Quotulatiousness

August 8, 2020

“The show exploits the most extreme disaster LARPers, but their visions of the apocalypse are typical”

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

Jen Gerson does a bit of disaster-watching, or rather not so much watching disasters as watching people prepping for disasters:

If you spend a few hours devoted to consuming episodes of the reality TV show Doomsday Preppers, it becomes impossible to avoid this obvious conclusion: doomsday preppers are probably the least prepared of any of us to survive the apocalypse.

Take Season 2, Episode 14, for example, in which a 44-year-old man in Hawaii believes that he will use his intuition and limited backcountry skills to survive a tsunami — his first such intuition is to get into a boat.

More typically, the television show documents Middle American families who believe they can buy their way out of society’s collapse by burying bunkers and stockpiling food, weapons and tactical gear.

Most of them seem paranoid. A few come off as genuinely disturbed. All of them seem sad.

Ask them what they’re so afraid of and they will list their apocalypse of choice: electromagnetic pulse, financial collapse, famine, drought, coup, a population-devastating plague.

The show exploits the most extreme disaster LARPers, but their visions of the apocalypse are typical. We were all prepared for zombies, and aliens — the surround-sound end-of-the world in which we would take up arms against invading forces and ferry our children to the bug-out Eden in the mountains.

Nobody pictured the apocalypse would like this; stuck at home for months at a time, pounding Oreos and beer at 11 a.m. and watching Doomsday Preppers on Netflix while faking a work day on the couch. For most, heroism has been an act of idleness.

August 6, 2020

Fallen flag — The Lehigh and Hudson River Railway

Filed under: History, Railways, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

This month’s Classic Trains featured fallen flag is a northeastern railway I didn’t know much about, the Lehigh and Hudson River. If you asked me to complete the phrase “Lehigh and …”, I’d most likely have said “New England”, which was a larger operation but is perhaps only remembered now as the second major American railway to file for abandonment after the New York, Ontario & Western. The L&HR earned its keep primarily as a bridge line, with additional revenues from online anthracite coal mines. From the original founding in 1881, it operated until it was incorporated into Conrail in 1976.

L&HR’s origins date to 1860, when arrival of the New York & Erie Railroad, at Greycourt, New York, 10 miles north of Warwick, prompted construction of the Warwick Valley Railroad under the leadership of Grinnell Burt. The Warwick Valley operated as a 6-foot-gauge feeder to the same-gauge NY&E, using the big road’s equipment for two decades. Around 1880, WV assumed its own operations, was standard-gauged, and built the 11-mile Wawayanda Railroad, which tapped agricultural and mineral sources at McAfee, New Jersey. Further extension southward soon followed.

Two projected competitive lines were combined as the Lehigh & Hudson River Railroad, extending from a Pennsylvania Railroad connection at Belvidere, New Jersey, on the Delaware River, to Hamburg, New Jersey, where three miles of isolated Sussex Railroad track linked it to the Warwick Valley. In 1882 the extensions were folded into the 61-mile Lehigh & Hudson River Railway.

In addition to the New York & Erie’s mainline business at Greycourt, its Newburgh Branch provided access to Hudson River carferries crossing to the New York & New England’s Fishkill Landing. Anthracite coal, particularly from mines of affiliate Lehigh Coal & Navigation, was a major eastbound commodity. Anticipating completion of the Poughkeepsie Bridge a few miles upstream, the Orange County Railroad built north of Greycourt to connect with the New York, Ontario & Western at Burnside in 1890. Via trackage rights, this provided a first connection with the Central New England & Western at Campbell Hall, New York. Within a year, the Orange County was extended from Burnside to CNE’s new Maybrook yard.

Simultaneously, trackage rights were obtained from the Pennsy over 13 miles of its Belvidere-Delaware Division (“Bel-Del”) to Phillipsburg, New Jersey. There, disconnected subsidiaries undertook bridging the Delaware to access Easton, Pennsylvania, and the Jersey Central and Lehigh Valley. The bridge also opened in 1890, creating a three-state route of about 85 miles. The L&HR thus fulfilled the prescient vision of the line’s 1861 directors, who reported, “It was well understood by those … promoting the construction of the Warwick Valley Railroad, that in all probability it would be but a link in a great chain destined to be one of the most important thoroughfares, and to effect an important influence upon the commerce and manufacturers of an extensive section of our country …” Additional links soon extended the chain of this “important thoroughfare.”

The Lehigh and Hudson River Railway bridge over the Delaware River between Easton, Pennsylvania and Phillipsburg, New Jersey. Easton, the Lehigh River Dam feeding the Delaware Canal, and the Northampton Street Bridge are in the background.
Photo by Zeete via Wikimedia Commons.

QotD: Selling booze to the immature

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

I’m getting really sick of manufacturers trying to extend their user base by appealing to younger people, playing on their unsophisticated and undeveloped taste buds by adding Kool-Aid flavors to grownup drinks. (Chocolate vodka? are you fucking kidding me?) This is akin to trying to get more women to shoot guns by making gunpowder smell like lilacs.

I am, by the way, fully aware of how innovation works — that most of civilization has occurred because someone, somewhere said: “Y’know, I bet if we just changed …” — but that’s confusing improvement with extension. Tinned fruity-flavored gin is not an improvement.

I know that raspberry-flavored beer may have caused more people to take to beer drinking, but that’s changed things, and not for the better. Go into any bar and look at what beers are on tap these days. Barely a drinkable one available, and worse, they’ve pushed all the decent beers into bottles (or out of stock) while hipsters and chickies are catered to with the latest fad, Strawberry IPA [pause to be sick].

Basically, booze manufacturers are changing their products to appeal to people who don’t like booze. In the old days of marketing, we used to call that pointless endeavor “catching eels” (try catching an eel in mid-air when someone tosses it in your direction and you’ll see what I’m talking about). Not only is it pointless, it’s mercurial because what’s popular today won’t be popular tomorrow as your fickle new customers chase after the next “Flavor Of The Month”, and you’ll have gone from catching one eel to catching multiple eels. That’s something they don’t teach in the Marketing section of the typical MBA course because MBAs are all about theory (“line extension”, “product enhancement”, etc.). And don’t tell me I’m talking nonsense because I’ve seen the curricula.

Kim du Toit, “Gilding the Lily #268”, Splendid Isolation, 2018-05-24.

August 3, 2020

Recycling is a SCAM!

Filed under: Asia, Business, Cancon, China, Economics, Environment, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 06:00

J.J. McCullough
Published 29 Jun 2019

Recycling is a disaster. This video was sponsored by Loonie Politics! Sign up using the code word “McCullough” for 25% off! https://looniepolitics.com/register/

Visit the channel of guest star Demetrios: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNKV…

An in-depth look at Canadian recycling:
https://globalnews.ca/news/5199883/ca…

The Vice video I mentioned:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pv1UP…

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QotD: History or “Her” story?

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

In another land, a long, long time ago, I was a student of languages. It was there that I came across the American left’s obsession with corrupting the language.

In my last year in college, I had American Literature taught by a Fullbright exchange professor. I will never forget the moment the poor man — talking to a class of 36, all women as such classes often are — let slip the innocent word “him” to mean an indeterminate gender. He paused, went white, his eyes widened, and he said, “I mean, I mean, he or she.”

Meanwhile, the class of 36 was staring at him in puzzlement. It took us a while to take it all apart and realize he thought we’d be offended by the use of “he” to mean someone generic, of indeterminate gender.

I think we patted him kindly on the shoulder and told him that no, really, we weren’t offended. The usage was the same in Portuguese and we’d been told it was the same in most Indo-European languages. And who on Earth would get offended over semantics? The language was the language. It meant nothing about us personally.

This was of course before I married, came to the U.S. and found that for the American woman circa 1985, the language was not just personal, it was personally offensive.

I remember standing in horror underneath a bookstore section proudly labeled Herstory.

Of course the etymology of the word history is not his + story, the sort of pseudo-clever deduction about language that I was used to from the near-illiterate elderly people in the village. (It would be too complex and involve Portuguese, but there was this old farmer who had somehow deduced from the Portuguese word for farmer that farmers were the only ones who would be saved at the end of time.)

History, of course, is not originally an English word. It comes from the Latin historia — meaning a relation of events — by way of the French estoire, meaning story. Note please that in neither of those languages does “his” mean “belonging to him.” And that making the same sort of illiterate assumptions about the French word, we’d get “It is oire.”

I thought that the store must have hired an illiterate employee, but no, over the next ten years, in various circumstances, and possibly still except for the fact that I’ve learned to silence such fools with a death glare, I’ve come across the same smug-idiot assumption and “corrections” of the English word, so as to “fight against the patriarchy.”

That this is done by people who paid more money than I make in a couple of years for a college degree, and who, doubtlessly, think that etymology is a dish made with onions, or perhaps a conspiracy of the patriarchy fills me with a sort of dull rage that has no outlet.

Sarah Hoyt, “The Semantic Whoredom of the Left”, PJ Media, 2018-05-11.

August 2, 2020

Words are verbal tools, but tools can be weaponized

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

In this week’s newsletter, Andrew Sullivan analyzes the roots of wokeness:

In the mid-2010s, a curious new vocabulary began to unspool itself in our media. A data site, storywrangling.org, which measures the frequency of words in news stories, revealed some remarkable shifts. Terms that had previously been almost entirely obscure suddenly became ubiquitous — and an analysis of the New York Times, using these tools, is a useful example. Looking at stories from 1970 to 2018, several terms came out of nowhere in the past few years to reach sudden new heights of repetition and frequency. Here’s a list of the most successful neologisms: non-binary, toxic masculinity, white supremacy, traumatizing, queer, transphobia, whiteness, mansplaining. And here are a few that were rising in frequency in the last decade but only took off in the last few years: triggering, hurtful, gender, stereotypes.

Language changes, and we shouldn’t worry about that. Maybe some of these terms will stick around. But the linguistic changes have occurred so rapidly, and touched so many topics, that it has all the appearance of a top-down re-ordering of language, rather than a slow, organic evolution from below. While the New York Times once had a reputation for being a bit stodgy on linguistic matters, pedantic, precise and slow-to-change, as any paper of record might be, in the last few years, its pages have been flushed with so many neologisms that a reader from, say, a decade ago would have a hard time understanding large swathes of it. And for many of us regular readers, we’ve just gotten used to brand new words popping up suddenly to re-describe something we thought we knew already. We notice a new word, make a brief mental check, and move on with our lives.

But we need to do more than that. We need to understand that all these words have one thing in common: they are products of an esoteric, academic discipline called critical theory, which has gained extraordinary popularity in elite education in the past few decades, and appears to have reached a cultural tipping point in the middle of the 2010s. Most normal people have never heard of this theory — or rather an interlocking web of theories — that is nonetheless changing the very words we speak and write and the very rationale of the institutions integral to liberal democracy.

What we have long needed is an intelligible, intelligent description of this theory which most people can grasp. And we’ve just gotten one: Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender and Identity, by former math prof James Lindsay and British academic, Helen Pluckrose. It’s as deep a dive into this often impenetrable philosophy as anyone would want to attempt. But it’s well worth grappling with.

What the book helps the layperson to understand is the evolution of postmodern thought since the 1960s until it became the doctrine of Social Justice today. Beginning as a critique of all grand theories of meaning — from Christianity to Marxism — postmodernism is a project to subvert the intellectual foundations of western culture. The entire concept of reason — whether the Enlightenment version or even the ancient Socratic understanding — is a myth designed to serve the interests of those in power, and therefore deserves to be undermined and “problematized” reason whenever possible. Postmodern theory does so mischievously and irreverently — even as it leaves nothing in reason’s place. The idea of objective truth — even if it is viewed as always somewhat beyond our reach — is abandoned. All we have are narratives, stories, whose meaning is entirely provisional, and can in turn be subverted or problematized.

During the 1980s and 1990s, this somewhat aimless critique of everything hardened into a plan for action. Analyzing how truth was a mere function of power, and then seeing that power used against distinct and oppressed identity groups, led to an understandable desire to do something about it, and to turn this critique into a form of activism. Lindsay and Pluckrose call this “applied postmodernism”, which, in turn, hardened into what we now know as Social Justice.

August 1, 2020

Secret Briefing: The Pedersen Device

Filed under: History, Military, USA, Weapons, WW1 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 8 Aug 2016

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons

Welcome to your briefing on the new equipment we are issuing for the Spring Offensive of 1919. With this new secret weapon, we can finally push the Germans out of France and end the war!

July 31, 2020

Xi Jinping and the “Chinese dream”

Filed under: China, Economics, Government, Health, Religion, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Zineb Riboua outlines possible ways for the West to counter ongoing Chinese economic espionage:

President Donald Trump and PRC President Xi Jinping at the G20 Japan Summit in Osaka, 29 June, 2019.
Cropped from an official White House photo by Shealah Craighead via Wikimedia Commons.

Since 2012, Chinese President Xi Jinping’s favourite catchphrase has been “the Chinese dream”. In stark contrast to the evil, capitalistic American dream, Xi’s alternative vision of progress teaches that the only route to prosperity is through rigid adherence to collectivist ideology.

The Chinese state embodies a very particular ideology. Over the last few decades, it has aggressively ramped up its economic and political capital through business and enterprise, inextricably tying itself to the economic fortunes of both developed and developing countries. It is now seeking to use the economic capital it has accumulated to force its political agenda into reality.

That is why the role of private companies in China is unparalleled. Milton Friedman defined corporate social responsibility in terms of private companies’ sole duty to make a profit, and then increase that profit. Chinese companies appear to be exempt from this rule because they interact with the state in a unique and troubling way.

The current state of the Chinese political and economic landscape is no accident. When Deng Xiaoping spoke in the 1980s of building a “socialism with Chinese characteristics”, this is probably exactly what he had in mind. The Chinese Communist party has succeeded in weaponising local market forces in such a way that it now holds all the cards in its nation’s dealings with the outside world, both political and economic, because the line between the public and the private is non-existent.

This strategy has not gone unnoticed. Thanks to the Chinese Communist party’s recent conduct – unprecedented aggression in Hong Kong, the appalling genocide of the Uyghur people and a costly unwillingness to share information relating to the coronavirus outbreak – the state of its internal affairs has come into sharp focus on the international stage.

Unsurprisingly, the hawkish US has placed itself at the forefront of counter-Chinese rhetoric. Secretary of state Mike Pompeo said recently: “We gave the Chinese Communist party and the regime itself special economic treatment, only to see the CCP insist on silence over its human rights abuses as the price of admission for Western companies entering China.”

QotD: Princess may have to wait to be rescued

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

I drove my daughter’s car this morning and the radio was tuned to whatever Sirius current pop station she listens to. I changed the lyrics of every single song to,

    “I cry myself to sleep,
    And I wear skinny jeans.
    I have a lumberjack beard,
    and I cry when I wake up.”

What’s amazing was that my lyrics fit every single whiny soy-boy vanilla song.

Someday all the princesses are going to look around and wonder why the princes are all married to homosexual exotic animal dealers or are simply not interested. The girlzz will be friend-zoned and will answer their biological urge to be a mother with the sperm banked by a stranger.

Paul Piatt, responding to a post on Mewe, 2020-04-29. (Reposted by permission.)

July 30, 2020

QotD: The “strong female protagonist” in movies and on TV

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

And I wonder whether you’ve noticed a character that can be found in practically every movie made today? I call her the “all conquering female.” Almost without exception, she is underestimated by men and then proves herself more intelligent, cleverer, more courageous, and more skilled than any man. Whether we’re talking about a romantic comedy, an office-drama, or an adventure movie, the all conquering female will almost inevitably show up. And she has to show her worth in a domineering way, that is to say, over and against the men. For her to appear strong, they have to appear weak. For a particularly good case in point, watch the most recent Star Wars film.

Now I perfectly understand the legitimacy of feminist concerns regarding the portrayal of women in the media as consistently demure, retiring, and subservient to men. I grant that, in most of the action/adventure movies that I saw growing up, women would typically twist an ankle or get captured and then require rescuing by the swashbuckling male hero — and I realize how galling this must have been to generations of women. And therefore, a certain correction was undoubtedly in order. But what is problematic now is the Nietzschean quality of the reaction, by which I mean, the insistence that female power has to be asserted over and against males, that there is an either/or, zero-sum conflict between men and women. It is not enough, in a word, to show women as intelligent, savvy, and good; you have to portray men as stupid, witless, and irresponsible. That this savage contrast is having an effect especially on younger men is becoming increasingly apparent.

In the midst of a “you-go-girl” feminist culture, many boys and young men feel adrift, afraid that any expression of their own good qualities will be construed as aggressive or insensitive. If you want concrete proof of this, take a look at the statistics contrasting female and male success at the university level. And you can see the phenomenon in films such as Fight Club and The Intern. In the former, the Brad Pitt character turns to his friend and laments, “we’re thirty year old boys;” and in the latter, Robert De Niro’s classic male type tries to whip into shape a number of twenty-something male colleagues who are rumpled, unsure of themselves, without ambition — and of course under the dominance of an all conquering female.

It might be the case that, in regard to money, power, and honor, a zero-sum dynamic obtains, but it decidedly does not obtain in regard to real virtue. The truly courageous person is not threatened by another person’s courage; the truly temperate man is not intimidated by the temperance of someone else; the truly just person is not put off by the justice of a countryman; and authentic love positively rejoices in the love shown by another. And therefore, it should be altogether possible to hold up the virtue of a woman without denying virtue to a man. In point of fact, if we consult the “all conquering female” characters in films and TV, we see that they often exemplify the very worst of the traditional male qualities: aggression, suspicion, hyper-sensitivity, cruelty, etc. This is what happens when a Nietzschean framework has replaced a classical one.

Bishop Robert Barron, “The Trouble With the ‘You Go Girl’ Culture”, Word on Fire, 2016-10-18.

July 29, 2020

What was TEKOI?

Filed under: History, Military, Russia, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

CGP Grey
Published 28 Jul 2020

## Related Videos

Exploring Tekoi: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABMV4…

Defeated by Tumbleweeds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FeXP…

## Special Thanks

Gregory Waltz

## Crowdfunders

Steven Snow, Bob Kunz, John Buchan, Nevin Spoljaric, Donal Botkin, BN-12 , Chris Chapin, Richard Jenkins, Phil Gardner, Martin, Steven Grimm, سليمان العقل, Elliot Lepley, Colin Millions, David F Watson, Saki Comandao, Ben Schwab, Jason Lewandowski, Bobby, rictic, Marco Arment, Shallon Brown, Shantanu Raj, emptymachine, George Lin, Jeffrey Podis, Ben Delo, Henry Ng, Thunda Plum, Awoo, David Tyler, Fuesu, iulus, Jordan Earls, Joshua Jamison, Nick Fish, Nick Gibson, Tyler Bryant, Zach Whittle, Oliver Steele, Kermit Norlund, Derek Bonner, Derek Jackson, Mikko, Orbit_Junkie, Ron Bowes, Tómas Árni Jónasson, Andrew Bereza, Rebecca Wortham, Bryan McLemore, Bear, chrysilis, David Palomares, Emil, Erik Parasiuk, Esteban Santana Santana, Freddi Hørlyck, John Rogers, ken mcfarlane, Leon, Maarten van der Blij, Peter Lomax, Rhys Parry, ShiroiYami, Tristan Watts-Willis, Veronica Peshterianu, Dag Viggo Lokøen, Essa omar, Ryan Richards, Alex Simonides, Felix Weis, John Lee, Maxime Zielony, Melvin Sowah, Elizabeth Keathley, Christopher Mutchler, Giulio Bontadini, Paul Alom, Ryan Tripicchio, Scot Melville, Kyle Wayman, Julien Dubois

## Music

David Rees: http://www.davidreesmusic.com

Update: CGP Grey posted a corrected version of this video here – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCeMCwxayp0
He also posted the Director’s Commentary video (originally intended only for his Patrons) here – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufsYK3Eecw4
There is also a video explaining how the whole process worked and how the error was missed, if you’re interested.

The Equity, Inclusivity, and Diversity Industrial Complex

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Economics, Education, History, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Dominion, Ben Woodfinden comments on a Ross Douthat column on the “antiracist” demands of our modern protestariat (the hordes of un- or under-employed university-educated young liberals and socialists):

University College, University of Toronto, 31 July, 2008.
Photo by “SurlyDuff” via Wikimedia Commons.

… the most interesting aspect of this lockdown-induced outpouring of collective rage hasn’t been the protests, or the cancellations, but the woke job creation that is going on. The ideology behind things like “white fragility” is increasingly being transformed into what can be described as an equity-inclusivity-diversity (EID) industrial complex that might end up being the most significant long term structural change that emerges out of the protests.

One of the most common responses in elite institutions as they promise to address systemic racism has been the creation of new jobs and positions that will supposedly help to do so. For instance, the Washington Post created a set of new positions that will be focusing on racial issues. This included hiring a “Managing Editor for Diversity and Inclusion.” At Princeton, the administration announced, like many other elite universities, new courses (which means new teaching opportunities) focused on racial injustice, as well as new projects and funding for research to explore and address racial issues. Stanford has created a new Centre for Racial Justice at its law school.

This direct job creation is just the tip of the iceberg. The real EID industrial complex is in the creation of a vast number of new jobs dedicated to the promotion and advancement of the basic tenets of this ascendant ideology through the expansion of human resource departments to deal with these issues, the creation of new EID bureaucrats and administrators in universities, corporations, government departments, the rise of EID consulting and mandatory courses and workshops for employees, new jobs and potential litigation for lawyers, as well as courses and modules in law schools to teach aspiring lawyers about these things.

In the bestselling Ibram X. Kendi book How To Be An Antiracist, one of Kendi’s central solutions is to pass an anti-racist amendment to the U.S. Constitution and permanently establish and fund a Department of Anti-racism. This department:

    would be comprised of formally trained experts on racism and no political appointees. The DOA would be responsible for preclearing all local, state and federal public policies to ensure they won’t yield racial inequity, monitor those policies, investigate private racist policies when racial inequity surfaces, and monitor public officials for expressions of racist ideas. The DOA would be empowered with disciplinary tools to wield over and against policymakers and public officials who do not voluntarily change their racist policy and ideas.

The radical tendencies of the bourgeois bolsheviks in the streets might make them seem like true revolutionaries, but what this movement seems to actually want to create, with remarkable success, is new employment opportunities for true believers in the new anti-racist creeds. Racism won’t so much be solved by tearing society down, but by massively expanding new professional and managerial jobs that can guarantee full employment for the credentialed class of true believers.

O’Boyle’s thesis is that the revolutions that swept across European cities in 1848 were because a large surplus of resentful and overeducated men felt society was denying to them what they were rightfully owed. O’Boyle looks at Germany, where university education was cheap, and was “emphasized as an avenue to wealth and power.” This ending up producing an excess of ambitious, but resentful and frustrated men who felt society was not allotting them the status and comfort they deserved. The same was true in France. But in Britain, the opportunities produced by industrialization that had yet to fully materialize on the continent kept this excess surplus of overeducated men much smaller, and helped insulate Britain from revolution.

What if the EID industrial complex actually helps to reduce the scarcity of opportunities in elite fields and institutions that will put a lid on the unrest that overproduction breeds? The EID industry is worth billions of dollars, and in a way it might be the solution liberalism offers to both the radical progressivism of this ideology, and to the challenge posed by elite overproduction.

America’s First Assault Rifle: Burton 1917 LMR

Filed under: History, Military, USA, Weapons, WW1 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 4 Jul 2016

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
https://centerofthewest.org/explore/f…

America’s first assault rifle? Well, it does meet all the requirements — select-fire, intermediate cartridge, and shoulder-fired. It was never actually fielded, though.

The Burton Light Machine Rifle was developed during World War One, with the firing model completed in 1917. It was intended as an aircraft observer’s weapon for attacking balloons — a role which required incendiary ammunition. With this in mind, Winchester’s Frank Burton adapted the .351 WSL cartridge from his 1905 and 1907 self-loading rifles into the .345 WSL, with a spitzer bullet. He designed an open-bolt, select-fire shoulder rifle to fire it, which became known as the Light Machine Rifle.

Burton’s rifle was to be usable both in an aircraft where it could be fixed to a Scarff mount for a wide field of fire or used by an individual on the ground, fired from the shoulder. It weighed in at just about 10 pounds (4.5kg) and had a pistol grip and straight-line design to bring the recoil impulse directly into the shooter’s shoulder and minimize rise during automatic fire. The barrel was finned for better cooling, and infantry barrels were equipped with bayonet lugs.

The most distinctive elements of the design, of course, are the dual top-mounted magazines. Each one holds 20 rounds, and each has a pair of locking catches. One position locks the magazine into a feeding position, and the other holds it up above the cycling of the bolt. The idea here was to keep a second loaded magazine easily accessible for an aerial observer, so they could reload without having to find another magazine somewhere in the aircraft. Contrary to some speculation, there is no automatic transition between magazines. When one is empty, the shooter must pull it back to the second locking position (or out of the gun entirely) and then push the second magazine down into feeding position.

Despite Burton’s work — which was well ahead of its time — the LMR had been rendered obsolete for its primary role by the time it was ready. Synchronized, forward-mounted Vickers machine guns firing 11mm incendiary ammunition were being mounted on aircraft, and were more effective on balloons and airplanes than Burton’s weapon would have been. Only this single example was ever made, and it was not presented for infantry consideration as far as I can tell. It was lost for many years before being discovered in a Winchester building, and eventually ending up in the Cody Firearms Museum with the rest of the Winchester factory collection.

July 28, 2020

A rosy hypothetical about the US 2020 elections

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

David Warren‘s not committed to this scenario being accurate, although elements of it are clearly based in reality:

Donald Trump addresses a rally in Nashville, TN in March 2017.
Photo released by the Office of the President of the United States via Wikimedia Commons.

Arguably, the American people have a handle on this. Their strategy is to support Biden and the Democrats publicly, to save their jobs, discourage doxing, and avoid vicious attacks from “friends” on Facebook. Then come November, they vote for a Republican supermajority, including a Trump sweep of the Electoral College, and a GOP landslide in the House of Representatives. Thanks to the secret ballot, they can say they voted for Biden afterwards, if he is still alive. (Has anyone checked on the dear old guy in his basement?)

That Trump will lose badly will be obvious to everyone until the election results come in. The younger constituency has been thoroughly indoctrinated by the radicals who captured schools and universities, but will, as usual, rarely turn up to vote. There will be a huge volume of fraudulent mail-in ballots — nine-tenths of them Democrat — but the Natted States Postal Service will fail to deliver them on time. Desperate efforts by Antifa and BLM to keep the riots going will substantially reduce the urban leftie vote. The meltdown of the meejah talking heads, on the night of November 3rd, will be even more amusing than their meltdown in 2016. Many will succumb to the Covid virus, by morning.

Not to be political, because I never am — but I did have a long history of correctly guessing election results when I was myself practising the demonic art. (Journalism.) I was, for instance, a polite “never Trumper” even after I’d been deleted by my newspaper employers (who felt they didn’t need “token conservatives” any more). But I did think, against all the odds, that Trump would win. This was because I try not to let my own prejudices interfere with my observations. My reasoning was simple. There were lots of people who loved Trump, and very few who loved Hillary Clinton. Therefore, the latter would lose. (This also explains how I predicted Obama’s victories.)

July 27, 2020

H.L. Mencken

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

In the latest Libertarian Enterprise, Eric Oppen (with whom I’ve had a few brief email conversations) discusses the work of the “Sage of Baltimore”:

H.L. Mencken in 1928.
Photo by Ben Pinchot for Theatre Magazine, August 1928.

I would say that, on the whole, Mencken is still quite readable and enjoyable, and many of his observations on the American scene are still as valid as when he made them. He has his weaknesses. He’s not much of an historian, which limits him when he takes up historical subjects. He never got over what he saw as the unfair treatment the German cause got in the American press between 1914 and the entry of the US into World War One. He also often identifies people as Jewish or black when it’s not really relevant to what he’s saying, but this was more a custom of his time than out-and-out bigotry. While he often has uncomplimentary things to say about Jews, and blacks, his greatest scorn is reserved for “the lintheads” — his term for the poor whites of the South. He regarded them as barely worthy of human status.

[…] his views on most subjects were quite compatible with libertarian positions. He was an inveterate opponent of government overreaching (which was behind a lot of his ferocious opposition to Prohibition) and while I don’t think he’d approve of drug use, he’d see our War on (Some Unpopular) Drugs as the assault on the Constitution that it is. While he was by no means hostile to blacks, and went out of his way to promote black writers (many of the figures in the “Harlem Renaissance” owed a lot to his support), he’d also denounce affirmative action and our current frenzy of “anti-racism” in scathing terms. His views on the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and how it has been turned into an alternate, and superior, Constitution would probably scorch the paint off the walls.

Mencken’s views on people’s private lives would have infuriated many of his contemporaries. While he disapproved of homosexuality, referring to it negatively in entries in his private diaries, he was by no means a howling “homophobe.” His writings on the travails of Oscar Wilde are very sympathetic to Wilde’s sufferings, which Mencken thought were wholly disproportionate to what he was known to have done. Mencken referred to Lord Alfred Douglas, in a review of Douglas’ book about Wilde, as a Tartuffe — that is to say, a posturing hypocrite.

Having been a reporter for years in Baltimore, back when reporters were very like the old film noir view of them, Mencken was very much a man of the world, and inclined to great tolerance on others’ sex lives. When he wrote of prostitutes, he refrained from the sort of pious moralizing that was expected in his time. He said that prostitutes often actively preferred their profession to other work available to them, and that most of them ended up respectably married. He kept his own love life very private, and was a faithful husband to his wife throughout their brief marriage, but he does mention, here and there, having had other lovers, whom he does not name even in writings designated to come to light only long after everybody involved was dead. By his own account in his Diary, he lost his virginity at age fourteen to a girl of his own age, who had already had other experiences before him. He felt that such experiences, unless pregnancy happened, did no one any harm.

While he was an atheist, Mencken had no particular hostility to religion per se, no matter what the Fundamentalists of his day thought. His book Treatise on the Gods makes interesting reading, although it is marred, in my view, by Mencken’s lack of knowledge of languages. He praises Christianity for having “the most gorgeous poetry,” but as far as I know, he could not read Hebrew, Aramaic or Greek, and was thinking in terms of the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer. However, the book is still worth reading, although a serious student of the subject would find it limited.

If you’ve been a regular visitor to the blog, you’ll know I have a huge regard for H.L. Mencken’s work and there are many Mencken quotes that have done duty as QotD entries over the years.

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