The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 24 Mar 2026The UN forces begin a huge operation to move the US 1st Marine Division to new defensive positions far to the west of the former ones, but this involves moving some 200,000 men back and forth along the lines. Behind the lines, the ROK continues building up force trying to turn itself into a well equipped and trained modern army, and above the lines the tech war marches on as the UN premieres a new night fighter.
00:55 Recap
01:40 The ROK Economy
06:40 Operation Mixmaster
07:39 Rotation Settled
10:31 Ridgway’s Recommendations
14:01 Overt or Covert POW Screening
15:54 Notes
16:22 Summary
16:34 Conclusion
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March 25, 2026
The Korean War Week 92: Operation Mixmaster! – March 24, 1952
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Apache Arms Carbine: A Saga of Compliance and Crappy Manufacture
Forgotten Weapons
Published 3 Nov 2025The Apache Arms carbine was a Thompson SMG lookalike that was made in small numbers in the late 1960s. It was the successor to the Spitfire carbine made by the same people, after the Spitfire was deemed a machine gun by the IRS. The Apache used M3 Grease Gun magazines and was chambered for .45 ACP. It uses a square receiver tube and many of the same cast parts as the Spitfire. It is a very interesting look at how the design was adapted to be legally considered semiautomatic.
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March 24, 2026
More political and philosophical illusions, left and right
Tom Kratman continues his discussion of the illusions that distort how people on the left and people on the right view reality:
There is an illusion – yes, on both sides – of guilt by association. This is related to, but not exactly the same as, the illusion of indistinguishability. How many nail-bomb-building moral sons of Bill Ayers are over on the modern American left? Can’t be too many, I think, based on the serious dearth of Earth-shattering kabooms we hear, or rather don’t hear, lately. How many hair-shirted and sandwich board clad – with said boards reading, “Repent! The end is near!” – folks are there on the religious right? Based on how the typical Christian lives, and those being by no means a particularly bad set of men and women, there aren’t all that many. How many Christians do you really think, given a button that would make the Westboro Baptist Church and all its members go poof, wouldn’t push that button twice, the first time slowly, for the emotional satisfaction (well, that and to savor the screaming1), and the second time, quickly, to make sure. How many leftists and liberals are dead set against gun control? More than a few.
Then there’s the illusion brought on by willful blindness. For example, “No enemies to the left!” said Alexander Kerenski, Prime Minister of Russia, in 1917. Pity Kerenski wasn’t able to see that the people to his left were largely intellectual idiots and dogmatic homicidal maniacs, and that there may have been people to his right who were considerably more reasonable and sane. He said that not too long before being tossed out on his ear by the Bolsheviks, who, interestingly enough, were to his left.
You don’t see as much of this – the notion that there are no enemies to the right – on the conservative side, by the way, though there is some. Still, the next time I see an actual conservative lining up with the American National Socialist Party,2 the KKK, or Stormfront will be the first.
Part of the problem here, I think, is that we take something – civilization, actually – so much for granted that we forget how hard it is to build or to hold onto, and so forget that we have something important in common with our more moderate political opponents. Thus, taking it for granted, we forget that common ground, see the opposition, and so line up with those more extreme sorts for whom civilization is probably just a burden they’d as soon be done with.
- Okay, maybe some would just push it the once.
- Which seems to have many trivial manifestations. You can find your own links, but why bother?
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March 22, 2026
Four million books published in North America during 2024
In the latest SHuSH newsletter, Ken Whyte considers the size of the North American book market at most recent count:
Random photo of books stacked in my office about 15 years ago.
I’m often asked by writers about the prospects of a particular book. I try to be encouraging. If it’s a good book, there’s undoubtedly an audience for it. At the same time, I try to be realistic. It’s a crowded market and it’s often difficult even for a good book to find its audience.
If asked to explain just how crowded the market for books is today, I usually say something like, there are about two million books published in North America every year. I’m not sure where I got that figure from. Probably from some research I read five years ago.
Turns out it’s wrong. “The total number of books published in the US in 2025 with ISBN numbers jumped 32.5% over 2024 to more than four million books,” announced Publishers Weekly on March 17.
I can’t get over that number. Four million books.
An average reader might get through about 2,000 books in a lifetime. A long-lived super-reader churning through 70 or 80 a year may exceed 5,000. Gladstone’s reading logs suggest that he engaged with more than 20,000 books, but it’s not clear he read them all.
A large independent bookstore might carry between 10,000 and 30,000 books. A suburban chain store, 60,000 to 120,000. The Barnes & flagship at Union Square in Manhattan has hundreds of thousands of books on four massive floors. Powell’s City of Books in Portland, occupying an entire city block—you need a map to get from room to room—has at least a half million books, and by some counts a million. New York’s The Strand, which boasts 18 miles of books, new and used, is probably the world’s biggest bricks-and-mortar retailer: it has 2.5 million books on incredibly dense shelving. You’d need a Powell’s, a Strand, and a couple of B&N Union Squares to hold four million titles.
Four million books is equivalent in volume to the holdings of a good-sized university library system, or a large public library system—collections built over a century. And these are published in a single year.
In 1939, the year Margaret Atwood was born, The Library of Congress, widely recognized as the largest library in the world, home to a civilization’s worth of books, boasted about six million titles, including pamphlets. It’s now holding about 25 million, and the US alone is on pace to produce that many titles between now and the end of the decade.
Four million books. That’s 11,000 books a day. Four hundred and fifty books an hour.
A year ago, there were “only” 3.15 million books, traditional and self-published, released. So 2025 represents an increase of 32.5 percent. Self-publishing was up just under 39 percent. Traditional publishing about 6.6 percent. Publishers Weekly doesn’t offer much of an explanation for the explosion of new titles. AI has to be a major factor (see this week’s publishing sensation in The New York Times.)
Of course, most of the four million books are not worth your time. Only 642,242 of the titles were released by traditional publishers. A traditional publisher doesn’t guarantee quality, but it suggests a minimum of vetting. The search for merit among self-published books is easily frustrated.
Bowker, the service that counts the ISBNs (the unique thirteen-digit identifiers attached to each book), does not distinguish among formats. Many of the four million were published only as ebooks. And some books published as print, ebook, and audiobook are triple-counted. There may only be about 2.5 million distinct works in that total.
If one were to take the colouring books, planners, puzzle books, and AI-generated garbage out of the equation, we might be down to 1.5 million meaningfully distinct books. And of all those, maybe 1 to 3 percent, or 20,000 to 50,000, will sell over 1,000 copies. That puts some perspective on the four million.
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“In 1800, most people worked the land. By 1900, most didn’t. … That’s a psychological earthquake”
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, L. Wayne Mathison points out just how vast the disruption of normal, traditional lives over less than a century has torn most of us from our historical moorings:
Image generated with AI
The Great Collision: When Reality Stopped Making Sense
For most of human history, life wasn’t confusing. It was hard, yes. Brutal, often. But simple.
You were born into a pattern. You followed it. You died in it.
Then the 20th century showed up like a wrecking ball.
What people call “progress” was really a mass psychological dislocation. We didn’t just move from farms to cities. We lost the structure that told us who we were.
We solved survival. Then immediately created a meaning crisis.
That’s the trade nobody advertises.
1. The Shock: When Life Broke Its Own Pattern
People think industrialization was about better tools. It wasn’t. It was about ripping people out of identity.
In 1800, most people worked the land. By 1900, most didn’t. That’s not a statistic. That’s a psychological earthquake.
Tradition vanished faster than people could adapt. So the state stepped in and did what states always do. Standardize. Educate. Normalize.
Mass schooling didn’t just teach reading. It replaced lost culture with manufactured culture.
Useful? Yes.
Neutral? Not even close.
You don’t remove a thousand-year identity system and expect people to just “figure it out”.
They don’t. They drift.
2. The Lie We Tell Ourselves: “People Want the Truth”
No, they don’t. They want to feel right.
Semmelweis proved it. Doctors were killing women by not washing their hands. When he showed them, they didn’t thank him. They rejected him. Destroyed him.
Why?
Because truth wasn’t the problem. Identity was.
If the facts say “you’re causing harm”, and your identity says “I’m a healer”, most people will reject the facts. Not update the identity.
That’s the Is vs Ought gap in plain terms:
The world is what it is
You believe what should be
When they collide, you protect the beliefNot truth. Belief.
That’s not stupidity. That’s self-preservation.
3. The Split: Are You a Person or a Machine?
Here’s the quiet tension nobody resolves.
You experience yourself as a decision-maker. You choose. You judge. You act.
But science describes you as chemistry and electrical signals.
Both are true. And they don’t fit together cleanly.
The old world said: you are a moral agent.
The modern world says: you are a biological system.
So which one is responsible when something goes wrong?
If you lean too far into “machine”, responsibility disappears.
If you lean too far into “agent”, you ignore constraints.
Most people bounce between the two depending on what excuses them fastest.
4. The Dangerous Shortcut: Let Someone Else Decide
Freedom sounds nice until it demands something from you.
Dostoevsky nailed this. People don’t just want freedom. They want relief from it.
So they trade it. Quietly.
Security, comfort, certainty. Those become the new gods.
And then comes the predictable move. Someone steps in and says:
“I’ll decide what’s good for everyone.”
History has a word for those people. It’s not flattering.
Once you remove any higher standard, the only thing left is preference backed by power.
That’s when things get ugly fast.
5. When “Good Intentions” Go Off the Rails
This is where it usually collapses.
When there’s no fixed standard, people start building their own. Then enforcing it.
George Bernard Shaw is a perfect example. Smart. Influential. Completely untethered.
Once you decide some people are “in the way”, the logic gets dark very quickly.
Not because people are monsters.
Because they think they’re right.
That’s always the justification.
Final Reframe: You Don’t Get Meaning for Free
Here’s the uncomfortable truth.
The old systems that gave people meaning are gone or weakened. They’re not coming back in their original form.
So now you’re left with a choice most people avoid:
Drift and absorb whatever narrative is loudest
Or build your own framework and take responsibility for itThere is no neutral ground.
You’re either shaping your values, or inheriting someone else’s without noticing.
Most people think they’re thinking.
They’re not. They’re echoing.
Simple Stoic Move
Strip it down.
Ask one question:
“What do I actually control here?”
Then act there. Only there.
Everything else is noise.
And right now, there’s a lot of noise.
[NR] – minor formatting added.
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The Original AR-15: Serial Number 6 in Original Configuration
Forgotten Weapons
Published 1 Nov 2025The very first AR15 rifles submitted to US government trials were extremely lightweight, with an assortment of interesting features that did not last long. They had top-mounted charging handles, one-piece hand guards, very thin barrels with plain muzzles, and a different safety selector configuration than became normal later one. Updates and modifications were made to virtually all of the original rifles, but today we have a chance to look at serial number 6 in the Springfield Armory collection — which is still in completely original configuration.
Thanks to the Springfield Armory National Historic Site for giving me access to this truly unique specimen from their reference collection to film for you! Don’t miss the chance to visit the museum there if you have a day free in Springfield, Massachusetts: https://www.nps.gov/spar/index.htm
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March 21, 2026
Colt LE-901 Modular Multi-Caliber AR: A Well-Designed Failure
Forgotten Weapons
Published 29 Oct 2025Colt originally developed the 901 as part of the US Army SCAR program, with the intention being to create a 7.62x51mm rifle that could also use unmodified 5.56x45mm upper assemblies. This would allow special operations units to customize a single weapon to a variety of different configurations for different mission profiles. Mechanically, the system Colt devised to do this was quite clever, and very effective. However, the rifle ultimately failed to win a military contract.
Moved to civilian sales, the system was unsuccessful fundamentally because the modular concept is just not very desirable. A single modular rifle like this inevitably sacrifices some capability in every specific configuration in exchange for the modular capability and most people would rather have two dedicated rifles in different configurations than one swappable one. It sounds appealing on paper, but almost always fails economically in practice.
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QotD: Rejectionism
… you can, and should, do this little “What is it in itself?” exercise for everything. What is Amazon in itself? Speed. Information velocity. Consumerism. I noticed a funny thing when I moved from the bigger city to a smaller town on the outskirts: All of a sudden I had a lot more money in the bank at the end of the month. I pulled my statements, and found out that I wasn’t spending nearly as much on impulse buys. I had to plan shopping trips to the grocery store, so not only did I save money, I ate better — in the old days, when I was hungry, I’d swing by the drive thru, because it was right there. Or I’d zip down to the store to grab a few things to cook, which ended up grabbing a bunch of other things, because it was right there.
Amazon works the same way. If you have to plan your trips to the grocery store, you have to ask yourself: Do I really need this? There are many fewer chances for impulse buys. When the store’s right there, you just run down and satisfy whatever momentary craving you happen to have. Same with Amazon — if you had to make a special store to get that piece of Chinese junk, you wouldn’t. But Amazon is right there, on the phone …
Haste. Impulsiveness. The instant, unexamined gratification of each and every urge. Those are the things the Left encourages. That’s what all that stuff is fundamentally for — Amazon, Twitter, smartphones, the whole deal.
That, therefore, is what we must reject. Call it “Rejectionism” if you want to make it into a sales pitch (or something better; I suck at titles). The Left’s “morality” is to treat everything — health, beauty, pleasure, the Economy, politics, people — as means to one and only one end: The instant, unthinking gratification of each and every momentary impulse.
We reject it. We reject the Internet. It’s a tool, nothing more, and remember what they say about hammers: When a hammer’s all you’ve got, everything looks like a nail. Reject it. Reject it all, for your soul’s sake.
Severian, “Rejectionism”, Founding Questions, 2022-05-24.
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March 20, 2026
When pursuit of knowledge shifts to sharing of feelings instead
Institutes of higher learning were once places where academic careers involved research, analysis, and logical pursuits to advance human knowledge (in theory, at least, and mostly in practice). Today’s groves of academe are apparently much more about “the feels” than the facts:
An expected and obvious consequence of the Great Effeminization of the Academy is that a great deal of academic output is now about the feelings of academics.
From the peer-reviewed paper “What’s Racial About Matter? A Conversation on Race and ‘New’ Materialism Past, Present, and Future” in Catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience. (They mean matter in the same sense as a physicist, only they are much vaguer.) My emphasis:
What follows is an informal, at times undisciplined, conversation about Asian American racial matters between interlocutors who have been in generative dialogue for several years now. This roundtable is the constellation of many other discussions from conference panels to shared meals, reflecting the relational nature of our inquiry. We hope this roundtable can open entry points for those exploring intersections of feminist new materialisms, STS, and studies of race — from its genealogies to its animating new directions. How did we get here, and where do we go from here?
The text itself reads like it was produced by one of those postmodern text generators that were passed around as jokes in the late 1990s.
From the Abstract of “After Hybridity: The Biological Life of the Mixed Race Child” (same journal):
I argue that renderings of the mixed race child as a metaphor for assimilation and multicultural progress obscure how racial science continues to shape the very definition of mixed raceness. Instead, I frame the mixed race Asian American child as hybrid matter to explore the slippages between their figuration and other abnormally reproduced objects: the genetically modified food organism and cancer.
From the Abstract of “Racial Atmospherics: Greenhouses, Terrariums, and Empire’s Pneumatics” (same journal):
What happens when we understand air as racial matter? This paper takes up this question by tracking the political, architectural, and artistic genealogies of Cold War phytotrons, or computer-controlled climatic laboratories.
From the Abstract of “Disrupting the Whitened Lemur: Reading Black Trans* Considerations in Feminist Primatology” (same journal):
In this article, I trace the evolution of female dominance studies in lemurs to explore how logics of cis-heterosexuality and whiteness are embedded in the study of the nonhuman … Following recent theories of trans* and the nonhuman, this essay argues that such critiques illustrate the trans* potential of the nonhuman, which was prefigured by decades of critique in feminist primatology. However, by engaging with recent Black trans scholarship, this essay suggests that such trans* critiques of the nonhuman have stopped short by ignoring the racialized nature of the dyad as a social unit. I thus propose a feminist science studies that attends to Black trans* theory to work against colonial taxonomies and the forced assimilation of the nonhuman world into rigid ontologies for material gain — or what I refer to as whitening processes.
The punchline is that not only are these all from the same journal, but they are all from the same issue of that organ. And that this is only one of many such diaries (the proper word) — funded largely by you via our great benevolent government.
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March 19, 2026
QotD: From the fall of the Soviets to the rise of the Wokerati
That protection ended when the Berlin Wall fell. In the same extraordinary moment, the collapse of Russian communism liberated revolutionary radicals across the Western world. The ghastly, failed Brezhnev state could not be hung round their necks like a putrid albatross any more. They were no longer considered as potential traitors simply because they were on the left. Eric Hobsbawm, and those like him, could at last join the establishment. Indeed, fortresses of the establishment such as the BBC now welcomed political as well as cultural leftists onto their upper decks.
Antonio Gramsci’s rethinking of the revolution — seize the university, the school, the TV station, the newspaper, the church, the theatre, rather than the barracks, the railway station and the post office — could at last get under way. At that moment, the long march of 1960s leftists through the institutions began to reach its objective, as they moved into the important jobs for the first time. And so one of the main protections of liberty and reason vanished, exactly when it was most needed.
The BBC’s simpering coverage of the Blair regime’s arrival in Downing Street, with its North-Korean-style fake crowd waving Union Jacks they despised, and new dawn atmosphere was not as ridiculous as it looked. May 1997 truly was a regime change. Illiberal utopians really were increasingly in charge, and the Cultural Revolution at last had political muscle.
Then came the new enemy, the shapeless ever-shifting menace of terrorism, against which almost any means were justified. To combat this, we willingly gave up Habeas Corpus and the real presumption of innocence, and allowed ourselves to be treated as if we were newly-convicted prisoners every time we passed through an airport.
Those who think the era of the face-mask will soon be over might like to recall that the irrational precautions of airport “security” (almost wholly futile once the simple precaution of refusing to open the door to the flight deck has been introduced) have not only remained in place since September 2001: they have been intensified. Yet, by and large, they are almost popular. Those who mutter against them, as I sometimes do, face stern lectures from our fellow-citizens implying that we are irresponsible and heedless.
Now a new fear, even more shapeless, invisible, perpetual (and hard to defeat — how can you ever eliminate a virus?) than al-Qaeda or Isis, has arrived in our midst. There is almost no bad action it cannot be used to excuse, including the strangling of an already shaky economy for which those eccentric or lucky enough to still be working will pay for decades. Millions have greeted this new peril as an excuse to abandon a liberty they did not really care much about anyway.
As a nation, we now produce more fear than we can consume locally, hiding in our homes as civil society evaporates. We queue up happily to hand in our freedom and to collect our muzzles and our digital IDs. And those of us who cry out, until we are hoarse, to say that this is a catastrophe, are met with shrugs from the chattering classes, and snarls of “just put on the frigging mask” from the mob. If I hadn’t despaired long ago, I would be despairing now.
Peter Hitchens, “Democracy muzzled”, The Critic, 2020-09-25.
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March 18, 2026
The Korean War Week 91: The South Korean Economy is Dying – March 17, 1952
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 17 Mar 2026There’s tension between allies as the ROK economy worsens and worsens, part of the problem being caused by all the South Korean currency printed to respond to the demand for it by the UN forces to buy “stuff”. Inflation is growing by leaps and bounds. However, at least some tension between enemies lessens, as one more point of the agenda at the Panmunjom Peace talks is settled.
00:55 Recap
01:40 The ROK Economy
06:40 Operation Mixmaster
07:39 Rotation Settled
10:31 Ridgway’s Recommendations
14:01 Overt or Covert POW Screening
15:54 Notes
16:22 Summary
16:34 Conclusionhttps://smithsonianassociates.org/tic…
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Virginia sees California’s tax schemes and says “hold my beer”
In The Freeman, Erik W. Matson pleads with the Virginian government not to “California our Commonwealth”, as the new governor keeps cribbing tax policies from Gavin Newsom’s playbook:
The state seal of Virginia. I am told that the motto Sic semper tyrannis does not actually stand for “Thus always to taxpayers”, all appearances to the contrary.
In 1966, fresh off four busy years of touring, the Beatles returned to the UK to discover they were on the brink of bankruptcy. Their earnings had placed them in the top tax bracket, putting them at the mercy of the Labour government’s 95% supertax. George Harrison, in response to this tyranny, penned the lyrics to what became the first track on their next album Revolver: “Taxman”.
Let me tell you how it will be
There’s one for you, nineteen for me
‘Cause I’m the taxmanHarrison’s words resonate across the pond today, especially for those living and working in the state of California. Consider the recent case of Sam Darnold, quarterback of the Seattle Seahawks. Darnold earned $178,000 for winning Super Bowl LX in February 2026, which was played in Santa Clara — and promptly found himself owing California $249,000, thanks to the state’s so-called “jock tax“. For almost three decades, the state has had the highest top marginal income tax rate in the US. Capital gains in California are treated — and taxed — as ordinary income, pushing many into higher tax brackets. At the state and local level, California features a garden variety of invasive taxes and surcharges to fund everything from tourism to mental health support initiatives. Add to this the recently proposed 2026 Billionaire Tax Act, which would impose a one-time 5% tax on the worldwide net worth of California residents worth more than $1 billion. The act would also amend the state constitution to remove the cap on taxes on intangible property (and likely cost the state $25 billion!).
California’s predatory tax regime, sadly, seems increasingly familiar to those of us living in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Thanks to the initiatives of the new governor Abigail Spanberger, Virginia is barreling down a trail of “California-ization.” In some sense, as Adam Johnston has recently discussed, our California-ization has been underway for over a decade, largely due to the influx of legal and illegal immigrants to the deep-blue suburbs in Northern Virginia. But it has entered a new and more aggressive phase under Spanberger, a former member of Congress’s Blue Dog Coalition who, two months in, is governing like anything but. Spanberger and her administration are openly attempting to gerrymander the Commonwealth’s congressional map in an effort to wipe out the state’s Republicans. They have also proposed an expansive set of truly California-esque taxes, subsidies, and regulations antithetical to liberty, prosperity, and “affordability.”
In January, City Journal‘s Judge Glock catalogued some of Spanberger’s initial ideas for governance, including her desire to subsidize housing for state employees and low-income residents and regulate the Commonwealth towards carbon neutrality. Unsurprisingly, the bulk of her ideas would, as Glock says, “drive up expenses for one group of consumers in order to benefit another group deemed more deserving”. If Spanberger’s officially announced agenda from November 2025 is any indication, the “more deserving” include smokers (taking a tactic straight from California’s playbook), solar farms, and scofflaw tenants (compare California’s 2019 Tenant Protection Act!).
Since the convening of the General Assembly, Virginia Democrats’ wildest dreams have metastasized into a concrete body of legislative proposals that promise at once to limit Virginians’ freedoms and nickel-and-dime us into oblivion. House Bill 978, for example, introduces new taxes on:
recreation, fitness, or sports facilities; nonmedical personal services or counseling; dry cleaning and laundry services; companion animal care; residential home repair or maintenance, landscaping, or cleaning services when paid for directly by a resident or homeowner; vehicle and engine repair; repairs or alterations to tangible personal property; storage of tangible personal property; delivery or shipping services; travel, event, and aesthetic planning services; and digital services.
Building on the architecture of the widely unpopular vehicle tax (which, despite what Spanberger proposed during her campaign, is likely here to stay), House Bill 557 proposes local personal property taxes on electric-powered lawn equipment — including mowers, trimmers, blowers, and chainsaws — used to maintain “commercial, public, or private gardens, lawns, trees, shrubs, or other plants”. These suggested taxes on electric-powered equipment complement a proposal in House Bill 881 encouraging the regulation and even outright banning of gas-powered leaf blowers — again following the lead of California.
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SPAS-12: Franchi’s Special Purpose Automatic Shotgun
Forgotten Weapons
Published 6 Nov 2024Franchi introduced the Special Purpose Automatic Shotgun (SPAS-12) for Italian military and police agencies in 1979 and it quickly became popular worldwide. Based originally on the gas-operated Franchi 500, that SPAS-12 was robust, reliable, and designed as a semiautomatic action with a backup pump action operation for use with underpowered ammunition (like beanbags or other less-lethal loads). In 1982 they began to be imported into the US through FIE, which was replaced by AAI as the importer in 1989. Eventually the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban ended SPAS-12 importation, and Franchi discontinued the model in 2000 in favor of the improved SPAS-15.
The SPAS-12 was almost always sold with a 21.5 inch barrel and 8-round magazine tube. It was available with either a solid sock or a top-folding type, complete with arm brace hook for shooting one-handed from a vehicle. In total, between 45,000 and 50,000 were made between 1979 and 2000, with the largest single purchaser being the Egyptian government (which took 18,000 of them).
Full video on the SPAS 15:
• SPAS-15: Franchi’s Improvement on the SPAS-12
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March 17, 2026
The mine threat in the Straits of Hormuz
CDR Salamander discusses the naval situation in Iranian coastal waters as the threat of mines in the busy seaway helps deter civilian tanker traffic even more than existing drone and missile threat:
At the end of last week, things were a’buzz’n about ‘ole silent-but-deadly … MINES!
There is a lot of bad and in some places intentionally misleading reporting from traditional media on down over this weekend, so let’s do a quick summary.
Iran has begun laying mines in the Strait of Hormuz, the Persian Gulf channel that carries 20 percent of the world’s oil, according to U.S. officials, an effort that could further complicate American efforts to restart shipping there.
While the U.S. military said it had destroyed larger Iranian naval vessels that could be used to quickly lay mines in the strait, Iran began using smaller boats for the operation on Thursday, according to a U.S. official briefed on the intelligence.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps can deploy hundreds, even thousands, of the small boats, which the Iranian force has long used to harass larger ships, including the U.S. Navy’s.
This quickly reminded everyone of a little event from the start of the year that had a memorable visual.
Via TWZ:
Four decommissioned U.S. Navy Avenger class mine countermeasures ships have left Bahrain on what may be their final voyage aboard a larger heavy lift vessel. Avengers had been forward-deployed to the Middle Eastern nation for years, where critical mine countermeasures duties have now passed to Independence class Littoral Combat Ships (LCS).
The public affairs office for U.S. Naval Forces Central Command (NAVCENT) and U.S. 5th Fleet first released pictures of the M/V Seaway Hawk, a contracted semi-submersible heavy lift vessel, carrying the former Avenger class ships USS Devastator, USS Dextrous, USS Gladiator, and USS Sentry last Friday. The Navy released more images and a brief statement yesterday. The date stamps on the pictures show the Avengers were physically loaded onto the Seaway Hawk in Bahrain on January 9.
This had a second echo of a seapower past.
Battered and unseaworthy, HMS Middleton was dragged by tugs into Portsmouth naval base on Sunday.
The Hunt class mine countermeasures vessel (MCMV) returned to the home of the Royal Navy on March 8 after being brought back from the Gulf by a heavy-lift ship.
The ignominious piggy-back was cheaper than letting the more than 40-year-old ship make the 6,200-mile journey back from Bahrain under her own power and freed her crew to join other ships.
But her return after a journey that took weeks meant the end of the Royal Navy’s anti-mine vessel presence in the Middle East after almost 50 years. Only unmanned drone systems are left, according to the Navy.
Another metaphor, etc.
However, there is a worry that Iran might mine the Strait of Hormuz because it has been a concern — and occasionally a reality — for almost half a century.
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Corned Beef and Cabbage Recipe | St. Patrick’s Meal | Food Wishes
Food Wishes
Published 13 Mar 2009Get the full story! Visit http://foodwishes.com to get the ingredients, and watch over 200 free video recipes. Leave me a comment there. If you have questions, ask on the website. Thanks!!
Full recipe here – https://www.allrecipes.com/Recipe/236601/Chef-Johns-Corned-Beef-and-Cabbage/
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