Quotulatiousness

January 13, 2021

Waking the Sleeping Giant – America Prepares for War – WW2 Special

Filed under: Economics, Government, History, Military, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 12 Jan 2021

As the United States enters World War Two, a huge industrial giant awakens from hibernation. This episode covers industrial mobilization plans, their execution, and their potential.

Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory
Or join The TimeGhost Army directly at: https://timeghost.tv

Follow WW2 day by day on Instagram @ww2_day_by_day – https://www.instagram.com/ww2_day_by_day
Between 2 Wars: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list…
Source list: http://bit.ly/WW2sources

Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Joram Appel
Director: Astrid Deinhard
Producers: Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Executive Producers: Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson, Bodo Rittenauer
Creative Producer: Maria Kyhle
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Joram Appel
Edited by: Karolina Dołęga
Sound design: Marek Kamiński
Map animations: Eastory (https://www.youtube.com/c/eastory)

Colorizations by:
Dememorabilia – https://www.instagram.com/dememorabilia/
Norman Stewart – https://oldtimesincolor.blogspot.com/

Sources:
– Library of Congress
– National Archives NARA
– Picture of the first class of the Army Industrial College from National Defense University
– FDR Presidential Library & Museum
– Icons from the Noun Project: Artillery by Creative Mania, Douglas SBD Dauntless by Lluisa Iborra, Man by Milinda Courey, Factory Workers by Gan Khoon Lay, Soldier by Wonmo Kang, Old Car by Andri Graphic, progress 20% & 40% by Roberto Chiaveri.

Soundtracks from Epidemic Sound:
– “The Inspector 4” – Johannes Bornlöf
– “London” – Howard Harper-Barnes
– “Break Free” – Fabien Tell
– “Last Point of Safe Return” – Fabien Tell
– “Force Matrix” – Jon Bjork

Archive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

Driving people offline will break essential political feedback loops

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Larry Correia on the ongoing purge of Trump supporters from many social media networks:

Screencap of a Fox News report on the social media networks that have deplatformed President Donald Trump, January 2021.

For all of history when people have a problem they have been able to talk about it and hash it out. Solutions to complex problems don’t spring fully formed into existence the instant you note the problem. You get ideas from others. Their perspectives help you better articulate the issue and recognize consequences you didn’t expect.

Lawyers know law, engineers know engineering, artists know art, so on. So when there is a big problem that spreads across multiple fields, of course you need to talk it over with people who know those areas, because they know things you don’t. Being smart in one area doesn’t automatically make you an expert in others. We all need help. Big problems require discussion and brainstorming. Even if it isn’t effective, it’s still useful for the clever people who can make solutions to be able to listen to what the regular populace thinks and feels so that they can get the scope and understand how the problem hurts the public.

In the old days these conversations happened at churches, taverns, colleges, that kind of thing. All the famous places where big solutions to big problems were hashed out have a historical marker on them today. For us, those things are now illegal or stifled and we get the internet.

So of course the people who don’t see the problems as problems — or sometimes they are the problem — are trying to stop the rest of us from discussing the problems or they are trying to control where and how the conversations happen. Since they benefit from the problem, they will squash or sabotage people talking about solutions. It is in their best interests to do so, and when you give a bully a stick, they will beat you with it.

The topic of the current problem isn’t the important thing. This is our public square now whether we like it or not. We have foolishly abdicated the public square and now we are paying the price. Of course they can’t just let people they don’t like converse. That’s dangerous to their positions.

So when information they don’t like appears, they hide it. If they can’t hide it, they “fact check” it, and often that’s just a headline screaming false followed by an article full of straw grasping excuses they know most people won’t read. The goal is to shut you up or discredit you.

In the old days, at your pub or church, your drinking buddies or co-religionists probably shared your concerns and faced the same problems. So at least you were working toward a common goal. But now, big tech doesn’t want that. They don’t like groups or forums that don’t share their orthodoxy. They want/need to keep you here, and they need strangers to constantly kick in the doors and blunder in to tell you that you are stupid or crazy, that way we waste time arguing with them. It used to be a village had one idiot. When we talk now we get to deal with a thousand villages worth of idiot.

Semiauto DPM Light Machine Gun Review

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

Forgotten Weapons
Published 7 Mar 2017

I have had a parts kit for a Soviet DPM light machine gun (actually a Polish one, but the design is identical) stashed away for many years now, with the hope to eventually have it built into a live gun. When I found out that SMG (makers of the sweet semiauto FG42 replicas) was making a new production run of DP and DPM barrels, receivers, and semiauto trigger conversions I jumped at my chance. I sent my kit to SMG, and they built it into this complete semiauto rifle.

The DP was introduced in 1928 as the standard Soviet light machine gun, and served through World War Two. In 1944, several defects were acknowledged and improved, notably the location of the recoil spring, the grip, and the bipod. This created the DPM, which did see some slight use at the very end of WW2, as well as use by several eastern bloc nations after the war (including in Korea). It would be updated again in 1946 with the RP46 conversion assembly to feed from Maxim belts instead of the distinctive pan magazines (and in fact, SMG is working on a reproduction of the RP46 conversion as well, although it is not yet ready).

Anyway, I took my new semiauto DPM out to the range and got a firsthand understanding of why these guns were so well liked by troops who used them. The design is nothing if not solid, rugged, and dependable. Like other iconic Soviet firearms, the DP/DPM is elegantly simple and bombproof. It is easy and comfortable to shoot, and SMG’s new and very clever linear hammer-fired semiauto conversion gives it a better trigger than any other semiauto machine gun conversion I have handled. Most such guns have really heavy and really creepy triggers, but this is about 8lb and very crisp – and that makes a huge difference in its shootability.

In a nutshell, the gun zeroed easily and shot well, it had no malfuctions in my 3 or 4 pans of ammo expended (using Czech surplus steel-case ammo), and was really a joy to shoot. I would not hesitate to recommend them, and SMG is offered everything from individual parts for you to build yourself to kit build services, and turnkey complete guns.

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons

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

If you enjoy Forgotten Weapons, check out its sister channel, InRangeTV! http://www.youtube.com/InRangeTVShow

QotD: Bureaucracy as a filter

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

Imagine there’s a new $10,000 medication. Insurance companies are legally required to give it to people who really need it and would die without it. But they don’t want somebody who’s only a little bit sick demanding it as a “lifestyle” drug. In principle doctors are supposed to help with this, but doctors have no incentive to ever say no to their patients. If the insurance just sends the doctor a form asking “does this patient really need this medication?”, the doctor will always just check “yes” and send it back. Even if the form says in big red letters PLEASE ONLY SAY YES IF THERE IS AN IMPORTANT MEDICAL NEED, the doctor will still check “yes” more often than a rational central planner allocating scarce resources would like. And insurance companies are sometimes paranoid about refusing to do things doctors say are important, because sometimes the doctor was right and then they can get sued.

But imagine it takes the doctor an hour of painful phone calls to even get the right person from the insurance company on the line. Now there’s a cost involved. If your patient is going to die without the medication, you’ll probably groan and start making the phone calls. But if your patient doesn’t really need it, and you just wanted to approve it in order to be nice, now you might start having a heartfelt talk with your patient about the importance of trying less expensive medications before jumping right to the $10,000 one.

Organizations have a legal incentive not to deny people things, because the people involved can sue them. But they have an economic incentive not to say yes to every request they get. Seeing how much time and exasperation people are willing to put up with in order to get what they want is an elegant way of separating out the needy from the greedy if every other option is closed to you.

This story makes sense and would help explain why bureaucracy gets so bad, but I’m not sure it really fits the evidence. People complain a lot about bureaucracy in places like the Department of Motor Vehicles, but the DMV doesn’t lose anything by giving you a drivers license and isn’t interested in separating out people who really want licenses from people who only want them a little. If the DMV can be as bureaucratic as it is without any conspiratorial explanation, maybe everything is as bureaucratic as it is without any conspiratorial explanation.

Scott Alexander, “Bureaucracy as Active Ingredient”, Slate Star Codex, 2018-08-31.

Powered by WordPress