Quotulatiousness

January 18, 2012

Mother Jones puts on the rose-coloured glasses over SOPA

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:07

In an otherwise good summary of the SOPA/PIPA issues in Mother Jones, Siddhartha Mahanta and Nick Baumann start the touchdown celebration prematurely:

Late Thursday, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), the lead sponsor of the House bill, announced that he would consider dropping the DNS-blocking provisions from the bill. Late on Friday, Smith, SOPA’s sponsor, did Leahy one better, removing the provision altogether. Not long after, six Republican senators — including two co-sponsors — released a letter they wrote to Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), asking him to hold off on a January 24th vote to end debate on PIPA and move to passage.

By this weekend, the writing was on the wall. Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.), the House Majority Leader, announced that SOPA would not come for a vote in the House before the controversy over the bill is resolved — essentially killing it for the time being. The White House issued a statement opposing significant portions of the bills. And Issa cancelled the hearing planned for Wednesday, saying he’s “confident” the bill is dead in the House.

Big Hollywood isn’t entirely beaten yet. PIPA, the Senate legislation, could still get a vote and move closer to becoming law, and a modified version of SOPA could conceivably come to the House floor at some point in the future. Wikipedia, Reddit, MoveOn.org, Mozilla (the maker of the Firefox web browser), the blogging platform WordPress, and others are still planning to go dark on Wednesday, just in case. But as of right now, a combination of grassroots activism, blogging, tweeting, boycotts, and the mere threat of having to scroll through 1500 LOLCats without Icanhazcheezburger (another boycott supporter), seems to have beaten an avalanche of money and lobbying. Those 1950s onion farmers would be proud.

Keep your powder dry, boys: the battle is far from won. This is just the latest skirmish in an ongoing campaign, and premature celebration of the victory is just what we don’t need.

January 17, 2012

Stop SOPA!

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 13:25

Although this is a Canadian blog and SOPA is proposed legislation in the United States, it is extremely likely that Canadian websites and internet users will be directly affected by provisions of it. Michael Geist has a list of reasons why Canadians should be concerned:

First, the SOPA provisions are designed to have an extra-territorial effect that manifests itself particularly strongly in Canada. As I discussed in a column last year, SOPA treats all dot-com, dot-net, and dot-org domain as domestic domain names for U.S. law purposes. Moreover, it defines “domestic Internet protocol addresses” — the numeric strings that constitute the actual address of a website or Internet connection — as “an Internet Protocol address for which the corresponding Internet Protocol allocation entity is located within a judicial district of the United States.” Yet IP addresses are allocated by regional organizations, not national ones. The allocation entity located in the U.S. is called ARIN, the American Registry for Internet Numbers. Its territory includes the U.S., Canada, and 20 Caribbean nations. This bill treats all IP addresses in this region as domestic for U.S. law purposes. To put this is context, every Canadian Internet provider relies on ARIN for its block of IP addresses. In fact, ARIN even allocates the block of IP addresses used by federal and provincial governments. The U.S. bill would treat them all as domestic for U.S. law purposes.

Second, Canadian businesses and websites could easily find themselves targeted by SOPA. The bill grants the U.S. “in rem” jurisdiction over any website that does not have a domestic jurisdictional connection. For those sites, the U.S. grants jurisdiction over the property of the site and opens the door to court orders requiring Internet providers to block the site and Internet search engines to stop linking to it. Should a Canadian website owner wish to challenge the court order, U.S. law asserts itself in another way, since in order for an owner to file a challenge (described as a “counter notification”), the owner must first consent to the jurisdiction of the U.S. courts.

Along with thousands of other bloggers and major internet sites like Wikipedia, Quotulatiousness will be marking the anti-SOPA effort tomorrow. Unless I’ve misconfigured it, you should see a “Down Against SOPA” page the first time you visit the blog tomorrow (either on the main page or on a particular post), but then it should allow you to have normal access. I considered going “dark” as Wikipedia will be, but this seems to be a better way of registering my opposition without inconveniencing my readers too much.

January 16, 2012

That pesky Constitution and the weird candidate who thinks it somehow matters

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:07

Rob Long writes about Ron Paul and his constitutional fixation:

It was always fun to see Paul’s dyspeptic, curdled expression during the 16,000 Republican debates this autumn. (There were 16,000 of them, weren’t there?) It was bracing to see him shrug off appeals to weasel-word his responses — just shutter the Fed! dump NATO! — and it was especially interesting to watch the other candidates, who, philosophically, aren’t supposed to be all that different from Paul, ballet-step around him, like he was one of those loud talkers at the neighborhood bar who make a lot of sense, mostly, but then every now and then say something — Lincoln was a tyrant! — that makes everyone think, “Oh, I get it. You’re just . . . insane.”

Ron Paul isn’t insane, of course. His views on sound money and central banking, and even his narrow interpretation of the national-defense interests, are principled — and not novel — conservative positions. You and I may not agree with them — I do, mostly, up to the part about allowing Iran to bomb Israel — but on the crackpot scale of 1 to Lyndon LaRouche, they’re barely a 3. And if we’re all really honest about it, the sainted Abraham Lincoln did, in fact, violate the Constitution on several occasions. And over a few beers, say, among friends, these are interesting and diverting topics of conversation.

But like all of those kinds of conversations, they always end up the same way. The conversation winds along interesting abstractions and what-ifs, and then someone — usually the old guy at the end of the bar — says something truly out-there — “There’s no constitutional reason, for instance, why the children of illegal immigrants cannot be eaten” — and then the conversation devolves into weird irrational tributaries, and everyone moves on to something else, but you always have the feeling that one guy — usually the old guy at the end of the bar — really meant it.

An unwelcome kind of “Top Ten Reasons” list

Filed under: Government, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:04

Jonathan Turley, writing in the Washington Post:

Every year, the State Department issues reports on individual rights in other countries, monitoring the passage of restrictive laws and regulations around the world. Iran, for example, has been criticized for denying fair public trials and limiting privacy, while Russia has been taken to task for undermining due process. Other countries have been condemned for the use of secret evidence and torture.

Even as we pass judgment on countries we consider unfree, Americans remain confident that any definition of a free nation must include their own — the land of free. Yet, the laws and practices of the land should shake that confidence. In the decade since Sept. 11, 2001, this country has comprehensively reduced civil liberties in the name of an expanded security state. The most recent example of this was the National Defense Authorization Act, signed Dec. 31, which allows for the indefinite detention of citizens. At what point does the reduction of individual rights in our country change how we define ourselves?

While each new national security power Washington has embraced was controversial when enacted, they are often discussed in isolation. But they don’t operate in isolation. They form a mosaic of powers under which our country could be considered, at least in part, authoritarian. Americans often proclaim our nation as a symbol of freedom to the world while dismissing nations such as Cuba and China as categorically unfree. Yet, objectively, we may be only half right. Those countries do lack basic individual rights such as due process, placing them outside any reasonable definition of “free,” but the United States now has much more in common with such regimes than anyone may like to admit.

These countries also have constitutions that purport to guarantee freedoms and rights. But their governments have broad discretion in denying those rights and few real avenues for challenges by citizens — precisely the problem with the new laws in this country.

The list of powers acquired by the U.S. government since 9/11 puts us in rather troubling company.

January 15, 2012

As you’d expect, healthcare costs are not evenly distributed

Filed under: Economics, Health, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:20

Jordan Weissmann in The Atlantic:

When it comes to America’s spiraling health care costs, the country’s problems begin with the 5%. In 2008 and 2009, 5% of Americans were responsible for nearly half of the country’s medical spending.

Of course, health care has its own 1% crisis. In 2009, the top 1% of patients accounted for 21.8% of expenditures.

The figures are from a new study by the Department of Health and Human Services, which examined how different U.S. demographics contributed to medical costs. It looked at the $1.26 trillion spent by civilian, non-institutionalized Americans each year on health care.

The top 5% of spenders paid an annual average of $35,829 in doctors’ bills. By comparison, the bottom half paid an average $232 and made up about 3% of total costs.

Steyn: Ron Paul’s military policies would be a disaster for the Pax Americana

Filed under: Liberty, Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:29

While I generally enjoy reading Mark Steyn’s writing, he does have a fixation with America’s burden to be the world’s policeman and he (correctly) sees Ron Paul as a threat to that role:

No candidate is ideal, and we conservatives are always enjoined not to make the perfect the enemy of the good — or in this case the enemy of the mediocre: sitting next to me last Tuesday on Fox News, the pollster Frank Luntz said that Romney in his victory speech was now starting to use words that resonate with the American people. The main word he used was “America.” On Tuesday night Romney told us he wants to restore America to an America where millions of Americans believe in the American ideal of a strong America for millions of Americans. Which is more than your average Belgian can say. The crowd responded appreciatively. An hour later a weird goofy gnome in a baggy suit two sizes too big came out and started yakking about the Federal Reserve, fiat money and monetary policy “throughout all of history.” And the crowd went bananas!

It’s traditional at this point for non-Paulites to say that, while broadly sympathetic to his views on individual liberty, they deplore his neo-isolationism on foreign policy. But deploring it is an inadequate response to a faction that is likely to emerge with the second-highest number of delegates at the GOP convention. In the end, Newt represents Newt, and Huntsman represents Huntsman, but Ron Paul represents a view of America’s role in the world, and one for which there are more and more takers after a decade of expensive but inconclusive war. President Obama has called for cuts of half a trillion dollars from the military budget. In response, too many of my friends on the right are demanding business as usual — that the Pentagon’s way of doing things must continue in perpetuity. It cannot.

America is responsible for about 43 percent of the planet’s military expenditure. This is partly a reflection of the diminished military budgets of everyone else. As Britain and the other European powers learned very quickly in the decades after the Second World War, when it comes to a choice between unsustainable welfare programs or a military of global reach, the latter is always easier to cut. It is, needless to say, a false choice. By mid-decade the Pentagon’s huge bloated budget will be less than the mere interest payments on U.S. debt. Much of which goes to bankrolling the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. Nevertheless, faced with reducing funding for China’s military or our own, the latter will be the easier choice for Washington.

[. . .]

Ron Paul says he would pull U.S. troops out of Afghanistan “as quickly as the ships could get there.” Afghanistan is a land-locked country, but hey, that’s just the kind of boring foreign trivia we won’t need to bother with once we’re safely holed up in Fortress America. To those who dissent from this easy and affordable solution to America’s woes, the Paul campaign likes to point out that it receives more money from America’s men in uniform than anybody else. According to the Federal Election Commission, in the second quarter of 2011, Ron Paul got more donations from service personnel than all other Republican candidates combined, plus President Obama. Not unreasonably, serving soldiers are weary of unwon wars — of going to war with everything except war aims and strategic clarity.

Ron Paul is neither isolationist nor anti-military (the donations from serving troops clearly proves that case). He is, however, against military adventurism and perpetual American involvement in the defence of rich countries who have been cashing in the “peace dividend” for two generations or more.

What’s next, allowing only “registered journalists” to report the news?

Filed under: Government, Media, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:14

A brief item that should send a frisson down the spine of anyone who collects and disseminates information from the web and social media outlets:

Under the National Operations Center (NOC)’s Media Monitoring Initiative that emerged from the Department of Homeland Security in November, Washington has written permission to collect and retain personal information from journalists, news anchors, reporters or anyone who uses “traditional and/or social media in real time to keep their audience situationally aware and informed.”

According to DHS, the definition of personal identifiable information can consist of any intellect “that permits the identity of an individual to be directly or indirectly inferred, including any information which is linked or linkable to that individual.”

H/T to Chris Myrick for the link.

January 14, 2012

George Jonas: Ron Paul as candidate, Ron Paul as cult leader

Filed under: Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:17

George Jonas likes Ron Paul, but he does point out that as a candidate, he’s not cut from the same cloth as the rest of them (to say the least):

Appearing in turn a sober, even austere, public-spirited physician and a mischievous, even vicious, old crank, Paul is between a candidate and a cult figure. Candidates have supporters; cult figures have devotees. You may express reservations about a candidate without necessarily incurring the wrath of his supporters, but expressing reservations about a cult figure will result in his devotees trying to eat you alive. Being a cult figure, however, doesn’t necessarily predict what happens at the polls. My paternal grandfather, an old-style ward boss in Europe, called one office-seeker an unelectable idol. “It’s easier to find people who’d die for him,” he said, “than people who’d vote for him.”

There are quite a few people voting for Paul. When cult figures break through the numbers-barrier, you suddenly encounter the Real Thing. In 2012, could it be a retired obstetrician from Texas? While Paul has only a very remote chance of winning his party’s nomination, should he do so, his chances of winning the White House are actually better.

How so? Well, Republicans disenchanted with, say, Mitt Romney would hardly flock to Paul on the convention floor, but Democrats disenchanted with Obama might gravitate to him in November. This, ironically, would give Paul a better crack at the American presidency than the Republican nomination, though of course he couldn’t have one without the other. His chance is wafer-thin but “wafer-thin” is a real chance. While it’s unlikely to happen, it could.

What would the world be like the day after? Well, whatever the intended consequences of President Paul’s policies, their potential reminds me of an editorial cartoon published during the war years in London’s Daily Mail. It shows a neat little man in a bowler hat unhappily shaking hands with a disheveled colossus. The caption reads: “Ah, Mr. Policy, young Side Effect here has been anxious to meet you …”

January 11, 2012

Reason.tv: Three reasons conservatives should cut defence spending now

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:23

New Hampshire breaks for Romney

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:13

After all the other candidates (except Ron Paul) effectively signed their Socialist Party cards during this campaign trying to portray Mitt Romney as the demon offspring of Ebeneezer Scrooge and Gordon Gekko, it’s probably no surprise that Romney won the state handily. Ron Paul managed a better-than-expected second place finish. Doug Mataconis wraps up the race:

Ron Paul came in second with 23% of the vote, higher than he had been polling over the past week and an apparent indication that he had been able to mobilize the independent/libertarian vote in the Granite State much as he had done in Iowa. In 2008, Paul had finished 5th in the state, with about 18,900 votes. This time, Paul garnered more than 55 votes, more than aall of the other candidates save Huntsman and Romney combined. Not surprisingly, Paul’s speech last night was as much a victory speech as if he’d actually won the night

[. . .]

Jon Huntsman, who finished a disappointing third with 17% of the vote, vowed to take the fight to South Carolina and did his best to spin an outcome that had to be a let down given his recent rise in the polls into good news

[. . .]

Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich, meanwhile, came out of New Hampshire virtually tied at 9% of the vote, Gingrich with roughly 22,921 vote and Santorum with roughly 22,708. and both gave simultaneous concession speeches that didn’t really concede anything, arguing that the race had just started and that they were heading to South Carolina. One candidate who’s already down in the Palmetto State, Rick Perry garnered a rather pathetic 1% of the vote and issued a statement that basically said that New Hampshire didn’t matter. Of course, you’d expect the guy who came in last place to say the race doesn’t matter.

Taking a look at the Exit Polls, Romney’s victory was pretty widespread, and pulled in what some might consider some surprising demographic groups:

  • Romney won all income categories, except those earning less than $30,000/year. That group went to Ron Paul slightly more (36%) than to Romney (31%)
  • Romney won among both registered Republicans (48%) and registered Independents (32%)
  • Romney won all ideological groups except those who called themselves “somewhat liberal,” which went to Paul 33% and 32% for Romney
  • Romney won all religious groups, except “None” which went to Paul 47% to 21% for Romney
  • Romney won the support of 42% of those with a positive opinion of the Tea Party, and 40% of those with a neutral opinion. Huntsman received 42% of those who had a negative opinion of the movement

In other words, it was, unlike Iowa, a clear and decisive victory for Romney. Some will discount it by stating that this was all expected given the fact that Romney had been leading the field by double digits for months now, and while that may be true nothing succeeds like success and, right now, Mitt Romney has the wind at his back heading into South Carolina. Polling there is now showing him with a double digit lead over his rivals. Of course, the next ten days are going to consist of candidates like Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry, and Rick Santorum trying to chip away at that lead. Gingrich and his SuperPac, for example, will reportedly putting as much as $3.5 million in to ad buys around the state, which is not an insignificant amount of mount for the Palmetto State. Rick Perry is already down there comparing Romney’s career at Bain to “vulture capitalism,” and Santorum is likely to spend his time trying to peal away the social conservatives in the South Carolina GOP, where he’s likely to find a friendlier venue than he did in the Palmetto State. The question is whether it will be enough. Romney will be able to match Gingrich or anyone else dollar-for-dollar and ad-for-ad for one thing. For another, it’s unclear whether the this anti-Bain message really works on Republicans and Republican-leaning Independents. If the results in New Hampshire are any indication, the answer to that question is a clear and resounding no.

“I don’t know how these kids do it, how they go to school every day without breaking these laws”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:07

The further criminalization of what used to be ordinary childhood behaviour:

Each day, hundreds of schoolchildren appear before courts in Texas charged with offences such as swearing, misbehaving on the school bus or getting in to a punch-up in the playground. Children have been arrested for possessing cigarettes, wearing “inappropriate” clothes and being late for school.

In 2010, the police gave close to 300,000 “Class C misdemeanour” tickets to children as young as six in Texas for offences in and out of school, which result in fines, community service and even prison time. What was once handled with a telling-off by the teacher or a call to parents can now result in arrest and a record that may cost a young person a place in college or a job years later.

“We’ve taken childhood behaviour and made it criminal,” said Kady Simpkins, a lawyer who represented Sarah Bustamantes. “They’re kids. Disruption of class? Every time I look at this law I think: good lord, I never would have made it in school in the US. I grew up in Australia and it’s just rowdy there. I don’t know how these kids do it, how they go to school every day without breaking these laws.”

The British government is studying the American experience in dealing with gangs, unruly young people and juvenile justice in the wake of the riots in England. The UK’s justice minister, Crispin Blunt, visited Texas last September to study juvenile courts and prisons, youth gangs and police outreach in schools, among other things. But his trip came at a time when Texas is reassessing its own reaction to fears of feral youth that critics say has created a “school-to-prison pipeline”. The Texas supreme court chief justice, Wallace Jefferson, has warned that “charging kids with criminal offences for low-level behavioural issues” is helping to drive many of them to a life in jail.

January 10, 2012

What a difference a decade makes

Filed under: Economics, History, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:53

Megan McArdle reports from her business school’s ten-year reunion on the fates of her fellow MBA students:

It was my 10-year reunion at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Obviously I wanted to see if people had gotten fatter, balder, and wrinklier. (Surprisingly, not really.) But I also wanted to know what had become of us, and our careers.

Ten years ago, we graduated into a country where the Twin Towers were still standing, Webvan was a going concern, and the unemployment rate was 4.5 percent. Many of us headed to New York or other cities to become what Tom Wolfe, in The Bonfire of the Vanities, called “the Masters of the Universe” — the financiers who can earn lottery-size sums on a single deal. Others went to Silicon Valley start-ups, or became the consultants who worked with them. I couldn’t find anyone at the reunion who admitted to trading dodgy residential mortgage-backed securities, but we participated in all the other madness of two decades of financial froth—and got smashed in two crashes.

We weren’t the people who inflated the bubbles; we were the ones hired, and then fired, by those people. We were the ones who happened to be standing next to the guy who was pushing the buttons when everything went to hell.

[. . .]

I have a theory about what happened to us, and our nation: when too much money is piled together in one place, it starts to decay, and as it does, it emits some sort of unidentified chemical that short-circuits the parts of your brain controlling common sense. When my class matriculated in 1999, ads for a firm called Discover Brokerage featured a tow-truck driver whose passenger notices in the cab a picture of the home — an island — that the driver has purchased with his fabulous online-trading profits. The passenger looks taken aback while the driver muses, “Technically, it’s a country.”

What’s even more amazing than the fact that this ad was ever made is that this sort of triple-distilled balderdash could intoxicate a large group of very smart people at one of the nation’s top finance schools.

Oh, don’t get me wrong: none of us was simpleminded enough to take those ads literally. Oh, ho-ho, no, not us! No, we made only the most erudite and sophisticated sorts of mistakes, like gang-rushing banking internships, and telling ourselves we were “consumption smoothing” as we used student loans to finance vacations. Believe it or not, many of us talked frequently about the echoes of 1929 — but we still didn’t necessarily act on that insight, as the markets cratered in the early 2000s.

For my summer 2000 internship at Merrill Lynch, I chose the technology-banking group despite having watched the March 2000 NASDAQ crash from the lobby of Merrill’s auditorium, where we were supposed to be undergoing orientation. Ignoring the helpless, angry flapping of the HR staff, a bunch of us spent the afternoon telling nervous jokes and watching the eerie flicker that billions of dollars give off when they evaporate on live TV.

January 9, 2012

Calling it “austerity” doesn’t make it so

Filed under: Economics, Government, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:11

Nick Gillespie provides a reality check on some particularly imaginative use of “austerity” in describing the end of the Bush administration and the start of the Obama administration:

In constant 2010 dollars, the federal government spent about $2.3 trillion in 2001. By 2010, the total was around $3.6 trillion. And though the federal government has not passed (and will not pass) a budget for a third straight year, the two plans currently on the table envision spending either $4.7 trillion or $5.7 trillion in 2021. The lowball figure comes from the budget that passed the GOP-controlled House last spring. The higher number comes from President Obama’s budget proposal.

If austerity is the new black, the news has yet to reach the people who actually wield power in the capital. And if the Washington elite aren’t serious about cutting spending, they sure aren’t hell-bent on cutting red tape and regulations either.

For self-evident reasons, George W. Bush and the Republicans soft-pedaled the fact that, over the course of his presidency, he hired 90,000 net new regulators, signed the Sarbanes-Oxley bill that radically complicated corporate accounting practices, passed a record number of “economically significant” regulations costing the economy $100 million or more and, says economist Veronique de Rugy, spent more money issuing and enforcing federal regulations than any previous chief executive.

Obama is continuing the trend by increasing employment at regulatory agencies by more than 13 percent and issuing 75 major rules in his first two years.

All this happened during what Frank calls “the golden years of libertarianism.” So I have problems understanding what he is talking about when he issues dicta such as “free-market theory has proven itself to be a philosophy of ruination and fraud.”

DARPA appoints former astronaut to lead 100-year starship project

Filed under: Space, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:56

Brid-Aine Parnell works the Star Trek angle on the appointment of former NASA astronaut Dr Mae Jemison as the head of the 100-year Starship project:

The agency had not responded to a request for comment at the time of publication, and has not yet announced the appointment publicly.

Dr Jemison, who has a degree in chemical engineering and a doctorate in medicine, was the science mission specialist on the STS-47 Spacelab-J in 1992 and logged over 190 hours in space.

As well as being a bona fide boffin, Jemison also spent time in the IT trenches, working in computer programming, among other things, before joining NASA.

She’s also no stranger to the ideas behind a starship, since, as a long-time Star Trek fan, she had a bit part in one episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

The episode, entitled Second Chances, must surely go down as evidence of her remarkable patience and forbearance, since it featured the two most irritating TNG characters, Commander Riker and Deanna Troi, rather prominently.

In praise of the Carl Gustav

Filed under: Military, Technology, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:42

Strategy Page discusses the recent decision by the US Army to adopt the Carl Gustav antitank weapon (which unlike most other “new” weapons is actually quite old):

The Carl Gustav is the first multiple-shot rocket launcher army infantry have used since the smooth bore 3.5 inch (88mm) bazooka was phased out in the 1960s. The Carl Gustav is basically a lightweight 8.5 kg (19 pound) recoilless rifle. It is 1.1 meters (3.6 feet) long. The barrel is rifled and good for about a hundred rounds.

The army also got rid of its recoilless rifles in the 1970s, replacing them with anti-tank guided missiles. What made the Carl Gustav unique was that it had the long range of a recoilless rifle (which used rifled barrels) but had a short barrel and was much more portable. The most popular American recoilless rifle was the 52 kg (114.5 pound) 75mm M20. With its long barrel (2.1 meters/6.9 feet), the M20 had a range of 6,400 meters. That was fine for use against tanks, but the army brass never appreciated the fact that the recoilless rifle was most frequently used against infantry in bunkers or buildings. The Carl Gustav took all this into account, and has been very popular with the infantry because of its portability and long range.

The 84mm projectiles weigh about 2 kg (4.4 pounds) each and come in several different types (anti-armor, combined anti-armor/high explosive, illumination and smoke.) The anti-armor round is very useful in urban areas and against bunkers. Range is 500-700 meters (depending on type of round fired), but an experienced gunner can hit a large target at up to 1,000 meters.

I trained on the Carl Gustav back in the 1970s … it was a good weapon then and still clearly has a role on the modern battlefield. The joy of hitting a tank right on the turret ring with an 84mm greeting card really cannot be adequately described.

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