Dallas: After-action

Now that things have started to settle down, let's give this a once-over based on updated information.

New Realities:

The shooter:
Infuriatingly for the media and the other leftist Usual Suspects, the shooter wasn't a white angry male, nor armed with the dreaded AR-15 series. Boo frickin' hoo. He was a black angry male. (And you'll see neither his name nor face mentioned herein, nor ever.) He was a one-man assault force. He pinned down 20-50x as many officers for hours, had them convinced they were dealing with a team of guys, and chasing their tails and imaginary suspects. He killed, so far, 5x his weight in police officers, and held off an entire urban SWAT team, to the point that TPTB elected to blow him up rather than risk more officers. And his weapon was nothing more ferocious than a humble semi-auto SKS (updated-A.) AK, probably with Russian surplus steel-core ammo, and simple optics. 1947 Russian technology sez "Hi".
A couple years back, I met Chris Hernandez (bloglist, right) in person, and one of my humble non-LEO observations on active shooter protocols was that eventually, bad guys, singly or in groups, were going to be expecting the whole "swarm 'em immediately" tactic, and eat the PD's lunch. Chris, both a military veteran of multiple recent deployments, and a serving police officer "somewhere in Texas" with tactical response experience, wasn't so sure that would happen, or make much difference.
Today I won that hunch, and it's going to cost DPD several funerals, and years of soul-searching. Every SWAT team in the country just got pwned Thursday night, and like Columbine, this incident is going to dictate a re-evaluation of everyone's future doctrine and tactics. And if you think the ISIS-holes aren't lapping this incident up, and filling notebooks with their own analysis, I've got a bridge to sell you, for cheap.

The only thing the left and DHS' crystal-ball gazers can salvage out of this is the knowledge that if you paint someone into a corner, even a humble military reservist with one whole SWAsia deployment under his belt, a rifle, and the will, can indeed be a formidable potential terrorist threat, and proved in the event to be more than a match for the forces of law and order for as many hours as one stays alive and on the loose.
Had he been possessed of better tactical planning (apparently pulling this whole incident out of his @$$ on the fly) and escaped, however briefly, he'd have been leading the entire state of Texas on the biggest ghost hunt in history, exactly as Dorner did in CA, and without helpfully painting them a trail right back to himself in advance.

This is also bad news for Team Oppression, when they contemplate that there are 300 million guns in circulation nationwide at last rough SWAG, and some number of millions of veterans in the country, many with multiple combat tours, minimal tactical training, or both, and a significant number pissed off to the gills about the last 8-40 years' worth of Leftism on a rampage, and any number of other causes.
That fact alone both undoes any hope of "gun control", and should have fecal matter running down the legs of everyone with a badge and the desire to go all King George/"just following orders" for the next 50 years, at least. For them, shit just got real.

The cops:
Just as in the celebrated North Hollywood Bank Shootout, the cops in Dallas, to their eternal credit, ran towards the gunfire, like they do, and interposed themselves between an active shooter and innocent victims, despite in  most instances being outgunned with just their sidearms vs. a rudimentary long weapon. Bravery 10, tactical acumen 2, if you're keeping score, also just like North Hollywood. And with similar body counts in both instances. The officer who blundered up on the shooter, then was single-handedly outflanked, surrounded, and then executed by multiple rounds to the back and body after he fell was the clearest example that being braver than you are smart is a short-term recipe for dying gloriously, but quickly, and permanently. Life is not a FPS game with "respawn".
Their SWAT team, despite being held at a standoff, at least had the wit on the fly to change the rules of engagement, drop Marquis of Queensbury Rules, and elect to blow this adversary up with a bomb robot ("C4-PO" per Arf.com. Hillarious!-A.), correctly determining that deadly force=deadly force, and that after 12 of their guys and two civilians were already down, attempting an arrest was futile, and that there's more than one way to skin that cat. It turns out that most problems in life can, indeed, be solved by a suitable application of high explosives. Kudos.

My condolences for the PD's losses, and a hearty thumbs up for taking out their opponent any way they could get the job done, and with no additional casualties. Just like with Flight 93, you get about an hour in America to turn the tables on folks; after that, the means may change, but the outcome isn't in doubt once you, the bad guy(s), have been fixed, outnumbered, and surrounded.

On the other side of the equation, this guy had a grievance. One that law enforcement in general has ignored, and would have continued to, right up until Thursday evening. After squirting the effluvia of a macho burrito on the whole Black Lives Matter bs'ers myself, the reality is that there's a serious, long-unappreciated, and finally acknowledged truth afoot in the black community: the average black person justifiably is afraid of being executed by Any Police Officer for any interaction whatsoever, and for cause.
And after last week, the fear of being gunned down for nothing now applies to Team Blue.
It was a long time in coming, and it took getting a dozen of their peeps gunned down in cold blood to get their attention. A preliminary listen to responses in the aftermath of the shootout shows it may finally have begun to swing the pendulum the other way.

An over-militarized, authoritarian, "respect mah authoritay" gene has run rampant in law enforcement in this country since the 1960s. And it isn't "a few bad apples", nor is it every swinging Richard on every force. The truth lies between those extremes, but the official institutionalized Team Blue attitude leads to the conclusion that qui tacet consentire videtur has been policy from coast to coast, with thousands of officers deciding they are cops first, and citizens second, and covering for, or even defending, in word and deed indefensible and egregious over-reaches by their brethren -  to the point that nothing but paying in blood gets their attention. As Officer John McClane once said famously. "Welcome to the party, asshole!"
 
When an entire occupational field - law enforcement - has reached, exactly like Islam, the point that only either being killed wholesale, or learning to call out and deliver the heads on platters of your own murderous offenders from within your midst will suffice to expunge your guilt in the public's eyes, as it has with American law enforcement for decades, you've fucked the pooch so hard the ASPCA should have had you arrested long ago. And we've now reached the threshold that people are going to start treating them, wholesale, randomly, exactly like jihadis, when they get the chance.

If that doesn't institute a sea change in Team Blue, leading to a deep and profound reversal of course, and a return to Peel's Principles rather than Machiavellian politics as usual, the body count from here on out is entirely justifiable, and I'll be rooting more for the shooters than the law enforcers, despite the near-term consequences to civilization, and so will millions of ordinary Americans.

If you wear a badge, LEARN. THAT. LESSON.
Think it over long and hard, and make some serious changes, right damn snappy.
Else, go to war with the American people and Constitution, and ask history how that's going to end for you over time.
Fix the problem, or settle your affairs.

The Black Community
During, by all accounts, an entirely peaceful protest otherwise, the march in Dallas accomplished precisely nothing of note. Right up until one lone gunman, a couple of blocks from Dealey Plaza, where JFK was un-elected with some finality, highjacked their march, and made a point that hundreds of protests, both non-violent and violent, hadn't made since at least Rodney King's time.
The bitter pill for everyone to swallow is that damnable as the highjacking of the event was, it probably accomplished more in 30 minutes than peaceful protests had in 40 years. Everyone is simply going to have to digest that, and deal with it. I neither call for nor applaud this, but I acknowledge its reality.

The black community, and individual members, are finally getting heard on their justified concerns. And, hopefully, they'll start to pay attention themselves to the reasons why no one's been listening until now. The list of reasons no one cared has been 1% their skin color being different, and 99% the myriad ways they sabotaged and continue to, their own agenda.

The way not to squander this abrupt crack in the door, and gaining the attention of both The Man, and the rest of America, is to fix the things they can:

Stop sticking up for the guilty-as-hell Dindu Nuffins, who get shot while fucking up by the numbers.

If Black Lives Matter to you for real, rather than for rent, stop ignoring that 98% of black crime and deaths are perpetrated on your community by your community, and not by The Man. (Unless, by The Man, you mean the calculated indifference of Rahm Emmanuel, the black mayors of DC and Detroit, and President For Life HopeyDopey the First, hisownself.)

While no one is advocating for police mistreatment, even Chris Rock has pointed out that you're a lot less likely to get shot, or get a PR-24 Shampoo, if, when interacting with law enforcement officials, you don't act like an oppressed, entitled jackass of biblical proportions, and probably thence deserve everything that happens afterwards.

The Civil War ended in 1865. Slavery ended with the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments in the 1860s-1870s. Civil Rights was instituted in the mid-1960s. So unless you wore slave chains, and picked cotton yourselves, STFU about your imaginary (for the last 50 years, minimum) allegations of widespread institutionalized racism. Do that, and we'll gladly hear you out about actual injustice perpetrated last year or 15 seconds ago. Swear to God, hand to my heart. The rest of us neither want nor tolerate that shit either.

Act like fellow citizens, instead of aggrieved, entitled @$$clowns, and you'll be treated like the former and not the latter. Just like everyone else in this country, including every wave of immigrants going back multiple centuries, is.

So either get in, or get out. You want to start yapping about how your great-great-grandparents got brought here instead of coming freely to Ellis Island, there's a solution to your whine, and it's no farther away than the ticket desk of Air Africa. You don't like it here, and can't parse out how to behave day in and day out forever, GTFO, and go live in Liberia. I hear the Ebola there is lovely this time of year.

Learn those lessons, take them to heart.


The Government PTB:
Are you kidding me? Those @$$clowns never learn anything from anything, and never have, so I'm not even going to waste the electrons to discuss the myriad ways they'll fuck this up, from HopeyDopey on down to the lowliest TSA minion, nor note the hundreds of thousands of ways they'll work, by indifference to actual malign design, to make things worse, starting with "never let a crisis go to waste."

If fucking up by the numbers were an Olympic event, the government would long ago have won the Lifetime Achievement Award in perpetuity.




The real aftermath can work out for good, if the people most directly affected choose to learn from the whole thing. It could actually serve to start turning the ship around on some decades-long major problems that have been driving this country to the brink, going back to the occasion of the last noteworthy shooting in downtown Dallas.

But if people behave stupidly, as they have universally until this point, the entire sorry spectacle will serve solely as a how-to manual for what the next 100 incidents will look like, and serve simply as a Harbinger of Ultimate Doom for the republic, as we collectively lurch and stumble towards our ultimate destruction.

Looking at the parties we need intelligence and wisdom from, I'm far from sanguine about the eventual outcome, but the opportunity for positive change is not imaginary.

And if it fails to materialize, wherever and whoever you are, you don't have enough ammunition. Pray for the best, but prepare for the worst.

UPDATE from 2018: DPD SWAT no-billed for blowing away cop killer with C4.

Dallas

Dallas:
Unknown shooter "extremely careless" with rifle fire, multiple Dallas police dead, wounded.

FBI Director Comey unavailable for comment.

Guess that whole "Rule Of Law" thingie comes in handy sometimes, eh Jimbo?

Wait...actions have consequences...?
Who knew...???

And for anyone with their panties in a twist, the time before The Usual Suspects start waving the bloody shirts and splashing in the blood of the victims to start braying "Gun Control! Assault Weapons Ban! Magazine Limits! Ammunition Registration!" was probably measured in milliseconds, and is now so old it's cold news.

Sauce for the goose, bitchez.

Thought For The Day

Chickenshit Comey has accorded Democrat voters an unaccustomed privilege, one they didn't enjoy in 1976, 1992, or 2008:

He's given them all the chance to fully enjoy Buyer's Remorse before their nominating convention! Mirabile dictu!

Well played, douchebag.
It's probably also the first time that a presidential candidate has been able to list
"won't be indicted for serial federal kilofelonies" as a resume bullet point for the presidency.

It's Official

We now live in a banana republic:
link

FBI recommends no charges against Clinton in email probe

FBI Director James Comey announced that an investigation has uncovered that while Hillary Clinton “used several different” email servers and numerous devices during her time as secretary of state, the agency is not recommending the Justice Department bring charges against Clinton.
“Although there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information, our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case. Prosecutors necessarily weigh a number of factors before deciding whether to bring charges,” Comey said.

Apparently whether an elected public official deliberately and consideredly broke thousands of federal laws was not one of those "considerations".
And of course, after investing millions of dollars in an intense criminal probe, and unearthing some tens of thousands of individual federal felonies (FTR Chuck Colson was sent to prison for one), the head of the FBI came to the same conclusion, purely coincidentally, as Bernie Sanders did on Day One of the presidential race:

Laws are only for the little people.

This is howl-worthy, and the FBI director, while avoiding a future case of Arkansas Flu, has just joined the ranks of Benedict Arnold, Vidkun Quisling, and Neville Chamberlain as one of the foulest national betrayers in world history.

If you can get to the head of the FBI, what's left?
And if cabinet secretaries don't have to obey the laws, why should anyone else?

This is earth-shattering, and the repercussions have only started to ripple.

Make your future plans with today's news in mind.

Unbe-fucking-lieveable.

Lee Greenwood was unavailable for comment.

But it just got a lot easier to find the quid pro quo from AG Lynch's and Fat Bill's little Phoenix airport tarmac confab, didn't it?

It's always best to hide things in plain sight.
Bazinga!

And hey, Mr. Comey, maybe you were sick that day in FBI Agent school, but here's the relevant law:

                    

 (f)Whoever, being entrusted with or having lawful possession or control of any document, writing, code book, signal book, sketch, photograph, photographic negative, blueprint, plan, map, model, instrument, appliance, note, or information, relating to the national defense, (1) through gross negligence permits the same to be removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of his trust, or to be lost, stolen, abstracted, or destroyed, or (2) having knowledge that the same has been illegally removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of its trust, or lost, or stolen, abstracted, or destroyed, and fails to make prompt report of such loss, theft, abstraction, or destruction to his superior officer—Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.

                                                           - 18 US Code Section 793(f)

That means doing it accidentally is still good for 10 years in the big house, you treasonous spineless fucktard.
 

Just Saying

So, courtesy of the fair-weather friends and sunshine patriots who took French leave of CA since 1989, our unopposed communist legislature and senile has-been governor are trying, yet again, to tighten the screws on the hundreds of thousands of liberty-minded people here who've successfully skirted the jackassical regulations on "assault" weapons, to try, once again, and squeeze the handful of Jell-O and ban the things. (As if.)

Which worked out so well for them in 1989, and 1999, that there are now 10x or more AR-style weapons here after they tried to ban them than there were before.

(As a direct result, my car runs on the tears of decrepit old Diane Fineswine, brainless Barbara Boxer, and ghoul-faced Nancy Pelosi.)

Those continual efforts are about as newsworthy here as sunshine, because like rust, our state's communists never sleep.

But what long since became tediously tiresome is the constant refrain from out-of-state jackasses to the effect of:

"Why that's so outrageous, if I were stupid enough to live in a state with year-round sunshine, beautiful beaches, postcard-worthy mountains, plentiful jobs, and dozens of other conveniences, I'd move right out back to the snowbound tiny-minded shithole I live in now, because chickenshit."

I paraphrase, but only slightly.

Look, Assholes From Elsewhere, I'm calling you on your bullshit, once and for all, and will herewith Fisk it by the numbers.

1) Your lack of empathy for our plight is noted, and we happily return the favor, and will return the consideration aptly, when a similar fate befalls you there.
2) Our current troubles are in no small part in the first place due to exactly your toothless banjo-playing kinfolk there, who unhelpfully for my home state moved here, since time out of mind. Pray, look up the ancestral homes of "Californians" like Barbara Boxer, Nancy Pelosi, or the unlamented and recalled Gov. Gray Davis. Then pop off. I'll own the ones we've spawned, the minute you come collect your litter-box nuggets deposited here from elsewhere, m'kay?
3) The minute, no, the second you get your wish, and another wave of "Californians" follows your sage advice, and relocates to your little Paradise By The Outhouse, you immediately begin to ceaselessly BMW (Bitch, Moan, and Whine) about how "Californians" have befouled your nest, and now support there the exact same tomfoolery and chicanery you lament. (The fact that they are as "Californian" as Susan Sarandon, and are in fact merely another group of stateless gypsies from your own and other locales always seems to swoop unnoticed right over your foreheads, before, during, and after the fact.)
4) California contains merely two senators, and slightly more than ten percent of the Congress, yet the other 98 senators and 390 or so congresscritters can't seem to find why "illegal aliens" are a problem they should address, despite the so-called "anti-illegal immigration" party being in control of Congress largely unimpeded since 1994. So, how's that studied ignorance working out for those of you in the Other 49? Tell me, who all's standing outside your local Home Depot every morning at sunup?

In short, the reason CA is so fucked up has about 10% to do with CA, and about 90% to do with you, not least of which for the waves of liberal lunatics from your own climes foisted upon us here by the twin marvels of the miracle of easy air travel and the Defense Interstate Highway System, and the unparalleled invasion by ignorant miscreants from across our southern border. 

In return all we did was provide pretty much the bulk of the aviation industry, no small part of the space age, and the greatest market for the cars and other goods the rest of the country could ask for, while incidentally feeding the world. (And while noteworthy, I wasn't just referring to things like McDonald's, Taco Bell, Carl's Jr., or El Pollo Loco, but rather to the agricultural miracle that is CA's Central Valley.)

I therefore do not think I overspeak when I say I think you've gotten more than you fair share out of us, and we deserve better. Despite this, the churlish and uneducated continue to prattle about how we've so offended your nostrils that you'd rather not be within scent of us downwind, because you're so much smarter in Pigknuckle.

Fair enough.

I have a standing offer: You come get your toothless, banjo-playing kinfolk here, and drop your actual native Californians there at the train station, and I'll come and get them.

But let's be serious: Last I looked, and the current President's math notwithstanding (he's a foreigner, after all) there are 50 states. I expect most of you are pretty enamored of where you live, more so if ties of birth and family tradition give you reason to cling to your heritage and birthplaces. From what I've seen in my travels around the country in person (23 states, DC, and a territory, when last I counted), and vicariously (through film, TV, and internet videos) there is beauty and reasons to appreciate other places wherever you live in this nation, and I wouldn't gainsay you out of any one of them. There are also, for each person, any number of other reasons to not want to live somewhere else. Dulce et decorum est. Make your choices, and live your lives in peace with them. I will happily decry individual idiocies, even individual cities that have sunk to Third-World Shithole status - DC, Chicongo and Detroitistan, I'm looking at you - but would be loathe to tar any entire state and its inhabitants simply because its legislature had its head up its ass. To do so would be simply ridiculous and small-minded. There are good people everywhere, and I love this country so much I'm not willing to part with a bit of it, let alone over anything so petty as partisan bickering.

But if you have nothing else to bring to any discussion besides your virtue-signal cock-a-doodling about the superiority of your own choices, blind parochial provincialism, and blisteringly pig-headed ignorance of life in general, do the internet a favor:

STFU.

We thank you.

Still Semper F*cked, but here's your kiss afterwards

h/t to WeaponsMan

General Bozo Pussypants Neller, Current Marinette Commandant
wonders "How am I going to gold-plate this litterbox truffle?"

New Marine Corps fitness standards weed out men, women alike
(for some English definitional values of the word "alike")

(Marine Corps Times via AP)

New physical standards established so women can compete for combat posts in the Marine Corps have weeded out many (which is softer than saying "all but ONE" -A.) of the female hopefuls. But they're also disqualifying some men, according to data obtained by The Associated Press.
In the last five months, six out of seven female recruits — and 40 out of about 1,500 male recruits — failed to pass the new regimen of pullups, ammunition-can lifts, a 3-mile run and combat maneuvers required to move on in training for combat jobs, according to the data.
The tests, taken about 45 days into basic training, force recruits who fail into other, less physically demanding Marine jobs. And that, the Marine commandant says, is making the Corps stronger.

Which is a lot better-looking lipstick on the pig that saying out of that data, 1460 men and one woman passed on to bigger and better things.

Still trying to spin pure bullshit into gold, Commandant Pussypants spews platitudes:

"I think that's made everybody better," Marine Commandant Gen. Robert Neller told the AP in his first in-depth interview on the subject. "We're trying to raise everybody's bar a little bit and we're trying to figure out how to get closer together, because at the end of the day we're all going to be on the battlefield and we all have to be able to do our job."

 "I have great respect for them being the pioneers in this area," Neller said of the women. "If they can compete and hang with everybody else, I think it will all just go away."

Which, in English, means this will NEVER go away, because in over 15 entire recruit training platoons, the Marines could only find 7 women who even wanted to try, and only one of them could "hang with everybody else" to meet even the most basic screening test requirements, and progress on to the harder tests to come.

If they were going to kick out the 40 men and 6 women (and every other one who fails henceforth) from the Marine Corps, then they "all" would be able to do the job. But Heaven forbid the Corps actually try to live up to its own reputation, if it required anything like courage and integrity, right Pussypants?

The odds of finding one woman who can make a 20-year career in the Corps at those standards is exactly 0%, precisely as the last 40 years of physiological testing data suggested. Getting even a 4-year hitch out of one female in combat arms should activate the Vatican criteria for certifying a documented miracle on earth. 

If we had a Commandant Krulak or Gray, let alone Walt or Vandegrift, or God willing comments from the likes of Lt. Generals like Chesty Puller or the Brute himself, the quote would have been

"The idea that women can ever do anything approaching combat in the Marines is farcical bullshit, spewed out of the SecDef's ass around his head, which seems firmly lodged so far up that orifice that it's a wonder he can find the physical capacity to answer his own phone, never mind run the defense of this nation.  

The job of the Marines is to fight and win America's wars, not salve the daddy issues of butched up lesbians on Capitol Hill and in the Pentagon on behalf of their imaginary Special Snowflake sisterhood, and we will be ceasing any furtherance of this monumental pile of horseshit immediately, Corps-wide, until further notice, or until the Secretary of Defense formally relieves me of my command, or refers me to court martial to answer for these remarks. I don't think that's a battle the Departments of the Navy or Defense are willing to undertake in open court using actual evidence. Tell your readers social experimentation just ended in the USMC, herewith."

But with the progression of high-heels-and-lace-panty-wearing commandants from Lame-us Amos, to Dipshit Dunford, to Pussypants Neller foisted onto the Corps by the current regime, and evidently the entire Marine Corps from the top down lacking the brains, balls, or backbone to tell the proponents of this silly shit where to head in, we'll hear nothing like that, and instead can content ourselves with the certainty that Marines, male and female, will needlessly fill up bodybags in the future to prove the utter stupidity and counter-reality of this course of action, when women inevitably physically fail to meet the challenges and accomplish the missions required in everyday combat since anyone started forming up in ranks to fight a foe. And every day from now until then, male Marines will be forced to pick up the slack for the lipstick-clad contingent.

Well done, shitbirds-in-charge.
And incidentally, you just made Marine recruiting duty a career suicide mission.
Which is the only good news in this entire sorry spectacle.

A Few Thousand Words On Istanbul

Enjoy.
(Unless you're a terrorist from the Religion Of Pieces{tm}, in which case have a bacon and dick burger, on the house.)

Since 9/11/01 until now, there have been about 12 actual days in the world with no deaths from Muslim terrorists.
There is no such thing as "moderate" Islam. The Wahabists are the mainstream.
So-called "moderates" are what practicing Muslims call apostates.
And this @$$hole wants to import a few hundred thousand more here:

Let us know how that works out for you.
Sleep tight.

Thought For The Day

"Lying to pollsters is obedience to comedy." - T. Jefferson

Britain, Great Or Otherwise

So, apparently, the old girl still has barely detectable pulse, and a stiffening upper lip.
We heartily cheer and raise a glass to that.

Short-term, the pound is in free-fall, but no longer finding itself tied to future failed states like Greece, Italy, etc., Britain and its economics should sort itself out in due course.

Winners:
Every British subject, like it or not, particularly those who actually are British.
England and Wales, which carried "Leave" to victory on their own backs.
And their children and succeeding generations, who may yet recoup some of their former glory.
UKIP in general, and Nigel Farage in particular, the latter being the closest thing that entire island has come to spawning another Winston Churchill there since, roughly, Winston Churchill.
The Dutch and any/many other nations' folk who may elect to take a powder from the EU as well, in the days and months to come.

Losers:
Maddened crowds of socialist rent-seekers and government teat-suckers there.
Any number of future would-be jihadis among the Britistani imports over the last 40 years.
The Conservative Party, and in particular, David Sodding Cameron, who having tied "Remain" about his own and the Tories' necks, will soon be to British and Conservative Party history what Gorbachev is to Soviet Russia. He has, at this point, elected to Brexit as well. Douchebaggery has consequences, Davey. Maybe you can hire out to drive a cab for some Pakistani entrepreneur.
Scotland and Ireland, who voted predominantly to remain in the EU, clearly just a bunch of socialist suck-ups, from whom manifestly the best part emigrated therefrom some decades to centuries past. Not being there, I can't tell if their motivation springs from inbred love for the monstrous EU teat, or simple reflexive disdain for anything English, based purely on a thousand years of poisoned history, or some amalgamation of both. Perhaps cooler heads will surface, and they'll both realize they're physically closer - and/or inseparable from - Britain, and notice that the latter may tolerate some local autonomy, but not outright open hostility. People have friends, nations have interests. So it behooves the Remainers in Northern Ireland and Scotland to temper their enthusiasm a bit, while still pushing for more complete autonomy. They may wish to learn Arabic and Pakistani as well as their native Gaelic dialects.
Red Angela, who's Merkeled her own country and countrymen up the ass so hard that she's simultaneously cemented her shot at UN leadership, while probably never being able to return to German soil without being greeted by a pitchfork and torch-waving mob behind a helpfully empty tumbrel cart, en route to a hastily erected gibbet and some rope. (They may not even wait for her to leave and return to accord her that special honor. Be still, my beating heart.)
The "Syrian" "refugees" throughout Europe (two monstrous lies for the price of one, since by actual tally, something like 98.7% are not Syrian, and 100% are not seeking refuge, rather instead seeking generous payouts from socialist welfare state coffers, and new bases to re-institute the Caliphate north of the gates of Vienna.) Brexit, once implemented, should be the death knell to their further emigration there, and in short order in greater Europe, once the locals decide whether they want to simply round them up, or begin the largest pogrom the world has ever seen to expunge them from European soil. (I'm betting that "A" will lead inevitably to "B", especially after another couple of attacks/incidents from the Usual Suspects from The Religion Of Peace{tm}, as is their wont the same way pigs root in filth and beetles in Egypt roll dungballs).
The New World Order monkeys on this side of the Atlantic, who are witnessing not only the utter failure of socialism and open borders over there, but the prospect of their own pending unemployment and disenfranchisement over here, (and perhaps, if God loves us, their pending imprisonment), for all such are consumations devoutly to be wished.

It's going to take something like months to years to work out all the details of disentangling Britain from the hair of the Medusa that is the EU, starting with Parliament repealing the monstrous act that committed them to the EU lunacy back in 1974, but to quote the great man himself, Brexit may not be the beginning of the end for the eclipse of Europe, but at least it's the end of the beginning.

So Britain may yet become Great again. Splendid news from a special ally this week, and sincere best wises to a people across the pond that aren't quite finished yet, if only just in the nick of time.

Now all we need to do is heave the shitbirds on this side of the pond over the rail, and get back to setting our own national affairs in order.

And a note to our well-wishers there: John has a long moustache.

Semper F*cked

From Marine Corps Times:

Right now, (LtCol) Coleman said he is training the officers and staff noncommissioned officers who will facilitate these discussions. The trainers often ask him why the service is opening all combat jobs to women if mixed-gender teams did not perform as well as their all-male counterparts during the service's Ground Combat Element Integrated Task Force experiment.
“We tell them that, yes, the majority of the tasks they performed at a lower level; however, their performance was not unsatisfactory,” Coleman said. “Their performance and the attacks that they executed were not failures. They just were potentially slower, maybe it was less accurate – whatever the metric that was being used for that particular task.
"It may have been a little bit off from what the males were, but they were still meeting what we have in our training readiness manuals as the standards.”

So, in short, screw excellence. The new Marine Corps standard is "slow, but not unsatisfactory." Imagine Recruit Dipstick giving that answer as his excuse to his drill instructor anytime in the last 100 years, and tell me what the response would have been in the real Marine Corps, instead of the New Sugarcoated Pansy Corps of today. Chesty Puller and thousands of Marines buried on three continents must be spinning in their graves fast enough to trigger seismographs at Caltech.

Doubtless they'll be awarding personal decorations for Marines who were "not unsatisfactory" in doing something that only gets half their squad, platoon, or company killed, because "half-assed" is the new "outstanding".

And there isn't a single butt-kissing general officer in the entire Marine Corps, let alone officer or SNCO, willing to tell the entire goddamned Emperor's Parade that HopeyDopey and his peter-puffing SecNav have fixed it such that America's sons and daughters will fill body bags to make the Rainbow Warriors Diversity Protective Association happy.

Good luck with accepting third-rate as the new normal, especially as the rest of the world tunes up to eat our lunch. Combat Barbie is going to get ass-rapped, literally, and G.I Joe is going to be cannon fodder picking up her slack. Particularly by those enemies, both current and yet-to-appear, who didn't get the memo that "readiness manual standards" are as good as they'll perform when they take us on. Look up how that outlook worked out at Little Big Horn or Corregidor, and get back to us. And better issue your recruits buttlube along with bullets.

Try, if you can, to explain how this is anything but a calculated attempt to hamstring and disarm the United States' military, in broad daylight and plain sight, and the fruit of an absolutely treasonous plan to assure that we never win any conflict from here on out.

Back when we had an actual military worth the name, turning in this kind of craptastic performance as an officer or SNCO would get your career cancelled.
Now they'll be handing out cupcakes and Navy Achievment Medals for this sort of "slower, but not unsatisfactory" half-assery disguised as actual performance.

So much for "standards won't be compromised". Riiiiiight. We'll just strive for the bottom end of them, rather than trying to excel.

I guess after 240 1/2 years, it was just too good to last.

All-male ground combat teams outperformed their mixed-gender counterparts in nearly every capacity during a recent infantry integration test, Marine Corps officials revealed Thursday.
Data collected during a months-long experiment showed Marine teams with female members performed at lower overall levels, completed tasks more slowly and fired weapons with less accuracy than their all-male counterparts. In addition, female Marines sustained significantly higher injury rates and demonstrated lower levels of physical performance capacity overall, officials said.
The troubling findings come as Commandant of the Marine Corps Gen. Joseph Dunford prepares to make a crucial decision regarding the integration of female troops into closed combat roles. Faced with a Defense Department-wide mandate that will open all jobs to women by Jan. 1, he must decide whether to ask for specific exceptions to the mandate in order to preserve combat readiness. Officials said Dunford had met with Navy Secretary Ray Mabus about the decision but had yet to issue his recommendations.

So now that we've seen how that question is answered, it's official.
JCS Chairman General Joseph Dunford and Commandant Robert Neller are a pair of four-star pussies.

(And when they retire, to collect blood money pensions, they'll become EX-Marines, joining the ranks of such celebrated ex-Marines as Charles Whitman, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Murtha, and Charles Rangel.) 

Consider the gauntlet thrown, shitbirds.

At your service, "generals", you unmitigated sonsofbitches.
If you'd been actual Marines, you'd have told SecNav and POTUS to piss up a rope, publicly, and told them where they could stick your pensions and retirement papers.
If you'd done that, you'd either be the next Senator from Pickastate, the next SecDef, or on the short list for Trump's VP. And then the book deal and speaking fees.
As it is, you clearly wouldn't make pimples on a good Marine's ass, and that goes for the rest of your leadership from top to bottom. The entire bunch should be melted down for fish sinkers, if not for the fact that the toxic stench would depopulate any body of water into which you were dropped. And the blood of every Marine henceforth who dies in combat will be on both of your hands, indelibly, and eternally.

Sleep tight, America.
When next the nation calls, the Marines will be at the beauty salon.
Just like the other services.
When the next jihadi sumbitch shoots up a recruiting station or military base, maybe they can throw their purses at 'em.

Everyone else is on their own from here on out.

El WTF Nino

It doesn't rain in SoCal in June, but what with this year's El Nino, which is apparently the excuse for Mother Nature to go on a year-long Cinco de Mayo drunken rampage, it's raining today. Like it never does here in June.

Usually June can be counted on for it to be cloudy/gloomy all morning until noon, then the marine layer haze burns off, and it's still pre-summer comfortable the rest of the day.

But evidently this year's oceanic subsurface temperature surges mean "anything goes".

The good news is that helps end the multi-year drought (or it will, if some of this manages to fall as late season snow in the high Sierras). But mainly, it just loosens weeks of accumulated road goo and oil, and turns the freeways into playgrounds for morons with more horsepower than horse sense.

Just as well. Now I don't have to wash the car, and I wasn't going anywhere today anyhow.

I keep hoping I'll read that it washed most of Los Angeles away and/or buried it under mud slides, but so far, no joy there.

Chain Chain Chain...

 

 

Notice the above.
What do they have in common? They're all patient ventilators.
What else do they have in common? Not very effing much.
They're all designed to deliver oxygen and room air, under pressure, to a (usually) intubated patient.

And they make a lot of noise.
Any similarity to other machines in the sub-genre pretty much ends there.

Who cares, right?

In one of the regular features on his excellent blog, WeaponsMan includes one detailing the various ways non-firearms and an assortment of sources can conspire to end your oxygen addiction, and move you over to the Darwin Awards website, given half a chance.

Today's example was batteries, in this case, the failed ones on a ventilator in the excremental limey National Health Service (which is to actual health care as Dr. Mengele and Dr. Kevorkian are to actual physicians).

The story notes,

Despite several loud alarms designed to warn staff about the failing power supply, Jacqueline Scott passed away after the ventilator keeping her breathing shut down.
An inquest heard a nurse did not recognise the warning sound because no ventilator had ever ran out of power before.
A jury inquest at the Royal Courts of Justice heard Mrs Scott was on a ventilator plugged into a wall socket.
But the circuit providing the power had blown, meaning it was running on batteries – which eventually ran out, with several alarms ringing out before the power cut out.

Some in the succeeding comments basically took shots at the nurse involved.

My response:

Equal time for opposing views.

Caveat: I am not a nurse in the UK, I am a nurse in the USA. So policy and procedure are probably somewhat different there, as well as duties and responsibilities.

That said, the following:

1) Ventilators do, in fact, put out a cacophony of sounds. Respiratory therapists, on this side of the pond, are the ducks who are extensively trained in understanding them, and maintaining the function of said machines. Not nurses, except accidentally, ever.

2) Most of the time, a patient on a vent is attached to a machine making more noise than R2-D2 on the electronic version of crack, for any one of dozens of reasons. It occurs virtually every minute the patient is attached, to the point far beyond sensory overload.

3) The display of information varies among every machine, from every maker, to the point that without intensive and specific training, anyone not a respiratory therapist would not readily grasp, nor be able to prioritize, what each note in the cacophony is intended to convey. Absent an actual trained member of the respiratory therapy department, the nearest equivalent is installing a pipe organ in the room, and assigning a capuchin monkey tethered to said organ to prance about the keys to the point of exhaustion. It isn't, for example, as if the machine would helpfully have been standardized among any number of makers, models, or what have you, or that knowing a bit about one machine, you could easily take the time to try and troubleshoot any other of the breed.

4) Respiratory therapists are eternally in short supply, everywhere and at all times, in every hospital I've ever been in, seen, or heard of, even under a medical care system here and not as thoroughly socialized (yet) as the abortion of care known as the UK National Health Service.

So in aviation terms, you had a device that looked about as intuitive as the engineer's panel on a B-29,

except labeled in Greek, with no such engineer anywhere handy, and with all the lights and bells sounding constantly, and thus conveying essentially zero useful information, to a person neither trained nor experienced in rapidly troubleshooting any of the plethora of alarms and noises.

And the ground power to said panel, which normally did not, failed, and the batteries, which normally did not, also failed, followed by which the patient asphyxiated.

If the nurse, doctor, nor anyone else handy didn't also have the patient on telemetry, didn't know nor notice, amidst the endless calliope of the ventilator's death throes, that the actual patient - the point of the exercise - was breathing less frequently, and also getting concurrently less oxygen in their bloodstream than what is normally found when everything's operating normally, then you could make a case that they should have noticed that - if the patient was attached to the requisite telemetry, if there was the equipment there to manually bag-ventilate the patient and deliver supplemental oxygen, and if the nurse wasn't simultaneously assigned care of a number of actually "sicker" patients whose care she could temporarily abandon to step in and non-stop do the work of the failed ventilator, to breathe for the patient, while waiting for an RT with a fresh machine, if either said technician and equipment was, in fact, readily available.

But I don't know what patient:staff ratios are or might have been at the incident or department of the hospital in question, or any of the other answers, and absent that information, trying to make this sound like nurse error is Stevie Wonder leading a backpacking trip through the Grand Canyon. Fun to watch, but joining, not so much.

Why aren't respiratory machines and their displays as standard as a car's dash panel?
Why are there eleventy-six noises and alarms, none of which can be shut off, to prioritize critical information from routine?
Where was the requisite expert in the operation and interpretation of such specialized machinery?
Was there any telemetry delivering basic patient information attached?
Why was a plug failed, with no one capable of fixing it, or red-tagging it until such was done, and no one aware of that condition?
Why did the back-up batteries fail?
Those are just the first six most obvious culprits here.

As in most aviation accidents, hospital deaths frequently involve a lengthy chain of errors and mistakes, and blaming the last person standing closest, in this case the nurse, is about like blaming all aviation disasters on "pilot error":
easy, convenient, self-serving for everyone but the accused, and generally a monumental load of horse cobblers.

If it were in my power, everything in my world that honks, squawks, beeps, clangs, and whistles, to include family members, would be cheerfully beaten to death at the first moment they offended my ears, every shift, and the person(s) who inflicted and designed them, after a proper crotch-punching. I would love to be able to prioritize the things that make noise to the one to three things that actually matter, so that if they did go off, I'd know
a) what it was, and
b) that it was important, and then be able to set about fixing it.

Unfortunately, no one, from the assholes who mis-design the offending hardware, to hospital purchasers of such horseshit, the administrators and clinical co-ordinators that implement it, nor anyone else, ever asks, let alone listens, to any input from end-users. Not once, ever, in a career.

So you and yours are taken care of by entirely non-standardized machines, that emit an ongoing cacophony of worthless sensory overload, delivered in an under-staffed care model, with safe levels of both enough and the right skills sets of the requisite personnel purely a forlorn fantasy, in an increasingly mechanized system, and then the entire thing falls on its ass, and your granny dies.

And to top it off, granny probably had ten bodily systems failing or in severe decline, had a chance in the single percentiles of ever having anything like recovery with any quality of life, but was being maintained on life support so that the long-neglectful family could feel better about the years of neglect of granny prior to that time, ignorance of the seriousness of her health conditions, and the utter futility of further care, and total denial of her probable end-state, despite the medical technology of the society she lived in. But that's just an anecdotal guess, based solely on 98% of the ventilated patients I've seen over two decades here. YMMV.

And then cared for in a failed socialist health care model by insufficient and overwhelmed staff, just for the cherry on top of the frosting.

So maybe the nurse was to blame.

Or maybe the health care system, the hospital, the staffing plan, the engineering department, the machine's designers and manufacturers, the family, and the actual patient, had some wee bit of the blame to chug down as well...?

Just saying.

Flail away.

Hognose's point was that dead batteries were the culprit, and the rest of the article noted that in fact

Dr. Renate Wendler, who led an investigation into the death, told the jury it was "not realistic" to expect nurses in the ward to know when power would have been interrupted to the plug sockets.
In front of the jury of six men and three women, she said: "The machine made a loud screeching alarm that no nurse had previously heard.
"This noise must have been the final battery warning.
"A lot of alarms had sounded on the machine.
"They were high priority alarms."

 Consultant anaesthetist Dr Wendler said the best nurses were looking after Mrs Scott, but that they reviewed the design of the machine and felt it was "not intuitive".
She said: "I do not think the delay in calling for help had anything to do with the outcome of Mrs Scott's case.

And finally

She added: "We looked at Mrs Scott's health and we found she was very sick and probably a pre-terminal patient when she came to the hospital.
"We found evidence of good practice and care.
"Usually if an incident happens, it is a result of a lot of factors, no single factor.
"Nurses were very busy looking after her in all sorts of ways."

 I read the details after my reply above, and lo and behold, they're just about the exact same thing (minus the gratuitous swipe at NHS, which is the rhetorical equivalent of shooting fish, in a barrel, with a Barrett M82A1).

Health care, even bad health care, is not magic nor miracle work. Handicapping caregivers with shitty equipment, let alone a shitty system, to care for a "pre-terminal patient", is a poor recipe for success, as we normally define the term.

Especially when you saddle them with a cacophony of worthless alarms, to the point that doing your job is the nightly equivalent of what Stephen Coonts described in Flight Of The Intruder, where you spend an inordinate amount of time turning the worthless clanging, dinging, buzzing, flashing, squeaking, squawking shit off, so you can get down to focusing and concentrating on doing the important parts of the job.

So as Paul Harvey always said, now you know the rest of the story...

The Daily Outrage - Illegal Alien Catch & Release Documented

h/t to WRSA

link

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is quietly transporting illegal immigrants from the Mexican border to Phoenix and releasing them without proper processing or issuing court appearance documents, Border Patrol sources tell Judicial Watch. The government classifies them as Other Than Mexican (OTM) and this week around 35 were transferred 116 miles north from Tucson to a Phoenix bus station where they went their separate way. Judicial Watch was present when one of the white vans carrying a group of OTMs arrived at the Phoenix Greyhound station on Buckeye Road.

 The OTMs are from Honduras, Colombia, El Salvador and Guatemala and Border Patrol officials say this week’s batch was in custody for a couple of days and ordered to call family members in the U.S. so they could purchase a bus ticket for their upcoming trip from Phoenix. Authorities didn’t bother checking the identity of the U.S. relatives or if they’re in the country legally, according to a Border Patrol official directly involved in the matter. American taxpayers pick up the fare for those who claim to have a “credible fear,” Border Patrol sources told JW. None of the OTMs were issued official court appearance documents, but were told to “promise” they’d show up for a hearing when notified, said federal agents with firsthand knowledge of the operation.

Your tax dollars at work, importing the felons non-government employee Americans won't import themselves.

This will end well. Not.
I predict a sudden uptick of border area residents helpfully adopting the shoot-shovel-shut up paradigm when dealing with all feral life forms, regardless of number of legs, or whether they speak Spanish, or wear federal badges.

And in case you didn't notice, when the federal government is importing tomorrow's angry third-world mobs to your city vanloads at a time, 24/7/365, you don't have nearly enough ammo.

Range cards prepared in advance for any number of likely spots wouldn't go amiss either.

Memorial Day

 

If you are able, save for them a place inside of you
and save one backward glance when you are leaving
for the places they can no longer go.

Be not ashamed to say you loved them,
though you may or may not have always.

Take what they have taught you with their dying
and keep it with your own.

And in that time when men decide and feel safe to call the war insane,
take one moment to embrace those gentle heroes you left behind.

-Maj. Michael Davis O'Donnell
KIA South Vietnam

 

 

Some thoughtless fools may wander about today with the benediction "Happy Memorial Day" on their lips, lacking any greater power of cogitation.

Every day is a happy one for those here to enjoy them, made possible by those who gave up all of their days to come to secure for us that blessing. The only military we appreciate today are those whose graves we decorated this morning, and the legions of their companions.

The correct sentiment for the day should be "To absent comrades!"
Semper Fi, guys.

Biology 7, Sociology 0.



 

More proof that no one in the Pentagon or DoD can read:

A team of 14 year old boys kicked the asses of the Oz Women's Olympic Team, the latter being ranked as one of the Top 5 women's teams headed to the 2016 Olympics in Rio this summer.

 

UK Daily Mail article

 

Australia’s national women’s soccer team have suffered a devastating defeat in the lead up to the Rio Olympics – going down 7-0 to the Newcastle Jets under-15 boys side.

Despite the embarrassing defeat on Wednesday night at Valentine Sports Park in Newcastle, the Australian team will travel to Brazil as one of the gold medal favourites.

While the Matildas played with a rotating squad, there is no denying losing to a team of school boys is far from ideal preparation for the world’s fifth ranked team in their quest for Olympic gold at Rio.

Assistant Matildas coach Gary van Egmond was as surprised as anyone about the result, admitting his side were outplayed.

‘To be honest we didn’t expect that,’ Egmond told the Huffington Post Australia.

‘The Jets boys were very good, all credit to them, they moved the ball around very well and were excellent all night.’

Egmond said that the Matildas are often forced to play against boys teams as trying to find quality female opposition can be difficult.

It may not be the first time that the Australian team have suffered a heavy defeat against school boys with claims that they were ‘smashed’ by an under 16 Sydney FC team last year circulating.

The social media reaction to the defeat has been condemning with many claiming that the result is not good enough for a team that is expected to challenge for a medal at the Olympics.

And a h/t for the money commentary from The Z Blog:

 

Maybe that’s true, but it would be amazing to me if that many humans were walking the earth unaware of the stark differences between male and female athletes. A woman in her prime years has the cardiovascular capacity of a man in his 50’s. It’s why girls cannot pass the same physical tests as males in the military. Many male recruits also fail early on, but a month or two of training and even the least fit males are well beyond the female recruits. Imagine the differences when we’re talking years of training.

 Of course, the differences between boys and girls are not limited to physiology. All the stuff that makes up personality and intelligence is rooted in the same stuff as physiology. We are what our DNA says we are and human DNA makes boys different from girls cognitively, physically and emotionally, etc. These differences cannot be wished away or hectored away. Most of what we call liberalism is at odds with biological reality and that can only end one way.

Ranger School cadre, call your office...

 

And I don't know the IOOC policy on dudes who "identify" as women, but if you can find a dozen or so gender-bender boys about 14-15 years old, and get them entered in Women's Soccer at this years' Olympics, they'll have a pretty easy shot at the medal round.

 

Just saying.

 

But The Bathrooms Are All LGBTEFGHIJKLMNOP Compatible

(h/t Vodkapundit and CNBC)

The U.S. Defense Department is still using — after several decades — 8-inch floppy disks in a computer system that coordinates the operational functions of the nation's nuclear forces, a jaw-dropping new report reveals.  

The Defense Department's 1970s-era IBM Series/1 Computer and long-outdated floppy disks handle functions related to intercontinental ballistic missiles, nuclear bombers and tanker support aircraft, according to the new Government Accountability Office report.
The department's outdated "Strategic Automated Command and Control System" is one of the 10 oldest information technology investments or systems detailed in the sobering GAO report, which calls for a number of federal agencies "to address aging legacy systems."

 It's okay, though. It's not like Russia is getting frisky, China is becoming militarily adventurous and simultaneously heading for economic disaster, a perpetually crazy Islamofacist Iran is frantically working to achieve nuclear weapons status, or jihadi terrorism has crossed onto American soil, while the American military is rapidly headed for lower strength in actual terms than what we had going for us in the 1930s, amidst the Great Depression.

Oh wait, all that is also all true now.

Thanks heavens we've replaced every general and admiral who still had a pair with a bunch of Happy Diversity Bean Counting Pseudo-Warriors, eager to give the CinC, NOW, NAMBLA, Globull Warming hysteria, and every other silly sonofabitch's pet crackpot buzzword bingo bullshit group a collective tongue bath, personally, and in detail.

And simultaneously sparked a new trend of traditional bedrock Americans formerly willing to serve, who now see the military overall as a total waste of time, hostile and inimical to their core beliefs, and simultaneously gutted and hamstrung by its ersatz erstwhile guardians.

Have no fear: the DoD hasn't spent one red cent upgrading their National Command Authority hardware to anything nearly as sexy as any James Bond movie ever made, not when they can continue to run it on hardware that was last considered cutting-edge when the height of American automaking brought us the AMC Pacer, and disco was a thing.

Sleep tight, America.

President HopeyDopey and his crack team of Absolutely Fabulous Diversity Warriors, their eyes as always keenly focused on the most important issues facing our nation's defense, have got your back.

Just don't drop the soap.

They might find a new place to plant their flag.

BBQ, .mil style

 



Some people think grenades are better.
Not.
In order:
1) The flamethrower projects flame, which burns over there, not back at you, and keeps burning if it hits anything or anyone flammable.
While a grenade might miss a firing slit (and then bounce back towards you), missing with a few ounces of gasoline isn't a problem, because you can move the stream around until you hit the sweet spot, and the screaming inside the bunker confirms proper weapons placement. Let's see some Smartypants do that with a grenade.
2) The gasoline is almost always at 14.7psi, except when you're about to fire, when you pressure up. The nitrogen propellant tank is the pressurized one. That's the one that does the work.
If somebody throws a WP grenade on your ass, it's a problem, but at that point, whether or not you were carrying four gallons of gasoline is largely moot. The only real drawbacks are signature, weight, and limited capacity before it's empty. The plusses are that anything within range you can see is going to die a horrible flaming death.
3)A grenade goes "whump" once, and showers a few bits of shrapnel. A flamethrower shoots flaming death into bunker slits from 40 yards away, and keeps burning the ass of whomever you splooged, long after the accelerant dies out. And they helpfully scream like little girls the entire time, and flail about, giving you additional morale kills on your intended enemies, and occasionally the 'splodey things on their body like ammo and grenades provide additional secondary explosions and casualties as they cook off! Yay, ingenuity!
4) It was a de facto antitank weapon in urban combat, because you could take out multiple AFVs with the backpack equivalent of a Molotov Cocktail Launcher. I would love to see what one would do to an M1 Abrams or M2/M3 Bradley, let alone an MRAP, just for research purposes. I think it would open some eyes and shut a few mouths.
5) It's exactly the weapon we should use for firing squads for terrorists captured in wars like Iraq and A-stan.

Note the video @ 1:19

Nota bene that cultural mores are such that despite issuing hundreds to thousands of them, no one from WWII or Korea ever says "I was a flamethrower operator." NO ONE. As Col. Kurtz observed, we teach young men to drop fire on their enemies, but we won't let them write "Fuck" on their airplanes. No one wants their relatives and friends to know that their job was to fry enemy soldiers and watch them dance around on fire. It upsets people at their breakfast.

The jackassical M202A1 flame rocket launcher was an abortion of a weapon to replace the M2, another legacy of the NacNamara DoD Idiot Trust of Really Dumb Ideas. The rockets leaked, thus insuring that if you ever fired it, 70/30 you would go up in the same blast, every time, if the pyrophyric agent didn't spontaneously combust the operator and anyone nearby before use upon contact with air. The best use of that system would have been to deliver them, intact, to the enemy, in hopes they would be deployed.

It's criminal that a bunch of non-combat jackasses and multi-star pussies have relegated hella-effective weapons like Claymores, Bouncing Betties, Toe Poppers, and M2 flamethrowers to the scrap heap, but that combat troops have to wear reflective belts to go jogging. I'm surprised they haven't added a module to the M-4 that lets anyone forward of the muzzle know that a loud device is about to be employed, and to please cover their ears, just before firing ignition, and make BUD/S trainees wear arm floaties before pool training. If anyone is still active, do they still do (sanitized for your protection) jody calls when running, or do TPTB just hold a formation group hug afterwards, and award participation trophies? Buncha fucking pussies...