THE 70'S LIVE! RAINY DAY ROCKFORD FILES

 Hey, it's the 70's! I can smoke a cigarette...on TV...while driving!

After ten days of snow and rain, followed by a couple days of high wind warnings, then going back to snow and rain, I started going stir crazy not being able to do much of anything outside. So I broke down and turned on the TV.          
          Other than in the evenings with my wife, I seldom, if ever, watch TV. We have a dish, not being able to pick up any TV stations out here in the sticks otherwise, but even when I’m really bored I can’t seem to find anything worth watching while flipping through the approximately 9,432 channels available.
          In desperation one day last week, as the sleet came down horizontally against the window, I just happened to surf through the old TV series available on Netflix Instant. It wasn't looking a whole lot better than the dish. Most of the series I saw fell into the category, "Hated it when it was on, why the hell would I want to see it again?"

          Suddenly, there was James Garner's face, looking kind of cocky and bemused, an orange Pacific sunset in the background, and over it all were transposed the words The Rockford Files. Things suddenly seemed a little brighter. I sat down with the remote, picked a random episode, and started watching.

          It was kind of like catching up with an old friend. They just don’t make ‘em like that anymore. James Garner as private investigator Jim Rockford was always the epitome of cool; women wanted him and men wanted to be like him. I still love to hear that Mike Post/John Carpenter theme song with the electric guitar and harmonica. Yeah, the loud 1970’s wardrobes are appropriately cheesy, the cars are old road-oiling Detroit dinosaurs, and the haircuts atrocious, but so what? It was just as good as I recalled, perhaps even better now.

          For starters, I didn’t remember the show being so gritty. The world is out to screw you and people can’t be trusted; Jim Rockford knows this well and acts accordingly. He’s not a glamor boy; he wears cheap sports jackets and lives in a piece of shit old trailerhouse on the edge of a parking lot at the beach. Creditors and bookies fill the telephone answering machine, something that was state-of-the-art technology at the time. 
          "This is the message phone company. I see you're using our unit, now how about paying for it?"

Jim is definitely his own man. Jim is a smartass and does not play well with others. When it pays to be tough and sarcastic, Jim is tough and sarcastic. When it pays to be tactful and polite, Jim is tough and sarcastic. Even if he knows the toes he steps on today are attached to the ass he will have to kiss tomorrow, he goes right ahead and stomps on those toes anyway.

          We know Jim served time in prison, San Quentin, something unheard of for a television good guy at the time. I don’t remember the show ever coming right out and saying what he went to prison for, but we get the distinct impression it was a bum rap. Jim is more than happy to put to good use all those little cons’ tricks of the trade he learned in prison in his new profession.

Jim fought in Korea, where we get the idea he was one of those soldiers who got promoted in combat and busted as soon as his unit pulled back far enough to be out of earshot of small arms fire. Field Marshall Sir Earl Wavell once defined the ideal infantryman as “cat-burglar, gunman, and poacher” with“ a seasoning of devilry.” He was talking about guys like Jim Rockford, guys who win the war against the enemy but lose the peace against the system.
          When the beautiful young damsels in distress used to come up to good old Thomas Magnum, P.I. with fluttering eye lashes and a sob story, he used to fall for them instantly, hook, line and sinker. When one comes to Jim he immediately starts grilling her and trying to trip her up on her story to see whether the bitch is actually just trying to run some kind of con on him. Actually not a bad policy when it comes to strange women, or even not-so-strange women for that matter. My wife excepted, of course.

 Jim doesn’t trust anybody, not easily, except for his dad Rocky, a retired trucker who’d rather be fishing. Even old prison or army buddies who come to Jim for help usually don’t get much traction until they show him some cash. If it’s a check, they have to wait till it clears the bank.

 Wisely, he doesn’t even trust cops or government agents whom he doesn’t know, only his long-suffering old buddy LAPD Sgt. Dennis Becker. I’m kinda getting that way myself, when I get out of my own county where I don’t know the sheriff and most of the deputies on a first name basis. Especially in big cities. Big city and federal prosecutors often prefer “easy-to-catch” to “actually guilty” when it comes to resume building or preparing to run for office.

          The Federal agents Jim meets are sometimes crooked and almost always arrogant and overbearing. They are more than happy to overstep their bounds and step all over Jim’s Constitutional rights simply because they've gotten away with such behavior in the past. Jim is always quick and loud in reminding them of his rights, as is his attorney Beth Davenport (whom someone around here used to have a crush on when he was a pup) and I've even heard them say the "C" word right out loud. On television! Jim is also more than happy to trip up the “friendly” feds to get them out of his way and ready to figure out how to set the crooked ones up to get busted, with a little help from honest cop Dennis.

          In today’s television world, cops and government agents are expected to shit all over the Constitution in every episode. They stomp all over everybody’s Civil Rights, deliberately break every rule in the book, and get extra points for every Amendment they ignore and all the while we've been conditioned to cheer them on as they do. All is forgiven as long as you catch the bad guy in the end, even if you destroy the Republic and leave behind entire cities in cratered ruins in the process.(Just don't falsely accuse a Muslim, the one cardinal sin!)

          On the other end of things, Jim knows that the rules which the system tries to enforce upon him are bullshit. He knows damn well he’s breaking the law when he takes that little Colt .38 snubbie revolver out of the cookie jar and slips it into his waistband. And he doesn’t care. Neither does Dennis when nobody else is looking. Permit? We don' need no steenkin' permit.          
          Jim can handle a gun, but he can't shoot it out successfully against a half a dozen Mafia enforcers with sub-machine guns and chopped .30 carbines (AK-47s were restricted to use by Commie guerrillas in distant lands in the 1970's). Although I did see one episode where Producer Stephen Cannell must have been smoking a little weed; Jim takes out a guy clean at about a hundred yards with his 2-inch .38 snubbie. Hey, not even I'm that good. Maybe Chuck Norris.

          Jim’s a tough guy, but he can’t take out a half a dozen bad guys at once with perfect right crosses and roundhouse kicks in a 2-minute brawl.  In fact, Jim gets the shit kicked out of him on a fairly regular basis. When Jim fights, he fights dirty to inflict hurt on the other guy to keep that other guy from doing the same to him, which is what fights really come down to in the real world.

        Car chases were a bit more realistic in those days. Jim’s a wheel man, but doesn’t perform any flaming five hundred foot jumps through streams of tracer fire between exploding parking garages. He drives that famous gold Pontiac Firebird, and supposedly James Garner did his own driving for the show, as well as other stunts. When pursued, he’d power brake to a stop, throw it in reverse, race through the bad guys backwards, then crank the wheel hard right over and spin around. It's a real evasive driving move and we actually used to call the maneuver “whipping a Rockford”. 
          Not that Jim always got away. The pursuers were, after all, driving those big old lumbering 1970’s gas-guzzling American-made tanks, when engines were defined by horsepower rather than voltage, and people actually wanted to purchase them.
          So, the next time there's nothing good on television (which is pretty much anytime Duck Dynasty or Swamp People isn't on) time-travel back to the 70's and give ol' Jim Rockford a call. If he's not there, leave your name and message and he'll get back to you.

HAS AUSSIE JIM BEEN IN RUSSIA LATELY?

Russia’s Pulkovo Observatory: “We could be in for a cooling period that lasts 200-250 years.”

Scientists at Russia’s famous Pulkovo Observatory are convinced that the world is in for a period of global cooling.

Global warming which has been the subject of so many discussions in recent years, may give way to global cooling. According to scientists from the Pulkovo Observatory in St.Petersburg, solar activity is waning, so the average yearly temperature will begin to decline as well. Scientists from Britain and the US chime in saying that forecasts for global cooling are far from groundless.

LINKIE

IN DEFENSE OF CHECHENS

Today, we'll include a column from a very Special Guest who'll shed some light on Chechnya, a place most Americans had  never even heard of until last week.

Americans are, in general, ignorant. Especially of anything outside of America, which sometimes to them can include Alaska and Hawaii. Ignorant to to the point of stupidity and blissfully ignorant. We even have numerous large government entities, such as the Department of Education, as well as a dedicated state-run media to keep us blissfully ignorant.

Since they don't know their own history, we can hardly expect the sheeple to have any knowledge of someone else's history. Or even geographical location. Or existence. Today, I kid you not, the Czechs are frustrated as hell because Americans can't figure out the difference between "Czech" and "Chechen". If we start talking about Grozny, expect to hear lots of Americans saying, "Gesundheit" immediately afterwards.

As part of general world history, both of the places mentioned above, as well as the Korean Peninsula, India-Pakistan, parts of Africa, most of eastern Europe as well as large portions of the Middle East have seen copious amounts of blood shed over the years for various causes. For the past century or so this has been thanks in no small part to large military super powers (UK, USA, USSR) who, immediately following world wars, arrogantly and almost arbitrarily draw imaginary lines on maps to create instant nation-states which appear to conveniently suit their own foreign policy needs at the moment.

PARIS, 1919: "Hey look! Here are three separate groups of a few million people who have distinctly different cultures, are geographically isolated from one another and all hate each others guts with a passion! Let's draw a line around them all and call it Iraq!"

"Sounds good. Should we consult anyone who lives there?"

"No, that sounds like a great deal of bother and it's almost time for tea."

I caught a bit of Hannity's talk show Voice of the RNC on the truck radio yesterday while on my weekly trip to the town dump (I live an exciting life). Apparently, I'm no longer a "conservative" because, strangely, I don't believe boy bomber Tsarnaev should be tried as an "enemy combatant". He was and is an American citizen at the time of his crime, so he should be afforded all the rights of an American citizen when tried, although realistically I know that some citizens are more equal than others in our increasingly dyslexic federal criminal justice system. I just don't think foreign nationals/non-citizens should be accorded any of the same rights and "protections" of an actual American citizen, whether they are blowing up people, sneaking into the country illegally, or just getting you and I to pay for their healthcare. Hence, were big brother Tsarnaev alive he would be an "enemy combatant" as he had never gotten his citizenship. You either are one or you ain't one, simple as that.

I'm not particularly anti-Chechen either. In general, I sympathize with a smaller country seeking independence from a larger, heavily-armed neighbor.

I am anti-Islamic; I don't believe it to even remotely resemble a "Religion of Peace". By its own holy tenets it calls for conversion, enslavement, or death for all of us infidels, the "vilest of animals", whom God does not even love. Hey, if you want to go back to the Eleventh Century and treat women like meat, be my guest, just don't include me and mine in your little plans. But that's a cat we'll skin some other time.

However, I am also in total agreement with our guest and with David Kilcullen's Accidental Guerrilla theory, in that Super-powers sending troops to invade and then occupy foreign countries for years or even decades, whether under the guise of "keeping the peace", "fighting terrorism" or "installing democracy" does nothing but create more jihadists by the bushel. It doesn't matter whether you're talking T-80s and Hinds in Grozny or M1 Abrams and Apaches in Baghdad.

Even non-Muslims will get pissed off when you invade their homeland. Consider the barefoot, dirt-poor Confederate private captured after a battle in Georgia during the American Civil War. A Union officer noted that he obviously did not own slaves, and never would, so why was he fighting? "I'm fighting because you're down here." If a battalion of Pakistani troops came and occupied our town tomorrow, you can bet your ass I'd be one of the first in line to go shoot at them.

Since we'll never get national governments, let alone world governments, (and at least one major religion) to stop interfering in other country's and people's affairs, I'll finally put you into the hands of our Special Guest Columnist who can at least explain what can happen as a result of such meddling. Our guest has considerable knowledge of and has traveled extensively in Russia and many parts of the former Soviet Union both before and after the collapse of Communism there. Our guest can not only locate places like Kyrgyzstan, Tbilisi or Azerbaijan on a map, but can also correctly pronounce them. We don't don't let just anybody in here, so listen up.

I used your Christmas present to buy Gulag, by Anne Appelbaum, which I would recommend to you if you don't mind 600 pages of gruelingly depressing reading.  I was reading it at the same time that a Holocaust speaker came to Cedar Rapids, and I was struck by how much we know about the Holocaust, and how little we ever hear about the Gulags and exiles of Soviet times.  Anyhow, this leads me to your blog.

I am  afraid to post to your blog, [Probably because Ben is so mean-Ed] but I feel the Chechens in general (not the Tsarnaev brothers, who seem to be pretty much evil and sociopathic) have gotten a bad rap.  I would argue that the Russian approach to Chechnya helped turn a mostly secular national movement into a holy war with support from throughout the Muslim world.

When the Soviet Union began splitting up in 1991, the Chechens, who had never really wanted to be part of Russia or the Soviet Union used this as a chance to try to declare independence.  While the Chechens were historically Muslim, Islam in the Caucasus was traditionally a fairly tolerant and mild religion, nothing like the Wahabbis in Saudi Arabia or Taliban in Afghanistan.  During the years of Soviet rule, much of the population had become pretty secular and the leader of the independence movement was Djokhar Dudaev, a former Soviet general married to a blond Lutheran from Estonia.

During the first Chechen war in the 90s, the Russian troops were underfunded, demoralized, and ill-equipped to fight with the guerrillas. They used carpet bombing and massive aerial strikes, killing civilians and rendering cities and villages uninhabitable. There were many documented instances of Russian troops, sometimes irregulars from neighboring republics, raping women and girls and slaughtering civilians. At one point, something like 40% of the population of the country was displaced, many of them in IDP or refugee camps.   To the best of my knowledge, the first Chechen attack on a civilian target (a horrible hostage-taking at a hospital in Budyonovsk) in greater Russia didn't happen until 1995, as a way of forcing Yeltsin to negotiate more seriously.  The mistreatment of Muslims in Chechnya and Bosnia were endlessly used as propaganda to fan pan-Islamic hatred of the West and lead to calls for jihad.
The first Chechen war helped set the stage for the later terrorist acts, general lawlessness, and kidnappings and hostage-takings that have made Chechnya ungovernable until this day and spread into the rest of the region. The second Chechen war had much more of an Islamic character.  The current president, appointed by the Russian government and not elected by the Chechen people, is supposedly Muslim and is in favor of outward displays of Islam like the hijab, but has also been implicated in corruption and human rights violations.

And why were the Tsarnaevs in Kyrgyzstan?

During the 40s, virtually the entire Chechen and Ingush populations (men, women, children, elderly and invalids) were deported thousands of miles to the Kazakh, Kyrgyz and Siberian steppes, traveling in unheated cattle cars and often without food, water, or toilets. They were dumped in villages with no supplies, and with a local population that was already underfed and lacking resources, didn't share a common language, and didn't want them there. Of course, many died in transport or in exile, before finally being allowed to return to Chechnya after 1956. Many returned to find their homes and farms claimed by someone else. 

Those who stayed in Central Asia often experienced mistrust and discrimination.  Although the Kazakhs and Kyrgyz are also Muslim, the cultures don't have much in common.  During Soviet times, ethnic Russians were often favored for jobs or educational opportunities; after independence, ethnic Kyrgyz or Kazakhs had the upper hand.

So, I'm not writing this because this sad history excuses what the Tsarnaevs did, but I hate to see an entire people labeled as terrorists.  I have met only a few Chechens, but they were warm, hospitable, and deeply honorable people. 

The Battle Rifle

I made this with Bawb's devotion to the old order in mind.

 

THE TERRORISTS HAVE ALREADY WON

Coming soon to a neighborhood near you.

First accelerating after 9/11 with the Bush Administration and the odious, misnamed Patriot Act and creation of the Department of Homeland Security, and then re-doubling again with the beginning of the reign of the untouchable Barack Obama, the federal government has been usurping power, demanding money, and trampling upon American rights at an unprecedented rate. Fed.gov has dozens, nay hundreds of agencies, employing millions, a giant jumbo-sized serving of alphabet soup. Most of these agencies are supposedly tasked with keeping our citizens safe or protecting the rule of law or both, quite often redundantly via multiple agencies.

Recently, every last one of them failed us…disastrously…again.

          One of the few things the Constitution tasks specifically to the federal government is the important mission of securing our borders. They do not, sometimes through incompetence and now increasingly through malfeasance originating within the federal government itself, instigated for political gain by men and women in the highest elected offices in the country. Our borders were wide open to two Muslim “political refugees” coming from a Chechen enclave in Kyrgyzstan. Chechnya remains the hottest hotbed of Islamic terrorism in Europe; at the time the bombers emigrated, the capital city of Grozny still lay in ruins after a months-long war between jihadists and the Russian Army. Just like our borders, the doors of Cambridge University, an elite institute of “learning” barred to the vast majority of American students, swung wide open for one of the two future terrorists.

          Through the years, the terrorists couldn’t help but to leave clues concerning the direction they were taking. In various netherworlds, vast, expensive and redundant government entities look down upon us all in Orwellian fashion, listening to our conversations, monitoring our every activity on-line, seeing what we purchase, following the GPS on our automobiles, keeping track and, perhaps more importantly to them, keeping score. They constantly demand more and more access…for instance, the IRS said just weeks ago that they do not need a warrant to intercept and read your personal email…to the last remnants of personal privacy, a right of the citizen ostensively protected by the government. All of these powers failed to notice as the bombers posted YouTube videos glorifying bombings in the name of Allah or songs like “I Will Dedicate my Life to Jihad!” or links to known radical jihadist clerics. The powers that be were too busy at the time working with the military and “intelligence sources” like the SPLC to develop profiles of real terrorists, such as “Roman Catholics” or “Evangelical Christians”, to put on government watch lists.

          The Russian Army fought another war in Chechnya against jihadists, this one leaving the confines of Grozny and spreading across the entire country. The American government, press and people did not seem to notice. A Russian intelligence agency contacted the American government, voicing concerns over ties between one of the bombers and Chechen Islamic terrorist organizations.  The American FBI found nothing of concern. Afterwards, one bomber flew out of the United States to visit “Russia”, after which he disappeared into Chechnya and Dagestan. A half a year later he came back through American Customs and Immigrations, DHS, FBI, TSA, etc. to find wide open arms and no questions, even though he was still not traveling as an American citizen.

The government agency charged with alcohol, tobacco, firearms and explosives does not prosecute over 99% of the criminals caught in the act of attempting to illegally purchase firearms and knowingly allowed thousands of firearms into the hands of Mexican drug cartels where they have been used to inflict some 400+ Mexican and American deaths. It should come as no surprise that this same agency also fail to notice or prevent the terrorists from building their bombs with what a recent police report now says were “military grade” explosives.

After the bombs went off, when the première federal government law enforcement agency had identified the bombers, at first they would not release photographs of them for fear of being politically incorrect. Initially, the only description they would cautiously release was to refer to the bombers as “dark-skinned”. Perhaps had their faces and descriptions been known and released earlier, the police officer who approached them while they sought to plant more bombs at the MIT campus might have been more cautious and not been shot to death by the “boys”.

They hijacked an SUV belonging to some citizen the government obviously failed to protect and fled MIT, tossing bombs out the window, severely wounding one of the pursuing police officers. The older bother was fatally wounded by police in the chase. The younger escaped.

A major American city of some three million people is besieged, not by the bombers or by an invading army, but by the government agencies still “protecting” them. Businesses are forced to close, transportation grinds to a standstill, people are imprisoned within their own homes, again not by the bombers but by the government. An army…9,000 law enforcement agents of various types, complete with armored vehicles mounting machine guns and covered by an umbrella of helicopters…march like Gestapo through residential neighborhoods of quiet, law-abiding citizens, entering homes and conducting warrantless searches at will, or pulling entire families from their homes on a whim, with no regard for the 4^th Amendment and any of the other “safeguards” the government says will protect us. The terrorist remains at large despite the massive curfew and manhunt.

 


LiveLeak.com - Family ripped from their home at gunpoint; Police storm the property looking for terrorists

 Ooops. Sorry. Wrong number. Our bad.

When an average citizen is finally allowed by the government to leave his own house, he goes to smoke a cigarette in his own backyard and thus tracks down the lone fugitive that nine thousand heavily armed trained government professionals could not.

In response, the well-conditioned sheeple of Massachusetts cheer the government which failed them every step of the way.

If you believe now that we need still more laws, more government agencies, more government agents, more military weapons in the hands of same, more taxes to support their growth, less privacy and fewer Constitutional rights, then yes, the terrorists have already won.

WHEN BARRY MET MAGGIE

 Perhaps all this is just about the difference in leadership styles.

This really should come as no big surprise, and it was a done deal long before the emergency in Boston happened.

Obama Administration Snubs Thatcher Funeral

The decision not to send a senior Administration official such as Vice President Joe Biden or Secretary of State John Kerry dishonors the central role Lady Thatcher played in advancing freedom, democracy, and peace in the world for over a decade as the leader of the U.K. It also dishonors her important role as America’s number one ally during the Cold War.

I am not surprised by this, anyway. Among his many, many, many, many other failings, Barry O never knew jack shit about foreign policy. Perhaps the smartest thing he ever did was appoint Hillary Secretary of State so that at least someone in the administration had a pair of balls when dealing with other nations. When it comes to international savvy, Barry's own parasitic living in countries in which he may or may not have been a citizen doesn't count for much, and neither does making deals with folks of Sicilian descent to win Chicago elections.

Yet even I must give Barry credit for staunchly sticking to his guns.The four pillars upon which his foreign policy rests have remained steadfast throughout his reign. Unfortunately, those pillars are...

1. Kiss every Muslim ass he can find.
2. Insult the British.
3. Screw Israel.
4. Beg the Red Chinese for more money.

Barry has certainly been consistent in snubbing and/or insulting the British ever since the media set this Chicago turtle up there on the big white fencepost. Right away we had him tossing that bust of Winston Churchill right out of the Whitehouse (he replaced it with one of his all-time favorite British diplomat, Neville Chamberlain). Then we had the dolt giving the Queen Mum an IPod full of his own speeches. Even if she has a sleep disorder and this was meant to cure it, this was still an incredibly tacky below-white-trash level international gift. If you don't remember that, don't worry. The media was making sure you didn't notice. Here's a reminder if you need IT.

This latest snub, however, seems to go above and beyond the usual Obama ignorance of and indifference to what happens across the Pond (with the sole exception of Muslim ass kissing). Granted, I'm all old Cold-Warrior who views the Iron Lady standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Ronald Reagan and staring down the Evil Empire...and it was indeed evil. The far left, although supposedly all about women in power, always hated Margaret Thatcher. It was kind of like the Hatred of Palin Derangement Syndrome of the 1980's.

Obama's latest insult seems to go beyond the standard Leftist mindless rage of a child who didn't get his way type of hatred for Maggie and into something downright personal. I took the opportunity to peruse some of Margaret Thatcher's words and it suddenly came to me. Barry must have thought Maggie was talking about him personally! Just from these few examples, I can see why the simpleton might think that.


“The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money.”

 “Do you know that one of the great problems of our age is that we are governed by people who care more about feelings than they do about thoughts and ideas.”

 “When I'm out of politics I'm going to run a business, it'll be called rent-a-spine.”


“The process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values, and policies in search of something in which no one believes, but to which no one objects; the process of avoiding the very issues that have to be solved, merely because you cannot get agreement on the way ahead. What great cause would have been fought and won under the banner: ‘I stand for consensus?”

“Being democratic is not enough, a majority cannot turn what is wrong into right. In order to be considered truly free, countries must also have a deep love of liberty and an abiding respect for the rule of law.”

“It used to be about trying to do something. Now it's about trying to be someone.”

“Do you know, one of the greatest problems of our age is that we are governed by people who care more about feelings than they do about thoughts and ideas? Now, thoughts and ideas, that interests me.”

“The truths of the Judaic-Christian tradition, are infinitely precious, not only, as I believe, because they are true, but also because they provide the moral impulse which alone can lead to that peace, in the true meaning of the word, for which we all long. . . . There is little hope for democracy if the hearts of men and women in democratic societies cannot be touched by a call to something greater than themselves.”

...and last, but certainly not least...

        “I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand 'I have a problem, it is the government's job to cope with it!' or 'I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!'; 'I am homeless, the government must house me!' and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society?
        "There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families, and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first.
        "It is our duty to look after ourselves and then also to help look after our neighbour and life is a reciprocal business and people have got the entitlements too much in mind without the obligations.”

GUILTY UNTIL PROVEN LEFFTIST

Before the smoke even cleared from the bomb blasts at the Boston Marathon, PMSNBC “Journalist” Chris Matthews was jumping up and down on his chair emitting spittle and screaming, “Right-wing Tea-party extremists!” By the next day, the MSM was grasping at any straw to continue that hopeful speculation. “These bombs exploded where there was A) air and B) people, which our college professor self-appointed terrorism expert believes could be the hallmark of a right-wing white lone wolf racist attack!” “Just because a suspect has been arrested (one actually wasn’t yet) that does not mean he’s guilty of anything! Especially if he's a Saudi. Or person of any color other than white.” (That’s sure not how you reported the whole Richard Jewel thing, kids.) My favorite was from the Salon, practically beseeching and crying, “The perp HAS TO BE a white American male or our leftist agenda will be set back years!" At least they finally admitted they have their own leftist agenda that they've been pushing. Add that to Biden's Freudian slip about "anti-gun legislation" and you're getting dangerously close to letting some truth slip through the filters. Better get a grip, Drive-bys.

One other thing I noticed in the MSM coverage. Where was a newscaster like Dan Rather on 9/11, on the air before the blood finished pooling, accusing the President of the United States of cowardice because he wasn't on the air yet too? Instead we get someone who's too chickenshit to even say the word "terrorism" in his response, yet barely a peep from the Drive-bys on that little gem, except maybe to criticize Glen Beck for being so boorish as to criticize the Anointed One in our time of trouble. (Or any other time, for that matter.)

Even without the tragic events in Boston overshadowing the story of some nut mailing letters poisoned with ricin to Obama and a Senator, the MSM never would have let us see this picture of one Paul Kevin Curtis, who has been arrested in conjunction with the ricin letters. Not a racist right-wing Tea-party hate-monger? Not worth reporting. Come to think of it, I never really heard anything more from the media about the senders of those anthrax-tainted letters a few years ago either. I guess now I know who wasn't guilty.

I do have to admit neither word means what it meant even 25 years ago.

This is not just a one-hit wonder, either. The MSM persistently and constantly reports only what the blatantly biased talking heads want to be true to advance their socialist agenda, and they’re not gonna let any damn fool things like facts get in the way of a good narrative. Like the old Soviet-era Tass and Pravda propaganda papers, what they don’t report has become perhaps more important and revealing than what they do report. For instance, notice how they bend over backwards whenever any information that the Boston bomber(s) might be something other than white American males is uncovered.

When a lone nutcase named Jared Lee Loughner tried to kill US Representative Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona, I don’t think the last shell casing had actually hit the ground before the MSM was blaming it all personally on Sara Palin and Rush Limbaugh and pronouncing that Loughner must be the worst kind of right-wing Tea-party extremist nutcase fueled by hate-filled rhetoric scumbag you could think of. It then turned out that practically everyone who ever knew him described him in terms such as “quite Liberal”, “political radical” and “left-wing”  and his rage would, “well up at the sight of George W. Bush.” While his on-line videos rants were often incoherent, those which could be understood were decidedly left-leaning, such as burning the American flag. Rolling up their sleeves and working hard to investigate who the real Jared Loughner was, about all the super sleuths of the MSM were able to determine and report was that he was registered to vote as an Independent…(NOT A DEMOCRAT!!! You could hear them wiping their brows in relief, even in the print media.)…at the time of the shooting. Afterwards, he became an instant non-story.

Then we had looney rogue ex-cop Christopher Dorner out in the People’s Republik of Kalifornistan, a registered Democrat and a fanatical Obama worshipper, by his own admission in his “manifesto”. The manifesto also had him all but spumping on his stomach over some of the other folks he worshiped along with the Mighty O…Michelle O, Joe Biden, the Clintons, and a host of MSM talking heads. Number one on the talking head list who made this kook's leg tingle the most? You guessed it, Chris Matthews!

From the manifesto: “Chris Matthews, Joe Scarborough, Pat Harvey, Brian Williams, Soledad Obrien, Wolf Blitzer, Meredith Viera, Tavis Smiley, and Anderson Cooper, keep up the great work and follow Cronkite’s lead. I hold many of you in the same regard as Tom Brokaw and the late Peter Jennings. Cooper, stop nagging and berating your guest, they’re your (guest). Mr. Scarborough, we met at McGuire’s pub in P-cola in 2002 when I was stationed there. It was an honor conversing with you about politics, family, and life.”

Did the media go into a feeding frenzy trying to personally blame these specifically selected and named people for Dorner’s actions? Oh, hell no. Are you kidding? Since Dorner was a full-blown left-winger, they were in fact quick to censor themselves and the rest of the O-Bot Chorus completely out of the manifesto. It was 22 pages long before the MSM revealed it, but only 11 pages long afterward, with all “names removed to protect the innocent.” A far cry from holding Palin and Limbaugh personally responsible just because they dared to disagree with your Party Line. A brief hiccup of adulation and hero-worship, and the media had to make the Dorner story go away.

Did you hear that Fort Hood Terrorist (er, I mean “workplace violence instigator”) Major Nidal Hasan was a registered Democrat? Do you remember the MSM going on and on that Virginia Tech Shooter Seung-Hui Cho was also a registered Democrat who wrote hate mail to George W. Bush? How about Colorado Theater Killer James Holmes? Did you hear about him being a registered Democrat, Obama campaign worker, and Occupy Wall Street Protestor? Me neither. I just heard about his gun, which was evil incarnate, and apparently acted all by itself following mind-control rays from the NRA and Rush Limbaugh. Connecticut School Shooter Adam Lanza? Registered Democrat. Maybe that evil assault rifle took him hostage and made him shoot those kids. The inanimate object certainly seemed capable of having done so from the press coverage it got.

Looking at the self-righteous cretins who pass for journalists in this country these days, hearing the exact same instantaneous and  instinctive one-note accusation springing immediately forth in every crisis, and just from the sheer number of times they've falsely cried, "white male wolf", I would have a hard time believing it if even if that's who really turns out to be behind this whole mess in Boston.

AN ANTI-MATERIAL RIFLE BY ANY OTHER NAME

PTRD-41 anti-tank rifle. Green recoil pad sold separately.

This video has been around for quite some time now, but I happened across it again lately and took another look. The video shows a group of terrorists (we called their dads and uncles “freedom fighters” when they were shooting at Communist soldiers in the 1980’s) trying to snipe what appear to be American military Hummers with an old WWII-vintage PTRD-41 anti-tank rifle.

           Here, take a look at the clip, and enjoy the soundtrack by the hot new Saudi band Man Suffering From Excruciating Constipation. 

  
LiveLeak.com - PTRD Anti-Tank Rifle against US Armoured Vehicles in the East

After watching this video a couple of times, I checked out the comments. They were universally scathing. Most began with something like, “Well, I’ve never been in the service, or even held a real firearm, and of course I’m still a virgin and living in my mom’s basement, but I got high score on Red Orchestra (or HALO or Call of Duty) so I know that…”

Introductory statements aside, written or unwritten, the further comments on the video could then be broken down into four groups:

1.    Those guys are friggin’ idiots! Ha-ha!

2.    They are too far away! Way out of range! Ha-ha!

3.    Anti-tank rifles are old, worthless pieces of shit and can’t hurt a tank! Ha-ha!

4.    An Apache (F16, A-10, US sniper, satellite death ray, etc.) would blow their heads off in about half a second. Ha-ha!

          Last things first, never assume that just because someone wears a towel on his head that he’s an idiot. He may be evil incarnate, but he’s not necessarily stupid. These kinds of insurgents have been running circles around some of the most powerful Western conventional military forces for decades and the fact that they’re still alive and kicking in the face of overwhelming Western firepower shows they must know something.

          Comment Number Two. This all depends. What is the maximum effective range of an idiot?

          Too many American shooters, even or perhaps especially veterans, think the world ends at 300 meters. That is all the further one is trained to shoot with an M16/M4 series rifle, that is the furthest target on the qualification range and, believe it or not, you can actually miss every 300 meter target on the course and still qualify. Besides, the whole assault rifle raison d’être is that, statistically, 300 meters is all the further the infantryman should ever need to shoot.

As usual, some dumb bastards up in the Hindu Kush didn’t get the message. In Afghanistan, the US Army in Helmand Province gave the figure of 500 meters for the average engagement range there, and the British reported that the majority of their firefights with insurgents in Afghanistan occurred between 300-900 meters. The idiots (ha-ha!) had figured out they were comparatively safe from return fire if they sat back out past 400 meters and pecked away at platoon-sized or smaller Coalition infantry elements with RPGs and 7.62x54R caliber weapons such as PKM machine guns, Dragunovs sniper rifles and bolt guns.

          I’ve been fortunate enough to have been able to play with the M1 Garand, M1A, FAL and assorted military and sporting bolt-action rifles in a state where I don’t really have to go too far to find a place where I can shoot out a thousand meters. I still had that 300-meter M16 mentality in the back of my head when I started. Then I figured out those old rifles had sights graduated to ridiculous distances because they could shoot to those ridiculous distances. The FN FAL, for instance, whether inch-pattern or metric, has open sights graduated to 600 meters and the various DMR-type military-issue scopes designed for said rifle are graduated to the same range. I’m certainly no Alvin York or Carlos Hathcock but with the afore-mentioned equipment I can certainly ding man-sized targets with first shot hits all day long at 600 meters. A decent scoped M1A/M14 rifle in good hands can extend that range by a couple of hundred meters.

          In the video, with the camera zooming in and out and not being able to figure out something of known size in the shot to use for scale, I don’t know at what range these yahoos are shooting. Just by guess and by God I would say they’re well within a thousand meters, though.

          While the ambushers do exhibit numerous idiot traits, you’ll notice that they actually did place their ambush on a section of road that is A) straight and B) running directly towards them so they don’t have to factor in any lead, the biggest problem you would have at such ranges. I’ll even give them the benefit of the doubt and say they figured out the ranges ahead of time.

          Some idiots, I must acknowledge, really just are idiots. The sights on the PTRD are graduated in 100-meter increments out to 1,500 meters and, while not a Schmidt & Bender sniper scope by any means, are certainly more than sufficient for a target the size of a Hummer within a thousand meters. This particular idiot does not appear to be aware that his weapon even has sights. He just kind of looks down over the barrel and tries to walk his shots onto the target by adjusting the weapon a bit after each shot. If he knew something of marksmanship and actually set and used his sights, he might have been dangerous.

          Then again, I can’t say too much. Uncle Sugar himself taught me that the proper way to fire the Browning Ma Deuce .50-caliber machine gun, whether vehicle or tripod-mounted, is to hold the handles tight to your stomach, look out across the landscape, and try to walk your bursts onto the target after seeing where they impacted.

          Me being the pain in the ass that I am, I tried to argue that John Moses Browning was a pretty darn sharp ol’ boy and that he probably put that windage-and-elevation adjustable rear peep sight graduated to 2,600 yards on the top of his masterpiece for a reason. Both John and myself, apparently, are also idiots as I was never allowed to use that beautiful sight for any such silly purposes as aiming the weapon. It's just there for decoration, I guess. Maybe the Marines still use them.

At the other extreme from not using sights at all, many are the tales from Africa and the Balkans of insurgent types setting the rear sights of their Kalashnikovs to the maximum 1,000-meter setting since this “makes the bullet go further” and hence, quite logically, also “makes it more powerful.” Assuming a perfect sight picture, with the AK 7.62x39mm round’s rainbow trajectory, such a sight setting puts you 82 inches (damn near seven feet) high when shooting at a target 100 yards away. We won’t even add to that the tendency of all shooters, well-trained or otherwise, to fire high when under pressure.

          So, once again, it all depends upon the individual idiot whether the shots in the video are “way out of range” or not.

          Number Three. True, absolutely true. I’ll give ‘em that one flat out. The anti-tank rifle is worthless against tanks; the majority were obsolete against “modern” tanks by the end of 1940. Shooting an anti-tank rifle at some modern-day Chobham-armored behemoth like an Abrams, Leopard or Merkava is pissing in the wind and getting yourself killed doing it. Even the newer infantry fighting vehicles such as the Bradley, Warrior or Puma are well proofed against such weapons.

However, I couldn’t help but notice that the boys in  the video are not shooting at tanks.

For every main battle tank on the ground in any theater of war, there are literally dozens, possibly hundreds, of soft-skinned (we used to just call them trucks) and/or light armored vehicles tooling around. The American Army’s tooth-to-tail ratio is less than 10%...if you have a half a million men (and women, of course) deployed on the ground, only around 50,000 will be combat troops and the remaining 450,000 are support troops of various kinds. Keeping just all those people supplied is a Herculean labor; machines, with their voracious appetites for fuel especially, compound the problem exponentially, making the tank-to-truck tooth-to-tail ratio something else again.

BTW, if you actually knew what tooth-to-tail ratio meant, or were merely able to infer it from the context, you are not a big enough idiot to be Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee.

(EDITORIAL NOTE FROM BEN: Oh for Christ’s sake don’t get him started on the whole Bradley air filters in Desert Storm thing!!! This column is going to be long enough as it is!)

Anyway, all of the other non-tank vehicles mentioned above remain vulnerable to even an old-fashioned out-dated piece of crap like an anti-tank rifle, depending on the caliber.

The caliber in question here is definitely inclusive. The 14.5x114mm (.57-caliber) round, such as fired by the PTRD used by the jihadist boys in the video, is nothing to sneeze at, especially if delivered accurately by a good marksman. It has nearly twice the projectile energy of my beloved .50-caiber BMG round. The most commonly used API (Armor Piercing Incendiary) ammunition consists of a tungsten penetrator core with an incendiary compound at the base, all covered in a gliding metal jacket, and fired at a muzzle velocity of 3,300 fps. It can penetrate 30mm (1.18in) of armor plate at 500 meters…and set whatever flammable shit it contacts on fire in the process. Weapons of this caliber are still in use today the world over in the series of ZPU light anti-aircraft guns and as a turreted main gun on a wide variety of Soviet Bloc-type light armored vehicles such as the BTR and BRDM, as well as all the Red Chinese copies of same.

Top: Soviet 14.5x114mm, Bottom: American .50-BMG (12.7x99mm)

Speaking of the Communist Chinese, they are manufacturing (and happily selling to any terrorist organization with 2 yuan (roughly $28,000 US) to rub together) improved 14.5mm ammunition. Their DGJ02 version of the armor piercing discarding sabot round can penetrate 20mm (0.8in) of armor plate at 800 meters when striking at a 50-degree angle. They are also making an Armor Piercing High Explosive Incendiary round which, although primarily intended as an anti-aircraft load, can still penetrate 15mm (0.6in) of armor at 300 meters and would obviously really tear the shit out of a motor vehicle…and the people and/or supplies within…as well.

As for the PTRD, yes, it is old, it is obsolete, and it is heavy…38 pounds. Its equally old big brother, the 5-shot semiautomatic PTRS-41, weighs 46 pounds. Millions of these weapons were produced right up to the end of WWII by the Soviets; after 1945 tens of thousands were given to North Korea.

Another BTW. Did you notice the weapon itself in the video? It looks brand new; there aren’t even any scratches in the finish on the receiver. I can just imagine some bitter old Russian colonel-for-life addressing a motley-looking crowd of customers, many wearing turbans, clinging to his vodka bottle with one hand and sweeping his arm across a dimly-lit arsenal full of row after row of like-new PTRs in Commie Cosmoline somewhere in Bumfudge, Siberia, saying, “Do I hear a bid of fifty, fifty dollars apiece? Going once…going twice…”

The anti-tank rifle per se is an old and dead concept. However, when push comes to shove, it is essentially the same damn thing as our awesome new “anti material rifle”, albeit sans cool new optics and weighing a bit more. It can certainly do the same things.

As early as 1942, the Russians had already figured this out, the infantry manual of that year noting: “If no tanks and armored vehicles are present…the antitank rifles can take under fire enemy machineguns, artillery and the firing slits of bunkers and forts at a range out to 800 meters and aircraft at a range of up to 500 meters.”

During WWII, Ivan, Fritz, Tommy, Tony and Joe found all kinds of non-tank targets to engage with the anti-tank rifle…parked aircraft, sea planes, halftracks, anti-tank and artillery guns with or without armored gun shields, trucks, railroad locomotives and rolling stock, armored cars, fuel tanks, flak towers, enemy soldiers in stone buildings, sangers, or bunkers, you name it. The good soldier of any nation always finds a way to destroy what needs destroying with whatever he has at hand.

American GIs saw the need for, and then went ahead and created, heavy sniper rifles during the Korean War. Especially when the fighting stale-mated into positional warfare along the 38^th Parallel, it was quickly found that the standard American .30-06 sniper rifles did not have the ability to really reach out and touch Communist troops at long range even though the environment allowed them to be plainly seen. The failing was not so much one of the rifles…M1C/D Garands and the Marines still had some Springfields…but of their ammunition. The American military saw no need for any such silly expensive thing as accurate Match-grade ammunition for snipers. Instead they got random issue of the the standard M2 ball, which fired a flat-based 150-grain bullet with a relatively poor ballistic coefficient that generally speaking couldn't hold minute-of-ChiCom much past 600 yards and whose performance could vary wildly between ammunition lots.

To top it all off, US Army marksmanship knowledge and training was even more abysmal in the early 1950’s than it was in the 1980’s and 1990’s.

Those soldiers who actually could shoot, through no fault of the Army’s, usually pressed into service the venerable ol’ Ma Deuce Browning .50-caliber machine gun as a long-range heavy sniper rifle.  Various telescopic sights were jury-rigged to the top of the receiver. The Marine Corps’ 8x Unertl was the Holy Grail of optics to get a hold of back then since the Army only used Weaver and Lyman 2.5x scopes on their sniper rifles; 2.5x really doesn't buy you very much at ranges out there past 1,000 yards. The Ma Deuce has a selector on the backplate for semi-automatic fire. With the tripod legs firmly sand-bagged in place and the gun adjusted via the standard traverse-and-elevation wheels (1 click = 1 mil), GIs learned to pick off Chinese and North Korean soldiers at ranges out to 2,000 yards and beyond.

Browning M2 .50-caliber machine gun being used as an improvised heavy sniper rifle, Korea, 1951.

A command report from the 24^th Infantry Division, dated November 1951, was the first official comment I found on the practice.

“The .50 cal machine gun was put to a new use by elements of the 24^th Division during the month. A .50 cal machine, mounted with a telescopic sight was used as a sniping weapon. The weapon was found highly effective at ranges of up to two thousand (2000) yards. In one instance three (3) Chinese were killed and three (3) wounded at a range of sixteen hundred (1600) yards.”

While the Ma Deuce is one of the finest military weapons ever made and further proof that John Browning was a super-genius, it was never designed nor intended to be a man-portable infantry weapon.

In theory, you could get four guys together and hand out (in addition to their personal weapons and gear) a receiver (60lbs), barrel (24lbs), tripod (44lbs) and a 100-round can of ammunition (also 44lbs) and then try to chase down skinny guys in sandals across the steep and rugged Korean mountains. But at least in those days even US Army brass was smart enough to figure out that you couldn’t saddle men up with half or more of their own body weight in gear and weaponry and then expect them to run down elusive light infantry in mountainous terrain at high altitudes. We had to wait for a whole new century before the Pentagon became that disconnected from reality.

So, since the Army would obviously not be forthcoming with any, GIs began to build their own man-portable .50-caliber rifles. In Korea then-CPT Bill Brophy, a champion marksman and veteran WWII mustang infantry officer turned ordnance man, quite naturally chose a captured North Korean PTRD-41 as the basis for his heavy sniper rifle. An M2 machine gun barrel, modified bipod, a Unertl scope on a home-made mount, and a butt-stock monopod with elevation adjustments taken from a 57mm recoilless rifle completed the transformation. It was a success in the field and, when taken back to the States at a later date, out-shot all of the Army’s current and proposed sniper rifles in tests. Army officialdom expressed no further interest.

 Brophy's home-made .50-caliber PTRD heavy sniper rifle in Korea.

In Taiwan, the Nationalist and Communist Chinese were facing off across the Straits of Formosa. In those straits, two tiny sandspit islands lay 1,000 meters apart, one garrisoned by a small force of Nationalists and the other by an equally small contingent of Reds, safely out of rifle range of eachother. An American advisor and gunsmith named Ralph T. Walker found some Capture of Singapore-vintage British Boys anti-tank rifles in a dusty warehouse in Taiwan, re-barreled them with American M2 MG barrels, and machined some mounts to utilize 20x spotting scopes from Japanese WWII tanks as telescopic sights. Although not allowed to test his toys personally, Walker’s creations in the hands of the Nationalist Chinese garrison on one of the tiny islands picked off a dozen or so Red soldiers from a kilometer away before everyone learned to stay hunkered down under cover during daylight hours. Army officialdom expressed no further interest.

Back on the other side of the world, at Aberdeen Proving Grounds, Lt. Col. F.B. Conway had taken a WWII German Panzerbuchse PzB 39 anti-tank rifle and modified it with a Ma Deuce barrel with a bipod and a muzzle brake of his own design and a telescopic sight from a WWII German anti-tank cannon. This was replaced with an American Redfield 4-12x variable power rifle scope when that worthy proved capable of standing up to the .50-BMG’s recoil. In the wide open deserts of Fort Bliss, TX, Conway and his testers found their so-called “PzB .50” accurate against man-sized targets out to 1,400 yards and, at 2,800 yards, they were able to drop rounds through the window of an old adobe shack after a few sighting shots. I believe Conway had even developed a prototype Redfield ART (Automatic Ranging Telescope) which had a bullet drop compensator calibrated for the .50-caliber round’s trajectory. Army officialdom expressed no further interest.

All concerned could have done even better were it not for USGI .50-caliber M2 ball ammunition, which was mass produced for machine gun use, where a little slop was actually desired. And there was plenty of slop to go around. Conway mentioned a lot of US WWII-made .50-cal ammo which had cartridges that, when rolled across a flat surface, would click the tip of the bullet on the tabletop once per revolution. Army officialdom expressed no interest in better ammunition.

When Vietnam rolled around, Marines and GIs were back to using the Ma Deuce to snipe with at long ranges. Using the big Browning, Marine Corps sniper legend Gunny Carlos Hathcock set a record that stood for 35 years when he shot a VC weapons courier at a range of 2,500 yards or 1.4 miles. When it became available, the Starlight night vision scope was also soon found mounted atop the Ma Deuce for night time sniping. In this war, while the snipers still would have liked to have had a heavy sniper rifle, neither American equipment nor captured Communist stocks provided anything like an anti-tank rifle to use as a basis for such a weapon. Even the improvisers had to do without.

Not to worry! McNamara’s Whiz Kids and the military-industrial-congressional complex were stepping up to the plate. They used some old Canadian-made Boys anti-tank rifles to start with but instead of just chasing some threads and sticking a Ma Deuce barrel on it, they decided to go whole hog. They designed the smooth-bore .50-caliber Flechette Rifle, firing a hardened-steel sub-caliber finned dart at a muzzle velocity of 4,500 fps and capable of penetrating two inches of steel at 100 yards.

Alas, this performance was not of much use since you couldn’t really hit anything with it, the best group they ever managed to fire being six feet at 600 yards, aka 12 MOA. One minute of angle is considered the bare minimum for a sniper rifle…a Remington M24 sniper rifle that cannot put three test shots inside of 0.8 MOA is rejected outright.

At around the same time, American involvement in the Vietnam War ended, so the heavy sniper/anti-material rifle idea languished now that, you guessed it, Army officialdom expressed no further interest.

Enter a man named Ronnie Barrett down in Tennessee. Ronnie wasn’t an engineer or gunsmith or veteran sniper; he just knew a good idea when he saw it. In the early 1980’s, with one partner, blueprints for a new weapon he had dreamed up were drawn by hand on his kitchen table. The first prototypes were manufactured in Barrett’s single-stall gravel-floored garage. After  testing and modifications of the prototypes, the next weapon off the line became the Barrett Model 82A1, a recoil-operated semi-automatic heavy sniper rifle in .50-caliber BMG.

Barrett Model 82A1 in Iraq.

It saw action first with some of the famous SAS “SCUD Hunter” teams and the United States Marine Corps in Desert Storm. In the hands of a Marine sniper, one proved capable of knocking out a light armored personnel carrier at 1,100 meters using standard M8 Armor Piercing Incendiary ammunition. The US Army then adopted the Barrett under the long-winded nomenclature of M107 Heavy Special Application Scoped Rifle. The weapon was in huge demand and was soon in use by the military forces of some 30 countries around the world.

Barrett Firearms now has a state-of-art facility in Murfreesboro, TN which does $20 million worth of business per year and employs a hundred people. Hmmm. By God, now that I think about it, he single-handedly created more real permanent jobs than the $787 billion stimulus bill did.

Once one civilian "amateur" had built a better .50-caliber mousetrap, other civilian “amateurs” of the Fifty Caliber Shooters Association developed Match-grade .50-BMG ammunition to bring out the weapons’ full potential. In 1991, Skip Talbot used a MacMillan rifle and lathe-turned bronze Match ammunition to shoot a 4-1/2 inch group at 1,000 yards, or 0.45 MOA compared to the Whiz Kids’ 12 MOA.

Now that I think about it, I believe it was civilian “amateurs” rather than giant defense contractors requiring millions just in R & D who also gave us the Mk-19 40mm automatic grenade launcher that’s such an important part of our inventory.

One more argument against gun control.

At any rate, the heavy sniper or anti-material rifle was a stunning success and everybody wanted such a weapon. Today, anti-material rifles are made in twenty odd countries around the globe and fire cartridges ranging from .50-caliber to 20x110mm, as in 20mm cannon. They are lighter in weight, have effective new devices to tame recoil, are extremely accurate, and wear optics some poor bastard waiting at the gates to Moscow in the winter of 1941-1942 could never have dreamed of.

 Soviet PTRD anti-tank rifle circa 1941 (top) and Hungarian M3 Gepard anti-material rifle circa 1990 (bottom). Both fire the same 14.5x114mm round. With either weapon, the most critical performance issue remains operator headspace & timing.

But whether your rifle was built in 1941 or 2013, if it launches a 14.5mm API round and you can hit what you aim it, it really doesn’t make much damn difference. It can kill 2013 Joe just as dead as it killed 1942 Fritz.

The US Army was excited about the potential of the anti-material rifle against high-tech targets when they first got the Barrett back in the late 80's. “Given the key importance of several electronic devices (and particularly of C3 systems) it would not be surprising if target priorities eventually changed, the sniper being mainly tasked not with the elimination of selected individuals but rather with the neutralization of equipment such as microwave antennae, power generators and transformers, search guidance or C2, and so on.”

However, with the exception of short-lived conventional campaigns like Desert Storm and Iraqi Freedom, we have been fighting an enemy who doesn’t even have any of the above military hardware to target. We, on the other hand, have all kinds of cool high-tech gee-whiz stuff for him to target.

I really expect to see more of these things in the hands of jihadists the next time we go somewhere to ram our increasingly perverted form of “democracy” down somebody else's throat. In addition to two different Al Qaeda videos showing insurgents with PTRDs in Afghanistan, I found reference to the Chechens using some kind of 12.7x108mm (the Russian .50 BMG, if you will) rifle against Russian troops on two occasions.

Anti-material rifles are expensive, but this is not a big concern to insurgents. TAQ can get all the money they could ever possibly want to spend from northern Afghanistan drug lords and our good buddies the Saudis. Plus I can’t imagine countries like Iran, Red China or Azerbaijan pricing themselves out of business in selling their anti-material rifle wares to jihadists.

Not to worry. While the US Government does essentially nothing to keep jihadists from walking away with entire warehouses full of ordnance, including tens of thousands of SA-7 Grail surface-to-air missiles, and is actually still arming Al Qaeda & Friends in Syria and Libya, outlawing the .50-BMG for American citizens is very high on their priority list. I feel safer already. The question is, when civilians are no longer allowed to have firearms, who the hell is going to design our next successful infantry weapons? The military-industrial-congressional complex? The same folks who don't know what a barrel shroud is or who don't know what tooth-to-tail means? Oh boy. Can't wait. I'm just glad I'm out of the service.

As for the last point from the video, I’ll have to wait for some other time to go into why each and every infantryman in Afghanistan cannot and does not have his own personal swarm of Apaches and CAS F16s stacked up overhead just waiting to smash each and every jihadist who sticks his head above ground for more than half a second.

For those who don’t find the answer already apparent from the sarcasm alone.