Something felt off when I arrived at Flyover State to take up my first teaching gig. It took me a while, but I finally figured it out: Everything, everywhere, was just ugly.
“Blandly utilitarian” was about the best that one could say about the least offensive campus architecture; “brutalist monstrosities” was closer to the truth for most of it. And as with the campus, so with the town — the off-campus housing was beautiful old Victorian houses ripped up and made into “efficiency” apartments, crammed cheek by jowl with poured-concrete boxes that looked like barracks for low-ranking Party members in the Pyongyang suburbs. The public parks were nicely landscaped, but each featured some publicly-subsidized “art” that made you want to gouge your eyeballs out. Every single space had wheelchair ramps, and was festooned with enough signs to give M. Night Shyamalan wood. It was hideous.
As with the built environment, so with human behavior. Everyone on the faculty looked like a refugee from 1968, but instead of toking righteous bud, they’d been taking sriracha enemas. The shopkeepers who catered to them were seemingly locked in a contest to out-obnoxious each other over their leftwing politics, and as for the few tradesmen who provided vital services, they had the warm and welcoming vibe of a DMV supervisor. Not that I blame them for this — I ended up hanging out with a lot of those guys at a townie bar, and trust me, being called out to work at a professor’s home is exactly the kind of experience you think it is. Hurry up and fix the leaky pipe, bigot, while I lecture you about your privilege … then try to stiff you on the bill. (Same thing in reverse for the students). So they came off like cops, assuming that everyone they met was a dyed-in-the-wool asshole until proven otherwise.
Life in a college town, then, is soulless, instrumentalist, transactionalist — everything’s for sale, but everything had best be spelled out, in writing, in triplicate. Nobody’s from there, nobody stays there, so everything is always on the arm. No one and nothing is ever on the level; everyone is always looking to chisel everyone else. And, ironically, the longer someone stays there, the more likely xzhey are to push this attitude to near-platonic perfection — eggheads all believe, with all their hearts and souls, that they deserve to be at Harvard, so when Harvard doesn’t come calling, the days and months and years become an intolerable insult. How dare they expect me to live like this, in a place designed to cater to my every whim, making only 100 large per year! It’s an outrage!!
Looking back on it, I see now why I hated the 1990s so much. Eggheads are incredibly conservative about everything but their politics, but in this one case, they really were as “progressive” as they fancy themselves. Before just about anyone else, they embraced the globohomo ethos of rootless piracy. Then as now, they all claimed to hate “sportsball” (if you’ll forgive an anachronism for clarity’s sake) with the heat of a thousand suns, but they could’ve given LeBron James lessons on how to be a backstabbing, glory-hogging, money-chasing, utterly mercenary douchebag. As early as the late 1980s, they found the idea of remaining loyally in one institution, building it up as a service to the community, as laughable as modern sportsballers find sticking in one city in order to be a role model. Fuck that, give me mine!!!
Severian, “Everything Is Ugly New”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-02-15.
July 1, 2021
QotD: Life at “Flyover State” in the 1990s
June 30, 2021
Questions the dying media daren’t ask Biden
Kurt Schlichter offers a few questions that an American media with any credibility would already have been asking after Biden’s ramble about F-15 aircraft and nuclear weapons:
“2-35 Infantry Battalion, 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 25th Infantry Division” by The U.S. Army is licensed under CC BY 2.0
“Are you saying that you would use bombers like F-15s against Americans? Would you ever use nuclear weapons against Americans?”
That seems like an important coule of threshold queries. Say “No” and you look like a fool. Say “Yes” and you’re a fool and a psycho.
“Mr. President, since using force against American citizens is on the table, can you tell us how many BCTs the American military has currently deployable within the United States? Do you know how many troops are in a brigade combat team? Do you understand the logistical needs of a BCT and its vulnerabilities in an insurgency environment?”
A “BCT” is a brigade combat team, 4,000-5,000 troops and the basic ground combat unit. Now, if you are going to pick a fight with 165 million Americans, specifically the half who like America and who own a whole bunch of those accursed AR-15s, you might wanna know how many dudes you have on your side first (I estimate about 80 active and reserve BCTs and equivalents in the whole active and reserve force, including the Marines). One might also want to understand why you would have problems using them here at home.
“How many BCTs do you think you would need to secure an urban area the size of Los Angeles. Didn’t it take three divisions, about 12 brigades, to secure it during the Riots? How long could you logistically support that?”
It did take three divisions (approximately 12 BCTs) to quell the riot in LA in 1992. I was there. Now, that was largely idiots burning and looting. What if the next time it is guys shooting back with evil AR-15s? And America is a zillion times bigger than Los Angeles. How do you hold all that ground? You don’t.
“Have your generals staffed exactly how many American military personnel they could count on to attack American citizens if you ordered it? What percentage do you believe would comply and why?”
Oh, awkward. I was informed – by them, the geniuses in the Pentagon – that “extremists in the ranks” are our gravest threat (except for the weather, of course), so I assume they will have analyzed the number of “extremists” in the ranks who would be averse to killing their own friends and family at the behest of coastal elitists and who would desert or go full Niedermeyer on the guys urging them to wage war on the American people. This would be a good number to have as a planning factor, since when 50% of his troops go *poof* overnight, it would mean a significant reduction in the *’s combat power.
“You mentioned F-15s. How many bombers of all types does the United States have deployable within the continental US? How many are operational? How many sorties could the military fly a day against American citizens? Can you explain how you would employ bombers to hold territory, like a city?”
Bombers are nice. But if they were decisive, you could walk around Kabul without a dozen guys with AKs keeping your Schumer safe. We bombed Afghanistan back into the Stone Age – albeit, it was not much of a trip, but the point remains. You control dirt by having a guy with a rifle standing on it, not plinking at targets from 30,000 feet. And speaking of targeting …
June 29, 2021
QotD: Carrier dive bombers in the early Pacific war
Almost exactly the same could be said for the American Douglas Dauntless dive bomber (255mph, 2 x 0.5 and 2 x 0.3 mg, 1,200lbs bombs, 1,115 mile range). Arrived at the same time, same strengths, similar weaknesses. Like all American aircraft it could absorb considerably more damage than any Japanese plane, but like all daylight attack aircraft, its top speed made it a sitting duck against organized fighter defenses. The greatest success of the Dauntless was at Midway, where the sacrificial run of the TBD Devastator torpedo bombers fortuitously arrived just far enough in advance to pull the entire Japanese fighter cover away and allow the Dauntlesses exactly the sort of unopposed attacks that the theoretically inferior Japanese “Val” dive bombers had enjoyed at Ceylon and Coral Sea. The increased success of the Dauntless later in the war was in direct parallel to the increased ability of American fighters to clear a path. By the time of the sinking of the Yamato in 1945, Dauntless formations always had almost completely unopposed runs. (Perhaps that is why it continued in operation when every other contemporary aircraft had been replaced?)
Nigel Davies, “Comparing naval aircraft of World War II”, rethinking history, 2010-12-20.
June 28, 2021
Warren’s terminal law of progress
David Warren considers the sudden rash of “revelations” about UFOs we’re getting in the dying media:
Yeah, I know: wrong UFO
This is a demonstration of Warren’s terminal law of progress. As it extends towards “infinity”, all technical progress becomes terminally boring. This also applies to more modest attainments. A civilization that has merely made itself comfortable, and remained so for too long, must find a pretext to demolish itself. Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and the various more advanced “human rights” campaigns, simply expand in a vacuum of irreparable ennui. Their revolutionary demands can only be answered with wilful destruction — until the offending society is erased.
It follows that everything on this planet, made with human hands, however beautifully, must eventually come to a bad end, even though the majority of its inhabitants have good intentions, and are simply trying to get on with their lives, and would if the aggressive would leave them alone.
For instance, the Portland, Oregon police estimate it took only 200 insurrectionists to turn that city into a revolutionary hell-hole.
Perhaps our alien visitors came to discover the secret of our self-destruction. Or they were bored with the place they came from, but decided to leave before they were tempted to destroy it.
Colt R75A: The Last Commercial BAR (With Shooting)
Forgotten Weapons
Published 2 Mar 2018The R75A was the last version of Colt’s commercial BAR, with 832 made between August and December of 1942 for the Netherlands Purchasing Commission. It was a derivative of the commercial R75 BAR, with a pistol grip, magazine well cover, and ejection port cover. The R75A added on a folding bipod and a detachable barrel functionality, albeit not of the most elegant sort. To remove the barrel, one first used the lever under the muzzle to detach the gas block from the barrel by sliding it rearwards. Then a tool or cartridge tip was used to pry open the barrel locking lever at the front of the receiver, which then allowed the barrel to be rotated about 60 degrees to unlock its interrupted threads and remove it.
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June 27, 2021
Fall Blau Starts … or Does it? – WW2 – 148 – June 27, 1942
World War Two
Published 26 Jun 2021Fall Blau, the huge Axis summer offensive in the Soviet Union, is supposed to being this, but is postponed to next. The smaller Operation Fridericus II does begin though, and what does Josef Stalin make of that and the intelligence he’s received? Meanwhile in North Africa, after the fall of Tobruk, the British 8th Army gets a leadership change, but Erwin Rommel is still on the move eastward into Egypt. Where will the Allies try to hold him? Half the world away, the Allies begin to establish a base at Milne Bay, New Guinea. It’s a start, a small one, but a start.
(more…)
June 25, 2021
The Birth of the Manhattan Project – WW2 Special
World War Two
Published 24 Jun 2021When nuclear fission was discovered, scientists theorized it could be used in an atomic bomb. Thus, the American Army sets up one of the biggest research projects in history: The Manhattan Project.
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June 24, 2021
First Arab-Israeli War 1948 – Political Background – COLD WAR
The Cold War
Published 31 Aug 2019Our series on the history of the Cold War period continues with a documentary explaining the political background of the First Arab-Israeli War of 1948.
To learn about the military events of this conflict, go to the Kings and Generals channel
Consider supporting us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thecoldwar
“[M]any of the woke genuinely do not understand why anyone finds their politics, or their political tactics, threatening”
In The Line, Joseph Heath tries to explain why many adherents of the wokist ideology fail to understand why anyone could possibly be against their policies or their tactics:
Godfrey Elfwick’s disturbingly accurate summary of free speech support among the woke.
After several years of creeping illiberalism under the guise of progressive politics, American liberals are finally getting their act together. They are pushing back, creating several organizations committed to combating the influence of “woke” politics and ideology. They have momentum, not just because many woke mantras like “defund the police” have proven spectacularly unpopular, but also because there is genuine growing alarm about the intolerant and authoritarian brand of politics that has become associated with the woke left.
Unfortunately, many of the woke genuinely do not understand why anyone finds their politics, or their political tactics, threatening. In particular, the accusation that they are being authoritarian, or that “cancel culture” is a threat to freedom of expression, is one that they are simply unable to process.
There is a reason for this — and one that’s worth understanding. There are several key phrases that play an enormously important role in woke politics (e.g. “safety”, “mental health”, “microaggression”, “bullying” and even “human rights”) which they use to deflect the accusation of authoritarianism. If you adopt the right words, it’s easier to convince yourself that you’re the good guys even as you’re acting like the bad ones.
I want to take a shot at explaining how this works.
The most important thing to understand about woke politics is that it is not a conventional form of illiberalism, it is better thought of as a type of “illiberal liberalism”. It involves making a set of political demands that are fundamentally illiberal, but then articulating them in a way that fits the conventional structure of liberal political discourse. Because of the way that their complaints are packaged, the woke are able to brush off criticism of their tactics.
Take an issue like freedom of speech. There are various versions of this traditionally liberal virtue; predominant among them, is that those who hold this belief are opposed to content-based restrictions on speech. In the old days, lots of politicians didn’t really believe in freedom of speech, as many among the ruling class maintained straightforwardly illiberal views.
The Founder | Based on a True Story
The Cynical Historian
Published 27 Jul 2017This one is a contender for best historical film of 2016. The Founder is an amazing movie about the beginning of the McDonald’s food chain. Seriously, more films should take cues from this.
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references:
http://www.historyvshollywood.com/ree…http://time.com/money/4602541/the-fou…
http://content.time.com/time/magazine…
https://www.bustle.com/p/how-accurate…
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entert…
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertain…
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/20/bu…
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-11-24…
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-real-…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kroc
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard…
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Wiki:
The Founder is a 2016 American biographical drama film directed by John Lee Hancock and written by Robert Siegel. The film stars Michael Keaton as businessman Ray Kroc, and portrays the story of his creation of the McDonald’s fast food chain. Nick Offerman and John Carroll Lynch co-star as McDonald’s founders Richard and Maurice McDonald.The film premiered at Arclight Hollywood on December 7, 2016 and was released in the United States on January 20, 2017, by The Weinstein Company. It grossed $23 million worldwide and received generally positive reviews from critics, with praise for Keaton’s performance.
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Hashtags: #History #TheFounder #McDonalds #Review #BasedOnATrueStory #RayKroc
QotD: The fantasy world of Canadian geopolitical posturing
Yet for all the reflexive anti-Americanism that has been the meat and mead of Canadian nationalism, Canada’s leadership class has usually been pretty good about understanding who is in charge. Over the course of the 20th century, from the Ogdensburg agreement of 1940 and the post-war establishment of NORAD to the Free Trade Agreement of 1988, we cemented that reality with a defence and economic alliance.
Paradoxically, what this continental defence and economic security arrangement has given us is the opportunity to let our internationalist pretensions run wild. One of the weirdest things about Canada is the extent to which we like to frame our place in the world in a-geographic terms. We imagine that we are as threatened as anyone by the mix of post-Cold War failed states, opportunistic terrorism, regional authoritarianism, and humanitarian disasters. By the same token, we like to presume that we are as well-positioned as any other country to do something about all of this.
As the dean of Canadian defence policy Kim Nossal points out in a recent paper, this a-geographic security fantasy is reflected in the official defence reviews that Canadian governments have released since the 1990s. Or take, for example, the 2017 Liberal policy statement, entitled Strong, Secure, Engaged, which rejects the idea that Canada’s privileged geographic location mitigates these global threats for us. As Nossal concludes, when you look at how Canadian governments actually talk about our security situation, you get little sense that, thanks to the Americans, Canada occupies “one of the safest spaces in contemporary global politics.”
You can see the logical leaps, then.
Once you’ve convinced yourself that Canada’s security is disconnected from the geographical imperative of the American security guarantee, it’s only a few steps to the conclusion that who we choose as our global strategic partner is actually a meaningful choice. And if it is true, as China’s president Xi Jinping has claimed, that the East is on the rise and the West is in decline, then why not throw your lot in with the new big dog on the block?
Andrew Potter, “Hedging our bets with China was a mistake”, The Line, 2021-03-23.
June 21, 2021
“… the GOP needs an inflammatory issue to rile their racist base, and so this entire foofaraw is really just an astro-turfed, ginned-up partisan gambit about nothing”
An excerpt from Andrew Sullivan’s most recent Weekly Dish looks at the burgeoning fight over the use of Critical Race Theory in public schools:
The stories in the mainstream media this past week about the broadening campaign to ban critical race theory in public schools have been fascinating — and particularly in how they describe what CRT is. Here’s the Atlantic‘s benign summary of CRT: “recent reexaminations of the role that slavery and segregation have played in American history and the attempts to redress those historical offenses.” NBC News calls it the “academic study of racism’s pervasive impact.” NPR calls CRT: “teaching about the effects of racism.” The New York Times calls it, with a straight face, “classroom discussion of race, racism” and goes on to describe it as a “framework used to look at how racism is woven into seemingly neutral laws and institutions.”
How on earth could merely teaching students about the history of racism and its pervasiveness in the United States provoke such a fuss? No wonder Charles Blow is mystified. But don’t worry. The MSM have a ready explanation: the GOP needs an inflammatory issue to rile their racist base, and so this entire foofaraw is really just an astro-turfed, ginned-up partisan gambit about nothing. The MSM get particular pleasure in ridiculing parents who use the term “critical race theory” as shorthand for things that just, well, make them uncomfortable — when the parents obviously have no idea what CRT really is.
When pushed to describe it themselves, elite journalists refer to the legal theories Derrick Bell came up with, in the 1970s — obscure, esoteric and nothing really to do with high-school teaching. “If your kid is learning CRT, your kid is in law/grad school,” snarked one. Marc Lamont Hill even tried to pull off some strained references to Gramsci to prove his Marxian intellectual cred, and to condescend to his opponents.
This rubric achieves several things at once. It denies that there is anything really radical or new about CRT; it flatters the half-educated; it blames the controversy entirely on Republican opportunism; and it urges all fair-minded people to defend intellectual freedom and racial sensitivity against these ugly white supremacists.
What could be more convenient? NBC News “reporter”, Brandy Zadrozny, even decried parents’ attempts to discover through FOIA requests just what their children are being taught — and argued this week that, “for longtime ultra conservative activists, CRT is the opportunity of a lifetime.” CRT, she explains, is not a threat at all, and there is no proof that it is even being taught. It’s “just a catch-all term repurposed as a conservative boogeyman.” She goes on: “it harnesses pushback against 2020’s racial justice movement, covid denialism, and depends on a base still energized by Trump and misinformation, looking for political power.”
I’m sure the MSM will continue to push this narrative indefinitely. They are still insisting, after all, that “white supremacy” is behind hateful attacks on Asian-Americans, and that soaring murder rates are purely a function of Covid19. And you can see why: this dismissive take is extremely helpful in avoiding what is actually happening. It diverts attention from the stories and leaks and documents that keep popping up all over the place about extraordinary indoctrination sessions that have become mandatory for children as early as kindergarten.
Turner Semiauto SMLE Conversion
Forgotten Weapons
Published 12 Nov 2016Cool Forgotten Weapons Merch! http://shop.bbtv.com/collections/forg…
Russell Turner was a Pennsylvania gunsmith and inventor who developed this semiautomatic conversion of an SMLE bolt action rifle circa 1940. It was intended for trial and potential sale to the Canadian military, as it would allow them to retrofit existing rifles into semiautomatic configuration and still use existing supplies of .303 British ammunition. Rather than try to devise a reliable system to rotate the original Enfield bolt, Turner replaced the bolt entirely, using instead a side-tilting design much like what he used in his M1 Carbine trials rifle for the US military. This was coupled with a long stroke gas piston and a hammer firing trigger mechanism.
Reportedly the rifle was tested by Canadian authorities, and performed quite well, with the adjustable gas system allowing it to function reliably even in temperatures of 25 below zero (where the Garand, tested alongside, experienced problems). However, Turner’s rifle was deemed too complex for military adoption.
That decision against the rifle was probably the right one for Canada, although Turner’s conversion is one of the better semi auto bolt acton conversions I have handled. It was remarkably non-awkward — that may not sound like much to crow about, but it sets a pretty high standard for this type of rifle.
QotD: The young Richard Nixon
The Orthogonians’ base was among Whittier’s athletes. On the surface, jocks seem natural Franklins, the Big Men on Campus. But Nixon always had a gift for looking under social surfaces to see and exploit the subterranean truths that roiled underneath. It was an eminently Nixonian insight: that on every sports team there are only a couple of stars, and that if you want to win the loyalty of the team for yourself, the surest, if least glamorous, strategy is to concentrate on the nonspectacular — silent — majority. The ones who labor quietly, sometimes resentfully, in the quarterback’s shadow: the linemen, the guards, the punter. Nixon himself was exemplarily nonspectacular: the 150-pounder was the team’s tackle dummy, kept on squad by a loving, tough, and fatherly coach who appreciated Nixon’s unceasing grit and team spirit — nursing hurt players, cheering on the listless, even organizing his own team dinners, entertaining the guests on the piano, perhaps favoring them with the Orthogonian theme song. It was his own composition.
Nixon beat a Franklin for student body president. Looking back later, acquaintances marveled at the feat of this awkward, skinny kid the yearbook called “a rather quiet chap about campus,” dour and brooding, who couldn’t even win a girlfriend, who attracted enemies, who seemed, a schoolmate recalled, “the man least likely to succeed in politics.” They hadn’t learned what Nixon was learning. Being hated by the right people was no impediment to political success. The unpolished, after all, were everywhere in the majority.
Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, 2008.
June 20, 2021
QotD: Cargo cult thinking in education
The problem of course is that college is not the cause of prosperity, but a marker (with prosperity) of other traits — focus on long-term goals, discipline, hard work, and yes knowing 2+2=4. This sort of woke BS just makes it worse, because it attacks the real roots of prosperity. There are real barriers to poor blacks achieving prosperity — eg how do you focus on long-term goals when you don’t know where you are sleeping tonight or when you have no role models who do so — but the purity and objectivity of math is not among these.
This sort of cargo cult thinking can be seen all the time in Progressive economic proscriptions. The government push for home ownership is another — middle class people own homes so if low income people owned homes they would become middle class. Now, this has a bit of accuracy in that, like the stock market, the elite have goosed the housing market to always go up. But leaving that aside for a moment, owning a home vs renting is a terrible decision for many people — it piles on a lot of financial risk but perhaps more importantly it limits geographic mobility which used to be critical to lower-income people improving their lot.
Warren Meyer, “Are the Woke a False Flag Operation of White Supremacists?”, Coyote Blog, 2021-02-16.
