Quotulatiousness

September 7, 2022

“For those brave right-wing Americans… if you want to fight against the country, you need an F-15. You need something little more than a gun.”

Filed under: Military, Politics, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Kurt Schlichter begs to differ with Joe Biden’s “Triumph of the Shrill” warmongering from last week:

Hmmmm, but do they? Really?

Grandpa Badfinger’s premise is that all you tens of millions of semi-fascists out there with your AR-15s would have no shot stopping the woke military, which would eagerly crush you with their potent force package of F-15s and esoteric pronouns. It is a flawed premise on more grounds than one column can cover (hence my book), but we need to focus and that means we will need to overlook some important questions. These important questions include:

– Why do you imagine your sorry band of socialist creeps who treat the Constitution like Jerry Nadler treats his boxers constitutes “the country”?

– The useless senior officer corps aside, why do you believe the normals who make up the vast majority of America’s combat forces will gleefully butcher their friends and family for the amusement of a bunch of Chardonnay-swilling blue checks?

– Have you ever heard of Afghanistan?

Let’s focus on his key sound bite. Gun vs. Jets … who ya got?

I’m putting my money on the guns. You dumb progressives can go for the jets and the points.

Now, let’s start raising the kind of facts that tend to undermine the soundbite that launched a thousand MSNBCgasms.

First up, what does a gun do? What does a fighter-bomber do?

Well, a gun gives an individual soldier – and that’s what civilian freedom fighters would be – the ability to dominate the space on the ground around them out to a couple hundred meters of open territory (let’s not argue about maximum effective ranges, or the fact that civilians have a lot of weapons that outrange the 5.56mm weapons systems currently used by the military – a weapon system whose bullets Mr. 10% Off The Top thinks fly “five times as rapidly as a bullet shot out of any other gun“). In other words, a gun controls space on the ground. Coincidentally, the ground happens to be where people live.

A jet fighter dominates air space and keeps other planes away. Few people actually live in the air. Now, a jet fighter bomber like the F-15 can drop bombs on the enemy – which is, according to Crusty, us freedom-loving American citizens. Of course, this kind of tactical employment works to support guys on the ground dominating terrain with guns. Planes don’t hold territory; they help soldiers hold territory. So, it’s an apples and oranges thing at the threshold, which is appropriate since the whole discussion Slow Joe began is pretty much Fruit Loops.

Biden assumes he’s got soldiers to support with his jets. How many? Who knows? Some. But lots of colonels and generals, the kind who add (he/him) or (zip/zap) to their official signature blocks – would salute and carry out order to kill other Americans. Hey, maybe they can win this war and finally get one in the “Win” column after three decades! They’re due!

But the problem for them is quantity. There are tens of millions of American patriots with guns, AR-15s being only one color in the rainbow of freedom-defending firearms. Real diversity is 5.56mm alongside 7.62mm and .30-06 and 12 gauge and .45 and others, all firing together for a brighter tomorrow. So, there better be a lot of airplanes to balance out millions of patriots.

Um, how many fighter-bombers do we have anyway?

Well, let’s give America’s Greatest Matlock Superfan the benefit of the doubt and include all types of fighter-bombers – F-25s, F-16s, F-18s, F-35s and even A-10s. Let’s see – there are about 1750 planes for the Air Force, about 1100 planes for the Navy, and maybe 300 for the Marines, so call it 3150 aircraft. Okay, where are they? You have to have them here in America if you want to kill Americans for refusing to obey, so how many are in the continental United States and available for Hunter’s Dad’s open season on dissidents?

Call it two-thirds. We have lots of planes forward deployed – Europe, Asia, on ships. He’s got about 2000 aircraft to use to kill other Americans – that’s what he was saying, so we’ll take him at his slurred, semi-coherent word. Add maybe another 400 combat drones in the USA.

Now, there’s a thing called the OR Rate – operational readiness. That’s the percentage of planes that are ready to go at a given time. Planes need maintenance. They break, and even routine use requires massive upkeep efforts. And parts can be hard to get, especially when you are spending all your money on woke nonsense. What’s the real OR Rate? I don’t know – it’s probably classified and, as we know, today exposing classified material is bad and we can’t wait for it to go back to being A-OK when Hillary does it again, or when someone leaks something classified to the NYT or WaPo and they publish it. Let’s assume 75% – that loud laughing you just heard is military aviation professionals scoffing at a consistent 75% OR Rate.

This means President Gumby has 1500 planes and 300 drones to suppress those millions of dissenters. Hey, that’s 36 aircraft a state!

The Original Caesar Salad from Mexico

Filed under: Americas, Food, History, Italy, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 6 Sep 2022
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Tamale Pie: What did WW2 Food Ration Stamps Look Like?

Filed under: Food, History, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

YesterKitchen
Published 3 Nov 2019

I hope you enjoy this special trip back in food history!! WW2 brought food rationing to America and American housewives needed recipes to accommodate the scarcity. Never fear, warm, hearty dishes such as this were created to feed the nation. This Tamale Pie is classic war ration cooking and is just YUM!
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QotD: Gender Dysphoria

Filed under: Health, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

My lifelong gender dysphoria has certainly been a primary inspiration for my entire career as a researcher and writer. I have never for a moment felt female — but neither have I ever felt male either. I regard my ambiguous position between the sexes as a privilege that has given me special access to and insight into a broad range of human thought and response. If a third gender option (“Other”) were ever added to government documents, I would be happy to check it. However, I have never believed, and do not now, that society has any obligation to bend over backwards to accommodate my particular singularity of identity. I am very concerned about current gender theory rhetoric that convinces young people that if they feel uneasy about or alienated from their assignment to one sex, then they must take concrete steps, from hormone therapy to alarmingly irreversible surgery, to become the other sex. I find this an oddly simplistic and indeed reactionary response to what should be regarded as a golden opportunity for flexibility and fluidity. Furthermore, it is scientifically impossible to change sex. Except for very rare cases of intersex, which are developmental anomalies, every cell of the human body remains coded with one’s birth sex for life.

Beyond that, I believe that my art-based theory of “sexual personae” is far more expansive and truthful about human psychology than is current campus ideology: who we are or want to be exceeds mere gender, because every experimental persona that we devise contains elements of gesture, dress, and attitude rich with historical and cultural associations. (For Halloween in childhood, for example, I defiantly dressed as Robin Hood, a Roman soldier, a matador, Napoleon, and Hamlet.) Because of my own personal odyssey, I am horrified by the escalating prescription of puberty-blockers to children with gender dysphoria like my own: I consider this practice to be a criminal violation of human rights. Have the adults gone mad? Children are now being callously used for fashionable medical experiments with unknown long-term results.

In regard to the vexed issue of toilets and locker rooms, if private unisex facilities can be conveniently provided through simple relabeling, it would be humane to do so, but I fail to see why any school district, restaurant, or business should be legally obligated to go to excess expense (which ultimately penalizes the public) to serve such a minuscule proportion of the population, however loud their voices. And speaking of voices: as a libertarian, I oppose all intrusion by government into the realm of language, which belongs to the people and which evolves organically over time. Thus the term “Ms.” eventually became standard English, but another 1970s feminist hybrid, “womyn”, did not: the populace as a whole made that decision, as it always does with argot or slang filtering up from ethnic or avant-garde subgroups. The same principle applies to preferred transgender pronouns: they are a courtesy that we may choose to defer to, but in a modern democracy, no authority has the right to compel their usage.

Camille Paglia, “Prominent Democratic Feminist Camille Paglia Says Hillary Clinton ‘Exploits Feminism’”, Washington Free Beacon, 2017-05-15.

September 6, 2022

Fixing the American education system (other than burning it to the ground and starting over)

Filed under: Books, Bureaucracy, Education, History, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At First Things, M.D. Aeschliman reviews The Knowledge Gap: The Hidden Cause of America’s Broken Education System — and How to Fix It by Natalie Wexler:

E.D. Hirsch Jr., distinguished scholar of comparative literature, is the most important advocate for K–12 education reform of the past seventy-five years. Natalie Wexler’s recent book The Knowledge Gap is a helpful examination of Hirsch’s critical analyses and intellectual framework, as well as the elementary school curriculum that he designed — Core Knowledge.

One of Hirsch’s key focal points is the vapid, supposedly “developmentally appropriate” fictions that dominate language arts curricula in elementary schools — mind-numbingly banal stories with single-syllable vocabularies and large pictures. These silly literary fictions and fantasies have helped “dumb down” a hundred years of American students by eliminating or forbidding any substantial reading of expository prose about history and science in the first eight grades. A poignant narrative well worth reading is Harold Henderson’s Let’s Kill Dick and Jane, which details a noble but ultimately losing fight waged by a family firm from 1962 to 1996 against the big textbook publishers.

After a teaching career of fifty years, I agree with Hirsch that the primary problem in American public education is not the high schools, but the poorly organized, ineffective elementary school curricula, including the idiotic books of childish fiction. As Wexler writes, the governing “approach to reading instruction … leaves … many students unprepared to tackle high-school-level work”. Pity the poor high school teachers.

A hundred years ago John Dewey and his lieutenants from Columbia Teachers College, especially William H. Kilpatrick, started dismantling academic “subjects” in favor of “the project method”. They also worked to redefine history as “social studies”, a degenerative development that has continued without cease in our K–12 schools, leading to ludicrous presentism. Dewey and the progressives also attacked traditional language classes — especially phonics but also Latin — opening the way for “naturalistic” literacy instruction that has proved to be ineffective. Yet it should be obvious that students must “learn to read” well early on so as to “read to learn” for high school and college and the rest of their lives. And what they read early on is important.

The “progressive” educational assault on traditional American education had another source, which might be called “soft utopianism”. Twenty-five years ago Hirsch was already writing powerfully — in The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them — about this romantic-progressive “soft utopianism” and how it conflicted with what is wisest and best in the thinking, writings, and achievements of the founding fathers and their early republic. Yet he also knew — as himself a repentant progressive “mugged by reality” — that in the nineteenth century the republican educational legacy was already under intellectual assault by Rousseau’s American disciples Emerson, Thoreau, and Walt Whitman. Whitman’s egalitarian naturalism was one of Dewey’s greatest inspirations by the early twentieth century.

The progressives particularly dislike history, and our current “Great Awakening” indicates this. A few years ago, the former superintendent of the school system of one of our most “liberal” states said to me in private conversation that “the progressives hate history and won’t tolerate it in the curriculum”. They hate it because any thinking about history requires ethical assumptions and qualitative judgments: What in the past is worth studying? How do we structure our narratives? How do we fairly evaluate historical personalities and events? Which ones were virtuous and beneficial? These and related questions require some standard of justice and the idea that most individuals — in the past and present — have some degree of free will and some disposition to ethics: the “self-evident truths” of our founding document, and of civilization itself.

September 5, 2022

We’ve somehow moved from “women who want to have it all” to “the servant problem” in less than a generation

Filed under: Economics, Health, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In Ed West’s weekly round-up post, he links to this article by Helen Andrews about the cultural shift for women since the sexual revolution:

People are always more likely to believe a lie if it’s plausible. The lie that women can have it all has as many adherents today as it does because it’s not obvious why it should be a lie. Have a career and a family: why not? There are enough hours in the day. The challenge of refuting the lie that women can have it all — that is, that they can prioritize career and family equally — lies in the fact that the trade-offs that make it impossible are hidden, not obvious, because mathematically it’s not something that should be impossible.

If only employers would do more to accommodate working women, if alternatives could be found to fulfill duties at home that mothers used to do for themselves, like childcare and housework. But the more you start thinking about those accommodations and thinking not just about what it means for any one woman to have it all, but for society to be restructured around women having it all, the more impossible those trade-offs start to seem.

Obviously there are women today in America who are trying to have it all, and many appear to be doing so successfully, at least insofar as they have both demanding careers and children. But look more closely at those households, and almost invariably you’ll see that behind every woman who is balancing work and family, there is an army of low-paid labor, immigrant cleaning ladies, nannies who are paid cash under the table, Door Dash delivery men who deliver the meals that mom never had time to cook. It’s no coincidence that the vast increase in female workforce participation has coincided with the reappearance of something that the more egalitarian America of the early 20th century did not have, and that is a servant class.

America today is more prosperous than it was 70 years ago, and yet it is no longer possible for an ordinary worker to support a middle-class family on a single income. The story of how that happened is bound up into a lie that has become gospel today, which is the lie that women can have it all. Undergirding that lie is a further lie that the Republican Party can have it all. The GOP has very much hitched itself to the idea that it can be the party of stay-at-home moms and girl bosses equally. Again, superficially this seems like it ought to be possible. Live and let live, it’s a free country. But this bargain is unsustainable in practice. We only have to look at the last 30 years to understand why.

The official position of the Republican Party today is that the government’s job is to make it possible for everyone to make the right choice for their family. This rhetoric of maximizing choice requires politicians to talk as if some women will choose to be moms and some will choose to be girl bosses, and it’s really 50/50 which one you end up being. You know, both are equally valid. Who’s to say one is better? But that’s just false, and it’s false according to women’s own preferences. The number of women who say they do not want to have children is very low, in the single digits, around 5% — and that’s just the number who will tell surveys that they predict they won’t have kids when their childbearing years are over. The number of women who actually reach old age and feel satisfied with their life, being just a girl boss with no children to keep them company, is even lower.

Squaring away all this family happiness is and ought to be a higher priority than maximizing women’s career success. It is also a more urgent priority. A woman cannot simply wake up at age 35 and decide she wants to have a family. Everyone says that the sexual revolution was brought about by the advent of the contraceptive pill, which was supposedly ushered in at an amazing new age of a new human experience thanks to science. But it actually changed a lot less than we think. We’ve gotten quite good at not having children when we don’t want to have them, but the science that gave us the pill has not made us very much better at making children arrive when we do.

“In this version of the story, the little boy points out that the naked emperor has no soul, and the people begin to notice”

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

Chris Bray uses the example of a new Disney show featuring the literal daughter of Satan — for the LULs — to illustrate just how unhinged our culture has become:

Give me a minute, and let me show you something without framing or a narrative. Then I’ll talk about it, but first just notice it. The company founded by Walt Disney has a new show about a middle school girl who has an awkward dilemma: She’s the Antichrist (as her mom reveals to her one day, after a weird day at school), and her Cool Dad is Satan, who has lots of funny lines about what a wild guy he is. Funny teen girl dilemmas follow, like this one time her parents show up to a party — which, like, super bummer and everything, but it’s even funnier when your dad is actually, literally Satan.

[…]

But no lines are being crossed, because there are no lines. Satan is a television character; immorality is impossible in a culture without morality, without a moral framework and moral anchors. Lacking principles, no one in power can violate any. They’re completely adrift, completely free, and completely ruined. They can go anywhere, and they often do. You can’t sin when nothing is a sin. Well, except for using the wrong pronouns, but more or less.

Now: There are people who are not adrift, who have moral reference points. I continue to believe they’re the majority, geographically prevalent and often thick on the ground, morally attuned as communities and families in a global and national milieu of amoral disconnectedness.

So we have people who see no lines, traveling freely across discarded boundaries, watched by people who are appalled by line-crossing that the line-crossers don’t perceive at all.

See also this essay from Dr. Robert Yoho, “Guess Who Passes the Psychopath Test?”

    Psychopathic lying is successful because normal people do not believe that anyone lies as a routine. Debates with sociopaths are useless. No matter what we say, no matter how much evidence is given, it has no meaning for them. Their sole goal is to fool us into classifying them as normal so they can continue to deceive, control, and use us …

    When major positions of power in business, government, industry, and society are filled by sociopaths, a downward spiral begins. The normal people eventually recognize what their leaders are and devise survival strategies.

We’re there, though it’s hard to place “there” on a map. We can see that a significant share of power and status — in politics, in economics, and in culture — belongs to people who have no perception of social rules or moral limits at all. And we see that some lines need to be reimposed, urgently and firmly.

After a few years of, “but these are the experts, right?” it feels like the beginning of the phase in which everybody finally knows the game and the stakes. In this version of the story, the little boy points out that the naked emperor has no soul, and the people begin to notice. And then?

QotD: Why bureaucracies are inherently slow

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

It is important to remember that all government law enforcement agencies are bureaucracies. And all bureaucracies have certain behavioral tendencies owing to their institutional structure and the incentives that structure generates.

The great economist Ludwig von Mises analyzed these tendencies and incentives in his 1944 book Bureaucracy.

In that book, Mises identified “slowness and slackness” as among the inherent features of government bureaucracy that no reform can remove.

We have all experienced the “slowness and slackness” of government bureaucracy: with the post office, the DMV, the public school system, etc. That’s why the animated movie Zootopia had sloths working at the DMV and everyone got the joke. And police bureaucracies are no exception to this reputation.

Why is this so? In part, it is due to another indelible feature of bureaucracy: that it is, as Mises wrote, “bound to comply with detailed rules and regulations fixed by the authority of a superior body. The task of the bureaucrat is to perform what these rules and regulations order him to do. His discretion to act according to his own best conviction is seriously restricted by them.”

Sometimes a delay is simply due to the fact that the government employee is too tied up in red tape to respond in a timely manner. The timely response may be outright prohibited by the rules. Or the delay may be owing to Kafkaesque procedural mazes that first must be navigated or chains of command that must be climbed for permission.

[…]

Again, Mises considered such features of bureaucracy to be unreformable. Why? He argued that it is the only way that a government bureaucracy can be made at all accountable to the public. A bureaucrat with a free hand is even more dangerous than a bureaucrat with his hands tied.

“If one assigns to the authorities the power to imprison or even to kill people,” Mises wrote, “one must restrict and clearly circumscribe this power. Otherwise the officeholder or judge would turn into an irresponsible despot.”

Dan Sanchez, “How Bureaucracy May Have Cost Lives in Uvalde”, Foundation for Economic Education, 2022-05-31.

September 4, 2022

Extreme Ultra-MAGA terrorist Trump voters are endangering “our” democracy!!!1!

Filed under: Media, Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Perhaps I exaggerate a tiny bit in my headline … but events here in Clown World metastasize so quickly that parodists and satirists are becoming an endangered species because it’s nearly impossible to come up with more incredibly stupid stuff than the political class do for real:

Over the past couple of weeks, it seems that the Regime has really been ramping up its rhetoric against its political and ideological enemies. In a coordinated rollout, talking heads across the media have been stating that “MAGA Trump voters” are “threats to democracy”, “trying to take away our freedoms”, “stochastic terrorists”, and so forth. This all has been timed to culminate with the pResident himself going on national television to explicitly state that the entire half of the country that didn’t vote for him are mortal enemies of the state. This takes on a somewhat more ominous tone when we remember that just a few days previous, this same pResident essentially threatened to use F-15s to bomb patriotic Americans who believe in the Constitution.

While these could be dismissed as the senile ramblings of a doddering old dementia patient, the thing to keep in mind is that Biden himself is merely a sock puppet. What he says reflects the words put into his mouth by the progressive theatre kids who staff his administration, as well as other elements within the Regime. Indeed, all of the huffinpuffery about how “your hillbilly AR-15 can’t take on tanks and fighter jets hurr durr!!” is basically the sort of thing you’d have heard on Reddit for years. But the fact that official channels are now openly talking about using the military against their own people for mere ideological purposes suggests that there is an acceleration going on in the Left’s subversion of this country.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again — if there is to be an open civil war in the USA, it will almost assuredly be instigated and started by the Left. However, it is not one that they are likely to win, for a number of reasons that I will elaborate briefly below. They are ones that I suspect the Regime itself knows, which makes the current trajectory they seem to be setting appear all the more desperate. Common sense would dictate that they should try to keep the repression at just a high enough level to intimidate the citizenry into compliance without actually provoking a broad response, even if not a violent one. Yet, the Left is dynamiting what is left of the social contract because once they’ve got started down this path there’s no stopping.

So briefly, let’s talk about why the Regime would not win a war against Red America, despite the hopes and expectations of thousands of redditards across the country. First and foremost there is the unreliability (from the Regime’s perspective) of the current military. Simply put, most military personnel below the O-4 or O-5 levels are not ideologically indoctrinated into woke progressivism and are unlikely to be willing to wage war on their own countrymen. They’re especially not likely to go along with wokester fever dreams of bombing Red cities into oblivion and turning the heartland into ashes just to stick it to those Trumpsters. So there would be deep fractures, mutinies, fragging incidents galore.

Of course, that’s why the Regime is trying to wokify the military to be more ideologically compatible with the Left. In a sense, for the Left the drastic recruiting shortfall that the military is currently experiencing is a feature, not a bug, since it provides them with the justification to make up the difference by recruiting foreigners with no connexion to the American people (and thus no compunctions about shooting at them). Which then introduces a further competency factor in that when you recruit a third world army, you … have a third world army, so you’re sacrificing competency for reliability. Nevertheless, as it currently stands most enlisted men and lower-level officers are not going to be inclined to incinerate their buddy’s parents for believing in the second amendment.

As Severian posted right after the “Triumph of the Shrill” speech by Biden:

I’d like to address the “they’re going in for the kill” argument, eloquently argued by MBlanc46 and others. I agree, there is exactly as much, if not more, evidence for this thesis then there is for my “they’re panicking” thesis. And whatever else they thought Brandon was doing last night, there’s definitely a “throw down the gauntlet” aspect to it.

The reason I favor “panic” over “going in for the kill” is that as hard as it is to believe, the Left always see themselves as the heroic underdog, struggling against a rigged system. Even when they’re throwing you into boxcars, they’re bewailing the fact — and in what passes for their minds it IS a fact — that you forced them to do it.

They cry out in pain as they strike you, as another demented shitbag collectivist said about a different group in an eerily similar context.

What all this — Biden’s big “My Struggle” speech (hereafter to be known, as Mmack put it, as “the Triumph of the Shrill”), the hiring of a zillion new IRS agents, the works — is designed to do is: provoke a reaction. To put it bluntly, there is no “domestic extremism”. Of course there really are some retards out there doing retard shit, but as we all know, the typical “Klan” meeting is an ATF agent trying to entrap a DEA agent who’s trying to entrap an FBI agent who is trying to entrap his own informant. Hello, fellow patriots!

But they keep failing to do roll-the-tanks-level shit. Which is a problem for the Apparat, because the ATF agent can’t get permission from the DEA to provide enough guns to the FBI agent to really kick things off (not least because he’s going to be foiled by the other undercover FBI agent who’s trying to entrap the other DEA agent and so on).

So they just keep upping the ante, hoping that maybe this time, finally, somebody will do a terrorism.

If they’re confident enough to put Brandon in a Darth Vader suit on national TV, in other words, they long ago passed the point where anyone not crippled by the psychological compulsion to see himself as a victim would’ve said “fuck it, drop the hammer”. We wore diapers on our faces for two fucking years, for Christ’s sake, and shot ourselves up with mystery goop because the same evil little goblin who turned AIDS from an easily containable plague of deviants into a legit public health crisis told us to.

The War is Four Years Old this week – WW2 – 210 – September 2, 1943

Filed under: Britain, Germany, History, Italy, Japan, Military, Pacific, Russia, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 3 Sep 2022

Four years of war and no real end in sight, but as the week ends the Allies land their first troops on Italy, actively committing themselves to a front in Western Europe. In the USSR the Soviets are taking heavy casualties but still pushing back the enemy with big partisan help and in Pacific plans are made for offensive against yet more Japanese held islands.
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Experimental Primer-Actuated Semiauto Springfield 1903

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

Forgotten Weapons
Published 3 Sep 2016

During the 1920s, a lot of experimental rifle development work was being done in the US. The military was interested in finding a semi-automatic rifle, and plenty of inventors were eager to get that valuable military contract. One particular item of interest to the military was the possibility of being able to convert large existing stockpiles of bolt-action 1903 Springfield rifles into semi-automatics, and that is what this particular example was an attempt at.

This rifle is built with a barrel and receiver made in 1921 (it was not uncommon for the government to provide parts to inventors working in this area), and uses an operating system which is pretty much unheard of today: primer actuation. In this system, the primer pushes back out of the cartridge case (intentionally) upon firing, acting as a small piston. This pushes the firing pin backwards (as well as the bolt face in this rifle), which begins the process of unlocking and cycling. It is a system that saw some popularity for a brief time in the 20s, as it allowed semi-automatic action without the need for a drilled gas port or a moving barrel — several of John Garand’s early prototypes operated this way. However, substandard performance and the need for special ammunition (most military ammunition had primers solidly crimped in place) led to its abandonment.
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September 2, 2022

The winner in 1932 campaigned against high taxes, big government, and more debt. Then he turned all those up to 11

Filed under: Economics, Government, History, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At the Foundation for Economic Education, Lawrence W. Reed notes that we often get the opposite of what we vote for, and perhaps the best example of that was the 1932 presidential campaign between high-taxing, big-spending, government-expanding Republican Herbert Hoover and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who ran against all of Hoover’s excesses … until inauguration day, anyway:

Top left: The Tennessee Valley Authority, part of the New Deal, being signed into law in 1933.
Top right: FDR (President Franklin Delano Roosevelt) was responsible for the New Deal.
Bottom: A public mural from one of the artists employed by the New Deal’s WPA program.
Wikimedia Commons.

If you were a socialist (or a modern “liberal” or “progressive”) in 1932, you faced an embarrassment of riches at the ballot box. You could go for Norman Thomas. Or perhaps Verne Reynolds of the Socialist Labor Party. Or William Foster of the Communist Party. Maybe Jacob Coxey of the Farmer-Labor Party or even William Upshaw of the Prohibition Party. You could have voted for Hoover who, after all, had delivered sky-high tax rates, big deficits, lots of debt, higher spending, and trade-choking tariffs in his four-year term. Roosevelt’s own running mate, John Nance Garner of Texas, declared that Republican Hoover was “taking the country down the path to socialism”.

Journalist H.L. Mencken famously noted that “Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.” If you agreed with Mencken and preferred a non-socialist candidate who promised to get government off your back and out of your pocket in 1932, Franklin Roosevelt was your man — that is, until March 1933 when he assumed office and took a sharp turn in the other direction.

The platform on which Roosevelt ran that year denounced the incumbent administration for its reckless growth of government. The Democrats promised no less than a 25 percent reduction in federal spending if elected.

Roosevelt accused Hoover of governing as though, in FDR’s words, “we ought to center control of everything in Washington as rapidly as possible.” On September 29 in Iowa, the Democrat presidential nominee blasted Hooverism in these terms:

    I accuse the present Administration of being the greatest spending Administration in peace times in all our history. It is an Administration that has piled bureau on bureau, commission on commission, and has failed to anticipate the dire needs and the reduced earning power of the people. Bureaus and bureaucrats, commissions and commissioners have been retained at the expense of the taxpayer.

    Now, I read in the past few days in the newspapers that the President is at work on a plan to consolidate and simplify the Federal bureaucracy. My friends, four long years ago, in the campaign of 1928, he, as a candidate, proposed to do this same thing. And today, once more a candidate, he is still proposing, and I leave you to draw your own inferences. And on my part, I ask you very simply to assign to me the task of reducing the annual operating expenses of your national government.

Once in the White House, he did no such thing. He doubled federal spending in his first term. New “alphabet agencies” were added to the bureaucracy. Nothing of any consequence in the budget was either cut or made more efficient. He gave us our booze back by ending Prohibition, but then embarked upon a spending spree that any drunk with your wallet would envy. Taxes went up in FDR’s administration, not down as he had promised.

Don’t take my word for it. It’s all a matter of public record even if your teacher or professor never told you any of this. For details, I recommend these books: Burton Folsom’s New Deal or Raw Deal; Murray Rothbard’s America’s Great Depression; my own Great Myths of the Great Depression; and the two I want to tell you about now, John T. Flynn’s As We Go Marching and The Roosevelt Myth.

For every thousand books written, perhaps one may come to enjoy the appellation “classic”. That label is reserved for a volume that through the force of its originality and thoroughness, shifts paradigms and serves as a timeless, indispensable source of insight.

Such a book is The Roosevelt Myth. First published in 1948, Flynn’s definitive analysis of America’s 32nd president is arguably the best and most thoroughly documented chronicle of the person and politics of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Flynn’s 1944 book, As We Go Marching, focuses on the fascist-style economic planning during World War II and is very illuminating as well.

Alliance For Peace (1951) North Atlantic Treaty Organization Promo Film

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Europe, France, Germany, Greece, History, Military, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

PeriscopeFilm
Published 14 May 202s

Produced by NATO and the Signal Photographic Service of the U.S. Army, this black & white film is about the formation of NATO and its importance in the defense of the free world. Copyright 1951. The film features a score by William Alwyn. The film dates from the time when Gen. Dwight Eisenhower was supreme commander of NATO (1950-52), a post he left in order to run for President of the United States.
(more…)

US Navy to get its very own Zampolit cadre

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

CDR Salamander reports on the latest politically correct doings at the US Naval Academy, which he points out always filter down to the active duty fleet, both good and bad … and I don’t think he considers this particular initiative to be a good one:

The quasi-woke religion as promoted by the CNO provided all the supporting fires they needed and the commissariat decided to make hay while the sun shines.

You know the drill.

Do you want Political Officers, USNA’s own Zampolit? You’ll get them.

Want blue and gold Red Guards? You’re going to have them.

You want red in tooth and claw racism, quotas, and different standards based on self-identified racial groups? You’re going to have more of it.

First let’s pull some nice bits from the governing document; COMDTMIDNINST 1500.5, the “Diversity Education Program” from February of this year. You can read it at the link, or below the pull quotes;

BEHOLD!

    1. Purpose. To provide guidance and designate responsibilities for implementation of the Diversity Peer Educator (DPE) Program.

    …

    b. DPEs support moral development at USNA by facilitating small group conversations that educate and inform midshipmen, faculty, and staff and foster a culture of inclusion across the Yard, resulting in cohesive teams ready to exert maximal performance and win the Naval service’s battles.

I’m not sure you could get more Orwellian … but they’re going to try;

    4. Responsibilities

    a. USNA Chief Diversity Officer. The Chief Diversity Officer is the final approving authority for all matters pertaining to the DPE Program and will ensure the program is in line with Department of the Navy and Superintendent’s guidance in reference (a).

    a. DPE Program Manager. The program manager for DPE is an active-duty officer appointed by the Chief Diversity Officer. Faculty/staff from the Stockdale Center for Ethical Leadership, the Naval Academy Athletic Association (NAAA), or other cost-centers on the Yard will aid the program manager.

Yes, the football booster organization will “help” the Zampolits. Huh. You see that, yes? Pull that thread …

    c. Brigade Dignity and Respect Officer. Reference (c) delineates the roles and responsibilities of the Brigade Dignity and Respect Officer (BDRO) who is accountable for the training, development, and qualification of the DPEs. However, the DPEs are organized and managed by the Midshipman DPE Lead.

    d. Midshipmen DPE Lead. A midshipman selected annually by the DPE Program Manager and confirmed by the USNA Chief Diversity Officer. The Midshipmen DPE Lead is typically a First Class Midshipman. Responsibilities include:

    (1) Work with the DPE Program Manager to ensure the mission of the program is met.
    (2) Provide feedback and keep the DPE Program Manager informed regarding anything that may impact the DPE program.
    (3) Serve as the senior DPE, and as the program representative to the BDRO.
    (4) Lead and provide guidance to the DPE Midshipmen.
    (5) Appoint and manage DPE leads in each battalion, company, varsity athletic team and club sport team.

I’ll let you do the math on how many bodies “each” means. That is a lot of Zampolits. I guess MIDN have a lot of extra time.

Again, I want you to ponder the opportunity cost of this across USNA and how it relates to professional development.

QotD: Historical parallels between the British and American empires

Filed under: Americas, Britain, Cancon, History, Military, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… let us compare the US imperial experience to its British model. A whimsical exercise in comparative dates.

England was colonised by the Norman Empire (a tribe that spread across France, Britain, Italy, and the Middle East can be referred to as an empire I believe), in 1066. After some initial fierce resistance, they settled well, integrated with the local economy, and started developing a more advanced economic society.

North America was colonised by the British Empire (and Spanish and French of course), in the sixteenth century. After some initial fierce resistance, they settled well, integrated with the local economy, and started developing a more advanced economic society.

Norman England spent the next few centuries gradually taking out its neighbours. Wales, Ireland, and eventually Scotland (though the fact that the Scottish King James I & VI actually inherited England confuses this concept a bit). The process was fairly violent.

The North American “English” colonies spent the next few centuries taking out their neighbours. Indian tribes, Dutch, Spanish and French colonists, etc. The process was fairly violent.

England fought a number of wars over peripheral areas, particularly the Hundred Years war over claims to lands in France.

The North American colonies enthusiastically joined (if not blatantly incited) the early world wars, with the desire of taking over nearby French and Spanish colonies

The English fought a civil war in the 1640s to 50s over the issue of how to share power between the executive government, the oligarchs, and the commons. It appears that the oligarchs incited the commons (which was not very common in those days anyway). It was extremely bloody, and those on the periphery — particularly the Scots and Irish — came out badly (and with a long term bad taste for their over-mighty neighbour).

The Colonies fought their first civil war over the issue of how to share power between the executive, the oligarchs and the commons in the 1770s to 80s. It is clear that the oligarchs incited the commons (who in the US were still not very common — every male except those Yellow, Red or Black. An improvement? Certainly not considering the theoretical philosophical base of the so-called Revolution!). It was not really so bloody, but those on the periphery — particularly the Indians and slaves (both of which were pro-British), and the Loyalists and Canadians — came out badly. (60-100,000 “citizens” were expelled or forced to flee for being “loyalists”, let alone Indians and ex-slaves). Naturally the Canadians and their new refugee citizens developed a long term bad taste for their over-mighty neighbour — who attempted to attack them at the drop of a hat thereafter.

The British spent the next century and a half accumulating bits of empire — the Dominions, the Crown Colonies, and the Protectorates — in a haphazard fashion. Usually, but not always, troops followed traders and settlers.

The United States spent the next century and a half accumulating bits of empire — conquests from the Indians, purchases from France and Russia, conquests from Mexico and Spain, annexations of places like Hawaii, etc. — in a haphazard fashion. Usually, but not always, troops followed traders and settlers.

Nigel Davies, “The Empires of Britain and the United States – Toying with Historical Analogy”, rethinking history, 2009-01-10.

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