One of the most amazing mistakes that Brett Kimberlin has made in his failed campaign of brass knuckles reputation management was recruiting Bill Schmalfeldt as one of his PR flacks. In addition to being ineffective at promoting Team Kimberlin’s interest, Schmalfeldt has been the source of much of the pointage, laughery, and mockification directed at Kimberlin and his minions. A Derp Brain Photo included in a post six years ago has been one of my favorite examples of Schmalfeldt unforced errors.
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Cabin Boy Bill’s bio says he served during the Viet Nam era as Navy Medical Corpsman and that he did a tour with a Marine Corps unit. Based on that, I assume that he would have qualified with the M16 rifle and that he should still retain at least a passing familiarity with it and the Marines’ standards of safe gun handling.
Schmalfeldt has spent the past couple of days whining about an unfairly cropped photo which he says unjustly portrays him as “crazed and evil.” This image is an unedited copy of one he posted at Breitbart Unmasked.
The Four Rules of Gun Safety (as stated by Lt. Col. Jeff Cooper, USMC Ret.) are
1. All firearms are always handled as if they were loaded.
2. Never point a firearm at anything you are unwilling to destroy.
3. Keep your finger off the trigger until the sights are aligned on the target.
4. Be sure of your target.
This picture shows the Cabin Boy violating all four at once.
The picture clearly shows that Bill Schmalfeldt is irresponsible. The Gentle Reader may form his own opinions about “crazed” or “evil.”
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The Cabin Boy™ claimed that the rifle belonged to his step son. If that’s the case, Schmalfeldt was probably breaking the law when that picture was taken. The rifle appears to have a 30-round magazine, and at the time the picture was taken, the maximum legal magazine capacity in Maryland was 20 rounds. While the step son may have bought the magazine while it was still legal and his possession of it might have been grandfathered in, it was not legal for the Cabin Boy™ to have it in his possession.
The Eagle Nebula (aka Messier 16 or M16) contains the young star cluster NGC 6611 and the star-forming region known as the Pillars of Creation. This new composite image shows the region around the Pillars. It combines X-ray data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory with Hubble Space Telescope optical data. The optical image, taken with filters to emphasize the interstellar gas and dust, shows dusty brown nebula immersed in a blue-green haze with a few stars showing up as pink dots. The Chandra data shows X-rays from star’s hot outer atmospheres. Low, medium, and high-energy X-ray data are colored red, green, and blue, respectively.
