When the Democrats ran the House of Representatives for almost all of six decades, before 1995, they did not treat the Republican minority particularly well. So I can understand Newt Gingrich’s desire for revenge when he took over as Speaker of the House in 1995. But many of the changes he made polarized the Congress, made bipartisan cooperation more difficult, and took us into a new era of outrage and conflict in Washington. One change stands out to me, speaking as a social psychologist: he changed the legislative calendar so that all business was done Tuesday through Thursday, and he encouraged his incoming freshmen not to move to the District. He did not want them to develop personal friendships with Democrats. He did not want their spouses to serve on the same charitable boards. But personal relationships among legislators and their families in Washington had long been a massive centripetal force. Gingrich deliberately weakened it.
And this all happened along with the rise of Fox News. Many political scientists have noted that Fox News and the right-wing media ecosystem had an effect on the Republican Party that is unlike anything that happened on the left. It rewards more extreme statements, more grandstanding, more outrage. Many people will point out that the media leans left overall, and that the Democrats did some polarizing things, too. Fair enough. But it is clear that Gingrich set out to create a more partisan, zero-sum Congress, and he succeeded. This more combative culture then filtered up to the Senate, and out to the rest of the Republican Party.
Jonathan Haidt, “The Age of Outrage: What the current political climate is doing to our country and our universities”, City Journal, 2017-12-17.
January 27, 2020
QotD: The radicalization of the Republican Party
January 26, 2020
You, your new DeLorean, and the LVMVMA
Many people — not all of them rabid fans of the Back to the Future movies — would like to own a DeLorean and it is going to be possible … eventually:
Photo of a DeLorean by grayesun is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
Basically, the legislation [the Low Volume Motor Vehicle Manufacturers Act of 2015], which was signed into law by President Barack Obama in 2015, would allow companies to produce limited-run replica vehicles without being bound by certain safety and emissions standards. But after that administration ended, the law stalled because the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration didn’t follow through with implementation.
“One problem, Espey explains, was that NHTSA hasn’t had a permanent administrator since the previous presidential election, and the acting administrator would not sign off on the regulations,” writes Hagerty. Thankfully, the Specialty Equipment Market Association (SEMA) took matters into their own hands and filed a lawsuit, and now it looks like the law could take effect soon.
That means DMC is once again gearing up to sell new turnkey DeLoreans, and this time around they’ll have modern conveniences like power steering and cruise control (imagine that!) and potentially features like heated seats and smartphone integration (the future!).
While they’re not available to order just yet, interested buyers can fill out a non-binding pre-order form. Just don’t expect to hit 88 miles per hour in 2020; as Espey said, “There will be no cars produced under this legislation for at least a year, and that’s presuming the feds do their job this time and don’t drag it out for four more years.”
H/T to Colby Cosh for the link.
The Diamond of Collector FALs: The G-Series
Forgotten Weapons
Published 2 Apr 2018Sold for $17,250.
When the Browning Arms Company first began importing semiautomatic FAL rifles from FN in 1959, the submitted an example for evaluation, and ATF determined that it was not a machine gun. The rifle was made with a selector that could not be moved to the fully automatic position, and did not have the automatic sear required for full auto firing. This was acceptable at the time, and Browning would import 1,836 of these rifles (mostly standard configuration, but some heavy barrel and paratrooper patterns) by January 10, 1963. On that date, ATF changed its standard, and ruled the FAL as currently being imported now would be considered a machine gun subject to the NFA. In order to be acceptable now, the rifle must not be able to accept an automatic sear at all, not merely be made without one. However, ATF ruled that the previously imported guns would be grandfathered in, and remain legally owned as semiautomatic rifles. They were listed by serial number (an additional 12 guns were added in 1974 which were imported by “administrative error”), and remain exempted from the NFA to this day. For the FAL collector, these G-series rifles are desirable because they are completely authentic and original early FN production guns, without any of the design changes that would be required later for importation.
Exempt serial number list: http://www.gseriesfal.com/docpages/91…
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January 25, 2020
Swedish K: The Carl Gustav m/45B and the Port Said
Forgotten Weapons
Published 24 Jan 2020http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
https://www.floatplane.com/channel/Fo…
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During the 1930s, Sweden acquired an assortment of different submachine guns, including Bergmanns, Thompsons, and Suomis. As World War Two progressed, they decided that they really needed to standardize on a single caliber and model of gun, and requested designs from both the Carl Gustav factory and Husqvarna. The Carl Gustav design won out, and was adopted as the m/45.
It was a very simple open-bolt, tube-receiver, fixed-firing-pin design chambered for 9x19mm Parabellum ammunition. The original guns were built around Finnish Suomi magazines, both 71-round drums and 50-round “coffin” mags. After the war these were replace by a new 36-round traditional box magazine, and magazine well adapters were fitted to the guns which precluded the use of the larger mags. The new magazines were much more convenient to carry, less expensive, and more reliable.
The name “Swedish K” comes form the full designation: Kulsprutepistol m/45. The guns were used by American special operations forces in Vietnam until the Swedish government stopped export sales to the US, at which point the Navy commissioned Smith & Wesson to produce the Model 76 submachine gun (essentially a copy of the m/45). The design was also licensed by Egypt, which also licensed the AG-42 Ljungman rifle at the same time. The Egyptian copy was called the Port Said, and shows the features fo the original Swedish m/45 pattern, where the guns in Swedish service were mostly updated to the m/45B pattern.
Photo of m/45C with bayonet from: http://www.gotavapen.se/index_eng2g.htm
Check them out for a ton of information on Swedish small arms!
Contact:
Forgotten Weapons
6281 N. Oracle #36270
Tucson, AZ 85740
QotD: The post-oil-crisis evolution of modern cars
The computer changed everything. Not only in engine tuning and performance, but in design and modeling.
I had an example of a classic late Dark Ages car, an ’84 Trans Am with the LG4 305c.i. Rochester Quadrabog motor. A hunnert and fifty horsepower and nearly every engine function powered by enough dry-rotting vacuum tubing to reach to the moon and back…
Only a few years later and exotic computer-designed and controlled long-runner port fuel injection systems were common on domestic performance cars and HP numbers were on the right side of 200 for the first time in a decade.
It was coming out of an awful time. Like a friend wrote: When he went into seminary you could buy a Mustang with a nearly 400bhp engine option. When he left seminary, the Mustang was a Pinto.
Being a car enthusiast in America in the latter half of the 70s/first half of the ’80s was like being a dirt farmer in Fifth Century Britain, marveling at the weed-grown roads and disused aqueducts left by a race of giants and building your pig shed with stones looted from a burned library.
Tamara Keel, “Cars of the future from the past…”, View From The Porch, 2017-12-26.
January 24, 2020
From a Canadian perspective, “NORAD … is more important than NATO”
The American government has once again expressed a strong desire to update the 1957 North American Air Defence Commmand arrangement between the US and Canada for defence of the North American continent. It’s a Cold War relic to some (particularly some in the Prime Minister’s Office and cabinet), but it has a very real value to Canada, as Ted Campbell explains:
In 1957 Canada and the USA agreed to create the North American Air Defense Command. It is a “combined” command, American and Canadian people, civilian and military, work together, in combined headquarters, to conduct an active aerospace defence effort over the continent we share. Americans and Canadians work side-by-side managing the airspace, detecting intruders and identifying and intercepting them and so on.
NORAD, I would argue, is more important than NATO.
First, it is about defending our own homeland.
Second, it is about defending the US strategic deterrent, which has, arguably, done more to keep global peace than all the efforts of the United Nations, combined.
NORAD modernization and expansion should be at the top of Canada’s defence policy agenda. Specifically:
- First, billions of dollars, likely tens of billions of dollars are going to be needed to upgrade the surveillance and warning system. We need new radars, terrestrial and space-based, and upgraded control systems to do the job properly;
- Second, Canada needs to buy enough (85+ is just the very barest of bare minimums) of the right new fighter jet; and
- Third, Canada needs to join the American ballistic missile defence system.
I believe that this issue: the shared defence of our, shared, continent and, therefore, the defence of the American heartland and of America’s strategic deterrent is a key, perhaps even the key element in our most important foreign relationship. […] The knowledge that Canada is doing a full and fair share of defending our shared continent, of defending America, is not lost on admirals and generals, diplomats and senior civil servants, representatives and senators in the US Congress, pundits and political leaders in waiting in the think-tanks and senior staff in the White House, even if Donald J Trump is not impressed … IF we are doing a full and fair share.
Right now, we are not.
An orbital analyst tracks the Kosmos 1402 spy satellite in orbit in the Space Defense Operations Computation Center, North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) on 18 February, 1983.
NORAD photo by Master Sergeant Hiyashi via Wikimedia Commons.
January 21, 2020
The Korean War – THE COLD WAR Turns Hot!
IT’S HISTORY
Published 23 May 2015Not so long after World War 2, the Cold War had its first very hot conflict. After the separation of Korea into a communist north and a pro-western south, the stage was set for war. A war that escalated quickly and brought new innovations to the front that were only in a testing phase a few years earlier. The conflict cooled down into an armistice and created the DMZ that we still know today.
» SOURCES
Videos: British Pathé (https://www.youtube.com/user/britishp…)
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Content:
Mulholland, Andrew: The Korean War: History in an Hour, William Collins, 2013
Malkasian, Carter: The Korean War, Osprey Publishing, 2014
Hastings, Max: The Korean War, Pan, 1987» ABOUT US
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Those magical couple of weeks when politicians really pretend to care about Iowa
Colby Cosh discusses some of those puzzling-to-Canadians electoral oddities of our southern neighbours:
The actual, real, honest-to-God voting part of the U.S. presidential nominating process will begin with the Iowa state precinct caucuses on Feb. 3, two weeks from Monday. Every four years, at around this time, I rediscover the astonishing opacity of this process and marvel anew. The Iowa caucuses themselves, which have been the paramount preoccupation of American politics for months, serve as an excellent example.
You may have seen C-SPAN footage of the weird precinct caucus goings-on. These incorporate no balloting. Instead, you see small roomfuls of enthusiasts forming physical groupings, chatting about who they ought to support, and then merging smaller “non-viable” groups until the number of groups matches the number of delegates to be sent further on in the process.
“Further on to where?”, you may ask. To the Iowa Democratic Party county conventions, silly; but those don’t happen until March 21. These conventions send delegates to the party conventions for each congressional district (on the morning of April 25), and also to the state convention (June 13).
The actual makeup of the Iowa delegation to the national convention isn’t fully decided until that last date — yet an estimate of the statewide “result” will be provided magically on the evening of the 3rd. Even if no candidate drops out before the district and state conventions, this guess isn’t exactly set in stone. If there are dropouts, the final Iowa vote in the national roll call may look nothing at all like the estimates from the evening. Yet it’s these semi-fictitious, inferential estimates that will actually influence the course of the race in the other 49 states (and in the non-state delegations).
From a Canadian standpoint it all seems like a hell of a way to run a country.
The United States Goes Dry – Alcohol Prohibition I THE GREAT WAR
The Great War
Published 20 Jan 2020In January 1920, after one year of preparation, the 18th Amendment to the US Constitution went into effect. From now on alcohol prohibition was the law.
» SUPPORT THE CHANNEL
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thegreatwar
Merchandise: https://shop.spreadshirt.de/thegreatwar/» SOURCES
Ehmer, K. and Hindermann, B. (2015). The School of Sophisticated Drinking. New York: Greystone Books.
Miron and Zwiebel, “Alcohol Consumption During Prohibition”. In the American Economic Review, Vol. 81, No. 2, pp. 242-247, (May 1991).
Darrow, Clarence, and John Haynes Holmes. Debate On Prohibition. Haldeman-Julius Co., 1924.
Iorizzo, Luciano J. Al Capone. Greenwood Press, 2003.
Nemtsov, Aleksandr. A Contemporary History of Alcohol in Russia. Stockholm, 2011.
Sullivan, Edward D. Rattling the Cup on Chicago Crime. New York: The Vangaurd Press, 1929.
United States Government, “Codification of Internal Revenue Laws, … Published Pursuant to Section 1203(c) Revenue Act of 1926”.
18th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. https://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/ou…
United States Department of Agriculture. “Crop Production Historical Track Records, 2018”. https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publication…
Kamieński, Łukasz: “Drugs”, in: 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War, ed. by Ute Daniel, Peter Gatrell, Oliver Janz, Heather Jones, Jennifer Keene, Alan Kramer, and Bill Nasson, issued by Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin 2019-03-07
Blocker, Jack S Jr. “Did prohibition really work? Alcohol prohibition as a public health innovation.” American Journal of Public Health vol. 96,2 (2006): 233-43.» SOCIAL MEDIA
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Amity Shlaes’ Great Society: A New History
In City Journal, Edward Short reviews the latest American economic history book by Amity Shlaes:
In Great Society: A New History, Amity Shlaes revisits the welfare programs of the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations to show not only how misguided they were but also what a warning they present to those who wish to resurrect and extend such programs. “The contest between capitalism and socialism is on again,” the author writes in her introduction. Despite the Trump administration’s thriving economy, or perhaps because of it, Democratic Party progressives are calling for new welfare programs even more radical than those advocated in the 1960s by the socialist architect of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, Michael Harrington. In the new schemes for wealth redistribution, student debt relief, socialized medicine, and universal guaranteed income that make up the Democrats’ political platform in 2020, Shlaes rightly sees a recycling of Great Society hobby horses — and she worries that a good portion of the electorate may be taken in by them. “Once again many Americans rate socialism as the generous philosophy,” she observes, and she has written her admirable, sobering study to make sure that readers realize that the “results of our socialism were not generous.”
Reviewing how ungenerous makes for salutary reading. After all, socialism of any stripe, whether in Russia, South America, Europe, or America, has always been an inherently deceitful enterprise. Shales captures the essence of this imposture when she describes one of its manifestations as “Prettifying a political grab by dressing it up as an economic rescue.” In totting up these receipts for deceit, Shlaes has done a genuine public service. […]
On display here are all of Shlaes’s strengths as an author: her clear and unpretentious prose, sound critical judgment, readiness to enter into the thinking of her subjects with sympathy (even when she regards it as mistaken), and, perhaps most impressively, understanding how history can help us fathom what might otherwise be obscure in our own more immediate history.
Accordingly, she describes the influence that Roosevelt’s New Deal had on Johnson, who saw it as a model for maintaining and consolidating his Democratic majorities, as well as focusing his Cabinet’s talents. “The men around Johnson,” Shlaes points out, including Robert McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, Richard Goodwin, and Sargent Shriver, “felt the weight of his faith on them, and strove hard. Vietnam would be sorted out. There would be a Great Society. Poverty would be cured. Blacks of the South would win full citizenship. The Great Society would succeed.” Yet the president’s men could not help asking “by what measures” it would succeed.
Moynihan’s answer to this question is one that still mesmerizes social-engineering elites. The Great Society would be achieved by social science. “Progress begins on social problems when it becomes possible to measure them,” Moynihan declared. Improved quantitative analysis would give the centralized power of planners a new credibility.
Whether Johnson himself ever truly believed in such claims is questionable. When aides asked the exuberant Texan what he thought of the risks of going forward with his wildly ambitious program, his reply epitomized the hubris at the heart of his Great Society: “Well, what the hell’s the presidency for?”
QotD: “Safe spaces” do not produce strong people
No, It merely makes of them mollycoddles, weaklings, and in some important ways barely or not even human. That’s the effect of a safe space, to render those who hide in them weak and ignorant.
There are things worse than the safe space, though. That only weakens your brain by making sure you never have to reason about or argue in defense of your beliefs. And, at least, this moral weakening and brain-deadening thing is voluntary. Much worse is the movement to restrict free speech and to manipulate speech for political ends. This does what the safe space does, of course, but a simple saunter down memory lane shows it does so much more. Want to starve ten or twenty or fifty million of your own people to death? Want to gas a few million members of a despised minority? Want to hack to death half a million countrymen? Job one is attack speech.
Don’t you find it odd that your teachers have led you away from any history that would tend to show you that destruction and perversion of free speech is generally followed by massive murder? Don’t you find it a little odd that they place offending someone as worse somehow than starving, gassing, or shooting them to death?
Tom Kratman, “It’s Up to You, Millennials. Deflect or Be Doomed”, Milo, 2017-12-06.
January 20, 2020
A Drag Queen speaks out against Drag Queen Story Hour for kids
Libby Emmons reports on a rare bird indeed — a Drag Queen who doesn’t think it’s appropriate to have other Drag Queens visit schools and libraries to read to pre-teen kids:
Drag Queen Kitty Demure has taken to Twitter to speak out against the sexualization of children by woke people co-opting drag culture and rebranding it as an educational tool.
“I have absolutely no idea why you would want [drag queens] to influence your child. Would you want a stripper or porn star to influence your child?”
A friendly message to mothers who want their kids influenced by drag. #dragqueensarenotforkids #dragqueenstorybookhour #drag #moms #woke #Liberals pic.twitter.com/EmOovz4E3F
— Kitty Demure (@demure_kitty) January 19, 2020
Demure notes that just as you wouldn’t take your kids out to see porn stars or strippers read stories while in full dress and makeup, you shouldn’t take them to see drag. There’s an effort to introduce kids earlier and earlier to adult sexuality. The idea is that this will help kids be more open-minded and understanding about the difference. What it really does is normalize deviant adult behaviour in children’s minds and override their own instincts. Giving children access to sexual content makes them think this kind of thing is for them, it opens doors that should stay closed until a child is of age.
Demure says here what all of us know: drag culture is adult entertainment. The look is sexualized. The names are sexualized. In fact, the entire concept of drag is a send-up of beauty queen culture. Beauty queen culture is sexualized as well, and while that is sometimes subsumed beneath the surface, it’s obviously fully part of it. That’s what drag plays on. Drag can be lots of fun, but it’s grown-up fun, not for kids.
January 18, 2020
Tank Chats #59 Sherman Grizzly | The Tank Museum
The Tank Museum
Published 16 Nov 2018David Willey, Tank Museum Curator, presents a Tank Chat on the Sherman Grizzly.
This version of the Sherman was built in Canada from October 1943. After the fall of France, the Canadians began making their own vehicles, beginning with the Ram tank based on the M3 Lee chassis before moving on to a modified M4 Sherman. Only about 180 were produced.
This vehicle is currently on loan to the Heeresgeschichtliches Museum Wien.
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January 16, 2020
QotD: Progressive hatred
One reason for this, obviously, is that many people attracted to the Left are mentally unstable, so their politics are just a vehicle for their pathology. Many of the Antifa people, for example, have no coherent political thoughts. They just like being crazy on the streets and causing mayhem. This is the type of person who was attracted to the riots that used to follow the big economic summits. There was never any purpose to their rampages, other than the thrill of smashing things and causing mayhem.
Another more important reason for the rage is the nature of leftist politics in our post-national age. Being on the Left no longer means joining a group that has a tangible enemy, against whom the group throws themselves. The days of unionist, socialists and communists operating as collectives are gone. Even the post-modern movements like climate change and sexual politics is atomized. Much of it is backed by the sorts of people the Left used to oppose like rich people and business.
The Z Man, “It’s Personal”, The Z Blog, 2019-11-12.
January 12, 2020
The shoot-down of Flight 752
Colby Cosh discusses the destruction of Ukraine International 752 in the historical context of the Vincennes incident (later on Friday, the Iranian official position appears to have shifted to accepting responsibility for an accidental missile launch):
Some of the wreckage of Ukraine International flight 752 near Tehran, Iran.
Photo from MOJ Newsagency via Wikimedia Commons.
It has become fairly obvious, whatever the Iranian authorities may say now or later, that Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 was shot down after departing Tehran. This was, in truth, overwhelmingly probable the moment the news broke, but there was still widespread shock and disbelief on Thursday when several Western heads of government announced signal-intelligence evidence of a missile strike. There are still “How could such a thing happen?” reactions pouring forth — mostly from people who are old enough, in theory, to recall the USS Vincennes accidentally shooting down an Iran Air Airbus A300 in 1988.
I say “in theory,” but the truth is that popular memory of the Vincennes incident has been much diminished — outside Iran — by later events in the region. This must qualify as one of the good Lord’s most sadistic jests. The United States wasn’t officially at war with anyone in the region at the moment when its best-trained sailors, equipped with scorchingly new and uncannily powerful missile and battlespace-mapping technology, blew up a commercial airliner full of religious pilgrims.
The Navy was in the Gulf not to fight or oppose anybody in particular, but to protect neutral shipping from the Iran-Iraq War. Up to the time of the accident, it was Iraq that demonstrably presented the greater danger to American warships. Ronald Reagan was still president. The First Gulf War wouldn’t kick off until 1990.
In other words: we forgot. The memory of Vincennes was overwritten by a generation of Middle East conflict, like an old computer file.
Which leaves a paradox. Liberals who regard recent U.S. history as one enormous, indistinguishable mass of bloodthirsty actions don’t seem especially aware of one of the most horrifying tactical blunders in American military history. What’s one jet plane more or less in the black ledger of imperialism? Conservatives, meanwhile, are racing to accuse Iran of “murder” in the case of Flight 752.
Blunders can be worse than crimes, according to one of the most famous of all military maxims. But if one points out that Iran’s “murder” of innocents is starting to look like a nightmarish replay of Vincennes, one risks being accused of postulating “moral equivalence” between the United States and Iran.
