… there is a certain level of pride that attaches to being ignorant of those one considers his inferiors. After all, it’s the natural duty of the simple shopkeeper to know the names of the Great Lords, but it is not the duty of the Great Lords to know the names of the shopkeepers. In fact, it’s the Great Lords’ class obligation to go out of their way not to know the names of the shopkeepers, because this Duty to Know flows in one direction — upwards — and hence ignorance of one’s lessers tends to solidify and reify the assumptions of certain castes being superior to others. It makes certain that everyone understands who’s important, and who’s not.
(I know, I sound like a communist — I can’t help it. I have to agree with Dennis the Peasant — “I mean, class is what it’s all about.” I guess I would say I’m agreeing with the communist critique of the rigid reification of class structures, but I happen to think the communists and their pink fellow travelers have largely captured the upper classes. I guess by my theory they’re so good at this because they’ve spent so long plotting vengeance for the exact same slights (which they largely imagined). In a similar way they’ve gotten quite good at blacklisting and guilt-by-association, eh?)
At any rate, it is your duty to know the values and customs of living of Piers Morgan, but due to his high station (ahem) he is proudly ignorant of yours. As is so often the case in our increasingly dysfunctional and nasty politics — in which certain parties refuse to even admit that their opponents are free citizens entitled to have beliefs at all — the Out-Classes are deemed all-but-officially Beneath Notice.
Michael Totten has written a crackerjack piece — or at least I think it is — about this principle in action among our foreign policy sages, the internationalist “elite.” He detects the exact same sort of phenomenon going on when the International “elite” visit foreign nations — because anyone who doesn’t share 90% of their cultural values (and the wealth that permits/encourages these values — the International Elite is not middle-class!) is beneath notice and not worth knowing about, they don’t bother asking anyone but the 3% of the population which largely shares their beliefs and cultural inputs about their intentions and their political agenda.
Which means, in Egypt, they only ask the jet-setting wealthy Westernized elite about the prognosis for Egyptian democracy. And in Lebanon, they only ask the educated, urbane population of Beirut about their desires for the country.
And they ignore all the “Dirty People,” the low people who aren’t worth networking with and probably wouldn’t be any fun to have a sexual affair with. Unfortunately — and this has huge consequences for American foreign policy — it turns out those Dirty Poor People greatly, greatly outnumber the small coteries of educated elites that cluster in every capital country.
And so our “elites” — and honestly, we need to start looking for a more accurate discriptor — come back with completely-wrong information about foreign countries.
Why, as Totten says (changing the words a bit), “All of these Egyptians are swell, educated, moderate, sexually-loose cosmopolitans! Why, democracy has a smashing chance of working out here!”
Yeah, not so much. Not so much.
Ace, “The Unburstable Bubble of Willful Ignorance of the International Self-Purported Elites”, Ace of Spades H.Q., 2013-01-09.
April 20, 2019
QotD: They used to be called the Jet Set, but now they’re the Transnational Elite
April 19, 2019
QotD: The revolution will be YouTubed, which might snuff it out before it gets underway
I think that a number of factors will ultimately tamp it down [campus protests/riots]. The ability of people to record videos of police has been a tremendous spur to calls for reform. But police are not the only people who can be filmed in public; so can protesters. I suspect that as people discover what can happen when future employers google up videos of you shouting “[expletive deleted] the police” or screaming at professors and speakers, the costs of this sort of protest will rise, and there will be less of it. Moreover, I suspect that both alumni and state funding for schools where this sort of thing happens a lot will often decline, putting pressure on administrators to curb it.
Megan McArdle, “Ask Me Anything”, Reddit, 2017-04-10.
April 18, 2019
QotD: Roadblocks to deregulating the US healthcare market
One problem America has is simply that our government administration isn’t very good. That’s not true across the board — our government statistics are, IMHO, the finest in the world. But there’s stuff that other countries can do that we can’t, either because our government is more decentralized, or because our civil service just isn’t as prestigious (and therefore as full of competent, motivated people) as those in other countries. And our regulatory approach — rules rather than principles based, and highly adversarial — is also suboptimal, and hard to change.
Given how much the government now interferes in health care, that’s a big problem. Given our lack of administrative competency, our first step should be pulling back where we can — trying to push more ordinary expenses onto consumers, for example, who can manage those the same way they manage their aspirin and antacid purchases now. And eliminating the tax deduction for employer sponsored health care would be major. But I fear, politically impossible.
Megan McArdle, “Ask Me Anything”, Reddit, 2017-04-10.
April 17, 2019
Lee Carbine: Gunmaking is not for the Faint of Heart
Forgotten Weapons
Published on 16 Apr 2019This rifle is lot #13868 at Morphy’s April 2019 auction:
https://www.forgottenweapons.com/lee-…James Paris Lee is known today as the inventor of the detachable box magazine, and the “Lee” in the “Lee Enfield” rifle system – a very significant contributor to firearms development. His first foray into the business of gun design and manufacture, however, was a rather ignominious failure.
Lee patented a single shot swinging barrel system in 1862, and hoped to win an Army contract for it. In February of 1864 he submitted a rifle version to the Army, and was promptly rejected – the Army was not interested in breechloading rifles. Lee came right back in April 1864 with a carbine pattern, and this was accepted for testing – the Army was indeed looking for breechloading cavalry carbines. It took a full year, but in April 1865 the Army came back and gave Lee a contract for 1,000 carbines at $18 each. Lee rounded up investors and capital, and created the Lee Fire Arms Company in Milwaukee to produce the guns. His first two samples were delivered in January 1866 – in .42 rimfire caliber.
At this point, there is some disagreement. Lee claims that his sample guns in .42 caliber were accepted, and thus his followup delivery of .42 caliber carbines should have been accepted. The government said that the contract specified .44 rimfire caliber, and his delivery of .42 caliber guns was unacceptable, and thus rejected. A court case would ensue, but with the rejection of the first 250 guns and the cancellation of their contract, the company had to look hard and fast for a backup plan. In March 1867 newspaper ads were placed in Milwaukee for sporting rifles and carbines from the Lee company. The parts planned for military production were used instead for civilian guns in a variety of configurations – carbines, light rifles, and heavy rifles in several barrel lengths and several calibers. By 1868 all production had ceased, and the Lee Fire Arms Company dissolved.
James Lee returned to his former profession of watchmaking, but this experience with gun manufacturing would not keep him deterred for long. By 1872 he was back working with Remington, and would go on the produce the designs that we know him for today. The lessons of this rifle? Firearms manufacturing is a risky business, not for the faint of heart. And also, sometimes you can learn from a difficult experience to do better the second time.
http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
Cool Forgotten Weapons merch! http://shop.bbtv.com/collections/forg…
Contact:
Forgotten Weapons
PO Box 87647
Tucson, AZ 85754
April 14, 2019
Model 1927 Thompson Semi Automatic Carbine
Forgotten Weapons
Published on 13 Mar 2019Note: Rock Island has not yet posted the catalog for this auction – I will replace this note with a link when they do.
http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
Cool Forgotten Weapons merch! http://shop.bbtv.com/collections/forg…
One of the rarest versions of the Thompsons Submachine Gun is the Model of 1927 Thompson Semi Automatic Carbine. These were regular 1921 machine guns that had their fire control groups slightly modified to only firm in semiauto and their receivers remarks to show Model 1927 instead of 1921. The rationale was a number of requests Auto Ordnance received from potential customers who wanted the look of a Thompson, but not an actual machine gun – mostly police and prison agencies that did not want to entrust their officers will fully automatic arms. Only about 100-150 1927 model guns were sold (and there is no specific serial range, they were simple converted one at a time as ordered). Of that very small number, only a very small percentage survive intact today, as most were converted back to fully automatic by later owners. Note that because the receiver is basically identical to a standard Thompson SMG receiver, these are considered machine guns under US law despite being factory semiauto carbines. However, this does mean that they can be legally converted to fully automatic (as, in fact, most have been).
Contact:
Forgotten Weapons
PO Box 87647
Tucson, AZ 85754
April 13, 2019
QotD: School vouchers
I am still a supporter of school vouchers. I don’t think they’ve lived up to the hopes that I (and a bunch of other folks) had for them. But that said, the best opponents can say is that they don’t do all that much better than the public schools on academic measures. Parents like them, kids like them, and they cost less. I just don’t see a good argument against them.
I think it’s telling that of the folks I know who oppose vouchers, not one of them has voluntarily kept their kids in a failing urban school. When they move, they choose a house in a good school district. I don’t see how you can morally do that and then tell some other, poorer parent that they need to lean into the strike zone and take one for the team.
That said, maybe there’s an argument for restricting them to kids in failing schools, or below a certain income. I don’t see any need for the government to subsidize Exeter. But for the kids who are trapped, I think they should get the same chance middle class kids do, even if it’s not the panacea we once hoped.
Megan McArdle, “Ask Me Anything”, Reddit, 2017-04-10.
April 10, 2019
M37: The Ultimate Improved Browning 1919
Forgotten Weapons
Published on 8 Mar 2019http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
Cool Forgotten Weapons merch! http://shop.bbtv.com/collections/forg…
In November of 1950, the US Ordnance Department requested an improved version of the Browning 1919 air cooled machine gun for use in tanks. The new version was to be able to feed from either the left or right, a feature which was unimportant for an infantry gun but much more relevant when mounting guns into the tight spaces of an armored vehicle. An interim conversion of existing guns to the M1919A4E1 pattern came first, followed by manufacture of all-new guns by the Rock Island Arsenal and Saco-Lowell company from 1955 until 1957.
The design of the gun fell to Bob Hillberg at High Standard. He came up with a clever set of reversible plugs to change the bolt between left and right hand feed, as well as a captive recoil spring, manual safety, improved top cover and rear cover latches, and several other strengthened parts. He also incorporated a charging handle extension with integral manual hold open and a link ejection chute that could be mounted to either side of the gun. His T153 design was formally adopted as the M37, in caliber .30-06. A 7.62mm NATO version (the M37E1) followed as well. The M37 would serve into the late 1960s on the M48 and M60 tanks as well as several helicopters.
Contact:
Forgotten Weapons
PO Box 87647
Tucson, AZ 85754
April 9, 2019
QotD: It won’t be easy to bring back politicians’ willingness to compromise
I think the donors are a problem for both parties, in terms of driving choices that aren’t necessarily the best strategies for building the base. (Both parties completely missed the populist backlash on trade, for example. Now, as a free trader, I like the resulting policy. But they paid for it at the polls.) But the issue isn’t fundamentally the donors. The issue is that fundamentally, both sides hate each other, and both sides have an increasing “It is not enough that I win. My enemies must lose” mentality about politics. Combine that with various reforms that have empowered extremists — campaign finance reforms that empowered outside groups, yes, but also the shift to primaries from conventions, and the abolition of the earmarks and pork that used to grease legislative passage. Throw in the “Great Sort” into increasingly politically homogenous communities — those are the problems you need to fix if you want to bring back legislative compromise. And damned if I know how we get there, because you can’t tell people where to live, and anyone who suggested getting rid of primary elections and bringing back pork barrel politics would come off as a backroom sleaze.
Megan McArdle, “Ask Me Anything”, Reddit, 2017-04-10.
April 8, 2019
Why Don’t Trains Have Cabooses Anymore?
Today I Found Out
Published on 7 Sep 2016Never run out of things to say at the water cooler with TodayIFoundOut! Brand new videos 7 days a week!
In this video:
Carrying a brakeman and a flagman back when brakes were set by hand, when it was time to slow the train, the engineer would blow the whistle. This signaled to the brakemen, and one would emerge from the caboose and work his way toward the engine, while another would leave the engine and work his way back toward the caboose. At each car, the brakemen would stop and turn its brakewheel with a club. Once the train stopped, the flagman would leave the caboose with a flag, lantern or other visual display and walk back down the track to warn any approaching trains.
Want the text version?: http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.p…
QotD: Why does US healthcare cost so much?
This is a hotly debated question in health care policy. Here’s my rough stab at it: the 1970s inflation interacted particularly badly with two pre-existing policy choices: the tax deduction for employer-sponsored health insurance, and Medicare.
Start with employer-sponsored health insurance, which is, as everyone knows, tax advantaged relative to salary, because your employer can deduct it as an expense, but you don’t have to show it as income on your taxes.
This was an incredibly dumb decision, but in the defense of the folks who made it in the 1940s, at the time, health insurance wasn’t very expensive, because the health care system couldn’t do all that much (and the female labor that ran hospitals was cheap due to discrimination, or in the case of nuns, basically free).
Come the 1970s, inflation started causing a problem called “bracket creep”. Back then tax brackets weren’t indexed for inflation, so as inflation went up, folks got pushed into higher and higher tax brackets, even though the buying power of their salary had stayed the same, or [had] gone down. This was great for the government (and is a big reason our deficits were not disastrous in the 1970s), but it was terrible for people, and led to the tax revolts that helped put Reagan in office.
But I digress. The point is that bracket creep made non-taxed benefits much more attractive relative to salary, so insurance started getting more generous. That process has continued for decades. Insurance used to be “major medical” that covered big ticket items like hospital stays. Now we expect it to cover the cost of going to the doctor for the sniffles. Well, if you insulate people from those costs, they will incur more of them.
Effectively, this raises demand for health care services. But the US system, decentralized and litigation-happy, is very bad at controlling the supply side. End result: high costs.
The other thing that happened is Medicare. The original legislation called for reimbursing services at “reasonable and customary rates”. This was a gold mine for doctors and hospitals. In New York, for example, doctors used to be forced to do charity care as the price of their admitting privileges at prestigious city hospitals. Once Medicare came into the picture, there was no need for that! Or to economize on beds; you could always find someone to fill them. Eventually, Medicare tried to crack down (http://reason.com/archives/2011/12/13/medicare-whac-a-mole), but by then, it was damned hard to cut physician and hospital incomes, in part because they had made decisions based on their — like building new hospitals with all private rooms — that couldn’t be undone. Our cost base is permanently higher, and politically, we have shown no will to slash provider incomes. So even though our growth rate is about average for the OECD, we’re growing from a much higher level.
Megan McArdle, “Ask Me Anything”, Reddit, 2017-04-10.
April 7, 2019
Rubin “Hurricane” Carter and the murders at the Lafayette Bar and Grill in Paterson, New Jersey
I was too young to know anything about Rubin “Hurricane” Carter except what I “learned” from listening to Bob Dylan’s “Hurricane” long after the events. In Quillette, Lona Manning recounts the story, which doesn’t agree with Dylan’s interpretation (but Dylan was far from the only journalist or celebrity to be fooled):
How many people who followed the BBC Radio 4 podcast series about Rubin “Hurricane” Carter were startled — or even outraged — when Carter was not triumphantly vindicated in the final episode?
In the small hours of June 17, 1966, two black men walked into a late-night Bar and Grill in Paterson, New Jersey and opened fire on the occupants. They left bartender James Oliver and patron Fred Nauyoks dead at the scene and mortally wounded a woman named Hazel Tanis, who would succumb to her injuries a month later. Another customer named Willie Marins lost an eye in the shooting but survived. Neighbors Patty Valentine and Ronald Ruggiero told police that they had seen two black males flee the scene in a white vehicle. This testimony was corroborated by petty thief Alfred Bello who walked past the dead and the dying to empty the cash register after the shooters had fled.
Half an hour later, Paterson police stopped middleweight boxer Rubin Carter and his companion John Artis in a car bearing out-of-state plates that matched the eyewitnesses’ description. A search of the car yielded a .32 and a 12 gauge shotgun, the weapons police later determined had been used in the shooting. Carter and Artis were eventually indicted by a grand jury and convicted of the Lafayette murders in 1967. Carter vehemently protested his innocence and his case became a cause célèbre after his 1975 autobiography found its way into the hands of Bob Dylan. Carter was retried in 1976, after the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that the first conviction had been unsafe. Despite support from Dylan, Muhammad Ali and the New York Times, the two were convicted again. John Artis was paroled in 1981, and Carter was finally released in 1985 after the second conviction was overturned and prosecutors declined to try him a third time.
Sports reporters Joel Hammer and Steve Crossman spent 18 months researching and reinvestigating the case and promised listeners of the BBC’s podcast that they would provide the “full” and “true” story. Their in-depth look at the crime provides far more detail about the murders than can be gleaned from Bob Dylan’s 1975 protest song or the hagiographic 1999 Norman Jewison film starring Denzel Washington. Dylan accused the prosecution team of framing Carter for the slayings and called them “criminals in their coats and their ties” who were “free to drink martinis and watch the sun rise.” Crossman and Hammer are likewise very critical of the prosecution; for example, they think that Alfred Bello should never have been allowed to testify. How could the life of such a man, be in the palm of some fool’s hand? And they argue that the prosecution ignored — or perhaps even suppressed — an investigation into a very plausible suspect, Eddie Rawls (who is now deceased). But they stop short of calling it a frame-up and an attempt at judicial murder.
On the other hand, Crossman and Hammer think the “racial revenge motive” was a reasonable one. The very first newspaper accounts of the slaughter at the Lafayette Grill included the speculation that the murders were committed in revenge for the slaying, earlier that night, of black bartender Roy Holloway and this would also be the prosecution’s contention. That Crossman and Hammer now accept the plausibility of this theory is a significant concession to the prosecution’s version of events, not least because it was Judge Lee Sarokin’s rejection of this motive which led him to overturn the second conviction—the prosecution’s case, he ruled, had been based on “racism rather than reason.”
Coincidentally, on the front page of the East Bergen Record, under the murder story, there was a wire service article about Stokely Carmichael proclaiming “Black Power” at a rally in Mississippi, an event which marked the transition from the peaceful civil rights tactics of Dr. Martin Luther King to the radical activism of the Black Panthers. These two articles encapsulated all the elements of the Lafayette Grill case that continue to be debated over 50 years later. Why did someone walk into a working-class bar and slaughter the occupants? Was the black community in Paterson in a ferment that night because a white man blew off Holloway’s head with a shotgun? And what, if anything, did this have to do with the state of race relations in America at the time?
April 6, 2019
Springfield Arms Double Trigger Navy Revolver
Forgotten Weapons
Published on 6 Mar 2019http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
Cool Forgotten Weapons merch! http://shop.bbtv.com/collections/forg…
The Springfield Arms Company existed only for a brief period in 1850 and 1851, making revolvers designed by its chief engineer, James Warner, before being driven out of business by Colt patent lawyers. During that time, Springfield (no relation to the arsenal) made a variety of models in .28, .31, and .36 caliber and with a variety of barrel lengths and other features (including a well-designed safety notch to allow the guns to be carried fully loaded safely). In an attempt to avoid patent infringement, Warner separated the cylinder rotation and firing mechanisms into two different triggers on some models, including this Navy pattern example. The front trigger would rotate and lock the cylinder, and then it would trip the rear trigger which released the sear and fired the gun. This was not sufficient to save him from copyright infringement suits, though, and only about 125 of the double-trigger Navy revolvers were made.
Contact:
Forgotten Weapons
PO Box 87647
Tucson, AZ 85754
April 4, 2019
Ingram M10 & M11 SMGs: The Originals from Powder Springs
Forgotten Weapons
Published on 3 Apr 2019These SMGs are lots 1069 (M10/45), 1070 (M10/9), and 1067 (M11) at Morphy’s April 2019 auction:
https://www.forgottenweapons.com/ingr…After the commercial failure of Gordon Ingram’s M6 submachine gun in the early 50s, he would radically change the layout of his designs. Instead of a Thompson-lookalike Ingram’s M10 (the M7, M8, and M9 doing experimental prototypes only) would be a boxy and compact affair with a Czech-style telescoping bolt. It found little interest until a meeting between Gordon Ingram and Mitch WerBell resulted in WerBell demonstrating it to excited military audiences in Vietnam in 1969.
WerBell was an ex-OSS man who had started a company called Sionics, selling suppressors to the US military. He thought the combination of Ingram’s submachine gun and his suppressor would be a fantastic package, and he found plenty of interest among special operations personnel in Vietnam. He would create the Military Armament Corporation based at his farm in Powder Springs, GA and entice Ingram to join as his chief engineer. The result would be the .45ACP M10, a 9mm version of the M10 (made for use with subsonic 9mm ammunition), and a scaled-down .380 ACP M11 submachine gun.
MAC would have a short life, with all its assets sold at a bankruptcy auction in April 1976 – but it had plenty of time to create what would become an iconic gun – the Big MAC. Many imitations and copies would follow, but Powder Springs was the home of true original Ingram M10 and M11 submachine guns!
http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
Cool Forgotten Weapons merch! http://shop.bbtv.com/collections/forg…
Contact:
Forgotten Weapons
PO Box 87647
Tucson, AZ 85754
QotD: Anti-masculinity
One of the many harms inflicted on us by the hive minded lunatics running our society is the binary world view. Everything is either all good or all bad. As such, everyone must either fully embrace something or completely reject something. Indifference, ambivalence and moderation are not permissible in a world run by zealous fanatics. The only things that matter, that can matter, are those things that require a moral position. Everything else falls outside the set of things that exist, at least to the hive minded.
The most obvious example is homosexuality. Like all normal men, I am mildly intolerant of homosexuals. I get that they cannot help themselves and I get that it is “natural” in the same way schizophrenia is natural. I’m fine with them doing what they must, just as long as they do it in private. Of course, that makes me a monster. In the hive, you must either fully embrace homosexuality and what comes with it, or you are a homophobe and not fit for decent company. There’s no room for indifference or mild intolerance.
Hive mindedness is much more of a female attribute, than a masculine one. That’s not to imply that all women are howling at the moon zealots. It’s just that the fairer sex is much more inclined to deal in absolutes. The reason is that men have ways to arbitrate disputes that do not require a transcendent set of rules. One chimp squares off with the other chimp and the winner is the one who was right about where to find the best bananas. Women don’t have that so they look for a set of rules to figure out winners and losers.
It’s why it was no accident, that as soon as the girls got the vote, and the boys were off fighting the Kaiser, the girls banned alcohol and prostitution. To quote Judge Roy Bean, “Drinking and gambling and whoring were declared unlawful. All those things which come natural to men became crimes.” Morality, at least in the modern age, is the set of rules the girls use to control the boys, which is why the prim-faced moralizers of today are running around trying to stamp out anything that smacks of masculinity.
“The Z Man”, “Pouf-berries”, The Z Blog, 2017-04-08.
