Raconteur Report

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.

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.

(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.

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...