BACTERIA BATTERY COULD RUN FOR A CENTURY – Researchers from Binghamton University’s Bioelectronics and Microsystems Laboratory have developed a battery that runs off of bacteria and could theoretically keep running for 100 years. Professor Seokheun Choi, the lead on the project, said, “The overall objective is to develop a microbial fuel cell that can be stored for a relatively long period without degradation of biocatalytic activity and also can be rapidly activated by absorbing moisture from the air.”
He continued, “We wanted to make these biobatteries for portable, storable and on-demand power generation capabilities. The problem is, how can we provide the long-term storage of bacteria until used? And if that is possible, then how would you provide on-demand battery activation for rapid and easy power generation? And how would you improve the power?”
The team created a dime-sized fuel cell, which was then sealed in Kapton tape, which resists extremely cold and hot temperatures. After the tape is removed, moisture enters in, which sets off a reaction between the bacteria and a chemical germinant that produces power, and spores.
The main drawback is the time it takes for the battery to produce power, which was originally 1 hour, but after adjusting temperatures and humidity levels it was reduced to 20 minutes.
SUDAN CIVIL WAR THREATENS TO SPILL OVER ITS BORDERS – 18 months after taking over Sudan in a military coup, the two Generals that led the coup are now vying for supreme power. The war is for control of the country by either the General of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, and the General of the Army, Abdel-Fattah al-Burhan. Now the fighting is leading border countries like Chad and Libya to shut their borders down for fear of seeing the fighting spill into their countries.
The United States has evacuated its embassy, as have most other nations. Control for the capitol of Khartoum rages on, with the state media center switching hands at least twice so far in the fighting. The number of killed has not been generally reported, but it appears to be at least in the hundreds, so far, with no hope of a cease fire on the horizon.
The war began after the power-sharing agreement reached in 2021 broke down. Dagalo wants to integrate his paramilitary group, the RSF, into the regular army gradually, over the course of a decade. While al-Burhan wants a more rapid integration into the regular army he controls.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken tweeted about the conflict, “Deeply concerned about reports of escalating violence between the Sudanese Armed Forces and Rapid Support Forces. We are in touch with the Embassy team in Khartoum – all are currently accounted for. We urge all actors to stop the violence immediately and avoid further escalations…”
A UN envoy, Volker Perthes, said“The two sides who are fighting are not giving the impression that they want mediation for a peace between them right away.”
BIDEN ANNOUNCES 2024 RE-ELECTION BID – Mass-Mailer President Joe Biden announced his re-election bid, claiming to be fighting for personal freedom by fighting for our democracy. He said, “Freedom. Personal freedom is fundamental to who we are as Americans. There’s nothing more important. Nothing more sacred. That’s been the work of my first term: To fight for our Democracy. This shouldn’t be a red or blue issue.”
He added, “This is not a time to be complacent. That’s why I’m running for re-election. Because I know America. I know we are good and decent people. And I know we are still a country that believes in honesty and respect, and treating each other with dignity. That we’re a nation where we give hate no safe harbor. And we believe that everyone is equal, and that everyone should be given a fair shot to succeed in this country.”
Kamala Harris confirmed she would be running for Biden, saying, “For two years we have made transformational investments to build a nation in which everyone can be safe and healthy, find a good job, and retire with dignity.” She then claimed, “As Americans, we believe in freedom and liberty—and we believe that our democracy will only be as strong as our willingness to fight for it. That’s why @JoeBiden and I are running for reelection.”
In his opening campaign video, Biden resorted to the usual incendiary, seditionist language, accusing Republicans of wanting to take our freedoms away and calling Trump supporters “Maga Extremists.” The opening salvo is vicious and portends a 2024 campaign that might make 2016 look like a 1950s election campaign (or our perception of one).
He laughingly claimed, “When I ran for president four years ago, I said we are in a battle for the soul of America, and we still are. The question we are facing is whether in the years ahead we have more freedom or less freedom, more rights or fewer.”
The DNC-CCP wants to censor speech, make resisting abortion a criminal offense, seize our guns, continue to outsource or resources to foreign countries, but it does want more freedom. What kind of freedom? Freedom to groom your children is tops on their list. Freedom to murder the unborn is number two. They want the freedom to force their Moloch worship on the rest of us.
“Serving as national campaign co-chairs are Reps. LISA BLUNT ROCHESTER (D-Del.), JIM CLYBURN (D-S.C.) and VERONICA ESCOBAR (D-Texas), Sens. CHRIS COONS (D-Del.) and TAMMY DUCKWORTH (D-Ill.), Michigan Gov. GRETCHEN WHITMER and entertainment mogul JEFFREY KATZENBERG.”
Biden claims in his video that “we are in a battle for the soul of America” in this upcoming election. We are, but the ones who wish to destroy the republic and replace it with a socialist democracy with Chinese characteristics are the DNC-CCP, the party of the Mass Mailer President. When they say “America” they mean market socialism. When they say Democracy them mean one-party control of the whole election/voting process.
Biden announced his intentions to “finish the job,” and we know what that is, to finish the job of killing the American republic and criminalizing any values or beliefs that might support her.
Conflict monitoring is an odd field: You try to monitor the world, and eventually specialize out of necessity. The recent descent into chaos in Sudan, Africa’s third-largest nation by size, is no different.
Beginning on April 15th, a series of armed clashes began in Khartoum, the capital of the African nation. The opposing sides are the regular Sudanese Army, and a paramilitary force called the “Rapid Support Force (RSF)“. The two forces had united in 2019 to oust Omar al-Bashir, the country’s long-time dictator, in a military coup d’etat; two years later, in 2021, the two parties staged another coup to derail Sudan’s return to a democratically elected government.
The situation has deteriorated, in barely a single week, to the point that the United States and other powers (YouTube link) are rapidly deploying forces to Camp Lemonnier, located in the state of Djibouti, on the Red Sea coast, in preparation for a possible evacuation of various embassy’s and foreign nationals – a daunting prospect, given that Khartoum’s international airport is not currently usable, and because the capital city is nearly 800 miles inland.
The source of the current “lover’s quarrel” is the Regular Army dragging its feet over formally integrating the RSF into its force structure, as well as delays in payroll to the paramilitary force, with its leadership claiming that they want to return al-Bashir to power.
Who are the RSF?
In 2003, fighting erupted in Western Sudan as non-Arab (i.e., “black African”) tribes united against the al-Bashir government’s continued campaign of oppression and discrimination against them. The result was the Darfur War (sometimes called the “Land Cruiser War” because of the extensive used of ‘technicals’), a genocidal conflict that killed hundreds of thousands, and created between two and three million refugees.
Map of Darfur within Sudan, July 2011. CCA/3.0
The RSF began life as the so-called “Janjaweed”, a Sudanese Arab tribal militia assembled by al-Bashir’s government to suppress the Black African inhabitants of the region. Supporting this, were the remnants of Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi’s “Islamic Legion”, an openly racist and pan-Arab organization intended to unite the Saharan region by force.
As the Darfur war reached a stalemate (that would ultimately result in a nominal ceasefire agreement in 2020), al-Bashir’s government began using a now-experienced and capable Janjaweed – under their commander, Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo – as extra muscle throughout the region, especially in places where the dirtiest of atrocities were needed.
Oozing to life in 2013 as an outgrowth of the Janjaweed, the RSF was quickly used by al-Bashir as a kind of “expeditionary force”, sending significant numbers of troops into both Chad and Libya (in the latter case, supporting the Libyan National Army of Khalifa Haftar), and a stunning 40,000-strong corps-sized unit into Yemen to fight against the Iran-backed Houthi rebels. The main difference between the RSF and the Janjaweed, is in the level of formal support and arms provided to them by the Sudanese government, with uniform weapons and vehicles.
The RSF is not simply large, with over 100,000 men under arms, but is also highly mobile, with an estimated 10,000 ‘technical’ trucks (YouTube link)…and it has developed an impressive economic infrastructure to support itself, thanks to the business chops of its leader and his family.
Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (known as “Hemedti“, locally), who dropped out of primary school in 3rd grade to work to support his family, started out as a well-respected camel herder in the Darfur region. As he positioned himself as the chief commander of first the Janjaweed, and then the RSF, he used the forces loyal to him to help is company, Al Junaid, to corner the gold mining industry within Sudan, as well as a host of other industries, ultimately controlling up to 40% of Sudan’s exports.
And, like most warlords with sufficient resources, he has made life well for his loyalists in the RSF, who now follow his orders without question, helped by him polishing his speaking skills. This, along with a “charm campaign” managed by Western public relations firms to improve Hemedti’s image, has combined to form a kind of “mercenary micro-state” of a type that is highly unusual in the modern day…In many ways, the RSF is the nightmare scenario that world security analysts have been dreading since the rise of the “corporate terror group” model, when al Qaeda appeared in the late-1990’s.
In a very real sense, the leader of the regular Sudanese armed forces and Hemedti’s rival in the power struggle, Lieutenant General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, have created a monster they can no longer control.
But, ultimately…who cares? Why should you care?
The current fighting in Sudan will almost certainly determine who will be the next ruler of the nation. As well, major powers – both global powers, and up-and-coming regional states seeking to expand their influence – are all jockeying for position, and that kind of jockeying can swiftly lead to an expanding conflict.
And all of this is happening literally on the banks of the Nile, Africa’s ancient major river system. No matter who wins this conflict, this will pose significant issues to Egypt and its population of over 100 million, already alarmed over Ethiopia’s dam building project that seriously threatens the downstream ecology and climate of the region.
Lastly, is the serious potential for major-power involvement, up to and including combat: Russia’s Wagner Group mercenary company has significant ties to the RSF, and in the region, generally. The Wagner Group has been reportedly guarding some gold mining areas for the central government since at least 2019, with speculation that Wagner-defended gold is being using used to fund Russia’s war in Ukraine. Numerous foreign corporations have major investments throughout the region, and the expansion of the “private military company” market in the last twenty-five years means that there is little incentive to not hire lots of ex-military guns to guard their investments.
And, looming over the regular Western military commands’ psyches is the shadow of 1993’s “Battle of Mogadishu”, but on a far larger scale, with far fewer advantages for the Western powers.
The future does not look sunny.
The Freedomist — Keeping Watch, So You Don’t Have To
With the recent arrest of an Airman of the Massachusetts Air National Guard, the United States’ defence and intelligence establishments are once again under fire for apparently lax information security. In fact, this is the second time in less than a year that this has happened.
At first glance, this seems like a very bizarre thing…until you realize, sadly, that it is not.
Instead, incredibly – or, sadly, not so incredibly – the leaks were the result of rabid video game players trying to prove how cool and ‘edgy’ they were.
While some of the leakers may be older, this is the result of the programming of the so-called “Generation Z”. This is the first generation to grow up with social media as a main facet of their lives. When “social media” as we would now recognize it, first arose in 1997, no one had any real idea of what its impact would be. Whatever the imagined intent, what it has evolved into, is a sort of electronic version of an elementary school playground at recess, with no adults present to regulate it.
Where older generations who entered the various defense and intelligence services would never, in their wildest nightmares, have taken classified materials to their local watering hole and deliberately passed them around to score social points, this is becoming increasingly common for a deliberately infantalized generation of youth. While there certainly were, and are, spies and informants stealing and passing on information for money, ideology or “love”, those reasons were at least tangible and understandable. Scoring social media points is, to be blunt, pointless in the extreme.
Coupled to the insanity of the RESTRICT Act (deliberately misconstrued as the “TikTok Ban” bill), this works to sweep away all the foundations of legality of the Rule of Law, in the fleeting hope of gaining some sort of security.
And, like the hysterical attacks from the music industry against services such as Napster and Grokster, idiocies like the RESTRICT Act are guaranteed to have exactly the opposite effect, as outraged online activists will find ways to send out increasingly large amounts of classified material – not for the older reasons, nor even the newer reasons, but simply out of anger at such tight restrictions. The fact of facing heavy penalties for doing so, are irrelevant once the information is “out in the wild,” as the saying goes: the damage will have already been done.
But the above does not address the real question: Why are these kinds of leaks so dangerous?
For those not familiar with intelligence gathering, as a discipline, the short answer is that, in the “old days,” obtaining intelligence – meaningful intelligence – on a hostile target was hard…very hard. An intelligence agency – from East or West – had to insert “non-official” (or “illegal”) agents into the target country; those illegal agents would then have to either infiltrate a facility, or suborn an intelligence worker (assuming that they could identify them). Conversely, they could hang out in bars, nightclubs or restaurants (good for staging a honey trap) outside the gates of military facilities, or take menial jobs at establishments outside the gates such as working as a barber or as a waitress, in an attempt to glean nuggets of information from random conversations…Not very flashy, and not very James Bond, but such methods did work.
An example of a one-time pad. Credit: Mysid, 2007. Public Domain.
(My favorite intelligence warning in the mid-1980’s, was an order that came down, telling service personnel to stop…”liberating”…large bottles of Tabasco® sauce from restaurants outside base main gates in preparation for going to the field or “rapidly redeploy strategically”, to make the early Meals-Ready-to-Eat (MRE’s) at least somewhat palatable. The problem had gotten so bad, those base-local restaurants developed their own internal intelligence networks, and were suddenly “out of Tabasco” when they learned of a local unit deployment…thus giving hostile agents a dead giveaway that large unit movements were afoot.)
With the rise of online gaming and their associated forums and chat servers in the early 2000’s, however, intelligence agencies quickly grasped that their agents could sit behind Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), in the comfort and security of their home nations. They could then “lurk,” monitoring boards silently, while not communicating very often, waiting to pounce on discussions where people who should know better would often drop bits – or entire files – of classified data…and those agents wouldn’t even have to hound the leaker, because the rest of the forum or chat group would do that for them, unwittingly.
This kind of thing came naturally to intelligence agencies, as it was a form of OSINT [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_intelligence]. OSINT, or “Open-Source Intelligence,” is a method, or discipline [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_intelligence_gathering_disciplines] of intelligence collection where a person meticulously (some might say, “obsessively”) scours every publicly available source of information on a subject they can find, and attempt to collate and boil-down the resulting information into a general picture.
OSINT differs from more expensive, technological or hazardous methods of information collection – like finding human sources of information, satellite reconnaissance, radio signal interception, etc. – in that it simply requires an illegal agent to buy multiple piles of newspapers and magazines, and inhabit libraries relentlessly. While also not very flashy, OSINT analysis often leads to very clear pictures of a nation’s defense strategies. As well, it lends itself very well to crowdsourcing [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowdsourcing].
So…Where does this leave us, in mid-April of 2023?
Unfortunately, there are serious problems within the information security apparatus in the West, as a whole. With the need to bring in a new generation of intelligence workers, the West – as opposed to Russia and Communist China – is finding that the “Woke” agenda that has been allowed free rein over the last decade has badly polluted the potential recruiting pool, as people who have been raised in a culture where ephemeral “electronic cred” is as important, if not more important, than being a “quiet professional”.
And, as those who promoted that social context are discovering, there is no putting the toothpaste back in the tube.
The Freedomist — Keeping Watch, So You Don’t Have To
IRS SHAKES DOWN TWITTER FILES REPORTER ON SAME DAY HE TESTIFIED TO CONGRESS – The recently militarized tax agency known as the IRS is flexing its Biden muscles by attempting to intimidate one of the reporters who testified before congress about how the FBI is controlling Twitter for political purposes to silence opposition to the DNC-CCP. Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH) sent a letter demanding answers from the thug organization, saying. “In light of the hostile reaction to Mr. Taibbi’s reporting among left-wing activists, and the IRS’s history as a tool of government abuse, the IRS’s action could be interpreted as an attempt to intimidate a witness before Congress. We expect your full cooperation with our inquiry.”
One suspects Jordan is being political in not plainly stating that it is, in fact, a shakedown effort made by the seditious, mass-mailer-elected Biden regime taking more notes from the Chinese Communist Party’s playbook in direct opposition to the American constitution the zombie President allegedly swore to uphold.
If members of the Democratic Party who do not wish to see this republic destroyed do not stand up to the seditionists within their own party, then the Democratic Party must cease to exist, or America will cease to exist. You cannot, anymore, have both.
PENTAGON EMPLOYS “GROOMER” DOCS WHO SUPPORT GENDER TRANSITION SURGERY FOR 7-YEAR-OLDS – The woke military of the Wokemerican nightmare ushered in by the mass mailer President, Joe Biden, doubled down on its perversity when doctors working for the Pentagon advocated for mutilating the bodies of 7-year-olds who think they are born in the wrong sex. The doctors called it a human right to mangle the bodies of children in the name of trans ideology. The three doctors, David A. Klein, Thomas Baxter, and Natasha A. Schvey, all work at Travis Air Force base in California, the home of leftist degeneracy.
The “doctors” make this perverse claim even as studies reveal that rather than helping people afflicted with this disorder, it dramatically increases the likelihood they will kill themselves.
One doctor, Stanley Goldfarb, who is the board chair for the organization Do No Harm called the claims “beyond laughable.” He said “The existence of a large, perhaps as much as 25% cohort of ‘detransitioners,’ suggests the folly of assuming the soundness of childhood decisions,” he said, later adding, “Just because a child states that they understand the implications of gender transitioning does not mean that they can conceive of their future regrets.”
Calls for their removal have been ignored by the woke infested Pentagon, which should now be viewed as an enemy of the American people and the Republic, in open defiance of its mission to uphold and defend the constitution of the Republic of the United States of America.
DNC-CCP ATTORNEY GENERAL TEST TOLERANCE FOR ARRESTING TRUMP – Just as YouTube restored former President Donald Trump’s account, the former President announced plans by the Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg to arrest him on trumped-up charges in an effort to destroy opposition to the DNC-CCP. The original date came and went, and came and went, and came and went again. Reports came out that the DA’s office is itself divided over the political assault. As of the writing of this report, no arrests have yet been made, though the Grand Jury has now reconvened and resumed its consideration on whether to execute the lawfare assault on the former President.
ED.NOTE: Should President Trump be arrested, we will provide a detailed report on the alleged case against him and the machinations behind the scenes that led to his arrest.
The Jack-booted thug networks of the DNC-CCP media feigned outrage at the notion Trump warned his followers that jack-booted thugs might arrest him, an irony not lost on Americans who’ve witnessed DNC spokesperson Nancy Pelosi’s reference to then President Trump’s Federal Agents sent in to protect a Federal Bank under assault by the DNC’s brownshirt unit, Antifa. She called them “stormtroopers” for daring to defend a bank from a terrorist assault inspired and led by her and the DNC’s rhetoric and sponsorship.
Ron DeSantis sent mixed signals by first defending Trump against the “Soros-Sponsored” DA that Alvin Bragg is (in part), but also throwing shade at Trump saying he wouldn’t be mixed up in something like this because he doesn’t have to pay off former porn stars.
When Donald Trump called for protests should he be arrested, the same DNC-CCP media that fans the flames of Antifa brownshirts burning down businesses in staged acts of political violence accused the former President of doing what they do every day on their Marat-inspired platforms, incite people to violence against the state.
When the House GOP finally found a spine and delivered a missive to the seditionist DA warning him of consequences should he decide to run with this clear use of DNC-organized lawfare to eliminate political opposition, the media accused the House GOP of abusing their powers, even as they cheered on the DNC-controlled House during its clear abuse of power when it conducted kangaroo courts to impeach the President without cause.
As of March 28, 2023, the Grand Jury has once again met and failed to produce an indictment. We suspect the powers that be are conducting focus groups and deploying deep learning A.I. tools to scrub the internet to determine if using lawfare to eliminate a former President will be tolerated by what remains of the American people.
TRANS ACTIVIST KILLS 3 CHILDREN, 3 ADULTS IN TARGETED ATTACK ON CHRISTIAN SCHOOL – Trans Activist Audrey Hale, who presents as a male, invaded a Christian school she previously attended and murdered 3 children aged 9 and 3 faculty. The murderer had maps on her that documented exactly how she was going to systematically murder children for daring to oppose her lifestyle choices. She also carried a manifesto which is not being shared by the media, for fear it might stigmatize transgenderism.
Leftists like David Packman blamed the Christian school for the deaths and championed the defiance of the transgendered woman for delivering “justice” to Christians who reject the lie of Satan that men and women do not exist.
This follows on the heels of trans militancy campaigns that include calls from transgendered people and their “allies” to use violence to teach those that reject trans ideology a lesson.
America has a founding tradition of live and let live, but transgender activists want more than to be “tolerated,” they want their claim of human reality to be forced on everyone else by any means necessary. It is time to consider whether tolerating “transgenderism” is tenable post-Nashville now that we realize the murderous outcomes of indulging mental illness rather than trying to actually treat it.
Transgendered people are suffering a mental illness that should be treated in a way that leads them to accept their actual reality. Leftists are using transgenderism as a weapon to assault Christian values and American constitutional rights, threatening us with more suicides if we don’t surrender our own beliefs and values to the transgendered community. The treatment of transgendered people by indulging their illness is leading to the premature deaths of transgenders, and now, the militant radicalization of people who now feel emboldened by the DNC-CCP and its corporate and state organs to act violently against others for simply rejecting their Satanic beliefs.
The compassionate response to a transgendered person is to bring them to face their actual reality, not to mutilate their bodies and make them dependent on life-shortening drugs for the rest of their diminishing lives. The way we treat transgendered people is just as horrible as the way we treated the mentally ill when we gave them lobotomies and sterilized them. One day, the transgendered activist of today will hate all the “favors” leftists have been giving them, “favors” that have only led to their further harm by the very same leftists that pretend they actually care about them as human beings.
If you truly love transgendered people, you won’t indulge their mental illness anymore than you would a schizophrenic who thinks they can fly and is about to leap off a 10-storey building. You would stop them and get them to see the reality, that they can’t fly. You wouldn’t push them off the ledge, like the left does every day to these afflicted people.
One suspects many transgendered people have already figured out how their community is being used as human shields to advance an ideology of fear and hate that demands nothing short of a police state to protect the lies such an ideology must tell to gain such power in the first place.
Anyone with even a passing familiarity with modern firearms knows about the AK-47. In fact, we discussed it here, as part of another series. The AK-47 is so well known because it is so widespread, having been handed out at no- or low-cost to so many rifles, that they now appear on national flags and crests.
Flag of Mozambique, showing an AK-47 in the canton. Public Domain.
But the AK-47 was not the first weapon to have this kind of impact. This article is the first part of a two-part series on the rifles that had a similar impact to the AK-47. One of those is still all over the world. This one, however, is nowhere near as well known today.
Gevär m/1867, from the Armémuseum (The Swedish Army Museum) collection. CCA-4.0
As the American Civil War raged, weapons using metallic cartridges began to appear, both in the hands of civilians and on the battlefield. While flashy weapons like the Henry and its descendant from Winchester Repeating Arms are better known, those weapons’ use in the military sphere was very limited. Early cartridge revolvers because popular with cavalry, but the Winchester remained almost solely a civilian weapon.
Armies are conservative by nature. The reason for this is understandable, given the stakes – when a business gambles on new technology, and the new tech fails, that is a very inconvenient; it might even be sad, if it causes the company to fail and costs workers their jobs. In contrast, if an army gambles on new tech and it fails, the consequences can be catastrophic out of all proportion to the technology. Case in point, the mitrailleuse.
Muzzle view of a Mitrailleuse, Les Invalides, Paris. CCA/3.0
The mitrailleuse was supposed to be France’s ultimate war-winning weapons system, able to sweep the Republic’s enemies from the battlefield like wheat before the scythe…The problem? It was kept so secret, no one ever trained the French artillery to handle it, and thus no one ever realized what it really was: a simple volley gun that could be loaded moderately quickly, and didn’t have much better range than the regular French rifles.
When it came to rifles in the post-American Civil War era, militaries around the world weren’t stupid – they knew that breech loading, metal-case cartridge rifles were the wave of the future…but which one was the best to use? Many countries tried various designs from their arsenals. Many other nations, unable to afford the infrastructure to mass-produce their own internal design, did what states have always done:
They went shopping.
The Remington Company of Ilion, New York, had been making firearms and ammunition since 1816. While it was legendary for its staggering levels of management incompetence (it finally folded permanently in 2020, broken into several pieces), it managed to produce a long and majestic line of firearms. And its first real “smash hit” was the Rolling Block.
The single-shot Remington Rolling Block began in 1863 as a slightly different design. Modified to strengthen the breech mechanism, by 1867, the rifle had matured into a solid weapon. It was rugged, reliable, and – most importantly for armies – was the last word in “soldier-proof”: it literally cannot misfire during loading, and cannot fire unless the breech is fully closed. The action was so strong, it needed virtually no modification when smokeless powder was developed in 1884. The only real danger was the chance of a misfired cartridge “cooking off” while it was being removed from the breech.
Remington Rolling Block breech mechanism. CCA/3.0
Remington’s rifle was made in a vast array of calibers and chambering’s. Remington would happily cut barrels for any cartridge provided by the customer. Mechanically much more simple than some thing like a British Martini-Henry and vastly more reliable than the Prussian needle-fired Dreyse rifle, the Rolling Block quickly took the military world by storm.
Although the Rolling Block was never adopted in any great numbers by the United States (due to a very parsimonious Congress), it was adopted by at least forty-seven nations over its lifespan, a staggering achievement for a time (~1880) when there were only about fifty-five “nations” in the world recognized as such.
From the United Kingdoms of Sweden and Norway, to Peru, Qajar Persia and the Papal States (YouTube link), the Rolling Block fought wars, guarded walls and stood in parades for nearly fifty years. It was party to one of the oddities of the Spanish-American War (YouTube link), in 1898. Its last major war was actually World War One (YouTube link), where it served as a second-line rifle for rear area troops. It served countless hunters as far afield as Canada and the heart of Africa, and was “the other buffalo rifle,” next to the Sharps. The last version of the Rolling Block produced by Remington was the elegant “Number 7” target rifle (YouTube link), introduced in 1907.
But, as we will see next week, the Remington Rolling Block was buried in the public mind by a newly arrived competitor in the military rifle market, a rifle what would continue to serve for nearly a century in active military forces, a rifle so iconic, it will likely still be shooting when all the readers of this article will have passed beyond the Pale.
The Freedomist — Keeping Watch, So You Don’t Have To
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