Donward

Alternate Title to this thread.
 
Masonic Fraternal Police Have A Hard Job.

This is called a pretext prosecution and is based upon selective arrests and a scientific measurement of human behavior known as psychographics.  Done right it is a god send for getting bad guys put away.  Done wrong and it is a racist trap that does little to stop crime.
 
However, just arresting people is not the only answer.  Here is my own story.  Not exciting Miami Vice stuff, undercover is not what you think - it is mostly buying drugs or letting chicken heads come on to you.  You do get a good understanding of the world though.
 
Drive someday into Bluff Estates, a blighted black community in Columbia, South Carolina.  When you drive in there will be three or four school age children not in school near the entrance.  They are the drug lookouts.  Their mothers get 20 bucks a day or so in drugs to rent their kids out to yell about police.  If you are in civilian clothes, and fit a profile, they won't yell, but maybe the old lady two doors down makes a call.
 
You are now on borrowed time.  If they make you as a cop you are safe, except people will stand out and yell at you, and they will have their kids run in front of your car hoping you will hit one.  If not then you are probably buying. 
 
As a drug user you take your life into your hands each day you buy.  You either buy from a friend with low risk but with a jacked up price, or you go to Bluff estates where the stuff is cheap but where you might draw the wrong attention and make someone decide you are better off dead.  
 
The first thing you realize about the neighborhood is - no older men.  You have very old men, and boys, but nothing in between.  
 
To understand why this is so weird you have to drive through an impoverished neighborhood where drugs are not a major issue, and they exist. These communities form around 30-40 year old men who are often veterans and usually hard working and blue collar, who provide cultural glue to the younger men.  Younger men are often unemployed, but take day work.  Criminal activity is part of the southern black experience, but black communities draw pretty serious lines between property crime and outright violence.  Beat your wife and ten guys from the neighborhood will come by and talk with you often lead by the pastor of the church. No one, even in the honest communities, talks to the police, but everything in the community is public knowledge.  Older black women are placed on a high pedestal, and motherhood is the route to respectability.  This is not a white suburban community but it works - and if the issue of educational access and job access would be solved, then these communities easily become middle class.
 
Bluff Estates though has no young men.  In the past decade forty are dead.  Four hundred are in prison, half never to return.  There is no statistics for fathers raising children because none are - most children meet their "baby daddies" when they are themselves first incarcerated.  Unlike the poor black community I described above, this one has most women having babies before they are 15 because literally, their men will be dead or in prison soon afterwards.  And addiction runs 50%.  
 
So I drive to the back of Bluff Estates, to a house where twenty men stand.  Only they are not men.  There are 10 old men - 50 plus, and 20 boys, and maybe two men around 20.  The kids are jumped in at 15 after having worked as lookouts.  Several of the kids will be carriers - they will have the guns - the young men never touch drugs or guns.  You look the kids over closely because the week before you had a kid accidentally shoot himself in the leg with a gun and bleed out.  The month before a kid was proving how fearless he was - on video he racked the slide of a Tec-9 he was told to hold, ejected the magazine to make sure it was empty, and then put the gun under his chin and laughing pulled the trigger.  People called it a "malfunction" of the gun and tried to make a case to sue the company that made the gun, but I argue it did exactly what it was told to do.  The gun was purchased by the girlfriend of a drug dealer - most of the weapons are stolen or are straw purchases but the DA is under pressure from the NRA not to prosecute straw purchase deaths, so it won't be a prosecution.  At the local NRA meeting I argue for a change of policy, but everyone is worried that it may happen to them so no prosecution for the gun buyer.
 
There is three cars in front of the drug  house in front of me, about normal - the drug sales is like McDonalds and Bluff Estates has only two entrances, so people tend to queue up.  I am buying an eight today which is five old twenty dollar bills.  If they are new from the bank you may get your ass beat - so be careful about that.  I run my twenties through a washing machine after signing them out because that mistake will get you dead.  You are not suppose to buy with a gun on you, but I have a MAS49 in my trunk and a GP 35 under the seat.  That way if I have to defend myself the department can deny they sent me in, because officially I am not cleared for the work, but the crew at Bluff estates knows all the full-timers so a lot of undercover is done with constables and deputies with part-time tickets.
 
An old guy comes up and I hand him $100.  He puts up five fingers, which means five twenties - everyone does it different but you learn how your dealer works.  If he puts up anything else I will get mad because I am a junky after all and if I let him cheat me to easily I will be in trouble.  He does not because if they think he held out on them they will kick his ass.
 
I drive down the street and a kid runs out with two tweens in a zip lock for me.  It is usually yellowish rock.  I smell it - it needs to smell acid.  If it smells base then I will flip my shit because they are treating me like some college kid and I am dressed like a chubby redneck in a wife beater which I have stained with motor oil.  White guys buying direct are either country or college, and I do not look college.  
 
One of those five twenties will go into the pocket of one of the young guys, and we will have PC to get him, usually in a traffic stop.  He will almost always have a small amount of drugs on him, and a gun.  He is the kingpin of Bluff Estates but we end up only getting him on a weapons and a drug charge.  However we get him, ignore the old guys and the kids.

Having had hundreds - if not thousands - of these games where I do incredible amounts of damage and spot the entire enemy team, while your team crumbles about you, the reason you're getting such a great score isn't because you are necessarily the best player ever (although you are good Ulric) it's just that there's no one else on the team to compete with you in farming damage. If you kill 8, 9, 10 enemies in the match its because the rest of your team is terrible and unable to put a cursor on a red tank, wait for the circle to get small and press the mouse button. 
 
Having watched replays that guys post on General Discussion, a lot of times (not all) the guys who are doing great damage are the ones who lost the game because they camped to begin the match, aren't supporting a team's push, aren't using their tank's armor and hit points to absorb damage, are off on the wrong part of the map or whatever. 
 
With all that, I've come to the conclusion having played 98-99 percent of my games solo-pub, you are guaranteed to lose at least 1/3 of your matches. It's kind of like baseball. The issue is, one doesn't know which 1/3 of those matches they will lose so you have to play them all the same.

Part of the problem with marijuana is that we have a lot of highly functional individuals who are able to use it and it doesn't really effect their ability to hold a job or be a grown up human being. Some of my friends smoke pot, hold down higher paying jobs than I'll ever hope to have and are able to manage to get by. Now there are certain unfortunate side effects that I've noticed in their behavior while high (namely they never fucking stop talking about how great pot is and how it's the answer to all of society's ills) but hey, it takes all sorts to make a world. And as I've mentioned, I have no real problem with marijuana possession by grown ups, per say, just so long as they aren't smoking it in public and that they're not doing it in a way that causes them to need society's safety net.
 
But to me there seems to be a bit of projection by individuals who themselves are able to partake of marijuana's benefits and assuming everyone can hold their liquor, so to speak, just like there are highly functioning alcoholics who are able to get along in life in a fairly proficient manner while being constantly drunk.
 
The issue isn't smoking pot. The issue is the criminal activity surrounding the use of pot. Criminals like to smoke pot. Criminals will do all manner of activities in order to get the money necessary to buy or steal pot. And criminals don't want to work a 9 to 5 in order to buy pot, they're going to take the easiest road to do so.
 
Since the legalization of marijuana in Washington state, we have seen a very noticeable uptick in property crimes since the passage of I-502 in November of 2012 and very noticeable changes in neighborhoods where the sort who would smash a car window to steal stuff in order to get high congregate. I'm a local so when I visit Pioneer Square or the International District or Capital Hill and see people who look like extras from the Walking Dead eyeing you up to see what they can get off of you, you know things have changed in your old hometown.
 
So while hipsters and software engineers and rich, old hippies are digging the chance to get high with no consequences, there has been an influx of the criminal element who also are coming to Washington state to steal shit from hipsters, software engineers and old hippies in order to get high with no consequences. 
 
In the old days the standard practice would be a pair of police officers respond to a scene where a criminal complaint takes place. Maybe a pimp has beat up his ho. Maybe someone did a smash and grab. Or whatever. While proving criminal intent of a known badguy and gangmember who has beat up his girlfriend and kids is difficult, the fact that he was in possession of drugs or paraphernalia wasn't when he was frisked by the cops isn't.
 
And since police and prosecutors offices don't have the time and money to arrest, indict, prosecute and convict individuals who commit property crime, someone has to come up with a way in order to do so the hard way.

So you could cut your prison population by 20-25% solely by decriminalising trafficking?
 
Depends on what you mean by trafficking.  No one in their right mind is considering decimalizing cocaine.  All of the talk is marijuana and simple possession of other substances.  25% might be high, but it might not.  It would certainly reduce prison populations for people serving under 60 days.
 
 
How many of these crimes are trafficking, possession or similar?
 
Possession and trafficking come out to 75/25 split for convictions.  However these numbers are soft.  Nearly every person we catch with a kilogram of cocaine claims it is for personal use, while a lot of people get caught selling dimes to friends in their frat house because they are congenitally stupid.  Plus a lot of captures are mules.  Plus possession is rarely prosecuted to its fullest while trafficking related to organized crime is prosecuted to its fullest and then some.  So a problem everyone has is finding out what the numbers mean.  
 
One of my students OD and died a few years back and I decided to get his family answers (at their request) that no police agency would.  The kid had purchased drugs from a man in Yakima, who received them from a connection in the local Hispanic gang.  They got the drugs by capturing the children of immigrants in Mexico and torturing them until the men agreed to mule for them, then holding them in camps.  From there I had no way to trace it further but those gangs actually have close connections with South American governments who support trafficking through Central America - that is published and not personal knowledge.  The amount of culpability in the system is variable, some of the people in the main supply have no culpability, but if caught will spend two decades in jail.  
 
Again, it seems like just, you know, not bothering to prosecute or lock people up for having or transporting drugs in the US would cut the total prison population by an enormous amount. Given that this would also make it much cheaper to get high (reducing second-order things like robbery), I can't really see a downside. I mean, it's not like the current approach seems to be doing much to stop people from becoming addicts in the first place.
 
You are right and wrong I think.  We can selectively decriminalize possession of a wide range of narcotics.  I even put forward an idea to the Washington Legislature that addicted people could apply for and receive a card permitted them to purchase and use narcotics, but which would also prevent their ownership of guns, automobiles, living with children under 15, entering a school or park, or holding license for some jobs.  We do something similar with people who are insane, and for nonviolent sex offenders who are under court mandated treatment.
 
The main objections to all of this come from the basic foundation of the United States legal system.  The first is that people who use narcotics cause a lot of damage in society.  That damage must be paid for either by the person who does the damage (who is a drug user and has no money), by the person who allowed the user to use (suits against the government for the acts of drug users are becoming more common based on failure to prosecute) or by insurance companies.  So any legalization scheme has to figure out how to pay the bill for the drugs.  Marijuana is easy - the bill is small and the users mostly non-violent.  
 
Other drugs are harder because while you say they would become cheap with legalization they might not.  An unlimited supply of some drugs (cocaine and opiates) only increases the addiction rate.  The resting addiction rate for communities that stop enforcement for these drugs is around that of the resting addiction rate for alcohol!  

I figured we should have a thread for that most venerable of firearms, the M2 .50 cal machine gun.  As a reminder of just how old this weapons system is, here is an article about it from 1921.  This gun is older than many of our grand parents.  Try to think of any piece of machinery dating back to 1921 that is still in use today, either military or civilian.  It's pretty amazing to consider what John Browning accomplished with this design.  
 

 
 



 

Just funny small-arms related pic.
 

This thread has gone far afield since last I responded. But I think some of you are really underestimating the political cost of dead pilots and dead ground pounders.
In the aftermath of Desert Storm, the shitstorm in the media and DC with the various friendly fire incidents - including the infamous "this Bud's for you" one - lasted for years.
Now multiply that ten times over and add the hot button issue of drones to the equation to a 24 hour news cycle with social media and the Internet and you have the risk of an event that could make Abu Gahrab look like an isolated, one-off bit of horseplay involving a bunch of POGs with poor platoon leadership.

I would be very surprised and disappointed if Putin does not have a shark tank that he throws his enemies and underperforming minions into.
 
Not sharks with laser beams on their heads.  In the 1980s, the Russians learned that Reagan was spending billions of dollars on sharks with lasers on their heads, and they entered into a disastrous, expensive crash program to make their own laser-head-sharks, which contributed to the collapse of the Soviet economy.  Never again; they learned their lesson the first time.

Don't be sore, cuz three out of four is nine percent better than Meatloaf's... score.
 
Nah, there are plenty of other rotund singers. I wanted to keep it to best of three with as wide selection of genres, sexes and races as possible.
 
Besides.
 
Fats Domino > Chubby Checker.
 
There. I said it.
 
I was going to post more to backup this claim. But I get distracted by a video of Putin lounge singing.
 

 
Thus turning what was an upbeat tune into the sound track to a frightening, dystopian future and enshrining once again my belief that Putin gets all of his cues from the best of our Hollywood villains.

Donward, how could you forget Chubby Checker?

I overpaid for it, but I definitely feel like I owe it to the guy. He's given me insane deals on guns and equipment, and he offered me dirt-cheap prices for .303 if I came back. My collection as it stands now (Minus my Argentine Mauser, which is at my parents' house):
 

Trolling around the Internets and I came across this period US military training video on the AK-47 filmed (I assume) sometime during the Vietnam War. 
 

 
It was interesting to note at the 1:15 mark, the sergeant describes the AK's cartridge as an intermediate round and "not a very good combat load".
 
Edit: And the sequel featuring the SKS.
 

Sturgeon. It goes like this.
 
In the 1969 movie Easy Rider, southern rednecks are portrayed as the film's bad guys, showing intolerance and bigotry to the film's protagonists, Wyatt "Captain America" (Peter Fonda) and Billy (Dennis Hopper). For those of you not in the know, Easy Rider is probably the first mainstream "counter culture" movie which romanticizes hitch-hiking, drug use, hippy communes and features Jack Nicholson in his break-out role as George Hanson, an ACLU attorney.
 
As the story of the movie goes, Fonda and Hopper who wrote, produced and directed the film had no real set script and much of the movie is ad-libbed and filmed as opportunities arose. One of the more infamous scenes features the trio of Wyatt, Billy and George being harassed by locals in a Louisiana diner for their long hair and unorthodox dress. The extras in the scene were locales hired on the spot and as movie magic motivation, were told to act like the trio were rapists and murderers who just killed a little girl outside of town.
 

 
The scene is portrayed as a classic example of the intolerance of outsiders in the Deep South. 
 
As I always like to say, Easy Rider does have a happy ending.
 

 
The two rednecks driving the pickup truck were local amateurs also hired on the spot.

There is an extremely embarrassing video of me, thankfully taken before Youtube but it received air time on the nightly news.  I was chasing a man through Leesburg Estates that we had a warrant on - he had several weeks before held up the gate guards at Fort Jackson and stole their M16A2 rifles and M9 pistols, along with cellphones, pistol belts, spare magazines, and gameboys. We were suppose to be delicate about the situation because they just wanted the rifles back without any press.  My partner and I saw the goofball on the list with another guy we were after - so I took after one and Gonzales took out after another.  The video shows this guy, whose pants were worn around his thighs, loose his pants and start hip-hoppity-skip jumping to get away from me.  The embarrassing part is he almost did - he put like a hundred meters between me and him (I was probably the world's worst road deputy and still wonder that I survived) before tripping and face planting into a curb.  I ran up and on the video yelled "quit resisting" as I put the handcuffs on and he replies he is not resisting, he swallowed several teeth.
 
Far from being a heroic cop, I looked like I was planning to apply for the Keystone division of RCSD but was lacking in skills had been made a junior member.

It is impossible to quarterback a police shooting without all of the data.  I know - I have done forensic analysis on 31 use of incidents in the past two decades and am a graduate of the SC police academy and 5 years of street work (part-time, but I was a full deputy).
 
On the one hand I agree with people who say police should be held to higher standards.  On the other hand - they usually are.  On the other other hand - some of the most egregious cases of police violence went unpunished.  Look up the real incident that lead to the creation of the TV show the Shield and the movie Traffic and tell me that police violence is not sometimes swept under the rug.
 
Police violence in the US won't be solved anytime soon because it is a double edged problem that requires two fixes.  The questions go hand in hand, but you cannot voice them in the same sentence to the same group without being called a name and shutting the conversation down.  The two questions are pretty easy to state.  #1 There are very very few cases of police shooting people who were not committing a criminal act followed by an aggressive posturing.  How do we teach people not to commit crimes and then charge police?  The second issue is similar.  Ambush of police is up across the board and across the United States.  If you are a cop and you are going to get killed in a crime, it will be when you are ambushed.  The current shoot / no shoot criteria is based on being right about the actions of a person you are facing 100% of the time or being quite possibly dead, so US police moved the shoot / no shoot line over - but then more people get killed.  How do we reduce ambushes allowing police to reset their shoot / no shoot point.
 
And a technological question.  Where is the ranged non-lethal weapon that will allow me to successfully deal with a 260 pound irate charging male before he enters by shoot envelope.  I was in a fight with such a man for nearly five minutes as he tried to get my gun, and you never know fear until you realize that your next mistake is your last and your wife and cats will never see you again.

I've heard anecdotal stories about sightings of wolves West of the Cascade mountains in Washington state for years. Usually from loggers or guys who spend a lot of time in the woods and away from civilization (see hermits, kooks). But it looks like we may finally have concrete evidence of wolves on the wetter (and more populated) side of Washington state. 
 
http://mynorthwest.com/174/2754998/Wolf-killed-on-I90-might-be-confirmation-animals-have-crossed-Cascades
 
As a bit of a geography lesson, the area described is about 40 miles from downtown Seattle and about 30 from suburban neighborhoods that include places like the Microsoft campus. And it is about ten miles from where I am typing this.
 
The politics of wolves interacting with farmers and ranchers is a particularly touchy one and those of you who are familiar with the stories surrounding ranchers in Montana, Wyoming, Idaho and Eastern Washington interacting with wolves introduced from Yellowstone and which have migrated down from Canada will know how touchy this situation can be.
 
Personally, I feel that wolf packs would have no trouble at all adapting as "urban wildlife" living in rural and suburban enclaves close to man and civilization. We already see species like coyotes and black bears doing the same. Wolves are an intelligent, creative and adaptable species. Put into an environment where you have a mixture of open space mixed with suburban housing units which contain easy food sources like garbage cans, domestic pets like cats and small dogs and unattended children, I can see wolfpacks thriving if left to their own devices.
 
Unfortunately, while the introduction of an apex predator like the wolf (and particularly the Canadian timber wolf) into Western Washington would be a Godsend in cutting down the influx of invasive species like possum, domestic cats and Californians, I have a hunch that political pressure will be put in trying to interdict wolf packs living over here.

Russians have +100 skill in Sweat clothes and Track suit usage.

Recently, a scansoriopterygid dinosaur was discovered in China that had membranous bat-like wings. No, really. Yes, it really does look like a dragon (well, wyvern, maybe). Yes, the diversity of life is this awesome. Yes, this has proven that literally random chance will every time create something more interesting and amazing than the creators of Jurassic Park sequels can come up with.

Meet Yi Qi:


 
The only proper reaction:

No surprise. No surprise at all.
 
Prisoner in van said Freddie Gray was ‘trying to injure himself,’ document says

I don't have the time to really delve to far into this. But after fishing season, we often take a few days off in the Alaska town of Aleknagik that my wife's family founded in the Great Depression. There's a University of Washington fisheries program there which counts fish and has been studying the life cycle of salmon continuously since the 1950s doing wonderful things like tracking DNA of fish. With Sockeye salmon, they need streams to spawn in but - more important - they need a lake where they spend the first year or two of their lives as fingerlings/smolt before migrating to salt water oceans. 
 
The last time we were there, a couple years ago, we were chatting with the head biologist there who was every bit as much interested in our story of the salmon life cycle as we were of his. One of the things he related was quite the opposite of the standard theory of Global Warming and salmon in that the warmer temperatures kill the salmon which need cool streams to thrive. Instead he mentioned that warmer temperatures saw more microorganisms living in the water of lakes and streams which provide more food for fish like salmon. And then he joked about not telling anyone because he'd lose his funding.
 
Warmer temperatures. More salmon. Good for Don!
 
I'm not trying to make my anecdotal story of a conversation over steaks as evidence of some huge scientific phenomenon. It's not. But I do like to think that Mother Nature is a very complicated old bitch who has plenty of safety valves and thermostats which can regulate how Planet Earth operates.

So this is what I have so far on the armor. 
 
Armor: Not as bad as people like to say it was.

 
M4 tanks had armor that was well balanced and in the same class as the other medium tanks of the war. We have gone over ‘welded’ and ‘cast’ hulls, and the different motors, that went into the different hull types, but even the ‘welded’ tanks used many cast parts welded to the plates. In either case it was it rolled homogenous plate steel, or cast homogenous steel. It was well balanced between hardness and ductility, and was resistant to spalling.  All versions cast or welded had well sloped armor.
A mid production M4 Sherman had 2 inches of armor at 56 degrees, and the sides were 1.5 inches at 0 degrees, the rear was also 1.5 inches at 0 to 10 degrees. The hull roof was ¾ of an inch thick and floor 1 inch under the driver, and a ½ inch everywhere else. This version of the Sherman being welded, the front plate was made many smaller plates welded together, with the cast fittings welded in places as well. This was a lot of welding, and one of the reasons why the cast version was well liked, it took a lot less man hours to produce, this also resulted in the high bred hulls, were the front section was cast, and the rest of the hill was welded. In some cases, when cast parts were called for, but there was a shortage, a particular tank maker might come up with their own built up, instead of cast, fitting. This in large part is why there are so many little details differences each factory had, they each left a signature on the tank. These details are the thing of nightmares for a scale modeler who really needs to get the details right.
The same mid production M4 would have a cast, 75mm gun turret. These turrets had 3.5 inch thick gun shields, a 2 inch rotor shield, 3 inches at 30 degrees of front armor. The sides would be two inches, and the rear 1. The top was also an inch thick. This turret armor was the same throughout the 75mm turret run, though, many early castings had a weak spot on the front, this was covered with a large section of welded on armor the tanks with this week spot, and the casting was improved in later versions of this turret. This is much better armor than say the armor on the PIV, and very similar to the Armor on the T-34. Most of this mid production tanks would not have a loaders hatch, unless it was retrofitted at a major tank factory.
A mid production M4A1 would have the same turret, but the hull armor would be 2 inches at 37 to 56 degrees. The rest of the armor, with the exception of a few places in the hull roof as thin as ½ an inch, and there was a contour difference inside the hull. Many of the cast fittings welded onto the M4 would be cast directly into the hull of an M4A1. All spare parts would be interchangeable between these two tanks.
This armor was pretty good against 37mm and 57mm anti-tank guns. It was ok on 75mm guns like the one mounted on later production PIV tanks. 75mm anti-tank guns and anything larger gave it trouble. This was no surprise to the army, and they had a whole plane worked out to use infantry, artillery and air support in conjunction with tanks to help them deal with anti-tank guns. The Shermans M3 75mm main gun was a very good gun for handling anti-tank guns, it was accurate, had a high rate of fire and an excellent HE round. Even a tank with armor as good as the M26 Pershings or Jumbo was still vulnerable to anti-tank guns 75mm and larger, being able to flank that AT gun or strong point is more important that being able to slug it out in the long run. Without AT guns, enemy infantry was going to have a very tough time with the Sherman, and even the Panzerfaust wasn’t all that effective in the long run, and if the Shermans had infantry working with them, and could hang back a big, they were much less effective.
In the pacific, these Shermans would really help defeat the Japanese. You don’t read about it much but the M4 saw a lot of action in the pacific. There are also a lot of wrecks still out there, some rotting away in the surf for tourist to play on like on Saipan. The Japanese saw them as the most serious threat, and used some desperate tactics to kill them. Basically they used man powered mines and shaped charges, and or the largest caliber guns that could be aimed at the tanks. They had a rare but effective 47mm at gun as well.
Later production tanks with the improved large hatch hulls, in some cases might still have the 75mm gun turret, these tanks would all have final production turrets with loaders hatches and cast in improved cheek armor, or early turrets retrofitted with the armor and hatches.  Most of the large hatch hulls would have wet ammo racks, but a few large hull tanks, mostly M4A2 75mm tanks got the large hatches but standard ammo racks, with the add on armor.
These large hatch welded hulls had a simplified one piece front plate. It was now 2.5 inches thick at 47 degrees. The improved final drive (lower hull) housing offered 4.25 to 2 inches of armor. The rest of the hull armor thickness stayed the same, but it was not only stronger from being thicker, but many of the ballistic weak spots and welding joints were now gone. Even these later large hatch hulls, only produced at three factories, have many minor cosmetic differences. The M4A1 received and improved large hatch casting, and its frontal armor and slope changed as well. It was 2.5 inches at 37 to 55 degrees and the rest of the hull remained the same thickness.
Many of these large hatch hulls had the larger and T23 turret. This turret had a 3.5 inch thick gun shield, a 2 inch rotor shield and front armor of 3 inches. The sides were 2 inches thick and the rear 1, the top was also 1 inch thick. All these turrets had loaders hatches. They were also made from casting, just like the 75mm turrets.  

A key piece of evidence for the fringe Solutrean-Clovis hypothesis, that proposes that Europeans crossed the Atlantic to the Americas before the Bering Land Bridge was dry, is likely a fraud. 
 
The hypothesis points towards a trawler that pulled up a stone blade and a mastodon. The problem is, is that that trawler's crew never said anything about finding a mastodon along with other inconsistencies about the finding. Sounds like someone likes to make up a story. 
 
Link. 
 
However, it isn't like anyone besides the History Channel took the idea seriously. 

That means purse size ones are even further out! Bummer.

Having everything go wrong and then the bears showing up is usually the punchline to my Alaska stories. No bears this adventure, sadly.
 
However, I am of the opinion that some of you all need to move up to Washington state. Parkland/Spanaway in particular.