The Great War
Published on 18 Oct 2018As the Germans are retreating further and further during the Battle of the Selle, Erich Ludendorff – the German Quartermaster General, one half of Germany’s military dictatorship and mastermind behind the last big German offensive in spring 1918 – resigns under pressure by the Kaiser and the Reichstag. The German upper class realizes that their days might be numbered if the war continues in the current form and Austria-Hungary’s Emperor Karl has the same epiphany.
October 19, 2018
The Battle of the Selle – Ludendorff Resigns I THE GREAT WAR Week 221
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Ontario’s lack of retail cannabis stores – “What have they been smoking at Queen’s Park?”
In the Financial Post, William Watson points out the weirdness of Ontario’s decision to delay the opening of legal cannabis stores until next Spring:
For several years now, dozens of dispensaries have been operating quite openly. (They call themselves dispensaries to further the narrative that, like your grandmother’s rye, marijuana is for medicinal purposes.) Only now, with pot use becoming legal, are these dispensaries being shut down — although Toronto’s chief of police says not right away, as he doesn’t have [the] person power to do it all at once.
If they don’t shut down, they may forfeit their chance at a licence to sell pot legally once licensed retail operations do finally start in the province on (when else?) April 1st of next year — 166 days after legalization. Why would they not be granted a licence? Not because they trafficked in marijuana when its use was strictly illegal, if seldom prosecuted. But because they continued to traffic in marijuana after it became legal but before the government gave them a licence, an offence that will be prosecuted slowly, if at all.
Silly me. I thought marijuana legalization would simply say that after a certain date the police wouldn’t arrest you for having such-and-such an amount of marijuana in your possession. End of story.
[…]
Countrywide, as the Financial Post’s Vanmala Subramaniam recently reported, a big roadblock to timely legal supply has been the need to seal products with federal excise revenue stamps. But there’s only one supplier and the stamps come without adhesive. Stamps! In 2018!
In American movies of the 1930s and 1940s, moonshiners and bootleggers waged war against “revenuers,” federal agents charged with levying excise taxes on booze. It seems the revenuers have now taken charge of Canada’s marijuana industry. You might plausibly argue that the former illegal market operated in the interests of consumers. There seems little doubt the new legal market will operate in the interest of governments, their unions and their revenue departments.
When cops did enforce the country’s no-toking laws, they could plausibly tell themselves they were doing it to protect young people and other innocents. Now when they enforce the laws they’re doing it to protect legally privileged producers against producers who find themselves offside with often arbitrary licensing laws. Protecting kids was one thing. Protecting cartels is quite another.
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Webley Model 1911 Stocked .22 Single-Shot Target Pistol
Forgotten Weapons
Published on 29 Sep 2018http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
The Webley Model 1911 is a single-shot, self-ejecting target pistol made only for a few years. It was fitted with a long barrel to increase sight radius and also a detachable shoulder stock for those who wanted a bit more stability when shooting. Mechanically, the piece must be loaded manually, and it will then open the slide and eject the empty case automatically when fired, leaving the slide open for the shooter to load the next round. These were manufactured until 1914, with the final batch of pistols sold in 1919 from remaining parts stocks.
I am at the range with this example on Malta, thanks to the Association of Maltese Arms Collectors and Shooters. I thought it would be interesting to compare shooting with and without the stock, although my biggest takeaway was that I need more practice time on the range!
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QotD: “None of us are standard issue”
Our own age, still, has the “image” of the mass-producing society that brought unparalleled prosperity and riches to the world in the last century (along with some truly horrible mass killings.)
The mass killings, Marxism (which people inhale without knowing, even in American Universities), behaviorism, and a passion for numbered, standardized everything are part of the ethos of the industrial age.
It is perhaps too much to ask people working on standard machines, to produce standard sizes, using standardized movements to conform to the machine’s mechanical exactness not to think in terms of “standard sizes” and “Models.”
You see this more strongly in the works of early science fiction writers, who expected psychology to to be standardized, numbered and filed and then all problems of mankind would be solved.
This stopped around the forties or fifties, when there was starting to be a suspicion that humans were not in fact standard issues, and that they had a disturbing tendency to be … human on an individual scale. I.e. “Nobody is normal” started penetrating the collective consciousness, but people STILL try to be normal. A part of the craze for transgenderism (other than that the progressives decided this was the next hill to die on) is this idea that there are standard models of people. Note I don’t say every transgender person is the result of that. There are cases of such profound mismatch between mind and body that even flawed and ultimately mutilating surgery (which is all we can do right now) is preferable to going on with the mismatch. These cases are, needless to say, very rare. But I swear at least half of the generation after my kids identifies as transgender, or gender queer, or gender fluid, or some other form of gender nonsense that has absolutely nothing to do with sex, and everything to do with the fact the poor dears have imbibed this flawed version of humanity as easily filable and definable. If you think that a girl who prefers trains and toy cars, a boy who prefers dolls […] a boy who is better at verbal than math, a girl who is the reverse, all of these are TOLD they are abnormal, if not in words, in the reaction of other people, until they feel they must have a problem.
In fact, none of us are standard issue. The very fact that, say, the medieval world, a communitarian world under stress (compared to us) of disease and famine, which needed to eliminate odds to operate, spent SO MUCH time decreeing what men and women COULD do meant that men and women kept blurring those lines, which for that time and place were FAR more clear than they are now. (I am an odd. In the world I grew up in, which retains a lot of medieval characteristics, I not only was pulled away from groups of boys I was playing with and told that girls play with girls and boys with boys (sounds like a motto for a gay bar) but I was also severely suppressed when I was about 8 and developed a fascination with whistling. I was told that women who whistle and men who spin (thread) are both going to hell. This must be a medieval thing, as I have clue zero why whistling should be masculine. In my family’s defense, this might have been an attempt at just getting the horrible noise to stop.
Sarah Hoyt, “Gears and Patterns”, According to Hoyt, 2016-12-16.
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