Now look here, you lot. It's all very well to get out in the field with a rigful of weaponry, well done, but here's the thing. After the shoot you have to clean the guns because if you don't they don't work, and if they don't work what use are they?
Caveat in mind I set to work on the front porch, starting with shotguns. Some people think shotguns don't need to be cleaned and that's an error, they do have to be cleaned otherwise they turn into filthy, rusty, seized up, malfunctioning beasts.
Perhaps you've been there. You're out in the country on a shoot and guess what, your friend's miserable gun, typically a pump which someone's been too idle to look after, won't feed or eject. Utterly useless except as some kind of club.
Still, some weapons are easier to keep in good order than others. The AR 15, for example, is annoyingly fixy, there's all these little bits which get filthy dirty because of the wretched thing's direct impingement system, annoying.
On the other hand, the gas piston system of, say, a ChiCom SKS is simpler, runs cleaner and I seem to remember the same held true with the FN. Mind you, we had to polish those things to the extent of harming the rifle itself, same with gas masks. You can bull a gas mask? you ask in bemused consternation. Yes, yes you can. I tell you, they shone like glass.
Some say they're more accurate than their semi brethren, and that's as maybe. But one thing's for sure, they're easy to look after. Remove bolt. Clean bolt. Run rods and patches through the barrel, replace bolt, oil the whole thing up and there you go, easy.
Then, job well done, sit back on the porch and watch lightning flash across the sky. Draw the moral of this cautionary tale as you will.
#2A,
LSP
The Masses went well at the Missions yesterday as we celebrated our Lord's entrance into Jerusalem and there it is, Palm Sunday, the gateway to Holy Week. The first part of the liturgy, with its blessing of palms and procession is jubilant, hosanna! Salvation rides into Jerusalem in fulfillment of prophecy to establish his sovereignty in the Holy City.
I always feel this part of the liturgy, with its victorious joy, has the feel and tenor of Easter but the mood swiftly shifts to Good Friday as we hear the awful story of the Passion. Judas' betrayal and suicide, the weakness of Pilate, the mockery of Herod and his degenerate court, the brutality of the soldiery, the wickedness of the High Priests, and the torture and execution of Christ. Hosanna! has moved to Crucify! But note this.
Even the demons and the people they drive are forced to acknowledge Christ's kingship, in derision for sure but they do so nonetheless. Jesus is given a royal robe, imagine the sneers, a reed for a scepter, he's crowned, but with thorns, and his throne is a cross at the top of which reads a sign, Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.
Even Hell in its twisted scorn calls Christ a king but the moment of Satan's seeming victory turns to utter defeat as Jesus rises triumphant from the grave, turning the Devil's mockery into the glorious regalia of kingship over death and Hell itself.
So we find ourselves back at the beginning, at Jesus' entrance into Jerusalem. If the crowds had known the unfathomable extent of his sovereignty they would have cried out all the louder, for the Savior had indeed arrived.
He rides to us now, today, into the Jerusalem of our souls. Meet him with joy, spreading the garments and palm of our lives before him as we follow the King in humble repentance to the Cross so that in dying to sin we too, in Christ, will rise to everlasting life.
INRI,
LSP
Two soldiers walked through the door last night and I sent them off into the wild with shotguns and an SKS. They did well, apparently, and today we went out for a shoot. First up, shotguns, a no-name O/U 12 and a CZ SxS. Two guns up on one thrower, how'd it go?
A slow start because everyone was rusty and then we moved into the zone, smoking those clays like so many F 190s over Falaise, result. Next up? An Anderson 7.62 x 39, AR platform, Sov bullets, and it failed to fire TulAmmo consistently. Perhaps a primer issue because the beast shot fine with Federal brass, nice little barker.
Tellingly, a ChiCom SKS swallowed up some nasty TulAmmo like it was going out of fashion, which is good because the cheap and dirty rounds are just that, cheap. Big fun and time to move on from Warsaw Pact tomfoolery to 7.62 NATO. After a few ranging shots we discovered the rifle was pretty much on and lined it up against Tannerite. BOOM, more of that please.
The shoot finished with my eldest's Glock 45 9 and it was pleasing to see my amateur gunsmithery worked out, the RDS didn't fly off, in fact the system performed surprisingly well in the hands of the soldiers. Me? Not bad but not up to their level, rusty you see.
And that was that, a great shoot under a clear blue Texan sky and I was genuinely impressed by the marksmanship of the young 'uns. They shoot front on, curiously and hey, the stance works. The Tannerite was cool too. More. please.
#2A,
LSP
You never know what our Old Enemy the Weather will throw at you. Today it launched rain and for a time the heavens opened and there it was, sky water, beautiful. In the midst of it all a call came through, "Padre, can you help load up some shelves for the food bank?"
Sure I could and did, especially as it was right across the way from the Compound. Lo and behold, this good deed came with an unexpected benefit, as is so often the case, notably a set of medium sized bookshelves, "All yours, LSP."
Good, I needed these because of a recent influx of books from my dad's library. He was a a bibliophile and we've only just, after a decade, got around to moving the books from Dallas to the Compound. Net result? Many boxes of books on the floor of a guest room waiting to be shelved, a nightmare of unfinished business.
But after a few shelvish hours it was nightmare over and books off the floor, what an affordable result. In the meanwhile, the climate had changed too, bizarrely, our enemy is so unpredictable, and the sun shone from a clear, big, blue Texan sky.
Where is the dog? I asked myself. Downstairs, on the porch, in the bathroom, in a guestroom, in my room, going den behind the couch? No, none of these, Blue Veteran was nowhere to be found. So I climbed in the rig and drove around the area looking for the pup, and found him a couple of blocks away, grinning like a dog.
He was happy to be lifted into the truck and happier still for the adventure of it all. OK, he's an old dog, blind and deaf, but he still enjoys life. I feel I should take him out to the range to roam about and feel free, he'd like that. Is this overly sentimental?
On topic, do you think that those who read and keep libraries will be the kernel of civilization when our current demonic babel implodes?
LSP
Here we go now, looks like President Trump's been indicted.
Does that make him the undisputed warlord of Manhattan?
More seriously, will it, they/them be brought to justice? Don't hold your breath.
Your Old Pal,
LSP
Tucker Carlson got fierce with the increasingly violent trans craze last night, accusing it of being Christianity's "natural enemy":
The trans movement is the mirror image of Christianity, and therefore its natural enemy.
In Christianity, the price of admission is admitting that you’re not God. Christians openly concede that they have no real power over anything, and for that matter, very little personal virtue. They will tell you to your face that they are sinful and helpless and basically absurd. They’re not embarrassed about any of this. They brag about it. “That saved a wretch like me,” goes the most famous Christian hymn ever written in English.
The trans movement takes the opposite view. Trans ideology claims dominion over nature itself. We can change the identity we were born with, they will tell you with wild eyed certainty. Christians can never agree with the statement because these are powers they believe God alone possesses.
That unwillingness to agree, that failure to acknowledge a trans person’s dominion over nature, incites and enrages some in the trans community. People who believe they are God can’t stand to be reminded that they’re not.
So, Christianity and transgender orthodoxy are wholly incompatible theologies. They can never be reconciled. They are on a collision course with each other. One side is likely to draw blood before the other side. That’s what we concluded last week.
He has a point, there's Promethean or Luciferian pride at work in an ideology which thinks it has power to recreate nature, even to the absurd point of claiming a person has godlike ability to change their identity as a man or a woman. It goes without saying that such infernal pride admits no rivals, "No Gods, No Masters!" raged Margaret Sanger in 1917.
Her spiritual heirs are still raging, and no wonder transgenderism is championed by the Left. It's sacramental to them, an outward and visible sign of revolutionary power over the self without constraint. That this anti-sacrament's not very convincing to the eye or biology itself, seems to have gone strangely unnoticed; the Devil has a way of cheating his own. Tucker concludes:
Yesterday’s massacre did not happen because of lax gun laws. Yesterday’s massacre happened because of a deranged and demonic ideology that is infecting this country with the encouragement of people like Joe Biden. Let’s start by being honest about that.
Right on,
LSP
You take a day off from mind blogging and what happens? A transsexual shoots up a Christian elementary school in Nashville. Audrey Hale, 28, who identified as a man, killed three children and three adult members of staff before being shot by police. This is the fourth transsexual mass shooting since 2018.
In November of 2018, Snochia Moseley, a man who identified as a woman, wounded three and killed three after opening fire at his place of employment in Aberdeen, Maryland.In May of 2019, a Colorado woman who identified as male shot up a school, killing one and wounding eight.In November of 2022, a Colorado man who shot up a gay nightclub, killing five and wounding 18, was identified as transsexual.On Monday, 28-year-old Audrey Elizabeth Hale, a woman who identified as a man, entered a Nashville Christian elementary school with a firearm. She murdered three adult staffers and three nine-year-old children.
All you tank heads may have noticed Russia's been pulling Cold War relic T 55s out of storage and sending them, apparently, to the front. Will they be upgraded with thermal sights and reactive armor? Who knows but we do know this.
The T55 is the most-produced tank in history, with >96,000 made, of which Russia has approximately 2,800. The tank features a 100 mm gun (rifled), as opposed to the 125 mm smoothbores employed on later tanks. According to the appalling Wikipedia:
The T-54/55 tanks are mechanically simple and robust. They are very simple to operate compared to Western tanks, and do not require a high level of training or education in their crewmen. The T-54/55 is a relatively small main battle tank, presenting a smaller target for its opponents to hit. The tanks have good mobility thanks to their relatively light weight (which permits easy transport by rail or flatbed truck and allows crossing of lighter bridges), wide tracks (which give lower ground pressure and hence good mobility on soft ground), a good cold-weather start-up system and a snorkel that allows river crossings.
All well and good, against Pattons or Centurions, but what about now? A German combat engineer fighting with the Ukrainians has this to say, (worth the click) in sum:
The Russians have changed their tactics and increasingly use tanks for indirect fire (out of line of sight), effectively turning their armor into assault guns/mechanized howitzers. And more tellingly, "In my opinion there is no obsolete weapon as long as you use them tactically."
For example, the trebuchet artillery system was maximal Medieval tech and it's so outdated now. But imagine a battery of those catapults raining down flaming hell on, say, Mexia when every modern, chip driven gun has been taken out along with GPS and satellites themselves. Fearsome prospect and perhaps a presage of things to come. Hi-tech ineluctably to lo-tech, sort of thing.
In the meanwhile, Russia has a fair few T55s and vast stores of Soviet era 100 mm. It'd be foolish, surely, for them to ignore such resource. Speaking of which, Europe has disarmed itself and has few tanks, old or new, much less ammo. But that's OK, 'coz America's their Army. Until it isn't.
Panzers roll,
LSP
