Tag Archives: Suppression

News

U.S. Army unveils revolutionary XM25 rifle in Afghanistan

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HK XM25 25mm GL Airburst Rifle
HK XM25 25mm GL Airburst Rifle

Here’s the story from Fox News.

Excerpt:

Since the dawn of modern warfare, the best way to stay alive in the face of incoming fire has been to take cover behind a wall. But thanks to a game-changing “revolutionary” rifle, the U.S. Army has made that tactic dead on arrival. Now the enemy can run, but he can’t hide.

After years of development, the U.S. Army has unleashed a new weapon in Afghanistan — the XM25 Counter Defilade Target Engagement System, a high-tech rifle that can be programmed so that its 25-mm. ammunition detonates either in front of or behind a target, meaning it can be fired just above a wall before it explodes and kills the enemy.

It also has a range of roughly 2,300 feet — nearly the length of eight football fields — making it possible to fire at targets well past the range of the rifles and carbines that most soldiers carry today.

Lt. Col. Christopher Lehner, project manager for the semi-automatic, shoulder-fired weapon system for the U.S. Army’s Program Executive Office Soldier, said that the XM25’s capability alone is such a “game-changer” that it’ll lead to new ways of fighting on the battlefield, beginning this month in Afghanistan.

“With this weapon system, we take away cover from [enemy targets] forever,” Lehner told FoxNews.com on Wednesday. “Tactics are going to have to be rewritten. The only thing we can see [enemies] being able to do is run away.”

[…]Lehner said the first XM25s were distributed to combat units in Afghanistan this month. The 12-pound, 29-inch system, which was designed by Minnesota’s Alliant Techsystems, costs up to $35,000 per unit and, while highly sophisticated, is so easy to use that soldiers become proficient within minutes.

“That’s how intuitively easy it is, even though it’s high-tech,” Lehner said. “All a soldier needs to know how to do is laze the target. It decimates anything within its lethal radius.”

Sample usage:

A potential battlefield scenario, according to Army officials, might go something like this:

— A patrol encounters an enemy combatant in a walled Afghan village who fires an AK-47 intermittently from behind cover, exposing himself only for a brief second to fire.

— The patrol’s leader calls for the XM25 gunman, who uses the weapon’s laser range finder to calculate the distance to the target.

— He then uses an incremental button located near the trigger to add 1 meter to the round’s distance, since the enemy is hiding behind a wall.

— The round is fired, and it explodes with a blast comparable to a hand grenade past the wall and above the enemy.

Video:

It is laser-guided. You know how you can’t hit the broad side of a barn with an underslung M203 grenade launcher past a hundred yards? Yeah, well this thing is laser-guided. Laser-guided grenade launcher. Semi-automatic laser-guided grenade launcher!

You don’t even have to do standard 4F military tactics (Find, Fix, Flank, Finish). (Not to be confused with Patricia Churchland’s 4Fs of evolutionary theory – feeding, fighting, fleeing and reproducing). You can just explode a grenade right over their heads!

Made by Heckler & Koch, naturally. By the way, I fired an HK USP9 recently on my annual trip to the firing range. It rocked! Unfortunately they did NOT allow me to try the HK CAWS or the caseless HK G11. Phooey!

You can see more H&K stuff here.

Now if we could only scrap the JSF and revive the F-22, I would be much happier and safer.

Next story: U.S. Navy unveils new electromagnetic rail gun weapon system.

News

Church loses charitable status for speaking out on abortion and homosexuality

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Story from the National Post.

Excerpt:

A Calgary church has lost its charitable status in part because it spends too much of its time advocating on social issues such as abortion and marriage.

In October, the Kings Glory Fellowship Association, a non-denominational Protestant group, was told by the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) that for several reasons, including a lack of clarity on how it spends it money, they could no longer issue charitable receipts.

But the letter highlighted that the group spent more than 10% of its time on “non-partisan political activities and therefore strayed into activities “outside its stated purpose.”

“We note … the members of the Board of Directors espouse strong negative vies about sensitive and controversial issues, which may also be viewed as political, such as abortion, homosexuality, divorce, etc.”

The CRA allows charitable organizations to spend some time on “political activities,” but the cutoff is 10%. A spokesman for the CRA was not immediately available to explain how the percentage of time a group spends on non-charitable works is determined.

Artur Pawlowski, the head of the Kings Glory Fellowship, said his group “has nothing to do with politics and we do not advertise for a party or a candidate. The only political activity you can connect us to is defending our right to speak.”

Mr. Pawlowski said the primary mission of his church is to feed homeless people. He said this group supplies food for about 150,000 a year, mainly to people “that no one else wants to deal with.”

“When we feed people we don’t care whether they are homosexuals or have had abortions or been divorced but we preach what the Bible says about those issues.”

This whole article is worth reading. I should note that Calgary is the most conservative city in Canada, but the CRA is a federal agency, which is filled with secular leftists who have no place in their worldview view for a right to free speech. Another reason why Canada is no longer ranked as one of the freest countries in the world for religious liberty.

UPDATE: We have a hate crimes bill in the United States so that certain things cannot be discussed, however civilly, in a public forum. There may be nothing wrong with your comment but even expressing disagreement with certain points of view is dangerous. If you take the view of the government on certain moral issues, then no would can respond to you. If you disagree with the government on certain moral issues, then you’re in trouble. So we just can’t discuss these things here, which I think was the real point of the hate crimes law.

Commentary

Climategate e-mails recall tactics used by Darwinists to stifle dissent

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Dr. Stephen C. Meyer, writing in Human Events.

Excerpt:

There have been parallels cases where e-mail traffic was released showing Darwinian scientists displaying the same contempt for fair play and academic openness as we see now in the climate emails. One instance involved a distinguished astrophysicist at Iowa State University, Guillermo Gonzalez, who broke ranks with colleagues in his department over the issue of intelligent design in cosmology. Released under the Iowa Open Records Act, e-mails from his fellow scientists at ISU showed how his department conspired against him, denying Dr. Gonzales tenure as retribution for his views.

To me, the most poignant correspondence emerging from CRU e-mails involves discussion about punishing a particular editor at a peer-reviewed journal who was defying the orthodox establishment by publishing skeptical research.

In 2004, a peer-reviewed biology journal at the Smithsonian Institution published a technical essay of mine presenting a case for intelligent design. Colleagues of the journal’s editor, an evolutionary biologist, responded by taking away his office, his keys and his access to specimens, placing him under a hostile supervisor and spreading disinformation about him. Ultimately, he was demoted, prompting an investigation of the Smithsonian by the U.S. Office of Special Counsel.

Global warming alarmism and Darwinism are two sides of the same coin. The former is embraced to achieve socialism, the later is embraced to achieve secularism, which leads to moral relativism. Neither is true, so neither is interested in authentic scientific inquiry nor open-minded debates with dissenters. Non-theists don’t have a worldview that rationally justifies the moral requirements of scientific inquiry, so for them science is just something to be twisted to support hedonism.