Forgotten Weapons
Published 28 Sept 2017Once it became apparent that the MAS-36 was going to be used in a substantial amount of frontline combat (contrary to its intended role as a reserve or secondary rifle), it became important to provide it with grenade launching capability. The French military really liked rifle grenades as a way to have explosive support firepower always available with the frontline infantry, without needing to call for specialized units like mortar crews.
After various experiments with clamp-on launchers (like and including the WW1 VB launcher), the LG48 (lance grenade, or grenade throwing) rifle was adopted in 1948. It used the same basic projectile as the Mle 1937 50mm light mortar, but with a new tail assembly fitted which allowed it to slide over the muzzle of a MAS-36 rifle. The LG48 rifle was essentially just a MAS-36 with a new nosecap assembly which included a simple grenade sight and a range-setting adjustable sleeve over the barrel.
The LG48 pattern rifles were made both brand new in the St Etienne factory and also supplied as conversion kits to be applied in the field. Neither type ever received new or special markings to identify their grenade launching status. The Mle 1948 grenades and the LG48 rifles were declared obsolete in 1968, as the French had switched to the NATO standard type of rifle grenades in the early 1950s. In 1968 the existing rifles were ordered to be retrofitted back to standard MAS-36 pattern, and their lack of special markings makes those retrofitted rifles virtually indistinguishable from original MAS-36 rifles. The surviving examples, like the one in this video, are almost all from nations which received the rifles as military aid from France and were not subject to the French retrofitting order (this particular rifle was imported as part of a batch from Lebanon in the 1990s).
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October 10, 2023
MAS-36 LG48: A Grenade Launcher for the Bolt Action Infantry
QotD: The production of charcoal in pre-industrial societies
Wood, even when dried, contains quite a bit of water and volatile compounds; the former slows the rate of combustion and absorbs the energy, while the latter combusts incompletely, throwing off soot and smoke which contains carbon which would burn, if it had still been in the fire. All of that limits the burning temperature of wood; common woods often burn at most around 800-900°C, which isn’t enough for the tasks we are going to put it to.
Charcoaling solves this problem. By heating the wood in conditions where there isn’t enough air for it to actually ignite and burn, the water is all boiled off and the remaining solid material reduced to lumps of pure carbon, which will burn much hotter (in excess of 1,150°C, which is the target for a bloomery). Moreover, as more or less pure carbon lumps, the charcoal doesn’t have bunches of impurities which might foul our iron (like the sulfur common in mineral coal).
That said, this is a tricky process. The wood needs to be heated around 300-350°C, well above its ignition temperature, but mostly kept from actually burning by lack of oxygen (if you let oxygen in, the wood is going to burn away all of its carbon to CO2, which will, among other things, cause you to miss your emissions target and also remove all of the carbon you need to actually have charcoal), which in practice means the pile needs some oxygen to maintain enough combustion to keep the heat correct, but not so much that it bursts into flame, nor so little that it is totally extinguished. The method for doing this changed little from the ancient world to the medieval period; the systems described by Pliny (NH 16.8.23) and Theophrastus (HP 5.9.4) is the same method we see used in the early modern period.
First, the wood is cut and sawn into logs of fairly moderate size. Branches are removed; the logs need to be straight and smooth because they need to be packed very densely. They are then assembled into a conical pile, with a hollow center shaft; the pile is sometimes dug down into the ground, sometimes assembled at ground-level (as a fun quirk of the ancient evidence, the Latin-language sources generally think of above-ground charcoaling, whereas the Greek-language sources tend to assume a shallow pit is used). The wood pile is then covered in a clay structure referred to a charcoal kiln; this is not a permanent structure, but is instead reconstructed for each charcoal burning. Finally, the hollow center is filled with brushwood or wood-chips to provide the fuel for the actual combustion; this fuel is lit and the shaft almost entirely sealed by an air-tight layer of earth.
The fuel ignites and begins consuming the oxygen from the interior of the kiln, both heating the wood but also stealing the oxygen the wood needs to combust itself. The charcoal burner (often called collier, before that term meant “coal miner” it meant “charcoal burner”) manages the charcoal pile through the process by watching the smoke it emits and using its color to gauge the level of combustion (dark, sooty smoke would indicate that the process wasn’t yet done, while white smoke meant that the combustion was now happening “clean” indicating that the carbonization was finished). The burner can then influence the process by either puncturing or sealing holes in the kiln to increase or decrease airflow, working to achieve a balance where there is just enough oxygen to keep the fuel burning, but not enough that the wood catches fire in earnest. A decent sized kiln typically took about six to eight days to complete the carbonization process. Once it cooled, the kiln could be broken open and the pile of effectively pure carbon extracted.
Raw charcoal generally has to be made fairly close to the point of use, because the mass of carbon is so friable that it is difficult to transport it very far. Modern charcoal (like the cooking charcoal one may get for a grill) is pressed into briquettes using binders, originally using wet clay and later tar or pitch, to make compact, non-friable bricks. This kind of packing seems to have originated with coal-mining; I can find no evidence of its use in the ancient or medieval period with charcoal. As a result, smelting operations, which require truly prodigious amounts of charcoal, had to take place near supplies of wood; Sim and Ridge (op cit.) note that transport beyond 5-6km would degrade the charcoal so badly as to make it worthless; distances below 4km seem to have been more typical. Moving the pre-burned wood was also undesirable because so much material was lost in the charcoaling process, making moving green wood grossly inefficient. Consequently, for instance, we know that when Roman iron-working operations on Elba exhausted the wood supplies there, the iron ore was moved by ship to Populonia, on the coast of Italy to be smelted closer to the wood supply.
It is worth getting a sense of the overall efficiency of this process. Modern charcoaling is more efficient and can often get yields (that is, the mass of the charcoal when compared to the mass of the wood) as high as 40%, but ancient and medieval charcoaling was far less efficient. Sim and Ridge (op cit.) note ratios of initial-mass to the final charcoal ranging from 4:1 to 12:1 (or 25% to 8.3% efficiency), with 7:1 being a typical average (14%).
We can actually get a sense of the labor intensity of this job. Sim and Ridge (op cit.) note that a skilled wood-cutter can cut about a cord of wood in a day, in optimal conditions; a cord is a volume measure, but most woods mass around 4,000lbs (1,814kg) per cord. Constructing the kiln and moving the wood is also likely to take time and while more than one charcoal kiln can be running at once, the operator has to stay with them (and thus cannot be cutting any wood, though a larger operation with multiple assistants might). A single-man operation thus might need 8-10 days to charcoal a cord of wood, which would in turn produce something like 560lbs (253.96kg) of charcoal. A larger operation which has both dedicated wood-cutters and colliers running multiple kilns might be able to cut the man-days-per-cord down to something like 3 or 4, potentially doubling or tripling output (but requiring a number more workers). In short, by and large our sources suggest this was a fairly labor intensive job in order to produce sufficient amounts of charcoal for iron production of any scale.
Bret Devereaux, “Iron, How Did They Make It? Part II, Trees for Blooms”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-09-25.
October 9, 2023
Janice Fiamengo finds a reason to watch the Barbie movie
I generally don’t watch movies these days, so I was never in the target audience for Barbie, but Janice Fiamengo has changed her mind about whether you should watch it:
I have changed my mind about Barbie. When I discussed it last week with my good friend Tom Golden (you can see our conversation here), I advised against viewing it.
I now recommend giving it a watch, not for pleasure or even ideological interest — it is too dull and humorless for that, with a senseless plot, wooden dialogue, and a coy voice-over — but for clarification. The high-grossing movie offers a vivid encapsulation of our culture’s view of men and women, complete with its own inadvertent self-subversion. Watching it is a leaden but useful reminder that feminists really are this self-destructively stupid, and really do want to destroy “patriarchy”, by which they mean masculine freedom, self-respect, and leadership. They no longer even pretend to value equality.
Men and boys (and the women who love them), take a good look.
In Barbie, men are at best second-class citizens who by movie’s end, in an improvement over their former nullity, are content to follow banal female directives about their attitudes and identity. In a jaw-droppingly condescending scene after the failed Ken Rebellion, Ken is counseled on how to find himself. He is told that it’s okay to cry (as he bawls like a baby) and is admonished to “figure out who you are without [Barbie/woman]”. He and the other Kens seem grateful for the puerile admonition and willing to be male on Barbie terms: sexless, rudderless, effeminate. They certainly can’t be equal, the film makes clear, because they make a mess when they’re in charge.
Keeping men in check means shielding them even from images of patriarchal (meaning competent, self-directed, masculine) men: Ken runs amok only after seeing a world (the “real world”) in which men are allegedly respected merely for being men, one of the more risible feminist lies in the movie. Feminists have never understood that men earn respect. But in the feminist vision, any possibility that men may perceive themselves as essential to their society — and as owed acknowledgement for the goods they bring — must be suppressed. Only women are essential.
Perhaps the feminist director of Barbie intended the portrayal of the Kens to reflect the situation of women under patriarchy (one searches in vain for a coherent analytical perspective). In Barbie Land, Kens are objects (not sex objects since there is no sex or even heterosexual desire) who exist only to compete, fruitlessly, for Barbies’ attention.
In the real patriarchal past, of course, women were never so reduced precisely because of male sexual longing, love, familial affection, chivalry, religious ideals, empathy, reasoning about justice, and the desire for procreation. All such longings or allegiances are absent from Barbie life. If the Barbies desire children and family — never made clear in the movie, though perhaps gestured to in the final scene when Barbie, now human, visits her gynecologist — theirs will likely be families without Kens. Whether in the real world or in Barbie Land, men are peripheral at best, dangerous at worst, and often mildly contemptible and tiresome with their “egos and petty jealousies”. The only good thing about Kens is that they are easy to manipulate.
The disdain is fathoms deep.
Women, in contrast, are complete in themselves, sufficient for each other in a world in which all positions of power — from President to CEO, doctor, pilot, astronaut, ambulance worker, professional athlete, and Nobel Prize-winning journalist — are occupied by women (and a few trans people, it seems), and in which neighborhoods function without any dirty, dangerous jobs, external threats, heavy machinery, complex repairs, or strenuous labor.
This aspect of the movie, by the way, is a striking illustration of the inability of the feminist mind to remember or even understand what men actually do: the risky, body-wearying and ingenuity-demanding work that feminists only rarely, if ever, advocate for women and which they are frequently hard-pressed even to name. One of the many magic tricks of feminism is its continual disappearing of distinctive male inventiveness, skill, adaptability, and heavy-lifting.
“Wildly popular public sentiment is disorder, and has to be restrained”
Chris Bray outlines one of the many (many) ways that elected officials are insulating themselves from the voters who elected them to ensure that they only hear what they want to hear from the public … and as little of it as they can get away with:
Wildly popular public sentiment is disorder, and has to be restrained. So here, let’s start with something vital and interesting, and then work our way through the process a local government is using to kill it. As always, the point about this local story isn’t just the local story, since versions of this are happening all over the country (and with federal assistance).
Early last year, an angry Virginia mom spoke to the Prince William County school board, blasting mask mandates in schools. Her fiery three-minute speech went viral, until YouTube, which now seems to mostly exist to prevent discussion, killed it:
It’s back, in a less-watched version that YouTube hasn’t gotten around to cancelling yet:
Here’s a version on Rumble, if you’d rather watch it there, but Substack doesn’t embed Rumble video.
The second thing to notice in that video, after you notice the clarity and strength of Merianne Jensen’s comments, is the response: an enormous audience of parents shouting and cheering in support as another parent sharply criticizes school district policy. The public is present for a government meeting, and the public is engaged. Citizens are participating, enthusiastically and in large numbers, which is supposed to be a thing we regard as an ideal.
[…]
Public comment is limited to one hour, full stop, no matter how many people wish to speak, and no matter how urgent a controversy before the board might be. The public — the entire public — gets an hour. But, second, that hour is alloted through an application process in which people who wish to speak to the school board fill out an online form that a clerk then evaluates and processes, deciding whether or not a request to speak will be granted. Detailed contact information is required before the school district will consider your request to speak, and national organizations and other outsiders have no right to speak at all, since public comment is limited to verified residents of the county. The form is a masterpiece of passive-aggressive nudging, communicating with great clarity that your desire to offer public comment is merely being tolerated. Read this carefully, because in a few minutes we’re going to get to the pernicious way this system is now being gamed:
This form does NOT confirm your request to be added to the list of speakers for Citizen Comment Time. You will receive a separate email indicating the status of your request. As a reminder, speakers are signed up to speak on a first-come, first-served basis.
Thank you again for your interest.
Citizens may sign up to be placed on the list of speakers for the citizen comment period starting at 8:00 a.m. on the Saturday immediately preceding the School Board meeting at which the citizen wishes to speak. Requests received prior to 8:00 a.m. on the Saturday immediately preceding the School Board meeting will not be honored. Speakers will be signed up on a first-come, first-served basis, ending at noon on the day of the meeting. The sign-up list will close once the number of total speakers who have signed up reaches twenty and there will be no sign-up thereafter, nor at the meeting.
That last sentence will become important: twenty commenters are signed up in advance, in the order in which they apply, and then the list for public comment is closed, the end. Can you see where this is going?
Before we get there, I’ll just note that a more detailed board policy on comments, available here, adds that the board chairman can end a public comment session, and ask school district security to remove speakers, if a commenter wanders into “inappropriate topics” or a tone the board regards as uncivil. You can feel the spontaneity and openness being drained.
THE BATTLE OF SYDNEY: Sabres, Meteors, Sea Furies And Two Blokes With A Bren Gun Battle A Runaway
Not A Pound For Air To Ground
Published 23 Jun 2023On the morning of the 30th of August, Anthony Thrower of Lavinia Street, Granville was out for a pleasure flight when his Auster Archer decided to make a break for freedom. What followed was a madcap three hour chase involving four jet fighters, two Hawker Sea Furies and two blokes with a Bren Gun.
Given that this incident pre-dated the more famous Battle Of Palmdale by a year, I thought it was interesting to compare how more conventionally armed aircraft fared against a slow, but determined piston-engined intruder. I hope you find it entertaining. I have to admit that as a Brit, I enjoyed poking a little fun at my Australian friends … hopefully they can take it in the spirit it’s intended.
Final point of note is to thank Bryanwheeler1608, whose comment put me onto this story in the first place. I hope you think I’ve done it justice!
QotD: Roman views of sexual roles
There is always a temptation to emphasise the way in which the Romans are like us, a mirror held up to our own civilisation. But what is far more interesting is the way in which they are nothing like us, because it gives you a sense of how various human cultures can be. You assume that ideas of sex and gender are pretty stable, and yet the Roman understanding of these concepts was very, very different to ours. For us, I think, it does revolve around gender — the idea that there are men and there are women — and, obviously, that can be contested, as is happening at the moment. But the fundamental idea is that you are defined by your gender. Are you heterosexual or homosexual? That’s probably the great binary today.
For the Romans, this is not a binary. There’s a description in Suetonius’s imperial biography of Claudius: “He only ever slept with women.” And this is seen as an interesting foible in the way that you might say of someone, he only ever slept with blondes. I mean, it’s kind of interesting, but it doesn’t define him sexually. Similarly, he says of Galba, an upright embodiment of ancient republican values: “He only ever slept with males.” And again, this is seen as an eccentricity, but it doesn’t absolutely define him. What does define a Roman in the opinion of Roman moralists is basically whether you are — and I apologise for the language I’m now going to use — using your penis as a kind of sword, to dominate, penetrate and subdue. And the people who were there to receive your terrifying, thrusting, Roman penis were, of course, women and slaves: anyone who is not a citizen, essentially. So the binary is between Roman citizens, who are all by definition men, and everybody else.
A Roman woman, if she’s of citizen status, can’t be used willy-nilly — but pretty much anyone else can. That means that if you’re a Roman householder, your family is not just your blood relatives: it’s everybody in your household. It’s your dependents; your slaves. You can use your slaves any way you want. And if you’re not doing it, then there’s something wrong with you. The Romans had the same word for “urinate” and “ejaculate”, so the orifices of slaves — and they could be men, women, boys or girls — were seen as the equivalent of urinals for Roman men. Of course, this is very hard for us to get our heads around today.
The most humiliating thing that could happen to a Roman male citizen was to be treated like a woman — even if it was involuntary. For them, the idea that being trans is something to be celebrated would seem the most depraved, lunatic thing that you could possibly argue. Vitellius, who ended up an emperor, was known his whole life as “sphincter”, because it was said that as a young man he had been used like a girl by Tiberius on Capri. It was a mark of shame that he could never get rid of. There was an assumption that the mere rumour of being treated in this way would stain you for life; and if you enjoy it, then you are absolutely the lowest of the low.
Tom Holland, “The depravity of the Roman Peace”, UnHerd, 2023-07-07.
October 8, 2023
Can we get back to de mortuis nil nisi bonum any time soon?
The Latin phrase refers to speaking nothing but good of the (recently) deceased, but as partisan passions rise, the urge to wave the bloody shirt and denigrate the dead overwhelms decency and common sense:
Of all the vices that can contribute to the collapse of civil society, a special place of honor surely needs to be reserved for mocking the newly murdered.
I don’t mean mocking the newly dead. The somewhat mawkish view that no ill should be spoken of the recently departed has always seemed rather priggish to me. It would, in fact, be absurd if we decided that in the wake of, say, Mitch McConnell’s or Noam Chomsky’s death, we couldn’t criticize their lives, careers, and beliefs. “If they’d given him an enema, they could have buried him in a matchbox” was my old friend Christopher Hitchens’ comment on the passing of Jerry Falwell. Rude, surely. Too soon, sure. But a swipe, not a gloat. And on Fox News. To Ralph Reed.
What crosses the line of what Orwell prized as “common decency” is using the occasion of someone’s untimely death to say they deserved it. “The homosexuals have declared war on nature, and now nature is exacting an awful retribution” was Pat Buchanan’s charming response to the outbreak of the AIDS epidemic. In the same vein today, on the other side as it were, there’s a “Herman Cain Award” subreddit with half a million members, devoted to naming and mocking vaccine skeptics who subsequently died of Covid. A giant, unified chorus of “ha-ha”s across the decades.
Social media and CCTV cameras have made the schadenfreude more visceral. This past week, a young “social justice” activist, Ryan Carson, was knifed to death on the street by a deranged 18-year-old assailant, as Carson’s girlfriend, paralyzed with shock, looked on. We might once have just heard of or read about this attack. Now we see it as it happens. Its reach might once have been limited by media gatekeepers. Now it can reach millions in a matter of hours on social media. And if you’re Elon Musk and your strategy for Twitter is to make it a more visual, visceral, sticky site, it’s gold. Within hours of Carson’s death, his last, terrifying moments were accessible to millions: a snuff video in all but name, now available to be monetized by gawkers.
And indecent gawkers. “It’s good to make fun of people who support criminals when they get murdered by criminals,” commented one on Twitter. “Ryan Carson took the phrase ‘bleeding heart liberal’ way too literally,” said another. (Carson’s actual heart was pierced by the murder weapon.) Other virtual tricoteuses went after the traumatized bystander: “Ryan Carson’s girlfriend is the Douche of the Week. 1. Showed almost no concern as her guy was murdered. 2. Expressed zero concern as he lay on the ground dying. Didn’t even bend down. 3. Refused to give police the murderer’s description. Soulless Marxist.” Another: “WHAT??? Ryan Carson’s girlfriend … started a GoFundMe page to make money off his death. I would tell her to eat trash but that’s cannibalism.” Or this: “She didn’t react when he was stabbed but she sure didn’t hesitate to raise $50k on go fund me. Makes you wonder.”
Makes you wonder what exactly? Twitter reminds me of Trump: you can’t believe it can go lower — until it always does.
I should stipulate, I suppose, that I doubt I would have been one of Ryan Carson’s favorite writers. His views on crime and policing were, to my mind, hopelessly naive and deeply counter-productive for real social justice. He also once tweeted upon news of Rush Limbaugh’s death — “lmao hell yeah” — and called himself, presumably with a wink, “COO of Antifa.” But many of us have lost our moral bearings in this cold civil war. And Carson was a human being, son of a mother and father, murdered senselessly, traumatizing a whole host of others. In that context, nothing else matters but his humanity. Lambaste his views; but don’t delight in his death even as millions can see his final, deeply vulnerable moments of panic and fear.
The same should be said to the online trolls who went after Josh Kruger, a lefty Philly journalist (and Dish reader) killed in his home this week, and Pava LaPere, a BLM-touting entrepreneur in Baltimore murdered brutally the week before. (I’ll spare you the Twitter comments.) The impulse to use anything to advance a narrative: this is how far we’ve sunk into bitter, vicious tribalism.
And is it me or is Musk’s Twitter obviously making all this worse, putting out more and more videos of street crime, bar fights, robberies, and brawls, often with racial tension fueling them? In our collective psyche there is the problem of mentally ill people committing crimes on the streets, and there is also the problem of everyone constantly seeing videos of mentally ill people committing crimes on the streets. It distorts our judgment; it privileges the vivid and violent over the lucid and peaceful. It normalizes and numbs us to violence and can incentivize it. And this emotive tribal priming makes us more likely to react to the deaths of our political opponents with glee.
The End of the Warsaw Uprising – WW2 – Week 267 – October 7, 1944
World War Two
Published 7 Oct 2023The Warsaw Uprising comes to its conclusion, a tragic one for the Poles. In the field in Europe, there are Allied attacks toward Aachen, Bologna, and Debrecen, while in China the Japanese have begun a new phase of their Ichi Go Offensive.
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Richard Blair’s memories of his father, George Orwell
Jonathon Van Maren contacted Richard Horatio Blair, the adopted son of George Orwell to discuss his memories of his famous father:
“My story starts on the 14th of May, 1944, when I was adopted by Eric Arthur Blair and his wife Eileen,” he told me. “This was during the Second World War. He’d been wanting a child for several years because he felt, rightly or wrongly, that he was unable to have children himself. I think this was compounded slightly by the fact that Eileen — my mother — was not very well herself, and in fact when I was ten months old, in March of 1945, she went to the hospital in Newcastle, which was the area where she was born and had gone to school. She went into a nursing home and died very soon after being anesthetized to have a hysterectomy. She probably had cancer, was very anemic, and simply had a heart attack on the operating table and died.”
The adoption had come about when Eileen was told by her sister-in-law, Dr. Gwen Shaughnessy, that she knew of a pregnant woman whose husband was off fighting. Orwell and Eileen adopted Richard when he was only three weeks old, and Orwell ensured that he alone would be known as Richard’s father by burning the names of the birth parents from the birth certificate with a cigarette. Richard would never know Eileen, as she died a mere nine months after the adoption took place, leaving the little boy and Orwell to fend for themselves. Some of Orwell’s friends suggested that perhaps he turn Richard over to someone else, but Orwell was having none of it. “I’ve got my son now, I’m not going to give him over,” Blair recalled. Blair even remembers Orwell “changing my nappy and feeding me after my mother died.”
“Meanwhile, my father had been asked to go to Germany at the end of the war by his friend, a gentleman by the name of David Astor of the Astor family,” Blair told me.
He was the proprietor of a newspaper called The Observer, and he asked my father — they had met during the war and become friends — to go to Germany after the war to observe what was happening, and it was while he was in Paris that he got a telegram telling him that Eileen, my mother, had died. He had to rush back and attend to the funeral and funeral arrangements. He decided the best thing he could do would be to go back to Germany and continue his war report, so that’s what he did. I was placed in the hands of relatives and friends to be looked after. I was cared for from that period onward by a nanny.
In 1946, he had decided to give up his reviews and extra work, because by now he had published his first major book, Animal Farm, which gave him enough resources to think about what to do next. And he had in his mind by then that he wanted to write what turned out to be 1984, and he decided to take the invitation of his friend David Astor to go to a remote island off the west coast of Scotland called Jura. He went up for a holiday and spent a couple of weeks there in the early part of 1946, came back, and announced that he would like to move out of London to this island of Jura and rent a farmhouse called Barnhill. A few weeks later I joined him with my nanny at the farmhouse, a place he had indicated to a friend was a very ‘un-get-at-able’ place.
Indeed it was. To reach the remote Hebridean island from London, “you had to take a train and several ferries, and then a taxi from the top part of the island, and then for the last five miles you had to walk,” Blair recalled. At first, it was Richard, Orwell, and his nanny, Susie Watson. This didn’t last long: Watson clashed with Orwell’s younger sister Avril and returned to London. “From that point on,” Blair told me, “I was cared for by my father’s sister Avril, and that continued well past when he died in 1950.” In the meantime, Blair still had a few precious years with his ailing father, who was trying to balance his fear of passing on his tuberculosis to his son with wanting to be an involved father. “He was really hands-on in a way that was really unusual for that era,” Blair told one interviewer.
In fact, he was so hands-on that he even worried about Richard’s television consumption, which is perhaps not surprising from someone who was so concerned about how people absorbed information — but Richard was, at this point, a very small child. “As a father he was completely devoted to me,” Blair told me. “He was terribly worried about my emotional development simply because he had TV, and he was very concerned that the views [on TV] might be passed on to me.” Blair still bears a scar on his temple from balancing on a chair while “watching him make a wooden toy for me”. He fell off the chair, cracked his head, and was bustled down to the village for a few stitches in the enormous gash on his forehead. “There’s a groove in the bone,” he ruefully told one interviewer. But there were no tests in those days, and so his head was sewn shut and he was sent back home again.
The Grave of Canada’s Greatest General: Sir Arthur Currie
OTD Military History
Published 23 Jun 2023The grave of General Sir Arthur Currie in Mount Royal Cemetery in Montreal, Quebec. Arthur Currie was the commander of the Canadian Corps from June 1917 to the end of World War 1. Appointed as the Principal and Vice-Chancellor of McGill University in 1920, he held that position until his death in 1933.
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QotD: Internet – pro and con
Those of us who came of age before Endless September still regard the Internet as a tool. I can do online in two minutes what used to take me two hours in meatspace. For instance, when I first started working full time, I’d have to waste my entire lunch break on the first Monday of every month taking my physical paycheck down to the brick-and-mortar bank, where I’d fill out a bunch of paper to move money around, which I’d hand to a real person who took her sweet goddamn time filing it, and so on. Fight traffic all the way there, fight traffic all the way back, and yeah, that’s a full hour, even when the bank is relatively close. If that bank is closed, or there’s road construction or something, I’d have to spend all Saturday morning doing it, because banks kept bankers’ hours and so I’d better get there and get it done during the three-hour window the brick-and-mortar place was open. And since everyone else on earth was in the same situation …
These days, I’m hard pressed to remember the last time I stepped a real foot inside a physical bank. There’s simply no need. Everything is automatic. Which is convenient, no doubt, but that’s ALL it is: I’ve saved X minutes / hours in my day, which I can use to do other stuff. Other stuff like “see my friends” or “take a walk” or “read a book”. You know, real person stuff. I might read the book online; I might check my email if there’s nothing else to do; but there too the Internet is just a boredom-alleviation tool; something conveniently to hand that passes the time when there’s no other easily accessible way to pass the time.
I would find it inconvenient, sometimes extremely so, to throw the Pocket Moloch in the nearest lake, but the thought doesn’t fill me with dread. Oh, the Net’s down? Shrug.
Not so with the younger generations. I have friends I haven’t seen in weeks, months, years, but when we get together again, it’s like we were never apart, because we met in meatspace and have so much real, personal interaction to fall back on. Younger generations have “friends” they’ve never met in the flesh. Not once. Tell me “Hey, you’re not going to be able to see Tim for a few months” and it’s no big thing. I can still call Tim, or write Tim a letter, or just catch up with him when he gets back, to hear all the cool stories he has. Tell the younger folks “Tim is offline” and they freak the fuck out. Tim is inseparable from the Pocket Moloch in a way we oldsters can only dimly grasp.
They would, I’m sadly sure, prefer to interact with Tim entirely digitally. If you haven’t done it yet, try to find some young people hanging out in a group. It’s actually not the easiest thing to do – which should tell you something right there – but if you manage it, you’ll notice that they spend more time texting than they do talking to each other. And here’s the real kicker: Half the time, they’re texting each other. The same people who are physically right there.
That’s a mentality I can’t begin to grasp. I wonder if it can be broken. I’m not optimistic.
Severian, “Friday Mailbag”, Founding Questions, 2023-07-07.
October 7, 2023
“Many people who hold ‘luxury beliefs’ … are oblivious to the consequences of their views”
Rob Henderson, guest-posting at The Free Press, illustrates several recent examples of well-connected people holding what he coined as “luxury beliefs” being suddenly introduced to the real-world consequences of their beliefs:
Recently, two high-profile supporters of “justice reform” were murdered.
At 4 a.m. on Monday, Ryan Carson, a 32-year-old social justice and climate change activist, was walking with his girlfriend in Bedford–Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, when he was stabbed to death by a stranger. Only a few hours earlier in Philadelphia, activist and journalist Josh Kruger was shot and killed in his home.
And two Democratic lawmakers who voted to “redirect funding to community-based policing reforms” have been recent victims of violent crime.
On Monday night, blocks away from the Capitol in Washington, D.C., Congressman Henry Cuellar was carjacked by three armed men. (The lawmaker survived the incident unscathed.) In February, Angie Craig was attacked in an elevator at her apartment building in Capitol Hill. A homeless man demanded she allow him into her home to use the restroom, then he punched her and grabbed her around the neck. She escaped after throwing hot coffee on him.
Of course, these people did not deserve harm because of their support for soft-on-crime policies. But I’ve long argued that many people who hold “luxury beliefs” — ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes — are oblivious to the consequences of their views. Support for defunding the police is a classic example.
Luxury beliefs can stem from malice, good intentions, or outright naivete.
But the individuals who hold those beliefs, the people who wield the most influence in policy and culture, are often sheltered when their preferences are implemented.
Some online commenters have said that my luxury beliefs thesis is undermined by these tragic events, because the victims were affluent and influential — and they still suffered the consequences of their beliefs.
But the fact remains that poor people are far more likely to be victims of violent crime. For every upper-middle-class person killed, 20 poor people you never hear about are assaulted and murdered. You just never hear about them. They don’t get identified by name in the media. Their stories don’t get told.
Eastern Front Tank Warfare 1944
World War Two
In this conflict, we’ve seen armored warfare on a greater scale than anything before or since. Indy takes a look at some of the tanks slugging it out on the Eastern Front, from the long-serving Panzer III and IV, to the newer and more powerful Tiger and T-34 85, and the monstrous IS-2.
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Wab Kinew, Manitoba’s incoming Premier
Colby Cosh profiles the first Canadian provincial premier of First Nations heritage, Wab Kinew of Manitoba:
Wab Kinew, Manitoba NDP leader, 27 October 2015.
Photo by Dwight Williams via Wikimedia Commons.
My colleague Michael Higgins has an excellent column in Friday’s Post about incoming Manitoba premier Wab Kinew and the remarkable victory speech he gave late Tuesday after his New Democrats won the provincial election. Kinew tackled the usual priorities of the moment, giving love to his own partisans and talking about how his party’s victory means a brighter future for Manitobans. But he also added an unusual personal message with an obvious specific audience, knowing that Canadians ordinarily don’t notice most anything that happens in Manitoba and that he may never again be watched by so many eyeballs.
Kinew is the first-ever First Nations premier of a Canadian province, and that’s a “first” that we dare not dismiss as the usual box-checking diversity exercise. Twenty years ago, as a young and aimless alcoholic, Kinew amassed a brief track record of violence that would probably disqualify a white politician for high office forever. But he pulled himself together while there was still time, became a celebrated broadcaster and found his way into an unlikely political career, becoming leader of the Manitoba NDP in 2017.
So, yeah, Kinew’s diversity bona fides helped make this possible … and the incumbent Manitoba Conservatives did their bit to help, running a re-election campaign characterized by comically daft creepiness. Kinew has made a point of not underplaying his troubled background, although when it was brought up by Conservatives on social media during the campaign, the favourite NDP counter-tactic seems to have been to point out the killer premier next door in Saskatchewan. Yes, us western voters sure have to do a lot of forgiving.
As it turned out, however, all this ugliness led to Kinew’s victory address — which, in turn, became what can only be called a fine and hopeful small-c conservative moment. He told troubled youths still in his old predicament — “the party lifestyle” — to stop “making excuses” and join the wider community.
“To young people out there who want to change your life for the better: you can do it,” the premier-designate said. “But here’s the thing: you have to want it … If you want to join the workforce, get a new career, it has to be you that takes the first step. And if you are dealing with some kind of illness, and want to find healing, it has to be you to decide to move forward.
Rearming West Germany: The G1 FAL
Forgotten Weapons
Published 19 Jun 2023Today we are taking a look at a German G1 pattern FAL. The initial purchased of the G1 were actual made by the German Border Guard (the Bundesgrenschutz). In the aftermath of World War Two, the western Allies decided to perpetually disarm Germany, and German security was provided by French, British, and American forces. As the Iron Curtain fell across Europe, that attitude softened — West Germany was on the front lines of the Cold War, and could be a valuable ally against Communism in the East. Thus in 1951, the West German Bundesgrenzschutz (Border Guards) were formed and armed — basically with all WW2 Wehrmacht equipment. Looking to improve its small arms in 1955/56, the BGS tested a number of modern rifles and decided to adopt the FAL.
The BGS initially ordered 2,000 FAL rifles from FN, with wooden hand guards and a fixed flash hider (essentially a standard Belgian FAL) — these are known as the “A” pattern. A second BGS order for 4,800 more rifles followed, this time of the “B” pattern with a metal handguard and folding bipod. This was the first use of an integral bipod on the FAL, and would go on to be a popular option for other buyers.
In 1955, the German Army was reinstated as the Bundeswehr. Looking over the BGS rifle testing, the Bundeswehr also decided to adopt the FAL, and placed and order for 100,000 rifles — the “C” pattern. These include sights lowered 3mm by specific German request, as well as a set of swappable muzzle devices (flash hider and blank-firing adapter).
Ultimately, FN was unwilling to license FAL production to West Germany, and this drove the Germans to adopt the Spanish CETME as the G3 rifle, which it was able to license. The Bundeswehr G1 rifles were eventually transferred to the BGS and later sold to other allies as surplus.
Special thanks to Bear Arms in Scottsdale, AZ for providing access to this rifle for video!
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