Quotulatiousness

September 17, 2019

“How did staging dinner-theatre raids to seize eleven grand’s worth of knock-off NFL merchandise become an ICE priority?”

Filed under: Football, Law, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Mark Steyn on a recent you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-me raid by ICE:

Because AOC and the open-borders left want to abolish ICE (US Immigration and Customs Enforcement), the right is obliged to defend it. This is a pity, because ICE is a deeply weird agency with, to put it mildly, increasingly curious and eccentric priorities.

Last week, for example, under crack agent Tatum King, ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations unit staged (that seems the appropriate word) a raid in Oakland of the Oakland Raiders game:

    ICE targeted vendors of unauthorized T-shirts, hats, caps and bandannas. The agency said the raid was done in partnership with NFL brand security representatives and state and local law enforcement. The Oakland Police Department said it was not involved.

    Officials said they seized about $11,000 worth of illegal swag — undoubtedly, most of it silver and black — during the ‘Monday Night Football’ game and its pre- and postgame tailgate parties.

    Tatum King, special agent in charge of the San Francisco Homeland Security Investigations unit, said about 400 pieces of merchandise were seized but no one was arrested. NFL brand officials issued warning letters and may be pursuing civil action, he said.

As they should — and in small claims court, if eleven grand is the best a no-expense-spared federal-state-local raid with everyone in the full Robocop can come up with.

But what business is it of ICE’s “Homeland Security Investigations” division? This arrest-less “raid” and its attendant publicity ballyhoo undoubtedly cost US taxpayers more than the barely five figures’ worth of Oakland Raiders swag they’re now passing round the office.

Like ICE, HSI was created post-9/11 — to enforce four hundred laws “combating terrorism and enhancing national security”. How did staging dinner-theatre raids to seize eleven grand’s worth of knock-off NFL merchandise become an ICE priority? Which it undoubtedly is:

    King said the agency is committed to ensuring the public purchases ‘legitimate products’ instead of cheaper knockoffs often sold outside stadiums like the Coliseum.

[…]

Tatum King appears to be the usual showboating tosspot in this regard. The picture above shows him after a previous raid netted him some Golden State Warriors merchandise. Agent King can’t keep actual MS-13 warriors out of the Golden State, but he can crack down on underpriced baseball caps and sweatshirts.

The President has declared, repeatedly, that there is an emergency at the southern border. I agree with that. He has also said that, therefore, he needs more resources. That’s harder to agree with when a rogue bureaucracy refuses to act as if there’s an emergency and deploy its existing resources accordingly.

In fact, I’m not sure the left’s alleged war on ICE isn’t just their usual sly deflection, intended to provide a bit of useful cover for a subversive immigration bureaucracy to carry on doing as it’s done for a generation now and refuse to enforce existing immigration law — at least for anything that matters.

The Curator’s Dingo | The Tank Museum

Filed under: Britain, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Tank Museum
Published on 16 Sep 2019

Most Curators don’t own armoured cars… David Willey, Tank Museum Curator, has owned his Daimler Dingo Scout Car for over 20 years. Find out how he came to own it and what he uses it for.

As part of the 75th Anniversary of Operation Market Garden, David will be driving his Dingo in a 200 vehicle convoy retracing the route.

Support the work of The Tank Museum on Patreon: ► https://www.patreon.com/tankmuseum

Visit The Tank Museum SHOP: ► https://tankmuseumshop.org/

Twitter: ► https://twitter.com/TankMuseum
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Tiger Tank Blog: ► http://blog.tiger-tank.com/
Tank 100 First World War Centenary Blog: ► http://tank100.com/

“Clean” alternative energy sources are not free … in fact, they’re quite expensive

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Earlier this month in Foreign Policy, Jason Hickel wrote about the requirements for expanding current renewable energy generation (wind and solar):

The phrase “clean energy” normally conjures up happy, innocent images of warm sunshine and fresh wind. But while sunshine and wind is obviously clean, the infrastructure we need to capture it is not. Far from it. The transition to renewables is going to require a dramatic increase in the extraction of metals and rare-earth minerals, with real ecological and social costs.

We need a rapid transition to renewables, yes — but scientists warn that we can’t keep growing energy use at existing rates. No energy is innocent. The only truly clean energy is less energy.

In 2017, the World Bank released a little-noticed report that offered the first comprehensive look at this question. It models the increase in material extraction that would be required to build enough solar and wind utilities to produce an annual output of about 7 terawatts of electricity by 2050. That’s enough to power roughly half of the global economy. By doubling the World Bank figures, we can estimate what it will take to get all the way to zero emissions — and the results are staggering: 34 million metric tons of copper, 40 million tons of lead, 50 million tons of zinc, 162 million tons of aluminum, and no less than 4.8 billion tons of iron.

In some cases, the transition to renewables will require a massive increase over existing levels of extraction. For neodymium — an essential element in wind turbines — extraction will need to rise by nearly 35 percent over current levels. Higher-end estimates reported by the World Bank suggest it could double.

The same is true of silver, which is critical to solar panels. Silver extraction will go up 38 percent and perhaps as much as 105 percent. Demand for indium, also essential to solar technology, will more than triple and could end up skyrocketing by 920 percent.

And then there are all the batteries we’re going to need for power storage. To keep energy flowing when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing will require enormous batteries at the grid level. This means 40 million tons of lithium — an eye-watering 2,700 percent increase over current levels of extraction.

That’s just for electricity. We also need to think about vehicles. This year, a group of leading British scientists submitted a letter to the U.K. Committee on Climate Change outlining their concerns about the ecological impact of electric cars. They agree, of course, that we need to end the sale and use of combustion engines. But they pointed out that unless consumption habits change, replacing the world’s projected fleet of 2 billion vehicles is going to require an explosive increase in mining: Global annual extraction of neodymium and dysprosium will go up by another 70 percent, annual extraction of copper will need to more than double, and cobalt will need to increase by a factor of almost four — all for the entire period from now to 2050.

Wind turbines require a lot of concrete to stabilize them on site (hundreds of tons of it), and that concrete is very carbon-intensive to create in the first place (nearly 930 Kg of CO2 per 1,000 Kg of cement), but even those huge turbine blades have a limited working lifespan and can’t be easily recycled into anything economically, so they generally end up in landfills.

From Bolt Action Lee to LMG: The Charlton Automatic Rifle

Filed under: History, Military, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published on 26 Jul 2019

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons

Cool Forgotten Weapons merch! http://shop.bbtv.com/collections/forg…

The Charlton automatic rifle is one of very, very few examples of a conversion from bolt action to self-loading rifle actually working reasonably well. Typically this sort of project founders in expense and unreliability. Charlton, however, was able to take his vision for providing the New Zealand Home Guard with a new weapon made form obsolete surplus and bring it fully to fruition, with 1500 guns made. They were never fired in anger, but allowed New Zealand to put all of its Bren guns into the field while retaining the Charltons as emergency weapons in case of Japanese invasion. Sadly, virtually all were destroyed in a warehouse fire after the war, leaving them extremely rare today.

Many thanks to the Royal Armouries for allowing me to film and disassemble this very scarce automatic rifle! The NFC collection there – perhaps the best military small arms collection in Western Europe – is available by appointment to researchers:

https://royalarmouries.org/research/n…

You can browse the various Armouries collections online here:

https://royalarmouries.org/collection/

For the whole detailed story on Charlton manufacture, and to download a copy of the manual, check my web site article here:

https://www.forgottenweapons.com/light-machine-guns/charlton-automatic-rifle/

Contact:
Forgotten Weapons
PO Box 87647
Tucson, AZ 85754

QotD: Rent-seeking

Filed under: Economics, Government, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

[Progressives] should also be delighted by public choice scholars’ development of the theory of privilege-seeking (or “rent-seeking“). It’s an old observation, really: when the state’s personnel have favors to dispense, people in the private sector will invest resources to obtain them. Such favors are by nature impositions on third parties. They may take the form of cash subsidies, taxes and regulations that hamper or quash competition and raise incomes in a non-market manner, and other devices. But the principle is the same: private- and government-sector individuals collude to use the state’s coercive power to obtain what they could not obtain through voluntary exchange for mutual benefit. It’s a theory of exploitation the good-faith left should embrace.

By the same token, the state’s personnel, seeing opportunities to sell favors, are just as likely to initiate the privilege-seeking process. In this sense, public choice scholars are right when they see the political arena as a series of exchanges. The big difference with the marketplace, however, is that in the political arena the largest group of people is forced to participate.

The bottom line on privilege-seeking, which should interest the left, is this: the people with the greatest access to power will not be those the left cares most about, but those who run Boeing and ExxonMobil and GE and Lockheed Martin. Wealth transfers will tend overwhelmingly to be upward.

Sheldon Richman, “TGIF: What the Left Should Like about Public Choice”, The Libertarian Institute, 2017-07-28.

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