer. The other gamer gave a false address. The SWAT team responded to the call at a third part address, unrelated to the two gamers, The result was the death of a 28 year old man.
The body cam footage from one of the responding officers was terrible.
One officer was yelling “show your hands” another “walk this way,” then in the middle of a repeated command, a third officer fired. The police were paled across the street, yelling. No one was using a police car loud speaker.
That shot was taken across four lanes of traffic, plus the start of a turning lane, an easement, sidewalk, and front yard. By my measure from the Google maps scale, that’s 30-35 yards.
You can barely see the victim in the bodycam footage.
Multiple police, taking cover behind vehicles, with rifles, shouting orders, in the dark, and a guy who was told to come out his front door is shot from 30+ yards, to me is no just a bad shoot but a criminal one.
Several officers arrived and surrounded the home, braced for a hostage situation. When Finch went to the door police told him to put his hands up and move slowly.
I didn’t hear “move slowly.”
But Livingston said the man moved a hand toward the area of his waistband — a common place where guns are concealed. An officer, fearing the man was reaching for a gun, fired a single shot. Finch died a few minutes later at a hospital. Livingston said Finch was unarmed.
“Reaching towards his waistband. Really. I didn’t see that because I didn’t see anything. Was it his waistband or a doorknob? Or just a confused guy wondering why there were a bunch of cops parked across the street from his house yelling at him?
Sure, the department can tell me that this is a breakdown in procedure, but at what point does a breakdown in procedure become criminal?
If a surgeon takes a dump, wipes his ass, and performs surgery without scrubbing or gloving up, that breaks procedure. If the patient dies of an infection because of it, the surgeon goes to jail.
I believe the only way to end these types of terrible situations is to develop a procedure and make disastrous failure of procedure criminal.
A lawsuit is little compensation to a two year old who will grow up not knowing her father because of a bunch of cops collectively fucking the dog over a 911 call.
Maybe if the cops have it in the backs of their minds that if they fuck up, they end up in prison, they will be more inclined to be follow procedure.
I know that I am considered a bit extreme among some because I keep telling people we are facing an Opposition that has no problem getting us killed. Hell, the nice ones want us interned in concentration camps!
But the combination of an education where everybody winds and you should care more about your feelings than what is right, combined with years of mental infusion where kids are told “It is not your fault” are coming to deadly fruition.
25-year-old Tyler Barriss is a For Hire Swatter. He is the one responsible for placing a fake 911 call to Wichita police that led to the death of an innocent man. Barriss was hired to place the Swatting call because a couple of morons playing Call of Duty online taunted each other and one gave a false address. But at that address people were living and Andrew Finch was shot to death by the cops. He was not even a gamer and much less was he involved in that particular and stupid feud.
Ladies and Gents, this is no longer something to be afraid but to be prepared for. As sad and un-christian it may seem, we no longer can afford to give the benefit of the doubt to people we don’t know and sadly we must believe that they have not only the capability but the lack of morals to have you killed.
Yes, I realize putting a werewolf mask on the passenger headrest while my daughter is asleep is a questionable thing to do during a road trip, but, howthehellelse is she supposed to learn about the dangers of lycanthropy?
This guy is my hero… And now you understand why God decided not to bless us with children.
That is one kid who will never sleep in a car ever again.
These couple of pics have been doing the travels around Facebook.
Click to enlarge
The usual snobbery was to be had: “ZOMG he is Open Carrying a Hi Point! How Crass!” and “By Hercules’ soul! He has a nylon holster! That is so gauche!”
As for the Hi Point, I don’t care much. The idea is to have a Pew Dispenser and if you can only afford that, I am not gonna complain about it. I am not crazy about the holster, but as long as it is not a paddle and it has some sort of retention device like this one does, you are somewhat OK. So, he is better than the Tactical Fudd that has a worked out SIG in an custom-made alligator paddle holster without anything to secure the gun.
However, the frigging concealed carry badge has to go. You do not need to give a prosecutor any excuse to screw with you in case you actually need to use your firearm in Self-Defense.
“So Mr. Jones has a badge that although it does not show he is a LEO, people may think he is one. Maybe Mr. Jones secretly thinks himself as a police officer? Maybe his fantasy led him to behave recklessly and put himself in a situation where he eventually killed the victim.”
Don’t give the enemy the nails to seal your casket.
