#wilcox

Great Wilcox Cartoon... Becoming more relevant every hour ..

* * * * *

Stonekettle Station

Jim Wright

How about that ... speech?

Sure, let's call it a speech, not the kind of dementia-addled 19 minutes of white-knuckled bug-eating insanity that a Roman Emperor might have given after generations of inbreeding, utterly insulated from reality, and a lifetime of lead contaminated water.

A speech!

A public address. An update on the war's progress. Huzzah!

Like a sane and rational president might give. Sure, lets call it that. Why the hell not?

A great speech. Oh yes. One for the ages!

Trump says he'll end the war "shortly." Two weeks, maybe, the standard Republican Time Unit. Two weeks. Two weeks to come up with a Republican healthcare plan. Two weeks for national infrastructure legislation. Two weeks to peace and prosperity. Two weeks to Trump's new Golden Age of America!

In Republican Land, we're always just two weeks away from Making America Great Again.

Trump, a student of history, tells us the war is a big success. It's going great. So great. Like nothing no one has never seen before! Better than Vietnam! More bombs than World War I and II combined! Maybe even bigger than the Battle of Bowling Green or when the colonists took those Revolutionary War airports.

And you know that's true, because this morning oil prices are surging and the stocks are falling. But don't you worry, America, oil will come down and stocks will go up. In two weeks.

"Iran's navy is gone! Their air force is in ruins! Their leaders, most of them and the terrorist regime they led, are now dead," reports Trump, a military genius.

I, for one, am glad to hear it. No way they'll be able to reconstitute their nuclear weapons program and be just "two weeks" away from getting a bomb. Right before an American election. No way that'll happen. Again.

So, with that out of the way, we should be able to get back to those Epstein files, right? In two weeks, probably.

"We are going to hit them extremely hard over the next two to three weeks. We’re going to bring them back to the stone ages where they belong" declares Trump, the peacemaker.

Certain people deserve to live in the stone ages [sic]. Not the billionaires, of course. They're God's chosen. They deserve to live in golden towers and their own space programs and many, many tax breaks. But some people, peasants you might call them, they deserve a life of toil and mud and poverty.

Like it says in the Bible.

Also, if their navy is gone, the air force is in ruins, their leaders are dead, who then are we bombing into the Stone Age? Children? Old people? Civilians? The very same people Trump expects to rise up, overthrow their religiously fanatical leaders and build an America-loving secular society from the rubble? Those people?

I don't know. I've seen a lot of war, but I don't have an uncle who was a professor at MIT so maybe that's why I can't figure out how you bomb people into democracy.

"They're (Iran) going to want to be able to sell oil because that's all they have to try and rebuild. It will resume the flowing and the gas prices will rapidly come back down. Stock prices will rapidly go back up," says Trump, in the same dismissive confident tone as Hitler in the Bunker telling his staff how Steiner's assault will turn the tide of WWII.

And how Iran selling their oil benefits anyone but Iran and China, or opens the Strait, is left as an exercise for the listener.

Trump tells us yet again how the Strait of Hormuz isn't our problem. Let someone else take care of that mess and boy it just don't get any more Republican than that, does it? I was waiting to Trump to tell us how he'd crashed all the banks and blown up the auto industry and it was somehow our job as taxpayers to bail them out again and blame the next Democrat president for it.

You got to wonder how Trump's pal Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud feels about the Strait not being OUR problem.

"Because of the actions we have taken we are on the cusp of ending Iran's sinister threat to America and the world," Trump, an expert on sinister threats, assures us.

On the cusp.

So, haven't eliminated ALL Iran's military then, I guess. Haven't changed all of their leadership. Haven't opened the Strait. Haven't gotten ALL of their nuclear material, or any of it actually. Technically. Still some resistance. Still some fight left in them.

But we're on the cusp. The CUSP indeed.

@JonesHowDareYou :: Wilcox

* * * *

“Iran is a nation of GREAT POWER. Tremendous power. No one expected them to attack the Gulf states. We were shocked!”

-- Donald Trump, President of the United States

We were shocked.

Shocked.

Yeah. Listen: Iran has repeatedly said that if attacked, they would draw every other nation in the Gulf into the war. They've been saying this for 50 years. Literally, 50 years.

I was a war planner. And I have some extensive experience in this part of the world. The most basic OPLAN for war with Iran begins with the assumption they would attack the Gulf States and close the Strait of Hormuz.

So, as a US military commander, you would have to DELIBERATELY ignore decades of intelligence, analysis, and planning in order to be even mildly surprised at this turn of events, let alone "shocked." It's simply NOT possible that Iran's continuing strikes on its neighbors in response to US and Israeli attacks was a surprise to anyone but Trump.

But that's what happens when you fire all the experts and listen to the toadies who only tell you what you want to hear.

Wilcox Exhaust Valve Kit for M40/Millennium Mask

Designed to adapt the facepiece for use with SCBA systems by providing a spring-loaded exhalation valve to provide the proper backpressure to use a lung demand regulator.

The M40/Millennium variant is similar to the M45 version (at left) in many regards, but has several notable differences -

The main outlet housing is made of CNC machined Delrin, as opposed to injection-molded glass-filled nylon

The same is a snap-on removable design, where the M45 version would have been permanently glued in place

The primary outlet valve disk must be removed from the mask in order to use the adapter (since unlike the M45 version, it does not seal against the walls of the valve body, so it seals on the valve seat instead)

The use of machined Delrin was more than likely due to its mechanical properties making it a more suitable material for a snap-on design rather than glass-filled nylon

While the official designation refers only to the M40 Mask, there are much more of these seen on MSA Millennium facepieces. Furthermore, the position of the drink tube storage port would place it pointing straight up if installed on an M40’s outlet valve, due to the position of the outlet cover lugs and the corresponding cutouts on the adapter.

Ignoring that this arrangement would block the installation of a VPU, it’s unclear if the M40’s drinking tube would even be able to reach the adapter’s storage port, given how short the former is.

I’ll update once @mou1age and I get a chance to run down to the storage unit and grab one of our M40’s.

The only other example of the M40/Millennium Exhaust Valve Kit that I know of resides in the archives of Avon Protection’s UK Headquarters, but more presumably exist somewhere within Wilcox’s HQ as well.

Wilcox P/N 56500G02 AN/AVS-6,-9 NVG Mount

An oldschool ground-ruggedized ANVIS-specific NVG mount that predates the venerable GSGM/DPAM

I bought this one to be my personal NVG mount and thought I'd give my first impressions on all the little quirks it has:

The mount sadly does not feature a LEMO downlead for a standard ANVIS battery pack; this mount runs off a single CR123A battery in a removable, slide-out tray. There is an alternate LEMO cable adapter, but I don't have it. As such, I'll need to get myself a counterweight for any helmets I use it on.

In order to flip the goggles up, two buttons on either side of the mount need to be depressed simultaneously, but they are at least in a very convenient position over standard ANVIS mounts

Most of all, the shroud locking interface on the back is semi-integral to the mount - you aren't really meant to use this mount on anything other than Norotos-style mount geometry. However, it does work surprisingly well with AWS 2-Hole Shrouds.

Technically they are compatible with the current-day Wilcox G24 rail interface, but you need to undo two tiny hex screws on top of the mount in order to remove the default locking plate: