I was directed, shoeless, into the little pen with the black plastic swinging door. A stranger approached, a tall woman with burnt-orange hair. She looked in her 40s. She was muscular, her biceps straining against a tight Transportation Security Administration T-shirt. She carried her wand like a billy club. She began her instructions: Face your baggage. Feet in the footmarks. Arms out. Fully out. Legs apart. Apart. I’m patting you down.
It was like a 1950s women’s prison movie. I got to be the girl from the streets who made a big mistake; she was the guard doing intake. “Name’s Veronica, but they call me Ron. Want a smoke?” Beeps and boops, her pointer and middle fingers patting for explosives under the back of my brassiere; the wand on and over my body, more beeps, more pats. The she walked wordlessly away. I looked around, slowly put down my arms, rearranged my body. For a moment I thought I might plaintively call out, “No kiss goodbye? No, ‘I’ll call’?” But they might not have been amused. And actually I wasn’t either.
I experienced the search not only as an invasion of privacy, which it was, but as a denial or lowering of that delicate thing, dignity. The dignity of a woman, of a lady, of a person with a right not to be manhandled or to be, or to feel, molested.
Peggy Noonan, “Embarassing the Angels”, Wall Street Journal, 2006-03-02.
February 12, 2022
QotD: One of those pre-9/11 things we’ve lost … personal dignity
February 11, 2022
QotD: “By their proposals, shall ye know them”
That is why the proposal that the IRS should have access to the data of all bank accounts from which or into which more than $600 a year are paid (hardly a king’s ransom) is so important, despite the fact that it has not been enacted. The very fact that someone wanted to enact it, and thought it right that it should be enacted, is highly significant — and sinister — in itself, for the proposal demonstrates a totalitarian mindset.
The ostensible purpose of the proposal, of course, is the elimination of tax evasion. (Incidentally, I have noticed recently an increasing tendency, in the press and elsewhere, for the term tax avoidance to be used interchangeably with that of tax evasion, as if the difference between legality and illegality were of no real importance. This conflation is itself indicative of a totalitarian attitude, according to which a governmental end may be reached without the necessity for any law.)
The people who proposed that, in effect, every bank account should be routinely available for examination by the IRS, without any specific warrant for such an examination, thereby revealed that they thought that the gathering of tax so important that it superseded all other considerations.
Psalm 24 begins: “The earth is the Lord’s, and the fulness thereof, the world and they that dwell therein. For he hath founded it upon the seas, and established it upon the floods.”
A better version, according to the proposers, would be: Money is the government’s, and the fulness thereof, money and they that have any. For it hath founded it upon the printing press, and established it as legal tender.
I do not go as far as some economists of my acquaintance, who believe that tax evasion is a citizen’s civic duty: at least it is not in the circumstances prevailing in any western country, however unsatisfactory they may be. In my own case, I do not evade taxes and even my attempts to avoid them are rather feeble, for unfortunately there is so little at stake.
But I reject completely the idea that, morally, the first call on anyone’s money is the government’s, which in effect has the right to leave you pocket money by its grace and favor after you have paid your taxes at any rate that it likes. This is the very tyranny that the founders of America feared in majoritarian democracy, untempered by inalienable rights — inalienable even, or especially, by or to the government.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Monitoring Bank Accounts Would Make the People of the Government, Not the Government of the People”, The Iconoclast, 2021-11-01.
February 8, 2022
Neil Young and the rebellion of “the Grumpy Old Woke Bros”
Julie Burchill on the (one hopes) last opportunity for elderly, wrinkly 60s and 70s rock stars to virtue signal their protests to a rapidly diminishing body of fans:
For a while now the generation gap has been making a comeback in politics in a way not seen since the youthquake of the 1960s. “Don’t trust anyone over 30” has become “OK Boomer”. Oldsters have been demonised for everything from Brexit to Covid. Personally, at 62, looking at the lives today’s teenagers can expect, I thank my lucky stars that I was young in the 1970s and 80s, when you could say what you liked and go where you wanted. But this dwindling of fun and freedom has as much to do with the stifling nature of woke culture as it does with the other virus.
So I wouldn’t blame teenagers if they were cross. But those doing the most to promote the alienation of young and old aren’t hot-blooded bright young things. They are old men who appear to identify as young, despite sharing the same unsavoury grey whiskers. Of course, if someone with a penis can be a woman, a greybeard can be a teenager. They’re the Grumpy Old Woke Bros.
We can trace this unhappy breed from the then 68-years-young Ian McEwan spluttering at an anti-Brexit rally in 2017: “A gang of angry old men, irritable even in victory, are shaping the future of the country against the inclinations of its youth. By 2019 the country could be in a receptive mood: 2.5million over-18-year-olds, freshly franchised and mostly Remainers; 1.5 million oldsters, mostly Brexiters, freshly in their graves.” Since then the likes of Alexei Sayle, Billy Bragg and Stewart Lee have joined in from the monstrous regiment of woke entertainers, adding Damon Albarn (a youthful 53 – and an OBE, the rebel!) to their rankled ranks last week when he said of Taylor Swift “She doesn’t write her own songs”. (This isn’t the first time Albarn has had beef with young female pop stars. He said of Adele in 2015: “She’s very insecure”, to which she replied “It ended up being one of those ‘Don’t meet your idol’ moments … I was such a big Blur fan growing up. But it was sad, and I regret hanging out with him.”)
Though we think of grumpiness as being an English trait, let’s not forget Neil Young (76) who spat his dummy out last week over sharing Spotify with Joe Rogan. Young is a latecomer to the wonderful world of wokeness, whose welcome to the spotless ranks was somewhat marred by the emergence of a 1985 interview in which he backed Ronald Reagan’s gun control policy and added for good measure, AIDS having recently been discovered, “You go to a supermarket and you see a faggot behind the cash register – you don’t want him to handle your potatoes”.
February 7, 2022
American pizza
At An Eccentric Culinary History, H.D. Miller makes a strong case for pizza being more an American dish than an Italian one:
“Pizza” by rdpeyton
Today, standing atop the sprawling edifice that is the American restaurant industry, it’s hard to imagine a time when pizza wasn’t popular. But, prior to World War Two, pizza was barely known in the United States outside of a few Italian enclaves in the Northeast. For all of the praise heaped upon Lombardi’s in New York City, until the war, few people north of Houston Street had heard of it, or the dish it served.
From the mid-19th century forward, there were plenty of Italians in America, in places like New York, New Orleans and San Francisco. Most of those early Italian immigrants — around 75,000 before 1880 — were from northern Italy, not the South, and the restaurants they built were usually serving multi-course, table d’hôte meals of meat, bread, macaroni, wine and coffee at reasonable prices. The model was Caffe Moretti’s in Manhattan. Established in 1858 by Stefano Morretti, an ex-seminarian from the Veneto, Morretti’s offered diners generous portions and cheap prices. It did not, however, offer pizzas.
I have to emphasize this, you couldn’t order a pizza in the vast majority of Italian restaurants in America prior to 1945. And the reason you couldn’t order a pizza in Italian restaurants is because pizza isn’t Italian.
Let me repeat that: Pizza isn’t Italian.
Pizza is Neapolitan. It’s a distinct speciality of Naples, developed at at time when Italy didn’t even exist as a nation. Saying pizza is Italian is like saying haggis is British. It might be technically true, but not really.
As in America, prior to the 1950’s, pizza wasn’t something most Italians knew or cared about. In 1900, there were supposedly no pizzerias in Italy anywhere outside of the medieval walls of Napoli. You couldn’t even get pizza in the suburbs. Pizza was strictly street food for poor people in the crowded tangled alleys near the port. […]
In other words, pizza was not something the average Tuscan, Ligurian or Venetian would have thought suitable for a sit-down meal. Or, if they ever did think of it, it was to revile pizza as oily, unappetizing and a likely vector of cholera. This is because Naples was really famous at the time for being dirty and disease-ridden. (If you’re serious about early pizza history, one that strips away the just-so stories, then go read Inventing the Pizzeria by Antonio Mattozzi.)
What brought pizza to America was the mass immigration of southern Italians between 1880 and 1910, when more than 4 million people moved to the United States. That’s why Lombardi’s didn’t get going until 1905, when there were finally enough Neapolitans in Little Italy to keep the doors open.
The same dynamic played out in South America, in Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil. The first successful pizza restaurant in the world located outside of Naples was founded in Buenos Aires in 1882, when a Neapolitan immigrant baker named Nicolas Vaccarezza started selling the pies out of his shop in Boca. For reference purposes, a decade earlier, an attempt to open a pizzeria in Rome, Italy, had ended in bankruptcy, meaning, at the turn of the last century, you could get a pizza in Buenos Aries, São Paulo or New York, but not in Rome, Florence or Venice.
H/T to Ed Driscoll for the link.
February 6, 2022
Guadalcanal, A New Offensive – WW2 – 180 – February 5, 1943
World War Two
Published 5 Feb 2022This week sees the 10th anniversary of Hitler’s ascension to power in Germany, but while there may be celebrations and speeches in Germany, the Battle of Stalingrad comes to its end with the surrender of the German 6th Army. The Soviets are on the move all over, launching yet more winter offensives. It is the Axis who are attacking in Tunisia, and in the Solomon Islands … well, the Allies aren’t sure what the Japanese are up to.
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In Critical Race Theory, racism “only applies to powerful whites (and fellow travelers) vis-a-vis powerless blacks”
Andrew Sullivan on Caryn Elaine Johnson (stage name Whoopi Goldberg) and how her unconsidered anti-semitic worldview has been moulded and shaped by Critical Race Theory:
Whoopi Goldberg, I think it’s safe to say, is not a deep thinker, and wouldn’t claim to be. She’s also clearly not an anti-Semite. She’s a talented entertainer and merely reflects many (but not all) of the assumptions of Hollywood types — well-intentioned, rarely ruffled, cultural leftism. But that’s precisely why her comments on The View about antisemitism and the Holocaust are so interesting. They expose some aspects of “anti-whiteness” and “antiracism” as these CRT ideas have trickled down into the public consciousness, and also a deep, long-standing sense among some African-Americans that Jews in America are not usually the oppressed, but often the oppressor. These are things no one wants to explore very much — because it’s complicated, fraught, and, well, who needs the grief?
So here we go! Anti-Semitism is seen as not racism, because for Whoopi, and critical theorists, “racism” is defined as an essentially Euro-American social construction, which didn’t exist before the colonial era, and only applies to powerful whites (and fellow travelers) vis-a-vis powerless blacks. Racism is not, for them, a universal, instinctual, tribal, evolution-rooted suspicion of different-looking others that is always with us, and can happen anywhere. It is solely rather the deliberate, historically contingent oppression of the non-white by colonial “white supremacy”. However much truth this contains about American history (and it does contain a lot of it), it’s a terribly parochial view that misses a huge amount in the world, throughout history, and in America.
As Adam Serwer explains, this parochial view of racism also “renders the anti-Semitism that led to the Holocaust illegible”. Well, yeah. Any theory of racism that cannot explain the Holocaust is not just illegible, it is untenable. It would mean that the conflicts between, say, Tutsis and Hutus, Germans and Slavs, Jews and Arabs, Burmese and Rohingya, or Han and Uighur, are not instances of racism — because they are not examples of “white targeting non-white”. It wouldn’t include the Bible’s description of the Jewish people’s own enslavement by the Pharaohs, for goodness’ sake. And that’s a problem for any concept of racism — let alone one that now controls much of American culture.
Here, for example, is the Anti-Defamation League’s woke definition of “racism” the day Whoopi made her remarks (a definition swiftly changed after the contretemps): “The marginalization and/or oppression of people of color based on a socially constructed racial hierarchy that privileges white people.” But since Jews are deemed “white people”, by this definition, how could the Nazis have been racist? The same would also have to be said, would it not, about Louis Farrakhan today? He may sound like a Nazi about Jews, but his skin color means he cannot be racist.
Whoopi’s gaffe helps explain why the mainstream media now describes young black men assaulting Jews and Asians as expressing … “white supremacy”! This is what the WaPo op-ed page, referring to growing Latino support for Trump, called “multiracial whiteness”. If they are non-white and bigots, they miraculously become white. And notice how bigotry is exclusively ascribed to a single “race”: whites. Without whites, we’d have no racism at all.
This is not the only way critical theorists distinguish anti-Semitism from racism. “Whiteness”, disproportionately including Jewishness, is wrapped up in systems of oppression, especially capitalism, and defined by control of money and power. Robin DiAngelo argues in White Fragility that “white supremacy” exists in mainstream America by noting how many “white people” there were in various positions of power in 2017:
Ten richest Americans: 100 percent white (seven of whom are among the ten richest in the world). US Congress: 90 percent white. US governors: 96 percent white. Top military advisers: 100 percent white. President and vice president: 100 percent white. US House Freedom Caucus: 99 percent white. Current US presidential cabinet: 91 percent white. People who decide which TV shows we see: 93 percent white. People who decide which books we read: 90 percent white. People who decide which news is covered: 85 percent white. People who decide which music is produced: 95 percent white. People who directed the one hundred top-grossing films of all time, worldwide: 95 percent white.
She goes on to emphasize Hollywood’s influence, in particular. Now just put the word “Jewish” where the word “white” is, and her list reads a bit differently, doesn’t it: “People who decide which books we read: 90 percent Jewish. People who decide which news is covered: 85 percent Jewish.” It’s an assertion that one race hoards power, controls the media, and directs the culture, a race so powerful it permeates everything. Sound a little familiar?
Quebec Papal Zouave’s Ceremonial Gewehr 71/84
Forgotten Weapons
Published 4 Oct 2021http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
https://www.floatplane.com/channel/Fo…
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Here’s a rifle with an interesting twisting history …
This began life as a German military Gewehr 71/84, made in 1888. It was issued to a unit, but eventually replaced by the Gewehr 1888. It was sold to the Francis Bannerman company at some point around 1900, as part of a big batch of surplus weapons (Bannerman was a massive international dealer in arms and military equipment). Moving ahead a few years, World War One breaks out and prompts the organization of a couple Canadian “Home Guard” units. The Montreal Home Guard has some money, and buys a batch of Savage Model 99 lever action rifles (in .303 Savage, interestingly). The Quebec Home Guard isn’t quite so well-heeled, so they go to Bannerman to see what they can afford. Bannerman sells them a batch of Gewehr 71/84 tube-magazine repeating rifles, in the same configuration as when they were sold off by the German military.
Incidentally, I believe these become the only Mauser rifles formally purchased and issued by the Canadian government, when they are acquired by the Home Guard. At any rate, after the war ends, a subset of those old rifles are given to the Quebec Papal Zouaves, a ceremonial vestige of the Quebecois military volunteers who went to Italy in the 1860s to help defend the Papacy during Italian unification. By this time, the Zouaves are basically just acting as guards in parades, and they crudely cut down the 71/84s, removed their magazines, and fit them with cut-down British Snider bayonets for use as single-shot, blank-firing arms.
Quite the journey, right? And also a reminder that sometimes what looks like sporterized junk is actually something with distinct historical provenance …
Many thanks to Mike Carrick of Arms Heritage Magazine for providing me access to film this example!
Contact:
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6281 N. Oracle 36270
Tucson, AZ 85740
February 5, 2022
Why great NFL players rarely make good coaches
In his (mostly) weekly mailbag post, Severian at Founding Questions considers the latest NFL scandal and some of the insane requirements to be a really great NFL quarterback and how few can both play and coach at that high level. First, the Romney Rule scandal:
I see that some black coach has sued the NFL for racial discrimination, and I must say I hope he takes them for every cent they’ve got. From the very little I’ve seen, his case is airtight, because of the NFL’s astounding stupidity. For those who don’t know, the NFL has been using what’s called the “Rooney Rule” for at least two decades now. This states that whenever a head coaching job comes up, the team must interview at least one (and I think two are mandatory now) black candidate.
Since there’s a serious dearth of black coaches at all levels of organized football (we’ll psircle back to that in a minute), this means that the same three or four guys go through the same pro forma interviews every time. As far as I understand it, then (which is not very, admittedly), this particular coach was actually told to his face that this interview with whatever team was just pro forma compliance with the Rooney Rule; we’ve already got our guy, so just fly out here, we’ll buy you lunch, have a nice chat, and put you back on the plane lickety split.
That’s one part of his airtight case. The other is that whatever team he interviewed with also has a Diversity and Inclusion Officer — because of course they do — and the DIE Officer is on record as saying all kinds of typical sanctimonious virtue-signaling shit, e.g. “We are a systemically racist organization and have to do better,” blah blah blah. Put those together, and what else can you conclude except that this coach got screwed out of a job because of explicit racial animus?
But as to why there are so few black NFL coaches, part of it is due to the way young quarterbacks are trained — he discussed this in detail here — which very frequently diverts talented young black quarterbacks away from learning the skillset they would need to make it in the NFL. The other thing is that the skills you need to be a good coach don’t often appear in a person who has the physical ability to be a good player:
If you haven’t met any high-caliber pro athletes, think of professors. The third-rate knockoff cow college I went to had a pretty big league chemist on staff; if he hadn’t won the Nobel he was at least in the conversation, something like that. This guy was a terrible teacher, because he just couldn’t grok that other people couldn’t follow him. Your brain couldn’t fire fast enough to keep up with his, and he couldn’t slow his down enough to let you catch up. The best chemistry teacher was still pretty smart — no dummies in Chem PhD programs, at least not back then — but because he was nowhere near the top guy’s level, he was so much better at explaining the nuts and bolts.
You could ask the low-end guy “What do I need to do to get better at chemistry?” and he could give you some solid, practical advice (I know, because with his help I squeaked out a C-). You asked that of the high end guy, and he’d reply “Be smarter”. (Not really, he was actually pretty cool, personally, but nonetheless that’s really all he could say).
Sports works the same way. While I was there, this same college also hired a former NBA player to coach basketball. Not a Hall of Famer, but a Hall of the Pretty Good-er; if you know basketball from the late 70s, you’ve heard of him. They thought having this guy as a coach would boost recruiting and ticket sales (he was a local notable, too), and it did … for a time, but under his stewardship the team got much worse, and for the same reason the Nobel-candidate chem wiz was the worst teacher. Billy Bigshot would tell his guys “Just go out there and do this and that” … but his guys couldn’t do this and that. Billy could, which is why he was a very good player at the highest professional level; but he couldn’t grok that not everyone could do the same genetic freak shit on the court he could, because they weren’t genetic freaks like him.
Psircling back to the NFL, if you want a race-neutral entry point for discussing this stuff, there you go. Good players are generally terrible coaches, because pretty much by definition good players are genetic freaks who have no idea how they do the things they do; they just do them. Good coaches, on the other hand, tend to be nerdlingers with people skills … another fairly rare combo, it must be said, but nowhere near as rare as a 6’4″ chess master with a big arm. If pro teams really wanted to start thinking outside the box, they’d start recruiting potential coaching candidates at video game tournaments … or straight from high school, where guys have to do much more with much, much less.
February 4, 2022
QotD: Don’t drive on the interstate highways
Kim du Toit, “Don’t Do That”, Splendid Isolation, 2019-01-28.
February 2, 2022
Neil Young revives the PMRC
Jim Treacher invites you on a trip down memory lane to a time when musicians like Neil Young were [gasp!] against censorship:
If you’re Generation X or older, you might be getting flashbacks over this whole “Neil Young vs. Joe Rogan & Spotify” contretemps. On one side, we’ve got a popular public figure who’s expressing his thoughts and opinions, just as America’s Founding Fathers told us we get to do. On the other side, we’ve got a bunch of miserable old fuddy-duddies who want to shut down free speech because they believe it hurts people.
In other words, Neil Young just revived the PMRC.
If you don’t know what the PMRC was and you’re too lazy to google it, here’s the short version:
Back in the ’80s, a senator’s wife named Tipper Gore got sick of her kids listening to music she didn’t like, so she started an organization called the Parents Music Resource Center. The PMRC compiled a list of songs they found unacceptable, including “Darling Nikki” by Prince, “We’re Not Gonna Take It” by Twisted Sister, and “She Bop” by Cyndi Lauper. Then Tipper used her political connections to convince the Senate to hold hearings about this supposedly dangerous music.
A lot of Americans decided they liked what popular entertainers were saying, and a handful of busybodies tried to put a stop to it. “If we don’t want to listen to it, nobody should get to listen to it. We need to protect the helpless unwashed masses from themselves!”
Sound familiar?
But then this happened:
If you’ve got a half-hour to spare, you can watch Dee Snider’s entire Senate testimony here. By the time he was done, the PMRC had been exposed for the meddling, hypocritical clowns they were. Their brief moment of relevance was over, at the hands of a guy who looked like Bette Midler transitioning into a Wookie.
The PMRC did get a consolation prize, though: the “PARENTAL ADVISORY” sticker you can find on a lot of cassettes and CDs from the era. Y’know, the sticker that made kids want to listen to what was inside because their parents wouldn’t like it.
Over the next couple of decades, the PMRC ended up helping a lot of artists sell a lot of records. Like this one:
I remember seeing that CD cover for the first time and thinking, “Damn … this must be awesome.” And it was! If not for Tipper Gore, NWA might not have become superstars and Dr. Dre probably wouldn’t be a near-billionaire now.
February 1, 2022
US Armored Doctrine 1919-1942, Part 2
The Chieftain
Published 29 Jan 2022Continuing on this series of videos supporting the WW2 Channel, this is part one of a two-part look at how the US Army ended up with the armored force with which it entered combat in North Africa. https://www.youtube.com/c/WorldWarTwo
If you missed part 1… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLkJP…
Sources include:
Forging the Thunderbolt (Gillie)
Men on Iron Ponies (Morton)
Greasy Automatons and the Horsey Set (Tedesco)
A number of Center of Military History documents to include GHQ Maneuvers 1941 https://history.army.mil/catalog/pubs…
A few other things I’ve forgotten about, but the above will get you 90% of the way there.Improved-Computer-And-Scout Car Fund:
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/The_Chieftain
Direct Paypal https://paypal.me/thechieftainshat1939 Cavalry Journal with Polish cavalry article.
https://mcoepublic.blob.core.usgovclo…
January 30, 2022
Fighting progressive illiberalism with populist illiberalism
In the free-to-non-paying-subscribers segment of this week’s Weekly Dish, Andrew Sullivan laments the ratcheting illiberal tactics of both the opponents and supporters of Critical Race Theory in American schools:
I’ve spent a lot of time these past few years concerned with left illiberalism, especially the replacement of liberalism with critical theory as the guiding principle of our republic. But at the same time, of course, right illiberalism has gone into overdrive, in a polarizing vortex. Being a conservative liberal, or a liberal conservative, is becoming close to impossible. And this week, as I pored over a mass of bills to ban the praxis, pedagogy and content of critical theory in public high schools, I felt as if I were being tossed between the blue devil to my left and the deep red sea to my right.
One core point: the illiberalism is real on both sides. Not always in equal measure, now or in the past, but definitely on both, feeding off each other. And in public education, once again a battleground in the culture war, it seems quite obvious to me that the left bears the burden of responsibility for the conflict.
Critical theory’s long march through the institutions reached its peak some time ago in higher education — and has gone on to capture media, corporate America, medicine, the federal government, tech, science, and every cultural institution. Over $14 billion have been spent on philanthropic “equity” initiatives since the summer of 2020 alone. Of course children’s education would be affected. What hasn’t been? And of course critical theorists aim directly at children. The woke, like the Jesuits, understand the value of instilling certain concepts at a very young age. How else to transform the world?
That’s why Ibram Kendi has bequeathed the world not just one but two books on how to rear “antiracist babies”. The publisher says the new one, Goodnight Racism, “gives children the language to dream of a better world and is the perfect book to add to their social justice toolkit.” My italics. Another recent book, Woke Baby, instructs toddlers to be “a good revolutionary”, and another one explains how “activism begins in the cradle”.
You truly think that in school districts where teachers are saturated in equity training, whose unions invite Kendi to be their keynote speaker, that this is all being made up? Just peruse through all the “equity” conferences, courses, syllabi, lesson plans and curricula that now dominate public ed. Many parents found out only because they overheard what their kids were being taught online during the pandemic. Or you can just surf the web as the woke dismantle schools for the gifted, abolish SATs, describe merit as racist, and lay waste to excellent schools merely because too many Asian-American kids are succeeding in them.
What we’re seeing now is the reaction to this left-wing power grab. And — guess what? — it’s a right-wing power grab. If the left has stealthily changed public education from above, the right has now used the only power they have to fight back — political clout in state legislatures. 122 separate bills have been introduced since January 2021, 71 in the last three weeks alone. They all regulate speech by teachers in public schools, but many are now also reaching into higher education — a much more fraught area — and outright book banning. The bills are rushed; some appear well-intentioned; others are nuts; many are very vague, inviting lawsuits to clarify what they can mean in practice. In most cases, if passed, they will surely chill debate of race and sex and history — and increasingly of gender, sex and homosexuality — in high schools. And that’s a bad thing for liberal education.
Time to Fire Rommel? – WW2 – 179 – January 29, 1943
World War Two
Published 29 Jan 2022The Allies are unable to win in Tunisia, though further east Bernard Montgomery has achieved his goal of driving the enemy out of Libya. To the west, the Casablanca Conference comes to its end and the Allies write a list of their war priorities. The Soviets, however, are on the move everywhere, closing in on Stalingrad, and launching new operations up and down the eastern front, to the dismay and detriment of the Axis forces.
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Engineer’s Delight: Stemple 76/45 Becomes the Stemple Takedown Gun
Forgotten Weapons
Published 17 Sep 2021http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
https://www.floatplane.com/channel/Fo…
Cool Forgotten Weapons merch! http://shop.forgottenweapons.com
The saga of how the original Stemple 76/45 became the Stemple Takedown Gun is a fantastic story of engineering design choices.
Essentially, John Stemple began by building a rather crude copy of the Swedish K in .45 ACP in the mid 1980s, called the Stemple 76/45. He produced and registered 2,000 transferrable receivers for the gun (pre-1986), but only built them slowly, a few at a time. In the late 1980s he faced criminal charges from ATF, and transferred the receivers to a friend while he (successfully) fought the charges. When he went to get the receivers back, his friend refused, and the two entered into a nearly decade-long legal battle over them.
By the time Stemple eventually won the case, he recovered about 900 transferrable tubes. By this time (circa 2000) these tube receivers were much more valuable than when he first made them, as the machine gun registry was closed in 1986 and new ones can no longer be made. At this point, Stemple reached out to Brian Poling (BRP Corp) to act as a subcontractor to make the parts for the Stemple 76/45. But Poling had a better idea …
Poling’s thought was to instead design a new gun that would be much more desirable as a recreational gun than the 76/45. He envisioned something controllable, low recoil, and using large drum magazines. Such a gun would be a lot more fun at the range than the MACs and Uzis that tended to dominate the submachine gun market at the time. In addition, Poling’s gun would be designed specifically to protect the irreplaceable registered receiver tubes from wear or damage. The result was the STG-76 — the Stemple Takedown Gun.
In order to remain legal, the STG-76 had to leave the original 76/45 receiver tube cutouts unmodified, so as not to change the configuration of the receiver itself. Poling designed a replaceable internal trunnion and slip-over magazine well, allowing multiple different calibers and magazine configurations. The internals were closely based on the Finnish kp31 Suomi, for which parts kits became readily available in the early 2000s. This also facilitated the use of Suomi 71-round drum magazines. The original STF-76 design also included a bipod for easy shooting, and a grip and stock from an HK91 or CETME Model C for comfortable handling (instead of the terrible metal strut stocks common to most budget SMGs).
Several other interesting configurations would follow (stay tuned for those videos), and the guns remain available brand new to this day. The original supply of receivers is sufficient for production until about 2023 …
Contact:
Forgotten Weapons
6281 N. Oracle 36270
Tucson, AZ 85740
January 27, 2022
What is this “Mass Formation Psychosis” thing that so many are suddenly fascinated with?
I started seeing the phrase “Mass Formation Psychosis” popping up a lot recently, but I hadn’t bothered looking into it until quite recently. In an effort to figure out what it’s supposed to be and why people are talking about it, I did the lazy thing I usually do and had a quick wander through some of the blogs I follow to gather up their respective takes on it. Here’s one from earlier in the week from Severian at Founding Questions:
In the depths of the Great Leap Forward, Mao Zedong decided that China must overtake at least Great Britain, if not the US, in steel production (this was back when the US actually made shit, you understand, so … you know, like a hundred years ago). But since that was impossible with China’s existing steel mills, Mao hit on a solution: He’d just have the peasants do it! Right in the backyards of their collective farms.
No, I’m not kidding. They really did that. The “steel” produced was worthless, of course, and indeed the whole zany scheme probably contributed to the Great Famine, as peasants ended up throwing farm implements, cooking pots, anything and everything that could be melted down into their backyard furnaces. Yeah, they’d need them for the harvest, but the harvest was a month or two away, and the commissar and his pistol demanding more more more! steel was right now.
And that’s the great thing about a totalitarian dictatorship (if you’re the dictator) — if your madcap caper runs aground on reality’s rocks, you can simply declare victory and move on. What backyard blast furnaces? Never heard of them … and neither have you, comrade, if you know what’s good for you. Problem solved.
But … what if, for some bizarre reason, Mao’s slaves had just kept throwing things into their backyard furnace? If Mao had come down personally from the Forbidden City and said “Yeah, we’re good here, save your hoes and scythes and woks and whatnot,” but they still they persisted?
That’s the situation in which Tapioca Joe and the Juggalos find themselves vis a vis Covid.
Severian linked to Robert Stacy McCain’s call for making today “Everybody Blog About Mass Formation Psychosis Day”, which in turn linked to this Substack post from Robert Malone.
As many of you know, I have spent time researching and speaking about mass psychosis theory. Most of what I have learned has come from Dr. Mattias Desmet, who realized that this form of mass hypnosis, of the madness of crowds, can account for the strange phenomenon of about 20-30% of the population in the western world becoming entranced with the Noble Lies and dominant narrative concerning the safety and effectiveness of the genetic vaccines, and both propagated and enforced by politicians, science bureaucrats, pharmaceutical companies and legacy media.
What one observes with the mass hypnosis is that a large fraction of the population is completely unable to process new scientific data and facts demonstrating that they have been misled about the effectiveness and adverse impacts of mandatory mask use, lockdowns, and genetic vaccines that cause people’s bodies to make large amounts of biologically active coronavirus Spike protein.
These hypnotized by this process are unable to recognize the lies and misrepresentations they are being bombarded with on a daily basis, and actively attack anyone who has the temerity to share information with them which contradicts the propaganda that they have come to embrace. And for those whose families and social networks have been torn apart by this process, and who find that close relatives and friends have ghosted them because they question the officially endorsed “truth” and are actually following the scientific literature, this can be a source of deep anguish, sorrow and psychological pain.
