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José Balta’s reign as the President of Peru ended with an assassin’s bullet on July 26, 1872. So perhaps this was a fitting weapon for him to own during a dangerous age. The French gunmaker Lefaucheux, Casimer & Eugene made this unique knife that includes a pinfire revolver in the handle. It fires six 7.65 mm rounds and was presented to Balta in a case that resembles a coffin.
Link -via The Firearms Blog | Images: Rock Island Auction Company
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Veterans are returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and Traumatic Brain Injuries. That’s bad enough, but the number of veterans suffering from back injuries is much bigger. VA social worker Carroll McInroe says the strain put on the backs of young soldiers is making them into old men -and women- way before their time.
McInroe started to ask each and every vet who came through his office if they were suffering back pain. Just about all of them had pain, he says. “I would say 70 percent of them. And not just a little. I’m talking chronic stuff here — misaligned vertebrae, bulging discs, herniated discs, the whole list of back problems.” At national conventions, he would share his informal findings with his counterparts at other VA facilities. They told him much the same situation prevailed in their offices. He called around to military hospitals and asked the nurses what their most common complaint might be. Back pain, he was always told.
He saw nothing like that among his cohorts in Vietnam. Since grunts have humped heavy packs since Napoleon’s day with no resulting epidemic of back woes, McInroe believes that modern body armor is to blame. “It’s too heavy. You can’t just put 120 pounds on a 19, 20-year-old musculoskeletal system, 14 hours a day, 365 days a year and not create some real serious problems.”
And in his view, this is a real serious problem indeed. If McInroe’s estimate — that 70 percent of returning veterans have moderate to severe back problems — holds true across the nation, the costs to America’s taxpayers will be enormous, and the bill will do nothing but grow and grow over the next 50 years.
The Houston Press has an extensive article on veterans, their pain, and the problems they have getting treatment. Link -via Digg
(Image credit: Brian Stauffer)
Outside the city of Šiauliai, Lithuania, there’s an area covered with an estimated 55,000 crosses. They are memorials to Lithuanian patriots who died in campaign after campaign to free the nation from various occupying forces. The crosses have been bulldozed several times, but spring back starting immediately afterward. Read the history of this amazing memorial at Environmental Graffiti. Link -via the Presurfer
(Image credit: Flickr user Kyle Taylor)
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Take this double .45-caliber handgun to the range to attract great scorn and admiration simultaneously. To commemorate the one hundredth anniversary of John Moses Browning’s model 1911, Italian gunmaker Arsenal Firearms produced a functional movie prop. Watch a video of it at the link.
Link | Photo: Arsenal Firearms
Retronaut has a collection of World War II-era Navy posters dedicated to making sure sailors didn’t waste food. There’s a whole lot of strangeness about this one. Was there really a problem of sailors being finicky eaters? The overall message is the same one I give my kids -always eat what you need, or even eat as much as you want, but wasting food out of gluttony makes me angry. Link
Jake Wright takes surplus ordnance and turns it into household furniture. This lamp, for example, is made from a 100-pound bomb left over from the Korean War. At the link, you can find his other designs, including dummy naval rounds made into table bases.
Link -via Everyday, No Days Off
In celebration of Women’s History Month in March, Buzzfeed posted a collection of photographs of women who went to work at factories during World War II, while many men were sent overseas to fight. The pictures were taken for propaganda purposes, but the women in them were real workers. In this photo, Dorothy Cole is plating needles to be used for blood transfusions. Link
(Image credit: Howard R. Hallem/Library of Congress)
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Steampunk Nerf Sniper Rifle. Now there are some words that don’t normally go together. DeviantART member vanbangerburger modified a Nerf gun into a steampunk work of art! Imagine the confusion it will cause some future civilization when they excavate this in a few million years. Link -via Geekosystem
One Piece is officially the most successful anime series ever, so it’s no surprise that custom toy weapon builders would want to bring some of the props from this series to life. The Slingshot Channel decided to make a Kabuto, a slingshot spear, for themselves in order to test its feasibility as a deadly weapon, and the results are dangerously cool! Check out the video and decide for yourself if this bad boy belongs in your home arsenal.
–via Geeks Are Sexy
Wyoming’s legislature is considering a bill that would establish a commission to draw up a plan to prepare the state for the collapse of the United States government. Should that event ever occur, Wyoming’s government would need to act as a national government by sustaining a currency, ensuring international commerce and providing military defense among other tasks. One provision of the bill would instruct the task force to examine:
[...] conditions under which the state of Wyoming should implement a draft, raise a standing army, marine corps, navy and air force and acquire strike aircraft and an aircraft carrier.
Wait, an aircraft carrier? It’s not a completely ridiculous proposition, argues Kevin Underhill:
The state does not have a whole hell of a lot of water, to be honest. It appears that its largest lake is Yellowstone Lake, which on average is about 140 feet deep. (Yes, it’s in a national park now, but that wouldn’t matter, would it?) The draft of a Midway-class carrier, which you can probably find on eBay for cheap, was only 33 feet; even the biggest carrier available (Nimitz-class) only needs about 40 feet of water to float. So yes, assuming they could find one and figure out a way to get it in there, the people of Wyoming could potentially have their own aircraft carrier. It might not have much room to putt around in, but still.
P.S. Don’t dismiss the notion just because Wyoming is landlocked — it wouldn’t be the first landlocked nation to have a navy.
The following is an article from the newest volume of the Bathroom Reader series, Uncle John’s 24-Karat Bathroom Reader.
Even if you’re not a history buff and know very little about World War II, there is one thing about it that you do know: how it ended. But here’s a part of the story that you may not know.
INCOMING
Shortly after 8:00AM on the morning of August 6, 1945, lookouts in the mountains east of Hiroshima, Japan, spotted two American B-29 bombers flying in close formation, followed by a third B-29, a few miles back. They weren’t overly concerned. The aircraft were flying at an altitude of more than 31,000 feet, unusually high for a bombing run. The firebombing raids that had devastated more than 60 Japanese cities since March of 1945 operated at a much lower altitude and involved huge numbers of B-29s, sometimes 500 or more. The only bombers that had flown as high as these three had been on reconnaissance missions, not bombing runs.
Even when the three aircraft altered course and headed straight for Hiroshima, officials weren’t alarmed. It was common for B-29s to rendezvous near the city before heading off to bomb other targets. At this late stage of the war, fuel, ammunition, airplanes, and pilots were in desperately short supply in Japan; the military couldn’t afford to waste resources chasing just a handful of planes. The B-29s approached Hiroshima unmolested by fighter planes and anti-aircraft fire.
Two of the three planes were indeed carrying only scientific and reconnaissance equipment. But the last plane, the Enola Gay, was on one of the deadliest missions of the war. It was carrying an atomic bomb, one with an explosive power equivalent to 18,000 tons of TNT -more than 1,500 times as powerful as the British Grand Slam, the largest bomb that had ever been used in warfare. At 8:15 AM, the Enola Gay released the bomb over the city. It dropped to an altitude of 2,000 feet, and then exploded, destroying much of Hiroshima and killing an estimated 70,000 people, or 30 percent of the population. Another 70,000 would die within weeks.
Shigeyoshi Morimoto
BEARING WITNESS
Shigeyoshi Morimoto was luckier than many people in the city. The master kitemaker was in town for a secret meeting to study whether kites could be used to protect the Japanese fleet from attack by American fighter planes, and was visiting his cousin’s home about a half a mile from ground zero when the bomb went off. Ninety-five percent of the people who were that close to the bomb were killed, but Morimoto, his cousin, and his cousin’s son all survived.
“There was something like a lightning flash, and along with the flash the house collapsed and we were pinned beneath the fallen ceiling and roof,” Morimoto told interviewer Robert Trumbull in 1956. “All three of us were alive -unhurt, in fact, except for bruises from the fallen roof and ceiling of the ruined house, which kept us from being exposed to the horrible blast.” When the three dug themselves out of the rubble, they were stunned by the vastness of the destruction. Like a lot of survivors, they assumed that the blast had been nearby, perhaps caused by an exploding fuel tank or a bomb falling a few blocks away. But when they saw how widespread the damage was, they realized this was no ordinary bomb. Every building within a one-mile radius of the blast was flattened, and every building within a 4.5 square mile area was or would soon be destroyed by fire. (Many of the fires were caused by cooking stoves knocked over by the explosion.)
WHAT NEXT?
Morimoto returned to the hotel where he had been staying, to see if he could salvage any of his belongings. The hotel was badly damaged but still standing. There he found that three of his colleagues had also survived: Tsuitaro Doi, Shinji Kinoshita, and Masao Komatsu. The four men spent the night in the ruins of the hotel, and the following morning they discussed what to do next.
Tsuitaro Doi, Shinji Kinoshita, and Masao Komatsu.
By now the news of the destruction of Hiroshima had spread to the rest of Japan, but there was no way for survivors to get word out to their families that they were still alive. The bomb had knocked all telephone and telegraph lines, as well as the radio stations. The four men decided to return home, and after obtaining permission to leave the city, on the afternoon of August 8 they walked out of Hiroshima and found a train to their home city: Nagasaki.
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A
Canadian man was arrested at his children's school, hauled down to the
station and strip-searched ... all because his 4-year-old daughter drew
a picture of a gun at school:
“I’m picking up my kids and then, next thing you know, I’m locked up,” Jessie Sansone, 26, said Thursday.
“I was in shock. This is completely insane. My daughter drew a gun on a piece of paper at school.”
The school principal, police and child welfare officials, however, all stand by their actions. They said they had to investigate to determine whether there was a gun in Sansone’s house that children had access to.
“From a public safety point of view, any child drawing a picture of guns and saying there’s guns in a home would warrant some further conversation with the parents and child,” said Alison Scott, executive director of Family and Children’s Services.
Dianne Wood of The Record has the story: Link (Photo: Peter Lee/The Record)
What do you think: Over-reaction or sensible precaution?
In the first few weeks after the formal entry of the United States into World War II, many Americans on the west coast feared Japanese air and sea attacks, or even an amphibious invasion. On February 23, 1942, a Japanese submarine briefly surfaced off Ellwood, California and shelled an oil refinery there. Two days later, radar spotted an unidentified flying object approaching Los Angeles:
The varying reports of the morning’s events represent the mass confusion and paranoia of the time. Some reported there were just a few planes, while others claimed to have seen several dozen aircraft. There were even reports that planes were shot down, when in reality, nothing was hit by the AA guns—except three civilians killed and a few buildings damaged by friendly fire. Guns fired at the flying object for more than an hour between 3:15 and 4:15 a.m. on 25 February 1942.
To this day it is still uncertain what the flying object actually was, giving rise to many conspiracy theories of aliens, UFOs, and a subsequent government cover-up; but the most likely scenario is that the object was simply a rogue weather balloon.
Link -via Ace of Spades HQ | Photo (unrelated) via the National Park Service
P.S. Neatorama contributor Eddie Deezen starred in 1941, a movie about this period of World War II.
That's not a battle mug. This is a battle mug! Introducing the OPMOD Battle Mug, which has everything you need for combat libation:
The OPMOD Battle Mug is like no other mug you've seen! This massive mountain of a mug combines three Mil-Spec 1913 scope rails and a block of CNC-machined 6061 T6 billet aluminum with the capacity to hold a sizable 24 ounces of your favorite frothy beverage.
Each one is custom-engraved with its own unique serial number and includes a removable AR15 carry handle.
If you think that's ridiculous, you're obviously underestimating the thirst of real men. Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] - Thanks Brian!
Sandra Coast decided to join the U.S. Army, despite the fact that she had to lose 30 pounds for the chance, despite the fact that her son is in the Marine Corps, and despite the fact that she is 51 years old. And she passed the test: she has graduated from boot camp with the rank of Sergeant.
“I was impressed, because she can do everything the younger soldiers do,” Army 1st Sgt. John Byars said of Coast, according to the Armed Forced Press Service (AFPS). “She never expected us to feel sorry for her. She even got one of the highest Army physical fitness test scores in the company. She is a prime example that age is just a number. She ran faster than soldiers young enough to be her kids.”
Coast served in the Navy from 1982 to 1993, so she was allowed to enter military service at her age, whereas most civilians would not be eligible. “Everybody in the world thinks I am a total nutcase,” she told AFPS. “I just want to support our troops. I love all of them.”
Coast will not be sent overseas, but serve with a virtual unit that works by internet. Link -via Fark
(Image credit: U.S. Army)
Want to look at a bunch of pictures of Navy SEALS in training?
In a world where enemies who agree to wear black hats are hard to come by, the military and President Obama have begun to lean on the highly trained, whip-smart services of elite Special Forces units. While other budgets are shrinking, funding for special ops has doubled since 2001; in the same time, the numbers of deployments has quadrupled.
The photographs are sure to impress you of the rigors they endure to become part of the elite squad. And they’re, you know, kind of attractive, too. Link -via Buzzfeed
NUKEMAP, a Google Maps application by Alex Wellerstein, makes the dangers of nuclear war personal. Move the marker anywhere in the world, then select a nuclear weapon. You can choose anything from the 20 ton Davy Crockett portable missile to the 100 megaton Tsar Bomba. The latter is pictured above detonating over Lubbock, Texas.
Link -via Geekologie
You’ve probably never heard the name Basil Zaharoff, so how did he earn a biographical post subtitled “The Wickedest Man in the World”?
Few men have acquired so scandalous a reputation as did Basil Zaharoff, alias Count Zacharoff, alias Prince Zacharias Basileus Zacharoff, known to his intimates as “Zedzed.” Born in Anatolia, then part of the Ottoman Empire, perhaps in 1849, Zaharoff was a brothel tout, bigamist and arsonist, a benefactor of great universities and an intimate of royalty who reached his peak of infamy as an international arms dealer—a “merchant of death,” as his many enemies preferred it.
In his prime, Zaharoff was more than a match for the notorious Aleister Crowley in any contest to be dubbed the Wickedest Man in the World. Still remembered as the inventor of the Systeme Zaharoff—a morally bankrupt sales technique that involved a single unscrupulous arms dealer selling to both parties in a conflict he has helped to provoke—he made a fortune working as a super-salesman for Vickers, the greatest of all British private arms firms, whom he served for 30 years as “our General Representative abroad.” He expressed no objection to, and indeed seemed rather to enjoy, being referred to as “the Armaments King.”
Sources on Zaharoff’s life and exploits are varied, incomplete, and sometimes suspicious. Mike Dash of Smithsonian’s Past Imperfect blog puts together what we know -and don’t know- about the strange life of the mysterious Mr. Zedzed. Link
The following is an article from the book Uncle John’s Fast-Acting Long-Lasting Bathroom Reader.
Born into bondage, Robert Smalls rose from slavery to the Halls of Congress. In between, he helped the Union win the Civil War by doing what no black American had ever done before -he commanded a naval vessel.
AT HOME ON THE WATER
Robert Smalls was born a slave on April 5, 1839, in the coastal town of Beaufort, South Carolina. His first taste of a sailor’s life came at 12 years old when his master hired him out to work at a shipyard in Charleston Harbor. Smalls took to it, displaying a natural talent for seamanship. By 19, he had risen to the highest sea rank available to a slave: a ship’s pilot. Although Smalls could neither read nor write, his photographic memory recalled every bar, shoal, and current in Charleston Harbor.
In 1858 Smalls married another slave, Hannah Jones, and two years later they had a son, Robert, Jr. Being a respected sea pilot, Smalls life was better than that of most slaves …but he was still a slave. Longing to be his own master, he set out to buy his family’s freedom. And he almost did it -Smalls had saved $700 of the $800 purchasing price when the Civil War broke out in 1861. Then everybody’s life was put on hold.
STEALING A SHIP
The Confederate army immediately put the 22-year-old Smalls to work doing what he did best: piloting a vessel. He was given the wheel of the CSS Planter (formerly the USS Planter), a 147-foot-long steamboat. With Smalls at the helm taking order from Captain Charles Relyea, the ship hauled ordnance and supplies to the rebel forts guarding Charleston. A few miles offshore lay a fleet of blockading Union ships, and Smalls knew that freedom awaited him in that blockade. He formed a plan.
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This beautiful AR-15 by Guns & Gardens looks like the stars of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic just barfed all over it. So it’s just right for the little girl or Brony in your life. The rifle comes with a handy chainsaw bayonet for any undead issues that s/he may encounter while walking around the neighborhood.
Video Link and Official Website -via Geekosystem
In the past year, we brought you the obituaries of Frank Buckles, the last U.S. veteran of World War I and Claude Choules, the last surviving combat veteran of that war. Yesterday, the very last member of the military from the War to End All Wars passed away.
Florence Green was only 17 years old when she signed up for the Women’s Royal Air Force in 1918. She worked at the military airfields in Norfolk.
Mrs Green spent her war days working ”all hours” serving officers breakfast, lunch and dinner and would often spend time wandering the base simply ”admiring the pilots”.
Before her death she said: ”I enjoyed my time in the WRAF. There were plenty of people at the airfields where I worked and they were all very good company.
”I would work every hour God sent but I had dozens of friends on the base and we had a great deal of fun in our spare time. In many ways I had the time of my life.
”I met dozens of pilots and would go on dates. I had the opportunity to go up in one of the planes but I was scared of flying.
”It was a lovely experience and I’m very proud.”
Mrs. Green was a couple weeks short of 111 years old. Link -via reddit
As if combat isn’t scary enough, imagine a future where bullets zip around, homing in on laser guided targets and doing a deadly dance in the air, curving and rolling until they hit home.
Well, this future battlefield phenomenon isn’t that far off, because Sandia National Laboratories have created a prototype for a self guided bullet that can hit a laser designated target from over a mile away. Here’s how it works:
While in flight, the guided bullet collects information with an optical sensor and relays it to an eight bit central processing unit that controls electromagnetic actuators. You may think it’d be tough to load all this equipment onto a bullet, but the researchers say that the bullet’s diminutive size has actually made things easier. With a rocket, course adjustment is a slow, meticulous process. With the bullet, adjustments are so responsive that the guidance system can compensate for over-correction pretty easily, which gives everything a little extra wiggle room.
I hope someone creates bullet proof armor with laser targeting jammers before these suckers start flying!
Although it might seem odd to see the crossed keys of St. Peter on a gun (well, maybe not), the Popes commanded armies, off and on, until the collapse of the Papal States in 1870. This model, popularly known as the Pontifico, was a variant of the M1867 Remington.
Link -via View from the Porch | Photo: Keith Doyon
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Think you're tough? Probably not as tough as these Chinese soldiers, who played a lethal game of Hot Potato ... with live bombs!
During an exhibition drill in Hong Kong, last month, an elite garrison of 6,000 PLA troops staged a series of impressive exercises for the visit of the island’s chief executive, Sir Donald Tsang. Snipers shot tiny glasses, soldiers carried heavy logs and jumped through rings of fire, but nothing as incredible as a group of men playing a game of pass-the-bomb.
The lethal game is played by six soldiers standing in a circle with a dug whole in the middle. They pass an explosive satchel from one two another, counting down until it detonates. Just before it explodes, one of the soldiers throws it in the hole and they all leap away as the ground trembles and dirt starts flying from the pit. Any miscalculation could mean the end for all six players, but they don’t seem very intimidated by that. They just calmly pass the live satchel as if it were a simple bag.
Man, with all the innovative ways people have come up with to destroy zombies, humanity should be well prepared if we ever end up in neck deep in the walking dead!
The latest innovation comes in the form of the Doublestar Zombie X Chainsaw rail attachment-just attach it to your favorite assault rifle and get to chopping if the rotten buggers start to close in on you! Perfect for channeling your inner Gear or Space Marine, badass suit of armor not included.
Link –via Geekosystem
You’ve probably seen the ad for this underground missile base in New York state that’s been on the market for some time. Now you have a chance to take a virtual tour! Scout from Scouting New York went to the site and the owners were gracious enough to let him look around and take plenty of pictures. There’s a nice house on top, and part of the underground has been renovated for use as a modern living area. Then there are parts that recall the facility’s original use during the Cold War. Link -via the Presurfer
Legolas is alive, and he’s a Russian woman named Iza Privezenceva. Watch her send arrows downrange about once a second and, as you can see at the end of the video, hitting her target most of the time.
George Lucas’ new movie Red Tails open today, about the exploits of the unit known as the Tuskegee Airmen in World War II. Before you see it, read the real story of Tuskegee Airman Dr. Roscoe Brown.
“The most difficult part is something that the movie refers to: overcoming the negative beliefs about blacks that we couldn’t do certain things. Our training was relatively fair; however, once we went into combat, initially they didn’t want us to be in the high-responsibility positions escorting the bombers. Once they realized they were losing so many bombers, they wanted as many people as possible to escort them; we were given that mission, and we did it extremely well. Then, once people began to hear about us, they said, ‘We want those guys, they’re really good!’ We were probably as good as many of the white pilots, but many of the white pilots would leave the bombers and shoot down planes to become heroes; our commander insisted that we stay with the bombers, which is why the bombers would like seeing our Red Tails flying over them.
Brown also talks about how he came to be a pilot, some close calls, and the indignities the Airmen endured in the military. Link
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Denmark is responsible for the defense of Greenland. To serve this role over such a vast and harsh land, the Royal Danish Navy maintains Sirius, the only special forces unit in the world that travels primarily by dogsled. Photographer Fritz Hoffman joined one team on its patrol into the frozen wilderness, snapping pictures of the amazing men and dogs who keep the peace there. You can view several more at the link.
Link -via Marilyn Terrell | Fritz Hoffman’s Website
Is it inappropriate or genius? Or maybe it's both. David S. Palmer used
a torch to create portraits of people killed by a bullet, on a canvas
of bullet shells casings.
David wrote:
The materials I have chosen to use serve my purpose because of the blatant and emotionally charged response they evoke. These mediums already have a strong mental imagery that is attached to them. Around the world they are still used to either help build dreams or destroy the dreamers. My hope is that you will feel the agony and then see the miracles that can arise from choosing to create rather than destroy.
His painting of John Lennon shown above, called "Walking in the Light," used 8,000 spent shell casings. David has also drawn Tupac Shakur, Abraham Lincoln, and John F. Kennedy - all killed by gunfire.
Oddity Central has the gallery: Link | David's official website
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